Benmore Engineer Lost To Australia

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29722, 16 January 1962, Page 12

Benmore Engineer Lost To Australia

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, Jan, 15. Mr J. W. Ridley, the Ministry of Works project engineer in charge of construction of the Benmore hydro-electric scheme, has resigned to take up a position in Australia. The Minister of Works (Mr Goosman) confirmed this in Wellington this evening, and added: "This will be a big

loss to New Zealand. Mr Ridley is an excellent engineer and has done a firstclass job at Benmore. We will be very sorry to see him go."

It has been suggested that Mr Ridley has been engaged to work on the Snowy river hydro-electric and irrigation schemes, at a salary of more than £6500 a year, but this could not be confirmed yesterday. Mr Ridley refused to comment.

Mr Ridley, who is 42, had a brilliant academic career. He was educated at Timaru Boys’ High School, where he was dux and then took B.E. (civil) and B.Sc. degrees at Canterbury University College. He served in the Army in New Zealand for two years and then spent nearly two years and a half in the Pacific and Italy, holding the rank of lieutenant at the end of the war. In 1946 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and completed his M.A. at Oxford, with honours in engineering science. He returned to New Zealand in 1948, after working briefly on hydro-electric schemes in the north of Scotland and in North America. On his return he joined the Ministry of Works. He worked on the investigation for hydro-electric works for a time and then on design, and at the time of his appointment to Benmore in 1958 was acting assistant chief designing engineer (hydro) in the head office. Mr Ridley received the highest honour awarded annually by the New Zealand Institution of Engineers —the Fulton Gold Medal—in 1954 for a paper on seepage and uplift pressures in hydraulic structures. In the same year be was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship to spend some time in the United States studying

hydro-electric engineering, particularly the design and construction o* earth dams. Mr Ridley is a son of the late Mr G. S. Ridley, formerly chief agricultural inspector of the Canterbury Education Board, and of Mrs Ridley, of Shirley.