Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.
Into this scenario, at a most opportune time, walked the Levitt family, father Abraham and sons Bill and Alfred. Bill Levitt, who took over the family real estate development business from his father, saw a chance to meet the country’s pressing accommodation needs by mass producing houses at lower cost. Levitt and Sons, as the company was called, had already entered the field pre-war, initially successfully but had failed in its first foray into the high-volume sector✱. Venturing into postwar low-cost housing bore a certain irony for the Levitts – as they had began their career in property development during the Depression building and selling high-end, custom-made houses to upper middle class people (the Strathmore project in Manhasset, Long Island). Indeed, the years spent making and selling exclusive, upscale properties to the gentry of New York made the family rich[‘William Levitt Facts’, (Your Dictionary), www.biography.yourdictionary.com].
Levittown, New York The first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.
A revolutionary approach to housing Prior to the advent of the Levittown model, house construction was done in a unitary fashion, a building company would work on a new home until completed and then move on to the next project (the average builder had been constructing only about four to five homes a year). William and Alfred Levitt✫, building on the mass-production experience of Californian builders, devised something radically different, a totally new division of labour to speed up the process dramatically. Construction was divided into 27 separate steps or operations, each worker or specialised team of workers would complete one step and then move to the next house to repeat the step there, and so on (for example one worker’s job would be the singular task of going from house to house bolting washing machines onto the floor all day!)[Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531].
Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.
Vertical integration Key to the spectacular success of Levitt & Sons (at its peak the company was constructing homes at the staggering rate of one every 16 minutes!), and its rapid prosperity, was the way it achieved a vertical integration of the industry…the company purchased its own forests in Oregon and started its own mills to provide the lumber it needed; a lot of the parts came in prefabricated; Levitt & Sons even made its own nails. It also purchased materials in mass quantities thus avoiding markups on prices paid [Schuyler]. By buying directly from the manufacturer, Levitt’s saved through cutting out the middleman in the process. Kenneth Jackson credited the Levitt brothers with “transforming a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process” [KT Jackson, Crabtree Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)].
Integral to Bill Levitt’s cunning strategy for success was his exclusion of labour unions from his projects and his capacity to persuade lawmakers into softening industry regulations making Levittown easier to achieve [‘William Levitt Facts’]. Another huge advantage in boosting the success of Levitt’s projects was the securing of mortgage financing incentives from the federal government (veterans could buy into the estates with little or no down-payment) [‘Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)’, (Suzanne Lashner Dayanim, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org].
Levittown, Pa. ca.1959
Levittown, Pennsylvania
The second Levittown (commenced in 1952) was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. The Levitt houses built had limited exterior variations – six types: the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, the Country Clubber – but again they were moderately priced with low down-payments. At project’s end, 1958, a total of 17,311 homes had been built on the site [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Growth and expansion of the prototype Eventually the Levittown concept of housing estates extended elsewhere – both far and wide. In Burlington County, New Jersey, Levittown Willingboro started in 1958, followed by Levittown Largo in Maryland, 1963, and two other Maryland communities, Bowie (1964) and Crofton (1970). As well, a Levittown in Puerto Rico was built in 1963, and two “Gallic Levittowns” in Northern France in the 1960s, Lésigny and Mennecy (both close to Paris)⍉. The Levitt covenants William Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].
There was another more controversial Levitt covenant, this one with grossly inequitable and far-reaching overtones. From the onset of the first Levittown, Bill Levitt refused outright to allow African-Americans to buy into the company’s housing estates. Levitt, a Jew, copped a lot of flak for his stance on excluding Black citizens, including Black veterans (see below FN re the dilemma of his Jewishness). I will detail this less edifying side of the Levittown phenomena in Part II of the blog.
