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| Garden Groppi |
Not so long ago Groppi's Café was once 'the place' to go in Cairo for
tea, pastries and chocolate. When Cairo was the place to be seen, Groppi's was
the café to be seen in. Such was its place in the social merry-go-round that
everyone from Kings and Queens to politicians and members of the social
elite passed through its doors to sample its legendary delights. Today, the café still
occupies two sites in downtown Cairo. The first opened for business on 23 December
1909 on Sharia al-Maghrabi (today: Adly Street) and was generally known as
Garden Groppi's.
The second followed on its success and opened in March
1925 on a corner of Midan Soliman Pasha (today: Talaat Harb
Square) opposite the Savoy Hotel, long after the British Military had
vacated its war-time headquarters in the requisitioned hotel. This branch has
become a downtown landmark with its art deco tiled exterior and
neon signage, with distinctive multi-coloured mosaics in the entrance executed by the Venetian artist, Antonio Castaman, and an eclectic interior by leading designers of the day.
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| Mosaics by the Venetian, Antonio Castaman |
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| Groppi in WW1 |
The Adly Street premises became a favourite haunt of T.E. Lawrence
long before he was sent out to the Hejaz as an advisor to the Emir Feisal. Every day for nine
months, he and Stewart Newcombe would have passed the café on their way by
bicycle to-and-from their lodgings at the Grand Continental Hotel to the
Military Intelligence offices based in the Savoy, a short journey of
some five minutes. With breakfast taken in the sumptuous dining room of the
Continental, the two men would undoubtedly have frequented the café during the
day, the cool enclosed garden offering a peaceful sanctuary from the hustle and
bustle of the Savoy offices. Conveniently, the café provided two exits, one
through the shop and one through a door set in the wall of the garden. For
operatives with secrets to divulge and enemies to evade, this was an added advantage.
At some time in late 1925 - the letter is undated - Lawrence wrote
to his biographer, Robert Graves who was en route to Egypt, explaining that he
had spent three magnificent years in Cairo and only ever went twice into a
club. But what stood out for him most was Groppi's: "The important thing
is GROPPI's, the Tea-garden shop," he wrote, emphasising its significance
by the use of capital letters, "and the drink is iced coffee.
Straws the process. 2 piastres the means. The children will love Groppi's.
Chocolate all right, too: but not in summer."
Based on Lawrence's recommendation Graves' children would probably
have enjoyed Groppi's but Egypt did not appeal to Graves and he left his
posting as Professor of English Literature at the Egyptian University at Cairo
at the end of the first academic year. In March 1925, Groppi
opened its second branch opposite the Savoy Hotel. One suspects that
Lawrence's abhorrence of 'clubs' held no sympathy for Newcombe who would have
felt most at home in either the Gezira Sporting Club or the Turf Club - those
two great institutions beloved by staff officers wearing suede desert boots and
brandishing fly whisks and swagger sticks.
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| Soliman Pasha branch signage |
“Early in 1920,” she wrote, “I went out to Egypt where my husband was in
command of the Royal Air Force Station at Heliopolis. The Cairo Conference was
held in spring of 1921 and there was, of course, much coming and going of
important people. The Conference had been summoned by Mr. Winston Churchill,
the Secretary of State for the Colonies, for the purpose of attempting to
settle the Arab question...
During the Conference we did our share of entertaining in our Cairo flat
and I was used to my husband bringing people in with him at odd times of the
day. So there seemed nothing out of the ordinary when one hot March afternoon
he came in as usual at tea-time accompanied by a small and, I thought, not
particularly distinguished-looking man in a blue suit, carrying a white topee...
I remember he was quiet and withdrawn and had a shock of untidy-looking
hair, but beyond that he made no impression on me at all.
After tea Sydney drove him home, and when he came back he said: "Do
you realize who that was?"
"No."
"It was Lawrence of Arabia!"
"Good gracious!"
"And what's more, he's asked us to go to tea with him
to-morrow."
That was our first meeting.”
The next day the Sydney Smiths made their way to Groppi's where they had
arranged to meet. “Now that I knew who he was,” Clare recalled, “I was looking
forward to getting to know our visitor better, but it was not until long
afterwards that I realised what an unusual event - almost unknown, in fact - it
was for him to invite anyone to tea. Usually he shunned all social occasions,
even the simplest, and never took the initiative in arranging them.”
The couple arrived first and sat at a table in the garden facing the restaurant
he would have to come through to join them. Looking back through the years,
Clare remembered the moment Lawrence first walked into the gardens:
“There was a stir of interest when he appeared as everybody knew him by
sight, but he took no notice as he walked straight across to us in the
peculiarly springy walk he had. A quiet dignity surrounded his small, modest
figure, dressed as yesterday in a dark blue suit and holding his white topee
with both hands in front of him - a dignity which put the bare-faced curiosity
of the public to shame.”
The event may have been unusual but the choice of venue was perhaps not
so surprising. Clare does not tell us if Lawrence did in fact drink tea that
day or whether her infatuation with him began over a glass of iced coffee drunk
through straws. But one thing is obvious; for Lawrence, Groppi’s was infinitely
preferable to the usual haunts like the great pavement-side terraces of Shepheards
and the Continental which served as both stage and auditorium and were
therefore anathema to his unique predicament of having a “craving to be famous;
and a horror of being known to like being known.”
