Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

He participated not only in the D-Day operations, the ill-fated Arnhem attack
and the Rhine crossing, but also in SOS/SAS missions to Norway.AfterV-E Day
David was sent with his squadron to eastern India on a mission to fly across
Burma and deliver supplies to the Chinese Republican forces under the
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. He had to contend with the eastern end of the
Himalayan mountains, or “The Hump”, with woefully inaccurate maps.
David left the military with a Distinguished Flying Cross and came to King’s
in 1947 to study Mechanical Science (as engineering was then called). His
academic prowess won him a place at a summer-exchange program with the
Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology in 1949. During his student days he was
an active member of the University Gliding Club, this time flying civilian
versions of the motorless gliders that he had once tugged with four-engine
Halifax bombers during the war. With a First, the Aeronautics Prize and fond
memories of King’s, David eventually left Cambridge after completing his
undergraduate degree.
He returned to the RAF, working on the development of supersonic planes at
Farnborough. But life in the peacetime RAF offered little excitement
compared to that of wartime, especially for a dynamic personality like David’s.
Soon he left the RAF for the second time, now for the fast-paced world of
insurance brokerage in the City. David proved equally adept in his professional
life as he had been in flying or in his scholarly pursuit. He eventually became
the Director of the insurance company Sedgwick Forbes and later helped draft
the new insurance legislation of the Cayman Islands.
The passion for flying, and gliding in particular, remained a constant in
David’s life. It was on the tarmac of the Redhill Aerodrome in Surrey that he
met his wife, Barbara, whom he married in 1952. In the 1950s David,
together with some friends, started a gliding syndicate championing a
pioneering design in which the glider had a retractable undercarriage. The
first meeting was in the Cambridge home of Dr Alice Roughton, and it was
after the crest painted on the side of her old Rolls Royce that the syndicate’s
glider was named Pigs Rampant. All the subsequent gliders of the syndicate
were given pigs’ names and David started a collection of toy pigs, winged if
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OBITUARIES