Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/281

 *tion concession of July, 1913. Lord Inchcape is perhaps the foremost shipping magnate in the British Empire. He is chairman and managing director of the Peninsular and Oriental and the British India Steam Navigation Companies; chairman and director of the Australasian United Steam Navigation Company and the Eastern and Australian Steamship Company; a director of the Steamship Owners' Coal Association, the Australasia and China Telegraph Company, the Marine Insurance Company, the Central Queensland Meat Export Company, and various other commercial enterprises. He is a vice-president of the Suez Canal Company. He has extensive interests in the petroleum industry as a director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Scottish Oils, Ltd., and the D'Arcy Exploration Company.

Lord Inchcape's interests were given ample consideration in the Anglo-German negotiations of 1914. On February 23, a contract was signed at London between the Bagdad Railway Company and Lord Inchcape, the signatures to which were witnessed by Herr von Kühlmann, of the German embassy, and Sir Eyre Crowe, of the British Foreign Office. Under the terms of this contract the Bagdad Railway Company acknowledged the monopolistic privileges in Mesopotamian river navigation conferred upon Lord Inchcape's interests by the Ottoman Government; agreed to cancel its outstanding engagements with the Lynch Brothers for the transportation of railway materials between Basra and points along the Tigris; and guaranteed Lord Inchcape a minimum amount of 100,000 tons of freight, at a figure of 22-1/2 shillings per ton, in the transportation on the Tigris of supplies for the construction of the Bagdad Railway and its subsidiary enterprises.[28]

This contract was so obviously in contravention of earlier rights of the Lynch Brothers, which had been