Morien Bedford Morgan, 20 December 1912 - 4 April 1978

Abstract

Morien Bedford Morgan was born on 20 December 1912 at Bridgend, Glamorganshire, S. Wales. He died suddenly on 4 April 1978 at the Master’s Lodge of Downing College, Cambridge, where he had been Master since 1972. After a school life involving a few moves for one reason or another, he read engineering at Cambridge University and, in keeping with his natural inclination, learnt to think in fundamental engineering terms. This was one of his great strengths. He was not particularly interested in academic work for its own sake unless he could visualize its being of use in an engineering project, but at the same time he worked hard to bring scientific thought and method into many aspects of engineering application. It was while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge that he became fascinated with aeronautics, and good at it too, since he won the Aeronautics Prize in his year. Partly owing to circumstances, he made one false start in industry after taking his degree, but within a year he had taken a job in the Aerodynamics Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (R.A.E.) in Farnborough, Hampshire. There he met Sylvia Axford, to whom he was married in Farnborough on 19 April 1941; there are three daughters, Carol, Deryn and Gwyneth. In aeronautics his enthusiasm was infectious, and for someone with his love of aeroplanes he could not have started his aeronautical career at a better place than in the Aerodynamics Department at the R.A.E. Nor could his career with aeroplanes have been better timed, at least for variety and excitement, than it was, spanning as it did the war years and the periods of rapid development both before, when the need was at last recognized, and after, when jet engines and sweepback were exploited on a large scale.