1950s Casablanca Real Estate Prices? – ‘like Shanghai in the Old Days’

Old China Hands will be more than familiar with the work of Ann Bridge (formerly Lady Mary Ann Dolling Sanders O’Malley). In 1913 Bridge married Owen St. Clair O’Malley, a British diplomat who was posted to Peking in 1925 for a couple of years. Out of this came Bridge’s classic novels of Peking ex-pat life, Peking Picnic and The Ginger Griffin (which if you haven’t read them you really should). Bridge moved around eastern Europe and later to Portugal. Knowing her China novels well I recently decided to try and read Julia Probyn novels, written later in the 1950s through to her death in 1973. Julia is a well-heeled spy and they are, so far, quite good fun (there’s eight of them in total).

One interesting thing about Bridge’s novels is that China remains a point of reference for her, if not a setting. They also show that that generation that had known China between the wars did regularly reference it when confronted with contemporary events. In the first Julia Probyn novel, A Lighthearted Quest (alternatively sometimes The Lighthearted Quest) our heroine travels briefly to Casablanca sometime a few years after the war. Casablanca is, she is informed by a local banker, going through a real estate boom – she is told, “land values in this place keep soaring like in Shanghai in the old days’.

When in the post-war period people looked around for a massive property boom to compare to they thought instantly of Shanghai in the inter-war period when property prices did indeed boom incredibly. Of course some would say that a few years hence from now we may well be using the same comparison, only to a later Shanghai property boom and resultant crash!!