To say that Kate Cooksey’s time as chair of the British Tunnelling Society was atypical in its challenges and hurdles would be somewhat of an understatement. But her inspiring approach and successes achieved, working with and helped by many colleagues, from long established professionals to those in earlier stages of their careers, are worthy of note in any chapter of the learned society’s history.
For, as Kate took on the role of Chair, in early 2020, the covid virus was accelerating its way around the globe. With public health concerns for millions – billions – rising suddenly to the top of the agenda the world, society and entire industries were rocked by the unfolding waves of lengthening lockdowns and all the uncertainties and problems then brought. Not hurdles that could be prepared for, by most measures.
While the problems of covid grew into a global pandemic, everyone was challenged and in myriad ways, personally and professionally, in business and their communities. As such, the hurdles also arrived for the highly connected, tightly bound tunnelling community, built around membership of the BTS.
Kate was no different, having held a role on BTS committee since her time as the founding chair of the BTS Young Members (BTSYM), initially as a co-opted member, followed by a three-year term on the committee and leading the Education Sub- Committee.
She has grown in voluntary involvement with the BTS over many years – as well as establishing the BTSYM group she shared the possibilities of such a model with international colleagues whilst visiting RETC and through developing the business case for the ITAYM with Petr Salak presented at the World Tunnel Congress.
Her knowledge of the BTS, knowing its needs and rhythms, among leading professionals working hard and systematically to serve members, through every quarter and year, in a steady reliable pattern of events and education, and reports and social celebrations, were important. Also her connections within the industry. It was all to prove fortuitous for her, and perhaps for the BTS itself, as she took on the role of Chair at that time.
Back then, a little over two years ago, the world was different in many ways.
Often working away, in dispersed and changing locations, tunnellers relished getting together, typically at the monthly evening lectures at the Institution of Civil Engineers, in London. There, old friends are greeted, new ones made, and opportunity taken to listen with keen ears to the interesting challenges faced by others, and successes won, on projects near and far.
In a packed theatre, wide ranging questions would follow presentations and applause, and then a quick exodus to the bar downstairs, which was the heartbeat of the regular gatherings. Voices rose in the swarm, conversations flowed, laughter was forever shared with jokes finding their targets, all while useful practical insights were often offered, and pints hit the mark. Along with plates of heaped sausages and chips. No social distancing at all. The opposite.
A regular pattern. A culture.
That was stopped.
By covid.
Members were left isolated at home, some on sites. Apart, like the rest of society.
But BTS had its norms and schedules, matters of business to attend to, plans that were going to be made – but seemed blocked.
As Kate recounts, the BTS, an associated society of the ICE, usually had a busy programme of events each year, including monthly evening lectures, the annual dinner, the annual conference, the Health & Safety course, the week-long summer tunnelling course at the University of Warwick – the academic partner with which the BTS, and through Kate’s earlier involvement, ran an established, successful and well-respected postgraduate masters-level course.
So much to do.
Committee members would change, as ever, joining and retiring, and taking on different responsibilities, voluntarily, to support an industry that is enjoyed passionately by so many.
An industry of colossal civil engineering projects run by relatively small numbers of highly practical and capable professionals. A community. Tight. Able to take on adversity and make success happen. With the BTS at the centre of their world.
A world that had seemingly, then, stopped.
Just as reason for another good get-together was brewing – the 50th Anniversary of the BTS, not far ahead, in 2021. A party to be planned for. Until it wasn’t. Kate recalls that possibilities evaporated for major and regular monthly events. Like for wider society, gatherings would be no more for the foreseeable future. No laughter in a busy bar, no tasty plates of standard fare wolved down.
Screens were stared at, instead, shoulders rubbing virtually, all unseen, except for speakers presenting lectures online. Live. For Kate and the BTS committee worked out a way to keep the ball rolling, in a fashion, and in a way that has become more normal, even complementary to meetings resuming at the ICE – just as her time as Chair came to an end. Live meetings broadcast on YouTube have played no small role in helping members to stay informed and connected. Able to ask questions, too.
The archive of presentations has grown, an online library easily accessible for replay, for education.
“Inclusion. Access,” says Kate. “Those are key for me.”
They always have been for her, which helped her give rise to and chair BTSYM at its outset.
“The BTS is something that I’ve been involved with almost from starting in tunnelling. As a graduate we were always encouraged to go to the evening lectures, so most of the office would come down to the ICE on Thursday evenings,” she says. She has been with Morgan Sindall (Morgan Est as it was then) from the outset.
Morgan Sindall had sponsored her through university and on graduating Kate started on the Thames Water Ring Main Extension. Other large project experience would come on Crossrail, Thames Tideway, HS2, and now she is a director on the Thames Lower Crossing project. But small parts of works had also made their mark, early on, like the emotional effect for one local woman on hearing, out on the road near her home, that, in fact, the hard hats, like Kate, were not there to help others take land for fancy housing but to alleviate the pain of flooding hitting existing homes, like hers. The relief scheme, even if a small pipejack, would help local people hugely.
