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Oilwork: North Sea Diaries | 
| Author: Sue Jane Taylor
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
Category: Book
Buy New: £14.99
New (5) Used (6) from £6.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 280740
Media: Paperback
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 9.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 1841584274
EAN: 9781841584270
ASIN: 1841584274
Publication Date: September 8, 2005
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
A great insight into Scotland's Klondike years December 1, 2007
Sue Jane Taylor's Oilwork: North Sea Diaries is a personal memoir, incorporating her own photos, sketches and paintings, and is interspersed with poems by Norman MacCaig, George Gunn and Iain Crichton-Smith and commentary from trade unionist Ronnie McDonald.
In it she profiles some of the characters who peopled the rigs and fabrication yards in the early years of the North Sea oil rush. Between them, these unsung heroes made it possible to bring in a peak of 2.62 million barrels of crude oil per day from hundreds of metres under the North Sea.
Brandishing camera and sketchbook, Taylor braved force nine gales and severe conditions to spend much of the late 1980s and early 1990s on North Sea oil installations.
When she first sought access to the rigs, Taylor initially met with resistance. The oil firms' PR managers couldn't understand why a young female artist would want to spend time in such a hostile environment. Wouldn't she prefer to take her sketchbook to the Mediterranean?
Taylor persisted and seemed happy to be tossed about on the decks of oil-supply vessels and to live in cramped and smelly quarters aboard North Sea rigs where she faced the predictable sexist taunts.
She captures the Klondike feel of the early days of North Sea oil well. The prospect of extraordinary riches attracted some wild characters to the onshore fabrication yards at Kishorn, Nigg and Ardesier. But the most important figures in her book are the ordinary workers who made the miraculous exploitation of this resource possible.
She conveys the sometimes melancholic life of the offshore oilman through paintings she made in the Forties Field in 1986-87. She quotes on offshore worker as saying: "Platforms and rigs eat at men's souls. Half your life is spent away from home; you have two lives in one."
Taylor is struck both by the engineering feats and the bravery of the workers who made it possible for oil to be extracted from deep below the sea bed. But she cannot hide her distaste for some of the companies that profited from it.
For example she is critical of Occidental Petroleum, the US-based operator of the Piper Alpha platform on which 167 people died. Soon after that disaster, Occidental sought to prevent her Oil Worker Scotland exhibition - which included paintings that Taylor had done on the platform prior to its destruction - from seeing the light of day. However Taylor resisted the firm's heavy-handed tactics and the exhibition opened at Edinburgh's City Art Centre in 1989 and went on to tour 12 cities around the UK.
Just like this book, that played a key part in opening people's eyes to the contribution made by so many ordinary workers in ensuring the UK could keep its national accounts firmly in the black.
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