As Britain fought for its survival during World War II, a team of American oil drillers found themselves on their way across the Atlantic to help the war effort. They became known as the ‘roughnecks of Sherwood Forest’.
During the dark days of WWII, when Britain stood alone against the Nazi regime, there was a dire need to increase oil production from indigenous hydrocarbon resources. By 1942, the strategic importance of discovering more oil in the UK was becoming critical. In fact, by August 1942, Britain’s oil stocks had fallen below safety reserves and the requirement to discover and produce additional oil was of paramount importance to the survival of the United Kingdom and its ability to continue the war.
In July 1941, Geoffrey Lloyd, Britain’s Secretary of Petroleum, wrote to the oil companies in the UK highlighting the need to discover and produce more oil, saying, “In the present emergency, every tonne of oil produced in this country is a direct contribution to the national war effort.” He also commented: “It is felt that an output of at least 100,000 tonnes per year of British petroleum is a target at which our most vigorous endeavour should be aimed.”
According to the official history of the US Petroleum Administration for War (PAW), during the first seven months of 1941 a total of 681 vessels, including a large proportion of US and British oil tankers, had been sunk, and by the autumn of 1942, German U-boats were sinking 700,000 tonnes of shipping per month. In 1943, 65% of the total tonnage of overseas shipping consisted of petroleum products; it was becoming increasingly important that some supply was found that the U-boats could not sink.
The 42 American drillers and roughnecks, that traveled to the UK under great secrecy, to drill the wells in the East Midlands. (Guy Woodward Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming). (Source: American Oil & Gas Historical Society)
A Secret Oil Field
Map showing the location of the East Midlands region within the UK.
In August 1942, Geoffrey Lloyd called an emergency meeting in London of the Oil Control Board with members of the oil industry’s advisory committee. The subject was the impending oil supply crisis. The Admiralty had reported fuel stocks were two million barrels below safety reserves and were sufficient to meet only two months requirement. Reserves of approximately five million barrels were normally held in some 40 widely scattered storage facilities. Bombing raids in dockland areas had destroyed almost a million barrels.
Philip Southwell was at the Oil Control Board meeting. He was a representative of the D’Arcy Oil Company, and he had a secret – and that secret lay underneath Sherwood Forest, in Nottinghamshire in central England: potential oil fields, located inland, in a heavily wooded area safe from inquisitive eyes and which could be easily camouflaged from the attentions of the Luftwaffe. The challenge was to drill and produce from the oil reserves at these fields at Dukes Wood and Eakring as rapidly as possible.
But how was this to be achieved? Manpower and equipment were in short supply during the early war years. Vital supplies of fuel needed for the war effort had to be shipped through the dangerous U-boat infested waters surrounding the British Isles. What was clearly needed was new equipment and the necessary expertise to use this equipment efficiently.
The main problem with existing equipment was its age, weight and difficulty in being manoeuvred between locations. The need for lighter, easily transported drilling units, with experienced crews, was paramount if the number of wells to be drilled to meet target production levels was to be achieved. Southwell suggested going to America for equipment. This was agreed, particularly as he thought that an additional 100 wells could quadruple production (Roberts, 2009).
Commemorating the Drillers
Artist Jay O’Melia.
In March 1991, a statue, called The Oil Patch Warrior, was unveiled in Dukes Wood by the Rt. Hon. John Wakeham, MP, Secretary of State for Energy, to commemorate the contribution of the American Volunteer drillers during WWII.
At the commemoration ceremony, 16 Oklahoma-based survivors of the original drillers and roughnecks were in attendance (see photo, below).
A duplicate of the statue was built in Ardmore, Oklahoma, ten years later, so two identical bronze statues separated by the Atlantic Ocean now commemorate the achievements of World War II American roughnecks.
