The 50th Lecture of the British Geotechnical Society was given by Professor Christopher Clayton at Imperial College, London, on 17 March 2010. The following introduction was given by Professor William Powrie, University of Southampton.
Chris Clayton was born in Hemel Hempstead in 1948. His father was in the colonial civil service, so Chris spent parts of his childhood and youth in Nigeria and at boarding school, eventually graduating in civil engineering from The Polytechnic, London, in 1970. While at The Polytechnic, he took – along with only one other student – the undergraduate option in foundation engineering, taught by Jim Armishaw. This persuaded Chris that geotechnical engineering would be a good career.
After graduation he worked for two years as a soils engineer for Nuttall Geotechnical Services Ltd (a subsidiary of Edmund Nuttall, then a tunnelling contractor). This period was spent largely on site, as a site agent, although he also carried out reporting and interpretation of ground investigations. The managing director was Dr Derek Cornforth (known for his pioneering work on plane-strain testing of soils), Finn Jardine was the laboratory engineer, and Doug Belshaw and Lionel Lake were senior engineers. Chris was site agent for the final site investigation for the Brenig Reservoir in North Wales, a large contract involving the construction of two trial embankments, a borrow pit and a trial quarry, in addition to high-quality drilling, sampling and in situ testing. This work was carried out in difficult conditions during the bitter construction strike of 1972.
In 1972 Chris went to Imperial College, London, to take an MSc in soil mechanics. This was a very formative period, during which he was taught by Professors Ambraseys, Bishop, Chandler, Gibson, Hoek, Hutchinson, Knill and Skempton, among others. Other class members included Leandro Costa Filho (subsequently a professor at PUC in Rio de Janeiro), Antonio Gens (Barcelona), John Powell (BRE) and Hywel Thomas (Cardiff). He graduated with distinction in 1973.
Following graduation, Chris joined Ground Engineering Ltd, a subsidiary of the civil engineering contractors John Laing and Sons. As a senior soils engineer he had technical and managerial control of a number of major ground investigations, including for a large section of the M3 and for the UK Channel Tunnel Terminal (which included a large trial cutting across a landslip area). From 1973 to 1978 he was responsible for both management and technical standards in the geotechnical laboratory at Ground Engineering Ltd.
As part of his work at Ground Engineering Ltd Chris also carried out geotechnical research funded by John Laing and Sons, and provided advice for their civil engineering contractual claims. A research project on the problems of using the chalk in civil engineering earthworks formed the basis of a collaborative PhD (between Ground Engineering Ltd and the University of Surrey), which was completed in March 1978, and was supervised by Professor Noel Simons.
In 1978 Chris was encouraged by Noel to apply for an academic post at Surrey, and was appointed Lecturer in Geotechnical Engineering, in the Department of Civil Engineering. One of his immediate responsibilities was the role of Course Director for the new part-time Master of Science/Postgraduate Diploma in geotechnical engineering which started in October 1978. He rose through the ranks at Surrey, through Senior Lecturer and then Reader, to become Professor of Geotechnical Engineering in 1992. He became Head of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Surrey in 1993, and Head of the School of Engineering in the Environment at its formation in 1997.
Also in 1978 Chris set up a small consulting practice, Surrey Geotechnical Consultants Ltd (SGC), which subsequently grew into a specialist geotechnical testing house, and is now part of the Fugro group. It rapidly developed – and still has – an excellent reputation for carrying out thoughtful and high-quality tests, both of which are hallmarks of Chris's approach to his professional life and activities.
I got to know Chris in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was a lecturer at King's College and then Queen Mary, University of London. Our universities were geographically close, and we had a common research interest in retaining walls. We used to meet fairly regularly at BGS, ICE Ground Board and CRISP User Group meetings (the latter a group once described by someone as ‘a sort of geotechnical subculture'). Chris had a very high visibility at BGS meetings at this time, and went on to become BGS Chair from 1990 to 1993.
I am very grateful to Chris for the support he gave me personally in those years: it was through Chris that I got the opportunity to serve on the organising committee for the ICE conference on retaining structures held in Cambridge in 1992, which Chris chaired. This was a real committee, which met and worked – quite unlike many of its present-day counterparts. I was also a member of the first editorial panel of the ICE Proceedings, Geotechnical Engineering, of which Chris was founder editor from 1993 to 1996.
