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

In The Real Abyssinia (1927), Colonel C.F. Rey described a ‘raw meat banquet’ on this scale, marking the Feast of Maskal, when ‘no fewer than 15,000 soldiers and 2000 or 3000 palace retainers were fed in four relays in the great hall’. 23The way of life Kathleen Thesiger had left behind in England must have appeared at that moment incredibly remote. Yet it would be events such as the Regent’s feast that gave her eldest son Wilfred his craving for ‘barbaric splendour’ and ‘a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world’. 24

England and home were brought suddenly into sharp focus by the death of King Edward VII in May 1910, news of which affected the Thesigers almost like a family bereavement. Captain Thesiger wrote to his mother on 14 May: ‘What a terrible blow the King’s death has been…We had heard nothing of his short illness to prepare us. Even now it seems impossible to believe and realize it.’ 25Edward VII died four weeks before the younger Wilfred Thesiger was born. The King’s death signalled the waning of an era, which the First World War would finally end. In the microcosm of Addis Ababa’s British Legation, ‘everything [was]…put off, polo, races, gymkhana and lunches’. To Wilfred Gilbert and Kathleen it seemed ‘as tho’ everything had suddenly come to a stop’. 26

In the heart of the British Legation’s dusty compound at Addis Ababa, Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born by the light of oil lamps at 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 June 1910, in a thatched mud hut that served as his parents’ bedroom. The following day his father wrote to Lady Chelmsford, the baby’s grandmother: ‘Everything passed off very well and both are doing splendidly. He weighs 8½lb and stands 1ft 8in [corrected in another letter to 1ft 10in] in his bare feet and his lungs are excellent…He is a splendid little boy and the Abyssinians have already christened him the “tininish Minister” which means the “very small Minister”. We are going to call him Wilfred Patrick but he is always spoken of as Billy. He has a fair amount of hair, is less red than might have been expected and has long fingers.’ 1

On 12 July Thesiger was christened at Addis Ababa by Pastor Karl Cederquist, a Swedish Lutheran missionary. Count Alexander Hoyos and Frank Champain were named as godfathers; his godmothers were Mrs John Curre and Mrs Miles Backhouse, the wives of two British officials. Captain Thesiger reported proudly: ‘The man Billy [whom he called ‘a jolly little beggar’] grows very fast and puts on half a pound every week with great regularity. I think he is quite a nice looking baby. He has a decided nose and rather a straight upper lip, his eyes seem big for a baby and are wide apart.’ 2Frank Champain had accepted his role as the baby’s godfather with reluctance. He would write to Wilfred in 1927: ‘Sorry to have been such a rotten Godfather. I told your Dad I was no good…I can’t be of much use but if I can I am yours to command.’ 3

Thesiger’s good looks, inherited from his father, were strengthened by his mother’s determined jaw and her direct (some thought intimidating) gaze. As a baby he was active, alert and observant. His adoring parents took photographs of him at frequent intervals from the age of one month until he was nine. They preserved these photographs in an album, the first of four similar albums they compiled, one for each of their sons. Some of the earliest photographs show Billy cradled in his mother’s arms or perched unsteadily on his nurse Susannah’s shoulder, grasping her tightly by her hair. Susannah, a dark-skinned Indian girl, stayed with the Thesigers for three years, working for some of the time alongside an English nurse who proved so incapable and neurotic that Wilfred Gilbert felt obliged to dismiss her. To the devoted, endlessly patient Susannah, little Billy could do no wrong. ‘When my mother remonstrated with her,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘she would answer, “He one handsome Rajah – why for he no do what he want?”’ 4Thesiger may have heard his mother tell this story, mimicking Susannah’s broken English.

Though he walked at an unusually early age, Thesiger admitted that he had been slow learning to speak. He said his mother told him that his first words were ‘“Go yay” which meant “Go away” and showed an independent spirit’. 5One day the Thesigers found Billy in Susannah’s hut, lying on the earth floor surrounded by the servants, who bent over him performing a mysterious rite. Susannah reassured the astonished couple: ‘We were just tying for all time to our countries.’ 6

The child’s birthplace, a circular Abyssinian tukul of mud and wattle with a conical thatched roof, like an East African banda or a South African rondavel , could scarcely have been a more appropriate introduction to the life he was destined to lead. Thesiger realised this, and used to talk about being born in a ‘mud hut’, which implied that the circumstances of his birth were more primitive than they had been in reality. He also liked to stress any extraordinary adventures during childhood which helped to explain his longing for a life of ‘savagery and colour’ 7In his early fifties Thesiger confessed that he had probably exaggerated his preferences and dislikes – his resentment, for instance, of cars, aeroplanes and twentieth-century technology foisted on remote societies he called ‘traditional peoples’. He wrote in The Marsh Arabs :

Like many Englishmen of my generation and upbringing I had an instinctive sympathy with the traditional life of others. My childhood was spent in Abyssinia, which at that time was without cars or roads…I loathed cars, aeroplanes, wireless and television, in fact most of our civilisation’s manifestations in the past fifty years, and was always happy, in Iraq or elsewhere, to share a smoke-filled hovel with a shepherd, his family and beasts. In such a household, everything was strange and different, their self-reliance put me at ease, and I was fascinated by the feeling of continuity with the past. I envied them a contentment rare in the world today and a mastery of skills, however simple, that I myself could never hope to attain. 8

Thesiger did not experience this sense of easy harmony among remote tribes at Addis Ababa, nor indeed for many years after he first left Abyssinia. Throughout his childhood and his teens, even as a young man in his early twenties, he lived in a European setting, with European values imposed by his family. He had felt instinctively superior by virtue of his background, education and race. Until the 1930s, he admitted, he was ‘an Englishman in Africa, travelling very much as my father would have travelled’. 9He fed and slept apart from the Africans who accompanied him. In 1934 in Abyssinia he read Henri de Monfreid’s book Secrets de la Mer Rouge , and afterwards sailed aboard a dhow from Tajura to Jibuti. Sitting on deck, sharing the crew’s evening meal of rice and fish, Thesiger realised that this was how he wanted to live the rest of his life. During the next fifteen years he accustomed himself to living as his tribal companions lived, in the Sudan, the French Sahara and Arabia. Meanwhile, reflecting on his influential childhood in Abyssinia, he said: ‘When I returned to England [with my family in 1919] I had already witnessed sights such as few people had ever seen.’ 10

Aged only eight months, early in 1911 Thesiger was taken by his parents on home leave. Carried in a ‘swaying litter between two mules’, 11the baby travelled three hundred miles from Addis Ababa to the railhead at Dire Dawa, and from there by train and steamer to England. A few months later this long journey was repeated in reverse, following the same route Thesiger’s parents had taken in November 1909. ‘The water for his baby food on these treks had to be boiled and then strained through gamgee tissue; his nurse hunted out the tent for camel ticks before he went to bed at night.’ Once, when Thesiger’s nurse had carried him a short distance from camp, they found themselves face to face with a party of half-naked warriors. ‘But she need not have worried, the warriors were just intrigued by a white baby; they had never seen such a sight before.’ 12