b. 19 January 1920 – d. 26 May 2018

An Appreciation by Steve Bousfield:

 
Paul Douglas Arthur Baird, known to us at Marconi Radar as "Paul", to his family was always "Doug".  

Paul joined the RAF at the beginning of the war and was sent for pilot training at Swift Current, Canada. He spent most of the war in Canada involved in getting aircraft for the war effort to Britain. It was there that he met and married his wife.

With the cessation of hostilities in the Far East he was deployed to Burma and was involved in the repatriation of injured and displaced persons.

A couple of years later he became ill and was diagnosed with TB, only pulling through with the removal of a major part of the infected lung. Invalided out of the RAF he and his brother set up an agricultural business in Hampshire.
By 1954 Paul was fit again and re-joined the RAF, though confined to ground duties, and was assigned to radar with various tours to Scotland, East Anglia and Germany.

His last three years or so of RAF service were spent at RRE, Malvern training for his future career in radar systems.
Paul joined the Airspace Control Division of Elliott Automation at Borehamwood. He became closely involved in a ‘proof of concept’ contract, awarded by the Royal Radar Establishment, that was to explore the application of digital techniques to radar simulation for the training of radar operators. This resulted in Sim X – the world’s first digital radar simulator whose simultaneous track capacity remained unsurpassed for many years.
The success of this project led to contracts for simulators for the Linesman system (Sim M) and for a simulator to be included in the SLEWC system.

With a simulation capability now established Paul set about seeking other customers for the technology. One such was the Egyptian Air Force, or as it was then known United Arab Republic.
Although we were both ‘imports’ from Elliotts, it was only around 1972 when the Egyptian interest became real enough to warrant the appointment of a Systems Engineer that I met Paul. Thus began a friendship and relationship that led to many successful simulator contracts which generated significant benefit for the company. It also was of great benefit to me personally as Paul acted as my mentor and the wisdom and experience that he imparted was a considerable help to my career.
We had some adventures along the way with several round the world trips taking in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. Travel with Paul was always a pleasure and on trips closer to home he always tried to take along several members of the team.

Apart from simulation Paul was a great champion of the S511 and was successful in setting up a trial for the FAA at the Grand Canyon. Whilst the radar was a success the FAA decided that an offshore purchase would be difficult for them
Paul would always fight passionately for something he believed in and was not afraid of ruffling a few feathers along the way.

In civvy street Paul had been able to resume flying, having his own light aircraft. Following his retirement Paul and his wife relocated to Eastbourne where he took up sailing and also horse riding. He survived his wife by several years. He was still driving well into his 90s and took a weekly grocery trip to the local Waitrose.  There is a fine selection of local pubs in the area, some of which he took me to, and to which, until comparatively recently, he enjoyed either walking or driving for lunch.

To me he was a wonderful person to know and to work with and a true gentleman.

Thanks to Paul’s daughter Valerie for her assistance in writing this.

A Tribute from Nick Pinnock:

Paul was something of an inspiration to me, and a real one-of-a-kind. I found him to be a champion of our company’s radar simulator product with a genuine passion for his work that was totally absent from some of his peers. Without Paul, radar simulation might have just withered on the vine. Had it not been for his willingness to keep sticking his neck out, and his nose in, the great and good at Chelmsford might have been happier just to forget it. Simulation was an Elliott-orientated system that was “not-invented-here” and truly a peripheral to the company’s mainstream activities.

Simulators were never going to be really big potatoes, anyway. They were often offered as a bolt-on to a system that dwarfed its price. These operationally valuable but financially trifling accessories would never have survived the full majesty of the company’s factory processes if they were to have an attractive selling price. Paul became not only the product’s champion but also a bit like a very-focused Rottweiler, searching out bureaucracy that was undoubtedly essential for the proper building of multiple leviathans but that would add no value at all to singleton tiddlers assembled largely from major OEM components—their quality was grounded in their own external manufacture, anyway. Otherwise there would have been nested layers of contingency and spiralling prices. So Paul was not only passionate, he used to get quite frustrated sometimes, not only with the Marconi system, but also with the financial strictures of GEC as a whole. And he showed it, which could be chromatically quite impressive, given his complexion.

Fortunately, Paul was also passionately good-humoured and possessed of an easy-going charm, and never short of a laugh. I am pleased to say that I found him an encouraging mentor, once again in a way that was sometimes lacking when I was looking upwards for guidance from my own line-management. Paul himself did not seem a great respecter of hierarchy, amusedly viewing the occasional senior retiree from the MoD who joined the company as less of a help to the sales process than might be desired.

Despite nearly a thirty-year gap in our ages, it was not difficult to get to know Paul; he was one of the most approachable of human beings in my working life, and there’s a couple of anecdotes about his life outside Marconi that I still find revealing. First, he lived in a thatched house at Great Easton for some time, and the time came for him to need the services of a thatcher, who was delayed because his supply of straw had dried up. What with modern cultivars of wheat being on such short stalks and with harvesting machinery developed to match, he was reliant on an old-fashioned long-stemmed crop, specially grown to be cut to lengths suitable for thatching by equally old-fashioned machinery. This would have been no problem, except that the old machinery kept breaking down because nobody knew how to mend it any more—Paul just went and fixed the old technology so he could get his supply of thatch. Second, (fair warning: alert to forthcoming cringe/ouch!) Paul was once painting under the eaves of that self-same thatched house when he managed to topple backwards off the ladder. Somehow catching his toes under a rung, he broke both his ankles at the same time. Ouch! Cripes! The thing is, he was back at work on sticks, selling simulation systems again before you could say “knife”! Lesser men would have been defeated.

My sojourn with MRSL was a short one by many standards, and I went on to experience a number of new challenges. Believe it or not, I would quite often find myself wondering how Paul would have dealt with one or two of the ticklish problems that required more of me than average persistence. Roadcraft, however, was not one of them. Trained pilot or not, I do hope that he has not been rostered for duties in the afterlife as chauffeur to St Peter; Paul could leave me feeling almost as nervous a passenger as could the late Harry Cole. But that, as they say, is another story. Thanks, Paul, you were one of the best, and your professional enthusiasm was as infectious as your laugh.

A postscript to the above from Steve Bousfield:

At the time of the ladder incident Paul's wife was away in Canada visiting relatives and he was at home alone.

Somehow or other he ended up in the hospital at Bishop Stortford where I visited him. A couple of days later he called me at work and asked if I could collect him from hospital and return him home. This I did. 

Next day, as Nick said, and much to everyone's surprise, he turned up at work. He had driven himself in with both feet encased in plaster!

From Robin Webb:
Sorry to hear that Steve. I worked with Paul on the 511 project for the US and Canada in the mid 80s. He rented my house in Rayne for a while when I was Washington. A great gentleman who will be missed.

From Robin Reynolds:
Sorry to hear about Paul but 98 is a pretty good target to aim for. Always found him very helpful when doing demos on the S511. If it hadn't been for him I probably would never have got to the Grand Canyon four times.

Cremation Record