Nick Higham, "Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War One" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

---

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Nick Higham
Book: Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution, and the Forgotten Battle of World War One (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Release Date: October 10, 2025

This episode spotlights Nick Higham’s latest book, which uncovers the little-known story of the British military adventure in Baku (present-day Azerbaijan) at the end of World War I. Eschewing the well-trodden trenches of France, this narrative follows a cadre of unconventional British soldiers, diplomats, and spies—“mavericks”—through empire, revolution, oil intrigues, and the peripheries of the Great War. Higham shares how he reconstructed these "forgotten histories," the vivid personalities at the heart of the story, and how their postwar lives reflect deep themes in imperial and personal adventure.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Origins of the Book and Its Subjects

• Higham’s Journey to the Story ([02:47])
  • Retired from the BBC, Higham stumbled upon Ronald Sinclair’s home movies of pre-WWII India, spurring curiosity about Sinclair’s unusual travels.
  • Further research unearthed Sinclair’s involvement (and those of other mavericks) in a “forgotten battle” in Baku during 1918.
  • The book follows five key adventurers—soldiers, spies, oilmen—whose exploits connect through this pivotal campaign.

“There was this extraordinary collection of really colorful people, so I focused on five of them, Sinclair is one of them, and tried to tell the story of the battle...but also their biographies, their backstories and what happened to them after the battle.”
—Nick Higham [04:14]

Researching Forgotten History: Sources and Pitfalls

• Piecing Together Truth from Memoir, Diary, and Official Record ([05:25])
  • Three main sources: unpublished/published memoirs, contemporary diaries and letters, and a “avalanche” of India Office official records (memos, minutes, cables) archived in the British Library.
  • Diaries and memoirs, though first-person, often distorted by selective memory or outright fiction. Higham had to cross-verify through official cables and documentation to separate fact from invention.

“One of the problems is that people who write diaries and then put them in the public domain often rewrite them...And in one case, candidly, I came to the conclusion rather reluctantly that the memoirs written by one of my characters, half of them, were simply made up, pure invention.”
—Nick Higham [07:19]

Setting the Stage: Why Baku, and Why “Mavericks”?

• Strategic Importance of Baku ([08:42], [10:52])
  • The Russian Revolution & the Eastern Front collapse opened the Caucasus to Turkish-German expansion.
  • Baku was a critical oil city—by 1900, half the world’s oil came from there. British concerns centered on denying its resources to the enemy and preventing strategic instability in Persia and British India.
• Lionel Dunsterville: The Archetypal Maverick ([08:42–13:14])
  • Major General Dunsterville’s mission: undertake the near-impossible, bribe local factions to resist the Turks, and travel 600+ miles across snowbound, mountainous terrain in midwinter.
  • Chosen not just for rank, but for his reputation as the real-life template for “Stalky,” Rudyard Kipling’s mischievous, resourceful schoolboy hero.

“Everybody knew, including the planners at the war office in London, that Lionel Dunsterville was the model for Stalky. And they thought what we need here is someone who’s not only militarily experienced but somebody who’s kind of got a Stalky like ability to think outside the box.”
—Nick Higham [12:32]

Other Key Mavericks: Motivations and Engagements

• MacDonell and Noel: Diplomats, Oilmen, Adventurers ([13:33])
  • MacDonell: Oil company executive and vice consul in Baku, instrumental in the British liaison efforts and covert money transfers to sway local powers.
  • Edward Noel: Adventurous vice consul in Persia, skilled at dealing with local tribes crucial to British oil interests. His role as a behind-the-scenes fixer remains mysterious—even to his superiors.
• Unconventional, Multilingual, and Not Always “Posh” ([17:29–19:48])
  • Aside from Sinclair (born to a Liverpool schoolmaster), the team was largely drawn from elite backgrounds. Sinclair’s own “social ascent” came through linguistic gifts (Russian, German, French, Indian languages) and continental education.

The World They Operated In: Risk, Mobility, Secret War

• Hazards of Operating on the Imperial Periphery ([20:17])
  • Persia (nominally neutral) was famine-stricken, war-torn, and riddled with tribal strife. The British missions crossed deserts and mountains in cars and trucks on terrain barely suited for mules—a logistical nightmare.
  • Dunsterville’s column was civil-military, not built for direct combat, yet perpetually at risk.

“This was not country where wheeled vehicles were particularly welcome or particularly at home...You know, this was a hazardous business.”
—Nick Higham [21:53]

Escalation: The Forgotten Battle of Baku

• Secret Missions and Hush-Hush Armies ([22:35])
  • Dunsterville delayed in Persia due to Bolshevik hostility; in the interim, he does local famine relief with a practical eye (“money he pays them will enable them to buy food for themselves and their families.” [23:24]).
  • Reaches Baku with 1,200–1,500 troops, including a contingent of especially tough officers—possibly proto-Special Forces—drawn from the “White Dominions.”
• The Battle’s Outcome ([27:19])
  • Forced to defend Baku with little local support; after six weeks of tough fighting, British and allies evacuate under threat. Tactically a defeat, but the delay “kept the oil-rich city out of enemy hands for six weeks”—a strategic partial win.

