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Canberra screening of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’

29 November 2006 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Our exhibition

As part of the Evolution Film Festival, Canberra’s Electric Shadows cinema will be screening David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia on 2 and 7 December 2006. This 1962 film is largely responsible for Lawrence’s enduring image with many people today.

We will be going to the Saturday evening screening (the show starts at 7.30 pm but get there early) to hand out some flyers about our exhibition in late 2007 and we will be inviting those attending to enter another competition that concerns the film itself. We won’t tell you here what the competition is until after we’ve released the flyers, so you’ll have to come to the cinema to find out! Yes, it is located in Akuna St, Canberra and that is in Australia.

You will be able to recognise the curatorial team as we will be appearing in period dress, including ‘Emir Nigel of Arabia’, ‘A Nurse called Robyn’, ‘Mal not really of Arabia’, ‘Brad the Light Horseman’ and ‘Save Our Souls Susie’ (who is actually the project manager for this exhibition).

Andrew Pike from Ronin Cinemas has asked me to give a brief introduction to the film and I’ll try to keep this under five minutes.

We all hope to see you there, even if you do have to purchase an air ticket!

Mal

Chauvel on the taking of Damascus

28 November 2006 by Robyn Van-Dyk. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Chauvel, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, The Light Horse

The papers of General Sir Henry George Chauvel are one of the highlights of the Memorial’s written collections.  This collection contains numerous correspondence exchanged between “Harry” Chauvel and his family and also includes two spectacular, large leather bound, gold embossed, scrap books created by Lady Chauvel after the war. The volumes document Chauvel’s military engagements during the war and offer an insight into his actions and thoughts. They contain a selection of his letters, hand transcribed by his wife, as well as photographs, maps, field message notes and news cuttings. The first volume includes a water colour scene of Palestine signed by Will Longstaff and was bound using fine calf from the Chauvel family’s own animals. The second volume was bound by the Memorial in matching style following its donation.

read on

The Taking of Damascus

14 November 2006 by Mal Booth. 2 Comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Chauvel, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Our exhibition, The Light Horse

The blog has recently received a number of comments that reveal the entry into Damascus in October 1918 still inspires strong feelings.

The question of who was the first to enter the city has been disputed ever since. The evidence now points to the men of Brigadier General L C Wilson’s 3rd Light Horse Brigade as being the first troops to enter Damascus in the early hours of 1 October. It has always been the intention of both the exhibition and the blog to draw attention to this fact as part of a wider historical story. Indeed, to illustrate this we plan to feature some of Brigadier Wilson’s material, as well as some of General Sir Harry Chauvel’s, along with original documents from the unit war diaries.

On 14 September 2006 we posted an article in this blog about the rare and lavishly produced 1926 subscribers’ edition of Lawrence’s Seven pillars of wisdom that the Memorial holds in its collection and that will also be featured in the exhibition. After the Memorial had purchased its 1926 edition Chauvel, who was a member of the Memorial’s then Board of Trustees, drew attention to some of the inaccuracies contained in the book. He wrote to the Memorial’s Director on 1 January 1936 that he ‘agreed to the purchase of this book as a very remarkable publication in connection with the late War likely to increase in value, not as an accurate record of events’. In a very detailed 13 page letter, Chauvel went on to outline his main concerns with Lawrence’s account. read on

Lawrence’s first meeting with Feisal, 23 October 1916

23 October 2006 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Key people, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, The Arab Revolt

Ninety years ago, on 23 October 1916, the momentous first encounter took place between Captain TE Lawrence, a relatively junior British intelligence officer from Cairo, and Emir Feisal, the 33 year old third son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca.

Earlier that year, in June, Hussein had initiated a revolt of the Arabs living in the Hejaz against Turkish rule. Early operations had gone well, with both Mecca and Jidda quickly secured. But momentum waned when the Arabs failed to capture Medina and concerns rose among the British authorities in Egypt and the Sudan about the state of the revolt.

On 13 October Lawrence and Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary to the British civilian administration in Cairo, left to visit the Hejaz and report back on how things were progressing. Lawrence’s position was curious. He still worked for the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo and technically took leave to go to Arabia. Foremost in his mind was the desire to establish which of Hussein’s four sons was likely to prove the most capable and dynamic leader of the Arab forces during the revolt.

Lawrence and Storrs arrived in Jidda on 16 October and had a meeting with Emir Adbullah, Hussein’s second son. Three days later Lawrence travelled north to Rabegh and spoke to Emir Ali, the Sherif’s oldest son, and to Emir Zeid, the youngest brother. None of them appeared to Lawrence to possess the right combination of personality and insight to lead the Arabs to victory. Already he had a vision of an independent, post-war Arabian state and to achieve this he knew it was essential to find precisely the right man. read on

Handbook of the Turkish Army

10 October 2006 by Robyn Van-Dyk. 1 Comment
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Less than six degrees of separation, Our exhibition

Lawrence worked for the Military Intelligence Department in Cairo as an intelligence officer from December

1914 to November 1916. His knowledge of the Middle East gained through his pre-war studies and work as an archaeologist in Syria and Sinai, were put to good use in Cairo gathering and collating intelligence on enemy troops throughout the Turkish Empire and producing maps in association with the civilian Survey of Egypt.

