Scotland's First Oil Rush

Scotland has some of the most spectacular natural landscape

in the world.

Its oldest rocks were formed a staggering three billion years ago.

But some of our most interesting geology

isn't quite as old as it might seem.

This hill was only created around 1941.

That's because it's a bing,

made up from the spoils from Scotland's last shale oil works.

More than 100 years before oil was discovered in the North Sea,

the world's first commercial oil strike was made

here in the flatlands between Scotland's two largest cities.

It signalled the start of an oil boom

that would transform this landscape.

Workers flooded in and towns sprung up overnight.

Fortunes were made and lives were lost.

EXPLOSIONS BOOM

And all in the name of this - oil shale.

This is the tale of the rise and fall

of the world's first oil industry,

the forgotten story of Scotland's first oil rush.

As a geologist, I've seen some fascinating places...

..but nothing quite like this.

What a crazy landscape.

It just looks like you're, I don't know, on a Star Trek set.

This is Albyn Bing, near Broxburn.

At one time this was part of a massive oil works

and to understand what's gone on here, you have to look very closely.

Ah, this is great.

Just a slice through the bing.

You can look at what we call a stratigraphy,

the layers of strata inside, except these are made of fragments of shale

that have been processed, the oil's been taken out.

And then it's been just dumped behind,

so you've got these layers that would have continued

up above our head.

What we are seeing here is the geological evidence

of a century of intensive shale mining.

Not to be confused with modern-day shale gas and its controversies,

oil shale was blasted with explosives

then dug out of the ground by hand.

It was subjected to intense heat before oil could be extracted.

So this is a history - 100, 150 years of man-made geology.

To understand the forces that created all of this,

we have to go much further back than a couple of hundred years.

HE GRUNTS

-Are you sure it's this way?

-Yeah, just down here.

I trust you.

This may seem like an unlikely place to start my search for oil,

but this is Scotland and its landscape was never going

to give up its treasures easily.

Nearly went there, I nearly went there.

'Luckily my guide is Tina Doyle, known as Teenzie,

'and she happens to be someone who knows these woods well.'

So how far is it from here?

Eh, just a wee bit round the corner. It's no' far, really.

See, the rock layers are amazing here.

That's the shale, there should be...

A-ha!

As a geologist, you can never stop.

'This is shale before oil is extracted.'

Look at that. I always try and look to see if you get fossils.

-Sometimes you get fossil fish and things like that.

-Yeah.

These layers are little layers of mud

and inside, it's all the organics.

And then in these little thin, what you call laminations, oil.

350 million years ago, this part of Scotland was a vast lagoon

surrounded by tropical forests.

The mud that settled at the bottom of this lagoon

was rich in dead plants and animals that over time decomposed

to form kerogen-bearing oil shale.

Lying at depths of up to 2,500 feet, these mineral-rich seams

were to be found in a band stretching south

from the Firth of Forth,

an area of 75 square miles covering a large swathe

of what is now known as West Lothian.

But its value wasn't discovered until the mid-19th century.

Teenzie is taking me to one of earliest known shale mines.

How did you find it?

-I used to play in it as a kid, eh, so...

-Ah, right.

-This was your playground?

-It was.

-Cool, what a cool playground.

-Is this it?

-It is. It's sort of black shadow in there.

-That's where the entrance is.

-Whereabouts?

Just straight ahead.

-Through there right in the back?

-Yep.

-I can just see a black...

Aye, that's where the entrance is. A dark hole, aye.

It may not look much, but this is all that is left

of one of the first shale mines in Scotland.

Oakbank Mine and its neighbouring oil works opened in the 1860s.

Back then, this would have been a hive of activity.

I'd never have spotted that.

-It's quite hidden.

-It is, isn't it?

-Do you actually go in there?

-Yeah, inside.

We've come here in the middle of winter

and with the river this high,

there's no way we can get any closer today.

Teenzie is one of a growing band of urban explorers,

people who are drawn to forgotten or abandoned spaces.

For her, this was a passion which began

with the disused mines around her hometown.

So what got you into this in the first place,

wanting to go into places like that?

My great-grandad used to be a miner.

Right, so are you kind of fascinated by the mines, then?

I am, aye. Sort of fascinated with anything underground, eh?

-You've been born in the wrong generation.

-I know, I have.

I wish I could go back in time.

Fortunately, along with her ropes, safety meter and torch,

Teenzie also takes her camera

on these excursions into the underworld.

Her footage provides a rare glimpse into a forgotten past.

It's a queer feeling...

