A Box of Sand

by Charles Stephenson

  Found on the body were several notebooks filled with sketches of the Italian positions, and literary matter evidently intended for newspaper articles. His binoculars, a large photographic apparatus of German make, and a Browning pistol with 211 cartridges were afterwards discovered in the recesses of the grotto, besides a military order signed by the commander of the Turkish camp furnishing him with a Bedouin escort for reconnoitring near the Italian lines.4

  Perhaps naturally, the English language papers within the British Empire gave the most coverage, including, of course, the paper that had employed him, though it studiously avoided labelling him as a combatant:

  We have to announce with profound regret that Mr Stuart Smallwood, Daily Chronicle correspondent, has been killed in Tripoli. The news reached the office of the paper in a telegram from its Rome correspondent, who states that while reconnoitring in the environments of Derna, a patrol, led by Lieutenant Vitalini, was set upon, by a band of Arabs. In the ensuing fighting a distinguished looking person, first thought to be a Turkish officer, was mortally wounded. Upon him were found papers issued by the British Consulate at Cairo in October last bearing the name John Warren Stuart Smallwood, British subject, aged 29 described as a professional journalist.5

  Though these articles were syndicated throughout the world, there were few further embellishments in respect of John Smallwood, alias Osman Mahdi, available until Georges Remond, correspondent of the Parisian L’Illustration, published his articles in book form, Aux Camps Turco-Arabes: Notes de Route et de guerre en Cyrénaïque et en Tripolitaine, in November 1912. Remond’s journey through the desert had coincidentally brought him to Enver’s headquarters at Ayn al-Mansur at the pertinent time, and he met Smallwood. His physical description of this officier anglais is interesting and, in terms of what might have been expected with regards to the majority of English officers, untypical: blonde and thin with a flat, boxer’s, nose he was covered from head to toe in tattoos. In terms of temperament, Smallwood was a ‘hothead,’ who had no fear and viewed life as sport.6

  Furthermore, far from being a mere correspondent, and therefore a non-combatant, Remond’s account confirms that Smallwood was active on the Ottoman side when he perished. In a section entitled mort d’un officier Anglais, Remond relates how Smallwood had taken a Kodak camera in order to photograph the Italian works, promising the Frenchman that he would supply him with pictures for publication in L’Illustration. He would achieve this by setting up the camera on a tripod and utilising a long exposure time in order to get a decent picture in the bright moonlight. Unfortunately, the reflection of this on the metal parts of the camera aroused the attention of the defenders and they opened fire. He was popular with the Arabs it seems, for following his disappearance and death a poet of the local Barassa tribe sang to the Ottoman camp of him (Le soir, le poète des ‘Barassa’ a chanté pour Osman effendi devant toute l’armée!)7

  When the, by then, German-exiled Enver Pasa published the diary recounting his participation in the Italo-Ottoman war in 1918, he included more information on Smallwood in his entry for 8 May 1912:

  In the camp we had a British officer who had converted to Islam before he had joined us as a volunteer. He was a brave fellow of a boldness I have not encountered before. It was sport for him to slip under the Italian wire and scout and record the enemy’s entrenchments. A few days ago he went deep with an Arab guard into the Italian positions, was discovered, attacked and killed. Tonight I remember that dead Osmanli, whose real name was Stuart Smallwood, I see his ugly features and his jerky movements. People loved him in the camp.8

  For those who might have been interested in learning more of this curious individual who had converted to Islam and fought and died for the Ottoman Empire, it was to be another three decades or so before more information came within the public purview. This was via a book by the equine expert Carl Raswan entitled Drinkers of the Wind which related the journeying of the nineteen-year old Carl Reinhard Schmidt, as Raswan then called himself, in search of the origins of the famous Arabian horse.9 He found himself in Egypt in 1911 when, one morning at the end of August, he witnessed a British officer involved in an accident whilst out riding and from which he became unhorsed. His steed then bolted but was caught by Schmidt and returned to the unhurt former rider. According to the German, this officer then introduced himself as ‘John Stuart Smallwood of the Mounted Police.’ Despite some linguistic difficulties the two became good friends thereafter, and Schmidt recalled his appearance as being of a ‘fine young cavalry officer’ whose ‘firm features had been tanned by the sun’ and who possessed a ‘lithe but soldierly bearing.’ The account went on:

