May 17, 2013

The marvelous Jules Guerin

There are a handful of artists whose names are familiar to anybody interested in travel in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the David Roberts and Robert Hay, of course; the watercolourist Augustus Lamplough and orientalist R. Talbot Kelly; and the lesser known but more commercially minded Tony Binder, Willy Burger and Lance Thackeray, all of whom produced designs for postcards and advertising. I’ve posted on most of these artists before. Recently I came across a new (to me) and exciting addition to that list.

Jules Guerin (born in St Louis, Missouri in 1866) was an American illustrator who studied art in Chicago, where he shared a studio with cartoonist Winsor McCay of Little Nemo fame. He specialized in architectural illustration and provided spectacular birds-eye perspective drawings for the monumental Plan of Chicago in 1907. He produced competition drawings for Henry Bacon’s proposed Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, and when Bacon triumphed Guerin was asked to paint two large murals on its ceiling.

From 1909 to 1911 the painter travelled with British journalist Robert Hichens through Egypt, the Holy Land, and the Near East. The trip resulted in several books, including Egypt and its Monuments, published in 1908. Hichens text is negligible, but Guerin’s illustrations are astonishing. They manage to be both incredibly precise (as you’d expect from an architectural illustrator) but at the same time beguilingly romantic thanks to the dramatic perspectives and set-like design, and an Impressionistic colour palette.

 

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May 4, 2013

Last days of the Semiramis

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The caption for this vintage news photo, issued by the Associated Press in January 1976, reads, “Nile landmark to go: The Semiramis Hotel, for years a landmark along the Nile River in Cairo, will soon disappear. The hotel, named for an Iraqi princess and built by Europeans in the the early 1900s, closed last summer and will be pulled down and replaced by a pyramid-shaped, 850-room, $18 million hotel.”

The Swiss-built Semiramis, opened in 1907, was demolished in 1976, and it was replaced by a new 800-room hotel – thankfully, however, this did not take the form of a pyramid. That was left for Las Vegas.

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April 28, 2013

Hollywood royalty in Egypt

Silent Couple

My last post mentioned in passing the fact that Hollywood golden couple Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had added their signatures to the Winter Palace Golden Book in November 1929. At the time they were just about two of the biggest names in cinema, partners with Charlie Chaplin and DW Griffiths in the founding of United Artists production studios, while in May of 1929 Fairbanks had been the host for the first ever Oscars ceremony. The Egyptian Gazette of 4 November 1929 reported on the pair’s visit to Egypt, noting that they were, “Better known and better loved than any other couple in the whole world”. They arrived in Alexandria on the SS Rashid of the Khedivial Mail Line and took a short tour of the town before they were driven to the station to catch the midday train to Cairo. Fairbanks told the waiting crowds at the station, “I’m just mad about Egypt”.

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Luxor with the manager of the Winter Palace, Anton Badrutt

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Luxor with the manager of the Winter Palace, Anton Badrutt

They stayed at Shepheard’s where they were interviewed by a correspondent from the Gazette who asked what Fairbanks thought of the talkies: “The talkies are a wonderful invention,” he replied, “and have a great future but so far the talking has been exaggerated.” He then reportedly gave a demonstration in his room of how he leapt from the bough of a tree to a windowsill 30 feet away. In Cairo, they were shown round the Egyptian Museum by Howard Carter, before travelling up the Nile to Luxor. The paper says they were due to leave Egypt on 12 November bound for the next stop on their world tour, which was Colombo.

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April 18, 2013

The Golden Books

When Shepheard’s went up in flames back in January 1952, one of the notable losses was the hotel’s set of Golden Books, the ledgers in which decades of distinguished guests had been invited to sign their names. It used to be common practice for hotels to keep VIP guestbooks and use the names they contained as marketing collateral, to be listed in ads and promotional booklets. But it’s not just Shepheard’s Golden Books that were lost, because I don’t know of any surviving examples from any of Egypt’s grand old hotels – except, that is, for one.

It comes from the Winter Palace and covers the years 1920-1935, an exciting time coinciding as it does with the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the ten years of excavations that followed. I learned of the guestbook through an essay written by André Wiese, curator of the Egyptian Department at the Museum of Ancient Art and Ludwig Collection in Basel. He discovered the existence of the guestbook back in 1991 when he was preparing an exhibition devoted to Seti I. It was in the possession of Carmen Heusser, the daughter of Swiss hotelier Anton Badrutt, who managed the Winter Palace between 1920 and 1935.

