H. R. P. Dickson

Lieutenant Colonel Harold Richard Patrick Dickson (4 February 1881 – 14 June 1959) was a British colonial administrator in the Middle East from the 1920s until the 1940s, and author of several books on Kuwait.

There his mother's milk failed and Shaikh Mijwal al Mazrab, the husband of Lady Jane Digby, provided the young child with a wet nurse from the 'Anizah tribe.

Islamic law lays out the permanent family-like relationships that are created by wet nursing, and this "blood affinity" between Dickson and the 'Anizah meant he was treated as a member of the tribe.

He stated that this blood tie 'in later life has been of assistance to me in my dealings with the Badawin [bedouin] of the high desert and around Kuwait'.

The house was ransacked during the invasion, but has since been restored by the Kuwaiti National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters, and is now a tourist attraction.

[13] Papers by and relating to H. R. P. Dickson are held at the Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony's College, Oxford University (MECA reference: GB165-0085).