Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers

I knew all this about Grandpa, and more, but I knew next to nothing about my real grandfather and my mother had not offered much detail when she introduced me to him. The time came to ask. One of the reasons her real father was not spoken about, she said, was because he had committed suicide, and she had not been told of it until the eve of her wedding in 1961. At that point I had no conception of the matrix of guilt and blame and shame that holds the survivors. My view of the act was still formed by the notions of Romantic literature and rock and roll.

He was a German called Fritz. Fritz Grossmann, or rather Großmann. He was a hotelier in Palestine, co-owner and manager of the Hotel Tiberias in the town of the same name. My mother was three when he died and she could remember very little about him. She remembered how he shuffled his feet in the slippers he wore around the house, him going to sleep in the afternoons with a newspaper over his face. She remembered one time standing in the enclosed circular bed at the foot of a fruit tree, crying because there were ants crawling over her bare feet, and her father saying, ‘Well, just come out of there then.’ As for the reasons for his suicide, it was said he had a depressive nature. His debts were also mentioned, but no one really knew why he did it. He had borrowed heavily to build a Lido at the hotel’s private beach on the Sea of Galilee, but the unsettled situation in Palestine and the events in Europe that led to war caused the tourist trade to fall away. When war came, his Austrian-born widow Margaret, her two daughters, her sister and her mother-in-law were interned by the British authorities together with all ‘enemy aliens’ in Palestine. Shan Hackett had already been courting her for some time, and continued to call on her in the internment camp. They were married in Jerusalem in 1942. Margaret followed Shan to Egypt, while the two girls stayed with their grandmother – Granny G – and went to school in Jerusalem. In 1944 they all left for England, but Granny G stayed behind in the land of her birth.

The hotel had been administered by the Custodian for Enemy Property for the duration of the war, and an Arab manager installed. I believe Granny G intended to return to her home and business when it was over, but the hotel was eventually confiscated by the new Israeli government. She lost everything. The compensation, which did not arrive until the 1960s, was of a token nature. She lived in Beirut for a number of years before moving to Germany where she died.

Most of us have grown up hearing anecdotes not just about ourselves, but also about our parents and grandparents, stories that build into a received family history, forming our sense of where we come from and who we are. Happy or sad, they make up an oral tradition to which the family continuously adds. While the telling of my family narrative was still turning up new digressions and sub-plots, the salient points I thought of as settled. It was astonishing to discover a whole section of the main story line, and such a dramatic one, had remained untold for so long, astonishing to realize I had German relatives of whom I had never even heard. My sense of self may not have been weakened, but it had certainly been broadened.

Army children often have a problem answering the question, ‘Where do you come from?’ It can even affect one’s national status; my brother has a Canadian passport. I had never thought of myself as anything other than English, even though I knew my grandmother was Austrian, and despite having visited our relatives in Graz I did not think of my mother as anything other than English either. It seemed absurd that her application for a driver’s licence in the mid-1970s should be questioned because she had been born in Haifa.

There was all the difference in the world between being quarter Austrian and being half German. The former I regarded as a recessive element in my make-up, diluted by a generation and distant enough to be left out of account; the latter could not be so easily ignored. When I opted to study German as an ‘A’ level it was because I got on with its grammatical certainties. Now I knew my mother had been a little German girl called Brigitte Grossmann once upon a time, I wondered (for as long as it took to dismiss the idea) if I might have inherited an aptitude. Did she still, if ever, think of herself as German? We never spoke the language together, although she had taught me to count to ten in German when I was four years old, a time when I still spoke English with a Canadian accent. I had lost the accent quickly on returning to England, just as she seemed to have lost the command of her first language.

As I could not ignore the fact that I was half German, I had to consider whether it ought to make a difference to my behaviour. I was not about to start cheering for Germany in a World Cup qualifier, but shouldn’t I stop the name-calling 1918, 1945, 1966 John Bull jingoism? After all, wasn’t it possible that members of my own family had played for the opposition in all three contests? Unlikely in 1966, but still possible in theory. Shouldn’t I own up to the Germanic part of my ancestry, take on the responsibilities of being German, the guilt? The people I told seemed to assume I would, and would break the flow of a tirade against, say, what Germans do with their beach towels in Mallorca to make placatory reference to my ancestry – ‘no offence’, assuming their remarks could offend. I did not know enough about my newly revealed family to feel that bothered.

