Vivienne de Watteville
| Vivienne Florence Beatrice de Watteville | |
|---|---|
| Born |
17 August 1900 Somerset, England |
| Died | 27 June 1957 (aged 56) England |
| Occupation | Travel writer, broadcaster, journalist |
| Alma mater | The wilds of Sirdal, Norway |
| Genre | Autobiography, travel writing |
| Notable works | Speak to the Earth (1935) |
| Partner | George Gerard Goschen |
Vivienne Florence Beatrice de Watteville (1900-1957) was a British travel writer and adventurer, author of two books based on her experiences in East Africa in the 1920s, Out in the Blue (1927) and Speak to the Earth (1935). She is best remembered for taking charge of and continuing an expedition in the Congo and Uganda at the age of 24, when her father was killed by a lion.
Vivienne de Watteville was the only child of the Swiss-French naturalist and artist Bernard Perceval de Watteville (Bernhard Perceval von Wattenwyl, 1877-1924) and his English wife Florence Emily Beddoes (1876-1909). Her father had been a pupil of the painter Hubert von Herkomer before turning naturalist. Her mother died of cancer when she was nine, and she spent her childhood holidays from her English boarding-school (St. George's School, Ascot) tomboyishly alone with her father, whom she called 'Brovie' ['brother'], in remote parts of Norway and in the Alps. (He called her 'Murray, my son'.) She had wanted to go to Oxford University and earn her own living, but her father, possessive to a fault, had brushed aside both ideas.
In 1923 Vivienne and her father set off on an eighteen-month safari through Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo, collecting fauna for mounting in the Natural History Museum of Bern, Switzerland, without the help of a professional hunter. In her first book, Out in the Blue (i.e. in the far country), published in 1927, she describes her experiences on safari. The de Wattevilles had been troubled by marauding lions through much of their trip. Lions had attacked the mules in the boma and Bernard had shot several of the big cats. One, on the verge of starvation, had stormed their camp and raced off with a canvas bathtub, which it had tried to eat. Sometime later they found nails and torn bits of canvas in its droppings. (They found the remains of their missing Airedale inside a leopard.) At the start of the safari, Bernard de Watteville had missed most of what he shot at; by the time he and his daughter reached the Congo, he had bagged more than a hundred trophies. Their collection included elephant, lion, leopard, cape buffalo, giraffe, over thirty types of antelope, and even a male mountain bongo, which took seven weeks of stalking in the Aberdare Range. With the help of Pygmy trackers they approached gorillas in the Virunga Mountains but were unable to shoot one. They also wanted a northern white rhinoceros and had obtained special permission from the Ugandan authorities to shoot the animal. The young and enterprising Vivienne, though only 23 years old, handled all the taxidermy, working to preserve whatever her father shot for the museum. She was, in addition, the camp nurse, relying heavily on Epsom salts and quinine powder, her cure-all remedies.
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