Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer

From the time he arrived in England, John Andrew Thesiger earned his living as an amanuensis or private secretary to Lord Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham, who led the Whig opposition and twice served as Prime Minister, in 1765-66 and again in 1782, the year he died. As well as his native German, John Andrew evidently spoke and wrote fluently in English, and possibly several other languages besides. His eldest son Frederic, we know, understood Danish and Russian.

We can only guess what John Andrew might have looked like. It is tempting to picture him as above average height, thin and wiry, with lantern jaws and a prominent nose. These characteristics recurred in later generations of Thesigers: for example General Lord Chelmsford, the actor Ernest Thesiger, and Ernest’s first cousin Wilfred, whose large, skewed, three-times-broken nose became his most famous physical hallmark. But the assumption that John Andrew’s looks and build were inherited by his descendants may be quite wrong. His eldest son, Frederic, who appears life-size on one of the four cast-bronze memorial panels at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, bears no obvious resemblance to other male Thesigers descended from his younger brother’s family. Neither Frederic’s looks nor build matches the gaunt, hawkish Thesiger model. He has a rounded face, a thin, expressionless mouth and an inconspicuous straight nose. He is neither stout nor very lean. It is difficult to judge his height, which seems about the same as Nelson’s; but the sculptor, J. Ternouth, may have exaggerated Nelson’s height to achieve a more dramatic effect.

Before he enlisted in the Royal Navy, Frederic served with the East India Company’s fleet in the Caribbean. He rose to Acting Lieutenant aboard HMS Formidable, commanded by Admiral Rodney, at the Battle of Saintes, off Martinique, in 1782. Praised by Rodney as ‘an excellent and gallant officer’, he later served with the Russian navy during the war between Russia and Sweden. The Empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great) awarded him an Order of Merit and, in 1790, a knighthood of the Order of St George. He became adviser to the First Sea Lord and was promoted commander, then captain. In 1801 Frederic served as ADC to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, when his knowledge of Danish enabled him to translate Nelson’s letter, accompanying a flag of truce, which Frederic presented to the young Crown Prince of Denmark. The bronze relief in Trafalgar Square shows him handing Nelson the Danes’ letter of surrender. Whilst the Royal Navy had profited from Frederic’s experience in the Baltic, no further offer of an active command was forthcoming. There appear to have been no obvious reasons for this. Depressed, disillusioned, without prospects or a wife and family of his own to console and distract him, Captain Sir Frederic Thesiger committed suicide at Plymouth on 26 August 1805, two months before Nelson was fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Sir Frederic’s younger brother Charles and his London-born wife, Mary Anne Williams, had six children, including two boys who died in infancy. Frederic, the third son – the late Sir Frederic’s nephew and namesake – witnessed, as a thirteen-year-old midshipman, the seizure of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807. He resigned from the navy, having become heir to his father’s estates in the West Indies, and afterwards studied law. He was called to the Bar in 1818 and recommended to King’s Counsel in 1834. In 1844 he was appointed Solicitor-General and was knighted. As a Member of Parliament he represented Woodstock, Abingdon and Stamford. Having twice served as Attorney-General, on 1 March 1858 Sir Frederic Thesiger QC was created the first Baron Chelmsford of Essex.

Sir Frederic’s noted attributes – ‘a fine presence and handsome features, a beautiful voice, a pleasant if too frequent wit, an imperturbable temper, and a gift of natural eloquence’ – must have stood him in good stead as a barrister and a politician. In any case, the Thesigers’ progress in less than three generations, from the arrival in England of their gifted German ancestor to achieving an English peerage, had been by any standards remarkable, and amply justified the optimism and ambition implicit in their family motto, Spes et Fortuna, ‘Hope and Fortune’.

Lord Chelmsford’s son and heir, the Honourable Frederic Augustus Thesiger, was born on 31 May 1827. After serving in Nova Scotia, the Crimea, India and Abyssinia, as General Lord Chelmsford he commanded the British force during the Kaffir and Zulu wars. In South Africa he earned a lasting notoriety when over 1300 of his troops were massacred by the Zulu army at Isandhlwana on 22 January 1879, known afterwards to the Zulus as ‘the Day of the Dead Moon’. Thesiger wrote in The Life of My Choice: ‘In the Milebrook [the house in Radnorshire, now Powys, where he and his brothers lived from 1921 with their widowed mother] were assegais and other trophies brought back by my grandfather after he had shattered the Zulu army at Ulundi in 1879 – but I never begrudged those peerless warriors their earlier, annihilating victory over a British force on the slopes of Isandhlwana.’10 Despite having ‘shattered the Zulu army’11 and won the war, Chelmsford was blamed for misleading intelligence and confused orders which had led to the massacre. He consequently returned to England with his reputation permanently tarnished. Thesiger wrote in 1940: ‘I have just finished the book about my grandfather and the Zulu war. [This was Lord Chelmsford and the Zulu War (1939) by Major the Hon. Gerald French DSO, which Percy Thesiger, Wilfred’s uncle, had given him in November 1939.] I found it most interesting. It seemed to be a very complete justification of his strategy in that war and a vindication of his generalship…I had not realised that the criticism had been so personal and so venomous. What does emerge very clearly is that he was a great gentleman, and that he won the respect and affection of those who served under him. He must have been a great and charming man and I wish I had known him.’12

