Page 46 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

the Shaikh’s territories, land and sea, in the concession. We wanted the
oil field to be developed as quickly as possible so as to start collecting
royalties. The British Government was concerned with wider, and to us
more obscure, oil policies which affected the whole area. The situation
was still further complicated when the Iraq Petroleum Company, in 1934,
entered the field as a competitor for the ‘additional area’. However, the
Shaikh finally granted the whole area to BAPCO, one of his reasons being
that he thought Bahrain was too small a place to contain two rival oil
companies.
The discovery of oil in Bahrain gave an impetus to the other oil com­
panies, who hurried to obtain concessions in the Gulf States. In 1935 the
Shaikh of Qatar granted a concession to the Iraq Petroleum Company
whose first, successful, well was drilled in 1938. In the same year the
Standard Oil Company of California obtained a concession over the
eastern pan of Saudi Arabia and found oil three years later. In Kuwait,
after long and complicated negotiations, a concession was granted to the
Kuwait Oil Company, owned, equally, by the Anglo-Persian Oil Com­
pany and the (American) Gulf Oil Corporation. Oil was found in their
second well, drilled in 1938. The Neutral Zone was acquired by the
American Independent Oil Company, which discovered oil in commer­
cial quantities in 1953. But Bahrain, where oil was first found, became the
poor relation among the oil states; its oil field is very small and only with
careful control does it produce about two and a quarter million tons a
Coursing with silugi hounds
year, an insignificant output when compared with Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia which each produce about sixty million tons.
The saving grace for Bahrain has been the gradual increase in oil
revenue which allowed time to build up a competent administration
capable of planning ahead. There was no sudden transformation, as in
Kuwait and Qater, from extreme poverty to unimaginable wealth. I knew
every year approximately how much revenue to expect. One day I said
to Shaikh Hamed, ‘Your Highness, would it not be a good idea to publish
the budget so that our people can know how much—and how little—
we have got to spend?’ He looked rather dubious for this was a very
radical suggestion; in the past the financial affairs of the State had been a
closely guarded secret. ‘It is the custom/ I explained, ‘in all advanced
J
countries/ ‘You may do so/ he said, ‘if you are sure that it will not cause
trouble/ But when I told my old head clerk what I proposed to do he
raised his hands in horror. ‘The Shaikh will never agree/ he said. I told
him that the Shaikh had agreed. He shook his head mournfully, and then
said, more brightly, ‘The people don’t want to know and they won’t
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An Arab falconer