Alan Stephenson
Stephenson, Alan Elmore Raymond, BE FIEAust (1906-1973)
Alan Stephenson was born in Northam on November 4, 1906, the eldest son of schoolteacher, Lorenzo Elmore Stephenson and his wife concert pianist Winifred Eva Stephenson nee Johnston. He was educated at schools in Dongara, Bridgetown, Wagin and York. In 1920 he was dux of the Senior State School at York. His family then moved to Mount Lawley and Alan completed his secondary education at Perth Modern School in 1925.
Alan enrolled in engineering at the University of Western Australia in 1926, completing the five year degree course in 1930. He had worked through all of his university vacations spending three months working for WAGR at the Midland Workshops from November 1927 to February 1928 as an engineering student. Other employment included five months working for surveyor, H Gladstones, at Wagin and a total of twelve months on road construction with Municipal Roads Ltd and the Main Roads Department.
In 1931 Alan was employed as Assistant Branch Engineer WA with Vacuum Oil working on bulk and packaged oil storage, a position he held for six years. In 1933 he won the Institution of Engineers Students and Juniors Prize for the best technical paper with his submission of “Supercharging of Internal Combustion Engines”.
In 1937, Alan joined Cooperative Bulk Handling (CBH) replacing Robert Sticht as Chief Engineer. Alan made important contributions to the bulk handling of grain including inventing a mechanical trimmer for loading bulk grain in ships, a wheat thrower and adapting the Clarke shovel for emptying fixed floor grain rail wagons. The trimmer had an initial capacity of 150 tons an hour but was eventually rated at 1,000 tons an hour.
In the 1936/37 season CBH received 282,338 tons of wheat. By 1953 the quantity of wheat handled increased over four fold to 1,253,983 tons. In 1936 CBH had 102 receival points. By 1950 this had increased to 237. This increase in receival, storage and handling capacity, often in very isolated locations, was a direct result of Alan’s engineering and organisational skills.
On June 12, 1935 he married Patricia Renee Roe Clifton at Cottesloe. They had three daughters and a son.
In March 1938, he drove across the Nullarbor to attend the annual conference of the Institution of Engineers Australia, in Sydney, giving himself two weeks to get there.
During World War II there was limited opportunities to export grain and large horizontal storages were added to ports at Bunbury, Geraldton and Fremantle as well as inland at Bassendean and Picton Junction. Alan designed and built these emergency storages and developed a wheat thrower to enable the efficient movement of grain within them. The thrower had a 200 foot range and could stack grain 50 foot high.
From 1939 to 1947 he was a consulting engineer to the Australian Wheat Board as well as his role as Chief Engineer with CBH. There were defence implications from where grain was stored, how it could be moved quickly and whether it might fall into the hands of the Japanese. Alan was instructed to be one of the last to leave Fremantle in the event of it being captured and to ensure that any stored grain was dumped in Fremantle Harbour.
In 1947, Alan won third prize in the worldwide James F Lincoln Welding Foundation Award for his work on designing and constructing the CBH Leighton Workshops.
In 1948 he was awarded a Gledden Travelling Fellowship with which he spent nine months travelling through Canada, the USA and South America inspecting grain storage and handling facilities.
On July 1, 1954, Alan retired from the position of CBH Chief Engineer and worked as a consultant on a wide range of structural and material handling projects. In 1954 he was engineering consultant on a major grain handling project in South Australia involving bulk storage at Wallaroo, Port Lincoln and Port Pirie.
In 1955 he was consultant for the construction of the Wesfarmers Wool Stores in South Fremantle.
From Alan’s first visit to Argentina in 1948 until 1970, a period spanning 22 years, he made frequent visits, lasting six to nine months at a time, working for the Argentinian Government and private companies as a grain storage and grain handling consultant. It is estimated that in the four years aggregate time spent in Argentina over £300,000 worth of his designs were built or manufactured involving over twenty underground storages, as well as grain elevators and fumigation facilities. He became fluent in Spanish and was a supportive member of the Spanish Society in Perth. Alan also worked in Taiwan and Japan.
