I received an email today from Charles Kenny of Essex in the UK. He has given me permission to post it here and I’ve put in some relevant links where I could.

Reading about your exhibition, I thought you might be interested in a little known connection.

The Bartlett brothers, Stephen and Alfred S., both pearlers of Broome (W.A.), enlisted together in the 10th Light Horse Regiment in May 1915, and embarked from Freemantle on HMAT Anchises in September. They saw plenty of action. Alfred was recommended for a bravery award at Rafa in January 1917 but sadly died of wounds that April and is buried in Gaza. Steve soldiered on in the great ride to Damascus, and then to patrolling the Delta. After the war he settled in England and became an author, writing under the name of Gurney Slade. read on

At last we have James Barr’s talk available as an audio file that you can listen to here, while browsing some of his 28 photos or after downloading it using the link below. Thanks again to James for his time and his generosity with these photos. Now go out and buy his book Setting the desert on fire!

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Download the MP3 audio file (13.9MB)

   

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Well, the exhibition is now open and my feet have barely hit the ground since. When things slow down I’ll post some images and information about the opening, but currently I am still spending about 3-4 hours a day running tours as the exhibition seems pretty popular so far. Don’t panic! It is open until 25 May 2008.

As many of you will have read, Jeremy Wilson came out to the opening of the exhibition and presented a public talk on the Lawrence and taking of Akaba on 9 December in the Memorial’s Telstra Theatre. This visit was sponsored very generously by the British High Commission in Canberra.  While he was here Jeremy also recorded a long interview with Phillip Adams on his Late Night Live show on the ABC’s Radio National. This show went to air late on Wednesday night, 12 December 2008. It was replayed from 4-5 pm the following afternoon and was also available as a podcast on the ABC’s website. (It looks like this podcast is now no longer available from the ABC. Updated by MMB 16 January 2008)

Our installation is almost complete now and we will open tonight. This week a few of us have done a lot of media interviews, so it looks to be attracting a good deal of attention already.

We released some edited film footage taken by Harry Chase for Lowell Thomas during his short stay with Lawrence and the Arabs in 1918. It was provided by the Imperial War Museum as it comes from their collection. You can view this footage and read a press report on the ABC’s website here.

An interesting thing about this footage is that Lawrence appears to be wearing a black “aba” (a long, loose sleeveless outer garment of aba or fine silk worn by Bedouin Arabs). You can see one of his abas in the exhibition and this one now belongs to the Memorial. I think it is beautifully displayed, for the first time in our history, along with an “agal” (a cord that secures a headdress). Both were given to the Memorial by the widow of artist Stuart Reid, who’s work is featured in the exhibition.

Lawrence aba belonging to the Memorial

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The many different versions of Seven pillars of wisdom are sometime difficult to understand, but since I put a small box of text about our 1926 subscribers’ edition into an article I wrote for Wartime, I have had to field a few questions about them. When we’ve solved our image attachment problem in WordPress, I’ll attach what images we have of each of them for further identification.

I’ll now attempt to summarise the differences for you here in text form:

The 1922 “Oxford Times” text
After losing almost all of his first draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station in 1919, Lawrence was urged by his friends to rewrite the lost material. He completed a revised manuscript (which he later gave to the Bodleian Library, Oxford) in May 1922. To prevent loss of the second text, he had eight copies made by the Oxford Times printing works. Five of these were bound and circulated to his wartime colleagues and other close advisers for critical review. It was never available for sale to the public. You can read about the two copies held by the British Library, including copy #2, donated by George Bernard Shaw, here (fourth paragraph). read on

Recently, I had one of those marvellous moments of discovery connecting T E Lawrence to C E W Bean . . . well, in a small way.

I was researching captions for the exhibition items on loan from various UK institutions when I came across some information about the lintel on the door to Lawrence’s Clouds Hill home in Dorset. I had visited Cloud’s Hill with Jeremy Wilson in 2006 when I was in the UK researching and negotiating our loans.

In their exhibition, the Imperial War Museum included  a copy of the lintel from the entrance door to Clouds Hill. Lawrence and one or two friends serving with him in the RAF or Royal Tank Corps carved the Greek inscription “Ou Phrontis” (or Why worry?) above his door. The words come from a story in Herodotus VI, 129. Lawrence explained this in a letter dated 18 October 1932 to Mrs Eric Kennington: “It means that nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon its inhabitant”.

There is an image of the lintel here.

I remembered that among the more interesting items in Bean’s own library – held in our ‘vault’ collection as a formed collection and not usually for public access, are his own volumes of Herodotus. Bean had acquired copies of Herodotus that he has dis-bound and then rebound with larger plain pages around each printed page for his notes, drawings and translations.

