In 2004 the Shell Heritage Society, a group of retired Shell staff based in Wellington, New Zealand, published a history of Shell in this country, sponsored by Shell New Zealand Limited. It was prestigious in appearance but research uncovered many hundreds of errors. I embodied these in a critique entitled "That's Shell?" and New Zealand's universities and the larger libraries have bought copies of it.
The 2004 history was entitled "Shell in New Zealand" and the writer was Peter Cooke. He was provided with material by the heritage society and seems to have been told that it had been well checked. Clearly it had not. This was probably the first time within Shell that such a major and ambitious work had been entrusted to a group of retirees, amateurs in the fields of research and publishing.
The errors suggest lack of supervision of the writing and no effective checking of the results. I have heard via a friend of a member of the Heritage Society (a member who was involved in the production of the history from its outset) that he was told by him that "we were not very pleased with the results". In making such a comment to someone with a love and respect for reliable history he took a risk. The remark, by an incredible chance, was passed on to me. That member, as chairman of the society, was one who had emphasised to me the society's unwillingness to consider a second edition. He had tried ineffectually to stifle my work by talking about my infringing the society's copyright, not at all the reaction that I as a long-time Shell man would have expected from anyone with a feeling for Shell's standards and reputation.
That remark, coupled with earlier information from the society's book committee that an expensive authorship quotation had been turned down on cost grounds in favour of a much cheaper author, shed a totally different light on the society's rather imperious attitude to my efforts. It appeared that the society had sailed into shallow water and that its evident mismanagement had then run it aground. It then battened down the hatches and declined to admit its failings or to act positively to correct them.
When I discussed my research with Shell New Zealand, it became clear that the Heritage Society alone was still seen as responsible. It was probably felt at that time that the society would be able to prevent an embarrassing situation through raising copyright concerns. There was probably a failure to appreciate the extent of my research in creating a completely new version of Shell's history. Copyright principles made it very clear that my history was a new and independent creation and faced no problem.
The position taken by Shell New Zealand has led, now that my version of the Shell history has developed into a substantial new history, to the strange situation that my history has been widely circulated and is held by universities and many other libraries (including the British Library in London) but neither Shell New Zealand nor the Shell Heritage Society seem to have read it or developed any view on its contents. Thus there have been no objections to any of my text, despite its detailed comments on the errors in Shell's own story and the mismanagement by the Heritage Society.
My motivation arose from an extremely long family involvement with Shell. My own life in Shell, and my father's, my sister's and my brother-in-law's, both in direct employment and in retirement, amount to well over 160 years, plus 17 years in the industry joint venture in refining and shipping in New Zealand. It was a background that made it impossible to ignore the need to correct the false history that had been published. It was enhanced by my own experience in research and my interest in exploring the history. The steady discovery of more and more errors simply fuelled that interest. My new story developed and grew.
The resistance by the Heritage Society must have reflected a wish to avoid embarrassment by a public admission that such a major piece of work was so lamentably defective. A further consideration would have been the cost of a second edition, though my authorship was offered at no cost and I was ready to help fund it. The result was a stone-wall policy and attempts to stifle my work. It was sad to find a group of long-serving, senior and devoted Shell people trying to suppress an honest and corrected version of a very bad Shell history. They were trying to protect history. That product was a danger to the future of historical records in New Zealand. A history clearly branded as coming from Shell would tend to be accepted as true by all future historians.
That 2004 book was not only sad but extraordinary. Many books contain the odd error or perhaps a handful. Few, if any, can have errors on anything approaching the scale of Shell's history. It was tragic. The 2004 history was a uniquely disastrous addition to the story of New Zealand.
A good history needs careful planning and considerable skills. The omission of many significant Shell people from the story, and of some significant parts of the company's operations, shows planning was defective. The book used many recollections recorded by former staff and many such memories were faulty. Even material from senior staff, including former directors, contained errors.
The errors were not just simple factual errors such as wrong dates, wrong names, wrong quantities. There were many major errors in the descriptions and explanations of events in the life of the company. Much in the book betrays a lack of oil industry knowledge on the part of the author. There is erratic historical sequencing and a failure by the author to spot the significance of many events. For such a book to get as far as the printing presses can only mean that the project was inadequately managed. I was shocked by the errors that I found on a first reading.
To cite just a handful of its many errors, "Shell in New Zealand" gave three different years for the introduction of electric petrol pumps, it gave two different levels of government participation in BP in 1947, it said that kerbside pumps arrived on the "Athenic" in January 1926 but it is easily found that she was then in European ports, it described expatriate staff as ex-patriots and hordes of visitors as hoards. Information on many of Shell's oil wells in New Zealand contains errors and conflicts. There are errors from one end of the book to the other. The clear impression is that neither the author nor the heritage society had the slightest expectation that the history would ever be questioned.
Even where the Shell history took information from other books, it managed to create errors. Its simple arithmetic was mishandled, with figures failing to add to stated totals, or wrong percentage calculations. Conversions of oil quantities between weights and volumes were faulty and misunderstood. All such elementary errors in a so-called Shell history, and they were many, condemn both the writer and the whole process of checking what he had written.
