Geography, Cartography and Military Intelligence: The Royal ......Game' of Anglo-Russian espionage...

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Geography, Cartography and Military Intelligence: The Royal Geographical Society and the FirstWorld War Author(s): Michael Heffernan Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1996), pp. 504-533Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/622594Accessed: 16-07-2015 09:01 UTC

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504

Geography, cartography and military intelligence: the Royal Geographical Society and the First World War

Michael Heffernan

This essay examines the connections between geography, cartography and military intelligence in Britain during the First World War. It focuses on the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and its wartime activities on behalf of the British intelligence service. Evidence is presented on the role of the RGS in the dispute between the so-called 'westerners', committed to an all-out clash with Germany on the western front, and the 'easterners', who argued that the key to deadlock in western Europe lay in the Ottoman Empire. For a short period, the RGS became a significant metropolitan focus for those advocating a British intervention in the Middle East coupled with an Arab revolt against the Turks, the campaign popularly associated with T E Lawrence. The essay concludes with an assessment of the significance of geography to the British war effort and an evaluation of the impact of the war on the institutions and prestige of the discipline. Some final comments are offered on the moral and ethical questions raised by the mobilization of geographical expertise in wartime.

key words history of British geography and cartography First World War Royal Geographical Society

Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicester LE11 3TU e-mail: [email protected]

revised manuscript received 22 November 1995

Introduction

War has been one of the greatest geographers. (Sir George Taubman Goldie 19071) War, in the modern sense of the word, is altogether based on geography. (Rev. H B George 19072)

The years 1914-18 witnessed the first modern war. All the major industrialized powers were involved and all parts of the globe were directly or indirectly implicated. Huge armies were mobilized, supported by powerful state bureaucracies and by the labour of entire civilian populations.

The Great War, as it is still often called, is generally depicted as a fault-line in world history. The progressive and optimistic values of the Victorian and Edwardian eras were, it is claimed,

shattered for ever on the killing fields of Flanders and Picardy. Into their place came the characteristic uncertainties, ambiguities and ironies of twentieth- century modernity. The 1914-18 war not only anticipates the even greater horrors which were to come; it also marks the birthplace of our modern neurosis about global apocalypse.3

A particularly disturbing feature of the First World War (and one reason why it is seen as such a tragically ironic turning point) was the unprecedented mobilization of science and technology. Military and political leaders could draw upon the harvest of more than a century of rapid scientific development. The war revealed, more clearly than ever before, the awesome destructive capacity of modern technology. This was the dark side of the machine age; an era of feverish industrial

Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 21 504-533 1996 ISSN 0020-2754 ? Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) 1996



Geography, cartography and military intelligence 505

production devoted almost exclusively to devas- tation and death. From the crisis of 1914 was forged a new and more intimate relationship between science, the state and the military. Thus emerged one of the central paradoxes of the modern age - the idea that logic and rationality could sustain something as illogical and irrational as 'total war'.

Depressingly few scientists resisted the call to arms in 1914. Those who did, such as Bertrand Russell in Britain and G F Nicolai in Germany, were subjected to merciless campaigns of vilifi- cation and abuse.4 Faced with this kind of pressure, the vast majority of academics threw their full weight behind the war effort.5 A sense of patriotic duty and a firm belief in their nation's cause were powerful motives but less elevated personal ambitions also influenced the behaviour of academics. Many entered the fray with an enthusiasm and belligerence which embarrassed rather than gratified the political leadership. Throughout the summer of 1915, for example, some of Britain's most distinguished scientists waged a spirited campaign, initiated by H G Wells, to force the government to increase funding for scientific research of relevance to the war effort.6 This theme was echoed by the zoologist E B Poulton in his 1915 Romanes lecture at Oxford.7 The message was simple: knowledge is power and whatever German scientists could do, Britons could do better, provided the necessary resources were made available. F H Royce, the engineering genius behind Rolls-Royce, went so far as to propose, in language chillingly prescient of later decades, that the British government should offer a 'substantial' cash prize to the scientist who devised the most efficient means 'to destroy... German, Austrian, and Turkish combatants in the greatest possible number in the shortest possible time'.8 Scientists whose research was stimulated by war needs revealed more than a hint of euphoria at their newly acquired power. The words of J A Fleming, professor of electrical engineering at University College, London, are characteristic:

the outcome of the present war must be an entirely new chapter in human history and a point of fresh departure in social, economic and intellectual life ... It is beyond any doubt that this war is a war of engineers and chemists quite as much as of soldiers.9

Several studies have examined the role of scientists and academics during the First World

War as well as the impact of that period on particular disciplines, notably chemistry.10 Despite the obvious significance of geographical expertise in wartime, there have been surprisingly few recent attempts to interrogate the role of geography in war.1 This essay is, therefore, an opening foray into a largely untouched, and perhaps consciously ignored, arena. Its theme is the dialectic between geography and war in the period from 1914 to 1919 as revealed by the activities of the Royal Geo- graphical Society (RGS), Britain's oldest and, at that time, most prestigious centre of geographical expertise. My concern is not with the broader intellectual impact of the Great War on geographical theory (which will be considered elsewhere) but rather with the practical and technical role of the discipline, particularly in the field of cartography, and with the connections which were established between the British geographical community and the intelligence services. By exploring this specific relationship in a particular historical and geographical context, I want to emphasize the importance of considering the full range of different, and often rival, geographies in both the past and the present. What follows, then, is one of the 'unfamiliar' histories of geography. Although rarely considered in conventional accounts, such histories raise the most profound moral, ideological and intellectual dilemmas which reverberate across the decades from past to present.12

Geography and military intelligence

The histories of geography and military intelligence in Britain are closely interwoven. As Christopher Andrew has demonstrated, exploration, map-making and cartography were the central elements of early intelligence-gathering.'3 The first British intelligence agency, the earliest ancestor of MI5 and MI6, was the Depot of Military Knowledge, established during the Napoleonic wars by the Quartermaster General's Department of the War Office. Its responsibility was to collect foreign maps and related information on the military resources and topography of other countries. This activity became virtually moribund after 1815 despite attempts to revive intelligence- gathering to facilitate British imperial expansion around the world. The most tireless advocate of better intelligence was Major Thomas Best Jervis, a senior officer on the Survey of India during the



506 Michael Heffernan

1830s and an active Fellow of both the Royal Society and the RGS. Jervis foresaw a central government agency which would collect and compile accurate maps and other geographical material; a secretive organization operating alongside the Ordnance Survey (OS), although devoted entirely to overseas territories.14

This argument was strengthened by British military disasters in the Crimean War which were widely attributed to a lack of geographical intelligence. Jervis impressed the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State for War, by presenting him with detailed Russian and Austrian maps of the war zone, hitherto unavailable in Britain, which he had bought on the open market in Belgium. Newcastle promptly recruited Jervis to oversee reproduction of these and other maps. Early in 1855, Newcastle's successor, Lord Panmure, established a Topo- graphical Department under Jervis's direction.15

This stagnated after hostilities ceased in the Crimea, though a major reorganization in 1857 merged the Topographical Department with the remnants of the Military Depot to establish a Topographical and Statistical Department (T & S) under the nominal control of the OS. Further reforms took place after 1870, when Major (later Major-General Sir) Charles Wilson took over at T & S. Like Jervis, Wilson was a cartographer, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the RGS, and a founder member of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF).16 Appalled by the primitive state of military intelligence, Wilson submitted a highly critical report to Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's reform- minded Secretary of State for War. This precipitated a series of organizational improvements culminating in the creation of a reorganized department, the Intelligence Branch (IB), under a new director, Major-General Sir Patrick MacDougall. The IB, with a staff of 27, was charged both with gathering intelligence and with devising war strategies, particularly in relation to India. Later directors, such as Major-General Sir Archibald Alison and Colonel Aylmer Cameron, were particularly concerned with the 'Great Game' of Anglo-Russian espionage and counter- espionage along India's vulnerable northwest frontier and an Indian branch of the IB was established at Simla (known as IBS) to coordinate intelligence- gathering in the region.17

By the mid-1880s, the IB had acquired an unrivalled collection of foreign maps and a 40 000- volume library (which was growing at a rate of

5500 volumes per year). Significantly, it was one of the first British libraries to adopt the Dewey Decimal classification system. Its effectiveness was hampered, however, by the implacable hostility of senior army officers, especially Field Marshal the Duke of Cambridge, and by an all-pervading public school code of honour, equally evident within and without the IB, which was uncomfortable with the idea of covert intelligence-gathering, an activity seen as ungentlemanly and worthy only of the most reprehensible foreign governments. Most IB information was gleaned from widely available foreign publications and from the reports of British military attaches in overseas capitals with whom it was reluctantly allowed to correspond. Attitudes slowly changed, however, and 'spying' was widely accepted from around the turn of the century, although it remained the preserve of eccentric volunteers with a taste for travelling incognito and compiling 'intelligence reports' of variable quality.18

By his third premiership (1895-1902), Lord Salisbury had become convinced of the need for a better intelligence service and the fortunes of the IB improved under his influence, especially after the appointment of Sir John Ardagh as director in 1896. Once again, it was the manifest failure of the British army, this time in the Boer War, that provided the main impetus. Ardagh's South African intelligence reports, subsequently recognized as accurate, had rarely been taken into account by senior officers during the war. Spenser Wilkinson, the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford, likened the War Office's use of the intelligence service to that of a man who 'kept a small brain for occasional use in his waistcoat pocket and ran his head by clockwork'.19 Lord Esher's 1903 report on the Boer War recommended wholesale reorganization of the War Office, the establishment of a General Staff and an expanded intelligence service.

The British Admiralty, unnerved by a series of potentially disastrous reports about non-existent foreign fleet mobilizations, belatedly came to the view that it too required a naval intelligence agency. Once again, it was from the mapping and surveying section of the Admiralty (the Hydro- graphic Department) that the new organization emerged. Following the 1883 Royal Commission on the Defence of British Possessions and Com- merce Abroad, a Naval Intelligence Department (NID) was established, directed by Captain William Hall.20



Geography, cartography and military intelligence 507 In the years before 1914, the War Office and

Admiralty intelligence services became increasingly interconnected, particularly after the establishment of a General Staff in 1906 and the creation of a separate Secret Service Bureau with both military and naval sections. From this emerged the complex structure of British intelligence that existed in the summer of 1914. At the Admiralty, the NID was still the focus of activity under the directorship, from November 1914, of Captain (later Admiral Sir) William Reginald 'Blinker' Hall, son of the first director of the NID and so-named as a result of his pronounced facial twitch. In the War Office, several intelligence sections existed in 1914, each prefixed by the letters MO for 'Military Operations' (this was changed in 1916 to the more familiar MI notation for 'Military Intelligence'). MO1 was concerned with general strategic questions and war games; MO2 with Europe, the Ottoman Empire and Africa; MO3 with India and the rest of Asia, the Americas and Russia; MO5 with espionage and counter-espionage in the UK (especially concerning Ireland); and MO6 with the same activities abroad.21 MO4, the direct offspring of the original intelligence agencies, was the preserve of map-making, map collection and topography. It was more commonly known as the GSGS, the Geographical Section of the General Staff. The GSGS was responsible for collecting and producing maps for the army in all parts of the world (with the exception of India which was handled by the India Office) and with providing geographical facts, particularly on boundaries, to other government ministries. It was commanded in its early years by Major E H Hills and then by Colonel (later Sir) Charles Frederick Close (subsequently Arden-Close).22 Close became Director-General of the OS in 1911 and was replaced at the GSGS by Colonel (later Sir) Walter Coote Hedley who was in charge throughout the war. 'Blinker' Hall and Walter Coote Hedley were key players in the British intelligence community in 1914 and both were to have a significant impact on the mobilization of British geographical expertise during the First World War.

Global war and global mapping: the RGS and war cartography

In August 1914, British geography was at the dawn of a new era. The age of Victorian exploration and

imperial expansion, which spawned the modern discipline, was virtually over. Most English geographical societies, established at the high noon of 'geographical fever' in the 1880s and 1890s, were in genteel decline.23 The exception was the RGS in London which remained a flourishing social and intellectual centre for the geographical and imperial elite. With 5300 Fellows and spacious new premises in Kensington Gore, it was easily the largest and wealthiest geographical society in the world.24 Its continuing success was due in part to its metropolitan focus, close to the centre of political and imperial power, but also to its greater willingness to move beyond the traditional con- cerns of travel and exploration to embrace more prosaic educational issues. In 1907, the subject was finally deemed worthy of examination by the Civil Service. By 1914, geography was beginning to establish a position in the nation's schools and universities from which it was to develop strongly after 1918. These developments were due, in no small measure, to the encouragement and generos- ity of the RGS.25 Change was in the air in other respects too. In 1913, after a long and acrimonious campaign, the RGS belatedly opened its doors to women Fellows.26

The new President of the RGS in 1914 was Douglas William Freshfield, a wealthy old Etonian, pioneer Alpine climber and indefatigable advocate of the educational value of geography.27 The Society's permanent secretary was Dr (later Sir) John Scott Keltie, widely respected chronicler of the 'Scramble for Africa' and author of a famous 1885 report on the teaching of geography in Britain.28 Keltie's assistant (and successor from early 1915) was Arthur R Hinks, an astronomer and previously lecturer in cartography and surveying at Cambridge.29 The RGS Council for the 1914 session was a veritable roll call of Britain's imperial establishment and included several men closely associated with the intelligence community. Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, for example, had been a long-serving frontier intelligence officer in India at the height of the 'Great Game' and was probably the country's foremost expert on boundary delimitation.30 Both Close and Hedley, past and present chiefs of GSGS, were Council members.

