The Christopher Lewis Autobiography - Part 1
This is an account in the author's own words of the first forty years of his life, preceded by a chapter on his ancestors accompanied by several photographs. The oldest record is from the start of the 19th century and it is of a Pask of which my father's mother was a descendant. The Lewis family originated in South Wales in the vicinity of Methyr Tydfil but his great-grandfather and grandfather found wives in Lincolnshire. Both his parents were born in Lincoln. They were married in 1931 and shortly thereafter moved to Bedford where the author and his three brothers were all born. Early schooling was in Bedford but in 1944 the family moved to Windermere in the Lake District. They adopted this as their native home. In 1946, the author attended The Leys School in Cambridge. He loved his home but adapted to the boarding school life quite well. He specialized in Modern Languages, French and German, in which he did well but his education was interrupted by two years of National Service. After basic training in the army he obtained a commission in the King's Regiment and served most of his time in Berlin. He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1952 and obtained an honor degree in Modern Languages and Geography three years later. Then as he did not have a specific career in mind, he joined Hogg, Robinson and Capel-Cure, Lloyds brokers in the City of London. He specialized in credit insurance and while he found the work quite interesting the job was poorly paid and he did not quite see where his future lay with the firm. He loved mountaineering and was fascinated by geology. So in 1956, he applied to take an External BSc at London University. He was accepted and four years later in 1960 he obtained a degree with high honors. He had to spend a year before starting the degree, qualifying in Physics and Chemistry, subjects he did not study at school. In order to earn his living during this period, he taught at private preparatory schools in Scotland. Although he specialized in Mineralogy and Petrology and intended to take up a teaching position at a university, he was offered a good position with BP and accepted it. After some training at mainly oil fields in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, he was posted to Benghazi, Libya and was present there when the company discovered the Sarir Field, the largest oil field in North Africa. In 1962, he participated in a geological survey of the Alaska Peninsula. The next year was spent revisiting his old haunts in Libya and after that he was back field mapping in Alaska where he spent three years mainly involved in the mountains of the Western Brooks Range. In 1966, he married Peggy Maddox in Las Vegas and they settled for a short while in Torrance, California. He then decided to remain in the United States and transferred to Sinclair in Denver, still mainly concerned with field mapping in Alaska although it was during that period that the giant Prudhoe Bay Oilfield was discovered. He was also personally involved in the discovery of the Kuparuk River Field. In 1970 he rejoined BP and moved first to Anchorage, Alaska and then to New York. He and his wife lived in Darien, Connecticut where their first child, Heather, was born in 1970. At the end of his first forty years he was still working Alaska out of New York.