The Emperor of Ethiopia in Britain
Meena Venkataramanan
As we were looking out through the windows straight across, the countryside reminded us of the hills of Harar,” the former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie wistfully recalled in his memoir, “My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress.”
But the emperor wasn’t writing these homesick sentences from anywhere
near the hills of Harar; rather, he was in the genteel city of Bath, England,
where he was exiled between 1936 and 1940. The city in southwestern England,
known for its Roman baths and medieval abbey, gave refuge to the emperor after
Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. He lived in Fairfield House,
on the town’s western outskirts, and the period he spent there proved to be
transformative for his political program.
Although well documented in various photograph and newspaper archives,
Haile Selassie’s exile in Bath is not well known to the modern public.
Fairfield House is not included among Visit Bath’s list of historic sites, nor
does it feature on Time Out or The New York Times’ lists of places to visit in
the city. (There was a subtle irony in Haile Selassie fleeing the Italian
occupation and ending up in Bath, which was formerly a Roman city, and living
in Fairfield House, an Italianate villa.) “A lot of biographies of the emperor
… only give a small amount of space to the exile as if it was an insignificant
period, but I would argue it had a massive impact on him,” Keith Bowers, author
of “Imperial Exile” — the first and only intensive study of Haile Selassie’s
time in England — told me.
Indeed, despite spending profligately and consequently
facing financial difficulties that led to a dependence on the British
government and private donors for funding, the emperor accomplished a great
deal during his exile in Bath. He rallied British organizations to back the
Ethiopian cause and sought financial aid for those who had fled before Italy’s
advances to Palestine, British Somaliland and other British colonies. In
addition, he befriended British campaigners, including the prominent women’s
rights activist Sylvia Pankhurst, who championed his cause, committing to such
an extent that she eventually moved permanently to Ethiopia.
In the summer of 1936, Haile Selassie gave a powerful, symbolic speech at
the League of Nations condemning Italian aggression and asking European nations
for their support. He made waves among activist groups in Britain and many
student groups embraced the emperor: He was conferred honorary life membership
by the Cambridge Union, the world’s oldest continuously running debating
society, and a group of students at the University of Edinburgh nominated him
as rector. It was an active time for Haile Selassie, during which he built and
developed a strong network of support and used his platform. Far from being a
break in a quiet English town, these few years in exile were vital to his
cause.
Just as Haile Selassie’s time in England is often relegated to the
margins in his life story, military action in East Africa is a similarly
overlooked part of World War II. When Mussolini became Italian prime minister
in 1922, he was determined to colonize Ethiopia to expand his country’s empire
and regain its prestige after Ethiopia had defeated Italy in the 1896 Battle of
Adwa, preventing its colonization. But historians devote more attention to the
war’s European and Japanese fronts, rather than its African one, to the
detriment of understanding both Mussolini’s colonial project in Africa and
Ethiopia’s resistance.
It was a tricky moment for Britain diplomatically. The Italian Ambassador
Dino Grandi warned that any British governmental skepticism of Italy’s claim to
Ethiopia “would have an exceedingly bad effect in Rome.” This included any
recognition of Haile Selassie’s title as the country’s emperor, a claim that
Italy rejected. Nevertheless, Britain offered him asylum.
Haile Selassie, who had traveled to Europe in 1924 as Ethiopia’s prince
regent, was already famous in the West. “The press covered him a lot, the
national press, the regional press, which was very well read in those days,”
Bowers, a former BBC producer, told me. The emperor was seen as a reformer,
modernizing Ethiopia by developing its education, financial and military
sectors, and the country was admitted to the League of Nations in 1923. His
coronation as emperor in 1930 was the subject of significant Western press
coverage, and European and North American representatives attended the event.
But most significantly, his resistance to Italian occupation symbolized a
non-Western nation standing up to the injustices of Western colonialism,
garnering global attention as Europe was catapulted into war. When he fled from
the Italians occupying his country, it was a British warship that rescued him,
underscoring his existing influence even before he set foot on English shores.
