- Foden, Giles.
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth.
London: Penguin, 2004.
ISBN 0-14-100984-5.
-
Only a perfect idiot would undertake to transport two forty foot
mahogany motorboats from London to Cape Town and then onward to Lake
Tanganyika by ship, rail, steam tractor, and teams of oxen, there to
challenge German dominance of the lake during World War I by
attempting to sink a ship three times the length and seven times the
displacement of the fragile craft. Fortunately, the Admiralty found
just the man in Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simpson, in 1915 the oldest
Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy, his ascent through the ranks
having been retarded due to his proclivity for sinking British
ships. Spicer-Simpson was an inveterate raconteur
of tall tales and insufferable know-it-all (on the ship bound for
South Africa he was heard lecturing the Astronomer Royal of Cape Town
on the southern constellations), and was eccentric in about as many
ways as can be packed into a single human frame. Still, he and his
motley team, despite innumerable misadventures (many self-inflicted),
got the job done, sinking the ship they were sent to and capturing
another German vessel, the first German warship ever captured by the
Royal Navy. Afterward, Spicer-Simpson rather blotted his copybook by
declining to engage first a German fort and then a warship both later
found to have been “armed” only with wooden dummy guns. His exploits
caused him to be worshipped as a god by the Holo-holo tribe, who
fashioned clay effigies of him, but rather less impressed the
Admiralty who, despite awarding him the DSO, re-assigned him upon his
return to the routine desk job he had before the adventure. HMS
Mimi and Toutou were the boats under
Spicer-Simpson's command, soon joined by the captured German ship
which was rechristened HMS Fifi. The events described
herein (very loosely) inspired C.S.Forester's 1935 novel
The African Queen and the 1951
Bogart/Hepburn film.
A U.S. edition is now available, titled
Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure, but at present
only in hardcover. A U.S. paperback is
scheduled for March, 2006.
October 2005 