Zahra Freeth Explained

Zahra Freeth (Irene Zahra Dickson; 1924/1925 – 20 May 2015[1] [2]) was a British author who wrote primarily about the Middle East. She was the daughter of H. R. P. Dickson (died 1959) and Dame Violet Dickson (died 4 January 1991).

Life

Zahra Dickson grew up in Kuwait. There, she and her family would spend time collecting animal and plant specimens for the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens, discovering one plant and two insects that were previously unknown to science. One of the latter, a grasshopper, was named after Zahra: Utubius syriacus zahrae,[3] now known simply as Utubius syriacus.[4]

She later attended boarding schools in England, including Cheltenham Ladies College, and studied for her BA at Girton College, University of Cambridge.[5] Her first book, Kuwait Was My Home, was published in 1956. She accompanied her husband, Richard Freeth, whom she married in 1951[6] [7] to the bauxite mining town of Mackenzie, British Guiana (now Linden, Guyana) and wrote Run Softly, Demerara (1960) about her experiences there.

Her later writings were on Middle Eastern topics, including a children's book, Rashid of Saudi Arabia (2001). She lived in Essex. Her brother, Hanmer Yorke Warrington Saud ("Dickie") Dickson, MBE, who had served as H.M. Acting Commissioner in Anguilla,[8] [9] died in May 2005.

Death

Zahra Freeth died on 20 May 2015, aged 90, after a short illness. Her obituary in the Girton College alumni magazine described her as "a respected author who wrote about Kuwait and Arabia in the days before the oil boom".[10]

Legacy

Freeth's writings are of use to modern-day anthropologists studying the change in Kuwaiti society. One such study commented that the "transformation of social values is clearly revealed in the history writings of Kuwait in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in the work of Zahra Freeth, the daughter of a British diplomat who lived in Kuwait before and after the discovery of oil."[11]

Books by Zahra Freeth

Further reading

Notes and References

  1. Creating the Arabian Gulf: The British Raj and the Invasions of the Gulf, Paul Rich, Lexington Books, 2009, pg. 216
  2. Web site: FREETH - Deaths Announcements - Telegraph Announcements. announcements.telegraph.co.uk. 25 December 2017. en. https://web.archive.org/web/20171225203119/http://announcements.telegraph.co.uk/deaths/191164/freeth. 25 December 2017.
  3. Web site: The Year 2016.
  4. Web site: Synonym Utubius syriacus zahrae Uvarov, 1936: Orthoptera Species File.
  5. Web site: The Year 2016.
  6. Web site: Archived copy . 25 May 2020 . 28 June 2021 . https://web.archive.org/web/20210628054426/http://www.arabtimesonline.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/2020/feb/20/11.pdf . dead .
  7. https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/gb165-0364-violet-dickson-collection.pdf Violet Dickson Collection
  8. Laws of Anguilla 1974–1976, p. 345
  9. Warsidaha Ururka Ingiriiska Iyo Soomaalida (Journal of the Anglo-Somali Society), collected vols. 33–40, The Anglo-Somali Society, 2003, pg. 63
  10. Web site: The Year 2016.
  11. Zaha F.M.M. Alsuwailan, "The Impact of Societal Values on Kuwaiti Women and the Role of Education", PhD thesis 2006, online https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3141&context=utk_graddisshere

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