In Kuwait, after the 1956 Suez War, workers at Ahmadi port brought oil transport and loading of British and French tankers to a halt, and protests and sabotage were so extensive that a nightly curfew was instituted.57 In Aden the same year, when Antonin Besse made a large donation to Oxford University, his workers went on strike to ‘protest at the donation to England of so large a sum of the firm’s money’.58 Adenese workers appear in the archives as some of the most persistently mobilised workers in the Peninsula. March and April of 1956 saw over 100,000 work-days of strikes in Aden, most of them in ports or shipping. A US consul described the leadership of the unions as young Arab men ‘imbued by the spirit of nationalism’.59 By October 1956, when the Suez War began, the protests and strikes reached a fever pitch.