Charles Husband

Sir Henry Charles Husband (30 October 1908 – 7 October 1983), often known as H. C. Husband, was a leading British civil and consulting engineer from Sheffield, England, who designed bridges and other major civil engineering works. He is particularly known for his work on the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes; the first of these was the largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world on its completion in 1957.

Early life and education

Husband was born in Sheffield in 1908 to Ellen Walton, née Harby, and her husband, Joseph (1871–1961), a civil engineer who had founded Sheffield Technical School's civil engineering department and subsequently served as the University of Sheffield's initial professor in the discipline. Charles Husband attended the city's King Edward VII School and gained an engineering degree at Sheffield University in 1929.

Career

Radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory in 2010

His first job was with Barnsley Water Board. He then worked under the civil engineer Sir Owen Williams in 1931–33, before spending three years on various major English and Scottish residential projects with the First National Housing Trust. In 1936, with Joseph Husband and Antony Clark, he founded the consulting engineering firm of Husband and Clark (later Husband & Co.) in Sheffield. During the Second World War, he first worked in the Ministry of Labour and National Service and later on aircraft manufacture for the Ministry of Works.

After the war, Husband headed the engineering consultancy, successfully expanding their business, with post-war clients including the British Iron and Steel Research Association, National Coal Board and the Production Engineering Research Association. Outside the UK, the company had an office in Colombo and undertook multiple projects in Sri Lanka.

He served as president of the Institution of Structural Engineers (1964–65), chaired the Association of Consulting Engineers (1967) and also served on the board of the Council of Engineering Institutions (1979 onwards). He also chaired Sheffield University's engineering and metallurgy advisory committee and served on Bradford Institute of Technology's civil engineering advisory board. In addition to the Institution of Structural Engineers, he was an elected fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and was among the founding members of the Fellowship of Engineering.

Engineering projects

Radio telescopes

From 1949, Husband worked with Bernard Lovell, the founder of the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Holmes Chapel in Cheshire, on the design and construction of the observatory's first large steerable radio telescope, the "250-ft telescope", now known as the Lovell Telescope. The telescope posed such formidable engineering problems that the project had been declared impossible by other engineers. Husband is reported to have considered, "It's not impossible, it's difficult, but about the same problem as throwing a swing bridge over the Thames at Westminster." Construction began in 1952 and was completed in 1957, when the Lovell Telescope was the largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world. Husband also helped to design the steerable radio aerials at the GPO's Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall, as well as radio telescopes in the UK and elsewhere.

Britannia Bridge after rebuilding

Other projects

Other innovative projects Husband & Co. undertook under Husband's leadership included designing a facility for testing jet engines at altitude in 1946. In the 1950s, Husband assisted the radiologist Frank Ellis in designing one of the earliest telecobalt radiotherapy units, for radiation treatment of cancer, which was installed at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. Like the radiotelescopes, the engineering problem involved moving a heavy weight, in this case the lead-shielded source, in three dimensions.

Husband was the architect of the Ceylon Insurance Building in Colombo, Sri Lanka (later Ceylinco House), a 16-storey building equipped with a helicopter landing pad on its roof. On completion in 1960, it was the tallest structure in Sri Lanka, at nearly 55 metres.

He designed many road and rail bridges. Husband was awarded the contract to rebuild the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait in Wales, after a 1970 fire. The original was an 1850 rail bridge by Robert Stephenson, and Husband faced criticism for designing a double-tier bridge including an additional road deck, which he stated formed part of Stephenson's original concept. The firm also designed the bridge used in the 1957 film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Awards and honours

Husband was recognised with the CBE in 1964. He won the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1965 for "his distinguished work in many aspects of engineering, particularly for his design studies of large structures such as those exemplified in the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank and Goonhilly Downs"; he was the medal's first recipient in the applied sciences. He was also awarded the Wilhelm Exner Medal of the Österreichischer Gewerbeverein (1966), the Gold Medal of the Institution of Structural Engineers (1973), and the Benjamin Baker gold medal (1959) and James Watt medal (1976) of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Manchester (1964) and Sheffield (1967). He was knighted in 1975.

Personal life

In 1932, Husband married Eileen Margaret Nowill (born 1906/7), an architect's daughter who was also from Sheffield. The couple had four children, with the elder of his two sons, Richard Husband, also becoming a civil engineer. Husband died in 1983 at Nether Padley, just outside Sheffield in Derbyshire.

See also

• Mott MacDonald, into which Husband & Co. merged in 1990

References

Source

• Daniel Eagan. America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry (Bloomsbury; 2009) (ISBN 1441116478)