Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland
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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.’3
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’.4 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.’5 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’
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.’1 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’.2 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.’3
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.’4 Hindlip’s scathing remarks were echoed in 1905 by Augustus B. Wylde, a former Vice-Consul