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Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer
Alexander Maitland


Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great gentlemen explorer-adventurers, became a legend in his own lifetime. This authorised biography by a longstanding friend and associate delves into his little-known character and motivations, as well as recounting the details of his extraordinary life.Wilfred Thesiger, the great explorer-adventurer and author of �Arabian Sands’ and �The Marsh Arabs’, and one work of autobiography �The Life of my Choice’, became a legend in his own lifetime, but his character and motivations have remained an intriguing enigma.In this authorised biography – written with Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003 and with unique access to the rich Thesiger archive – Alexander Maitland investigates this fascinating figure’s family influences, his wartime experiences, his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist, his writing and photography, his friendships with Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived, and his now-acknowledged homosexuality.










Wilfred Thesiger


The Life of the Great Explorer




Alexander Maitland









HARPER PERENNIAL London, New York, Toronto and Sydney


For Margaret




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u4066f85a-0f4e-543e-9448-a6639fe74c09)

Title Page (#udeb1d01b-965c-5b6a-aa3a-dc5fd89e9608)

Dedication (#ud1b2571e-3099-5251-b89c-61e4698b93c9)

THESIGER FAMILY (1722-2005) (#u2bd4b482-fc39-5426-b0d8-217bebb8c1b3)

INTRODUCTION (#uce756e29-9790-538f-a850-cec4c12765d5)

ONE The Emperor Menelik’s �New Flower’ (#u96a21737-b965-5360-96d4-4ff676b33ad5)

TWO Hope and Fortune (#u5afe51eb-1437-5e0d-bf17-30a797e0a9c5)

THREE Gorgeous Barbarity (#udafd5ee4-b2a6-544f-9a9c-e7b19b69789a)

FOUR �One Handsome Rajah’ (#uff615d28-87fa-529b-aed2-0fe5fd8489f9)

FIVE Passages to India and England (#ua5551f4e-3f3f-511e-9160-ebb71038a9cf)

SIX The Cold, Bleak English Downs (#uc3298212-5836-509d-b733-24f76615f6d2)

SEVEN Eton: Lasting Respect and Veneration (#u02d95d06-9149-5154-97b9-62d319753fcf)

EIGHT Shrine of my Youth (#ufa1761c8-1906-5b84-9195-14b66aa5d11e)

NINE The Mountains of Arussi (#ud1cae181-282e-5bd4-8919-f3d2da482d04)

TEN Across the Sultanate ofAussa (#u36f1024e-48c2-53db-8b3e-7af32578d112)

ELEVEN Savage Sudan (#u70c2d0ae-74f5-5607-9ad5-cb50c63e7faf)

TWELVE The Nuer (#u4b39affb-7fb5-5f97-9adb-2a3c90458aea)

THIRTEEN Rape of my Homeland (#u6a86185f-584a-57a6-8201-a64db3c73505)

FOURTEEN Among the Druze (#u6bde2b14-d402-5429-9ed0-b96c1904f767)

FIFTEEN The Flowering Desert (#uc9c4a5c0-4c81-5b65-8410-763fd0fe13c5)

SIXTEEN Palestine: Shifting Lights and Shades (#u688ed726-dc8a-58b9-a6d0-9ae3dac8daea)

SEVENTEEN Prelude to Arabia (#ub0c6261f-49de-5ce0-a6d7-96c44e5bc53c)

EIGHTEEN Arabian Sands (#u8d46d85f-478c-5f57-8cd0-baea84fcb7ca)

NINETEEN Marsh and Mountain (#u4903a1b0-e6b2-53c5-897a-e2c574d5b5aa)

TWENTY Among the Mountains (#ub04b9a70-abef-5756-b2a7-1310fa27cf11)

TWENTY-ONE A Winter in Copenhagen (#u8c4bb801-aa40-5878-8af2-86b65ac8f992)

TWENTY-TWO Camel Journeys to the Jade Sea (#u3076b315-9d46-5058-a801-38fd77e00a14)

TWENTY-THREE With Nomadic Tribes in Other Lands (#u34fb5712-4e3c-5199-994e-cdbb3963f229)

TWENTY-FOUR Kenya Days (#u9b807f9c-2bd9-507b-be64-2fbf60f6d410)

EPILOGUE (#ub1625a94-7ad4-5e60-a7a4-c584ee810dff)

Notes (#ub1541199-7ac8-559a-a490-233cb336b4a9)

Bibliography (#u65d64c34-c0f9-59a9-a5a7-8f1f126eff9e)

Index (#u224b2250-1ae3-5469-a708-ccfd8054b0f7)

Acknowledgements (#ud4c8ad36-c59c-5d8a-bf29-d412ad3a07cd)

About the Author (#ua6bbceed-432a-52a5-91f6-664cade4f8bd)

Praise (#u5acbf56c-a516-5487-99f4-07f9ca219f0a)

By the same author (#ud96f5c55-b1ce-5260-834d-2c0a0ca33102)

Copyright (#u9a9dd276-84f2-5b88-9c8a-4d0b2cede3d8)

About the Publisher (#u26ec3051-1c6e-53eb-9534-02006cbe260e)




THESIGER FAMILY (1722-2005) (#ulink_5779d154-ab4e-53a1-864d-5c6bb1d0040b)










INTRODUCTION (#ulink_f860cf82-5167-53a8-9640-19905634d0e7)


�Even now, after so many years, I can still remember Wilfred Thesiger as he was when I first saw him,’ was how Thesiger suggested I might begin his biography. To this he had added: �The rest is up to you.’




I met Thesiger for the first time in June 1964 at his mother’s top-storey flat in Chelsea. He was then aged fifty-four. He was sunburnt, tall, with broad shoulders and deep-set grey eyes. As we shook hands I noticed the exceptional length of his fingers. He wore an obviously well-cut, rather loose-fitting dark suit. I remember clearly that he smelt of brilliantine and mothballs. He spoke quietly, with an air of understated authority. His voice was high-pitched and nasal; even by the standards of that time, his rarefied pronunciation seemed oddly affected. He had a distinctive habit of emphasising prepositions in phrases such as �All this was utterly meaningless to me’. He moved slowly and deliberately, with long, ponderous strides; yet he gave somehow the impression that he was also capable of lightning-fast reactions. Later, I heard that he had been a source of inspiration for Ian Fleming’s fictional hero James Bond. Whether or not this was true, Thesiger, like Bond, was larger than life; and like Bond, he appeared to have led a charmed existence.

He introduced me to his mother, Kathleen, who had retired early to bed. Cocooned in a woollen shawl and an old-fashioned lace-trimmed mobcap, she lay propped up on pillows, with writing paper and books spread out on the bedcover within easy reach. Thesiger left us alone for a few minutes while he carried a tray with a decanter of sherry and glasses to the sitting room. It was then that his mother offered me the unforgettable advice: �You must stand up to Wilfred.’




Thesiger preferred to sit with his back to the window, in the dark shadow of a high-backed chair. At intervals he fingered a string of purple glass �worry beads’ that lay on the small table at his elbow. He talked energetically and fluently in reply to enquiries, but he himself asked few questions, and instead of taking up a fresh theme he sat quietly, staring at me, until I questioned him again. When I could think of nothing to say, or to ask, he reached again for the purple beads. Meanwhile he scarcely had touched his thimbleful of sherry.

His mother’s flat, to which Thesiger returned for two or three months every year, was like a catalogue raisonnee of his life and travels. Danakil jilis in tasselled sheaths hung beside framed black-and-white Kuba textiles from the Congo. There were silver-hilted Arab daggers and ancient swords in silver-inlaid scabbards. Medals honouring Thesiger’s achievements as an explorer and, in his youth, as a boxer were displayed in velvet-lined cases. A portrait of Thesiger painted in 1945 by Anthony Devas hung on the right of the sitting room fireplace. On the wall opposite, three tall glass-fronted cabinets held part of his collection of rare travel books devoted to Arabia, Africa and the Middle East. His mother had brought the cabinets to London in 1943 from their former home in Radnorshire. Thesiger commented proudly: �I can’t begin to imagine how my mother knew they would fit into this room. It was remarkable how she did this. But, there again, my mother is a very remarkable person.’




In a cupboard in Thesiger’s bedroom were stored the sixty or more landscape-format albums of black-and-white photographs which he often described as his �most cherished possession’.


As far as I remember he did not produce these albums during my first visit, but over the years I became very familiar with the wonderful images they contained. Only some time later did he show me his collections of travel diaries, notebooks and annotated maps describing his journeys. Not until some years after she had died did he encourage me to read letters he had written, many from outlying places, to his mother, who to her eternal credit preserved them with care, as she had preserved those Wilfred’s father had written a generation before.

One memory stands out from the vaguer recollections of that first visit. To my surprise, as I was leaving Thesiger took out a pocket diary, consulted it for a moment and said: �If you’ve nothing better to do next Sunday, why don’t you come along and we’ll cook ourselves supper. My mother’s housekeeper is away for the night, but we can heat up some soup and scramble an egg or two.’ He grinned and added: �That’d be fun.’


This unexpected invitation marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted for almost forty years.

I have heard it said that Thesiger was very straightforward, uncomplicated, easy to get to know and to understand. To some people he may have appeared like that; and of course, everyone who met him (whether they knew him intimately or hardly at all) received a slightly different impression. But even his oldest friends, who had known him since his schooldays, could not quite agree about certain seemingly paradoxical aspects of Thesiger’s character and temperament. Most of them, however, accepted that he was a veritable maze of contradictions; and, if the truth be told, in some ways his own worst enemy. Like the Bedu of the Arabian desert, he was a man of extremes. He could be affectionate and loving (for example towards his mother), yet he was capable of spontaneous, bitter hatred; he was either very cautious or wildly generous with his money and possessions; he was normally fussy and meticulous, but he could be astonishingly careless and foolishly improvident; he relished gossip, yet was uncompromisingly discreet; his touching kindnesses contrasted with sometimes appalling cruelty. He denied being possessive and criticised others who were, including his friend the writer T.H. White, and his own mother, who was by nature possessive – as indeed he was himself. Being possessive, and yet desperately needing to be possessed, was part of Thesiger’s chronic sense of insecurity, which resulted from traumas he suffered during his childhood in Abyssinia and England. His vices were fewer, less extreme and yet more conspicuous than his many virtues. The greatest of these – immense and selfless bravery, compassion, determination, integrity and creative energy – enabled him to achieve his outstanding feats of exploration and travel, and to record them with a matchless brilliance in his photography and in his writing.

Thesiger’s craggy features and tall, gaunt frame were a gift for the painter or sculptor. His earliest adult portraits were sketched in pencil on menu-cards by (probably inebriated) friends at Oxford’s �bump suppers’. Gerald de Gaury drew him in 1943, and Anthony Devas painted his portrait in oils at the end of the Second World War. In 1953 Fiore de Henriques sculpted Thesiger’s head in bronze, a powerful image, like Devas’s excellent portrait, which nevertheless romanticised him. In contrast, three portraits painted by Derek Hill in 1965 showed Thesiger, then aged fifty-five, very much as I had first seen him, and indeed as he really was. Although he portrayed the man who had survived dangerous journeys through Abyssinia, the Sahara and Arabia, a decade hunting African big game, and four years’ intense fighting in the war, Hill also captured a defensive, shy, vulnerable side of his sitter’s complex personality, a side that Thesiger normally kept hidden.

In old age Thesiger was painted, sculpted and photographed by artists and photographers fascinated by his achievements and his weathered features, whose creases, folds and crenellations by then resembled ancient tree-bark, or elephant’s hide, or rock, more than the surface texture of an ordinary human being. These later portraits celebrated him as the patriarch of modern exploration and travel, and as a living legend to which they gave substance. Only when his visitors were greeted by a greyhaired, elderly gentleman in a dark suit or country tweeds did many of them realise how, in his books, Thesiger had been frozen in time, like the age-defying images of tribal men, women and children he had photographed more than half a century before. Although Thesiger’s last portraits cast him in old age, the finest bridged a widening gap between his wander years and the present; and to his increasingly iconic status they paid due and worthy homage.




