I recently bought a couple of vintage
petrol pump globes (above and left). You have to be of a certain age (around fifty or
over) to even remember what these were, since they were already being
phased out during the nineteen sixties. Prior to that time, the pumps
at petrol stations had acquired an almost anthropomorphic quality,
and stood, like seven-foot-high giants, in rows of three or more on
the narrow concrete islands that were a feature of most filling
station forecourts.
The ‘heads’ of these mechanical
monsters took the form of illuminated globes, often
distinctively-styled to reflect the petrol company’s logo: Esso
globes were ovoid (and occasionally spherical), BP’s shield-shaped
(changed to a simple cube during the early 60s), whilst the greatest
of all were those of the Shell brand: huge glass shells embazoned
with the company name, which came in a number of colours according to
grade: white for normal and economy, blue for high-octane ‘Super
Shell’, and another shade (pink?) for diesel. These were by no
means cheap items, but once upon a time they graced pretty well every
petrol station forecourt across the world.
In Britain if not elsewhere, their
decorative potential as cool living room lamps led to many being
stolen, rendering their pump bases ‘headless’ – a common sight
during the last years of these petrol dinosaurs. For a time, the oil
companies issued cheaper plastic or glass fibre replacements, but
pump design was undergoing a revamp as a new generation of small,
squat, headless examples took the place of the mid-50s giants, and
vintage features like analogue clock dials were replaced by rotary
displays. Glass globes were an unnecessary and showy expense... and
accordingly, they were done away with.
These days, original glass petrol
globes command huge prices: mint examples of the Esso ovoid can sell
for over a thousand pounds, and it’s hard to find glass Shell
globes for sale much below the mid hundreds. Not bad going when you
consider that many of them were originally acquired by theft...
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| A typical 1960s Shell filling station… |
In the 1960s, the business of filling
up with petrol (or, less likely during that era, diesel) was a
somewhat more sedate affair than it has become. Queues were unheard
of, other than at times of national shortage, and yet the average
filling station was usually of quite modest proportions, often with
only a single stand of pumps. Nowadays, a typical petrol station
might have two or three aisles offering maybe ten or twelve working
pumps, each one dispensing all the different kinds of fuel available.
A 1960s filling station, such as the one illustrated, might have had,
at best, six; and each pump was limited to a specific grade of fuel.
The only exceptions would have been the service areas on motorways
which were just beginning to emerge during the decade.
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| …and Corgi's kit version (the illustrator evidently having used the above image as reference). |
By the mid-60s, the big brands were
long-established icons, and the largest of them are still with us
today: Shell, Esso, BP. Of the big three, only Esso’s logo remains
unchanged in fifty years (for some reason, I find this rather
reassuring), while Shell has stuck rigidly to its late 60s/ early 70s
image, and BP, slow to update, is now saddled with a kind of floral
emblem which replaced its classic ‘shield’ logo some time during
the last decade. I’m not quite sure what they’re trying to say
there... is the floral device intended to suggest care for the
environment? Whatever they’re at, the green and yellow colour
scheme remains the same.
As a kid, I liked BP the least of all
the petrol companies – not that you might have expected me to have
an opinion on such things, but I did – and it was solely because of
the green/yellow logo. Esso’s red white and blue seemed somehow
more serious (maybe more masculine?), while by the mid-60s, Shell had
settled on the red/yellow combination that still does service today.
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| A typical wayside filling station from the 1950s. |
The fact that I even noticed such
things as brands of petrol is telling: at the age of five or six I
was already keenly aware of the ‘grown-up’ world of cars, petrol,
architecture and suchlike, and found these items curiously alluring
in a way that the artefacts of childhood were not. In short, I wanted
to be old enough to drive a Triumph Herald like my dad, and to fill
up at our local ‘Super National’ garage – a tiny forecourt of
two pumps selling this defunct brand.
