My father, Peter Cubbage, who has died aged 91, was a leading gas forensic research scientist. He led a team that was responsible, among other things, for pioneering the flame-release chamber, a safety innovation used in offshore oil rigs and pipelines, which was compared to the miners’ Davy lamp for its significance.
He was appointed by the crown in 1988 to write the report into what happened during the first two seconds of the Piper Alpha rig explosion.
Peter was born in Bermondsey, London, the son of Wilfred, a tax inspector, and Doris, and brought up in Beckenham, Kent. He went to Emanuel school, Wandsworth. During the early years of the second world war, the whole family, including Peter and his sister, Jane, were evacuated with the Inland Revenue to Llandudno.
Following wartime service as a radar officer in the Royal Navy, Peter studied at Queen Mary College, London. He began his career at the Gas Research Board in Beckenham, moving to the new Gas Council research station in Solihull in 1953. There he became manager of the special projects division, which used test sites to carry out what he always described as his favourite part of the work: playing with his “personal chemistry set”. The principal focus was how to contain flames and eradicate explosions. This necessarily involved carrying out controlled explosions.
For 20 years, Peter and his team were the first to be called to gas explosions, in the UK and occasionally Europe. Their first major investigation was in 1968, when an explosion in Ronan Point tower block, Newham, east London, killed four people and injured many more. They thought that the poor construction of Ronan Point had caused a progressive collapse, and that future buildings should employ a new method whereby bricks were bridged over. As part of their investigations, and helped by the Brick Development Association, they built a three-storey block of flats to help them prove their case.
In 1987, Peter was appointed MBE for services to the gas industry, which included many years of touring schools and colleges nationwide presenting a lecture called “Science of Flame”, famous among its audiences for spectacular pyrotechnics that would probably see it outlawed nowadays.
A keen sportsman, Peter had represented Kent at table tennis in his youth, partnering for a while the British champion Chester Barnes.
He married Jean McOwan in 1954, and they settled in the village of Hampton-in–Arden, in the West Midlands, where Peter lived until his death.
He is survived by Jean, his three children, Andrew, Sally and me, and five grandchildren, Alistair, Matthew, Aliya, Stanley and Betty.
