My father, Teddie Drew, who has died aged 97, devoted his working life to public health engineering, and sewage purification in particular. “It’s my bread and butter,” he would joke, but this never masked a deep and lifelong commitment to purer drinking water, cleaner rivers and the eradication of water-borne diseases.
Teddie was the son of Dick Drew, a stationmaster, and his wife, Mabel (nee Hamlett), whose Cheshire family had a salt-mining business. He went to Farnham grammar school, Surrey, and studied engineering at University College London, graduating at 18 with a first. He joined the civil engineering department of Surrey county council and worked on the Farnham bypass, but was called up within three weeks of the start of the second world war. He joined the Royal Navy and served on cruisers, surviving the sinking of HMS Cornwall in the Indian Ocean.
On being demobbed, Teddie made a career in the postwar new towns. In 1947, he joined the engineering staff at Stevenage development corporation, to oversee the construction of the main drainage system. He was soon appointed to a team of specialists to find a way of treating the sewage from the three new towns of Harlow, Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City, all within the river Lee catchment area. The aim was to reverse the growing pollution of the river and make it a primary source of drinking water for London.
The result was a new sewage purification works at Rye Meads, near Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, which Teddie ran from 1953 to 1974. It discharged treated effluent into the river at a quality never before achieved. To prove this success, Teddie installed a pond in which fish swam in treated effluent, outside his office door. Teddie regarded these as the happiest days of his life; typically, on being appointed OBE in 1972, he attributed the honour to the teamwork at Rye Meads.
In 1969 he was elected president of the Institution of Public Health Engineers, and in 1974 was invited by the government to serve on the central advisory water committee. Upon the death that year of his first wife, Irene (nee Holliman), whom he had married in 1939, he sought a new challenge, took on consultancy work in the Middle East and far east, and advised the World Health Organisation. In 1980, he married Pat Beeson (nee Pugh-Davies).
A friend and constant help to all, Teddie lived out his Christian faith in practical ways, believing that honesty and justice were always the best way forward.
Pat died in 2002. Teddie is survived by me and my sister, Jane, the children of his first marriage.
