Allan Beckett
Encyclopedia
Allan Harry Beckett MBE
(b. 4 March 1914, East Ham
, London Borough of Newham
, United Kingdom
, d. 19 June 2005, Farnborough
, London]]) was a brilliant and practical engineering designer whose floating roadway was crucial to the success of the Mulberry harbour
that was used in the Normandy Landings. Starting his war as a sapper digging trenches on the South Coast at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Allan Beckett came to play a significant rôle in the success of the Mulberry harbour used during and after the Normandy landings of June 1944.
His contribution to the Mulberry was to design the floating roadway which connected the pierhead to the shore, and a system of anchors. The roadway had to be strong enough to withstand constant wave action which, as occurred in the appalling weather of June 1944, was much more severe than anticipated. Beckett’s design, which had been tested in the severe conditions of Scotland in winter, survived the storm which struck on June 19, 1944, and raged for three days.
, London; the eldest of three children of George William Harry Beckett and his wife Emma (née Stokes). Allan’s father was a professional soldier in the Royal Field Artillery
and was proud to be one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’. Allan's first interest was mechanical engineering - he was a keen model maker, building intricate model boat engines when a teenager. However his father persuaded him to study civil engineering at university as the career prospects were better.
He read civil engineering at the University of London
and was then apprenticed to Sanders and Forster, steelwork and structural engineers from 1930-33. From there he moved to the bridge department of consulting engineers A. J. Bridle until the war began. He volunteered for the Royal Engineers
in January 1940, and after basic sapper training was, at the time of the Dunkirk Evacuation, engaged in trench digging, watch duties and manning a searchlight at Folkestone
Harbour where he also assisted in the sinking of the block ship Umvoti across the harbour's entrance. Commissioned in 1941, he was sent to King’s Newton, near Derby, to work for Lieutenant-Colonel W. T. Everall, a specialist on the rapid construction of railway bridges for battlefield use. In this position, he gained valuable experience in assembling light steel bridging.
, determined never to repeat the 1915 debâcle of the amphibious landings over open beaches during the Gallipoli Campaign. As early as 1942, with an invasion of the German-occupied Continent only a distant dream, he had prepared a minute for the chief of the Combined Operations Headquarters, headed: “Piers for use on beaches”.
“They must float up and down with the tide,” Churchill noted. “The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.” These injunctions set down the essentials of the floating piers, protected by a breakwater of blockships and caissons, which enabled the vast tonnage of vehicles and stores to be got ashore to support the forces in the field.
In the wake of Churchill's minute Allan Beckett's boss, Everall was charged by the War Office with designing a series of mile-long pontoons for use on shelving beaches under tidal conditions. Shortly afterwards Everall gave Beckett a sketch marked "Top Secret" asking whether, "as a keen sailor", he could make sense of it. The sketch showed a mile-long series of pontoons on legs, linked by bridges covering water that was shallow one end, deep the other. The caption read "Piers for flat beaches", without explanation of what they might be intended for.
Beckett thought the legs an unnecessary complication for a floating bridge. "If you think you can do better, you must make it clear before next Monday when I shall be revisiting the War Office," said Everall. Allan made a tin-plate model of a floating roadway, consisting of a torsionally compliant lozenge-shaped bridge span and part of an adjacent span to show a junction using spherical bearings. Everall returned from the War Office exultant. "Beckett," he said, "they want six spans built right away, I have promised that you will produce fabrication drawings by the end of the week."
, where, over a period, they were subjected to severe weather.
Summoned to Scotland to check his system after a particularly fierce storm, Beckett imagined that he was being called ruefully to inspect a mass of twisted and fractured metal. To his immense gratification the floating roadway had survived intact under the severest of torsion, whilst the Hamilton Swiss Roll had been washed away, and the Hughes Caisson, too, had failed. As Beckett later observed: “After several more days of rough weather it was not difficult for the chiefs of staff to make a choice”
After designing the roadway he found that there was no anchor available that was light enough to be easily handled yet had sufficient holding power. Everall was away in America, so Beckett developed a design for an anchor in his own time performing experiments with models of anchors in the mud at Erith
Yacht Club where he was a member. The Ministry of Supply ordered 2,332 Kite anchors, as they became known, to be manufactured at a total cost of £89,786 with more than 2,000 of the anchors being used on the two Mulberry harbours.
