Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer

Every morning after breakfast, Billy and Brian would find their ponies saddled and waiting with Habta Wold, the Legation syce (the servant who looked after the horses), who usually accompanied them. The boys had learnt to ride by the time they were four. They rode most mornings, and sometimes again in the afternoon. On a steep hillside five hundred feet above the Legation there was a grotto cut into the rock. From there Billy and Brian had tremendous views, to the north over Salale province and the Blue Nile gorges, southward to the far-off Arussi mountains. There, one day, Billy would follow in his father’s footsteps and hunt the mountain nyala, a majestic antelope with lyre-shaped horns. Aged four, he had been photographed with a fine nyala trophy head.

After their morning ride Billy and Brian did schoolwork, which consisted of reading, writing and arithmetic; sometimes they drilled with the Legation’s guard. After lunch they rode again or tried to shoot birds in the garden with their ‘Daisy’ airguns. Thesiger wrote: ‘Had it not been for the First World War I might have been sent to school in England, separated indefinitely from my parents, as was the fate of so many English children whose fathers served in India or elsewhere in the East. I must have had some lessons at the Legation, though I have no recollection of them, for I learnt to read and write.’26 The idea of very small children being sent away to school did not appeal to Thesiger, who spoke out strongly against it; but he approved of preparatory boarding schools and, of course, segregated public schools, for older children.

Because he was so obviously fond of children – and, indeed, very good with little girls and boys – he was often asked why he had never married and had a family of his own. In his autobiography, the phrase The Life of My Choice, selected for the book’s title, occurs in a paragraph where Thesiger affirms his attitudes to marriage and other ‘commonly accepted pleasures of life’. He wrote: ‘I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation.’27 He later added: ‘The Life of My Choice was the right title for the book I wrote about myself. It gave you everything. I had lived as I wanted, gone where I wanted, when I wanted. I travelled among peoples that interested me. My companions were those individuals I wanted to have with me.’28

Thesiger’s impossible dream had been to preserve the near-idyllic life he had known as a boy in Abyssinia. He viewed change dismally, as a threat to the tribal peoples he admired, and to himself as a self-confessed traditionalist and romantic who ‘cherished the past, felt out of step with the present and dreaded the future’.29 Such a reactionary outlook had been doomed from the start, and Thesiger knew it. And, of course, without a sword of Damocles hanging over it, the life he dreamt of would have been spared the impending threat of corrosive change, perhaps of annihilation – a fate later exemplified by the destruction of the marshes in southern Iraq. He took an aggressive pride in being the ‘last’ in a long line of overland explorers and travellers, a refugee from the Victorians’ Golden Age. In a romantic fit of self-indulgent melancholy, he yearned for an irretrievable past summed up by the robber-poet François Villon’s poignant query: ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’30 – ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ Ironically, from Thesiger’s bachelor-explorer viewpoint, this quotation, taken from ‘Le Grand Testament: Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis’, lamented not the vanishing wilderness or its tribes, but the sensual, white-bodied women Villon had slept with during his dissipated youth, in fifteenth-century Paris.

Thesiger’s father and mother were supremely important figures during his early childhood, and took pride of place in his idealised (and romanticised) memories of those halcyon days. He wrote of his father: ‘Inevitably at Addis Ababa he was busy for most of the day, writing his despatches, interviewing people or visiting his colleagues in the other Legations…it was perhaps in the camp where we went each year from the Legation for an eagerly awaited ten days that I remember him most vividly. I can picture him now, a tall lean figure in a helmet, smoking his pipe as he watched the horses being saddled or inspected them while they were being fed; I can see him cleaning his rifle in the verandah of his tent, or sitting chatting with my mother by the fire in the evening.’31

The camp’s setting was remote, perfect: ‘an enchanted spot, tucked away in the Entoto hills. A stream tumbled down the cliff opposite our tents, then flowed away through a jumble of rocks among a grove of trees. Here were all sorts of birds: top-heavy hornbills, touracos with crimson wings, brilliant bee-eaters, sunbirds, paradise flycatchers, hoopoes, golden weaver birds and many others. My father knew them all and taught me their names. Vultures nested in the cliffs and circled in slow spirals above the camp. I used to watch them through his field glasses, and the baboons that processed along the cliff tops, the babies clinging to their mothers’ backs. At night we sometimes heard their frenzied barking when a leopard disturbed them. Several times I went up the valley with my father in the evening and sat with him behind a rock, hoping he would get a shot at the leopard. I remember once a large white-tailed mongoose scuttled past within a few feet of us.’32

