I first came in to contact with Martin in 1985. He had joined Quietflow Engineering, fresh from his time at BP Oil, where he was a Marine Engineer. He called me for some information about pumps we were supplying for a job in the UAE. Quietflow were doing the surge suppression equipment for the project. I was immediately impressed by his amiable manner on the phone, and obvious technical competence. We only exchanged a couple of phone calls—but I remembered him.

Three years later SPP Projects needed more people to bolster the proposals team. We advertised and Martin applied. I remember commenting at the time “I know this guy, he’s good”. And that was that—he joined SPP. When we met in the summer, I joked with him—joining SPP was not a life sentence—but it turned out it was—he went on to achieve so much in his later career.

Back in the day, Projects was quite a small team. We didn’t even have a computer—we had to fight to get one. This was initially on a trolley which was wheeled about from desk to desk—we were all like kids fighting about whose turn it was to use it. Martin was streets ahead of any of us with this new-fangled technology. If any of us ever got in a fix with something on the PC he’d always be on hand to help. He never once grumbled and had the patience of a saint.

I particularly remember Martin’s skills being put to good use in 1993. A contractor presented us with a floppy disk containing borehole well data with anticipated water table drawdowns over twenty-five years for 484 water wells. We were asked to bid for the project. Armed with the floppy disk we had a vision of an idea to layer a look-up table embedded in the worksheet to aid pump selection—rather than doing 484 individual pump selections. This was beyond my skill level so Martin sorted it out with an embedded look-up table in the spreadsheet. He even used some calculations of the relative steepness of curve of the proposed pumps. This enabled us to easily project the pump flows from each respective well as the water table dropped over time. This was a match winner and all largely down to Martin’s skills. We worked on many jobs together. In addition to Martin’s skill as a professional Engineer he also had a great deal of patience and steadfastness. We were a great Team and I am ever so proud of the work we did together.

I am proud to have known Martin both as a friend and colleague. All of us are on the same path, journeying to one and the same destination. Martin regrettably was ahead of us on this journey as he was in most aspects of his life.

Ian Reynolds
15th January, 2024