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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
The eminent British architect, designer and educator Charles Robert Ashbee (1863–1942) lived and worked in Jerusalem from 1918 to 1922, as Civic Adviser to the City of Jerusalem and principal officer of the Pro-Jerusalem Society. This proved to be a busy and fruitful period in his late career. Back in England sixteen years later, following a final visit to Palestine, Ashbee compiled his Jerusalem Collection, assembling and classifying all the research and planning material he had collected and developed during his Jerusalem years. Edited by Ashbee in his old age and never published in its entirety — and therefore remaining virtually unknown — the collection contains not only textual material but also hundreds of original drawings, plans and watercolour perspectives, together with photographs, the illustrated material bearing autograph annotations throughout.
1 Ashbee family collection.
2 Storrs, Ronald, ‘Preface’, in Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. vi Google Scholar (for full reference, see n. 4).
3 For further information on Ashbee, his life and work, the standard biography is Alan Crawford’s brilliant C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer & Romantic Socialist (New Haven and London, 1985; 2nd edn, 2005). Crawford dedicates a whole chapter to the years of Ashbee in Palestine, ch. 7: ‘Jerusalem 1919–1922’, pp. 173–93.
4 The Council of the Pro-Jerusalem Society, Jerusalem 1918–1920: Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the Period of the Military Administration, ed. C. R. Ashbee (London, 1921); referred to hereafter as Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921). The Council of the Pro-Jerusalem Society. Jerusalem 1920–1922: Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the First Two Years of the Civil Administration, ed. C. R. Ashbee (London, 1924); referred to hereafter as Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924).
5 See n. 3.
6 This part of World War I is known as the Palestine Front, a campaign fought between British and Turkish forces for control of the south-western Ottoman Empire from 1915 until the Armistice. The Turkish Army was bolstered by German units and staff officers, while on the British side fought Imperial troops from Australia, New Zealand and India.
7 The Balfour Declaration was a revolutionary statement of support of the British government for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. This announcement was made by means of a letter addressed to Lionel Walter, second Baron Rothschild, then one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Britain, from the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, on behalf of the government. The declaration also stated that ‘nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.
8 General Sir Edmund Allenby (1861–1936), known to his troops as ‘The Bull’, had been Commander of the British Expeditionary Forces cavalry division and later of an infantry corps on the Western Front, notably at the first and second battles of Ypres; all these had been setbacks. In June 1917 he was transferred to the Palestine Front, where his service was a brilliant military success. After the Great War, Allenby was appointed special High Commissioner for Egypt where he served until his retirement (1919–25). Allenby’s restraint in Jerusalem was one of the demonstrations of fine political and religious sensibility displayed in this occasion; furthermore, Allied flags were not raised in sign of victory. See Gilbert, Martin, Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996), pp. 52–56.Google Scholar
9 Storrs would leave Palestine only in 1927, to become Governor of Cyprus until 1932, then Governor of Northern Rhodesia until his retirement in 1934. The best source on Storrs is his captivating autobiography: Storrs, Ronald, Orientations (London, 1937).Google Scholar It was so successful that it was reprinted four times within the same year, and it remains probably the best personal record written by an official of the administration during the British Mandate of Palestine.
10 Storrs recorded the state of near starvation in the city and his first measures taken to arrange an emergency supply of grain, flour, sugar and kerosene. See Orientations, pp. 336–38.
11 Storrs, Ronald, ‘Preface’, in Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. vi.Google Scholar For the report he alludes to, see below n. 13.
12 Keith-Roach, Edward, Pasha of Jerusalem: Memoirs of a District Commissioner under the British Mandate, ed. Eedle, Paul (London and New York, 1994), p. 55.Google Scholar
13 This would become Ashbee’s ‘Report on the Arts and Crafts of Jerusalem and District’, unpublished bound typescript, August 1918, 120 pages. A copy is kept in the Jerusalem Collection, Box I, Portfolio 1: ‘Reports’.
