The body of a WWI diplomat is to be exhumed, and could help avoid a pandemic, says robert fox |
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The remains of a body lying in a lead-lined coffin in a peaceful Yorkshire graveyard may hold the key to Britain avoiding an impending disaster.
The body is that of Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes: baronet, diplomat, soldier, dilettante, practical joker and power-broker, who died at the age of 39 on February 16, 1919, at the Hotel Lotti in Paris, where he was attending the peace conference at the end of the First World War. He is buried in the graveyard of St Mary's, Sledmere, close by his ancestral home.
In life, Sir Mark's greatest achievement was the secret deal to carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, which he negotiated with Georges Picot in 1916. Some of the lines on the Middle East map today - notably the straight frontier between Syria and Iraq, originally marked out |
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| Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes: baronet, diplomat, soldier, dilettante and power-broker |
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by an architect's ruler - are those of the Sykes-Picot agreement.
He was a friend of two of the architects of the modern Middle East, TE Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, though neither appear to have trusted him entirely. "He saw the odd in everything, and missed the even," wrote 'Lawrence of Arabia' of Sir Mark. "He would sketch out in a few dashes a new world, all out of scale, but vivid as a vision of the thing we hoped."
His friend and fellow diplomat in the Paris talks, Harold Nicolson, was more generous: "It was due to his endless push and perseverance, to his enthusiasm and faith, that Arab nationalism and Zionism became two of the most successful of our war causes" (and Britain's most troublesome legacies for the Middle East today).
Now, it transpires, it may be in death that Sir Mark (left, in a contemporary caricature) makes his greatest contribution to humanity.
He was a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic which killed 30m at a conservative estimate, and possibly as many as 50m, in the space  |
