My mother did not mention that Olga was a terrible gambler and – Patrick’s phrase – ‘an exceedingly lavish person’. In the ’sixties, when she returned to Mersin, Olga would take a carriage to the Club every evening, not leaving until three in the morning. She lived with a maid in a modest apartment and kept a photograph of the Queen of England on her sideboard. Olga retired to England in the early ’eighties and moved into a residence for the elderly in Bedford: she didn’t want to die in a Muslim country, she said. At the time, I was a student in Cambridge, which is not far from Bedford, and my mother urged me to visit Olga: ‘It would give her such pleasure, Joseph, you must go.’ But I never got round to it, even though the journey would have been easily made and Olga, trapped in her unapproachable homeland, would have been thrilled to see me. She surfaced a final time before she died: my parents and I were in the car in The Hague one Sunday morning when the BBC World Service played a request by Olga Catton for O Silver Moon. Aunt Olga died not long afterwards. Her last wish was for her ashes to be returned to Mersin.
Olga’s passing represented another unravelling of the Levant, a realm, as was implied by its very name – from the French for the rising sun – that was a creature of the occidental mind. In its narrowest sense, the Levant designated the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean; but the term was also applied to places (typically, ports and trading centres) that, although remote from the littoral, shared its distinctive ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity and flavour. Cities like Salonika and Alexandria and Adrianople could be considered to be in the Levant, as could Istanbul. The British diplomat Sir Charles Eliot wrote of the Ottoman capital in 1907:
Nothing, perhaps, gives one a better idea of its inhabitants than what is styled an Almanach à l’usage du Levant. Every leaf which is daily torn off […] bears inscriptions in six languages: Turkish, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian, and Spanish in Hebrew letters. It records the flight of time according to five systems […]. Nay more, the Almanach extends the same large impartiality to all religions. It registers the disagreeable ends of Greek, Bulgarian, and Armenian martyrs, and bids the believer rejoice, according to his particular convictions, over the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, the Prophet’s journey to heaven on a winged steed, and the dedication of the Temple of Jerusalem – all these exhilarating events being commemorated on the same date. Besides this, it informs us that the day in question is the thirtieth after Kassim, that twelve o’clock Turkish, or sunset is at 4.30 à la franca, and that midday is 7.23 Turkish […]. The little Levant almanack does, it is true, give a certain pre-eminence to Mohammed and his celestial tour; he sprawls over the middle in triumphant Arabic flourishes, crowding the Bulgarian and Armenian martyrs into corners, and casting vowel points and spots parlously near the Immaculate Conception. But though recognizing the predominance of Islam, it addresses a public which has no one language, religion or code of institutions.
Looking back from the vantage-point of a Turkey that was at least 99 per cent Muslim, the world evoked by Eliot seemed scarcely credible. But the official Ottoman data bore it out. In 1886, for example, Istanbul’s Muslim population (itself by no means exclusively Turkish) stood at 385,000, whereas the combined population of Greeks (153,000), Armenians (150,000), ‘foreigners’ (129,000), Jews (22,000) and miscellaneous Christians and Bulgars exceeded 460,000.
Eliot’s cheerful celebration of this ethnic and religious plurality was exceptional. Until the mid-nineteenth century, a Levantine meant a European national resident in the Levant: Arthur Maltass and William Rickards fell into this category. The term then acquired a broader and pejorative sense, connoting a person – usually a Greek, but he might equally be an Armenian or an Eastern Christian or any half- or pseudo-European generally – who formed part of the transnational commercial scum that floated on the clear seas of pure Turks and Arabs. The Levantine was typically an unwholesome, repellent type – Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, Mr Eugenides in ‘The Waste Land’ – with a malign, tapeworm-like effect on his host society. Sir Mark Sykes (of the Sykes–Picot agreement 1916, by which France and Britain settled on the post-war carve-up of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine) described him as ‘this mule-brained jackanapes who is destined to influence and corrupt every attempt that may be made towards raising the fallen people of Asiatic Turkey’, and in January 1920, the magazine Near East pronounced:
The failure of Turkey is the failure of Rome. Rome fell because there remained no Romans, Turkey fell because in Constantinople there remain no Turks. They have become ‘Levantine-y’. A Turk will trace in his family, perhaps, a Circassian mother, an Egyptian grandfather, here a rich Greek, always an Albanian or a Jew. He differs only in this respect, that he forms the aristocracy of ‘Levantinia’. Throughout the centuries many people have come to the city, the city of the Great Whore has sucked most of them in and spat them out Levantines – a people without honour, talking myriad tongues in jargon, the sole people of the world without one virtue.
