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(BAHRAIN PETROLEUM COMPANY)
Collection of original photographs commissioned for the BAPCO in-house magazine, The Bahrain Islander.
Publisher: Awali, Bahrain: The Bahrain Petroleum Company, 1954-6
Stock code: 68214
Price: £4,750 Currency Conversion
An unusual collection of original photographs illustrating the oil industry in Bahrain, together with a group of internal company documents, providing news, history and an overview of the financial development of the company. BAPCO had been founded by Standard Oil Co. of California in 1928 to exploit the exploration rights that they had been granted in the country. Bapco #1 struck oil on 1 June 1932, which presented them with the problem of marketing its production. This was solved by a collaboration with the Texas Oil Company in the founding of Caltex. While Socal provided the product, Texaco offered their marketing subsidiaries throughout the Eastern Hemisphere, in Africa, Australasia and Asia. By 1935, when 16 oil wells were in production and construction of the Bahrain refinery had commenced, the royalties paid by Socal to the Bahraini government constituted more than 40% of the state budget. In the years up to independence in 1971, Bapco oil revenues annually averaged 60 per cent of government income and helped to finance major development, education, and health programs. In 1975 the government of Bahrain acquired a 60 per cent interest in Bapco, and assumed control of the remaining 40 per cent in 1980. An attractive, unusual and allusive group, giving insight into the transformation of Bahrain from a "pearl state" to an "oil state".
18 original silver-print "8 by 10" press photographs (257 × 204 mm, or the reverse), one a duplicate, carbon-copy, typescript caption texts mounted versos; together with 4 issues of the bi-monthly company magazine The Bahrain Islander - September and November 1955, and January and April 1956; a copy of the Annual Company Report for 1954; and 2 4-page offprints, "Who are we," on the history of BAPCO, and "Schooling in skills,"about the training and education of the company's Bahraini employees; all preserved within a BAPCO card folder The folder a little sunned and rubbed, but overall very good.
