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Duke of Gloucester, who was to represent his father, King George V, at the ceremonies.

      The Duke of Gloucester’s party left London by the boat train from Victoria on 16 October 1930. From Marseilles they sailed to Aden aboard the P&O liner Rampura.¹⁷ From Aden they crossed to Jibuti on HMS Effingham, and travelled by train from there to Addis Ababa. Apart from Thesiger, the Duke’s mission included the Earl of Airlie, Captain Brooke, Major ‘Titch’ Miles from Kenya, Mr Noble from the Foreign Office and Major Stanyforth. Aged twenty, obliged to wear a morning suit that contrasted dully with his companions’ dress uniforms and decorations, Thesiger felt conspicuous and ill at ease. The arrival of Sir John Maffey, who led the Sudan delegation that accompanied the mission, helped. Maffey had served as Frederic Chelmsford’s private secretary when Thesiger’s uncle was Viceroy of India; Wilfred and Brian had stayed in Scotland, near Loch Naver, with him and his family for ten days in 1929. Lord Airlie was also kind, ‘But,’ Thesiger wrote, ‘it was the natural kindness of the Duke of Gloucester himself which helped me most.’¹⁸ Seeing Maffey again reminded him of an encounter with one of his daughters in Sutherland the previous year. Thesiger said: ‘I felt tremendously attracted to her. But then I thought: I must stop this or it will wreck the rest of my life.’¹⁹ It is not known whether his feelings were reciprocated, although his way of telling the story implies that they were. The experience was probably unique. In 1933 Dermot Thesiger wrote definitively in his Isis article: ‘as to [Wilfred’s] normal pleasure, it would appear that women have no part therein’.²⁰

      Wonderful as it was, the Emperor’s coronation meant less to Thesiger than the adventure of returning to Abyssinia. He jotted in his diary: ‘Felt thrilled to be back.’²¹ He stared, fascinated, from the train windows at the arid Danakil desert, empty save for tiny dik-dik antelope, baboons and lesser bustard. In a letter to his mother he described the ceremony quite briefly, with here and there amusing, observant touches that brought the occasion alive. ‘The actual coronation was held in a canvas building added onto St George’s Cathedral…The Emperor and Empress (who is to have a child in a month’s time and consequently has the European midwife as lady-in-waiting) had had an all-night vigil in St George’s…The Empress and Prince were also crowned, with rather awful European crowns…The Abyssinian diplomatic corps wore European clothes and cocked hats, which was a pity…Tafari [now Emperor] was to have left in his state carriage, but the horses were unmanageable…After the ceremony the Abyssinian air force flew over the building (they have crashed two planes [out of a total of six aircraft in working order] in the last fortnight)…I went to the reception afterwards. There was a tremendous selection of fireworks, but unfortunately an accident occurred and they all went off at once.’²² In The Life of My Choice Thesiger gave a more polished version, with only a brief mention of the prematurely exploding fireworks. Even this incident he managed to dignify, adding: ‘This must have been a bitter moment for Haile Selassie, but once again he gave no indication of his feelings. He stood for a while, watching the pyrotechnic chaos in the yard below, then moved slowly back into the banqueting hall.’²³

      Thesiger wrote to Brian: ‘The Coronation was the most stirring and impressive show I have ever seen. You could easily imagine yourself back in the days of Sheba. I suppose there never will be such a scene again. It was held in a building added onto St George’s church. The robes were magnificent. The chiefs were present in their lions mane crowns and velvet cloaks and the priests in every coloured robe and crowned with glittering crowns. The main church was filled with the rest of the priests, and throughout the ceremony the thudding of their drums and the rise and fall of their chanting came faintly to our ears. I went in and saw them dance. A wonderful sight. The church was surrounded by the other Rases and chiefs in themselves a sight never to be forgotten…’ Lost for words, he signed off: ‘I have so much to tell you and you can’t even try to describe such scenes as I have seen in a letter.’²⁴

      Two days after the ceremony, Thesiger had a private audience at the palace. The new Emperor was ‘extremely gracious’. Their conversation (as usual in French) was very like that Thesiger reported in London. In The Life of My Choice he wrote: ‘He received me with grave courtesy and enquired after my family. When I expressed my appreciation of the honour he had done me by inviting me to his coronation, he replied that as the eldest son of his trusted friend, to whom he owed so much, it was proper that I should be present. I told him how happy I was to be back in his country. “It is your country. You were born here. You have lived here for half of your life. I hope you will spend many more years with us,” was his answer. As he spoke I was very conscious of the smile which transformed his usually impassive face. It was twenty minutes before he terminated the interview. That evening I received two elephant tusks, a heavy, ornate gold cigarette case, a large, colourful carpet and the third class of the Star of Ethiopia.’²⁵ He wrote on 10 November telling Kathleen: ‘We were all decorated the other day and I got the Star of Ethiopia second class [sic].’²⁶ He added, as if to play down this honour: ‘A thing you hang round your neck.’ He noted: ‘If my father had lived, he and my mother would have met Tafari in London, during his State Visit, and they would have attended his coronation. Instead, I represented my father. Seeing the Legation again, where I was born and brought up, the old servants and their affection for my parents – all of this mattered desperately to me…If I hadn’t been invited like that, by Haile Selassie, none of it would have happened.’²⁷

      Other letters give ample proof of Thesiger’s intense attachment to the Abyssinia of his childhood. In books he wrote from middle-age onwards he returned continually to the theme of his youth at Addis Ababa and its ‘crucial influence’ on his life. This was no mere literary device; yet childhood were memories perfected by a rose-tinted lens. In his letter in 1930 he described how he had climbed a hill behind the Legation which he frequented as a boy. He called this place ‘Shrine of my youth’. High places, giving wide and distant views, were important to him. The hill behind the Legation at Addis Ababa; Stowe Hill near The Milebrook, where he and his brothers went for walks or went shooting as teenagers; a sheer precipice near Maralal in northern Kenya – Malossa, which he referred to always as ‘The Viewpoint’. The mountain ‘shrines’ were quite personal, and were not to be confused with merely fine mountain views of Morocco, the Middle East and western Asia, where he travelled between 1937 and 1983. Thesiger invariably rejected attempts to explain the significance to him of hills and mountains, saying only that they had ‘always attracted’ him. Any analysis of his emotions he condemned as ‘rubbish’: ‘It’s been fashionable for years to analyse Lawrence, to denigrate him, to probe into his childhood, his friendship with Daoud. I hate all of that. The last thing I’d want is someone probing about in my life. But, after I’ve kicked the bucket, I suppose, they can do as they please.’²⁸

      From Addis Ababa, Thesiger wrote: ‘I got a horse and went to the old ruined church behind the Legation…then on to the little wood and home through the plains. Great fun and I loved it.’ The church, originally built of mud and thatch, may have been the same building Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger described in the October 1913 issue of Man, the Royal Anthropological Society’s monthly record. Of his old home, Thesiger wrote: ‘The Legation is terribly the same and yet horribly different…It brings back the days we were here rather painfully.’²⁹ He met no fewer than ‘15 old servants and syces, including Hapta Wold, Ratta and Mahomet and they are very pleased to see me and bursting with enquiries about you all’.³⁰ The British Minister, Sir Sidney Barton, became very involved with Wilfred and his journeys in

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