Freshfield assumed a key role in the RGS as the country lurched towards war. On 31 July 1914, 48 hours before news reached London of the German attack on Belgium, Freshfield placed what he later




called 'the personal and material resources' of the RGS at the disposal of Hedley's GSGS, an offer accepted after some hesitation.31 From that date until 31 March 1919, the RGS remained on an emergency, wartime footing. Freshfield was plainly relieved when the government declared war on 4 August:

Well thank God that England has been spared the ignominy of hanging back in the war of Right against Might. One could never have gone to the Continent again had we failed France.32

Within 24 hours of the declaration of war, Hedley sent orders to the RGS to begin work on two urgent GSGS projects. The first was an index of what The Times subsequently called the 'horribly unpronounceable place names' on the tactical large-scale GSGS maps of Belgium and France issued to all officers of the British Expeditionary Force. The second involved the production of a new four-sheet 1:500 000 skeletal wall map of Britain showing railways, principal towns, rivers and county boundaries. Reproductions of this map were required by the War Office in planning home defence strategies in the event of a German invasion.33

Hinks took charge of both projects and hastily recruited dozens of female volunteers from Cheltenham Ladies' College and various colleges of the University of London. After round-the-clock work, the index was completed with remarkable speed by the beginning of September.34 Hinks wrote to Hedley in ebullient mood:

it has been a blessing to have hard work to do... [The] volunteers declared that they never enjoyed anything so much in their lives, and are pining for more ... perfectly thrilling, the ladies call it.35

Hedley was delighted with the index, the prompt arrival of which ended an uncomfortable and embarrassing episode for the GSGS which had scandalously overlooked this basic requirement. 'I tremble to think what would have occurred, if we had been obliged to try to get the work done without your help', Hedley confessed."6

To assist with the 1:500 000 map, Hedley des- patched one of his staff, Captain O H B Trenchard, to work full-time at Kensington Gore.37 Hinks, by now effectively in control of the day-to-day run- ning of the RGS, was determined to enhance the Society's significance through its war work. To this end, he drafted a long memorandum to Hedley on

10 August, offering to produce a similar skeletal map covering the whole of Europe, but on the 1:1 million scale. No such map existed, although Hinks claimed it would have considerable 'strategical use during the war and ... political use during the re-arrangements that are likely to follow it'.38

The idea of an international 1:1 million map had a tortuous history which provides an illuminating commentary on the hopes and fears of the fin-de- siccle world in which it was conceived. The concept dated back to 1891 when the leading German geomorphologist Albrecht Penck, then at the University of Vienna, proposed to the Fifth International Geographical Congress in Berne that a new world map should be constructed on this scale, based on a standard set of conventions and styles to be agreed by the cartographic agencies of all the major powers.39 Penck argued that, four centuries after Columbus set sail for the Americas, sufficient information had been gathered about the land masses of the world to justify this grand international venture. The International Map, as it came to be known, was to be a tribute to the great age of exploration and mapping which was drawing to a close. Producing an internationally recognized 1:1 million global map would provide an appropriate summation of 400 years of geographical inquiry. Based on the solid foundations of this map, a modern, twentieth-century geography could emerge to ask new and more complex questions about the natural world and its human inhabitants.40

An investigative commission was established which, predictably, achieved little. Penck and his growing band of supporters persevered and resolutions were passed at the International Geographical Congresses in London (1895), Berlin (1899), the USA (1904) and Geneva (1908), followed by an inaugural conference of a new International Map Committee at the British Foreign Office in November 1909.41 Progress was painfully slow, however, mainly due to the mutual suspicion between the different mapping agencies involved. Only six provisional European sheets had been compiled by 1913 and several of these had been rejected by one or more participating governments.42 Further high-sounding resolutions were issued at the Tenth International Congress in Rome (1913) and a second conference was organized in Paris that December by General Bourgeois of the Service Giographique de l'Armie to accelerate the




project.43 The impact of this event was lessened, however, by the withdrawal of the United States which opted to develop its own ambitious scheme to map South America at 1:1 million scale freed from the discipline of an international agreement.44

The British delegation in Paris - Close, Hinks, Hedley and two other GSGS officers, Captain E W Cox and Major E M Jack - was authorized by the Foreign Office to suggest that the headquarters of the project should be located at the OS which had been the main focus of activity since the 1909 London conference. To deflect criticism that the British were seeking to seize control of the project, Close suggested that the RGS, an ostensibly independent and apolitical institution, should be involved alongside the OS and the GSGS.45

Ironically, Hinks was far less enamoured by the idea of international cooperation than Close and his cynicism at the high-flown rhetoric of earlier declarations was all too obvious: 'I do not know that any very definite statement has ever been made of the precise purpose of this map', he wrote on the eve of the Paris Conference.

We may think of it, perhaps, as meant for the use of the systematic geographer, whenever it shall have been determined what is the function of that person.46

He was also scathing about the existing provisional sheets, informing Captain H St J L Winterbotham of the OS that only two were of any use, a claim which greatly irritated Close who had been largely responsible for their production.47 Yet Hinks was perfectly prepared to be involved in the practical side of the project, not least because the War Office was willing to provide the RGS with ?1550 per annum to support its work. He informed Close that, in these happy circumstances, the RGS would do its best to 'boom the map a little' amongst the Fellowship and in its publications.48

By offering to produce a simplified wartime version of the European sector of the 1:1 million map, Hinks was seeking to take control of a project which would otherwise have foundered. The OS and the GSGS would, he reasoned, be too busy with large-scale military maps of the various theatres of operation to devote valuable time and resources to the 1:1 million. With the spirit of international cooperation in tatters, the RGS was uniquely placed to keep the project alive, enhanc- ing thereby its own reputation and ensuring British control of the map in the future.

Hinks' provisional objective was a 24-sheet map, to be prepared over two years, based on five existing International Map sheets plus newly researched material for nineteen other sheets covering the rest of the continent gleaned from existing maps and surveys at different scales. Each sheet was to contain the basic features of relief and drainage plus the principal centres of population and communication expressed in English.49

Hedley was enthusiastic:

There can be no doubt that a skeletal map of Europe on the 1/M scale will be most useful... Without such help the GSGS would be quite unable to undertake the work at the present time.50

Hinks was delighted:

We are very glad that Hedley has given us something more to do ... for it is wretched having nothing to do for the country in these times ... [I]f we can make a success of it [the 1:1 million map], I expect that it will last for a good many years before it is superseded.51

To help with initial research, Hedley sent another GSGS officer, Captain Malcolm N MacLeod, to work alongside Hinks, Trenchard and the RGS draughtsmen.

By the end of 1914, after five months of war, the RGS had successfully manoeuvred itself into an important strategic position. It had become, in effect, a technical and cartographic annex to the War Office. Freshfield was greatly encouraged by this. While he did not underestimate the strength of the Central Powers and was at pains to guard against any hint of complacency, he remained optimistic both about the eventual outcome of the war and about the role of the RGS in contribut- ing to an Allied victory. His optimism was based in part on his personal memories of the Franco- Prussian confrontation of 1870 coupled with a firm conviction that war in 1914 would reflect both the rapid pace of technological change and the dramatic globalization of European power which had taken place over the preceding four decades. Once the enormous military resources of the British and French empires were mobilized (and this would obviously take some time), he believed the crisis would end with an Allied victory even more decisive than the Prussians had achieved over 40 years earlier. But before victory was achieved, he reasoned, the war would become a global and imperial conflict, involving all aspects of modern transport and communications as




well as the specialist technologies of war on land, sea and in the air. A dashing confrontation of movement, thrust and counter-thrust over enormous distances was thus inevitable.

This would be, in short, a quintessentially geographical struggle and an ideal opportunity for the RGS to influence events. Freshfield was convinced that geographical expertise, if employed with imagination and flair, could play a decisive role in winning the war.52 His views were eloquently summarized in a speech at the opening of the 1914-15 session on 9 November:

the present crisis calls on us, more than most, not only to keep up, but to add to, our normal activities. More than ever in time of war and the revision of frontiers that must follow war, ought we to persist in our endeavours to distribute geographical facts and to inculcate the right way of grouping and dealing with them. For war and geography are closely connected. A grasp of the features of the country, the right maps and intelligence to use them, are among the first requirements of a soldier."53 Yet, even as he spoke, the nature of the conflict

was undermining Freshfield's hopes and ambitions. The war of movement in western Europe had already come to a shuddering halt and a great sinuous scar of opposing trench lines was estab- lishing itself from Flanders to the Vosges. Tech- nology, the force in which Freshfield placed so much store, was in fact militating against the kind of mobile, decisive victory he predicted. Railways, motorized vehicles and telephonic communication, scarcely involved in previous wars, were proving extremely efficient at maintaining huge armies in well-dug trenches. Protected by lethal new weapons, especially the machine gun, these subter- ranean lines could be made virtually impregnable to infantry assault and would remain so until the advent of modern air and tank power. When military 'strategy' was limited to massive artillery barrages followed by futile infantry attacks across a few yards of 'no man's land', detailed geographical knowledge of topography, soils, vegetation and climate - vital to a mobile war of sweeping infantry manoeuvres and cavalry charges - was of little relevance.

These depressing facts led some to question the need for the 1:1 million map, by now the centre- piece of the RGS's war effort and openly promoted as a cartographic aid to the grand strategy of a mobile campaign. Captain Bertram F E Keeling, Close's assistant at the OS, wrote to Hinks (whom

he cordially detested) in March 1915 dismiss- ing the RGS's work on the map as an irrelevance. The trenches of France and Belgium would be long-term features, he argued, and new large-scale maps of the western front should be the main priority: 'No-one [at the OS] ...', he wrote, 'dis- plays any interest in the million ... I have asked soldiers here and they say it is too small a scale to be of use'.54 Close, although personally committed to the idea of the 1:1 million map, shared this sense of priority and the vast majority of the 32 million maps produced by the OS during the war were large-scale battlefield sheets.55

British capacity for self-delusion was, however, limitless and most military leaders insisted, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Allied armies would eventually break through the German lines on the western front and reopen a war of movement. This ambition required large-scale planning for which simple small-scale maps such as the 1:1 million were ideal. The rapid forward movement of men and weaponry which failed so dismally to materialize during the campaigns of 1915-17 around Ypres and on the Somme would certainly have been sketched in general outline on the RGS sheets (as well as on the more detailed GSGS and OS maps). 'These maps of yours', Hedley informed Hinks about the handful of sheets that had been compiled by the autumn of 1915,

have been of the greatest use to ... the General Staff because they give a clear representation of the ground and communications and are not confused by too many lines. They give in fact just what is required.56

A month later, Earl Kitchener's private secretary wrote stating that the 1:1 million sheets were used personally by the Secretary of State for War who wished to offer his thanks and congratulations.57 Political leaders of an equally optimistic outlook also believed that a British 1:1 million map of Europe, albeit in skeletal outline, would be enor- mously useful when the time came, after an Allied victory, for negotiations about boundary alter- ations and territorial exchanges. RGS work on the 1:1 million map was thus protected by the wishful thinking of Britain's military and political leadership.

Hinks set about his work with zeal. By mid- summer of 1915, he was able to present a detailed technical paper to the RGS on the 1:1 million, complete with dismissive comments about the




Index to i~Xtp (1N T[E SCALI OF /IIUO0N

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Compiled at the tieyaI Geot~phicalSoei 31 \ , under the direction of the GeneralS

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Figure 1 Index to the map on the scale 1:1 million compiled at the RGS under the direction of the General Staff, 1914-15

pre-war International Map and the small-scale maps of other European powers. By this stage, ten sheets had been completed (Fig. 1).58 After some debate, the War Office agreed that the 1:1 million need not be treated as secret (indeed, sheets were subsequently sold to the public) and Hinks proudly sent complimentary copies to leading politicians, including the Prime Minister.59 Hinks also managed to obtain, through Hedley, an impressive amount of sensitive information from domestic and Allied intelligence services and British military attaches abroad. In October 1915, for example, a large parcel of classified Russian military maps of the eastern front arrived at the RGS, via MO3 and the GSGS, from Major James Blair, the British military attach6 in Petrograd.6? Not content with providing basic cartographic requirements, Hinks persuaded Hedley that B C Wallis, an accomplished cartographer, should be employed to produce a thematic series of language and ethnicity maps at 1:1 million scale for Austro- Hungary and the Balkans. The explicit objective was to demonstrate cartographically the bewilder- ing ethnic complexity of Austro-Hungary to underline the need to dismantle the Hapsburg Empire after the war.61

West versus east: D G Hogarth, T E Lawrence and British intelligence in the Middle East

Each escalation of the war provoked a new burst of activity in the RGS and a rescheduling of the 1:1 million work to meet the demand for maps of the new theatres of conflict. The Italian Alps became a new priority after Italy entered the war on the Allied side in April 1915, as did the Balkans once Bulgaria sided with the Central Powers in the following October. The most important event for the RGS, however, was the Allied declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire in November 1914. This had little immediate impact on the RGS but, from January 1915, the Middle East became the main focus of attention. This was directly connected to an increasingly angry debate within the upper echelons of British military and political life between the so-called 'westerners', who insisted that British and Allied forces should be concentrated on the western front against the full might of the German army, and the 'easterners', who felt that a vigorous campaign against a weak Ottoman Empire (which Britain had previously supported as a bulwark against Russian imperial




expansion) would allow Britain and France to link up more effectively with Russia while, at the same time, providing an opportunity to unleash Britain's unmatched naval power, hitherto frustratingly underdeployed. Deadlock on the western front could thus be circumvented by an eastern campaign against Turkey.

Most senior army officers were committed 'westerners' but several politicians, notably Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, were attracted by the 'eastern' option. Churchill's preferred solution was an all-out assault on Constantinople through the straits of the Dardanelles. If these could be breached by naval attack, troops could be landed on the Gallipoli peninsula and the Turkish capital would lie within reach. The 'soft underbelly' of the Germanic power axis would be exposed and a new southern front would be opened which German or Austro- Hungarian troops would be forced to protect, thus stretching their reserves and diminishing their defensive capacity in Europe. Despite fierce opposition, this daring plan was approved in January 1915.

On 17 January, Hedley ordered Hinks to cease work on the European 1:1 million sheets and prepare another place-name index for the large- scale GSGS maps of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. He also ordered 1:1 million sheets to be prepared for the whole of the Ottoman Empire.62 This presented an entirely different scale of prob- lem as there were few accurate maps or surveys of the Middle East which could be used as the basis for these sheets. Hinks had therefore to rely on the observations and recordings of the explorers, scholars and intelligence officers who had spent much of the prewar era working in the region. An obvious starting point was David George Hogarth, Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Fellow of Magdalen College and a prominent member of the RGS Council.63 Hogarth, then in his mid-50s, was probably the leading British authority on the geography and archaeology of the Middle East. By 27 January 1915, he was working full-time at the RGS on map work relating to Turkey and the Middle East. Two other RGS Council members were also recruited: Douglas Carruthers (a hearty big-game hunter who had spent much of his adult life pursuing the wildlife of Asia, Africa and the Middle East) and H N Dickson (professor of physiology and meteorology at University College Reading).64

Hogarth, whose 'behind-the-scenes' influence on the RGS and on British strategy in the Middle East was to be enormous, was a close friend and mentor of T E Lawrence whom he first met in Oxford in January 1909. Lawrence was at that time an undergraduate at Jesus College while Hogarth, who had previously combined a distinguished academic career in Britain with periods in journal- ism (he was The Times' correspondent in Crete during the rebellion against the Ottoman Turks in 1897) and directorship of the British School in Athens (1897-1909), had just taken up his position at the Ashmolean (succeeding Sir Arthur Evans).

