Eric Ambler: The Levanter

The land, in the vilayet of Latakia, was granted to him as a reward for political services rendered to the Ottoman court. The exact nature of the services rendered I have never been able to determine. My father once told me, vaguely, that “they had something to do with a government bond issue”, but he was unable, or unwilling, to amplify that statement. The original land grant described Grandfather’s occupation as that of “entrepreneur-negotiator”, which in Imperial Turkey could have meant many different things. I do know that he was always very well in, in Constantinople, and that even during World War I, when as an Englishman he was interned by the Turks, his internment amounted to little more than house arrest. Moreover, the land remained in his name, as, too, did the businesses there — a tannery and a flour mill — which he had acquired before the war. “Johnny Turk is a gentleman”, he used to say.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French Mandate over the areas now known as Syria and Lebanon, some changes had to be made. Although his tenure of the lands he had previously held was eventually confirmed by the new regime, his experience under the French colonial administrators — less gentlemanly than Johnny Turk by all accounts — had taught him a sharp lesson. Personal ownership of a business made one vulnerable. He made arrangements to acquire a corporate identity in Syria and to transfer gradually most of his subsidiary businesses, chiefly those which did not depend directly on landholding, to Cyprus.

Grandfather died in 1933, and my father, John Howell took control. He had been in charge of the Cyprus office in Famagusta, which had been established originally to find cargoes for the fleet of coasters which the parent company owned and operated out of Latakia.

As his Cyprus office had grown in importance my father’s interest in the mainland of Asia Minor had waned. He had married in Cyprus. My sisters and I were born in Famagusta and baptized in the Greek Orthodox faith. My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon but, with a Lebanese-Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English. There are lots of families like ours, rich and poor, in the Middle East. Ethnically, I suppose, my sisters and I could reasonably be described as “Eastern Mediterranean”. Personally I prefer the simpler though usually pejorative term, “Levantine mongrel”. Mongrels are sometimes more intelligent than their respectable cousins; they also tend to adapt more readily to strange environments; and in conditions of extreme adversity, they are among those most likely to survive.

The World War II years were difficult ones for our Syrian interests. Those in Cyprus gave little trouble. The coasters, prudently reregistered in Famagusta before the war, were all on charter to the British. They lost three of them off Crete, but their government war-risk insurance covered us nicely; I think we even made money on the deal. In Syria, though, it was a different story. The fighting between the Allies and the Vichy French brought business virtually to a standstill. The demand for liquorice root and Latakia tobacco at that time was, to put it mildly, minimal. In 1942, when the Allies started driving the enemy out of North Africa, father moved our head office to Alexandria and registered a new holding company, Howell General Trading Ltd. The Syrian and Cypriot businesses became subsidiaries. In that year, too, I was sent around the Cape to purgatory in England. Had I been consulted I would have chosen to stay at the English school in Alex, or, failing that, go to the one in Istanbul where there were family friends; but my mother wouldn’t have Istanbul — unlike Grandfather Howell she is very anti-Turk — and anyway my father’s mind was made up. War or no war, I had to go through the same prep and public school mills as he and his father had.

Not all my father’s ideas were so fixed, however. After the move to Alexandria the whole character and direction of our business began to change. This was father’s doing and he was quite deliberate about it. He had sensed the future. Some things remained — the coasters and the bigger ships that later replaced them had nearly always been profitable — but from 1945 on, when the war in Europe ended, the whole emphasis on the trading side of our business shifted from bulk commodities to manufactured goods. During those postwar years we became selling agents throughout the Middle East (after 1948, Israel always excepted) for a number of European and, later, some American manufacturers.

This change had a direct effect on my life. The first of these agencies of ours was that of a firm in Glasgow which made a range of rotary pumps. It was my father’s realization that it is difficult to sell engineering products effectively when the buyer knows more than you do about them that made him decide on a technical education for me. So, instead of going from school in England to Cairo University, a transition to which I had been looking forward, I found myself committed to a red-brick polytechnic in one of the grimier parts of London.

At the time, I am afraid, my acceptance of this change of plan was more sullen than dutiful. Born in Cyprus when it was a British colonial possession, I held a British colonial passport. By the simple process of threatening me — quite baselessly, I later discovered — with the prospect of National Service conscription into the British army unless I enrolled as a student in London, my father had his way. It wasn’t, I know, a nice trick for a loving father to play on a son; but I can admit now that, as a businessman, I have had no reason to regret that he played it.

One way and another, then, I learned a lot from my father. He died in 1962, of a heart ailment, eighteen months after we moved our head office to Beirut in Lebanon and registered our second holding company in Vaduz.

The testing time for me, as the new head of our business, came the following year, when I had to make my first major policy decision.

It was that decision, made almost nine years ago, that started me on the road which has proved in the end to be so very dangerous.

Our Syrian troubles had started in the early fifties when Soviet penetration of the Middle East began. In Syria it was particularly successful. Friendship with the Soviet Union grew with the rise to power of the Syrian Arab Socialist Renaissance movement, later to be known as the Ba’ath Party. They were not communists — as Sunnite Muslims they could not be; they were, however, Arab nationalists committed to socialism and strongly anti-West. The Ba’ath program called for union with Egypt and other Arab states, and rapid socialization of the Syrian economy.

In 1958 they got both union with Egypt and, at the same time, the first of their socialization measures, “agrarian reform.” In that year an expropriation law was passed which stripped the Agence Howell of all but eighty hectares of its irrigated land. We had held over a thousand hectares. As a foreign-owned company we received “compensation”, but since the compensation was paid into a blocked account in the state-owned Central Bank, it didn’t do us much good. We were not permitted to transfer the money out of the country, we could not buy foreign currency or valuta, and we were not even allowed to reinvest or spend the money inside the country without permission from the Central Bank. It was in limbo.

They let us keep the tannery and the flour mill for the time being. Nationalization of industry was to come later.

In 1959 my father formally applied for the release of the blocked funds for reinvestment purposes. He planned to buy a 2,000-ton cargo vessel that was up for sale in Latakia and base it in the Aegean. It was a way of exporting some of the capital that he thought he might just get away with. But that was a bad year in Syria. There was a prolonged drought and the harvests were so poor that Syria had to import cereals instead of exporting as usual. The Central Bank, which clearly saw through the ship-purchase idea, regretted that, owing to the current shortage of foreign exchange resulting from the adverse trade situation, the application for release must be refused.