Suez 1956, page 8
Farouk was then handed a paper to sign, surrendering his throne. According to Stone:
The King took it all in a calm and dignified manner but was obviously a bit shaken on reading the abdication form. It looked for a moment as if he intended to sign it, but Hassanein came round behind him and they had a short consultation which I could not hear. The King then said he agreed to summon Nahas to be Prime Minister and select his own Cabinet and the Ambassador had won his point.7
The story was later much embroidered. Lampson claimed that the king asked ‘with none of his previous bravado if I would give him one more chance and . . . even even thanked me personally for having always tried to help him’.8 Farouk counter-claimed that he had had armed guards standing behind a curtain ready to defend their king if he had given the word. Moreover, he was said to have told Lampson that he would come to regret his action and that he agreed to sign only to prevent the streets of Cairo running in blood.
Whatever the variations on the record, the king chose capitulation as the better part of valour. Lampson returned to his embassy confessing that he ‘could not have more enjoyed’ the events of the evening. ‘It was sorely tempting to have insisted on King Farouk’s abdication which I could have extracted.’9 Nahas, summoned to the palace the next day, formed a government that remained loyal to Britain for the rest of the war, even when German forces were so close to Cairo that Lampson was prompted to order the burning of secret papers.
What would have happened if Farouk had proved a tougher proposition? Lampson was not without experienced advisers. Oliver Lyttelton (later Viscount Chandos), minister of state in Cairo since June 1941, was technically senior to Lampson since it was his job to coordinate the work of British ambassadors in the Middle East. Also on hand was Walter Monckton, lawyer and politician, who had recently been named director general of British propaganda and information services. Monckton was destined to play a not insignificant part in the 1956 Suez crisis. As minister of defence he was to oppose military action but nonetheless stay in his job for fear that a resignation would be seen as a betrayal of a government under pressure. Perhaps he used the same reasoning in his relations with Lampson. While Lyttelton urged caution, Monckton was content to follow Lampson’s imperious lead. It is almost certain that had Farouk showed any spirit, the ambassador would have packed him off into exile. Various options had already been discussed. There was talk of accommodating the deposed monarch on board a warship until the politicians had decided what to do with him. Lampson favoured sending him to Ceylon. An alternative was retirement in Khartoum. The word from London was that Lampson was to be given a free hand.
As leader of a country that few imagined could withstand the German onslaught, Churchill could be forgiven for not worrying overmuch about the feelings of those unsympathetic to the British cause. Likewise Anthony Eden, who, after a brief period out of office in protest against his party’s vain attempts to oppose the European dictators, was back as foreign secretary, this time in the wartime coalition. He cabled Lampson, ‘I congratulate you warmly. Result justifies your firmness and our confidence.’10 But even in extremity, Eden might just have thought twice about flouting the spirit of an agreement that he had brought about a mere five years earlier. By hardening anti-British sentiment, not to mention the political ambitions of Abdel Nasser and other young officers, who were more pro-nationalist than they were anti-monarchist, Eden would, before long, regret his oversight. Or maybe not. The unshakeable belief on the British side was that once again prompt action had saved Egypt from its own imbecilities. As Dr Johnson observed, ‘He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them.’ When, later on, Nasser voiced his resentment of British pretensions, he was denigrated for his ingratitude.
Meanwhile, there was a war to be won. With Britain pushed out of Europe by Germany and out of Singapore and the Far East by Japan, it was strategically and politically vital that she should hold her position in the Middle East. The battle of the titans, when the forces of Montgomery and Rommel met at El Alamein, proved to the world that Germany could be beaten. But more than that, the British achievement was to assume huge significance at home as the only major victory of the Hitler war that owed nothing to America. In the collective political mind it seemed to confirm Britain as the dominant power in the Middle East.
Churchill certainly believed this to be so, which is why, towards the end of the war, after the Big Three conference at Yalta, presided over by Stalin, Churchill was much exercised to find that his old friend President Roosevelt was planning to stop off on the way home to hold meetings with the King of Saudi Arabia. It did not need a clairvoyant to predict that top of the agenda would be American participation in the exploitation of oil.
Hopes of a major find somewhere in the Middle East had been sustained for well over half a century. The discovery of surface traces of oil in Egypt in the 1880s had led to exploratory drilling but without success. Elsewhere in the region the maladministration of the Ottoman Empire deterred serious investment, though Persia and Iraq were known to be likely prospects. Even after petrol-driven vehicles went into mass production, the Middle East remained a minor participant in the oil industry, producing a mere 1 per cent of the world’s output in 1920. When the post-war mandates approved by the League of Nations came into effect, however, geologists descended on Persia and Iraq. Their findings were so impressive as to start a race for concessions. Britain forged ahead in Persia, where the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became the country’s dominant economic force and the world’s fourth-largest oil producer.
It was a different story in Iraq. Despite Britain’s best efforts to corner the market, American and French interests were powerful enough to gain a substantial share of the monopoly known as the Iraq Petroleum Company. American and French oil interests also gained a foothold in the Gulf sheikhdoms of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and Abu Dhabi (the latter now part of the United Arab Emirates), where Britain had acted as overlord and protector for more than a century.
