Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland

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’.⁶ 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.’⁷

      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.’⁸ 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.’⁹

      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.¹⁰ 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.’¹¹

      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.’¹² 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’.¹³ 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’.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

      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.’¹⁶ In 1987 he wrote: ‘Two days later we went on another beat, this time for panther, but the panther broke