Theft of T.E. Lawrence's letters

The Times of London reported today that handwritten letters of T.E. Lawrence have been stolen from the offices of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) under the heading 'Thief snatches Lawrence of Arabia's historic letters'. In the letters, which are more than 100-years old, Lawrence of Arabia discusses his involvement in what the newspaper describes as a 'devious archaeological expedition'. Felicity Cobbing, the curator of the archive, said the letters were stolen by a “gloating thief”.

“They’re going to be very difficult to shift because they’re well known,” Ms Cobbing said. “They were probably taken by somebody who likes to look at things and gloat in their own privacy.”

Lawrence and C.L. Woolley had been invited by the PEF to provide archaeological cover for Royal Engineer surveyors under the command of Stewart Newcombe who were operating in the desert region south of the Gaza-Beersheba line in southern Palestine as part of a secret survey carried out on behalf of the British War Office.

PEF Quarterly Statement

It is thought the theft of the letters occurred between November 2013 and January last year and only came to light after it was revealed by Anthony Sattin, the author of Young Lawrence, who was the last person to see some of the stolen material whilst researching his book. Having left the file on a table to be put away by the archivist Sattin believes that an opportunist took the documents when he left the room.  

“The PEF had a very relaxed way of handling their archive,” he said. “They only found out when someone else requested the material and it wasn’t in the folder.”

Ms Cobbing said that the PEF had “toughened up” its security. “It was a horrible reality check because as an archive, the whole reason for us existing is to promote research and scholarship.”

The offices at the PEF are small and intimate and admittance is normally by appointment by people genuinely interested in researching the work of the organisation or the many personalities connected to it. Kitchener, Lawrence and Newcombe are well represented in the archives which date back to 1865 when the society was founded. The PEF's offices also house a unique collection of photographs, pictures, maps and antiquities. The organisation describes itself as the "oldest in the world created specifically for the study of the Levant, the southern portion of which was conventionally known as ‘Palestine’. The PEF is a major bridge and information resource for the public and academic community."

NOTE: Lawrence once wrote to Colonel Wavell admitting that when he first received Wavell's book The Palestine Campaigns his first vanity was to look himself up in the index. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Anthony Sattin for acknowledging my insignificant contribution to his research and mentioning me and my forthcoming biography of Newcombe in his own Acknowledgments for Young Lawrence. Although I have not yet had the time to read Mr. Sattin's book I was pleased to see it receive positive reviews:

“A compelling, pioneering biography - Sattin has written a compelling account of a young man learning to live according to his dreams” - The Observer

“Reading Anthony Sattin’s “The Young T.E. Lawrence” is particularly fascinating when the West’s empathy for the Arab world is at such a low, undermined by violence and mistrust” – Wall Street Journal

“A quirky but rigorous biographical study” – The Economist

“Anthony Sattin proves that the British know how to write a great adventure as well how to have one. This highly readable book never lacks for the big story but it also does not let that history lose the hero” – New York Journal of Books

In memoriam A.J.D

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. 

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: 

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.

In the Steps of Newcombe

Plans are now complete for an ‘in the steps of Newcombe’ tour of Turkey commencing next week which will give me the opportunity to capture the landscape, atmosphere and spirit of place before publication of In the Shadow of the Crescent next year. This trip will all too briefly cover Stewart Newcombe’s onward journey from Carchemish in 1914 after he had visited T.E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley at the end of the survey season that had included the Wilderness of Zin and Sinai intelligence-gathering missions. From the archaeologist’s house Newcombe and fellow Royal Engineer officer Lieutenant J.P.S. Greig travelled on horse-back to observe the progress of the Berlin to Baghdad railway through the Taurus Mountain passes, although as Newcombe complained, ‘horse is rather a misnomer for the animals obtained’.

