After Belgrade, Wilfred Gilbert was posted to St Petersburg, where, to his relief he was not ‘bothered with too many social duties’.31 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.’32 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.’33
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.’34
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.35
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.’36 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.’37
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’.38
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.’39 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’.40 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.
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.1 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.’2 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.’3