45
University Press, 1953), 276–7. As an accomplished Arabist with many
years’ experience in Iraq, Longrigg is an important general source; how-
ever, readers should beware of his antisemitism.
- Gerald de Gaury, Three Kings in Baghdad, 1921–1958 (London:
Hutchinson, 1961), 110–11. Other sources state that Ghazi was returning
home from his private radio station; for example, Houstoun-Boswall to
Halifax, 11 April 1939, FO 371/23201/2820, TNA.
- United Kingdom, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 345 (5 April
1939), cc 2791-2; FO 371/27085, TNA; FO 371/40089/2476, TNA.
- Edmonds to Newton, 1 April 1941, Iraq Political Situation, 1939–1941,
File 3, Box 2, Cecil John Edmonds Collection, GB165-0095, Middle East
Centre Archive, St Antony’s College (Oxford) [MECA]; also reprinted in
Robert L. Jarman, ed., Political Diaries of the Arab World: Iraq, vol. 6
(1932–1947) (Slough: Archive Editions, 1998) [PDAW], 483.
- Named for its commander, James Joseph ‘Joe’ Kingstone (1892–1966),
about whom much is to be found in Somerset de Chair, The Golden Carpet
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945).
- For a pilot’s eye-witness account of the battle, illustrated with some mar-
vellous cartoons, see Tom Slack, Happy Is the Day: A Spitfire Pilot’s Story
(Penzance: United Writers, 1987), 21–32.
- Robert Lyman, First Victory: Britain’s Forgotten Struggle in the Middle
East, 1941 (London: Constable, 2006), 82. The official version was that
AVM Smart had been injured in a car accident during the Habbaniya
blackout. On his recovery and return to Britain, he was transferred to
Coastal Command and retired with a CBE in 1945.
- See Freya Stark, Dust in the Lion’s Paw: Autobiography, 1939–1946
(London: John Murray, 1962), 88–116; also East Is West, 148–60. Cecil
Hope-Gill also kept an entertaining diary, which he never published, and
which Freya Stark purposely ignored when publishing hers, because the
jovial Hope-Gill had made an indelicate remark about the embassy men’s
state of undress during the siege, because of the intense heat, which he
claimed had led him to realize the full import of the phrase ‘stark naked.’
Stark was not amused. See Appendix 8, British Embassy War Diary, ‘From
Womb to Tomb: Memories of a Victorian Childhood, an Edwardian
Youth, and Military, Consular, and Diplomatic Service’, Cecil Gervase
Hope-Gill Collection, GB165-0151, MECA.
- Cf. Chap. 11 , where I have made further comments about the absence of
any dramatization of events in Iraq during 1941.
- Cornwallis to Eden, 6 June 1941, reprinted in PDAW, 495.
- Beyond the embassy and the US legation, about 150 British and 300 other
aliens were interned in a Baghdad camp, while 97 individuals were besieged
PRELUDE TO CONFLICT AND THE EMBASSY SIEGE
