Читать книгу Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer - Alexander Maitland - Страница 15

Haile Selassie’s coronation, and the shooting safari that followed, added glamour to Thesiger’s forbidding reputation as a boxer. Among strangers, without some coaxing, he still felt reluctant to talk about his experiences. Within his circle of family and close friends, however, he proved to be an excellent storyteller. He was also an attentive listener. While his stories were often amusing, he never told jokes. He said: ‘I don’t begin to understand this fascination by humour and, besides, I always think I’ve got none. Things people tell me make me laugh. When I see them written down I don’t find them so funny.’¹ Thesiger’s high-pitched, throaty cackle exposed his gums and his small, discoloured teeth. When he laughed, his whole face lit up, his eyes glittered, his bushy brown eyebrows arched expressively. Yet some people who met Thesiger for the first time found him bloodless and distant. One visitor described him as ‘rather blank, with penetrating eyes that look as though they haven’t seen much to laugh about’.² This impression was accurate, but it portrayed only one aspect of his personality.

Meeting Robin Campbell at Oxford helped to bring Wilfred out of his shell. In this new, unfamiliar setting, Campbell, who was two years younger than him, filled a void in Thesiger’s emotional life. Thesiger told an interviewer: ‘He was one of the gilded youths of Oxford. He had the looks and the charm of Rupert Brooke. Everyone was trying to get hold of him and the fact that this most sought after person actually liked spending time with me, brought out my self-confidence. After that, I assumed, for the first time really, that people could like me.’³ In his seventies, Thesiger recalled his feelings in more detail: ‘It was love…I wanted to hold him in my arms…But I always feared any advances would spoil a very close friendship. My feelings for Robin were romantic feelings, whereas Val ffrench Blake was interesting to talk to.’ He added, somewhat unjustly, ‘Perhaps there was not much more to Robin Campbell than his looks.’⁴

Furtive embraces and voyeuristic encounters set a pattern for Thesiger’s sexual life from then on. His photography expressed this very clearly. He viewed his male subjects as forbidden objects of desire, signalling his feelings for them by his choice of pose and his sensitive handling of light and shadow. The beauty of his images derived in part from the unconscious revelation of these suppressed feelings to the viewer, as much as from Thesiger’s skilful composition and his intuitive ability to capture and record what he called ‘the exact moment caught or lost forever’.⁵ When he wrote, ‘Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled,’ he meant exactly that. He insisted that the concept of physical sex, with men or women, revolted him: ‘I should have liked to have children. It was what I needed to do in order to get children that put me off.’⁶

Thesiger never explained, or may have been unable to explain, why he was revolted by the physical act of sex. He dismissed most attempts to analyse his motives and thought processes as ‘rubbish’ and saw no point in discussing or exploring the source of this revulsion. It may have originated in Lang’s abusive bathtime inspections, in being made to feel ashamed for ‘playing with’ himself, or perhaps from embarrassingly bungled experiments in lovemaking while he was in his teens. He dealt with it by spurning physical sex, by channelling his energy and emotions into dangerous, self-testing pursuits: big game hunting, exploration, remote travel. Boxing gave him ‘savage satisfaction’; broken bones and torn lips were tangible reminders of his Danakil shikari Moussa’s scarred arms and body.

On 30 September 1929 Thesiger had been elected a member of the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, proposed by his uncle Edward Vigors and seconded by Sir Ralph Verney, and as part of his blossoming social life at Oxford he joined clubs including the Raleigh, Vincent’s and the Gridiron. He described this period in The Life of My Choice as ‘getting over the feeling of rejection instilled into me at St Aubyn’s’ and discovering that ‘most people were only too willing to be friendly if I gave them a chance’.⁷

In the summer of 1931 he sailed with a Hull trawler to fishing grounds off Iceland’s southern coast. They skirted the Faroes, ‘an awe-inspiring sight, with the sea thundering against great black precipices and hurling scattered sheets of spray high up the face of the rock; above this turmoil a host of wheeling, screeching sea birds showed white against the cliffs’. Of the gruelling labour, Thesiger wrote: ‘I remember the brief darkness at midnight when the arc lamps lit the decks; the interminable hours of daylight; the unceasing work with men too tired to talk; the hurried meals; the luxury of sleep when we were moving from one fishing ground to another.’⁸ These wonderful descriptions recalled memories of hours spent in the Sorrento’s bunkers the previous year, ‘hard, hot, dirty, choking work’ shovelling coal, and would be echoed in later memories of his first desert journey, across the French Sahara: exhausting, marvellous days ending in ‘tired surrender to sleep’.⁹ As a memento of his trip to Iceland, Thesiger kept a letter written on 28 July 1931 by R.P. Ross of the steam trawler owners, F. & T. Ross, West Dock Avenue, Hull: ‘Just a line to let you know we have sent this morning two haddocks, two lemon soles, and one halibut to…The Milebrook…Hoping you are feeling no ill effects from your voyage…PS The Pelton [Thesiger’s vessel] landed 578 kits [i.e. barrels] and made £380.’¹⁰

