The Clem Lack Memorial Oration

The Clem Lack Memorial Oration MOUNT ISA'S RUSSIAN CONNECTION by K.H. Kennedy Presented at a meeting of the Society 28 March 1985. M.I.M. Holdings is Queensland's largest pubUc company; the group activities extend not only inter-state but also to the United Kingdom, U.S.A., West Germany and other countries. Its annual report for 1983-84 disclosed sales from the year's operations approaching $1000 miUion; total assets were valued in excess of three billion dollars; and output from the mine at Mount Isa - the foundation stone of the company - totalled more than nine million tons of ore. One particular table in the report, on the distribution of shares, illustrated the company's strong Unks with the giant American concern, ASARCO: ASARCO holds 44% of its shares, while M.I.M. Holdings in tum holds neariy 20% of ASARCO. The ASARCO connection has always been widely known; it has histor ical roots dating back to 1930 and was personified locally in Julius Kruttschnitt, whose work at Mount Isa extended over a quarter of a century. What is less widely known, however, is that Mount Isa had another intemational connection, one with direct links to Tsarist Russia through the Anglo-Russian corporation, Russo-Asiatic Con solidated and its remarkable Chairman, John Leslie Urquhart. This side of the story of Mount Isa and M.I.M. Holdings resurfaced briefly in April 1982 when a number of metropolitan newspapers carried a report on a possible claim to the "Zotoff Millions", which I will examine later in this paper. The Russian connection was fully documented a year later when I completed a biography of the mercurial Leslie Urquhart, Russia's mining Tsar. The study clearly Dr. Kett Kennedy is senior lecturer in History at James Cook University of North Queensland. The author of The Mungara Affair and editor of two volumes of Readings in North Queensland Mining History, he has also published numerous papers on mining history. He has recently completed a biography of Leslie Urquhart, commissioned by M.I.M. Holdings. 184 demonstrates that the nature of development and company practice at Mount Isa was intertwined with Russian experiences, and with money won from the base metal mines of Siberia. To trace the Russian influence from its beginnings, I have divided the paper into segments covering: the career of Leslie Urquhart, the early years of Mount Isa, and the Russian legacy. JOHN LESLIE URQUHART Leslie Urquhart was one of the most conspicuous men on the intemational mining scene during the period from the tum of the century to the Great Depression. An engineer with outstanding entrepreneurial talent and considerable influence in intemational financial circles, he was involved in projects on several continents during his lifetime, but it was in Imperial Russia that he earned his reputation. Born in Asia Minor in April 1874 of Scottish parents, Urquhart received his elementary education in Smyma, the commercial port for British merchants trading with Persia. When he was thirteen years of age, his mother removed the family to Portobello outside Edinburgh, partly so that her children could complete their education, and partly because Urquhart's father, a liquorice merchant, had decided to undertake a new liquorice operation at Oudjari in Transcaucasia on behalf of the Orient Trading Company of which he was a director and general manager. After attending public school in Edinburgh, Urquhart was appren ticed to Glasgow engineers, and in the evenings attended the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College, studying mechanical and electrical engineering. In 1895, he was introduced to a new field- chemistry, speciaUsing in oils - and subsequently worked at the Broxborn and Lanark refineries. He was tempted by an offer from a French shale concem, but under pressure from his father accepted a contract with the Orient Trading Company in late 1896. He spent Christmas of that year en route to Oudjari. One of Urquhart's early tasks was to learn Russian. In only three months he was reading Russian novels: Dostoevsky's short stories became particular favourites. Urquhart in fact had a flair for languages. Before he left Smyma in his early teens, he was proficient in English, French, Greek and Turkish. By his twenty-third birthday, he had acquired Russian, German and Azerbaijani, in addition to smatterings of many of the local dialects of the Caucasus. This talent for languages was important to his subsequent business career, making it easy for him as a Briton aboard to operate comfortably in alien surroundings. Urquhart remained with the Orient Trading Company for nearly Itf six years, during which time he assumed greater responsibility for its management. They were years of adventure, hard work, monotony; at Oudjari he leamed the fundamentals of business management, how to deal with a cosmopolitan workforce, how to