It is not often that a company gets an opportunity to acquire a piece of history. In 2005, the Tata-controlled Indian Hotels purchased Pierre, a New York hotel, built just before the Great Depression. It was inaugurated with great fanfare in the 1930s, but economic troubles quickly forced it out of business.
A painful business reorganisation followed, but with fortunes dwindling, it was left to Paul Getty with wealth from the Stanford oil business to lead a remarkable turnaround.
Orient-Express, the international luxury hotel resort chain that is Indian Hotels' latest target, does not boast such an impressive pedigree having been established only in the 1980s, but it has something else for which the history-conscious Tata group will be ready to walk the extra mile. A name, a lasting name.
In 1934, the year when Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express was published, the name Orient Express (also called the Venice-Simplon Orient Express) was associated with just a train. A fashionable and popular service running between Paris and Istanbul with stopovers at Venice, Belgrade, Bucharest and Vienna. The modern, post-World War II makeover that resulted in the name being transplanted to a chain of luxury hotel resorts, and had not yet happened.
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Christie's book was inspired by a real-life event, when, en route from Istanbul, the train was trapped in Turkey for six days in deep snow. On another occasion, the author herself was stuck on board for 24 hours due to floods.
Her authorised biography quotes in full a letter to her husband detailing the event. The letter includes descriptions of some passengers on the train who influenced the plot and characters of the book, in particular an American lady, Mrs Hilton, who was the inspiration for Mrs Hubbard.
The book made the train service world famous, but it had acquired a different sort of fame during World War I as trenches littered central Europe's rural landscape and the sound of artillery and the smell of gas poisoned the air and the earth and maimed an entire generation of able-bodied men.
Love, Hate & Propaganda
Robert Baden-Powell, better known to the world as the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, used to travel in the train as a lepidopterist, sketching butterflies and collecting smaples. What was unknown to the world at that time was that Baden Powell's sketch books had coded drawings of enemy fortifications along Yugoslavia's Dalmatian coast. In 1920, the then president of France Paul Deschanel found himself in an embarrassing situation when he stumbled out of the train in his pyjamas and bathroom slippers. With great difficulty, he reached the signal box to be greeted by the signal man. "I am the president of France," Deschanel said. The signal replied without batting an eyelid. "And I am Emperor Napoleon".
Despite its great popularity, one man hated the train and its service with all the intensity that he could muster. Adolf Hitler took particular interest in one car of the service which had been used by the Allies as a conference room when the Germans signed the surrender document on November 11, 1918.
After his troops stormed Paris in 1940, Hitler ordered the same car to be brought to the place of the signing in 1918 before asking the exhausted Allies to surrender. Five years later, as his own defeat appeared inevitable, the car was blown up to prevent it from becoming a symbol of Allied triumph.
The Cold War did not provide any exciting episodes for the train service but it was being increasingly associated writers and movie makers. Graham Greene's Stamboul Train was based on the Venice-Simplon Express, and a cavorting Sean Connery makes a daring escape in the train in the Bond thriller From Russia with Love.
The service finally came to a halt in 1977 (though a super-luxury train by the same still continues to run) but the name has survived thanks to a an American businessman James Sherwood after he purchased Venice based Hotel Ciprani in 1976. Sherwood, who had earlier founded London based shipping company Sea Containers Ltd, then took control of the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which was operated by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits in 1982 after he had bought two of the original carriages of the train at an auction in 1977. After acquiring the tourist train, Sherwood continued to build on the brand and currently operate high end hotels, cruise and train services around the world.
The Cold War did not provide any exciting episodes for the train service but it was being increasingly associated writers and movie makers. Graham Greene's Stamboul Train was based on the Venice-Simplon Express, and a cavorting Sean Connery makes a daring escape in the train in the Bond thriller From Russia with Love.
The service finally came to a halt in 1977 (though a super-luxury train by the same still continues to run) but the name has survived thanks to a an American businessman James Sherwood after he purchased Venice based Hotel Ciprani in 1976. Sherwood, who had earlier founded London based shipping company Sea Containers Ltd, then took control of the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which was operated by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits in 1982 after he had bought two of the original carriages of the train at an auction in 1977. After acquiring the tourist train, Sherwood continued to build on the brand and currently operate high end hotels, cruise and train services around the world.
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