Endangered archaeology

After all the years I've spent researching the life of Stewart Newcombe he remains a fascinating and absorbing character, still able to surprise and still surprisingly relevant. Recently, one of his many diverse interests overlapped with a contemporary research project run by three leading British universities which has at its core the protection of endangered archaeological sites across a study area of 7000 kilometers and in more than twenty countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. 

The EAMENA Project, a five-year Arcadia Foundation funded project (2015-2020), was set up to record and make available information about archaeological sites and landscapes which are under threat across the Middle East and North Africa. The project is based in the Universities of Oxford, Leicester and Durham. The archaeological heritage of the region, which is of international significance for all periods, is under increasing threat from massive and sustained population explosion, agricultural development, urban expansion, warfare, and looting.

The project uses aerial photography and satellite imagery to map unrecorded and endangered archaeological sites, to a uniform standard, and evaluates and monitors their condition. The information provided will assist with the effective protection of these sites by the relevant authorities. The use of satellite and aerial imagery is especially important for those countries where access on the ground is currently either impossible or severely restricted (e.g. Syria, Libya, Iraq and Yemen). 

Michael Fradley, an archaeologist at Oxford University who manages the project, contacted me seeking information on Newcombe who was an important early advocate for the use of aerial photography for photogrammetric mapping. After the end of the war Newcombe remained very vocal about the potential of the technique. In 1920 he pushed for an experimental air survey by the Royal Air Force of the Nile flood region from the old Aswan Dam to the Cairo Barrage for water management purposes but for other projects he came up against significant opposition, not least an unwillingness among the Corps of Royal Engineers to move beyond their traditional ground survey methods.

Newcombe at his Oxford house. Courtesy of Joseph Berton

Fradley, during a visit to the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, wrote to ask: "Just out of interest, do you know which house Newcombe lived in on the Woodstock Road in Oxford. I find myself trying to guess every time I get the bus in to work." 

Today: The site of Newcombe's former home

It is easy to see why Fradley missed it. The house at number 300 has been long gone, demolished to make way for a rather unremarkable estate of flats, which by a strange twist of irony is just a few streets away from the EAMENA Project's office. Woodstock Road is a major road running through the leafy suburb of North Oxford but the clue is obvious as Newcombe was credited when they built the current development and a prominent sign was placed at the entrance. It is doubtful if the residents of Newcombe Court are aware of the connection. 

 

Newcombe's air survey of the Nile in September 1920 produced 1200 glass plates of overlapping photographs but only a section of one plate was used in his 1921 paper  'Contouring by the Stereoscope on air photos' (RE Journal Vol. XXXIV July-Dec 1921). It is not known if this photographic archive exists. "If the full series of 1200 photographs survives and could be located," Fradley reflects, "it could be of major value to archaeologists to identify and document sites destroyed or eroded by the modern occupation of the Nile valley, which has increased significantly in intensity over the past 100 years." 

Contoured hills east of Cairo

Newcombe's paper won him the Royal Engineers’ prestigious Montgomerie Prize in recognition of his contribution to exploration and surveying and he continues to achieve recognition in academic journals over one hundred years later. There is a natural evolution from when a plate camera was first strapped to the wings of a wood and canvas aeroplane to the use of equipment like drones or satellites. Newcombe’s reputation was built on surveying by horse, camel or by foot across inhospitable lands often in the most appalling of conditions. At heart he was an adventurer and loved nothing better than to ride off to see what was over the next hill. But without doubt the technique of mapping the world by aeroplane and camera had begun to expose much more of its unknown and unknowable parts, more than could ever be achieved by land surveying. 

For many years Newcombe enjoyed the connectivity to the environment, and more importantly to its inhabitants, yet at the same time he recognised the need to explore ways to break free from the rigours and difficulties of those journeys and to see the world from new and exciting perspectives through the utilisation of emerging technologies that he helped develop and promote. As such he was clearly a man of his time who lived to enjoy the best of both worlds.  

For more information about the work of EAMENA, go to eamena.arch.ox.ac.uk

Newcombe's Colt .455 Revolver

Throughout the desert campaign as head of the British Military Mission to the Hejaz, Stewart Newcombe carried a Colt revolver as his sidearm of choice. It was a hefty gun to carry but before the introduction of lighter metals, power meant size and the Colt New Service .455 Eley was a large, heavy, double-action, swing-out 6 cylinder revolver with real stopping potential. 

