The Suez Canal, a crucial waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, has a rich history intricately linked with global politics and trade. This history is vividly captured through various postage stamps and postal history items. Let's delve into the story of the Suez Canal as told through philately.
Suez Canal.
The Genesis of the Suez Canal
The idea of a canal linking the Red Sea and the Mediterranean dates back to ancient Egypt. The first attempt, apparently, was in the 20th century B.C. when the ancient Egyptians, under the Pharaoh Sesostris I, dug a west-east canal from the Nile Delta to a point on the Red Sea near the present port of Suez. That canal, probably the first, silted up, despite sporadic re-excavation projects, but successive pharaohs continued to open and reopen the canal in the ensuing millennia.
In modern times, Napoleon Bonaparte was the first to try and dig a canal. More ambitious than the pharaohs, he wanted his canal to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and so assigned his engineers to make a survey and see if such a canal were feasible. The engineer, J.M. Le Pere, surveyed the Isthmus of Suez and somehow concluded that the waters of the Red Sea were at least 9.8 meters (32 feet) higher than those of the Mediterranean.
The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, or the Suez Canal Company, was granted a concession in 1855 to undertake this monumental project. The canal opened to shipping on 17 November 1869, and not only had the Canal been inaugurated in grand pomp, in the presence of de Lesseps’ cousin, empress Eugenie, but also world opinion had changed drastically as to it’s commercial and strategic significance.
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Early Postal Services in Egypt
Handstamps were first introduced during the Napoleonic period, 1798-1800. Carlo Meratti, an Italian, set up the first postal system in Egypt in 1821. This was a private enterprise which in 1842 was named "POSTA EUROPEA".
The Egyptian Government, in 1857, sanctioned it to carry on all inland postal services. This concession was purchased by the Egyptian Government and on 1 January 1865 it took control of this service. First Egyptian stamps were issued on 1 January 1866. The 1867 issue featured a pyramid and the sphinx. Stamps issued in 1872 were inscribed in Italian "Poste Khedive Egiziane'. Egypt joined the UPU in 1875.
British Involvement and Control
On Sunday, November 14, 1875, the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was supping with his old friend Lionel Rothschild at 148 Picadilly, as they did almost every weekend. During the main course the butler approached with the telegram salver. It was a message from one of the Barons’s Paris informants. Both men instantly knew what it was all about. The debtridden Khedive wanted to sell his 177’000 Suez shares for one hundred million gold francs.
With one stroke of pen, Her Majesty’s Government obtained control of the Suez Canal Company. And the Queen received a triumphant note from her beloved “Dizzy”: “You have it, Madam. The French Government have been out-generalled.
The Suez Canal inauguration in 1869.
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The 1956 Suez Crisis and Philatelic Commemoration
The Suez Crisis 1956: A Turning Point in History
In July 1956 the revolutionary Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in response to the withdrawal of British and American funding of the Aswan Dam. Eden believed that nationalisation was a violation of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty which Nasser had signed with the British and the French in October 1954.
The Suez campaign was documented philatelicly by the Egyptian Post Office as events took place. A single stamp was issued on 26 September 1956 to commemorate the Nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The Suez campaign itself was marked by the issue of another single stamp on 20 December 1956. The stamp depicted Egyptians reacting to the landing of Allied paratroopers and commemorated the defence of Port Said.
This stamp was overprinted in red and reissued on 14 January 1957 to commemorate the evacuation of the Allied forces from Egypt. Finally, on 15 April 1957, a single stamp was issued, similar to that released on 26 September 1956, to commemorate the Reopening of the Suez Canal.
But the Egyptian Post Office had not finished rubbing philatelic salt in the British and French wounds. A set of five stamps was issued on 26 July 1957 with the splendidly dramatic title, “Egypt Tomb of Aggressors”, each stamp depicting the defeat of a force invading Egypt over many centuries of history. Two other issues commemorated events in Egyptian history where the Egyptians fought against the British, and in one case, the French as well.
A single stamp issued on 21 September 1957 commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Arabi/Urabi revolution where the Egyptians attempted to resist the domination of the British and French. The second issue was released on 28 March 1957 and celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Rosetta, a timely anniversary given that it was so close to the Allies’ recent forced evacuation.
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The Six-Day War and the Great Bitter Lake Association
On June 5th, 1967, things reached a breaking point and the Six-Day War began. It was common for ships from different countries to pass through in a convoy together because it was easier to control traffic that way. The Agapenor was one of 14 cargo ships and two tankers grouped together. Not long into the journey, the convoy entered a section of the Suez called the Great Bitter Lake, a 100-square-mile body of salt water in the canal.
Israel had just declared war on what was then known as the United Arab Republic, and they were traveling through a potential conflict zone. Around 200 Israeli fighter pilots used the low position of the rising sun, and the convoy of ships, to mask a surprise blitz on Egypt. The planes were heading westward over the Suez Canal and straight for an Egyptian airbase near the convoy’s position.
Even if the 14 trapped ships wanted to leave against orders, they physically couldn’t. The Egyptian government figured the best way to prevent Israel from using the canal was to block it entirely, so a few days after the conflict started, they dumped debris, scuttled old ships, and threw in landmines to make the canal impassable.
The convoy of 14 ships came from 8 different nations: the UK, West Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, France, Bulgaria, and the United States. After three months a compromise was finally reached. There was no way Egypt would reopen the Suez Canal, but the people trapped on-board were released.
The Great Bitter Lake Association was a way to regulate the unofficial marketplace that had sprung up between the ships, and bring some order to their makeshift community. It was also a social committee.
Technically these stamps were Cinderella stamps, which means they had no postal value and were made mostly for their own amusement, but some actually made it through as official postage. The stamps featured common motifs like birds to represent the seafarers’ longing for freedom. There were ships and anchors. The artwork on each stamp acted like a tiny time capsule of their experiences.
Great Bitter Lake Association stamps.
Reopening and Modern Times
A deal was finally brokered in 1974 to reopen the Suez Canal, but by this point, the heyday of the GBLA was over. It took a full year to remove the 100 bridge sections, 20 trucks, 8 tanks, 100 vessels and 750,000 explosive devices thrown into the waters of the Suez. But in 1975, eight years after the start of the Six-Day War, the ships said their final goodbyes to the Great Bitter Lake.
Both ships had an epic welcome back in Hamburg. Around 30,000 cheering spectators came out to see them dock at their home port. From 1967 to 1975, over 3,000 men (and one woman actually) served on the Great Bitter Lake. In 2017 a fifty-year reunion was held in Liverpool, and members in Germany and Slovakia still meet up annually. It remains a quiet tradition fifty plus years later.
Nowadays, over 140 years after it’s coming into existence, the Suez Canal has developed into an obvious feature of geography, comparable to the Straits of Gibraltar.
Because of its importance in Egyptian history, the story of the Suez Canal is a natural theme for postage stamps and Egypt has missed no chance to tell the story on stamps and covers.
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