Page 93 - Personal Column (Charles Belgrave)_Neat

belonging to 203 Squadron which had its headquarters at Basra; two
• below the transparent water which from above gave the impression of
Arabian desert, and the wind carried the brown sand across the water,
flying-boats were going down to Bahrain. Near Kuwait something hap­
causing visibility to be almost nil.
pened to the oil supply; it was very evident when oil began to pour down
from a pipe in the ceiling of the aircraft. The pilot decided to land at once played Bridge until a late hour. The ‘Bara’ was blowing so we sat inside
on the sea. This was done successfully, but in very shallow water, and the
other flying-boat came down alongside us. It was decided that I should go
on in the second aircraft but with no luggage as the aircraft was fully
loaded. The sea was warm and smooth, which was fortunate as the
transfer had to be done by swimming and wading. I arrived in Bahrain
with nothing but a sponge bag—black-and-white check—into which I
had put my watch, my passport and my money, but my luggage arrived
a few days later in another R.A.F. flying-boat.
The most frightening journey which I ever had was when I accepted
the offer of a lift in a U.S. military aircraft from Bahrain to Karachi. I
was going to Kashmir on short leave in wartime. It was a big, heavy
machine and fairly steady but with it were several small aircraft of a type
which were, I think, called Mosquitos. All down the Gulf they appeared
to be doing stunts around the big aeroplane in which I was travelling.
They came so near to it that I could almost see the time on the watches
which the pilots wore on their wrists. We hugged the Persian coast,
dodging in and out among the high cliffs and mountains, and to make
matters worse the Captain constantly told me that he had never been in
the Gulf before and. hoped that he was on the right course. However,
we reached Karachi without mishap and the Captain very kindly
offered to take me on to ‘Del Hi*, which was his pronunciation of Delhi,
but I thanked him warmly and said that I had business in Karachi. That
night I took the train to Lahore, on my way to Kashmir.
Usually the Gulf was smooth and the sight of it from the air was very
beautiful, though the land over which one flew was desolate and ugly.
Nothing could be more depressingly monotonous than the appearance of
the Qatar peninsula or the mountains of Oman. They reminded me of a
contour map made of brown plasticine with no relieving colour. But the
colour of the water in the Gulf was more brilliant than any sea which I
have seen. Much of the Gulf was shallow and the sea bed was visible
being only a few feet deep. One saw circular depressions in the sea: bed
where the water took on a darker shade, there were patches of golden
yellow where there was sand, and a wonderful range of colour varying
from palest blue to aquamarine and through every shade of green. But the
Gulf was not always calm and clear. At times there were sandstorms in the
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On June 12th, 1950, we were dining with friends in Manama and we
the house instead of on the veranda. I wrote in my diary that it was ‘a
very wild night and sand blowing’. Shortly before we left I heard the
sound of an aircraft circling overhead, but this was not an unusual sound
in Bahrain. That night I slept indoors, although it was June, because there
was so much sand in the air. Very early next morning, before I left the
house to ride up to the fort, there was a telephone call from the aero-
drome at Muharraq. I was told that an Air France Skymaster had come
down in the sea off Sitra. The news had apparently come from a man,
who had been seen by some of the crew of an anchored ship, swimming
in the sea. He had been brought ashore at Sitra. I jumped into my car and
drove to the fort.
As quickly as possible I got the police together, told them what had
happened and sent them off in the police launches, and on camels and
horses and in cars to patrol the coast, then, with Jim Hyde, one of the
British police officers, and a young Arab officer, I raced to Sitra, which is
about fourteen miles from Manama. The BAPCO launches and boats
from the ships in the harbour were already searching the sea in that area,
but it was dark and rough. We went out to sea in one of the launches
for some time, but we found nobody. Later on five more survivors were
picked up in the sea; these and the first man were the only people who
were saved out of fifty-one passengers and crew. I spent all that day at
Sitra, and going up and down the coast to see that the police were patrol-
ling properly. A number of bodies were recovered but they had been too
long in the sea for first aid to be of any use. The six survivors were taken
to the BAPCO hospital; I went to see them, hoping to hear something
about how the crash had happened, but they were in no state to give any
coherent description.
Everybody in Bahrain was horrified by the disaster. The Skymaster
had come from Indo-China, where the French were fighting against the
Communists, and there were suggestions in Bahrain that it was a case of
sabotage. Next day several Air- France officials arrived from Paris and from
Cairo to enquire into the matter. It was a day of macabre muddle. I was
asked to help in making the arrangements for the burial of the bodies
which had been recovered from the sea in the little Christian cemetery,
which was looked after by the American Mission. The Mission clergyman
offered to take part in the funeral service as well as the Catholic priest, as
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