On 8 October 1931, Kathleen Thesiger remarried at the age of fifty-one. Her second husband, Reginald Basil Astley, was sixty-nine. Astley was a childless widower whose first wife, Caroline Douglas Stewart, had died in 1921. A cousin of the twentieth Baron Hastings of Melton Constable, Norfolk and Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, he was an Old Etonian. He owned a villa on Lake Como and the Weir House, Alresford, Hampshire, whose tranquil setting included a trout stream and closely mown lawns shaded by ancient cedars. According to the Weir House visitors’ book, Kathleen Thesiger had been a fairly frequent guest there since at least 1927.

In his 1931 Milebrook diary Thesiger mentioned only briefly his mother’s engagement to this elderly, white-haired gentleman of leisure, whose dilettante interests included art, architecture, the lineage of noble families and, of course, trout fishing. Thesiger wrote on 20 August 1931: ‘Mrs T’s engagement to R Astley made public.’ This was a mistake; between ‘made’ and ‘public’, Thesiger scribbled hastily, ‘not yet’. The following day he wrote firmly: ‘Mrs T’s engagement made public. [Wilfred’s godmother] Mrs Backhouse…arrived for tea. W[ilfred] and B[rian] shot pigeons in the afternoon.’¹¹ Thesiger ‘never thought it odd’ that Kathleen announced her engagement to Astley on the anniversary of her wedding to Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger. To some the engagement seemed ill-timed, but it is conceivable that, by overmarking one anniversary with another, Kathleen intended to signal that her life had moved on. Whether or not this was the case, her memory of Wilfred Gilbert never faded, nor did her love for him diminish.

Thesiger wrote nothing about the wedding in his diary. On 6 October Kathleen left for London by the mid-morning train.¹² Wilfred took the same train the following morning.¹³ By coincidence, Kathleen had married Thesiger’s father at St Peter’s church, Eaton Square, and her second marriage took place at another St Peter’s (as it was then), which stood almost next door to her brother-in-law Percy Thesiger’s porticoed, redbrick London house, number 25 Cranley Gardens in South Kensington.

To begin with, Thesiger and his brothers had regarded Reginald Astley as a joke; later on, they realised his qualities as a man and an amateur historian. At The Milebrook, Thesiger said, ‘Reggie had his own room, opposite mine. It was a marriage of companionship. My mother dominated him, but not unpleasantly. She was a stronger character…that’s all it amounted to.’¹⁴ Thesiger knew how lonely his mother had been, and felt relieved that she had found a congenial companion for her old age, when her sons had left home. But later he would reflect that the marriage ‘didn’t in fact work very well’.¹⁵ Of the four brothers, Roderic got on best with their new stepfather. Not only did he share Astley’s fascination with pictures and architecture,¹⁶ but, being the youngest, he had almost no recollection of Wilfred Gilbert, whereas Wilfred inevitably made comparisons between his father and stepfather that did not always favour Astley.

Kathleen endeavoured always to be fair in her treatment of her sons. She loved them all and showed no obvious favouritism, although Thesiger later said that in those days she had felt closest to Dermot, with whom she shared a passion for horses. Thesiger had ridden since early boyhood, but by his late teens his passion for shooting took precedence over everything else. He came to regard horses as ‘silly creatures, and inferior to camels’.¹⁷ Whilst Dermot had adored his horses, Thesiger would claim that no animal he ever owned, not even his beloved spaniels, meant as much to him as Faraj Allah, the beautiful Bisharin female camel he acquired in the Sudan.¹⁸

For a blissful fortnight in the summer of 1932, Thesiger and six friends from Oxford stayed at the Villa Cipressi, Reginald Astley’s house on the shore of Lake Como. The party included Robin Campbell, Harry Phillimore, Edward Ford, Bill Peat, Tony Rumbold and John Schuster. All were Etonians, except for Campbell, who had been educated at Wellington. They swam in the lake, waterskied and sunbathed naked on the lawns among flowering magnolias. ‘After dinner,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘we would sit looking out over the three arms of the lake and talk until, drowsy with sun, swimming, food and wine, we went off to bed.’¹⁹ It all seemed perfect, yet this vacation marked a waning of Thesiger’s once-inseparable friendship with Robin Campbell. Forty years later, Tony (then Sir Anthony) Rumbold invited the two men to lunch, hoping their lapsed friendship might be revived. To Rumbold’s disappointment (and Thesiger’s), nothing came of this. Rumbold said: ‘It didn’t go very well. Their old friendship had gone and the atmosphere was rather a cold one. I thought it was sad. Robin had been wounded and had his leg amputated during the war. I think this affected Wilfred, who wanted to remember Robin as he was when we were all young. Perfect – you know, like a Greek god.’²⁰

