Afterword
Tangier, May 1992
ONE OF WALTER HARRIS’S NICKNAMES at Harrow had been the Liar and for the rest of his life he accepted with cheerful equanimity a reputation for fibbing, saying that you should never spoil a good story by sticking to the truth. So is Morocco That Was fact or fiction? Its author would himself have brushed the question aside with a wave of his hand, and steered the conversation into less boring channels with another of his teasing anecdotes. We might have heard how he and the young princes of the Greek royal house had once made apple-pie beds for the Empress Frederick’s ladies-in-waiting; or about his father, as trustee of the Wilde marriage settlement, walking up Bond Street to pay the spendthrift’s more pressing debts – with Oscar not too far behind contracting new ones. But the question of the book’s veracity remains.
The highly ornamented jokes, like the fat Jewish petitioner who falls from her pillar in front of the sultan, are all obviously pure invention-until we learn from Dr Verdon, the court physician, that he personally witnessed that particular incident. So even the jokes have some element of truth, and there were careful men with a thorough knowledge of Morocco who maintained that everything he wrote about it was based on fact. The facts themselves were often bizarre in a country that had for centuries resisted all internal change and outside influences. The story of the soldiers breaking off their attack on the Zimmour to remove their trousers and fill them with grain no longer seems far-fetched when we remember that it was normal for military operations to be halted by any opportunity for looting, and that villagers did not store their grain in sacks but in huge jars buried in the ground. Harris uses selection and exaggeration in order to entertain us. But a caricature that exactly catches the features, expression and posture of its subject does not give a false picture just because the head is made three times the size of the body.
Selection and exaggeration serve a less innocent purpose, however, in his accounts of his own part in events. The truth here is often deliberately distorted so that he himself shall be always centre-stage, using his sagacity, charm and local knowledge to deal with problems that have baffled everyone else, or displaying nonchalance in the face of danger. Take his visit to Fez in the aftermath of Mulai Hassan’s death. He gives the impression that he was acting as Satow’s confidential emissary to the Moroccan notables there, with whom he had personal influence; and he implies that he was at least partly responsible for persuading them to recognise Mulai Abdul Aziz as the new sultan. In fact, though he is not mentioned by Harris, there was at Fez a British consul, James Macleod, from whose private papers we known the truth: Harris indeed came with Satow’s blessing, but as The Times correspondent with no official position or unofficial authority to interfere; he did not even arrive until a day or two after the notables had unanimously decided to endorse Mulai Abdul Aziz, and it was Macleod who introduced him to Mokri and the other notables, by whom he was quite unknown. The consul otherwise confirms the story as Harris tells it: his dash from Tangier on horseback, disguised as a wild mountaineer, with but a single companion; the unsettled state of the country; the call at Wazzan, where Macleod supposes Satow wished to make use of Harris’s friendship with the highly-influential shereefs of the remote little town to urge upon them the British government’s interest in a smooth succession for Mulai Abdul Aziz. Harris’s role was therefore creditable and interesting enough without twisting the facts. Why did he do so, knowing that Macleod and others would note what he had done?
In the days of empire the British found particular satisfaction in the notion of the gentleman freelance doing his bit in remote places, preferably in some picturesque disguise, during the long intervals between reappearances at his West End club. In real life there were such famous examples as Sir Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, and a host of lesser men who crop up constantly in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine. In fiction, Kipling gives us Strickland Sahib, Buchan has Sandy Arbuthnot, and Walter Harris contributes that heroic example of the breed, Walter Harris. A later generation, which rejects heroes of any sort in favour of celebrities, may look askance at this slightly bogus character and his creator. Many of Harris’s contemporaries, on the other hand, felt able to dismiss the braggadocio as a minor foible; the man was after all so amiable and such good company, and to some extent truly represented a type which his fellow-countrymen considered flattering to themselves. Macleod, for one, remained a friend and in a foreword to Harris’s last book, East Again, published posthumously in 1934, paid him a warm tribute.
In his later years Harris mellowed, and if he had lived longer he might eventually have given us the story of his life with a new modesty, although it is difficult to imagine him ever sticking too closely to the facts. That he had much of interest to tell may appear from a biographical summary and a glance at some of the details, which is all that space will allow us here.
