Frank Kearton, Baron Kearton

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher Frank Kearton, Baron Kearton Kt OBE FRS (born February 16, 1911 in Congleton , Cheshire , † July 2, 1992 in Stoke Mandeville , Buckinghamshire ) was a British economic manager who was a member of the House in 1970 as a life peer under the Life Peerages Act 1958 of Lords .

Life

Kearton, son of a bricklayer, started after visiting the Hanley High School and a Grammar School in 1929 to study chemistry at St John's College of the University of Oxford , which he in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts graduated (BA Chemistry) as valedictorian. He then worked for the chemical company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in London from 1933 to 1940 , before he worked for the Atomic Energy Project , the British government's nuclear energy program, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War . Among other things, Rudolf Peierls , Klaus Fuchs and Tony Skyrme also collaborated with the US atomic bomb program ( Manhattan Project ). After the end of the war in 1945, he was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of the British Empire for his services there .

He then joined the chemical and textile company Courtaulds , which belonged to the Samuel Courtauld family, in 1945 as manager and head of a chemical engineering department , where he initially became a board member in 1952 and was vice chairman between 1961 and 1964. Then Kearton, who became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1961, took over the position of chairman of the board and held this position for eleven years until 1975. During this time, he was also president of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) from 1972 to 1974 and was also involved in 1973 to 1980 also as chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents , the royal society for the prevention of accidents.

Kearton, who was knighted as a Knight Bachelor in 1966 and henceforth had the suffix "Sir", was named a Life Peer with the title Baron Kearton , of Whitchurch in the County of Buckingham, by a letters patent dated February 5, 1970 House of Lords, of which he was a member until his death.

After leaving Courtaulds, in 1976 he became Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), which was newly founded on the basis of the Petroleum & Submarine Pipe-lines Act 1975, and held these functions until 1979. He also held the office of from 1978 to 1979 Chair of the British Association for the Advancement of Science . He then took over the office of Chancellor of the University of Bath in 1980 as the successor to Christopher Hinton, Baron Hinton of Bankside, and held this position until his death. From 1980 to 1982 he was also chairman of ASLIB , the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux .

honors and awards

Kearton has received multiple awards for his long service to industry and society. He received the following honors, among others:

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Laucht: Elemental Germans: Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls and the Making of British Nuclear Culture, 1939-1959 , 2011, pp. 52, 57, 87, ISBN 0-19991-1-509
personal data
SURNAME Kearton, Frank, Baron Kearton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kearton, Christopher Frank, Baron Kearton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economic manager
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Congleton , Cheshire
DATE OF DEATH 2nd July 1992
Place of death Stoke Mandeville , Buckinghamshire