The Sons of Adam (75 page)

Likewise, the George Reynolds of
The Sons of Adam
owes a debt to the real-life George Reynolds who was Knox D’Arcy’s man in Persia from 1901 to the 1908 strike and beyond. The real-life George Reynolds showed an extraordinary drive and tenacity of purpose, without which no oil strike would ever have been made. It says something about the man’s ability to get things done that he first struck oil in the Middle East in 1904, with his first major well yielding in 1908. By comparison, the first strike in Iraq didn’t come until 1927, the first strike in the Gulf not coming until 1932 in Bahrain. My George Reynolds was blessed by a good relationship with his boss, not to mention a good parcel of stock in Alanto Oil. The real-life George Reynolds had no such pleasure – though one hopes he would have been pleased to know that Anglo-Persian would grow into a company (later renamed British Petroleum) worth as much as two hundred billion dollars by the century’s end.

But my debt to history goes deeper still. In a way, the story of oil
is
the story of the twentieth century.

In the Great War, oil already signalled its importance. The British Army started the war with virtually no motorised equipment. By the end of the war, the Western allies had two hundred thousand vehicles in action. They had built aeroplanes by the tens of thousands. They had launched and won the first tank battles in history. Lord Curzon was hardly exaggerating when he declared that ‘the Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil.’

In the two inter-war decades, oil continued to grow in importance. By the time of the Second World War, oil was, beyond doubt, the most important commodity in the world. The German failure to reach oil in either North Africa or the Caucasus, the Japanese failure to strike the oil at Pearl Harbor, the British ability to use 100-octane fuels in the Battle of Britain were all matters of the utmost strategic importance. As for
PLUTO
, the Pipe-Line Under The Ocean, it’s a staggering fact that the world’s first undersea pipeline should have been laid within hours of the largest-ever seaborne invasion. While there were some early teething problems, the technology eventually delivered more than a million gallons of fuel per day to the Allied forces in Europe – and conferred a strategic advantage that the oil-poor German forces were never able to overcome.

Finally, one cannot write about the two world wars without being conscious of an enormous debt to the men who fought them. This book has attempted to walk a fine line between entertainment on the one hand and respect for what actually occurred on the other. It is to be hoped that the balance is right. From George Reynolds to the infantrymen of the Somme, from Knox D’Arcy to the pilots of the Battle of Britain, from Columbus ‘Dad’ Joiner in East Texas to the mounted tribesmen of the Persian oilfields, this book is intended to honour them all.

The Money Makers
Sweet Talking Money

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s
imagination, other than the names of certain historical
characters from the early days of the oil industry. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events
or localities, is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollins
Publishers
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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins
Publishers
2003

Copyright © Harry Bingham 2003

The Author asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

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EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN 9780007439669

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