والذين امنوا وعملوا الصالحات لنبوئنهم من الجنة غرفا تجري من تحتها الأنهار خالدين فيها نعم أجر العاملين. الذين صبروا وعلى ربهم يتوكلون.
سورة العنكبوت (58-59)
Those who believe and do good works, them verily We shall house in lofty dwellings of the Garden underneath which rivers flow. There they will dwell Secure. How sweet the guerdon of the toilers, Who persevere, and put their trust in their Lord!
(Koran, The Spider 58/59)

In May 1926 I arrived in Jeddah to commence my service with His Majesty. It was perhaps as well for me that the King was in Hejaz when I went to join his Court, for life there, although by no means easy, was not nearly as severe as in Najd. I thus had time to adjust from the comparatively soft life which I had led in Bombay and Basra to the spartan conditions of Arabia.

After I had been in Jeddah about a day, cars arrived to collect me and some others who wished to see His Majesty. We were taken to Mecca and I was accommodated at a guest house which belonged to the King. I arrived in the morning and was asked to wait until the afternoon. Following the afternoon prayer, I was taken to see the King by the Foreign Minister’s Second Secretary, Faud Hamza, a man who was himself fluent in English. By this time Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud was already a legend in his own lifetime and I shall never forget my first meeting with him. I was immediately impressed, not only his physical size but also by the aura which he carried about him of great power, intelligence and wisdom. His Majesty courteously asked me a few questions about myself and my family and then requested the Second Secretary to ask me some questions in English. After a few such questions, the Second Secretary informed the King that my English appeared to be satisfactory and His Majesty immediately invited me to join his Foreign Court. As a civil service examination this may appear perfunctory, but I left the room with the feeling that my abilities had been very thoroughly weighed up by the King. Indeed I am sure that this was so, for after I had been with the King for a while, I learnt that one of his many skills was the ability to assess people rapidly and accurately. After the King had confirmed my appointment we rose and went together to the mosque, where we prayed side by side, a moment I shall always remember as one of the most moving of my life.

During my first few days in Mecca I lived in the guest house where I had spent my first night. The Chief of the    Court, Ibrahim Ibn Muammar, showed me great hospitality and invited me to his house on several occasions. As soon as it could be arranged, I was given a rented house in the town. The house was situated conveniently near the palace, and my work at the Court started immediately. My desk was in the hall of the Court and there I worked from dawn until noon, when we had a lengthy break for prayers and lunch. We lunched in His Majesty’s dining hall, where the King himself frequently joined us. In mid afternoon we would return to our desk and work until dinner time, which was after sunset. After dinner there would be a short break and we would then return to work until midnight. It was a long working day, about fourteen hours on average, but we enjoyed the work and it was nit strenuous. We worked every day of the week and it was not customary to take time off except for religious holidays, during which we often worked anyway.

When His Majesty first came to Mecca he appointed his son Faisal as Viceroy of Hejaz. In keeping with the importance and prestige of the post, the King gave Faisal for his own use the palatial government house of the Sherifs. For his own Court, the King appropriated a substantial private house previously owned by a prominent official in the Sherif’s government by the name of As-Saggaf. The family of As-Saggaf had accumulated substantial wealth from their services as contractors for the British government is Singapore. Much of this money had been spent in the erection of fine buildings in Mecca and Jeddah. The King commandeered several of these buildings for his own use, although he paid the As-Saggafs ample compensation, and thus characteristically ensured that they lost nothing by his action.

While in Hejaz, His Majesty moved between Mecca, Jeddah and the pleasant mountain city of Ta’if. During the first few years after he became ruler of Hejaz, he had no fixed residence in Jeddah and often stayed in the comfortable four-storey mansion of Sheikh Mohammed Nassif. Sheik Mohammed, who was to become a valued adviser and friend of the King, was an ulema and one of the most prominent citizen of Jeddah. He was also an intellectual and the proud owner of an excellent Arabic library. Before Hejaz fell, he had been instrumental in persuading Sherif Hussein to abdicate in favour of his son Ali. Later he had helped to persuade Ali to flee from the besieged city of Jeddah and surrender it to Ibn Saud. Whenever the King came to stay at his house, Sheikh Mohammed would retire with his family and servants to the top floor of the house and make the first three floors available for His Majesty’s exclusive use. Despite the many changes which have taken place in Jeddah, the house and its library are still in existence today.

