The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  The American explained I was an official RAF photographer, also working for the Ministry of Information. These pictures I had taken would be censored, of course. I had come a long way especially to take pictures of the Middle East Command.

  ‘But no,’ said the dry-lipped blonde. ‘No. The film must be liquidated.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  I got good and mad. But before we found ourselves in further difficulties we would at once seek out the air attaché. Meanwhile, I was forced to hand over my films. But I gave them to the Americans. While waiting for my conducting officer to get some papers from his office, I stood on a parapet by the barracks, where the Russian soldiers are billeted in the same building as the RAF. The RAF entrance happened to be in the sun. The Russian soldiers, boys of about seventeen, all looking like brothers, were sitting in the shade. I walked ten yards towards the shade, and stood for a moment trying to pry a splinter from one of my fingers. A Russian sentry with a bayonet and a flick of his hand sent me packing.

  It was not for several seconds that I realized what had happened, and began to smart at such treatment. How after all was the sentry to know that I was not a bona fide RAF officer? I told my conducting officer what had happened.

  ‘It is very difficult,’ he said, ‘but we have to keep calm.’

  SHAH AND FAMILY

  The snow-striped Mount Demavend, 20,000 feet high, is seventy miles distant, but so clear and bright, so dry and fine, is the air in Tehran, that the extinct volcano seems to overhang the summer palace. The palace is as new as any Hollywood movie house, and its ‘modernistic’ decorations, the colossal silver sphinx bastions to flights of marble steps, the geometric furniture, the furnishings of triangular patterned materials of squashed strawberry and chutney colouring, strike an anachronistic note in this country, which knew civilization before Greece and Rome. But it is a fitting setting for someone so young in ideas and years. Shahpur Mohamed Reza believes in democratic government, has abolished many forms of despotism and dictatorship in favour of reforms towards liberty and progress.

  A young man of courage and independence, he has thrown in his lot whole-heartedly with the Allies, and today his country provides the great supply lines to Russia; upon its roads thousands of workmen can be seen.

  The Shah, with his family and entourage, stood rather shyly around the swimming-pool. He looked surprisingly untidy with long curling hair, unshaven chin and black and white co-respondent shoes that were in need of a going-over. His wife, Queen Fawzieh, a sister of the King of Egypt, appeared little more than a child although wearing the maximum of maquillage and a knee-length dress, probably from Shaftesbury Avenue or Buenos Aires. On slender arm and leg were bandages.

  Princess Ashraf, the Shah’s sister, with flashing eyes and long black curls, wore beach shorts. A chamberlain was busy picking up dogs and children, while minor court officials stood by on the terrace and in the neighbouring rooms. On guard behind the colonnades of trees, half hidden, were numberless unshaven Charlie Chaplins.

  The Shah, agreeable, well-mannered and serious, submitted to being photographed while his wife and sister tittered and occasionally burst into explosions of laughter which they ill-concealed behind their hands. The Queen as a model proved to be more photogenic than many a film star as she posed on the edge of the bathing-pool with skirts and scarves trailing in the water. But my intention was to use the Queen as a figure in a photographic version of one of the miniatures of the golden age of Shah Abbas — the contemporary of Queen Elizabeth, under whom a renaissance of Persian art flourished. Although here was the perfect sitter we were missing suitable garments. Surely there must be some embroidered coat or a piece of material to turn into a turban? An old woman servant brought an armful of Riviera foulards and garments trimmed with swansdown or ostrich feathers. ‘We have a large garden party hat upstairs.’ No, never mind. It was my mistake. How unwise to try to link the past with the present.

  My visit to Teheran was flavoured by the wit and originality of outlook of my old friend Christopher Sykes. He has been out here for over a year acting as the Hon. Second Secretary to HM’s Legation. In his company one can only relax, and any feeling of strain at finding oneself meeting strangers in a strange place melts into guffaws of laughter. I stayed with him in the Legation compound at Gulhak, about six miles out of Teheran. Here, in his offhand way, he explained the political situation, and introduced me to the Luards (he is AICO) and other close friends who have apparently acquired, if not Christopher’s charm and stutter, his somewhat debunking attitude to everything from the romance of a Persian garden (‘Look at those moth-eaten roses and that piddling little f-f-fountain!’) to the war itself. Yet Christopher is one of the most talented of his contemporaries and his seriousness of purpose has been recognized.