Naval opinion was sceptical of Beckett's ability to come up with a new design of anchor with the holding power he claimed for it; consequently the Navy did not use the Kite anchor for mooring the Bombardon floating breakwaters which were the Navy's design responsibility.
); Allan Beckett set out for Arromanches, the site of the British Mulberry, as technical adviser in the field to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group). After a day and night at sea, he supervised the installation of the anchors, and over the next few days gave technical advice on constructing the Whales.
In the event the Americans at Mulberry A were first to have a pier in operation, on D+5; this remarkable achievement was at least partly due to the Americans installing Whale bridge spans as they arrived mixing up the 25t and 40t capacity spans in a single roadway and leaving out many of the Kite anchors. The more methodical British approach to construction, and the installation of the designed number of anchors, was vindicated in the violent storm of D+13 which damaged Mulberry A beyond repair, whereas Mulberry B survived and continued to function for four months, until the capture of Antwerp in October rendered it redundant. After the storm Beckett acted as liaison officer to the Americans for the transfer of such undamaged equipment at Mulberry A as could be used by the British on their harbour.
After his part in the Mulberry project was finished, Beckett carried out various tasks in the wake of the Allied advance. He showed how a stock of abandoned German bridging equipment, located near Brussels
, could be put to use; he oversaw the installation of much of the Everall bridging equipment which came into its own as the Allied advance took it over river after river; and he assisted Dutch engineers in repairing gaps in the dykes made by RAF bombers at Walcheren Island. For this, surplus Mulberry units came in useful for plugging the breaches.
Beckett was appointed MBE
for his wartime work. He also received an inventor's award for the design of the Kite anchor.
Allan Beckett's work is remembered today at a memorial dedicated to him in the town of Arromanches-les-Bains
. Unveiled by Mr Patrick Jardin, the Mayor of Arromanches, on 6 June 2009, the 65th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings, the monument features a bronze bas relief portrait of Allan by the artist Richard Clarke beneath a full-sized replica of the Kite anchor. The monument is located adjacent to a preserved Whale bridge span.
, Wolfe Barry and Partners as chief engineer. There he was responsible for projects in India including Mazagon Dock, the Tata locomotive works, the Bombay Marine oil terminal and a self-scouring lock gate to cope with heavily silt-laden waters at Bhavnagar
. In the UK he built factories for Bibby. In 1959 he became a partner in the firm, and developed techniques for mini-hydraulic model studies for designing and building the new port at Muara in Brunei
as well as major port expansion work at Aden
, Harwich
and Cardiff
.
As senior partner from 1983 he oversaw all the engineering aspects of a huge contract to build a new port at Dammam
in Saudi Arabia. Closer to home there were the design and construction of complex Thames flood defences for north Kent, including the Dartford Creek barrier. In official retirement from 1989, he acted as a consultant to the marine consulting engineering practice Beckett Rankine where his son Tim and Sir Bruce White's grandson Gordon Rankine were directors.
A keen and adventurous yachtsman from boyhood, he also designed and had built 'Pretty Penny' in 1979 - a new yacht made of non-corrosive Cupronickel
(copper-nickel alloy) - still one of the very few in the world.
Allan Beckett married his wife Ida James in 1949. She survives him, with his two sons, Michael (1950) & Tim (1953) and his daughter, Sian (1957) and his eight grandchildren.
MBE
MBE can stand for:* Mail Boxes Etc.* Management by exception* Master of Bioethics* Master of Bioscience Enterprise* Master of Business Engineering* Master of Business Economics* Mean Biased Error...
(b. 4 March 1914, East Ham
East Ham
East Ham is a suburban district of London, England, and part of the London Borough of Newham. It is a built-up district located 8 miles east-northeast of Charing Cross...
, London Borough of Newham
London Borough of Newham
The London Borough of Newham is a London borough formed from the towns of West Ham and East Ham, within East London.It is situated east of the City of London, and is north of the River Thames. According to 2006 estimates, Newham has one of the highest ethnic minority populations of all the...
, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, d. 19 June 2005, Farnborough
Farnborough
Farnborough may refer to:* Farnborough, Berkshire, a small village and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire* Farnborough, Hampshire, a town in the Rushmoor district of Hampshire, England...
, London]]) was a brilliant and practical engineering designer whose floating roadway was crucial to the success of the Mulberry harbour
Mulberry harbour
A Mulberry harbour was a British type of temporary harbour developed in World War II to offload cargo on the beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy....
that was used in the Normandy Landings. Starting his war as a sapper digging trenches on the South Coast at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Allan Beckett came to play a significant rôle in the success of the Mulberry harbour used during and after the Normandy landings of June 1944.
His contribution to the Mulberry was to design the floating roadway which connected the pierhead to the shore, and a system of anchors. The roadway had to be strong enough to withstand constant wave action which, as occurred in the appalling weather of June 1944, was much more severe than anticipated. Beckett’s design, which had been tested in the severe conditions of Scotland in winter, survived the storm which struck on June 19, 1944, and raged for three days.
Education and early military service
Allan Beckett was born on on 4 March 1914 in East HamEast Ham
East Ham is a suburban district of London, England, and part of the London Borough of Newham. It is a built-up district located 8 miles east-northeast of Charing Cross...
, London; the eldest of three children of George William Harry Beckett and his wife Emma (née Stokes). Allan’s father was a professional soldier in the Royal Field Artillery
Royal Field Artillery
The Royal Field Artillery of the British Army provided artillery support for the British Army. It came into being when the Royal Artillery was divided on 1 July 1899, it was reamalgamated back into the Royal Artillery in 1924....
and was proud to be one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’. Allan's first interest was mechanical engineering - he was a keen model maker, building intricate model boat engines when a teenager. However his father persuaded him to study civil engineering at university as the career prospects were better.
He read civil engineering at the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
and was then apprenticed to Sanders and Forster, steelwork and structural engineers from 1930-33. From there he moved to the bridge department of consulting engineers A. J. Bridle until the war began. He volunteered for the Royal Engineers
Royal Engineers
The Corps of Royal Engineers, usually just called the Royal Engineers , and commonly known as the Sappers, is one of the corps of the British Army....
in January 1940, and after basic sapper training was, at the time of the Dunkirk Evacuation, engaged in trench digging, watch duties and manning a searchlight at Folkestone
Folkestone
Folkestone is the principal town in the Shepway District of Kent, England. Its original site was in a valley in the sea cliffs and it developed through fishing and its closeness to the Continent as a landing place and trading port. The coming of the railways, the building of a ferry port, and its...
Harbour where he also assisted in the sinking of the block ship Umvoti across the harbour's entrance. Commissioned in 1941, he was sent to King’s Newton, near Derby, to work for Lieutenant-Colonel W. T. Everall, a specialist on the rapid construction of railway bridges for battlefield use. In this position, he gained valuable experience in assembling light steel bridging.
The Mulberry Minute
The notion of the Mulberry harbour had come from Winston ChurchillWinston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, determined never to repeat the 1915 debâcle of the amphibious landings over open beaches during the Gallipoli Campaign. As early as 1942, with an invasion of the German-occupied Continent only a distant dream, he had prepared a minute for the chief of the Combined Operations Headquarters, headed: “Piers for use on beaches”.
“They must float up and down with the tide,” Churchill noted. “The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.” These injunctions set down the essentials of the floating piers, protected by a breakwater of blockships and caissons, which enabled the vast tonnage of vehicles and stores to be got ashore to support the forces in the field.
In the wake of Churchill's minute Allan Beckett's boss, Everall was charged by the War Office with designing a series of mile-long pontoons for use on shelving beaches under tidal conditions. Shortly afterwards Everall gave Beckett a sketch marked "Top Secret" asking whether, "as a keen sailor", he could make sense of it. The sketch showed a mile-long series of pontoons on legs, linked by bridges covering water that was shallow one end, deep the other. The caption read "Piers for flat beaches", without explanation of what they might be intended for.