Then there was Saudi Arabia, a country carved out by Abd-al-Aziz Ibn Saud, who had stayed clear of the Great War, but who subsequently had annihilated his rivals by a combination of guile and brute force to make his family dominant over a desert region stretching from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was independent, the only country in the Middle East apart from Yemen to claim that distinction. But Ibn Saud was also in need of money to develop his country and to secure his succession. In the closing stages of the Second World War neither Britain nor France was in any position to give Ibn Saud what he most needed. But America was in another league, and Ibn Saud was well aware that he could hold the attention of the power brokers in Washington.
The American connection with Saudi Arabia had started in 1933 when the Standard Oil Company had gained permission to explore for oil. It was not long before Standard chanced on a major find. So colossal were the estimated reserves that three other American oil companies were encouraged to join a consortium dubbed Aramco. By now the American military was taking an interest. If the experience of modern warfare proved anything it was the dependence of fighting machines on a plentiful supply of oil. In September 1943 the American joint chiefs of staff were urging that ‘everything possible be done to give the US access to Saudi Arabian oil’, emphasising that ‘in the unhappy event of another war in Europe, possession or access to Near Eastern oil supplies were essential to any successful campaign by the Americans’.11 When one of America’s leading geologists concluded that ‘the centre of world oil production is shifting from the Caribbean to the Middle East’,12 Roosevelt needed no further encouragement to put on a post-Yalta reception for King Saud on board his battle cruiser Quincy, as it lay at anchor in the Great Bitter Lake, near Cairo.
It was, noted Roosevelt’s chief of staff, ‘like something transported by magic from the Middle Ages’: Ibn Saud and his forty-two-strong retinue, all dressed in white, made a grand spectacle. Flanked by ten sabre-armed guards chosen from the leading tribes of Saudi Arabia, he was accompanied by the Royal Fortune-teller, the Royal Food-taster, the Chief Server of the Ceremonial Coffee and the Royal Purse- bearers.’13
If oil had been the only subject of conversation the meeting could have been counted a great success. Raising no objection to Saud’s autocratic rule, Roosevelt promised a vast public works programme and other measures to help raise living standards just so long as the oil contrived to flow westwards. But the president struck a log jam when he raised the issue of Palestine.
What was soon to become the Jewish homeland was already a world trouble spot with political violence part of the social fabric. With the advent of Nazism, immigrant numbers had soared to a point where, in 1939, Jews accounted for one third of the Palestine population. Hovering between sympathy for Jewish refugees and an appreciation of Arab fears that they would soon be outnumbered in their own country, Britain as the mandatory power settled for acting as referee, hoping that the contenders would eventually settle their differences. It was an impossible dream. When Jews and Arabs were not fighting each other they took it out on the British. A proposal to divide the country was rejected by both sides, the Arabs because they could see no reason to surrender territory, the Jews because they expected more. In 1939 the British government fixed at 75,000 the number of Jewish immigrants who could enter Palestine in the next five years. With the outbreak of war Jews escaped from Europe any way they could and headed for Palestine with no right to land in ships that were so unseaworthy there was no certainty they would get there. The inevitable tragedies heightened tensions between Arabs and Jews and between both and the ineffectual peacemakers.
Aware of a growing Zionist lobby in America, Roosevelt was keen to do something without getting too closely involved with what he most fervently hoped would remain a British affair. Hence, in his meeting with King Saud, Roosevelt took the opportunity to press for more Jews to be allowed into Palestine.
He was greatly shocked when Ibn Saud, without a smile, said ‘No.’ Ibn Saud emphasised the fact that the Jews in Palestine were successful in making the countryside bloom only because American and British capital had been poured in in millions of dollars and said if those same millions had been given to the Arabs they could have done quite as well. He also said that there was a Palestine army of Jews all armed to the teeth and he remarked that they did not seem to be fighting the Germans but were aiming at the Arabs. He stated plainly that the Arabs would not permit a further extension beyond the commitment already made for future Jewish settlement in Palestine.14
With a politician’s capacity for ignoring what he does not wish to hear, Roosevelt soon returned to the theme, voicing the hope that Arabs and Jews would somehow get along together.
Ibn Saud politely but firmly gave the President a lesson in the history of Palestine from the Arab point of view. The King, with great dignity and courtesy and with a smile, said that if Jews from outside Palestine continued to be imported with their foreign financial backing and their higher standards of living, they would make trouble for the Arab inhabitants. When this happened, as a good Arab and a True Believer, he would have to take the Arab side against the Jews, and he intended to do so.15
And there the matter rested. The deal on oil was done, but Roosevelt, like successive American presidents, had no firm policy for solving the most critical problem threatening peace in the Middle East.