Wiese was allowed to study the book and subsequently wrote a 22-page study (in German) that was published in an academic journal in 1998. He kindly sent me a copy, which I’ve translated. I’m not going to run the whole text because it’s 5,000 words long, but I will summarise it.

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‘Bound in parchment and leather, here we truly have a piece of history in front of us!’ Wiese begins. Inside, the fly-leaf is decorated with a hand-painted image of a cheery Tutankhamun (above) done by Austrian artist Anton ‘Tony’ Binder. Binder (1868-1944) was an Orientalist painter, who lived in Alexandria but travelled around Egypt gathering material for his oils of Egyptian landscapes and interiors. Some of his work was also printed on postcards. In addition to the Tutankhamun drawing, the book also contains sketches by him of hotel guests Howard Carter and Bernard Shaw.

A card painted by Tony Binder for Anton Badrutt when he departed the Winter Palace in 1936

A card painted by Tony Binder for Anton Badrutt when he departed the Winter Palace in 1936

According to his daughter, Badrutt liked collecting autographs, so this guestbook was something of a personal affair. As well as signatures it also contains notes of thanks addressed to Badrutt in person, and a number of photographs, including several of Carnarvon and Carter dated ‘Winter 1922-23, Luxor’. One is the famous image of Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn on arrival at Luxor station on 23 November 1922, being met by Carter and the Governor of Qena, just three days before they breached the tomb.

Also slipped into the guestbook is a menu for Christmas dinner on 25 December 1923 decorated with a guardian figure from the tomb of Tutankhamun, depicted befoe and after the dinner, in the latter case with a huge fat belly and smoking a pipe.

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Most of the space though is taken up with signatures, and it’s some collection. Wiese lists them: there are the statesmen, including former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, Czech president Tomas Masaryk and ex-Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria – who were all in residence at the hotel at the same time; and the crowned heads, such as crown prince Edward of England, visiting in April 1930, who, six years later would be become king of England only to step down within the year, as well as the Belgian king and queen, Albert and Elizabeth, and the crown prince of Sweden, the future King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden.

There’s an entry in the guestbook on 8 March 1929 by Rudyard Kipling and signatures from November of that year of the American silent film star Douglas Fairbanks and his wife, the equally famous Mary Pickford (there’s also a photograph of the pair with Anton Badrutt). German novelist Thomas Mann, who spent 10 days at the hotel, signed the book on 6 March 1930 (and left a lengthy inscription, which I was unable to translate), while George Bernard Shaw wrote on 26 December 1932, “I cannot make up my mind whether Luxor is the hottest place on earth or the coldest”.

Howard Carter by Tony Binder

Howard Carter by Tony Binder

Other random names and the dates they signed the book include John D Rockefeller Jr (15 Feb 1929), Evangeline Lindbergh, mother of Charles (24 Jan 1929), Somerset Maugham (14 Dec 1929), Nelli Melba (18 Feb 1930) and World Champion Heavy weight boxer Gene Tunney (23 Feb 1931), who added the message: ‘The charm of this lovely Winter Palace is only equalled by that of its guiding spirit Mr AR Badrutt’.

Wiese includes a lot of background on Badrutt, but I’ll save that for a future post.

George Bernard Shaw by Tony Binder

George Bernard Shaw by Tony Binder

Recently, I thought I might travel to Basel to see this wonderful piece of history for myself, so I emailed André Wiese to ask if he could put me in touch with Ms Carmen Heusser. His reply was tragic:

Dear Andrew

Thanks for contacting me again. I have no good news. Unfortunately the lady suffers in the meantime heavily from dementia and the guestbook has disappeared recently when she moved to the home for old people. There exists only our digital copy in the museum.

Best wishes,

André

And then there were none.

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April 4, 2013

It’s called adaptive reuse

Some years back, well before the calamity that has befallen the country, I stayed at the Zenobia hotel at Palmyra in Syria. It has the most extraordinary location, away from the modern town and right on the edge of the Roman ruins. It is possible to sit up in bed and look out of the window of your room at grand colonnades silhouetted against the moonlight. It seems natural that pieces of antiquity should find their way into the hotel, and so in the garden the ancient carved capitals of columns serve as bases for tables. I think I remember something similar in the garden of the Palmyra hotel at Baalbek in Lebanon.

