| Preface
Wallace Lyon was an administrator in Iraq from the end of the war with the Ottoman empire in 1918 until near the end of the Second World War. After service in France he had been an officer with the 52nd Sikh Frontier Force which was sent to Iraq in 1917 as part of the British and Indian force that was to complete the conquest of Mesopotamia in 1918. Thus he happened to be in Mesopotamia late in 1918 when the Civil Administration was urgently looking for civil administrators. He was sent to Kurdistan where he spent most of the next twenty-six years. In this he was exceptional. The great majority of British non-technical officials were gradually replaced by Iraqis after 1921, when the Iraqi state and monarchy were set up, culminating in 1932, when Iraq became a sovereign state. Lyon survived this second cut by being appointed Land Settlement Officer. After the attempted revolution of 1941 he rejoined the Indian Army and was appointed a Political Adviser with the British Army, ‘Paiforce’, remaining until the end of 1944. He then resigned from the Indian Army and entered the Consular Service, serving until 1949 and his final retirement as Consul in Harar.
After retirement he wrote his memoirs. This, as is explained in ‘A Note on Spelling’, was done secretively and was completed in 1964. It was not intended for immediate publication, mainly because many of those mentioned in it were still alive; though he told his daughter, Sheila Lyon, for whom it was written, that he hoped that I, as her husband, would eventually edit and publish it. He did not give it a title, simply putting ‘Buyurun Bakinez’ (roughly translated as ‘take a look inside’) on the cover. Hence the title of this book is mine, a deliberate echo of the title of C. J. Edmonds’s Kurds, Turks and Arabs. Lyon died in 1977; and by the end of the century it is unlikely that many if any of those mentioned in the memoir are still alive. The time therefore seems ripe for publishing an edited version.
The case for doing so is that, although there is a very large literature on what may be called the high politics of the creation and organization of Iraq during this first quarter-century, and a good deal on the Kurds as an ethnic group and political problem, there is very little on how the British actually ran or manipulated the Kurdish region of northern Iraq during the period of the Mandate to 1932, or thereafter while Britain had extensive treaty rights there. There are only three comparable personal memoirs on Kurdistan in this period of which I am aware: W. R. Hay’s Two Years in Kurdistan. Experiences of a Political Officer 1918–1920 (London, 1921); Edmonds’s Kurds, Turks and Arabs (London, 1957); and A. M. Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan: The Narrative of an Engineer in Iraq (London, 1937). Hay left Iraq in October 1920 to work in the Indian Political Department, so his account covers only the critical first two years after the end of the First World War. Lyon is not mentioned in his account, though they must have known each other. Edmonds was a close colleague and friend of Lyon from 1922 and there is much synergy between their accounts. But Edmonds left Kurdistan in 1925 to become Assistant Adviser to the Ministry of Interior until 1933, then briefly Adviser to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and finally, from 1935 to 1945, Adviser to the Ministry of Interior. Edmonds thus moved from the Kurdish area to the central government in Baghdad in the mid-1920s and never wrote in detail about his later experiences, though there is a great deal in his unpublished papers about the problems of Kurdistan after 1925. Finally Hamilton, a New Zealander, was a road engineer in the Ruwandiz region from 1928 to 1932. His book is mainly about building the road through the Ruwandiz gorge, but also contains much material on people and events in Kurdistan which intermesh with Lyon’s narrative for those four years.
By contrast with these men, Lyon stayed almost continuously in Kurdistan until 1944, and this gives his memoir its special value. It provides a detailed and lively account of the life and work of a Briton who had to deal with the problems of a mixed Arab, Turkish and Kurdish population, and in particular with the feuds of the Kurdish shaikhs in the mountains. In the early years, until 1926, these were complicated by Turkish irredentism and perpetually by the existence of a largely open Persian frontier. His account plays down the dangers and emphasizes the excitement and the interest of the job. It therefore fills a substantial gap in the history of the evolution of modern Iraq and, in particular, of Kurdistan and throws much light on the origins of later and contemporary Kurdish problems. Lyon became a devoted supporter of the interests of the Kurds and in the end decided to retire largely because of the continuing refusal of Arab politicians to fulfil promises made to the Kurds or to give them a fair share in the increasing wealth generated by petroleum. After retirement he remained in contact with Kurdish leaders and strongly supported their claims for greater autonomy.
In editing the memoir I have cut out virtually all the material relating to Lyon’s private life and family, both before and after 1918, indicating briefly in parenthesis when he went on leave, married and so on, but summarizing his earlier and later life at the end of the Introduction. I have also, regretfully, had to shorten the rest of the text very substantially to make it possible to publish at reasonable length. In particular I have excised much interesting material on sporting activities and many anecdotes. Other adjustments to the text are indicated in the ‘Note on Spelling’. In the Introduction I have attempted to do two things: to put Lyon’s regional narrative into the broader context of Iraqi history, and so to make his text largely self-explanatory; and at the same time to provide my own interpretation of that very controversial subject from the standpoint of a general imperial historian rather than that of a specialist or expert in Iraqi or Middle Eastern history, which I am not. To do this rigorously I would have needed to spend a long period of basic research in the archives, including the Public Record Office and various other MS collections of Lyon’s contemporaries. I have not done so, partly because I was not prepared to devote several more years to the project, and partly because I am not writing my own account and would have used such information mainly to footnote Lyon’s text. I did, however, work through some of the more relevant material in the Edmonds Papers in the Middle East Archive at St Antony’s College, Oxford, which provided collaborative evidence on the period before and after 1925 and which, as mentioned in the ‘Note on Spelling’, enabled me to standardize Lyon’s somewhat variable spelling of names, places and titles. For the rest I have relied on the wide range of published material and on the advice of friends and colleagues.
D. K. Fieldhouse
Jesus College, Cambridge
March 2000 |