Joseph Dakak, born in the quintessential Levant port of Iskenderun, undoubtedly qualified as a Levantine in the pejorative sense. He spoke numerous languages, cut a suave figure, ran a hotel, did a bit of opportunistic import–export business, and generally made a living at the intersection of east and west. As a metropolitan, uprooted Syrian he did not count as a proper Arab, who was to be found in the warlike, desert-loving tribes further south. Indeed, ‘The main characteristics of a Syrian,’ a 1902 travel handbook asserted, ‘are ease and courtesy, lightheartedness, hospitality, childishness, indolence and deceit. Under the exterior air of politeness and candour, there lurks in every Syrian an ingrained spirit of deceit. There is a common saying in the East that a Greek will get the better of 10 ordinary Europeans; a Jew will beat 10 Greeks; an Armenian will get over 10 Jews; but that a Greek, a Jew and an Armenian together are no match for a Syrian.’
In their propensity for intrigue and deception, half-Syrian Olga and William Rickards were stereotypically Levantine – and, so far as Joseph Dakak was concerned, destructively so. But, driving back down to London from Patrick Grigsby’s house, I felt no hostility towards these lost, disconnected siblings.
In the middle of December 1941, after John Catton had enlisted with the British army and left his wife Olga to her own devices in Mersin, his successor as consul in Mersin, Norman Mayers, alighted from the Taurus Express at Yenice, a railway junction between Tarsus and Adana at which, a little over a year later, Winston Churchill would meet President Ismet Inönü and vainly urge him to commit the Turkish Republic to the Allied cause. It was six in the morning and raining heavily; blind to the future historic significance of his location, His Majesty’s newly appointed consul felt like a man abandoned at a country junction in Ireland. When Mayers finally reached Mersin on the local train, he was dismayed to discover that the conveyance awaiting him was a dilapidated carriage drawn by two horses. His dejection worsened when he arrived at the consulate – a cold, dark, dank building in the interior of the town that overlooked a small cobbled square in which caravans of camels, led by a braying donkey, would discharge their loads in the morning rain. He decided that the house, which consisted of an office on the ground floor and living quarters above, was the worst thing he’d seen since his posting as a new vice-consul in Beirut.
By the following Sunday, Mayers was feeling a little less sorry for himself. A local British resident, William Rickards, had invited him to a picnic in the orange gardens of a Turkish friend, and on Sunday the three men sat in a wooden kiosk high above the treetops, drinking beer and munching on bread and cheese and tinned fish. They enjoyed the views: the sea to the south, the snow-tipped mountains to the north. The pleasantness of the occasion was made complete when, shortly after Mayers returned home, a basket of lemons and oranges was delivered to the consulate by his Turkish host. The consul turned some of the fruit into candied peel for Christmas pudding and further busied himself making plum-puddings and mincemeat for the consulate Christmas party. Three
small turkeys were delivered and kind locals supplied him with fruit salad and Russian salad. Norman Mayers began to dislike Mersin a little less.
On Christmas Eve, the consul went to a party given by William Rickards’ sister, Olga Catton (who was ‘more Syrian than English but very Britannic for all that, [and] who is supposed to have done more damage than ten in Mersin with her tongue, which has a great appetite for scandal’). There was a Christmas tree, good food, good cheer, lots to drink, and some bridge. Then, on Christmas Day, it was Mayers’ turn to entertain. A buffet of turkey, chicken, plum-pudding, cold mince pies, salads, cheese, sweets, various cakes, cold tongue was set out and talc was sprinkled on the tiled floors to encourage dancing. The party, attended by the British flock, went well, thanks in part to the enlivening presence of a few ‘kittenish Syrian-Mersin-Turkish jeune filles’. On New Year’s Eve, Mayers ran into these girls again at a party given at a ‘Syrian’ house. He was pleased to note that black tie and evening frocks were worn and astonished when, at midnight, the lights were dimmed and the foreigners sang Auld Lang Syne. Everyone then stumbled off to the Club, where the cream of Mersin society was present. At three in the morning, a carriage took the consul home through heavy rain. He later heard that at five in the morning a great bagarre had broken out at the baccarat table which was eventually quelled by the Chief of Police himself.
