Dubai Police have established Cycle Racing Teams
These include both Men and Women Teams
Dubai Police Woman Cycling Competitor
Jack Briggs led at remarkable life before he became Chief - Trucial Scouts Police Section
He went on to become Commander in Chief of Dubai's Police Force (1965 to 1975).
Jack spoke and wrote fluent Arabic,
- translated books by Dubai's Writers from Arabic into English
- lectured on Arabic Affairs in UK Universities.
But Jack had one lifelong obsession - Cycling!
Cycling was Jack's passion - not trundling around on a comfortable roadster but on a racing bike competing against others.
Road races and Time Trials was what Jack enjoyed. But he had a problem - in Dubai was he had no one to race against.
He solved that problem by convincing his young Dubai Policemen to try cycling as a sport. To do that Jack needed racing cycles - but there were none in Dubai.
So Jack placed an order for six racing bikes with the local Bike Shop back in his UK home town where he had bought all his racing cycles.
The next problem was how to get these six cycles back to Dubai!!
Dubai's Royal Flight had a new Boeing 747 SP Jumbo Jet. Jack heard this Jumbo Jet was flying to UK for routine maintenance checks. He hitched a ride back to UK.
There he made his way to his village to collect the six racing cycles. Jack organised transport to take his six cycles back to the airport, loaded them onto the Royal 747 then flew back to Dubai with his cycles in the cargo hold. All had gone to plan as far as Jack was concerned.
Jack's local Bike Shop Owner was understandably excited at selling six racing cycles and knowing they were being transported in a Royal Jumbo Jet to Dubai. He told his story to the local Newspaper.
The story was prominently published prominence in their next edition.
Good stories travel fast in the newspaper business! Soon this local story had become Regional and National News.
Jack was blissfully unaware of this until after he arrived in Dubai.
Jack was shown the headlines printed in UK Newspapers.
Jack's response was not recorded!
UAE is on track to produce the next Olympic champion in cycling with the grand announcement by the Dubai Sports Council that it will host the Dubai Tour 2014 at the inauguration of the Dubai Cycling Course on Friday. Sheikh Mansour bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum officially inaugurated the 68-km circuit located on Al Qudrah Road towards Bab Al Shams Resort at a glittering event. Grand Tour winners Alberto Contador, Ryder Hesjedal, Vincenzo Nibali and Tony Martin attended the event
Jack Briggs, who has died aged 86, did a powerful lot for Britain in the Arab world. He was also one of the most decent and lovable men on this foolish world. From the mid-1960s, in the early years of Dubai's astonishing expansion he was Commandant of Police, and a loyal but frank servant and confidant of the Ruler, Shaikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktum.
In that brash and cosmopolitan society he was shrewd, impartial, universally liked and absolutely straight. He took a degree in Arabic by correspondence from the School of Oriental and African Studies. His Arabic, both written and spoken, was so good that he was able to publish translations of modern Dubai Authors and was an Examiner for the international baccalaureate. This, from a man with only elementary school education, was a remarkable achievement.
When Jack retired in 1974 he was kept on as Adviser and Inspector General. Even when he stepped down from that post, the Ruler insisted that he retain a house in Dubai and he was constantly consulted.
Although he was born in London, he was a Lancastrian through and through. He grew up in Accrington, left school at 14 and, after a short spell as an apprentice lithographer, enlisted in the Scots Guards. Eager for service abroad, he transferred to the Palestine Police, where he quickly became fluent in Arabic. After the collapse of the Palestine mandate he joined the Bahrain police but later moved to Qatar as Deputy Commandant. When in 1964 the Trucial Oman Scouts formed a Police Wing he was recruited to command it with the rank of major, based in Sharjah. The move to Dubai soon followed.
Jack was awarded the OBE. His lifelong hobby was cycling; not the sit-up-and-beg variety but racing championships and time trials. It was while riding in mid-heatwave that he collapsed and died.
He had a long, old-fashioned marriage to Cath Laverty and spent his last years caring for her in her chronic illness. She survives him, with their four children.
.........................................The Guardian UK Monday 7 August 2006
Dubai: When Jack Briggs answered an advertisement for volunteers to join the Palestine police force during the Second World War, he could never have imagined it would lead to a decades-long love affair with the Arab world.
Briggs, who died a few days ago in his native England aged 86, spent a decade in charge of Dubai Police and retained strong links with the city right up until his death.
The father-of-four was a fluent Arabic speaker and this helped him to earn the respect of the many nationals who served alongside and beneath him.
"He loved the people in Dubai and he loved the place. It was a very demanding job but he enjoyed every minute of it. He often went back to Dubai and although it has changed a lot, he said the traditions and culture were the same," said his son John, 49, from England.
Briggs was born in London in 1920 although much of his childhood was spent in the northwest of England. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he signed up with the Scots Guards, a regiment of the British Army, but answered a notice asking for volunteers.
"At the time, he didn't know it was to go to Palestine as a policeman. It was when he was out there that he started to learn Arabic," John added.
In the late 1940s, after about seven years in Palestine, Briggs returned to England, where he continued to work as a policeman.
However, he was only to stay a few years as his spell in Palestine had given him a taste for life in the Middle East.
"I think it was the language that made him like the region. To keep his love for the police and for Arabic, he went back to the Middle East," John said.
He worked as a policeman in Bahrain before moving to Doha, where he became Commandant of Police. Briggs transferred to the Trucial Oman Scouts, a paramilitary security force, in Sharjah and then was seconded to the police force, working with the late Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai.
In 1965 he was appointed Commandant of Police in Dubai, a post he held for 10 years. He then spent 11 years working as an adviser to the police force until his retirement in 1986.
"He believed Shaikh Rashid was a great man and he admired and respected him and all the things he did for Dubai," John said.
Briggs's skills as a linguist helped to earn him a degree in classical Arabic from the University of London in the 1960s.
He translated many works from Arabic to English, among them a popular book that is still on sale, The Wink of the Mona Lisa and Other Stories from the Gulf by Mohammed Al Murr.
Ian Fairservice, Managing Partner and Group Editor of Motivate Publishing, which publishes some of Briggs's works, said he was "one of the most modest men he had ever met."
"He was hugely dedicated to the progress of Dubai. He was a great modernising influence behind the police force. We tried many times to get Jack to write about his life he had some wonderful stories, but he was just far too modest," he said.
Briggs moved permanently back to England in 1996, but continued to visit Dubai regularly. He was here in March last year and was planning another trip in September.
Briggs had long been a keen cyclist and it was while he was on his bike a few miles from his home in Hampshire in the south of England that he suffered a heart attack and died on July 26.
He is survived by his wife Cath, 87, whom he married in 1953, along with one daughter, three sons and four grandchildren.
........................By Alia Al Theeb, Staff Reporter