Alfred Benjamin Gaston
Alfred Benjamin Gaston (c1873-1941)
1941 Obituary [1]
ALFRED BENJAMIN GASTON was a marine engineer and served in China for practically the whole of his career. After completing a four years' apprenticeship with Messrs. Courtney and Birkett at Southwick, Sussex, in 1895, he was appointed engineer to the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company, of Baghdad and. Basrah.
In 1899 he went to the Yangtse Trading Company at Shanghai where he superintended the erection of the S.S. Pioneer, which was subsequently transferred to the Royal Navy and renamed H.M.S. Kinsha. Mr. Gaston served as chief engineer on her in the Boxer rising of 1900 and 1901. He then returned to England and was engineer in the China Navigation Company until 1903 when he became chief mechanical engineer in the mining department of the Pekin Syndicate, Ltd. From 1906 until 1920, when he retired on account of ill-health, he held the appointment of marine superintendent and manager to the Taku Tug and Lighter Company in Tientsin, North China.
Mr. Gaston, whose death occurred on 10th January 1941 in his sixty-eighth year, was elected an Associate Member of the Institution in 1900 and was transferred to Membership in 1906.