Richard Meinertzhagen

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Richard Henry Meinertzhagen (March 3, 1878 - June 17, 1967) was a British soldier and intelligence officer with an interest in birds and Zionism.

Meinertzhagen was born to a wealthy English family. His last name derives from a town in Germany, the home of an ancestor. On his mother's side (the Potters), Richard was of English and perhaps partly Jewish ancestry (see his Diary of a Black Sheep, 1964). He also had a dash of Spanish royal blood, rumored in his lifetime but confirmed since his death.

His passion for bird-watching (and -shooting) was encouraged by a family friend, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who, like Darwin, was an ardent empiricist and who took young Richard on walks, urging him to study the natural world: "Observe, record, explain!"

Meinertzhagen joined the British Army early and was stationed in various places in India, Africa and Palestine. In East Africa in 1905, he crushed a major revolt by killing the tribal leader who led it. During the Palestine campaign of World War I Meinertzhagen let a haversack containing false British battle plans fall into Turkish hands, thereby contributing much to the surprise British attack that took Beersheba and all of Gaza. The incident and attack are depicted in the 1987 film "The Lighthorsemen."

He attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and was Allenby’s Chief Political Officer, involved in the creation of the Palestine Mandate, which eventually led to the creation of the State of Israel. He attained the rank of colonel, but was dismissed from the service for insubordination in 1926.

Meinertzhagen had a hatred of anti-Semitism, and for decades promoted the founding of Israel. But he was also a Nazi-sympathizer in the 1930s, observing that Jews had dominated Germany in the 1920s, and that the Soviet Union posed a major threat to Europe.

He was a prolific diarist and published four books based on his diaries, which make fascinating and often insightful reading. However, his Middle East Diary (1959) contains dozens of entries that are probably fictional, including those on T.E. Lawrence and on Hitler (Meinertzhagen's alleged "Heil Meinertzhagen" salute and assassination attempt on Hitler). Lockman, in his book shows that Meinertzhagen later falsified his entries on T. E. Lawrence. The original diaries kept in the Rhodes House Library contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and there are oddities in the page numbering.

Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Annie Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard.

As the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessing a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens, Meinertzhagen was long considered one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. Yet his magnum opus, Birds of Arabia (1954), is believed to have been based on the unpublished manuscript of another naturalist, George Bates, who is not sufficiently credited in that book.

He also named a series of birds for Theresa Clay, a close "confidante" 33 years younger than himself.

In the 1990s, an analysis of Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring, UK, revealed a fraud involving his thefts and falsifications. Alan Knox, who uncovered the fraud, said in 1993: "Meinertzhagen had stolen the best specimens of other people's collections and then proceeded to fabricate data to go with them." More recent research indicates the fraud was even more extensive than first thought.

Meinertzhagen discovered a Giant Forest Hog in Africa, a species thus named Hylochoerus meinertzhageni.

His three biographers have largely lionized him, but T.E. Lawrence, a sometime colleague in 1919 and again 1921, described him more ambiguously:

"Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain...." (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926).

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References

Ali, Salim. The Fall of a Sparrow. Oxford University Press, Delhi. 1985. xv, 265 pp.
Boxall, Peter. The legendary Richard Meinertzhagen. The Army Quarterly and Defence Journal [October 1990] 120(4): 459-462.
Capstick, P.H., Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. 1998.
Cocker, Mark. Richard Meinertzhagen. Soldier, Scientist and Spy. Secker & Warburg, London, 1989. 292 pp.
Dalton, R. Ornithologists stunned by bird collector's deceit. Nature [Sept 2005] 437(7057): 302.
Jones, Robert F. The Kipkororor chronicles. MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History [Spring 1991] 3(3): 38-47.
Judd, Alan. Eccentric hero. New Statesman and Society [June 23, 1989] 2(55): 37-38.
Knox, Alan G. Richard Meinertzhagen-a case of fraud examined. Ibis [July 1993] 135(3): 320-325.
Lockman, J.N. Meinertzhagen's Diary Ruse. 1995, 114 pp.
Lord, John. Duty, Honour, Empire. New York: Random House, 1970.
Mangan, J. A. Shorter notices. English Historical Review [October 1993] 108(429): 1062.
Vines, Gail, 1994. Bird world in a flap about species fraud. New Scientist [7 May 1994] 142(1924): 10.
Wijesinghe,Priyantha (11 Jan 1998) BirdChat List "Meinertzhagen (Was: Forest Owlet - more clarifications, etc)"
wa Tiong'o, Ngugi. Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary. Heinemann Educational Books, London, 1981. p. 34

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