..realising how far down you are under the ground.

Oh, you are doon below, you are doon in the bowels of the Earth.

That's all I can say - you are in the bowels of the Earth for shale.

If you went away from the pit bottom into the darkness,

you couldnae see your finger.

Pitch-black.

You'd never get darkness like it

anywhere in the world than down a mine -

it was so pitch-black, you couldnae see anything.

It's reckoned at least 150 mines like this were sunk

into Scotland's shale fields

and it transformed the landscape.

I want to find out how a rural agricultural society

suddenly changed into one at the forefront

of global industrial innovation.

In the early part of the 19th century,

Scotland had some of the leading scholars and thinkers of the time.

It seemed that anything was possible.

The Victorians had this unshakeable belief in the power of progress.

They believed that the men of science and industry

could change the world through invention and hard graft.

One of those men was the son of a carpenter

who would go on to become the world's first oilman -

James Young.

Young was one of a new breed of inventor entrepreneurs.

Born and raised in Glasgow,

he quit school early to work with his father

and got his first taste of academia

while fitting windows at what is now Strathclyde University.

Six years later, he was teaching

chemistry at University College London.

He wasn't just driven by scientific curiosity,

he was a practical and principled man

and he wanted to leave his mark on the world.

In 1850, Young's attention was drawn to an interesting discovery made here -

Boghead Estate, one mile south of Bathgate...

..home to a mysterious mineral known as torbanite.

This is a piece of torbanite,

and geologically it's a complicated little beast.

It's a halfway house between coal and oil shale.

So, like coal, it's light and it's just packed

full of organic material - something like 90% carbon.

But you don't get the black stuff coming off, and in terms

of its appearance and its texture,

it's essentially an oil shale.

'When this rock was first discovered here, amongst the small coalmines

'dotted around the Boghead Estate,

'it caused great excitement.'

Have you tried digging in here?

'I've come to meet farmer David Dalling, whose family have

'worked this land since the middle of the 19th century.'

If I was here 150 years ago, what would I have seen?

Hundreds of small mine workings.

-All over this area?

-All over.

Digging away to power the start of the Industrial Revolution, really.

So, how did they find the torbanite here?

It was two guys sunk a shaft, and as they dug the shaft

they discovered this black substance that had peculiar properties.

-It's a really volatile material, isn't it?

-It's very volatile.

You could light it with a match,

it would burn as easily as that.

It was very, very rich in oil.

It was called parrot coal

because when you lit it, it squawked like a parrot.

IAIN LAUGHS

They stockpiled a large quantity

and it went on fire.

So, as it burned, the oil was running down the road

into the Almond river.

And it burned for weeks and weeks, I believe.

According to all accounts, anyway.

It would be something to see.

It would have been something to see, actually.

'These rivers of fire came to the attention of James Young,

'who had already begun experimenting

'with ways of extracting oil from coal.

'He enlisted the help of a talented chemist, Edward Meldrum,

'a friend and collaborator.

'Here at Meldrum's cottage near Bathgate, their quest for oil

'would occupy many late nights.'

Meldrum's chemistry lab was at the back of the house,

and it was here that he and Young experimented,

trying to turn torbanite into commercial oil.

It wasn't quite like getting blood out of a stone,

but it wasn't far off.

My plan is to get the oil from coal by distilling it.

In theory it was simple.

It had to be mined, ground into smaller pieces,

and then heated to a vapour.

Young realised early on that the key

to successfully producing oil would be in the refining.

Using every ounce of his scientific knowledge and patience,

he finally came up with a process he believed could work.

Here's the oil I've got from it.

Real mineral oil.

Putting his theory into practice required planning

and a huge investment.

When it was first built, Young's refinery was

known as the Secret Works.

It was surrounded by high stone walls, its heavy wooden gates

were constantly guarded,

and all workers were sworn to secrecy.

I think it must have been very strange for the local residents.

There were very few factories in the area at that time.

Most people still worked in agriculture or,

Bathgate was very much a weaving village,

so nothing like that would've been seen before.

It apparently had very high palisade or palling round about it

so you really couldn't see what was going on inside.

The workers only knew their own bit of their job,

so they didn't have an overall idea of what was being done there.

Central to the whole operation was a cast-iron chamber called a retort.

The torbanite was crushed by heavy steel rollers

and tipped into a hopper at the top of the retort.

It was then subjected to an intense

but controlled heat for up to 24 hours.

This released the oil vapour from the shale.

This vapour was drawn off and transferred into huge

stacks of iron pipes.

Here it was cooled and condensed into thick black crude oil.

