Abstract
Censure was understandable. The 1951 dispute had cost Britain a rich oilfield, the world’s largest refinery and a major source of much-needed dollars. Historians have mostly agreed with Churchill in blaming the British Government led by Attlee,2 but for different reasons. They believed Ministers could and should have resolved the crisis by forcing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company3 to make large and early concessions to Persian nationalism. Churchill’s complaint was that the Government ‘had scuttled and run from Abadan when a splutter of musketry would have settled the matter’.4
I cannot recall any large matter of policy which has been so mishandled as this dispute with Persia.
Winston Churchill1
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Notes and References
On 6 October 1951. Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill — His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, Vol. VIII (London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), p. 8252.
Quoted in Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), p. 599.
Philip M. Williams (ed.), The Diary of Hugh Gaitskell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 260 and
Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune 1945–1955 (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 344.
John Montgomery, The Fifties (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), p. 34.
Herbert Morrison (1888–1965), later Lord Morrison of Lambeth. See Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. 514.
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–80). See Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1950, Vol. V (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), p. 512.
According to his biographer Mossadegh (1882–1967) was the transliteration of his name he himself employed. See Farhad Diba Mohammad Mossadegh (London: Croom Helm, 1986).
R.K. Karanjia, The Mind of a Monarch (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 108.
Ramesh Sanghvi, Aryamehr: The Shah of Iran (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 202.
Yonah Alexander and Allan Nanes, The United States and Iran — A Documentary History (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1980), p. 225.
Francis Williams, Twilight of Empire: Memoirs of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 255.
Quoted in Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), p. 404.
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© 1991 James Cable
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Cable, J. (1991). Verdict in Dispute. In: Intervention at Abadan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11913-4_1
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