by Jan Morris
‘Practically all the experts and authorities on the Middle East’, he later wrote, ‘were summoned’, which meant in the context of the times that of the thirty-eight participants, thirty-six were British and two Arab. There is a famous photograph of this conference, taken at the Mena House Hotel—where Churchill, who spent much of his time painting pictures, guarded by an armoured car, held a one-man exhibition of Pyramidical portraits. There we may see, frozen for ever in their official poses, the true progenitors of the Anglo-Arab empire. The chubby-faced, balding man in the centre is of course Churchill himself, twenty years older than he was at Spion Kop, and by now an experienced imperialist. The young man in the three-piece suit, papers untidily protruding from his jacket pocket, is T. E. Lawrence. The only woman in the group, wearing a wide flowered hat and a fox fur, is Gertrude Bell, writer, orientalist, explorer, and forceful protagonist of the British presence in Iraq. On Churchill’s left is Sir Percy Cox, ‘Kokkus’ to the Arabs, who so fatefully advocated a British advance to Baghdad in 1915, on his right is Sir Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first High Commissioner in Palestine, charged with the fostering of the Zionist National Home. Tactfully among the paladins stand the two Iraqis, the soldier Jaafar al Askari, in a spiked helmet, and Sam Browne, the politician Sasun Effendi Haskail, in a tarboosh and wing collar, and in front of them all, guarded by a kneeling Sudanese, two young lions gambol emblematically on the gravel.
It was scarcely a conference really. Churchill and Lawrence had already made its decisions—‘over dinner’, Lawrence said, ‘at the Ship Restaurant in Whitehall’. But the grandees at Mena House ordered the new arrangements, and gave to all the British officials in the Middle East some sense of unified purpose. Churchill’s solution was to create two new kingdoms in the Arab world, the Kingdom of Iraq, the Emirate of Transjordan. Both would have Hashemite monarchs, Feisal in Baghdad, Abdullah in Amman, but both would be unmistakably protégés of the British.
So the new empire was established—‘knitting together the old’, thought the historian Arnold Toynbee, then a Foreign Office official. By the middle 1920s Britain was overwhelmingly paramount in the Middle East, and her control of the Arab world was absolute, if not in principle, at least in fact. The routes to India were safe as never before, the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the Abadan refinery, all were securely in British possession. ‘I must put on record my conviction’, Lawrence wrote after surveying this consummation, ‘that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands’—or if not with clean hands, he might have added, at least with full pockets.
None of the new territories became colonies, and Aden was to be, first to last, the only true British possession among the Arabs. Elsewhere the new suzerainty was veiled in euphemism. Egypt was proclaimed independent, in 1922, but remained a British fief just the same. The Persian Gulf emirates were officially Protected States, or States in Treaty Relationship, but did what they were told. Iraq and Transjordan had their own monarchs and Governments, but were effectively run by British advisers, and policed by British forces. Palestine was a Mandated Territory, but was governed by the familiar Colonial Office hierarchy of Chief Secretary and District Commissioner, Director of Public Works and Conservator of Forests. The vassal dynasty of the Hashemites, the front of British control among the Arabs, adopted under the tutelage of the Empire all the trappings of western kingship, and there were Baghdadi tailors By Appointment to the Royal House, and two new royal palaces for the penniless Emir of Transjordan, one for the summer in the Moab mountains, one for the winter by the blue Dead Sea.
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This was a little forlorn. It was the example and policy of the British that turned old Hussein’s sons and grandsons into Arab parodies of Windsors or Hanoverians. They were more easily controlled, of course, as members of the royal brotherhood: like the subservient rulers of Indian princely States, or the more docile chiefs of black Africa, they were absorbed into the purposes of their patrons. When the Emir Abdullah of Transjordan remarked one day that the only lady whose hand he would ever kiss was Queen Mary of England, he was expressing as much a political as a domestic condition.
