IOR/L/PS/12/128

The file mainly consists of correspondence between the India Office and the Foreign Office, and enclosed copies of Foreign Office correspondence, relating to the former Amir [Emir] of Mecca, Sherif Ali Haider.

It includes a letter from Kenneth Johnstone, Foreign Office, to John Gilbert Laithwaite, India Office, 31 January 1935 (folios 10-11), enclosing a copy of a letter from Princess Fatma Haider (née Miss Dunn), the wife of Sherif Ali Haider, which she sent to the Prince of Wales, and which was passed on to the Foreign Office by the Prince’s Private Secretary. In her letter, dated 10 January 1935 (folios 13-14), Fatma Haider states that her husband is ‘old and delicate’ and describes his difficult financial situation, stating that he was promised £200 of gold a year by the King of Saoud [Saud] when the latter refused to allow her husband to return to Mecca, but that in the present and previous year the King had sent nothing. Fatma Haider’s letter appeals for help from the Prince of Wales ‘through some Mussulman perhaps’. In the letter from Johnstone to Laithwaite of 31 January 1935, Johnstone asks whether the India Office has any observations to make on the matter, and states how the Foreign Office intends to reply to the Prince’s Private Secretary. A reply from Laithwaite to Johnstone of 5 February 1935 (folio 8) states that the India Office has ‘no comments to offer, but note the course of action which the Foreign Office propose to adopt’.

A copy of a letter from the Foreign Office to Sir Godfrey Thomas, the Prince of Wales’s Private Secretary, 12 February 1935 (folios 5-7), gives a brief account of the Sherif, and concludes that ‘we have no political reason for wishing to assist him’, and that ‘unless, therefore, His Royal Highness is personally disposed to assist the Sherif indirectly, we can only suggest that a regretful reply in the negative should be returned to Princess Fatma’s request’.

The file also includes a copy of letter sent to the Foreign Office from Godfrey Thomas Havard, Consul General, Beirut, 27 March 1935 (folio 3), informing the Foreign Office of the death of Sherif Ali Haider on 24 March 1935.