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the inshore surveying craft Medusa in 1964.
In 1968-70 he was given command of the brand-new Beagle, but he was rumoured to have been passed over for further promotion when sent to command Hydra on a survey in the Malacca Strait. There, however, he was called to join the relief operation in East Pakistan after the devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone which killed 500,000 people, his task to find and mark channels for small craft to ferry in food and supplies. For his success, he was promoted to commander. Subsequently, he commanded Fawn in 1972, Hecla 1975-77 on the west coast of Scotland and at the Jubilee Fleet Review, and Hydra 1978-80.
After the Iranian episode, Morris took Hydra to conduct surveys in the Minches between the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland, as well as charting a shoal between St Kilda and Harris which he named Whale Rock, for a minke whale which watched over his work. Morris came ashore for the last time in 1980 to go first to the Hydrographic Office at Taunton, and then to Whitehall before being promoted to rear-admiral.
In 1985 he succeeded Rear-Admiral D W Haslam, who had taught him his craft 30 years before, as Hydrographer of the Navy, an appointment first established more than two centuries earlier.
He was appointed CB and retired to Somerset in 1990, where he wrote ‘Charts and Surveys, in Peace and War’ (1995). Morris studied heraldry, was an ornithologist and a talented watercolourist, some of whose paintings were used to update Admiralty Sailing Directions.
Peter William Taylor (1917 – 2020)
Peter Edward William Taylor was born in 1917 in Berkshire. He joined the FSA soon after and was instrumental in drafting the Articles of Association which now underpin the DSA Constitution. He became a Life Member in 1973.
Educated was Peter Symons School Winchester and was Scholarship to read Mathematics at Christ’s College Cambridge 1935. At Cambridge gained a first in the first part of the Maths degree but then switched to Law. In the summer holidays 1936 he went to Iceland with fellow students and gained his first experience of surveying - mapping the icecaps there using instruments borrowed from the British Antarctic Survey.
At Cambridge also joined the OTC and at outbreak of war he went
with the Horse Artillery to France to confront Hitler’s advance. The
fact they took two hounds with them (from Larkhill Foxhounds)
illustrates the attitude to this early part of the war. Hitler advanced
so they had to leave the horses with local farmers and retreat to Dunkirk. He was one of the fortunate few of his division to make it home. As an officer, he let the men embark first but their boat was torpedoed mid-Channel. However, he got home on a later vessel.
During the rest of the war he was a government scientist advising Churchill on the sound ranging of V1 and V2 rocket sites further developing the techniques created by Sir Lawrence Bragg and Harold Hemming in WW1. The main anxiety was that a desperate Hitler might fit a nuclear warhead to the V2 so this work had a high profile with the war office.
At the end of WW2, he left the scientific community but kept in close touch with Lawrence Bragg and Harold Hemming in spite of deciding to be a barrister. He obtained pupillage then chambers in Lincoln’s Inn where he practiced as a Chancery barrister for 50 years. He became a QC and was head of chambers for the last 23 years.
After retirement he was an active legal voice for the Kensington Residents Association attending many planning enquiries and was awarded the Mayor’s Medal for this work when age 95. He was a keen member of the DSA and enjoyed reminiscing about the sound ranging experience.
In 1948 he married Julia Mary Brown and they had two sons. He died peacefully at home age 103.
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