Remembering Aberfan
Following our story of how the Llandarcy Refinery provided support to the emergency services during the Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966 in our August bps news, I’m grateful to Leslie (Les) Rees, ex BP Chemicals, Baglan Bay, South Wales, for pointing out that the Pantglas Junior School clock, which stopped at 09.13 on that terrible day, is now on display at The Welsh Heritage Museum at St Fagans, south Wales.
‘Anniversaries’ – are we inclusive?
Michael Peck raised an interesting point about whether we are inclusive when reporting significant wedding anniversaries. Michael emailed the following: ‘I’ve just received a copy of the August bps news and on page 22 it talks about significant wedding anniversaries of 50, 55 or 60 years. I feel this is discriminative against lesbian, gay and […]
Is it ‘bp’ or ‘BP’? Make your mind up
I’m grateful to Michael Ridd for taking me to task over the use of ‘bp’ and ‘BP’ in bps news, and he makes an interesting suggestion. Michael writes: ’Many, perhaps most, members of this society were employed by a company known the world over as BP. But then, in recent years, the company changed its […]
Brothers run marathon for Gurkha Welfare Trust in grandfather’s memory
Many of our members will remember Stephen Mullaly, a former HR director at BP. However, what you may not know is that before a successful BP career, Stephen fought as a Gurkha officer during the Second World War in Burma and played a leading part in the post-war Gurkha presence in Vietnam prior to the […]
Recollecting Mark Woolveridge and his, er, teddy bear
My thanks go to Andrew Robertson for emailing this memory of working with Mark Woolveridge. Mark died in March 2022 and we reported on his death in the February 2023 bps news. Andrew provided the following background information: ‘When BP took over Britoil, and before the organisations were fully integrated, it was necessary for the […]
LEO remembered
In 2020 we published a letter in bps news on behalf of the LEO Computers Society, when it was seeking memories and memorabilia from people who had worked on LEO, the world’s first computer to run business applications. The LEO society has recently published a book called LEO Remembered, consisting of reminiscences from around 80 […]