In the winter of 1956, The Times correspondent David Holden arrived on the island of Bahrain, then still a British protectorate.

After a short-lived career teaching geography, Holden had looked forward to his Arabian posting, but he hadn’t expected to be attending a garden durbar in honour of Queen Victoria’s appointment as Empress of India.

Everywhere that he went in the Gulf – Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Oman – he found expected traces of British India.

“The Raj maintains here a slightly phantasmal sway,” wrote Holden, “a situation rich in anomaly and anachronism… The servants are all bearers, the laundryman a dhobi, and the watchman a chowkidar,” he wrote, “and on Sundays the guests are confronted with the ancient, and agreeable, Anglo-Indian ritual of a mountainous curry lunch.”

The Sultan of Oman, educated in Rajasthan, was more fluent in Urdu than Arabic, while soldiers in the nearby state of Qu’aiti, now eastern Yemen, marched around in now-defunct Hyderabadi army uniforms.