  John Stuart Smallwood was as interesting as I had hoped he would be. For two years he had been a Boundary Guard officer in Australia; later he served as a colonial cavalry officer in India. Only lately he had returned from the Sudan where he had a commission in the Camel Corps. In spite of his wide experience he was only twenty-nine years of age. He sympathised with the Arabs and was enthusiastic about the Egyptian nationalist movement.10

  ‘Though quite a scholar and linguist’ his greatest interest was geology, and he was at the time concerned with the investigation of gold mines between the Nile and the Red Sea, and turquoise mines in the Sinai. The young Schmidt later discovered that Smallwood had, rather unusually for a European officer, become a Muslim and was decidedly more than merely ‘enthusiastic’ about Egyptian nationalism. Indeed, he had actually joined the Egyptian Nationalist Party and took an active, though inevitably secret, part in their councils, particularly as these related to organising aid for the resistance following the Italian invasion of Tripoli. Whilst these latter activities were concealed from his English colleagues they were nevertheless still somewhat shocked at his religious conversion, but rationalised it by considering that it had probably occurred at the request of the British Foreign Office; that he was working undercover as a spy or agent of some description.11

  According to Schmidt’s account, over the 1911 Christmas period Smallwood contracted diphtheria and was quarantined at Victoria Hospital in Cairo meaning he was effectively incommunicado for a period of time. Schmidt thus rather lost touch with him, and was surprised to discover that after recovering from the disease the Englishman had not only resigned from the police but had also disappeared completely without leaving word of his whereabouts. It was only ‘many weeks later’ that Schmidt received four letters from his errant friend revealing that he had journeyed to Derna in Cyrenaica, where he was ‘helping the Turks to organise artillery positions, establish observation points and train volunteers.’ Also related was that, accompanied by an ‘heroic Arab’ named Sheykh Sassi ‘who was his guide and constant companion,’ he was in the habit of reconnoitring the Italian defences at night by surreptitiously crawling amongst them.12

  At Smallwood’s prompting, and with the cooperation of the movement to aid the Ottoman resistance which he had also joined, Schmidt made the lengthy and complex journey to join his friend at Derna. Arriving on the evening of 7 May 1912, he found that the Englishman and his colleague were not at Ayn al-Mansur, whilst the sound of gunfire, and the activity of Italian searchlights, indicated that a firefight of some kind was taking place on the left of the Ottoman lines close to the Italian strongpoint of ridotta Lombardia.The very intensity of the fire, the ‘incessant strafing of the machine guns,’ indicated that something out of the ordinary was in the offing and, as Schmidt learned, Smallwood and Sheykh Sassi were abroad somewhere in that very area.

  Ridotta Lombardia (the Lombardia redoubt or fort) was constructed to anchor the western side of the defences of Derna, to a design obviously influenced by the fact that the Ottoman forces were in possession of much inferior artillery. Though not visible in this photograph, the work was protected by 18-metre wide belts of interwoven barbed wire. It was in the vicinity of this work that the Muslim Englishman, John Smallwood (Osman el-Mahdi), met his death on the night of 7 May 1912. (Author’s Collection).

/>   Permission to proceed having been received from Ottoman headquarters, Schmidt and two Arabs, Aziz and Marzuki, set out to see if they could locate the errant pair by heading towards the sound of the guns:

  Aziz, familiar with every foot of the surrounding countryside, led us directly to the last Turkish trench, where he spoke with the officers in charge.

  No report of Osman el-Mahdi or Sheykh Sassi had been received at the front, nor could any telephonic contact be made with the old ruined blockhouse hidden in the gully between the Turkish and Italian lines. Smallwood had lately installed [telephone] wires there, and he kept a store of arms and ammunition in the place. […]

  After leaving the Turkish trench, we crossed a narrow valley. On the opposite height our real task began. Before us lay a sector about a third of a mile [circa 500 metres] in width, leading over level ground right up to the Italian barbed wire defences, behind which the masonry of the fortress of Lombardia could plainly be distinguished. From time to time the Italian searchlights flared up and groped about the tangled mass of wires in front of us.13

  By creeping forward, and using camouflaged burlap sheets to cover themselves where necessary, the three men reached a small patch of dead ground at the outer edge of the Italian wire without being discovered. The trio then split up. Marzuki remained under cover whilst the other two went left and right in an attempt to ascertain if there were any signs of Smallwood and Sheykh Sassi. Schmidt went to the right [easterly] but after venturing some sixty metres decided it was unlikely the pair would have gone that way as the ground sloped away steeply and offered no cover at all. Reversing his course he passed Marzuki before continuing after Aziz. The Italians were obviously on high alert, ‘flooding the landscape with their light beams,’ so he had to proceed with extreme caution. He discovered electrical wires used to trigger mines that had been cut and taped back. This was work he attributed to Smallwood who, he had been told, made a habit of appropriating Italian mines by installing control wires that allowed them to be triggered from the Ottoman positions.