When not staying with Sheikh Mohammed, His Majesty often occupied the old Turkish garrison building at Jeddah, which also still stands today. Another dwelling where he frequently stayed in later years was a luxurious one-storey house known as Al-Kandara. It was yet another of the prestige building erected by the family of As-Saggaf, and was on the site of what is now the Al-Kandara Continental Hotel. Only in the mid-1930s was a purpose-built palace erected for the King in Jeddah and this was constructed, not by His Majesty himself, but by a wealthy Najdi merchant of the city who presented it to the King as a splendid gift. It became Known as the ‘green palace’ because of the greenish hue of the concrete from which it was made. His Majesty was fond of Jeddah. I can remember once or twice seeing him in a moment of rare seclusion and peace, sitting in the hall of one of other of his residences there, serenely contemplating the ever-changing colours of the Red sea in the glowing sun of late afternoon.

In Ta’if His Majesty appropriated a grand mansion called Shubra which had belonged to Sherif Abdullah Pasha. The house was a copy of a similar building in Egypt which had taken Abdullah’s fancy. Abdullah was reputed to have had the thousands of tons of marble and materials needed for its construction dragged piece by piece from Egypt, in order to make sure that his Shubra was an exact replica of the original.

Such were the residences of His Majesty in Hejaz. In my first year I had little time to appreciate them, for after I had been with the King in Hejaz for about a month, he returned with his Court to Riyadh. The contrast was complete and abrupt. Pilgrims from every corner of the globe flooded into Mecca, bringing with them foreign ideas and foreign money and all the latest technology and inventions. In consequence, it was the most cosmopolitan and sophisticated city in the King’s domain, and undoubtedly the most worldly. Riyadh was isolated in the middle of the desert and at that time was almost never visited by foreigners. It had little contact with the outside world and possessed none of its amenities. It was a smaller, simpler and much harder place to live in than Mecca, and for this reason was perhaps a more suitable capital for a puritan Wahhabi King. Here there were none of the vices which flourish in the wake of affluence, and the King’s pure religious zeal was matched by the spartan faith of his people. I recall being invited after Ramadan to a feast in one of the better houses in Riyadh. When I entered the reception hall I saw that the floor was coated with small white pebbles on which was laid a mat made of reeds. At one end of the hall was a water-bag of goatskin from which one could drink. I remember thinking that this was surely very much the same as things must have been in the time of the Prophet himself.

The King’s palace was by far the greatest building in Riyadh and was about eight hundred foot square. Like the simplest dwellings in the town, it was of adobe construction, built of dried layers of mud. Although the palace has long been demolished, one can see to this day the old fortress of Riyadh; it has been carefully preserved and is similar to the old palace in general design and appearance. The palace had two storeys throughout and four wings radiating north, south, east and west from the centre. Each wing was a warren of large rooms, halls, staircases and courtyards. The north wing was the largest; on its ground floor were vast storerooms piled high with supplies of all kinds, particularly rice and dates, the provisions for the King and his bedouin army. At one end of the wing was a huge Kitchen, which catered for the crowds of visiting bedouin as well as for the needs of the palace. It contained cooking-pots eight and ten feet high, each of which was able to hold the meat of a whole camel. Every day the cooks would prepare traditional meals of boiled rice and meat for at least a hundred bedouin guests, who would eat it on the large terrace set aside for that purpose on the first floor just above the kitchen.

