The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  It was finally resolved, in 1920, that the French should indeed have Syria and Lebanon, and the British Palestine and Mesopotamia. Winston Churchill (secretary of state for war and soon to become colonial secretary) persuaded Lawrence to join him as a special adviser to help clean up the postwar mess. Part of this was done by air power, as Lawrence and Churchill were enthusiasts for using the RAF to police and tame the turbulent tribes of Iraq (Lawrence had warned about a “Wahhabi-like Moslem form of Bolshevism” 14 developing there). Part of it was political, as Churchill and Lawrence pushed to have Feisal installed as the monarch of Mesopotamia, his consolation prize for having lost Syria, and to carve out a new state, Transjordan, as a consolation prize for his brother Abdullah. Lawrence and Churchill managed to pull this off, with Lawrence shoring up Abdullah’s regime when it looked like it might collapse (today’s King Abdullah II of Jordan owes his position to Lawrence of Arabia). They could not, however, reach an accord with Sherif Hussein, who was too stubborn, greedy, and mercurial. Without Britain’s protection he was ousted from the Hejaz by the forces of Ibn Saud in 1924 and became an exile in Transjordan. Lawrence left the Colonial Office in 1922, reasonably pleased with what he and Churchill had achieved, writing how he “must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.”15 He predicted, “There’ll be no more serious trouble for at least seven years,” which, in those territories for which Britain was responsible, proved broadly true.16 In 1935 he wrote to Robert Graves, “How well the Middle East has done: it, more than any part of the world, has gained from the war.”17

  An American in Damascus

  Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence came up with idea—as a compromise given that the Arabs did not want the French, and the French did not want the British—of the United States accepting a mandate over Syria. The American King-Crane Commission (after Oberlin College president Henry Churchill King and Charles R. Crane, a businessman, diplomat, and financial supporter of President Woodrow Wilson who appointed King and Crane to the commission) thought this a proper outcome, but there was little popular or congressional desire to make democrats of Arabs (at least those that couldn’t vote in the United States).

  Despite his satisfaction with this apparent achievement, Lawrence had a strong penitential streak. He served as an enlisted man, under assumed names, in the Tank Corps and the RAF. About his fame—the floodlights hit him fully when American newsman Lowell Thomas’s touring film of Lawrence’s exploits appeared shortly after the war—he took a famously Garbo of Arabia line. As Lowell Thomas said, “He had a genius for backing into the limelight.”18 Celebrity was, in a way, the fulfillment of his boyhood dreams of being a hero, and he traded on it when he wanted to—but he also hated himself for such pride, wanted to be left alone and free, and was so guilt-ridden that he actually ordered regular beatings for himself. He left the RAF in February 1935. In May he was dead. A motorcycle enthusiast, he was riding near his cottage when he had to swerve to avoid two young boys on bicycles. His injuries were fatal.

  His massive memoir of the war, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is regarded as a classic, if also an oddity and unreliable as history. It was intended as a work of literature—and has been employed as a textbook on guerrilla warfare. He was an extraordinary man, torn between a brilliant intelligence, a chivalric imagination, a weakness for posturing, a Christian conscience without Christian faith, and a strong adolescent streak. But most of all he was a British patriot who, though he had served a foreign race, knew that ultimately what mattered was the green, soggy ground of Old Blighty: “I went up the Tigris with one hundred Devon Territorials, young, clean, delightful fellows, full of the power of happiness and of making women and children glad. By them one saw vividly how great it was to be their kin, and English.... All our subject provinces to me were not worth one dead Englishman.”19 Yet it can rightly be said that Lawrence gave his own life for those very provinces. At Wareham Church in Dorset there is a carved memorial, a faux catafalque, of Lawrence recumbent in death, dressed in his Arab robes and headdress, hand clutching a dagger, an imitation, by the artist Eric Kennington, of the medieval effigies that so attracted Lawrence as a boy.

  Chapter 22

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR JOHN BAGOT GLUBB (1897–1986)

  “He dealt as an Arab with the King’s palace, as a Bedouin with the tribes, as a British officer with London. No one except Glubb knew everything that was going on.”

