In 1935, the Morning Post sent a young journalist to Abyssinia to cover the imminent war with Italy. There he met Evelyn Waugh, whose impressions of his fellow reporters and their escapades formed the basis of the novel Scoop. In the first of three extracts from his new book, W. F. Deedes, for the first time, describes his part in the story and what he made of his acerbic travelling companions to war with 600 lb of luggage

One sunny morning early in August 1935, I was summoned from the Morning Post's reporters' room by H. A. Gwynne, editor since 1911, and asked if I was willing to go as the newspaper's correspondent to Abyssinia, where war with Italy seemed inevitable.

Gwynne had been a Reuters war correspondent in the South African war along with Winston Churchill, Edgar Wallace and others, and so had plenty of avuncular advice to offer. A dead correspondent, he reminded me cheerfully, was useless to his newspaper. A finger of whisky in the water bottle killed bugs in doubtful water. Above all, as a representative of the Morning Post, I must look the part, acquire the proper kit, and so on. Anxious to seem equal to the occasion, I nodded eagerly, but felt unable to contribute much to the conversation because, at the age of 22, I had never travelled beyond Switzerland, had never been a war correspondent and knew nothing about Abyssinia.

After I had agreed to go, Mervyn Ellis, the Morning Post news editor, told me that the newspaper thought it likely that those reporting the war from the Abyssinian side would be cut off by the Italian advance, so I must be equipped to withstand a long siege. That line of thought led to a lively shopping spree.

At Austin Reed in Regent Street, where Ellis and I made most of our purchases, the notion of preparing me for an extended siege was greeted with enthusiasm. We were persuaded to buy, among other things: three tropical suits, riding breeches for winter and summer, bush shirts, a sola topi, a double-brimmed sun hat, a camp bed and sleeping bag, and long boots to deter mosquitoes at sundown. To contain some of these purchases we bought two large metal uniform cases and a heavy trunk made of cedar wood and lined with zinc to keep ants at bay.

Nobody seemed to know much about the climate except that it was highly variable. In the Somaliland and Danakil lowlands, one would encounter semi-tropical conditions. Addis Ababa, where I was to go, was 8,000 ft above sea level with temperatures during most of the year no higher than an early English summer.

At the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria Street, we found a department that specialised in kitting out those bound for the tropics. They knew where Abyssinia was and could suggest the right medicines for the region. These included bottles of quinine pills that were then reckoned to be the best protection against malaria. The Army & Navy also produced slabs of highly nutritious black chocolate - an iron ration for emergencies to go inside the zinc-lined trunk. Our purchases in all weighed just short of 600 lb - a quarter of a ton. I was not to know that such extravagance would contribute to Evelyn Waugh's portrait of William Boot in Scoop, the novel he later wrote about journalists covering the war.

Gwynne sent me a longer, personal letter which I treasure, for it carries the flavour of those less hurried days and reminds me what a kindly place the Morning Post was.

"As regards financial arrangements, of course all your expenses will be charges on the office. In addition to that, I propose that, while you are acting as a Special Correspondent, you will have allocated to you, in addition to your present salary, a sum of £20 a month [about £800 in today's money], and this additional remuneration can either accumulate here for you, or be sent to you, whichever you desire.

"You will have to outfit yourself for the climate, with the knowledge that we have of it, and I hope you will observe due economy in getting an outfit.

"In addition to other financial arrangements we are making, we are going to insure your life. Details of this will be given you before you leave.

"As regards telegraphing, here again we must leave it almost entirely to your discretion. We shall be glad to have anything you can send by mail, but we want to be on a level with our competitors in regard to telegrams. The length also, of such cables as you may send must be left to your discretion. While we do not want to be extravagant, yet we want to be in a position to give as good a picture as any other paper with one correspondent can give.

"I imagine there will be great difficulties in getting messages off. With the large number of correspondents, it should not be difficult to arrange a system of runners who could work for the whole corps of correspondents and thus save money and time."

That final sentence, relating no doubt to Gwynne's recollection of the South African war, suggests that the cleft sticks which Waugh mentions in Scoop were not altogether fanciful.

All things considered, it was a generous letter. The Morning Post's grand days were behind it. It had left a fine office in Aldwych overlooking Waterloo Bridge, and was tenant of a property in Tudor Street (which runs parallel with Fleet Street) owned by its printers, the Argus Press. If I had received such a letter from my editor today, it might have given me a sleepless night. What troubled my mind then, to the exclusion of almost everything else, was how I might contrive to convey a quarter of a ton of luggage in six separate pieces from London to Addis Ababa.

