Autograph Letter Signed (“Ted). Hindijah Barrage, Iraq, Jan. 27, 1940. 2pp. To his wife Helen, Bideford, Devon, England. With original mailing envelope.
An adventurous, itinerant engineer, Meade urges his wife, then back in wartime England, to rejoin him in Iraq. He speaks lightly of the War, then still in its early months – “this dratted Adolfrumpus” – and thinks of accepting a three-year contract to remain at his post, “provided we don’t become slaves of Adolf on the Polish system.” He thinks of building a “first-class” 28-ton ship so that “I shall have a home in which I can go anywhere, picking up a job when I can, and even if all banks crash and England starves, I can live somehow.”
Britain was the dominant European power in the kingdom of Iraq between the World Wars; maintaining military bases in the country and being instrumental in the design, construction and maintenance of the Hindiya Barrage, an 800-foot dam on the Euphrates River. A year after Meade wrote this letter, the country’s British-sponsored monarchy was overthrown in a pro-German coup. In a one-month “Anglo-Iraq War” of May 1941, British troops restored their favored king, propped up by British occupation forces. Meade survived to publish a short book, in the 1960s, on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.