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Story

Frederick Thomas Webb

Map Location

Latitude: 4° 23' 58.949" N
Longitude: 113° 59' 25.613" E

Date

1879-Unknown
  • A family portrait with Fred Webb seating on the far left with his wife on the right and three children in the center. Family portrait of Fred Webb, Lyla, and Eliza (Lizzie) Lawry in the front and Gladys and James in the back.
  • A photograph of a group of International Drillers. They are arranged in three rows, on a platform elevated off of the ground. They are under a roof with wooden supports and metal sheeting. Group photograph of International Drillers in Borneo in 1908. Fred Webb is in the front row, fourth from the left.
  • Two men wearing work clothes and hats standing inside a drilling rig. There is a large pipe and a wheel in behind them. Fred Webb (right) standing inside a drilling rig in Ecuador.
  • Webb and Burns standing on either side of a car parked on a dirt road. There are short trees on either side of them. The licence plate between the headlights reads: 1924. I.P.Co. STA.ELENA. 40". Fred Webb (left) and Alfred Burns in Ecuador.

Frederick Webb was a big man - a man renowned for his strength, both on the rugby fields of his home-town Petrolia and on the international drilling fields.

Few drillers took their families overseas, but this did not stop Webb from taking his wife Lizzie and his children Lyla, Gladys, and James across the world twice. Working in Borneo, Sarawak, Sumatra, and Celebes Islands, Webb and family had opportunities to see more of the world than many of their friends and family in Southern Ontario.

Hired on a three-year contract with the Royal Dutch Drilling Co., Webb used his massive strength to pull cable on drilling rigs.These rigs were one of the first tools used to drill deep oil wells through bedrock. He is even credited with bringing the first oil drilling rig to Colombia.

Retirement did not sit well with Webb, only two years after retiring in 1923, he found himself accepting an offer from Alf Burns, the Vice-President of Imperial Oil, to spend two years working in Eucador, overseeing a subsidiary called the Petroleum Company. After returning to Petrolia, Webb managed his own oil rigs for a number of years, permanently retiring to London, Ontario in 1954.

 

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