IOR/R/15/2/1493

Correspondence exchanged between the Political Agency and representatives of the American Mission in Arabia (chiefly the American Mission at Bahrain), as well as some British Government correspondence relating to the American Mission in Arabia. Aside from the Political Agent at Bahrain, the file’s principal correspondents are: Dr Louis Paul Dame of the American Mission, Dr William Harold Storm and Reverend Bernard Daniel Hakken, all of the Arabian Mission; Dr Edith Mary Brown of the Women’s Christian Medical College at Ludhiana in Punjab.

Subjects covered by the correspondence include:

• visits made by Arabian Mission doctors to various parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, including Qatar, Dubai and Riyadh, in order to attend to requests for medical attention from members of the region’s ruling families;
• Dr Storm’s travels and researches into leprosy in Arabia, including a copy of his ‘Leper Survey of the Arabian Peninsula’, published in January 1937 (ff 198-202);
• requests from academics (G W Paget of the University of Liverpool, and Dr Aladár von Soós of the Royal Hungarian Pázmány Péter University in Budapest) for assistance with research projects (ff 31-34, ff 53-63);
• correspondence relating to a memorial service held at Bahrain in February 1937, in honour of Dr Samuel Marinus Zwemer, founder of the Arabian Mission, and subsequent correspondence finding that, as a result of an error in the decoding of a telegraphic message, it was not Zwemer who had died, but his wife, Amy Elizabeth Wilkes (ff 181-188);
• a will, written in 1932 by a British Indian woman who was resident in Bahrain, and who subsequently died in India in 1935. Reverend Hakken of the Arabian Mission was the executor of the will and guardian of the woman’s two adopted children, under the guidance of Dr Brown of the Women’s Christian Medical College at Ludhiana in Punjab. Much of the correspondence concerns the status of the adopted children after the woman’s death in 1935.