Ivor Thomas gets intense claustrophobia. Which would seem to make tunnelling a less-than-ideal occupation for him, since tunnels are by their nature enclosed spaces, generally narrow and confined and, during their construction at least, have only one way out. But he has spent more years in tunnelling than he cares to acknowledge, rising to the top of the profession, leading on Crossrail and Tideway, and now providing expertise for the Silvertown Tunnel. Ivor has done his stint as Chair of the BTS – and did so during the difficult times of Covid. The tunnelling bug he says, has bitten him.
So – to get it out of the way first – how does he cope with the claustrophobia?
“It doesn’t seem to bother me when I’m working. I can’t go caving or anything; to be stuck in a lift would be the worst possible nightmare; but when I’m working it is a different mindset and it stays under control. Once or twice if I’m going into a tight space in the tunnelling machine and there is somebody behind me so I can’t see a quick exit then that takes my breath for a couple of minutes; but ninety-nine times out of a hundred it has never bothered me at work.”
So, since he, the BTS and this magazine generally are keen to get more young people into the profession, the message for anyone contemplating such a move is don’t let the fear of confined spaces put you off. Routes into the tunnelling aspects of civil engineering are many and diverse. So, what were Ivor’s?
Family background, he says, had something to do with it: “I come from a line of Irish farmers on my mother’s side and Welsh/Irish/German engineers on my father’s. His family included clockmakers – you can still find long-case clocks with the name ‘Felix Eschle’ on them – who emigrated from the Black Forest to Aberdare, Wales.
“My grandfather was an engineer when he joined up to fight in the Great War in 1914. (He joined the Rifle Brigade; was injured at Ypres, was temporarily at home in 1916 and, fortunately for me, escaped the carnage of the Somme). When my grandfather returned from the Western Front in 1919, he took to racing motorcycles professionally in the ‘great age of speed’, so he was more of a mechanical engineer. My father was a bridge engineer and filled our family home with his enthusiasm for engineering. All of which connects with engineering and, in its way, with tunnelling. “In the holidays of my youth I was packed off to the family farm in West Clare, Ireland working with my uncle. That taught me the value of time, and of course teamwork. Civil engineering construction is all about teamwork and time.
“I followed my father in that I took a degree in Civil and Structural Engineering at Bradford. Older readers may remember a weekly BBC programme called ‘Tomorrow’s World’ about the latest in science and technology. It was presented by an ex- Spitfire pilot called Raymond Baxter and just as I was graduating it featured a story on a Mowlem microtunnelling system. Mowlem was really the cutting-edge tunnelling company to work for at that time and their new system sounded wonderfully futuristic back then, though now it would probably look Stone Age tech. At any rate, it showed people having lots of fun underground. Mowlem offered me work and I took it.
“Mowlem provided me with a healthy mixture of tunnelling, trams, and heavy marine civil engineering. I was with them for about a third of my career. Unfortunately, Mowlem went through a bad patch, becoming very risk averse just before they were taken over by Carillion in 2005; and at that time I was lucky enough to be offered a job by Edmund Nuttall – it is BAM Nuttall now – managing a tunnel job in London. I have been with Nuttall ever since.”
“My first job with them was on a cable tunnel in North London, in Kentish Town. It was the first of the cable tunnels that had been enabled by a new act of parliament that allowed statutory cable-layers to follow the line of roads without land acquisition or too much legal wrangling. Parliament had recognised the need to set up legislation for a telecoms infrastructure, and this scheme was a result of it. It was a 100in (2.54m) tunnel, which was a standard diameter in London at that time; a lot of the ring mains were constructed in 100in. I was in charge of two machines, one going east, one going west – and I discovered that I actually loved tunnelling.”
All the tunnels Thomas worked on, he says, were interesting; all had their challenges and solutions. Perhaps the culmination was Crossrail, where he was tunnel manager. “We were driving TBMs from West Paddington to Farringdon, all of it under the most expensive infrastructure in the world. That was quite exciting.”
Crossrail could be said to epitomise much about tunnelling old and new, and the public perception of tunnelling and engineering in general. “We rightly revere the great Victorian engineers like Brunel; at Paddington we were adding to his work. But they lived in an age when the public – and politicians – understood the need for team effort, and for ingenuity (which is, after all, the same word-root as ‘engineering’).
“I think what the Victorians had was an understanding of the importance of manufacturing industry to the economy and an understanding of the importance of infrastructure for servicing that industry. Ingenuity and engineering underpin industry and infrastructure, and consequently during the industrial revolution engineers had a more prominent place in society.
“There is no doubt that their engineering endeavours were the product of team effort, much the same way as our engineering is today, but these people – Trevithick, the Brunels, the Stephensons – captured the imagination. “If you look at the Crossrail project – and I very much hope it will open this year – it was a fantastic project to build and far more complex than anything the Victorian engineers ever built. But although the television series about it, ‘The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway’, has been very well received, Crossrail itself really does not seem to have captured the imagination of the wider public.
“So for me, if we are to learn anything from the Victorian engineers, it is to understand the importance of industry and ingenuity, and provide the infrastructure that will allow that sector of our economy to flourish once again.