Before setting off for home, Roosevelt also met King Farouk. This was more of a courtesy call; the president was, after all, parked on Egyptian territory. But it is a measure of his innocence that he seemed not to have realised that Egypt was another post-war crisis in the making. The nationalist movement had taken on a sharper edge with the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which began as a welfare organisation but soon turned to violence as a means of attracting anti-British and anti-monarchist partisans. A clear warning of what was to come was given soon after Roosevelt made his farewells to Farouk. In haste to qualify for a seat in the newly fledged United Nations, Egypt declared war on Germany. It was purely a symbolic act but it cost the prime minister his life. The young assassin was a fascist sympathiser.
6
It was plain to see that Egypt was in trouble. The days of a stable economy managed by British bankers had long since gone. A burgeoning population up from 11 million in 1905 to over 16 million forty years on had overwhelmed what few services were in place. Ninety per cent of the population suffered from ophthalmia, 85 per cent from hookworm. A few wealthy Egyptians had made themselves even wealthier from the war but over a million were on the starvation line and unemployment was up to 50 per cent. A more fertile breeding ground for revolution would be hard to imagine. But Britain had no intention of giving up on Egypt or the Suez Canal, which had become the chief thoroughfare to Europe for essential oil supplies and thus central to Britain’s fortunes in the Middle East and beyond.
France too retained a strong interest in the Middle East. Though pushed out of its two mandatory territories – Syria and Lebanon joined the UN as independent states in 1946 – what happened in Egypt and neighbouring countries was seen to have an impact on Algeria and other French colonies in North Africa. Nationalism had a tendency to spread and multiply. Moreover, France had her own oil interests to protect, while the Suez Canal was still regarded essentially as a French operation.
This remained the British and French position even after the departure from power of the two arch imperialists – General Charles de Gaulle in a huff at the rejection of his plans for a strong presidency capable of overriding party rivalries, Churchill in dark mood having discovered that his status as war hero was not enough to save his party from a devastating defeat at the polls. Their successors, politicians of the centre left, spoke up for the independence of subject peoples but, in practice, turned out to be more concerned with maintaining national prestige, in particular to stand alongside the United States and the Soviet Union in directing world affairs. This obsession with keeping up international appearances required huge military expenditure, devoted in large measure to the trappings of empire, the traditional symbol of great-power status.
As Anthony Eden put it, in one of many observations that should have warned of conflicts to come in the Middle East, the empire ‘is our life; without it we should be no more than some millions of people living in an island off the coast of Europe, in which nobody wants to take any particular interest’.1 Or as a delegate to the 1948 Conservative conference put it more bluntly, ‘We are an imperial power or we are nothing.’
This conviction, which led Foreign Office thinking, was faithfully echoed in the Quai d’Orsay. So often was it said that the French overseas territories in Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) and North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria) conferred international authority that the converse was assumed to be equally beyond question – France ‘n’est rien sans les colonies’. And the people cheered. For all the grand talk of spreading democracy and liberty, the British and French bolstered a fragile self-confidence with boasts of superiority to other countries and to other races.
Barely disguised propaganda started in the schools. As French children were taught that the empire was integral to hopes for a better future, so too were British youngsters brought up to glory in the great swaths of the world map coloured red (with Britain at the centre, of course). State occasions from the 14 July celebrations across France to the coronation of Elizabeth II were given an imperial slant. Empire Day was an annual fixture in the British ceremonial calendar. At an Empire Day service held at St Paul’s Cathedral in May 1945, the dean spoke of British influence as ‘a stabilizing influence in the world’ and of the Empire itself as ‘the greatest creation of British political genius’.2 No one was heard to argue the point.
Considered now, such sentiments pose an obvious question. What precisely was so terrible about accepting a lower placing in the international league? Both France and Britain were up to their necks in post-war debt, dependent on American handouts. Both faced the awesome challenge of reconciling economic reconstruction with popular demands for better living standards and advances in social welfare. But a more realistic view of British and French conceits, free of world war sensitivities, had to wait on the younger generation, the product of social reforms and the expansion of education. Meanwhile, the stage was held by those who were used to playing the great game in international politics. They were to remain unchallenged until the Suez crisis, the little war that brought them crashing down.
Nonetheless, we can still wonder. Given an informed choice, would ordinary families in Britain or France have opted for international prestige against the prospect of acquiring more of the basics of civilised living? If they had had the chance to visit the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway or Switzerland – countries that were sneered at by the Anglo-French establishment for their lack of influence in world affairs – would they really have turned down decent homes with efficient public services and advanced social security just so that their elected leaders could prance on the world stage telling others how to run their lives? The questions are forever hypothetical because, of course, there was no informed choice.
To be fair, seen from the point of view of those in the front line of diplomacy, there was an understandable desire to show the Americans and the Russians that they could not have it all their own way; more, that the achievements of France and Britain over the centuries of their predominance were not to be scorned. Underlying the arrogant, often pompous rhetoric was a conviction held by many decent politicians that Britain and France were a force for good in a world that was not at its happiest under the aegis of the two superpowers. It was hard for them to give up on what they saw as their solemn responsibilities. It was harder still to accept that, as individuals having clawed their way up to positions of power, they were to be any less effective than their predecessors who had made France and Britain great.
