Seed Money

About 40 kilometers south of Rockhampton, slightly inland & about 240 meters above sea level, is Mount Morgan & the town of the same name that grew up on & around it. Originally it was called Ironstone Mountain, but was renamed after the three Morgan brothers, sons of a man convicted of murder & transported to the colonies, who pegged out a gold-mining lease on it in 1882 & began extracting the metal.

To obtain capital for the work, they formed a syndicate with some Rockhampton businessmen; but the Morgans remained doubtful of the mine's profitability, & sold out their share of the syndicate to the other members in 1886.

On the 1st of October, 1886, The Mount Morgan Gold Mining Company Limited was registered in the Supreme Court of Queensland, with a nominal capital of one million one-pound shares.

The Shareholders were Thomas Skarratt Hall (158,332 shares), William Knox D'Arcy (358,334 shares), William Pattison (125,000 shares), Walter Russell Hall (125,000 shares), John Ferguson (116,667 shares), Charles Carlton Skarratt (58,334 shares) & Alexander William Robertson & John Wagner (together) (58,333 shares).

The Morgans' doubt was misplaced. During the 108-year life of the mine approximately 262 tonnes of gold, 37 tonnes of silver & 387,000 tonnes of copper were mined from Mount Morgan from underground & open cut operations. For a time it was the largest gold mine in the world. Fortunes were made.

Walter Hall died in 1911. His widow Eliza began the process of establishing a trust, part of which went to establishing the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, situated at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, begun in 1915 & still one of the world’s most prestigious research centers.

William D'Arcy put his money to a different use. He returned to England in 1887 & wanted to establish a place in English upper-class society. But his life-style expenditure & the collapse of some of his investments during the final years of the century meant he had to look for somewhere new to replenish his fortune.

To quote from the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

The opportunity came in 1900 when Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, a former British minister to Teheran, approached him to invest in Persian oil exploration. Early in 1901 D'Arcy sent to Teheran an emissary who in May obtained a concession to search for oil over 480,000 sq. miles (1,243,195 km²). D'Arcy agreed to provide all necessary finance for the search. But at the end of 1903 he had spent £150,000 with no result. His financial position was now desperate. He had to mortgage his Mount Morgan shares at a time when they had dropped to £2 10s. each. By May 1905 he had used £225,000 and could spend no more. He began negotiations with the French branch of the Rothschild family for the sale of the concession. But on 20 May the British owned Burmah Oil Co. stepped in with an offer. D'Arcy agreed to it and made over the rights to his concession in return for 170,000 Burmah Oil shares and a payment to cover expenses he had incurred.

On 26 May 1908 Burmah Oil finally found the biggest oilfield yet known in the world in D'Arcy's old concession. This led in 1909 to the formation of a new company, Anglo-Persian Oil, which later became Anglo-Iranian Oil and ultimately British Petroleum.

& which, of course, is now known simply as BP.