Footnote: A “Gentlemen’s Agreement”:
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day
William Levitt’s discrimination against Non-Whites in Levittown was preceded by a similar policy against his own race in the earlier, North Strathmore housing project. Despite being Jewish himself (and a generous benefactor of the state of Israel and an organiser of Jewish-American funding for Israel during the Six-Day War) Levitt in his business dealings would not buck the local practice of real-estate agents refusing to sell to Jews – the unspoken “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among Gentiles to discriminate against Jews [‘William Levitt Facts’].
__________________________________ ✱ building a 1,600-shack community in Norfolk, Virginia, which still had unsold units in 1950 [‘William Levitt’ Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org] ✫ William was overall the boss of the business as the financier and promoter, whilst Alfred created the mass production techniques, designed the homes and the developments’ layouts. Father, Abraham, pretty much early on took a step back, ceding the running of the enterprise to oldest son Bill. This allowed the elder Levitt (a horticulturist by training) free rein to pursuit his pet interest, taking charge of the Levitt projects’ landscaping. ⍉ Levitt designed tract-homes can be found also in Buffalo Grove and Vernon Hills (Illinois) and Fairfax (Virginia)
𓂊𓂉𓂊
𓇽 see also the October 2021 blog Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittownon www.7dayadventurer.com Lakewood Park, a mega-sized, rapidly constructed Californian housing development in the 1950s—the brainchild of three Jewish American developers—operated what was effectively a (unwritten) covenant discriminating against non-white prospective home-buyers.
Felix the cat,
The wonderful, wonderful cat! (Popular theme song lyrics)
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝
❛ I made the cat and the cat made me! ❜ ~ Pat Sullivan
↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝
The model for a certain cartoon mouse …
The best part of a decade before Mickey Mouse made his first appearance on a celluloid screen and then went on to establish himself as the international popular culture phenomenon par excellence, there was Felix the Cat. The parentage of Mickey Mouse is not a topic that has generated the same level of controversy as that of Felix, which over the last forty years has been a matter for much impassioned cross-Pacific conjecture.
BF – before Felix… Felix, the anthropomorphic black cat with the massive white eyes and the broadest of broad grins, was not the first animated cat to grace the screens of movie theatres. That honour went to a mouser called Krazy Kat, the conception of cartoonist George Herriman…first appearing as a comic strip character in the New York Evening Journal, Krazy Kat debuted on movie screens in 1916 in a silent short featuring the eponymous cat and his brick-throwing ‘frenemy’ Ignatz Mouse.
Master Tom, prototype Not long after, Felix had his beginnings in the prototype form of Thomas Cat. In 1917 Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan produced a short, animated silent film about a black cat, The Tail of Thomas Cat, through his own New York studio. By 1919 ‘Thomas Cat’ had morphed into ‘Master Tom’ in the short Feline Follies. After a follow-up entry (The Musical Mews) again starring Master Tom, Sullivan’s third short of 1919 (Adventures ofFelix the Cat) changed the name of the ‘Tom’ character to the name he would henceforth be universally known as – Felix. Despite the seemingly clear lineage between Thomas Cat and Felix, some American animation historians discredit the connexion, citing Thomas Cat’s non-anthropomorphised nature, the uncertainty of his fur colour, the fact that he loses his tail fighting a rooster without ever being able to recover it (cf. the difference with Felix who can magically transform his tail into other forms) [‘Felix the Cat – McGill CS’, www.cs.mcgill.ca].
The chief animator of Sullivan’s film studio was Otto Messmer, but because of Sullivan’s proprietorial role in the process of animation production it was Sullivan’s name alone that appeared on the credits of films (this was a common business practice in animation at the time), despite Messmer as principal artist conceivably doing a weighty share of the studio’s artwork. After Sullivan’s premature death in 1933 his relatives in Australia took ownership of Felix. It wasn’t until 44 years later, that Messmer in an interview with animation historian John Canemaker belatedly made his claim to have been the originator of the famous feline.
