On 22 May 1929 a ship anchored two miles off the Kuwait shore, after a voyage its passenger described as “intensely hot”. An Englishwoman of thirty-three came ashore from it, and stayed in this country sixty-one years of a life that ran to ninety-four.
Who she was
Violet Penelope Lucas-Calcraft, born in 1896 at Gautby in Lincolnshire. In 1919 she worked at Cox’s bank, and there met Harold Dickson; they married in India. From India to Bahrain, then Basra, Amara and Kut in Iraq, then to Kuwait where her husband became the British political agent.
She named her son Saud and her daughter Zahra, and so became known in Kuwait as Umm Saud. She died in 1991, leaving memoirs covering forty years of her life here.
The house that dissolved
The most valuable description in the memoirs is not about politics but about the building. The agency house walls were of sun-dried mud brick, coated with a layer of white gypsum. Heavy rain seeped through the gypsum, reached the mud and dissolved it. Which is why these houses needed immediate repair after every winter.
Then a worse problem: the house sat on a slope, and rainwater gathering from three houses up the hill behind it poured through the house’s passage and out to the sea.
How it was laid out
The ground floor held the agency offices, a post office and a kitchen. The bedrooms were upstairs. Between them ran a long, cool, dark sirdab from the main gate to the inner courtyard. The guest room was in a separate wing joined to the house by a small wooden bridge — and its balcony had collapsed to the ground on the day they arrived, so it could not be entered.
The answer came from the sea
They found a skilled Persian builder called Ustad Ahmad, who used coral sea rock — the only stone available in Kuwait — to strengthen the house’s foundation and build four piers. The sea was the building material, not only the road.
A small detail that explains the whole summer
On their first day they looked for a boy to pull the punkah rope — a curtain-like fan hanging from the ceiling. No electricity, no water, no transport. And that fan, moved by a person, was all that stood between the room and the heat of May.
Photo: a Gulf baghlah sailing ship. By Aliparsa, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Farhan Al Farhan, “Violet Dickson in Kuwait (1896–1991)”, published in Al Qabas and reproduced on the Kuwait History forum, drawing on her memoirs.
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