by Andy Beckett
On the afternoon of 2 November 1975, a special train arranged by BP left King’s Cross station in London for Aberdeen. On board were politicians, civil servants and industrialists invited by the company to the official opening of the first oil pipeline to Britain, from the Forties field in the North Sea. The journey did not go as planned. Before the train could reach Scotland, a crane collapsed across the East Coast main line. The train had to be diverted via Carlisle.
In Aberdeen, a Scottish nationalist group called the Tartan Army was threatening to disrupt the inauguration ceremony. Since 1973, there had been successful bomb attacks on overland sections of the Forties oil pipeline, for which the Tartan Army had claimed responsibility. With Harold Wilson, the Queen and Prince Philip due to take part in the official opening, the city was readied for one of the largest deployments in the history of Scottish policing.
But the day of the ceremony dawned blue and perfect. The royal family arrived at Aberdeen station at eleven and were driven west through the city towards Dyce, a booming suburb near the airport. There, on a large area of grass next to a new dual carriageway and BP’s new Aberdeen headquarters, a dazzling white marquee had been erected. Its canopy, said to be the biggest ever made, was like some desert mirage in the flinty northern air, an infinity of Arabian swoops and diagonals. Inside the marquee there was a heating system, a lake of red carpet and, up on a pedestal, a towering, angular model of one of the Forties oil rigs. With the light coming through the canopy, and additional stage lights, everything and everyone in the tent, even the tired grey faces of Wilson and his ministers, was lent a clean, futuristic, vaguely uplifting glow. Outside, a crowd of oil workers waved Union Jacks, specially provided for the purpose, as the Queen and Prince Philip drove by. Then their Rolls-Royce came right into the marquee and braked smoothly to a halt, looking suddenly as old-fashioned as a horse-drawn carriage in its new white surroundings.
Wilson addressed the rows of dignitaries, his voice shrunken but faintly triumphant:
It is not often that one can point to a particular current event … and, without the benefit of hindsight, identify it as being of major long-term significance; ‘the turning point’ beloved of historians and journalists. Today’s opening by the Queen of the Forties Field is one such occasion … It can truly be said to mark … the beginning of the end of our dependency on overseas supplies of energy.
Afterwards, in a spotless control room in the BP headquarters, with the Tartan Army nowhere in evidence, the Queen pushed a gold-plated button. A nearby screen began to flash. Along a transparent reconstruction of a section of the pipeline, a black mass began to move, inch by inch.
That evening, despite the chill which the heating had never quite banished, there was a party in the marquee to celebrate. ‘It was one of the best parties I ever went to,’ remembered a retired BP man I met in Dyce three decades later. ‘There was a dance. They did it in style.’ He nodded across his back garden towards the grass where the marquee had stood. He had helped put it up. ‘Those were the days,’ he said with a brightness in his narrow eyes, ‘the early oil days, when everything was new.’ Then he looked back at the window frame he had been carefully painting when I arrived, at his blocky but lovingly preserved mid-seventies house. He had lived in it ever since then, he said, ever since he had left farming as a young man and first come to Aberdeen to work in oil. Then he cut the reminiscence short and waved his paintbrush. ‘Now be quick with your other questions,’ he said, Aberdonian curtness returning. ‘I’ve got to do this now because it’s going to rain.’
Oil was first extracted on a small scale in Britain by the Romans. In Scotland, a slightly more substantial oil industry was created in the eighteen fifties around the laborious mining and processing of oil shale, or oil-bearing rock. This industry, which preceded by several years the better-known pioneering of the modern oil business in the US, survived until the nineteen sixties. In England, hundreds of oil wells were drilled between the First World War and the fifties, mostly in the Midlands and mostly with limited success. None of this land-based activity had a significant effect on the economy or on most Britons’ perceptions of their country’s important natural assets. As the post-war Labour politician Nye Bevan put it, Britain was ‘a lump of coal, surrounded by fish’.
