Paunchy, balding and bloated, Farouk was thirty-two when he lost his throne. The Egyptian monarchy had been set up by the British in the 1920s and Farouk had been king for sixteen years since succeeding his father, Fuad I, in 1936. Sir Miles Lampson, the British high commissioner, described him in a report to the Foreign Office in 1937 as ‘uneducated, lazy, untruthful, capricious, irresponsible and vain, though with a quick superficial intelligence and charm of manner’. Farouk’s attempts to introduce reforms made little progress against the Egyptian establishment of politicians and major landowners. He also butted his head vainly against the British and by 1949 he was despised at home and abroad as an ineffectual playboy.

By that time a group of Egyptian army and airforce officers was secretly planning a revolution to get rid of both the British and the entrenched Egyptian regime. They had all been stung by ignominious defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and they blamed the King, the politicians and the corruption endemic in the system. The Free Officers, as they called themselves, gathered substantial support among the officer corps. Their leader was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat was one of them. Many of them had been at the Military Academy in Cairo in the later 1930s and, according to Sadat, a secret officers’ revolutionary society had been founded as early as 1939. Nasser was a teacher at the Military Academy in the 1940s and influenced many up-and-coming young officers.

The Egyptian army had long been controlled by the king, but Farouk’s scandalous and grotesquely self-indulgent lifestyle and the belief that some of his closest associates had profited by supplying defective weapons and munitions to the forces had eroded the army’s loyalty. At the end of 1951 the Free Officers ran their own slate of candidates for election to the board of directors of the Officers’ Club in Cairo. Their candidate for club president was General Mohammed Neguib, one of the few high-ranking officers who had distinguished himself in the war. The King personally endorsed rival candidates of his own, but the Free Officers’ candidates won.

Farouk regarded his election defeat as evidence of a seditious conspiracy in the officer corps, as indeed it was. His efforts to recover control drove the plotters to drastic action. They feared that their counsels had been penetrated by informers and that they were in imminent danger of arrest.

The decision to attempt a coup seems to have been taken early in the morning of July 22nd. At midnight, while the court was enjoying a late champagne and caviar picnic in Alexandria, some 200 officers and 3,000 troops took control of army headquarters and put senior officers under arrest. Troops occupied the airport, the Cairo broadcasting station and the telecommunications centre, and tanks and infantry patrolled the Cairo streets. There was no opposition and at 7am on July 23rd Sadat announced the take-over on Cairo radio.

Farouk, at his summer palace in Alexandria, has been criticised for not immediately taking command of the troops there. Apparently, he turned that course down for fear of causing civil war and bloodshed. Instead he appealed to the American ambassador for help, but the Americans had no confidence in him and the CIA had been encouraging the plotters, whose armoured columns now took control of Alexandria. The British force in the Canal Zone made no move to interfere. Farouk betook himself to the Ras el-Tin palace by the western harbour in Alexandria, but the coup leaders ordered the captain of his seagoing yacht, the Mahroussa, not to sail without their orders. (...)

2010 – WikiLeaks publishes classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history.

1984 – Salyut 7 cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.

1976 – Viking program: Viking 1 takes the famous Face on Mars photo.

1965 – Bob Dylan goes electric as he plugs in at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major change in folk and rock music.

1946 – At Club 500 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stage their first show as a comedy team.

1897—Amelia Earhart is born.

1951 - Lynda Carter born.
 

(...) Here’s a closing coincidence. In 1932, reacting to news that Einstein would move to Princeton, New Jersey, to take a position at the new Institute for Advanced Study, the Woman Patriot Corporation, a right-wing organization opposing feminism and socialism, lobbied the Department of State to bar him from the country. In a single-spaced sixteen-page letter, the organization complained that Einstein was a militant pacifist intent on subverting the Constitution. Then, when Einstein visited the United States consulate in Berlin to obtain his visa, he was insultingly interrogated about his politics. Appalled by the treatment of such a prominent scientist, a group of prominent women in New York (including the wife of the president of General Electric) subsequently called for the resignation of the consul general, who, they said, “has humiliated America and made it a laughing stock second only”—to what?—“to the Scopes trial in Tennessee.”

1946 – King David Hotel bombing: A Zionist underground organisation, the Irgun, bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the civil administration and military headquarters for Mandate Palestine, resulting in 91 deaths.

1933 – Wiley Post becomes the first person to fly solo around the world traveling 15,596 miles (25,099 km) in seven days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.

1899—Birth of Ernest Hemingway

Nationale Feestdag van België (sinds 1831)
National Holiday of Belgium (since 1831)

1873—James Gang held up The Rock Island Express in Adair, Iowa, making it the first train robbery in the US.

 Red_Dragon wrote:Regrettable.  Sad.

2011 – NASA's Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135.

1969 – Space Race: Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission (July 20 in North America).

 Red_Dragon wrote: 

Jacob's Ladder 

1977 – The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.

1976 – The American Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.