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My travellers in Central Arabia and the Gulf
HVF Winstone
An edited version of a talk delivered at the opening of an exhibition of British Travellers in Arabia at the embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 29 September 2004
In the chair, Sir Alan Monro, Chairman Saudi-British Society
Whenever I speak to Arab friends about travellers in their lands, even those who have read my books and are familiar with my version of events are liable to ask ‘What were they actually up to? Why were these people travelling in hot, unfamiliar and hostile territories, enduring all sorts of privations and woes?’ Of course, the question is usually rhetorical. I have a fairly good idea what is in their minds. The word that always comes to mind is intelligence of the MI variety. In fact, that kind of intelligence, the peculiarly English kind, did sometimes come into it, but most of them were first and foremost in those early times journeying into the unknown, coming to terms with tribal life under conditions of extreme austerity, and of course filling in those white blots on the map. I began to research their lives some forty years ago, in the 1960s. Some of the people I spoke to knew of Gertrude Bell, though most confused her with Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury set. None of my acquaintance had ever heard of Captain Shakespear or Gerard Leachman. Finding out about such people, cutting a swathe through the thickets of the Lawrence of Arabia saga, became a personal adventure. ¤ As most of you will know, it all started with Captain Shakespear. That first excursion into the 19th and early 20th century politics of central Arabia led in quick succession to Gertrude Bell, Leachman (I stole the title ‘OC Desert’ from a wartime article in Blackwell’s), Parker Pasha, and on to Lady Anne Blunt and the archaeologists Leonard Woolley and Howard Carter. It was an aged Kuwaiti who first set me on my journey of discovery. He was a wealthy man of the post-oil era when I met him; if I remember correctly a cigarette tycoon.. He recalled to me the days of his youth in Kuwait when he fell victim to smallpox. It was I gathered about the year 1910. Like others who were stricken with infectious diseases in those days he was confined to a tent in the desert, hostage to fate, seldom visited by fellow humans. There were no medical treatments. But he was visited often by an Englishman who wandered in and out of the desert, usually on hunting trips, dressed as an officer of the Raj complete with topi, sometimes accompanied by tribal Shaikhs and by his own entourage of Indian servants, his faithful Arab jemader Khalaq, saluki dogs, and sinister hooded hawk by the name of Shalwa. And he always brought with him food and water for the invalid. The invalid eventually recovered and never forgot the benefactor who turned out to be HBM’s Political Agent in Kuwait - Captain Skaishpear as they called him. As the story unfolded, it dawned on me that this was the man of whom Lawrence had written in the early chapters of The Seven Pillar of Wisdom, of whose ‘magnificence’ and splendid isolation the Arabs spoke in their camp fire conversations.
Shakespear was, and I suggest remains, the foremost among Englishmen in the territory of Al Saud. Most importantly on this occasion, he was the one Englishman of his day whose unswerving support for the founding father of the Kingdom was to mark him out as a uniquely perceptive figure in an administration that was then as now decidedly equivocal in its Middle East policies. Thirty years after Gladstone’s ‘bag and baggage’ speech, Britain still insisted on maintaining the status quo in central Arabia and the Gulf, and warned its own representatives not to become entangled in the politics of the area. France and Germany had no such qualms. Thus began the era of clandestine travel, in which Britons travelling in those parts often had the tacit support of one department of state but not of another. An era in which Germany already had the most effective ‘Nachrichtdienst’ or news-service (a much more apt word than ‘intelligence’) and was gradually usurping Britain’s commercial dominance of the Gulf. As so often happens, fate took a decisive hand. I need waste no time in telling this audience that in the very early days of the new century, the warrior king Abdal Aziz retook his capital from its Rashid governor, and thus the re-emergence and transformation of Najd into a strong and ambitious Saudi Arabian state began. It was an event the significance of which took a little time to seep into the European mind, but it soon began to concentrated political minds. Nowhere was the realisation of change in central Arabia better portrayed in its earliest stages than in the brief drama acted out by the gallant Shakespear and his rival on the scene, Lieutenant Gerard Leachman, representing as they did opposite extremes of Britain’s imperial presence – one the Indian Political Service, the other a staff officer