A brief tribute to Sir Alec Skempton

Professor Sir Alec Westley Skempton, one of the founding fathers of soil mechanics, was born exactly 110 years ago, on June 4, 1914, and we will try to draw a brief description of his vast legacy.

Sir Alec Skempton was born in Northampton, where he attended the Waynflete House Preparatory School, and starting in 1928, the Northampton Grammar School.

In 1932 he went on to study civil engineering at Imperial College London, where he graduated in 1935 with First Class honors.

After graduating, Skempton remained at Imperial College London as a researcher on the topic of reinforced concrete but went on to continue his research at the Building Research Station (BRS) in 1936, after being offered a reimbursed post.

BRS inaugurated its soil physics section in 1933 and renamed it to Soil Mechanics section in 1935. It was there that Sir Alec Skempton decided to abandon his reinforced concrete studies and join the Soil Mechanics section in January 1937.

In 1947, at the invitation of Sutton Pippard, Skempton returned to Imperial College London as a Reader in Soil Mechanics, and in 1949 he received a higher doctorate of DSc from the University of London, despite not having completed his PhD research.

In 1950, Sir Alec Westley Skemptor introduced the first postgraduate course in soil mechanics at Imperial College.

After a couple of years, in 1955, he was elevated to Professor of Soil Mechanics and in 1957 he became Head of the Department of Civil Engineering, holding both titles until his retirement in 1981.

It is worth noting that even after his retirement, he stayed at Imperial College as Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow, working at the Civil Engineering Department there on an almost daily basis, until just a couple of months before his passing in 2001.

Sir Skempton contributed to numerous societies, publications, lectures, and consulting projects, so we are going to try and focus on just the major ones in the following lines.

However, a more detailed list of his achievements can be found in Géotechnique’s Volume 51 Issue 10, December 2001, pp. 829-834, while it would be nice to add at this point that Sir Skempton was also associated with the creation of the Journal in 1948, and it was his wife that designed the front cover.

In 1957, he was elected second President of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, succeeding Karl Terzaghi, and in 1981 he also received the Karl Terzaghi Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Sir Skempton also received the Gold Metal of the Institution of Structural Engineers in 1981, while prior to that he had also been awarded the Ewing Gold Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1968, the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London in 1972 and the Dickinson medal of the Newcomen Society in 1974.

Sir Alec Skempton gave the 4^th Ranking Lecture in 1964, which was named “Long-term stability of clay slopes”.

Some of his most notable contributions to Soil Mechanics include the A and B pore water pressure parameters, his pioneering work on the behavior and residual strength of clays, as well as his work on the subject of slope stability, among others.

As for his role in consulting, Sir Skempton had been involved in numerous projects, involving the first implementation of sand drains for consolidation acceleration in the UK, as well as working on the foundations of the Waterloo Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Italy’s Tower of Pisa, and the Salisbury Cathedral. He was also very active in landslide and slope stability consulting.

Finally, Sir Alec Westley Skempton was knighted in 2000 for his services to engineering.