Dangerous Retreat and Daring Escapes

• Dramatic Exfiltration, Near Disaster ([27:24])
  • Evacuation led by Dunsterville; especially harrowing for Colonel Toby Rawlinson, who alleged he sailed out of Baku under fire, having threatened to blow up his own dynamite-laden ship rather than surrender.

“[Rawlinson] stands there on the bridge with his gun to this chap's head...lines the bridge with, with piled up cases of dynamite containing extremely...fragile detonators...The gunships at the harbor mouth, Julie, open fire...but astonishingly, the dynamite doesn't go off.”
—Nick Higham [29:02]

Aftermath: Maverick Lives in Peacetime

• War Doesn't End for Everyone in 1918 ([30:25–34:22])
  • Rawlinson: Imprisoned by Turkish nationalists, starved, barely survives as the British government fails to act.
  • Dunsterville: Retires with financial difficulties, founds the Kipling Society, keeps up his reputation as a kind of “elder maverick.”
  • MacDonell: Shifts from adventurer to journalist and author of an unreliable but entertaining memoir.
  • Noel: Becomes a north-west frontier commissioner, radio enthusiast, pursues outlandish schemes like charcoal-fueled cars (which immediately fail).
• Sinclair/"Reginald T. Jones": Living With a Deadly Secret ([34:22–43:40])
  • After the war, Sinclair (born Reg Jones) is haunted by Soviet claims that he masterminded the massacre of the 26 Baku Commissars (actually, a local Transcaspian action), even though he wasn’t present.
  • Spends his life under a new identity; public acknowledgment of his dual life only emerges on his death at age 99.

“He carried this secret with him to the grave...And about three or four weeks after it was published, he died, not surprisingly. And there was an obituary of him in the Times...a second obituary in the Times in which was pointed out that actually he wasn’t Ronald Sinclair, he was in reality Reginald T. Jones and had had an even more colorful life than obituary number one had suggested.”
—Nick Higham [42:15]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On sources and the joy/pitfall of research:

  “The memoirs are just so problematic because people misremember things. People tell stories to make themselves look good or to make what they did sound more exciting...half of them were simply made up, pure invention.”
  —Nick Higham [07:06]

• On the mission’s bizarre qualifications:

  “It was not just what’s on paper...what we need here is someone who’s got a Stalky-like ability to think outside the box. And that, I believe, is why Dunsterville got the job.”
  —Nick Higham [13:05]

• On cultural/language skill:

  “One of the things about these people that astonishes me is their command of language...someone who is, you know, barely able to express himself, even in schoolboy French—I find this staggering.”
  —Nick Higham [19:20]

• On the realities of operating on the imperial fringes:

  “Their racist assumptions, the anti-Semitism, it’s very hard to take. They had wonderful qualities, but they were also, by our modern standards, often rather sort of Neolithic in their attitudes.”
  —Nick Higham [33:24]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Book Genesis & Research Methods: [02:36]–[08:19]
• Enter the Mavericks—Who Were They? [08:19]–[16:59]
• The Mission in Context: Baku's Oil, Geopolitics, WWI: [08:42]–[13:14]
• Class, Language & Maverick Characteristics: [17:29]–[20:17]
• Hazards and Logistics of the Persian-Caucasus Campaign: [20:17]–[22:35]
• Escalation & Outcome: The Battle and Its Aftermath: [22:35]–[30:25]
• Postwar Fates and Lingering Legacies: [30:25]–[43:40]
• Projects on the Horizon for Nick Higham: [44:13]–[46:47]

---

Further Reading & Next Steps

• Higham alludes to possible future works on other eccentric British imperialists, Victorian fraudsters, and a quirky social/art history of laundry.
• The book, Mavericks: Empire, Oil, Revolution, and the Forgotten Battle of World War One, is now available from Bloomsbury.

---

For Listeners Wanting More

This episode offers a thrilling, often humorous but rigorous deep dive into a neglected theater of WWI, full of vivid personalities, imperial panic, daring escapes, tragic and comic postwar lives, and a frank look at both the admirable and problematic qualities of British adventurers. Higham’s storytelling and Dr. Melcher’s probing questions deliver a true slice of historical adventure—with all its mess, myth, and magic.

Transcript

[WhatsApp Narrator]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Experian/Liberty Mutual Narrator]

Learn [e-mail] it's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.

[Nick Hyam]

Experian.

[Home Depot Narrator]

The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot.

[Experian/Liberty Mutual Narrator]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking again with Nick Hyam about his latest book published by Bloomsbury in 2025, titled Mavericks, Empire, Oil Revolution, and the Forgotten Battle of World War I. Now any book that has the word forgotten history or something like that in the title is always very exciting. And this book very much lives up to the sort of thrilling nature that history can have. When we go into the details that maybe aren't where we usually look at. For World War I, we're not going to be talking about trenches in France and Germany. We're actually going to be going somewhere very different, looking at very different kinds of interactions, missions, attempts, some things that happen as planned. But obviously history is way more fun when lots of unexpected things occur too. So I don't want to give too much away at this point because I think we're going to have quite a fun discussion. Nick, thank you so much for joining me to tell me about this book.