After Brian Thesiger’s godfather, Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, was killed in Italy in 1915, his widow Judith ‘constituted herself’ as Brian’s godmother.²¹ Rich and manipulative, Judith later promised Brian that, if he changed his name to Doughty-Wylie, he would inherit her money. Thesiger said: ‘Like my father before me, I grew up to be proud of my family. Nothing on earth could have induced me to do this. My mother, however, told us: “You mustn’t interfere. You must allow Brian to do as he wishes…It is up to Brian to decide.”’²² When he left Oxford, Brian joined Doughty-Wylie’s regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and on 26 September 1933 he changed his name by deed poll from Thesiger to Doughty-Wylie. Wilfred and Brian remained as close as before, yet Thesiger admitted that he had found it difficult to understand, or approve of, his brother’s decision: ‘Brian was still Brian, but I suppose, in a way, I always resented what he had done.’²³

The two brothers had been inseparable since they were small children. As Thesiger never tired of repeating, everything connected with his early childhood at Addis Ababa was vitally important to him. His first nine years, he firmly believed, influenced the whole of his life. He had enshrined those halcyon days and years, obliterating from his memory anything that might have tarnished their unalloyed perfection. Nothing he remembered of his upbringing in Abyssinia was less than idyllic. To achieve this, Thesiger needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to do so fairly ruthlessly. Like everyone, he saw as much as he wanted to see, and turned a blind eye to anything he preferred to ignore. But he tended to carry this normal self-protective process to an extreme. He came very close on occasions to reinventing his early boyhood years in order to harmonise them with the idealised, almost mythical, decade which inspired his extraordinary adult life as a world-famous explorer and traveller. Everything that Thesiger said or wrote about his early life was true. But he did not always tell the whole story, and the fascinating detail he chose to reveal was viewed through a rose-tinted lens, from his determinedly self-orientated, exclusive and sometimes quixotic perspective. Thesiger’s father, his mother, his younger brothers, his nurse Susannah, his ‘cherished confidante’ Minna Buckle, the Legation servants and staff, his father’s Consuls scattered across the length and breadth of Abyssinia, even animals and birds in the garden and the hills round his home, became indispensable cast members in this childhood drama. When he left Abyssinia in 1919, the first chapter in his life had closed. In a real sense, as well as metaphorically, his selective memories of those years were sealed off and preserved forever, embalmed and perfectly incorruptible.

The person closest to Wilfred in age, who shared these experiences, was his brother Brian. While Brian had featured in many of the juvenile episodes recorded in The Life of My Choice and Desert, Marsh and Mountain, Thesiger erased him from other events, including adventures with his father such as the viceregal tiger-shoot at Jaipur, at which both boys had been present. Thesiger said: ‘The books I wrote described my life and the things I’d done. When we were children, Brian and I went everywhere together…almost everything we did then, we did together…We were together at St Aubyn’s…later at Eton, and at Oxford…It’s true, we were very close, and yet Brian was so different from me. He wasn’t affected by our life in Abyssinia in the same way I was…He was always wasting his time, chasing about after girls.’²⁴ Thesiger’s mother and father had hoped for a daughter, yet his mother told a visitor, years afterwards: ‘If I’d had a daughter, I’d have drowned it at birth!’²⁵ Kathleen had been joking, of course, unlike T.E. Lawrence’s mother when she made her jealous remark: ‘We could never be bothered with girls in our house.’²⁶

During his fourth year at Oxford, Thesiger spent more and more time with his brother Dermot, who was by then an undergraduate at Magdalen. He wrote: ‘Roddy did not go up to Oxford until the year after I had left. Dermot and I had been together at Eton but then Dermot was one of the Lower boys who came when I shouted “Boy”. Now we were grown up and the difference in our ages was immaterial.’²⁷ Dermot was tall, slender and handsome. His memories of Abyssinia were at best very vague. Travelling abroad did not appeal to him – he used to say he never wanted to go further than Dover. Highly intelligent and witty, Dermot followed in his great-grandfather the first Lord Chelmsford’s footsteps and was called to the Bar after he left Oxford. Like his great-grandfather he had his heart set on a political career: ‘his dream [was] to become Prime Minister’.²⁸

