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‘Araby the Blest* 253

the Saudi kingdom was made eligible for lend-lease assistance - despite the
legal requirement that recipients of such assistance should be active belliger­
ents on the Allied side. The funds which subsequently flowed into Ibn Saud’s
coffers made the continuance of the British subsidy unnecessary, and
CASOC’s fears of being outflanked by British oil diplomacy were stilled.
The company, which renamed itself in January 1944 the Arabian American
Oil Company, perhaps in acknowledgement of a subtle shift in its political
orientation, had a few bad moments during the war as a result of its soliciting of
lend-lease funds for its Saudi clients. For a time in 1943 it seemed as though the
price of this aid might be the participation of the United States government in
its oil concession, perhaps even as a controlling partner. No sooner had this
spectre been banished by the invocation of the American capitalist ethos than
another apparition took its place in the shape of a proposal for the construction,
under the auspices of the United States government, of an oil pipeline from the
eastern region of Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean. Its cost was to be borne in
the first instance by the United States government and repaid over a twenty-
five-year period by ARAMCO. The company would also remain under an
additional obligation to set aside 20 per cent of its oil reserves for the use of the
United States armed forces. ARAMCO successfully evaded the government’s
embrace, and went on to build the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPline) itself
between 1947 and 1951. It also enlarged its shareholding by taking in Standard
Oil of New Jersey (Esso) and Socony-Vacuum (afterwards Mobil) as partners

in 1947-8, the former with a 30 per cent interest, the latter with 10 per cent.
From its earliest days in Saudi Arabia ARAMCO had set out to be a model
company. It not only made itself responsible for such obvious matters as the
training, safety, health, housing and proper remuneration of its workers, but it
extended its responsibility to the people of Hasa in general. It built and
maintained a modern road network; it encouraged local commercial enterprise
by assisting in the establishment of service industries to meet its own many
needs; it improved the general health of the population of Hasa by eradicating
malaria and reducing the incidence of fly-borne and water-borne diseases; and
it developed a comprehensive system of hospitals, clinics and dispensaries to
care not just for its own workers and their families but for thousands of
Hasawis as well. By the mid-1960s, in fact, ARAMCO was spending more on
hospitals and health programmes to gratify the Saudi authorities than it was on
oil exploration. The company also helped to plan or execute a miscellany of
public works projects for the Saudi government, including irrigation schemes,
wireless stations, airports, water pipelines and the construction of modern
docks and jetties at Dammam and Jiddah. When Ibn Saud in 1947 expressed
his desire for a railway to be laid from the Gulf coast at Dammam to Riyad, 350

miles away in the interior, ARAMCO had one built, even though it was a
highly uneconomic venture.

Towards the Saudi government ARAMCO consistently pursued what a