Untold lives blog

On 17 August 1932, the Italian Fascist newspaper, Il Lavoro Fascista, reported that a special envoy to ‘Abd al-‘Azīz bin ‘Abd al-Raḥmān bin Fayṣal Āl Sa‘ūd, King of the Hejaz (and soon to be proclaimed King of Saudi Arabia), had arrived in Turin for a special visit. Such a visit might have been expected, given the fact that treaties of friendship and commerce between the two countries had been signed earlier that year.

IOR/L/PS/12/2062

However, all was not as it seemed. A translation of the article had been sent by the Foreign Office to His Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires to Jeddah, Cecil Gervase Hope Gill, who replied some weeks later with a few details that appeared to contradict Il Lavoro Fascista’s version of events. According to Hope Gill, the purported special envoy, named as Mohamed Rafaat El Ahdale in the translated article, was in fact a Syrian chauffeur who had formerly been employed by the ex-King of the Hejaz, ‘Alī bin Ḥusayn al-Hāshimī, and had more recently been engaged to drive the Mecca Municipality’s water sprinkler.  He had since gone on to open his own repair shop, concentrating on ‘worn-out Fiats’.

Fiat 508 Ballila 1932 Wikimedia Commons

Hope Gill’s letter continued by reporting that the Hejazi Government, which owned a number of Fiat cars, had contracted the former chauffeur for the maintenance of its vehicles, and had later assisted him financially so that he could visit Italy in search for spare parts.

Either Il Lavoro Fascista was misinformed, or it was determined not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

David Fitzpatrick
Content Specialist, Archivist, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further reading:
IOR/L/PS/12/2062, ff 141-143

Sir Trenchard Craven William Fowle spent twenty-four years working as a British colonial administrator in the Persian Gulf before retiring in the summer of 1939. During that time he amassed a collection of thirteen Persian carpets.

Extract of an advert from the journal The Nineteenth Century, dated 1892. Mss Eur F126/28, f 16 

Prior to returning to England, Fowle put the carpets up for sale at the Political Agency in Bahrain. A list in an Agency file offers details of Fowle’s carpets. Five of the cheapest were described as Baluchi (i.e. made in Baluchistan), their price likely reflecting their small size. Four further carpets originated from Turkmenistan, while the two most expensive items were manufactured in the city of Kashan, renowned for its superior carpets of intricate design.

 List of carpets for sale at the Bahrain Political Agency. IOR/R/15/2/1531, f 26.

Europe’s affluent middle-classes became avid collectors of Persian carpets in the nineteenth century. Letters from the East India Company Resident in the Persian port of Bushire indicate that carpets were being sourced for European markets as early as 1813. In the meantime, a succession of European travellers to Persia, including the novelist James Morier and colonial administrators Henry Pottinger and John Johnson, penned narratives in which richly decorated carpets were closely associated with the opulence of the Persian court.

Extract of a letter from William Bruce, Acting Resident at Bushire to Francis Warden, Chief Secretary to the Government, Bombay, 17 January 1813.

IOR/R/15/1/12, ff 156-157 

The European (and American) market for carpets had grown to such an extent that by the 1880s, demand outstripped supply. ‘Very old carpets are now extremely rare,’ reported Robert Murdoch Smith in 1883, while sourcing Persian carpets for the South Kensington (now V&A) Museum. In response to a diminishing supply of carpets, commercial companies, including manufacturers from England, set up carpet-making factories in Persia, with the intention of catering specifically to their domestic markets.

In 1883 the Manchester firm Zielger & Company established premises at Sultanabad (now Arak) consisting of houses for their employees, offices, stores and dyeing rooms. This was no factory though; carpets continued to be hand-woven by women and children in the home, although now according to orders and designs stipulated by the Company. Between 1894 and 1914 the number of looms in Sultanabad increased thirty-fold, from 40 to 1,200 (equating to one loom for every 5.8 persons in the town).

 Nineteenth century Kashan carpet. Source: ArtDaily.com (Public Domain) 

Although one British colonial administrator reported that the firm was ‘much liked by the villagers’, evidence of the exploitation of weavers elsewhere was reported. The impressions of other visitors to Persia suggest that some carpet production had shifted to grim karkhanas (or manufactories), described as ‘low, dark, miserable rooms’, often with a ‘sour and sickening atmosphere’, in which ‘weakly children of ten or twelve years’ laboured on carpets, under pressure to complete ‘a certain allotted portion per diem’. In 1913 the British Resident at Bushire noted there was ‘no doubt that the industry as carried on is responsible for a great deal of human misery, in deforming and arresting the development of children, especially the girls’.