Newcombe's personalised Colt revolver

Even before Kitchener created his New Army, it became obvious that the Webley and Scott factory in Birmingham would not be able to single-handedly fulfil military requirements for supplies of the standard British service revolver, the Webley .455 Mark V and its 1915 variant the Mark VI. Traditionally, British Officers were required to purchase their own sidearm from a gunsmith, a military outfitter, or from the Government with the former two methods classed as ‘private purchase’; in fact, a number of corps were also issued with pistols as self-defence weapons especially when separated from their main weapon, including the Machine Gun Corps, The Royal Flying Corps, and the Tank Corps. Pistols were successfully used in areas where a rifle would be an unnecessary encumbrance, such as the close confines of trench raiding, patrols or tunnelling. Finding the weapons and ordnance with which to equip the swelling ranks of Kitchener’s Army required the War Office to look beyond domestic and imperial facilities. To meet the demand for pistols – the British military services purchased approximately half a million pistols during the Great War - the War Office turned to the two foremost manufacturers of handguns in the world, Colt and Smith & Wesson of America. Both manufacturers immediately responded with variants of their large frame revolvers chambered to match the British .455 cartridges in general use at that time. 

By 1917, Colt had manufactured upwards of 55,000 .455 New Service revolvers for British and Commonwealth armed forces which upon receipt were then stamped with arrow government acceptance and inspection markings. Between 1914 and 1917, the Army and Navy Cooperative Society sold 1000 Colt revolvers, a quarter of all private purchases.  

 

Newcombe’s Colt was personalised with his name, rank and regiment engraved on the butt end on either side of the lanyard ring and was carried in a non-Military issue purpose-made leather holster with belt attachments to his own design for use with desert garb.

A Mosque for London

The recent discovery of Stewart Newcombe’s involvement in the creation and development of one of London’s first mosques certainly adds a further dimension to his life and I wish to thank the archivist at the mosque concerned for his invaluable help in supplying the supporting documentation that illustrates Newcombe’s considerable contribution to this commendable endeavour. A full and public recognition for the assistance of the archive department will be made in the appropriate manner once the section has been completed.

It could be argued that coming at a time of national emergency during the early years of the Second World War the benefits of keeping the empire’s millions of Muslims on board were obvious and a mosque in London was an absolute minimum requirement, one that was "worthy of the tradition of Islam and worthy of the capital of the British Empire".

As a non-Muslim, Newcombe was not alone in giving his time and expertise to the enterprise. Others sitting on the management committee included Sir Ernest Hotson, who as Acting Governor of Bombay in 1931 was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by V. Gogate, a young revolutionary student who spent the next 6 years in prison alongside Mahatma Ghandi. Hotson remarkably survived, going on to help secure his assailant’s release and later sending him a substantial sum of money to help towards completing his education in politics. The cheque was duly accepted and proved to be a worthy donation in Gogate’s future political career in an independent India. Hotson served with distinction alongside Newcombe as Joint Honorary Secretary until his death two years later, making way for Newcombe to take over the role single-handed.

One other non-Muslim sitting on the mosque’s management committee was Lord Winterton who was recently mentioned in the Daily Telegraph (24.08.2010) for setting the desert on fire in his own inimitable manner:

Daily Telegraph - Lawrence of Arabia's secret X flights revealed in diary

This article refers to an entry in the latest Lawrence book to be published in which Winterton is mentioned as burning the breakfast for a group of men belonging to X Flight, a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps which in this book has been dubbed ‘Lawrence of Arabia’s Secret Air Force’. Of course, this group was not a ‘secret’ and not exclusively ‘Lawrence’s’.

Based on the diary of Flight Sergeant George Hynes, this latest book on Lawrence adds an attractive dust cover to the bookshelves but little else in the way of new or startling information on the desert war, except perhaps that it confirmed that it was George, on behalf of his fellow X Flight colleagues, who initiated the idea of sending a piece of rush-grass originally brought back from Aqaba to Lawrence’s brother Arnie when Lawrence died in 1935 with a request that it be placed inside his coffin. But even this small detail was already accessible to those with a keen eye in the form of a note in Paul Marriott and Yvonne Argent's book The Last Days of T. E. Lawrence, A Leaf in the Wind.

Congratulations must go to Henry Wilson and his team at Pen and Sword Publishers who have yet again produced an evocative and attractive cover, in keeping with the range of cover illustrations they produce across all military subjects. By making accessible information that was only previously available in archives, Pen and Sword have produced a book that is worth reading not only by Lawrence aficionados but by aviation buffs, for whom this title is also intended.