# The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

Christopher Simon Sykes

At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes’ lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work, and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it.The Sykes-Picot agreement was a secret pact drawn up in May 1916 between the French and the British, to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in the First World War. Agreed without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier guarantee of independence to the Arabs made by the British. Controversy has raged around it ever since.Sir Mark Sykes was not, however, a blimpish, ignorant Englishman. A passionate traveller, explorer and writer, his life was filled with adventure. From a difficult, lonely childhood in Yorkshire and an early life spent in Egypt, India, Mexico, the Arabian desert, all the while reading deeply and learning languages, Sykes published his first book about his travels through Turkey aged only twenty. After the Boer War, he returned to map areas of the Ottoman Empire no cartographer had yet visited. He was a talented cartoonist, excellent mimic and amateur actor, gifts that ensured that when elected to parliament a full House of Commons would assemble to listen to his speeches.During the First World War, Sykes was appointed to Kitchener’s staff, became Political Secretary to the War Cabinet and a member of the Committee set up to consider the future of Asiatic Turkey, where he was thirty years younger than any of the other members. This search would dominate the rest of his life. He was unrelenting in his pursuit of peace and worked himself to death to find it, a victim of both exhaustion and the Spanish Flu.Written largely based on the previously undisclosed family letters and illustrated with Sykes' cartoons, this sad story of an experienced, knowledgeable, good-humoured and generous man once considered the ideal diplomat for finding a peaceful solution continues to reverberate across the world today.

## Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Christopher Simon Sykes 2016

Christopher Simon Sykes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover image © Look and Learn/Peter Jackson Collection/Bridgeman Images (shows Lieut Colonel Mark Sykes by Hester, Robert Wallace 1866-1923)

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008121938

Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780008121921

Version: 2017-09-06

## Dedication

I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandfather, Mark Sykes, whom I would so love to have known.

‘… of this I am sure, we shall never in our lives meet anyone like him.’

(F. E. Smith. 1st Earl Birkenhead)

## Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Prologue: An Exhumation

1. The Parents

2. Trials and Tribulations

3. Through Five Turkish Provinces

4. South Africa

5. Coming of Age

6. Return to the East

7. Family Life

8. A Seat in the House

9. War

10. Kitchener and the Middle East

11. The Sykes–Picot Agreement

12. Zionism

13. The Balfour Declaration

14. Worked to Death

Epilogue: The Legacy

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

References and Notes on Sources

Index

Also by Christopher Simon Sykes

About the Publisher

## Introduction

It is extraordinary to think that my grandfather, Sir Mark Sykes, was only thirty-six years old when he found himself signatory to one of the most controversial treaties of the twentieth century, the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This was the secret pact arranged between the Allies in the First World War, in 1916, to divide up the Ottoman Empire in the event of their victory. It was a piece of typical diplomacy in which each side tried its best not to tell the other exactly what it was that it wanted, while making the vaguest promises to various Arab tribes that they would have their own kingdom in return for fighting on the Allied side. None of these promises materialised in the aftermath of the War, Arab aspirations being dashed during the subsequent Peace Conference in which the rivalries and clashes of the great powers, all eager to make the best deals for themselves in the aftermath of victory, dominated the proceedings, and pushed the issue of the rights of small nations into the background. This was the cause of bad blood, which has survived to the present day.

Perhaps it is because my grandfather’s name is placed before that of his fellow signatory that history has tended to make him the villain of the piece rather than Monsieur Georges-Picot. ‘You’re writing about that arsehole?’ commented an Italian historian in Rome last year, while even my publisher suggested that a good title for the book might be ‘The Man Who Fucked Up the Middle East’. These kinds of comment only strengthened my resolve to find out the truth about a man of whom I had no romantic perceptions, since he died nearly thirty years before I was born. I felt this meant I could be objective.

I also knew that there was much more to him than his involvement in the division of the Ottoman Empire, which occupied only the last four years of his life. Before that he had led a life filled with adventures and experiences. As a boy he had travelled to Egypt and India, explored the Arabian desert and visited Mexico. He had been to school in Monte Carlo, where he had befriended the croupiers in the Casino, before attending Cambridge under the tutorship of M. R. James. His first book, an account of his travels through Turkey, was published when he was twenty, before he went off to fight in the Boer War. He travelled extensively throughout the Ottoman Empire, mapping areas that cartographers had never before visited. He was generally recognised as a talented cartoonist, whose drawings appeared regularly in Vanity Fair, as well as being an excellent mimic and amateur actor, gifts that, when he eventually entered the House of Commons, ensured a full house whenever he spoke. All this against a background of a difficult and lonely childhood that he rose above to make a happy marriage and become the father of six children.

I decided to tell his story largely through his correspondence with his wife, Edith, a collection of 463 letters written from the time they met till a year before his death. As well as chronicling his daily activities, they provide a fascinating insight into his emotional state, since he never held back from expressing his innermost feelings, pouring his emotions onto the page, whether anger embodied in huge capital letters and exclamation marks, humour represented by a charming cartoon, or occasionally despair characterised by long monologues of self-pity. They are also filled with expressions of deep love for Edith, with whom he shared profound spiritual beliefs. Sadly, almost none of her letters have survived.

Needless to say his writings also often embody the attitudes regarding race that were common among members of his class in a world which was largely ruled by Great Britain. Though they are anathema to us today it was considered quite normal in the nineteenth century to refer to Jews as ‘Semites’, the peoples of the East as ‘Orientals’, and the South African blacks as ‘Kaffirs’. With this in mind I decided not to sanitise these terms when I came across them. I was also mindful of the fact that while Mark expressed many racist views about the Jews when he was a young man, he radically changed his mind after meeting the celebrated journalist Nahum Sokolow and embraced Zionism.

When I was growing up my father rarely talked about my grandfather, and when he did so he always referred to him as ‘Sir Mark’. I think growing up in his shadow had been too much for him. Certainly his former governess, Fanny Ludovici, known in the family as ‘Mouselle’, who worked as his secretary, endlessly regaled us with stories of what a wonderful man our grandfather had been and what a loss it was to the world that he had died so young. My aunts and uncles also expressed this view, though when I actually interviewed my Aunt Freya, Mark’s firstborn, about her father for a book I was writing, The Big House, she had very little to say about him, and I suddenly realised that the reason for this was that she scarcely knew him as he was hardly ever at home. My interest was aroused, however, and when the Arab Spring sparked off a series of revolutions that spiralled into the situation we see today, with the Middle East seemingly on the point of disintegration, and the words Sykes–Picot regularly on the front pages, the time seemed right to tell the story of the 35-year-old junior official who was one of the men behind it.

## Prologue. An Exhumation

In the early hours of 17 September 2008, a bizarre scene took place in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, Sledmere, high up on the Yorkshire Wolds. In a corner of the cemetery hidden by yew trees were two tents illuminated by floodlights, from which there would occasionally emerge figures dressed in full biochemical warfare suits, their shapes creating eerie shadows on the outer walls of the church. But this was no science-fiction movie. It was an exhumation, of a man who had died nearly 100 years previously, and it was hoped that his remains might provide evidence that in the future could save the lives of billions.

The grave that was being opened up on that early autumn morning was that of Sir Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet of Sledmere, and MP for East Hull. He had passed away on 16 February 1919, aged thirty-nine, a victim of the Spanish flu, a particularly deadly strain of influenza that had swept across the world towards the end of the First World War, killing 10 per cent of all those it infected. At the time of his demise, Sykes was staying in Paris, where he had been attending the Peace Conference. Had he been a poor man he would have been buried at once nearby, the custom having been to bury victims of the flu as quickly as possible to avoid the further danger of spreading the virus by moving them. However, if a family could afford to pay for the body to be sealed in a lead coffin, a very expensive process, then it could be shipped home for burial, which is how Sykes came to lie in rest in a quiet corner of East Yorkshire rather than in a far-off Paris cemetery.

Though there have been many other strains of influenza in the intervening years, none have been as toxic as the Spanish flu, so called because Spain was the first country to report news of large numbers of fatalities. A Type-A virus classified as H1N1, and thought to have originated in poultry, it broke out in 1918, probably in America, and spread like wildfire partly owing to the movement of troops at the end of the war. Its symptoms were exceptionally severe, and it had an extremely high infection rate, which was the cause of the huge death toll. What made it exceptional, however, was that unlike most strains of influenza, which are normally deadly to the very young and the very old, more than half the people killed by H1N1 were young adults aged between twenty and forty. By the time any of the therapeutic measures employed gave a hint of being successful, the virus was on the wane and between 50 million and 100 million people had already died. It was a death toll that has haunted virologists ever since.

To this day, the great, unanswered question about H1N1 is how this dangerous strain of ‘avian flu’ made the leap to humans, one that has become even more urgent since the emergence in the 1990s of a yet more highly pathogenic virus, H5N1, first documented in Hong Kong in 1997. Using isolated viral fragments from H1N1 flu victims, of which there were only five examples known worldwide, mostly from bodies preserved in permafrost, scientists were able to reconstruct a key protein from the 1918 virus. Called haemagglutinin, it adopts a shape that allows it readily to latch on to human cells, and its discovery went a long way to helping virologists understand how such viruses adapt to new species. It struck one of them, Professor John Oxford, of Queen Mary University of London, that if modern methods of extracting DNA could derive so much information from frozen samples, then a great deal more could be extracted from soft tissue, such as might be found in a well-preserved body that had been sealed in a lead-lined coffin. He knew exactly the condition in which such a body might be found from photographs he had been shown of the freshly exhumed body of a woman who had been interred in a lead casket in the eighteenth century in a cemetery in Smithfield. ‘This lady was lying back in the lead coffin,’ he said, ‘with blue eyes. She was wrapped in silks, and had been in that coffin for two hundred years. She was perfectly preserved.’


Oxford knew that ‘We could take for example a big piece of lung, work on it, do the pathology and find out exactly how that person died, so in the next pandemic we would know to be especially careful about certain things.’[1] Ian Cundall, a contact in the BBC, told him the story of Sir Mark Sykes, and he decided to contact the living relatives, who all gave their permission for the project to go ahead. This included moving the coffin of Sykes’s wife, who had died eleven years after him and had been buried in the same grave. After the Home Office and the Health and Safety Executive had been satisfied that the operation would involve absolutely no risk to the public, all that was left was for the local Bishop and Rural Dean to give their assent.

The exhumation team dug until they reached the remains of the coffin of Sykes’s wife, Edith, which, being made of wood, had disintegrated, leaving only the bones. These were carefully moved aside before the dig was continued, the utmost care being taken until one end of Sir Mark’s lead coffin was exposed. At first this looked to be in good condition, until it was noticed that there was a four-inch split in the lid. ‘That didn’t bode well,’ reflected Oxford. They pulled back the coffin’s lead covering, to find that, as Oxford had suspected when he saw the split, the body was not in the perfect condition they had so prayed for. The clothes had disintegrated and the remains were entirely skeletal. The team managed to recover some hair, however, which was important as that would possibly include the root and some skin, and, as usually happens, the lungs had collapsed onto the spinal cord, allowing the anatomist to remove some dark, hard tissue. Finally they extracted what might have been brain tissue from within the skull. With the exhumation at an end, prayers were recited, and then the team stood round the re-closed grave and sang ‘Roses of Picardy’, the song that soldiers used to sing on the way to the front. When the news of the exhumation finally reached the ears of the Press, there followed a rash of headlines such as ‘Dead Toff May Hold Bird Flu Clue’.

Though the samples removed from Sykes’s grave have revealed nothing so far, there is always hope that they may in the future. New advances in technology have allowed scientists to take DNA samples from dinosaurs that died thousands of years ago, and it is known that even in circumstances where it has been poorly preserved, a virus can leave a genetic footprint. So the chance exists that in the future a vaccine may be created that has its origins in tissue taken from the body of Mark Sykes, and which would protect the world from an H5N1 pandemic that could, with intercontinental travel as common as it is today, kill billions. If that were to happen it would be a great posthumous legacy for a man who has been reviled for what he achieved in his lifetime, namely the creation of what is known today as the Middle East through the Sykes–Picot Agreement. When he signed his name in 1916 to this piece of diplomacy, which has been since derided as ‘iniquitous’, ‘unjust’ and ‘nefarious’, he was only thirty-six years old.

## Chapter 1. The Parents

On 21 April 1900, the eve of his departure for South Africa to fight in the Boer War, the 21-year-old Mark Sykes paid a visit to his former tutor, Alfred Dowling, who told him: ‘How it is that you are no worse than you are, I cannot imagine.’[1] These may have seemed harsh words spoken to a man who was facing possible death on the battlefield, but they were intended as a compliment from a friend who knew only too well what Sykes had had to overcome: a childhood that had left him filled with bitterness and of which he had written, only four days earlier: ‘I hate my kind, I hate, I detest human beings, their deformities, their cheating, their cunning, all fill me with savage rage, their filthiness, their very stench appalls [sic] me … The stupidity of the wise, the wickedness of the ignorant, but you must forgive, remember that I have never had a childhood. Remember that I have always had the worst side of everything under my very nose.’[2] The childhood, or lack of it, of which Sykes spoke in this letter to his future fiancée, Edith Gorst, had been a strange and lonely one, spent in a large isolated house that stood high up on the Yorkshire Wolds. Sledmere House had been the home of the Sykes family since the early eighteenth century, when it had come into their possession through marriage. In the succeeding decades, as the ambitions and fortunes of the family had increased, along with their ennoblement to the Baronetcy, so had the size of the house, which had grown from a modest gentleman’s residence of the kind that might have been built in the Queen Anne period to a grand mansion, the design of which had its origins in schemes drawn up by some of the great architects of the day, such as John Carr and Samuel Wyatt. Built in the very latest neo-classical style, it had a central staircase hall, off which, on the ground floor, were a Library, Drawing Room, Music Room and Dining Room, all with the finest decoration by Joseph Rose, while much of the first floor was taken up by a Long Gallery doubling as a second Library that was as fine as any room in England.

This was the house in which Mark Sykes was brought up, as an only child, the progeny of an unlikely couple, both of whom were damaged by their upbringing. His father, Sir Tatton Sykes, had been a sickly boy, a disappointment to his own father, also named Tatton, an old-fashioned country squire, of the type represented in literature by characters such as Fielding’s Squire Western and Goldsmith’s Squire Thornhill. He was hardy in the extreme, and Tatton, his firstborn, lived in constant fear of a father who had no time for weakness, and was only too free with both the whip and his fists, believing that the first precept of bringing up children was ‘Break your child’s will early or he will break yours later on.’ This principle, better suited to a horse or dog, was followed exactly by Tatton, who imposed it upon his own offspring, six girls and two boys, in no uncertain terms.

The young Tatton despised everything his father stood for, and grew up a neurotic, introverted child who developed strong religious beliefs and could not wait to get away as soon as he was of age. As it happened he reached adulthood at a time in history when the world was opening up to would-be travellers. The railways were expanding at great speed. Brunel had just built the SS Great Western, the largest passenger ship in the world, to revolutionize the Atlantic crossing. Steamships regularly travelled to and from India, and on the huge American tea clippers it was possible for a passenger to sail from Liverpool all the way to China. For someone as painfully shy and who valued solitude as much as him, travel to a distant place was the perfect escape, and in the years between his leaving Oxford and the eventual death of his father in 1863, Tatton visited India, America, China, Egypt, Europe, Russia, Mexico and Japan, making him one of the most travelled men of his generation. But of all the places he visited, none struck him as forcibly as the lands that made up the Ottoman Empire, stretching from North Africa to the Black and Caspian Seas, where he was particularly fascinated by the myriad religious sites and shrines, which appealed to his own powerful spiritual beliefs.