ONE The Emperor Menelik’s �New Flower’ (#ulink_a6925777-e429-56f9-993e-70f172b37ead)


In 1901 an English traveller, Herbert Vivian, described his recent journey through Abyssinia in a book which included impressions of the capital Addis Ababa as he first saw it, less than a decade after the Emperor Menelik II had established the town. �I looked round incredulously, and saw nothing but a few summer-house huts and an occasional white tent, all very far from each other, scattered over a rough, hilly basin at the foot of steep hills. That this could be the capital of a great empire, the residence of the King of Kings, seemed monstrous and out of the question.’


More than twenty pages of Vivian’s book Through Lion Land to the Court of the Lion of Judah were devoted entirely to Addis Ababa, whose name in Amharic means �New Flower’.


Vivian described the remote setting; the tents and primitive thatched huts of the British Agency (as he called the Legation) in its mud-walled compound; tribesmen arrayed in striking costumes; the huge marketplace, trading in exotic spices and other varied produce, brass and silver ornaments, livestock and weapons, which reminded him of an Oriental bazaar or conjured up images of medieval England. �To appreciate Addis Ababa,’ he wrote, �it is necessary to realise that this strange capital covers some fifty square miles, and contains a very large population which has never been numbered. Streets there are none, and to go from one part of the town to the other you must simply bestride your mule and prepare to ride across country. Three-quarters of an hour at least are necessary for a pilgrimage from the British Agency to the Palace, and as much again to the market. On either of these journeys you must cross three or four deep ravines with stony, precipitous banks and a torrent-bed full of slippery boulders.’




Lord and Lady Hindlip visited Addis Ababa in 1902, during their big game hunting expedition in Abyssinia and British East Africa. In his book Sport and Travel, Hindlip wrote: �The squalor of native African towns and villages is apparent everywhere…Menelik’s capital is nothing but a collection of huts…surrounded on nearly three sides by mountainous country.’


Hindlip’s scathing remarks were echoed in 1905 by Augustus B. Wylde, a former Vice-Consul for the Red Sea: �The place cannot be called a town but a conglomeration of hamlets and huts with hardly a decent house to be seen anywhere. The whole area is nearly tree-less and very disappointing.’




In his autobiography The Life of My Choice, published in 1987, Wilfred Thesiger conjured a rather more vivid and more sensual image of his birthplace, which had changed apparently very little by the time his father and mother arrived there, only a few years after Vivian, the Hindlips and Wylde, in December 1909. He did this very skilfully, introducing his parents and placing them at the centre of the stage, sketching the embryonic, sprawling township of Addis Ababa, its wild surroundings and multicultural population, and the social and political chaos into which Abyssinia had lapsed, from 1908, after Menelik had been incapacitated by the first of several strokes.

Thesiger wrote:

Addis Ababa consisted of a series of scattered villages grouped on hillsides with open, uncultivated spaces between. Menelik’s palace crowned the largest hill; nearby a jumble of thatched huts and some corrugated-iron-roofed shacks clustered round the large open market. Nowhere were there any proper roads. [In his north Abyssinia diary, dated 1960, Thesiger commented on 12 May: �Menelik’s gibbi [palace] was on a small isolated hill below the present town.’ And on 13 May: �[It occupied] a surprisingly small area on the top of the hill…He used to sit under a tree and watch his cattle being watered, with a telescope.’


When Thesiger visited the site of Menelik’s palace in 1960, he had found �almost no sign of it’.


]

Abyssinians of any standing travelled everywhere on muleback, followed by an armed mob of slaves and retainers, varying in number according to the importance of their master. Galla, Somali, Gurage, people from the subject kingdom of Kaffa, negroes from the west, mingled on the streets with their Amhara and Tigrean overlords; but it was these latter who dominated the scene, imposed their stamp upon the town and gave it its unique character. Wrapped in white toga-like shammas worn over long white shirts and jodhpurs, they set a fashion which over the years was copied by an increasing number of their subjects.

The clothes, the buildings, the pitch and intonation of voices speaking Amharic; the smell of rancid butter, of red peppers and burning cow dung that permeated the town; the packs of savage dogs that roamed the streets and whose howling rose and fell through the night; an occasional corpse hanging on the gallows-tree; beggars who had lost a hand or foot for theft; debtors and creditors wandering round chained together; strings of donkeys bringing in firewood; caravans of mules; the crowded market where men and women squatted on the ground, selling earthen pots, lengths of cloths, skins, cartridges, bars of salt, silver ornaments, heaps of grain, vegetables, beer – all this combined to create a scene and an atmosphere unlike any other in the world…




Almost certainly, Thesiger’s detailed descriptions of Addis Ababa were not based entirely on childhood memories, but on notes and recollections of visits he made later, between 1930 and 1966, no doubt clarified by reading his father’s correspondence and the many books about Abyssinia he had collected over the years. Having painted this colourful backdrop to his life story, Thesiger gave a perceptive résumé of the Abyssinians’ character: �Encircled by British, French and Italian territories, they were intensely proud of their age-old independence and very conscious that their forefathers had been among the earliest converts to Christianity. Consequently they were both arrogant and reactionary, while the past three hundred years had made them suspicious and obstructive in dealing with Europeans. As a race they had an inborn love of litigation and suffered from inherent avarice. Yet they were naturally courteous, often extremely intelligent, and always courageous and enduring.’




A year after Menelik’s first, paralysing stroke, �Conditions in Addis Ababa and in the country as a whole were already chaotic…They were soon to become very much worse. In and around Addis Ababa murder, brigandage and highway robbery increased alarmingly; in restoring order, public hangings, floggings and mutilations had little effect. The town was filled with disbanded soldiery from Menelik’s army, and on the hills outside were camped the armies of the various contenders for power.’




Here, at the heart of Menelik’s remote African empire, threatened by anarchy and bloodshed, Thesiger’s father took up his official duties at the British Legation in December 1909. He and his young bride, who was four months pregnant, adjusted to married life in these primitive surroundings as they waited anxiously and eagerly for the birth of their first child the following year.




TWO Hope and Fortune (#ulink_1b7e8e53-64de-5620-8b05-f5c373256d41)


In March 1911, nine months after the birth of their eldest son, Wilfred Thesiger’s father wrote in a romantic mood to his wife, who was then in England and pregnant for the second time: �What a wonderful thing it is to be married and love like we do, and all has come because you once said “yes” to me in a hansom and gave yourself to me.’




Captain the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger was aged thirty-eight and Kathleen Mary Vigors was twenty-nine when they married on 21 August 1909 at St Peter’s church, Eaton Square, in the London borough of Westminster. The ceremony in this fashionable setting was conducted by the Reverend William Gascoigne Cecil, assisted by the Reverend Arthur Evelyn Ward, whose marriage to Kathleen’s younger sister Eileen Edmee took place in November that same year. The Thesigers made a handsome couple on their wedding day. Kathleen’s slender build and radiantly healthy complexion, set off by luxuriant waves of auburn hair, perfectly complemented Wilfred Gilbert, who stood over six feet, and was lean and muscular, with broad, sloping shoulders. His gaunt, rather delicate features, still sallow after two years’ exposure to the African sun, were clean-shaven except for a heavy moustache, and his dark-brown hair was brushed from a centre parting. Like his late father, General Lord Chelmsford, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger was reliably discreet, formal and pleasantly reserved.

Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen’s was the third wedding uniting two generations of their families. Handcock sisters, who were first cousins of Kathleen’s mother, had married distinguished younger sons of the first Lord Chelmsford. In 1862 Henrietta Handcock married the Honourable Alfred Henry Thesiger, a Lord of Appeal and Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales. The following year, Henrietta’s elder sister Charlotte Elizabeth married Alfred Henry’s elder brother, the Honourable Charles Wemyss Thesiger, a Lieutenant-General in the Hussars. In August 1909, witnesses to the Thesigers’ marriage included Kathleen’s widowed mother Mary Louisa Helen Vigors, Wilfred Gilbert’s elder brother Percy Mansfield Thesiger, and Count Alexander Hoyos, a Secretary at the Austrian Embassy and a friend of the bridegroom. In his autobiography, Wilfred Thesiger portrayed his father as �intensely and justifiably proud of his family, which in his own generation had produced a viceroy, a general, an admiral, a Lord of Appeal, a High Court judge and a famous actor. Intelligent, sensitive and artistic, with a certain diffidence which added to his charm, he was above all a man of absolute integrity.’




Wilfred Gilbert painted in watercolours, wrote verse and also played the cello.


By his early thirties he had already had a distinguished career in the Consular Service, and had been awarded a DSO in the Boer War. Perceptive studio portraits by Bertram Park, a society photographer in Dover Street, London, highlighted these compatible yet contrasting facets of his life and character. On the one hand, Park captured the thoughtful, determined expression of a soldier and administrator accustomed to authority; on the other, he evoked the introspective, wistful gaze of an artist and a poet.

Thesiger described his mother Kathleen as attractive, brave and determined, a woman who had dedicated herself to her husband �in the same spirit shown by those great nineteenth-century lady travellers Isobel Burton and Florence Baker…ready to follow [him] without question on any odyssey on which he might embark’.


�A photograph of my mother at that time [also taken by Bertram Park] shows a beautiful, resolute face under waves of soft brown hair…Naturally adventurous, she loved the life in Abyssinia, where nothing daunted her. She shared my father’s love of horses and enjoyed to the full the constant riding. Like him, she was an enthusiastic and skilful gardener…Since she was utterly devoted to my father, her children inevitably took second place. In consequence in my childhood memories she does not feature as much as my father; only later did I fully appreciate her forceful yet lovable character.’




When he wrote about his father’s family, Thesiger saw no reason to include the generations of ancestors before his grandfather, the famous general and second Lord Chelmsford. He defended this, saying: �The Life of My Choice was about me and the life I had led. My father and, later on, my mother were tremendously influential and I was fascinated by what my grandfather had done. These things affected me, but I can’t have been affected by relatives living at the time of Waterloo. To suggest that I might have seems, to me, utter nonsense. It would never have occurred to me to spend months studying my ancestors, to see whether or not there might be any resemblance between some of them and myself.’




Whereas later generations of Thesigers have been well-documented, little is known about Johann Andreas Thesiger who emigrated from Saxony to England in the middle of the eighteenth century and in due course established the Thesigers’ English line. According to family records, Johann Andreas, now usually known as John Andrew, was born in Dresden in 1722. He married Sarah Gibson from Chester, and fathered four sons and four daughters. John Andrew died in May 1783,


and was survived by his wife, who died almost thirty-one years later, in March 1814. John Andrew was evidently intelligent, amenable and hardworking. Although the young Wilfred Thesiger scoffed at efforts to prove similarities between his remote ancestors and later generations of his family, John Andrew’s sons, like their father, had been clever and diligent. His great-grandson Alfred Henry, who became a Lord of Appeal and Attorney-General, was described as �extremely industrious’, while Alfred Henry’s nephew Frederic, the first Viscount Chelmsford, was known to work �very hard’, as was Frederic’s younger brother, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger.

In The Life of My Choice, Wilfred Thesiger underlined his father’s tireless capacity for hard work: �By December 1917 my father badly needed leave. The altitude of Addis Ababa, at eight thousand feet, was affecting his heart. He had been short-handed, overworked and under considerable strain.’


As for Thesiger himself. He was once described by his lifelong friend John Verney as �the world’s greatest spiv’.


Yet when writing a book he often worked for as many as fourteen hours a day, and even in his eighties his powers of concentration and his ability to work long hours for weeks at a time appeared to be undiminished.

From the time he arrived in England, John Andrew Thesiger earned his living as an amanuensis or private secretary to Lord Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham, who led the Whig opposition and twice served as Prime Minister, in 1765-66 and again in 1782, the year he died. As well as his native German, John Andrew evidently spoke and wrote fluently in English, and possibly several other languages besides. His eldest son Frederic, we know, understood Danish and Russian.