The Iraqi dynasty, whose first king was the fighting prince Feisal, soon degenerated into pastiche. Though in 1930 Iraq theoretically became an independent Kingdom, it really remained a British puppet, and the royal family willingly connived in the sham. Only a generation removed from the arcane chieftaincies of the Hejaz, now they seemed almost as British as the British themselves. English tutors and governesses, English nannies, English coachmen, English grooms and mechanics were installed in Kasr al-Rihab, the Palace of Welcome, on the outskirts of Baghdad. An English architect designed a Royal Mausoleum. The royal sons were sent to Harrow, and though the Queens of Iraq remained generally in purdah, the Kings made frequent public appearances, in immaculate lounge suits, or feathered topees and gauntlets, driven in crested landaus by white-gloved grooms. Feisal died in 1933; his headstrong successor Ghazi was killed driving his sports car too fast across Baghdad; the climactic years of the monarchy were dominated by the regency of the Crown Prince Abdulillah, who looked after the throne during the boyhood of his cousin, King Feisal II.
This interregnum was the true allegory of the British presence among the Arabs, for there was never a client prince more subtly anglicized than Abdulillah, or a regime which seemed, except to its struts and sycophants, more inevitably fated. Abdulillah was your true Anglo-Arab, the most transient of all imperial types, for it had scarcely a generation in which to appear, reach its fulfilment and be obliterated. He was educated at Victoria College, Alexandria, a transplanted English public school specifically designed, like the Princes’ Colleges in India, to produce surrogate Britons. A slim and elegant man, with a small dark moustache, sloping eyebrows and a Mongolian puffiness about the cheeks, he had adopted all the externals of the British style. Reticent, formal, courtly, shy, strict about protocol, devoted to pedigree, he was made to be a well-heeled monarch in exile, growing old charmingly in house parties of the English shires, or on hospitable Italian terraces. Instead he was the all too proper figurehead of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.
See him there now, in the garden of his palace. He is sitting in a deck-chair beneath a fronded tree, wearing a dark suit in the brilliant sunshine, smoking a Turkish cigarette. Before him, in the shade, the young king is playing chess with his brother, using big wooden chess men on a carved table, but Abdulillah is not watching them. His legs elegantly crossed, he is looking thoughtfully across the lawn towards the distant roofs of the capital, spiked by minarets and hazed in dust. It is a highly suggestive scene, but in a charged way: the two boys intent upon their game, the enamelled guardian aloof and preoccupied at his cigarette. It seems timeless, changeless, as though the three figures have always been there, and are condemned to remain for ever motionless in that Baghdadi garden: but at the same time it seems a fictional or contrived tableau, arranged there by some producer of plangent gifts. Will they ever grow up, those young innocents? Will that urbane regent ever be old? Are they real princes, or only tokens, placed there for a purpose, like pieces on a wider board themselves?
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Among and around the Hashemites a group of Anglo-Arab satraps rose to power. Some were Arabs themselves, like the Iraqi politician Nuri-es-Said, who became a living emblem of the British connection. Many more were Britons, discovering for themselves fine opportunities for adventure and advance. The ruling establishments of the British, swiftly erected through the Arab countries, became at once late outposts of the imperial idea.
In Jerusalem the British High Commissioner first occupied the great Augusta Victoria Hospital, originally built to commemorate the Kaiser’s visit, but supposedly designed as the Government House of a German-conquered Palestine: later he was given a palace of finely dressed Jerusalem stone, golden as the city itself, encouched in pine trees, and there, looking splendidly out across the Holy City, he was constantly reminded that he stood in direct descent from Pontius
Pilate in the imperial satrapy. In Amman, the capital of Transjordan, the British Resident was so much more powerful than the King that the affairs of the country revolved naturally not around the royal palace on its hilltop but around the Residency in the valley. And beside the Tigris in Baghdad the British High Commissioner’s headquarters very soon assumed a somewhat baleful dominance, with its wide gravelled courtyard and its Persian gardeners, its lions and unicorns and punctilious aides, its dogs, its hunting talk, its flowering verbena, its familiar dinner lists of visiting grandees and fawning locals, its languid Union Jack above the river, its varnished motor launches, its statue of General Maude the conqueror—a structure, born by the Great War out of the Indian Raj, which became the truest monument to the British presence among the Arabs.
