MR. R. CYRIL
THOMPSON
THE PLANNING OF
LIBERTY SHIPS
Mr. R. Cyril Thompson, C.B.E., deputy chairman of the Doxford and Sunderland Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, died suddenly at his home at East Bolden, Sunderland, on Thursday. He was 59.
He was a former president of the Shipbuilding Employers Federation and of the North-East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, of which he was a Fellow. Until last year, when the Doxford and Sunderland Shipbuilding and Engineering Company was reorganized, he was also chairman and joint managing director of Joseph L. Thompson and Sons, the shipbuilders, and a member of the company.
In September, 1940, as joint managing director of Thompson's he went to the United States at the request of the Admiralty as head of a mission with the object of ordering 60 ships from American shipbuilders. He took plans and designs of his own company's standard ship and it was from these that the first Liberty Ships were built. On the way back to Britain he was torpedoed in mid-Atlantic in rough weather and spent nine hours at the oars of a lifeboat before he and others were rescued by another ship. Later he joined the Royal Air Force as an AC2 and became a Flight Engineer, serving in Liberator bombers in Italy. In June 1941, he was made C.B.E.
He became chairman of Joseph Thompson & Sons on the death of his father, Sir R. Norman Thompson in 1951, and in the years that followed was responsible for a modernization scheme costing well over a million pounds.
He was a director of many companies both within and outside the Doxford group. He was chairman of the Wear Shipbuilders Association from 1950 to 1952, a member of the council of the Institution of Naval Architects, and served on the technical committee of Lloyds Register of Shipping. He was educated at Marlborough, and Pembrook College, Cambridge.
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