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Bahrein, just 100 minutes by plane across the Persian Gulf from Kuwait, epitomizes the progress that can be made when a sheikdom has a good ruler, a devoted foreign adviser, and enough oil royalties to work with. The five-island archipelago produces only one-thirtieth of Saudi Arabia's crude, has one-fortieth of Iraq's proven reserves, earns but a fiftieth of Kuwait's royalties. Yet Bahrein (rhyme with ah, rain) is the showplace of the oil kingdoms. Manama, the capital, looks more like a clean town in the West Indies or Bermuda than an Arab town. It has dial phones, running water, sewers, electricity. Mobile DDT sprayers roam over the islands. Malaria has been wiped out, trachoma is disappearing. There are schools and hospitals, and one of the few insane asylums in the whole Arab world.
U.S. Oilman Max Thornburg, onetime administrator of Iran's defunct Seven-Year Plan, who lives part of each year like an air-conditioned Robinson Crusoe on one of the Bahrein Islands, says: "If the Point Four people really want to know how to handle this sort of thing, they should come out here and study Bahrein."
The first thing they should look for is a 6 ft. 4 in. skyscraper of a man who wears loud clothes and has a surprisingly unlined face for his 57 years. If all Britons in the Middle East were as able, deft and unruffled as Bahrein's Financial Consultant Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Britain would be winning, not losing, popularity contests in the Arab world. Belgrave, an officer in the British Camel Corps in the Sudan in World War I, answered a blind personal ad in the London Times in 1925. The job was to advise a sheik in Bahrein. Belgrave took it, married a childhood friend, and set out with her for the Persian Gulf. He found Bahrein living on an income of something less than $500,000 a year. Sheiks at that time were not in the habit of sharing the wealth. But Belgrave talked the Sheik into electricity for the capital, public health measures, and an inter-island causeway.
In 1932 the Bahrein Petroleum Co., jointly owned by two American companies, the Texas Co. and Standard of California (but registered as a Canadian corporation), discovered oil. Production has risen slowly to 30,000 barrels daily, which is about the best Bahrein can do. Some day, perhaps in 20 years, all of Bahrein's oil will be gone.
But when it is, Bahrein will be prepared. Again persuaded by Belgrave, the Sheik has been saving a husky part of his $4,000,000-a-year oil royalties (which are due to be raised). The Sheik keeps one-third for himself, salting away a good chunk in British securities; spends another third on public improvements; deposits the remaining third in the bank, where it buys British government debentures. Today Bahrein has a growing cash reserve of more than $6.500,000 against the inevitable day when the last of the oil is drained away.