James Rennie Whitehead (1917 – )

In 1931 James Rennie Whitehead moved from Barrow to Great Harwood. His father and brother rented a shop opposite the Mercer Memorial Clock, which housed a radio business. With little stock they relied on James's ability to repair faulty radios,

“The first mains-operated radio I repaired was the first one I had ever seen.”

Within a couple of years they had built up the business and opened a second branch in Clayton-le-Moors.

During the school holidays he and his brother Jack undertook electrical house-wiring jobs and when kit radios became the rage he found himself running a one-man assembly line for those reluctant take on self-assembly themselves.

James had only one aim in working so hard and that was to go to University. Without the time to work for a state scholarship he had to wait several years before he could enrol on the Honours Physics Course at the University of Manchester in September 1936 where Bernard Lovell, the radio astronomist, was in his first year of lecturing. They would eventually become wartime colleagues.

Whitehead had ambitions of going on to a PhD at the University of Cambridge but the war put paid to that and in the summer of 1939 he was interviewed for a job in radar research at Bawdsey secret research establishment in Suffolk, later called Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), and it was here he became a ‘boffin'; working long and hard on those essential devices which made up the radar system that the RAF was hungry for. He worked at Bawdsey until 1945 and at TRE from 1945 to 1949

“ I have also been fortunate to serve through three or four other careers, including research in two universities and in a multi-national industry, followed by a decade at the centre of government and a few years as a private consultant. I have been privileged to spend a good part of my time during the last 20 years working, in the context of the Club of Rome and its National Associations, towards a better future for coming generations.”

A fair achievement for an ‘adopted son' of Great Harwood

Taken from: "Memoirs of a Boffin" formerly “Radar to the Future” Copyright © 1995, J. Rennie Whitehead