Background: From boom to bust and back again in Granite City

Half a century ago, the port was completely filled with deep sea trawlers. Aberdeen was Scotland’s leading deep sea port, its fishermen making a fortune from the cod they were catching in the hostile waters of the North Atlantic, hundreds of miles from home.

It was no idle boast that fishermen could walk from one side of the harbour to the other without getting their feet wet by clambering from vessel to vessel tied up alongside the thriving fish market.

The city stank of fish. But the Cod Wars of the 60s and 70s sealed the fate of the fleet and nowadays trawlers are sporadic and rare visitors to Aberdeen.

Instead the harbour is filled with oil vessels of every kind – massive diving support ships, supply boats and standby vessels. And out in Aberdeen Bay even more ships lie at anchor, waiting for the chance to berth inside the shelter of what is now Europe’s largest oil port.

The first Stetson-wearing American oilmen had arrived in Aberdeen in the late 1960s, leading to the discovery in 1969 of the first commercial oil field in the North Sea in what is now the Arbroath field. But it was the discovery of the giant Forties field the following year that was to transform the fortunes of a city already in the throes of economic decline.

Aberdeen’s once mighty granite industry, which had created Rubislaw Quarry, the biggest man-made hole in Europe, had virtually ceased to exist within the city. Ship building in Aberdeen was struggling, paper-making was beginning its slow death and its days as a major herring port were already history.

But at Aberdeen harbour alone, income to the port, principally on the back on the oil boom, increased fifteen-fold in the 1970s and the 1980s.

Until oil arrived Aberdeen’s population had been on a steady downward spiral. But by the mid 70s Aberdeen was a city in the midst of an unprecedented economic revival, attracting thousands from all over the UK to seek the “film-star wages” on offer by the oil giants setting up their North Sea headquarters in the city.

House prices boomed and rents soared as oil production hit 2.5 million barrels per day in 1985 on the back of the discoveries of the new Brent, Ninian, and Piper fields.

And by 1995 the population of the North east had soared to 533,000 – 100,000 more than the population had been when North Sea oil was first discovered. It was estimated then that the oil industry accounted for 20 per cent of the total employment in the region.

But Aberdeen has not been without its troubles. The need to diversify the city’s economy away from its over-dependence on the fluctuating fortunes of black gold became all too apparent in 1986 when the oil price, hovering steady at around $40 a barrel, collapsed to less than $10 a barrel. Thousands lost their jobs. House prices collapsed and it took years for many home owners to recover from negative equity.

Now the good times are back with the world oil price well above $100 a barrel.

But the need for Aberdeen to find an alternative potential source of employment to North Sea oil remains as vital as it did in the dark days of 1986 when the oil boom looked certain to follow fishing, granite and paper manufacture into the history books.