Just say Yes.

by Richard Pooley

Three years ago my wife’s step-father needed to have 24-hour care in the Cotswolds cottage where he and my mother-in-law lived. However, the British Jamaican nurse who was caring for him found the house too cold, the plumbing too ancient, and the distance from her home in Birmingham too far. Her husband, a Rastafarian, was not happy either. She said she wanted to leave. My wife, Sarah, and I happened to be visiting and I asked my mother-in-law to confirm something that she had told us: that Emperor Haile Selassie had stayed a day or two in the cottage during his exile from Ethiopia between 1936, when Mussolini’s army had invaded the country, and 1941, when with the British army’s help he regained his throne. Yes, she said, he had been a guest of the owner of the cottage who lived in the big house next door, the painter, writer and cultural bureaucrat William Rothenstein. I asked her whether she knew that the nurse’s husband was a Rastafarian. No and what anyway had that to do with Haile Selassie? I explained that Ras Tafari Makonnen was Haile Selassie’s title before he became emperor (Ras means duke) and that most Rastafarians regard him as God or Jesus returned to Earth. When we told the nurse that she was sleeping in the same room as Haile Selassie had slept in, and she told her husband, he begged her to stay.

So, when a neighbour in Sarah’s book group said she was off to Nepal and asked if anyone could accommodate a friend, the great-granddaughter of Haile Selassie, and her daughter for a week or so in October, Sarah instantly said Yes. And why not, you may ask. Well, an immediate Yes to any suggestion is not my cautious wife’s normal reaction. When I went down on one knee on a hot July day in Devon over forty years ago and asked her to marry me, her response was “I suppose I should say Yes.” I’m the one who too often says Yes, without thinking or consulting. But how right she was to say Yes this time.

We have lived in Bath for twenty-one of the past twenty-seven years. I knew that Haile Selassie had spent his exile in a Victorian villa called Fairfield House on the western edge of the city but that was all I knew. Having two of his descendants stay with us not only gave us a crash course in Ethiopian history, the Ethiopian Orthodox church, and Rastafari beliefs; it also led us to meet a whole new set of people in Bath itself.

Princess Esther Selassie Antohin is the great granddaughter of Emperor Haile Selassie. ‘Princess’ because she lived the first fourteen years of her life in Selassie’s court in Addis Ababa and he conferred the title on her. Her daughter, Alexandra (Sasha) has no such title.

Esther heads up Heritage Watch in Ethiopia, a charity which tries to stop the destruction of old Addis Ababa and, at the same time, teach Ethiopian schoolchildren about their history. As HW’s website puts it “…Ethiopian children have very little opportunity to learn about their heritage while at school.” Given Esther’s own heritage and Ethiopia’s often brutal recent history this aim makes her the target of much abuse. She currently divides her time equally between Addis Ababa and Washington DC.  Sasha is a US-based anthropologist, who has recently become involved in an organisation which models itself on the US Peace Corps but which recruits Africans to help Africans.

Puzzled by Esther’s surname?  She read Russian and Russian history at New York University after fleeing Ethiopia when Haile Selassie was toppled in 1974 (and murdered in 1975) by the Marxist military junta known as the Derg. She saw the Russian Revolution as not unlike the coup d’état which removed her great grandfather. She hoped it would help her understand what had happened to her country and her family. She then met and married a Russian dissident, Anatoly Antohin, a playwright who had left the Soviet Union in 1980. They moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Anatoly was a professor and theatre director and where Sasha and her brother, Alexei, were born and brought up. Anatoly died in Addis Ababa in 2011. Alexei was killed in a car crash in San Diego in October 2015

Esther and Sasha came to Bath to join in the 70th anniversary celebrations of Haile Selassie's return to Bath in 1954 whilst on a state visit to the UK. He received the Freedom of the City  and, in turn, gifted Fairfield House in 1958 to the city in perpetuity. At first he wished it to be used to house Ethiopian students but soon asked that it become a care home for the elderly. Up to 30 residents shared 12 bedrooms. By all accounts it was a happy place. But in the early 1990s new legislation required that each resident should have their own bedroom, making it impossible for the villa to remain a care home; it would have cost too much to upgrade. So it was turned into a day care centre, catering to the elderly, though it remains what it has been for decades: a shrine for Rastafarians.