A lively controversy surrounds both Lawrence and Hogarth. According to some authorities, Hogarth was a profoundly anti-democratic member of The Round Table group, an informal and rather secretive Oxford club associated with a periodical of that name edited by the colonial historian Lionel Curtis. This group, which included a number of leading imperialists such as the nov- elist John Buchan and the wartime editor of The Times Geoffrey Dawson, is generally credited with helping to formulate some of the ultra-imperialist policies advocated in government by politicians such as Lord Milner. The group was, in short, a semi-official think-tank on Britain's imperial strategy in response to French and German ambitions around the world.65 Hogarth's unmatched knowledge and experience of the Middle East was obviously invaluable given the international intrigue in this area. His knowledge was also well-known to the British intelligence services, particularly to Hedley who served alongside Hogarth on both the RGS Council and on the Executive Committee of the PEF.66 It has been claimed that Hogarth became an academic spy-master (of a kind subsequently associated with the University of Cambridge) who recruited likely young men and trained them in the subtle arts of espionage under the guise of scholarship. Lawrence, it is argued, was one such recruit.67

Whatever the truth of these claims, it is certain that Hogarth encouraged Lawrence's early interest in Middle Eastern archaeology and introduced his young prot~g6 to Charles Doughty, the elder statesman of British Middle Eastern studies. When Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, asked Hogarth to lead an excavation around Carchemish in Syria in 1911, Lawrence was invited along. The two years of intermittent research at this site, located on the western flood




plain of the upper Euphrates, marked the beginning of Lawrence's serious involvement with the Arab world, the 'turning point' in his life.68

Those who believe that Hogarth and Lawrence were part of a British spy-ring insist that the Carchemish excavation was merely an archaeological 'cover'; the real objective was to gather intelligence on German railway construction in the area. Under the Drang nach Osten policy, German ambitions in the Middle East had expanded exponen- tially since the turn of the century. The most obvious physical manifestation of this 'drive to the east' was the proposed Berlin to Baghdad railway to be built with German capital and expertise. The last link in this iron axis was the section connecting Adana, the eastern rail terminus for the line from Constantinople, with Baghdad by way of the Tigris valley. The railway represented a direct challenge to the ambitions of other European states in the region and specifically threatened the all-important British imperial routeway to India. Its route was to cross the Euphrates immediately south of the Carchemish site, the excavation of which would thus serve a dual scientific and political purpose.69 Following his experience at Carchemish, Lawrence then became involved in a PEF project to produce a half-inch-to-the-mile archaeological map of the Sinai desert which was also designed to improve British intelligence about the region: 'We are obviously only meant as red herrings', wrote Lawrence, 'to give an archaeological colour to a political job'.70

After the declaration of war, Lawrence, who was by now back in Oxford, spent several months seeking employment with the intelligence service. In October 1914, following an intervention from Hogarth, he joined Hedley's GSGS where he wrote intelligence reports and worked on military maps."7 In December 1914, after war was declared with Turkey, Lawrence was transferred to Egypt as part of a British intelligence department under the control of Lieutenant-Colonel Gilbert Clayton which included Leonard Woolley (Hogarth's assistant at the Ashmolean), Stewart Francis Newcombe, George Lloyd and Aubrey Herbert. This small team - 'more reminiscent of a university department than a military unit' - was based at the Continental Hotel in Cairo and spent its time working out strategic options to ensure the protec- tion of the Suez Canal zone, the principal defensive objective of British policy in the region. Lawrence's duties included liaising with civilian map-makers

from the Survey of Egypt and writing 'little geographical essays. It doesn't sound exciting, but it has been far and away the best job in Egypt'.72 Under the influence of Newcombe, Lawrence developed an interest in the scientific and strategic possibilities of aerial photography.73

Lawrence's superiors left an unfavourable impression on him:

we advise all sorts of people in power on geographical points. The ignorance of these people would give them impossible-ever-to-sit down again experiences in a preparatory school. 'Who does Crete belong to?' 'Where is Piraeus?'.74

The image of the preparatory school is probably more apt in describing this small group than that of the university department. Most members shared a peculiarly English, upper-class predilection for games, conspiracies and secret agendas. The only exception was Newcombe who was dismissed by the old Etonian Lloyd as 'underbred'. Lawrence, on the other hand, seemed engagingly eccentric to his colleagues: 'odd gnome, half cad - with a touch of genius' was Lloyd's assessment.75

From this group emerged an influential intelligence network, operating mainly in the Middle East, which sought to develop a very different 'eastern' option from that devised by the Admiralty in late 1914. This 'band of wild men', as Lawrence called them, advocated an Allied invasion of the eastern Mediterranean coast, a region many commentators dismissed as stra- tegically irrelevant. If this invasion could be combined with a general Arab revolt against the Turks, however, sustained by the promise of some measure of postwar pan-Arab independence, it was argued that the Ottoman Empire would implode. Hogarth was a key proponent of this view. He was, according to Lawrence,

Not a wild man, but Mentor to all of us ... our father confessor and adviser, who brought us the parallels and lessons of history, and moderation, and courage. To the outsiders, he was a peace-maker (I was all claws and teeth, and had a devil), and made us feel favoured and listened to, for his weight judgement. He had a delicate sense of value, and would present clearly to us the forces hidden behind the lousy rags and festering skins we knew as Arabs. Hogarth was our referee, and our untiring historian, who gave us his great knowledge and careful wisdom even in the smallest things, because he believed in what we were making.76




Elsewhere Lawrence wrote, 'I owed [Hogarth] everything I had'; the war, he also claimed, had turned him into 'a sort of Hogarth: a travelled, archaeological sort of man, with geography and a

,77 pen as his two standbys'.7

The motives of Hogarth and Lawrence are a matter of further controversy. Some historians insist that both men became genuinely convinced of the need for Arab independence. Others claim that neither exhibited real sympathy for the Arab cause but calculated that, in the midst of this national crisis, British interests were best served by encouraging pan-Arab independence in the belief that a future Arab state would be dominated by Britain (rather than Germany or France).78 Estab- lishing the truth in this shadowy world is notori- ously difficult but one thing is clear: from early 1915, while Hogarth was poring over maps in the RGS, Lawrence and his colleagues in Cairo began to develop ideas for a more offensive campaign in the Middle East. One idea was to combine the proposed assault on the Dardanelles, which most members of the Cairo office felt unlikely to succeed, with an Allied naval attack on the port of Alexandretta, on the north Syrian coast. This idea was quickly rejected in London, however, on the grounds that it would create tension with France where a powerful imperialist lobby insisted that greater Syria (la Syrie integrale) was a French sphere of influence. French politicians, it was judged, would be alarmed by British military involvement in a region which France hoped to annex unchal- lenged once Turkey was defeated.79 Forestalling French ambitions may well have been the principal objective of Lawrence's scheme but the British government decided that a major force, comprising mainly of Indian imperial troops, should advance instead through Mesopotamia from the Persian Gulf towards Baghdad.

Lawrence had little faith in either the Dardanelles or the Mesopotamia proposals, neither of which were to rely upon local Arab support.80s He sought to communicate his views to Hogarth in London during the early weeks of 1915. Two of his letters, dated 18 and 22 March (as preparations for the Dardanelles campaign gathered momentum), seemed to escape the vigilance of the British military censors. In the first, Lawrence entreated Hogarth to use his influence and contacts in London to revive the Alexandretta scheme and to undermine those who were concerned about French sensibilities:

go to the F[oreign] O[ffice] if possible. Point out that in the Baghdad [Railway] Convention France gave up Alexandretta, to Germans, and agreed that it formed no part of Syria. Swear that it doesn't form part of Syria - and you know it speaks Turkish: and also tell F[oreign] O[ffice] ... that it is vitally important we hold it. One cannot go on betting that France will always be our friend. If France has all of Syria south of Alexandretta, she ought to be content.sl

Once Alexandretta was captured, Lawrence argued that a general Arab revolt could be instigated against Turkish rule across much of Syria and beyond. In his second letter, he urged Hogarth to concentrate his efforts on officials in the government of India who, he claimed, still regarded the Middle East as rightfully their responsibility and remained committed to an Indian-style 'divide- and-rule' policy with respect to the Arab population. The Arab revolt foreseen by Lawrence was predicated upon greater Arab unity which Britain should encourage rather than undermine. Ulti- mately, the government should embrace the idea of Arab self-rule after the war in return for Arab support against the Turks: 'It's a big game', he observed, 'and at last one worth playing... If only [the government of] India will let us go. Won't the French be mad if we win through?'.82

Breaking the deadlock: the RGS and the Middle East, 1915-16

Hogarth tried hard to promote these ideas in London, not least within the RGS itself. On 24 March 1915, he volunteered to present a lecture at the RGS in a series which Freshfield and Keltie had inaugurated on the geography of the war, part of their attempt to increase the wartime profile of the Society.83" The date of the lecture, suggested by Hogarth, was 26 April, the day after the Allied naval assault on the Dardanelles was due to begin. This was clearly chosen, with obvious inside information, to maximize the lecture's impact on public and political opinion. Hogarth's presentation, a survey of the war in the 'Near East', ended with an eloquent warning against underestimating the military power of Turkey. The attack which had just begun, he argued, was extremely risky for the straits of the Dardanelles were narrow, treacherous and offered few natural landing places. All was to the defender's advantage in this natural fortress. Hogarth's paper was, in short, a severe indictment of the agreed strategy, all the more effective for its



Geography, cartography and military intelligence 515 calm understatement. The best chance of success, he concluded, lay in combining the Dardanelles campaign with other assaults on the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Syria, though no mention was made of an Arab rising.84

While he remained at the RGS, Hogarth worked diligently to develop military options for an attack on Syria drawing upon his own expertise and an impressive range of secret intelligence reports on the Middle East supplied by Hedley. The main sources of information were Hogarth's close friend Gertrude Bell, the remarkable archaeologist who travelled widely in the Middle East before 1914 and spent much of the war on intelligence duty in the region, and Captain W H I Shakespear, whose pioneering motorized travels in Arabia before and during the war ended with his death fighting with Ibn Saud's men against pro-Turkish Arab forces on 24 January 1915.85

Incorporating this mass of often-conflicting information (which arrived in frustrating instal- ments) onto the 1:1 million sheets was a major task. By May 1915, following an Admiralty request for information on the Persian Gulf sheet, Hinks confessed that progress on that sector was being 'delayed in order to incorporate the recent work of Miss Gertrude Bell and the late Captain Shakespear'. The following August, Hinks informed Hedley that

All the notebooks and observations of the late Capt. Shakespear have recently come into our hands, and we are putting on as much ... staff as possible to working this up. When it is finished we shall tackle Miss Gertrude Bell and I hope that by Christmas time all that material will be ready.86

Lawrence's own map-work and reconnaissance information, particularly on Damascus and its environs, also began to filter back to the RGS map-room via GSGS (Fig. 2).87 This new information generated several ideas including one developed by Lawrence and Hogarth which, drawing heavily on Shakespear's reports, outlined a surprise motorized invasion of Syria from Mesopotamia.88

In May 1915, Hogarth left England for Athens, probably at Hedley's instigation and with some mixed feelings: 'The fact.., is...', he informed his wife,

I have been pushed here into a job which I alone can do as it is at present constituted. Even if TEL [Lawrence] or GLB [Bell] return, they can't quite do the same thing for

various reasons ... so I feel tied by the leg - or rather by a very obvious duty and even if I were to get free and return, what should I do? Odd jobs at the Admiralty and RGS some useful, but many futile. The worst of all would be to have nothing to do. So I stay unwillingly here.89

Two months later, he was on the move again and on 9 August he wrote from the Continental Hotel in Cairo, headquarters of the Egyptian intelligence group, where he was reunited with Lawrence:

At present there is no particular secret about my movements. I am attached to the War Office Intelligence Department here as an expert on Turkey ... I go through my daily round of office work and interview- ing and interrogating Turkish prisoners contentedly enough.9?

A week later, he observed:

My work is interesting but not exactly exciting, though it puts me in the way of hearing a good deal of what is really happening ... (sometimes singularly different from what is stated officially) and what is expected to happen ... Here it is all politics and war!91

Within days of Hogarth's arrival in Cairo, intelligence reports began to flow from Egypt to the GSGS and the RGS in London.92 Hinks was rarely satisfied either with the quality or the quantity of the material he received and constantly suspected critical details were being withheld. He wrote innumerable complaining letters to Hedley and to Cairo, particularly about Lawrence whose reports and statistical digests on Syria and Damascus were composed in his inimitable style which playfully refused to conform to any consistent system for the transliteration of Arabic place-names.93 'I cannot help thinking', Hinks confided to Hedley, 'that Lawrence is a bit of a crank because at any rate there seems to be a very great weight of serious opinion against him'.94 Hedley, who had directed Lawrence's work at the GSGS earlier in the war, replied in soothing tones:

Lawrence is a young man who is very cock-sure. It is a good fault and he is very often right but not always. If I was [sic] you I would continue your 1/1M series without bothering about Lawrence except to use any information or material he may supply.95

Hogarth remained in the Middle East, though not always in Cairo, until the last weeks of 1915. The Gallipoli campaign continued, despite appal- ling losses, throughout this period; the decision finally to abandon the assault coming at the end of




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Figure 2 The Damascus sheet of the RGS 1:1 million map Source: RGS-IBG map library

October after newspaper reports about the true scale of the disaster ended the command of Sir Ian Hamilton.96 The British advance towards Baghdad, which began earlier in the year, also ran into major difficulties and was forced to retreat after the Battle of Ctesiphon on 22 November to the town of Kut where the Indian troops were besieged by Turkish forces. Faced with these reversals, which he had predicted, Hogarth found it difficult to conceal his weariness: 'I hate this sort of life as much as ever', he wrote on 8 November, 'and this cloudy state of the political situation does not make it any more bearable'. He was, he claimed, 'pen-tied by the

Censor and my own discretion: I can't write about anything really interesting and trivialities don't suit at a time like this'.97

