Memories of Suez

From a work in progress

In May 1955, three months after I was born, Denys was given his first independent foreign posting. He would be the British consul in Ismailia on the Suez Canal, at the heart of the Egyptian nationalist revolt against British control. Patricia followed him out, with me and the nanny, two months later.

It’s almost impossible seventy years later to grasp the way in which Britain then had shaped, and still hoped to control, the Middle East and its oil. Saudi, Iraq, and Jordan were all ruled by dynasties who had been installed by British armies. Iran had been under British control for decades before a democratic government there had been overthrown by a British and American coup in 1952.

In 1919, a British force under the command of Major General Lionel Dunsterville, a schoolfriend of Kipling’s who had served as the model for Stalky, had marched through Iran and Azerbaijan and occupied Baku for a month before being driven out by Communist forces.

In Palestine, which the British army occupied and administered after driving the Ottomans out in 1917, the Balfour Declaration had committed the British government to the Zionist project and so to decades of bloody and ultimately futile attempts to hold the ring between Arabs and Jews. British officers ran the elite forces of the Jordanian army and even after the end of World War II 80,000 British troops remained stationed in Egypt to guard the Suez canal^[1], which was owned by an Anglo-French company, in which the Egyptian government had little say.

But the tides of history had scoured out the foundations of this settlement. In 1945 the Saudis had come to their own agreement with the US which ensured that the British would not control their vast oil reserves. In 1948 the British had been driven out of Palestine by a Jewish guerrilla campaign, followed by the establishment of the state of Israel, the war of independence and the concomitant ethnic cleansing. In Egypt, nationalist guerillas started to harass the British troops occupying the Canal Zone.

The contempt in which the conscripts of the British Army held Egypt and the Egyptians is nicely conveyed by one history of the crisis:

“Since 1914, hundreds of thousands of British civilians in uniform had endured often long periods of boredom and discomfort there … Egyptians were remembered as street-hawkers or pimps, as thieves of unparalleled ingenuity, as wealthy idlers flaunting their possessions in the Cairo cafés, or sometimes as street-louts hurling bricks and abuse.”

This attitude was all of a piece with the arrogance and brutality of the occupying power. The British army in Egypt was based in camps round Ismailia, a city in the middle of the canal, and by the winter of 1951 there were regular guerilla attacks on soldiers when they left their bases. The British Army retaliated in January 1952 and surrounded the two main police stations in Ismailia with tanks and artillery, then demanded the policemen inside surrender. When the Egyptians refused, a full-scale military assault was launched with tanks, mortar bombs, and artillery. The auxiliary police maintained their hopelessly outgunned resistance for two hours or more before the survivors surrendered. Fifty were by then dead along with three British soldiers.

The next day there were riots in Cairo. European civilians were lynched where they could be found. The landmarks of British control were burned to the ground: Shepheard’s Hotel went, and Gotti’s Ice Cream parlour; the Turf club was burnt and thirteen people killed. The Times recorded with satisfaction the methods used to restore order:

“The police showed themselves unreliable—they were seen at Shepheard’s cheering incendiaries. By evening the Egyptian Army began to take the situation in hand. Troops lined up from wall to wall and advanced along the streets, shooting from the hip. They very soon brought the situation under control.”

The paper went on to explain that “It is thought that the disorders were organized by extreme left wing elements taking advantage of the national feeling caused by the death of so many policemen at Ismailia. The Muslim Brotherhood possibly joined in the riots. Foreign economic ‘imperialism’ is unpopular with them too. Small groups gathered in many parts of the city at the same time. equipped with incendiary bombs and torches. with which they ignited buildings after they had broken in through doors and windows.”

The tone of that report, from 1952, is eerily similar to the way the American papers would report on the chaos in Iraq after they had conquered it, long after it was obvious to everyone else that they were losing the guerilla war.

Within months of the Cairo riots the Egyptian monarchy had been overthrown by a nationalist revolt and replaced by a military junta, led and soon headed by Colonel Nasser. The new government’s programme was explicitly nationalist and negotiations began almost at once for the British withdrawal. In 1954 the British army agreed to leave Egypt completely, the withdrawal to be completed in July 1956.