Young's true genius lay in the perfection of the refining process.

By repeated distillation, he discovered

he was able to separate this crude oil into different products.

At first, the market for his oil was as lubricating oil.

But he began to realise, as he refined the processes,

that he had a very good lighting oil.

Lamps at that time worked on whale oil,

which apparently was quite dirty, it was smelly, and it had a

very sad tendency to burst into flames and it was quite dangerous.

A lot of deaths were caused in that way.

Young's oil came on to the market at exactly the right time.

British Empire was expanding, industrial activity was increasing,

and people were crying out for safe, affordable light.

Young knew that providing that would be the key to growing the business.

Young, in another one of his flashes of inspiration, realised that

if this light oil could be refined to a certain degree

and if the right sort of oil lamp was there available,

then he had this cheap, or relatively cheap,

fuel for paraffin lamps,

and there'd be a whole new domestic market for that product.

He produced this lighting oil that was clean and safe

and didn't have too bad a smell,

and he then had to produce a market for this new product.

So he set up a very large lamp factory and he marketed

these lamps in a quite modern way, really, and a very intensive way.

You buy our lamp and you buy our fuel for it.

He created a market for the product that he had already produced.

So, a very modern and astute businessman, I think.

Young's lamps were bright, safe and easy to use,

and they changed the way people set up their homes.

Chairs were arranged to take advantage of the light,

and that brought families closer together.

It also made James Young and his partners very wealthy men.

Young's high-growth, high-profits business enabled

him to buy this place -

Limefield House, near Polbeth.

Known to the world as Paraffin Young,

he moved here in 1855 and promptly gave it a Victorian makeover,

even rekindling his carpentry skills to build these stairs.

A devout Presbyterian, he wasn't given to

elaborate displays of wealth.

But he did allow himself the odd extravagance.

This is a mini-replica of the Victoria Falls,

which he built to celebrate his lifelong friendship with David Livingstone.

Now, by the standard of today's oil oligarchs,

these are pretty restrained gestures,

but Young's fortune was vast

and he was determined to keep it that way.

He did everything in his power to protect his discoveries

and his profits, taking out more than 45 patents.

But there was one thing Young had no control over,

and that was the finite supply of natural resources.

His torbanite was running out.

But rather than this being the end of the industry,

Scotland's oil boom was just about to start.

They may have exhausted the torbanite seam,

but beneath West Lothian's soil another type of rock had been

discovered that also produced oil.

It would become known as oil shale,

and across a swathe of fields and moors,

there were seemingly untold reserves.

Young wasn't alone in realising the potential of shale.

In the 1860s, an enterprising mine owner

by the name of Robert Bell got in on the act.

He bought some land to mine,

built a refinery,

and turned Broxburn into Scotland's first boom town.

Within a short space of time there was

an astonishing 650 retorts

producing 10,000 gallons of crude oil per day.

It must have been like the Klondike back then.

All those mines and works just popping up overnight.

And all that noise, the smells, the clamour.

Workmen poured in daily,

transforming this rural village into what

became known as Shaleopolis.

It all happened very, very quickly,

and there are accounts of sort of half-built cottages and muddy roads

and odd-shaped works with big flares

and flames coming out and holes in the ground

all over the place where the shale was mined.

So it must've been a really sort of lively

and interesting place in the early days.

The word was out - there was money to be made in shale.

The map of West Lothian changed dramatically during

the second part of the 19th century.

Mines, refineries and oil works began emerging

all over the landscape.

And of course, those massive shale bings started

to appear on the horizon.

It's majestic, isn't it? Our very own Ayers Rock.

This picture shows how quickly things changed for the people here.

Shortly after it was taken,

this farm was buried under the advancing

mountain of shale looming behind it.

Within a decade, Scotland was producing over 20 million gallons

of crude oil a year -

even exporting to mainland Europe and Scandinavia.

Nowhere were these incredible changes more apparent

than in Addiewell.

Here, the world's biggest oil refinery was built in 1865.

And to find out how quickly rural villages like this were transformed,

I've come to meet retired schoolmaster John Watts.

When the work started they were looking for a whole lot of workers,

and so there were a high proportion

-of single men came to the village.

-Right.

There was a shortage of beds as well,

so what they did, apparently, was

when the day shift men left for work the night shift men took their beds.

-So they swapped round.

-Did a kind of swap around. Yes, exactly.

In shale towns the company built and owned the houses.

They were hastily constructed and the majority weren't built to last.

We're in Graham Street. It looks pretty empty,

but in fact it would have been full of people.