Thesiger’s lifelong interest in ornithology dated from visits to this ‘enchanted’ enclave among the hills. As a boy he continued to shoot birds, and went on shooting them for sport and scientific study; but from then on he began to see and to recognise birds not as mere targets, but as living things that were fascinating as well as beautiful. The juvenile diaries he kept in Wales and Scotland between 1922 and 1933 contain detailed observations on local birdlife. During his Danakil expedition in 1933-34, Thesiger shot and preserved no fewer than 872 bird specimens, comprising 192 species, and three sub-species new to science which were named after him.

The chubby, smiling baby grew up as an extremely good-looking if rather sombre child who, his father noted, seemed very shy in the company of adults other than his parents.33 As a boy of six he had thick brown hair tinted with his mother’s auburn, and large, expressive eyes. His mouth, like Kathleen’s, was wide, with small, slightly uneven teeth shielded by a long upper lip (like Wilfred Gilbert’s) which were hardly seen except when he was speaking energetically or laughing. In those days his nose was long and quite straight. Only after being broken three times did it acquire the misshapen, craggy character that led his oldest friend, John Verney, to describe him as ‘a splendid pinnacle knocked off the top of a Dolomite’34 Although they went about protected from the hot sun by large sola topees, Billy and Brian must have had permanent tans which no doubt set them apart as creatures secretly to be envied by the pale-skinned little boys at their English preparatory school. The healthy outdoor life they led made the brothers fit and strong, with muscular arms and legs, and without an ounce of spare flesh on their lean brown bodies.

The Emperor designate, Lij Yasu, was one of three Abyssinian boys who, then and later, played roles of varying significance in Thesiger’s life. The other two were Asfa Wossen, the baby son of Ras Tafari, Abyssinia’s Regent after 1916 and the country’s future Emperor; and a nameless child, nine or ten years old, who had fought with Tafari’s army at Sagale. Abyssinia’s political chaos worsened from 1911 when Lij Yasu, aided by Menelik’s commander-in-chief Fitaurari Habta Giorgis, seized the palace and took control of the country. Lij Yasu was never crowned. This had been impossible during his grandfather’s lifetime, and after Menelik’s death in December 1913 a prophecy stating that if he were crowned he would die may have discouraged him. Lij Yasu meanwhile embraced Islam, and lived for long periods with the warlike Danakil (or Afar) tribes, hunting and raiding villages for provisions. An arrogant, cruel youth, he took pleasure in watching executions and floggings. To satisfy his blood-lust he massacred Shanqalla Negroes on the Abyssinia–Sudan border, and slaughtered three hundred Danakil, including women and children, in Captain Thesiger’s opinion ‘simply because he liked the sight of blood’.35 Besides these atrocities Lij Yasu was rumoured to have himself killed and castrated a page at Menelik’s palace; and according to one of his officers, when a girl refused to have sex with him, Lij Yasu sliced off her breasts after watching her being gang-raped by his soldiers.

The Life of My Choice – described by Thesiger as ‘a fragment’ of autobiography36 – tends to bury its subject under an avalanche of impersonal details. Though absorbing, these details are far more comprehensive than the often meagre infill of Thesiger’s life history requires. As well as exploiting its historical context to the full, Thesiger used the wealth of factual information about his life to produce a ‘treasure galleon’ of a book, written ‘with much distinction and honesty’,37 yet offering few noteworthy revelations about its author. Nowhere in The Life of My Choice is this more apparent than in the opening chapters, describing Thesiger’s background and his early upbringing in Abyssinia and England.

