Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  My first sight of Crater brought about a strange temporal displacement, the shock of the not-so-old. Once through a cutting in the volcano’s rim, the road descends then flattens out into a scene curiously familiar to Britons of the pre-Habitat age. Passing what claimed, in large letters, to be a Rootes Group car showroom, I entered an eerily realistic mock-up of a 1950s city centre in the English Midlands – one that had been blitzed, then rebuilt by architects who had ration-book budgets and a nodding acquaintance with Bauhaus. In most of Britain, townscapes like these have been razed or post-modernized. Here the style lives on, needing a lick of paint, Coventry in the sun.

  Above the road, the theme of provincial England continues in a neo-Gothic church set on a basalt eminence. St Mary the Virgin, built in 1869, together with Christ Church, Steamer Point, took over from the ‘divine sheds’ which were previously the focus of the settlement’s Christian worship. It is now CID headquarters. Instead of pews there are metal desks; above, a grubby asbestos roof is out of kilter with the line of the gables. Further up from the church I came across a broken concrete slab commemorating the Norfolk Regiment. From here on, the rough path is strewn with dog turds bleached by the sun to the colour of Cheshire cheese. An extermination order was issued against the dogs of Aden eight hundred years ago; they managed to kill one, and the rest escaped to the rocky heights where they hid by day, and still do. ‘I seek refuge with God from their bite,’ Ibn al-Mujawir exclaimed, ‘for it is poisonous on account of the little water they drink.’

  In the heat of noon, when even the dogs are laid low, Crater simmers. As I looked over the town, it struck me that, improbable though the natural setting of Aden is, it was nothing to this vision of home – but home misplaced in both space and time. The transposition of England to the East was, in the root sense of the word, disorientating.

  Down in the middle of Crater, the vision was dispersed. The older houses are a combination of warehouse and dwelling, a couple of storeys boxed in by screened verandas to catch what breeze there is, a vaulted godown below. On the other side of Jabal Shamsan in al-Tawwahi there are similar buildings, but a greater sense of space and elegance. Here lived most of Aden’s European community.

  The Crescent Hotel* in al-Tawwahi uses veranda screening on a huge scale. At first sight, it promised to retain something of the old maritime grandeur. Built in 1932, its lobby had the feel of an ocean liner, with large expanses of dark wood and simple lines. But in the dining-room the napery was crusty and fly-spotted fans hung motionless. There was a miasma of fried fish, but no food. The bar was grotesque. Nursing-home tapestry sofas and club chairs had collapsed in situ, as if someone had forgotten to remove the mortal remains of departed inmates; the carpet was tacky with spilt Sirah beer (God knows where it came from – my bottle, warm and produced after a long search, was ‘the last one’, and the regulars were drinking Stolichnaya); surreal murals included a lady’s leg being swallowed by a giant banana, Carmen Miranda’s final exit. The hotel is a period piece as much as Le Baron in Aleppo, which lives off its T.E. Lawrence connection and is at least clean. When I first saw it, the Crescent’s grandeur was not faded, but rotten.

  Someone had advised me to eat not in the Crescent, or the nearby Rock, a monument to 1950s schmaltz, but in the Chinese restaurant in al-Ma’alla. Here you might have found yourself in the company of a Cuban delegation or a knot of Party stalwarts who would slip into Russian over sweet-and-sour squid and Stolly.

  The Ching Sing was at the end of a mile-long gash of almost identical apartment blocks in Novosibirsk-brutalist style.

  ‘I didn’t realize the Russians had built so much,’ I said to the taxi-driver.

  ‘The Russians? Oh, they didn’t build anything. It was the British.’

  In 1963 Johnston, the High Commissioner, described the half-finished Martyr Madram Street (quondam Queensway) as ‘a sort of triumphal way’.

