William Richard Williamson

When the vessel docked at San Diego, Williamson jumped ship and found work on a farm near Los Angeles, then with his aunt on her homestead.

After bribing a guard, Williamson escaped to the American consul Alexander Russell Webb and boarded a British ship bound for Hong Kong.

Relations with the British were changeable: they suspected him of gun running in the Persian Gulf and yet were happy to use him as a secret agent and spy hunter during World War I.

He regularly met Royal Navy gunboats as they criss-crossed the Persian Gulf in stop and search operations to suppress an illicit trade in rifles, slaves and contraband.

The pearling season known al-Ghaus al-Kabir (“The Big Dive”) ran from May to September when a fleet of some 4,000 dhows ranging from the regular sambuk to the larger boum and baghlah would set out from the many ports of the Persian Gulf.

But when doing business with Westerners, he would put on a navy-blue suit with double-breasted jacket while retaining an Arab headdress and toying with his prayer beads, in those days an eccentric fusion of east and west.

However, they hated each other with a passion and developed a rivalry which led Williamson (perhaps melodramatically) to believe that his life was in danger, constantly looking over his shoulder for an assassin trailing in his wake.

[3] Williamson acted in a similar capacity for the first visits of Anglo-Persian geologists to Abu Dhabi in 1934, and was responsible for signing the first oil concession for that country in January 1935.

“We landed from the Gulf mail steamer at Dubai after a day and night lying to and waiting until one of the most violent storms of thunder and rain we had ever experienced had blown itself out,” wrote one of the geologists.

“During the first few months in Dubai we were advised never to leave the house without an armed escort, as we were the first Europeans to live in the town and it was considered desirable to accustom the local populace gradually to our presence.” The party travelled inland with the sheikh and his followers who used each occasion as an excuse for hunting.

Our routes followed camel trails, the only tracks of any kind which existed, and as most of the country was sand the cars were very often stuck.”[4] However, there were lingering suspicions among British officials that Williamson was favouring local sheikhs over the interests of the oil company.

He retired into typical Arab life at Kut-el-Hajjaj near Basra where he supervised daily work on the date palm and orange tree plantations on his estate.

In recent years, a conspiracy theory has emerged that the British secretly backed Ayatollah Khomeini in overthrowing the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in 1979.