of the British army on ‘special duty’. ¤ Shakespear was very much a creature of the Raj, confirmed through generations of his family. They had been pillars of the Indian empire for generations past, surviving and succeeding through the ups and downs of the Company, the Mutiny and the power conflicts between political and military wings of the viceroys’ administrations. Close relatives were high officials in Calcutta and Simla. His father worked for the Bengal forestry service. Mother, a descendant of English - West Indian slave traders was the dominant parent. And by the time he was ready for school it was one of the up and coming public schools with a reputation for taking on the progeny of empire that attracted his devoted mother, King William’s College in the Isle of Man. ’Shakers’ left school with a modest academic record and an all-round sporting presence, especially on the rugby and cricket fields. Sandhurst led straight to India and reunion with the family. He learnt Arabic and Farsi, and was soon in demand as an interpreter and translator. Thus his passage from the Devonshire Regiment to the Bengal Lancers and thence into the Indian political service was determined. He became the youngest political officer in the service when in 1904 at the age of 25 he was appointed Consul and PO at Bandar Abbas, He was also made first assistant Resident to Cox at Bushire. Five years later he was in Kuwait at the court of Mubarak bin Sabah. From then on he moved freely among those classless stalwarts of the desert, the Badu and their leaders, and among the seafarers of the Gulf. He won the friendship and admiration of both but he kept them at arm’s length. He was ever the Englishman abroad. Arabs were always amused to see him retire to bathe privately in the special compartment of his tent designed for the purpose, or taking his meals in splendid isolation, usually with a glass of Moselle to hand, eating his lamb with a strange greenish fluid or a red jam-like substance, putting on weight as the years went by. The Badawin, those most gregarious of humans, lived and ate in heaps and told endless tales round the evening fire. In the context of this exhibition, I should add that when night and darkness fell on the desert he used the ‘bathroom’ section of his tent as his photographic dark-room, developing the pictures he had taken of people and places and which you see on the walls today. I suspect that it was his independence, his determination to retain his identity as a British officer, unlike others before and after him who tried to assume Arab dress and habits, that most appealed to Bin Saud. What of Leachman? Lijman of the Arabs could not have been more different. Lanky, wiry, ascetic, capable of going for days with little food or water, ruthless, fearless, and cavalier. His physician father put him through the powerhouse of Charterhouse School without his laying claim to a single distinction, academic or sporting, though he just made it to Sandhurst and left there in time to serve bravely and with some distinction in the Boer War. Unlike Shakespear, he learnt Arabic not from books and teachers but from the vernacular of the Badu. By the time their paths crossed in Arabia, the two men already represented separate sides in the increasingly divisive Calcutta – Whitehall dispute. None-the-less, they had a common interest, Britain’s role in the Arabian peninsula. It was a role dictated by the incursions of France, Germany and Austria-Hungary into what was hitherto regarded as British India’s extended back yard - even if it did belong legally to the empire of the Ottoman Turks. Arab leaders were already starting out on the road to statehood, making up their minds as to which imperial power best represented their interests. I wrote a book about these matters called ‘The Illicit Adventure’, a term I borrowed from that unashamed imperialist Lord Milner. He said that Britain’s policy from the outset was to 'diddle France out of Syria'. That assuredly became Lloyd George’s policy a few years later. Strangely, Shakespear and Leachman were destined never to meet, though they would come within shouting distance of each other in the desert region between Kuwait and Najd, and would engage in angry personal conflict over Leachman’s incursions into the Kuwait territory that Shakespear had been sent to guard as Britain’s strong man in the region. Leachman and Shakespear made their first simultaneous excursions in the Arabian desert in the last days of 1909. Leachman had been on the ‘Special Duty’ list for two years, most of it spent in India. His Arabian exploit was preceded by a visit to London and MO2 (a), military intelligence in those days being part of the Military Operations directorate. His task was to reach Hail in disguise if he could and assess the strength and stability of the regime that the Turks and Britain regarded as the dominant power in Najd. He headed from Baghdad to Najaf, disguised in Arab dress, in company with a party of Shammar. They proceeded along the