Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoo

He built a significant regional business in shipping and trading agencies, which brought him into conflict with British companies and authority, before seeing much of his holdings wiped out by the financial crisis that followed in the wake of the collapse of the pearling industry in the Persian Gulf.

Taking over the business from his father in 1890, at the age of 22,[1] Yusuf bin Ahmed chartered boats to import commodities directly from Kerala and Mombasa, expanding his links to the whole Indian coast and also other ports in East Africa.

As well as an increasingly wide network of general trade throughout Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Sharjah, he secured an agency to ship large bulk cargoes of coffee and tea, breaking these down into smaller consignments for regional distribution.

This safe underpinned a number of banking services offered by Kanoo to local merchants, including Islamic finance and money transfers between Bahrain and Bombay.

[2] Kanoo eventually agreed to drop his resistance to the establishment of the British bank, which opened in 1918, but quietly continued to provide financial services to the local trading community.

[2] Kanoo was childless himself, but adopted the two sons and daughter of his brother, Mohamed when he died of plague at the age of 25 in the outbreaks of disease that swept Bahrain and the Trucial Coast in 1903 and 1904.

[1] Although he had managed to repay most of his debts by the time of his death on 21 December 1945, Haji Yusuf bin Ahmed Kanoo died leaving his two adopted sons just 10,000 Rupees with which to rebuild the family's fortunes.

However, he also left them with a considerable collection of lucrative businesses and agencies and they formed a successful partnership that was to evolve into a major conglomerate with operations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the UK.