Obituary – Dr W Les Mercer FREng CEng FIMMM
Les was always a great champion of engineering, encouraging young people to take up engineering careers and served as the last President of The Institute of Metals in 1990-1992
Dr W Les Mercer FREng CEng FIMMM
1932–2021
Les Mercer was a metallurgist and engineer. Les followed a career in applied industrial engineering R&D, initially in civil nuclear power and then in the gas industry. He was Director of the British Gas Engineering Research Station from 1978–88 and held the post of Director, Research Resources within British Gas plc when he retired in November 1993. Les served as the last President of The Institute of Metals, 1990-92, immediately before it became, by amalgamation, The Institute of Materials, and as President of the Institution of Gas Engineers, 1984/85. He was elected a Fellow of The Fellowship of Engineering in 1985, which later became The Royal Academy of Engineering.
Joining General Electric in 1955, he worked on the nascent civil nuclear engineering program in Dr Monty Finniston’s Metallurgy Division at Harwell. He was the metallurgist working on the zirconium-magnesium alloy casings used to house the uranium fuel in the nuclear reactor and was awarded patents for the casings used in the first generation of Magnox reactors. He was part of the team that built the first civil nuclear power station in the world at Calderhall.
In 1959, he was sent to Australia, as a British nuclear metals expert, to test different reactor materials at the Atomic Energy Commission’s HIFAR reactor at Lucas Heights. He went onto join British Gas; natural gas having just started to flow from the North Sea off the coast of Norfolk. In 1965, he joined the British Gas research station at Killingworth in the North East under John van der Post, as one of several founder (engineering and metallurgical) members of a new team to research, build and test gas production and high pressure gas transmission pipelines, becoming Director in 1978. They constructed the PIG (Pipeline Inspection Gauge) which was exported around the world. Its crowning glory came in 1989 when the Online Inspection Management team received national recognition through the award of the McRobert Gold Medal for Innovation in Engineering.
Les was always a great champion of engineering, encouraging young people to take up engineering careers. He was President of the NE Branch of the Association of Science Education, working with the Engineering Department of Birmingham University and a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) from 1995.
Around this time, he became President of Institute of Gas Engineers and President of the Institute of Metals. Since his retirement from full time employment in Nov 1993, Les served on the Engineering Council (later the ETB) on a voluntary basis.
He met his wife Barbara in 1952 and they married in August 1954. He left two sons, myself and Geoff, and two grandsons, Ben and Josh.
Andrew Mercer
