In the wake of famous travellers and explorers such as Lawrence of Arabia and Wilfried Thesiger came ordinary people, leading what seemed to them at the time to be ordinary lives. However, with the passage of time and the immense technological and social changes that have occurred in the region, the lives of the British in the Middle East in the 1950s, 60s and 70s now seem quite extraordinary. In this, the twenty-first century, it is probably almost impossible for anyone who visits the Middle East, and more particularly the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, now with its high-rise modern cities, superb communications and accumulation of financial and banking centres, to imagine what the region was like only fifty or sixty years ago, when I worked there in various branches of The British Bank of the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. The Middle East that I knew has now almost entirely disappeared both physically and socially