DISCOVERING LAWRENCE, UNCOVERING NEWCOMBE

Having left education early to pursue a career within the creative sector, I found myself aged 17-years-old academically short-changed and in need of further self-development. I filled these gaps through the reading of books, any books, but especially books on art and design that might disguise the obvious absence of any formal training. I decided to join a popular postal book club which had an attractive introductory offer but also the annoying habit – certainly to this otherwise preoccupied teenager - of sending the Editor's Choice if you didn't physically write in to say you didn't want it, and so on more than one occasion I was forced to accept an unwanted book that I certainly couldn’t waste limited funds on. That was how I came into possession of a book with an intriguing title, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The title was one reason I decided to keep the book, the other – and this appealed to my eye for design – was its evocative cover showing a string of camels in silhouette set in contrast against a burnt orange sky. The writer’s name was unfamiliar to me, although in hindsight I must have seen David Lean’s epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, and having made no connection between book and film it was my hunger for knowledge that made the book and not the film the catalyst for my continued education.

It was Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence’s authorised biographer, who once wrote: “In general, people who are interested in cinema, and people who are interested in history, are on roads that never meet.” When Lawrence’s brother, Arnold, saw the film he said: “I should not have recognised my own brother.” But it is the film that has presented Lawrence to the widest possible audience. As Wilson observed: “For every person who has spent three hours reading a serious book about Lawrence's life there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, who have seen the film.” If the film had been less successful then perhaps we would not be here today.

Being a heavy and unwieldy tome, Seven Pillars was difficult to hold in one hand as I made the daily commute into London in a standing-room-only train carriage. But despite the discomfort I held the vain hope that the title alone might make me look a little more intelligent to my fellow passengers. Was there ever a shallower reason to embark upon a lifelong quest for knowledge?

I hadn't travelled far on my very first journey in company with Lawrence - a typically dull, dreary and grey London day - when I came across the following passage:

We were fond together, because of the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought ought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

As the overcrowded carriage pulled into Waterloo Station, Lawrence's description of "the sweep of the open places, the taste of wide winds" struck me as a stark and obvious contrast to my current situation. I was captivated, and have been ever since.

Still eyes look coldly upon me,

Cold voices whisper and say --

'He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,

They have stolen his wits away.'

Victoria Ocampo, who wrote what Arnold once said was "the most profound and the best-balanced of all portraits of my brother," felt affinity with Lawrence through a shared love of the vastness of open places: in her case, the pampas of Argentina.

It is the desert that is the essence of the saga, in both film and fact. Lawrence immersed himself in its alien ways, while Stewart Newcombe, Lawrence’s senior officer, fought hard to step outside the limitations set by his military background and training and adapt to its inhumanities and frustrations. Despite being an experienced desert explorer, Newcombe was eventually overwhelmed by the environment and the materiel he was given to work with. Lawrence, the archaeologist turned nonconformist subaltern, had no such limitations.

Eager to explore the open places of Lawrence’s description myself, I travelled whenever I could throughout the Arab countries of the Mediterranean and beyond. As a photographer and designer I was able to find work in Cyprus, Egypt and eventually Dubai, the latter at a time when the desert still needed taming each day lest it overwhelm the as yet undeveloped city.

Dubai Creek, 2017. Still retaining its original charm.

My desire to visit Dubai sprang from a separate book, Arabian Sands, by British explorer and travel writer Wilfred Thesiger. This is how Thesiger portrayed Dubai in 1952, before massive oil profits accelerated the city's expansion:

I then went to Dibai and stayed with Edward Henderson. We had been together in Syria during the war. He was now working for the Iraq Petroleum Company, making preparations for the development which was expected there, but of which there was mercifully as yet no sign. He lived in a large Arab house overlooking the creek which divided the town, the largest on the Trucial Coast with about twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Many native craft were anchored in the creek or were careened on the mud along the waterfront. There were booms from Kuwait, sambuks from Sur, jaulbauts, and even a large stately baghila with a high carved stern on which I could make out the Christian monogram IHS on one of the embossed panels. This work must have been copied originally from some Portuguese galleon. To the English all these vessels were dhows, a name no longer remembered by the Arabs.

Naked children romped in the shallows, and rowing-boats patrolled the creek to pick up passengers from the mouths of alleys between high coral houses, surmounted with square wind-turrets and pleasingly decorated with plaster moulding.

