Lewen Weldon

Lewen Weldon always defined himself as an Irishman, though he was born in England, on 15 October 1875, the fourth child of Rev Lewen Burton Weldon, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Weymouth. But Lewen’s own father had grown up in Ireland, one of the eleven children of Sir Anthony Weldon (4th Baronet) of Rahenderry, County Kildare. Lewen’s mother, Olivia Maria Barrington was also Irish: one of the daughters of Sir Croker Barrington from Limerick. It was typical of such Anglo-Irish families that the eldest son inherited the land and the younger brothers sought employment in one the professions, typically either in the Church, the military or colonial administration.

Lewen was educated at St Edwards school in Oxford, then at Trinity College, Dublin with the long summer holidays spent with his Irish uncles topped up with some useful work experience within Lord Wimborne’s estate office in Dorset. After university he took the stiffly competitive exam to gain entry into the Egyptian Civil Service and having won a place, was posted to the Survey Department. Lewen first went out to Egypt in 1901 as a 26-year old, travelling on The Cheshire, one of the ships of the Bibby Line. He would travel twenty-two times as a passenger with the Bibby Line and was delighted by each journey. As the son of a clergyman, money had always been tight, so travelling from Tilbury to Port Said seemed to be just one continuous party, all for a £12 First Class ticket.

When Lewen arrived, the Egyptian Civil Service was still under the autocratic direction of Lord Cromer, “whose guiding principle was to take infinite care to procure the best men for any given job of work and then to let him get on with it.” Lord Cromer was efficient, incorruptible and imperious but as the living representative of the British Empire’s dominance over Egypt he was also loathed. The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Public Works and The Irrigation Department maintained government rest houses in all the principal towns, whilst the Ministry of Interior had rooms in the more important police stations. The Survey of Egypt were however tent dwellers, constantly sent out on maroor – inspection duty. Lewen first cut his teeth by working in the Egyptian Delta, helping complete the creation of a 6 inch Ordnance Survey map for this densely populated, flat and fertile region. There was no such thing as uncultivated space in the Delta, so the Surveyors got used to pitching their tent on the village threshing ground which stood beside the murky, mosquito friendly waters of the village brick pit. Lewen worked from dawn to dusk, mucking in with village life or in a more isolated camp “splitting a tin of sardines, washed down by tea and ideal milk.” This healthy, spartan life was broken by time off in Cairo. Social life for expatriate civil servants was dominated by four hotels each with its own nickname; Shepherds with Notoriety, Savoy with Society, Continental with Variety and Angleterre with Propriety. Though in terms of charm, all made way for The Mena House and The Gezira –old palaces of Khedive Ismail Pasha that had been converted to hotels. Lewen’s zest for life was quickly recognized and he was placed in charge of the annual St Patrick’s Day Ball, complete with indoor shinty matches after dinner.

After two years working in the Delta, Lewen was sent to Nubia (southern-most Egypt, upstream of Aswan). In 1907 he was sent even further south, to work on the Upper Waters of the Nile, calculating river volumes below Murchison’s Falls, as well as some fine tuning of the seasonal difference in levels between Lake Victoria and Lake Albert. Rather than proceeding up the Nile, Lewen’s survey team reached the East African headwaters of the Nile by marching inland from the Somali shore. The success of this mission led to Lewen being asked to join a survey of Northern Sinai on behalf of the War Office. His colleagues in this task were two very keen young officers, King from the Royal Engineers and Pitt-Taylor, seconded from the Rifle Brigade. Lewen assessed that it would take six years to produce a full survey of the Sinai mountains, so they cut to the quick of their brief which was to look at the Turkish frontier forts and the best routes by which an army might engage with them. It was confidential work which brought him into contact with the two charismatic British officers who policed this mountain region, Parker Pasha and Beamish Bey. Lewen’s energy, professional competence and ebullient charm had once again been noticed, alongside his skill with languages and his ability to work with any team of men, of whatever race, religion or class. In 1911 he hitched a lift in the first British submarine travelling underwater through the Suez Canal. Lewen described it as a lark, but he was also possibly interested in working out effective measures against enemy submarines doing this in time of war. He was then sent back to Sinai to lead his own survey team, looking at possible rail routes, should a British army advance into southern Syria and need to be supplied from Egypt. In the summer of 1914, before war broke out and on his own initiative, Lewen had collected together a dossier on all the fresh-water wells in the deserts of Egypt. Discrete observation of these wells would enable the British to track any foreign intelligence service trying to operate within Egypt. On the outbreak of the First World War, Lewen was seconded to the Intelligence Department formed by Gilbert Clayton who assembled a small team with some impressive hands-on experience of the various landscape and peoples of the Near East. Lewen shared a suite of rooms with George Lloyd, Leonard Wooley, Aubrey Herbert, David Hogarth, T.E.Lawrence and Stewart ‘skinface’ Newcombe. One of the early problems of this Intelligence Department was that they found themselves serving three rival masters: Generals Maxwell, Murray and Altham of The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, the Levant Base, and Egyptian Command.

Hard Lying describes most of Lewen’s activities between 1914-1918 as he witnessed them. He does not record the work of his colleagues. He was the amphibian, always conscious that his work was balanced by an additional stream of land-based intelligence provided by Parker Pasha infiltrating the desert frontier.