  —A British officer of the Arab Legion on John Glubb1

  He was universally known as Glubb Pasha: a short, soft-spoken man of gentle demeanor (if occasional fiery temper), deep Christian faith, quiet courage, and adamant will. He, like Lawrence of Arabia, dedicated his life to the Arabs and to the British Empire. As commander of the Arab Legion, he led his Bedouin troops to the only decisive Arab victory ever inflicted on an Israeli army—putting him in the odd position of defending one British ally (Jordan) by fighting a British creation (Israel).

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Glubb’s sister became a race car driver

  He led the only militarily successful Arab army against the Israelis (leading a British ally, Jordan, against a British creation, Israel)

  Glubb’s son, named after a crusader, took an Arab name, converted to Islam, and became a Palestinian activist

  * * *

  His mother, Frances Letitia Bagot, was witty, pious, and Anglo-Irish, while his father, Major-General Sir Frederic Manley Glubb (then a major and not yet knighted) was a stalwart, charming, gentlemanly fellow who in the Great War was chief engineer of the Second British Army. Their household had that typical British imperial flavor—they were all terribly well-mannered, with lips as stiff as starched shirts, but loving as well, and beneath their apparent conventionality, adventurous individualists to the core. Their daughter Gwenda became a race car driver and their son not only led Arab armies—frequently dressed in Arab garb—but was the chief adviser to an Arabian king.

  Glubb spent most of his boyhood in England, with some time abroad in Mauritius (which he loved, and where he learned French) and Switzerland. His education was at Cheltenham College (a typical public school of the time, full of muscular Christianity) and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. His goal was to become an officer of engineers like his father, but he almost enlisted in the Rifle Brigade instead, because his entrance exams coincided with the outbreak of the First World War. His father, however, convinced him that the army needed officers, so Glubb dutifully went to Woolwich. He would see war soon enough.

  The two-year course at Woolwich was crammed into six months in order to get new officers to the front. It was an early lesson in hurry up and wait—Glubb graduated and then had to fidget for six months because he was too young for active service. In November 1915, he finally made it to France, where he was three times wounded and had to be evacuated—the worst injury coming on 21 August 1917 as he was riding a horse amidst shellfire (he didn’t believe in taking cover, thinking it bad form in front of the men), and was blown from his saddle, shrapnel hitting him in the face so that “half my jaw, which had broken off, teeth and all . . . was floating around in my mouth.”2 It was a gruesome wound, and in the days before antibiotics a potentially fatal one. The surgery and the recovery (including from infection) was unpleasant, to say the least. When it healed, his shortened jaw led to his eventual Bedouin nickname: Abu Hunaik, Father of the Little Jaw. Glubb recovered in time to rejoin the war. His father wanted to arrange a staff job for him, but Glubb insisted on returning to the front.

  A Father’s Advice

  “Don’t chase after women, old boy. If you do so, you will regret it bitterly when you ultimately meet the woman you want to marry. Some men can think of nothing else, but I have not been tempted in that way and I hope you will not be.”

  Major-General Frederic Manley Glubb’s counsel to his son, the future Glubb Pasha; he followed it. Sir John Glubb, The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography (Quartet, 1983), p. 10
8

  Glubb of Mesopotamia

  Like the fictional hero Bulldog Drummond—who found peace after the Great War “incredibly tedious”—Glubb blanched at the prospect of dull peacetime assignments. His salvation came when the War Office asked for volunteer officers to fight an insurgency in Mesopotamia. Glubb applied and was accepted. It was the decision that made his career.

  What a Piece of Work Is a Man

  “One cannot see these ragged and putrid bundles of what were once men without thinking of what they were—their cheerfulness, their courage, their idealism, their love for their dear ones at home. Man is such a marvelous, incredible mixture of soul and nerves and intellect, of bravery, heroism and love—it cannot be that it all ends in a bundle of rags covered with flies. These parcels of matter seem to me proof of immortality. This cannot be the end of so much.”

