How a little Arctic bird gave its name to the world’s most famous oil price
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
This one’s out of left field.
The London connection is distant but, so what? And in a broad general sense it does get hooked up. Pervasively so.
Anyway, here we go, here’s your London Calling daily fix.
This morning the price of Brent Crude is hovering around the headlines again.
Up a bit. Down a bit. Traders nervous. Tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz. The world economy listening for every creak and groan in the Middle East.
Brent Crude.
You hear the phrase all the time now. Radio bulletins. Financial pages. Newsreaders saying it in grave tones, as if it were some vast metallic thing clanking away beneath the global economy.
Brent Crude rose today.
Brent Crude fell today.
Markets reacted to Brent Crude.
And because I live in the London Borough of Camden, right next door to the London Borough of Brent, the thought occurred to me the other day – idle thoughts are often the best ones – I thought, wait a minute…
Brent?
Any connection?
Is the world economy somehow named after north-west London?
Does global capitalism tremble because of Kilburn? Wembley? Neasden?
Answer: no.
No connection whatsoever.
But the real story, I think, is better.
Much better.
Because the real Brent turns out to be fluffy. And feathery. And faintly quacky.
Which is not generally how one thinks of oil markets.
Now before we get to our bird, let’s linger for a moment on another word. Borough.
That’s a tiny portable museum right there.
Borough is ancient. Germanic. Cousin to the “burgh” in Edinburgh and “burg” in Pittsburgh and Hamburg.
Originally it meant a fortified place. A defended settlement. A place with walls.
You can practically hear the old Anglo-Saxon
consonants
clanking together in it. Borough. Burh. Burg.
Language does this all the time. Words are little capsules of history we carry around in our mouths without noticing.
You say “window” and you’re speaking Viking. Old Norse. Wind-eye.
You say “salary” and somewhere in the background Roman salt crystals are rattling around.
You say “broadcast” and a medieval farmer is scattering seed by hand.
And you say Brent Crude…
…and a goose waddles into view.
Because Brent Crude takes its name from the Brent oilfield, discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s.
And the Brent oilfield got its name from a bird.
The Brent goose.
A small dark goose
you see
around Britain in winter. Estuaries. Mudflats.
Salt marshes.
Migrating down from the Arctic like a tiny feathered commuter.
Now here’s the lovely bit.
The oil companies operating in the North Sea had naming systems for fields.
Shell plc used birds. Especially birds beginning with the same letter.
So the Brent field became Brent because of the Brent goose.
One of the most important benchmark prices in the world economy is therefore named after a bird that potters about in coastal marshes looking slightly chilly and under-impressed.
Which feels gloriously British somehow.
And there’s another layer to this story for me personally.
Nearly fifty years ago I worked briefly on a North Sea oil rig.
Roustabout.
Now there’s another wonderful word.
A roustabout.
It sounds like somebody in a music hall act.
Or a cowboy in a travelling circus.
In reality, on an oil rig, it means the bloke doing the hard graft.
Shifting equipment. Cleaning. Hauling. General labouring.
I helicoptered out from Aberdeen.
That helicopter journey is something you never forget.
The city drops away.
The coast disappears.
Then there’s nothing but grey water and weather
and suddenly
this gigantic steel insect appears standing on the sea.
An oil rig.
Half factory, half fortress.
And now I find myself wondering:
was the rig I worked on connected to Brent?
Was I, without knowing it, standing inside the machinery behind those news bulletins we hear today?
Possible.
Quite possible.
Because Brent became far more than one oilfield.
It became the benchmark.
The standard price against which huge amounts of the world’s oil are measured.
That’s why you hear it every day now whenever tensions flare in the Middle East or shipping through Hormuz is threatened.
Incidentally, Hormuz probably derives from the Persian for a date palm or perhaps from the old Persian god Ahura Mazda by way of linguistic erosion over centuries. Another tiny portable museum.
And that’s really the point, isn’t it?
History survives in language.
Not in museums alone.
Not in textbooks.
In ordinary words.
Words are
footprints in wet cement.
The walkers vanished centuries ago
but the prints remain.
Sometimes Roman.
Sometimes Viking.
Sometimes Saxon.
Sometimes North Sea oilmen naming a drilling field after a goose.
And sometimes your own life loops unexpectedly back into the story.
You hear “Brent Crude” on the radio while making tea in Camden and suddenly you’re remembering a helicopter lifting off from Aberdeen half a century ago.
That’s London for you as well.
A city where almost any word, if you tug gently enough at it, turns out to have
history attached.
This… is London.
And somewhere out there this morning, on a cold estuary under a grey British sky, a little Brent goose is paddling about entirely unaware that international markets are named after it.
Story time.
History time.
Goose time.
See you tomorrow.