The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

In the spring of 1895, at the age of sixteen, Mark was sent abroad, to an Italian Jesuit school in Monaco, an unusual choice inspired by his mother’s friendship with the then Princess of Monaco, the former Alice, Duchess of Richelieu, whom Jessie had met in Paris, at one of her celebrated salons in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Jessie, Beck and three of his terriers accompanied him there, and they moved into a rented house, the terriers living out on the flat roof. ‘The atmosphere at Monte Carlo,’ Mark later wrote, ‘was a peculiar one for a boy of my years. It is quite natural to think of people going there for pleasure, but for study seems rather curious. I knew everything about the inner workings of the tables and knew most of the croupiers.’ Not as well as Jessie, however, who haunted the tables while her son was at school. One day word got out that she had disgraced herself by flinging her hat down on the table in fury after sustaining a particularly large loss.

As for the school itself, which Mark attended as a day-boy, he found the discipline stifling after the relaxed atmosphere of Beaumont, and much of his time was taken up with his terriers, whose number had grown to eight by the time they returned to England in July. Sadly in the autumn he had to leave them behind when he left for Brussels to undergo the final part of his education before going up to university, a stint at the Institut de Saint-Louis, a slightly less rigid school than the one in Monaco, but where the boys were still ‘very much overworked’. He was to take lodgings in a hotel during the term-time, which unfortunately forbade pets, so he had to bid farewell to his little family, with whom he was eventually reunited at Christmas.

Amongst the guests staying in the house that December was Jessie’s former admirer Thomas Gibson Bowles, with his daughters, Sydney and Dorothy, who was nicknamed ‘Weenie’. Sydney wrote an account of the stay in her diary. They arrived on Christmas Eve. It was snowing heavily and the Sykeses were giving a Christmas party in the house for the tenants. ‘Two whole cows [were] cut up, and the mince pies were without number. There were … fifty or sixty people come for the beef and we were struck by their good-looking, well-fed appearance.’ At dinner, Jessie gave presents to the two girls, a ‘lovely little box’ to Sydney and ‘a handsome writing desk’ to Weenie. ‘Lady Sykes is very nice and extremely kind-hearted,’ she noted.

On Christmas Day, which was ‘all snow and glitter’, a ‘great number of Carol singers came round all day, beginning as soon as we got down to breakfast’, but there was no church since Tatton had demolished the existing one in order to build a much grander Gothic church. Instead ‘Father Theodore and Mark and I and Grayson and the dogs (an ugly little crew of ten fox terriers) went for a long walk through the wood.’ She later noted, ‘Mark keeps ten together in order to observe their habits when living in lots. One of their habits is that when their leader gets old, they kill and eat him!’ At lunch they had the nicest crackers she had ever seen. ‘There was one I should think quite a yard and a half long, which Mark and I pulled. It went off with such a bang that Tap was quite frightened.’

Sydney found Tatton very kind, but also thought him rather silly. ‘It is impossible to help laughing at him,’ she wrote. ‘For instance, Mark is still very fat, too fat really, though not so bad as he used to be. But Sir Tatton, seeing him a trifle thinner than when he last saw him, said “Ah Yes! Yes! Wasting away, wasting away.” I roared. I simply couldn’t help it.’ There were more crackers at dinner, after which they played charades ‘which were very funny,’ noted Sydney. ‘One word was “Preposterous”, another “Drunk-ard”, another “Dyna-mite”, etc, etc. Mark seems to have a great talent for acting among his other accomplishments.’3

This was to be the last happy Christmas that Mark was to spend at Sledmere for many years to come, for life was about to take a terrible downward spiral. To begin with, the relationship between his parents had reached a new low. His mother’s drinking had reached the point where her faithful maid, Gotherd, had on several occasions to hide her scent to prevent her drinking that too, as well as resorting, when her mistress was in a particularly bad state, to such tactics as hiding her stays so that she could not go out and disgrace herself on the street. She was also severely in debt. As early as 1890, for example, she had owed as much as £10,000, a staggering sum equivalent to over £1,000,000 at today’s values, and, when pressed for the money by the Union Bank, had given them a letter purporting to be a guarantee for that amount signed by Tatton. When the bank had asked him to confirm this, he had denied that the signature was his. Jessie told him he was mad to suggest that she would commit such a fraud, and to avoid a scandal Tatton had paid up, but the incident had shaken him.

