Tag Archives: Edward Ardizzone

Edward Ardizzone in Cairo

ARDIZLicence

So, more about that Parade cover I posted before Christmas. Or, more specifically, more about the person who drew it. Edward Ardizzone (1900–79) was once a hugely popular English artist and illustrator, revered in particular for his series of Little Tim children’s books. During World War II he worked as a war artist, documenting the experiences of soldiers and civilians in England and across Europe. While sketching the devastation caused by the ongoing Blitz in London he was arrested by the Home Guard as a spy. In 1942, the War Office sent Ardizzone to the Middle East. He arrived in Cairo in May during preparations for the Allied offensive at El Alamein. He was given lodgings in Garden City, in a room above the offices of the soldiers’ magazine Parade, for which he did illustrations and that special Christmas cover.

Even before I discovered his Cairo connection, I’d always been an Ardizzone fan. For me, it is his love of the intimate and ordinary, along with his humour. While in Egypt he went out into the desert, attached to the mechanized Second Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and dutifully recorded scenes of warfare, but I suspect he was much more at home in Cairo. He followed the soldiers into the bazaars and drew them having their photographs taken or shopping for silks and other luxuries to send back home to England where such things were unavailable. In London he was an avid frequenter of pubs, which he celebrated in a wonderful little book called The Local, which is full of his drawings of humble public barrooms and their gossipy, boozy clientele. In Cairo he sought out similar places. He frequented places like Badia’s Casino, Groppi’s and the Gezira Club, which he drew, leaving us tantalizing sketches of the city’s wartime nightlife as experienced by off-duty British officers (all such places were off-limits to common soldiers, of course).

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Badia’s Casino

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The Bar at Badia’s Casino

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The Gezira Club

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Light Horse at Groppi’s

Ardizzone also drew a nightclub called Dolls. One of the posts on this site last year featured pages from Schindler’s Guide to Cairo, from 1942/43, and on one of those pages is an ad for ‘Dolls music hall and cabaret’. It’s not somewhere I know anything about but from the guide’s description it sounds quite a joint: on Sharia Malika Farida (these days Abdel Khalek Sarwat), it is described as one of Cairo’s leading cabarets, with a hundred tables and entertainment nightly by the “well-known” Black and White Band. When the cabaret began the dance floor was automatically raised to give everyone the best view.

Doll's Cabaret: the Girl in Black
Dolls Nightclub

Ardizzone was in Egypt for just a few months before moving on to Sicily, mainland Italy and Normandy before being discharged from the army in 1945. He lived until 1979 producing masses of work, mostly illustrations for books, but also pieces of commercial advertising and other odd commissions such as an altar piece. Sadly, he is very much out of fashion these days, although there was an excellent exhibition devoted to his work and life here in London last year and, to tie in with it, a superb book Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator by Alan Powers (Lund Humphries, £40).

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Compliments of the season, Mrs ‘Arris

ARDIZParade

The cover of Parade magazine, 19 December 1942, entitled “The Soldiers Dream” or “Christmas Eve at the Local” and drawn by Edward Ardizzone. Parade was published in Cairo and distributed to the Allied forces in Egypt and around the Mediterranean. More on Ardizzone and Egypt to come in the New Year. Meanwhile, my own compliments of the season to you.

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Then and now: the Eden Palace

Eden_Palace_letterhead

Although it was hotel for only around 20 years, and the last guests checked out 93 years ago, the name of the Eden Palace lingers in Cairo – it’s there in large letters on the pediment of a corner building on modern Khazindar Square, across from the Sednaoui department store. It’s passed every day by thousands of people but likely noticed only by a very few.

The hotel opened around 1900 in a grand new building raised on the site formerly occupied by the original Hotel d’Angleterre, the first hotel run by George Nungovich (see earlier post). It was a good site, overlooking the Ezbekiyya Gardens; guests in the better rooms would wake to birdsong, and a view of trees and greenery when they opened the shutters. It had 145 rooms, with a lift and steam heating. Shepheard’s, the epicentre of the city’s social scene was just a stone’s throw away. Unlike Shepheard’s, which attracted a fashionable crowd, the Eden Palace catered to businessmen and long-term residents, who would sacrifice a little glamour for cheaper room rates – the 1914 edition of Baedekers gives Shepheard’s charging 80 piastres per night, same as the nearby Continental, while the Semiramis charged 90 pias and the Savoy 90-120 pias; by comparison, the Eden Palace was just 50 pias.

Hotel du Nil 01 map

eden palace card

An insight into the kind of person who stayed at the Eden Palace comes from a letter held by the Albany Institute of History and Art in upstate New York. Dated March 1909, it’s from Samuel W. Brown, a noted local businessman in the coffee, spice and mustard trade who was also on the board of trustees of the Institute. It’s addressed to Cuyler Reynolds, the curator of the Institute, and it concerns the attempt to acquire a pair of Egyptian mummies on the cheap:

Letter_from_Samuel_W_Brown_to_Cuyler_Reynolds 1909 AIHA

My Dear Mr. Reynolds

I received your letter with enclosures as stated I called at the U.S. Consulate several times but did not find Mr. Berry; later on learned that he was not connected with the Consulate but was a “Judge” of the Tribunal Court here. I called at his hotel then but did not see him there. He called on me at my hotel last evening. He did not hesitate to inform me that he could do little to assist me as he was not acquainted with the Director of the Museum. I am at a loss to understand why you should expect to get any of the Museum Curios for nothing. The Museum is a Government affair and everything going out of the Museum must be paid for at a fixed price whether for a museum or private collection. These people are not in the Museum business for their health, and I fully learned of that fact when I was in Cairo four years ago.

I called on the Director the following day and made my wants Known to him and have secured two Mummy’s [sic] which I am having packed for shipment. I have written to Mr. Ten Eyck the details of the transaction and I hope that they will be in Albany before I reach home.

We are having a delightful time Bright warm weather.

Sincerely Yours

Samuel W. Brown

Whatever his frustrations, Brown was successful and the pair of mummies he brought back form the centerpiece of the Institute’s Ancient Egypt collection until today.

While the front entrance of the Eden Palace was on Sharia al-Genaineh, facing the Ezbekiyya, the back door let out onto Wagh al-Birket, which at this time was notoriously a street full of brothels. This can’t have done much for the hotel’s reputation. And when Cairo became flooded with British and Commonwealth soldiers following the outbreak of World War I, it seems the Eden Palace might have taken on the character of some sort of Wild West saloon:

“We had our first pay day on Christmas Eve and leave was general and everybody went straight into Cairo. Our own party of four really disgraced outselves, AWOL for three days, finally and very ignominiously dragged out of the Eden Palace Hotel in the early hours of the morning by the picket and made to walk it home into the guard tent.”

Letter from an Australian soldier quoted in Peter Hart’s Gallipolli

Troops in the Birka by Edward Ardizzone, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

Troops in the Birka by Edward Ardizzone, courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

The hotel seemingly never quite recovered, and trade post-World War I was sufficiently bad that when, in 1920, British Army HQ decided to vacate the Savoy for budgetary reasons, the owners of the Eden Palace made them an attractive offer. The army didn’t stay long in residence but after the uniforms left the place never returned to use as a hotel.

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Eden Palace 02

The building today is in a wretched state, but with its arcaded pavements and low-rise, Italianate architecture, if your imagination can dust things off a little, then this dilapidated corner still gives a good impression of what the city once looked like when the Ezbekiyya was a pleasure garden and birds still sang in Cairo squares.

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