Noticeboard

John Percy Ineson (G43-50) passed away peacefully on 8th March 2024, aged 90. He was husband to Diana, father to Mark and Jane and grandfather to Tom, Rory, Isabella and Archie. The funeral service is at St Edmund’s Chapel, West Suffolk Crematorium on Tuesday 2nd April at 3.00pm and afterwards at The Cadogan Arms, The Street, Ingham, Bury St Edmunds IP31 1NG.

John was in touch with the Society only a couple of months ago about his subscription for the OF Newspaper.  Prior to that he attended a mini supper gathering organised by James Ruddock-Broyd (G46-52) in July 2019 and the picture was taken at that event.

James reported at the time “The first invitee was John Ineson (G43-50) of Assington whom I had seen regularly since my mother approached him amongst 100 boys on Ipswich station on the first day of term in September 1946 asking John to “Look after little James on his first day.”.  James also reports that “John had a whole room for his memorabilia on the Boer Wars”.  He also collected Fram stuff and his lists of boys in the school photos of his time were handed to me and I tidied them up and passed them on to Archives a few years ago.”

John’s mother was a Church and he was the seed analyst director at the seed merchants W A Church (Bures) Ltd with the contemporary Church brother OFs, Brian (R50-53), Anthony (R52-56) and David (R53-60).

He was a member of Sudbury Round Table, Sudbury Philatelic Society, Sudbury Conservative Club, Hon Sec for Bures and District Agricultural Club, District Commissioner Sudbury and District Boy Scouts and West Suffolk Youth Advisory Committee.

In connection with his interest in philately he amassed a major collection of stamps and wrote a book “Paper Currency of the Anglo Boer War, 1899-1902” which is included in the Distinguished section of the website.

His involvement with scouting has led to the following tribute being posted by Colin Walker “I am very sad indeed to pass on the news of the death of my great friend in Scouting John Ineson.  John was 91 years old [he was 90]. He joined Suffolk Scouting aged 16 remaining in the County for the rest of his life.  He was a  Rover and then a Scout Leader in Bures, Suffolk where he was  one of the  first to arrange for his Group to go to camp on an international air flight. He was an early member of the Scout and Guide Stamp Club becoming its President and very  well known internationally.

He was awarded the Silver Wolf and was an International Commissioner,  very active in the return of Hungary to the Scouting family after the fall of communism. He helped found the Mafeking Museum and was responsible for the campaign to provide a  headstone for the  grave of Sergeant Major Warner Goodyear, the only Mafeking Cadet Baden-Powell ever named.  (Warner Goodyear appeared on a Mafeking ‘Blue’ stamp). 

John without question had  one of the best and widest collections of Scouting items ever assembled including pottery, stamps, postcards, cigarette cards, Baden-Powell artefacts and letters etc etc  He was a personal friend of many members of the Baden-Powell family and most generous with his time and encouragement to all with a quest for knowledge. Our thoughts are with his wife Diana and family.  He will be most sadly missed.”

PROFESSOR HUGH STEPHEN SALTER MBE (R50-56), Stephen Hugh Salter, inventor, born 7 December 1938; died, aged 85, on 23rd February 2024.

He was the inventor of the Salter’s Duck, a wave-power device that was the first of its kind and promised to provide a new source of renewable energy for the world – until it was effectively killed off by the nuclear industry.

In 1982, after eight years of development under Salter’s direction at Edinburgh University, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) was asked by the government to see if the duck might be a cost-effective way of making large quantities of electricity. To the great surprise of Salter, and others, the UKAEA came to the conclusion that it was uneconomic, and that no further government funding should be given to the project.

A decade later it emerged that thanks to a misplaced decimal point, the review had made Salter’s duck look 10 times more expensive than the experiments showed it was likely to be. The UKAEA claimed this was just a mistake, but Salter, who had never been allowed to see the results of the secret evaluation, put it another way: asking the nuclear industry to evaluate an alternative source of energy was like putting King Herod in charge of a children’s home, he suggested. By then, however, Salter had become interested in other projects. As a result his duck has never been tested at sea – although wave-power devices using some of his technology are now in development in the Orkneys and off the coast of Portugal.

The prototype ducks, developed in a multidirectional wave tank of Salter’s invention, are now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where there are a number of other exhibits with links to him, including the only remaining Black Knight rocket, a UK ballistic missile from the 1950s, and Freddy the Robot, from the 60s, the first machine to have artificial intelligence that could “see” and had a sense of touch. He also invented the Dervish, a low-cost method of clearing landmines, by using a revolving three-wheeled vehicle with a constantly changing path.

Perhaps the range of those projects sums up Salter’s mind better than anything else. Colleagues who worked with him said that while other scientists concentrated for years on one subject to the exclusion of all others, Salter was fascinated by new problems.

Although it was the oil shock of 1973 that first stimulated his interest in renewable energy, he later became one of the first scientists to realise the dangers of climate change. Doubting that the slow pace of cutting fossil-fuel use would be enough to save the planet from dangerous overheating, at the turn of the 21st century he set up a scheme to develop marine cloud brightening – an idea to produce more and brighter clouds in the middle of the oceans in order to reflect sunlight back into space, thereby keeping the oceans cooler and reducing sea-level rise.

He designed a project to build a large number of automated ships spraying aerosols from sea water into the atmosphere to create and brighten clouds in the middle of the world’s oceans and – having made a considerable fortune by selling some of his inventions – was able to set up the Lothian School of Technology just outside Edinburgh for £2.4m. The centre provides premises for up to 60 of his students to work on inventions and develop them commercially beyond their time at university.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Stephen was the son of British parents who had emigrated there. His father joined the Royal Navy as a meteorologist during the second world war and afterwards the family moved to Britain. Stephen attended two boarding schools before arriving at Framlingham College.

He began designing, building and flying model aeroplanes, and his ambition was to take an engineering degree at Cambridge University. But he failed to get good enough grades, so became an apprentice at Saunders-Roe, an Isle of Wight aero- and marine-engineering company, where he was involved in the Black Knight rocket project. After studying at night classes he was finally accepted at Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, including Metallurgy.

He moved to Edinburgh University in 1967, aged 29, to become a research fellow working on artificial intelligence in robots. Within six years he was also a lecturer and had begun his work on wave energy. In 1984 he became professor of engineering design.

Perhaps Salter’s left-leaning politics and his willingness to take on the London establishment prevented him from being showered with the honours he deserved, but he was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1991, made MBE in 2004, and inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2021. He never stopped working, becoming an Emeritus Professor at retirement age and continuing to research, advise companies and refine his inventions until the end.

He married Margaret Donaldson, a professor of Development Psychology at Edinburgh University, in 1973. She died in 2020. He is survived by his younger brother, Edmund.