“Mr. Was Admirable”
When Winston Churchill took over as Secretary of State for the Colonies in January 1921 Britain was spending some thirty million pounds a year on the British Army in Mesopotamia.1 The enormous cost was receiving bad press, but the financial burden on both the British taxpayer and the wider Empire was a symptom of the underlying challenge—a sustainable future for Mesopotamia.
Following the end of the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a reasonably stable security situation in Mesopotamia had degenerated by the summer of 1920. The British administration had struggled to maintain authority, and violent uprising had led “near to a complete collapse of society,” with the result that the government called the administration in Baghdad for a report.2
The Acting Civil Commissioner A. T. Wilson “entrusted responsibility for the preparation of A Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia to Miss G. L. Bell CBE, a senior member of his staff.3 The report was published on 3 December 1920 and provided an account of the civil administration during the military occupation from 1914 until that year.
On 31 December, Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Cabinet resolved to set up a new inter-departmental committee to recommend the establishment of a new department to take over the mandated territories and other territories in the Middle East from the Foreign Office, India Office, and War Office.
Churchill as Colonial Secretary
The Cabinet proposal made on the last day of 1920 went into effect on 14 February
