Chris’s post of a very rare Orbit sign in the Haynes Motor Museum reminded me that I have this Orbit badge, which must be from the quite brief lifetime of the brand, about 1962–4.

I don’t know the full history of Orbit, and there is a slightly confusing aspect to it—but here’s what I have been able to find out:

Lancashire Oil Distributors, with premises in Goodman Street, Blackley and Heywood Old Road in Middleton, run by Charles Lynch, had already been selling discounted petrol in the Manchester area in the mid-1950s, in the first (small) wave of discount brands which pre-dated Jet’s massive success. Presumably they targeted garages who were not prepared to sign up to solus contracts with the big oil companies. I don’t know what brand Lancashire Oil Distributors used for this petrol, but they also sold motor oil under the Lanoil name (also the name of a popular perm treatment of the time!).

Like the industrialist & racing driver Cyril Kieft, another discount petrol pioneer of this era, Lynch got his supplies from The British Viscoleum Fuels Ltd of Liverpool. British Viscoleum was best-known for its Viscoleum lubricants, originally a cycle chain oil, dating from the 1890s. The British Viscoleum company was founded in 1934 and while I don’t know the full history here, it was a subsidiary of Lobitos Oilfields, a British company producing oil in Peru, and importing it to their own refinery at Ellesmere Port / Stanlow (a different refinery to the better-known Shell one now owned by Essar) — which I think later became, or was adjacent to, one of Castrol’s main manufacturing plants. British Viscoleum sold Lobitos petrol in north-west England from the return of brands in 1953 onwards, with sister companies in Belfast (HMD) and Dublin also selling Lobitos (much more extensively) in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I think perhaps buying from Lobitos / British Viscoleum was one of the few routes open to independent petrol companies in the 1950s unless they could afford to build their own import/storage facilities as companies like Jet and Isherwood’s / VIP were later able to. The Lobitos Ellesmere Port refinery’s petrol output was quite small—a 0.25 million tons/year capacity (as listed in 1965) compared with 10 million tons for Shell’s Stanlow facility, although Lobitos also bought the Manchester Oil Refinery in Trafford Park in 1960 which added an extra 0.17 million tons. But petrol was mainly a by-product for them; they told the 1965 Monopolies Commission report (from which the refinery capacity figures also come) that “”investment” in petrol distribution” was “a defensive step necessitated by the need to dispose of a by-product in a market governed by solus trading”.

While by 1960 Lancashire Oil Distributors seem to have become (briefly?) associated with Jet, or at least delivered on behalf of them, this looks like it was short-lived (there is a mention in Commercial Motor of the company applying for a licence to carry fuel for Jet); by 1962 Lynch had launched a new brand, Orbit, offering low-cost petrol across Manchester, Lancashire, and later Yorkshire and the Midlands too, and drawn once again from the Lobitos / British Viscoleum refinery. As we have seen with Bowen, Space Age names and imagery were quickly becoming part of the public imagination and Orbit was a good name in this context. The name has also been used (unrelatedly) in the US.

The first few garages selling Orbit included Belmont Motors of Stockport and garages in Rochdale, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and Bolton. The HQ for the new Orbit Petroleum company was Northern Service Station on Church Lane, Harpurhey, now S.Bolz Vehicle Maintenance Centre maps.app.goo.gl/HtBHWbbwS1afwXiv7 — a garage which features in this wonderful Leyland Octopus photo uploaded by Colin Pickett, showing a diamond-shaped Orbit logo on the building. The opening day, Saturday 24 March 1962, included free gifts (maybe badges!) and slogan “Let us put you in Orbit”. A Belmont Motors newspaper advertisement of a few months later shows an image of an Orbit globe—poorly reproduced but it seems to show that the globes just had ORBIT with the letters tapering up and down again in size (as on the badge), and the octane number below. The Orbit trademark was registered in March 1962.

By April 1963 Orbit Petroleum (managing director P.K. Cole) had expanded into Birmingham, with a garage at 838 Washwood Heath Road (now “Kwik Tyres”) offering the first 400 customers petrol at just 2s. per gallon, and the standard prices a few pence per gallon below the majors’ prices. Orbit planned to gain another 5 sites in the Birmingham area. It’s worth noting that Orbit offered some pretty low-octane grades, right down to 85 or 86 octane. At some point in this rapid expansion, Orbit established a 17 million gallon storage depot at Gunness Wharf near Keadby in Lincolnshire, where a number of other independent petrol companies including TOP (before the war), Globe, Murco (see below) and later RP, would also have facilities. The Lincolnshire Echo of 9 July 1963 notes that the Orbit petrol distributed from Keadby was imported from West Germany, which Orbit was obtaining supplies from multiple places (likely), not just Lobitos.

