Bapco, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of American oil company Socal, was established on 11th January 1929: on 12th June 1930 the Sheikh of Bahrain approved the transfer of oil exploration rights to Bapco. Socal geologist Fred A. Davies arrived in Bahrain in May 1930, publishing a favourable report in November 1930. A drilling team arrived on 26th May 1931, led by Edward A. Skinner.
Drilling commenced at Oil Well No.1 adjacent to Jebel Dukhan and the exploration team lived at a camp next to the drilling site. The well was spudded-in on 16th October 1931. Oil was struck on 31st May 1932 and, on 1st June 1932, a commercially viable amount of oil was found at an initial flow rate of 400 barrels-per-day. And with this, the oil industry on the southern side of the Persian Gulf commenced. Crude oil exports from Bahrain started in 1934 and Bapco's refinery was built in 1936. See Bapco's page. Some old photos of Bapco installations are here.

Bapco and Awali Golf Club

Bapco's oil workers first played golf in the vicinity of the camp at the Jebel (as recorded in the Political Agency report for 1933, issued 3rd March 1934). As oil production and refining increased, a permanent camp at Awali was built. At its initial design, a nine-hole golf course was included. This was in use from early 1934 to late 1936. Increasing staff numbers necessitated the building of accomodation on the course, which closed late 1936. Following its official opening on 4th January 1937, play commenced at the site of our current course, and we regard 4/1/1937 as our establishment date.
Bapco golfers originally played golf as the "Golf Section" of The Bapco Club. This Section became the "Awali Golf Club" with the issue of the Club's original Constitution at the beginning of the 1957/58 season. Bapco has been the Club's major sponsor for more than 80 years: without their generosity, the Club would not exist. See the website's "History - Club" for further details.

Privacy

All persons visiting Awali Golf Club and its facilities

You may be included in a picture/video, should you be present when events are taking place at the Club. This includes, but is not limited to, any competition organised by the Club. Pictures/videos may then be published by the Club in any media, for advertising or news purposes.

All Club members

Your name and contact details, as provided by you, shall be displayed on the notice board at the Clubhouse. This information is therefore available to any person visiting the Clubhouse. This information shall also be made available to any person that may telephone the Clubhouse, no matter who requests the information or for what reason.
Your name and playing record (at AGC) may be made public via the Internet. The publication of this includes, but is not limited to the AGC website.
Pictures/videos, related to the Club, that may include you may be made public via the Internet. The publication of these includes, but is not limited to, the AGC website.
Media articles, related to the Club, may include your name and picture and may be made public. The publication of these includes, but is not limited to, the printed media, the websites related to these printed media, and the AGC website.

Awali Golf Club presence within other websites

Awali Golf Club may have a presence on other related websites, which includes, but is not limited to:

The privacy criteria described above under "All persons visiting Awali Golf Club and its facilities" and "All Club Members" also applies to these other related websites.

Removal of your picture from the AGC website

You may direct the deletion of any picture from the Awali Golf Club website, provided you are visible in the picture. You do not have to provide a reason for your directive. For this, send an email to the website administrator with a statement such as:
"Please delete picture number 37 of the gallery for the Club Competition of 27th August" etc.
Additionally, you are the sole person responsible for deciding whether your picture should be deleted.

Website: Terms of service

This Awali Golf Club website is designed, programmed and maintained by the voluntary efforts of a member of the Club.

He has tried to ensure the information is reasonably accurate. Journalistic licence may be present in news articles for the purposes of entertainment only. Therefore, such news articles may be intentionally inaccurate.

Neither Bapco, nor any of its employees, nor any member of the Awali Golf Club shall be held responsible for any loss or inconvenience caused as a direct or indirect result of the information contained within this website.

Also, where information published on this website differs from that displayed on the Clubhouse notice board, the notice board takes priority.

You may download any content of this website for your personal, non-commercial use only. Downloading does not transfer any right, title or interest in the downloaded material, and the respective owner keeps all intellectual property rights therein.

If you consider something within the site should be changed, please contact us via email.

