He was born on 11 April 1874 to Scottish parents, Andrew and Jean Urquhart, in Aydın, 81 miles (130 km) from Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire.
His father was engaged in the export trade of licorice root and paste, the extract from which was widely used in the pharmaceutical and tobacco industries, as well as confectionery production.
When he was forced to leave the oil business, two years later, Urquhart was able to set up the Anglo-Siberian Company in London, for mining, by combining his contacts with Leslie's.
[10] After a complex series of events and negotiations, Urquhart left revolutionary Baku on instructions from the British Foreign office and companies, reaching Moscow on 25 September.
The Perm Corporation was likewise intended to exploit minerals in the Urals, and Anglo-Siberian took it over in 1908, once it had acquired the Kyshtym Mining Works of 1900, a Russian company.
[12] Exploratory surveys at Kyshtym for Anglo-Siberian had confirmed the presence of deposits of copper, iron and sulphur; and gold in the Soymonovsk Valley.
In autumn 1908 Urquhart and Semmy Joseph Blumlein, managing director, went to Kyshtym and supervised investment, including rail track and a smelter.
[19] The Hands Off Russia campaign by the British Left had little purchase, but the Lloyd George administration was keen to trade with the Soviet Union.
[20] Urquhart was a strong opponent of the Bolsheviks, and as a backer of Alexander Kolchak an advocate of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.
[21] Under Sir Charles Eliot, British Commissioner in Siberia, he ran through staff the Siberian Supply Company that operated in 1918–9 behind the White Russian lines, but no further west than Harbin.
[26] Arthur Ransome argued that their assumption that treating Urquhart harshly would affect the British government was based on faulty reasoning.
[29] Urquhart's approach to dealing with the Soviet concessions, and Georgy Pyatakov who controlled them, on behalf of the Russo-Asiatic Consolidated group, contrasted with the subtler and more accommodating tactics employed by Herbert Guedalla and Grigori Benenson (1860–1939) for the Imperial and Foreign Corporation, also based in London.
[30] Urquhart attempted, through Midian Ltd., to exploit sites formerly in the Ottoman Empire, to the south of the Dead Sea; but the British government favoured the interests of the Turkish Petroleum Company.
[33] The Australian mining consultant William Henry Corbould, who had worked at Mount Isa, went on in 1928 to survey Edie Creek in the Territory of New Guinea, for Urquhart and the Ellyou Goldfields Development Corporation.