SWINFEN, first Baron (1851-1919), judge. [See Eady, Charles Swinfen. |
SYKES, Sir MARK, sixth baronet (1879–1919), traveller, soldier, and politician, was born in London 16 March 1879, the only child of Sir Tatton Sykes, fifth baronet, of Sledmere, Yorkshire, by his wife, Jessica, elder daughter of the Rt. Hon. George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck, M.P. At the age of three he was received, with his mother, into the Roman Catholic communion. He had no continuous schooling, being withdrawn repeatedly from private tutors to accompany his father on long journeys abroad; but for short periods he was placed under Jesuit instruction at Beaumont College, at Monaco, and at Brussels. Thus he learned to speak French fluently and acquired miscellaneous experience and interests; but after matriculation at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1897, he showed no aptitude for the university course, and went down without a degree. Two Lent terms he spent in the Near East, and of these wanderings he published a humorous account under the title Through Five Turkish Provinces (1900). He joined the Yorkshire militia, and served with it in 1902 in South Africa, where, till after the peace, he was employed in guarding lines of communication. After returning home he went off to Syria, Mesopotamia, and Southern Kurdistan, about whose peoples and scenery he wrote in the most amusing of his books, Dar ul-Islam (1904). For a short time in 1904–1905 he served at Dublin Castle as private secretary to Mr. George Wyndham [q.v.], and gained a lasting interest in the Irish question; but in 1905 he returned to Turkey as honorary attaché to the British embassy. He had married in 1903 Edith Violet, third daughter of Sir John Eldon Gorst [q.v.], whom he met first at Cambridge, and now took her with him through the north of Asia Minor. Later, he utilised opportunities to revisit Mesopotamia and Syria, in which lands he did some mapping for the War Office. Accounts of these travels appeared in his Five Mansions of the House of Othman (1909), and at the end of The Caliphs' Last Heritage (1915), the most ambitious of his books.
In 1907 Sykes left Constantinople, and was adopted as conservative candidate for the Buckrose division of the East Riding; but he failed to secure the seat at two elections in 1910. In 1911 he was returned for Central Hull, and found no difficulty in gaining from the first the ear of the House of Commons, thanks to a turn of humour, a pleasing voice, and an unusual measure of youthful audacity. As a leading member of a small group of young conservative independents he spoke frequently on matters military, Oriental, and Irish, and became well known for pungent political caricatures and mimicry. He had been noted as an actor at Cambridge. His humour was nowhere better used than in a skit on the Infantry Drill Book, which he wrote in collaboration with Mr. Edmund T. Sandars and issued, in 1902, as Tactics and Military Training by Maj.-Gen. D'Ordel. Always a keen amateur of military theory, he showed interest also in the improvement of equipment and armament, and twice (1912 and 1914) took part in organizing military tournaments at Olympia.
In 1913 Sykes's father died and he inherited Sledmere, where he largely rebuilt the ancestral house. Before the outbreak of the European War he had raised a reserve battalion of the Yorkshire regiment, largely from wagoners and other tenants on his estates; but he was prevented from accompanying it to France in 1914 by orders from head-quarters to undertake political duties, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. These took him to Serbia, Bulgaria, Egypt, and India, and occupied his time till the summer of 1915, when objections taken by France to proposed action by Great Britain in Syria, coinciding with a prospect of failure in the Dardanelles, rendered it expedient that preliminary agreement should be arrived at among the Allies about the future of the Near East.
Sykes's knowledge of French, his political and diplomatic training, and his general first-hand acquaintance with the field to be discussed, suggested to the Foreign Office and to Lord Kitchener his admission to the formal conversations which were instituted in London that autumn with the French Foreign Office, represented by M. Georges Picot, sometime consul-general in Syria. The British principals, overdone with other duties, soon fell out; and after the beginning of 1916 Sykes was left virtually single-handed to carry on the negotiation with M. Picot. His general instructions were to spare no effort to conciliate French susceptibilities about Syria, but to detach, so far as possible, the Palestinian question from
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