Walter Burton Harris was born in London on 29th August 1866, one of seven children. His father, of Quaker descent, was a rich and respected figure in shipping and insurance in the City. His mother came from a prosperous Lowland Scots family. At Harrow he had neither the physique to do well at games nor the temperament to shine academically, although he did win the Lower School Prize for Knowledge of Shakespeare. Rejecting any employment that would have tied him to an office, he came by chance to Tangier at the end of 1886 and chose to settle there, becoming eventually the Morocco correspondent of The Times. He was a tireless traveller in out-of-the-way places, wrote books and magazine articles, built houses and created gardens. He made hardly any enemies in his life and few really close friends, but his high spirits, gift for telling stories, good humour and kindliness earned him the regard of a great variety of people: European royalty and Chinese coolies, pro-consuls and aesthetes, missionaries, debutantes, Kurdish mountaineers, cabinet ministers, his Moroccan servant’s little daughters and latterly most of Tangier’s cosmopolitan population. His marriage in 1898 was an immediate failure; nearly thirty years later he had an affair with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter; but he was predominantly homosexual, perhaps largely platonic and certainly very discreet. The French gave him the Legion of Honour and other decorations; from the British, to his intense disappointment, he got nothing, but it was his own fault for having in 1902 made a foolish attempt at arm-twisting for which he was never forgiven by the powers that be. He died of a stroke in his sixty-seventh year in 1933.
A contemporary at Harrow later remembered two things in particular about Walter’s school-days: how as a fifteen-year-old in one of the lowest forms in the school he was still perfectly able to sustain a grownup conversation on equal terms during a Sunday tea with his form master; and the way he earned the name of Liar by telling incredible stories about himself, such as how he spent most of the holidays with the Prince of Wales’s sons, although he had never in fact met them. His own account of his time at the school includes a characteristic anecdote about the young Prince Emich of Leiningen, a boy in the same house. One day the prince’s father took him to Windsor, dressed in the ‘bumfreezer’ of the Lower School, to be presented privately to his relative, Queen Victoria. After his return he told the other boys about his reception. The Queen had looked at him for a moment or two and told him to turn round. Obeying, His fledgling Serene Highness had heard the only other royal words addressed to him that day: ‘Emich, you are much too fat behind for those short jackets’.
His schoolfellows also learnt from the Liar about his trips on the Thames river steamers with James McNeill Whistler who, to retain the image of what he had seen, would sometimes close his eyes and not open them again until he had got back to his studio, guided by Walter. They did in fact know one another at this period, while the Harrises were living at 9 Chelsea Embankment, just round the corner from Whistler’s house in Tite Street. The painter’s visit to Cambridge in 1885, to give his Ten O’clock lecture, coincided with Walter’s brief and unfruitful studies as an undergraduate at Caius, and he spent part of the afternoon in Walter’s rooms. Also in Tite Street was Oscar Wilde. Walter’s parents had known Constance before her marriage and Oscar was a frequent guest at the Harris dinner table. Young Walter was equally often at Oscar’s house and at the surprising age of eighteen he became godfather to the Wildes’ elder son, Cyril. But in these early years as throughout his life, nothing appealed to him so much as travel and he was always ready to forsake artistic circles in London to kick about the world, with very little money in his pocket, on some tramp steamer belonging to his father or any other cargo boat in which he could cadge a passage to an interesting destination. The Times, in its obituary, exaggerates in saying he had been round the world by the age of eighteen; but he had visited Madeira, Malta, Athens, Constantinople, Egypt, India, South Africa and Archangel before his first arrival in Tangier at the age of twenty.
There were several reasons why Tangier should have appealed so strongly to Walter that on his first visit he decided to settle in the place. It was pleasing to the eye: the waters of the bay sparkling in the winter sunshine; the square white houses almost all still within the old ramparts; the Biblical figures thronging the narrow, roughly cobbled streets; the sandy lanes meandering out between tall hedges of Spanish reed into the surrounding tangle of lumpy little hills dotted here and there with country villas half-hidden in shady gardens. The population, though only twenty thousand, was diverse enough even for somebody with Walter’s strong interest in people: a small majority of native Muslims, aloof and secretive; the self-important diplomatic representatives of the Powers, who ran everything in the town in so far as they were ever able to agree on anything among themselves; some prominent private residents, few in number, of various nationalities and all more or less eccentric; a small coterie of European painters; sundry shady characters, coy about their real names and true countries of origin; many native and foreign Jews, making themselves indispensable in all sorts of ways; and a choice always of smiling young idlers, ready at the drop of a hat to set out with you for London or Timbuctoo or fall in with any other suggestions. The town offered all the mystery of the East only three or four hours by paddle-steamer from Europe; and, visible far inland, the mountains beckoned to adventure in forbidden, lawless, tribal territory. Lastly, and perhaps this was the biggest attraction of all for a young gentleman living on an allowance from his father of only £180 a year, the necessities of life were so cheap that he would be able to afford a personal servant and possibly even a horse.