We can only guess what John Andrew might have looked like. It is tempting to picture him as above average height, thin and wiry, with lantern jaws and a prominent nose. These characteristics recurred in later generations of Thesigers: for example General Lord Chelmsford, the actor Ernest Thesiger, and Ernest’s first cousin Wilfred, whose large, skewed, three-times-broken nose became his most famous physical hallmark. But the assumption that John Andrew’s looks and build were inherited by his descendants may be quite wrong. His eldest son, Frederic, who appears life-size on one of the four cast-bronze memorial panels at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, bears no obvious resemblance to other male Thesigers descended from his younger brother’s family. Neither Frederic’s looks nor build matches the gaunt, hawkish Thesiger model. He has a rounded face, a thin, expressionless mouth and an inconspicuous straight nose. He is neither stout nor very lean. It is difficult to judge his height, which seems about the same as Nelson’s; but the sculptor, J. Ternouth, may have exaggerated Nelson’s height to achieve a more dramatic effect.

Before he enlisted in the Royal Navy, Frederic served with the East India Company’s fleet in the Caribbean. He rose to Acting Lieutenant aboard HMS Formidable, commanded by Admiral Rodney, at the Battle of Saintes, off Martinique, in 1782. Praised by Rodney as �an excellent and gallant officer’, he later served with the Russian navy during the war between Russia and Sweden. The Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) awarded him an Order of Merit and, in 1790, a knighthood of the Order of St George. He became adviser to the First Sea Lord and was promoted commander, then captain. In 1801 Frederic served as ADC to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, when his knowledge of Danish enabled him to translate Nelson’s letter, accompanying a flag of truce, which Frederic presented to the young Crown Prince of Denmark. The bronze relief in Trafalgar Square shows him handing Nelson the Danes’ letter of surrender. Whilst the Royal Navy had profited from Frederic’s experience in the Baltic, no further offer of an active command was forthcoming. There appear to have been no obvious reasons for this. Depressed, disillusioned, without prospects or a wife and family of his own to console and distract him, Captain Sir Frederic Thesiger committed suicide at Plymouth on 26 August 1805, two months before Nelson was fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Sir Frederic’s younger brother Charles and his London-born wife, Mary Anne Williams, had six children, including two boys who died in infancy. Frederic, the third son – the late Sir Frederic’s nephew and namesake – witnessed, as a thirteen-year-old midshipman, the seizure of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807. He resigned from the navy, having become heir to his father’s estates in the West Indies, and afterwards studied law. He was called to the Bar in 1818 and recommended to King’s Counsel in 1834. In 1844 he was appointed Solicitor-General and was knighted. As a Member of Parliament he represented Woodstock, Abingdon and Stamford. Having twice served as Attorney-General, on 1 March 1858 Sir Frederic Thesiger QC was created the first Baron Chelmsford of Essex.

Sir Frederic’s noted attributes – �a fine presence and handsome features, a beautiful voice, a pleasant if too frequent wit, an imperturbable temper, and a gift of natural eloquence’ – must have stood him in good stead as a barrister and a politician. In any case, the Thesigers’ progress in less than three generations, from the arrival in England of their gifted German ancestor to achieving an English peerage, had been by any standards remarkable, and amply justified the optimism and ambition implicit in their family motto, Spes et Fortuna, �Hope and Fortune’.

Lord Chelmsford’s son and heir, the Honourable Frederic Augustus Thesiger, was born on 31 May 1827. After serving in Nova Scotia, the Crimea, India and Abyssinia, as General Lord Chelmsford he commanded the British force during the Kaffir and Zulu wars. In South Africa he earned a lasting notoriety when over 1300 of his troops were massacred by the Zulu army at Isandhlwana on 22 January 1879, known afterwards to the Zulus as �the Day of the Dead Moon’. Thesiger wrote in The Life of My Choice: �In the Milebrook [the house in Radnorshire, now Powys, where he and his brothers lived from 1921 with their widowed mother] were assegais and other trophies brought back by my grandfather after he had shattered the Zulu army at Ulundi in 1879 – but I never begrudged those peerless warriors their earlier, annihilating victory over a British force on the slopes of Isandhlwana.’


Despite having �shattered the Zulu army’


and won the war, Chelmsford was blamed for misleading intelligence and confused orders which had led to the massacre. He consequently returned to England with his reputation permanently tarnished. Thesiger wrote in 1940: �I have just finished the book about my grandfather and the Zulu war. [This was Lord Chelmsford and the Zulu War (1939) by Major the Hon. Gerald French DSO, which Percy Thesiger, Wilfred’s uncle, had given him in November 1939.] I found it most interesting. It seemed to be a very complete justification of his strategy in that war and a vindication of his generalship…I had not realised that the criticism had been so personal and so venomous. What does emerge very clearly is that he was a great gentleman, and that he won the respect and affection of those who served under him. He must have been a great and charming man and I wish I had known him.’




Fascinated all his life by his grandfather’s controversial role in the Zulu war, Thesiger, at the age of eighty-six, visited Isandhlwana and saw for himself where the massacre had taken place. In South Africa he met the Zulu leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who presented him with a Zulu knobkerrie, a shield and a spear. Thesiger said afterwards: �I found Buthelezi impressive. It moved me to have met him like that more than a century after Isandhlwana. There we were: Buthelezi, the grandson of Cetewayo, the Zulu king; and myself, the grandson of Lord Chelmsford, whose army Cetewayo’s warriors half-destroyed, and who finally destroyed them at Ulundi.’




On 9 April 1905, while he was playing billiards in the United Services Club, Lord Chelmsford died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. Thesiger said: �My grandfather and my father died instantaneously, so that they could have felt nothing. When it’s my turn to push up the daisies, that is how I should wish to die.’




Wilfred Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert, was the third of Lord and Lady Chelmsford’s five sons. He was born at Simla on 25 March 1871, four years after Frederic Augustus Thesiger married Adria Fanny Heath, the eldest daughter of Major-General Heath of the Bombay Army. Their eldest son, Frederic John Napier, was appointed Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921; in 1921 he was created the first Viscount Chelmsford. Harold Lumsden Thesiger, their fourth son, died in India, aged only two and a half months, in 1872.

�For some reason,’ Thesiger wrote, �my father was educated at Cheltenham [College], whereas his brothers [Frederic, Percy and Eric] were educated at Winchester.’


Wilfred Gilbert had twice failed the Winchester entrance examination, despite receiving extra tuition at a crammer in Switzerland. As a boy he had been delicate. Above average height, he was handsome and slender, and his expression was wistful, perhaps melancholy. In 1889 and 1892 he was examined at Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Institute in South Kensington, which was equipped and supervised as part of the International Health Exhibition. Galton’s laboratory measured �Keenness of Sight and of Hearing; Colour Sense, Judgement of Eye; Breathing Power; Reaction Time; Strength of Pull and of Squeeze; Force of Blow; Span of Arms; Height, both standing and sitting; and Weight’.


A student of �hereditary talent and character’, and founder of the Eugenics Society, Galton espoused the theory of �right breeding’, which the high achievers produced by successive generations of Thesigers appeared to confirm.

An illness, possibly rheumatic fever, had drained Wilfred Gilbert’s energy and left him with a permanently weakened heart. Though he was a �well conducted boy’, his school reports describe him as �languid and unattentive’


– failings conspicuous in the younger Wilfred Thesiger, who confessed to having a limited attention span and who wrote that he had proved �an unreceptive boy to teach, disinclined to concentrate on any subject that bored me’.


Wilfred Gilbert’s poor performance in French and German (which had once been his family’s first language) prompted a master’s opinion that he �was not a linguist by nature’. While at Cheltenham he began to write poetry. His poems suggest that he was prone to depression or melancholy. Many are preoccupied with death, and evoke a sense of futility which later seemed at odds with his private and public roles as husband, father and staunch representative of the Crown.

Wilfred Gilbert’s career in the Consular Service began in Asia Minor, where he served at Lake Van from 1895 to 1898 �as a secretary to Major [later Colonel] W.A. Williams RA, Military Vice-Consul’ at the time of the Armenian massacres. He earned a mention in despatches and wrote letters which were keenly observed and often vivid. Many of them presaged others written years later by his son Wilfred, on topics that included hunting, photography and travel. In July 1896 Wilfred Gilbert wrote: �I want very much to see more of the country…a good pair of ibex horns still haunts my dreams.’


And in April that same year: �If ever I come out here again I shall certainly bring a camera.’


Romantically careless of time and place, he wrote on �the 20 somethingth of August 1896’ from Garchegan, �somewhere in the mountains’: �It is a glorious life this, living in tents and moving from place to place.’


Of the conflict between Armenians and Turks he saw nothing worse than a skirmish, like �a music hall battle’, in front of the consulate. Once an Armenian banker who lived nearby �sent over to say some revolutionists were in his garden and were going to murder him’.




Wilfred Gilbert spent much of his time at Van gardening, sketching, reading, riding and shooting. He learnt Turkish, and took charge of the household. Thesiger wrote: �My father made a number of watercolour sketches of [Kurdish tribes in their �spectacular garb’] that fascinated me as a boy but have since disappeared. At Van he was very conscious of past greatness, when kings of Assyria ruled, fought and fell among these mountains.’


Wilfred Gilbert remarked in a letter: �even a short description of these districts written by a certain Marco Polo, which we have here, is perfectly up to date’.




After Van he had been nominated Vice-Consul at Algiers, but he was posted instead to Taranto in southern Italy. There he monitored exports of olive oil and red wine, and compiled an encouraging report on Calabria’s mother-of-pearl industry. Having written poems inspired by the sea, at Taranto Wilfred Gilbert became a keen yachtsman. He also took up fencing. According to Signor Ferri, his fencing master: �Correctness, thundering attack, and the highest intelligence, distinguish him on the platform.’


Even if �thundering attack’ was overdone, it sounded better than Cheltenham’s less flattering comments that Wilfred Gilbert was �not of much power’ in the classroom and �lacked scoring power at cricket’.


Thesiger did not share his father’s fencing talent: at Oxford he �was noted as much for the extraordinary and often furious contortions of his blade in fencing – a pastime at which he was never an adept – as for his lightning successes in the ring’.




�During the Boer War,’ Thesiger wrote, �[my father] joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a trooper, but was soon commissioned and later promoted to [temporary] captain. He fought in South Africa from March 1900 until October 1901 and was awarded the DSO.’


Wilfred Gilbert’s DSO was for general service, not, as in his son Wilfred’s case, for an outstanding act of bravery. After the war he considered becoming a District Commissioner in the Transvaal, but instead rejoined the Consular Service. In 1902 he was sent as Vice-Consul to Belgrade. The following year he was left in charge of the Legation when the Minister was withdrawn after the brutal murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga by an anarchist group known as the Black Hand.

King Alexander’s successor, Peter I (like Wilfred Gilbert’s father), suffered from �a sort of shyness and inability to make small [impromptu] remarks to everyone’.


Wilfred Gilbert understood this difficulty, yet could not resist describing, tongue-in-cheek, preparations for the coronation: �the king has been practising in the palace garden how to get on horseback in his robe and crown with his sceptre in his hand, for he is to ride back in all his glory; and the ministers are having little loops sewn on their best clothes in anticipation of the orders they expect to receive…For two days it has drizzled and all the Serbian flags are gradually fading into limp rags in which the red, blue and white have run into each other to such an extent that by Wednesday they promise to be little more than mere smudges of colour not of the cleanest.’




After Belgrade, Wilfred Gilbert was posted to St Petersburg, where, to his relief he was not �bothered with too many social duties’.


He looked forward to playing golf at Mourina, an hour’s drive from the city, and reassured his now widowed mother: �I am awfully lucky in servants, having just got a treasure in the way of an office boy and with a jewel of a cook and Collins [his former batman in the Imperial Yeomanry] am really in clover.’


