William Knox D'Arcy

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William Knox D'Arcy (1900)

William Knox D'Arcy (born October 11, 1849 in Newton Abbot , Devon , England , † May 1, 1917 in Stanmore , Middlesex ) was a British lawyer and entrepreneur. In 1872 he married Elena Birbeck. The marriage resulted in two sons and three daughters. The marriage was divorced on August 9, 1896. Elena died on December 19, 1899. D'Arcy married Nina Boucicault (Mrs. Ernestine Nutting) in 1899, daughter of Arthur L. Boucicault, owner of the Rockhampton Argus newspaper . William Knox D'Arcy died of pneumonia on May 1, 1917. He left his family a fortune worth 984,000 GBP .

Early years

William Knox D'Arcy is the son of William Francis D'Arcy and his wife Elizabeth Baker born. Bradford. D'Arcy attended Westminster School in London from 1863 to 1865 and emigrated with his parents to Rockhampton in Queensland Australia in 1866 , where D'Arcy studied law. In 1872 he passed the bar exam and began working in his father's office. He later opened his own law firm.

Practice as a lawyer in Australia

In 1882 he took part in a gold mine syndicate with other Australian businessmen . D'Arcy served as the syndicate's attorney, defending mining rights against competing claims. In 1886 the syndicate was transformed into a public company called Mount Morgan Goldmining Corporation . As a founding member of the company, D'Arcy held 125,000 shares. The price of the share rose in a short time from one to 17 pounds. D'Arcy had become a millionaire.

Back in England

D'Arcy dissolved his law firm and returned to England in 1872. Knox also had important houses in London, 42 Grosvenor Square, as well as Paris and Brussels. The stock exchange had opened in 1885 and that drew the world's largest financial dynasties to London, such as B. Hirsch, d'Erlanger, Rothschild, Bischoffsheim, Lazard, Seligman, Speyer and Stern. D'Arcy invited them all, had a box in London's Royal Opera House and his guests whirled to the singing of Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso . He also had a box for the horse races in Epsom . He went to Marienbad (today: Czechoslovakia) for a cure and for hunting he had Bylaugh Park , a house in Norfolk.

He bought Stanmore Hall , an impressive building in Middlesex, and commissioned the architect Brightwen Binyon (1846–1905) with the expansion and William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones with the decoration. A series of tapestries "The Search for the Holy Grail" were hung in the entrance hall and staircase.

The rising cost of his new lifestyle and falling dividend payments from his Australian stocks kept him looking for new sources of income.

The Persian Oil Concession

The D'Arcy Concession

In 1900, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a British politician, diplomat and former British ambassador to Tehran, convinced him to look for oil in Persia. On May 28, 1901, D'Arcy acquired a concession from Mozaffar ad-Din Shah for GBP 20,000, a 10% stake in the yet to be founded “First Collecting Society ” and a profit participation of 16% , which covers an area of ​​1,243,000 km² (75 % of the area of ​​Iran) and a period of 60 years should apply. After the concession expires, all of the company's real estate assets should go to the Iranian state. The concessionaires were also subject to Iranian income tax. D'Arcy had agreed to pay all of the development costs.

D'Arcy began drilling oil in Chia Surkh in western Iran in 1902. The first oil was found in 1903, and D'Arcy founded First Exploitation Co. Ltd (FEC) . However, it quickly became apparent that the well did not deliver enough oil to be economically exploitable. The oil exploration was now moved to an area inhabited by the Bakhtiars . In order to secure their protection, a separate concession agreement was concluded with the tribal leaders, in which the tribal leaders were granted a 3% stake in all oil companies in their district plus an annual payment of GBP 3,000, starting from 1905, for the protection of the oil installations and pipelines has been.

By late 1905, D'Arcy had invested £ 250,000 in exploring for oil without any significant amounts of oil being found. D'Arcy had already mortgaged his Australian gold mining stocks, which had fallen to £ 2, so he was in dire need of cash. D'Arcy began negotiations to sell the concession to the Rothschilds' French line . However, upon intervention by the British Admiralty , the Burmah Oil Company, founded in Glasgow by Sir David Sime Cargill in 1896, took over the concession. In compensation, D'Arcy received 170,000 shares in Burmah Oil and an unspecified amount in cash.

Burma (written Burmah in Victorian times, now Myanmar ) became part of the British Empire after the invasion of British troops in 1886. The Burmah Oil Company had been quite successful in finding oil. In 1899 the oil, initially only sold in Burma, was also shipped to India in our own tankers. In 1905 the British Admiralty had signed a long-term contract with Burmah Oil for the supply of oil to the British fleet, which was switched from coal to oil at the beginning of the 20th century.

Burmah Oil pledged to fund the oil exploration with an additional £ 100,000. At the beginning of the drilling, Burmah Oil should also fail. It was not until three years after taking over the D'Arcy concession that a well in Masjed Soleyman hit 360 meters on May 26, 1908. Burmah Oil had discovered one of the largest oil fields in the world. For fear of spies, the head of the drilling - George B. Reynolds - telegraphed the company management in London with: “See Psalm 104, verse 15, 3” (“... that wine may delight the heart and the face of the man with oil . ").

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company

In order to mine, process and market Persian oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company abbreviated APOC, (1935 renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil Company , AIOC; 1954 renamed British Petroleum Company ) as a nearly 100% subsidiary was established on April 15, 1909 the Burmah Oil Company founded. D'Arcy was appointed to the board of directors and continued to do so until his death.

To be able to sell the oil, a pipeline, a new refinery in Abadan and a loading station for tankers had to be built. In 1912, Burmah Oil, headed by Sir John Cargill, refused to provide further funding for the APOC. Winston Churchill , first Lord of the Admiralty at the time, negotiated new agreements with Burmah Oil. The British government acquired a majority (56%) in AIOC for £ 2.2 million. In addition, a long-term supply contract to supply the British fleet was concluded with AIOC. The partial nationalization and purchase agreement guaranteed by the British state saved the APOC from financial collapse. In the following year (1913) oil production could finally be started. At that time it was not foreseeable that the world's largest refinery would be built in Abadan in a few years.

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ BYLAUGH PARK ESTATE of over 8,150 ACRES ( March 4, 2016 memento on the Internet Archive ) - Auction Details - Friday, September 28, 1917.
  2. ↑ Stanmore Hall Exterior and Interior Views - Photos English Heritage
  3. ^ Photo of the library at Stanmore Hall
  4. ↑ The Quest of the San Graal of Stanmore Hall / page 73 ff . in: Malcolm Bell: Sir Edward Burne-Jones (first ed. 1892)
  5. ↑ Holy Grail tapestries in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from Stanmore Hall
  6. ^ Mohammad Gholi Majd: Greta Britain & Reza Shah. University Press of Florida, 2001, p. 240.
  7. ↑ William Knox D'Arcy's first oil well in Chiah Surkh
  8. ^ Cargill, David Sime (1826–1904), merchant and oil industrialist Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  9. ↑ Zuhayr Mikdashi: A financial analysis of middle eastern oil concessions: 1901–65. New York, 1966, p. 15.
  10. ↑ Andrea Klasen: WDR5 Zeitzeichen from May 1st, 2012  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (MP3 file; 6.30 MB)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / gffstream-0.vo.llnwd.net  
personal data
SURNAME D'Arcy, William Knox
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH Newton Abbot , Devon , England
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1917
Place of death Stanmore (London) , ( Middlesex )