Adolph Victor Danckwertz (also known as Viktor Adolf Danckwerts)

He was an emigrant German doctor living in Somerset East, South Africa.

Adolph Danckwerts was one of four doctors attached to the British German Legion which was recruited for service in the Crimean War. At the end of that war many of these men were resettled in the Cape Colony.[1] [2]

His son Sir Harold Otto Danckwerts (1888–1978) became a lawyer, judge and Privy Counsellor; another son, Rear-Admiral Victor Hilary Danckwerts (1890–1944)[3], was Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Fleet and the father of his grandson Peter Victor Danckwerts, chemical engineer and George Cross recipient.

References

[1] Jane McSporran. "Great achievers educated at a small East Cape village school". http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards.page/board/general_topics/thr.... Retrieved 2011-03-18.

[2] "William Otto DANCKWERTS - From Barnyard to London Bar", an article by Mr. Justice Leslie Blackwell in "Personality", 26th February, 1970, cited in Jane McSporran, "Great achievers educated at a small East Cape village".

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Jane McSporran. "Great achievers educated at a small East Cape village school.

The chief subject of this article is William Otto DANCKWERTS. His father, Dr Viktor Adolf DANCKWERTS was one of four doctors attached to the King's German Legion, 4000 Hanoverians who were recruited by Britain to fight in the Crimean War. At the end of the war the British authorities had to find occupations for these 4000 men and the project was conceived of sending them to the Cape Colony to be settled in the Border area inland from East London.

Viktor Adolf, born in 1821 in Gottingen, Germany, had received his medical degree from the University of Gottingen, and emigrated to the Cape Colony with the King's German Legion in 1857, bringing with him his wife Ida Sophia Louisa WILMANS and the first of their six children, Wilhelm Otto Adolf Julius, born at Heidelberg in Germany in 1853.

When Doctor DANCKWERTS settled in a practice in Somerset East, South Africa, his son William Otto went to Templeton's school in Bedford. At the age of seventeen he went to the diamond fields in Kimberley. He was well suited to the life - apparently able to shoot a green parrot on the wing, and with a stock whip flick the ear of an ox in the leading span of a team. William was, however, not destined for the life of a farmer or a diamond field overseer, and at the age of eighteen he went to Cambridge, where he entered Peterhouse College.

In spite of his rural colonial background he graduated with Honours in Mathematics and took his M.A. a few years later. He was called to the English Bar in 1878, where, though lacking influence and expectations, he attained a position of leadership. Even in those early days he was known for his quickness of temper and irritable disposition. ASQUITH, with whom he had studied, said of him in later years that every man who aspired to succeed at the Bar had sooner or later to earn "the danger, the multiform and manifold danger of an encounter with DANCKWERTS".