Harry Collingwood

Harry Collingwood was the pseudonym of William Joseph Cosens Lancaster (23 May 1843 – 10 June 1922), a British civil engineer and novelist who wrote over 40 boys’ adventure books, almost all of them in a nautical setting.

Biography.

In September 1860, at age 17, he began working as a pupil in the architectural office of G R Crickmay RIBA in Dorset. That architectural practice continues today under the name of John Stark and Crickmay. He continued in Dorset until March 1864 and then moved to Durban in South Africa. He worked there in a range of posts until the end of 1870, by which time he was the Government Engineer and Surveyor for the Port District of Natal. He returned to the UK in 1871 and worked on an eight-mile section of the Devon to London Railway for two years (the section of the London and South Western Railway from Okehampton to Lydford was under construction at this time). He continued in the UK, working on a range of projects including harbor works in the Isle of Man, as well as work at Burntisland on the Firth of Forth, where he lived in 1880 while advertising in Coleraine in Northern Ireland, for accommodation for himself, his wife, and infant son. In 1888 he spent a year on the island of Trinidad, surveying for a deep-water port and associated railway. He also traveled to the Baltic, Mediterranean, and the East Indies. His wide travels provided accurate backgrounds for many of his works. Returned to England, and now living in Norwood, London, Collingwood applied for associate membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers on 31 July 1889 and was elected on 3 December 1889.

Associated membership is the grade of membership open to engineers who are not academically qualified Civil Engineers, but have learned engineering by another route. In 1893 Collingwood was one of the three short-listed candidates from the 89 applicants for Resident Engineer at Llanelly Harbour, but was unsuccessful. From 1894 to 1896 he was an engineer, working out of London, for works on the River Bann for the Coleraine Harbour Commissioners. In 1906, Collingwood moved to Mutley in Plymouth. By 1908 he was back in London, at New Bushey in Watford, London.