Coll 6/10 'Hejaz-Nejd Affairs: Financial Situation and Internal Situation' [‎498r] (1002/1310)

THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF;HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
EASTERN (Arabia).
October 13, 1931
CONFIDENTIAL.
Section 2.
[E 5141/1600/25]
No. 1 .
Mr. Hope-Gill to the Marquess of Reading.—{Received October 13.)
(No. 375.)
My Lord, Jedda, September 30, 1931.
1 HAVE the honour to report that Mr. Philby, or rather Hajji Abdullah
St. John Philby, has returned unexpectedly from feiadh, and in the course of
several conversations has given me some interesting sidelights on the internal
situation in this country.
2. There seems little doubt but that Ibn Saud and he get badly on each
other's nerves. He left with all his baggage and instruments in two cars running
on a three-quarter paraffin mixture. In full desert they ran out of
even this modest admixture of benzine, and Mr. Philby subsisted on
dates and insufficient water until relief came from Taif. Arrived there, he
learned of the misappropriation of the whole of the Standard Oil Company’s
benzine stock at Jedda, for which he is agent. Although he pretended on his
arrival here that the seizure was the result of previous arrangement by him
with the Director-General of Finance, he confessed to me last night that he had
been faced with a fait accompli and that all he could do w T as to write it up with
the other debts owing to him by the Hejazi Government. These, he said, now
amount to some £50,000, £12,000 of which represent the value of this and
previous consignments from Standard Oil. He holds no drafts on customs nor
even promissory notes. If the Government swims he hopes eventually to be paid.
If it sinks, he fears that he must sink with it. He has staked his all on Ibn
Saud.
3. This makes it all the more striking that he should criticise him so
unfavourably to a third person. He describes the King as disheartened in spirit,
disillusioned in mind, and approaching impotence in body. This last discomfort
seems to poison his whole outlook, so that he has become morose and reticent,
withdrawing himself for the greater part of the day into the quarters outside
Riadh, where he keeps his slaves and concubines, spending long nights with one
or other of his wives, and only finding relaxation between whiles in the company
of a few Bedouin cronies where the talk is of women and camels. Although he
used even in Riadh to devote anything up to ten hours a day to current affairs, he
seems now to have lost all interest in them and Sheikh Yusuf Yasin moons about
with nothing to do. These activities and this indolence indicate to Mr. Philby
that Ibn Saud, in the fifty-first year of a strenuous sexual career, has reached a
stage of conflict between desire and its fulfilment. The male climacteric, maybe.
n 4 . He also has discovered, to his intense disappointment, that the King lies
to him, not out of malice, he thinks, but because his moral fibre has weakened and
he no longer holds a strict regard for truth. He instances the misappropriation
of his benzine, with which he is convinced Ibn Saud was fully conversant. As
another instance, he states that Ibn Saud told him that M. Boucicault had com
pleted one wireless station north of Medina and was moving on to the next.
Mr. Philby now learns that M. Boucicault has, until quite recently, again been
held up by lack of benzine for his convoy, this time at Al Ula, whence he had been
insistentlv telegraphing for supplies, and that he was only now able to move on to
Tabuk to begin work on the first station. The Marconi payments, incidentally,
are four months in arrear. . . . ^
5 Mr • Philby’s sidelights on the Yemen trouble are illuminating. He
was with the King and Yusuf Yasin when the news of Imamic encroachment was
received. They pored over large-scale maps and Mr. Philby pointed out that
Arwa, the village reported as occupied, apparently lay on the Yemen side of the
Jebel Razih wiitershed. Ibn Saud would have none of it and for some days
while waiting for further news he pondered plans for a sweeping desert attack
on Sana from the north-east. Mr. Philby was doing his best to show that there
was no casus belli, but he gained the firm impression that Ibn Saud was intending
to attack the Imam at all costs—a providential means, he added, of employing a
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