GRANDAD'S SLIDES (30) - WOODEN BOX 2 - SS CANBERRA 1965 (PHOTOBLOG)

SLIDES 0320-0333

Cairo, August 1965

In some ways, we've come full circle here, as we arrive back at the subject of that early posting I made when I first started with this scanning project (http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/cairo-1945-1965-2010.html) and I first found the evidence of my Grandparent's trip to Egypt.

The faces of the tourists and the souvenir salesmen may have changed but, apart from the Pharoah's barge and the huge car park, and the inevitable progress of erosion and decay, it all looks much the same as when I went, and still just as astonishing.

It appears that my Grandparents were far braver than I was and actually did the whole "Posing on camels" thing (I expect that it was more "expected" in those less cynical times), and I don't imagine that my Grandfather was in quite such a sulky mood as I was. Our tour made a feature of arriving early to "beat the crowds" and then trapped me inside a bus listening to a history lecture as all those other coaches rolled up, rather than letting me out to photograph the very soul out of the things.

That said, I still photographed the hell out of it (I love digital...!), and my Pyramid photography "Tip of the Day" (should you ever be in Giza) is to stroll away to the far corners and take your pictures there, because fewer people seem to bother doing that and you get much clearer (i.e. "People-free") pictures.

Mind you, the "Ones That Got Away" can still haunt you. I remember being just a second too late for the perfect moment shot of the row of Japanese women with a row of colourful parasols with the three Pyramids lined up against the horizon behind them.

Ah well (he sighed philosophically), it was a pretty grey day, anyway...

GRANDAD'S SLIDES (29) - WOODEN BOX 2 - SS CANBERRA 1965 (PHOTOBLOG)

SLIDES 0306-0319

Cairo, August 1965

Heading out from the Museum of Antiquities and hitting the mean streets of downtown Cairo was something that we didn't do on our trip. Our hotel was out near the Pyramids at Giza (leading to my astonished cries of "There are Pyramids at the end of the road...!" when I went up to the rooftop terrace one afternoon), and, having opted out of the afternoon part of the tour which involved a visit to some church or other (possibly the very one pictured here), we were ferried back there in our little minibus and the nearest we got to an "outside the bubble" experience was a stroll to a local restaurant back there.

In one of these pictures, presumably in their hotel lobby, Grandma does look as if she's being "beamed up" in a most "Blake's Seven" way, and in some others she seems to be getting on terribly well with the locals.

Other than that, generic views of Cairo from over half a century ago. 

Apart from the skyline, and the motorways, and the apartment blocks, I wonder if it's really changed all that much in the last fifty years compared to the previous four thousand...?

GRANDAD'S SLIDES (INTERLUDE) SLIDES 0365-0376 - EGYPT

SLIDES 0365-0376

We have to take a moment here and leap slightly forward in the box of slides, as, filed at the end of the "Canberra July/August 1965" set are a number of "bought" slides of Egypt, which I've scanned and added here for completeness of his little archive.

They seem to fit better here (rather than where they were in the box), following his own pictures from the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo and (all ancient copyright infringements aside - well they are at least fifty years old), probably show a "tourist's eye" version of Egypt that is now long gone, and yet still awfully familiar to anyone who has travelled there, give or take an erosion, relocation or a crumble or two.

GRANDAD'S SLIDES (28) - WOODEN BOX 2 - SS CANBERRA 1965 (PHOTOBLOG)

SIDES 0302-0305

Cairo Museum of Antiquities, August 1965

These are the photographs from amongst my Grandfather's collection which most surprised me (and made me slightly jealous, to be honest with you) when I started scanning these pictures, not least because my Grandparent's trip to Cairo came as something of a surprise to me, but also because, back then, he was allowed to take photographs when I was not and had to leave my camera on the tour bus.

Well, given that there are only the four pictures, maybe he wasn't "allowed" to at all...

That said, that relic room doesn't look all that different then to how it looked during my own visit 45 years later, and that most iconic of masks remains in that simple glass case in front of which the incredulous traveller is able to find himself mere inches away from one of the oldest and most incredible icons of human history.

Meanwhile, here are some reflections on my own visit to that very room, from five years ago.
http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/egyptian-tales-3-mask-of-boy-king.html

CAIRO - 1945, 1965, 2010

That strange moment when you discover three generations of your own family travelled to more-or-less the same spot... and you were pretty much totally unaware of at least some of it ever happening.

Top left is my father standing close to the Sphinx, I think just after the war ended, in 1945. The main picture is the one my Grandfather took during their (second) cruise on the SS "Canberra" in the summer of 1965. Top right is my own snapshot, taken during our flying visit to Giza in March 2010.

