George Walkeden
WALKEDEN, George Henry MIMechE (1860-1914)
George Henry Walkeden was born in Wolverhampton in 1860, the son of Thomas W Walkeden and his wife Emmeline Frances Walkeden nee Perkins. He was married in November 1904 at Hendon, England, to Freida Olga Deglow.
Walkeden served a mechanical engineering apprenticeship and studied engineering and chemistry at Mason College in Birmingham, and then worked in coal and iron mines and also in iron and steel works. He travelled to Melbourne in 1890, where he worked in Victorian Railways engineering workshops at Newport and in a variety of rural engineering occupations.
Walkeden had an unsuccessful career as a Hotel Keeper at Toolangi, before he moved to Broken Hill in 1896 to work as a draughtsman to pay back the 400 pounds he owed his creditors. Walkeden joined the Broken Hill Proprietary Company in 1896 and spent a year working on the design of an ore treatment plant and other works. He was then transferred to Port Pirie to supervise construction of the company’s smelting and refining works. In 1899 he moved to Western Australia where he was appointed construction engineer of Great Boulder Proprietary Goldmines Ltd.
At the beginning of 1899 the patented Koneman process devised by the American engineer, Wiliam A. Koneman (q.v.), to treat the mine’s sulpho telluride ore, after eighteen months of construction and testing, failed at the last hurdle and was rejected. Walkenden was hired to do the detailed design of, and to construct, a sulphide plant to replace the Koneman plant. [1] When the plant had been erected Walkeden accepted a position as engineer to the London and Hamburg Gold Recovery Co. which was constructing bromo cyanide or Diehl process plants. [2] The London and Hamburg Co obtained contracts for the construction of treatment plants for three mines which were, Hannan’s Star (plant handed over in June 1900), Lake View Consols (September 1900) and Hannan’s Brownhill (March 1901). All three plants were different as two incorporated items of plant already at the mines. Walkeden, presumably, was responsible for preparing the detailed drawings and for overseeing the construction of the plants. With the three being ordered and built at very similar times, the task could not have been an easy one. However, the plants were finished and operating by 1902 when Walkeden returned to London.
Soon after Walkeden went to gold mines in the Gold Coast and Nigeria on consultancy assignments. On his return he spent nearly two years in London working on experimental metallurgy and designs for gold mines in West Africa and Mexico. In 1907 he returned to Western Australia, where he became the chief engineer and general manager of the London and Hamburg Gold Recovery Company.
He died at Fremantle on May 24, 1914.
References:
Battye 2, pp.346 47;
JCMWA 1908, 1913
- ↑ The new plant was designed by manager Richard Hamilton and was similar to the ‘dry crush and roast’ process which eventually became the standard Kalgoorlie process and which had been first devised by J.T. Marriner of Great Boulder Main Reef.
- ↑ The Diehl process was the alternative process to the ‘dry crush and roast’ for treating the sulpho telluride ore.
