On April 6 1945, Sewell was the captain of "A" Battery, 11th (Honourable Artillery Company) Regiment Royal Horse Artillery (11 HAC). The Battery was ordered to occupy a forward position opposite Cotignola on the River Senio where it could support the New Zealand Division.
Soon after dark Sewell was leading a petrol and ammunition convoy across a bridge to the Battery's position when the Germans opened up with a heavy and prolonged artillery bombardment. Many of the shells landed on the road and several of them set ammunition dumps ablaze – but Sewell pressed on.
As a result, the Battery's guns, tanks and vehicles were replenished that night. It was able to stand firm and it fired more than 1,000 rounds of high explosive in support of the New Zealanders' attack.
Then, in the final phase of the Italian Campaign, throughout the battle which began with the crossing of the Senio and ended with the breakthrough at Argenta, Sewell led battery advances on roads exposed to intense mortar, artillery fire and sniping. He carried out supply runs day and night for two weeks with very little sleep, ensuring guns and tanks in highly exposed positions had enough ammunition. The citation for his MC stated that his leadership had been an inspiration to all ranks
Major Hugo Jones
Bomb disposal officer who saved Cardiff’s Central Station from devastation in the Second World War
In the early hours of May 17 1943, the Germans bombed Cardiff, causing great damage. Their press claimed that it was in retaliation for the Dambusters’ raid which had been carried out the day before. At the Central Railway Station, it was found that an unexploded bomb (UXB) had gone through a platform canopy and buried itself near the line. Jones organised the rail traffic so that it could pass safely without causing vibrations that might set off the bomb and placed ballast trucks on two of the tracks as blast shields. That evening, his section started digging for the UXB.
Progress, he said later, was agonisingly slow, and it was well into the night when it was discovered that a second bomb had fallen nearby. It was believed to be fitted with a time fuse which might detonate at any moment. Accordingly, a clock-stopper — a powerful electro magnet — was attached to the bomb to arrest the mechanism of the fuse. An electric stethoscope was also fitted to the UXB to listen for any tell-tale ticking. Its operator held the lives of the team in his hands, and he had to keep constantly alert for any sign that the clock had restarted.
The bomb was identified as weighing 1200lb. The filler cap could not be opened to remove the charge of TNT, so holes were drilled in the casing and, in the early hours of the second day, steam began to be fed through heavy-duty hoses, liquefying the explosive and expelling it. This operation lasted 12 hours, and only when the empty casing and the cylindrical pocket containing the fuse was blown up by Jones did the bomb finally become safe
Rex Lawrie
Outstanding surgeon at Guy's who excelled in a variety of disciplines
During the Second World War he served in North Africa and Italy with the Royal Army Medical Corps, working with a small but pioneering maxillo-facial unit, treating serious, complex injuries, including burns, with novel surgical techniques and achieving extraordinarily successful results. In addition to the innovative techniques, the other remarkable feature of the unit's work was the quality of their data collection, which set a standard not always achieved by surgeons more than 60 years later.
Chemical weapons expert who was later employed as scientific advisor on major government projects
Ken James was an organic chemist, an expert in chemical warfare and defence against it, a pioneer of operational research, an inventor, a craftsman, an entrepreneur and a writer. He was a man of formidable learning, exceptional energy and limitless curiosity.
He achieved much, having begun with few advantages and some signal disadvantages. Edwin Kenneth George James was born in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, in 1916. His father, then serving as a soldier, never really recovered from the First World War. When he was demobilised he became a groom in Neasden, then still more or less a village. It was in such places on the periphery of West and northwest London that James grew up as his father moved from job to job and his family from one rented flat to the next. Alcoholism, indigence and bailiffs were omnipresent.
His mother walked out — she would live to a great age. Despite a constantly disrupted primary education, James won a place at Latymer Upper in Hammersmith, in those days a grammar school. Like many beneficiaries of that system he considered its abolition to be a folly. Although he was evidently a gifted pupil he left at 16 after taking the School Certificate and sought work in order to provide for his increasingly unemployable father. By night he played trumpet in a jazz band with,among others, Les Hitchcock, nephew of Alfred, and Cliff Townshend, future father of Pete. At Number One Rhythm Club, off Haymarket, they were joined on stage one night by Louis Armstrong.
By day he was a laboratory chemist. At C A Vandervell he was employed by the father of Tony Vandervell who in the late 1950s manufactured the Vanwall Formula One car. At British Drug Houses he was precociously involved in the development of an early commercial thyroxine used to stimulate an underactive thyroid gland. It was made clear to him that an autodidact, no matter how talented, would always suffer a competitive disadvantage to a graduate, no matter how dull.
He cut down on jazz and enrolled in evening classes at the Northern Polytechnic in Holloway to take a London external degree. He had yet to complete it when, just before the outbreak of war, he was offered a job at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down, which he described as having “the atmosphere of a university ... there were scientists of every discipline — there was even an archaeologist who had dug round Stonehenge”.
