At present I am not so much interested in the regiments themselves--I am doing some research into the lives of the wives and daughters of the regiment and am looking for photographs of the ladies who might have accompanied their husbands and fathers to the middle east -- Egypt, Palestine and Syria. I don't suppose there would have been many in the area during a war, but there might have been some and I particularly want to see if any of the ladies bothered to ride sidesaddle while they were out there. Does anyone have any suggestions about how I could find such photographs?

Hi

Have you tried the National Archives?

regards

Robert

No--I have never thought of them as a photographic resource. I'll visit the site and see what I can find.
thanks for the tip--
Lydia

Or the Imperial War Museum Department of Photographs.

or the Jerusalem City archive at City hall, or the Jewish agency in Jerusalem or the Israel Central Government Archives or the ChristChuch museum Jerusalem. There are certainly no women camp followers in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force although there are women in the various Christian and Zionist colonies and you do see see them in some photos with EEF soldiers. A large number of the Christian colonies on the Plain of Sharon are German Protestant, and their response to the EEF is somewhat mixed to say the least. They are generally Menonite so women will not sit astride beasts and they certainly wont wear forked garments. They will have rather gentile little buggies and the proverbial "surrey with a fringe on the top"! As the driving of beasts is mens work they will invariably be passengers. If you find photographs of british women they are almost certainly the wives of Egyptian colonial administrators rather than military personnel.

The Turkish national archives are gradually putting the national photo archive on the web and there are lots of photographs of settlers and colonists there. You have to bear in mind that Turkey is trying to curry support for their EU entry and so are doing their best to show the benign and peaceful side of ottoman rule in Palestine (or more correctly in the Turkish Province of South Syria) so they are being rather selective in their treatment.

You might also try asking the photoclub of Jerusalem. Although this is a photographic hobby club many of the members have or know about private collections. You can find them at: http://jphotoclub.com/blog/

I would be interested in what you find so let us know
MrK

Wow! I didn't expect all of THAT. Thank you so much, you chaps.

I rang the IWM as suggested by Chris, and have now put in my request for any photographs they might find relevant. Then I went through the suggestions made by MrK -- which took me nearly all day what with one thing and another. At present it is just requests and queries and I am waiting for responses. The IWM librarian also suggested I try the Army Medical Museum (incorporating the Royal Vetinary Corps Museum--and its obvious interest in horses), which I did. I have to say they were not very helpful but their resources are limited so I don't suppose I can blame them. The man I spoke to said they have 'thousands' of photographs but no time whatsoever to look through them on my behalf. This is inconvenient for me but not unreasonable, if they really do have so many pictures. I'd have to go over to Aldershot to leaf through the collection myself some time.

The idea of what social constraints persisted or were ignored by the dependents of the colonial administrators and enforcers (and how much license the administrators and enforcers were prepared to allow) is rather interesting, is it not? It divides what people classify in their heart of hearts as mere decoration from what they believe in their heart of hearts is true civilisation.

Lydia I think it is interesting but I think you are going to have to do the leg and spade work yourself as I doubt you will find much calleted material. Just resign yourself to it taking a long time and giving you the opportunity to have holidys in interesting and unusual places! You might find it worthwhile to look up masters dissertations and maybe doctoral theses for universities and colleges with courses in design and social history. You might start with University of the Arts in London. It is the sort of thing that an enterprising student at the London college of Fashion might have done. You might also look at some of the more fashion/ clothing design based art schools, eg Falmouth, Middlesex, Bournemouth. Theyought tobe able to give you lists of Masters dissertation titles, although you have to bear in mind that there is no statutory requirement to lodge or retain disseretations and there is no obvious or uniform way of finding them as institutional practices will vary. Doctoral theses should be deposited in the British Libray. Befor you get into picture collecting there are some quite complex theoretical issues to sort out at least hypothetically. Are there differences between country? Are there differences between the diplomatic service and the colonial service? How will you know when you see them in images?.....pity you are not one of my students. I would quit like to supervise this! good luck and best wishes. MrK

Are you by any chance in London University, Mr. K?

