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John Simpson
Many will recall JES, who joined Clayesmore fro Cambridge and taught Mathematics from !937 to 1941. He was a Quaker and left to join firstly the London Fire Brigade and later the Friends Ambulance organisation. After a crash course in Mandarin he was sent to the Far East and spent the rest of the war running convoys carrying medical supplies over the Burma Road to Chiang Kai Shek’s armies in Southern China: one such convoy carried the first sulphonamides into China and on another occasion his lorries were stopped and looted by armed rebels.
When he returned to England in 1945 he went back for a year to Cambridge to run the Flying club. Many will recall his gliders but may not have been aware that when he was still an undergraduate at Emmanuel College he had won a British Open Gliding Championship. Others will recall helping him take off from Hambledon and Win Green by pulling on the elastic launching ropes. His two-seater glider was taken over by the RAF in 1939 for trials to determine whether the recently invented radar could pick up all-wooden aircraft: it could. The same glider later came to an untimely end over Manchester when its RAF pilot attempted unauthorised aerobatics which resulted in it breaking-up. This did not stop John from competing in twelve more National Championships.
In 1947 he went to teaching and taught at Leighton Park School for a number of years. After a short break he moved to Reading University which required a mathematician who was also a glider pilot to research certain atmospheric phenomena. In due course this work came to the notice of the Applied Maths Department in Cambridge, which he then joined. Uniquely he still has a funded desk in the Department, despite the fact that he is now in his 82nd year! In 1984 he was awarded his PhD in acknowledgement of his published works on Sea Breezes and other similar phenomena: the writer of this note, who was the Domestic Bursar at Emmanuel at the time, lunched with him in the college on the day of the ceremony. He recalled that on several occasions he had been called upon to help entertain visiting Chinese academics because what he called his Billingsgate Mandarin was such a very effective ice-breaker.
To mark John’s 80th birthday his Department organised a special Seminar in his honour and invited him to nominate speakers from anywhere in the world to present special papers on his and related subjects. At about the same time he published both an important work on gravity currents (now in its second edition) and another entitled “Photographing Your Grandchildren”. He is still at his desk.
JNE 22 Feb 1996.