I’m thrilled to have learned something new about my family.
Great-uncle Harold, I knew, was something in the Foreign Office. His wife, Doreen, was an expert on the condition of tribal women in the Yemen, and because she rode across the Empty Quarter on a camel to write a book about them, our name is still revered in academic circles in San’aa – although I don’t plan to go there to prove it.
We seemed to lose touch with my father’s side of the family in the 1950s, after my grandfather died in somewhat murky circumstances. Harold followed-on in 1973, and I don’t remember ever meeting him. Doreen passed away not long ago, at the age of 98. I had no idea she was still alive.
Today, however, while idly prospecting, I found a monograph about Great-uncle Harold on a history researcher’s website. With acknowledgement to the author, Christopher Knowles, here is a precis:
Wounded in the First World War, Great-uncle Harold joined the Colonial Service. Promoted initially to the exotic-sounding post of Administrator of Zanzibar, in 1936 he was reassigned to the Arabian peninsula, where he soon became the unsung equivalent of Lawrence of Arabia, only he was Great-uncle Harold of the Yemen!
He too wore tribal costume, rode a camel and united the warring clans against the Ottoman empire, or something. Germans? I am just not sure if he blew up any trains. If he was ever flogged and buggered by the Turks, I expect five years at an English public school would have inured him to any privation.
After the second world war, things got even more like an Evelyn Waugh novel. Appointed Head of Local Government in the British-occupied zone of Germany, Harold wrote papers and gave lectures promoting the virtues of English village-green-style democracy as the best model of governance the world had to offer. His superiors and the Americans were not convinced. He is said to have treated the defeated German burgomeisters like recalcitrant Bedouin tribesmen. He held court in a tent, and banged an official-looking stick on the floor to indicate when an audience was over.
Great-uncle Harold’s story explains everything. I’m so relieved, I thought it was just me who was leading a really interesting life.
Postscriptum
Further to this, I have learned that my grandfather, the brother of Great-uncle Harold, was also an administrator in occupied Germany and something high-up in British intelligence. Nudge nudge, enough said, eh? A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat.
(This Post is now closed. Ed.)
The Boglington Post (Incorporating The Pumpkin) 