Ian Mackintosh obituary
My father, Ian Mackintosh, who has died aged 97, enjoyed a distinguished career as a civil engineer for more than three decades before reinventing himself as a secondary school maths teacher in later life.
As a civil engineer, Ian worked for Halcrow, Taylor Woodrow and Balfour Beatty on projects as varied as Dungeness A nuclear power station, the Mangla dam in Pakistan, Kainji dam, Nigeria, and deep station excavation and tunnelling for the London Underground Jubilee line at Bond Street. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals Ian, who had an expertise in dams, was invited to speak at the 1964 International Congress on Large Dams in Edinburgh.
Born in Anstruther, Fife, Ian was the son of James, a GP, and Emma (nee Ellis), a Salvation Army officer. James was killed in a cycling accident when Ian was three months old, and Emma moved to Bath with Ian and his elder brother, Jim, to take up a post as warden of a Salvation Army retirement home.
Ian won a scholarship to Epsom College in Surrey (1938-44), where he experienced German V1 and V2 rockets flying in the vicinity of the school. He then studied mechanical sciences at St John’s College, Cambridge, rapidly gaining prominence as a rugby referee due to the absence at war of the lecturers who usually took this role. In 1946 Ian refereed the second XV varsity match (Cambridge LX Club v Oxford Greyhounds) while still an undergraduate. He was also co-founder of the Cambridge University and District Referees Society, which still administers the refereeing of college, university and club rugby in Cambridgeshire.
After national service at Sandhurst, where he was called upon to be a maths instructor for officer cadets, Ian joined Halcrow as a civil engineer in 1950. His last role in that sector was as an economic analysis consultant at Balfour Beatty, from which he took early retirement in 1981, and then reinvented himself as a maths teacher. Given the contemporaneous shortage of teachers of that subject, combined with his previous experience at Sandhurst, Ian was not required to do extra training. He taught at Cardinal Newman school in Acton (1981-84) followed by Sacred Heart school in Hammersmith, where he was on staff until his official retirement in 1991, then continued to act as a supply teacher until he turned 70 in 1996.
Outside work Ian was a choral singer for more than 70 years, including a stint in the Bach choir. He was a stalwart member of the London Society of Rugby Referees, where a fellow member of his “Golden Oldies” group was Denis Thatcher. In retirement he self-published five books featuring his abridgements of travel and theological writings.
In 1962 Ian met Hilary Hunt, a primary school teacher, through the English Speaking Union club in London, and they married later that year. After two years based at the Kainji dam, central Nigeria, where I was born, the family settled in Hammersmith, west London.
Hilary died in 2022. Ian is survived by his children, Catherine and me, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.