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Chapter Eight

                  the influence which the Arab World rapidly gained on people and
                  politics in these seven shaikhdoms, 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
                  States 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 States, 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,110 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 al the expense of
                 the less spectacular work of laying solid foundations for future
                 projects. The establishment of the agricultural trial station at
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