So, I had a look for the above quote to see whether Bean too had noted it. It is indeed underlined and his notation reads ‘What does H. care? The proverb arose’.

John Lafferty from the Memorial’s Information Technology section has taken himself and his trusty camera to Gallipoli on our annual Battlefield Tour. John is a gifted photographer and he is maintaining a blog from the tour while they are all in Gallipoli. You can find the Gallipoli Battlefield Tour blog here.

The Dardanelles campaign is not covered by our exhibition, but both Lawrence and the Light Horse were involved. 

Many members of the Light Horse who were later involved in the defence of the Sinai and Allenby’s advance through Palestine had earlier served on Gallipoli. Sir Harry Chauvel and his 1st Light Horse Brigade landed at Gallipoli on 12 May 1915.

During the Dardanelles campaign Lawrence worked for the Cairo Intelligence Department and provided maps and intelligence for the forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula. He was also keenly involved in pioneering work done to use aerial photography taken over Gallipoli to produce maps.

I’ve just put up Matthew Gibbs’ review of the film Lawrence of Arabia against our call for reviews. You can find it here and it is well worth a read. Matthew is a freelance writer from Sydney with a good knowledge of Lawrence.

While I’m here, did anyone else catch the appearance by Lawrence in the SBS TV show As It Happened about Churchill’s bodyguard on Friday night (23 February 2007)? The bodyguard, Walter H. Thompson, was amazed by Lawrence’s reputation and influence with the Arabs in Palestine in 1921.

Churchill and Lawrence enjoyed a long working relationship after Churchill persuaded Lawrence to work as an adviser in the Colonial Office when he was Colonial Secretary. For our exhibition, we will be bringing out from The (UK) National Archives, some original correspondence between Churchill and Lawrence that illustrates the bond between the two men and Churchill’s respect for Lawrence’s advice regarding Middle East matters over this period in 1921.

Mal

The political background to the entry into Damascus is complex and murky. Yet, only by identifying the underlying web of forces involved, can sense be made of what happened as control of the city passed from the Turks to the Allies.

It is clear that parts of the 10th Australian Light Horse Regiment were the first troops formally to enter Damascus when they passed through on their way to secure the Homs road and that Major Olden was handed the city by the acting governor, Emir Said, a member of the influential al-Jaza’iri or Qadir family. But within hours this unexpected turn of events was overshadowed by the political need for Damascus to be seen to be liberated by the Hashemite army led by Feisal that had fought its way north from the Hejaz.

An article published in 2005 by the British historian Dr Matthew Hughes of Brunel University reviews and updates the evidence supporting this view which was first identified more than 40 years ago by Professor Elie Kedourie of the London School of Economics. Both show that, as part of a wider Imperial policy originating in London, the British were keen to establish the Hashemites in a strong position in central Syria to destabilise French claims to this area enshrined in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. Independently the Hashemites wanted to move their power-base from the distant and sparsely populated Hejaz to Syria and establish themselves as the legitimate and natural heirs to Turkish rule there. In this respect the British and Hashemites were equal partners of self-interest. read on

Well, our little exhibition team did all go to watch Lawrence of Arabia in period costume as planned. There will soon be some very embarassing photos and perhaps some film footage displayed on this blog, so keep an eye out for them.

I thought that I’d give you my perspective of the film as the curator of our exhibition. (My apologies, for this is a long post and there are no images!) For me, looking again at this film after spending so much time immersed in everything Lawrence, was an eye-opener in many ways and I recognised and understood more clearly some aspects of the film that probably led to the many accolades it received in 1963. I read recently in Malcolm Brown’s Lawrence of Arabia, the life the legend that he believed the film was ‘in numerous respects more Hollywood than history’. On the whole I don’t really think that is the case, but I suppose it depends on your perspective. Sure enough, there are many factual, chronological and even geographical errors in the film and those can easily be found in a number of critiques elsewhere on the web. Most criticisms are summarised in Wikipedia and Lawrence’s authorised biographer Jeremy Wilson also details them here. I am not debating those observations.

I believe, however, that the film is a masterpiece of film making and, for those who are not interested in reading any of the many books written about Lawrence during the First World War, it does leave you with all the essential parts of the story. A rather enigmatic young English officer with some knowledge of the Middle East is sent by his superiors to assist the Arab Army and becomes a close adviser to Emir Feisal during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. I am sure that the story told by the film has inspired many people to read more about Lawrence and it probably also inspired further biographies about him. Why?

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