The Polyester Prince by Hamish McDonald Read Free Book Online

territory was administered from India. The Indian rupee circulated as its currency until it was replaced by the East African shilling in 1951.

    The outpost had been a punishment station for British regiments deemed to have shown cowardice or other offences against discipline while in India. As one of its last governors, Charles Johnston, noted in a memoir, it had been ‘the dumping ground, even as late as between the wars, to which regiments sent officers who had got themselves into matrimonial difficulties’.

    The colony also became the entrepot for the Red Sea and Horn of Africa, where deepwater ports were few. Cargoes of cattle hides, coffee, aromatic gums and pearl shell were brought to Aden by wooden sailing dhows, and bought by trading firms like Besse, Cowasji Dinshaw, Luke Thomas and Cory’s. In return, basic commodities such as sugar, rice and textiles were shipped back.

    Between the world wars, the biplanes of the Royal Air Force kept the hinterland quiet by machine-gunning the villages of any unruly Yemeni tribesmen. Behind this shield of bullets, the middleman trade flourished. The definitive historian of British rule in Aden, R. J. Gavin, noted:

    Aden indeed consisted of a hierarchy of brokers from the heads of foreign firms to the lowest workman or child who offered his labour or hawked in the street. Speculators, hoarders and price rings frequently sent commodity and foodstuff prices rocketing up and down, while moneylenders and dealers darnpened the effect of this for the rest of the population at a price which included a claim to social leadership. Acquisitive individualism was mitigated only by ethnic and other local solidarities formed outside rather than within the town.

    Aden’s economy developed rapidly after the Second World War, but its business milieu still had some of this character when Dhirubhai learnt his basic techniques in the 1950s.

    The spur to Aden’s growth was the decision of British Petroleum to build a new oil refinery in Little Aden, another crater jutting into the sea across the bay from the main town. BP’s existing refinery in the Gulf port of Abadan had been nationalised by a new Iranian government. The refinery employed up to 11000 workers at any one time during its construction over 1952-54, and then had a permanent staff of 2500 housed in a comfortable village. This sparked off a construction boom which saw Aden extend beyond the wastes and saltpans of the causeway which had been kept clear for defensive reasons in earlier times.

    Later in the 1950s, the British began concentrating strategic reserve forces in Aden from other bases in the Gulf and East Africa. By 1964, Aden had some 8000 British military personnel plus dependents-and their demand for housing kept the construction activity going. Aden’s population grew from 80000 in 1946 to 138000 in 1955.

    ==It became a more modern economy, and airconditioning ameliorated the hot humid weather in the midsummer months. But it retained many exotic features, including the daily inward flight by Aden Airways of the mild narcotic called qat. From a hedge – like bush in the mountains of Ethiopia, the qat leaves had to be consumed fresh and were delivered to consumers in Aden within a few hours of plucking at dawn. ‘It is not medically harmful, so far as can be ascertained,’ noted Johnson, the former governor, 1although if taken in excess it lowers the appetite and produces a characteristic green-faced, cadaverous appearances. Just before mass air travel arrived with the first passenger jets, Aden overtook New York in 1958 to become the biggest ship – bunkering port in the world. As well as for cargo shipping and tankers, it was a refuelling stop for elegant liners of the P & O and Orient Lines as well as crowded migrant ships taking Italians and Greeks out to Australia.

    Disembarking tourists, brought ashore in launches from the ships moored out in the roadstead, were immediately surrounded by desperate Arab and