When I say Scotland s Oil Boom, straight away you think of helicopter busses to North Sea derricks
and the transformation of Aberdeen but No.
I m talking about the oil boom where Scotland led the world.
When Scotland was the world s Saudi Arabia If you re interested in the people,
places and events in Scottish history then click the subscribe
button at the bottom right of the screen. In the meantime, let me tell you a story.
For years, as I ve driven towards Edinburgh from Stirling,
I ve seen these great red mounds by the motorway.
They always seemed like sand dunes but now they re changing.
They look greener now, more like just Scottish hills
but as grass and flora grow, they cover over the history of a time when Scotland
was the pioneer and provider of oil to the world. It s a story of Scottish ingenuity,
of improvement, of hard living, social struggle, environmental destruction and renewal ,
and I m going to show you it all on a wonderful walking and cycling path through West Lothian.
This is James Young House. This is James Young Avenue.
This is James Young High School are you starting to see a pattern?
This is one of the dunes in the industrial desert James Young
created that are gradually greening into a new oasis.
So is this, and Almond Park is a good place to start the story.
So we ve established James Young is hugely significant to West Lothian.
The question is: Why?
The story of an intelligent and enterprising young Scot from a relatively modest family of
cabinet makers, who apprentices with his dad, but takes an interest in science and starts making
experimental stuff for one of the plethora of Scotland s eminent Victorian scientists,
then goes with that scientist to London, building his own reputation on the way
that s been told five million times before. What did he do after that? I hear you ask.
Well, first of all, let s remember that in the 1830s and 40s
if you wanted to light your house you probably ended up smelling of fish.
Well technically a whale is a mammal, but the point is that people burned whale
oil or other animal fats in lamps to light their houses.
The reason there were no vegetarians in Victorian era
was because so many of them died in household accidents tripping over in the dark.
Enter James Young presumably carrying a paraffin candle.
By this time he was working as a technical guy in coal mining
and once, in a coal seam, he noticed the roof was bleeding.
It wasn t blood. It was oil seeping out from the coal.
Oil was becoming more and more necessary as a lubricant in steam engines,
or to extract paraffin but at that time there was
very little oil to be had in the world and nothing on an industrial scale
But if oil gradually seeps out form coal naturally,
then presumably you can engineer it to come out more quickly.
James Young was effectively the world s first chemical engineer
Young developed a system to heat coal and shale at fixed pressures to extract oil.
This was revolutionary! His first works were in Bathgate.
Then, when coal ran out there, he moved six miles down the road to Addiwell.
That transformed this whole area into a mining and industrial powerhouse.
The world s first mass production of oil was in Scotland,
the world s first oil refinery and chemical byproduct fabrication was here in West Lothian.
James Young became known as James Parafin Young. Vegetarians could light their houses with a clear
conscience, and nobody needed to smell of fish mammals.
I remember paraffin lamps in our house when I was a kid.
We carried one when we went up the garden path to use the toilet.
Tell me in the comments section if you ever... had to go up the garden to do a poo?
used a paraffin lamp I say this transformed the area, and it did.
There was a period before the drilling for black gold when West Lothian
was the biggest oil producer in the world and production here continued into the 20th
century completely changing this area. You can follow this transformation
in a thing called the shale trail. It s a modern walking and cycling path
that takes you through West Lothian to tell the story of that era.
If you d been here back then, then behind me you would have seen a huge aerial cable bucket lift
taking shale mined in Dedridge all the way over the hill to Oakbank.
Obviously it s not there now because now the trail goes through green space that wouldn t
have felt nearly as green back then. but I want to take you to the other
end of the trail to show you a really intriguing part of that transformation.
Behind me is the Five Sisters. Every year as nature takes over,
they look more like the amazing symmetrical artwork of mother nature s hand.
But when West Lothian was the heart of the world s oil industry, shale was mined here,
then it was processed in furnaces The oil was distilled off to make
paraffin candles, lubricants and all kinds of stuff but we were left with the waste,
unused shale tipped into these ever-growing huge shale bings.
As time went on things became more mechanised and automated.
In 1941 they built the Westwood Oil Works here. The waste shale that came out of the bottom
of the retort furnaces went by conveyor into self-tipping buckets that ran up the bing,
but the direction they dumped their waste depended on what direction the wind was blowing.
Apparently that s what gives us a five fingered natural wonder that
started as an un-natural waste tip. What s more, this Westwood estate,
bought over by the oil company used to contain a country
house , imaginatively named Westwood House. It had belonged to a retired military officer
returned from India. When he and his wife died
it was divided up into flats. Of course, when the oil company
took over, they had no use for the house. They did need land do dump the shale waste.
Gradually bucket after bucket, tip after tip the house, its contents and even a car in the garage
were submerged underneath the growing bing and they re still under the five sisters today.
I can just imagine one day in the future archaeologists will dig the
hills that have formed here and, just like Sutton Hoo,
the five sisters will reveal buried treasures destined to accompany some elite warrior king
to the afterlife in his automotive chariot.
Westerwood House wasn t the only controversial housing.
As I look from the railway foot crossing to Northfield Cottages, they ve replaced
what was called Happy Land. I don t know how happy it was.
Houses built and owned by the oil companies. You might describe them as minimalist.
Why would Young s Mineral Oil Company pay for more luxury than was essential.
Spartan houses, standpipe in the street, communal dry toilets
and no need for wash houses or sculleries that should just about do it.
Of course, the folk who lived in the houses could little complain.
If your family had been cleared from the Highlands or fled famine in Ireland,
you made do with what you could. Let s face it, you weren t working
underground mining shale or overground transporting
the piping hot byproducts because of a cornucopia of employment choices
and if you lost the employment with the oil company you lost the home that you did have.
These hard-working people who became West Lothian, bring us to West Calder s Union square
and this clock , which is still in the same place
where it used to sit atop a grand building here. You see if you worked for the oil company,
you lived in an oil company house, and you probably shopped in an
oil company shop , but in 1875, 40 shale miners set up a co-operative shop,
so that the workers didn t have to buy over-priced goods from the company owners.
This Co-op grew into one of the most successful businesses in West Lothian, branching out into
other West Lothian towns and enterprises. The Co-op went on to provide housing better
than the oil company housing at Happyland; supported evening classes to encourage
education and training, and an ambulance service dealing with disasters locally.
Walking the shale trail gives us stories of individual enterprise and ingenuity
delivering technological solutions, but also reminds us of the need for
community cohesion and preservation in the face of the social inequity those advances can bring.
Many of the political struggles of the 20th century seemed to be between which of these
two competing forces had the ascendency , but climbing the five sisters industrial
bing now reminds me that whatever our struggles and choices today
eventually nature wins out. There s another video about West
Lothian coming up on screen now. In the meantime