[Nick Hyam]

Not at all. Thank you very much for having me.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book. What were you hoping readers would take away from the project?

[Nick Hyam]

Yes, I'm a former BBC correspondent, spent nearly 30 years doing that and when I retired, I decided I would write history books. And you very kindly interviewed me two or three years ago about my first, which was a history of London's water supply. An unpromising subject, but one, I think, which turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. And this one, the second book, I was alerted to the subject many, many years ago when I was at the BBC and I was doing some picture research. I was looking for footage of India, black and white footage of India before the Second World War. And I came across a lot shot by a man called Ronald Sinclair, who had, apart from anything else, filmed himself and another chap driving from India to London, across Persia in a Bullnose Morris and getting stuck in the deserts of Persia and. And so on, which are pretty ambitious trip to have made in a car in those days. And I thought, you sound an interesting man. Sinclair did a bit of research, found he'd already. Before that he'd done the same trip by himself in a Model A Ford going from Beirut to Bombay. And I thought, yeah, I'd be interested to know more about you. And digging into his background, I found that he had been involved fairly tangentially, but one of a number of adventurers, spies, soldiers, I call them mavericks in the book. He had been involved in this forgotten battle in Baku, in what is now Azerbaijan, but was then Russia. And we'll talk a bit more about that perhaps in a minute. And there was this extraordinary collection of really colorful people, so I focused on five of them, Sinclair is one of them, and tried to tell the story of the battle because. But also their biographies, their backstories and what happened to them after the battle, which was fought in August and September 1918.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That's a very helpful introduction. Thank you for giving us that foundation. When we're talking, though, about forgotten histories, obviously, as you've mentioned, there a lot of this was sparked by coming across a particular source, and that's obviously really key in piecing this sort of thing together. But often histories can be forgotten because there are challenges with the sources. So before we go into their biographies and the ways in which they really are quite colourful characters, can you tell us a bit more about the kinds of sources you've used for this and what are some of the cool things about them, but also maybe some of the challenges you had to work with to make them Work?

[Nick Hyam]

Well, I suppose there were three principal sources. One was the memoirs that all of these men wrote subsequently, though they didn't always publish them. And in one case, the memoir is just a short memoir of one particular episode. The second is contemporary diaries and letters, particularly diaries. And the third, which provides an absolute avalanche of information, is official records. And particularly valuable in this case were the records of the India Office, which of course abolished long ago when India was made independent and were deposited in the British Library. So there is an enormous India Office archive there, full of memos and minutes and particularly cable traffic sent from India to London and back again and to Indian government appointees in places other than India itself. Because what we often forget is that although India's. The British Empire in India was obviously based in the subcontinent. It extended to Burma, to Aden, to parts of the Persian Gulf. And then there was a kind of informal empire which was unfair to say it was administered, but it was directed, it was nudged along by Indian government appointees, usually consuls and vice consuls in places like Persia. And so everything that happened in. In particularly Persia, which is a very important field of operations for my mavericks, is recorded in these cables. The. The official record is. Is. Is fine. It's not always comprehensive. The diaries are obviously written at the time. One of the problems is that people who write diaries and then put them in the public domain often rewrite them, so you can't be absolutely certain that what you're getting is the authentic thing. And the memoirs are just so problematic because people misremember things. People tell stories to make themselves look good or to make what they did sound more exciting. And there's a lot of exaggeration. And in one case, candidly, I came to the conclusion rather reluctantly that the memoirs written by one of my characters, half of them, were simply made up, pure invention. You know, he was. It was as if he was trying to write a novel. And you. I. A lot of my time and a fair amount of the book is spent trying to wade through this, working out what was accurate, what was true by, you know, referring to official cables and so on, and what he simply made up.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And this is why sources are both really fun and really challenging. So thank you for telling us a bit about the behind the scenes of figuring all of this out, getting then into some of the mavericks. I'd like to. To start, I think, with Lionel Dunsterville. Who was he and why was he given a mission by the British government? What exactly was this mission? How do we sort of start all this off?

[Nick Hyam]