Of Fowle’s carpets, the expensive Kashanis remained unsold. They were returned to Fowle’s widow after the War (Fowle himself having died suddenly in 1940), but not before being lost by staff of the Southern Railway Company, and spending two months in the lost property office at Waterloo Station.

Mark Hobbs
Subject Specialist, Gulf History Project

British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further reading:
British Library, London, Volume 12: Letters outward. IOR/R/15/1/12  – East India Company correspondence dated 1811 to 1813.
British Library London, ‘Gazetteer of Persia. Volume II’ (IOR/L/MIL/17/15/3/1) – for a description of the Ziegler & Co.’s activities at Sultanabad.
British Library, London, ‘Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency for the Years 1911-1914' (IOR/R/15/1/711) – reporting attempts to reform conditions in carpet-weaving factories at Kerman, 1913.
British Library, London, ‘File 16/32-II Miscellaneous. Correspondence with the Residency, Bushire.’ (IOR/R/15/2/1531) – correspondence relating to Trenchard Fowle’s carpets.
George Nathaniel Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), 523-525.
Frederic John Goldsmid, Telegraph and Travel (London: MacMillan & Co., 1874), 586-587.
Edward Stack, Six Months in Persia Vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882), 209.
Leonard Helfgott, “Carpet Collecting in Iran, 1873-1883: Robert Murdoch Smith and the Formation of the Modern Persian Carpet Industry” Muqarnas Vol.7 (1990), 171-181.

On 13 June 1938 Shaikh Abdul Husain Al-Hilli, originally from Hilla in Iraq, arrived in Bahrain to act as the Head Shia Qadi (judge) at the Shia Court in Bahrain.  The appointment begs the question: given that Shias were a majority in Bahrain at the time, why was a Qadi brought all the way from Iraq and not appointed locally?

 Shaikh Abdul Husain Al-Hilli from Al-Wasat News, No 1628, 20 Feb 2007.

The India Office Records provide the answer to this question, in correspondence exchanged between Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, the Adviser to the Bahrain Government, Shaikh Hamad bin ‘Isa al-Khalifa, the Ruler of Bahrain, and the Political Agent in Bahrain. Between 1935 and 1937 enquiries were raised regarding the recruitment of a third Shia Qadi in Bahrain’s Shia Court. However, the possibility of this Qadi being a Bahraini subject was dismissed due to a number of cases involving the misappropriation of money by local Qadis. The Bahrain Government raised concerns about the local Qadis, who had been quarrelling amongst each other and allowing their personal animosities to influence their legal decisions.
 

IOR/R/15/2/1941, f 27. The copyright status is unknown. Please contact [email protected] with any information you have regarding this item.

Applications for the job were subsequently opened to foreigners. Shaikh Hamad was very keen for the candidate to be from one of the Shia holy cities of Najaf or Karbala’ in Iraq. He asked Mr. Belgrave to pass his request to the Political Agent in Bahrain to enquire from the Government of Iraq whether they could recommend a candidate. The job description drawn up by Shaikh Hamad stated that the candidate must have been educated in Sharia law either from a Waqf Department (responsible for the donation of land for charitable purposes) or from one of the schools in the Shia holy cities. The new Qadi was to be paid a larger stipend than the 100 Rupees paid per month to the local Qadis. This was to cover his travel expenses.
 

IOR/R/15/2/1941, f 10. The copyright status is unknown. Please contact [email protected] with any information you have regarding this item.

Amongst the four candidates for the job, Shaikh Abdul Husain Al-Hilli (1883- 1956), a Najaf graduate, proved to be an authority in the field. Soon afterwards, Al-Hilli was appointed to act as Qadi and teacher of religious law in Bahrain. Upon moving to Bahrain, Al-Hilli opened a religious school in Manama near the Al-Khawaja Mosque. The school was mainly established to teach the principles of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). Many of Bahrain’s religious scholars, including Shaikh Ahmad Al-‘Usfoor and Al-Sayid Muhammad Saleh al-Adnani, benefited from Shaikh Al-Hilli’s school. A man of letters, Al-Hilli became known for his literary contributions in various Bahraini based magazines, literary clubs, and cultural institutions. He died in 1956 and was buried in Bahrain, the country which became a second home to him for nearly two decades. Interestingly, his place of burial is disputed. Some religiously affiliated online sources claim that Al-Hilli was buried in the holy city of Najaf, which reflects his significance and acclaim.  