There was no shortage of Britons to man these frontiers. Not many were needed anyway, and bright young men who had soldiered in those parts welcomed the chance to make careers there. Some were veterans of the Revolt itself. Here is Fred Peake, for instance, ‘Peake Pasha’, the founder of the Transjordan Arab Legion, wearing an Arab headdress with his khaki uniform, standing with a hand on his stomach among a troop of his Bedouin swashbucklers: with his piercing blue eyes and his beautifully cut Saxon features, he looks just like one of the fighting Anglo-Indian patriarchs of a century before, and indeed he had come to the Arabs by way of India and the Egyptian Army. Here is Alec Kirkbride, Abdullah’s chief British adviser, a huge kindly Scot whose pungent friendship with the Emir gave extra subtleties to the imperial theme. (‘Why don’t you like that idea?’ Abdullah asked him once of a new development scheme. ‘Who said I didn’t like it, Sidi?’ ‘Nobody, but I know that when you flick your head away like that, it means you disapprove.’) Here is Charles Belgrave, Adviser to the Ruler of Bahrein, tall, worldly, witty, almost theatrically handsome, who got his job by answering an advertisement in the personal column of The Times, whose tastes ran to roulette, pantomime, watercolour painting and The Fairchild Family, and whose ugly house above the water-front bulged in every cranny, corridor and bathroom with the books of his eclectic library. Or here is John Bagot Glubb, the most famous of them all, nicknamed by the Arabs Abu Hunaik, Father of the Little Chin, because of a disfigurement of his jaw: succeeding Peake as commander of the Arab Legion, he went much further, and with his merry Irish smile, his quiet manners and his quick emotions, became in the end the grey eminence of Anglo-Arabia.
Few of these men went to the Arab countries with any imperial mission. The basis of this enterprise was pure opportunism: its protagonists seldom pleaded moral obligation or White Man’s Burden. At least towards the desert Arabs, the British felt no prejudice or even condescension, and most of this new imperial class went to the Middle East partly because they relished the adventure of it all, but partly because they genuinely admired the Bedouin ethos. On a personal level, it was a meeting of equals. Most of the Britons were men of the rural gentry, and they felt at ease and at home with Arab gentlemen, affectionate and paternal, like squires or conscientious subalterns, towards the Arab rank and file. They were happy men, probably the happiest of all the imperialists. More than any colonial servants since the great days of British India, they felt themselves fulfilled: they believed the British presence to be good for the Arabs and for the world in general, they felt, some of them,. that they were expiating a betrayal, and they genuinely wished their subjects well.
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For a couple of decades it worked. What Britain needed in the Middle East, Balfour once said, was ‘supreme economic and political control, to be exercised … in friendly and unostentatious cooperation with the Arabs, but nevertheless, in the last resort to be exercised.’ This is exactly what she got. For thirty years the British were able to safeguard their oil supplies and their strategic interests at minimum cost to themselves, and more than any other of their suzerainties, more even perhaps than their Empire in India, it was their position in the Middle East that kept them among the ranks of the Great Powers into the middle years of the century.
Arab nationalist opinion, of course, soon turned against them. They did little enough to conciliate the younger patriots. Their puppet regimes were essentially law-and-order governments, and their affinities were with the traditional ruling classes of Islam. The kings, emirs, sheikhs, princes, and sultans of the Middle East saw in Britain their best protector against the dimly perceived but all too clearly apprehended dangers of radicalism: the British believed that by bolstering the conservative forces of Islam, the ruling families, the desert heritage, they could best maintain the stability of Arab society. They often quoted Curzon’s dictum about the most unselfish page in history, and they continued to claim, until the end of the Empire, a particular kinship between Englishman and Bedouin Arab—‘we understand each other you see, we use the same language so to speak….’
But it was to go sour in the end, all the spirited pleasure of the British presence, all the comradeship of Briton and Hashemite, even the devotion of so many British administrators to the ideal of Arabness. In the Middle East the British never had time to acquire the profound expertise they had gathered over so many generations in India, while die Arabs, especially the urban intellectuals, proved to be nationalists of a sophistication and intensity unknown to the imperialists elsewhere. The British, so late in the imperial day, were nagged by a sense of incongruity: the Arab patriots believed the whole imperial structure in their midst, disguised as it was in mandate, protectorate or formal independence, to be false.
