Serious civil commotions rarely if ever occur in a vacuum – and by 1881 the Egyptian cauldron had been on soft boil for quite some time. Its origins could be traced to Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt or to the excavation of the Suez Canal.
With the Khedive Ismail’s rule and his extravagant spending, Egypt ended in deep financial distress and this had led Benjamin Disraeli in 1875 to snap up the Egyptian shares in the canal for a pittance. Ismail “had been fleeced by financiers who felt no responsibility beyond a desire to make as much profit as possible as quickly as possible”.
Egypt had by then replaced Tunisia as the paradise of quick-buck exploitation that attracted every petty financial shark around the Mediterranean.
The de facto stranglehold exercised by France and Britain over Egypt, nominally still under weak Ottoman rule, irked the military and inflamed the nationalists.
Egyptian troops rose in revolt in 1881 under Arabi Pasha and succeeded in gaining control over the Egyptian government power structures by February 1882. Their main recrimination related to the sense of entitlement and the arrogance of the Europeans and Coptic Christians over what, at least on paper, was still an independent Egypt under Ottoman protection.
Colonel Arabi (also Orabi or Urabi) Pasha organised his followers and marched on Alexandria. The European powers supported the new Khedive Tewfik and predicted that a joint Anglo-French fleet, to be sent to Alexandria, would work miracles in scaring the nationalists and propping up the fragile Tewfik.
The English Channel armada sailed to Malta under Admiral Frederick Beauchamp Seymour. Arabi started reorganising Alexandria’s harbour defences.
An impressive number of British and French ironclads entered Alexandria harbour belligerently – well before the June 11 massacres. Why?
No persuasive justification was ever given for this prime example of gunboat diplomacy. Suggestions included the desire to prevent anarchy, to protect the Suez Canal or to comfort and reassure British and French businesses which were then reaping impressive dividends in Egypt.
Tensions between the nationalist Egyptians and the European Christians had already reached a high pitch in the city.
The presence of an uninvited Anglo-French imperialist fleet bristling with guns lording it over the harbour helped to further exacerbate the patriotic sentiments of the population, long humiliated by the contrast between European opulence and native squalor, between the victims of Maltese and Greek usury and intimidation, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who lived big by skinning the wretched fellahin.
The British consul-general in Cairo, Sir Edward Malet, had wisely advised London that the presence of the Anglo-French warships in Alexandria harbour “was more likely to cause trouble than to prevent it”. His foresight and discernment had been found ludicrously inconvenient by those who craved empire in the mornings and dreamt empire at night.
It is against this background that the murder by a Maltese lackey of a native donkey-boy comes to be assessed. It turned out to be that small and inevitable spark destined to set off a huge conflagration which was to soak the soil of Egypt with the blood of many.
At first, blame for the massacres was bandied around between the Khedive, who accused Arabi of deliberately planning the riots, and the followers of Arabi pointing fingers at the Khedive, said to have wanted the disturbances to discredit Arabi.
British opinion-makers initially embraced wholeheartedly the fairy-tale that the June 11 riots had not been spontaneous at all – in fact, the British establishment claimed that Arabi had premeditated and organised them.
But when it came to the crunch, they found themselves unable to come up with one shred of credible evidence in support of this, despite the huge efforts and resources spent in commissions of inquiry, blue books and fact-finding missions. Ironically enough, after some initial ambiguities and faltering, it had to be Arabi’s forces that eventually restored order in the city.
On June 11, the day of the riots, Admiral Seymour happened to be ashore and barely escaped with his life. Sadly, his “body servant” George Strackett, to whom the admiral was profoundly attached, was one of the six Englishmen killed on Bloody Sunday.
His death “personally infuriated” Seymour and may have had a fatal influence on future developments.
The British and French fleets anchored threateningly inside and outside Alexandria harbour.
Order had been re-established in the city by Arabi – anyway, the majority of the Egyptians and almost all the foreigners had fled – at least 4,000 refugees arrived in Malta “in the most pitiable condition. The Lazzaretto was set apart for the poorest of them. We fear that unless some relief is afforded, much misery will prevail.”
Arabi went on with his efforts to strengthen the forts facing the sea. Admiral Seymour viewed this as impertinent and downright provocative – how dare an Egyptian fortify the defences of an Egyptian town under siege by Her Majesty’s master race? He had an ultimatum delivered to Arabi: either dismantle the fortifications of Alexandria and allow them to be occupied by British forces, or the city would be bombarded.
Seymour set the ultimatum to expire at 7 a.m. the following day, July 11. The Egyptian cabinet, the legal government of the country, voted to disregard the threat and sent what they believed to be a conciliatory reply instead.
Meanwhile, all other foreign ships had left Alexandria. The command of the strong French naval contingent did not see why a city had to be ravaged just because British officers considered naval target-practice to be jolly good fun.
Claiming he had not received specific instructions from his superiors, the French Vice-Admiral Alfred Conrad weighed anchor and headed for Port Said with the staff of the French consulate on board, leaving to the 15 British warships the dazzling credit of carrying out on their own the terrible carnage yet to come.
Sharp on the stroke of seven in the morning, Seymour gave the signal to attack, and one by one the 15 British ships shelled the forts of the city with all the heavy ordnance at their disposal, over and over again, until they had nothing left to load their guns with. “British fire was indiscriminate but effective.”
