Tim Jeal obituary

Thanks to the biographer and novelist Tim Jeal, who has died aged 81, we now know that one of the most famous sentences in journalism – “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – was almost certainly never uttered.

In November 1871, after a 700-mile expedition, the Welsh-American journalist and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer. He had been lost to the outside world for six years and was now nearing death, in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania.

Yet, as Jeal revealed in Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (2007), there was no mention of the greeting anywhere in Stanley’s original diary, from which the two following pages had been torn out and probably destroyed. Nor did Livingstone record it in his own journal. It all smacked of self-promoting sensationalism, eagerly trumpeted by the New York Herald.

The reconstruction of the event, based on literary archaeology, exemplified Jeal’s strengths as biographer: a revisionist approach underpinned by tenacity in his research, empathy for his subjects and a vigorous narrative drive. In what was a controversial rehabilitation of a complicated man, the Stanley who emerged from these pages was a more nuanced figure, not so much a collaborator in brutal Belgian colonialism as a courageous, driven explorer and abolitionist with a powerful humanitarian streak and a tendency to exaggerate for effect. Widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, the book won the US National Book Critics Circle award.

Jeal was drawn to figures who had been damaged in their childhood. His study of Stanley, a workhouse boy who managed to haul himself out of poverty to international fame and fortune, followed big biographies of two other sons of empire.

Published when Jeal was still in his 20s, Livingstone (1973) offered a radical reappraisal of the definitive Victorian hero of African exploration. There were uncomfortable truths to confront.

As a missionary, Livingstone was a striking failure, gaining just one convert in three decades, a tribal leader named Sechele whose faith had to compete with an adherence to rainmaking and polygamy. Though revered by the Royal Geographical Society, Livingstone was equally unsuccessful as an explorer, failing to locate the elusive source of the Nile. Jeal’s biography, never out of print, remains the standard life.

In Baden-Powell (1989), his biography of the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, Jeal brought his empathetic style and intensive research to bear on another troubled imperial servant. Here the revisionism was more positive, defending Robert Baden-Powell against the traditional accusations of moustachioed English racism and militarism and of having starved Africans as a colonel during the Siege of Mafeking in 1899-1900.

One reviewer reckoned the book so far transcended earlier biographies as to make them “almost meaningless”. Contentiously Jeal also concluded that Baden-Powell, a married father of three, was a repressed homosexual.

Explorers of the Nile (2011) drew some of his earlier themes together in another reappraising study which knocked the restless Richard Burton off his perch and championed John Hanning Speke as the man who discovered the source of Africa’s mightiest river.

Born in London, Tim was the son of Norah Sabine (nee Sabine Pasley), from an aristocratic background, and her husband, Clifford Jeal, a pacifist vegetarian who belonged to the Order of the Cross, a fellowship of Christian mystics. The two first set eyes on each other at Heal’s, the London furniture store, where Clifford worked. An unlikely romance between the baronet’s daughter and the good-looking man on the shop floor followed.

At the age of seven Tim was sent to Boarzell, a boarding school in East Sussex. The school’s nickname, “Boys’ Hell”, reflected a regime of cold showers, poor food and predatory teachers. As a young boy, his mother once sat him on a cushion with a pin underneath it and told him that if he kept silent for long enough it would turn into a golden egg. Despite these trials his childhood was tenderly described in Swimming With My Father, a moving memoir published in 2004.

After Westminster school, Jeal disappeared to Africa on some far-ranging solo travels. The experience inspired his lifelong interest in some of the 19th-century explorers who made their name there. In 1963 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, to study history, before switching to English. In a party-filled undergraduate life he admitted to attending one lecture – and, later, to experimenting with fiction. His first novel, For Love and Money, was published to rave reviews when Jeal was 21. A later novel, Cushing’s Crusade, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1975.

As a graduate trainee producing arts and features for the BBC, Jeal met Joyce Timewell, a researcher. They married in 1969 and settled in north London, where they raised three daughters, walked Boz, the family dog, across Hampstead Heath, and entertained friends at spirited dinner parties. “He mesmerised everyone,” recalled his elder sister Thomasina. “He was in charge of the conversation. A great raconteur, he enjoyed amusing people.” 

Away from his books, Jeal was a convivial and mischief-loving man who took great delight in his family. He was said to be at his happiest in the Lizard in Cornwall, the scene of sailing holidays on the Helford River as a child and, later, as a father and grandfather of six. In recent years he was a devoted carer of Joyce, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Asked by the Guardian in 2008 what made him write, Jeal suggested it was perhaps “an inability to risk living without being intellectually occupied for hours on end. I’ve also got used to the idea of being a writer, and writers write, for goodness sake.”

Jeal is survived by his wife, their three daughters, Jessica, Lucy and Emily, and his sister.