  He was to report to GHQ at Cairo, and I was fortunate to travel with him in the same aircraft as far as Habbaniyah. The Bible is his Baedeker, and we had no sooner left Teheran than he indicated the places over which we were flying. ‘That is the tomb of the Three Magi.’ Over Hamadan he showed me the tomb of Esther, and pointing to Azerbaijan he roared, ‘That’s where the Ark came from.’ He laughed, too, at the place where Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale. ‘There’s some half-witted yarn about this town being named with a word that could easily be mistaken for the sound ‘belly of a whale’. Nearer to Baghdad he pointed to Babylon, and as we looked down upon the mountain range of Pai-Tak he remarked that the strange formations looked like fortifications, though I thought they looked like nothing so much as serried ranks of pagodas.

  IRAQ

  Habbaniyah

  It is fortunate that I am invited to stay with the Air Officer Commanding, Air Marshal de Crespigny, for he lives with his staff in a building appropriately called ‘Air House’. Its pagoda roof, with slits to let air into the high-ceilinged rooms, allows it to remain cooler than most buildings. For this I am particularly thankful, as although I have never suffered from an excess of heat this is like a scourge. Each day starts with a bathe soon after dawn in the surprisingly rough and choppy Lake of Habbaniyah. By 11 o’clock the sun has become so piercing that one can hardly bear to remain out of doors.

  The air station of Habbaniyah, with its power works, workshops, water supply, electric plant, native cantonment and messes for Service men and civilians, built at the cost of many million pounds in the desolation of the Iraqi desert, is a self-supporting town of 6,000 inhabitants. All building was done by British contractors: all fittings and furnishings for this desert mushroom brought from England. Its thoroughfares are called ‘Kingsway’ and ‘Cheapside’, its circus is named ‘Piccadilly’.

  In spite of the terrible heat, the enthusiasm of the ‘levies’ on the parade ground never falters throughout the day as they salute, stamp and beat their rifles. These are the Assyrians who arrive from the hills in their turbans, draperies and wide elaborate belts. Soon their hair is shorn, and the moment they are put into uniform they become so fanatical about their training that they drill in secret, behind cover, on their ‘afternoons off.’ They are trained to guard the airport and, at the time of the recent rebellion,[27] showed a complete contempt for danger under fire.

  The latest batch of recruits has just arrived. Some of the men are noble-looking creatures with long plaited hair and white flying skirts, like figures from a nativity play. One of these men, for our benefit, performed a war dance called the Khigga, to the accompaniment of weird screams and whistles from the pipes and the gourd-like instrument of a three-piece orchestra. I went up to another in a speckled mongoose turban, who with a look of fury on his face withdrew a dagger from his cummerbund and adopted a menacing pose. The young English captain with flowing, blond moustache, who escorted me, remarked disgustedly to this fearsome warrior, ‘Oh, stop that bullshitting!’ Farther along were groups in their national dress of Kurds, Yazidees, and Assyrians.

  In another part of the drill ground, a group of recruits, after three weeks’ training, has
attained clockwork precision. Near by the cantonment live the wives and families. Each man has an average of six children. The interiors of their small mud homes are immaculate, the officers’ rooms furnished with embroidered antimacassars, coloured pictures of our King and Queen, and silver trumpet-shaped vases filled with stiffly arranged asters and zinnias.

  Today, at luncheon at Air House, a group of four American officers, of the Army Air Corps stormed in. Their deep voices rolled out in the reverberating high-ceilinged room with such volume that it was hard to hear what they said, but it seems they had just brought down a Messerschmitt. They are en route for their home station on their first operational trip, the initial American air operation in the Middle East. They had been to bomb oil stores near Lake Constanza, had flown at a tremendous height, using oxygen for many hours, so were now suffering from innate fatigue. Even so, they have an enviably easy flow of talk that shames the English officers who sit dumb, without making any attempt to break a silence.

