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Geotechnical News September 2011
Carl Benson Crawford 1923-2010
Carl was born in Dauphin, Man. on
Oct. 2, 1923. He died in Vancouver on
Aug. 28, 2010, surrounded by his wife,
Adah, and their four children, Nora,
Henry, Meg and Blair. Carl and Adah
were married for nearly 62 years and
during that period shared the joys of
having children and of travel to many
countries, both for pleasure and for
Carl’s work.
Carl served as a navigator in the
Second World War. After the war, Carl
attended Queen’s University in Kings-
ton graduating in 1949 with a degree
in civil engineering, followed by post-
graduate degrees from Northwestern
University in Illinois and Imperial Col-
lege in London.
While at Queen’s, Carl attended
a lecture by R.F. Legget and was so
impressed, he joined the National Re-
search Council in Ottawa working for
Legget in the Soil Mechanics Section
of the Division of Building Research.
This launched Carl’s illustrious career
in geotechnical engineering.
Carl is perhaps best known for his
pioneering work on Leda clay, a highly
sensitive clay prevalent in the Ottawa
area and the cause of numerous land-
slides and major settlement problems.
Carl developed testing apparatus and
measurement techniques to measure
the behaviour and properties of Leda
clay and published several papers on
this work. He also worked closely with
Laurits Bjerrum and other leading re-
searchers at the Norwegian Geotech-
nical Institute who were studying the
sensitive Scandinavian clays at the
same time.
Carl became Director of the Divi-
sion of Building Research in 1974, a
position he held until his retirement
in 1985. During this period, he was
Chairman of the National Research
Council’s Associate Committee on Soil
Mechanics which had considerable in-
fluence on geotechnical research and
practice in Canada.
After his retirement, Carl continued
his research interests spending time
at Cambridge University in England,
the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute
in Oslo, the Centre for Cold Oceans
Research in St. John’s, NL, and at the
University of British Columbia. Dur-
ing this period, Carl documented sev-
eral valuable case histories where long
term settlement records could be com-
pared with predicted settlements.
Carl received many honours over
the course of his career, including the
6
th
R.F. Legget Award from the Cana-
dian Geotechnical Society in 1975; the
Julian C. Smith Medal from the Engi-
neering Institute of Canada in 1989;
and the 1996 R.M. Quigley Award for
Carl and his co-authors for the best pa-
per of the year in the Canadian Geo-
technical Journal. Carl was elected as
a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of
Canada (FEIC) in 1983 and, in 1985,
he was invited by the Canadian Geo-
technical Society to undertake a two
week Cross Canada Lecture Tour. In
1984, he received an honorary doctor-
ate of law from Concordia University
in Montreal.
In addition to his family, one of
Carl’s true pleasures was the family
cottage that he had designed and built
at Sharbot Lake, located about two
hours southwest of Ottawa. After Carl
had retired, and he and Adah moved to
Vancouver, every summer they would
make the long drive back to the cot-
tage, stopping to visit friends and fam-
ily along the way. Over the years they
made 40 of these trips.
Carl Crawford made a significant
impact in the field of geotechnical en-
gineering research, and particularly
our knowledge of the properties and
behaviour of sensitive clays. His work
is an enduring contribution to interna-
tional geotechnical practice.
