A museum piece

While I was working for Castrol R&D they decided to establish a museum at the Swindon headquarters of Castrol UK. As a company Castrol is extremely conscious of strong public relations and saw the museum in this light.

An appeal was made for old Castrol artefacts to exhibit. Among those produced were Castrol cans from ( I guess ) the immediately post war era. These cans were quite dirty and my group was given the job of cleaning them up prior to use as exhibits. We set about the job and soon realised that the quickest and easiest method was ultrasonic cleaning. We had taken a keen interest in ultrasonic cleaning although as the tanks were fairly small and often replenished infrequently the commercial sales had been disappointing.

We had a laboratory ultrasonic cleaning tank so we set about the job. It was very nearly a disaster. What we hadn’t reckoned with was the poor quality of the can decoration. Cleaning the can was set to strip it back to bare metal. Fortunately we realised in time to switch off at the stage where the decoration was dulled but not removed.

I was invited to the opening of the museum This was to be done by the person behind the Castrol sponsored land speed record contender Thrust 2, Richard Noble and his driver Andy Green..I see that the successor, Thrust SSC is also Castrol sponsored.

Castrol is good at providing plenty of razzmatazz at this sort of event. So it was to the strains of Tina Turner singing “Simply the best”( on record not live ) that we opened the museum and toured it taking the opportunity to talk to Andy Green.  It is an excellent effort but sadly kept for customers and dignitaries.

Talking of razzmatazz every six months we had a presentation at the R&D centre by the senior Castrol folk. On at least one occasion the event went right over the top and became how I imagine a Nuremburg rally would have been. While these events were I suppose good for morale they could be a bit too much of a good thing. Sometimes they were quite thought provoking as when the CEO of Castrol India spoke. He said while India was a poor country the middle class with some disposable income while a minority in India were still far larger in number than any country in Europe.

Ever keen for publicity group subsidiary, Kerry, had earlier been involved in the “Mary Rose”, Henry V111 flagship restoration. At the time it was suggested that Prince Charles had prevailed upon Kerry to provide an ultrasonic cleaning bath for which Castrol was to provide the cleaning content.

What had not been expected was that the largest artefacts were huge wooden gun carriages which the Mary Rose trust needed cleaning. This necessitated an equally huge ultrasonic tank, the largest I had ever seen, of some two cubic metres capacity. This was vastly expensive.

I was designated to provide the cleaning product. I visited the trust at Portsmouth and soon established it would be ruinously expensive to provide what the trust wanted. Eventually after some fraught time with Kerry I came up with a product broadly acceptable to everyone involved. In this case a more senior man represented Castrol at the commissioning.

My visit to the trust was very interesting but I rather foolishly elected to drive the round trip from Manchester in a day. Five hundred plus miles had me exhausted. I remember taking a break and reflecting that if I had been driving back from Swindon which was a regular trip I would have been home.  Fortunately it was the height of summer so I had a lot of daylight for my journey. I particularly recall a huge cooking pot among the recovered items stored in a large warehouse.. The importance of careful conservation was shown by a comparison of recovered arrows. Those not conserved were unrecognisable twisted sticks.