BAHREIN: The Uncontrollable Genie

In the summer of 1925 a young Englishman named Charles Dalrymple Belgrave found himself in a quandary as old as the state of matrimony. Home on leave from a colonial service job in Tanganyika, Belgrave had become smitten with the Mayfair-bred daughter of a prosperous knight, and knew he could not support her on his colonial service pay. He began to read the “Personals” column of the London Times and was intrigued by this one:

WANTED : Young gentleman, age 22 to 28, public school and/or university education, required for service in an Eastern state; proficiency in languages essential.

Firing off a reply, Belgrave discovered that the post was that of adviser to Sheik Hamed bin Issa al Khalifah of Bahrein, a 213-square-mileBritish protectorate composed of five islands lying off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. Charles Belgrave had never heard of Bahrein, but the pay was enough to get married on.

Belgrave and his bride arrived in March 1926, found Bahrein a feudal and impoverished place. Manama, the crumbling mud capital, did not even have its own water supply. (Water brought from the mainland by ship was hawked through filthy streets in goatskin bags.) The populace, illiterate, diseased and unruly, was forever trying to overthrow the Sheik. The police, imported from Muscat on the Arabian coast, were, if anything, even less law-abiding.

A Helping Hand. Sheik Hamed, who was primarily interested in hunting bustard with his falcons, was willing to give his “adviser” a virtually free hand. With Hamed’s backing, Belgrave packed off the imported cops and established an effective police force. Only once has Belgrave felt it necessary to give his red-turbaned cops a hand. During an and-Jewish riot in 1947, the 6-ft. 4-in., 200-lb. adviser dispersed the mob pillaging a Jewish home by standing at the top of a flight of stairs and bowling the mob leaders back down the stairs into the arms of their comrades.

Belgrave’s wife, to the horror of Bahrein’s purdah-loving elders but with a behind-the-scenes assist from Sheik Hamed’s No. i wife, won permission to open a school for girls. In a series of bitter struggles with the usurers and dhow owners, who had long run the Bahrein waterfront, Belgrave reorganized the pearl-diving industry and gradually won Bahrein a lucrative reputation as the only honest transshipment port in the Middle East.

The turning point came in 1932, when Standard Oil of California hit oil on Bahrein. Belgrave persuaded the Sheik to take a step unprecedented for an Arab ruler: to split Bahrein’s oil income ($8,500,000 in 1955) three ways−one-third to the Sheik, one-third to “the people” and one-third to a national reserve fund. The consequence is that while the oil wealth of neighboring Arab countries has often been squandered on Cadillacs, harems and princely pub-crawls, Bahrein’s oil has helped to propel a whole people into the 20th century.

Today six hospitals provide free medical service to all of the sheikdom’s 140,000 citizens, and malaria, once the scourge of Bahrein, is gone. Water from artesian wells flows into many Bahrein homes, and a dial telephone system links the archipelago’s principal towns. And, at Belgrave’s insistence, the accumulated reserve funds have been carefully invested abroad so that even when Bahrein’s oil finally dries up−her proven reserves are only 200 million barrels v. Saudi Arabia’s 35 billion barrels−Bahreinis should still enjoy a fair degree of prosperity.

The Shining Example. By the early 1950s, Belgrave’s success in Bahrein had made him one of the most influential and respected men in the Middle East and Bahrein a shining example of what Western techniques and money could do for backward nations. In gratitude for Belgrave’s achievements, Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1952. Sheik Hamed’s son and successor, Sulman bin Hamed al Khalifah, told a visitor: “We consider Mr. Belgrave to be not an Englishman but a Bahreini. He is my hand.”

But by his very successes Sir Charles had conjured up a genie he could not control. Soon after World War II, Bahrein’s emerging middle class, merchants who owed much of their prosperity to Belgrave, began to agitate for “democratic reforms.” The Sheik, on Belgrave’s advice, refused to make any major concessions.

The merchants dared not attack the Sheik. But, supported by young intellectuals who owed their education to Belgrave, they launched an all-out campaign against Sir Charles and his lady. (In the best paternalistic tradition, Lady Belgrave ran the school system herself, paid teachers personally instead of through a central agency.) Last March, when Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd made a visit to Bahrein, he was stoned by crowds shouting “Down with Britain.” A few days later, five days of strikes and rioting broke out over Belgrave, and eleven were killed.

“Our Own Correspondent.” Outraged by these disorders, Sheik Sulman not only refused to fire Belgrave but exiled the reformist leader, Abdul Rahman Bakir−who promptly took refuge in Nasser’s Cairo. The British Foreign Office, however, disturbed by Egypt’s growing influence in Bahrein and anxious to avoid another blow to British prestige like Jordan’s unseemly ouster of Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb (TIME, March 12), pressured Belgrave to get out while the getting was good. Last week, in a brief dispatch from “our own correspondent in Bahrein,” the London Times reported that “the Sheik of Bahrein has with reluctance accepted the resignation of Sir Charles Belgrave, his adviser for over 30 years.” (The seven-line dispatch did not identify the Times’s “own correspondent”−Sir Charles Belgrave himself.)

Among the Arabs to whom he had devoted his life, some conceded that “Belgrave was a good man and did much for Bahrein,” and then hastened to add “The world has changed, and today everyone wants independence.” One Egyptian put it more drastically: “Belgrave was one of those so-called Arab experts. Just as Glubb went, so he’s gone, and so will goall of them. Nobody’s impressed any more with Englishmen who can recite the Koran. The hell with them.”