The Royal Dutch Shell Group of companies was created in February 1907 when the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (legal name in Dutch, N.V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij) and the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom merged their operations – a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with the then predominant American oil company, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The terms of the merger gave 60% of the new Group to the Dutch arm and 40% to the British. To celebrate its centenary in 2007 Shell launched a scholarship fund.[3]

Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was a Dutch company founded in 1890 by Jean Baptiste August Kessler, along with Henri Deterding and Hugo Loudon, when a Royal charter was granted by king William III of the Netherlands to a small oil exploration company known as "Royal Dutch Company for the Exploration of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch Indies" (now Indonesia).

The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel and his brother Samuel Samuel. Originally,the company was engaged in trading with east Asian countries, with opium as its main commodity.

In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the "Shell" and "Eagle" brands in the United Kingdom. In 1931, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975.

In November 2004, following a period of turmoil caused by the revelation that Shell had been overstating its oil reserves, it was announced that the Shell Group would move to a single capital structure, creating a new parent company to be named Royal Dutch Shell plc, with its principal listing on the London Stock Exchange and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and its headquarters and tax residency in The Hague in the Netherlands. The unification was completed on 20 July 2005. Shares were issued at a 60/40 advantage for the shareholders of Royal Dutch in line with the original ownership of the Shell Group.[4]

Under the old capital structure, Shell's ADRs were traded on the New York Stock Exchange under RD (Royal Dutch) and SC (Shell).

We're not quite sure when Lound Road Garage was built...