A TEXT:
Robinson Institute (12 June 2012): among the elements of Group THREE of the seven
"Picturesque Views".
I sit under an 'Orientalist' painting by Sydney Carlin, a view from high up in the sky above the ground, which is called – Over the Hills of Kurdistan: Flying above Kirkuk 1919. I watch a 32 minute Pathe News film made in 1951. The film appears to be a celebration of the previous 50 years of the pursuit of British oil interests in the Middle East. It is called:
Oil for the Twentieth Century
The film opens with a view of a busy central London street filled with traffic, and an anonymous narrator with the familiar nasal, clipped-tones announcement voice of that time. The voice of authority begins; Fifty years of the story of our time, Well, for this story you don’t even have to lift your head. And the camera starts to sink below the streets of London to a subterranean archive, weaving its way along dark, windowless corridors and into electric-light lit cellars filled with floor to ceiling shelves of ledgers, invoices, letters, documents and files:
"Which read the wondrous progress of our age", the official narrator continues,
as he describes a heroic story of oil exploration and extraction in Iran, leading up to the agreement signed 17 June 1914, which secured a controlling interest for the SYNDICATE of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
"Yes, we had a market," the SYNDICATE narrator continues, "Yes, they wanted
oil. Our customer was the Royal Navy."
Then a second disembodied voice, a Scotsman with a soft lilting Highlander accent takes over the telling, romantically as if he had been there himself, an adventurer with a gentle but determined voice, which I am equally able to believe could as well have been my own great grandfather's, who had crisscrossed the Midwest of America from Texas to Wyoming before the frontier was closed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then begun his own oil exploring in Oklahoma in the 1900's, on the land previously ceded to native American reservations under treaty with the US government. The Scotsman takes the story forward through wars and inter-wars:
"One could feel the progress of it all, progress as the tyres under a London
bus"
"By 1938 we had done the choosing (the new oil fields in Iran), and our choice was
sound."
"War like oil was fluid (oil which in the ultimate spelled victory)."
"For oil is not made, it is got."
"Oil thinks large, Oil thinks wide."
"Strange fields and there is no limit."
Oil, the driving force not only of machines, but of ideas in the mind of man, the original SYNICATE narrator concludes.
REF: James Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company (Vol 2, P 489):
In 1951, in the same year the Pathe film was made, the democratically elected
Iranian government under premier Mussaddiq voted to nationalize all the foreign oil industry interests operating within Iran. The UK and US governments subsequently organised a coup in the same year, which , successfully maintained the status quo, but the conclusion regarding Iran and the West relations reached by Bamberg in his text is that, the coup, "did some later damage to relations between…".