H. R. P. Dickson was one of six children of John Dickson, a diplomat in the
Levant from 1872 to 1906, and Edith Wills. He was born in
Beirut, Lebanon and was taken at a young age to
Damascus, Syria where his father was
Consul. There, his mother's milk failed and Shaikh Mijwal al Mazrab, the husband of
Lady Jane Digby, provided the young child with a
wet nurse from the
'Anizah tribe.
Islamic law lays out the permanent
family-like relationships that are created by wet nursing, and this "blood affinity" between Dickson and the 'Anizah meant he was treated as a member of the tribe. He stated that this blood tie 'in later life has been of assistance to me in my dealings with the Badawin [bedouin] of the high desert and around Kuwait'. Following the death of Lady Jane Digby, the Dickson family rented her house in Damascus, and Dickson recalled that he 'spent my childhood days rambling about the lovely garden that had once been [her] pride and happiness.'. Dickson was educated at
St Edward's School, Oxford and then attended
Wadham College at Oxford University, where he was a university candidate in the
Volunteer battalion of the
Oxfordshire Light Infantry. He joined the 1st
Connaught Rangers as a
second lieutenant on 28 January 1903, serving in Ireland until 1904 and then in India, first with the 2nd Battalion Connaught Rangers and then in the
29th Lancers of the
Indian Army. In the
First World War he served in
Mesopotamia before being transferred to the Political Department. Dickson served as British
Political Agent in
Bahrain from 1919 to 1920. In late January to late February 1920 Dickson visited
Ibn Saud in
Hasa in what is now
Saudi Arabia. Around the same time he wrote a report on the
Ikhwan movement. He also served in Persia (present-day
Iran). In 1929 he was appointed British Political Agent to Kuwait, and served in this role until 1936. He briefly held this role again in 1941. Some of his reports have been published in
Political Diaries of the Arab World: Persian Gulf 1904-1965. The publishers' description of this volume reads in part: "Perhaps the most idiosyncratic [contributor to the volume] was Lt. Col. H. R. P. Dickson who wrote voluminously in the 1920s and 1930s on his trips into the
Saudi hinterland, his meetings with rulers and all the machinations and gossip that sometimes go into political intelligence-gathering." After retiring from his political career he worked for the
Kuwait Oil Company, Dickson had a detailed knowledge of northern Gulf Arab life and customs, and produced two books which are considered valuable chronicles of a now-threatened way of life. These books, ''The Arab of the Desert: A Glimpse into Badawin Life in Kuwait and Sa'udi Arabia
, first published in 1949, and Kuwait and her Neighbours'', first published in 1956, have been described as 'monumental', and are now sought-after collector's items. Dickson had a son, diplomat Hanmer Yorke Warrington Saud ("Dickie") Dickson, MBE (who died in May 2005), and a daughter (Irene)
Zahra Freeth (née Dickson, died on 20 May 2015 after a short illness), who was also an author on Middle Eastern topics and who co-edited and abridged the third edition of
The Arab of the Desert. ==The Dickson House Cultural Centre, Kuwait City==