Page 628 - Belgrave Diaries(N)_Neat

626

1931

Court. Heavy rain in the morning and afternoon, it swamped my office and the office passage but did not come into the house.
A tiresome court, several awkward cases. I can see that people are getting very much on edge over the conditions. No one has
any money this year and things are going to be very tiresome. We asked people to tennis but had to give it up. Prior came in
to tea. Indoors all day which is unusual for us and rather boring.

Tuesday [6 January]

No Biladya meeting. Worked in my upstairs office as the other one is drying. Hussein Yatim came to see me to say he had
heard from Major Holmes in England, I had hoped he was on the down mail. Very cold day, we had a fire in the drawing room
all day. Tennis at the Mission and then went round to D.G's for Bridge.

Wednesday 7th Jan 1931

Expected the Shaikh to come in but he didnt. A lot of people came to see me, Khalil Kanoo, who wants to get a monopoly for
making tiles, Abdu Ali, who came to try and borrow money, which I had to refuse, Steele and various other people. The
Shaikh wrote me to arrange a loan for a man for 5,000 rupees, knowing what a state our revenues are in, so I replied very much
to the point that it simply could not be done. He has no idea of being careful. Last night we had the Pennings to dinner with
two men who are staying with them, one is a Pole called Zietarski and the other a German, but naturalised American called
Raswan. He adopted the name from a horse which he was very attached to. They came here to buy Arab horses for Poland
and want to get across to the mainland. I liked them, they were unusual, the Pole was in the Austrian cavalry at one time,
looked more like a German, a big man with a yellow moustache who only spoke a little French, besides Polish and German,
the other lives mainly among the Arabs and has been made a sort of honourary member of one of the tribes up in the north. He
was very interesting he is an expert on Arab horses and knows Lady Wentworth very well. He seems to have travelled all over
most of the Mohamedan countries. They think it very doubtful if they will be allowed by Ibn Saoud to enter Nejd. They are
staying at the Mission. The German American showed me a lot of very interesting pictures of horses and Arabs. He has
bought one horse from the Shaikh.

Slept in the afternoon as we were very late last night, Prior, who came to dinner too, stayed on so long after the
others had gone. The D.Gs gave a tea party, all the English and Americans, it was quite well done though the tea was awful,
they borrowed all our stuff as he has nothing in the way of cups etc. Played Bridge. They are putting up a standard for an
electric light on the pier opposite the customs a very difficult business as it is 75 feet high, during tea it fell down and killed a
man who was working on it, a Somali. Very cold day. Down mail arrived with a letter from Gordon saying he was to see
Holmes again.

Thursday [8 January]
Court. Motored in the afternoon and got a lot of branches from a tree very like Mimosa, very sweet smelling with a round
flower just like mimosa, went out to Aali and saw the cultivation, it is not doing very well as the heavy rain injured it a lot.
The school boys were out there having a lesson with the Agriculturist. Cold day but very nice. Prior wrote another tiresome
letter about the smell and the noise of the electric machine. The Shaikh sent in to me about it and he evidently was very