He was a major general in the Indian Army. And in December 1917, he was given a mission which sounded, as he himself realized, next to impossible. But he decided he would try to pull it off anyway. Just to sketch in the sort of geopolitical background. End of 1917, Russia undergoes the second of two revolutions that year, the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin and Trotsky. And the Bolsheviks make peace with the Germans. The war is unbelievably unpopular in Russia. They make peace with the Germans, basically. Russia's armies spontaneously demobilized. The soldiers just decide they're going to go home. And that's bad news for Russia's allies in the First World War, particularly France and Germany. It means, for one thing, that the Germans can transfer up to a million men from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, which makes possible the Germans 1918 offensive in France. But it also means that further south in the Caucasus, where the Russians have been fighting the Ottoman Turks since very early in the war, there's suddenly the nothing, no opposition to the Turkish armies. And the British look at the map and they see two things. They see, first of all that if the Turks aren't stopped, they can move eastwards towards Baku on the Caspian Sea. Baku, as I said earlier, is now in Azerbaijan. It was oil rich in 1900. Half the world's oil had come from Baku. And any city with huge oil deposits and resources was a really big prize, strategically very important. And the British were desperate to stop the Turks and their German allies getting access to Baku's oil. And there was another fear which was that if they got to Baku, the Turks might then carry on further east across the Caspian into what is today Turkmenistan, but in those days was known as Trans Caspian, and play havoc in Central Asia and do what the British for the last century have been fearing the Russians would do, which is in threatening Central Asia and India. They might create subversion, particularly among the Muslim population in British India. And of course, British India was jewel in Britain's imperial crown. And the last thing the British wanted was a sort of repeat of the Indian mutiny of the 1850s. And so it became imperative to try and stop the Turks. The trouble was, British didn't have an army anywhere near. The nearest one was in, in Baghdad. It had been fought. It had fought in, in Mesopotamia and defeated the Turks there, but it wasn't capable of getting tobacco. So a plan was devised, basically to bribe the local people in the Caucasus, Georgians and Armenians, who were in theory part of the Russian Empire, though they were now trying to break away, bribe them to fight the Germans. And Dunstable was given the job of taking a, a convoy of vans loaded with cash all the way across Persia from Baghdad. It's about 6, 700 miles set out in January in deep mid winter across very high passes, snow covered plateau, get to the Caspian, take a ship, go to Baku, pay the Georgians and the Armenians to go on fighting the Turks. And there was a reason why he particular reason why he got the job. Yes, he was a successful senior army officer in India. But more importantly he had been at school with Rudyard Kipling and Kipling had written a series of school stories based on his Kipling's own experience at school which had been published under the umbrella title of Stalky and company. And they were about three guys, sort of 16, 17 year olds, subversive pranksters. And the leader of the gang was called Stalky. And everybody knew, including the planners at the war office in London that Lionel Dunstable was the model for Storkey. And they thought what we need here is someone who's not only militarily experienced but somebody who has kind of got a Stalky like ability to think outside the box. And that I believe is why Dunstable got the job.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's really interesting the sort of qualifications on paper, the strangeness in some ways of the mission and therefore you kind of have to go not just with what's on paper. Is that true for two of the other mavericks that Dunsterville eventually connects up with? And we've got MacDonnell and Noel. How did they end up in Baku and what were they trying to accomplish?

[Nick Hyam]

Well MacDonell had been for many years the British Vice Consul, the diplomatic representative in Baku. This was originally a part time job. He was a executive in the oil industry working for one of the oil companies. And he got involved because after the revolution and the collapse of Russian power the his bosses said to him you'd be better off joining an existing British military mission in Tbilisi. They called it Tiflis at the time, which is the capital of Georgia, where the British had had had a sort of liaison group with the local czarist arm was the, the army. The Tsarist army had collapsed but the British were still there sending information intelligence back. And McDonald was sent off to Tiflis to join this group and given the job of bringing money, not just the money that Dunstable was bringing but other money from Baku to Tiflis. And he traveled backwards and forwards in a private train which had belonged to the Grand Duke who was in charge of the Tsarist armies before the revolution. And Edward Noel had been one of these British vice consuls in Persia where he had spent much of his time wrangling with a particularly troublesome tribe called the Bakhtiaris, a nomad tribe who were very important to the British because in their territory were more oil wells, more oil, the oil deposits that eventually formed the basis for the Anglo Persian Oil Company which eventually became bp. And so keeping the Baktiaris on side was very important and Noel was an adventurer spirit. And Noel was given the job of taking money from Persia to Baku and then handing it on to MacDonald to distribute to the Georgians. And he and Noel traveled backwards and forwards. It's not clear from the record exactly how many times on this train. The final occasion, the Turks had basically infiltrated the whole of the Caucasus, so they had to run the gauntlet of armed opposition on the way back to Baku. And Noel subsequently wrote about having a confused memory of traveling in a luxury Pullman car while an attractive woman dealt cards and they drank champagne to the crackle and roar of burning stations. So and, and Noel had had another role because passing through Baku immediately after the revolution, astonishingly, and I have no idea why, he appeared to go from Persia to Saint Petersburg to Petrograd and arrived just in time for the October Revolution. I have no idea who sent him, I have no idea why he went. And interestingly, his bosses at the time didn't either. But anyway, there he was. He went back to the Caucasus on his way back to Persia, stopped off in Baku in December 1917 and he was the man who said what we need in this part of the world is someone to encourage the locals to go on fighting. We need someone who's got military experience, who's politically adroit. And that was the seed from which Dunstable's expedition grew.

[Blinds.com Narrator]

@Blinds.Com it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 40% off site, wide and free professional installation rules and restrictions apply.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

This is, I think, where the idea of Maverick comes in. Of wait, why was he there? No one seems to know. We don't know now they didn't know then. Clearly he had ideas of his own and had all sorts of kind of background and connections to enable that. I mean, words like Viceroy certainly tell us something about class background. Were all of these mavericks posh people?

