HISTORY
The foundation of UKLA’s forbear, the National Lubricating Oil and Grease Federation, owed much to the submarine menace of 1917, which forced collaboration among companies. German U-boats were striving to cut off supplies of all commodities, including base oil, into Britain. In a strange reversal of intent, a few years later they were actually carrying luboils for a British wholesaler...
Arthur Brown and the U-boats
Tim Hill
When I started writing my history of the British lubricants industry, I held conversations with many of the senior figures of the 20th century. One of the very first was John Burningham who had been one of the proprietors of Arthur Brown & Co (ABCO), a leading wholesaler. Among the stories John told me about his company was one that intrigued me from the start, although John’s information about the already almost 80-year old event was sketchy.
What he told me was that after the First World War ABCO had used German U-boats to import base oil from the United States! He knew they had
somehow been converted into oil tankers and had typical German names, that he couldn’t quite remember – perhaps Unterhausen or Schwebischgarten – or something... I determined to find out more about this story if I possibly could. Early enquiries came to nothing,
however, for I couldn’t tie the putative names to any real vessels. I then wrote an appeal for information through the nautical magazine Sea Breezes. Again, nothing ensued and I assumed defeat, until several years later I had a letter from Herr Klaus Pribilla, a German now living in Finland. He had the answers to all aspects of the story, having worked for the Stinnes Group, which had played the major role in events.
The story was as follows:
After the armistice, work was naturally suspended on all U-Boats that were under construction, and there were obviously questions as to what to do with hulls
28 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.147 OCTOBER 2018
that were reasonably advanced. A Stinnes company had the answer – convert them into oil tankers! Thus in 1921 two ships, named Ostpreussen and Oberschlesien took to the oceans. Each could transport 3000 tons of oil and it is believed that these were the ships that ABCO chartered in the early 1920s. They did not have a long life under the German flag, for Stinnes sold them to Italian owners, and, in one of life’s ironies, the Oberschlesien was sunk by the British submarine HMS Utmost in World War II.
For the record, the U-boats were numbers U-183 & 4 and U-187 & 8, for each of the tankers was built on top of the submarines as it were, sporting two cigar shapes side-by-side below a conventional superstructure.
All the information about the ships has come from Herr Pribilla to whom
I am immensely grateful, and without whose help the mystery of the “submarine movement” of luboils would not have been solved.
This story is not repeated in Tim Hill’s forthcoming book, ‘A History of the British Lubricants Industry’, but further information on the history of Arthur Brown & Co. is in there, along with countless anecdotes of well- and not-so-well-known oil companies.
LINK
www.ukla.org.uk
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