Bertram Sidney Thomas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertram_Thomas

Bertram Thomas, a famous Arabian explorer. Wrote a number of books. Lecture tour of Canada in 1933. Honourable degree from Acadia University, Nova Scotia, November 1933.

Thomas, Bertram Sidney (1892-1950), explorer and Arabist, was born on 13 June 1892 at Avon Villa, Springfield Road, Pill, near Bristol, the son of William Henry Thomas, master mariner, and his wife, Eliza Ann, nee Thomas. His education at the local village school was supplemented by private tuition; at the age of sixteen he was accepted for employment in the Post Office and seemed set for a modest career in this or other branches of the home civil service. Although he had achieved no academic or sporting distinction at school he had shown some aptitude for music, which remained an interest and solace to him throughout his life.

As with many of his generation the outbreak of the First World War provided Thomas with his first experience of overseas travel and a wider horizon. He survived two years with the North Somerset yeomanry in Belgium, and in 1916 was transferred to the Somerset light infantry in Mesopotamia, for the last two years of the war. He then was fortunate enough to be spotted as a man of talent by Sir Arnold Wilson, the British acting civil commissioner in the Persian Gulf. This was the turning point in Thomas's career. He held a number of civilian posts under Wilson and distinguished himself as political officer at Shatra during the Iraqi uprising in 1920. He also derived from Wilson his initial fascination with exploration-a fact which he acknowledged in the dedication of his later and most famous book, Arabia felix, where he recorded that it was to Wilson's 'advice and encouragement in the years 1918-1931 [that] my journeyings in Arabia owe their inspiration ... he set my feet upon the rock, and ordered my goings'.

Wilson's successor in the gulf, Sir Percy Cox, retained Thomas in his position as a political adviser to the Arab leaders serving under the provisional British administration. He was appointed OBE and transferred to Transjordan as assistant to the chief British representative at the court of Amir Abdullah. He became in 1924 financial adviser (and later first minister) in the sultanate of Muscat, and it was during this period that his serious journeys of exploration began, with trips to the interior of Muscat that contributed substantially to the geographical and ethnological knowledge of the region.

Thomas developed an ambition to make the first crossing of the 'empty quarter' (the Rub' al Khali) of Arabia. He recognized that if he applied for official permission to do this he was likely to be refused. As he subsequently admitted in Arabia felix, 'my plans were conceived in darkness, my journeys heralded only by my disappearances, paid for by myself and executed under my own auspices'. While other British officials in the gulf escaped from the heat of the summer to the hill stations in India, Thomas worked through the gruelling gulf summers and stored up his leave until the winters-the only possible season to explore the desert. In the winter of 1927-8, for instance, he made a 600-mile journey through the southern borderland of the area that he wished to penetrate. On these trips he dressed as a Bedouin, eschewed tobacco and alcohol, and spoke only Arabic.

Finally, in October 1930, Thomas slipped away in the middle of the night from the port of Muscat and (hitching a lift, by arrangement, on a passing British warship) arrived at Dhufar, on the Indian Ocean (southern) coast of Arabia, from where he intended to commence his south-north crossing of the 'empty quarter'. After waiting some months for his guides (who were involved in desert hostilities) he eventually set out with a small camel caravan but no promise of protection from the warring and predatory tribes of the interior. He emerged fifty-eight days later at Doha, on the Persian Gulf. The Royal Geographical Society in London promptly awarded him their founder's medal, and other learned societies around the world followed suit.

One person dismayed at Thomas's achievement was the rival Arabian explorer Harry St John Philby, who had been awaiting the consent of the Saudi Arabian ruler to make his own attempt at the crossing. Philby subsequently made the first east-west crossing, and explored the empty quarter in greater depth than Thomas had attempted and achieved greater fame in the process. Thomas none the less enjoyed considerable success with his subsequent books about Arabia, which included Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (1931), Arabia felix (1932), and The Arabs (1937). He was also much in demand as a lecturer on both sides of the Atlantic and received degrees and honorary degrees from a number of leading universities, including Cambridge. It was at this time (1933) that he married Bessie Mary, daughter of Surgeon-Major Edmond Hoile, with whom he had one daughter.

Thomas, continuing his career of public service, was a public relations officer in Bahrain for part of the Second World War (1942-3). He went on to be (1944-8) the first director of the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, initially in Palestine and later in the Lebanon; these services were recognized by a CMG in 1949. He died on 27 December 1950, in the house where he was born.

Thomas's first crossing of the empty quarter, albeit by the shortest and easiest route, assured him a permanent place in the history of European exploration of Arabia. He was admired by T. E. Lawrence (who wrote a preface to one of his books) and by his successor Wilfred Thesiger, who found twenty years later that Thomas was remembered by the Bedouin as an honourable, brave, and tolerant man. His refusal to compromise either his Christian faith or his loyalty to British interests was never held against him by the Arabs and brought him respect from his compatriots.

John Ure

Sources DNB + B. S. Thomas, Arabia felix (1932) + J. Keay, Royal Geographical Society history of world exploration (1991) + W. Thesiger, Arabian sands (1959) + CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1951)

Archives U. Cam., faculty of oriental studies, corresp. and papers | BLPES, letters to C. G. Seligman + St Ant. Oxf., Middle East Centre, corresp. with Cecil Edmonds + St Ant. Oxf., Middle East Centre, letters to H. St J. B. Philby

Likenesses photograph, 1930, RGS

Wealth at death £12,754 1s. 7d.: probate, 10 Sept 1951, CGPLA Eng. & Wales