William Knox D'Arcy
Co-founder 1909Background
William Knox D'Arcy was born in Newton Abbot, Devon, England in 1849 and emigrated to Queensland, Australia, as a young man, where he built a legal and business practice before striking extraordinary wealth through his investment in the Mount Morgan gold mine — one of the richest gold deposits ever discovered in Australia. The Mount Morgan fortune, which eventually yielded more than $3 million for D'Arcy personally, gave him the capital to pursue speculative investment on a grand scale. By the early 1900s, D'Arcy was a wealthy London socialite with connections to the British colonial establishment and a growing interest in the emerging petroleum industry.
Role at BP plc
The founding of BP is a story of geopolitical risk, imperial ambition, and the gamble of a single, eccentric British entrepreneur. The corporate lineage of BP traces back to 1901, when William Knox D'Arcy, an extremely wealthy British prospector who had made a fortune in Australian gold mining, secured an unprecedented concession from the Shah of Iran. The concession granted D'Arcy the exclusive right to explore, drill, and produce oil across almost the entire territory of Persia (modern-day Iran) for a period of 60 years. D'Arcy invested a portion of his personal fortune hiring George Reynolds, a hardened, brilliant engineer, to lead the expedition into the brutal, unforgiving desert of southwestern Persia. The expedition was a nightmare, plagued by brutal heat, disease, and hostile local tribes. By 1908, after seven years of continuous failure, D'Arcy was on the verge of total bankruptcy and sent a desperate telegram ordering Reynolds to cease operations immediately and return home. Reynolds, however, famously ignored the telegram and kept drilling. A few days later, on May 26, 1908, the drill struck oil at Masjid-i-Suleiman, initiating a blowout that shot oil 50 feet into the air. This was the first commercial oil discovery in the Middle East, altering global geopolitics. In 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the direct predecessor to BP) was incorporated to extract and refine the oil. Recognizing the strategic importance of the discovery for the British Royal Navy (which was transitioning its fleet from coal to oil), the British Government famously acquired a controlling 51% stake in the company in 1914, essentially nationalizing the entity and cementing BP's status as an instrument of British imperial power for the next century.