I went into Beeps for the first time one day in mid-1968 and noticed the punkahs. And, unbelievably, on the day I was there, a wiry local employee was busy operating them in the old-fashioned way with ropes because the apparently the machines had failed. How I wished I had my little Kodak Instamatic with me but I'd accidentally left it at my cousin's home.

Can anyone please tell me exactly what year it ws built in? Thanks, Hellen White

Its intriguing bell-tower like topknot and its punkahs aside, BP's head-office in then TP&NG was the centre for a very large and comprehensive merchant-shipping operation to say nothing of an equally-wide- spread empire of coastal plantations. Thus the building, now no more, must have been the scene of an extraordinary number of interesting, possibly controversial and undoubtedly often rancorous, even combustible, exchanges of opinion, meetings and confrontations, particularly back in the time of the late Sir Hubert Murray, who was not a fan of the big,sometimes muscular trading company.

BP's boats, large and small traversed the coasts of the then Territory, and I well remember evenings of considerable levity and occasional loud song spent on board the likes of M.V."RASKAI", chartered to BPs and captained by Pip Bolton,who I think actually leased rather than owned his small but redoubtable vessel. An old, much-travelled wooden ship,she was hailed with some accuracy all round the coast of New Britain, as "em Ratskaikai ia!".

My late wife, Pennie, as a friend of the Hilder family, sat at Brett Hilder's table on board M.V. "BULOLO" when she travelled to Lae to marry me in 1965.The other "Cap'ns tablers" included senior Admin men and their ladies returning from leave, and a dowager plantation-owner of many years residence in the Islands. This lady asked Pennie what the purpose of her trip was. Pennie replied,
"Actually, Im going up to be married.." whereupon the old one, taking a second, judicious look at my bride-to-be said,
"Oh, my dear, a nice girl like you should have no trouble at all!"

Whilst the diners at the captain's table, together with the other paying passengers, were fed well and sufficiently, the Company had a well-entrenched and justifiable reputation for meanness with its resources. Whilst all its ships were easily identifiable by the chequer-board, black-and-white motif painted around the funnels or exhaust-stack of every BP's ship, large or small, it was said that another reliable marker was the complete absence of any sign of following, soaring sea-birds. The birds knew, it was said, that food-scraps were never thrown overboard from ships with black-and-white funnels.

One of my first impressions of Port Moresby was a visit to BP's store in the late 1960's. It seemed a veritable classic example of an old, tropical emporium.

I had previously heard and read of the old system of using 'punkahs', an Indian term for a flapping board hanging from the ceiling that was used to move the tropical air around the inside of a building.

Imagine my surprise when I actually saw them being used in BP's? They were of course then operated by a machine but it didn't take much to imagine, in the old days in India in the time of the Indian Raj, they would have been hand operated by a 'punkah wallah' who pulled the rope connected to the punkah.

Perhaps the punkahs in BP's were originally operated by hand when the store was first built? Husat isave? Lau diba lasi.