The ignominious collapse of both Allied assaults on the Ottoman Empire intensified intrigue in the region. To an extent, these disasters played into the hands of Lawrence and Hogarth whose ideas for encouraging an Arab rising in return for pan-Arab self-government after the war began to win wider support. Vague British promises were made to the Hashemite Arabs to this effect in the summer and autumn of 1915.98 But powerful, and less subtle, imperialist voices in both London and Paris




remained hostile to any talk of postwar Arab independence as this would compromise the uncomplicated division of the Ottoman spoils amongst the Allied powers after Turkey's defeat. Matters were further complicated by the emerging Zionist lobby which was agitating for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Secret Anglo-French negotiations, led by Sir Mark Sykes (Tory MP for Hull and Kitchener's adviser on Oriental matters) and Francois Georges Picot (former French Consul in Beirut and a leading advocate of France's Middle East claims), began in London on 23 November to clarify Allied policy towards the Middle East.99 The Admiralty, the ministerial focus of an 'eastern' strategy which might capitalize on British naval power, was keen to develop its intelligence on the Middle East in anticipation of the Sykes-Picot talks leading to a relaunched Allied offensive in the region. 'Blinker' Hall therefore made two important changes to his intelligence-gathering capacity. First, he ordered Gertrude Bell to Cairo to work alongside Hogarth and Lawrence. She arrived on 26 November, three days after the Sykes-Picot negotiations began, and set about helping 'to fill in the Intelligence files with information as to the tribes and sheikhs'.100 Almost immediately, she began to agitate for a resurrection of the Syrian option.101 Secondly, Hall asked Hogarth to return to London to work alongside several other academics who had recently been recruited by the NID to research strategic alternatives with respect to different localities around the world where naval power could be deployed.102 Other NID recruits included the historian and philosopher R G Collingwood and the aforementioned H N Dickson.103 The latter was already working at the RGS and, partly through his influence, the new NID team installed itself alongside the GSGS cartographers in Kensington Gore where the RGS map and reference library proved perfectly suited to its needs. One of the NID tasks was the preparation of a series of geographical handbooks on the actual and potential theatres of naval warfare, although the team's responsibilities embraced other, more general intelligence duties.104 By October 1915, there were twenty NID academics working full-time at the RGS squeezed into four large rooms, under the immediate command of Lieutenant-Commander Cozens-Hardy.105

Hogarth's return to London and his recruitment by Hall were clearly connected to the Sykes-Picot negotiations. Hogarth had tried to convince Sykes

about an Arab rising when the latter visited Cairo to consult with British officials in the protectorate just before negotiations began. Hogarth's return to the RGS shifted the focus of the NID group strongly towards the Middle East. Detailed research began on the distribution of different tribes and on the territorial jurisdiction and loyal- ties of various Arab sheiks and warlords. The NID team in the RGS became, in essence, a London branch of the Cairo intelligence office, preparing the way for an Arab revolt and a renewed British campaign in the Middle East.

This created some tension within the RGS between the two intelligence operations: the GSGS 1:1 million cartographers answerable to the 'westerners' in the War Office and the NID group representing the 'easterners' in the Admiralty. The row focused initially on the allocation of space. In December 1915, 'Blinker' Hall made a formal request to the RGS Council for more rooms to be made available for the NID team. Following pressure from Hinks, this request was turned down. Instead, the Council offered the stables, provided the Admiralty paid for their conversion and run- ning costs.106 Early in 1916, however, an over- worked and exhausted Hinks succumbed to a form of pneumonia and was bedridden from around 10 January. Cozens-Hardy, abetted by Dickson, seized this opportunity to take over most of the RGS, citing the overwhelming national importance of their work on the Middle East. Work on the European 1:1 million sheets was to cease immediately and all other research was to focus on the Middle East. Freshfield was reluctant to prevent this lest his actions be interpreted as obstructive and unpatriotic.

An outraged Carruthers, who was still working on the GSGS 1:1 million map, wrote a series of angry memos to Hinks. The Society, he claimed, was 'upside down': the library had been 'cleared for action'; the office of the librarian, Edward Heawood, requisitioned by Dickson; and the map room mysteriously relabelled 'The Arabia Room'. Carruthers now shared this with Hogarth, effectively as his assistant. His orders were to 'undertake immediately the Arabian maps to accompany Hogarth's work' at a variety of scales from 1:1 million upwards:

I think it is the dirtiest trick I have ever seen played... The only thing that might happen now is that I might loose [sic] my temper and hit someone! I will try to control myself for the sake of the 1/M!107




Hinks wrote a long and vitriolic letter to Freshfield from his sick-bed, attacking the NID group, particularly Cozens-Hardy and Dickson, in the most bloodcurdling fashion:

They are quite impossible people to co-operate with ... an amateur organisation run by a KC [Cozens-Hardy was a barrister] who spends half his time ... cleverly exploiting people and the other half... attending to his own private practice in the Courts. The more he can get out of other people the more time he has to devote to his profitable career.

As for Dickson, Hinks had been

politely at war [with him] for some weeks ... I should resist with all the strength at my command (which I admit for the moment is very little) any attempt to exploit our ... 1/M map ... just in order that these Admiralty people may carry through what they want.1o8

'Blinker' Hall, anxious to avoid any impression of a policy split between the NID and the GSGS, also wrote to Freshfield insisting that the GSGS map work was of 'critical importance' to the Admiralty and enclosing a copy of a letter from Hedley stating that the NID research was of 'considerable benefit' to the War Office. Hall pointedly insisted, however, that the Middle East research should be given priority by both the NID and the GSGS.109

A 'War Maps' meeting, involving senior representatives from the NID, the GSGS and the RGS, was arranged on 3 February to clarify objectives.n0 The meeting was attended by Freshfield, Hedley, Hogarth, Keltie, Close and Leonard Darwin, a past President of the Society. Carruthers, Dickson and E A Reeves (the RGS Map Curator and Instructor in Surveying) were brought in to answer specific questions.11 Hinks, still bedridden, submitted a marginally less offensive memorandum expressing his views, as did 'Blinker' Hall who was unable to attend.112 Hedley gave a ringing endorsement of the 1:1 million map and offered a further ?200 to support the work.

As a matter of fact, it is now THE map in the Chief of Staff's office. For general strategical consideration of any given area it is extremely useful. It is the best map for showing the country and representing the position of troops from day to day. It is very clear. The Staff does not care a bit about a lot of names because in that case they cannot show the position of their troops. They like the communications clear and the topography, and to have plenty of space to write on.

It was decided, following an eloquent intervention from Hogarth, that the Admiralty would support GSGS work on the 1:1 million map but the Middle East research, including the 1:1 million sheets, should have top priority until both the Admiralty and the War Office issued new instructions.113 This policy was formally agreed at the next RGS Council meeting on 7 February.114 At this stage, thirteen 1:1 million European sheets had been compiled and a further eight were in press. Thirteen more were in preparation covering most of the Middle East.'1s

Hogarth had busied himself in London on detailed intelligence reports in support of his preferred policy. While at the RGS, he completed the Admiralty intelligence handbook on Arabia and undertook further research which culminated in a comprehensive two-volume study of more than 1200 pages, subsequently issued to 'Blinker' Hall and senior Admiralty staff in late 1916.116 At some point early in 1916, the details of the Sykes- Picot agreement, which had been concluded on 3 January, were made known to Hogarth. The accord, an uneasy compromise between mutually exclusive perspectives, fell far short of Hogarth's ambitions. Once the Turks were defeated, the Middle East was to be divided into Russian, Italian, French, British and international zones plus Italian, French and British 'spheres of influence'. The coastal belt of the eastern Mediterranean and much of Mesopotamia were to be shared between French, British and (in the case of Palestine) international control. The 'independent' Arab lands lying between the Mediterranean strip and the Gulf were to be further divided between British and French 'spheres of influence'. These desert lands would be colonies in all but name and isolated from the sea other than through the proposed British, French or international coastal zones. As far as Hogarth was concerned, this directly compromised British promises to the Arabs and would certainly undermine the fragile trust which had been painstakingly constructed over the preceding months. It also gave France far too powerful a role in the postwar political geography of the region. Nevertheless, the architects of the scheme believed that this arrangement would be sufficient to facilitate an Arab rising against the Turks and the agreement was subsequently ratified by the various governments involved, subject to such an insurrection taking place.117




By the end of March, Hogarth was back in Cairo as head (in all but name) of a new Arab Bureau, established in the wake of the Sykes-Picot talks to prepare for the Arab revolt in the Hejaz desert of western Arabia, due to begin in June. Clayton, who was the official head of the new unit, was eager for Hogarth to become involved: 'if you can let Hogarth come later on', he wrote to Hall in mid-January, 'he will be of the greatest value'.11s Hogarth arrived in Cairo with the revised and officially ratified version of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement. If this became known to the Arabs, Hogarth feared that the entire campaign would be undermined. He therefore wrote long despatches to Hall in London insisting that the details of the Sykes-Picot accord should be kept 'strictly secret'. The agreement should, moreover, be regarded as provisional and in need of further negotiation after the war.119

Despite Hogarth's absence, the cartography of the Middle East remained an important priority for the RGS through late 1916 and 1917. Intelligence reports and comments on provisional copies of the 1:1 million Middle Eastern sheets arrived regularly from Cairo, including a 'big roll of tracings with corrections and comments' from Gertrude Bell.120 Hogarth made two further short visits to the RGS in the summers of 1916 and 1917 to inspect work in progress, and Freshfield, in his annual Presidential addresses, reserved his most lavish praise for the Middle Eastern activities of Hogarth, Bell and others, though he was careful never to cite names and to keep his remarks as vague as possible.121 Once the Arab revolt and the British campaigns in Palestine and Mesopotamia were successfully underway by mid-1916, launching Lawrence to his legendary status in the pantheon of English romantic heroes, the focus of intelligence-gathering and interpretation shifted almost entirely to the new Arab Bureau and other intelligence agencies in the Middle East. The RGS, which had functioned through 1915 and early 1916 as a convenient metropolitan focus from which to promote these Middle Eastern projects, became far less significant. As the war moved into its final phase, other cartographic demands became increasingly important in Kensington Gore.

War and peace: the RGS, 1916-19

By the spring of 1916, 'western' strategic planning for the battle of the Somme and the subsequent 'third' battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) began to

dominate all map work in the OS, the GSGS and the RGS. In May, Hedley issued Hinks with an urgent demand for special thematic maps of the British sector of the western front coloured to show different relief and drainage features, for which another ?200 was made available. Although hastily prepared, these maps were received, according to Hedley, 'with rapture' by the General Staff.122

The failure of the 1916-17 campaigns to reopen a war of movement served only to underline the futility of small-scale maps for strategic military purposes. Recognizing this, Hinks sought valiantly to devise new cartographic options with which to impress his War Office paymasters. His most successful scheme was a new 1:2 million map of Africa, designed specifically to allow British territorial claims in the German ex-colonies to be advanced more effectively.123 Work also began on an Asian map at 1:5 million scale, though only a single sheet, for Manchuria, was ever prepared.124

The 1:1 million map was never in serious jeopardy, however, and the collapse of the last- ditch German offensive in the spring of 1918 brought it once again to the forefront of War Office planning. By the late summer of 1918, an Allied victory was at last within sight and preparations for postwar negotiations were intensifying around the world. Hedley and Hinks were determined that the 1:1 million should be adopted as the principal base map for the initial redrawing of political boundaries in Europe and the Middle East at the coming peace conference. Not only would this boost the prestige of the RGS and the GSGS but it would also give Britain a significant strategic advantage over other countries. The objective now was to achieve maximum territorial coverage at the million scale. Hinks also began to champion the 1:1 million as the obvious 'peace map' amongst leading geographers in Allied countries.125 When finally the guns fell silent at 11am on 11 November 1918, over 90 sheets had been prepared covering most of Europe and the Middle East.126 No other Allied country had devoted comparable time and effort to small-scale mapping of the main theatres of war.127

Peace negotiations began in Paris at the beginning of 1919. On 6 February, representatives from the cartographic agencies of the major powers, under the chairmanship by General Bourgeois, agreed that the 1:1 million should be adopted as the base map for general political discussion, to be photographically enlarged or reduced as the need



520 Michael Heffernan arose.128 On 27 March, an official letter of thanks arrived at the RGS from the Chief Secretary to the War Office. The map, it stated,

was not only of great value during the war, but has proved to be indispensable for the work of the Peace Conference ... [It] has been, and will always be, of the greatest possible value.129

This was a notable coup for the RGS but it did little to lift the sense of disillusionment and resent- ment within the Society. Many senior Fellows believed the nation's store of geographical knowledge and expertise had been woefully underused during the conflict. Freshfield, whose Presidency had ended in May 1915 (he was succeeded by Holdich), seemed particularly bitter. The mur- derous catalogue of British military reversals was, he argued, directly attributable to geographical ignorance:

much of... [the work carried out in the RGS] ... ought to have been done before the war. Owing, however, to our traditional attitude in times of peace, it has had to be done under great pressure ... Is it an extravagant hope that a lesson has been learned, and that in future the uses of geography both in war and politics may be more fully recognized at Westminster and Whitehall?130

This lament was echoed by other RGS Fellows, notably Sir Harry H Johnston, the diminutive but vocal African explorer and colonial administrator, who observed as early as November 1916 that

Geography... is worthy of the greatest deference from its sister sciences, as it is really the Eldest Sister of the Band. It keeps house over the other sciences and should be the overmastering subject in the education of the British people... [Yet] ... lack of geographical knowledge in our Government and possibly our generals ... [has] led to the unhappy issues of our land campaigns ... and may yet react on us other lamentable directions ... I believe that ignorance of geography in high quarters has tripled the length of the War, tripled its cost, and endangered its victorious issue for the British Empire.'1'

The peace negotiations in Paris did little to alleviate this sense of frustration. Although Hogarth, Lawrence and Bell, whose views had such an influence on the RGS in 1915 and 1916, were prominently involved as advisers to the British delegation with respect to the Ottoman Empire, their visions of the postwar geopolitical order in the Middle East proved either too danger-

ous or too subtle for the British political leadership which opted instead for an Anglo-French division of the Ottoman imperial spoils, albeit under the cosmetic guise of the mandates system introduced under the new League of Nations.132 Thus ended the wartime prospect of an independent Arab state. Despite the much-vaunted expertise of geographers such as Holdich and Sir Halford Mackinder, whose wartime writings had been devoted to the political geography of postwar reconstruction, neither was called upon to offer advice.133 The sole representatives of the British geographical community in Paris (beyond those concerned with the Middle East) were the members of a small GSGS team, led by Hedley and including Major O E Wynne and Captain Alan G Ogilvie, who offered cartographic advice to the British delegation.134

