Walter Thomas James Morgan CBE. 5 October 1900 – 10 February 2003

Walter Morgan's long and distinguished career followed modest beginnings in Islington, where he was born the second child of Walter Morgan and Anne Edith Morgan (née James). To his children he recalled the street gas lamp lighters and the ‘knockers–up’ who tapped on workers’ bedroom windows with a long pole before alarm clocks were generally used. In some autobiographical notes he recalled his paternal grandfather who was a ‘Tipstaff’ for the Royal Courts of Justice and whose job was to take into custody nobility and persons ‘illustrious by rank’ when ordered to do so by a Judge of the High Court. On his maternal side an uncle became a chemist specializing in oils and fats who eventually spent most of his life in Borneo, where he discovered a vegetable poison that resulted in the development of the insecticide pyrethrum.