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HISTORY · DIASPORA · BATH

The Lion’s Refuge

Ninety years after Emperor Haile Selassie I came ashore in England, Bath gathered at Fairfield House and in its Abbey to remember the five years when an English spa city sheltered an African sovereign — and to ask what that hospitality still demands of us.

By Endex | Bath, October 2026

Princess Alexandra rose beneath the fan vaulting of Bath Abbey to read the oldest story the Ethiopian throne tells about itself: the Queen of Sheba travelling north with spices, gold and precious stones to test King Solomon with hard questions. For a dynasty that traced its line to that meeting, it was more than a lesson. It was a genealogy read aloud, in an English abbey, by a great-great-granddaughter of the last Emperor.

That evening — Sunday 18 October 2026 — fell exactly seventy-two years to the day after Emperor Haile Selassie I last prayed in the same Abbey, having just received the Freedom of the City of Bath. And it closed a weekend marking something older still: ninety years since a sovereign in exile, his armies broken and his capital in fascist hands, made his home on a hillside above the Avon.

I was privileged to attend both the commemorative banquet at Fairfield House on Friday 16 October and, two days later, the special prayers and Choral Evensong, alongside Lij Mulugeta Asrate Kassa, members of the Ethiopian imperial family and many distinguished guests. What follows sets those two evenings against the history they honoured — a history that, as Bath’s own historians have long observed, most biographies of the Emperor hurry past.

[ PHOTO: Bath Abbey, Choral Evensong, Sunday 18 October 2026]

The Road from Djibouti

On 2 May 1936, with Italian columns closing on Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie named his cousin Ras Imru Haile Selassie Prince Regent and left with his family for French Somaliland. The decision has been argued over ever since. To some of his nobles, flight was dishonour. The Emperor reasoned that an Ethiopia without a living, recognised sovereign abroad would simply be swallowed, and that the League of Nations — of which his country had been a member since 1923 — was the last forum in which it might still be defended. Days before he left, he told the foreign press that by fighting on he had been “standing guard in the last citadel of collective security.”

Royal Navy ships carried the imperial party onward; the family rested in Jerusalem before continuing west by way of Gibraltar. On 3 June 1936 — Ginbot 26, 1928 in the Ethiopian calendar — they came ashore at Southampton and travelled on to London by train. The newsreels of the day show the Emperor stepping off the ship, the train pulling away, and a waiting crowd in the capital; later footage catches the family on a balcony at Princes Gate, and a young princess speaking into a microphone.

The public’s welcome was warm. The government’s was cooler: anxious not to provoke Rome, Stanley Baldwin’s cabinet received him as a private visitor rather than a head of state. Within three weeks he was on his way to Geneva.

Geneva, and the Silence that Followed

On 30 June 1936 Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly of the League of Nations. Although fluent in French, he chose to speak in Amharic. Italian journalists in the gallery jeered until they were removed; the Emperor waited, and then delivered the speech that made him a moral symbol for a generation. He described poison gas sprayed from aircraft on soldiers, villagers and livestock, and warned the assembled nations that what was being done to Ethiopia would in time be done to them. Within days, the League voted to lift its sanctions on Italy.

It was after Geneva — his appeal rejected, his treasury all but empty — that the Emperor turned towards the West Country.

Why Bath?

He arrived in Bath on 5 August 1936 and took rooms at the Bath Spa Hotel; a photograph in the Bath Chronicle archive shows him on its steps beside the manager. Another shows him waiting on the platform at Bath Spa station to greet the Empress Menen. Bath offered what London could not: discretion, a gentler pace, the reputed benefit of its waters, and a quieter stage for a monarch who could no longer afford a grand one.

Bath offered what London could not: discretion, and a quieter stage for a monarch who could no longer afford a grand one.

The house the family settled on was Fairfield, a limestone Italianate villa of about 1850 at Newbridge, on the western edge of the city, which came onto the market after the death of its previous owner, a Mrs Campbell-White. While it was readied, the household stayed on at the hotel. More than one writer has noticed the quiet irony: a ruler driven out by Italian fascism found sanctuary in a former Roman city, behind the façade of an Italian-style villa.

Fairfield was never merely a residence. It sheltered the Emperor’s family, his advisers and Orthodox clergy; a small telephone room and the morning room served as offices where he received supporters and petitioners. A generation of Bath children grew up able to say that the Emperor of Ethiopia had been their next-door neighbour — a claim the city’s oral historians have heard many times over.

[ PHOTO: Fairfield House, Newbridge ]

A Court Without a Country

Exile was an education in humility. Keith Bowers, the former BBC executive producer whose Imperial Exile remains the only full-length study of these years, portrays an Emperor nearly crushed by debt, diplomatic neglect and grief, and has argued that the period marked Haile Selassie far more deeply than his biographers allow. Fittingly, Bowers was among the guests on both days of this year’s commemoration, at the Fairfield banquet and at the Abbey, a decade after he launched his book in the 80th anniversary year.

