Starting the war as a sapper digging trenches on the South Coast at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Allan Beckett came to play a significant role in the success of the Mulberry harbour used during and after the Normandy landings of June 1944.

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.

[4] The notion of the Mulberry harbour had come from Winston Churchill, determined never to repeat the 1915 debâcle of the amphibious landings over open beaches during the Gallipoli Campaign.

On 30 May 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.

In the wake of Churchill's minute Allan Beckett's boss, Lt-Colonel William Teague Everall who was the Chief Bridging Instructor to the War Office,[6] was charged with designing a roadway for use over shelving beaches under tidal conditions.

"[8] In a week Beckett produced the works drawings and the prototype consisting of six spans of floating roadway was constructed by Braithwaites of West Bromwich.

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.

[10] After designing the roadway, Beckett found that there was no anchor available that was light enough to be easily handled without a lifting vessel, yet had sufficient holding power which he calculated as 20 tons plus a safety factor.

7 June 1944 was D+1 (the day after the start of Operation Overlord); Allan Beckett set out for Arromanches, the site of the British Mulberry, as technical adviser in the field to Montgomery's 21st Army Group.

[1] The character Major Young in the 1947 historical novel Het verjaagde water by A. den Doolaard, about the recovery works after the inundation of Walcheren, is based on Beckett.

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 south facing three light window was designed by artist Petri Anderson and features a Mulberry tree in fruit together with depictions of a Whale floating roadway and a Kite anchor.

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.