Last week’s BL blog was about the death of Queen Victoria: the Politics of Mourning and Memorialisation in the British Persian Gulf.
I was fascinated to find a mention of Emily Overend Lorimer in it.
Her husband David Lockhart Lorimer worked with the Bakhtiari when he was Vice-Consul of Arabistan (1903-1910). He was an important ally for the first oil explorers and successfully renegotiated the key 1905 oil agreement. His wife, Emily, was a trained linguist and the pair translated Bakhtiari poetry – of which there is lots more here. ‘Lock’ was also a photographer and captured rare images of ordinary Bakhtiari men, women and children engaged in daily life. Click here to see more of these.
The BL blog writes of how much of the memorialisation of Victoria was a “myopic fixation with ‘political influence’, rather than public health”. ‘Lock’ must have moved on to Bahrain, as Emily is described as the “wife of the Political Agent at Bahrain (1911-1912)”. She apparently wrote “in a letter home to her mother that the Victoria Memorial Hospital was built without proper consideration of the costs. It was, she wrote, a ‘fine large hospital’ but with insufficient income. ‘When really bad cases come’, she noted, ‘we have to ask the Mission Hospital to take them in’ ”