Fascinated all his life by his grandfather’s controversial role in the Zulu war, Thesiger, at the age of eighty-six, visited Isandhlwana and saw for himself where the massacre had taken place. In South Africa he met the Zulu leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who presented him with a Zulu knobkerrie, a shield and a spear. Thesiger said afterwards: ‘I found Buthelezi impressive. It moved me to have met him like that more than a century after Isandhlwana. There we were: Buthelezi, the grandson of Cetewayo, the Zulu king; and myself, the grandson of Lord Chelmsford, whose army Cetewayo’s warriors half-destroyed, and who finally destroyed them at Ulundi.’13

On 9 April 1905, while he was playing billiards in the United Services Club, Lord Chelmsford died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. Thesiger said: ‘My grandfather and my father died instantaneously, so that they could have felt nothing. When it’s my turn to push up the daisies, that is how I should wish to die.’14

Wilfred Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert, was the third of Lord and Lady Chelmsford’s five sons. He was born at Simla on 25 March 1871, four years after Frederic Augustus Thesiger married Adria Fanny Heath, the eldest daughter of Major-General Heath of the Bombay Army. Their eldest son, Frederic John Napier, was appointed Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921; in 1921 he was created the first Viscount Chelmsford. Harold Lumsden Thesiger, their fourth son, died in India, aged only two and a half months, in 1872.

‘For some reason,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘my father was educated at Cheltenham [College], whereas his brothers [Frederic, Percy and Eric] were educated at Winchester.’15 Wilfred Gilbert had twice failed the Winchester entrance examination, despite receiving extra tuition at a crammer in Switzerland. As a boy he had been delicate. Above average height, he was handsome and slender, and his expression was wistful, perhaps melancholy. In 1889 and 1892 he was examined at Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Institute in South Kensington, which was equipped and supervised as part of the International Health Exhibition. Galton’s laboratory measured ‘Keenness of Sight and of Hearing; Colour Sense, Judgement of Eye; Breathing Power; Reaction Time; Strength of Pull and of Squeeze; Force of Blow; Span of Arms; Height, both standing and sitting; and Weight’.16 A student of ‘hereditary talent and character’, and founder of the Eugenics Society, Galton espoused the theory of ‘right breeding’, which the high achievers produced by successive generations of Thesigers appeared to confirm.

An illness, possibly rheumatic fever, had drained Wilfred Gilbert’s energy and left him with a permanently weakened heart. Though he was a ‘well conducted boy’, his school reports describe him as ‘languid and unattentive’17 – failings conspicuous in the younger Wilfred Thesiger, who confessed to having a limited attention span and who wrote that he had proved ‘an unreceptive boy to teach, disinclined to concentrate on any subject that bored me’.18 Wilfred Gilbert’s poor performance in French and German (which had once been his family’s first language) prompted a master’s opinion that he ‘was not a linguist by nature’. While at Cheltenham he began to write poetry. His poems suggest that he was prone to depression or melancholy. Many are preoccupied with death, and evoke a sense of futility which later seemed at odds with his private and public roles as husband, father and staunch representative of the Crown.

Wilfred Gilbert’s career in the Consular Service began in Asia Minor, where he served at Lake Van from 1895 to 1898 ‘as a secretary to Major [later Colonel] W.A. Williams RA, Military Vice-Consul’ at the time of the Armenian massacres. He earned a mention in despatches and wrote letters which were keenly observed and often vivid. Many of them presaged others written years later by his son Wilfred, on topics that included hunting, photography and travel. In July 1896 Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘I want very much to see more of the country…a good pair of ibex horns still haunts my dreams.’19 And in April that same year: ‘If ever I come out here again I shall certainly bring a camera.’20 Romantically careless of time and place, he wrote on ‘the 20 somethingth of August 1896’ from Garchegan, ‘somewhere in the mountains’: ‘It is a glorious life this, living in tents and moving from place to place.’21 Of the conflict between Armenians and Turks he saw nothing worse than a skirmish, like ‘a music hall battle’, in front of the consulate. Once an Armenian banker who lived nearby ‘sent over to say some revolutionists were in his garden and were going to murder him’.22

Wilfred Gilbert spent much of his time at Van gardening, sketching, reading, riding and shooting. He learnt Turkish, and took charge of the household. Thesiger wrote: ‘My father made a number of watercolour sketches of [Kurdish tribes in their ‘spectacular garb’] that fascinated me as a boy but have since disappeared. At Van he was very conscious of past greatness, when kings of Assyria ruled, fought and fell among these mountains.’23 Wilfred Gilbert remarked in a letter: ‘even a short description of these districts written by a certain Marco Polo, which we have here, is perfectly up to date’.24

