In the late 1960s and early 1970s I was a regular visitor to the Gulf States in the wake of the crash of Intra Bank in 1966. Intra was the Lebanon’s largest home-grown bank. In its growth it had expanded overseas and set up offices in Geneva, London, Paris, New York and many parts of Africa and South America. The bank’s founder, Yusif Bedas, was of Palestinian origin, a charismatic figure and a remarkable foreign-exchange wizard. It was he who taught me a great deal about the international currency market, though I had previously discovered I had skills in that field through working for a French bank in the City of London. Bedas, with his masterly intuition and his prophetic reading of the political events that always sway the daily fluctuations of the world’s currencies, could not have been a better mentor in refining my knowledge.
The crash of Intra was the result of a heinous conspiracy by the Central Bank of Lebanon, aided and abetted by a gang of Lebanese politicians who saw Bedas as a threat to their power base and political futures. The main repercussion of their actions robbed Lebanon of its financial status as the most important banking centre in the Middle East. The whole country was plunged into an international crisis of confidence and the former dominant status was never regained.
Bedas became an exile, hounded by the conspirators, and died a broken man in 1968. He was buried at Lucerne in Switzerland, with very few of his friends present to mourn his passing. The whole tragic tale of the demise of Intra is told in my book, In Touch with His Roots.
After the death of Bedas, and the manner of his downfall, I felt I had become a forlorn creature, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time, with a young wife and child to support. The destiny I thought I had mapped out ahead of me was suddenly redundant. I found myself having to fend alone in the jungle of finance, where no honour is sacrosanct, where morality stems from expediency and personal greed is the predominant motto. I needed to readjust and see the world as it really was, not as one might like it to be. For a while the Gulf became my hunting ground. In looking for opportunities, I visited Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In the latter I established a trading company manned largely by English expatriates, most of them recruited from the British armed services. And, believe it or not, I came to regard myself not as a mere civilian but as the commander-in-chief of my small band of employees. In the early days of the Gulf, Bahrain was probably the most liberal country in the region. It had a large British community who enjoyed their time there with relish. Life was comfortable. From the outside it looked more appealing than the highly competitive style of living then prevailing in the UK.
I got to know Bahrain well, along with its local leading families of great merchants. They tended to be rather more sophisticated than their counterparts in the other Gulf States. Wherever I went I was always made welcome and fêted. My memories of Bahrain therefore remain highly gratifying and my links with the region were further strengthened after I became a publisher. A Yorkshire Television series on The Arab Experience recruited me as a consultant and a book with the same title by the producer, Michael Deakin, was published by Namara Publishing in conjunction with Quartet. While working on a documentary about Bahrain, I then had the idea that it needed a local authenticity in its soundtrack. An approach to David Fanshawe, the composer of African Sanctus, led to another ambitious project based on his Arabian Fantasy, for which EMI issued the record in conjunction with Namara Music while BBC 2 screened a documentary of the same title.
The success of this went completely to my head. I was already on a high from a business association with David Frost that involved me in the production of the successful 1976 film version of the Cinderella story, The Slipper and the Rose, and its glamorous première as the Royal Command Performance film that year. For Arabian Fantasy I had a vision of hiring the Royal Albert Hall to present an extravagant pageant of Arabian life, complete with live camels and dancing harem girls. I lost no time in booking the hall for a date in April and engaging Ludmilla Nova as lead dancer. Ludmilla was stepdaughter of the novelist Paul Gallico, with whom I was very friendly. But having hired my professionals to see to the logistics, I then made the mistake of leaving them to get on without proper supervision on my part. So far as gathering an audience together to make a full house went, I succeeded admirably, but alas, as the show unrolled it became more and more of an embarrassing shambles. I didn’t dare leave my box in the interval, all too aware of the audience melting away by the minute. The Guardian critic gleefully overheard my associates at Asprey (of which I was then a director) moaning that they didn’t dare leave before the end. It was a fiasco from which I learnt many lessons. A full account may be found in my memoirs, Fulfilment and Betrayal, 1975-1995.
