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Fascinated all his life by his grandfather’s controversial role in the Zulu war, Thesiger, at the age of eighty-six, visited Isandhlwana and saw for himself where the massacre had taken place. In South Africa he met the Zulu leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who presented him with a Zulu knobkerrie, a shield and a spear. Thesiger said afterwards: ‘I found Buthelezi impressive. It moved me to have met him like that more than a century after Isandhlwana. There we were: Buthelezi, the grandson of Cetewayo, the Zulu king; and myself, the grandson of Lord Chelmsford, whose army Cetewayo’s warriors half-destroyed, and who finally destroyed them at Ulundi.’13
On 9 April 1905, while he was playing billiards in the United Services Club, Lord Chelmsford died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-seven. Thesiger said: ‘My grandfather and my father died instantaneously, so that they could have felt nothing. When it’s my turn to push up the daisies, that is how I should wish to die.’14
Wilfred Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert, was the third of Lord and Lady Chelmsford’s five sons. He was born at Simla on 25 March 1871, four years after Frederic Augustus Thesiger married Adria Fanny Heath, the eldest daughter of Major-General Heath of the Bombay Army. Their eldest son, Frederic John Napier, was appointed Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921; in 1921 he was created the first Viscount Chelmsford. Harold Lumsden Thesiger, their fourth son, died in India, aged only two and a half months, in 1872.
‘For some reason,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘my father was educated at Cheltenham [College], whereas his brothers [Frederic, Percy and Eric] were educated at Winchester.’15 Wilfred Gilbert had twice failed the Winchester entrance examination, despite receiving extra tuition at a crammer in Switzerland. As a boy he had been delicate. Above average height, he was handsome and slender, and his expression was wistful, perhaps melancholy. In 1889 and 1892 he was examined at Francis Galton’s Anthropometric Institute in South Kensington, which was equipped and supervised as part of the International Health Exhibition. Galton’s laboratory measured ‘Keenness of Sight and of Hearing; Colour Sense, Judgement of Eye; Breathing Power; Reaction Time; Strength of Pull and of Squeeze; Force of Blow; Span of Arms; Height, both standing and sitting; and Weight’.16 A student of ‘hereditary talent and character’, and founder of the Eugenics Society, Galton espoused the theory of ‘right breeding’, which the high achievers produced by successive generations of Thesigers appeared to confirm.
An illness, possibly rheumatic fever, had drained Wilfred Gilbert’s energy and left him with a permanently weakened heart. Though he was a ‘well conducted boy’, his school reports describe him as ‘languid and unattentive’17 – failings conspicuous in the younger Wilfred Thesiger, who confessed to having a limited attention span and who wrote that he had proved ‘an unreceptive boy to teach, disinclined to concentrate on any subject that bored me’.18 Wilfred Gilbert’s poor performance in French and German (which had once been his family’s first language) prompted a master’s opinion that he ‘was not a linguist by nature’. While at Cheltenham he began to write poetry. His poems suggest that he was prone to depression or melancholy. Many are preoccupied with death, and evoke a sense of futility which later seemed at odds with his private and public roles as husband, father and staunch representative of the Crown.