From the very first day of the new year, Mayers noted, the weather turned extremely cold; and by the twelfth day of 1942, the frost had destroyed the orange crop. Luckily for the consul, he’d already made a large quantity of ‘MMMM’ – Mayers’ Medicinal Mersin Marmalade.
I found Norman Mayers’ letters home at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford (where the papers of Sir Patrick Coghill and C.T.C. Taylor were also kept). They were filled with vivid, somewhat fiddling accounts of food, furnishings, parties, the weather and the inadvertently hilarious activities of Mersin’s ‘O so provincial’ ‘Syrians’. (There was that unsettling term again.) Christmas festivities notwithstanding, Norman Mayers despaired at the uneventful and inconsequential character of the place to which he had been posted. He devised the humorous theory that Mersin, as a glance at an atlas would confirm, was the motionless hub around which the world at war revolved.
It seemed that the consul, as he boiled greengages into jam, organized soirées and battled with quartermasterly zeal for mince pies and Cypriot brandy, fell victim to a kind of diplomatic somnambulism; or, at any rate, was slow to wake up to the shadowy activities taking place before his eyes at the consulate. It was not long before he realized that Mersin was not as dead as it looked; and by August 1942 he was writing home, ‘It is really amazing how in my time at Mersin this place has changed from a complete backwater to – still a small place, but one busy with work, intrigue, visitors and all sorts of opposing forces.’ At the forefront of Norman Mayers’ mind, when he wrote these words, was the controversial detention by the British of a certain Mersin businessman, Nazim Gandour.
I discovered that the details of the Gandour affair were preserved in one of the small number of embassy and consular files concerned with wartime Turkey kept in the Public Records Office at Kew, in south-west London. The contents of the file – memoranda, letters, notations on minute sheets – provided a remarkable insight into the workings of the organization responsible for the arrest of Joseph Dakak.
The story began on 23 May 1942, when Norman Mayers wrote to the British embassy declaring himself to be ‘exceedingly troubled about the news that Gandour was arrested when he crossed the [Syrian] frontier with our visa over a fortnight ago’:
The indefiniteness of the whole matter, and the consciousness that Nazim Gandour has been the object of suspicion all that time that I have been in Mersin, without any proof being offered so far as I am concerned, arouses all my apprehension.…
Doran says that it is a question of espionage. I am not going to say that Gandour is innocent. I do not know him very well. But I do know that he is an exceedingly clever businessman who is closely connected with the timber and chrome business of the UKCC. His business affairs and his fortune are in our hands, and the majority of his relatives are in Syria and Egypt. If this man has done espionage for the Italians or Germans, he cannot have done it for pecuniary interest. I do not believe that he would work for our enemies out of political conviction. There remains only the possibility that he has been subjected to pressure by them. In the last connection I would say that Gandour is quick enough to take a lot of catching in that way.
The matter must be brought into the light, and it must be brought into the light quickly. That is the British way of doing things, don’t you agree?
Two days later, Mayers wrote again to the embassy:
You may ask what is worrying me so much in the matter. It is the fear that we have got hold of a man who is at least innocent of the serious charge of espionage; and the fear lest this whole inquiry be conducted on arbitrary lines. In the case of Gandour I can get nothing but ‘suspicions’ out of Doran, and I am beginning to think that there may be against him nothing more than suspicions.…
The embassy in Ankara did not share the consul’s anxieties. The minister, J.C. Sterndale Bennett, thought that Mayers was ‘getting altogether too worked up about this’, and the counsellor, A.K. Helm, did not ‘think we need be too tender-hearted about these Levantine traders. The profits are no doubt well worth the risk.’ Nevertheless, the embassy could not afford to brush off its man in Mersin, and the decision was taken to look into the matter. It was at this point that the trouble, and the dark farce, started – when the diplomats undertook the seemingly straightforward task of fathoming why was Gandour arrested. Wading into an apparently shallow pool of inquiry, they finally emerged soaked, mud-spattered, and spitting weeds.
