Abyssinian impressions
Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger, died in 1920. The third son of Lord Chelmsford, he joined the consular service in 1895, and was posted first of all to Lake Van in eastern Turkey, followed by Taranto, in southern Italy, Belgrade, and then St Petersburg. In 1907 he was posted to Boma in the eastern Congo. In Belgrade he proved his ability and courage by running single-handed the British Legation, after anarchists had murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga. In the Congo, Wilfred Gilbert investigated Sir Roger Casement’s shocking reports of atrocities inflicted by Belgian officials on native workers employed in the plantations. He performed these duties so efficiently that, in 1909, he was appointed HM Consul-General and Minister Plenipotentiary in charge of the British Legation at Addis Ababa, which his immediate predecessor, Captain John Harrington, had helped to establish only a few years before the Thesigers’ arrival there.
On 21 August 1909, Captain the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger DSO married Kathleen Mary Vigors at St Peter’s Church, Belgrave Square, London. The couple arrived at Addis Ababa in early December, after they had trekked for a month with mules, across the Tchercher Mountains, from the railhead at Dire Dawa in eastern Abyssinia. Wilfred Patrick, eldest of the Thesigers’ four sons, was born at 8 p.m. on Friday 3 June 1910 in one of the circular, thatched mud huts known as tukuls,which originally housed the British Legation. These huts were less primitive than Thesiger’s descriptions suggest. The better furnishings were shipped from England, and then transported by camel-caravan across the Danakil Desert. The wattle-and-daub walls of the Thesigers’ tukulwere tastefully papered and decorated with framed pictures, and the exposed roof lathes were interlaced with coloured ribbons. Kathleen Thesiger thought them ‘enchanting’ and described the Legation tukulsas ‘wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in’.7 The single-storey building housing the new Legation had a pedimented façade and shuttered windows. Sited in a compound that according to Kathleen was the size of St James’s Park in London, it was completed in 1911, and became the family’s home for the next eight years. Thesiger’s parents were both energetic gardeners and the gardens they laid out and planted have remained to this day very much as they left them.
Thesiger’s early upbringing in Addis Ababa was immensely significant, and, he maintained, affected the whole course of his life from then on. His brother Brian, a year younger, who joined in everything Wilfred did, remained almost untouched by their shared experiences. The two youngest children, Dermot and Roderic, were aged 5 and 3 when the Thesigers left Abyssinia early in 1919. As a result, neither the country nor its people left any lasting impression on them.
Thesiger remembered vividly sitting on the Legation steps in the evening, and listening to his father read aloud from his favourite books. Among them were Jock of the Bushveld(1907), Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s story of a dog’s adventures in the South African wilds; A Sporting Trip through Abyssinia(1902) by Major P. H. G. Powell-Cotton; and African Nature Notes and Reminiscences(1908) by Frederick Courteney Selous. Edmund Caldwell’s beautiful drawings in Jock of the Bushveldmay have inspired Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s sketches of big game in his letters to Wilfred and Brian. These books fired Wilfred’s boyhood passion for big game hunting, and encouraged a lifelong fascination with African peoples.
During visits to Addis Ababa, Arnold Wienholt Hodson, who served as a consul in Abyssinia from 1914 to 1927, enthralled Wilfred with tales of big game hunting and tribal warfare. Besides Hodson’s books, Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia(1927) and Where Lion Reign(1929), Thesiger possessed photographs taken by Hodson on safari, many of them captioned in Hodson’s handwriting. According to a letter written by Thesiger’s father, and his own recollections, the urge to hunt originated in Thesiger’s earliest childhood. He had tried as a toddler to knock down birds in the garden with a bat and an empty cartridge-case his father had given him, perhaps to play with instead of a ball. Aged 3, he had watched his father shoot an oryx, and remembered how the wounded antelope galloped madly away before it collapsed in a cloud of dust. He remembered later sitting up with his father, near the Legation, anxiously waiting for him to shoot a leopard that never appeared. He said: ‘My father enjoyed hunting big game, but he wasn’t very successful. He did some shooting while he was in the Congo and [hunted] in Abyssinia as well as India and Kenya. I liked being there with him and it was probably doing this that got me started.’8
Among his other memories of childhood in Abyssinia were vague impressions of camels and tribesmen at waterholes; of white-robed priests with their prayer-sticks and silver drums dancing before the Ark of the Covenant at Timkat, or Epiphany; watching in horror, one day when he and Brian were riding, as their escort dismounted from his horse, and, in doing so, stabbed himself accidentally through the shoulder with his lance; seeing Ras Tafari’s victorious army march their prisoners past the Empress Zauditu, after the battle at Sagale north of Addis Ababa, which crushed the Revolution in 1916 ( overleaf). He also remembered a boy-soldier, in Ras Tafari’s army, being carried shoulder-high, and how he would have given anything to change places with him. The deep impression made on him by such extraordinary experiences he felt certain was a key to understanding the adventurous life he would lead, years later, in Africa and elsewhere.
Stimulated by his upbringing in Abyssinia, Thesiger’s powers of observation were no doubt focussed and sharpened by his passion for big game hunting and bird life. As his fascination with birds grew, he progressed from merely shooting, to studying birds and recording their behaviour. Lying awake at night in his preparatory school near Brighton, he often pictured his home in Addis Ababa, and the brilliant green-and-chestnut bee-eaters and crimson touracos fluttering among the trees in its large garden. Throughout his life, Thesiger was always more sensitive to visual images than he was to sounds. He was tone-deaf; and he confessed that music, however beautiful or melodious, meant little more to him than a ‘jumble of noises’.9 For the same reason, bird-song and the call-notes of birds may have been essentially meaningless to Thesiger–although he insisted these never failed to evoke for him atmospheric, vivid memories of the African bush. Having no ear for music, he was not particularly receptive to nuances and variations in people’s voices. As a result, his publishers complained that his attempts to reproduce direct speech were seldom convincing. Thesiger’s companions in Morocco said that he spoke French haltingly, and with a bad accent. Yet his spoken Arabic was fluent and slightly flavoured by the accent and intonation of Darfur’s Muslim tribes and the dialects of the Bedu with whom he travelled in Arabia. He enjoyed listening to drums and to the rhythmic stamping of tribal dancers’ bare feet; but, unlike his brothers, he never learned to dance. In his autobiography The Life of My Choice(1987), he recalled with dry self-mockery his clumsy effort at dancing with the wife of Sir Angus Gillan, the Sudan’s Civil Secretary, in the 400, a fashionable Mayfair nightclub.10
The Afar (Danakil) and the Awash River
In The Danakil Diary(1996) Thesiger describes in more detail the hunting trip he made to Bilen after the coronation of Haile Selassie:
I had gone down there to hunt, but this journey meant far more to me than just the excitement of hunting … [T]here had been the constant and exciting possibility of danger … with no possibility of getting help if we needed it. I had been among tribesmen who had never had any contact with a world other than their own.11
Among the Oromo (Itu Galla), Thesiger had ‘an unpleasant feeling … of being in a hostile country … constantly being watched from the hilltops’.12 That ‘wonderful’ month gave his boyhood dreams a thrilling reality and made him even more determined to live a life of ‘colour