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An image kindly sent to me by Susan Allen reminds me it used to be like that in Egypt too. It shows the garden of the Hotel du Nil and, in it, two great stone sarcophagus lids.

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The terrace at Shepheard’s used to boast a pair of sphinxes, reputedly from Saqqara, while the Luxor Hotel in Luxor had two statues of Sekhmet in its garden, most likely brought over from Karnak. Probably nobody at the time thought this an inappropriate employment of Egypt’s archaeological heritage. What was contentious, though, and stirred up comment in the press of the time, was architect Henri Farvager’s usage of stones from the Pyramids to build the Mena House hotel. He didn’t deny it, but in an address given to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1892, claimed it was rubble gathered from the foot of the Pyramids that was collected, and only then with the approval and close supervision of the Egyptian museum authorities.

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March 29, 2013

Louis Vuitton’s labels

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A couple of years back the Musée Carnavalet in Paris hosted an exhibition dedicated to the iconic travel baggage of Louis Vuitton, which I was lucky enough to visit. The incredible vintage pieces on show included trunks that doubled as camp beds and wardrobes, one made for a maharajah to transport his silver tea sets and another custom-built to hold 36 pairs of shoes. There was a lavish catalogue that went with the show, which came in an LV-monogrammed slipcase adorned with vintage luggage labels.

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Hand-tooled leather trunks and luggage labels belong to the same world, so no surprise that legendary trunkmaker Gaston-Louis Vuitton (grandson of the original Louis Vuitton) should turn out to be a label collector. A compulsive voyager, after every trip he would carefully remove the labels from his trunks and place them in albums. He added to his collection by writing to printers and hotels. He amassed around 3,000 labels, which these days form part of the LV archive. A selection of 900 of them are reproduced in World Tour: Vintage Luggage Labels from the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton, just published (in its English version) by Abrams of New York.

The book itself is a piece of art, with its embossed leather cover, tipped-in postcards and page edges printed with the names of far-flung destinations. Some of the vintage photography is gorgeous, and there’s an informative essay on the history of luggage labels by Joao-Manuel Mimoso, who’s probably the world’s leading expert on the subject (he was also kind enough to provide me with images of some of his labels to reproduce in Grand Hotels of Egypt). The rest of the text (by travel writer Francisca Mattéoli), a grand world tour, is as deep and meaningful as a holiday postcard but then nobody’s buying this book for the words.

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March 14, 2013

Then and now: the Savoy

Savoy

For the brief 16 years it was open to guests, the Savoy was Cairo’s most aristocratic hotel. It was a third venture for the indefatigable George Nungovich, the earliest of Cairo’s hotel czars (who I’ve blogged about earlier, here).

A palace belonging to Prince Djemil Toussoun didn’t meet requirements and the building and its grounds were bought up by Nungovich. The site was at the heart of the new Ismailia quarter, on Qasr al-Nil Street, overlooking the Rond Point Qasr al-Nil (see map below). Nungovich had the palace pulled down and replaced with a grand new building of three stories topped by a rotunda.

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This he named the Savoy Hotel and it opened on 28 November 1898. It was described at the time as being remarkably modern with a large dining room and smaller restaurant, spacious lounges, smoking rooms, a reading room in ornamental Egyptian style, electric lift and a wide terrace overlooking Qasr al-Nil Street. Each bedroom had a fireplace and new furniture from Waring and Gillow of Oxford Street, London, and there were suites with private bath and toilet on each floor.

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It was aimed at the class of people who might find Shepheard’s and the Grand Continental, then Cairo’s leading hotels, a bit vulgar. High society checking in at the Savoy in its early years included a young Winston Churchill, fresh from his adventures as a war correspondent in South Africa, Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Aird, the architect and contractor of the Aswan Dam, then under construction, and African colonialist Cecil Rhodes. When General Kitchener and his officers arrived in Cairo triumphant after victory at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1899, they were honored with a grand banquet on the Savoy’s terrace.

Flags were flown over the hotel whenever a royal was staying. First to be hoisted was the white elephant on red, in respect of the visit of the King of Siam. King Albert of Belgium, however, objected to the practice and demanded the flag be removed or he’d leave. In 1905, when the white-haired, 80-year-old ex-empress Eugénie returned to Egypt 36 years after opening the Suez Canal, she took rooms at the Savoy. King George V and Queen Mary, then Prince and Princess of Wales, stayed on their way back from India a couple of years later.

