The spring green of rural Surrey unfolded to reveal a neat white house with a veranda trimmed with the black tracery of Victorian wrought iron work. Marshaled under the canopy, in genteel congruity with the smug pigeons that strutted on the manicured lawns, sat a line of well-wrapped old people, heads bobbing over tea and dainties, cooing at one another.
In, but definitely not part of, the line was a startlingly different figure, his intent and steady stare focused somewhere far away. Sharp aquiline features, high cheekbones, jutting pugilist’s jaw and deep-set eyes marked out the figure as an archetypal English gentleman. Completely motionless, with one sinewy fist gripping a carved walking stick sat Sir Wilfred Thesiger, a legend in the Arabian Peninsula and named by many as the last of the great explorers.
At 92, Thesiger is still a striking figure. Although time has taken its toll of vision and physical mobility, he recalls with remarkable clarity events of 70 years ago. Now a stooped figure, he is still every inch the English gentleman, dressed in a three-piece suit with pocket handkerchief and carefully cleaned shoes. Seated, he is erect and attentive, a hand on his ever-present carved stick. His face betrays a life of physical hardship. His heavily textured features seem weathered from rock, etched with lines from the ravages of harsh winds and sun. Deep-set eyes bracketed with deep crow’s feet from decades of squinting in harsh light, often down the barrel of his hunting rifle, gaze intently from beneath a heavily furrowed forehead.
As we exchanged greetings he gripped my elbow. “We’ll go to my room. Better to talk there.” The point was made with an almost imperceptible lift of an eyebrow that initiated a chorus of murmurs. With characteristic directness, he set the tone. “Call me Wilfred; it’s my name.” So we went on, a very English eccentric with a life story that reads like one from Kipling or John Buchan that inspired generations of British schoolboys to dream of adventure. Thesiger made those fantasies his reality. His life, which he describes as “the life of my choice,” had however an inevitability about it.
The facts are well known. He was born in 1910 to a privileged British family on the British Legation compound in Addis Ababa and spent his early life there. His later life, involved as it was so closely with foreign tribes, cultures and other races, contrasts dramatically with the exclusive and almost tribal nature of the British privileged classes to which he belonged and where social, racial and cultural distinctions were rigidly drawn.
His early education was supplemented with stories of adventure that, to the young Wilfred, had the extra piquancy of being about the place he was growing up in. He didn’t identify with the servants or retainers around him at all. “I suppose I felt a bit superior — but they were just part of the surroundings.” It was not a consciously discriminative attitude; it was just how the ruling tribe were and how they were taught. So what changed him and kindled the passion that drove him for the larger portion of his life?
“That was my father — he was the British minister in charge of it all. He used to read me books like ‘Jock of the Bush’ and he talked a lot. I got the idea that I would go back there one day and I did, when Haile Selassie was crowned. It was definitely being brought up there. I was born in Abyssinia, the first English boy to be born there.”
He speaks in a sometimes almost inaudible voice in phrases still as taut as his writing. Long pauses punctuate his speech; his expression becomes distant, implying that he is away in some remembered waste or mountain in the company of good companions. Then he returns. He roamed the country freely and experienced the excitement of hunting, later his obsession, as soon as he could ride a horse. In contrast to the very active and adventurous life he led as a boy, the evenings with his family, he recalled, developed a powerful intimacy.
Thesiger’s boyhood hero was Haile Selassie, and herein lies a contradiction that characterizes one of the paradoxes that color Thesiger’s life. Deeply committed to tradition and the preservation of lives and cultures in a romantically pure form, Haile Selassie, whose dearest wish was to bring Abyssinia into the modern age, was his hero.
“He was a quite remarkable man, in that there was no greed in him, no cruelty in his nature. He wasn’t arrogant at all, oh, he was the emperor, but his own character. He was a very remarkable man. I admired him enormously.” Thesiger’s admiration for the emperor was influenced by the cultural assumptions of his own background. Benevolent autocracy and partisan devotion to the individual usually took precedence over more general philosophical considerations. More importantly, Thesiger emphasized Selassie’s powerful presence, patience and humanity as qualities that impressed him most. “He never took revenge on those who opposed him. It made him different.” Although an autocratic monarch his rule was “probably the best way to benefit Abyssinia.”
