Harold Williams

Harold Whitmore Williams (6 April 1876 – 18 November 1928) was a New Zealand journalist, foreign editor of The Times and polyglot who is considered to have been one of the most accomplished polyglots in history.

He is said to have known over 58 languages, naturally including his native English.

He "proved to know every language of the Austrian Empire", Hungarian, Czech, Albanian, Serbian, Romanian, Swedish, Basque, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Coptic, Egyptian, Hittite, Old Irish, and other dialects.

Harold Williams was born in Auckland on 6 April 1876, the oldest of seven sons.

His parents had emigrated from Cornwall, England, and his father, the Reverend W.J. Williams, was one of the early leaders of the Methodist church in New Zealand, for many years editing the Methodist Times.

Williams senior was well-read and gave Harold early instruction in the classics.

Like most youngsters his age, Harold was not possessed by a voracious appetite for learning, but he recalled that, when he was about seven, “an explosion in his brain” occurred and from that time his capacity to learn, in particular languages, grew to an extraordinary degree.

He began with the study of Latin, one of the great root languages, and hungrily acquired others.

As a schoolboy he constructed a grammar and vocabulary of the New Guinea language Dobu from a copy of St. Mark's Gospel written in that language.

Next he compiled a vocabulary of the dialect of Niue Island, again from the Gospel written in that language, and was published in the Polynesian Journal.

Harold spent his pocket money purchasing New Testaments from an obliging Christchurch bookseller in as many languages as he could.

By the end of his life he had studied the Bible in twenty-six languages, including Zulu, Swahili and Hausa.

Before attending Christchurch Boys' and Timaru Boys' High Schools he had managed to teach himself Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian and other Polynesian languages.

In 1893 the Williams family moved to Auckland, where the teenage Harold would visit ships at the Auckland wharves so that he could converse with Polynesian and Melanesian crewmen in their own tongues.

He sat for his BA at Auckland University, but was failed because of an inability to sufficiently master mathematics, and, on the instruction of his father, entered the Methodist Ministry at the age of 20.

After appointments in St Albans, Christchurch, and Inglewood, Taranaki, he went to the Northern Wairoa district around Dargaville where there were crowds of gumdiggers of diverse nationalities.

He quickly absorbed their languages and then begun to study Russian and Polish, inspired in part by an interest in the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

As Harold wrote to a Christchurch friend Macie Bevan Lovell-Smith, he was "struggling with reading Tolstoy in his native tongue".

Harold's admiration for Tolstoy was not only literary, but philosophical.

He enjoyed preaching despite having a stammer.

Some members of his congregation were suspicious of his socialist views and pacifism.

Conservative members of the clergy also harboured suspicions, as Eugene Grayland writes in Famous New Zealanders, "His clerical superiors distrusted his views and disapproved of some of the heterodox books in his library, touching on evolution and such matters."

In June 1899 Harold wrote, "I have had rather slavonic crazes lately." One of these crazes would eventually be the compulsion for him to leave New Zealand.

In 1900, aged 23, Harold decided to "embark on a pilgrimage" determined to visit the home of Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.

With a grant of £50 to cover the voyage (from a director of the New Zealand Herald who had been informed of his talents), and no scholarships or other assistance, he set off for Europe.

He went first to Berlin and by the time he arrived at Berlin University he already knew twenty languages.

There, and at Munich University, he studied philology, ethnology, philosophy, history and literature.

These years as a student were marked by poverty—Harold's money from New Zealand had quickly run out—and he was forced to sell his books and the prizes he had won at school.

He taught English part-time to make some money and he often had only a few hours each day to pursue his studies.

There were days when he had nothing to eat, but he persevered and gained his PhD (on a grammar of the Ilocano language) from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1903.

Williams next undertook the study of Slavic languages and as a result became interested in Russian affairs and Tolstoy's Christian socialism.

He toyed with becoming an academic, but instead entered journalism.

The Times correspondent in Saint Petersburg, D.D. Braham, had been expelled and was organising a news service from adjacent countries.

He appointed Williams as a special correspondent to work with Petr Struve an exiled Russian liberal in Stuttgart.

The city had become the centre of organised political opposition by Russian political refugees working towards reform in their own country.

Here Williams met Ariadna Tyrkova, the ‘Madame Roland’ of Russia.

In October 1904 he had moved from Paris, in December to St Petersburg and Williams began to send by post dispatches to Reuters.

Williams corresponded with the Dutch Frederik van Eeden about translations of his work.

In January 1905 Williams obtained positions with the Manchester Guardian in Russia, and worked towards Anglo-Russian rapprochement together with Bernard Pares.

As a special correspondent for the Morning Post in 1908 and in the Ottoman Empire in 1911.