Monthly Archives: July 2013

The Fishing Fleet

Her first season

Before writing Grand Hotels of Egypt, I’d never come across the term ‘fishing fleet’ to mean anything other than the obvious. But as I discovered, it was also a term widely used in the 19th century to describe the boatloads of single women who arrived in Egypt each Season on the hunt for a husband. This is a forgotten bit of colonial history that’s now been put in the spotlight thanks to a book published last year, called The Fishing Fleet, and written by Anne De Courcy.

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De Courcy’s book doesn’t mention Egypt at all because it turns out the Fleet actually has its origins in India, 200 years previously. It existed from the late 17th century when the East India Company first shipped women out to Bombay as prospective brides for its officers out there. The Company was staffed by large numbers of young men sent out from Britain – they outnumbered the women four to one – who had little opportunity of finding a British bride, possibly not until until they retired and returned home. These men were well educated, well bred and well paid – in short, perfect husband material. The Company saw this as a business opportunity and charged British families desperate to make a match for unmarried daughters a fee to sail them out to India. There, they maintained the women for a year, during which time they were expected to find a mate. Women who failed to make a catch were sent back home and known as ‘Returned Empties’.

De Courcy doesn’t make success sound like much fun either. She quotes a Lady Canning who married and settled in Calcutta where her shoes turned ‘furry with mildew’ in a day and there were so many cockroaches that the wine glasses on the dinner table had to have lids to cover them. There’s a Waughesque account of a ball that suffered an invasion of blister-flies (earwig-like insects that could leave large and painful blisters on the skin): ‘Some crept up gentlemen’s sleeves, others concealed themselves in a jungle of whisker. One heard little else all evening but “Allow me, Sir, to take off this blister-fly that is disappearing into your neckcloth” or “Permit me, Ma’am, to remove this one from your arm”. This however did not stop the dancers and they polka’d and waltzed over countless myriads of insects that had been attracted to the white cloth on the floor, which was completely discoloured by their mangled bodies at the end of the evening.’

The Fishing Fleet began targeting Egypt after 1882, when Britain made the country a protectorate and flooded the place with civil service and soldiers (prior to this, India-bound husband-hunters had temporarily alighted at Port Said, where they stocked up on tropical supplies, like sun hats and fly whisks, at the large Simon Arzt store).

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Chaperoned by her mother, 19-year-old Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller came husband-hunting to Cairo for the 1910-1911 Season. The pair took up residence at the Gezira Palace. They went to five dances a week, and attended the races and polo games every afternoon at the neighbouring sports club. Her mother tried to broaden her mind by taking her to the Egyptian Museum, but when she suggested they should go up the Nile to see Luxor, the young girl protested passionately, saying that she was enjoying herself far too much to want to go and kick around dusty old monuments. Shortly after returning to England, she wrote a novel, which she called Snow Upon the Desert, which she set in Cairo and populated with characters modelled on people she’d seen at the Palace. It possibly wasn’t up to much because it never made it into print. Perhaps had she gone husband hunting in India rather than Cairo she might have had more colourful source material. Not that it mattered, because her next novel, written after she found herself a husband back in England, did considerably better, being published to some acclaim under her new married name of Agatha Christie.

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It’s just a flesh wound

Just posted on the always excellent boingboing.net:

The best opening paragraph on Wikipedia
Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880–5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He later said, “Frankly I had enjoyed the war”.

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This extraordinary character has strong links to Egypt. Although born into an aristocratic family in Brussels, at the age of six the household relocated to Cairo where Carton de Wiart’s father became a court magistrate and, later, a director of the Cairo Electric Railways, the company responsible for developing the suburb of Heliopolis. He dispatched his son back to England for schooling where, on graduating from Oxford, he joined the army and was sent off to fight in the Boer War, commencing his campaign to discard bits of his anatomy (by the end of World War I he was down his left hand, an eye and part of one ear). His mental faculties remained intact and he became a valued advisor to Churchill. In this capacity he was invited to attend the 1943 Cairo Conference, with Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-Shek of the Republic of China, held at the residence of the American ambassador to Egypt, Alexander Kirk, near the Pyramids, and at the Mena House hotel. See, you knew there’d be a hotel link in there eventually.

Carton de Wiart is on the far right

Carton de Wiart is on the far right

Read the rest of the Carton de Wiart’s Wikipedia entry here.

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Ann Lees, former guest at Shepheard’s

My cousin Anthony, who lives on Alderney, called me recently to say that he’d lent his copy of Grand Hotels of Egypt to a friend of his on the island and that this person wanted to talk to me. I called her at the weekend. Her name is Ann Lees and I think she is possibly in her 80s. Her husband served in the Indian police until independence in 1947, and then went on to work as a British agent in Baghdad and Tehran. In 1949, Ann told me, they travelled out from the UK to the Middle East on the SS Canton, disembarking at Port Said and spent some time in Egypt. They stayed at Shepheard’s. Sixty-four years later Ann doesn’t really remember much about it except the bathrooms, which she says were “so big”, and also that there were numerous large vitrines in the corridors containing jewellery and objets d’art for sale. Her husband bought her a necklace, which she still has. She visited the Semiramis for dinner, where King Zog of Albania was in residence, and also the Mena House and Heliopolis Palace. Ann is only the second person I have spoken with who actually stayed at the original Shepheard’s – there can’t be too many people who did that are still around. Amazingly, Ann still has several mementoes of her Egypt trip (in addition to the necklace), which Anthony kindly photographed and which I’m posting below.

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Filed under Memorabilia, Shepheard's, Travellers' tales

Glamour girls and sphinxes, part 2

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Some time ago I posted a picture of Sophia Loren on a sphinx for no better reason that it was a beautiful photograph – well, in a similarly spurious vein, here is Russian ballet star Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) in front of a sphinx at the Serapeum, Alexandria in 1923. A regular trooper when it came to touring, she was in town for a run of seven nights of performances at the Grand Theatre Mohamed Aly (she’d also been in Egypt in 1910 and would return in 1928). Below, she poses in Cairo with a more famous Sphinx, while bottom that’s her beside a hideous fountain in the garden at Shepheard’s, which is presumably where she stayed.

NPG x135875; Anna Pavlova in Egypt by Anglo-Swiss Photo-Studio, Cairo

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