I have included these diaries under my subtitle “From Pearls to Oil” so as to keep the oil company records together and maintain the distinction between them and the British Government archives or any other sources of information about the early days on the Trucial Coast.

One cannot stress too much that the Trucial Coast in those days bears very little resemblance to the United Arab Emirates of these days. These reports illustrate how very much it is to the credit of the several Rulers and their people, who in 1971 decided to put the past differences behind them and move rapidly from the individual Sheikhdoms, jealously guarding their own interests, to the modern President-led state of the United Arab Emirates.

The Trucial Coast Diaries are secret reports written in Dubai, between the years 1948 and 1957 by representatives of the oil company PD(TC), (Petroleum Development (Trucial Coast)) which was exploring for oil in the United Arab Emirates (formerly Trucial Coast). Many years ago I was entrusted with the safekeeping of these documents and I believe that it is now time to make them available for researchers and anyone who is interested in the history of the Emirates. Sadly all the main players in these reports, and even some of their sons have passed away.

Unfortunately some reports are missing, some were never written, and although some were written after 1957 I do not have them. Some reports are short and of little interest to most readers but I have included them as even they have some significance.

In this volume the oil company, in keeping with the custom on the Trucial Coast at that time, is referred to as PD(TC) or just the ‘Company’. Sir Easa Saleh Al-Gurg in conversation with me referred to the company as Lermitte’s company. This is a reference to a representative of the company from 1937 to 1953, Basil Lermitte, who was based in Bahrain but who travelled throughout the Trucial Coast and south into the Sultanate of Oman.

The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) and its bunch of associated companies, PD(TC) was one of those companies, ceased to exist when the last concession expired in Abu Dhabi in January 2014. In its heyday, roughly the years 1930 to 1960, the IPC engineers and particularly the exploration geologists and geophysicists were pre-eminent in the whole of Arabia. The records of their work are copious and still preserved to this day in the BP archives at the university of Warwick in England.