In 1913–14 Thesiger’s father trekked from Addis Ababa to Nairobi to discuss with the Governor of British East Africa (later Kenya) border issues created by Abyssinian slavers, ivory raiders and the large populations of Boran and Galla tribesmen who migrated to East Africa from Abyssinia after Menelik had conquered their territory. Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger noted in 1911 that the Abyssinians had occupied the Turkana territory in British East Africa and Karamoja in Uganda, although the Abyssinian frontier established in 1907 lay to the north of these territories. In his teens Thesiger was fascinated by books such as Major H. Rayne’s The Ivory Raiders (a fourteenth-birthday present) and Henry Darley’s Slaves and Ivory, which provided an exciting background to his father’s mission. As a boy of three and a half, however, he remembered only vaguely the journey with his parents and Brian to the Awash station, the next railhead that replaced Dire Dawa until the Chemin de Fer Franco-Ethiopien’s line from Jibuti had progressed as far as Addis Ababa, its ultimate destination. Almost fifty years later he wrote in Arabian Sands that his attraction to ‘the deserts of the East’ might lie ‘in vague recollections of camel herds at waterholes; in the smell of dust and of acacias under a hot sun; in the chorus of hyenas and jackals in the darkness round the camp fire’. Such ‘dim memories’38 as these derived from this and other journeys with his parents. They suggest that even as a child Thesiger was unusually observant and receptive to the sights, scents and sounds of the African bush and of the Abyssinian highlands where he lived for almost nine incomparably happy years. In 1914 Kathleen, who was pregnant once again, returned to England, and by the time Wilfred Gilbert joined her there at the end of March, the Thesigers’ third son, Dermot Vigors, had been born.

On his way to Nairobi Captain Thesiger wrote to Billy and Brian in London from camps at Laisamis and the Uaso Nyiro river, places which the younger Wilfred would often visit during his travels in Kenya. He treasured his father’s letters, written in pencil on coarse grey paper, illustrated with lively drawings of giraffes, lion and warthogs. Wilfred Gilbert may have got the idea of illustrating his stories with thumbnail sketches of big game from Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s South African classic Jock of the Bushveld. First published in 1907, the book was illustrated with hundreds of drawings, and many half-tone plates, by Edmund Caldwell. The earliest impressions of Jock had Caldwell’s uncorrected sketch of a dung beetle pushing a tiny ball of dung with its front, instead of its back, legs. Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen each owned a first edition of the book, and Thesiger remembered his father reading from it in the evenings, sitting on the entrance steps of the Legation. Later, Wilfred Gilbert gave Billy his copy, which the little boy inscribed proudly in pencil: ‘W P Thesiger – from Daddy Adiss-Ababa – Abysinia’. (In 1995 Thesiger sold his mother’s copy, inscribed by her, rebound, with more of his child’s pencilling erased from it, but still perfectly legible.)

Thesiger often emphasised how his father never talked down to him, but instead gave him ‘a happy sense of comradeship’ and ‘shared adventure’.39 His father’s letter from Laisamis, he said, ‘could have been written to a boy of seven; I was only half that age’.40 This was a harmless exaggeration, like Thesiger’s suggestion that he alone had been the recipient of the letter; whereas it was addressed, using the children’s euphonic pet names, to both Billy and Brian. The Laisamis letter began:

My dear Umsie [Billy] and Wowwow [Brian]

Daddy has been having a very good time hunting…daddy shot [a rhino] in the shoulder & he turned round & wanted to charge but we shot him again and soon he was quite deaded…41

As she read Wilfred Gilbert’s letter aloud, Kathleen must have pictured her husband in his khaki shirt and riding breeches, smoking his pipe in the shade of his fly-tent or under a shady tree; writing with meticulous care on official paper ruffled now and then by the wind; sketching wild animals he described to bring his words alive. His account of shooting a female rhino clearly illustrates the dramatic change in our attitude to wildlife since the days when big game hunting was viewed uncritically (indeed, was strongly justified and admired) as sport. Nor was the episode by any means untypical of hunting adventures at that period. ‘Last night,’ he wrote, ‘two of our soldiers were out at night & they were attacked by an old mummy rhino which had a baby one with her and they had to shoot but they had not many cartridges & did not kill her & then they had to whistle for help & we all took our guns & ran out & daddy shot her and she fell but got up again & we all fired again until she was deaded & then we chased the baby one in the moonlight & tried to catch him but could not as he ran too fast.’42

As a small boy Thesiger was thrilled by stories such as these. As he grew older he memorised tales of lion hunts and of fighting between warlike tribes told by his father’s Consuls. Arnold Wienholt Hodson, a Consul in south-west Abyssinia, hunted big game including elephant, buffalo and lion. Aged six or seven, Thesiger pored over Hodson’s photographs of game he had shot, and listened spellbound to his stories. Later he read Hodson’s books Where Lion Reign, published in 1927, and Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia (1928). Introducing Where Lion Reign, Hodson wrote: ‘In this wild and little-known terrain which it was my mission to explore, lion were plentiful enough to gladden the heart not only of any big game hunter, but of all those whom the call of adventure urges to seek out primitive Nature in her home among the savage and remote places of the earth.’43

By then Wilfred Thesiger was at school in England. As a teenager yearning to return to Abyssinia, his birthplace and his home, he drank in like a potent elixir Hodson’s words, which defined precisely the life he aspired to, the life he was determined one day to achieve.

