Page 4 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

Monday, August loth, 1925
PERSONAL
Young Gentleman, aged 22/28, Public School and/or University
education, required for service in an Eastern State. Good salary
and prospects to suitable man, who must be physically fit; highest
references; proficiency in languages an advantage. Write with full
details to Box S.501, The Times, London E.C.4.

ne morning, in the summer of 1925,1 was sitting at breakfast in
a flat in Chelsea, overlooking the Thames, reading the papers
when this advertisement, in the middle of the ‘Personal Column*
of The Times, caught my eye.
I was on leave from Tanganyika, in East Africa, where I had spent
two years as an administrative officer in the Colonial Service. I had been
lucky in my first term of service. The district where I was stationed was
in the south-west highlands, one of the healthiest parts of the Territory;
the work had been interesting and, as I was in the centre of the big-game ■
country, I had enjoyed exciting and profitable sport. In my two years I
shot eight elephants and by selling the ivory of six of them I had supple­
mented my very meagre pay. The vast herds of elephants used to descend
on the gardens of the Africans and destroy cultivation and houses, and I
was often called upon to shoot one. There was, however, small chance of
my being posted again to such a good station; besides, I wanted to marry
and I saw little prospect of this in the immediate future on the pay which
I got in the Colonial Service. I had no private income. From the time
when I joined the Army as a subaltern, on seven-and-six a day, I had kept
myself. I was in two minds whether to remain in the Colonial Service or
to look elsewhere for another job in the Middle East.
Before going to Africa I was a ‘temporary officer* in the Army. I got
my commission after leaving Oxford, through the O.T.C., and I served
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STATE OF BAHRAIN