Robert Wynne-Edwards
Sir Robert Meredydd Wynne-Edwards CBE, DSO, MC and bar (1 May 1897 – 22 June 1974) was a British civil engineer and army officer.
He served on the Western Front in France where he received a Mention in Despatches, Distinguished Service Order and a Military Cross and bar for his gallantry and leadership.
He returned to Britain in 1935 following a slump in the Canadian building industry and joined John Mowlem & Co. where he was given the task of constructing the William Girling Reservoir.
The newly constructed dam later collapsed and Wynne-Edwards enlisted the expertise of the Building Research Station and Karl von Terzaghi to prove that he was not at fault.
After the war Wynne-Edwards was managing director of Richard Costain Ltd, specialising in pipelaying and also served on several boards and committees for the British Government.
[1][6] Upon leaving the army Wynne-Edwards became a student of engineering science at Christ Church, Oxford from which he graduated in 1921 with second class honours.
In July of that year he moved to Canada where he was apprenticed to Andrew Don Swan, the consulting engineer to Vancouver Harbour Board.
In 1923 he joined Sydney E. Junkins Ltd, a contracting firm in Vancouver, where he assisted in the construction of a reinforced concrete wharf for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
He was given the task of building the William Girling Reservoir near Chingford in Essex, this was constructed using the first fleet of newly developed American earth moving equipment to reach Britain.
In 1937 a recently constructed part of the dam embankment collapsed and it was shown by the Building Research Station (BRS) that the fault was due to a patch of soft clay which Wynne-Edwards had asked to be allowed to remove but was overruled.
When this theory was ignored by more senior consultants Wynne-Edwards traced Karl von Terzaghi, the famous geologist and soil mechanics expert, and persuaded him to represent Mowlem.
[1] After the outbreak of the Second World War Wynne-Edwards worked as a deputy agent for Mowlem in the construction of a shell factory in Swynnerton, Staffordshire.