IOR/R/15/2/1941, f 51. The copyright status is unknown. Please contact [email protected] with any information you have regarding this item.
 

Ula Zeir
Content Specialist/ Arabic Language
British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further reading:
Al-Wasat News, No 1628, 20 Feb 2007.
Al-Wasat News, No 4028, 17 Sep 2013.
IRIB World Service http://arabic.irib.ir/programs/item/2339
Belgrave, Sir Charles Dalrymple. Personal Column. London: Hutchinson, 1960.
IOR/R/15/2/1941 File No. G/6 V. O. Appointment of Qadhis.

From 4 December 1944 to 30 January 1945 an Afghan Military Mission to India toured the country, visiting army and air force divisions, witnessing weapon demonstrations and training events, and meeting military and civil functionaries.

A stable, independent Afghanistan on friendly terms with India was seen as vital to the defence of India and the Empire.  Led by Lieutenant General Muhammad Umar Khan, Chief of the Afghan General Staff, the tour was an opportunity to strengthen military and political ties between the Government of Afghanistan, the Government of India, and the British Government.

The Military Attaché at Kabul, Colonel Alexander Stalker Lancaster, had been heavily involved in the preparation of the tour programme, and accompanied the Mission group throughout their stay.  He submitted an incredibly detailed report following its completion, which makes for interesting reading.

 

IOR/L/PS/12/2217, f 37r

The report consisted of a tour summary, notes on Lancaster’s impressions of the Mission delegates, and a fully annotated tour programme, providing a timeline of events and visits alongside Lancaster’s comments.

 
IOR/L/PS/12/2217, f 58r 

As might be expected, the report contains details of weapon demonstrations, tours of barracks and ammunition factories, and includes details of the scale of the preparations for war against Japan.  According to Lancaster the Afghan Mission were suitably impressed, although the report does provide information on one hair-raising incident at a firing demonstration for the 4.2” mortar:

 
IOR/L/PS/12/2217, f 82r

Interestingly, the report also provides details of the entertainments laid on for the Mission.  These included regular dinner engagements with army and air force personnel, diplomats and Government Officials, and even a number of cinema trips.

On 20 December, following a day of weapons demonstrations, the Mission were shown “Training films on Camoflage [sic] and Use of Compass, War News Reels and an entertainment film”.  On 4 January “[the] Mission attended Dinapur Cinema. By chance a colour film of Afghan scenes taken by the Thaw Caravan expedition in 1939 was shown.  The commentary was given by Lowell Thomas in his well known [sic] style. Fortunately the Afghans treated it as a joke”.  During their trip the Mission saw several other films, including Kismet, Get Cracking (starring George Formby), Lady in the Dark, and the play adaptations Bhagwan Buddha and Charlie’s Aunt.

 

Cover of a promotional leaflet for the film Kismet, digitised as part of the Endangered Archives Programme project ‘Collection of books and periodicals at the Bali Sadharan Granthagar, Howarh’, reference EAP/341/5/473

Lancaster judged that the Mission had been “an unqualified success”, and positive reports appeared in the Afghan publication Islah.  In the years that followed the Mission, the Government of India agreed to supply arms, equipment and training at a discounted rate to Afghanistan, in what became known as ‘Scheme Lancaster’.

The file containing the report, IOR/L/PS/12/2217, is part of a series of records compiled by the India Office Political (External) Department related to arms, ammunition and arms traffic.  These records are currently being catalogued and digitised, and should be available for access through the Qatar Digital Library portal later in the year.

Alex Hailey
Content Specialist / Archivist
British Library / Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further reading:
British Library, IOR/L/PS/12/2217
British Library, IOR/L/PS/12/2218
British Library, IOR/L/PS/12/2204

One morning in May 1944, the British Adviser to the Government of Bahrain, Charles Belgrave, was wandering amongst the stone burial mounds near the Bahrain village of A’ali.  He noticed ‘an elaborate stone crushing’ machine set up on one of the largest and most-valued stone monuments.  ‘I consider it most improper’ he complained in a letter to the British Political Agent, ‘that [the A’ali tombs] should be interfered with’.