The south and east wings of the palace contained offices and accommodation for the Court of Internal Affairs, the army administration and the fifty or sixty Negroes who acted as servants and bodyguards in the palace. Both inside and outside the palace were set many benches made of the same adobe material as the walls. Throughout the day, these benches were always thronged with visiting tribesmen and others who had business with Majesty or the Court. All the business of the Court was transacted on the first floor of the north wing. Here were the King’s courtroom, his general and private majlis, a room for his political committee and smaller offices where the Court staff worked. One such office was allocated for my use. A corridor led to the palace mosque in the west wing, above which was a hall where the King could pray privately. Also in the west wing were the King’s own personal rooms and the accommodation for the women of his household, most of whom were African girls. The Africans were engaged in the menial duties of the palace and some were married to male servants. Their duties included laundering and bearing the incense urns for His Majesty’s clothing. Some of the girls were responsible for the many varied sets of apparel worn by the King at different times. His Majesty liked to change his clothing several times a day, whenever the pressure of state business relented sufficiently to allow him to do so. He usually wore a brown robe in the morning, a grey one in the afternoon and a black one at night. On Friday, which is the Moslem Holy Day, he would wear white.

The most distinctive feature of the palace was its four square towers. The purpose of these was only partly defensive. Each housed one of the King’s wives, four being the maximum number permitted under Islamic law. In practice, only three of the towers were occupied at any one time. The fourth was kept vacant in case the King should desire to marry again. Whenever he did so, he always divorced one of his other wives in order to restore the number to three. It is a dictate of the Koran that a man should treat all his wives with equal favour, and His Majesty always spent a night with each of his wives in turn.

When I first came to Riyadh, the palace had much the same primitive facilities as it would have possessed two or three hundred years before. There was no running water or sophisticated drainage, and there was no electricity anywhere in Riyadh. One of the few luxuries which existed in the palace nearly caused His Majesty’s death where all his enemies had failed. In the King’s personal rooms was a bath-chamber which contained a huge samovar of water heated by charcoal. One day, the charcoal smoke failed to escape properly from the chamber and His Majesty was overcome by the fumes. He would very rapidly have died, had it not been for a quick-thinking servant girl who was alerted by the suspicious absence of sound coming from the chamber and immediately raised the alarm.

Gradually some modern amenities began trickling into Riyadh from Hejaz, despite the opposition of the Ikhwan. In 1926, when His Majesty took over Hejaz, electric power even there had been the exception rather than the rule. Small generating stations had been donated by wealthy pilgrims from India and the Far East and these were used for the lighting of the Holy Places and some of the more prominent buildings. There was a chronic lack of spare parts and skilled engineers to maintain the generators, and such electricity supplies as existed were erratic and unreliable. Eventually in about 1928 a Moslem philanthropist from Burma had the foresight to supply, not only some new generators, but also an Indian mechanic by the name of Mohammed Rafik to operate and maintain them. Rafik was a very competent engineer and under his supervision the generators operated most efficiently. His performance impressed His Majesty, who decided the time had come for Riyadh to have similar facilities. While he was in Hejaz in 1930, he commissioned Rafik to procure new generators and equipment and transport them to Riyadh in order to light the royal palace. Three machines were immediately purchased and sent in trucks to Riyadh, which they miraculously reached more or less intact. Rafik and some assistants followed them shortly afterwards. By the time His Majesty returned to Riyadh, the palace was in a turmoil. Rafik and his men scuttled round like demented spiders, spinning a web of cables and wires all over the Court offices, the harem, the audience halls and various other chambers. Rafik spoke no Arabic, and since I spoke fluent Urdu, I was often required to translate for him in the embarrassing situations which arose as he strung his cables around the private rooms of the palace.

A spacious room had been cleared on the ground floor and given to Rafik for his generators. Finally came the great day when the electricity was due to be switched on. Everybody was waiting eagerly for the big moment but unaccountably nothing seemed to be happening. As darkness fell, I was called by one of the King’s servants and told that I was wanted by His Majesty in Rafik’s engine-room. I went there immediately and found poor Rafik labouring over his machines, with the majestic figure of the King towering over him, impatiently waiting for the power to be connected. Rafik tried several times to start the engines but each time there was only a tiny flicker of light before the motors spluttered to a halt and darkness returned. My work consisted of translating His Majesty’s increasingly terse orders to Rafik to get his engines going, and Rafik’s ever more desperate assurance that all would be well in a few moments.

