Lives Remembered : Bill Barbour

Thursday, 7 January 2010

Lives Remembered : Bill Barbour
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Bill Barbour, who has died aged 89, was a classicist, codebreaker, 
soldier, schoolmaster, political activist and voluntary worker. He was 
born in 1920, to a family which had founded Combe Barbour ( originally 
Barbour ), the Belfast engineering firm; after the Great War the business 
failed and William Pirrie Barbour, one of a large family, was raised in 
relative impoverishment. His progress in life was aided by his 
intelligence, not wealth. Educated first at Bangor Grammar School, he was 
a scholar at Trinity College, Dublin and took a first in classics in 1942.

At the start of 1943 he moved to London to spend 18 months at a branch of 
the Government Code and Cipher School directed by A.G. Denniston; there he 
worked on Yugoslavian, Finnish and ( most remarkably ) American diplomatic 
codes. He had been interviewed for the job in neutral Dublin on the 
recommendation of his college tutor Joseph Johnston. Nights were spent 
firewatching at St Paul's.

London had a lasting effect on his life as he met at the Foreign Office a 
young secretary named Ann Burrell, who herself spent part of the war 
working at Bletchley Park; they married in 1948 and had four children. In 
1944 Bill joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers as a private; the next 
year he transferred to the Intelligence Corps in Cairo as a 
sergeant..../snip/


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lives-remembered-bill-barbour-1859831.html