report added that fully laden ships of draughts deeper than six feet (two metres) were unable to leave the harbour, over the sandbar at its mouth.
Their report on Sharjah recognised the commercial significance of the town, which ‘was for many centuries the most prosperous centre of maritime activity in the region’, and acknowledged that unsuccessful attempts had been made in the past to ‘build a harbour in the shelter of the rocky point at Layya’.20 The report also pointed out that the silting of the Sharjah Creek had gone so far that most of Sharjah’s everyday supplies were now imported through Dubai. Halcrow’s report emphasised not only the degradation of Sharjah Creek but also its transport infrastructures, and indicated the other options the ruling family of the emirate was considering:
The Customs Wharf at Sharjah was built some twenty years ago to facilitate the landing of heavy materials when the airport was being constructed but because of the deterioration in the condition of the harbour referred to above, practically all the stores and plant required now for both service and civilian stations are imported through Dubai … The recent acquisition of new possessions on the Muscat coast is likely to give a new impetus to this [entrepôt] trade and efforts are being made to open up a trading centre based on the fine natural harbour of Khor Fakkan.21
Both reports contained a long litany of the problems that a construction project of this magnitude would face. These included
(a) Lack of raw materials. Only sand and stone are available naturally. Cement, timber, oil, fuel and fresh water in any quantity would have to be imported. (b) Lack of skilled labour. (c) Lack of adequate housing for the necessary [European] supervisory staff and cost of providing special housing. (d) All plant would have to be imported and freight charges would be heavy. (e) A comparatively small job of this nature would not be attractive to first class contracting firms unless they happened to be working within a reasonable distance from Dubai. Competition would therefore be limited and tendering would consequently not be keen.22
The report then indicated that these factors could increase the cost of construction of these harbours by several factors beyond the cost of similar projects in the UK. The reports estimated the cost of dredging the creek and construction of a harbour for Dubai at £388,000 (approximately £9.6 million in today’s value) and for Sharjah at a range between £250,000 and £825,000 (or between £6.2 and £20 million today).
Upon receiving Halcrow’s 1955 reports on the development of Sharjah and Dubai Harbours, the commercial secretary at the political residency in Bahrain, W.H. Adams, wrote in a memo that Sharjah’s ‘harbour facilities must continue to decline and in due course it will cease to exist as a “deep sea” port’. Commercially, however, Dubai would be encouraged to ‘survive and probably develop’. Financing options for dredging the Dubai Creek included a possible loan from the UK government ‘secured by a lien on Customs revenues’ or loans from construction companies or banks. Adams added that he preferred the first option, ‘as we could then dictate terms and the dictation of terms would seem to be most necessary’. The dictation of terms was deemed crucial for the British to create a ‘free-port’ facility for Sharjah in Dubai and allow Sharjah to decline as a port.23
In the event, Shaikh Rashid of Dubai attempted to raise some part of the necessary financing for the dredging project through a bond issue. The issue was taken up by both Dubai merchants (whose purchase of the bond secured a third of the necessary budget at £200,000). The rest of the cost was covered by a loan from the government of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti loan was guaranteed with the anticipated incomes from customs collection in Dubai. To improve the process of customs collection, the ruler of Bahrain seconded businessman Mahdi al-Tajir as the head of Dubai Customs.24 Mahdi al-Tajir went on to become the most powerful man in Dubai, after Shaikh Rashid himself, and acquired a vast estate in Scotland in 1975, becoming one of the richest men there. The Dubai Creek was eventually dredged by Overseas AST of Austria and Halcrow.25 Dredgers then expurgated the sand bank at the mouth of the creek and the harbour was deepened to eight feet.
The effect was to provide Dubai with a deep harbour – and enrich Shaikh Rashid’s own purse. The UAE historian Frauke Heard-Bey explains how the Dubai Creek dredging project
proved to be not only a costly convenience but was turned to good advantage because the spoil was deposited in a low-lying area nearby to create new building land. The sale of this land paid for the cost of dredging. The value of reclaimed land became an integral part in the assessment of all marine projects; no amount of dredging work seemed too large when the cost of that work was already debited against expected commercial value of the new building sites. The Ruler personally became the owner of such reclaimed land. Since he also often personally guaranteed loans raised for certain projects, the money he would eventually realize from selling land was taken into consideration when negotiating such loans.26
Sharjah’s fate – at least for the following decade – was determined not only by British reluctance to dredge its creek but also by the winds blowing from the deserts of Iran across the waters. In 1960, one particularly stormy shamal – which lasted several days and caused drastic changes in currents, tides, and temperatures – blustered so unrelentingly that it shifted a sandbar to the mouth of the Sharjah Creek and sealed it shut. ‘Overnight the tidal creek became a saltwater lake.’27 With the enclosure of the Sharjah Creek just as Dubai Creek was being deepened, the merchant families of Sharjah relocated their businesses down the coast to Dubai. The British rancour against Shaikh Saqr of Sharjah arose because they deemed his closer relations with the Arab League and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser threatening to their interests on the Peninsula. Enclosing Sharjah Creek and dredging Dubai Creek was meant as a punishment for one and reward for the other. The transformation of Sharjah Creek into a deepwater port had to wait until the British began planning to leave the Gulf.
Delicate aluminium girders
Project phantom aerial masts
Swaying crane and derrick
Above the sea’s just surging deck.
Stephen Spender, ‘Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth’
Dubai’s next maritime transport project was an even larger mechanised port to relieve the congestion of the now-deepened creek harbour. Halcrow was again involved in the surveys for what eventually became Port Rashid at the entrance to the creek. The British projections for Dubai trade formed the basis for the 1967 port plans, even as Shaikh Rashid (and his Scottish economic adviser, Bill Duff) argued for four times as many berths as Halcrow allowed. When Port Rashid was inaugurated in 1971, it was already congested and had to be expanded to thirty-seven berths by the end of that decade.28 The congestion of the port had everything to do with the independence of Aden from British colonial yoke. Dubai benefitted from revolution and war in Southern Arabia as shipping and bunkering businesses moved their base there from Aden. By the late 1970s, Port Rashid was the largest port in the Gulf, and typical of the ports of its time: still close to the commercial centre of the city, capable of serving large container ships, and later complemented with a drydock suitable for repairing crude carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels, and dredgers. Shaikh Rashid had appointed the British shipping firm