Tatton was in Egypt when, on 21 March 1863, he was brought the news of his father’s death. ‘Oh indeed! Oh indeed!’ was all he could manage to mutter.[3] He returned home with only one thing in mind: to take a new broom to the whole place He sold all his father’s horses, and his pack of hounds, and had all the gardens dug up and raked over. These had been his mother’s domain and he set about destroying them with relish, demolishing a beautiful orangery and dismantling all the hothouses in the walled garden, no doubt in revenge for her not having been more protective of her children. When all was done he embarked upon his own passion, one that had grown out of his early travels through the Ottoman Empire, when he had been astonished by the religious fervour he had encountered amongst the large number of pilgrims to the holy cities. The considerable quantity of crosses and memorials which had been erected along the roads as reminders of these journeys had made a deep and lasting impression upon him, and he had returned home determined that some similar demonstration of the people’s faith should be made in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He therefore decided that he would use some of his immense wealth to build churches where none stood, building and restoring seventeen during his lifetime.

As the owner of a beautiful house and a great estate, now scattered with fine churches, it soon became clear that Tatton would need someone to hand them all on to, especially since he was nearing fifty. His introverted character, however, did not make the path of finding a wife a smooth one, and when he did finally get married it was to a girl who was thrust upon him. Christina Anne Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck was the daughter of George ‘Little Ben’[4] Cavendish-Bentinck, Tory MP for Whitehaven, and a younger son of the fourth Duke of Portland. Though Jessie, as she was known, was no beauty, having too square a jaw, she was certainly handsome, with large, dark eyes, a sensual mouth and curly hair which she wore up. She was intelligent and high-spirited, and had political opinions, which at once set her apart from the average upper-class girl. She also loved art, a passion that may have had its roots in her having sat aged five for George Frederick Watts’s painting Mrs George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck and Her Children. She later developed a talent for drawing, and her hero was John Ruskin, whom she had met and become infatuated with, while travelling with her family in Italy in 1869.

Jessie’s mother, Prudence Penelope Cavendish-Bentinck, was a formidable woman of Irish descent who went by the nickname of ‘Britannia’. From the very moment Jessie had become of marriageable age, she was determined to net her daughter a rich and influential husband. According to family legend the pair of them were travelling through Europe in the spring of 1874 when, as they were passing through Bavaria, Jessie became mysteriously separated from the party. Faced with the unwelcome prospect of spending the night alone, she was obliged to turn for help to the middle-aged bachelor they had just befriended, Sir Tatton Sykes. He, quite correctly, made sure that she was looked after, and, the following morning, escorted her to the station to catch the train to join up with her family. However, when she finally met up with them, her mother feigned horror at the very thought of her daughter having been left unchaperoned overnight in the company of a man they barely knew. As soon as she was back in London, Britannia summoned the hapless Tatton to the family house at no. 3 Grafton Street and accused him of compromising her daughter. It was a shrewd move, for Tatton, to whom the idea of any kind of scandal was anathema, agreed at once to an engagement, to be followed by the earliest possible wedding.

The nuptials, which took place on 3 August 1874, in Westminster Abbey, were as splendid an occasion as any bride could have wished for, with a full choral service officiated by the Archbishop of York, assisted by the Dean of Westminster. It was, wrote one columnist, ‘impossible for a masculine pen to do justice to such a scene of dazzling brilliancy’.[5] There were those, however, who considered it the height of vulgarity. ‘The Prince of Wales,’ wrote Tatton’s younger brother, Christopher, from the Royal Yacht Castle, to which he had conveniently escaped in order to avoid the celebrations, ‘is so disgusted with the account of the wedding in the Morning Post. He says if it had been his there could not have been more fuss.’[6]

‘You looked such a darling and behaved so beautifully,’ Britannia wrote to Jessie. ‘I can dream and think of nothing else.’ She attempted to allay any fears her daughter might have had by heaping praise upon her new husband, whom she described as a man of worth and excellence of whom she had heard praises on all sides. ‘He has won a great prize,’ she told Jessie, continuing, ‘I believe firmly he knows its worth and you will be prized and valued as you will deserve. All your great qualities will now have a free scope.’[7]

Jessie arrived at Sledmere on 15 August 1874, to find the sixteen household servants all gathered together to greet her. At the head of the line-up was the housekeeper, Mary Baines, an elderly spinster aged sixty-six, who had begun her life in service under Tatton’s father. She ruled over two housemaids, three laundry maids and two stillroom maids, and was responsible for the cleaning of the house, overseeing the linen, laying and lighting the fires, and the contents of the stillroom. The other senior female servant was Ann Beckley, the cook, who was on equal terms with the housekeeper, and who had under her a scullery maid and a dairymaid. The butler, Arthur Hewland, was in charge of the male servants, consisting of a pantry boy and two footmen. Tatton’s personal valet was Richard Wrigglesworth. The servants were housed in the domestic wing, enlarged and improved by Sir Christopher in 1784, and they welcomed the young mistress to Sledmere.

Her younger sister, Venetia, bombarded Jessie with questions about Sledmere. ‘Is the Park large?’ she asked. ‘Have you a farm? What is the garden like, is there any produce? Have you any neighbours? What sort of Church have you. Where is it and who is the Clergyman high or low? What sort of bedrooms?’[8] In fact the Sledmere at which Jessie had arrived was badly in need of a facelift. Virtually nothing had been done to the house since it was built, and as four of Tatton’s sisters had left home to be married, the last in 1863, he had lived there with only his spinster sister, Mary, to look after the place. She had had little opportunity to decorate and imbue the house with a woman’s touch, since Tatton was extremely careful with his money and was abroad for six months of the year On arriving at Sledmere, Jessie made up her mind to change all this, but her determination to renovate the house met a major stumbling block in that trying to get money out of Tatton to carry out her schemes was like trying to get blood out of a stone. ‘It has been practically impossible,’ she was on one occasion to write in a letter to her lawyer, ‘to persuade Sir Tatton to pay any comparatively small sums of money, nor to induce him to contribute to the keeping of our … establishment in town and country.’[9]

After years of living with the introverted Sir Tatton, Jessie’s extravagant and outgoing nature came to most of the household as a breath of fresh air, and she worked hard to breathe life into the house. In Algernon Casterton, one of three semi-autobiographical novels she was to write later in her life, Jessie described her methods of decoration through the eyes of Lady Florence Hazleton, recently wed and attempting to instil some life into her new home, Hazleton Hall. ‘She had made it a very charming place – it was in every sense of the word an English home. She found beautiful old furniture in the garrets and basements, to which it had been relegated in those early Victorian days when eighteenth century taste was considered hideous and archaic. She hung the Indian draperies she had collected over screens and couches; she spread her Persian rugs over the old oak boards. The old pictures were cleaned and renovated, and among the Chippendale and Sheraton tables and chairs many a luxurious modern couch and arm-chair made the rooms as comfortable as they were picturesque.’[10] This could well have been a description of the Library at Sledmere, which was the first room on which Jessie made her mark. She plundered the house for furniture and artefacts of every kind, and soon the vast empty space in which her father-in-law had taken his daily exercise was filled to overflowing with chairs, tables, day-beds, china, pictures, screens, oriental rugs, bric-a-brac from Tatton’s travels and masses and masses of potted palms.


For the first two years of her marriage, Jessie threw herself into the role of being the mistress of a great house. She organized the servants, she breathed life into the rooms, she attended church and took up her deceased mother-in-law’s interest in good works and education, she read, wrote and hunted. She also tried hard to be a good wife, accompanying Tatton on his travels abroad, and to the many race meetings he attended when he was back home. But it was an uphill struggle. Twenty years later she was to say that she had never been to a party or out to dine with him since their marriage. She could never have guessed, when she took the fatal decision to bow to her mother’s wishes, the life that was in store for her with Tatton. Their characters were simply poles apart. While she had a longing for gaiety and company, he wished wherever possible to avoid the society of others.

Like his father, he seldom varied his routine. Each day he rose at six, and after taking a long walk in the park he would eat a large breakfast, before attending church. He spent the mornings dealing with business in the estate office, before returning to the house at noon for a plain lunch, which always featured a milk pudding. After lunch he would snooze, then return to the office for further business. He took a light supper and was in bed by eight. He did not smoke and the only alcohol that passed his lips was a wine glass of whisky diluted with a pint of Apollinaris water, which he drank every day after lunch. This was hardly a life that was going to keep a young wife happy for long, and her frustration and boredom were reflected in a pencil sketch she secretly made on the fly-leaf of a manuscript book. It depicts an old man lying stretched out asleep in a chair, snores coming out of his nose. Above him are written the poignant words ‘My evenings October 1876 – Quel rêve pour une jeune femme. J.S.’[11]


What changed life for Jessie was the eventual arrival of a child, though many years later she was to confide to her daughter-in-law that it had taken her husband six months to consummate the marriage, only with the utmost clumsiness, and when drunk. In spite of the rarity of their unions, however, she managed to get pregnant, and in August 1878 announced that she was expecting a child. The news was the cause of great rejoicing in Sledmere, all the more so when the child was born, on 6 March 1879, revealing itself to be the longed-for heir, a fact that must have delighted his father, who knew that his duty was now done. Though born in London, where his birth was registered in the district of St George’s Hanover Square, within a month he was brought up to Sledmere to be christened by the local vicar, the Rev. Newton Mant.

The ceremony, a full choral christening, took place in St Mary’s, the simple Georgian village church, its box pews filled to capacity with tenant farmers and workers and their families, all come to welcome the next-in-line, and each one of whom was presented with a special book printed to mark the occasion. The infant was traditionally named Tatton and Mark after his forefathers, while Jessie’s contribution was the insertion of Benvenuto as his middle name, an affirmation of her great joy at his arrival as well as a nod towards her love of Italy. When the ceremony was over, the doors of the big house were thrown open to one and all to partake of a christening banquet in the library, where tables laden with food were laid out end to end. Jessie was presented with the gift of a pearl necklace, and Mark, as he was always to be known, was cooed over and passed round by the village women.

Needless to say, Jessie’s mother was thrilled by the arrival of her grandson, as were Jessie’s friends and admirers. In one quarter only was there a singular lack of rejoicing at the birth of a new heir. Christopher Sykes, Tatton’s younger brother, was a sensitive, intelligent and charming bachelor of fifty-one who was MP for the East Riding, and a leading member of the Marlborough House set that revolved round Edward, Prince of Wales. He had been relying on his older brother to bail him out of his financial difficulties, which were the result of the constant and lavish entertaining of his Royal friend, both at his house in London, 1 Seamore Place, and at Brantingham Thorpe, his country home near Hull. The notion that his Tatton would ever marry, let alone sire a son, had never entered his mind, and when he managed both, the first came as a surprise, the second as a shock. ‘C.S.,’ wrote Sir George Wombwell, a Yorkshire neighbour, ‘don’t like it at all.’[12]

Though producing a son and heir had strengthened Jessie’s position immeasurably, she was as restless as ever and the next couple of years saw her indulging in a number of liaisons which set tongues wagging, beginning in 1880 with the dashing Captain George ‘Bay’ Middleton, one of England’s finest riders to hounds. When this flirtation ended, at the end of 1881, she took up with a German Baron called Heugelmüller, a serial womanizer who eventually ran off with her cousin Blanche, Lady Waterford. ‘Oh Blanche, how you have spoilt my life,’ she wrote miserably in her diary in August 1883. ‘He is selfish poor ugly and a foreigner, and yet I like him better than anyone or anything.’[13] Her unhappiness was compounded by the fact that in the summer of 1881 she also suffered a miscarriage. ‘That walk on Saturday, the consequence of so much quarrelling,’ wrote Captain Middleton in August 1881, ‘must have been too much for you, and am very sorry your second born should have come to such an untimely end. Altho’ the little beggar was very highly tried … Goodbye and hoping this will find you strong, but don’t play the fool too soon.’[14]

Jessie’s state of mind was noticed by a new acquaintance she had made, George Gilbert Scott Junior, a young Catholic architect who was working on the restoration of a local Yorkshire church at Driffield. Intrigued by the Sykeses’ strange marriage, and having strong links to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, he saw them as perfect subjects for conversion. ‘The Baronet is a serious, taciturn, melancholy man, who has no hobby or occupation but church-building,’ he wrote to Father Neville, secretary to Cardinal Newman at Birmingham Oratory. ‘It is his craze and he grudges no money upon it and yet he is not happy. With everything to make life sweet, abundant wealth, fair health, a keen enjoyment of open-air exercise, a splendid house, a noble library, a clever luxuriously beautiful wife, and a promising healthy young son, he is one of the most miserable of men, neglects his wife, his relations, his fellow-creatures generally, lavish in church-building, he is parsimonious to a degree in everything else, leaves his wife, whose vivacity and healthy sensuous temperament throw every possible temptation in the way of such a woman, moving in the highest society, exposed within his protection to the dangers of a disastrous faux pas and all this for want of direction … I want to interest yourself, and through you the Cardinal, in these two. The securance to the Catholic Church in England of a great name, a great estate, a great fortune, is in itself worth an effort … But to save from a miserable decadence two such characters (as I am convinced nothing but the Catholic Faith can do) is a still higher motive and venture respectfully to ask your prayers for their conversion …’[15]

It was in fact a road down which Jessie had been considering going. ‘You have not forgotten that many years ago I told you that I was in heart a Catholic,’ she wrote in a letter to an old friend and Yorkshire neighbour, Angela, Lady Herries, ‘only I had not the moral courage to change my religion.’ After ‘many struggles and many misgivings’, she told her, she was at last ready to embrace the faith, adding, ‘and I shall have the happiness of bringing my little child with me’.[16] It was a brave move considering that the Sykeses had been Anglicans since time immemorial, the six churches so recently built by her husband being monuments to their faith. She would have liked to persuade Tatton to join her, but he was reluctant to take the step for fear of offending the Protestant and Methodist villagers of Sledmere, even if he gave her the impression that he would consider doing so. ‘Sir Tatton, who as you know is of a nervous and retiring temperament and who dreads extremely publicity, has decided to wait to make his final profession when he intends he will be at Rome in the end of February.’[17]

Angela Herries, sister-in-law to the Duke of Norfolk, the head of England’s leading Catholic family, was delighted to hear the news of the conversion. It was through her family connections that Jessie had been given an introduction to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward Manning, and she was pleased that he had not wasted the opportunity of adding another wayward soul to his flock. He had indeed taken a very personal interest in Jessie, who bared her soul to him in her letters. ‘Since I returned from London,’ she wrote to him in November 1882, ‘I have thought much and sadly of all the wasted opportunities and the useless and worthless life I have led up to the present time, thinking of nothing but my own amusement, and living without any religion at all for so many years. I sometimes fear that the voice of conscience and power of repentance has died away from me and that I shall never be able to lead a good or Christian life. I feel too how terribly imperfect up till now my attempts at a Confession have been, and how many and grave sins I have from shame omitted to mention …’[18]

With Lady Herries and Lord Norreys acting as her godparents, and Lady Gwendolyn Talbot and the Duke of Norfolk as Mark’s, Jessie and her son were received into the Catholic Church at the end of November. The conversion caused some upset in Sledmere, as Tatton had predicted it would, and in an attempt to soften the blow Cardinal Manning wrote a ‘long and eloquent’ exposition on the subject for the vicar of Sledmere, the Rev. Mr Pattenhorne. Nevertheless, Jessie was riddled with guilt at the unhappiness she had caused to him and his congregation. Her inner struggles continued, and she was devastatingly self-critical in her letters to Manning. ‘I … fear steady everyday useful commonplace goodness is beyond my reach,’ she told him. ‘Honestly I am sorry for this – I have alas! no deep enthusiasm, no burning longings for perfection, no terrible fears of Hell – I am wanting in all the moral qualities and sensations which I have been led to believe were the first tokens and messages of God the Holy Spirit working in the Human heart.’[19]

In taking Mark with her into the Catholic Church, Jessie well and truly staked her claim on him, and there is no doubt that she was the overwhelming influence upon him as he grew up. To her, children were simply small adults who should quickly learn how to stand on their own two feet. As soon as Mark had started to master the most basic principles of language, she began to share with him her great love of literature and the theatre. As well as the children’s books of the day – the fairy tales of Grimm, Hans Andersen and George Macdonald, the stories of Charles Kingsley and Lewis Carroll, the tales of adventure of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson – she read him her own favourites, Swift, Dickens and Shakespeare, much of which she could quote from memory. She encouraged him to dress up and act out plays, and she was delighted when he began to develop a talent for mimicry and caricature.

