|  | Derek Johnson was born in Coventry in 1926 and was educated at Christ's Hospital School and Pembroke College Cambridge, to which he won a scholarship. On graduating in 1949 he joined BP and was immediately posted to Iraq, where he spent the next 10 years. He was subsequently posted to Bahrain, where he became the youngest General Manager in the group, and to Lagos, just as the Biafran War was beginning. He left BP in 1975 to set up the Overseas Directorate of the CBI, from which he retired in early 1989. He died of a heart attack in his sleep in September 1989, shortly after completing a memoir on his years in Iraq. |
