The late Bevan Braithwaite OBE MA FREng FWeldI

TWI Bulletin, July - August 2008

Tributes to an engineer extraordinaire

Earlier this year TWI announced that its former chief executive Bevan Braithwaite died on Friday 25th April 2008 after a long illness. He retired in 2004 following a 43 year professional and personal vocation to engineering.

Whether it was the purposeful demeanour or the acerbic wit, the warm smile or the gravelly voice, few people meeting Bevan Braithwaite for the first time dismissed or forgot the occasion.

He will be remembered as an engineer of extraordinary talent, a businessman with a marksman's eye for a deal and an ambassador at the highest level of his profession. He could be tough but compassionate, ruthless but kind, irascible but understanding.

Educated at Leighton Park School and Jesus College, Cambridge, he rose to become managing director of TWI in 1984 and the top job, chief executive, in 1988. He was awarded the OBE in 1991.

The autumn of 1961 saw the fresh-faced 22 year old joining The British Welding Research Association, as TWI was then known, as a scientific officer. It was a post for which his Cambridge engineering degree and class 1 welder qualification equipped him ideally. The job provided a springboard to a career of extraordinary distinction. By 1964 he was authoring seminal works on fatigue strengths of structural steel, metallurgy for engineers and friction welding for railways.

Within the firmament of the late TWI director general Richard Weck he was soon identified as a rising star and elected as the youngest member of the Executive Board, at the age of 28, in 1967.

Eloquent and quick witted, particularly when put on the spot, he was always well informed, entertaining, often coruscating, sometimes excoriating, but never, never dull. He led from the front, made things happen, and perfected a magician's prowess for walking through obstacles. He never suffered fools gladly.

To find yourself on the wrong side of Bevan invariably revealed poor positioning on your part. Seasoned adversaries knew when to blend into the wallpaper to avoid incurring his wrath. The eyebrows met, the hairline tightened, the silent stare chilled your soul. To have him on your side was to be armed with a formidable ally. To have him as an adversary was imprudent.

His speech could be coded...'It would be nice if...' was cipher for 'You'll do this my way'. 'We had particular fun doing.....' meant 'The job was riddled with obstacles'. And perhaps most memorably 'How good of you to drop by....'was Bevan speak for 'you're late'.

Four colleagues look back on their times with Bevan Braithwaite.........

I first met Bevan over 30 years ago at a Welding Institute annual dinner in London. BOC had unusually just won a large weld metal development research grant. Bevan was at his charming best, easy to talk to and yet it was obviousthat his commercial radar was switched on. He was always like that, interested in new things and new people and especially when there was a whiff of a new business opportunity in the air.

I got to know him better through my time serving on Council and the Finance and General Purposes Committee. Although the youngest director, he seemed to answer most of the awkward commercial and policy questions and there were plenty of those flying around with the proposed sale of the Institute's London home - Prince's Gate. He was a good networker. Occasionally I got invited to lunch, but there would always be a big idea he was pushing. 'Come on Bob,surely you lot (ESAB by this stage) could sell TWI's welding software alongside your welding equipment and consumables' .... some things never change.

It was Bevan's idea that I came to TWI as Business Development Director in 1991, a few years after he had taken over from Alan Wells as CEO. 'I've got the best job in the world!' he was fond of saying.

As Chairman of the Finance & General Purposes Committee I was technically Bevan's boss, we often joked about the role reversal when I joined the staff and worked for him. Either way it was clear that Bevan loved projects, the bigger the better and especially those that involved constructing large machines, or buildings or preferably both. Some of the large machine projects were a scary ride but the changes he had in mind for our building stock at Granta Park have provided an enduring legacy for all of us.

His favourite management mantra was 'if you're going to be awkward you'd better be brilliant'. In his own way Bevan could be both. He was always ambitious for TWI and could be very single-minded when he wanted his own way. Today,there is much to show for his endeavours. His name now adorns our headquarters building at Abington, a fitting tribute to his lifelong contribution to the welding and joining community that we all serve.

Thank you Bevan.

Bevan and I were at The University of Cambridge around the same time. He received a degree in Mechanical Sciences but could often be found playing jazz at Daddy's Night Club in Sidney Street, what is now the top floor of Waterstones bookshop. Bevan told me that at a very young age he used to tuck a violin under his chin, but switched to the banjo because violins were unlikely to get you into night clubs. He was an excellent gymnast and won a half blue at University spending more than the usual amount of time vaulting through the air and walking on his hands. But in later life he was never one for sitting on his hands!

In 1961, he became a Research Officer in the Fatigue Laboratory at a princely salary of £650 per year. Concentrating mainly on large scale fatigue testing, he was firmly of the view that size matters, and built one of the large rigs in the lab that is still used today. In the meantime, he turned the Fatigue Lab into a garage, regularly welding up car wrecks, but always out of hours of course! In fact, he was so concerned that the customer should get value for money that he pushed for and introduced time sheets for the first time at BWRA and this was the birth of TWI's billable hour!

