2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (3 page)

In one of the Admiralty’s beautifully appointed rooms—all oak panels and heavy chairs and paintings of Drake and Franklin—naval experts quizzed Lee on why it was not better to take much bigger boats. The Germans had taken out the
Hedwig
in sections in 1900, they told him. Why could we not do the same?

The hunter explained that African spies told the Germans everything. If they heard that a big ship was being assembled on the lakeshore they would land and try to damage or destroy it, just as they had done with the Belgian ship the
Alexandre del Commune
. This, and associated problems with the supply of parts, was why the Belgians were keeping back their biggest steamer, the
Baron Dhanis
, which remained in pieces at a railhead in the Congolese interior. After great energy and expense in transporting similar sections of a large warship to Africa, the same thing was likely to happen to a British scheme of this nature. The advantage of using light motor boats instead was that they could be put into action the moment they reached the lakeshore.

Accepting this argument, the Navy then asked Lee why it was not possible to launch the expedition from British territory in Northern Rhodesia at the lake’s southern end, thereby avoiding the likelihood of disagreements with the Belgians. Lee answered that the southern end of the lake was too far from the German base in Kigoma, 200 miles away. The issues were further thrashed out by the War Office, when it discovered that Belgian forces were currently spread out along Lake Tanganyika, trying to keep the Germans at bay. If the Allies could get command of the water, men could easily cross and start attacking the German railway, which came in to Kigoma.

Lee was right; it made sense to attack immediately opposite Kigoma and his route was the best one. Sir Henry ratified the plan, largely on a matter of principle. ‘It is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship,’ he noted in a memo.

The only question remaining was who would command the Naval Africa Expedition? Sir Henry sought out candidates, but the service was short of officers. He drew a blank and promptly handed over control of the idea to his junior, Admiral Sir David Gamble. Despite its strategic importance, the war in Africa was still regarded as little more than a sideshow.

The First Sea Lord could not be blamed for handing on the baton of the Naval Africa Expedition. It must have seemed like a fanciful proposal compared to his other business at the time. The Gallipoli operation had put the Navy under a great deal of pressure. Sir Henry had been personally involved in working out the detailed plans for a naval attack there—as opposed to a joint naval and military attack, which is what Churchill favoured. Sir Henry’s predecessor, the combative and cunning 74-year-old Admiral Fisher, believed only ships should be used. But Fisher had resigned on 15 May when it became clear that delays and disagreements were provoking errors of judgement. It was taken as read in the House of Commons that Fisher’s opposition to landing troops meant the less experienced and impetuous Churchill was wrong to have insisted upon it. And so it seemed. Three days after Lee’s visit, Australian and New Zealand troops had landed on the Gallipoli peninsula too late to prevent a strengthening of the Turkish position. Men were dying.

The affair provoked a crisis in the Liberal war leadership that went to the very heart of British politics. Two days after Fisher’s resignation, Prime Minister Asquith announced in Parliament that a Coalition government would be formed comprising both Tories and Liberals. Part of the deal was Churchill’s removal from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty, which was insisted upon by one of his fiercest opponents, the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law. A ‘teetotal, chain-smoking Scots-Canadian devotee of the chessboard’,↓ Bonar Law was one of many to loathe Churchill for crossing the floor and joining the Liberals more than a decade earlier.

≡ Graham Stewart,
Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party
(London, 1999).

Churchill, who at the end of the year would leave to serve in the trenches, was aware of the planned operation on Lake Tanganyika. Indeed, he would have a role to play in its endgame. But for now he was
persona non grata
in political circles.

All this was going on, more or less, while Sir David was planning the Naval Africa Expedition. He had yet to find somebody to take command. As a civilian, Lee was not eligible (though it was pointed out he had served in the Anglo-Boer War). The hunter gladly accepted the position of second in command and immediately set about organising the transport of the boats with South African Railways, and hiring African carriers to help haul them over the mountains in the Congo. He also began selecting members of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) who might be suitable for such a venture: men with experience of Africa and machinery.