This was fortunate, since Wilfred Gilbert’s later postings, in the Congo and Abyssinia, were to prove very stressful; and, at Addis Ababa, potentially dangerous.

Like his father, Thesiger grew up to be �justifiably proud’ of his family. By this he meant proud of the Thesigers. He adored his mother and got on well with her relatives, but her family did not greatly interest him. He said: �The Vigors were landed gentry with estates in Ireland. They achieved nothing of consequence, whereas every generation of my father’s family produced somebody who was outstanding.’




Whenever Kathleen Mary Vigors thought of Ireland, she pictured Burgage, her childhood home near Bagenalstown and Leighlinbridge, in County Carlow, where she had been brought up with her sister and brothers until she was eight. Some photographs of Burgage taken in June 1939 show the house and part of the estate, with meadows that slope from terraced lawns down to the River Barrow. Supposedly written at Burgage, Cecil Frances Alexander’s popular hymn �All Things Bright and Beautiful’ praised the �river running by’ and the �purple-headed mountain’ – possibly Mount Leinster, which could be seen from the �Butler’s Terrace’. Thesiger said: �When we came back from Addis Ababa [in 1919], we went to Burgage and we were there for a bit. Burgage was desperately important to my mother. There was this love of Ireland and the Irish. She was passionate about Ireland, and yet she had seen so little of it.’




The Vigors originated either in France or Spain, and were among the many Protestants who fled to England in the sixteenth century. The Irish branch of the family originated with Louis Vigors, who became vicar of Kilfaunabeg and Kilcoe in County Cork in 1615. In the family records it is said that Louis Vigors’s son Urban served as chaplain to King Charles I. A later Vigors, Captain Nicholas Aylward, contributed important papers to the Linnean Society and published an essay titled �An Enquiry into the Nature of Poetic Licence’. Though severely wounded in the Peninsular War, he won distinction for his �scientific attainments’. Together with Sir Stamford Raffles he helped to found the Zoological Society of London in 1826, and served as the first of its secretaries. Nicholas Vigors’s stepbrother, General Horatio Nelson Trafalgar Vigors, was born in 1807, two years after the battle which his forenames celebrate so comprehensively. He served for some years in the 1850s as the acting Governor of St Helena, having previously commanded the island’s tiny regiment.




In The Life of My Choice Thesiger sketched his Vigors grandparents briefly: �My maternal grandmother was an undemonstrative and rather prudish woman, whereas my grandfather was rather a rake, a confirmed gambler and obviously excellent company. My mother remembered him with affection all her life.’


Thesiger later explained that he described Thomas Vigors, his grandfather, mainly from Kathleen’s reminiscences. He recalled: �When I was a boy, my Vigors grandmother seemed to me a formidable, rather frightening figure. I think, in fact, she was very attached to my mother. They got on well and Granny [Vigors] was always kind to us.’




Kathleen’s father, Thomas Mercer Cliffe Vigors, was born in 1853 at Perth in Western Australia. Her mother, Mary Louisa Helen Handcock, was the elder daughter of Colonel the Honourable Robert French Handcock, a younger son of Lord Castlemaine of Moydrum Castle, County Westmeath. Thomas Vigors married Mary Louisa Handcock on 4 April 1877 at St Stephen’s church in Dublin. He inherited the Burgage estate in County Carlow when his bachelor uncle John Cliffe Vigors died in 1881. Kathleen, her sister Eileen Edmée and their brothers Edward and Ludlow Ashmead were brought up at Burgage until their parents separated about 1888. The comfortable Georgian house, with ivy-covered walls surrounded by large gardens, fields and woods, gave them a childhood as idyllic as Wilfred Thesiger’s early years at Addis Ababa. By coincidence Kathleen’s upbringing at Burgage ended when she was eight, the same age Thesiger would be when, to his dismay, he found that �we were leaving Abyssinia for good, that we should not be coming back’.




The difference was that Thesiger’s father and mother were happily married, whereas Kathleen’s parents had been hopelessly incompatible. The strained relationship between Thomas and Mary Louisa deteriorated until a separation became inevitable. When Mary Louisa found Thomas in bed with one of the housemaids, he excused himself laconically: �If one is going to appreciate Chateau Lafitte, my dear, one must occasionally have a glass of vin ordinaire.’


Taking her children with her, Kathleen’s mother went to live in England. She divided her time between Roe Green House at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, and the Vigors’s London flat, 18 Buckingham Palace Mansions, where Thesiger and his brother Brian stayed occasionally as schoolboys. Kathleen, Eileen, Edward and Ashmead had been born in London. They continued to visit their relatives in Ireland, including their father, who died in January 1908, the year before Kathleen’s wedding.

We do not know how or when Thesiger’s parents first met; but they were already corresponding, rather formally, by the time Wilfred Gilbert arrived at Boma, in the Belgian Congo, in December 1907. For some reason Thesiger avoided this subject, although in private he would discuss, quite openly, other more sensitive aspects of his life. Being so close to her eldest son, it seems inconceivable that Kathleen did not tell him anything about her courtship with his father. He could have written much more than he did about his parents (and, indeed, about himself) in The Life of My Choice. But instead he devoted many of its pages to less personally revealing themes, such as Abyssinian history, in a book that his publisher’s editor described as �magnificent, yet strangely impermeable’.


Wilfred Thesiger had often been described as �enigmatic’. His autobiography merely confirmed this, and at the same time encouraged readers to speculate about the undisclosed details of his private life.




THREE Gorgeous Barbarity (#ulink_80efc06f-5cca-527c-810e-4467adb9b73d)


On 2 November 1909 Thesiger’s father and mother arrived at Jibuti on the coast of French Somaliland, after a week’s voyage from Marseilles aboard the Messageries Maritimes steamer Tonkin.


From Jibuti they travelled by train to Dire Dawa in eastern Abyssinia, and onwards to Addis Ababa by mule caravan across the Chercher mountains. They were accompanied by Captain Thesiger’s manservant Collins, his faithful batman in the Imperial Yeomanry, and Susannah, an Indian nursemaid from Zanzibar. At Dire Dawa the task of checking and distributing the vast quantities of baggage occupied the Thesigers for several days. �They had brought all that they would require in Abyssinia: provisions, clothes, books, pictures, furniture, tents, saddlery. There were scores of boxes and crates, all to be checked and loaded before they left Dire Dawa.’


In The Life of My Choice, Thesiger recalled how his mother told him that �the only thing that dismayed her was sorting out their incredible mass of luggage, making sure things went by the right route and that nothing was left behind. The heavier loads were being sent to Addis Ababa on camels by the desert route, where the Danakil, always dangerous, were said to be giving more trouble than usual.’




Thesiger did not mention that, as well as several crates having gone missing, the trunk containing his mother’s wedding trousseau had been broken open and looted on the way from Jibuti. Exasperated and indignant, Captain Thesiger commented: �the railway can hardly back out of the responsibility. What on earth a Somali can do with ladies’ lace trimmed underclothes is a wonder, but it was probably looting for looting’s sake.’




The journey across the mountains took twenty-nine days, including a brief official visit paid by Captain Thesiger to the legendary walled city of Harar. To her lifelong regret Kathleen felt too exhausted by the two-thousand-foot climb from Dire Dawa to the Harar plateau to accompany him. Harar seemed unchanged since the Victorian traveller Richard Francis Burton saw it in 1855 and described it in his book First Footsteps in East Africa. When the younger Wilfred Thesiger visited Harar in December 1930, he imagined that even then, �except for a few corrugated iron roofs, it still looked the same as when [Burton] had been there’.




Neither Thesiger nor his father mentioned Harar’s links with the French poet, and gun-runner, Arthur Rimbaud, who lived at Harar and was photographed in 1883 in the garden of its first Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha’s, residence. Thesiger said: �I knew who Rimbaud was, I suppose, but I knew nothing of his poetry or what he did in Abyssinia. The one that interested me was [the French traveller Henri] de Monfreid. When I was twenty-three I read his book about pearl-diving in the Red Sea and, for a while, I longed for the same sort of adventurous life.’




Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s visit to Harar had been officially requested by the Governor, Dedjazmatch Balcha. A favourite of Menelik, Balcha �had a well-merited reputation for ruthlessness, brutality and avarice, and was hated and feared by his subjects’.


Thesiger’s father was met by Balcha and some hundreds of soldiers with green, yellow and red banners and chiefs in silver-gilt crowns, red and blue robes and lion- and leopard-skin capes, armed with rifles, spears and shields. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: �It was very picturesque, the brown rough stones of the town and crumbling loopholed gateway and…narrow streets where only two mules could walk abreast…The palace was a whitewashed building, European of a bad style with quaint lions in plaster on the roof…Afterwards I walked round the bazaars and narrow street market, thronged with wild, white-clothed Abyssinians, Gallas and Somalis…The only thing one could compare it with are descriptions of the old Aztecs. Gorgeous barbarity such as one could nowadays meet with nowhere but here.’




Describing their marches from Harar along the top of the Chercher mountains, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: �We are having a splendid journey and Kathleen is better than I have ever seen her.’


He thought she looked �very smart and neat in her khaki astride costume and helmet’, and the scenery �beautiful’ with �thick forests of enormous juniper and wild olive trees full of mountain clematis, jessamine, briar roses and other unknown flowers…and looking for all the world like Switzerland or Norway’.


Kathleen observed impatiently: �I do not think we needed to spend so long on the journey but we were accompanied by the Legation doctor [Wakeman]…a half-caste Indian [who]…liked to take life leisurely.’




They reached the outskirts of Addis Ababa on 10 December, where they were met by the retiring Consul, Lord Herbert Hervey, with an escort of Indian sowars, troopers, in full dress uniform, an Abyssinian Ras and various ministers of state. Later, in an undated memoir, Kathleen described her first impressions of the British Legation, her home for the next nine years:

The Legation lies on a hillside outside the town with vast and beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. I was told that the Legation compound is the same size as St James’s Park. In 1909 the large and imposing stone building in which we later lived in such comfort did not exist and we arrived to a settlement of thatched huts or �tukuls’. Each room was a separate round mud hut joined to the next one by a �mud’ passage and the whole built round a grassed courtyard with a covered way down the middle. [This accommodation had been planned by Wilfred Gilbert’s predecessor, Captain (later Sir) John Harrington, and was being constructed when the writer Herbert Vivian arrived at Addis Ababa in 1901.]

The servants’ quarters – kitchens etc., stood at the back. The sowars’ quarters and the stables stood higher up on the hillside and the native �village’ where the Abyssinian servants lived lay in a hollow beneath them. �Mud hut’ is not really at all descriptive of those charming round thatched rooms; always cool in summer and warm in winter. They were wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in, although at that time our furniture was very primitive. The [ceiling] was not boarded over, but rose with thatch to a point in the centre and the supporting laths of wood were inter-wound with many gay colours. The effect was enchanting…I shall never forget our first meal that evening. Roast wild duck I most particularly remember! Our head servants were Indians and we had an excellent Goanese cook…




In the first draft of her memoir Kathleen recalled that the furniture �was mostly made from packing-cases but we had some very handsome “pieces” and a few comfortable beds’.


Wilfred Gilbert wrote to his mother: �Kathleen is making cushion covers and tablecloths…the effect of a circular room is rather good only one does miss the corners.’


He eulogised the Legation’s compound, with its

masses of glorious big rose bushes smothered in blossom [and] a bed of scarlet geraniums…rather tangled and wild, but very pretty. Tall Eucalyptus trees make an inner boundary and our compound is a square about a quarter of a mile each way. A big field serves for grazing and hay making and will allow a little steeple chase course all round. There is a good tennis court [and] a regular village of little stone circular houses for the servants…All round are highish hills broken and covered with scrub and to the East a big plain with mountains all round…the evening lights are very beautiful…




During the week before Christmas 1909, Captain Thesiger had his first formal audience with Menelik’s grandson, Lij Yasu (or �Child Jesus’), who was attended by the corrupt Regent, Ras Tasamma. Thousands of Abyssinian soldiers riding horses or mules escorted Thesiger’s parents to the Emperor’s palace, the gibbi, which crowned the largest hill at Addis Ababa. �At that first meeting,’ Thesiger wrote, �my father can have had no idea of the troubles this boy would bring on his country.’


