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Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers
Sebastian Hope
Part history, part travel journal and part autobiography, ‘Hotel Tiberias’ is a journey of many layers and resonances, as Sebastian Hope follows the tumultuous story of his family’s hotel in Palestine.In 1900,Thomas Cook, who had been running tours of the Holy Land since the 1890s, financed the building of a hotel in Tiberias, the largest town on the Sea of Galilee, which had long been a stopover point for Christian pilgrims. The hotel, built, run and eventually owned by Richard Grossmann, was situated in the Sanjak of Acre, part of the Ottoman Empire, and after the First World War found itself in the British mandated territory of Palestine, prospering under British rule until the Second World War, after which the hotel was eventually confiscated by the fledgling state of Israel in 1948.With the hotel as the pivotal point in the story, Sebastian Hope researches the story of his grandmother, Margaret Frena and her two husbands, Fritz Grossman (Richard Grossman's son), who shot himself dead in 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, and John Winthrop Hackett (General Sir John Hackett) who served with the TransJordan Frontier Force.Journeying through Rhineland Germany, Turkey and the Middle East, his research takes him to some strange places as he weaves a wonderful, strong family story into a rich, sweeping backdrop of both time and place. Just as he unravels the tumultuous history of the area, Hope digs deep into the history and layers of his own family, and discovers how family histories have an archaeology too.
HOTEL TIBERIAS
A Tale of Two Grandfathers
SEBASTIAN HOPE
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_b353f324-596b-594e-a06d-5c8b9e6f5bbe)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
This edition published by HarperPress 2005
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Sebastian Hope 2004
Sebastian Hope asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006551997
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780007404964
Version: 2016-03-24
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
PRAISE (#ulink_917ab9b7-74bb-5383-8ea6-c5b5254ea85e)
From the reviews of Hotel Tiberias:
‘One half of Hope’s story describes the romantic derring-do soldiering of Hackett, whose steps are traced in a modern-day journey to “Palestine”, the other tracks the more elusive figure of Grossmann, from a family of Templars who settled in Palestine … Hope writes so honestly about his lost German family that we share his urgent desire to acquit them of charges of Nazi sympathies … it is heartening to see [Grossmann] rescued from wartime slanders by a grandson who never knew him but will not let him fade’
Sunday Times
‘Hope indicates a new direction in the British travel book: a post-colonial search for roots and for explanations in their families’ involvement in the recent history of the British imperial endeavour’
TLS
‘Hope is a seasoned travel writer and his descriptive writing is vivid and convincing … [Hotel Tiberias] achieves real pathos. All families have their hidden as well as public histories. Hotel Tiberias gives us a poignant glimpse into a particularly dramatic example’
Independent on Sunday
‘The politics of the Middle East are sketched with verve … Hope’s meditation on his grandfather’s suicide and the region’s history is written with conviction and clarity’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Hope takes us down all sorts of intriguing avenues and gives us a vivid and unusual perspective on an endlessly fascinating chapter of the twentieth century’
Edward Stourton, Tablet
‘Moving, intelligent, highly readable and occasionally extremely funny, this is a fine book indeed’
Geographical Magazine
DEDICATION (#ulink_22fd728a-a908-5712-bb33-2298f7ecaff4)
In memory of Dore Vorster 1906–2003
and
despite Barnaby
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_752cbc31-d54f-5efa-b06a-bfb10a4702aa)
Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain a child forever. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into that of our ancestors by the records of history?
