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Winstone, H V F : Captain Shakespear: A Portrait

London: Jonathan Cape,1976

First edition, 1976, hardback, 8.5" x 5.5", very good condition, in a very good unclipped (£4.95) dust jacket now protected by plastic cover, publisher's original brown clothboards with gilt blocking to spine, b/w mapped endpapers, 236 pages including index, internally clean tight and bright, b/w photo illustrations and b/w line drawings. ----- "The short life of William Henry Shakespear - one of the most intrepid and accomplished lone explorers that Britain produced in the heyday of her Empire - is today a legend among the tribesmen of Central Arabia. Sixty years after his heroic death, Captain Shake-spear's name and deeds are virtually unknown to his fellow countrymen arid his memory is lost even to his closest surviving relatives. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence mentioned the tales his guides told round the camp fire about Shakespear. Some years later, Philby recalled the great warrior king Ibn Saud speaking of his friend Shakespear. Yet the disappearance after his death of some of the most important government files relating to Shakespear, while many less important papers of the time survive, has assured, until now, an undeserved obscurity outside Arabia to their subject. The Author first stumbled across Captain Shakespear's exploits by chance when he was researching a history of Kuwait. It took him two years to track down and piece together the fragments of the remarkable story he unfolds in this book. Then a stroke of luck brought Winstone into possession of the private papers and photographs which Shakespear had left to his brother in 1915, and put him in touch with the Baird family, among whose daughters Captain Shakespear found the" single romance of his life. Born in India in 1878, Shakespear, through his conventional colonial upbringing, developed, besides an athletic prowess and a not inconsiderable intellectual force, those remarkable powers of endurance, inventiveness and single-mindedness that enabled him to gain the friendship and unqualified respect of the fiercest tribes of Arabia. A pioneer motorist, he made lengthy journeys when the automobile was in its infancy, requiring careful planning of fuel supplies and spares, as well as nerve. He made six journeys of exploration in eastern Arabia in addition to his major expedition across the peninsula.But his political influence in the area came at the wrong end of British policy before the 1914-18 war. In alliance with Sir Percy Cox, he fought a solitary battle when he was Political Agent in Kuwait to gain protection for Ibn Sand, whom he considered the only desert leader able to gain the allegiance of the tribes in the event of trouble with the Turks. Pleading through the Viceroy and the India Office, however, was muted by the power of the Foreign Office under Sir Edward Grey. When war came Shakespear was sent back to Arabia to bring the tribes over to Britain's side. But, at 36, he was tragically killed at Ibn Saud's side in battle against his pro-Turkish enemy, Ibn Rashid of Hail. If Shakespear lost the political struggle during his lifetime, he won it posthumously when Britain's wartime promises to Husain, Sharif of Mecca, were coming home to roost. For, as Shakespear had forecast, his friend Ibn Saud became the ruler of nearly all Arabia and the richest king in the world, though not before Britain had set herself, needlessly as it turns out, at a disadvantage with the Arabs for decades to come."

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