“For even Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of light.” —2nd Corinthians 11:14
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In 1962, Ian Fleming was asked by New Yorker writer Geoffrey Hellman about why he believed his Bond novels were so successful. Fleming’s (intoxicated) reply was that “People are lacking in heroes in real life today… I think people absolutely long for heroes.”¹ Indeed the same could not only be said for why the character Bond was created, but also for why other 20th century heroes of fiction came about. Indiana Jones, Captain Kirk, and Han Solo all emerged during and after a time when soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat on, the bra-burners were driveling about how women needed men like fish needed bicycles, and anyone not a part of the cultural revolution was left wondering where all the heroes had gone.
As cloaked backlash I suspect, these fictional characters were fashioned to be men who weren’t afraid of unpopularity. They were pioneers. Adventurers. Rebels. Everything a 60s man and post-60s man envied. The embodiment of Rob Siltanen’s salute to the “misfits” in that they were square rugged pegs in round countercultural holes. They fought wars. They explored. They stood up for right and opposed wrong. In sum, the creations of these strong male figures and their stories were necessitated by the latter half of the last century feeling nostalgic about its first half; the first half being a time when late-stage empires clashed, daring individuals like Howard Hughes and the Wright brothers staked their lives and reputations on the boundaries of aviation, and a blunt gritty style of storytelling was being produced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. The early-20th century, in essence, was a time of guts, gallantry, and innovation in the face of existential uncertainties, and this was the reason for its romanticization in the mid-to-late 20th century.
Thus it’s no surprise that the “big two” real life inspirations behind Indiana Jones, Captain Kirk, James Bond and the like, were the famous early-20th century badasses T.E. Lawrence and John Pendlebury. We all recognize T.E. Lawrence because of his nickname “Lawrence of Arabia”, and we recognize John Pendlebury because of his reputation as the one-eyed “fighting archaeologist” who died in a battle against Nazi paratroopers on the island of Crete in 1941.
But I say these are the “big two” inspirations of our most lovable heroes of American and British lore, because there was a third smaller inspiration for these characters that rarely gets mentioned today: Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen (1878-1967).
I first became acquainted with Richard Meinertzhagen when I was 19, and a cadet in ROTC considering whether or not to enlist in the Army. John Lord’s Duty, Honor, Empire—a biography of Meinertzhagen—had been given to me as a gift, and I quickly became enthralled with the man and his legacy, deciding that Meinertzhagen was a personal hero of mine and embodied the type of soldier I wanted to be in my own life. It wasn’t until I read Brian Garfield’s The Meinertzhagen Mystery a year or so later, that my opinion on the adventurer changed and my vision of him shattered. But more on that in a moment.
To be clear, the not-so-famous Col. Meinertzhagen wasn’t always obscure. Especially during the time he was alive. The second son of a family of wealthy English bankers and a nephew of Beatrice Webb (one of the founders of the London School of Economics), Richard’s life as a boy was populated by Britain’s most prestigious figures who were all considered family friends, including Oscar Wilde and Charles Darwin, and his childhood mate at school was none other than future Prime Minister Winston Churchill.² ³ ⁴
The colonel had always been an adventurous personality. As a boy he enjoyed fishing, hunting, and studying birds with his older brother Dan on the Meinertzhagen’s large estate of Mottisfont; which, as an aside, had its own history that long preceded the existence of the Meinertzhagen family. Built in 1201, the estate had originally been an abbey up until the 16th century, when King Henry VIII seized it, and there was a legend that the house was haunted by the wandering ghost of a murdered monk. Young Richard could often be found by the servants “hunting” the elusive spirit to no avail.
