First edition. The actress, traveller, and writer Doreen Ingrams (1906-1997) married the colonial official William Ingrams in 1930 and lived with him in Mauritius, where she learned Arabic. ‘In 1934 [Doreen] accompanied her husband to Aden [...], then on his visit to the Hadhramaut, and was the first European woman to visit Seiyun and Tarim. She helped him with his research, visiting harems and investigating women’s lives. [...] She travelled, by donkey and camel, sometimes in areas where no European woman had been seen, and in her contacts with Arab women urged them to influence their menfolk in favour of the truce negotiated by her husband (known as the Ingrams peace) among the warring tribes. Doreen founded the first Bedouin girls’ school and a school for the blind. In the famine of 1943-4 she established and worked in a hospital at Mukalla and set up a children’s village for orphans. [...] Doreen Ingrams returned to England in 1944 and lectured on the Hadhramaut and Arab women for the Central Office of Information. [...] From 1956 to 1967 she worked for the BBC Arabic service, in charge of talks and magazine programmes. [...] She was a founder of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding and served on its executive committee, and was patron of the Friends of the Hadhramaut. [...]. For their pioneering work in south Arabia she and her husband were awarded the Lawrence of Arabia medal of the Royal Central Asian Society (1939) and the founder’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1940); in 1993 she was awarded the Sir Richard Burton medal of the Royal Asiatic Society’ (ODNB).

Palestine Papers 1917-1922 drew upon official documents including Foreign Office and Colonial Office files, and Cabinet Papers to present ‘a compilation of the records that tell the story of the first five years of British involvement so that the reader may follow the course of events both in Whitehall and Palestine through the words of those who were in positions of responsibility at the time’ (dustwrapper blurb), and Ingrams provides brief editorial and biographical notes to contextualise them. Some of these documents draw upon intelligence provided by T.E. Lawrence, and this copy is from the library of the distinguished Lawrence scholar Jeremy Wilson, the editor of T.E. Lawrence’s Minorities (London, 1971), and the author of the National Portrait Gallery catalogue T.E. Lawrence: Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1988) and the authoritative biography Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London, 1989). Wilson was also the co-founder, with his wife Nicole, of the Castle Hill Press, which has published scholarly editions of works by Lawrence and the definitive series of Lawrence’s letters.

O’Brien F0550.