WW2 Aden colony passport

 

1940 British Protectorate issued travel document.

 

Some of the rare and most sort after passports were those issued in former colonial territories that once belonged to the vast British Empire .

 

At one point the Empire span from Pitcairn in the far west to Western Samoa in the Far East.

 

After the end of World War Two much of the territories gained their independence and one of them was the British ruled colony of Aden.

 

The Colony of Aden was a British crown colony from 1937 to 1963; and was located at what is today Yemen: before that year it was part of British India and once detached, it became a separate colony also known as the “Colony and Protectorate of Aden“.

 

In 1963 the colony became part of the new Federation of Saudi Arabia and in 1967 it became the Peoples Republic of South Yemen on November 30^th.

 

Passport number 609, in itself being a remarkably low SN (!), was issued to a young Jewish merchant named Felix Joseph Hatooka (this is a well known Yemenite Jewish family name in Israel today) at Aden on May 31^st 1940.

 

The actual use of the passport was done towards the end of the war, in 1944, where Felix was permitted to travel to Cairo after receiving the permits for leaving to Egypt and British Palestine. Once there his passport was extended to 1950 and also obtaining French visa for Syria and Lebanon (shortly before the name was changed back to France from the war-time term of French National Committee ). On December 23^rd 1944 he entered the Mandate via the Kantara border crossing, exiting on May 31^st the following year.

 

Among the interesting endorsements inside this war-time passport is the one applied on June 5^th of 1945 by the Eritrea Immigration Department office in Cairo: it bares the extremely rare British “Eritrea Inland Revenue” stamps that were issued during their military administration from 1943 to 1952; they are rarely found inside passports and thus once being used as “consular revenue stamps” are considered as a good and rare addition to a passport.

 

In 1946 Felix returned to British Palestine in order to proceed from there via the Metula border crossing into Lebanon. On September he returned to Cairo.

 

Eventually Felix left Aden in late 1947 for Cairo to proceed from there for permanent immigration to British Palestine in 1948. Five months later he would become a citizen of the newly founded Sate of Israel on May.

 

 

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