While newspapers such as the Morning Post made their preparations to cover the forthcoming war, ministers in London were wrestling with the infinitely harder task of averting it. Though seen against the huge tapestry of the Second World War as a relatively minor event, rendered faintly ridiculous by Scoop, Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia can now clearly be seen as a prelude to 1939-45. The British government's sincere but ill-starred efforts to stop Italian aggression failed, and that failure sent out all the wrong signals, particularly to Hitler. We pursued too many worthy but conflicting aims. Anxious to keep Mussolini on our side, we prevaricated, turning him into a deadly enemy. Desirous of upholding the authority of the fragile League of Nations, we made undertakings that we lacked the military strength to fulfil.

Mussolini's determination to establish military dominion over Abyssinia had been apparent from the start of 1935. At home, he was sorely in need of a triumph, and he had long been aggrieved by Italy's small share of the African spoils at the end of the First World War. Moreover, Italy's defeat by Abyssinia near Adowa in 1896, an encounter in which the Italians lost 4,500 white and 2,000 native troops killed and wounded, continued to rankle. As he had made abundantly clear at the Stresa conference in April 1935, Mussolini saw the peace of Europe as desirable, but peace in Africa a different matter altogether.

Britain had noted this, but hesitated to pursue the question of Abyssinia with Mussolini at the time because we wanted his support for the Stresa agreement. This was signed by Britain, France and Italy in response to German rearmament, which Hitler had declared a month earlier. In theory, the signatories undertook to defend Austria's independence from the threat of a forced anschluss with Germany. In reality, the agreement posed no serious threat to Germany's ambitions in Europe and collapsed six months later, after Mussolini invaded Abyssinia.

A yearning for peace at almost any price was not in the least surprising. We were barely 15 years away from the carnage of the First World War. Countless families had lost their menfolk; a lot of my mother's friends were war widows. As Hitler progressively flouted the terms of international undertakings and rearmed that mood began to change, but in the summer of 1935 we were dealing with the "years that the locusts had eaten", in Baldwin's phrase to the House of Commons in November 1936; we were dealing with neglected defences.

None of these considerations weighed heavily on my mind as I left Victoria station one hot August day on the first leg of my journey to Addis Ababa. There had been touching farewells at the Morning Post office, where several colleagues made it disturbingly clear that they did not expect to see me again. The chief reporter, S. R. Pawley, gave me his battered compass - property of the Territorial Army. A godmother invited me to spend a fiver on an expensive briefcase at the Army & Navy Stores, which brought the pieces of baggage I had to guard up to seven. It had taken two taxis to convey me and my gear from my uncle's house in Bethnal Green to the station.

Waugh's William Boot, occasional contributor of nature notes to Lord Copper's Beast, flew to Paris at the newspaper's expense and then caught the Blue Train to Marseilles. After they had weighed his luggage at Croydon he was called on to pay a supplement of £103 - about £4,000 in today's money - then they produced an additional aeroplane. The Morning Post couldn't quite run to that, but I was booked through on the Blue Train, which at that time conveniently ran direct from Calais to Marseilles. Those were the days when well-to-do people travelled with mountains of luggage, including unwieldy cabin trunks, so there were abundant porters at Marseilles to deal with my collection which, with the help of a courier, was stacked away in no time at all on the Messageries Maritimes steamship General Metzinger for the long sea voyage. Today's foreign room would have procured a visa for me, booked a seat on the next plane and had me filing copy from Addis Ababa within hours.

The General Metzinger being a French boat, the cuisine was a strength. A weakness was its second- and third-class cabins, in which the temperatures soared long before we reached the Red Sea. I shared a second-class cabin with a Turkish merchant named Alfred Roche who was travelling as far as Jaffa. I found the food exciting but strenuous. We were served in bed with a light meal at 7.30 and had a proper breakfast at 9 am, which left an interval of only three hours before a lunch of six courses. Only the English on board took any exercise. Tea was served at 4 pm and a long dinner at 7 pm.

