This photo shows ‘El Nil’ (‘The Nile’, in Arabic) in its period of glory, 1936, when it was operating as a liner on the Marseille-Alexandria run. ‘El Nil’, as I wrote in an earlier entry, is important to me because a chance onboard encounter led to me being born some three years later.

Since making that entry, however, I have learned much more about the ship, its various alternative names and functions, and its role in the childhood of Christopher Hampton, the writer.

Conflating various internet searches gives the following as the most likely version of the ship’s history. It was commissioned by a Hamburg-based company in 1914 and launched as the ‘Marie Woerman’ for the Woerman Linie in 1916. After WW1 it was handed over to the Netherlands and renamed the ‘Wadai’. In 1921 it was sold on to Rotterdamsche Loyd, renamed the ‘Tjerimai’ then sold on again to the Egyptian Compagnie Misr de Navigation Maritime who owned it from 1933 to 1950.

It was in those early years that it operated as a fairly luxurious liner, with space for 140 passengers in 1st class, 80 in 2nd and 40 in 3rd. (I imagine that Laura Wilcock would have travelled in first).

It was either requisitioned or chartered by the British as a troopship sometime between 1940 and 1942 (accounts differ). Whichever version is true, it seems that it changed owners again in 1950, only to be scrapped in 1953 or 1954.

So, how does Christopher Hampton come into it?  In ‘A Shipboard Romance’ I wrote that, as a result of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956

Chris and his mother make for Port Said, where they are to join a ship heading for England, and he casually reveals [in the play ‘The White Chameleon’] that they travelled on a ‘battered old cargo vessel’ called ‘El Nil’.

But that was a mishearing on my part. He and his mother did travel on the ‘El Nil’ but it wasn’t on the way back from Egypt.  In a recent exchange of emails he tells me that

the trip on the El Nil was probably in 1953, when we returned to Alex after having been evacuated after the Egyptian revolution. The ship we scrambled aboard in Port Said just before the Suez invasion was called the SS Prome, en route from Australia to London.

He goes on to say that

By the the time my mother and I climbed aboard the EL NIL in Liverpool in the early fifties, it was fairly battered, had a (charming) Egyptian captain and crew and was a cargo ship (in this case transporting train carriages) with facilities for 8 passengers. We ran into a storm quite early on not far south of the Irish sea - and after three increasingly alarming days my mother and a couple of other lady passengers went as a delegation to see the captain to ask him to be so kind as to pull in to the nearest port. He informed them that he was obliged to run before the storm and that the nearest port was now New York.

I'm not sure whether the train carriages were deliberately jettisoned or

washed overboard, but I do have a memory of mountainous seas towering over the ship and another small boy also making the journey had his leg broken by a swinging door propelled by the swell. I suspect it was probably only good seamanship that kept us afloat and finally delivered us to Alex in one piece.

If the El Nil was scrapped in 1954, it might well have been as a result of the damage it sustained, don't you think?

And he ends by saying that

it was a a great pleasure to see the photo of your parents, who make an

exceptionally attractive couple, on board the ship when it was in its

heyday.

It was a pleasure for me, too, to learn that, however battered the poor ship might have become, it still had a charming Egyptian captain and crew. And I would like to think that some of them might well have been the same people who, 18 years before, had looked on with pleasure at the budding romance of the couple who would become my father and mother.