Wilfred Gilbert’s career in the Consular Service began in Asia Minor, where he served at Lake Van from 1895 to 1898 ‘as a secretary to Major [later Colonel] W.A. Williams RA, Military Vice-Consul’ at the time of the Armenian massacres. He earned a mention in despatches and wrote letters which were keenly observed and often vivid. Many of them presaged others written years later by his son Wilfred, on topics that included hunting, photography and travel. In July 1896 Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘I want very much to see more of the country…a good pair of ibex horns still haunts my dreams.’19 And in April that same year: ‘If ever I come out here again I shall certainly bring a camera.’20 Romantically careless of time and place, he wrote on ‘the 20 somethingth of August 1896’ from Garchegan, ‘somewhere in the mountains’: ‘It is a glorious life this, living in tents and moving from place to place.’21 Of the conflict between Armenians and Turks he saw nothing worse than a skirmish, like ‘a music hall battle’, in front of the consulate. Once an Armenian banker who lived nearby ‘sent over to say some revolutionists were in his garden and were going to murder him’.22
Wilfred Gilbert spent much of his time at Van gardening, sketching, reading, riding and shooting. He learnt Turkish, and took charge of the household. Thesiger wrote: ‘My father made a number of watercolour sketches of [Kurdish tribes in their ‘spectacular garb’] that fascinated me as a boy but have since disappeared. At Van he was very conscious of past greatness, when kings of Assyria ruled, fought and fell among these mountains.’23 Wilfred Gilbert remarked in a letter: ‘even a short description of these districts written by a certain Marco Polo, which we have here, is perfectly up to date’.24
After Van he had been nominated Vice-Consul at Algiers, but he was posted instead to Taranto in southern Italy. There he monitored exports of olive oil and red wine, and compiled an encouraging report on Calabria’s mother-of-pearl industry. Having written poems inspired by the sea, at Taranto Wilfred Gilbert became a keen yachtsman. He also took up fencing. According to Signor Ferri, his fencing master: ‘Correctness, thundering attack, and the highest intelligence, distinguish him on the platform.’25 Even if ‘thundering attack’ was overdone, it sounded better than Cheltenham’s less flattering comments that Wilfred Gilbert was ‘not of much power’ in the classroom and ‘lacked scoring power at cricket’.26 Thesiger did not share his father’s fencing talent: at Oxford he ‘was noted as much for the extraordinary and often furious contortions of his blade in fencing – a pastime at which he was never an adept – as for his lightning successes in the ring’.27
‘During the Boer War,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘[my father] joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a trooper, but was soon commissioned and later promoted to [temporary] captain. He fought in South Africa from March 1900 until October 1901 and was awarded the DSO.’28 Wilfred Gilbert’s DSO was for general service, not, as in his son Wilfred’s case, for an outstanding act of bravery. After the war he considered becoming a District Commissioner in the Transvaal, but instead rejoined the Consular Service. In 1902 he was sent as Vice-Consul to Belgrade. The following year he was left in charge of the Legation when the Minister was withdrawn after the brutal murder of King Alexander and Queen Draga by an anarchist group known as the Black Hand.
King Alexander’s successor, Peter I (like Wilfred Gilbert’s father), suffered from ‘a sort of shyness and inability to make small [impromptu] remarks to everyone’.29 Wilfred Gilbert understood this difficulty, yet could not resist describing, tongue-in-cheek, preparations for the coronation: ‘the king has been practising in the palace garden how to get on horseback in his robe and crown with his sceptre in his hand, for he is to ride back in all his glory; and the ministers are having little loops sewn on their best clothes in anticipation of the orders they expect to receive…For two days it has drizzled and all the Serbian flags are gradually fading into limp rags in which the red, blue and white have run into each other to such an extent that by Wednesday they promise to be little more than mere smudges of colour not of the cleanest.’30
After Belgrade, Wilfred Gilbert was posted to St Petersburg, where, to his relief he was not ‘bothered with too many social duties’.31 He looked forward to playing golf at Mourina, an hour’s drive from the city, and reassured his now widowed mother: ‘I am awfully lucky in servants, having just got a treasure in the way of an office boy and with a jewel of a cook and Collins [his former batman in the Imperial Yeomanry] am really in clover.’32 This was fortunate, since Wilfred Gilbert’s later postings, in the Congo and Abyssinia, were to prove very stressful; and, at Addis Ababa, potentially dangerous.