The unfortunate Rafik was never able to start his motors. He left Riyadh as soon as he could, with his tail between his legs, on the rather feeble excuse that he had to return to Jeddah for some spare parts. The rest of the year passed and Rafik was conspicuous by his absence. We then heard that he had managed to persuade Suleiman, the Finance Minister, to allow him to go to Egypt to purchase an expensive new machine. Rafik and his costly equipment eventually arrived in Riyadh in 1931. He was fortunately able to install the generator and get it working without further trouble, and the palace was at last graced by the splendour of electric light. Visiting bedouin who had never seen such marvels before would often ask the King what this electricity was and how it worked. ‘Oh, it is nothing,’ His Majesty would say dismissively, ‘just a machine and some pieces of wire.’

The organization of the Court was devised by the King himself and it worked very smoothly. There were two Courts, Foreign and Domestic, the functions of which were different and separate. There was also a separate, fully-fledged Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Court consisted of the Chief of the Court, the Chief Translator (which was my position), an officer in charge of writing letters, and one or two typists. Even at the time of the King’s death in 1953 the Foreign Court was no larger. In the Domestic Court there was one chief and five or six clerks. They divided their work between dealing with the townspeople of Central Arabia and the bedouin tribes. There were also a few minor clerks, and an officer who was responsible for examining petitions sent to the King and pruning any of excessive length. Whatever defects we may have had as a civil service, an excess of bureaucracy was not one of them.

When I first joined the King’s service, none of the Court staff received a regular salary. We were paid in the same way as the King’s bedouin militia, namely, by periodical gifts of money and clothing. At the end of each year we could expect to receive an extra gift of a lump sum of money. In addition, the families of the Court staff, as well as the staff themselves,could rely upon being clothed at the King’s expense. (This system did not apply to the civil service in Hejaz, who received regular salaries, as established during the time of the Sherif and the Turkish regime.) While the King’s gifts were always generous, such method of remuneration made budgeting for expenses something of a fine art. One day, together with others in the Court, I tentatively approached His Majesty and asked him to pay us a regular salary instead. He readily agreed to give a salary to all those who wished to be paid in this way and so the matter was resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

On my arrival in Riyadh, I found that I was to live in a large room in the palace with other members of the staff. This proved uncomfortable even by the standards of Riyadh. I mentioned the matter to the King, who immediately arranged to rent houses for us in the town. Those who were married had a house to themselves and bachelors lived two or three to a dwelling. It was not long before I had cause to regret moving out of the palace. One night I left the palace with the rest of the Court staff to go home. Unknown to us, the King had decided that certain correspondence should be finished that day as a matter of urgency and had told one of his servants to give us this message. For some reason, the servant failed to deliver these instructions before we left and a boy had to be sent out to search for us. He found us only after we had gone some way from the palace. The Chief of the Court was with us and he decided that we had no alternative but to return. This was not easy as it sounds. The king still had many enemies and there was a constant threat of treachery and assassination. Members of the family of Rashid were in the town and, although ostensibly loyal to the King, remained a likely source of rebellion. His Majesty did not intend to suffer the same fate as that he had inflicted upon Governor Ajlan. The palace was always heavily guarded at night by the King’s Negro soldiers, who were not well disposed towards unexpected visitors. We returned very cautiously to the side gate of the palace, which was our usual entrance, but we were prevented from going in by a burly black slave belonging to one of the King’s sons. The large scimitar which he was waving discouraged any argument with him, so we all went instead to the main gate. Here we had a long dispute with the gatekeeper, who also refused to let us in. All this time the King was with one of his wives in a tower opposite the gate. On hearing the commotion, he looked through a slit in the tower and saw a number of people milling around the entrance to the palace. Concluding, reasonably enough, that some sort of conspiracy was afoot and that his enemies were trying to break in, His Majesty grabbed his rifle and took aim at us. Had he opened fire, he could certainly have shot several of us with ease, for he had an excellent rifle and was a first-class marksman. Fortunately for us, just as the King was about to squeeze the trigger, he heard the sound of our nailed boots on the stony ground. Realizing that conspirators would hardly be likely to make so much noise, he dispatched a servant to find out what was going on. When he was told what had happened, he immediately sent word that we should leave the correspondence until the morning. The next day he told us with glee that he had very nearly shot us all and this remained a favourite story of his for years afterwards.