Walter’s most remarkable journey outside Morocco was through the Yemen at the beginning of 1892. The Turks had shut out all foreigners while trying to suppress a general rebellion there, but he managed to reach the capital, Sanaa, by taking the three-hundred-mile route from Aden which had seldom if ever been travelled by a European before, and by passing himself off to the Turkish frontier officials as a poor Greek trader. To support that character and avoid tempting the marauding rebels who had for three months stopped all caravan movement on this road, he travelled with hardly any animals or baggage, only a few local men and two young servants: Abdurrahman who had come with him from Morocco; and Saïd, a typical Yemeni, handsome, bright-eyed, always ready with a song, and clad mainly in a blue loincloth. The little party shared many hardships and some real dangers but also the pleasures of the journey: the wonderful night skies of the early desert stages; the enchanting scenery of later days in the mountains; and above all the camaraderie of an adventure which their leader, still only twenty-five, so obviously relished as much as any of them. He ate the same poor food, slept in the same comfortless room in the khans and joined them in the primitive little wayside cafés, sitting cross-legged on the floor for a chat and a joke while the amber mouthpiece of the hookah passed from hand to hand. In Sanaa, suspecting he had been sent from Aden to stir up the rebellion, the Turks politely but firmly kept him for five days in prison, where he and the servants went down with malaria, and then sent the whole lot of them to the Red Sea coast under the guard of two soldiers. It was in keeping with the spirit of the whole expedition that the two soldiers were at once admitted to the fellowship of the little band until they reached their journey’s end at Hodaidah. Walter’s book, A Journey through to Yemen, leaves us in no doubt he would always remember that country as Arabia indeed Felix.
During the nineties he found time for frequent visits home and to the Continent. Though not generally one for the fleshpots, he liked occasionally to join in the amusements of the fashionable world; so, naturally, in August he was to be found in Homburg and it was there in 1894 that his friend, Sir Edward Malet, British ambassador at Berlin, introduced him to the Prince of Wales. HRH was amused by this virtuoso raconteur, Walter was flattered by his reception, and they formed a friendship which lasted tenuously until Albert Edward’s death. Walter’s youngest brother, Clement, was also a virtuoso, a brilliant amateur pianist, who had on that account become a favourite of the Princess of Wales after playing to her at the royal palace in Athens the previous year on a visit with the blind Landgraf of Hesse. During the Homburg season of 1896 the Empress Frederick invited both brothers to Friedrichshof for a family dinner she was giving to the Waleses and other royal relatives. Clement could not go, so Walter went by himself. After dinner the empress started pressing Walter to take Clement’s place at the piano, and the more he protested that he had never played a note in his life the more she insisted that he should not let false modesty rob them of the pleasure of hearing him. As the empress led him to the piano, Walter appealed in desperation to the Princess of Wales, but she only smiled sweetly and added her own pleas for some music. Then suddenly there was a ripple of laughter and the assembled company owned up to a prearranged practical joke. Poor Clement threw away his life the following year at the age of twenty-five, fighting as a volunteer with the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish war.
There was always scepticism about Walter’s tales of hobnobbing with aristocratic and royal personages. As with his accounts of Morocco in the old days, he certainly embroidered the facts, but there is no doubt about their underlying truth. This is well illustrated by one of the stories told by G. H. Selous, of the British Consular Service, in his book, Appointment to Fez. In the spring of 1908 General Lyautey was on a visit to Morocco for consultations with the French field commanders there. As Walter was in Casablanca at the same time and they had never met, he was invited to dinner at the mess. The general had previously heard Walter ridiculed for his snobbishness and purposely steered the conversation to encourage him to talk about his important friends. Walter took the bait and the French officers had a good laugh up their sleeves, though Lyautey had already come under Walter’s spell and they were to become friends. Not long after his return to Paris, Lyautey was presented to King Edward VII as a general who had recently been in Morocco. ‘Morocco?’, said the King. ‘Then perhaps, General, you will have met my good friend, Mr Harris, out there’. Telling the story to Selous four years later, Lyautey’s eyes twinkled as he added, ‘Alors, Selous, j’étais bien fixé sur notre ami mutuel! Rien de faux là’.
