British enter Kerman

The British chronology of the war records under 12 June 1916 that British forces occupied Kerman, the capital of a vast province in south-eastern Persia. R.P.P. Rowe’s chronicle of the events of the war gives the same date. The Encyclopaedia Iranica and the British National Army Museum say in general terms that the force reached the town in June, and its commander, General Percy Sykes, who described the march in his History of Persia, gives no day. It was not a capture of the town but an entry without a fight. Sykes, a former British consul in Kerman, came at the invitation of local notables to restore order and to recruit soldiers for a new force.

Sykes’s mission

Sykes landed at Bandar Abbas on 16 March 1916 with a few British officers and NCOs and a small escort. His task was to create from Persian volunteers a force that would restore order in the south of the country and take the field away from German agents. In 1915 the gendarmerie, commanded by Swedish officers and largely sympathetic to Germany, had driven the British and Russians out of many towns, Kerman among them. Sykes enlisted his first 53 recruits within a day of arriving. At the end of April an escort of Indian troops arrived at Bandar Abbas by sea from Bushehr: two guns of the 33rd Mountain Battery, a squadron of the 15th Lancers and half a battalion of the 124th Baluchis. According to the Iranica the force numbered 27 British and 611 Indian soldiers. Sykes later wrote that this small force could claim a record for the length of the marches it made during the war.

The ground had been prepared for him by events in Kerman itself. The Bakhtiari governor-general, Sardar Zafar, wavered between the sides, while the most important local notable, the commander of the Kerman troops, Sardar Nosrat, was a friend of the British. A few days after Sykes landed, his opponents tried to kill Sardar Nosrat with a bomb. He escaped the attempt slightly wounded, but several of his men were killed. Soon afterwards the governor’s tribal warriors disarmed the gendarmes and the local “democrats”, and the Germans and Austrians had to flee west towards Sirjan. One of the groups that escaped from Bam was led by the Austrian zoologist and traveller Erich Zugmayer, the German consul in Kerman. Pursued by the tribes, the groups fell into the hands of the men of Qavam ol-Molk, a pro-British chief from Fars. According to Sykes, nearly 60 Germans and Austrians, a dozen or so Turks and a few Afghans ended up in captivity in Shiraz.

The march to Kerman

The first echelon of the column left Bandar Abbas on 17 May. It had about 450 kilometres to cover. First came eight stages through the Garmsir, the hot and malarial coastal belt, where the average daily maximum temperature reached 43 degrees, and then the cool uplands, where the soldiers suffered from fever. Transport depended on hired camels and donkeys, whose owners could not bear taking orders. The column passed through the dangerous Tang-e Zendan, the “Prison” gorge, in which sudden floods swept away caravans, and at Dowlatabad entered the province of Kerman. There a letter of welcome from the town’s leading inhabitants awaited Sykes. From then on the march became, as he wrote, a triumphal progress. Over a pass in the Lalezar mountains at more than 2,700 metres the force came down to Kerman and, welcomed by Sardar Nosrat and other notables, marched ceremonially through the bazaar.

In the town the telegraph office and the bank quickly resumed work, and according to Sykes those he called anarchists fled or went into hiding. One landowner told him that until the last night before the troops arrived he had kept thirty villagers with him for protection, and now he did not need a single watchman. Sykes attached particular importance to Kerman. From 1895 he had been consul here for nearly ten years, he knew the local notables, and earlier he had made friends with the then governor, later Prime Minister Farmanfarma. He believed that the entry of British troops strengthened the position of the British minister in Tehran and had a calming effect in Afghanistan and Baluchistan, where the British were just then dealing with the tribes.

The Kerman brigade

In the gendarmerie barracks Sykes began recruiting the first brigade of the force eventually named the South Persia Rifles. Exaggerated rumours quickly spread that he already had 30,000 men and 20,000 rifles. At the end of July the column moved on to Yazd, and G.L. Farran remained in Kerman with three officers to recruit and train soldiers. According to Sykes he fulfilled this task completely, and the Kerman brigade remained loyal to the British even in 1918, when the brigade in Fars was decimated by desertions. Sykes’s main objective, however, lay further west. Through Yazd and Isfahan his column reached Shiraz in November, having covered about 1,600 kilometres in all across the middle of Persia. The Persian government officially recognised the South Persia Rifles only in March 1917.