The subject of Fritz Grossmann came up only twice more in the next thirteen years. Occasionally a story was told about the girls’ childhood in Palestine, usually as a digression from some other topic – a news item about rabies inoculation reminds my mother of the time she was bitten by a dog in Tiberias and of the long needle required to pierce the solar plexus; a picture of flat bread being fished out of a tandoor in Peshawar transports Lizzie to the Old City of Jerusalem. Although younger, Liz seemed to feel much more of a connection with the German side of the family than my mother did as a result of her closeness to Granny G. At one time she had been a regular visitor to our relatives there. It was after one of her visits that a folder of photocopied documents and pictures appeared in our kitchen. Among them was the first photograph I had seen of my real grandfather.

It showed a man of medium build smartly dressed in a light summer suit and wire-rimmed glasses. The jacket is buttoned over a striped tie. The trousers have turn-ups. He has dark wavy hair and a sun-tanned face which is inclined down and slightly away from the camera so it cannot be clearly seen. In each brown hand he holds that of a small girl in a short cotton dress, white socks and sandals. Nearest the camera stands my mother, wearing the serious expression of an eldest child reminiscent of my own at the same age. Furthest away is Lizzie, peering round her father’s legs at the lens. She is almost two and looks to have the potential for mischief. They stand on a gravel path edged with black and white stones. There is a bit of a lawn and a flowerbed; a rose climbs up the wall of a white-washed brick building in the background. A palm frond intrudes from the left. The picture was taken at the Lido on the Sea of Galilee, my mother said.

The only other time my real grandfather was mentioned, and then not even by name, was at a dinner in a restaurant in London. It was winter, almost a year after Susan’s death, and I had been flat-sitting her apartment while it was on the market. Granny and Grandpa and Lizzie had come up for the night, something to do with the Order of the Bath as I recall, and certainly the conversation came round to one of Grandpa’s favourite subjects – his ancestry and coat of arms. I do not remember exactly how it came up, or who suggested I take a more active interest in compiling the Hackett history. It was an idea that had to be nipped in the bud and, reckoning they knew that I knew already, rather than offend with a direct refusal I said I would be more interested to find out about my real grandfather. Lizzie let out an exclamation of horror. I may have been breaking a family taboo, but it was too late to take back the words, and what with the wine and the wide open opportunity, I wanted to say more. I said that Grandpa was the only grandfather I had known and that I loved him as much as a grandson could, but the fact remained he was not my blood relation. As a consequence there was 25 per cent of my genetic inheritance about which I knew nothing and was curious, and which I could no longer deny. My interest was noted and it was said that we would talk about the matter at a more appropriate time.

The time more appropriate never did come. Grandpa’s reminiscences began to stretch further back, leaving behind the smouldering issues of the Cold War and Northern Ireland and revisiting his years in the Eastern Mediterranean. One day he would be reiterating the argument he had advanced at the time, that Rhodes rather than Sicily should have been the site of the Allied counterattack in 1943; on another he would be reliving a cavalry charge against Arab irregulars, sabres drawn, while serving with the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, and as an aside, ‘that was when I first met your grandmother’. Frequently he told stories that we had heard before, often using the exact same form of words as he had on the previous telling. He was rehearsing his memoirs. He was given a dictaphone one birthday, but he did not start to use it until shortly, too shortly, before his death.

Coberley Mill began to show signs of it’s aging occupants. Tubular handles in a hospital-white plasticized finish appeared in doorways and bathrooms. A stair-lift was installed. The rituals of gathering remained broadly the same, although the bottle of champagne before lunch became New Zealand sparkling. Nonetheless, Grandpa would still produce his silver swizzle stick and defizz it somewhat. The trout in the pool below the millpond sluice grew fatter on the bread we threw them. Ducklings disappeared one by one. Dippers flitted past the drawing-room window. If Grandpa was now less inclined to argue, he was more prone to insult, and Lizzie bore the brunt of this.

The isolation that made up so much of the charm of the house came to be a liability for eighty-year-olds. The narrow lane leading down the hill from the main road arrived steeply at a bridge over a stream; snow made it impassable. If that were to coincide with a power-cut or a problem with the boiler or a burst pipe … The loneliness of the spot must have made it seem vulnerable to burglary. One day, when my grandparents were away, a gang of thieves reversed a pick-up through the heavy oak front door. To silence the burglar alarm they tore the bell off the wall and threw it into the millpond. What they could not have realized was that, ever since the IRA threats against Grandpa’s life, the alarm had been hard-wired to Special Branch in Cheltenham. A rapid reaction unit had the place surrounded in thirty minutes.

In the new year of 1997 Grandpa went for a walk up the lane and was discovered sometime later lying on the verge. His balance had not been good for a number of years, but it was not clear whether he had fallen and then suffered a stroke or the other way round. He was admitted to hospital, and then to a rehabilitation centre where his recovery progressed to the point where he was able to go home. Soon after, though, he developed jaundice and returned to hospital for more tests. These revealed he had cancer of the liver.

