Description

Recently re-published, A Life of Ups and Downs, the memoir written by our Director and Founder Hélène Alexander, is now back in stock in both our Museum Gift Shop and Online.

‘In her memoir, Hélène Alexander recreates a stratum of the lost world of pre-revolutionary Alexandria, and tells us of idyllic childhood years interspersed with visits to Granny Mosseri in her magnificent villa on the bank of the Nile in Cairo, and of summer holidays variously spent near Loch Ness which they would reach after cultural peregrinations across Europe with their loving parents. She also speaks at length of the magical island in the Nile at Aswan which her father bought as a paradisaic getaway for his family and which brings some great names of the time into the memoir: Dame Nellie Melba, Sultan Mohamed Shah the Aga Khan, Somerset Maugham and others!

The memoir takes the reader through Mrs Alexander’s student years in the UK and her married life in London and Scotland. As with the Egyptian elite in general, her untroubled early life was sharply punctuated by the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the ensuing depredations carried out by the new revolutionary government against its resident minority communities.

And – naturally of great interest to all those connected with The Fan Museum – the memoir also details how Mrs Alexander and her husband Dicky, with a group of dedicated supporters, established The Fan Museum, Greenwich, an institution that has earned world renown during its over thirty years of operation.’