Remembering John V. Mitchell

Chatham House’s staff and community was very saddened to learn that our Associate Fellow John V. Mitchell passed away on Wednesday the 3 August, after a short illness. He will be greatly missed and our thoughts go to his family and friends.

In memory of John’s remarkable life and work, his daughter Elizabeth Mitchell has shared a text with us:

My father was born on 6 October 1933 in what was then the Transvaal, in South Africa. His grandparents had emigrated from Scotland and England in the 1880s. His father had a 3,000 acre farm on the Springbok Flats and my father grew up there. It was remote, he did not go to school until he was ten, then he went to boarding schools in Pretoria and then Hilton in Natal. He studied Economics and English at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and then did a masters degree in English. He met my mother, who was studying Latin and English on a debating team; he was captain and tried to tell her what to say. She told him no, and gave brilliant speech. They were opposing the motion “A woman’s place is in the home”. He always said he knew immediately, but it took him eight years to get her to the altar. He was also very politically active, as editor of the student newspaper and through his involvement with the student union. This was just after the first National Party government had been elected and were introducing laws to impose very strict apartheid and there was a great deal to object to. He wrote critical articles and organised a torchlight parade to object to the South African army uniform being changed to one modelled on those of the SS.

After he finished his masters degree, and wanting to work in public service, he emigrated to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland where he spent eight years in the department of trade. I always thought that this gave him a breadth of experience different from someone who went into the oil & gas industry straight from college. He gave up his South African citizenship and became a citizen, married my mother and again was involved in politics, specifically an organisation called Capricorn Africa (founded by David Stirling who founded the SAS) which was trying to promote multiracial democracy. After the break up of the Federation, John was posted to the London Embassy of Southern Rhodesia as trade commissioner until Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence meant that Rhodesia did not need any diplomats (not recognised except by South Africa) and he deplored the policies of Ian Smith. He and my mother decided to stay in the UK and he and I gave up our citizenships to become citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (with right of abode in the UK; I remember he told me those were the most important words I would ever see when I got my first passport aged 3).?

After a long search for a job, he joined BP in 1967 in the supply department and became fascinated by the oil and gas industry, moving into planning, then becoming BP’s first senior economist and head of the policy review unit which was as innovative internal think tank. He spent a sabbatical year at Churchill College Cambridge in 1977 and was very keen?to establish relationships with academic economists and set up studies to analyse not just oil and gas but the wider energy market. He was very interested in the environment early on an door BP funding for a project looking into wind farms in the early 1980s. In the mid 1980s he became Regional Co-ordinator of the Western Hemisphere which was a much more strategy and business role, being on the boards of BP companies in north and South America and overseeing the takeover of Sohio. During this time he travelled almost constantly.

Towards the end of is time with BP, he was a Special Advisor to the Managing Directors which again meant constant travel and investigating a wide variety of topics of interest or potential importance to BP, for example, the break up of the Soviet Union. It was at this time that he built his relationship with Chatham House and when he retired from BP after 27 years in 1993 he came to Chatham House as Chair of the Energy and Economics Programme. He wrote a large number of papers on a variety of aspects of energy and the environment and two very highly regarded books: The New Economy of Oil and the Geopolitics of Oil. He continued as an Associate Fellow. And was active right up until the pandemic, taking part in webinars with Professor Paul Stevens during the first lockdown. I was very fortunate to co-write three papers with him “What Next for the Oil and Gas Industry?” 2012 “Oil and Gas Mismatches: Finance, Investment and Climate Policy” 2015 and “Paris Mismatches: the Impact of the COP21 Climate Change Negotiations on the Oil and Gas Industries” 2016. I was so impressed by the way he got people into working group meetings who would never normally meet, and would seem to have little in common. He would conduct a calm, productive discussion which fed into the papers and illuminated the understanding of everyone present.

He was involved in the founding of the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies, where he was a research?advisor, he was on the supervisory board of the Energy Intelligence Group until his death, he was an honorary fellow at the Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Kaw and Policy at the University of Dundee. In November 2007 he received a lifetime achievement award for research from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the opening of the third OPEC summit in Riyadh. His contribution to the understanding of the energy sector was profound, and recognised as such in the industry.

In many ways his varied career embodied many of the Chatham House virtues, open mindedness, expertise but not confined to one narrow silo, the importance of listening to and communicating with a wide range of people. My father delighted in learning new things, hearing new ideas, especially from young people, challenging himself and developing his views. He continued to attend conferences and seminars until the pandemic, by which time he was in his late eighties. He took up French when he retired from BP and attended classes at the Alliance Francaise for more than 20 years. He loved going to the theatre and after he retired from BP we would go almost every week, travelling all over London to tiny theatres above pubs, under railway arches as well as in the more standard venues. Most of all he loved my mother, my sister and me, his garden (and gardens in general) and his cats. He remained very interested in everything and only two days before he died was showing interest in the oil majors’ quarterly results and the NASA climate spiral. He was a brilliant man and a wonderful father, we will miss him every day.