Sardar Daud Khan With Earl Of Leicester Of Holkham

 Thomas William Edward Coke, 5th Earl of Leicester of Holkham; Sardar Shah Wali Khan; Mohammad Daud Khan; Frederick Herbert Willasey-Wilsey, England, June 1953.

This photograph of the Afghan delegation to the 1953 Coronation tells a story of Afghan history spanning almost a century; a period littered with instability, rivalry, murder and occasional courage. Monarchs rarely attend the coronations of other monarchs. So when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned on the 2nd June 1953 the only other monarch to attend was the Queen of Tonga. She endeared herself to the crowds by leaving down the hood of her carriage and braving the pouring rain on the way to Westminster Abbey.

King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan was represented by his uncle, Sardar Shah Wali Khan (who appears in the photograph second from left). He was a good choice as he was a rare anglophile in an Afghanistan where Germany had been generally preferred to Britain, Turkey and Russia with their colonial ambitions. Indeed Sardar Wali had been Ambassador in London twice (1929-31 and 1950-53) and had sent his second son Abdul Wali to Sandhurst and later on attachment to the Brigade of Guards. He also owned a Rolls Royce which he drove around Europe with some panache.

Born in 1888 in British India he was a Field Marshal in the Afghan army and famous both for successes in the Third Afghan War in 1919 (known to the Afghans as the War of Independence) against the British and as “the Victor of Kabul” when, in 1929, he defeated the forces of Bacha Saqqao, (the son of a Tajik water carrier, who briefly ruled as King Habibullah Kalakani). He then helped install his own brother Nadir Shah as King. When Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1933 Sardar Wali was one of three uncles who placed the 19 year-old Zahir Shah on the throne. Later he served as acting Defence Minister and as acting Prime Minister. Sardar Wali was forced into exile in Rome by the 1973 coup where he would die, a somewhat embittered man, in 1977.

The coup leader was Sardar Wali’s companion at the Coronation, the King’s cousin and close friend Mohammed Daud Khan (also in the photograph, second from right). Like the King, Daud had been educated in France and was far happier speaking French than English. He too had served in the Afghan army but, whereas Zahir Shah was gentle and rather passive, Daud was energetic and ambitious; a committed moderniser in a hurry. Two months after the London Coronation Zahir Shah appointed Daud Prime Minister, a position he held for 10 years. A year after being appointed Prime Minister for a second time he mounted a coup in 1973 against the King who was out of the country and transformed Afghanistan into a Republic with himself as President. The royal family took up exile in Rome. In 1978 Daud was in turn deposed by the communists in a Soviet-backed coup during which he was arrested and ‘executed’ along with his family.

© National Portrait Gallery London