Page 83 - They Also Served

35
Arnold Wilson 1903.
Arnold Talbot Wilson was born on
18th July 1884 and educated at Clifton
College, where his father, Canon James
Wilson, was headmaster. The family were
high achievers; his elder sister, Mona,
was an author and the highest-paid
female civil servant, being one of the first
women to earn equal pay. His younger
brother, James, was a noted tenor who was knighted as director of the Arts Council. A tall, powerful man, Arnold, known as ‘AT’, won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Indian Army in 1903.
After an attachment to the Wiltshire Regiment, he was gazetted into the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, soon leading a contingent of troops in Persia, guarding the British consulate in Ahvaz. During his time in India, he famously saved money returning home on leave by working his passage to Marseilles as an engine room stoker before cycling to the Channel Ports, then again from Dover to Bristol. In 1907, Wilson transferred to the Indian Political Department and was sent to the Persian Gulf. A towering presence, he worked his way up from political officer through consul-general to civil commissioner for Mesopotamia. He believed in improving the lot of the people through efficient government and administration as well as fair and equal treatment of the various ethnic and religious groups. Such was his influence throughout the region that he was known as ‘The Despot of Mespot’.
Awarded the DSO for his work, Wilson was a keen naturalist, and two species of reptile, Wilson’s Iranian Worm Snake and Wilson’s Snake-Eyed Skink, are named after him. He advised during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, recommending that the ancient name of Iraq be used instead of the Greek Mesopotamia, and at the 1920 Conference of San Remo, which agreed to the British mandate over the new country of Iraq. By now, Wilson was so close to the intractable problem of Iraqi independence that he was deemed an obstacle to progress – the British government removed him from post, with a knighthood as compensation. Bitterly disappointed, he resigned from the army in 1921 and spent the next eleven years as the Middle East manager for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
77