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Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Books: Edwardian aristocrats went to Egypt hoping for glamour — but they got dysentery instead


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/edwardian-aristocrats-went-egypt-hoping-glamour-got-dysentery/

Edwardian aristocrats went to Egypt hoping for glamour — but they got dysentery instead

The Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, 1910
The Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, 1910 Credit: Buyenlarge 

Was Egypt the first place ever to have been mourned by the seasoned traveller as "ruined"? At the close of the 1900s, a leisured clergyman and Oxford Professor of Assyriology called the Rev Archibald Sayce, who had spent the previous 18 winters cruising the Nile, sold his beloved "dahabiya" – a kind of houseboat, later incarnations of which will be familiar from Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile – and left Egypt, as "life on the Nile had ceased to be the ideal existence it once was... The smoke of the steamer [had usurped] the sights and scents of the fields".

Egypt had been known to rich and adventurous British tourists since the Napoleonic Wars. Nonetheless, it was not until the opening of the Suez Canal that Thomas Cook – who had begun his career ferrying local temperance societies on trips between Leicester and Birmingham – realised a fortune to be made if he could introduce a less rarefied clientele to Nilotic delights. The success of his undertaking, aimed firmly at the middle classes, was astonishing. From the late 1870s, the Nile was awash each winter with rheumatic Englishmen of every stamp and their pasty companions, all enthused by amateur Egyptology, a forgiving climate, or both.

Louise, Duchess of Devonshire, painted by Edward                    Hughes (1832–1908). The Duchess would only allow                    herself to be painted or photographed in profile
Louise, Duchess of Devonshire, painted by Edward Hughes (1832–1908). The Duchess would only allow herself to be painted or photographed in profile Credit: Diane Naylor

Among them was a young doctor, Ferdy Platt, whose first trip to Egypt in 1890 instilled in him a deep love for Egyptology, which grew into an impressive knowledge, and who was employed by the ailing Duke of Devonshire, Britain's last great Whig politician, on a recreational cruise down the Nile in the winter of 1907. The series of letters which Platt wrote to his wife in St John's Wood throughout his three months on the river form the basis of Aristocrats and Archaeologists, an idiosyncratic but engaging book by Toby Wilkinson and Julian Platt, a great-nephew of Ferdy's, to whom the letters were left in a handsome box, illustrated in hieroglyphics by Ferdy himself.

The trip, however, was not a success. For all that one might now romanticise the glamour of such a voyage – picnics amid the deserted ruins of the Temple of Seti I; mummy jawbones and garlands of olive leaves raided from unsealed tombs as amusing gifts for the Duchess – the reality was rather less appealing. Their dahabiya was dirty, noisy and cramped. The Duke and Duchess took little consolation from their surroundings – "they are not moved to enthusiasm very much by anything apparently," wrote Ferdy – and suffered from heat, cold, mosquitoes and diarrhoea. (As the on-board doctor, Platt was concerned with their graces' bowels as a matter of routine.)

A poster for the Anglo-American Nile Steamer and                    Hotel Company
A poster for the Anglo-American Nile Steamer and Hotel Company Credit: Chris Hellier 

That the expedition was doomed to farce should have been obvious to all involved. The cast guaranteed it. There was the Duke himself, cantankerous and stubborn – described by Max Beerbohm as "my favourite Duke, the most natural and monumental". There was his wife Louise von Alten, the "Double Duchess", previously married to his great friend the Duke of Manchester, whose scorn for any subject but gossip was famous: in Platt's reverential words, "she seems to talk more about people than ideas".

With them came their uninspiring descendants, Lord and Lady Gosford, whose only claim on posterity appears to be the loss of a vast fortune through fast living; the rather endearing Sir Charles Cradock-Hartopp, whose stunning lack of concern for every aspect of Egypt is profound enough to arouse something close to admiration in Platt, and who comes alive only when given a chance to shoot duck from the barge or to discuss the breeding of puppies; and finally Lady Theodosia Acheson, in Platt's words "supercilious and chilling", the kind of Edwardian woman who, as the novelist A G Macdonell put it, had "no topic of conversation and only one adjective at a time". It appears she may have been aboard escaping from an engagement with a young ex-MP, "unseated from Bodmin owing to a technical breach of the Corruption Act".

Ladies Alexandra, Mary, and Theodosia Acheson                    painted by John Singer Sargent. Almost certainly                    commissioned by their grandmother the Duchess of                    Devonshire, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy                    in 1902
Ladies Alexandra, Mary, and Theodosia Acheson painted by John Singer Sargent. Almost certainly commissioned by their grandmother the Duchess of Devonshire, and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1902 Credit: Glen Segal

It could have made a magnificent comedy: these aristocrats gliding past what Flaubert called the "splendours, shining in the dust", with surprise visits from Winston Churchill and Howard Carter, on his uppers after losing his archaeological post because he abused French tourists. The trouble is Platt himself. His frustrations with his absurd companions are obvious, but he bites his tongue. One longs for a more acerbic narrator. It is also impossible to shed the knowledge that these letters were written to his incurably respectable wife, to whom Platt does not even feel comfortable writing a "bad word" in Nubian which forms the basis of some joke. Great chunks of prose are instead devoted to reassuring her that his dress – "knickers and Norfolk" – are appropriate to the climate.

And yet there is doubtless much that will appeal to those familiar with the history of Egyptology. Platt was one of the last Englishmen to see parts of Upper Egypt and Nubia before their second, deliberate flooding for the Aswan Low Dam, completed in 1902 and raised during 1907-12. He is at his most engaging when talking of his sadness at the loss of tomb paintings destroyed by damp, or of the once magnificent temple of Philae, already half-flooded: "sad and out of place in all these horribly modern surroundings".

A portrait of British statesman the Duke of                    Devonshire by Spy (Leslie Ward) from English                    periodical VANITY FAIR
A portrait of British statesman the Duke of Devonshire by Spy (Leslie Ward) from English periodical VANITY FAIR Credit: Time Life Pictures 

These letters also offer a quite unintentional insight into the general impending loss of an entire epoch. As the bazaars of Upper Egypt filled with "Birmingham rubbish", so the Duke's health deteriorated. He would never make it back to Britain, and died in the Metropole Hotel in Paris in 1908. When the news reached London, Asquith described him to the Commons as "almost the last survivor of our heroic age".

The short narrative to be found in these letters gives one a sense of the inevitability of the collapse of the society that the Duke represented. Adrift on a soot-blackened barge, the dinner-jackets, champagne, stiffness of manner and idées fixes appear much more absurd; and the aristocrats themselves, in the words of Henry Newbolt, the great poet of their own passing age, like "Pharaohs crowned divine/ …dust among the dust that once obeyed them."

Aristocrats and Archaeologists

Aristocrats and Archaeologists by Toby Wilkinson | The Telegraph - Bookshop

A collection of letters in a small painted box passed down through three generations of a London family is the starting point for a vivid account of a three-month journey up and down the Nile in a bygone age.

To order your copy from The Telegraph Bookshop for £19.99 (rrp £24.95) plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

--   Sent from my Linux system.

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