36
heard at first hand from Ghazi’s cousin, Emir Abdulillah, with whom de
Gaury was on intimate terms. According to Abdulillah, the King was driv-
ing at great speed along a narrow lane from the Zuhur Palace to his sum-
mer cottage on the Tigris to fetch a film that he wished to show some
friends. As Ghazi shot across a small humpback bridge over a culvert not far
from the palace gates, his front wheels left the ground. When he tried to
steer to the left, his wheels were in mid-air, he had no control, and he
smashed into a telegraph pole, which snapped and fell onto the King.^20
All was well until the news of Ghazi’s death reached Kurdistan, where
an angry, bloodthirsty crowd of Arabs (not Kurds) stormed the British
consulate in Mosul and brutally murdered the consul, George Monck-
Mason, splitting his head with a pickaxe. The next day, 5 April 1939, a
deeply moved Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rose to address the
House of Commons as follows: ‘His Majesty’s Government have heard
with profound regret of the tragic death of Mr. Monck-Mason. I under-
stand that shortly before noon yesterday a crowd gathered in Mosul to
mourn the late King Ghazi, whose death at an early age has aroused feel-
ings of deep sympathy, which I know the House would wish me to express.
The crowd was worked into a passion by agitators who declared that the
British Government were in some way responsible for the King’s death.
Such allegations are, of course, without the slightest foundation. Our
reports state that the British Consulate was stormed and the Consul mur-
dered before the local authorities had time to act. Troops and police were
called out at once, and four men, who are believed to be responsible for
the murder, were arrested. Martial law was declared and order restored. In
the afternoon the Iraqi Prime Minister called at the British Embassy at
Bagdad and expressed to His Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires the deep sorrow
of the Iraqi Government at the tragic events in Mosul, which he said had
been a terrible shock to himself and his colleagues.’^21
The British were undoubtedly right to lay much of the blame for the
ugly incident at the door of the ex-Mufti. However, given his remote per-
sonality, constantly seething with cold indignation and malicious intrigue,
it was not long before the ex-Mufti succeeded in alienating many Iraqi
Arabs even within the pan-Arab, pro-Palestinian camp on a purely per-
sonal level. Generally, hostility grew towards him and his hordes of Syrian
and Palestinian parasites, not only among the Shias and the Kurds, but
among Arab Sunnis too. He was frequently abused with the most oppro-
brious epithets as an outsider who had destroyed his own Palestine and
now wanted to destroy Iraq. By April 1941, while Rashid Ali al-Gaylani