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PORT SAID
Kay Clay, 1955
I am out to vindicate the town of Port Said. Going to Port Said?, said my friends before I left London. "Poor thing.
We do feel sorry for you. It's quite the dirtiest and dullest town in the world. And just think of the heat. You'll hate it
there!" Well, I don't hate it. I love being here. And because I am tired of being commiserated with by letter, I want
to try and show what an interesting town it can be.
First, let me explode the belief that it is dirty. It may well have been so in the past, when ships came here to coal
and ton upon ton of the stuff was carried on board in open baskets. Nowadays, with oil-burning ships, none of the shipping
agents handles coal at all, and the air over the Canal and in the town is as fresh and clear as in Cornwall. I am not claiming
that all the streets of Port Said are spotlessly clean. There are clean streets and dirty streets just as there are in other
Mediterranean ports such as Naples areas or Genoa. The main streets in the shopping and residential areas are swept regularly
and washed down too. The much criticised Arab town, a slum area on the outskirts of Port Said, is bad, very bad, but if one
takes climate into consideration, no worse than the slums of Glasgow, for example. It is a hang-over from the past, when national
policy did not favour the poor. The Municipality is in the process of building workers' houses and hopes eventually to pull
down the whole of Arab town.
And what of the people themselves? Well, my impression, after spending some ten months here, is that they wash themselves
and their clothes far more often than the general population does in the big towns of Europe. Their clothes, the galabieh
which is rather like a cotton nightshirt, or pyjamas which many of them wear instead of a suit, are easy to wash, and dry
quickly in the sun. Water is cheap and there is an unlimited supply of it from the sweet water canal. And their religion,
too, obliges them to wash at least their face and hands five times a day before prayer. The water is, incidentally, extremely
good to drink and very safe. The sanitary system is extremely efficient and compares very favourably with hers in England.
The municipality concerns itself too with the control of mosquitoes in this malarial free town, and not only sprays all trees
and plants in the streets with DDT but also carries out a check on private houses and garden. Once a month I open my door
to a Sanitary inspector who comes to look at my lavatories, not to see it they are working but to see if, by flushing them
insufficiently, I am allowing them to become a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Port Said is a Mediterranean port and its summer temperature rarely exceeds ninety degrees. This summer it has seldom
reached even that. In fact on several occasions we have had letters from home complaining of a greater heat in London than
we have experienced here. It is not a perfect climate, for its day and night temperatures only vary by about ten degrees,
and the percentage of humidity is high. But for anyone who likes sun and warmth and a low rainfall -- one inch a year --
and a very short cold spell in the winter Port Said is ideal.
To call it dull is perhaps the unkindest criticism of all. Every day, right outside our window, we watch the ships of
the world going by with their various cargoes. There are huge liners, some on luxury cruises, some going to the Far East,
others on the Africa run, coming from Britain and France and Italy and Holland and Germany and Poland and Scandinavia. The
Oronsey, the Europa, the Batory, the Marseillaise, we begin to know them all, and to check up on our engagement calendar by
their punctual arrivals from north and south. There are the fleets of tankers coming from all parts of the world, from such
varied points of the compass as Russia and Panama, Japan and Great Britain. These are outsize sleek modern monsters, of anything
from ten thousand to thirty thousand tons, all, except the Russian tankers, and they do it in reverse, riding high to the
south with their propellers half out of the water and returning from the Persian gulf right down to the Plimsoll mark, with
three red lights glinting a warning from their masts that their cargo is dangerous and all other shipping must stay clear.
Their passage adds a spice of danger to our lives, for the slightest collision might cause an explosion, with the likelihood
of considerable damage to the town. Our own seat at the performance would be uncomfortably close to the stage. There are the
cargo ships, with perhaps a dozen passengers on board, and the ships of various navies, not many, though, of these. And most
beautiful of all, there are the caiques, all sails set, with their hulls painted vivid blue and green and orange and yellow,
who call in here for repairs or cargo on their Mediterranean run.
South bound most of the ships put in here for a few hours. And then the town becomes really alive. Whether it is day or
night the shops open and the streets suddenly fill with sellers who offer watches and jewellery, highly coloured and pungent
smelling leather pouffes and bags and camel saddle stools, tarbooshes and riding whips, and boxes of dates and Turkish delight.
They begin by asking exorbitant prices. "You buy watch, sir. I have very good watch. Twelve bounds, sir", they murmur
confidentially in your ear, with the endearing Arab mispronunciation of the letter p. They end by pressing the article into
your hand for almost nothing as you walk through the Customs Gate back to the ship, and plead for "one bound, sir, only
one bound. Best watch Bor Said, only one bound".
