Vivienne de Watteville

Vivienne Florence Beatrice de Watteville (17 August 1900–27 June 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. Early life 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. Out in the Blue (1927) In 1923 Vivienne and her father, with a large team of African helpers, set off on an eighteen-month safari through Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo. It was primarily a hunt for big game, collecting fauna for 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 were troubled by marauding lions through much of their trip. Lions attacked the mules in the boma (camp enclosure) and Bernard shot several of the big cats. One, on the verge of starvation, stormed their camp and raced off with a canvas bathtub, which it tried to eat. Sometime later they found nails and torn bits of canvas in its droppings. (They found the remains of their missing Airedale Terrier inside a leopard.) At the start of the safari, Bernard de Watteville 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. At that time elephant hunting was permitted. Their collection included the Big Five (elephant, lion, leopard, cape buffalo, and rhino). They also shot giraffe, over thirty types of antelope, and even a male mountain bongo, which took seven weeks of stalking in the Aberdare Range.