Crude Britannia

How Oil Shaped a Nation

James Marriott, Terry Macalister

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780745341095
• eBook ISBN: 9781786806390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

'Dripping with delicious detail' - Aditya Chakrabortty

Taking the reader on a journey through North East Scotland, Merseyside, South Wales, the Thames Estuary and London, this is the story of Britain's oil-soaked past, present and future. Travelling the country, the authors discover how the financial power and political muscle of an industry built the culture of a nation from pop music to kitchen appliances, and how companies constructed an empire, extracting the wealth of the world from Iran to Nigeria and Alaska. Today, the tide seems to be going out – Britain's refineries have been quietly closed, the North Sea oilfields are declining and wind farms are being built in their place. As the country painfully shifts into its new post-industrial role in the shadow of Covid, Brexit and the climate crisis, many believe the age of oil to be over. But is it? Speaking to oil company executives and traders, as well as refinery workers, filmmakers and musicians, activists and politicians, the authors put real people at the heart of a compelling story.

PART I

1940–1979

1
The Whole World Was Aflame

The oil began to catch alight

And no land remained unscarred.

The whole world was aflame

But oil was our country’s name.

‘Die Muschel von Margate’ by Kurt Weill, part of Konjunktur (Oil Boom), a musical by Léo Lania, 1928¹

In the summer of 1941 Terry’s father, Lennox ‘Mac’ Macalister, was a surgeon in an RAF mobile field hospital in the midst of the North African desert war. The British forces had been fighting for a year, trying to slow the advance of German army under the command of Rommel. The ultimate goal of the Axis forces was the oil fields of Iran and Iraq.

Mac Macalister’s life was utterly determined by oil. It was lack of diesel for tanks that stopped Rommel taking Cairo, and aviation fuel that kept RAF fighters in the air, harassing the German supply lines. In the desert, petrol was as important as water.

In the same months Richard Marriott, James’s father, aged ten, lived in a world almost devoid of oil. The Keeper’s Cottage near Leeds was heated by firewood. The trains that took him south to school were run on coal. Toys were made of wood, lead or Bakelite. There was not a shred of plastic in his daily life. Every drop of crude was for the war effort.

North Africa was not the only theatre in which oil was a central war aim. On 22 June 1941 German forces invaded the Soviet Union determined to conquer western Russia and especially the oil fields of the Caucasus. A month later the US imposed an embargo on oil exports to Japan. This was swiftly followed by a similar ban from the British government and the Dutch government-in-exile. In retaliation, on 25 July 1941 Japan invaded southern Indochina heading for the prized oil fields of Borneo, mainly controlled by Shell.²

In the summer of 1941, Britain’s chances of survival as an independent state looked slim. The US had not yet entered the war, the Japanese forces swept all before them, Rommel was winning in North Africa and the Red Army was retreating before the German advance. Across the globe the extraction, refining and distribution of oil was central to every conflict.

In this moment of global oil wars, Britain took a pivotal switch away from coal. For over 50 years long lines of fuel wagons had lumbered across the nation, running on rails from station to station. Clearly moving petrol in this way was acutely vulnerable to aerial attack.

Every gallon of oil product utilised in Britain had been shipped into the eastern estuaries such as the Forth and Thames. But on the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the east coast was exceptionally vulnerable to the German air force, navy and mines. The mouth of the Thames was a killing ground. Consequently oil, vital to keep Britain at war, was shipped into western ports, such as Bromborough on the Mersey next to the Stanlow Refinery, and Avonmouth on the Severn Estuary near Bristol.

Plans to address this were commissioned from Shell in early 1941 by the UK government’s Petroleum Department during the Blitz, the bombardment of London. On 2 April that year drawings for a pipeline running from Avonmouth to Walton were approved by the Petroleum Board, headed by Sir Andrew Agnew. Construction began in May. For a nation at war a vast amount of steel and labour was diverted to this project. By November 1941 the Avonmouth/Thames, or the A/T, pipe was pumping petrol for cars, diesel for tractors and kerosene for lamps³ across the country. Within a couple of years the pipeline had been extended to the Shell Haven terminal and the Isle of Grain, both in the Thames Estuary.

The North/South, or N/S, pipeline from Avonmouth to Bromborough, next to Stanlow, was soon added. From Stanlow a pipe was laid through the Midlands to Misterton in Nottinghamshire and Sandy in Bedfordshire. Another ran from Old Kilpatrick, on the River Clyde not far from Glasgow, across Scotland to Grangemouth, on the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh. The next ran from Thames Haven in the Thames Estuary up to Norwich and Saffron Walden, supplying the bomber airfields with aviation fuel. Seventy-five thousand tons of steel pipe, financed by the state, linked the estuaries of Britain. These were the subterranean trunk roads of the country, as fundamental to its functioning as the highways, canals and railways above ground. A thousand miles of oil became the bloodstream of the nation. Hidden, not only from enemy aircraft, but also from prying eyes and the public’s imagination, owned by the state and effectively managed by two private corporations.

It’s a good mile through the suburban streets of Walton-on-Thames as we walk from the station to the river. At the foot of the bridge that links the Surrey and Middlesex banks, we turn on to the towpath and follow it downstream.

On the journey to understand the background to the maelstrom of our times, we need to return to some point of origin. Of course there are myriad such moments and places, but we need to find one, a thread that we can pick up and follow. We have come to the navel of Britain’s oil system.

There’s a nest of six off-white storage tanks, set down low behind a grass-covered mound and high wire fences. We walk along its northern perimeter to reach the gateway. There’s barely any indication of the compound’s function, except a signboard explaining the site to be under the ownership of CLH – Compania Logistica de Hidrocarburos.

