Biography|Jim Ratcliffe — The Edgbaston Court Where Chemical Engineering Became the Trade

In 1974 Jim Ratcliffe left the University of Birmingham with a 2:1 in chemical engineering.

The Edgbaston campus, laid out by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell, is still the public face of that degree.

Chancellor's Court and the Aston Webb buildings sit three miles south-west of the city centre, with University station a short walk away.

The chemical engineering department taught on the south-west side of the same campus.

A later engineering block completed in 2021 is not the building he knew. The red-brick court is.

A-levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry at Beverley had already pointed this way. Birmingham was the place the industrial habit became a qualification.

After graduation he entered the oil and chemicals industry. Profiles disagree on which firm signed him first.

What is stable across Bloomberg and later company accounts is the next credential: Esso funded his MBA at London Business School.

He later worked at Courtaulds and, in 1989, at the private-equity firm Advent International.

The Birmingham degree is what made those rooms possible. Without the 2:1 he is not the buyer of leftover plants.

He is another graduate looking for a job in 1974 Britain.

INEOS still presents him as a chemical engineer who learned to buy factories.

That is not branding. It is the sequence.

Queensgate, then Edgbaston, then the plants.

A visitor who wants the 1970s campus should stand in Chancellor's Court, not at the 2021 school of engineering. The court is the surviving ceremonial room of the university he actually attended.

Photo: Dave Bevis, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph. Portrait: staff photographer, PET, 25 March 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.