Arthur Burton Buckley
Arthur Burton Buckley (1877-1964)
1964 Obituary [1]
1964 Obituary[2]
"ARTHUR BURTON BUCKLEY, a distinguished civil engineer in Egypt, died recently at his home in Emsworth, Hants, aged eighty-seven. He was a student at the Central Technical College, London, and then apprenticed at Thorneycrofts; in 1896, he was engaged in destroyer trials and was sent to Kiel to hand over a destroyer built for the German Navy. From 1899 to 1902 he was on the staff of Sir Benjamin Baker, working in Genoa docks. Topham, Jones and Railton Ltd. employed him as engineer at the Bute dockworks in Cardiff from 1902 to 1905.
At the beginning of the twentieth century little was known about the Nile upstream from Khartoum until Sir William Garstin made a tour of exploration up to Lake Victoria. As a result of the tour, the need for engineers was advertised. Whereupon Buckley, in 1905, accepted a post with the irrigation staff of the Egyptian Government, employed on construction work. In 1907 he became assistant inspector-general of irrigation for Egypt; as such he was responsible for much of the dam construction and auxiliary irrigation work. Later he became director-general of reservoirs. Among his special concerns at this stage of his career were the preliminary designs for the Namgahamadi barrage and the second heightening of the Aswan Low Dam.
In 1915 Buckley was sent by the Egyptian Government to survey Lake Tsana in Abyssinia on behalf of a Foreign Office mission. Three years later he accompanied Sir John Hewett to Iraq and was awarded the O.B.E. for war services in that country. The Egyptian Government decorated him with the Order of Ismail and the Order of the Nile for services to Egypt, and the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Watt Gold Medal for his paper on "The Influence of Silt on the Velocity of Water Flowing in Open Channels.
Since his retirement in 1928, when he was elected Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute, Buckley had devoted much time to original research. He was fluent in Arabic and Italian."
See Also
Sources of Information
- ↑ 1964 Institution of Civil Engineers: Obituaries
- ↑ The Engineer 1964 Jul-Dec