[BITList] John Alexander Brodie

Sun Nov 27 07:13:40 GMT 2011

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Brodie,  John Alexander  (1858-1934), civil engineer and town planner, was born on 5 June 1858 at Chyknell, near Bridgnorth, Shropshire, the fifth child of James Brodie (b. 1822/3), farm bailiff, and his wife, Elizabeth, nee Freeland (b. 1821/2). By 1861 the family had moved to Woodside Cottage, Kettins, Forfarshire.

In 1875 Brodie was articled as a pupil engineer to George Fosbery Lyster, engineer-in-chief to the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. The Liverpool and Birkenhead docks were then undergoing a massive programme of extension and modernization, and Brodie's four-year involvement gave him a broad grounding in engineering under the supervision of Lyster's large team, including membership of the Liverpool Engineering Students' Society, later the Liverpool Engineering Society. Brodie went on to win Whitworth and Canning scholarships to read mathematics at Owens College, Manchester (1879-81), during which time he lodged in Chorlton upon Medlock, Lancashire. Returning to Liverpool, after a stint on harbour works in Bilbao, Spain, he gained a temporary position in the borough engineer's department before moving into private practice with J. T. Wood in 1882. These steps must have provided both knowledge and gainful contacts, for two years later he became general assistant to Liverpool's city engineer, and in 1898 was appointed city engineer. In this rapid progress he had worked on an astonishing variety of mechanical and civil projects.

By then Brodie had already earned lasting fame for his patent (no. 19,112) for goal nets for football and other games-first submitted in November 1889 and approved on 27 November of the following year. The football goal had initially consisted only of two upright posts, and although by 1882 a crossbar was required, there remained extensive scope for disputes. These were eliminated by Brodie's delightfully simple invention of a 'pocket in which the ball may lodge after passing through the goal' and, soon after, nets 'as under Mr Brodie's patent' were approved by the Football Association. First used in an FA cup final in March 1891 at the Oval, London, nets became compulsory for all league matches from September of that year and all FA cup ties from 1894. On 13 November 1897 at St Andrew's Episcopal Church, Uddingston, Lanarkshire, Brodie married Amelia Freeland (b. 1872), daughter of Hugh Freeland, messenger-at-arms; the couple had two sons and two daughters.

In his new post as city engineer Brodie quickly applied himself to such problems as Liverpool's chronic shortage of acceptable working-class housing. His response was to adapt concrete technology, which he had encountered at the Liverpool docks and at Bilbao, to form a novel construction using large pre-cast concrete panels. This system was so cheap that his 'artisans' dwellings' were budgeted to yield a surplus, after interest costs, from a rent of 4s. per week. During his time with J. T. Wood, Brodie had worked on developing what would now be called combined heat and power waste destructors. These plants used heat from burning refuse to produce steam for generating both electricity and hydraulic power, the latter being used for materials handling, and for crushing clinker, initially for forming street paving slabs. Low grade heat was simultaneously applied to warming an adjoining baths and laundry. It was at one of these destructor stations that the research for Brodie's pre-cast concrete panels was carried out, using furnace clinker for aggregate. His contribution to the development of waste destructors was acknowledged by H. Percy Boulnois, his predecessor as city engineer, in a paper given to the Liverpool Engineering Society in 1892.

These achievements aside, Brodie's great vision for Liverpool lay in his 'circumferential boulevard' which was to extend round the outside of the city with carriageways, pavements, and electric tram tracks. This required a road of initially up to 120 and later 160 feet-enormous widths for the period. Brodie's scheme was supplemented by improved radial roads and tramways, enabling people to move out to the suburbs more easily, and thus helping to solve the housing problem in the inner city. In the process Brodie deliberately invented 'ribbon development' by building so far as possible on agricultural land which he could obtain extremely cheaply or even gratis. Brodie's circumferential boulevard featured in the first issue of the Town Planning Review, the journal of the Liverpool School of Civic Design, of which Brodie was a founder member and an honorary lecturer. Construction of Brodie's Queen's Drive-an orbital ring road connecting Walton in the north and Mossley Hill to the south-began in 1904 with accompanying housing, much of it overseen by the city architect, Lancelot Keay, from the 1920s.

