Introduction

Message received from Graham Pearce:

It is with sadness that I report to you the death of my father, John Pearce.  John worked for Marconi Radar at Writtle Road for many years.  He died on 20th January.

The funeral will be family only but there will be a celebration service held for John at Poulner Baptist Chapel, Ringwood, BH24 3HZ on Thursday 13th February at midday.

Tributes

From John L

RIP John - a great colleague and a good friend. He will be much missed!

From Alan M

I worked with John on several Projects including, TOR in Sweden and shared an office with him for quite a while.

He was always a great person to work with – very helpful and fair when he was running things.

John’s technical know-how extended into many fields and discussing things with him was always a pleasure. I was very glad to see his name in the honours list a few years ago, it was well deserved.

RIP John

From Barry P

John was a very well respected engineer and Project Manager with Marconi, as colleagues John Lancaster and Alan Matthews have affirmed. He was directly associated with setting up and managing the JORN (Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network) project in the UK and Australia in the early 1990s.  This included the joint Marconi Communications and Marconi Radar aspects. Basically the system used HF communications transmitters and the reflective properties of the ionosphere to transmit and receive reflected signals over very long distances beyond the horizon.  As a result, he spent some time working  with our teams at the Marconi JORN project headquarters in Melbourne.

From Malcolm M

Sad news to hear that John has passed on. He was a very pleasant person to have known. I first met him when he was the Company's Contract Manager on IUKADGE. It was at the start of the Installation phase when he was negotiating with UKSL & MOD with respect to the payment programme; and he asked me for various breakdowns of the programme that would give advantage to the Company. Five years later he was briefly my manager when I was in the Operations Department under John Mackinnon. At the time JORN was being negotiated, and when the contract was won I went with him out to Australia. He was the General Manager GMSPL HF Division. We were in 35, Winterton Road, Clayton, Melbourne which was shared with TELSTRA. Keith Hainsworth was the Financial Manager. The Engineering staff were in 22, Winterton Road. John stayed for a year and returned to the UK; at which time Arthur Feist ex Plessey/UKSL manager took over. It was only in the Jim Chapman /David Overton era that GMSPL HF Division Head Office moved to No 6 Winterton Road.
John did some sterling work on contracts for and on behalf of the Company.
RIP John.