A Century Ago, Lynette Soane, Hailed the Kurds as “my friends” Rather Than “Kurdish Brigands”

In 1919, Lynette Soane was said to be the “only European woman to enter parts of Kurdistan”.

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

“If only you knew me when I was younger!” Lynette would say. She took a committed interest in Kurdish life right until her death.

When I first met Lynette in the late 1980s, the Kurds in Turkey were suffering enforced migration. The Turkish army destroyed 3000 Kurdish villages; the Kurds in Iran were under constant attack by the Pasdaran and KDP-I leader, Abdurrahman Ghassemlou had just been assassinated by Iranian agents in Vienna; the Kurds in Syria were demanding equality and full rights for the Maktoum (stateless nationals) whilst the Kurds in Iraq had just suffered attacks using chemical weapons in the latter stages of the Iran-Iraq war and thereafter before going on to fight each other in a bitter civil war (brakuji).

Early life

Born in Paddington, Sydney, Australia, in 1899, Lynda Mary Edith Hooper (Monzette) met and married Major Ely Bannister Soane on September 18, 1918.

Orphaned at the age of nine when her mother Mary Monzette passed away, her mother’s marriage to a much older man had secured enough money for Lynette to be taken in by a doctor’s family and well educated and cared for until she met and married Major Ely Bannister Soane.

At the time, Soane was a commissioned British officer based in Katoomba, Australia. After WW1 having contracted tuberculosis he was sent to Australia to recover.

By this time he was 38-years-old to Lynette’s 23 years of age. She left Australia with him after their marriage and before long they set up home in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan. Ely had been accorded the post of governor).

He was the chief political officer during the British Administration of the Kingdom of Iraq (created in 1921 following the 1920 Iraq Revolution against the proposed British Mandate of Mesopotamia). When the Cairo Conference in March 1921 finally opted to abandon the idea of Kurdish autonomy as part of the policy of maintaining British control as cheaply as possible, Soane was summarily dismissed as being too close to the Kurds.

Soane spoke fluent Persian and had learned many of the Kurdish dialects, describing his travels from 1881-1910) in his book, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise: With Historical notes of the Kurdish tribes and the Chaldeans of Kurdistan, published in 1910. 1 In 1922 the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty had been enacted. Soane played a significant role in Kurdistan, loved by some and repudiated by others.

Soane had been a member of the Royal Geographical Society and upon being dismissed from his role as political officer in Sulaimaniya in 1921, he was elected as a Fellow of the society. 2

His outstanding seminal work as a speaker of Farsi, Turkish and several of the Kurdish dialects remains in several publications independently of To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise.

His work is full of warm anecdotes about the many Kurds he encountered and his scorn for the often lazy and ill-mannered Ottoman official along the roads he travelled.

By the time of her marriage to Soane, Lynette had already become a competent photographer. Her (surviving) archive begins with formal photographs of her and Soane taken in 1918 soon after their marriage in Australia. Three succeeding albums cover the period of her marriage and time spent in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After Soane died at sea of consumption on his way home from South Africa in 1923, Lynette took to travelling alone with her camera and a protective co-driver. Just 28 years old and widowed after just five years of marriage she took to the road alone employing various bearers along the way.

In time spent off the road, she compiled several albums that included a few postcards bought during her travels. Upon her death in 1995, these were left to me with a small legacy for Kurdish projects. Lynette saw me as following in her footsteps.

Chronology of Lynette Soane’s surviving photo albums

1- 2018. The album begins in Australia with a few photographs of Ely Bannister Soane inscribed “after our marriage. Some taken later detail parts of Mesopotamia and Kurdistan, including Mosul, Koya, Rawanduz, Sulaimaniya and Raniya, and then jump to show that Lynette was in California in 2019, during the flu epidemic.

She is photographed on her own camera, sometimes wearing a flu mask just as the world was obliged to do during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Lynette returned to Basra, and to Khanakin, in 1921 as her photos are captioned by hand.

A few images have been inserted there out of sequence and date to 1926. I sent this album to the University of Exeter which now has a Kurdish Studies programme. Librarian, James Downs of the Special Collections has digitised the contents, and it is available at the University.

