Beschreibung:

Sir Harry Luke
Archive of correspondence and papers as a senior British colonial official, including as High Commissioner of Palestine (1928-29), Lieutenant-Governor of Malta (1930-38), Governor of Fiji (1938-42), and early service in Cyprus and elsewhere. Housed in five boxes as follows:
Box 1 (9 folders)Various Photographic Material (eastern Mediterranean); Various Personal Correspondence (Unclassified) [8 folders]
Box 2 (8 folders)Various Personal Correspondence (Unclassified) [8 folders]
Box 3 (22 labelled folders)Mountbattens; Foreigners/ Pleas for Help; Miscellaneous; Fiji: Correspondence; Broadcast Talks, Lectures, Articles; W.K. Hancock, 1936; Gownes/ Galway; South America: Correspondence; Malta in Wartime; Medical; Malta – Trivia; General 1930-40; General 1930-43; Silly Girls; Family: General; Add to General (Malta); Family: Separation; Miscellaneous – Newspapers; Miscellaneous (2); Many Letters from Palestine, Letters from the East including two in Greek; Fiji
Box 4 (15 labelled folders)Colonial Office, 1930-38; Telegrams; Malta: Official Reports/ Memoranda 1930s; Politica; Corr. – Malta; General Corr. – Malta; Report on Visit to Malta; Charles and Madge Bonham Carter; Miscellaneous Letters; Recipe. Angelo Graziozo; Storrs; Harry Pine-Gordon, 1924-39; Aurelia Pine-Gordon, 1922; Stewart Perowne 1932-41 and Freya Stark 1947-50; Robert Smallbones, 1908-48; Various
Box 5 (23 labelled folders)Cyprus: extracts from court records, 1798-1874; Cyprus: Consular Letters to Turkish Governors, 1840-66. 24 letters; Cyprus: Turkish documents; Sheep-tax, 1879; Cyprus: Letter in Greek from Archbishop Sophronioz; Cyprus: Letters in Greek from Kirill Archbishop of Cyprus, 1909-12 and Cleophas, 1925; Adnameh (translation) 1918; Early Career 1908-14; Coronation Medal; Sierra Leone: Correspondence; Harry Pine-Gordon, c.1916; Chief Secretary, Cyprus and Others; Armenia, Georgia; [Orthodox Patriarchate Affairs, Palestine, 1918]; Allenby; General Correspondence 1923-26; Sierra Leone 1924-28; Despatches and Telegrams; Palestine: Letters to High Commissioner and Others; Diary, 1929; Palestine, 1929; Palestine: Correspondence; Palestine: Newspapers, bulletins, 1929
An important archive of a senior colonial administrator at the height of the British Empire, giving an often personal insight into British policies and their impact on millions of people across the globe.
Sir Harry Charles Luke (1884-1969) was the son of an Austro-Hungarian father (who changed his surname from Lukacs to Luke) and Polish mother, but had a quintessentially English education at Eton and Oxford. He was the author of numerous books and an accomplished linguist, and had a distinguished and varied career in the Colonial Service that took him across four continents. Luke joined the Colonial service in 1908 as Private Secretary and A.D.C. to the Governor of Sierra Leone. In 1911 he was transferred to Cyprus. A bundle of mid-nineteenth-century letters by consular officials to Kaleth Bey, Governor of Cyprus, which are found in the archive, were presumably collected by Luke at this time. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he was seconded for service on the personal staff of Admiral Wemyss at Mudros, and subsequently on that of the Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople and the Black Sea (the current archive includes papers relating to his service in the Dardanelles). In 1920 he served briefly as British Chief Commissioner in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan until these republics were absorbed into the Soviet Union. On his return to the Colonial Service in 1920, at the instigation of his mentor Sir Ronald Storrs, Luke was removed (in Storrs's words) from "the comparative obscurity of Cyprus to the positive difficulties, but brilliancy, of Jerusalem" as assistant to Storrs, who was then Governor of the city. Letters by Storrs to Luke during this period give an unusually unguarded view of British administration in the Holy Land and its limitations (“...It is characteristic that the Secretariat should imagine that the entire work of the Jerusalem District to consist in the repression of Coptic-Latin squabbles at the Holy Sepulchre…”). In 1924 Luke returned to Sierra Leone as Colonial Secretary, before being appointed Chief Secretary of Palestine (1928-30).