Tunnel through the Tuarus Mountains

Although the archaeologists’ hospitality would have been a welcome diversion after the rigours of the surveys, Newcombe and Greig were eager to be off to investigate the progress of the construction of the railway to the west. After they set off they soon picked up the railhead at Dorak and followed the line through the Taurus Mountains until Karapunar (mod. Karapinar) from where I’ll be able to pick up their journey. Identifying about 18 kilometres of tunnels, they made their way through the stunning but slightly terrifying gorges of the Taurus range, with its hair-raising zigzag paths and a cleverly graded carriage-road cut alongside the route of the line. At the village of Bedernadik (today’s Belemedik) they encountered a stone-built camp for engineers supported by a guard of Ottoman soldiers who stopped them and asked for papers. Newcombe was able to bluff his way out of a difficult situation. As he explained: ‘A few chosen words in French to an Austrian, who could only understand Italian, and the acceptance of a cigar, were sufficient to get us through.’ They continued in the direction of Bozanti (mod. Pozanti), and although it was getting dark the effect of the fading light on the rock-cut road was inspiring and moved Newcombe to describe it as a ‘narrow gorge of the most impressive and romantic description, seen as it was after dusk with a crescent moon, on either side the cliffs rising sheer to the snowline.’ It was an uncharacteristically lyrical description from a man more familiar with technical and factual details. 

Always the engineer, Newcombe was equally impressed by the extremely difficult work of surveying and construction, especially at the tunnel mouths, which continued through the night by the glow of electric arc lights – 12 tunnels were eventually built although the original idea was to pierce the Taurus mountain range by one long tunnel. Accordingly, he paid his respects to his fellow engineers, hoping also to elicit intelligence. But as he pointed out, ‘It was difficult, however, to get any other information than what could be seen on a hurried journey.’  

One of the highlights of my journey north will be a visit to Bursa, the ancient capital of the Ottoman State from 1326 to 1365. It was here that Newcombe was imprisoned and from where he and his brave accomplice and future wife, Elizabeth (Elsie) Chaki, hatched a daring plan for his escape back to Constantinople (Istanbul) and where he would later make contact with the escape organisation of an equally courageous woman who went under the nom de guerre of The White Lady.

‘A nice man whom I once met in Constantinople.’

Galata Bridge, Constantinople

Newcombe knew Constantinople well from before the war. Gertrude Bell, the ‘Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations’, as one recent biography describes this most extraordinary woman, was already a celebrated mountaineer, intrepid traveller, writer, political officer and spy when she crossed paths with Newcombe in the city. She first wrote of him to her mother in 1916 as “…a nice man whom I once met in Constantinople.” Years later she would bemoan the fact that he had been ensnared by marriage: ‘...Col. Newcomb [sic] is the kind of man who never ought to have married at all. He is an adventurer and really good at the job.’

Before Elsie and The White Lady came to his rescue, Istanbul was the scene of many failed escape attempts by Newcombe and his accomplices – some calamitous, some amusing but all with potentially serious consequences. A boat trip on the Bosphorus from the Galata Bridge which spans the Golden Horn will be essential in recreating one particular adventure that nearly ended in disaster and necessitated the need for the would-be escapees to return to their military prison undetected. My return journey will be to a suitably located restaurant to dine on locally caught fish and to watch the sun setting across the Sea of Marmara in the knowledge that within weeks of the war’s end, Newcombe and Elsie were reunited in London and married in a small church nestling in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, situated at the spiritual and political epicentre of the Empire he served as a loyal and dedicated agent. Elsie may not have met with Gertrude’s approval but their marriage flourished within the parameters of his military career which, given his rank, status and experience, gave them ample opportunities to share and enjoy fresh adventures together.

An Oriental Assembly – Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert (1880-1923)

Highclere Castle

The recent success and popularity of the ITV television period drama Downton Abbey reminded me that the country house that ‘plays’ the title role has a significant Middle Eastern association, linked forever with Egypt in particular, and by familial connection, with Newcombe and Lawrence. The master servant, upstairs downstairs drama uses the magnificent Highclere Castle in Berkshire for most of its external and internal scenes, with the servants' living areas constructed and filmed at Ealing Studios. Since 1679, Highclere has been the country seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, a branch of the Anglo-Welsh Herbert family. It is currently the home of the 8^th Earl and Countess of Carnarvon. 

Set in 1,000 acres of spectacular Berkshire countryside and boasting a park by Capability Brown, Highclere Castle is in the Jacobean style and was redesigned in 1838 by Sir Charles Barry, the architect responsible for rebuilding the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Barry himself classified the style as Anglo-Italian.