Thesiger sometimes took Dermot with him to tea at Elsfield Manor, John Buchan’s house near Oxford. Buchan was President of the university’s Exploration Club, and Wilfred wrote to him in 1931 asking for advice. He had read Buchan’s novels as a boy, starting with Prester John at St Aubyn’s. In 1969 he remembered: ‘I became a passionate John Buchanite, I read every one [of his books] as it came out and I tried to emulate his style. I never tire of his books and I can read them now with pleasure at every moment.’²⁹ Twenty years later, Thesiger’s opinion of Buchan’s writing was still high, but more critical: ‘Reading The Thirty-Nine Steps again, I enjoyed it. But it does feel dated. I don’t mean the story and the settings, but the writing – just a bit.’³⁰ When he described John Buchan, Thesiger might have been describing his own father: ‘I can still picture him as I knew him, his sensitive ascetic face etched with lines of pain but lit by his innate kindliness, his lean body in comfortable country tweeds. Although a man of many and varied accomplishments, he remained a countryman at heart.’³¹ Thesiger’s uncle, Frederic Chelmsford, had been cast in a similar mould as ‘a patrician in the Roman tradition, cultured, erudite, civilised’.³² Chelmsford was a keen fisherman and shot who spent his summers at Otterburn and Wark, in Northumberland, whose ‘wild black moors’ his brother Wilfred Gilbert had celebrated in verse. Thesiger recalled the thrill of catching a fifteen-pound salmon there, in a racing river swollen by torrential rain. He wrote in 1987: ‘No excitement in my life has ever quite equalled the tense fifteen minutes during which I was connected to that fish.’³³ This was an apt metaphor for Thesiger’s relationships with his younger companions. Much of the excitement and interest lay in the first contact and his gaining absolute control.

During his years at Oxford, Thesiger often discussed his plans to explore the Awash river with his mother, his brothers, friends and relatives, including John Buchan and his uncle Lord Chelmsford. In April 1933 his uncle collapsed and died, like Wilfred’s father and grandfather, of a sudden heart attack. Since he had first stayed at Otterburn at the age of seventeen, Thesiger’s feelings of alarm and awe in his uncle’s presence had gradually been replaced by increasing affection. Chelmsford became a father figure, and when he died Wilfred felt ‘a sense of desolation’.³⁴ He wrote: ‘My uncle intended to contribute to the cost of my Danakil expedition. In The Life of My Choice, I said my aunt insisted I should receive the sum he had meant to give me. This, in fact, wasn’t quite right. Aunt Francie was well-off, but she was – you know – very careful, and she only gave me half of the money that Uncle Fred had promised to give me.’³⁵ Thesiger partly funded the expense of the Awash expedition by selling some gold rings which Haile Selassie’s son and heir, the Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, had given him during a visit to London. The rings made £400. The President of Magdalen, George Gordon, donated £50 on behalf of the college. Thesiger also received a grant of £125 from the Royal Geographical Society; and another of £250 from the Linnean Society’s Percy Sladen Memorial Trust. The British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington promised to buy any suitable specimens of birds and mammals he had collected, and from various firms he acquired provisions, cartridges, medicines and supplies of film, either at a discount or free of charge. Definitions of the purpose of the expedition altered, it appears, according to the sponsor’s agenda. A letter from Dr S.A. Neave, Assistant Director of the Imperial Institute of Entomology, stated that Thesiger was ‘undertaking a zoological expedition to Abyssinia…His primary object will be to collect material for the British Museum (Natural History), and he also hopes that he may be able to obtain data for this Institute, which is officially recognised by all countries in Africa as the international centre for receiving and coordinating information respecting migratory locusts.’³⁶ Predating by more than a decade Thesiger’s famous investigations of locust outbreak-centres in Arabia, Dr Neave observed that in the Danakil country beyond the end of the Awash river, ‘it is possible that breeding areas of the desert locust…or other migratory species occur there’.³⁷

At Thesiger’s request, Sir Sidney Barton, the British Minister at Addis Ababa, obtained the Emperor’s permission for the expedition to follow the Awash to its end. Barton informed Thesiger that ‘permission could not be obtained for your expedition to leave Aussa via the French Somaliland frontier, so I am afraid you will have to be content with the Hawash section…fever in the [Awash] valley is very bad in October and…it is not really safe to start until the beginning of December – after which it is alright up to May. Conditions in the lower valley are presumably worse, so if you want to avoid mortality among your followers I think you should bear this in mind.’³⁸ Barton’s approach to Haile Selassie was backed by a letter from the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Instead of geographical discovery (as might have been expected), the Society’s letter, like that from the Imperial Institute of Entomology, emphasised that Thesiger’s main objective was ‘to study the distribution and life history of locusts’. The letter nowhere mentioned exploration, but only stated vaguely: ‘These travellers wish to undertake surveys and photography.’³⁹ Thesiger was unable to clarify why the purpose of his expedition had been described (quite distinctly and separately) as zoology, entomology, surveying and photography instead of his own definition, ‘to follow the Awash river into the fabulous Sultanate of Aussa and discover how and where it ended’. Rather than collecting birds, insects, mammals and plants, it was the ‘lure of the unknown’ and the challenge ‘presented by the murderous company of the Danakil and the physical difficulties of the journey [that had proved] irresistible’.⁴⁰