  For me, it recalled more closely the description of Aden by Harold Ingrams, the pioneering British administrator of Hadramawt: ‘For soulless, military officialdom did its best to see that nothing picturesque or beautiful was ever allowed to raise its head among the depressing, severely practical, and utterly uncomfortable barrack-like structures it erected itself’ The sentence is telling. It illustrates the peculiarly British gulf that separated the Arabist from the professional administrator, the open-minded from the philistine, or – in the eyes of some – the dreamer from the pragmatist. Ingrams, who responded joyously to the ‘peculiar cachet’ of Hadrami architecture, was appalled by Aden, a literally outlandish carbuncle of a place but the reason for his being in that distant flawed Shangri-la of Hadramawt. The tension is one that lasted from the earliest days of the British in Aden until 1967. Inevitably, it was soulless military officialdom that came out on top.

  ‘Like a pair of resurrectionists’, on a dark night in January 1839, two men prowled around Aden’s graveyard. They were looking for a choice and movable specimen of the finely carved marble grave slabs littering the ground. One of them was John Studdy Leigh, 24-year-old supercargo of an English trading vessel that had put in at Aden. Next morning he ascended ‘Djebel Shunsum’ with some companions: they had a picnic breakfast, raised three cheers and waved the Union Jack. ‘We left as usual with escaladers like ourselves a memorial of our visit in a claret bottle, which we had emptied.’

  It was still some months before the British flag was to flutter more permanently over Aden, but Leigh, an adventurer with a patriotic bent, embodied the soul of the new age. The Napoleonic Wars had marked a turning-point, and just as the Great War a century later loosened corsets and raised hemlines, so Waterloo condemned the powdered wig to its block. The last of the Hanoverian kings had sired ten bastards, but now the debris of the Regency party was being swept away: on the throne sat Victoria, virgin and immaculate, and Aden was the first imperial acquisition of her era.

  British interest in the area was not new. The little island of Mayyun, or Perim, in the Bab al-Mandab Strait had been garrisoned in 1799 to prevent the French from sailing to India; but they were soon forced out of Egypt by the Battle of Alexandria, and the British out of Mayyun by lack of water. What brought them back was the need for a coaling-station for the new steamships on the Suez-Bombay run. The first steam-powered vessel to sail the route was the Hugh Lindsay in 1830, and the decade that followed saw a flurry of activity in search of a suitable stop near the mouth of the Red Sea. The Island of Suqutra was tried but abandoned when the troops succumbed to fever. Aden was the obvious choice.

  The man chosen to take it over, Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines, belonged to a recent and more swashbuckling past, the age of Clive and the English nabobs. He was to run Aden for sixteen years by a mixture of chicanery, blandishments, and brute force, which earned him the contempt of Victorian Bombay society who dubbed him the ‘sultanized Englishman’. His portrait does indeed give him a foreign and disreputable air, a corsair forced into a stiff collar. Had he ended up further off the beaten track, like Rajah Brooke in Sarawak, he would have escaped the snooty opprobrium of the Establishment, but in Aden he was caught between the East India Company’s Secret Committee in London and the Governor of Bombay. The military in particular were wary of the way in which he courted local rulers and encouraged trade. His dreams of Aden’s mercantile renaissance resembled those of Raffles in Singapore, but Bombay wanted to straitjacket him within the town’s defences. Haines’s character was a curious amalgam: Bombay accused him of going ‘against the spirit of the age’ when in 1851 he hung the corpse of a would-be murderer in chains at the Barrier Gate; later, on trial for peculation, he was to assert that ‘goodwill, kindness and respect … will do more than even the bayonet can in Arabia’. Ultimately, Haines was – like the city he created – a misfit.

  British relations with the tribes were uneasy for the first three decades of their rule in Aden. Their immediate neighbours the Abdali Sultans of Lahj, from whom Haines had taken the port, proved the most fickle; the Fadlis, w
ho controlled the coastal region to the east and whose sultan was described by Playfair as ‘a very old man, but … bold and reckless, delighting in marauding excursions and hazardous exploits’, were the most inimical. The tribes launched a number of unsuccessful attacks on Aden from 1840 onwards, but by the 1860s the British claimed to have broken their spirit.

  At first, the people of the hinterland did not know what to make of the alien presence, this cuckoo in the South Arabian nest. So they gave British Aden honorary tribal status, with Haines as sponymous patriarch: the new Adenis became known as Banu Haines.