As you will have discovered in your reading of Hard Lying, Lewen Weldon first commanded the SS Aenne Rickmers, a German cargo boat, which had been seized and converted into a ‘transport auxiliary’, the HMTA Anne. By August 1915 she had been converted into one of the first aircraft carriers. So the upgraded HMS Anne, sailed under the white ensign as one of the Royal Naval Air Service’s seaplane tenders, equipped with two-seat Nieuport VI floatplanes. Lewen Weldon observed the initial Gallipoli landings aboard HMS Euryalus.

In January 1916 Weldon was informed by his colleagues in Cairo that "they had procured a yacht for the spy business." By the spring of 1916 Weldon was actively in charge of H.M.Y. Managem which delivered spies into Ottoman Turkish territory. Weldon had strong Arabic language skills which allowed him to debrief agents on board or row himself to the shore to hold night-time meetings, land agents, keep them supplied and pick them up at the end of their mission. The Managem was skippered by Lt-Cdr Alan Cain RNR: “a first-class man, a real stout-hearted fellow. He had been in 'sail' first but just before the war, had been the skipper of a New Zealand Union Steamship Co. Steamer.”

At the end of the Lewen Weldon was awarded the Military Cross in 1918, “for an unusual combination of service on land and sea.” In 1919 Lewen returned to his old job and was quickly promoted to become the Surveyor-General of Egypt from 1919-1923. It was a confusing period for British officials. The population of Egypt had been infuriated by the British refusal to allow Saad Pasha Zaghloul to attend the negotiations of the Postwar Peace Conference. Nationalist street demonstrations erupted in all the big Egyptian cities backed up by armed rebellions in some of the provinces. British authority was eventually reastablished but only at the cost of hundreds of Egyptian casualties, shot dead on the streets. The British realised that they had seriously misjudged the national mood and that nothing short of a permanent military garrison could now uphold their unpopular domination. This would be too expensive, so liberal-looking commissions of inquiry were launched and negotiations with selected nationalists paved the way for a new understanding. Egypt would acquire a parliamentary constitution under the hereditary monarchy of the Khedives and a new status within the British Empire. The declaration of 1922 formally ended the political and fiscal powers of the British Protectorate over Egypt, but they yet kept control over the military, the Canal, the national frontiers and foreign policy. Many Arab nationalists within Egypt were not so certain what had been won by these negotiations, and if they looked east over Palestine, Iraq, Jordan and the Emirates along the Persian Gulf the authority of the British Empire appeared to be expanding not contracting. The British for their part retreated into a garrison mentality within Egypt. It was almost as if they could never quite forget the Beni Mazar incident of 1919, when seven British passengers had been dragged from the train (on the main Cairo to Alexandria track) and lynched. This lingering sense of threat was reinforced by periodic nationalist assassinations.

In 1923 Lewen tended his resignation and took his formal leave of King Fuad in the Montaza Palace. The Khedive was too much of an Egyptian nationalist to ever want to speak English in public, but he could not speak Arabic as well as Lewen. So the two men chatted together in bad French but with a shared pride in what had been achieved by the Survey of Egypt.

But the revolution in Egypt had been mirrored by a similar internal struggle that had totally transformed the political realities within Lewen’s Irish homeland. The long agitation for Irish Home Rule had almost been peacefully resolved before the First World War battened down the hatches on reform. This delay had catastrophic consequences. The suppression of the 1916 Easter uprising helped polarise the nation which would be continued in greater earnestness after the end of the war. The armed struggle for Irish Independence was only ended by an unpopular compromise peace with the British, which left the northern quarter of Ireland (Ulster) as part of the United Kingdom. So this peace signed with England led to a very divisive civil war within newly independent Ireland, fought out in assassinations and armed raids, between pro and anti-peace treaty parties. Many Anglo-Irish families decided to leave Ireland or already had that decision made for them, when their grand old houses were burnt-out. Although Lewen was a senior official within the British Empire, his own sense of Irish identity had never been in doubt. It had been further confirmed by his marriage to Mary Macaulay Molloy who could not be accused of being descended from a Cromwellian settler, like so many of Lewen’s Anglo-Irish ancestors. His wife’s family, the O’Molloys of Firceall had been in possession of their lands since the 4th century.

Lewen returned home (by boat of course) to Clonbeale House, Birr, County Offally, to help his wife look after her estate. He died in 1958 and was survived by his only child, Olivia Mary, better known as Molly. Olivia Mary had never married and in the 1960s decided to sell up and move from Ireland to Dorset. She would leave her father’s papers and literary estate to her favourite cousin Bridget who was a young art student interested in Middle Eastern archaeology. Bridget was married to Robert McCrum, who rose to become a submariner Captain in the Royal Navy. He was my father’s oldest friend, both having joined up as ten-year old naval cadets in 1940. After the deaths of these two naval officers, I used to entertain my mother and two of her widowed friends by organising an annual journey in the dull month of February, exploring different parts of the Western Desert of Egypt in a small convoy of jeeps. We had lots of time to chat, and it was here that I first heard about the work of Bridget’s great uncle, Lewen Weldon. My interest encouraged Bridget to give me a rare copy of Hard Lying and after I expressed an interest in it, she lent me his unpublished diaries which is the source for this biographical note.

Barnaby Rogerson

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