 KURDS, ARABS and BRITONS
The Memoir of Lieutenant-Colonel W. A. Lyon CBE in Iraq 1918–44 In editing Lyon’s memoirs I faced a number of technical decisions. The most important was how to reproduce his text. This was written after his final retirement (from Ethiopia) in 1949 and was finished by 1964. He did so secretively (because, for whatever reason, his wife did not approve of his doing it), from memory, and without access to standard reference works or even his own papers. These, including the letters he wrote regularly to his parents and later his wife, would have been extremely helpful to me. None has survived, apart from a small folder of limited value, which I have referred to as ‘Lyon Papers’. The longhand script was then typed by a secretary who was evidently not familiar with the place or period. The result is that the spelling of names of people, places and institutions in the typescript (the longhand version does not survive) is both internally inconsistent and also often different from that used by most of his contemporaries (which differed widely) and in his own reports etcetera of the period, as well as by later historians. |