However, it was Richard meeting the famed explorer Harry Johnston at the age of 10 that proved to be the catalyst for the future colonel’s desire to become an explorer himself, particularly in Africa. Johnston—who discovered the okapi and later became the first recipient of the Livingstone Medal—had sat young Richard on his knee and revealed to the boy all the tales of wonder and danger from his years in the horn. “From that time I would have a tremendous desire,” Richard would later recollect, “to visit the Dark Continent and see for myself the big game, the huge tropical lakes, and all the wonders.”⁵
Richard’s hunger for thrill, glory, and peril only intensified upon the death of his brother Dan a decade later in 1898. It had fallen upon Dan to learn the family banking business (which Richard considered to be incredibly dull), but when Dan contracted peritonitis and died shortly thereafter, the burden of banking was to fall to Richard, who at the time was 20-years-old. It didn’t take long for the young Meinertzhagen to stand up to his mother and father and inform them that this wasn’t going to happen. He would no longer allow them to entertain notions of the banking business continuing through him, and that he was determined to not waste his life on the trivial and mundane. He desired, rather, to devote his life to the service of Her Majesty’s empire, and that was all there was to it.
It is here where the legend of Richard Meinertzhagen—a majority portion of his life where fact is inextricable from fiction—begins.
As a newly commissioned officer, the British Empire sent Richard to India in 1899. En route, he records an incident in his journal where he was wandering the streets of Port Said and happened upon a young English girl, whom he saved from being prostituted by a group of cunning Egyptians who had kidnapped her.⁶ After his arrival in India, another diary entry has him claiming he rode a pet elephant regularly around the formations of British soldiers, while garrisoned in Nasirabad.⁷
He remained in India until 1901, but then from 1902 to 1906, we find Lt. Meinertzhagen in the King’s African Rifles on the outskirts of Nairobi in British East Africa (present-day Kenya). There he allegedly battled barbarous tribes like the Kikuyu and the Nandi, who, according to Meinertzhagen, had a habit of not only abducting and murdering British soldiers, but also of defiling their corpses and destroying them beyond recognition⁸; he fought the Tetu—careful to avoid the pits they had dug, studded with sharpened stakes—because the tribe had been guilty of butchering a group of Indian traders⁹; and while on the horn, Richard also hunted his share of dangerous and exotic beasts including rhino, lion, waterbuck, and hippo. On top of these achievements which he made by the time he was 25, Richard additionally claimed that one of his duties was to spy on the Germans in Moshi and Taveta (both located in present-day Tanzania).¹⁰
It was also in Africa where Meinertzhagen’s work in the field of ornithology purportedly began. Throughout his various military adventures, Richard claimed to study the honeyguide and other continental birds, and the British Natural History Museum was so taken by this romantic image of a “naturalist who fights for the crown”, that for decades to come they would go on to display 20,000 of his collected specimens in their galleries.¹¹ ¹²
In Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), where Richard was stationed in 1914, the adventurer—by this point, a captain—was tasked by Her Majesty’s government to gather intelligence on a railway planned by the Russians. Britain feared that Russia was building a railway in an effort to bulk up presence to seal off the Persian Gulf.¹³ Compounding this issue, the Germans were also planning a railway, and none of these three empires had any real power in the region, because Mesopotamia still belonged to the crumbling Ottomans. Captain Meinertzhagen, according to his diaries, gathered intelligence on Russia’s planned railway by traveling from Baghdad to the ancient cities of Babylon, Nineveh, and Mosul, all the while surviving floods, severe sandstorms, violent mobs, and the “curse of an ancient tomb”.¹⁴
From the Sinai Desert (1917) to the Paris Peace Conference and Palestine (1919-1921), and from Dunkirk (1940) to the founding of the nation of Israel (1948), along with many other travels between these years too various to include in an article as brief as this one, it is easy to see how the life and long career of (the eventual Colonel) Richard Meinertzhagen became one of the pillars of 20th century film.
The photos of the man tend to evoke a masculine reverence in the hearts of red blooded American and British males. A type of reverence that has to do with a subconscious longing for the days when guys didn’t wear skinny jeans and demand gluten-free everything. In these photographs we see a man with a big bushy beard; a pipe protruding from his mouth; or standing confidently—in the familiar “Captain Morgan” pose—with his rifle slung over his shoulder and a wide grin on his face. The image of Meinertzhagen was, in every sense of the term, “Gentleman Savage”.