  Haines and his successors realized that Aden, whose only natural resource was salt, had to be supplied from the interior. They began to pay out protection money to the neighbouring rulers, and Bombay came reluctantly to accept that it had spawned a monstrous offspring which grew and grew as the network of treaties and stipends ramified.

  Haines’s problem was that he was a lax bookkeeper. British policy towards Aden, whether controlled by the East India Company, the India Office or the Colonial Office, was to be steered to the last by the men in Accounts, and when the auditors found a shortfall of £28,000 in the records he was shipped off to Bombay, never to return. He was cleared of embezzlement but held responsible – as a gentleman – for the deficit.

  The cuckoo in the nest, meanwhile, kept growing; Haines’s successors continued to sign ad hoc agreements with more and more distant rulers. It was not until the turn of the century that Ottoman expansion from the north forced the British to consider fixing a limit to their sphere of influence, and it took until 1913 for Whitehall and the Sublime Porte to ratify a border treaty. This delineated a boundary running north-eastward from Bab al-Mandab. The following year, the two powers went to war and the treaty was rendered meaningless. On this slender legal basis was Yemen partitioned.

  The clash of the two empires in South Arabia* was not so much a sideshow as a freak show which might have been funny had it not been grotesque, ludicrous and – even by First World War standards – incompetent.

  British and Ottoman forces arrived at Lahj simultaneously, and exhausted, on the evening of 4 July 1915. Almost the first casualty was Sultan Sir Ali ibn Ahmad al-Abdali, who was mistaken for a Turk and shot by a sepoy as he rode out to greet the column from Aden. He died shortly after. Following this inauspicious start the British, outnumbered, withdrew, and the Turks marched on to take al-Shaykh Uthman; their raiding parties reached as far as al-Ma’alla – unopposed, since the naval-gazing British had all their big guns pointing out to sea.

  The saviour of Aden was Sir George Younghusband, brother of the more famous Younghusband of Tibet. He was called in with the message, ‘The Turks are on the golf course’ – not a metaphor, as Aden Golf Club’s links were on the isthmus south of Khur Maksar. Sir George later provided the epitaph for the Lahj fiasco: ‘the army sat down and incidentally began to die of heat … Some said advance but most said retire and did so.’

  The British under Younghusband quickly retook al-Shaykh Uthman and set about fortifying the isthmus, to the dismay of the Golf Club. For the rest of the war they and the Turks glared at each other across no man’s land, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and occasionally lobbed shells. Transit passengers in Aden would ride out to the barbed wire, hoping to catch a bombardment. It was altogether a chivalrous affair. The Turkish commander refrained from interfering with Aden’s water supply, and on the British side the only unpleasantness was, as usual, financial, with London and India wrangling over who should foot the bill. In the end, they went Dutch.

  Of the two imperial dinosaurs one expired gracefully at Versailles; the other began a long Middle Eastern suicide when Balfour opened its veins with his promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Death was slow, its final throes in Aden played out not to the stately measures of Elgar but to the sound of grenades and snipers’ bullets.

  ‘I am an Imperialist,’ Harold Ingrams had said in the 1941 introduction to Arabia and the Isles, ‘and equally certain that the vast majority of Arabs in the Aden Protectorate are too.’ In the 1966 edition Ingrams felt obliged to furnish a ninety-page apologia for the sentence. In the intervening years, everything he and the few men like him had achieved had crumbled to dust.

  The treaties which Haines and his successors had signed with minor potentates had left the map of southern Yemen a crazy patchwork of states, most of them miniscule. These were divided into a Western Protectorate, extending inland from the coast 100 miles either side of Aden, and a far bigger Eastern Protectorate, largely made up of Hadramawt and al-Mahrah. During the 1930s, Ingrams had succeeded in bringing peace to the Eastern Protectorate. The Western Protectorate, however, remained unsettled. Following the Ottoman withdrawal, Imam Yahya had loudly asserted the unity of Yemen and had occupied parts of the Western Protectorate; the British had responded by bombing raids on the Imam’s domains, and Yahya had accepted the status quo but without dropping his claim to rule all of the Yemen. From the late 1940s, however, the British pursued a forward policy in the Western Protectorate, imposing their ‘advice’ on its rulers. The new Imam, Ahmad, reacted by encouraging rebellions against the British who, in turn, sent in troops. Ingrams viewed this British interference – which he called ‘Englishry’ – with dismay.

