‘Persian Gulf tragedy’ – the death of John Gordon Lorimer

Abstract

• On the morning of Sunday 8 February 1914, John Gordon Lorimer, the officiating British Resident in the Persian Gulf at Bushire, retired to his dressing room to ascertain the exact calibre of his automatic pistol as he wished to order cartridges from Bombay. He was later found lying on the floor, dead, at the age of 43, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to a press communiqué reported in the Times of India newspaper, Lorimer, in examining his pistol, ‘had pulled the trigger and discharged a last cartridge which had been overlooked in the magazine’. The bullet entered his stomach, passing through the body, rupturing major blood vessels. Shock, in the opinion of the Residency Surgeon, ‘must have caused immediate loss of consciousness… and death speedily followed’.