The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Christopher Sykes Simon
the wife of twenty five years, to Mr Mark Sykes the dishonour of his mother, and to Lady Sykes, it might be, other proceedings in a criminal court. At present Sir Tatton might wish to win this case, but in the evening of his days would he wish his name to be clouded with the dishonour of his wife?’26
In the end the jury took only forty-five minutes to decide that ‘The letter of 2 January, 1897, was not in the hand of Sir Tatton Sykes.’ As the newspapers were quick to point out, this verdict left Jessie in an unenviable position. ‘The person upon whom the verdict of the jury fell with such crushing force last week,’ commented The World, ‘stands arraigned by that verdict, on a double charge of forgery and perjury; and any shrinking from the natural sequel of such arraignment will certainly be interpreted as a sign of partiality in the administration of justice.’27 Luckily for Jessie, there was never any criminal prosecution brought against her, because of the problems arising from the fact that the main witness against her would have been her husband. The horrendous publicity was punishment enough, and the fact that public sympathy lay with Tatton. ‘Sir Tatton Sykes may not have been the most judicious of men in the management of his household,’ commented the Times’ Leader of 19 January, ‘but if his evidence is to be believed, as the jury believed it, he has shown great forbearance for a long time.’28 A few days later Sydney Bowles wrote in her diary, ‘The verdict in the Sykes case was for Sir Tatton, which has hit Lady Sykes and Mark very hard. The latter told George he is not ever going to speak to or see his father again, and he will never go to Sledmere again so long as Sir Tatton lives.’29
Chapter 3
Through Five Turkish Provinces
Devastated by the outcome of the trial, and simmering with anger, Mark made plans to travel abroad for a few months. He needed to get away from the lawyers, a profession he would despise for the rest of his life, and to put as much distance as possible between himself and his parents. His education had suffered from the stress of the trial, the result being that he had failed the ‘Little-Go’ exam that all Cambridge students were required to take in their second year. Luckily for him, the Rev. Swain attached little importance to this. ‘He could have taken the ordinary degree easily enough,’ he noted, ‘if he had set himself to do it, but it never seemed to him worth doing. He seemed to be always looking round the University to see how it might best serve him, and to follow his own conclusions without considering the views of other people or whether his practice were usual or unusual. He seemed to me to do this with great sagacity … The power of close application to what did not immediately interest him, if he ever had it, was lost before he appeared at Cambridge.’1
His plan, supported by his tutors, who understood how much both he and they would get out of the trip, was to return to Palestine and Syria, scene of many of his childhood travels. With the help of A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, first published in 1858 by the London publishers John Murray, he mapped out a journey that would take him as far east of the river Jordan as was possible, before striking north to Damascus through the remote and mountainous Druse country of the Haurân. In preparation he also persuaded the distinguished lecturer in Persian Professor Edward Granville Browne to give him some basic instruction in Arabic, and though Mark was soon reporting to Henry Cholmondeley that his lessons were progressing well, Browne let it be known that he considered his new pupil to have ‘the greatest capacity for not learning he had ever met!’2 Unfortunately for Mark, scarcely was he set to leave for the East than his mother got wind of his intentions and tried to attach conditions to her parental blessing. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he wrote from Cambridge to his first cousin, Henry Cholmondeley, the Sledmere agent, ‘… my mother was quite willing for me to go if I took the maid and herself with me, which is of course ridiculous’. Barely concealing his anger he added, ‘The only object of having me here is to come down and extort a few shillings or pounds as the case may be, to read all the letters she may find in the rooms and return to London …’3
He left without her, accompanied only by his servant, McEwen, travelling first to Paris, and from there taking the Orient Express to Constantinople, a journey of three and a half days. He arrived at the Pera Palace Hotel, however, only to find three telegrams from his mother that had reached there before him.
(1) Return at once important.
(2) Must return at once father will not settle.
(3) Absolutely necessary your return will explain on arrival.
‘Having read these,’ he wrote to Henry Cholmondeley, ‘I replied that I could not return and proceeded to the Custom House where I was delayed some two hours. At length I proved in different ways viz (by 20 francs) that I was neither an Armenian travelling on a forged passeporte [sic], or an English conspirator or an importer of Dynamite …’ He then boarded a Russian steamer bound for Jaffa, carrying 800 Russian pilgrims in the hold: ‘when I went into the hovel that does duty for a Saloon,’ he told Cholmondeley, ‘I found the Russian Skipper blind drunk with two lady friends from the shore’.
He did not, he continued, expect it to be ‘a pleasant voyage as I am the only other passenger’.4
On arrival in Jaffa Mark took the daily train to Jerusalem, operated by the French company Société du Chemin de Fer Ottoman de Jaffa à Jérusalem et Prolongements. It was an uneventful journey, bar one incident, which both amused and impressed him: ‘when the train reached a station called Ramleh,’ he reported to Cholmondeley, ‘a shot was fired, and presently a man appeared tied up like this (drawing),
he was a Turkish cavalryman. It turned out that he had had a quarrel with a farmer two years ago, he had been looking for him ever since, found out where he was, obtained leave to go to Ramleh and shot him in the station. He then gave himself up saying he had done what he wanted and they might do what they liked.’5
In Jerusalem, Mark was greeted by an old friend, Sheik Fellah, a Bedouin of the Adwan Tribe in Ottoman Syria, whom he had previously met on his travels with his father: ‘the old Sheikh recognized me,’ he told Cholmondeley, ‘and shouted to the crowd that I was his son’.6
They then set off north-east for Jericho, close to the river Jordan, where on 10 March they picked up the rest of the party, consisting of a dragoman, the traditional Ottoman guide, a cook, a native servant, five muleteers and an Armenian photographer who was to spend one day with them photographing Sheikh Fellah’s camp at El Hammam. ‘The people were wild and interesting,’ wrote Mark. ‘The Arabs, every man of whom carried a weapon of some sort, struck terror into the heart of the Armenian. They dug him in the ribs with a pistol, whereat he wept, upset his camera, and remembered he had pressing business at Jericho. He wanted to return at once, but I persuaded him to take four photographs.’7
Sheikh Fellah’s nephew, Sheikh ‘Ali, invited them for lunch. ‘The food consisted of a huge bowl of meat and rice,’ Mark recorded, ‘into which I and another guest, who was a holy dervish, first dipped our hands. The holy man showed no dislike to eating with so ill-omened a kafir as myself, but told my dragoman