Wander00,
pzu and
Pom Pax.
Thinking myself back into my boyhood in the '30s, I recall that there
was a cheap imported Russian petrol. It sold under the title of "Russian Oil Products", or R.O.P. It was scornfully dubbed "Rotten Old P#ss", but I suppose it worked, otherwise it would not have sold at all.
"TVO" and the like (Tractor Vaporising Oil) were essentially Derv. Supplied for normal use, and subject to excise (petroleum) duty, the stuff was pretty colourless, as was the domestic heater paraffin, dyed ("Esso Blue") to taste by the manufacturer.
TVO was also supplied,
duty free, to agriculture for use in tractors and stationery engines. This was dyed red, so that the zealous C&E would attend agricultural shows, farmer's markets and the like, to check Farmer Giles's muddy new Mercedes 500D was not running on "red" Derv.
Many and various were the subterfuges adopted to deceive our noble public servants. One was to fit a sort of giant alloy cigar tube, or cod-piece, into the filler inlet. The tank would be full of red derv, but the insert would contain only innocuous plain (legal) stuff. Hopefully, the Exciseman would not realise that the tube he was sucking on had
not reached tank bottom.
A better idea was to go to source. The system was this: a tankerful of clear derv, but intended for farm use, had to go out of the refinery via a single, guarded exit. There was stationed an old chap with the red dye barrel and a gimlet eyed Customs man. If the red dye was not put in before his very eyes, the tanker did not go out. Quantities used were faithfully recorded.
Clearly the answer was to "get at" the old chap. C&E would be a harder nut to crack, but they found some way to distract him from his duties (the "honey trap"?), the tanker(s) got out with all the paperwork OK, and certain selected retail outlets got heavily discounted street-legal Derv wholesale.
Only snag was: the dye had to be accounted for, too. The old chap soon had a 50-gallon drum of the stuff that shouldn't exist; he poured it down the drain; but local anglers started to complain about this pinkish water; the whole profitable business unravelled; people went into durance vile, and that was that.
Many were the fables that circulated about this red stuff. One of the most captivating was this: the Republic of Ireland ran a similar scheme, but their dye was (not surprisingly) green. The story was that, if you mixed it with the red stuff North of the border in the correct proportion, the colour would vanish and you were home and dry (I cannot vouch for this). And of course, there was no lack of snake-oil additives which purported to produce the same result. They did not work.
Danny.
