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windows. Fortunately for Lloyd the mob that had eagerly awaited his return

abandoned its vigil in the very early morning of 3 March and he was finally escorted

out of the Residency at 1.30 am for his flight to New Delhi at 2.45 am, having

suffered a mere four-hour hiatus to his schedule. 519

In a private letter from Wight-Boycott to his mother, now kept at the

Imperial War Museums in London, he added some further details about the event.

He noted that he had accompanied Lloyd’s car parade in a separate vehicle. He was

sure that the protestors ‘were not after blood at that time’. He also noted that the

two trucks that drove the thirty military personnel from Sitra to Juffair were driven

by ‘unauthorised drivers’. Inside the British Naval Base during the height of the

crisis that night, he had the men ‘armed to the teeth’ and equipped with tear gas. He

confirmed that they were not needed as the crowd that had waited for Lloyd’s

return had dispersed before he drove by. He also made it plain to his mother that he

had no wish for a confrontation with the demonstrators as he feared that grave

consequences would follow. 520

Belgrave sent a letter dated 8 March to his friend Colonel Charles Fredrick

Howard Gough, the British MP for Horsham, in which he justified his attitude to the

stoning of Lloyd’s car convoy. The letter’s content was passed to the FO through Sir

AD Dodds-Parker, the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, as Gough had handed it

to him. After the Adviser provided the MP with an overview of the HEC that

involved personal attacks against the nationalists’ leaders, the letter revealed new

519 TNA, FO 371/120545, V.A. Wight-Boycott: Disturbance in Bahrain, 6 March 1956.
520 Imperial War Museums in London, Collections, Private Papers of Captain V.A. Wight-Boycott, OBE
DSC RN, ‘Letter from Wight-Boycott to his Mother’.

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