A typical working day at the palace would start for the king at about 8 a.m., when the Chief Chamberlain, Ibrahim Ibn Juma’a, would announce to him the names of the people who had come to see him that day with petitions or particular matters they wished to raise with him. Everybody who wished to see the King had first to arrange it with the Chamberlain, although in practice His Majesty saw almost everybody who wished to speak with him. The King would first hold a small private majlis for those whose business was of some importance. Visitors were introduced to him one by one in order of their priority and prominence. After the most important callers had been dealt with and the visitors had begun to thin out, His Majesty would start to deal with the day’s correspondence. It was quite common to see him talking to a bedouin chief and dictating two different letters at the same time. After this the king held his general majlis. Anybody could attend and there were usually between eighty and one hundred and thirty people present. His Majesty would first recite a verse from the Koran and present an interpretation of it. He would then choose some topic of national importance and speak about it for a time to the assembled company. Finally he would invite questions, whereupon the visitors were free to ask him about anything the liked. The proceedings were rather like a modern press conference, except that they were far less impersonal. The King had a remarkable ability to grasp instantly the important points of any question which was asked of him and was always able to give an immediate and full reply in a few well-chosen sentences. In this way, each man could leave satisfied that he had received the King’s personal attention. The general majlis seldom lasted more than forty minutes but an astonishing amount of work was always done in the time.

After each general majlis the Chamberlain would bring the King a list of people who had been present and His Majesty wrote against each name whatever gift he thought the man should receive. Nobody who attended the majlis ever went away empty-handed. Indeed, the quantity of goods given away was so great that the distribution of them had to be organized from a central warehouse in the middle of Riyadh. There was often more to these gifts than simple generosity. By tradition, all the bedouin who fought for the King came to the general majlis once a year. If they needed accommodation overnight, it was provided free of charge. The gifts they received were, in effect, a retainer for their services. The average gift for a bedouin tribesman would be three gold pounds, a robe and a cloak. If he was a minor chief, he would receive six gold pounds and a robe of finer quality. All the bedouin could rely upon leaving the Court with sacks of rice, baskets of dates and small bags of tea, sugar and coffee. Anybody who had performed a particular service for the King or distinguished himself in battle could expect to receive further gifts as a token of His Majesty’s gratitude. These gifts to the tribesmen made up a significant proportion of their annual income and for this reason were obviously a major factor in guaranteeing the loyalty of the royal army.

It is worth nothing here that when the formidable army of Ibn Saud went into battle, or indeed on any desert expedition, the provisions were usually provided by individual soldiers themselves. This was true even of those members of the army who were closest to the King. The King only carried extra provisions as a precaution in case of exceptional need. This was because, in addition to his gifts at the general majlis, the King supplied his bedouin troops regularly throughout the year with items such as dates, rice and flour(small quantities of which were used to bake bread in the hot sand). When necessary, the King could therefore gather a strong force almost immediately, at no extra cost to himself.

A few bedouin were tempted to return to the Court a second time during the year to receive another helping of the King’s bounty. Pride and prudence usually deterred a third visit. Although the King was aware of this, he never allowed anyone to leave without a gift. He was by nature the most generous of men, even to the undeserving, and it would have affronted his sense of honour if anybody who visited his palace had left empty-handed. Although this arrangement might sound like a free meal-ticket for everybody in the kingdom, there was a clear unwritten understanding among the King’s subjects that a man did not go to the palace unless he had particular business with the King, or the visit was a traditional right such as the annual visit of the bedouin. The townspeople of Riyadh, for instance, never came to the palace unless they had a special reason to do so.

The traffic in largess was not all one way. Visiting bedouin and townsmen brought the King gifts of all kinds, depending upon their rank and wealth. The King received many horses and camels in this way; and sometimes falcons or hawks, for his love of hunting was well known. Often the donations were more modest. I remember that one day a poor bedouin walked in to majlis carrying a club. He raised it above his head and cried out, ‘O Protected, I have only this to offer!’ His Majesty called him forward and with a few apt words praised his gift and graciously accepted it. Parcels occasionally arrived from foreign friends and admirers of the King or those seeking to find favour with him. Once a large consignment of petrol arrived unexpectedly in Jeddah sent by the government of Soviet Russia. The Russians had only a commercial Consul in Jeddah left over from the Sherif’s time and, somewhat naively, they hoped to persuade the King to establish diplomatic relations with them. His Majesty was happy to accept the petrol, but refused to have anything whatever to do with the Soviet government. Other gifts were more personal, such as a little package received from a German doctor who must have been seriously misinformed about His Majesty’s medical requirements. When unwrapped, the package revealed a small tin of aphrodisiac tablets!