After vandalism in 2012 by metal poachers, the bronze statue in Dukes Wood was moved to a safer, new home at Rufford Abbey Country Park, 10 miles away, and repaired – a new statue was commissioned for Dukes Wood, this time made out of stainless steel and resin, less attractive to thieves. Two of the ‘roughnecks’ were on hand for its unveiling in May 2014.
In the picture opposite: The Oil Patch Warrior – (clockwise, from left to right) the bronze statue originally in Dukes Wood, now at Rufford Abbey Country Park, its duplicate in Ardmore, Oklahoma (top right), and the new stainless steel and resin replacement statue in Dukes Wood today.
Surviving ‘roughnecks’ who made the trip to England for the commemoration ceremony in 1991.
The Oil Patch Warriors (from the Dukes Wood Oil Museum website – link below)
Joe S. Barker; William N. Burnett; Robert M. Christie; Elray R. Davis; George G. DeArman; Herman Douthit; Lewis V, Dugger; E. G. Gates; Phillip E. Albritton; Dewey Aycock; Gerry E. Griffin; James E. Harding; De Talt Haveley; E. H. Hemphill; Ray A. Hileman; Edgar Holt; William C. Francis; Johnston Virgil L. Latham; A. I. Long; L. B. McGill; John H. McLewain, Jr.; A. J. May; Ray F. Miller; Albert A. Morton; J. W. Nickle; Lloyd Noble; Carl Norberg; L. M. “Pete” Oaks; C. E. Olvey; Frank Porter; I. P. Robinson; Clement Riedinger; Allen Rutherford; E. P. Rosser; Clarence Sikes; Gordon O. Sams; Woody Wayne Walden; J. A. Waits; G. Christie Watson; Donald E. Walker; John Townsen Webster; Albert F. Webster
Experienced Drillers and Roughnecks
Under strictest secrecy, Southwell flew to the US In September 1942 to meet with Don Knowlton, the Deputy Administrator responsible for the US PAW. Lease-lend was considered but would take too long to set up and it was finally agreed that a drilling contractor, based in the US, could be employed by D’Arcy Exploration to operate in the UK and that the contractor could purchase the necessary equipment to bring to the UK. Contact was made with the Noble Drilling Corporation and the Fain-Porter Drilling Company, both of Oklahoma. These companies agreed to the contractual arrangements with D’Arcy and also agreed to the purchase and supply of drilling units and equipment. Both companies agreed to not receive any profit after reimbursement of expenses.
Kelham Hall, where the American oilmen were stationed, is a stately home built in the mid-1800s, which later became a monastery. (Source: Dave Bevis/Wikipedia)
In February 1943, 42 experienced drillers and roughnecks and their equipment and two toolpushers, Eugene Rosser and Don Walker, arrived in the UK from the US in two groups on the RMS Stirling Castle and HMS Queen Elizabeth. They had been told that they would be working under austere wartime conditions and subject to strict censorship and absolute secrecy. They were accommodated at Kelham Hall, a former monastery which was secret, secure and in the vicinity of Dukes Wood.
In March their four American jack-knife rigs and other drilling equipment started to arrive, the rigs having been shipped in separate vessels. Only three rigs made it – the ship carrying the fourth was attacked and sunk by a German submarine. Later, a replacement was sent over and arrived safely (Woodward and Woodward, 1973).
One of the wellheads which has been preserved at Dukes Wood. (Source: Trevor Rickard)
The more modern American methods led to great improvements in drilling efficiency and resultant costs. The American drilling equipment employed consisted of a ‘state of the art’ drilling unit and jack-knife 87 ft (26m) mast, the whole being designed for maximum mobility, often employing skids to avoid dismantling, and for a drilling depth of 5,000 ft (1,524m). With the old-type heavy exploration equipment, the time to transfer drilling equipment from site to site had been about two weeks, but by using this special mast, in combination with utilised draw-works, this was reduced in good weather to about 12 hours. At Eakring a record move of six and a half hours was made and on one occasion an outfit was transferred to a new site and drilled 650 ft (200m) in a mere 24 hours.
