both proud of his family history and eager to escape its colonial confines. In joining his great-grandfather’s regiment he was at once honouring his ancestry by reconnecting with his Irish forbears and striking out for himself.
All these circumstances led the second lieutenant unsteadily to Port Said’s waterfront at dawn on the morning of 30 December. His companion, a captain in the East Surrey’s, was even shakier than Hackett, on whom it fell to hail a passing dinghy and negotiate a passage back to the Nevasa. The fisherman and his wife rowed them across the still harbour. It was so calm and quiet that the sound of a dog barking reached them from miles away, quiet that is until the captain started singing at the top of his voice, the raucous song bouncing between the hulls of the dimly lit ships lying at anchor. They paid double the agreed fare. The fisherman presented them with a crab which they gave to the sentry, who signed them in as having returned at midnight.
No amount of coffee could restore Shan for the arduous day ahead and his mood was as flat as the desert through which the train ran towards their barracks at Abbassiyya, just outside Cairo. The sand stung his eyes. The station was crowded with men from the 14th Hussars who were to leave that night and his sore head could have done without the band that led them into the troops’ quarters. There was no let-up that night either as he had friends in the departing regiment and so did not get to bed until midnight. He had slept for only eleven hours in the preceding four days; the following night being New Year’s Eve, his aggregate was not set to rise by much. There was a party at Shepheard’s Hotel. On New Year’s Day there were arrangements to be made for the start of training the following morning, after which Shan paid a visit to the stables to see his pair of polo ponies. So ended his first three days as an officer of the Cairo Cavalry Brigade.
By the time the British took control of Egypt in 1882 the country had been ruled by foreigners for more than two thousand years, ever since Alexander the Great was confirmed as Pharaoh by the priests of Memphis in 332 BCE. Greek was supplanted by Roman rule in 30 BCE, whose centre shifted eastward to Constantinople during the fourth century CE. The Byzantines were defeated in their turn not only by a new Arabian power, but also by a new religion. The armies of Islam established a camp before the walls of the Byzantine fortress, Babylon-in-Egypt, in 641, from which the city of Cairo grew. As a province in the empires of Islam, Egypt was ruled in succession by the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, the North African Fatimids, the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, the Kurdish Ayyubids, Mameluke sultans, whose origins lay in the Caucasus and Kipchak Steppe, and finally, from 1517, by the Ottoman Turks. Even when the country did regain a degree of autonomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was under the leadership of an Albanian officer in the Ottoman Army, Mohammed Ali, who could not speak Arabic. His successors, first as khedives and then as kings, remained in power until 1952.
The rise of Mohammed Ali reversed the isolationism of the Ottoman era and once again the Red Sea route to India and the East lay open. The British established a coaling station at Aden in 1839, and together with the French invested heavily in Egypt. Factories were established and irrigation work in the Nile Delta brought a million new acres under cultivation, planted with cash crops like cotton and sugar cane. With modernization came westernization among the non-Egyptian ruling elite, and an ever-increasing national debt. In the 1850s the British built a railway from the Red Sea to Alexandria to carry their Indian trade, and in 1859 the French began work on the Suez Canal. It opened ten years later, during the reign of Khedive Ismail, Mohammed Ali’s profligate grandson, a reign which saw the undertaking of vast public projects. Egypt’s cultivated area increased by 15 per cent as a result of the digging of more than 8000 miles of new irrigation canals; her railway network was extended by some 900 miles, and, in imitation of Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, Ismail built a new European-style quarter next to the old walled city of Cairo. The khedive declared, ‘My country no longer belongs to Africa; it is part of Europe,’ but to achieve this end he had borrowed £25 million at punitive rates of interest. In 1875 Ismail was forced to sell Egypt’s 44 per cent stake in the Suez Canal – the British government, then under Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, bought the shares for £4 million – but it was not enough to save the country from bankruptcy the following year. To protect their interests, the British and the French took control of Egypt’s finances and for a while the schedule of repayments was maintained, until European dominance and the increased level of taxation became insupportable. Ismail’s policies only inflamed the situation, and he was exiled in 1879. His son Tewfiq failed to control the upsurge of nationalist sentiment; the country stood on the brink of anarchy. A strong Anglo-French fleet was sent to Alexandria, though the French contingent withdrew in protest at the hard line adopted by the British towards the nationalist leader, Colonel Arabi. The decisive engagement came at Tel el-Kebir in September 1882 where Arabi’s forces were defeated with the loss of ten thousand men. British casualties totalled fifty-seven dead and twenty-two missing. The British occupied Cairo.
William Gladstone, who had succeeded Disraeli as prime minister, was faced with a dilemma. His sentiments were naturally anti-imperialist. He had once said that it was as unnecessary for Britain to make a colonial possession of Egypt as it was for a man with property both in the north of England and the south to want to own all the inns along the way; all that the landowner required of those inns was that they should be ‘well-kept, always accessible, and [furnish] him, when he came, with mutton-chops and post-horses’. Moreover, French and Ottoman opposition to the establishment of a British colony might have triggered a European war. Yet after the battle of Tel el-Kebir, the British were in possession of Egypt, more by force of circumstance than design, and despite frequent protestations that their departure was imminent their rule lasted seventy-four years.
While the undignified imperialist scramble for the acquisition of African colonies at the end of the nineteenth century was in full swing, Egypt remained stable under the guidance of the British ‘agent and consul-general’, Sir Evelyn (‘Over’) Baring, later Lord Cromer. A former viceroy of India, he was the power behind the khedive’s throne and appointed British advisers to every cabinet minister’s office. He had stereotypically Victorian ideas concerning ‘subject races’, of which the Egyptians were one, and ‘governing races’ of which the British were the exemplar. He did not think it worthwhile to educate the Egyptian peasants, the fellahin, beyond the most basic level and looked to the old Turco-Circassian landlords and military classes to provide civil servants. He set about the eradication of corruption and curtailed all public works except irrigation. Within ten years, Egypt had returned to solvency, but Cromer never achieved his stated ambition: to relieve the British exchequer of the cost of maintaining a military presence in the country. The country was relieved of him in 1907, but his ideas about the native Egyptians’ unfitness to rule lingered on.
The nature of the British occupation changed dramatically with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the Great War on the side of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Egypt was still nominally an Ottoman territory, but it could not become a British one without alienating France. The compromise was to declare it a Protectorate, and then fill it with troops. Britain’s main concern was to safeguard the Suez Canal, but once the only Turkish attack on the waterway had been repulsed, Egypt was used as the launch-pad for the Syrian campaign and the Gallipoli landing, and to supply the Arab uprising in the Hejaz. The defeat and disintegration of the Ottoman Empire brought Britain new responsibilities in the Middle East – a League of Nations mandate for the government of part of Syria, and the position of Protector to the Gulf Emirates and the newly created kingdoms of Trans-Jordan and Iraq. Cairo became Britain’s regional headquarters and the permanent garrison was enlarged accordingly.
At 8.15 on the morning of 2 January 1934, Hackett’s squadron, sixty-nine men and horses, formed up on the parade ground and moved off into the desert. As a schoolboy in Australia Shan had been inspired by reading Robert Graves’s book Lawrence and the Arabs and, when it appeared in the Geelong Grammar School library a year later, T. E. Lawrence’s abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom entitled
