William Shakespear (explorer)
English civil servant and explorer (1878-1915)
Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, CIE (29 October 1878 – 24 January 1915) was a British civil servant and explorer who mapped uncharted areas of Northern Arabia and made the first official British contact with Ibn Saud, future king of Saudi Arabia. He was the military adviser to Ibn Sa'ud from 1910 to 1915, when he was killed in the Battle of Jarrab by Matni bin Shraim, who was fighting with Ibn Rashid's men. He was buried in Kuwait.
Early life
He was baptised in Multan, one of three sons of William Henry Sullivan Shakespear of the Imperial Forestry Service, and Anne Caroline Shakespear (née Davidson). All of the boys were enrolled at Portsmouth Grammar School in 1889. From 1893 he attended King William's College in the Isle of Man and then went on to Sandhurst. After graduating from Sandhurst he spent time in India where he served as a 2nd Lieutenant and in 1901 was appointed as an Assistant District Officer in Bombay.
In 1904 he was appointed Consul at Bandar Abbas in what was then Persia before being transferred in 1909 to Kuwait where he held the post of British Political Agent.
Arabian expeditions
While in Kuwait, Shakespear made seven separate expeditions into the Arabian interior, during which he became a close friend of Ibn Sa'ud, then the Emir of the Nejd. It was Shakespear who arranged for Ibn Sa'ud to be photographed for the first time.
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