Like his father, Thesiger grew up to be ‘justifiably proud’ of his family. By this he meant proud of the Thesigers. He adored his mother and got on well with her relatives, but her family did not greatly interest him. He said: ‘The Vigors were landed gentry with estates in Ireland. They achieved nothing of consequence, whereas every generation of my father’s family produced somebody who was outstanding.’33
Whenever Kathleen Mary Vigors thought of Ireland, she pictured Burgage, her childhood home near Bagenalstown and Leighlinbridge, in County Carlow, where she had been brought up with her sister and brothers until she was eight. Some photographs of Burgage taken in June 1939 show the house and part of the estate, with meadows that slope from terraced lawns down to the River Barrow. Supposedly written at Burgage, Cecil Frances Alexander’s popular hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ praised the ‘river running by’ and the ‘purple-headed mountain’ – possibly Mount Leinster, which could be seen from the ‘Butler’s Terrace’. Thesiger said: ‘When we came back from Addis Ababa [in 1919], we went to Burgage and we were there for a bit. Burgage was desperately important to my mother. There was this love of Ireland and the Irish. She was passionate about Ireland, and yet she had seen so little of it.’34
The Vigors originated either in France or Spain, and were among the many Protestants who fled to England in the sixteenth century. The Irish branch of the family originated with Louis Vigors, who became vicar of Kilfaunabeg and Kilcoe in County Cork in 1615. In the family records it is said that Louis Vigors’s son Urban served as chaplain to King Charles I. A later Vigors, Captain Nicholas Aylward, contributed important papers to the Linnean Society and published an essay titled ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of Poetic Licence’. Though severely wounded in the Peninsular War, he won distinction for his ‘scientific attainments’. Together with Sir Stamford Raffles he helped to found the Zoological Society of London in 1826, and served as the first of its secretaries. Nicholas Vigors’s stepbrother, General Horatio Nelson Trafalgar Vigors, was born in 1807, two years after the battle which his forenames celebrate so comprehensively. He served for some years in the 1850s as the acting Governor of St Helena, having previously commanded the island’s tiny regiment.35
In The Life of My Choice Thesiger sketched his Vigors grandparents briefly: ‘My maternal grandmother was an undemonstrative and rather prudish woman, whereas my grandfather was rather a rake, a confirmed gambler and obviously excellent company. My mother remembered him with affection all her life.’36 Thesiger later explained that he described Thomas Vigors, his grandfather, mainly from Kathleen’s reminiscences. He recalled: ‘When I was a boy, my Vigors grandmother seemed to me a formidable, rather frightening figure. I think, in fact, she was very attached to my mother. They got on well and Granny [Vigors] was always kind to us.’37
Kathleen’s father, Thomas Mercer Cliffe Vigors, was born in 1853 at Perth in Western Australia. Her mother, Mary Louisa Helen Handcock, was the elder daughter of Colonel the Honourable Robert French Handcock, a younger son of Lord Castlemaine of Moydrum Castle, County Westmeath. Thomas Vigors married Mary Louisa Handcock on 4 April 1877 at St Stephen’s church in Dublin. He inherited the Burgage estate in County Carlow when his bachelor uncle John Cliffe Vigors died in 1881. Kathleen, her sister Eileen Edmée and their brothers Edward and Ludlow Ashmead were brought up at Burgage until their parents separated about 1888. The comfortable Georgian house, with ivy-covered walls surrounded by large gardens, fields and woods, gave them a childhood as idyllic as Wilfred Thesiger’s early years at Addis Ababa. By coincidence Kathleen’s upbringing at Burgage ended when she was eight, the same age Thesiger would be when, to his dismay, he found that ‘we were leaving Abyssinia for good, that we should not be coming back’.38
The difference was that Thesiger’s father and mother were happily married, whereas Kathleen’s parents had been hopelessly incompatible. The strained relationship between Thomas and Mary Louisa deteriorated until a separation became inevitable. When Mary Louisa found Thomas in bed with one of the housemaids, he excused himself laconically: ‘If one is going to appreciate Chateau Lafitte, my dear, one must occasionally have a glass of vin ordinaire.’39 Taking her children with her, Kathleen’s mother went to live in England. She divided her time between Roe Green House at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, and the Vigors’s London flat, 18 Buckingham Palace Mansions, where Thesiger and his brother Brian stayed occasionally as schoolboys. Kathleen, Eileen, Edward and Ashmead had been born in London. They continued to visit their relatives in Ireland, including their father, who died in January 1908, the year before Kathleen’s wedding.
We do not know how or when Thesiger’s parents first met; but they were already corresponding, rather formally, by the time Wilfred Gilbert arrived at Boma, in the Belgian Congo, in December 1907. For some reason Thesiger avoided this subject, although in private he would discuss, quite openly, other more sensitive aspects of his life. Being so close to her eldest son, it seems inconceivable that Kathleen did not tell him anything about her courtship with his father. He could have written much more than he did about his parents (and, indeed, about himself) in The Life of My Choice. But instead he devoted many of its pages to less personally revealing themes, such as Abyssinian history, in a book that his publisher’s editor described as ‘magnificent, yet strangely impermeable’.40 Wilfred Thesiger had often been described as ‘enigmatic’. His autobiography merely confirmed this, and at the same time encouraged readers to speculate about the undisclosed details of his private life.
