Richard Meinertzhagen

Richard Henry Meinertzhagen (March 3, 1878 - June 17, 1967) was a British soldier and intelligence officer with an interest in birds and Zionism. Due to irregularities and well-documented instances of fraud, his ornithological research and other published works are of questionable veracity.

Early life

Meinertzhagen was born to a wealthy English family. His last name derives from a town in Germany, the home of an ancestor. His mother was Georgina Potter, sister of Beatrice Webb, a co-founder of the London School of Economics. On his mother side (the Potters), Richard was of English and perhaps partly Jewish ancestry (see his Diary of a Black Sheep, 1964). He also had a dash of Spanish royal blood, rumored in his lifetime but confirmed since his death. Richard's father, Daniel Meinertzhagen, was a banker of German origin.

His passion for bird-watching (and -shooting) was encouraged by a family friend, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who, like another family friend, Charles Darwin, was an ardent empiricist and who took young Richard on walks, urging him to study the natural world: "Observe, record, explain!"

Military and political career

Meinertzhagen joined the British Army early and was stationed in various places in India, Africa and Palestine. In East Africa in 1905, he crushed a major revolt by killing the Laibon (witchdoctor) who led it. He collected some of the tribal artefacts after this revolt. (In April 2006, these artifacts, including a walking stick and baton belonging to the Nandi tribal leader Koitalel arap Samoei were repatriated to Kenya.)

The East African mission was a punitive expedition against specified sections of the Kikuyu and Embu tribes due to frequent murders of friendly natives. Meinertzhagen was called by the Nandi tribes as Kipkororor (Ostrich feathers) for his habit of having two ostrich feathers stuck in his hat. This expedition was commanded by a Captain F.A. Dickinson and had 5 officers, 135 rifles of the 3KAR, 60 police and 300 Masai levies. Over 11,000 stock were captured at the cost of 3 men killed and 33 wounded. The number of enemy killed was estimated at 797 Kikuku and 250 Embu. Richard Meinertzhagen wrote in his diaries on 18 March 1904

During the Palestine campaign of World War I Meinertzhagen let a haversack containing false British battle plans fall into Turkish hands, thereby contributing much to the surprise British attack that took Beersheba and all of Gaza. The incident and attack are depicted in the 1987 film The Lighthorsemen.

He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and was Allenby's Chief Political Officer, involved in the creation of the Palestine Mandate, which eventually led to the creation of the State of Israel. He attained the rank of colonel, but was dismissed from the service for insubordination in 1926.

Meinertzhagen had a hatred of anti-Semitism, and for decades promoted the founding of Israel. But he was also a Nazi-sympathizer in the 1930s, observing that Jews had dominated Germany in the 1920s, and that the Soviet Union posed a major threat to Europe.

He was a prolific diarist and published four books based on his diaries, which make fascinating and often insightful reading. However, his Middle East Diary (1959) contains dozens of entries that are probably fictional, including those on T.E. Lawrence and on Hitler (Meinertzhagen's claimed to have mocked Hitler by giving a Heil Meinertzhagen salute in response to those given by the men around Hitler). Lockman, in his book shows that Meinertzhagen later falsified his entries on T. E. Lawrence. The original diaries kept in the Rhodes House Library contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and there are oddities in the page numbering.

Zoology

Meinertzhagen continued to keep his interest in nature from his childhood. He was a chairman of the British Ornithologists' Club and a recipient of a Godman-Salvin Medal.

As the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessing a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens, Meinertzhagen was long considered one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. Yet his magnum opus, Birds of Arabia (1954), is believed to have been based on the unpublished manuscript of another naturalist, George Bates, who is not sufficiently credited in that book.

In the 1990s an analysis of Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring, UK, revealed large scale fraud involving theft and falsification. Alan Knox, who uncovered the fraud, said in 1993 : Meinertzhagen had stolen the best specimens of other people's collections and then proceeded to fabricate data to go with them. More recent research indicates the fraud was even more extensive than first thought. Many of the specimens that he submitted as his own were found to be missing specimens belonging to the Natural History museum and collected by others such as Hugh Whistler.

Meinertzhagen however did discover the Giant Forest Hog in Africa and is credited with the species being named Hylochoerus meinertzhageni.

He also edited Nicoll's Birds of Egypt in 1930. Michael J. Nicoll was Assistant Director of the Zoological Gardens at Giza and he attempted to write a comprehensive guide to the ornithology of Egypt. He died before it could be published and the work was finished by Meinertzhagen.

He named a series of birds for Theresa Clay, a cousin and close "confidante" (Salim Ali in his autobiography notes her as Meinertzhagen's niece) 33 years younger than himself. Theresa Clay studied and documented the vast collections of bird lice that he had made.

Personality

His three biographers have largely lionized him, but T.E. Lawrence, a sometime colleague in 1919 and again 1921, described him more ambiguously:

While in India he killed one of his personal assistants in a fit of rage and had the local police officer cover it up as a death due to plague. Salim Ali notes his special hatred for Mahatma Gandhi and his refusal to believe that Indians could govern themselves.

Gavin Maxwell wrote about how his parents would scare him and other children to behave themselves when Meinertzhagen visited with ...remember...he has killed people with his bare hands....

Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard. After Anne's death his companion was Theresa Clay and they lived on 17 and 18 Kensington park gardens with an internal passage connecting the two houses.

Meinertzhagen himself traced the 'evil' side to his personality to a period during his childhood when he was subjected to severe physical abuse at the hands of a sadistic school master when he was at a boarding school named Fonthill in Sussex. He was apparently also traumatized by the indifference of his mother to his plight

References

Ali, Salim. The Fall of a Sparrow. Oxford University Press, Delhi. 1985. xv, 265 pp.
Boxall, Peter. The legendary Richard Meinertzhagen. The Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 1990 120(4): 459-462.
Capstick, P.H., Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. 1998.
Cocker, Mark. Richard Meinertzhagen. Soldier, Scientist and Spy. Secker & Warburg, London, 1989. 292 pp.
Dalton, R. Ornithologists stunned by bird collector's deceit. Nature 2005 437(7057): 302.
Jones, Robert F. The Kipkororor chronicles. MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 1991 3(3): 38-47.
Judd, Alan. Eccentric hero. New Statesman and Society 23, 1989 2(55): 37-38.
Knox, Alan G. Richard Meinertzhagen-a case of fraud examined. Ibis 1993 135(3): 320-325.
Lockman, J.N. Meinertzhagen's Diary Ruse. 1995, 114 pp.
Lord, John. Duty, Honour, Empire. New York: Random House, 1970.
Mangan, J. A. Shorter notices. English Historical Review 1993 108(429): 1062.
Vines, Gail, 1994. Bird world in a flap about species fraud. New Scientist May 1994 142(1924): 10.
Wijesinghe,Priyantha (11 Jan 1998) BirdChat List "Meinertzhagen (Was: Forest Owlet - more clarifications, etc)"
wa Tiong'o, Ngugi. Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary. Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1981. p. 34

External links

http://whyfiles.org/084hoax/index_a.html
http://www.afsi.org/OUTPOST/2001MAY/may8.htm
http://www.nwf.org/internationalwildlife/1998/britbird.html
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/0305mein.html
The giant forest hog
Biography
PDF of New Yorker article on Pamela Rasmussen and her study of Meinertzhagen's fraud

1878 births | 1967 deaths | British ornithologists