RUSSIA, GALICIA, AND ROUMANIA next to Russia, there is no doubt that in the past this was a far more dangerous competitor of the Standard than it now is. The Baku output was at first so tremendous that it seriously disarranged the Standard's calculations, and when first Russian shipowners and afterwards Sir Marcus Samuel proposed in 1891 to ship Russian oil in bulk in tank steamers to the Far East, a perfect panic seized the Standard. Immediately one of those bogus agitations, in which it excels, broke out with great virulence. Not only was the ship ping community thrilled by the supposed dangers to other vessels of conveying oil in bulk through the Suez Canal, but the British nation was once more warned of the dark and male volent designs of Russia against " our highway to India." Nothing could be more amusing than this waving of the Union Jack over the designs of the Standard Oil Trust, but we shall see the same " patriotic " imposture reappear in the flash-point agitation a few years later. The Standard was at this time supplying its Far Eastern markets with " case-oil," packed in tin cans, which was, of course, a more expen sive method of transit than the large tanks of the bulk-oil steamers, and the agitation against the new scheme was carried to the Foreign Office. The story is told (without unduly emphasising the Standard's share in it) in Mr. J. D. Henry's well-known work, " Thirty five Years of Oil Transport" (Chaps V. and VI.). Messrs. Russell and Arnholz, solicitors, wrote to the Foreign Office, urging the Government to use their influence through the British directors of the Suez Canal Company to prevent the transit of bulk oil. Lord Salisbury asked them for whom they were acting, and received this very significant reply :— In view of the opposing commercial interests engaged, and the fact that the true promoters of bulk transit have not yet declared themselves, we respectfully submit that without pleading the privilege of our profession it would be imprudent on our part to permit our clients to disclose their names.
In the reply which the British directors of the Suez Canal Company forwarded to Lord Salisbury, this coyness on the part of the Standard was thus commented on :— They decline to give your lordship any clue for the present as to the names of their clients, but an expression in their letter of November 10th, which describes the passage of petro leum in bulk as a disturbance of the regular and safe case trade, leads to the inference that they are pleading the cause of parties engaged in sending petroleum through the canal packed in cases, and whose interests they appear to think may be damaged by facilities being given for the more economical conveyance of petroleum by these tank ships.
The Foreign Office then informed Messrs. Russell and Arnholz that Her Majesty's Govern ment could not take action in the direction they desired without full information as to what British interest they represented in the matter. As the Foreign Office thus declined to become a Rockefeller catspaw, somebody organised a memorial by merchants and tinplate manu facturers in Wales, where the Standard still buys most of the material for its cans, and another by shipowners who at that time were being chartered to carry case-oil to the East for the Standard. Finally, Sir Frederick Abel and Mr. (now Sir) Boverton Redwood prepared a report for those British shipowners who were hostile to the bulk carriage of oil through the Canal. Sir Frederick Abel was a chemist who constantly gave evidence on behalf of the Standard Oil Trust when it needed an expert, and Mr. Boverton Redwood had been from 1870 till just before this period (1889) the salaried chemist of the Petroleum Association, a trade body whose members vended the Rockefeller oils. Mr. Redwood was subsequently for a considerable period regularly employed to test oil cargoes on behalf of the Anglo-American Oil Company, and he gave evidence against raising the flash-point of lamp oil before the Petroleum Committee of 1896. His presence on the scene is sufficient to satisfy anybody in the oil trade as to what was the real origin of this benevolent agitation against tank steamers. While this gentleman was still in Egypt Sir Marcus Samuel artfully published in the Times an extract from a paper Mr. Redwood read to the Institution of Civil Engineers, in which he said :— The tank storage of kerosene oil has undoubtedly a great advantage over barrel or case storage in the event of fire.