surrender of those inside. The minister of the interior ordered them to resist; fifty policemen and five British soldiers died when the building was stormed. Protests in Cairo the following day turned into riots by late morning. The mob set fire to many buildings in the European quarter, targeting especially British-owned and frequented property and establishments, though French, Italian, Greek, Armenian and Jewish businesses were also torched. The day came to be known as Black Saturday as a result of the clouds of smoke and ash that filled the air. The arsonists appeared to be well-organized in small groups, each of which had a list of targets and a supply of combustible materials. Plans for such an action must have long been in place. The day’s events were encouraged by government ministers and condoned by the police. The Turf Club, as a bastion of the British class and colonial systems, was high on the rioters’ list. Hackett described it as being ‘like one of the less exclusive bits of St James’s complete with stags’ heads’. It had been a club ‘to which no Egyptians were allowed in membership, though sometimes, greatly daring, some member might take one of the more distinguished Egyptians there with him. This wasn’t popular.…’ Neither was the club with the Cairenes and the mob showed particular savagery towards its members. Artemis Cooper in her book Cairo in the War describes what happened.
Just after 1.30 the Turf Club was attacked. For the past few weeks, the Club had been protected by a police guard of some forty men, but this had mysteriously dwindled to four by the time the gang arrived. [T]hey broke down the front door, and immediately started smashing furniture and making piles of it on the ground floor, which were set alight with bundles of hessian …
Of the forty-odd members who were in the Club at the time, most were on the ground floor and managed to get out by the back door. But several were prevented from escaping by the crowds outside, and were pushed back into the flames. Two Englishmen who were trapped on an upper storey jumped out of the windows. The first broke his back on the roof of a small shed beneath, and must have died soon after; but the second let himself down into a small courtyard on knotted sheets. He was kicked and beaten to death with iron bars. The bodies of the two men were then brought together, and a great pile of material was put on top of them to make a bonfire … While the Turf Club was under attack, a lorry full of police drove by. They did not stop, and the crowd cheered. Inside the building, a number of other Britons were savagely mutilated before being tossed onto bonfires.
Shepheard’s Hotel went up in flames shortly afterwards, though with less loss of life. The offices of Thomas Cook and BOAC, Barclay’s Bank and W. H. Smith’s followed. Other groups organized by the Muslim Brotherhood attacked targets they considered immoral, such as bars, nightclubs and cinemas. Though much of Cairo’s ‘West End’ was on fire by nightfall, both the large synagogue on Sharia Adly Pasha and the Opera House were spared.
‘The Opera House didn’t burn down till years later,’ said Mr Doss, owner of the Windsor. ‘The wardrobe master had been stealing for years, and suddenly there was going to be an audit. Of course they would discover he had not bought all the costumes he said he had, so he set fire to the wardrobe to cover his tracks.’ Verdi had written Aida for the grand opening of the Opera House in 1871; a hundred years later as a result of this petty larceny the building burned to the ground. ‘They tried to burn this place down in 1952, but it survived because it is mostly brick and had very thick iron gates. Then it was empty. The NCOs did not come back.’ The British did consider moving on the capital – the destruction of foreign property during the Alexandria riots of 1882 had provided them with the excuse for occupying the country in the first place – but the world had changed and Britain could no longer ignore its opinion. When the revolution came six months later on 23 July 1952 it met only token resistance. Public approval of the events of Black Saturday had made its success inevitable, and that day’s frenzied destruction had purged it of the need for violence. A group of military commanders known as the Free Officers forced King Farouk to abdicate and he went into exile in Italy. He was succeeded briefly by his infant son, the great-great-great-great-grandson of the Albanian Mohammed Ali, but less than a year later Egypt became a republic with General Muhammad Neguib at its head. It was the first time an Egyptian had ruled the country since Alexander the Great.
In 1979, three years after General Sir John Hackett retired from his post at King’s College, he gave an interview to a researcher from the Imperial War Museum for its sound archive. A second recording was made twelve years later and together the two sessions last four and a half hours. They reveal as much about Hackett’s public persona as the events recounted. They cover his time in the Middle East and his experiences during the Second World War. On both occasions he speaks with such fluency and precision, displaying his great range of knowledge and power of memory. The 81-year-old general of the last two reels is a little more forgetful and in the last fifteen minutes he repeats a story he finished telling the first time but ten minutes earlier. Yet even this repetition reveals just how polished his performance is; in retelling the story he uses the same form of words and the same intonation as he did on the first occasion.
There is a clunk as the tape recorder is turned on, and then the interviewer’s voice some way from the microphone states, ‘Sir John Hackett, reel one. When did you first go to the Middle East, Sir John?’ From the first syllable of Hackett’s reply – a mere ‘er’ – you can see his three-piece tweed suit, his regimental tie, thin grey hair slicked flat over capacious pate, pale blue eyes, arched nostrils, the clipped moustache. He says: ‘Er, other than a brief visit to Egypt for twenty-four hours off a P&O ship …’ and continues without a pause for the next eleven minutes, until the interviewer finally interjects into Hackett’s flow on a trivial point and produces nothing but a digression. He keeps quiet after that, saying during the following twenty minutes only ‘Just milk, please’ to Lady Hackett’s enquiry as to how he took his tea. Shortly after there is the sound of a door-latch lifting as somebody leaves the room, the rattle before the thumb-plate is depressed and the wrought-iron latch rises with a clack. It is instantly recognisable as the door furniture of the drawing room at Coberley Mill. As a spoon chinks against a saucer the pattern on the china becomes visible.
Hackett’s is a voice from a different era, the accent betraying no hint of his Australian upbringing, the pronunciation received, patrician and retaining elements of pre-war vowel sounds – not so affected that he says ‘haice’ for ‘house’, or ‘awff’ for ‘off’, but there is a hint of that diction, which it seems has survived into the twenty-first century solely among members of the Royal Family, when he says ‘lawst’ for ‘lost’. He is a man who has become accustomed to people listening to what he has to say, and a military manner creeps in occasionally; at one point he corrects himself with a bluff ‘no, as you were …’ He paints a picture of life in the Cairo Cavalry Brigade with fondness, ‘a very healthy, agreeable, highly social life … with a lot of leave … a life that has disappeared. Nobody worked in the afternoon, you weren’t expected to … Every officer was expected as a matter of course to have his visiting cards and [you] had to go through a ritual of calling on the designated people when first you arrived.’ The formality of British society abroad is encapsulated in this custom, the obligatory calls on the High Commissioner and the commanders of the British Troops in Egypt and the Egyptian Army. ‘Your card had on it “Mr J. W. Hackett, Cavalry Club”. You would no doubt be asked to attend garden parties later.’
‘Of course we had a good deal of fun …’ and to illustrate this the general recounts a tale of Cairo high-jinx that occurred one Saturday night in Shepheard’s Hotel:
the souffragi who was at the cloakroom counter … was an old Egyptian whom I knew quite well. He was sick, he’d had injections that day and was very, very unwell but didn’t like to disclose this because he thought it might even jeopardize his job so I took over from him, put on his clothes and his tarbush … he was a fair coloured Egyptian and I was pretty sunburnt as we all were. His clothing fitted me and all that evening I spent taking