Many statements in the book were simply incorrect, implying that they were made by some informant who was ignorant of the true facts. Some have been detected by good fortune. One item about the early days at Marsden Point was jumped on by my friend and former colleague who was there at the time and was personally involved in that particular event. Other wrong information about refinery tanks could be checked and corrected because I happen to have that information in my own collection of working papers. Other information has been checked and corrected by oil companies, former oil engineers and by direct reference to authoritative sources and people. Shell's history had been put together by the uncritical and unresearched acceptance of material given to the author by the heritage society. It proved badly defective.
A former general manager of Shell BP Todd has told me that much of the work on exploration and production seemed to have been written by senior staff in Wellington who had little real knowledge of that part of the business.
Librarians and academics have expressed dismay to me that such a faulty history could have come from a source that is generally considered reliable.
2005 to 2008 - The corrected story
With a life time of experience in the oil industry, in
Shell or in closely related work, I wrote a new history entitled "She'll be
Right". With nearly two more years of dedicated research, I extended that
history through two more editions entitled "She'll be right shortly" and
eventually "She'll be right at last" at the beginning of 2007. It drew on a
wealth of sources and was a totally new book. The very early history of cars
and petrol in New Zealand was researched and developed, beginning to fill a
void that existed in both the Shell and Mobil histories. More information was
added on climate change, oil depletion, Maui depletion, aircraft emissions,
refinery development, other Shell group developments overseas, Shell people,
LPGs and innumerable minor additions and changes.
Many Shell publications and news reports continued to bring the overall
picture right up to date. Shell's 2004 history was a decade or more out of
date in some areas of its story. My story grew in size and the index was
reworked and extended. The preface was reworked and the story of this whole
research was encapsulated in a poem.
It became more relevant to the changing energy scene since the millennium.
Subjects such as the energy outlook and the emerging problems of climate
change were not touched in the 2004 history. Thus the new Shell history is a
book of more topical and general interest.
My history also makes it clear that other oil histories, such as those of
Mobil and New Zealand Refining, had errors of their own, errors that tended
to be copied across by the Shell author without being questioned or checked.
I believe that my new history can now be read by general readers as a book
of considerable interest, a story that is informative and significant. Beyond
those merits of its own, it has its original purpose of being the antidote to
the catastrophic version of 2004.
The errors in the Shell history were presented with total confidence. It
is clear that Peter Cooke was assured that his material could be trusted
implicitly. Some errors, such as the obvious internal contradictions, can be
blamed on the author, as can wrong word choices such as the ex-patriots
mentioned above.
My work on the new history has tested all information as far as possible.
More errors in the original story were found in that process. I have since
found only a couple of slips in my own work. One professional historian has
told me that he often works under pressures of time and cost and that
mistakes do indeed occur.
I received encouragement from some former directors of the company and help
and cooperation from many former members of Shell and associated companies.
"She'll be right at last" has been written independently, not relying on any
support from Shell New Zealand or the heritage society. It has made it
possible to write more frankly and to venture into areas that would not appear
in a typically sanitised sponsored history. It has been able
to become a more realistic historical story.
My book not only "invisibly mends" many of Shell's errors. It also
discusses some of them so that the reader can see and
appreciate the differences between the two books. Examples are the
correction of some of the dates, the arithmetic and simply wrong statements
in the original history.
Copies of my work are now held by many libraries in
New Zealand. The new story has been read by a number of former Shell staff
and they have been enthusiastic about it. Copies of the final "She'll be right
at last" will be donated to those libraries that have bought earlier versions
as it would feel unfair to suggest another purchase of what has been a
progressively developed story.
Contents of the history
Histories of Shell in New Zealand are inevitably similar
in structure but they can differ greatly in content. Two artists may paint the
same countryside but will see it differently and create different pictures.
They will see different details, emphasise different forms, paint in different
colours. Their pictures are not complete amd never can be; they are different
impressions of the same reality, even if the artists have been conscious of
portraying the same subject and have tried to paint realistically. As it is
with paintings, so it is with histories.
Opening chapters in the Shell history and in my book describe the origins
of Shell and then its arrival in Australia and New Zealand. The early steps
in shipping and marketing in New Zealand describe the case oil trade and then
the move into bulk storage and shipment by all the companies operating here.
That early period then leads into WW2, with its rationing and with the
involvement of Shell staff in local defence and in the armed forces,
leading through to what looked like a comparatively unchanged post-war
economy. My story, however, adds much that is new. It often draws historical
conclusions that Shell's author, though claiming to be a historian, failed to
notice because he knew too little about the material.
The two decades after WW2 were dominated by successful oil/gas exploration
and by the creation of the Marsden Point refinery (each of which has a
chapter). The refining venture brought with it a local coastal tanker
operation, again as a joint venture between the local oil companies. It forms
another separate chapter. There were also many changes in the market place
and those are covered in a long chapter, long because the oil companies in
New Zealand were predominantly marketing companies. Another topic in the book
is chemicals, also getting a small chapter.