Then, in 1959, a huge underwater gas field was discovered off the Dutch coast. Since the geology beneath much of the North Sea was thought to be similar, a search for gas began in British waters. In 1965, it was found near the Humber Estuary. Further major British gas finds followed; geologists and oil companies, knowing that gas and oil deposits, formed in similar ways as ancient layers of rock trapped the decayed remains of prehistoric plants and animals, were often located close together, and knowing that oil was the more valuable of the two commodities, began to look for North Sea oil as well. In September 1969, a BP drilling rig chartered by the American Oil Company (Amoco) was prospecting 150 miles east of Aberdeen when it struck oil. ‘None of us were prepared,’ the on-board geologist Brendon MacKeown told the Scotsman.
We thought we might find some gas or at the most watery oil traces, so I didn’t have any stainless-steel containers. I had to clean out an empty pickle jar from the mess hall to collect the sample. It was what we call sweet oil …[A colleague] poured it into an ashtray on his desk and set it alight and it burned well. But unfortunately the heat caused the ashtray to crack and the bloody stuff spilled all over the floor.
Britain’s rights over such underwater discoveries had only recently and belatedly been established. In 1964, after more than half a decade of Whitehall inertia, Britain had followed twenty-one other nations and ratified the United Nations Continental Shelf Convention, which permitted countries to explore and exploit natural resources found beyond their immediate coastal seabeds. Where two or more countries bordered the same continental shelf, as in the North Sea, the convention stated that the seabed should be divided by a boundary that followed the midway points between the national coastlines in question. Britain’s long eastern seashore, running north to south down one entire side of the North Sea, with large eastward bulges in Norfolk and Scotland and the broad scatter of the Orkney and Shetland islands even further to the north and east, gave it a significant advantage, therefore, over the other nations hoping to secure windfalls from under the North Sea. When the sea was divided into national oil ‘sectors’, Britain’s was by far the biggest in area, a great diamond of seabed and water, its grey surface glittering in good weather, stretching from Dover almost to the Arctic Circle.
For a country whose industrial revolution and long economic supremacy had been due, in large part, to the discovery and exploitation within its borders of another mineral – coal – North Sea oil seemed to offer another momentous opportunity. For a country whose economy, and whose heavy industries and northern territories in particular, had for decades been in seemingly terminal and accelerating decline, this opportunity seemed to have arrived in exactly the right place and at exactly the right time. Britain had long seafaring and engineering traditions; it had a national gift, at least according to its patriotic self-image, for mechanical improvisation and ingenuity; and it had many large ports and shipyards, which were increasingly available for work as much of their old custom disappeared to continental Europe and the Far East. Britain even had, at the start of the North Sea era, an existing industry making oil rigs and oil pipelines for use in other countries’ offshore oilfields. Everything seemed in place for an oil boom.
In July 1973, the Labour MP and oil enthusiast Laurance Reed gave a lecture at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, which was published as The Political Consequences of North Sea Oil Discoveries. Speaking before the oil crisis made the deposits vastly more valuable, he predicted: ‘North Sea Oil arrives in time to save us from relegation to the third division … The 1980s will be Britain’s decade. We shall become one of the most influential of nations.’ The oil, he went on, would end Britain’s dependence on the US and the Middle East, and it would pr
ovide Britain with a new empire, a chance for expansion comparable to the American ‘opening of the West’. During the early and mid-seventies, forecasts like Reed’s were common. A succession of huge oilfields were discovered in the British sector, estimates of the North Sea’s total reserves surged accordingly, and all of this was reported by newspapers in the giddiest language. In the February 1974 election campaign, Wilson declared: ‘By 1985 the Labour Secretary of State for Energy will be chairman of OPEC.’
Even Ted Heath in his final weeks in office, hemmed in by the miners, the three-day week and the economic crisis, was often preoccupied by the promise of North Sea oil. ‘One thought, “There was a solution to our problems,”’ he told me. Naturally, he and the other seventies prime ministers also thought about the windfall in party political terms. ‘If we’d won the [February 1974] election,’ he continued, his voice even lower and gloomier than usual, ‘we’d have got it all.’
