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| One piastre Hejaz stamp |
“Shortly after the Arab Revolution we found that its success
was being denied or blanketed by Enemy Press (which was of course quoted by
neutrals), and we decided that the best proof that it had taken place would be
provided by an issue of Hejaz postage stamps, which would carry the Arab
propaganda, self-paying and incontrovertible, to the four corners of the
earth.”
(Storrs,
Ronald, Orientations, 1937)
Storrs, an aesthete with exquisite good taste, took Lawrence
off to the Arab Museum in Cairo to collect suitable motifs “in order that the design in wording, spirit and
ornament, might be as far as possible representative and reminiscent of a
purely Arab source of inspiration. Pictures and views were avoided, for these
never formed part of Arab decoration, and are foreign to its art; so also
was European lettering.”
In this,
their first joint endeavour, Lawrence and Storrs found agreement in the
creative direction of the project and thereafter Lawrence was given a free hand
in completing the design and production of the stamps to this format. The result was a
series of arabesque designs taken from a number of sources which were worked up
by two Cairo designers, Agami Effendi Ali and Mustafa Effendi Gozlan, and were soon
put into production at the Survey of Egypt’s printing department located at
Giza, some two miles from the Savoy Hotel in which G.H.Q. was housed. From the
outset, Storrs was happy to let Lawrence – whom he called his ‘super cerebral
companion’ - take over the running of the production, planning every detail from
the design concept to print. As Storrs said:
"It was quickly apparent that Lawrence already possessed or had immediately assimilated a complete working technique of philatelic and three-color reproduction, so that he was able to supervise the issue from start to finish."
In fact, Lawrence had long experience of liaising with government
printers with his work on map reproduction at the War Office in London and for Military
Intelligence in Cairo so he was perfectly suited to the task. He even had his
own ideas, long held it seems, on what constituted good philatelic design and
production. ‘It’s rather amusing,’ he wrote to his brother, Arnie, ‘because one
has long had ideas as to what a stamp should look like, and now one can put
them roughly into practice...I’m going to have flavoured gum on the back, so
that one may lick without unpleasantness.’ This became a running joke and
although it was never put into action he used to like to tell an apocryphal
story that the Arabs enjoyed the flavours so much – strawberry essence for the
red, pineapple for the green - that they would lick the gum clean away so that
the stamps fell off the envelopes in the post and then postage could be charged
double to make a very good profit for the Revolt.
THE STAMPS
The 1 piastre stamp
in blue (shown above) depicts as a central motif the phrase ‘Makkah al-Mukarramah’
(Mecca the Blessed, or the Honoured), a phrase that is used whenever Mecca is
mentioned, and above are the words ‘Hejaz Post’ in a lozenge which is mirrored
below showing the price as ‘1 piastre’. The date of 1334 in two side panels
corresponds to the launch of the Arab Revolt according to the Arabic calendar
which differed slightly to the Ottoman one. The design elements were taken from
an ancient prayer niche in the al-Amri mosque at Qus in Upper Egypt. Lawrence
was particularly pleased with the design of this stamp as he said it was pure
Arabic in style while the quarter-piastre
in green (shown below) was Egyptian and showed the carved door panels of the
al-Salih Tala'i mosque on Shari’ Qasabet Radwan in Cairo. He thought the half-piastre in red looked Chinese
although its central design was taken from a page of a Holy Quran in the 14th
Century mosque of Sultan Al-Malik
Az-Zahir Sayf ad-Din Barquq
on Shari' al-
More postage stamps followed (6 in total) plus a set of three tax stamps but by then Lawrence had changed from being ‘Lawrence of Carchemish, of
Cairo - of any place for a little while - and became permanently Lawrence of
Arabia,’ as Storrs so accurately described the transformation.
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| Quarter-piastre Hejaz stamp |
Lawrence’s connection to the Hejaz stamps issue of 1916-1917
was acknowledged by Mr. (later Sir) Ernest Dowson, Surveyor-General of Egypt, in a coded reference in the introduction to a booklet entitled A
Short Note on the Design and Issue of Postage Stamps Prepared by the Survey of
Egypt for His Highness Husein Emir & Sherif of Mecca & King of the
Hejaz.
‘It is desired to take this opportunity to express the
obligation due to all those who gave assistance or counsel, in particular to El Emir ‘Awrunis of the Northern
Armies of His Highness the King of the Hejaz, at whose suggestion the work was
undertaken, and to whose critical acumen the success met with must largely be ascribed.’
