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Bahrain as a sign of weakness and will have stimulated the Movement to come

forward with its own set of demands.

In late October the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Assistant Head

of Eastern Service, Nevill Barbour, toured the Middle East and included a short stay

in Bahrain. The Adviser met Barbour on 30 October. 244 In Nevill Barbour’s

collection kept at St Antony’s College in Oxford he recorded some information on

the new modus vivendi formed between Sunnis and Shi’ites. He sympathised with

the Movement and recounted details of a meeting conducted with ‘the principal

organiser of this political demonstration’ whom he did not name, but was likely to

have been Al-Bakir. The meeting took place at a Bahraini club to which a member of

staff from the Political Agency had taken him. The opposition figure that Barbour

met objected to the BBC’s Arabic Service coverage of Bahrain, claiming that it

offered ‘a misleading picture of local conditions’. 245

In Shuckburgh’s unpublished diary notes of his tour of the Middle East, the

FO’s Under-Secretary visited Bahrain accompanied by Robert Belgrave on 6

November, arriving from Iraq. On the day of their arrival at the Residency they were

taken to a banquet in the Ruler’s palace. Shuckburgh recorded an intriguing

encounter at the banquet where he met the Adviser. It was Belgrave who had

approached the Under-Secretary and talked ‘gravely about unrest in Bahrain’. In

Shuckburgh’s judgment, the Adviser seemed to have ‘no remedy’ for the ongoing

conflict and acted rather ‘curiously reserved’. On the following day a private

244 Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave’s Personal Diaries, 30 October 1955.
245 St Antony’s College in Oxford, the Middle East Centre Archive, Nevill Barbour Collection 1921-
1963, GB165-0019, Box 3, File 2: ‘Report on Tour of Middle East by Nevill Barbour Assistant Head of
Eastern Service, 1954’.

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