This subsection covers Morton's extensive consultancy work on public water supply projects in Britain. It comprises files relating to over two hundred public water supply projects with which Morton (and his company Edgar Morton and Partner) was involved as a geotechnical engineering consultant.
Morton was working at a time when the water industry in Britain was required to meet a rapidly increasing need for assured supplies of water for domestic and industrial use. After the Second World War local authorities had been given greater powers to build and extend reservoirs and search for potential new sources of supply. Morton and his company, Edgar Morton and Partner, were much in demand in advising on public water supply. He himself was involved with more than 150 dams and reservoirs throughout Britain, many being long-term projects with Morton advising on different aspects of investigation, design, construction, litigation and site monitoring over many years.
The largest bodies of material relate primarily to the construction and development of Grimwith Reservoir for the Bradford Corporation Waterworks (later the Yorkshire Water Authority); the Roadford, Colliford and Wimbleball Reservoirs (South West Water Authority); and the Foremark Reservoir and Carsington Reservoirs (Severn Trent Water Authority). Significant amounts of material occur also for the Isle of Man Water Board (Sulby Reservoir and Druidale Scheme, and others), the North West Water Authority, the Staffordshire Potteries Water Board, St Helens Corporation, Buckinghamshire Water Board, Nottingham Corporation, Portsmouth and Gosport Water Company, North Devon Water Board (the Meldon Reservoir Scheme) and the City of Cardiff Corporation Waterworks (Llandegfedd Scheme).
Much of the material covers the initial stages before reservoir construction, such as site investigation, involving the siting and drilling of numerous trial and exploratory boreholes to search for new sources of supply, the question of the mining position (old and abandoned or working mine shafts situated underground below the proposed reservoir site) and site stability, so as to avoid possible embankment slips and reservoir cracking later on. Several of the projects on which Morton advised were not constructed. After extensive site investigation, monitoring and testing, they were found to be technically or economically unfeasible, even when alternative sites had been proposed and subjected to similar investigation.
Not all the public water supply projects for which Morton was acting involved reservoirs and dams. Morton was also concerned in the construction of pumping stations, sewage works, water treatment works and other such water supply projects. Morton gave advice to many local authorities on water sources, often subterranean, for augmenting the public water supply, protection of gathering grounds, new well sites, etc., and advised on borehole licence applications.
The majority of the projects date from the 1930s to the early 1990s, although in some cases, where a related project or the same local authority was involved, the working papers incorporate earlier Boyd Dawkins material, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and used for background engineering and geological information. Others represented extensively in the papers include colleagues in the consultancy, P.W. Rowe, C.W. Isherwood and J. Scriven.
The material has been arranged in alphabetical order by principal client, following the outline listing. The client is generally a public authority - County Council, City, Borough, Rural or Urban District Council, River Authority, Water Board, etc. Morton frequently was acting for more than one public authority on any major project and this is indicated in the catalogue entries. Another complication is that the jurisdiction of these public authorities frequently changes over time as they merge, divide, expand or diminish.
Some of the material was found in folders marked 'Selected Papers'. It appears the contents of these were chosen as worthy of preservation by Morton himself and it is therefore possible that material not so selected was discarded. In many sequences of correspondence there is evidence that documents have been removed, sometimes torn out. Key documents relating to any given project were generally kept in reverse chronological order and this arrangement has been retained.
The papers may include correspondence, plans and maps, draft and final reports (during his lifetime, most of the reports were written by Morton himself), borehole logs, drilling logs, rainfall records, rock test data, calculations, tender documents, photographs, etc. There is much manuscript material, including beautifully hand-drawn and coloured geological diagrams, maps, plans and sketches. Morton's manuscript annotations occur throughout the documentation, sometimes the two copies of the same document being differently annotated.
Where there is significant material relating to a collaborating engineering, surveying or similar company, this is indicated in parentheses.