On 30 September 1929 Thesiger had been elected a member of the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, proposed by his uncle Edward Vigors and seconded by Sir Ralph Verney, and as part of his blossoming social life at Oxford he joined clubs including the Raleigh, Vincent’s and the Gridiron. He described this period in The Life of My Choice as ‘getting over the feeling of rejection instilled into me at St Aubyn’s’ and discovering that ‘most people were only too willing to be friendly if I gave them a chance’.7
In the summer of 1931 he sailed with a Hull trawler to fishing grounds off Iceland’s southern coast. They skirted the Faroes, ‘an awe-inspiring sight, with the sea thundering against great black precipices and hurling scattered sheets of spray high up the face of the rock; above this turmoil a host of wheeling, screeching sea birds showed white against the cliffs’. Of the gruelling labour, Thesiger wrote: ‘I remember the brief darkness at midnight when the arc lamps lit the decks; the interminable hours of daylight; the unceasing work with men too tired to talk; the hurried meals; the luxury of sleep when we were moving from one fishing ground to another.’8 These wonderful descriptions recalled memories of hours spent in the Sorrento’s bunkers the previous year, ‘hard, hot, dirty, choking work’ shovelling coal, and would be echoed in later memories of his first desert journey, across the French Sahara: exhausting, marvellous days ending in ‘tired surrender to sleep’.9 As a memento of his trip to Iceland, Thesiger kept a letter written on 28 July 1931 by R.P. Ross of the steam trawler owners, F. & T. Ross, West Dock Avenue, Hull: ‘Just a line to let you know we have sent this morning two haddocks, two lemon soles, and one halibut to…The Milebrook…Hoping you are feeling no ill effects from your voyage…PS The Pelton [Thesiger’s vessel] landed 578 kits [i.e. barrels] and made £380.’10
On 8 October 1931, Kathleen Thesiger remarried at the age of fifty-one. Her second husband, Reginald Basil Astley, was sixty-nine. Astley was a childless widower whose first wife, Caroline Douglas Stewart, had died in 1921. A cousin of the twentieth Baron Hastings of Melton Constable, Norfolk and Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, he was an Old Etonian. He owned a villa on Lake Como and the Weir House, Alresford, Hampshire, whose tranquil setting included a trout stream and closely mown lawns shaded by ancient cedars. According to the Weir House visitors’ book, Kathleen Thesiger had been a fairly frequent guest there since at least 1927.
In his 1931 Milebrook diary Thesiger mentioned only briefly his mother’s engagement to this elderly, white-haired gentleman of leisure, whose dilettante interests included art, architecture, the lineage of noble families and, of course, trout fishing. Thesiger wrote on 20 August 1931: ‘Mrs T’s engagement to R Astley made public.’ This was a mistake; between ‘made’ and ‘public’, Thesiger scribbled hastily, ‘not yet’. The following day he wrote firmly: ‘Mrs T’s engagement made public. [Wilfred’s godmother] Mrs Backhouse…arrived for tea. W[ilfred] and B[rian] shot pigeons in the afternoon.’11 Thesiger ‘never thought it odd’ that Kathleen announced her engagement to Astley on the anniversary of her wedding to Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger. To some the engagement seemed ill-timed, but it is conceivable that, by overmarking one anniversary with another, Kathleen intended to signal that her life had moved on. Whether or not this was the case, her memory of Wilfred Gilbert never faded, nor did her love for him diminish.
Thesiger wrote nothing about the wedding in his diary. On 6 October Kathleen left for London by the mid-morning train.12 Wilfred took the same train the following morning.13 By coincidence, Kathleen had married Thesiger’s father at St Peter’s church, Eaton Square, and her second marriage took place at another St Peter’s (as it was then), which stood almost next door to her brother-in-law Percy Thesiger’s porticoed, redbrick London house, number 25 Cranley Gardens in South Kensington.
To begin with, Thesiger and his brothers had regarded Reginald Astley as a joke; later on, they realised his qualities as a man and an amateur historian. At The Milebrook, Thesiger said, ‘Reggie had his own room, opposite mine. It was a marriage of companionship. My mother dominated him, but not unpleasantly. She was a stronger character…that’s all it amounted to.’14 Thesiger knew how lonely his mother had been, and felt relieved that she had found a congenial companion for her old age, when her sons had left home. But later he would reflect that the marriage ‘didn’t in fact work very well’.15 Of the four brothers, Roderic got on best with their new stepfather. Not only did he share Astley’s fascination with pictures and architecture,16 but, being the youngest, he had almost no recollection of Wilfred Gilbert, whereas Wilfred inevitably made comparisons between his father and stepfather that did not always favour Astley.
Kathleen endeavoured always to be fair in her treatment of her sons. She loved them all and showed no obvious favouritism, although Thesiger later said that in those days she had felt closest to Dermot, with whom she shared a passion for horses. Thesiger had ridden since early boyhood, but by his late teens his passion for shooting took precedence over everything else. He came to regard horses as ‘silly creatures, and inferior to camels’.17 Whilst Dermot had adored his horses, Thesiger would claim that no animal he ever owned, not even his beloved spaniels, meant as much to him as Faraj Allah, the beautiful Bisharin female camel he acquired in the Sudan.18
For a blissful fortnight in the summer of 1932, Thesiger and six friends from Oxford stayed at the Villa Cipressi, Reginald Astley’s house on the shore of Lake Como. The party included Robin Campbell, Harry Phillimore, Edward Ford, Bill Peat, Tony Rumbold and John Schuster. All were Etonians, except for Campbell, who had been educated at Wellington. They swam in the lake, waterskied and sunbathed naked on the lawns among flowering magnolias. ‘After dinner,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘we would sit looking out over the three arms of the lake and talk until, drowsy with sun, swimming, food and wine, we went off to bed.’19 It all seemed perfect, yet this vacation marked a waning of Thesiger’s once-inseparable friendship with Robin Campbell. Forty years later, Tony (then Sir Anthony) Rumbold invited the two men to lunch, hoping their lapsed friendship might be revived. To Rumbold’s disappointment (and Thesiger’s), nothing came of this. Rumbold said: ‘It didn’t go very well. Their old friendship had gone and the atmosphere was rather a cold one. I thought it was sad. Robin had been wounded and had his leg amputated during the war. I think this affected Wilfred, who wanted to remember Robin as he was when we were all young. Perfect – you know, like a Greek god.’20
After Brian Thesiger’s godfather, Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, was killed in Italy in 1915, his widow Judith ‘constituted herself’ as Brian’s godmother.21 Rich and manipulative, Judith later promised Brian that, if he changed his name to Doughty-Wylie, he would inherit her money. Thesiger said: ‘Like my father before me, I grew up to be proud of my family. Nothing on earth could have induced me to do this. My mother, however, told us: “You mustn’t interfere. You must allow Brian to do as he wishes…It is up to Brian to decide.”’22 When he left Oxford, Brian joined Doughty-Wylie’s regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and on 26 September 1933 he changed his name by deed poll from Thesiger to Doughty-Wylie. Wilfred and Brian remained as close as before, yet