Conflicting stories of Felix’s origin Sullivan maintained all along that he was the creator – on a visit back to Australia in 1925 he told the Melbourne Argus newspaper that the idea for Felix had come to him when his wife brought a stray cat into Sullivan’s studio one day (as was her wont). On other occasions he said that the inspiration came from a Rudyard Kipling story, ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. For the name of his cartoon creation Sullivan explained that he had drawn on his native Antipodes… Australia Felix was a term in use from the 19th century to describe the western districts of the state of Victoria (also later the name of an Australian novel by Henry Handel Richardson). Another source for the cat’s name came from a contemporary fellow cartoonist – appearing in print in 1936 the cartoonist affirmed that Sullivan told him that he derived the name from a black West Indian-born boxer living and fighting in Australia called Peter Felix whom Sullivan was acquainted with (the animator being a big enthusiast of boxing) [Pat Sullivan – I made the cat and the cat made me’,www.vixenmagazine.com].
Messmer by contrast had a wholly different story of Felix’s ‘birth’ and evolution. He recounted to Canemaker for the latter’s 1977 documentary film that because Sullivan’s studio was busy at the time, he (Messmer) went away and by himself at home drew the figure that was to become Felix. He perceived of the mischievous black cat as a kind of animated Charlie Chaplin. Messmer explained that the name “Felix” was thought up by a Paramount Magazine journalist from the Latin words felis (cat) and felix (happy). Canemaker and other contemporary American animation historians have been undisguisedly dismissive of Sullivan’s creative contribution, backing Messmer’s claim, subscribing to the view that Messmer ‘ghosted’ Felix for Sullivan who was preoccupied with his entrepreneurial role (inexhaustibly promoting and marketing Felix to the world)✱.
Contesting Felix Not surprisingly the strongest argument for endorsing Sullivan as Felix’s true creator comes from Australia, the animator-cum-entrepreneur’s homeland. Australian cartoonists, including some who knew Sullivan, have drawn attention to a comment during an interview when he visited Sydney in 1925 (quoted in the local papers): Sullivan stated that his practice was to ‘do the “key drawings” and leave the rest to a staff’ [Vixen Magazine, op.cit.]. Moreover, the Australian Cartoonist Association have argued that the distinctive lettering style of Sullivan can be detected on the Felix artwork, eg, in Feline Follies (Felix’s first incarnation), the lettering used matches examples of Sullivan’s handwriting. Additionally, certain speech bubbles in the short uses expressions and terms which have distinctive Australian usage, especially ” ‘Lo Mum! “. Australian animators, argue that had Otto Messmer conceived and created the prototype Felix film, as he claimed in 1977, he would have used the traditional American form of shorthand for mother, ‘mom’ (not ‘mum’) and he would not have dropped the ‘h’ in ‘hello’ which is more characteristically Australian or British◰. [‘Reclaiming Felix the Cat in the Picture Gallery’, (Judy Nelson, Exhibition, 1-May to 7-Aug 2005, State Library of NSW, Sydney),www.pandora.nla.gov.au]
Animator Ub Iwerks drawing animated rodent extraordinaire, M Mouse ▶
Sublime collaborations Whether it was Messmer or Sullivan who was the true creator of Felix we may never know for sure, given that the episode occurred around 100 years ago and both claimants have been long dead. For a very long time the reflected glory for the creation of the animal superstar even more famous than Felix, Mickey Mouse, was almost exclusively falling on Walt Disney. Only in a relatively recent period, historically speaking, has the role of animator Ub Iwerks been properly acknowledged. Today even the Disney Corporation (metonymically known as the Mouse House), more or less unequivocally recognises Iwerks as the real creator of the mouse. But this doesn’t diminish Walt’s integral role from the origin point in developing Mickey’s personality and traits (not to mention the story lines). Similarly with Sullivan and Messmer, the fairest course may be to attribute causation, Felix’s genesis and transformation to the screen, to what was quintessentially a collaborative effort between two creative individuals.