During their 365 drilling days in Sherwood Forest, the American volunteers managed to drill 106 wells in the Eakring and Dukes Wood fields, of which 94 were new producers (Johns, 1999).
With their contract up, the crews sailed from Glasgow on HMS Mauretania II on 3 March 1944. D’Arcy continued to produce oil from Eakring and Dukes Wood to a total of 300,000 tonnes of oil (2.25 MMbo) by the end of the war, via 170 ‘nodding donkeys’ spaced every 10,000 m2.
The deepest well to be drilled at Dukes Wood was No. 146 to a depth of 2,328m (7,473 feet). Pictured are members of the drilling team involved in this achievement. (Source: Dukes Wood Oil Museum via BP)
About the author
Bruce Blanche is an international oil and gas geoscientist with over 40 years experience in a wide range of functions. These include exploration, new ventures, acquisitions, assessments, evaluation, project management and competitor intelligence analysis. He has expertise in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South East Asia, Europe, the Falkland Islands and Latin America. He is also an expert on the provision of country risk overviews, assisted by his 30 years of military reservist service. He’s also been chairman of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Africa London Scout Group for the last 13 years. Bruce’s current focus is upon building high impact acreage portfolios.
Bruce comes from a family of Canadian oilmen with a strong link to the early exploration and development of UK oil and gas resources. Bert Blanche, Bruce’s father, started his long career in the oil industry as a roughneck in Texas in 1930, going on to work in the UK during the war years. Later, after the war, on the island of Borneo, he was caught up in the Brunei revolt (December 1962) being held hostage, along with 43 others. Bert managed to escape in the confusion after he and several other hostages had been used as ‘human shields’ in an attempt to storm a police station; several hostages were wounded and one killed.
You can find out what happened next to Bert by reading Bruce’s fascinating account in our archives – The Canadian Driller: A Life in Oil.
Small but High Quality
Eakring must have been one of the best kept wartime secrets, for it was not until April 1944 that the veil was officially lifted by the government, having been prompted to act by an ‘exclusive’ report on the oil discovery in a national newspaper. Geoffrey Lloyd and the then BP Chairman Sir William Fraser, later to become Lord Strathalmond, hosted a visit by Fleet Street journalists to the operations centre at Eakring.
(Source: Dukes Wood Oil Museum)
Mr Lloyd commented: “This oilfield, like Britain, is small but of the highest quality; it yields a whole range of refinery petroleum products. This oilfield came into operation just when we needed every barrel of oil to carry this country through the crisis of the war. These were supplies that the U-boats could never sink.”
These fields established a new oil province in the East Midlands Plateau Basin and the Gainsborough Trough.
Oil from Eakring and Dukes Wood was indeed of very high quality and superior to Middle Eastern oil. After it was refined it was found to be particularly suited to the Rolls Royce Merlin Engine, the engine extensively used by most of the Royal Air Force’s high performance fighters and bombers.
Thus it was that Dukes Wood and Eakring, along with a contingent of US drillers, made a significant contribution to Britain’s war effort.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the following organisations and individuals: Kevin Popham and the Dukes Wood Oil Museum; American Oil and Gas Historical Society, Washington DC, USA; Mrs Janet Roberts for permission to quote from Oil Under Sherwood Forest; Mrs Jean Blanc for her valuable support and patience.
References
Anon, 1989. Eakring 1939-1989 Fifty Years of Achievement. BP Exploration booklet.
Johns, M. G., 1999. Sherwood Forest Had Many Heroes. AAPG Explorer, August.
Roberts, J., 2009, Oil Under Sherwood Forest, Private publication.
Woodward, G. and Woodward G. S., 1973. The Secret of Sherwood Forest Oil Production in England During World War II. Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
Dukes Wood Oil Museum
American Oil and Gas Historical Society
From the GEO ExPro Archive
‘What Oilfields?’ Onshore Oil in the UK by Michael Quentin Morton
Geologists at War by Will Thornton
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