When I applied for a chair at the University of Southampton in 1994, Chris was one of my referees. At this point he had been at Surrey for quite a while (16+ years), and had succeeded Noel Simons as the public face of geotechnics there. It therefore came as something of a surprise when Chris mentioned that if an opportunity to move to Southampton came up, he'd be interested. But an opportunity did come up; Chris impressed the interview panel, and in 1999 was duly appointed as Professor of Infrastructure Engineering (an improvement on the wording of the advertisement, which was for a professor in ‘an area related to structural engineering'), as part of a programme of investment to improve Southampton's research presence and performance. We marked Chris's move by delivering jointly the Fourth Géotechnique Lecture on ‘Recent research on embedded retaining walls', in November 1999.
After moving to Southampton, Chris – freed for a while from the threat of university management – threw himself wholeheartedly into research. He won a research contract for cyclic testing of chalk fill in connection with the behaviour of embankments on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1), and the sight of the eminent Professor Clayton in denim jeans in the laboratory, elbow deep in chalk slurry as he worked alongside the researchers to prepare specimens for testing, became the talk of the tearoom. Chris also sowed the seeds for the geotechnical work subsequently carried out within Rail Research UK, which grew out of a project carried out by Hannes Gräbe, an employee of the South African railway operator Spoornet, who came to Southampton to study for a PhD under Chris's supervision, on the effect of principal stress rotation on the performance of railway formations. Further very fruitful research came in the form of a fundamental investigation into the behaviour of methane hydrate bearing sediments, in collaboration with the Southampton Oceanography Centre, which has attracted substantial EPSRC, EU and industry funding, and has made some real breakthroughs, such as the first realistic artificial sample of methane hydrate bearing sediment to be made anywhere in the world.
A link with South Africa, starting with Noel Simons, is a thread that runs through Chris's career, and it is a real pleasure to welcome Eben and Jeanne Rust and their family, and Gerhard and Yvonne Heymann, who have come from Pretoria to be here tonight. Eben, originally Noel Simons' PhD student, was subsequently supervised by Chris. Chris kept up the link as visiting professor at the University of Pretoria, and in supervising the PhD studies at Southampton both of Eben and Jeanne's son, Martin, and of their future daughter-in-law, Michelle. He was awarded the Jennings Prize by the South African Institution of Civil Engineering in 2002, 2004 and 2005 and gave the Fifth Jennings Memorial Lecture in South Africa in 2006.
If I were looking for words to characterise Chris's research, three that would come to mind would be ‘relevance', ‘carefulness' and ‘quality'. His areas of research have always been of practical relevance, perhaps reflecting his background as a contractor (of which he is justifiably proud): the Chalk, retaining walls, laboratory testing, site investigation, managing geotechnical risk, and so on. His work has always been carried out methodically and with great care, sometimes developing new techniques and instruments – Hall effect transducers for use in triaxial tests, for example – to ensure that the quality of data is something with which he feels comfortable.
This carefulness and practical relevance have been translated into research of the highest quality: this is evidenced by his many publications, including over 220 papers, textbooks on site investigation and retaining structures, and no fewer than five CIRIA guides on the procurement of ground investigations, the SPT and the Chalk.
It is also recognised by those who ask him to do challenging jobs: for example, he was a member of the HSE board set up to investigate the collapse of the Heathrow Express trial tunnel in 1994; founding editor of the ICE Proceedings, Geotechnical Engineering; editor of the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrology, and now of Géotechnique. He is also the current Head of the School of Civil Engineering and the Environment at Southampton. The only surprise surrounding his invitation to deliver a Rankine Lecture is that it did not come some time ago: the sounds of appreciation that greeted the announcement of the 50th Rankine lecturer about a year ago suggest that quite a number of other people share this view.
I am sure that we are all anticipating a lecture tonight that will be entertaining and relevant, of practical importance and scientific significance. Without further delay, I invite you all to join me in welcoming the 50th Rankine lecturer, Professor Chris Clayton.
