Found on ebay, this postcard depicting arrivals at Shepheard’s heading for reception past an intimidatingly large phalanx of tarboosh-topped staff (all of whom would be looking to squeeze as much baksheesh as they could from the newcomers during the course of their stay). It was posted from the hotel (the stamp on the reverse has a Shepheard’s Hotel frank) to an address in Paris in 1934.
The cartoon is signed ‘Kem’; this was the pen-name of Kimon Evan Marengo, born in 1904 in Egypt, the son of Evangelos Marangos, a Greek cotton merchant. He grew up in Alexandria and from 1923 to 1931 he edited and contributed to a political weekly called Maalesh. In 1929 he moved to Paris and then in 1939 went to Oxford University, where his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war. He ended up working for the British Foreign Office as political adviser on the Middle East, producing cartoons, postcards, posters and other propaganda material, notably pin-cushions in which the pins were stuck into the backsides of Mussolini and Hitler. He also acted as a war correspondent and was later awarded the Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre. In 1956 his family lost everything when Nasser nationalised the Egyptian cotton industry and Marengo remained in the UK, dying in London in 1988.
