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fell to an outsider, an eccentric Englishman named William Childs, to warn them – and all the rest of Smyrna’s non-Turkish communities – that they were living on borrowed time.

The Great Idea

    T he captain had met some oddballs in his time but this particular Englishman was stranger than most. William Childs was travelling along the Black Sea coast of Turkey accompanied by one large trunk of Cambridge sausages and dozens of tins of bacon.
    When the captain enquired as to his passenger’s line of business, he drew an even more startling response. Childs was not travelling on business. Rather, he was intending to walk across Anatolia, a trek that would take him across more than 1,300 miles of wild countryside. He had no desire to eat the ‘native foods’ during his travels, preferring to rely on his trusty sausages. He found that they set him up for the day, providing him with the energy for a long walk. No matter that his insistence on eating pork might offend Muslim sensibilities. ‘I intended,’ he wrote, ‘to have good honest English breakfasts the whole way.’
    Nor did he have any intention of trying to blend in with the local inhabitants; he was a firm believer in wearing his Englishness on his sleeve. ‘The fact of being English,’ he later wrote, ‘was ever the most universal and respected recommendation I could possess.’
    When Childs confessed that his voyage was being undertaken for the purposes of pleasure and recreation, the captain of the little mail packet began to fear for his passenger’s safety. ‘An avowal of lunacy had been made to him . . .’ wrote Childs, ‘and he took it as a matter requiring immediate attention.’ Childs did his best to explain why he wished to travel on foot but the captain remained unconvinced. ‘“Paris and Berlin and Vienna are for pleasure,” he said, “but not this country.” And he waved his arm towards the coast.’
    Childs’ plan was indeed eccentric, especially as he was setting off in winter, when the temperature was already well below zero, yet it was not entirely without logic. He saw that the world was rapidly changing and he wanted to visit the heartland of Anatolia now – in October 1912 – before the colourful old customs disappeared for ever. He had decided to travel on foot because he thought it would bring him into direct contact with the different races and peoples of the interior of the country.
    But there was another reason why Childs was undertaking his voyage – one that he did not reveal to the captain. He was working as a spy, garnering intelligence for the British Secret Service. The government, fearful of Russian expansion into Anatolia, was also deeply concerned by German influence in Turkey. As the international climate grew increasingly tense, British ministers realised that they needed a more detailed report on Turkey’s vast interior.
    Childs never admitted his role as an undercover agent, although he dropped several hints in the book that he would later write. He suggested that his voyage had been provoked by more than idle curiosity and liked to refer to himself as ‘an ever listening ear and watchful eye’. His industry seems to have impressed his bosses in Whitehall. Soon after his return to London, he was given employment in the secretive ‘Room Four’ of the Foreign Office, gathering sensitive information on Turkey and the Middle East.
    Childs’ account of his Anatolian voyage, On Foot Through Asia Minor , might have sold more copies if he had included the tales of banditry and abduction that he promised his readers. Yet even base metal occasionally glitters and Childs’ dullness is not without sparkle. His prosaic tales of daily life in the hinterlands of the Ottoman empire are heavy with portent and reveal many of the underlying tensions that would soon tear the empire apart. As such, his book is a clarion of doom for the international city of Smyrna.
    Childs’ first stop was Samsun, a cosmopolitan Black