Once again, Colonel Dan Sandford helped Wilfred to assemble his caravan, while Kathleen gave her son encouragement as well as practical support. Thesiger said: ‘My mother was a naturally possessive woman. She knew very well what the dangers were, and the risks I was running. Yet, in spite of this, she did all she could to help me – getting in touch with people, everything.’⁴¹ Kathleen knew that an Egyptian army commanded by Werner Munzinger had been annihilated by Danakil tribesmen in 1875, between Tajura and the eastern border of Aussa. In 1881 Giulietti and Biglieri’s expedition was massacred, and in 1884 a second Italian party led by Bianchi, Diana and Monari suffered the same fate. She and Wilfred had discussed these massacres, and also Ludovico Mariano Nesbitt’s account of his Danakil expedition, published in October 1930 in the Geographical Journal. Although Nesbitt had escaped with his life, only to die in a plane crash in 1935, three of his servants were murdered during the journey he later described in his book Desert and Forest, which Thesiger reviewed favourably after he had returned from his 1933-34 expedition.

Understandably, Kathleen insisted that her son must find a companion. It was the last thing Wilfred wanted, but for his mother’s sake he agreed. Evelyn Waugh had asked ‘at second-hand’ if he could accompany him. Thesiger dramatised his refusal in The Life of My Choice: ‘Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned.’⁴² Apart from mapping the river’s end, among his other tasks Thesiger intended to collect as many bird specimens as possible from the Danakil country. Preferably, the companion he chose needed to be a skilled ornithologist, and to be able to shoot any specimens they required. Thesiger approached Peter Markham Scott, son of the Antarctic explorer, a gifted field naturalist, an ornithologist, a painter of birds and portraits who had trained at the Royal Academy Schools and would exhibit at the Royal Academy from 1933 onwards. Nine months older than Thesiger, Scott had graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge. Thesiger said: ‘Peter’s mother, Lady Kennet, invited me to tea. She asked me a lot of questions: why I wanted to discover where the river ended; who the Danakil were; was there any danger involved, and so on. Well, there it was…I said, yes, it would be dangerous…and that was the point of doing it. Then she said: “I am sorry, Mr Thesiger, but in view of the risk I cannot possibly consent to my son coming with you.” Well, if my mother had said that about me, I’d have been absolutely furious.’⁴³

Robert Robertson, a young Scotsman, had hoped to accompany Thesiger, but his father Sir William Robertson opposed the idea – like Lady Kennet, on the grounds that it was too dangerous.⁴⁴ In the end, Thesiger agreed that David Haig-Thomas should join him. Haig-Thomas’s credentials, in every respect, seemed ideal. His chief interests included ornithology and photography, and he had boxed at Eton as a bantamweight in the school’s annual competition in March 1925. Perhaps his most important contribution would be persuading Thesiger to buy a Leica II 35mm miniature camera. As a beginner, Wilfred had previously used an old Kodak box camera that once belonged to his father. He took this simpler camera with him to Abyssinia and used it together with his brand-new Leica, unaware that it was faulty, as a result of which many of its negatives were cropped.

David Haig-Thomas’s family contributed £250 to the cost of the expedition, raising Thesiger’s credit balance to £1075. In addition, from his late uncle Lord Chelmsford’s estate he received £50, £30 from Brian, £25 from Kathleen’s brother Ashmead Vigors, and a further £20 from Magdalen College. In a letter from Addis Ababa, dated 23 December 1933, Thesiger stated that the expedition had cost £1500; this meant either that he and his mother between them must have added a further £300 of their own money to the other contributions, or else that he had managed to save this from the annuity left to him after his grandmother, Lady Chelmsford, had died.

