MURDER OF LIEUTENANT LAWRENCE

The news of the murder of Lieutenant Lawrence, at the time the Assistant Resident on Perim, was passed by the superintendent of the Eastern Telegraph Company’s office on Perim to his opposite number in Aden. His telegram, sent at 0645 on 2 September 1924, read: “Inform resident soonest assistant resident found this morning murdered sentries bolted telephone cut stop just reported to me by his butler and lance corporal ahmed saleh stop doctor advised.”

This news was followed less than two hours later by a telegram from Mr Davey, the manager of the Perim Coal Company, who would later receive a commendation from the Resident for his handling of the affair. Lawrence had received multiple bayonet wounds and his servant was missing in addition to the sentries. The safe had been emptied and 12 rifles taken as well as two boxes and 80 rounds of loose ammunition. Lawrence would be buried later that day.

The Resident was on leave but his 1st Assistant, Major Barrett the locum tenens, was quick to react to this emergency. He despatched the station ship, the RIMS Cornwallis which arrived at Perim late on the 2nd. She was carrying the Assistant Political Resident, Major Murphy, who would conduct the enquiry, and Lieutenant Colonel Lake who was the commanding officer of the 1st Yemen Infantry, one of whose platoons was providing the detachment on Perim. Lawrence was one of Lake’s officers, on attachment from his own regiment, the West Yorkshires. The Cornwallis also carried a replacement platoon from the Indian infantry battalion in Aden, from the Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, one of the ‘crack’ regiments of the Indian Army, it having been quickly appreciated that the Yemen Infantry would have to be withdrawn from the island.

Whilst Murphy was conducting his enquiry on the 3rd, Lake temporarily filled in as Assistant Resident. The facts soon emerged: the two junior NCOs and three privates of the guard, together with Lawrence’s personal servant, had fled to the mainland at Sheikh Syed in a sambok, the crew of which had been paid 300 Rupees. All this was quickly ascertained as the crew had been arrested by the Iman at Sheikh Syed and the 300 rupees recovered. The telephone line to the exchange (which was in the Coal Company’s office) had been cut and the line on to the barracks (by the lighthouse) had been expertly interfered with.

Having completed his enquiry Murphy was puzzled by several aspects of the case, which taken together suggested that more people had been involved than the six being sought: the number of bayonet wounds was very large; none of those implicated were signallers, but the telephone had been tampered with by someone who knew what they were doing; the amount of loot was somewhat heavy for six men to carry; the discharge of the Arab officer who had detailed the guard as being unsatisfactory was already being considered prior to the murder; finally, the guard on the petrol dump at the aerodrome, past which the six would have gone on their way to be picked up by the sambuk, professed to have heard nothing. In due course all the remaining members of the platoon would be discharged and deported into the Protectorate, and banned for life from entering Aden.

By 6 September all the rifles had been recovered, including seven by a local sheikh who had followed the culprits and somehow persuaded the six to hand them over. (The others, with half the ammunition had been hidden in caches before the group had left the island.) Over 1,100 rupees had also been recovered, but about 5,000 were still missing as well as 750 rounds of ammunition.

What was being done to catch the culprits? On 4 September Lake had urged the Resident to offer a reward, and he thought 1,000 rupees to be a suitable amount. In fact the reward when advertised was for 500 rupees for each man captured, or 250 rupees for information that would lead to capture. The sheikhs of each of the men was written to and urged to find and hand their man over. By 27 September the reward had been raised by the Resident to 2,000 rupees per man – a huge sum, being around 10 years pay for most of the Arabs on Perim employed by the Coal Company or Government. This hike in the size of the reward was because it was thought of paramount importance to keep up British prestige.

Three of the men were thought to have been detained briefly in Taiz, but it was not until 20 November that the first reward could be paid; another was paid the following February – but these were the only successes. They were court-martialled in June – not for murder, for which there was insufficient evidence of their involvement - but for desertion, for which one received two years imprisonment and the other only one year, both with hard labour, but with the proviso that they could subsequently be tried for murder if sufficient evidence was forthcoming. In August Lawrence’s servant was reported to have been seen on Kamaran but he was tipped off and escaped to the mainland before he could be arrested. The ring-leader and the others were still at large in June 1927 when the man serving two years imprisonment was released, the prison governor having just checked that he could let him go.

Lawrence's Grave. See also Perim Cemetery.