Perhaps because of Italy’s warning to Britain, or perhaps
simply because he was so famous, Haile Selassie was officially classified as an
“incognito” visitor by the British authorities to minimize public scrutiny
around his exile, according to the economic historian Lutz Haber, who wrote an
article for Bath History on the emperor’s time in the city. But the world
already knew of his plans: On June 3, 1936, before settling in Bath, the
emperor arrived at London’s Waterloo Station to jubilant fanfare. “Outside the
station, there was a wild rush by Londoners to catch the first glimpse of the
monarch who has been front-page news for nearly a year,” said a Reuters
newsreel documenting the event.
Later in the same month that he arrived in England, Haile
Selassie was already on the move, with similarly exuberant attention from
crowds. “This is a journey of hope,” Haile Selassie told them, as he left to
give a speech at the League of Nations in Geneva, where he was also greeted by
cheering crowds of Europeans. Yet his hope was for naught: Despite the
Emperor’s passionate address on June 30, 1936 — still referred to as his
“greatest hour” — when he rebuked Italy for its use of chemical weapons and
condemned the league for failing to intervene, the league neglected to act. In
the words of Paul Henze, author of “Layers of Time: A History of
Ethiopia,” the speech won Haile Selassie “applause from the assembly and
worldwide sympathy, but not much else.” The very next month, the league
overturned its sanctions against Italy and all but one of its member nations
recognized Italy’s claim to Ethiopia.
This setback didn’t stop the emperor’s advocacy for his country. He
returned to England to continue his political organizing, settling in Bath.
“From London one reached the world,” the emperor declared in one of the
unfinished chapters meant for his memoir.
Britain was indeed strategically positioned. France and Switzerland were
too close to Italy: An exile in either country could cause problems between
neighbors, especially for Switzerland, which maintained a policy of neutrality
in the years leading up to World War II. In addition, the U.K. “had the power,
military power, and strategic position in order to potentially liberate
Ethiopia,” said Ras Benji, an independent researcher who focuses on Haile
Selassie’s imperial rule and exile and is the operations manager of Fairfield
House. “It could have been quite a swift job if the British put their full mind
to that cause, but at that time, they were appeasing Mussolini.”
But if London was Britain’s political nexus, why was Bath the location
the emperor chose for his exile? “The main reason he chose Bath,” Ras Benji
said, “was the hot springs, because the Roman baths in those days and the
mineral hospital nearby were known for treating all sorts of ailments,”
including the burns the emperor suffered from Italian use of chemical weapons,
in particular the substance known as mustard (dichlorethyl sulphide). According
to a Bath Chronicle reporter in 1936, “Bath was the only place in the United
Kingdom where the monarch had felt really well.”
The surrounding quiet in Bath also offered the emperor refuge. He lived a
seemingly domestic life. Although he made several public appearances in Bath,
attending a garden party in Englishcombe and the Bath Dog Show, as well as
visiting the Post Office Exhibition, “we did not go to the theatre or places of
entertainment,” he reflected in his memoir. “Our only time of relaxation was
when occasionally we conversed with our children,” who, along with his wife,
joined the emperor in exile. “In the evenings we were engaged in reading books
until midnight and in writing the history of our past life.” Between praying,
reading and championing his cause, the emperor was known to sleep for only five
hours a night, falling asleep at midnight and waking up with the lark at 5
a.m., according to Ras Benji.
Yet despite this apparently quiet life, Haile Selassie’s troubles were
mounting, thanks to his “extravagant spending,” combined with purchasing
Fairfield House and losing some of his assets, per Quentin Holbert, a scholar
of African imperial history who wrote a dissertation on the emperor’s
relationship to Britain and contributed a chapter to the recently published
book, “The Second World War in East Africa, 1940-1941.” In 2005, interwar files
from the Foreign Office were released detailing Haile Selassie’s financial
affairs, a full 65 years after the emperor left England, shedding light on his
exile. They revealed that the Foreign Office was reluctant to fund him because
it would sour Anglo-Italian relations just as the British were trying to drive
a wedge between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Government officials’ reactions to the emperor ran the gamut from
hesitant to supportive. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who would go on to
become the country’s prime minister two decades later, before resigning in the
wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, was “regarded in England and indeed throughout
the world as the champion of the League of Nations, and the most valiant friend
of Ethiopia,” Haile Selassie wrote in a draft chapter of his autobiography.