14 Ashbee’s report, illustrated with many photographs, reviewed the state of the arts and crafts ‘within the City’ and ‘in the surrounding districts’; its chapters covered six themes: ‘Modern Buildings and Change in the City during the last few years, Schools and Religious Organizations Where the crafts are taught or practised, Agriculture in relation to the arts and crafts, National Costumes, Suggested Plan for the central Civic School [which was to be a school of Arts and Crafts] and Coordination of the School with the civic services’, plus an introduction, a summary and an index. It is interesting to consider the wide scope of the skills Ashbee included in his study. In the ‘Introduction’ to his ‘Report’, he defined eleven different categories of crafts. The crafts listed were, in his words: ‘Fundamental (food or its preparation); Agricultural, Building and Allied Trades; Metal Work and Engines; Textiles and Dyeing; Costume and Needle work; Clay, pottery, glass and mosaic; Printing and Writing; Crafts connected with Music; Religious Crafts’, and also a last ‘Miscellaneous and unclassified’ category. Furthermore, he subdivided the third category, ‘Building and Allied Trades’, into a further eleven specialized occupations: ‘Stone cutters, Quarry Workers, Masons and Bricklayers, Carpenters and Cabinetmakers, Wood Turners, Sculptors, Smiths, Plasterworkers and Whitewashers, Painters and Home Decorators, Gassiers [Plumbers?], Planting and Landscape gardeners.’ (This transcript retains Ashbee’s own capitalization.) See Figs 3 and 4.
15 ‘Jerusalem To-Day: Interview with the Civic Adviser. Repairing the Havoc of Ages. Archaeological Research’, The Observer, November 1918 (cutting in Sir Ronald Storrs’ Papers, Pembroke College Library, Box III/1).
16 Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, p. 176.Google Scholar
17 For instance, in a letter of dedication to Sir Harry Charles Luke (see following paragraphs). For the letter’s full text, see n. 22.
18 2 Samuel 5, 7–9.
19 The lecture was entitled ‘The Higher Aspects of Technical Education and the Elementary Teacher’, and was published by the Essex Press, as part of an anthology of Ashbee’s own writings first published by his Guild of Handicraft: A Few Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction and Citizenship (1894); republished, together with his An Endeavour towards the teaching of Ruskin and Morris (1st edn, 1901; London, 1978), pp. 73–80 (p. 80).
20 This was The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, & Other Rites & Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of England; Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David [Prayer Book of Edward VII].
21 Sir Harry Charles Luke (originally Lukacs) (1884–1969), was born in London and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, and had been Private Secretary to the Governors of Sierra Leone (1908–11), Barbados (1911) and Cyprus (1911–12). During the Great War he was Commander in the RNVR, Mediterranean, becoming Chief British Commissioner in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan (1920). He was appointed Assistant Governor of Jerusalem (1920–24), which was the time of his contact with Ashbee. He left Jerusalem to serve as Colonial Secretary of Sierra Leone (1924–28), returning to become Chief Secretary of the Government of Palestine (1928–1930), then moving to Malta as Lieutenant-Governor (1930–38) and finally to Fiji, where he was Governor (1938–42). Luke was a prolific author of books on travel, contributing to Thomas Cook’s travel guides, particularly those for the Near East. His memoirs, Cities and Men (3 vols (London, 1953, 1956)) contain little about his period of office in Palestine ( Wasserstein, Bernard, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917–1929 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 246–47).Google Scholar
22 The full text of the dedication letter addressed to ‘My dear Luke’ (written in Jerusalem and dated ‘Dec 24 1921’) runs: ‘I fished out of the “wreck” this morning among other things the Complete Copy of ‘The Common Psalter’ which I had some from England with the remainders of my Private Press. I think I would like you to have it as a Xmas present, for it is always a source of gratification to me that my books fall in the hands of those who really care for them. Yours brotherly, [signed] CR Ashbee.’ As a postscript he added: ‘in token of many congenial hours spent together in the City of the Great Singer.’ (My thanks to the anonymous owner of the book for showing me this document, which led to this article’s title.) The ‘wreck’ was Ashbee’s nickname for his own house in Wadi al Joz, Jerusalem.
