Gary May - Crude Genius: The Making of an International Oil Baron William H. McGarvey

CRUDE GENIUS

THE MAKING OF AN
INTERNATIONAL
OIL BARON

CRUDE GENIUS

THE MAKING OF AN
INTERNATIONAL
OIL BARON

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Crude genius: the making of an international oil baron : William H.McGarvey / Gary May.

Names: May, Gary, 1951- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220173206 |
Canadiana (ebook) 20220174245 |

ISBN 9781771616409 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771616416 (PDF) |
ISBN 9781771616423 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771616430 (Kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: McGarvey, William H. | LCSH: BusinessmenCanadaBiography. |
LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade. | LCGFT: Biographies.

Classification: LCC HD9560.5 .M39 2022 | DDC 338.7/6655092dc23

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved here, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, by photocopy, recording or otherwisewithout the prior written permission and consent of both the copyright owners and the Publisher of this book.

Published by Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 2022.

MOSAIC PRESS, Publishers
www.Mosaic-Press.com
Copyright Gary May 2022

Printed and bound in Canada.

MOSAIC PRESS

1252 Speers Road, Units 1 & 2, Oakville, Ontario, L6L 5N9

(905) 825-2130

DEDICATION

For Charles Oliver Fairbank III, whose encouragement and assistance started me down this uncharted road.

CONTENTS

William Henry McGarvey, 1910

INTRODUCTION

The development of the petroleum industry today provides the means for the satisfaction of the desire, which has existed among mankind from time immemorial, for more light, greater power, and accelerated motion.

William Henry McGarvey,

Vienna, 1910

W hen William McGarvey wrote the above words for a book on oil resources in the British Empire, he was reflecting on the preceding half century, on his own career, and on the remarkable creation of what had become the worlds premier industry: petroleum. Much of the story of that creation had been written by McGarvey himself. Starting off as a shopkeeper and then a small-time oil driller in Ontarios Lambton County, he became a leader in the evolution of procuring oil, raising it up from a primitive act to a modern industry. It had all happened in just five decades.

When circumstances aligned, McGarvey left the Canadian oil fields and took his skills to Europe, one of a band of a few hundred Canadians who left their homeland over the course of about seventy years and became known as the Foreign Drillers. These skilled technicians of oil had learned their expertise the hard way, by trial and error, and then shared it in the great fields of the world: in Russia and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and the United States.

William McGarvey was the most successful among their numbers. His was a fairy tale rise to the upper echelons of the international business world, a journey that made him one of Canadas earliest entrepreneurial success stories. By the turn of the twentieth century, McGarvey had made the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia now part of Poland and Ukraine the third-largest oil-producing jurisdiction in the world and expanded his empire to Russia and Romania. He drilled for oil and refined it, manufactured equipment and built pipelines. He was among a handful of individuals responsible for bringing petroleum to the brink of ubiquity; the arrival of the Great War in 1914 would solidify its omnipresent hold on mankind.

As well as establishing his successful business, McGarvey was a giant in petroleum science and technology. He was crowned the Petroleum King of Austria, dubbed Europes Rockefeller and called upon to advise the British government in the great debate over converting its naval fleet to oil fuel in preparation for the coming war.

The company McGarvey established and led never rose to the heights of John D. Rockefellers Standard Oil, or the empires established by the Nobels and the Rothschilds. While always a smaller player by that measure, this son of an Irish immigrant was the keystone in a four-generation family saga that centred upon oil. His father started a business that catered to the early wildcatters who put down the roots of the industry in pre-Confederation Canada. His brothers and his son were his support system as he built his domain.

The women in his family were far more than passive beneficiaries of his success. Several of them were strong, proficient and accomplished individuals in their own right. Williams first wife bridged the cultural and language gap he faced when they arrived in Galicia, and as a levelling influence, was crucial to McGarvey being welcomed into Polish Galician society. One of his daughters became the true matriarch of the family and struggled through two world wars to maintain her Austrian estate as the place the family was always welcomed into for refuge and regeneration. His two granddaughters became the link to the various branches of the family and the keepers of its archive.

This, then, is the story of a pioneer Canadian family that defied the odds to become an international success and what became of them.

A note on spelling: McGarvey was the accepted spelling of the family name when Williams ancestors arrived in Canada from Ireland. Once in Europe, however, the name was often spelled MacGarvey, with the a in Mac. This is also how William frequently signed his own name. Sometimes it became MacGawey or just Garvey, and there were occasional other misspellings and interpretations that evolved in German and Polish. For the purposes of consistency, this book sticks to the original, straight-from-Ireland McGarvey, although in some direct quotations, variations will be found.