If you have ever visited St. Nectan’s Church in Stoke, near Hartland in North Devon, you will no doubt have noticed a chair there, which has a plaque attached to it, indicating that it was once sat upon by Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, who visited that church on 17 August 1938.

You may well ask why Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Lions, Lion of Judah, was visiting such a remote part of the British Isles at this time.

The answer lies in the date. After serving as regent to his cousin Zaudata, Haile Selassie (originally called Lij Tafari Makonnen, and who was born in a mud hut), became Emperor in 1930. Soon afterwards, in 1934, Mussolini decided to invade the country in an attempt to create an Italian Empire in the Horn of Africa. It was no minor skirmish. Poisoned gas was used by the Italians, and by the end of the war, a quarter of a million Ethiopians had been killed. The Emperor himself, after going round the world pleading for peace, took an active part in the fighting, but to no avail. In the end the Ethiopian royal family were forced to move into exile, going first to Djibouti, then to Palestine, and finally arriving in England, where they originally set up house near the Ethiopian legation in London.

The government were somewhat embarrassed by his presence, as it was proof of their inability to control the actions of the continental dictatorships. However, after going on holiday to Bath, the Emperor was impressed by the friendliness of the local people, who, of course, treated him as a celebrity, and he eventually bought a house there, called Fairfield, and moved into it with the rest of his family and entourage.

He had brought some money with him (about £25,000) but there were legal disputes as to what was personally his, and what belonged to the nation. Although they were generally sympathetic to his plight, the British Government only granted him ‘visitor status’, and he received no official financial support from the state, though, at a later date an anonymous benefactor, whose identity has never been revealed, did give him some financial help.

In the meantime, however, with his large family (a wife, five children, five grandchildren from his elder daughter), not to mention the rest of the staff, his finances ended up in poor shape, and he was obliged to earn money in any way he could, and this included opening fetes.

In 1938, he accepted one such invitation to open Hartland Church Fete, and this is how he came to visit St. Nectan’s Church, staying down the road at Hartland Abbey, by courtesy of the Stucley family.

Of course, as the legitimate ruler of one of the oldest Christian nations on earth, and having a three thousand year old ancestry that stretched back to King Solomon, he was treated with the utmost dignity and respect.

The opening ceremony was quite a formal one (as fetes go), with many local clergymen and dignitaries attending, the formalities taking place in the church, and thus the reason for the special chair. He was praised for his attempts to modernise his own country, and for giving encouragement

to other nations to do the same, for his attempts to keep the peace, especially via the League of Nations, and ‘ when the demons of war were unleashed’, for his bravery in battle.

In return, he said in Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia), and using an interpreter, that he hoped that his presence in Hartland would raise the profile of Christianity in the area, help to improve the church’s finances, and thanked the British people as a whole, who had been his most faithful supporter whilst in exile.

He eventually persuaded the British Government to send him back to Ethiopia to help with the war effort, and he regained his power as Emperor in 1941.

He was regarded in the West as a progressive leader, especially in the fields of education and law and order, but eventually famine, unemployment and a mutinous army undermined his rule, and he was overthrown by the Marxist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in 1974.

He was kept under house arrest until his death, in dubious circumstances, in 1975, aged 81. At first, he was thought to have died of natural causes, following a prostate operation, but, in 1992, his body was found buried under a toilet in the imperial palace, an ignominious end to a distinguished life.

In November 2000, his body was properly laid to rest in Addis Ababa’s Trinity Cathedral.

Of course, as Emperor, he was the last monarch (the 225^th) in an unbroken succession that went back three thousand years to Menelik I, said to be the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and who was treated in his lifetime as a living god and messiah by adherents of the Jamaican Rastafarian movement, partly because of his ancestry and partly because he was the only black African leader not to be deposed by white imperialists.

Rastafarians see Ethiopia as their spiritual home, and there is a small Rastafarian community there.

They are now about a million-strong, and St. Nectan’s Church, because if its connection to Haile Selassie, has now become a place of pilgrimage for his followers.