The previous year Menelik had appointed Lij Yasu, then aged thirteen, as his heir. By 1911, when Lij Yasu seized power, the government of Abyssinia had begun to crumble. Five years later, Captain Thesiger would report to the Foreign Office that �Lij Yasu…has succeeded in destroying every semblance of central government and is dragging down the prestige of individual ministers so that there is no authority to whom the Legation can appeal.’




The Thesigers, meanwhile, each recorded impressions of that first audience: �a big affair and a wonderful sight’,


wrote Wilfred Gilbert, while Kathleen found it �magnificent beyond my wildest dreams’.


Wilfred Gilbert continued:






As at Harar the big men wore their crowns with fringes of lions’ mane standing up all round and the skins of leopards and lions over their gold embroidered silk and velvet mantles, an escort of Galla horsemen in the same dresses, each with two long spears rode on either side on fiery little horses and added immensely to all the movement…We circled the walls of the palace to the far gate and here there was a great rush to get into the inner court on the part of the Abyssinians and various gorgeously dressed chiefs told off for the purpose, but right and left with long bamboos to keep out the unauthorised, they did not spare the rod. One chief in full dress hit over the head missed his footing and rolled down the steep entrance to my mule’s feet. I expected he would hit back, but it seemed part of the game, get in if you could, but accept blows if you can’t. Another stick smashed to splinters on the head of a less gorgeous official…

Inside a large courtyard lined with soldiers a brass band play[ed] a European tune for all they were worth, others with long straight trumpets, like those played by angels in [stained] glass windows, negroes with long flutes all added to the din…We passed into another court by an archway…and came to the central one where the walls were lined by chiefs only. We rode into the centre and dismounted and formed our little procession. I went first with the interpreter, then Kathleen, Lord Herbert [Hervey], Dr Wakeman, and behind them the escort on foot…

I went on alone up the steps to the foot of the throne in front of which Lij Yasu sat with all his big officials and after being introduced…I read my little speech and then handed it over to the interpreter to be translated and when he had finished I handed over the letter to Menelik to Lij Yasu who then read his speech which was interpreted by the court dragoman. I then asked leave to present Kathleen and went back to bring her up with the others…It was a very impressive ceremony. The hall is an enormous building very dimly lighted with pillars of wood on either side, the floor…strewn with green rushes and a long carpet down the centre.




Later that day, after the presentation ceremony, the Thesigers met Lij Yasu again at Ras Tasamma’s residence. Wilfred Gilbert praised Lij Yasu: �a nice boy of clear cut Semitic features and very shy…when something amused us he caught my eye and laughed and then suddenly checked himself’. He added cautiously: �Everyone was very friendly but at present I am only on the surface of things.’


Kathleen wrote that for the occasion �Wilfred was wearing full diplomatic uniform and I my smartest London frock [her �going away’ dress worn after her wedding] and a large befeathered hat. To the European eye we surely would have presented an amusing spectacle more especially as the “diplomatic mule” [ridden by Wilfred Gilbert] was also in full dress with gaily embroidered coloured velvet hanging, and tinkling brass and silver ornaments.’

Kathleen’s candid account of the feast that followed might have been borrowed from James Bruce of Kinnaird’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), a work whose descriptions of alleged Abyssinian customs, such as eating raw meat cut from live oxen, had been dismissed as nonsense by critics following Dr Johnson, who doubted that Bruce had ever been there:

Course after course, one more uneatable than another and served by very questionably clean slave women. This feast lasted quite interminably, or so it seemed to me. But at last it ended…and the curtains surrounding the daïs [where we sat] were suddenly drawn back and a vast Hall was revealed below us crowded with thousands of soldiery. An incredible number of them packed like sardines and all wearing the usual white Abyssinian �Shamma’. They sat on benches stretching into the far distance, and between these benches there was just room for two men to walk in single file. These men carried a pole on their shoulders which stretched from one to the other, and from this pole was suspended half the carcase of a freshly killed ox. Each man, as it passed him, pulled out his knife and skilfully cut for himself as large a piece of bleeding meat as possible and this he proceeded to eat pushing it into his mouth with his left hand and with his right cutting off a chunk which I think he gulped down whole – and so on until all was finished. Eventually the soldiery filed out somehow and I shall always remember our exit, because, for some reason we went out by the door at the end of the great Hall and to do so we had to pick our way through the bloody remains of the Feast.




In The Real Abyssinia (1927), Colonel C.F. Rey described a �raw meat banquet’ on this scale, marking the Feast of Maskal, when �no fewer than 15,000 soldiers and 2000 or 3000 palace retainers were fed in four relays in the great hall’.


The way of life Kathleen Thesiger had left behind in England must have appeared at that moment incredibly remote. Yet it would be events such as the Regent’s feast that gave her eldest son Wilfred his craving for �barbaric splendour’ and �a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world’.




England and home were brought suddenly into sharp focus by the death of King Edward VII in May 1910, news of which affected the Thesigers almost like a family bereavement. Captain Thesiger wrote to his mother on 14 May: �What a terrible blow the King’s death has been…We had heard nothing of his short illness to prepare us. Even now it seems impossible to believe and realize it.’


Edward VII died four weeks before the younger Wilfred Thesiger was born. The King’s death signalled the waning of an era, which the First World War would finally end. In the microcosm of Addis Ababa’s British Legation, �everything [was]…put off, polo, races, gymkhana and lunches’. To Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen it seemed �as tho’ everything had suddenly come to a stop’.







FOUR �One Handsome Rajah’ (#ulink_70c7027d-e3c9-5a3b-be8a-ec8fc24a7c1e)


In the heart of the British Legation’s dusty compound at Addis Ababa, Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born by the light of oil lamps at 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 June 1910, in a thatched mud hut that served as his parents’ bedroom. The following day his father wrote to Lady Chelmsford, the baby’s grandmother: �Everything passed off very well and both are doing splendidly. He weighs 8½lb and stands 1ft 8in [corrected in another letter to 1ft 10in] in his bare feet and his lungs are excellent…He is a splendid little boy and the Abyssinians have already christened him the “tininish Minister” which means the “very small Minister”. We are going to call him Wilfred Patrick but he is always spoken of as Billy. He has a fair amount of hair, is less red than might have been expected and has long fingers.’




On 12 July Thesiger was christened at Addis Ababa by Pastor Karl Cederquist, a Swedish Lutheran missionary. Count Alexander Hoyos and Frank Champain were named as godfathers; his godmothers were Mrs John Curre and Mrs Miles Backhouse, the wives of two British officials. Captain Thesiger reported proudly: �The man Billy [whom he called �a jolly little beggar’] grows very fast and puts on half a pound every week with great regularity. I think he is quite a nice looking baby. He has a decided nose and rather a straight upper lip, his eyes seem big for a baby and are wide apart.’


Frank Champain had accepted his role as the baby’s godfather with reluctance. He would write to Wilfred in 1927: �Sorry to have been such a rotten Godfather. I told your Dad I was no good…I can’t be of much use but if I can I am yours to command.’




Thesiger’s good looks, inherited from his father, were strengthened by his mother’s determined jaw and her direct (some thought intimidating) gaze. As a baby he was active, alert and observant. His adoring parents took photographs of him at frequent intervals from the age of one month until he was nine. They preserved these photographs in an album, the first of four similar albums they compiled, one for each of their sons. Some of the earliest photographs show Billy cradled in his mother’s arms or perched unsteadily on his nurse Susannah’s shoulder, grasping her tightly by her hair. Susannah, a dark-skinned Indian girl, stayed with the Thesigers for three years, working for some of the time alongside an English nurse who proved so incapable and neurotic that Wilfred Gilbert felt obliged to dismiss her. To the devoted, endlessly patient Susannah, little Billy could do no wrong. �When my mother remonstrated with her,’ Thesiger wrote, �she would answer, “He one handsome Rajah – why for he no do what he want?”’


Thesiger may have heard his mother tell this story, mimicking Susannah’s broken English.

Though he walked at an unusually early age, Thesiger admitted that he had been slow learning to speak. He said his mother told him that his first words were �“Go yay” which meant “Go away” and showed an independent spirit’.


One day the Thesigers found Billy in Susannah’s hut, lying on the earth floor surrounded by the servants, who bent over him performing a mysterious rite. Susannah reassured the astonished couple: �We were just tying for all time to our countries.’




The child’s birthplace, a circular Abyssinian tukul of mud and wattle with a conical thatched roof, like an East African banda or a South African rondavel, could scarcely have been a more appropriate introduction to the life he was destined to lead. Thesiger realised this, and used to talk about being born in a �mud hut’, which implied that the circumstances of his birth were more primitive than they had been in reality. He also liked to stress any extraordinary adventures during childhood which helped to explain his longing for a life of �savagery and colour’


In his early fifties Thesiger confessed that he had probably exaggerated his preferences and dislikes – his resentment, for instance, of cars, aeroplanes and twentieth-century technology foisted on remote societies he called �traditional peoples’. He wrote in The Marsh Arabs:

Like many Englishmen of my generation and upbringing I had an instinctive sympathy with the traditional life of others. My childhood was spent in Abyssinia, which at that time was without cars or roads…I loathed cars, aeroplanes, wireless and television, in fact most of our civilisation’s manifestations in the past fifty years, and was always happy, in Iraq or elsewhere, to share a smoke-filled hovel with a shepherd, his family and beasts. In such a household, everything was strange and different, their self-reliance put me at ease, and I was fascinated by the feeling of continuity with the past. I envied them a contentment rare in the world today and a mastery of skills, however simple, that I myself could never hope to attain.




Thesiger did not experience this sense of easy harmony among remote tribes at Addis Ababa, nor indeed for many years after he first left Abyssinia. Throughout his childhood and his teens, even as a young man in his early twenties, he lived in a European setting, with European values imposed by his family. He had felt instinctively superior by virtue of his background, education and race. Until the 1930s, he admitted, he was �an Englishman in Africa, travelling very much as my father would have travelled’.


He fed and slept apart from the Africans who accompanied him. In 1934 in Abyssinia he read Henri de Monfreid’s book Secrets de la Mer Rouge, and afterwards sailed aboard a dhow from Tajura to Jibuti. Sitting on deck, sharing the crew’s evening meal of rice and fish, Thesiger realised that this was how he wanted to live the rest of his life. During the next fifteen years he accustomed himself to living as his tribal companions lived, in the Sudan, the French Sahara and Arabia. Meanwhile, reflecting on his influential childhood in Abyssinia, he said: �When I returned to England [with my family in 1919] I had already witnessed sights such as few people had ever seen.’




Aged only eight months, early in 1911 Thesiger was taken by his parents on home leave. Carried in a �swaying litter between two mules’,


the baby travelled three hundred miles from Addis Ababa to the railhead at Dire Dawa, and from there by train and steamer to England. A few months later this long journey was repeated in reverse, following the same route Thesiger’s parents had taken in November 1909. �The water for his baby food on these treks had to be boiled and then strained through gamgee tissue; his nurse hunted out the tent for camel ticks before he went to bed at night.’ Once, when Thesiger’s nurse had carried him a short distance from camp, they found themselves face to face with a party of half-naked warriors. �But she need not have worried, the warriors were just intrigued by a white baby; they had never seen such a sight before.’




