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

CHRISTOPHER ARTHUR EXTON (1958) read Mechanical Sciences at
King’s. He was born in Bury on 7 May 1939 and attended Rossell School. In
1961 he joined English Electric as a graduate apprentice. Christopher stayed
with the company, which later became GEC, ultimately becoming
Manufacturing Manager. After retirement he took up tutoring and voluntary
work and was also the Treasurer of the Leicester Philharmonic Society.
Christopher died in Leicester on 11 April 1999.
DAVID STANLEY EVANS (1934) was a vibrant and distinguished astronomer
whose scientific career spanned five continents and nearly 70 years.
Born in Cardiff in 1916 and educated at Cardiff High School for Boys, David
came to King’s to read Mathematics, and was an outstanding student, winning
the Tyson Medal for Astronomy in 1937. His passion for astronomy led him
to a PhD at the Cambridge Observatory, where his thesis was on The Formation
of the Balmer Series of Hydrogen in Stellar Atmospheres. During the war, he registered
as a conscientious objector (a decision he came to question in later life) and
worked as a medical physicist. He also held an appointment as a research
assistant at the University Observatory in Oxford, where he worked on solar
spectroscopy, as well as being a scientific adviser for the journal Discovery,
precursor of the New Scientist.
David worked for 22 years in South Africa, at the Radcliffe Observatory and
the Royal Observatory. He specialised in obtaining “fundamental” data for the
stars, and this remained the theme of David’s research all his life. He was a
pioneer in the use of lunar occultation to measure the diameters of stars and
separations of double stars. After initial scepticism, this work was accepted as
one of the few direct methods of measuring stellar diameters, but he was
given rather little recognition for it. His legacy is the large amount of reliable
data which he and his colleagues published in various papers and catalogues.
Over his lifetime, he produced numerous articles and a large number of
books, one of them with his wife Betty Hall Hart, whom he had married in
1949 and with whom he had two sons.
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OBITUARIES