Alexander Maitland - Wilfred Thesiger - The Life of the Great Explorer

They reached the outskirts of Addis Ababa on 10 December, where they were met by the retiring Consul, Lord Herbert Hervey, with an escort of Indian sowars , troopers, in full dress uniform, an Abyssinian Ras and various ministers of state. Later, in an undated memoir, Kathleen described her first impressions of the British Legation, her home for the next nine years:

The Legation lies on a hillside outside the town with vast and beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. I was told that the Legation compound is the same size as St James’s Park. In 1909 the large and imposing stone building in which we later lived in such comfort did not exist and we arrived to a settlement of thatched huts or ‘tukuls’. Each room was a separate round mud hut joined to the next one by a ‘mud’ passage and the whole built round a grassed courtyard with a covered way down the middle. [This accommodation had been planned by Wilfred Gilbert’s predecessor, Captain (later Sir) John Harrington, and was being constructed when the writer Herbert Vivian arrived at Addis Ababa in 1901.]

The servants’ quarters – kitchens etc., stood at the back. The sowars’ quarters and the stables stood higher up on the hillside and the native ‘village’ where the Abyssinian servants lived lay in a hollow beneath them. ‘Mud hut’ is not really at all descriptive of those charming round thatched rooms; always cool in summer and warm in winter. They were wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in, although at that time our furniture was very primitive. The [ceiling] was not boarded over, but rose with thatch to a point in the centre and the supporting laths of wood were inter-wound with many gay colours. The effect was enchanting…I shall never forget our first meal that evening. Roast wild duck I most particularly remember! Our head servants were Indians and we had an excellent Goanese cook… 12

In the first draft of her memoir Kathleen recalled that the furniture ‘was mostly made from packing-cases but we had some very handsome “pieces” and a few comfortable beds’. 13Wilfred Gilbert wrote to his mother: ‘Kathleen is making cushion covers and tablecloths…the effect of a circular room is rather good only one does miss the corners.’ 14He eulogised the Legation’s compound, with its

masses of glorious big rose bushes smothered in blossom [and] a bed of scarlet geraniums…rather tangled and wild, but very pretty. Tall Eucalyptus trees make an inner boundary and our compound is a square about a quarter of a mile each way. A big field serves for grazing and hay making and will allow a little steeple chase course all round. There is a good tennis court [and] a regular village of little stone circular houses for the servants…All round are highish hills broken and covered with scrub and to the East a big plain with mountains all round…the evening lights are very beautiful… 15

During the week before Christmas 1909, Captain Thesiger had his first formal audience with Menelik’s grandson, Lij Yasu (or ‘Child Jesus’), who was attended by the corrupt Regent, Ras Tasamma. Thousands of Abyssinian soldiers riding horses or mules escorted Thesiger’s parents to the Emperor’s palace, the gibbi , which crowned the largest hill at Addis Ababa. ‘At that first meeting,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘my father can have had no idea of the troubles this boy would bring on his country.’ 16The previous year Menelik had appointed Lij Yasu, then aged thirteen, as his heir. By 1911, when Lij Yasu seized power, the government of Abyssinia had begun to crumble. Five years later, Captain Thesiger would report to the Foreign Office that ‘Lij Yasu…has succeeded in destroying every semblance of central government and is dragging down the prestige of individual ministers so that there is no authority to whom the Legation can appeal.’ 17

The Thesigers, meanwhile, each recorded impressions of that first audience: ‘a big affair and a wonderful sight’, 18wrote Wilfred Gilbert, while Kathleen found it ‘magnificent beyond my wildest dreams’. 19Wilfred Gilbert continued:

As at Harar the big men wore their crowns with fringes of lions’ mane standing up all round and the skins of leopards and lions over their gold embroidered silk and velvet mantles, an escort of Galla horsemen in the same dresses, each with two long spears rode on either side on fiery little horses and added immensely to all the movement…We circled the walls of the palace to the far gate and here there was a great rush to get into the inner court on the part of the Abyssinians and various gorgeously dressed chiefs told off for the purpose, but right and left with long bamboos to keep out the unauthorised, they did not spare the rod. One chief in full dress hit over the head missed his footing and rolled down the steep entrance to my mule’s feet. I expected he would hit back, but it seemed part of the game, get in if you could, but accept blows if you can’t. Another stick smashed to splinters on the head of a less gorgeous official…

Inside a large courtyard lined with soldiers a brass band play[ed] a European tune for all they were worth, others with long straight trumpets, like those played by angels in [stained] glass windows, negroes with long flutes all added to the din…We passed into another court by an archway…and came to the central one where the walls were lined by chiefs only. We rode into the centre and dismounted and formed our little procession. I went first with the interpreter, then Kathleen, Lord Herbert [Hervey], Dr Wakeman, and behind them the escort on foot…

I went on alone up the steps to the foot of the throne in front of which Lij Yasu sat with all his big officials and after being introduced…I read my little speech and then handed it over to the interpreter to be translated and when he had finished I handed over the letter to Menelik to Lij Yasu who then read his speech which was interpreted by the court dragoman. I then asked leave to present Kathleen and went back to bring her up with the others…It was a very impressive ceremony. The hall is an enormous building very dimly lighted with pillars of wood on either side, the floor…strewn with green rushes and a long carpet down the centre. 20

Later that day, after the presentation ceremony, the Thesigers met Lij Yasu again at Ras Tasamma’s residence. Wilfred Gilbert praised Lij Yasu: ‘a nice boy of clear cut Semitic features and very shy…when something amused us he caught my eye and laughed and then suddenly checked himself’. He added cautiously: ‘Everyone was very friendly but at present I am only on the surface of things.’ 21Kathleen wrote that for the occasion ‘Wilfred was wearing full diplomatic uniform and I my smartest London frock [her ‘going away’ dress worn after her wedding] and a large befeathered hat. To the European eye we surely would have presented an amusing spectacle more especially as the “diplomatic mule” [ridden by Wilfred Gilbert] was also in full dress with gaily embroidered coloured velvet hanging, and tinkling brass and silver ornaments.’

Kathleen’s candid account of the feast that followed might have been borrowed from James Bruce of Kinnaird’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), a work whose descriptions of alleged Abyssinian customs, such as eating raw meat cut from live oxen, had been dismissed as nonsense by critics following Dr Johnson, who doubted that Bruce had ever been there:

Course after course, one more uneatable than another and served by very questionably clean slave women. This feast lasted quite interminably, or so it seemed to me. But at last it ended…and the curtains surrounding the daïs [where we sat] were suddenly drawn back and a vast Hall was revealed below us crowded with thousands of soldiery. An incredible number of them packed like sardines and all wearing the usual white Abyssinian ‘Shamma’. They sat on benches stretching into the far distance, and between these benches there was just room for two men to walk in single file. These men carried a pole on their shoulders which stretched from one to the other, and from this pole was suspended half the carcase of a freshly killed ox. Each man, as it passed him, pulled out his knife and skilfully cut for himself as large a piece of bleeding meat as possible and this he proceeded to eat pushing it into his mouth with his left hand and with his right cutting off a chunk which I think he gulped down whole – and so on until all was finished. Eventually the soldiery filed out somehow and I shall always remember our exit, because, for some reason we went out by the door at the end of the great Hall and to do so we had to pick our way through the bloody remains of the Feast. 22