Word: aden
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...incessant border squabbles along the bleak mountainous boundary between independent, isolated Yemen and the British Protectorate of Aden, on the southern tip of Arabia, are, as one British diplomat put it, part of the "burden of empire." Last spring, Aden's British Governor Sir Reginald Champion added another straw to his imperial burden. An Adenese chieftain, the Sharif of Beiham, had asked that a frontier customs post be set up to tap the rich stream of smuggled coffee, skins and qat (an Arabian drug) which kept flowing into his territory over an ancient traders' trail from Yemen. Governor...
...customs garrison replied in kind, and for two months the fusillade continued back & forth across the frontier. Then the Yemeni built a small fort to improve their position. After a fruitless exchange of diplomatic protests, Aden's British government dropped a few smoke-bombs near the fort. The Yemeni sat tight. A fortnight later the British dropped real bombs, and Yemen's new fort was flattened. But no one was hurt, because the British had considerately informed the Yemeni of their plans well ahead of time and the fort's garrison of 20-odd stalwarts had prudently...
...over an open clay oven and eat from a rough board supported by orange crates. Moshe's wife has found only occasional work picking oranges, and the 'family's stake is going for food. But Moshe, who spent three years in a British detention camp in Aden, plans to stay. He says: "The Arabs of Yemen hated us. There we had a three-story house made of stone. But this will be our home...
...knew a little more. In 1930, on a trip through Africa and the Middle East, Novelist Evelyn Waugh had dined with Besse on the roof of his home in Aden. Waugh had described him (under the pseudonym of M. Leblanc) in When the Going Was Good: "He talked of Abyssinia, where he had heavy business undertakings ... he expressed his contempt for the poetry of Rimbaud . . ." He thrived on risk and had made and lost more than one fortune. He liked shark-infested waters: it made swimming more interesting...
Last week Antonin Besse was in Aden and was not talking. Said an employee in his London branch office: "The old man won't like it that his name is out. For 50 years he has worked on the principle that the less people know about him, the less trouble he will have." Oxford authorities felt the same way. They did not have all the cash in hand yet, and as one undergraduate cracked: "They sure don't want to get the old man in a huff and have him take the money back. That would...