| Administrative History | Oleg Kerensky, the elder son of Alexander Kerensky and Olga Lvovna, was born in St Petersburg on 16 April 1905. After the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917, he remained in Russia with his mother and younger brother Gleb. After a period in the Lubianka prison in Moscow in 1918, the family were released, and returned to St Petersburg where he went to boarding school. In 1920 they escaped to Sweden through Estonia and shortly afterwards arrived in England.
He attended Oakfield school in London, and although he had originally hoped to become a lawyer, he qualified as an engineer with degree from the University of London, obtained at Northampton Engineering College in 1927. He joined the Bridge Department of Dorman Long & Co. Ltd as a Junior Assistant Designer in their drawing office in London and worked for the company on various bridge design projects during the 1920s and 1930s. He joined the steel construction company Holloway Brothers in 1937 and was transferred to Bristol in 1940. In 1946 he was appointed as Principal Bridge Designer at the practice of Freeman Fox & Partners and later became a partner in the firm. He was involved in the design of the Severn Bridge and various motorway, road and railway bridges in the UK, as well as Auckland Harbour Bridge, the West Gate Bridge, Melbourne and bridges in Thailand and India. He also contributed to work on structural codes by the British Standards Institution and was associated with the promotion of research through his membership of the Construction Industry Research and Information Association, the Institutions of Civil Engineers and Structural Engineers and his involvement with the Institute of Welding. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1970.
He married Nathalie Bely on 3 June 1928 and they had a son, Oleg (jnr), born in 1930. Nathalie died in 1969 and Oleg Kerensky married Dorothy Harvey in 1971. He died on 25 June 1984. |