  Eventually he came across Aziz, who told him that he had discovered the body of Sheykh Sassi lying at the edge of the barbed wire. The Italian defenders could see the corpse too, and were illuminating and scrutinising the area in the expectation that where there had been one man then there would likely be more. With there still being no sign of Smallwood, the two crawled further along the defensive perimeter; ‘an almost impregnable girdle of interwoven barbed wire at least sixty feet [18 metres] wide.’ His account continued:

  The moonlight was now so bright that we could see to the western end of the fortification where it turned to the north. Along this line, but not more than fifty feet [15 metres] away, inside the defence – as if in the cobweb of a spider – hung the lifeless, broken form of a human being.

  The body had fallen into the wire entanglement against a wooden post. […] The part of the face I was able to see [and the brown khaki uniform of an officer] left no doubt in my mind that this was Smallwood. […] The left sleeve of his brown khaki shirt was torn by bullets, and the broad leather belt around his waist was furrowed and split. There could not be life in him.14

  In this Schmidt was mistaken, as he was later to discover. However in withdrawing to the Ottoman lines he came under fire, and was wounded severely enough to require hospitalisation. After recovering somewhat he was told that Aziz had made it safely back, but had then returned with another Bedouin in the hope of recovering the bodies of Sheykh Sassi and Smallwood, or at least bringing them within the Ottoman sector before sunrise (when there was an hour’s truce whilst both sides recovered any dead and wounded). The two Arabs had managed at least part of this task, but discovered that the Englishman, despite suffering eleven wounds, was somehow still alive. Indeed, they managed to drag him to the ruined blockhouse where he recovered consciousness.

  This was not safety however, as the Italians were by this stage thoroughly aroused and were pushing out patrols under the cover of artillery which shelled any points where an enemy might be lurking. It was one of these patrols, led by Enrico Vitalini, that approached the blockhouse. The unnamed Bedouin managed to slip away and later stated that ‘when he last saw Aziz and Smallwood, they were still alive, and – incredibly – even Smallwood, propped up against a wall, was firing at the enemy!’ Their ultimate fate was communicated via a note sent to the Ottoman headquarters by Vitalini: Aziz had been found dead, his life taken by an Italian revolver bullet but the other man had been taken alive and ‘carried to the hospital in the fortress of Lombardia, where ‘Osman el-Mahdi’ died late at night in his [Vitalini’s] arms.’15

  This is undoubtedly a tale with more than a hint of romance, and one moreover that ended tragically. However, there is a little more known about Smallwood that perhaps somewhat undermines the romanticism. It might be the case that, rather than being quarantined with diphtheria in December 1911, Smallwood had fled Cairo to avoid the authorities. This was because of an incident at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel that occurred on the evening of 16 December.16 Further to this, on 19 December, a summons was issued by His Britannic Majesty’s Provincial Court at Cairo to ‘Mohamed Sherif Smallwood, otherwise known as John Warren Stuart Smallwood.’17 According to this document, Smallwood was charged with causing a disturbance ‘at or about eight in the evening’ by threatening ‘to kill Hassib Ydlibi and use abusive language to and of him.’18 In order to answer this charge he was commanded to appear before the court on Saturday, 23 December 1911 at 10 o’clock in the morning.

  He did not turn up, and may have had a good excuse not to do so, for it appears that there were two guests at the hotel that night named Smallwood, and the summons was delivered to the other one; Arthur Smallwood. The latter wrote to A D Alban, the British Consul who would preside over the hearing, on 21 December pointing out that he was not the person named on the document and would send his advocate, John Walker, to return it and clarify the situation. He explained that he could not stay in Cairo as he had ‘made arrangements to leave for the Soudan to-day.’

  Demonstrating that J W S Smallwood had yet another alias is probably the only point of interest that arises from this inconsequential incident. Whether or not he did leave Egypt because of it, or after recovering from diphtheria as he told Schmidt, can only be a matter of speculation. Indeed, I have been unable to discover much more about the man, other than that he was probably born in Droitwich, Worcestershire, in 1882.19

  Quite what, undoubtedly twisting, path led Smallwood from Droitwich to Derna, via his identities of Mohamed Sherif and Osman Mahdi and decision to join the Ottoman resistance, remains a total mystery. His is indeed a curious case and he appears to have been one of those eccentric and colourful adventurers that occasionally surface in studies of European imperialism. Unfortunately, the amount of work that would be required to unearth any more information on this intriguing character would be disproportionate to the probable results and his historical importance.