CICERO, Orator, XXXIV, 120
CONTENTS
Cover (#u3c1d0523-17da-5b50-881a-4b41762c1c46)
Title Page (#u44eae0dd-caaf-5f6f-bba3-9741cebff9de)
Copyright (#u1b203463-459e-5e86-8bda-3db19240e457)
Praise (#uf08a5a2f-2493-5621-9d1c-cb5f70cf475a)
Dedication (#u1a2d2456-9c12-5bb6-bdbf-d8492c8f9a9c)
Epigraph (#u6454cc8e-d090-5859-a01c-aaf7e142a8ab)
Prologue (#udafff410-89fe-598e-8912-35ecddefb383)
PART ONE (#u8fc62eb6-f69c-5e7f-9d75-3f8e8802c8f2)
Chapter One (#u1393b637-166b-56a0-a6be-85e86a0f8dc7)
Chapter Two (#u3695a05b-420d-52fb-aa00-9cf23a401ea7)
Chapter Three (#u63286e90-23bd-5795-a0b6-bb1ea70b0578)
Chapter Four (#ufa4dee7d-03f5-5a8f-b690-4ba20028fddd)
Chapter Five (#uaee776a4-03d5-5cd2-b146-ec617b3a8ff5)
Chapter Six (#ua8ca64b6-b851-5839-a7a9-f0983651c382)
Chapter Seven (#u2e2af3f8-9498-509e-904f-24e358e67ec1)
Chapter Eight (#u598e07e0-2c38-5c56-89f2-df5b6c789e4a)
Chapter Nine (#u73a62090-423e-5685-810a-77bd7fa6a415)
Chapter Ten (#ud18da04f-f951-593f-8a9c-682d1a64db88)
Chapter Eleven (#u89007235-90e3-5618-b10b-e9d3ae2847af)
Chapter Twelve (#u26530c92-e495-5e87-b519-8dac6cfd7bf6)
Chapter Thirteen (#u5ffaafa4-2166-57e8-8b16-46aabbd8bdea)
Chapter Fourteen (#u7f52346a-5eb3-5983-a92e-a8643501707f)
Chapter Fifteen (#u75c78f17-c8c5-594f-a0b4-952996d29fce)
Chapter Sixteen (#ub296fa0d-488d-5b53-aca3-3572a38169e5)
Chapter Seventeen (#u4fac8ef9-83d8-53a9-8926-64b05bfb6a95)
Chapter Eighteen (#u9a5a8ecf-f3d6-5552-8b11-572845a618e4)
PART TWO (#ud55cd52e-5176-5f71-a7b9-8362e4067922)
Chapter Nineteen (#uee34d949-c100-5712-9ac7-7441d4efdc40)
Chapter Twenty (#uf0bd77f8-ee1a-502a-bcb4-610c826f8250)
Chapter Twenty-One (#u2120ba5f-6e90-5d79-bb13-0e929cf43566)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#u8967bf64-ca2a-53bd-8927-32c1b18bbb73)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#u2c62f291-4074-57df-ab6a-105ad9b959e8)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#uf34641e4-50dd-57ba-9c14-c1eb0cf9e757)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#u64b025a7-2f99-537f-a125-0c8afd66c039)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#u74b33bb3-cfd0-5427-9241-ce6c1ec64553)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#u36bceafa-65eb-50cf-a6f8-1d508ea68f5b)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#u2fbf5e53-c989-52f8-b8c6-050994976d0f)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#ucc1835aa-153a-511c-9b65-fc7d8ca1e2d2)
Chapter Thirty (#u110a0437-d681-58cd-93ae-587410dce6f6)
Chapter Thirty-One (#ucf51899a-eef3-5229-b77e-306661768492)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#u5c85a31f-b6ec-52c9-94d0-8af09bbdb14f)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#ud18eb64f-eb43-5fbf-ba31-9ca9d174657d)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#u1bc4e6b3-2140-5230-beb5-92df40e8c174)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#u16655abd-3178-5305-bdb9-4d469f5dd56f)
Keep Reading (#ub79459bb-996f-529f-bbf9-39c27030b84b)
Index (#u0a75c4f6-d97f-539c-b7f4-35e099c8c21f)
Acknowledgements (#udf95db14-0aa6-55e8-8fd5-11af1590e10b)
About the Author (#u9417a6c2-f815-5773-ab02-4bdff6559063)
Also by the Author (#uc63b9611-226f-562e-944e-83aea1614cd3)
About the Publisher (#u9775d755-0e5a-5e05-bdfb-04cf0700c98b)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_1ad235fd-28be-5c96-a74f-4ef0159cf09a)
I was sixteen when I found out. We were going on holiday to Scotland with another family. The car was already loaded at 6.30 a.m. with everything from frozen food to an inflatable dinghy. My mother, my brother and I were standing in the kitchen, ready to leave the moment my father said, let’s go, so as not to start the twelve-hour drive on a bad note – we would have to keep our nerve for his overtaking manoeuvres on the A9. Mum said almost as an aside that we were not to be surprised if we heard the other paterfamilias refer to Grandpa as her step-father – why? – because he is. ‘Grandpa adopted Lizzie and me when he married Granny. Our real father was her first husband, and he died when we were very small.’ And then my father said, let’s go.
