Thrills and spills in the Gulf

Jan 3 2010 by Mike Kelly, Sunday Sun

Resourceful journalist Andrew Trimbee hitched a ride on a milk float to get to a job interview which opened up a world of boozy Arabian Nights, political intrigue and the mysterious death of a top North East footballer. Mike Kelly reports.

He’d covered everything from the Korean war to Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest before ending up in Bahrain as a freelance reporter.

Through him, Andrew was introduced to the Bahrain lifestyle, both personal and professional, getting to know and gain the trust of business leaders and even royalty. And it was through one of his contacts in an oil drilling company that Andrew got a world exclusive.

“I used to write a paragraph or two about his company, which nobody really read, in exchange for story tip-offs. One day he asked, ‘Have you heard of the Robledo brothers?’ I said, ‘I can’t say I have’.”

Andrew was soon to find out that Chilean-born Jorge ‘George’ and Eduardo ‘Ted’ Robledo had played for Newcastle United during the North East club’s halcyon days in the 1950s.

Both were in the starting line-up of the 1952 FA Cup final in which Newcastle beat Arsenal 1-0, with George scoring the winning goal. “He said ‘Eduardo works for us on the oil rigs. He’s vanished’.”

Robledo had been on shore leave when he met up with Heinz Bessenich, the German skipper of a coastal tanker, and decided to spend a few days steaming up the coast before he disappeared.

A call to Dubai fleshed out the story. Andrew was told Bessenich had been arrested and accused of ‘wilfully and unlawfully causing death in a brutal and savage manner’. He had his scoop.

The story and the subsequent trial had Fleet Street and the international Press knocking on his door.

Despite strong circumstantial evidence, including Bessenich’s instruction to a crew member to say they had no passengers on board, the same crew member reporting a knife missing from the skipper’s cabin, as well as the accused not making a report of a missing passenger, he was cleared. Robledo’s body was never found.

That was perhaps the journalistic high point of his two years at the paper which he launched and took into profit.

After a disagreement with bosses, he moved into a PR consultancy in Bahrain where he remained for another five years before returning to the UK and journalism.

Andrew, 67, now lives in Filey, North Yorkshire, as well as spending part of the year in Granada in Spain. His wife Christine, with whom he had a further two children – James and Rachel – died five years ago.

It was a half-written book by Christine about their time in Bahrain that inspired him to write of his experience. The Inshallah Paper has now been published.

The story is about sex-mad expatriates, visits to casinos, drunken diplomats and, of course, the Bahrainis themselves, who Andrew remembers fondly as gentle and generous.

Andrew said: “It’s my story and I wanted to tell it for my kids and I wanted to tell it in memory of my wife. It’s an area that has had a bad press, but to me it still remains a magical place.”

* The Inshallah Paper by Andrew Trimbee is published by Quarter Books and costs £15.