The Arab Revolt, Palestine, 1939
Lieutenant Clive Rivett-Carnac, Sherwood Foresters
War Cloister, Winchester College

In retrospect Britain should have tried hard not to get involved. When the League of Nations decided that Britain should have the mandate to govern Palestine, until such time as it was a state with the viability to govern itself, Britain could have avoided thirty years of grief by refusing, and Clive Rivett-Carnac could have lived on for at least a few more years.

Many would argue, but I suggest that the government of Palestine could have been left to the Palestinians. However,  the colonial mindset was, and probably still is, difficult to overcome. The British felt that they were the proper people to govern until such time as the Palestinians were regarded as being fit to govern themselves, and so they did, although whether they truly foresaw the impact of Jewish immigration is doubtful.

In 1918 Palestine had a population of six hundred and sixty thousand, of which about seventy-five thousand were Christian and sixty thousand Jewish. That meant about 8% of the population were Jewish, a percentage that had been stable since 1880, albeit the actual numbers had gone up. In Europe and the USA there was a vociferous and influential lobby which was promoting the concept of Palestine being the Jewish homeland, but it was only after the First World War that the numbers in Palestine grew. 

Prompted by ceaseless anti-semitism, and taking advantage of the collapse of the defeated empires of World War One, Jews from Eastern Europe emigrated to Palestine, so that by 1922 they comprised 17% of the population. This obviously created tension with the resident Arabs, and with the British who were attempting to control the immigration figures, but it was a tension that was, from the British point of view and more importantly from the Arab point of view, manageable.

When Nazism came to the fore in Germany, however, the situation in Palestine changed dramatically. Between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population grew by over two hundred thousand, and comprised 28% of the population. The German Jews were more urbanised, sophisticated  and educated than previous waves, which meant the British administration could communicate with them more easily and identify with them more readily. An English-speaking well-qualified professional was more likely to have his argument heard than a Palestinian peasant farmer. This mattered, because the new wave of immigrants also brought with them wealth, money with which they could buy businesses and property and, very significantly, land. The new landowners still required workers to tend the land of course, and that could be done by the existing Palestinian workforce, but that did not, in many cases, happen. The Jewish community preferred to employ Jewish labour, and consequently large numbers of rural Palestinians found themselves unemployed and forced to seek work in the cities.

Marginalised and jobless, feeling like victims and outcasts in their own land, Palestinian resentment festered and grew. Initially there was a General Strike, lasting from April to October 1936,  amongst the Palestinian population, but as so often a peaceful protest degenerated into violence. Jews attacked Palestinians and Palestinians attacked Jews and eventually people were killed. As is usually the case the killings became tit for tat, and the authorities were forced to become involved.

As the strikers were effecting British businesses as well as Jewish ones, it is not surprising that over time there appeared to be more clamping down on Palestinians rather than Jews, and so the British authorities became regarded, in Palestinian minds, as being pro-Jewish. The British would say they were just defending law and order, which was probably true, and that they were even-handed, which, as they came under criticism from within the Jewish community for being too soft on the protesters, may also have been true. The Palestinians did not see it that way, however, and the strike morphed into armed resistance, targeting Jews, but also targeting the British police and military.

In essence, the British were now fighting a guerrilla war, and by July 1938 the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that reinforcements had to be sent from Egypt, and then, in September, from Britain itself. The police were placed under military control, and in October troops were sent to occupy Jerusalem. The heavy military presence calmed the situation in the cities, but the rural resistance continued, and that is where Lieutenant Clive Rivett-Carnac found himself in August 1939.

Clive Rivett-Carnac was the fifth son of  Charles Rivett-Carnac and Frances Clyde Greenstock, his second wife.  Charles was an Indian civil servant who became Accountant General in Burma and then Financial Advisor to the Siamese Government. Twenty years his junior, Frances was the daughter of a colonial churchman, and together they made Olympic history in 1908 when they became the first husband and wife team to win a gold medal, with Charles still holding the record for being the oldest Briton to have won a yachting gold. The achievement is slightly tempered by their boat being the only entrant in its class.

Clive was their youngest son and was educated at Winchester College. He was a keen boxer and marksman, so perhaps entering the army was a natural progression. He went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters in 1936. His last school report said that he "successfully resisted all attempts to conventionalise a naturally independent and irresponsible temperament". Three years after his commission he had not lost it, so he cannot have been that irresponsible.

He was unlucky, as he was one of the last British soldiers to be killed in Palestine before the advent of the Second World War, when the Palestinian resistance effectively ceased. It was August 1939, and dusk, when he and his troop were returning back to base near Haifa. Close to a village identified at the time as Beit Hamma (which I have failed to locate) the British soldiers were ambushed by a group of about sixty Palestinians, firing at close range from both sides of the road. The radio operator managed to summon air support quickly, and under the aerial threat the attackers fled, leaving seventeen dead. The British troops suffered three wounded and one fatality, the twenty-three year old Clive Rivett-Carnac. 

​He was buried two days later in the Ramleh Military Cemetery, now in Ramla, Israel. His father had predeceased him, but his mother lived until 1962, dying in Hampstead, presumably still mourning her youngest son.

Sources

www.winchestercollegeatwar.com - an excellent look at all the military fates of the college's former pupils
www.thepeerage.com
Nottingham Evening Post 19th August 1939
Palestine Post 20th August 1939
www.palijourneys.org - an interesting look at inter-war Palestine
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

Photo of Clive Rivett-Carnac from www.winchestercollegeatwar.com