Beckett thought the legs an unnecessary complication for a floating bridge. "If you think you can do better, you must make it clear before next Monday when I shall be revisiting the War Office," said Everall. Allan made a tin-plate model of a floating roadway, consisting of a torsionally compliant lozenge-shaped bridge span and part of an adjacent span to show a junction using spherical bearings. Everall returned from the War Office exultant. "Beckett," he said, "they want six spans built right away, I have promised that you will produce fabrication drawings by the end of the week."
The Mulberry Trials
In a week Beckett produced the works drawings and the prototype was constructed by Braithwaites of West Bromwich. It and two competing schemes (the Hamilton Swiss Roll and the Hughes Caisson Scheme) were tested at Cairn Head, GallowayGalloway
Galloway is an area in southwestern Scotland. It usually refers to the former counties of Wigtownshire and Kirkcudbrightshire...
, where, over a period, they were subjected to severe weather.
Summoned to Scotland to check his system after a particularly fierce storm, Beckett imagined that he was being called ruefully to inspect a mass of twisted and fractured metal. To his immense gratification the floating roadway had survived intact under the severest of torsion, whilst the Hamilton Swiss Roll had been washed away, and the Hughes Caisson, too, had failed. As Beckett later observed: “After several more days of rough weather it was not difficult for the chiefs of staff to make a choice”
After designing the roadway he found that there was no anchor available that was light enough to be easily handled yet had sufficient holding power. Everall was away in America, so Beckett developed a design for an anchor in his own time performing experiments with models of anchors in the mud at Erith
Erith
Erith is a district of southeast London on the River Thames. Erith's town centre has undergone a series of modernisations since 1961.-Pre-medieval:...
Yacht Club where he was a member. The Ministry of Supply ordered 2,332 Kite anchors, as they became known, to be manufactured at a total cost of £89,786 with more than 2,000 of the anchors being used on the two Mulberry harbours.
Naval opinion was sceptical of Beckett's ability to come up with a new design of anchor with the holding power he claimed for it; consequently the Navy did not use the Kite anchor for mooring the Bombardon floating breakwaters which were the Navy's design responsibility.
D Day and Beyond
June 7, 1944 was D+1 (the day after the start of Operation OverlordOperation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the operation that launched the invasion of German-occupied western Europe during World War II by Allied forces. The operation commenced on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings...
); Allan Beckett set out for Arromanches, the site of the British Mulberry, as technical adviser in the field to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group). After a day and night at sea, he supervised the installation of the anchors, and over the next few days gave technical advice on constructing the Whales.
In the event the Americans at Mulberry A were first to have a pier in operation, on D+5; this remarkable achievement was at least partly due to the Americans installing Whale bridge spans as they arrived mixing up the 25t and 40t capacity spans in a single roadway and leaving out many of the Kite anchors. The more methodical British approach to construction, and the installation of the designed number of anchors, was vindicated in the violent storm of D+13 which damaged Mulberry A beyond repair, whereas Mulberry B survived and continued to function for four months, until the capture of Antwerp in October rendered it redundant. After the storm Beckett acted as liaison officer to the Americans for the transfer of such undamaged equipment at Mulberry A as could be used by the British on their harbour.
After his part in the Mulberry project was finished, Beckett carried out various tasks in the wake of the Allied advance. He showed how a stock of abandoned German bridging equipment, located near Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
, could be put to use; he oversaw the installation of much of the Everall bridging equipment which came into its own as the Allied advance took it over river after river; and he assisted Dutch engineers in repairing gaps in the dykes made by RAF bombers at Walcheren Island. For this, surplus Mulberry units came in useful for plugging the breaches.
Beckett was appointed MBE
MBE
MBE can stand for:* Mail Boxes Etc.* Management by exception* Master of Bioethics* Master of Bioscience Enterprise* Master of Business Engineering* Master of Business Economics* Mean Biased Error...
for his wartime work. He also received an inventor's award for the design of the Kite anchor.
Allan Beckett's work is remembered today at a memorial dedicated to him in the town of Arromanches-les-Bains
Arromanches-les-Bains
Arromanches-les-Bains is a commune in the Calvados department in the Basse-Normandie region in north-western France....