Providing new maps and cartographic expertise was one thing; a substantive involvement in for- mulating British policy on the new political map was quite another. Hinks belatedly realized that drafting the base map for the Peace Conference would in itself do little for British geography's intellectual status, either at home or abroad. A week before the Armistice, he wrote to Hogarth and other senior Fellows exhorting them to write short 'geographical notes' on different parts of the world which could be submitted to the Peace Conference in the name of the RGS. 'So far as I can see', he claimed, 'if this Society does not get together something of the kind it won't be done systematically'. Not surprisingly, no such publications were ever produced.135

Other countries used their leading geographical experts in a much more substantive political capacity. Leading French geographers had been prominently involved in planning their nation's war aims and elaborating official negotiating positions on every conceivable subject during the war. The Service Giographique Frangais, which included Emmanuel de Martonne, Emmanuel de Margerie, Albert Demangeon, Lucien Gallois and Jean Brunhes, also wielded real influence on French policies at the Peace Conference itself.'36 In the USA, President Wilson agreed to establish an ambitious American investigation under Colonel Edward Mandell House to prepare for a future peace conference even before the Americans entered the war in April 1917. The headquarters of the House Inquiry were the New York offices of the American Geographical Society, which was



Geography, cartography and military intelligence 521 directed by Isaiah Bowman. By mid-1918, this had become arguably the most exhaustive exercise in geographical and historical data collection ever attempted, the idealistic objective being to provide a future peace conference with an unprecedented mass of factual material in an accessible form which would ensure fair and equitable negotiations. Over 150 leading American academics were involved, representing virtually every discipline and including several prominent geographers such as Douglas W Johnson from Columbia University and Mark Jefferson from Michigan State Normal School. Bowman, whose ambition was such that he usually ended 'in charge of whatever organization he happens to be a part of', was effectively in control of the entire operation.1'37 Less than a month after the Armistice, three huge truck- loads of American evidence had been assembled to be shipped across to France aboard the George Washington along with Wilson and the other members of the American delegation, Bowman included.'""3 The 'new' nations lobbying for territory at the peace negotiations were also represented by senior geographical experts, most notably Jovan Cvijic from the University of Belgrade, who was a leading member of the Yugoslav delegation, and Eugeniusz Romer from the University of Lwbw, who was equally prominent in the Polish delegation.139

Senior British geographers were understandably fearful that the presence of so many distinguished foreign scholars at the Peace Conference would overwhelm the efforts made by British geographical agencies. Hinks became especially concerned by the scale of the American involvement in what was, he insisted, a European affair. His irritation increased through 1918 as Bowman and his co-workers in New York made increasingly extravagant requests for maps and other information, ending with an order placed a few days after the Armistice for a complete version of the RGS 1:1 million map plus all GSGS war maps.140 Money, it seemed, was no object.'4"' The relationship between Hinks and Bowman quickly deteriorated into a mutual loathing as intense as it was long- lasting.142

Despite their political connections and growing intellectual respectability, the involvement of British geographers in the peace negotiations and in the formulation of official policy was negligible compared with the experience of other countries. The contribution of British geography to the war

effort and to the subsequent peace process was limited to technical and cartographic issues rather than substantive research on military or geopolitical strategy. While the war stimulated a great deal of theoretical debate within the British geographical community (debate which was to have a considerable influence on the subsequent development of British geography), geographical theory had little discernible impact on political or military leaders.143

The failure of British geographers to play a significant role in the Peace Conference possibly relates to the largely amateur nature of the discipline in the UK at the time. The geographers who advised other countries on the complex questions relating to war aims or territorial claims were drawn from well-established geographical com- munities in major universities with formidable intellectual reputations. In Britain, the status of geography in higher education was still relatively precarious in 1914 and the country's most influential academic geographer, Mackinder, had long since moved into the world of party politics. In these unpromising circumstances, it is perhaps understandable that few political leaders thought of geographers as anything other than technical cartographic advisers.

Yet the practical contribution of the discipline to the war effort did not go unnoticed either by political authorities or academics in other disciplines and this seemed to strengthen the argu- ments of those who advocated the relevance and necessity of the subject in the modern educational system. It is, perhaps, not entirely coincidental that, despite severe wartime restrictions on university resources and a massive reduction in student num- bers (conditions which, in other circumstances, might have fatally undermined a fledgling university discipline), geography's place in higher education was immeasurably strengthened by the war. Once the threat of closure was lifted from the Oxford School of Geography (precipitated by Herbertson's death in 1915), the first honours schools were established in other British universities during or immediately after the war - Liverpool in 1917; the London School of Economics and Aberystwyth in 1918; University College, London, Cambridge and Leeds in 1919; Manchester in 1923; and Sheffield in 1924.144 Despite the tensions and antagonisms of the previous months, as well as the frustrated ambitions of some senior figures, British geography




emerged from the war with a noticeably enhanced reputation.145

Conclusion

The history of the RGS during the First World War illustrates how geographical knowledge and expertise can become implicated in broader political and ideological conflicts, and how ostensibly universal, 'scientific' objectives can readily become fused with the narrow, strategic objectives of the nation- state. In a controversial and polemical review of the discipline, Yves Lacoste has written of two apparently distinct forms of geography which have developed side-by-side from the late nineteenth century. The first and older form, which Lacoste calls 'la gdographie des 6tats-majors', is the kind of strategic geography carried out by armies and secret services as a means of reinforcing state power. This has generated a series of huge, largely secret geographical archives dotted around the world developed for, and controlled by, rival nation-states. Lacoste's second form of geography, which he calls 'la gdographie des professeurs', represents the ostensibly more open and disinter- ested educational and research activities of the academic geographical community. Couched in the familiar language of rational science and liberal scholarship, it is 'la g6ographie des professeurs' which ends up in the published record of the discipline and which dominates our conception of what geography means. Yet, as Lacoste argues, and as this article has tried to demonstrate, the same personalities, institutions, research methods and techniques have frequently been employed within both camps, to the extent that it becomes difficult to draw a clear and comforting distinction between these two versions of the discipline.146

This is an important lesson which should certainly inform current debates in the history and present condition of geography. An awareness of the different kinds of geography which have existed in the past, and an understanding of the tensions and overlaps between them, allows us to make more informed decisions about the moral and intellectual dilemmas which continue to con- front the discipline today.147 Yet, when considering episodes from geography's past, it is important to avoid the temptation to make excessively dark and simplistic claims; to depict the discipline as a putative military science, an elaborate intellectual

justification for untrammelled imperialist exploita- tion or a university haven for assorted racialists and environmental determinists. This is modern geography's own brand of postcolonial angst, a collective disciplinary 'guilt trip' in which an over- simplified 'evil' past is laid bare with all the confessional zeal of a reformed alcoholic. While it can reasonably be argued that confronting the unpalatable aspects of a discipline's past represents a necessary first step towards the construction of a new and more challenging version of the discipline, there is an ever-present danger of over- stating the case and, usually by implication, of vastly over-emphasizing the institutional cohesion, intellectual power and political influence of geographical theory and practice in the past.

The experience of the RGS during the First World War is a case in point. The RGS did play a significant role as a cartographic agency closely linked to the intelligence services of both the War Office and the Admiralty. Its most notable achievement was the production of a simplified 1:1 million map of Europe, the Middle East and north Africa which was designed and used as an important strategic and geopolitical device both during war and at the postwar Peace Conference. For a short period in 1915 and early 1916, at the height of the dispute between 'westerners' and 'easterners', the RGS began to play a more significant role as a centre of military and political strategy with respect to the Middle East. Here the influence of Hogarth, Hall and the NID was all important. But this is not to say that the diverse Fellowship of the RGS adopted a coherent, institutional response to the Middle Eastern campaign or to any other aspect of the war. The vast majority of the Fellow- ship would have been only dimly aware of what was happening within their Society and even those who were closely involved in the war work rarely articulated a consistent view on these larger strategic questions. In this sense, the RGS was simply a conveniently located and well-resourced metropolitan focus for those few Fellows whose connections, vision and grasp allowed them to develop and promote policy objectives on this grand scale.

I have not, so far, considered how individual British geographers coped with the moral and ethical dilemmas raised by the wartime mobilization of their discipline. The depressing reason is that such questions seem never to have been debated in the correspondence or publications I have examined. While British geographers were




increasingly willing to criticize Britain's political and military leadership and to mount spirited attacks on both the conduct of the war and the peace negotiations, there was little clearly articulated or consistent opposition to the war on moral or ethical grounds in British geography. Most of the key actors on the British geographical stage seemed to detect no contradiction between their scientific role and their moral responsibilities.

The implications of this are, of course, far- reaching and were widely debated during and after the war. For some, like the radical economist J A Hobson, the fusion of science and politics threatened to undermine the foundations of a free and tolerant society:

The graver perils to free-thought and scientific progress lie in ... [the] timid conservatism of... professors and their genuine class sympathies and reverences. They are not so much the intellectual mercenaries of the vested interests as their volunteers.148

This may be an accurate assessment of the geographical establishment during the First World War but few members of this small community shared Hobson's concern that their war work compromised their scientific credibility. Hogarth, writing on the eve of the Armistice, expressed a more common view:

the last four years have been a time in which there has been no question of a Government apart from the individuals of the Nation, or of an Army as opposed to Civilians. Everyone, who could do anything, has had to become part of the Govt. or the Army. It is a People's, not a Government's, War! I offered myself four years ago for my specialist knowledge of one theatre of this war, and bit by bit was put in charge of our policy in the Nearer East. I went in neither for pay nor honours, and at first lost some hundreds a year by it... with one sole object - to beat the Bosche! and keep Grt. Britain where she was before the War.149

It would not be accurate to conclude that a principled anti-war sentiment was entirely absent from British geography. Most geographers, particularly in the universities, remained silent on the broader moral questions raised by the war and it would be unjust to assume that this implied acqui- escence or implicit support. There was, moreover, at least one senior figure in the geographical establishment who found it impossible to reconcile war in its modern form with firmly held scientific and moral convictions. Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, a former President of the RGS and an

influential member of its Council during the war, was also President of the Eugenics Education Society. In common with many of his fellow eugenicists, Darwin came to the conclusion even before August 1914 that war had become essen- tially dysgenic. In contrast to other scientists such as Sir Arthur Keith (who viewed war as 'nature's pruning hook', periodically removing society's surplus population and thus sustaining growth, energy and virility), Darwin believed that war destroyed the best and the brightest, leaving behind a morally and physically inferior stock. War, once ennobling and uplifting, had become an evolutionary retrogressive force, reversing the march of human progress and accelerating racial degeneration.1so That geography's only moral opposition to war should be based upon this disturbing rationale is perhaps the final ironic lesson of this tragic era.151

Acknowledgements

Research for this essay was made possible by a British Academy grant. The staff of the RGS library and archive, and the custodians of the Middle East archive at St Antony's College, Oxford, have been very helpful. Keith Boucher and Professor David Wallace of Loughborough University, Professor David Stoddart of the University of California at Berkeley, the editor of this journal and the anonymous referees all provided useful comments and information. I am especially grateful to Professor Charles Withers of the University of Edinburgh for his generous hospitality and to Dr Caroline Barron (Hogarth's granddaughter) of Royal Holloway, University of London, for allow- ing me to quote from her grandfather's letters and for her invaluable advice. Any errors are entirely my responsibility.

Notes

1 Goldie G T 1907 Geographical ideals Geographical Journal 29 1-14, quotation from p. 8.

2 George H B 1907 The relations of geography and history Clarendon Press, Oxford, 95.

3 On the cultural impact of the First World War, see Fussell P 1975 The Great War and modern memory Oxford University Press, Oxford; Kern S 1988 The culture of time and space 1880-1918 Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London; Eksteins M 1989 Rites of spring: the Great War and the birth of the modern age Black




Swan, London; Hynes S 1990 A war imagined: the First World War and English culture Pimlico, London; Winter J 1992 Catastrophe and culture: recent trends in the historiography of the First World War Journal of Modern History 64 525-32; Pick D 1993 War machine: The rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age Yale University Press, New Haven.

4 Russell was hounded from his Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Nicolai, professor of physiology at the University of Berlin, was imprisoned and subsequently forced to join the German army, although he refused to wear a sword and eventually fled to Denmark in 1916. Russell's views were eloquently expressed in a number of wartime publications including Russell B 1915 The ethics of war International Journal of Ethics 25 2 127-42; Russell B 1915 War: the offspring of fear Union of Democratic Control, London. For Nicolai's eugenicist perspective, see Nicolai G F 1919 The biology of war Century, New York (orig- inally published in Zurich in 1917). See also Wallace S 1988 War and the image of Germany: British academics 1914-1918 John Donald, Edinburgh, esp. 124-66; Stromberg R N 1982 Redemption by war: the intellectuals and 1914 Regents Press of Kansas, Lawrence; Wohl R 1979 The generation of 1914 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

5 In October 1914, 93 leading German scientists, led by Max Planck, put their names to a manifesto insisting their country was fighting a just, defensive war. This provoked an immediate counter-blast from 150 British academics, led by J J Thompson (see Stromberg 1982 Redemption by war op. cit. 3).

6 See letters to The Times from Wells and leading scientists such as George H Raynor, J A Fleming, E H Griffiths, H Trueman Wood, Henry E Armstrong and Patrick Geddes on 21 May 9 col. e; 22 May 5 col. b; 11 June 9 col. d; 12 June 7 col. e; 15 June 7 col. e; 16 June 9 col. d; 17 June 9 col. e; 19 June 9 col. c; 21 June 9 cols d-e; 22 June 9 col. d; 24 June 9 col. d. For an anxious account of the German mobilization of science, see Skrine F M 1915 War and the German universities Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 60 439 469-75.

7 Poulton E B 1915 Science and the Great War Clarendon Press, Oxford.

8 Royce F H and Johnson C 1915 Mobilization of invention The Times 14 June 7 col. d.

9 Fleming J A 1915 Science in the war and after the war Nature 14 October 180-5; the quotation is from pp. 180 and 184. For a general discussion of the impact of the First World War on national and international science, see Crawford E 1992 Nationalism and internationalism in science, 1880- 1939: four studies of the Nobel population Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 49-78.