Darb Zobaidah, the pilgrim path that led to Hail and Madina. Shakespear followed in much the same direction. In defiance of Whitehall’s injunction that he should not become involved in the affairs of the Amir of Riyadh, he headed out of Kuwait, coming close to the tribal territory that Leachman was making for. Thus he was able to keep in touch with the desert grapevine as his fellow countryman passed close by. Leachman was being followed not only by his compatriot, however, but by the very able Austrian spy Alois Musil, a Jewish academic who was the eyes and ears in Arabia of the developing alliance between the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Austria was already instrumental in sending arms supplies to Ibn Rashid at Hail. For Shakespear and the Indian government it was a matter that should be addressed before it led to irreversible change in the balance of power in central Arabia. By February 1910, three men, representing diverse interests and major powers that would be at war with each other within three years, were found themselves at the epicentre of Arab tribal politics. What was happening here in a desert region that saw some of the early 20th century tussles between tribes loyal to Al-Saud and Al-Rashid would lead to alliances and contracts that would determine the emerging map of the Arabian peninsula. Events, indeed, that could be said to represent a starting point in the imperial battle for control of the Arabian peninsula which bedevils the world at the present day. Up to this moment these tribal lands had been more or less closed societies, inaccessible to the outside world. With a resurgent German empire in Europe and World War threatening, they became an embryonic battlefield of the great powers. There were essentially two principal tribal alliances in the large expanse we are concerned with, forming a triangle between Bagdad, Basra province at the head of the Persian Gulf and Hail in central Arabia. They were the great Anaiza confederation led by two of the most powerful of desert sheikhs, in the east from Baghdad by Fahad Beq ibn Hadhhal and in the west from Damascus by Nuri ibn Shalan; and secondly the Shammar of the family of Ibn Rashid of Hail, currently led by the imposing Zamil ibn Subhan, regent for the infant prince Saud bin Abdal Aziz al-Rashid.. A third and vitally important desert force was the Muntafiq, a highly disciplined army of Shi'a horsemen from the towns and marshlands of southern Iraq, the Turkish vilayet of Basra, led by Abdul Mehsin Beq, known to his people as Sadun Pasha, whose exploits, incidentally, had greatly impressed Anne Blunt when she was told about them by Muhammad al-Bessam, who supplied her and Charles Doughty before her, with desert guides. She renamed her favourite horse, Abeyan, after the Muntafiq leader. There were of course other important tribes, not least the Ajman and Mutair, which like the Anaiza pledged fidelity to the House of Saud,though their allegiances tended to sway in the desert wind. Leachman the intrepid representative of military intelligence and his company of Baghdadi adventurers left Karbala on 26 January 1910. After a week or so on the open road they were enjoying the spree. They were mounted on ponies, Leachman’s long legs touching the ground for he had no stirrups, causing much amusement. They expected to excite no more interest than would any small group of Arab travellers on the road so generously provided with watering places in the 4th century of the Hegira, by Harun Rashid’s Queen. Zubaidah. Imagine then their surprise when they were suddenly confronted by a posse of armed camel riders sent by the Anaiza sheikh Fahad Beq, sworn enemy of the Rashid force he intended to visit, to take them to his camp in protective custody. Imagine, furthermore, the surprise of this English agent when he and his companions found themselves in very short time at a vast Anaiza encampment that stretched as far as the eye could see, occupied by an army that was also on its way to invade Hail, home of the Rashid and the fortress capital of Jabal Shammar. In very short time, Leachman's captors were themselves overwhelmed. He was quite unprepared for the sudden appearance of the Shammar, the very people he intended to visit at their capital of Hail, under the very able leadership of the Regent Zamil Subhan. The Anaiza encampment was thoroughly ransacked by rampaging horsemen and Fahad Beq led his dejected troops back towards Baghdad. The Englishman and his companions were taken to the new conqueror’s tent. There seems to have been some extensive planning by the Anaiza. Not long before Fahad Beq’s force proceeded towards Hail, another Anaiza army, its western arm led by the paramount chief of the Ruwalla faction of the mighty Anaiza, Nuri bin Shaalan, had captured the strategically important northern town of Al-Jauf from the Rashids. Leachman somehow dispatched a letter by desert messenger to his rival Shakespear in Kuwait, telling him the story thus far. It was their first communication.
