AAB (Tony) Williams

A. A. B. "Tony" Williams (1926 - 4 February 2016) was a South African civil engineer with the National Building Research Institute and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. His primary contribution to geotechnical engineering practice was co-authoring the Revised guide to soil profiling for civil engineering projects in Southern Africa.

Background Williams was born in 1926 in Kokstad and attended primary and high school in the Natal Midlands. After school, he served aboard a frigate on the Burma coast during World War II. After the war he completed a BSc in Civil Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand graduating in 1948.

Williams spent three years working for the then Transvaal Roads Department on road and bridge construction before returning to study at Imperial College, London. He completed a Diploma in Soil Mechanics in 1953. Upon his return to South Africa in 1954, he started working at the National Building Research Institute (NBRI) where he worked under the directorship of Jere Jennings and Tony Brink. co-authored with Tony Brink and Tim Partridge.

Williams, Terry Pidgeon and Peter Day also collaborated on a 1985 paper on expansive clays. This was key to highlighting that the shear strength along existing slickensides was close to the residual strength (about 50% of the peak strength). This has importance for South African slopes assessment, in contrast to the common overseas practice of using peak strength for analysing ‘first time’ slides. and the Gold Medal of the South African Institute for Engineering and Environmental Geologists (SAIEG) in 2005.

Williams was a Fellow of SAICE, serving on Council, the committees of the Pretoria Branch and Geotechnical Division, as well as assisting with the organising committees of several Regional Conferences for Africa on Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering.