Page 41 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

When I was in Bahrain he sent me a complete set of what is technically
called ‘furniture* for hawking, including jesses, hoods and other equip­
ment, which I gave to the Shaikh. We found that the Scottish material
was identical to that used by the Shaikh, which was made by his own
falconers.
Coursing hares with silugi hounds was another form of sport which
provided good exercise, as one followed the hounds on foot, which in­
volved some hard running. Silugis are very similar to greyhounds, but
their tails and cars are ‘feathered’. They are beautiful, graceful creatures,
possessing great speed, but they hunt by sight, not by scent. On an average
about half of the hares which were put up managed to get away. For
many years I had a half-bred silugi, known as a ‘lugi’ among the Arabs.
He was a great hunter and several times when coursing hares he hunted
and brought down a gazelle, which was very embarrassing, as the Shaikh
did not like anyone to kill gazelle.
I found that looking for truffles was regarded by the Arabs almost
as much a form of sport as coursing and hawking. The desert truffles
appeared after the rains and were only visible by a slight excrescence in
the sand formed by the truffle, which resembled a small potato, pushing
up towards the surface. The Shaikh used to go into the desert with a
number of his sons and followers and in extended order they would
comb the desert for truffles, which grow very sparsely.
Indiscriminate shooting of game was forbidden by the Shaikh, unlike
in Saudi Arabia where gazelle are hunted in cars and shot down, with the
result that they have been almost exterminated in many parts of the
desert. Before the oil company town was established at Awali, twelve
miles from Manama, gazelle roamed where today there are lines of
European houses and gardens and roads full of motor vehicles. The
gazelle have now retired to the southern end of the island, but on the
large island of Omm al Nasan, known as ‘the Shaikh’s island’, there are
big herds of gazelle and black buck; the latter were introduced from
India many years ago. Very occasionally the Shaikh allows one or two
of the bucks to be shot if there are too many of them in the herd.
During our early years there were about a dozen Europeans in
Manama, including the missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church of
America, who did useful medical and educational work but very rarely
made any converts. It was a sociable community; people met together
most days playing tennis or bridge or at small dinner parties. In the
summer the French pearl merchants came out from Paris, which en­
livened the atmosphere, bringing supplies of interesting food and wines.
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Sloops of the British Navy paid frequent visits and from 1928 the R.A.F.
Hying boats of 303 Squadron came constantly from Basra .to Bahrain. It
about this time that I started making gardens, and I persuaded the
was
R.A.F. to bring from Basra plants and Howering shrubs, especially
oleanders, which for many years were called by the Arabs ‘the Adviser's
flower’ as they had never previously been grown in Bahrain. Now they
the commonest shrub in the place. I used also to ask people to bring
are
me plants from the botanical gardens in Karachi, from where I got many
of the trees and shrubs which now grow profusely in Bahrain. When we
left there was a European population of between two and three thousand
people, and the social life in the winter became a round of cocktail parties
and dinners. It was not unusual to have to attend two cocktail parties in
one evening followed by a dinner party, which was not conducive to
early rising or efficiency. It produced, too, a spirit of social competition, as
people who had no official obligations felt compelled to entertain more
lavishly and expensively than their means permitted. The social life in
Bahrain’s early days was pleasanter than it was latterly.
Visitors from abroad were rare. At one time I had a British officer in
the police who would have described his knowledge of French as ‘rusty’
—which usually means non-existent. One day I received a message from
him, marked ‘Urgent’. It read as follows: ‘A man calling himself Albert
London has arrived here dressed as an Arab. He says he represents La Vie
Parisienne. He is a suspicious character. He is in the police lock-up.’
I hurried to the police station to investigate the ‘suspicious character*
and found a Frenchman sitting on a hard bench surveying the scene with
interest; he was Albert Londres, a well-known French writer who was
doing a series of articles for Le Petit Parisieti. He had come from Jedda
and had visited King Saud, who presented him with the Arab clothes. ~ I
took him to my house and fortunately found that he regarded the matter
as a good joke, especially the idea of being on the staff of La Vie. Later,
he described the incident amusingly in his book La Peche des Perles.
In 1932 Bahrain was hit by ‘The Depression’. The revenue, which
had averaged about ^82,000 during the previous seven years, slumped
to about £50,000, which was insufficient to pay for the cost of the
administration. I had a difficult time explaining the position to the Shaikh
and the senior members of the family, but eventually they realized that
the situation w*as critical and reluctantly agreed that the allowances to the
Ruling Family should be reduced and that all salaries of government
officials should be cut by 10 per cent, until the financial position improved.
At the same time work on new projects was slowed down, a small sum
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