Revealed: the remarkable oil magnate who modernised Mexico

HE never learned to speak Spanish himself, but it’s not fanciful to say that the fortune amassed by engineer, oil magnate and philanthropist Weetman Pearson has helped thousands of people to learn the language at Leeds University over the last 95 years.

With a fortune mostly made from large public building works in Mexico and discovery of that country’s most lucrative oil field, the man born at Shelley Woodhouse, near Huddersfield, later gave £10,000 (which would be about £500,000 today) to finance the first chair, or professorship, of Spanish at the university in 1916.

Tomorrow evening the Mexican Ambassador to the UK, Eduardo Medina Mora, himself born at a Mexico City hospital financed by Pearson, and the great grandson of Weetman Pearson (who became Lord Cowdray thanks to the Asquith government), will be at the opening of an exhibition celebrating a man who left a great mark on foreign soil. Also there will be Professor Paul Garner, the present holder of the Cowdray Chair of Spanish, and author of a new book about Weetman Pearson’s 30-year involvement with Mexico.

Pearson’s work there included his exploitation of oil reserves that would help to fuel the naval forces of the United States and the Allies during the First World War and make him one of Britain’s richest men.

Pearson was born in 1856 and took over the family construction company Samuel Pearson and Son in 1890. The firm built part of the Yorkshire-Lancashire Railway, and had a brickworks at Cleckheaton. Pearson took the company to a higher level, building docks at King’s Lynn and Dover, in Canada and Egypt, and also the Hudson River Tunnel in New York and a railway in Spain. An untrained but skilled engineer, Pearson was also a highly gifted accountant and manager.

In 1889, he was invited by Mexican President Porfirio Diaz to build a canal that would drain flood waters from Mexico City into Lake Texcoco. This was the first of many contracts, including a railway linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, secured because of his company’s reliability and the relationships he had forged with Mexico’s political elite under the Diaz dictatorship. His projects became the foundations of the industrialisation and development of the country.

In 1917, he would be promoted from Baronet to Viscount Cowdray and was appointed President of the Air Board, the precursor to the RAF. Somehow, in among all of this, he was for 15 years (1895-1910) the Liberal MP for Colchester – but known as “the Member for Mexico” in the House because of his absenteeism.

“Lord Cowdray’s contribution to British business and the promotion of Hispanic studies in the UK has been somewhat forgotten now, but he was a remarkable man who did remarkable things,” says Prof Garner.

“Whilst some might see him as a dictator-supporting imperialist, his public works in Mexico helped to build a modern nation and to transform the lives of ordinary Mexican people. I’ve tried to separate the facts from the fiction in my book.

“One of the most interesting things about him was that he stayed in Mexico after the revolution of 1910, even though he was associated to some degree with Diaz the ousted dictator and his ruling elite. Pearson weathered a lot of criticism, not least for exploiting the country’s oil resources (which were on land he owned), but he did reinvest a great deal of money to help Mexican people. His relationship with Mexico is also fascinating because the country was not among Britain’s imperial territories. He was not an agent of British imperialism, but an agent of Porfirian state building and modernisation.”

After the First World War Pearson sold most of the shares in his Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company to what was to become Royal Dutch Shell. He died in 1927 and the Pearson Group has since become one of the world’s leading media groups.

The exhibition Yorkshire in Mexico: the Pearson/Cowdray legacy at the University of Leeds runs from midday today until midday on Friday, October 14 in Parkinson Court, University of Leeds.

British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919 is published by Stanford Press, £55.95. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk