2004 - Mimi and Toutou Go Forth Read Online Free PDF

report came back that Magee had been killed in an avalanche while climbing the mountain. Swaffer and his colleagues were just clubbing together to buy a wreath when the man himself walked through the door of the newspaper’s offices in London. Asked by Swaffer what his thoughts were when the avalanche came sweeping down, Magee said: ‘I offered up a prayer that I might return safely to give you a kick in the pants for sending me on such an awful journey.’
    Magee carried a letter from Lord Northcliffe informing whomsoever it may concern that he had seen a great deal of active service. He was commissioned Petty Officer Writer and would take charge of clerical and photographic duties on the expedition. He would later write it up for the October 1922 issue of the National Geographic magazine. The other main sources for the story are Peter Shankland’s The Phantom Flotilla (based on interviews with Dr Hanschell) and a lecture given by Spicer himself to the Royal United Services Institute in London.↓
    ≡ ’The Operations on Lake Tanganyika in 1915’, given on 28 March 1934 at 3 PM . Reprinted in the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute , Vol. 79, 1934.
    Chief Gunlayer was to be James Waterhouse from Birmingham. Quiet and unflappable, he was self-possessed to a fault. You could never tell what he was thinking, which unnerved some members of the expedition. He was tall and dark, with bushy eyebrows and sharp lines either side of his nose and mouth. Waterhouse would take charge of the guns that were to be mounted on the motor boats—far too much weight for such small vessels, it might be supposed, but there was no point in going all that way and having insufficient firepower to finish the job. He would be assisted on the guns by Petty Officer Flynn.
    Among the ratings was a tall, muscular fisherman from Donegal whose name has not survived in naval records, many of which were destroyed in a Luftwaffe bombing raid during the Second World War. This intriguing character appears at crucial moments in Shankland’s account of the journey. His flaming red hair and very pale skin distinguished him among the crew—as did his habit, when speaking about his wife, of calling her ‘mother’.↓
    ≡ It is possible he was William Carey from Buncrana, who later served on the royal yacht Ilona and died in 1918.
    Most of these men were recommended by friends and colleagues of Spicer or Lee. One or two, however, heard about the expedition through less orthodox routes. They included Tait and Mollison, two hulking Scotsmen who learned of the mission in a West End bar and went straight round to the Admiralty to volunteer. They were lance corporals of the London Scottish Regiment and had played for its rugby team. Tait had lost a finger at Ypres, and both men mostly wore kilts.
    Some of the members of the expedition knew each other. Tait had certainly come across the eccentric, monocle-wearing Tyrer before, telling Dr Hanschell that the barmaids at London’s Criterion Restaurant called Tyrer ‘the Piccadilly Johnny with the glass eye’. Perhaps it was at the Criterion that Tait and Mollison overheard talk of the expedition, which was supposed to be top secret. The two giant Scotsmen didn’t speak much throughout the adventure. They simply carried out their orders and gave the impression they didn’t care about much except their next meal, which they always consumed with great eagerness, whatever the ingredients. And so Tait and Mollison joined the rest of the expedition, most of whom were billeted in the old monkey-house at Crystal Palace.
    The palace, at Sydenham in south London,↓ had become the headquarters of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve a week after the declaration of war.
    ≡ The Crystal Palace was originally in Hyde Park, housing the Great Exhibition of 1851, after which a group of enterprising promoters took it to pieces and transported it to south London. It burned down in 1936, possibly due to a fault in