Brodie's road-building schemes also opened up new opportunities for private as well as public forms of transport. With Henry Hele-Shaw, professor of engineering at the city's university college, Brodie was active in the Liverpool Self-Propelled Traffic Association which organized the city's famous trials of commercial motor vehicles between 1898 and 1901. He was also instrumental in the corporation's purchase of a Leyland steam wagon in 1899 and foresaw the future growth and importance of the motor lorry. Brodie's broader vision beyond the city was for a new highway to extend from Liverpool to Manchester (and preferably on to Leeds) in one direction and across the Mersey and the Dee to north Wales in the other. Work on the east Lancashire road (A580)-one of the country's first purpose-built trunk roads, connecting Liverpool and Manchester-began in 1929 and took five years to complete, while the (old) Mersey, or Queensway, Tunnel, was opened in July 1934. Other parts of the project remain unexecuted.

In 1911 came the first references to one of the twentieth century's greatest town planning exercises, New Delhi. Informal soundings were made to find suitable experts for a planning committee, and while Edwin Lutyens remains the person most commonly associated with the project, John Brodie was invited and had joined the advisory group well before him. Brodie's involvement was entirely merited as the New Delhi scheme was the first occasion that a modern capital city, with its complex service infrastructure, had been planned from nothing. It was a job in which, as drainage and water supply problems in other Indian cities had shown, the engineering had to come first. Indeed Brodie was now such a respected figure that he was asked for his opinion on fellow committee members; this reputedly led to the exclusion of Stanley Adshead, the recently appointed head of civic design at Liverpool University, on the grounds that he was too academic.

Brodie was an imposing and sociable figure who made a habit of leading the organizations he joined, becoming president of the Liverpool Engineering Society (in 1898 and 1923), the Royal Sanitary Institute, and the Institution of Municipal and County Engineers (1907). A member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, in 1920 he became the first 'municipal' to be elected president of the senior institution, of civil engineers.

Still keen to face the big challenges, in 1926 Brodie resigned as city engineer in order to join in partnership with Sir Basil Mott to work on the construction of the Mersey Tunnel, which on its completion in 1934 became the world's longest and largest subaqueous road tunnel. Brodie lived to see it completed, but only by four months: on 16 November 1934 he suffered a coronary thrombosis and died at his miniature country estate, Aigburth Hall, Liverpool. His funeral, on 19 November, took place at Liverpool Cathedral, and was conducted by the dean in the presence of the lord mayor. His body was afterwards cremated at Anfield crematorium. His contribution to the city's civic design is commemorated by the naming of the appropriately wide Brodie Avenue in the south of the city and, from 2000, by an English Heritage plaque at his former residence, 28 Ullet Road, Liverpool.

Adrian Jarvis 

Sources  The Times (17 Nov 1934) + PICE, 140 (1934-5), 787-9 + Institution of Mechanical Engineers: Proceedings, 128 (1934), 471-2 + Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury (20 Nov 1934) + J. A. Brodie, 'The development of Liverpool and its circumferential boulevard', Town Planning Review, 1 (1910-11), 100-110 + J. A. Brodie, 'Engineering development in Liverpool', Merseyside, ed. A. Holt (1923) + J. A. Brodie, 'Presidential address', PICE, 211 (1920-21), 6-27 + J. A. Brodie, 'Presidential address', The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health, 45 (1924), 117-24 + candidate circulars for election as an associate member and member of the ICE, Institution of Civil Engineering, London + E. W. Hope, Handbook for the Conference of the Institute of Public Health (1903) + R. Moore, 'An early system of large panel building', RIBA Journal (Sept 1960), 383-6 + R. Physick, Played in Liverpool: charting the heritage of a city at play (2007) + Lancashire, Pevsner + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Likenesses  J. A. Berrie, oils, Inst. CE [see illus.] · photograph, Edward Chambre Hardman Archive, Liverpool · photographs, Liverpool Record Office, 352/ENG · portrait, repro. in www.fa-cupfinals.co.uk/1892.html
Wealth at death  £14,165: probate, 28 Dec 1934, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

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