 

The burial mounds at Bahrain. Photograph by the Rev Edwin Aubrey Storrs-Fox, 1918. Photo 496/6/30

Enquiries revealed that the Royal Air Force (RAF) was the culprit, and was taking stones from A’ali for use as construction materials at their air base at Muharraq.  The RAF’s Air Liaison Officer in Bahrain conceded that the Air Ministry’s ‘lack of historical knowledge’ of the area meant that ‘one heap of stones was as good as another’.

Extract of a letter from the Air Liaison Officer to the Political Agent at Bahrain, 23 May 1945. IOR/R/15/2/1513, f 11.

Belgrave’s objection was not without a touch of hypocrisy. Seven years earlier, in 1937, he himself permitted the demolition of several mounds to make way for a new road on the island. On cutting through the condemned mounds it was discovered that they had been hitherto untouched, with skeletons and grave goods, including pots, dishes and other metal and glass objects all found inside.

Extract from a note on antiquities at Bahrain by Charles Belgrave, 1937. IOR/R/15/2/1513, ff 6-7

Bahrain’s burial mounds, assumed in Belgrave’s time to have been created by the Phoenicians, are now known to date from the Dilmun civilisation that inhabited the region between 4,000 and 500 BCE. Documents in the Qatar Digital Library record the encounters that British explorers and archaeologists had with the mounds from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards.

Edward Law Durand was the first to come across the mounds in 1879, while exploring Bahrain in his capacity as First Assistant to the Persian Gulf Resident. He drew sketches of the structures and wrote: “This large series of mounds packed together, and of regular rounded shapes, cannot be the ruins of houses, as asserted by the Arabs, tombs they simply must be”.

Drawing by Durand, from his visit to the burial mounds at A’ali, 1879. IOR/L/PS/18/B95

Durand’s report, which offered the tantalising prospect of relics and other treasures in the tombs, prompted the British Museum to subsidise excavation works to the cost of £100. A decade passed before any more excavations of note took place, this time under the guidance of Theodore and Mabel Bent, in February 1889. The Residency Agent at Bahrain reported back to the Resident on the Bents’ excavations, writing of earthenware finds, and bones and ‘a greasy earth of dark colour’ that ‘belonged to a human body'.

 
Extract of a letter (Arabic, with English translation) from the Residency Agent at Bahrain, on Theodore and Mabel Bent’s excavations at Bahrain, 20 February 1889. IOR/R/15/1/192, f 98

Bahrain’s burial mounds have been repeatedly excavated ever since, for example by British Political Agents Colonel Francis Prideaux, between 1906 and 1907, and Major Clive Daly, between 1921 and 1926; the British archaeologist Ernest Mackay in 1925; a Danish archaeological team in the 1950s; and the Bahrain Department of Antiquities in the 1970s.

The protection and understanding of the burial mounds at Bahrain was paramount to Bahrain’s first National Museum, which opened in the Bahrain Government’s headquarters in 1970. The museum’s later move into a building that had formerly been the RAF Officers’ Mess at the Muharraq air base is not without some irony, given the RAF’s earlier attempts to use the burial mounds’ stones as construction materials.

Mark Hobbs
Subject Specialist, Gulf History Project

British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further reading:
British Library, London, ‘37 File 483 Memorandum on Bahrain; Major E L Durand’s Notes on the Antiquities of Bahrain’ (IOR/R/15/1/192)
British Library, London, 'Notes on the Islands of Bahrain and Antiquities by Captain E. L. Durand, 1 Assistant Resident, Persian Gulf.' (IOR/L/PS/18/B95)
British Library, London, ‘16/16 Miscellaneous – Archaeological excavations at Bahrain’ (IOR/R/15/2/1513)
D T Potts, The Arabian Gulf of Antiquity Vol.1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Michael Rice, The Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf, c.5000-323BC (New York: Routledge, 1994)

In August 1924, the Sultan of Nejd, Ibn Sa’ud, launched an invasion of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, in the west of the Arabian Peninsula.  Meeting little resistance, his Ikhwan forces swiftly captured – and brutally plundered – the city of Ta’if.   After this, the Kingdom’s ruler, Sharif Husain bin Ali al-Hashimi, abdicated in favour of his son, Ali bin Husain al-Hashimi.  The Ikhwan continued to advance and in October captured the holy city of Mecca, leaving the newly incumbent Ali isolated and virtually surrounded in Jeddah.  These rapid territorial losses had left the Kingdom vulnerable militarily and strained economically.

