When I embarked on a survey of oilfield exploration vehicles, I had no idea what a vast subject would be uncovered. It turns out that there were very few winners, such as the Kenworth 953, and dozens of losers. Just about every specialist lorry making firm of the 1930s to 1960s tried to tap into oil company wealth. National pride was at stake with each country vying to make its own equipment.
Not surprisingly, in view of Royal Dutch Shell, Holland was at the heart of the matter and this makes a good moment to look at protagonists like Kromhout, Verheul and Terberg, and at the complicated structure of Shell itself. Founded in Britain as an importer of exotic seashells in 1833 by Marcus Samuel, it began trading in Asian kerosene in 1897 and four years later won the concession for Texas crude oil from Standard Oil (Esso). In 1890 an oil business had started in Holland which, with its merger with Shell in 1907, became the Royal Dutch Shell Group.
Billions of pounds later, after a period which had seen natural gas shipped from Algeria from 1964 and Shell’s discovery of the Brent Oilfield in the North Sea in 1971, the firm recently announced that it would halve its carbon emissions by 2050. Then, in 2021, came the big news that London would henceforth be its