-So it was kind of a new town?

-A totally new town.

It grew from 23 souls right up to 1,300

in the space of six years.

They were rows of single storey houses, just one room each.

They say that the man of the house could

light his pipe off the fire without even moving from the bed.

-Just stretching.

-Aye, just stretch, aye.

It did grow tremendously fast.

The priority, of course, was to get the oil works built

and the mines sunk and housing came a poor second

and any social facilities a very poor third.

So, for a long time, the population must have been living in very,

very poor conditions.

As demand for Scottish oil increased, so did

the need for workers, and thousands arrived from across the Irish Sea.

Tara Dolan's grandfather was one of them.

He went from pit to pit, trying to get better wages.

So, their first child was born in Tarbrax.

But their next child was born in Livingston, Bathgate,

Dechmont, Addiewell, before they moved to Newbury.

My granny said her stuff was never off the cart.

She had no sooner got her house the way she wanted it

and then she'd have to move again.

The Irish weren't always popular at that time

because coming from extreme poverty in Ireland,

they would find the wages in the shale industry very generous,

so they would be willing to work for a penny or two a day cheaper

than the local workforce and that of course was undercutting wages

and made them quite unpopular at first.

In Addiewell, the new immigrants settled in such huge numbers

that it quickly became known as Little Ireland.

-This village got a priest of their own.

-Right.

And when he first came, he had nowhere to live, no church,

no nothing.

-So eventually, they got their own church.

-Yes.

-Over there.

-Yes.

It took them a long time and they got their own church.

If you look towards the church there, you'll see the land dips, but

at first, originally, it dipped a lot more and it was all waterlogged.

And the authorities actually said, "You cannot build there,

"we will not allow it." So there was a real problem.

Father Kenny gathered the men and said, "Can we help?

"Can we do something?"

And what they did was after their work, every day, they would come

with wheelbarrows and they would gather spent shale

-and bring it down and dump it.

-To build it up.

Gradually raise up the level and Father Kenny

reckoned that they shifted 100,000 barrel loads to do it.

-After a full day's work!

-After a full day's work. And do you know?

You could say in a sense this parish was built on shale.

Yeah, that's a lovely story.

Shale didn't just change the landscape.

It changed the way people earned a living

and although the scientists had found a way to extract

oil from rock, those rocks still had to be dug out of the ground by hand.

It took one tonne of shale to produce 25 gallons of oil.

And it was down to the miners to keep the retorts fed.

I was a miner's draw. I was drawing to my father.

You shovelled the shale into the hutches

and got it sent up to the surface.

We would fill 18 hutches a day between two of us.

So that would be like 18 tonnes.

Shale miners were paid by the amount of shale in a hutch,

rather than the dirt,

so the shale inspector would go and look at the hutch and decide,

was it 50% shale or 90% shale and therefore,

it was a key position for deciding what the wages were.

If they were behind, were getting held up,

were getting their hutches full for any unknown reason,

I used to see them hanging the piece on a string,

take a bite of it as it went backwards and forwards

to the hutches. There was a lot of miners did that.

It was a competitive environment.

The men would vie amongst themselves to produce the most shale

and to be the strongest.

So when you look at the pictures, just the muscles on them.

You know, you'd have to be down the gym doing a lot of work

nowadays to look anything like that.

They were very proud of the fact that they could produce

so much shale.

I brought this along for us. This thing here is a hefty weight.

Eddie McLean and Bert Carroll are retired shale miners

and I'm joining them in the local pub to get a better

idea of what life was really like underground.

How much of that would you be shifting in a session?

Well, we were doing maybe 20 hutches.

So how much would be in a hutch?

-A tonne.

-Hutch is kind of the... A tonne?

-A tonne.

-OK.

-So he was cutting the stuff down and your job was what?

-The hutches.

Put it in the hutches.

-Yeah.

-You work as a team, if you know.

Everybody's doing what they can to get the money out the pit.

The shale had to be brought down with explosives

and it was the faceman's job to set the charges.

-You had to drill your holes to do the blasting.

-Right.

And then you had to put the fuse in.

The explosives went in to these holes.

The explosives went into these holes and then you just walked away

-and shouted "fire!"

-Right.

Hoping everybody heard it!

Black powder was just set off by putting a strum into it.

You'd seen on the old cowboy films where they light it

and it goes "psss" and fizzles along.

EXPLOSIONS

Cos that must have been the dangerous bit.

Just once you'd blasted and there was bit hanging off the roof.