[Nick Hyam]

They were all posh people except Sinclair, who started life as a schoolteacher's son in Liverpool, but had the. I suppose it was good fortune to be sent off as a teenager to St Petersburg to be educated. We assume that there was some sort of family friend there who wanted our boy to be companion to their son. And as a result of that, he was sent off to an elite school in St Petersburg where, in fact, they were taught in German. So he emerged able to speak Russian and German fluently, as well as French. And he subsequently went to India, first of all was a policeman in the Punjab. He hated that. And then as a member of something called the Frontier Constabulary, which fought tribal raiders in the Northwest Frontier Province of what's now Pakistan. And he taught himself several other Indian languages. And one of the things about these people that astonishes me is their command of language. Dunstable spoke 8. He spoke Russian, German, French, Persian, Pashtu, Punjabi, Russian, said Russian, Chinese, and I think I've missed one out. And. And he spoke all of these to a level which qualified him as an interpreter for the British Army. So he'd done exams and so on, and someone who is, you know, barely able to express himself, even in. In schoolboy French. I find this staggering.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that's definitely worth highlighting the number of them and also that particular grouping in combination. It's not like those languages are all sort of related to each other and easy to switch between. We're not talking about, I don't know, speaking Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian.

[Nick Hyam]

No, they belong to. Belong to completely different language families. I mean, he, he, he. Dunstanville disclaimed any great talent for languages. He said, I'm not a linguist, despite.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, maybe you were digging them up. I imagine, though, that speaking all these languages would be really helpful in this sort of context anyway. But pro. Especially given that we are, as you mentioned earlier, right, we're in the middle of a war here. So how dangerous was it to be one of these mavericks running around trying to do all sorts of things, some of which London knew about, some of which they didn't. Obviously the languages would help, but this was risky, right?

[Nick Hyam]

Yes, it was. I mean, there was straightforward war fighting. Dunstable was going not to fight himself, because he didn't. I mean, he set out from Baghdad with 41 Ford vans and cars, 41 drivers, 12 officers, one of whom had a Lewis submachine gun, a light machine gun and two Sergeant Clarks. So this was not a war fighting outfit, but he was going into a war zone. He expected to be working alongside people in Georgia and Armenia who would be fighting. So yeah, there was the obvious danger that it was a war zone. Persia was in theory a neutral country, but in fact for the last two or three years a Russian army and a Turkish army had been fighting in Turkey, in Persia, as a result of which Persia was in a dreadful state. Its central government had collapsed anyway, it was famine stricken. There were all the kind of hazards of traveling through very mountainous country. Bear in mind that Dunstanville was traveling with a convoy of motor vehicles on roads that had been developed principally for mules and camels. I mean, this was not country where wheeled vehicles were particularly welcome or particularly at home. So there were all those dangers. There was then as the story developed, the fact that Georgia, Armenia, what is now Azerbaijan and Transcaspia were trying to break away from Russia. They'd been part of the Russian empire. The revolution had destroyed the tsarist government. They wanted to be independent and the Bolsheviks wanted them back. So they were fighting the Bolsheviks and the Brits were fighting the Bolsheviks with them alongside them. And we're talking also about a part of the world in which not only were there Persian mountains and so on, there were also deserts. I mean, most of Transcaspia is a desert. The eastern side of Persia through which Sinclair traveled was, was desert. Three weeks traveling on a camel and on horseback through country with absolutely virtually nothing in the way of water and so on. You know, this was a hazardous business.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And it is a hazardous business for the group of mavericks. But you mentioned there, there's other people involved. We've got 40 trucks going on which as you've described sounds very precarious, but we do sort of get to a point where it's not just 40 trucks. We've got a thousand British troops being deployed in defense of Baku, which is really far away from most things British at this point. How do we get to that point?

[Nick Hyam]

Well, Dunstable sets off on this mission and expects to get to Baku only to discover when he, after about three weeks traveling across Persia, when he gets to the port of Enzeli, as it was called then at the southern end of the Caspian, which is in Persia. But even so, he discovers it's been taken over by a Russian Bolshevik Soviet and the, the Bolsheviks won't let him set sail. For Baku. And the reason is that the Bolsheviks have come to a peace treaty with the Germans. They want the war to end. And here is Dunstable saying, I'm going to continue the war. I want to keep the Turks out of Baku. And the Bolsheviks said, well, we want the war to stop, so we're not going to let you go anywhere near Baku. And this is actually humiliating and a bit of a poser. So for the next right through until July, whatever that is, five months, I think he effectively marks time in Persia. He has to, has to find ways to occupy himself. One of the things he does is famine relief. He employs a lot of the local men to build roads which obviously will make his own movement and supply easier. But also the money he pays them will enable them to buy food for themselves and their families. And I found, it's in the book. I found a wonderful photograph, often in enormous steamroller built in Kent, an invicta steamroller which has somehow been brought all the way to Persia and over the mountain passes and so on, and is busily rolling a new road through Persia as part of Dunstable's operations. And while he is in Persia, there's a lot of toing and froing about what the new situation means. And eventually he's given reinforcements. He's given reinforcements of two kinds. One is regular infantry with some cavalry and some airplanes and artillery to the number of about 1500 who are to accompany him to tobacco. And he's also given, I think it's about 430 the numbers. It's not quite possible to pin down the exact numbers. About 430 specially selected officers and NCOs, mostly from what Britain called its white dominions, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, who've been specially recruited mostly in France because they're all tough and brave and, and so on. And they have been sent off on what is actually a very secret mission. I mean, Dunstable's mission was, was not reported at all. It was not made public until much, much later. And people in the know called it the hush hush army was a hush hush venture. And these chaps had been selected. Some people say, oh well, Dunstables was one of the very first Special Forces operations because these chaps sound as if they ought to have been special forces types and probably were actually. Their main job was to try and train the locals in Persia. And if they ever got there, the locals in the Caucasus volunteer militia to fight because the British had no troops themselves. So he had, by the time he was finally allowed by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks had been overthrown so they weren't there to stop him. By the time he was finally allowed by the War Office and finally invited by the Bolsheviks replacements in Baku to go to Baku to try and fend off the Turks, he had about 1500 troops of home. Around 1200 were deployed to Baku itself. But by then it was too late. The Turks were at the, the gates, the city was surrounded and 1200 Brits, however bravely they fought, and they did fight very bravely to the death in some cases and however well disciplined they were, simply couldn't make a difference. So after about six weeks Dunstable was forced to evacuate the city. That was a defeat, tactical defeat, but arguably a strategic victory because this was August, September 1918, outcome of the war still in the balance. To have kept the oil rich city of Baku out of enemy hands for six weeks, that was an achievement.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

