Edgar Riley Wilkinson

Cynthia McDowall MBE

08 March 2019, 11:59

I am Edgar Wilkinson's elder daughter.

Any contribution from me would be largely about his home and family life, events and circumstances.

For his professional career, successes and notability you cannot do better than to look up an old edition of Who's Who. The last edition in which he was included was 1972. He died in 1978 at the age of 80.

Some items I do remember: he left school at 15 to go to work to help pay the horrendous doctors bills for his very ill mother. He got a job at the local engineering works near his home in Ashton-on-Ribble, Preston and took evening classes. Later he went to work at an engineering firm in Rugby. He was with Mertz and McLellan, consultant engineers, until 1928 when he was poached to join the Central Electricity Board as their Commercial Manager which position he occupied until 1948. He was Commercial Manager of the British Electricity Authority until 1955 and then he became Deputy Chairman of Balfour Beatty until 1967. By this time he had become a world expert on power generation. I remember he went to Paris to attend the Foreign Ministers' Conference as specialist adviser to Ernest Bevin around 1947. Similarly, many years later, he went as specialist adviser to the World Bank regarding the advisability of lending money to developing countries towards developing their own power plants.