NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION. Western Arabia and the Red Sea.

NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION. Western Arabia and the Red Sea.With a Little Help from Philby, Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Bertram Thomas NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION. Western Arabia and the Red Sea. [OUP for H. M. Stationery Office]. June 1946. 8vo. Original green cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt; pp. xix, 659, highly illustrated with plates, fold out maps and panoramas, topographical profiles, colour map in rear pocket; spine and parts of the boards sunned; the lines This book is for official use

With a Little Help from Philby, Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Bertram Thomas

NAVAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION. Western Arabia and the Red Sea. [OUP for H.M. Stationery Office]. June 1946.

8vo. Original green cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt; pp. xix, 659, highly illustrated with plates, fold-out maps and panoramas, topographical profiles, colour map in rear pocket; spine and parts of the boards sunned; the lines This book is for official use of persons in H. M. Sevice only and must not be shown, or made available, to the Press or any member of the public on title-verso covered with later label reading This volume was produced and printed for official purposes during the war 1939/45; withdrawn from Pembroke College, Cambridge, with bookplate, shelfmark and stamps on endpapers, labels removed from spine; nevertheless a good copy of an important volume.

First edition. B. R. 527 (Restricted) Geographical Handbook Series. - One of the best-researched books of the time on the region, including Sinai. "A sub-centre of the Naval Intelligence Division was established at Oxford to recruit contributors of the first quality. It was directed by the Professor of Geography, Lieutenant-Colonel (later Sir) K. Mason who had, after first war service in Mesopotamia and Persia, spent many years in the Survey of India. He himself wrote much of the volume on Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The principal author of the volume Western Arabia and the Red Sea was Dr Hugh Scott of the Natural History Museum, whose book on the Yemen published in 1942 was by far the best available. The volume on Syria was written mainly by J. W. Crowfoot, who had been Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and, as a pupil of D. G. Hogarth, the great archaeologist-cum-intelligence officer of the first two decades of the century, had been a colleague of T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley. The main contributor to the volume on Persia was Dr J. V. Harrison, formerly the geologist of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, who made a name as an explorer in little-known parts of Iran and Borneo. Palestine and Transjordan was largely the work of A. H. Hyamson, late Director of Immigration, Palestine, and author of several scholarly books. Not all the contributors were academics and information was collected from many other sources. The Western Arabia volume acknowledges the assistance of St John Philby, while photographs were forthcoming from such explorers as Sir Claremont Skrine, Bertram Thomas, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, as well as such organisations as the Royal Air Force, the Royal Geographical Society and the Palestine Exploration Society" (Cambridge Archive Editions).

SKU: 2123642