There was a packed audience at last week’s history society talk on a British policeman in Palestine titled ‘Monmouth School’s Second Master and the Mossad Hit List’. Speaker James Harrison outlined the experiences of Alec Stuart, a young man who worked for the Palestine CID in the tumultuous years of 1936-1946.

Stuart’s daughter, married to a long-serving Second Master at Monmouth School, kindly allowed family papers to be used in preparing this talk. Stuart, aged 24, had left his safe job in retail in Cardiff and headed east to start his police career at a time when the British Mandate in Palestine was being rocked by the Arab Revolt 1936-1939. From 1940 as a policeman he was also being threatened by a radical Jewish nationalist group, the Stern Gang, and from February 1942 he was being personally targeted on an assassination list put together by this group. The talk focussed on Stuart’s official reports held in the archives of the Imperial War Museum and his private papers (which included a fascinating series of mugshots of the terrorists whom Stuart was both hunting and being hunted by, including two gunmen who subsequently served as Prine Minister of the new state of Israel). It was a gruesome game of cat and mouse involving roadside bombs, booby-trapped buildings and shootings that Stuart was very lucky to survive. At the end of the talk it was fascinating to hear of other local connections to British Palestine, particularly the personal reminiscences of one member of the society who had served in the British army there in the final chaotic years of 1946-8.

The next talk, also in the Priory at 7pm is on 20th February and will be given by renowned medievalist Dr Helen Nicholson, Emerita Professor of Medieval History at Cardiff University, on “The Templars and Hospitallers on the Welsh March”.