Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎26r] (51/118)

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to Russia. I had with him my first American working breakfast of PX bacon
and egg-soaked toast called French with copious coffee. I enjoyed American
hospitality again when begging a lift on a freighter whose crew ate generous
rations that showed no sign of food shortages and over their non-stop games
of pinochle and non-stop coffee spoke of pay plus danger money that was far
above my level. In the Residency An office of the East India Company and, later, of the British Raj, established in the provinces and regions considered part of, or under the influence of, British India. we lived simply off the land, with a very
occasional tin cadged from a passing steamer, but hardly more spartanly than
was normal in a remote district station in Bengal.
To add to our occasional visitors who were preciously rare birds in our small
community of three or four senior officials (of which one might be a bachelor
such as myself) a bouncy Hampstead intellectual breezed in boasting a hot line
to Stafford Cripps as he prepared for the arrival of the first lorries to be
assembled and despatched to Russia. After the departure of the Resident,
Sir Geoffrey Prior for Cairo to join the Middle East War Council under Oliver
Lytel^ton (later Lord Chandos) his successor, Colonel W.R. Hay brought the zest
A.
of his wife and five young children to cheer his small war-isolated staff. The
former lean hero of the Arabian Empty Quarter's first crossing in 1930-31,
Bertram Thomas became Public Relations Officer in the Gulf to hearten the Arab
Sheikhs of the Gulf's west shore but daunt, I fear, with his now portly form
the camels which had carried him to fame.
Sir John Dashwood, scion of Sir Francis who as the second baronet had been
the dissolute founder of the Hellfire Club (motto: 'fay ce que voudras') arrived
(a touch incongruously, I thought, given his line's antecedents) to vet our
security. The upshot of this was that I as a jumped up temporary security
inspector was sent off unwelcome to check the security of mostly senior colleagues
at the other Gulf posts. In one more change of hat I was sent to act as Political
Agent, Bahrain for a short spell in the course of which I went to greet Peter
Fleming as he passed through the Bahrain airport on his way home from India.