The Times July 15, 2006
Extracts From City Diary
Prophetic Times
By Martin Waller
A PACKAGE arrives on my desk. It is from a regular correspondent and contains a real find, a copy of The Times for May 2, 1966, just before this paper took the advertisements off the front page.
There are ads inside for Gamages, a largely forgotten retailer, for West End plays by William Douglas Home — “the perfect comedy for those who simply want to be entertained”, Daily Mail — and, strangely, for Chase Manhattan Bank, apparently offering a way around exchange controls.
I turn to the City Editor’s comment. Hill, Samuel, the merchant bank, has opened for business in New York and has over the past six months acted for US flotations worth a staggering, ooh, $55 million. But it is the headline “Long Wait For Gas” that catches my eye.
“The most intriguing” of impending gas exploration schemes is “for gas from the Russian island of Sakhalin to be shipped some 600 miles south to Japan”. That would be the same Sakhalin, off the east coast of Russia, where Shell has recently admitted to cost overruns and delays on its gas project. Forty years later. Make that a “Very, Very, Very Long Wait For Gas.”
JACQUELINE GOLD, chief executive of Ann Summers, has been voted one of the ten most powerful women in Britain by Woman Magazine. I’m sorry? Power? Selling naughty knickers, however profitable and liberating this may be, hardly makes you Britain’s answer to Condoleezza Rice.
Royal Dutch Shell conspired directly with Hitler, financed the Nazi Party, was anti-Semitic and sold out its own Dutch Jewish employees to the Nazis. Shell had a close relationship with the Nazis during and after the reign of Sir Henri Deterding, an ardent Nazi, and the founder and decades long leader of the Royal Dutch Shell Group. His burial ceremony, which had all the trappings of a state funeral, was held at his private estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The spectacle (photographs below) included a funeral procession led by a horse drawn funeral hearse with senior Nazis officials and senior Royal Dutch Shell directors in attendance, Nazi salutes at the graveside, swastika banners on display and wreaths and personal tributes from Adolf Hitler and Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goring. Deterding was an honored associate and supporter of Hitler and a personal friend of Goring.
Deterding was the guest of Hitler during a four day summit meeting at Berchtesgaden. Sir Henri and Hitler both had ambitions on Russian oil fields. Only an honored personal guest would be rewarded with a private four day meeting at Hitler’s mountain top retreat.
IN JULY 2007, MR BILL CAMPBELL (ABOVE, A RETIRED GROUP AUDITOR OF SHELL INTERNATIONAL SENT AN EMAIL TO EVERY UK MP AND MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS: 
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A head-cut image of Alfred Donovan (now deceased) appears courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