Though his first contribution to The Times was published on 22nd September 1887 it was years before Walter had regular work for them in Morocco. The reason is suggested by the title of this first piece, ‘Troglodyte Remains in Southern Morocco’: little or nothing of interest was happening in the country. But having got a foot in the door at Printing House Square and being short of money, he kept offering to hurry as their Special Correspondent to any part of the world that came into the news. They gave some support to his journeys in the Yemen and Persian Kurdistan but otherwise he had to be content with sending occasional reports about Morocco in return for quite haphazard payments. Then from early 1903, when he was put on a monthly salary, there was a dramatic change. Suddenly nothing interested the world more than the Morocco Question: who among the Powers should get what out of that country’s expected early demise. So, until the Protectorates were established in 1912, he had an important job. His local knowledge, Moroccan contacts and personal standing at all the Tangier legations enabled him to do it well, and in 1906 he was at last brought onto the staff. In Morocco, he said, the real skill lay in knowing what not to report. It meant hard work, fewer visits home and only modest pay, but he now had independent means and his reward was the prestige and power that went with representing the world’s leading newspaper. After the 1914–18 war Morocco continued for a time to attract some attention because of controversy over Tangier’s international status, and the war in the Rif; but by 1926 and for the remaining seven years of his life there was no longer real justification for a full-time correspondent at Tangier. For old times’ sake, however, they kept him on, and when he used his new freedom to go off again to the East he had the definite honour and rather vague duties of travelling as their Special Correspondent.
Probably because of Quaker ideas about the proper stewardship of wealth, Walter’s father never owned any of the houses he lived in or the land over which he enjoyed shooting. Walter himself, brought up among the sons of landowners, may have felt keenly the want of a single ancestral acre, and this perhaps explains his lifelong passion for building houses and creating gardens. His first property still survives: the ‘Moorish’ Villa Harris in its many acres of garden on the eastern side of Tangier bay. Having bought the land for next to nothing because of its isolated position, he began building a small house there in the early nineties while still in precarious financial circumstances. Soon afterwards he came into the first of several substantial inheritances, which enabled him to enlarge the house and bring from Fez the best craftsmen and many camel-loads of the finest mosaic tiles to decorate the interior; at the same time trees were imported from France, Spain and Algeria to create a romantic garden inhabited by white peacocks and other exotic birds. After Ba Ahmed’s death, however, insecurity spread even to the immediate vicinity of Tangier and at the end of 1904, despite the protection of a platoon of soldiers, the house was attacked by Anjera bandits and Walter only narrowly escaped a second capture. He was obliged to move into the town and never again lived in the villa which he had only just completed at a cost of £12,000, about half a million in today’s money. Later he built three other houses in Tangier and acquired a fourth by purchase. The five were in various styles and mostly designed by Walter himself. Three had large gardens. His last house, the ‘Moorish’ Dar Sidi Hosni high up in the old town, was unfinished at his death and bought many years later by Barbara Hutton.
Walter was the benign sort of snob who is fascinated by the romance of titles and lineage, so his choice of Lady Mary Savile to be his wife may have had something to do with her being a daughter of the fourth Earl of Mexborough. The wedding in July 1898 was a grand event at the Roman Catholic church in Warwick Street, with Cardinal Vaughan officiating and Lord Granville best man. There were presents from his friends the Prince of Wales, the Crown Prince of Greece and the Grand Duke Michael of Russia. But things went wrong even during the honeymoon; they separated as soon as it was over and she is not mentioned in the will he made a few weeks later. She came out to stay with him in Tangier for a short time at the end of 1899 but they could not patch things up, and in 1905 the marriage was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. It may well have been her fault. At thirty-six she was set in a mould of rigid formality; servants were required to address her in the third person, as ‘her ladyship’, which was already old-fashioned, and Walter claimed that she wore her pearls in bed. A sort of fondness nevertheless continued between them and increased after she lost the companionship of her only sister, Princess Loewenstein, who disappeared in 1927 during an attempt to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic. Walter’s last book is dedicated to Lady Mary.
