Monthly Archives: February 2015

It’s here!

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I have a copy of On the Nile. Just the one, mind. It’s an advance copy, couriered to me direct from the printing house in China. The bulk of the books are now making their way slowly by sea to Egypt from where they will distributed internationally. I’m not sure when they make land at Suez, but I think it’s probably early April, which means it should be in the bookshops later that month. Meanwhile, you can place advance orders on Amazon.

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The Alexandria Savoy

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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).

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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.

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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.

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Once grand, still grand

The River Front circa 1904,  by artist Harold Oakley

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to get to stay a night at the London Savoy. I was writing a story on it for Celebrated Living, the inflight magazine carried in the premium-class cabins of American Airlines. I have visited the hotel before but only to drink at the American Bar, plus once to attend an awards ceremony held in the ballroom, and once in 2007 when the whole place was thrown open for a viewing of lots in advance of the auction of around 3,000 pieces of the hotel’s furniture prior to it closing for three years of refurb. This then was my first visit since the Savoy reopened in 2010 after being taken over by the Fairmont chain.

Charlie Chaplin and wife Oona on the roof

Charlie Chaplin and wife Oona on the roof

Unlike the grand hotels of Egypt, where these days more than a little imagination is required to conjure up any glamour or opulence (or, for that matter, any life), the Savoy still buzzes. The American Bar remains one of the best bars in the world and the Savoy Grill, despite being operated by the group headed by the asinine Gordon Ramsay, remains a truly special restaurant. Fads and fashions hit London’s dining scene with the regularity of January rains but after more than a century in existence the Grill still feels like the place to be. I love that at around 10pm it receives a new rush of energy as a post theatre crowd turns up for a 400g rib-eye or sirloin and a decent bottle of red before bedtime.

Fred Astaire and sister Adele, also on the roof

Fred Astaire and sister Adele, also on the roof

Our room was a river suite, next door to the Monet suite, in fact, and if the view didn’t include the Pyramids or the Nile plus Theban Hills/First Cataract, there was at least Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment below. The element of the Savoy I enjoyed most was the lifts, one red, one blue, one green; I don’t know if they are original but they are wooden and certainly old. The Savoy was the first hotel in England to install electric ‘ascending rooms’, which apparently used to take eight minutes to rise up seven floors, each with a lift boy offering cognac stiffeners to calm passengers’ nerves.

Marilyn Monroe with Laurence Olivier at the Savoy for a press conference in 1956 conference

Marilyn Monroe with Laurence Olivier at the Savoy for a press conference in 1956

There are a whole host of firsts associated withe Savoy, a hundred of which are listed out in an article on the hotel’s website, including the following:

* The Savoy was the first hotel to have its own artesian well, 420 ft deep.

* On an infamous evening in 1896, the Savoy was the where the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre became the first woman to smoke in public at the dinner table.

* The first ‘Gondola Party’ not in Venice was held in the Savoy in 1905; the courtyard floor was made watertight and flooded to a depth of 4 feet, scenery erected around the walls, and gondolas floated for a party hosted American millionaire George Kessler.

* The first flight within the hotel took place on New Year’s Eve, 1906, when on the stroke of midnight, an aero-mobile (a hybrid motor-car and aeroplane) set off on rails fitted to the roof of the foyer, landed and ran between the diners as two ladies on board showered party-goers with gifts.

The Savoy entrance, added in 1929 and still a beacon of elegance today

The Savoy entrance, added in 1929 and still a beacon of elegance today

Read the rest here.

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