. Unveiled by Mr Patrick Jardin, the Mayor of Arromanches, on 6 June 2009, the 65th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings, the monument features a bronze bas relief portrait of Allan by the artist Richard Clarke beneath a full-sized replica of the Kite anchor. The monument is located adjacent to a preserved Whale bridge span.
After the war
After being demobbed Beckett joined Sir Bruce WhiteBruce White
Brigadier Sir Bruce Gordon White, KBE, FCGI, FICE, FIEE was one of the leading British consulting engineers of his generation. Son of the engineer Robert White , Bruce White joined his father's practice in 1919 together with his brother Colin White in 1923. On his father's death Bruce White...
, Wolfe Barry and Partners as chief engineer. There he was responsible for projects in India including Mazagon Dock, the Tata locomotive works, the Bombay Marine oil terminal and a self-scouring lock gate to cope with heavily silt-laden waters at Bhavnagar
Bhavnagar
-Topography:Bhavnagar is a coastal city in the eastern coast of Saurashtra, also known as Kathiawar, located at . It has an average elevation of 24 metres . It occupies area of 53.30 km². General slope dips in the northeasterly direction at the apex of Gulf of Khambhat...
. In the UK he built factories for Bibby. In 1959 he became a partner in the firm, and developed techniques for mini-hydraulic model studies for designing and building the new port at Muara in Brunei
Brunei
Brunei , officially the State of Brunei Darussalam or the Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace , is a sovereign state located on the north coast of the island of Borneo, in Southeast Asia...
as well as major port expansion work at Aden
Aden
Aden is a seaport city in Yemen, located by the eastern approach to the Red Sea , some 170 kilometres east of Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000. Aden's ancient, natural harbour lies in the crater of an extinct volcano which now forms a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a...
, Harwich
Harwich
Harwich is a town in Essex, England and one of the Haven ports, located on the coast with the North Sea to the east. It is in the Tendring district. Nearby places include Felixstowe to the northeast, Ipswich to the northwest, Colchester to the southwest and Clacton-on-Sea to the south...
and Cardiff
Cardiff
Cardiff is the capital, largest city and most populous county of Wales and the 10th largest city in the United Kingdom. The city is Wales' chief commercial centre, the base for most national cultural and sporting institutions, the Welsh national media, and the seat of the National Assembly for...
.
As senior partner from 1983 he oversaw all the engineering aspects of a huge contract to build a new port at Dammam
Dammam
Dammam is the capital of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, the most oil-rich region in the world. The judicial and administrative bodies of the province and several government departments are located in the city. Dammam is the largest city in the Eastern Province and third largest in Saudi...
in Saudi Arabia. Closer to home there were the design and construction of complex Thames flood defences for north Kent, including the Dartford Creek barrier. In official retirement from 1989, he acted as a consultant to the marine consulting engineering practice Beckett Rankine where his son Tim and Sir Bruce White's grandson Gordon Rankine were directors.
A keen and adventurous yachtsman from boyhood, he also designed and had built 'Pretty Penny' in 1979 - a new yacht made of non-corrosive Cupronickel
Cupronickel
Cupronickel or copper-nickel or "cupernickel" is an alloy of copper that contains nickel and strengthening elements, such as iron and manganese. Cupronickel is highly resistant to corrosion in seawater, because its electrode potential is adjusted to be neutral with regard to seawater...
(copper-nickel alloy) - still one of the very few in the world.
Family
With the £3,000 inventor's award he received for his Kite anchor design, he built himself a house in Farnborough, Kent, where he settled.Allan Beckett married his wife Ida James in 1949. She survives him, with his two sons, Michael (1950) & Tim (1953) and his daughter, Sian (1957) and his eight grandchildren.
Papers
- Some aspects of the design of flexible bridging including "Whale" floating roadways
- River Thames - removable flood barriers
Reference Sources
- The Times - Allan Beckett Obituary
- New Civil Engineer - article on Arromanches Memorial to Allan Beckett
- New Civil Engineer - Arromanches Memorial Bronzes
- News page linking to Allan Beckett's Curriculum Vitae