“Proud of his country and a staunch believer in her destiny of service to the world, he spared no effort to bring to Egypt and especially his birthplace, Alexandria, some measure of the blessings Great Britain herself enjoyed.” Thus Sir Henry Barker (d 1942). Even on their gravestones, British settlers remained sturdily insufferable. Patronising from the grave is an imperial Englishman, one of the elect of Egypt, also one of many thousands of immigrants – foreigners, Greeks, Jews, French, English and Italians. Useful people, making money from the Levant indeed, but belonging there, most would be driven out through the agency of several stupidities.
Philip Mansel, author of an admired account of Constantinople, has applied himself to three cities, Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut, related – with an eye kept on Salonica – in an enlightening and quite irresistible book. All three were multi-racial communities. All had a high culture and busy commerce. All would suffer mass expulsions and humiliations turning the very word Levant into a distillation of time past, history as a Proustian notion.
Beirut is most familiar, country of three kinds of Muslim and two sorts of Christian, with a long history of autonomy and business. Neighbours eyed it, private armies sprang up around great families recalling the old Scottish clans – quite as murderous and much better armed. In the early 1980s, the benign General Sharon made a kindly intervention here. Later the businessman Rafiq Hariri would create a measure of calm, put up some terrible buildings, approximate to a fairly good thing and be blown up by the Syrians. Life continues – uneasily.
TS Eliot sneered at “Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants.” He shouldn’t have. Men of similar stock to his Somerset ancestors had been scavenging – handling currants and better – in places like Smyrna for a couple of centuries. William Barker from Derbyshire arrived there to trade in 1760. Moving on, his son, John, would be the confidential friend of two generations of Egyptian khedives and became British consul general in Alexandria. The Barkers and friends shot ibex and gazelle, attended polo matches, gave sought after picnic parties, directed banks, employed Scottish nannies and summered in England where their children went to school. Yet they were not bad people. Without quite following Dr Johnson’s dictum that “No man is more innocently employed than in making money,” as traders in cotton, shipping magnates, creators of harbours and good buildings, they were as useful as awful.
The conclusion of the British community in this great city, after the immemorial folly of Anthony Eden, was a shift of key jarring down to the roots of teeth. In 1957, another Barker – Henry Alwyn – was addressed by Ministry of Interior 25A: “Owing to the existing situation the Ministry of Interior gives you an advice to leave the country as soon as possible. The passport department will give all necessary facilities to you. Kindly do the needful to execute the same.”
At the elder Henry’s birth in 1872, about a third of Alexandria’s population was foreign, with 15,000 Greeks, 15,000 Italians, 10,000 French plus assorted Maltese and Syrians – and the more important British. Within the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna was preponderantly Greek, Salonica a great Jewish haven. All of this had come about under the intermittently tolerant, occasionally demented and reliably uneconomic dominance of the Sublime Porte. Meanwhile, English and French played a power political hand in what they called the Near Eastern question – keeping out Russians and advancing themselves.
The Turks having swept across great parts of two continents, and gradually expelled from the Balkans over the 19th century, had no aptitude for either civil government or business. Greeks, Jews, English, French and others kindly did the needful. As Henry Salt, one of them, put it, every consul became “a sort of king in the process… every consulate here is a little government and all [his countrymen] residing in the country are considered to be under its exclusive protection.”
When Muhammed Ali, a Turk from Albania, Governor later of Khedive, intelligent, active and reforming, sought development, consuls and their merchant clients prospered. He wanted a commercial canal to the western Nile, a French engineer constructed it; desired a palace at Ras el-tin, an Italian architect and Macedonian tradesmen built it. Thomas Galloway brought in gas lighting. The Tossizza family, Greeks, had advanced a crucial loan in his provincial days in Albanian Kavalla. In Alexandria, the Tossizzas would build a Greek school and hospital to serve its swelling Greek population.
It could get nasty. Great men at court, the consuls were also walking pretexts. In 1826, Hussein Pasha, Dey of Algiers, struck the French Consul, with a fly whisk. Three years later, the affront provided occasion for a French conquest of Algeria lasting until 1962. In the same spirit, Lord Palmerston, seeing Muhammed Ali as having too much ambition, sent the proverbial gunboat. A profitable relationship had been underlined as an unequal one. The Khedive knowing the score, his dynasty continued securely as not quite British puppets – not quite not.
The cosmopolitan societies which the incomers built, and local rulers endorsed, were attractive beyond profit. The cities themselves came to be quite loved. One chapter here is called Alexandria, Queen of the Mediterranean. In the 20th century, it attracted a foreign literary and artistic class, Lawrence Durrell and Olivia Manning, of course, their reputations made by books set in the city, also that quietly brilliant poet, Dennis Enright. Born here was the actor, Michel Chalhoub, secure in his French Christian first name, later shrewdly Omar Sharif. Egyptians went to schools put up by foreigners, Muslims to schools created by French Catholics and American Protestants, for education not conversion. Under the louche King Farouk, Alexandria, full of foreign soldiery during a world war partly fought in its own countryside, emerged as a fast-paced society, an un-Muslim city of cocktails, bridge and sexual brio, also pretty louche, but also tolerant and, by those who knew it, cherished.
What, after the idiocy of Suez, would happen to the Alexandrian British – houses repossessed, goods sold for a fraction of their value, sound businesses taken and stripped bare by Free Officers – was nothing to the horrors facing the Greeks of Smyrna four years after the first war. The Greeks, a nearer sort of foreigner, lacked finesse. Lacking the insouciance of Sir Henry, they crassly sought in the smaller city to be overt masters and did so in the name of the same nationalism which would plague the late, lamentable 20th century.Encouraged from a safe distance by the demagogic politician, Venizelos, they demanded union with Greece. On May 15 1919, a Greek battleship arrived. Chrysostomos, the fool of a Greek Archbishop, blessed it. A shot was fired on the main promenade. After “a terrible fusillade” three to four hundred Turks and a hundred Greeks were dead. The local street bullies or quabadays led a pillaging spree turning into rape and murder until a late afternoon downpour stopped it.
Turkish revenge waited three years and a bigger qubaday, the enlightened Mustafa Kemal, a Salonica Turk, lately busy eliminating Armenians from Anatolia. Armenian homes in Smyrna, together with the entire Greek quarter, a third of Smyrna all told, General Kemal burned into history. As the French consul remarked after the events begun in mid-September 1922: “Nothing is left.”
Smyrna ceased to exist. Izmir, a singed two-thirds remained: wholly Turkish, wholly Muslim. The great Greek trading families fled. The harvest was never taken in. The fool of an Archbishop had his eyes gouged out. Turkey had risen from healthy lethargy to murderous vitality and, setting about secular reform, Kemal hanged his Turkish critics in public. The first strong man of the century would be the object of widespread international admiration and The Levant would become a geographical expression.