By the time His Majesty had finished his general majlis, the morning was usually over. He would take his midday meal and sometimes retire to the harem (the women’s quarters) for a while. After the midday prayers he would attend the daily meeting of his political committee. The only function of this committee was to advise the King; it had no executive power. Some of the members of the committee were powerful and important men in their own right, and I shall have more to say about them in a later chapter. As an interpreter, it was often necessary for me to be present at the meetings. I could thus observe at first hand the way in which the committee worked. The King would raise a subject upon which he wished to have advice. A general discussion then followed, in which every member of the committee was quite free to give his true opinion and make any suggestion he wished. The King would end the discussion when he thought that enough had been said and he would then make up his own mind about what to do. No member of the committee would ever have considered suggesting a topic for discussion on his own initiative; this was entirely the prerogative of the King.

After the audience with his advisers was over, the King, accompanied by a few members of his retinue, would go for a short car ride around the outskirts of the city until sundown. His Majesty loved driving, and it had the advantage that he was able to show himself daily to his people. Sometimes he would travel for a short distance into the desert, where he would say his evening prayers before returning to the palace for dinner. One of his favourite places in the desert was a low hill, some distance outside Riyadh, which had a striking feature at its crest in the form of a huge natural archway formed in the rock. We called this ‘the hill with the hole’. With the growth of Riyadh in recent years, the hill has now been absorbed into the outskirts of the city and is surrounded by roads and buildings. Because of its importance to His Majesty, it has been carefully preserved and made into a national monument.

An hour and a half after sunset the King prayed again. Afterwards he held another majlis, this time an informal one, which was an open house for all the dignitaries and high officials in the city and for any prominent visitors. The first  half-hour of the majlis was taken up with the reading, usually by the King’s ulema, Sheikh Abdul Rhaman Al-Guwaize, of religious history or traditional stories about the Prophet Mohammed. The floor was then open for anybody who wished to raise a topic for general comment or discussion. The mood of this meeting was always more relaxed and light-hearted that at the business majlis in the morning. After the reading by the ulema, it was the custom for a large bowl of camel’s milk to be brought to the King. He would drink from the bowl and then pass it to his guests, who would each drink from it in turn. As the night wore on, the guests departed one by one, and His Majesty finally left the majlis himself and made a tour of the Court. He usually ended up in the political section, where his advisers would often be waiting to discuss some matter of importance. Finally, before he retired to his harem, he would pay a last visit to the Court offices, where we were of course still working, to see if anything there required his personal attention. Even after a long day he was always ready to listen patiently to any of our problems, however small, and to offer a few words of advice. We had our fair share of peculiar correspondence which required his personal attention. Foreigners used to write to the King requesting his personal guidance in religious matters, and I can remember translating a letter from American in Chicago who said he knew nothing about Islam and wanted the King to explain it to him. On His Majesty’s advice, we wrote back suggesting that the American buy a translation of the Koran. There were any number of people with dubious commercial propositions who wanted the King’s patronage. Many of these concerned the animals which were sacrificed during religious ceremonies which took place in Hejaz during the hajj. One man wanted to buy the meat of the beast, another the bones, another the skin, and so on. Such requests were always refused, for His Majesty had no desire to turn the hajj into a commercial bazaar. There was no shortage of suggestions from people wishing to improve the communications in the kingdom. One of the more bizarre proposals came from a gentleman who wanted to buy up an entire narrow-gauge railway in India, including the track, and ship it to Hejaz to run between Jeddah and Mecca. These are only a few examples of the sort of problem we might discuss with the King late into the night.

