About

Peter Ackers, who has died at the age of 97, was one of the foremost innovative engineers and researchers in civil engineering hydraulics in the 20th century. His early life was centred around the Liverpool suburb of Bootle, where he was born into a working class family, with summer holidays spent with Welsh-speaking relatives in a farming community in Anglesey. He attended Bootle Grammar School, whose headmaster Dr Berbiers was the Honorary Belgian Consul in Liverpool. He excelled at physics and maths. The applied maths master at Bootle Grammar School, who also gave careers advice, was Bill Gourley, whose brother or cousin was a partner in the renowned water engineering firm of Binnie, Deacon & Gourley. The advice he received to go and study civil engineering at the City & Guilds of London Institute (part of Imperial College) probably arose from Bill Gourley’s familiarity with the discipline. Attending Imperial College in wartime meant that his degree was compressed into two years, with its scope widened to include matters (such as air-frame design) that could be useful in the war effort. He was also required to become an air-raid warden, reporting to a unit in the basement of the mansion block opposite the back of the Albert Hall, near where he had his closest shave with mortality when a shell hit the road nearby and the heavy granite kerb-stones deflected the shrapnel upwards, breaking the panes of a telephone box near where he was sheltering against a wall. Upon leaving university he was directed to report to the National Physical Laboratory, where he did research on the design of composite steel and plastic struts, being transferred after nine months to the Bristol Aircraft Corporation, where he worked on the designs of the Bristol Freighter and Brabazon aircraft. It was in 1946, when wartime employment controls were relaxed, that he was able to leave BAC and enter civil engineering. After a period in local government in Preston and Stoke-on-Trent, during which time he obtained his MSc(Eng), he moved to the Hydraulics Research Station (now HR Wallingford), rising to the position of Assistant Director. In 1972, he moved into civil engineering consultancy with Binnie & Partners, where he was retained as Hydraulics Consultant and led the hydraulics team. From 1984, he worked for a further ten years as a freelance hydraulics consultant for a number of engineering consultancies. Between 1973 and 1983, he combined his Binnies work with acting as a visiting professor at his alma mater, Imperial College. During his career he wrote or contributed to about 70 technical papers and publications, including the famous ‘Wallingford tables’ concerning the discharge capacity of pipes and conduits. Key areas of research and design practice development included meandering streams and regime theory, flow measurement structures, siphons (in particular with air-regulation), vortex drops, tidal energy, coastal protection (including riprap and dolosse), cavitation, flow aeration and sediment transport, the last including the development with Rodney White, during his time at HRS, of the Ackers-White sediment transport equation. His wife, Margaret (née McGeagh), who was born on the same day as him and in the same city, died almost seven years ago, at the age of 90. In 2011, they moved from the South Oxfordshire village of Moulsford (where they had lived for almost 50 years) to Swarland in Northumberland, to be near their daughter. After Margaret’s death he continued to live semi-independently in Swarland until July 2021, when he moved into a care home in Alnwick. He is survived by their three children, John, Sheila and David, by four grandsons and by two great-grandchildren (plus another on the way). John Ackers, 14th December 2021

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