In 1911, to avoid the hot weather, Thesiger and his mother, escorted as far as Jibuti by an official from the Legation, travelled to England ahead of his father, who arrived there on 15 June with members of an Abyssinian mission representing the Emperor at the coronation of King George V. The second of Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen’s sons, Brian Peirson Thesiger, was born at Beachley Rectory in Gloucestershire on 4 October 1911. Wilfred Gilbert had bought the house, with its large overgrown garden overlooking the Severn estuary, to provide his expanding family with a home of their own in England. Billy and Brian became inseparable. Sixteen months older, Billy dominated his younger brother, who seemed content to follow his lead. Those who knew the two elder Thesigers affirmed that this continued for the whole of Brian’s life. Whereas Wilfred Thesiger and his youngest brothers, Dermot Vigors (born in London on 24 March 1914) and Roderic Miles Doughty (born in Addis Ababa on 8 November 1916), had inherited their parents’ looks, Brian bore little obvious resemblance either to the Thesigers or to the Vigors. From his mother’s side no doubt came his reddish fair hair and his freckled, oval face – colouring and features which set him apart from Wilfred, Dermot and Roderic. In his late twenties Brian’s face showed more bone structure, but even then he bore little resemblance to his brothers. Lord Herbert Hervey’s successor as Consul at Addis Ababa, Major Charles H.M. Doughty-Wylie, nicknamed Brian �carrot top’ because of his red hair.


Roderic Thesiger was named after Charles Doughty (who had changed his name to Doughty-Wylie before he married, in 1907, a rich and �capable’ widow, Lily Oimara (�Judith’) Wylie).

Thesiger’s childhood recollections from the age of three or four were clear, lasting and vivid. He remembered his father’s folding camp table with Blackwood’s Magazine, a tobacco tin and a bottle of Rose’s lime juice on it. He remembered, aged three, seeing his father shoot an oryx, the mortally wounded antelope’s headlong rush, and �the dust coming up as it crashed’.


How many animals he saw his father kill for sport we don’t know. The only others he recorded apart from the oryx were two Indian blackbuck, �each with a good head’,


and a tiger his father shot and wounded in the Jaipur forests in 1918 but failed to recover. Such sights as these had thrilled Thesiger as a boy; they fired his passion for hunting African big game, most of which he did in Abyssinia and the Sudan between 1930 and 1939. He continued to hunt after the Second World War in Kurdistan, the marshes of southern Iraq and in Kenya. By the time he arrived in northern Kenya in 1960, however, his passion for hunting was almost exhausted, and he only shot an occasional antelope or zebra for meat.

In 1969 Thesiger told the writer Timothy Green how as children he and Brian sat up at dusk in the Legation garden, waiting to shoot with their airguns a porcupine that had been eating the bulbs of gladioli. �Before long Brian, who was only three, pleaded “I think I hear a hyena, I’m frightened, let’s go in.” “Nonsense,” said Wilfred, “you stay here with me.” Finally, long after dark, when the porcupine had not put in an appearance, Wilfred announced, “It’s getting cold. We’ll go in now.”’


Thesiger’s conversation shows how, aged less than four and a half, he was already taking charge in his own small world. He went on doing so all his life. A born gang leader, Thesiger dominated his brothers, just as, as a traveller, he would dominate his followers.

He was aware of this tendency, and in later years he strove to play it down. In My Kenya Days, he stated: �Looking back over my life I have never wanted a master and servant relationship with my retainers.’


A key to this is his instinctive use of the term �retainers’: literally �dependants’, or �followers of some person of rank or position’. Throughout his life he surrounded himself with often much younger men, or boys, who served him and gave him the companionship he desired. Many of them, initially, owed Thesiger their liberty, or favours in exchange for financial assistance he gave them or their families. These favours affected their relationship with him, in which the distinction between servant and comrade was frequently blurred.

As a child Thesiger had ruled over his younger brothers, even using them as punchbags after he learnt to box. The �fagging’ system at Eton encouraged his thuggish behaviour, which was tolerated only by friends who realised that he had a gentler side, which he kept hidden for fear of diluting his macho image. It was characteristic of him, from his mid-twenties onward, that he would choose �retainers’ younger than himself, over whom he exerted an authority reinforced by the difference between their ages, as well as by his dominating personality and his position or status – for example, as an Assistant District Commissioner in the Sudan, and in Syria an army major ranked as second-in-command of the Druze Legion. In contrast, Thesiger’s relationships with his older followers were seldom as close or as meaningful. The same applied to his young companions in Arabia and Iraq after they became middle-aged and, in due course, elderly men. Thesiger reflected: �I don’t know why it was. They were just different. We had travelled together in the desert and shared the hardships and danger of that life. When I saw them again, thirty years later, they lived in houses with radios and instead of riding camels they drove about in cars. The youngsters I remembered had grey beards. They seemed pleased to see me again, and I was pleased to see them; but something had gone…the feeling of intimacy, and a sense of the hardships that once bound us together.’




At the Legation, Thesiger’s parents encouraged the children to play with pet animals, including a tame antelope, two dogs and a �toto’ monkey his mother named Moses. Kathleen wrote: �Altho’ we kept [Moses] chained to his box at times, we very often let him go and then he would rush away and climb to the nearest tree top, only to jump unexpectedly from a high branch on to my shoulder with unerring aim. Every official in the Legation loved my Moses and he was so small that they could carry him about in their pockets. He was accorded the freedom of the drawing room [in the new Legation] and I must confess that I still have many books in torn bindings [which] tell the tale.’




Thesiger remembered Moses and the tiny antelope wistfully, with an amused affection. He commented in My Kenya Days: �My father kept no dogs in the Legation,’


but this was a lapse of memory. Later he remembered: �Our first dog in Addis Ababa was called Jock. The next dog had to be got rid of because Hugh Dodds [one of Wilfred Gilbert’s Consuls] thought it was dangerous. This was about 1916…As a child, I was afraid of nothing but spiders…When we were at The Milebrook, the first dog I owned was a golden cocker spaniel, and it died of distemper. I had only had the dog for about a year.’




In The Life of My Choice Thesiger pictured his childhood at Addis Ababa against a background of Abyssinia in turmoil. This was the chaotic legacy of the Emperor Menelik’s paralysing illness and his heir Lij Yasu’s blood-lust, incompetence and apostasy of Islam. The turbulent decade from 1910 to 1919 gave the early years of Thesiger’s life story romance and power, and enhanced the significance of his childhood as a crucial influence upon �everything that followed’.


As a small boy he was no doubt aware of events he described seventy years later in The Life of My Choice, however remote and incomprehensible they must have appeared at the time. In reality his life at Addis Ababa had little to do with the Legation’s surroundings – except for its landscapes, including the hills (Entoto, Wochercher and Fantali) and the plain where Billy and Brian rode their ponies and went on camping trips every year with their parents. On these memorable outings Mary Buckle, a children’s nurse from Abingdon in Oxfordshire, accompanied the family. Mary, known to everyone as �Minna’, had been engaged in 1911 to look after Brian. Thesiger wrote in 1987: �She was eighteen and had never been out of England, yet she unhesitatingly set off for a remote and savage country in Africa. She gave us unfailing devotion and became an essential part of our family.’


Just as he idealised his father and mother, Thesiger idealised Minna, whom he admired as brave, selfless and indispensable. He wrote affectionately in The Life of My Choice: �Now, after more than seventy years, she is still my cherished friend and confidante, the one person left with shared memories of those far-off days.’


This statement was literally true. Thesiger, a confirmed bachelor, respected strong-willed, practical women, mother figures whose common sense and devotion tempered their undisputed authority. Thesiger’s occasional travelling companion and close friend Lady Egremont later remembered visiting Minna with him at Witney in Oxfordshire. She watched as he smoothed his hair and straightened his tie, �like a twelve-year-old schoolboy on his best behaviour’,


as they waited for Minna to open her front door.

Every morning after breakfast, Billy and Brian would find their ponies saddled and waiting with Habta Wold, the Legation syce (the servant who looked after the horses), who usually accompanied them. The boys had learnt to ride by the time they were four. They rode most mornings, and sometimes again in the afternoon. On a steep hillside five hundred feet above the Legation there was a grotto cut into the rock. From there Billy and Brian had tremendous views, to the north over Salale province and the Blue Nile gorges, southward to the far-off Arussi mountains. There, one day, Billy would follow in his father’s footsteps and hunt the mountain nyala, a majestic antelope with lyre-shaped horns. Aged four, he had been photographed with a fine nyala trophy head.

After their morning ride Billy and Brian did schoolwork, which consisted of reading, writing and arithmetic; sometimes they drilled with the Legation’s guard. After lunch they rode again or tried to shoot birds in the garden with their �Daisy’ airguns. Thesiger wrote: �Had it not been for the First World War I might have been sent to school in England, separated indefinitely from my parents, as was the fate of so many English children whose fathers served in India or elsewhere in the East. I must have had some lessons at the Legation, though I have no recollection of them, for I learnt to read and write.’


The idea of very small children being sent away to school did not appeal to Thesiger, who spoke out strongly against it; but he approved of preparatory boarding schools and, of course, segregated public schools, for older children.

Because he was so obviously fond of children – and, indeed, very good with little girls and boys – he was often asked why he had never married and had a family of his own. In his autobiography, the phrase The Life of My Choice, selected for the book’s title, occurs in a paragraph where Thesiger affirms his attitudes to marriage and other �commonly accepted pleasures of life’. He wrote: �I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation.’


He later added: �The Life of My Choice was the right title for the book I wrote about myself. It gave you everything. I had lived as I wanted, gone where I wanted, when I wanted. I travelled among peoples that interested me. My companions were those individuals I wanted to have with me.’




Thesiger’s impossible dream had been to preserve the near-idyllic life he had known as a boy in Abyssinia. He viewed change dismally, as a threat to the tribal peoples he admired, and to himself as a self-confessed traditionalist and romantic who �cherished the past, felt out of step with the present and dreaded the future’.


Such a reactionary outlook had been doomed from the start, and Thesiger knew it. And, of course, without a sword of Damocles hanging over it, the life he dreamt of would have been spared the impending threat of corrosive change, perhaps of annihilation – a fate later exemplified by the destruction of the marshes in southern Iraq. He took an aggressive pride in being the �last’ in a long line of overland explorers and travellers, a refugee from the Victorians’ Golden Age. In a romantic fit of self-indulgent melancholy, he yearned for an irretrievable past summed up by the robber-poet François Villon’s poignant query: �Où sont les neiges d’antan?’


– �Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ Ironically, from Thesiger’s bachelor-explorer viewpoint, this quotation, taken from �Le Grand Testament: Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’, lamented not the vanishing wilderness or its tribes, but the sensual, white-bodied women Villon had slept with during his dissipated youth, in fifteenth-century Paris.

Thesiger’s father and mother were supremely important figures during his early childhood, and took pride of place in his idealised (and romanticised) memories of those halcyon days. He wrote of his father: �Inevitably at Addis Ababa he was busy for most of the day, writing his despatches, interviewing people or visiting his colleagues in the other Legations…it was perhaps in the camp where we went each year from the Legation for an eagerly awaited ten days that I remember him most vividly. I can picture him now, a tall lean figure in a helmet, smoking his pipe as he watched the horses being saddled or inspected them while they were being fed; I can see him cleaning his rifle in the verandah of his tent, or sitting chatting with my mother by the fire in the evening.’




The camp’s setting was remote, perfect: �an enchanted spot, tucked away in the Entoto hills. A stream tumbled down the cliff opposite our tents, then flowed away through a jumble of rocks among a grove of trees. Here were all sorts of birds: top-heavy hornbills, touracos with crimson wings, brilliant bee-eaters, sunbirds, paradise flycatchers, hoopoes, golden weaver birds and many others. My father knew them all and taught me their names. Vultures nested in the cliffs and circled in slow spirals above the camp. I used to watch them through his field glasses, and the baboons that processed along the cliff tops, the babies clinging to their mothers’ backs. At night we sometimes heard their frenzied barking when a leopard disturbed them. Several times I went up the valley with my father in the evening and sat with him behind a rock, hoping he would get a shot at the leopard. I remember once a large white-tailed mongoose scuttled past within a few feet of us.’




