OBITUARY 265

Dr Leonard Frank Cooling, 1903-1977

Dr Cooling died at the Peace Memorial Hospital, Watford, on 15 February, 1977 after a short
illness. He will always be remembered as the founder of the British school of soil mechanics
and, by those who had the good fortune to know him, as a man of wisdom and kindness
combined with great ability. These qualities were endearing to all who worked with him,
from the most junior laboratory assistant to his senior colleagues at the Building Research
Station, and justly inspired a feeling of confidence in the leading members of the civil engineer-
ing profession at a time when soil mechanics was still a novel and rather mysterious subject.
Cooling never doubted the importance of soil mechanics but always recognized its limitations;
the reports and papers written by him and under his direction, though often at the forefront
of knowledge, as it existed at any given time, are straightforward documents aimed at helping
the reader.
Leonard Cooling was born at Solihull near Birmingham on 23 December, 1903. He
attended St Mary’s School, Acocks Green, from which in 1915 he moved as a Foundation
Scholar to Yardley Secondary School and thence in 1922, with an entrance scholarship, to
Birmingham University. He took a first class honours degree in physics in 1925 and stayed
on at the university for nearly two years, with a DSIR grant, to undertake research on thermo-
magnetic properties of nickel-irons and meteorites. This lead to his MSc degree in 1926.
Brilliant though his school and university career had been he found plenty of time and
energy for sport, at which he also excelled, having played for the England amateur football
team during his student days.
Early in 1927, with strong support from his professor at Birmingham, he applied for a job
at the Building Research Station near Watford, at Garston, and took up an appointment there
in May as a Junior Scientific 0fficer.l For the next six years he worked first in the Physics
Division on capillary properties of porous materials and then, with R. J. Schaffer in the
Chemistry Division, on the weathering of building stones. During this time his work on capil-
larity, evaporation and permeability brought him naturally into contact with the soil physics

1 To be historically correct this grade, before 1933, was known as Junior Assistant.

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 266 OBITUARY

group at Rothamsted Experimental Station, particularly Dr R. K. Schofield, and the Rotham-

sted monograph on soil physics by B. A. Keen, published in 1931, was soon to become one of
the standard references in the BRS laboratory.
But this is to anticipate events, and before resuming a summary of Cooling’s career it is
necessary to refer to some work by Professor C. F. J&kin, FRS. On his retirement from the
Chair of Engineering Science at Oxford Jenkin came to BRS in 1929 at the invitation of the
Director, Dr Reginald Stradling, to continue research on earth pressures which he had started
at Oxford three years earlier. He did not join the staff, but had as an assistant R. C. Bevan
who, like Cooling, was then a JSO. By the beginning of 1932 the earth pressure experiments
were completed, and Bevan undertook the calculations for a book of earth pressure tables
(published in 1934). But Jenkin immediately started investigations on the strength properties
of clay, with kaolin as a research material. With the help of D. B. Smith, a young graduate
from Oxford who was brought in as his assistant, ring shear and compression tests were
carried out, using apparatus of ingenious design in the ‘string and sealing wax’ tradition.
Scarcely more than a year passed, however, before Jenkin’s health gave way and he had to
retire completely from active work. As it happens, at just this time the Road Research
Board was established with Dr Stradling acting as Director in the initial stages, while still
continuing as Director of Building Research. He clearly saw the need for a soils laboratory
in connection with road investigations and was also anxious that Jenkin’s work should be
extended. A soil physics section (as it was then called) therefore came into being, at BRS,
and Stradling made the wise decision to put Cooling in charge. This was in September 1933.
The staff of the new section consisted of Cooling, by this time a Scientific Officer aged 29,
with D. B. Smith and A. J. Newman, who joined BRS in November. These three set up the
first proper soil mechanics laboratory in Great Britain in two small rooms in what had been
the stable block of the country mansion at Garston which housed the BRS. Cooling had a
tiny office in the attic above the main lab; the other two shared a slightly larger room next door.
By March 1935 Cooling was able to write a substantial report on the progress achieved. A
four-inch diameter sampler had been rigged up on the back of a truck. Dozens of samples
were taken from a wide variety of geological deposits and submitted to laboratory tests.
A word is perhaps necessary here to explain what is meant by the term ‘proper soil mechanics
laboratory’. Jenkin’s earth pressure research belonged to a lengthy, if intermittent, series of
model tests going back at least to Mayniel in the early years of the nineteenth century. They
are of great interest but represent only a minute part of soil mechanics. In a somewhat
similar fashion the work on kaolin is characteristic of the independent, almost isolated,
research work carried out from time to time by pioneers. But Cooling established a
laboratory equipped to measure Atterberg limits, shrinkage, particle size, permeability,
consohdation and other properties wholly in the main stream of soil mechanics as it had
recently evolved, principally in the United States, under the inspiration of Terzaghi, and he
went into the field to obtain undisturbed samples.
Research during the year 1934 was admittedly of an exploratory nature, but in 1935 the first
civil engineering investigations began, with the study of embankment slips at Winchfield and
Botley (both on the Southern Railway in Hampshire) and movements of a retaining wall in
London Clay at the west end of Kensal Green tunnel.2 By the end of that year Cooling’s team
was placed in the Engineering Division under W. H. Glanville and renamed the Soil Mechanics
Section.
Work continued for the Road Research Board until 1937, when the Road Research Labora-
tory established its own soil mechanics section, under A. H. D. Markwick, and at about this
2 The more famous Kensal Green failure, investigated in 1942, was a different site.