23 Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, p. 165, also pp. 160–61.Google Scholar
24 2 Samuel 1, 26; see also 1 Samuel 18–19; on Ashbee’s own homosexuality, see Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, pp. 20–21, 56–57 Google Scholar and passim.
25 Storrs, , Orientations, p. 366.Google Scholar The citation is from Psalm 48, 12–13; it actually ends ‘that ye may tell it to the generation following’, a sentiment that Storrs, knowing how widely his compatriots were familiar with the psalms, may have been deliberately implying through such a citation.
26 Psalm 55, 9–10.
27 Ashbee, C. R., ‘The Work of Conservation’, in Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 4.Google Scholar
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Hobhouse, Hermione, London Survey’d: The work of the Survey of London 1894–1994 (Swindon, 1994), p. 17.Google Scholar
31 Ashbee, , ‘The Work of Conservation’, p. 5.Google Scholar
32 C. R. Ashbee, ‘Statement & Index: Mr. C. R. Ashbee’s Jerusalem Collection’, four-page typescript signed and dated 1938, in which the author explained his aims and listed the contents of this collection. This document underwent several revisions, and one draft can be found in the Index portfolio in Box VI, with many corrections on the ‘aggregate numbers’. A photocopy of the final text of this ‘Statement & Index’ was found in a plastic cover, in Box I, separated from the portfolios. This could not have been Ashbee’s own inclusion, as the production of text and cover both employ later technologies. There is no clear evidence as to the authorship of the photographs in the Jerusalem Collection, but nowhere does Ashbee assert that he had taken them all himself. Some of them bear the stamp of the American Colony photographic studio, and would have been purchased there; those concerning the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock are very probably by K. A. Creswell (see n. 54). For the rest, Ashbee used the services of his friend the photographer John Whiting, a member of the American Colony, who accompanied him on his surveys. The American Colony photographic archive has been bequeathed to the Library of Congress, Washington DC, while on Creswell’s death his collection of negatives passed to the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, forming what is today the Creswell Archive. Both archives are now accessible on-line.
33 A new, larger Post-Office was being built by Austen St Barbe Harrison on Jaffa Street (1934–39) instead of Ashbee’s much more modest proposal; across the road A. Clifford Holliday had built the [British and Foreign] Bible Society House (1926–28). Along Julian Street (now King David Street) a magnificent YMCA building (1928–33), much larger than Ashbee’s project of the early 1920s, was entrusted to Arthur Loumis Harmon, of the New York office of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon (which designed of the Empire State Building), and had been dedicated by General Allenby in 1933. In front of the YMCA building a first-class hotel had been built between 1929 and 1931, the King David Hotel, to this day the most luxurious in Jerusalem. This 200-room hotel had been built at the initiative of the Jewish-Egyptian Mosseri family, which owned several luxury hotels in Cairo (including the famous Mena House Hotel beside the Pyramids). They entrusted this hotel’s design to the Swiss architect Emil Vogt and the Swiss interior designer G. H. Hufschmid, who worked in association with the local British architect Benjamin Chaikin. Most of these buildings are referred to in press cuttings included by Ashbee in his Jerusalem Collection.
34 Ashbee, ‘Statement & Index’.
35 The principal contemporaneous publications relating to the Pro-Jerusalem Society’s activities are: its own Quarterly Bulletins, especially that of March 1922; Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921); Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924); Storrs, Orientations. Further sources of information are Storrs, Ronald, ‘The Pro-Jerusalem Society’, unpublished typescript, n.d. [c. 1920], 2 pages (Sir Ronald Storrs Papers, Pembroke College Library, Cambridge, Box III/2: 1920/1); C. R. Ashbee, ‘Conservation and Town Planning in the City of Jerusalem’, unpublished typescript, n.d. [c. 1925], 8 pp., in Ashbee’s Jerusalem Collection, Box I, Portfolio 1: ‘Reports’; also throughout Ashbee’s Jerusalem Collection.
