Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance Read Online Free PDF Page A

her imposing manner and unshakeable belief in her own importance, she seemed to embody all the qualities and weaknesses of the Levantines of Smyrna. She expected daily visits from her offspring – for which she would sit in state in the garden of the Big House, awaiting their arrival – and she tolerated no excuse for non-attendance. They called her Old Dudu, a Turkish term of endearment that meant something akin to ‘old parrot’.
    Magdalen was accustomed to being accompanied by her personal kavass or bodyguard, a fearsome bandit who wore ‘a scarlet sash-like belt wound three times round his waist and stuck with daggers and pistols and other fierce paraphernalia’. He was always dressed in an embroidered jacket ‘over which silver chains hung in tiers round his neck, flashing in the sun with each movement he took as he guided the old lady to her deck chair’.
    Magdalen’s favourite party of the winter season was the Whittalls’ annual Christmas dinner, held in the gilded ballroom of the Big House. It was attended by at least a hundred adult members of the close family and scores of children, all of whom could claim their bloodline from Magdalen. ‘Her Christmas dinner was one of the events of the year,’ wrote one of those children, ‘and, surrounded by a court of her grown-up children, she received her guests with all the dignity of an Eastern potentate.’
    Gertrude Bell was entranced by the formidable Magdalen and her extended family. Industrious yet carefree, their lives seemed a heady blend of patrician duty and footloose frivolity. ‘The sons [are] young men now in various Whittall businesses,’ she wrote. ‘The daughters very charming, very gay. The big gardens touch on one another and they walk in and out of one another’s houses all day long, gossiping and laughing. I should think life presents itself nowhere under such easy and pleasant conditions.’
    At the time of Bell’s visit, the elderly Magdalen’s authority was approaching its apogee, yet her power was totemic rather than real. The day-to-day running of the Whittall business empire was in the hands of three of her eight sons: Richard, Edward and Herbert Octavius. Of these, it was Herbert who inherited all the spunk and ebullience of his mother.
    He was ‘stern and uncompromising’ according to one member of the family; ‘hard and uncompromising’ according to another. Patrician in sentiment, with a strict sense of duty, he remained in Smyrna right up to the terrible events of 1922 and became an important source of information for the British government. His grandchildren joshed among themselves that the initials of his name spelled the word ‘HOW’, ‘but no one added a question mark’, recalled one, ‘[and] no one would have dared to make a joke of it, for he was a formidable man’. A photograph of him taken in about 1910 reveals his sang-froid. Unlike his brothers, smiling and genial, his piercing eyes stare directly and chillingly into the camera.
    Herbert was the eleventh of thirteen children and in any other family might have contented himself with a modest career in the Church. Yet it was he, not his elders, who became the effective head of the company and he who inherited the Big House. It was a perfect reflection of his personality – grand, chilly and austere.
    The house had first been acquired by old James Whittall in 1820. Since that time it had been greatly enlarged and embellished so that it now included scores of reception rooms as well as a gilded ballroom, vast dining room, drawing room and library. From these rooms, visitors had a spectacular view of the Magnesia mountains, the cone-shaped Bel Khave and the snow-capped Nymph Dagh, home to ibex and wild boar. Herbert Octavius, a voracious hunter, had the great entrance hall mounted with scores of trophies and stuffed animals. His grandchildren were particularly terrified of an adult black bear that stood guard by the front door, its front paws outstretched and