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Nicholas Stanley-Price

BOAC and other corporations to help provide an air traffic control-system in the post-
war world. The Sharjah airfield came under its control following BOAC’s decision to
withdraw. In autumn 1948 E.J. Palmer arrived from the United Kingdom to assume
responsibility for International Aeradio Limited, replacing William Coultard, the last
of the station superintendents to serve in BOAC’s name. In taking over the functions
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of the airfield, IAL’s managers, who were specialists in telecommunications and radio
aids for navigation, found themselves also operating what had become a small hotel.

For visiting businessmen and others, it was the only lodging “to Western standards”
that was available near Sharjah or Dubai, some 20 km away. The demand was not
insignificant. In a single two-week period in November 1949, visitors to Sharjah
included Colonel Moody, medical advisor to the Political Resident and Political
Adviser on the Trucial Coast, the explorer Wilfrid Thesiger, H.S. Gibson, General
Manager of the Iraq Petroleum Company, Holloway for the new Dubai hospital site
(who returned to Bahrain the same day), W. Meikle, manager of Gray Mackenzie (a
shipping firm in Dubai), Ronald Codrai of PDTC (Petroleum Development Trucial
Coast), George Popov and E.M. Guichard for the Desert Locust Survey, and E. Innes
Pocock of the Golden Valley Ochre and Oxide Company Limited which for years had
had a mining concession on Abu Musa island. Not all visitors arriving by air stayed at
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the Rest House. Some such as Thesiger were guests of the resident British diplomats.
The Golden Valley company had quarters in town as did PDTC in Dubai and, later,
in Sharjah too. The banks soon established their own premises but, while waiting for
these to be constructed, some of their personnel lived at the airfield and commuted
into either Dubai or Sharjah. Mark Stott when establishing a Dubai branch of what
became the British Bank of the Middle East and Desmond McCaully while setting
up the Al-Maktoum hospital in Dubai both lived for extended periods at the Rest
House. So too in 1953 did Julian Walker, newly arrived diplomat at the Agency in
Sharjah which had no spare room for him. As he observed, since aircraft no longer
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stopped overnight and there was spare capacity, “the Fort acted as the only hotel…
on the Coast.” 5

During the 1950s and 1960s, travellers’ accounts and official publications acknowledge
that ‘the rest house’ indeed had this function. The novelist Hammond Innes in 1954
thought it “no more than an airport transit hotel. For a desert hostel it is incredibly
good” while guessing that one day Sharjah would be a colourful winter resort for
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the rich traveller. Around 1957 the oilman and explorer Wendell Phillips arrived
in Dubai to be told that the only real accommodation was at the Sharjah Airport
Resthouse. In the 1960s an Egyptian journalist, Salim Zabbal, called it the only hotel
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in all the Trucial Coast that provided a good meal and an air-conditioned room for
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sleeping (the Airlines Hotel in Dubai, opened in 1961, was not air-conditioned).
The construction of modern hotels in Sharjah had to wait until the end of the 1960s
when three opened: the Seaface on the waterfront, in the former residence of the

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