We stand on our balcony and watch the scenes below us. Under a hundred yards from our block of flat lies, let us say,
the Lloyd Triestino S/S Europa. A series of pontoons linked together joins it to the jetty. Around the ship and lining the
pontoons lie bumboat men shouting their wares. Tonight they shout in Italian, tomorrow it may be French or English or Dutch
or German or Greek. It is a cut throat, starvation level trade, and as we lie in bed at night trying to get to sleep, we become
certain that he who shouts loudest must sell most. Now that we have become used to the noise and can sleep through the sound
of even the largest anchor dropping like a landslide, we are grateful to the Canal Company. They provide us with free non-stop
entertainment for twenty-four hours of the day and make it quite unnecessary for us to think up conversational gambits or
party games for our guests. People calling on us from a passing liner, local residents who have lived here for years, even
the pilots of the Canal Company, all spend their time jumping up from their chairs and exclaiming to us: Look there's a ship
going by!
It looks so easy. The ships slide silently by at a maximum speed of fourteen kilometres an hour, some forty of them a
day, two convoys southbound and northbound, and they arrive so regularly that you could almost set your watch by them. But
behind it all lies a complicated organisation of the highest precision. If the ships are held up for a few hours it means
the loss of thousands of pounds to the shipping companies concerned. If they are held up for two or three days by any accident,
then unless their destination is the Far East their passage would have been cheaper round the Cape. With such a small margin
of error the Canal Company cannot afford to make mistakes. To ensure maximum efficiency it pays high wages and expects first
class service from all its personnel, pilots, engineers, administrative officers and workers alike. A captain of a ship arriving
outside Port Said knows that he is in safe hands. From the moment he approaches the Canal he will have a Company pilot on
board, one for the Roads, one from Port Said to Lake Timseh, one from Lake Timseh to Suez. In exchange for this security the
shipping firms are required to pay high, very high Company dues, about seven shillings a ton per ship, and so they in their
turn demand flawless service from their own agents, in order to get their ships through the Canal quickly. Shipping offices
remain open day and night, ready to board a ship at the earliest moment. I am sure one of my most vivid memories of Port Said
will be of men stepping dangerously from a moving boat to a moving ship, goaded by the thought that shipping time, to quote
the local pidgin English, costs bags of money! In fact everything runs so smoothly that I am afraid I find the occasional
slip quite exciting, when a ship gets into difficulties over mooring, or there is a temporary blockage in the Canal.
All life in Port Said centres around the Canal. In fact without it Port Said would have no reason to exist. The original
survey made for de Lesseps revealed no harbour here at all, and merely two or three fishermen's huts. Now it is a town of
some hundred thousand inhabitants. Its growth has been slow and haphazard, closely following the success graph of the Canal
Company. And because people of many different nationalities have come here to find work, and have brought with them their
own tastes in housing, it is architecturally a hotch potch of no great beauty. Victorian, Italianate and Colonial styles,
skyscrapers, and in the background the wooden huts of Arab town, no, you cannot call it beautiful but it is typical of the
international character of life here. With colonies of Italians, Greeks, Maltese, Lebanese, Syrians, Cypriots, French, British
and the Egyptians themselves, you have a wide range of choice for friends. The colonies, to some extent, keep themselves to
themselves, but if you take a cross section as we have tried to do, and make friends in them all you will find it very rewarding.
You will also develop what I call Port Saidese, a language made up of the three main languages spoken: French, English and
Italian. You may begin with the best intentions of choosing one of the three but before very long you will be saying without
a blush: "Bon jour, Signora, how are you? And come va votre mari?"
You cannot of course get much ready-made amusement here. The cinemas, though by no means of the mammoth Odeon variety
and in fact more in the style of the simple hall of the silent film days, give you a chance to see all the best international
films in the original languages. But there is no theatre unless we put on our own amateur productions. There are only very
occasional concerts, two or three a winter, sponsored by the active Alliance Francaise. We also go to cocktail parties, and
lunch parties and dinner parties, but the conversation at them is lively and provides an excellent opportunity for exchanging
ideas internationally. We have learnt to develop the lost art of entertaining and intelligent conversation. Most women in
England would envy us our servants, I know, but very few of them have such constant calls on their time as housewives and
hostesses. In Port Said you must be ready to receive a continuous stream of guests at any moment in the twenty-four hours
and be prepared to give them a bed and meals without any notice, since people travelling through the Canal like to get a change
from life on board and people arriving in Egypt or leaving it often have to wait a day or two for their ship.
I have only one regret and that is that one cannot learn very much about Egypt in Port Said, though I do not think I shall
be disappointed in that for long. The present Government policy requires the Suez Canal Company and all local shipping firms
to employ a percentage of Egyptian nationals where suitably qualified ones are available. In our ten months here we have already
noticed a considerable Egyptianisation of the town. It is likely, therefore, that Port Said will soon be as representative
of Egypt as any other of its towns. I am encouraged by the arrival of a camel beneath our window, who sits in the shade of
a palm tree waiting for tourists to climb up on his back and be photographed. He is covered in a gaudy saddle cloth in red
and orange and green. He looks ageless and detached, and he gives me the link I need with the desert and the Delta and the
ancient pyramids.
Dull in Port Said? Not a bit of it. Imperial luxury? Scarcely. I extend an open invitation to anyone in search of warmth
and colour and excitement to come and visit us in our flat on the Canal and see how interesting life can be on one of the
main highways of the world.
Kay Cambell Clay
c/o British Consul
Port Said
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