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The first hotel in the Emirates: the “BOAC Rest House” at Sharjah airfield

to 35 shillings the daily allowance for senior officers who stayed in the BOAC (now
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IAL) rest houses at the Bahrain and Sharjah airfields. Evidently they now had to
pay full rates. There may have been some feeling that IAL’s charges were high. For
example, when in the same year of 1949 the Political Resident in the Gulf, Sir Rupert
Hay, visited Sharjah with his wife and daughter, he stayed (as visiting diplomats often
did) at the Agency where the Political Agent held a cocktail party and dinner in his
honour. Two days later, the Coast Medical Officer, Desmond McCaully, who often
stayed in the Rest House, organised a dinner for Hay not in that building but in
the RAF mess nearby. It may have been on cost grounds that IAL’s facilities were
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not used. Within a few years, alternative accommodation for visiting businessmen
began to become available. The Ruler of Dubai rented rooms to visiting engineers
of oil companies. They would share with two to three others a room that lacked
running water or sanitation facilities and had only intermittent electricity supplied
by a generator. The charge was Rs 30 per person per night. The Sharjah Rest House
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must have appeared very good value by comparison.

The hotel managers

The warmth of welcome at the Rest House, and whether paying visitors found it
value for money, depended to a great extent on the person of the Superintendent
(or station manager as he was also called). He had to ensure that all ground services
operated smoothly and that freight and mail were swiftly received and dispatched.
He was responsible for staff supervision and buildings maintenance or expansion.
But he also had to be a hotel manager, familiar with catering and customer relations,
so as to ensure the satisfaction of both the overnight passengers and longer-term
visitors that might use his facilities. Under BOAC, and probably under its forerunner
Imperial Airways, the superintendent had a handbook which listed the tariffs to be
charged to guests; any discount had to be authorised by the regional manager. But
in all other respects, he was the central figure in personally representing the airline
to its customers, and interacting without discrimination with the wide variety of
people who passed through his station. With such a profile in mind, Imperial Airways
recruited young men who were unmarried, had suitable character and schooling,
and performed well in psychological tests. The selected candidates would then have
three years of paid in-service traineeship, partly at Imperial’s home base and partly at
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one of its overseas stations. Customer service was an integral part of their training.
In their careers that followed, they would be frequently rotated from one station to
another – few superintendents assigned to Sharjah, considered a hardship post, served
for more than one year.

When BOAC took over from Imperial in 1940, with a war in progress, many of
these superintendents were re-employed by the new airline. Clive Adams was one
of them. He had joined Imperial Airways as a 17-year-old trainee in 1931, and after

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