Free Enemy on the Euphrates by Ian Rutledge

had been Slade who had urged the government to obtain some form of control over Anglo-Persian, paving the way for Churchill’s dramatic move to partially nationalise the company. 10 Subsequently, Slade had been chosen as one of the two government-appointed directors on the board of Anglo-Persian and at the beginning of hostilities in the East it was Slade who had strongly urged the defence of the Abadan refinery and Anglo-Persian’s pipelines. 11 So when the admiral took his place at the table and began his exposition the committee members would have listened to him very attentively indeed. Slade explained to the committee that there were,
    large deposits of oil throughout Asiatic Turkey. A strip of oil-bearing regions is known to run from the southern extremity of Arabia along the west coast of the Persian Gulf, through the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates and so on to the northern coast of Asia Minor almost to the European end.
    If the Eastern possessions of the Ottoman Empire were partitioned, Slade argued,
    it would be sufficient if we secured the Vilayet of Mosul as that district comprises some very rich oil-bearing lands, connecting with the Persian oil fields, which it is essential we should control to prevent undue competition with the Anglo-Persian Concessions. 12
    Now here was a consideration which had not, as yet, entered the minds of the committee – it was not, apparently, just a question of acquiring access to Iraqi oil in order to supplement Britain’s military oil requirements currently being developed in Persia, but given the apparent abundance of oil in ‘Asiatic Turkey’ to which the admiral had alluded, it was also a matter of preventing any other power – or company – acquiring oil resources in Iraq, developing them, and undermining the monopoly which the partnership of state and private interests had obtained in Persia and at Abadan. Oil was going to become a major world commodity and when production of that commodity began to take on the scale that he envisaged, Slade, for one, had no intention of allowing competition from other large oil companies (and here, both he and the committee members most probably thought of Shell) to force down prices and undermine the returns on the heavy investment which not only British taxpayers but also British capitalists had made in southern Persia.
    Slade concluded his presentation by urging that once the Iraqi oilfields were acquired it would be necessary to ‘connect the fields by a pipeline with the Mediterranean’ and Haifa was again mentioned as a possible oil terminal. De Bunsen then expressed his satisfaction that ‘Admiral Slade’s views as to our requirements in regard to oil practically coincide with the views that the Committee has taken in regard to the inclusion of the Mosul Vilayet in the territory to be acquired by us.’
    Although this was the first time they had met, as the deliberations of the De Bunsen Committee proceeded, Sykes and the thirty-eight-year-old secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, Lieutenant Colonel Hankey, became close friends. They met, they dined, they discussed. It wasn’t just their similarity in ages: Hankey as well as Sykes was an ‘Easterner’. It was Hankey who, on Boxing Day 1914, had issued a memorandum to the War Council proposing a major attack onTurkey. Contrary to the views of the majority of the British general staff, Hankey argued that ‘no increase in men would enable us to break the front in the West’, urging that victory was only to be obtained in the Eastern theatre of operations. 13 And by now, Hankey had won the enthusiastic support of both Churchill and Kitchener: the assault on the Ottoman Empire had begun. Moreover, of all the members of the De Bunsen Committee, it was Hankey who seems to have paid closest attention to the repeated mention of oil in the Mosul vilayet. Three years later it would be Hankey who turned all his subtle intelligence and guile to the task of ensuring