Jack Neale at One Hundred

 I am grateful to my friend Roger Hobbs for sending me the photographs of Jack Neale’s hundredth birthday party, held on 16 January 2026, somewhere in England. I am far away in Kolkata, yet the digital photographs travelled in a trice. They stopped me for a while.

Jack Neale, displaying the note from the King and Queen, with Joan

To see a man at one hundred is a rare and fine thing. To see Jack at one hundred is finer still. The framed note from the King and Queen says it plainly and says enough. He earned it. In one photograph, Jack is with Joan. She looks wonderful. There is ease in them both, the kind that comes from years lived well together. In another, Jack is with his daughter, Susan, and his brother, aged one hundred and two. It is a family at peace. That settles the matter entirely. Longevity, it seems, runs deep in the Neales.

Jack, his daughter, Susan, and his 102-year-old brother

I first met Jack in 1965. I was a young PhD scholar then, finding my way in the Structural Engineering Laboratory at Imperial College London. Jack ran the place. He had some twenty technicians under his care, and he knew the work as well as any man there. He was not showy about it. He knew. Roger was another research student then. Though it feels like another life now.

For seven years, until I left for India in 1972, Jack helped me build my test rigs and run my experiments. He was steady, practical, and unfailingly helpful. The technicians respected him, and he respected them in return. Under his watch, things worked as they should. That mattered in a laboratory where heavy loads and fine measurements leave no room for error.

Jack was casual and friendly with both technicians and researchers. I remember him climbing the steel stairs to his office on the mezzanine floor, three steps at a time, calling out “Woof, woof” as he went. He did it often. From that sound alone, one always knew where Jack was in that vast laboratory spread over two and a half floors. It was not a quirk, nor a mannerism meant to be noticed. I thought then he suffered from acidity and belched for relief. It seemed practical enough.

For the larger experimental setups, other technicians—men like Denis Denness and Malcolm Bracken—worked under Jack’s supervision. Because of that, every major experiment my fellow researchers and I ran went smoothly. For example, I tested full-scale concrete-filled tubular steel columns, some over three metres long, loaded to 750 kilonewtons at eccentricity. Such loads leave no margin for carelessness. A single mistake could be fatal. Yet nothing went wrong. Every detail was watched. I remain indebted to those men, and especially to Jack, who took responsibility without fuss.

Rig for testing columns under 750KN load

Jack bore the marks of hard work in those days. The sharp belch. The shadows under his eyes. I would never have thought he would live to be one hundred. And yet here he is. Relaxed. The shadows gone. The same friendly smile. Joan beside him, radiant. Susan close by. And a brother who proves that time, when met honestly, can be generous.

The photographs delighted me. They lifted my spirits. I shared them with friends, and they, too, were moved. I look at them now, and I see not just a celebration, but a life well used.

Here are those two photographs, and one more: a testing rig in the laboratory at Imperial, set up under Jack’s guidance all those years ago. Steel, bolts, gauges, and care. Quiet competence made visible.

I send my heartfelt good wishes to Jack and Joan. May they have more years together, in good health, and in peace.