William Knox D'Arcy

William Knox D'Arcy (11 October 1849 – 1 May 1917) was a businessman of British and Australian background, remembered as a key figure in establishing Persia’s oil and petrochemical sector. He set up the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, the forerunner of BP. The 1901 D'Arcy Concession gave him rights to search for and sell oil, natural gas, asphalt, and ozokerite across Persia.

Born in Newton Abbot, Devon, to solicitor William Francis D'Arcy, he attended Westminster School until 1866, when his father’s bankruptcy prompted the family to move to Australia. They settled in Rockhampton, Queensland, where D'Arcy studied law and later joined his father’s practice. He prospered and began speculating, first in land. On 23 October 1872, he married Elena Birkbeck at St Patrick's Cathedral, Parramatta. Elena, born in Mexico in 1840, was the only child of Damiana de Barre Valdez and Samuel Birkbeck, an American mining engineer from Illinois who managed a silver mine in Mexico. She came from the English Birkbeck family, Quakers with a focus on education.

In 1882, D'Arcy entered a partnership with Walter Russell Hall, Thomas Skarratt Hall, and the Morgan brothers—Thomas, Frederick, and Edwin—to open a mine on Ironstone Mountain (later Mount Morgan), 24 miles south of Rockhampton. The site held a major ore deposit. In October 1886, the venture became the Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company, with D'Arcy as a director and its largest shareholder. He personally held 125,000 shares and another 233,000 in trust. At their peak, shares traded at £17/1s each, valuing his holdings at over £6 million (roughly £674 million today). The company also ran a rich gold mine at Matakanui, Central Otago, New Zealand, through its subsidiary the Mount Morgan Sluicing Company.

By 1889, D'Arcy had amassed a considerable fortune and moved his family to England. He bought Stanmore Hall, a house on Grosvenor Square, and rented Bylaugh Park. After Elena died in 1897, he married Nina Boucicault in 1899—a first cousin of the actress of the same name—and the couple entertained lavishly. He kept his interest in horse-racing from his Australian days and maintained a private box at Epsom racecourse.

In 1900, D'Arcy agreed to fund an oil and mineral search in Persia led by Wolff, Ketabchee, and Cotte, though he never visited the country himself. Negotiations with Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar began in 1901, and by May, a sixty-year concession was secured for £20,000 (about £2.1 million today). The D'Arcy Concession covered 480,000 square miles and granted oil rights across all Persia except five northern provinces. In return, the Iranian government received 16% of annual oil profits, a deal that lasted until the industry was nationalised in March 1952.

A drilling team under George B. Reynolds started work at Chiah Surkh in late 1902. Despite striking oil in January 1904, D'Arcy had already spent £160,000 and was £177,000 overdrawn at Lloyds Bank. Forced to seek more funding, he helped form the Concession Syndicate in 1905, with Burmah Oil Company Ltd. as a major investor and D'Arcy’s operation as a subsidiary. Operations shifted to the Shardin region in 1906. Drilling there continued until 1907, when the search moved to Masjed Soleyman, at a site called Maydon-e-Naftune. Two wells were started in early 1908. By April, with no success and the venture nearly bankrupt, D'Arcy and Burmah decided to abandon the project. In early May, they telegraphed Reynolds to cease work, dismiss staff, and return. Reynolds delayed, and on 26 May 1908, at 1,180 feet, oil was struck.

In April 1909, D'Arcy became a director of the newly formed Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), later British Petroleum. By 1911, APOC had built a pipeline from the find to a refinery at Abadan. In 1912, the Mount Morgan company was listed in London, and D'Arcy was made its chairman. Because Burmah Oil and the British Admiralty provided financial backing, D'Arcy could not have the company named after him, despite his wife’s efforts, and remained a shareholder.

In later years, he lived at Stanmore Hall, Middlesex, which was enlarged by Brightwen Binyon between 1888 and 1891, adding a billiard room and new dining room. He commissioned a suite of tapestries from William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, titled 'The Quest of the Holy Grail', which once hung in the hall but are now scattered. He also owned paintings by Frank Dicksee and Frederick Goodall. D'Arcy died on 1 May 1917, aged 67. In 2012, he was posthumously inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame.