Famously, Queen Elizabeth II has made two state visits to the UAE. But was there also a third trip even earlier and now all but forgotten?
The story goes like this. On a lengthy overseas tour, the royal aircraft made a refuelling stop in Dubai. There she was greeted by Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, Ruler of Dubai at the time, with whom she already had a friendly relationship.
Several reports say the queen took the opportunity to visit a trade show at the airport, and that this inspired Sheikh Rashid to build the Dubai World Trade Centre.
Jim Krane makes a brief reference to the visit in his book Dubai: The Story of the World’s Fastest City and places it in 1972.
Len Chapman, in his blog Dubai As It Used To Be, says the visit was in 1974. The queen, he says, was on her way to Indonesia and was shown round a “British Building and Construction Equipment Exhibition” at the airport, designed by John Harris, the architect of the Dubai International Trade and Exhibition Centre, as it was called then, and the man behind the Dubai Master Plan.
“As a result of the Queen's visit, Sheikh Rashid became convinced Dubai needed an exhibition facility and charged John Harris with preparing a proposal,” Mr Chapman writes.
A handful of other publications make reference to the visit. Al Manakh, an engineering journal with a focus on the Gulf, repeats the date of 1972 and says the queen diverted her aircraft from Bahrain to Dubai because she wanted to see the new airport.
Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography, by the American academic Stephen J Ramos, also says the visit happened late at night in 1972 and that “Sheikh Rashid knew that a proper facility was needed to host future trade events”.
What is missing, however, is any official version or evidence that the visit took place, including photographs.
Let us consider the two dates. In February 1972, the queen was on a lengthy royal tour that included Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. She travelled with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, and daughter Princess Anne, flying on Royal Air Force VC10 aircraft.
Her first stop was in Bangkok on February 10, so the royal aircraft would have needed to make at least one refuelling stop en route on the flight of about 10,000 kilometres.
Dubai, with its new state-of-the-art airport that was less than a year old at the time, would have been an obvious choice. However, there is no evidence the queen got off the aircraft there and there can have been no link with the World Trade Centre – it had yet to be conceived.
Two years later, in March 1974, the queen set out on another tour of East Asia, heading first to Bali, then Indonesia. She travelled with the then newly formed British Airways and, at a distance of about 12,000 kilometres, would have needed to refuel, with the Gulf the obvious halfway point.
She was actually resuming her itinerary. A visit to Australia in February had been interrupted by a snap general election and a hung parliament in the UK, which required her to fly back to Britain as part of her constitutional duties. Prince Philip continued without her and the plan was to reunite on the royal yacht Britannia in Bali.
Apart from her aides, the queen was alone on the chartered British Airways jet.
Crucially, the travelling press corp that might have confirmed the Dubai story had remained overseas with the duke.
In his 2020 book, Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai, architect and writer Todd Reisz provides a description of the trade exhibition at the airport as “draped in Union Jack Flags”.
The jet carrying Queen Elizabeth is said to have landed on March 14, 1974, although Mr Reisz is careful to use the word “allegedly” to reports that Her Majesty diverted the aircraft from its planned refuelling stop In Bahrain.
Sheikh Rashid and Mr Harris hurried to the airport to welcome the queen and gave her a tour of the exhibition, he writes.
Mr Harris, who died in 2008, later told the story of the creation of the World Trade Centre. Checking his luggage for a flight home to the UK, he received a tap on the shoulder from an assistant to Sheikh Rashid, who wanted an urgent meeting to propose the project.
“I explained about my luggage but, of course, my suitcase went one way and I went the other,” Mr Harris recalled.
This account by Mr Harris makes no mention of the queen. Mr Reisz says Mr Harris, in a 1985 speech, told the story of the airport tour but included Prince Philip in the royal party – even though he was not there.
To add the confusion, a promotional leaflet for the Dubai World Trade Centre from 1999, apparently based on Mr Harris’s recollections, gives the earlier date of 1972.
At least Mr Reisz can confirm the queen’s visit could have taken place. Buckingham Palace told him that aircraft carrying the queen on overseas trips made several refuelling stops in Dubai during the 1970s, including on March 14. But the palace cannot say if she left the aircraft, let alone met with Sheikh Rashid.
And there is another complication, potentially fatal to the story. According to British government records, the trade exhibition did not officially open until March 16 – two days after the stopover and by which time the queen was already in Indonesia.
Perhaps the two stories from March 1974 – a brief refuelling stop in Dubai by the queen’s aircraft, and the realisation by Sheikh Rashid that he needed a better, bigger showcase for trade – have over time become conflated?
All that can be said with any certainty was that the queen did visit Dubai on her 1979 state visit, in which she also inaugurated the World Trade Centre.
Whether she was aware of the reports of her role in its creation is not recorded.
Queen Elizabeth's visit to the UAE in 1979
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