  Captain John Glubb, 7th Field Company, Royal Engineers, September 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, taken from John Glubb, Into Battle: A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War (Cassell, 1978), pp. 67–68

  He was employed on engineering assignments in the Mesopotamian hinterlands. Encouraged by Arab hospitality, he did reconnaissance among the Iraqi tribes, taught himself Arabic, and developed a lasting affection for the life of nomadic Arabs. His developing knowledge of the country attracted the attention of the RAF, which was charged with keeping the peace, because air power was the most economical way to do so. But air power, to be effective, required land-based scouts to provide intelligence on potential targets. Glubb happily took this role, which kept him mounted on a stallion, riding through the desert, meeting with tribesmen: “Although these people were, in some ways, addicted to violence and bloodshed, although there were lice in their clothes and they ate with their hands, there was something about them which attracted me.”3 That was the typical British attitude: up with warrior tribes and races, peoples grounded in courage and honor; down with pushy, calculating merchants, disputatious lawyers, and babbling, aspiring clerks. British standards were classical standards, because the British imperial ruling class was classically educated.

  Glubb furthered his own education by reading classic Western accounts of the Arab world; like Lawrence he adopted Arab dress (though only in the field); and he provided invaluable topographical and human intelligence to the RAF. He also came directly to the aid of the Mesopotamian Arabs against the Ikhwan, fanatical Wahhabi warriors loyal to Ibn Saud. Ibn Saud tried to use the Ikhwan to further his ends in central Arabia, but even he couldn’t control them. The 60,000-strong Ikhwan army mercilessly put to slaughter every male, from newborn to old man, of any village they attacked. Their goal was to convert the world to their brand of Islam by killing all dissenters. They had targeted Mesopotamia for conversion, and Glubb, witness to their terror and destruction, vowed to stop them. He did—in large part because Ibn Saud diverted his wild warriors to conquering the Hejaz and deposing Sherif Hussein. In 1925, Ibn Saud signed the Basra Agreement, pledging to uphold the border between Arabia and Iraq.

  In 1926, Glubb received orders to return to engineering duties in England—which he was loath to do. Instead, he resigned his commission and became a civil servant of the government of Iraq. Though now a civilian, he was back in the saddle fighting the Ikhwan, whose Islamist fervor would not be bound by Ibn Saud’s agreements with infidels. An Iraqi nationalist newspaper testified to Glubb’s standing among the Arab tribes: Glubb, though undoubtedly an agent of British imperialism, “is the refuge to which the nomads fly; he is the shield behind which they seek safety and he is commander and the prohibitor. It is sufficient to pronounce his name when all will fall down to their knees and to tell them that here comes Abu Hunaik and they will begin to tremble and then freeze as if thunder struck.”4

  Glubb formed a new unit, the Southern Desert Camel Corps, made up of Iraqi border Arabs—each one chosen by Glubb himself—to provide better intelligence to the RAF and help sheep-herding tribesmen fend off Ikhwan raids. Supplementing the camels were a smattering of cars and trucks mounted with machine guns. The Corps stung the Ikhwan and despite its small size—it started with only 70 men—it played an important role in another peace agreement (in 1930) between Ibn Saud (who pledged to restrain the Ikhwan) and King Feisal of Iraq.

  With Iraq set to become independent in 1932, the number of British advisors was dramatically reduced—even Abu Hunaik was made redundant. But he was not long removed from his camels. Feisal’s brother Abdullah, the emir (and eventual king) of Transjordan, had his own troubles with tribal raiders (and later with Syrian gangs and terrorists spilling over from Jewish-Arab fighting in Palestine), and invited Glubb to recreate his camel-borne constabulary. He did this by forming a Desert Patrol within the existing Arab Legion, to which he was appointed deputy to Frederick Gerard Peake (a former colleague of T. E. Lawrence’s)—without Peake’s knowledge or consent while Peake was on leave. Peake never quite got over his irritation at Glubb’s appointment, yet the two men proved an able pair—especially as Glubb was never happier than when far away from Peake, patrolling the desert and enjoying the company of the Bedouin whom he made the dominant force within the Arab Legion.