Lord Carnarvon

‘Everywhere the glint of gold’

Highclere’s connection with ancient Egypt began through the patronage of the archaeologist Howard Carter by George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert (1866-1923), who as Lord Porchester was known as Porchy Carnarvon. When Porchy, who enjoyed a bit of a gamble, became the 5^th Earl of Carnarvon after his father’s death he put some of his money into funding 16 years of excavations near Luxor in the Valley of the Queen’s, the Valley of the Nobles, the Valley of the Kings, and in the Nile Delta near Alexandria. Having decided that it would be the last year of funding excavations in Egypt, Porchy knew he had quite literally struck gold with the gamble of a lifetime when on 22 November 1922, after Carter had broken through to an inner tomb chamber, he asked the anxious question: ‘Can you see anything?’ What Carter had seen had literally struck him dumb with amazement - a room full of “strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold.” After a pause to compose himself, Carter replied, ‘Yes, wonderful things.’ 

The discovery of Tutankhamun's nearly intact tomb received worldwide press coverage and sparked a renewed public interest in ancient Egypt. The Boy King captured the public imagination and exhibits of artefacts from his tomb continue to tour the world. His gold burial mask is not only a key attraction but remains a potent symbol of his status and power.

Highclere now houses a permanent exhibition commemorating this historic event.

Aubrey Herbert

The man who would be King? 

Porchy’s half-brother was the Right Honourable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, the second son of Henry Herbert, the 4^th Earl of Carnarvon, a British cabinet minister and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and his second wife, Elizabeth Howard of Greystoke Castle, Cumberland.

Aubrey Herbert was elected to the House in 1911 as the Conservative Member of Parliament for South Somerset at a time of great changes within British domestic politics but his pre-election travels made foreign affairs a more natural area of interest. He was forever drawn to the Balkans and took up the Albanian cause with vigour while keeping a watchful eye on Turkey where he had been an honorary attaché in Constantinople. His commitment to Albania led to an extraordinary hypothetical proposal when a delegation attending the Balkan Conference in London in May 1913 put to him the question of whether he would accept their throne. Lack of funds and not conviction prevented him for accepting. Seven years later the Albanians would not forget their friend and offered him the throne once more under different circumstances, and yet again he had to refuse for very different reasons. But his legacy to Albania still stands. “No one understood better the internal and external problems of the Albanians,” wrote the writer and editor Desmond MacCarthy. “And if it is asked what Aubrey Herbert most notably achieved during his public career, the first answer is that he contributed more than anyone to bringing into existence the modern independent state of Albania.”

Aubrey goes to war

On 1^st September 1914, Aubrey Herbert was shot and wounded as he rode his horse Moonshine at breakneck speed along the edge of a beech tree wood delivering orders to a division of the Coldstream Guards that was holed up in a copse near the village of Rond de la Reine, 25 kilometres south-west of Compiegne, France. Moonshine, a thoroughbred mare racehorse with an impeccable pedigree, had been purchased by Herbert only a few days before in a nearby village for forty pounds. She held up surprisingly well under the fusillade of fire that was sweeping the open field towards the trees and after Herbert was hit her racing spirit carried him onto his regiment where he was treated for a single bullet wound to his stomach. Later that afternoon Herbert became a prisoner of the Germans when they overran the woods where he lay injured on a stretcher.  He was moved to a makeshift hospital which was in turn retaken ten days later by the French, a scene replicated many times in the area during the confusion surrounding the ebb and flow of the retreat. 

Herbert underwent a second operation to extract the fragmented bullet that was still causing him considerable pain. Two days later he left France to transfer to hospital in England. On the way he passed the woods and witnessed the fresh communal grave of one hundred and twenty men. It was the 13^th September, exactly a month to the day since Herbert had landed in France. 

