Tag Archives: Agatha Christie

June 17, 2016 · 3:16 pm

The Cataract aka the ‘Grand Hotel’

Nice to see Aswan’s Cataract hotel enjoying plenty of screen-time as it takes the lead role in the ritzy Ramadan TV series Grand Hotel. I have only seen the first two episodes so far but there are lots of scenes in the hotel’s Nile-side gardens and some on the terrace with its views of the river and desert beyond. But it seems the production wasn’t given permission to film inside the hotel because the interiors – at least in the first two episodes – were definitely not shot at the Cataract.

In honour of the series, here are a few things you may or may not know about the Cataract.

It was built by Cook & Son
The hotel was financed by the English travel company Thomas Cook & Son. The railway had arrived in Aswan in 1898, bringing far more visitors to the town than the existing hotels could cope with. For a few seasons Cook & Son had been accommodating some of these tourists on one of its Nile cruisers, which was permanently moored on the Corniche at Aswan as a floating hotel. In 1899, the company decided to address the problem by commissioning a grand new hotel.

Mummies were harmed in the construction
Construction began in 1899 on nine feddans bought from the state. There was considerable controversy when Al-Ahram reported that workmen leveling the driveway to the hotel had come upon two hundred mummies which they then destroyed with their picks.

It was an immediate hit
The hotel opened to guests on 8 January 1900. It was two storeys high with 120 rooms, the majority south-facing with balconies overlooking the Nile. Forty more bedrooms were added later that year but the following season the number of visitors was so great that tents had to be erected in the grounds to house the overﬂow. So in 1902, the hotel gained a third story with an additional sixty rooms, bringing the total number of rooms to 220.

It was critically acclaimed
The architect of the hotel was an Englishman with the very un-English name of Henri Favarger. He was the same architect responsible for the Mena House out by the Pyramids in Cairo. The highlight of the Mena House was Favarger’s Moorish dining hall and at the Cataract he created an even more dramatic dining space, a great octagonal, double-height hall topped by a central dome seventy-ﬁve feet high. The press described it as “unmatched even in Europe”. You can still see Favarger’s name etched into a stone at the foot of one of the columns.

…but not by everybody
Not everyone was a fan of the hotel. French travel writer Pierre Loti, who was generally appalled by the Europeanisation of Egypt. “Cook & Son have even gone so far as to conceive the idea that it would be original to give to their establishment a certain cachet of Islam. And the dining-room reproduces the interior of one of the mosques of Stamboul. At the luncheon hour,” he wrote with dripping sarcasm, “it is one of the prettiest sights in the world to see, under this imitation holy cupola, all the little tables crowded with Cook’s tourists of both sexes, while a concealed orchestra strikes up the Mattchiche.” English travel writer Douglas Sladen was almost as scathing: he thought the hotel looked like a county asylum.

There is no evidence Agatha Christie stayed at the Cataract
Despite the claims of the hotel – and everybody else taking these claims as fact – there is no evidence Agatha Christie ever stayed at the Cataract. She holidayed in Egypt twice in the early 1930s and passed through Aswan on a Nile cruise. Her descriptions of the hotel in her twenty-second novel, Death on the Nile, prove that she certainly visited the hotel but passengers on Nile cruises tended to sleep in their cabins on the boats while in Upper Egypt. I’m not saying categorically she did not take a room at the Cataract, simply that there is no evidence to say she did.

It attracted repeat visitors
A Lord Benbrook, a regular guest at the hotel, once arrived at the terrace to ﬁnd his favorite table taken and informed the seated party that the table was reserved. “Since when,” asked the occupant. “Since twenty years,” Benbrook replied. Another regular was regular was Sultan Muhammad Shah, better known as Aga Khan III. After his ﬁrst stay in 1937, when he and his new bride honeymooned at the Cataract, he reserved a suite at the hotel every year during the winter months. Before his death in 1957, he requested to be buried in Aswan and his mausoleum faces the Cataract from the top of a sandy hill across on the far side of the Nile.

