Navy, concessions for almost three thousand miles of railway, together with valuable rights to the exploitation of the mineral resources of Anatolia.[33] The Chester concessions conflicted with certain French claims which had been under discussion at the first Lausanne Conference: the concession for a Black Sea railway system, which had been conferred upon French capitalists in 1913; and rights to the Arghana copper mines, to which a French group had been given a kind of priority under the Angora Treaty of 1921.[34] In part, at least, the award of the Chester concessions at this particular time was a shrewd political move on the part of the Nationalist Government. It was designed to serve notice on France that no treaty would be acceptable to Turkey which would require complete confirmation of pre-War concessions; from this decision there could be no departure without infringing upon American rights and without recognizing the acts of a former Sultan as superior to acts of the new government of Turkey. It was intended, also, to win for the Turks a measure of American diplomatic support. That the French Government understood the implications of the Chester concessions is evidenced by the fact that the Foreign Office despatched to Angora a note which characterized the award as "a deliberately unfriendly act, of a nature to influence adversely the coming negotiations at Lausanne."[35]
When the second Lausanne Conference convened on April 22, 1923, therefore, it was France, not Great Britain, which was on the defensive. And the French position became steadily worse, rather than better. On May 15, it was announced that a syndicate of British banks had purchased a controlling interest in the Bank für orientalischen Eisenbahnen, of Zurich, the Deutsche Bank's holding company for the Anatolian and Bagdad Railway Companies. Ismet Pasha, it was said, was kept
