British enter Shiraz

On 11 November 1916 the column of General Percy Sykes entered Shiraz, the capital of the province of Fars in southern Persia. This is the date given by Sykes himself in his History of Persia and by the British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign (Moberly). The British official chronology of the war records the occupation of the city a day later, under 12 November. As in Kerman half a year earlier, this was not a capture of the city but a ceremonial entry without a fight. The column was welcomed by the Persian governor-general of Fars, Prince Farmanfarma, the local magnate Qavam ol-Molk and the notables. Sykes calculated that since landing at Bandar Abbas his force had covered about 1,600 kilometres across the middle of Persia.

A year of gendarme rule

The British were returning to a city from which they had been driven out a year earlier. In the autumn of 1915 the German consul Wustrow, supported by Swedish officers and many Persian officers and men of the gendarmerie, stirred up anti-British feeling in Shiraz. In October the honorary British vice-consul was murdered in broad daylight. In November the gendarmes cut the telegraph lines, placed guns in positions commanding the city and gave the British consul, Lieutenant-Colonel W. F. O’Connor, the choice between surrender and bombardment. O’Connor surrendered, and the whole British colony was escorted under guard towards the coast. The women were sent to Bushehr, while the men spent about seven months as captives of one of the Tangestani chiefs before they were freed in an exchange of prisoners.

The hereditary mayor of Shiraz and chief of the nomadic Khamseh tribes, Qavam ol-Molk, held out against the gendarmes for some time, but ran out of ammunition and withdrew to the coast. At Bushehr he asked the British Resident, Percy Cox, for rifles, ammunition and money. In 1916, with arms brought by Sykes from India and a few guns served by Indian gunners, he set off inland, defeated the gendarmes at Lar and pushed on towards Shiraz. He never reached home: according to Sykes his horse fell under him while he was chasing a gazelle, and Qavam broke his neck. It was his 28-year-old son who entered the city, took the title of Qavam ol-Molk and punished the leaders of the revolt. It was his men who caught almost 60 Germans and Austrians fleeing from the province of Kerman. Sykes found them in the citadel at Shiraz.

Farmanfarma and the Qashqai

In the summer the former prime minister Farmanfarma, appointed by Tehran as governor-general of Fars, arrived in Isfahan with a bodyguard of about two hundred men. He was accompanied by the new British consul, Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Gough. The most powerful man in southern Persia, the chief of the Qashqai, Sowlat od-Dowleh, felt slighted by him: he had not received his investiture because he would not pay the “honorarium” demanded. So he went to Shiraz to make trouble. When Farmanfarma reached Dehbid, he learned that his deputy in Shiraz was in prison and that if he went further he would be attacked by the combined forces of Sowlat, Qavam and the gendarmerie. By negotiation, however, the governor won most of his opponents over to his side, and according to Moberly he rode into Shiraz on 15 October. Sowlat od-Dowleh rode off sullenly to his tribes.

By the end of October the Russian position in northern Persia had grown strong enough for the British to conclude that the Turks would advance no further. Sykes could therefore lead his column out of Isfahan to Shiraz, about 525 kilometres away. Because the consul had warned of famine in the city, the soldiers carried wheat with them. On the way they routed a band of robbers, passed gendarmerie posts, and near Yazd-e Khast marched through a belt that the Boyer-Ahmadi tribes plundered with impunity. On the whole journey they met only one caravan. At Abadeh one of the Qashqai chiefs came out to meet them, demanding money for alleged services. Sykes did not trust him and, as he wrote, in 1918 the same man led an attack on the British. Beyond Dehbid, which lies at an altitude of about 2,300 metres, the column camped by the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae, and before entering Shiraz it rested at Persepolis. One British NCO summed up the ruins with the remark that whoever had said they dated from the Stone Age was right.

What next

In Shiraz Sykes found about 3,000 gendarmes scattered along the caravan road as far as Kazerun, without their Swedish officers. Many of their Persian officers were pro-German. At the beginning of the year they had even concluded a written alliance with Sowlat od-Dowleh against the Russians and the British. Sykes faced a difficult choice. The Persian government had not yet agreed to the British taking over the gendarmerie, and the British had too few officers to run it. Yet if nobody paid the gendarmes, they would scatter or go over to the enemy. Sykes decided to take them over that very November and formed from them the Fars brigade of the South Persia Rifles. According to the official history, by December the situation in southern Persia was already very satisfactory.

German influence in Fars was waning. Sykes described with satisfaction a Shiraz merchant whom the agent Wilhelm Wassmuss had taken in with a supposed “telegraphic” conversation with the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, swindling him out of the equivalent of £10,000. When the British entered the city, the merchant is said to have complained that he had “eaten dirt”. The calm proved fragile, however. Soon afterwards, with winter already setting in, the headman of Kazerun, incited by Sowlat od-Dowleh, attacked the garrison of riflemen there, and Sykes’s column was unable to force its way through the mountain passes and turned back to Shiraz. The reckoning with the Qashqai came only in 1918.