Matthew Leeming, who has died aged 58, was an eccentric and intrepid entrepreneur, explorer, journalist and expert on Afghanistan.
He was co-author of the definitive Afghanistan: A Companion and Guide (2005), one of the best books of any genre ever written about the country, as well as taking some of the first tourist groups there in the early 2000s after decades of war.
He was at various times also a management consultant, tile manufacturer and jet fuel trader. A picaresque and ultimately hapless figure whose wild antics became legendary among his friends, Leeming often seemed more suited to a very different era.
Matthew David Leeming was born on September 22 1964 near Winchester and brought up as a Roman Catholic. His father was an inventor whose biggest success came from a water-dispensing gadget used in battery chicken farming.
Matthew was sent from prep school to Bradfield, where he was bullied for being bookish, completely un-sporty and entirely out of step with his peers in terms of youth culture, spending much of his time alone digging holes in pursuit of his interest in archaeology.
Things changed for him in the sixth form, when he was “discovered” by the cool gang, emerging as a great wit with a pronounced gregarious streak.
After winning an open exhibition to read Theology at Trinity College, Oxford, he cut a dashing figure on his arrival there in 1983. His somewhat angelic looks were deceiving, as he could be mischievous and highly combative when crossed – waging a comical war of attrition with the elderly couple who ran the college beer cellar, and stretching the patience of his tutor, the mild-mannered college chaplain, to the limit.
In his third year he moved out to 36 St Clement's, a rundown bohemian household presided over by Allegra Mostyn-Owen, the girlfriend and future wife of Leeming’s friend Boris Johnson.
Leeming had previously featured prominently in a cartoon of Trinity toffs in a tumbril on their way to the guillotine, but he was in reality a more subversive character, often in the crosshairs of the establishment. Hence one evening, in a scene straight out of Evelyn Waugh, the Bullingdon Club came for him.
Leeming’s stout resistance resulted in a flowerpot being thrown in frustrated exuberance through the window of the fish restaurant below and the memorable clatter of a dozen pairs of leather-soled shoes as they scarpered back over Magdalen Bridge, chased by the police.
During that year he founded “St Clement's College”, dispensing English language courses in hired scout huts to German schoolchildren, possibly failing to disabuse the alumni of their belief that they went away as Oxford graduates.
He also appeared in The Sunday Times after organising what purported to be the first foreign expedition along the ancient Chinese silk road, but bailed out at Istanbul after a row with his travelling companions. He was at his happiest having long conversations into the night. He loved talking about exploring, antiquity, theology, travelling – Bruce Chatwin and Richard Burton were heroes of his.
After graduating and inheriting a small tile workshop in Winchester, Leeming set about expanding the business until it was the UK’s leading manufacturer of handmade tiles. He established another factory in India and devised the so-called “groutometer”, which he said showed that British people were feeling richer by tracking the changing ratio in which they bought patterned (and thus more expensive) tiles as opposed to plain tiles.
Boris Johnson cited Leeming’s groutometer readings in his Telegraph column as cause for Tory optimism (misplaced as it happened) ahead of the 1997 general election.
Another Oxford friend, the future Polish politician Radek Sikorski, first introduced Leeming to Afghanistan, where Leeming helped restart the world’s oldest tile factory in the Friday Mosque in Herat, bringing out coloured glazes from Stoke-on-Trent to make the mosaic tiles which decorate the mosque’s inner courtyard. The country would later become his home for several years and his consuming passion.
After studying for an MBA in Oxford, Leeming returned to Afghanistan to write for the Spectator and begin work on his eventual 750-page guidebook.
In the course of his travels around the country, in 2001 he shared a guesthouse in the Panjshir Valley with two “rather weird” monosyllabic Moroccans who claimed to be journalists. It was not until a week later, after they had blown themselves up with General Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the anti-Taliban Afghan forces (who was always prepared to see journalists, hence their disguise), that Leeming realised he had spent five days living with two of Osama bin Laden’s kamikaze fighters.
The next year, he ran a project that took 500 swabs from the mouths of Afghan tribesmen and had them compared at University College, London, with similar samples from modern-day Greece. The results seemed to disprove the theory that the many blond and ginger-haired Afghans descend from Alexander the Great’s army, who passed through the country on their way to conquer India.
In 2004 Leeming led the first British package tour of Afghanistan for several decades. The Foreign Office (“complete old women” in Leeming’s estimation) was at the time still strongly advising against all “non-essential” travel there, warning of kidnappings and a landscape littered with mines and unexploded ordnance. Nerves were further jangled when, shortly before Leeming’s party was due to arrive, the Afghan tourist minister who had signed their invitation was assassinated, leading to a flurry of cancellations.
In the end just two of the original group of 10 came. One of these, an adventurous 77-year-old grandfather, remarked: “I might as well die stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan as rotting away in an old people’s home in England.”
“We had a great time,” Leeming later recalled.
Leeming was keen for his tours of the stunning landscapes and monuments of Bamiyan, Herat, Mazar, the Panjshir Valley and Kabul not to be seen as war tourism. “Afghanistan is an incredible country with a fascinating history and the most hospitable people in the world,” he said. He went on to take 45 tourists on these trips before the resurgence of the Taliban made further trips too dangerous. The Taliban’s eventual takeover was heartbreaking for him.
In 2006 Leeming set up a fuel supply venture, the New Afghanistan Petroleum Company, delivering diesel to military bases around the country and at one point it became the largest supplier of jet fuel in the country. But like one or two other of his schemes it eventually ended in law suits and a bitter dispute with his Afghan business partner. He repaired to live in Dubai, destitute, and subsequently had a breakdown.
In later years Leeming was based back in Winchester, where the Roman Catholic church helped to house him. He ran tours of the Galapagos Islands with Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, founded a charity for impoverished Afghans and mounted an expedition to ascertain the source of the Oxus.
Leeming had long suffered from depression and he experimented with various treatments – including LSD and anti-inflammatory drugs – to alleviate it.
He had several girlfriends over the years but never married. He died of natural causes.
Matthew Leeming, born September 22 1964, died November 29 2022
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