Cairo's Music For All
Ivor Wynne Jones on how a dusty garage in Cairo was once the unlikely setting for keeping up British morale with 'Music for All'.
An old 750-seat cinema in Cairo's Marouf Street became the unlikely repository for a burst of cultural activity among the British conscripts stationed in the city during the Second World War. Still fondly remembered as 'Music for All', it was the creation of Lady Dorothea Russell Pasha, wife of the city's police chief between 1917-46, Sir Thomas Wentworth Russell Pasha.
Technically never at war and never bombed – with Rommel's Afrika Korps on its doorstep and well outside the Suez Canal Zone which had been retained as a British base under the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 – wartime 'neutral' Cairo was a city where the lights never went out.
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