Thesiger's photo of Dubai's wind towers, 1952

Behind the diversity of houses which lined the waterfront were the suqs, covered passageways, where merchants sat in the gloom, cross-legged in narrow coves among their piled merchandise. The suqs were crowded with many races – pallid Arab townsmen; armed Bedu, quick-eyed and imperious; Negro slaves; Baluchis, Persians, and Indians. Among them I noticed a group of Kashgai tribesmen in their distinctive felt caps, and some Somalis off a sambuk from Aden. Here life moved in time with the past. These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation. They did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless. I would willingly have consorted with them, but I now wore European clothes. As I wandered through the town I knew that they regarded me as an intruder; I myself felt that I was little better than a tourist.

But it was not just what Thesiger wrote about the town he called Dibai that attracted me. He illustrated his book with beguiling black and white photographs, and one image in particular caught my attention. It showed the “high coral houses, surmounted with square wind-turrets” that was located by a wide creek that flowed through the town. These were just two of the many barjeel wind towers of Al Bastakiya, a neighbourhood built in the 1890s by Persian merchants looking for trade opportunities and named after Bastak, a town in southern Iran. The towers were designed to expel hot air and to funnel cooler air to the living quarters below, providing passive cooling solutions that predate modern air-conditioning.

My photo of a souk trader, 1981

I reached Dubai just in time to photograph them myself before half of them were demolished in the 1980’s. The remaining towers were only saved through the intervention of British architect Rayner Otter. His efforts culminated in a letter to Prince (now King) Charles, who visited Dubai in 1989. The Prince advocated for their preservation, halting plans for their demolition and igniting a revival that saw the towers restored in 2005. The area, also known as the Al Fahidi Historical Neighbourhood, is now a major tourist zone with tea houses, a coffee museum, art galleries, boutique shops and the Sheikh Mohammad Centre for Cultural Understanding.

It doesn’t seem to matter when you arrive anywhere in the world, you will hear a phrase that goes something like this: “You should have been here ten years ago”. There were still a number of European expatriates living in Dubai who had arrived before 1971 when it was then part of the British Protectorate called the Trucial States, and for whom this was a common refrain. By the end of that decade, and largely by their efforts, the town began to change from an old pearling and re-exporting hub into a modern and vibrant city-state, attracting all kinds of people from around the world - oil men and their families, the military, financial advisors, architects and civil engineers, construction workers, hospitality, and a rapidly developing media industry.

Shy sailors, Dubai 1982

Ten years to the month after Prime Minister Edward Heath ended the treaty relationships with the seven trucial sheikhdoms, I arrived to take up a position as the art director of a small advertising and publishing company founded by Ian Fairservice just two years previously with his business partner Obaid Humaid al Tayer, later the Minister of State for financial Affairs. Ian originally came to Dubai as assistant manager of a hotel and was also influenced by Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom which he had read as a schoolboy. He eventually met and published books by Wilfred Thesiger, whom Ian had long admired. When Thesiger came to the UAE for an exhibition of his photography sponsored by the British Council, Ian asked him what, if anything, remained unfulfilled for him. Thesiger said that he's always dreamt that one day the very Arabs who he had written about in Arabian Sands would be able to read the book in their own language. Within a year, Ian had secured the worldwide rights to publish the book in Arabic, and so began a 13-year relationship during which he published twelve of Thesiger's books.

Dhow captain, 1982

My time in Dubai was marked not just by the beginning of a rapid acceleration of growth from oil revenues, but by the vision of its ruler, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who planned for the eventual decline in the dependency on oil with an ambitious construction programme which allowed the emirate to not only survive but thrive in an economic market where oil production contributed less than 1 percent of the emirate's GDP by 2018.

There is a question mark over whether Sheikh Rashid said the following: "My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel".

If he didn’t, a similar train of thought might well have motivated his desire to set in motion an ambitious vision for the future of his young country, a vision now carried forward by his son and current ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The pace of change has been staggering, the impact more so. But the people of Dubai have adopted, adapted and improved the new, incorporating it all into a culture that dates back hundreds of years.

Abra boatman, 1981

I was three years too late to have met Henry St. John Armitage who had recently retired from public service as British Consul-General at the Dubai branch of the British Embassy in the UAE, a creek-side venue where I was often dispatched to report on an event or initiative for the magazine that was part of our publishing range. St. John was old-school. It was said he knew everyone in Arabia and had their telephone numbers and their family particulars in his head or his pocket-book. He had known several Arabs who had participated in the Arab Revolt and was on good terms with the descendants of many more.