Luke’s papers from his time in Palestine, which total some 300 pages, are particularly significant. The period of his appointment was marked by major riots between Arabs and Jews in August 1929. Luke’s diaries and other papers describe how the violence was sparked by competing claims over Jewish access to the holy site of the Western Wall, which of course neighbours the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Luke’s typescript diaries give a vivid impression of the chaotic violence of the riots, and the archive includes reports on atrocities committed against Jews in Hebron and elsewhere. Luke was vilified by the Zionist press and beyond for allowing such violence to occur. 
Luke’s Palestine papers also include: notes of a meeting between the High Commissioner and Arab Executive, 26 November 1929; telegrams to and from the Secretary of State for Colonies and the High Commissioner; reports on governmental investigations on alleged mutilations inflicted on Jews at Hebron during the riots; Luke's correspondence with the Secretary of State on such subjects as Italian complaints that they have been denied rightful access to Holy Places, and Prince Hussein's residence in Baghdad and his possible interference in political matters; a report on the delegation to the High Commissioner of the Palestine Arab Congress headed by Musa Kazem Pasha al-Husseini, complaining of a diminution of their rights since the change from Turkish to British rule and demanding a representative government in Palestine; notes on the restoration of the al-Aqsa Mosque and its political repercussions; a critique of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and its shortcomings; a speech to Arab students on the interchange between Arab and European cultures; a report on the military and administrative establishment in Palestine and Trans-Jordan and suggestions for its reform; and detailed analyses of the existing constitution of Palestine and its probable future.
Luke served as Lieutenant-Governor of Malta from 1930-38. Maltese politics in the 1930s was dominated by the confrontation between the Maltese Constitutional Party led by Lord Strickland, who enjoyed Luke’s support, and the pro-Italian Nationalists. Luke’s Maltese papers show the continuing centrality of the Italian language question, and includes memoranda on the police force, Propaganda Bureau, and the duties of various government officials. There are intelligence reports, which show the British awareness of Fascist Italy’s support for the Nationalists, as well as dispatches to and from the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1938 Luke was promoted to Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, from where he was forced to withdraw by Japanese incursions at the end of 1942. He retired in the following year.
Luke’s correspondence is an important part of this archive. There are letters from Amir Abdullah of Jordan, Rudyard Kipling, Freya Stark and Stewart Perowne, Beatrice Webb, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Lady Diana Cooper Admiral A. B. Cunningham, A. J. Dawe of the Foreign Office, Queen Salote of Tonga, Geoffrey Dawson of The Times, Archbishops of Canterbury, successive Secretaries of State for the Colonies, Lord Lloyd, Admiral R. E. Wemyss, Sir Roger Backhouse, Stephen Gaselee, Ormsby Gore, Sir John Shuckburgh, Robert Sencourt, Wyndham Deedes, Herbert Samuel, Leo Amery, Sybil Thorndyke, Sir Samuel Wilson J. R. Chancellor and others. A particularly revealing aspect of the current archive is Luke's correspondence with his mentor and long-standing friend, Sir Ronald Storrs, which continues well beyond their shared service in Jerusalem in the early 1920s. There are nearly fifty letters by Storrs in the present archive, many of which are superscribed with unheeded requests: "Destroy", "Delenda", "Ad flammas", "Subject is urere flammis". The topics they cover range from the abdication crisis ("…the old Simpson gang in London are known as 'Gone with the Windsors'…"), the fortunes of their peers ("…Anthony Eden has really done well but people mistrust his eyelashes (which he cannot help)…”), their admiration for each other’s writing, and the destruction of Storrs's library and art collections during the Cyprus riots of 1931 ("…as if the setting, background, past and almost memory were clean gone out of my life…”). During the first years of World War II Luke was in Fiji, so Storrs writes to assure him that their homeland is "in wonderfully good spirits, a third I should say from natural pluck, a third from the admirable way in which our great strategic reverse has been tempered down and liability capitalized, and a third--from sheer lack of imagination."
For the related archive of Sir Ronald Storrs see lot ***.
PROVENANCE:Sotheby's, London, 13 March 1979, lot 113