Thomas Christopher Carter
27 December 1917 – 18 August 2014
Thomas Christopher (Toby) Carter was born on 27th December 1917 on the Isle of Portland,
Dorset, where his father, an Officer in the Royal Navy, was based. He had an elder sister, Honor.
Toby's father lost his job as a result of the so-called Geddes Axe, in 1922, when a third of all
officers in the British Armed Forces lost their jobs due to cuts in public spending. Toby's father had
to leave the Navy and started to work for the newly-founded BBC, at Bush House. It meant,
however, that the family had to move to London (they later moved to Woking and, much later, back
to Dorset). The family's economic circumstances had changed, too. It was impressed upon young
Toby that he would have to work very hard at school and win scholarships, if he wanted to have a
good, i.e. public school, education and go on to university. Toby was sent to Weymouth College
and then, after winning the necessary scholarship, to Clifton College near Bristol, a school with
which his family had many connections. A contemporary of his at Weymouth College, incidentally,
was the actor John le Mesurier.
Toby, who was highly intelligent, excelled at all his schools and won many prizes. He went on to
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, again with the help of a scholarship. The fact that an uncle of
his, George Stuart Carter, was a Fellow of that College, must, however, have played an important
role in his choice of college.
Toby's time at Cambridge was not all work He learnt how to fly at Cambridge, in the University
branch of the. Royal Airforce Voluntary Reserve. He loved flying. He was also a member of the
University choir, where he met his first wife, Margaret. He obtained a first class Honours B.A. in
Natural Science at Cambridge, followed by an MA. in the same discipline. While at Cambridge Toby
was involved, too, under John Cockcroft, in the development of what later became known as
Radar.
When the Second World War broke out, Toby's Natural Science background, his flying experience
and his work on radar meant that he was a natural choice when it came to selecting people to set
up radar stations throughout Britain. He also saw war service in France, Norway (where the plane
he was in was shot down by a German plane (in Bodö), India, Singapore, Sumatra and, finally,
Britain again. He was the last member of the RAF to leave Singapore, when Singapore fell to the
Japanese, responsible for seeing to it that several hundred servicemen and civilians were safely
evacuated. Unfortunately, a spy told the Japanese about the planned evacuation.The Japanese
bombed the small boats fleeing across the Strait of Malacca, and when Toby, then a 24-year-old
squadron leader, reached Sumatra, he discovered that only a handful of the several hundred
servicemen and civilians for whom he was responsible had survived. Toby was awarded an O.B.E.
Mil for his courage in Singapore and was promoted to Wing Commander. But he never forgot the
Fall of Singapore and the shock and horror he felt when he discovered that he was alive, whereas
so many of those committed to his charge were dead. He had nightmares for years, reliving those
days in the Far East. One tends, nowadays, to forget just how young many of the officers in the
Armed Forces were, during the Second World War, when they assumed command.
A small anecdote: there was a notice in the papers, saying that Toby was missing, supposed dead,
after the Fall of Singapore. Toby had fought his way through the jungle, on reaching Sumatra, and
for a time nobody knew where he was. Margaret, his first wife, wrote to his mother, to offer her
condolences, saying that she had known him at Cambridge and how very sorry she was to hear
that he had died. When Toby turned up again, his mother sent the letter on to him, remarking that
one young lady missed you, at any rate. When he went home on leave, Toby contacted Margaret
and 18 months later they married
Toby and his wife and first child, Susan, moved to Cambridge after the war, where a second
daughter, Rosemary, was born and where he embarked on a career in Animal Genetics, which
took him to Edinburgh, in 1948, where he started to work on his first doctorate, a DSc. in Natural
Sciences and then, a couple of years later, his second one, a PhD. in Animal Genetics. Susan
remembers well the many cages full of mice lining his study at home, in those days Toby worked in
the MRC group of the Institute of Animal Genetics, at King's Building, under Conrad Hal
Waddington (Wad), earning the money to support a wife and 3 children (a son, Nicholas, had,
meanwhile been born), and then on his theses, until the early hours of the morning, every day. The
MRC group, which also included Mary Lyon, used mice to assess the genetic risks to man of
exposure to ionising radiation.
Susan remembers vividly her sister Rosemary and herself being taken to school by Toby. Their
preparatory school was on the way to King's Buildings. He pointed out all the wild flowers and
birds on the way - which made the long walk more tolerable to two small girls. He knew the names
of most flowers and animals. He was interested in a wide range of things and if he occasionally did
not know something, the relevant volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1924) was consulted
Some Sunday lunches lasted hours, because Toby insisted on reading page after page of the
Encyclopedia Britannica out loud to his family.
