Anthony – I bought the Egyptian dolls in Eqypt, in Cairo, when i was staying there around 1980 or a little after. Sadat, the president of Egypt was having dreadful financial problems, food shortages and the like, and with a subsidy from America he wanted to build cold stores. Meat that was being given to Egypt was going bad because they had no means of storing it, so he desperately wanted some cold stores in a hurry. Large cold stores and he had a consultant he trusted who was of German origin but he seemed to speak British but he was the agent in Egypt for Nutella, this is purely by the way, but he knew of Trevor Lancaster who was a builder of cold stores in England, and Trevor Lancaster was very close to Star Refrigeration [Anthony’s company which he started in 1970], because we had helped him – he was a bit of a rogue trader, Star had to pick up in its early days the not so respectable customers, because all the respectable customers were going to their old long established contacts and so we worked very hard on new contacts, and the upshot was that we got the contact for building the refrigeration plant for this cold store in Cairo. As far as we were concerned it was a private contract with Trevor Lancaster. He was buying the steelwork which he did via this Nutella agent because that was provided more locally, and he made himself the insulation panels. He was not a jerry builder, but he was on that side of respectability. He was a fun man, but of course we always had to treat him carefully because he was very sensitive. He was large, and his offices were in Scarborough, and when you went down to Scarborough you always had to be taken out to his favourite fish restaurant, and you always had to have a Dover Sole, and he was that sort – he had to be entertained. How he got the contract I don’t know, but there would have had to be a bit of jiggery pokery, but it was great from our point of view and we built quite a connection and the Egyptians were extraordinarily impressed because they had tried to find a supplier of cold stores and all the deliveries were beyond twelve months and very high prices, because the respectable people – Egypt wasn’t a particularly good contact – so they priced lots of contingencies and so on, and it was a time when things were busy and only people on the fringe like Trevor Lancaster and Star Refrigeration and so on would make the effort to deliver them quickly. So anyway we got the contract, and the wonderful thing was that it developed into two more after that. There was one more at Ismailia which is on the Suez Canal, and a third one in Alexandria on the Mediterranean. We got quite a team who enjoyed going out there, and eventually our engineers, the builders & the technicians were even visited by President Sadat who insisted on them being photographed with him – the president of Egypt kowtowing with our engineers, and the refrigeration plant worked – very reliable and one of the design features which suited us, because we built standard packages. The tradition then was to deliver all the bits and pieces to site, and then to build on site, like building a railway line on site, but we had developed pre packaging in the factory, so each of these cold stores had 3 or 4, depending on the size, separate plants, so if one had broken down or if one had wanted serviced, the others would carry on working and keep the cold store cold, so it was a very safe design, but slightly more expensive because of having duplication. Anyway, I naturally went out, and of course I had all the usual problems and difficulties. One was warned not to eat salads etc and I was very good, but on each visit I went I got gippy tummy – why gippy tummy, obviously Egyptian, but if one went anywhere in the Middle East one got Gippy Tummy….. where it just dates back to Suez Canal times when we were first involved in that part of the world, or WW1 or Laurence of Arabia, I have no idea, but that always knocked me out for two days [here is the origin of the phrase]. On all three occasions I stayed in Cairo because that’s where our customers were.
The reason Forbes Pearson and I went out was to give confidence to the government officials and of course I went round the market, I can’t remember what it was called, it wasn’t called the Souk, I just remember a vast trading area, and all the stands had very similar objects, and I was attracted to these dolls because they were colourful, and certainly cheap, and I just got a whole variety of them, and I got more on each occasion. They looked so well up on the window – we always had them pointing outwards – so people coming to the house always commented on our lovely doll decorations in the window, and you children seemed to like them, but there was nothing special about them at all, other than they were bought as decorative toys for you four children. We kept them up on the windowsills until we left. [and now they are back up again]
I did part of my national services in the canals based on Ismailia. It must have been 1954 I was in Eqypt. When I was out in National Service I saw very little of Egypt. We were confined to the canals. Because of the president, we weren’t allowed outside the canals, because things had thawed. Just before I left they had arranged that one could do a day trip to Cairo, but we must be back before dark because we were still being shot at. One of my last jobs was to repair a bridge that ran over the Sweet Water Canal which ran parallel to the Suez Canal, which the Muslim Brotherhood, which was just as active then as it is now, had blown up, and oh dear the Egyptians were such rotten shots. We were shot at in the dark because we were working 24 hours a day under floodlights at night to get the bridge rebuilt. It was a railway bridge and all our communications across middle Egypt came across this canal, but they never hit anybody. Nobody was ever injured despite all this gunfire. But they were so skilled the Egyptians, and we had to be very wary because we had put minefields around all the British military camps, but the Egyptians came in at night and moved the mines. There were accidents from time to time because the mines had been removed….. I don’t know, it was part of guerrilla warfare…. They were very clever, but they kept us on tenterhooks.
The Royal Collection 