After he retired he took a keen interest in the T.E. Lawrence Society and gave unstinting support to Jeremy Wilson who was writing Lawrence’s biography, with one demand: that the narrative should respect the historical context and not bend to propaganda - and above all it must tell the truth. He was always unwaveringly honest, although at times he could be undiplomatically forthright. His knowledge of Arabia and its history was exceptional, and anyone flaunting historical accuracy would frequently be taken to task. Jeremy, when writing about history would often ask himself: “Would that get past St. John?”

Through Wilson’s T.E. Lawrence Studies Discussion group, St. John solved the mystery of a letter inserted into my copy of the 1935 edition of Seven Pillars and explained what books on Lawrence in Arabic I had purchased from a much-missed Charing Cross Road bookshop. He also said, in reply to my enquires, that Newcombe’s story existed in regimental archives and libraries and then helped direct me to the relevant locations. As Wilson said: “I am sure that St. John helped many other researchers. My experience of his generosity is probably typical rather than exceptional.”

When I look back I can see how my education began with Lawrence. Being exposed to his interests ignited those interests in me - archaeology, WW1 Palestine Campaigns, history, literature, music, art, politics, and of course the Middle East. That education now continues through the life of Stewart Newcombe. As I uncover his life it reveals a story that resonates with our shared history and our current predicaments, a story that is as relevant today as it was over one hundred years ago. Wilson told us that propaganda based on distortions of history has no defence against well-researched accuracy. Newcombe championed the historical narrative in relation to his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination. As we have seen, to not do so leads to the building of barriers, drives people apart, decreases understanding, dehumanises and demeans.

“If there were broad agreement about the history of the Middle East,” Wilson wrote, “it would be far easier to reach the political settlement which its peoples and the rest of the world so badly needs.”

SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM by T.E. Lawrence. Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1935.

For more of Jeremy Wilson's appreciation of Henry St. John Armitage - The Journal of the T.E. Lawrence Society XIV No. 2

ARABIAN SANDS by Wilfred Thesiger. Published by Motivate Publishing, Dubai, 2004. First published in 1959 by Longmans, Green & Co

All photos by Kerry Webber © taken early 1980's, one in 2017, except Thesiger's wind towers from 1952

Website update

A fitting memorial

Over the years this blog has grown considerably and now contains a wealth of information and items of interest on both Stewart Newcombe and T.E. Lawrence, as well as highlighting the involvement of a supporting cast of unsung brothers-in-arms who for too long languished in the shadow of Lawrence's legend. Lately, Newcombe's narrative has shifted to highlight his work in helping to achieve a just solution in relation to the promises that were made to the Arabs during the war in return for their active participation in support of the Allied cause.

Beyond Arabia

To safeguard the online content I decided to create a printed version for personal use. To facilitate this process the site has undergone a number of changes in both layout and content, including replacing the old title with one that more accurately captures the essence of Newcombe's life. With photos and text, the printed book came to over 240 pages in length. The copy and overall content of the blog differs significantly to the proposed book-length biography of Newcombe, on which I hope to be able to give an update shortly.

Lies, Deception and Subterfuge

On 5 November 2024 I was invited by Stuart Hadaway of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in WW1 Group to present my paper on Colonel Stewart Francis Newcombe titled Lies, Deception and Subterfuge. The paper focused on Newcombe’s distinguished war career and achievements, especially in connection to T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, as well as briefly touching upon other areas of service before he arrived in Cairo as head of Military Intelligence in 1914. Newcombe’s story is one of love, war and politics, but for this talk I also explored a story of lies, deception and subterfuge, presenting a range of contradictory claims surrounding the so-called Haversack Ruse, one element in an arsenal of deceptions employed by General Allenby prior to the Third Battle of Gaza in November 1917.

But before that, I began the talk by describing my own journey in pursuit of Newcombe's remarkable story:

Several people encouraged my early research, but the author H.V.F. Winstone went further. Victor Winstone is well-known for his 1982 book The Illicit Adventure, a distillation of his research that had gone into individual biographies of many Middle Eastern personalities such as Gertrude Bell, Captain Shakespeare, Parker Pasha, and Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Leachman. Beginning life as a history of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, it soon expanded into a wider study of the political and military intelligence apparatus in the Middle East during the years 1898 to 1926.

In retrospect, Winstone made a few factual errors and misplaced assumptions in the interpretation of his research, partly due to a bias against the legend that had been created around Lawrence of Arabia, which he described as “a story of stupefying naiveté,” and one in which he believed all previous history, all fact and sense had been swamped by the Lawrence myth. It was perhaps why he brought characters out into the light after they had languished too long in Lawrence’s shadow.

