Talking Location With… author Gill Paul – EGYPT and LONDON

29th September 2021

Talking LocationWith… Gill Paul, author of The Collector’s Daughter

When I visited Egypt in 2011, it was a simple matter of flying from Heathrow to Cairo, which took less than five hours. When Lady Evelyn Herbert went with her father in November 1922, after receiving a telegram from Howard Carter to say he’d discovered an undisturbed tomb in the Valley of the Kings, they drove from Highclere Castle to London in the Earl’s Panhard & Levassor car, which was started by hand-cranking and had a top speed of 12 miles per hour. From there they took the boat-train to Paris then changed onto a train south for Marseilles, followed by a steamer around the Med to Alexandria, stopping at ports in Italy and Greece along the way, and finally yet another train through Egypt to Luxor. Total journey time? Seventeen days.

Many of the sights I saw in Egypt would have been exactly the same for Eve and her father. Local sailors still whisk passengers across the Nile in feluccas, tacking skilfully to take advantage of the prevailing wind. The road up to the Valley of the Kings has tarmac now, and tourists queue for access to Tutankhamun’s empty tomb, but you can still feel the remoteness of the spot the pharaohs chose to be their last resting place, amidst red-gold sand and rock stretching as far as the eye can see. Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Eve and her father stayed, has been through many renovations since 1922, but retains stately grandeur and an unparalleled location.

We sailed down the Nile to Aswan, just as Eve and her father did, admiring the glorious colour scheme: startlingly blue water fringed by green date palms on either side, backed by endless golden sand. Emerging from the air con of our cruise boat, the steamy heat of Aswan was oppressive, and I can vouch for the mosquitos that swarm at dusk. One of them bit the Earl of Carnarvon on the cheek, a bite that proved fatal in the pre-antibiotic era. Fortunately I had brought Deet and Anthisan cream.

The Old Aswan Dam was built by the British in 1899–1902, to solve the problem of the annual Nile floods. The High Dam that I saw on my visit was a multinational project built between 1960 and 1970, which created a new lake, Lake Nasser, and required many antiquities, like Abu Simbel, to be moved to alternative locations. I saw crocodiles floating like logs of wood in that lake, just as Eve would have seen in the Nile of her day.

In Cairo, I visited the vast Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, the same one Eve saw, but it will be supplanted later this year by the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. Unlike Eve, I saw exhibits from Tutankhamun’s tomb on display: the gold funeral masks, the ornate shrine, the guardian statues, and even the shrunken mummy. I also visited the touring exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2019. There’s no substitute for seeing the rich artistry up close and imagining the ancient people who commissioned the intricate jewellery, the shabti figures, and the glorious golden furniture. It’s truly awe-inspiring, especially when you think it dates back more than three thousand years.

To imagine Eve’s life in the upper echelons of the British aristocracy, I visited her childhood home of Highclere Castle, and was able to fine-tune my description of the secret cupboards, the splendid Saloon, and the desk once owned by Napoleon. It was smaller and shabbier than I’d expected, reminding me that even the grandest aristocratic families struggle to maintain their stately homes. The grounds are stunning, though, and unchanged, apart from a gift shop, a café, and a bar serving creative cocktails on the lawn.

The Earl of Carnarvon owned a house at 13 Berkeley Square, which has now been converted into an office block. His wife’s grand home at number 1 Seamore Place, Park Lane, was bought by Westminster Council in 1936 and demolished to allow Curzon Street residents direct access to Hyde Park. But Eve and Brograve’s first marital home at 26 Charles Street is still there in the heart of Mayfair, and looks very charming. I didn’t travel to Framfield in Surrey to see their country house but Google Earth showed me all I needed to know about its architecture and location. It’s not a patch on Highclere, but it looks like a comfortable home rather than a museum.

Location research is one of the fun bits when writing historical fiction, but you have to look through a historian’s eyes, filtering out the modern world. Having said that, I do recommend the cocktails at Highclere…

Gill Paul

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