Sir Donald Murdo McCallum CBE FRAeS FREng

FRSE Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...

FIET (6 August 1922 – 18 October 2011) was a Scottish radar engineer and an important industrialist.

Early life

Don McCallum was born in Edinburgh. His father, Roderick McCallum, was a headmaster who married Lillian McPhee. He attended

George Watson's Boys' College George Watson's College is a co-educational independent day school in Scotland, situated on Colinton Road, in the Merchiston area of Edinburgh. It was first established as a hospital school in 1741, became a day school in 1871, and was merg ...

. He gained a BSc (1st) in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from the University of Edinburgh in 1942.

Second World War

He worked for the Navy on homing beacons on the Implacable-class aircraft carriers

HMS Indefatigable (R10) HMS ''Indefatigable'' was one of two s built for the Royal Navy (RN) during World War II. Completed in 1944, her aircraft made several attacks that year against the , inflicting only light damage; they also raided targets in Norway. The ship w ...

and HMS Implacable (R86). From 1942-46 he worked for the Admiralty Signal Establishment, later known as the Admiralty Research Establishment. From June 1944 he worked on the short range VHF radio system for Talk Between Ships (TBS). On the day before D-Day, he had worked on

HMS Bulolo HMS ''Bulolo'' was a 6,267 ton passenger and cargo ship of the Burns Philp, Burns, Philp Shipping Company operating in the South Pacific. In 1939 she was converted into an Armed Merchant Cruiser, then a Headquarters ship, Landing Ship Headquarter ...

, which had directed the landings off

Gold Beach Gold, commonly known as Gold Beach, was the code name for one of the five areas of the Allied invasion of German-occupied France in the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, during the Second World War. Gold, the central of the five areas, was lo ...

Career

Ferranti

He worked for forty years at Ferranti Scotland in Edinburgh, half of those years as general manager from 1968; the company had 8,000 employees. He joined Ferranti in 1947. The company had established itself in Edinburgh during World War II to make gyroscopic gunsights ( gyro gunsights). Projects he oversaw included the Ferranti Laser Target Marker (LTM or FLTM) and the Seaspray radar, and airborne interception radars. He was made an FIEE in 1969 and an FEng in 1982. In 1985 he won the British Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society.British Gold Medal
/ref> He became a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1986. He retired as general manager in 1985, then as Chairman in 1987; six years later Ferranti went bankrupt. Some people believe that had he still been at the company, that bankruptcy may not have happened.

Education

In the early 1990s he was President of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry. He was Chairman of the Scottish Committee of the Universities Funding Council, now the Scottish Funding Council. He also served on the Scottish Tertiary Education Advisory Council.

Personal life

He married Barbara Black in 1949, and they had a daughter in 1950, who died in 2007; his first wife died in 1971. He married again in 1974, and his second wife died in 1997. He married in 2007. He received a CBE in the 1976 Birthday Honours and a knighthood in the 1988 New Year Honours. He lived in his later life from 2007 at Egton with Newland near Ulverston in

South Lakeland South Lakeland is a local government district in Cumbria, England. The population of the non-metropolitan district was 102,301 according to the 2001 census, increasing to 103,658 at the 2011 Census. Its council is based in Kendal. It includes ...

. He died aged 89 in Cumbria. He was buried on Wednesday 26 October 2011 in Edinburgh. He had grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

References

External links

''Independent'' obituary
{{DEFAULTSORT:McCallum, Donald 1922 births 2011 deaths Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Businesspeople from Edinburgh Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Royal Aeronautical Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Ferranti Knights Bachelor People associated with radar People educated at George Watson's College People from Ulverston Scottish electrical engineers 20th-century Scottish businesspeople