“DESERTED DESERT”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 76, Issue 6480, 20 February 1948, Page 5

“DESERTED DESERT”

WHERE MAADI CAMP WAS - VISITOR FROM EGYPT “Maadi camp was used for a short time after the war by British refugees from Palestine, but the last time I saw it it was just another part of a deserted, derelict desert,” said Dr E. L. Farrow, a medical missionary of the Egypt General Mission visiting New Zealand on furlough, in an interview at Christchurch. Dr Farrow was educated at Edinburgh and has been in Egypt for 21 years. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, with the rank of major, and was mentioned in dispatches. Dr Farrow said the New Zealand Club buildings in Cairo had been turned into flats for civilians. All the Army barracks formerly occupied by British forces flew the Egyptian flag. The only area where British Jroops were now stationed was from Tel-el-Kebir to the canal. Although the long-standing agitation that Great Britain should evacuate the canal area and the Sudan was still being carried on, the majority of the Egyptians were not anti-British, said Dr Farrow. Only a small, noisy minority of about 10%, which lived in the towns, was anti-British. The end of the war and the evacuation of troops from Egypt had the effect of creating a certain amount of unemployment, and in Alexandria there had been a demonstration urging that the British be asked to return. The British Government had made it compulsory for foreign businesses to employ at least 75% Egyptians. One Englishman he knew in the motor trade had been unable to carry on under these conditions. Most of Dr Farrow’s time with the Egyptian General Mission has been spent at the mission hospital at Shebin-el-Kanatar, which was well known to large numbers of members of the 2nd N.Z.E.F.