Energy in History

Building rigs at Nigg

The quiet village of Nigg on the Cromarty Firth became the centre of a huge cutting edge industrial venture in the early 1970s.

Texan oilmen from the Brown and Root company, a subsidiary of the giant firm Haliburton, arrived and built a huge graving dock on the sand dunes of the Firth. They had begun a new company, 'Highland Fabricators', which was tasked with building oil rigs for the new North Sea fields.

These posed vast challenges given the arduous conditions of the North Sea.

The rigs which were built at Nigg were on a much vaster scale than the offshore installations in the calmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nigg was hungry for workers, with a teaming demand for thousands of new workers. This had to be met locally but also required an influx of workers to the Cromarty Firth, often from England and lowland Scotland.

Workers' stories

Rab Wilson was a builder in Edinburgh, frustrated with insecure work and low wages.

In 2022, Rab remembered that fifty years earlier, in 1972, he tossed a coin to decide whether to travel south to build homes in prosperous areas of Eastern England or to head north for work in the new oil industry.

"We'd heard they were looking for people at Nigg and what they were doing there was training welders. They call them fabricators but it’s platers. No quite pipe fitting, but riggers, scaffolders, plant operators or what have you. It was a case of irrespective of what other skills you had, electricians were taken on as electricians and I think mechanics were taken on. For others that went there. Technically speaking you had the indigenous people from here and people who were moving there who’d heard about it. For four weeks they’d put you through this training school. I went into what was called the rigging department. So it was slinging pipes and how to operate a 15 ton or a 30 ton crane, the hydraulic ones. I knew about rigging and I knew about the scaffolding, the construction industry. That rate started at 75 pence an hour. They were actually training you and after you came out it was 85 pence an hour. It started at 8 and it finished at 4 and then once you got onto site you might go on to the shift it was 8 in the morning til 4 at night or if you went onto the shift it was 4 at night to 12 at night. And of course the site had already been, they were digging the big hole, have you seen the dock? They were digging a big hole to get it ready. They’ve no breached it yet or moved the dock gate or what have you. The other thing is that when I went there, there was an agreement so we had a handbook that gave you your rate of pay, your hours of work, basically the meal breaks and what have you. In general your terms and conditions. Prior to that I’d never been anywhere where any employer had gave you your terms and conditions. It had been signed by the signature of the trade unions."

The local newly trained workers that Rab mentioned were beneficiaries of a welding school set up by the company, initially using American and then Scottish trainers.

In 1972, a Scottish Office visitor reported highly favourably on the new operation:

"A very efficiently organised training school … [serving] local men, many from the unemployed register, and the company are very impressed already at their interest and skill. … Management staff were genuinely impressed with the degree of co-operation they had received from everybody in the area and were well satisfied with their choice of location."

J.B. Fleming, Brown and Root-Wimpey, Highland Fabricators Ltd: Note of a visit on Thursday 6 April 1972, National Records of Scotland, SEP 4/2436.