Kennedy, Russell

Russell Kennedy came to Queen’s in 1937 from Dunrobin, Ontario, to study civil engineering. Shortly after graduation in 1941, he enlisted with the Royal Canadian Engineers.

Armies move forward because engineers build the bridges, airfields and roadways that allow them to advance. This was especially true in the fall of 1944, when Allied armies were trying to capitalize on the D-Day landings by punching across the Rhine River into Germany’s heartland. Paratroopers were dropped well ahead of the advancing Allied armies in the hope of seizing bridges across the Maas and Rhine Rivers and expediting the march on Berlin.

Operation Market Garden went disastrously awry: the Germans fought back fiercely, and ground troops failed to arrive to back up the paratroopers’ beachhead. Amid this fiasco, Lieutenant Kennedy took part in the dramatic rescue of 2,100 British paratroops trapped near the Dutch city of Arnhem. A Military Cross recognizes his bravery on that day, and in 1977, the film A Bridge Too Far chronicled the incident.

With peace came a call from Queen’s Dean of Applied Science Douglas Ellis: veterans seeking a post-war education were overwhelming the campus. Would Lieutenant Kennedy – 1941 medalist in civil engineering — return to ease the strain in the classroom? Interested in pursuing research in hydraulics, he said yes. He soon found there was little time for research. In his first term, he was aghast to discover that he had been scheduled to oversee a lab in the basement of Carruthers Hall at the same time he was to teach on the top floor. Dean Ellis counselled the new professor to start the basement lab “a bit early and then run down once in a while to keep them straight.”

The 1950s gave Professor Kennedy the time to embark on major research projects in hydraulics for the Canadian pulp and paper industry. He also began serving in the university administration, taking the role of vice-principal, administration from 1970 to 1976. As a civil engineer, he was ideally suited to oversee big construction projects such as Botterell and Mackintosh-Corry Halls. Stints in the School of Graduate Studies and Research, the Alumni Association and chairing the board of the Donald Gordon Centre rounded out his career of distinguished administration.

In 1983, shortly before he retired, Professor Kennedy bought a 59-hectare piece of rough bushland 50 kilometres northwest of Kingston. With the Salmon River meandering through it, the property was a microcosm of eastern Ontario topography – a crosscut of Canadian Shield, limestone sedimentation and riverine swamp. On the property, he built a custom-made cedar cabin and large workshop/driveshed, and set up a managed forest under a provincial program by planting and thinning 40,000 trees.

Shortly before his 2010 death, Professor Kennedy donated the property to his old department for use as a field station where young civil engineers could hone their skills. “It’s hard to imagine a property better suited to teaching the interactions between civil engineer and the natural environment,” Professor Andy Take of the department has noted. “The property contains a wetland, a river with a weir, a sustainable forest, and fascinating geology.”

Today, Kennedy Field Station exposes new generations of civil engineers to the challenges of the natural world.