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BOOK REVIEWS


“THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF A COLOSSAL FRAUD”


When a friend asked if I had heard of Colonel Meinertzhagen, I was able

to respond that not only had I heard of him, I had slept in the same bed as him

- though not at the same time, of course. When I first visited the Bamleys in

the Cherengani Hills in western Kenya, I was boarded with Tim’s mother,

who put me in a bedroom in an annexe, telling me that the last person who

had slept in the bed had been Colonel Meinertzhagen, when he was there

studying African cuckoos.


A few weeks earlier, I had been on a birdwatching safari with Leslie

Brown and Derek Wood, during which Leslie had cast doubt on some of

Meinertzhagen’s observations on, I think, the Lammergeier. “How can you

trust the word of a man who shot a German officer in bed, ” asked Leslie?

He also alleged that Meinertzhagen had shot his wife. Ever since then I

have wondered about the truth behind Leslie’s startling allegations. Now,

American author Brian Garfield has written The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The

Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud , in which he examines Meinertzhagen’s

life and attempts to answer these and many other questions. According to

Meinertzhagen, on a raid into German East Africa during the First World

War, he shot dead a German officer as he lay on his camp bed in his tent.

Then, with another member of the raiding party, he sat down and ate the

German officer’s “excellent Xmas dinner.” It was, he wrote, “one of the

best though most gruesome dinners I have ever had, including an excellent

Xmas pudding.” However, Brian Garfield’s research has revealed that the

other officer in the raiding party was hundreds of miles away at the time of

the alleged incident and Meinertzhagen according to his official reports was

behind his desk in Nairobi.


Brian Garfield has consulted a vast number of books, official reports,

papers and other documents, and from information in these is able to show

that many of Meinertzhagen’s daring exploits could not have taken place

when he said they did, or in the way he described.


To quote from the dust jacket: “Col. Richard Meinertzhagen was an

acclaimed British war hero, a secret agent, and a dean of international

ornithology. His exploits inspired three biographies, his life has been the

basis for movies and Jerusalem dedicated a city square to his memory.

Meinertzhagen was trusted by Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George,

Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, T. E. Lawrence, Elspeth Huxley,

and a great many others. But he bamboozled them all. Meinertzhagen was

a fraud.”



