Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (4 page)

The majority of Levantines lived in Cordelio, Boudja or Paradise, three of the more expensive and sought-after garden suburbs. They were places of excitement in the early years of the twentieth century, for there was a frisson of danger that was not present in the city itself. When Petros was a young boy, brigands still haunted the snow-dusted peaks of Nymph Dagh that formed the backdrop to the port. And picnic excursions to Lake Tantalus, undertaken in a barouche with Greek bazouki players, could quite easily end in a shoot-out. Gwynneth Giraud, elderly matriarch of the Giraud clan, can still remember her grandmother recounting stories of a running gun battle in the grounds of their suburban mansion. As I sipped Earl Grey tea in the shade of a chestnut tree, she showed me where brigands had fired pot-shots at her grandfather more than 120 years earlier.

The Girauds lived in the spectacular Levantine colony of Bournabat, where all the most exclusive addresses were to be found. Lying some six miles from the city centre – and dominated by rambling villas and pleasure gardens – Bournabat was home to many of the great dynasties that had done so much to shape Smyrna.

The Giraud family, the Woods and the Patersons, along with many others, all lived in palatial mansions. All, too, commanded vast fortunes. But even among the very rich there was a strict hierarchy of power. There was one family in Bournabat that wielded more influence – and had done more to engender Smyrna’s unique spirit – than their surrounding neighbours put together.

When Gertrude Bell visited the Whittalls of Smyrna in the spring of 1902, she caught a tantalising glimpse of a private world. The Whittall family had amassed a spectacular fortune over the previous five decades. By the time King Edward VII came to the throne in distant England, they wielded more influence than at any previous point during their long years in the Orient. Sultan Abdul Aziz had indeed beaten a path to their door, an extraordinary acknowledgement that such trading dynasties were helping to prop up the ailing Ottoman empire. He arrived early and spent the entire day with the Whittalls, inviting local notables to an audience in the large garden marquee. The sultan showed particular interest in the family’s private botanical garden and, ‘at his own request, was ushered into the Protestant Church at Bournabat, built by Mr Whittall some years previously’. Upon his return to Constantinople, he sent his Minister of Foreign Affairs back to Smyrna with brooches for two of the Whittall ladies: ‘a costly souvenir . . . set with large brilliants and pearls’.

Almost forty years had passed since the sultan’s 1863 visit and the intervening time had only served to increase the family’s fortune. C. Whittall and Company had expanded to become the largest Levantine-owned business in Smyrna. ‘My Whittall friends . . . have the bulk of the English trade in their hands,’ noted Bell, ‘branch offices all down the southern coast, mines and shooting boxes and properties scattered up and down the S. W. coast of Asia Minor and yachts on the sea.’

Their principal residences were in Bournabat, which was connected by railway to the city. Each member of the family had his or her designated seat on the steam train. Such privileges seemed a part of the natural order of life. After all, the British owned and managed the railway.

Complex marriage alliances had enabled the family to strengthen still further their commercial grip on the metropolis. The Whittalls, Girauds, La Fontaines, Charnauds, Alibertis, Williamsons, Patersons and Reeses (among many others) were all intermarried and all had hundreds of cousins in common. Procreation came about as naturally and annually as the company profits. A brief glance at their family trees reveals extraordinary fecundity and an alarming cocktail of mixed blood. If a Whittall boy married a Giraud girl one year, then it could be expected that a Giraud boy would reciprocate in the year that followed.

The family also had a singular attachment to names, rendering their genealogy well-nigh unintelligible to outsiders. Take the two Whittall brothers, Charlton and James. Charlton’s sons were named Charlton and James. And James’s sons were named James and Charlton. When one of these Jameses had sons of his own, he named two of them Charlton and one of them James. In time, there were dozens of Jameses and Charltons, all of whom could claim descent from Charlton and James. A family tree recently compiled by a surviving Whittall runs to more than seventy pages and reveals the complexities of Smyrna’s intermarried families. ‘[We] called everyone aunt or uncle to be on the safe side,’ recalled one of the Whittall grandchildren in her memoirs.

