ALEXANDER DUCKHAM

He made a fortune from motor oil, but always kept his face out of the public eye

‘IN 1968, DUCKHAM’S WAS BRITAIN’S THIRD-BIGGEST MOTOR OILS BRAND. TODAY IT’S TOTALLY MORIBUND’

WELL, READERS, I hope you enjoy gazing into the hooded eyes of oil tycoon Alexander Duckham. His image was especially tricky to locate. You know you’re in for a gruelling picture-research ride when a Google Images search gives precisely no results. Requests to Beaulieu’s Motoring Picture Library, the Science Museum, even former Duckhams PR man Gordon Bruce – they all drew a blank. I’d almost given up when the National Aerospace Library unearthed this stuffed-shirt study; the sort of businessman-at-desk image you’d only use as a last resort. Which this actually is.

What’s paradoxical about Alex’s elusiveness is how huge the brand he created became. Duckhams, thanks to its Q 20-50 and its gloopy green viscosity, was a multigrade oil almost as famous as Castrol GTX. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Duckhams was all over Britain’s garages, accessory shops and motor factors. For a long spell it was a key Lotus F1 sponsor, and well into the 1980s the packaging proudly proclaimed ‘Alexander Duckham & Co’.

You probably think it’s still on sale. It isn’t. In 2014, small Yorkshire petrol retailer Spring Petroleum bought 100 petrol forecourts from BP, which threw in the Duckhams brand too (it also owned Castrol by this time). Shortly afterwards, the familiar blue-and-yellow cans vanished from sale without notice, and now Spring itself has gone too. Duckhams quietly evaporated into the mists of recent times.

Alexander Duckham’s father, Frederic, was an inventive mechanical engineer. He married Maud McDougall (of the flour-milling dynasty), and their son was born in Blackheath, south-east London, on 1 March 1877. Frederic’s speciality was governors for marine engines and, with encouragement from shipbuilding tycoon Sir Alfred Yarrow (a Blackheath neighbour), Alexander decided after university to specialise in mechanical lubrication. In doing so, he became probably the first man to develop a rigorous, scientific understanding of the subject.

He worked briefly for Fleming’s Oil Company, which distributed heating oil, before launching his own business, in Millwall, aged just 22. The useful introductions Sir Alfred provided opened dozens of doors for the new research consultancy.

Duckham bought his first car in 1899, and was spellbound by the emerging motor industry. One of his guinea-pig collaborators was Selwyn Edge, racing driver and Napier designer, who called at the Millwall premises weekly to discuss car durability. Later on, he often accompanied Edge to the new Brooklands track to see how engines and oils performed under extreme pressure. Alexander was also a close chum of aviation pioneer Louis Bleriot. He funded the memorial stone at Dover where Bleriot’s world-first Channel-crossing flight touched down in 1909.

Having become a global authority on the properties of lubricating oils, Duckham (with Yarrow’s cajoling) next focused on the goldrush surrounding production of the stuff.

He started prospecting in 1905, sending geologists first to Barbados and then Trinidad. The Duckham team struck lucky in Tabaquite, a village in the island’s central hills. Because of a cocoa boom in the area, a railway line had been built there, and this proved Duckham’s trump card in extracting and exporting his shiny black booty of light crude oil.

He’d hit the big time and had no problems in raising £50,000 in 1911 to establish Trinidad Central Oilfields. Before long, boatloads of oil barrels left Port-Of-Spain bound for his London refinery in Millwall, and later Hammersmith – the site today of the River Café restaurant and Richard Rogers’ architecture partnership. The First World War enriched him hugely, particularly after one Winston Chuchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, converted the fleet from coal power to oil, partly on the basis of Duckham’s supply chain.

A refinery was also built at Port of Spain, producing a petrol called Tricentrol for exotic cars – one that minimised carbon deposits in high-performance engines. And the firm built a revolutionary pipeline to flow oil to massive storage tanks in Claxton Bay, 20 miles away, without the need for railway tankers.

In 1920, Alexander Duckham & Co went public. It supplied oil to the Royal Navy and petroleum spirit to the new Royal Air Force, and now the Duckham’s brand of retail motor oils became ubiquitous, perhaps second only to the relentlessly promoted Wakefield Castrol in popularity.

The Trinidad fields were exhausted by 1939 but Duckham’s business sailed on regardless. Meanwhile, his younger brother Arthur made his own fortune in coal-derived gas and became the founding president of the Chemical Engineers in 1922, before dying while still young, ten years later.

Alexander Duckham himself lived until 1945 and his son Jack then ran the business until 1968, when BP bought it, shortly after a brand new refinery had opened in Aldridge, Staffordshire. It was then Britain’s third-biggest motor oils brand, and yet today it’s totally moribund.

From 1907 until 1920, Alexander Duckham lived at Vanbrugh Castle, a huge, Gothic-style pile in Greenwich, which he then donated to the RAF Benevolent Fund as a school for boys whose fathers had been killed in the First World War. When these had all grown up, the mansion was sold. That legacy is still used today to fund educational and welfare needs for disadvantaged RAF kids via the Alexander Duckham Memorial Schools Trust. But even they don’t have a picture of him. I did check.