At 46 Grosvenor Street, the bills were piling up. To pay them, Jessie was borrowing money from unscrupulous moneylenders – a Mr Sam Lewis was one, a Signor Sanguinetti another – at the most exorbitant interest rates, and she was speculating on the stock market. She often found herself borrowing from one person merely to pay back another. She even sank to asking Mark to lend her money from his allowance. This time Tatton, supported by the bank, put his foot down and refused to help her, a decision in which he was also backed up by his new land-agent, his nephew, Henry Cholmondeley. In the winter of 1896, Tatton’s advisers, in particular a ruthless lawyer called Thomas Gardiner, Deputy Sheriff to the City of London, persuaded him to go one step further. A recent amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 stipulated that a husband would be declared free from all debts subsequently incurred by his wife if he advertised his refusal to pay up in a daily newspaper. In spite of his abject horror of the impending publicity, and the fact that this was hardly a gentlemanly thing to do, Tatton went ahead and became the first man ever to publish such a notice. It appeared in various newspapers on the morning of 7 December.

I, SIR TATTON SYKES, Baronet, of Sledmere, in the County of York, and No. 46 Grosvenor Street in the County of London, hereby give notice that I will NOT be RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS or ENGAGEMENTS which my wife, LADY JESSICA CHRISTINA SYKES, may contract, whether purporting to be on my behalf or by my authority or otherwise.

In desperation Jessie now took to gambling and was soon losing sums as high as £530 a week at the tables and in the bookmakers’ shops. Her behaviour began to lose her friends, including Blanche Howard de Walden, the mother of Mark’s friend Tom Ellis. A nervous and delicate woman, she became afraid of Jessie, and put an end to the friendship between their sons. ‘I must admit,’ Tom later wrote, ‘that Jessica, partially caged and embittered, was terrifying. At last Mark and I saw that our friendship could not continue. Mark had been more than a friend. He had been a sort of miraculous Philistine striding through the difficult age of adolescence and bowling over the conventions that I could only blindly resent. We had never talked of religion and we had never discussed our mothers. These two things we kept sacred. We knew what was putting us apart, and I think it was bad for both of us. The parting had to come, and Mark shook hands with me a little ruefully and said suddenly “If we meet again we shall smile at this. If not, then was this parting well made.”’4

It is hard to believe that this enforced separation would not have left some ice in Mark’s heart, though what happened next was far worse, and may have inspired his former tutor, ‘Doolis’, to warn him, ‘Unless you strive and fight against circumstances, you will grow up a worthless, cruel, hard-hearted, frivolous man.’5 He returned from Brussels for the Easter holidays, and instead of his terriers racing out of the house to greet him, barking wildly, tails wagging and tongues eager to lick his face, there was no sign of them. There was silence. The servants would not look him in the eye. Then, under instruction from his father, one of the grooms took him down Sylvia’s Grove, a long carriage drive named after his great-grandfather’s favourite dog. There, beneath a tall beech tree by an iron gate, he met with a dreadful sight; the bodies of his beloved dogs, suspended from a branch, hanged to death on the orders of his father.

The fit of blind rage on his father’s behalf that inspired such a vicious and cruel act was the result of him having found out that Alice Carter had given birth to Mark’s child, a boy she had named George. It was a fact of which Mark was ignorant and was to remain so for the rest of his life. Though Jessie had succeeded in keeping the pregnancy a secret from Tatton, it had been impossible to prevent him finding out once the child was born, as she felt strongly that she had to persuade him to take financial responsibility, and it is a tribute to her strength of character that she managed to achieve this. She then arranged for Alice’s cousin, Mary Page, and her husband, Frederick Lott, to adopt the baby. George was brought up in Sheerness, where Frederick worked in the docks, and here Alice was allowed to visit him in the guise of his aunt. Jessie impressed it upon her that on no account was she to attempt to make any contact with Mark, whose interests and honour were not to be compromised. ‘She totally accepted this,’ her granddaughter, Veronica Roberts, later confirmed. ‘I imagine that Jessica must have been very persuasive and very forceful too. Alice also probably had a great feeling of guilt. She no doubt felt that she had misled this boy and was now paying for it. She always held this strong belief that nothing whatsoever should damage Mark’s reputation.’6