  I took the liberty of giving Smallwood a small role in the second book of The Samson Plews Collection, The Niagara Device, (shortly available via all main book outlets in both electronic and hard copy), where the main character accompanies him on the journey to Derna. In this portion of the adventure the protagonist is on the trail of what becomes known as The Voynich Manuscript.

  However, if anyone who reads this knows anything more about Smallwood, or can point me in the right direction, then I would be most interested to hear from them.

  1 Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno D’Italia, Martedì, 7 maggio 1912.

  2 Tullio Irace, With the Italians in Tripoli: The Authentic History of the Turco-Italian War (London; John Murray, 1912) pp. 155-6.

  3 La Domenica del Corriere, 19-26 maggio1912.

  4 Official Report issued from Rome and syndicated internationally.

  5 The Daily Chronicle, 15 May 1912.

  6 Georges Remond, Aux Camps Turco-Arabes: Notes de Route et de guerre en Cyrénaïque et en Tripolitaine (Paris; Hache
tte, 1913) p. 182.

  7 Remond. pp. 182-3.

  8 Enver Pascha, Um Tripolis (München; Hugo Bruckmann, 1918) pp. 45-6.

  9 Carl R Raswan, Drinkers of the Wind (New York; Creative Age Press, 1942).

  10 Raswan. p. 51.

  11 Raswan. p. 61. There may have been, at least to some extent, a grain of truth in this. Smallwood was definitely in contact with Arthur Wavell (Arthur John Byng Wavell), a cousin of the future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, who was almost certainly a British agent operating in Ottoman territory and was deported from Yemen in June 1911. See: Önder Kocatürk, Hacı Ali (Wavell) Olayı (an article which ‘aims to shed light on the incident in which Arthur Wavell (1882-1916) was caught in Yemen and taken into custody by the Ottoman authorities and later developments from then on). Available from stanbul Üniversitesi website: http://www.istanbul.edu.tr/enstituler/ataturk/kisiler/docs/onderkocaturk-Wavell.pdf

  12 Raswan. p. 66.

  13 Raswan. p. 145.

  14 Raswan. p. 147.

  15 Raswan. p. 155.

  16 The Heliopolis Place Hotel was no ordinary establishment. Opened on 1 December 1910 it was advertised as the ‘most luxurious and comfortable hotel in the world’ containing ‘500 rooms with private bath’ and a ‘first class restaurant.’ Samir Raafat, ‘The Heliopolis Palace Hotel: A Desert Taj Mahal’ in the Cairo Times, 19 March 1998. Available online at: www.egy.com/landmarks/98-03-19.php

  17 The records are in the National Archives at Kew. FO 841/121 Consular Court Cases. Hassib Ydlibiv (sic). Mohd. Sherif Smallwood k/a John Warren Stuart Smallwood.

  18 Hasib, or Hassib, Ydlibi (Ydlabi) was a person of some substance: ‘One of the most intriguing foreign personalities involved in Ethiopian trade and politics at the turn of the 20th century. He was born in 1866 of a Syrian father and a Circassian mother. As of 1897, Ydlibi served as an interpreter for the British Expeditionary Force in the Sudan. After leaving the service, his trading in gum brought him to Kordofan, which was followed in 1905 by his trip to Ethiopia as a representative of the Kordofan Trading Company. After discovering rubber trees in the south of the country, Hasib Ydlibi was granted monopoly rights for the trading of gum by Emperor Menelik II and gradually became involved in Ethiopian state matters and the politics of the Empire.’ Hanna Rubinkowska, Review of May Ydlibi and Bahru Zewde (Ed.), With Ethiopian Rulers: a Biography of Hasib Ydlibi (Addis Ababa; Addis Ababa University Press, 2006) in Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies, Volume 11, 2008. pp. 283-85. He was domiciled in Britain and had been a partner in a rubber importation business at 56 Bloom Street, Manchester; Hassim, Ydlibi & Rehan. See: ‘The India-Rubber Trade in Great Britain’ in The India Rubber World, Vol. XXXV No. 2. 1 November 1906. p. 47.