AGC Admin - Maintaining our history, website

It is important that significant events in the Club's history are documented: if you have looked at the "History" menu item, you have seen why - all the photos, details about trophies, details about the Committee etc. All the good stuff, even the bad and the ugly. In an Internet-connected age with cyberspace storage and where paper records are generally a thing of the past, this history goes online for all to access.

So that our website functions to a modern standard and is kept up-to-date with the latest news, Club details and history, five functionalities are necessary: fulfilled by AGC's

Historian
(see duties)
- Investigate any old paperwork and research the Internet, to find answers to outstanding questions or anomalies
- Forward information to the Website Administrator, Reporter and Captain and lock-in new history
- Maintain the master copy of AGC's "Record Book": an MS-Excel workbook file of competition winners
- Reprint the relevant pages of the white "About AGC" files in the Clubhouse bookcase, both for history and competition results
- Relabel the trophy name stands within the trophy cabinet with the latest winners details.
Photographer
(see duties)
- Attend competition prize-givings and other events, for photography purposes
- Attend competitions, for on-course in-action photography purposes
- Maintain the master archive of original photographs on the Clubhouse PC and any other storage location at the Clubhouse
- Following a competition, copy photographs onto the Clubhouse TV for display
- Forward original photographs to the Website Administrator.
Reporter
(see duties)
- Attend competition prize-givings and other events, promptly create an entertaining and informative report suitable for forwarding to the media
- Integrate photos received from the Photographer into the report
- Forward the report to the public media and to the Website Administrator.
Website Administrator
(see duties)
Note: The "Website Administrator" is not (necessarily) a programmer (someone programming the individual lines of code of the pages necessary to make the website work in a browser).
- Receive and consider feedback from the Committee and other members
- Decide the design of the website: its look, feel and functionality
- Decide upon the content of reports received from the Reporter, Committee and other sources
- Convey these decisions and content to the Website Programmer.
- If the website is created using a content management system (such as Wordpress), perform the duties of the Website Programmer using this CMS.
Website Programmer
(see duties)
- Promptly implement the decisions of the Website Administrator, updating the website look, feel, functionality and content
- If the website is not created using a content management system (such as Wordpress), to program the website using the web-based programming languages already in use within the website.
- If you are the website programmer,
  - Here is an approximation to show what the website looks like on various sizes of smartphone or mobile device,
  - Here are some programming notes,
  - Here is the action after a weekend competition when the effects of the orange juice have abated, and
  - Here are some tenets to assist with formal document writing (our Local Rules).

AGC's domain name www.awaligolfclub.com was registered on 12th December 2001. According to this small article published in "The AGC Newsletter" of November 2002, AGC web presence commenced in July 2002. Committee member Raj Malik was instrumental in designing the initial site. Bapco employee (now retired) Andy McAlpine further developed the site, and

this was its design just prior to 1st September 2012.

On this date, a new website - completely replacing the first - was created by guest member Onny Martin. Onny has continued to design, program and maintain the website ever since (amongst lots of other things). The homepage of this new website looked like this.

In the 2013/14 season, with a greater emphasis shown toward maintaining and increasing external sponsorship, the new post of "Sponsorship Member" was added to the Committee. Associated with this, the homepage was redesigned to this, so that sponsors logos were a little more obvious.

Having received criticism in October 2017 that the homepage design was "functional" and should be more modern, glitzy and dynamic, the homepage was redesigned again, to what you see now, going live on 17th November 2017. This website was the first to include complete smartphone compatibility. And you may be interested to know that the website is not built using a content management system (such as WordPress): it is manually programmed by the Club member who tries his best to be up there with the best of them.

Website visitor statistics for this website have been recorded since 13th July, 2013.

You may test your internet download speed:

First, clear your browser cache (important!) then click here to download a page containing 5 x 100kB images and see the resultant speed.
Alternatively, as a quick speed check, you may see the speed at which the homepage loaded: hover your cursor at the very top right corner of the home page (the cursor changes when you are in the correct place) and click on this hidden link.