We landed on a Sunday evening. Djibouti in those days was a hellhole, with its stupendous heat and shoddy hotels. It struck me as the sort of place where men who disgraced themselves in Somerset Maugham tales might wish to come to drink themselves to death. Drinking even lemon squash in Djibouti was hazardous because flies were everywhere and crowded greedily around every glass. I spent some of Monday visiting French and Abyssinian officials in the port. Even the prospect of war had not stirred their lethargy. The story I filed from there began: "In the total absence of any reliable news whatever by newspapers, radio or other means of communication, the population of this town awaits developments in astonishing tranquillity" It was not altogether surprising. We were in French Somaliland whereas most of the Italian ships were arriving higher up the coast at Massawa. Very little news filtered through from there.

Very early on Tuesday morning I thankfully took the train out of Djibouti, where the midday temperature had risen to 110F. The two representatives of Hearst Newspapers, Carl von Weigand and H. R. Knickerbocker, had secured the train's wagon-lit and invited me to join them. It was the first and last occasion I have travelled in a coach from which all but white people were excluded.

The train did not reach Addis Ababa until 9 pm. Stuart Emeny, a senior reporter on the News Chronicle I had come to know well from stories we had covered together in England, met the train with Evelyn Waugh and our own local man, Salmon. I found they had made most satisfactory arrangements on my behalf.

I had arrived in a ramshackle town with facilities unequal to the invasion of journalists that was taking place. Most of them were quartered in great discomfort at the Imperial Hotel. Always fearful of missing a story, reporters on a major assignment often stick close together, so they packed into this relatively small hotel, close to the radio station from which everyone's copy had to be sent, sleeping four to a room but secure in the knowledge that they could keep an eye on each other. This was the hotel that Evelyn Waugh called the Splendide in his account of the war, Waugh in Abyssinia, and from which he drew his portrait of the Hotel Liberty, Jacksonburg, in Scoop.

My friend Stuart Emeny, Evelyn Waugh and a few others had made altogether better arrangements in a nearby pension, run by a German couple, Mr and Mrs Heft. It was close to the Imperial and the radio station, was on a single floor with a balcony running round it and had 10 or a dozen rooms. It was, as Waugh put it, humbler than the Imperial but very much more hospitable. On the night of my arrival it was full, so Salmon had arranged for me to spend a single night at the Hotel D'Europe, which was comfortable enough, with a bathroom to every room, but five miles from the centre of Addis, which rendered it unsuitable for a journalist. We dined together and, next day, which was a public holiday, I had ample time to shift my stuff to the Deutsches Haus. Its surroundings were unimpressive. Immediately opposite was a tannery which often smelt offensively; nearby were the homes of local prostitutes. But, as Waugh was to write later, "though the surroundings were forbidding, the hospitality inside the gates (which were kept by a grizzled warrior armed with a seven-foot spear) was delightful".

Ihad not been in Addis Ababa many hours before thanking my lucky stars that my boat had sailed from Marseilles a fortnight after the ship in which Evelyn Waugh, Stuart Emeny and others had travelled. One of their companions, who joined the ship at Port Said, had been a Mr F. W. Rickett. To his credit, Waugh had spotted something fishy about him but sent only a leisurely letter of inquiry from the Red Sea to his friend in England, Penelope (wife of John) Betjeman: "Can you find out for me anything about a man who should be a neighbour of yours, named Rickett? He says he is master of the Craven & lives near Newbury. I want particularly to know how he earns his living, whether he is in the British secret service and whether he is connected with Vickers or Imperial Chemicals Reply poste restante Addis Ababa."

According to Waugh's own account, Rickett talked about a "mission" and when questioned by Emeny about it, hinted that he was bringing Coptic funds to the Abuna, the patriarch of the Abyssinian Orthodox Church. He spoke about his pack of hounds in the Midlands and, on receiving lengthy cables in code, declared they came from his huntsman. "He says the prospects for cubbin' are excellent." Waugh put him down as one of the many arms salesmen who were heading for Addis Ababa. Because the Imperial Hotel was full, Rickett failed to get the suite he had ordered there and had to accept humbler accommodation with Waugh and Emeny at the Deutsches Haus.

Rickett then vanished into the shadows, and no more was heard of him until Saturday August 31, when a huge splash in The Daily Telegraph announced to the world: "Abyssinia's £10,000,000 Deal with British & US Interests". This was how Sir Percival Phillips, Daily Telegraph Special Correspondent in Addis Ababa, began this revelation which, regardless of cable costs, ran to something like 3,000 words:

"A few strokes of an ordinary black fountain-pen this morning performed one of the most momentous and far-reaching acts in the history of Ethiopia, bringing her out from the Middle Ages and setting her fairly on the road of the twentieth century.

