In the closing days of 1913, the British Museum requested two of its archaeologists, C.L Woolley and T.E. Lawrence, to travel south to the Ottoman town of Beersheba in Southern Palestine, from their excavations at the ancient site of Carchemish, an important city of the Mitanni and Hittite empires. In Beersheba, they joined a party of Royal Engineers operating under the direction of Captain Stewart Francis Newcombe (later Colonel, D.S.O), an experienced military surveyor with a reputation for boundless energy and drive under harsh conditions. By the time Woolley and Lawrence arrived at the camp Newcombe had been operating in the desert for some five weeks and had already proved to be an effective communicator with both Arab tribes and Turkish officials, displaying ´a reputation which will smooth the way of any future English traveller in the desert.´

For some weeks his team had been carrying out a covert survey in the guise of a scientific mission under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Although permission had been granted by the Ottomans at the highest political level, Newcombe´s mission quite deliberately overstepped its authorised brief in order to gain military intelligence in the Akaba area, vital to the security of the Egyptian border and the protection of the Suez Canal. The Ottomans were not fooled and protested strongly. Lawrence had also guessed the deception. ´We are obviously only meant as red-herrings, to give an archaeological colour to a political job,´ he perceptively observed in a letter to his parents.

For the archaeologists, their efforts in carrying out a scientific survey of the biblical Wilderness of Zin, a largely unexplored area south of Beersheba, where Moses had led the Children of Israel, yielded poor results and culminated in a hastily assembled report of the same name - ´to justify the overt purposes of the survey.´ Perhaps more significantly, it equipped Lawrence with experiences and local intelligence well-suited to his future wartime duties.

So, Lawrence’s fate was determined and the legend of schoolboy-archaeologist turned spy assured. But what did the future hold for Captain Newcombe, or ´Skinface´ as he was known, due to his tendency to peel and burn in the harsh desert sun? His story, like those of other unsung figures in the Anglo-Arabian panoply, has been eclipsed by the legend of ´Lawrence of Arabia´, and has languished in the dusty recesses of regimental records, Government files or in the elliptical words of Lawrence’s book ´Seven Pillars of Wisdom´. However, Newcombe´s story is there to be told. It is a story of extraordinary exploits and courage, coupled with inexhaustible energy.

Newcombe´s connection with the region did not end with the mapping of Sinai, nor with the audacious raid behind enemy lines north of Beersheba prior to the Third Battle of Gaza that caused the capture not just of Newcombe but also the bloodied remnants of his force of ninety heavily armed camel-mounted raiders. He returned to map out the peace settlements of Versailles and later, in the years leading to the Second World War, he actively campaigned with many of his Jewish and Arab friends in an effort to shape and influence the fragile relationship between the two protagonists.

His unpublished memoirs, recently unearthed, tells of remarkable adventures under the very noses of the Ottoman authorities – full of danger, intrigue and, perhaps more surprisingly, of romance during his captivity in Turkey. But it is as a loyal friend to Lawrence – a loyalty that remained steadfast to the end – that Newcombe is best remembered. From the Wilderness of Zin report comes Lawrence’s leg-pull of a dedication:

TO CAPTAIN S.F. NEWCOMBE, R.E.
Who showed them “the way wherein they must walk,
and the work that they must do.”


Kerry Webber´s IN THE SHADOW OF THE CRESCENT will be published shortly.