Postal Communication with the Eastern Aden States
1887-1942
The first reference that has been found concerning mail between Aden and Mukalla is in records for 1887. On 4 February that year the Aden Postmaster asked the Residency to try to get approval from the Sultan in Mukalla to formalise the arrangement the former had had for some while with the Customs in Mukalla and Shehr Bunder whereby paid letters (i.e. with stamps on) from merchants in Aden would be carried by the steamer ‘Pheasant’ to be distributed by the Customs. Two days later the Resident, Brigadier General Hogg (after whom Hogg Tower was named), wrote a suitable request to the Sultan, asking also for letters for Aden to be forwarded on. Having received no reply by August the Postmaster sent a hastener, repeating the Resident’s letter in case the first had not arrived. Arrangements appear to have been formalised to a certain extent by 1890 at the latest as a Postal Notice dated 15 October 1891 concerning a change of postal rates between Aden and Zanzibar mentions that “ The rates from Aden to Perim, Berbera, Zaila, Mukalla and Shehr will continue to be Indian Inland rates as hitherto.”
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The Postmaster’s annual summary for 1894-95 included a brief mention of postal traffic to and from Mukalla: 16 mails had been dispatched and only one received. For 1896-97 the totals were eight dispatched but none received; and for 1898-99 two mails were dispatched but again none received. The next references to Mukalla of any postal interest are in 1908 and 1910 when on both occasions the Sultan was passing through Aden and the Resident suggested establishing a post office at Mukalla. It was stressed that it would cost the Sultan nothing and he would have the advantage of a fortnightly or even weekly service with Aden. Nothing came from these meetings.
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On now to 1927 when the Sultan himself instigated new overtures towards opening a post office. In spite of this initiative by the Sultan it was to be another 10 years before an office was finally opened! In his letter to the Resident he mentioned that he would cover the costs of the service, but that he insisted on using his own stamps. It was this condition that was to delay matters for so long. On receipt of this letter the Aden Postmaster was tasked by the Resident to provide estimates of the quantity of mail from Mukalla currently passing through Aden. The figures were about 20 items weekly from Aden and about 300 weekly in the opposite direction, including many addressed to India, China and the Dutch East Indies. A further check for a month in 1931 produced the following quantities:
Paid letters to Mukalla 650
Paid letters from Mukalla 32
Unpaid letters from Mukalla 1380
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No Unpaid letters were accepted for Mukalla from Aden; these were sent to the Dead Letter Office in Bombay.
But no progress was made regarding stamps; in 1932 the Aden point of view was that whilst a post office at Mukalla was in the experimental stage Indian stamps would have to be used. The Sultan had other ideas; in November 1933 he wrote that he hoped the stamps would be Mukalla State stamps and that he would perform the opening ceremony when the service was ready. The other problem, as the reader will have gathered, was that the Sultan was notoriously bad at answering letters and also avoided face-to-face discussions on the subject. A final but short delay was caused by the transfer of Aden to Colony status in 1937. The office at Mukalla was finally opened on 22 April 1937; this date being tied to the arrival of office furniture from the post office at Sheikh Othman which had been closed on 31 March, the post office at Mukalla being staffed by and under the control of the Aden Postmaster.
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Much of the credit for finally getting things moving had been due to Harold Ingrams, the Political Agent in Mukalla. He knew that there were a lot of letter writers in the Eastern States, as the following figures show for mails leaving Mukalla in the first three months after the opening of the post office: 10 steamers and three air mails carried nearly 13,000 paid and nearly 4,000 unpaid letters between them. The first mail out was on the steamer SS Alawi which carried 433 items, about one-third being for destinations in China, Singapore, India and elsewhere in the Far East; about one third for addresses in Aden, almost exclusively to Crater; and the final third to Red Sea ports or destinations in Africa, down as far as Mombasa and Zanzibar. The second outward mail was on 2 May when over 1,100 items were flown to Aden by the RAF. The involvement of the RAF was an important factor in the early carriage of mail between Mukalla and Aden and several days before the opening of the post office the Residency was investigating the possibility of using RAF planes on training flights to carry mail, as for the well established training flights to Kamaran and Perim. The AOC tasked 8 Squadron to carry mail when space permitted. The next two flights out from Mukalla were on 25 June and 17 July.