By regaling him with tales of her travels across the world, and of all the people she had met and the strange sights she had seen, Jessie also gave Mark a sense of place and of history. She described to him the architectural wonders of medieval Christendom, and told him of the important ideas and ideals which grew out of the Renaissance. Fascinated by politics since childhood, she brought to life for him all the great statesmen and prominent figures of the past, heaping scorn on modern politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, none of whom had any romance. She also passed on to him her hatred of humbug. The result of all this was that by the age of seven he was thoroughly precocious.

With Tatton away so much of the year on his travels, if anyone was a father to Mark, it was old Tom Grayson, the retired stud groom, who had been at Sledmere since the days of his grandfather. A tall, white-haired old man in his eighties, with a strong weather-beaten face and a kindly smile, he was an inseparable companion to his young master, a friendship that brought great happiness to his declining years.


He taught him to ride – ‘this is t’thod generation Ah’ve taught ti’ride,’ he loved to boast, – and helped him look after his pride and joy, an ever-growing pack of fox terriers. He also contributed greatly to his education, sharing with him his great knowledge of nature and the countryside, and inspiring his imagination with tales of local folklore and legend, which gave him a strong sense of locality and of his origins.

Grayson was like a rock to his charge. As a highly intelligent and sensitive child Mark could hardly have failed to be affected by the worsening relations between his parents, and when things got bad he always knew he could escape to the kennels or the stables. By the mid-1880s, Tatton was getting increasingly parsimonious and difficult, while Jessie had taken a lover, a young German Jew of her own age, Lucien de Hirsch, whom she had met some time in 1884, and with whom she had discovered a mutual fascination with the civilization of the Ancient Greeks. In a sizeable correspondence, she shared with him details of the tribulations she was forced to suffer at the hands of ‘the Alte Herr’, the old man, which was the nickname they gave Tatton: ‘that vile old Alte,’ she wrote in the summer of 1885, ‘has been simply too devilish – last night when I got back from hunting – very tired and very cold – he saluted me with the news that he had spent the afternoon going to the Bank and playing me some tricks, and after dinner, when I remonstrated with him and told him this kind of thing could not continue. He pulled my hair and kicked me, and told me if I had not such an ugly face, I might get someone to pay my bills instead of himself … I was afraid to hit him back because I am so much stronger I might hurt him.’[20]

The times Jessie dreaded most were the trips abroad with Tatton, taken during the winter months, long journeys of three months or more which separated her from her son as well as her lover. ‘Je suis excessivement malheureuse,’ she wrote to Lucien from Paris on 4 November, en route to India, ‘de quitter mon enfant – qui est vraiment le seul être au monde excepté toi que je desire ardemment revoir.’[21] On these trips Tatton would become obsessed about his health, exhibiting a hypochondria that often bordered on the edge of insanity. ‘We mounted on board our Wagon Lits’, she wrote, ‘and passed a singularly unpleasant night. He had a cabin all to himself, and my maid and I shared the next one. I took as I always do the top bed and was just going to sleep when the Alte roused us and everyone on the car with the news his bed was hard and uncomfortable. We made him alright, as we thought, and all went to sleep. In about 2 hours, tremendous knocking and cries of Help! Help! proceeded from Sir T’s cabin. It then appeared he had turned the bolt in his lock and could not get out. Such a performance – shrieks and cries – it was nearly an hour before we got his door open and then he was in a pitiable state.’[22]

His extraordinary habits also drove Jessie to distraction. He had for example a mania about food. He would not eat at regular hours, forcing her to eat alone, while his own mealtimes were often erratic. Every two hours or so he would devour large quantities of half-raw mutton chops, accompanied by cold rice pudding, all prepared by his own personal cook and eaten in the privacy of his bedchamber. ‘He has also adopted an unpleasing habit,’ wrote Jessie, ‘of chewing the half-raw mutton, but not swallowing it, a process the witnessing of which is more curious than pleasant.’[23] He took no exercise, and when not driving about in his carriage lay on his bed ‘in a sort of coma’.[24] At night he would often call Jessie to his room as much as eight times, leaving her frazzled from lack of sleep.

Of all his obsessive whims, however, the most worrying was his fixation that he was going to die. ‘The Alte is a sad trial,’ she wrote to Lucien on 20 December, from Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta. ‘About 2 this morning Gotherd and I were woken by loud shrieks and the words “I am dying, dying, dying (crescendo)”. We both jumped up thinking at least he had broken a blood vessel – We found absolutely nothing was the matter … We were nearly two hours trying to pacify him. He clutched us … and went on soliloquising to this effect, “Oh dear! I am dying, I shall never see Sledmere again, oh you wicked woman. Why don’t you cry? Some wives would be in hysterics – to see your poor husband dropping to pieces before your eyes – oh God have pity. Oh Jessie my bowels are gone, Oh Gotherd my stomach is quite decayed, my knees have given way, Oh Jessie Jessie – Oh Lord have mercy.”[25] ‘This is not a bit exaggerated,’ she added, ‘quite the contrary’, concluding, ‘My darling, I think of you every day, I dream of you every night …’[26]

In January 1887, Jessie was at Sledmere and beside herself with fury because of the latest of Tatton’s outrages. She loved to sit in the Library, which she had filled with palms and various potted plants. ‘I am very fond of them,’ she wrote to Lucien, ‘and when quite or so much alone there is a certain companionship in seeing them.’ The room being so large, however, and having eleven windows, it was only made habitable by having two fires lit in it. Having gone away for a few days, she had instructed the servants to keep a small fire burning in one of the grates until she returned. ‘After my departure,’ she wrote, ‘the Alte in one of his economical fits ordered no fires to be made till my return. The frost was terribly severe – the gardener knew nothing of the retrenchment of fuel and when he came three days later to look round the plants he found them all dead or dying from the cold.’[27] Morale throughout the household appears to have been at a very low ebb. ‘The confusion here is dreadful, everyone is so cross, all the servants quite demoralized. Broadway leaves Monday – I am very sorry for him – The coachman cries all day – I can do nothing! Gotherd is in a fiendish temper – and the Alte is in his most worrying state.’[28]

However snobbish and scheming Jessie’s mother may have been, she had a soft spot for her grandson, and was increasingly worried about the effect that both the general atmosphere at Sledmere, and his parents’ frequent absences abroad might be having on him. They were often away for months at a time, and she saw how he was left in a household with eleven female servants, and only three males, around whom he apparently ran rings: ‘if he remains for much longer surrounded by a pack of admiring servants,’ continued his grandmother, ‘and with no refined well-educated person to look after him … and check him if he is not civil in his manners, he will become completely unbearable … When he goes to Sledmere he is made the Toy and idol of the place and each servant indulges him as they please.’[29] His burgeoning ego needed stemming, and she felt strongly that the way to achieve this was to engage a tutor for him. She made her feelings known to Jessie. ‘He is a charming child and most intelligent and precocious, which under the circumstances makes one tremble, for there is no doubt that he is now quite beyond the control of women.’[30] For a start, engaging a tutor for Mark would give him a male companion other than the elderly Grayson, to ease the loneliness of his life at Sledmere. Jessica herself admitted this in a letter to Lucien, on the eve of another trip abroad, this time to Jerusalem. ‘The house is to be quite shut up, all the servants that are left to be on board-wages, the horse turned out, and poor little Mark left by himself … and not a soul in whom I have any confidence in the neighbourhood to look after him.’[31] She set out on her travels having even forgotten to buy him a birthday present, writing to Lucien in February, from Jerusalem, ‘March 16th is Mark’s birthday – it would be very kind of you if you would send him a little toy from Paris for it – as I fear the poor child will get no presents, and he would be so delighted.’[32]

Up till now, the elementary part of Mark’s education had taken place at Sledmere village school. Here he had learned to write and spell under the worthy schoolmaster, Mr Thelwell, but had shown little aptitude for other studies: ‘he was not a diligent scholar,’ commented Thelwell; ‘book-work was drudgery; but having great powers of observation and a splendid memory, he stored a mass of information’.[33] Almost everything else he had learned, he had done so at his mother’s knee, so in 1887 Jessie gave in to her mother and hired a young tutor, Alfred Dowling, whom Mark nicknamed ‘Doolis’. No sooner had he arrived than his new charge had dragged him up to see the Library, which he said was the only ‘schoolroom’ he ever loved. ‘I wish you could see the library here,’ he was later to write to his fiancée, Edith Gorst, ‘it is really very interesting. Going into a library that has stopped in the year 1796 is like going back a hundred years. Everything is there of the time. In the drawers is the correspondence dated for that year. In the cupboards are the ledgers and rent rolls of the last century. If I stayed in it long I, too, would be of the last century, because everything there is of the same date, from fishing rods to the newspapers.’[34]


‘I enjoyed an advantage over most of my age,’ he was to write in a memoir, ‘in having access to the very large library at Sledmere, and, before I was twelve, I was quite familiar with the volumes of Punch and the Illustrated London News for many years back.’[35] He was particularly fascinated by military history, inspired no doubt by the large collection of old uniforms and muskets which lay about the house, a reminder of the days when his ancestor Sir Christopher Sykes had, in 1798, raised a troop of yeomanry to defend the Wolds against the French, and amongst his favourite books were Marshal Saxe’s Reveries on the Art of War and Vauban’s seventeenth-century treatise New Methods of Fortification. There were other rarer and more forbidden books too, such as Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights, the footnotes of which, with their anthropological observations on Arab sexual practices such as bestiality, sodomy, eunuchism, clitoridectomy and miscegenation, all contributed to his sexual education.

It was a bout of illness at this time that heralded the beginning of what was to be the most important part of Mark’s schooling. He was bedridden for a few months with what was diagnosed as ‘a congestion of the lungs’,[36] and when he recovered it was decided that the damp climate of Yorkshire winters was the worst thing possible for him. From then on he was to spend the winter months abroad travelling, at first with both his parents, and later, when Jessie ceased to accompany Tatton on these journeys, with his father alone. In the autumn of 1888, he made his first trip abroad, to Egypt, where he acquired a fascination for and some knowledge of antiquities from the cicerone of the ruling Sirdar, Lord Grenfell, to whom Tatton had been given an introduction. This elderly guide later recalled him as having been ‘the most intelligent boy I had ever met. Mark took the greatest possible interest in my growing museum; he very soon mastered the rudiments of the study; he could read the cartouches containing the names of various kings, and, with me, studied … hieroglyphics.[37]


In Cairo, Mark made a new friend in George Bowles, the son of an old admirer of Jessie, Thomas Bowles, who was staying with his family at Shepheard’s Hotel. They accompanied the Sykeses on a trip up the Nile, and the two boys became inseparable. Soon they were exploring on their own and Mark passed on to George his new passion for ancient artefacts. At Thebes the two boys bought themselves a genuine mummified head. ‘That it will one day find its way into the soup,’ wrote Thomas in his diary, ‘unless it soon gets thrown overboard I feel little doubt.’ They were nicknamed ‘the two English baby-boys by the Arabs’ and ‘distinguished themselves by winning two donkey races at the local Gymkhana, Mark having carried off the race with saddles, and George the bare-backed race; but two days ago they fell out, and proceeded to settle their differences by having a fight according to the rules of the British prize ring, in the ruins of Karnak – a battle which much astonished the donkey-boys. Having shaken hands, however, at the end of their little mill, they are now faster friends than ever, and are at present, I understand, organising a deep-laid plot to get hold of an entire mummy and take it to England for the benefit of their friends and the greater glory of what they call their museum.’[38]

This was the first of many trips that Mark was to make over the next ten years, which were to contribute more to his general development and education than anything he ever learned at school. ‘Before I was fifteen,’ he later wrote, ‘I visited Assouan, which was then almost the Dervish frontier … Then I went to India when Lord Lansdowne was Viceroy. I did some exploration in the Arabian desert, enjoying myself bare-footed amongst the Arabs, and I paid a trip to Mexico, reaching there just when Porfirio Diaz was attaining the zenith of his power.’[39]

In the spring of 1890, aged eleven, Mark returned from a trip with his father to the Lebanon to find that, against the wishes of his father, who would have preferred Harrow, he had been enrolled by his mother as a junior student at Beaumont College, Windsor, a Roman Catholic school often called ‘the Catholic Eton’. She chose the school, which stood on rising ground near the Thames at Old Windsor, bordering the Great Park, not for religious reasons, but because it was more likely to nurture an unorthodox character such as Mark’s. The Rector, Father William Heathcote, was a known libertarian who believed that qualities such as humour and loyalty should be encouraged. She also approved of the emphasis placed by the school on theatre.