Much of the Emperor’s public work in Britain ran through his envoy in London, Hakim Workneh Eshete — known to the British as Dr Charles Martin — the Ethiopian Minister to the Court of St James’s. When the Emperor, then staying in Bath, visited the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking on 26 August 1936, the local paper recorded Dr Martin and Ras Kassa at his side. The legation also gave work to the Jamaican poet Una Marson, who served as its English-speaking secretary and accompanied the Emperor to Geneva. Even that partnership would later strain under the weight of money the exiled court simply did not have — one of exile’s many private wounds.

Some who came never went home. Blattengeta Heruy Wolde Selassie, the Foreign Minister and one of the Emperor’s most trusted counsellors, died in September 1938 and lies in Locksbrook Cemetery, a short walk from Fairfield. The Emperor himself used the long Bath years to dictate the first volume of his autobiography, My Life and Ethiopia’s Progress.

Then there was Princess Tsehai, his youngest daughter. At seventeen she began training as a resident student nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in August 1936, and on 25 August 1939 she qualified as a State Registered Children’s Nurse — Ethiopia’s first trained nurse. When war came she continued her general training with Guy’s Hospital, then evacuated to Pembury in Kent. She returned home with her people, married, and died in childbirth at Nekemte on 17 August 1942, aged twenty-two. Her father’s memorial to her, the Princess Tsehai Memorial Hospital, was funded in part by the friends she had made in England. Bath has not forgotten her: since 2021 her portrait has looked out from a mural in the atrium of the city’s Royal United Hospital.

The Road Home

Rescue came, in the end, from the war the League had failed to prevent. When Mussolini declared war on Britain in June 1940, the exiled Emperor ceased to be an embarrassment and became an ally. He left Bath that summer for Sudan. In January 1941 he crossed back onto Ethiopian soil near the village of Um Idda, and on 5 May 1941 — five years to the day after Italian troops had entered his capital — he returned to Addis Ababa and reclaimed his throne.

1954: The Freedom of the City

He came back to Bath only once as a reigning monarch. On 18 October 1954, during a state visit to Britain, he received the Freedom of the City — the highest honour the city can bestow — from the Mayor, Councillor Gallop, and walked with him along the High Street to the Abbey. The Bath Chronicle’s photographers followed him to the Stothert & Pitt engineering works and to a house on the Moorfields estate, where Mrs Edith Rowland had laid a table for tea that his timetable would not allow him to stay for. Small details, but they speak of a visit conducted less as pageantry than as a return among neighbours.

Four years later, in 1958, he made his gratitude permanent, presenting Fairfield House to the city as a home for its elderly. His great-granddaughter Princess Esther Selassie Antohin — Aster Woldeselassie in Amharic — who chairs today’s Fairfield House organisation, has described the gift as “a statement of his gratitude to the people of Bath.” The house served for decades as a residence for the aged, and the bungalows of Empress Menen Gardens still stand beside it. Today, Grade II listed and run as a community interest company, it hosts tours, exhibitions, Ethiopian Orthodox and Rastafari gatherings alike, and now carries a blue plaque.

Friday: A Banquet at Fairfield

It was in this house that the anniversary weekend began. On Friday evening Fairfield was full: members of the imperial family, clergy, civic guests, Rastafari elders, Ethiopian families from across Britain and the house’s own volunteers. The address of the evening came from Lij Mulugeta Asrate Kassa, a kinsman of both the Emperor and Empress Menen Asfaw: his mother, he explained, is a granddaughter of the Empress through her earlier marriage. He spoke of how destiny had drawn him to Fairfield “through thick and thin,” and of a family bond that the house makes tangible.

The theme of the evening was welcome. He and others described Fairfield as a “United Nation in Bath” — a place where people of every background and age meet, and where nobody in need is turned away, fulfilling the inclusive vision, they said, that His Imperial Majesty would have wanted. Guests were told, too, that Princess Esther and Princess Alexandra would take an active part in the commemorative Evensong at the Abbey on Sunday.

A United Nation in Bath — where nobody in need is ever turned away.

https://www.youtube.com/live/sadp3zSXmO8?is=Oc7hgfVYjjwiwI2q

[ Video: The banquet at Fairfield House, Friday 16 October 2026 ]

Sunday: Sheba, Philip and the Emperor’s Voice

On Sunday I joined Lij Mulugeta and members of the royal families for the special prayers that culminated in Choral Evensong. The Abbey’s welcome set out the purpose plainly: to mark ninety years since the royal family’s residence in exile in Bath, and to celebrate the enduring bonds between the city and Ethiopia. Among those greeted were Her Highness Princess Esther, great-granddaughter of Haile Selassie I; Dr Alexandra, his great-great-granddaughter; the Mayor of Bath, Councillor Ruth Malloy; and representatives of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Fairfield House and BMSA.

