IOR/R/15/2/672

The file comprises correspondence, notices and lists relating to the numbers of, and plans for the evacuation of, British, British-Indian, American and other (chiefly Goans, described as Portuguese-Indian) subjects, particularly those employed by the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) and California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), from the Persian Gulf region.

The first set of correspondence, dated 1940 (ff 2-19), chiefly deals with the evacuation of women and children of United States subjects employed at BAPCO and CASOC, in response to the Italian bombing raid on Bahrain and Dhahran in Saudi Arabia on 19 October 1940. Correspondence includes: arrangements for the evacuation of eighty people on the tanker Bahrein; production plans for BAPCO, a circular issued by BAPCO on 31 October 1940, stating that the Company would provide evacuation for British families (f 17); numbers of people evacuated from the CASOC refinery at Dhahran (f 18).

The second set of correspondence, dated May to July 1941 (ff 21-59), concerns evacuation plans in the wake of the coup d’état in Iraq by the Arab nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani [Rāshid ‘Alī al-Gaylānī] in April 1941, and the expectation of imminent air raids on Allied oil installations in the Persian Gulf. Correspondence includes: the refusal of British families to evacuate for the present moment, and BAPCO’s handing over of emergency evacuation procedures to the Political Agency in Bahrain; requests (with replies) from the Defence Office in the Persian Gulf for the numbers of essential and non-essential staff and subjects of British, British-Indian and American extraction in Bahrain and those areas operated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC); requests for the numbers of British, British-Indian and Goan subjects in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf, or those who have left Bahrain since the beginning of the year, with several replies, including: the Residency Agent at Sharjah (f 36); Eastern Bank Limited (f 41); Petroleum Concessions Limited (supplying numbers of subjects based in Qatar, f 42); CASOC (f 43); BAPCO (ff 44-53); Gray, Mackenzie and Company (f 54); British Overseas Airways Corporation (f 55). A collated table of these figures is on f 58.

The final set of correspondence, dated 1942, includes a letter marked ‘Most Secret’ from British Army HQ to the Political Residency, dated 24 May 1942, requesting information on evacuation procedures for the Gulf, and a copy of a letter from the Residency, dated 11 August 1942, stating that there is no need to ‘lay down at present hard and fast rules’ for evacuation, but that each Agency should make out its own rough evacuation schemes (f 65).