36 For a more detailed discussion of the Pro-Jerusalem Society’s activities and Ashbee’s part in them, see Rapaport, Raquel, ‘Conflicting Visions: Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, 2005), pp. 48–64 Google Scholar (‘1918–26, Jerusalem: “Walk about Sion and go round about the towers”: The Pro-Jerusalem Society’).
37 Board of Members of the Pro-Jerusalem Society (the list published in the Society’s Bulletins):
Hon. President: The Rt. Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner of Palestine
President: Ronald Storrs C.M.G., C.B.E., District Governor of Jerusalem
Council:
Hon Secretary: C.R. Ashbee, Civic Advisor to the City of Jerusalem
Hon. Member: The Rt Hon. Viscount Milner K.C.B.
Members:
The Mayor of Jerusalem
The Director of Antiquities
His Eminence the Grand Mufti
His Reverence the President of the Franciscan Community, the Custodian of the Holy Land
His Reverence the President of the Dominican Community
His Beatitude the Greek Patriarch
His Beatitude the Armenian Patriarch
The President of the Jewish Community
The Chairman of the Zionist Commission
Le Rev. Père Abel, École Biblique de St. Etienne [= École Biblique et archéologique; Dominican father]
Le Capitaine Barluzzi
M. Ben Yahuda
Cap. K.A.C. Creswell M.B.E., Inspector of Monuments G.S., O.E.T.
Prof. Patrick Geddes
R.A. Harari
Musa Kazem Pasha El Husseini, Ex-Mayor of Jerusalem
Capt. Mackay, Inspector of Monuments, G.S., O.E.T.
Mr. Meyuhas
Mr. Lazarus Paul, acting representative of the Armenian Patriarch
Col. L. Popham
Mr. E.T. Richmond [British architect in charge of restoration on the Temple Mount]
Mr. D.G. Salame, Ex-vice-Mayor of Jerusalem
Dr. Nahum Slousch
Mr. Jacob Spafford [member of the American Colony]
Col. Waters Taylor, C.B.E.
Le Rev. Père Vincent, École Biblique de St. Etienne [= École Biblique et archéologique; Dominican father]
Mr. John Whiting, Hon. Treasurer [member of the American Colony]
Mr. David Yellin, Vice Mayor of Jerusalem.
38 Storrs, ‘The Pro-Jerusalem Society’, p. 1; Storrs, Orientations, p. 364; also Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, p. 179.
39 Storrs, , Orientations, p. 364.Google Scholar
40 ‘Statement & Index: Mr. C. R. Ashbee’s Jerusalem Collection’, Jerusalem Collection, Box VI, Index Portfolio.
41 See ‘The Naming of the Streets’, in Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), pp. 26–28.
42 Excerpt from ‘Decorative Art from a Workshop point of View’, in Ashbee, , A Few Chapters in Workshop Reconstruction and Citizenship (New York, 1978 Google Scholar; 1st published in London, by the Essex House Press, 1894), pp. 39–48 (p. 44). For a full discussion about Ashbee, emblems and symbolism, see ‘Emblems and Symbols’, in Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, pp. 221–31.
43 These are: Portfolio 9 (II): Suk al Kattanin; Portfolio 10 (II): Suks: Al Attarin, Al Lahamin; Portfolio 9 (IV): Jaffa Road Market (Haim Valero); Portfolio 2 (II): Haram al Shareef; Portfolio 3 (II): Dome of the Rock, and Portfolio 6 (I): Blizzard of 1920. The Arabic word Suk, derived from the Accadian sukaku (square) and related to the Hebrew shuk (commercial street or square), means literally a bazaar or market. It is an open space or covered building used by people for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, etc., especially with a number of different vendors.
