John Clarke Hawkshaw

Biography

Hawkshaw was born in Manchester, England in 1841 and was the son of civil engineer Sir John Hawkshaw and Lady Ann Hawkshaw. He attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was president of the University Boat Club and rowed in the annual Boat Race against Oxford University in 1863 and 1864. On 9 December 1862 John Clarke Hawkshaw was commissioned as an ensign in the Third Cambridgeshire Rifle Volunteer Corps a Volunteer Force unit stationed at Cambridge University. He resigned his commission as ensign in the unit on 1 December 1863. Hawkshaw graduated with a Master of Arts degree and lived at Liphook in Hampshire. By 1876 Hawkshaw was a partner in his father's civil engineering firm.

In March 1876 Hawkshaw was elected a member of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers, an institution that he would become president of in 1889. He served as the 39th president of the Institution of Civil Engineers from November 1902 to November 1903. In holding that office he followed in the footsteps of his father who had been the 11th president from December 1861 to December 1863. The largest civil engineering project undertaken by the firm which was initiated by John Clarke Hawkshaw was the Puerto Madero docks in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1887–98). On 4 October 1884 Hawkshaw was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel in the Engineer and Railway Staff Corps, an unpaid Royal Engineers unit which provides technical expertise to the British Army. He was promoted to honorary Colonel and the Commandant of that corps on 6 February 1903, reverting to Lieutenant-Colonel on 1 April 1908. In 1903 he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission to decide the British submission to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Hawkshaw also served as a Justice of the Peace. He was married to Cecily Mary Wedgwood the daughter of Francis Wedgwood of the famous pottery firm. Hawkshaw died on 12 February 1921, Cecily had died in 1917.