PostScript A: Felix, a template worth copying One green-eyed embryonic animator in the US in the mid-Twenties very much aware of Felix’s ascending star was Walt Disney. Disney’s earliest innovation in the field was his Alice Comedies where he inserted a human figure “Alice of Wonderland” into an animated landscape. As foil to Alice, the main animated figure in these shorts was Julius, a cat with a particularly strong resemblance to Felix…basically a clone of Felix [‘Felix the Cat’, (Ian Gordon), St James Encyclopaedia of Popular Culture (2002)]. Disney’s later followed up Julius with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (a product he ultimately lost creative control of) and then lucked in again, hitting the jackpot with Mickey Mouse…Oswald and Mickey were both different animals to Felix but again the physical similarities to the (original) Felix are there – albeit with reshaped faces and ears.
PostScript B: Felix, the image de jour to launch a new medium Felix with his funny, all-too-fallible anthropomorphic ways (fond of a drink or two in ‘speakeasies’, given to making whoopee and his general hijinks and manic spurts in surrealistic situations)✪ suited the “Jazz Age” to a tee! [Michael Cart, ‘The Cat with the Killer Personality’, New York Times, 31-Mar-1991, www.nytimes.com]. Capitalising on Felix’s success on the big screen (upward of 150 animated shorts made in the 1920s), Sullivan introduced a comic strip version of Felix in 1923 (syndicated by King Features 1923-1967). Everyone wanted a piece of the famous celluloid feline, the US Navy’s Bombing Squadron adopted Felix as its insignia, his countenance was used as the logo for car dealerships, he was the mascot for the New York Yankees at one time and for many high schools [‘Felix the Cat’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The universal appeal of Felix made him the prime candidate to introduce television to Americans…in 1928 broadcaster RCA choose a papier-mâché doll of Felix as THE image for testing the new technology [‘The First Star of Television’, MZTV Museum, www.mztv.com].
PostScript C: A marketing bonanza
Felix as a commodity had an electrifying impact on the world of celebrity merchandising in the 1920s – the iconic image of the black cat popped up on toys, dolls, ceramics, postcards, cigarette cards, jigsaw puzzles, clothing, pencils, sheet music and so on (earning Sullivan an estimated $100,000 a year) [Dictionary of Sydney staff writer, Felix the cat, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/felix-the-cat, viewed 6th Oct 2018]
﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌ ✱ the generally accepted view of Sullivan’s character and behaviour, which was very far from exemplary, seems to have jaundiced the opinion held by some commentators (particularly Canemaker) as to the merits of the Australian animator’s achievements ◰ as Nelson et al have argued, these discrepancies in the case for Messmer have not been accounted for satisfactorily by American animation historians including Canemaker ✪ this said, Felix could also be contemplative at times, deep in thought, working things out, solving problems…a cat for all seasons!
When the dust and sand settled after the lightning strike of the Middle East Six-Day War in 1967, there was an unanticipated outcome with profound ramifications for the Suez Canal. The upshot of that briefest of brief wars left Israel in control of the Sinai Peninsula which included the eastern bank of the Suez waterway✱. Egypt’s response to this unpalatable circumstance was swift and long-reaching.
Immediately at the cessation of hostilities each side of the Suez Canal was cordoned off, Israeli troops massing on the east (Sinai) side and Egyptian troops on the west (African) side. The Egyptian government reacted to the situation by effectively immobilising access to the canal…ships, dredges and other floating water-crafts were sunk to block both ends of the waterway, the task of blockading was completed by placing a number of sea mines in the canal to render navigation an unviable (and dangerous) option.