My world did not fall apart. I did not feel betrayed or deceived because we had not been told sooner. I did not feel as though my own sense of identity had been weakened. As the August countryside passing by in car window-sized frames gave way to the purple hills of the Highlands, I wondered if my relationship with my grandfather would change now he was my step-grandfather. I saw no reason why it should. He was the only one I had ever known – I could not remember my father’s father. We were the only grandchildren he had. Even though we were not related by blood he could never be anything other than our Grandpa. The real surprise was that our mother was not entirely the person I thought she was. I had passed through that stage of early adolescence when you think your parents don’t know anything about you, and I was beginning to realize how little I knew about them. Family gatherings thereafter became opportunities to observe the newly revealed relationships at work.
John Winthrop Hackett, my step-grandfather, was a great man. He was a career soldier who had reached the rank of major at the outbreak of the Second World War. He had what they call a ‘good war’ and was a brigadier by the end. He had shown great bravery, receiving wounds and decorations in equal measure. As a leader he had inspired enduring devotion in his subordinates, not least because of his maverick attitude towards his own superiors. He rose to the rank of full general and commanded the British Army of the Rhine during the deep mid-winter of the Cold War. He had been commander-in-chief of the British forces in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and still featured in those IRA assassination wish-lists that were discovered scribbled on Rizla papers and the backs of envelopes bearing the new decimal stamps. He was dubbed a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Bath. He had even been tipped for the top army job, but a frank letter to The Times on the ability of NATO to withstand a non-nuclear offensive, in which he asserted that Russian tanks would be in Paris in forty-eight hours, so infuriated his political masters that he was denied, it is said, this final promotion.
He was also a scholar. He had read Greats at New College, Oxford, having the precocity to complete that degree in two years and sit the finals for one in History the following summer. It was said that he did not know which to be, a soldier or a don, and that he became a soldier in a prolonged bout of donnish absent-mindedness. Even after becoming a soldier he gained a B. Litt. for his thesis on Saladin’s campaign against the Principality of Antioch in 1188. After he retired from the army he became Principal of King’s College, London. It was his last public appointment. Granny and Grandpa lived in a narrow house on Campden Hill that had a security grille in front of the garden doors and a twisting wooden banister, perfect for sliding down, that I scratched from top to bottom with the buckle of my belt.
In 1975 Grandpa retired and he and Granny moved to a mill house in the Cotswolds that they had bought some years previously. It was an event that had an impact on my family too: we had to vacate the mill. We had lived there for five years, and it was the longest that we had stayed anywhere. My father was also a career soldier, a major at the time of his secondment to the Wessex Yeomanry in Cirencester, which was to be his last posting. I was six when we moved in. I had already had four different homes, three of which I could remember, army married quarters in Canada, Dorchester and Sevenoaks. While I remembered them all with affection, Coberley Mill was the best place a boy who loved woods and streams could possibly find himself. Leaving a house so old and so alive, the creaking boards below which water trickled through the old mill race, leaving the sylvan hollow in the Churn Valley was a wrench; moving into a house on the corner of a B road in the middle of a village near the M4, surrounded by flat land, was both a shock and a disappointment. Long stretches at boarding school augmented my alienation from our new ‘home’.
Visiting Granny and Grandpa was also to revisit childhood memories. At first my brother and I would leave the lunch-table early and scramble onto the oak that had fallen across the stream where we used to have our tree house, or put on gumboots and rebuild a dam with nuggets of clay. Crayfish live in the banks, trout in the pools. Later on we would sit with the adults listening to their serious talk upstairs in the drawing room, whose windows framed the big ash tree at the top of the cowslipped bank where the tyre-swing used to hang. The room itself had changed, the yarra boards covered with pale carpet, the windows double-glazed. The image of how it once had been faded quickly, but every now and again I would look out over the millpond and see myself on an oil-drum raft paddling upstream, a wartime mission deep in the jungles of Burma.
These birthdays and anniversaries, Boxing Days and Easters were always difficult occasions for my father. He may have married the general’s daughter, but he was a different type of soldier. In 1944, at the age of seventeen, he had left school without sitting his Highers, grown a moustache, lied about his age and joined up. The war ended before he could be posted – ‘the atom bomb saved my life,’ he says – but his career did not lack active service: Palestine; Korea; Malaya. He met my mother during his regiment’s tour of duty in West Germany. Five days after I was born in 1964 he left for fourteen months, fighting insurgents in the Radfan. He was a regimental soldier by nature and did not attend Staff College, partly because of his strong anti-intellectual bias. Grandpa, battlefield commander, sought out the weakest point and attacked. Any discussion on any topic between the two men invariably ended in Grandpa correcting my father’s use of English, and my father taking umbrage. He would always lose more than the argument, his composure and his temper being frequent casualties of the engagement.