The routine of the King’s Court continued in much the same way whether His Majesty was in Mecca or Riyadh. Being in the King’s service was by no means a sedentary occupation, for it was a unique feature of the Court that almost the whole Court staff followed His Majesty wherever he went. Not only did we accompany the King on his annual pilgrimage to Mecca and back, but also on all his military and political expeditions. It was somewhat reminiscent of the medieval kings of Europe, whose courts accompanied them on all their journeys. When the King travelled, he would take with him most of the staff in the Domestic and Foreign Courts, numbering in total about twelve clerks and six servants. We would take with us not just the usual supplies and weapons but also all the Court records, files and correspondence. They were stored in huge wooden chests and were carried first on camel-back but later by car over countless thousands of miles of desert, following the King’s caravan wherever it went. Inevitably, each year the mass of paperwork became more and more unmanageable. Eventually it became just too great to handle. Subsequently, essential files only were carried with us and the remainder kept in store in Riyadh.

From the Chamberlain’s section of the Court would come three Chamberlains and three servants. Three of the king’s personal servants would also travel with him to take care of his clothing and personal requirements. Two or three cooks would accompany the King and they would usually have some soldiers to assist them. His Majesty also took his personal bodyguard, numbering fifty or sixty men, made up of member of the families of Riyadh who were noted for their long-standing loyalty. There would, in addition, be an armed group of thirty or forty of His Majesty’s trusted black guards. Other soldiers came as well, and in total the King’s personal entourage would include about two hundred armed men. On his military expeditions His Majesty took no women with him, but on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca he would take some of his wives and daughters and their servants. By the time I joined the King in 1926, he was beginning to use cars extensively. There would be fifteen or twenty cars carrying the King and the members of the Court and a few of the bodyguard. The rest of the party would follow on camels. His Majesty had a magnificent, custom-built   Mercedes saloon for his own use. The other cars were a motley assortment of Fords, Chevrolets, Buicks and Hudsons. When I joined His Majesty there were two Fords allocated to the Foreign Staff. The Chief of the Court and two clerks travelled in one, and I travelled with three colleagues and a driver in the other. Every year the number of cars increased until by 1935, when I left the King’s service, the camels had all been retired and the royal caravan consisted of over two hundred and fifty cars crossing the open desert together. There was no road between Riyadh and Mecca, or indeed anywhere else in the kingdom, and travelling was done with the assistance of local guides who knew the best routes through their part of the desert. Cars broke down frequently in these arduous conditions, and we took with us some ten or fifteen Indian and Indonesian driver-mechanics who became expert at doing makeshift repairs.

Inevitably there were the occasional accidents. I remember one such incident when we were returning from Hufuf in Al-Hasa. The cars in which I was travelling was crossing a series of undulating dunes. As we reached the top one of the dunes we realized to our horror that, instead of a gentle gradient on the other side of the crest, there was a sheer drop instead. The car slithered over the edge and plummeted downwards. Luckily for us, it landed on a slope of soft sand and nobody was seriously hurt. But it was the end of the road for the car, which for all I know is still there today. It is about five hundred miles from Riyadh to Mecca. When I first joined the King the journey took about five or six days; later on, when everyone was in cars, it became about four days. In 1926 I remember that the womenfolk accompanying the party, usually about fifteen in all, travelled in a large lorry. It may sound uncomfortable but it was a considerable improvement on travelling by camel. By 1935 each of the women had a car to herself.

When we stopped in the desert for the night, a large tent was erected for the use of the King so that he could entertain those of his family and advisers who were travelling with him. There was a small tent nearby for his personal servants which was also used as a kitchen and food store. Everybody else slept on the ground in the open, in the manner of the bedouin. The cooks in the party catered for the king’s needs. Everyone else carried his own food, which was supplemented by sheep and other supplies which we bought from local tribes along our route. At night the desert would twinkle with camp-fires in the best romantic, Hollywood tradition. Less romantic were the biting desert insects, which made life extremely uncomfortable for those not accustomed to sleeping in the open.

It is remarkable to think that our travelling Court, comprising barely thirty men, was only fifty years ago responsible for the central administration of the whole of Saudi Arabia. It is true that there were small subsidiary Courts to assist in Hejaz. Nevertheless, the administrative machinery of our great country was tiny. That is was so successful is a tribute to the patience and skill of His Majesty King Ibn Saud.