The Crown Prince of Germany being greeted by the manager of the Savoy, Auguste Wild

The Crown Prince of Germany being greeted by the manager of the Savoy, Auguste Wild

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, in October 1914, the hotel was taken over by the British Army – as I noted in a previous post, TE Lawrence worked out of an office here from December of that year. When the war ended, the British Government elected to hold on to the hotel and it became a business address for British-owned companies. In 1924 it was sold to Charles Baehler, chief shareholder of Egyptian Hotels Ltd, who tore the building down. He replaced it with a grand commercial and apartment complex that still stands today facing onto what’s now Talaat Harb Square. Ironically, the Baehler Buildings, as they’re known, have themselves now become a totem of modern Downtown’s architectural heritage, cherished by conservationists, who are possibly unaware that the buildings in fact took the place of an establishment of far greater pedigree.

The Baehler Buildings on Talaat Harb Square now occupy the site of the former Savoy

The Baehler Buildings on Talaat Harb Square now occupy the site of the former Savoy

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March 9, 2013

Thackeray at the hotels

Back last August, I blogged about the artist Lance Thackeray and promised to post more examples of his work. It’s a taken a while, but here we go – these sketches, all of which deal with hotel life, are taken from his 1908 book The Light Side of Egypt, along with the accompanying text.

 

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The Vultures
No one in Egypt gives you a more hearty welcome than the dragoman. He remembers his old friends, and beams upon the newcomers with childlike simplicity; he speaks English, and other languages, also American – sure! Put yourself in his hands and he will see you through. If you have money to burn he will fan the flame. His favourite hobby is collecting baksheesh, which includes a ten per cent commission on everything you purchase while in his company. This accounts for his passion for the bazaars.

 

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Cairo Curios, or the Shepheard’s Flock
No one could desire a more delightful way of spending an hour than to sit on the balcony of Shepheard’s Hotel and watch the curious crowd of natives who decorate the front in every imaginable costume. Millions of piastres must have passed through its balcony railings in exchange for the various articles which the natives hawk in the street below. Shawls, beads, scarabs, fly-whisks, stuffed snakes and crocodiles, and many other charms and horrors, are here bargained for and bought to decorate or disfigure our Western homes.

 

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Romeo and Juliet, or the Balcony Scene at Shepheard’s Hotel
The balcony of this famous hotel still remains the happy hunting ground of the tourist. It has been the scene of many delightful comedies, and more than one tragedy. The beginning of many a love story, and also the end. The arrival of some new beauty will send a flutter through the hearts of the male portion of the visitors, and arouse the susceptibilities of the resident soldier; she will be come the Juliet of the balcony, but with more than one Romeo; and when she at last boards her train at the station, a sigh of relief goes up from the mothers of rival daughters, and the pulse of the Turf Club returns to normal.

 

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The Parting Guest
Any lack of attention which may have shown itself during your stay at the hotel in this country is thoroughly made up for by the extraordinary amount of it which is wasted on you during the day of your departure. You will, no doubt, have provided yourself with a good handful of loose change for those servants who have become familiar obstacles; but you are not prepared for the sudden attack of civility which greets you around the hotel entrance. It is no use looking over their heads, or putting on a far-away expression, as they are sure to trip you up. So pay up and try to look pleasant.

 

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Globe Trotters
It is the hour of the departure. Men and women, from all quarters of the globe, are busy shaking hands, exchanging cards, and pressing cordial invitations upon each other to distant and impossible parts of the earth. The American blonde walks down to her ’bus with a supreme air of indifference and importance, holding fast to her bag, leaving along line of males guessing their chances of meeting on the steamer. The hotel manager stands deferentially by receiving the congratulations and au revoirs of his best customers, and the keen-eyed dragomans rush in for a farewell handshake with their old clients.

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February 28, 2013

Heliopolis, the Clapham Junction of the African skies

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By coincidence, shortly after I posted the pic of the flying boat in front of the Winter Palace (see the post before last), a piece appeared on the BBC News website by Gerald Butt, titled Frank McClean: Forgotten pioneer of the sky. It’s about an Irish aviator who in 1913 flew from Alexandria to Khartoum and back, a journey that took exactly three months thanks to no fewer than 13 breakdowns. The seaplane he flew had been built by the Short brothers of Derbyshire, England, founders of one of the earliest aircraft manufacturing companies. They would become particularly notable for their flying boats – that’s one of their’s in the Luxor photo.

