page_title: Mark Sykes
section_title: The Boer War, travels and Parliament
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Sykes / The Boer War, travels and Parliament
caption_attribution_description: English: Vanity Fair Men of the Day No.2278: Caricature of Lt-Col Mark Sykes JP FRGS MP. Caption reads: "Our Mark"
context_page_description: Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet was an English traveller, Conservative Party politician, and diplomatic advisor, particularly with regard to the Middle East at the time of the First World War.
  He is associated with the Sykes–Picot Agreement, drawn up while the war was in progress regarding the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by Britain, France and Russia, and was a key negotiator of the Balfour Declaration. Although a great supporter of Zionism during the First World War, his views changed in the year prior to his death.
context_section_description: Heir to vast Yorkshire estates and a baronetcy, Sykes was not content to await his inheritance. In 1897 he was commissioned into the 3rd (Militia) Battalion of the Green Howards. Sykes was sent abroad with the 5th Battalion of the Green Howards during the Second Boer War for two years, where he was engaged mostly in guard duty, but saw action on several occasions. Following the war, he was promoted to captain on 28 February 1902, and returned to the United Kingdom on 15 May the same year, when the appointment was confirmed. He travelled extensively, especially in the Middle East.
  From 1904 to 1905 he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham in the last year of Balfour's administration.  He made a friend of the lugubrious Prime Minister, who went on to serve as Foreign Secretary during the First World War, when Sykes worked closely with him.  Transferred by Balfour, he served as honorary attaché to the British Embassy in Constantinople 1905–06, at which time he began a lifetime's interest in middle eastern affairs of state.
  Sykes was very much a Yorkshire grandee, with his country seat at Sledmere House, breeding racehorses, sitting on the bench, raising and commanding a militia unit, serving as Honorary Colonel of the 1st Volunteer Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, and fulfilling his social obligations. He married Edith Gorst, also a Roman Catholic, daughter of the Conservative party manager, Eldon Gorst. It was a happy union, and they had six children. Two of those children were Angela Sykes, a sculptor, and Christopher Sykes, author. Sykes succeeded to the baronetcy and the estates in 1913.
  After two unsuccessful attempts, Sykes was elected to Parliament as a Unionist in 1911, representing Kingston upon Hull Central.  He became close to Lord Hugh Cecil, another MP and was a contemporary of the volatile F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, and Hilaire Belloc, a naturalised British citizen from France. As a JP in the East Riding, he was also elected a member of the County Council.
  Sykes was also a friend of Aubrey Herbert, another Englishman influential in Middle Eastern affairs, and was acquainted with Gertrude Bell, the pro-Arab Foreign Office advisor and Middle Eastern traveller. Sykes was never as single-minded an advocate of the Arab cause as Bell, and her friends T. E. Lawrence and Sir Percy Cox. His sympathies and interests later extended to Armenians, Arabs and Jews, as well as Turks. This is reflected in the Turkish Room he had installed in Sledmere House, using the noted Armenian ceramic artist David Ohannessian as designer.
caption: Sykes caricatured by Wallace Hester for Vanity Fair, 1912
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