“I thought, ‘This is what I want to do, to make that sort of difference to people,’” says Kate. She adds. “It was only a small scheme but it was something that brought it all tolife. And I think that is probably at the heart of what engineers are inspired by.”
She grew up in Cardiff, where the barrage, completed in 1990, was also about transformative engineering, creating a freshwater lake where mudflats sat and improving the landscape, bringing in investment.
“It was hugely controversial at the time,” she says. “But it has transformed the city and improved people’s lives. I loved geography in school and it was through this subject that I learnt to appreciate the differing views on such transformative scheme and the importance of listening to those views and striving for balance.
“And that is a lesson which has served me in much of my engineering career, whilst designing tunnelling solutions, planning construction works as well as negotiating consents, third-party interfaces and accesses for projects like Crossrail and HS2.”
Inclusion. Access.
Tunnelling came into Kate’s awareness while a student at Cardiff, when near the end of her degree she was President of the Civil Engineering Society. With mention in the Morgan Sindall newsletter about somebody becoming a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and giving talks, she invited him to speak to her fellow students. It was Colin Eddie, the engineering director, a key figure in the industry. After a summer placement as a tunnel designer on the Croydon Cable Tunnel, she was hooked.
The concept of the BTSYM was grown from a chance conversation with a colleague who was on the BTS Main Committee whilst they were discussing a design calculation. On hearing that the BTS were considering producing a promotional DVD to get more young people into tunnelling, Kate challenged “‘Is this the best way to reach young people, how are you thinking you will get people to watch it?’ So, I listed a number of other opportunities to attract young people into the industry and suggested they could all be delivered by a young members group, specific to tunnelling.”
He said, “Go and write them down and then we’ll have a chat about them.’’
“My enthusiasm was perhaps a little overwhelming for him – I’ve still got the list – it was about 30 things, and it included to set up a group for younger members. Those are the people who are most in tune with how to get people into tunnelling because they’ve literally just come out of that experience themselves. They’ve just gone through school, made those choices of career path, they can help you deliver some of that impetus to get other young people into the profession.”
The BTS Committee loved the idea. The task landed back on her desk – with permission to lead it.
“Which was a little bewildering because I hadn’t really thought that it would be me. I had only recently graduated and felt like I knew very little about tunnelling at that point.”
She rose to the challenge, recruited friends and acquaintances, they recruited others and soon after the BTSYM was up and running.
“I am incredibly proud of the development of the BTSYM to date and the successes of each of the subsequent chairs of the BTSYM and their committee members. It has been fantastic to see the friendships and drive from so many young tunnellers to help promote the industry to others as well as establishing international connections and training opportunities. I watch on each year in delight with what they will do next. I am also proud to see how much of my original list they have achieved…although there are still a few items left to go.
“One of the key things that came out was that nobody had had any official or specific tunnelling training or education,” she says. “It would actually have been really good to have had somewhere where you could have gone and learnt about this beforehand to be less of a burden to your employer.” A specialist Masters course, for example, helping on the path to chartership while learn more deeply, practically, about tunnelling. None existed.
So, again, with support, she helped to explore possibilities and eventually it was set up with the University of Warwick and accredited by the ICE, as a block release – an intensive gathering, really, with fellow practitioners.
“So many of the lecturers were people from industry and that set the tone,” she says, “and it was important to me for it to be accredited by the ICE to support students obtaining ICE chartership after their study.” Course moderators were always surprised by the amount of industry interest and involvement.
With the importance of education in her sights, in 2012 Kate took the opportunity to speak at the Houses of Parliament about limitations on funding from student finance in the UK for those seeking postgraduate-level specialist education second degrees. This helped get traction and changes were made to the funding options for students.
“In addition, the BTS set about sponsoring students via an annual bursary, and a number of companies also pledged to fund students with a job at the end of it. So, I am quite proud of that bit of lobbying. It’s these little things – all part of the key threads – that can make quite a big difference.”
Then, having helped to create BTSYM and the Warwick MSc, all while working in the industry on largely major projects, including Crossrail, Thames Tideway, York Potash, HS2 and Lower Thames Crossing, Kate was elected Vice Chair of the BTS. She would be the first female and one of the youngest Chairs of the BTS, leading the society with many prominent tunnellers that she has looked up to over the years represented on the committee.
She knew there would be proven systems to run with, regular beats of activities and events, of tradition and proven practice for gatherings through each year.
Then covid pandemic hit.
The reset button had to be hit. New ways found to reach out and bring people together – but socially distanced.
“The world turned upside down and became very bizarre.”