As well as seeking out various specialists, Lee was also looking for people who could keep their mouths shut. As one of his recruits later recalled:

It was important that no news of the departure or object of the expedition should leak out and get to the enemy. Consequently, officers and men were put on their honour not to divulge, even to their nearest and dearest, where they were bound nor what was their mission.↓

≡ Frank J. Magee in ‘Transporting a Navy through the Jungles of Africa in Wartime’,
National Geographic
, October 1922.

Meanwhile Sir David focused on the problem of finding a leader. It seemed a Royal Marines Officer would be ideal for an expedition like this, and he began casting about. Most marines were on active service on the high seas, but he happened to look in on a certain major working in the Intelligence Division. Next to the Major—in an office with a cracked teapot and a photograph of the King above an empty grate—sat a man named Spicer-Simson. He was an ordinary naval officer. Or seemed to be.

‘And how do you think I got the command?’ Spicer later asked the expedition’s medic, Dr Mother McCormick Hanschell, in that same room one morning a few months later. ‘Simply by eavesdropping!’

The doctor had known Spicer for a long time. Their wives had been schoolfriends and were reacquainted by chance when both couples were staying at a hotel off London’s Russell Square. He knew Spicer well and he also knew, in the words of that brilliant naval historian Peter Shankland (who interviewed Dr Hanschell at length shortly before he died in 1968), how ‘mischievous fortune seemed to invest everything he did with a faint tinge of absurdity’. Everyone seemed to know this, actually, which explained why Spicer was the oldest lieutenant commander in the Navy. Or had been. For the purposes of the Naval Africa Expedition, he’d been promoted to acting commander.

Given his chequered career, it is surprising that Spicer was ever considered for the post, let alone given it. Perhaps Sir David saw some streak of heroism in Spicer hitherto unperceived or perhaps, as seems more likely, there was simply nobody else available. In any case, promotion meant Spicer was at long last permitted to wear gilded oak leaves on his cap. He had coveted them for so long. And perhaps, while setting his newly adorned cap on his head the moment it came back from Gieves (later Gieves and Hawkes), the naval tailors in Bond Street, Spicer smiled at his mirror image. Things were going to turn out just fine. The years of romancing were over. At last he could be what he had always known he could be: the best of men.

Or maybe not. When Spicer invited Dr Hanschell to join his African expedition, the Major who shared that spartan office tapped his temple while Spicer was speaking, implying he was mad. He was probably right. But Africa was an exciting proposition and a man had to do his duty in wartime. Dr Hanschell accepted and his first responsibility the next day was to visit a Lieutenant Higgins, one of the men Lee had selected, who was ill.

Spicer had sworn the doctor to absolute secrecy, so when he returned home the night after he had accepted the job, he told his wife only that he was joining Spicer on an expedition abroad.

‘Oh, didn’t he tell you, dear?’ she replied. ‘You’re going to Lake Tanganyika via Rhodesia and the Congo River. Amy Spicer-Simson telephoned me this afternoon and we had a long talk about it.’

The following day Dr Hanschell did his best with Lieutenant Higgins, but it was hopeless. The man had blackwater fever from a previous tour of duty as a mining engineer in Africa. He died the day after. It did not seem a good omen for the Naval Africa Expedition; but the doctor was a strict rationalist and did not believe in omens. Undeterred, he threw himself into the task of collecting the necessary medical supplies for the expedition.

They would be entering dangerous territory: tropical jungle, savannah bush, formidable mountains. Some of the most difficult terrain in the world, in fact, and it was blighted by malaria, the tsetse fly (
Glossina palpalis
, conduit of the sleeping-sickness germ) and a thousand amoebic horrors that made a home of the human gut. The doctor knew his amoebas. Prior to his appointment to the team, he had spent some time in West Africa’s Gold Coast (Ghana) researching the causes of yellow fever. While there, he had contracted amoebic dysentery and it had never quite gone away.

I
n London during the summer of 1915, Spicer embraced the Tanganyika project with gusto. All the torpor and guilty self-laceration of the past few years was forgotten at a stroke. Perhaps he knew this was his last chance—that there was no other way of becoming a hero than going to Africa and making a successful expedition.