Having been exposed to far more than most boys of his age, and with his precocious and rather rebellious nature, Mark was an object of curiosity from the very moment he arrived at his new school. ‘He was quite unlike any other boy,’ wrote a contemporary, Wilfred Bowring, ‘and most of the boys certainly thought him eccentric. He took no part in the games, but soon gathered round him and under him all the loiterers and loafers in playroom and playground.’[40] Instead of organized games, he devised elaborate war games and could often be seen charging across the playground, perhaps in the guise of an Arab warrior, or a Red Indian chief. ‘I can recollect him now’, continued Bowring, ‘at the head of a motley gang, all waving roughly made tomahawks, charging across the playground to meet an opposing band.’[41] He kept a stock of stag beetles, with which he amused people by getting them intoxicated on the school beer, and was also the subject of much hilarity on account of his haphazard manner of dressing and his scruffy appearance, a trait shared by his close friend Cedric Dickens. ‘I can see the two of them,’ recalled Cedric’s brother Henry, ‘wandering into a certain catechism class … on Saturday afternoons, always dishevelled and invariably steeped in ink to the very bone. It must have taken years to get that ink out … I can see him too pretending to hang himself by the neck in a roller towel in the lavatory, and precious nearly succeeding too, by an accident! It was my hand that liberated him. So far as my observation went, never doing a stroke of school work.’[42]

It is a tribute to the monks of Beaumont that they made no attempt to force Mark into a mould into which he was not going to fit. Accepting that he would never have to earn a living, they seemed instead content with teaching him his religion. They made little attempt to ensure he did his school work, and his exercise books, rather than being crammed with Latin vocabulary and translations, were filled with entertaining histories based on Virgil and Cicero, illustrated with witty caricatures, a talent he had inherited from his mother. When Jessie, as she did from time to time, swooped down on the school to remove him to far-off places, the authorities simply turned a blind eye. ‘On several occasions,’ remembered Wilfred Bowring, ‘Lady Sykes, generally half-way through term, announced that she proposed to take Mark on a journey of indefinite length. Mark vanished from our ken for about six months, when he reappeared laden with curios from the countries he had visited. These curios nearly always took the shape of lethal weapons, most welcome gifts for his school cronies. He returned from these trips with a smattering of strange tongues … full of the habits, customs, history and folk-lore of the countries he had visited.’[43] Most boys, one might expect, would have been spoiled by this kind of upbringing. ‘Not so Mark,’ wrote one of his teachers, Father Cuthbert Elwes. ‘Though he was undoubtedly a remarkably intelligent and intensely amusing boy, his chief charm was his great simplicity and openness of character and entire freedom from human respect.’[44]

On his return to school, he invariably attracted a large crowd around him to listen to the extraordinary stories he had to tell. Sitting cross-legged and often puffing on a hubble-bubble, he regaled them with tales of being taken by his father to a mountain in the desert that was home to ‘the weird Druses of Lebanon’, whom few schoolboys could name, let alone place; of sleeping in tents on the edge of the Sea of Galilee; and of the dreadful scenes he witnessed in the lunatic asylum in Damascus, where wretched madmen imprisoned in tiny kennels, each six feet by five, ‘clamoured and howled the lifelong day; over their ankles in their own ordure, naked save for their chains, these wretched beings shrieked and jibbered! Happy were those who, completely insane, laughed and sang in this inferno.’[45]

‘He was a consummate actor,’ wrote Father Elwes. ‘On a wet day, when all the boys were assembled together in the playroom, he would stand on the table and entertain his schoolfellows with a stump speech which would go on indefinitely.’[46] His talents for acting and story-telling found their truest expression when he went up to the senior school in 1892, and they gained him the only award he was ever to win at school, the elocution prize for a play he wrote and directed himself, ‘A Hyde Park Demonstration’, in which he took the leading role of the orator. He also published his first piece of writing, an article for the first issue of the Beaumont Review, entitled ‘Night in a Mexican Station’, which was an account of an incident that had taken place during a trip to Mexico he had made with his father during the winter of 1891–2. They had taken an overnight train to the north of the country, and Mark demonstrated his powers of observation in his amusing descriptions of some of the passengers in the different carriages. Those in the ‘Palace on Wheels’, for example, included ‘The Yankeeized Mexican – viz, a Mexican in frock coat and top hat; the “Rurales” officer, a gorgeous combination of leather, silver and revolvers, etc; the American “drummer”, a commercial traveller …; and lastly, the conductor – a lantern-jawed U.S. franchised Citizen, a voice several degrees sharper than a steam saw.’[47]

One boy who fell under Mark’s spell during this period was his cousin, Tom Ellis, who had left Eton to enroll at Beaumont, a move that had been engineered by Jessie, who considered him a perfect companion for her son. ‘About 1894,’ he later wrote, ‘I was enveloped in one of her whirlwind moods by Jessica and flung into the society of a large, round, amiable boy of my own age. Three years of Cheam and one of Eton had produced a sort of palaeolithic cave-boy in me with a crust of classical education. Even so I think it took me about three minutes to succumb completely to Mark’s charm, even though he opened the conversation by demanding my opinion on the Fourth Dimension … I think Mark was as lonely as I was, for he adopted me and added me to the retinue which he employed for his romantic purposes.’[48]

Ellis often spent his holidays at Sledmere, which, he later recalled, ‘was to a boy of my age remarkably like fairyland. That is, anything might happen at any moment, and strange things did happen at odd moments … Strangest of all were the queer evenings when theoretically Mark and I were both abed and asleep. I would wander alone to Mark’s room, and whilst the elders played poker savagely Mark would talk high and disposedly of everything in the world and often of things not even discussed in public. It was my great good fortune to be introduced to the vile and ignoble things of the world by the only soul I have known who seemed to be completely proved against them. All those sexual matters, that are hinted at, boggled, hatched and evaded until the boy is initiated into a mystery in the grubby way of experience, were for Mark either dreary commonplace or subjects suited to Homeric laughter. At the same time Mark maintained that high matters should be gravely discussed with the aid of a two-stemmed hubble-bubble.’[49]

Mark was fifteen now and driven by an insatiable curiosity about the world. Everything he read about he was keen to put into practice. Military history was still one of his passions and he eagerly introduced his new friend to Vauban’s New Methods of Fortification. No longer satisfied with merely looking at the diagrams, he decided they should bring them to life: ‘nothing would satisfy Mark but a model siege upon the lawn,’ recalled Ellis, ‘so shortly there rose a fortress about ten foot square, laid out strictly according to Vauban, bastions, lunettes, redans and all else. Guns were represented by door bolts, and I was told off to invest the fortress scientifically. With a saloon rifle apiece, we fired alternate shots, but any digging involved the loss of a shot. This meant that I dug madly while Mark shot … By the third day of the siege the lawn was a nightmare. I had closed upon the doomed fortress, and, joy of joys, I looked like beating Mark at one of his own games. About this moment Sir Tatton glanced at what had once been a fair lawn and was now a mole’s Walpurgis night. I faded into the horizon, but Mark came out of the situation manfully. Sir Tatton was then ploughing up the park “to sweeten the ground”. And Mark maintained that our performance was doing the same for the lawn!’[50]

These military games became more and more elaborate, with Mark calling on children from the village to play the part of troops, which he, being the young master, could command without opposition. He devised complicated battles in the park and paddocks, in which he devoted great attention to the working out of tactics and the designing of fortifications. Poor old Grayson often found himself drawn into these. ‘Witness the battle of Sledmere Church,’ remembered Tom Ellis, ‘which nearly brought about the death of Grayson … Mark ordained that the church was to stand the onslaught of the heretics, represented by old Grayson and the twins of Jones, the jockey. After a prolonged siege the heretics attempted to take the outer palisades of the church by escalade, and were repulsed with one casualty. Old Grayson, being eighty, was not of an age to stand a fall from a fifteen-foot ladder.’[51]

But not all was fun and games in Mark’s life, far from it. Tom Ellis wrote of ‘nightmare scenes amongst the grown-ups that faded as strangely as they began … Through these Mark walked quite steadily, with myself trailing dutifully in pursuit.’[52] The fact is that his mother’s behaviour was steadily deteriorating, and had been since the spring of 1887, when her lover, Lucien de Hirsch, had died suddenly in Paris of pneumonia, while she was in Damascus with Tatton. It had broken her heart, for in the short time she had spent with him she had had a glimpse of what life could have been like for her had she married a man of her own age and with her own interests. Both the knowledge of this and the loss of him proved too much to bear and she began to lose control. As part of a deal she had struck with Tatton before setting out on their last trip to the Middle East, that she would stay with him in Palestine as long as he wished, he had agreed to take a lease on a London house for her, 46 Grosvenor St. This is where she retreated when she returned home and where she was to spend more and more time in the years to come. Away from ‘the Alte’ and with a healthy disrespect for the conventions of society, she attempted to drown her sorrows in a hedonistic lifestyle. Soon the grand ground-floor rooms of this impressive Mayfair house were filled with the scent of cigarette smoke – smoking was a habit forbidden at Sledmere – and the sounds of merry-making, dominated by the rattle of the dice and the clink of the bottle, two vices to which Jessie was to become increasingly addicted.

There were more lovers too, mostly dashing army officers who took advantage of her generosity and did nothing to improve her state of mind. As her drinking increased, so did her indiscretions, until the vicious gossips and jealous spinsters of London drawing-rooms were whispering in each other’s ears with undisguised pleasure the new name coined for her by one of the wittier amongst them. To them she was no longer Lady Tatton Sykes, but Lady Satin Tights. ‘Nevertheless,’ she had written to Cardinal Manning in 1882, ‘I have … a real reverence for goodness and wisdom … and a desire … to try and utterly abandon my sinful and useless life.’[53] She did not give up the struggle. Society may have laughed at her behind her back, but amongst the poor and needy she was revered and blessed with a kinder nickname – ‘Lady Bountiful’. When she was at Sledmere, much of her time was spent in daily visits to dispense food, clothing or money to families in need, while in Hull, where slum housing and conditions for the poor were particularly bad, she was something of a heroine. She was known particularly for her work on behalf of poor children, and Lady Sykes’s Christmas Treat, for the Catholic children of Prynne Street, had become an important annual event. ‘I gave a Tea in Hull for the children of the Catholic School,’ she had written to Lucien on 31 December 1886, ‘which lasted from midday till 6.30 … There were 520 children, and I was carving meat for three hours. I think they enjoyed themselves poor things. Certainly they were very poor and 21 boys and 1 girl amongst them had no shoes or stockings, and in this bitter weather too. We made a huge sandwich for each child and gave them besides various mince pies and cakes. It was a great pleasure to me.’[54]

Nor was her charity confined to Sledmere. She lived at a time when philanthropy was almost a social imperative and in London there was no shortage of directions in which she might turn her attention. Her particular interest was the Catholic poor in the East End, mostly Irish immigrants who were flooding in to look for jobs which were better paid than back home, or at least thought to be so. In they swarmed into the cheapest and already most overcrowded districts, creating appalling slum ghettoes from which it was difficult for them to escape. ‘Whilst we have been building our churches,’ thundered the author of a pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ‘and solacing ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and the immoral more corrupt.’[55] It was typical of Jessie to combine her social life and her charity work in a flamboyant style and she would often astonish people by leaving a party in full swing and going straight to the East End to dispense soup. Still dressed in her ball gown and sparkling jewels, she appeared to the homeless like a fairytale princess.

Though she now led a life which was increasingly independent from her husband, Jessie was still Lady Sykes and she continued to play that role as she was needed, acting, for example, as Tatton’s travelling companion. She accompanied him to Russia in 1887, India in 1888 and Egypt in 1889. Her powers of flirtation remained undiminished and each trip netted her new admirers. In Russia a General Churchyard fell under her spell. In India, two young men, Richard Braithwaite and David Wallace, were rivals for her love, but it was in Egypt that she came closest to finding again the happiness she had felt with Lucien when she embarked on an affair with Eldon Gorst, a young diplomat and rising star in the Foreign Office who had been assigned to the British Consulate-General in Cairo. For two years they conducted a passionate relationship with periods of great happiness interspersed with the heartbreak of separation. There could be no future in their union, which, when it finally broke up, left them both heartbroken. Jessie was inconsolable.

Aged thirty-six, her sadness compounded in April 1891 by the death of her beloved father, she felt her life was beginning to cave in on her. Over the next two years, her drinking became heavier, her promiscuity more flagrant, and she began to haunt bookmakers’ shops and the premises of money-lenders, while those who cared for her looked on in horror, powerless to help, foremost amongst them her fifteen-year-old son.

## Chapter 2. Trials and Tribulations

Watching his mother’s slow deterioration was extremely difficult for Mark, and for the first time in his life, he began to dread her visits to Beaumont, fearing that she would be begging him to intervene on her behalf with his father, or, worse still, that she would be drunk. ‘I can still see Lady Sykes,’ recalled Henry Dickens, ‘descending on Beaumont like a thunderbolt, entering into tremendous fights with Father Heathcote, the then and equally pugnacious rector.’[1] At home he felt increasingly isolated, having no one to whom he could really turn. His tutor, ‘Doolis’, had left, as had his replacement, Mr Beresford, and his worries about Jessie were not the kind of thing he would have discussed with Grayson or any of the house servants. He began to spend more and more time with his terriers, the pack of which numbered six, and he took comfort in eating, which caused his weight to balloon. Then just at a time when he was at his most vulnerable, he formed a new friendship, in the form of the nineteen-year-old daughter of his father’s coachman, Tom Carter. Alice Carter, whose father had come to Sledmere from the neighbouring estate of Castle Howard, was anything but the ‘village maiden’. Tall, good-looking and stylishly dressed, she had a job as a teacher in the village school, and when she met Mark up at the house stables, he immediately captivated her. To an intelligent and literate girl such as her, who had seen little of the world, he was a romantic figure, fascinating her with tales of his travels through the Ottoman Empire, and impressing her with his fluency in Oriental languages. She also saw that he was very lonely.

Mark took Alice for walks with the dogs, rode with her, showed her all his favourite places in the park and in the house, and they spent many happy hours in the Library, where he showed her his best-loved books and read her stories from the Arabian Nights. He gave her a present of an inkwell made from the hoof of a favourite pony he had had as a child. A strong attraction soon developed between them, the eventual outcome of which was the consummation of their affair, in Alice’s recollection, on the floor of the Farm Dairy.[2] The romance lasted long enough for them to plan to elope to London, which they managed to accomplish for a short while. To keep such an affair secret in a tight-knit community such as Sledmere was, however, impossible, and gossip meant that they were soon tracked down by Jessie and forcibly separated, leaving them both distraught.

The repercussions of this affair were far-reaching. The Carter family had to leave Sledmere and were sent to London, where employment was found for them in Grosvenor Street, while Alice was set up in a house round the corner in Mount Street. Tatton was angry enough to threaten to disinherit his son, a step which Jessie somehow managed to dissuade him from. Instead, he was immediately removed from Beaumont School and forbidden from accompanying his father on his annual trip to the East. Instead he spent the winter of 1894 alone at Sledmere with his terriers, from whom he could not bear to be separated, and with a new tutor, a young Catholic called Egerton Beck, who was widely read and already the author of a number of papers on monastic history. A man of impeccable dress and manners, with a fascination for the past, he hit it off at once with his new charge, of whom he was to become a lifelong friend. Mark could not wait to take Beck into the Library, where they spent hours studying the papers of the Sykes ancestors, poring over the wonderful folios of engravings by Piranesi, and devouring the military histories that Mark loved so much.

In the spring of 1895, at the age of sixteen, Mark was sent abroad, to an Italian Jesuit school in Monaco, an unusual choice inspired by his mother’s friendship with the then Princess of Monaco, the former Alice, Duchess of Richelieu, whom Jessie had met in Paris, at one of her celebrated salons in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Jessie, Beck and three of his terriers accompanied him there, and they moved into a rented house, the terriers living out on the flat roof. ‘The atmosphere at Monte Carlo,’ Mark later wrote, ‘was a peculiar one for a boy of my years. It is quite natural to think of people going there for pleasure, but for study seems rather curious. I knew everything about the inner workings of the tables and knew most of the croupiers.’ Not as well as Jessie, however, who haunted the tables while her son was at school. One day word got out that she had disgraced herself by flinging her hat down on the table in fury after sustaining a particularly large loss.

As for the school itself, which Mark attended as a day-boy, he found the discipline stifling after the relaxed atmosphere of Beaumont, and much of his time was taken up with his terriers, whose number had grown to eight by the time they returned to England in July. Sadly in the autumn he had to leave them behind when he left for Brussels to undergo the final part of his education before going up to university, a stint at the Institut de Saint-Louis, a slightly less rigid school than the one in Monaco, but where the boys were still ‘very much overworked’. He was to take lodgings in a hotel during the term-time, which unfortunately forbade pets, so he had to bid farewell to his little family, with whom he was eventually reunited at Christmas.

