When I first began covering the energy scene back in the early 1980’s, it was assuredly a man’s world. If you ever encountered a female, it was normally someone in public relations or a secretary. There were women in other positions, quite often HR (human resources), but it was rare to meet a woman in a manufacturing facility, a construction yard or sitting on a technology panel at a conference.
This is of note for me as I grew up in a household with four women – my mother and her three younger sisters. When I was growing up, my three aunts and my father all went out to work at the same time every day. I didn’t know then what they did exactly, but they all worked in offices in Manhattan, so as far as I knew, they all did something similar, ie they were equal. Not a bad place to start mentally in a world that was still male dominated. Probably the most interesting fact was that my Aunt Claire, who was closest in age to my mother, had worked in a munitions factory in Philadelphia during World War II. Our own Rosie the Riveter.
On my first ever offshore trip – to Denmark, related to a pipeline project – I met a woman pipeline engineer. I believe she may have worked for Saga Petroleum at the time. I apologise for not remembering her name, because I should do, but I do not believe I ever encountered her again. And it was years before this situation changed, ie meeting a woman on a project trip or at a construction yard, usually it was an engineer from Norway or maybe Brazil.
So into this testosterone filled world, stepped a smallish unassuming woman with a very quiet voice. In my small world, she was known as quiet Meg, to distinguish her from her Scottish namesake. In fact, Meg Chesshyre was in oilfield journalism long before me, probably more than half a decade. And she was no token woman. She was an oily hack like the rest of us, never shy to ask the hard question or to get the attention of some project manager who only wanted to talk to ‘us chaps’. There were other women to follow her into the oilfield pit – Jenny Gregory and later Elaine Maslin at Offshore Engineer, Amanda Battersby at EOPN and now Upstream, There have been others who I have now forgotten which is rather a good thing as there have been too many to remember.
I don’t recall where quiet Meg was working when we first met, FT North Sea Letter maybe, but most recently she and editor-publisher Scottish Meg (Leitch) have held the fort at North Sea Reporter, while also producing copy for Global Underwater Hub’s (formerly know as Subsea UK) inhouse news service. But having reached four score years in 2025 – I know as I was at her birthday do – she has decided now to stop filing for NSR at the end of June. Truly the end of an era, but she was there pretty much in the beginning, so it is quite a thing to be an alpha and an omega.
