Mary Thompson Irvine

Mary Thompson Irvine (later Lindsay), (19 August 1919 – 12 July 2001) was a British engineer. In 1947, she was the first woman to be elected a chartered member of the Institution of Structural Engineers.

Early life and education

Mary Thompson Irvine was born in Glasgow on 19 August 1919, to Annie (née Clark Anderson) and William Scott Blackwood Irvine. She had on older sister Jessie. William Irvine trained as a draftsman and mechanical engineering apprentice, and the family lived close to the St Rollox Railway Works in Glasgow. It was an industrial, working class, area at the time, and is now the site of Buchanan Street Bus Station.

In 1921, the family moved to Leeds in Yorkshire and Mary was aged 2 when the family settled in the village of Gildersome. This village was home to the works of Robert Hudson Ltd which was founded in the 19th Century and which, by the 1920s, had grown to an international supplier of light railway rolling stock and tipper trucks. The Gildersome works covered a 38-acre site and was a huge local employer. There is no firm evidence that William worked for Hudson, but his employment listing for the 1939 England and Wales Register makes very unlikely that he was working elsewhere: "chief technical engineer light railway rolling stock". Mary Irvine, age 20, was working as a "Junior Draftsman" in the same census. She studied evening courses at Bradford Technical College and then completed her final studies at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow (now the University of Strathclyde) where her father had also studied.

Irvine took two evening classes in Structures and Structural Design at the Royal Technical College. She was an exceptional student and gained very high grades. Very soon after completing her studies in Glasgow, in July 1947 she sat the exam to become a chartered engineer with the IStructE. At that time it was a two day exam and, of the 171 who sat the test, only 65 passed.

Career Irvine's long career led her to work in the UK, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, from the 1930s to 1985, with a specialism in structural steelwork for commercial and industrial buildings.

During her career she worked for the London County Council, Taylor Woodrow, Southern Rhodesia Railways and Bradshaw Buckton & Tonge of Leeds, establishing a Dundee office for the latter in 1979. They married on 11 June 1955 in The Rhul on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and after a honeymoon in Europe, initially settled in Bulawayo.