October 2008 issue
|
OBITUARIEs
Edward (Ted) le Marchant Trafford, P.Eng.
APEGGA Life Member
A Calgary member with an international pedigree and a globe-trotter’s resumé, Edward (Ted) le Marchant Trafford died at age 91 on July 26 in Calgary.
Born March 5, 1917, in Brighton, England, he was the older of two sons of Capt. Edward and Sya Trafford of Natal, South Africa. Mr. Trafford’s early years were spent in South Africa and when his parents left there to work in the oil business in Trinidad, he and his brother were sent to school in England.
In 1938 Mr. Trafford earned a mechanical engineering degree from Cambridge University and soon joined the Royal Dutch Shell Company in Holland as a trainee petroleum engineer. His first assignment in the Ploesti oilfields in Romania was cut short when the German army overran that country at the start of Second World War.
He was then transferred to Bakersfield, Calif., and subsequently to Maracaibo in Venezuela. In 1944, on a skiing holiday in Quebec, he met Alice Tyler of Montreal and they were married later that year at his parents’ home in Trinidad. She predeceased Mr. Trafford in 2004.
Shell transferred Mr. Trafford in 1947 to Egypt, where he was the company’s chief petroleum engineer. In 1950, he and Alice and their two sons moved to Calgary, where their next five children were born. Between 1950 and 1965, he founded Trafford and Associates, a petroleum consulting business in Calgary, and served as a senior officer and director of several oil companies.
Mr. Trafford played a significant role in developing the Calgary Ski Club and Calgary’s first bid to host the Winter Olympics. In the mid-1960s, he became CEO of Burmah Oil Company in Australia and was instrumental in discovering the first of the major offshore oil-and-gas fields in Western Australia. He was also one of the developers of the South Australia gas fields.
Later, Mr. Trafford worked in Ecuador for Burmah Oil, before he and Alice returned to their home, dubbed Deer Run, in Springbank, west of Calgary.
Mr. Trafford was an enthusiastic skier and hiker, and with his family went on exciting walking and riding trips to Assiniboine, Skoki and the Lake Louise area. Shortly after the Traffords arrived in Calgary from Egypt in 1950, they built a cabin at Canmore — and it proved to be one of their happiest achievements.
Ted Trafford is survived by seven children — Ted, Tyler, Geof, Bill, Randy, Katie and Tom — as well as his extended family. He was predeceased by his wife, and by a brother killed at El Alamein in North Africa in the Second World War.
|