44 It is worth noting here that Jerusalem (originally known as ‘And did those feet in ancient time’, when it appeared in Blake’s preface to his epic Milton: a Poem) had been only recently popularized. In 1916 C. Hubert Parry (1848–1918) had been asked to set it to music for a ‘Fight for Right’ campaign meeting in Queen’s Hall, London; to mark the final stage in the Votes for Women Campaign in 1918, Parry conducted it himself at a performance at the Royal Albert Hall, which is when it became known as Jerusalem. Sir Edward Elgar would score it for orchestra for the Leeds Festival of 1922. Transformed into a hymn, with the setting so well known today, Jerusalem had been co-opted as a morale raiser at a time when spirits had begun to decline due to the high number of casualties in the Great War. Consequently, this particular poem was of especial relevance for forces serving in Palestine, and gave particular poignancy to the Prime Minister’s command, ‘Jerusalem before Christmas!’
45 Conversations with Felicity Ashbee and Alan Crawford, summer 1997.
46 For a full account of this phenomenon, see Rapaport, , ‘Conflicting Visions’, pp. 243–52 Google Scholar (‘The New Crusaders’ Vision’). See also Siberry, Elizabeth The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 94–97 Google Scholar, and her chapter ‘Images of the Crusades in recent times’, in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford, 1995), pp. 365–85 (pp. 381–84).
47 See, for instance, the cartoons by Cesare, in the New York Evening Post (1917), which depicts Richard the Lionheart holding the crusaders’ standard aloft while gazing at troops raising the Union Jack beside a domed building, the caption reading ‘At Jerusalem. Richard Coeur de Lion: “My dream come true’”, and by Donahey, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, again 1917, which shows Great War infantrymen charging with Richard the Lionheart on horseback in their midst, the caption reading ‘Again at the Gates of Palestine’. Both of these are to be found within Ashbee’s 24-volume ‘Journal’, in the Papers of Charles Robert Ashbee, Kings College, Cambridge.
48 Queen Melisende (1105–61), daughter of King Baldwin II, was Queen of Jerusalem from 1131 to 1153, and a great patroness of the Church and the arts. A charter reference of 1152 suggests that she may have built — or more likely rebuilt — part of the suq. As to how Ashbee could have known of her involvement with the markets, it is possible that he had heard of this through Père Abel, a legendary scholar at the École Biblique et archéologique in Jerusalem and member of the Pro-Jerusalem Society (my thanks to an anonymous referee for this suggestion), who at that time was surveying the ancient churches and monuments of Jerusalem. Furthermore, Queen Melisende is famous for the commission of a beautiful Psalter made for her in the scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre. This richly decorated Psalter, now in the British Library, represents Crusader illumination of the early period at its best. Its original binding incorporated panels of ivory carved with scenes from the life of David. Ashbee might have particularly appreciated a Crusaders’ Psalter produced in Jerusalem with King David on its cover.
49 C. R. Ashbee, ‘Conservation and Town Planning in the City of Jerusalem’. This document is evidently the text of a lecture given by Ashbee in Britain (probably in London, perhaps for the Art Workers’ Guild) ‘on the work of the Pro-Jerusalem Society’, shortly after the publication of the second Records of the Society in 1924. That would place the date of this lecture at some point during 1925, about three years after Ashbee’s return from Palestine.
50 Ashbee, C. R., ‘Report on the Arts and Crafts of Jerusalem and District’, figs 123 and 124.Google Scholar
51 For a more detailed discussion of this project, see Rapaport, , ‘Conflicting Visions’, pp. 64–76 Google Scholar (‘1919, Jerusalem: “One of the most splendid of the vaulted streets of the East”: Ashbee’s Reconstruction and Rehabilitation of the Cotton Market in the Old City’).
52 Ashbee, , ‘Conservation and Town Planning in the City of Jerusalem’, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar The last line helps to date the beginning of the restoration of the Suk al Kattanin to some time in 1919, and thus very soon after Ashbee’s and Creswell’s arrivals in Jerusalem; work on the Market was well under way before the great snowstorm of January 1920.
