Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Alexander Maitland
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and huts with hardly a decent house to be seen anywhere. The whole area is nearly tree-less and very disappointing.’5
In his autobiography The Life of My Choice, published in 1987, Wilfred Thesiger conjured a rather more vivid and more sensual image of his birthplace, which had changed apparently very little by the time his father and mother arrived there, only a few years after Vivian, the Hindlips and Wylde, in December 1909. He did this very skilfully, introducing his parents and placing them at the centre of the stage, sketching the embryonic, sprawling township of Addis Ababa, its wild surroundings and multicultural population, and the social and political chaos into which Abyssinia had lapsed, from 1908, after Menelik had been incapacitated by the first of several strokes.
Thesiger wrote:
Addis Ababa consisted of a series of scattered villages grouped on hillsides with open, uncultivated spaces between. Menelik’s palace crowned the largest hill; nearby a jumble of thatched huts and some corrugated-iron-roofed shacks clustered round the large open market. Nowhere were there any proper roads. [In his north Abyssinia diary, dated 1960, Thesiger commented on 12 May: ‘Menelik’s gibbi [palace] was on a small isolated hill below the present town.’ And on 13 May: ‘[It occupied] a surprisingly small area on the top of the hill…He used to sit under a tree and watch his cattle being watered, with a telescope.’6 When Thesiger visited the site of Menelik’s palace in 1960, he had found ‘almost no sign of it’.7]
Abyssinians of any standing travelled everywhere on muleback, followed by an armed mob of slaves and retainers, varying in number according to the importance of their master. Galla, Somali, Gurage, people from the subject kingdom of Kaffa, negroes from the west, mingled on the streets with their Amhara and Tigrean overlords; but it was these latter who dominated the scene, imposed their stamp upon the town and gave it its unique character. Wrapped in white toga-like shammas worn over long white shirts and jodhpurs, they set a fashion which over the years was copied by an increasing number of their subjects.
The clothes, the buildings, the pitch and intonation of voices speaking Amharic; the smell of rancid butter, of red peppers and burning cow dung that permeated the town; the packs of savage dogs that roamed the streets and whose howling rose and fell through the night; an occasional corpse hanging on the gallows-tree; beggars who had lost a hand or foot for theft; debtors and creditors wandering round chained together; strings of donkeys bringing in firewood; caravans of mules; the crowded market where men and women squatted on the ground, selling earthen pots, lengths of cloths, skins, cartridges, bars of salt, silver ornaments, heaps of grain, vegetables, beer – all this combined to create a scene and an atmosphere unlike any other in the world…8
Almost certainly, Thesiger’s detailed descriptions of Addis Ababa were not based entirely on childhood memories, but on notes and recollections of visits he made later, between 1930 and 1966, no doubt clarified by reading his father’s correspondence and the many books about Abyssinia he had collected over the years. Having painted this colourful backdrop to his life story, Thesiger gave a perceptive résumé of the Abyssinians’ character: ‘Encircled by British, French and Italian territories, they were intensely proud of their age-old independence and very conscious that their forefathers had been among the earliest converts to Christianity. Consequently they were both arrogant and reactionary, while the past three hundred years had made them suspicious and obstructive in dealing with Europeans. As a race they had an inborn love of litigation and suffered from inherent avarice. Yet they were naturally courteous, often extremely intelligent, and always courageous and enduring.’9
A year after Menelik’s first, paralysing stroke, ‘Conditions in Addis Ababa and in the country as a whole were already chaotic…They were soon to become very much worse. In and around Addis Ababa murder, brigandage and highway robbery increased alarmingly; in restoring order, public hangings, floggings and mutilations had little effect. The town was filled with disbanded soldiery from Menelik’s army, and on the hills outside were camped the armies of the various contenders for power.’10
Here, at the heart of Menelik’s remote African empire, threatened by anarchy and bloodshed, Thesiger’s father took up his official duties at the British Legation in December 1909. He and his young bride, who was four months pregnant, adjusted to married life in these primitive surroundings as they waited anxiously and eagerly for the birth of their first child the following year.
In March 1911, nine months after the birth of their eldest son, Wilfred Thesiger’s father wrote in a romantic mood to his wife, who was then in England and pregnant for the second time: ‘What a wonderful thing it is to be married and love like we do, and all has come because you once said “yes” to me in a hansom and gave yourself to me.’1
Captain the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger was aged thirty-eight and Kathleen Mary Vigors was twenty-nine when they married on 21 August 1909 at St Peter’s church, Eaton Square, in the London borough of Westminster. The ceremony in this fashionable setting was conducted by the Reverend William Gascoigne Cecil, assisted by the Reverend Arthur Evelyn Ward, whose marriage to Kathleen’s younger sister Eileen Edmee took place in November that same year. The Thesigers made a handsome couple on their wedding day. Kathleen’s slender build and radiantly healthy complexion, set off by luxuriant waves of auburn hair, perfectly complemented Wilfred Gilbert, who stood over six feet, and was lean and muscular, with broad, sloping shoulders. His gaunt, rather delicate features, still sallow after two years’ exposure to the African sun, were clean-shaven except for a heavy moustache, and his dark-brown hair was brushed from a centre parting. Like his late father, General Lord Chelmsford, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger was reliably discreet, formal and pleasantly reserved.
Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen’s was the third wedding uniting two generations of their families. Handcock sisters, who were first cousins of Kathleen’s mother, had married distinguished younger sons of the first Lord Chelmsford. In 1862 Henrietta Handcock married the Honourable Alfred Henry Thesiger, a Lord of Appeal and Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales. The following year, Henrietta’s elder sister Charlotte Elizabeth married Alfred Henry’s elder brother, the Honourable Charles Wemyss Thesiger, a Lieutenant-General in the Hussars. In August 1909, witnesses to the Thesigers’ marriage included Kathleen’s widowed mother Mary Louisa Helen Vigors, Wilfred Gilbert’s elder brother Percy Mansfield Thesiger, and Count Alexander Hoyos, a Secretary at the Austrian Embassy and a friend of the bridegroom. In his autobiography, Wilfred Thesiger portrayed his father as ‘intensely and justifiably proud of his family, which in his own generation had produced a viceroy, a general, an admiral, a Lord of Appeal, a High Court judge and a famous actor. Intelligent, sensitive and artistic, with a certain diffidence which added to his charm, he was above all a man of absolute integrity.’2
Wilfred Gilbert painted in watercolours, wrote verse and also played the cello.3 By his early thirties he had already had a distinguished career in the Consular Service, and had been awarded a DSO in the Boer War. Perceptive studio portraits by Bertram Park, a society photographer in Dover Street, London, highlighted these compatible yet contrasting facets of his life and character. On the one hand, Park captured the thoughtful, determined expression of a soldier and administrator accustomed to authority; on the other, he evoked the introspective, wistful gaze of an artist and a poet.
Thesiger described his mother Kathleen as attractive, brave and determined, a woman who had dedicated herself to her husband ‘in the same spirit shown by those great nineteenth-century lady travellers Isobel Burton and Florence Baker…ready to follow [him] without question on