Biography | Allan Beckett — The Roadway Had to Flex and the Anchors Had to Hold

Allan Harry Beckett was commissioned into the Royal Engineers on 13 January 1941 from 142 Officer Cadet Training Unit; the London Gazette prints his name and his service number, 167927, in a supplement that February. He had volunteered a year earlier and served as a sapper at Folkestone Harbour while the army came back from Dunkirk. From the Royal Engineers' School of Bridging at King's Newton he went in 1942 to the War Office's Transportation 5 branch, and the artificial-harbour problem reached him there.

Two of the answers were his. The floating roadway that would carry lorries from the pierheads to the shore had to ride an open sea, so its spans were jointed to flex in every direction rather than stand against the swell. Holding that roadway in place was the harder half. His Kite anchor weighed about a third of a tonne, held some thirty tonnes, and could be laid without a specialist vessel; accounts of how many were made differ, 2,332 in one and 2,434 in another. He crossed to Arromanches the day after the landings, as a technical adviser to 21st Army Group.

A Nautical Archaeology Society study records that he was later drawn into a patent dispute over the anchor, and that the design does not appear to have been manufactured beyond its wartime use. He died on 19 June 2005, aged 91.

The commune of Arromanches unveiled this memorial on the Cale Maréchal Montgomery on 6 June 2009, part-funded by the Royal Engineers: a bronze relief of his face and a full-size replica of the Kite anchor, black against the sea wall. Its English panel credits the anchors with carrying the harbour through "the storm of 13 to 18 June 1944." The gale began on the nineteenth.

📸 Cover: the memorial to Major Allan Beckett, Cale Maréchal Montgomery, Arromanches-les-Bains, photograph by Duch.seb, 8 July 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: a standard Whale roadway span preserved on the same quay, photograph by Andy Li, 25 March 2025, CC0.