Home is where the heart is for explorer (From Ludlow Advertiser)

Home is where the heart is for explorer

THE valleys of Teme and Clun may well be home to the quietest places under the sun but they have also been a backdrop for some of the towering figures of the 20th century.

Among them were the greatest explorer of our time, Wilfred Thesiger, and his friend, the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie.

For Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary explorer renowned for his travels through some of the most inaccessible places on earth, the area was the home to which he returned at intervals over 20 years.

The Milebrook (now the Milebrook Hotel, between Bucknell and Knighton, on the Shropshire-Powys border) was the Thesiger family home from 1922 until the Second World War.

Thesiger and his two younger brothers, Brian and Dermot, roamed the local hills with their dogs, birdwatching and shooting game. Haile Selassie, a lifelong friend of the Thesigers, stayed with them at the gabled stone house and together, they rode with the local hunt.

The Thesigers worshipped at St George's Church in Clun and presented to the church an Ethiopian painting of St George, who is also a major saint in the African country.

On the inside wall of the church is a plaque to the memory of Thesiger's younger brother Dermot, killed as a newly-commissioned pilot in RAF Coastal Command in 1941.

His other brother, Brian, a regular Army officer, served with distinction at Anzio and in Burma in the Second World War.

The Emperor also stayed with Ronald and Noel Stevens at Walcot Hall, Lydbury North.

With him on an archive picture of him being greeted by his hosts when he arrived at Craven Arms station in January 1938 is his daughter Princess Tenagneworq.

When Thesiger died in 2003, aged 93, there were whole-page obituaries in all the broadsheet newspapers.

Born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British Minister, Thesiger spent his childhood in still-mediaeval Abyssinia. He was a life-long friend of Ras Tafari, who personally invited him to attend his spectacular coronation as Haile Selassie in 1930.

Rastafarianism survives to this day with many adherents believing he still lives and will come to deliver all those Africans captured as slaves and forcibly taken from their homes.

Thesiger began his explorations of the earth's remotest and wildest places at the age of only 23, when he travelled among the Danakil nomads of Abyssinia, who were noted for a disturbing tendency to kill men and carry off their testicles as trophies.

Such practices seemed to hold little horror for Thesiger, who had survived floggings at Eton. In fact he saw one young warrior, flushed from the slaughter of four victims in a day, as "the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who has just won his school colours for cricket."

He won the DSO in 1941 when fighting with Wingate to free Ethiopia from the Italians. Amazingly, he used bluff to take 2,500 Italians prisoner. Later, he served with Col David Stirling's SAS in north Africa and then served as adviser to Haile Selassie.

He travelled widely and wrote marvellous books about places as far afield as Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Himalayas, Yemen, the Sudan, Iran and Kenya. He covered tens of thousands of miles by camel, mule, horse, donkey and canoe. He was knighted in 1995.