2- The most detailed album of the period that Lynette spent living with Soane in Kurdistan had several pages reproduced in Kurdistan in the Shadow of History, compiled by Magnum photographer, Susan Meiselas. Susan became a dear friend thereafter. This album features photographs from Sulaimaniya, Rawanduz and Serai Sulaimani, where Lynette was based with Soane in 1919. Some interesting old pictures of Baghdad and its horse tram travelling through lush palm groves along a dirt road surface are included there. The album toured for a very long time with images and artefacts linked with the Kurdistan book.

3. No album has yet been found for the year 1923. E.B.Soane passed away on April 22, 1923. 3 The couple had no children and Lynette – having been orphaned at the age of nine, as above, had very few surviving relatives. Her migrant family in Australia included cousins on her mother’s side and in particular a cousin that she cherished romantically, named Lindfield Rupert Joseph Monzette. Lynette added the name ‘Lindfield’ to her married surname after Soane’s death.

Her albums, captioned in white ink bear the name of Lynette Lindfield-Soane in their opening page along with an address to contact her should they ever have become lost. Some surviving correspondence posted to Lindfield by Lynette on such occasions asChristmas or New Year, as well as from places she visited, include a postcard of Port Said dated 1935, and indicate her surviving romantic attachment to him.

A photo of Lindfield forwarded to me by his grand-daughter, Jewelie Lohman, when undertaking comprehensive research into her family tree remains among the love letters and cards Lynette posted to Lindfield all signed as ‘Bonnie”. The Swiss Monzette family were mining migrants that had settled in Australia. Jewelie believed that Lindfield may have been illiterate and could not have replied to any of Lynette’s loving missives. Lynette’s family background was also solved in this quest to discover the identity of the mystery woman who had been writing to her grandfather.

The Lynette Soane albums at the University of Exeter – Archivist, Dr. James Downs.

4. Lynette travelled by car through India between 1925-1926, staging her journey via the Suez Canal, Port Said, Cairo, and the Valley of the Kings where she visited Luxor, the temples and the border with Sudan. The album includes some black and white classic style photo postcards that were on sale at the time.

Lynette then passed through Muscat, and inserted further photos and postcards of Egypt, all undated. In this album a number of photos that were removed from a page she had inscribed Tanganyika were then put into a different album (#6) below:

5. Marked 1929, and beginning with a headed page, Greece, Lynette’s voyages progressed on to Rhodes (October 1929’s pages are captioned “My own films were lost”, so she inserted postcards to document the places she visited there). Lynette then travelled on to Cyprus (no month is given but it is dated sometime in 1929), before going on to Palestine in August 1929.

The next sequence is labelled Tarsus, and Mersin in Turkey, showing a large wooden waterwheel, before Lynette then travelled on to Tripoli (in north Lebanon, that was then still called Syria) before continuing to Alexandretta, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, Nazareth etc. inscribed with a selection of pictures captioned “Palestine during the riots 1929” (November).

Our fearless traveller then went down to the Dead Sea, crossed the Jordan river into Transjordan (now Jordan), and returned to Palestine, including Nablus, in December 1929. Some postcards are interspersed with her own pictures here again, and a section of this album is headed as being in the Dead Sea “where I camped for two weeks” (1932). The final pages of this album cease abruptly after Lynette married Alan Malcolm-Ellis in 1934 after a decade spent travelling alone and to British contacts as a widow.

The final page is inscribed “Our home in Jerusalem” 1934, in white ink. This farewell page is followed by a few mixed photos of Palestine, dated 1933, replacing a pre-captioned page labelled ‘Petra’. The Petra photographs are shown elsewhere. The back cover photos have been removed. In summary, this is a composite album with pictures dating from 1929-1934.

Several loose photographs of the riots in Palestine remain intact and in good condition along with several pictures of her second husband, Alan Malcolm-Ellis. Although I met Alan during some of the visits to Lynette at their home in Rottingdean, outside Brighton, she explained that when visitors came to ask her about Kurdistan or talk about Soane, Alan preferred to retire upstairs.

Beyond our initial introduction no occasion arose to ask him about his years – or role – in Palestine. Lynette wrote down details of the riots on the back of each photograph. These photographs I recently sent to the University of Exeter for digitising and study along with Lynette’s letters and the correspondence with Lindfield’s granddaughter in Australia.

6. Cairo, (March 1930) and other locations in Egypt, include a stay by Lynette at the Continental Savoy Hotel with pictures taken in the gardens, March 1929, and others taken in Cairo featuring the social and diplomatic life of British military families and ex-pats there from December 1929 – January 1930. Some postcards of Giza and the pyramids are inserted among them including a well-known, popular set of Arabs posed in the desert with camels, followed by further such tourist postcards of Luxor at the time.