THREE Gorgeous Barbarity
On 2 November 1909 Thesiger’s father and mother arrived at Jibuti on the coast of French Somaliland, after a week’s voyage from Marseilles aboard the Messageries Maritimes steamer Tonkin.1 From Jibuti they travelled by train to Dire Dawa in eastern Abyssinia, and onwards to Addis Ababa by mule caravan across the Chercher mountains. They were accompanied by Captain Thesiger’s manservant Collins, his faithful batman in the Imperial Yeomanry, and Susannah, an Indian nursemaid from Zanzibar. At Dire Dawa the task of checking and distributing the vast quantities of baggage occupied the Thesigers for several days. ‘They had brought all that they would require in Abyssinia: provisions, clothes, books, pictures, furniture, tents, saddlery. There were scores of boxes and crates, all to be checked and loaded before they left Dire Dawa.’2 In The Life of My Choice, Thesiger recalled how his mother told him that ‘the only thing that dismayed her was sorting out their incredible mass of luggage, making sure things went by the right route and that nothing was left behind. The heavier loads were being sent to Addis Ababa on camels by the desert route, where the Danakil, always dangerous, were said to be giving more trouble than usual.’3
Thesiger did not mention that, as well as several crates having gone missing, the trunk containing his mother’s wedding trousseau had been broken open and looted on the way from Jibuti. Exasperated and indignant, Captain Thesiger commented: ‘the railway can hardly back out of the responsibility. What on earth a Somali can do with ladies’ lace trimmed underclothes is a wonder, but it was probably looting for looting’s sake.’4
The journey across the mountains took twenty-nine days, including a brief official visit paid by Captain Thesiger to the legendary walled city of Harar. To her lifelong regret Kathleen felt too exhausted by the two-thousand-foot climb from Dire Dawa to the Harar plateau to accompany him. Harar seemed unchanged since the Victorian traveller Richard Francis Burton saw it in 1855 and described it in his book First Footsteps in East Africa. When the younger Wilfred Thesiger visited Harar in December 1930, he imagined that even then, ‘except for a few corrugated iron roofs, it still looked the same as when [Burton] had been there’.5
Neither Thesiger nor his father mentioned Harar’s links with the French poet, and gun-runner, Arthur Rimbaud, who lived at Harar and was photographed in 1883 in the garden of its first Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha’s, residence. Thesiger said: ‘I knew who Rimbaud was, I suppose, but I knew nothing of his poetry or what he did in Abyssinia. The one that interested me was [the French traveller Henri] de Monfreid. When I was twenty-three I read his book about pearl-diving in the Red Sea and, for a while, I longed for the same sort of adventurous life.’6
Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s visit to Harar had been officially requested by the Governor, Dedjazmatch Balcha. A favourite of Menelik, Balcha ‘had a well-merited reputation for ruthlessness, brutality and avarice, and was hated and feared by his subjects’.7 Thesiger’s father was met by Balcha and some hundreds of soldiers with green, yellow and red banners and chiefs in silver-gilt crowns, red and blue robes and lion- and leopard-skin capes, armed with rifles, spears and shields. Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘It was very picturesque, the brown rough stones of the town and crumbling loopholed gateway and…narrow streets where only two mules could walk abreast…The palace was a whitewashed building, European of a bad style with quaint lions in plaster on the roof…Afterwards I walked round the bazaars and narrow street market, thronged with wild, white-clothed Abyssinians, Gallas and Somalis…The only thing one could compare it with are descriptions of the old Aztecs. Gorgeous barbarity such as one could nowadays meet with nowhere but here.’8
Describing their marches from Harar along the top of the Chercher mountains, Wilfred Gilbert wrote: ‘We are having a splendid journey and Kathleen is better than I have ever seen her.’9 He thought she looked ‘very smart and neat in her khaki astride costume and helmet’, and the scenery ‘beautiful’ with ‘thick forests of enormous juniper and wild olive trees full of mountain clematis, jessamine, briar roses and other unknown flowers…and looking for all the world like Switzerland or Norway’.10 Kathleen observed impatiently: ‘I do not think we needed to spend so long on the journey but we were accompanied by the Legation doctor [Wakeman]…a half-caste Indian [who]…liked to take life leisurely.’11
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’.13 Wilfred 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.’14 He 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.’16 The 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’,18 wrote Wilfred Gilbert, while Kathleen found it ‘magnificent beyond my wildest dreams’.19 Wilfred 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.’21 Kathleen 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
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’.23 The 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.’25 Edward 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
