Tag Archives: William Doss

More sad news from the Windsor

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The Windsor Hotel in Cairo is closed. I haven’t been by for some months now, but I saw an article in the online Arabic-language Mantiqi magazine that details what’s going on. I know that for years now, the Cairo governate has been digging up Alfi Street right next to the hotel as part of the new Metro line construction. Inevitably, this has caused subsidence and the Windsor building has suffered slippage. Marileez, one of the Doss family that own the hotel told me, “On the 30th of September as I was sitting with my father and taking care of some business, I heard a cracking sound, looked around and saw the walls opening with big cracks. We immediately evacuated everyone, transferred my father and most of the guests to The Lotus, our other hotel, and never went back.” The Metro people have apparently since shored up the foundations but nobody is allowed back in the hotel and the Doss family have no idea what happens next.

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Photos from Mantiqi

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William Doss 1915-2020

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Sad to hear recently of the death of William Doss, owner of the Windsor Hotel. He died on 30 January at the age of 105. I interviewed Mr Doss twice while researching Grand Hotels of Egypt and ever since I have continued to drop by the Windsor, where he lunched every afternoon with his children, to say hello. In recent years he was too frail for conversation, but when I interviewed him around ten years earlier he was full of terrific stories. As a young man he studied in England and he had brilliant recall of his time there. He bought himself a car and explored the country, and he could clearly remember where he visited, where he stayed and what it all cost, down to the penny. When it was time for him to return to Egypt he had the car – a stylish and sporty little thing, he told me – shipped with him to Port Said. But when the ship docked the car wouldn’t start and had to be towed. So, William made his grand return home in a sports car pulled through the streets by a donkey. He was a living link to the era of the grand hotels of Egypt and Cairo will feel diminished for his passing. My best wishes go to his children Wafik, Wasfi and Marileez, and their families. Photo of William Doss by Hossam el-Hamalawy

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Back at the Windsor

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Photo by Jacobs Cindi

In the 1990s, when I was lucky enough to be paid to travel and write guidebooks for the likes of Lonely Planet, people would occasionally ask, ‘Where’s your favourite place in the world?’ The answer was usually wherever I’d been last, but there were also a couple of immovable regulars I always mentioned: one of these was a coffeehouse in the shadow of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, another was the barrel lounge at the Windsor hotel in Cairo. I’ve no idea if that coffeehouse in Damascus has survived the devastation of recent years but the lounge at the Windsor hotel is definitely intact, and I was back there last week.

If you have never visited the Windsor, it is a time capsule, not just of Cairo, but of a very particular vanished world of steamer trunks, Baedekers and gin & tonic sundowners. The caged lift that carries guest up to the first-floor lounge is still manually operated and may well be the oldest in Egypt. The hotel décor has certainly not changed since the Doss family took over the hotel in 1962 and looks like it hadn’t been changed for a further 30 years before that. In the lounge, the wooden floors are deeply scored with age, the walls are hung with hunting lodge trophies and many of the seats are fashioned from old barrels – hence, the ‘barrel lounge’.

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Photo by Jacobs Cindi

In one corner there is a small flag, red with a white cross, a memento to the former owner from whom Doss purchased the business, a Swiss man named Frey. Last week I was delighted to find William Doss lunching underneath the flag, as he has done for decades, which is something of an achievement considering this year he turned 102. With him were sons Wafik and Wasfi, and daughter Marileez, who now together oversee the hotel. We drank tea together and I caught up on news.

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From left to right: Gadi Farfour, me, Marileez Doss Suter, Wafik Doss and William Doss

I first visited the barrel lounge in 1988, shortly after arriving in Cairo, and was a regular for a few years. During the 1990 football World Cup, the last in which Egypt participated, I watched some of the games at the Windsor – including the one in which England inevitably went out to Germany on penalties. Even without the football, it was a lively place at that time. Every night one particular large table would be filled by a boisterous crowd of actors, directors and hangers-on from the theatres on nearby Emad ed-Din Street. It went a little quiet in the 2000s – as, sadly, did the hotel side of the business – but on current evidence the bar seems to have bounced back into life. While we were there an Egyptian crew was shooting a short film in the stairwell, just the latest, Marileez said, in a string of recent shoots taking advantage of the Windsor’s period charms (taking advantage in a very literal sense in one case, when a production crew walked off with a couple of the hotel’s armchairs and the lid of an antique urn).

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A scene from the filming on the day of our visit

There have been one or two changes Marileez was pleased to point out to me. The faded old Swissair posters that used to hang on the stairs have been replaced with new Windsor hotel posters inspired by the luggage labels in Grand Hotels of Egypt. The cover of that book has also been framed and hung on a column in the lounge, as has the book’s title page, which I inscribed to the Doss family during the launch party, held in this very place in 2012. I’m hugely honoured to have a lingering presence in this wonderful old establishment.

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Photo by Jacobs Cindi

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For anyone who has never been to the Windsor, I urge you to pay it a visit next time you’re in Cairo. Meanwhile, with Egypt now qualified for the 2018 World Cup, I’m thinking I might book a room for next June and cheer them on again from a seat in the barrel lounge.

The photos in this post come from the Windsor’s Facebook page. Those credited to Jacobs Cindi are from the website of French newspaper Le Monde, where they accompanied a recent article on the hotel

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Memories of the Parisiana

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When a few years ago I interviewed the owner of Cairo’s Windsor hotel, William Doss (who was then 94), his earliest memories of the place were not of the hotel but of the bar–restaurant that once occupied the ground floor. This was the Parisiana, one of several popular night spots on Alfi Bey, along with the neighbouring Kursaal and the St James. As a student in the 1930s, Doss told me, he would go each Thursday evening to sit at one of the Parisiana’s pavement tables and order a beer for two and a half piasters. The café also appears in the memoir The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, as the venue where the parents of author Lucette Lagnado first met: “Edith was sitting outdoors at La Parisiana, Cairo’s most popular café, enjoying a café turque with her mother, when she noticed the man in white.”

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The café is, of course, long gone. It was ‘foreign-owned’, and in the wake of the 1952 Revolution it was either nationalized or the owner just sold up and quit. Doss remembers the space becoming a showroom for a state collective of furniture makers before being occupied by the Ministry of Communication. This week I received an email from the great-granddaughter of a/the former owner of the Parisiana, an Armenian called Kapriel Ayrandjian. This lady wonders if I have any further information on the Parisiana and/or her great-grandfather. Unfortunately I don’t but I wonder if anybody reading this blog has? If so, please do get in touch.

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