User:Baragalogue/sandbox/Edward Winnett (International Driller)

Edward Winnett (1849-1917) was an international driller who owned and operated several boiler works both in Canada and in Indonesia.

Winnett was born in 1849 in Ireland, possibly in Killaloe or Dublin. His family, which included his parents, Henry and Ellen (nee North) Winnett and his brothers Henry and Frederick, emigrated to Canada in 1855. The family settled in London, Ontario, a center of the burgeoning Southwestern Ontario oil industry. Edward’s father  started a boiler shop in London, building steam boilers, which were essential to the early oil industry.

Edward Winnett’s first job was as a messenger for the Tecumseh House Hotel, which he began in 1865. In 1873, Winnett married Anna Jane Winnett, who the family called Annie. She was his cousin who had previously immigrated to Canada. Their first child, Frederick Walter Winnett was born in 1874. By then, Edward was working at his father’s boiler shop and learning the business. Edward and Anna Jane would have 11 children between 1874 and 1896, six of whom were alive in 1897.

Following the death of his mother in 1883, Edward  and his family moved to Oil Springs, Ontario where he opened the Winnett Boiler Workshop a couple years later. In 1890-1891, Edward Winnet moved to nearby Petrolia, leaving his son Frederick to run the boiler shop in Oil Springs. Fred was only 16 years old when his father left him in charge. Boiler makers like the Winnetts were essential to the early oil industry, as they helped to build the engines that pumped the oil out of the ground.. But by the 1890s, the oil fields in Southwestern Ontario were starting to dry up. However, the skills and methods that had been refined in Enniskillen township, the center of the Canadian oil industry at the time, were invaluable on the international market. Local oil workers went abroad and helped start other nations' domestic oil producing industries. In 1897, Edward Winnett made the nine week journey from London, Ontario to Palembang on the island of Sumatra (then part of Dutch East Indies) with fellow Petrolia oil men John Crosbie, Robert Rawlings, George Luxton, and John Hall. They were hired by the Standard Oil Company to construct a refinery on Sumatra, as well as tanks and pipelines to store and move oil. He documented the trip and his time in Indonesia in his diary, which he kept for the nearly two years he was abroad. In his diary, Winnett asserted that the 140 kilometer pipeline he helped construct in Indonesia was the longest in the world at the time. He also noted that he was “the first to do a piece of boiler work on the island of Sumatra.”

Like most international drillers, Edward Winnett enjoyed his time overseas. His diary contains many stories of hunting crocodiles and encounters with snakes “fully 5 feet long”. He also recorded the less positive aspects of his time in Indonesia, including dealing with striking workers, loneliness, and a bout of yellow fever that put him in the hospital for four months. Deeply religious and devoted to his family, Winnett was often lonely in the jungles of Sumatra. He wrote to his family often and in turn received a steady flow of letters from them. In December 1898, Winnett decided not to renew his contract with Standard Oil and to return to Canada. The journey home took him to Singapore, where he met several Petrolia men on their way to Indonesia. Winnett traveled from Singapore to Shanghai, then across the Pacific, completing his circumnavigation of the globe.

After returning to Canada, Winnett settled into retirement. Despite the attraction of money (Winnett sent home on average $90 a month, that would be over $2,000 in 2021), he would not leave Canada for work again. He moved a short distance from Petrolia to Sarnia, Ontario, then to Port Huron, Michigan. Winnett stayed in the Port Huron area until his death in 1917, and the age of 68.