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 OBITUARY 261

The ‘stable block’ at BRS. The first soil mechanics laboratory was in the end bay furthest from the camera.
The ‘greenhouses’ laboratory can he Seen beyond

time the BRS group moved from the stable block into rather more commodious quarters
concocted, as Cooling said, by converting the old greenhouses. To an increasing extent
attention was directed to civil engineering problems; about eight had been studied before the
well known Chingford dam failure in August 1937. As is well known the work of the BRS in
this investigation, which involved the first visit of Terzaghi to England, had a profound effect.
The influence of Cooling in this critical early period, 1933-37, cannot be emphasized too
strongly. With the exception of D. B. Smith who had worked for a year with Professor
Jenkin, none of Cooling’s staff had the slightest experience in soil mechanics before joining the
section. A. W. Skempton, who came as an additional member of the group in January 1937,
had been working on reinforced concrete; H. Q. Golder, who took Smith’s place in May 1937,
came from the Forest Products Laboratory; G. C. Wilson who had never heard of soil mechan-
ics when he replaced Newman in October 1935, nor had his successor A. B. Lloyd who came
after Wilson joined Markwick at RRL about April 1937. Nevertheless, by the summer of
1937 the BRS had a well equipped laboratory with shear boxes, oedometers and all the neces-
sary routine apparatus, together with sufficient knowledge to handle a difficult and demanding
investigation in the face of scepticism from some members of the civil engineering profession.
That the small group at BRS managed so well in these circumstances is due partly to the
support of engineers such as Sir Robert Wynne-Edwards and Mr Wentworth-Sheilds, and also
to the encouragement of the Director, but above all to Cooling’s abilities.
The subsequent growth in scale and importance of soil mechanics in Great Britain, at BRS
and elsewhere, is now a matter of history. The change can well be indicated by the fact that
Cooling was the sole representative of this country at the first International Conference in 1936,
at Harvard, which included only three papers from England (two written jointly by Cooling
and D. B. Smith and the third a report from the BRS laboratory) while, in contrast, the second
Conference at Rotterdam in 1948 was attended by 74 British delegates, with 57 papers in
addition to reports from 15 laboratories. There is not the slightest doubt that throughout
these years the BRS occupied a central position. Engineers from consultants, contractors and