First of all he fitted out the two motor boats that had been chosen for the operation. They were 40-foot motor launches, made of mahogany, both about eight feet wide. They had two propellers each, driven by 100-horsepower petrol engines. Originally designed as tenders for the Greek seaplane service, they were part of a batch of eight made before the War by the famous boat-builders Thorneycroft, who kept a yard at Twickenham on the Thames. One boat was there, the other in Dundee, whence it was swiftly commandeered and brought up to London.

At this stage the boats were merely numbered, and it fell to Spicer to name them. He suggested—they were very small—that they be christened
Cat
and
Dog
. The Navy was not amused, so Spicer went back to the drawing board. They had to be named, after all, for they would be the smallest ever vessels to be distinguished by the title His Majesty’s Ship. But what would follow the HMS? It was just the sort of topic to which Spicer liked to apply his febrile imagination: the same imagination that had so far blighted his career with madcap schemes that ended in disaster.

But there was also another issue outstanding. There still weren’t enough men. In spite of the need for secrecy, further word was put out among members of the RNVR. One by one, over a period of weeks, hearing of the plan through diverse routes, prospective members of the team came to see Spicer at the Admiralty to be signed up.

The retired petty officer who kept the door at the Admiralty grew to recognise members of ‘the Tanganyika Party’, as he called them. They were an outlandish lot, catching the eye as they went back and forth for briefings.

Here was 50-something Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer with his canary-yellow hair, who’d previously been in the Royal Naval Air Service. One of the earliest British aviators, he was addicted to Worcester sauce—as an aperitif. Tyrer was a handsome man, but spoilt the effect by wearing a monocle and addressing people with the prefix ‘Dear Boy’, even if (like the retired petty-officer doorman) they were several years older than him.

Next up the steps was ‘Tubby’ Eastwood, a short man with a neat round face. He was once a travel agent at the offices of Thomas Cook in Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo, which was on the expedition’s route. Taken on as the team’s Paymaster and Spicer’s confidential clerk, Eastwood was a genial fellow. He was also an ardent Methodist and animal-lover.

A former racing driver, Chief Engineer Lieutenant Cross had twice won the Grand Prix, though he actually knew almost nothing about the workings of the internal combustion engine. Appositely named, he took offence easily and would become the butt of jokes during the expedition. Cross’s senior Engine-Room Artificer (ERA) was John Lament, a Glaswegian and an equally prickly character. Among the junior ERA
s
was one William Cobb. He and Lament were the only ones who really understood how the boats’ engines worked.

Lieutenant Wainwright would be Transport Officer. A Belfast man originally, he had worked on the railway that came from Beira in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) inland to Rhodesia, where he had a cattle farm. He had been a labourer once, then driven locomotives, and he loved steam engines with a passion. Wainwright was in charge of the traction engines that would pull the boats part of the way. He was about 45, with a sharp nose and light brown hair. He would become known by the junior members of the expedition as ‘Old Loco Driver’, but he was respected by everyone. Intelligent and inquisitive, Wainwright became great friends with Dr Hanschell in particular.

Dr Hanschell was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1880. He was part of the Hanschell shipping and distilling family, makers of Cockspur rum. During his childhood there he became fascinated by the Navy. He remembered fondly the time he had been allowed aboard HMS
Tourmaline
in the harbour and climbed to the top-sail, coming home with ship’s tar on his hands and knees. He was later sent to Britain to be educated at Malvern College, Worcestershire. After qualifying at St Bartholomew’s medical school in London, he returned briefly to the Caribbean. He was Acting Port Medical Officer in Bridgetown in 1907–8. In 1913–14 he was a member of the Colonial Office Commission on Yellow Fever in the Gold Coast.

Prior to his appointment to Spicer’s team, Hanschell was back in London and holding down two jobs. He was both Acting Medical Superintendent of the Seamen’s Hospital in the Royal Albert Dock at Wapping, and Senior Demonstrator at the School of Tropical Medicine. The doctor had a precise mouth, searching eyes and an odd way with sideburns, which were cut off at angles high above the ear. While working in London he had lived quietly with his wife in Muswell Hill. Spicer and his wife Amy sometimes visited—Amy bringing along her husband’s socks to darn as they chatted in the comfortable front room.