A rare commemorative photograph of HRH Prince Phillip’s tour of Dubai. He is shown alongside Sultan Saqr bin Sultan Al Qasimi, Glencairn Paul (the British Political agent of Dubai), and Colonel De Butts (the first chief of staff in the UAE armed forces). We presume that this meeting in the Gulf coincided Prince Phillip’s visit to Riyadh in 1965. This would mean that this is one of the last images of Saqr as Sultan before the British intervened to depose him in 1965.
During this period, the British interest in the Persian Gulf was predominately limited to making sure it did not fall into the hands of a rival western power. This meant they had no interest in actively investing or developing the Trucial States; an outlook that left the majority of the local population of Sharjah in dire poverty.
Saqr became Sheikh of Sharjah in 1951 and immediately sought finance to help develop the country. Whilst industrial levels of oil had been discovered in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, Sharjah’s supply was poor by comparison. British agents noted it would take years before any benefit was felt to the local population from the royalties allocated to them.
Saqr’s efforts to court foreign investment included contacting Egypt and the Arab league. As a committed Arab nationalist, this approach included him trying to open an Arab league’s office in Sharjah. However, the British viewed pan-Arabism as a direct threat to their Imperial control. This sensation must have been heightened by their loss of oil resources following Mossadegh’s attempted nationalisation of A.P.O.C in 1952. To counter this, the British started to finance more projects in the Trucial States.
However, whilst British control was effective at isolating the local population from worldwide political developments, the population were increasingly being introduced to Gamel el Nasser’s pan-Arab ideas. This may have been caused by the influx of labourers from the centres of this movement working on Sharjah’s new infrastructure projects.
Threatened by Saqr’s actions, the British decided to intervene and depose him. They replaced him with his cousin Khalid bin Mohammed Al Qasimi. He was informed of this by Glencairn Paul and subsequently exiled to Bahrain.
Rare. We have located a single example of this image at the University of Exeter. However, this cataloguer believes that it is mis-catalogued, as 1966 would have been after Saqr’s exile.
Provenance: The archive of Dubai policeman Jack Briggs OBE (1920-2006), who was considered to have established the modern police force within the country. Having left school at 14 with no formal qualifications, he studied Arabic at SOAS before signing up to serve in the Palestine Police force. He then transferred to the Trucial States, joining the Trucial Scouts before he was appointed Commandant of Police in Dubai in 1965.
He was renowned for speaking Arabic with a local’s accent, becoming so proficient that he translated the works of local authors into English. Somewhat a maverick, he made headlines in the Gulf News by reportedly smuggling the first six racing bikes into the UAE on an RAF airplane.
