Thread by @ajcdeane

#deanehistory 154. The mad – and successful – adventures of Geoffrey Spicer-Simson.

Most of the stories I tell on the @HistoryHrPod #podcast with @denvercunning are from the #deanehistory tweets & book. Today, courtesy of @WillardFoxton, this story is from the podcast.

Geoffrey Simson was born in Tasmania and took his wife’s name to become Spicer-Simson before embarking on a magnificently lunatic military career. Which had a rather bad start.

Shortly after the First World War broke out, Spicer-Simson was in command of the Royal Navy ship HMS Niger, which was on active service but at the time in question was at anchor just of Deal in Kent. Spicer-Simson took some time away from his ship to enjoy a party at a local

hotel for his wife and her girlfriends – maintaining that he could still see his command from the hotel’s window, so that was alright then. Alas for him, as was all too well known at the time and therefore this outcome could have been predicted, the Germans had recently

captured Belgium’s naval bases, putting Deal within easy range of their submarines. One, under the command of the dashing Walther Forstmann, duly put in an appearance & promptly sank Spicer-Simson’s ship in broad daylight. At least he had a good view of the event, I suppose.

Spicer-Simson was therefore not flavour of the month with the Admiralty & was posted to the Colonial Department of the Royal Navy, which would have seemed a massive backwater posting to the uninformed, just as the great debate about what to do about Lake Tanganyika to commence.

The Tanganyika challenge was a toughie. The British & Belgian colonies around the lake were endangered – Spicer-Simson learned from an itinerant Big Game hunter who had been on the spot to garner the information – by a newly discovered, but rather long-planned, German manoeuvre.

With the lake – one of the largest bodies of water in the world, but hundreds of miles from the sea– hard to supply with big kit, & various colonial treaties forbidding the passage of significant materiel to it, the Germans had secretly sent a ship to Tanganyika through the post.

That’s right. Long before the advent of IKEA, the Imperial German Navy were all over the flatpack component delivery model. The Kaiser’s men dismantled a powerful ship – the Graf von Goetzen – &, bolt by bolt, nut by nut, sent the entirety of a fighting ship to the arena by post.

They’d done this well before the war commenced. Indeed, they’d been executing this plan for a decade. But their timing was just right, and the parts were all in place when hostilities broke out.

Now, reassembling the ship – presumably with an allen key and suitably confusing diagrammatical instructions – the colonial German forces put her to use.

The Allies realised that the steamer-cum-sort-of-battleship Graf von Goetzen threatened to exercise a distortive effect

upon the entire theatre of war. Whilst not an actual battleship, she was powerful enough to utterly dominate the lake, so she would mean effectively uncontested German control over a significant chunk of operations in the conflict in the African arena.

This threat quickly became real. The Graf von Goetzen pootled her way around Lake Tanganyika, putting Belgian towns to the sword & sinking Allied ships with ease.Control of traffic upon the lake meant that whole of the heart of Africa was under German control– or so they thought.

Spicer-Simson convinced the Admiralty that the Germans floating a ship upon Lake Tanganyika meant that the British were obliged to respond in kind. But, whilst not unsympathetic to this point, the British authorities lacked both the time to IKEA a ship to the battlezone

and the budget to really deal with the issue as it merited.

So Spicer-Simson got hold of two torpedo boats, which he wanted to call “Dog” and “Cat,” which the Admiralty forbade, so the ever-so-cunningly christened Mimi and Toutou became his miniature navy

to take on the Graf von Goetzen. He assembled a suitably montage-friendly scrappy group of circa fifty adventurers to crew them – including two rugger players from the London Scottish side he’d met in the pub who were plainly “great chaps.”

The next challenge is obvious. You’ve got your boats. You’ve got your crews. How to get them to the famously hard-to-access lake? Don’t worry, said Spicer-Simson. I’ve got a plan for that.

Said plan was as follows.

Sail the torpedo boats on a cargo ship to Cape Town (which is, geography aficionados will have spotted, approximately one continent away from Tanzania). Pop the boats on the railway to the northern end of South Africa. Buy a couple of traction engines en route.

Use those engines, along with teams of oxen, obviously, to pull the boats through a five hundred mile untracked jungle wilderness. Go across mountains and plains. Build over 150 bridges across rivers as we come to them.

Where we can, pull them along river routes with dugout canoes we’ll obtain or make. Get the boats on the lake and start handing the Hun some defeats at last.

It all worked. The journey took them over a year, mind you, given the distance to cover and the challenge of the terrain.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, having an expert on tropical diseases as their doctor, they didn’t lose a single man to illness along the way. They did most of this journey slathered in insect repellent and wearing coated layers of early 20th Century suncream,

giving them an eerily shining white appearance along the way across a continent.

Using the might of the Graf von Goetzen, the Germans had commandeered a clutch of Belgian ships by this point, which Mimi and Toutou now promptly dispatched or captured one by one,

led by a cutlass-wielding Spicer-Simson wearing a skirt and nothing else (whether his choice of apparel was down to shortages caused by the journey, personal eccentricity, a desire to alarm the enemy or a combination of all three is sadly unrecorded).

The British mini-fleet of ships they had captured was therefore ready to go, led by the indefatigable Mimi and Toutou, ready for the mother of all lake battle showdowns with the Graf von Goetzen. Spoilsports to the last, calculating that they couldn’t defeat

this newly constituted enemy force, and rather than have their own ship captured, the Germans promptly scuttled their kit ship. A battle averted by dint of superior firepower is plainly better than a battle fought and won on one view, but no doubt the hardy Allied lake fleet

felt rather cheated as the Graf von Goetzen sank without a shot. Lake Tanganyika, & the entirety of the territory that control of it gave an occupying force, returned to the Triple Entente without losing a man as a result of Spicer-Simson’s eccentric vision

and intrepid bunch of misfit adventurers.

Spicer-Simson had taken a journalist from the Daily Mirror with him on this madcap enterprise (dubbed “Simson’s Circus” by Rhodesians who thought the white paste they wore against insects and the sun made them look like clowns)

who promptly wrote up this story in suitably heroic terms, and returned to Britain a hero.

The story has two suitably unpredictable codas.

First, Spicer-Simson’s legend in the region was such that he became a deity. A local tribe to whom he’d been nicer than the Imperial Germans or the colonial Belgians (not hard, in either case) worshipped him, paying homage to their effigies of a fat-bellied, white-paste covered,

skirt wearing, cutlass-clutching man. Some of the statues are still there today, whilst the tribe has largely died out.

Secondly, in the 1920s, the same old difficulty about getting a suitably large vessel to Lake Tanganyika – for commercial purposes, this time – applied.

Well, said an enterprising engineer… why build a new one when we’ve got a perfectly good ship sunk on the bottom of the lake?

So the Graf von Goetzen was raised, pumped out, patched up and put back into use, where she remains to this day.

Today, as the MV Liemba, plying her trade around Lake Tanganyika, she is the sole vessel of the German Imperial Navy still actively sailing, anywhere in the world.

This story was brilliantly told on the @HistoryHrPod #podcast by @WillardFoxton:

I confess that @denvercunning and I were *crying* with laughter at several points as @WillardFoxton told us this one on the podcast.

Little did Willard and I know, as we debated against one another in Stellenbosch 20 years ago, that we’d produce this two decades later..!

If you like this kind of chat… tune in!

https://twitter.com/HistoryHrPod/status/1555592130877349894