The discovery of the oil, and the dramatic economic benefits and rises in tax revenues it was expected to bring, had a profound influence on the British governments between 1970 and 1979: on their reluctance to abandon the old way of doing things; on their strong desire, even by the standard of governments in general, to cling to power. If you were in office when the oil came ashore in decisive quantities, the feeling persisted at Westminster, most of the difficulties and dilemmas of the British crisis might melt away. But when would that liberating moment be? Strikingly, even the boldest North Sea oil advocates of the early seventies tended to talk about the eighties as Britain’s promised land. They may have been trying to give their rhetoric a faintly science-fiction glossiness. Or they may have known that getting the oil was going to be a challenge.
The North Sea was, and is, one of the roughest and most unpredictable seas in the world. Weather systems approach it from several directions. Its waters are frigid, deep and murky compared to those in the places where offshore oil drilling was pioneered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as coastal California and the Gulf of Mexico. Its seabed is sandy and shifting. Its tides are large. It is prone to protracted storms, when 100-mile-an-hour winds are quite common and waves are regularly 70 feet tall. It is ringed but not sheltered by land masses, which can cause its currents and tides, as Bryan Cooper and T. F. Gaskell put it in North Sea Oil: The Great Gamble, to ‘slop about like the liquid in a tea cup’. At other times, there is a dangerous calm: impenetrable mists descend in minutes and linger for days. In winter, which can last for more than half the year, there are often only a few hours of daylight anyway.
When I arrived at the heliport in Dyce in 2007 to take a flight to an oil rig, it was mid-September and a warm sun was shining, but the first storm of the winter was on its way. In the departure lounge, which was full of heavy-set men in their forties with glum expressions and restlessly bobbing feet, I picked up a discarded newspaper to look at the weather forecast; where the detail for north-east Scotland should have been, there was a carefully torn hole. Elsewhere in the paper there was a report that three men had been killed in uncertain circumstances the previous day, in an accident on a ship supplying North Sea oil rigs.
Before the flight, we put on rubber-sealed ‘immersion suits’ over our clothes in case the helicopter crashed into the sea. Officially, the suits would insulate you against the waves for a few, potentially crucial minutes; unofficially, one of the rig workers muttered to me as we pulled them on, they were known as ‘body bags’. Out on the tarmac, our helicopter looked patched-up and old. After we had boarded, bulkily strapped and squeezed into our seats, earplugs in against the rotor din, it took the ground crew several tries to get the passenger door to close. Then the helicopter was quickly above Aberdeen, tidy and clean in the sunshine, and we headed out to sea.
For a few minutes the water was a benign Mediterranean blue. Then the first clouds came rushing in beneath us. The sea quickly turned steel grey, and the helicopter began to dip and lunge in the headwind. Rain crackled against the windows. The sea turned blue-black and disappeared. It was only mid-afternoon, but outside the helicopter the light was nearly gone. Inside the cold, draughty passenger cabin, no one spoke; most of the oilmen, veterans of hundreds of flights like this, sat with their heads in paperbacks or their eyes tight closed. After an hour and a half, the pilot spoke over the intercom: the weather at the rig was only ‘fifty-fifty’, he said; if he could not manage a landing, we would be flying straight back to Aberdeen. For another hour we battered through the clouds, then a ragged hole opened up in them below us, there was the tiny flame of a rig’s gas flare in the murk, and the helicopter dropped erratically towards the waves.
Down on the rig’s helipad, the wind was almost enough to flatten me. The air was wet and raw. Beyond the edge of the helipad, which had no parapet, heaving inky waves seemed to be advancing towards the rig from all directions. Otherwise, the horizons were empty, alien as a moonscape. Steep metal-mesh steps led down from the helipad to the main deck; through them I could see more waves, spitting and clawing at the legs of the rig a hundred feet below. I walked unsteadily down. When I finally stepped into the fuggy refuge of the rig’s recreation room for the welcome briefing, I noticed there was only one tiny window with a sea view, and that all the chairs were turned away from it. ‘The sea’s up quite a bit tonight, then Tuesday through Thursday,’ the man giving the briefing mentioned in passing. ‘Waves of five to eight or nine metres.’
