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 Revolt in the Desert (1927). The latter was the first book he ever started to reread immediately on finishing it. Now he found himself part of a small mounted force riding out into a desert morning. He drank in the scenery. They crossed a sandy plain strewn with iron-stone pebbles where the Egyptian infantry was parading to the accompaniment of a band. ‘On the right hand were hills, the near ones bright red with little yellow ochre foothills, the farther ones blue. They were savagely torn and great rents in them were filled with rich blue and plum coloured shadows.’ The squadron advanced to the top of one of these foothills, Signal Hill, and took their bearings. To the north lay Heliopolis, a garden suburb the British had constructed before the Great War. It was built in a quixotic style, a fantastic blend of European and Asian architecture that threw up such follies as a private residence modelled on a Hindu temple. In the morning light it looked like stage scenery. Beyond Heliopolis was the RAF aerodrome, which consisted of a few hangars beside an area of desert that had been levelled and cleared of stones. To the left of that stood the Abbassiyya barracks, and to the west Cairo, al-Qahira, ‘the City of Mars’, crowded onto the banks of the Nile. This plain, these foothills, served as the regiment’s training ground for the next three months.
After two weeks of little more than exercising the horses, the training began in earnest. Officers wore swords and their mounts were caparisoned with the brass-bound, plumed regimental saddlery. The squadron’s first task was to ride on a compass bearing for 6000 yards, to be calculated according to regulation paces. Next they walked, trotted and cantered on the ‘pace track’, a distance of 440 yards marked out with white cairns, timing each pass, then onto the ‘wheeling track’, turning in a figure of eight. It was during these manoeuvres that Shan noticed his plume had worked loose. While they continued to trot and wheel and reform their columns, he tried to loosen its straps so that he could stow it away, but almost unbridled his horse in the process. The result was the straps trailed on the ground and the plume dangled. Hackett bemoaned his ‘congenital unsmartness’ that was always inviting ‘extra and unseen disaster’.
It was not his first gaffe. There was the occasion where he had worn a Tyrolean hat he had been given for Christmas – he was banned from ever wearing it again – and another time he had appeared at a funeral wearing the wrong kind of uniform trousers – he was sent off to change. Twice he had been late for the morning parade, and once the squadron had moved off without him, taking his empty mount with them. Twice he had forgotten his duties when ward officer and had failed to set the watch, but the sergeant-majors expected as much from junior officers and nothing was said. The continuing field drill provided opportunity for plenty more mistakes – dismounted attacks, night manoeuvres, extending and closing