What saved Mark from being completely dragged down by the hideous events being played out around him was going up to Cambridge University, in the Easter term of 1897. He was accompanied by Beck and an Irish valet, MacEwen, an old servant of his mother’s. Jessie had chosen Jesus College, for reasons thoroughly typical of her. She had originally intended him to go to Trinity, but on arriving late for her appointment with the Master had given as her excuse, ‘I’m sorry to be late, but I’ve been at the Cesarewitch.’ When he replied ‘Oh, and where may that be?’ she interpreted his ignorance of turf affairs as stupidity, turned tail and headed to the neighbouring college, which happened to be Jesus, to put her son’s name down there. ‘I was going to make sure,’ she said later, ‘that my son was not put in the charge of a lunatic!’7

Mark was hardly the run-of-the-mill Cambridge student. ‘I must say I was not impressed by him when he first came,’ wrote one of the dons, Dr Foakes Jackson. ‘He struck me as a rather undeveloped youth whose education had been neglected. I considered that he would soon vanish from the scene and be no more heard of. By slow degrees I realized that Sykes was a man of exceptional powers. I discovered that he was one of those people who really understand the traveller’s art and can educate themselves by observation … [He] showed even as a lad an extraordinary grasp of all that was really important in the countries he visited and surprised those who knew him by the breadth of his interests.’8 His evident charm and intelligence allowed him, just like his mother, to get away with murder. ‘About once a week,’ recalled Foakes, ‘his man McEwen appeared in his place with a message to the effect that Mr Sykes regretted that he “could not attend upon my instructions that day”, the words being evidently those of McEwen.’9 His tutor, the Rev. E. G. Swain of King’s, soon realized that his new charge had little, if any, interest in the tasks ahead of him, such as passing exams, but was, on the other hand, head and shoulders above most of his fellow students when it came to knowledge of the world and of the important things in life, and was also excellent company. ‘He never failed to be unobtrusively amusing,’ he recalled, ‘and, since none of us had had experiences like his, he was always interesting. His experiences of travel, acute observation, retentive memory and great powers of mimicry supplied him with means of entertainment such as no one else possessed …’ He was impressed too by how unspoiled he was. ‘It would be hard to find,’ he wrote, ‘another instance of a wealthy young man, completely his own master, who lived so simply or held so firmly to high principles.’10

The most important friendship that Mark struck up in his first term at Cambridge was with the distinguished scholar Dr Montague Rhodes James, then Dean of King’s. He was a historian, amateur archaeologist, expert on medieval manuscripts, writer of ghost stories and an excellent mimic, and it was his habit to hold open house each evening in his rooms on the top floor of Wilkins’ Buildings in King’s College and he would leave his door ajar for any student who wished to visit. ‘To a very large number of them,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘he was the centre of their Cambridge life. It is safe to say that not one of them ever found him too busy to talk to them, play games with them, make music with them on that very clangy piano, and entertain them with his vast stores of knowledge, his inexhaustible humour and his unique power of mimicry. The tables were piled deep with books and papers, with perhaps a whisky bottle and siphon standing among them.’11 Mark and James were made for one another. ‘On many an evening,’ James later wrote in his autobiography, ‘he would appear at nine and stay till midnight: I might be the only company, but that was no deterrent. Mark would keep me amused – more than amused – hysterical – for the whole three hours. It might be dialogues with a pessimistic tenant in Holderness, or speeches of his Palestine dragoman Isa [sic] … or the whole of a melodrama he had seen lately, in which he acted all the parts at once with amazing skill. Whatever it was there was genius in it.’12