While Thesiger continued to read for his final examinations at Oxford, and to raise funds for the Awash expedition, Colonel Sandford commuted between his farm at Mullu and Addis Ababa, arranging temporary accommodation, permits, baggage animals, men and supplies. The letters he wrote between June and August indicate how much trouble he had taken on Wilfred’s behalf. A letter from Addis Ababa dated 8 June 1933 discusses important details of the forthcoming expedition. Having helped to organise Thesiger’s first safari, in 1930, Sandford knew his strengths and weaknesses. He wrote: ‘I came here from the farm yesterday largely in order to get going with your preparations. I saw Barton who told me that…you would get your permits to explore from the Hawash Station to the point where the Hawash disappears into the ground…Sir Sidney…has taken a great deal of trouble for you, and so long as you don’t take too much for granted (which old birds like us resent) he will do all he can to help. That is just a word of warning in season, so don’t get hot under the collar!!’ Assuming that the expedition’s primary objectives were ‘Survey and birds’, Sandford proposed that Thesiger should also collect ‘blood slides, lice, ticks, and so on’ for the Tropical Diseases Hospital, or for the former head of medical services in the Sudan. While accepting that fever was ‘pretty virulent’ in the Awash valley, he reassured Wilfred that if he was careful, carried a good supply of ‘the right medicines’ and learnt how to treat his followers properly for malaria, ‘especially in giving injections’, he ‘needn’t be greatly afraid of it’. Sandford’s headman, Umr, would buy ‘20 good camels’ for £70 and ‘ten riding mules’ costing $80 (Abyssinian thalers) apiece – ‘efficient’, ‘handy’ transport for Thesiger, his interpreter, cook, tent boys and any sick whom ‘you cannot leave…on the roadside’. As for the headman and interpreter, Sandford wrote: ‘I don’t think you will do better than take Umr Wadai…He is a Somali and was headman to Sir G[eoffrey] Archer and Duke of Gloucester. He is expensive but worth the money. He wanted $120 to $150, but I have cut him down to $100 per month plus rations…I am looking around for a suitable No 2 to him – a man with knowledge of the Hawash valley and of all the languages there. Umr speaks English, Amharic and Galla perfectly but doesn’t know the Danakil language.’⁴⁵ Thesiger noted: ‘Umar had been with [the Sandfords] since he was a boy.’⁴⁶

Colonel Sandford added a rough estimate of the cost of the expedition for the first four months, not counting provisions, camp equipment, weapons, ammunition and travelling expenses between England and Abyssinia: ‘I should think £300 would cover your expenses in this country…But I am not prepared to be called to book if it costs more! You may have to pay for game licences – say $100 each person, but this is not yet fixed.’⁴⁷ In fact, Thesiger was charged no less than 680 Abyssinian thalers for game licences. Either Sandford’s estimate had been low, or, more likely, six licences were issued: one each for Thesiger, Haig-Thomas and four of their men.

On 13 July Sandford wrote to Umr instructing him to buy eight riding mules, including three ‘good strong animals for the personal use of Mr Thesiger and the gentlemen with him’, and fifteen ‘first class baggage camels suitable for work in the valley of the Hawash’,⁴⁸ complete with baggage saddles and other equipment, and a man to look after them. As protection against ‘the Hawash type of “malignant” malaria’, a Dr Lambie recommended Atebrin, Plasmocin and Plasmocin C, Emetin and Yatren for dysentery, and Neo-Salvarsan for tick or relapsing fever. Thesiger had enquired about free railway passes in Abyssinia, and the possibility of hunting along the Abyssinia-Sudan border. Sandford replied: ‘I don’t think you’ll get a free railway ticket, but I’ll enquire whether reductions are ever made to scientists!’ As for ‘trekking along the Sudan border in search of game’, he doubted that this would be worthwhile.⁴⁹ By the end of August, Thesiger decided that he and Haig-Thomas would delay starting the expedition to avoid the Awash’s worst malarial season, and would spend two months hunting nyala and other game in the Arussi mountains.

The mountain nyala, a large antelope that resembled the greater kudu, was only found in the highlands of Arussi and Bale, where the hunter-naturalist Edward North Buxton had discovered it as recently as 1910. Since then, few had been shot by sportsmen. On 23 November 1933, David Haig-Thomas’s father Peter, who had himself hunted in the Arussi, wrote to Kathleen, who had sent him one of Wilfred’s letters from there: ‘Many thanks for letting me read such an interesting letter. They evidently went further South than I did in the Arussi Mts. I saw 73 female nyala but never a male.’ Such numerous sightings were evidently exceptional. Thesiger wrote in 1996: ‘few Europeans had ever seen a mountain nyala, so Haig-Thomas and I were naturally eager to secure one’.⁵⁰

Aware of his obligations to the Natural History Museum, Thesiger wanted to shoot specimens of k’ebero (or cuberow), also known as the Abyssinian wolf, as well as the blue-winged geese needed to expand the museum’s collection, which at that time consisted of a single specimen brought back in 1868 after Napier’s Magdala expedition.