"The instrument of this transformation is a Convention conferring on Mr F. W. Rickett, an envoy of the African Exploitation and Development Corporation, the sole rights to oil, minerals and other natural resources over half the Empire for a period of 75 years.

"It enables an intensive development by British and American capital, on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of foreign applicants for concessions in the past. Many have tried repeatedly to break down the barriers of Ethiopian conservatism, and have as repeatedly failed."

As The Daily Telegraph reported in a second splash on the following Monday, "the news caused a stir all over the world". Nowhere did it cause a bigger stir than in the offices of those newspapers that had expensively sent correspondents to Abyssinia but had failed to land the story. After completing the agreement, Rickett appears to have decided that his clients' interests would be best served if he revealed its contents exclusively to two major correspondents close at hand: Jim Mills, who was in Addis Ababa for the Associated Press of America, and Phillips of The Daily Telegraph. This meant that every other news agency and newspaper in the world was scuppered.

Waugh could hardly have known what a particularly bitter blow this would be to the Daily Mail, which had employed Phillips as its special correspondent from 1922 until the previous year, when he is said to have quarrelled with Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, and defected to the Telegraph. Phillips was one of the half-dozen newspaper correspondents who had received knighthoods for their reporting of the First World War. After working in America, he joined the Daily Express in 1901 and remained with them until 1922 when he joined the Mail. He was an experienced correspondent and a smart operator.

And where was Waugh during this drama? Some 200 miles away in Harar and Jijiga. Having arrived in Addis Ababa in mid-August and decided that it offered none of the news for which the Daily Mail was hungering, he had in all good faith gone east with his friend Patrick Balfour (later Lord Kinross), the Evening Standard correspondent, to explore what stories those regions could provide. He was attracted by Harar, an ancient Arab city that he had first seen during his visit to Abyssinia in 1930. It had come down in the world since then, but still offered attractions. Many thought that Italy would start the war in that area. With that in mind, Waugh and Balfour sensibly decided to spend a few days down there, looking around. It turned out to be a disastrous decision. They were still there at the end of August when the Phillips splash appeared. An urgent telegram from the Daily Mail: "What do you know Anglo-American oil concession?" left Waugh baffled. He knew nothing about it, and while in Harar had no means of finding out.

It was four days before Waugh could get back to Addis Ababa, and by then the Rickett story was dead. The agreement had of course been seen by the Emperor as a way of enlisting American interests and perhaps support. Cordell Hull at America's State Department, Eden of Great Britain and Laval of France saw that quickly - and the dangers it entailed. The deal was squashed, leaving behind it a trail of urgent and sometimes angry cables to the correspondents in Addis Ababa.

The angriest of all were directed by the Daily Mail at Evelyn Waugh and were still arriving when I took my first breakfast at the Deutsches Haus. Waugh affected to treat them lightly and would occasionally use one of them as a spill for his after-breakfast cigar. But they had certain consequences, which is why such a small episode in the history of the 20th century is worth recalling. They signalled the end of Waugh's working arrangements with the Mail and provoked in him a feeling of resentment against his more professional colleagues in journalism which, I have always believed, provided the impetus for his novel Scoop. We see evidence of this in a letter he wrote to Katharine Asquith from Addis Ababa about the time of my arrival. Katharine Asquith, daughter-in-law of the former prime minister, had become Lady Horner. A Catholic convert, she was 50 in 1935 and a considerable figure in society. Waugh was at first nervous of her, but they became and remained close friends until his death. The relevant passage in his letter to her reads:

"The journalists are lousy competitive hysterical lying [sic]. It makes me unhappy to be one of them but that will soon be OK as the Daily Mail don't like the messages I send them and I don't like what they send me but I don't want to chuck them on account of honour because they have given me this holiday at great expense and would be left in the soup if I stopped sending them even my unsatisfactory messages; they don't want to sack me for identical reasons. So it is deadlock and we telegraph abuse at 4 and something a word."

