Sideshow on the lake

During the night of 9 February 1916, two men were sitting on opposing shores of Lake Tanganyika. The longest lake in the world, it at that time divided German East Africa from the Belgian Congo. One of the men was Herr Kapitänleutnant Gustav von Zimmer, the other was an eccentric British navy officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson. The following morning, Zimmer would launch the Graf von Götzen, a large vessel which floats to this day on the waters of the lake.

Spicer-Simson takes a starring role in my narrative non-fiction book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (2004). The history of the two British motor launches, Mimi and Toutou, and their vainglorious, skirt-wearing, tattooed commander — who brought them from the Thames to Africa, tugging them by steam engine through the bush to the lakeshore — is extraordinary enough. Now Alex Capus has added another layer to this strange episode in a sideshow of the first world war, with a wonderful fictionalised account of what the Germans did while Spicer pranced about in his skirt.