Air Marshal Sir Herbert Durkin, KBE, CB, Controller of Engineering and Supply, RAF, 1976-78, was born on March 31, 1922. He died on April 12, 2004, aged 82.
Beginning his career on navigation systems as a component of Bomber Command’s strategic air offensive in the early years of the war, Herbert Durkin progressed via electrical work on Britain’s first atomic bomb to the RAF’s top engineering job in 1976.
Educated at Burnley Grammar School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated in mathematics, he had become involved in radar work while still at university in 1940. While still an undergraduate he had been invited to work on the home radio direction-finding chain which was put in place in time to provide the vital radar “eyes” for the air defence of the UK during the Battle of Britain.
Advertisement
In October 1941 he was commissioned into the technical branch of the RAF and was posted to No 60 (Signals) Group. There, in the face of evidence that at least 50 per cent of the RAF’s bombs were falling in open country, work on developing navigation systems to improve the effectiveness of the RAF’s night bombing was being carried on apace.
Durkin worked on Gee, the first of the radio navigation systems used by Bomber Command. Involving ground transmitters and a receiver carried in the aircraft, this provided much greater accuracy in dirty weather than that of conventional methods, but its range was limited. Durkin was next involved in developing Gee’s successor, Oboe, which was accurate enough, at an average error of 300 yards, to be used as a blind target marking device and prefigured the operations of the Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder Force.
Durkin remained in 60 Group until the end of the war when he went as ADC to the last AOC India before the sub- continent’s independence in 1947. He was posted in 1950 to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Fort Halstead, Kent. There he was involved in work on the electrical arming system for Britain’s first atomic bomb, a 25-kiloton device which was detonated in a frigate at Trimouille Island in the Monte Bello group, off the northwest coast of Australia on October 3, 1952.
He went on to command RAF Cosford, home of No 2 Technical Training School and — as possessor of one of the finest indoor athletics tracks in the country — host to several AAA indoor athletics championships. His culminating service appointment was as Controller of Engineering and Supply. In retirement from the RAF after 1978, he was busily engaged for a number of years in industry as a consultant or director to several companies in the electronics and cognate fields. In 1980 he was appointed president of the Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Advertisement
Syd Hoff, cartoonist, was born on September 4, 1912. He died on May 12, 2004, aged 91.
Syd Hoff was taken by surprise by the success of his perennially popular book for children Danny and the Dinosaur, about a boy who recruits a brontosaurus from a museum and spends the afternoon with it. He had sold his first cartoon at 16, abandoned his fine art degree and begun a syndicated daily strip — Tuffy — by the time he was 21. He drew for The New Yorker between 1930 and 1975. Cartoons portraying the foibles and cultural aperçus of his Jewish Bronx upbringing were his stock in trade. “Humour, for some reason, is basically sad,” he wrote. “The best humour has to do with events people can identify as having happened to them.” Besides his work for the New Yorker, he drew at different times for Playboy, the Saturday Evening Post and Look magazine.
Danny and the Dinosaur came about almost by chance, when Hoff’s young daughter underwent painful therapy for a hip condition. He began compiling a story to tell her as a distraction, and accompanied it with simple, colourful pictures. He claimed later that his book was the first to have pitched dinosaurs to the children’s market, likening their appeal to that of bogeymen and King Kong. Hoff said: “I have a theory that Steven Spielberg first saw Danny and the Dinosaur before he made Jurassic Park. If he had any conscience, he’d say to his secretary: ‘Make out a cheque for $2.5 million for this guy Syd Hoff.’ ”
Advertisement
The book was followed by two sequels, in which Danny and his beast have a birthday and attend a summer camp, and in the ensuing years Hoff produced around 60 humorous books for children, including the bestselling Sammy the Seal. In addition, he published another longrunning cartoon strip, Laugh It Off, and wrote a number of books about the art of cartooning.