I say defunct, but I have a sneaking
suspicion that there are still garages somewhere in the UK selling
National-branded petrol, complete with its futuristic ‘Mr. Mercury’
logo in blue and yellow, itself a modern update of a 1930s emblem.
The brand seemed to undergo a revival during the 1990s, but even in
the 60s, National stations weren’t as common as those of the
Shell/BP/Esso axis, although they were probably in fourth place after
those global giants. Lesser brands of the era included VIP – with
its orange and black logo; Gulf (a comparative newcomer in my
experience: I saw my first station around 1968); and Regent. Of these
names, Regent was already on the way out during the 60s, but I still
remember seeing their rather dull stacked block logo on pump globes
of the era.
Other brands came and went, most
usually as a result of mergers within the oil industry. The Belgian
Fina brand (Petrofina) had been around since the 1920s, but appeared
to be on the wane during the ’60s: I knew their logo principally
from model petrol pumps, and there never seemed to be any stations
close to where we lived. In the 1990s, there was a short-lived
Fina-branded station attached to the local Co-Op supermarket close to
where I lived, but it now trades under the dreary pale green banner
of the Co-Op itself.
By the time I finally became a
customer for petrol, the whole filling station experience had altered
out of all recognition, like so many other aspects of the adult world
that I’d aspired to as a child. Now, increasingly, petrol was being
sold at supermarkets, often forgoing oil company names in favour of
the supermarket branding, and it was being sold by the litre as
opposed to the gallon. Pumps, once presided over by men and women in
liveried overalls, had become self-service during the 1970s. My one
and only experience of being served by a pump attendant was at a tiny
wayside filling station on the Scottish border in 1990, and the pump
in use was a vintage example from the mid 60s; but I well remember my
dad filling up in the 1960s at the little local station where we were
served by a genial, white-overalled man whom my dad, after an archaic
fashion of the times, addressed as ‘squire.’ I even remember
being bought sweets from a filling station – the long-forgotten
Opal Toffees, in fact – which seemed a novelty of ludicrously
exciting proportions.
That’s another thing that’s
changed. The average filling station these days offers a range of
goods comparable to any small newsagent or supermarket, but back in
the ’60s and ’70s – and even until well into the ’80s –
you’d have been hard-pressed to obtain much more than a packet of
Polos and a can of Duckhams from pretty well any service station.
There is, seemingly, still one petrol
station left in the UK operating 50-year-old pumps (complete with
their Fina branded glass globes - above), but for the most part such items
are now only to be found in museums or very expensively-equipped
‘mancaves’ (to use a loathsome piece of modern terminology).
During the ’80s and ’90s it was still possible to stumble on the
occasional rural filling station equipped with old pumps: taking a
replacement bus service on a train journey from Manchester to
Birmingham around 1988, I passed a classic example located somewhere
between Stafford and Wolverhampton, where a row of vintage 1960s
Shell pumps was seemingly still in service, complete with original
glass globes. Closer to home, a garage on the A453 at Shire Oak had a
huge sculpted mid-50s Shell sign standing until well into the ’90s,
while further down the same road stood a redbrick garage, probably
dating to the ’30s, with a row of globeless Fina pumps outside. I
photographed it in 1996, but unfortunately, neither the station nor
that photographic record survives.
Petrol, and the changing way in which
it has been sold to us as consumers, is just one of the many aspects
of the world I grew up in that seemed to be disappearing before I could
even come to terms with them. I liked the style of the cars I grew up
with, but by the 1970s a kind of careless ugliness was beginning to
replace the considered, aesthetic lines of vehicles from the ’50s
and ’60s. It was the same everywhere you looked... clothes,
buildings, graphics of all kinds were becoming crass and vulgar, as
excess became the default style of the times. As a five-year-old,
watching the cool, swinging TV commercials for ‘Super National’
and Esso petrol (‘I’ve got a tiger in my tank’ went the
slogan), I imagined that slick, clean-lined adult world would be
waiting for me when I came of age. But the pace of change was too
fast. Trying to get a hold of that cool world was like trying to
catch smoke...