Richard Meinertzhagen
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Richard 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 British family. He was a contemporary of T. E. Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame and was positioned in various places in Africa, Arabia and India. He was Allenby’s Chief Political Officer and was involved in the creation of the Palestine mandate, which led to the creation of the State of Israel. He was dismissed from service for insubordination.
The bird watching interests apparently arose due to a family friend, the philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who is supposed to have coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest', and who like Darwin was an ardent empiricist who took the young Richard Meinertzhagen and his brother on long walks persuading them to look at the natural world around them, "Observe, record, explain!" He collected specimens of new species from various parts of the world, but recent research has indicated that he was stealing them from museums and resubmitting them after altering their labels. This was probably done to provide alibis. Much of his work in these areas is now believed to be falsified.
During the Palestine campaign of World War I Meinertzhagen let a haversack containing false British battle plans fall into Turkish hands, thereby enabling the surprise attack that took Beersheba and all of Gaza. This incident is the basis for some events in the 1987 Australian movie "The Lighthorsemen" which features a 'Major Meinertzhagen', an odd, enigmatic, intelligence officer played by Anthony Andrews. The same incident was portrayed in an episode of "Young Indiana Jones."
Meintertzhagen had an uncomromising hatred for anti-Semitism, which he called "Hebra-phobia," and anti-Semites. When he met Hitler, Meinertzhagen taunted the feurer with a 'Heil Meinertzhagen' and considered killing him on the spot.
He was known to be a man of violence and had been well known for killing enemies.
T.E. Lawrence's said of him
"... a student of bird migration drifted into soldiering ... 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, which chose the best way to its purpose, unhampered by doubt or habit."
ref. Lawrence, T. E. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom 1935 edition p.384
His second wife, the ornithologist Annie Constance Jackson (an expert on wading birds), died in a shooting accident in 1928 which seemed suspicious to some at the time, even though Meinertzhagen appeared genuinely devastated by the tragedy. As the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds Meinertzhagen was a respected ornithologist, 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.
References
- Ali, Salim, 1985. The Fall of a Sparrow. Oxford University Press, Delhi. xv, 265 pp.
- Boxall, Peter, 1990. 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
- Cocker, Mark, 1989. Richard Meinertzhagen. Soldier, Scientist and Spy. Secker & Warburg, London. 292 pp.
- Jones, Robert F., 1991. The Kipkororor chronicles. MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History [Spring 1991] 3(3): 38-47.
- Judd, Alan, 1989. Eccentric hero. New Statesman and Society [June 23, 1989] 2(55): 37-38.
- Knox, Alan G., 1993. Richard Meinertzhagen-a case of fraud examined. Ibis [July 1993] 135(3): 320-325.
- Lord, John. Duty, Honour, Empire. New York: Random House, 1970.
- Mangan, J. A., 1993. Shorter notices. English Historical Review [October 1993] 108(429): 1062.
- Meinertzhagen, Richard. Middle East Diary. London: Cresset Press, 1959;
- 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)"