STRAIT-ON FOR OIL

Notes from PCAA's exhibition: Penicuik Looking Back, organised with Penicuik Historical Society and Midlothian Council in May 1997 at the Cowan Institute (Penicuik Town Hall).

Scotland's oil production began in the 1850s with James 'Paraffin' Young's first works producing oil from the coal-like Torbaneite mineral deposits near Bathgate. Around the world, oil was desperately needed for lighting and lubrication, the whaling levels of the 1840's could not be sustained, and vegetable sources could not keep up with the demand either. James Young's new process seemed to have developed just at the right time. But soon the American exploitation of natural oil reserves would begin. The new sources in the USA, with oil virtually on tap, looked set to squash the fledgling Scottish oil industry, which was finding the rich paraffin coals needed for its raw material increasingly expensive. It was then that the work of a Midlothian pioneer William Young (no relation of James) put Scotland's oil industry back on a competitive footing and allowed it to survive for nearly another hundred years.

William Young's big step forward was in demonstrating efficient ways of refining from unpromising and cheap mineral shale deposits, once regarded as mere colliery waste. His technical brilliance allowed Britain to maintain an oil industry on home territory and helped to secure a vital part of the Royal Navy's oil requirements in the years of its worldwide Imperial duties.

The Callyr Inn on the road from Penicuik to Edinburgh was once the local office of the Clippens Oil Company. And from the area nearby, products like ÎRoyal Standard Lamp Oil', ÎSunlight Oil', and ÎTaylor's Paraffine' were among the thousands of gallons of oil and oil products that went around the world from the villages north of Penicuik, all as a result of local inventiveness, hard labour, and refining skill. Royal Standard Oil, sold in Edinburgh 150 years ago through Grays of George Street, had been an early (and briefly worldwide) brand. It may have prompted the choice of name in America of Standard Oil (Esso) a firm which was later to dominate the industry as world oil output overtook the wildest dreams of the early producers.

William Young was born in Selkirk in 1842 where his father John Young (ÎJock the Genius') was manager of the recently built gasworks. William's mother, Mary Clapperton, was the daughter of Galashiels radical and co-operator William Clapperton. The family soon moved to Dalkeith, where John Young was appointed to run the town's gasworks in Buccleuch Street. As eldest son, William became apprenticed to a plumber. He showed a lot of skill in inventive craftsmanship, working out effective ways of forming lead pipes. His older sister Mary married an Orkney man, George Cusiter, the teacher in charge of the school beside the gasworks. George helped William develop an early form of gas meter in collaboration with Milne & Company of Canongate, Edinburgh, who made much of the equipment for the Edinburgh Gas Works behind the Tolbooth there. Then, while still a very young man, William was appointed manager of the new Lasswade Gasworks in Goat Brae.

William's inventiveness led to trials at his Lasswade gasworks to see if he could produce oil and gas from colliery waste. Soon he was able to take up the idea in a bigger way at Whitehill Colliery, Rosewell, where the proprietor Archibald Hood was prepared to let young William experiment and where more oil was produced from unpromising material. By now, William's father John Young, who had been increasingly called on to ride the railway expresses from Eskbank to Lancashire and South Wales as a consultant, moved away from Dalkeith to take up a post advising the Wigan Coal and Iron Company. George Cusiter gave up the Buccleuch School to take over as Dalkeith Gas Manager, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. Encouraged by George, young William found a new scientific and industrial backer in Peter Brash of Seafield who was interested in chemical technology and developed artificial fertiliser production at works in the Leith and Portobello areas. It was Brash who enabled William to attend meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and meet some of the leading scientific minds of the day.

As William Young began to devote more and more of his interest to oil, the Lasswade gas proprietors felt that their young manager was not giving the business his wholehearted attention. They were not prepared to allow further experiments at the works. William chose to leave rather than accept this. Soon he was carrying out a series of experiments at the various concerns associated with Peter Brash - the Îsecret' works at Magdalene Bridge, Joppa, and at Straiton where extensive beds of shale were encountered by the company quarrying of limestone for fertiliser and building work. Some of the big Straiton lime kilns can still be seen overlooking Burdiehouse on the Penicuik to Edinburgh road.

For the next forty years, William Young brought out a succession of oil and gas patents which revolutionised the industry in Scotland and allowed every ounce of value to be extracted from unpromising shale. From his house at Seafield Villa at Bilston, and later at Priorsford, Peebles and Harehope Farm in the Meldons, William worked for the technical advancement of the industry. He was chiefly associated with the Clippens Oil Company of Paisley, the Oakbank Oil company of Midcalder and the Midlothian Oil Company of Straiton. But all the Scottish shaleworks and refineries benefited as their engineers carried improvements forward little by little. And this influence spread worldwide through the work of Scottish engineers and enterprises like the Burmah Oil Company.

William Young died in 1904 leaving Harehope to the people of Peebles as a sanatorium. His former assistant, George Beilby, was knighted and became FRS, while Arthur Balfour, the fuel and defence conscious prime minister, regretted the lack of popular recognition for his countrymen's technical achievements. During the 1914-18 War the Scottish shaleworks were amalgamated with government backing as Scottish Oil Agency, which joined Burmah's offshoot the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to become eventually BP. The shalemines and oilworks at Straiton did not survive to this inheritance, though the miners' houses still stand. Plagued by water in the workings and with legal action threatened by the Edinburgh Water Trustees whose pipeline ran overhead, the works were one of the industry's early closures. Ultimately all shale workings in Scotland stopped in the nineteen sixties. Straiton may have ceased to be important for oil, but Calor Gas kept a presence there for many years. And it is maybe not surprising that the veteran locomotive "Penicuik" (now preserved in Alnwick, Northumberland) which once did duty at the papermills by Penicuik Station, was powered not by coal, but by oil.