It seems that the Orbit facility at Gunness was shared with Olympic Petroleum of Croydon, and this is where the story needs a bit more unravelling for it to make full sense. According to the Croydon Times, 22 March 1963, Olympic (founded by the Churchill family in 1962 following their earlier heating oil business Universal Fuel Oils) had “joined forces” with Orbit to “flood Britain’s ‘independent’ garages with good quality fuel twopence cheaper than that supplied by the giant companies”. Per the article, Olympic’s Victor Churchill jr. had planned to use the Orbit brand for his move into petrol retailing—apparently independently (though I don’t understand why Olympic wouldn’t have been the obvious name?) and only when applying to register the trademark, came to be aware of Orbit Petroleum’s existence, and travelled up to Manchester to talk to them. The result was that Olympic would use the Orbit brand in the south of England (30 garages) and Orbit in the north (40 garages). While the Croydon Times article describes this as a collaboration between the two companies, sharing tankers and staff, other contemporary stories suggest a different arrangement, with Olympic being “a southern branch” of the Orbit company (Liverpool Echo, 25 May 1963), or a merger of the two companies (Sheerness Times-Guardian, 12 April 1963), or that Orbit itself was owned by Mr Churchill (Liverpool Echo, 23 May 1963), or that Orbit had bought Olympic (London Evening Standard, 29 March 1963). D.F. Dixon (1966) in an article in the em>California Management Review on the UK petrol market mentions that Orbit and Olympic “apparently had at least one common board member”. Perhaps the exact arrangement doesn’t matter, as it was to be a very short-lived collaboration (as we will see). In the south, Olympic were drawing at least some of their supply via Petrofina, form the BP refinery on the Isle of Grain.

It seems as though Olympic also supplied some garages in the north of England under the Olympic name in this period, perhaps outside of the Orbit collaboration, even as garages in the south rebranded to Orbit. In August 1963, Auto Sales of Wragby Road Lincoln announced that the petrol they had previously sold under the Orbit name would now be known as Olympic, while Law Bros of Sheffield sold both Olympic (grades 92, 95, 98 octane) and Orbit (100 octane) simultaneously (and indeed as late as April 1964).

Whatever the intricacies and confusions of the arrangement, there is also the matter of the branding. The Orbit badge here shares the logo design also seen on the back of an Orbit tanker in a photo posted on the Facebook group “Oil and Fuel company road tankers (Old and New)” by Steve Wright, with “Orbit Petroleum Ltd, Manchester 9” visible on the cab door. But the Orbit sign that Chris posted, although superficially similar, has a different design of rocket and globe, and is similar to some of the Olympic signage that has survived from this era. I would suggest that the badge here is thus from the Manchester Orbit company, whereas Chris’s sign is from Olympic’s use of the brand. But who knows?

In September 1963, Isherwood’s Petrol Company of Eccles, the proprietors of the VIP brand—with about 250 sites at this point and rapidly expanding—bought Orbit Petroleum Ltd and presumably this is when the arrangement between Orbit and Olympic unravelled. Isherwoods would have had little need for the Olympic connection. Lancashire Oil Distributors seems to have continued to exist for a while, advertising “over 50 second-hand petrol pumps” for sale in 1965 from a site at 157 Monton Road, Eccles.

This presumably was the end of the Orbit brand, as VIP would have had no need for a secondary brand and would have wanted to expand their VIP network, although perhaps Olympic continued to use the Orbit name for a few more months. In September 1963 Guildford Motors in Surrey announced they were the first in Guildford to offer Orbit petrol; in October 1963 Olympic announced they would increase the octane of their Orbit Thrift grade (mirroring Jet’s use of the ‘Thrift’ name) from 90 to 92 octane with no price increase (Evening Standard, 28 October 1963) which suggests they were still using the Orbit name temporarily at least. But by November 1963, Olympic announced that the Olympic name would replace Orbit in the south, “coinciding with the forthcoming Tokyo Olympic Games” and “bringing uniformity to our presentation throughout the country” (advert in the Kent Messenger, 15 November 1963).

Olympic retained the Gunness depot, managed by former prisoner-of-war Hans Georg Sauter, who, it would shortly (Sunday Mirror, 1 December 1963) be revealed, was a neo-Nazi supporter who contributed funds to the British National Socialists, a British Nazi movement, and who was fired after adverse publicity. But this was the least of Olympic’s troubles: during the period under discussion, Olympic’s expansion had been hiding some darker secrets which would come out during 1964, with a major red diesel fraud scheme. Murco bought Olympic Petroleum in May 1964 and retained and even expanded the brand until the early 1970s. But it was all over for Orbit, which seems to have lasted only a couple of years. Total ended up owning the Orbit trademark, which passed from VIP to Elf to TotalFinaElf to Total.