  Worse was to come. Having lost their hold on the Suez Canal at the end of 1956 the British decided, urged on by America and Cold War paranoia, to compensate by enlarging the Aden base. To this end they greased the Protectorate rulers’ palms liberally in the hope of gaining their goodwill and assurances over its future. In 1959 they tried to impose order on the free-for-all by setting up the Federation of South Arabia. Eventually, a dozen rulers signed up; those of the larger Eastern Protectorate states refused, partly because they were unwilling to share potential oil wealth with their neighbours. The idea was to create something like the United Arab Emirates-to-be, but while Britain could hand each federation ruler a ministerial portfolio, it could not give them the loyalty of their subjects.

  The British had lost Suez, but in trying to cling on to it they had also lost their prestige and – in the eyes of many – their conscience. Cairo Radio was there to tell anyone who did not already know, and at a period when cheap transistors were turning the airwaves into a genuinely mass medium. The Aden government suggested lamely that its good relations with Aden and Protectorate Arabs were ‘unimpaired’. In stark contrast is the report of an eye-witness, David Holden, who described news of the British defeat over Suez running through Aden’s back streets ‘like an orgasm’.

  Nasser’s finger pointed not only at the British but also at the Indians who had come to dominate commercial and political life in the Colony. New laws introduced in 1955 meant that four members of its Legislative Council were now elected, but the mass of the population – Arabs from the Protectorate and further north – had no vote. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master,’ said the philosopher George Santayana of the British. If Suez proved that Britain had grown into an embittered and tyrannical old man, then electoral policy in Aden was all too close to that of Athens in ancient times, where a semblance of democracy teetered on a mass of unenfranchised non-citizens.

  Yet, for two or three years after the start of the Federation, Aden boomed. There was a lot of money about, and the new refinery at Little Aden was in full swing. For the British, or at least the Conservative government, the worm in the apple was Abdullah al-Asnaj. With his podgy and deceptively innocent features he bore a resemblance to Harold Wilson, whose opposition Labour Party courted him. The al-Asnaj-led trades union movement, encouraged by the unlikely trio of Wilson, Nasser and (for very different reasons) Imam Ahmad, was able to cause serious disruption. A lot more was on the way.

  Life for the British went on, though it seems, with hindsight, to have been tinged with a Buñuelesque surrealism. The Fisheries Department was looking into the possibility of catching sucker fish, which after a ten-day training period could be us
ed to hunt green turtles; the fish only required feeding and exercise, ‘like pets’, and the turtles could be made into soup and toilet preparations. On the surface of the water the Reverend J. Fisher buzzed about Back Bay distributing spiritual sustenance not, like his Beatrix Potter namesake, on a water-lily leaf, but in his new launch Speedy II. His Excellency the Governor, Sir William Luce, spoke of the need for secondary industries in Aden for fear that perhaps the large sums spent there on Her Majesty’s Services might one day be reduced. ‘No matter how unlikely such things may appear in the near future,’ the Port of Aden Annual commented, ‘wise men should listen to wise guidance.’ Not to worry. A 1962 Defence White Paper had pronounced, with the sibylline certainty of the Queen of Hearts, that the base would be maintained for at least ten years. That meant a lot more balls to be bowled down the wicket at Steamer Point (157,000 in 1962), a lot more chukkas to be played at the Khur Maksar polo ground. There seemed to be no croquet enthusiasts; in these last looking-glass days of the Colony the flamingoes grazing on the nearby beach didn’t know how lucky they were.

  For six months of the year, the 1963 Welcome to Aden Guide told newcomers, you could enjoy a climate normally available only to wealthy invalids (even if, as the Federal Army Commander Brigadier Lunt admitted, it was too warm ‘to wear a tweed suit with any degree of comfort’). Never mind the other six months and the expense of cook-bearers, the suggestion was that in Aden everyone could be a nabob, or at least a nob.