Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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ruled Angola and Mozambique. The Belgians had the Congo. The French and the British converted their trading interests in West and Sub-Saharan Africa into colonial rule. The Spanish held the Western Sahara and enclaves in Morocco, eventually French, as were Algeria and Tunisia. The Ottomans, nominally, ruled Libya. After the British took control of Egypt in 1882, the French threat to the headwaters of the Nile made it necessary to extend their power into the Sudan. The Germans made room for themselves in Cameroon and South-West Africa, agreeing their sphere of influence in East Africa by treaty with the British. The only place for the Italians to gain a foothold was in the Horn of Africa.
The Italian presence there began in 1869, less than a decade after Italy had reunited, freeing itself from the rump of Habsburg and Bourbon rule. Following the example of the British and the French in Seylac and Djibouti, the Italians established a coaling station at Aseb on the Danakil coast. Their ambitions did not end there. In 1885 they took another port, Massawa, on the Eritrean coast to the north, and in the space of four years extended their rule to such a degree that the Emperor of Abyssinia, Menilek II, was forced to cede the whole province to them. Their attention was then turned towards the Somali coast where they acquired two small protectorates in the north and succeeded to the interests of the British East Africa Company in the south. A direct attack against Abyssinia in 1896 was defeated, but Italy’s colonial intentions were stated for all to see, inscribed at the gateway to the Mediterranean on its consular building in Port Said: ‘Rome – once again at the heart of an Empire.’
In 1911 the Italians invaded Libya and during the resulting war with the Ottomans they took ten of the twelve Greek islands that make up the Dodecanese. In 1915 Italy joined the Allied camp and though largely unsuccessful against the Austrians, gained territory in the Tyrol and at the head of the Adriatic. Italian ambitions towards the Dalmatian coast and Albania were disappointed. Though it retained control of the Ottoman islands taken in 1912, Italy did not receive the possessions it had been promised on the Turkish mainland, and furthermore the Treaty of Saint-Germain proscribed Italian expansion in Africa.
The First World War was called the Great War until the Second World War started. It was supposed to be the last colonial war. Its closing territorial arrangements were to be ordered on Woodrow Wilson’s ‘principle of nationality’. Italy, which had regained its own nationality within living memory, felt cheated of the empire that was its birthright. Within a year of gaining office in 1922, Mussolini, at the head of a party whose symbol was the fasces of Imperial Rome, instructed his governors in Libya and Somalia to consolidate Italy’s power and this they did with enough vigour to prompt the last uncolonized state in Africa, Abyssinia, to join the League of Nations.
As a force for world peace, the League of Nations was even more ineffectual than its successor. When it acted – such as in its support of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine – and when it failed to act – such as against Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 – the consequences were alike: new conflicts. Abyssinia appealed to the League in vain as Italian forces encroached inland from the Somali coast, until the Italians provoked a skirmish at the Oasis of Welwel that provided the excuse for Italy’s invasion. The colonial powers of Europe expressed their horror. The League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy that had no bite since they did not include oil; Mussolini conceded that if they had he would have had to withdraw in a week. (At that time nobody knew that the Italians in Libya were sitting on one of the largest oilfields in the world.) In May 1936 Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile and the world worried about other things once more. The era of the appeasement of Fascism had begun.
The British protested strongly against the Italian trespass into their Nilotic sphere of influence, but took no direct action against their erstwhile allies. Britain did not have the military resources in Egypt and the Sudan to counter the Italian invasion. Moreover, to have attacked the Italians in Abyssinia would have not only threatened stability on the European mainland, but also prompted an attack against Egypt by Italy’s forces in Libya. Such an invasion would not have lacked local support. Since 1911 an increasing number of Italians of all types had settled in Alexandria and Cairo; the waterfront in Alexandria had come to resemble ‘a broken-down version of Naples’, according to Lawrence Durrell. King Fuad had been educated in Italy and numbered many Italians among his household. Realising the vulnerability of their own position, the British in Egypt could only take measures to discourage Italian ideas of further expansion, and these had a profound effect on the future of the 8th Hussars. Hackett recalls:
we were hastily mechanized and put into locally adapted Ford V8 pick-ups mounted with a Vickers Vertier machine gun and, rather ill-trained and inexperienced as mechanized troops, we went out into the desert. The war didn’t break out, and we went as far as Mersa Matruh, up to the Wah and down to the Oasis of Siwa some of us, and then back to Cairo. This raised a problem about the regiment’s [imminent transfer to] India, since the Indian government only wanted cavalry on horses. The remainder of our foreign tour was therefore cancelled and the regiment stayed in Cairo, so that by the outbreak of war [it] had been stationed there for some six years. Now this had one very important effect upon the officers in the 8th Hussars, in that, in the expectation of a seven-year tour in India and with high ambitions in the polo world, we, the officers of the regiment, had mobilized all the funds we possibly could, regimental and private, to finance the purchase of a string of unmade polo ponies … We found ourselves with a string of very, very high class polo ponies on our hands, far better than could commonly be found in Cairo, where we won all the tournaments there were to win – and there were quite a few of these … We were loaded with these things and couldn’t get rid of them; there was no market for them in Egypt. So we sent a team to California with some of them to play them and sell them there. We sent a team to Austria to play and sell them in Hungary. We sent a team back to Hurlingham … to sell them in London. And when war broke out we still had a very considerable number of ponies.
Madame Wafa’a asked: ‘Why are you British so keen on sports?’ It was an unlikely question from the Cultural Secretary of the Gezira Sporting Club, which relied on the continuing keenness on sport of the Egyptian upper classes, and indeed she was an unlikely-looking employee. Her wimple-like headgear and all-covering robe proclaimed the orthodoxy of her Islamic observance, while at the swimming pool women, both married and not, stripped down to bikinis. Her humorous, almost flirtatious manner may have been at odds with her dress, but it was difficult to imagine where her own keenness on sport might lie. ‘Your British officers were crazy for sport, even during the war, even when the Germans were so close to Alexandria they were still playing polo here. Crazy!’ She had a point. Why were British officers so obsessed with sport? She had touched on a deep vein of socioeconomic ore that ran through the substrata of the British Empire: the quasi-feudal British class structure.
The French in their imperial dealings viewed their overseas territories as an integral part of France, which is why the European Union has constituencies in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The British thought of their colonies as possessions separate from the Mother Country. Their peoples were to be kept at arm’s length, and British soldiers and civil servants were regarded with suspicion if they fraternized too much with the locals. To maintain their otherness the British recreated their own exclusive society wherever they went. Their priorities in this endeavour are discernible in Cairo. Very shortly after British forces arrived, their officers established the Gezira Sporting Club on land granted to the army by Tewfik, Mohammed Ali’s great-grandson, long before work began on All Saints Anglican Cathedral. Before the democratizing of warfare in the two world wars, British officers were drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the aristocracy and landed gentry. Second, third, fourth sons would become politicians, clergymen, soldiers and colonial administrators, creating a remarkably uniform social ethos within the Empire, based on the values instilled at public school. If success in such an institution was judged by one’s peers on sporting rather than academic criteria, so demonstrating too much professional zeal in one’s work in later life was in as bad taste as talking about money. The Empire was administered by gifted amateurs with a notion of fair play. What really mattered were the team games that had won the battle of Waterloo, allegedly, such country pursuits as the