Confirmations of Meinertzhagen’s travels to the countries he wrote about from military records, foreign cables, etc., appear at first to provide reason to believe the wild and outlandish accounts often found in his writings: In 1910 while in Greece, Richard claims he found himself on a derailed train that had slid off a cliff until it dangled halfway over the precipice. Spotting a girl clinging desperately to the outboard—legs dangling over the abyss—and in complete disregard for his own life, Richard rescued the girl and escaped mere moments before the rest of the train fell off of the mountain.¹⁵ Deep in the bush of Africa during World War I, a German officer having a solo Christmas feast in his tent was blown backward by a shotgun blast when Richard burst through the opening. The British soldier then took a seat, said to the deceased on the ground “Why waste a good dinner?”, and finished the food himself.¹⁶ ¹⁷ But these types of unverifiable nailbiters pale in comparison to the most audacious claim Richard jotted down. Five years before the Second World War, he meets Adolf Hitler for afternoon tea during an intel-gathering trip in Berlin, and writes in his diary that he regrets not having had the political foresight to shoot the German leader with the revolver he always carried in his pocket.¹⁸
These daring and grandiose exploits caused Richard Meinertzhagen to become the toast of every man in the United Kingdom and United States who had desired a similar life to his own, but for whatever reason, had fallen short of acquiring: those rejected from military service in either of the world wars, those who were domesticated by marriage and children sooner than they had wanted to be, and those who—like so many of us today—had sacrificed a dream for the “pragmatic”.
So how is it possible for a man such as this who lived a colossal life to fade into obscurity? Why do we all know the names T.E. Lawrence and John Pendlebury, and yet the name of this colonel yields only shrugs? What has caused us to forget a warrior with such a formidable list of published works, including Nicoll’s Birds of Egypt (1930), The Life of a Boy (1947), Birds of Arabia (1954), Kenya Diary 1902-1906 (1957), Middle East Diary 1917-1956 (1959), Pirates & Predators: The Piratical & Predatory Habits of Birds (1959), Army Diary 1899-1926 (1960), and Diary of a Black Sheep (1964)?
Well…
It’s because a great portion of Richard Meinertzhagen’s adventures have proven to be outright fabrications.
He was a liar. A con man. And as I go on, you will find that this was not even the worst of what he was.
For one, there is no record of Richard having saved a young English girl from being prostituted by Egyptians at Port Said. In his diaries he claims to have entrusted her to the care of the British consul, and specifically to the consul’s wife. If this had really happened, it would have been included in the consul’s correspondence for the month of April 1899 (when Richard says the event occurred).¹⁹ But no incident of a victimized English adolescent is recorded.
Secondly, there are also no records—save for Richard’s own account—of his heroic battles against the Kikuyu and the Tetu. Only one of his recorded encounters against the Nandi has been confirmed.²⁰ You may say “Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence”, but the fact of the matter is, when it comes to official military records and omission of the alleged events in other soldiers’ diaries, it does mean that, yes. Every skirmish between soldiers of the empire and various tribes were meticulously recorded for intelligence-gathering purposes, and it’s hard to believe that among the thousands of soldiers who fought in Africa, Richard would be the only one willing to brag about his role in certain battles in journals and memoirs.
Third, there was certainly no train wreck that occurred in the mountains of Greece in 1910. No local, national, or international press covered such an incident, despite the fact that Richard claimed the King of Saxony was onboard, which is also false because the King of Saxony was not even in Greece at the time.²¹ I feel it important to say here that lies have patterns. Richard has a thing for saving helpless adolescent girls; the first in Port Said, and the second one clinging to the window of this imaginary train that was dangling off a cliff (third time’s a charm in another diary entry, previously unmentioned, where he claims to save a young Jewish girl from a Russian mob during its pogrom).²²
Fourth, in regard to his meeting Hitler, you may at this point be unsurprised to discover that Richard didn’t do that either. Hitler wasn’t in Berlin at the time Richard claimed to meet him there. Instead, Hitler was at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgarten on the week in question.²³ So there, too, goes the story of Meinertzhagen’s missed opportunity to pop the führer for queen, country, and world peace.
