A 1936 picture of the First Old Speckled Jellabi?

Five years after Bogdan Zientarski and Carl Raswan’s 1931 horse-buying trip to Arabia, which took them to Bahrain among other places, it was the turn of Dr. Ahmed Mabrouk to make a similar trip for the Royal Agriculture Society. He too visited the stud of the ruler, Sh. Hamad, and had the following to say about it:

I was introduced to the Amir, brother of the ruler of El Bahrein, who allowed me to see his horses and those of his brother. All the pedigreed Arab horses are in the possession of the Hamad family. Photographs and descriptions of some of these horses are published in the following pages. I regret to say that these horses, like those of Amir Galawi [Edouard’s note Ibn Jiluwi in al-Ahsaa] are not desert bred, but confined in two stables, one situated near the ruler’s palace and the other at a distance of 60 kilometers from El Manama, the capital of El Bahrein, where the winter palace of the Amir is situated.

Regardless of his views on what constitutes a desert-bred horse, Dr. Mabrouk left us photos and brief descriptions of seven mares, two stallions and one colt that caught his eye. He must have seen more horses that he did not record. The seven mares are from the Jazian, ‘Ubayyan, and Jellabi strains. The one stallions is identified as:

8. El-Gallabi El-Asfar, Flea-bitten, by El-Chawaf (no age, height or further description given)

This looks to me like an exact description of the First Old Speckled Jellabi (Jellabi al-Marshoosh al-Awwal): the strain (Jellabi), the color (flea-bitten), the sire (a Shawaf or El-Chawaf, as French-influenced writers of English spell it), and the date of the visit (pre-1937, when the table below says that he was presented to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia) all match. This First Old Speckled Jellabi is the sire line ancestor of all Bahraini modern horses.

Even better, it may be that Mabrouk left us a photo of that stallion. His photo below is captioned: “Stallions of El Bahrein” and shows an older flea-bitten stallion representative of the “Bahraini male type”: high off the ground, short back, small round croup, thicker neck, and good bone.