Page 51 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

supply. Today there arc between sixty and seventy Europeans in Bahrain
Government service.
Bahrain was in a flourishing condition in 1937; there was a good
diving season and many people were earning high wages in the oil field,
so a group of young Arabs decided that it would be a profitable under-
taking to open a cinema. This had been mooted some years before, but it
was given up owing to opposition from the older Arabs whose main
argument was that children and young people would wish to go to the
cinema, parents would disapprove and would not provide the money, and
this would encourage the young people to gamble and steal in order to
get money for cinema tickets. This seemed to me a very far-fetched
argument. By 1937 the opposition had subsided and the first cinema was
opened. The Bahrainis soon became ‘movie fans* and there are now seven
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or eight commercial cinemas in Manama and Muharraq in addition to
those of the R.A.F., the oil company and the Navy. I am fond of films Photo Bahrain Petroleum Co.
myself, but I think an unrestricted diet of‘movies’ has a bad effect on a Awali, the oil town
comparatively primitive people. In Bahrain the advent of the cinema
caused a deterioration in manners and morals. After a film was shown in
which acid was thrown at someone two cases occurred of Arabs throw­
ing acid, and I have always attributed to some incident in a film the
terrible habit of suicide among women by pouring petrol over their
Manama from a minaret
clothes and setting themselves alight, which has become prevalent in
recent years. Egyptian films were the most popular, because they were in
Arabic, but old-fashioned ‘Westerns* and ‘Tarzan’ films were much en­ •; : • ■
-.-.r
joyed by the less sophisticated villagers. When education is more ad­ ; : -. h #
vanced the influence of the cinema may be less harmful; perhaps the
public will then no longer believe that the screen is a faithful picture of 7-V
!r- :-~y ■■'y: -<• x\i*' >_V;
life in the West. §e*«-si
. 7.7" S3
Education was one of the most diflicult problems which I had to deal ■—i
with and..I feel that the results were not commensurable with the vast
sums of money which were spent on it and the hard work of some of the
nr-.
teachers and directors. Since 1919, when the first school was opened at
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Muharraq, paid for partly by public subscription, there had been constant
quarrels between the teaching staff, some of whom were foreigners, and
the committee of notables, most .of them illiterate, who ran the school ■ *. ■ **9
with a subsidy from the Government. One of the. first headmasters was 1.7
Shaikh Hafiz Wahba, an Egyptian, who became Ambassador for Saudi ■rrr.
>=C.
Arabia at the Court of St James and, before he left London, was awarded ui V
WtTv.’
the K.C.V.O. He fell foul of the Political Agent, before I came, and had
to leave Bahrain. I knew him well in later days and I much admired r
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