Alfred Pippard

Alfred Pippard
Born	6 April 1891 Yeovil, Somerset
Died	2 November 1969(1969-11-02) (aged 78) Putney, London,
Nationality	English
Education	University of Bristol
Occupation	Engineer
Engineering career
Discipline	Civil, aeronautical
Institutions	Institution of Civil Engineers (president), Royal Society (fellow),[1]
Projects	R100 and R101 airships

Alfred John Sutton Pippard MBE FRS^[1] (6 April 1891 – 2 November 1969) was a British civil engineer and academic. Pippard was the son of a carpenter and joiner and spent much of his early life helping his father on construction sites. Initially supposed to follow his father into the family business, Pippard instead decided to study for a bachelor's degree in civil engineering at the University of Bristol, supporting himself with an Exhibition award. Pippard worked for a Bristol based consulting engineer and for the Pontypridd and Rhondda Valley Joint Water Board in his early career. He also completed his master's degree during this period.

At the start of the First World War Pippard joined the Admiralty Air Department where he studied aircraft stresses. After the war he joined an aeronautical engineering consultancy with many of his colleagues and was involved in accident investigation cases. He gained his Doctorate of Science from Bristol in 1920 and took up the chair in Civil Engineering at University College, Cardiff in 1922. This began a long career in academia at Cardiff, Bristol and Imperial College during which he was responsible for the analysis of the methods used in the design of the R100 and R101 airships. The public enquiry into the latter's crash, which ended British participation in airship development, found no faults with Pippard's work but he withdrew from the field of aeronautical engineering – feeling keenly the loss of several of his friends amongst the 48 dead.

During the Second World War Pippard was a member of the Civil Defence Research Committee which met at Princes Risborough and continued his teaching at Imperial College. Pippard was a member of the council of the Institution of Civil Engineers for fifteen years and was their president for the 1958-9 session. During his later career he chaired the fifteen-year investigation into pollution in the Thames tideway the length of which he was criticised for by the press. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society^[1] in 1954 and was pro-rector of Imperial college for the next year. He retired in 1956 and began a lecture tour of the United States and received honorary degrees from Bristol, Birmingham and Brunel Universities.