Wrote his experiences while in Indian army Nigel Groom tells about experiences in Yemen [Archives:2002/44/Culture]

YEMEN TIMES STAFF
During the late 1940s, British governance of the Western Aden Protectorate was being tentatively extended by a handful of hardy officials, whose reputation for fairness and even-handedness went before them.
Of these young, Nigel Groom was one. Posted to the almost inaccessible Wadi Bayhan in 1948, he was to spend nearly two years among the people of what in antiquity had been Qataban, once part of Biblical Sheba. Pre-Islamic lineage was evident all around in the imposing remains of cities. Irrigation works and formal inscriptions, exerted a powerful fascination on the young Political Officer which has never since waned.
As representative of a distant government, Groom naturally met with an ambivalent reception from the local people, many of whom lived in the areas that were still uncontrolled and ungoverned. His book recounts a young official’s brave efforts to influence obstinate rules and to demonstrate, to clans and tribes who for centuries had settled disputes by violence, the benefits of the rule of law.
His doubts and moral dilemmas, his personal relationships, and the pitfalls of inexperience and amongst the intricacies of a tribal society, are honestly described and add depth, dramatic tension and occasional hilarity to tale.
Sheba Revealed depicted people, customs and antiquities of this remote part of Arabia with compelling verve and candor. Its close, sympathetic and skillful observation of a single locality places it in an unusual niche among accounts of Arabian travel. And it will engage all those with an interest in pre-Islamic archaeology, colonial history, Arabian society and Yemen’s transition to the world of today.
Born in 1924 and educated at Haileybury and Magdalene College, Cambridge, Nigel Groom joined the Indian Army in 1943 and served in Burma. Recruited in 1946 into the Colonial Administrative Services, he was sent to Aden as Political Officer in 1948, where his first posting was to Bayhan and is the subject of this book (he is pictured above during his time there).
There followed service elsewhere in the Aden Secretariat. He married his wife Lorna in Aden in 1952. In 1957 he was transferred to Kenya and was Defense Secretary in the East African High Commission until the East African territories became independent. From 1962 until his retirement in 1984 he worked in the Ministry of Defense in London. He was awarded the OBE in 1974.
During his time in Bayhan – ancient Qataban – Nigel Groom discovered and brought to the notice of Western archaeologists many of its pre-Islamic sites and inscriptions, and encouraged Wendell Philips to mount the well-published expeditions of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, which studied and excavated them in 1950 and 1951.
In 1981 he published Frankincense and Myrrh: A study of the Arabian Incense Trade, which is now a standard work. He has also published books on perfume and many articles in academic journals on Arabian archaeology.

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