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From this article in "Granta" by his son Sir Peter Stothard b. 1951, editor of "The Times" 1992 - 2002:

"Like most of our neighbours, he had learned about radar by chance, in his case while becalmed for the war years off West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He had bought red ­leather-­bound knives for his mates back in the Yorkshire­/Lincolnshire borderlands; he had sent postcards of Dakar’s six-­domed cathedral to his strictly Methodist mother; he had never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. And when he had needed something else to do, he chose to watch the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea, turning solid things into numbers. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life, in the south of England instead of the north because that was where the radars were made, quietly reasoning through his problems on his ‘bench’ in the Marconi laboratory and in an armchair at home, spreading files marked ‘Secret’ like a fisherman’s nets. He earned £340 per year, as my mother and I discovered when he died."

Obituary

Max Stothard, 1925 - 1997

Foreword by Don Halstead:
To me very touching, the article below appeared in The Times two days after Max Stothard died in 1997. This seems like a good moment to resurrect it! His son Peter was then, of course, Editor of The Times.

But first, for those whose Latin is as hopeless as mine, a word of explanation about ‘Ave Atque Vale’. You will see why later on!

The Romans used ave and avete by themselves for saying hello or goodbye. Later ave was a morning greeting, and vale was used when leaving someone in the evening. In classical Latin, ave atque vale came to be a formulaic farewell to the dead, as in the touching final line of the obituary poem that the lyric Roman poet Catullus addressed to his departed brother : Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale : “now for all eternity, my brother, farewell.”

Don Halstead

From The Times, Wednesday December 31 1997

“There will be no obit

There will be no obituary of my father in The Times. He was not quite good enough at cricket or cards, although he played both well when he was young. He was named after my grandfather's Yorkshire hero, Wilfred Rhodes, but lost quickly both the Wilfred and the highest ball-spinning ambitions. From soon after he was born on April 21, 1925, to soon after 2.30 on Monday afternoon, December 29, he answered to the name Max.

A man of his age might reasonably have booked his space on the obituaries page during the war. My father set out for war when he was supposed to have been setting out as a student. He joined the Royal Navy despite all his family's efforts to keep him at home. But he sailed away to West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He bought red-leather knife cases and postcards of Dakar's  six-domed cathedral and never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. He was lucky, he said; but that was then.

When he was not shooting fish or trading cans for trinkets, he studied the young science of radar, watching the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea. He was not a radar pioneer in the sense that our obituarists would require. He was one of thousands who fiddled with diodes, quartz and wire to make radar work. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life.

He returned to England when the war was won and took up the place at Nottingham University which he had won before. He batted and bowled and played bridge and studied physics. He had a striped blue-green-yellow blazer, which he bequeathed to his son long before this week and which made it easier for my friends to recognise me at Oxford in the Seventies in the dark. It will go in turn to his beloved granddaughter or grandson — whichever might want it first.

He had a brain which engineers described as Rolls-Royce. It was powerful but he did not like to test it beyond a purr. On July 17, 1950, he joined the Marconi Company [MWT] at its research laboratory in Great Baddow, Essex, on a salary of £340 per year. He worked on many and various half-forgotten, half-suc­cessful, mostly never needed air defence systems that protected Brit­ish skies during the Cold War. He reasoned through his problems in an armchair at home, spreading files marked "Secret" like fisher­men's nets. He preferred to solve technical glitches in series not in parallel. He found solutions singly. He hated to stress the machinery of his mind.

Later he became a manager for Marconi and a salesman whom, in my own too simple student days, I would call an arms salesman. He travelled and loved to travel. He came to know thousands of fellows in the science of spotting fast-moving objects in the sky. He loved Marconi, and later the Ericsson Radar Company, for whom he worked in his retirement. He had space in his purring life for hundreds to be his friend. But he long did not seek the advancement that an obituarist would wish; and latterly, when he sought it, he did not find it.

He sometimes misunderstood people. He liked to see them as electro-machinery, as fundamen­tally capable of simple, selfless working. He was closed to the| communications of art. His favour­ite picture was a photograph, of an oil-production platform being towed through a fiord. He listened to no music. He was especially offended by the violin and the soprano voice. His passions were for moving parts, moving balls, jet-streams in the skies over air shows, Channels golf club, the Royal Marines and Beotys restaurant on St Martin's Lane. Other minds were not his pasture.

If I had asked him his own list of passions this week, it would have been headed by the Farleigh Hos­pice in Chelmsford, whose powers of love and peace-bringing should be celebrated in sky-written letters of gold. Their nurses saved his death. He claimed that he had never had a dream until the painkillers for his prostate cancer brought him dreams, too. On Monday he died peacefully in diamorphine dreams.

Thirty years ago, when I was setting off for Oxford to study Latin and Greek, he gave me his own father's copy of the second six books of Virgil's Aeneid. The name B. Stothard, in firm now faded hand, still sits  inside the flyleaf.  My wonderful father did not much care for Latin or for my studying it. But he never tried to stop me. He never closed a gate. I felt guilt this week when the best farewell that I could say was, in the adapted words of Catullus, "atque in perpetuum, pater, ave atque vale". I think he heard me.

Atque in perpetuum - there is no need for an obituary in The Times.

Peter Stothard”

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