adapt to foreign cultures. But Urquhart was highly ambitious and increasingly looked to the petroleum boom at Baku on the shores of the Caspian, where fortunes were being made. Leslie Urquhardt, 1922. (M.I.M. Holdings) 186 At the turn of the century, Baku was the centre of the Russian oil industry: for a short time its fields, barely thirty-five square miles in area, gave up more cmde than the total output of the United States. Urquhart came to the gaunt, poorly lit, windblown metropolis in 1902 as assistant manager of the British-owned Schibaieff Petroleum Company. Within months he was appointed general manager follow ing the death of his superior and friend, Alfred Wagstaff, the first Briton to be buried in the ancient city of fire. It was, however, a troubled inheritance to which Urquhart succeeded. Depressed prices, declining production and increased drilling costs obliged managers to cut wages. This, in tum, led to a series of strikes in high summer 1903, which were ruthlessly suppressed by Cossack regiments, only to set in motion a new wave of clandestine revolutionary agitation. For his part, Urquhart was proving to be an excellent oilman, energetic and shrewd. In the latter part of 1904, he was the chief intermediary in the scheme to create a single agency for distributing petroleum and kerosene. Known as Mazoot, the cartel, which involved Nobel, Rothschild and various Russian and British pro ducers, was formaUsed in Paris in March 1905, Urquhart personally drafting the contracts in English, French and Russian. His initiative was highly praised in the City of London, and he was subsequently offered the management of three other British oil concems - Russian Petroleum & Liquid Fuel, Baku Russian Petroleum and Bibi-Eybat Petroleum. Aged only thirty, Urquhart had in prospect a position with few rivals among foreigners in the world of Russian commerce. His work and future in the petroleum industry however would abmptly come to an end in only eighteen months. In early 1905, a combination of revolutionary activities and an orgy of race butchery, which cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of Armenians and Tartars, paralysed Baku's oil industry. Month after month, strikes and riots afflicted the bleeding city. Then in September 1905, as Russia was fast sliding down the path of revolution, tensions at Baku climaxed, obliging Urquhart to assemble the British colony and remove them offshore on one of his company's tankers. For the slaughter and turmoil had spread beyond the city and engulfed the oilfields where derricks were fired and sabotage was rampant. When the blood-lust abated, Urquhart was an intemational celebrity, nominated for the Albert Medal first class, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, for bravery and heroism. The action which won Urquhart his award was a forced march in the company of a stablemen, and two Cossacks who deserted before its end, to reUeve four Britons besieged at Zabrat. One of them later paid tribute to Urquhart's courage in the rescue when he wrote: 187 I have since seen his Russian companion, who avers that he would never in his life repeat that ride, not even for a hundred wives. That he got through unscathed was mainly due, he told me, to Mr. Urquhart's thorough command of their language, and, to a great extent, also owing to his possessing such an exceptional knowledge of life in the Caucasus, whereby he has acquired the air, if not the authority of a chieftain in his intercourse with the people. But time was mnning out for the British oilman, who now carried additional responsibility as His Majesty's vice-consul. Urquhart had favoured the Tartars over the Armenians who in 1906, through their secret society Dashnaksutiun, were working hand in glove with Baku's Bolsheviks. Simultaneously, the reaction ary and fanatical Black Hundreds were stepping up their campaign of murder, extortion and incendiarism. Urquhart himself received two death threats. Then on the evening of 8 September, his carriage was mshed by assassins. At least six bullets were fired at point blank range - that was the number of holes in his jacket- yet, almost miraculously, his only wounds were in the webbing of his left hand and four grazes across his stomach. An attempt on the Ufe of so influential an emissary of foreign capitaUsm caused concern, but being the British vice-consul to boot was a very serious matter. Accordingly the Russian author ities reacted swiftly and informed the British embassy that the guilty party had been arrested but was shot trying to escape. RecaUed to London, Urquhart never commented on the matter; but ten years later he insisted that the attempt was the work of six members of the Dashnaksutiun, all of whom were dispatched by the Cossacks within the week. Of immediate concem for Urquhart, however, was his future.

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