Aside from bringing an immediate halt to any vessels seeking to use the passage, the unilateral action had the effect of trapping existing shipping already within the canal zone. At the time of the war there was a number of foreign ships, mainly freighters and cargo carriers, steaming their way north through the international waterway. Unable to proceed, those fourteen merchant vessels gathered together in the Great Bitter Lake section of the canal (the widest portion and the midway-point of the waterway). Great Bitter Lake (sat-map) ⇗
The Yellow Fleet
As time passed it became evident that Egypt was intending to block the canal indefinitely. The ships settled down for a long stay and the ships’ masters and owners devised a strategy to cope with the delay. The crews on the vessels were rotated, initially after three months the original crews were relieved, and then this process was repeated at periodical intervals. Over the next eight years (that’s how long the canal was blockaded and the fourteen ships were stranded in the Bitter Lake) some of the original crew members even returned for a second stint in the canal. So long were the stranded vessels exposed to the harsh elements of the region that the nickname the Yellow Fleet was ascribed to them – due to the fact that over months of remaining motionless the decks of the ships would become completely caked in windblown sand from the adjacent Sinai desert [‘The Yellow Fleet’, www.history.com].
Composition of the cargo container fleet: Vessel nationalities
The stranded Bitter Sea flotilla comprised a miniature “United Nations” of vessels – of the fourteen merchant ships, four were from the UK, two each from West Germany, Sweden, the US and Poland, and one each from Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In addition to these fourteen entrapped vessels, one other container ship, the Canadian SS Observer, was also immobilised by the Egyptian blockage, but it was separated from the others and forced to anchor in Lake Timsah (AKA Crocodile Lake), near the city of Ismailia.
From the perspective of the ship-owners (who included large shipping companies like the Blue Star Line and Blue Funnel Line), the main priority was to protect as far as possible the valuable cargo onboard the containers. The ships, despite their anchored status needed to be maintained regularly so that they would be immediately ready to go in the event of the Egyptian government lifting the blockage [‘Meet the seafarers who were stranded in the Six-Day War’, (Simon Edge), 03-Jun-2017, www.express.co.uk/].
Despite the difficulties faced by the crews (the presence of Egyptian police guarding the vessels; being stopped from maintaining radio contact with the outside world; the frustration of being confined and entrapped in one spot), the seafarers involved made a really good fist of keeping up morale by keeping busy and engaged in fractional and social activities. Organisational skills were put to good use, in October 1967 a meeting of all officers and crews members on the British MS Melampus resulted in the formation of the Great Bitter Lake Association.
1968: Year of the parallel olympics
Given the trying working conditions that prevailed, the merchant shipmen (there was a solitary woman among all of the crews of workers, a Swedish stewardess) made the best of their time in the Suez…in 1968 with the Summer Olympics playing out in Mexico City the seamen were inspired to concoct their own version of the great quadrennial international sporting event. The GBLA ‘Mini-Olympics’ included the disciplines of sailing (naturally!), diving, soccer, shooting, archery, sprinting, high jump and weight-lifting✧. The ‘athletes’ got right into the spirit of the event, the UK newspaper the Daily Express even sponsored the games, providing kits, footballs and trophies. Overall “winner of the Olympics” was Poland, followed by West Germany [‘Stranded in the Six-Day War: the story of 14 ships trapped for eight years in the Suez Canal – by Cath Senker’, (Company of Master Mariners of Australia),www.mastermariners.org.au/]. Outside of Olympics time crew members would keep active with matches of football (soccer) on the largest of the vessels, MS Port Invercargill.
Inventiveness and ingenuity of the crews
Improvised Olympic games, football and boat races was one way of making the time pass enjoyably, another more imaginative pursuit was getting into the stamp business! The Yellow Fleet marked its prolonged confinement in the Suez by hand-making and issuing its own stamps…envelopes sent home to family and friends would bear the frank of the Great Bitter Lake Association. These labels were purely decorative, without postal validity and needed the accompanying legal issue of Egypt for delivery – however some letters did apparently make it to their destinations bearing only the GBLA frank! GBLA stamps often contained eagles and seagulls, birds of flight symbolising freedom and escape which the crews undoubtedly longed for whilst passing their days [‘Maritime Topics On Stamps: The GBL Locals!’, (Bjoern Moritz), www.shipsonstamps.org/].