As torturous as the flight was, it showed that by using rivers and lakes for landings, Africa could be traversed by aircraft without the expense of preparing airstrips. The eventual result was that in 1931 Imperial Airways introduced a weekly England-to-Central Africa service. Egypt became a key stopover.

Butt writes: ‘Cairo became synonymous with all the glamour and luxury attached to the early years of commercial flight. As early as 1919, the head of civil aviation in Britain, Sir Frederick Sykes, had correctly predicted that “Egypt is likely to become one of the most important flying centres. It is on the direct route to India, to Australia, to New Zealand, while the most practicable route to the Cape and Central Africa is via Egypt.” A journalist the following year described Heliopolis as “the Clapham Junction of the Empire air routes”.’

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He goes on to describe how senior colonial civil servants would rest overnight in the grandeur of Shepheard’s. ‘The following morning, a launch would ferry passengers to the waiting Imperial Airways Empire flying boat and they would be regally wined and dined as the majestic airliner headed south.’

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February 14, 2013

Kipling’s Egypt

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Eighty-four years ago today, The Egyptian Gazette of 14 February 1929 carried a notice of the arrival of well known author Rudyard Kipling (that’s him, above) and Mrs Kipling at Port Said. They’d landed the previous day and proceeded direct to Cairo. “Mr Kipling exhibited his well-known dislike of publicity,” reported the paper. “The British Vice Consul Mr Williamson-Napier went out in a special police launch to meet the distinguished visitors, but Mr Kipling seeing the interested crowd gathered for his arrival chose to go ashore in a smaller and less conspicuous launch, by which means he escaped popular attention.”

This wasn’t Kipling’s first visit to Egypt. He’d first passed through at the age of five, before the Suez Canal had been made. He also made a visit in 1913, when he’d stayed at the Semiramis (opened just six years previously) but since the weather was cold and wet, he didn’t stay long in Cairo, and instead made his way up the Nile to Luxor and Aswan on Thomas Cook’s SS Rameses III.

The 1913 trip inspired a series of letters, that were collected and published (Letters of Travel: 1892-1913), and include some typically pithy statements on matters relating to tourism in Egypt.

On sightseeing:
“For three weeks we sat on copiously chaired and carpeted decks, carefully isolated from everything that had anything to do with Egypt, under chaperonage of a properly orientalised dragoman. Twice or thrice daily, our steamer drew up at a mud-bank covered with donkeys. Saddles were hauled out of a hatch in our bows; the donkeys were dressed, dealt round like cards: we rode off through crops or desert, as the case might be, were introduced in ringing tones to a temple, and were then duly returned to our bridge and our Baedekers.”

On Americans in Egypt:
“Since the bulk of our passengers were citizens of the United States, Egypt in winter ought to be admitted into the Union as a temporary territory.”

On the Swiss in Egypt:
“The Swiss are the only people who have taken the trouble to master the art of hotel-keeping. Consequently, in the things that really matter – beds, baths, and victuals –they control Egypt.”

On Cairo:
“Modern Cairo is an unkempt place. The streets are dirty and ill-constructed, the pavements unswept and often broken, the tramways thrown, rather than laid down, the gutters neglected. One expects better than this in a city where the tourist spends so much every season. Granted that the tourist is a dog, he comes at least with a bone in his mouth, and a bone that many people pick. He should have a cleaner kennel”

By 1929, Kipling had obviously got over his dislike of Cairo because he and Mrs Kipling spent 13 days there, staying again at the Semiramis. Also at the hotel at that time, reported the Gazette, were the HH Aga Khan and large party, American mining magnate and millionaire Chester Beatty and future professor of Islamic art AC Cresswell. Quite a line up.

Cook's Nile Steamer

On 27 February, the couple boarded the SS Egypt (pictured above) for a 20-day voyage to Luxor and Aswan. Two years to the month later, in February 1931, they were back in Egypt once more: Kipling’s wife suffered from rheumatism and a doctor had recommended the Helwan as a health resort. They found it too cold and went once again up the Nile in search of warmth, spending 10 days in Aswan.

Thanks to books such as Kim and The Jungle Book, the name may always be associated with India, but Rudyard Kipling spent a significant amount of time in Egypt too.

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