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Nicholas Stanley-Price

one year was posted to run flying-boat
operations at Brindisi in Italy. His early
career involved a spell at the Savoy Hotel
in London being trained to the high
standard of professional service required
for the role of Purser/Steward on Imperial
Airways routes. After Brindisi he served
as station superintendent at different
locations in Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, the
UK and South Africa before arriving
at Sharjah in October 1940 to succeed
Brian Nelson, mentioned earlier. He
served there for ten months (Fig. 6). But
not all station managers had followed
this career path. During the war they

(Fig. 6) tended to be serving RAF officers who
Clive Adams with the head guard at the were seconded to BOAC. For example,
Rest House entrance Raymond O’Shea, who served for eight
(photo: Adams, 1940-41) months in 1944-45, was a journalist
in Asia before joining the Royal Air
Force at the outbreak of war. He had been on active service as a pilot and as an
administrator in the RAF before his appointment to Sharjah. His memoir provides
the most vivid picture that we have of the daily life of a station superintendent at a
remote airfield. One of the first Sharjah station managers under IAL when it took
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over in 1947 was Harold Dunn. He brought to the position many years’ experience
at sea as a radio operator (“Marconi man”). Later, during World War II, he worked
in West Africa providing communications for the trans-Atlantic Clipper flying-boats
ferrying personnel and cargo to the war fronts. After the war, by now an airfield
communications manager for BOAC, he transferred to IAL when it was founded
(Fig. 7).

These three superintendents, Adams, O’Shea and Dunn, all had extensive experience
of life at overseas airfields before taking on the additional responsibilities of a ‘hotel
manager’ at the Sharjah Rest House. The hospitality tradition that had started with
Imperial Airways in 1932-33 survived the war years to ensure that the Rest House
was still known to foreigners in the 1950s and 1960s as the only place to stay on the
Trucial Coast.

Acknowledgments. I am indebted to John S. Adams and Hedley Dunn for
information about their fathers’ careers and for permission to reproduce photos
from their collections. My thanks also to the British Library and the British Airways
Heritage collection.

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