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Sir Alexander Gibbs Obituary 1958



1958 Obituary [2]
SIR ALEXANDER GIBB, G.B.E., C.B., F.R.S., LL.D., died at his home at Hartley Wintney on January 21, at the age of eighty-five. His family has a tradition of distinction in civil engineering, and he represented the fifth generation, in direct succession, of civil engineers. His career was unique in another respect, too: he achieved his reputation first as a contractor, then as an engineer in high positions in governmental service, and finally as a consulting engineer and as the founder of the firm of Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners.
Alexander Gibb was educated at Rugby School, and always intended to be an engineer. His inclination was to go into the electrical side, which, in 1890, when he had to make his choice, was in its very early infancy. His advisers, however, considered that he would come under better teachers if he followed his forebears on the constructional side, and accordingly, on leaving school, he went to University College, London, where the engineering laboratories had been founded by Sir Alexander Kennedy, F.R.S. Then, in 1891, he became a pupil of Sir John Wolfe Barry and Henry Marc Brunel in their Westminster office.
After four years' pupilage, which included one year as outdoor inspector on the Lanarkshire and Dumbartonshire Railway, he continued for another five years on Wolfe Barry's staff. During this latter period he was employed as resident engineer on railway widenings and extensions, including the widening of the Metropolitan Railway (Harrow to Finchley Road section), and the Bow and Whitechapel Railway, both heavy jobs in which the resident engineer had to do most of the work, nowadays usually done at head office. In 1900, Gibb joined his father's firm Easton Gibb and Son, who were in the course of constructing Kew Road Bridge. As managing director of Easton Gibb and Son, he was engaged later on a dock wall at Ipswich, the Gateshead and Dunston Railway widening, extensions at the Alexandra Dock, Newport, costing over £1,250,000 and finally, from 1909 to 1916, contracts running into £4,000,000 for the construction of the Naval Base at Rosyth. It was in great measure due to his initiative and powers of organisation that this great base, with its dry docks, was completed two years earlier than intended, just in time to dock the battleships and cruisers damaged in the Battle of Jutland, fought on May 31, 1916.
In 1916 Gibb accepted a new appointment under Sir Eric Geddes, with whom he was to be closely associated in various capacities for some years. He was now chief engineer, ports construction, to the British armies in France; his responsibility was to prepare for reconstruction of ports and railway junctions demolished by the retreating Germans. His next appointment, created for him by Geddes, was civil-engineer-in-chief, Admiralty. Here he was concerned with measures to counter the U-boat menace, including the famous mystery towers-an idea which, though too late to be of service before the Armistice, was applied to anti-aircraft defence in the Thames estuary and elsewhere during the second world war. Gibb was granted a C.B. for his services to the armies in France and a K.B.E. on appointment to the Admiralty. His work there was recognised by advancement to G.B.E.
It was once more Geddes, by then Minister of Transport, who appointed Gibb his director-general of civil engineering in. 1919. He bad to create a new department in a new Ministry while dealing with a variety of problems connected with communications in the British Isles. Among the projects which came under his review were the Channel tunnel and the Severn barrage, his report on the latter advocating the English Stones site, and a pumped storage reservoir.
In 1921 Sir Alexander decided to set up as a consulting engineer and a year later took for his offices Queen Anne's Lodge. Much of his early work was done in conjunction with Dr. Merz and Colonel McLellan, the consulting electrical engineers. The most notable of these joint enterprises was the 535MW Barking power station, Humber River hydro-electric scheme in Newfoundland and in 1926 to 1929 the 103MW Galloway hydro-electric project. Other early works included an investigation into the foundations of St. Paul's Cathedral and the building of the Aquarium in the London Zoological Gardens.
There were many works overseas on which Sir Alexander acted as consulting engineer. He was adviser to Canadian National Ports, to New Zealand for the Arapuni hydroelectric station, to Australia for the Sydney Dock, to Burma for the Port of Rangoon, to India for a number of projects, to the Admiralty for certain aspects of the Singapore Naval Base, to Venezuela for the extension of La Guaira Harbour, and to Colombia for sea walls at the mouth of the Magdalena River, with a new port at Barranquilla. He also arranged the purchase, manning and despatch of two destroyers built in Portugal for the Colombian Navy. At home he was engineer to the Kincardine road bridge opened in 1936 and for the widening of the old Menai Straits bridge. In the period 1933-38 he was responsible for many schemes of industrial engineering, laying out sites for factories, such as Guinness brewery at Park Royal and industrial development of trading estates in the depressed areas. It was his policy to group round him in these schemes teams of specialists such as architects, and beating and ventilating engineers and others; his firm grew. to be one of the largest in the country.
In 1938 chiefly due to overwork and over-strain he was taken ill, and when war broke out in 1939 he was not fit enough to be given an appointment comparable with those he held during, and just subsequent to, the first wor1d war. His consolation lay in the manner in which the Government made . use of his organisation and of the team of engineers which he had so carefully built up over a period of years, first for the construction of many new ordnance factories, and later for other war activities such as new steam electric power stations, and underground factories.
Sir Alexander's interest in the social and scientific life of the world of engineering was also characterised by a ubiquitous activity, and he held high offices in numerous institutions and similar bodies, such as the Royal Fine Arts Commission, of which he was the first civil engineer to be a member. Most of his published writings are presidential addresses or discourses of similar nature. There is one exception: in 1935 his "Story of Telford" was published. He held that Telford, above all others, should be considered the founder of the profession of the civil engineer, and the greatest exponent of that profession; a point of view ably explained in his book.
He was also very conscious of the contribution which civil engineers had made to the improvement of life, by the arts of road and harbour construction and the like. This he expressed forcefully in his presidential address to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1936. In this sense he was an Empire builder, and the Empire stood, in Sir Alexander's view, for the benefits which all these works brought in their train. " The basis and justification for the existence of the Engineer " he said " and his contribution to civilisation exist in the fact that the application of science to practical use is in fact Engineering. Without the Engineer I would claim, civilisation as we know it would never have been achieved . . . . he has changed the face of the world and created the British Empire. It is in no spirit of boasting that I would say that." He could see no limit in the future, to the achievements of engineers, but he affirmed that, with the bewildering speed of new developments, control was essential. He called for a brake on the "continuous disintegration" of engineering institutions and societies, and tried to implant in the mind of every engineer the idea of co-operation. One broad policy to inspire and guide all engineers and a body of engineering opinion so authoritative as to command attention in politics and administration would be, he said, the greatest and perhaps the only safeguard for the future of civilisation.

Linked toBrigadier-General Sir Alexander Gibb

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