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included, inter alia, letters on policy from the Foreign Secretary, correspondences

between the Residency and the Eastern Department of the FO, letters from the

Agency to the Residency (and vice versa), a collection of proclamations by the Ruler

of Bahrain and correspondences, circulars, pamphlets, letters and petitions by the

nationalist movement, letters forwarded by Belgrave to British officers in Bahrain,

Ministry of Defense’s Chiefs of Staff (COS) memoranda, the treasury’s imperial and

foreign division files, and Prime Ministerial notes and minutes of conversation. It
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should be said en passant that not all files from the period under study had dealt

only with the political affairs of Bahrain. Some focused on other matters, such as

court hearings and social life. It must also be noted that a number of FO folders on

the Bahraini conflict at TNA included some repeated correspondences and

instructions on British policy. For example the following folders: FO 1016/467, FO

371/120547, and FO 371/120573 included repeated documents among them.

Britain’s stance on Egypt, the Glubb Pasha issue, and the Baghdad Pact were

additionally viewed. The British Cabinet papers at TNA were also explored which

paid special attention to the Bahraini conflict after the Lloyd incident in March 1956.

Overall, the documents at TNA provided a detailed insight onto the issue in Bahrain

and illustrated how Britain’s FO and the Residency handled the islands’ political

developments and internal strife as will be revealed in the thesis as events unfold.

Documents at the IOR were also viewed but only to provide the necessary

7 If two or more correspondences from one party to another in the same folder and dated on the
same date, the despatch number or other reference number of the correspondence was used to
distinguish between the two.

© Hamad E. Abdulla ix