Yesterday Willie Walsh, chief executive officer of British Airways, took time out of his busy schedule on the island to visit the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.
Walsh and several of his executives toured the campus. While there he met with principal Sir Hilary Beckles.
Beckles surprised the chief executive officer with a poster for the defunct British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). BOAC was the British state airline from 1939 to 1946 and the long-haul British state airline from 1946 to 1974. The company started life with a merger between Imperial Airways Ltd and British Airways Ltd. Following a 1971 act of Parliament, BOAC was merged in 1974 with British European Airways Corporation (BEA) to form British Airways.
“I have a little surprise for you because as a historian one of my jobs is to gather things. And I was going through my archive when I found the reference to an old institution called BOAC. And in my archive collection I found a poster of the old BOAC,” said the principal.
Walsh was delighted to see the poster.
“I must get a photograph of that because we have a BA museum where we have a number of these original posters, but I have never seen that one,” he said. (AH)