Incidentally, he was told by his engineer peers not to mix with process people! They must have forgotten he was a welder. After a brief secondment to Resistance Welding he made several forays into processes and developed a passion for rotary friction welding almost everything.

Bevan then prised open a large part of the American market for BWRA. He recruited some of the largest US engineering companies into membership, such as Caterpillar and Allis Chalmers. In 1967, he was part of the BWRA team exhibiting for the first time at the AWS show and for many years the BWRA/TWI stand helped raise our profile and recruit new Members in the USA.

Bevan became CEO in 1988, and his record speaks for itself. The last twelve years showed continuous growth in turnover, with profits and cash generation meeting our forecast to Council every year.

We were all delighted when he became the first UK President of the IIW and in that period of office, worldwide harmonisation of welding engineering training and qualifications took place, owing much to his strong leadership. He was awarded the IIW Edstrom medal for this and other successes.

Throughout his business life, he was a champion of change, addressing new markets and customers and showed a consistency of commercial drive, both nationally and internationally. And this was recognised by the award of his OBE in1991.

Bevan was proud to be an engineer. A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 1999, he made many major contributions to some complex engineering contracts handled by TWI, and several large rigs would never have been completed or sold to Members without his talent for solving some tricky mechanical issues. He thrived on site visits to companies where he could see the engineering problems at first hand. He had a stroke of good luck on one visit when everyone changed into industrial boots. He came home thinking his shoes were a bit tight only to discover that he had left his own Marks and Spencer shoes behind and walked out wearing someone else's pair, made by Paul Smith and probably worth £200!

Bevan's most successful deals were the negotiations for the land purchases around Abington Hall and with Bovis, the site developer. I know these were particularly tough but they were the situations in which Bevan thrived and heen joyed the process enormously. The outcome is there for us all to see, Granta Park, a lasting tribute to his skills as a negotiator and his vision for a better TWI.

Two of Bevan's houses

Bevan was an enthusiastic house restorer. From 1962, when I first met him, the Braithwaites lived in seven houses, each a major project. This makes me feel most inadequate, since during that time we have lived in just one. The first of these Braithwaite houses was a mediaeval cottage in the Cambridgeshire village of Balsham. During its restoration, Bevan found that it was being kept up almost solely by the wattle and daub plaster. All the major uprights had rotted through at floor level so that you could run your hand under them. Obviously this called for major reconstruction of the timber framework.

The next was Herring's House in Fulbourn, formerly owned by the eponymous painter. At this time, Bevan and I both installed our central heating systems, quite a novelty in those days. We used electric resistance welded steel pipe,the theory being that the oxygen in the water in the system would be absorbed in some initial corrosion and that subsequently the water would be passive. Unfortunately practice did not live up to theory. The pipes leaked on the weldline and we both had to re-pipe our systems completely after a year or so. It was an early encounter with the failure of welded components.

Bevan's Aston Martin

One of Bevan's early cars was a second hand Aston Martin. This was offered for sale by a huge car dealer in the Bedfordshire town, Leighton Buzzard. The offer price was £1,500, a fair amount in those days. Bevan liked the car and made an offer of £750 and showed the salesman a briefcase containing that amount of cash and no more. After a lot of toing and froing, his offer was accepted - early evidence of advanced negotiating skills. It later transpired that the reason for the hesitation on the part of the sales rep was not the low offer but that this was the dealership where the Great Train Robbers had purchased their get-away cars using cash which they had previously stolen in a wages heist at Heathrow Airport. This was the only previous occasion on which the salesman had seen so much cash. It was the car that was repaired in the evenings in the fatigue laboratory with Bevan working under it with the front end hanging from the crane. 'ealth 'n safety - ouch.

Managing by walking about

Bevan was a great believer in the importance of visibility. He always lunched in the staff restaurant, the senior staff restaurant having been abolished. He encouraged all his managers to do the same and suggested that they try to sit with different groups so that they could get to know as many people as possible. This had a very beneficial effect on staff relationships.

Granta Park

I thought that Bevan was dreaming when, in the eighties, he presented to TWI's Council his vision to create a material oriented technology park at the TWI site. He made several attempts to find an appropriate partner but without any success. Even though he never gave up his idea several years later he signed a contract with a well-known exploitation and real estate company. Today we all are impressed at seeing Bevan's realised vision with the creation of the Granta Technology Park. It is judged to be the most impressive Science Park in the UK. In addition TWI has in 2003 moved into new, huge and impressive facilities called the Bevan Braithwaite building. It has improved the TWI image and the image of welding. In addition TWI has got a very strong financial platform thanks to its 20% shareholding in Granta Park.

IIW President

Bevan was persuaded by British members to join the International Institute of Welding Board. He was elected treasurer and started the financial turn around of the IIW business. When in 1999 he became the IIW President he changed the whole IIW Secretariat and when I succeeded him in 2002 as the IIW President I inherited a sound and efficient organisation. During his three year term Bevan also managed to get EWF to transfer most of their harmonised programmes for training and qualification of personnel to a new group in the IIW organisation. It is an important milestone in IIW's history.