That he was in France at all was nothing short of an impertinent deception that could only have been carried out by someone with Herbert’s nerve. His shockingly poor eyesight, a defect since birth and put down to a congenital imperfection blamed on the consanguinity of his parents, would certainly have ruled him out for active service. So how did he come to be there? In a stunt resembling a university prank, Aubrey had brazenly walked into a military tailor and asked to be fitted out in a uniform of an officer of the Irish Guards. Then appropriately kitted out he later simply sidled up to the departing regiment as it marched out of Wellington Barracks at seven in the morning and joined their ranks as they crossed Vauxhall Bridge on their way to Nine Elms train station. Reaching Southampton he lost himself amongst the melee of soldiers as they embarked on a troop ship bound for France. Once on board he was somehow able to bluff his way into the regiment with the rank of Lieutenant as it steamed out of harbour.  In this most extraordinary manner, Herbert was on his way as perhaps the most incongruous member of the British Expeditionary Force. 

By mid September 1914, Herbert had returned to England to convalesce after his adventures in France. Before the end of the year he was to join Newcombe, Woolley and Lawrence in Cairo. In the meantime, he had three months to recuperate at his country estate at Pixton Park and bask in the love and good wishes of family and friends. As one friend wrote, ‘It was thoroughly characteristic of you to be shot and lost but equally characteristic to be found and healed. I would always put my last shilling on your luck in these little things...’ 

Before Herbert’s name was put forward for a role in the new Cairo set-up, he had thoughts of returning to the front, but his poor eyesight was finally exposed and he waited like Lawrence for Turkey to show her hand. 

The Turkish decision to side with Germany was a blow to Aubrey Herbert who had hoped for neutrality. He was eventually ordered to the east because, as he put it, ‘it had been my fortune to have travelled widely, and I had a fairly fluent smattering of several Eastern languages.’ This experience and knowledge would be put to good use in the new Intelligence department that would soon be formed in Cairo. 

Savoy Hotel, Cairo

Herbert travelled out by the slow route via Gibraltar. With him on the ship were Leonard Woolley and George Lloyd. Lloyd was an old friend who had shared the role of honorary attaché in Constantinople. They ran into heavy seas out from England and the ship pitched violently, although not enough to interrupt the chess games the men played to pass the time. While Herbert was studying Arabic his place was taken either by the architect Edwin Lutyens or the painter William Nicholson who had joined their group for the duration of the voyage. At Gibraltar the news that an enemy submarine had passed through into the Mediterranean kept everyone alert. Once they safely reached Cairo on Friday 18 December the men went to their appointed quarters. Herbert chose to take up residence at Shepheards Hotel where he was soon joined by his wife Mary and a few weeks later by his mother, Elizabeth, the Countess of Carnarvon, who left the comfort of Highclere Castle to be with both her sons after the Foreign Office transferred Aubrey’s younger brother, Mervyn, to Cairo. The Countess would arrive just in time to see them depart for Gallipoli. 

In the meantime, Herbert was assigned to the offices of Military Intelligence housed in the Savoy Hotel, positioned on a prominent corner of Midan Soliman Pasha and identified by its distinctive rotunda tower. Even before being taken over by the British Military, the Savoy was decidedly English in character, although Aubrey Herbert likened it to an oriental railway station, with its bustle and jangling bells and running to and fro. 

Herbert and Newcombe
Before long, Herbert became deeply discontented with his position within the office and began manoeuvring for a more fulfilling role. His frustrations arose principally from a clash with Newcombe, rather than from any real discontent with the duties assigned to him. In any case, most of the more mundane tasks, such as amending a large map to show current Turkish troop movements, were in fact undertaken by his batman, Johnny Allen, who went everywhere with him. Herbert’s dislike of Newcombe was class based and he made no attempt to disguise his disdain for the senior officer. He noted down his thoughts in his diary and even shared his views with George Lloyd, who tended to agree. Even Lawrence did not come out of this first round of character assessments too well, although Herbert’s description of him as ‘an odd gnome, half cad – with a touch of genius’, afforded Lawrence with at the very least a blended compliment, as well as providing future biographers with an eminently quotable phrase. Most first impressions in the office were apt to change over time. Not so with those formed of Newcombe by Herbert. 

