Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance Read Online Free Page B

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