STRANGE LIFE STORY

Waipa Post, Volume 49, Issue 3505, 14 August 1934, Page 7

STRANGE LIFE STORY

OF APPRENTICE WHO MARRIED ROYALTY. There are life-stories so strange that they seem like a page out of some improbable romance (says the “Children’s Newspaper’.”) Such is the story recalled at the unveiling of the memorial to Stephen Turr, the Hungarian soldier who started life as a tradesman’s apprentice, became the friend of Louis Kossuth and. Garibaldi, married a pi’incess, and ended as a courtly old gentleman of leisure in the first years of this century. The son of poor parents, he was early apprenticed to a trade, but, seizing the only way of escape open to him he ran away and enlisted as a soldier, and soon won his stripes. This, however, was only the first step, for it was not long before his colonel’s favour procured him a commission. In 1848 his regiment was mobilised against the Italian insurgents. This cut him to the quick, for as a Hungarian he sympathised with all who tried to shake off the Austrian yoke and, going over to them, he fought so well that he was almost at once given the command of a company. After many adventures and vicissitudes he went to Switzerland. The spirit of adventure and the craving to strike a blow for what he considered the right side still dominated him, and offering his services to the British Army, he rose from rank to rank till he was made a colonel. Badly wounded in the Crimea, he was made prisoner by the Russians, and delivered up to the Austrians to be executed as a deserter. But in 1856 he was back in Turkey, helping the insurgent Circassians against Russia. In 1860 he was at Garibaldi’s side in the glorious venture which liberated Sicily and Naples and set Victor Emmanuel on the Italian throne. For his gallant services in this campaign Stephen Turr was made a general and Governor of Naples, and became aide-de-camp to and a friend of Italy’s first king. Not by ambitious climbing but simply by being himself and following his own rashly-generous and liberty-loving impulses he had risen to heights which the little Hungarian apprentice could not in his wildest dreams have' envisaged; and it must have seemed to him like the mar-

vellous and yet fitting conclusion of a fairy tale when, as a field-marshal of he won the love and the hand of Princess Adele Buona-parte-Wyse, the niece of Napoleon the Third.

He might well have been excused had he settled down after this to “live happily ever after.” Yet four years later we find him, at a word from Kossuth, throwing up his position in the Italian Army and risking life, liberty, and his new-found happiness on another venture against the Hapsburgs. He was, however, not to be an outlaw and an exile for ever, nor was it only as a soldier that he was destined to make his mark. Granted an amnesty in 1867, he returned, after nearly twenty years, to the land of his birth to take an active part in every sort of scheme for social and economic welfare. With the help of trained Hungarian engineers he built the canal which bi-

sects the Isthmus of Corinth. The evening- of this remarkable man’s life was serene and tranquil. One by one he gave up his manifold activities and centred his interests on his books, his friends, and his political writings. Yet when he passed away at seventy-eight those who knew him felt as though something magnificent and picturesque had gone out of the world.