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Book by Stanley-Price, Nicholas
- Sales Rank: #2673177 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Book Guild Ltd
- Published on: 2012-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 6.25" w x 1.00" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 238 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Enthralling portait of a time and place
By Stephen Altman
This fascinating book is a meticulously researched and documented account of the heyday of the British airfield at Sharjah, today one of the United Arab Emirates. Passengers on the Imperial Airways route from England to India---and from there to Australia---flew in high style aboard the Handley Page 42, a four-engine bi-plane that made its stately (if occasionally bumpy) way over land and sea at 95-105 miles per hour. Innumerable stops were needed along the route for rest and refueling. Hence the new outpost at Sharjah, a blocky compound built of shellstone on the desert sands, bringing to mind among the passengers the fortress in Beau Geste.
Inside was the Rest House where foreign passengers, sojourning overnight, dressed for dinner and sipped cocktails. The time and place light up in the imagination: the British Empire still holding sway in a foreign land, the customs and prerogatives of empire still in place; a desert outpost designed and guarded to withstand the occasional Bedouin raid; outside in the darkness the giant bi-plane/airliners at rest for the night, while overhead the floodlight swings a beam that can be seen 130 miles out over the Gulf. There's the Bedouin town of Sharjah nearby, as foreign to the passengers---and no more frequented by them---than a village on the moon, while inside, in the glow of the Rest House, educated small talk and the clink of glasses.
This book, then, is valuable not just as a work on the history of civil (and military) aviation, but as a portrait of a particular time and place---something of what Stanley-Price calls "the British experience in hot climates and the encounter between Western and Arabian Gulf societies." The story of the airfield---the burgeoning of British civil aviation, the development of the England-India route, the British dealings with the Shaikh, the ongoing struggles with heat, floods, malaria, and the countless discomforts of the desert---is a kind of case study of the British character in action during the years leading up to and including World War II.
"Imperial Outpost in the Gulf" is dense with facts, but Stanley-Price is an author who trusts the facts---rather than any literary extravagance---to tell the story. The writing is accessible, the humor dry. But above all, the eye for detail is extraordinary. For example, it is especially interesting to read of the contrasting conditions for the pampered air travelers of Imperial Airways (succeeded in 1940 by BOAC) and the workers and military personnel who manned the airfield. Passengers staying overnight at the Rest House ate fresh food and bathed, if they wished, in fresh water delivered by donkey caravan from the desert wells at Al Falaj. And the workers and RAF airmen stationed at Sharjah? For them, Sharjah was a hardship post. They ate tinned foods only. They bathed in salt water. And---astonishing in the heat of the desert---each day they were rationed a single bottle of fresh water. Don't ask me what the airmen slept on, and what they did to fight off bedbugs. For that, you'll have to read the book.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Detailed, romantic and surpising
By Rene
Reviewed by AVIATIONBOOKREVIEWS.COM
After having reviewed `History in the Arab Skies' by Gerald Butt, quite by chance I came across this little gem of a book about Sharjah airfield, close to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its author, Nicholas Stanley-Price, was the cultural heritage advisor to the Sharjah Museums Department in the UAE from 2007 to 2008. Interesting that aviation in the Middle East has been so in vogue these last years. Well, I suppose it is obvious given the emerging airlines in the region.
The book deals chronicles the development of the airport between 1932 and 1952. The author describes in detail how Sharjah airfield was built close to the sea just to the north-east of Dubai. When you read this book, you are filled with the desire to go back in time and, together with the English, discover this piece of land and render it fit for an airfield. Why was it so important to build an
airfield on that spot? Simple: the British company, Imperial Airways, needed an airfield to break the long-haul journey to Basrah (Iraq) and to Karachi (Pakistan). This hop was part of the much longer route from London to the Far East where Great Britain had important imperial interests in India, Pakistan and Afganistan. Imperial Airways would have preferred to found an airfield in Iran as that would have made the journey quicker, but, at the time, the Iranians were most reluctant to allow the British to have a base on their soil.
The book contains lots of b/w photos which conjure up a romantic atmosphere. However, I doubt it was really that romantic. The heat was unbearable and it was a struggle just coping with providing the basics - water, food, petrol/kerosene - not to mention the intermittent tension between the Bedouin and the `Rest House' residents. This Rest House, built on the airfield, was essentially a fort, and quickly became the hub of the airport. Nicholas Stanley-Price describes in great detail how the Rest House came to be built, why it was designed in the way it was, what was later built to either side of it, and its central role in the lives of passengers, crews, the British soldiers who were stationed there, and the local guards whose job it was to protect the aircraft.
Stanley-Price leaves no stone unturned in his story of Sharjah. From the Rest House construction blue prints to the airplanes which landed at the airfield, from the meals provided to the air conditioning systems, and from the settlement contract from 1932 to the seaplanes which, unfortunately, could not be accommodated at Sharjah because the sea there turned out to be unsuitable for them. He does this in depth and with precision. His eye for interesting details holds the reader's attention. Of course you have to want to read a history of the airport in the first place... "Go for it!" I say. The accompanying photos are excellent and, because they are interspersed with the prose throughout, they make the book extra attractive to read. Personally, I found the story of the search for suitable land and how the contract between the British and the local Sultan was drawn up the most fascinating part.
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