Blocks like this are heavy enough,

and did you think it was a dangerous job when you were doing it?

Oh, it was a dangerous job. We'd get the pick and do that to the roof.

-There was - boom. You knew that had to come away.

-Aye.

Or it would come down some time.

The most common injuries in mines were collapses of the roof

when a great lump of shale would come off and

because the seams were higher than in coal,

the shale had further to fall and therefore,

the injuries might be correspondingly greater or fatal.

EXPLOSIONS

The shots went off, the place would be full of smoke and dust.

You'd sometimes take your light off your helmet

and shine on the rails to find your way back in.

And you started straight away among the dust and the smoke.

There was no wait till it cleared.

The roof all came in and that's when I got smashed up.

And what I can always mind when they were getting me out,

something else came through the roof.

And me, when they were getting me out, it hit me

and it split my head open.

So that was my luck out that day.

This technique of blasting through rock changed little over

the years and many men lost their lives.

The shots had been fired,

we were getting ready to go in and start filling,

and one of the lads didn't appear

and we looked round to see where he was and all we saw was a slab

that had come out of the roof and landed on top of him.

So, that was him.

The worst shale mining disaster happened in January 1947

at Burngrange Pit in West Calder.

It was a bitterly cold Friday evening when the siren sounded.

It was a terrible time.

It cast a gloom over everybody.

Jean Shirlaw's father was John Stein,

a mining agent for the oil company

and Burngrange was one of the pits he was responsible for

when the alarm was raised.

He went in to the Regal Cinema and went on to the stage

and announced that there had been a very bad accident at Burngrange.

The lights came on, screen dimmed,

and the manager came on to the stage and says,

"Could any mines rescues please go to Burngrange.

"There's been an explosion."

The picture house emptied

because everybody knew somebody that worked in Burngrange.

It quickly became clear how serious the situation was.

A large number of men had been trapped by a roof collapse.

For three days, rescuers fought through flames

and fallen rock to reach the miners.

When the dust cleared, 15 were dead.

Two of those who perished were the uncles of Bert Carroll.

So, what age were you back then?

I was a five-year-old, coming on six at that time.

So you remember it? You were pretty young.

-Can you remember it all right?

-Oh, I remember the siding going off.

An investigation into the accident determined that

all but one of the men had died due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

This map produced at the inquiry

detailed the last moments of the men's lives.

And you get this forensic data, like the jacket of D Muir,

the piece box and flask,

-the prop screen, some drills, some haversacks.

-A-ha.

-All the kind of paraphernalia just recorded.

-Aye.

-My uncle David's jacket.

-It's got here this is a...

Site of ignition here, then.

-Yeah.

-So I guess a blast was here.

-Yeah.

-And then the fires moving upwards.

-Aye, it must have.

-And my Uncle David, he was found here.

-Where his body was found?

That's right. He left five of our family.

And my Uncle Willie left two of our family.

And they were all young.

-Right.

-Young.

-God.

Behind each of these names was a family left without a son,

brother or father,

and as this close-knit community mourned its loss,

there were stories of men like William Ritchie,

who died that night only because he swapped shifts with his brother,

whose wife had just given birth to son George.

My father was on the black shift,

so my mother was very ill and his brother had said to him,

"I'll do your shift and you can do one for me later on,"

because my mother was very ill.

So that's what happened and of course, he perished in the disaster.

That saved my father's life. You know what I mean?

Unfortunately, it was at the cost of my uncle's life.

# Poor wee bonnie laddie

# Haud yer wheesht and gan to sleep

# Daddy slumbers

# We has buried him so deep. #

What was the feeling that was left behind in that community?

Devastation.

Devastation.

My granny losing her two sons, after losing her husband through

an accident in the shale pit as well, you know?

'Frae the black isles and the borders,

'twa centuries ago

'they laboured roond the calders

'above grund and ablo'

'and there was no idle bread.

'Oh, thir faithers, they wir bastards'

and their grandfaithers they say,

but ivry man a mason grand,

no godless Irish they.

Oh, no.

'But I still remember them.'

Author and poet Alistair Findlay is the son of a shale miner.

His father spent the first 20 years of his adult life

working in the mines around Winchburgh.

'I was brought up in a housing scheme in Bathgate,

'but my parents and my grandparents, who lived with us,'

spent all their time talking about Winchburgh.

It was about the Winchburgh neighbours

rather than the neighbours that we actually had.

So it was this kind of folklore almost, you know?

Raised on stories of the shale mines and its people,

Alistair began researching the subject

when, by chance, he stumbled on rare recordings of early shale miners

recounting their experiences.

