He was credited with creating and executing the Haversack Ruse in October 1917, during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War, but his participation in this matter has since been refuted.

His father, Daniel Meinertzhagen, was head of the Frederick Huth & Co. merchant-banking dynasty, which had an international reputation, that one biographer claimed in the introduction to his book was second in importance only to the Rothschilds.

Spencer would take young Richard and Daniel on walks around the family home of Mottisfont Abbey, urging them to observe and enquire on the habits of birds.

They had first met Richard Bowdler Sharpe at the Natural History Museum in 1886 and noted that he was very fond of encouraging children, showing them around the bird collections.

[10] Other than routine regimental soldiering, he participated in big-game hunting, was promoted, sent on sick leave to England, and after recovery posted to the relocated battalion at Mandalay in Burma.

In 1904, one such punitive expedition was commanded by a Captain Francis Arthur Dickinson of the 3rd KAR with participation by Meinertzhagen, where more than 11,000 cattle were captured at the cost of 3 men killed and 33 wounded.

Meinertzhagen shot Koitalel at point-blank range while shaking his hand and his men killed Koitatlel's accompanying entourage, including most of his advisors.

[20] Pressure from the Colonial Department on the War Office eventually brought about Meinertzhagen's removal from Africa, as "he had become a negative symbol" and on 28 May 1906 "he found himself on a ship being trundled back to England in disgrace and in disgust.

However, "... by making full use of his wide network of contacts in high places" he was able to rehabilitate himself and was assigned to the Fusiliers' Third Battalion in South Africa, arriving at Cape Town on 3 February 1907.

His diary record of this campaign contain harsh assessments of senior officers, of the role played by the Royal Navy, and of the quality of the Indian units sent to East Africa.

A German Jewish doctor stationed at el-Afulah railway junction gave valuable reconnaissance reports on troop movements south.

No changes in German-Turkish positions took place in the weeks leading up to the British operations at Beersheba or Gaza, indicating that the ruse had no effect on the decision-making of the Turkish-German leadership.

Allenby told him that the Turks had to be induced to escape Jerusalem, northwards if possible, so a boundary was set at 6 miles (9.7 km), a no-fighting zone to facilitate their flight.

In the film A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia (1990), which depicted the Paris Peace Conference, Meinertzhagen was a major character and was played by Jim Carter.

His unpublished diaries hint, among other exploits, at a successful rescue attempt of one of the Czarist-Russian Grand Duchesses, possibly Tatiana (see The Romanov Conspiracies by Michael Occleshaw).

He is wholly unable to appreciate the justice of the native case, which he dismisses contemptuously as "superficially justifiable", because in his view, the Arab is a very inferior person...

A careful examination of Colonel Meinertzhagen's reckless championship of the Zionist cause fails to convince the Court that he has added materially to the proof of general bias charged against the O.E.T.A.

(S) officials, while Colonel Meinertzhagen's own indiscretions on a tour which was apparently intended to conciliate the Arabs, reveal him as an agent who, however capable of doing good work in other spheres is singularly out of place in the East.Israeli historian Tom Segev considers Meinertzhagen both a "great antisemite and a great Zionist," quoting from his Middle East Diary: "I am imbued with antisemitic feelings.

With Aaronson, Meinertzhagen had many talks about Palestine, and was so impressed by him that he completely changed his mind and became an ardent Zionist – which he has remained till this day.

The original diaries are kept at Rhodes House (the Bodleian Library), Oxford, and contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and oddities exist in the page numbering.

He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri.

His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain.... Meinertzhagen himself traced the "evil" side of his personality to a period during his childhood when he was subjected to severe physical abuse at the hands of a sadistic schoolmaster when he was at Fonthill boarding school in Sussex:Even now I feel the pain of that moment, when something seemed to leave me, something good; and something evil entered into my soul.

"[63] In 1948–49, he was accompanied by Dr. Phillip Clancey on an ornithological expedition to Arabia, Yemen, Aden, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa.

Meinhertzhagen's magnum opus, Birds of Arabia (1954), however made extensive use of the unpublished manuscript of another naturalist, George Bates, who has been insufficiently credited in the work.

[64][65] In the 1990s, an analysis of Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire, revealed large-scale fraud involving theft and falsification.

A species of owl, the forest owlet, thought to have gone extinct, was rediscovered in 1997 based on searches made in the locality where the original specimens were collected.

[72] From about 1926, Meinertzhagen started to have a cold relationship with his wife and became increasingly close with his cousin Tess Clay, then aged 15, spending much time with her sisters and her.

[55] As noted above, Brian Garfield's research led him to speculate that in fact she was murdered by Meinertzhagen, out of fear that she would expose him and his fraudulent activities.

Annie Constance Meinertzhagen left £113,466 (net personalty £18,733) in her will to her husband if he remained her widower, while if he remarried, he was to get an annuity of £1200 and interest in their London home for life.

[74] Clay was his housekeeper, secretary, "confidante", and later scientific partner who studied and eventually documented the vast collections of bird lice that Meinertzhagen had gathered.