On 27 May, the military attaché, Major-General Alan C. Arnold, reported the following to Sterndale Bennett:
With reference to the arrest of Nazim Gandour, British Security in Syria have considerable evidence that Nazim has been working for a considerable time for the Axis. This is confirmed by the Turkish Secret Service authorities who far from being horrified, as Mr Mayers suggests, have urged us to put an end to his activities. As I have frequently pointed out to Consuls, proof as known in peace time law courts can very rarely be produced against enemy agents in a neutral country. All that you can do is to take the sum total of evidence available and if it is sufficiently damning act. It is better that one innocent man in twenty should be interned rather than the lives of British sailors should be endangered.
Gandour’s particular line of country as far as I can remember was acting as intermediary between Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestine caique crews and the Axis agents in Mersin.… I am only passing on to you what I believe to be the views of Security second-hand and I will ask Lt.-Colonel Thomson [of SIME] to come and see you personally about it when he arrives tomorrow.
But Lietenant-Colonel Thomson was not able to help, and Arnold wrote to SIME in Beirut for further information. In response, he received a Secret letter dated 30 June 1942 from Colonel R.J. Maunsell (the head of SIME and the chief spycatcher in the Middle East) in Cairo. However, Maunsell’s letter was unilluminating. In the end, Helm could do no better than simply – and misleadingly – inform Norman Mayers that there existed ‘detailed evidence from the competent authorities regarding the reasons for the arrest of [Gandour].’
But as soon as Mayers had been swatted away, another problem presented itself: an Istanbul lawyer engaged by Gandour’s family, Miss Süreyya Agaoglu, travelled to Beirut to see the prisoner. The lawyer was ‘of considerable repute and persona grata with Turkey’s leading political figures, including the Prime Minister’ and, although not allowed to communicate with Gandour, was received with great courtesy in Beirut by Sir Patrick Coghill. Coghill informed her that Gandour was charged with having (1) sold wood to the UKCC at exorbitant prices; (2) passed on to the Axis information regarding UKCC transactions; (3) passed on to Axis sources i
nformation regarding British dealings in chrome; (4) sold to the Axis manufactured goods imported from Egypt. Coghill also suggested that her client’s predicament was, at bottom, down to two people in Mersin: Desmond Doran and Norman Mayers’ picnicking friend, William Rickards.
On 7 September 1942, Gandour’s lawyer had a lengthy interview in Ankara with the minister, Sterndale Bennett. She argued that, since she had received assurances from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Turkish authorities had submitted no evidence against Gandour, it was clear that information had been laid against Gandour by business enemies.
Sterndale Bennett was stumped by the wealth of detail amassed by the Turkish lawyer and was, he afterwards noted, ‘somewhat handicapped in discussing the case by the fact that it was a matter dealt with entirely by the military authorities [and by the fact that I am] not aware of the exact nature of the charges or the evidence’. The minister – who noted that the ‘Turkish authorities will, of course, never admit that they laid any information against Gandour’ – decided to take the advice of the military attaché, Arnold, on how best to proceed, although he acknowledged that ‘Colonel Maunsell or Sir P. Coghill alone will probably have detailed knowledge of the case’.
By now, things had descended into absurdity. Norman Mayers, it had become clear, relied on the diplomats in Ankara for his information; the diplomats (Sterndale Bennett, Helm, etc.) relied on briefings from their military attaché, Arnold; Arnold depended on ‘Security’ personages – Thomson and Maunsell – who relied on Coghill, who in turn relied on Doran, who himself relied on information produced by his local sources – Turkish sources and/or William Rickards – whose own sources were unknown. What passed as reliable intelligence was, in fact, an erratic pendulum of hearsay by which second- and third- and fourth-hand information of uncertain origin swung from Mersin A (Mayers) to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo to Beirut to Mersin B (Doran) and back again to Mersin A.
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