Eden’s private secretary greeted the emperor at Waterloo Station and Eden
visited him in London on his third day in the city.
Despite Eden’s sympathy, the emperor was met with mixed
feelings from other British officials. Then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin,
according to Bowers, is said to have ducked under a table when he saw the
emperor on a tour of the Palace of Westminster, evidently embarrassed over
being associated with Haile Selassie while Britain was trying to appease
Mussolini. The emperor also wrote that Baldwin was “notoriously uninterested in
foreign affairs.” Neville Chamberlain, who would succeed Baldwin as premier but
was then chancellor of the exchequer, delivered a speech arguing against
sanctioning Italy even before the emperor gave his own appeal to the League of
Nations, asking for more direct support.
“We should do nothing which could arouse Italian suspicions or be
construed as provocative,” said Chamberlain, who became prime minister in 1937.
His successor as chancellor, John Simon, shut down Eden’s suggestion that the
Secret Intelligence Service covertly offer a financial grant to the emperor,
fearing it would embarrass the government if discovered.
Instead, private organizations came to Haile Selassie’s aid. The
Abyssinia Association and British Red Cross donated to the emperor and his
family to “lighten the heavy responsibility which falls upon Him in
administering the many [Ethiopian] officials and Exiles.” The emperor was
grateful, although he confessed in his memoir that “the available assistance
could not offer succour to our violated country.”
In the end, a private philanthropist, later revealed to be William Cox,
came forward and offered him 10,000 pounds — worth over 800,000 pounds ($1.1
million) today, enough to ensure the emperor was “adequately provided for for
the next five years,” according to the Foreign Office. The payment “depended on
the Emperor discouraging any public appeal on his behalf, particularly one such
as that envisaged by the Abyssinian Association, which would cause the British
government considerable discomfort,” according to Graham Macklin, a researcher
at the University of Oslo and expert on the history of British intelligence.
After originally rejecting the offer, the emperor eventually accepted it, writing,
“It is difficult for us adequately to express our feelings of respect and
gratitude towards one who in wishing to remain unknown joins to his generosity
a rare disinterestedness.”
But confusion abounded among government officials when the Abyssinian Association
continued its appeal for funds for the emperor and his country, and Haile
Selassie’s secretary claimed he had never accepted the deal — incensing
officials who claimed he was “taking money under false pretences.” Committed to
his cause, the emperor refused to remain silent.
Beyond politics, there were also mixed feelings about the emperor. Brig.
Maurice Stanley Lush, who became a leader in the British military in Ethiopia,
called him “the pawn who thought he was king,” doubting his military prowess
while still acknowledging that he helped to unify Ethiopian and British troops.
And although remembered as a Pan-Africanist who helped establish the
Organization of African Unity, the emperor allegedly snubbed a delegation of
Pan-Africanists, including Marcus Garvey, who were present at his welcome at
Waterloo Station. Garvey, a Jamaican political activist who advocated the
return of those of African descent to Africa, became strongly critical of Haile
Selassie, calling him “at best … but a slave master.”
While in England, Haile Selassie also developed a friendship with
Pankhurst, the renowned women’s rights activist and daughter of Emmeline
Pankhurst, the suffragette who helped women win the right to vote in Britain.
The younger Pankhurst was present with her son Richard at Waterloo Station for
the emperor’s arrival. Although opposed to monarchy in principle, Pankhurst
empathized with Haile Selassie and despised fascism, passionately espousing the
Ethiopian cause. Later named an “honorary Ethiopian” by the emperor, she raised
money to build Ethiopia’s first teaching hospital and founded the New Times and
Ethiopia News to publicize Ethiopian struggles in the wake of the Italian
occupation.
