IOR/L/PS/18/B380

The memorandum concerns the border between Mohammerah [Khorramshahr] and Turkey, and was prepared by Alwyn Parker of the Foreign Office. There are a number of labels at the top of the first page: ‘Persia’, ‘Confidential’ and ‘Section 10’. The memorandum sections are as follows:

• Part I. A preface (folios 1-5), introducing the points at issue, with two maps, the first being a sketch map of the Mohammerah district, with the proposed Turkish, Persian and mediating commissioner’s lines indicated (folio 2), and a map compiled from plane table surveys by Lieutenant Arnold Talbot Wilson in 1909, with the frontier as defined by the mediating commissioners in 1850 (folio 4);
• Part II. An historical summary (folios 6-19) of British Government correspondence relating to the border dispute, with the chief focus being on correspondence exchanged during the period 1843-52, around the time of the Treaty of Erzeroum (c.1848). This part contains two copies of a map, a facsimile of a diagram of the disputed area, the original of which was enclosed by Colonel Williams in his despatch of 4 February 1850, indicating Turkish and Persian claims and the mediating commissioner’s proposal (folios 15, 19);
• Part III. Conclusion (folios 20-28), with a further map (folio 23), an exact copy of that found on folio 4.

The appendices that follow are:

• A: British assurances given to the Shaikh of Mohammerah, 1899 and 1902-10;
• B. Protocol of December 1911 (in French) for the proposal settlement of the Turco-Persian frontier question;
• C. An extract from Sir Austen Henry Layard’s Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylonia, published in 1887. The extract is from volume 2, pp 431-439;
• D. Rough notes made by General William Monteith when in Persia, on the frontier of Turkey and Persia, as communicated to the Foreign Office in 1843;
• E. Observations by Sir Henry Rawlinson on a Persian memorandum relative to the situation of the cities of Mohammerah and Fellahiah [Fallāḥīyah], 1844;
• F. Text of the Treaty of Erzeroum, 31 May 1847, in English and French translation;
• G. Copy of a despatch from Sir Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador to Istanbul, to Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary, dated 30 May 1850;
• H. Copy of a despatch from Lord Palmerston to Lord Broomfield, dated 12 July 1850.