In the case of the scientist, there is more subtlety. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), his father was Patrick Watson Watt, a carpenter and joiner, and Robert grew up with no hyphen. It was not until he was knighted in 1942 that Sir Robert adopted the name Watson-Watt, so a hyphen in any description of his activities before that year is incorrect.
From 1936 Watson Watt was superintendent of the Bawdsey research station at Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk. It is cheering now to note the progress being made, by the Bawdsey Radar Trust, in the preservation of Bawdsey, so much a location associated with victory in the Battle of Britain.
Watson Watt was based at Bawdsey for a relatively short time, but the two are linked for all time. How reassuring to be reminded that the great have foibles like the rest of us. The ODNB in its description of his life remarks that:
“Both in speech and in writing his style was usually elaborate, sometimes to the point of ornateness, which led one colleague to comment, ‘He never said in one word what could be said in a thousand’; but by contrast the most vital thing he ever wrote, his report to the Tizard committee on the feasibility of radar in February 1935, was a model of brevity and clarity. Without the crucial step that it represented, and without the drive that he put into its realization, the battle of Britain would have been much more difficult to win, and could have been lost.”
Geoff Simpson FRHistS
Courtesy andrewhendry.com
