William Hallam Ward

William Hallam Ward (born December 3, 1917 in London , † April 24, 1996 ) was a British civil engineer ( geotechnical engineering ).

Ward studied civil engineering from 1935 to 1939 at the City and Guild's College of Imperial College London . He then worked as a civil engineer at Freeman, Fox and Partners, where he was involved in setting up an explosives factory in South Wales. In 1942 he moved to the soil mechanics department of the Building Research Station (BRS), where he replaced Hugh Golder , who switched to the private construction industry. His investigations during the war led, among other things, to the development of small bored piles for the renovation of foundations and concrete cladding for tunnel projects, which later often replaced the iron tubbing in the London Underground (and were also used, for example, in sewers). He also advised on the metro in San Francisco and Oslo. In 1959 he became head of the geotechnical department of the BRS and in 1969 he received the title of Deputy Chief Scientific Officer. From 1967 to 1969 he was visiting professor at City University London and 1978/79 at the University of Toronto. In 1988 he retired, but continued to work as a geotechnical consultant, including for the engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners .

In 1978 he gave the Rankine Lecture (Ground supports for tunnels in weak rocks). On the same subject he gave the overview lecture at the 10th International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering in Stockholm in 1981. In 1961 he received a D.Sc. of the University of London. In 1991 he received the Skempton Gold Medal from the British Geotechnical Society.

Among other things, he was involved in the preliminary investigations for the CERN Proton accelerator in various European countries as well as for the location of the European space agency and was a consultant for the establishment and location of nuclear power plants in Great Britain. In London he advised on the deep excavation pits for the underground car park of Parliament and the YMCA building. Other projects included the very sensitive foundations for the radio telescopes in Cambridge, the Ely - Ouse water tunnel , the cooling water and electricity line tunnels under the River Medway for the Grain Power Station in Kent and, for example, the M 40 road cut in the Chiltern Hills (where for the first time microseismic monitoring was carried out during construction in Great Britain). Among other things, he advised on the Tyne-Tees Tunnel for the water supply from the Kielder Reservoir to Teesside and on water tunnels for hydropower plants in India. In line with his expertise in tunnels in soft subsoil (especially fissured, stiff clays and limestone), he also examined the effects of tunnels on nearby buildings and vice versa.

After he took part in an expedition of the Imperial College to Jan Mayen in 1939 , he later occupied himself with glaciology and studied glaciers in Norway and on Baffin Island (1950, 1953).

He was one of the co-founders of Geotechnique magazine . 1966/67 he was chairman of the British Geotechnical Society. From 1959 to 1966 he was Vice President of the British Glaciological Society and from 1954 to 1964 Secretary of the International Commission on Snow and Ice.

He was involved in the recommendations of the British Standards Institute (BSI) on geotechnical field surveys .

Ward was a passionate mountaineer. The Ward Glacier in Antarctica is named after him.

Web links

• Obituary in Geotechnique, pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the night of April 23rd to 24th. He died of a heart attack alone in his home after suffering a heart attack a month earlier.
2. ↑ He developed it during the war, when foundation damage often occurred due to clay shrinkage due to the dehydration of nearby tree roots, with vibrations from bombs increasing the damage, which is why the BRS was commissioned with the investigations.
3. ↑ He had to break off the work for his doctorate due to the war in 1939, but published the results.