16 - 22 August 2001
Issue No.547
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 August 2001 Issue No.547 |
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Plain talk
I was saddened to read about the death of Sir Harold Beeley on 27 July and I felt I had to pay tribute to a man who truly loved Egypt. In fact Sir Beeley's love for Egypt went further to embrace the Arabs as a whole. Having held diplomatic posts in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, prior to his appointment to Egypt, Sir Harold had already developed an understanding and appreciation of the Arabs and Arab affairs.
Yet this interest goes further back than 1950-1953, when he was British ambassador to Baghdad. As a junior research fellow and lecturer at Queens College, Oxford in 1935, he developed an interest in Middle Eastern affairs that would shape his career to come. It was not until 1946, however, that he became closely associated with events in the region. For he was appointed as secretary of the Anglo-American Commission of Enquiry on Palestine, which was to recommend partition and a two-state solution to the nascent Arab-Israeli conflict.
It was in 1946 that I first met Harold Beeley, not yet knighted. At that time I participated, with other young, enthusiastic -- even revolutionary -- Egyptians, in writing a booklet entitled "Egypt and the Labour Party." We submitted our booklet to the honourable Ernest Bevin, then foreign minister of Britain. That was how I got to meet a young secretary of Begin, who was both friendly and enthusiastic about our cause: Harold Beeley. He was at that time advisor to the foreign secretary on Palestinian affairs.
I vividly remember discussing with Sir Harold the Suez Affair, known to us as the Tripartite Aggression of 1956. He was at the time assistant under-secretary for the Middle East. He assured me that he was kept ignorant of what was brewing about the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, an assertion he was later to confirm in his own writings. From there he went on to New York where he served as deputy head of the British Mission to the UN.
Sir Harold was eventually appointed ambassador to Cairo in 1961. It was a pleasant surprise for me to receive a call from him in Cairo. We met and talked many times during his term in Cairo which lasted until 1964. In fact during his ambassadorship, the British Embassy resembled a beehive, for it was a centre of much political as well social activity.
Sir Harold Beeley was the first full fledged British ambassador to Egypt after the Suez crisis. We had had a trade representative but he was the first ambassador to try and restore Anglo- Egyptian relations to a friendly level. And to a great degree he succeeded in his mission. For when he returned to Cairo for a second tenure, in 1967, he found many friends eagerly welcoming him.
Apart from Sir Harold's interest in and knowledge of Middle Eastern and Arab affairs, his wife Lady Beeley, Pat to her friends, managed to make the embassy a centre of hilarity and fun. They hosted parties galore. Never before had the British Embassy, or any other embassy in Cairo for that matter, managed to create such numbers of friends. Sir Harold and Lady Beeley's parties would have provided much material for society columns. The embassy during Sir Harold's tenure became, in my opinion, an excellent and worthy example of what diplomatic representation should be.
In their obituary of Sir Harold Beeley, the British newspaper The Independent writes: "Harold Beeley's reputation, and the high esteem in which his colleagues in Britain and abroad held him, rests mainly on his role as one of the most influential creators and practitioners of British policy in the Middle East." He recognized, perhaps earlier than others "that a romantic notion of desert hawks and black tents was an unreliable basis for policy, and was delighted when a well- known Arabist of the old school was heard to say, 'Beeley is a bit of an Effendi.'" He certainly was.
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