Barbara Harrison, whom he met at the end of 1926, was also from an ‘aristocratic’ background, a prominent Virginian family that had supplied the United States with two Presidents; but otherwise she could not have been more different from Lady Mary. She was scarcely more than twenty-one, totally without inhibitions or respect for social conventions, and strikingly beautiful. Walter was bowled over; and although he was over sixty she was captivated by his vivacity, his stories and his air of mystery. They talked, not too seriously on her part, about getting married, and drifted into an affair. Late in 1927 she went with him to the Far East on what he said was a secret mission disguised as work for The Times. At his insistence her friend Bernardine Szold came too, for the sake of appearances. Barbara’s rather subversive behaviour and Bernardine’s gypsy-style clothes and painted toenails caused some raised eyebrows among the sahibs and memsahibs on the voyage out, which upset their escort and led to recurrent tension between the three. But they also had plenty of fun during their seven months together. In Bangkok they were invited to a reception at the British legation. For a joke, Walter, their mentor on all points of protocol East of Suez, told the two young women they must dress in nothing but black, with black stockings, because the Bishop of Singapore would be present as guest of honour. Their entry caused quite a stir in the legation drawing-room, where of course all the other women were in the brightest colours and the bishop himself in purple. Finally, however, Barbara tired of his nagging, and in the Dutch East Indies the two walked out on him. They are not mentioned in East for Pleasure, Walter’s book about the journey, but Bernardine is the splendidly scatterbrained heroine of his piece, ‘The Letter of Introduction’, published by Punch on 23rd April 1930. Barbara later remarked that he had taken their desertion like a gentleman, and both women remembered him with affection for the rest of their lives.
In the summer of 1930, a few days after his sixty-fourth birthday, he set out once more for the Far East. Readers of East Again will know how much he enjoyed himself. He was away nearly a year and a half, and free for the whole of that time from the heart trouble and nervous prostration which had been bothering him intermittently since the early nineteen-twenties. By the beginning of 1933 his plans were laid for yet another journey: he was to leave Tangier on 9th March for Malta and two months in Tunisia and Tripoli working for The Times, and then go on to still-undecided countries further east. Early in January he had a little passing trouble with one of his eyes; then, just a week before he was due to leave, he suffered what was unmistakably a mild stroke which partly paralysed his face and left him confused and depressed. They could not dissuade him from sailing but he became worse on the voyage and was put in hospital as soon as they reached Malta. On 20th March a more severe stroke left him mostly unconscious and unable to speak, and on 4th April, there in the hospital, he died. The Times obituary ran to some one thousand seven hundred words. King George V’s Private Secretary telephoned the newspaper to say that His Majesty sympathised with them in the loss of a man he had known personally, whose messages he had always enjoyed. Marshal Lyautey was among the many who sent their condolences to the family.
For years an outlandish rumour persisted that he had not in fact died from natural causes but been murdered by the French secret service. Walter would surely have preferred some such mysterious, dramatic ending for his legend. But at least he could not have wished for a better funeral than he received in Tangier a month after his death. The family were represented by his surviving brother, Sir Austin Harris, the banker, and by his sister Isabel from Egypt. The official mourners included everybody who was anybody in the town: the Mendoub (local viceroy of the sultan), the entire diplomatic and consular corps, and all the highest dignitaries of the International Zone, including the judges of the Mixed Tribunal. There was a huge crowd of ordinary Moroccans, some of whom had come long distances, and most offices and shops were closed in a spontaneous gesture of affection and respect. He would have welcomed too some last touch of comedy in the proceedings, and this was provided by the ecclesiastical authorities. Long and anxiously they deliberated how to bury at St Andrew’s Protestant church a man who had been, since the time of his marriage, at least nominally a Roman Catholic. In the end the Catholic funeral service was conducted at the port. His coffin, draped in the Union Jack, was then taken in procession up to St Andrew’s, where the Spanish Franciscans, who are said to have come for the purpose at dead of night, had previously re-consecrated the grave according to their own rite. He rests there still, in the dappled sunlight.