Flies, fever and farce
The African Queen is renowned as one of the toughest and craziest
shoots in cinematic history. But it was nothing compared to the first
world war British naval escapade which lay behind the film, as Giles
Foden's new book reveals
Tuesday September 21, 2004
The Guardian
At one point in John Huston's 1951 film The African Queen, starring
Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, Bogie gets covered in flies. A
crude special effect (the insects are plastered on the lens), it is
nevertheless one of the links between the film and the true story
behind it: a British navy campaign on Lake Tanganyika in 1915 which
saw 28 men haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi and
Toutou through the wilds of the Congo.
At the start of the first world war, German warships controlled Lake
Tanganyika. The British had no ships there. This mattered: it was the
longest lake in the world, and of great strategic importance. The
Admiralty ordered the 28 men, mostly volunteers, to take control of
it. They were a strange bunch - one was addicted to Worcester sauce
(as an aperitif), another was a former racing driver - but the
strangest of all of them was their skirt-wearing, tattoo-covered
commander, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson.
Giles Foden
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