Amongst the guests staying in the house that December was Jessie’s former admirer Thomas Gibson Bowles, with his daughters, Sydney and Dorothy, who was nicknamed ‘Weenie’. Sydney wrote an account of the stay in her diary. They arrived on Christmas Eve. It was snowing heavily and the Sykeses were giving a Christmas party in the house for the tenants. ‘Two whole cows [were] cut up, and the mince pies were without number. There were … fifty or sixty people come for the beef and we were struck by their good-looking, well-fed appearance.’ At dinner, Jessie gave presents to the two girls, a ‘lovely little box’ to Sydney and ‘a handsome writing desk’ to Weenie. ‘Lady Sykes is very nice and extremely kind-hearted,’ she noted.

On Christmas Day, which was ‘all snow and glitter’, a ‘great number of Carol singers came round all day, beginning as soon as we got down to breakfast’, but there was no church since Tatton had demolished the existing one in order to build a much grander Gothic church. Instead ‘Father Theodore and Mark and I and Grayson and the dogs (an ugly little crew of ten fox terriers) went for a long walk through the wood.’ She later noted, ‘Mark keeps ten together in order to observe their habits when living in lots. One of their habits is that when their leader gets old, they kill and eat him!’ At lunch they had the nicest crackers she had ever seen. ‘There was one I should think quite a yard and a half long, which Mark and I pulled. It went off with such a bang that Tap was quite frightened.’

Sydney found Tatton very kind, but also thought him rather silly. ‘It is impossible to help laughing at him,’ she wrote. ‘For instance, Mark is still very fat, too fat really, though not so bad as he used to be. But Sir Tatton, seeing him a trifle thinner than when he last saw him, said “Ah Yes! Yes! Wasting away, wasting away.” I roared. I simply couldn’t help it.’ There were more crackers at dinner, after which they played charades ‘which were very funny,’ noted Sydney. ‘One word was “Preposterous”, another “Drunk-ard”, another “Dyna-mite”, etc, etc. Mark seems to have a great talent for acting among his other accomplishments.’[3]

This was to be the last happy Christmas that Mark was to spend at Sledmere for many years to come, for life was about to take a terrible downward spiral. To begin with, the relationship between his parents had reached a new low. His mother’s drinking had reached the point where her faithful maid, Gotherd, had on several occasions to hide her scent to prevent her drinking that too, as well as resorting, when her mistress was in a particularly bad state, to such tactics as hiding her stays so that she could not go out and disgrace herself on the street. She was also severely in debt. As early as 1890, for example, she had owed as much as £10,000, a staggering sum equivalent to over £1,000,000 at today’s values, and, when pressed for the money by the Union Bank, had given them a letter purporting to be a guarantee for that amount signed by Tatton. When the bank had asked him to confirm this, he had denied that the signature was his. Jessie told him he was mad to suggest that she would commit such a fraud, and to avoid a scandal Tatton had paid up, but the incident had shaken him.

At 46 Grosvenor Street, the bills were piling up. To pay them, Jessie was borrowing money from unscrupulous moneylenders – a Mr Sam Lewis was one, a Signor Sanguinetti another – at the most exorbitant interest rates, and she was speculating on the stock market. She often found herself borrowing from one person merely to pay back another. She even sank to asking Mark to lend her money from his allowance. This time Tatton, supported by the bank, put his foot down and refused to help her, a decision in which he was also backed up by his new land-agent, his nephew, Henry Cholmondeley. In the winter of 1896, Tatton’s advisers, in particular a ruthless lawyer called Thomas Gardiner, Deputy Sheriff to the City of London, persuaded him to go one step further. A recent amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 stipulated that a husband would be declared free from all debts subsequently incurred by his wife if he advertised his refusal to pay up in a daily newspaper. In spite of his abject horror of the impending publicity, and the fact that this was hardly a gentlemanly thing to do, Tatton went ahead and became the first man ever to publish such a notice. It appeared in various newspapers on the morning of 7 December.

I, SIR TATTON SYKES, Baronet, of Sledmere, in the County of York, and No. 46 Grosvenor Street in the County of London, hereby give notice that I will NOT be RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS or ENGAGEMENTS which my wife, LADY JESSICA CHRISTINA SYKES, may contract, whether purporting to be on my behalf or by my authority or otherwise.

In desperation Jessie now took to gambling and was soon losing sums as high as £530 a week at the tables and in the bookmakers’ shops. Her behaviour began to lose her friends, including Blanche Howard de Walden, the mother of Mark’s friend Tom Ellis. A nervous and delicate woman, she became afraid of Jessie, and put an end to the friendship between their sons. ‘I must admit,’ Tom later wrote, ‘that Jessica, partially caged and embittered, was terrifying. At last Mark and I saw that our friendship could not continue. Mark had been more than a friend. He had been a sort of miraculous Philistine striding through the difficult age of adolescence and bowling over the conventions that I could only blindly resent. We had never talked of religion and we had never discussed our mothers. These two things we kept sacred. We knew what was putting us apart, and I think it was bad for both of us. The parting had to come, and Mark shook hands with me a little ruefully and said suddenly “If we meet again we shall smile at this. If not, then was this parting well made.”’[4]

It is hard to believe that this enforced separation would not have left some ice in Mark’s heart, though what happened next was far worse, and may have inspired his former tutor, ‘Doolis’, to warn him, ‘Unless you strive and fight against circumstances, you will grow up a worthless, cruel, hard-hearted, frivolous man.’[5] He returned from Brussels for the Easter holidays, and instead of his terriers racing out of the house to greet him, barking wildly, tails wagging and tongues eager to lick his face, there was no sign of them. There was silence. The servants would not look him in the eye. Then, under instruction from his father, one of the grooms took him down Sylvia’s Grove, a long carriage drive named after his great-grandfather’s favourite dog. There, beneath a tall beech tree by an iron gate, he met with a dreadful sight; the bodies of his beloved dogs, suspended from a branch, hanged to death on the orders of his father.

The fit of blind rage on his father’s behalf that inspired such a vicious and cruel act was the result of him having found out that Alice Carter had given birth to Mark’s child, a boy she had named George. It was a fact of which Mark was ignorant and was to remain so for the rest of his life. Though Jessie had succeeded in keeping the pregnancy a secret from Tatton, it had been impossible to prevent him finding out once the child was born, as she felt strongly that she had to persuade him to take financial responsibility, and it is a tribute to her strength of character that she managed to achieve this. She then arranged for Alice’s cousin, Mary Page, and her husband, Frederick Lott, to adopt the baby. George was brought up in Sheerness, where Frederick worked in the docks, and here Alice was allowed to visit him in the guise of his aunt. Jessie impressed it upon her that on no account was she to attempt to make any contact with Mark, whose interests and honour were not to be compromised. ‘She totally accepted this,’ her granddaughter, Veronica Roberts, later confirmed. ‘I imagine that Jessica must have been very persuasive and very forceful too. Alice also probably had a great feeling of guilt. She no doubt felt that she had misled this boy and was now paying for it. She always held this strong belief that nothing whatsoever should damage Mark’s reputation.’[6]

What saved Mark from being completely dragged down by the hideous events being played out around him was going up to Cambridge University, in the Easter term of 1897. He was accompanied by Beck and an Irish valet, MacEwen, an old servant of his mother’s. Jessie had chosen Jesus College, for reasons thoroughly typical of her. She had originally intended him to go to Trinity, but on arriving late for her appointment with the Master had given as her excuse, ‘I’m sorry to be late, but I’ve been at the Cesarewitch.’ When he replied ‘Oh, and where may that be?’ she interpreted his ignorance of turf affairs as stupidity, turned tail and headed to the neighbouring college, which happened to be Jesus, to put her son’s name down there. ‘I was going to make sure,’ she said later, ‘that my son was not put in the charge of a lunatic!’[7]

Mark was hardly the run-of-the-mill Cambridge student. ‘I must say I was not impressed by him when he first came,’ wrote one of the dons, Dr Foakes Jackson. ‘He struck me as a rather undeveloped youth whose education had been neglected. I considered that he would soon vanish from the scene and be no more heard of. By slow degrees I realized that Sykes was a man of exceptional powers. I discovered that he was one of those people who really understand the traveller’s art and can educate themselves by observation … [He] showed even as a lad an extraordinary grasp of all that was really important in the countries he visited and surprised those who knew him by the breadth of his interests.’[8] His evident charm and intelligence allowed him, just like his mother, to get away with murder. ‘About once a week,’ recalled Foakes, ‘his man McEwen appeared in his place with a message to the effect that Mr Sykes regretted that he “could not attend upon my instructions that day”, the words being evidently those of McEwen.’[9] His tutor, the Rev. E. G. Swain of King’s, soon realized that his new charge had little, if any, interest in the tasks ahead of him, such as passing exams, but was, on the other hand, head and shoulders above most of his fellow students when it came to knowledge of the world and of the important things in life, and was also excellent company. ‘He never failed to be unobtrusively amusing,’ he recalled, ‘and, since none of us had had experiences like his, he was always interesting. His experiences of travel, acute observation, retentive memory and great powers of mimicry supplied him with means of entertainment such as no one else possessed …’ He was impressed too by how unspoiled he was. ‘It would be hard to find,’ he wrote, ‘another instance of a wealthy young man, completely his own master, who lived so simply or held so firmly to high principles.’[10]

The most important friendship that Mark struck up in his first term at Cambridge was with the distinguished scholar Dr Montague Rhodes James, then Dean of King’s. He was a historian, amateur archaeologist, expert on medieval manuscripts, writer of ghost stories and an excellent mimic, and it was his habit to hold open house each evening in his rooms on the top floor of Wilkins’ Buildings in King’s College and he would leave his door ajar for any student who wished to visit. ‘To a very large number of them,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘he was the centre of their Cambridge life. It is safe to say that not one of them ever found him too busy to talk to them, play games with them, make music with them on that very clangy piano, and entertain them with his vast stores of knowledge, his inexhaustible humour and his unique power of mimicry. The tables were piled deep with books and papers, with perhaps a whisky bottle and siphon standing among them.’[11] Mark and James were made for one another. ‘On many an evening,’ James later wrote in his autobiography, ‘he would appear at nine and stay till midnight: I might be the only company, but that was no deterrent. Mark would keep me amused – more than amused – hysterical – for the whole three hours. It might be dialogues with a pessimistic tenant in Holderness, or speeches of his Palestine dragoman Isa [sic] … or the whole of a melodrama he had seen lately, in which he acted all the parts at once with amazing skill. Whatever it was there was genius in it.’[12]

Acting was one part of his life at Cambridge to which he gave one hundred per cent, becoming a leading member of the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, acting in and directing productions such as Sheridan’s The Critic, as well as designing and drawing the posters that advertised them. It was a good way of temporarily forgetting the problems that overshadowed his life. His mother was now in deeper trouble than ever. The effect of his father’s advertisement had been to bring all her creditors out into the open, each one clamouring for payment. Since no one would now lend her any money, she could no longer resort to the expedient of borrowing from one to pay off another. In a last-ditch attempt to settle the matter once and for all, Tatton’s lawyers drew up an agreement under which, in return for her promise ‘not to speculate any more on the Stock Exchange or to bet for credit on the Turf’, she would receive a lump sum of £12,000 to discharge her existing liabilities, and a guarantee of a future allowance of £5,000 per year plus ‘pin money’ out of which she would pay all the household and stable accounts in London. The signing of this might have solved the problem had it not been for the fact that, paying exorbitant interest rates of 60 per cent, the true sum borrowed by Jessie since 1890 was £126,000, meaning there were still massive debts which she had kept secret, and by the spring of 1897 the creditors were once again banging at the door. They were led by one Mr Daniel Jay, of 90 Jermyn Street, a moneylender with the telegraphic address ‘BLUSHINGLY, LONDON’, whom Mark was later to refer to as ‘the biggest shark in London’.[13]

Tatton’s lawyer, Gardiner, advised him to stand firm and not pay his wife a penny more. He arranged for him to leave the country for three months and, in the meantime, put the house in Grosvenor Street up for sale and gave notice to all the servants. He also made it his business to collect any information he could which might be eventually used against Jessie. He sent his men to Yorkshire, for example, to collect statements from people willing to testify as to her drinking. One such affidavit, from the second coachman at Sledmere, James Tovell, told how he had collected her one morning in July 1894. ‘I could not understand her orders,’ he said, ‘and she kept me driving her about from about 10 until 3 o’clock and was unable to tell me where she wished to go.’ He went on to state that ‘her conduct was so notorious that onlookers frequently chaffed me on her condition’. Robert Young, the assistant stationmaster at Malton, said, ‘her conduct was the subject of conversation amongst the men’.[14]

Seeing that he was getting nowhere, Jay now decided to take his case to court to force the payment of the debts. His case was straightforward; that he had consistently lent money to Lady Sykes, and, as evidence of this, the court would see five promissory notes all signed in 1896 by both Sir Tatton and Lady Sykes, for sums ranging from £1,200 up to £5,000. He had made repeated requests for their repayment, but to no avail. There was also an important letter, apparently signed at Grosvenor Street, on 2 January 1897, asking Jay to accept security for payment until the return of Sir Tatton from the West Indies in March. The problem was that Tatton denied that the signatures on the notes and the letter were his.

After an initial delay of one month, owing to Tatton having fallen victim to a bout of bronchial pneumonia, the case finally opened in the Queen’s Bench on 12 January 1898. Heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, it was loudly trumpeted and closely followed by an eager pack of journalists from all the daily papers. It is easy to imagine how the ears of the press must have pricked up when they heard the opening address of Mr J. Lawson Walton QC, acting for Jay, for he did not understate ‘the eccentricities of character which marked the defendant in the knowledge and estimation of his friends’.[15] He described a man of great wealth who had few outside pursuits other than church-building and horse-breeding and who, though he never betted himself, had sowed the seeds of such an interest in his young wife by expecting her to accompany him to racecourses all over England. As a result of this, he told the court, she ‘engaged to a considerable extent in that form of excitement’. Sir Tatton was also parsimonious to a degree that he was prepared to allow an overdraft of £20,000 to permanently exist at his bank, in spite of the heavy interest, because he could not bear to call up the cash to pay it off. In addition to this, the jury were told, he was a recluse who never went out into society – since they were married, she had never once been out to a party or out to dine with him – and who shirked responsibility for the payment of almost all expenses necessary for the upkeep of two houses.

After giving a brief account of the charges, he called Jessie to the stand, and in his cross-examination of her enlarged the picture of the extraordinary Sykes marriage. Nominally, she told the jury, she was to have £1,000 a year, but it was always a fight to get it. She had found herself living in a house ‘as large as Devonshire House’[16] to which very little had been done since 1801 and which then had no drains. Sir Tatton paid for nothing, and whenever she applied to him for money he was very tiresome. At one point, before the birth of her son, she had even been obliged to sue him for her pin money. As a result of this attitude, she had, with his knowledge, begun to borrow money, and had been doing so for eighteen years. Her debts had consequently increased like a snowball ‘and time did not improve them’. She knew, she claimed, it was ‘an idiotic thing’[17] to do, and would never have done it had she been able to get the money elsewhere.

