Early days From the moment oil was discovered in Persia (now
Iran) in May 1908, the issue arose of how best to ship it back to Britain. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) initially employed independent contractors; principally the Asiatic Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of
Shell, to carry the oil by sea. In 1912 the company acquired its first ocean going ship, the SS
Ferrara, a conventional freighter that carried oil products in metal cases. Tankers were unable to berth in
Abadan owing to a natural sand bar off the coast known as the Shatt-al-Arab Bar, and often had to anchor up to 40 miles from the port. This meant oil had to be
lightered out to the ships. Accordingly, APOC made two further shipping purchases, a
barge Friesland and a
tug Sirdar-i-Naphte. This situation remained until the mid 1920s when the bar was eventually dredged to allow ships direct access to the port.
1915 to 1945 However, the directors of APOC soon decided it would be better for the company to possess its own fleet of
tankers. It set up the British Tanker Company Limited (BTC) in April 1915, with an initial capital of £100,000. The BTC placed orders with two
Tyneside based shipbuilders,
Armstrong Whitworth and
Swan Hunter, for a total of seven steam-powered
oil tankers. The names of the first ships bore the prefix
British, and most future additions to the fleet followed the same naming convention. This acknowledged the fact that the British government had invested heavily in the fledgling company to ensure a supply of fuel oil for the
Royal Navy. BTC's first tanker was the 3,663
grt British Emperor, launched in 1916. She was employed to take oil from Abadan to the ports of
Bombay,
Karachi,
Madras and
Calcutta. She was the only BTC vessel not to be chartered by the
Admiralty in
World War I. Her career eventually ended in 1941, when she was sunk by the , after evading all the ''Pinguin's'' attempts to capture her intact. BTC's share capital was doubled to £200,000 in 1916, and further increased to £3,000,000 in November 1917. In 1917 APOC made a successful offer to the British government for the assets of the former German-owned Benzin und Petroleum BP AG seized on the outbreak of war. This included the associate Petroleum Steamship Company (PSSC) whose 13 oil tankers passed into BTC ownership. The same year BTC was chosen by the Royal Navy to manage seven
Royal Fleet Auxiliary tankers, giving it management experience that proved valuable post-war. The PSSC, now a subsidiary of BTC, took over ownership of the locally manned and managed fleet of small craft operating at Abadan. In addition two ex-BTC tankers operated by Italian companies were sunk by British submarines while a third was sunk by RAF
Coastal Command.
1945 to 1955 Within two years of peace in 1945, BTC had restored its fleet to its pre-war total of 93 ships. This included the purchase of 10 American wartime
T2 tankers To ease the problems of managing this large fleet an associated shipping company, the
Lowland Tanker Company, was formed in association with Mathesons and Common Brothers of Newcastle to operate 10 time-chartered tankers exclusively for BTC. In 1951 the situation changed dramatically, when Iran nationalised its oil industry. AIOC removed all its staff from the country, and for a while had no access to Iranian oil. AIOC set about forming new alliances with other oil producing countries, especially
Kuwait and
Bahrain. The crisis lead to a major emergency logistics operation being undertaken to reroute and repurpose the tanker fleet to cope with the loss of the refining capacity at Abadan. In addition the Petroleum Steamship Company's fleet of barges, tugs, lighters and ancillary craft was hastily evacuated to
Basra and
Kuwait. In the early 1950s BTC began increasing the size of its deep-sea ships by building 13 so-called 'supertankers', each of 18,000 grt. These larger ships were particularly useful during the
Suez Crisis of 1956, which closed the
Suez Canal and forced ships to sail around the
Cape of South Africa, adding to their journey. In November 1954 AIOC renamed itself the British Petroleum Company, and the BTC became the
BP Tanker Company from 1 June 1956,
British Soldier being the first ship turned out in the new company's colours. ==The ships==