Thesiger’s lifelong interest in ornithology dated from visits to this �enchanted’ enclave among the hills. As a boy he continued to shoot birds, and went on shooting them for sport and scientific study; but from then on he began to see and to recognise birds not as mere targets, but as living things that were fascinating as well as beautiful. The juvenile diaries he kept in Wales and Scotland between 1922 and 1933 contain detailed observations on local birdlife. During his Danakil expedition in 1933-34, Thesiger shot and preserved no fewer than 872 bird specimens, comprising 192 species, and three sub-species new to science which were named after him.

The chubby, smiling baby grew up as an extremely good-looking if rather sombre child who, his father noted, seemed very shy in the company of adults other than his parents.


As a boy of six he had thick brown hair tinted with his mother’s auburn, and large, expressive eyes. His mouth, like Kathleen’s, was wide, with small, slightly uneven teeth shielded by a long upper lip (like Wilfred Gilbert’s) which were hardly seen except when he was speaking energetically or laughing. In those days his nose was long and quite straight. Only after being broken three times did it acquire the misshapen, craggy character that led his oldest friend, John Verney, to describe him as �a splendid pinnacle knocked off the top of a Dolomite’


Although they went about protected from the hot sun by large sola topees, Billy and Brian must have had permanent tans which no doubt set them apart as creatures secretly to be envied by the pale-skinned little boys at their English preparatory school. The healthy outdoor life they led made the brothers fit and strong, with muscular arms and legs, and without an ounce of spare flesh on their lean brown bodies.

The Emperor designate, Lij Yasu, was one of three Abyssinian boys who, then and later, played roles of varying significance in Thesiger’s life. The other two were Asfa Wossen, the baby son of Ras Tafari, Abyssinia’s Regent after 1916 and the country’s future Emperor; and a nameless child, nine or ten years old, who had fought with Tafari’s army at Sagale. Abyssinia’s political chaos worsened from 1911 when Lij Yasu, aided by Menelik’s commander-in-chief Fitaurari Habta Giorgis, seized the palace and took control of the country. Lij Yasu was never crowned. This had been impossible during his grandfather’s lifetime, and after Menelik’s death in December 1913 a prophecy stating that if he were crowned he would die may have discouraged him. Lij Yasu meanwhile embraced Islam, and lived for long periods with the warlike Danakil (or Afar) tribes, hunting and raiding villages for provisions. An arrogant, cruel youth, he took pleasure in watching executions and floggings. To satisfy his blood-lust he massacred Shanqalla Negroes on the Abyssinia–Sudan border, and slaughtered three hundred Danakil, including women and children, in Captain Thesiger’s opinion �simply because he liked the sight of blood’.


Besides these atrocities Lij Yasu was rumoured to have himself killed and castrated a page at Menelik’s palace; and according to one of his officers, when a girl refused to have sex with him, Lij Yasu sliced off her breasts after watching her being gang-raped by his soldiers.

The Life of My Choice – described by Thesiger as �a fragment’ of autobiography


– tends to bury its subject under an avalanche of impersonal details. Though absorbing, these details are far more comprehensive than the often meagre infill of Thesiger’s life history requires. As well as exploiting its historical context to the full, Thesiger used the wealth of factual information about his life to produce a �treasure galleon’ of a book, written �with much distinction and honesty’,


yet offering few noteworthy revelations about its author. Nowhere in The Life of My Choice is this more apparent than in the opening chapters, describing Thesiger’s background and his early upbringing in Abyssinia and England.

In 1913–14 Thesiger’s father trekked from Addis Ababa to Nairobi to discuss with the Governor of British East Africa (later Kenya) border issues created by Abyssinian slavers, ivory raiders and the large populations of Boran and Galla tribesmen who migrated to East Africa from Abyssinia after Menelik had conquered their territory. Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger noted in 1911 that the Abyssinians had occupied the Turkana territory in British East Africa and Karamoja in Uganda, although the Abyssinian frontier established in 1907 lay to the north of these territories. In his teens Thesiger was fascinated by books such as Major H. Rayne’s The Ivory Raiders (a fourteenth-birthday present) and Henry Darley’s Slaves and Ivory, which provided an exciting background to his father’s mission. As a boy of three and a half, however, he remembered only vaguely the journey with his parents and Brian to the Awash station, the next railhead that replaced Dire Dawa until the Chemin de Fer Franco-Ethiopien’s line from Jibuti had progressed as far as Addis Ababa, its ultimate destination. Almost fifty years later he wrote in Arabian Sands that his attraction to �the deserts of the East’ might lie �in vague recollections of camel herds at waterholes; in the smell of dust and of acacias under a hot sun; in the chorus of hyenas and jackals in the darkness round the camp fire’. Such �dim memories’


as these derived from this and other journeys with his parents. They suggest that even as a child Thesiger was unusually observant and receptive to the sights, scents and sounds of the African bush and of the Abyssinian highlands where he lived for almost nine incomparably happy years. In 1914 Kathleen, who was pregnant once again, returned to England, and by the time Wilfred Gilbert joined her there at the end of March, the Thesigers’ third son, Dermot Vigors, had been born.

On his way to Nairobi Captain Thesiger wrote to Billy and Brian in London from camps at Laisamis and the Uaso Nyiro river, places which the younger Wilfred would often visit during his travels in Kenya. He treasured his father’s letters, written in pencil on coarse grey paper, illustrated with lively drawings of giraffes, lion and warthogs. Wilfred Gilbert may have got the idea of illustrating his stories with thumbnail sketches of big game from Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s South African classic Jock of the Bushveld. First published in 1907, the book was illustrated with hundreds of drawings, and many half-tone plates, by Edmund Caldwell. The earliest impressions of Jock had Caldwell’s uncorrected sketch of a dung beetle pushing a tiny ball of dung with its front, instead of its back, legs. Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen each owned a first edition of the book, and Thesiger remembered his father reading from it in the evenings, sitting on the entrance steps of the Legation. Later, Wilfred Gilbert gave Billy his copy, which the little boy inscribed proudly in pencil: �W P Thesiger – from Daddy Adiss-Ababa – Abysinia’. (In 1995 Thesiger sold his mother’s copy, inscribed by her, rebound, with more of his child’s pencilling erased from it, but still perfectly legible.)

Thesiger often emphasised how his father never talked down to him, but instead gave him �a happy sense of comradeship’ and �shared adventure’.


His father’s letter from Laisamis, he said, �could have been written to a boy of seven; I was only half that age’.


This was a harmless exaggeration, like Thesiger’s suggestion that he alone had been the recipient of the letter; whereas it was addressed, using the children’s euphonic pet names, to both Billy and Brian. The Laisamis letter began:

My dear Umsie [Billy] and Wowwow [Brian]

Daddy has been having a very good time hunting…daddy shot [a rhino] in the shoulder & he turned round & wanted to charge but we shot him again and soon he was quite deaded…




As she read Wilfred Gilbert’s letter aloud, Kathleen must have pictured her husband in his khaki shirt and riding breeches, smoking his pipe in the shade of his fly-tent or under a shady tree; writing with meticulous care on official paper ruffled now and then by the wind; sketching wild animals he described to bring his words alive. His account of shooting a female rhino clearly illustrates the dramatic change in our attitude to wildlife since the days when big game hunting was viewed uncritically (indeed, was strongly justified and admired) as sport. Nor was the episode by any means untypical of hunting adventures at that period. �Last night,’ he wrote, �two of our soldiers were out at night & they were attacked by an old mummy rhino which had a baby one with her and they had to shoot but they had not many cartridges & did not kill her & then they had to whistle for help & we all took our guns & ran out & daddy shot her and she fell but got up again & we all fired again until she was deaded & then we chased the baby one in the moonlight & tried to catch him but could not as he ran too fast.’




As a small boy Thesiger was thrilled by stories such as these. As he grew older he memorised tales of lion hunts and of fighting between warlike tribes told by his father’s Consuls. Arnold Wienholt Hodson, a Consul in south-west Abyssinia, hunted big game including elephant, buffalo and lion. Aged six or seven, Thesiger pored over Hodson’s photographs of game he had shot, and listened spellbound to his stories. Later he read Hodson’s books Where Lion Reign, published in 1927, and Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia (1928). Introducing Where Lion Reign, Hodson wrote: �In this wild and little-known terrain which it was my mission to explore, lion were plentiful enough to gladden the heart not only of any big game hunter, but of all those whom the call of adventure urges to seek out primitive Nature in her home among the savage and remote places of the earth.’




By then Wilfred Thesiger was at school in England. As a teenager yearning to return to Abyssinia, his birthplace and his home, he drank in like a potent elixir Hodson’s words, which defined precisely the life he aspired to, the life he was determined one day to achieve.




FIVE Passages to India and England (#ulink_69ff5cd0-fb3b-5920-af59-bcdce41adf09)


When war was declared in August 1914, Thesiger’s father was still on leave in England. �An accomplished linguist, fluent in French and German,’ Thesiger wrote, �he was accepted by the Army, given an appointment as captain in the Intelligence Branch, and sent to France, where he arrived on 23 September. This posting was a remarkable achievement…He was attached to the 3rd Army Corps, and while serving in France he earned a mention in despatches.’




Wilfred Gilbert’s four-month posting was indeed �remarkable’, not only because he had been commissioned (in the British Censorship Staff), whereas many regular officers of various ages, anxious to serve, had failed, but also because his language skills had improved vastly since Cheltenham, where his masters judged he was �not a linguist by nature’. His position as British Minister on Foreign Office leave from Addis Ababa perhaps led to his acceptance by the army as a temporary recruit for non-active service. Furthermore, he had evidently been passed as fit, with no mention of the heart problem that affected him as a boy, and would cause his premature death in his late forties.

In May 1914 Wilfred Gilbert had given Kathleen a specially bound Book of Common Prayer. Dedicated to her and to their children, he wrote in it a prayer of his own which ended: �Give us long years of happiness together in this life, striving always to do Thy will and content to leave the future in Thy hands.’


In January 1915, at the end of his Foreign Office leave, Wilfred Gilbert, Kathleen and their three sons went back to Addis Ababa. By then Kathleen was pregnant for the fourth time. On 8 November Roderic Miles Doughty Thesiger was born at the British Legation. Susannah having returned to India in 1913, an elderly nurse, known to the children as �Nanny’, had been engaged in England to look after one-year-old Dermot and, in due course, baby Roderic.

At Addis Ababa, Captain Thesiger felt concerned that the still-uncrowned Lij Yasu dreamt �of one day putting himself at the head of the Mohammadan Abyssinians, and of producing a Moslem kingdom’ that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Abyssinia’s �present Empire’.


Lij Yasu confirmed this fear when, at the Eid festival in Dire Dawa, swearing on the Koran, he professed himself a Muslim. When this was proclaimed to a meeting of chiefs at Addis Ababa there was a riot and shooting that resulted in many dead and wounded. A second meeting proclaimed Menelik’s daughter, Waizero Zauditu, Empress, and the Governor of Harar, Dedjazmatch (later Ras) Tafari, as heir. Thesiger dedicated his autobiography to Tafari’s memory, as the late Emperor. He had admired Tafari unreservedly, despite his wish to modernise Abyssinia, of which Thesiger surely could never have approved. Meanwhile, Tafari marshalled opposition to the deposed Lij Yasu, whose father, Negus Mikael, led the revolt aimed at restoring him to power. Had the revolt succeeded, Islam might have become the official religion of Abyssinia, where there were already Muslim tribes. Thesiger wrote in 1987, �Lij Yasu’s restoration would at least [have constituted] a considerable propaganda success for [Muslim] Turkey,’ and might have brought Abyssinia into the First World War on the side of Britain’s enemies, �at a time when we were fighting the Germans in East Africa, the Turks in Sinai, Mesopotamia and the Aden Protectorate; and the Dervishes [led by the �Mad Mullah’] in Somaliland’.