A few years later, in 1983, David Elliott, a scion of Quartet Books, persuaded me to attend the Bahraini book fair and have a go at marketing some of our books to do with Middle Eastern topics. If nothing else, it was to be a promotion of Quartet in that part of the world. I readily embraced the idea, and David travelled to Bahrain ahead of me with the delectable Lady Cosima Fry, one of the assistants in my private office at Namara House. I followed forty-eight hours later, to be greeted at the airport by the two of them showing every sign of relief to see me there. It seemed that Cosima, attracting a phenomenal amount of attention, had barricaded herself in her hotel room pending my arrival.
At the opening ceremony for the book fair, when we were lined up in the crowd to watch the arrival of dignitaries, the minister of information recognized me and broke away from his official entourage to make his way across to greet us. His gleaming eyes spotted Cosima, and that proved to be the entrée we needed to enhance our welcome at the highest levels. The very next day the Ruler himself invited Cosima to tea and took her to see his stables of thoroughbred horses. We were invited to many a sumptuous feast, where the food was plentiful and our hosts over-generous in their hospitality. The amount of food we consumed was far above anything we were used to, but rare indulgence of this kind only made our trip more memorable. On the last night of our stay, we were treated at the Ex-Pats Club to a cabaret by Georgie Fame, who happened to be in Bahrain at the time. Bizarrely, he was the stepfather of Cosima.
Given all these past associations with Arabia in general and Bahrain in particular, I felt very pleased when Andrew Trimbee, a much travelled former national newspaper journalist who has worked on the Daily Mail, The Times and the Daily Telegraph, where he was chief sub-editor, submitted a manuscript about his time in Bahrain. Quartet have just published it under the title of The Inshallah Paper.
This modern version of One Thousand and One Nights is a colourful no-holds-barred account of life in a largely traditional Arabia as the author fights to produce the Gulf’s first English-language newspaper, ignoring cautions that his ambitions could be a lost cause.
‘Through the haze of cigarette smoke a figure wove his way towards me, threading his way past gossiping groups of Arabs, Europeans and Indians. “I should warn you. The infant mortality rate of newspapers in Bahrain is high.” If this was a greeting, it was also a less than encouraging putdown by the former Fleet Street cartoonist as he thrust a drink into my hand.’
Thereafter sex-mad expatriates, a ghost and a mermaid crowd the pages on an odyssey that includes a flying visit to the Middle East’s most famous casino in the Lebanon, where the author shows an oil company president how to win. There’s a veteran foreign correspondent who felled a heavyweight boxing champion and an assortment of characters; the good, the bad and the crooked.
From drunken diplomats to drunken journalists, Andrew Trimbee lifts the lid on life in a country where the Ruler shows a steel fist inside a velvet glove as he intervenes to save the newspaper after a dramatic showdown with directors. There are lotharios and lesbians, a high-seas murder, a two-fisted British prison warder, and the Bahrainis themselves, gentle and generous, who provide the backdrop for this revealing insight into a way of life largely gone, from the coffee ritual at the palace to crafts of yesteryear.
Set in a time when the pace of life was slower, in a sheikhdom that today has its own Formula One racetrack, The Inshallah Paper is a non-stop roller-coaster ride through drama, pathos, humour and suspense in a desert-island setting straight out of the Arabian Nights.
This is an important book for those who go to seek their fortune in the Gulf States. It highlights those countries’ culture, tribal in nature and very different from ours in the West, being more attuned to a religious, traditional mode of life. Family ties and loyalties are still firm and strong among them, with respect for their elders being an integral part of their upbringing. Their trading skills come from the hardships of the desert and generations of maritime enterprises. Bahrain has never been in the big league of oil-producing countries, and its traditional occupations of dhow building, mat making and pearl fishing have inevitably declined. Its position on a group of islands in the Persian Gulf, however, have made the country prominent as a trading nation and the establishment of an aluminium-smelting plant has been an important plank in its economy. The Bahrainis are sharp and streetwise and know how to enjoy their wealth.
The expatriates who work among them come and go, leaving many a strange and entertaining anecdote to tell of their time spent amid luxury on the rim of the eternal desert. From the fisherman’s cottage on the north Yorkshire coast, where he lives today, Andrew Trimbee has gathered up many of these to weave into the narrative of his own story.