Cross-examined by Tatton’s junior QC, Mr Bucknill, she elicited laughter from the court when, in answer to his question as to whether she considered her husband was a sound business man, she replied that in her opinion he was ‘as capable of managing his own affairs as most women’.[18] As an example, she cited the fact that instead of reading his letters, many of which contained share dividends, he often just threw them in the wastepaper basket. She had once found, she recalled, a warrant for a very large sum from Spiers and Paul in the bin, and had asked him to give it to her as a reward. She also intimated to the court that Tatton knew about her betting and was very proud when she won. He would tell everybody he saw about it, and always wanted £100 out of her winnings. When asked if she was angry after he had placed the advertisement in the newspapers, she replied, ‘You are not angry with people who are like children … He is like a child in many ways … Yes, like a naughty child.’[19]

Most of the notes in question, she told Mr Bucknill, were signed in Grosvenor Street, and she had explained to Tatton that she wanted him to sign them in order for her to get money. It was unlikely, she had assured him, that he would ever have to pay up. When questioned closely about the times and dates of the various notes, she became vague, saying Tatton ‘did not mind what he signed’ and repeating, ‘He would not give me any money, so I had to borrow.’ As Bucknill piled on the pressure she was reduced to repeating the defence that ‘Sir Tatton knew all about it, but he had a bad memory.’[20]

Re-examined by Mr Walton, Jessie reiterated that all the signatures purporting to be Sir Tatton’s were made by him, in her presence. These included those on two cheques for £1,000 signed in 1895 in Monte Carlo, and cashed at Smith and Co.’s Bank, which Tatton subsequently claimed to be forgeries. ‘Sometimes he used to say he had signed guarantees, sometimes that he had not,’ Jessie rambled on, her testimony having become rather disconnected. ‘It never made any difference to our way of living. He never treated me as having been guilty of a great crime. I do not think he realized what forgery meant. I have never had a cross word with him about it. I went over to Paris last October and lunched with him, and he said “Oh, it’s all the lawyers. It’s not my fault.”’[21] Laughter filled the court room.

Two of Mark’s tutors were now called. Robert Beresford, who succeeded Doolis, told Mr Walton that, in his opinion, the signatures were those of Sir Tatton, though in cross-examination by his defence counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, he admitted that the last document he had seen him sign had been as far back as 1892, and that the more recent signatures ‘were blurred and unlike his normal signature’. When asked by Lord Russell if he considered Sir Tatton an intelligent man, he caused a stir by answering that he had always thought him to be suffering from incipient insanity. ‘He would go about in ten coats,’ he told a surprised court. ‘You don’t mean that literally?’ asked Lord Russell, adding, ‘You mean two or three.’ ‘No I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I mean seven or eight overcoats one over the other … I can swear to that distinctly, because there were five covert coats, and one or two silk coats.’ When Egerton Beck was called to the stand and told the court that, in spite of Sir Tatton being ‘habitually a sober man’, one signature did not look as if it were written by a very sober person, Sir Edward asked, ‘That observation as to sobriety does not apply to Lady Sykes?’[22] Luckily for Jessie, Lord Russell forbade that line of questioning.

The third day of the trial began with Lord Russell asking Tatton to make two copies of the letter of 2 January, with two different pens. While he was doing this, Sir Edward Clarke opened the case for the defence. The question before the jury, he said, was a simple, if serious, one. Did Sir Tatton sign the notes, or were they forgeries by Lady Sykes? ‘A case more painful to an English gentleman,’ he continued, ‘could not be imagined.’ Called to the stand, Tatton ‘gave his evidence in a low voice with a slow, nervous, hesitating manner, and kept repeating his answers over and over again, repeatedly fingering the Bible which lay on the desk before him, and occasionally raising it and striking the woodwork sharply to emphasise what he said.’ He had never seen the notes and he had never signed them, and he had certainly not written the letter of 2 January. He had never had any need to borrow money, he said, preferring to keep an overdraft at the bank, which could run to any amount, since the bank had securities. After the advertisement had appeared, he had agreed to make a final payment of his wife’s liabilities ‘to avoid scandal! To avoid scandal! To avoid scandal!’[23]

Cross-examined by Mr Walton, Tatton caused much amusement by asking if his lawyers could ‘refresh his memory’ about the details of the alleged Monte Carlo forgeries. So great in fact was the laughter when Mr Walton said ‘No!’, that Lord Russell had to threaten to empty the courtroom. Walton then did his best to try and show that Tatton really had very little memory of what he had signed and what he had not, but he could not sway him from the basic fact that when it came to the Jay notes, he was adamant that he had nothing to do with them. The copies he had made earlier of the 2 January letter were then shown to the jury, Tatton complaining that the pens he had had to write with were too thin. When Mr Walton said that that was because the original was written with a quill pen, Tatton stated, ‘Well, I have not used a quill pen for 40 years,’[24] leaving his interrogator floundering.

Mr Walton, who saw his case collapsing, now revealed that Mark was in court, and, though he realized that ‘it was a painful thing to ask him to give evidence on the one side or the other’,[25] he invited Lord Russell to call him onto the stand so that he might be questioned as to the veracity of these dates. This the Lord Chief Justice refused to do, though he told him that he could do so himself if he so wished. Though at first Walton decided against this course of action, on the morning of the following day, destined to be the last of the trial, he changed his mind.

It was a devastating experience for Mark to be forced into the witness box to testify that one of his parents was a liar, and, as Sir Edward Clarke told the jury in his summing up, his evidence was so vague and therefore so inconclusive that he might have been spared the ordeal. It was given in a barely audible whisper. In his final address, Sir Edward gave no quarter to Jessie, whom he described as a woman of ‘discreditable character’, for whom there could be ‘no sympathy and perhaps no credence’. When it came to the turn of the counsel for the plaintiff, Mr Walton accused Tatton of being a man without honour. ‘The disaster of victory,’ he told the jury, ‘would be infinitely greater than the disaster of defeat. To himself, if he won the case, there would be the degradation of 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 that he had known an Englishman with a long beard who spoke Arabic, had read all Arabic books and wrote night and day without eating or sleeping, and whom he had nursed at Salt during an illness. His name was Richard Burton. In return that evening I invited the two Sheikhs to dine with me. Fellah is a great friend of the Franciscans, having a room of his own in their convent in Jerusalem, and so had learnt the use of knife and fork, but ‘Ali, true son of the desert, was much puzzled by the Frankish eating tools, and invariably took the spoon from the dish for his own use.’[8]

Mark’s travels progressed smoothly until, on 13 March, he reached ‘Ammân, today the capital of Jordan, the site of which is described in the 1903 edition of Murray’s Handbook as being ‘weird and desolate … The place is offensive too from its filth. The abundant waters attract the vast flocks that roam over the neighbouring plains, and the deserted palaces and temples afford shelter to them during the noon-day heat; so that most of the buildings have something of the aspect and stench of an ill-kept farm-yard.’[9] Here the Circassian military caused problems for Mark’s party, insisting that he did not hold the correct travel permits, and though he managed to get as far as Jerash, a ten-hour ride away, he was held up there for a number of days. On 19 March, when he was finally able to continue his journey towards the ancient biblical city of Bosrah, he was lucky enough to meet the Hajj pilgrimage on its way to Mecca, an experience that very few Westerners would then have had.

‘It was an extraordinary sight,’ he wrote, ‘… miles it seemed to be of tents of every shape and form: military bell tents; black Bedawîn tents; enormous square tabernacles of green, red, and white cloth; tiny tentes d’abri, some only being cotton sheets on poles three feet high. The gathering of people would be almost impossible to describe. In one place I saw a family of wealthy Turks in frock coats, all talking French; close by, a green-turbaned Dervish reading the Korân; a little further on, the Pasha of the Hajj, in a fur-trimmed overcoat, giving orders to a dashing young Turkish subaltern; here, two men who owned a most gorgeous palanquin which they were in hopes of letting to some rich lady from Cairo, were fighting over the fodder of the two splendid camels that carried it; there, Arab stallions were squealing and kicking at the mules of the mounted infantry contingent … There were at least 10,000 civilians in the pilgrimage. Among them were many whole families of hajis, children and women being in almost as great numbers as men … The enormous procession, at least four miles long, glittering with red, green and gold saddles and ornaments, was an impressive sight that I shall never forget; for every animal had at least four bells on its saddle or neck. I could hear it like that sound of the sea …’[10]

For Mark, the country of the Haurân was the most interesting part of his trip, known as it was for the number, extent and beauty of its ruins. It was the home of the Druses, a monotheistic religious and social tribe whose sheikhs formed a hereditary nobility that preserved with tenacity all the pride and state of their order. The correct letters of introduction were vital for the progress of a traveller through their lands, but once obtained they would be received with the greatest hospitality, with no requirement of compensation. ‘When I arrived at Radeimeh,’ he wrote, ‘the Sheikh was particularly hospitable, not only giving me dinner but feeding all my muleteers and servants. The sight of McEwen sitting between two Druse Sheikhs and being solemnly crammed by them with rice and bread dipped in oil and pieces of mutton was, to say the least, quaint. After … the Sheikh took my dragoman aside and told him that there was a certain place in the desert named Heberieh, where there were many arms, legs and fingers sticking in the stones.’[11] No European had yet visited this strange place, which he said was a long ride away and would need an escort of at least fifteen men. ‘I decided to visit the place the next day,’ wrote Mark, ‘visions of some ancient quarry or isolated sculpture rising before me, and as there was no mention of anything of the sort in Murrays Handbook, I had great hopes of making a discovery.’[12]

At four the following morning, the party set off and after two hours’ riding found themselves in country which Mark described as being some of the most extraordinary he had ever seen in the course of his extensive travels in four continents. He wrote of it as ‘a fireless hell; nothing else could look so horrible as that place. Enormous blocks of black shining stones were lying in every direction; in places we passed great ridges some 20 feet high and split down the centre. One of these stretched over a mile and looked like a gigantic railway cutting. There was neither a living thing in sight, nor the least scrub to relieve the eye from the monotony of the slippery black rocks. My dragoman said to me “I tink one devil he live here.”’ After four hours’ hard riding through this inferno, the party reached an open space in the centre of which was a hill. The Druses announced that they had reached their destination.

‘At first I thought the hill was only a mass of lava and sand,’ Mark wrote in his report, ‘but on closer examination I found that it was a huge mass of bones and lava caked with bones. It was infested with snakes; I myself saw four gliding through the bones. When I had taken some photographs and secured some specimens of the rock and bones, we started on our return … I can say on excellent authority that I am the first European who has visited this place.’[13] When Mark eventually submitted his findings to the Palestine Exploration Fund, they concluded that the bones were probably the remains of a herd of domestic animals that had been caught in a volcanic eruption.

To have travelled to places where few Westerners have ever set foot and to have made a ‘discovery’ must have seemed the greatest of excitements for a young man of twenty, and it was undoubtedly one of the catalysts that gave Mark a life-long fascination with what would come to be generally known as the Middle East. He returned to Cambridge with a large supply of Turkish cigarettes, a Damascus pariah dog named Gneiss, an assorted array of Oriental headgear and a desire to share his experiences with anyone who would join him in his rooms, usually sitting cross-legged on the floor puffing away at a hookah. He lectured to the Fisher Society, and to the Cambridge Society of Antiquaries, as well as writing up an account of his travels for the Palestine Exploration Fund. He was planning his next trip when he received an important letter. ‘I have just heard from the Royal Geographical Society,’ he wrote to Henry Cholmondeley in the autumn, ‘to tell me that my discovery in Syria is of the greatest importance. My tutor has in consequence given me leave to stay down next term if I go abroad. I have every reason to believe that I shall find some extraordinary things in the Safah, the place where I discovered the “Hill of Bones”. I am the first person who ever entered the place. This was merely because for some reason the natives like me.’[14]

Mark was in high spirits when around this time he received an invitation to lunch at Howes Close, the Cambridge home on the Huntingdon Road of the local Conservative MP, Sir John Eldon Gorst. Gorst, who served as Vice-Chairman of the Education Committee in Lord Salisbury’s government, was the father of Jessie’s former lover, Jack, as well as another son, Harold, and five daughters, Constance, Edith, Eva, Gwendolyn and Hylda. This large and affectionate family welcomed in Mark, who, as an only child, was quite unused to the warm and friendly atmosphere they generated with their in-jokes and humorous banter, but he quickly fell under their spell. He too entranced them, regaling them with tales of his adventures, acting the part of the individual characters in each story.

Sunday lunch at Howes Close became a regular outing for Mark, not least because he found himself increasingly attracted to Edith, the middle of the five girls. Twenty-six years old, tall and handsome, with soft features and thick chestnut-coloured hair, she was, like him, a convert to Roman Catholicism, and their mutual devotion to their religion became the basis for, first, a firm friendship, and then a growing attraction. She was also an accomplished horsewoman and since Mark also had a horse stabled in Cambridge, they took to going riding together. After the intrigues and machinations of his mother, Edith’s down-to-earth approach to life came like a breath of fresh air. ‘I really like [you],’ he told her, ‘really and truly and not in any way tinged with that ridiculous, maudlin, drivelling, perverse folly that idiots call “being in love”. I like you because you are honest and unselfish, because you are the only truly straightforward person I have ever met.’[15]

Edith’s emotional support was doubly important in the light of his mother’s situation. She was at her lowest ebb. Her friends had all dropped her. She could not approach her brothers, who were all respectably married with families, while her younger sister Venetia, married to an American millionaire, Arthur James, and one of Society’s leading hostesses, considered that she had disgraced herself beyond measure and would have nothing to do with her. She had been turned out of the house in Grosvenor Street and, to cap it all, in December 1898 she suffered the death of her beloved brother-in-law, Christopher, who had been one of the few people to stand by her through all her troubles. Mark decided that before he left on his next journey, he would make one more effort to persuade his father and his lawyers to reach a final settlement with Jessie. ‘Dear Cousin Henry,’ he wrote to Cholmondeley, ‘… would you try & get a meeting arranged between yourself, my father, Gardener [sic] and I at Gardner’s [sic] office, this is the last chance of a settlement, & worth trying, my mother is really broken and would accept any reasonable terms. I hope I can trust you to arrange this meeting as after that I should feel quite unresponsible for any further disgraces & that I had done all possible to stop it …’[16]

Confident that he had set the wheels in motion to try and help his mother, he prepared to set out for Syria. On the eve of his departure he went to mass in Cambridge to take one last look at Edith, an event which reinforced his feelings for her. ‘If you knew the agony of mind I went through,’ he wrote to her on his return, ‘… when I saw you leave the church and I went away without a word, if you knew how I felt that day, how I shook as if with an ague, with dry mouth and trembling steps, how I watched you go away further and further, and by quickening my steps I could have caught you up and didn’t for fear that you might have some small inkling what was in my mind before I chose you should, because I thought to myself, perhaps I am only in love …’[17]

Mark left for Syria on 14 December, intending to return to the Haurân in the hope of making more discoveries, but things did not work out quite the way he had hoped. The country was divided into three districts, or Wilayets: Aleppo in the north, Beirut in the west and south, and Damascus, which embraced the whole country east of the river Jordan. Each of these was governed by a Wâli, and was in turn divided into districts which themselves were governed by more officials. No progress could be made by the traveller without a series of permissions, the issue of which was by no means certain, often leading to days or even weeks of delays. For some reason, ‘difficulties arose’ and Mark was refused a permit by Nazim Pasha, the Wâli of Damascus, to visit the Haurân. Instead, he decided to travel to Baghdad by way of Aleppo.