After Van he had been nominated Vice-Consul at Algiers, but he was posted instead to Taranto in southern Italy. There he monitored exports of olive oil and red wine, and compiled an encouraging report on Calabria’s mother-of-pearl industry. Having written poems inspired by the sea, at Taranto Wilfred Gilbert became a keen yachtsman. He also took up fencing. According to Signor Ferri, his fencing master: ‘Correctness, thundering attack, and the highest intelligence, distinguish him on the platform.’25 Even if ‘thundering attack’ was overdone, it sounded better than Cheltenham’s less flattering comments that Wilfred Gilbert was ‘not of much power’ in the classroom and ‘lacked scoring power at cricket’.26 Thesiger did not share his father’s fencing talent: at Oxford he ‘was noted as much for the extraordinary and often furious contortions of his blade in fencing – a pastime at which he was never an adept – as for his lightning successes in the ring’.27

‘During the Boer War,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘[my father] joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a trooper, but was soon commissioned and later promoted to [temporary] captain. He fought in South Africa from March 1900 until October 1901 and was awarded the DSO.’28 Wilfred Gilbert’s DSO was for general service, not, as in his son Wilfred’s case, for an outstanding act of bravery. After the war he considered becoming a District Commissioner in the Transvaal, but instead rejoined the Consular Service. In 1902 he was sent as Vice-Consul to Belgrade. The following year he was left in charge of the Legation when the Minister was withdrawn after the brutal murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga by an anarchist group known as the Black Hand.

King Alexander’s successor, Peter I (like Wilfred Gilbert’s father), suffered from ‘a sort of shyness and inability to make small [impromptu] remarks to everyone’.29 Wilfred Gilbert understood this difficulty, yet could not resist describing, tongue-in-cheek, preparations for the coronation: ‘the king has been practising in the palace garden how to get on horseback in his robe and crown with his sceptre in his hand, for he is to ride back in all his glory; and the ministers are having little loops sewn on their best clothes in anticipation of the orders they expect to receive…For two days it has drizzled and all the Serbian flags are gradually fading into limp rags in which the red, blue and white have run into each other to such an extent that by Wednesday they promise to be little more than mere smudges of colour not of the cleanest.’30

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.

THREE Gorgeous Barbarity

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

Thesiger did not mention that, as well as several crates having gone missing, the trunk containing his mother’s wedding trousseau had been broken open and looted on the way from Jibuti. Exasperated and indignant, Captain Thesiger commented: ‘the railway can hardly back out of the responsibility. What on earth a Somali can do with ladies’ lace trimmed underclothes is a wonder, but it was probably looting for looting’s sake.’4

The journey across the mountains took twenty-nine days, including a brief official visit paid by Captain Thesiger to the legendary walled city of Harar. To her lifelong regret Kathleen felt too exhausted by the two-thousand-foot climb from Dire Dawa to the Harar plateau to accompany him. Harar seemed unchanged since the Victorian traveller Richard Francis Burton saw it in 1855 and described it in his book First Footsteps in East Africa. When the younger Wilfred Thesiger visited Harar in December 1930, he imagined that even then, ‘except for a few corrugated iron roofs, it still looked the same as when [Burton] had been there’.5

Neither Thesiger nor his father mentioned Harar’s links with the French poet, and gun-runner, Arthur Rimbaud, who lived at Harar and was photographed in 1883 in the garden of its first Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha’s, residence. Thesiger said: ‘I knew who Rimbaud was, I suppose, but I knew nothing of his poetry or what he did in Abyssinia. The one that interested me was [the French traveller Henri] de Monfreid. When I was twenty-three I read his book about pearl-diving in the Red Sea and, for a while, I longed for the same sort of adventurous life.’6

Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s visit to Harar had been officially requested by the Governor, Dedjazmatch Balcha. A favourite of Menelik, Balcha ‘had a well-merited reputation for ruthlessness, brutality and avarice, and was hated and feared by his subjects’.7 Thesiger’s father was met by Balcha and some hundreds of soldiers with green, yellow and red banners and chiefs in silver-gilt crowns, red and blue robes and lion- and leopard-skin capes, armed with rifles, spears and shields. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘It was very picturesque, the brown rough stones of the town and crumbling loopholed gateway and…narrow streets where only two mules could walk abreast…The palace was a whitewashed building, European of a bad style with quaint lions in plaster on the roof…Afterwards I walked round the bazaars and narrow street market, thronged with wild, white-clothed Abyssinians, Gallas and Somalis…The only thing one could compare it with are descriptions of the old Aztecs. Gorgeous barbarity such as one could nowadays meet with nowhere but here.’8

Describing their marches from Harar along the top of the Chercher mountains, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘We are having a splendid journey and Kathleen is better than I have ever seen her.’9 He thought she looked ‘very smart and neat in her khaki astride costume and helmet’, and the scenery ‘beautiful’ with ‘thick forests of enormous juniper and wild olive trees full of mountain clematis, jessamine, briar roses and other unknown flowers…and looking for all the world like Switzerland or Norway’.10 Kathleen observed impatiently: ‘I do not think we needed to spend so long on the journey but we were accompanied by the Legation doctor [Wakeman]…a half-caste Indian [who]…liked to take life leisurely.’11