May 2012


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The column that supported Civil Engineering

Desmond Imbert

By Professor Bridget Brereton

When I.D.C. (Desmond) Imbert died in 2010, Gyan Shrivastava, head of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, described him as ‘the beams and columns that support the Department, physically and intellectually’. No surprise, then, that the Civil Engineering Building—the Faculty’s Block 2—was named after him in a ceremony in November 2011.

Imbert was the quintessential Caribbean man. Born in St Lucia, as a child he lived in Dominica and Montserrat. Before he went to Ireland to study, he lived in both Tobago (where his father was a magistrate) and Trinidad (where he taught at Fatima College for a year). As an engineer, he worked in Antigua and in Barbados, where he was Director of Public Works. Of course, he lived and worked in Trinidad for much of his adult life; and he often visited Jamaica, where he was involved in the transformation of CAST to today’s UTech (University of Technology).

Though Imbert loved literature and the classics, which he studied at his secondary school in Montserrat, he opted for engineering, gaining his BSc and MSc in civil engineering from University College, Dublin, and his PhD from Trinity College, also in Dublin. He joined the new Faculty of Engineering at St Augustine in 1964, one of that small group of West Indian pioneers who built it up after the original, mainly British academics, gradually left in the 1960s—men like Ken Julien, G. M. Richards, George Sammy, Harry Phelps and others.

In some ways Civil Engineering was the core department of the Faculty, and Imbert built up its reputation and its staff, serving as its Head in the 1970s. He was appointed Professor of Construction Engineering & Management in 1976. But it was as a three-term Dean of the Faculty (1979-88) that he became one of the best known ‘Big Men on Campus’ (notwithstanding his small physical stature). He was a passionate advocate of his Faculty and an inspiring leader.

It fell to him to manage the massive expansion of Engineering—new buildings, new staff, rapidly increasing student numbers, new programmes—which took place during his deanship, funded by oil boom money—even though the oil boom was over by about 1983. Those of us from the less favoured Faculties looked on with awe and envy as the splendid buildings went up, and we heard rumours of an elegantly furnished Board Room which none outside the Faculty could penetrate, except when it was used for a luncheon for Elizabeth II when she visited the campus in 1985. Imbert was an assertive and robust leader of his Faculty at a time of expansion and optimism.

Many have testified that he was also an inspiring teacher and an active graduate supervisor, supervising more successful PhD candidates than any other academic in the Faculty; two of them succeeded him as Professors of Construction Engineering & Management (Winston Suite and T.M. Lewis). With an international reputation in concrete technology, and more generally in construction engineering, Imbert enjoyed a very active professional life off-campus, serving on many national, regional and international committees, boards and associations. This recognition brought him many honours and awards, including a Chaconia Medal, and the Career of Excellence Award from the Association of Professional Engineers of Trinidad & Tobago (APETT), of which he was a past President.

Imbert retired as a Professor Emeritus in 1996, but he continued to teach and to mentor, coming to campus nearly every day until his health began to fail. A man who hardly ever wore a suit and was often to be seen on and off campus in short pants and sandals, who drove small, beat-up cars, Imbert was unquestionably a ‘character’, not to say an eccentric. Genial, sociable, at times acerbic and irascible; a great raconteur (posh speak for ole talker) and compulsive conversationalist—Desmond Imbert will long be recalled, as a founding father of the Faculty of Engineering and as a fascinating human being.

Bridget Brereton is Emerita Professor of History and author of the 2010 “From Imperial College to The University of the West Indies.”