The party left Damascus on 17 January. ‘I took with me,’ wrote Mark, ‘a dragoman, a cook, a waiter, four muleteers, and a groom; seven Syrian mules … two good country horses for myself and one each for the cook and the waiter; a Persian pony for the dragoman; and last, though not least, a Kurdish sheepdog that answered to the name of Barud, i.e Gunpowder, and not only attended the pitching and striking of the camp but after nightfall undertook the entire responsibility of guarding it.’[18] Of the attendants, including Michael Sala, the cook, and Jacob Arab, the waiter, by far the most important was the dragoman, a Cypriot Christian called Isá Kubrusli, whose job was to act as interpreter and guide. A striking-looking man with piercing eyes, he had worked as a dragoman for forty years, in which time he had served a number of important Englishmen, notably Sir Charles Wilson on his expedition to locate Mount Sinai in 1865, and Frederick Thesiger in the Abyssinian Campaign of 1867–8, ‘Thirty years ago,’ Mark wrote, ‘a dragoman was a person of importance; a man similar in character to the confidential courier who in the last century accompanied young noblemen on the Grand Tour. But he has degenerated and for the most part is now simply a bear leader, to hoards [sic] of English and Americans who invade Syria during the touring season.’[19]

Isá, who worked for the Jerusalem office of Thomas Cook, had a very poor opinion of most of his clients. Unlike the rich and cultured gentlemen he had encountered in the old days, who wore beards, could ride and shoot beautifully, and were liberal with ‘baksheesh’, ‘Now everything very different,’ he used to say. ‘Many very fat and wear rubbish clotheses; many very old men; many very meselable; some ride like monkeys; and some I see afraid from the horses. Den noder kind of Henglish he not believe notin; he laugh for everything and everybody; he call us poor meselable black; he say everything is nonsense and was no God and notin …’[20]

In the first week of their journey, the weather deteriorated by the day, with constant rain and hail storms, and eventually turning to snow, which got heavier and heavier until ‘the weather was too cold for camping, so I telegraphed to Damascus for a carriage to take me to Aleppo’. Eventually an ‘antique monstrosity’ arrived, drawn by four horses abreast. It was ‘enormously broad, with a rumble for baggage behind’ and ‘had the appearance of a decayed bandbox on a brewer’s dray; and, as I found to my cost, was extraordinarily uncomfortable’.[21] Their first stop was at the village of Hasieh, ‘the most desolate and filthy little village that it has ever been my luck to visit’. The guest house consisted ‘of a large heap of offal with four rooms leading off it: the first and best was occupied by the cow; the second which was not quite so clean, was given to me; in the other two most of the villagers were gathered together to watch my cook preparing what he called “roast whale and potted hyæna”, that is roast veal and potted ham’.[22]

It was a miracle that they ever reached Aleppo, considering that, in the early hours of one morning, the troublesome coachman made an attempt to sabotage the journey by deliberately overturning the coach. ‘The carriage fell on its side with a fearful thud,’ recalled Mark, ‘which was accompanied by a howl of terror from both the dragoman and the cook. The ensuing scene was not without a humorous side. The carriage opened and spat out a curious assortment of men and things on the scrub of the Syrian desert, and it was only when the cook, the bath, the medicine chest and the dragoman had been lifted off me that I was able to survey the scene of the accident. Its appearance reminded me exactly of those admirable pictures drawn in Christmas numbers of illustrated papers of Gretna Green elopements coming to grief in a ditch; luckily however no lady was present, for the language made use of, whether in Arabic or in English, was neither that of the Koran nor Sunday-at-Home.’ When they did finally reach their destination, he found it ‘not altogether a pleasant town’. The natives had a penchant for throwing stones at the hats of foreigners, and often had faces disfigured by ‘Delhi Boils’, which gave them ‘a most sinister expression’. Almost everyone he met, he wrote, who was not a native, ‘seemed to be trying to get away from the place, without success’.[23]

Six days in Aleppo was quite enough. The party then struck out for Baghdad. Not a day went by without Mark being either amused or frustrated by the character of local people. ‘Their ideas of time and space are nil,’ he noted. ‘If you ask how far away a certain village is, you may be told “one hour”, be the real distance anything from five minutes to twelve hours; or, when you are beginning to feel tired, everyone you ask during the space of a couple of hours may tell you that you are only “seven hours” from your destination. This is really … most annoying.’ At Meskeneh he got his first view of the Euphrates, which did not greatly impress him. ‘Its water is so muddy,’ he noted, ‘that it is impossible to see through a wine-glass filled with it.’[24]

Meskeneh was the first of a series of military outposts, manned by police or mounted infantry, which lined the high road from Aleppo to Baghdad. They were intended to help keep order in the valley, and to prevent the Anezeh Arabs from crossing the Euphrates, and it was at one of these that Mark now spent each night. When he finally reached the first bridge across the river at Falúja, the final stop before Baghdad, he was amused by what he found there. ‘There is a telegraph wire which crosses the river but there is no telegraph office; the only official in the place is the collector of tolls who dozes most of the day on the bridge; there are no troops; and there is no police station within twenty miles of the bridge. There is therefore nothing to prevent any number of people crossing it … Truly the ways of the Unspeakable are inscrutable.’[25]

After days of trekking through the desert, the approaching minarets of Baghdad were a wondrous sight: ‘the golden mosque appeared in the distance in the midst of a cluster of palm trees, and … the effect was very beautiful and inspiring’. Once within the city walls, however, although he was impressed by its cleanliness, Mark found little to inspire him, and after spending an enjoyable week staying with the English Resident, he was keen to be on his way to Mosul. Before leaving he penned a letter to Henry Cholmondeley. ‘I have had the most trying weather on my trip, the thermometer has varied in one month from 5º below zero to 90º in the shade, including fogs, snows, sandstorms + 1 week’s incessant rain am going up to Mossoul [sic] and thence to Batoum or Trabzionde [sic] but my route will depend on the state of the country Climactic & Political, it is useless to tell you all that has happened as it fills at least 30 pages of a diary, I can show you the faces of the people tho’ …


He signed the letter with his Arabic signature, adding the question, ‘How would this do as a check [sic] signature?’[26]


The journey from Baghdad up to the Russian border turned out to be full of incident, beginning with an encounter with some robbers north-east of Kerkúk. At the time he was travelling with a local governor, or Kaimakám, and his military escort, when they came under fire from some robbers: ‘just as we entered a kind of natural amphitheatre, about two thousand yards broad,’ he recalled, ‘I was handing him my cigarette case, when I was startled by the buzzing of a bullet somewhere overhead followed by the faint “plop” of a rifle on the hill side. I looked round but the kaimakám took a cigarette out of my case and lit it without saying a word. Two other bullets passed overhead and I made some remark about them; he merely said Sont des voleurs Monsieur, and it was only after five more shots had been fired that he took any further notice.’ Mark was impressed by the coolness of the man, ‘who seemed to think no more of the matter than a farm-boy would of crow-scaring’.[27]

Approaching the town of Mosul, Mark was able to give further rein to his love of underlining the comic and exaggerating the grotesque. ‘The first thing that struck me,’ he wrote, ‘… was a splendid bridge. It is a fine piece of workmanship and has only one fault; it does not cross the river. The engineer commenced building it about a hundred and seventy yards from the bank; he built twenty-four piers, and at the twenty-fourth came to the water. Then after due consideration he thought that he would build the bridge with boats, and these he chained to the end of the masonry. Though this structure is useless as a bridge, it makes an excellent rendezvous for beggars, lepers and sweetmeat vendors.’[28]

The hardships of the journey increased after Mosul. They were constantly on the lookout for brigands, often mule-rustlers, and as they began to climb up into the mountains, the terrain became more treacherous, with rushing rivers and streams, non-existent roads and tracks that were impassable to anything but mules. It was bitterly cold, but the scenery was magnificent. ‘Overhead was a blue sky, below, the vegetation, such as it was, was green as an emerald,’ wrote Mark. ‘We were among high mountains, whose ruggedness was relieved here and there by clumps of stunted trees. There was snow on the peaks, and down the sides of the mountains streams rushed frantically … In one place we had to pass a very rickety patched-up bridge … Isá when crossing missed his footing and only by the greatest good luck I caught him by the band of his Ulster. Even now it makes me shudder to think of what might have happened to him; for there was a drop of forty feet into a river running like a mill race towards the mass of rocks over which it fell.’[29]

As Mark and his party drew closer to Bitlis, a strategic Armenian town that was to see 15,000 of its inhabitants massacred by the Turks in July 1916, they began to see more and more snow, which soon became so deep that they had to drag their mounts through it. His plan had been to head straight from here to the Black Sea port of Trebizond, and then home, but when this proved impossible he was forced to go to Van instead. This meant abandoning the muleteers in favour of fifteen man-sledges, each of which could carry a hundred pounds weight of baggage. One of them even had the added weight of Isá, who, fearful of getting cold, had drunk a whole bottle of mastic, the local aniseed-flavoured spirit, and had become so drunk that he had to be tied face-down onto his sledge. Mark was astonished at the strength of the men who pulled these sledges. ‘They kept up a pace of about three and a half miles an hour,’ he noted. ‘They mounted steepish hills with only raw hide lashed under the soles of their feet, and they only rested for five minutes or so every three quarters of an hour. The heavy breathing of the sledge-draggers, the gentle zipping of the sledges as they passed over the snow, the occasional moaning of the drunken man, and the stamping of the cold feet had such an effect on me that a couple of hours after leaving Bitlis I was fast asleep. When I awoke I saw a glorious sunrise; the red flush of the sun on the waters of Lake Van … was beautiful indeed.’[30]

Crossing Lake Van, the largest lake in Turkey and seventy-four miles across at its widest point, was a hazardous affair. They hired a fifty-ton fishing boat, the Jámi, hired from and captained by its Armenian owner, and though at first all went well, after two hours the wind dropped, and there followed a fearful nocturnal storm during which the sail split, water began to seep in, and the boat began to list alarmingly. The crew, including the skipper, panicked and proved useless, and when Mark tried to get Isá to help him get the ballast straight, he became ‘quite childish, and … screamed “Why you bring me to this debil country? I say bad word for the day I came with you; rubbish boat, rubbish captain, rubbish sea; I say bad word for the religion of this lake!” Then as the boat took a particularly heavy roll, he stood on his feet with a cry of “Our God help us!” (the us being prolonged into a perfect scream) and then collapsed on the side of the boat and lay there vomiting and praying.’[31] In the end Mark was reduced to watching over the ballast and bailing by himself. It was, he confessed, ‘one of the most dismal vigils I have ever kept’,[32] and Mikhãil, his cook, later confessed, ‘We were as near death as a beggar to poverty.’[33]

The storm had abated by sunrise, and the shore was in sight. Their plight had been noted from the shore by a Kurdish horseman, who galloped along the cliffs and, with the aid of a stout whip, persuaded a group of Armenians to tow the Jámi to safety. In Van, Mark spent a week with the British consul, Captain Maunsell, before setting out on the slow and arduous trek to the Russian border. The last part of this journey, over a high mountain pass, was almost too much for Isá, the rarefied air giving him heart palpitations. He ‘threw himself on the ground gasping,’ wrote Mark, ‘unable to walk any farther. I tried to carry him on my back but the result was that we both rolled head over heels in the snow; so I got out the medicine chest and gave him a mixture of ginger, brandy and opium …’[34] Eight days after finally reaching the Russian border, Mark reached Akstapha, where he boarded the Trans-Caucassian railway bound for Tiflis and Batoum, port of call for the steamer to Constantinople. ‘Isá, Jacob and Michael came to the station and bade me a tearful farewell; and I feel sure that the sorrow they expressed was sincere … we had seen much together and a mutual feeling of respect had grown. Certainly I must confess to a lump in my throat when Isá quavered through the window of the parting train “Masalaam. I pray our God He help you always.” I can only add Inshallah.’[35]

During the time that he had been travelling, Edith may well have been on Mark’s mind, but, he later told her, he ‘neither wrote nor spoke of you to any man’.[36] On his return, he began to write to her, his first letters, posted in May 1899, being quite formal, addressing her as ‘Dear Miss Gorst’ and signing off ‘Yours sincerely, Mark Sykes’. By August, she was still ‘Miss Gorst’, while he had given himself a nickname, ‘The Terrible Turk’, that was accompanied by a drawing, and was an allusion to a phrase originally used by Gladstone when condemning the slaughter by the Turks of thousands of Bulgarians in 1876.


A month later, he was beginning his letters with the words ‘Honourable and Well-Beloved Co-Religionist’ shortly to be abbreviated to ‘H. and W.B. Co-Relig’. As soon as he returned to Cambridge he invited her to dinner. ‘You may remember,’ he said, ‘how … little I spoke at dinner, and then only did I know that I had a real affection for you’, adding, ‘I tell you, if … you had a hump in the middle of your back, a beard like a Jew, eyes that squinted both ways, were bald as a highroad, and had only three black teeth in a mouth like a cauldron, still my affection for you would be the same.’[37]

However much his thoughts may have been on Edith, he was also fired by a desire to return to the East. ‘I am preparing already for my next journey,’ he wrote to Henry Cholmondeley in August. ‘Entering Turkey by Russia on the Van Side, my rough scheme so far is to buy a complete Equipment gradually & send it to Erivan in small quantities, and then to arrange with Maunsell to send me mules to the frontier, & a certain dragoman I know of there. Then to use those mules & my own equipment for about 5 months, thoroughly visiting Koordistan [sic], presently working down to Baghdad where another dragoman & fresh mules would await, from Baghdad I should work across to Jebel Hauran and thence southward.’[38]

Such a journey, which was to take up the better part of a year, was expensive, in spite of his attempt to save money by buying his mules outright rather than renting them by the day. He calculated the expenses as follows: ‘Jacob, his servant, £40; Dragoman, £50; Cook, £30; Soldiers, £60; Fodder, £60; Mules, £54; Outfit, including carriage, £200; Muleteers, £30; Cash, £200; and Journey to Turkey and back to London, £35.’ By his very poor mathematics, he reckoned this as adding up to £819, the actual sum being £759, or approximately £82,000 at today’s values. ‘I include, as you see,’ he explained to Cholmondeley, ‘£200 cash for accidents etc, but I count on selling my mules and equipment for at least £150 at the end.’ His intention was to leave England on 15 June 1900, towards the end of the summer term, and end up in Cairo on 10 May 1901, and, with this trip in mind, he intended to devote his next year at Cambridge to the study of the Middle East and its political aspects. ‘I think if I am able to do as I propose,’ he told Cholmondeley, ‘I shall be as well informed on Eastern subjects as many M.P.s who pose as Orientalists.’[39]

## Chapter 4. South Africa

In spite of Professor Browne’s reservations about Mark’s capacity for ‘not learning’, he found him a delightful companion, and he was the perfect choice to tutor him in the history and politics of the Middle East. Though Browne had paid only one visit there, to Persia between 1887 and 1888, he had made good use of his time, travelling through the whole country, and mixing with the company of Persians, mystics and Sufi dervishes. It was a trip that eventually resulted in the publication of his book A year amongst the Persians, as well as numerous articles on subjects such as the rise of the Babi movement. Together he and Mark spent many a happy hour exchanging anecdotes about their travels, while he also did his best to instil a little history into his pupil, as well as attempting to increase his Arabic vocabulary. Their political views, however, were poles apart, with the Professor adopting a Nationalist view, while those of the undergraduate Mark veered towards the Imperialist.

Browne could only do so much tutoring with Mark, whose mind was almost permanently elsewhere. Firstly he was writing up an account of his recent travels with a view to having it published under the title Through Five Turkish Provinces, an ambition that was to be realized the following year. At the same time he was involved in numerous journalistic activities, contributing several pieces, for example, to the Cambridge student magazine The Granta, edited by his old friend George Bowles. In No. 266, for instance, he not only provided the leader, an article on the Militia titled ‘A Sangrado Policy’, but also a skit called ‘The Granta War Trolley’, a cartoon entitled ‘Taste’, the dramatic criticism, and an illustrated limerick. In addition he drew a series of sketches caricaturing various aspects of some of the British newspapers. These included ‘The Pillory of Truth’, ‘The Times’ Sphinx’, and ‘The Imperial Ecstasy of the Daily Mail’.