On the first floor is a fascinating exhibition telling the story of Haile Selassie's extraordinary life. The Operations Manager, Ras Benji, has dedicated the past thirteen years to curating this museum. He is a dreadlocked Rastafarian who has recently converted to the Ethiopian Orthodox church, and also runs Imperial Voice Radio from a studio in the house: “broadcasting goodness”.  The room where Haile Selassie and his family worshipped was restored by Esther and is now an Ethiopian Orthodox prayer room. Several local charities use the place as their office and meeting centre. The house is open to visitors on certain days. Yet few people in Bath, let alone tourists, know that Fairfield House exists. 

Esther had been on the board of the house’s Community Interest Company (CIC) for many years. Sasha has now taken her place. Yet more learning for me: CICs were one of Tony Blair’s big ideas. Introduced in 2005, a CIC is a limited company which, in the UK’s tax authority’s own words, is “created for the use of people who want to conduct a business…for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage.”  Fairfield House fits that description.

Our first excursion into this new world was to Bath's Assembly Rooms, festooned with the green, yellow and red of the Ethiopian flag, to watch Esther and the city’s deputy mayor cut a cake, surrounded by Rastafarians and next to an enthusiastic and loud Ethiopian jazz band. The shade of Beau Nash would not have approved. I hope that of Jane Austen would. Conversation was near impossible but very necessary when I arrived at a stall exhibiting German-made toy soldiers of 1936. They were of Mussolini’s and Haile Selassie’s armies, all beautifully made and in perfect condition. The stallholder, a tall, handsome Ethiopian in khaki military uniform, explained that the Italian-Ethiopian war was over before the German toy manufacturer could get the toys to market. German children were perhaps more interested in their own armed forces than those of Italy and Africa.

The next day, a Sunday, I went with Esther and Sasha to a Church of England church where an Eastern Orthodox service was taking place. They wanted to request a prayer be said for Alexei on the anniversary of his death. The size and diversity of the congregation - standing, walking about, walking in or walking out – would have been the envy of any C of E vicar. The bishop (or was it archbishop? ), in gold hat and glittering vestments, recited the scriptures while around him acolytes danced attendance and waved incense over us. The service at Bath Abbey (above) later in the day was well-attended and the sermon moving but had little of the vibrancy of the Orthodox one.

The biggest surprise came when we joined Esther and Sasha at a dinner party hosted by one of Bath’s worthies, William Heath, a self-described social entrepreneur who has been involved in over a dozen start-ups, many of them in the IT field (“with exciting successes and chastening setbacks”). William is also co-founder and trustee of Fairfield House CIC, a presenter on Imperial Voice Radio, a farmer, and a keen saxophone player. Others there included a leading Anglican theologian who is also an expert on trees (advising the late Prince Philip). He told us of the church in the nearby village of North Stoke where the ancient font was carved from a Romano-Celtic sacrificial altar. The Romans, not known for their fastidiousness, had insisted that the Celts replaced the real heads of their enemies with small stone heads at each corner. The Christians had removed just one of the heads and replaced it with a groove allowing water from the font to be tipped out.

The surprise? William asked us if we wished to watch a documentary on Sylvia Pankhurst which a friend had just made and which had yet to be screened. It was then that I recalled that Pankhurst had, towards the end of her life, lived and been buried in Ethiopia. But why, I did not know. The story of her travels and campaigns as a major figure in the suffragette movement were illuminating. Yet more learning to be had. But I had had no idea that she had been such a devoted, some would say over-devoted, supporter of Haile Selassie and Ethiopian independence, not only from Italy but just as much, after the Second World War, from Britain.

How many roads, real or metaphorical, do we not travel down because we have no idea where they lead? Or we just can't be bothered? Or we are not sufficiently curious? How wrong we are not to do so. Sure, I have taken quite a few wrong turns but just saying Yes has more often led me to fascinating places, interesting people and mind-widening experiences.

I got an email last week asking me if I would be willing to take on the role of conciliator in disputes within my political party. And would I be interested in vetting people who wished to become Members of Parliament? I have said Yes to both.