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a political movement in opposition to the Government. 387 The HEC’s gatherings at

Shi’ite mosques and Ma’tems during religious festivals could have given the false

impression that the Movement was all for that cause. To Mapp, Al-Bakir’s friend

before the formation of the HEC, one of the visions shared by the Sunni Bahraini

nationalist was to abandon the rituals associated with the month of Muharram. 388

Al-Bakir’s secret communications with the Political Agent in Bahrain and his

approaches to the Residency were conducted using a mysterious contact developed

through the Residency. The contact point with the Residency (as revealed in papers

found at TNA) was that of a British diplomat First Secretary, Ivor Thomas Mark

Lucas. In a minute written by Lucas on 8 September, he stated through an

unidentified member of the HEC, the Party’s desire to form a ‘Shadow Government’

with which to confront the local Administration. This suggests that Lucas was the

contact point. 389 Lucas was interviewed on 25 January 2005 by Malcolm McBain, a

former British diplomat as part of the Churchill College Cambridge’s The British

Diplomatic Oral History Programme. He confirmed in the interview that he was the

contact point between the Residency and the opposition. Lucas did not specify

whether there were other British officials in contact with the opposition or that this

role was solely his at the time. Nor did he specify who in the opposition they were

in contact with, nor the time period over which these contacts were made.

387 The theory relating to Shi’ites’ exiting the HEC as they had hoped the Movement would stand for
their rituals was proposed by Bahraini historian Naguib Abdul-Mohsin Al-Makhraq in an interview
by Haider Mohammed in Bahrain’s Al-Wasat newspaper. See H. Mohammed, ‘Ba’da Khamseen
A’man… Al-Watan Yabqa Lljamie’ [After Fifty Years… The Nation Remains for All], Abwab Al-Wasat,
13 October 2004, 5.
388 Mapp, Leave Well Alone, 221.
389 TNA, FO 1016/387, Minutes with a HEC Member Drafted by I.T.M. Lucas, 8 September 1955.

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