ABSTRACT
On 9 March 1919, Lowell Thomas gave his first performance of With Allenby in Palestine – later renamed With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia – at the Century Theater in New York, a mile north of the Theater District in Midtown Manhattan. Packing the front row was a who’s who of New York’s banking families. Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, Nathan Straus, Paul and Felix Warburg, as well as a Rothschild, were seated with their wives. After seeing the show, Schiff, a passionate Zionist, and the Warburgs were convinced that Americans needed to see and hear Thomas’s tale of the war in the Holy Land. Once the season at the Century ended they encouraged Thomas to move his travelogue to Madison Square Garden, bought large sections of seating for Thomas to give away to working class New Yorkers, and even chartered buses to transport people from The Bronx. 1 Six years later, after a sold-out season in London and a worldwide tour of the rest of England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Burma, British Malaya, Ceylon and India, Thomas’s travelogue had been delivered over 4,000 times. Total ticket sales exceeded 4 million, or roughly 1 per cent of the population of the British Empire. 2
With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia ’s attendance numbers dwarf the readership of any of the well-known authors of disillusionment or otherwise. Nonetheless, historians of the First World War have focussed relentlessly on post-war writings by exservicemen and non-combatants. Even Michael Paris and Brian Bond, so keen to demonstrate that British and Anglo-Imperial society did not reject the war as a futile slaughter, have bypassed Thomas’s travelogue and, in fact, inter-war theatre altogether. 3 Where theatre and stage productions have been discussed, Thomas’s name has been noticeably absent. 4
1 Lowell Thomas Remembers the Allenby and Lawrence Show, Lowell Thomas Papers (LTP) 1.25.2.6.505.7, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York.
