University of East Anglia

Graduate Student, School of Literature and Creative Writing

Thesis Title: Oil Men: the twinned lives of Arnold Wilson and Morris Young

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Iran has never, formally, been part of a modern empire. However, many countries such as Russia, Britain and Germany have sought to claim it for themselves. For years, the British enjoyed unrivalled power and influence in Southern Iran and boasted of the countries' shared history.  Britain's initial interest in the Gulf peninsula was not for Iran's own sake but because of its proximity to India, the jewel in the crown of the "real" Empire. Just over a century ago this concern was bumped into second place by a new one that was to define the modern age: oil. My biography follows two men brought together by the first successful Iranian oil strike in 1908, Lieutenant Arnold Talbot Wilson and Doctor Morris (Yudlevitz) Young. The following two decades of British involvement in the Middle East are seen through their eyes, as the demands of Empire and industry send Wilson criss-crossing the border between Iraq and Iran and constantly test Young's powers of cultural negotiation to their limits. Morris Young and Arnold Wilson grew up in different worlds, but in very different ways both their personal histories trained them for service to the Empire. The psychologies created by Wilson’s journey through boarding school, Sandhurst and the Indian Army and Young’s transformation from Jewish émigré to stalwart ‘upholder of British prestige’ will ultimately dictate which one of them - for it can only be one - may survive as their Empire, and the world it represents, crumble.


This is not only Wilson and Young's story however. They were both, during their lifetimes, employed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company - the forerunner of modern-day BP. As the company put their roots deeper into Iranian soil, that soil shifted. Sometimes it was pushed out of the way; often,  it rose up against unwelcome intrusion. What the people of Iran, and later Iraq, did and had done to them in the days of Young and Wilson reverberates down the century and echoes in all the dealings between those countries and the West there have been ever since. Their lives were bound up with the soldier and medic's and both men knew it well. It was a shared history indeed, but not one that looked romantically back into the past so much as it has laid the fractured foundations of our present.   

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