Thanks for your academic referrals. The sidesaddle is a fascinating subject, at least I find it so. I have done quite a bit of research into it and have found very strong parallels, at least in Europe, of the sidesaddle both to technological development (the sidesaddle is actually a very hi-tech piece of kit) and to the way women are viewed in society. In many ways the amount of technology that went into the development of side saddles demonstrates the way women, as the Weaker Sex, have been seen as the consumers of technological innovation in order to help them get through their day almost since the 10th century. But it was also a technological innovation that women managed to turn into an allurement and a challenge.

But that is general sociology. From the point of view of a student of WWI, the sidesaddle -- as is its wont -- is a marker for what happened in the war both to society and to technology. The FANYs are our illustration in this case. At the beginning of the war, when it was romantic and a Grand Adventure (St. George rescuing the Belgian maiden-chained-to-a-rock from the nasty German dragon) the posters inviting women to join the FANYs showed a lady wearing a sort of hussar uniform, wielding a St. George's banner and sidesaddle on a white horse, as you will see here:
http://www.64-baker-street.org/organisa ... _fany.html

The FANYs did ride sidesaddle to start with. They were ladies, and they rode like ladies. However, the irregular shape of the saddle made it difficult to transport. Furthermore, since the length of the saddle has to match the length of the user's leg, the saddles were not interchangeable between riders, and that is before you consider that the width of the saddle also has to match the width of the horse. Within a few months, the romantically accoutred and mounted FANYs were wearing khaki divided skirts and riding astride. The war was not romantic any more and when you were at the front, the shells did not care that you were a lady.

Then, within a couple of years, the FANYs were off their horses altogether. Dressed in khaki breeches, they rode bicycles and motorcycles, and they drove ambulances and trucks. Chivalry and the sidesaddle had given way to mechanised armaggedon and the truck.

[btw. if anyone in the London area is interested in a talk about the history of side saddle, I can do that, but WWI would come in only as a short bit at the end because there are a few hundred years of history to get through before that.]

As we are told in the Book of Proverbs "Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser"
And there am I thinking it was about the transition from foundation garments to underwear!
Presumably if you want to ride sidesaddle abroad you not only need to take your own saddle, you need to take your own horse. Can I infer from that that the women we find riding sidesaddle in Palestine are either natives or else long term residents, while those riding astride are visitors or non residents? If so then I will look at the Ottoman archives on line in a new light and may have more to offer in due course.
very many thanks
MrK

Certainly it was an advantage to take your own horse with the saddle padded (flocked is the correct word) exactly to fit, but since many soldiers went to war with their own horses, turning up at the front with all your kit would not have seemed strange, at least at the beginning of hostilities. I am sure most commanders in those early months did not anticipate so many horses being casualties of indiscriminate shelling. They would have been absolutely certain that if the ladies' saddles were flocked to a general fit, in the unlikely event that a horse became injured or ill, a substitute of roughly compatible proportions would be easily found. However, with the increase of equine casualties from the usual illnesses as well as malnourishment, active bombardment and possibly also from injuries sustained while negotiating treacherously pocked and metal-littered land, mounts of all sorts of sizes and shapes had to serve, at which point the sidesaddle became a positive handicap.

As for British ladies abroad, it is a recorded fact that in the 19th century they frequently took their own horses. It is also true that many others bought local mounts. If they were army wives, this was not a problem because there were sufficient saddlers in the army to deal with the tack.

Local women in the Middle East did not ride sidesaddle at all. So far as I have seen, Arab culture does not appear to have developed even the sort of pannier-type seat which was used sometimes in medieval Europe. Women rode astride, or there were 'houdah' type constructions for camels and there was a sort of saddle which most Europeans would find very strange indeed which had the woman almost squatting on the top of the horse. I have no idea how those ladies managed to stay aboard but since the photographs I have seen often show them holding babies, the position might not have been as unsafe as it looks.

As you know, my interest is what happened between about 1910 and about 1940. Most women accustomed to the security of a sidesaddle would prefer to keep to that, especially in a strange place, using unknown horses. However, as everyone on this newsgroup now knows, a sidesaddle can be very fiddly. What I suspect is that the ladies who did ride sidesaddle were army or colonial wives and daughters with the infrastructure to keep them and their horses comfortable--and with an axe to grind: that is, the sidesaddle would have been a very deliberate outward sign of their difference from the natives, inconvenience being of lower priority than cultural superiority. I have seen several photographs of 19th century ladies obviously on long trips through eastern deserts, riding sidesaddle and carrying parasols.

My aim is to find out if WWI did away with all of that.