Having received his degree and several promotions, he was, after little more than a year, devoted to the design of chemical weapons, appointed head of the munitions section of the Australian Field Expermental Station. He decribed this subsequently as “assessing bomb performance ... it actually meant laying waste to a considerable area of the Queensland jungle”.
After the war he was seconded from Porton Down to the British Army of the Rhine, and then to Washington DC, Utah and Alberta where he introduced the practices of operational research. Until late in life he was loath to talk about the tiny fragment of Porton’s work that has rendered the place notorious. His only involvement in experiments “in the chambers” was as a willing guinea pig.
He considered that to judge these seldom injurious experiments, conducted at the height of the Cold War, by the standards of the rights-obssesed early 21st century was morally, judicially and philosophically flawed. He was inured to the sanctimonious sensationalism that attaches to experiments that go wrong. Such experiments were, he thought, the very rare exceptions that proved the rule of Porton’s probity. They provided, and still provide, a straw for the enemies of science to clutch at.
In 1961 he and his wife Peggy built a state-of-the-art house (open plan, underfloor heating, spiral stairs, mixer taps) at the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder to the south of Salisbury Cathedral Close. He designed and crafted tesselations and stained glass. He made most of the furniture and was, a couple of months after they moved in, still making it in his lavishly equipped workshop when he was appointed director, chemical defence research and development, at the War Office.
They let the house and moved to Twickenham. He sat on various Nato committees, went on to become director of the Operational Research Establishment at Byfleet. In 1968 he was given the post of scientific adviser to the Treasury with a brief to apply operational research methods to large-scale government projects including the funding of the Channel Tunnel and the Thames Barrier, the NHS’s expansion and the introduction of decimalisation.
He was instrumental in bringing computers into government, a move that was widely, though ultimately unsuccessfuly, resisted. When he retired he was chief scientific officer. He had foreseen that Victor Rothschild’s Central Policy Review Staff — which he reckoned to be a club-like vanity project — presaged the advent of partial “special advisers” and batallions of consultants. He was astonished by Tony Benn’s “silliness”. He had come to admire William Armstrong, Denis Healey and Harold Wilson. His reaction to any mention of his eventual Salisbury neighbour Edward Heath was a suppressed laugh.
After moving to Twickenham he and Peggy had, somewhat uncharacteristically, joined an amateur film club. There they met a young instrument engineer Alan Lavender and a younger sound recordist Glyn Powell-Evans. Both of them persistently complained about the quality of equipment available. They claimed they could build far better themselves had they a workshop in which to do so. So began PAG, in which he had no official role since it might be seen to conflict with his duties as a civil servant.
When he retired in 1976 he joined PAG, and edged it away from the now oversubscribed sound recorder market into the manufacture of fast chargers for nickel cadmium batteries in ENG cameras, an area where there was little competition because no one had devised a satisfactory means of doing so until he did. He also invented a method of moulding leather so that it might be formed into belts with pouches to contain batteries. Even more prosaically, he exchanged the luxuriously spendthrift life of what he reckoned to be absolutely pointless but highly enjoyable governmentally funded junkets for stands at trade fairs in forgotten towns in Carinthia and Jutland. PAG became a globally recognised name in the television industry. Today it manufactures batteries, lights, chargers, mounts and so on.
He sold his stake in PAG in 1986, and retired for a second time. The couple moved back to the house in Salisbury. James was by now a fairly wealthy man and could freely indulge his hobbies of wine, metalwork, cross-country skiing and recondite philately — “The Ken James Collection of Great Britain” was auctioned at Phillips. But his late-life idyll was coarsely ruptured by his daughter Caroline’s cancer and his wife’s protracted dementia. They would eventually die within months of each other in 1998. At that point he embarked on yet another career, as a writer. Strew on Her Roses, Roses — the line is Matthew Arnold’s — is an unflinching, far from sentimental memoir of his long and happy marriage and of living with a dementia sufferer. It was in fact his second marriage: his first wife had died in 1939 when his Wolseley Hornet lost a wheel and turned over near High Wycombe. His next book Escoffier: King of Chefs was well received in New York, less so in London where his virtual omission of the chef’s dogged peculations was considered over-affectionate.
Ken James was a man whose humanistic affirmation of life touched everyone who knew him. Although he was an ambulatory encyclopaedia he was reluctant to foist his knowledge on the unwilling. He was an enthusiastic optimist who believed in the values of the Enlightenment and in the benificence of science. He was, equally, bewildered by religious faith and contemptuous of the tribalism that accompanies it.
His two wives and his daughter all predeceased him.
Ken James, scientist, was born on December 27, 1916. He died on December 29, 2010, aged 94