  Glubb frequently rhapsodized about the desert stars, the Bedouin gift for hospitality with dinner set out before an aromatic fire, coffee served in little cups, and manly conversation into the evening. The journalist (and later Labour member of Parliament) Tom Driberg profiled Glubb in 1938:Glubb spends few days in the year at his house in Amman; goes there only to have the occasional bath and do a bit of office work. He is never seen at social functions in Amman or Jerusalem.... This is not Lawrence coyness. It’s simply that Glubb has to be constantly in touch with all the corners of his territory. He goes by car (reading a good deal of history on the way). He does not affect Arab dress; when I met him he was in khaki uniform. “The trouble all over the east,” he told me in a clear, imperial rather school-masterish voice, “is that with improved communications and so on, the British people [in the outposts of empire] lead an increasingly Western life. They go to each others’ parties. They never mix with the people of the country. They might as well not be here.”5

  Perhaps not surprisingly, Glubb was suspicious of Western oilmen, urban Arabs, Jewish immigrants (“In Palestine the influx of Jews and foreigners, and seventeen years of direct British administration, have made the country Levantine or Mediterranean”6), and modernizing capitalism (“I do not wish to state that the importation of foreign capital into Transjordan might not be for the benefit of the capitalists. It would probably increase the total revenue of Transjordan. It might be for the general benefit of the human race. But let us be quite clear and honest—it would not be for the benefit of the tribesmen”7).

  Glubb relished life in the desert with the Bedouin. He said as much time and again; it was his tonic. As a romantic conservative, he wanted that honorable, free, martial life preserved forever; and he was a perpetual, ardent advocate for Bedouin interests to a degree that sometimes made British officials wonder if he hadn’t gone native. He had, in fact, dual loyalties. When, in 1939, he became commander of the Arab Legion (and a lieutenant-colonel in Jordanian rank) he gave his word to Abdullah that on all occasions, save a conflict between Britain and Jordan, he would serve as an Arab soldier.

  No Peace, Please, We’re Arabs

  “The abstract European worship of peace is absolutely unknown to them. They believe it to be the natural state of all rulers, princes and governments to be continually toiling to gain some advantage over their neighbouring rulers. A prince content to sit down and merely enjoy his natural dominion is regarded by them as hopelessly poor-spirited and effeminate. Moreover, it is not only the prince who conquers his enemies whom they admire. In high politics, successful lying, deceit and subtlety evoke exclamations of admiration.”

  Glubb in a July 1933 memo to the Colonial Office, quoted in Trevor Royle, Glubb Pasha: The Life and Times of Sir John Bagot Glubb, Commander of the Arab Legion (Little, Brown and Company, 1992), p.
185

  The End of Glubb Pasha

  But 1939 was a time when Britain needed her own soldiers, as she would soon be at war with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, and their allies, which would include Vichy France and its imperial appendages, Syria among them. There were also fears of growing Nazi influence in the Middle East. Rumors had it that Ibn Saud was flirting with the Nazis. Growing Arab hostility to Jewish settlers—and occasionally to the British troops who protected them—in Palestine left Arab public opinion dangerously inclined to Nazi propaganda. Glubb rapidly expanded the Legion, acquired improved equipment for it, and continued his magnificent training regimen, which would make the Legion the premier pro-British Arab fighting force.

  In 1941, a military coup in Iraq made the country a Nazi ally. As the British prepared a counterstrike, Glubb organized Iraqi resistance to the new regime. He also pressed into service detachments from the Arab Legion, who proved loyal when other Arab units did not. In thirty days, the British reconquered Iraq, denying the Nazis its airbases, and recovering its oil supplies. Glubb characteristically blamed Iraq’s near Nazi-defection to Britain’s having vouchsafed the country a Western democratic government, when what was wanted was a federal state, united by the monarchy, which dispersed power from the cities to the more conservative rural areas.