BP-the early years and beyond

Before it was a brand name, BP was just a simple product range. In 1917 British cans of motor fuel that had previously been sold under the enigmatic label ‘Palm Tree Oil’ from what i disscovered and were then marketed as ‘BP’, short for British Petroleum.
The company itself wouldn’t be called BP for at least another 40 years, but BP quickly captured motorists’ imaginations, both in Britain and across Europe. Many letters appeared in advertisements, on the pumps and on the sides of delivery trucks. 

A Mr Saunders from the purchasing department at BP won an employee competition in 1920 which was to design the first BP mark, a boxy ‘B’ and ‘P’ with wings on their edges, set into the outline of a shield, a very interesting idea if may say so.

For a while the colours inside the shield could be almost anything: red, blue, black, green, yellow, white and to be honest very confusing but could work if each color represented a different division in BP. Actually this could be easily used for UK COAL because UK coal has 4 divisions and a color coded logo would definitely be useful to me.

 But by the time executives sent a letter to subsidiaries in the 1930s asking them all to use a consistent house sign rather than how they felt at the time, green and yellow were the nominated colors. A wise choice as green is a positive and yellow is safety.

Precisely how these distinctive colours came to stand for BP is in my opinion is the greatest mystery of its time as no one knows. At any rate i believe it was the French that introduced the color scheme in 1923, followed shortly thereafter by the Swiss. In Britain the first BP petrol pumps and trucks were bright red, which drew the eyes of some in the countryside who said they spoiled the views. The repainted green pumps blended in better with the scenery and didn't have that red shock factor, my logo should either be green related are the traditional black and yellow for the coal UK.

There is quite a lot of potential in the BP logo as it would work well with a color code for oil and so on...

COAL UK could have a different color for each different section, for example:

Surface mining - light grey   

Deep mining - black

Corporate - yellow

H. estates - green