53 Harâm ash-Sherif, literally ‘the Noble Enclosure’, is the Arabic name for the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, the temenos of the city. According to tradition, the place is the biblical Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice of Isaac took place. Later on it became the site of both the Salomonic and Herodian Temples of the Jews. Islamic tradition venerates it as the place where Mohammed ascended to heaven; since the early Middle Ages, it has been the site of the Dome of the Rock, the El Aqsa mosque and several other historic buildings that together comprise the Harâm, a magnificent architectonic complex. Ashbee, Ernest T. Richmond and K. A. C. Creswell were involved in conservation and archaeological work within the Harâm.
54 K. A. C. Creswell (1879–1974) was born in London and educated at Westminster School, then trained as an electrical engineer at the City & Guilds Technical College. He began studying Muslim architecture in 1910 and first came to the East in 1916, when he was posted to Egypt with the Royal Flying Corps. Creswell’s career in Islamic art and architecture advanced in 1919 when he was appointed Inspector of Monuments in General Allenby’s military administration of the Occupied Enemy Territory (OETA); his first task was to compile a complete inventory of the monuments. Creswell was appointed to the eastern area — Aleppo, Hama, Horns, Damascus — but on the evacuation of Syria by the British forces, at the end of that year, he was transferred to Palestine, being stationed in turn at Amman, Haifa and Jerusalem. Creswell was forty when he arrived in Palestine, and would pursue this line of research for the next fifty years. In 1926 Creswell moved to Cairo. He then conceived a project for a history of Muslim architecture of Egypt, to be preceded by a work on early Muslim architecture, King Fouad becoming patron of this project for the first three years. He was then appointed to the Egyptian University (1931), where he founded the Institute of Muslim Art and Archaeology, which he directed for the next twenty years. His seminal research was first published by Oxford University Press, as a two-volume work: Early Muslim Architecture (1932). He subsequently held the chair of Muslim Architecture in the American University in Cairo. He was elected FBA in 1947, and appointed CBE in 1955, but for most of the remainder of his life he lived and worked in Cairo.
55 Ashbee, ‘Conservation and Town Planning in the City of Jerusalem’, p. 2. Other documents concerning the Old Cotton Market Restoration project in the Jerusalem Collection are found in Box II, Portfolio 9: ‘Suk al Kattanin’; Portfolio 2: ‘Haram al Shareef; [Harâm ash Sherif] Portfolio 3: ‘Dome of the Rock’, and Box I, Portfolio 6: ‘Blizzard of 1920’.
56 Creswell, K. A. C., ‘The Suq el Qattanîn’, in ‘Muslim Work Touched by the Society’, in Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), pp. 69–70 (p. 69).Google Scholar
57 Gilbert, , Jerusalem in the Twentieth Century, p. 66.Google Scholar
58 Storrs, , Orientations, p. 369.Google Scholar
59 Creswell, , ‘The Sûq el Qattanîn’, in Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. 69.Google Scholar
60 ‘Jerusalem To-day’, The Observer, November 1918.
61 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), Appendix IV: ‘Weavers Apprenticeship Indenture’, p. 76.
62 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. 35.
63 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), fig. 62, ‘The Society’s Weaving Apprentices’, and fig. 63, ‘Weaving Apprentices Ceremony of Indenture’. The original prints were found in the Jerusalem Collection, Box II, Portfolio 9: ‘Suk al Kattanin’.
64 Crawford, , C. R. Ashbee, p. 179.Google Scholar
65 Ashbee, , ‘Reconstructing Jerusalem’, The Times, 5 February 1919 Google Scholar (Letter to the Editor).
66 For further details on this project, see Raquel Rapaport, ‘C. R. Ashbee’s Interior Design for the Old Government House in Jerusalem, 1921’, in Proceedings: Welsh School of Architecture Second Research Student Conference, ed. Judi Loach (Cardiff, 2005), pp. 82–94; and Rapaport, , ‘Conflicting Visions’, pp. 76–90 Google Scholar (‘1921, Jerusalem: “Men working happily and humanly together”: Ashbee’s Interior Design for the Old Government House’).