'I discovered this treasure-trove of tapes

'interviewing about 80 old shale miners and their wives.

'So I managed to get my hands on that.

'And all the kind of old language,'

you know, that I'd been brought up with

kind of just came suddenly back to me.

And I could see that there was a lot of social history.

I can mind of some of the folk that used to be in Niddry.

There was the Mallins, Devlins and the Quinns,

McEwans and the Flynns,

the Nichols and the Wicks,

the Newtons, Riders and the Burns.

As he sifted through these recordings,

Alistair found not only the tales of hardship

but also songs, poems and tales of a disappearing world.

..the Donoghues.

There were the Johnsons, Andersons and Tweedies,

the Donways, Cannons and Banns.

The stories about mining communities,

about the masculinity and the hardship

are not untrue.

But they're not the whole story.

And in a way, I was trying to get

the other side of the story, the cultural side.

-JIMMY BUCHAN:

-They shut doon the old oil works.

Aye, and they shut doon all the mines.

And it broke many a body's heart

wi' the changing o' the times.

'So, in many ways, I was writing about the folk memory'

of the shale mining community.

I wanted to emphasise the poetry and the song side of that community.

For the people of the shale towns of West Lothian,

the gala day was when the workers downed tools and had some fun.

In the early years it was their only annual holiday.

'I think there was a huge sense of community'

in the shale industry

and in the works and the houses which were owned by the companies.

All were part of one big machine, if you like.

Certainly, a lot of rules and regulations

'determining how people lived

'and how they played, as well, in some circumstances.

BRASS BAND MUSIC

At one time, almost every shale community had its own band.

And even though the mines are gone

the tradition continues here in Broxburn.

Today, they're known as the Broxburn and Livingston Brass Band

and two of their longest-serving members

are Alec Chalmers and Jim Ferguson.

'It started in 1892.

'The works managers supplied the instruments.'

'The shale miners used to pay a penny a week for us,'

for the band, off their wages.

'It's a family band.'

My dad is right in the middle.

My uncle on the right.

My brother.

And, of course, me in there.

The band all had connections with the shale.

Downie, he actually worked with my dad down in the shale mine.

This film shows the band leading the Broxburn parade in 1910.

But within a few short years

many of these men would be marching to a different tune.

'During the first few months of the First World War

'masses of recruiting meetings were held

'and they would often try and have a band there

'to dispense patriotic music.

'And the Broxburn Public Band'

was used to play music at these recruiting meetings.

And I suppose, fired up with their own fervour,

the band, en masse,

enlisted into the 2/4th Battalion of the Royal Scots

'and became the regimental band of the Royal Scots.'

Tom White's grandfather David was one of those who enlisted.

It was an adventure, you know?

And they were going to get fed, they were going to get clothed

and so on and so forth.

And they were used as a recruiting band.

So they would go round the country looking for volunteers.

'The lads, they were only young, young men

'and they probably thought,'

"Well, we've got to do our bit for our country."

As war dragged on, the men swapped their instruments for weapons.

'And nobody expected it to last as long as it did.'

So they were all dispersed into different regiments.

And quite a number of them never returned.

Among the six band members who perished on the fields of France

were three brothers from the same family.

James, Archie and Robert Webster.

The war brought devastation to millions.

But for Scottish Oil it was good for business.

Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty,

converted the British naval fleet to oil

and awarded a massive contract to Scotland.

With so many men at the front,

the only way to meet the increase in demand was for women to help out.

'There was a shortage of workers in the oil works

'and some women were certainly taken on'

in Broxburn Oil Works and, no doubt, in most of the others, too.

There would be a limit to the sort of work that they could do.

I mean if it was heavy, physical labour,

perhaps they weren't so suited for that.

'But it's known that women, for example,

'were emptying the hutches on the top of the bings

'and they were doing all sorts of other jobs in the oil works.'

When the war ended, the men returned from the trenches to the mines.

But they didn't find a land fit for heroes.

They came back to find their livelihoods under threat.

Crude oil had been discovered in Pennsylvania decades earlier,

quickly followed by the Caspian region.

Compared to shale it was like turning on a tap.

In an attempt to compete, the shale bosses imposed wage cuts.

Workers became more militant and strikes were frequent.

'Industrial action very much affected the women'

and the families

because, as soon as the man wasn't working,

there was the problem of how on earth

they were to feed the family and pay the rent.

There was no financial cushion in those days.

In mining families, you depended, you lived week to week on your wage.

So then, in times of industrial strife, actually,

the women seemed to come into their own making ends meet.

