My Father

A Memory of Llandarcy.

My father worked for BP Llandarcy from the 1960s. I was born in 1971 and some of my earliest memories are the smell of my dad coming home from Llandarcy. He worked on a machine called the catreformer. He rescued my first cat Sooty from the firey furnace at Llandarcy. One bad winter, when I was about 8 or 9, the refinery sent Landrovers out to pick up the workers from Dunvant where we lived, because the snow was so deep we hadn't been able to get out of the house. Sadly my dad was made redundant in 1986 and our family changed forever. We moved to Hampshire where my dad worked on an inshore oil well until he retired.

I remember Lllandarcy used to take all the workers' children to the theatre to see the pantomime. In 2003 I set up a rugby club for children in Leeds and made sure that all the children went to the pantomme for free as we had.

We didn't have much money growing up but BP Llandarcy was a constant throughout my early childhood and early teens.

My father is Peter Jeffrey Hawthorne Jones. He was from Baglan but now lives in Alresford in Hampshire.

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