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Akher Sa’ah (The Last Hour) Magazine. The article was headlined ‘Revolution

Sweeps Bahrain’. It stated that ‘The people of Bahrain are on the move. The secret

national movement is growing stronger and for several weeks this country has been

living on the edge of a volcano’. It also reported that the Secretary General of the

Arab League, Abdul-Khaleq Hassouna, had received ‘a grave report’ regarding affairs

in Bahrain forwarded to him by ‘a special messenger’. The article saw the

Movement as one struggling to free Bahrain from ‘British Imperialism’ and to

liberate it from the hands of Belgrave, who was labelled ‘the British High

Commissioner in Bahrain’. The article also suggested that Belgrave saw himself in

Bahrain as ‘the Guardian of Islam’. The article portrayed the Adviser to be the actual

Ruler of Bahrain on behalf of the British. The magazine went on to provide an

overview of Belgrave’s career prior to becoming the ‘High Commissioner of

Bahrain’, and it declared that he had been dismissed from his post at Siwa Oasis and

that only through his ‘aristocratic’ wife did he manage to land the post of

Commissioner in Bahrain. The magazine also alleged that Belgrave had successfully

‘acquired for himself a huge fortune’ and had used his powers to appoint his wife as

an educational director for girls’ schools. Other attacks were made on the British

Director of Health in Bahrain, RHB Snow, who it said had performed negligent

surgery after he had operated on a patient’s healthy eye instead of the one which

had glass in it for two years. The report, however, did not state how the patient

managed to live comfortably for two years with glass in his eye. 318 Belgrave was

318 TNA, FO 1016/386, Translation of an Article by Akher Sa’ah, 20 April 1955.

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