The grown-up world we were never to inhabit...

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...

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.

…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.

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...