'THIM DAYS IS GONE' [‎121r] (241/248)

122
took place. The Shaikh ceremonially opened a valve before a
large concourse at the new oil-loading terminal and the oil began
to flow ’"to the waiting tanker. There was an Arab repast at sun
down at the Company head quarters in Kuwait town, where some 400
guests sat down to a magnificent Quzi which was all finished I
record with approval, in some 20 minutes flat! It was followed
by a splendid fire-work display, during which the Managing
cK r ^^ 0r * said to me " Its a r egular Brock's Benefit! Tell the
Ar^hir t 'h tS t a . f re 9 u,ar Brock's Benefit!" I told the Shaikh in
roni »H th n t ^ s P ectacu,ar display. Whereupon the Shaikh
replied No, that s not what he said. He said it's a Brock
something". I then had to go into a lengthy explanation of who
Brock was and what a 'Benefit' was, at the end of which the
Shaikh was very little the wiser. it would be nice if people
being translated into a foreign language would use more simple
and less idiomatic phraseology! K
The
one
winter
there
was necessarily less care-free than the preceedinq
. r . u . wer . e hardly any expeditions into the desert and very
few f i shing trips, and the count-down to the birth of our second
daughter, Virginia (without whose encouragement and
these reminiscences would never have seen the
proceeding apace. Too much was happening.
light
co-operation
of day) was
The representatives of world oil companies were arriving in
Kuwait to put in their bids for the Neutral Zone concession
They all (except the British contender) felt it necessary to
suborn (at the cost of some f25,000 a time) one of the Shaikh's
immediate entourage to plead their case with him, presumably
under the impression that the Shaikh would not know about it. Of
course he did. None of them could have extolled the merits of
one company over another, so they told him right out which
company had bought them. The Shaikh always referred to the
companies to me as "Abdullah A1 Mulla's Company" or "Izzat
Jaafar's company."
One outfit - an American Independent - was even more brash They
arrived in a Grumman flying boat which could lower wheels
it could come down on either land or water.
Shaikh a flight in it. He was incensed. "Wha^
am?", he said to me, "some unsophisticated
bamboozled by their technology?"
so that
and offered the
do they think I
beduwi to be
I did not of course try to
have been useless), although
hard to believe this.
influence him in any way (it would
I felt that the Americans found it
The wily old New Zealander, Frank Holmes, who started the
concession-hunt i ng in the 1920s, noted somewhere in his diaries
Saw the Shaikh for an hour today but did not talk business as he
was not in the mood". Few of the 1947 concession hunters were