Back in 1975 I was a member of a team of consultants that developed a comprehensive Suez Master Plan which laid out a template for the reconstruction of the city following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The team was drawn from three UK companies, Sir William Halcrow and Partners [engineers], Shankland Cox [architects and town planners] and Economic Consultants Limited [which contributed the economists like myself].
The city of Suez had been heavily shelled during the war and was largely uninhabitable. The team members lived in Cairo [flats in Dokki and Zamalek in my case]. We went down to Suez periodically to undertake fieldwork, braving the trucks that hurtled towards us down the centre of the highway. Unperturbed, our drivers would hold their ground until – at the last minute – the truck would swerve off onto the verge in a cloud of dust and sand.
At one point, Bill Luttrell, who was the founder and owner of ECL, asked me to entertain 2 young men from an as-then scarcely known Japanese outfit called the Nomura Institute. They were keen to learn about the emerging trade that became international development consulting and had spent time with us in London at our tiny but charming office near Covent Garden [an old drum factory it was reputed] – they were then privileged to join us for a short spell in Egypt on their way back to Japan.
I remember bounding through the wartime rubble of the city up the banks of the Suez Canal to gain vista of the derelict waterway – and beckoning my charges to follow. Looking back, I marvel that we returned unharmed. I was blissfully unaware of the concept of UXOs [‘Unexploded Ordnance’] at that time – and it took an assignment in rural Cambodia in 2001 to bring me up to speed on the concept [or perhaps it would be better to say down to earth].
There’s a very apposite piece online that takes me back to time and place, at
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/197705/suez.reborn.htm
As Elias Antar comments on Suez in 1977:
‘In Suez some 5,000 people remained - out of a 1967 population of 250,000. These few kept essential services going for the soldiers patrolling the canal, but rats, they said, far outnumbered the people. The scars were everywhere. In Port Tewfik waterfront restaurants were unrecognizable piles of rusty metal and torn concrete, and in Suez entire streets were devastated.
‘Shells had turned apartment buildings into huge, grotesque skulls with gaping eye sockets. At the Convent of the Good Shepherd, the roof of the church had been blasted off and the fortunes of war had torn one statue off the wall, but left another unscathed. All told, the Egyptians say, Suez suffered losses of about $650 million in destroyed housing, utilities and industries.
….
‘Little wonder then that the prospect of rebuilding the cities appeared far-fetched in the autumn of 1973. But with the war over less than a week - and the Israelis still in their cease-fire positions along the canal and around Suez - President Anwar Sadat appointed a Minister of Housing and Reconstruction and told him to start bringing the canal towns back to life.
‘The Minister's reply was typical. "I said okay I'll try," recalls Osman Ahmed Osman, archetypical "can-do" man and the Arab world's leading contractor. (See Aramco World, May-June 1974). Head of "The Arab Contractors Company, Osman Ahmed Osman," he had built airports, bridges, factories, housing and roads all overthe Middle East and - his crowning achievement - the Aswan High Dam, built in cooperation with the Soviet Union. Now, in the wake of war, he was faced with a challenge that in financial terms, was even bigger.
‘Osman, who has subsequently resigned from his ministerial post moved rapidly. By the spring of 1974, he unveiled a program that in fact, was a vision of the canal region during the next 25 years. Industry and agriculture would multiply the populations of the three cities. Free trade zones in Port Said and Suez would attract foreign investment.
…
‘Their orders were crisp and pragmatic: repair what can be repaired, tear down what must be rebuilt, and do it all as quickly as possible.
‘Which they did. A year after reconstruction began, some 55,000 apartments, 210 schools and 46 hospitals in the Suez Canal zone had been repaired, replastered or repainted. In Suez itself, some 60 apartments were repaired per day. Some of those repairs, it is true, consisted only of filling in bullet holes; but new housing was provided too. "In Suez we have built 7000 housing units from scratch," said Kafrawy and "some 200,000 people have returned."
I have a clear memory of Osman Ahmed Osman welcoming our team warmly – and then setting us firmly in our places by telling us that ‘they were happy to have British consultants because they came from a poor country like Egypt and were therefore easily able to relate to local realities’.
And life in Egypt was indeed very low-key at that time. Cairo still had the air of a blitzed London or a Comecon Warsaw - and the opening of a Wimpy Hamburger outlet was a major event. Groppi’s cakes and the Heliopolis Swimming Pool were the major resources in the battle to stem the blight of broken marriages among the expats, together with the cultivation of mordant humour.
As for the jokes, one was that the proof readers had messed up with the Draft Final Report and that it had gone to the printers advising the Port Authority in Suez to invest in ‘a Large Floating Duck’, rather than a Large Floating Dock.
So I felt a sense of belated fulfillment when I learnt that, as there is nothing new under the sun, a Large Floating Duck has been spotted in Hong Kong Harbour. All we need now is someone to tow it over to the Red Sea!
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