Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland
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and wives…I don’t think they care about [the horses] though the daughter is keen. Lady B said “The Sowars were the raison d’être of the stables.” All terribly different.’31 Wilfred enjoyed the banquet given by Sir Sidney Barton in honour of the Emperor. Despatched from London in October, according to the Birmingham Post, a cake produced for the occasion, stood five feet five inches high, on a gold base twenty-two inches in diameter, and weighed more than one and a half hundredweight.32 Many years later, he acquired seven volumes of press cuttings reporting events in Abyssinia from 1929 to 1942. The collection had belonged to Sir Sidney Barton, and among other things it included very full coverage of Haile Selassie’s coronation.
Thesiger admitted that his view of history was ‘romantic’ rather than ‘objective’. He might have added ‘selective’. Whereas his description of the coronation in The Life of My Choice was dignified and sombre, his letters from Addis Ababa in 1930, though no less admiring, had a lighter touch. Of the Duke of Gloucester’s stay at the old palace, he wrote: ‘They are having an odd time at the Gibbi. About a score of courses for every meal, and most of the servants seem to have disappeared. HRH does not treat things seriously and sees the funny side of it.’ The Italians, he noted, were angry after being refused the gibbi as their quarters, since ‘the palace was engaged’.33 Thesiger later dismissed such anecdotes as inappropriate for an autobiography dedicated to the Emperor’s memory. He felt annoyed and depressed by ‘intrusions’ from the West into the old Abyssinia he had known as a boy. ‘Already it was slightly tarnished round the edges…the bodyguard now wore khaki, some of the palace secretaries were in tailcoats and top hats. There were cars in the streets and brash, noisy journalists crowded round hotel bars competing for sensational stories to wire to their papers. On ceremonial occasions they thrust themselves forward with their cameras.’34 He remembered being elbowed aside by someone shouting, ‘Make way for the eyes and ears of the world!’35 Evelyn Waugh, reporting for the Graphic, joined Lady Ravensdale, a ‘hopelessly loquacious’ American, at the unveiling of a memorial statue to the Emperor Menelik. Waugh wrote: ‘One photographer, bolder than the rest, advanced out of the crowd and planted his camera within a few yards of the royal party; he wore a violet suit of plus-fours, a green shirt open at the neck, tartan stockings, and particoloured shoes.’36 Thesiger, in turn, mocked Waugh’s grey suede shoes, his floppy bow tie and his fashionably wide trouser legs: ‘he struck me as flaccid and petulant and I disliked him on sight’.37 During the ‘preposterous Alice in Wonderland fortnight’38 at Addis Ababa, Waugh gathered enough material for two books: the satirical novel Black Mischief and Remote People, a prime specimen of his ‘impeccable’ acid-etched prose, which Thesiger praised, yet thought was wasted on descriptions of trivia such as the red flannel underclothes worn by Haile Selassie’s temperamental German housekeeper.39 His dislike of Waugh was confirmed by Waugh’s disparaging references to the new Emperor in Remote People: ‘Haile Selassie (Power of the Trinity)…is the new name which the emperor has assumed among his other titles; a heavy fine is threatened to anyone overheard referring to him as Tafari. The words have become variously corrupted by the European visitors to “Highly Salacious” and “I love a lassie” – this last the inspiration of a RAC mechanic.’40
Sir John Maffey discouraged Thesiger’s plan to hunt big game in the Sudan after the ceremonies were over. Thesiger wrote: ‘I talked it over with Sir John, and he said if there was a chance of a shoot here take it, as a Soudan shoot would be terribly expensive. A licence costs £50 and I could not have got round it.’ He declined Sir Sidney Barton’s proposal that he should join his and Lord Airlie’s hunting party in the Arussi Mountains, insisting that he needed to hunt by himself to gain confidence and experience for the future.41 Colonel Dan Sandford, who served under Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger in 1913 and had become a friend of the family, advised Wilfred to hunt in the Danakil country; owing to the Danakil tribes’ murderous reputation it was avoided by Abyssinians, and game was plentiful. Thesiger delighted in recounting Barton’s solemn warning: ‘He said: “Don’t go further down the Awash than Bilen. If you get yourself cut up by the Danakil, it would rather spoil the effect of the show [the coronation].”’42 Presaging his later style of travel and exploration, Thesiger wrote: ‘I am taking camels for transport as there are two longish marches over the desert.’43 His godmother Mrs Backhouse, herself a keen hunter, lent him her .318 Westley Richards magazine rifle. From Colonel Sandford at Mullu he borrowed a double-barrelled .400 Jeffery, a more powerful weapon than the .318, in case he decided to hunt (or else encountered) buffalo in the extensive reedbeds at Bilen. Sandford also lent him one of his most trusted employees, a Somali named Ali Yaya who was ‘a first class headman’, together with ‘their 2nd cook and a boy’.44 The Abyssinian government provided four armed askaris as an escort. Thesiger wrote: ‘I am naturally hopelessly excited at the idea. It is what I have always longed to do above all things, and the Hawash [sic] is the best shooting left in Abyssinia.’45
Before he left Addis Ababa Thesiger met Major R.E. Cheesman, who had served as Consul at Dangila in north-west Abyssinia from 1925 to 1929. In 1926 Cheesman published a book of his travels, In Unknown Arabia. His account of Lake Tana and the Blue Nile followed ten years later. Cheesman remembered talking on the steps of the Legation to Thesiger, who said: ‘“I want to do some exploring. Is there anywhere I could go?” I told him he was rather late in the field; that areas round the North Pole and the South Pole were all that had been left. He said he was not interested in cold countries. I then reminded him that there was a nice hot spot down in the Danakil desert and that nobody had explored it to find out where the Awash river went to.’46
On 15 November he wrote to Kathleen: ‘I am off tomorrow…The Government decided our activities were to be confined to 3 heads apiece. (The Minister [Sir Sidney Barton] and Airlie are also going on a safari). Abyssinian humour…’ Lord Airlie and Barton planned to hunt nyala in the Arussi mountains with the Duke of Gloucester, who also hunted in British Somaliland, long before popularised by Captain H.G.C. Swayne’s Seventeen Trips Through Somaliland (1895) and Two Dianas in Somaliland, written by Agnes Herbert in 1908.
From Sade Malka, roughly halfway to Bilen, Thesiger wrote: ‘Everything is going very well…So far I have shot one Soemering’s gazelle and one oryx with a good head, also a bush pig.’ He shot and wounded other game, but missed eight shots at a long-necked gerenuk antelope. Three attempts to shoot a buffalo in the reedbeds at Bilen also failed. At target practice with the .318 his shots went high, perhaps due to its brass cartridges being overheated by the sun, or the deceiving effect of strong sunlight when judging distances.
Thesiger’s much-scarred Danakil shikari, Moussa Hamma, wore an earring indicating he had killed ten men. This ‘most pernicious custom’ at first shocked Wilfred, yet it also excited him: ‘I accepted the fact that among the Danakil a man’s status depended on the number of other men he had killed. They castrated their victims, and this I also accepted. I’ve always believed…killing is natural to men.’47 By killing and castrating other men, Danakil warriors demonstrated their maleness and superiority. Robbed of its symbolic virility, a castrated corpse was no longer the corpse of a ‘true man’. In Thesiger’s view, the Danakils’ savage ethos comprised nothing more or less than the survival of the fittest,