Alumni Profile: Bill Colverson

EUR ING Bill Cecil Vivian Colverson FICE (Senior Managers Development Programme, 1967) writes

As an alumnus of The Oxford Centre for Management Studies (OCMS), I was in at the very early stages of a journey that would see its name change twice and take it from a semi-detached Victorian dwelling at 165 Woodstock Road, stopping at Templeton College, Kennington and terminating at Green Templeton College at the Radcliffe Observatory site.

I became a student of the OCMS in the Autumn of 1967, joining the Senior Managers Development Programme (SMDP), a course designed for managers in commerce and industry with top management potential. It was a six-month residential programme, twelve weeks of which was intensive management studies followed by twelve weeks for the preparation of a project chosen by the participant. I chose to prepare a disquisition on Marketing in the Construction Industry, with emphasis on seeking the acquisition of profitable civil engineering contracts.

Until I became a student at OCMS in 1967, my formal education had ended at a grammar school. On leaving school in 1951 I was indentured for three years to a City Engineer. On the completion of my pupil ship I worked on several construction sites for Consulting Engineers and in Local Government Capital Works designing and constructing roads and bridges, land drainage schemes, sewage works and many reinforced concrete water retaining structures including the first indoor swimming pool on Donkeys Common, Cambridge. On completing the civil and structural design of the swimming pool I went on site as the Resident Engineer. Following the failure of two of the short-bored piles used in the foundation for the pool, Cambridge University kindly allowed me to use their civil engineering laboratory to run some tests to establish the likely cause of the failure. Whilst in Cambridge I gave several guest lectures to students on Concrete Shuttering and Structural Design at what is now The Cambridge Regional College.

During this period, I was studying eight subjects at home by correspondence course for the Institution of Civil Engineers examination. This was an exasperating experience as in those days there were no laptops or mobile phones, no texts, emails or WhatsApp groups, no means of communicating with your tutor other than by mail and it could take up to three weeks to get a response; a far cry from the face-to-face tutorials I was to experience at the OCMS. The studies paid off as I passed the exams held in the Great Hall at the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great George Street, London. I progressed from Member to Fellow of the Institution and for five years I worked, in time given off by my employer, as an examiner of Graduates of the Institution wishing to become Members. These examinations involved oral and written work and were held in Glasgow, Durham, Cardiff and London.

Following my experience at Cambridge, I joined a medium sized international civil engineering construction company. The company’s strength was in power stations, cooling towers, roads, soft ground and rock tunnels and industrial buildings. Initially I was in the design department and had experience of designing structures to both British and European Codes of Practice and local bylaws. In the autumn of 1967, I was coming to the end of a four-year programme as Project Coordinator for the redevelopment of six factories throughout Britain.

At the same time, Norman Leyland, Bursar at Brasenose College and founder member of the OCMS, was recruiting for the SMDP course. After speaking to my chairman, he was invited to interview me. He must have thought that I had the potential to benefit from some further education and I subsequently found myself living in the Randolph Hotel for six months and walking the mile to 165 Woodstock Road each day. There were just seven other mature students on the course and this daily walk-in groups of two or three was very good for getting to know each other and for making friends which developed into deeper friendships over the next few months. However, this daily exercise was insufficient to control my weight gain brought on by excellent lunches at number 165, the Stilton cheese hollowed out and laced with port was my particular favourite, followed by lavish dinners at the Randolph, so I was more than happy to forgo the occasional dinner and be taught to play Squash by the Managing Director of Fibreglass and Regional Squash Champion in India and fellow course member.

Other members on the course included three bankers, one of whom became Deputy Chairman of Barclays Bank, the secretary of one of Britain’s largest retail stores, and the only woman on the course who became Second Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office, then at HM Treasury and Chancellor at De Montfort University. I was the second youngest member on the course at the age of thirty-three I and was surprised at the age and experience of my fellow students. But I soon found that my grasp of mathematics, particularly in the Quantitative Methods sessions and my experience in dealing with Industrial Relations from my construction site experience gave me a head start and a little breathing space in the hectic programme of lectures, tutorials and the necessary reading into the early hours.

Whilst I was on the course, the building of accommodation for OCMS at Kennington was underway and Norman Leyland was more than happy to show me the work under construction. I was impressed with the design and the materials used, which were quite innovative, but also impressed that before the completion and occupation of the new OCMS premises Norman had appointed a chef and sent him off on a course on how to make sauces… Norman always got his priorities right!

