Tools / UAE heritage
If you lived in 1965
Type your age and emirate and see your day as if you lived it six years before the union: what currency you'd pay with, whether your house had electricity, the nearest hospital and school, what was on the radio and when television arrived, and how a diver lived after pearling collapsed. Every fact with its source, and what we couldn't verify, we say.
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Most sources are press and archival (The National, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, DEWA, the Media Office); dates that conflict between sources are shown as such. Undocumented figures are not written.
How to use it
- Type your age today and the emirate — you see your birth year and whether you came before or after the dirham, electricity and television.
- Read your 1965 day stop by stop: morning, market, work, evening.
- Tap the source under any fact. What we couldn't verify (like wages in rupees) is said plainly.
Questions
What currency did people buy with in 1965?
The Gulf rupee (issued by the Reserve Bank of India since 1959). In June 1966 it was devalued, so the emirates switched to the Saudi riyal temporarily, then the Qatar and Dubai riyal from September 1966 (Abu Dhabi to the Bahraini dinar), and the dirham came on 19 May 1973.
How many people lived there?
There was no 1965 census; the first census of the Trucial States, in 1968, gave about 180,000: Dubai 59,000, Abu Dhabi 46,500, Sharjah 31,500, Ras Al Khaimah 24,500. By 1975 it was 557,877.
Was there electricity and television?
Dubai's electricity began with the first 21 connections in 1961 from diesel generators, so some houses in Deira and Bur Dubai were lit in 1965. Television, no: «Kuwait Television from Dubai» began in September 1969, and Arabic radio from Sharjah in the sixties with conflicting dates.
Why don't you write the wages?
Because we found no documented figure for wages or rice prices in rupees in 1965 in the available sources; the likely reference is the British Political Agency files (Qatar Digital Library and the National Archives). We don't invent a number.
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