Acting was one part of his life at Cambridge to which he gave one hundred per cent, becoming a leading member of the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, acting in and directing productions such as Sheridan’s The Critic, as well as designing and drawing the posters that advertised them. It was a good way of temporarily forgetting the problems that overshadowed his life. His mother was now in deeper trouble than ever. The effect of his father’s advertisement had been to bring all her creditors out into the open, each one clamouring for payment. Since no one would now lend her any money, she could no longer resort to the expedient of borrowing from one to pay off another. In a last-ditch attempt to settle the matter once and for all, Tatton’s lawyers drew up an agreement under which, in return for her promise ‘not to speculate any more on the Stock Exchange or to bet for credit on the Turf’, she would receive a lump sum of £12,000 to discharge her existing liabilities, and a guarantee of a future allowance of £5,000 per year plus ‘pin money’ out of which she would pay all the household and stable accounts in London. The signing of this might have solved the problem had it not been for the fact that, paying exorbitant interest rates of 60 per cent, the true sum borrowed by Jessie since 1890 was £126,000, meaning there were still massive debts which she had kept secret, and by the spring of 1897 the creditors were once again banging at the door. They were led by one Mr Daniel Jay, of 90 Jermyn Street, a moneylender with the telegraphic address ‘BLUSHINGLY, LONDON’, whom Mark was later to refer to as ‘the biggest shark in London’.13

Tatton’s lawyer, Gardiner, advised him to stand firm and not pay his wife a penny more. He arranged for him to leave the country for three months and, in the meantime, put the house in Grosvenor Street up for sale and gave notice to all the servants. He also made it his business to collect any information he could which might be eventually used against Jessie. He sent his men to Yorkshire, for example, to collect statements from people willing to testify as to her drinking. One such affidavit, from the second coachman at Sledmere, James Tovell, told how he had collected her one morning in July 1894. ‘I could not understand her orders,’ he said, ‘and she kept me driving her about from about 10 until 3 o’clock and was unable to tell me where she wished to go.’ He went on to state that ‘her conduct was so notorious that onlookers frequently chaffed me on her condition’. Robert Young, the assistant stationmaster at Malton, said, ‘her conduct was the subject of conversation amongst the men’.14

Seeing that he was getting nowhere, Jay now decided to take his case to court to force the payment of the debts. His case was straightforward; that he had consistently lent money to Lady Sykes, and, as evidence of this, the court would see five promissory notes all signed in 1896 by both Sir Tatton and Lady Sykes, for sums ranging from £1,200 up to £5,000. He had made repeated requests for their repayment, but to no avail. There was also an important letter, apparently signed at Grosvenor Street, on 2 January 1897, asking Jay to accept security for payment until the return of Sir Tatton from the West Indies in March. The problem was that Tatton denied that the signatures on the notes and the letter were his.

After an initial delay of one month, owing to Tatton having fallen victim to a bout of bronchial pneumonia, the case finally opened in the Queen’s Bench on 12 January 1898. Heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, it was loudly trumpeted and closely followed by an eager pack of journalists from all the daily papers. It is easy to imagine how the ears of the press must have pricked up when they heard the opening address of Mr J. Lawson Walton QC, acting for Jay, for he did not understate ‘the eccentricities of character which marked the defendant in the knowledge and estimation of his friends’.15 He described a man of great wealth who had few outside pursuits other than church-building and horse-breeding and who, though he never betted himself, had sowed the seeds of such an interest in his young wife by expecting her to accompany him to racecourses all over England. As a result of this, he told the court, she ‘engaged to a considerable extent in that form of excitement’. Sir Tatton was also parsimonious to a degree that he was prepared to allow an overdraft of £20,000 to permanently exist at his bank, in spite of the heavy interest, because he could not bear to call up the cash to pay it off. In addition to this, the jury were told, he was a recluse who never went out into society – since they were married, she had never once been out to a party or out to dine with him – and who shirked responsibility for the payment of almost all expenses necessary for the upkeep of two houses.

After giving a brief account of the charges, he called Jessie to the stand, and in his cross-examination of her enlarged the picture of the extraordinary Sykes marriage. Nominally, she told the jury, she was to have £1,000 a year, but it was always a fight to get it. She had found herself living in a house ‘as large as Devonshire House’16 to which very little had been done since 1801 and which then had no drains. Sir Tatton paid for nothing, and whenever she applied to him for money he was very tiresome. At one point, before the birth of her son, she had even been obliged to sue him for her pin money. As a result of this attitude, she had, with his knowledge, begun to borrow money, and had been doing so for eighteen years. Her debts had consequently increased like a snowball ‘and time did not improve them’. She knew, she claimed, it was ‘an idiotic thing’17 to do, and would never have done it had she been able to get the money elsewhere.