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 268 OBITUARY

public authorities, and university lecturers, came to Garston to study or had in some cases
actually been on the staff. Up to 1946 the principal research laboratory in soil mechanics
was at BRS and the number of field investigations carried out from that base far exceeded
those undertaken by any other organization.
Cooling remained in charge of soil mechanics at BRS throughout this period and until 1959.
His staff was never large but the responsibility of dealing with major engineering enquiries and
the international reputation established by the group justified it becoming a Division in its
own right in 1946. Cooling then became a Senior Principal Scientific Officer. In October
1959 he was promoted to Deputy Chief Scientific Officer with overall direction of Physics,
Materials and Soil Mechanics3 and W. H. Ward, who succeeded Golder in 1942, became head
of the Division.
This is not the place to speak in detail of Cooling’s work. It is widely known and appreciat-
ed, and a representative bibliography of his publications is given here. For his original
research he gained the degree of DSc from Birmingham University in 1952, and for his out-
standing contributions to civil engineering he was elected an Associate of the Institution of
Civil Engineers in 1957. He gave the second Rankine Lecture in 1962.
There is, however, another side to the story which must be mentioned; namely, the immense
amount of work carried out for the general good of the subject. It was he who started the
informal discussion meetings at the ICE in 1940, and gave the first paper. He took part in
the influential lectures in soil mechanics at the Institution in 1945. He was a leading member
of the Soil Mechanics and Foundations Committee set up by the ICE in 1947, and of the
British National Committee of the ISSMFE established in the same year. He was for a long
time, and from the start in 1949, on the committee of the British Geotechnical Society, and held
the position of Chairman of the Society from 1955, with a brief interruption, until 1959. He
served on the GPotechnique Advisory Panel, again from its first meeting in 1949, for twenty
years without a break and was Chairman from 1966 to 1969.
All this he did with the utmost good humour and a wonderful amount of what is mislead-
ingly known as common sense. Though occupying from his early thirties a position of high
responsibility Dr Cooling was invariably and entirely unpretentious and very approachable.
His criticism of papers written by his junior colleagues was masterly: kind and simple advice
which was always taken with great benefit to the finished product. Indeed his help and en-
couragement to his younger colleagues was quite exceptional, and it is appropriate that the
British Geotechnical Society chose to honour him by establishing, in 1970, the Cooling Prize
to be given annually for the best paper presented by a young engineer. This was after he
retired from BRS in May 1968.
Many members of the Society will recall the delightful talk which he gave at the ICE in
December 1974 on the early history of soil mechanics in this country. The present writer had
the pleasure of working with Dr Cooling at his home in Oxhey, near Watford, on several
occasions while this talk and an accompanying set of notes on the origins of the BGS were in
preparation. Mrs Cooling, who attended many conferences in the company of her husband,
was there and their daughter Christine, now a member of the BRS, looked in to see how we
were getting on.
These recent visits to Oxhey vividly brought back to the writer’s mind the happy and
productive period of ten years during which he worked under Dr Cooling, and a sense of
gladness, which surely is shared by the soil mechanics world, that we had such a man with us.
A. W. S.

3 A grouping more logically reformed in 1966 as Structural Engineering and Geotechnics.

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 OBITUARY 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1930. Contributions to the study of florescence; evaporation of water from brick. Trans. Ceramic Sot. 29,
39-54.
1936. (With D. B. Smith.) Exploration of soil conditions and sampling operations. Proc. First Znt. Conf
Soil Mech. Fdn Engng, Harvard 1, 12.
1936. (With D. B. Smith.) The shearing resistance of soils. Proc. First Znt. Conf Soil Mech. Fdn Engng,
Harvard 1, 3741.
1936. Report on the soil mechanics laboratory of the Building Research Station. Proc. First Znt. Conf Soil
Mech. Fdn Engng, Harvard 2, 12-16.
1936. Report on the First International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering. Jnl
Znstn Civ. Engrs 4,135-147.
1938. (With R. G. H. Clements et al.) Examination of the sub-soil of roads. Eighth Cong. Perm. Znt. Road
Cong. 85, 1-31.
1940. (With H. Q. Golder.) A portable apparatus for compression tests on clay soils. Engineering 149,
5658.
1941. (With A. W. Skempton.) Some experiments on the consolidation of clay. Jnl Znstn Civ. Engrs 16,
381-398.
1942. (With A. W. Skempton.) A laboratory study of London Clay. Jnl Znstn Civ. Engrs 17,251-276.
1942. Soil mechanics and site exploration. Jnl Znstn Civ. Engrs 18, 37-61.
1942. (With H. Q. Golder.) The analysis of the failure of an earth dam during construction. Jnl Znstn Civ.
Engrs 19, 38-55.
1944. (With W. H. Ward.) Damage to cold stores due to frost-heaving. Proc. Inst. Refrig. 41, 37-47.
1946. Development and scope of soil mechanics. The principles and application of soil mechanics, pp. l-30.
Institution of Civil Engineers.
1946. Some foundation troubles with small houses. Jnl Inst. Sanitary Engrs 45, 327-347.
194;3~~;;lement analysis of Waterloo Bridge. Proc. Second Znt. Conf. Soil Mech. Fdn Engng, Rotterdam 2,

