Sir Barnes Wallis
Sir: With The Times still absent for a little longer, the obituaries in the daily press of Sir Barnes Wallis, who has died at the age of 92, have been rather brief and impersonal.
He is famous for great aircraft structural work, from the R100 airship to the Wellesley, the Wellington and the Warwick up to the four-erigined Windsor, which latter never went into production owing to the ending of the second world war. Equally well remembered is the remarkable series of widely differing bombs for which he was responsible. Less appreciated is the enormous scope of his swing-wing project, lost to this country through governmental wind-up over development costs, and his years of largely single-handed work on a hypersonic aircraft project.
Apart from these, his post-war work included a detailed investigation into the causes of trawler losses through the buildup of ice on masts, decks and superstructures; and plans for the use of very large; high-speed, cargo-carrying submarines. In fact, his fertile genius was capable of producing a remarkable and original answer to any problem put to him, or of his own conception. Had he lived at a time when companies and governments were less afraid of rising costs, I feel he would have been regarded as a 20th-century Brunel.
Awkward and very difficult he may have been with those who did battle with him, but I was in a position to appreciate the human kindness of the man. He was always approachable and happy to listen to much younger people and to care about them. In 1937, when the Wellington prototype was lost through control failure, one of the crew was killed. Amid all the technical investigation and argument as to the cause of the crash, Wallis was deeply concerned that he might be to blame for the death of Leading A ircraftsnian Smurthwaite.
Maurice Hare Fordley Hall, Middleton, Saxmundham, 'Suffolk
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