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The Residency also noted in its account for the month of December a sharp

rise in attacks on European workers in Bahrain. Some of those were British and

suffered serious injuries. The report blamed the cause of the incidents on the ‘lack

of respect for law and order which has become noticeable in Bahrain’. 454 However

external factors must have had an impact on emotions in Bahrain leading people to

act so forcefully. Belgrave’s attitude towards these events from his diary was

similar to that of the Residency. As a method to combat this growing trend the

Adviser simply noted, ‘we have the cars [police vehicles] to deal with [this] and

court’. 455

Nasser saw the Baghdad Pact as an anti-Soviet alliance and by obstructing its

expansion he was supporting the Soviet Union, the power in opposition to the West

in the Cold War. Bahraini nationalist leaning towards the East was recognised in a

pro-Soviet short article published in Al-Watan’s front page on 16 December which

declared that ‘Khrushchev, the Communist Party Secretary, said during a visit to

Burma that the English were robbing their colonies up to their last piece of

bread’. 456 Eden was critical of Khrushchev’s statements in Burma in his memoir as

he viewed him to have used ‘abusive rhetoric of the colonial system, ignoring their

own extensive empire over subject peoples from Samarkand to Hungary’. 457

With the collapse of the Templer mission, Bahrain was due for a one-day visit

on 17 December by Al-Sadat. He arrived to Bahrain from Qatar as part of his tour of

454 ‘Bernard Burrows, Residency’s Report for the Month of December 1955’, 1-8 (2).
455 Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave’s Personal Diaries, 3 October 1955.
456 ‘Al-Qafilah Taseer’ [The Caravan Marches On], Al-Watan, 16 December 1955, 1.
457 Eden, Full Circle, 354.

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