bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 40–41
Cairo in the War — 1939-1945 by Artemis
Cooper, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1989,
370 pp, £17.95.
Artemis Cooper, married to the writer Antony Beevor, is the grand-daughter of Duff and Diana Cooper. Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount of Norwich, was Minister of Information in Churchill’s cabinet from 1940-42 and British Ambassador to France from 1944 to 1947. Born in 1953, Artemis Cooper first went to Egypt after leaving Oxford, and taught English at Alexandria University.
Cairo in the War — 1939-1945 is a delightful, amusing, well-researched and readable book. With verve, percipience, a wicked sense of humour and a marvellous collection of anecdotes, the author skillfully recreates the extraordinary atmosphere prevailing in Cairo and Alexandria during the Second World War.
Not only is the book a fascinating account of life in Egypt from 1939 to 1945 but, for someone who experienced Cairo during a much shorter war, the Six Day War of 1967, it is astonishing how closely Artemis Cooper’s brilliantly drawn vignettes of people and life in Cairo in the 1940s resembled Nasser’s Egypt, twenty-five years later. descriptions of the sights, the sounds, the smells (above all the smells) and the polyglot population of Cairo and Alexandria are very evocative and, in a sense, timeless. I would be surprised if her descriptions would not apply also to present-day Egypt.
In their books, Lawrence Durrell (the Alexandria Quartet) and Olivia Manning (the Levant Trilogy) capture the quintessence of Egypt, the sultry decadence; the unrelenting heat; the omnipresent sand, like powdered talcum, covering every pore and opening of the body; and the flies so thick on the meat hanging in the butcher shops that a dessicated piece of lamb easily could be mistaken for a Black Forest ham.
Artemis Cooper has done no less, but she also has provided an astute and fascinating account of political life in Egypt in the 1940s. Particularly interesting are her not uncritical descriptions of the extraordinary way in which the British Ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson (elevated to the peerage in 1943, as the first Baron Killearn) dominated the country’s political life with imperial majesty and absolute ruthlessness.
In a chapter entitled, Behind Closed Doors (SOE Cairo), she provides an account of Cairo after Alamein and the establishment there of a British Minister of State. It then became the hub of all British diplomatic and clandestine activity in the region. headquarters of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo took its directives from London but operational control of its clandestine activities was exercised through a Special Operations Committee run by the General Headquarters. Not surprisingly, there was constant infighting between the armed forces and the SOE.
Included in the chapter is a brief description of operations involving the recruitment of Canadian Croats to make contact with Tito’s Partisans operating in Slovenia and Croatia. (Roy MacLaren’s Canadians Behind Enemy Lines 1939-1945 gives an excellent, and fuller account of Canadian involvement in the secret war in Yugoslavia.)
The majority of the Canadian Croats were recruited in Canada but one, Corporal A.D. Yarich, was recruited from the Corps of Military Staff Clerks in London. I had dealings with him because one of my jobs in 1942 at Canadian Military Headquarters was to seek out Canadians qualified and willing to act as British secret agents in Europe. My responsibility was strictly limited to finding likely recruits and, eventually, to making the administrative arrangements for their transfer to SOE and other similar agencies.
Yarich accepted at once. He was a brave man for he knew the odds were against his survival and he could have refused without opprobrium. Moreover, to move immediately from a cushy desk job to demanding commando courses and parachute training, not to mention the job itself, was no piece of cake. After initial training in England and the Middle East, he made his way to Yugoslavia via southern Italy, in 1943. In early January 1944, he was killed when the small boat taking him to join a group of Partisans on the island of Dugi Otok was strafed by a German aircraft.
In an epilogue entitled, Fire and Revolution 1951-1952, she writes of the rising nationalist sentiment leading to the seizure of power by the Free Officers of the Egyptian Army in July, 1952. She provides a vivid description of the rioting and the destruction by fire of many famous landmarks in Cairo, such as the Turf Club. However, she mistakenly states that a Canadian Trade Commissioner was helped to escape through the rear of the Club by Egyptian friends, that he was hidden and later discovered, and then stabbed to death by a mob. In fact, there had been a Canadian Trade Commissioner named Joseph Boyer, but he was trapped in the building and perished in the fire.
At the time, yet another Canadian Trade Commissioner, Charles Butterworth, was returning to the Turf Club where he lived. He attempted to get into the burning building but was unable to do so because of the mobs. Eventually, he was helped to escape by Egyptian friends and now lives in Ottawa.
Anyone who has experienced the zenophobic savagery of a Cairo mob will know something of the sheer terror inspired by the feral sounds made by tens of thousands of screaming Cairenes running through the streets, ululating in a high-pitched scream, mindlessly bent on killing any foreigner unfortunate enough to be in their path. They quite literally hack and tear their victims apart, limb from limb!
What a vision! What a book!
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 40–41. Read the rest of this issue →
