What do you think of when you hear the name Tarzan? A man swinging through the jungle on a vine? Olympic swimmer-turned-actor Johnny Weissmuller beating his muscle-bound chest? A great cry of ‘Aaaaaaah-aah-aah-aah-aaaaaah’ impressing a suspiciously well-coiffured woman called Jane? Or a castle in a small village in the Cumbrian countryside?
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Yes, that’s right: 'a castle in a small village in the Cumbrian countryside'. It’s perhaps not entirely intuitive but there is indeed a connection. Stranger still, to discover it we must travel in our minds not to the depths of the African jungle but to China.
The story goes that it was there that the British Ambassador to China, a man named Cecil Spring Rice, met an aspiring American writer named Edgar Rice Burroughs.
It’s not known whether they discussed the irony of being in China while both containing the word Rice in their name. However, the ambassador – who wrote the hymn ‘I vow to thee my country’ which would become a favourite of Princess Diana’s – is said to have talked about a village and its castle near his home in Cumbria.
The castle was particularly notable on account of its ancestral owners, the Howard family, Dukes of Norfolk, and Cecil Spring Rice is said to have regaled his guest with memorable tales about them. Presumably one of these centred on the eventful life of the 4th Duke who was widowed three times and then came within a hairpin of marrying Mary, Queen of Scots.
The name of the Howards' castle was Greystoke. When Edgar Rice Burroughs came to write his stories about Tarzan, the orphaned son of nobility marooned on the coast of Africa, he remembered his encounter with the ambassador to China and gave his hero the title Viscount Greystoke.
Today, the castle – or at least the latest version of it – is still in the hands of the Howard family. The compact village that lies to its east, also called Greystoke, is likewise an interesting place. It’s home to a venerable inn called The Boot and Shoe [bootandshoegreystoke.co.uk]; a plague stone in whose vinegar-filled hollow the ailing could place coins to pay for food left for them by the uninfected; and a farm with a spire. This last is a folly built in the 1780s by Charles Howard, the 11th Duke, to make fun of a tenant who believed that it was possible to worship God without being in a church.
There’s only slight hitch with the 'Tarzan, Viscount Greystoke' origin story: Cecil Spring Rice was never actually the ambassador to China. However, he did become ambassador to Sweden four years before Tarzan’s first adventures were published in the magazine The All-Story.
Thus we’ll just have to assume that Edgar Rice Burroughs took some time off from his job as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler in the US, crossed the Atlantic, and somehow found himself at a British embassy reception in Stockholm shooting the breeze with the ambassador. That may seem a stretch but, after all, it’s no more fantastic than the tale of a boy brought up by apes.
