Imagined Landscapes in Palestine During the Great War

Wellington, Jennifer

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78229-4_11

Imagined Landscapes in Palestine During the Great War

Jennifer Wellington⁶

Chapter
First Online: 23 August 2018

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Part of the book series: War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850 ((WCS))

Abstract

This chapter explores the creation of a series of official representations of Palestine during the First World War and their reception by British and Australian audiences during and after the war. Drawing on the images generated by official war correspondents, artists, photographers and cinematographers, Wellington shows how the Palestine campaign was represented through a series of recurring motifs, visual tropes drawn from Scripture, the history of the Crusades and the generalized exoticism of imperial Orientalism, and examines how those images served different agendas in Britain and its settler colony, Australia, where the image of the hardy antipodean Briton, the bush horseman, battling the colonial frontier, allowed Australia to join the glorious sweep of British imperial history.

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Notes

1.
Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London, 2016), p. 350.
2.
James E. Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East: Morale and Military Identity in the Sinai and Palestine Campaigns, 1916–18 (London, 2014), p. 68.
3.
Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans, p. 351; Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East, p. 69.
4.
Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008), p. 213.
5.
See John Horne, ‘Remobilizing for ‘total war’: France and Britain, 1917–1918’, in John Horne, ed., State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 195–211.
6.
Meirion and Susie Harries, The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century (London, 1983), p. 5.
7.
Horne, ‘Remobilizing for ‘total war’, p. 198.
8.
‘Civil society’ may be understood to refer to the intermediate space between people and the state and here refers specifically to the case of sponsors of these self-mobilizing propaganda efforts, including groups like churches, the press and ‘a host of semi-official and private agencies’. Ibid., pp. 198, 195.
9.
Ibid., p. 195.
10.
See Jennifer Wellington, Exhibiting War: The Great War, Museums and Memory in Britain, Canada, and Australia (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 38–46.
11.
Gregory, The Last Great War, p. 213.
12.
The National War Aims Committee, which was intended to organize domestic propaganda campaigns and local events, also began its work in 1917. See David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First Word War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale (Liverpool, 2012).
13.
Mark Connelly, ‘The British Media and the Image of the Empire in 1917’, in Douglas E. Delaney and Nikolas Gardner, eds., Turning Point 1917: The British Empire at War (Vancouver, 2017), pp. 188–213, p. 204.
14.
Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London, 1989), p. 85.
15.
Although the British ban on cameras on the Western Front did not prevent numerous soldiers from privately taking photographs: see Jay Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge, 2017), chapter 2. However, due to the official restrictions, these images remained in private collections and were not published, so did not become part of the publicly circulated visual lexicon of the war in the United Kingdom and the empire (the situation was quite different in France).
16.
Doron Bar and Kobi Cohen-Hattab, ‘A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim of Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, 39 (2003), pp. 131–148, p. 141.
17.
Bar and Cohen-Hattab, ‘A New Kind of Pilgrimage’, pp. 133–134.
18.
Carmichael, First World War Photographers, p. 84.
19.
Connelly, ‘The British Media and the Image of the Empire in 1917’, p. 204.
20.
Imperial War Museum, FILM 2327.
21.
See Luke McKernan, ‘“The supreme moment of the war”: General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 13 (1993), pp. 169–180, p. 179 (in note 10), and also M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War 1914–1918 (London, 1982).
22.
Illustrated London News 19 January 1918, cited in Carmichael, First World War Photographers, p. 83.
23.
General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem (1917) IWM FILM 2327. For a detailed description of this, see also McKernan, ‘“The supreme moment of the war”: General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem’, pp. 171–177.
24.
See Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East, pp. 69–70.
25.
James McBey, The Allies Entering Jerusalem, 11th December 1917: General Allenby, with Colonel de Piépape Commanding the French Detachment, and Lieut-Colonel d’Agostio Commanding the Italian Detachment, Entering the City by the Jaffa Gate (1917/1919) IWM ART 2599.
26.
EN1/1/REPD/6/1-2: Reports. Departmental 1924-25. IWM – General Report on Exhibits – Month of January 1925.
27.
Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East, p. 61.
28.
See Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East, pp. 67–68.
29.
Eitan Bar-Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18’, Journal of Contemporary History, 36 (2001), pp. 87–109, p. 89.
30.
Notice D.607. Notice the Press. Private and Confidential. 15 November 1917. FO/395/152, no. 218223. The National Archives, Kew. This notice is cited at length in Bar-Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade?’, p. 87.
31.
Kitchen, The British Imperial Army in the Middle East, p. 70. See also, for example, the film listed as “With the Forces of the Palestine Front (The New Crusaders or The Palestine Front) England – April 1918” in the list of films in Nicholas Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War: published in association with the Imperial War Museum (London, 1986), p. 270.
32.
Punch, 19 December 1917, p. 415.
33.
See Stefan Goebel, ‘Britain’s ‘Last Crusade’: From War Propaganda to War Commemoration, c. 1914–1930’, in David Welch and Jo Fox, eds., Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age (London, 2012), p. 161.
34.
Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory (Cambridge, 2007), p. 115.
35.
See Goebel, ‘Britain’s ‘Last Crusade’.
36.
Bar-Yosef, ‘The Last Crusade?’ and Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005).
37.
James E. Kitchen, ‘“Khaki Crusaders”: Crusading Rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916–18’, First World War Studies, 1 (2010), pp. 141–160.
38.
After being printed in book form in Melbourne in 1896, it was published in London in 1897, and then went into numerous reprints. W. H. Fitchett, Deeds that Won the Empire (London, 1897).
39.
Dixon, Photography, early cinema and colonial modernity, p. 53, citing Hurley.
40.
Dixon, Photography, early cinema and colonial modernity, p. 51.
41.
‘Pictorialism’ entry in Anne Lee Morgan, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, (Oxford, 2007), p. 379.
42.
William Ivor Castle, born in Bristol, was aged 39 and manager of the photographic department of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mirror when he was appointed an official photographer. Peter Robinson, ‘Canadian Photojournalism during the First World War’, History of Photography, 2 (1978), p. 42.
43.
See, for example, ‘Australian Battle Pictures In Natural Colour. Exhibition At The Grafton Galleries’, The Times, 22 May 1918, p. 3.
44.
In some ways Hurley’s approach resembled that of the American Lowell Thomas, who photographed T. E. Lawrence during the war and later popularized the “Lawrence of Arabia” myth with a post-war travelling magic lantern show, and the film With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia (1919)—which had total ticket sales of over four million. See Justin Fantauzzo, ‘A Tribute to the Empire: Lowell Thomas’s With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’, in Andrekos Varnava and Michael Walsh, eds., The Great War and the British Empire: Culture, Identity, Memory (London, 2017), pp. 199–213.
45.
Robert Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (London, 2012), p. 3.
46.
Frank Hurley, diary entry for 25 May 1918 in Dixon and Lee, eds., The Diaries of Frank Hurley, (London, 2011), 104. See also ‘Australian Battle Pictures’, The Times, 22 May 1918, p. 3.
47.
‘Colour Photographs. Capt. Hurley’s Work in Palestine’, The Times, 6 June 1918, p. 9; and ‘Australian Battle Pictures’, The Times, 22 May 1918, p. 3.
48.
Frank Hurley in Dixon and Lee, eds., The Diaries of Frank Hurley, p. 91. ‘The exotic locations and multicultural character of the Middle East also provided Hurley with unlimited opportunities to indulge his interest in travelogue photography, a genre that might be characterised as Great War Orientalism’. Robert Dixon, Photography, early cinema and colonial modernity: Frank Hurley’s synchronized lecture entertainments (London, 2012), p. 54.
49.
Frank Hurley, diary entries for 5 and 7 February 1918 in Dixon and Lee, eds., The Diaries of Frank Hurley, p. 94.
50.
Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity, p. 54.
51.
Dixon, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity, p. 54. For more on this, see Christopher Lee, ‘“War is not a Christian Mission”: Racial Invasion and Religious Crusade in H. S. Gullett’s Official History of the Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 7 (2008), pp. 85–96. For Gullett’s work itself, see H. S. Gullett, The A.I.F. in Sinai and Palestine, 1914–1918 (Sydney, 1923).
52.
Frank Hurley, diary entry for 25 May 1918 in Dixon and Lee, eds., The Diaries of Frank Hurley, p. 104.
53.
Descriptive Catalogue. Exhibition of Enlargements. Official War Photographs. Sepia and Natural Colour. The Official Collection which the Commonwealth Government is Preserving to Hand Down to Future Generations. The Photographs Depict the Work of the A.I.F. on Gallipoli, and in France, Belgium and Palestine. Arranged by the Australian War Museum (Commonwealth Government). (Melbourne, 1922).
54.
Frank Hurley, ‘75. PASSING THROUGH JERUSALEM. (Official Photo No. B1520). Australians of the Anzac Mounted Division passing through the ancient city of Jerusalem on January 22nd, 1918’. Descriptive Catalogue. Exhibition of Enlargements. Official War Photographs (Melbourne, 1922).
55.
Frank Hurley, ‘77. THE DESERT TRAIL. (Official Photo No. B1443)’. Descriptive Catalogue. Exhibition of Enlargements. Official War Photographs (Melbourne, 1922).
56.
‘A.W.M.432A. ARAB “THROAT PIERCERS” This instrument, carried by the Arab, was often used to settle personal differences. Should an opportunity occur during an argument he would put an end to the quarrel by stabbing his opponent in the neck with such a weapon as this. For this reason members of the Australian Light Horse, who had ample opportunities of studying the Arab and his little idiosyncrasies, dubbed these weapons “throat piercers”. – Presented by the Military Governor of Molakah’. AWM 333 2/5/12 Palestine Gallery captions.
57.
See, for example, the maps of the exhibition mounted in Sydney from 1925 filed in AWM 93 6/1/15. Layout of Collections in Exhibition Building, Sydney.
58.
AWM 333 2/5/38 Part 1 captions for exhibits.
59.
A.W.M.440. ‘TO JERUSALEM’. AWM 333 2/5/12 Palestine Gallery captions.
60.
Harry Chauvel (dir.) Forty Thousand Horsemen (Famous Feature Films: National Film and Sound Archive, 1940), minutes 21.07–22.19.
61.
For more on this in other films depicting the First World War before 1940, see Chapter 4, ‘The Empire’s Last Laugh’ in Daniel Reynaud, Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War through Australian Cinema (Melbourne, 2007).

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University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Jennifer Wellington

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Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Joseph Clarke
Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
John Horne

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Wellington, J. (2018). Imagined Landscapes in Palestine During the Great War. In: Clarke, J., Horne, J. (eds) Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century. War, Culture and Society, 1750-1850. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78229-4_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78229-4_11
Published: 23 August 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78229-4
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