Dead Sea fruit: Edmund Allenby, the First World War and the politics of personal loss

Abstract

On 28 April 1936, two weeks before his death, Field Marshal Lord Allenby delivered his last public address as the newly elected rector of Edinburgh University. ‘The glory of conquest is departing’, he urged Edinburgh’s students, ‘its gains are Dead Sea fruit.’ Allenby called for an international police force and a policy of collective security and international cooperation to prevent a second great war. This article argues that Allenby, a war hero who was popularly celebrated as the ‘conqueror of Palestine’ and ‘liberator of Jerusalem’, was changed irrevocably by the death of his only son on the Western Front in 1917 and the unstable world political situation in the inter-war period. His personal loss and world politics put him on a path towards a pacific and internationalist worldview, which was most clearly expressed from the unveiling of Belfast’s war memorial in 1929 onwards. Allenby’s political transformation came at a time when British society was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war, and when his retirement and involvement with ex-servicemen groups made it impossible to dissociate himself from the memory of his only son’s death and the fear that another worldwide conflict would devastate Britain’s youth.