| Andrew Humphreys’ Grand Hotels of Egypt takes readers back two centuries to an Egypt of socialites and celebrities |
| By Kate Durham |
| The first Shepheard’s Hotel was built by a Scottish seaman who was marooned in Suez after he backed the losing side during a mutiny. The San Stefano in Alexandria was built by a prime minister’s son as an homage to French resorts. The Semiramis was the brainchild of two men who started out running a sawmill in Switzerland. And if all these men could see the hotels that bear the names today, they’d scratch their heads in confusion.
In his new book Grand Hotels of Egypt in the Golden Age of Travel, journalist and travel writer Andrew Humphreys takes readers back in time 200 years to the dawn of Europe’s fascination with Egypt, starting in the early 1800s when the country was nothing more than a waystation on Britain’s shortcut to India. L’Description d’Egypte, commissioned by Napolean during his attempted conquest of the country, had sparked public interest in the country, but it was Thomas Cook — inventor of the package tour — who opened the floodgates of foreigners infected with the earliest cases of Egyptomnia.
Humphreys, a former resident of and frequent visitor to Cairo, artfully traces the rise of modern tourism and the hotel industry from Alexandria to Aswan by channeling the voices of the tourists themselves. One did not come to Egypt in those days without penning an account of the trip. One did not stay a few weeks either. Socialites and celebrities often spent the entire winter here, generating plenty of news for the society pages. In fact, Humphreys gives The Egyptian Gazette archives top billing in a bibliography of more than 100 memoirs.
The result is a gossipy and at times snarky glimpse at Egypt’s royal era and British occupation years, punctuated with historical photos, cartoons, sketches and reproductions of hotel luggage labels. Some readers may take offense at the Orientalist disdain many foreign writers expressed for the natives, but it is indicative of the era, and those same writers were often equally generous in heaping contempt on their fellow tourists and the hotels they stayed at.
Humphrey’s book is a litany of “famous person slept here” anecdotes, but sadly, few of the hotels in the book still exist. Of some 90 hotels that merited a mention, only about 15 are still operating. Of those, even fewer have retained any semblance of their original look, name and location. The Italian-inspired architecture of Shepheard’s Hotel, originally in Azbakeya, burned down in the anti-British riots of 1952; today the name is pinned to a box with arches on the Nile Corniche. The Semiramis and the San Stefano kept their original waterfront real estate, but their sprawling palatial buildings were torn down in the 1970s and 1990s respectively, and replaced with internationally branded high-rises. Fortunately, the style and the stories of their hallowed halls live on in the Grand Hotels of Egypt.
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