Angus Buchanan obituary
Engineers shape economies, landscapes and how people work and live in them. Yet in the past their achievements were little celebrated. Angus Buchanan, who has died aged 90, did much to increase awareness of their endeavours and breakthroughs.
The appearance of his book Industrial Archaeology in Britain as a Pelican Original in 1972 marked a significant step forward for an emerging discipline. It supplied the crucial link between the development of industrial archaeology at regional and national levels in Britain, leading to the conservation, restoration and reuse of buildings, sites and engineering that might otherwise have been lost.
Buchanan’s involvement with the Council for British Archaeology’s National Record of Industrial Monuments from 1965 onwards and his founding, with Neil Cossons and others, of the pioneering Bristol Industrial Archaeology Society (BIAS) in 1967 led six years later to the formation of a national organisation, the Association for Industrial Archaeology (AIA).
The culmination of Buchanan’s research came with Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (2002). In building the Great Western Railway and important bridges, tunnels and dockyards, the great Victorian engineer changed the face of the British landscape. Innovations at sea included the SS Great Britain, the first screw-driven iron transatlantic steamship, and his designs revolutionised modern engineering.
The biography provided the first fully documented and objective account, placing Brunel’s significance in a historical context. The desire to avoid concentrating on familiar incidents and the legends surrounding them led Buchanan to a thematic approach rather than a chronology, covering Brunel’s overseas projects and professional practices, and the politics and society within which he functioned, as well as familiar subjects, among them his other major ship, the SS Great Eastern.
The BIAS had a major influence on the preservation of Bristol’s city docks, thwarting traffic planners who wished to build a major road complex across them. In 1970 the Great Britain was returned from the Falklands to the dry dock where it had been built in 1843, and it is now a popular tourist attraction; nearby is another of Brunel’s masterpieces, the Clifton suspension bridge.
Born in Sheffield, Angus was the son of Robert, who ran a small business, and Bertha (nee Davis), a schoolteacher and later a Labour councillor. From High Storrs grammar school he went on to national service in Singapore (1948-50), a history degree at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (1953) and the start of research on trade union history.
In 1955 he married Brenda Wade, whom he had met on a school hike; she went on to become a scholar in the same field with a particular interest in the manufacture of gunpowder. The following year, after he had completed his national service, they moved to Stepney, in the East End of London. There he worked as an adult education officer, became involved in the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and completed his PhD (1957).
In 1960 he went to Bristol College of Science & Technology as an assistant lecturer, continuing his WEA work with a course on social and economic history at the Bristol Folk House. Cossons, then the curator of technology at Bristol Museum, joined the group, and out of it came the BIAS, whose many younger members contributed to the conviviality of on-site visits.
The term industrial archaeology had been coined in 1955 by Michael Rix of Birmingham University in calling for greater study and preservation of 18thand 19th-century sites and relics of the British industrial revolution. In 1966, Bristol College of Science & Technology became Bath University of Technology (from 1971 Bath University), and Buchanan
launched a series of conferences on the subject that soon had an international following.
He subsequently established the Centre for the Study of the History of Technology to attract postgraduate researchers, with publications and seminars following throughout the 1980s and 90s. The conferences led to the founding in 1973 of both the AIA and the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (Ticcih); in 1968 Buchanan had already helped found an organisation intent on removing the iron curtain as an obstacle, the International Committee for the History of Technology (Icohtec).
In 1969 Cossons and Buchanan contributed a volume on the Bristol region to a series on industrial archaeology. Buchanan published a pamphlet on The Industrial Archaeology of Bath, and Industrial Archaeology in Britain quickly became the seminal introduction to the subject.
Over the next four decades Buchanan published key works and more than 15 articles on Brunel. His research on other engineers focused on their development of the stationary steam engine, whose uses ranged from powering the cotton mills of Lancashire such as the Queen St Mill at Burnley, to pumping out coal mines and the raising and lowering of London’s Tower Bridge. He and George Watkins, an expert in this field, published extensively on the subject, and the Watkins Collection of thousands of photographs of more than 220 stationary steam engines is now in the care of Historic England. Many are reproduced in Landmark Publishing’s series Stationary Steam Engines of Great Britain.
From 1971 Bath University hosted the staff of the National Industrial Monuments Survey. In 1981, the organisation was transferred to the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments
of England, with its record of monuments and the Watkins Collection going to what is now the Historic England Archive at Swindon.
Buchanan was appointed a royal commissioner, and for the next decade advised on the publication of numerous volumes on England’s industrial heritage. At various times he held visiting lectureships in Australia, the US, Sweden and China, and in 1990 was appointed a professor at Bath and elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
A friendly and accessible lecturer, Buchanan was good company, tolerant of the opinions of others but sceptical of authority. After his retirement as emeritus in 1995 he remained active in scholarship and publication until recent years.
Brenda died in April, and he is survived by their sons, Tom and Andrew, both historians.
•Robert Angus Buchanan, industrial archaeologist, born 5 June 1930; died 17 June 2020