Mr Alexander C.E. Sandberg (Civil and Environmental Engineering 1943)

Provided by The Times newspaper

Alec Sandberg transformed Britain’s construction industry by pioneering a method of laboratory testing that examined the quality of materials used to build more than half of Britain’s motorway network. His consultancy went on to check the fabric of infrastructure projects all over the world. Latterly it found stone and mortar for the restoration of some of the UK’s best-known historic buildings and monuments including Windsor Castle and Nelson’s Column.

The beginnings of Sandberg’s world-renowned laboratory testing consultancy lay in the early 1960s when he approached the British Government to propose independent testing of motorway-building materials. He was spurred into action after hearing how newly completed stretches of Britain’s fledgeling motorway network were already falling apart because of poor materials and workmanship.

Sandberg convinced the mandarins in what was then the Ministry of Transport (now Department for Transport) that they should engage an independent contractor to test the quality of the bituminous materials used in the road surfaces, the concrete used for structures such as bridges and the earthworks for the embankments. The arrangement was put in place for the building of the M6 from Lancaster to Carlisle, the M5 from Bristol to Exeter and the M4, with an immediate improvement in quality evident. From then on, the practice of seeking verification, independent of the contractor and designer, became commonplace on government contracts. It changed Britain’s construction industry.

Sandberg was born in London in 1923 into a Swedish rail engineering dynasty that had established itself in the 1860s after his grandfather, Christer Peter, emigrated from Sweden to London. The Sandberg family firm prospered for two generations providing consultancy services all over the world during the great age of railway building. Having been schooled at Charterhouse, Sandberg studied civil engineering from 1940 at the City and Guilds Engineering College in South Kensington that would later become part of Imperial College.

Fully qualified engineers were desperately needed for the war effort, so Sandberg was initially exempted from the call to arms and remained a scholar, although he volunteered by night for Air Raid Protection, fire fighting and ambulance driving. He joined the Royal Engineers in 1943 and was sent to Burma in 1944 where he brought his expertise to bear on reconstruction of its railway after the war.

In 1950 he joined the family firm at a time when its lucrative rail consultancy work had all but stopped. After being appointed as senior partner in 1955, Sandberg turned the firm around by building up the materials-testing side of the business, which would later reap dividends with the Ministry of Transport motorway contracts. These contracts would mark the practice growing to 400-strong, including a team of world-leading experts on particular materials.

Testing of steel box-girder bridges was added to the Sandberg government portfolio after the collapse of the Milford Haven bridge (now Cleddau bridge) while it was under construction in 1970. This resulted in Sandberg overseeing testing of steel box girders on the Severn, Wye, Erskine and Humber bridges. He would later test some of Britain’s best-known bridges for steel corrosion of reinforced or pre-stressed concrete.

But by the 1980s the big government transport contracts dried up. The UK motorway network was largely complete and government procurement policy had developed towards a lowest-price approach which dispensed with such perceived luxuries as testing laboratories. The gentleman’s agreement under which Sandberg would bill the department annually as part of an “open book” agreement was also frowned upon in the new climate.

As fewer big infrastructure projects were being built in Britain the bestBritish engineering consultants were taking their expertise to the fast-developing Middle East and Far East, where big road and rail projects were under way. Sandberg followed suit. The biggest market for his services overseas would be for testing the swaths of structural concrete for suspension bridges, ports and railways in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Bahrain and Dubai.

He went on to work on important projects such as the Tsing Ma suspension bridge in Hong Kong, where he was brought in to resolve a dispute between the designer and the contractor over the quality of the concrete which the administration had been unable to resolve. Neil Sandberg, son of Alec and current managing partner of the Sandberg consultancy, said: “He had a style that would get him out of awkward situations and put everyone at ease.” Sandberg acted as an expert witness in some high-profile fraud cases in countries where use of poor-quality concrete was rife. On one large public housing contract in Hong Kong he proved that the concrete he had been asked to test was not the same as the poorer quality concrete being mixed on site. He demonstrated that the contractor had purchased concrete cubes for the testing. The building was knocked down and the contractor successfully prosecuted.

Such cases would often involve tense and highly charged meetings with clients but Sandberg was renowned for lightening the atmosphere with his wisecracks. On one occasion when a client risibly asked him to prove that 5mm cracks in a building he wanted to sell were merely “hairline”, Sandberg contacted London Zoo and persuaded a keeper to send him some elephant hairs which he attached to a diagram of the cracks to illustrate that this would be the only way his client could ever prove that the cracks were “hairline”.

Back in Britain, Sandberg found a new pipeline of work for his labs by securing contracts to test materials for the commercial property building boom of the mid to late 1980s. Clients included the Canary Wharf developer Olympia & York, which appointed Sandberg to test the stone, steel, concrete, glass and paint being sourced by the 20 contractors building the vast docklands site in East London.

Even towards his retirement Sandberg continued to open up new avenues for his labs and became increasingly involved in the restoration of historic monuments. His massive store of stone and mortar samples — in various degrees of distress — were a vital source for clients, such as English Heritage, which were looking to find as close a match as possible for the materials to be replaced.

Acclaim for his materials matching won him work on the restoration of Windsor Castle after a fire in 1992, and on Nelson’s Column, the statue of Eros in Piccadilly and the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park.

An ebullient man with a prodigious workrate, Sandberg rarely switched off from his passion for engineering — not even when being invested with the OBE by the Prince of Wales in 1998. A ceiling at Buckingham Palace had fallen in six months earlier and as Sandberg stepped forward he looked up to the newly restored ceiling and suggested that the Royal Family might want the job tested for quality.

His wife, Aline, and three sons, survive him.

Alexander Sandberg, OBE, construction engineer, was born July 31, 1923. He died on August 1, 2008, aged 85.