Research, Development and Special Investigations (continued)

In his youth Harry was a fine athlete, playing senior Australian Rules football in Adelaide. He played tennis well into his later years.

On my appointment as Supervising Meteorologist (Research) in August 1948 I was eager to apply some ideas I had gathered from contacts with overseas meteorologists at the IMO conferences in Toronto and Washington DC in 1947. The Bureau's Central Office Research Section had responsibility for CAWDS in which John Lillywhite had succeeded me as OIC. My principal responsibility as Supervising Meteorologist (Research) was to advise the Director and the Chief Scientific Officer (J. C. Foley) on the scientific activities which would improve Bureau services to the general public and to special users. I was also responsible for the overall program of CAWDS and the group of two or three staff responsible for special investigations. Adjoining CAWDS was a small room accommodating two or three people, one a junior meteorologist with responsibility for monitoring the output of radiosonde stations. I believe the group may have been led at different times by Keith Morley and Bruce Kell.

J. C. Poley was a diffident, benign, friendly person whose main personal interest lay in classification of patterns of surface synoptic charts and the investigation of the occurrence of droughts and floods in Australia. His retirement notice in Weather News in August 1957 announced that J. C. Foley had retired on 18 June of that year but gave no details of his career in the Bureau. His obituary, which appears in the February 1967 issue of Weather News, gave remarkably few personal details, but paid tribute to his achievements in producing Bureau publications, particularly Bulletin No 43 on drought. Foley was one of the last of the old school of Bureau meteorologists. They are likely to be misjudged by later generations but they made a significant contribution to the Bureau's development.

Bureau of Meteorology