Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger: The Last of the Old Travellers

In 1916, a six-year-old boy at the British Legation in Addis Ababa watched the armies of Ras Tafari march past in triumph. "That day made a profound impression on me," he wrote decades later, "implanting a craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour." He spent the next eighty years chasing it, and crossed the Empty Quarter of Arabia twice on camelback in the last years before the oil companies arrived. The Pitt Rivers Museum, which holds his negatives, calls him "probably the greatest traveller of the twentieth century."

Addis Ababa, Eton, Oxford

Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa on 3 June 1910, son of Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger, British consul-general in Ethiopia from 1909 to 1919, and Kathleen Mary Vigors; his grandfather was the 2nd Baron Chelmsford. He grew up as one of only two European children in the Ethiopian capital, and the sense of having been formed somewhere other than England never left him.

He was sent to St Aubyn's at Rottingdean, then Eton, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a Third in History and cared a great deal more about boxing — he represented the university from 1930 to 1933, captained the team in his final year, and won a Blue in each of his four years. He was treasurer of the Oxford University Exploration Club in 1931–32.

In 1930 Haile Selassie personally invited him to his coronation and admitted him to the Order of the Star of Ethiopia. Three years later, at twenty-three, he led a Royal Geographical Society expedition to trace the course of the Awash River, becoming one of the first Europeans to enter the Aussa Sultanate and reach Lake Abbe. The Danakil had killed previous parties. His journals and letters home from that journey were later published as *The Danakil Diary*.

Sudan and the War

From 1935 to 1940 he served in the Sudan Political Service in Darfur and the Upper Nile, an appointment he chose partly because it kept him among camels and away from offices. When the war came he joined the Sudan Defence Force and helped organise Abyssinian resistance to the Italian occupation; his part in the capture of Agibar and its garrison of 2,500 Italians earned him the Distinguished Service Order in 1941. He went on to the Special Operations Executive in Syria and the Special Air Service in the North African campaign, ending as a major, and from 1943 to 1945 was political adviser to Crown Prince Asfa Wossen.

The Empty Quarter

His great journeys began by accident. In 1945 an entomologist hired him to look for locust breeding grounds in southern Arabia for the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit. The locusts were a pretext almost from the start.

A first camel journey ran from October 1945 to February 1946, Salalah to Tarim. Then, in October 1946, with Bedu companions of the Rashid and Bait Kathir, he left Salalah for Mughshin and crossed the Rub' al Khali — the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert on earth — reaching the Liwa oasis in mid-December and returning to Salalah in February 1947. The second crossing began in December 1947 at Manwakh well in Yemen. The Saudi authorities imprisoned his party at Sulayil; released, he pressed on to Liwa and reached Abu Dhabi on 14 March 1948.

There is a bitter irony in the financing. In April 1948 he visited the Buraimi oasis, where the Iraq Petroleum Company held a concession, and though he loathed what oil exploration would do to Bedu life, he needed money and took the company's, trading the geographical information his travels produced. He was, in some measure, scouting for the thing he hated.

The Books

*Arabian Sands* (1959) is his monument: an account of the journeys between 1945 and 1950 and of a way of life he knew was ending as he recorded it. It is one of the few travel books that has held its place as literature.

He then went to live among the Marsh Arabs, the Madan, of southern Iraq, producing *The Marsh Arabs* (1964) — an ethnographic record of a people and a landscape that Saddam Hussein's drainage schemes would later come close to erasing, and which included documentation of local gender categories such as the *mustarjil*. His companion Gavin Maxwell wrote his own account of the same journey, *A Reed Shaken by the Wind* (1957).

He travelled on through Iran, Kurdistan, French West Africa and Pakistan, and lived for many years in northern Kenya. The later books — *The Last Nomad* (1979), *The Life of My Choice* (1987), *My Kenya Days* (1994), *Desert, Marsh & Mountain* (1995), *Among the Mountains* (1998), *Crossing the Sands* (2000) — kept working the same seam.

The Photographs

He was, almost incidentally, one of the great documentary photographers of his century. He left 38,000 negatives and 71 personal albums covering more than fifty years of travel, including over 5,000 images of Arabia made between 1945 and 1950. The collection was accepted by the British government in 2004 under an inheritance tax scheme and transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, which has been exhibiting from it since 1993. It is the visual record of societies that no longer exist in the form he found them.

Why Wilfred Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the word sits awkwardly on him, and he would have said so. Thesiger's gift was endurance and observation, not intellect: a physical and psychological capacity to live for months on starvation rations in the worst desert on earth, at the pace and on the terms of his Bedu companions, and to see clearly while doing it. He took a Third at Oxford. He advanced no theory. What he had was a prose style of extraordinary austerity and precision, and the discipline to record — in words and in tens of thousands of photographs — ways of life that were about to vanish, at exactly the moment when almost nobody else thought them worth recording. The Royal Geographical Society gave him its Founder's Medal in 1948 for the Empty Quarter crossings; his companion Salim bin Ghabaisha, asked about him fifty years later, said he was "loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing."

The counter-case is real. He was a reactionary who despised the modern world and, in particular, the motor car, and whose romantic attachment to "barbaric splendour" — his own phrase, formed in childhood — shaded into a preference that other people remain poor and pre-modern so that he could admire them. He took oil company money while deploring the oil. And his crossings, magnificent as they were, were made possible entirely by Bedu guides whose knowledge of the desert was greater than his and whose names are far less famous. He is best understood not as a genius but as a supremely gifted witness who arrived, by luck and by will, just before the door closed.

Legacy

Thesiger collected the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1948), the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal (1955), the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1962) and the Burton Memorial Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1966). He was appointed CBE in 1968 and knighted KBE in the 1995 Birthday Honours, held honorary doctorates, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the British Academy. He appeared on *Desert Island Discs* in October 1979.

He returned to England in the 1990s and died at Croydon on 24 August 2003, aged ninety-three — a very long way from the sands. What he left is the closest thing we have to a first-hand record of the Bedu of the Empty Quarter before the trucks, and of the Marsh Arabs before the draining.

Achievements

• Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Distinguished Service Order
• Founder’s Medal
• Burton Memorial Medal
• Recorded as explorer, diplomat and writer