Thanks to...

Thanks are due to many people for help and encouragement on this site.

Firstly, thanks are due to those who have supplied with images. I would dearly like to have some of the more unusual maps shown on these pages, but am pleased that the following people amongst others have willingly scanned their own maps for inclusion and often provided me with additional information about the history of the various oil companies:

Thomas Been Michel Breugelmans Alexander Drews Alan Eastlund Wilhelm Feuer Dennis Frajevich Richard Horwitz Etienne Houdoy Dave Leach Roy Mårtensson Michal Okonek Pascal Pannetier William Phillips Hermann Rauh Jon Roma Bob Silver Dennis Toth Juha Tuulaniemi Oliver Wileczelek Walt Wimer, Jr.

A 1965 Shell map from the part of France I visited that year on my first trip outside the UK.

Special thanks are due to those who have helped me with the translations: Enrico Audisio, Michel Breugelmans, George Kollias, Christian Krutzke and Pascal Pannetier. Several of the above have their own websites, which can be reached through my links page. I am also indebted to Guy Kudlemyer for letting me re-use his Glossary of Gas Station Terms, many of which relate to things about which I have no knowledge whatsoever!

And a special thank you is due to those petrol companies and cartographers who have freely provided me with maps for inclusion on this site. I will not name them, in case it opens a flood of "me-too" requests for free maps, but their assistance is greatly valued.

Thanks are also due to a number of people who have pointed out errors and omissions (including some past and present employees of oil companies), and to the various dealers and sellers of maps, especially those who have been prepared to look out for maps for me that otherwise they might have thrown away. I'm also extremely grateful to those Daily Telegraph readers who freely sent in maps to raise money for the MacIntyre Charity in 1998 (and to the Telegraph's Honest John for including the appeal in his column).

Historical Sources

I have attempted to give a brief summary of the development in Europe for most of the brands on this site. Some people have asked me what my principal sources have been; the answer has to be "varied". The key sources for the more recent information are:

• the Financial Times
• Petroleum Review
• Erdölinformationsdienst

Company Reports and Accounts are sometimes helpful, as are - increasingly - their own websites. Where there are officially sanctioned company histories, these can be most helpful, although most seem to dwell on the upstream side. Nonetheless, the following have proved useful:

AGIP	Mattei Oil & Power Politics, Faber & Faber, London 1966
AZUR	Un Siècle d'Industrie Française du Pétrole, Desmarais Frères, Paris, 1961 d'Azur à Total - Desmarais Frères, le premier grand pétrolier français, Editions Drivers, Toulouse, 2007
BP	BP Fifty Years in Pictures, BP, London, 1959 Adventure in Oil, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1959 Geschichte der Deutschen BP, 1904-1979, Hamburg, 1979 Portrait in Oil, James X James, London, 1995
BURMAH	A History of the Burmah Oil Company, Volume II, Heinemann, London 1988
CONOCO (Jet)	Conoco The First 100 Years, Dell, New York, 1975
DEA	100 Jahre RWE-DEA, RWE-DEA, Hamburg, 1999
FINA	Petrofina - un Groupe Pétrolier International et la Gestion de L'Incertitude, Ed. Peeters, Louvain, 1997
MOBIL (GB)	Mobil into the second century, Mobil, London, 1985
OK/IC	Olja i Samköp, Rabén & Sjögren, Stockholm, 1967 Detta är OK, OK, Stockholm?, 1984
SHELL	Bearsted: A biography of Marcus Samuel, Kelley, New York, 1970 The Royal Dutch Petroleum Company 1890-1950, Nijgh & van Ditmar, The Hague, 1950 A Century in Oil, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1997
STANDARD OIL (and successors)	Titan - the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Little Brown & Co, New York, 1998 Standard Oil the first 125 years, Motorbooks International, Osceola, 1996
TEXACO/CALTEX	The Texaco Story the first 50 years, Texaco, New York, 1953
TOTAL	La Compagnie Française de Pétroles du franc-or au pétrole-franc, Plon, Paris, 1962 1924/99 The Story of Total, Energies (magazine), Paris, 1999

Among other books describing the wider oil industry, I should single out Anthony Sampson's "The Seven Sisters" (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1975) and, although somewhat long in the tooth now, Christopher Tugendhat's "Oil - the Biggest Business" (Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1968), both of which helped to kindle my interest in the subject. Of those books looking at petrol stations as more of a sociological phenomenon (or from a nostalgic viewpoint) three European titles stand out: from Germany, Berndt Polster's Super oder Normal and from Sweden, Olle Wilson's Full Tank! and Staffan Bengtsson & Göran Willis's K-Märkt på väg. There are of course many more such books about US Gas Stations and many of these are listed in Guy Kudlemyer's bibliography which is also maintained on this site.

Yellow pages have proved an invaluable resource, although not always reliable in terms of identifying actual branding! Among other directories, Who Owns Whom? has also been consistently useful for over 25 years, and the FT Oil & Gas Directory (formerly Skinner's) has been helpful. Jane's Major Companies of Europe was valuable when I first started gathering information.

Of course, my spare bedroom cannot have all the above resources on tap! I am indebted to libraries, notably the City of London Business Library and the library of the Energy Institute (formerly the Institute of Petroleum), as well as at various times over the past 35 years the main libraries in Oxford, Holborn, Milton Keynes, Bournemouth and the Kent County Library. I would also like to thank again the individuals named above, several of whom have helped me out with missing links of history. As always, errors are my own, especially where I have observed changes of branding and drawn the wrong conclusion.

My final thanks...

And finally, I must thank my long-suffering wife, Karen, for putting up with me (a) hunting out every shop in Britain (or so it seems) that might just possibly sell a few maps, (b) stopping at likely filling stations in obscure European towns in the hope that they may still have a few maps hiding in a rack, and (c) losing me to my computer while I have been creating this web site!

Like Conrad's hero, I grew to love maps as a child. My first acquaintance was with a book of street maps marking the route of the 1962 Milk Race (for cycles) which I was given to draw on as - unusually for the era - it was only printed on one side of each page. But I found great delight in extending the town plans, building imaginary suburbs for future cycle races to explore. It was natural that when we first ventured abroad in the 1960s, I volunteered to be the navigator.

This site is therefore dedicated to the memory of my father, without whom I would never have gained my love of maps and travelling hopefully, or my knowledge of what can be found along the roads of Europe. He first took us across France in 1965 and before long I was proud to be guiding us on journeys ranging from Lisbon to Lidköping and Duncasby Head to Dubrovnik, with (most often) a Shell map on my knee.

Lisbon (Lisboa) 1965 Shell Portugal 1:700,000 Litografia de Portugal

Lidköping 1962 Shell South Sweden 1:1,000,000 Kartografiska Institutet

Duncasby Head 1969 Shell Northern Scotland 1:316,800 George Philip & Son

Dubrovnik 1964 Shell Yugoslavia 1:1,500,000 Freytag-Berndt

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