Sir Hubert Shirley-Smith, CBE, BSc, MICE was a British civil engineer. Shirley-Smith is perhaps most famous for helping to design the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta for the Indian Public Works Department in 1943.
Sir Hubert Shirley-Smith, a British civil engineer who designed steel bridges in many parts of the world and was a noted writer on engineering topics. Shirley-Smith is perhaps most famous for helping to design the Howrah Bridge in Calcutta for the Indian Public Works Department in 1943. One year after he graduated from the City and Guilds of London Institute (1922), Shirley-Smith joined the engineering firm of Sir Douglas Fox and Partners (later Freeman, Fox, and Partners), where he was involved in the design of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. During the 1930s he worked on the design of bridges in northern England, Rhodesia, and India, and during World War II he set up the shipyard where tank-landing craft were constructed for the Normandy Invasion. In 1951 he joined the board of the U.K.-based Cleveland Bridge Co. and traveled to sites in Africa, Asia, and Australasia. Shirley-Smith worked on the Rovaniem Bridge in Finland, did structural designs for the London Shell Centre, and worked on the Forth Road Bridge, which spans the Firth of Forth in Scotland.
He also served in the Engineer and Railway Staff Corps, an unpaid, volunteer Territorial Army unit which provides engineering expertise to the British Army and was gazetted as a Major of that corps In 1962 he worked as site agent for the ADC bridge company during construction of the Forth Road Bridge.
He served as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers from November 1967 to November 1968, during the 150th anniversary of that institution, and was made a Fellow of Imperial College, London in 1966 Shirley-Smith was a consulting engineer and worked for W.V. Zinn & Associates of London from 1969 to 1978. During 1968 Shirley-Smith was president of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering and helped to arrange the first joint-conferences of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Shirley-Smith was honoured with an appointment as a Knight Bachelor on 1 January 1969 in the Queen’s New Year Honours, being knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 7 March 1969. He was appointed a first class engineer member of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers in 1969. In 1953 he published The World’s Great Bridges. Shirley-Smith also contributed to the article on bridges in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.