Page 102 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

get back till after 4 p.m., but when someone asked the Shaikh it he
was not
tired after so many hours in the Abbey he replied that he had found it so
interesting that the time in the Abbey had seemed not more than a
quarter
of an hour.
Out of a full and varied programme of official and private functions,
it is difficult to describe any particular incident as having made
most
impression on the Shaikh, but apart from the Coronation and his meeting
with the Queen perhaps his 'visit to Sir Winston Churchill at 10 Downing
Street came next, for he had a great admiration for ‘Shirshill’. He saw
many of the great houses of England—Hatfield, Lambeth Palace and
Blenheim—he attended State banquets and receptions, he went to the
Derby, to dog racing and to Richmond Horse Show, where he lunched
in a caravan with Captain C. E. Kendall, who was the Government
Purchasing Agent in London. When, later in the summer, the Shaikh’s
two older sons came to London they bought two caravans to take back
to Bahrain for use on hunting trips. He saw a boxing match which he
thought rather barbarous, but which I enjoyed. He was present at the
Naval Review and went down the Thames to the docks in the yacht of
the Port of London Authority. He was at the Trooping the Colour, he
visited the Lord Mayor and the Bank of England and saw a parade of
Lady Wentworth’s Arab horses at Crabbet Park. He lunched one day at
Oxford, at Lincoln College, and spent a day at Brighton and he attended
innumerable luncheon and dinner parties in London.
An amusing incident occurred at an enormous Garden Party which
was given at Blenheim by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. As we
were ‘ leaving, walking through the hall, I noticed that young Shaikh
Mohammed was not with us. I looked back and saw him standing in front
of an old-fashioned porter’s chair with a hooded top, made of leather. I
went back to see what was attracting him. Curled up in the chair, with an
enormous cigar, sat Sir Winston Churchill, and the sight of the Prime
Minister sitting in this peculiar chair seemed to fascinate the
young
Shaikh.
188
Nineteen
If the success of a drama is to be measured by the effects which
it produces upon die people for whom it is composed, or upon
the audience before whom it is represented, no play has ever sur­
passed the tragedy known in the Mussulman World as that of
Hasan and Husain.
The Miracle Play of Hasati and Husain.
Colonel Sir Lewis Pelly (1879)
It was the great Mahommedan festival which is sacred to the
memory of Husain, the son of Ali. The history of Islam contains
nothing more touching than the event which gave rise to that
solemnity.
Lord Clive. Critical and Historical Essays.
Lord Macaulay. 1800-1859
e returned to Bahrain in September. Outwardly everything
W seemed as before, but I soon found that below the surface there
was a strong undercurrent of political unrest. It manifested
itself by floods of anonymous notices and letters and by violent articles in
the local Press. Anonymous letters never worried me, I had a drawer full
of them, but the Arabs regarded them seriously. The local newspapers
edited by irresponsible young men who found that the more
were
violently they wrote the better sales they had. The papers were constantly
suppressed by order of the Shaikh then, after an interval, they were
allowed to appear again. Freedom of the Press in a country where
editors have some regard for the truth and where a law of libel exists is an
admirable thing, but in Bahrain there was no law of libel.
There was trouble too between Sunnis and Shias. Sunnis are orthodox
Moslems. Shias believe that after the death of the Prophet Mohammed
his nephew and son-in-law, Ali, should have become the first Caliph, to
be succeeded by his heirs. The dissension between the two sects in Bahrain
189