Charles Herbert West
Charles Herbert West (c1867-1941)
1942 Obituary [1]
CHARLES HERBERT WEST was the youngest son of Mr. Henry H. West, M.I.Mech.E., a prominent marine engineer of Liverpool, whose services to the Institution as Hon. Secretary to the Local Reception Committee, on the occasion of the Liverpool Summer Meeting of the Institution in 1891, will still be remembered. Mr. Charles West was educated at the Liverpool Institute, and from 1884 to 1889 served his apprenticeship with Messrs. Laird Brothers, shipbuilders and engineers, of Birkenhead, being subsequently employed on the overhaul and repair of ships' machinery, and serving at sea as engineer on several vessels. After a short engagement in the shipyard department of Messrs. Palmer's Shipbuilding and Iron Company, of Jarrow on Tyne, he joined his father's firm in Liverpool in 1892 as assistant, and later became partner, under the style of Henry H. West and Son, consulting engineers and naval architects.
For a number of years, in addition to his constructional and consulting work, the bulk of his business was in connection with marine damage cases in which he generally acted on behalf of the underwriters concerned, and during the war of 1914-18 his firm was appointed to supervise the carrying out of some of the largest hull and machinery repairs effected in the port of Liverpool.
Mr. West, who was drowned in the Thames on 10th June 1941, in his seventy-fourth year, was elected an Associate Member of the Institution in 1895 and was transferred to Membership in 1897.