The photographer returned to the Suez Canal, and included a sea view of Calais, and then went on to Tangier, Morocco, in December 1928, adding in some undated images taken in the Sudan, and Dar-es-Salam and Tanganyika, 1926, before the sequencing jumps to 1930 back in Giza again, (and further in 1931).

A formally issued portrait of King Fuad, dated to April 1930 is positioned there, and in March 1931 Lynette returned to Cairo, via Paris, in May 1930.

The images of friends in Cairo span 1930 and 1931 with the final pages of this album captioned Dieppe, Paris, Rouen 1935 & 1937 (making this also a mixed chronology composite photo album of Lynette’s travels undertaken between 1926-1931) – the last few photos have evidently been added to the album after it was first inscribed.

7. 1931-1933 spans pictures taken in Jordan, greater Syria, (incl. Lebanon’s Beirut, and Baalbek), then Mesopotamia; Lynette visited and photographed Ctesiphon, Baghdad’s best-known landmarks, Behistun (with its famous inscription in the rock face carved into the stone by Darius 1 in three languages), her travels back to Baghdad’s shrine in Kazimain (Kadhimain), the ruins of Babylon, the ziggurat of Dur Kurigalzu, the ziggurat of Ur, and several out of order pictures of the Roman ruins in Baalbeck, 1931.

(The photos were inserted out of order, because they revert to Iraq, in 1933, with the desert fort of Ukhaidir featured, then move on to Jordan, and Sinai, with a few general distant views of Mosul, (a few are missing leaving only the inscriptions of where they once were). Lynette returned to Kurdistan in 1933 and there this album suddenly ends unfinished.

A monograph for the Royal Geographical Society

From her last visit to Kurdistan, and before her marriage to Alan Malcolm-Ellis while stationed in Palestine, Lynette composed a monograph about the Kurds and the political situation as she found it on her return between 1931-1933. It was called ‘A Recent Journey to Kurdistan ‘(1935).

She had long since become a firm friend of Adela Khanum, the female Kurdish ruler of Halabja back in 1919, who wrote to her affectionately after their separation through Lynette’s onward travels. 4 She had a basis for comparison for the changes between her first stay there with Soane and her solo return in a different political era.

Meetings with Kurds in her last years

An interesting aside here is that during several visits to Lynette in the coastal village of Rottingdean, I took along several Kurds (at different dates), including a granddaughter of her old friend, Adela Khanum, Ronak Jaff. On yet another trip, Susan Meiselas came down with me from London and we pushed Lynette in her wheelchair up the hill to enjoy the sea air. Alan was deceased by this time.

Between such visits, Lynette wrote letters to me, and shared phone chats. She was entering her nineties but was as enthusiastic as ever about her time spent among the Kurds. She had also enjoyed the company of Kurdish patriot and businessman, Dara Attar, who had hoped to establish a Kurdish library and include her work.

The Soane Trust for Kurdistan

After her death, Lynette’s probate lawyers informed me of a small legacy left in my name. Accordingly, I set up the Soane Trust for Kurdistan and assembled a small board of specialist volunteers.

We selected a handful of academic projects to support and published Iranian Kurdish writer and linguist, Anwar Soltani’s momentous research work, The Anthology of Kurdish (Gorani) Poetry. The launch we then held in London was attended by Kurds from all parts of their divided homeland and of diverse political backgrounds.

The trust also sponsored the launch of Kurdistan in the Shadow of History with Susan Meiselas signing copies of the book.

Kurdish writers and intellectuals attending both events included Ismet Sherif Vanly, Ibrahim Ahmad, Jalal Jaff, Hazhir Teimourian, Anwar Soltani, and several other prominent Kurdish thinkers, writers and political figures of the day.

Becoming history

The Soane Trust was wound up after the remaining funds helped several Kurdish students complete their academic studies. It had served its purpose, and, in my view, it served this purpose in the spirit of the great travellers, Ely and Lynette Soane, (later Mrs Malcolm-Ellis), far more than ‘Orientalists’. 5

They travelled under great difficulties and took serious risks in getting to know the peoples of the region, their towns and villages and their diverse cultures. It cannot have been easy.

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