Monthly Archives: February 2015

Speaking of the Savoy (see last post), Egypt had no less than four hotels that borrowed the name of the original London establishment – which took its name from a palace that formerly stood on the site, founded by the royal Savoy family back in the 13th century. I’ve already posted about the Cairo Savoy and Aswan Savoy, and in passing the Luxor Savoy, but not yet written anything about the Alexandria Savoy, or more properly, the Savoy Palace Hotel. There’s good reason for this, which is that I really don’t know much about it.

The reason I don’t know much is because the life of the Alexandria Savoy, despite being the grandest of the city’s hotels when it opened, was a short one. That opening was on 23 February 1907. The previous day’s edition of The Egyptian Gazette carried a story on Alexandria’s new hotel: “It is a curious fact that although palatial and luxurious hotels are to be found throughout Egypt and even in the suburbs of Alexandria, the port itself is singularly deficient in similarly first-class houses of accommodation. But in the Savoy Palace Hotel, which opens its doors tomorrow, the public will find a hostelry which will compare most advantageously with the best of those in Cairo and Upper Egypt.­”

The address was 35 rue de la Porte de Rosette – now Tariq Horeyya – which was somewhere near the junction with An-Nabi Daniel; in other words just about as central as it was possible to get. The hotel occupied a building that had only been constructed three years previously, for a personage the Gazette identifies only as “Baron Cumbo”, an obviously ridiculously wealthy individual given that after a bit of structural rejigging the Savoy ran to 180 bedrooms. Some of this, it seems, was accommodated in two new wings that were added at the back, in what was the garden, with the space between the wings being covered with a high, glass-domed roof to create an enclosed winter garden. Off this, according to the Gazette, were reading and billiard rooms on the left, and, on the right, a restaurant described as having enormous gilt electroliers, a crimson carpet over the parquet floor and a high stand of palms in the centre of the room. There was a handsome marble staircase leading from the entrance hall to the upper floors, where the bedrooms were furnished by Maple & Co of London and Krieger of Paris. Which all sounds rather splendid.

And that, for the moment, is about the sum of knowledge on this hotel. There were some ads that ran in the press but they add nothing (while contradicting the Gazette’s count of 180 rooms).

The best image of the hotel is the beautiful luggage label that heads this post, which is very rare, although one did pop up on eBay last month – the first I’ve seen in years – where it sold for $167. There are also a couple of postcards that show up in online searches, one of which was obviously used as the main source by the artist responsible for the luggage label.

Archival material I’ve dug up online suggests the Alexandria Savoy, like its Cairo counterpart, was used by the British Army in Egypt as a temporary headquarters during World War I and there’s a mention elsewhere of a meeting that took place at the hotel in 1920. That, however, is the last reference I have come across to it. The hotel appears in Baedeker’s guides to Egypt for 1911 and 1914, but has disappeared by the next edition, in 1929. I suspect that like many hotels in Egypt – again, the Cairo Savoy included – the Alexandria Savoy was a victim of the Great War and the vacuum it created where tourism used to be, which wasn’t filled until the early 1920s. If anybody knows different or has any other information to add, I’d love to hear from you.