Geoffrey George John Cooper 1920 – 2024

Obituary provided by Geoffrey’s grandson, Edward.

 On another occasion, Geoff witnessed Winkle undertake a test catapult launch from Farnborough in front of Winston Churchill. There were apparently nerves in the team and a mistake (not his) was made in setting up the launch. It meant the launch rocket accelerated off the catapult immediately under Winkle’s Seafire. Winkle got away cleanly but there were a few red faces and an investigation of what went wrong. Winkle associated with what he called the ‘junior boffins’ rather than decamp to the officer’s mess and a friendship was forged.

Post retirement, Geoff spent the best part of a decade researching the definitive book on the NAD (Farnborough and the Fleet Air Arm, Pub 2008, Ian Allan). This brought him back into contact with Winkle who wrote the foreword to the book. Geoff was a first-time author at 88 years old and he and Winkle sat in blistering heat at the 2008 SBAC Farnborough Air Show signing copies. They last met, as sprightly nonagenarians, at the unveiling of the Cody Memorial at Farnborough in 2013.

Apart from Home Guard duties, Geoff’s war was an entirely technical one. He had flown in six different aircraft on 12 occasions, being deployed on 46 occasions on 31 different aircraft carriers and spent 134 days at sea off the coast of Scotland, including Scapa Flow and the Irish Sea. On one occasion, on a particularly windy day, he flew in a Grumman Martlet to land on HMS Pretoria Castle where he disembarked, feeling very sick, to find he was being tasked to perform the role of an Admiral in a practice reception for the following day. He just about got down the red carpet being welcomed by Captain Dickens without being sick. He was taken to the mess and given a stiff whisky to settle his stomach – something as a teetotaller he was unused to. Sometimes with lack of space on board, they would have to spend the night in a nearby prison cell as at Campbelltown on the Mull of Kintyre. He always said, ‘at least they didn’t lock the cell door’.

His time at the NAD ended in December 1945 with the ground-breaking Vampire jet plane landing on HMS Ocean in The Solent. Again, Winkle Brown was the pilot who became the first in the World to achieve a jet landing on a carrier, and only after disobeying orders to abort the landing. Geoff was on board taking the instrument measurements that day.

Geoffrey was born on the Mountbatten Estate (where the family had a smallholding) at Romsey on 14th March 1920 to parents, George and Alice Cooper, part of a long-standing mill engineering family. Initially at school in Romsey, he transferred to the Farnborough School when his father took an engineering role at the local water treatment works following the depression-induced bankruptcy of the mill engineering business. Geoff gained one of the sought after five-year engineering apprenticeships in 1936 and continued his academic qualifications by night school. He gained Chartered Engineer status with memberships of the Institutes of Mechanical, Electrical, Heating and Ventilation Engineers as well as becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

At Farnborough School, he met his first wife, Dora May Dean. They went their separate ways in 1936. Geoff recalled as recently as his 104th birthday that he had written to Dora suggesting they keep in touch. She wrote back that ‘she couldn’t imagine wanting to have anything to do with him.’ Love blossomed eventually with their marriage in 1944, and he again recalled the shock of being phoned at the RAE to be told she had been injured in the V1 flying bomb attack on the Air Ministry in Aldwych (where she worked) in June that year. He said how she was fortunate to be out of the office (there were multiple casualties with a death toll widely estimated at 200, many in Adastral House, the Air Ministry building) but she was taken, injured by flying glass, into the BBC at Bush House who called him at his office.

She was accompanied home on the train, and he met her at Farnborough Station and recalled her blood-stained coat shimmering with shards of glass embedded in it. Shortly afterwards, Dora developed a nervous condition, initially diagnosed as neuritis. This turned out to be more correctly diagnosed as multiple sclerosis in the early 1950’s. They had two children Peter, who followed Geoff into a RAE engineering apprenticeship, retiring as an aviation insurance loss adjuster and author, and Paul, a retired commercial and finance director.

Post war, Geoff took up a mainstream engineering role with the Ministry of Works in London involved with multiple military sites around the UK. Then the opportunity came to take up the Principal Engineer role in a new project at the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock, Farnborough in 1960. This was known as Cell 4 and was a major engineering infrastructure project to test the new Olympus engine that was planned for the Anglo-French Concorde. This was probably the most satisfying role in his long career, he often headed off to site on the weekend when the cell unit could be heard starting up from home, some four miles away. It also meant he could pay more attention to home life as Dora became increasingly disabled and ultimately bed-ridden. Dora died in 1966.

The Cell 4 work continued to 1967, and he then transferred to the Institute of Aviation Medicine, at Farnborough, in charge of the centrifuge that trained jet pilots to deal with extreme ‘G’ forces. This coincided with his second marriage to Irene Anne (who survives him) in 1967. They had two sons Timothy, a nuclear physicist who pre-deceased him in 2006, and Andrew, a specialist sound engineer with a major musical equipment group. He is survived further by 10 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren.

His last career move was to the Building Research Establishment at Garston as Head of Works Engineering until he retired in 1985 after a lifetime in Government Research Establishments.

He maintained a passionate interest in aviation and with his incredible memory, he was still being interviewed and filmed at the age of 102 for writers researching the WW2 period. More recently he would recall working with Joe Smith of Supermarine who was responsible for the fuselage design of Spitfire and Seafire modifications (the inventor, Mitchell having died in 1936). The Seafire, of course, was the naval Spitfire.

A committed Christian, Geoff was a self-taught organist and secretary of the Organ Club for over 20 years. Before Dora became ill, he would tour the country with the club playing different pieces on different organs – there was nothing quite like Bach’s Fantasia in G Minor. He was the regular organist at the Baptist Church in Farnborough and latterly at St. Mary’s in Watford, both with fine mid-19th century organs. He maintained the former – he would often bring an organ pipe home for overhaul on the dining table– and helped rebuild the latter in 1989.

Geoffrey was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and Member of the Institute of Heating and Ventilation Engineers. He was also chartered with the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and IMechE from 1978 until 2016.