David Reid Higgins (1939-2024)
Written by Gertrud (Trudi) Higgins
Occupations: Engineer and Draughtsman
Background
The Higgins family came from Ireland to Scotland almost 200 years ago, married into the Reid Clan, which gave them the right to a red and green tartan, and finally moved south to Cockermouth. They were a large catholic family with many relatives running businesses there including the sweet shop, the tobacco shop and the paper shop; one family even moved on to Rhodesia. Another relative owned a little farm near Lorton and took her butter and cheese by horse and trap to Cockermouth market. They all bought shares in the Jennings Brewery in Lorton when it was founded in 1828.
David was the son of William ‘Bill’ Edward Ivison Higgins and his wife Monica Mitchell, who had married before the Second World War. She was the daughter of a Caldbeck farmer who ploughed with four in hand. Marriage meant she could give up her work as a cook in a wealthy household, when she had only a few hours each week to spend with him. David’s grandfather, also William, was a company representative and married to Agnes Reid Ivison. He drove one of the first cars in Cockermouth, loved golf and gave the Higgins cup to the local club. The Jennings shares were inherited by David`s father Bill, who was by then the only male left. Agnes was an artist and the family still have some of her lovely oil paintings of landscapes and flowers; her sister ran the household.
Coming home from the war, when he served in the Border Regiment and was involved in Operation Fork in Iceland in 1940, Bill learned that his mother had died and that his father had remarried. His stepmother was a very capable lady who owned a butcher’s shop in Whitehaven. So Bill and Monica moved to Whitehaven and Bill ran the shop. There they raised David Reid, who was born just born before the war started and then Edward, born in 1945. David remembered the homecoming of his unknown father very well, as he was told to move out of his mother’s bed; this was hard in a cold house with only one coal fire. At the age of eight he was presented with his baby brother Edward, whom he detested all his life. Eight year olds generally do not like to be told to look after little brothers, instead of going to play with their friends. Furthermore, Edward grew tall and got a place in the RAF at the age of fifteen, which David did not. Instead, his father expected him to help in the shop in the morning before going to St Benedict’s, his catholic school in Whitehaven, where his love of mathematics was encouraged, a vital foundation for his later work. Monica attended the Church of England services, which was sometimes a sore point.
David and his father were great sportsmen and David played rugby for Whitehaven, until his shoulder was damaged in a scrum. Following the family interest, they both played golf and were excellent snooker players. Also, as keen cyclists in the local cycle club, they enjoyed time trials in the Lake District. Bill and Monica had a tandem and cycled regularly from Cockermouth to Carlisle to visit the cinema. In his seventies Bill joined the Carlisle bowling club and eventually became their president, as he was adept at speaking during competitions with other clubs.
Early Years in Work
Bill and his stepmother clashed over the running of the butcher’s shop and Bill left and found employment at the newly opened nuclear plant at Sellafield, where he worked for the rest of his life. He encouraged his son David also to work at Sellafield but David preferred to attend night school, developed his talent for drawing and was given an apprenticeship at Workington Iron and Steel Company as a draughtsman. At this time he cycled to work on a fixed wheel bike from Whitehaven to Workington, in all weathers. On one occasion he travelled with his friends to Blackpool for a dance, coming back during the night and went to work the next morning, without sleep.
Having passed all his examinations, he moved to Oxford and designed car showrooms for the BMC corporation, though when his mother fell ill, he moved back home. He had a girlfriend from school called Marianne, the daughter of a German immigrant who worked at the Sekers silk mill. She moved to Australia on the £10 Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, which then was not such a small sum considering that in 1966 a family of four could live on £80 a month. She expected David to follow her, but he stayed in England, found employment with West Cumberland Farmers and began to design steel-framed farm buildings. He even built the new WCF head office in Carlisle and subsequently worked in designing and making steel-framed buildings for farms and industrial units for the rest of his life.
On his first foreign holiday to Mallorca, when there was still a £50 travel restriction, he met Gertrud ‘Trudi’ Knoblauch and her twin sister. He was looked after by Gertrud after he was badly sunburned on his legs, having fallen asleep on the beach. Soon he decided she was the woman he wanted to marry and in due course they were united in church in Hamburg, her home town. Then they moved to Cumberland, where, after four house moves and the arrival of two sons, they settled in Carlisle city centre in a Victorian terrace house.