In a letter to Charles Francis Bell in April 1915* he wrote:

Maps, maps, maps, hundreds of thousands of them, to be drawn, & printed, & packed up & sent off: – my job: – also in keeping track of Turkish Army movements.

According to Lawrence, intelligence was collated in Cairo from various sources including telegrams from Sofia, Belgrade, Petrograd, Athens, Basra and Tiflis. In his letter to Bell, Lawrence mentions that new information was also written into a book called the Handbook of the Turkish Army. The handbook was designed for extensive circulation and Lawrence, who also organised the printing of the book, mentions in his letter to Bell that thousands of copies were printed.

The principal authority on the handbook was Philip Graves. He was a former correspondent for The Times in the Middle East and from 1910, regularly passed information to British Intelligence about terrain, roads and railroad development in the Ottoman Empire. He was also the half brother of the poet Robert Graves.

Lawrence and other staff in the Cairo intelligence department contributed information to the handbook which required constant updating to take into account the latest reports they received. There were eight Cairo editions published between January 1915 and February 1916. Graves based these Cairo editions on a 1912 edition of the handbook which was produced by the War Office in London. Changes to the Turkish Army as a result of the outbreak of war were embodied in Graves’ first 1915 Cairo edition. read on

TE Lawrence correspondence in our records

20 September 2006 by Mal Booth. No comments
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Less than six degrees of separation

The following interesting exchange between C. E. W. Bean (Australia’s Official Historian for the First World War) and TE Lawrence was found a while ago when we started researching our exhibition.

It was found in an official record series: AWM 43 ‘Official History, 1914-18 War, biographical and other research files’.

Bean intended to show biographical details (eg. the dates and places of birth and a connection to a town or district to which they belonged) for all those mentioned in the 12 volumes of the history. (These are now fully digitised and available on our website here for anyone interested.) So, on 29 March 1922, Bean sent Lawrence the usual form letter requesting his details. The request was sent to ‘Lieut-Colonel T. E. Lawrence, C.B., D.S.O., All Souls College, Oxford, England’. 

Lawrence replied with the following note hand-written on the bottom of the form:

Dear Bean

I do not think I belong to any special town or district, though I have a house in Essex (England). This entry is no doubt meant specially for Australians, who may be more domiciled than we are. The two decorations which you put after my name were not conferred upon me – except by the Strand Magazine!

22.5.22                                                  TEL.

On the returned form, Lawrence has also written in ‘Wales’ for place of birth and just ’1888′ for the date. For profession or calling he has written ‘Historian’. He circled the C.B. and D.S.O. post-nominals and noted after the rank Lieut-Colonel ‘in 1918 only’.  

In July 1922, Bean wrote to an officer of the Australian War Museum, then located in the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne, Victoria seeking the London Gazette information for Lawrence’s CB and DSO awards. He was informed that the CB was gazetted in the Third Supplement to the London Gazette on 7/8/1917 (p. 8163) and the DSO on 13/5/1918 (p. 5694), along with the citations for these awards. The officer (Mr A. G. Pretty) also informed Bean that in the British Who’s Who of 1920 and 1921 the CB and DSO are shown in Lawrence’s biography, but in the 1922 issue they are deleted, noting that this was ‘probably at Lawrence’s own request. By then he was disillusioned.’ I have no idea how he came upon that information, other than by reading press reports in Melbourne.

Mal Booth

Seven pillars of wisdom

14 September 2006 by Mal Booth. 1 Comment
Exhibitions,Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse, Our exhibition

One strong connection between Lawrence and the Light Horse is evident in our books collection. We have a very rare edition of TE Lawrence’s memoir of the Arab Revolt, Seven pillars of wisdom. Only a very limited, but lavish edition was produced while Lawrence was still alive (in 1926). An abridged version The Revolt in the Desert was produced in 1927, but the full trade edition was not published until after his death in 1935.

The 1926 subscriber’s edition was purchased by the Memorial using funds donated to the Memorial by the Australian Light Horse Association (raised through the sale of the book Australia in Palestine) to acquire records relating to military operations in Palestine. At the time this edition was the only version of Lawrence’s fuller account that was available. After much consultation, the Memorial’s Board of Trustees offered to purchase the book soon after Lawrence’s death in 1935 as it was seen as an important addition to the Australian Light Horse records held in the collection. It is one of only 170 full copies ever produced.

The production of the 1926 subscriber’s edition reflects Lawrence’s love of exquisitely produced books. Each copy had its own individual binding. The Memorial’s copy has a gold-tooled, Oxford blue morocco leather binding with raised cords. The index page to the illustrations is hand-annotated by Lawrence ‘Complete Copy’ and initialled ‘T.E.S.’ (He had adopted the pseudonym ‘T.E. Shaw’ in February 1923 when he joined the Tank Corps as a private.) Each new chapter within the book begins with an illuminated first letter. The text was printed on high quality paper and laid out with much consideration given to balance on the page. Respected contemporary artists were commissioned, and their works, which include landscapes and portraits of the main Arab and British participants, give the book a modernist feel.

You can hear a recent Memorial podcast by subscribing to the Exhibitions feed on our Podcasts page.

Mal Booth