DAVID FAWCETT | INTERVIEW


David Fawcett’s long and successful tunnelling career began back in 1970. He spent much of his time with Babtie, helping to transform it from a medium-sized engineering company to a major player. He has worked on projects around the world; is an expert adviser and witness; was a Chairman of the BTS in the mid-1990s; and, since retiring still runs his own consulting business. He offers that he holds some unusual opinions.


avid Fawcett’s first civil engineering job was in tunnelling. Why?


“It was accidental.” Which is what almost


all the tunnellers we have interviewed for these pages say. “I was at Bradford university, where I worked on the Gravelly Hill interchange for a year as part of my course. It was a massive civil engineering project at the time.” Gravelly Hill may be more familiar


to some readers as Spaghetti Junction, a famous, indeed notorious, traffic and motorway meeting-place outside Birmingham, the best view of which is generally considered to be in a rear-view mirror. It is not of course a tunnel. It is nevertheless relevant; and how he got to university at all to help build it is worth telling. “I’d been extremely unsuccessful at


school, extremely successful at university. I failed my A Levels, then I went on to get first class honours.”


Why the change? And how did he get into


university with poor A Levels? “I didn’t go through UCAS or anything.


We were in Bradford, my father knew some guys who were lecturers there. I re-took some A levels after six months and when the results came out he told them and they said ‘go down and see John Ayers.’ Ayers was a civil engineer and a lecturer at the university; and he said, ‘Well, turn up in October.’ “So I did. At the end of the first year I


came top of the course. Nothing like that had ever happened in my life before. I wasn’t just surprised: I was seriously surprised. I was surprised even still to be on the course – they kicked out 25% of the students after the first term. So it was interesting: I was doing what I wanted to do, and I was top of the class. All of this was absolutely new to me.” And the first tunnelling job? “In those days companies used to come


round the universities recruiting people, and a guy called Alastair Biggart from a company called Mitchell Brothers came to the university. I said that the Gravelly Interchange had been a big job, where I had


felt like a small fish in a big pool. I wanted to work on a small job, where I could see a lot more of the results. He said, ‘Sure, we’ve got some of those. Come and join us.’ That was it. “Alastair left Mitchell Brothers before I


started there, but I worked with him again later in life. “That first job with Mitchell Brothers was


a cable tunnel in Manchester for a new telephone exchange. It was a short tunnel in sandstone, and it was tricky because you had to go down a shaft and into the tunnel system, underground in very wet ground. It was muscle work, drill and blast, and it was in at the deep end. You were working on site and the Irish workmen didn’t take prisoners. It wasn’t a personally happy time for me and it took a while but I did find my feet and establish myself. “And what that start in engineering


...TUNNELLING HAS BEEN EXTREMELY GOOD TO ME.


did – the unexpected degree, my intense sport of rock climbing, and the climate at Mitchell Brothers – was to give me an irrational amount of confidence; and that has stayed with me throughout my career. The tunnelling was an accident but I stayed with it – people didn’t change direction in their jobs in those days. And tunnelling has been extremely good to me. I have travelled the world. I’ve made friends from all over the world, our families have become friends, the children have become friends and now the grandchildren have started to become friends as well. So, socially as well as professionally, it has been a wonderful thing.”


Above left: The Robbins TBM used for the Kielder tunnels ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF DAVID FAWCETT Above right: David Fawcett (right) with rock drill in a Dublin sewer tunnel, 1971


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