THE HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTING
PART FOUR - VISCOUNT COWDRAY

Chapter 12  -  War Ends; Geophysics Begins

On May 15, 1911, Porfirio Diaz resigned the Presidency of the Republic of Mexico and on the next day left Mexico forever to take up residence in Paris for his family and for the family of his son. The revolutionary movement succeded mainly because ill health prevented the aging President from acting with his usual vigor in repulsing the rebels. In June the leader of the revolution, Francisco Madero, entered Mexico City in triumph. Madero did not bother the foreign oil companies. However, his government did not last long enough to bring economic stability. He was seized and killed by General Huerta in February of 1913. The next two years saw four men come to power;

Huerta, Carranza, Villa and Obregon. The most serious crisis fo r the Mexican Eagle Oil Company arose in November, 1913, when rebel forces occupied the oilfields and asked for $100,000 in cash and for other concessions. Dr. C. W. Hayes was successful in stalling for time, while London was being consulted. Before the end of the month, Federal troops had driven the rebels to the north.

In April, 1914, the rebels attacked Tampico and were driven off by the combined forces of Admiral Cradock and Captain Doughty of the American and english naval forces, respectively. The foreign admirals now stood together in advising their nationals not to pay the blackmail demanded by the rebels. There existed for a time two governments in Mexico, the Government of Carranza and the Government of Villa, and both tried to levy a toll on the oilfields. Although there were some anxious moments for the Mexican Eagle Oil Company, it never paid any of the rebel demands and except for temporary shutdowns, operations for both the oilfields and the refinery were relatively neutral throughout the Mexican Revolution and throughout World War One.

From 1914-1917, the Mexican Eagle Oil Company furnished the British Admiralty with one' of its major sources of supply for crude oil and for refined products. The Admiralty requisitioned all seventeen vessels of the Eagle Transport Company early in the war. This fleet carried nearly three million tons of oil to Great Britain in four years from Mexico. Three of the seventeen tankers were sent to the bottom of the Atlantic by submarines, while five others limped to port with German torpedoes in their innards, to be repaired and sent to sea once again.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson had advised all Americans to leave Mexico. Most of the American employees of Mexican Eagle did send their wives and children to the United States during this year. The men stayed on and took their chances . No American lives were lost but in March, 1917, two English employees, Mr. H. W. T. Buckingham and Mr. B. E. Campbell Bannerman, were killed by a band of armed raiders.

In the spring of 1914, Lord Cowdray advised Dr. Willard Hayes and Mr. Everette De Golyer to repair to the United States, pick up their families and proceed to London as a place of permanent residence. Weetman Pearson expIaned that he wanted them in Britain to be his right hand and his left hand in the formation of a world-wide oil company. The offers of salary made to the two Americans on this new venture were too lucrative for either to dream of refusing. The De Golyer and Hayes families arrived in London on June 14th. The next few weeks were spent in the discussion of geologic plans and programs by Pearson, Hayes and De Golyer.

The area mutually decided upon for first exploration was Spain. De Golyer departed for Paris late in July to make arrangedments to descend into Spain with a surface geologic party. "De" had scarcely settled in his Paris Hotel when World War One broke out. One day he wandered abroad without his xxxxport and by some quirk was arrested as a probable spy or at least an enexxxx alien and put on a train bound somewhere or other. De Golyer managed to find the man in charge of the train and somehow convinced him that he was an American with a French name and French ancestry and therefore about as far removed from a German as a man could be. Everette was allowed to leave the train and walk back to Paris. Soon thereafter he recrossed the channel to Londen.

All these wonderful and elaborate plans for geologic conquest on a world-wide scope thus came to naught. Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. De Golyer managed to secure passage on a vesseI sailing for the United States in August but their husbands, who had certain things that had to be attended to before they could depart, waited until October for passage. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, Everette De Golyer had tried to contact Baron Roland von Eotvos in Budapest and obtain from him a torsion balance to be used in geophysical prospecting for oil. The attempt proved unsuccessful.

Tragedy struck the Pearson family before the war was two months old. In September, 1914, Weetman Pearson's youngest son, Geoffrey, who had volunteered as a dispatch-rider, was captured by the Germans along with his motorcycle. He was killed trying to escape, leaving a widow and a young daughter. The blow was a crushing one for Mr. and Mrs. Pearson. Lord Cowdray threw himself into long hours of war work and was soon engaged in the general supervision of the five major projects already mentioned.

At the beginning of 1917, Pearson was advanced a step in the peerage by being created Viscount Cowdray of Cowdray. Shortly thereafter the new Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, asked Lord Cowdray to accept the post of First President of the Air Board. In spite of the heavy burden he already carried. Pearson reluctantly agreed to the new responsibility and was sworn in as a Privy Councillor.