  The colonel telephoned for news of the other crews: ‘There are five here, one at Mosul, another somewhere nearby; another has given wireless signals recently; as for the others, let’s hope that Messerschmitt hasn’t been repaid.’ But, for the time being, they bothered little about the others, as they described their own adventures. One growled in a voice like the breaking of coke, ‘The ack-ack was jurst like a fluhr gordon, vurry purty!’ My neighbour growled, ‘I’m taking quite a small part in this war, but I’ll be playing a really big one in the next “blow out” in twenty years’ time!’

  KING FAISAL AND THE REGENT

  Baghdad

  This morning early an Oxford was waiting with a crew of three young English boys to take me to Baghdad.

  When our aircraft circled over the aerodrome of our destination Stewart Perowne, whom I knew at Cambridge, hurried down the steps to welcome me and, with a frog of excitement in his voice, to take me off to photograph the King and the Regent.

  The Palais des Fleurs is of white marble, white stucco and white wood. In the throne-room the chairs and tables are doubtless intended for a chain of hotels, while in other rooms the furniture is chromium plated.

  The Regent brought us, by the hand, his nephew, the King, wearing white knickers. The Regent, quietly assured, modest and gentle, is one of the great figures of the Middle East. Politically he is courageously pro-British. The seven-year-old King is a phenomenon, a child with adult poise and sense of responsibility. Yet he is not precocious. Much credit for his being so well brought up must go to Miss Boland, the grey-haired young Scotch woman, who hung around in the middle distance knitting a khaki scarf. The child enjoyed changing the films in my camera and watching my impromptu methods, such as putting one table on top of another to act as an improvised tripod. Generally I am loth to end most sittings; but after two hours, when the heat of the day had begun, I felt we had really got more than we needed, and the Prime Minister was awaiting his appointment to be photographed, so we said good-bye to the child with such a remarkable destiny.[28]

  Stewart escorted me from one national figure to another: I was in complete ignorance of the significance of many of my subjects; I only knew that they were excellent photographic sitters, and the language barrier provoked laughter and childish mime. The unusual heat, and an unaccustomed amount of spiced food, inspired ideas for a long siesta. However, the sleep of the whole household was continually broken by the strident alarm of the telephone bell. Always it was the indefatigable Miss Freya Stark. ‘Would we come at 4 o’clock?’ Later: ‘Could we come at 5.30 instead?’ Later still: ‘Could we come at 4.30? Or could we come at 6 o’clock?’ When at last we drove around to her home, it was just in time to see Miss Stark, dressed like a child in scarlet and white with a bow in her hair, tottering out on to the lawn to a committee meeting. An assortment of English neighbours, spotty youths, old men in Panama hats, and chicken-like women in voiles, were sitting on deck chairs in a large circle.

  Later this evening we visited Adrian Bishop,[29] and sat on the terrace of his Turkish house, overlooking the Tigris, built around a series of courtyards with pretty grill balconies and elaborate capitals painted white. The bathing-boys below ‘showed off’, splashing, holloaing and diving from pale-blue boats. Twilight faded; the lights, one by one, were turned on in the distance and the scene was peaceful and soothing. We reminisced about Cambridge. Since those days, when we were all ‘up’ together, Adrian has taken his vows, entered a monastery and is only ‘out’ for the duration of the war, doing propaganda here for the Ministry of Information. We talked about Cambridge personalities and were glad that Maynard Keynes had, today, been made a peer in the King’s Birthday Honours. In the old days the newspapers would have written stories of Lydia[30] headed: ‘From Ballerina to Baroness’.

  PALESTINE: TWO PATRIARCHS

  Jerusalem

  The Patriarch of the Greek Church, today the most powerful in Jerusalem, in black robes with a magnificent array of jewels at his breast, appeared with outstretched hand for his ring to be kissed. Princess Peter of Greece, making a curtsy to him, gabbled, ‘If you are to be photographed, your Beatitude, why don’t you put on your ceremonial garments? The Easter garments are particularly magnificent.’ But the Patriarch benignly refused: why must he be glamorized? No, there could be no question of wearing the Easter garments. From the liturgical point of view, it would be impossible, for the robes have to be donned in ceremony in front of the altar. With no one to witness the ceremony, how could he wear the robes? The Princess suggested that she should come and watch. No, she got short shrift. The Patriarch, with enormous white, tin-loaf beard, wearing a square, pork-pie black hat, provided a magnificent target for my camera as I lured him around the various rooms of the Patriarchate and down the stairs into the garden. He sat on the throne, stood by a black and silver door, by a richly carved holy water well, by a mother-of-pearl model of some church, and by the hollyhocks. I had lately photographed a large variety of people, hospital matrons, master bakers, desert cooks, and stokers. I have given instructions to Majesties and Air Marshals; but not before this had I the opportunity to say, ‘Please moisten the lips, your Beatitude.’