Ultimately, the Pankhursts moved to the quiet western outskirts of Addis
Ababa — paralleling, albeit unintentionally, Haile Selassie settling in the
similarly peaceful western outskirts of Bath during his exile. They devoted
their life to the Ethiopian cause — Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia’s son, helped
found the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and wrote extensively about Ethiopia,
his mother and Haile Selassie. This fiercely English family of suffragettes and
activists made a second home in Ethiopia, underscoring the emperor’s influence
on their lives.
While in exile, the emperor also fundraised for Ethiopian refugees in
Palestine and other British colonies, dedicating his after-lunch talks with his
visitors in Bath to discussing “the fate of supporters in [Ethiopia] and the
refugees in Kenya, Sudan and Palestine,” whom he assisted with payments. “The
Abyssinian Refugees Relief Fund … raised substantial sums for distribution in
Africa,” writes the historian Lutz Haber, adding that “the [Abyssinian]
Association managed the Emperor of Ethiopia’s Fund which supported exiles in
Palestine when Haile Selassie was no longer able to do so.”
The emperor eventually left England in 1940 for Sudan, where he crossed
the border into Ethiopia and fought the Italians with both Ethiopian and
British forces (the latter made up largely of African troops, including
Sudanese, South African and other contingents), emerging victorious. The
Italians left Ethiopia in 1941. The emperor reclaimed his title.
His financial struggles notwithstanding, the emperor refused to be
silenced by money from the government and private donors. He continued to
pursue his cause, even as he risked poverty and the ire of British officials.
In spite of the British government’s exhortations to Haile Selassie to
keep a low profile, the emperor used his time in England to build a platform.
Eventually, his plans succeeded: Ethiopia was indeed liberated from Italian
occupation and Haile Selassie returned home. This period in the emperor’s life
may be relegated to a footnote in the history books, but this mistakenly
diminishes his quiet — but formative and productive — few years in Bath.
“As we were looking out through the windows straight
across, the countryside reminded us of the hills of Harar,” the former
Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie wistfully recalled in his memoir, “My Life and
Ethiopia’s Progress.”
But the emperor wasn’t writing these homesick sentences
from anywhere near the hills of Harar; rather, he was in the genteel city of
Bath, England, where he was exiled between 1936 and 1940. The city in
southwestern England, known for its Roman baths and medieval abbey, gave refuge
to the emperor after Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia. He lived
in Fairfield House, on the town’s western outskirts, and the period he spent
there proved to be transformative for his political program.
Although well documented in various photograph and
newspaper archives, Haile Selassie’s exile in Bath is not well known to the
modern public. Fairfield House is not included among Visit Bath’s list of
historic sites, nor does it feature on Time Out or The New York Times’ lists of
places to visit in the city. (There was a subtle irony in Haile Selassie
fleeing the Italian occupation and ending up in Bath, which was formerly a
Roman city, and living in Fairfield House, an Italianate villa.) “A lot of
biographies of the emperor … only give a small amount of space to the exile as
if it was an insignificant period, but I would argue it had a massive impact on
him,” Keith Bowers, author of “Imperial Exile” — the first and only intensive
study of Haile Selassie’s time in England — told me.
Indeed, despite spending profligately and consequently
facing financial difficulties that led to a dependence on the British
government and private donors for funding, the emperor accomplished a great
deal during his exile in Bath. He rallied British organizations to back the
Ethiopian cause and sought financial aid for those who had fled before Italy’s
advances to Palestine, British Somaliland and other British colonies. In
addition, he befriended British campaigners, including the prominent women’s
rights activist Sylvia Pankhurst, who championed his cause, committing to such
an extent that she eventually moved permanently to Ethiopia.