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In September the Aden merchant, Besse, who owned the Halal Shipping Company which took cargoes to Mukalla and Shehr as and when required, decided to introduce some local scheduled air services in the Aden area. From the volume of correspondence that had been carried since April, both on their steamer and by the RAF it was obvious that there was scope for a contract with the Aden Post Office on the Mukalla route. The company owned two aircraft, a Short Scion Junior which could carry six passengers and a Monospar ST 25 which was a 4-seater. Arabian Airways, as the airline was named, intended to initially fly on two routes: Aden-Djbouti and Aden-Mukalla-Shehr-Seiyun. There was a delay in the introduction of the former, chiefly due to problems with the French authorities, but there was much enthusiasm and support for the latter service within the Aden community. It was agreed that mail would be carried at a charge to the Post Office of Rs5 per pound weight to Mukalla and Seiyun, but not to Shehr where there was no post office; from his initial calculations the postmaster planned to make an Air Mail surcharge of As2 per half ounce, subsequently changed to As2 per tola to make the service profitable to the Post Office. The Arabian Airways service to Mukalla commenced on Thursday 29 September 1937 with the plane remaining overnight at Seiyun before returning to Aden the following morning. In the first month of operations nearly 75 pounds of mail was carried from Aden, including over 40 pounds of 1st Class mail at the surface rate originating from outside the Colony which was sent air mail without additional charge. In the same month over 42 pounds of mail was sent to Aden, five sixths being from Mukalla.
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On 18 December the Scion was written off whilst landing at Tarim, although the six passengers aboard came to no harm. The pilot was sacked by Besse. Unfortunately his second pilot failed an eye test at more or less the same time and the Mukalla service was temporarily abandoned whilst the company’s engineer went to England to find a new plane and to engage new pilots. Besse at this time began lobbying for a substantial subsidy to introduce an air link from Aden to Khartoum as a feeder service into the Empire Air Mail Scheme, a facility much sought after by the Aden community. Under current arrangements the fastest route to send letters to England took about a week, mail going to Egypt by the weekly P&O steamer and thence on from Cairo by air. Taking mail to Khartoum would reduce the time to three or at the most four days. Besse required a subsidy of £10,000 a year, which was beyond the means of Aden Colony and the Colonial Office was not willing to pick up the bill.
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The Mukalla service was resumed at the end of March 1938 to the same schedule as previously, leaving Aden at 0600 on a Thursday, returning the same time the following morning. But Arabian Airways was in severe financial difficulties; since the insurance premium on the Scion would have amounted to 20% of its value it had not been insured. The proposed Djbouti service had been blocked and there was no immediate prospect of a major subsidy for one to Khartoum. As a result on 4 May Besse informed the Governor’s office that he was forced to suspend the service to the Hadramut, adding as a subsidiary reason that “unfortunately we noticed on several occasions that an RAF aeroplane left about a day before our service taking with it some 1st Class Mail.”
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In December 1938 the Aden Postmaster went to Mukalla to see what improvements were needed there and in the Hadramut. He found that letters were being carried coastwards “by any old traveller”, that local delivery was uncertain and conveyance onwards to Aden from Mukalla was most irregular. The steamers of the Halal Shipping Company, and less frequently of Cowasjee Dinshaw, sailed as and when cargoes were available, usually every two to three weeks, although during the three monsoon months from July to September the harbours at both Mukalla and Shehr were unusable by all but small vessels. The postmaster therefore proposed to Government that the RAF be asked to undertake a regular fortnightly flight, in alternate weeks to the Kamaran flight. To tie in with P&O steamer schedules the plane would need to leave Aden on a Monday, remain overnight at Seiyun and return to Aden early on a Tuesday morning. Although government was keen to improve communications with the eastern states they were not hopeful of a positive response from the RAF, and certainly not before the arrival of a second squadron of “faster machines” [Blenheims] at Aden. The proposal was put to Air Headquarters but languished in a pending tray. By the time the request was followed up it was October 1939 and the eventual reply, not surprisingly, was “no chance in the present circumstances”.
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The formation of an Aden Postal Union was agreed in February 1939, the chief measure being a decision to allow the two eastern states to have their own postage stamps. In fact at the end of the previous October the Colonial Secretary in London had stipulated that the Qu’aiti and Kathiri States could have their own stamps, and also Lahej if the sultan there requested it, but not Dthala. There was considerable discussion and argument regarding the wording on the stamps, with Harold Ingrams protecting the interests of the sultans. When the proofs arrived at Mukalla his sultan was absent on a protracted trip to India, from where he had written for an update on progress with his stamp issue; although Ingrams knew the sultan would have liked to have approved them personally he considered the resultant delay would have been less popular. Luckily the sultan was delighted with the end product which was issued in July 1942.