Leafing through foreign driller diaries
The diary of International driller Edward Winnett reveals a lot about his 1897 journey and work in Sumatra, now part of the Indonesia.
His diary is a part of the Oil Museum of Canada’s collection.
Oil Museum of Canada Curator Erin Dee-Richard described some of Winnett’s entries in his diary during a panel discussion, Heritage Hour-For Posterity’s Eyes Only: Historic Diaries, Letters and Correspondence on May 9.
The panel included presentations about diaries that are held in the collections of many Lambton museums including the Lambton Heritage Museum, Lambton County Archives, Moore Museum, Sombra Museum, Oil Museum of Canada and the Forest Museum.
Winnett had come with his family to Canada in 1855 when he was only six years old, settling in London.
He moved to Oil Springs with his wife Annie in 1885 where he established the Dominion Boiler Works on the corner of Kelly Road and Victoria Street. The couple had 11 children by 1896.
Winnett signed a contract with Standard Oil in 1897 where he was to do work in Sumatra, constructing boilers for a refinery near Palembang.
He left for his travels from the train station in Petrolia in October. His trip took two months and seven days.
Winnett crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the SS Labrador, where he found he had an iron stomach. There were 200 passengers who experienced seasickness because of rough seas, but Winnett remained in good health.
He landed in Liverpool and took a train to London, which he called the city, “one living mass of people,” said Dee-Richard.
While in London, Winnett took a walk through the Whitechapel district, where the Jack the Ripper murders had taken place nine years earlier.
“There seems to be no civilization,” said Winnett, as he landed in Egypt, before going through the Suez Canal.
Upon arriving in Sumatra, he lived in a home he called the bungalow which was situated only five feet from a river, which Winnett said was the same size as the St. Clair River.
Winnett was the first person to do boiler work in Sumatra and was put in charge of a large crew to build oil tanks capable of holding 20,000 barrels of oil.
Winnett and his crew also built a railroad and a 200-kilometre pipeline linking the oil fields to the coast, something, which Winnett described as the longest pipeline in the world at the time.
He left Sumatra after one year, travelling through the Pacific Ocean, crossing the International Date Line before landing in Vancouver and making his way back to Ontario.
Lambton Heritage Museum Curator Dana Thorne, who acted as the panel’s moderator, said many of the diaries, journals and letters within the collections of the museums give an neat insight to people’s lives.
, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Independent
