On the evening of 26 July 1956, in a defiant speech to a vast crowd in Alexandria, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser told the story of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who had built the Suez Canal. The name was the codeword: each time he pronounced it, Egyptian teams moved to seize the offices of the Suez Canal Company. By the speech's end the canal — owned by an Anglo-French company, run from Paris, and carrying the oil lifeline of Western Europe — had been nationalised. Nasser was retaliating for the withdrawal, days earlier, of Anglo-American funding for his Aswan High Dam; he was careful to promise shareholders compensation at market price, which made the seizure legally awkward to condemn. In London, Prime Minister Anthony Eden — ill since a botched bile-duct operation, and haunted by the 1930s — cast Nasser as a new Hitler who could not be appeased.
Britain and France wanted the canal back and Nasser gone; France also seethed at his support for Algeria's rebels, and Israel faced fedayeen raids from Egyptian territory and a blockade of the Straits of Tiran. The result was one of the most extraordinary documents of the century: the Protocol of Sèvres. In a villa outside Paris, from 22 to 24 October 1956, Israel's David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres met French ministers and, awkwardly, Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, and wrote down the script. Israel would invade Sinai on 29 October; Britain and France would issue an "impartial" ultimatum ordering both sides away from the canal; Egypt's inevitable refusal would justify Anglo-French intervention to "protect" the waterway. Eden, appalled that anything had been signed, ordered the British copy destroyed. An Israeli copy survived to end the argument decades later — because Eden told the Commons, flatly, that there had been no foreknowledge of the Israeli attack. It was a lie to Parliament.
The run on the pound
Militarily, the script played. Israel swept through Sinai; Anglo-French bombing began on 31 October; paratroops took Port Said on 5 November with the seaborne landing following at dawn. Politically, everything collapsed at once. President Eisenhower — days from re-election, and simultaneously watching Soviet tanks crush the Hungarian uprising — was incandescent at being lied to by allies whose adventure handed Moscow a propaganda gift. The United Nations General Assembly demanded a ceasefire by an overwhelming vote. The killing stroke was financial: a run on sterling gathered pace, and Washington blocked Britain's access to International Monetary Fund support — and dangled oil supplies — until it stopped. On 6–7 November, with troops barely a quarter of the way down the canal, Britain accepted a ceasefire, dragging a furious France with it. Nasser, defeated in the field, had already blocked the canal with some forty scuttled ships; it stayed shut until the spring of 1957, and Britain endured petrol rationing through the winter.
First in, first out
The reckoning was swift and lasting. The United Nations deployed its first ever armed peacekeeping force, UNEF, to the canal — an innovation championed by Canada's Lester Pearson, who won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for it. Eden, his health and authority gone, resigned on 9 January 1957; Harold Macmillan, who as Chancellor had backed the venture and then led the retreat when the reserves drained — "first in, first out", as Harold Wilson jibed — succeeded him and set about repairing the American alliance. Nasser, militarily beaten, emerged politically colossal, the champion of Arab nationalism and the non-aligned world. France drew the opposite lesson from Britain's: never again depend on Washington — a thread that runs to its independent nuclear deterrent and its investment in the new European project, whose founding Treaty of Rome was signed months later. "Suez" entered the language as shorthand for the moment a power discovers its real size. Britain had won the battle in a week, and discovered in a fortnight that the century had moved on without it.
Quiz nuggets
- Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956, using the name "de Lesseps" as the codeword for seizure teams.
- The secret Protocol of Sèvres (22–24 October 1956) scripted Israel's invasion and the Anglo-French "ultimatum"; Eden had the British copy destroyed.
- US refusal to support sterling — blocking IMF help — forced Britain's ceasefire on 6–7 November 1956.
- Lester Pearson won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for creating UNEF, the first UN peacekeeping force.
- Eden resigned on 9 January 1957 and was succeeded by Harold Macmillan — "first in, first out".