A letter ..... three soldiers and the Imperial War Graves Commission

 Sooner or later, if you are fascinated by the past you will end up interrogating what historians call “original source material”, which is pretty much anything that has survived accidents, neglect, or deliberate attempts to destroy it.

The material can be anything from a letter, to a legal document, the mundane everyday objects we all have knocking around, to a  precious piece of art, which could be small to  large, and takes in a key ring to a palace.

The fun comes in working out what the item tells you about the past, and excitement comes with coming up close to something which is very old.

The serious historians will go looking for the sources as part of an ongoing piece of research, while the lazy ones just wait till it falls into their laps, and then tries to make sense of it, and place it in its historical context.

I would always like to be the former, but I fall into the last category, jumping from what ever comes my way, and then moving on, making me less a historian and more a magpie.

And that is pretty much how I came to hold a letter from a Major General Fabian Ware to Colonel  C. E. Hughes, about Brigadier General Sir Herbert Ernest Hart, in the May of 1936.  

Ware and Hughes were part of the Imperial War Graves Commission and Sir Herbert Ernest Hart, had just been appointed to a position with the Commission in the Middle East.

His role involved overseeing the upkeep of the cemeteries and memorials established by the Commission in the Middle East, Turkey and Greece.

All had been serving officers in the Great War, and all three had been or were to be deeply involved in the work of finding allied servicemen who had been hastily buried in the heat of battle and reinterring them in a manner which honoured their sacrifice.

Brigadier General Sir Herbert Ernest Hart, had served in the Gallipoli Campaign and been invited to join the Commission partly because he was from New Zealand, and there was a policy of appointing Commissioners who were from New Zealand or Australia, given the high number of men from those two countries who had fought in the Middle East.

The letter refers to the policy but also offers up other interesting insights, including Ware’s annoyance that the press had picked up on the appointment before the official announcement, and the current political climate in what was then Palestine.  

Hart would  nominally have been based in Jerusalem, hut he and his wife initially moved to Cairo because of the Arab revolt against the British Mandate in Palestine. It was not until March 1937, after the conditions in Palestine had sufficiently improved, that the couple moved to Jerusalem

Location; the Middle East

Picture; the letter, 1936, from the collection of David Harrop