Car guys in Trinbago of the 1950s and 1960s would remember a greenish motor oil of excellent quality called Duckham’s which at the time was second only to Castrol in the world as a manufacturer of this commodity. What few realised was how intimate a connection Duckham’s had to Trinidad’s early oil days.
Alexander Duckham (1877-1945) was the son of a successful mechanical engineer which was a career that he himself followed. After a short stint working for a syndicate distributing heating oil in Britain, Alexander was advised to study the chemistry of lubricating oils which he undertook with a passion.
In 1899 he purchased his first automobile and founded Alexander Duckham and Co, which specialised in motor lubrication. The firm was so successful, it led Duckham to think about vertical integration of his operations by finding a source of crude oil which was the basis of his refined motor lubricants.
The company had assembled a small team of chemists and specialist engineers over time. One of these people was dispatched to Barbados where in 1896, the West India Petroleum Company had drilled several wells. In 1905 the Duckham’s geologist arrived in the Turner Hall area of that island to assess the potential of the wells which were producing a significant output.
For whatever reason, the man’s report back to his superiors in London was not favourable and Duckham immediately cabled a message for him to examine Trinidad instead where since 1902, productive wells had been drilled at Guayaguayare by Major Randolph Rust and the presence of the Pitch Lake indicated the existence of sizeable petroleum deposits.
The evaluations and surveys of the Duckham’s man paralleled and coincided with similar work being done in the Guapo area near Point Fortin by petroleum geologist, Arthur Beeby-Thompson. This latter oil pioneer was to prove that Trinidad had vast oil reserves and was to be the driving force behind the birth of the local oil industry.
Thompson had formed the Trinidad Petroleum Company in 1907 and was voraciously acquiring leases on Crown lands as well as from private landholders in the southwestern peninsula in the Guapo, La Brea, Fyzabad and Point Fortin which promised great returns. Duckham was then forced to look elsewhere for his crude oil which happened to be at a location not traditionally understood to be part of Trinidad’s oil belt even today.
In the rolling hills of the Central Range was the little village of Tabaquite. It had barely existed until the cocoa boom of 1870-1920 when global prices skyrocketed, resulting in a rapid expansion of production in Trinidad. A large number of estates sprang up in this area which was eminently suitable for cultivation and which yielded great rewards for the planters both large and small.
It was a highly mixed population which formed the main settlement in the early 1890s, consisting of white proprietors, Afro and Indo Trinidadian smallholders, Chinese merchants and ‘cocoa panyols’ from Venezuela who provided skilled labour.
The thriving cocoa economy of the Central Range led planters to petition the colonial government for a railway line since the only communication was by an almost impassable bridle path. The authorities extended a railway line south of Jerningham Junction in Cunupia in the 1890s which bisected Tabaquite and Flanagin Town. Part of this line boasted a railway tunnel which when commissioned in 1898 was named after then acting governor, C C Knollys.
Tabaquite was described by H Marshall in 1911 as follows:
“Up to now we had been travelling over flat country ever since leaving Port-of-Spain, but on approaching the end of our journey where we passed through the only tunnel on the line, we had reached the spurs of the Montserrat Hills, at the foot of which lies the little settlement of Tabaquite. Near the railway line there was a good track, on the far side of which were three or four stores at intervals from each other, a few cottages of the poorer class were within sight, and the rest was bush, forest, or whatever else one might choose to call the surrounding foliage.”
It was this railway line and the immediate advantages it provided that was to prove instrumental to the area’s place in oil history. The Duckham syndicate investigated seepages of a light crude in the cocoa woods near Tabaquite around 1906 and determined that there was enough evidence of petroleum to warrant further investment of resources in the area.
Next week, we will look at what happened to Duckham and his exploration for oil.