the times | Saturday April 30 2022 81
Readers’ Lives
Opera-loving chief executive who sailed to Stockholm and back
work as director of Nato’s petroleum
planning committee.
It may have appeared to be a
straightforward career progression for
the Oxford-educated former
Coldstream Guard but his success did
not spring from a robust start. Colinwas born in 1936 in Burma (now
Myanmar), where his father, George,
was a district commissioner with the
Indian civil service. His mother was
Daphne (née Bisset) and he had a
younger sister, Diana. After the
Japanese invasion of 1941, the family
left for Calcutta so quickly that they
left the Christmas presents behind.
Until the age of eight, when Colin
boarded at Claremont, a prep school
in East Sussex, he and his sister
divided their time between their
parents, who had divorced and were
based respectively in Poona and
Simla, India.
Both parents remarried and had
two children each, and Daphne’s
second husband, a military attaché,
had posts in Austria and Hungary.
George moved between Jamaica and
Britain and in the holidays paid an
aunt to care for Colin and Diana.
Colin went to Wellington College in
Berkshire, where he was head ofschool, and on to Trinity College,
Oxford, to read PPE. For his National
Service he served two years with the
3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards in
Krefeld, Germany.
In 1965, when he was working for
BP North America in New York, he
met Suzy Scarff, an editor at Random
House. They had been asked to the
same party and Suzy needed help
getting an armchair out of the car.
Despite a back injury from skiing,
Colin duly obliged and they were
engaged two months later and
married the same year. They raised
three children: Vanessa, a company
director; Alex, an entrepreneur in
New Zealand; and Ben, an IT director
in the Cayman Islands. Suzy
predeceased Colin in 2018.
After the disruption of his own
upbringing Colin set store by family
life. He never brought a briefcase
home and taught his children to ski
and to sail, including in Denmark andon the Great Lakes. With Suzy he
sailed to Stockholm through the Göta
Canal and back again.
Based latterly in Standlake,
Oxfordshire, he was on the board of
the Welsh National Opera and when
the company came to Oxford, he and
Suzy hosted friends for the week of
performances. For his 80th birthday
his family organised an opera singer
to perform at home.
Colin was chairman of Opportunity
International, a microfinancing
organisation, and travelled on its
behalf with Suzy to India, Russia
and Nicaragua.
He was known as a warm,
charming figure, and around him
laughter and intelligent conversation
were the norm. Where he disagreed,
it would be with a smile and a first-
rate explanation. A “born leader” was
how his brother-in-law described him,
“whether in the boardroom, on the
poop deck or opening the batting”.When National Power was formed
after the privatisation of electricity in
1990, Colin Webster — a personable,
astute and strategic figure — stepped
into the role of commercial director.
With 30 years’ experience at BP
behind him, he helped to smooth the
transition into the private sector and
implement a fairer pricing system. By
1996 he was chief executive.
Almost all that Colin had learnt in
the energy business had been with
BP, where he started as a graduate
trainee in 1959. Over the 1970s and
1980s he rose to be managing director
of BP Denmark in Copenhagen and
of BP Gas International and he was
latterly executive vice-president of BP
America in Cleveland, Ohio,
responsible for the copper, mining
and materials businesses. In 1982
he was appointed OBE for his
Colin Webster, 85
Colin Webster, with his family in 1985,
taught his children how to ski and sailcontroversial process at the time” as a
colleague described it. Nearly 60
years on, the pipelines remain in
existence and explosion-free as a
tribute to the work of the team.
In 1967 Les joined the modernist-
looking engineering research station
in Killingworth, Newcastle, now a
grade II listed building, to research,
build and test high-pressure gas
transmission pipelines, becoming
director in 1978.
By 1984 he was president of the
Institution of Gas Engineers. A year
later he was made a fellow of the
Royal Academy of Engineering and in
1992 Les became president of the
Institute of Metals, responsible for
changing its name to the Institute of
Materials to reflect the increasing use
of plastic in gas pipelines.
Born in 1932 in Wigan, Les spent
his childhood showing early
inclinations for engineering.
Supported by his father, Edward, who
had risen from a junior role in a coal
distribution company to become its
director, and his mother, Louisa,
known as Lulu, Les engrossed himself
in making Meccano models and balsa
wood aircraft and building
motorbikes from pieces brought home
in a sack.