FIVE Passages to India and England

When war was declared in August 1914, Thesiger’s father was still on leave in England. ‘An accomplished linguist, fluent in French and German,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘he was accepted by the Army, given an appointment as captain in the Intelligence Branch, and sent to France, where he arrived on 23 September. This posting was a remarkable achievement…He was attached to the 3rd Army Corps, and while serving in France he earned a mention in despatches.’1

Wilfred Gilbert’s four-month posting was indeed ‘remarkable’, not only because he had been commissioned (in the British Censorship Staff), whereas many regular officers of various ages, anxious to serve, had failed, but also because his language skills had improved vastly since Cheltenham, where his masters judged he was ‘not a linguist by nature’. His position as British Minister on Foreign Office leave from Addis Ababa perhaps led to his acceptance by the army as a temporary recruit for non-active service. Furthermore, he had evidently been passed as fit, with no mention of the heart problem that affected him as a boy, and would cause his premature death in his late forties.

In May 1914 Wilfred Gilbert had given Kathleen a specially bound Book of Common Prayer. Dedicated to her and to their children, he wrote in it a prayer of his own which ended: ‘Give us long years of happiness together in this life, striving always to do Thy will and content to leave the future in Thy hands.’2 In January 1915, at the end of his Foreign Office leave, Wilfred Gilbert, Kathleen and their three sons went back to Addis Ababa. By then Kathleen was pregnant for the fourth time. On 8 November Roderic Miles Doughty Thesiger was born at the British Legation. Susannah having returned to India in 1913, an elderly nurse, known to the children as ‘Nanny’, had been engaged in England to look after one-year-old Dermot and, in due course, baby Roderic.

At Addis Ababa, Captain Thesiger felt concerned that the still-uncrowned Lij Yasu dreamt ‘of one day putting himself at the head of the Mohammadan Abyssinians, and of producing a Moslem kingdom’ that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Abyssinia’s ‘present Empire’.3 Lij Yasu confirmed this fear when, at the Eid festival in Dire Dawa, swearing on the Koran, he professed himself a Muslim. When this was proclaimed to a meeting of chiefs at Addis Ababa there was a riot and shooting that resulted in many dead and wounded. A second meeting proclaimed Menelik’s daughter, Waizero Zauditu, Empress, and the Governor of Harar, Dedjazmatch (later Ras) Tafari, as heir. Thesiger dedicated his autobiography to Tafari’s memory, as the late Emperor. He had admired Tafari unreservedly, despite his wish to modernise Abyssinia, of which Thesiger surely could never have approved. Meanwhile, Tafari marshalled opposition to the deposed Lij Yasu, whose father, Negus Mikael, led the revolt aimed at restoring him to power. Had the revolt succeeded, Islam might have become the official religion of Abyssinia, where there were already Muslim tribes. Thesiger wrote in 1987, ‘Lij Yasu’s restoration would at least [have constituted] a considerable propaganda success for [Muslim] Turkey,’ and might have brought Abyssinia into the First World War on the side of Britain’s enemies, ‘at a time when we were fighting the Germans in East Africa, the Turks in Sinai, Mesopotamia and the Aden Protectorate; and the Dervishes [led by the ‘Mad Mullah’] in Somaliland’.4

As a six-year-old boy, Thesiger remembered seeing Ras Tafari’s baby son, Asfa Wossen, being carried into the Legation in a red cradle for protection. This ‘most embarrassing proof of their confidence’ created an enduring bond between the Thesigers and Tafari which, directly and indirectly, influenced profoundly the course of Thesiger’s future life. Standing at the Legation’s fence, Billy and Brian saw Tafari’s soldiers stream across the plain below, on their way north to Sagale. ‘It was an enthralling, unforgettable sight for a small, romantically minded boy.’ A few days later, during a morning ride, the brothers heard firing. Galloping home, they were told of Tafari’s decisive victory on the Sagale plain, sixty miles north of Addis Ababa, which ended the revolt of Negus Mikael. ‘Forty-four years later,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘I visited the battlefield and saw skulls and bones in crevices on the rocky hillock where Negus Mikael had made his final stand.’5

