William Beckett (engineer)
Brigadier-General William Thomas Clifford Beckett
railway engineer in India and a British Army
officer.
Beckett was the eldest son of William Henry Beckett, a
Benares between 1881 and 1887, and who served from 1900 as the engineer-in-chief for the construction of the iconic Havelock Bridge, a 2700-metre crossing of the Godavari River in Andhra Pradesh
.
In 1887, Beckett was appointed a district engineer with the
Calcutta Corporation
.
For many years, Beckett was an officer in the
Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, a pioneer battalion which he commanded for the rest of the war, being awarded the Distinguished Service Order
(DSO) in 1918.
In 1919 he was given command of the British Military Railway Mission in
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Siberian War Honours of January 1920.[3] From 1921 to 1923, when he retired, he was British member of the Inter-Allied Technical Board for the Trans-Siberian Railway at Harbin. He was awarded the Chinese Order of Chia Ho and the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun
.
In December 1889 William Beckett married Bessie Drummond Thomason, fourth daughter of Major-General
James Thomason, lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces from 1843 to 1853 and founder of the College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee. Major-General Clifford Thomason Beckett and Captain W. N. T. Beckett
RN were his sons.
Footnotes
- ^ "Sarah Philadelphia Walton b. Apr 1843 Hampton, Middlesex, England d. : Sandison Family History".
- ^ The Bridges over the Orissa Rivers on the East Coast Extension of the Bengal – Nagpur Railway, W. T. C. Beckett, M. Inst. C.E., Paper No. 3250, 1901
- ^ "No. 31732". The London Gazette (Supplement). 13 January 1920. p. 663.
References
- Obituary, The Times, 11 February 1939
- The Bridges over the Orissa Rivers on the East Coast Extension of the Bengal – Nagpur Railway, W. T. C. Beckett, M. Inst. C.E., Paper No. 3250, 1901
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