Alan was instrumental in solving the engineering problems of transporting and distributing LPG with the introduction of Kleenheat into Western Australia. He designed a store, salesroom and tanker depot at Myaree for LPG as well as the ramps and trailer that would carry the empty cylinders and scales for distribution around Western Australia.
Alan’s strength as a both the CBH Chief Engineer and as a consultant was to innovate and work his way around problems. He specialised in providing low cost horizontal grain storage facilities. He worked with multiple crops including rice (in NSW), barley and wheat as well as gold, nickel ore and iron ore. He also did extensive design and building work in the new town of Karratha.
His clients apart from CBH and Wesfarmers included E G Green (Abattoir at Harvey), Goldsborough Mort, Great Southern Flour Mills, the Wheat Pool of WA, Norseman Gold Mines, Western Mining, Ricegrowers Cooperative Mills, Mountain Quarries, Mills and Wares, Mount Barker Cooperative and the WA Honey Pool. His inventions and manufactured items included a solar hot water system, a washing machine, producer gas plant, fruit processing equipment and fruit handling machinery.
Alan developed a system for simple coordinated jacking of wide span roofs. He telescoped the supports so that they remained vertical and coordinated the jacking using a loudspeaker, constantly checking that the jacking was proceeding in unison. He was able to successfully lift asbestos roofs without distressing the cladding. Lifts included an 8,640 square foot roof at a wool store in North Fremantle in 1957 using 36 ten ton jacks, a 30,000 square foot roof at Wesfarmers South Fremantle wool store and a tobacco airing shed roof in Manjimup.
The Holland Rocks Grain Storage clearly illustrates his economy of construction in using basic trusses to achieve a wide span and floor clear of obstructions.
Alan had a long association with the Institution of Engineers Australia joining as a Junior member in 1931, being made an Associate Member in 1937 and a Fellow in 1968. Between 1956 and 1959 he was Chair of the WA Division of the Panel of Consulting Engineers and in 1961 became Chairman of the WA Division of the Institution of Engineers Australia. He was Chairman of the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia WA Chapter between 1967 and 1969. In 1944, he was the Chairman of the Institution of Automotive and Aeronautical Engineers. He was also a member of the UWA Engineering Faculty Advisory Board being first appointed in 1948. He worked on committees to assist the transition to the new metric system and to introduce new building bye laws. Following the Meckering Earthquake in 1968, he assisted in developing new building standards.
Alan had a passion for music and the arts. He had formal instruction in the piano, no doubt encouraged by his mother who was a concert pianist and who had graduated from the Conservatorium of Music in Melbourne. He played the piano right up until he died. He loved music and opera. He gave a piano performance at the Claremont Cottesloe Rotary club of which he was a member, and to which he gave several talks on Taiwan, Japan, and the Argentine, and one he termed ”spurious thinking”. He was a keen Rotary member and was made an honorary member of the La Paz Rotary Club which he displayed on his office wall. Alan was a member of the Mount Hospital Board.
Alan died on December 14, 1973 and was survived by his wife Patricia and their four children.
References:
Richenda Goldfinch (editor), Legends of the Grain Game, CBH, 2003
Cyril Ayris, A Heritage Ingrained, CBH, 1999
Peter Thompson, Wesfarmers 100, The People’s Story 1914-2014, UWA Publishing, Crawley 2014
A E R Stephenson Private Papers
West Australian, 18.5.1933, p. 4.
West Australian, 11.10.1933, p. 16.
West Australian 15.3.1938, p. 17.
Western Mail, 27.11.1947, p. 78.
West Australian, 10.12.1948, p. 10.
West Australian, 11.5.1949, p. 16.
Port Lincoln Times, 28.5.1953, Supplement
West Australian, 7.9.1954, p. 19.
