The Broxburn Oil Company: Scotland's Forgotten Oil Boom

Long before anyone drilled for oil in the North Sea, Scotland already had an oil industry, and Broxburn was one of its capitals. The 'Broxburn Oil Co.' design on our boxes is a tribute to a genuinely world-first story: the West Lothian shale oil boom, and the company whose name became shorthand for it. Here is the history behind the label.

The chemist who started it all

The industry began with a Glasgow-born chemist, James Young, who around 1850-51 patented a method of distilling oil, paraffin and wax, first from cannel coal and later from oil-bearing shale. In 1851 he opened what is often called the world's first commercial oil refinery, near Bathgate. The timing was perfect. Factories needed lubricants for their machines, homes wanted clean-burning lamp oil, and the old supply of whale oil could not keep pace with demand. Young grew wealthy enough to help bankroll the African expeditions of his friend David Livingstone, and earned a nickname that stuck for life: 'Paraffin' Young.

When Young's patents expired in 1865, the floodgates opened. Anyone could now 'cook' shale for oil, and across West Lothian a rush began that has fairly been compared to the Klondike gold fever of the same era.

Broxburn becomes 'Shaleopolis'

Few places were transformed as completely as Broxburn. In the 1860s the entrepreneur Robert Bell opened a shale mine and refinery in what had been a quiet farming village, and within a short time it was pouring out around 10,000 gallons of crude oil a day. Mines, retorts and oil works sprang up across the surrounding fields. In the Broxburn area alone, some 650 retorts were in operation or being built in 1864-65, and workers poured in from all over Scotland and, above all, from Ireland, an influx that shaped the character and community of the town for generations. Broxburn's population leapt from a few hundred to around 5,900 by 1891, and people started calling it 'Shaleopolis'.

The Broxburn Oil Company

The famous Broxburn Oil Company was floated in 1877 with capital of £180,000, taking over the works and shale leases that Robert Bell had built up. Bell became its chairman, and the company grew into one of the largest operations in the entire field. Its crude oil works stood at Albyn, while its refinery, candleworks and sulphuric acid plant were built at Greendykes. Crucially, it did not just make oil. From the shale and its by-products came paraffin, lamp oil, lubricating oil, wax, naphtha, candles, soap, sulphuric acid and even ammonium sulphate fertiliser. Very little was wasted, and the products were shipped well beyond Scotland.

Hard, dangerous work

Behind the profits was brutal labour. Shale was mined from shafts and tunnels that could run hundreds of metres deep, hauled to the surface, and roasted in towering retorts to drive off the oil. The economics were punishing. It took around eight tons of shale to yield roughly ten barrels of oil, leaving some six tons of spent rock behind for every batch. The best early shale gave around forty gallons of oil per ton, but as the rich seams were used up, miners had to dig deeper for poorer rock that gave less than half as much.

Life above ground was little easier. Families crammed into rows of one-room-and-kitchen houses, often three or four to a bed. To make ends meet, widows might take in as many as eight lodgers, who slept in shifts: the night shift climbing into beds still warm from the day shift that had just left them. The oil companies built whole villages for their workers, and the work shaped every part of daily life.

Decline and merger

The West Lothian industry peaked around the 1890s, then began a long decline. Cheap crude oil, drilled straight from the ground in the United States and later the Middle East, steadily undercut the expensive business of mining and roasting shale. In 1919 the Broxburn Oil Company became one of just five surviving shale firms merged into Scottish Oils Ltd, which later passed into BP. Broxburn's own refinery and crude oil works closed in the mid-1920s, and the wider Scottish shale industry struggled on, increasingly dependent on subsidy, until the very last works at Westwood closed in 1962.

Written into the landscape

The most visible legacy is impossible to miss. All that spent shale was piled into vast heaps known as 'bings', and many of them, Greendykes and Albyn at Broxburn itself, along with Faucheldean, Niddry and the famous Five Sisters pictured above, still rise dramatically over West Lothian. Burnt shale starts out a dark blue-grey but oxidises to a striking pinkish-red, giving the bings their unmistakable colour. They are so striking that the geologist Iain Stewart has likened them to Ayers Rock, and in 1976 the artist John Latham had several declared works of art, naming one the 'Niddry Woman'. Greendykes and the Five Sisters are now protected industrial monuments.

That is the story the Broxburn name carries: a world-first industry, the miners and refiners who powered it, and the families who built a town out of little more than shale and hard graft. We think it deserves to be remembered, which is why it sits, proudly, on our boxes.

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Header image: the Five Sisters shale bings near West Calder, West Lothian. Photo by Richard Webb via Geograph, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.