Tim Denvir’s Home Page
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B T Denvir, MA (Cantab), CEng, MIET, MBCS, CITP
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B T Denvir, MA (Cantab), CEng, MIET, MBCS, CITP
I was a software engineer for forty-two years, latterly dipping my toes into the waters of academic computer science. I worked almost entirely in industry, but have had honorary appointments at Brunel and City Universities in England and the University of Stirling in Scotland.
In software engineering I worked on operating systems, language compilers including two versions of Algol60, and formal methods. I have also had management rôles over 15 years and most recently moved into software and management consultancy. Here is a short CV.
Now retired, I review books for Springer, and co-edit and write a chatty column for FACS FACTS, the newsletter of FACS, a special interest group of the British Computer Society. I take an interest in the activities of the Edinburgh branch of the BCS and the retired members section of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.
I have ambitions to write more books, one a personal history of software engineering, and the next being an engineer’s introduction to formal semantics. I don’t know if these will ever transpire, but incomplete, extensive notes on my experiences of SE are here.
I live in the picturesque village of Killin, in Perthshire, Scotland. Killin lies within the confluence of the rivers Dochart and Lochay, just before they flow into the west end of Loch Tay. Dominating the village to the north-east are the mountains of Ben Lawers, Bheinn Ghlas, Meall nan Tarmachan and Meall Corranaich, all of them Munros. Two more Munros are visible from the west of the village, Ben More and Stob Binnein. I am lucky enough to be able to see all these hills from my rather large garden. I am a reluctant gardener: gardening is a battle between me and nature. Nature is winning. However, I have had good practice in repairing storm-damaged fences and enjoy growing food. The house was built in 1937, has three bedrooms and a fourth in the loft. I use the smallest bedroom as a study. Killin is well equipped with six pubs, a golf course, primary school, library, bank, post office, a Co-Op supermarket whose off-licence section has expanded three-fold since my arrival (is there a cause and effect here?), pharmacy, police, fire and ambulance stations and an excellent GP surgery. A disused railway provides a scenic walk and a cycle track, which is part of the Sustrans route no. 7 from Glasgow to Inverness.
I started climbing the Munros in 1992. The Munros are those hills in Scotland over three thousand feet in height. They are so-called because Dr. Hugh Munro was the first to survey them accurately in the late nineteenth century and published his first tables of Scotland’s mountains in 1891. The tables are now maintained by the Scottish Mountaineering Club. After the latest revision in 1997, and the demotions of Sgurr nan Ceannaichean and Beinn a'Chlaidheimh to Corbetts, there are now listed 282 separate hills over 3000 feet in Scotland. However, when I climbed them, those last two hills had not yet been demoted, they were still Munros, and so I can claim to have climbed 284 Munros although there are now only 282 of them. The hobby of attempting to climb all of the Munros has gained popularity apace. This hobby has stimulated my love of rural Scotland and was influential in prompting me to move from north London to Killin in 2002. For the previous five years before that I had a holiday static caravan in Glen Dochart, seven miles from Killin. I completed my Munro quest on 25th August 2011, climbing Ben More on Mull. I was accompanied by family: Hazel, James, Eleanor and granddaughter Selena, and several hill-walking friends. Thus there were three generations of my family in the outing. It was also the first Munro for Selena's friend Jessica, the youngest member of the party. I started to keep a journal of my last 52 Munros in April 2008. I wish I had done this from the beginning. This brief account is here.
Apart from climbing hills, I read books, but not as profusely as many people: novels, philosophy and popular science, especially cosmology, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. I seem to get through about 20-25 books each year. A list of my readings over the last few years is here. I take an interest in local arts and classical music, of which there is a surprising quantity in rural Scotland. Music in Blair Atholl provides several delightful concerts through the year. My favourite composers are J.S.Bach, Dmitry Shostakovich and Philip Glass, but I also love the Beethoven piano sonatas and late quartets, Steve Reich and much else besides.
For fifteen years in the eighties and early nineties I was non-meat eating, but have lapsed somewhat. I still eat very little meat. I enjoy cooking and eating in restaurants. My current local favourites are EE-Usk in Oban and the Monachyle Mhor in Balquhidder. But the latter is for special occasions.
Hazel is a psychotherapist and lives in Wennington, Lancaster.
Eleanor is an ESOL lecturer in adult education at Lancaster and Morecambe College. Her children are Selena and Nico.
James is a statistician at Mashall University in West Virginia. He is married to Carrie and they have a daughter, Isabel Maya.
I was born in December 1939 in Putney, London, a few months after the outbreak of the Second World War. WW2 was a dominant background during my formative years. My father, John Denvir, was born in 1898 from Liverpool-based Catholic Irish stock. His father and grandfather, both also named John Denvir, were in literary professions. My grandfather was a journalist who worked for the Times and the Manchester Guardian. He was editor of two local Irish newspapers, the Drogheda Argos and the Cork Examiner. My great-grandfather ran a small publishing house which specialised in Irish issues. He wrote a political autobiography, "Life Story of an Old Rebel", which now is available to read on the web in several places, for example here. Three of my father’s four sisters worked in creative professions. My aunt Nell was a pianist, a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and specialised in accompanying ballet dancers, at the Royal Academy of Dancing and Sadler's Wells Ballet. Nancy taught English to young women immigrants from Spain and for a time was theatre critic for The Universe, a Catholic newspaper. My father did not follow this professional, creative tradition, instead working all his life for the linoleum firm of Barry, Ostler and Shepherd Ltd., except for military service during both world wars. After the first world war there was considerable scarcity of work and his father, who knew John Barry, one of the firm’s founders, secured the job for him. While a young man my father spent a year at the University of Cork, studying economics, something he did not reveal to me until I was about 35.
