Although I already knew of him as a noted expert in his field, I got to know David when our hitherto separate parts of GEC came together to form the business embarrassingly known the world over as Tadpole. He was a leading light in Power Transmission, which was characterised as very clever, but rather unworldly, boffins, while I was from the Rectifier business, seen as more practical people (relatively speaking, as the horny-handed sons of toil) whose role in the combined entity was to sprinkle the fairy dust of real-world production onto the innovative concepts of the brainboxes. (This is, of course, a hopelessly unfair generalisation, but with a few grains of truth). We attended many meetings together in the early days of the Tadpole’s life cycle, and it quickly became apparent that David – having a more practical and business-like background than some - could become as frustrated as I was by some of the goings-on.  I recall how this irritation developed as meetings dragged on – his team would start to nudge each other and mutter “QBL”. I learned that this marked the approach of David’s boiling point, the Quivering Bottom Lip, and – sure enough – things could get  livelier after that. I thought that he was remarkably restrained in the circumstances, and my respect for him grew higher still!
 
With sympathy and best wishes,
 
Roger Clark