Cities and Men
Cities and Men. By Sir Harry Luke. (Geoffrey Bles. 25s.)
SIR HARRY LUKE belongs to a generation which has produced many distinguished men. I did not read the first volume of his autobiog- raphy, but he must have been at Oxford when bishops got rowing blues and double firsts as a matter of habit. He was also at Eton, that vast world-wide organisation which knows every corner of the Empire and a good deal more besides. It is a formidable and slightly unnerving combination, the Oxford and Eton of his time, especially when Sir Harry could join the Colonial Service and know that his Governor is likely to be a friend of the family or that his High Commissioner was in the same house at school. This is not fact, only conjecture, but it is something to say that he could find three old Etonians with whom to celebrate the Fourth of June in Tiflis in 1920.
What one generation gives, another takes away : Sir Harry adds to the archives of his generation in that pleasantly cosmopolitan and yet conspiratorially English manner which is redolent of the quiet distinction of his age. We are a good deal more brash nowadays.
The second volume of Sir Harry Luke's autobiography covers the years 1914-24. The author was thirty when the First World War started and he was already well embarked upon a career in the Colonial .Service. At that time he was in Cyprus and at the out- break of war he joined the Navy. As a naval officer his duties were many and varied : he went first to Lemnos in the Aegeart.as Political Officer to Admiral Wemyss, then again to the secretariii! in Cyprus as a civilian, and then he rejoined the Navy as Political Officer attached to the staff of Sir John do Robeck. It was in Turkey that he saw the tragic workings of Lloyd George's mistaken Greek policy and at the same time witnessed the rise of Turkish nationalism under Mustafa Kemal. Thence Sir Harry went to the Transcaucasian republics, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, where, as Chief Commissioner (with a Georgian prince for an A.D.C., another prince for a butler, and a Baltic baroness for a shorthand-typist), he saw the gradual Bolshevik absorption of the three Republics. From the interesting, cosmopolitan, politically chaotic kaleidoscope of Transcaucasia the author went as Assistant Governor to Jerusalem where he was intercessor and arbitrator for a troubled religious community in the 'first four years of the British Mandate. A full and varied ten years.
Sir Harry's account of British and Allied diplomacy is always shrewd and interesting in that it was seen from the right end—often the most uncomfortable. He admirably puts into focus the difficul- ties with which the English administration had to contend, the solutions of which, in those troubled times and places, were more often than not rendered impossible by political uncertainty and the ineptness of our foreign policy.. Neither Transcaucasia nor Jerusalem could be called the administrator's paradise during Sir Harry's period of service.
Sir Harry is a most accomplished writer blessed with the qualities of scholarship, high intelligence and urbanity. Whether he is writing of Constantinople, Georgia or Jerusalem, one is always made aware of his diverse interest in people and places, their ethnology, their history and their architecture. If one must make a complaint it is that the author rarely reveals himself outside his official and social capacities. I must confess I had an urge to see Sir Harry being carried to bed after one of those monumental Georgian banquets which he describes so well. But that, I suppose, is another charac- teristic of his generation : they are also stayers.
BRIAN WIDLAKE
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