Giles Foden
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth — the Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
Penguin Books 2004 HB 320pp £16.99 (0 71 814555 0)
Spring of 1915 and Europe was convulsed by war. In Central Africa the longest of the Great Lakes of the Rift Valley, Lake Tanganyika was a German fiefdom, Tanganykesse. An affront to the new First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Jackson — ‘It is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship.’ First, find your water. No shortage of that in Lake Tanganyika. Four hundred miles long, a mile deep, and big enough for tides to influence climate.
Secondly, floating a ship, was more of a problem. Giles Foden, with precision, wit, and careful searching of the archives describes the Admiralty's solution. On the urging of a big game hunter, two mahogany motor launches were requisitioned from the Greek navy, dispatched from Tilbury to Cape Town, taken by train to Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo, dragged over a 6000 foot massif (by steam tractors), refloated on the Upper Congo, sailed down it, then on to rail again eastwards towards a crocodile infested river mouth at Albertville on Lake Tanganyika. There to ‘engage the enemy’.
So far, so odd. Enter stage left the British Commanding Officer — the oldest Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy in 1915, Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson. His last ship, the destroyer Niger, had been torpedoed on a Sunday morning in Ramsgate while he and his wife watched from a boarding house with a fine view of the bay.
Spicer-Simpson becomes ever weirder. Whole-torso tattoos, deification by the Holo-Holos, batheing rituals. And he affects a skirt, of his wife's design.
His ships, Mimi and Toutou, sink or capture their bigger tug-sized German adversaries. Then he loses it, and returns home, broken, but with bombast enough to sustain him through another 20 years of the lecture circuit. John Huston, 20 years later makes African Queen.
A German adversary still sails, refloated twice. No such luck for their battleground.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2004.