Dear Shakespear I know you by name from Gibbon in the Intelligence at Simla. I am here at camp with Ibn Rashid near Hail. Three days ago I was with a very large mass of the Anaiza on their way to attack Ibn Rashid. In the evening Rashid appeared and utterly defeated the Anaiza who got away with their camels only. Rashid’s men looted thousands of tents.
He told Shakespear how he had escaped with his friends and had joined up with the victorious Shammar at Zamil’s HQ. Not the precise truth, but near enough. The Rashid regent wanted the news of his victory to ‘resound widely’. Zamil had spared the Anaiza chief, said Leachman, ‘always insisting the enemy chiefs should not be harmed’. Leachman was much impressed by Zamil Subhan who he said had ‘the straight gaze of an honest man’. He also met the boy prince of Hail, Saud bin Abdal Aziz al-Rashid and found him an ‘attractive if ill-tempered youth’ of about 12 years, whose only apparent interest was in horses. Until recently he had been in the care of the Sharif of Mecca. The Englishman sought permission to go on to Hail but Zamil refused him, though he allowed him to join the Shammar army at its camp at Shahiyah where he was granted further interviews by regent and the boy prince Saud. It was two months later, in April, that he was allowed to leave the Shammar camp and make his way back to Baghdad. It was not by any means an ignominious end to an ‘intelligence’ operation. Indeed, for a young soldier on a covert mission it was a remarkable stroke of good fortune that he had been able by sheer chance to speak with the ruler of a large part of central Arabia whom he had set out to meet, if he was lucky, after several weeks' arduous travel. It was sufficient to cause Shakespear to make an envious response when the Turks and Shaikh Mubarak questioned him about Leachman’s presence among the tribal assembly. Shakespear told the Shaikh and his chief that he was not ‘enamoured of Leachman’s imposture in the desert’. Britain’s consul in Basra, F.E.Crowe, was more discreet. Asked by the Turk governor what Leachman was doing he replied ‘he’s an English dervish studying botany’. When the adventure was over, Leachman wrote to John Gordon Lorimer, that most informed of British Political Residents in the Middle East. In that letter, he told Lorimer: ‘This movement of the Anaiza was concerted with Ibn Saud with the idea of utterly finishing the Rashid power.’ In fact, it was less than half the story. Zamil Subhan was well disposed to Bin Saud. Indeed, the two men had great respect for each other, and had the former survived assassination at the hands of his own kin, it is not inconceivable that an alliance would have been forged.. ¤ While Lijman remained at the camp of Ibn Rashid, Shakespear was dealing with matters closer to home. Shaikh Mubarak and the man he called his ‘son’, Bin Saud, were also on the warpath. Back in Kuwait in March 1910, with Leachman’s adventure still very much in mind, the Political Agent went out to the fortress of Jahra in time to witness a remarkable gathering of tribes. A massive encampment of tents both black and while signalled the presence of large forces of Bin Saud’s and Shaikh Mubarak’s men, the latter under the leadership of the Shaikh’s son Jabir, along with Ajman tribesmen who were making their peace with the Kuwaiti leader after recent raids on his subjects. Shakespear was convinced that Abdal Aziz, Mubarak, and Bin Hithlain of the Ajman, having waited on the outcome of the battle between the Anaiza and Shammar warriors, were about to launch a fresh attack on the Shammar. As it happened they came face to face with the 4000 horsemen of the highly disciplined Muntafiq army of Sadun Pasha. The conflict was over almost as soon as it was joined. The Kuwaiti force took flight and lost almost all its arms and animals. The Saudi and Ajman forces fought for a while but the flight of the Kuwaitis left them hopelessly exposed and they too gave up the struggle and hurried back to Kuwait, often five or six to a camel, for Sadun had decreed that his men should take as many animals and arms as they could transport, but that the men themselves should be spared. Shakespear had kept a watching brief at the rear of the Kuwaiti force, but he was told sternly when Whitehall heard about the fiasco ‘You will see that the Government of India direct that a warning be conveyed to Shaikh Mubarak, in terms of a previous warning, not to enter into any operations calculated to involve him in difficulties in Najd or with the Turks.’ But it was game set and match to Leachman, who on the instruction of Zamil Subhan had joined up with the Muntafiq and was by now on terms of close friendship with Sadun Pasha and the Rashid leadership of Hail, while Shakespear was left to cope with the mercurial Mubarak and the Sabah shaikhs of Kuwait. When Shakespear went out to the Sabah fortress of Jahra to deliver HM Government’s latest warning to Mubarak, the Shaikh was already gathering another raiding force, hoping to repay the Muntafiq. He attributed his men’s defeat not to his son’s leadership but to a 'dust storm'. The old Shaikh of Kuwait was described by Lovat Fraser, the well-informed editor of The Times of India, as 'the Richelieu of Arabia'. Britain's Foreign Minister in 1903, Lord Lansdowne, was less complimentary. He described him as 'an untrustworthy savage'. The planned retribution by Kuwait, launched on 1st April 1910, was no more effective than the last. Again, the Muntafiq force was triumphant. But it was to be Sadun’s final victory. Shortly after, the great leader of the tribal confederation of Southern Iraq’s Shi’a , was invited aboard a gunboat by Sayyid Talib, the son of the Naqib of Basra. There he was handed over to the Turks and sent to imprisonment at Aleppo.. He was found dead early in 1911, it was said from poisoning.
I have tried to portray as a vividly as I am able the circumstances in which two of the most spirited and courageous figures of the British administration came into close proximity in the early years of the last century, in tribal forays that were beginning to excite the interest of the imperial powers of Europe, without ever meeting. Shakespear went on to become the close friend and confidant of the founder king of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud. And of course he made one of the outstanding exploratory crossings of the peninsula in 1914 before dying at the hands of Shammari at the side of Bin Saud on the battlefield of Jarab, close to that first encounter of the Anaiza and the Shammar. He had just reached his 36th birthday. At the time of his death, Shakespear was officially Britain's Political Officer on Special Duty in Arabia. A year before he was sent out to act as special envoy to Ibn Saud he had visited Riyadh on his way across the peninsula.. I record his journey briefly. When he reached Riyadh on 11 May 1914, he camped in the date garden outside the town. He never accepted the shelter of his hosts. In his report to the Viceroy and the Secretary of State for India after that visit he described his entry into Riyadh: ‘…went by moonlight along the Shaib until we crossed a bit of rising ground and the whole east wall of the town with its bastions was in front. Taken through east gate along a wide road, past a lot of ruins and some big houses built on a palatial scale…Greeted warmly. Tea, coffee and sweets until evening prayer.’ Of his host he wrote: ‘Abdal Aziz is a broad-minded and straight man…His reputation is that of a noble and generous man…’. He spoke of the enmity Abdal Aziz felt for the Turks who then occupied al Hasa, and of the Arab leader’s desire for friendship with Britain. Contrary to most received opinion, Shakespear thought that Palgrave’s plan of Riyadh was ‘exceedingly good’. And it is worth noting that he differed radically from Philby with regard to Palgrave’s description of Ayun, the Arabian ‘Stonehenge’, again finding it 'accurate if sparce'. Almost the entire male family of Bin Saud joined the Englishman on the second day of his visit in the palm grove of Shamsiyah, the garden mad by Mahbub, prime minister of Bin Saud’s grandfather Faisal bin Turki. The Englishman was able to photograph the procession of sons, several of whom would inherit the throne of the kingdom – Fahd and Muhammad, Turki, Saud, and Faisal. And he was to speak in report after report to his government of the Saudi leader’s ‘sincerity and utter reliability’, of his single-minded devotion to his people and his religion’, and to the securing of their independence from Turkish imperial rule. But it was not until war was declared that Whitehall took his offer of alliance seriously.