The telegram rate was not, in fact, "4 and something" but two shillings and sixpence a word at urgent rates, which every correspondent felt compelled to use and so became the going rate. Moreover, Waugh did try to cancel his contract with the Mail and wrote to his agent, A. D. Peters, telling him so. "I am sending in my resignation to the mail [sic]. It wasn't possible for me to work with them as they have all the wrong ideas." This led to impasse. Waugh did not wish to leave Abyssinia because he still had his book contracts to fulfil for Waugh in Abyssinia, which attracted modest public attention when it was published, and Scoop, which took him longer but eventually appeared in 1938 and proved a huge success. The Daily Mail sent a replacement, W. F. "Binks" Hartin, a first-class reporter whom I had met earlier while we were working for our newspapers on a murder mystery, the Brighton trunk crime.

But the Abyssinians reckoned that one man from the Mail at any one time was enough. The paper was not as pro-Italian as Waugh himself but was some way from being pro-Abyssinian. So Waugh remained inside the country and "Binks" Hartin languished at Djibouti, where he contracted dysentery. Happily he recovered, and four years later we became riflemen together in the Queen's Westminsters (KRRC).

Regardless of how relations stood with the Daily Mail, Waugh's reputation as a writer was established. In the world of today he could well have been rich, but in the mid-Thirties, earning enough to keep pace with the standard of living he chose for himself was a serious business. For this assignment he had sought through his agent roughly the sort of deal they had secured for the Emperor's coronation in 1930.

For the coronation, The Times had hired him as its special correspondent, and a very good choice it had turned out to be. As was the custom in those days, Waugh's name did not appear over the copy, but the style of the pieces was unmistakably his. While we were in Addis Ababa, Waugh boasted to me that he had posted his account of the coronation to The Times, a method of despatch that had caused them displeasure. It might well have done, as the mail would have taken three weeks or more. It turned out to be a typical Waugh invention, perhaps devised to impress me with his disdain for journalism.

One needs to remember also, though none of us in Addis Ababa was remotely aware of it at the time, that Waugh was preoccupied with his private life. His marriage to Evelyn Gardner in 1928 had ended in divorce a year later. In September 1930, he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Early in 1935, he fell in love with Laura Herbert, whose mother, Lady Herbert, had her doubts about Waugh and he could make no decisive move until Rome had agreed to the annulment of his marriage. This agreement did not come through until July 1936. He needed the proceeds of Scoop to pay for his marriage to Laura in April 1937 and their new home. These events may partly explain his sometimes erratic behaviour in Addis Ababa during 1935.

I have often been asked what I made of Waugh. He had a weakness for wellconnected people, but unlike a lot of so-called snobs, he was adept at conversing with those of small importance, though often baffling them with his brand of wit. He paid close attention to what they said, which is why dialogue in his novels rings so true. Some, for example, think that his portrait of the young officer Hooper in Brideshead Revisited is odious and unfair. But it is a true portrait of a type we all encountered in the Army as it expanded during the Second World War.

When in Waugh's company, I always felt secretly relieved that I had been to a good public school, although Waugh did not think highly of Harrow; it was where poor Giles of Decline and Fall had been educated. None of us quite measured up to the sort of company he liked to keep back at home. He openly mocked the American correspondents and would gleefully mimic their accents. As Scoop makes abundantly clear, he especially looked down on reporters and photographers sent to Abyssinia by the popular press. On the other hand, Waugh was a more experienced traveller than any of us. He knew Africa; he had been in Abyssinia five years earlier. So, literary talent apart, he established a sort of leadership that drew respect. If you got stung by a scorpion, he was the man you were most likely to consult. In his heart, he knew he had to take the world as he found it, not as it was in one of his London clubs. In the drab world of Addis Ababa, that made him, at least to some of us, a good companion.

A lifetime in journalism has taught me that people have to be judged in the context of their times, and that is what newspapers and television so often overlook. In those early days of Waugh's success, there were many fashionable people who were happy to entertain and lionise authors in the public eye, particularly if they were "amusing", which to some Waugh was. He did not have to seek their society; they would seek him out for house parties, cocktail parties, any social gathering.

Waugh also had much in common with my young friends whom the Morning Post was recruiting from Oxford and Cambridge at the time I joined the newspaper. We went to parties most evenings, frequented smart nightclubs, drank too much and sometimes behaved badly, while automatically asserting what we supposed to be our social superiority. As he grew older, Waugh became more eccentric. In the mid-Thirties his talent was outstanding, but his behaviour not all out of line with that of many contemporaries.
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