In 1958 he was appointed commandant of the Joint Services Staff College and retired from the RAF in 1960 and became Controller of the National Air Traffic Control Services until 1966.On his retirement, Laurie Sinclair continued with his love of fishing and country recreations, and landed his last salmon at the age of 90. He was very active with the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association.Max Arthur. “Coppy” Laws was one of the outstanding electronics and radar engineers of the Second World War. In his mid-twenties he designed the range-finding system that allowed guns to home in on ships at the horizon with devastating accuracy. The first time the system was used, at the battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, an entire Italian fleet was sunk. Cecil Alfred Laws, electronic engineer: born Great Yarmouth, Norfolk 21 November 1916; married 1942 Marguerite Hay (died 1988; four sons, and one son deceased); died Axford, Hampshire 28 May 2002.

His achievements won recognition from the British government in the form of a large cash award, similar to that given to Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine.A decade earlier, however, it would have been hard to foresee this distinguished career. In 1931 his father suddenly died, and to support the family his older brother took a job in a greengrocer’s and his mother went into service. The 14-year-old Cecil (a name he hated) was boarded with a schoolfriend’s family, and came to terms with his loss by immersing himself in radio, his childhood hobby. He built the first television in the street, and neighbours would crowd in to see the one hour of weekly broadcasting transmitted by the BBC.There was no money for further education, so he worked in a local shop recharging lead-acid accumulators for radios by day, and cycling 16 miles to evening classes and back, five nights a week for four years.

This determination won him a first class City and Guilds examination in radio communications (the word electronics didn’t yet exist) and also developed in him the prodigious stamina that sustained him throughout life.Shortly after qualifying Cecil, then 20, took a job at Philco and soon became head of the car-radio research division. He had striking, copper-coloured hair and a high-spirited young secretary, Rita Hay, coined the nickname “Coppy” and spread it around the company. He was infuriated; sparks flew; but the name stuck for life, and so did Coppy and Rita: they married in 1942, and loved each other deeply until her death in 1988.At the outbreak of war he was seconded to the Admiralty to work on the development of radar. Mulling over ideas as he cycled to and from work, he resolved the key component of a design for a radar distance-measuring oscillator, a problem which at the time was defeating the young Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, part of the mathematical team backing up the radar designers.At war’s end Laws was invited by his former Admiralty boss John Coles to form a radar division for Elliotts, the electrical engineering company.