“Thankfully, Divik Bandopadhyaya – who was about to become BTSYM Chair – helped keep my BTS Chair journey alive, for which I will forever be grateful to him. He quickly had our evening lectures running live on YouTube for tunnellers to tune in – from everywhere – and non-tunnellers, too. The BTS AGM ran on Teams and the first evening lecture had pre-recorded sections whilst we tested the system, allowing speakers to join from Australia.
“I hadn’t imagined that I would chair my first BTS evening sitting by my kitchen table, talking to the world, but I didn’t want to put BTS on pause,” she says. “I’m really pleased that we found a way to keep it going as a place of connecting and meeting. I think people recognised our efforts and joined the Thursday evenings online, to hold on to some sort of structure which kept it all going. While other ICE societies struggled to adapt to the digital delivery and did find some of their membership figures were impacted, we didn’t.”
Tunnellers are bound to the BTS, for it is about people, relationships, forged underground when facing, in geology, often mostly the unknown. There is never certainty. But there are people, who make things happen. People who work together.
Providing inclusion. Access.
“A key theme for me as Chair was always going to be education, because that has been at the heart of what my BTS journey has been about.”
Kate has a keen eye on how covid hit formal education in tunnelling, which saw the Warwick MSc go on hold.
Recognising that no BTS training events could be held in person, as a temporary measure the BTS worked with the University of Warwick to offer four separate paid online CPD training courses, including Tunnelling Design, Finite Element Modelling for Tunnelling, and Health & Safety.
She is now looking at degree apprenticeships, initiated around 2015, as a potential way forward for the industry. This, she sees, will help the model for restarting a tunnelling MSc as well as giving options for other further learning tunnelling courses.
“Whilst the process for establishing a degree apprenticeship is rather complex and lengthy, I can see that being the route for a lot of future tunnellers coming into the industry. The opportunity to be supported by an employer through job development and further education training would be hard to turn down in today’s economic climate. I implore employers to investigate how they use their apprenticeship levy.”
She is also looking ahead – to the past – to the final completion of activities that began during lockdowns to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the BTS.
“It was a significant occasion to be marked,” she says. “But we still couldn’t physically get together. So, instead, we decided to commission some folk songs to capture some of our tunnellers’ stories which have been shared with the BTS@50 book. A very different experience.”
They met folk singer Nancy Kerr virtually and then she talked to people in the BTS, the industry, which brought up all kinds of reflections which informed her compositions. The sharing of stories was not over but has grown for the celebratory book.
With 50 years being celebrated, the occasion came to look ahead at what the next 50 might hold – which Kate did at the first large in-person gathering for everyone, the BTS conference in October 2021, when she gave the David Wallis Lecture.
“It was great to meet people again.”
In the following months, the BTS lectures continued to be online. By May, the Annual Dinner was the next big opportunity to meet, en mass, and allowing Kate the opportunity to meet the membership and celebrate her time as Chair with friends, committee members and colleagues who have helped on her BTS journey. It was then that in person evening lectures were starting again, slowly, at the ICE. Although the onsite bar isn’t yet back in action with drinks and food.
She is pleased that the successful efforts to keep communication going for the membership provided a form of stability, which many found helpful.
The committee did not stand still during the pandemic and focussed time was given to things that could be managed virtually. “We increased the membership of the technical sub-committee which has led to significant progress with the development of our publications, further developed connections with other tunnelling and industry groups, had exceptional levels of entries for our Harding Prize competition (perhaps a sign of possibilities when young engineers are given a little more time) and even managed to hold a discussion with the then ICE President, Rachel Skinner, on net-zero and climate concerns in relation to underground space.
“There’s been huge change in the industry over the past 50 years but there has been also continuity, especially in the friendships and support that different specialities and members of the industry give each other.”
Amidst continuity there is also change – a period of rapid technological advancement is underway in digitalisation, scanning, modelling and artificial intelligence – already making early inroads into the equipment, systems and approaches of the tunnelling sector.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company is rattling cages in the tunnelling community, “and for me that has to be a good thing, because you never know what ideas that will help encourage and unlock,” she says.
While technological change accelerates, and sometimes other pressures come out of left field, like covid, the pleasure of BTS gatherings continue.
May 2022 marked the end of Kate’s time as Chair, with the reins being handed over to Rod Young. Though her time as Chair was not as anyone envisaged, especially Kate, she says “I am grateful to all of the committee members, colleagues and those around the globe that tuned in for the monthly lectures for all of their support, helping me (and my vacuum) to become ‘YouTube famous’. It would not have been possible without each of you. As friendships are at the heart of what the BTS means to me.”
With all other members they look to the future, the reopened bar for the traditional drinks and meals, and buzz of friendships enjoyed in person, again. Connection remains the key – through inclusion and access – also continued opportunities for education, to learn.
“Being open to ideas is the key. Embrace the unimaginable.”