* * *

World War II was an oil war, both in its experience and in its memory. In the 80 years since, World War II has been distilled into images of Spitfire fighters and Lancaster bombers, tanks in the North African desert and ships in the Atlantic convoys. Behind all these icons lay combustion engines, pipelines, refineries and drilling rigs. The conflict years saw an astounding increase in the global extraction of crude.⁴ The war proved to be Britain’s great leap into the world of oil. Behind this lay an alliance between the private oil corporations and the nation state.

In accordance with an agreement made between Anglo-Iranian, Shell, three other oil companies and the British government, at the outbreak of war the businesses were to pool their resources and put them under state control for the duration of the fighting. The Petroleum Board was set up to oversee the delivery of oil from overseas, the operation of terminals, the management of refineries and the retail of fuel to both civilians and the armed forces. Road tankers and petrol stations had their Shell and BP logos removed and, painted in dull camouflage, were rebranded POOL.

The companies’ workforce both in the UK and overseas was effectively requisitioned. David Barran, Shell’s representative in Egypt, wanted to enlist in the services at the start of the conflict but was told by the War Office⁵ to stay in post and coordinate fuel supplies to the 8th Army fighting the Germans in Libya.

Refineries were retooled to prioritise the production of aviation fuel of a new high-octane standard, and Stanlow – guided by the Shell research facility at Thornton – was at the forefront of this effort. A new plant to manufacture high-octane jet fuel was built by Shell at Heysham.⁶ The entire operation of the Petroleum Board was run out of the Shell-Mex and BP Ltd offices on the Strand in the heart of London, directed by Sir Andrew Agnew, chairman of Shell Transport and Trading, and a key figure in the Shell group of companies.

At noon on 1 December 1939 Captain A.R. Hicks checked the position of his vessel, Shell’s San Calisto oil tanker, as it headed into the Thames Estuary.⁷ There was a deafening explosion. Leaning over the chart table Hicks had the sensation of the amidships being lifted bodily, and then the ship plunging down by the bow. A few moments later a second mine detonated, and a more violent explosion drove a huge column of water up through the shattered hull and afterdeck. Six men were killed instantly. Another six were wounded. This was the first of Shell’s tankers to be sunk.⁸

By the following spring the shipping lanes through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal were closed to Allied tankers due to Axis attacks, so oil imports from Iran stopped almost entirely. Refined products and not crude oil were shipped across the Atlantic from the US, Caribbean and South America.⁹ The tankers had been requisitioned by the state, painted with camouflage and coordinated by the Trade Control Committee, once again under the chairmanship of Sir Andrew Agnew.¹⁰ By the end of the war 87 Shell vessels had been lost and a further 50 seriously damaged.¹¹ Fifty Anglo-Iranian tankers were sunk, claiming the lives of 657 sailors.¹² Almost half of both companies’ fleets were destroyed.

It was Anglo-Iranian tanker crews that braved the U-boats of the Atlantic to deliver oil to Avonmouth and Shell workers who laboured under the threat of bombardment at Stanlow. It was Shell-Mex and BP staff who oversaw the supply, by pipeline, rail and road tanker, of fuel to RAF Spitfire crews at airfields across Britain. All of these men – and women – were employed by the companies, but they were under the command of the British state. As the historian of BP writes, ‘The machinery of wartime control expanded until it was so complete that the seam between the company, other oil firms and the government seemed scarcely to exist at all.’¹³

* * *

In October 1934 the chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, Sir Henri Deterding,¹⁴ stayed with Hitler for four days at the head of Germany’s private retreat, Berchtesgaden,¹⁵ 20 months after the latter had come to power. The meeting was reported in the New York Times, as was Deterding’s aim to secure a monopoly for Shell over petrol distribution within the Reich for ‘a long period of years’. There were more American consular reports the following year stating that Shell were aiming ‘to obtain a monopoly in Germany’ and that Deterding had offered a major oil loan to the Nazi government to facilitate this agreement.¹⁶,¹⁷

Germany provided the strongest market in Europe for oil products between 1933 and 1939 with the largest growth in aviation fuel, partly on account of the rearmament of the Luftwaffe. BP had 9.6 per cent of the market and Shell 22.1 per cent, with Standard Oil¹⁸ holding 26.1 per cent.¹⁹ Just as the Shell parent group operated in the UK via its subsidiary Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, so in Germany it worked through the company Rhenania-Ossag. Between 1932 and 1938 this Shell arm in the Reich increased in turnover from 180 million Reichsmarks to 500 million Reichsmarks and in staff from almost 6,000 to 10,000 – a more rapid growth than their UK operations experienced.²⁰

During the 1930s business in Germany, including both Anglo-Iranian and Shell, was increasingly dominated by Nazi ideology. In places this was embraced. The Shell company Rhenania-Ossag adopted anti-Semitic policies, with Jewish members of the board being forced to resign two and half years before this was demanded by the Nuremberg Laws.²¹,²² This would have required the consent of the Shell Group board, upon which sat Sir Andrew Agnew.²³ These changes took place not only at the level of senior executives but all the way through the company at drilling rigs, oil terminals, refineries, distribution depots and petrol stations. The nature of the Nazi regime was well understood by Shell and Anglo-Iranian both in Germany and outside it. This was a time when concentration camps, such as Dachau and Buchenwald, were operational and the rule ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Table
• List of Tracks
• Prologue: The Last Living Rose
• PART I: 1940–1979
• PART II: 1979–2008
• PART III: 2008–2020
• Epilogue: The Commonwealth of Wind
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index