So it was. Iraq and Transjordan, the bulwarks of the British position, were only semi-nations. Their kings were creatures, their diplomatic missions were mere sops to their self-esteem, their trade, commerce and industry were ancillary to imperial needs, their armies were trained, equipped and often commanded by Britons. The British Empire was a true ally of reaction in the Middle East, depending as it did upon the alliance of sheikhs and princes, distrustful of urban values and intellectual tastes. The progressives were bound to rebel against its presence, sooner or later, and their antipathies were given an extra focus by the problem of Palestine, where the Zionists were busily building their National Home under British auspices—a permanent imperialist bridgehead, as every Arab agreed, upon the shore of Islam.
The Arab Awakening, as it came to be called, was sporadic and scattered—an assassination in Egypt, a mutiny in Iraq, a riot in Palestine—but it was never altogether quiescent. As the decades passed the British stance among the Arabs became more and more defensive, and the High Commissioners, the Residents, the Advisers, the General Officers Commanding, the Conservators of Forests, fortified themselves with their sheikhly partners against the assaults of change.
10
We will take a journey now, through the British Middle East some time in the 1930s, when the imperial suzerainty was complete still, but precarious—powerful, but challenged nearly everywhere by subversion and dissent.
We will start from Cairo, then as always the power-base of the British presence—from the Embassy in fact, formerly the Residency, before that the Agency, in whose offices the Anglo-Arab conspiracy had first been hatched. This is a building of sombre dominance, set among wide lawns on the edge of the Nile, with its back to the mediaeval city and its front to the pyramids. British sentries stand guard at its gates, and when the Ambassador drives out, ostentatiously from the mudguards of his Rolls fly the twin flags of his plenipotence.1 Through the gates we pass ourselves, accepting to the manner born the crash of the sentry’s salute, and drive away through the tumultuous streets of the capital. Everywhere, though this is a sovereign kingdom now, the British Empire shows. There stand the hideous brown barracks of Kasr-el-Nil, with the soldiery’s khaki shirts drying from its windows, and there to the right is the Turf Club, awnings down against the sun2—and we wave to Reggie and Lorna taking breakfast on the terrace of Shepheard’s, and catch a glimpse of the 9th Lancers polo team limbering up beyond the hedges of the Gezira Sporting Club. My goodness, are they never going
to get that Anglican Cathedral finished?3 Great God, isn’t that Andrew Holden there, in the tarboosh, just getting off the tram? Doing things the hard way, isn’t he?4
Away we sweep beside the Sweet Water Canal, a thin thread of green through the eastern desert, and in an hour or two, as we approach Ismailia, we see the masts and upperworks of ships eerily gliding above the banks of the Suez Canal. British of course, we discover to our gratification when we scramble up the levee to watch them go by, and very British too is the luncheon they give us at the officers’ mess up the road (‘What a bloody awful place,’ says our host as he waves us away. ‘Do we have to have an Empire?’) Over the canal next, and at Kantara, on the east bank, a troop train stands in the siding waiting to move into Palestine (‘Keep your fingers off the window-ledge, lads, or the wogs’ll get ’em for wedding-rings’):5 the soldier who waves us through the check-point into Sinai is an Egyptian in a tarboosh, but the officer you may see behind him in his office, chatting over a cup of coffee with a fat Arab in a green sports coat and khuffiya, looks remarkably like that fellow Jarvis, you know the man, used to write those frightfully funny skits in the ship’s paper coming out….1
By the evening we are in Palestine. Here the British seem to be embattled. There are ancient armoured cars on patrol, and roadblocks, and when the District Commissioner of Gaza, in his straw hat and suede shoes, meets us at the garden gate of his bungalow above the town, we find it guarded by watchful infantrymen. ‘Welcome to the Holy Land!’ he says. ‘They shot poor Andrews up in Galilee last night. You will keep your eyes skinned, won’t you, when you get up towards Bethlehem tomorrow?—always a tricky spot, Bethlehem.’