In the summer of 1936, Haile Selassie gave a powerful,
symbolic speech at the League of Nations condemning Italian aggression and
asking European nations for their support. He made waves among activist groups
in Britain and many student groups embraced the emperor: He was conferred
honorary life membership by the Cambridge Union, the world’s oldest
continuously running debating society, and a group of students at the
University of Edinburgh nominated him as rector. It was an active time for
Haile Selassie, during which he built and developed a strong network of support
and used his platform. Far from being a break in a quiet English town, these
few years in exile were vital to his cause.
Just as Haile Selassie’s time in England is often
relegated to the margins in his life story, military action in East Africa is a
similarly overlooked part of World War II. When Mussolini became Italian prime
minister in 1922, he was determined to colonize Ethiopia to expand his
country’s empire and regain its prestige after Ethiopia had defeated Italy in
the 1896 Battle of Adwa, preventing its colonization. But historians devote
more attention to the war’s European and Japanese fronts, rather than its
African one, to the detriment of understanding both Mussolini’s colonial
project in Africa and Ethiopia’s resistance.
It was a tricky moment for Britain diplomatically. The
Italian Ambassador Dino Grandi warned that any British governmental skepticism
of Italy’s claim to Ethiopia “would have an exceedingly bad effect in Rome.”
This included any recognition of Haile Selassie’s title as the country’s
emperor, a claim that Italy rejected. Nevertheless, Britain offered him
asylum.
Haile Selassie, who had traveled to Europe in 1924 as
Ethiopia’s prince regent, was already famous in the West. “The press covered
him a lot, the national press, the regional press, which was very well read in
those days,” Bowers, a former BBC producer, told me. The emperor was seen as a
reformer, modernizing Ethiopia by developing its education, financial and
military sectors, and the country was admitted to the League of Nations in
1923. His coronation as emperor in 1930 was the subject of significant Western
press coverage, and European and North American representatives attended the
event. But most significantly, his resistance to Italian occupation symbolized
a non-Western nation standing up to the injustices of Western colonialism,
garnering global attention as Europe was catapulted into war. When he fled from
the Italians occupying his country, it was a British warship that rescued him,
underscoring his existing influence even before he set foot on English shores.
Perhaps because of Italy’s warning to Britain, or perhaps
simply because he was so famous, Haile Selassie was officially classified as an
“incognito” visitor by the British authorities to minimize public scrutiny
around his exile, according to the economic historian Lutz Haber, who wrote an
article for Bath History on the emperor’s time in the city. But the world
already knew of his plans: On June 3, 1936, before settling in Bath, the
emperor arrived at London’s Waterloo Station to jubilant fanfare. “Outside the
station, there was a wild rush by Londoners to catch the first glimpse of the
monarch who has been front-page news for nearly a year,” said a Reuters
newsreel documenting the event.
Later in the same month that he arrived in England, Haile
Selassie was already on the move, with similarly exuberant attention from
crowds. “This is a journey of hope,” Haile Selassie told them, as he left to
give a speech at the League of Nations in Geneva, where he was also greeted by
cheering crowds of Europeans. Yet his hope was for naught: Despite the
Emperor’s passionate address on June 30, 1936 — still referred to as his
“greatest hour” — when he rebuked Italy for its use of chemical weapons and
condemned the league for failing to intervene, the league neglected to act. In
the words of Paul Henze, author of “Layers of Time: A History of
Ethiopia,” the speech won Haile Selassie “applause from the assembly and
worldwide sympathy, but not much else.” The very next month, the league
overturned its sanctions against Italy and all but one of its member nations
recognized Italy’s claim to Ethiopia.
This setback didn’t stop the emperor’s advocacy for his
country. He returned to England to continue his political organizing, settling
in Bath. “From London one reached the world,” the emperor declared in one of
the unfinished chapters meant for his memoir.
Britain was indeed strategically positioned. France and
Switzerland were too close to Italy: An exile in either country could cause
problems between neighbors, especially for Switzerland, which maintained a
policy of neutrality in the years leading up to World War II. In addition, the
U.K. “had the power, military power, and strategic position in order to
potentially liberate Ethiopia,” said Ras Benji, an independent researcher who
focuses on Haile Selassie’s imperial rule and exile and is the operations
manager of Fairfield House. “It could have been quite a swift job if the
British put their full mind to that cause, but at that time, they were
appeasing Mussolini.”
