Marjorie Hesketh obituary

Marjorie Hesketh, who has died aged 94, spent her working life keeping the North Sea out of Lincolnshire. As a 21-year-old engineering graduate she walked the breached sea banks at Mablethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea in February 1953, days after the flood that killed 307 people on the east coast of England, and she was still arguing about wave overtopping formulae in her 80s. In between she designed or oversaw more than 20 miles of sea wall, became the first woman to run a British civil engineering consultancy of any size and trained, by her own count, 140 engineers, of whom she was proudest of the 31 who were women.

She was born in Grimsby in 1931, the only child of a trawler skipper and a schoolteacher, and grew up with the sea on three sides. Her father died at sea in 1941 and her mother, determined that she should have a profession, pushed her towards the University of Sheffield, where in 1952 she was one of two women in a civil engineering year of 70. She later said the course had taught her less than the harbour at Grimsby had, but it gave her the credentials, and on graduating she joined a small firm of consulting engineers in Lincoln as its first female engineer and, for 11 years, its only one.

The 1953 flood defined her. The firm was engaged to rebuild the defences between Mablethorpe and Skegness and Hesketh, the most junior engineer on the job, was sent to survey the damage because nobody more senior wanted to spend a fortnight in the mud. Her report, which argued that the pre-war practice of building ever-higher walls on sand was futile and that the coast needed a combination of concrete, beach nourishment and managed grassy banks, was adopted almost in full and shaped the design of the Lincolnshire defences for the next 40 years. The walls she designed at Trusthorpe and Anderby Creek in the 1960s have never been overtopped.

She became a partner in 1968, the firm’s senior partner in 1979 and, when it merged with a larger practice in 1986, managing director of a 400-person consultancy with offices in Lincoln, Hull and Newcastle, a position she held until 1996. She was blunt, exact and unimpressed by rank; a contractor who told her in 1974 that a sea wall was “close enough” was, colleagues recalled, taken to the beach at low tide and asked to point out which part of the North Sea was close enough. She was appointed CBE in 1992.

Retirement did not take. She chaired the Lincolnshire flood committee for a decade, advised the Environment Agency on the beach nourishment programme that now pumps around 400,000 cubic metres of sand on to the county’s beaches each spring, and was a persistent and well-informed critic of what she saw as the agency’s underfunding of maintenance. In 2013, at 82, she gave evidence to a parliamentary committee on coastal flooding and told it that the east coast had been “lucky for 60 years and is planning on being lucky for 60 more”. The committee’s chair later said it was the clearest evidence it had heard.

She lived all her life within 10 miles of Grimsby, in a house at Cleethorpes whose sea view she said she had chosen so that she could keep an eye on her work. She never married, saying that she had been engaged to the coast, and was a formidable bridge player and a lifelong member of Grimsby Town. She is survived by a cousin, Margaret, and by what she called her other family, the engineers she trained, several of whom now run the firm she built.

Marjorie Ann Hesketh, civil engineer, born 14 June 1931; died 9 October 2026