The Water Engineers in Egypt
During the twenty-four years of Lord Cromer’s consulship, writes Peter Mansfield, British engineers were active on the Nile.
In present-day Egypt the direct public references to the British occupation have all been removed by the nationalist tide. Only in Zawalek - the spacious residential quarter of Cairo on a Nile island - a characteristically unpretentious street is still named Avenue Willcocks.
William Willcocks, the kind-hearted but opinionated eccentric who stood up to Cromer, was one of the small group of Anglo-Indian engineers who in restoring and extending Egypt’s hydraulic system created the most enduring monument to the occupation. In 1892, Milner wrote:
‘The longer I remained in Egypt and the more I saw of the country, the more clear it became to me that the work of these men had been the basis of all the material improvement of the past ten years. We at the Finance Office have, so to speak, registered that improvement in our easier budgets and growing surpluses. But it is the engineers who have created it.’1
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