10 Schwabe K 1969 Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral: Die deutsche Hochschullehrer und die politischen Grund- fragen des Ersten Weltkrieges Musterschmidt-Verlag, Gottingen; MacLeod R M and Andrews E K 1971 Scientific advice in the war at sea, 1915-1917 Journal of Contemporary History 6 3-40; Whittemore G F 1975 World War I, poison gas research, and the ideals of American chemists Social Studies of Science 5 135-63; Trumpener U 1975 The road to Ypres: the beginning of gas warfare in World War I Journal of Modern History 47 460-505; Gouber C S 1976 Mars and Minerva: World War I and the uses of higher learning in America University of Louisiana Press, Baton Rouge; Gusewelle J K 1977 Science and the Admiralty during World War I: the case of the BIR in Jordan G ed. Naval warfare in the twentieth century Croom Helm, London 105-17; Pattison M 1983 Scientists, inventors and the military in Britain, 1915-19: the Munitions Inventions Department Social Studies of Science 13 521-68; Haber L F 1986 The poison- ous cloud: chemical warfare in the First World War Clarendon Press, Oxford; Hartcup G 1988 The war of inventions: scientific developments, 1914-1918 Brassey's Defence, London.

11 See, however, Lacoste Y 1976 La glographie, ga sert, d'abord, ti faire la guerre Maspdro, Paris; Balchin W G V 1987 United Kingdom geographers in the Second World War Geographical Journal 153 2 159-80; Stoddart D R 1992 Geography and war: the 'new geography' and the 'new army' in England, 1899- 1914 Political Geography 11 1 87-99; Godlewska A 1994 Napoleon's geographers (1797-1815): imperialists and soldiers of modernity in Godlewska A and Smith N eds Geography and empire Blackwell, Oxford 31-53; Kirby A 1994 What did you do in the war, Daddy? in Godlewska A and Smith N eds Geography and empire Blackwell, Oxford 300-15; Heffernan M 1995 The spoils of war: the Socidtd de Gdographie de Paris and the French empire, 1914-1919 in Bell M Butlin R A and Heffernan M eds Geography and imperialism, 1820- 1940 Manchester University Press, Manchester 221-64.

12 Driver F 1995 Submerged identities: familiar and unfamiliar histories Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 4 410-13.

13 Andrew C 1985 Secret service: the making of the British Intelligence Community Heinemann, London. For a more theoretically complex argument about British intelligence and the Victorian 'information revolution', see Richards T 1993 The imperial archive: knowledge and the fantasy of empire Verso, London.

14 The OS, which dates from 1791, has always been primarily concerned with mapping the British Isles. Its overseas role was limited even in the former British colonies which were surveyed and mapped by the War Office, the Colonial Office or the




Dominion governments. For a general account, see Seymour W A ed. 1980 A history of the Ordnance Survey William Davis and Sons, Folkestone.

15 Jervis W P 1898 Thomas Best Jervis as Christian soldier, geographer, and friend of India, 1796-1857 Eliot Stock, London.

16 Watson C M 1909 The life ofMajor-General Sir Charles Wilson John Murray, London.

17 On the 'Great Game', see Hopkirk P 1982 Trespassers on the roof of the world Oxford University Press, Oxford; Hopkirk P 1990 The Great Game: on secret service in High Asia John Murray, London; and Richards 1993 The imperial archive op. cit. 11-44. For German attempts to destabilize British India before and during the First World War, see Hopkirk P 1994 On secret service east of Constantinople: the plot to bring down the British Empire John Murray, London.

18 Robert (later General Lord) Baden-Powell, who took a particular pleasure at dressing up in unusual costumes, was a notable pioneer. On one occasion, he masqueraded as a butterfly collector in Dalmatia in order to sketch naval fortifications onto the wings of insects drawn in his notebook. See Andrew 1985 Secret service op. cit. 53.

19 Ibid. 58. 20 Ibid. 36-42. 21 Winstone H V F 1982 The illicit adventure: the story of

political and military intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926 Jonathan Cape, London 6-8; Andrew 1985 Secret service op. cit. 259.

22 Freeman T W 1985 Charles Frederick Arden Close 1865-1952 in Freeman T W ed. Geographers: bio-bibliographical studies 9 1-13.

23 Mackenzie J M 1995 The provincial geographical societies in Britain, 1884-1914 in Bell M Butlin R and Heffernan M eds Geography and imperialism, 1820-1940 Manchester University Press, Manchester 93-124.

24 Freeman T W 1980 The Royal Geographical Society and the development of geography in Brown E H ed. Geography yesterday and tomorrow Oxford University Press, Oxford 1-99; Cameron I 1980 To the farthest ends of the earth: the history of the Royal Geographical Society 1830-1980 Macdonald and Jane's, London.

25 Scargill DI 1976 The RGS and the foundations of geography at Oxford Geographical Journal 142 438- 61; Stoddart D R 1986 On geography and its history Blackwell, Oxford 59-127; Coones P 1989 A hundred years of geography at Oxford and Cambridge I: the centenary of the Mackinder readership at Oxford Geographical Journal 155 1 13-32; Stoddart D R 1989 A hundred years of geography at Cambridge Geographical Journal 159 1 24-32.

26 Bell M and McEwan C 1996 The admission of women Fellows to the Royal Geographical Society, 1892-1914 Geographical Journal 162 3 (in press).

27 Middleton D 1991 Douglas W Freshfield 1845-1934 in Freeman T W ed. Geographers: bio-bibliographical studies 13 23-31.

28 Wise M J 1986 The Scott Keltie report of 1885 and the teaching of geography in Great Britain Geo- graphical Journal 152 367-82; Jay L J 1986 John Scott Keltie 1840-1927 in Freeman T W ed. Geographers: bio-bibliographical studies 10 93-8.

29 Steers J A 1982 A R Hinks and the Royal Geo- graphical Society Geographical Journal 148 1-7.

30 Holdich worked for the Survey of India from 1865 to 1898 and eventually became Superintendent of Frontier Surveys. From 1900, he was a member of the British Arbitration Tribunal which adjudicated on international boundary disputes, particularly in Latin America, working alongside Lord Macnaughton and Sir John Ardagh, then head of the IB. Holdich bears some similarity to the character of Colonel Creighton, the omnipotent British intelligence officer in Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901), though there is no evidence that Holdich ever met Kipling.

31 RGS archives, Freshfield correspondence, Freshfield to Keltie, 5 August 1914 (hereafter RGS Freshfield Freshfield to Keltie 5 August 1914); Hinks to Fresh- field 5 August 1914; Keltie to Freshfield 5 August 1914; Place-name index for BEF maps Secretary to Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) to the RGS Council 3 August 1914; Hedley to Hinks 4 August 1914; Council minutes 9 November 1914 (item 1). For brief accounts of the RGS during the war, see Anonymous 1919 War work of the Society Geo- graphical Journal 53 336-9; Mill H R 1930 The record of the Royal Geographical Society 1830-1930 Royal Geographical Society, London 189-205.

32 RGS Freshfield Freshfield to Keltie 5 August 1914. 33 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 5 August 1914;

Anonymous 1915 Geographers and the war The Times 18 May, col. b.

34 RGS Freshfield Keltie to Freshfield 5 and 14 August, 5 and 10 September 1914.

35 RGS Place-name index for BEF maps Hinks to Hedley 2 September 1914.

36 Ibid. Hedley to Hinks 3 September and 4 November 1914.

37 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 7 August 1914. 38 Ibid. Hinks and Trenchard to Hedley 10 August

1914. 39 Meynen R 1983 Albrecht Penck 1858-1945 in

Freeman T W ed. Geographers: bio-bibliographical studies 7 101-8.

40 Penck A 1892 Die Herstellung einer einheitlichen Erdkarte em Massstabe von 1:1 000000 Compte rendu du Vme Congris International des Sciences




Giographiques tenu & Berne du 10 au 14 aoit 1891 Schmid, Francke et Cie., Berne 191-8; Penck A 1893 Construction of a map of the world on a scale of 1:1 million Geographical Journal 1 253-61.

41 See resolutions and articles by Penck, Franz Schrader, E H Hills and others in 1896 Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress, London, 1895 John Murray, London, 365-70, 781-2; 1901 Verhandlungen des Siebenten Internationalen Geographen-Kongresses, Berlin, 1899 W H Kuhl, Berlin vol. 1 208-29, vol. 2 65-71; 1905 Report of the Eighth International Geographic Congress held in the United States, 1904 Government Printing Office, Washington DC 95-102, 104-7, 553-70; 1909 Neuvihme Congrbs International de Giographie, Gen~ve, 27 juillet-6 aoat 1908: Compte Rendu des Travaux du Congrbs publid au nom du Comiti d'Organisation par Arthur de Clapar~de Socidtd G~ndrale d'Imprimerie, Geneva, 1909-11, vol. 1 331-5, 388-400, vol. 2 52-3.

42 RGS 1:1 million map Miscellaneous file 1913-14. 43 See articles and resolutions by Penck, Close,

Schrader and others in 1915 Atti del X Congresso Internazionale di Geografia, Roma 1913 Presso la Reale Societh Geografica, Rome vol. 1 5-65, 111-15. The Paris conference was attended by over 80 politicians, diplomats, civil servants and geographers from 34 countries. RGS 1:1 million map Miscellaneous file 1913-14.

44 The US map was completed in 1946. See Anony- mous 1946 The map of Hispanic America on the scale of 1:1 000 000 Geographical Review 36 1 1-28; Wright J K 1952 Geography in the making: the American Geographical Society 1851-1951 American Geographical Society, New York 300-19. Lord Renell of Rodd, the RGS President, described its 107 sheets, as 'the greatest map ever produced of any one area'. See Bowman I 1948 The geographical situation of the United States in relation to world policies Geographical Journal 4-6 112 128-45, quotation from p. 143.

45 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 1 January 1914. Jack was Close's successor as Director-General of the OS.

46 Hinks A R 1913 The international one-in-a-million map of the world Royal Engineers Journal 17 77-86, quotation from p. 86.

47 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Winterbotham 7 October 1914; Close to Hinks 8 October 1914.

48 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Close 31 March 1914.

49 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks and Trenchard to Hedley 10 August 1914. The use of English throughout was a significant departure from the policy agreed at both the 1909 and 1913 conferences according to which place names and other features on the Inter- national Map would be rendered in the official language of the country being depicted.

50 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 14 September 1914. The GSGS offered ?200 every six months to help defray costs and the RGS provided ?150 for every War Office payment. Council minutes 9 November 1914 (item 1), 31 May 1915 (item 4).

51 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Close 16 September 1914.

52 RGS Freshfield Freshfield to Keltie 12 September 1914.

53 Freshfield D W 1914 The new season, 1914-15 Geographical Journal 44 6 525-8, quotation from pp. 526-7.

54 RGS 1:1 million map Keeling to Hinks 2 March 1915. Hinks and Keeling became so annoyed with each another on this matter that Hedley and Close decided that the two should no longer correspond directly. RGS 1:1 million map Keeling to Hinks 27 April 1915, Keeling to Hinks 30 April 1915, Hedley to Hinks 6 May 1915, Close to Hinks 21 May 1915, Hinks to Keeling 21 May 1915. Contact was, however, resumed a few months later. RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Keeling 14 August 1915, Hinks to Hedley 25 August 1915.

55 This was a prodigious achievement. Keeling, MacLeod (also a future Director-General of OS), Winterbotham and Jack commanded OS military topographic sections and field survey battalions which surveyed and mapped different sectors of the British front in Belgium and France from mid-1915, coordinated in France through the OBOS (Ordnance Survey Overseas Branch) from late 1917. See OS 1914-19 Reports of the progress of the Ordnance Survey to the 31st March, 1914-1920 in British Parliamentary Papers HMSO, London vol. xliv 1-39, vol. xxxi 819-30, vol. xiv 455-61, vol. xvii 815-21, vol. xii 527-35, vol. xxvii 1-26; GSGS 1916 Catalogue of the maps of the theatres of war and maps for home defence and training issued by the Geographical Section of the General Staff (revised to 31st May, 1916) HMSO, London; GSGS 1916 Index diagrams issued as a supplement to the catalogue of the 'maps of the theatres of war, &c.', by the Geographical Section of the General Staff (October, 1916) HMSO, London; OS 1919 A brief outline of the growth of survey work on the Western Front HMSO, London; OS 1919 The Ordnance Survey and the war 1914-1918 HMSO, London; Winterbotham H S L 1919 British surveys of the Western Front Geographical Journal 53 4 253-76; Winterbotham H S L 1919 Geographical work of the army in France Geographical Journal 54 1 12-28; Jack E M 1926 The war work of the Ordnance Survey Scottish Geographical Magazine 42 220-7; O'Donoghie Y 1980 The Ordnance Survey 1914- 1918 in Seymour W A ed. A history of the Ordnance Survey William Davis and Son, Folkestone 220-30; Chasseaud P 1986 Trench maps: a collectors' guide. Vol. 1: British regular series 1:10000 trench maps




GSGS 3062 - a cartobibliography of maps printed at the Ordnance Survey, OBOS and by Field Survey Companies/Battalions in France, 1915-1918 Mapbooks, Lewes, especially 1-6.

56 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 23 September 1915.

57 RGS 1:1 million map Secretary to Earl Kitchener (Secretary of State for War) to Hinks 29 October 1915; Council minutes 15 November 1915 (item 4).

58 Hinks AR 1915 The map on the scale 1/1 000 000, compiled at the Royal Geographical Society under the direction of the General Staff, 1914-15 Geographical Journal 46 1 24-50 and 46 2 140-56. Close issued an angry defence of the pre-war International Map in the ensuing debate: 'We have not been listening to a funeral oration [for the International Map]', he observed; the RGS version is 'only an offspring from it, and may be a useful adjunct, but it is not the Interna- tional Map. The International Map is a more authori- tative production, and differs from this effort in form and intention, in character and detail. The map we are discussing to-night has a National and not an International character' (quoted on pp. 142-3).

59 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Lord Curzon 7 June 1915; Hinks to Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) 8 June 1915; Hinks to Arthur Balfour (First Lord of the Admiralty) 8 June 1915; Hinks to Herbert H Asquith (Prime Minister) 7 June 1915; Hinks to British Consulate, Petrograd, 5 April 1916; British Consulate, Petrograd, to Hinks 1 May 1916; General Bourgeois (Chief of the Service Giographique de I'Armie, Paris) to Hinks 10 May 1916; Hinks to Bourgeois 30 May 1916. Copies were also sent, under diplomatic cover, to Allied embassies in London.

60 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 7 November 1915. Batches of material from Petrograd arrived at the RGS right up to the 1917 revolution. RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to British Consulate, Petro- grad, 5 April 1916; British Consulate, Petrograd, to Hinks 1 May 1916.