 

Ali bin Husain al-Hashimi (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Desperate to gain any advantage that could halt the Ikhwan’s advance, the Kingdom had managed to procure a small number of aircraft.  However, its only pilot was a White Russian refugee named Shirokoff [Shirokov], who was paid a bottle of whisky per day and £60 in gold every month.  Shirokoff is said to have made regular reconnaissance flights, but he refused to fly at less than 9,000 or 10,000 feet and his observer was a “one-eyed officer who always wears dark glasses”.  This prompted Reader William Bullard, Britain’s Agent in Jeddah, to comment sardonically that “it is not believed that the reports brought back are of great value”.

The Kingdom’s aircraft were not armed but Shirokoff was repeatedly pressured to drop hand grenades on Ikhwan positions, even in Mecca, an order he adamantly refused to follow.  He pointed out that if the grenades did not blow the plane up, they would burst before reaching the ground anyway.  Bullard remarked “it is difficult to see what could be gained by the bombing of Mecca by a non-Moslem airman” - doing so would provide Ibn Sa’ud with a propaganda victory.  Shirokoff was said to have supplemented his “inadequate” daily ration of whisky by “heavy purchases and drinking at the expense of his admirers”.  Bullard speculated that “he may one day reach the point of exhilaration at which the prospect of dropping explosives on Mecca will cease to appear objectionable”.  Not long after Bullard expressed this fear, Shirokoff was dead.

 Ibn Sa’ud with his cousin Salman Al-‘Arafa c. 1920 pictured in ‘Heart of Arabia’ (1922) by St. John Philby (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

In January 1925, the pilot was flying above an enemy camp when his plane exploded and all those on board were killed.  That particular day, ‘Umar Shakir, a Syrian anti-Ottoman intellectual and journalist who had fled to the Hejaz, was on board.  Shakir was a friend of Shirokoff’s spotter, and had boarded the plane “without authority”.  Shakir was said to have been “clamouring to be allowed to go and drop bombs” and it appears that he did just that.  Bullard speculated that Shakir had attempted to throw one of the improvised bombs and it had exploded in the plane.

 A bird’s eye view of Mecca and surrounding hillsides, August 1917. Photograph by Samuel M. Zwemer, National Geographic Magazine.

As the Kingdom’s position became increasingly desperate, it resorted to procuring a fatwa [religious ruling] that justified the bombing of Mecca by Christian pilots from a Shaikh said to be named ‘Shengetti’.  Subsequently, a limited number of aerial raids were made on Mecca by newly recruited foreign pilots, but they proved ineffectual and were soon halted.  By December 1925, Jeddah had been formally surrendered to Ibn Sa’ud and Ali fled to the court of his brother King Faisal in Baghdad, where he died a decade later.  The Hejaz region has been under the rule of the Al Saud ever since, and in 1932 became a part of Ibn Sa’ud’s newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Louis Allday
Gulf History/Arabic Specialist British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership 

@Louis_Allday

Further reading:
British Library, IOR/R/15/1/565
British Library, IOR/R/15/5/36
British Library, IOR/R/15/5/37

On 10 November 1929 the Colonial Office received a letter from Philip Perceval Graves of The Times asking whether the Government held any information on a Danish author and traveller named Knud Holmboe.  Holmboe had written to The Times the previous day, briefly describing his plans for a trip across the Arabian Peninsula. He hoped to visit Palestine, Mecca, Medina and Oman, before reaching Aden.  Holmboe requested an appointment with the newspaper’s foreign news editor.  Graves told the Colonial Office that since he assumed that British permits would be required for parts of Holmboe’s proposed trip, it might be interested to know of the Dane’s intentions. 

Graves also wrote:

'[h]ow he means to reach Mecca and Medina is his affair and perhaps "it is his funeral" is all that need be said of that part of his scheme. The rest might be possible'.

Graves’s words would prove to be sadly prescient, although perhaps not quite in the way that he might have imagined.

Knud Holmboe from Desert Encounter (London, 1936)

A fluent speaker of Arabic, Holmboe, who was born in 1902 into a Danish middle class family, had converted to Islam a few years previously.  He had already travelled extensively in the Middle East. The initial part of his proposed journey took him by car from Morocco to Libya, where he witnessed the shocking treatment that was inflicted upon the Libyan Muslim population by its Italian colonial rulers: thousands of Bedouins were imprisoned in concentration camps and summary executions occurred on a daily basis.  According to Holmboe, during his time in Cyrenaica there were thirty executions a day.