Because the canal was run by a foreign company controlled and largely owned by the British and the French, the Consul in Ismailia was loosely responsible for thirty soldiers and engineers as well as his own eleven staff. There were also 500 British subjects who could call on him for help, but for whom he had not direct responsibility. Most were employed by the canal company. The consulate itself was a substantial building, easily fortified, at a crossroads where to main roads met the railway line. It had been attacked in the revolt of 1952.

Denys and Patricia settled uneasily into this tense and bloodstained city. They rented a large villa in the suburbs with two Egyptian servants and a British nanny, Barbara Clark, for me. Daily life depended on her, for Patricia’s social duties started almost almost the moment we’d arrived. In her first week there were four dinner parties and in the week after a dinner, cocktails, and tea. For the rest of her time in Ismailia there were seldom fewer than three of these parties to organise or attend every week, each one requiring complex and unsatisfying work.

At first it seemed as if Nasser’s government had changed nothing important in the relative positions of the British and the Egyptians. Denys imported a specially sturdy car to Egypt, a Standard Vanguard, as used by Hillary’s Everest exhibition, and it proved well up to the rigours of Arab traffic in which he learned to drive: “17 November Car accident – we hit another and knocked it over,” Patricia’s 1955 diary records. Nothing more about the car knocked over or its passengers.

The political crisis came next year, in 1956. Nasser’s hopes for his country centred around a huge dam on the Nile which would greatly increase the amount of land that could reliably be cultivated since the dam at Aswan would control the flooding of the Nile downstream. To build it, he needed foreign capital. America had agreed to lend $56m towards it; Britain, whose engineers had planned the dam, only $15m. Both countries saw their contributions as bribes necessary to keep Egypt from falling further into the Russian sphere of influence.

But it was an election year in the US and congress was unhappy about foreign aid in any form. The cotton lobby was particularly unhappy about a scheme which would vastly increase the amount of cotton grown in Egypt and in July John Foster Dulles, the US secretary of state, abruptly dropped the policy without forewarning either the Egyptians or indeed the British. In the wake of his announcement the British pulled their subsidy and the World Bank did too.

How could Nasser retaliate? They’d find out soon enough.

In July Denys and Patricia were visiting the embassy in Cairo, where the temperature was 44 degrees and there was no air conditioning. It was hard going for a woman three months pregnant. On the evening of the 26th July she noted a Cocktail party with TEs (Their Excellencies – the Ambassador and his wife) and immediately in hurried fainter writing “Nationalisation of Canal”.

It had been the only form of retaliation open to Nasser and he grabbed at the chance. His right to do so was clear in international law, but what was that worth against brute force?

The British government was outraged by his impertinence. The French, locked in their terrible war in Algeria, saw an intolerable surge of Arab power. They determined even before the British that the remedy was a military attack that would topple Nasser’s regime. The British also believed that no Egyptian could do the skilled work of the canal pilots if the Europeans were withdrawn. In that, as in other things, they were absolutely wrong.

Since the Egyptians had both the right and the means to control the canal Eden needed ingenuity to contrive the war he wanted. Much of August was taken up with Anglo-French attempts to manoeuvre the UN into setting terms to protect traffic through the canal which would be unacceptable to Nasser and so provide a pretext for invasion. But the UN refused to help.

So the French entered into a conspiracy with Israel, to which it was selling fighter aircraft: The Israelis would attack Egypt through Sinai and the French would seize the Canal on the pretext of separating the two sides. They supposed that Nasser would then be toppled by an outraged populace. Soon the British were drawn into this agreement, although its existence was kept secret from parliament and indeed most of the cabinet.

But the preparations for war could not be very well concealed. In August 50,0000 British troops massed in Cyprus, and were joined – in a gesture both unprecedented and entirely unambiguous – by French forces. Denys, in Ismailia, had to decode top secret a telegram asking where the main post office was. The British had occupied the town for 70 years; in fact the last of the garrison troops had left only six weeks before the nationalisation of the Canal but the army still didn’t know where the post office was.^[2] That telegram, Denys would later say, was the moment when he knew that the invasion would go ahead and that it would be a disaster.

On the 16th August there was a general strike in Egypt in protest against the impending war. “No servants all day” noted Patricia. Two days later she gave one of them a week’s notice and he retaliated by reporting sick the next day; the other Egyptian servant immediately followed suit. On the 27th of August the house was packed up, and on the fourth of September Patricia, now six months pregnant, was flown back to England, nanny and toddler in tow, leaving Denys to face the oncoming war.