What happened next though? He's retreating. Where does he retreat to? How does that go?

[Nick Hyam]

Well, he retreats back to this port of Enzeli in Persia where he, Dunstable is promptly fired largely because he sent some very angry cables to his commanding officer in Baghdad complaining that he wasn't given enough support and he thinks he's going to be court martialed. He wasn't. My surmise would be because they were a bit worried about what might come out if he were, you know, what other evidence might accrue. But the evacuation process itself is very successful. He gets all his men, all his surviving men and his wounded onto ships and takes them to Enzeli. The, the, the, the, the, the one who has the most exciting voyage if you like, is a colonel working for him, a man called Toby Rawlinson, who is the younger brother of Henry Rawlinson, is one of the most senior generals in the British army. And Rawlinson, Toby is a bit of a black sheep. He's a man really who's dedicated his life to dangerous sports. He's, he holds pilot's license number three in the uk. He is a racing driver before for danger and excitement and risk. And he has joined Dunstable and been put in charge of Dunstable's artillery. And he tries to evacuate as much of that artillery as he can on board a little ship sailing out of Baku harbour on the night they evacuate. And the Baku authorities don't want the British to leave because obviously if they do, they fear the city will be defenceless and they say if you leave we will shoot at you. We have gunboats at the harbour entrance which will shoot at you and Rawlinson's captain knows this and is absolutely terrified and really, really doesn't want to set sail. So Rawlinson stands there on the bridge with his gun to this chap's head. And lest the dissident crew, the captain's crew, try to storm the bridge or whatever, he lines the bridge. This is his story anyway. He lines the bridge with, with piled up cases of dynamite containing extremely. What's the word? Fragile detonators, Detonators that will go off, you know, the slightest shock. And he says, if anybody tries to shoot us or storm the bridge, you know, the whole ship will go up in, in, in, in, in, in flames. And so he sails out of Baku harbor at night. The gunships at the harbor mouth, Julie, open fire. According to Rollinson, they hit his ship, but astonishingly, the dynamite doesn't go off. And Rawlinson lives to tell the tale and eventually, a day late, joins Dunstable in Persia. But that was, if Rawlinson's account is true, and I think much of it is, in substance, it's true. That was an incredibly dangerous, brave and risky thing to do.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, he definitely seems to be one of the mavericks in the book that takes a lot of risks and in fact that continues because World War I, of course, ends in 1918. But that's not quite true for all the mavericks, right?

[Nick Hyam]

Absolutely. Two of them in particular. Rawlinson is one and this chap Sinclair is the other. Rawlinson stays on in the army, and when the Turks sue for peace, the British send an army of occupation into Turkey based in Constantinople, and the Turks agree under the terms of the armistice to disarm. And Rawlinson is given the job of overseeing the disarmament process at a city in the Far east of Turkey, Anatolia, called Erzeroum, which is a big military headquarters. And he spends some time there and realizes that the Turks have no intention of disarming. And the reason for this is that while the Turkish government in Constantinople, led by the Sultan, has sued for peace, Turkey's generals, led by Kemal Ataturk, who became eventually president of, of Turkey, have, don't believe that they should, should settle the peace they want. Their nationalists, they want to establish an independent Turkey and they're hanging on to all the weapons, weapons in order to be able to fight their own government and indeed anybody else who tries to stop them setting up an independent Turkey. And Rawlinson is a victim of this. He is eventually arrested by the Turkish nationalists along with a handful of his men and thrown into prison, where he remains for the best part of two years as a hostage. And the British government, which could have taken steps to free him, is very. Drags its feet and doesn't do much. And the conditions in which he and his men are held grow gradually worse and worse, until at one point they are starving and then they're told they're going to be released and they're taken down to the port of Trebzond on the Black Sea coast and they feed themselves up in restaurants and they get some money from the Ottoman bank and it's all going swimmingly. And then they're told you're not being released after all. So they had to go back to Erzerum and further incarceration. And I think it. It took a bit. It took a. It took a lot for Rollinson to survive that. He was not a young man, but rather touchingly his may. His men do seem to have been, you know, devoted to him. I mean, they had no alternative. Basically. They were all in this together. And he's very careful in his memoir to. To pray, to praise them all except for one who was an Irishman who he thinks betrayed them to the Turks and then sloped off. But then, what can you expect of Irishman? I'm afraid some of the attitudes of my mavericks, the racist assumptions, the anti Semitism, it's very hard to take. They had wonderful qualities, but they were also, by our modern standards, often rather sort of Neolithic in their attitudes.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Definitely not always able to fit into how we live now. But that was kind of also true even then. I mean, maybe not for those reasons, but mavericks by definition sort of don't fit into sort of quote, unquote, normal society that. Well, they were chosen or got involved in these wartime things, things partially because they were not fitting in and were able to sort of do things that maybe other people would find too risky or not be willing to do. What happens then when the mavericks are now in peacetime? That doesn't sound like it would sort of work that well for them.