Leachman made one more journey in Arabia proper, from Damascus to Riyadh, at the instigation of the War Office, before becoming the hero figure of Britain's war in Mesopotamia, the soldier's soldier, known to his men as 'OC desert'. He became the first post-war governor of Kurdistan before he too lost his life at a place little know then to the outside world - Fallujah. He was the victim of a gunsho attributed to a shaikh of the central region, Dhari, though it was widely rumoured that the shaikh's son, Khamees, actually fired the fatal shot. Between them, Shakespear and Leachman took the first photos of Riyadh and its ruling family, al-Saud. Shakespear, with close family ties to the Fox Talbots, was a keen and expert cameraman. His bulky heavy equipment and the pictures he produced in his improvised desert darkroom, were a source of much wonderment to the Badu. Their reputations and their photos survive them. Unfortunately, neither was more than .adequate with the pen. At least they were spared the battles of words that followed thge war and brought another name to the fore, TE Lawrence, as they were spared the consequences of the promises Britain and France to each other, to the Zionists and to Arab leaders. Goodness know what they would have made of it all. § So for my two ladies of the Arab lands. We always call Anne Blunt ‘Lady Anne’ since she was a ‘Lady’ by birth. I need hardly add that she was the granddaughter of Lord Byron and the daughter of Ada, the poet's only legitimate child, Countess of Lovelace. She was the pioneer woman of desert exploration, the first of her sex to reach central Arabia, yet she was dominated by an irascible, arrogant, vain husband. Gertrude Bell was very much 'The Lady of Baghdad'. Gertrude, Anne’s successor in the lands of the Tigris and the Euphrates, was a woman who dominated the male world she inhabited by force of intellect. But she would most certainly have preferred marriage and family life had her powerful opinions not stood in the way of any such contract. They succeeded each other too in wearing that Turco-Arabic courtesy label ‘Al Khatun’, a title that denoted a lady of esteem in the Arabs' midst. If they were so different as women, they were remarkably alike in strength of mind and in their stoicism as travellers. More to the point of this talk, she was the first European of her sex to make a recorded journey into Central Arabia. Her passion, of course, was the Arab horse, and she devoted much of her life to its salvation at her famous Crabbet stud in Sussex. Between times she translated into English some of the finest pre-Islamic verse, including the celebrated tale of Abu Zaid al-Hilali and the Stealing of the Mare, wrote two books recording the journeys she and her husband made to Najd and the Euphrates Valley which remain in print to this day, and – as we see today - displayed very real ability as a water colourist. For Anne’s determined grandmother Lady Byron, in whose care she was raised, only the best tutors were good enough. Her drawing master was Ruskin no less. Joachim taught her the violin, Hallé gave her piano lessons. Certainly the influence of Ruskin, and of his idol Turner, is evident in some of the work you see here today, photographs of those delightful watercolour sketches made in he notebooks as she went in search of the tribes and the pedigree horses of Arabia. Her skill with pencil and brush is obvious, but there the comparison ends. In art as in life, the charming, attractive lady with the melodious voice said to come from her grandfather and the aristocratic demeanour, lacked imagination above all else. Her drawing had charm but not life force. She won for herself a reputation for bravery and perseverance in the face of hazard and hardship that persists to this day in many parts of the Arab world. Her Arabic was good enough to keep up a correspondence with Arab shaiks and the Ulema across thirty years or more. ¤ It is apparent from what has gone before that the years 1900 to 1912 were a busy period in the complex interrelationship between the European powers and the Ottoman territories. War was in the air. It was on 18 March 1911 that TE Lawrence, newly arrived as an apprentice archaeologist at the site of Jerabalus, or Carchemish, wrote