“Why does this matter? Why am I concerned about the lack of prominence of engineers in wider society? For me, it comes down to basic economics. One has only to look at the decline of manufacturing and industry in our British society over the past fifty years; we have seemingly lost any pretence of being a manufacturing and engineering hub. Napoleon is said to have described us as a nation of shopkeepers, but if that is indeed what we are then we need something to sell – that something being a product of our ingenuity.
“In 1970, manufacturing was 30% of our economy; in 2016 it was just 10%. That data is from the Office of National Statistics. Eighty per cent of our economy is now in services, and I am left wondering if this is sustainable. The governments of the 1970s were sufficiently concerned at the way manufacturing was already in decline that they commissioned a number of reports into engineering and manufacturing to see what could be done to turn the decline around. The Finniston Report was one and it established many of the approaches towards training young engineers that are used today.”
Which is where we move towards the BTS and the need for young blood in the profession. “The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) provides an ideal model for the training and chartership of young engineers – what they refer to as the Gold Standard. I am a reviewer for the ICE, so I have some working knowledge of how young engineers gain chartership.
“The first part of training is reaching the academic standard. As a rule, universities provide this: most young engineers take a full-time degree. Do newly qualified engineers coming out of university have the necessary practical knowledge to prepare them for the worksite? Of course they don’t – but that is not the universities’ job. Their academic training provides the tool kit that the young engineer can apply to problem solving. The practical application of that tool kit can only be learnt in industry and industry cannot shy away from its responsibility to train engineers in a practical way.
“Many engineers entering industry do so under a training programme, like apprenticeships, which are recognised by the Institution. We at BAM Nuttall provide such a programme: we undertake to provide successful applicants with – what is roughly – a two-year training period on site and a one year training period in design. That mix of practical training between site and design is fundamental to the overall training of an engineer – the Gold Standard. Young engineers wishing to gain chartered status then apply for a review in front of two chartered engineers who ascertain whether that candidate has reached the required practical level of training.
“In addition, we also support apprenticeships and work-based learning. The apprenticeships are aligned to the entry-level professional qualification at EngTech. Onward progression is provided by degree apprenticeships linked to IEng qualification or work-based further learning routes. The graduate training described above is offered to apprentices as well as to graduates at an appropriate stage in individuals’ development.
“I am lucky enough to work with some fantastic young engineers and believe that UK tunnelling has never been in safer hands. But we do need to continue to grow our own engineering ability. If you look at the TBM contractors on Crossrail, only one of the three tunnel managers was a homegrown tunneller; on Tideway though, the home-grown have been in the majority. We need to give our own engineers these career-building opportunities.
“We also need to be able to export our ability. Export requires good leadership and support – we have seen UK tunnellers on the Brisbane Cross River Rail project, for example; they got there on the back of their experience at Crossrail. Consultants are much better than contractors at exporting themselves and selling their skills abroad.
“Tunnelling is a global industry. Before the current wave of Covid, we held a small meal for the engineers on the tunneling project that I am currently working on. A dozen engineers spoke ten different first languages between us. What a fantastic place to work that made. Imagine that mix of culture and language – what young engineer wouldn’t want to be part of that? All working together to reach that common goal, the end of that tunnel.
“Anything that hinders that mixture of ideas and culture is not good for the tunnelling industry. Of course, we need to look after our own home-grown engineers; but we also need to give them the global view to draw in good ideas and to develop.
“The BTS and the British tunnelling industry punch well above their weight for such a small island – we need to keep ourselves there as a key player. The great news is that a past Chair of the BTS, Damian McGirr, is standing for the Executive Council of the International Tunnelling Association (ITA), with BTS support. It is difficult to imagine a better ambassador for British tunnelling than Damian and we wish him well in his election.
“One really positive development I have seen has been the greater number of women successfully working in tunnelling. Pioneers were Helen Nattrass on the Jubilee Line and Theresa Ashford as a shift manager on CTRL – these colleagues broke new ground in more ways than one. Now we see women as first-rate engineers and leaders: Sally Cox, who led one of the Tideway projects, and Alison Norrish at Arup are two great examples. I take my hat off to them. I look forward also to women working as TBM operators. Why shouldn’t they?
“What of the future? In the UK we have the Lower Thames Crossing in prospect. Who wouldn’t want to have a go at building a tunnel 16m in diameter. But look further. The UK has committed to become carbon neutral by 2050. It has committed to decarbonise the electricity system by 2035. And many Tier 1 civil engineering contractors aim to reach net-zero by 2030 or earlier. What does that look like?
“The view is that there could be a large increase in power demand between now and 2035, which amounts to an annual requirement rising from 300TWh to 400TWh. Now, we get about half our power from low-carbon sources. A look at the numbers illustrates what a great challenge we engineers have ahead of us in decarbonising power generation.
“How are we going to do it? Wind power requires power storage. Schemes are already in procurement and planning for pumped storage hydro in the Highlands – which needs tunnels. Decarbonising means more nuclear. Somewhere with nuclear we have to deal with long-term storage of nuclear waste – more tunnelling. Greater power requirements lead to a greater need for power transmission – more tunnelling again. And what is more with all this tunnelling, we absolutely must explore innovations to develop methods that reduce and possibly in the longer term eliminate our carbon footprint. The challenges ahead are fantastic – time to roll up our sleeves.”