Strangely enough, whilst I knew Dad was in Cairo in 1945, I did not know that my Grandparents went there at all until I read the label on that big box of slides towards the end of last week. They did have a "coffee table" book about Egypt (which I still have, somewhere...) but the fact that they'd been was something I knew nothing about.

Such a chatty bunch, eh?

Of course I am particularly jealous that he was allowed to take pictures inside the Museum of Antiquities in 1965, because in 2010 this was very much forbidden - although, given that he only took five, maybe they weren't then, either.

That said, five photographs in the age of slide film in manual cameras is probably equivalent to the fifty-plus I'd probably shoot off in no time whatsoever on a digital one when photographing anything at all - no matter how mundane - these days.

Those five pictures that my Grandfather took, of course, I will share with you all at some other time.

Another point of minor interest that I have realised from the admittedly meagre labels, is that, by going on this cruise, they missed my first birthday, which is kind of fair enough. After all, by popping into the world when I did the previous year they were able to know that I had already arrived before setting off to Southampton for their first go on that renowned vessel.

Overall, I think that both times they probably made the correct decision. I don't think that the sort of family gatherings for the slightest of occasions that occur nowadays were quite the done thing back then and, to be perfectly frank with you, given our experiences in later years, I can't imagine any of us would have preferred things to have been any different.

EGYPT, 1945

Picking up the theme of Dad’s wartime snapshots from yesterday’s chat about Burma, here’s another page from that album featuring a few of the pictures of him taken in Egypt during 1943.

I think what’s interesting about these pictures, other than the fact that they exist at all and that they confirm the fact that dad actually was actually in Egypt, (which is something which still astonishes me), is how much the ordinary soldiers were allowed to interact with the ancient monuments back then.

I mean I know there had been a worldwide war on, and that preserving antiquities probably wasn’t near the top of anyone’s agenda, just I know that the idea of the value of ancient monuments, tourism and looking after them future generations was probably still relatively in its infancy, but being able to go up to a statue and give it a cuddle, or just clamber up to the top of a pyramid “because it’s there” is something that modern visitors to Giza can only really dream of.

I certainly know that during my own visit, sixty-five years later, we had about two hours maximum in which to try and absorb the sheer wonder of being so close to these remnants of the ancient world and much of that was spent trying to keep out of the way of the hundreds of other coach-loads of tourists and get away from the many, many locals who would latch on to you and try to sell you some tat.

Interestingly for me, I found that just strolling along the length of one of the sides of the Great Pyramid to an alternative corner where the crowds basically weren’t was the best way to get a moment alone with the ancient stones, and photograph it to buggery without getting too many strangers into your shot, and that, I suppose, is my “Travel Tip of the Day…”

Mind you, I think everyone in our little minibus would have been gut-burstingly envious of the kind of access to those monuments which my dad and his “gang” must have had all those years ago, although, on balance, I think that I still would have preferred to be there under the circumstances I was rather than those that took him there.

Meanwhile, I hope that my dad and his pals, including, I presume, his best mate at the time, the enigmatic “Cyril”, managed to have a great day out visiting the pyramids in the midst of all that madness, and managed to create a few good memories from amongst all of the bad ones.

The first picture, however, also fascinates me for other reasons. My dad would have been about twenty-one at the time (maybe this was his birthday treat) and yet there he stands, “Near top of Pyramid” as the caption explains wearing a flippin’ monocle alongside those ridiculous army socks and looking for all the world like the officer he so very patently wasn’t.

I wonder about the conversation that was going on when they decided to set up that snapshot and what joke they thought that him standing there like that would illustrate to the folks back home?

I don’t suppose any of us can ever know, now…

Mind you, it’s almost endlessly fascinating to me how much older everyone looks in photographs from the forties, fifties and early nineteen-sixties. I know that it’s most likely down to the clothes and the haircuts, but everyone looks so much more mature.

And then, someone in charge of such things must have dropped a tab of acid (Oh, look at me pretending that I know all of the vernacular) and decided that they’d had enough of this and changed the rules so that we all dressed like children who’d just raided the dressing-up box and decided that wearing some curtains was the most sensible option, which led directly to the modern age where pensioners feel that they have to dress like toddlers and mumsies are mortified if they don’t get at least one inside-pants-targeting smarmy “But surely you must be sisters…” comment during the day.

People fought a ruddy great big war for our basic freedom, you know… and now we’re left with a world designed for and run by children, where “acting your age” is more likely to get you rounded up and shipped off to a death camp disguised as a rest home than to get you anything approaching respect.

Still, I guess that’s progress for you.