Amongst this congenial coterie of university-educated amateurs, with their impeccable connections and impressive titles, Newcombe was clearly the odd man out. A professional soldier with years of loyal service, he was now in command of a group of what he might rightly have considered to be elitist dilettantes, albeit most of them holding perfect credentials and with highly relevant experience for the present undertaking. But it must have rankled, on both sides, and although Newcombe seems to have conducted himself in a thoroughly professional manner within the rigid and hierarchical military structure, his patience must have been sorely tested by men like Herbert who after all had donned his military uniform by deceit. With only a short period with the Territorial Army before the war, Herbert was likewise ill-equipped to deal with Newcombe. Unfortunately, these tensions were exposed most vividly during a testing time when the fledgling department was just getting off the ground and at the very moment the Turks were knocking on the door of the canal defences. Relationships were not improved when a memo written by George Lloyd listing Newcombe’s shortcomings landed on Newcombe’s desk by mistake. 

Herbert was moved soon after to field duties and tasked with an intelligence-gathering mission on board the battleship Bacchante that sailed the Eastern Mediterranean coastline watching for Turkish troop movements. After a few weeks, both he and Lloyd would be moved from Egypt to form the nucleus of a new intelligence department that was to serve the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force assembling at the Greek island of Lemnos in preparation for the invasion of Gallipoli. 

Throughout all this, Lawrence remained somehow detached from the squabbling within the office and managed to steer a neutral path between all the personalities. The letters he wrote at the time betray no hint of the problem and he remained loyal in his friendship with Newcombe and unwavering in his admiration for his abilities.

Herbert would go on to have many more adventures during the war, not least in undertaking a secret mission in 1916 with Lawrence to secure the release of the besieged British-Indian garrison at Kut-Al-Amara, 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Baghdad, and commanded by General Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend.  Khalil Pasha, the military governor of the region, refused the bribe of two million pounds and therefore surrender became the only option for Townshend after about 1,750 of his men had died from wounds or disease during a siege that had lasted 147 days. Some 2,600 British and 9,300 Indian other ranks were rounded up and marched away, most to certain death. In fact, 70% of the British and 50% of the Indian troops died of disease or at the hands of the Ottoman guards during the death marches or in captivity. General Townshend sat out the war in some comfort on a small island in the Sea of Marmara, close to Istanbul, and was knighted whilst in captivity. Newcombe would later meet up with Townshend in Turkey when Newcombe, himself an escaped prisoner-of-war on the run, was secretly negotiating armistice terms with the Ottomans while under cover in Constantinople. 

In 1921, Aubrey and his wife Mary welcomed the Emir Feisal, accompanied by Lawrence, to their home at Pixton Park. In the evening, they all played bridge and chess while Feisal fretted about the future. Four months later he took the throne of Iraq. 

“At the dear journey's end”

Porchy, the Earl of Carnarvon, and his half-brother Aubrey died within a few months of one another in 1923, both from septicaemia. Porchy died in the Continental-Savoy Hotel in Cairo on the 5 April 1923 after shaving a mosquito bite, leading to wild stories about the ‘mummy’s curse’. Towards the end of his life, Aubrey had become totally blind and his right eye was removed to give his left a better chance. He was given bad advice to the effect that having all his teeth extracted would restore his sight. Some weeks later, perhaps remembering the advice or in answer to a twinge of toothache, he had several teeth extracted. The dental operation resulted in the blood poisoning from which he died on 23 September 1923 aged 43. He is buried in the Herbert memorial chapel at the Church of St. Nicholas in Brushford, Somerset, under a wooden canopy designed by Edwin Lutyens. His sword hangs over the tomb. 

Desmond MacCarthy wrote: “When to distract himself from the sensation of blindness he turned to memories of his early travels, the verses which he wrote are characteristic both of his muse and himself.” In this poem, Aubrey seems to take comfort in his memories and in the inevitable end to a life full of adventure and well spent:

Gold-dusted memories of the Past
Abide like friends, but falter,
Like morning mirages that last,
Yet lasting, later, alter.
Ah, was that mountain quite so high,
and had its flowers that scent?
Could winds be friendly and as shy,
That filled night's starlit tent.
And did it taste so good, that wine,
At the dear journey's end,
Beneath the whispering island pine,
Beside a singing friend?
God knows the answer to these things,
Man is a dreamer, age and youth,
And none forget the sound of wings,
No rainbow's traitor to the truth.
And if these colours were not fair,
As memory paints, still let them stand,
To be as perfect and as rare,
As all the ghosts of that dream land.