[Nick Hyam]

I suppose you could say it doesn't. Dunsterville has quite a successful retirement, except that he's always strapped for cash. He finds his Indian army pension is very difficult. But he is widely liked and admired and is the founding president of something called the Kipling Society, trading on his earlier arrangement, earlier acquaintance with Kipling. Kipling hates the Kipling Society. Why can't you wait until I'm dead? He says. But the answer of Kipling Society founders is, well, we'll be dead too by then. So they found a society to celebrate Kipling and Dunstable as its first president and he publishes a number of memoirs and so on. So he has a sort of success, successful retirement. Rawlinson, I think, was physically broken by what he went through and also discovered that his wife had been two timing in while he was in. In jail. So he has a somewhat depressing time. MacDonald goes through all sorts of jobs. The man in Baku works in the city for a time, eventually becomes a journalist, which of course is what most people do, can't do anything else, and writes a very entertaining, though not, not wholly reliable memoir. Noel goes back into government service, the Indian government service. He's appointed a consul elsewhere in Persia and eventually ends up on the northwest frontier in India as one of the government's commissioners there, where he gets involved in all sorts of. He's a very interesting man, Noel, because he's a spy, he's a soldier, he's a plotter, he's also an opium addict, interestingly, and he's an agricultural reformer. And when he gets to the northwest frontier in the 1930s, he becomes very enthusiastic about broadcasting. So he becomes a broadcaster on the early radio station in Peshawar and he's full of crackpot schemes. At one point he decides that charcoal, which is abundant in India, is a much cheaper and better fuel than petrol and could be used to power motor guards. And to prove this, he sets out with two Rolls Royces to drive from London to India. One of the Rolls Royces fueled by charcoal, and this is written up in the papers before he goes, and there are photographs and so on. And rather cynical fellow, as they set off, is quoted by a journalist saying, I don't think they'll make it. I think they'll get as far as Fontainebleau. And the cynic was wrong because they didn't even get as far as Fontainebleau. They. They threw the charcoal device away at Dover. So that's the sort of thing that Noel gets up to, eventually marries a second time to an Belgian. He's a Roman Catholic. He marries a second time, a Belgian artist and mystic. And the, the one who has the most interesting afterlife, if you like, is Sinclair, because I'm going to. I'm going to spill one of the sort of secrets of the. The book. Now, the man who I first encountered as Ronald Sinclair, a sort of world traveler and filmmaker in the 1930s, started life as Reg Jones and then renamed himself Reginald T Jones. So the schoolmaster's son in Liverpool was Reg Jones and he, he was in Baku briefly during the battle working on Dunstable's staff, but his real job was on the other side of the Caspian, where he was the British point man with the the local breakaway government which had set itself up in Transcaspia in opposition to Bolshevik Russia. And in that capacity, he finds himself involved in fighting Bolsheviks who are trying to. To retake Transcaspia. But he also finds himself, for instance, printing a currency. The Transcaspian government is broke, doesn't have any money, so the British agree that they will print banknotes and Teague Jones Sinclair signs all of them himself. And this episode, which lasts until 1919, when the British shenfle actually abandoned the Transcaspians, whom they've agreed to support because it's domestic politics at home, mean that it just doesn't make sense any longer to maintain a small army and the British presence and spend all this money on propping up a regime which the Bolsheviks are trying to overthrow. So the poor old Transcaspians are left to their own devices and Teague Jones comes away. But before that happens happens, he is embroiled in an episode which every Soviet school child was taught about, called the massacre of the 26 Baku commissars. So bear with me, just explain this briefly. As I said, there was at one stage before Dunstable got there, there was a Bolshevik regime in Baku which wouldn't let Dunstanville sail. They didn't want anyone prolonging the war. When it became clear that the Turks were on the point of, of capturing Baku, this Bolshevik regime was overthrown and Dunstable was invited in. 26 leading members of the regime, known as the 26 commissars, were imprisoned in Baku. And then when the city fell to the Turks, they were released and got onto a ship which they hoped would take them north up the Caspian to Bolshevik controlled territory in Astrakhan. Instead, for reasons that are disputed and are unclear, the ship didn't go north, it went east to the, to Transcaspia, where the British were in control. And these chaps were arrested again, not by the British, by the local Transcaspians, but with British knowledge and approval. And they were a bit of an embarrassment to the Transcaspians. And so two or three days later, they were put on a train and taken out into the desert and shot. And the British subsequently got the blame for this. When the Bolsheviks ultimately, a year or so later, discovered what had happened, the people who'd been running Transcaspia said, it wasn't our idea, it wasn't our idea, it was the British idea. And what's More. It was Reginald T. Jones's idea. Reginald T. Jones told us to do it. This was not true. Anyone who studies the thing in any detail knows that this was unfair. It didn't stop this myth taking hold in the Soviet Union of the shocking behavior of the British imperialist British and the massacre of the 26 commissars. And there were books written about it, plays, and two films made about it. There's a very famous painting showing the heroic commissars facing a firing squad. And on one side there are three British officers looking off. There were no British officers within 200 miles of the firing squad. But Teague Jones was named as the man responsible. Now he does have, I think, some responsibility. He went to a meeting at which was discussed what should be done with the commissars. And he could have said, look, you know, you do what you want with them, but don't shoot them. We won't. We don't like that. We wouldn't approve of that. But he didn't. If he'd spoken up, it's possible they would have survived. But he didn't speak up. So he's mildly guilty, if you like, by omission. But he had. He'd absolutely not, his suggestion or any other Britain's suggestion that they should be killed. Nonetheless, he lived the rest of his life under fear and under the fear justifiable, I think, that the Soviets would track him down and assassinate him, which was why he changed his name. He changed his name from Reginald Teague Jones to Ronald Sinclair in, I think, from memory, 1923. And he carried this secret with him to the grave. And he lived a very long life. As I say, he was a traveler and possibly a spy in the 1920s and 30s. Then he went to New York during World War II and was a spy, worked for British Intelligence in New York. And then he became a diplomat. He retired and he carried this secret with him to his grave. And it was particularly interesting because at the age of 99, he published his first book under the name Ronald Sinclair. And the book was an account that he'd written of that first journey he'd taken by car in 1926, a Ford car across Persia all by himself. And it's quite an entertaining book. And. And about three or four weeks after it was published, he died, not surprisingly. And there was an obituary of him in the Times written by his publisher. The man who had published this book, who thought he was an interesting chap, deserved an obituary. And then a few days later, there was a second obituary in the Times in which was pointed out that actually he wasn't Ronald Sinclair, he was in reality Reginald T. Jones and had had an even more colorful life than obituary number one had suggested.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, this is really quite fascinating. They're mavericks very clearly kind of for a long time. It's not a one off thing for them turning up in somewhere like Baku in World War I. So thank you for giving us that sketch of their lives here. Obviously the book has way more details about all of them for our listeners who want more of that. But before I let them go off to read it and Nick, you go back to the rest of your day. Is there anything you want to tell us about any upcoming projects? I don't know if you've come across for example a cool source here that you couldn't include that is now book number three or anything you want to give us a sneak preview of.

