
Luke Batterham
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'A PLEASANT COUNTRY, SPOILED FOR THE WHILE BY DISCONTENT': Lawrence on Palestine. Sir Ernest Dowson, recipient of this letter, had been Director-General of the Survey of Egypt and Lawrence's immediate superior at Cairo prior to the Arabian campaign. In 1923 he had been appointed special adviser on land questions in the newly created mandated territories of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. Lawrence's transfer to the RAF that same day is something he had been working towards ever since he had been forced out of it two and a half years earlier. This letter is not published in The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett (1938) or The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by Malcolm Brown (1988); nor is it listed on the T.E. Lawrence Studies calendar of his letters (at telawrence.net).