As chief quantity surveyor at Manchester city council, my father, John Judge, who has died aged 91, was part of a team that led the city’s housebuilding programmes from the 1960s to the 90s. One of his roles was to create bills of quantities with specifications for all the work to be conducted, which were then priced up, after which tenders were invited for each scheme. He then helped to manage the work through to completion.
John was born in Regina in Canada to English parents, Rosannah (nee Cahill) and her husband, Thomas Judge, a telephone linesman. John’s father died when he was three and afterwards his mother and her five children moved to Swinton in Lancashire, where she worked as a cleaner. There was little money within the household, and at one point, when the family were evicted unjustly from their home, he was separated from his mother for a time. That experience of housing insecurity never left him, and informed his later work.
