Page 72 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

across the racecourse to a suburb of Manama, where white houses stood
the oil company was not a crime, though the same people would have
hesitated to steal from a house or from an individual. In Manama the war
brought on to the scene a new type of young man, an Eastern form of the
English ‘Teddy Boy’. Instead of wearing stove-pipe trousers, a tight coat
and a string tic, like rjiis London counterpart, he wore light-coloured
trousers, a violently patterned American shirt, sometimes a white linen
cap, side-whiskers and several prominent gold teeth. He made his money
by peddling liquor in the Black Market and running a racket in the
brothel area with pornographic pictures as a sideline. Many of these
youths started their career by hanging round the shops in the bazaar and
carrying parcels for Europeans; strange to say, some gf the British and
many of the Americans encouraged them. The Americans found them
‘cute’ and sometimes engaged them as servants in their houses, with dire
results.
During the war the British community organized various activities in
aid of war charities and in 1944 they held a race-meeting, on the plain
behind Muharraq, with a Tote from which a proportion of the takings
was given to war funds. It was the first time that anything of this kind
had been done in Bahrain, and it proved to be so popular that in after
years the spring and autumn race-meetings became one of the. chief events
of the cold-weather * '•on. After the war the races were held in aid of
the T.p fy- . '’re the Government opened the T.B. hospital
ir ’ ‘ }])'* ‘ \rab patients to go to a sanatorium in India,
r V3*' l about racing I became the Secretary of the
'ilLlUh SlCZ:’ - 1 - 11 . . • 1
, f which involved organizing the race-meetings
XVct**- -cnree times a year and enlisting people to work as judges,
t
•^stewards, starters, members of the handicapping committee and Tote ? kind to photographers. After a short interval the horses in the first race
workers. Shaikh Sulman was fond of horses and had a stable of fine
Arabs; in its day the Bahrain strain was famous. When Shaikh Sulman
visited Lady Wentworth at Crabbet Park, in the Coronation year, she
told him that her mother, Lady Anne Blunt, had bought several Arab
horses from Bahrain about eighty years ago from which some of the
Crabbet stud were descended. The cavalry section of the police had about
thirty horses, the Bahrain Petroleum Company’s riding club had a.stable
at Awali and there were a number of private owners, so it was possible
to ring the changes, though certain horses did seem to appeal: rather
frequently on the race-cards.
A racecourse was made on what had originally been intended as an
aerodrome about a mile outside Manama with an enclosure, grandstand,
Tote, paddock and a ‘Royal Box’. It was pleasantly situated with a view
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among palm trees along a curving bay of the sea. One of the difficulties
was handicapping, which had to be by distance, not by weight, as most
of the Shaikh’s jockeys rode without saddles. The handicapping com­
mittee, of which Marjorie was a member, had to depend on the horses’
previous performances, except in the case of new runners, who always
started at scratch. Another matter which caused complications was the
Arabs’ habit of rarely giving individual names to their horses but of calling
them by the strain to which they belonged, so in one race there might be
two, or sometimes even more than two, horses called ‘Saqlawi’ or
‘Kahaylan’, only distinguished by their colour or by a number. But when
it came to calling horses of the same name No. 3 or No. 4 I insisted on
their owners giving them individual names.
On Race Day, long before the first race began, the road leading out
of the town was crowded with cars, lorries full of men, buses, bicyclists
and pedestrians and cars containing purdah ladies, peeping through their
veils at the crowds. Some time before the first race the Shaikh arrived and
drove slowly down the course with an escort of police on motor-bicycles,
as the police horses who normally provided the mounted escort were
among the runners. I and the other race officials met him at the entrance
to the enclosure. His personal standard, a red flag with a white border,
was unfurled above the Royal Box, the police band played the Bahrain
National Anthem, which had been composed by the Bandmaster of the
Royal Marines band from one of the flagships of the East Indies Squadron
—it was rather reminiscent of ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’—cameras and
cine-cameras clicked and buzzed as a crowd of European and Arab
amateur photographers took pictures of the Shaikh, who was always very
appeared in the paddock. Besides being Secretary I was one of the pad-
dock stewards. I spent some of my time in the paddock, then I Hurried
to the Shaikh’s box and watched the race and then down to the horse
lines to make sure that horses and riders were ready for the next race, for
wc liked to start exactly on time and this we usually succeeded in doing.
I used to walk a great many miles on race days.
Along the rails, all down the course as far as one could see, there was
a solid line of Arabs four or five deep. Among them were the cars of the
purdah ladies who sent their servants to the Tote to place their bets.
Barrow boys selling cigarettes, sweets, soft drinks, ice cream and Pepsi­
Cola—of which 40,000 bottles a day used to be sold in Bahrain in the
summer—shouted their wares between the races. Car horns blared as
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