Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Sykes, Mark
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 He had no continuous schooling, being withdrawn repeatedly from private tutors to accompany his father on long journeys abroad; but for short periods he was placed under Jesuit instruction at Beaumont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 the Syrian, and to conserve intact the special interests of Great Britain in Arabia, where steps had already been taken by the British towards bringing about a rising by the emir of Mecca. Sykes had become an enthusiast for Lord Kitchener's pro-Arab policy, and in negotiating the agreement with France he laboured to render possible the ultimate establishment of Arab independence, even in Syria. So far as he succeeded he had in the main to thank M. Picot's fixed disbelief in the possibility of such independence. Sykes was sent to communicate the draft agreement to M. Sazonof at Petrograd and to the Grand Duke Nicholas in the Caucasus; and on 16 May it was duly signed by the three governments and kept secret. It assigned definite spheres of interest to each of the signatory powers: to Russia, the north Armenian and the south Kurdish provinces, to beyond Trebizond on the west; to France, Cilicia and Cappadocia, with the south Armenian provinces down to Aintab, and the Syrian littoral; to Great Britain, southern Mesopotamia with Bagdad, and the ports of Haifa and Jaffa. The zone between the French and British territories was to be placed under Arab sovereignty, and Palestine was to be subjected to a special régime, the details of which were reserved for future settlement. Commonly spoken of since as the ‘Sykes-Picot Agreement’, this pact has focussed unfair criticism upon the British representative, who was acting under orders at a moment of danger to the continuance of the Entente, while neither an Arab rising nor a British conquest of Palestine and Syria seemed likely to happen. At any rate the settlement thus arrived at enabled the British to go forward without let or hindrance in the war against the Turks.
Henceforward Sykes was attached to the Foreign Office, and used as chief adviser on Near Eastern policy, with special reference to the Arab revolt. Twice (1916 and 1917) he was sent out to Egypt to consult with the military command and the Arab bureau, and he accompanied M. Picot to Jidda in May 1917, in order to persuade King Husein of the reality of the Entente, and to secure some reasonable agreement about prospective Arab claims. A habit of reading his own thoughts in the minds of others, and a politician's instinct for scoring quickly, made him an unsafe negotiator with purposeful Orientals; but usually he won their affection, and he will be remembered by Arabs not only as a champion of their nationality, but as the inventor of the quadricolor flag under which they marched to Damascus, and under which the Hejaz was subsequently ruled. In spite of his fervent Catholicism he was converted early to Zionism, which he believed to be a just cause, likely to serve England well with Russia and the United States, and not inconsistent with British pledges to the Arabs. He was employed at home throughout the autumn of 1917 to prepare public opinion for the Balfour declaration (November 1917), and no one became more popular with Zionist leaders. From the Foreign Office he was able to dictate the general tenor of the proclamation issued by General Allenby on his entry into Jerusalem (December 1917), as he had already dictated that read by General Sir Stanley Maude [q.v.] at Bagdad. With characteristic disregard of self-interest he refused from first to last all honours for these or other war services.
During the first half of 1918 Sykes exerted influence at home to impose a pro-Zionist direction on the administrative policy of General Allenby in Palestine, and to minimize difficulties raised by the French about a further British advance. When Syria had fallen into British hands, and friction was imminent between the French administration in the coastal province and Feisal's administration in the interior, he asked to be sent out again on a roving commission. He was in Jerusalem when called upon to seek re-election to parliament for Hull; but despite his absence he was returned by an overwhelming majority, his wife acting for him throughout. Finally, he established himself at Aleppo, where he hoped to reconcile French aims with those of the Arabs, and also to serve the cause of the refugee Armenians—a people which he held to have been betrayed by the terms of the armistice with Turkey. By his earnestness and prestige he triumphed that winter, as few men could have done, over the disadvantages of his anomalous advisory position in territory occupied but not administered by the British; and never did he render better or more strenuous service. But the consequence was that when, in January 1919, he procured his recall, in order to lay the state of affairs in Syria before the British government, he was physically enfeebled. He halted in Paris where his wife, joined him. The Peace Conference had already assembled, and he began honestly and fearlessly to state facts unpalatable alike to French chauvinism and to British optimism and not a little derogatory of some of his own earlier enthusiasms. The mental strain of this effort further reduced his strength, leaving him but a poor chance when the influenza of that bitter spring attacked him. He died in Paris after only three days' illness, 16 February 1919, one month short of the age of forty. His body was taken to Sledmere. The concourse at his funeral betokened the personal affection that he had inspired; as did the numerous tributes paid to his memory by absent representatives of causes which he had advocated and even of some that he had discouraged.
In person, Sykes was typically Nordic—fair, tall, loosely and powerfully built—with humorous eyes and a winning smile. His laughter soon overcame his anger. Careless of appearances and manners, he paid little heed to polite conventions.
He left three sons and three daughters, and was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, Mark Tatton Richard (born 1905).
[Shane Leslie, Mark Sykes, his Life and Letters, 1923; History of the Peace Conference at Paris, vol. vi, 1924, pp. 15–17 for the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement; private information; personal knowledge.]