Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  What is largely forgotten is the risk capital that was sunk below the waves before that pickle jar of oil was brought ashore, when there were no guarantees that anything worthwhile would be found. Forgotten, too, are the men who made it happen – corporate dice-rollers backing their hunches, seamen, pilots, geologists, roughnecks and roustabouts, all of them operating beyond the limits of human knowledge in places where informed opinion said wells could not be drilled and helicopters could not fly. In the pioneering days, the North Sea made the Klondike look like a Victorian tea party; the gambles were riskier, the environment more harsh, and the death toll higher – deep-sea divers whose life expectancy matched that of machine-gunners on the Somme, get-rich roughnecks who made more money than the Prime Minister, gung-ho foremen and charge hands whose brief was to get the job done whatever the cost, material or human. New technologies, ingenuity and a willingness to risk everything characterised North Sea oil exploration. To sustain their working colonies up to 200 miles offshore, to provide all their personnel, their drilling equipment, their food, their medical care, no matter how foul the weather, they looked to the helicopter, and on the North Sea, another name for helicopter was Bristow.

  Bristow Helicopters Ltd was there from the start to share the risks and the rewards. By the time the Sea Quest struck oil BHL had sunk close to £4 million into North Sea helicopters and support equipment. The investment was scheduled to pay off on a four-year cycle if oil was found in commercial quantities, but with most oil companies offering one-year contracts there were no guaranteed returns. The customers couldn’t offer longer terms because they might be forced to abandon drilling as a bad job at any time; BHL in turn had to aim for margins on the order of twenty per cent to reduce the risks. It was a relief to everyone when the Sea Quest made that first find, and in the 1970s we were able to negotiate three- and five-year contracts. BHL went on to supply the Sea Quest as she drilled the Montrose and Forties Fields, and when she was moved to Nigeria to drill off Warri for Texaco, Bristows serviced her there, too.

  Just as Air Whaling Ltd had done in the Antarctic, BHL initially operated single-engined helicopters far from land in weather that was rarely tranquil and could change in an instant. Even in the central North Sea, where BHL had begun flying in 1965, waves could top sixty feet and winds of severe gale force nine, storm force ten or even eleven were not unusual in winter. In the northern sectors it was worse. Waves 100 feet high were not unknown, and the winds could be incredible – a gust of 135 mph was recorded in Orkney on a February day in 1969. Fog could be a problem in any season, but in winter the difficulties of providing a helicopter service to schedule were exacerbated by the short periods of daylight. Unlike most of the gas installations off East Anglia the oil rigs were far offshore, and PNR – point of no return – operations were common. That meant that if weather conditions at the rig deteriorated there would not be enough fuel to get back to dry land; when the point of no return was passed, a landing had to be made on the rig come what may. It was obvious to me when we first started supplying the gas rigs that twin-engined helicopters would be required, and that they must be equipped with the most sophisticated instrument-flying and auto-stabilisation systems available at the time. The Westland Wessex 60 was the helicopter of choice. The Sikorsky S61, destined to become the workhorse of the North Sea, was not available in sufficient numbers until later.

  Nor was the North Sea Bristows’ only growth area. When I returned full-time to BHL from British United Airways in 1970 one of my first tasks was to evaluate prospects in Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. Many of the contracts on which the company had been built were beginning to look less secure. Thanks to the oil industry, grinding poverty was a distant memory along the Persian Gulf coast and the era of mud huts was giving way to one of skyscrapers and Rolls-Royces. As these countries became more technically capable, so they increasingly wanted to handle the business of oil support for themselves and were promoting their own helicopter outfits and urging the oil industry to employ them. Contracts in new markets more than compensated for this loss. BHL was the biggest contributor to the profits of the holding company, and as a major shareholder I was seeing twenty-five years of hard work in the helicopter industry pay off handsomely.

