The UK trampling Scottish ventures is far from a recent development

The “North British” epithet spliced on to railway built and managed hotels evolved into an anachronism long before the end of the 20th century, and some still remember the resentment expressed by many of the workforce in “North British” Locomotive in Springburn where I was in lodgings for a time in the 1960s. The largest such works in Europe, it employed tens of thousands in its heyday and built locomotives for export to many foreign climes.

Born in Montrose in Angus, David Sime Cargill set sail as a young man for Ceylon in 1844 as representative of the Glasgow-based firm William Milne & Co. Returning to Glasgow in 1861, he acquired the entire business. In 1872, he became director of another Glasgow centred establishment known as the Rangoon Oil Company who specialised in selling oil-related products throughout Scotland and in 1886, David Sime Cargill managed to obtain exploration rights in what is now Myanmar, founding Burma Oil Limited in the same year. He died on May 25, 1904 and is buried in the Glasgow Necropolis beside his first wife Margaret.

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Following several fruitless searches on the worldwide web, I finally managed to secure the two-volume copy of A History Of The Burmah [sic] Oil Company which covers the years 1886 to 1966, and thoroughly expounds the fascinating history of not only its formative years but the effort expended by the son of the founder, Sir John T Cargill, the chair from 1904 to 1943 and based at 191 West George Street, Glasgow.

Gold-mining entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy was one of those helped out of financial turmoil by Burma Oil. Knox D’Arcy made his fortune in Australia, and was an entrepreneur par excellence before he ventured to invest in drilling for oil in Persia. Employing an engineer by the name of George Reynolds, Knox D’Arcy spent most of the fortune he had accumulated before Burma Oil came to his aid and quite literally bought him out although he remained a director of the new company that was formed.

Yet despite adequate financial backing, the board of the newly created Anglo Persian Oil Company – a wholly owned subsidiary of Burma Oil – almost pulled the plug on their venture, when an enormous gusher of more than 50 feet alleviated their concerns. Then as now, the prolific oil field known as Masjed Soleyman heralded the very first discovery of oil in the entire Middle East on May 26, 1908.

And into the historical narrative steps a portly middle-aged man who just happened to be navy secretary by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill who was determined to convert British warships to burning oil instead of coal.

Standing up in the House of Commons, he referenced a “British” company that discovered massive oil deposits in Persia and considered “semi-nationalising” the merciful bounty for increased advantages of efficiency within the fleet. The Government therefore purchased a controlling stake in Anglo Persian Oil Company which became known as Anglo Iranian Oil Company in 1935.

A brand-new refinery, the biggest in the world, built in Abadan manned by British expatriates. Throughout the decades of British involvement in Iran, the host country received only a pittance in royalties until the Iranian government decided to nationalise its oil under the auspices of their prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The inevitable aftermath resulted in the first “oil embargo” by Britain and the United States. The workforce in Abadan ignominiously turfed out of the country. An attempted coup that followed also engineered by the two Western allies served only to arouse and sustain animosity which exists into the present.

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On the opposite side of the Arabian Gulf in Saudi Arabia, the Arabian American Oil Company heeded the debacle at large in another Islamic country and when the time eventually came for their own hydrocarbon assets to be nationalised in the early 1980s, the contrast in amicable handover could not be more pronounced. Coinciding, as it happens, with my own transfer to the Kingdom for the following quarter century!

Anglo-Iranian became British Petroleum in 1954 and in 1966, the Burma Oil Company bought Castrol, both of which merged with BP in 2000.

Incidentally, Denis Thatcher, husband of Margaret, was a director of Burma Oil, retiring from the company in 1975 – four months after she won the Conservative Party leadership election!

Roderick MacSween

Stornoway

I COULD never tell Scots who they should vote for on July 4, but if NHS Scotland is your number one issue as a voter, there is a real dividing line between Labour and the SNP.

I am the lead campaigner at We Own It, a national organisation that campaigns against NHS privatisation and for proper NHS funding. At the beginning of the election, we asked all Scottish candidates to take our Pledge For The NHS. Pledge For The NHS asked all Scottish candidates to commit that if elected, they would fight in Westminster for £3.9 billion extra per year for NHS Scotland to catch up with average proportional European health spending. The pledge also asked them to commit to fight against NHS privatisation.

So far, almost 40% of SNP candidates have taken the pledge, including the party’s Westminster health spokesperson, Amy Callaghan. And while some English Labour candidates have taken the pledge, none of their Scottish Labour colleagues have. Wes Streeting, the man who will speak on behalf of Scottish Labour MPs on health in Westminster after July 4, continues to insist on expanding the outsourcing of operations to private hospitals instead of investing to build up the NHS.

If the NHS is your top issue, then there should be no confusion about which party has made the best case for the trust of Scots.

Johnbosco Nwogbo

Oxford