One of the highlights of my Oxford experience was to be invited by Norman Leyland to dine at the high table at Brasenose College. The Master was not present that evening and Norman was particularly interested in the order in which the Fellows left the Senior Common Room to enter the dining hall. I remember only one small piece of the esoteric conversations going on around me and that was a discussion between two Fellows, one of whom was in charge of the well-stocked wine cellar. ‘What was the wine like from that bottle of 1895 Petrus Pomerol you found last week? It was like… drinking a ghost’.

The future Deputy Chairman of Barclays Bank organised an evening meal at one of the local Chinese restaurants for both tutors and students, for which we paid. We had discussed the case of the ‘negotiable cow’ earlier that day and so I was not too surprised when he refused a cheque, I had drawn up on an A3 sheet of cartridge paper, despite the fact that both the Bank of England and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank course members said that it was a negotiable instrument. The course was intensive and exhausting but stimulating and highly enjoyable. My viva voce interview carried out a month or so after the end of the course to examine my project was somewhat nerve racking but fortunately ended with the award of the Oxford University Certificate in Management Studies.

On returning to work I was appointed General Manager of the Engineering and Estimating Division. This involved selecting engineers and estimators to form teams whose combined expertise was best suited for the particular project we were pursuing. I also carried out detailed studies into the problems we had on an overseas hydro-electric contract where rock conditions on site were at variance to those declared in the contract documents against which we had quoted and which had resulted in the death of our tunnelling foreman in an unexpected rock fall.

I was then invited to join the largest civil engineering company in Britain as Group Marketing and Communications Manager. The company had several businesses; civil engineering at home and abroad, grouting and piling, railway permanent way construction and overhead electrification, power transmission lines, heating and ventilation and property development. I had a team of six at Head Office with others involved in procuring contracts scattered around the various businesses. I and my team prepared proposal documentation for civil engineering contracts at home and abroad, the latter in both English and in the language of the potential client. I gave presentations to the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors in Dublin and in London on the subject of obtaining sub-contracts for main contractors, I represented the Company on the London Branch of The British Chambers of Commerce and was on the British Standards Committee for the Design of Natural Draught Cooling Towers.

In 1990, a working party was formed by British Rail to find the best route for the rail link between London and the Channel Tunnel. The party consisted of two from British Rail, a leading consulting engineer, and myself representing civil engineering contractors. Each of us worked separately on the project with our own in-house teams and then met at two- or four-week intervals to pool our findings where they were examined and argued over in great detail until the best route on paper was agreed. Building the link started three years after my retirement! Looking back on my life a number of things are quite prominent; I had polio in 1949, went to Canada in 1950 and left school in 1951 to embark on a civil engineering career.

I missed out on National Service not because I was unfit, I ran in the Midland Counties Athletic Championship in the 440 yards hurdles the weekend of my medical, but purely on my medical history. I would have liked to have done eighteen months in one of the armed forces, not least because I would come out with about £400 which would have gone to my wedding expenses, but coming from a family with a military background; my paternal grandfather was a Sergeant Major in the Marines and my father a Warrant Officer in the RAF until his discharge through injury.

The six-week trip to Canada was as a representative of British youth with a number of other boys from youth clubs and Public Schools. The leader of the party was Field Marshal Sir Claud Auchinleck. I had foolishly said that I played in the school chess team. This led to the Great Auk asking for a game of chess whilst we were on the Empress of Scotland sailing for five days from Liverpool to Montreal (no BA flights in those days). At the end of the tour, we were each given a silver medal with the following inscriptions;

A high soul climbs the highway,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.

‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Both of these quotations come from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox and seemed very appropriate for young men (or ladies) starting out on a career.

Sport has played a big part throughout my life (I’m reduced to lawn bowls now, which can be pretty competitive), having represented the county at athletics at the White City and in the county hockey team. I won two club decathlons and played squash and golf. In later life I took up long distance running, completing a number of ultra-marathons and marathons whilst we were living in France. I did well in my age group particularly when I reached Vet.4, 70 to 79 years old. I had many podiums finishes and took home much produits régionaux.

On returning to the UK after eighteen years of sojourning in France I decided that I would benefit from a little further education and signed up for Classics and Poetry, which filled my spare time for eight years until COVID-19 meant the closure of both courses. During the lockdowns I put a poem a day on the local library website. When caring duties permit, I also do a little water colour painting and ink and wash sketching.

My greatest achievement in life is living with and loving the same woman for seventy-one years … and hopefully a few more.