[This lecture is rescheduled from Thursday 6th June] 

On Thursday 19th September 2024 at 6pm, Richard Morris will discuss the life and legacy of Barnes Wallis. This virtual talk will be live-streamed via Crowdcast.

Barnes Wallis has been claimed as Britain’s greatest engineer of the twentieth century. Richard Morris’s new biography rests on sources that include company, public and technical records, the private papers of individuals, the archive of Wallis’s first biographer, and thousands of letters.

Focusing on four areas - the lasting influence of Wallis’s mother, the emergence of the R100 airship, Wallis’s friendship with the shadowy banker Leo d’Erlanger, and tensions across government and the aero industry in the 1950s and 60s - Richard Morris will explore opportunities, challenges and questions that arise from the letters.

Richard Morris is an archaeologist and historian who grew up in north Worcestershire and began his career working on excavations under York Minster. He is emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Huddersfield. Faith (Churches in the Landscape, Evensong), place (Yorkshire), cultural memory (Time’s Anvil), battlefield archaeology, aviation and its people are among the themes in his writing. Dam Buster completes a trio of biographies – Guy Gibson (1994) and Cheshire(2000) are the others – which meet in the record of No. 617 Squadron RAF.

Virtual Lecture: Dam Buster: Barnes Wallis: An Engineer's Life