Page 60 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

When the Shaikh was Lr. England, Lord Cadinan, the head of the
because it was a private visit he could not hold a big public reception to
Anglo-Pcrsian Oil Company, paid a call on him and talked for an hour
about the reasons why his company had not taken up the Bahrain oil
concession, which was certainly a very difficult matter to explain. The
Shaikh got more and more restive during this non-stop monologue, which
I had to translate, and although there were no hawks or camels at the
Hyde Park Hotel to which he could transfer his attention, as he did when
he was in his country house in Bahrain when he found conversation dull,
he soon gave up listening. When Lord Cadman finally took his leave the
Shaikh said to him, with almost a wink at me, ‘Some day yo\i must tell
me why your company did not compete for the Bahrain concession.’
Lord Cadman was nonplussed arid as I escorted him to the lift he suggested
another talk to explain why his company had ‘boobed’ so badly over
Bahrain—though this was not the expression which he used—but some-
how the Shaikh never found time for another meeting.
At the end of 1937 the Amir Saud, who is now the King of Saudi
Arabia, paid a visit to Bahrain. He came at the time of the annual cele­
brations, which were held on the anniversary of the Shaikh’s accession,
so with some adjustment it was possible to adapt the decorations and the
entertainments so that they served for the Shaikh’s celebrations and for
the royal visit. We gave a luncheon party for the Amir to which we in­
vited about twenty people; this was as many as the table which we used
could take, but when the guests arrived we found that there were several
extra people with the Amir’s party. At an Arab luncheon this would not
have mattered, but it necessitated frantic rearrangements of the table so
that when the guests sat down there was hardly room for them to
move
their elbows. Early in the following year the Shaikh with many of his
relations and followers went on the Pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving his two
brothers and me as a Regency Council. The party travelled by sea and
when the ship left Bombay it was found that the servant in charge of the
impedimenta for making coffee had left all his equipment on shore, so the^
ship had to be stopped until the things were recovered from Bombay./-'
Soon after the Shaikh’s return from Mecca, Princess Alice and the
Earl of Athlone spent some days in Bahrain on their way back from Saudi
Arabia; the visit was unofficial and the only entertainments were small
luncheon and dinner parties. They stayed at the Political Agency with
Hugh Weightman, who was then Political Agent, and his wife. They
were ve ry informal and spent much of their time taking photographs and
shopping in the bazaar. Princess Alice was the first member of the British
Royal Family to visit Bahrain and the Shaikh was disappointed that
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do honour to the royal guests. He and the other Arabs who were present
were much impressed by the fact that the Princess—a woman—inspected
the Guard of Honour which paraded at the palace; such a thing had never
before been seen in Bahrain.
King Ibn Saud came to Bahrain in the spring of 1939 when I met him
for the first time and succumbed to the attraction of his manner, though
before I knew him I had been inclined to resent his attitude towards
. Bahrain. He was extremely friendly and made himself particularly
pleasant to me. When he returned to Arabia he sent me an Arab mare in
foal; she foaled a chestnut filly, Oleander, which I rode every day for
many years. In liis early years, when he was in exile, the King had lived
for some time in Bahrain as the guest of the Shaikh’s father and he never
forgot the hospitality which he had received at that time. Long before the
visit most of my time with the Shaikh was spent in discussing the arrange­
ments. The visitors were housed in Shaikh Sulman’s new palace at Rafaa,
which was surrounded by tents for the King’s retainers. When crowned
heads pay visits in Europe there is usually a programme and a time-table
to which they adhere, so I suggested to the Shaikh that we should have a
printed programme for King Ibn Saud’s visit. He agreed to this, rather
doubtfully, after I had pointed out to him that when he visited London
there had been a printed programme. My suggestion was a success and
the time-table worked very well.
The King came from Al Khobar, on the Arabian coast, in the Shaikh’s
new launch, a present from the oil company, accompanied by an armada
of launches flying the green flag of Saudi Arabia, carrying the King’s
relations, officials and about two hundred followers. The Amir Saud
arrived with a large party ahead of the King and the Amir Faisal, his
brother, came by air from Egypt. The two rulers met at the end of the
pier and embraced each other warmly under an enormous red umbrella,
which I had brought from England as a present for the Shaikh the last
time I had been on leave. As the procession of about fifty cars, with an
escort of mounted police carrying lances with red-and-white pennants,
preceded by police on red motor-bicycles, drove slowly through the
crowds which lined the streets, many of the spectators threw their cloaks
on the road to do honour to the King.
At the Manama palace the Shaikhs of the Khalifah family were
assembled. This had been difficult to arrange as everybody wished to be
on the pier to meet the King, but I knew that the interminable greetings
would have involved a long delay in the hot sun. Lines of household
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