John Williams, who died of cancer in June 2002, aged 68, might be described as a poly-monomaniac. Either an activity was worth pursuing to the limit of his ability or it wasn't worth doing at all. In his last weeks, he decided to write an account of some of those activities, and the result runs to more than a dozen densely-filled pages. Here is my condensation of those pages.
John was born in northwest London on 6 January 1934. His father William taught French and German at Kilburn Grammar School; of his mother Frances he says very little, except that she suffered a slow death from breast cancer while John and his sister Sheila were still in their teens.
John's school career was unconventional by today's standards. The disruption caused by the War - he was evacuated with his father's school to Northampton for a time - meant that he attended eleven different primary schools. Once he settled at University College School in Hampstead, he passed his School Certificate at 14 and spent the next four years studying mathematics and physical sciences and playing cricket, including a game in 1950 against a team featuring one D.C.S. Compton.
Cricket was his great enthusiasm in his bachelor days, but as his bowling form declined in his 30s, he decided he could contribute more to the game as an umpire, and he applied himself to this task with his usual thoroughness.
From school, John went as a civilian to the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, near Swindon, in 1952, graduating in 1955 with a First in Civil Engineering. He took a job at the Admiralty Research Establishment at Teddington, spending his leisure hours at the Sports and Social Club of the National Physical Laboratory next door. It was an advertisement on an office noticeboard there that nudged him, in 1960, on the way to becoming a bassoonist.
He had been playing the piano since his mid-teens and singing in choral society concerts, where he was always impressed by the bassoons in the visiting orchestras. He consulted a teacher and, on her advice, didn't buy the French bassoon in the ad but a new, German one instead.
From Teddington, he returned to Shrivenham, this time as a senior lecturer - and, despite his brief experience, as bassoonist in the College's orchestra. Being John, he wasn't content with mediocrity, so he spent five consecutive summers at Ernest Read summer schools to improve his playing, taking every opportunity to play with orchestras in between. This in turn prompted him to try the contrabassoon and eventually to buy one of his own.
On holiday in 1964, a chance meeting at the breakfast buffet at Basle station introduced John to Helen, then working as a GP in Woking. Her confidence and openness in social situations immediately appealed to the diffident young John. Back in England, John notes that it was after a Shrivenham performance of Ruddigore on 27 March 1965 that they became engaged.
They married on 2 April 1966. At almost the same time, John began a new job at the Hydraulics Research Station in Wallingford, working on tidal flows in estuaries. The couple moved into the house in Harwell that was to be their home for the next 21 years. Sons Clive and Nigel arrived in 1968 and 1969.
John remained at Wallingford until it was privatized in 1982. During that time, he took an M.Tech. in Numerical Analysis as an external student at Brunel University to improve his computing skills, and was elected Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1969. At the end of 1975, he was seconded to the Department of the Environment in Marsham Street, London. He hated the travelling and the Yes Minister absurdity of the job: his officemate went on to become Brain of Britain, having spent his Marsham Street years cutting out paper doilies.
Returning to Wallingford in 1978, John began work on what became his Ph.D. thesis, an idea for solving Stokes waves that had begun as part of his M.Tech dissertation. He received his Ph.D. from Brunel in 1983.
In 1982, John opted not to join the new HRS Limited but instead took a job at the then Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment on Portsdown Hill, overlooking Portsmouth Harbour. The recent loss of the Sheffield in the Falklands had increased interest in the radar signatures of ships, and in 1985 John moved to a specialist signatures team at Funtington in West Sussex, where he stayed until his retirement in 1999. In this final phase of his career, he achieved his greatest degree of satisfaction and achievement, building a highly successful and respected team of scientists and becoming regarded as an authority in his field. He was awarded a sought-after Individual Merit Promotion in 1989.
From 1983 to 1987, to allow Clive and Nigel to complete their A-levels without changing schools, John commuted weekly between Harwell and ASWE, but in 1987, once Nigel was established at university, John and Helen moved to their present home in Bosham, only three miles from Funtington.
Freed from commuting and the day-to-day responsibilities of parenthood, John set about deepening his musical involvement. He joined Petersfield Orchestra in 1987 as a bassoonist, also becoming its Chairman the following year, and took a diploma in teaching bassoon, becoming a certified teacher in 1997. He continued his musical commitments until the last weeks of his life.
A reduced commitment to Funtington after his notional retirement date in 1994 left John more time for music and other activities. One of these was astronomy, another long-time enthusiasm. He built an engineering workshop at Bosham, whose first project was to complete a six-inch telescope mirror he had begun in 1959. Once the mirror was finished, he built a complete equatorial-mount telescope frame to house it, and spent many winter nights under a blanket in his garden, watching the progress of the planets.
His final completed project was another mathematical one. John wrote a suite of computer programs to update the tables published in the handbook of the British Astronomical Association. He submitted the final version to the Association in the days before he left Bosham for the last time.
Much of what John did was esoteric to the point of impenetrability, but to understand the breadth of his activities, and the respect he gained along the way, one has only to look at the variety of people gathered to remember him today.
Clive Williams
October 2002
(written for the programme at the memorial concert)