Further biographies followed, with Lady Anne Blunt and the archaeologists Leonard Woolley and Howard Carter, but it was obvious from footnotes in The Illicit Adventure that Winstone had gathered papers from people close to the Newcombe family that he hoped would form the backbone of a proposed biography. However, despite considerable experience in the genre he later admitted he fell short in his attempt, as seen in the following intriguing letter written to me in reply to my persistent intrusions into his retirement when I had by then hit a wall in my own faltering adventure into discovering Newcombe’s life story:

What an interesting exchange you keep up,” he wrote. “I often wondered if you might make a breakthrough where I signally failed, but rather doubted it, having myself come up against implacable and at times most unpleasant opposition from MI5/6 and MoD. As you have obviously discovered these people do not, in common parlance, ‘take prisoners.’ For years I had my own watcher who stopped at nothing to prevent my books from being written and published. On one occasion I had to threaten legal action against my own publisher in order to prevent the abandonment of several years’ work.

So I am not surprised to learn that you are roughly as you were with SFN. I would greatly applaud success, but I find it hard to know how I could help. Could you pose a few questions and see if anything opens up? It is all so long ago and the fight with 6 has taken its toll. But I soldier on at 84. Don’t despair. It would be great if you could pull it off.

As ever

Victor Winstone

Undeterred by the thought of MI5 knocking on my door, I pressed on in pursuit of the illusive Colonel Newcombe and after further prodding, Winstone summoned up the energy to dig deep into a pile of wicker baskets he kept under his bed and came up with some fascinating papers that galvanised the project. There wasn’t much, but among the papers were some first-hand accounts that not only confirmed but added substantially to the publicly held research material I had previously obtained. It was the encouragement I needed. The journey began again, an adventure in biographical research that has changed course over the years, as our relationship with empire-building and our own colonial past continues its path of re-evaluation. Newcombe’s fascinating life as a military man may have been set against the backdrop of crumbling empires, uneasy nation-building, and within the legends of Arabia, but the focus today is on his role in helping to shape the Middle East that emerged when the war ended and the peacemakers took centre stage. As Lawrence put it so eloquently:

“We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”

Newcombe’s life spanned the reigns of six monarchs from Victoria to Elizabeth and through numerous wars and skirmishes, right through to the Suez Crisis in 1956, the year he died, when that debacle would prove to be the death knell not just of the British Empire but of all the empires of Western Europe.

The war that is at the core of this story – the First World War – was meant, according to H.G. Wells, to be the war that will end war. So vast was its reach that Wells said: “It is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age.” He wrote those words in 1914 even before the horrors of a new industrialised war had fully coalesced into a perfect storm of unprecedented slaughter and appalling human suffering, where there were no easy triumphs, no prancing victories. Three years later, US President Woodrow Wilson echoed Wells’s sentiment with his own version of “a war to end all wars” to support his call to bring the US into the conflict in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” They were both wrong. The First World War did not bring everlasting peace, its final act of reckoning at Versailles became merely a stepping-stone to a second and more devastating world war.

As the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, poignantly observed, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

HAVERSACK!

During my talk to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in WW1 Group I discussed an often-overlooked comment by Lawrence in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom concerning a dropped haversack.

Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen

In the annals of war, the Haversack Ruse has gained a legendary status in the art and science of military deception, disinformation and surprise. According to the accepted legend, this intricately planned and audaciously executed ruse was attributed to the wildly eccentric Major Richard Meinertzhagen when he was attached to Allenby’s Intelligence Department and has since been described as one of the most original and inspired examples of the art of deception.

However, evidence suggests that Stewart Newcombe had in fact carried out an almost similar exploit some four months prior to Meinertzhagen. My paper went on to explore the important question as to whether Newcombe had in fact originated the Haversack Ruse, albeit a ploy that can trace its roots back through history to military deceptions (MILDEC) carried out by such practitioners as the Chinese (as described in The Art of War, an ancient military treatise originating from the 5th Century BC), and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks (one thinks of the guile of the Trojan Horse under Odysseus’ leadership). Much later, the haversack deception was updated early in WW2 when Rommel’s forces discovered a burnt-out scout car with a corpse clutching a map that appeared to show a “fair going” route that bypassed minefields in the North Africa desert. The hope was that Rommel’s tanks would take the bait and get bogged down in soft sand. Then, in the run up to the invasion of Sicily, James Bond creator Ian Fleming from Naval Intelligence came up with "A Suggestion (not a very nice one)" to plant misleading papers on a corpse that would be found by the enemy, in what became known as Operation Mincemeat, a deception that bore all the hallmarks of the original Haversack Ruse, along with supporting diversions and feints designed to confuse the enemy and reinforce the deception.

