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

Well, at least something we were not allowed to borrow . . .

We did want to bring one of Lawrence’s Arab daggers out to show in our exhibition. Two were displayed by the IWM: a gold dagger made for Lawrence in Mecca in 1917 that is now owned by All Souls College, Oxford; and a silver-gilt dagger now owned by Lord and Lady Kennet. I thought that it would be best to try for both and my first negotiation was in London at the home of Lord and Lady Kennet. We didn’t get the dagger, but I have the Kennet’s permission to tell you this story, which is pretty interesting, at least from my perspective.

I was told on the phone by Lord Kennet that I could not have the dagger but was invited to evening drinks with him and Lady Kennet and walked up there, across Hyde Park from my ’summer residence’ in South Kensington. Ha! When I approached the house I noticed one of those blue historic site disks mounted on the house. They live in the former home of Sir James Barrie.

read on

A while back, actually a long while back, I promised to enlighten you about a couple of inspiring things that I saw in London in 2006 during my visits to view the IWM’s Lawrence of Arabia, the Life, the Legend exhibition and to negotiate our UK loans. So after a long delay and absolutely no requests to read the second part of my story, here it is. I must tell you that what I’ve written below were my impressions, recorded in London over Easter 2006. Since then, I’ve worked on the challenges presented by our exhibition and I’ve developed an even deeper appreciation of the work that went into these exhibitions.

Firstly, I found the IWM’s relatively new Churchill Museum absolutely stunning. Located with the Cabinet War Rooms, it is visually splendid and makes full use of modern exhibition technology to educate visitors about Churchill’s amazing life by very clever use of sound, documents, images, film footage, interactives and the display of selected objects. I went for a quick visit, just to breeze through and found myself there for some hours. You get a very good sense of the man and his achievements without being confused or overwhelmed by too much content or context.

read on

In September 1914 Charles Reginald Yells, a 24 year old labourer from Kapunda, South Australia enlisted with the AIF. Joining the 9th Light Horse Regiment, he trained at Broadmeadows in Victoria before embarking on the HMAT Karroo for Egypt in February 1915. In July 1915, he was promoted to Temporary Sergeant to teach at the Imperial School of Instruction at Zeitoun, Egypt. He worked as an instructor at the school until assigned for “special duty” to the Red Sea Ports on 10 August 1917.

The special duty assigned to Yells was to instruct Lawrence and his Arab squads in the use of the Lewis gun. Throughout 1916 and 1917 Lawrence and his Arabs regularly mined the Hejaz railway as a means of diverting Turkish resources and disrupting their lines of communication. Lawrence had acquired Lewis guns and trench mortars to secure the trains and provide cover during their attacks. Yells was assigned to instruct on the use of Lewis guns and a British Servicemen, Lance Corporal Walter Herbert Brooke of the 25th Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers was to instruct on the use of trench mortars. In Seven Pillars Lawrence wrote:

Their names may have been Yells and Brooke, but became Lewis and Stokes after their jealously-loved tools.

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’.

This post is a bit of a stretch, but I think the link is there and it is interesting enough, so here it goes. Recently, I have been reading up on the actions of our Light Horse in Palestine, particularly in late 1917 and 1918. This has all been related to the development of the exhibition text or storyline. Earlier, our efforts had concentrated on selecting items for the exhibition and then negotiating loans for those items that have to be borrowed. There’ll be more about that soon. Currently, we are trying to finalise the text and all the captions and then get a designer on board.

So, now back to “Hooky” Walker . . . One of the loans we have negotiated from the UK is a sketch map that was drawn by Lawrence. It covers part of the route taken by Sharif Nasir’s expedition from Wejh to Akaba in July 1917 to capture the Red Sea port from the Ottomans. This map is owned by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs in London and my negotiations for this loan were greatly assisted by Sir Harold “Hooky” Walker, their Chairman. Sir Harold told me that his grandfather was Lieutenant General Sir Harold “Hooky” Walker, who as an English regular officer had commanded the 1st Australian Division. General Walker took command of the 1st Australian Division temporarily on Gallipoli in May 1915 after Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges was mortally wounded.  After being wounded himself, General Walker left Gallipoli, but returned to command the Division as a Major General in France from March 1916 until July 1918 when he relinquished command “to the deep regret of his officers and men” according to Bean. read on

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

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

Rania MacPhillamy, born in 1889, was the daughter of a wealthy squatter from Forbes NSW. In 1915 she trained as a VAD and went to Egypt to help nurse the wounded from Gallipoli. After the death of her sweetheart, Ronnie MacDonald of the 1st Light Horse Regiment,  Rania stayed on in Egypt and formed a remarkable partnership with an older Australian, Mrs Alice Chisholm. Together they set up a canteen for the Light Horsemen at Port Said, and in early 1917 took over the running of another canteen at Kantara, a busy railway junction on the Suez Canal. Known as the ‘Empire Soldiers Club’, this became one of the best-known and best-loved institutions in Egypt. Thousands of soldiers were able to enjoy low-cost meals and friendly hospitality on their journeys to and from the front line: the club was open 24 hours a day and operated without a break from early 1917 until after demobilisation.

TE Lawrence visited the club at least once on his travels, and a number of Arab delegations also passed through. At one stage in 1917 the two women were hosts to 17 Arab dignitaries, including Nasib al Bakri, a wealthy merchant from Damascus and one of the key players in the fight for Arab independence. In June 1918, Rania set up another club in Jerusalem, which became a haven for the ANZACs on leave from the terrible conditions that summer in the Jordan Valley. Rania’s work for the Light Horse was recognised with the award of an OBE; her older friend, Alice Chisholm, received a DBE.

The images used in this post are courtesy of Christopher and Elizabeth Murray.

Jenny Horsfield

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