But at least the famed soldier of the empire—tall tales aside—made great contributions to ornithology, right? Actually no. Of the 20,000 bird specimens that Richard gave over time to the British Natural History Museum, nearly all of them were stolen from other museum collections and relabeled as his own. Amusingly, some of these birds weren’t even real birds at all; with Richard having taken parts of one bird’s body, combining it with another bird’s body, and claiming to have discovered a brand new type in some far corner of the earth. Yet he was so trusted by British bird enthusiasts of his day, that his “work” in ornithology—up until the 1990s—formed a foundation upon which later ornithologists based their research.
This to such an extent, in fact, that when his contributions were found to be completely fraudulent, it created a major crisis in the field. Birds once believed to be extinct because Richard had lied about the locations he had seen them in, were starting to be found in other parts of the world alive and well. Conversely, ornithologists who had spent decades fervently searching for other birds, finally had to admit they had wasted large chunks of their lives looking for creatures entirely fictitious.²⁴
But as I mentioned before, Richard Meinertzhagen was more than a mere liar and fraud. Later investigation would reveal he was something much worse. Richard Meinertzhagen was a raging psychopath. Unlike the film heroes who were based on the contemporary perception of Meinertzhagen—noble-hearted and honest and brave—the real Meinertzhagen was actually the very antithesis. What’s more, he made little attempt to hide this aspect of his personality himself.
For instance, Richard brags in his diaries about how on one occasion he induced a black mamba to strike an African tribesman so he could record how fast it was, and how, on another occasion, he bludgeoned his Indian servant to death with a polo mallet because the boy had abused his horses.²⁵ ²⁶ It is a telling window into Richard’s psychology that he thought his readers would relish in these accounts rather than recoil. To be a sadist is one thing, but to assume that everyone around you is also equally sadistic is another.
Yet even without Richard’s own testimony in support of his psychopathy, we still have none other than T.E. Lawrence to vouch. Lawrence met Richard when the two became roommates during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and they both would go on to serve as intelligence officers in what was then British Palestine.²⁷ ²⁸ I have in my possession the first edition of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Its pages are nearly crumbling to dust, its cover is faded, and its edges are worn.* But books—no matter what condition they are in or how rare—are no good if they are not read, and as I was reading Seven Pillars four years ago, I discovered just what Lawrence thought of his colleague:
“Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain…”²⁹ [emphasis mine]
Lawrence further remarks that Meinertzhagen had a “hot immoral hatred of the enemy that expressed itself as readily in trickery as in violence”.
But perhaps the most disturbing detail about the life of Richard Meinertzhagen is the suspicious death of his second wife Anne Constance in 1928. Richard had married Anne just seven years prior after his return from British Palestine, and Anne’s family wealth had certainly been no secret to anyone in English high society. If she were to die, she wrote in her will, her husband—our colonel—would be the recipient of ￡113,446.³⁰
Unbeknownst to Anne, Richard was enjoying an affair at the time preceding her death with his cousin Theresa Clay (who at the time of the affair’s initiation was only 15, while Meinertzhagen was 50). The official account of Anne’s death is that while practicing with a firearm on the estate, she shot herself in the head by accident. While there was no official inquiry into the circumstances of her sudden end, Richard’s own blood relatives couldn’t help but believe—and state their belief publicly—that a bullet traveling from a downward angle from Anne’s head to her spine would be difficult to self-inflict, but could easily be inflicted from a husband who stood a foot taller.³¹ ³² Either oblivious or uncaring toward his family’s suspicion, Richard writes in his diaries of Theresa providing him with “consolation” in the wake of his wife’s death, and the two lovers/cousins carried on their relationship until Meinertzhagen’s death in 1967.³³
And so here I have briefly articulated—and further exposed, to the best of my ability—the life and legend of a fraud and psychopath who for too long enjoyed the reputation of a gentleman and adventurer-extraordinaire. For decades he was lionized by writers as accomplished as Peter Capstick and Mark Cocker, as well as the aforementioned John Lord; and his persona that he crafted for himself was incorporated into the personalities of Bond, Jones, Kirk, and Solo. But with the discovery of his many deceptions and misdeeds, he has rightly been abandoned to obscurity.