61 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Sir Robert Blair (Chairman of the Department of Education, London County Council) 23 February 1915; Blair to Hinks 2 March 1915; Hinks to Blair 6 March 1915. Cartographic experiments were carried out by Wallis using 'iso-ethnicity' lines. RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Blair 15 January 1915. See Wallis B C 1916 Distribution of nationalities in Hungary Geographical Journal 47 3 117-89; and numerous articles in Geographical Review (1917 4 465-81; 1918 6 421-35; 1918 6 52-65; 1918 6 156-71; 1918 6 268-81; 1918 6 341-53; 1921 11 426-9).

62 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 17 January 1915.

63 Ibid., Hinks to Hogarth 17 January 1915. Hogarth served as RGS President from 1925 to 1927.

64 Ibid., Carruthers to Hinks 15 December 1914; RGS Place-name index for BEF maps Dickson to Hinks 11 December 1914. For a strangely moving tribute from a leading Marxist scholar of China and Mongolia, where Carruthers spent a great deal of time, see Lattimore O 1978 Douglas Carruthers and geographical contrasts in central Asia Geographical Journal 144 2 208-17. Dickson's career was linked closely to Sir Halford Mackinder's. He was lecturer in physical geography and Fellow of New College, Oxford, under Mackinder and subsequently moved to Reading in 1904, where Mackinder was Principal.

65 Knightley P and Simpson C 1969 The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia Thomas Nelson, London 31-46; and, on The Round Table more generally, see Symonds R 1986 Oxford and empire: the last lost cause? Macmillan, London 62-79.

66 Middle East Archive, St Antony's College, Oxford, Hogarth correspondence, Hogarth to his mother, 12 March 1897, Box A, Letter 2 (hereafter MEA Hogarth to his mother 12 March 1897 A2).

67 Knightley and Simpson 1969 The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 31-46; Winstone 1982 The illicit adventure op. cit. 17 41-2. This view has been widely challenged, not least by Lawrence's brother, A W Lawrence, who wrote a dismissive letter to The Times on 22 November 1969 7 cols f-g. The exhaustive authorized biography of Lawrence also rejects these claims. See Wilson J 1989 Lawrence of Arabia: the authorised biography of T E Lawrence Heinemann, London 1008-9.

68 Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 70. 69 Knightley and Simpson 1969 The secret lives of

Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 47-60. For worried accounts of Germany's eastern policy before and during the war, see Sarolea C 1907 The Baghdad railway and German expansion as a factor in European politics Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh; Yate A C 1916 War and the east Scottish Geographical Magazine 32 187-98; Woods H C 1917 The Baghdad railway and its tributaries Geographical Journal 50 1 32-57; Woods H C 1919 The cradle of the war: the Near East and Pan-Germanism John Murray, London.

70 Quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 136.

71 Lawrence wrote, for example, a Military report on the Sinai Peninsula in late 1914. See Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 153-4.

72 Quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 174, 167-8.

73 An article on 'Map making by air' appeared in The Daily Telegraph on 30 October 1920 under Lawrence's name, although the author was apparently Newcombe. See Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 1007.

74 Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 191. 75 Ibid. 174.




76 Lawrence T E 1962/1926 Seven pillars of wisdom: a triumph Penguin, London 56-8.

77 Quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 988, 147-8.

78 The rival claims are reviewed from different perspectives in Knightley and Simpson 1969 The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia op. cit.; Mack J E 1990 A prince of our disorder: the life of T E Lawrence Oxford University Press, Oxford; and Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit.

79 See Heffernan 1995 The spoils of war op. cit., especially pp. 240-5.

80 Lawrence subsequently claimed that he opposed these strategies because they were motivated by an imperialist design to capture, and then permanently retain, Arab territory. 'Do make clear ...', he wrote in 1928 to D G Pearman who was preparing lectures on the Arab revolt, 'that my objects were to save England, and France too, from the follies of the imperialists, who would have us, in 1920, repeat the exploits of Clive or Rhodes. The world has passed by that point' (quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 149). For a perceptive discussion of Lawrence and the French, see Hourani A 1991 Islam in European thought Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 116-28

81 Hogarth's contacts were indeed impressive and included Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, who was an old schoolfriend from Winchester. Mack 1990 A prince of our disorder op. cit. 105.

82 Both letters are reprinted in Garnett D ed. 1938 Letters of T E Lawrence Jonathan Cape, London 193-4, 195-6, and quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 181-3.

83 RGS Keltie Hogarth to Keltie 24 March 1915. Other speakers in this series included Lionel W Lyde, Hilaire Belloc, Vaughan Cornish and Harry H Johnston. These lectures were published in the Geographical Journal and reprinted together as a special RGS booklet in 1917 entitled The geography of the war.

84 Hogarth D G 1915 Geography of the war theatre in the Near East Geographical Journal 45 6 457-71.

85 On Bell and Shakespear, see Winstone H V F 1978 Gertrude Bell Jonathan Cape, London; Winstone H V F 1978 Captain Shakespear: a portrait Jonathan Cape, London.

86 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Admiral Sir H Jackson 27 May 1915; Hinks to Hedley 10 August 1915.

87 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 10 August 1915; Hinks to Military Intelligence Office, Cairo, 17 August 1915; Egyptian Survey Department, Cairo, to Hinks 8 September 1915; Hedley to Hinks 17 September 1915.

88 Winstone 1982 The illicit adventure op. cit. 236. 89 MEA Hogarth to his wife 26 May 1915 A12. Wilson

1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 1008-9 insists that

Hogarth went to Athens of his own volition in search of an intelligence job having been frustrated in his attempts to find such a position in London, an impression apparently supported by a comment from Compton Mackenzie who met Hogarth in Athens.

90 MEA Hogarth to his mother 9 August 1915 A5. 91 MEA Hogarth to his wife 15 August 1915 A6. 92 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Military Intelligence

Office, Cairo, 17 August 1915; Military Intelligence Office, Cairo, to Hinks 8 September 1915; Hinks to Military Intelligence Office, Cairo, 17 September 1915; Military Intelligence Office, Cairo, to Hinks 3 October 1915; Military Intelligence Office, Cairo, to Hinks 5 October 1915.

93 On Lawrence's Syrian reports, see RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 14 October 1915; Hinks to Hedley 15 October 1915; Hedley to Hinks 16 October 1915. No letters from Lawrence survive in the RGS archives as he normally corresponded with Hedley at GSGS and all material was returned to GSGS after use. One Lawrence bundle in late November was described by Hinks as 'amusing but not, I think, very practical' (RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 30 November 1915). Lawrence took great delight in his inconsistencies: 'I spell my names anyhow to show what rot the systems are'. His mischievous responses to his publisher's exas- perated queries about the manuscript of Revolt in the desert (1927) are characteristic: 'Bir Waheida, was Bir Waheidi'- 'Why not? All one place'; 'The Bisaita is also spelt Biseita' - 'Good'; 'Jedha, the she-camel, was Jedhah on Slip 40' - 'She was a splendid beast' (quoted in A W Lawrence's preface to Lawrence 1962 Seven pillars of wisdom op. cit. 19-20). For an opposing view, see Carruthers D and Hinks A R 1917 Notes on the transliteration of Arabic names for the 1:1 million map Geographical Journal 49 2 141-8.

94 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 18 October 1915.

95 Ibid. Hedley to Hinks 21 October 1915. 96 On the Dardanelles campaign, see Rhodes James R

1965 Gallipoli B T Batsford, London. Once the ter- rible scale of the Gallipoli disaster became clear, Freshfield used the RGS as a platform to attack the architects of the campaign, particularly Winston Churchill. To demonstrate their ignorance of geography and history, Freshfield invited Dr Walter Leaf, a noted classical scholar, to speak on the impregnability of the Gallipoli peninsula since the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The lecture was followed by forthright condem- nation of the recent campaign from Freshfield and Lord Bryce. See Leaf W 1916 The military geography of the Troad Geographical Journal 47 6 401-21. Recent historians concur with Freshfield. A J P




Taylor claims that 'none of the politicians looked at a detailed map before advocating their "side shows". They were clearly ignorant that Gallipoli has steep slopes... All the side shows were "cigar butt" strategy. Someone, Churchill or other, looked at a map of Europe; pointed to a spot with the end of his cigar; and said: "Let us go there"' (see Taylor A J P 1963 The First World War: an illustrated history Hamish Hamilton, London 71-2). For a neutral statement by a geographer involved as a soldier in the Gallipoli campaign, see Ogilvie A G 1916 Notes on the geography of Imbros Geographical Journal 48 2 130-45.

97 MEA Hogarth to his wife 8 and 17 November 1915 A8 and A9.

98 Kedourie E 1976 In the Anglo-Arab labyrinth: the MacMahon-Husayn correspondence and its interpret- ations, 1914-1939 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Fromkin D 1989 A peace to end all peace: the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East St Martin's Press, New York 173-86.

99 For recent analysis, see Fromkin 1989 A peace to end all peace op. cit. 188-99; Andrew C and Kanya- Forstner A S 1981 France overseas: the Great War and the climax of French imperialism Thames and Hudson, London 87-102.

100 Quoted in Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 232.

101 Three days after her arrival, Bell wrote a long letter to Lord Cromer, the elder statesman of British policy-making in the Middle East, reasserting the case for an Allied attack on Alexandretta coordinated with an Arab rising (see Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 232).

102 The historian H A L Fisher claims to have acted as an intermediary between Hall and Hogarth (see Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 1008-9).

103 The full list of academic recruits to the NID include F E Adcock (King's, Cambridge - ancient history), C Bailey (Balliol, Oxford - classics); J Baillie (Aberdeen - moral philosophy); W M Calder (Manchester - Greek); G B Grundy (Corpus Christi, Oxford - ancient history); L G Wickham Legg (New, Oxford - history); R B Mowat (Corpus Christi, Oxford - history); J Orr (Queen Mary, London - French); H J Paton (Queen's, Oxford - philosophy); H Rashdall (New, Oxford - philosophy); N Kemp-Smith (Princeton - philosophy); W B Stevenson (Glasgow - Hebrew); R N Rudmose Brown (Sheffield - geography) (see Wallace 1988 War and the image of Germany op. cit. 238-9).

104 Dozens of Admiralty handbooks on different countries were prepared during and after the war, with Rudmose Brown playing a particularly important role. Most were regional surveys but some, such as the volume on Nationalities and national movements

in the war (Admiralty Naval Staff, Intelligence Department, November 1918, ID 1194) were more thematic. On the more extensive and detailed Sec- ond World War Admiralty handbooks, the production of which was partly overseen by Ian Fleming (author of the James Bond books), see Balchin 1987 United Kingdom geographers op. cit.

105 RGS 1:1 million map Anonymous memo to RGS Council (probably Hinks) 1 October 1915. On the Cozens-Hardy family, see Cannadine D 1994 Aspects of aristocracy: grandeur and decline in modern Britain Yale University Press, New Haven 184-210.

106 RGS Council minutes 13 December 1915 (item 4). See also Freshfield D W 1916 Address at the Anniver- sary General Meeting, 22 May 1916 Geographical Journal 48 1 1-10.

107 RGS 1:1 million map Carruthers to Hinks n.d.; Reeves to Hinks 17 January 1916.

108 RGS Freshfield Hinks to Freshfield 13 January 1916; Freshfield to Hinks 13 January 1916; Hinks to Freshfield 15 January 1916; Freshfield to Hinks 17 January 1916; RGS 1:1 million map Hogarth to Hinks 15 January 1916; Dickson to Hinks 15 January 1916. See Scargill 1976 The RGS op. cit. 452.

109 RGS Place-name index for BEF maps Hall to Freshfield 30 January 1916.

110 RGS 1:1 million map Freshfield memorandum 26 January 1916; RGS Council minutes 24 January 1916 (item 4).

111 Reeves's bizarre autobiography contains a chapter on his war work at the RGS. Regularly suspected as a German spy while undertaking field survey classes, Reeves took to carrying a loaded pistol everywhere he went and subsequently signed up as a 'special constable' so he could devote his energies to rooting out the real German spies. His counter- espionage activities were somewhat hampered, however, by regular 'psychic experiences' and encounters with ghosts, including a phantom of the recently deceased Lord Kitchener which appeared, Reeves claimed, in a rowing boat at the foot of his bed (see Reeves E A n.d. The recollections of a geographer Seeley, Service and Co., London 165-215).

112 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Freshfield 27 January 1916; Hall to Freshfield 16 February 1916. Hinks's memorandum was also circulated in advance to Hedley and Close. RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 27 January 1916; Hinks to Close 27 January 1916; Hedley to Hinks 1 February 1916; Close to Hinks 8 February 1916.

113 RGS 1:1 million map Minutes of Special War Maps Meeting 3 February 1916.

114 RGS Council minutes 7 February 1916 (items 5 and 8) and 6 March 1916 (item 6). Relations between Hinks and Dickson did not improve. Rather than ask Dickson for copies of the classified Admiralty handbooks, Hinks wrote to Hedley asking him to




request them through the GSGS. A farcical situation then ensued whereby material compiled in one room of the RGS was sent across London to the War Office only to be returned to another room in the RGS. RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Hedley 13 and 17 April 1917.

115 RGS 1:1 million map Report on the progress of the 1/M map compiled by the [Royal Geographical] Society for the General Staff, and request for a further grant 10 January 1916.

116 Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 1008-9. 117 The map devised by Sykes and Picot is reproduced

in Heffernan 1995 The spoils of war op. cit. 243. 118 Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 247-8.

Hogarth had few doubts about his role in the Arab Bureau: 'in a sense, I am the Arab Bureau', he informed his wife in 1917, although such responsibility brought him little pleasure. 'I feel I can't stick it out here much longer', he wrote around the same time. MEA Hogarth to his wife 12 May 1917 B14; Hogarth to his wife 28 March 1917 B11. Hogarth spent most of the remainder of the war in Cairo and in Palestine as an adviser to General Edmund Allenby during the 1917 campaign.

119 Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 283. 120 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Bell 12 September

1916; Hinks to Hedley 3 October 1916. Bell was awarded the RGS Patron's Medal in March 1917. RGS Council minutes 5 March 1917. Other RGS Middle Eastern research is discussed in MEA Hogarth to Clayton 17 August 1916 A14; RGS Council minutes 19 March 1917 (item 3); RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Baron Etienne Hulot (Secretary, Socidtd de Giographie de Paris) 28 July 1917; Hinks to Charles Lallemand (President, Socidtd de Giographie de Paris) 27 August 1917; Lallemand to Hinks 6, 16 and 19 September 1917; Hulot to Hinks 20 September 1917; Henri Froidevaux (Librarian and Archivist, Socidtd de Giographie de Paris) to Hinks 20 September 1917; Hinks to Lallemand 24 September 1917; Hinks to Hulot 24 September 1917; Hinks to Froidevaux 24 September 1917.