There is a fuller portrait of Aubrey Herbert in Desmond MacCarthy's introduction to Herbert's Mons, ANZAC and Kut.

The second series of Downton Abbey premiered in the UK on 18 September 2011, and is due to do so in the U.S. on 8 January 2012. A Christmas special is also planned.

This is the second of an occasional portrait on personalities from the desert campaigns of the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918

A Prelude to War - Mapping Palestine, Sinai and the Wilderness of Zin

Eretz Magazine

I recently wrote an article for Eretz, a bi-monthly magazine published in Israel, which has now appeared in English after first being published in Hebrew translation last November. The magazine focuses on "the heritage, geography history and culture of the Land of Israel and the Jewish People". The article looks at the surveys of the Negev and Sinai deserts carried out by and on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Society (P.E.F.) both for peaceful and military purposes and naturally features Stewart Newcombe, T.E. Lawrence and C.L. Woolley.

As Newcombe was firmly in the Arab camp and a strong advocate for a bi-nation state in Palestine, circa 1922-1948, I was not sure if his anti-Zionist stance would sit well with the readers of Eretz. He held strong views on what he considered were acceptable levels of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine in the years between the World Wars, based on his long study of the region, its people, infrastructure and resources. He tried in his own way to come up with proposals that were fair to both sides, as they stood at that time, but as he tended to side with anti-Zionist European Jews his arguments are often seen as biased and at variance with the parallel Zionist movement as well as his own government. 

The article highlights the role played by the P.E.F. in charting the history and culture of a thriving Palestinian society within Ottoman Greater Syria. In mapping the historical geography of the Holy Land, and in meticulously chronicling the process, the P.E.F. sought to recover a landscape that was already familiar to the Christian imagination. By retrieving the original map of the Bible from place-names of a predominiantly Arab and Muslim country, the P.E.F. documented an urban and rural geography that would be largely transformed following the future development and colonisation by European Jews, a group which by then had not fully emerged as a likely candidate for the 'redemption' of the land after its neglect by an Ottoman government in decline. 

Wilderness of Zin

The article also discusses Newcombe's secret military surveys, largely in the Negev region, carried out on behalf of the War Office under the guise of a scientific survey for the P.E.F. prior to the First World War. His post-war joint surveys with the French for the Boundary Commission, delineating the borders of the British Mandate of Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria, are still relevant today in Israel's relations with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. This intimate involvement with the country would naturally contribute to his strongly-held views on its future, leading to his association with organisations like the Palestine Information Centre in London where he held the post of Honorary Secretary.

Most Israelis today - at least the "reading" public - accept that the Zionist narrative runs parallel to an Arab narrative and that both have equal merit. There is definitely a growing interest in the Palestine narrative and an attempt to get a more balanced picture of the Mandate and Pre-Mandate years - including an interesting re-evaluation of the merits of the Mandate itself and in subjects represented by figures like Newcombe, the British Empire and the P.E.F.     

Newcombe believed that the Arabs would not vanish like the mist before the sun of Zion and therefore thought that it was imperative that they had fair representation in the contest for the hearts and minds of those in lofty power who would ultimately bring about the fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration, with all its stipulations - important provisos which supported his firm belief that only by respecting native interests could you achieve a lasting consensus. He worked tirelessly towards that aim after consulting the opinions of his many Jewish and Moslem friends before reaching his proposals that he hoped would satisfy both Moslems and Jews as well as best serving the interests of the British Empire.

Entrance to Islamic Centre

Whatever his lasting impact on mapping the region or subsequently in his life-long interest and involvement in Islamic affairs, Newcombe refused to be satisfied and once exclaimed, 'I wish I could have done more'. A legacy to his prodigious efforts can be found in the maps, papers and records held in government files or in libraries alongside those of his friend T.E. Lawrence, with whom he will be forever connected. But perhaps it the invaluable assistance he gave in helping to establish the East London Mosque, the first purpose built mosque in London, that Newcombe's legacy to his Muslim friends is best illustrated.

Eretz can be found at www.eretz.com