'The 1920s were a very difficult period for working-class families.

'There was great social upheaval'

and political unrest.

I mean, I remember my aunt,

'she would have been about six or so,

'talking about children being hungry and having no shoes.

'There was quite a lot of poverty at the time.'

From the midst of this political unrest

emerged a woman from Addiewell who would become a local legend.

Her name was Sarah Moore.

Known to everyone as Ma Moore, she was a mother of nine,

a political campaigner

and a poet.

'The broken and the maimed came back

'to find not peace,

'but this instead.

'The people they loved the best on earth,

'unclothed, uncared for,

'unfed.'

Not even the right to work and live,

not even the right to cry

against the fate that life had spread,

only the right to die.

'She was an ordinary woman in many ways.

'She had no particular education.'

But she became active first of all,

perhaps, in the 1925 shale strike,

which was quite a major strike

by the shale miners protesting against

a proposed 10% cut in their wages.

In those days, poor relief was paid by the parish council.

But in this instance,

they refused to help the families of the men on strike.

'She was saying, "But the women and the children are starving.

'"You must pay them."'

And she made her point and persuaded the parish council

that they did have to relieve that poverty

and prevent the children, basically, from starving.

The following year, her militancy would bring her

into direct conflict with the authorities.

During the General Strike of 1926, Ma Moore organised a protest here

at what was the West Calder Parish Council Office.

During the strike, the council had decreed

that the miners weren't eligible for hardship benefits.

So a bunch of miners' wives and children from Addiewell

came here to protest.

That demonstration was broken up by baton-wielding police.

But the council relented and the miners got their benefits.

Victories like this would make Ma Moore a hero

in the shale villages of West Lothian.

And to this day she's still revered.

In an attempt to combat the threat from imported oil,

the surviving companies pooled resources to form Scottish Oils.

They set up their HQ here at Middleton Hall near Broxburn

and the man who took charge was James Bryson.

Bryson lost his father in a mining accident when he was 13

and he had to become self-reliant and inventive.

As a young man, he had designed a retort

which could process three times the amount of shale at half the cost.

He knew the only way to survive was by continued innovation.

Scottish Oils held their head above water

by just being able to produce a wider range of products

from the oil shale.

They were basically wringing as much as they could

out of the rocks beneath them.

-NEWSREEL VOICEOVER:

-Paraffin coke to make carbons for electric furnaces.

Sulphate of Ammonia,

an effective fertiliser.

Paraffin wax to make candles and matches,

to render cloth and paper waterproof,

to insulate electrical apparatus and to pack foodstuffs.

By further improving the refining process,

they developed a product which would be hugely profitable.

They called it motor spirit and it was used to power

the invention of the age.

The internal combustion engine.

Shale companies acted very decisively.

They set up new distribution depots

right through Scotland and they had little horse and carts or, latterly,

very early motor tankers, taking this oil out to where it was needed.

So they did respond and were very innovative in the way

that they promoted and publicised their products.

The new strategy seemed to be working and there was a real sense

of optimism here at Scottish Oils - but it would be short-lived.

These buildings might project an air of confidence but it was misplaced.

Things were on the turn. As well as America, crude oil was now being

produced in Russia, Romania, Indonesia, Iran and South America.

The 1920s weren't going to be easy for the industry.

With the support of the British Government, British drilling

had begun in the Persian Gulf. And to process the crude oil,

a state-of-the-art refinery was built

on the edge of the shale field at Grangemouth.

'Tank steamers bring crude petroleum from across the ocean

to the new refinery at Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth,

where it is converted into products

similar to those obtained from the native shale.

When the British-produced oil came in from overseas from

British interests and started to be refined, really the whole economics

of the shale oil industry was disturbed.

Places like Grangemouth were built with Scottish know-how and technology

but were soon producing oil from Persian crude at a fraction

of the price that it cost

to actually dig it out of the ground in West Lothian.

Shale oil just couldn't compete and the '20s was a decade

marked by closures.

Addiewell refinery was the first to go.

In 1926, the Tarbrax oil works followed.

It was devastating for the town and its 2,000 people.

Workers were evicted from company housing

and then re-employed to demolish their own home.

In 1927,

the refinery at Broxburn, the original boom town, also shut down.

Closure happened kind of suddenly, as well,

so people didn't have time to adjust to it.

People who had good jobs

and were proud of the work they were doing suddenly found nothing.

It would be a slow and lingering death.

The industry was kept alive by government subsidies

and defence contracts.

And somehow managed to survive a further three decades.

