Robin Wilton's esoterica

by John Wilton Part 4 of 8

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One of the many provisions of the 1916 Treaty which had been left in abeyance for more than 30 years was that a Postal Service linking Qatar to the outside world be set up. Such links had not been seriously missed so far, but now it was clearly necessary that some system of communication be established. In the absence of anyone else available to do the job I was instructed to add the duties of sub-postmaster to my other tasks and to arrange the details in agreement with the Postmaster in Bahrain. In a matter of weeks all the arrangements for a service using the newly introduced Gulf Airways scheduled weekly flight to Doha had been agreed and a supply of stamps sent over (Government of India in Rupee denominations not, at the express desire of the Ruler, overprinted Bahrain). The date for the first collection and transmission was appointed and advertised locally. On the day some half-dozen letters had been handed in for onward transmission to Bahrain. Unfortunately one piece of equipment had not yet arrived: the date-cancelling stamp. I was not to be defeated by so trivial a deficiency and cancelling the stamps with my "Office of the Political Officer, Doha" stamp I despatched my first mailbag. I received a stern command from the Postmaster to cease this irregular practice at once and, until the proper stamp could be provided, to send the letters uncancelled to him to be franked. I thus unwittingly (and, in my ignorance, at no profit to myself) created a philatelic rarity. Somewhere one or two unique first day covers survive and appreciate in value. They appear in some philatelic catalogues. Other aspects of my work were rather more ticklish. The Ruler was not really enthusiastic about having a Political Officer keeping an eye on what went on and reporting to Bahrain, with whom there were long established disputes about sovereignty over some off-shore islands and even about a cemetery in which some of the Ruler of Bahrain's ancestors were buried. His determination not to have any Bahrain overprinted stamps was symptomatic. Another was his insistence that no flagstaff be planted in the ground where my office was established. (I met that requirement by flying my flag from a flagstaff on the roof, the Oil Company being less sensitive in these matters.) In Bahrain on New Year's Day slaves who had been manumitted by the Political Agent would come and dance around the flagstaff in the Agency grounds to demonstrate that they were still alive and free. There were still slaves in Qatar and a certain amount of clandestine slave trading continued. Later in my time in Doha I was able to free a Baluchi youth who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. I had little faith in his chances of surviving as a freed slave in Qatar and arranged for him to be taken to Bahrain by the visiting Royal Navy sloop. High-handed interference of this sort did not endear me to the Ruler, who remained suspicious of anything that appeared to infringe his sovereignty. It was a disconcerting aspect of life in Qatar that the acceptance of slavery as a normal feature of society went unchallenged. I was aware of the continued existence of slavery in Bahrain, Kuwait and the Trucial Shaikhdoms from my previous brief sojourns in those places. I knew that British policy was to combat the slave trade and punish any that they caught engaged in it. Slaves caught in anti-slavery operations would be freed, as would slaves who managed to get to the Political Agency and demand their freedom. Records of manumission were kept and freed slaves were encouraged to maintain contact with the Agency to demonstrate their continued liberty. But no active steps were taken to persuade the Rulers to abolish the institution of slavery; and, according to their temperament, the Rulers acquiesced more or less gracefully in the practice of manumission. In Qatar, where there had been no resident Political Officer, slavery and the slave trade had gone unhindered. It would take some time to reconcile the Ruler to the idea that times had changed in this respect. This is, perhaps, an appropriate point to jump ahead to an occasion when in Sharjah it emerged that a member of the Agency launch crew was a slave, who handed over his pay to his “uncle” each week. He eventually was driven to revolt when his owner demanded that he hand over the smart navy blue jersey (embroidered with anchor and P.O.T.C.* on the chest) which was part of his winter uniform. He appeared in the office loudly demanding his freedom, which was granted. When I enquired some months later how he was getting on I was told that he had returned quite peaceably to his former servitude having won his right to keep his jersey. Slavery did not, in many cases, bear particularly heavily on the slaves; and when eventually rising prosperity encouraged the Rulers up and down the Gulf formally to abolish the institution, many freed slaves continued with their way of life virtually unchanged. Slavery eventually died out, physically, with their demise. *Political Officer, Trucial Coast