Secretariat

Harry Hunter

We are very sorry to have to report that we have recently been informed of the death, on 14 September 2005, of Dr Harry Hunter, former Lecturer in the Department of Physics.

Dr Hunters route to an academic career was not an easy one. His initial degree studies at what was then the University College of the South West in Exeter were interrupted by war service with the Signals Research and Development Establishment of the Ministry of Supply. Dr Hunter returned to Exeter in 1946 but was then forced to withdraw by the death of his father. He eventually resumed his studies as a part-time, later full-time, student at Birkbeck College, London and was awarded an External BSc in Physics in 1952. He then spent a year at Birkbeck pursuing research on cosmic rays on a part-time basis, before being awarded a full-time University postgraduate studentship. In 1955, he was appointed to a three-year post as Assistant Lecturer at Queen Mary College, London and held a Temporary Lectureship at the same institution in 1958-59. He was awarded his PhD in 1961 for a thesis entitled Observations underground on the penetrating component of air showers.

Keen to continue his research into cosmic rays, Dr Hunter joined the Department of Physics at Leeds as a Senior Research Assistant in January 1962. He was appointed to a Lectureship in the following year. Dr Hunter was one of the earliest workers in the long-running Haverah Park project to seek the origin of the most energetic cosmic rays, and for many years helped to develop numerical methods of deducing the arrival directions and energies of these radiations.

Dr Hunter retired in September 1987.