After Princess Alexandra’s lesson from 1 Kings came the most affecting moment of the evening. Into the stillness of the nave the Abbey played an archival recording of the Emperor himself, speaking in 1938 at the Royal Albert Hall. He spoke of the great antiquity of the Bible in Ethiopia, of Scripture as a guide that transcends race and empire, and of the comfort it offers in every trouble. He spoke, too, of commissioning a new translation, so that every Ethiopian might read the Scriptures for themselves and find in them truth, refuge and a rallying point for humanity amid the perplexities of the age.

It is worth pausing on the date. In 1938 the Emperor had no throne, little money and fading hope of foreign help; yet he was planning a Bible for his people. The ambition outlived the exile. After liberation he convened a Bible committee in 1947, and the revised Amharic Bible issued under his authority appeared in 1960/61. Heard by his descendants in an English abbey, his voice carried the weight of a man speaking from the very depths of exile about the one possession no invader could take.

The second lesson, read by Princess Esther, was Acts 8:26–40: the deacon Philip on the desert road to Gaza, the Ethiopian court official reading Isaiah in his chariot, and the baptism beside the road — the first recorded Ethiopian follower of Christ. Between them the two readings spanned the long arc of Ethiopian faith, from Sheba’s journey to Jerusalem to the official’s journey home.

[ PHOTO: Princess Alexandra, Princess Esther and Lij Mulugeta at the Bath Abbey ]

A Photograph Handed Back

Not every guest that afternoon came with a title. Among those who lingered in the nave after the service was Alan Gait, a frail, white-haired Englishman whose memory of the exile was a family one. His father, John Gait, he explained, had taught one of the Emperor’s sons to drive: Prince Makonnen, later Duke of Harar, who was still a boy when the family came to England. On hearing that Bath was marking the anniversary, Mr Gait had come to the Abbey to tell the story in person, and to hand over a photograph of his father at the wheel beside the young prince.

It is a small story, and it is exactly the kind on which the history of the exile rests: the hotelier, the matron, the neighbour on Newbridge Hill, and here John Gait, an Englishman teaching an Ethiopian prince to drive. It carries a shadow too. Prince Makonnen, widely held to be the Emperor’s favourite son and the father of Prince Mikael, Duke of Harar, was killed in a car crash between Debre Zeyit and Nazret on 13 May 1957, aged thirty-two. The skill he learned in exile went with him onto the Ethiopian road where his life ended. Ninety years on, the photograph has come home to the family it belongs to.

*After Evensong: guests in the nave of Bath Abbey, Sunday 18 October 2026. Centre right, Alan Gait, whose father John Gait taught Prince Makonnen to drive.*

A Theology of Refuge

The preacher took the anniversary as the text behind the texts. Ninety years ago, the sermon recalled, a family fleeing fascist invasion found a home at Fairfield. From that he drew three words — refuge, compassion and hospitality — and traced them back to the Benedictine community whose ministry first shaped the Abbey, through the teaching of Jesus, and forward into a present that needs them urgently as a counter to fear and division.

The two lessons, he suggested, belong together: Solomon receiving a foreign queen, Philip baptising a foreign official. Both describe a single, global family of faith that no frontier can divide. The Emperor’s own reflections on the warm refuge he had found in Bath were offered as a living example of that spirit of welcome, and the sermon closed with a charge: that the congregation recommit its churches, communities and nations to being places of safe refuge, deep compassion and generous hospitality.

Refuge, compassion, hospitality — three words carried from a Benedictine cloister to a fleeing Emperor, and handed back to us.

What Bath Gave, and What It Asks

It would be easy to treat the anniversary as a pleasant chapter of civic heritage. The record is more demanding than that. The British state kept the Emperor at arm’s length; it was townspeople — a hotelier, a hospital matron, the neighbours on Newbridge Hill, the families who lined the High Street in 1954 — who did the welcoming. Hospitality, in Bath’s story, was not policy. It was character.

For Ethiopians, the anniversary arrives at a painful hour. Ninety years on, our people are again scattered across the world — journalists, clergy and ordinary families, many driven abroad not by a foreign army but by conflict and repression at home. Bath’s example is a reminder that exile is survivable when someone opens a door, and that those who are received carry a duty to remember. Haile Selassie remembered. He came back, and he gave back.

Ninety years ago a city opened its door to a stranger who happened to be an emperor. On Sunday evening, in the Abbey where he last prayed, his descendants read the scriptures of his people to the city that had sheltered him. It was, in the fullest sense, a homecoming — and a reminder that the measure of a place is not the guests it honours, but the strangers it receives.