…and repeat offenders
Egyptian royalty, on occasion, also favored the Cataract. King Farouk visiting for the 1941–42 season took an entire ﬂoor. According to stories doing the rounds at the time, the King enjoyed taking potshots from his balcony at the little Nubian boys paddling their boats on the river below. True or not, it says a lot about Farouk that such a story was so widely circulated.

There is a painting of it in a Cairo museum
Maybe because it is so far from Cairo, but the Cataract was never written about or photographed as much as most of Egypt’s other grand hotels. It is, though, the only hotel to feature in a Cairo museum. This is a painting done in 1948 by Shaaban Zaky, a self-taught artist and railway employee, who travelled Egypt with his easel and brushes, and you’ll find it in the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art on Gezira.

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Filed under Art and artists, Grand hotels

Tagged as Agatha Christie, Cataract, Death on the Nile, Douglas Sladen, Henri Favarger, Pierre Loti, Thomas Cook & Son

July 27, 2013 · 9:09 pm

The Fishing Fleet

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.

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).

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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Filed under Book reviews, Travellers' tales

Tagged as Agatha Christie, Anne De Courcy, Gezira Palace, Simon Arzt, The Fishing Fleet

October 22, 2012 · 9:27 pm

The Baron

The previous pair of posts were about TE Lawrence’s stays in Cairo hotels – a year at the Grand Continental, a year and a half, on and off, at the Savoy and two weeks at the Semiramis. In the Middle East it’s not an Egyptian hotel, though, that he’s most associated with but the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria, thanks to an unpaid bar bill that to this day is displayed framed on the lounge wall. I’ve stayed at the Baron a couple of times, most recently in 2009 when I wrote the following text for Jazeera Magazine (the photographs are by Damascus-based John Wreford):

In 1880, when Aleppo was the great cosmopolitan metropolis of the region, the Mazloumian family from Turkish Armenia halted here on the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They found only crude accommodations and seeing an opportunity started a small hotel. In 1909 they built a bigger hotel. They called it the Baron because in Armenian baron means “sir”, which was how the Egyptian construction workers addressed the owners.

Exactly 100 years on, reading the entries on website tripadvisor.com, courtesy is no longer a strong suit of the hotel. Nor it seems are plumbing, furnishings, cuisine or service. But in recompense, how many hotels can boast of having played a part in the formation of the country? (In 1918 King Faisal declared Syria’s independence from a balcony at the Baron.) And can waiters at the Four Seasons in Damascus honestly boast that guests used to shoot duck from the hotel roof?

One can almost excuse the dilapidated air of the hotel’s rooms and hallways as fidelity to a century of history. A tour of the second floor is a walk through the passage of the Middle East during the 20th century. The balcony in Room 215 is where King Faisal made his proclamation. Room 203 was favoured by Agatha Christie, although she preferred to sit out on the terrace to do her writing (part of Murder on the Orient Express was supposedly written during stays at the hotel). Lawrence of Arabia slept in Room 202, while the Presidential Suite was once variously occupied by the Shah of Persia, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nahayan (principal architect of the United Arab Emirates). Before the Ottoman withdrawal, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, mounted machine guns on the roof during World War I in case the British or the Arab Legions broke through. These are the claims of the hotel, anyway.

Hard evidence for at least one of the stories is offered in the hotel lounge, where visitors can examine a framed copy of a drinks bill signed by Lawrence. Otherwise, staff (many of whom have been with the hotel for two, three or even four decades) have a blasé attitude to history – the guest books, filled with past signatures, are stuffed along with piles of yellowed, scrunched up newspaper clippings in the top of an old dusty radiogram.

The hotel is still owned by the Mazloumian family, who have always resisted buy-out bids. Baron Street, on which the hotel stands, has recently seen the loss of several neighbouring buildings, torn down by developers, and the old hotel is beginning to look a little besieged. The current owner, a direct descendent of the Baron’s founders, has always insisted he will never sell – after all, it was his family who founded the hotel business in Syria.