to his bother to say ‘We are expecting a Miss G.Bell’. The world knew little of either of them at that time, though Gertrude had published two well received books and was the better known. It was a time of intense archaeology and widespread espionage. The two came together almost inevitably. At such places as Carchemish, Nineveh, Ashur, Babylon, learned spies from Britain, Germany, France and other lands proliferated, soon to become staff officers in their respective armies. Miss G..Bell was one of them.So were Lawrence and his colleagues Leonard Woolley, Campbell Thompson and their chief, David Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean. Gertrude’s contribution to the political make up of the modern Middle East may have its detractors. But of her contribution to the western world’s understanding of civilisations of the Middle East there can be no question. You will see from the work on display here that her contribution to the pictorial record of Najd and other Arab lands before the First World War was immense. More than anyone, she caught the Badu, those most serious and solemn of humans, off guard. She worked with faster film and more responsive cameras of the Rolleiflex and Leica variety. She could afford the best cameras that money could buy. For almost the whole of her life she travelled as the favoured daughter of one of the wealthiest families in England, owners of the major steel, aluminium, chemical and coal enterprises of the North-East of England. Only in the year of her death, 1926, were there signs that the solid fortune that underpinned her life of travel and adventure was on the wane. Had she lived for just another year she would have seen the sale of her beloved home, Rounton Grange in North Yorkshire, with its Morris and Burne-Jones decoration and the garden that she had so fondly created. As Rebecca West wrote of her: ‘she was the incarnation of the emancipated heiress, using the gold given her by the industrial revolution to buy not privilege but the opportunity for noble performance’. Rebecca West saw in her the realisation of Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Shirley’. She was indeed, as both Arab and British admirers pointed out, a woman of great valour, and remarkable intellect. Her visit to Hail certainly demanded that combination of features, and more. There is little doubt in my mind that her visit to the Rashid capital a few months before the outbreak of world war had obvious undertones of espionage. Perhaps she was favoured by the absence of the Rashid princes on one of their not infrequent bouts of regicide. At any rate she escaped from ‘house’ imprisonment to reach Baghdad safely. A year later, as a member of the Arab Bureau in Basra - as LS Amery never tired of telling us, the first woman officer of Britain’s military intelligence service - she set in motion that train of events that would lead to Britain’s adoption of the Sharifian family of Husain bin Ali as the princes of all the conquered Arab lands, though France prevented their realisation in Greater Syria. And of course, the stewardship of Iraq and Transjordan, was counterbalanced by the victorious progress of Bin Saud in central Arabia. There is something very poignant in the contemporary context in speaking today of her unique contribution to Al-‘Iraq as she punctiliously called it; to the preservation of Iraq’s heritage, indeed the world’s heritage, through the libraries and museums she created and the artefacts she safeguarded. She had an almost uncanny sense of archaeology and ancient history. She was admired as much by the learned men of the Deutsche Orient Gesellshaft, as by their British counterparts who dug under her auspices. By the time Leonard Woolley arrived Ur in 1921 she was able to stand on fairly level ground with him. At that time she had only her first Baghdad Museum with its single exhibition room to fill. By the time Woolley’s expedition was in its fourth year she had a new and luxurious space to fill. The government King Faisal I, advised by Gertrude, was only too anxious to ensure that it had the lion’s share of the finds of Ur. We owe to Max Mallowan the story of Gertrude’s annual visit in 1924 to supervise the distribution of the season’s find’s. She had insisted on having for her Baghdad museum a particularly precious piece. She was accompanied by Lionel Smith, Dean of Magdalen and tutor to Edward VIII. Woolley argued ferociously that the piece should go either to the BM or to Philadelphia, but Gertrude was insistent and the last word was hers. The dignified Smith put in a mild word or two on Woolley’s behalf. As they departed for Ur junction to catch their train to Baghdad, Max and Agatha heard Gertrude muttering between clenched teeth, ‘You traitor! You traitor!’. ¤
