A. T. Wilson
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Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson (A.T. Wilson) (1885-1940) was a British government official who became known for his role as a colonial administrator of Mesopotamia, later named Iraq, during and after World War I.
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[edit] Early career
Born in 1882, gifted with great health and considerable energy and memory, he was educated in England at Clifton Public School where his father was a headmaster. He started his career as a young officer in the British army in India. In 1904, he was sent as a Lieutenant to Persia (now Iran) to lead a group of Bengal Lancers to guard the British consulate in Ahwaz and to protect the work of the D’Arcy Oil Company, which had obtained a sixty years oil concession in Iran and was pursuing oil exploration in partnership with the Burma Oil Company. In this capacity, Wilson witnessed in May 1908 the first gush of oil in south western Iran, in a place named Masjid-i-Suleiman. This was the first major discovery of oil in the British colonial empire, and it would be developed with a 138 mile pipeline and a large refinery in Abadan, in the Shatt-El-Arab estuary leading to the Arab-Persian Gulf. Subsequently, in 1913, as World War 1 was threatening, the D’Arcy Company was transformed into the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, or APOC, which was 51% owned by the British government and which signed a twenty years fuel supply contract with the British Royal Navy. APOC became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – AIOC - in 1935 and, eventually, British Petroleum – BP – in 1954.
[edit] Governing Iraq
In 1915, in the middle of WW1, as Great Britain was moving troops from India into Mesopotamia through the Persian Gulf and Basra, Wilson was designated to be assistant, and then deputy, to Sir Percy Cox (Percy Zachariah Cox), the British Political Officer for the region. Based in Baghdad, he then progressively became the Acting Civil Commissioner for Mesopotamia, later to be renamed Iraq, effectively in charge of governing this newly created country which would later be put under British Mandate by the League of Nations.
During his administration of Iraq, which lasted till the summer of 1920, he worked tirelessly to organize and improve the administration of the country, according to the principles and methods he had learned in the British India Empire. In doing so, he became nicknamed “The Despot of Mess-Pot”. However, after the end of WW1, he found himself progressively opposed to other British officials, such as the famous “T.E. Lawrence” (“of Arabia”) of the British Arab Bureau in Cairo, as well as with his own Oriental Secretary in Baghdad, Ms Gertrude Bell. While both the latter favored granting independence under British supervision to the various Arab countries, Wilson believed that independence and political emancipation could not be granted before a long period of thorough “nation building” process had occurred under the leadership of a British protectorate. In Wilson’s views, the priority was to reconstruct and stabilize the country, by establishing an efficient government and administration as well as a fair treatment and political representation of the various ethnic and religious communities (i.e., in the case of Iraq: Arabs, Kurds, Persians, of religions such as Muslim Shiite and Sunni, Christian and Jews).
In 1919, during the Paris international conference which followed WW1, he was amongst the few who successfully recommended adopting the Arab name Iraq instead of the Greek name Mesopotamia. This name change was intended to cover the planned northern expansion of the newly created country under British Mandate to include the oil rich Mosul region of Kurdistan, in addition to the Mesopotamian provinces of Baghdad and Basra.
In April 1920, at the conference of San Remo, the League of Nations agreed the British mandate over Iraq, i.e. Mesopotamia plus the Mosul province of Kurdistan which was formerly part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. In his announcement of the mandate to the Iraqi population, Wilson emphasized the role of the British mandatory in a way which was considered restrictive by the Iraqis and resulted in tensions. In the Spring and summer of 1920, various insurgency riots erupted across central and southern Iraq. These riots were often violently repressed by Wilson’s British administration, together with the British troops headed by general Aylmer Haldane. The total number of Iraqi casualties of these riots was estimated to have reached 10,000 people.
In the middle of the summer, Wilson made a compromise proposal, suggesting that Faysal, the ex King of Syria who had just been defeated by the French army, be offered the throne of Iraq; this proposal was intended to obtain support from the Iraqi population as well as by the British officials who favored a controlled Arab independence. It was eventually accepted by the British Government and by Faysal, but Wilson would not be there to participate in its implementation. Indeed, the British government had decided not to follow Wilson views, but to grant independence to Iraq. The main reason for this decision was that the British Government no longer had the financial and military means to operate a protectorate over Iraq, with the required civil and military organizations that this required. The other reason was, along the lines of thought of T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, to obtain the Arabs and Iraq’s support, with the goal to ensure that these newly independent nations would remain allies to Great Britain and its Empire.
[edit] Career at APOC
At the end of 1920, the British government removed Wilson from his position in Iraq, and awarded him a Knighthood. Deeply disappointed by the turn of events, he then left the public service and joined APOC as manager of their Middle Eastern operations, a position which still enabled him to be invited to attend as advisor the British Government Middle East conference organized by the Secretary of State for Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, in Cairo in March 1921, where he met again his former Oriental Secretary and previous opponent, Gertrude Bell.
[edit] Death
Wilson was later elected as a Member of the British Parliament, and, when World War II was declared, he volunteered in the Royal Air Force. He died, aged 55, in May 1940 during the evacuation of Dunkirk, as the RAF bomber plane on which he was a gunner was shot down by German artillery.
[edit] References
- Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Talbot, by John Marlowe, 1967 (London).
- Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East, by John Keay, W.W. Norton, 2003 (New York, London).