The fleet also maintained its own trading system among the various vessels. The container ship crews fed themselves initially from the plentiful fresh food in the cargos. Beer, wine and other day-to-day necessities were supplied by trade with visiting Egyptian chandlers (suppliers for boats). Captain Kensett of the Port Invercargill estimated that they had to be upward of 1.5 million empty beer bottles at the bottom of the Great Bitter Lake. The food that perished after the refrigeration finally gave out also got dumped overboard [Simon Edge].
As time went on…and on, the situation needed to be rationalised of course. During 1968 the MV Agapenor‘s owner, Blue Funnel Line, considered abandoning the vessel, but the insurers vetoed that! Later on, the Agapenor was placed in the care of the nearby Czech freighter Lednice [Gordon Frickers, ‘Agapenor Manoeuvring in Bombay (Mumbai) Roads’, (Artist Gordon Frickers), 31-Mar-2009, www.frickers.co.uk]. The collection of ships were moored closer together. Consolidation continued with a view to reducing costs to the companies, by June 1969 the number of personnel maintaining and protecting the ships was scaled down to around 200, by Christmas of the same year there was just a skeletal crew of 50 present [Edge].
Egyptian president and Arab unity strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970 and gradually the government in Cairo started to soften its hard-line stance on the blockade (plus there was the worrying consideration of the ongoing lost revenue from the canal tolls that Egypt was suffering). For the last couple of years of the closure a Norwegian company took over the management of the fleet. By 1974 work had begun on the extremely onerous task of clearing the scuttled ships and sea mines before shipping in the canal could resume. American naval units and British and French minesweepers assisted the operation, with the salvage job finished by Californian company Murphy Pacific Marine Salvage. With the Suez Canal finally opened again, eleven of the remaining thirteen vessels⊟ were unable to continue their journey unaided, only the two German container ships were capable of making it back to their destination (Hamburg) under its own power.
PostScript: a ‘new’ Suez Canal?
Even by the time of the canal closure in 1967 Suez had become an inferior sea transportation route. Since the 1950s the advent of the supertanker, which is capable of carrying four to six times that of the smaller ships, has been a game-changer. The canal however has been unsuitable for supertankers being too narrow and insufficiently deep in most of the watercourse [‘A “new” Suez Canal shapes up for 1980s’, (John Pearson & Ken Anderson), Popular Mechanics, May 1975]. Accordingly the Egyptian government first mooted the prospect of a new canal in 1974. After many obstacles and delays a multi-billion dollar project was launched. Finally in 2015, a ‘new’ section of the Suez Canal was completed…increasing the canal capacity to accommodate a two lane shipping route (ie, two commercial-scale vessels are now able to pass one another in opposite directions over a longer stretch of the canal) [‘Suez Canal Area Development Project’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
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✱ along with the Golan Heights (taken from Syria) and the West Bank of Jerusalem (wrestled off the Kingdom of Jordan)
✧ oddly swimming is not listed as one of the GBLA’s ‘Olympic’ sports, especially puzzling as the MS Killara (from Sweden) had an onboard pool!
⊟ the US-owned African Glen had been hit and sunk during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The war came very close to the stranded Yellow Fleet as the Israeli counter-attack took place at the northern end of the Bitter Lake
Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.
Levittown, New York
Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.
Levittown, Pa. ca.1959
‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day
__________________________________
Egyptian president and Arab unity strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1970 and gradually the government in Cairo started to soften its hard-line stance on the blockade (plus there was the worrying consideration of the ongoing lost revenue from the canal tolls that Egypt was suffering). For the last couple of years of the closure a Norwegian company took over the management of the fleet. By 1974 work had begun on the extremely onerous task of clearing the scuttled ships and sea mines before shipping in the canal could resume. American naval units and British and French minesweepers assisted the operation, with the salvage job finished by Californian company Murphy Pacific Marine Salvage. With the Suez Canal finally opened again, eleven of the remaining thirteen vessels⊟ were unable to continue their journey unaided, only the two German container ships were capable of making it back to their destination (Hamburg) under its own power.
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