There always remained the intriguing question regarding the Haversack Ruse that centred on the fact that the ploy has been so deeply embedded in military folklore that few historians have ever questioned to whether or not it had played any significant part in the success of the battle for Gaza. What can be said is that the potential doubts surrounding deceptions such as this and others throws just as much confusion and suspicion around their authenticity that the doubt has almost as much effect on the outcome as the reality.

So, was Newcombe’s ploy an intriguing and hitherto unremarked addition to the age-old art of military deception and the forerunner of the famed Haversack Ruse? It was an intriguing question, with even Lawrence, in typical mischievous fashion, throwing doubts and confusion into the mix. The answer was no less compelling and will be discussed in a separate post.

Palm Sunday - Israeli air strike destroys part of last functioning hospital in Gaza City

Today is Palm Sunday when Christians around the world prepare to mark the beginning of Holy Week. It's also the day the Israeli government chose to bomb the only Christian-run hospital in northern Gaza, the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital, the last partially functioning hospital in Gaza city - again. If anyone chose to ask, the IDF would say that there is no significance to the day on which they chose to bomb the hospital, as this is the fifth time the hospital has been targeted. This time there is no mention of a missile misfire. No-one else to blame. This, they will tell you, is a command and control centre, and therefore a legitimate target. To date, the IDF have not provided evidence to back up this claim. In fact, the only available evidence is of Israel's systematic dismantling of the Gazan healthcare system - one hospital at a time. In targeting the Al Ahli, a hospital protected under international law, it is destroying one of the last places offering hope and care. And the world barely notices.

The Al Ahli is in fact the oldest medical facility in Gaza and can trace its roots back to 1882 when the Church Missionary Society opened a simple dispensary. Funds were raised for establishing a permanent medical mission and in March 1891 a hospital adapted from a native house was opened. Rev. Dr. Robert B. Sterling arrived in 1893 and expanded the services offered by the hospital to include in-patient care. It's reputation grew and in 1906 the Muslim community presented Dr. Sterling with £100 which they had collected in token of their gratitude for his work among them. The hospital and out-patient hall were now much too small to match its growing reputation and on 1 April 1908 the Bishop of Jerusalem dedicated a new hospital containing forty-six beds followed by the opening of a spacious out-patient block on 22 February 1911. The new hospital, providing care for Jews, Christians and Muslims, was known locally as Dr. Sterly's. 

In his report back to the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1914, Stewart Newcombe called the hospital:

 "The best place in the whole of this country"

For more information on this important and historical hospital please see my previous post Dr. Sterlys - A story of Gazan healthcare

Today, 13 April 2025, significant parts of the Anglican Church run hospital were destroyed by the IDF after issuing a warning to evacuate the patients and staff. Hospital beds, children in arms and critically-ill patients were forcibly displaced from the site in great haste in a pre-dawn strike that struck fear in patients, medical staff and those seeking shelter within its environs. 

"Footage on social media showed staff and patients leaving the building while it was still dark outside. Dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, were also seen fleeing from a courtyard inside the hospital where they had been seeking shelter." (BBC)

One child who previously suffered a brain injury died as a result of "the rushed evacuation process", according to a statement from the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, which is affiliated to the hospital. The ambulance and emergency department was destroyed in the double strike as well as the central laboratory, the reception and the pharmacy. It is now effectively out of service.

Today a heavy silence of injustice persists on this Palm Sunday in Palestine. This action will not bring security. It will not bring back the Israeli hostages. It will not end this war.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: 

ONE DAY EVERYONE WILL ALWAYS HAVE BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad

Published by Canongate, 2025

"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." Omar El Akkad

Palestinian lawyer and human rights activist, Raja Shehadeh, says: "Omar El Akkad's book is a brilliant mosaic of heartfelt reflections on the sad state of the world, one that dared to end in hope."

British historian and writer, David Olusoga, says: "To get a glimpse of how we in the twenty-first century might one day be judged for our passivity and hypocrisy, I urge you to read Omar El Akkad's astonishing book."

UPDATE

More than 50,933 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023. 

Of those, 1,563 have been killed since 18 March 2025, when Israel restarted its offensive in the Gaza Strip.