My mother was born in 1904 in Barrow in Furness, but spent her childhood in Cheshire, living in Bramhall and attending Macclesfield High School. She always had aspirations to study Art, but her father would not let her do so, apparently convinced that art schools were dens of immorality. Some artist friends of mine tell me he was probably right. She eventually attended art school as a mature student when I was about eleven years old. She became a competent amateur artist, specialising mainly in watercolours. She especially liked to paint Suffolk coastal scenes and boats. My mother also did a teacher training course, again as a mature student, and worked as a primary school teacher, later setting up her own private kindergarten in an annexe to our house in Clophill, Bedfordshire. She often used to point out to me the wonders of the night sky, and to this day I have a strong interest in astronomy and cosmology. She used to say that everyone is an artist, and the biggest work of art one creates is one’s own life. My mother’s name was Mabel Freda Woodhall, but she disliked her two first names intensely. She experimented with substitutes for these names, mostly using "George" or "Georgie". She was the youngest of four siblings. Her eldest brother, Herbert, was a radio pioneer between the wars and established his own small manufacturing business, where my mother when young was his enthusiastic assistant. Herbert patented a variometer, a device that enabled variable inductive coupling. More details here.
The younger of my mother’s two brothers, Basil, achieved some fame in the RAF during the second world war, and was the leader of the squadron in which Douglas Bader, the legless pilot, served. Douglas Bader and Basil Woodhall, known by all as "Woody", figured in the film Reach for the Sky, their parts played by Kenneth More and Howard Marion Crawford. My mother was always close to her sister Dorothy. Their father, Job Woodhall, was a not too successful small-time businessman. At one time he was declared bankrupt and escaped his creditors by emigrating to South Africa with his family. There was not enough money to pay for all their fares, so Basil worked his passage as a steward. There is a story that the other stewards victimised him because of his "posh" background, until he challenged three of them to a fight, acquitting himself well enough that they did not trouble him again. So it was that my mother spent much of her childhood in South Africa, at six years old walking miles to school accompanied by the family Great Dane, sometimes riding on its back. In 1939 my parents had a house built in Harpenden. I believe the cost was £1,200, slightly more than a year’s salary of my father. Almost as soon as it was finished war was declared and my father joined the RAF where he worked in the Intelligence section. I believe this involved logistics and planning rather more than any glamorous spying. The new house was let as a billet to RAF officers on the move for most of the war while the remainder of our family, my mother, my brother and me, lodged with friends of my parents. We moved into our own house in 1944, taking in a few elderly lady lodgers until my father returned after being invalided home. So I was four years old when I first met my father. We visited him in a military hospital situated on the south coast. The sea air was believed to assist convalescence.
Between the wars my parents bought a holiday cottage in Suffolk, within sight of the sea in the village of Alderton, for £350. There were no main services: no electricity, water, drainage or telephone. We were not allowed to visit the cottage during the war because the East coast was considered too dangerous. Nonetheless, families from London’s East End were evacuated there. In 1948, with my father still not well enough to work full time, we sold the Harpenden house and moved to the cottage in Suffolk. This was exciting for me: lighting by candle lamps and oil lamps, cooking on an oil stove, heating water in a copper in the kitchen, using chemical toilets and pumping up water from a well in the garden. Radios were battery driven, with a large dry-cell high tension and an accumulator for the valve heater circuits. The radio dealer from Woodbridge, ten miles away, arrived in a van once a week to swap discharged accumulators with charged up ones. Bit by bit we modernised. A telephone arrived first, then electricity for which my parents had to pay a lot to have poles put up along the road. We were the first house in the village to be supplied with electricity apart from the Post Office, which needed it for sending telegrams. The electricity company laid power lines to the other houses in the road, but none of the residents wanted this "new-fangled" invention. We had a cold tank erected on some scaffolding and the well pump connected to it. Then a simple plumbing system and bathroom could be installed. I remember that eighty pumps each morning was sufficient to keep the tank topped up for the day’s needs. Later the hand pump was replaced with an electric one, triggered by a ball-cock and pressure switch.
In Suffolk I went to the primary school in Bawdsey, a neighbouring village where an extensive radar station scanned the North Sea for aircraft during the war. My father soon recovered his health and worked again for his old firm as a representative, travelling the south east of England. In 1949 aged nine I followed my brother John to Stonyhurst, a Catholic boarding school run by Jesuits. My father had himself been educated by the Jesuit order and had a high regard for them. My parents moved house several times during my schooldays and I have memories of leaving one house at the beginning of term and returning to another one that I had not seen before. My brother was an influence in my developing an interest in classical music and electronics. I did A and S levels in mathematics and physics, and gained a place at Trinity College, Cambridge. National Service had just been stopped and I was not called up, but universities were temporarily overloaded with twice the usual intake. My place, along with many others, was deferred for a year. I spent it working at Texas Instruments in Bedford, designing electronic circuitry using discrete semiconductors. I had been keen on electronics as a hobby since I was thirteen years old, building radio sets and hi-fi equipment. A job at Texas Instruments was like being paid to continue my hobby. My salary was £342:4:0 (£342.20) per year. Many years later I was bemused to realise that I sometimes earned nearly twice that for a single day's work.