Holmboe was deported from Libya to Egypt, where he was imprisoned before being sent back to Denmark.  He recorded his observations in a book Ørkenen Brænder (English title: Desert Encounter), which was first published in 1931. In the book, Holmboe writes:

'[i]t became more and more clear to me that the Italians understood nothing of the soul of this people, of whom they had appointed themselves rulers'.

Predictably, the book was banned in Fascist Italy (it would not be translated into Italian until 2004) but sold well elsewhere in Europe. However, Holmboe did not live to enjoy his book’s success. Having returned to the Middle East in late 1931, intent on completing his pilgrimage to Mecca, he was killed in Aqaba, in modern-day Jordan, allegedly by members of a local Bedouin tribe in the employ of Italian officers, although this claim has never been verified.

David Fitzpatrick
Content Specialist, Archivist, British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership 

Further reading:
IOR/L/PS/12/2071, ff 401-402
Knud Holmboe, Desert Encounter (London, 1936)

‘We regret that no-one in Bahrain is interested in “pre-packed airports.”’ So ran the briefest and most succinct of letters from the Political Agent in Bahrain to the Board of Trade in London, in December 1949. What were “pre-packed airports”, and why was no-one in Bahrain interested in them?

Extract of a letter from the Political Agency in Bahrain to the Commercial Relations and Exports Department of the Board of Trade, London, 1 December 1949. IOR/R/15/2/508, f 193 

The Political Agent’s note was in response to a letter, sent by the Board of Trade in London in September 1949, reporting on a combined Dutch-US company that was comprised ‘of specialists in each constituent field of airport construction’, and who were offering the ‘pre-packed airport’, which could be built in any place as required.

This approach was in stark contrast to the way in which the British-administered airports in the Persian Gulf, at Bahrain and at Sharjah (in the United Arab Emirates), had developed. These sites, established by the British in the 1920s and 1930s, had grown up in an ad-hoc and oftentimes haphazard manner, in response to wartime as much as peacetime needs. Moreover, in the wake of India’s independence in 1947, and as the Royal Air Force scaled back its operations in the Gulf, a host of commercial aviation concerns – both British and foreign – were demanding access to improved airport facilities across the region.

British officials in the Gulf were unprepared and uncertain about how to respond to these changes. One Government official in Bahrain noted in 1949 that ‘we have no clear picture of the respective functions of the R.A.F., I.A.L. [International Aeradio Limited] and B.O.A.C. [British Overseas Airways Corporation] at Muharraq [in Bahrain].’ In official correspondence of the same year the Political Resident Rupert Hay conceded that ‘far more foreign aircraft are using the airfields without permission than with it’.

Extract of a letter from the Political Resident, William Rupert Hay, to the Foreign Office, 9 July 1949. IOR/R/15/2/508, ff 164-168

There was a gross underestimation on the part of British officials over the future potential of air travel, as well as a clear lack of understanding of the Gulf’s future potential as an international hub for air travel, and of the safety implications this raised. In October 1949 the newly installed Political Officer in Doha concluded that the future prospects for an expansion of ‘air traffic [in Qatar] is unlikely’, and that he did not think ‘there would ever be a demand in Qatar for a complete “pre-packed airport” installation.’

Extract of a letter from the Political Officer in Doha to the Political Agent in Bahrain, 29 October 1940. IOR/R/15/2/508, f 190

Meanwhile, British Government officials were meeting at the Ministry of Civil Aviation in London, to discuss airfield crash facilities at Bahrain. The facilities at Muharraq, the meeting’s minutes noted, are ‘quite hopeless for any aircraft emergency.’ Proposals made during the meeting included the installation of ‘two standard RAF foam tenders, plus two water bowsers’.

 
Extract of advance notes from a meeting held on 19 October 1949, on Bahrain (Muharraq) Airfield Crash Facilities. IOR/R/15/2/508, ff 185-189

Such equipment could deal with, but not prevent accidents occurring, and, less than a year later, in June 1950, a double tragedy occurred when two Douglas DC-4’s, both operated by Air France, crashed on the approach to Bahrain within two days of each other. A total of eighty-six people died in the two incidents. While investigators attributed the cause of the accidents to bad weather, the tragedies were a wake-up call to British officials, who acted quickly to equip the airfield at Muharraq with radio landing aids and runway approach lights.

Mark Hobbs
Subject Specialist, Gulf History Project

British Library/Qatar Foundation Partnership

Further Reading:
British Library ‘File 13/2 VIII Air facilities in Arab shaikhdoms’ IOR/R/15/2/508