  The Orthodox Patriarch and the Latin Patriarch are not as friendly as twins. Monsignor Barlassina, the Latin Patriarch, is an Italian and considered, in general, unfriendly to Englishmen. But to me he could not have been more hospitable. He was wearing black, with a wide magenta sash and a magenta skull cap; he said the colour was the purple of a Roman iris, but to me it was more the colour of those wild cyclamen they used to sell in the Piazza in Venice. His head bald, his pale face with wild humorous eyes, a beak and false teeth, gave a parrot-like impression. A jolly old boy with lots of fire and laughter, he reminded me of a wicked character out of an Elizabethan tragedy. Sitting on his throne he looked like the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi. When I told him I thought he should have been painted by Tintoretto, his heart melted; he was delighted.

  ‘Turn your head more to the right, your Beatitude.’ ‘No, that is too much,’ he said. ‘Not at all, your Beatitude, no, have more faith in me, your Beatitude.’ He laughed. He roared. ‘After all these pictures the police will have no difficulty in tracking me down! I believe you have been sent here to take my photograph in every position by the CID,’ he roared, his false teeth sagged.

  I enjoyed his irony. He once said to Ronald Fleming, the Aide-de-Camp to the High Commissioner, ‘Oh, your English towns are so wonderful! I remember so well your beautiful old city of Glasgow!’

  TRANSJORDAN: EMIR ABDULLAH

  Amman

  ‘Just a little bit of drift weed’ was the name of a song I once sang in the ADC at Cambridge, and that was how I felt this morning when I left for Amman. What the immediate future would bring I had no idea. I had been told to report to the Resident, and he would be responsible for my wherewithal. The cab was late in arriving, and we had not started more than ten minutes before the old Arab in the front seat turned round and said, ‘Give me three pou
nd!’ ‘Nonsense!’ I knew that if I acquiesced now, the blackmail would continue all day. Half an hour was wasted while we argued, and the resources of my indignation amazed me.

  It is now late in the summer here, and the enormous mountain slopes and pastures are burnt to a biscuit colour; but in the wadi there is still an extraordinary richness of green and the oleanders are in flower, pink by the mile. As we drove on, the valleys became more tropical with palms unlike any others I have ever seen — the green very juicy and dark — and much of the landscape was dotted with small bushes and dark green tufts like the backgrounds in Piero della Francesca’s paintings. When we reached desert land, it seemed a more sympathetic wasteland, with more personality to beguile the eye, than the appalling, ugly flatness of the Libyan Desert, where I remember that for hours one day the shining reflection of the sun on the telegraph wires was our sole distraction.

  Now we passed through Jericho, its famous walls encircling nothing but a small village. On and on through many other villages whose names I could never discover, and eventually we arrived at Amman — the ancient capital of the Ammonites. Now, after many earthquakes, it is a modern town recently carved from the craggy precipices, with few remains of antiquity except the Roman theatre for 6,000 people — an impressive ruin built into the towering hills.

  The Resident was rattled at my late arrival; the Emir had wanted me to go to lunch, but he did not know whether it was not too late now. It was not. The interpreter, in a sharply pressed suit and tarboosh, arrived to take me away forthwith. Suddenly I found myself having to make conversation to a nice old man with painted eyes who smelt of musk and was immaculately starched in white shift and turban. The Emir Abdullah is the brother of the late King Faisal, and grandfather of the present King of Iraq. He speaks no English or French, so the interpreter had to work hard, seizing the gist of one’s halting utterances and turning them into brilliant witticisms; or, at any rate, so it seemed from the reaction of the others at table. The meal was a succession of a dozen dishes of the same consistency — mousses of cheese, of eggs, of marrows and cucumbers. Rice was the nearest we came to any ‘roughage’.