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| Groppi chocolate wrapper |
During the Second World War, Groppi’s retained its reputation as one of
the few smart places open to everyone regardless of rank, although its
exorbitant prices tended to mostly attract the officer class. It was said the garden was a favourite of General Montgomerie who came to enjoy the regular jazz evenings. Stage shows were a regular feature throughout the Forties. When the musicians stopped playing well into the evening and the dancers had returned to their tables, the floor would then be hydraulically raised two feet to become a stage for the floor show which often featured some very accomplished performers. An officer in the Special Boat Service, Colonel David Sutherland, famously entertained two German prisoners to ice-cream sodas in Groppi's before handing them over for interrogation. It was said his act of hospitality was unappreciated in certain quarters but in his defence he pointed out to an exasperated brigadier that as it was so rare for the SBS to take prisoners alive during missions in enemy territory he saw no harm, especially as one of the men had been captured with the Wehrmacht's new self-loading rifle, a weapon years ahead of its time and of particular interest to the boffins in Cairo.
No matter how
full, the flowering creepers that had by now been trained up the garden walls
created an illusion of intimacy and a haven of peace in the midst of the
bustling city. Such an atmosphere gave rise to more than just the promise of
welcome refreshment. The writer, Artemis Cooper, who taught English at the
University of Alexandria, recalls how pashas came to sip freshly roasted coffee
and eat cream cakes with their Levantine mistresses who draped their furs over
the chairs while discreet waiters shuffled silently on the sandy floor wearing
long white galabiehs topped with red tarbushes. “Officers on leave,” she
revealed, “looked out for female companionship, and envied the man at the
opposite table who suddenly rose to his feet with a smile, and pulled out a
chair for the woman who had just joined him.” Then, as dusk fell, strings of
coloured light-bulbs illuminated the garden adding to the possibility of intrigue
and romance for the clientele who at that time in Egypt was mostly under the
age of thirty.
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| The key to Rebecca |
While the 1920s witnessed the ultimately unsuccessful hunt for the lost
oasis of Zerzura in the Western Desert - a mythical city that had long
excited the imagination with tales of verdant palms, a ruined city and lost
treasure - it at least alerted one of
the region’s most famous explorers, Count Laszlo Almásy, to a way of smuggling
two German spies into Cairo. Almásy may have known the ways of the desert but
he clearly underestimated the British spy-master, Major A.W. Sansom, of the
British Security Services in Cairo. Sansom’s interest was first aroused when a
copy of Daphne de Maurier’s novel Rebecca
was found among the belongings of two German wireless operators in a remote
desert W/T station which had been captured in May 1942, the significance being
that the men could not read English. A rubbed out price mark of ’50 escudos’
indicated the book had been bought in Portugal and Sansom’s network of agents
soon discovered that six copies of the book had been bought on the same day in
a Lisbon bookshop by the wife of a staff member from the German Embassy. The
book was clearly being used to encode and decode wireless messages.
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| Hekmat Fahmy |
Almásy’s two hapless spies, Hans Eppler and Gerd Sandstede, were finally
undone when their Egyptian money ran out and they began to off-load forged five
pound notes onto the black market in the belief that their value would plummet
the closer Rommel approached Cairo. Their dissolute and desultory lifestyle was
funded by over 3,600 pounds worth of dud fivers lavishly spent not just in the
usual fleshpots like the Kit Kat Club, the legendary cabaret venue, but in more
sedate establishments like Groppi’s where suspicions were raised and brought to
Sansom’s attention. Their friendship with the sultry Hekmat Fahmy, known as the
belly dancer spy, further sealed their fate and the three were surrounded in a
dawn raid on their luxurious houseboats on the Nile. Eppler contrived a getaway by rolling up his socks and throwing them like hand grenades to slow down Sansom's men. But the game was up and they were apprehended.
During the infamous Cairo riots that took place on 26 January 1952, both
the Gezira Sporting Club and the Turf Club – the latter situated almost
opposite Groppi's garden entrance on al-Maghrabi Street – were firebombed and
totally destroyed. On what has been called Black Saturday, a series of
anti-British and anti-Western riots spread throughout the city targeting banks,
shops, theatres and hotels. Even the iconic Shepheard’s Hotel was not spared,
along with the destruction of 12 other hotels, almost 300 shops and department
stores, 40 cinemas and even the Cairo Opera House. Within a few hours thousands
of local workers were displaced while the perceived symbols of seventy-years of
British rule were razed to the ground as the incendiary fervour of revolution
swept throughout the capital.
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| Shepheard's Hotel Terrace |
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| Shepheard's in ruins 1952 |
In 1971, the café provided the catering at the inauguration of the Aswan
High Dam, an enormously ambitious project at the heart of Nasser’s economic
vision. Five-hundred guests attended an extravagant party that included heads
of state from other Arab countries as well as soviet leaders, since the Soviet
Union had funded the project.
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| Talaat Harb Square branch |
But already the trends in catering had shifted and competition came from
an unexpected direction. With the opening of the first Wimpey’s in Cairo in the
mid-70s, the burger restaurant quickly became the place of choice for young modern
Cairenes and was where you took your girlfriend if you wanted to treat her. The
old world charm of Groppi’s, with its ice-cream smothered in Chantilly créme, marrons glacés and chocolate covered dates, gave way to the brash
plastic and bright lights of the first of the fast food giants to hit the town.
Egypt had changed and Groppi’s was just one of its anachronistic casualties.
Groppi's fortunes have been mixed during the past one hundred years
of trading and having survived social upheavals, riots, bomb blasts and financial
downturns it survives today by reputation only. The current owners are
fighting back and are using social media sites to promote its
history and products to a younger generation while older clients remain
steadfastly loyal, sometimes against all the odds. But if you are strolling in
Cairo and want to soak up some of the atmosphere of a bygone era, Egypt's Belle Époque, then take a table
at Garden Groppi’s and let your imagination wander. You’ll have plenty of time.
Your waiter, no longer wearing the galabieh and tarbush, will not rush to serve
you. Having seen off revolutions and fast food establishments, life moves at a
different pace at Groppi’s and you would be wise to sit back, relax, and wonder who
might next come through those famous doors.
