William Hoffman has fascinated me ever since I realised he had walked across Africa 1887-1890 with Henry Stanley yet was not mentioned in Stanley’s best selling two-volume In Darkest Africa (1890). Biographer John Bierman Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley (Knopf 1990; Hodder & Stoughton, 1991) commented “Even when every allowance is made for Victorian class attitudes, the plebeian Hoffmann’s invisibility is striking. What did he do to condemn himself to such unpersonhood?” I wrote his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and that was used by Tim Jeal in his biography of Stanley (2007) with a photograph of Hoffman from the Stanley Archive in Belgium. I had found and inteviewed Hoffman’s wife’s niece, looked at the Stanley-Hoffman documents in Belgium, the RGS London and the Wellcome Library, for a study of the six pygmies from the Congo who were in Britain 1905-1907: for Hoffman was their interpreter for 15 months. He worked for the Force Publique of the Congo Independent State in the 1890s, and was left £300 in Stanley’s will (1904). I obtained a copy of Hoffman(n)’s With Stanley in Africa (1938) in which the above photographs appear.

In 1902 he was living at 47 Grafton Street, then 46 Howland Street, he got married in Acton and then lived with his wife’s family at 42 Essex Street from 1904 with spells in 1906-7 at 47 George Street then 24 Tolmers Square 1910-12. He kept pressing Dorothy Stanley for money.

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This website page was created in December 2009. It asked:

In May 2016 contact was made from New Zealand by a great-grand daughter of William Hoffman’s parents. Her ancestor was Louise (or Louisa) Matilda Hoffman. From this it seems that Kate was named Katharina or Katherina. The 1911 census says she was born in Germany around 1853, and she was living in Sandringham Road, Dalston (London) — with her four sons aged 15 to 28, and Louise aged 20. The mother – who of course was William Hoffman’s mother – died in Preston, Lancashire on 23 January 1923, leaving an estate worth £205 12s 8d to Alice Hoffman, a spinster. A further grant was issued on 14 May 1943: Alice M. Hoffman died aged 50 and her death was registered in late 1943. An Alice Hoffman’s birth in London was registered in the autumn of 1894. The email exchanges led to identifying the Canadian as Albert Hammond (he changed his name) who lived in Moncton, New Brunswick and visited his sister in England in the 1970s.

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In August 2026 I was contacted by a descendant of Albert Hoffman who migrated to Canada and lived for many years in Winnipeg. Born Keely Hammond, and for a long time frustrated in her searches for her ancestors thought to be Germans named Hammond, she found the original name Hoffman(n) when tracking Albert’s documentation. Born in London in December 1892, he and siblings had been placed in the German Orphanage in east London in 1895. Their mother was the second wife of Wilhelm, for his first wife (Bill Hoffman’s mother) had died in Germany in 1877. Alice Kate Hoffmann died in the German Hospital in east London in 1935. Her son Albert left England for Canada (via New York) in 1915 and immediately joined the Canadian army as Hammond, serving three years in France from December 1915. He married an English woman in 1918 and they wen to to Canada.

My informant – married to an Englishman and a regular visitor to London – said that Bill Hoffman had been in a Fulham hospital which was bombed in 1941. He was transferred to a hospital in Windsor where he died.

Many thanks to Kelly Speechley.