"THE MOORHOUSE AFFAIR"

Circumstances of the death of Second Lieutenant Anthony Moorhouse
1st Btn West Yorkshire Regt in Port Said - December 1956

The “Moorhouse Affair” was a military confrontation between the United Kingdom and Egypt over the abduction and murder of Second Lieutenant Anthony Moorhouse in Port Said, Egypt, following the end of British military operations in the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Anthony Gerard Moorhouse (8 December 1935 – 13 December 1956), a graduate of Stonyhurst College, was a Second Lieutenant on National Service in the 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment. His father, Francis Gerard Moorhouse owned a jam-manufacturing company in Leeds, Yorkshire – Moorhouse’s Jam. Moorhouse was stationed in Port Said after the 7 November 1956 ceasefire.

On 10 December 1956 Moorhouse had led a raid in Port Said on the premises of an Egyptian dentist and arrested seven Egyptian commandos. On the following morning he returned to the scene alone and without military authority where he was surrounded in his army Land Rover by a crowd of Egyptians, one of whom took his pistol. He was overpowered and driven off in a civilian car, later located by British forces.

Lieutenant General Hugh Stockwell, the British Task Force commander and commander of the British Army’s II Corps, ordered a house-to-house search of a five-block area and for all males over the age of 15 found there to be detained and questioned. The searches were unsuccessful in locating the missing officer.

The United Nations also made efforts to obtain information on Moorhouse’s disappearance. On 22 December 1956 the kidnappers allowed Major Wiks, a Norwegian UN officer, to see a man in a British uniform claiming he was Moorhouse. After the encounter the UN officer reported that Moorhouse was “alive and well”. However, uncertainty remained.

A family friend and former army colleague of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the British Member of Parliament Colonel Cyril Banks, traveled to Cairo in an effort to establish the missing officer’s fate. On Christmas Eve, 24 December 1956, he finally had a meeting with President Nasser who told him that Moorhouse had died of suffocation when held captive.

On 31 December 1956, Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations received a report from the Egyptian Army that, after his capture, Moorhouse was kept with the intention of exchanging him for Egyptian prisoners. When British troops began to search for him he had been locked in a small metal cupboard; his captors returned once to feed him but, as the search intensified, they felt unsafe to return and he was left for two days. When they finally returned they found him dead, apparently from suffocation, and buried him in the house
where he had been kept prisoner.

According to an account made in 2006 by one of the Egyptian kidnappers, Moorhouse was captured and then taken to a safe house where he was trussed, gagged and hidden under the floor. It was never intended to kill him, but to kidnap him as a hostage to exchange against prisoners held by the British in Port Said. However, he was left alone and bound by his abductors for four days due to the curfew and constant British patrols, and when they returned they found him dead. He was then buried secretly in the Port Said graveyard. In late December 1956, Banks returned to Egypt to recover Moorhouse’s body and the British government asked the UN and Swiss government to mediate to recover the body with the Egyptian authorities.

The Egyptians complied with the UN request on 2 January 1957 and, on 4 January 1957, Moorhouse’s body was flown to Naples, Italy, for formal identification. On 5 January 1957, British pathologists from Scotland Yard carried out an examination of teeth, scars, measurements, etc established beyond doubt that the body was that of Second Lieutenant Moorhouse. The body was flown back to the UK on 6 January 1957.

Lieutenant Moorhouse was buried with full military honours in Lawnswood Cemetery in Leeds on 10 January 1957, after a service at Leeds Cathedral. His memory marked in the name of a road, “Moorhouse Close”, in Chester, Cheshire. A small plaque refers to his “heroic death during the Suez Crisis” at the right entrance to this cul-de-sac.

This tragedy “aroused furious anger in Britain” and became “a national symbol of Egyptian deceit”. It led to widespread criticism of the Eden government from opponents of the Suez invasion. When residents of Port Said planned to turn the house where Moorhouse had been held into a museum, British public opinion was further inflamed. Moorhouse’s death also raised questions regarding President Nasser’s authority and the effectiveness of the United Nations.

TAKEN FROM THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS – JANUARY 12, 1957

THE BODY OF LIEUTENANT MOORHOUSE: THE JOURNEY FROM PORT SAID

The body of 2nd- Lieutenant Anthony Moorhouse, who was kidnapped by Egyptians at Port Said on December 11, was flown to England from Naples on January 6. The funeral was due to take place at Leeds Cathedral on January 10, and the body was to be buried at Lawnswood Cemetery with military honours. The body has been handed over by the Egyptians to United Nation officials at Port Said on January 2. On January 4 it was flown to Naples in a transport Aircraft of the Royal Canadian Air Force attached to the United Nations Emergency Force. A team of medical experts, including the Moorhouse family doctor, had been flown to Naples to carry out an autopsy. The body was identified as that of Lieutenant Moorhouse, and it was reported that the British experts confirmed the death was caused by asphyxia, though no official statement concerning this had been made at the time of writing.

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