Working Worldwide
By this time David had left West Cumberland Farmers and had joined a local building company. He then worked for Boythorpe Cropstores, founded near Butterwick in the Yorkshire Wolds. They supplied and erected high metal bins for grain and silage, encouraged by government grants. Thousands of these were produced until the grant ended and the Boythorpe firm declined. So David moved to Alfa Laval, founded in Lund, Sweden in 1883. This very large Swedish company sent him to build milking parlours in England and Scotland and even in Egypt, where he created a unit for milking sheep. In Sicily, the Mafia negotiated the contract with pistols on the table, and in Russia he was involved with building a farm, as part of the infrastructure in advance of the Winter Olympics, at Sochi in 2014. For a short time he was in Iraq, where during his stay he met Saddam Hussein, and there he built a cattle station with a milking parlour which had to be bigger than the one the Israelis had. Ten Iraqi families ran this station, with the milking parlour being busy all day. It is very challenging working in such heat and one day someone forgot to turn on the water and all the cows were found to be dead in the morning. In Egypt, in another ambitious project, he saw prize-winning cows flown in from Canada to his new farm, but at the last minute the Egyptians realised that no appropriate fodder was available and a consignment had to be flown in urgently. It was often difficult to impose Western agricultural techniques in African and Asian countries.
David developed the first large rotary milking parlour in Glasgow, which was then shipped to Australia but his relationship with Alfa Laval broke down when he was sent to Ireland during the Troubles. He was not allowed to hire an Irish car and his own English one made him a prime target. David also became frustrated by the administration involved in creating a large cheese factory and a brewery which had about a ten year development time. He was used to faster results. So he left Alfa Laval in 1978 and started his own company called Planrite Farming Systems Ltd, which he ran for twenty years.
With Planrite, he erected further farm buildings all over England and Scotland as far as the Orkneys, with cow sheds, milking parlours, slurry pits and silage bunkers. In conjunction with these projects he sourced rubber cow sleeping mats from Hungary, cattle slats (slotted concrete floor panels) from Belgium and cement from Germany. Further projects included the installation of seating for theatres, auction houses, outdoor events and also universities. Nearer to home, he designed the steps for the recycling stations in Cumbria, improved the quality of abattoirs in Carlisle and Middlesbrough, following European directives, and built over eight years the large plant which is now A.W. Jenkinson Forest Products at Penrith. In 1999, at 60 years old, he was head-hunted by Thomas Armstrong’s, a prominent building company based in Workington and worked for them for another seven years. On top of that he planned a bungalow in Carlisle, a house extension for his son in London, a loft conversion in Newcastle and houses for his friends. David’s Planrite company continued for three years after his departure and was closed down officially in 2002.
His Technical Abilities and Legacy
His ability to anticipate difficulties showed in his careful attention to each site. He could always spot where the crane might snag on an overhead cable, would be careful to avoid underground drains and would calculate whether a bridge over a beck was robust enough to carry a large waggon of steel and concrete elements, or whether two smaller ones were needed. He built car repair shops, with inspection pits and the hangar for the police plane at Carlisle airport. Unfortunately, shortly after the completion of this latter structure, when the new plane was delivered, it became evident that the police procurement staff had ordered a plane too large for the hangar, so it had to be rebuilt. Other typical glitches included a farmer who introduced him to an architect who insisted he could house ten more cows in the shed but the architect had foolishly not taken into account the measurements of a cow when in calf. Someone else thought to reduce the space on the plans for the turning circle of a tractor, but had not considered that a tractor often pulls a trailer and therefore needs more room. His wide experience enabled him to identify and solve these and many other technical problems.
David retired at the age of 67 and had several good years of travelling the world, visiting his ex-girlfriend Marianne in Australia and spending time in Thailand and China. He enjoyed many trips to Germany and river cruises in Europe and travelled in the USA for six weeks with his sons. Then he had a serious car accident in 2014 which he survived, but he was as a result diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, in addition to his already existing diabetes and asbestosis. From this point, he was not allowed to drive any more. During the following ten years he had excellent treatment form the NHS in Carlisle and Newcastle and was grateful for his efficient GP and the devoted attention of his wife and family. They took him out and helped whenever they could, considering they themselves had to earn a living and were raising their own children. During respite care at an excellent care home in Carlisle, he finally died very suddenly, when his heart stopped.
He left behind a considerable life’s work of designing and erecting buildings all over the world and working on the related inventions and solutions. He had a large family: his wife Trudi, two sons, six grandsons and two great grandsons, who all have memories of a very active, gifted man who has left a legacy of hundreds of A1 sized architectural designs, in addition to numerous delightful pen and ink drawings.
Sources:
- Family memories
- Several industrial websites.