[mikefoster]

I'm another transferee from Ships Nostalgia, shipping having been my main interest in one way or another during my working life.

Equally, though, I've had a long-standing interest in vehicles, not in any way as a mechanic or in the vehicle industry, but starting way back in the 1950s when I was in the Economics Division of Shell in London. It was an outfit that assiduously maintained records on motor vehicles worldwide, all as part of the background operation in knowing as much as possible about what made the oil world tick.

Much more recently I've found myself involved in oil history. Shell in New Zealand had a history written of its operations here, published in 2004, and I immediately found that it had a horrendous number of mistakes of all sorts. In the course of three years, with heaps of research, I progressively wrote a new history, dodging the buckshot based on supposed infringement of copyright - it fact it was well off target because you simply can't copyright the facts of history, simply a particular presentation of them.

One area of the history that was weak (as was a previous history by Mobil) was the very early development of motor vehicles in the first decade of the 1900s. Another year's research has led to a 50-page supplement and has turned up a remarkable amount about early vehicles and early oil trade in this country. We got our first motor omnibus in 1904, a Stirling, followed by two more in 1905, and they operated in Christchurch. At that time the South Island was about equal in population to the North Island.

All my books have been self-published and in very small numbers, but it has been a fascinating retirement activity that I never ever bargained for !

I'll look forward to visiting and revisiting "truckand bus".

Mike Foster

PS Ironically, the centenary history of the Royal Dutch Shell Group in 2007, huge three volumes, proved equally faulty, so I've written a critique of that too, but that is probably a little off-topic for this forum as I can't recall any particular problems directly related to motor vehicles.