The seven year old Alamayu had lost his father and his mother, and he was about to lose his country too - bundled onto a waiting ship, he would never return to Ethiopia. What’s in the book?

Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay

Comments

For me the main weakness of the book is the central tragedy of the story: Alamayu didn’t live that long, dying aged 18. Most of the book therefore is his progress through schools and tuition, together with sporadic battles for custody. Not much happens and Alamayu is mostly a silent figure. Before he could really become an agent in his own life he died. In his recent biography of Alemayehu, The Prince and the Plunder, Andrew Heavens follows the palace’s excuses with the history: the prince was buried outside St George’s chapel, in catacombs, in a named coffin. Queen Victoria had taken an interest in the child since he was brought to her, aged seven, survivor of the Maqdala conflict in which British forces defeated his father, King Tewodros II. During the progress of the excavation fragments of carved marble, flat pieces of alabaster, having one side well-polished, were dug up, and some fragments of marble shafts; also one carved capital in marble, which may be referable to Byzantine architecture. Rough drawings of all these fragments are herewith submitted, and may prove interesting to those possessing more archaeological knowledge than I can lay claim to.

What: Gold disc “from the cross on the altar at Magdala” showing an angel, bought from Col W J Holt In this fascinating, haunting book, which takes us from a high mountain plateau in Ethiopia to Osborne on the Isle of Wight where Prince Alamayu met and charmed Queen Victoria, and all too soon to the catacombs of St George’s Chapel Windsor, Andrew Heavens tells the astonishing story of the uprooting of this lost boy.” Her reaction was fairly typical - even though she was sympathetic and friendly, she was also intensely interested in his physical differences to other white Europeans. She wanted to slot him into the racial hierarchy that dominated British thinking at that time: how far down the scale should he go? In the first part of the book, the prince’s short life and his times are covered. It traces the prince’s journey from the Red Sea port of Massawa (in present day Eritrea), through Suez, Alexandria and Malta, to his first landing on the shores of Britain at the Port of Plymouth. Three days after his arrival, he would meet Queen Victoria and the royal family at their summer home of Osborne House. Soon after, he would travel again. His guardian, who goes by the name of ‘’Speedy’’, would take him to The Crown Jewel of the British Empire, India.

Get Notified

Presumably it’s the palace’s intention for Ethiopian petitioners to picture, as you do from euphemisms like “others in the vicinity”, scenes of such ghastly Hadean mayhem that they will tactfully withdraw. British subjects may, on the other hand, wonder if expert accounts, with diagrams, of what would become of the late queen’s body, disguised the fact that the royal vault is actually a chaotic ossuary in which unidentifiable parts of foreign princes are so carelessly jumbled up with those of Charles’s forebears that only DNA testing could positively tell them apart (some hair of Alemayehu’s father is in fact available, courtesy of Lord Napier’s pillaging Victorians). It would certainly accord with an earlier royal excuse for inaction that “identifying the remains of young Prince Alemayehu would not be possible”. One of those pairs of eyes staring out at Alamayu belonged to Queen Victoria, who he met three days after he arrived in England. Alamayu headed to India with Speedy when the latter was appointed a District Superintendent in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and later to Penang, when the guardianship was questioned by Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ultimately, Speedy and Alamayu would separate, as the latter entered Cheltenham College, where the boys called him “Ali”, and he did not prosper.

The following is the report by the officer in charge of the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum, on the articles found at Adulis, which were presented to that Institution:-If like me you didn’t know anything about Alamayu and the Maqdala treasures beyond some vague memories of a Flashman novel, this is a fascinating and eye opening account. It is also hugely relevant for today - particularly in Ethiopia, but also for many other countries that will have had similar dealings with Britain in the 19th Century. Given the keen interest shown by British royals in the symbolism and placement of their relations’ bodies, sympathy for the Ethiopian request is natural.

His revision of his mother’s decision would add a progressive flourish to an act requiring nothing more of the palace than is, when not actively mandated by the Geneva conventions, common decency. There could even be room for some tasteful restitution ritual, possibly involving uniforms, where Charles’s default expression of bemused gloom would be utterly appropriate. William and Kate, too, could do their mournful faces and fancy dress, welcoming this opportunity to show that animals and dancing are not the only thing royals love about Africa. Andrew’s absence might be approvingly noted. For the first time, Andrew Heavens tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father’s fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy. The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home. In just two days his father’s empire had been emphatically destroyed, and Alamayu was surrounded by enemies - British and other Ethiopians opposed to Tewodros, as his own Grandfather had been.On informing the Commanding Engineer that I had been directed to apply to him for a working party to enable me to make excavations with a view to discovering some remains of ruins of ancient Adulis, I was told that owing to the amount of work in hand just at that time I could not have more than 25 men of the Madras Sappers and Miners; with this small party, however, I at once made a commencement. Three narrow trenches being cut into some of the tumuli the walls and foundations of old buildings were discovered. At one spot some cut stone columns were found, and this induced me to remove more of the debris in the immediate vicinity, when the outline of a building, as shown in the accompanying plan, was discernable. I also ascertained by excavation that the foundations of this building, in which the bases of the cut-stone columns were found in true position, were 13 feet deep. Too bad: the palace wants Alemayehu kept where he was put, on Queen Victoria’s instructions. Since it can hardly say the request is over-ambitious – Philip’s mother’s body was flown from Windsor to Jerusalem 19 years after her death – its refusal, reported by the BBC, cites both practical and propriety-related objections. “It is very unlikely,” the palace says, “that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity.” It said the chapel authorities had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”. For a service template, how about something like the memorial ceremony in 2013, when the Serbian royal family was allowed – Queen Elizabeth having authorised the exhumation – to repatriate Queen Maria of Yugoslavia from Frogmore? Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies