William Duff

William Duff (13 May 1922 – 14 February 2014) was a Scottish banker, Arabist and an advisor to the first vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a former ruler of Dubai, Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum. He is credited by many with initiating the modernisation of the Emirate. Biography William Duff (originally MacDuff which was later shortened to Duff) was born in Singapore on 13 May 1922 to Eleanor and Robert Duff who ran a business there. His education was at Cheltenham College and, later, at the Hertford College, University of Oxford, from where he secured a master's degree in Eastern Studies. While his father endured incarceration by the Japanese till 1945 in the Changi Prison, a British jail used by the Japanese as a prisoner of war camp after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Duff was drafted into the British Army and his first commission was at the 1st Battalion Princess Louise's Kensington Regiment. He was involved in the World War II, fighting in Italy, Sudan and Palestine. During his stay at Palestine, he is known to have developed an affinity for the Arab culture. It was there he met his future wife, Irenka Trachimovic, a Polish national, at a party at The British Embassy in 1946, whom he married the same year.