Arabi’s men tried to put up what resistance they could, but the firepower of the ironclads proved so disproportionately overwhelming that the Egyptians only succeeded in inflicting minor damage on the British warships.
Though the guns of the ironclads generally aimed at the fortifications, by the end of the shelling most of Alexandria had been reduced to masses of rubble and set on fire.
About 60,000 Egyptians fled the slaughter. No one found it possible in the aftermath of the butchery to estimate with any accuracy how many died in the bombardment and the subsequent fires.
An official from the British consulate, an eyewitness, almost gloated that “much of Alexandria had turned into a Dantesque inferno almost alight from end to end, the flames running riot from street to street without any attempt to check them being made, with wild figures here and there pillaging and looting and ghastly corpses swollen to gigantic proportions lying charred and naked on the roadways”.
Another Englishman likened the terrible onslaught he witnessed to “a pandemonium of hell and its devils. I never saw anything so awful.”
Luigi Fiorillo was an Italian photographer who had established himself in Egypt. Shortly after the bombing and the arson he published an album entitled Alexandria in Ruins.
Philip Mansel comments about this collection: “It would make the staunchest imperialist blush: gutted mosques, churches, schools and consulates (British guns destroyed both the British and the French consulates), dismantled forts, piles of rubble, empty streets with no sign of life, not even a stray dog.” A splendid city dead by deliberate massacre.
Visiting the forlorn ruins a year after the bombardment, Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace lamented how the town, once “one of the most populous, enterprising and prosperous cities in the Levant with a magnificent harbour, solidly built houses and well-paved streets” had now turned into “a shapeless mass of ruins” whose lost prosperity was never likely to return.
Seymour chose Lord Charles Beresford as Provost Marshal of the martyred city with “absolute power of life and death or to flog and blow down houses or do anything I deemed fit”. This appointment ensured that the main square of Alexandria turned into “a shooting range with humans as targets” – suspected robbers, rebels, those who resisted, arsonists and anyone the British officers believed did not look quite right, profited from Beresford’s rather summary notions of ‘justice’.
Estimates vary as to how many Egyptians and Arabs became net beneficiaries of Lord Charles’s extrajudicial inspirations, but they must have been a very considerable number. He dreaded being accused of having left any backlog to the criminal courts.
No one quite understood why that whole appalling blood-bath was necessary. Was it a personal vendetta of Admiral Seymour, still grieving the loss of George Strackett, his cherished ‘body servant’? Seymour, who must not have been very bright, “made a very foolish speech at the Mansion House six months later in which he virtually boasted that that had been his aim”.
And Lord Gladstone, in justification, said that leaving the death of the six Englishmen killed in June “wholly unavenged would have an adverse effect on the security of all European people throughout the whole East”.
Six dead Englishmen were, on the London Stock Exchange, well worth innumerable Egyptians exterminated plus a whole city in ruins and flames.
Today, Seymour, the suave butcher, would not have escaped charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity before an international criminal court.
But Queen Victoria belonged to a different school of thought. This time round she broke the rule and was inordinately amused – she instantly raised the admiral to a peerage and dubbed him Baron Alcester instead.
However fatuous the justification, the British occupation of Egypt had now begun in earnest.
The indiscriminate bombardment of Alexandria had many other repercussions in Malta, a few quite unexpected – and this apart from the huge amount of fugitives and refugees who fled to the island.
Someone, perhaps Admiral Seymour himself, instructed Girolamo Gianni, the Italian artist who had settled in Malta, to paint the marvellous event, in everlasting, if shameful, memory of something best forgotten.
The following year Gianni again executed a picture of Alexandria and its lighthouse after the bombardment. It is not known whether the artist finished that canvas from photographs or whether he visited the ghost town personally.
The British authorities commissioned official reports into the troubles of Alexandria and their tragic outcome. Some Maltese were called to give evidence, among them Felice Ebejer, wounded with a sword cut across his face, Mario Musù and Federico Panzetta.
This story started with an unnamed Maltese servant who got away with murder, and ends with an unnamed Maltese cook whom many would gladly have seen murdered. Admiral Seymour celebrated the annihilation of Alexandria and the massacre of its inhabitants with a gala dinner on board his flagship, to which he invited all the senior officers.
Death and arson surely called for some major rejoicing, and Seymour was not one to ignore the beckoning of protocol. His ideas of a proper requiem included streams of vintage claret and champagne. An 1886 New Zealand journal has preserved some less than delectable details about this banquet.
The main dish consisted of a curry which impressed all the guests with its particularly evanescent aroma that just hinted at garlic. Several of the guests asked Seymour for the recipe “of this most delicious dish”.
The victorious admiral obligingly sent for the cook, “a fat, oily Maltese in spotless white”, and asked him to reveal the secret. At first the Maltese chef hesitated: “No Sar, I would rather not”, but on a peremptory order from the admiral, he spelled the magic formula out: “Vell Sar, I do first make de curry, I do next pop a piece of garlic in my mouth and den I breathe gently on de curry and stir vell”. Chew, blow, stir. Chew, blow, stir.
Most of the gallant officers who had shown superlative valour shelling a moribund city to death, almost passed out. How sad that Malta’s sole but outstanding contribution to creativity in the kitchen, curry à la Maltaise, has been so ungratefully overlooked.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Maroma Camilleri of the National Library.