His conviction of the rightness of rule through a benevolent ruling class was reinforced by the position of his uncle, the 3rd Baron of Chelmsford, who served as Viceroy of India. A visit to Delhi brought the young boy into first-hand contact with history. Here he saw Empire at work with an ancient and complex culture. “A lot of it depended on relationship, friendship and relationship.” The British Empire has for some the image of oppressor and subjugator. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was far deeper than that.” It was stated as fact, not opinion.
Thesiger is an anachronism. With a father who was a pillar of Edwardian English society, a privileged upbringing at Eton and Oxford, his future was planned. However, an early taste for big game hunting and his return to Abyssinia fixed in his early years the ambition to be part of the cultures and landscapes he grew up in. Ironically, while involving himself so completely with them, by describing and mapping them, he was in fact an element of their eventual change. Yet he still maintained his image as an English gentleman. “I wouldn’t want to be called anything else.” He knew his involvement was part of the decline of the culture he loved; he uses Oscar Wilde’s line, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” as the preface to one of his books.
It is this change, from what he calls “the pure civilizations” to the modern, that Thesiger still resents and detests. He tells the story, as an example of pure values long gone, of an old man he met, dressed in rags and entirely destitute. Oddly, he was treated with great respect by all who knew him. “He is the most generous man we have ever known,” Thesiger was told. “But he’s poor!” “Yes,” came the reply, “he gave away everything he had.”
The automobile is for Thesiger the symbol of that change. “The motor car is the worst invention of them all. If you go in a car and make a long journey, the journey has lost its point. It’s just traveling. You don’t meet the people there on equal terms.” There is the reverse side of this coin. “There’s no possibility of doing the journeys now as I did them. You go off and do the journey like that and now, when you meet the people, they ask ‘Well, why didn’t you come in a car?’” The change from “pure” to modern is complete and irreversible. “Technology, technology; the world has lost its challenges.” So what are the challenges now?
“A lot of young men come here; they want to go off to Arabia and do what I did there, with camels, but it becomes a sort of...” he faded for a moment “an interesting thing to do; it’s no longer a necessity. You’re doing a stunt.” He paused, away somewhere in the past, staring at Surrey, but seeing hot dry desert. The eyes snapped back. “They don’t want to get in a car, they want to get back to the challenging way of traveling, but it’s gone. Even if you endure the same hardships as I did, there’s a felling of well, why did you do it? They are looking for something that is unutterably lost.”
A palpable silence weighed heavily, thickened by the distant clatter of spoons on saucers from the veranda. What, I asked, is the most valuable thing you have learned from the total of your experience?
Thesiger sat motionless for several minutes. Very softly he said, “Tough to answer that. I would say that it is the necessity for physical hardship in your life. It’s not the physical hardship; it’s the necessity for the physical hardship. It’s the fact that you couldn’t get anywhere except physically with your companions, not with machinery and cars. That’s the most important thing of all, the total relationship with Bin Kabina and Bin Ghubaish (traveling companions in the Rub Al-Khali) down there.”
Thesiger was and still is held in great respect by the people he lived with and related to. His own obvious modesty and simplicity sits easily beside his inner strengths and deep humanity and compassion for older, simpler societies that held relationships between people dearer than possession of or by things. His travels were not the idle self-indulgence of an aristocrat with not much else to do; they were motivated by a deep need to find something he felt was lost to modern Western society by suffering the same hardships as the people of older cultures. What he found is that when all is done, relationships with people are what life is about.
As I drove away, he was on the veranda, the archetypal explorer, complex and humane, now staring out onto a world he neither likes nor wants. Anachronism? Certainly, in these days of hype and instant celebrity. Yet he embodies so many of the qualities that men speak of but never achieve, admire and scorn in the same breath. His final words kept circling in my mind. “That society,” he said, “where the old man had given everything away and had respect; now they would think it a ridiculous thing to do. He wouldn’t be respected. They’d think he was a bloody fool.”
Somewhere, a chorus of old pigeons cooed appreciatively.