Cross-examined by Tatton’s junior QC, Mr Bucknill, she elicited laughter from the court when, in answer to his question as to whether she considered her husband was a sound business man, she replied that in her opinion he was ‘as capable of managing his own affairs as most women’.18 As an example, she cited the fact that instead of reading his letters, many of which contained share dividends, he often just threw them in the wastepaper basket. She had once found, she recalled, a warrant for a very large sum from Spiers and Paul in the bin, and had asked him to give it to her as a reward. She also intimated to the court that Tatton knew about her betting and was very proud when she won. He would tell everybody he saw about it, and always wanted £100 out of her winnings. When asked if she was angry after he had placed the advertisement in the newspapers, she replied, ‘You are not angry with people who are like children … He is like a child in many ways … Yes, like a naughty child.’19

Most of the notes in question, she told Mr Bucknill, were signed in Grosvenor Street, and she had explained to Tatton that she wanted him to sign them in order for her to get money. It was unlikely, she had assured him, that he would ever have to pay up. When questioned closely about the times and dates of the various notes, she became vague, saying Tatton ‘did not mind what he signed’ and repeating, ‘He would not give me any money, so I had to borrow.’ As Bucknill piled on the pressure she was reduced to repeating the defence that ‘Sir Tatton knew all about it, but he had a bad memory.’20

Re-examined by Mr Walton, Jessie reiterated that all the signatures purporting to be Sir Tatton’s were made by him, in her presence. These included those on two cheques for £1,000 signed in 1895 in Monte Carlo, and cashed at Smith and Co.’s Bank, which Tatton subsequently claimed to be forgeries. ‘Sometimes he used to say he had signed guarantees, sometimes that he had not,’ Jessie rambled on, her testimony having become rather disconnected. ‘It never made any difference to our way of living. He never treated me as having been guilty of a great crime. I do not think he realized what forgery meant. I have never had a cross word with him about it. I went over to Paris last October and lunched with him, and he said “Oh, it’s all the lawyers. It’s not my fault.”’21 Laughter filled the court room.

Two of Mark’s tutors were now called. Robert Beresford, who succeeded Doolis, told Mr Walton that, in his opinion, the signatures were those of Sir Tatton, though in cross-examination by his defence counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, he admitted that the last document he had seen him sign had been as far back as 1892, and that the more recent signatures ‘were blurred and unlike his normal signature’. When asked by Lord Russell if he considered Sir Tatton an intelligent man, he caused a stir by answering that he had always thought him to be suffering from incipient insanity. ‘He would go about in ten coats,’ he told a surprised court. ‘You don’t mean that literally?’ asked Lord Russell, adding, ‘You mean two or three.’ ‘No I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I mean seven or eight overcoats one over the other … I can swear to that distinctly, because there were five covert coats, and one or two silk coats.’ When Egerton Beck was called to the stand and told the court that, in spite of Sir Tatton being ‘habitually a sober man’, one signature did not look as if it were written by a very sober person, Sir Edward asked, ‘That observation as to sobriety does not apply to Lady Sykes?’22 Luckily for Jessie, Lord Russell forbade that line of questioning.

The third day of the trial began with Lord Russell asking Tatton to make two copies of the letter of 2 January, with two different pens. While he was doing this, Sir Edward Clarke opened the case for the defence. The question before the jury, he said, was a simple, if serious, one. Did Sir Tatton sign the notes, or were they forgeries by Lady Sykes? ‘A case more painful to an English gentleman,’ he continued, ‘could not be imagined.’ Called to the stand, Tatton ‘gave his evidence in a low voice with a slow, nervous, hesitating manner, and kept repeating his answers over and over again, repeatedly fingering the Bible which lay on the desk before him, and occasionally raising it and striking the woodwork sharply to emphasise what he said.’ He had never seen the notes and he had never signed them, and he had certainly not written the letter of 2 January. He had never had any need to borrow money, he said, preferring to keep an overdraft at the bank, which could run to any amount, since the bank had securities. After the advertisement had appeared, he had agreed to make a final payment of his wife’s liabilities ‘to avoid scandal! To avoid scandal! To avoid scandal!’23