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whether he had accepted or rejected the proposal. 205 Al-Bakir returned to Bahrain

during the taxi and bus drivers’ strike. He claimed that the idea of creating the box

was his own as he had proposed it earlier to two of the three men who had met

Belgrave. Following a deadlock between the Administration and the strikers, an

agreement was reached to accept the formation of a local Cooperative

Compensation Fund and Al-Bakir was elected as its Secretary. 206 Khalil Al-Moayyed

was elected as its Chairman, Mansoor Al-Arrayed was appointed member, and

Abdulla Fakhroo was nominated Treasurer. 207

Apart from Belgrave’s diary entry and Al-Bakir’s memoir, British officials

recorded little information on the taxi and bus drivers’ strike. However the monthly

report by the Residency for November declared that the third-party insurance

scheme was postponed by the Administration until 1 January 1955 and that the

drivers ended their strike on 1 October. 208

Superficially the situation might have seemed a purely local affair, its

complexities can be tied to the overall sense of grievances against foreign-owned-

or-operated companies, for insurance companies established in Bahrain at the time

were all foreign. The general frustration towards these companies can be viewed in

the larger local and regional context of attacks on foreign-owned-or-operated

205 Sir Charles Dalrymple Belgrave’s Personal Diaries, 26 September 1954.
206 Al-Bakir, From Bahrain to Exile, 53-54.
207 According to Bahraini historian Ghassan Al-Shehabi, the Fund continued to function until the mid-
1990s. See G. Al-Shehabi, ‘Sunduk Al-Tawithat… Al-Tajrubah Al-Ta’imeniya Al-Tawuniyah Al-Ra’eda
Arabiyan’ [The Compensation Box… The Pioneering Arab Cooperative Insurance Experiment],
Abwab Al-Wasat, 13 October 2004, 12.
208 ‘Bernard Burrows, Residency’s Monthly Reports on November 1954’, in Political Diaries of the
Persian Gulf, vol. 19 1951-1954, ed. R.L. Jarman (London: 1990), 1-5 (3).

© Hamad E. Abdulla 68