Frank Holmes (geologist)

Frank Holmes (1874 – January 1947), known affectionately by Arabs as "Abu Naft" (the Father of Oil), was a British-New Zealander mining engineer, geologist and oil concession hunter. Following distinguished service in World War I, he was granted the title of honorary Major and was thereafter known as Major Frank Holmes in his civilian life.

He was born in 1874 on at a remote work camp in New Zealand where his father was building a bridge. He attended Otago Boys' High School, Dunedin in 1888–89. At the age of 17, he was apprenticed to his uncle who was the general manager of a gold mine in South Africa. For two decades, specialising in gold and tin, he worked as a mining engineer all over the world – Australia, China, Russia, Malaya, Mexico, Uruguay and Nigeria.

During World War I, he was a quartermaster in the British Army. In his efforts to source food and supplies for the British Army in Mesopotamia (today's Iraq), Holmes travelled widely through the Middle East and may have heard rumours of a possible oil seepage on the eastern seaboard of the Arabian peninsula. This, together with a close study of Admiralty maps of the area, appears to have triggered an abiding interest in oil in the region. By 1918, he was writing to his wife that "I personally believe that there will be developed an immense oil field running from Kuwait right down the mainland coast [of eastern Arabia]".

In 1920, Holmes helped set up the Eastern and General Syndicate Ltd in London to develop, among other things, oil ventures in the Middle East. In 1922 he travelled to Arabia to discuss the possibility of an oil concession with Emir Ibn Saud, who ruled parts of the eastern peninsula. With Ibn Saud’s permission, he carried out a survey over four weeks in the desert and returned to Hofuf with earth samples which he claimed bore traces of oil. In order to allay the suspicions of British officials, Holmes claimed that he was looking for a rare butterfly, the Black Admiral of Qatif, although this deception appears not to have been effective. At the Uqair conference later in the year, Holmes approached Ibn Saud with a view to finalising a concession document but the British High Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, persuaded Ibn Saud not to sign. It was only when the British government ended Ibn Saud’s annual stipend in 1923 that Ibn Saud considered himself free of British control and awarded a concession to Holmes for the region of al-Hasa. But when a subsequent survey was unfavourable, and a financially challenged Eastern and General Syndicate failed to find a bidder, the concession for al-Hasa was allowed to lapse. Holmes, nevertheless, still entertained hopes of finding oil on Bahrain and concentrated his efforts there.

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