Page 105 - The Pirate Coast (By Sir Charles Belgrave)

Around the courtyard were kitchens, stores and offices, and on
one side, a large, high dining-room with a wide verandah in
front of it. On the upper floor, were rooms to accommodate
men in the service of the Company, who were at Bushirc on duty
or furlough; one of these rooms was allocated to Loch. Along
another side of the courtyard was a screen of pierced, Persian
plaster work, decorated with arabesque designs, which to Loch
looked Chinese. This very fine plaster work was once a feature
of Arab houses in Bahrain, but it is now regarded as old-fashioned,
and has been replaced by uninteresting styles of Western decora­
tion. Behind the plaster-work screen stood a row of enormous
water jars made of blue and green earthenware ‘such as Ali Baba’s
may be supposed to have been’. A passage gave access to an inner
courtyard, ‘in which there were Mrs. Bruce’s private apartments,
wliich were hardly ever seen except by intimate friends’. It
seems that Mrs. Bruce led a somewhat sequestered life for, al­
though Loch spent much time with Bruce, he only mentions Mrs.
Bruce two or three times, without saying anything about her.
The Bushirc Residency, which was in the town, was established
in 1763, when the East India Company obtained from the Persian
ruler, Karim Khan, a firman granting the Company certain ex­
clusive trading rights in Persia. Apart from being closed for a
short time on two occasions, it occupied the same site until the
middle of the 19th century, when a Captain Felix Jones, of the
Indian Marines, after whom a cable ship was named in the present
century, obtained from the Persian Government a piece of land
on the coast, about seven miles from Bushire, as a summer camp.
Gradually permanent buildings were put up on this site, which
was called Sabzabad, and eventually, it became the Residency.
Sabzabad, although in many ways an inconvenient and un­
suitable building, having been constantly altered and added to by
many Residents, without a water supply, and distant from the
town of Bushirc, was retained until 1946. The Residency was
then moved to Bahrain, and the Sabzabad building was handed
over to the Persian Government for use as a sanitorium, but
whether it was ever used as such, history does not relate. The
British naval base which was at one time at Basidu, on Kishm
Island, had been transferred to Bahrain in 1935.
The next place wliich the Eden visited was Basra. It was
governed by a Turkish Mutasellim who was responsible to the
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