[Nick Hyam]

Well, I need to have a discussion with my agent and my publisher about this. There is a lot of over matter from this book. There were lots of other people who were involved either in Persia and Mesopotamia or in Russia around the time of the revolution. Brits who were were just as much mavericks and I'd like to find a way to write a book about them. The difficulty is finding a thread. The thread that links these five men is that they were all involved in one way and another in the battle of Baku. I haven't yet managed to find a thread that links the others that I would like to write about. Failing that, I quite like to write a book about Victorian fraudsters. The Victorian era was the great age of. Of fraud. For the first time you had a large affluent middle class who had money that they wanted to invest and you had new projects, businesses, industries, railways, the original one, but lots of others which needed money. Mining in particular was a particular source of fraud and scams and. And the Victorian period was full of people who basically launched fraudulent companies and suckered ordinary investors into putting money into them. And some of these people are remarkable characters so I'd like to write about them. And also the other thing I'd like to write about, though I don't think you could make this one pay is the Art of Laundry one of the spin offs from my first book which was about at the the water supply of London was a fascination with the business of doing laundry which before modern washing machines was a really arduous important task. It was the way people for the most part kept clean. It was absolutely vital to personal hygiene. It was done by women. It was incredibly hard work and ubiquitous laundry was everywhere. What I discovered is that it, it, it's subject that absolutely fascinated Pentas. I kind of never, once you start looking, there are things, so many paintings, Both from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries and contemporary of people doing laundry, of laundry hanging out to die, that runs the complete gamut of kind of artistic styles and so on. So I'd love to write that book, a combination of social history and art history, but I don't, I don't think there's any money in it. So probably nobody would agree to publish it.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, we shall find out, I suppose. But while you pursue those many interesting projects and threads, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Mavericks, Empire, Oil Revolution and the Forgotten Battle of World War I, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Nick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Nick Hyam]

Not at all. Thank you very much for having. And Doug, here we have the Limu.

[Experian/Liberty Mutual Narrator]

Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.

[Nick Hyam]

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us.

[Blinds.com Narrator]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty.

[Nick Hyam]

Liberty.

[Blinds.com Narrator]

Liberty Savings Ferry. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.