Gertrude, as we know, became, in her own words, a Sharifian through and through, but that made little impact on the Saudi leader. Abdal Aziz for his part was never able to take very seriously the belief of this determined English lady that she could single handedly determine the fate of the emerging Arab nations. According to Philby, he often entertained his tribesmen with imitations of a shrill feminine voice calling ‘Abdal Aziz, look at this’, that or the other. But hers was the most generous and most vivid of all the pen portraits to this very day. In fact she wrote two descriptions, the first before she met him at the famous Kuwait durbar, and based on information supplied by the American missionary doctor, Paul Harrison. ‘He possesses great personal charm, with a ready and attractive smile. He is a great kingly-looking man like an Assyrian picture…’ And so on, with references to his many wives and children, and some very misleading references to his dealings with other Arab chiefs.’ It was the meeting at the subsequent Basra durbar of 1916 that caused Gertrude to write for the Arab Bulletin, the fortnightly journal of the Bureau in Cairo, her famous portrait|:
‘Ibn Saud is now barely forty, though he looks some years older. He is a man of splendid physique, standing well over six feet, and carrying himself with the air of one accustomed to command. Though he is more massively built than the typical nomad sheikh, he has the characteristics of the well-bred Arab, the strongly-marked aquiline profile, full-flesh nostrils, prominent lips, a long narrow chin accentuated by a pointed beard. His hands are fine, with slender fingers…and in spite of his great height and breadth of shoulder he conveys the impression common enough in the desert of an indefinable lassitude, the secular weariness of an ancient and self-contained people, which has made heavy drafts on its vital forces and borrowed little from beyond its own forbidding frontiers..’ She wrote of Ibn Saud’s deliberate movements, his ‘sweet smile and the contemplative glance of heavy lidded eyes’. By then, the eyes had succumbed to the desert glare. Dr Stanley Mylrae, the senior medical man with the American mission, was there too. He had attended Bin Saud once, three years before, and he added:
‘Among all the richly dressed Arabs in the room, he was easily the most conspicuous figure. His magnificent bearing still commanded attention. The three years had only increased the attractiveness of his personality, and when presently Sir Percy Cox presented him with the KCIE and the beautiful ornament glittered on his handsome brown cloak, he would have made an unusual subject for an artist.’ As he watched the proceedings, Mylrae was reminded of Mark Twain’s description of King Arthur, ‘Armour is proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it.’ Others have been inclined to describe Bin Saud as the Richard Lionheart of the Arab world, but with the greatest respect I doubt whether our Arab friends are too keen on the analogy. If there was no artist to hand, he made an imposing subject for the photographer. Even so, it was Shakespear’s camera that had caught the desert king most aptly, especially at Thaj in the youthful vigour of his leadership, just as Gertrude’s words would capture the English imagination and finally convince the Liberal government of the day that it would ignore him at its cost. She wrote of his strength and unequalled skill in the saddle, of his physical endurance, ‘rare even in hard-bitten Arabia’; and finally, ‘such men as he are the exception in any community, but they are thrown up persistently by the Arab race’. A thought for politicians of today perhaps. Thank you.
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