The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia

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One of those pairs of eyes staring out at Alamayu belonged to Queen Victoria, who he met three days after he arrived in England. Extraordinary and thrilling ... This story should be known to every man, woman and child' - Lemn Sissay Too bad: the palace wants Alemayehu kept where he was put, on Queen Victoria’s instructions. Since it can hardly say the request is over-ambitious – Philip’s mother’s body was flown from Windsor to Jerusalem 19 years after her death – its refusal, reported by the BBC, cites both practical and propriety-related objections. “It is very unlikely,” the palace says, “that it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity.” It said the chapel authorities had “the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed”.

Returning Heritage “A deeply moving account of a life cut short and the fate of a kingdom’s treasures … Heavens’ book tells this remarkable and unhappy story with authority and skill … surely the most definitive study of Alamayu and Maqdala to date … tragic, authoritative and deeply moving.” There is a footnote saying Christopher Middlemass Davidson and Edmond Anderson Shuldham are linked through the South Cork Militia. It adds: Alamayu headed to India with Speedy when the latter was appointed a District Superintendent in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and later to Penang, when the guardianship was questioned by Robert Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ultimately, Speedy and Alamayu would separate, as the latter entered Cheltenham College, where the boys called him “Ali”, and he did not prosper. Before his death Alemayehu had “hankered”, Heavens writes, for Ethiopia. During his lifetime his plight touched some would-be protectors, including Victoria (his Windsor burial was a respectful gesture), while one of her prime ministers, William Gladstone, condemned the removal, at the same time as the child, of Abyssinian spoils. He “deeply lamented”, Hansard recorded, “that those articles, to us insignificant, though probably to the Abyssinians sacred and imposing symbols, or at least hallowed by association, were thought fit to be brought away by a British Army.” In just two days his father’s empire had been emphatically destroyed, and Alamayu was surrounded by enemies - British and other Ethiopians opposed to Tewodros, as his own Grandfather had been.Presumably it’s the palace’s intention for Ethiopian petitioners to picture, as you do from euphemisms like “others in the vicinity”, scenes of such ghastly Hadean mayhem that they will tactfully withdraw. British subjects may, on the other hand, wonder if expert accounts, with diagrams, of what would become of the late queen’s body, disguised the fact that the royal vault is actually a chaotic ossuary in which unidentifiable parts of foreign princes are so carelessly jumbled up with those of Charles’s forebears that only DNA testing could positively tell them apart (some hair of Alemayehu’s father is in fact available, courtesy of Lord Napier’s pillaging Victorians). It would certainly accord with an earlier royal excuse for inaction that “identifying the remains of young Prince Alemayehu would not be possible”. So why, while it has learned to contextualise the Koh-i-noor, does the palace still assert proprietorship of a child victim of conquest? Since they’re safe from a rush on prince-restitution that would leave mausoleums empty, the greater risk for the royals would seem to be in sabotaging, with this intransigence, their own claims to have changed. Unless they really have lost him? For a service template, how about something like the memorial ceremony in 2013, when the Serbian royal family was allowed – Queen Elizabeth having authorised the exhumation – to repatriate Queen Maria of Yugoslavia from Frogmore? Few families can have devoted as much attention as UK sovereigns to re-arranging, rehousing and relocating ancestral bodies

The Economist “Heavens has produced an exceptionally fascinating, evenly balanced and moving account of Alamayu’s life. While there are scores of books recounting the story of Tewodros and the events at Maqdala, there are precious few biographies of this young prince… and none of them more rewarding to read than this one.“Heavens makes many tenuous claims; footnotes or endnotes would have been preferable to the summary of sources he offers at the book’s end. At Cheltenham, Alamayu “mastered the chief virtues of public school life – the suppression and repression of troubling emotion” – how does he know? Heavens also suggests that Alamayu’s melancholy nature and poor performance at school were due to dyslexia – though he at least adds the caveat that “it is a risky business diagnosing anyone from the distance of 160 years, especially with no medical or other relevant expertise”. Well, quite. For the first time, The Prince and the Plunder tells the whole story of Alamayu, from his early days in his father’s fortress on the roof of Africa to his new home across the seas, where he charmed Queen Victoria, chatted with Lord Tennyson and travelled with his towering red-headed guardian Captain Speedy.The orphan prince was celebrated but stereotyped and never allowed to go home. The book is written in an uneasily breezy style. Readers are told to “hold tight”, that “it’s a fair cop”, and there is a lot of “perhaps” and “maybe”. And in telling rather than showing, Heavens does Alamayu a disservice. His tragic tale needs neither elaboration nor anachronistic moralising.

On informing the Commanding Engineer that I had been directed to apply to him for a working party to enable me to make excavations with a view to discovering some remains of ruins of ancient Adulis, I was told that owing to the amount of work in hand just at that time I could not have more than 25 men of the Madras Sappers and Miners; with this small party, however, I at once made a commencement. Three narrow trenches being cut into some of the tumuli the walls and foundations of old buildings were discovered. At one spot some cut stone columns were found, and this induced me to remove more of the debris in the immediate vicinity, when the outline of a building, as shown in the accompanying plan, was discernable. I also ascertained by excavation that the foundations of this building, in which the bases of the cut-stone columns were found in true position, were 13 feet deep. In this fascinating, haunting book, which takes us from a high mountain plateau in Ethiopia to Osborne on the Isle of Wight where Prince Alamayu met and charmed Queen Victoria, and all too soon to the catacombs of St George’s Chapel Windsor, Andrew Heavens tells the astonishing story of the uprooting of this lost boy.” Late Night Live - Separate stories podcast: The Prince and the Plunder – a tragic tale of colonial pillageMr Franks has the honour to report that two cases have been received from the India Office, containing various fragments of marble excavated by the British troops in Abyssinia. They appear to have been chiefly found amid the ruins of a church at Adulis, near Annesley Bay, a view of which has been published in the ‘Illustrated London News’ for September 5, 1868. Remarkably Alamayu seems to have remained even tempered and open hearted throughout his short life. Lootany Heavens is a good storyteller and guides us with a sure pen through the events of 1868 and beyond. He sprinkles in first hand sources throughout the book so that people who met or knew Alamayu, like Queen Victoria, can speak to us directly.