But I regret to say that I have likely not touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full extent of who this man was (and was not). Even some of my citations about Col. Meinertzhagen’s early life and career—you will notice—are from his personal journals. As much as that could possibly be avoided, I avoided it of course, but again that is precisely what is so problematic about the life of Richard Meinertzhagen. So much of what is true is intertwined with what is not, that it is a painstaking process determining which is which. Barbarian though he was, one label from his glorified past still remains: man of mystery.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the unraveling of this Stanley and Livingstone-wannabe is too little too late. Many of Meinertzhagen’s travels, alleged-exploits, and scandals took place while my great-grandparents were still small children. So the inevitable question—not only in the case of Richard Meinertzhagen, but with history in general—is Why does this matter? Why does this man’s deeds, misdeeds, achievements, and frauds matter?
Because Ian Fleming was right.
We do need heroes. But we need real ones.
Every generation in its youth longs for authenticity, and frequently looks to figures of the past to provide that authenticity seemingly lacking in the current day. And at this, Richard Meinertzhagen as a historical figure so miserably and utterly falls short.
Citations
1. “Bond’s Creator”, The New Yorker, April 21st 1962, Pg. 33; 2. Richard Meinertzhagen, “Nineteenth century recollections”, Pg. 46, 1959; 3. Peter Capstick, Warrior: The Life & Legend Of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Chapter 1, 1998; 4. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Pg. 46, 2007; 5. Richard Meinertzhagen, Diary of a Black Sheep, Pg. 79, 1964; 6. Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary 1899-1926, Pg. 11-12, 1960; 7. Ibid. 14-15; 8. Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary, 1902-1906, Pg. 40, 1984; 9. Ibid. 64; 10. Peter Capstick, Warrior: The Life & Legend Of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Chapter 6, 1998; 11. Ibid; 12. “Ruffled Feathers”, The New Yorker, May 29th 2006; 13. Peter Capstick, Warrior: The Life & Legend Of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Chapter 7, 1998; 14. Ibid; 15. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Pg. 72, 2007; 16. Peter Capstick, Warrior: The Life & Legend Of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Introduction, 1998; 17. James Parry, “Richard J. Meinertzhagen”, Sunday Express, July 19th 2010; 18. John S. Craig, Peculiar Liaisons: In War, Espionage, & Terrorism In The Twentieth Century, Pg. 108, 2005; 19. Today one can find the consul’s 1899 report in London’s Public Records Office; 20. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Pg. 59, 2007; 21. Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary 1899-1926, Pg. 43, 1960; 22. Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary 1917-1956, Pgs. 2-4, 1959; 23. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Pg. 188, 2007; 24. Ibid. 201; 25. Richard Meinertzhagen, Army Diary 1899-1926, Pg. 381, 1960; 26. Ibid. 69; 27. James Parry, “Richard J. Meinertzhagen”, Sunday Express, July 19th 2010; 28. “Ruffled Feathers”, The New Yorker, May 29th 2006; * On the inside is the written name of the owner, Reuven Frank, who enjoyed a long career at NBC between 1950 and 1984. It appeared he had received the book as a gift while attending the premier of “Lawrence of Arabia”. Small treasures such as these are why antique shopping is never a waste of a Saturday morning; 29. T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Chapter 69, 1922; 30. “Rich Lady’s Bequest To Husband”, Western Daily Express, October 25th 1928, British Newspaper Archive; 31. Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Pg. 170-171, 2007; 32. Ibid. 168-169; 33. Ibid. 193-198