Having been awarded a third-class degree in modern history, Thesiger returned from Oxford to The Milebrook. In the third and final volume of his Milebrook diary, his last entry, dated 18 April 1933, describes a fine day’s birdwatching in the Elan Valley. He might have been describing a scene at Addis Ababa: ‘Saw two kites. Both came out of oak trees on hill side. Very good view. Can this be one of the old…ones and a new mate[?] Am certain there was only one there till now. Very exciting. Hunted round together. Ravens very demonstrative. A good afternoon.’⁵¹

On 24 August 1933 Thesiger and David Haig-Thomas travelled by train and ferry from London to Marseilles, and from there by the MM Chermonceaux, third class, to Jibuti. Apart from the £300 Sandford calculated they would need in Abyssinia, Thesiger had spent £389.3.11 equipping the expedition in England. The most expensive item had been foodstuffs, purchased in style at Fortnum & Mason at a cost of £208.8.10. Thesiger and Haig-Thomas each brought guns and miniature rifles (.22s firing lead bullets or dust-shot) for collecting birds, and big game rifles to shoot meat for their caravan, as well as trophies. Their large, comfortable tents were equipped with verandahs, and they would dine off folding tables laid with tablecloths, cutlery and glass, shaded from the sun by a parasol with fringes like an enormous lampshade. Thesiger commented: ‘I travelled then as my father had travelled in the past, like an Englishman in Africa.’⁵²

They were met on 8 September at Addis Ababa by Sandford and Frank de Halpert, a banker who knew Thesiger and his family. Umr Wadai, ‘a tall, powerfully-built, middle-aged Somali’,⁵³ was with Sandford. Umr was to be Thesiger’s loyal, trusted companion for the next nine months. The Sandfords provided Wilfred with an excellent cook, Habta Mariam, who was elderly, frail, yet very sturdy. The first supper Habta Mariam prepared, from ducks shot at Mojjo, ‘tasted delicious, a happy augury for future meals’.⁵⁴

Guided by Umr, they engaged two Somalis, Abdullahi and Said Munge, as gunbearers, and, as head syce, and later assistant to Umr, a middle-aged Amhara named Kassimi. Goutama, Kassimi’s assistant, had worked as a young syce at the Legation when Thesiger was a boy. He was a devout Christian, of slave origin, and very dark-skinned. The camels Umr had already purchased, and their Somali camelmen, awaited Thesiger and his party at the Awash station.

After an audience with the Emperor at Addis Ababa on 22 September, Thesiger and Haig-Thomas spent a week with Dan and Christine Sandford in their charming, mud-walled, thatched farmhouse at Mullu. On the Mullu river they shot six fat blue-winged geese. In The Danakil Diary Thesiger noted: ‘we obtained several specimens for the museum’.⁵⁵ According to his unpublished ‘Notes on the Blue Winged Goose’, however, between September and November they shot twenty adult geese – including the six at Mullu – and two goslings of this little-studied species, which, Thesiger observed, was ‘a very silent bird for a goose’.⁵⁶

The Arussi trek had scarcely got under way when a brigand, or shifta, stole a rifle from one of their followers. Thesiger described the incident briefly in The Danakil Diary, but an unpublished version taken from Haig-Thomas’s diary is more detailed. To Thesiger the theft was of little consequence; to Haig-Thomas it had been an adventure: ‘I was behind the caravan collecting birds but grabbed a rifle and followed by Said and Joseph raced along towards the shouting…Having clubbed a Galla [the shifta] had seized his rifle and made off and was only a short way in front. WT being in front…fired over his head and he dived into thick bush. I soon came up, and we gave up thinking he would escape through the bush. [Thesiger stated that he ‘Followed him, very ticklish work as thick scrub and I thought he would fight.’] Umr and our syce kept him in view, got to close quarters and after firing close to his head he surrendered. He was bound all the time muttering “here you have me bound, if only I had some cartridges and was in the bush I could shoot you like rats”…He had been a shifta for 9 years and had shot several men.’