Not only did Toby have a profound knowledge of and interest in many things, he also spoke
several languages reasonably fluently, including Hindi, which he taught himself during the war.
In 1954 Toby moved to Harwell, near Didcot, with the MRC. There he stayed until 1958, as Head of
the Genetics Section, working under John Loutit in the Animal Genetics Division of the Medical
Research Council. A further daughter, Lucy was born in August 1958.
A short break from Academia followed. Toby was appointed scientific director of of all Western
Chickens, based in Devizes, Wiltshire. When Western Chickens merged with Buxton Chickens,
Toby returned to Edinburgh, where he became scientific director of Danny Marshall’s Chunky
Chicks. He had swopped mice for eggs and broiler chickens
In 1961 Toby was lured away from Mammon and the business world and made Director of the
PRC (Poultry Research Centre), part of the Agricultural Research Council. The family moved back
to Edinburgh. Sadly, Margaret, his wife, was diagnosed as having ovarian cancer soon after the
move and died in March 1966.
Toby remarried shortly afterwards. He had met Jacquie Walsh, who became his second wife,
during the course of his work and after Margaret's death they grew very close to one another and
then married. Jacquie took on what must have been far from an easy task of bringing up Lucy, who
was very young when her mother died, and Nicholas, who was fourteen.
Toby retired from the PRC (based in Roslin, at the Roslin Institute, in the meantime) at the age of
60, in 1978. During the course of his work at the PRC he was awarded an F.R.S.E. from the Royal
Society of Edinburgh.
He and Jacquie moved to Crewkerne, a small market town in Somerset, after his retirement. Toby
wanted to move to warmer climes. He disliked the Edinburgh weather, with its biting winds. He
suffered badly from sinusitis, which is why he never went out without a beret or a trilby hat.
Crewkerne was not far from the Dorset countryside Toby had so much loved as a child and was
decidedly warmer than Edinburgh
Toby and Jacquie bought a house with a large garden in Crewkerne. Toby began gardening on a
large scale, producing many vegetables. Jacquie often did not know what to do with all the
vegetables, there were so many of them
Toby also joined the Civic Society (now no longer in existence). History had always interested him.
He and Jacquie made many friends and Crewkerne soon became their home.
However, living on a hill, a long way from shops, can be difficult, when one is on longer that young,
so Toby and Jacqie moved to a smaller house, in the middle of Crewkerne,. The garden was also
proving to be too large for Toby to handle nearer to the shops. Now that he had no gardening to
do, Toby began devoting more and more of his time and attention to genealogy, a subject which
had always fascinated him and which he had taken up seriously after his retirement. He
corresponded with second and third cousins throughout the world and got a lot of pleasure out of
doing so He also wrote a chapter for a book on Singapore as well as contributing to a book on
wartime Norway. He typed everything, first of all on a manual typewriter and, later, on an electric
one, absolutely refusing to acquire a computer During this period, Toby also contributed to a book
recording the inscriptions on the gravestones and memorials in the churchyard of St.Bartholomew’s
Church in Crewkerne, often meticulously correcting the information which previous researchers
had collated
Toby was a well-known figure in Crewkerne. He patted all the dogs he encountered and always
exchanged a few words with their owners. He was a member of the local British Legion and every
year attended the Remembrance Day Service, proudly displaying the medals he had received for
his distinguished service during the war. When he got to the stage of needing a stick to assist him
in walking, he used the tip of his stick to flick cigarette stubs, pieces of paper and leaves from the
pavement into the gutter. The pavement was always spotlessly clean, after he had been along it
He went out every day, until quite recently, carrying a small red bag and a small notebook in which
he had written down what he had been told to buy and used to tell passers-by that he had been
sent out to do the low-grade shopping, which meant that he had been instructed by Jacquie to buy
an extra pint of milk or a loaf of bread. He went out for his constitutional every day, sometimes
twice a day.
Toby lived at home until three weeks before his death. Jacquie looked after him devotedly, which
was far from easy for her as she suffers from macular degeneration herself. He was diagnosed as
having cancer of the pancreas in February 2014 and became weaker and weaker, falling a lot,
until, finally, a move to a care home became unavoidable. He died on 18th August in the presence
of Jacquie, his wife of 48 years, and Susan, his eldest daughter, who arrived from Germany an
hour before he died. His other two daughters and his grandson Alex all managed to see him
shortly before his death. Sadly his only son, Nicholas, died in December 2013, eight months before
his father.
Toby will be sorely missed by his family and, I am sure, by many others, as well.
Submitted by Lucy Carter
and other family members
Thomas Christopher Carter, OBE (Mil), AE. FSB. MA, PhD(Cantab), DSc(Edin). Born 27
December 1917. Elected FRSE 1956, Died 18 August 2014