In his early teens he constructed a
TV receiver that picked up pictures
from the inaugural BBC broadcasts
from Alexandra Palace and at 17
was the proud owner of a BSA Gold
Star motorbike to ride over the
Lancashire Fells.
After Wigan Grammar School Les
read chemistry at Leeds University
and completed his PhD in two years
rather than the usual three. In Leeds
he met Barbara Platt, who was at
teacher training college, and they
married in 1954. They raised two
sons: Andrew, a telecommunications
software engineer for British Telecom,
and Geoffrey, a retired fireman.
Barbara predeceased him in 2016.
Les had time for everyone and
kept an eye on promoting those who
he thought deserved to go further.
Proud of his roots — he was a
“true Lancastrian” — he exhibited
the characteristics that the region
prides itself on: honesty, calmness,
fairness, a firm opinion and an ability
to work hard.second time before the age of 35, join
a scientific field in its infancy. Natural
gas had recently been discovered off
the coast of Norfolk and he was
tasked with producing the 36in-wide
high-pressure pipelines to deliver the
gas around the country.
A specialist in fracture mechanics
and non-destructive testing, he led
the team in exploring how to weld the
pipes made from high-tensile steel
that would not crack and cause gas
explosions, a “critical and somewhatLes Mercer was part of the team who
built the first nuclear power station to
produce electricity for domestic use at
Calder Hall, Cumbria. Left, with his
son Andrew in Aberdovey in 1990nuclear powered, and why Japanese
steel knives were not sharp.
In 1965 Les left the GEC to work
for British Gas in a career that would
span the next 28 years and, for theOne Sunday evening in the late 1950s
the General Electric Company
metallurgist and engineer Les Mercer
received a call from the office asking
him to get from his home in Didcot,
Oxfordshire, to Sellafield in Cumbria.
Les calmly replied that he would be
there in the morning, but it was
insisted, not without a degree of
panic, that he pack his bags
immediately — a car would be
arriving in ten minutes.
At Sellafield Les discovered that his
experiment involving rods of uranium
inside their metal casings had
overheated, expanded and were stuck
in the reactor wall. It took him about
30 minutes to wrestle them out
and deactivate them. Little
thought was given to the effects of
radiation poisoning.
In the immediate postwar years the
race for countries to develop atomic
energy was urgent and technology
was advancing at breakneck speed.
Falling behind the US and the Soviet
Union, Britain did not test an atomic
device until 1952, when Operation
Hurricane, a plutonium implosion
device, was detonated on islands off
the northwest coast of Australia.
For Les, who had just completed a
doctorate on the use of radioisotopes
to study diffusion in metallic alloys,
nuclear power was an area to which
he could contribute. In the metallurgy
division of the Atomic Energy
Research Establishment at Harwell,
Oxfordshire, the 24-year-old got to
work on zirconium-magnesium alloy
casings used to house the uranium
Wigan-born
engineer at
forefront of
nuclear power
fuel in nuclear reactors. In October
1956 he was part of the team who
built the world’s first nuclear power
station to produce electricity for
domestic use at Calder Hall, Cumbria.
Les was awarded patents for the
metal casings used in the first
generation of Magnox reactors and
the success of Calder Hall led to the
building of several power stations
around the country as well as in
Japan and Canada.
In 1959 Les was sent by the
company to Australia to test metal
irradiation at its first nuclear reactor
at Lucas Heights in Sydney. It was
Les’s first trip abroad — his
honeymoon had been spent on the
Isle of Man — and he flew in a Bristol
Britannia that landed and refuelled
eight times before reaching Sydney.
The journey,
known as the
kangaroo route,
took almost
50 hours and the
first-class ticket
was the
equivalent of
65 per cent of his
annual salary.
In Sydney the
Australians
greeted Les
excitedly and he
was promptly
interviewed by
the ABC and
headlined the
news that evening. Among the diverse
questions he fielded was whether
nuclear bombs could be used to build
a canal from the north of Australia to
Sydney, whether submarines could beDr Les Mercer, 89
Remembering loved ones
If you would like to commemorate
the life of a relative, friend or
colleague, call 020 7782 5583 to
discuss the content and cost, or
email: [email protected].
thetimes.co.uk/static/terms-and-conditionsAmongthediverse l