Briars, Saint Helena

• 1. Introduction

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  The Briars is a small pavilion on the island of Saint Helena that housed one of history's most closely watched exiles. When Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on the remote South Atlantic island in late 1815, this was the first place he slept. Not a grand fortress or a manor house, but a modest garden pavilion belonging to an English merchant named William Balcombe. He would stay there only a few weeks before being moved to Longwood House, yet the friendships and strange coincidences that gathered around those brief weeks have given the pavilion an outsized place in history. Who was the family that welcomed the fallen emperor into their home? What unlikely connection linked Napoleon to his great rival inside those same walls? And how did a cutting taken from a willow tree eventually cross an ocean to root itself in Australian soil?

• 2. The Balcombe Household

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  William Balcombe was an English merchant who had made himself useful enough on Saint Helena to be appointed a purveyor to Napoleon. His household became Napoleon's temporary world. Of all the Balcombe family, only his 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth Lucia, known as Betsy, could speak French. That accident of language made her the family's translator and drew her into a proximity with Napoleon that few Europeans of any age ever experienced.

  The closeness between the Balcombe family and their famous lodger did not go unnoticed. Governor Hudson Lowe regarded it with suspicion, and in 1818 Balcombe was compelled to leave the island and return to England. After his departure, the pavilion took on a new administrative role: it became the official residence of the admiral assigned to Saint Helena.

• 3. Wellington's Earlier Visit

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  Before Napoleon ever set foot in the pavilion, another towering figure of the Napoleonic Wars had slept there. The Duke of Wellington stayed at The Briars in 1805, on his way back from a tour of duty in India. It was a chance overlap of two trajectories that would eventually collide at Waterloo, years before either man could have imagined the outcome.

  Wellington later marked the irony himself. Writing to the admiral commanding the garrison on the 3rd of April 1816, he said: "You may tell Bony that I find his apartments at the Elysée-Bourbon very convenient and that I hope he likes mine at the Balcombes." The two men had, without meeting, swapped quarters on opposite ends of Europe, and Wellington made sure Napoleon heard about it.

• 4. Silk, Mulberry Trees, and a New Owner

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  In 1827 the East India Company purchased The Briars for six thousand pounds. Their purpose was commercial rather than commemorative: the property was put to work growing mulberry trees and producing silk. The pavilion that had sheltered an emperor became a horticultural enterprise.

  The next significant change came more than a century later. In 1959 a woman named Dame Mabel Brookes bought the pavilion and then donated it to the French government. Brookes was a great-granddaughter of William Balcombe himself, which made the gesture a kind of homecoming across generations. The French government recognised her generosity by appointing her Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1960. The pavilion joined two other French-administered sites on the island: Longwood House and the former tomb in Sane Valley.

• 5. The Name Travels to Australia

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  William Balcombe carried more than memories with him when he left Saint Helena. He was later offered a post in Australia and established a new estate in the Carwoola area of New South Wales, which he called The Briars after his former home. He is reported to have introduced two plants to Australia on that property: the Sweet Briar, known botanically as Rosa rubiginosa, and the Weeping Willow, Salix babylonica. The willows are said to have been propagated from cuttings taken near Napoleon's grave on Saint Helena, adding a botanical thread between the island exile and the new southern colony.

  The name itself kept spreading through the family. Balcombe's youngest son, Alexander Beatson Balcombe, named his pastoral run and homestead in Mount Martha The Briars as well. That property had previously been known by the name Chen Chen Gurruck, also recorded as Tichingorourke. A third generation carried the name further still: William's grandson, William Alexander Balcombe, son of Thomas Trywhitt Balcombe, built yet another house called The Briars at Wahroonga.