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

of the High Street in the early morning before the traffic; May morning and the choirboys singing on Magdalen Tower; reading in a punt on the river beneath overhanging willows; the water meadows beyond Parsons’ Pleasure, and the sound of corncrakes; sailing with Robin Campbell on Port Meadow and then tea together at the Trout Inn; dinner parties in my rooms, with evening light on the College buildings and the scent of wallflowers from the President’s garden’.²

      At Oxford Thesiger read military history, although his chronic ‘inability to cope with Latin’ prevented him from taking the Crusades as his special subject. He admired and envied T.E. Lawrence’s ground-breaking research on the military architecture of the Middle East, and his thesis, Crusader Castles, published in 1936, a year after his death, a copy of which Thesiger eventually owned. To his regret they never met during Lawrence’s brief visits to John Buchan at Elsfield Manor, near Oxford, where Thesiger was sometimes invited to lunch or tea. Thesiger and Lawrence had much in common. Both had Anglo-Irish backgrounds, both studied history at Oxford and both became Fellows of Oxford colleges. Neither drank nor smoked, bothered about food or took an interest in women. Both needed to be liked and appreciated. Lawrence claimed he was ‘sexless’, while for Thesiger sex was ‘of no great consequence’.³ They held similar views about money and work, and the ‘separateness’ of friendships. While they were truthful, both tended (in varying degrees) to gloss over plain facts with a romantic veneer. Both practised self-discipline, yet were not averse to self-promotion in the sense of ‘backing into the limelight’. As for differences between the two, Thesiger was tactile, whereas Lawrence hated to be touched; and, of course, Lawrence revelled in speed – speedboats and powerful motorcycles – while Thesiger viewed the invention of the internal combustion engine as a catastrophe. Lawrence was the most famous British Arabist of his day; Thesiger was a great Arabist in the making. With John Buchan as a mutual friend and a catalyst, it is difficult to believe that they would not have got on well together. As for the other Lawrence, David Herbert, with whom Thesiger has never been compared, and whom he would almost certainly have disliked, they nevertheless shared strong views on ‘the close tie of male to male’⁴ and the mechanised materialism of Western nations, ‘ready for an outburst of insanity [throwing] us all into some purely machine-driven unity of lunatics’.⁵ In 1928, despite his professed loathing of cars, Thesiger had learnt to drive. He said: ‘At the Titley farmhouse and at The Milebrook, until my mother bought a car, we got about using a pony and trap. The small open car I got after I left Eton extended the range of my brothers’ and my social lives very considerably.’ Thesiger used to park this car outside Magdalen, a practice, he wrote, ‘people thought was rather undignified’.⁶

      His history tutor, J.M. Thompson, gave tutorials which were diverse and ‘always stimulating’⁷ but, for Wilfred, lacked the real-life excitement of the wild victory parades at Addis Ababa in 1916, or of seeing the Zulu assegais and other trophies his grandfather had brought back from the Zulu War. Nothing Thesiger read at Oxford’s history school compared with the books he read about the Zulus, including Rider Haggard’s African novels, or about Abyssinia or Dervishes in the Sudan. In the same way, the buildings and people he saw in London or Paris had failed to stir his imagination like the colourful crowds, mosques and tombs he remembered in India as a boy.

      Thesiger avoided Magdalen’s ‘communal life’ and organised sports: ‘I did not drink, and for such festivities as Bump Suppers celebrating success on the river by the College eight I had no taste.’⁸ In May 1931 he did attend a Boat Club supper, and that month someone pencilled on his college menu: ‘I’ve never seen you inebriated before, and I hope I never do again…!!!’ In fact Thesiger drank very little, and unlike his parents and his brothers, he never smoked. Out shooting in Wales or fishing off Brittany, he would drink cider. He enjoyed sweet liqueurs, and used to pour a generous measure of dark, sweet sherry into his favourite oxtail soup or minestrone. Beer and spirits he never touched.

      For four consecutive years Thesiger boxed for Oxford, and captained the university in his final year. Three wins against Cambridge, he wrote modestly, ‘gave me a certain standing in the College’.⁹ Thesiger first learnt to box at Addis Ababa, encouraged by Count Arthur Bentinck, a member of his father’s staff. A First World War veteran who had been badly wounded in France, Bentinck was appointed Captain Thesiger’s Military Attaché in 1917. Thesiger wrote: ‘One day at the Legation he had produced boxing gloves, and instructed Brian and me to put them on. He always maintained that our later success was due to his initial coaching. He alarmed us as children – he had a gruff manner, a game leg and a pronounced cast in one eye. Later he became a close family friend.’¹⁰

      At St Aubyn’s and Eton, boxing had won Thesiger respect but not friendship. In his male-orientated world, boxing equated with assertiveness, controlled aggression and strength of character. It was an exclusively male pursuit which signalled virility and courage. Boxing, even when the contestants fought tirelessly and hard, channelled and curbed aggression. However brutal they might appear, the matches were never brutish, and the rules and art of boxing maintained a proper division between the controlled aggressive spirit of the ring and an uncontrolled violence ‘improper in the affairs of men’.¹¹ In this sense the sport suited Thesiger’s ethos as well as big game hunting and bullfighting. In each of them, the appeal for Thesiger was the same: to master uncertainty, to win decisively, always facing the possibility of defeat (as a boxer) or of death (from a dangerous African animal such as a lion or a buffalo).

      Thesiger said: ‘I had the heavy punch whereas Brian was stylish in the ring. Brian fought hard, right to the end. Of the two of us, he was probably the better boxer.’¹² During Thesiger’s year as Oxford captain his brother Dermot wrote in Isis, the university journal: ‘A kindly fortune favoured him with the means of practising and ripening his fistic ability. It entrusted him to the care of an Indian ayah, who devotedly assured him that there was no reason why he should do anything other than he pleased. Further, it produced a self-willed child of six with three brothers smaller than himself, thus mitigating the danger of an embryo boxer being sadly battered in the early stages of his career.’¹³

      At Eton Thesiger had boxed as a flyweight in 1925, a bantamweight in 1926, a lightweight in 1927 and a welterweight in 1928.¹⁴ At Oxford, ‘Finding it difficult to get down to middleweight, I decided to fight as a light-heavy in the University trials.’¹⁵ For his height, almost six foot two inches, this weight – with an upper limit of twelve stone seven pounds – was not excessive. He was broad-chested and broad-shouldered, with sinewy arms, massive biceps and muscular legs which figured prominently in the photograph of him with his guard up, published originally in the Illustrated London News and later in Desert, Marsh and Mountain. He wrote: ‘Boxing was the only sport I was any good at, but I often wondered, sitting with gloves on waiting for the fight before mine to end, why on earth I did it. Yet, once I had started, I felt a savage satisfaction in fighting. I was never conscious of pain, even with a torn ear, a broken nose and split lips, but I do remember occasions of desperate tiredness, and of effort to keep my hands up or stay on my feet.’¹⁶

      In his summer holiday in 1930, for the nominal wage of a shilling, Thesiger worked his passage as a fireman aboard the tramp steamer Sorrento, through the Mediterranean as far as Istanbul and Constanza in the Black Sea. When he returned home at the end of a ‘rewarding’ month, he found two letters waiting for him: an invitation from Ras Tafari to attend his coronation as the Emperor