In October he wrote to Henry Cholmondeley, ‘I am starting a newspaper named ‘The Snarl.’ I calculate the loss on three copies about £10. I think the venture is worth trying … it may possibly pay its expenses. I calculate on a certain sale, but at the same time I am paying somewhat for the contributions and also on the necessary advertisement, so please send me a cheque book. I shall not tell my mother I have one, or use it for any other purpose but that of paying contributors … If you think my father will write to stop me, do not tell him as the production is well worth trying & may make me a certain kind of reputation.’[1] The Snarl, was co-edited by a Cambridge friend, Edmund Sandars, but appears to have been entirely written by Mark, who also designed and drew the cover. The magazine was subtitled An Occasional Journal for Splenetics, and was a vehicle for him to let off steam on a variety of subjects.

Say what you please – say ‘D—n!’ say ‘H-ll!’

Say ‘botheration!’ Say ‘You Tease!’

Say ‘Don’t!’ Say ‘Dreary me!’ Say ‘Well!’

Say what you please!

Say that the Transvaal’s made of cheese!

Call Chamberlain Ahitophel!

Say women ought to have degrees! –

Say printers might know how to spell!-

Say petits pois means little peas! –

So long as this line ends in l,

Say what you please.[2]


In the only two issues that were published, he railed against compulsory chapel, attacked the Cambridge Union for degenerating ‘hopelessly and finally into the recognized organ of the great conformist conscience’, described the degree of Master of Arts as being nothing more than ‘the triumph of mediocrity’, and criticized the dons for their ‘narrow-minded ignorance of the world’. In the barely concealed anger and snappish tone of its articles, The Snarl anticipated the modern-day journalism of writers like Will Self and Charlie Booker.

The Cambridge life that Mark was now thoroughly enjoying was rudely interrupted by a conflict which erupted at the outer reaches of the British Empire. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the British had acquired the colony of South Africa to which the government had then actively encouraged British settlers to emigrate. This was the cause of conflict with the original, Afrikaans-speaking, Dutch population, who were known as ‘Boers’, many of whom migrated northwards, on ‘The Great Trek’, where they established two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, both of which were eventually recognized by the British. However, the discovery in the second half of the century of, first of all, diamonds at Kimberley, on the borders of the Orange Free State, and then of vast gold deposits in the Transvaal brought a massive influx of foreigners, ‘uitlanders’, mainly from Britain, who were needed to develop these resources. This caused increasing tensions with the Boers, who began to fear that they would soon become a minority in their own country. In 1899 their worst fears were realized when the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, demanded full voting rights and representation for all uitlanders living in the Transvaal. It was over this that Paul Kruger, the President of the South African Republic, declared war on Britain in October 1899.

Having spent much of his childhood playing war games in the park at Sledmere, reading books on the great generals, and studying Vauban’s theories of fortification in the Library, it is not surprising that Mark had an affinity with the military. His heroes were Marshal Saxe, Marshal of France in the reign of Louis XV, and the Emperor Napoleon, as whom he had a penchant for occasionally dressing up.


In his first year at Cambridge, he had decided to apply for a commission in the army, filling in the required E536 form ‘Questionnaire for a candidate for first appointment to a Commission in the Militia, Yeomanry, Cavalry or Volunteers’. Citing his height to be 5 ft 11¾ inches, he had applied to and been accepted for a volunteer militia battalion, the Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment. In this he was following in the footsteps of his ancestor, Sir Christopher Sykes, who in 1798 had raised his own volunteer militia, the Yorkshire Wolds Gentlemen and Yeomanry Cavalry, to help defend the neighbourhood in case of an invasion by Napoleon. Though Mark had done some training with the Regiment in 1898 and 1899, it must still have come as a shock to hear, in the middle of his Michaelmas Term, that they were to be mobilized to serve in South Africa.

‘I now have to go to South Africa’, he wrote to Henry Cholmondeley, ‘which is the most infernal nuisance.’[3] It was a nuisance compounded by the fact that his mother’s debtors were once again clamouring for payment and Mark, fearful that his father was immovable in his refusal to pay up, felt himself bound to step in to prevent the whole estate going ‘to the thieves’ shelter’.[4] Such a disaster was not inconceivable, since the sums involved were huge, the entire debt being calculated at £120,000.[5] ‘[I]f I make myself liable for all these immense sums,’ he wrote to Edith, ‘and no arrangement can be made with my father, with the Estate duty added to all, I shall stand in a somewhat precarious position’. What he found most humiliating, however, was ‘to be constantly arguing on a hypothesis of my father’s death which is to me the most loathsome feature of my repulsive affairs’.[6]

Over the next two months Mark fought hard to reach a settlement that would be agreeable to all parties, while simultaneously having to be prepared for his leave to be cancelled, and his subsequent departure for South Africa. The number of false starts was marked by the numerous letters of farewell he received from Edith.


In return he kept her entertained with tales of his daily life. He was at Sledmere at the end of March for his coming of age, a very muted affair owing to the war.

These last days have seen me amusing myself by reading old books and arranging a room for me to sit in … I have been receiving piles of congratulatory telegrams and letters concerning my coming of age, mostly of this description …

‘13 Queer St.

Dear Sir,

I hasten to congratulate you on your majority, should you Sir require any small temporary loan from 5 to 20,000 pounds etc, etc …’

I received a silver inkstand from the labourers, a very pretty thing, where at I was very pleased.[7]

He also amused her with some of the nonsense written about him in the local papers.

By the way, it never rains but it pours … an extract from the Yorkshire Evening Post. ‘Mr Mark Sykes who has just come of age … is a fine singer and can tell a yarn with anyone.’ Fine Singer!! I’faith a fine singer, that should amuse you. See me sing


or tell a yarn with anyone.[8]


Back in London, on April Fool’s Day, he took a friend to dinner and a play. ‘I had great fun before the play,’ he told Edith.

I have a little friend not a bad fellow, but an esthete [sic], who is very decadent in fact. Likes Burne-Jones pictures, Aubrey-Beardsley [sic], Ibsen plays, Revolting French Novels, and only likes dining at the Trocadero Restaurant where the food … consists of Truffles and hot pâté de foie gras … I said dine with me at the Marlboro … after a little arguing he agreed, and came expecting rich filth, now for a punishment I ordered

Scotch Broth (with vast lumps of meat floating in it)

Boiled Turbot (fresh and enormous)

Beefsteak Pudding (Suety, wholesome, succulent, heavy, hot, crammed with Oysters, Lark’s Kidneys)

Boiled Oranges and Rice Pudding (a nursery dish)

Welsh Rarebit (in a dish the size of Lake Windermere)

Hard English Cheese and Brown Bread

Wines. Still Hock 1876.

Poor little thing, I believe you would have pitied him, he gasped at the Scotch Broth, gaped at the Turbot and the Beefsteak Pudding, words cannot describe appearance, his poor little decadent stomach fairly rose,


the effect of the huge dish of Welsh Rarebit I must leave to your imagination suffice that he staggered from the table almost speechless and the best of it is he cannot be revenged on me because I can eat anything.[9]


All the while the negotiations between Mark’s parents were becoming increasingly frustrating: ‘things do not look so well as before,’ he wrote in early April, ‘as my father now says he won’t do anything before I return from the War because says he “I might be killed and then of course he wouldn’t have to pay anything at all.” This hardly strikes me as a very noble thought.’[10] The stress began to take its toll. ‘I have very little to tell you,’ he added, ‘but you’ll be glad to hear I am steadily losing flesh. I am now reduced to 12st. Have lost 6lbs.’[11] The greater the indecision, the more angry he became. ‘My father arrives tonight,’ he wrote a week later, ‘another struggle with him, tomorrow lawyers, another talk, the day after if all goes well an unsatisfactory settlement … a surly misanthropy begins to pervade my nature … I have never lacked bodily comfort and never experienced mental rest, for this reason am I misanthropic yet how can one help it the world is bad, vile, corrupt, and there is no remedy, socialism is ridiculous, Anarchy is futile, reforms bring no good, only stamp old evils to raise new. There is no Utopia, evil triumphs, religion is dead, honesty never existed … The whole world is a mass of individuals struggling for their own ends … here you have a party, some ends are gained and they break asunder and fall on one another, fighting, struggling, and the most noble calling of this vile race of mortals is the military, for it is for their mutual destruction.’[12]

Three days later, on the evening of 20 April, a solution was finally thrashed out at a meeting in the Metropole Hotel in London. ‘Oh my dearest co-religionist,’ wrote Mark, ‘At last it is finished. I’m sitting here writing to you, your photograph is in front of me – well it is all over. I must tell you me dear co-relig what happened … After arguing, fighting, changing, erasing, quarrelling, cursing, to-ing and fro-ing, the following arrangements were made.’ It was agreed that a mortgage of £100,000 should be raised to pay off the debts. From then on Jessie would receive an annual allowance of £5,000, from which a third would be deducted to help pay off the interest on the loan, while Mark would receive £2,000 per annum, out of which he would give his mother £500 annually. ‘At last it is done,’ he wrote, ‘and I start for S.A. tomorrow, thank God! Alhamdollilah! … Now I must say goodnight and goodbye, God willing I’ll see you at Cambridge in September, goodbye puella honesta et rara … Masalaam.’[13]

Mark boarded the RMS Norman on 21 April, his spirits high at having finally got away from his squabbling parents, but his heart tinged with sorrow at leaving Edith. ‘I felt a considerable sensation of misery when I recalled my last visit,’ he told her, ‘and thought how long it would be before I should see you again, and how long it will be before I even hear from you alas! … By the way I don’t think it I likely I am going to meet “the someone else” you are always so full of, at any rate on this steamer, here are all the female passengers.’


He went on to describe the majority of passengers as being ‘Jews of the most repulsive type, in fact it is for these beasts that we are fighting. They jabber about the mines all day long, I hope they will be made to pay. I would extort the last farthing from the most jingo loyal Jew in the British Empire before I’d fine a traitorous gentile.’[14] Such a shocking and sudden outburst of anti-Semitism needs to be seen in the context of the times when the need to blame someone for the war was sparked off by a series of early and disastrous defeats. These took place in the space of one so-called ‘Black Week’, at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso, the latter being particularly crushing with the British suffering 1,137 casualties to the Boers’ 37. Sent to report on the war for the Manchester Guardian, the highly influential economist J. A. Hobson identified a small group of wealthy Jews, with influence in the British press and the British Cabinet, among them Alfred Beit and Julius Wernher, who, for the sole purpose of their controlling South Africa’s diamond and gold industries, had encouraged the Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Alfred Milner, to take the belligerent stand that had led to war. It was the cause of a wave of anti-Jewish feeling.

Another figure with a vested interest in the war also happened to be on board, the multi-millionaire mining magnate and founder of Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes, to whom Mark had been given a letter of introduction, ‘He is a large, ill-made, somewhat muscular man,’ he recorded, ‘there is nothing whatever striking about him except a certain nervous twitching and folding of the hands and arms which was I believe a characteristic of the great Napoleon. The annoyance which I felt when I looked upon this man was considerable when I thought of the misery and desolation brought about by his machinations. I could hardly restrain myself.’ His secretary expounded Rhodes’s views on how he saw the future of the Transvaal and the Free State as their becoming Crown Colonies. ‘Why could they not have a constitutional government?’ asked Mark. ‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘because our enemies would be in the majority.’ ‘No comment is necessary on these words,’ wrote Mark, ‘it comes, to speak plainly, to the uncontestable fact that we are fighting to take away the liberty and independence of two Republics which are not even our colonies, this is the most monstrous admission ever made by any country in the last 100 years.’ In the course of a short conversation, however, Mark did find himself agreeing with Rhodes on one subject, ‘his unrestrained and open contempt for the stupidity of our generals’.[15]

Mark finally touched dry land at the beginning of May, when Norman docked at Port Elizabeth, which, along with East London, was one of the ports in the Eastern Cape used for the landing of troops, horses and equipment, for transport by train to the front in the Northern Cape/Free State region. The tide of the war had begun to turn since ‘Black Week’ owing to heavy reinforcements having been sent out from home under the command of Field Marshal Lord Roberts, with Lord Kitchener as his Chief of Staff. The besieged towns of Ladysmith and Kimberley had been relieved, and in mid-March Roberts had occupied Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State. The week Mark arrived, the siege of another town, Mafeking, was almost over. It was to be a long time, however, before Mark saw any action. His first few weeks were spent guarding the harbour. ‘I look like this’, he wrote to Edith. ‘We are doing nothing and neither shall. Our Colonel is as foolish and incompetent as ever …’[16]


After a few days the regiment were sent to guard an important railway bridge, Barkly Bridge, an isolated spot right in the middle of the bush. Here Mark received a letter from his old tutor Alfred Dowling – ‘Doolis’ – fantasizing that he was in the thick of the action. ‘It is rather provoking’, he replied, ‘reading your inspiriting [sic] account of what I may be doing


and what I am doing …


My business is to guard a bridge with 50 men, sleep 10 hours, read 8 hours and eat drink and smoke the rest of the twenty-four. This at least is what I might be doing, but a sudden fit of unwonted energy has seized me and I keep my men well employed and the bridge well guarded. I really in the last fortnight have achieved a good deal, made a rifle range, constructed a mud fort capable of holding all my men, practised the alarm twice by night and three times by day, and produced a very efficient guard.’[17]

With his boundless enthusiasm, he appears to have knocked his fifty men into an extremely effective fighting unit. ‘I can now man the trenches and have all ammunition served out in 6 min at night, and 4½ by day, which is creditable as the men have to cross a bridge 290 yds long on a narrow footplate with 2000 rounds of ammunition.’[18] The men of the militia impressed him enormously, and he described to Doolis their spirit and temper as being ‘marvellous and interesting … these men are not soldiers, they are not educated bank clerks … they have no sense of glory, but an immense sense of humour, an inordinate love of liquor, and a vast conceit of themselves’. Even the few troublemakers among them came in for praise. ‘I would trust these same men anywhere, all they want is handling and tact, with that you can accomplish wonders, I have only had two drunks the whole time, and they are as keen as mustard, they take everything as an excellent joke, and laugh, whistle and sing all day.’[19] Of the officers he did not hold such a high opinion, referring to most of them as being ‘wretched and contemptible creatures not worth talking to or about’.[20]

Mark also gave Doolis his opinions on the war:

1. Boers are beasts.

2. British colonists are liars or Jews.

3. British soldiers are splendid.

4. African farmers who wanted to rise but didn’t dare are skunks.

5. South Africa is a desert.

6. The war was necessary to maintain prestige in other quarters.

People may blame Generals and Heads of Departments however much they choose, but as far as mortal men could work, everyone in the Army from highest to lowest has worked splendidly and successfully. Against a European force in England of half the size again, the S.A. Field Force would have proved the most splendid and unconquerable army ever beheld.

He ended the letter by telling Doolis, ‘I do not suppose I shall see any fighting, and have hopes of returning in October, if all goes on as it is doing now.’[21]

Unfortunately for Mark, just as he was beginning to feel that he was actually doing something useful in the war effort, he was sent back to Port Elizabeth, where he found himself guarding the harbour, ‘a most unpleasant duty which recurs every four days,’ he wrote to Edith. ‘It lasts 24 hours in which time one does not go to bed. I am surrounded with putrefying meat and dead horses.’[22]