Five years after the end of World War I, the victorious allies attending the lengthy Lausanne Peace Conference found themselves facing not the originally intended representatives of the old defeated Ottoman Empire, but those of the new Turkish Republic which had abolished it.

Raven-Hill's cartoon, The Turkish Conference Bath, published on 28 March 1923, shows the commanding self-confident shampooer, Mustapha Kemel Ataturk, addressing a tired-looking British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, and a couple of dispirited Allied negotiators, telling them that he is ready when they are.