Humphrey Derek Howse, M.B.E., D.S.C., F.R.I.N., F.R.A.S.

Derek Howse was born in Weymouth on 19 October 1919, the son of a Royal Navy captain, and educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He went to sea as a midshipman in 1937 and served in destroyers and minesweepers throughout the war, being mentioned in despatches three times, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and promoted to lieutenant-commander in 1949. Howse served in the Korean war from 1952-4 as navigator of the cruiser Newcastle in the hazardous waters of the Yellow Sea, and retired from the service in 1958. After working for three different commercial enterprises in five years he returned to a maritime environment, albeit ashore, when he was appointed assistant keeper in the Department of Navigation and Astronomy at the National Maritime Museum in 1963. Howse had no great hopes of this rather desperate leap in the dark but, with a growing family, he needed the stability it offered. He expected to be surrounded by dusty objects and thoroughly bored whereas, as he was to say later, he had never worked so hard nor so rewardingly. Most of all, Howse relished the task of supervising the conversion of the Meridian Building of the old Royal Observatory at Greenwich into a department of the National Maritime Museum. The eighteenth-century building, which had been almost derelict since 1950, had been extended to perfect positional astronomy in the 1800s by a succession of Astronomers Royal. Howse’s job was to restore each part to its original state when in active astronomical use and to reinstate the ancient instruments, mainly telescopes, to their working position. Requiring physical stamina, ingenuity and technical skill, it was a suitable job for a seafarer and occupied his team for four years. The operation was completed in 1967, when the restored building was opened to the public by the Astronomer Royal. In 1969 Howse was appointed Head of Astronomy and published his first book, The Clocks and Watches of Captain James Cook, followed by The Tompion Clocks at Greenwich, jointly with M Sanderson, in 1970. His book Francis Place and the Early History of Greenwich Observatory (1975) contains reproductions of original prints by Place in the Antiquaries’ collection. Howse was appointed Deputy Keeper and Head of Navigation and Astronomy in 1976 and promoted to Keeper in 1979 with special responsibility for the Museum’s incomparable astronomical and horological collections. On retirement in 1982 he was immediately appointed Caird Research Fellow for four years, and spent the academic year 1983-4 as Clark Library Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles; the transformation from sailor to scholar was complete. Howse also proved an excellent committee man as a member of the council of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science, the British Astronomical Association, the Royal Institute of Navigation, the Society for Nautical Research, the Hakluyt Society and the Scientific Instrument Society, and was elected a liveryman of the Clockmakers’ Company in 1981. He published regularly in learned journals and wrote Greenwich Observatory, volume 3, The Buildings and Instruments (1975). In retirement he published Nevil Maskelyne: the seaman’s astronomer (1989); A Buccaneer’s Atlas, with Norman J W Thrower (1989); Radar at Sea (1993) and a revised edition of his 1980 publication Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (1997). He died on 26 July 1998.