  Winning new contracts was my primary responsibility. My style of approaching business was to make a formal approach to drilling and oil company executives, giving them a sales pitch – a brochure about our fleet showing the number of hours flown, at that time completely free of accident, and suggesting we meet at their convenience in London. I believed you had to have more than a formal relationship with these men and their companies; it was on the basis of a personal relationship that they came to trust in one’s ability to deliver a professional service. At the London meeting I would establish what their sporting interests were, and I found that almost all of them – there were a few exceptions at BP and Shell – were interested in shooting. Many were Americans, with a preponderance of Texans. Some, like the Signal Oil contingent, were mad keen on tennis, and Bristows had four debenture tickets to Wimbledon to help improve relations with customers. I played against some of them and became a good tennis player – I had courts installed at Coxland and had professional coaching. Sailing was another relationship-builder. Basil Butler, exploration director of BP, was a sailing man. He kept a yacht at Moody’s on the Hamble where I kept mine, and we would sail together regularly. Very few of the Americans were golfers – my golf was mostly played with Douglas Bader – but the majority liked to shoot. They became known as ‘the Oilies’, a shifting cast of executives who would come to Baynards in groups of half a dozen or so to experience one of the best shoots in Britain.

  My accountant had written to the Inland Revenue to tell them I was developing a shoot, to which members of the oil industry engaged in North Sea oil exploration would be invited. We received a reply saying it was an allowable expense provided a record was kept naming all those who were there. Baynards Park had been laid out very much with shooting in mind, and I went on improving it for twenty years. The shoot identified, generated and tied in more oil company business than virtually anything else I did. The men who came to Baynards became fast friends and remained so long after I left the oil business. Regular guns included Bill Kinney and Corky Frank from Marathon, Bill Schmoe of Conoco, Earl Guitar of Phillips, Charlie Morris of Mobil, Doc Seaman of Ranger Oil, and Ian McCartney and Howard Dalton of Amoco, while executives from Occidental, Texaco, Exxon, Dome, Hamilton Brothers, Signal and Arco all came on occasion. Chevron’s Howard Ewart loved shooting and fishing so much that when he retired he either shot or fished five days a week. Ian McCartney, Amoco’s chief geologist at Yarmouth, had been the first man to discover gas in the North Sea. McCartney was six foot three and fit as a fiddle, but he had an operation on his back and was virtually crippled after it. He took up riding and kept a horse at Baynards, where he’d go out with one of the grooms. Over the years the muscles in his legs started to grow back from the bottom up. His son became a helicopter pilot with Bristows, but after he’d left us was killed flying in Alaska. When Ian went back to Houston as a Vice President, Howard Dalton was left in charge of North Sea oil exploration, and Bristows also worked for Dalton in Egypt. He was an absolute gentleman who turned into a tough son of a bitch when he wanted to make his point. Later he became executive director of British Gas.

  One of the first contracts to come as a result of the shoot was for Texaco. I heard that they were going to drill off Aberdeen and made an appointment to see the man in charge. Texaco had delegated decision-making for helicopter contracts down from Board level to an Aberdeen project manager who had an office in a Portakabin on the dockside. His name was Jim Barber and he was a Texan through and through. He’d come up the hard way, starting out as a driller, and he didn’t seem to have much time for Limeys. When I was finally ushered into his office he was rocking back in his chair with his cowboy boots on the desk, and he was smoking a cheap cigar. In those early days these A
merican managers, Texans almost to a man, looked down on British companies who operated helicopters with names like Whirlwind and Wessex and made it clear they would prefer to do things the way they did them in the Gulf of Mexico. Jim Barber certainly didn’t go out of his way to make me feel comfortable – we didn’t shake hands before, during or after the conversation.

  ‘Whaddaya want?’ he said.

  I made my pitch while he leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry but I can’t bear the smell of that cheap cigar you’re smoking. For heaven’s sake throw it away and have one of my Montecristos.’

  His boots came off the desk and he sat upright as I pulled out my tooled leather case, clipped a cigar for him and handed it over. I lit it for him, and he savoured a few puffs.

