Arnold Wilson

Sir Arnold Wilson

Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson KCIE , CSI , CMG , DSO , MP (* 18th July 1884 , † 31 May 1940 in Dunkirk ) was a British officer, colonial administrator and conservative MPs, a decisive role in the founding of the modern state in Iraq played .

Life

Wilson was born to the Anglican clergyman James Maurice Wilson and his second wife Georgina Mary and raised at Mostyn House Preparatory School and Clifton College in the suburbs of Bristol , where his father was headmaster. He learned several Indian languages ​​and Persian. He then attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and was accepted into the Indian Army in 1903 as a temporarily unregulated officer . After a year of service with the Wiltshire Regiment stationed in British India , he joined the 32nd Sikh Pioneers in 1904 . In the same year he was sent with a department of the Bengal Lancers to Ahvaz , Persian , to guard the British consulate there and at the same time to protect the oil concession of the D'Arcy Oil Company (later Anglo-Persian Oil Company ).

In 1907, Wilson moved to the Intelligence Branch of the Political Department of the British Indian Administration, for which he served as a political officer in the Gulf region . He was present in 1908 when the first oil deposits in the region were discovered in Masjed Soleyman . From 1909 to 1911 he was consul general in Khorramshahr and was entrusted with the chairmanship of the Turkic-Persian border commission.

During the First World War , Wilson acted first as assistant and then as deputy to Sir Percy Cox , the political officer in charge of Mesopotamia. He took part in several battles of the campaign in Mesopotamia and won the Distinguished Service Order here . From the summer of 1918 he represented Cox as acting civil commissioner in Baghdad after he was transferred to Persia. Wilson's goal was to establish a direct administration of the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad , Basra and Mosul under the sovereignty of the British-Indian government. In a letter to parliamentarian Charles Yate dated November 1914, he had described his vision for the country: after the victorious end of the war, it would serve as a settlement area for Muslim Indians and thus in a certain way compensate the Muslim element in India for participating in the war. Wilson was also in close correspondence with Arthur Hirtzel , the secretary of the political department in the London India Office , to whom he informed in early 1919 that he considered himself responsible for the entire British-occupied area from the Indian border westwards to the Syrian border. The Anglo-French declaration of November 7, 1918, which promised the peoples of the Middle East the prospect of free choice of government, he regarded as absurd. However, he was forced to bow to the political guidelines from London and held a kind of referendum on the future of the country in early 1919. In the spring of the same year he attended the Paris Peace Conference , where he offended the Arab delegates around Yasin al-Hashimi, accompanied by TE Lawrence , with his rejection of their plans for the future of Mesopotamia, and London, where he lectured to the Eastern Committee .

Wilson was known for his hard work. He traveled several parts of the country by plane and familiarized himself with the local conditions. In a short time he created an organization from the ground up that comprised 16 administrative high-level units and 40 districts. However, he neglected the planned local participation in the form of elected councils. When his colleague Gertrude Bell warned him in a memorandum at the end of 1919 that this policy would sooner or later lead to a violent outbreak, he sharply rejected it. Nonetheless, the outbreak of the Iraqi uprising of 1920 , which occurred after the decisions of the Sanremo Conference were announced, can hardly have surprised him . The Kurds under Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji had already rebelled in the north and Shiite clergy had declared British rule to be illegal in fatwas . In addition, after the arrest of al-Hashimi in Syria , Arab nationalists from the vicinity of al-Ahd al-Iraqi intensified their propaganda against the British and occupied Tal Afar in the border region. The uprising, which spread rapidly from the central Euphrates, was only suppressed by the use of airplanes by troops under General Aylmer Haldane, among other things, at great expense in terms of personnel and money . Wilson was replaced after this fiasco in October 1920, after the British government had already decided in June to reinstate Percy Cox, who was better respected by the Iraqis.

After retiring from civil service, Wilson joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, where he was a senior manager until 1932. He was also a prolific writer. In 1933 he won a by-election as a Conservative candidate for the Hitchin constituency in Hertfordshire and was a member of the House of Commons until his death. Among other things, he acted as chairman of the parliamentary science committee and was an advocate of eugenics . In the 1930s he toured the German Reich several times at the invitation of the National Socialists and was impressed by their achievements, so that he is sometimes described as a Nazi sympathizer. During World War II he enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and was assigned to a Vickers-Wellington crew as a gunner . He died when his plane crashed during the Battle of Dunkirk , was initially considered missing, believed killed and was pronounced dead in November 1940. He was buried in the Eringhem cemetery.

literature

• John Marlowe: Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson. London 1967.
• Peter Sluglett: Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. IB Tauris, 2007.
• Charles Townshend: When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921. Faber and Faber, 2010.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Arnold Wilson in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John Fisher: Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East, 1916-1919. Frank Cass, 2012, p. 113.
2. ^ Fisher: Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East , p. 254.
3. ↑ Steve Bond: Wimpy: A Detailed History of the Vickers Wellington in Service, 1938-1953. Grub Street Publishing, 2014, p. 42.