The old soldier faded away over that spring and summer, as the Halle-Bopp comet waned. The warrior became meek, and I would push him in his wheelchair to feed the fish, or to inspect the lambs in the meadow where I had played kiss-chase as a boy with the girls from the farm in the village. He stayed at home until the end. The final phase of his illness came at the beginning of September. The last time I saw him he was yellow and swollen. His hands were puffed up and dimpled at the knuckles. His eyes were closed. His carer had said that he might be able to hear so I should talk to him, but I could not find anything to say. I sat watching his chest rise and fall as he took gulping dry breaths, between which there were interminable intervals, so long I had to wonder if he would ever breathe in again. I bent over him to tell him I loved him, to kiss him goodbye. His moustache tickled my cheek.

Grandpa often said he could start the day only if when he turned to The Times obituary page his was not there. What the comment said about him depended on which camp you were in, those who thought him an egotistical martinet, and those who found in his amused take on public life irreverence and self-deprecation. The former resented being told that ‘egotistical’ should be pronounced with a short ‘e’; for them his querulousness was merely a way of showing off that he was cleverer than you. The latter were inclined to see a certain intellectual mischievousness in his pedantry. Besides being the subject of jest, the ritual of turning to the obituary page first was for him a memento mori, an acknowledgement that the day would arrive when his own appeared there.

When it came, the obituaries were indeed encomious. Condensed into fifteen hundred words his public career glittered with decorations and honours. His qualities as a scholar, soldier and leader were dwelt upon. His sense of humour and approachability were mentioned in the same breath as his pedantry, or rather, to quote his entry in Who’s Who, an interest in ‘the pursuit of exactitude, called by some pedantry’. It was a fitting send-off for one of the breed obituarists know collectively as ‘the Moustaches’, the heroes of the Second World War. At his memorial service in St Martin-in-the-Fields Church there were five field marshals, three air marshals, and thirty-six assorted generals among the eight hundred people who attended.

Shan and Margaret were married for fifty-five years. She was his Schatz, his treasure. The pain she suffered during his last illness was terrible to behold; her sadness after his death was deep indeed, and into it intruded the sublunary necessity of ordering his affairs. Before his death King’s College, London, had been offered and accepted the gift of his papers. He had left an ample record of himself which was still being archived four years later, and as the papers were sorted through and boxed up, occasionally a gem would emerge. One item that caught my eye was a large Manila envelope containing the photographs and negatives he had taken while touring the Crusader Castles of Northern Syria for his thesis on Saladin. As I had an enlarger at home I offered to print them for Granny.

My father had taught me to print black and white photographs using pictures he had taken during the Korean War – helicopters and tanks in the snow, cherry-blossom time in Japan. His father, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, had taught him. I had become interested in old printing processes – carbon and cyanotype and gum bichromate – and in the world such old photographs portrayed, so to come across a hoard of negatives from the 1930s was exciting. That they showed an obscure corner of the world made these even more intriguing. Grandpa had occasionally spoken about this journey down the Orontes Valley on a mule, and having had similar experiences in Asia I was eager to work on the pictures.

They are not good photographs. Though Grandpa listed painting among his hobbies, had even attended art school, he did not have an eye for taking pictures and he was further disadvantaged by the camera he was using, ‘a poor camera, borrowed from a brother officer’ whose bellows leaked light. The flat noonday sun deprives the scrubby hills and tumbled masonry of all contrast and bleaches the sky to a dull white. Where the ruins are substantial and well preserved, the photographs fail to capture the spirit of the place. Admittedly they were not taken for a wholly pictorial purpose, but even as illustrations they are disappointing.

Nevertheless, however good or bad they are, these were 1/60th of a second slices of May 1935 in Northern Syria. They were part of the source material for a story that had become a family legend, proof that it really had happened. I wondered what else had survived from that time, and what I could find out about my real grandfather. If such discoveries could be made about a family legend, why not a family mystery? The telling and re-telling of the events recorded in a family’s oral history seldom follow the same path twice. The self-contained episodes are re-combined according to theme. Their chronology becomes obscured and the larger story fragmented. Yet I felt certain that if I could track down more concrete evidence to which to anchor the anecdotes, I would be able to reassemble these pieces into a narrative that would not only tell what had happened sixty years previously in Palestine, but also how the protagonists came to be there in the first place. Maybe I would even find out why my real grandfather had committed suicide. At the least I might find his grave.