Matriarch of them all was the formidable Magdalen Whittall, descendant of a pirate-prince, who ruled her family fiefdom with all the swagger of an Oriental despot. She was destined to remain as head of the family for fully twenty-nine years after the death of her husband. It was she who had welcomed Gertrude Bell to Bournabat; Bell described her as ‘mother of the tribe’.

As indeed she was. Magdalen produced thirteen children, ninety-one grandchildren and 256 great-grandchildren – offspring who would together help to shape the character and prosperity of Smyrna. Magdalen, meanwhile, was doing her utmost to shape them. She imposed her will on them with a severity that continued to terrify them long after she had died. Brooking neither dissent nor disobedience, she abhorred any of her children who might dare to call into question her pronouncements on matters concerning the family. ‘She ruled over them till the end,’ recalled one of her great-granddaughters, ‘and during most of her lifetime, her word was law.’

With 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 its bare teeth exposed in a snarl.

They were equally scared of their great-aunts. Three of them – Jane, Blanche and Mary – always used to take their afternoon promenade together. ‘They were all three widowed at that time,’ wrote one of the grandchildren, ‘and were dressed in black from head to foot. It was a strange procession. They walked in single file, hardly speaking to each other, having perhaps little in common except a united desire for exercise.’ No less frightening was Aunt Coralie. ‘Who she was I never knew, but once a year we had to parade in front of her. She had a famous talking parrot and she was reputed not to have washed her hair for years, but always to clean it with eau-de-cologne.’

Not every member of the family chilled the blood quite as much as Herbert Octavius and his widowed sisters. His brother Richard, a partner in the business, was ‘open handed [and] of a genial gay disposition’. He was rarely parted from his beloved hookah pipe, which he smoked with as much enthusiasm as the native Turks.

Another of the brothers was Edward, a firm favourite with the Whittall youngsters. His branch of the family lived in their own vast mansion, which stood just a few minutes’ walk from the Big House. Yet there was a world of difference in the feel of the two places. ‘It was a most lovable house,’ recalled Edward’s niece. ‘It had the unstudied charm and graciousness which comes from the daily use of beautiful things, and it was alive and without pomp. It rambled all over the place and was madly inconvenient, needing a regiment of servants to keep it going.’

The drawing room and dining room opened onto the winter garden, making them rather dark, and the deep-red velvet curtains added to the impression of twilight, but there were ample treasures to brighten the gloom. ‘The dining room shone with silver, and the old-fashioned épargne in the centre was filled with flowers which cascaded down on all sides.’ For the children, the only person to be avoided was Marco the head chef, who presided over the kitchen like an autocrat. ‘The only time I can remember him being really pleasant was one April Fool’s Day,’ wrote one of those children many years later, ‘when he condescended to fry some cotton-wool in batter and serve it instead of brains to one of our uncles at breakfast.’

Edward Whittall’s passion was gardening and he devoted long hours to his spectacular botanical garden that climbed up the hillsides in sweeping terraces. There were Judas trees and ginkgo trees, giant cypresses and cream-flowered magnolias. Giant chestnuts kept the great lawns in shadow during the hottest hours of the day, while turpentine trees added a spicy scent to the air. Swings were attached to the rose arbour. It was a paradise for the numerous young cousins who played here together, refreshing themselves on the juicy oranges and limes that fell from the trees.

Edward Whittall had many glasshouses in which he propagated rare and exotic specimens. He also had a large mountain garden on the slopes of Nymph Dagh, where he grew bulbs, as well as an orchard in the village. He sent tens of thousands of specimens to the director of Kew Gardens and had a tulip and fritillary named after him. ‘Whittall is smiling all over the place,’ reads one letter written by Kew’s head gardener.

Such frivolous pursuits never took place in the neighbouring Big House, whose garden was formal and filled with ‘rather dull shrubs’. Its most distinguishing feature was a long avenue of cypress trees that led to the wrought-iron entrance gates. These gates opened out onto the principal square in Bournabat – the meeting point of five roads, including the main thoroughfare into Smyrna.