Laurence Champney
Laurence Champney (1897-1951)
1951 Obituary.[1]
Laurence Champney, B.Sc, who died at his home in Wimbledon on the 28th August, 1951, was a Principal Scientific Officer of the Royal Naval Scientific Service. He was born at Tynemouth on the 29th November, 1897, and began his technical training at the Heaton Works of C. A. Parsons and Co. After a period of war service in the Royal Engineers, he entered Armstrong College, where he studied electrical engineering under the late Prof. W. M. Thornton, taking his London B.Sc. with honours in 1920. In that year, he joined the staff of Dr. C. V. Drysdale at the Admiralty Experimental Station at Shandon, Dunbartonshire, where he was associated with investigations into the magnetic field around a submerged cable. In 1922 he was appointed Junior Scientific Officer in the then newly formed Scientific Research and Experiment Department of the Admiralty, being attached to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington. His activities here up to the outbreak of the Second World War covered a wide field, ranging from dielectric studies of rubber and similar materials for electric cables to the design of navigational instruments; he was co-patentee of an automatic course plotter which has been widely used in the Royal Navy. In 1939 he was appointed head of the group dealing with development of naval gyroscopic equipment, a subject in which he thereafter specialized. He revelled in tackling the technical difficulties inevitably associated with gyroscopic mechanisms for use in fighting ships, and his solutions to some of the problems can be regarded as a major contribution to British naval gunnery. In July, 1951, he went to sea in one of H.M. ships to study at first hand the performance under rough weather conditions of some important equipment of his own design, and his untimely death occurred only a few days after his return home. He is survived by his widow and three sons.
He was widely recognized as a master of his subject, and he will be sadly missed by his many friends and acquaintances, not only in Service circles, but also in the numerous industrial concerns with which his official duties brought him into contact; he will especially be mourned by his colleagues on his own staff by whom he was much beloved.
He joined The Institution as a Student in 1918 and was elected an Associate Member in 1924 and a Member in 1951.