Professor John Hudson

Dec 13 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HIS True expertise lay in what grew upwards through the earth, but the slim young man who had suffered from a sickly chest as a child, was staring into the hole made by the rude and uninvited arrival of “doodlebug”.

He had been told to defuse this, the first V1 (flying bomb) to have landed complete in England, in 1944.

Fortunately, it was handily located, near the house in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, where he lived with his two sons and wife, Gretta.

So Professor John Hudson arrived at home covered in mud on each of the two days it took him to make the bomb safe.

For this act of gallantry, he was awarded his second George Medal.

The first came in January, 1943, when, at immense personal risk, he defused an unexploded, 500kg German bomb fitted with a new type of fuse, which had landed on London’s Albert Bridge Road, near a flour mill.

With typical modesty and understatement, Hudson described his action as “lucky”. In those days, the life expectancy of a bomb disposal officer was 10 weeks.

However, he had been comforted with the knowledge that death was usually “instantaneous”, the description he had been given when making safe a bomb fitted with a similarly wicked fuse.

Hudson was born in Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, where his father ran the post office. The boy suffered from poor health and was sent to a “dame school” in West Kirby, Wirral, to build up his strength.

Later, he went to a local secondary school, leaving at 16 without any particular ambition, though he was adept at making crystal wirelesses.

But to help his father, who had started a small nursery, Hudson studied horticulture at the Midland Agricultural College, Nottingham. While working for his BSc, Hudson began courting the dairymaid Gretta Heath.

They married in 1936 when he was agricultural adviser to Sussex County Council. Hudson joined the TA and was with the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk. An understanding of chemicals led to his attachment to the bomb disposal unit.

After the war, he worked with the New Zealand Department of Agriculture, before returning to Nottingham as lecturer and then head of the horticultural department.

In 1943, he was awarded a military MBE, and in 1975 he was appointed CBE for his services to horticulture.

Professor John Hudson, horticulturalist;born July 24, 1910, died December 6, 2007.