George Robert (Bob) Evans



The following short biography was written by his daughter, Alice.

Born 1928 the only child of George + Lydia Evans George Robert (Bob) Evans inherited a love of Electrical Engineering from his father George Senior ; he was a Radio Signaller in the RAF during the war but when off duty a keen Radio Ham who, with his son George Junior (Bobby) collected messages to be sent to Bletchley for decoding.

On leaving school Bob joined English Electric at Phoenix Works, Thornbury, Bradford as an apprentice ; met my mum Nancy there (they married in 1953) and gained his papers as an Electrical Engineer in the early 1950's .

During the early years of their marriage he was seconded to the Dick, Kerr + Sons works in Preston as part of the R+D team working on the Deltic Locomotives (1955 prototype).

In 1968 English Electric merged with GEC and Bob was in the Calibration Department at the Bradford works ; he attended a course at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the early 1970's and was promoted to Chief Calibration Engineer following another takeover by Lucas Aerospace .

During the next 10 years he regularly visited the works at Hemel Hempstead to oversee Calibration there as well as at Bradford, he trained many apprentices some of whom became lifelong friends, and continued his hobby of jewellery and watch repairs at home.

After 40 years service he was made redundant in 1982/3 , but after a short period of unemployment joined the Clock Department at Bradford Metropolitan District Council , as part of a small team of 4 responsible for cleaning, maintaining and winding up the church and municipal clocks in the greater Bradford area.

Following a triple heart bypass operation Bob retired in 1987 and devoted his time to repairing and restoring Magnetos (and anything else of interest) and playing his double bass in a local Ceilidh band.

The couple left Bradford and moved to Leicester in 2003, but in 2005 my father passed away leaving wife Nancy, 2 daughters and 5 grandchildren.

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