Behind the scenes in Arabia
JACOB NORRIS welcomes a challenge to the Lawrence of Arabia myth, but wonders where the Arab players are
Behind the Lawrence Legend by Philip Walker OUP, 320 pages, £25
Think of the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 and a number of iconic images spring to mind. Desert landscapes, Bedouin raids on Ottoman railway lines and, above all, TE Lawrence as the British intelligence officer who ‘went native’ and led his Arab army all the way to Damascus.
What does not spring so readily to mind is a small circle of British officials struggling to manage the campaign from the sweaty urban milieu of Jeddah on Arabia’s west coast. Yet this is what Philip Walker urges us to consider here. He argues that it was these men, consisting of a core team of five officers, who orchestrated the Arab Revolt and steered it through numerous crises.
Colonel John Bassett, Major Hugh Pearson, Captain Norman Bray, Lieutenant Lionel Gray, and above all their commanding officer, Colonel Cyril Wilson, were Britain’s ‘men on the spot’ in Jeddah, liaising between military HQ in Cairo and Sherif Hussein in Mecca, nominal leader of the revolt.
Through a meticulous gathering of materials about these men, gleaned from both family archives and official collections, Walker is able to reconstruct their pivotal role in the revolt, and in so doing reorient our gaze away from the cult of Lawrence’s oversized personality.
That cult has been so shaped by Lawrence’s own aptitude for myth-making, as well as by David Lean’s classic 1962 film, that we have been largely blinded to the work of Wilson and his men behind the scenes. But it turns out that their secondment in Arabia was equally colourful, albeit of the more stiffupper-lip variety. They smuggled weapons into Jeddah’s port and smug- gled camels out of it. They kept a pet gazelle that ate screwed up balls of paper, designed their own golf course, and spied on the Arab leaders they were ostensibly assisting. This somewhat bizarre British base, argues Walker, was the real “beating heart of the revolt”, and Wilson “the crucial man on the spot who had the touch of a pacemaker”.
This book, then, is a convincing and valuable corrective to the great-man histories of the Arab Revolt we are used to. Peppered with previously unseen photographs, and written in readable prose that anchors us into the rhythms of these men’s daily work, it is a must for anyone interested in the war Britain waged in the Middle East from 1916–18.
What the book does not do, unfortunately, is move us any closer to the thousands of Arab actors who were surely the real unsung heroes of the revolt. What of the soldiers, tribesmen,
They smuggled weapons in and smuggled camels out
traders and servants who took up arms against the Ottomans? We gain occasional glimpses of them here, but only as walk-on cameos in an essentially British drama. Walker’s study trades one Eurocentric story for another, swapping the charismatic hubris of Lawrence for the more stoic, understated heroism of Wilson and his men. It is not until historians immersed in Arabic language sources are able to publish on an international level, that we will be able to appreciate the revolt as a truly threedimensional historical event. In the meantime, Walker should be commended for an engaging and thoroughly researched account of the British men who underpinned Lawrence’s romantic forays into the desert. Jacob Norris is a lecturer at the University of Sussex, specialising in the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East