The Baghdad Set_ Iraq through the Eyes of British Intelligence, 1941–45

144

should cause little anxiety.^66 Clearly, in ending his work in Iraq on such a
note of conditional optimism, Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd was strongly
affirming his and Chokra Wood’s positive achievements in their albeit lim-
ited role as British counterintelligence and security-intelligence experts.
Without military heavy-handedness and in full cooperation with the local
police and civil authorities, they had not only sought to bring to Iraq four
years of relative stability and calm, but had conscientiously done so on the
basis of sociocultural sensibility and political awareness.

Notes

1. Known informally as the ‘Guides Cavalry,’ the regiment’s official title was
   the 10th Queen Victoria’s Own Frontier Force. In 1942, the Guides were
   transferred from Iraq to North Africa to defend and hold the Eighth
   Army’s exposed southern flank during preparations for the El Alamein
   battles, after which they returned to India via Iraq. In 1947, the regiment
   was allotted to the Pakistan Army, where it continues today as an armoured
   (tank) regiment: The Guides Cavalry (Frontier Force).


2. At the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH), Stanmore,
   Middlesex.


3. Geoffrey Wheeler Collection, GB165-0298, Middle East Centre Archive,
   St Antony’s College (Oxford) [MECA]. Quoted in Adrian O’Sullivan,
   Espionage and Counterintelligence in Occupied Persia (Iran): The Success of
   the Allied Secret Services (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) [ECOP],
   17.


4. In yet another ‘Baghdad Set’ social connection, according to Raymond
   Maunsell, head of SIME, Dawson-Shepherd’s father had worked in Egypt
   for the Aboukir Company under Maunsell’s father-in-law. Private papers of
   Raymond Maunsell, 4829, Documents Collection, Imperial War Museum
   [IWM].


5. Dr. Alexander Dawson-Shepherd, letter to the author, 8 May 2018.


6. Cf. Georgina Sinclair, “‘Get into a Crack Force and Earn £20 a Month and
   All Found ...”: The Influence of the Palestine Police upon Colonial
   Policing 1922–1948’, European Review of History 13, no. 1 (2006).


7. Edward Patrick John Ryan was a tough Indian Army career soldier and
   intelligence officer, who had risen from the noncommissioned ranks of the
   Calcutta Light Horse. In 1949, after years with the local rank of colonel,
   but still holding only the substantive rank of lieutenant, he was finally pro-
   moted to substantive major and granted the honorary rank of full colonel
   in the Intelligence Corps. Supplement to the London Gazette, 5 August
   1949, 3795. He was Mentioned in Despatches during the war and also

ADRIAN O’SULLIVAN