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| A.J.D. |
A clan elder passed away today (Thursday 6 December 2012) and
although he would not have wanted to take up space on pages devoted to Stewart
Newcombe's life he is remembered here because he had a keen interest and wide
knowledge in all things connected to Newcombe and T.E. Lawrence.
A.J.D worked in the Middle East for much of his life and had travelled over much of the same ground as Lawrence. He knew Arabia, the Arabs and a lot about most things and passed on his wisdom and experience to his girls, all of whom he was intensely proud. He was deeply supportive of this project, always insightful in his comments and liked nothing better than to probe the depths of my ignorance which only spurred me on to find the answers to impress him.
A.J.D worked in the Middle East for much of his life and had travelled over much of the same ground as Lawrence. He knew Arabia, the Arabs and a lot about most things and passed on his wisdom and experience to his girls, all of whom he was intensely proud. He was deeply supportive of this project, always insightful in his comments and liked nothing better than to probe the depths of my ignorance which only spurred me on to find the answers to impress him.
He lived a life that can be
best described by relating it to something that Lawrence had once said about the
weather. During a break in their archaeological work at Carchemish, a Hittite
city located on what is today the border between Turkey and Syria, Lawrence and
C.L. Woolley were invited to join Newcombe’s surveying teams to explore the
Wilderness of Zin region in today’s Southern Israel. This is how Lawrence described
the differences he found in the temperature: “The Dead Sea is hot, the Red Sea is hot: this
oasis is cool, and Carchemish is snowbound. Don’t you envy us our alternate
frizzle and freeze?”
The maverick spirit that was A.J.D also lived a life of "frizzle and freeze" - in more ways than one. From the deserts of Arabia to his final resting place in the home he built himself out of wood in the wilds of Alaska, he lived life to the extreme. He was equally at home in the boardrooms of major petroleum companies or at the helm of his own fishing trawlers off the west coast of Scotland as he was in hunting and fishing in the place he called the last paradise on earth.
This poem by Robert Louis Stevenson could have been written for him:
The maverick spirit that was A.J.D also lived a life of "frizzle and freeze" - in more ways than one. From the deserts of Arabia to his final resting place in the home he built himself out of wood in the wilds of Alaska, he lived life to the extreme. He was equally at home in the boardrooms of major petroleum companies or at the helm of his own fishing trawlers off the west coast of Scotland as he was in hunting and fishing in the place he called the last paradise on earth.
This poem by Robert Louis Stevenson could have been written for him:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the Hunter home from the hill.
The night
he died the temperature had been as low as -22 C with a slight flurry of snow
drifting through the Matanuska-Susitna Valley to settle on the peaks of the Talkeetna Mountains overlooking Hatchers
Pass. At the end, inside the place he could finally call home - with its
Persian carpets, Arabic coffee pots and mementos from his Middle Eastern journeys
- he was surrounded by the warmth and love from his family and a few friends – rather
more ‘frizzle’ than ‘freeze’ you could say.
