Oil Wells That End Well

Oil men prospecting for hidden reserves should forget the Middle East and head straight for the unlikely setting of Warwick University. Sadly for would-be wildcatters the deposits there are not liquid ones, but rather the historical archive of one of the world's largest oil companies: British Petroleum.

In an unprecedented act of commercial glasnost BP has given over almost 100 years of company files, covering two shelf-miles, to the university's Modern Records Centre (a £5 million joint venture between Warwick and BP) which opened in July. Annual reports, accounts registers of shareholders and personal effects, such as the family photo albums of William Knox D'Arcy, BP's founder, are all included. The novelty is that this is the first time the company's records have been open to outside scrutiny since its founding in 1908 as the Anglo-Persian (later Iranian) Oil Company.