They got him in the end. The man known to his numerous friends among the Egyptian peasantry as âWilguksâ was finally cornered by the British colonial establishment in the Supreme Consular Court of Egypt in 1921. Charged with sedition and criminal libel during a scientific spat about the flow of the Nile, the 70-year-old builder of the first Aswan dam was disgraced and hounded out of the country. How had it come to this? Why did they ostracise Britainâs greatest imperial engineer, the father of the modern superdam? And why is his name unrecognised today, while that of his courtroom accuser, fellow water engineer Murdoch MacDonald, lives on as the founder of an international engineering consultancy that spans the world?
WILLIAM WILLCOCKS was born 150 years ago this year in a tent beside a canal in northern India, where his father was a lock-keeper. He learnt his engineering in India before heading for Egypt in 1883. There he rose to become director-general of reservoirs, and a legend on the banks of the Nile.
He built the first Aswan dam, then the largest in the world, went on to revive the ancient irrigation systems of Mesopotamia, and watered deserts from South Africa to India. But although knighted in 1902, he was an outsider and a man deeply troubled by the discovery that much of what his fellow water engineers got up to in their colonial playgrounds was worse than useless.
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Today, Willcocks looks more and more like an environmental visionary. But in 1921, when he stood on the court steps in Cairo, he was perceived as a misfit with outmoded ideas- a water engineer more concerned about silt than water; a top official who preferred the company of peasants; a team player who had turned against the team.
He was undeniably odd. Obituaries described him as âsallow, eyes half-closed, dressed anywayâ, a man for whom âdinners, dances, visits and suchlike are a wicked waste of timeâ. For years, he âspent every day and slept every night in the fields and villages along the Nileâ. At Cairoâs cocktail parties, they whispered that âevery fellah [fallehin, or farmer] knows the name Wilguksâ. It was not meant as a compliment.
But Willcocksâs mentor, Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, told many stories of his good works. Once, when the Nile was sluggish and famine loomed, Willcocks saw a chance to flood an area of low-lying farmland if water could be dammed and diverted into a canal. âHe stuck his bed on the bank of the canal, got together the peasantry of the whole province and for three days and nights worked at it till the water rose and flooded the plain.â Another time he emptied a rest house of its furniture to plug leaks in barrage gates.
His great engineering works in Egypt were the design of the Assiut Barrage, which held up Nile water for distribution across the delta, and the first Aswan dam. And here his troubles started. Willcocks never wanted to build the dam at all. Moncrieff had asked him to find a way to store Nile water so that an extra crop of cotton could be grown on the Nile delta. He left Cairo and spent three years in the desert- sleeping rough and subsisting, it is said, on rice, apricots and whisky. On his return, he announced that he had found a depression in the desert, at Wadi Rayan close to the Nile, into which he could divert part of the riverâs annual flood waters, feeding it back into the river downstream in the dry season.
The other engineers wanted to build a dam instead. And in the end that is what he agreed to. But it was a dam with a difference. Willcocks knew that a conventional dam would prevent the riverâs rich silt flowing onto Egyptâs fields during the annual flood. It would wreck the fertility of the countryâs soils even as it irrigated them. So he devised a dam that would allow the silt-laden waters that came in the early weeks of the annual flood to pass through, and only capture for storage the clear water that flowed later in the season.
Willcocksâs Aswan dam, 2 kilometres long and 40 metres high, was completed in 1902. It was an engineering triumph, albeit a second-best as far as he was concerned. But the damâs financial backers, cotton mill owners from Manchester, soon wanted to grow yet more cotton on the delta. The dam was twice raised to supply more water. Then the cotton barons demanded a new dam, far upstream in British-ruled Sudan, to irrigate cotton fields near Khartoum.
Willcocks rebelled. He feared that the new dam would leave his own- and the farmers of Egypt- short of water. To ensure the Aswan dam filled each year, its operators would be forced to capture the silt-laden early flood waters. Sudan was stealing the water from his âfellahsâ. Egypt âwill be sacrificedâ, he wrote in his memoir.
And it got personal. Murdoch MacDonald, an imperial engineer newly arrived from Scotland, was backing the plan. Willcocks charged MacDonald with falsifying key hydrological data to make it look as if the dam in Sudan would pose no threat. MacDonald, he said, had grossly exaggerated the Nileâs flow during dry years- and it would be during these times that the Sudan dam would threaten Egyptâs water supply.
In case anyone was in any doubt, Willcocks added: âI have also charged [MacDonald] with ignorance of his profession, and concealment of public documents.â The feud ended in court, where Willcocks was accused of sedition because his claims were said to have fanned the flames of Egyptian unrest. This charge failed, but he was convicted of criminal slander and libel.
The Sudan dam, built at Sennar, was completed in 1925. But the Egyptians were in luck: the succeeding decades were unusually wet. The next long drought did not come until the 1980s, by which time Willcocksâs dam had been submerged by the much larger High Aswan dam, built in the 1960s.
If MacDonald did manipulate the Nile flow data, the fraud persists to this day. But whatever the merits of Willcocksâs charges on this point, his insistence that the Nileâs silt is as important to Egypt as its water is just as pertinent today. The High Aswan dam prevents all silt from flowing downstream. As a result, Egyptâs soils are denied their natural source of fertility- and Egyptian farmers are today among the biggest users of chemical fertiliser in the world.
Disgraced in Egypt, Willcocks returned to India, where he advised colonial administrators on how to use irrigation to boost declining agricultural production in famine-wracked Bengal. In a series of lectures in Calcutta, he scandalised imperial engineers all over again by arguing that their works had caused the problem.
In ancient times, the people of Bengal dug canals across the Ganges delta. The canals both protected the land from inundation and, when the breaches were opened, allowed the silty monsoon flood to pour into the fields. The flood waters also brought fish into the fields, where they ate mosquito larvae and so helped prevent malaria.
This ingenious three-in-one technology was still in operation when the British arrived. But, in their ignorance, British engineers abandoned the canals, calling them âdead riversâ and raised their banks to prevent floods. They even prosecuted farmers who made breaches to let the silt-laden water onto their fields. The result, as Willcocks pointed out, was that the soils were starved of silt, farm yields fell and the mosquitoes returned to Bengal, bringing with them a series of malaria epidemics in the 1860s and 1870s.
But Willcocksâs strictures were branded the views of a crank, and ignored, even though malaria continued to plague the region and famine raged in the 1940s, killing millions of Bengalis. Only in the past decade have Indian and Bangladeshi scientists uncovered Willcocksâs old lectures, and begun to call for a return to the old ways.
Willcocksâs love of ancient engineering techniques extended to Mesopotamia â modern-day Iraq â where in 1914 he completed the rehabilitation of the Hindiya Barrage, allowing the Euphrates to be diverted to irrigate a million hectares of desert. And he went to the US, where he gave lectures on âhow the ancients would have controlled the Mississippiâ. They would emphatically not have done what American engineers were doing- trying to stop floods by building giant levees to cut off the river from its flood plain. But his audiences again ignored him, and his ideas were only resurrected after the massive floods of 1992 proved him right.
But while Willcocks became a forgotten footnote in history, his nemesis MacDonald returned from Egypt to England and set up a water engineering consultancy. Mott MacDonald remains among the biggest in the world, and is still at work on the Nile. One of its latest commissions is an investigation into the restoration or replacement of Willcocksâs Assiut Barrage on the Nile delta. Willcocksâs last work on the river could soon be gone. But even as his physical structures slip away, his ideas seem to be gaining a new lease of life.
