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associated trading companies, has always been very much a family concern. The original société à responsabilité limité was registered by my grandfather, Robert Howell, in the early 1920’s. Before that, since the turn of the century in fact, he had grown licorice and tobacco on big stretches of land held under a firman of the Turkish Sultan, Abdul, in what used to be called the Levant.
    The land, in the vilayet of Latakia, was granted to him as a reward for political services rendered to the Ottoman court. The exact nature of the services rendered I have never been able to determine. My father once told me, vaguely, that “they had something to do with a government bond issue”, but he was unable, or unwilling, to amplify that statement. The original land grant described Grandfather’s occupation as that of “entrepreneur-negotiator”, which in Imperial Turkey could have meant many different things. I do know that he was always very well in, in Constantinople, and that even during World War I, when as an Englishman he was interned by the Turks, his internment amounted to little more than house arrest. Moreover, the land remained in his name, as, too, did the businesses there - a tannery and a flour mill - which he had acquired before the war. “Johnny Turk is a gentleman”, he used to say.
    With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French Mandate over the areas now known as Syria and Lebanon, some changes had to be made. Although his tenure of the lands he had previously held was eventually confirmed by the new regime, his experience under the French colonial administrators - less gentlemanly than Johnny Turk by all accounts - had taught him a sharp lesson. Personal ownership of a business made one vulnerable. He made arrangements to acquire a corporate identity in Syria and to transfer gradually most of his subsidiary businesses, chiefly those which did not depend directly on landholding, to Cyprus.
    Grandfather died in 1933, and my father, John Howell took control. He had been in charge of the Cyprus office in Famagusta, which had been established originally to find cargoes for the fleet of coasters which the parent company owned and operated out of Latakia.
    As his Cyprus office had grown in importance my father’s interest in the mainland of Asia Minor had waned. He had married in Cyprus. My sisters and I were born in Famagusta and baptized in the Greek Orthodox faith. My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon but, with a Lebanese-Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English. There are lots of families like ours, rich and poor, in the Middle East. Ethnically, I suppose, my sisters and I could reasonably be described as “Eastern Mediterranean”. Personally I prefer the simpler though usually pejorative term, “Levantine mongrel”. Mongrels are sometimes more intelligent than their respectable cousins; they also tend to adapt more readily to strange environments; and in conditions of extreme adversity, they are among those most likely to survive.
    The World War II years were difficult ones for our Syrian interests. Those in Cyprus gave little trouble. The coasters, prudently reregistered in Famagusta before the war, were all on charter to the British. They lost three of them off Crete, but their government war-risk insurance covered us nicely; I think we even made money on the deal. In Syria, though, it was a different story. The fighting between the Allies and the Vichy French brought business virtually to a standstill. The demand for liquorice root and Latakia tobacco at that time was, to put it mildly, minimal. In 1942, when the Allies started driving the enemy out of North Africa, father moved our head office to Alexandria and registered a new holding company, Howell General Trading Ltd. The Syrian and Cypriot businesses became subsidiaries. In that year, too, I was sent around the Cape to purgatory in England. Had I been