SA Affordable Housing November - December 2019 // ISSUE: 79 | Page 37

PROFILE
Part of the Blyde River Scheme that was one of the first
projects Marshall worked on in South Africa.
age group followed; and finally, senior kids thereafter. The
parents ran the school and it was kept spotless.
“If you get the right thirst for education you can get things
done. This is why I work in poor countries – you don’t get the
same satisfaction from working in developed countries.”
Born in 1941, Marshall says, “I’m a farmer’s son, one of
four boys and one girl. Our farm got wiped out by foot and
mouth disease – the entire farm and livestock was bulldozed
and burnt – the lot. Thereafter, I studied Agricultural and
Mechanical Engineering – to keep my father happy.” In those
days, the UK still had compulsory military service. Marshall
relates how he became an officer in the Gordon Highlanders
of the British Army. “The assessment process consisted of us,
the ordinary troops, to march past a panel of officers who
would ask you a question – and based on your answers you
might be recognised as officer material. I was asked some
technical question and I replied, ‘I haven’t a bl***y clue, but
I’ll ask my sergeant,’ and I was appointed second Lieutenant
on the basis of that answer and posted to West Germany.” He
eventually became a Captain.
Earlier, he had proved a maverick spirit: “I was on duty one
day – which basically means checking the toilets – when it was
reported to me that the entire officer corps of colonel, the
brigadier, the lot, were drunk in the early hours of the morning.
I had them all locked up for the night. You can’t have one rule
for the ranks and one for the officers – it ruins respect.” They
couldn’t touch him, he says, but it blighted his military career,
because he was thereafter posted as far away as they could
possibly find, to what is today Malaysia. At that time it was in
the throes of the Malayan War in the province of Borneo.
That three-year military experience gave him the
wanderlust, and he has seldom been back to the UK. He
added to his qualifications by studying civil engineering at
Nottingham University and then looked for work abroad.
“There were jobs going at the time (the 1960s) in Bermuda
and South Africa, so I flipped a coin and that is how I came to
this country in 1966.”
Like any civil engineer, he has had to go where the work is,
given that the construction cycle (like now) has been through
many peaks and troughs. Although he has worked in many
developing countries building their infrastructure, South
Africa has been his home base throughout.
His motivation for choosing civil engineering was ‘the
challenge of the discipline’. He gives the illustration of
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constructing a pipeline in the middle of the Sahara, where
the nearest town is 3 000km away, and he needed aggregate
to mix concrete for the construction. “I sent tribespeople out
to look for all the car and truck wrecks, from which we made
chisels. We then located a nearby outcrop of rock from
which I sent a sample to the university in Asmara to find out
if it was acceptable. Then I got the people to chisel away and
measure sizes in sieves. That’s the initiative that’s required
in civil engineering.
“In civil engineering, you have to adapt plans to all sorts
of underground conditions, and the civil engineer has to
exercise the authority to make decisions on site based on
those changing conditions. If he has to move a road a metre,
he can do it. It often takes guts to make such decisions, and
the problem in South Africa at the moment is that nobody
has the guts and authority to do so. An Engineer can manage
bad decisions – but no decision is a greater problem. Worse
than that is a collective decision.”
One of his first work experiences in South Africa was
enough to put any Engineer permanently off the profession.
It was the time when the Blyde River Scheme was being built
by one of the large contractors which today is in trouble.
Marshall had by now established his own sub-contracting
business. The main Contractor was in cash flow trouble at
this time, and at the conclusion of the contract, says Marshall,
he was told that, although he had completed the contract in a
completely satisfactory manner, the company was not going
to pay him the R12-million he was owed. He was invited to
sue the company for it but was assured the company’s
lawyers would successfully postpone a court case for at least
five years, if they didn’t outright bankrupt him in legal fees.
“That’s how these big contractors deal with you as a sub-
contractor,” he says.
Fed up, he accepted a job in the Eritrean desert, living in a
fabricated steel hut. “It’s one of the poorest countries in the
world, but the people are completely honest and
conscientious workers.”
HOPE FOR THE POOR MAN
Marshall’s scope of responsibility for Montrose Mega City is
training workshops to train community-recruited workers;
planning; and time-related management, which he fulfils
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