WITH energy companies being allowed to begin drilling in the controversial Rosebank oil field off the coast of Shetland, we look back to the earliest days of the 'black gold' that is North Sea oil.
IT was, said the Queen, "a day of outstanding significance in the history of the United Kingdom".
Watched by eminent figures including Labour’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and company executives who had played key roles in Britain's new role as an oil-producing power, the monarch threw a switch that enabled the first oil to be piped ashore from the North Sea to B.P.’s refinery at Grangemouth.
The ceremony took place on Monday, November 3, 1975, in a vast, specially-designed marquee at Dyce, near Aberdeen, the control centre of the pipeline between B.P.’s Forties Field and the refinery, 237 miles away.
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“Auspiciousness and mutual congratulations hung over the aristocratic event like cigar smoke”, wrote the Glasgow Herald’s energy correspondent, Hugh Cochrane. Wilson made a speech in which he said that North Sea oil would lead to a new industrial revolution in Britain and that Scotland would be one of the areas to benefit most. A typing error, however, led him to say that the reserves in the British sector of the North Sea had been valued at £2,000 million – he had meant to say £200 billion.
As the champagne flowed in Dyce, 1,300 workers on the first of the four Forties platforms, far out in the North Sea, were looking forward to a special celebration meal.
The first oil in the North Sea had been discovered in September 1969 by the Sea Quest drilling barge in what was then known as the Montrose field. Engineer Brendan McKeown, keen to prove the discovery was genuine, filled a pickle jar from the rig’s canteen and filled it with oil. Back in Aramco’s office in Great Yarmouth, his boss, Mitch Watt, poured it into an ashtray, gave it a cursory sniff and set it alight. "That's it. It's oil," he said.
If oil companies had been despairing of finding meaningful oil reserves in the North Sea, the Sea Quest’s success alerted them to genuine possibilities.
On October 20, 1970, it was reported that, thanks again to Sea Quest, B.P. had struck oil, 110 miles east-north-east of Aberdeen, in what was believed to be its biggest discovery so far. Tests had shown a flow-rate of about 4,700 barrels a day.
The SNP, however, had been quick to latch onto possibilities of a transformative, long-term windfall for Scotland. Even before the news of the new discovery, James McGugan, SNP candidate for North Angus and Mearns in the forthcoming general election in June 1970, said that Scotland should get its fair share of the prosperity for any North Sea oil finds.
“There have been rumours”, he said, “that the oil which lies off our coast may be piped to England. The oil is our right and the right of Norway, our nearest North Sea neighbour… The Scottish Treasury will find the income from the oil fields most useful in developing our country”.
The election saw Ted Heath sweeping Harold Wilson out of power. The SNP ended up with just one MP: even Winnie Ewing, the darling of the nationalists' Hamilton by-election of November 1967, lost her seat. Exhausted, the SNP’s campaign director, Gordon Wilson, gave up his party work in 1971 and took time out to do other things. It was during this period that he hit upon the idea of campaigning on North Sea oil.
“This produced, from the graphic artist Julian Gibb, the slogan ‘It’s Scotland’s oil”, noted the former Glasgow Herald editor, Arnold Kemp, in his book, The Hollow Drum. “This was a stroke of political imagination.
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“… The roots of modern [Scottish] nationalism are to be found in industrial decline, relatively high unemployment, the softening of the Tory vote and what might be called a general sense of anomie or spiritual discomfort”, added Kemp. “If the Sixties had been a seeding and a flowering then the oil campaign was the sunshine that made for a vigorous bloom. It lent credibility to the SNP by removing many of the economic fears associated with secession or separation”.
The SNP steadily developed the 'Scotland’s oil' idea, with campaign posters and political pressure, the aim being to persuade the electorate that the new oil wealth could do so much for an independent Scotland. (Poster slogans ranged from 'To London with Love' to 'England Expects Scotland's Oil' and 'Rich Scots or poor British'. Wilson would later say that the posters caught the public imagination and added to the party's support, culminating in the winning of 11 seats in October 1974).
In January 1972 SNP president Dr Robert McIntyre accused Heath of pillaging Scotland’s natural resources on a shocking scale, after Heath had refused to consider channelling revenues from offshore oil directly into Scottish capital projects. Heath predictably gave him short shrift.
That same year, SNP leader Willie Wolfe asserted that total revenues from oil in the Scottish sector of the North Sea could reach £800 million a year by 1980; and, in a pamphlet entitled ‘Oil, the key to Scotland’s future’. the Scottish Liberal Party suggested splitting oil royalties evenly between a Scottish government and the Liberals’ proposed federal UK government. (Other parties were also promising to divert substantial oil revenues in Scotland’s direction). John McGrath’s play, The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, first performed by the 7:84 company in 1973, was, observes Kemp, “the theatrical expression of contemporary nationalism, and it struck a deep chord in the public mind”.
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By this time, numerous other oil fields had been established in the North Sea, including the Brent and Cormorant fields, and others yet were in the process of being explored. In late 1972 one authoritative report ranked the North Sea oil and gas fields within the top 15 of major world reserves.
The discovery of huge stores of oil in the North Sea was fortuitous from Britain’s point of view, given the serious economic impact of the OPEC oil crisis of 1973-74, when oil prices had quadrupled. The country had also been battered by severe industrial unrest during Heath’s time in office – a miners’ strike over pay had led to power cuts and a three-day week in the winter of 1973. Inflation remained wretchedly high, too.
Heath went to the country in February 1974, on the critical issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’ One of the many key issues during the election campaign centred on Harold Wilson’s pledge that a Labour government would bring every aspect of North Sea oil production under State control.
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Labour won that election but was short of an overall majority and needed to call, and win, a second election, in October 1974. Thus a victorious Wilson, and Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, Energy Secretary Tony Benn, and Scottish Secretary Willie Ross, were on hand to see the Queen opening a chapter in British history that November day at Dyce.
Matt Linning, B.P.’s manager of offshore developments, said with pride: “B.P., with experience in the Middle East second to none, plus achievements in Alaska – the most northerly environment ever tackled by the oil industry – are now first in exploiting the North Sea”.
But some voices had already been raised about what they saw as the adverse impact of North Sea oil. Speaking in May 1974, the Rev William B. Johnston, convener of the Church and Nation Committee, told the Kirk's General Assembly that the oil had become the great divider in Scotland.
"It divides," he said, "men into spenders and hoarders; it determines conservationists and developers; it even defines the division between a political nationalist and a political unionist; it divides communities with haves and have-nots". Some viewed oil as the great saviour of our national affairs. To others, it was the "great black polluting streak".
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