User:SvobodaDiaries/Tommy Dexter

Tommy Dexter was a steamboat operator for the Lynch company. Captain R. E. Cheeseman [of the Secretariat of the High Commissioner for ʿIraq] in his 1923 article "A History of Steamboat Navigation on the Upper Tigris" relates a story that he received "first hand" from Tom Dexter, who at the time of his writing the article (1922) was a dragoman at the British Residency in Baghdad. According to Cheeseman’s account, a steamer named the Comet was built in Bombay to replace a steamer by the same name which had sailed out of Basra since 1852. Tom Dexter was, at the time, a 17 year-old apprentice at the Bombay dockyard. He was assigned to the post of engine-driver on the Comet’s trial voyage. Because he was a member of the foreign community in Baghdad of English and Armenian parentage, he was sent with the ship when it traveled to Baghdad in 1885. Shortly thereafter he served on it during an adventuresome exploratory journey up the Tigris to Mosul. Cheeseman writes that, on one occasion, seeing a band of mounted Arabs in the distance, Dexter thought a visit on a bicycle might impress them. Mounting his 54 inch bicycle he went out to meet them dressed in his white uniform. The effect was not exactly that desired. The whole cavalcade turned and put their horses into a gallop, and nothing could be seen of the column but flying dust and gravel. Doubtless the unfamiliar outline had been sufficient and the mirage had done the rest. Subsequently a rumor reached the ship that a long thin white Jinn haunted the lands of Waush-haush, that was three times as high as a man and could travel faster than a horse. The bicycle afterwards became famous, and visitors from distant tribes came in from afar to see for themselves this wonder of machinery. (Navigation, 32.) At the time he accompanied the Svobodas and Colonel Mockler on their journey, Tom Dexter would have been 29 years old and may have been working for the Lynch Brothers as was Alexander’s father. It is also possible that the bicycle that accompanied the caravan and amused Alexander, was similar to or the same as Dexter’s famous machine.