Captain Shakespear

The remarkable tale of Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, whose daring exploits helped shape the course of history.

Two years before T E Lawrence's misson to the Hejaz, Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, a pioneering British political agent, ventured deep into the Nejdi desert, building crucial ties with Ibn Sa'ud before WW1. His journey and pivitol role in early British-Saudi relations are chronicled in this compelling book.Two years before T E Lawrence received orders to travel to the Hejaz to liaise with the leader of the Arab Revolt, other British officers had already roamed the Arabian Peninsula's unforgiving Nejdi desert to rally tribal support for the British war effort. The first was Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, a political agent from the Government of India's Political Department. Born in October 1878 in India, Shakespear spent much of his childhood away from his Anglo-Indian parents schooling in Portsmouth and later in the Isle of Man, before entering Sandhurst as a British Indian Army Officer Cadet. On his return to India, Shakespear spent six years in military service before he joined the Political Department in 1904, serving twice in Bandar Abbas and briefly in Muscat. Shakespear's next mission was as a political agent in Kuwait, arriving at the coastal Sheikhdom in the spring of 1909. For the next four years, he travelled extensively into the Nejdi desert, providing both London and Delhi with valuable intelligence about the vastly unknown interior as well as cultivating a personal relationship with Ibn Sa'ud, the Emir of Riyadh. During the negotiations between London and Constantinople over the Anglo-Ottoman treaty, Shakespear almost became persona non grata for advocating support for the emir after his tribal warriors expelled the Ottoman garrisons from al-Hasa in 1913. When war was declared in July 1914, Shakespear was one of the first to try to join the British Army to fight in France, but when the Ottoman Empire looked set to ally with Germany, the powers that had previously shunned him now needed his unique knowledge of Central Arabia and relationship with Ibn Sa'ud. That October, as many of his peers and countrymen crossed the English Channel to reinforce those already in the trenches, Shakespear set sail for Kuwait on special duty to rendezvous with the emir. It was a mission that T E Lawrence would later commend, acknowledging the crucial role the political agent...