PART ONE

Chapter One

‘The East is a career,’ wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Tancred, or The New Crusade published in 1847, but just what sort of career lay ahead for John Winthrop Hackett was far from certain. His regiment, the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, the regiment in which his great-grandfather had served in the eighteenth century, arrived in Port Said on 29 December 1933 aboard the Nevasa. ‘I was glad’, he wrote, ‘to be in the East again.’ He was so glad, he embarked upon an all-night bender with a group of other young officers. They started at the casino and dined at the Eastern Exchange Hotel, before being led by ‘a persuasive person in a blue dressing gown’ to an unsavoury part of the town where a floor-show was staged for them in an equally unsavoury establishment. For some who served in the ‘sensuous and despotic’ Orient their career was a headlong one towards dissoluteness.

The first time Shan Hackett passed through Egypt he had been a serious Australian teenager en route to a place at New College, Oxford. He returned with a taste for champagne, two degrees and a thirst to learn about the world; as an officer in the British (rather than the Australian) Army he would have the chance to see some of it. There may also have been a financial motive. His widowed mother had remarried and the bulk of his father’s fortune had gone to various public institutions as a result. In life his father had been a philanthropist, but in death he was more than beneficent; his endowment to the University of Western Australia remains, in real terms, the largest single bequest to an academic establishment in Australian history. They named a wallaby after him. Shan said later that he was glad he had not inherited a fortune as it would have made him bone idle, yet the modest means left to his mother were severely depleted by the Great Depression. He may have come from ‘the uppermost crust’ of Australian society, but he was frequently short of money while he was at Oxford, not least because he ran with a rich crowd, and in 1931 he pledged to join the army on graduating, thereby supplementing his irregular allowance with a subaltern’s pay.

He was an unlikely-looking soldier, short of stature, only five foot six, and slight, but he had a competitive toughness, resulting perhaps from his antipodean upbringing, which earned him a half-blue at lacrosse, and a physical recklessness that directed him to the biggest jumps while out hunting. He had grown up with horses, and a part of the allure of joining the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars stemmed from the fact it was still a mounted regiment. As strong was the desire to make his name outside Australia, where, because of his father’s standing, he would never have been sure that his achievements were entirely his own. He was only too aware of the burden he had inherited with his father’s name. He was both proud of his family history and eager to escape its colonial confines. In joining his great-grandfather’s regiment he was at once honouring his ancestry by reconnecting with his Irish forbears and striking out for himself.

All these circumstances led the second lieutenant unsteadily to Port Said’s waterfront at dawn on the morning of 30 December. His companion, a captain in the East Surrey’s, was even shakier than Hackett, on whom it fell to hail a passing dinghy and negotiate a passage back to the Nevasa. The fisherman and his wife rowed them across the still harbour. It was so calm and quiet that the sound of a dog barking reached them from miles away, quiet that is until the captain started singing at the top of his voice, the raucous song bouncing between the hulls of the dimly lit ships lying at anchor. They paid double the agreed fare. The fisherman presented them with a crab which they gave to the sentry, who signed them in as having returned at midnight.

No amount of coffee could restore Shan for the arduous day ahead and his mood was as flat as the desert through which the train ran towards their barracks at Abbassiyya, just outside Cairo. The sand stung his eyes. The station was crowded with men from the 14th Hussars who were to leave that night and his sore head could have done without the band that led them into the troops’ quarters. There was no let-up that night either as he had friends in the departing regiment and so did not get to bed until midnight. He had slept for only eleven hours in the preceding four days; the following night being New Year’s Eve, his aggregate was not set to rise by much. There was a party at Shepheard’s Hotel. On New Year’s Day there were arrangements to be made for the start of training the following morning, after which Shan paid a visit to the stables to see his pair of polo ponies. So ended his first three days as an officer of the Cairo Cavalry Brigade.

By the time the British took control of Egypt in 1882 the country had been ruled by foreigners for more than two thousand years, ever since Alexander the Great was confirmed as Pharaoh by the priests of Memphis in 332 BCE. Greek was supplanted by Roman rule in 30 BCE, whose centre shifted eastward to Constantinople during the fourth century CE. The Byzantines were defeated in their turn not only by a new Arabian power, but also by a new religion. The armies of Islam established a camp before the walls of the Byzantine fortress, Babylon-in-Egypt, in 641, from which the city of Cairo grew. As a province in the empires of Islam, Egypt was ruled in succession by the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, the North African Fatimids, the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, the Kurdish Ayyubids, Mameluke sultans, whose origins lay in the Caucasus and Kipchak Steppe, and finally, from 1517, by the Ottoman Turks. Even when the country did regain a degree of autonomy at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was under the leadership of an Albanian officer in the Ottoman Army, Mohammed Ali, who could not speak Arabic. His successors, first as khedives and then as kings, remained in power until 1952.

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.