But if London was Britain’s political nexus, why was Bath
the location the emperor chose for his exile? “The main reason he chose Bath,”
Ras Benji said, “was the hot springs, because the Roman baths in those days and
the mineral hospital nearby were known for treating all sorts of ailments,”
including the burns the emperor suffered from Italian use of chemical weapons,
in particular the substance known as mustard (dichlorethyl sulphide). According
to a Bath Chronicle reporter in 1936, “Bath was the only place in the United
Kingdom where the monarch had felt really well.”
The surrounding quiet in Bath also offered the emperor
refuge. He lived a seemingly domestic life. Although he made several public
appearances in Bath, attending a garden party in Englishcombe and the Bath Dog
Show, as well as visiting the Post Office Exhibition, “we did not go to the
theatre or places of entertainment,” he reflected in his memoir. “Our only time
of relaxation was when occasionally we conversed with our children,” who, along
with his wife, joined the emperor in exile. “In the evenings we were engaged in
reading books until midnight and in writing the history of our past life.”
Between praying, reading and championing his cause, the emperor was known to
sleep for only five hours a night, falling asleep at midnight and waking up
with the lark at 5 a.m., according to Ras Benji.
Yet despite this apparently quiet life, Haile Selassie’s
troubles were mounting, thanks to his “extravagant spending,” combined with
purchasing Fairfield House and losing some of his assets, per Quentin Holbert,
a scholar of African imperial history who wrote a dissertation on the emperor’s
relationship to Britain and contributed a chapter to the recently published
book, “The Second World War in East Africa, 1940-1941.” In 2005, interwar files
from the Foreign Office were released detailing Haile Selassie’s financial
affairs, a full 65 years after the emperor left England, shedding light on his
exile. They revealed that the Foreign Office was reluctant to fund him because
it would sour Anglo-Italian relations just as the British were trying to drive
a wedge between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Government officials’ reactions to the emperor ran the
gamut from hesitant to supportive. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who would go
on to become the country’s prime minister two decades later, before resigning
in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, was “regarded in England and indeed
throughout the world as the champion of the League of Nations, and the most
valiant friend of Ethiopia,” Haile Selassie wrote in a draft chapter of his
autobiography. Eden’s private secretary greeted the emperor at Waterloo Station
and Eden visited him in London on his third day in the city.
Despite Eden’s sympathy, the emperor was met with mixed
feelings from other British officials. Then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin,
according to Bowers, is said to have ducked under a table when he saw the
emperor on a tour of the Palace of Westminster, evidently embarrassed over
being associated with Haile Selassie while Britain was trying to appease
Mussolini. The emperor also wrote that Baldwin was “notoriously uninterested in
foreign affairs.” Neville Chamberlain, who would succeed Baldwin as premier but
was then chancellor of the exchequer, delivered a speech arguing against
sanctioning Italy even before the emperor gave his own appeal to the League of
Nations, asking for more direct support.
“We should do nothing which could arouse Italian
suspicions or be construed as provocative,” said Chamberlain, who became prime
minister in 1937. His successor as chancellor, John Simon, shut down Eden’s
suggestion that the Secret Intelligence Service covertly offer a financial
grant to the emperor, fearing it would embarrass the government if discovered.
Instead, private organizations came to Haile Selassie’s
aid. The Abyssinia Association and British Red Cross donated to the emperor and
his family to “lighten the heavy responsibility which falls upon Him in
administering the many [Ethiopian] officials and Exiles.” The emperor was
grateful, although he confessed in his memoir that “the available assistance
could not offer succour to our violated country.”