  ‘Cheap cigars are a false economy,’ I said. ‘I smoke four or five of these a day.’

  ‘Hell, I couldn’t afford that on my salary,’ he said. It was the longest sentence he’d uttered since I’d walked in.

  On a shelf above his desk was a jar with four or five pheasant feathers stuck in it. I lifted out the longest and studied it. ‘A bird at least three years old,’ I said.

  ‘You know something about hunting?’

  ‘I have one of the finest shoots in England,’ I said. ‘A party could expect to shoot somewhere around 400 birds. Why don’t you come down and shoot with us?’

  ‘Hell, I hunt a lot of quail back in Texas,’ he said. ‘I might just do that.’

  ‘There’d be a mixture of pheasant, partridge and duck,’ I went on.

  ‘Duck, huh?’

  ‘I have the finest duck shoot in England.’ This statement would not perhaps have withstood scrutiny under the Trades Descriptions Act, but Jim Barber was intrigued.

  ‘Say, you’d better put in your contract proposal . . .’

  I left him with another Montecristo to be going on with and walked out thinking what cowboys these American oil executives were. In due course he sent me a bid form, and together with Stan Couchman, my loyal and hard-working cost accountant, I did the costings on the job. We won the Texaco contract.

  Jim Barber came to shoot with us, and he was one of the most ill-disciplined guns I had ever seen, shooting low birds and swinging wildly through the line. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but if you do that again I’m going to have to send you home.’

  ‘Yeah, send the bastard home.’ The speaker was Jim Bustin of Occidental, another Texan and the next gun in line. Bustin and Barber constantly wound each other up – we called them the Terrible Jims. They would set me up, too – on one occasion they brought automatic five-shot guns and blazed away into the empty air until I came storming over to accuse them of ungentlemanly conduct, then laughed themselves into delirium at their own joke. But Barber behaved himself beautifully after that first visit and was always welcome at Baynards. We built up an open and friendly relationship and remained friends as he rose through the ranks at Texaco. Barber married a lovely Hong Kong Chinese lady he called ‘The Dragon’ and sent me letters and postcards long after I’d left Bristows. Jim Bustin retired from Occidental, went back to Houston and started buying up abandoned concessions. He did the same in Sharjah and made himself a lot of money, because a small operator could extract oil without the overheads of a major.

  Charles Morris was head of the aviation department at Mobil, and my children grew up calling him Uncle Charlie. I met him first at an oil industry conference in New York, at which he got blind drunk and could hardly stand up. I put him on a train to his home town in Connecticut but ended up having to travel with him because he was too drunk to know where to get off. His wife thanked me for bringing him home, and shortly after that she walked out. Charlie found a new girlfriend called Juliet, who made a living as a painter, and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He used to spend a lot of time with us in the UK because of Mobil’s North Sea operation, and he became a keen shot and a lifelong friend.

  We never talked business during a shoot, but afterwards we talked of little else. I operated the shoot so we had short lunch breaks and ample time for socialising when shooting stopped. The Oilies knew everything there was to know about North Sea concessions, who was bidding for what, how drilling was going and what helicopter services might be needed. Some were more secretive than others, but in all cases a close personal relationship was a prerequisite to getting useful information. After a shoot we’d play ‘cotton reel snooker’ where you had to pot balls while knocking over a cotton reel on which bets had been placed. There were penalties for going in-off and so forth, and it wasn’t unusual for £150 or more to change hands. The games used to get tense because in shooting, in cotton reel snooker and in life, these were highly competitive men. They were also honourable men who never played me false, and I could rely on them to do what they said they’d do. All they asked of me was that I do the same. They were loyal, reasonable people who appreciated professional service, and if you were loyal and reasonable in return they wouldn’t accept anyone squeezing you out for a couple of hundred dollars.

  I took my shooting very seriously and I suspect I was as competitive as any of them. I’d taken the shotgun I bought in Orkney to be assessed by a gunsmith in Guildford. He set it to one side.

