Abdallah Bey Simaika, like all his brothers, is active in the fight for Church reform and in the Coptic Community Council, as well as in the Tewfik Benevolent Society. He is still active to this day in Coptic community affairs, as if he were still a young man in his twenties.
In this way do patriotic families contribute to their country.
Al-Ahram newspaper, July 14, 1940
| 4 | The State Railways |
When Simaika graduated in 1882, Egypt was under British occupation. Gross financial mismanagement, first by the viceroy Said Pasha, and to a far greater extent by his nephew and successor, Isma‘il Pasha, had put Egypt well on its way to bankruptcy. Isma‘il’s extravagance and irresponsible spending in his quest for Egypt’s rapid modernization left the country deeply in debt to European bondholders. By 1876, 70 percent of the entire Egyptian state budget went to service the interest due on these loans, in effect handing over control of the Egyptian economy to the creditors. The British government sent a member of parliament to investigate these financial difficulties. Sir Steven Cave judged Egypt to be solvent on the basis of its resources, and stated that all the country needed to get on its feet was time and proper payment of the debts. However, European creditors would not accept this, in spite of Egypt paying the debt faithfully. The French were particularly insistent on foreign supervision, and the Caisse de la dette publique14 was established in 1876 to supervise loan repayment. After both external and internal pressure, Isma‘il was deposed as khedive in 1879, to be succeeded by his son Tewfik Pasha (1879–92).
All these measures led to widespread nationalistic resentment in the country, particularly within the army. In July 1882, Colonel Ahmad Pasha Urabi (1841–1911), one of the few high-ranking Egyptian officers at a time when Turco-Circassians still dominated the upper ranks of the army, took over the government after confronting Khedive Tewfik.
In the same month, the arrival of foreign vessels outside the port of Alexandria had incited some of its inhabitants to attack and kill foreigners and members of minority communities. Under the pretext of protecting the city’s minorities, the British Fleet bombarded Alexandria, and British troops landed on July 13, 1882. On September 13, 1882, Sir Garnet Wolsley with an army of twenty thousand troops defeated Urabi Pasha and the Egyptian army at Tell al-Kebir, occupying Cairo four days later. The British agent and consul general at the time was Sir Edward Baldwin Malet (1879–83). His telegram to the British cabinet on the situation grossly exaggerated the instability of the khedive’s rule and was pivotal in the decision to invade Egypt to protect the interests of the British bondholders and to guarantee British control over the Suez Canal route to India. With the British occupation of Egypt, foreign ‘advisers’ were appointed to all government departments. In fact, these advisers effectively ran the country.
The British occupation provided many job opportunities for a young man with language skills and a good education. On completing his studies at the Collège des frères des écoles chrétiennes, Simaika was offered a post as secretary to Emily Anne Beaufort, Viscountess Strangford, who had just opened a hospital in Cairo to treat wounded British and Egyptian officers of the Urabi campaign. Lady Strangford had come out to Egypt with a team of British medical doctors and nurses who had volunteered to help her in running the hospital. Named after Queen Victoria, this was the first European hospital to be established in Cairo. Helping her was Dr. Herbert Sieveking, who later published an article on the Victoria Hospital in Cairo in the British Medical Journal on June 16, 1883. Simaika accepted the temporary post of secretary for four months and lived with the volunteer doctors and nurses, which greatly helped him improve his knowledge of English.
While working at the hospital, Simaika read a newspaper advertisement for a vacancy as a translator in the Engineering Department of the Egyptian State Railways. He sat for the examination, passed it successfully, and was asked to join the service. When he informed Lady Strangford of this, she was angry, but Simaika explained that this was a permanent post while his present job was for only four months, and that he had applied without previous permission from her as he did not know if he would pass the examination. She then asked him to take a letter to the chairman of the Railway Board, asking him to keep the post for him until her departure. On presenting this letter to the chairman, Mr. Lemesurier, the latter said it was a wonderful recommendation in Simaika’s favor. He asked Simaika to present his compliments to Lady Strangford and tell her the post would be reserved for him for as long as was convenient for her.
I was overjoyed for she wanted me to spend most of the time visiting the mosques, the churches and other monuments of Cairo and its environs, and of course I studied all I could about them so as to give her the necessary explanations. Thus I spent some of the most pleasant months of my life in the company of that highly accomplished lady who finally left Egypt in December 1882.15
The Egyptian State Railways was the first railway system in the Ottoman Empire, Africa, and the Middle East. In 1833, Muhammad Ali Pasha had considered a railway between Suez and Cairo after consultation with Gallway, his Scottish chief engineer, to improve transit between Europe and India. He proceeded to buy the rail, but the project was abandoned due to pressure from the French, who had an interest in building a canal instead. The pasha’s successor and grandson, Abbas Hilmi I, contracted Robert Stephenson to build Egypt’s first standard gauge railway. Stephenson, the only son of George Stephenson, the famed locomotive builder and railway engineer, accepted the post of engineer in chief to the planned Egyptian railway between Alexandria and Cairo.
The first section built extended from Alexandria to Kafr al-Zayyat on the Rosetta line and was inaugurated in 1854, followed by the Kafr al-Zayyat-to-Cairo section in 1856. An extension from Cairo to Suez was built in 1858, thus completing the first modern transport link between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal not being completed until 1869. It was Isma‘il Pasha who vastly expanded the railroad building project that saw Egypt and Sudan gain the distinction of having the most railways per habitable kilometer of any nation in the world. The euphoria surrounding the inauguration of the Egyptian railways was marred only by a tragic event on May 15, 1858, when a special train conveying Said Pasha’s son and heir presumptive, Ahmad Pasha Rifaat, fell off a car float into the Nile and the prince drowned.
In February 1883, two months after joining the Egyptian State Railways at the age of nineteen, Simaika sat for another public examination for a higher post in the Accounts Department. When the result was announced, his name appeared at the head of the successful candidates. From accounts he was soon transferred to the Purchasing and Contracts Office, which was not en odeur de sainteté,16 as Simaika recounts in his memoirs. The chief of that department was a Mr. Baines, who was not trusted by his colleagues but who had the full confidence of the chairman. Mr. Lemesurier at that time was confined to bed with gout and was soon to be replaced by Halton Pasha, the postmaster general, a man of great energy. In the Purchasing and Contracts Office, Simaika had with him a Copt, Girgis Asfour, who was a drunkard, an Indian who was consumptive, and two junior clerks, an Egyptian and an Austrian. As Girgis Asfour was often the worse for drink, the work was neglected for lack of supervision. Being young and active and anxious to learn, Simaika shouldered all the work the others neglected, and often remained at his desk for two hours after the other clerks had left, studying every file carefully. As a result, in a short space of time he had mastered the work at the office thoroughly.
Soon after his appointment, Halton Pasha took over the personal supervision of the Purchasing and Contracts Office, Baines was pensioned off, and M. Imblon, a Frenchman who knew nothing of the work, was appointed to replace him. With a second in command who was new to the job, a drunkard, and a consumptive in the office, Halton Pasha was delighted with Simaika, upon whom he could rely and who knew all the details of the work. From then on, Simaika worked directly with Halton, and in 1888, was made chief of the Purchasing
