Professor Roy Butterfield, who served the University for 32 years as lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in civil engineering, professor of soil mechanics and head of the department of Civil Engineering, died peacefully on 13 June after a brief illness.
Roy graduated in 1949, aged 20, with a first-class honours degree (BSc) in Engineering from the University of London, followed by a Diploma in Concrete Technology from Imperial College. He then worked outside academia for a period of 11 years, mainly with civil engineering contractors except for two years of national service with the Royal Engineers in Nairobi from 1952-4. Before venturing into engineering, Roy had a promising football career as an apprentice at first division Huddersfield Town and spun a mean leg break in the Yorkshire cricket leagues, ending with a knee injury. Always the curious and practical Yorkshireman, he kept screws and parts in golden syrup tins in his shed, where he made anything from virginals to furniture.
After a year teaching at Bradford College of Advanced Technology (now Bradford University), he joined the University of Southampton in 1962 as a lecturer in civil engineering. Though initially appointed to teach construction management, he took responsibility for the then relatively new discipline of soil mechanics. With colleagues including Richard Harkness, and later Max Barton and Mike Cooper, Roy developed research in this area, laying solid foundations that enabled soil mechanics and the more application-related geotechnical engineering to grow into the area of strength that they are for the University today.
Roy and his colleagues maintained a meaningful and powerful Southampton presence at key international conferences through the 1960s and 70s, as the discipline developed and matured. Roy’s personal contribution to that has been immense, and was recognised by the University through the award of a DSc in 1974.
In 1973, Roy spent a sabbatical year at the National Research Centre (CNR) in Venice, investigating the ongoing subsidence that threatened the city and its lagoon. His work during this period established the first quantitative relationship between subsidence, subsoil properties and groundwater abstraction. This not only helped to establish Roy’s profound and enduring personal bond with Venice, but also provided him with the basis for the development of an innovative and rational framework for the assessment and quantification of soil compressibility.
Roy also pioneered a novel and elegant approach to quantifying the response of shallow foundations to general loading conditions, based on interaction diagrams able to accommodate every possible combination of load components. This highlighted the dependence of the load capacity of the foundation on the load path. Roy later generalized the method to cover the complete load-displacement behaviour of the soil-footing system. The approach forms the basis of the macro-element models, which revolutionized offshore foundation design all over the world.
A further area of note was the invention and development of the boundary element method of analysis, with his PhD student Prasanta Kumar Banerjee.
Roy served the University from his appointment in 1962 through to his retirement in 1994 as lecturer, senior lecturer and reader in civil engineering, and from 1979 as the University’s first Professor of Soil Mechanics. He was Head of the Department of Civil Engineering from 1980-1990, which was a difficult and turbulent time for universities. As Emeritus Professor, Roy retained links with the Department and School of Civil Engineering and the Environment, and most recently the Department of Civil, Maritime and Environmental Engineering – including attendance at the Christmas lunch – up to the time of his death.
Roy’s first paper was published in 1966 and his most recent in 2017 – a record spanning more than half a century. A good proportion of his papers were published in Géotechnique, the first and to many still the best and most rigorous journal in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering. He served as Editor of Géotechnique from 1994-1996. His 2017 paper on the compressibility of natural and reconstituted marine clays was awarded the Telford Premium by the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2018.
Roy was always generous with his time and ideas, and many of the areas he started to develop were taken forward by others with Roy’s enthusiastic support and often the handing on of ingenious apparatus or equipment. Examples include an instrumented test pile to Imperial College, and a large calibration chamber (originally from the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute) to Brazil.
Roy supervised more than 20 PhD students to completion, many of whom went on to become successful professors around the world, and has inspired thousands of undergraduate students. He could be a demanding mentor and teacher – it is rumoured that he once set the problem of the toy woodpecker attached by a spring to a collar, vibrating its way down a wooden pole, as a first-year mechanics examination question. He will be fondly remembered and much missed by friends, colleagues and students alike, for his youthful enthusiasm, eclectic manner, analytical insight and acerbic wit.
He is survived by his wife and muse Jeanne; by his three children Sarah, Andy and Sam for whom he was an unparalleled father – honest, indomitable and furiously creative; as well as many paintings and drawings and the scribblings of his unstoppable mind, which found the world mostly amusing.