Letters home from the Buchan Alpha
Four weeks on, two weeks off. Through his years on a floating oil platform in the North Sea, Bruce Thomson kept in touch with his young family with long letters on rig fax paper, illustrated with whatever pens were to hand.
The Floating Rig: Bruce's own view of his workplace riding heavy seas.
Long before his work dressed a rare Speyside malt, Bruce Thomson earned his living far from any gallery. He worked offshore on the Buchan Alpha, a floating production platform moored over the Buchan oil field in the North Sea, off Aberdeen. He started on the drill floor as a roughneck, the hardest and least glamorous job on the rig, and worked his way up to marine control room operator: the person responsible for keeping a floating platform stable and afloat, watching ballast, moorings, weather and sea state through everything the North Sea could send.
The pattern of the work was a brutal one: four weeks offshore, then two weeks home. For his young family that meant long spells without their father, missing birthdays, first snows and everything in between, and waiting impatiently for the next letter. So he wrote.
The letters
The letters came home on oil rig fax paper, written in a generous, running hand and illustrated in biro and highlighter, whatever he had to hand in the control room. They told the family about the stormy seas, about life among the crew, and about how much he was looking forward to seeing everyone soon. Around and through the words came the drawings: the rig pitching in weather, imagined creatures circling beneath the platform, and scenes from the home he was missing, pictured as he hoped to find it.
The cast repeats from letter to letter. There is the family at home, the deerhound angling for a biscuit, a small boy checking the bedroom for ghosts, a daughter caught mid-sneeze, a worm braving the rain. The humour is written for children, and the pages were made to be read aloud at the kitchen table.
"We always thought he would have been a wonderful children's book illustrator." — his family
A selection from a much larger archive
The estate holds a large collection of these letters. The drawings in the illustration gallery are a selection from them, chosen for the range they show: weather and sea pieces like The Floating Rig and Weather, home scenes like Snowstorm on the Family Home and The Family at Home, and the comic miniatures like Aaaa-tishoo! and The Deerhound and the Biscuit.
Set beside the etchings and oils, the letters show a different Bruce. The line is the same one that runs through all his work, quick and sure, but here it is telling bedtime stories rather than myths. Bruce gave little thought to audiences. With his wife he ran a gallery that sold the work of other artists, mainly Scottish and Polish painters; he had always made his own art, and the few pieces of his that went in among them sold. The letters were made for no one but his children.
See the drawings
The letters home drawings live in the illustration gallery alongside his Robert Burns work. The story of the man who drew them is told on the about page, and the estate welcomes enquiries about the originals and the wider archive.