The end finally came in 1962 with the closure of the last oil works

at Westwood in the shadow of what became known as

the Five Sisters Bing.

Nae mair to hear the hutches timmin' ower the tips

Nae mair tae go oan the auld haey cairts

tae our annual trips

Nae mair tae hear the auld pug's whussle

Or the works horn's blaws

Nae mair tae wander up the brae,

tae jist staun there and pause

Or linger oan the memories o' dear auld niddry raws.

The houses, mines and oil works may be gone,

but there is a very visible reminder of this fascinating chapter

of Scotland's past and it's hard to ignore.

The Shale bings have their own story to tell,

as botanist Barbra Harvey explains.

As we go up here,

you'll notice we've got quite strong shrubs on either side.

Yeah.

It's unusual that they're just appearing in this avenue

and they're mainly hawthorn, a few rosehip trees...

-This is the hawthorn?

-This is the hawthorn, it is.

-There are some berries just here...

-Look at that.

-Yup.

And this is because the guys that worked at the top of the bings

would take a lift on the bogies that were carrying the shale.

-That's the trollies going up, yeah.

-As they were going up,

they were catching a lift they would be eating their pieces as

they were going along and throwing the crusts out

cos they didn't fancy them and birds would come along to eat the crusts

-and deposit the seeds...

-Seeds!

-..on either side.

-Ah...

To get this kind of avenue?

-Yes.

-So that's a kind of sandwich ecology?

-Definitely, yes.

So I wonder if the workers had any idea

that throwing away their jeely pieces,

-they were creating a new ecosystem here?

-I doubt it very much.

This is Greendykes Bing near Broxburn,

one of the few still intact.

In the '60s, when the oil works shut down, there were 27 of them

containing 200 million tonnes of burnt shale.

Much of that was put to good use.

'These great rosy hills, the crushed remains of rocks that once

'provided oil, are providing a new source of wealth.

'Motorways are based on this gravel, for so long disused

'and seemingly worthless.

'It provides raw material for bricks to raise homes.

'It is an unexpected asset for the new town of Livingston

'where they are building for a population of 75,000.'

In recent times, the bings have been shown a bit more appreciation.

In 1995, Greendykes and the Five Sisters

were declared national monuments by Historic Scotland

and they have a unique ecology all of their own.

Individual species of grass are completely different up here

from the ones that you see in the countryside round about.

In the summer months, these bings are in their full glory.

Teeming with wildlife, there's more than 350 different types

of plant life, including a rarely found species of orchid.

The climb up here is rewarded with a stunning view.

-This is the climax.

-This is it.

-What a vista!

-Absolutely.

And this is on a cold wet day in January!

Not everyone comes up here to enjoy the scenery.

So they are getting used... they are actively getting

-used as leisure places?

-Very much actively getting used as leisure.

They may be noisy but it's good to know this piece of industrial

heritage is as much a part of West Lothian's present as it is its past.

I just think they are really quite beautiful, though.

Yes, I think they are amazing celebrations of the work

of the men that actually built them with their own hands.

And when you talk to some of the older miners, they're really

proud of what they have created.

I like to think of these bings as man-made volcanoes.

Not just because of their shape but because the rocks

that they are built on have been thrown up from inside the Earth.

Few of the men who spent their working lives hauling

these rocks out of the ground have seen inside a shale mine

since finishing their last shift more than half a century ago.

For ex-miners Eddie and Bert,

Teenzie's exploration of an abandoned mine

is a vivid reminder of those times.

-I thought there would've been mair collapse.

-Aye.

It's like as if it's just been abandoned.

It's when you see how old it is

and it looks desolate.

I dinnae think that I would like to go down there now.

Brave girl!

One, two, three four...

BAND STARTS UP

The story of Scotland's first oil rush

is one of an epic 100-year struggle to exploit our natural wealth.

The breakthroughs made by James Young and those that followed him

are still very much the basis for oil production today

and that expertise has been exported far and wide.

What is most striking is the determination

and hard work of the people whose lives depended on shale.

'Then in later years they started to knock doon the oil works...

'..and that was the beginning of the end

'to one of the finest communities that I've ever known.

'Course, all mining villages were the same.'

Spend a bit of time around here and you quickly realise that

Scotland's oil shale story is fading away.

Being consigned to the history books.

And with the move away from fossil fuels,

it's something that's never coming back.

And yet the ingenuity and the sheer hard graft of those times

has helped build modern Scotland.

Those bings...those bings are our pyramids

and we should celebrate them.

BAND PLAYS