The victory parades before the Empress Zauditu on Jan Meda field impressed Thesiger enormously. He devoted two pages of The Life of My Choice to his father’s letter describing them and the sight of Negus Mikael led past, humiliated, in chains. Thesiger wrote: ‘Even now, nearly seventy years later, I can recall almost every detail.’ He remembered, and clearly envied, ‘a small boy carried past in triumph – he had killed two men though he seemed little older than myself’.6 Thesiger said he had been reading Tales from the Iliad, and in Ras Tafari’s victory over Negus Mikael and Lij Yasu he could envision ‘the likes of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses’ as they passed ‘in triumph with aged Priam, proud even in defeat’. This was a piece of dramatic invention. Although H.L. Havell’s Stories from the Iliad was published in 1916, the same year as the Battle of Sagale, Thesiger was given the book only five years later, in July 1921, as an examination prize by R.C.V. Lang, his preparatory school’s headmaster.

More important than this, the 1916 Jan Meda parades inspired Thesiger as a boy to pursue without compromise the adventurous life he would one day lead as a man. He wrote: ‘I believe that day implanted in me a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.’7

In February 1917 Waizero Zauditu was crowned Empress of Abyssinia. Lij Yasu, meanwhile, supported by Ras Yemer, one of Negus Mikael’s officers, raised a force and occupied Magdala, north of Addis Ababa in Wollo province. Confronted by an army from the province of Shoa, he and his followers escaped, only to be defeated in battle, with heavy losses, near Dessie. From there he fled once more into the Danakil country. Having been detained at Fiche for fourteen years, he again escaped before he was finally captured in 1932 and imprisoned at Harar, where he died ‘a physical wreck’ at the age of thirty-seven.

By the end of 1917 the effort and strain of the previous two years had begun to tell on Wilfred Gilbert, whose heart was further weakened by the effects of Addis Ababa’s altitude of eight thousand feet. In December the Thesigers and Minna Buckle travelled to Jibuti, by the now-completed railway linking Addis Ababa and the coast. From Jibuti, Kathleen, Minna and the children sailed along the coast to Berbera, where they stayed with Geoffrey Archer, the Commissioner of British Somaliland, and his wife Olive. Captain Thesiger meanwhile went on via Aden by HMS Fox to Cairo, for talks with the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, about the political future of Abyssinia.

Thesiger wrote: ‘Geoffrey Archer…a real giant…six foot four and broad in proportion…lent Brian and me a .410 shotgun and took us shooting along the shore, and when we got back told his skinner to stuff the birds we had shot; I was thrilled by these expeditions.’8 Archer recalled years later how, ‘Firing at the various plovers and sandpipers…skimming close inshore over a placid sea, the children could observe exactly where their shot struck.’ Although Wilfred Gilbert noted that Billy and Brian ‘each shot several kinds of birds’, Geoffrey Archer remembered, ‘Heartrending were the scenes when Brian, the younger…reported to his mother with tears flowing that he had not succeeded in hitting a single bird, while Wilfred, showing signs of a prowess to come, had bagged at least half a dozen.’9

On 3 January 1918 the Thesigers crossed from Berbera in very rough seas to Aden. Wilfred Gilbert, exhausted by his journey to and from Cairo, had been ill in bed for four out of six days at Berbera. During the crossing, he wrote, ‘we were all ill’. In cooler weather at Aden they soon recovered. In Desert, Marsh and Mountain and The Life of My Choice, Thesiger told how the Resident, Major-General J.M. Stewart, took Wilfred Gilbert, Billy and Brian to Lahej in the Aden Protectorate, where they saw British troops shell lines of Turks who had invaded the Protectorate from Yemen. Thesiger’s memory of the trenches and the puffs of white smoke from exploding shells remained clear, but earned him a reputation as a little ‘liar’ at his preparatory school.10 Strangely, none of his father’s letters from Aden mentioned this event. Instead, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘There seems to have been a week’s cessation of hostilities for Christmas. Our men had sports etc while the Turks took the occasion to celebrate a big wedding on their side of the lines. I wanted to take the two eldest boys out this morning to see the aeroplanes working and our guns firing but they were too tired yesterday and it means an early start from here.’11