67 Augusta Victoria’, ‘the German Hospice’, or ‘the Siftung’, were all colloquial names for Die Kaiserin Augusta Victoria Siftung auf dem Oelberge. Back in 1898, on the occasion of the visit of the Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria to Palestine, a fund had been set up to erect in Jerusalem, as a gift to the city, a new hospital and pilgrimage centre for German Protestants. The name of the German Empress was given to the complex, which, built in a beautiful location on the Mount of Olives, was designed in neo-Romanesque style by Robert Leibniz and inaugurated in 1910. At the outbreak of the Great War the building became the headquarters of the German army.
68 Storrs, , Orientations, p. 329.Google Scholar
69 Sir Herbert Samuel (1870–1963), statesman and philosopher, had been born in Liverpool to a Jewish banking family, and studied at University College London and Balliol College, Oxford. From a young age he was active in Liberal Party politics, being elected to Parliament in 1902, to become under-secretary of state at the Home Office in 1905. Samuel entered the cabinet in 1909 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and was made Home Secretary in Asquith’s coalition government.
70 Ashbee, (ed.), ‘A Brief Description of the Work Done by the Local Craftsmen at Government House’, in Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 60.Google Scholar
71 These are: Ashbee, (ed.), ‘A Brief Description of the Work Done by the Local Craftsmen at Government House’, in Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924)Google Scholar; Ashbee, , Jerusalem Collection, Box IV, Portfolio 5: ‘Government House’.Google Scholar
72 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 60.
73 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 61.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ashbee, Jerusalem Collection, Box IV, Portfolio 5: ‘Government House’. Original prints were found in the Collection of the photos published in Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921) and Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924). Ashbee glued these prints onto double folio sheets, annotating them in the margins and adding some new information, each small piece of information being related to the relevant photo by means of pencilled arrows. It is from this source that some of the master craftsmen’s names have been revealed.
78 Father Johann Ludwig Schneller (1820–96) was a German missionary who, in 1860, founded one of the most notable educational institutions in Jerusalem, the Syrisches Waisenhaus (or Syrian Orphanage), famous for the excellent vocational training it offered to its pupils. This institution comprised — as well as its old Main Building, a House for the Blind, several residential and ancillary buildings — a recently-built workshops courtyard that contained a shoe-maker’s workshop, a repairs shop, a printer’s shop, a woodwork shop and a metalwork workshop. These last two, famous for fine craftsmanship, were modern and mechanized, the first gas-suction motor in town being fitted there to supply power for the machines. See Kroyanker, David, Jerusalem Architecture: European-Christian Buildings outside the Old City Walls [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 129–44.Google Scholar
79 Nevertheless, he noted that he had to use the Indian wood available, as Palestine had none, and also had to order the silks and the carpets to be woven in Cairo, according to the chosen colour schemes of the rooms.
80 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 62. Kutahia (or Kuthaya) was the Armenian town from which the ceramics craftsmen, led by David Ohanessian, came to Jerusalem as refugees of the Great War. Ashbee worked in close partnership with them. See Shalev-Khalifa, Nirit, ‘David Ohanessian: The Founder of Armenian Ceramics in Jerusalem’, in Birds of Paradise: Marie Balian and the Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem, ed. Kenaan-Kedar, Nurith (Tel Aviv, 2000), pp. 14–21.Google Scholar
81 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 62.
82 Storrs, , Orientations, p. 461.Google Scholar
83 Kroyanker, , Jerusalem Architecture, p. 243.Google Scholar
84 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 62.
85 It is interesting to note the fact that present-day lamps in Eastern churches and mosques have indeed adopted the same idea as Ashbee had already conceived in the 1920s, i.e., they have conserved their traditional design while incorporating small electric bulbs within the old oil receptacles. See, for example, lamps used today at Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.
86 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), pp. 32–33 and p. 75.
