WOODBANK COMMUNICATIONS - Key Persons

Dr Brian Austin is a retired engineering academic from the University of Liverpool's Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics. Before that he spent some years on the academic staff of his alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also had a spell, a decade in fact, in industry where he led the team that developed an underground radio system for use in South Africa's very deep gold mines. He also has a great interest in the history of his subject and especially the military applications of radio and electronics. This has seen him publish a number of articles on topics from the first use of wireless in warfare during the Boer War (1899 - 1902) and South Africa's wartime radar in WW2, to others dealing with the communications problems during the Battle of Arnhem and, most recently, on wireless in the trenches in WW1. He is also the author of the biography of Sir Basil Schonland, the South African pioneer in the study of lightning, scientific adviser to Field Marshall Mongomery's 21 Army Group and director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Brian lives on the Wirral in North West England