How Mike Hoare dazzled an intellectual
Last month saw the 43rd anniversary of the attempted coup in the Seychelles. A lot has happened since then, for example Tullio Moneta who was second-in-command to Mike Hoare, died in 2022 aged 84. Peter Duffy, the so-called leader of the Frothblowers, died in 2017 aged 79. And Gerard Hoarau, one of the ringleaders of the exiles, was assassinated on a London street in 1985 – and no one has ever been arrested for the crime.
And of course the legendary Mike Hoare set off on his last adventure on 2 February 2020, aged 100 years. He had had an extraordinary life, all the more so because his philosophy was that "you get more out of life by living dangerously".
Mike was certainly a man of many parts, but it is not generally known that he was a Shakespeare and Marlowe aficionado, and a lover of poetry. I (Chris Hoare) was privileged to witness Mike engaging at a high intellectual level with somebody new on their subject. This is what happened after Mike was released from prison in May 1985. Quote from the biography 'Mad Mike' Hoare: The Legend:
Soldier of Fortune magazine immediately sent a senior editor, Bill Guthrie, PhD, to Natal. Guthrie was not your typical soldier of fortune; he was in fact an intellectual who had studied widely, including archaeology and literature. He was the type who could well have known several 16th-century Norwegian dialects. As I was soon to witness, he could converse with authority on almost any humanities subject.
Guthrie had a number of meetings with Mike, and wrote about his encounters in the January 1986 issue, saying: 'I hadn't expected a Renaissance man. We discussed religious writers, Greek history, medieval English drama, kayaking, sailing, motorcycling across Africa, the writings of Mohandas K Gandhi and, of course, mercenary soldiering. But the best time was a long South African winter afternoon spent in the sunlit study while Hoare told what he had done in the Seychelles.
'Then he brought out a bottle, and we drank and talked about – believe it or not – early English language and Christopher Marlowe's poetry. Hoare had memorised long tracts of Marlowe's verse, and spoke professionally and eloquently of Renaissance poets. He quoted freely from criticism and scholarship. Had Colonel Hoare been Dr Hoare, he would have been the best drama professor I had met.'
I was in that sunlit study and I saw how Mike rose to the occasion. When he realised he was in the company of a man who had memorised the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or whatever it was, by the age of 10, or whatever it was, Mike began engaging with Guthrie on a tricky aspect of Shakespeare's King Lear. The ensuing discussion took an hour, and covered the fields of religion, literature, history, politics, art, and so on. Mike was in his element. This was a classic example of something I had seen Mike do on occasion: engage at a high intellectual level with someone new on their subject. It never failed to make a huge impression. Unquote.
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