87 Ashbee, Jerusalem Collection, Box IV, Portfolio 5: ‘Government House’. Nebi Samuel was the nickname given locally to Edwin — later second Viscount — Samuel, a son of Sir Herbert and personal friend of Ashbee’s. This sobriquet was a nice play of words, as ‘Nebi Samwil’ is the Arab name for Samuel the biblical prophet, but also the name of his traditional burial place, north of Jerusalem. Ashbee, through the Pro-Jerusalem Society, had undertaken extensive restoration work at this site.
88 The sketches extant in the Jerusalem Collection show the plan and side elevations of two tables: one, probably a writing-desk, measuring 4 × 2 feet, with three drawers above and two side doors, and the other a square folding table, 3 × 3 feet when open. Both tables are designed to have inlay ornaments of mother-of-pearl, whose geometric configurations — triangular for the surface of the folding table and circular for the doors of the writing desk — are drawn on drafting paper and detailed at a 1:1 scale. The annotations on the drawing are written in German, presumably for the eyes of the German-speaking craftsmen at Schneller’s workshop.
89 Keith-Roach, , Pasha of Jerusalem, p. 54.Google Scholar
90 Jerusalem 1920–1922 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1924), p. 61.
91 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. 34. Effendi: a Turkish title of respect chiefly applied to officials and professional men; the Turkish efendi, is derived from the Greek authentes, meaning ‘lord’ or ‘master’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
92 Sir Herbert Samuel returned to political life in England and in 1928 re-entered the House of Commons. In 1931 he became Home Secretary in the national government led by Ramsay MacDonald, resigning in 1932. He remained head of the opposition until 1935. Samuel had been knighted in 1920, and in 1937 was created first Viscount of Mount Carmel and Toxteth. He published his Memoirs in 1945, and was made an Hon. Fellow of RIBA in 1948.
93 On this and other work by Austen St Barbe Harrison, see Ron Fuchs and Gilbert Herbert, ‘Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922–37’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), pp. 281–333.
94 See ‘A Crusaders’ Castle of Today: Government House, Jerusalem’, Country Life, 31 October 1931.
95 Jerusalem 1918–1920 … Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council (1921), p. 21; Jerusalem Collection, Box I, Portfolio 2 (cit. Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, p. 182, n. 36).
96 Joseph Rykwert, ‘The Last Flowering of the Arts and Crafts?’, Lecture, international conference, ‘Jerusalem and the British Mandate — Interaction and Legacy’, Session IV: Architecture in Jerusalem during the British Mandate: Historicism vs. Modernism, Jerusalem, 11–14 March 2001.
97 Palestine Town Planning Adviser, Annual Report 1936 (Jerusalem, 1937)Google ScholarPubMed, Table 6: ‘Table summing up the Central Town Planning Commission activities, 1921–1936’, p. 18. For further details on the link between legislation and planning in Mandate Palestine, see Rapaport, ‘Conflicting Visions’, pp. 42–45 (‘The Planners’ Work: Experimental Practice in Mandate Palestine’).
98 Keppel, Francis,Built in Jerusalem’s Wall (London, 1920)Google Scholar. ‘Built in Jerusalem’s Wall’ is a line quoted from ‘To the Christians’, one of the poems in Blake’s Jerusalem (1804–18, published in 1820 with a hundred engravings), which had been recently re-published in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse Chosen by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee (Oxford, 1917): ‘I give you the end of a golden string: / Only wind it into a ball / It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate / Built in Jerusalem’s wall.’
99 C. R. Ashbee, letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson from Jerusalem, 10 February 1920: GBR/0272/CRA/1/45, the Papers of Charles Robert Ashbee, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge; also cited by Crawford, C. R. Ashbee, p. 185.
100 ‘Jerusalem To-Day’, The Observer, November 1918.
101 Letter, Ashbee to John Whiting, dated 20 January 1938, Jerusalem Collection. A carbon copy of this letter is to be found in Box VI, the last document in the Index portfolio, which is the last portfolio in the collection.
102 SirCunningham, Alan Gordon, ‘Foreword’, in Kendall, Henry, Jerusalem: The City Plan: Preservation and Development during the British Mandate 1918–1948 (London, 1948).Google Scholar