  ‘I’ve got just the guns for you,’ he said. They’re rather special – only twenty-eight inches long. For a man your size it wouldn’t be unusual to have a thirty-inch barrel. There’s something else that’s very unusual about them sir. They’re single trigger, and they’re made by Boss.’

  Even then I knew Boss to be a maker of fine guns. The gunsmith lifted them out of a beautiful handmade leather case, and they were immaculate. At six and three-quarters pounds each they were lighter than most. The numbers checked out – the serial numbers were consecutive – and there wasn’t a spot of corrosion on them.

  ‘They belonged to a gentleman who has died, and his widow left them with us to sell,’ the gunsmith said. ‘I can let you have them for £240.’

  In the 1950s £240 was a significant sum, but I didn’t argue the price. I hadn’t a clue about their value when I bought them, but I expect they’d fetch £24,000 now. I’ve looked after them very well – at the end of every season they’ve gone back to Boss for checking and refurbishment, and I’ve gone through most seasons without a single failure.

  And of course, shooting at Baynards was not solely the province of men in the oil industry. Most of my fellow directors shot with me and had shoots of their own. Nick and Tony Cayzer were frequent guests, and ‘Bill’ Mountain and his son Nicky came often. Sir Ray Brown of Racal was a regular, as was Charlie Hughesden, Lord Hamilton, Charles Forte, Tommy Sopwith, Charles Clore, Harry Hyams, the journalist Harry Chapman Pincher – a man who, uniquely for a journalist in my experience, could get a story straight and keep a confidence – Elliot Cohen, Keith Showering and John Sunley, a scattering of Persian Gulf Sheikhs and Indonesian politicians, military men like Admiral Christopher Bonham Carter and Major General Dare Wilson, and one of my favourite shooting companions, Sir Donald Gosling. Don was an ex-Navy man and had taken part in the wartime landings on the Mediterranean coast of France, where he told me he’d liberated a brothel, which he thought looked a likely spot for a gun emplacement. After the war he built up National Car Parks with his partner Ronald Hobson. They made an unbeatable team, and even when NCP was worth hundreds of millions of pounds they shared the same office and never to my knowledge exchanged a cross word. Don was an enthusiastic and excellent shot; we regularly rented a shoot together with John Sunley at Les Innocentes, south of Madrid, and Don and I often went shooting side by side. Don, too, was highly competitive.

  Charles Clore had a shoot in Shropshire and I went up with Don Gosling. It was absolutely lashing down, and we were togged up in sou’westers and slickers as we struggled to get our guns out of the back of the car. Up came Charles Clore’s bailiff and said to Don:

  ‘Are you a Suffolk
Gosling?’

  ‘No,’ said Don, struggling with his guns.

  ‘Then you must be a Norfolk Gosling,’ said the keeper.

  ‘No,’ said Don, with the rain running down his neck.

  ‘Oh. Well, what Gosling are you?’

  ‘I’m a fucking wet Gosling.’

  The bailiff stomped off in the huff, and we found that rather than drawing for pegs, as was usual, Don and I were stuck out on the wing.

  ‘We’ll never see a bird out here,’ said Don. ‘Charlie Clore offered us a good day’s shooting and we’re going to get wet for nothing.’

  But for some reason, that day virtually all the birds came out on our flank. Gosling and I blazed away, and they fell about us in heaps. Hardly a bird reached the rest of the line. ‘They shall not pass,’ I shouted. The bailiff was livid and we got a ticking off for not letting some birds through for the other guns. Gosling was having none of it. ‘They were low, they were fast, and we shot ’em,’ he said.

  Don talked to Charles Clore about it later and I think he sacked the bailiff. I was luckier with my own gamekeepers – I had one chap, Cliff Shelton, who stayed at Baynards for years and never caused me any problems, although there was one close-run thing when he locked two Cypriot poachers in a disused railway truck and forgot about them for four days. We had to hose the truck out, and I prepared for a degree of police interest that never materialised. Cliff was an ex-Royal Marine who had a way with poachers.