During 1915 änd the early part of 1916, Everette Lee De Golyer divided his time between his home in Norman, Oklahoma, and his Mexican office in Tampico. The Mexican Eagle Oil Company was still his first client but he was adding other accounts in his new role as a consulting geologist. Mr. Maurice G. Mehl, the first Secretary of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, reported to the Executive Committee in 1917, that plans were laid down for organizing the AAPG in a conversation between Professor Charles Henry Taylor and Everette De Golyer held early in 1915 at Norman, Oklahoma. At the first meeting of what was first called the Southwestern Association of Petroleum Geologists at Norman, Oklahoma, held on January 7 and 8, 1916, De Golyer took a prominent part. In May of 1916, he moved his family to New York Cit where he became widely known for his excellence as a geological consultant.

Two overtures were made to Lord Cowdray in 1913 by the Standard Oil Copany of New Jersey through its President, Mr. J. D. Archbold, who spoke of acquiring the Mexican Eagle Oil Company interests. Mr. Archbold drew back somewhat the next year on the ground of "legal and political difficulties." In November of 1916, the Standard Oil Company reopened negotiations and by February, 1917, the exchange of communications had reached the point where it was necessary for Pearson to ask the British government for its views on the projected acquisition. British officialdom urgently requested Cowdray to discontinue the negotiations, which was done with regret on the part of bot parties.

In October, 1918, Royal Dutch Shell expressed a serious interest in acquiring the Mexican Eagle. Weetman Pearson summoned Everette De Golyer to come to London as soon as possible and aid him with the Shell negotiations. De Golyer arrived shortly after the war had ended and spent the next several months in a series of conferences with the Shell Group officials. By the spring of 1919, the arrangement with Shell had been finalized, whereby Shell bought out the controlling interest in the Mexican Eagle Oil Company and Pearson was left to go his way without any responsibilities of management.

In the same year of 1919, Lord Cowdray entered into two new oil ventures. The Pearson oil company for North America was to be called „Amerada" (America and Canada). De Golyer was given the funds to perfect this organization. He was to be Vice President and General Manager of the corporation which was to use geophysical as weIl as geological exploration to find Oil structures. The other company, the Pearson enterprise which was set up to operate throughout all the rest of the world except North America, opened its offices in London under the name of the Whitehall Petroleum Company. 

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.... first class geophysics had been but a dream in the creative and imaginative mind of Everette Lee De Golyer.

The fact has been mentioned that Lord Cowdray began two oil enterprises in 1919. The Whitehall Petroleum Corporation, Ltd. enjoyed the same worldwide concept as the grand scale oil exploration effort put together by Pearson, Hayes and De Golyer and launched at the worst of times, just six weeks before the start of World War One. But Whitehall Petroleum was without the earth science genius of De Golyer, who was much too busy in the 1919-1927 period, putting Amerada on an even keel, to worry with the Whitehall problem. At Viscount Cowdray's death, the net accomplishment of the Whitehall Petroleum Corporation was exactly nil. It had prospected in Canada, China, Columbia, Costa Riea, Algeria, Argentina, France, Greece, Mesopotamia, Morocco, Tunis and finally in England itself. Oil was struck but not in commercial quantities.

The unique feature of the campaign to find a horne source of Petroleum supply in England was the fact that it was done by Cowdray at cost. The other side of Parliament (the Conservatives) had no difficulty in adopting a liberal view that English oil should belong to the English nation and not to any individual. When the government formulated this policy, Viscount Cowdray immediately placed the Whitehall Company in the position so that it could not realize any profit upon oil development on English soil. In 1916 he had drawn up a memorandum urging the formation of a British Imperial Oil Company to secure and develop the petroleum requirements of the Empire. The opening step suggested was to be the amalgamation of the Mexican Eagle Oil Company, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Burmah Oil Company. The idea had failed to find favor with the War Government.

In 1925 Viscount Cowdray was able to look back on an astounding array of good works and good deeds. His concrete accomplishments would rival if not overshadow those of any other twentieth century industrialist. There was some slackening of the pace as he allowed his son, Clive, to take over as Chairman of the Board of S. Pearson and Son. Nothing could have been more modest than Pearson's speeches during the last years of his life. He gave the major credit for his success to his able and hard working partner, Lady Cowdray, and to his brilliant and persevering assemblage of engineering talent. In the mid-1920s he commenced extensive coal mine exploration of Kent. He entered the newspaper fielcl with interests in the "Weekly Sun" and the "Sunday Sun." He also bought into the "Westminster Gazette." Shortly after his death these interests would become amalgamated within the liberal "Daily News.“

Pearson's donations to establish and maintain the Royal Air Force Club amounted to weIl over a million and a half dollars. Nearly a million went into the London College of Nursing and into "Cowdray Club" to house nurses and professional women. As a War Memorial he presented the town of Midhurs with a fully built and fully equipped Midhurst Grammar School on extensive and beautiful grounds.

Lord Cowdray gave close to a million dollars to the Cowdray Hospital in Mexico City and over a million in various grants to Cambridge University, Birmingham University, Aberdeen University, Leeds University and to University College in London. A quarter of a million dollars went to the League of Nations Union and a like amount to the Royal Infirmary at Aberdeen. Large sums were expended in restoring the war damage to St. George's Chapel at Windsor. There is no record of the Pearson public charities prior to the War, nor to the private charities, too numerous to mention. When in 1927, Viscount Cowdray passed from the scene, a grateful England mourned one of her truly great sons.