I’m planning on reading ‘Scoop’, Evelyn Waugh’s comic novel about the life of a foreign journalist in the coming months but remembered I had on the shelves an example of Waugh’s own time as a foreign reporter, namely his account of attending the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. This occurred in 1930, eight years before he wrote ‘Scoop’ during which he was submitting stories for several newspapers in a freelance capacity. The main inspiration for ‘Scoop’ was when he was back in Abyssinia in 1935, this time on behalf of the Daily Mail covering the second Italo-Abyssinian war. Whilst he was not a great war reporter he did get plenty of material for his subsequent novel. But this link does make reading his stories about reporting in 1930 an ideal prelude to tackling ‘Scoop’.

This Penguin 70 book is actually a couple of extracts from his 1931 travelogue ‘Remote People’, a book I’m now keen to track down to read more fully, but for now the two sections included here regarding the coronation and the apparently interminable journey to get home from it are all I have and I have loved the dry humour and observation of detail that are a trademark of his writing. He starts off by introducing a few of the people he has dealings with or are directly involved with the coronation or in several cases both in particular who was originally in Abyssinia as a trader but had somehow ended up as chief, and apparently only member of the bureau of foreign affairs and had an office in the centre of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital. Described as extremely handsome of German and Abyssinian descent he was also an excellent linguist and could apparently arrange anything even finding copies of the apparently non-existent coronation service…

In this last statement Mr Hall appears to be no different to anyone else Waugh has to deal with or indeed just observes. Addis had been the capital for almost forty years by then but large parts of it was still under construction. The hotel the British Marine band had been quartered in lacked a roof and building work all over the city was making very little progress as the workmen would apparently simply stop if they weren’t under constant supervision. Throw into this chaos the organisation of a coronation and the consequent arrival of foreign dignitaries along with the world media to cover it and the difficulties of communication both inside and outside the country and it’s a wonder anything progressed to any sort of a plan. This is where Waugh had an advantage over his fellow representatives of the press he didn’t have a daily newspaper to serve that needed something all the time he could wait and write accurately what happened unlike others he derided such as Associated Press which sent in totally fictitious accounts of the ceremony because of time constraints needing copy before it had even started. Mind you those members of the press that waited to get at least accurate reports of the first part of what turned out to be an interminable event discovered that the only telegraph office in the city had closed for the day so they couldn’t send their reports anyway.

The book doesn’t have any of Waugh’s actual reports in it, rather it is a diary of his experiences both in the lead up to and being at the coronation and the six days of feasting and celebration that followed for the royal family and the numerous tribal leaders that attended and it is at times both an important historical document and also extremely funny. The second account included in the book is entitled ‘First Nightmare’ and describes how Waugh attempted to get at least part way home with ships and trains being either cancelled, not turning up even when expected or even taken over by a Princess and her retinue who could just bounce all the passengers who had managed to find seats out of Abyssinia back out of them again. In all Waugh takes four days to go from Harar to Aden, a distance of 311 miles (500km) with numerous hold ups and false hopes of possible means of moving forward and you can feel his frustration building. At the time Aden was part of the British Empire and regular ships travelled back to the UK all he had to do was get there but it proved incredibly difficult.

I’ve really enjoyed this short book and am now looking forward to reading ‘Scoop’, probably early next year by the look of the planned reading list I already have for the rest of 2023.