Harold McCarter Taylor

Harold McCarter Taylor CBE TD (13 May 1907 – 23 October 1995) was a New Zealand-born British mathematician, theoretical physicist and academic administrator, but is best known as a historian of architecture and the author, with his first wife Joan Taylor, née Sills, of the three volumes of Anglo-Saxon Architecture, published between 1965 and 1978.

Taylor was born in Dunedin, son of a merchant, and graduated with an MSc from the University of Otago, whence he continued in 1928 to Cambridge. He worked with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, received his PhD in 1933 and became a university lecturer and a Fellow of Clare College Whilst still in New Zealand he had been an officer in the New Zealand Artillery, and on 3 March 1934 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the university Officer Training Corps, commanding the artillery section. He was promoted local captain on 10 March 1934, and received that rank on a substantive basis on 24 November 1935, and was promoted major on 1 May 1936. Following the start of World War II, he was transferred to the Royal Artillery on 30 April 1941, rising to be Senior Instructor in Gunnery at the Royal School of Artillery, with the rank of temporary lieutenant-colonel, and was awarded the Efficiency Decoration (TD). He was awarded the J. H. Lefroy Gold Medal of the Royal Artillery, the only non-regular recipient, for "furthering the science and application of artillery" His experience as a lecturer came in useful when he was a student on a staff course, and the instructor was having great difficulty explaining the difference between two types of gunsight, he offered to help the instructor explain (to the horror of the other students), and was then thanked by the instructor, "Thank you now we all know". He returned to part-time service after the war, and on his eventual retirement from the army in 1957, he was permitted to retain the honorary rank of lieutenant-colonel.

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