Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope

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       Chapter Ten

      A cold wind had forced the tea-drinkers inside. The smell of flavoured tobacco wafted through the open door, the slapping of dominoes on the table, the tumble of backgammon dice. A red-headed boy moved among the customers with a pail of fresh coals for the water-pipes. A Sudanese hawker of sunglasses in a powder-blue galabiya leant against the door-jamb watching for passing trade. Further down the alley, just before it joins the main road there is a small printing shop, no wider than a corridor. The white-haired man behind the counter did not look up from his Greek newspaper. Fuad I Avenue was renamed in mandatory revolutionary fashion ‘Twenty-sixth of July’, the day in 1952 on which Fuad’s son Farouk left Egypt. It has become like Oxford Street, full of clothing retailers and fast-food outlets. The evening promenade attracted strolling shoppers, families straggling across the width of the pavement, matrons in long colourful top-dresses and headscarves, children in Western clothes – tracksuits and trainers, jeans – the men in slacks and tweed jackets of an English cut. In the yellow twilight the shop lights seemed blue and cold, as though the stock of shoes and shirts were kept refrigerated. Taxis raced past, braking at the last minute where the road’s eastward progress is blocked by the Ezbekiyya Gardens and it turns right into Sharia al-Gomhuriyya, the Street of the Republic (once Ibrahim Pasha Street). Turn left and it is a short walk to the site where Shepheard’s once stood. It occupied the whole block north of Sharia Alfy. There stood the raised terrace, with its rattan chairs and pianist, at the foot of the three-storey facade, classical and balconied. The site remained empty for many years, a scar worn proudly by an anti-Imperialist nation. Now the plot has filled up with office blocks, the most recent of which was still under construction – all except one lot on the corner of Alfy, a petrol station.

      Turning right with the traffic on al-Gomhuriyya, towards Opera Place, brings one immediately to the Continental Hotel. It was always second best to Shepheard’s, but it strove to be just as exclusive; only officers were allowed into both. Hackett used to visit the Continental Cabaret – his verdict: ‘rather dull’. Nevertheless it became something of an institution during the war years, its belly dancers and acrobats introduced by a pretty American called Betty. The cabaret was staged on the dance floor of the roof-top restaurant and there was also a roof garden, which was the venue for amateur concerts and shows. What passes for a roof garden today is a collection of struggling shrubs planted in old cooking-oil tins.

      The hotel may have escaped the attention of the arsonists in 1952, but its recent history has been one of decline; today it is all but derelict. It remains an imposing building, occupying the whole block between Twenty-sixth of July and Sharia Adly Pasha, but its unadorned neo-classical facade is cracked in places, its louvred shutters awry, its windows showing no signs of life. The central block consists of a double loggia comprising the first and second floors, framed on each wing by a projecting tower, and punctuated in the middle by a third. At a later date a fourth storey was added whose inferior construction has since become apparent. At street level a parade of shops was added in the 1960s in a brutalist concrete box style, enclosing the carriage sweep and the porte-cochère, whose roof became part of a large terrace thereby. Mounted on its gable-end the hotel’s sign, once garish, had faded into the jumbled shop-fronts, the single word ‘Continental’ in raised Arabic and Roman letters, red and blue on a yellow background. The letters ‘TIN’ are missing; the rest have become ledges on which dust accumulates.

      Mohammed Turk led the way through the dark entrance hall. It looked shabby in the twilight, lit by single low-wattage bulbs instead of chandeliers. The marble floor had lost its shine. On the back wall, behind a dust sheet, was a large mural of heroic peasant women working in the fields of the delta. It was dated 1953, a year after the revolution. The subject seemed provocatively out-of-keeping with the lobby of a luxury hotel. The tableau stood as a lesson to wealthy visiting foreigners on what was important in modern Egypt – not the pharaohs and priests recorded on the walls of tombs, not the foreign sultans and viziers and kings who had finally been expelled, nor the pashas and beys of the Ottoman time – their titles were abolished and their land redistributed to the fellahin depicted in the mural. They were the bedrock of a republic, proclaimed on 18 June of that year, reliant on its agricultural output. The social-realist style reflected the political mood of the Free Officers, though when they seized power they lacked a coherent political philosophy. The more influential, like Abdul Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat, were by and large nationalists with socialist leanings, but the Revolutionary Command Council also included Marxists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter would not have approved of the mural since representations of the human form are forbidden by Islamic law. They were bound to clash with the nationalist elements and an assassination attempt by the Brotherhood against Nasser in 1954 provided him with the excuse to replace General Neguib.

      The besting of the British encouraged the Free Officers to embark on a programme of nationalization, reclaiming property and trade which had become concentrated in the hands of foreigners. Despite the protests of the capitalist bloc and warnings of creeping communism, nationalization was to be the chief weapon used by newly independent and non-aligned countries against the old imperial powers, a mechanism whereby they could take control of their nation’s wealth and infrastructure. Iran’s oilfields, India’s railways, sugar plantations in the Dutch East Indies were all nationalized in the decade following the Second World War. In Egypt the process was building to a climax of international significance, an appropriation that would see Nasser become a hero of the non-aligned movement. Along the way Egyptian Hotels Limited, the company that owned both Shepheard’s and the Continental, whose shares had doubled in value during the course of the war, was also taken into public hands and renamed ‘Egos’.