It was Idi Amin who concluded the empire was getting a good deal from Jeremy Hespeler-Boultbee.
Victoria’s Hespeler-Boultbee was a barely shaving officer in the King’s African Rifles. Amin, a monstrously huge man, was a corporal in a Ugandan unit temporarily under Hespeler-Boultbee’s command.
This was in the early 1950s, long before Amin became the most feared and hated man on Earth (no, young reader, Gary Bettman doesn’t come close). Estimates of the number of Ugandans killed by the dictator’s 1970s regime range from 100,000 to 500,000. Some were fed to crocodiles.
Amin, who also boxed on the same army team as Hespeler-Boultbee, was surprised to find his young officer was not an Englishman doing his compulsory national service, but a Canadian fighting Britain’s war, the Kenyan action known as the Mau Mau insurrection.
“You good man, sah!” Amin declared. “Very generous! Mrs. Queen get good mileage outta you!”
It’s all in Hespeler-Boultbee’s new book, Mrs. Queen’s Chump, an account of the two years he spent as a second lieutenant fighting in the jungles of Kenya and Malaya — a flag-draped 19-year-old boy going in, a jaded 20-year-old man coming out, any idealistic preconceptions shattered.
It’s a good read. Most people who can write don’t have lives worth writing about. Conversely, those who have good stories to tell usually don’t know how to tell them. Hespeler-Boultbee goes two for two.
Born in Vancouver in 1935, he was raised in Esquimalt before being educated in Australia, the U.S. and finally one of those cricket-and-rugby British boarding schools that churned out fodder for the officer class.
He eventually landed back in Victoria as a reporter for the Daily Colonist in the 1960s, then went on to document a world in upheaval. Covering the U.S. civil rights movement for the Globe and Mail, he was in Tuscaloosa when Gov. George Wallace blocked a University of Alabama doorway to prevent two black students from entering. He was arrested while reporting on the guerrilla wars in Angola and Mozambique, and later wrote about the 1974 Portuguese revolution for Maclean’s magazine.
He stayed in the latter country for 25 years, becoming a professor of architectural history. (His previous book, A Story in Stones, is about Portugal’s influence on the culture and architecture of the Ethiopian Highlands between 1493 and 1634.) He now lives in Victoria with his Ethiopian-born wife. At 77, Hespeler-Boultbee resembles Santa Claus, or at least what Santa would look like if he knew good scotch from bad.
Mrs. Queen’s Chump reads like a black-and-white safari movie: jungle patrols — lions, charging elephants, vicious rhinos, poisonous snakes — but it’s also a story of a soldier who gradually found he couldn’t believe in his cause.
“I could find solace in the cover of the forest, escape there to get away from the emergency — the dreadful expectation that because I was a member of Her Majesty’s forces I actually agreed with what we were all doing,” he writes.
“The trouble was that as an independent, free-spirited and rather sensitive young man, I was beginning to think for myself and to find my own levels of toleration, my own likes and dislikes.
“I realized the people I cared about the most were the Africans of my platoon. … The senior officers of the mess were the ones who perpetuated the ignorance, the nauseating pomposity and racist mentality of the Raj.”
Likewise, the Mau Mau, whose atrocities in Kenya fanned the flames in Britain, were not what he expected. “The Mau Mau was no real enemy. Armed with knives and crudely built firearms made from curtain rods and door bolts activated by elastic bands, they were terrified of being caught by us and desperately tried to avoid confrontation — or being shot in the back.”
Savagery was found on both sides. This month, the Guardian newspaper reported the British government is negotiating compensation for thousands of former Mau Mau who were imprisoned and sometimes tortured — including being waterboarded and sexually assaulted — in the 1950s. Previously secret papers show colonial officials authorized abuses in what one history calls “Britain’s gulag.”
Hespeler-Boultbee will give a presentation on Mrs. Queen’s Chump at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Oak Bay branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library.