In his version, Thesiger discreetly omitted to mention that they found on the shifta letters to a Fituarari: as Haig-Thomas wrote, ‘a high personage in A[ddis] A[baba] saying “I am sorry I have not got you anything for so long and hope to get you something soon.” He told us he had friends not far, and that they had been spying on the caravan the night before.’ He added, maybe nervously: ‘It is possible they may try to raid the camp tonight for a hostage.’⁵⁷ Later, at Chelalo, Haig-Thomas recorded graphically, they ‘saw a man hanging from a tree, far from fresh. The hyenas could reach his legs and had eaten them. Umr says he was a shifta. I wonder why nature usually so beautiful has not evolved a more pleasant method of ridding herself of unwanted boddies [sic]?’ He remained optimistic, however: ‘we may see nyala tomorrow?’⁵⁸

In a large, steep-sided valley at Mount Chelalo, they heard two k’ebero calling to one another across the valley east of the mountain. The animals made ‘a most weird noise, faintly resembling a baboon’s bark’.⁵⁹ On 6 October they shot a female k’ebero in heathland on the edge of a forest of causo trees. Haig-Thomas sighted two that were hunting for moles. The k’ebero were ‘unafraid and curious’, sometimes ‘passing leisurely by within 20 yards’. In these highlands, Thesiger noted, k’ebero were ‘quite tame’, and ‘evidently plentiful from the number of droppings seen’; the animals went about either singly or in pairs.⁶⁰ As well as birds and mammals, in Arussi Thesiger collected seventy-six plants and flowering shrubs, including cacti, yellow daisies, pale-blue and dark-blue delphiniums, and a ‘round green ball [with an] orange flower [protruding] out of it’ supported on a single stem, which was perhaps a marigold or a dahlia.⁶¹

On 8 October, by mistake David Haig-Thomas tracked and shot two nyala. Thesiger wrote in The Danakil Diary: ‘He jumped one in thick bush and saw it hide soon after in another patch of thick heather. Stalked it and shot at it, when it apparently bolted. Fired four more shots and killed it. Found the head very much smaller than he had thought. When Umar arrived with the mule, he found another one – the original one – lying dead where first shot at. A great nuisance as David only paid for one on his licence.’⁶² Haig-Thomas observed ruefully: ‘[Umr] had arrived and found a nyala dead where I had first shot…They must have been lying side by side and I should think the first nyala must have fallen on the second?’⁶³

A few days later Thesiger saw through binoculars an ‘extremely fine’ bull nyala lying in the open, four hundred yards away. After an hour, the bull got up and started to graze. Thesiger made a careful stalk, on all fours, to within a hundred yards of the nyala, which now faced him. The moment it turned side on, he fired. The bull staggered, then recovered. Two more shots killed it. The nyala’s horns measured forty-nine inches, ‘an unofficial record’. For Haig-Thomas, this was a defining moment; a ‘real triumph’ for Thesiger, who noted with relief in his diary, ‘I am so glad I did not take another indifferent head.’⁶⁴

Travelling through the Arussi mountains gave Thesiger the opportunity to assess his followers and make any necessary changes before the Danakil expedition started. It also gave him and Haig-Thomas a chance to find out how they would fare as travelling companions, even though the hardships and stresses of their Arussi journey were slight compared with the dangers they would face in the Danakil. The high plateau felt bitterly cold. Thesiger’s pony grew listless and died. The baggage mules sickened, due to fever or to bad grazing, and their stomachs distended. One had to be shot. Thesiger wrote: ‘As long as they are kept on the move they keep alive, but die as soon as they are allowed to lie down.’⁶⁵

By mid-November, David Haig-Thomas had developed painful ulcers on one leg and an abscess in his throat. Prickly grass seeds picked up in his socks caused Thesiger’s right foot to itch and swell. Haig-Thomas’s ulcers got worse. A doctor he met on a coffee plantation lanced the abscess, but soon afterwards he developed tonsillitis in both tonsils. Thesiger wrote: ‘Four days after we had left the Daro [river] he decided to push on ahead with Kassimi, on our two best mules, in order to catch a train from the Awash Station to Addis Ababa for medical treatment.’⁶⁶ He continued: ‘We reached the Awash Station on 25 November. Haig-Thomas was at the railway rest house. He had returned from Addis Ababa two days before, apparently cured, but his throat had now flared up again.’⁶⁷ Unable to speak, hardly able to walk, Haig-Thomas returned once more by train from the Awash station to Addis Ababa on 28 November. The following day he sent Thesiger a telegram: ‘Cannot come.’⁶⁸

Thesiger wrote in The Danakil Diary: ‘I was content to be on my own, glad that I should have no need to accommodate myself to a fellow-countryman, that any decisions in the days ahead would be entirely mine. Haig-Thomas had been cheerful and good natured, and never once had we quarrelled. No one, indeed, could have been more easy-going; but we never got on close terms or found much in common during the four months we had been together since leaving England. I did not feel I should miss his company, and the fact that I should have no fellow-countryman with me to take charge if I fell sick or was wounded did not worry me, since I had every confidence in Umar.’⁶⁹

In July 1934 David Haig-Thomas left England to spend a winter in the Arctic, as the ornithologist attached to the Oxford University Ellesmere Land Expedition led by Dr Noel Humphreys.⁷⁰