The invasion of Egypt should have started the following week but Britain and France quarrelled about Israel’s role in the war^[3]. By the time the quarrel was resolved, the war had been put back by a fortnight, and both Britain and France had agreed that a “European Common Market” would be a desirable thing, even if no one had any idea what this might mean in practice.

For the rest of September Patricia wrote to Denys every day and recorded every letter that she had from him. These letters are now lost, but only seven had reached her before October 30th when her diary recorded “Laundry came. Israel invaded Egypt.”

Denys had been up till two that morning decyphering two telegrams from the the Foreign Office which had arrived at nine the previous evening. The first was an order to burn all their codebooks and one time pads. That could only mean war was imminent. The destruction took him until four in the morning. At half past ten that morning he met the leader of the Cypriot community in Ismailia and advised him that his people should remain in Egypt. This was followed by a panic among the locally based British subjects: fifty of them occupied the consulate building to demand an assurance that their salaries would be paid even if they were left behind when senior staff were withdrawn or expelled to Britain. Later that night armed Egyptian police collected all the British technicians in Ismailia and took them away.

The next morning Patricia recorded “We invaded Egypt”. The Israeli army had swept into Sinai, and British and Israeli aircraft bombed around Ismailia all morning and were met with heavy anti aircraft fire.

Denys had been left in charge of forty people, all notionally civilians, even though five were army officers serving in a civilian capacity. Three were women; five were children under three. The phone lines to the consulate were cut off; Patricia recorded “Lady T^[4] telephoned. No news of D’s getting out.”

In Ismailia, Denys and all his charges were first herded into the consulate building by the Egyptian police then, after a day, into Denys’s house on Rue d’Ankara; two days later back into the centre of town, in an office block across the square from the consulate, but still certain to be a target if the British army fought its way in. And there they waited for two more days until relieved by the news that the war had ended that morning with a ceasefire imposed by the Americans just as the allies were on the brink of an infamous victory.

The Israeli army had broken through the Egyptian defences and their tanks were moving across the desert towards the canal. British paratroops had taken Port Said, at the northern end of the canal. They could have marched, unopposed, down to Ismailia, although they did not know this. But none of this mattered in the face of America’s economic might.

The Egyptians had completely blocked the canal by sinking ships along its length; the main pipeline carrying oil from Iraq to the Mediterranean had been blown up; the Saudis had announced an oil embargo; America was now the only source of oil for Britain and the Americans refused to sell any without a ceasefire which must be followed by a withdrawal of all allied troops and the recognition of complete defeat.

The whole fiasco was over in ten days. When calm returned Denys and his charges were moved under guard to the British embassy in Cairo where they were interned for another month before being put on a train to Libya and flown home from there. The railway line passed through the coastal strip along which the Eighth Army had defeated Rommel – a victory that had seemed to monumental that it was commemorated in the front papers of Patricia’s pocket diary along with the dates of major religious festivals. And now it was gone. It had taken only twelve years from that triumph of Empire and Commonwealth at El Alamein before the last remnants of the British rulers of Egypt were themselves chased out. Soon Alamein would mean no more than Oudenarde or Malplaquet, forgotten victories in the War of Spanish Succession, which once schoolchildren had to learn by heart.

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1. The French, fighting an exceptionally brutal colonial war in Algeria and Tunisia, had at the time 250,000 men in North Africa↩︎

2. Similarly, one of the War office maps had shown a phantom city on the opposite bank of the Canal to Ismailia, called Talata. That name is just the Arabic for “Three” and the city had been conjured into existence by an intelligence operative studying a map on which the signalling stations along the canal were numbered in Arabic.↩︎

3. The French were entirely on the side of Israeli aggression, and supplied the Israeli air force with its planes. The British, who had been driven out of Palestine by Jewish guerillas, regarded Jordan and Iraq as their client states, and were anxious to prop up the monarchies there. Their plan was to move an Iraqi force into Jordan to strengthen the Bedouin, monarchical, faction in Jordan against the Palestinian population of the West Bank. The Israelis rejected this plan for obvious reasons, and the French could see nothing in it for them either. So the Iraqi troops stayed in Iraq; but not before Anthony Eden had flown to Paris to persuade the French Prime Minister to go along with the Jordan plan, so after the French said non something had to be rescued for the press. Hence the Common Market, later the EU.↩︎

4. Trevelyan, the ambassador’s wife↩︎