Terence Patrick O'Sullivan

Terence Patrick O'Sullivan
Dr T P O'Sullivan about 1966 at his desk in Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster
Born	(1913-09-25)25 September 1913 Shoreditch, London, England
Died	26 February 1970(1970-02-26) (aged 56) Surrey, England
Education	University of London
Occupation	Civil engineer
Spouse(s)	Eileen Burnell

Terence Patrick O'Sullivan (1913-1970) was a British civil engineer. He specialised initially in steel and reinforced concrete structures. Later he founded a firm of consulting engineers, T. P. O’Sullivan & Partners, which grew to have offices on four continents and made a reputation in the field of infrastructure development, particularly in the developing world.

O'Sullivan was born on 25 September 1913 in Shoreditch, London, to Patrick Joseph O'Sullivan, an Irish Catholic doctor formerly in the British army medical service in India, and his third wife, Emma Agnes Callingham.

Terence O'Sullivan was educated by the Jesuits at St Ignatius' College in Stamford Hill. He was the youngest child but had six sisters, and in the climate of the period was left with burdensome family responsibilities when his father died in 1923.

On leaving school he chose to go into engineering. Though still supporting his widowed mother, he combined studying at the Regent Street Polytechnic between 1929 and 1932, for a degree as an external student of the University of London, with working on the Shenington to Gidea Park railway line in Essex, the last new railway to be built in England before the Channel Tunnel link at the end of the century.

His first job after graduation was with a newly founded consulting engineering firm, L. G. Mouchel and Partners. Mouchel was a French engineer noted for his work in reinforced concrete structures who set up his firm in England during the 1930s. There O’Sullivan came under the influence of an eminent French engineer and associate of Mouchel, Clément Gilbin, and for ever afterwards was an admirer of the creativity of French engineering.

In 1937, since Mouchel's paid only four pounds ten shillings per week and his first child was on the way, he joined the London Power Company and took part in the design of Battersea Power Station. As with many professionals at the time, his career was thrown off course by the Second World War: in 1938 he began a five-year term working for the Air Ministry Works Division on a series of airfield construction projects throughout Great Britain. Next he was involved with the construction of the fourth and final chimney at Battersea, as well as with the design of Deptford Power Station. During this period he returned to university as an external student, all the while doing a demanding full-time job and bringing up a family of three boys. He was awarded a PhD by the University of London for a thesis on reinforced concrete design. This was later published by Pitmans as The Economic Design of Rectangular Reinforced Concrete Sections, a book notable for its clarity and concision of style.