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Chapter Two

Bahrain’s ‘Suez Canal Companies’ and the attack on the Police Fort

March to September 1954

Foreign-operated-or-owned companies stood as a symbol of oppression and

exploitation to the nationalists in Bahrain. They viewed them as malicious entities

and an extension of colonialism out to deprive locals of their national resources

while enslaving employees in what could be described as Bahrain’s own Suez Canal

Companies, in reference to Egypt’s Suez Canal Company. 150 In Bahrain there were

systematic attacks by the nationalist press targeting BAPCO and other organisations

with accounts of events in those companies, some of which were presented as facts

backed by cursory investigative reporting. The aim of these reports was to build a

case by which nationalists could air their protests, blaming their frustrations on

British influence. Moreover, it was in the nationalists’ vade mecum, Nasser’s manual,

where he stressed the importance of Arab oil as he illustrated that ‘Half the proved

reserves of oil in the world lie beneath Arab soil’. 151 The focus of nationalists on

Bahrain’s oil company was of no coincidence since oil was an element of crucial

importance to Britain from a financial perspective and for its overall strategy to

defend the Middle East. A COS memorandum reviewing British strategy in the

Middle East stressed the importance of retaining ‘the countries of the Middle East

150 To better understand what the Suez Canal Company meant to Egyptian nationalists, Erskine B
Childers, a British journalist and writer presented the nationalist views of the Company as an entity
exploiting the locals via its ‘Anglo-French holdings’. Furthermore, to the Egyptians the Company was
associated indefinitely with what they viewed as its ‘submissive past’. See Childers, The Road to Suez,
116.
151 G. Abdel-Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution (Washington: 1955), 108.

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