Peter Fraenkel was a civil engineer who realised some of the world’s most challenging marine and coastal engineering projects in the 1970s and 1980s.
He practised at a time of rapid development in heavy civil engineering structures and his own contribution to this story was expertise in the deep and complex foundations that facilitated the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge at the time and the largest oil terminal in Europe. He was also responsible for an influential report that did much to convince the Government of the need to revive Britain’s decaying canal system.
Peter Fraenkel was born in Breslau, Germany — now Wroclaw in Poland — in 1915. His Anglophile parents, seeing the way the wind was blowing, sent him at 16 to live in London where his dissident father later joined him. He completed his schooling and learnt English at the same time before entering Imperial College to study civil engineering.
Newly qualified when the Second World War broke out, he pledged his allegiance to the Allied cause and was detailed to oversee construction of many of the brigade camps that needed to be built all over the country to train newly enlisted soldiers.
After the war he joined the consulting engineers Rendel Palmer & Tritton and got his first taste for the port and marine engineering that would become his forte with projects such as the ore unloading terminal at Tyne Dock. He rose to become a partner, but left the firm in 1972 to set up his own consultancy, Peter Fraenkel & Partners (PFP).
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One of his first commissions was to study the feasibility of reviving Britain’s canal network, which had fallen into decay in the post-industrial age. The waterways had been regarded as too expensive to maintain and some had already been filled in. The Fraenkel report (1975) for the Department of the Environment presented a vision of revamped canals that could act as a catalyst to flourishing recreational use and heritage interest and urban regeneration along the quaysides. It was several years before the recommendations of the report were put into action, but it has been regarded as an influential document that did much to persuade the British Waterways Board (now British Waterways) of the potential of the seemingly moribund waterways, such as the Grand Union Canal and the Forth-Clyde Canal, if investment were made.
He went on to realise some vast engineering projects in the next few years. These included the Sullom Voe oil terminal in Shetland, completed in 1978 and opened by the Queen in 1980. Oil from the Brent and Ninian fields in the North Sea would be piped out to jetties in 20 metres of water where 300,000-tonne oil tankers moored up. The project comprised 32 marine structures supported by steel tubular piles that were drilled into the bedrock under the sea. At the time it had the largest throughput of any oil terminal in Europe. Fraenkel’s firm remained responsible for the maintenance and additions to the structures which are still in excellent condition after 30 years of buffeting from the North Sea.
PFP also designed the vast flood barriers on the River Thames to protect the entrances to Tilbury docks and the King George V dock in Newham.
The building of the Thames Barrier near Greenwich in 1982 required flood barriers at the dock entrances because the rise in water level when the barrier was operated threatened to inundate the ports. The 700-tonne steel barriers were set in frames, slid along horizontally and then lowered vertically into position. The innovative sliding mechanism was needed because it was important that the barriers did not obstruct the views of vessels approaching the docks.
PFP’s rapid growth into a 160-strong consulting firm was achieved on the back of some major port and bridge contracts overseas.
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Fraenkel had launched the firm towards the end of a period when British consulting engineers were world market leaders. Because of the similar work they carried out in the old British Empire they had the teams in place to capitalise on the infrastructure building boom in the Far East and South-East Asia. Fraenkel’s excellent reputation in heavy marine civil engineering meant that he was able to break into this market from a standing start against other British consulting firms that had been established for generations. His development of PFP was recognised with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 1982.
Influential projects included a dockyard for the Thai Navy at Pom Prachul, near Bangkok, completed in 1980. The dockyard’s location in a mangrove swamp required deep foundations through 20m of soft clay for all the structures. Fraenkel was also involved in port developments in Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cyprus.
His effective solutions for deep foundations in difficult ground conditions led to commissions for innovative bridge structures. One such project was the Rama IX bridge, spanning the Chao Phya River in Bangkok, which at the time was the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world with a main span of 450m when completed in 1987. Along with the German engineer Helmut Homberg and the US consulting engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, Fraenkel was responsible for the design and construction of the bridge, which formed part of the expressway into the city. The approaches to the main span curved upwards nearly 50m off the ground to ensure that the bridge was navigable and the completed structure was hailed as an elegant engineering wonder.
Hong Kong was a particularly fruitful field for Fraenkel’s skills as the British colony entered its halcyon days of an infrastructure building boom. Hong Kong’s particularly challenging topography led to some of the world’s most spectacular engineering projects. After opening an office on the island in 1974 Fraenkel was able to play his part in this playground for civil engineers where nothing was considered impossible.
His most ambitious project was the Tolo Highway along 7km of coastline in the New Territories from Shatin to Tai Po. The highway had to be built on land reclaimed from the sea because there was no room inland and a railway hugged the coastline. Fraenkel was able to bring his marine engineering skills to bear on overseeing the dredging and landfilling as well as the firm’s rapidly developing highway design skills, with many concrete bridge structures in heavy and complex foundations. The six-lane highway, which was the largest single road scheme in Hong Kong at that time, even included a cycle lane against a sea wall protecting users from typhoon surges.
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Highways work at home and abroad had begun to occupy a higher proportion of the firm’s workload, particularly in Britain. PFP became heavily involved in design and supervision of concrete bridges as Britain’s motorway network was completed. The firm would have around 20 projects at any one time but it was badly hit when the road-building programme was curtailed in the early 1990s. It was not revived on any great scale for several years, by which point Fraenkel had returned to his roots and reorganised the firm to work on heavy marine engineering.
Fraenkel continued to work as senior partner and chairman of PFP well into his eighties and would still appear regularly in the office into his nineties. He was renowned for his rigorous approach to designing structures that could withstand the battering of the seas. To that end he could be a scourge to contractors whom he suspected of laxity when he was supervising construction of projects and his name became feared in the contracting world because of the rigour he brought to bear.
Forthright in an old-school way, he eschewed the expletive-rich macho culture that developed in the construction industry. Away from the engineering world he loved music and taking rambling holidays in the Swiss Alps.
Fraenkel was a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers, the Institution of Highways and Transportation and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Telford Gold Medal and the James Watt Medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers.
He is survived by Barbara, his wife of 62 years, and by two daughters.
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Peter Fraenkel, civil engineer, was born on July 5, 1915. He died on November 18, 2009, aged 94