Page 23 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

I got together a band from the sons and young brothers of policemen
who, when they grew up, joined the regular force. Every morning,
before breakfast, I attended the police parade, riding to the fort on my
Arab marc, taking a different route through the town every day so that
I could castigate the municipal authorities if the streets were dirty or the
dustbins unemptied. In the beginning I taught the band myself. I whistled
to them and played gramophone records and very soon they picked up
the tunes. They had a natural sense pf rhythm and were experts.on drums,
their earliest chef-d'oeuvre being ‘Marching through Georgia’, which re­
sounded through the town every Sunday morning when the police went
C ' - 1 • » <-> — r--------~~ " '’“v
for a route march. But this was too jejune. I took on a Sikh bandmaster,
a venerable, bemedalled old soldier, and lie taught the band to read music,
an accomplishment which had never formed part of my education. After
that they soared above me to great heights with expensive musical i
____mstru-
ments ** from Boosey and Hawkcs and quantities of printed music. They
played marches and ‘pieces’, descriptive of Monastery Gardens and
Persian Markets, with chimes, produced on an instrument consisting of
hanging metal tubes—till one of the tubes disappeared, which was a relief
to me as I got so tired of hearing ‘The Bells of St Mary’s*—and they
played dance music, with great verve, in spite of a few wrong notes.
The advantage of a police force consisting of men who knew the
country, the people and the language outweighed the disadvantages; one
being that when anyone was arrested he usually turned out to be either
a relation or a neighbour of some member of the force. On the whole
the Bahrain police were very effective and it was mainly due to them that
for so many years the state of public security in Bahrain was excellent.
The number of prisoners in jail, at one time, was rarely more than forty
or fifty, which is a very low average in an Eastern state with a population
which by 1957 was about 125,000. Few of the police were educated, only
a handful of them could read or write, but they were men on whom one
could depend in a tight comer. They developed a certain esprit de corps,
which foreign police lack, and some of them became skilful, though un­
orthodox, in the art of detection. L knew every man in the force, and all
about his family and background. Some of the happiest times which I
spent in Bahrain were when I was dealing with the police.
40
Four
Of several duties assigned to the Indian Navy that of cruising the
pearl banks is far die most harassing and unpleasant. . . the heat
is not surpassed by any known spot in the world. The sun rises
red hot. Under double awnings, their heads not unfrcquently
bound with wet cloths, the seamen are seen lying on the deck or
stretched along the gunwale, panting for breath--- Her Majesty’s
frigate Liverpool, going from Muscat to Bushire, one day lost
three lieutenants and thirty men from heatstroke.
Travels in Arabia. Lieutenant J. R. Wellsted (1838)
Dear as the wet diver to the eyes
Of his pale wife, who waits and weeps on shore,
By sands of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf,
Plunging all day in the blue waves, at night
Having made up his toll of precious pearls;
Rejoins her in his hut upon the shore.
The Light of Asia. Sra Edwin Arnold. 1832-1904
he picture of a Bahrain pearl diver and his ‘pale* wife, by Sir
T Edwin Arnold, the Victorian poet, is inaccurate, even allowing for
poetic licence, as I discovered when I came to Bahrain. The diving
season lasts for four months and ten days, from June till early October,
when the sea is hot and calm, and the diving dhows only return once or
twice in the season to replenish their supplies, so visits to the family ‘hut*
were infrequent. The divers and their wives were definitely dusky and
‘pale’ is hardly the word to describe them. The lines are worth quoting,
not for their poetical merit, but as the only reference to Bahrain by any
known British poet.
When I first arrived, and for the following six or seven years, the
prosperity, and almost the existence, of Bahrain depended on the pearl
trade. If the catch was good, and pearl prices high, divers, boat-owners
and pearl merchants made money, which they spent in the bazaar. The
41
A
\v"r.^ ~ ’
rjr. w