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accident at the gate of the airport, thus temporarily blocking it. The second option

was to have Nasser driven in the Residency’s car with a British flag flown on the

car’s front side. But before any of the possible solutions could be acted upon the

process of refueling the plane was completed and the Egyptians were ready to

board. Nasser remained in Bahrain for a total of approximately thirty minutes,

according to Belgrave. Al-Bakir arrived late and managed to have a few words with

the Egyptian leader. He apologised to Nasser in the name of the people of Bahrain

for not knowing earlier about his arrival. As a consequence of this curtailed visit

Egyptian media outlets attacked the British in Bahrain for their failure to publicise

Nasser’s visit although British officials were only informed of it a few hours before

to his brief stopover. 333

In a letter to Harold Macmillan, the then new Foreign Secretary in Eden’s

Cabinet dated 9 May from Burrows, he explained the Residency’s objective in aiding

the Administration in its process of setting up the new Government Labour

Committee. The Resident said:

We are in fact making the rather curious experiment of introducing
industrial democratic processes in a society in which political
democracy is almost entirely absent and in which it continues to
appear most unwise to tamper too rapidly with the existing
constitutional position.

Burrows also made the point that although the frontline members of the HEC were

pushing strongly for a trade union, none of them were labourers. It was hoped that

333 Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave’s Personal Diaries, 2 May 1955; ‘Bernard Burrows, Monthly Report
for June 1955’, in Political Diaries of the Persian Gulf, vol. 20 1955-1958, ed. R.L. Jarman (London:
1990), 1-7 (2); B. Burrows, Footnotes in the Sand: The Gulf in Transition 1953–1958 (Wiltshire: 1990)
38-39, hereafter Footnotes in the Sand; and Al-Bakir, From Bahrain to Exile, 106.

© Hamad E. Abdulla 111