Page 345 - Truncal States to UAE_Neat

Chapter Eight

the influence which the Arab World rapidly gained on people and
politics in these seven sheikhdoms, both in its own right and as the
vehicle for assimilating the influences from the industrialised world.
The role which Britain eventually played in the field of develop­
ment in theTrucial States was not spectacular in financial terms, but
it was significant not least because most of the planning and much of
the work were done by British officials. The new British policy of
assuming some responsibility for the welfare of the people of these
Slates was readily adopted by most of the British civil servants in the
Gulf during the 1950s and 1960s because many of them had
previously been involved in development work for the Indian or the
Sudan Civil Service. They easily singled out the fields where help
was most needed, and they often tried their very best to prod the
British Government into spending more money for development in
the Trucial Slates, as the sums of money which were channelled in
this direction usually fell short of the hopes and expectations of these
officers. But a number of specific schemes were realised even before a
plan for the overall development was prepared. The lack of medical
facilities locally made this field the most obvious one to be tackled
first. In 1939 the British Indian authorities opened a dispensary in
Dubai with a resident Indian doctor; this was a forerunner of the
hospital which had been planned since 1941. The war years delayed
these plans until 1949, when an Irishman, a former doctor in the
Indian army, was sent to Dubai to prepare for and later to run the first
hospital on the coast.
In the years 1954/56 the British Government spent a total of
£50.000 on small development and welfare projects, including the
restoration of a falaj in Abu Dhabi’s sector of the Buraimi oasis,116 on
drilling water wells in Ra’s al Khaimah, on building the first school in
Sharjah, and on adding to the hospital in Dubai. In 1955 the then
Political Agent in Dubai, J.P. Tripp, together with the Political
Resident in Bahrain, Sir Bernard Burrows, convinced the British
Government of the necessity to commit herself to finance a Five Year
Plan in the sum of £450,000. This plan was conceived to bring long­
term benefits to these states by specifically helping to create
institutions and administrative bodies which could themselves
implement further development. In the event the Five Year Plan did,
however, provide more immediately visible results at the expense of
the less spectacular work of laying solid foundations for future
projects. The establishment of the agricultural trial station at
320