As a six-year-old boy, Thesiger remembered seeing Ras Tafari’s baby son, Asfa Wossen, being carried into the Legation in a red cradle for protection. This �most embarrassing proof of their confidence’ created an enduring bond between the Thesigers and Tafari which, directly and indirectly, influenced profoundly the course of Thesiger’s future life. Standing at the Legation’s fence, Billy and Brian saw Tafari’s soldiers stream across the plain below, on their way north to Sagale. �It was an enthralling, unforgettable sight for a small, romantically minded boy.’ A few days later, during a morning ride, the brothers heard firing. Galloping home, they were told of Tafari’s decisive victory on the Sagale plain, sixty miles north of Addis Ababa, which ended the revolt of Negus Mikael. �Forty-four years later,’ Thesiger wrote, �I visited the battlefield and saw skulls and bones in crevices on the rocky hillock where Negus Mikael had made his final stand.’




The victory parades before the Empress Zauditu on Jan Meda field impressed Thesiger enormously. He devoted two pages of The Life of My Choice to his father’s letter describing them and the sight of Negus Mikael led past, humiliated, in chains. Thesiger wrote: �Even now, nearly seventy years later, I can recall almost every detail.’ He remembered, and clearly envied, �a small boy carried past in triumph – he had killed two men though he seemed little older than myself’.


Thesiger said he had been reading Tales from the Iliad, and in Ras Tafari’s victory over Negus Mikael and Lij Yasu he could envision �the likes of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses’ as they passed �in triumph with aged Priam, proud even in defeat’. This was a piece of dramatic invention. Although H.L. Havell’s Stories from the Iliad was published in 1916, the same year as the Battle of Sagale, Thesiger was given the book only five years later, in July 1921, as an examination prize by R.C.V. Lang, his preparatory school’s headmaster.

More important than this, the 1916 Jan Meda parades inspired Thesiger as a boy to pursue without compromise the adventurous life he would one day lead as a man. He wrote: �I believe that day implanted in me a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.’




In February 1917 Waizero Zauditu was crowned Empress of Abyssinia. Lij Yasu, meanwhile, supported by Ras Yemer, one of Negus Mikael’s officers, raised a force and occupied Magdala, north of Addis Ababa in Wollo province. Confronted by an army from the province of Shoa, he and his followers escaped, only to be defeated in battle, with heavy losses, near Dessie. From there he fled once more into the Danakil country. Having been detained at Fiche for fourteen years, he again escaped before he was finally captured in 1932 and imprisoned at Harar, where he died �a physical wreck’ at the age of thirty-seven.

By the end of 1917 the effort and strain of the previous two years had begun to tell on Wilfred Gilbert, whose heart was further weakened by the effects of Addis Ababa’s altitude of eight thousand feet. In December the Thesigers and Minna Buckle travelled to Jibuti, by the now-completed railway linking Addis Ababa and the coast. From Jibuti, Kathleen, Minna and the children sailed along the coast to Berbera, where they stayed with Geoffrey Archer, the Commissioner of British Somaliland, and his wife Olive. Captain Thesiger meanwhile went on via Aden by HMS Fox to Cairo, for talks with the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, about the political future of Abyssinia.

Thesiger wrote: �Geoffrey Archer…a real giant…six foot four and broad in proportion…lent Brian and me a .410 shotgun and took us shooting along the shore, and when we got back told his skinner to stuff the birds we had shot; I was thrilled by these expeditions.’


Archer recalled years later how, �Firing at the various plovers and sandpipers…skimming close inshore over a placid sea, the children could observe exactly where their shot struck.’ Although Wilfred Gilbert noted that Billy and Brian �each shot several kinds of birds’, Geoffrey Archer remembered, �Heartrending were the scenes when Brian, the younger…reported to his mother with tears flowing that he had not succeeded in hitting a single bird, while Wilfred, showing signs of a prowess to come, had bagged at least half a dozen.’




On 3 January 1918 the Thesigers crossed from Berbera in very rough seas to Aden. Wilfred Gilbert, exhausted by his journey to and from Cairo, had been ill in bed for four out of six days at Berbera. During the crossing, he wrote, �we were all ill’. In cooler weather at Aden they soon recovered. In Desert, Marsh and Mountain and The Life of My Choice, Thesiger told how the Resident, Major-General J.M. Stewart, took Wilfred Gilbert, Billy and Brian to Lahej in the Aden Protectorate, where they saw British troops shell lines of Turks who had invaded the Protectorate from Yemen. Thesiger’s memory of the trenches and the puffs of white smoke from exploding shells remained clear, but earned him a reputation as a little �liar’ at his preparatory school.


Strangely, none of his father’s letters from Aden mentioned this event. Instead, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: �There seems to have been a week’s cessation of hostilities for Christmas. Our men had sports etc while the Turks took the occasion to celebrate a big wedding on their side of the lines. I wanted to take the two eldest boys out this morning to see the aeroplanes working and our guns firing but they were too tired yesterday and it means an early start from here.’




Wilfred Thesiger’s childhood photograph album, annotated by his father and mother, shows the Archers’ garden with palm trees and their large, dimly-lit drawing room with its tiled floor, Indian carpets and big game trophies on the walls. There are photographs of Billy and Brian riding camels, and one of a small figure in a sun helmet (perhaps Billy) retrieving a shot bird from the sea.

On 3 January the Thesigers sailed from Aden on board a P&O steamer for Bombay. Wilfred Gilbert assured his mother: �Kathleen and the children are all well and I think their month at Berbera has done them good altho’ they rather lost their colour.’


The children had their portraits taken in a photographer’s studio in Bombay. With his thick brown hair carefully brushed and parted, Billy looked very composed in a plain shirt, silk tie and tiepin.

In The Life of My Choice, Thesiger gave a vivid description of the months he and his family spent in India in 1918 with Frederic Chelmsford, Wilfred Gilbert’s eldest brother. Appointed Viceroy in 1916, Chelmsford had a reputation for hard work, a lack of originality, and prejudices which, one senior official observed, appeared to originate in ideas �other than his own’.


Meeting his uncle for the first time in the awe-inspiring surroundings of Delhi’s Viceregal Lodge, Thesiger recalled that he found Frederic Chelmsford impressive and magnificently remote. Since the government buildings designed by Lutyens were not yet complete, the Thesigers lived in �palatial tents luxuriously carpeted and furnished, and were looked after by a host of servants’.


To the seven-year-old Wilfred Thesiger, camping out on this grand scale, amidst �pomp and ceremony’, waited on by elaborately turbaned, splendidly uniformed Indian retainers, gave the still seemingly unreal experience added theatrical glamour.

According to Thesiger, the highlight of the visit came when he and Brian joined their father for a tiger shoot in the forests near Jaipur. Here again, Thesiger’s versions, published sixty or seventy years later, do not quite correspond to Wilfred Gilbert’s contemporary description. In his autobiography Thesiger wrote:

Soon after breakfast we set off into the jungle. We saw some wild boar which paid little attention to our passing elephants, and we saw several magnificent peacock and a number of monkeys; to me the monkeys were bandar log, straight out of Kipling’s Jungle Book. It must have taken a couple of hours or more to reach the machan, a platform raised on poles. We climbed up on to it; someone blew a horn and the beat started. After a time I could hear distant shouts. I sat very still, hardly daring to move my head.

A peacock flew past. Then my father slowly raised his rifle and there was the tiger, padding towards us along a narrow game trail, his head moving from side to side. I still remember him as I saw him then. He was magnificent, larger even than I had expected, looking almost red against the pale dry grass. My father fired. I saw the tiger stagger. He roared, bounded off and disappeared into the jungle. He was never found, though they searched for him on elephants while we returned to the palace. I was very conscious of my father’s intense disappointment.




In 1979 Thesiger had written: �I shall never forget sitting, very still, in a machan, hearing the beaters getting closer. Then a nudge [from my father] and looking down to see the tiger, unexpectedly red, move forward just below us.’


In 1987 he wrote: �Two days later we went on another beat, this time for panther, but the panther broke back and we never saw it. However, a great sambhur stag did gallop past the machan.’ He added for emphasis: �Scenes such as this remained most vividly in my memory.’




Describing the tiger shoot in a letter to his mother written on 12 March 1918, Wilfred Gilbert commented: �This went wrong unluckily as the tiger stopped in front of the wrong machan at 50 yards and then came to mine and showed just his head out of the grass at 130 yards. It was no good shooting at that and I only got a moving shot at the same distance, hitting him but not badly. He gave a roar and went on and everyone fired without effect. We followed up on elephants and found blood tracks but unluckily he got clean away. The Maharajah [of Jaipur] promised me another but the beat was a failure and he broke back through the line and we never got a glimpse of him. The same happened with a panther drive which was doubly bad luck.’




The Maharajah’s shikaris had located a sambhur stag in the nearby hills, and after a �good climb’ Wilfred Gilbert saw through his binoculars the sambhur’s horns and one ear �twitching to keep off the flies’; the rest of the animal was hidden by grass and scrub. Risking a shot from two hundred yards, across a ravine, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: �I had to guess where his chest would be…and dropped him stone dead. This bucked us up a bit…but it was very hard that the only shot I missed at Jaipur was the tiger.’


�Billy and Brian…had the time of their lives. They came blackbuck shooting in bullock carts. I got 3 quite good heads [Thesiger remembered only two]; pigsticking also when they and Mary [Buckle] followed us on elephant.’


Nowhere, however, did he mention Billy being with him on the machan, tense, motionless, waiting for his father to shoot a tiger.

In view of the fact that Thesiger’s recollections, which even as late as 1987 were so vividly detailed, so precise, were yet different from his father’s, it seems he may have combined a vaguer memory of Wilfred Gilbert’s stories with his own much more recent sightings of tiger at Bandhavgarh, Bhopal, in 1983 and 1984. When Thesiger saw these tigers he was writing The Life of My Choice, and was able therefore to describe a (perhaps partly imagined) scene from his childhood as clearly as if it had only just occurred.

The �opulence and splendour’ of Jaipur’s court seemed to equal if not surpass the viceregal splendours of Delhi. To Thesiger as a boy what mattered was �the all-important hunting’; he admitted he was too young to appreciate the gorgeously ornate palaces, the Maharajah’s courtiers in sumptuous robes. Far more appealing to Billy and Brian was the return crossing from Aden to Jibuti on board HMS Juno after their voyage by P&O liner from Bombay. A Marine band played and the captain fired one of the ship’s guns �after [the children] had been given cotton wool to stuff in [their] ears’.




Six months later, Captain Thesiger was recalled to London by the Foreign Office to report on Abyssinia. He returned to Addis Ababa in December 1918 via Paris, Rome, Taranto and Cairo. The worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza that claimed more victims than the war itself had struck Cairo, causing many deaths. At Jibuti, Wilfred Gilbert found letters from Addis Ababa. He wrote: �Poor Kathleen must have had an awfully anxious time. 4 doctors out of 6 dead, besides a lot of other Europeans and some 13-20,000 Abyssinians. They died like flies and at last ceased even to bury their dead. Billy, Roddy, Dermot and Mary had had it and the compound [was] all down so that they had at times practically no servants.’


Thesiger wrote in 1987: �Ras Tafari sickened. His detractors might well ponder what would have happened to the country had he died.’


Thesiger remembered his mother had been reading to him A Sporting Trip Through Abyssinia by Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton. �We had got to where Powell-Cotton was at Gondar, trying to shoot a buffalo, and his servant came running down the hill and frightened the buffalo away. My mother thought I looked a bit flushed. She took my temperature and she popped me into bed.’




By the end of the year, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s duties at Addis Ababa had come to an end. In April 1919 the family travelled together to England for the last time. For Billy, their final exodus from Abyssinia was bewildering; more than a sad occasion, it had been totally incredible: �Until almost the last day I could not believe that we were really leaving Abyssinia for good, that we should not be coming back.’







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