In the end, a private philanthropist, later revealed to be
William Cox, came forward and offered him 10,000 pounds — worth over 800,000
pounds ($1.1 million) today, enough to ensure the emperor was “adequately
provided for for the next five years,” according to the Foreign Office. The
payment “depended on the Emperor discouraging any public appeal on his behalf,
particularly one such as that envisaged by the Abyssinian Association, which
would cause the British government considerable discomfort,” according to
Graham Macklin, a researcher at the University of Oslo and expert on the
history of British intelligence. After originally rejecting the offer, the
emperor eventually accepted it, writing, “It is difficult for us adequately to
express our feelings of respect and gratitude towards one who in wishing to
remain unknown joins to his generosity a rare disinterestedness.”
But confusion abounded among government officials when the
Abyssinian Association continued its appeal for funds for the emperor and his
country, and Haile Selassie’s secretary claimed he had never accepted the deal
— incensing officials who claimed he was “taking money under false pretences.”
Committed to his cause, the emperor refused to remain silent.
Beyond politics, there were also mixed feelings about the
emperor. Brig. Maurice Stanley Lush, who became a leader in the British
military in Ethiopia, called him “the pawn who thought he was king,” doubting
his military prowess while still acknowledging that he helped to unify
Ethiopian and British troops. And although remembered as a Pan-Africanist who
helped establish the Organization of African Unity, the emperor allegedly
snubbed a delegation of Pan-Africanists, including Marcus Garvey, who were
present at his welcome at Waterloo Station. Garvey, a Jamaican political
activist who advocated the return of those of African descent to Africa, became
strongly critical of Haile Selassie, calling him “at best … but a slave
master.”
While in England, Haile Selassie also developed a
friendship with Pankhurst, the renowned women’s rights activist and daughter of
Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette who helped women win the right to vote in
Britain. The younger Pankhurst was present with her son Richard at Waterloo
Station for the emperor’s arrival. Although opposed to monarchy in principle,
Pankhurst empathized with Haile Selassie and despised fascism, passionately
espousing the Ethiopian cause. Later named an “honorary Ethiopian” by the
emperor, she raised money to build Ethiopia’s first teaching hospital and
founded the New Times and Ethiopia News to publicize Ethiopian struggles in the
wake of the Italian occupation.
Ultimately, the Pankhursts moved to the quiet western
outskirts of Addis Ababa — paralleling, albeit unintentionally, Haile Selassie
settling in the similarly peaceful western outskirts of Bath during his exile.
They devoted their life to the Ethiopian cause — Richard Pankhurst, Sylvia’s
son, helped found the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and wrote extensively
about Ethiopia, his mother and Haile Selassie. This fiercely English family of
suffragettes and activists made a second home in Ethiopia, underscoring the
emperor’s influence on their lives.
While in exile, the emperor also fundraised for Ethiopian
refugees in Palestine and other British colonies, dedicating his after-lunch
talks with his visitors in Bath to discussing “the fate of supporters in
[Ethiopia] and the refugees in Kenya, Sudan and Palestine,” whom he assisted
with payments. “The Abyssinian Refugees Relief Fund … raised substantial sums
for distribution in Africa,” writes the historian Lutz Haber, adding that “the
[Abyssinian] Association managed the Emperor of Ethiopia’s Fund which supported
exiles in Palestine when Haile Selassie was no longer able to do so.”
The emperor eventually left England in 1940 for Sudan,
where he crossed the border into Ethiopia and fought the Italians with both
Ethiopian and British forces (the latter made up largely of African troops,
including Sudanese, South African and other contingents), emerging victorious.
The Italians left Ethiopia in 1941. The emperor reclaimed his title.
His financial struggles notwithstanding, the emperor
refused to be silenced by money from the government and private donors. He
continued to pursue his cause, even as he risked poverty and the ire of British
officials.
In spite of the British government’s exhortations to Haile
Selassie to keep a low profile, the emperor used his time in England to build a
platform. Eventually, his plans succeeded: Ethiopia was indeed liberated from
Italian occupation and Haile Selassie returned home. This period in the
emperor’s life may be relegated to a footnote in the history books, but this
mistakenly diminishes his quiet — but formative and productive — few years in
Bath.
Source: https://newlinesmag.com/essays/haile-selassies-refuge-in-britain/
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