OBITUARY : Eric Toresen, May 17, 1925 - June 17, 2006

The Times
July 28, 2006

OBITUARY : Eric Toresen, May 17, 1925 - June 17, 2006
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RAF radio operator on the ground in wartime Burma who later worked for the 
Diplomatic Wireless Service.

TOO young for service at the outset of the Second World War, Eric Toresen 
spent several years with the Cardiff Fire Brigade before he was old enough 
to join the RAF. He subsequently served as a member of a signals unit in 
Burma, sending back information on enemy dispositions to tactical 
headquarters, as General Sir William Slim's 14th Army advanced towards 
Rangoon.

For a few years after the war he served as a radio officer in the Merchant 
Navy. Then, in the 1950s, he joined the Foreign Office, and spent the rest 
of his career as a signals officer in the Diplomatic Wireless Service.

Eric Vincent Toresen was of Norwegian seafaring extraction. His 
grandfather had come to the UK as a pastor to the Mission for Seamen in 
Cardiff in the last years of the 19th century. His father was a master 
mariner who had gone to sea at 14, served under sail and survived three 
torpedo attacks during the First World War. He died when Eric was 12.

Still only 14 when war broke out in September 1939, Eric Toresen 
volunteered for fire watching duties with the Cardiff Fire Brigade, which 
he was later able to enter as a firefighter. In the meantime he had also 
joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps.

He was called up into the RAF in 1943, trained in radio communication and 
was sent to the Far East theatre.

In Burma he joined a 15-man Air Ministry Experimental Station under the 
aegis of 181 Signals Wing RAF. Slim's 14th Army advanced from the Indian 
frontier after the Imphal and Kohima battles of the spring and summer of 
1944, and operated radio communications stations that had to be erected 
and dismantled in the jungle ahead of the main advance of the troops, 
often being exposed to Japanese attacks.

In a campaign in which air supply of troops on the ground played an 
important part, the RAF's communications had a vital role.

Demobilised at the end of the war, in 1948 Toresen joined the Merchant 
Navy and served as a radio officer in a succession of ships, Canton, 
Hinsang and British Glory, sailing mainly out of Hong Kong, until 1951.

In that year he was recruited as a wireless operator by the Foreign 
Office, initially based at Bletchley Park. Thereafter, as a signals 
officer with the Diplomatic Wireless Service, he was attached successively 
to British embassies or high commissions in Ankara (1958), Tripoli (1961), 
Warsaw (1965), Lagos (1967), Athens (1969) and Singapore (1973). In these 
posts he handled both overt and covert radio traffic.

His final appointment was as a principal signals officer at the 
headquarters of HM Government Communications Centre at Hanslope Park in 
Buckinghamshire, from where he retired in 1985.

He is survived by Sylvia, his wife of more than 30 years. A previous 
marriage, of which there were children, was dissolved.

Eric Toresen, HM Government Communications Centre signals officer, was 
born on May 17, 1925. He died on June 17, 2006, aged 81.


see : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2288617,00.html
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