The North Sea has been familiar to trawlermen for centuries; but in the late sixties and early seventies little was known about how the far larger and less nimble vessels required for extracting oil, and the great numbers of non-seafarers involved, would cope with prolonged exposure to this unrelenting world. Oil rigs, unlike ships, could not head for the nearest port when the weather turned too perilous. The only fixed man-made structures already in the North Sea oilfields, underwater telegraph cables, had been known to shift half a mile in a storm. On 27 December 1965, there was a grim early example of the hazards Britain’s new offshore industry was likely to encounter. Forty miles out to sea, the BP gas-drilling rig Sea Gem, a crudely converted barge, suddenly suffered the collapse of two of its supporting legs. The rig capsized and sank, throwing many of its crew into the water. Thirteen men died. Only the lucky presence of a cargo ship nearby ensured the toll was not greater.
To draw oil up through thousands of feet of rock and seawater; to pump it ashore via hundreds of miles of under-sea pipeline; and to do it in such a hostile environment, on a mass scale, for decades to come – all this required the invention and production of a whole new range of technologies, from giant semi-submersible rigs to tiny underwater cameras. During the early seventies, not enough British companies were able or willing to seize the opportunity, and much of this technology had to be imported. Professor Alex Kemp of Aberdeen University, a leading authority on North Sea oil since the beginning, told me: ‘Bits of equipment were flown here straight from Texas to save time.’
Yet as the decade went on, British businesses started to catch up. Between 1976 and 1979, a quarter of all the country’s manufacturing investment was North Sea-related. In effect, a new heavy industry was being created – after a long period when such enterprises had been increasingly thought of as doomed Victorian relics. Patriotic comparisons began to be made between the equipping of the oilfields and the American space programme. ‘We flew over various pipe-laying barges etc,’ recorded the usually downbeat Ronald McIntosh in his diary on 23 May 1975. ‘The scale of the North Sea operations is very impressive and cheers me up every time I see it.’
One area of particular official pride, which was at least partly justified, was the design and assembly of the biggest, most expensive items of offshore equipment of all: the production platforms. These blunted Eiffel Towers of metal plate and mesh, as tall as skyscrapers and as heavy as Second World War battleships, were best suited to local fabrication, since they had to be towed into position in the oilfields. But they were too bulky to be buil
t in a conventional dockyard. Dockyards would have to be built for them, ideally as close to the North Sea as possible. The first to open was at Nigg, a waterfront hamlet just inside the mouth of the Cromarty Firth in the Scottish Highlands. In November 2004, I went to see it.
Driving north-east from Inverness, past white farmhouses, sloping cornfields and the glassy waters of the Firth, it was hard at first to imagine Nigg as an industrial centre of great significance. But as elsewhere in the Highlands, the silence and emptiness hid a lot of history. During both world wars, Nigg Bay had been an important Royal Navy anchorage. There were major military encampments in the area for decades before and afterwards. An aluminium smelter had been erected in 1970.
When the Nigg dry dock was completed in 1972, 1,000 feet long by 600 feet across – ‘the biggest hole in Europe’, according to The Architectural Review – another sudden local boom came with it. ‘I used to travel this road to work at the yard at 3 a.m.,’ my taxi driver told me. ‘There were hundreds of other cars on it. Now you hardly see one.’ He was in his late forties, with a moustache, long hair and slightly melancholy eyes. Seventies-style, he wore faded jeans that matched a short denim jacket. He was from Invergordon, an old navy town a few miles west of Nigg, he said. But in the seventies, ‘There were a lot of Geordie boys up here. Even lads from the south of England. The wages in the yard were probably double the ones for other local jobs. It was good work. You wore earplugs and it was cold, especially when it was snowing. But you were kept so busy, you didn’t feel it much.’