IVOR THOMAS | INTERVIEW


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


Above: Preparing for tight-space working and cutterhead intervention 20m below the River Thames February 2022 | 35


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