Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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a slump in the market, ‘the price of an old but serviceable rifle is not more than two pounds.’ The local price of tomatoes, however, had gone up, indicating perversely a weakening of the strike, wrote Hackett, since it seemed that the better part of Gaza’s abundant crop was being shipped out once more. Two other members of the Strike Committee approached Hackett to enquire about the awarding of the army’s orange juice contracts.
The reports show an acuity and maturity that seem beyond Hackett’s twenty-five years, on best display in his analysis of inter-clan politics of the Beersheba’s Bedou population where his Arabist inclination comes to the fore. In the Imperial War Museum interview, Hackett remembers this as ‘a really very, very interesting time’, but he also recalls the frustration – absent from the reports, but one imagines not from opinions expressed off the record – he felt with aspects of the British response to the unrest.
We went up … in the V8 pick-ups with machine guns mounted on each into the Gaza/Beersheba area, where our vehicles were very well adapted for the sort of policing role that was necessary there. There was occasional shooting … there was the occasional infliction of a collective punishment upon a village … which would be the blowing up by the sappers of a house after the evacuation of all of the inhabitants of the village … I don’t think it ever did any more than harden opposition.
What he had learnt from his study of mediaeval Arab tactics, based on the razzia principle of lightning raids by irregular forces that melted away into the countryside, showed him ‘your only hope is to operate on similar lines’. When the Arab violence stopped abruptly, the British commanders attributed to their own tactics a cessation that had in fact been caused by political intervention from Iraq and Trans-Jordan. In consequence they failed, in Hackett’s opinion, to learn this lesson, and regular troops unsuited to the job of suppressing civil unrest continued to be so deployed. Riding in the car behind that of General Dill as the ‘victorious’ commander made a flag-showing tour of Beersheba, Hackett had to dodge the stones aimed at the lead vehicle. People shouted at General Dill and he waved back, unaware of the ‘ruderies’. “‘Go Home Dill” was about the essence of it.’
Hackett also discerned a complacency in the British units that caused them to underestimate the danger of the situation. He bet a ‘brother’ officer in the South Wales Borders, who were guarding a pumping station, that he could slip past his sentries, through the wire and plant a ‘bomb’ inside their perimeter. He left an empty whisky bottle with a message round its neck right against the pump. This complacency was coupled with a sentimentality Hackett thought natural in the British soldier.
British soldiery is very bad at brutality, we use it half-heartedly or even not at all … [The] South Wales Borderers … kindly folk, they were told to do what they could to find weapons round the place, and I saw one of them at it, not beating the lights out of the little boy for information but showing him his rifle and saying ‘Our lad, has your Dad got one of these?’ It’s very endearing, the British way of handling insurgency … you see the Turks took a much rougher line … they’d come [into a village] and as a preliminary to any negotiation they’d throw half a dozen of the leading men from the top of the minaret and, having encouraged cooperation by these means, then set about discussing the matter with the rest of the population, beating one or two to encourage the others as they went along … Our attempt at brutality was half-hearted, unconvinced and unconvincing.
British measures against the ‘habitual snipers and bomb throwers’ were usually confined to demolishing their homes. Hackett’s opinion in the 1979 interview, that these collective punishments merely hardened opposition, may have been proved right by the escalation of the General Strike to the Arab Revolt of 1938–9, but one of his 1936 reports states that:
Fear of demolitions is strong, particularly in the President of the Strike Committee, Rushdi Shawa, who has just built for himself a large house of which he is very proud. He has given frequent signs of nervousness on its account … and last week his wife told another woman that he could not sleep at night for worrying over his house. ‘And if they blow it up it will kill him.’
When dealing with civil unrest, military intelligence begins to sound like town gossip.
Hackett finally delivered his thesis in early 1937 and, by the time he appeared before the Board of the Faculty of Modern History in late June for his oral examination, its members were able to congratulate him on his posting to the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force.
A cold wind had forced the tea-drinkers inside. The smell of flavoured tobacco wafted through the open door, the slapping of dominoes on the table, the tumble of backgammon dice. A red-headed boy moved among the customers with a pail of fresh coals for the water-pipes. A Sudanese hawker of sunglasses in a powder-blue galabiya leant against the door-jamb watching for passing trade. Further down the alley, just before it joins the main road there is a small printing shop, no wider than a corridor. The white-haired man behind the counter did not look up from his Greek newspaper. Fuad I Avenue was renamed in mandatory revolutionary fashion ‘Twenty-sixth of July’, the day in 1952 on which Fuad’s son Farouk left Egypt. It has become like Oxford Street, full of clothing retailers and fast-food outlets. The evening promenade attracted strolling shoppers, families straggling across the width of the pavement, matrons in long colourful top-dresses and headscarves, children in Western clothes – tracksuits and trainers, jeans – the men in slacks and tweed jackets of an English cut. In the yellow twilight the shop lights seemed blue and cold, as though the stock of shoes and shirts were kept refrigerated. Taxis raced past, braking at the last minute where the road’s eastward progress is blocked by the Ezbekiyya Gardens and it turns right into Sharia al-Gomhuriyya, the Street of the Republic (once Ibrahim Pasha Street). Turn left and it is a short walk to the site where Shepheard’s once stood. It occupied the whole block north of Sharia Alfy. There stood the raised terrace, with its rattan chairs and pianist, at the foot of the three-storey facade, classical and balconied. The site remained empty for many years, a scar worn proudly by an anti-Imperialist nation. Now the plot has filled up with office blocks, the most recent of which was still under construction – all except one lot on the corner of Alfy, a petrol station.
Turning right with the traffic on al-Gomhuriyya, towards Opera Place, brings one immediately to the Continental Hotel. It was always second best to Shepheard’s, but it strove to be just as exclusive; only officers were allowed into both. Hackett used to visit the Continental Cabaret – his verdict: ‘rather dull’. Nevertheless it became something of an institution during the war years, its belly dancers and acrobats introduced by a pretty American called Betty. The cabaret was staged on the dance floor of the roof-top restaurant and there was also a roof garden, which was the venue for amateur concerts and shows. What passes for a roof garden today is a collection of struggling shrubs planted in old cooking-oil tins.
The hotel may have escaped the attention of the arsonists in 1952, but its recent history has been one of decline; today it is all but derelict. It remains an imposing building, occupying the whole block between Twenty-sixth of July and Sharia Adly Pasha, but its unadorned neo-classical facade is cracked in places, its louvred shutters awry, its windows showing no signs of life. The central block consists of a double loggia comprising the first and second floors, framed on each wing by a projecting tower, and punctuated in the middle by a third. At a later date a fourth storey was added whose inferior construction has since become apparent. At street level a parade of shops was added in the 1960s in a brutalist concrete box style, enclosing the carriage sweep and the porte-cochère, whose roof became part of a large terrace thereby. Mounted on its gable-end the hotel’s sign, once garish, had faded into the jumbled shop-fronts, the single word ‘Continental’ in raised Arabic and Roman letters, red and blue on a yellow background. The letters ‘TIN’ are missing; the rest have become ledges on which dust accumulates.
Mohammed Turk led the way through the dark entrance hall. It looked shabby in the twilight, lit by single low-wattage bulbs instead of chandeliers. The marble floor had lost its shine. On the back wall, behind a dust sheet, was a large mural of heroic peasant women working in the fields of