121 MEA Hogarth to Clayton 20 July 1917 B2; Freshfield D W 1916 Address at the Anniversary General Meeting, 22 May 1916 Geographical Journal 48 1 1-10; Freshfield D W 1917 Address at the Anniversary Meeting, 21 May 1917 Geographical Journal 50 1 1-12.

122 RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 29 May 1916; Hinks to Hedley 30 May 1916; Hedley to Hinks 8 June 1916; Hinks to Hedley 10 June 1916; Hedley to Hinks 20 June 1916; Hinks to Hedley 29 July 1916; Hinks to Hedley 9 August 1916.

123 Hinks A R 1918 Notes on the construction of a general map of Africa, 1/Two million Geographical Journal 52 4 218-37. For a brief discussion of wartime Anglo-French disputes about the division of

the African spoils, see Heffernan 1995 The spoils of war op. cit. 236-40.

124 Anonymous 1919 War work of the Society op. cit. 338.

125 RGS 1:1 million map Hinks to Lallemand 15 March and 13 November 1918; Hinks to Isaiah Bowman (President of the American Geographical Society) 13 December 1918.

126 Anonymous 1919 War work of the Society op. cit. 336. A large public exhibition of captured German war maps, ranging from large-scale trench maps to small-scale propaganda maps of Europe and Africa, was staged at the RGS a few days after the Armi- stice. RGS Holdich Hinks to Holdich 19 November 1918; Hinks A R 1919 German war maps and surveys Geographical Journal 53 1 30-44.

127 The Service Giographique de l'Armie, under General Bourgeois, produced a few new sheets at 1:1 million scale. See Service G~ographique de l'Armie 1936 Rapport sur les travaux exdcutis du ler. aoa~t 1914 au 31 dicembre 1919: historique du Service Giographique de l'Armee pendant la guerre Imprimerie du Service G6ographique de l'Armde, Paris.

128 Anonyous 1919 War work of the Society op. cit. 338. On the subsequent inconclusive history of the 1:1 million map, see MacLeod M N 1926 The present state of the International 1/M Map in OS Professional Papers: New Series, No. 10 - Papers read at the British Association Meeting of 1925 on the work of the Ordnance Survey including an account of the work of the International Bureau of the 1/M map which is located at the Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton HMSO, London 11-13; United Nations 1953 The International Map of the World on the millionth scale and the international co-operation in the field of cartography World Cartography 3 1-13; Gardiner R A 1961 A re-appraisal of the International Map of the World (IMW) on the millionth scale International Yearbook of Cartography 1 31-49; Crone G R 1962 The future ofthe International Map of the World Geographical Journal 128 36-8.

129 Anonymous 1919 War work of the Society op. cit. 338-9; RGS Place-name index for BEF maps B B Cubitt to RGS Council. War Office funding to the RGS ceased on 21 March 1919. RGS 1:1 million map Hedley to Hinks 21 March 1919; Hinks to Hedley 26 March 1919.

130 Freshfield D W 1917 Address at opening of session, 6 November 1916 Geographical Journal 49 1 1-2, quotation from p. 1.

131 RGS Hinks Johnston to Hinks 11 November 1916. 132 Heffernan 1995 The spoils of war op. cit. 240-5.

Hogarth's campaign on behalf of an Arab state had continued through the rest of the war and culminated with a detailed memorandum submitted to the British cabinet, dated 15 November 1918, which argued that all wartime accords should be




renegotiated from scratch with full Arab partici- pation. See Memorandum on certain considerations of settlement of western Asia Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers CAB 27/36 fo. 142; Wilson 1989 Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 582. Hogarth was dis- mayed by subsequent events in Paris which, apart from refusing to countenance Arab independence, seemed to surrender too much to the French. He returned to Oxford 'sick at heart at all this fiasco' (quoted in Knightley and Simpson 1969 The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia op. cit. 147-8).

133 The failure to exploit Britain's geographical expertise at the Peace Conference is the dominant theme of Chisholm G G 1920 Geography at the Congress of Paris, 1919 Geographical Journal 55 1 309-12. Mackinder had hoped to be involved in peace negotiations as a member of the British delegation but his ultra-imperialist stance made him an unlikely choice given the rising anti-imperialism of most of the other nations involved. His much- quoted Democratic ideals and realities: a study in the politics of reconstruction Constable, London, published in 1919 at the beginning of the Peace Confer- ence, summarized his views on the postwar order. Mackinder contented himself instead with a short but notorious period as official British agent in southern Russia where he agitated against the Bolshevik regime. On this, see Mackinder H J 1949 General report with appendices on the situation in south Russia: recommendations for future policy in Woodward E L and Butler R eds Documents on British foreign policy, 1919-39 HMSO, London vol. III 768-98; Blouet B W 1976 Sir Halford Mackinder as British High Commissioner to south Russia, 1919-20 Geographical Journal 142 228-46; and, more generally, Parker W H 1982 Mackinder: geography as an aid to statecraft Clarendon Press, Oxford; Blouet B W 1987 Sir Halford Mackinder: a biography Texas A&M University Press, College Station.

134 Chisholm 1920 Geography at the Congress of Paris op. cit. Ogilvie, who joined the GSGS in May 1918, was subsequently Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Although his work with the GSGS and at the Paris Peace Conference earned him the MBE, the OBE and the Serbian Order of the White Eagle, he did not exploit his experience in his subsequent research and writing. His only publi- cation on this was a short factual pamphlet: Ogilvie A G 1922 Some aspects of boundary settlement at the Peace Conference Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, New York. Hedley used his position in Paris to keep Hinks informed of all developments so that the latter was able to prepare a series of articles on the new political landscape with impressive speed. RGS Hinks Wynn to Hinks 29 July 1919; Hinks to Wynn 2 August 1919; Hinks to G P Churchill (Foreign Office) 19 September 1919;

Churchill to Hinks 24 September 1919; Hinks to Wynn 25 September 1919; Wynn to Hinks 8 October 1919; Hinks to Wynn 8 October 1919; Wynn to Hinks 13 October 1919; Hinks to Wynn 15 October 1919. See Hinks A R 1919 Boundary delimitations in the Treaty of Versailles Geographical Journal 54 2 103-13; Hinks A R 1919 The boundaries of Cecho- Slovakia Geographical Journal 54 3 185-8; Hinks A R 1919 The new boundaries of Austria Geographical Journal 54 4 288-96; Hinks A R 1919 The progress of boundary delimitation in Europe Geographical Journal 54 4 363-7.

135 RGS Hinks Hinks to Hogarth 4 November 1918; Hinks to Freshfield 4 November 1918; Hinks to Holdich 4 November 1918. Hinks was being somewhat disingenuous here as Hedley had informed him the previous January that the GSGS had been ordered to put together a series of 'Peace Books' on different theatres of war, which would include copies of the 1:1 million sheets, to clarify British geopolitical desiderata. RGS Hinks Hedley to Hinks 18 January 1918.

136 See Heffernan 1995 The spoils of war op. cit. 137 Wrigley G M 1951 Isaiah Bowman: prophetic soul

of the wide world dreaming on things to come Geographical Review 41 7-65, quotation from p. 22. For a detailed list of names and a summary of the wartime work of American geographers, see Anonymous 1919 War services of members of the Association of American Geographers Annals of the Association of American Geographers 9 53-70. On the House Inquiry, see Gelfand L 1963 The Inquiry: American preparations for peace, 1917-1919 Yale University Press, New Haven.

138 For other perspectives of Bowman's career at this time, see Martin G J 1980 The life and thought of Isaiah Bowman Archon, Hamden, CT; Smith N 1984 Isaiah Bowman: political geography and geopolitics Political Geography Quarterly 3 69-76; Smith N 1986 Bowman's New World and the Council on Foreign Relations Geographical Review 76 438-60. Bowman's summary of the new political order (Bowman I 1921 The New World: problems in political geography World Book Company, New York), became an international best-seller.

139 Cvijic had been a particularly eloquent advocate of Serbian/Yugoslavian territorial demands throughout the war, most of which he spent in Paris. His work culminated in Cvijic J 1918 La pininsule Balkanique: glographie humaine Armand Colin, Paris. On his manipulation of the ethnic cartography of Macedonia at the Paris Peace Conference, see Wilkinson H R 1951 Maps and politics: a review of the ethnographic cartography of Macedonia Liverpool University Press, Liverpool; Taylor P 1993 Political geography: world-economy, nation state and locality Longman, London 209-12.




140 RGS 1:1 million map Bowman to Hinks 21 November 1918.

141 Following a request from Bowman, H A Bumstead, the Scientific Attache at the American Embassy in London, wrote to Hinks asking for the loan of all German maps and publications in the RGS which did not exist in American libraries. He was authorized to pay up to four times the original price for the temporary loan of each bound volume or map sheet and was even willing to employ a team of workers to copy out tables of contents and selected articles in long-hand if the removal of this material was impossible. The response was negative. RGS Hinks Bumstead to Hinks 26 March 1918; Hinks to Bumstead 27 March 1918.

142 Two years later, Bowman wrote to Keltie in a blatant attempt to stop Hinks reviewing The New World in the Geographical Journal (Letter in the American Geo- graphical Society Archives, Bowman correspondence, dated 17 December 1921): 'I have long since learned that Mr Hinks's apparent anti-Americanism and his inexplicable attitude towards me have made it impossible in my judgement to secure justice from him ... The sole question is the propriety of using the journal of a learned society such as that of the Royal Geographical Society as a weapon for political controversy and propaganda ... I am not alone in regretting the better days of the past when we had both a distinguished man and a gentleman as Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society'. Hinks' anti-Americanism, part of his general antipathy to all foreigners, was indeed pronounced. He dismissed W M Davis as a peddler of 'unfortunate jargon' and tried to block suggestions that either Davis or Ellsworth Huntington should receive RGS medals: 'The trouble with both of them is that they are rather dangerous people to stamp with a high award as so much of what they have written is unreliable'. RGS Freshfield Hinks to Freshfield 24 May 1918.

143 I am currently engaged on a broader study of the British geopolitics during the First World War. A preliminary statement is contained in Heffernan M 1995 Geographers militant: British geography during the First World War Working paper Department of Geography, Loughborough University.

144 Keltie J S 1921 The position of geography in British universities American Geographical Society Re- search Series No. 4 Oxford University Press, New York; Stoddart 1986 On geography and its history op. cit. 41-58. Keltie and Freshfield were extremely concerned about the threat to Oxford geography following Herbertson's death, widely attributed to overwork. Keltie felt that 'the School [of Geography] has reached a critical stage. The feeling in Oxford is that it is in the University but not of it. No doubt very good work was done in Herbertson's time but

... the School did not enter so thoroughly into the work of the University as it did even in the time of Mackinder. Practically no research work was carried out'. Freshfield, who made several visits to Oxford to discuss matters with the Vice-Chancellor, was unequivocal: 'The closing of the School would be a disgrace to the University and the country and at the moment a flagrant token of British stupidity'. Freshfield, Keltie and Mackinder all wanted Hogarth to succeed Herbertson, although Hinks had to remind them that Hogarth was otherwise occupied 'on confidential service for the government'. RGS Freshfield Keltie to Freshfield 4 September 1915; Freshfield to Keltie 5 September 1915; Hinks to Freshfield 11 September 1915; Scargill 1976 The RGS op. cit. 455-7.

145 The deployment of new, particularly repugnant weapons during the war was financially beneficial to one leading geographer. To fund his prewar political career as an MP, Mackinder invested in a chemical company in Cheshire, Electro-Bleach, whose profits increased significantly when its wartime production was switched to chlorine gas for which, sadly, there was a growing demand. This is mentioned in passing in Blouet B W 1987 Political geographers of the past V: the political career of Sir Halford Mackinder Political Geography Quarterly 6 4 355-67, on p. 364.

146 Lacoste 1976 La glographie op. cit. 19-21. 147 Others feel very differently about the moral or

intellectual relevance of historical awareness. See Barnett C 1995 Awakening the dead: who needs the history of geography? Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 417-19.

148 Hobson J A 1926 Free thought and the social sciences George Allen and Unwin, London 54-5. For a similar critique of French academics, see Benda J 1927 La trahison des clercs Bernard Grasset, Paris.

149 MEA Hogarth to his mother 20 September 1918 C26.

150 Darwin's position was clearly expressed a month before the outbreak of war in his Presidential address to the Eugenics Education Society on 2 July 1914, reported in The Times 3 July 1914 4 col. e. See also Darwin L 1915-16 Eugenics during and after the war The Eugenics Review 7 91-106; Darwin L 1916 On the statistical enquiries needed after the war in connection with eugenics Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 79 159-88; Darwin L 1917-18 The disabled sailor and soldier and the future of our race The Eugenics Review 9 1-17; Darwin L 1918-19 The need for widespread eugenic reform during reconstruction The Eugenics Review 10 145-62; Darwin L 1926 The need for eugenic reform John Murray, London 499-504. For an excellent analysis of this debate, see Crook P 1990 War as genetic disaster? The First World War debate over the




eugenics of warfare War and Society 8 47-70; Crook P 1994 Darwinism, war and history: the debate over the biology of war from the 'Origin of species' to the First World War Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; and Pick 1993 op. cit. 75-87.

151 One should note the heroic personal stand taken by the Quaker mathematician and meteorologist, Lewis Fry Richardson, uncle of the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, who not only refused to serve in the war (other than in the Friends' Ambulance Unit) but actively prevented his pioneering wartime work on numerical forecasting from being used by the War Office. See Richardson L F 1922 Weather prediction by numerical process Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Richardson L F 1919 Mathe- matical psychology of war Oxford University Press,

Oxford; Richardson L F 1960 Statistics of deadly quarrels Boxwood Press, Pittsburgh; Richardson L F 1960 Arms and insecurity Boxwood Press, Pittsburgh. For summaries of Richardson's life, see Gold E 1954 Lewis Fry Richardson Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 9 217-35; Richardson S A 1957 Lewis Fry Richardson (1881-1953): a personal biography Conflict Resolution 1 300-4; Platzman G W 1967 A retrospective view of Richardson's book on weather prediction Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 48 514-51; Ashford O M 1980 Prophet or professor? The life and work of Lewis Fry Richardson Hilger, Bristol; Ashford O M 1981 The dream and the fantasy Weather 36 11 323-5; Charnock H 1981 Echo-ranging: L F Richardson's contribution Weather 36 11 316-22.



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