John Cox

Lawrence John Cox, highway engineer: born Wolverhampton, Staffordshire 18 August 1920; director, Tarmac National Construction 1966-82, chairman 1974-83; President, Institution of Highway Engineers 1982-83; married 1960 Rosemary Marshall (one daughter, and one son deceased); died Wolverhampton 4 March 2007.

In 1989 John Cox's son, Peter, was found to have an inoperable brain tumour. It was his wish that his organs should be made available for transplant. On his death, aged 24, this was achieved and had a profound effect on his father, leading him to campaign successfully with Peter's sister, Christine, to establish the NHS Organ Donor Register.

John Cox then worked hard to publicise the register by speaking in schools and at other engagements that he could contrive. He argued with eventual success for legislation presuming consent to organ donation unless the contrary had been duly declared. The NHS Organ Donor Register was perhaps his greatest achievement, with countless lives being saved or quality of lives improved in consequence of it. There are now 14 million people on the register.

Cox also holds a unique place in the history of motorway construction. In 1956, on the first British motorway, the eight-and-a-half-mile Preston bypass, as it was then known, his role with Tarmac made him responsible for construction and for seeing that the conditions of contract were met.

Sir James Drake was County Surveyor and Bridgemaster of Lancashire County Council, the letting authority on behalf of the then Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. Both were men of principle, engaged on the ground in a scheme that could not but be in part experimental, requiring agreement ambulando. Cox's skill in practical improvisation was exercised amid exceptionally heavy rainfall upon heavy malleable clay. Even so, he had the work complete by December 1958.

As it was the first section of the motorway network, Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister performed the opening ceremony. The glory went behind a cloud when, six weeks later, frost penetration damaged enough of the surface for it to be closed again for repair.

Lawrence John Cox was born in 1920, the only son of John and Gladys Cox of Wolverhampton. He left Wolverhampton Intermediate School aged 14 and took many jobs to help the family income. He turned to construction and worked for Bernard Sunley and Co. Each day he left home at 6am, worked through the day to night school for study of building construction, and returned home at 9.45pm.

When war was declared in 1939 he was assigned to airfield construction - a reserved occupation - at Salmesbury Aerodrome near Preston. In 1940, aged 20, he found himself providing, alone, civil engineering input to development of a greenfield site near Selby for the RAF. He went on to work on airfields in Northern Ireland, including Aldergrove and Ballykelly, both playing their parts in the Battle of the Atlantic.

By 26 he had been promoted agent on projects for his company and worked in that capacity on the Harbour Power Station at Belfast. Returning to England in 1948, he worked on utilities in Cornwall before joining Tarmac in 1949, where he would stay until his retirement in 1983.

In 1962 he was working as agent on housing infrastructure at Lincoln and at Corby New Town when the lethal East Coast floods of that year struck. On the strength of one handshake, he contracted that night to help the Lincolnshire River Authority to seal the break in the nearby sea defences within three weeks with large quantities of rock, earthworks and concreting.

The Cold War revived the call for airfields with long runways, especially for the USAF and the RAF's V bombers. In 1955-56, laying concrete in deeper layers than ever before, he built Elvington airfield near York, where the US Corps of Engineers could not cope with the high water-table; and at Machrihanish in Argyll he built the Nato airfield by removing and ingeniously spreading over higher ground the unsurpassed volume of one million cubic yards of peat.

In 1956 John Cox met his wife, Rosemary, on a blind date. He proposed to her 24 hours later. The same year, upon his experience of constructing runways in concrete, came the opportunity of Britain's launching her motorway programme. Following the Preston bypass, Cox worked with broadening responsibilities on the M5, the M6 and many other major construction projects. In 1966, he became a director of Tarmac Construction and later chairman of Tarmac National and vice-chairman of Tarmac International.

Projects in which he was engaged included the Drax Power Station, accelerators at Culham and Cern for studying nuclear fusion, and the Thames Barrier. Two decades ahead of its time, he was advocating use of private capital to finance motorways.

In retirement he became President of the Institution of Highway Engineers, now the Institution of Highways and Transportation, a change of name he oversaw. He devoted much of his last years to the Motorway Archive Trust.

Peter Baldwin

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