Review of: Oilwork: The North Sea Diaries, by Sue Jane Taylor (Birlinn, £14.99)
FOR a brief decade from 1973, it looked like the North Sea oil boom might transform the UK economy. Black gold was being pumped out of the continental shelf in ever increasing quantities, creating billions of pounds for successive Chancellors of the Exchequer.
The latter day gold rush had already transformed many Highland communities, and seemed to provide Scotland and the wider country with the opportunity to slough off its post-imperial, post-industrial blues. One of the underlying themes of artist Sue Jane Taylor’s book Oilwork: North Sea Diaries, is how this once-in-a-millennium chance for economic rebirth was squandered.
In sharp contrast to the more canny Norwegians, successive UK governments just wanted the quickest financial hit they could get. They were prepared to sell off many of the country’s valuable exploration and production licenses, often too cheaply, to US firms who could get the stuff out of the ground as fast as possible.
The last thing on the Westminster government’s mind – as the recently released 1974 dossier written by former Scottish Office economist Gavin McCrone made clear – was to properly husband this precious new resource, which would have only provided fodder for the resurgent Scottish Nationalist cause.
McCrone admitted in his dossier that oil presented the opportunity to transform Scotland into one of Europe’s strongest economies with “embarrassingly” high fiscal surpluses.
But Taylor’s book – which blends a coffee table art format with excerpts from her North Sea diaries – does not focus on the macroeconomic issues. It’s a personal memoir, graced with her own photos, sketches and paintings, and interspersed with poems by the likes of Norman MacCaig, George Gunn and Iain Crichton-Smith as well as historical commentary from pioneering trade unionist Ronnie McDonald.
Taylor, a feisty young artist who was fresh out of the Slade School of Art in the mid-1980s, profiles some of the characters who peopled the rigs and other installations. Between them, they made it possible to bring in a peak of 2.62 million barrels crude per day from scores of rigs, and from hundreds of metres under the North Sea.
Brandishing her camera and sketchbook, Taylor braved force nine gales and very severe conditions to spend much of the late 1980s and early 1990s on North Sea oil installations.
But when she first sought to gain access to the rigs, Taylor met with resistance. She admits she had three disadvantages – being a woman, an artist and wanting to draw oil rigs. The oil firms’ PR managers in their plush London offices could not understand why a young female artist should have any desire to do such a thing. Wouldn’t she have preferred to do something safe and predictable – like going to paint the Mediterranean?
Taylor persisted, and despite her seeming frailty was extremely willing, even thrilled, to be tossed about on the deck of an oil supply vessel and to live in cramped and smelly quarters aboard North Sea rigs – where she was subjected to all the predictable sexist taunts.
Taylor brilliantly captures the Klondike feel of the early days of North Sea oil. The allure of extraordinary riches attracted some wild characters to the onshore fabrication yards at Kishorn, Nigg and Ardesier.
Her sketches of the enormous upended rigs that were built there are reminiscent of the architectural works of Italian printmaker Giambettista Piranesi. But by the time Taylor reached the hot spots of the early oil boom, some were already beginning to look forlorn.
“It brought to mind the very transient quality of the gold rush experience in the north,” she writes. She contrasts this with Fort George – the military complex built by the Hanoverians to subdue the Highland Scots after Culloden “and still very much in use today”.
But the most important figures in the book are the ordinary workers, almost all men, who made the miraculous exploitation of this precious resource possible.
Taylor’s remarkable ability to empathise is no more apparent than during her visits to BP’s Forties field in 1986-87.
The drawings and paintings she made here, seemingly influenced by the industrial artist Stanley Spencer, capture the sometimes melancholic life of the offshore oilman. Tea Time Offshore, for example, depicts a solitary worker nursing a red mug as he stares vacantly into the middle distance. Pornographic images adorn the walls behind him.
He could be thinking of loved ones back home, or perhaps reflecting on the harsh realities of working in an environment where elemental forces and the ingenuity of technology make for a sometimes lethal cocktail. Elsewhere an offshore worker is quoted as saying: “Platforms and rigs eat at men’s souls. Half your life is spent away from home; you have two lives in one.”
Taylor is awestruck by the incredible feats of engineering that went into extracting oil from the sea bed. But she cannot hide her distaste for some of the companies which so profited from it, particularly in her commentary on the Piper Alpha disaster, for which she created the unofficial memorial sculpture. The tragedy haunts her still.
Taylor had spent time on the rig a year prior to the disaster, befriending many of those 167 people who would later lose their lives. Soon after the inferno, she describes how Occidental Petroleum, the rig’s owner at the time, sought to prevent her touring exhibition Oil Worker Scotland from seeing the light of day.
She was invited to “name her price” so Occidental could buy up all the works in it. Taylor believes that the US company was “looking for evidence of any kind which might be held against the company and make them liable in a future enquiry”.
“The company had never before shown any interest in my work but [there was now] a minor potential threat I might keep the name of Piper Alpha alive in the public eye . . . . I was stunned by their attitude to me.”
To Taylor’s credit, she resisted the US firm’s heavy-handed tactics and her Oil Worker Scotland show opened at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre in 1989 and was seen in 12 additional venues around the UK.
Just like this book, it played a key part in enabling us to recognise the immense contribution of – and sometimes the ultimate price paid by – so many ordinary workers in ensuring the country could keep its national accounts firmly in the black.
Her book is also a timely reminder that a less short-termist approach from UK powers that be could have made the story of North Sea Oil a longer and happier one.
This book review was published in he Sunday Herald on 23 October 2005