The ‘spear’ that won Sinai

One of the often forgotten fronts of the Great War is the Sinai Peninsula and Palestine where the British army was locked into a tedious but often deadly three-year conflict with the Ottoman Turks. At stake was control of the Suez Canal, the British Empire’s most imperative waterway, as well as the Holy Land, with Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem as the greatest prize.

When the campaign began in the summer of 1916, arguably the greatest challenge for the Allies was how to provide enough water for tens of thousands of troops, as well as vast numbers of horses, mules and camels. Without an adequate water supply the British could not mount an offensive attack against the Turks.

The traditional solution was to send soldiers in with a pick and shovel to dig and dig until they struck the water table. However, in the Sinai Desert this was almost pointless because loose sands kept filling the holes. The possibility of sending water wagons into the desert was also redundant because the terrain was impassable in so many places.

Step forward John Howard Alexander, a Dublin-born engineer whose ingenious "spear-point pump" would enable the Allied army to penetrate the desert sands and extract water as and when required.

Alexander's grandfather hailed from Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, and served in the navy. David Alexander, his father, ran a lithography business in south Dublin, and married Emily Gahagan of Co Limerick. They lived on Frankfort Avenue in Rathgar, Dublin, where John, the fourth of their 10 children, was born in 1880.

Educated at High School, Rathgar, his first job was with Ferrier and Pollock, a wholesale silk and haberdashery firm based in present-day Powerscourt Townhouse on South William Street. In 1896 the 16-year-old went to work for Anderson, Stanford & Ridgeway, specialists in carpets, curtains and interior furnishing, on Grafton Street.

During the Anglo-Boer War he served as a trooper with the 2nd Dublin Company of the 61st (South Irish) Company (part of the Imperial Yeomanry). Like so many veterans of that war, he fell under South Africa’s spell, and in 1903 he embarked on a new life as an inspector of buildings for the Zululand Railway. Having mastered the isiZulu language, he settled in the Natal, working as an engineer on a coal mine and running a farm. He was also closely involved with suppressing a rebellion by the Zulu chieftain Bambatha Zondi in 1906.

In 1912 General Smuts placed Alexander in command of a unit of mounted field engineers within South Africa's Union Defence Force (UDF) . When the Great War erupted two years later, South Africa declared for the Allies. Alexander's engineers played a key role in persuading German forces in southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) to surrender to the UDF in 1915, an event regarded as the first major Allied victory of the war.

Following a visit to his family in Dublin in early 1916, Alexander was posted to Palestine and assigned to command a squadron of field engineers within the ANZAC Mounted Division. Their role was to construct or demolish bridges, roads, communication lines and observation posts as and when required.

Both riders and mounts had to survive extreme heat, harsh terrain and suffocating dust storms. Such weather wreaked carnage on horses, with approximately 640 horses and mules falling casualty every week. The Allies were also in a major quandary about how to proceed against the Turks without a decent water supply.

It was at this time that Alexander came up with his ingenious spear-point pump system. His sappers drove a tubular spear down to the water table and then screwed on a pump to extract water. Sometimes the water lay in depressions less than 6ft underground. Occasionally they found an existing well buried in the sands, the legacy of Roman engineers 2,000 years earlier. On one occasion a spear-point was inserted into an apparently dry well which duly pumped out water for eight hours.

Camel trains

By early 1917 Alexander’s pumps were being extensively used all across the Sinai Peninsula. He also invented a system of “racks and carriers” so the pumps and driving gear could be carried on packhorses or pulled upon sleighs rather than relying on the slow, lugubrious camel trains. In his diary Alexander allowed himself a pat on the back. “This method, I may say, is working with excellent results.”

Alexander’s engineers also took part in several raids on the Ottoman railway, demolishing large sections of the line, including three bridges. He was still with the Australian Mounted Division when it stormed the Turkish lines at Beersheba in October 1917, when Jerusalem fell that Christmas, and when the division became the first of the Allied troops to enter Damascus in October 1918.

Colonel J H Alexander was awarded the Military Cross, mentioned in despatches on four occasions, and honoured with the Distinguished Service Order in 1919.

After the war he worked with the Baghdad Railway before returning to England where, rather blandly, he became manager of an ailing margarine and cheese factory in Mitcham, London.

In 1934, he married Frances Callow, a talented harpist from New York, with whom he moved to Ashorne Hill, a mansion in Warwickshire which they ran on behalf of the British Iron and Steel Confederation.

During the second World War over 600 men and women worked inside Ashorne Hill, overseeing the production of iron and steel with such secrecy that the house was dubbed “the Bletchley Park of the steel industry”. The Alexanders later retired to the Lake District, where the colonel is thought to be buried.

The importance of Alexander’s innovation cannot be overstated. Spear-point pumps gave the Allies the mobility they needed to traverse the Sinai Peninsula with speed. This resulted in a string of victorious attacks on the fixed Turkish lines culminating in the fall of Jerusalem. Ultimately this led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which freed up enough men to finally defeat the Germans on the Western Front.