1948. Settlement observations on four grain silos. Proc. Second Znt. Conf Soil Mech. Fdn Engng, Rotterdam
2, 135-138.
1948. (With W. H. Ward.) Some examples of foundation movements due to causes other than structural
loads. Proc. Second Znt. Conf. Soil Mech. Fdn Engng, Rotterdam 2, 162-167.
1951. The influence of pore water on soil behaviour. Chemy Znd. 43, 892-898.
,195l. Some foundation problems in Great Britain. Proc. Building Res. Cong., London 1, 157-164.
1951. (With N. Davey.) Review of civil engineering research at the BRS. Part 2: soil mechanics. Civ.
Engng and Pub. Wks Rev. 46, 34-36.
1952. (With E. E. Jones and A. E. J. Pettet.) Dewatering of sewage sludge by electro-osmosis. Water and
sanitary Engineer 3, 246250.
1953. (With W. H. Ward.) Measurement of loads and strains in earth supporting structures. Proc. Third
Znt. Conf. Soil Mech. Fdn Engng, Zurich 2, 162-166.
1953. (With A. Marsland.) Soil mechanics studies of failures in the sea defence banks of Essex and Kent.
Proc. Conf on North Sea Floods of 1953, 58-73. London: Institution of Civil Engineers.
1955. The measurement of pore water pressure and its application to some engineering soil problems. RZLEM
Symp. on Observations of Structures (Lisbon) 2, 298-314.
1955. (With R. E. Gibson.) Settlement studies on structures in England. Conf on Correlation between
Calculated and Observed Stresses and Displacement in Structures, 295-317. London: Institution of Civil
Engineers
1960. Water movements affecting foundations. Proc. Third Austral. NZ Engng, Conf Soil Mech., 181-186.
1962. Second Rankine Lecture. Field measurement in soil mechanics. Geotechnique 12, 77-104.
1968. Field measurement for design purposes and for monitoring structural performance. Proc. Fourth
Conf Austral. Road Res. Board 4, 1922-1942.
1969. (With A. W. Skempton and A. L. Little, editors.) A century of soil mechanics. London: Institution
of Civil Engineers.
1971. Opening address. Proc. Symp. Interaction of Structure and Foundation, pp. 5-6. Birmingham:
Midlands Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering Society.
1974. Closing address. Symp. on Field Instrumentation in Geotechnical Engng, pp. 708-710. London: Butter-
worth.
1975. The early history of soil mechanics at the Building Research Station. Geotechnique 25, 629-634.

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 270 OBITUARY

The following progress reports, written by Dr Cooling, appear anonymously in Reports of the Road Research
Board and the Building Research Board. These reports are published by HMSO, London, and are as follows:
Soil physics RRB, March 1935, pp. 23-36.
Soil physics BRB, Dec. 1935, pp. 113-l 16.
Soil physics RRB, March 1936, pp. 17-25.
Soil mechanics BRB, Dec. 1936, pp. 137-141.
Soil mechanics RRB. March 1937. UP. 6-13.
Soil mechanics BRB; Dec. 1937; pp. 94-105.
Soil mechanics BRB, Dec. 1938, pp. 106110.
Soil mechanics BRB, Dec. 1939, pp. 33-36.
and in BRB Reports to 1959.

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