Government involvement in the oil industry here was a major factor from the
1930s to the 1980s. Prices were closely regulated and the industry's hands
were so closely tied that there was little development in service stations and
internal distribution. It was not until the 1980s that a free market became
government's new objective and the retail oil market was revolutionised.
During this whole period there were the oil shocks of the 1970s, changing the
costs of what had once been a very cheap commodity. OPEC remains a major
factor in oil pricing.
Finally, as with the Shell history, my story looks at a variety of topics,
diversification ventures, training, computing, sponsorships, public relations
and many others. This raft of subjects is grouped into the last three
chapters. The subjects as a whole may be much the same but the contents are
very different throughout. The style of the text is very different and much
more compact than the wordy text of 2004 (where much could be reduced by 50%
with no loss of meaning).
One very great difference throughout this new story is
that I have been able to write objectively and sometimes critically in a way
that Shell's contracted author could not. Having spent
a lifetime in the oil industry, much in Shell, my writing has had an
autobiographical element to it. I have had a personal involvement in the
shipping, refining, economics and supply areas of the industry. I have had
extensive personal records to draw upon. All these factors have ensured that
my new history is a very different and a very independent product.
There are people who see the oil industry as "the enemy" in the problems
of climate change that have surfaced so dramatically in the past few years.
My story makes it plain that the fundamental cause has been the immense rise
in world population from one billion in 1900 to 6.6 billion at present. It
happens to have coincided with the "oil age" and has both been fuelled by
oil and has driven the demand for it. If population had risen to around two
billion, we would not now be facing the twin problems of climate change and
oil depletion and the world would still have most of its rain forests and
oceans as full of fish as they used to be. Malthus was right after all.
My index has become very much more detailed. I also have a good
glossary that is almost a story in itself. There are appendices dealing with
Shell products, oil wells in New Zealand, condensate shipments and product
demand. It is an informative book. The appendices and good index make it a
good reference book.
Many Shell people (and many others) get a mention in the new book but it
is much more than a simple story of Shell staff. It is a history of events
from a Shell man's perspective, a somewhat different approach from Mobil's
centenary history. Both are very readable as New Zealand histories and both
are inevitably founded on the individual companies. A student of history
should really read them both and would get a rounded and very detailed picture
from doing so.
A supplement to "She'll be right at last", published in 2008, has added
very significantly to the story of the early days of motor vehicles and oil
supplies in New Zealand. Thanks to newly developed digital versions of early
New Zealand newspapers, it has proved possible to uncover new material much
more easily. The first decade of the 1900s has revealed an astonishing growth
in motor vehicles and in their fuel supply. A motor car first drove over the
Rimutaka Hill in January 1901. Parcels of benzine were arriving by the turn of
the century. Shell companies registered trade marks as early as 1904.
A critique - explaining the errors
At the outset of my work on the history, I listed the
errors found in it and as it steadily grew I passed copies of this "critique"
to the heritage society. I gave it the name "That's Shell?", reflecting the
old advertising slogan "That's Shell that was" but now with a question mark.
The critique was published as an A4 comb-bound volume, eventually going
through three editions as more and more errors were found. The 3rd and final
version has been slimmed down by giving it a more compact format. It has a
preface outlining the problems and background to Shell's 2004 history, setting
out what seem to be the many reasons why its production went so badly off
track. The body of the critique is a systematic listing of errors great and
small. Actual errors run to more than 500, and other points and criticisms
that cover grammar, punctuation and the like probably take the total well over
1000.
Availability
"She'll be right at last" is available from the author, Michael Whitfield
Foster, 30 Campbell Street, Karori, Wellington 6012, at NZ$25 by post within
New Zealand. It is in a comb-bound format of A4 size, a format that opens flat
on the table. If handled carefully, it lasts well and I find it good to use.
The pricing is the barest minimum to cover printing and binding cost. Overall
it has been a loss-making project.
"She'll be right shortly" is still available in a "perfect bound" soft-cover version at
$32. It is a stronger and more durable binding, titled on the spine and
looking better on a bookshelf, but doesn't lie quite so conveniently flat
like the comb-bound version. It is, however, produced by a good book-binding
firm, with attention to the grain of the paper, and does open well. The cover
has been laminated.
The critique "That's Shell?" is also available comb-bound at $20. It is the
final tidied-up version.
"She'll be right at last" is a book of 271 pages and nearly 200,000 words in
the main text. There are several appendices and a very extensive index. A
glossary has many "oil words" for which no dictionaries will provide adequate
answers. ISBN 978-0-473-12257-7.
Copies of the soft-cover version can be mailed overseas, eg to Europe, by
economy airmail, at around $19 compared with the inland postage of $3.50,
giving an all-in price of about $46 or about GBP 16.
The 2008 "Supplement" runs to 50 pages packed with information, and can be
mailed within New Zealand for $12.