DEACON, GEORGE EDWARD RAVEN

(b. Leicester, United Kingdom, 21 March 1906;

d. Guildford, United Kingdom, 16 November 1984), oceanography.

Deacon was one of the leading British oceanographers in the mid-twentieth century. He was the first to show the extent of the circumpolar Antarctic Convergence, and his work helped to define the characteristics of the Southern Ocean. He became an influential figure in developing theories of global ocean circulation. He also directed pioneering studies of waves during World War II, and later directed Britain’s National Institute of Oceanography for over two decades. In 1971, he was knighted and received the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal.

The Discovery Committee . Deacon had no training as an oceanographer, though that certainly was not uncommon for oceanographers of that era. The son of devout nonconformists George Raven Deacon and Emma Deacon (née Drinkwater), he grew up with a strong appreciation for education and religion. As a youth, he excelled in mathematics, physics, and chemistry at Leicester Boys’ School. He entered King’s College, London, in 1924 as a student in the chemistry honors course. He planned to become a teacher, so he pursued a Diploma in Education and taught grammar school two days a week. He published his first paper in 1927 in the Journal of the Chemical Society, based on research he conducted in his spare time. When he finished, he found a job lecturing in chemistry and mathematics at Rochdale Technical School. Meanwhile, responding to a newspaper advertisement, he applied for a post to take part in the ocean investigations of RRS Discovery, the ship made famous by Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition from 1901 to 1904.

The British government appointed the Discovery Committee in 1924 to address the economic importance of the Falkland Islands dependencies. This remote region’s most important natural resources were the whales in the surrounding seas. The committee’s purpose was to coordinate scientific studies of the whales, their biology, and their environment, with the aim of putting the industry on a sustainable basis. Its work was to be financed from taxes on whale products. By the time Deacon was hired as a chemist, the committee already had set up a laboratory near one of the major whaling stations at Grytviken in South Georgia, and Discovery had made a preliminary survey of the surrounding whaling area.

Deacon jumped at the chance to go to sea, both for the scientific work he could do and for the possibility of adventure. He started in late 1927, first aboard William Scoresby, the supporting vessel for Discovery. It was a smaller, faster ship that was intended for chasing down whales to mark them for migration studies. Deacon’s job was to sample the water, to determine its temperature, salinity, oxygen content, and concentrations of chemicals at various depths. Because of its small size, William Scoresby was not very well-suited for Deacon’s chemical analyses. Thus much of his work was done on land, in South Georgia. Soon, however, Discovery was replaced by a new ship constructed specifically for scientific research in the open ocean, Discovery II. After joining the ship in 1930, Deacon found it equipped with a chemical laboratory, allowing him to conduct most of his analysis aboard ship and to develop his ideas about ocean circulation. He worked intensively with the Discovery II, either on board taking samples or on land studying them, through the 1930s. He was the ship’s principal scientist from 1935 to 1937.

The Hydrology of the Southern Ocean . In the course of the Discovery investigations, Deacon’s work strayed far from the narrow studies of whales. In 1931, between voyages, he came to England and submitted a manuscript about the hydrology of the southern Atlantic Ocean, ultimately published in 1933. He later added his studies of other parts of the seas surrounding Antarctica. With Deacon on board, Discovery II circumnavigated the entire continent of Antarctica in 1932–1933, and Deacon could describe the circulation of water over a huge area. The result was his major work, The Hydrology of the Southern Ocean, finally published in 1937 in Discovery Reports. This work earned him a doctorate from the University of London, election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944, and it became the standard text on the Antarctic water masses.

The Hydrology of the Southern Ocean synthesized a great number of descriptive observations with some recent theoretical work, especially from Albert Defant’s 1929 book, Dynamische Ozeanographie. Deacon used the data from all around the continent to construct a larger picture of ocean circulation and the interaction of water masses. These masses differed in temperature, salinity, and density. The principal interaction was the Antarctic Convergence, where cold southern waters met relatively warm northern ones. Deacon demonstrated definitively that the Antarctic Convergence did indeed surround the whole continent. He concluded that the cold water formed from the continent spread northward at shallow depths until it reached the convergence, where it dropped deeper and continued northward beneath the warm water mass above it, with another warm mass below it. Deacon referred to this cold water as the Antarctic intermediate current. From the north, the warm deep water crept southward past the convergence underneath the intermediate current, but on top of even colder water, dubbed the Antarctic bottom water.

Although the Southern Ocean might have been difficult to identify to a lay person glancing at a conventional map of the world, Deacon’s work implied that it could be studied as a specific entity, with the Antarctic Convergence as its boundary. His work became the basis for the discussions of Antarctic waters in the influential 1942 textbook, The Oceans, by Harald Sverdrup, Martin Johnson, and Richard Fleming. Thus Deacon’s work on the Southern Ocean’s circulation and its interactions with the seas north of the Antarctic Convergence became a crucial component of oceanographers’ views of global circulation from the 1940s onward.

The War Years . In 1939, Deacon asked the British government what he could do for the war effort. The Admiralty put him to work on HMS Osprey, a center of research on Asdic (sonar) and undersea warfare. Deacon helped to design and test equipment for detecting ships with underwater sound, including some work on the sloop HMS Kingfisher. During this period, in 1940, he married Margaret Elsa Jeffries, who had also worked for the Discovery Committee. Soon the intense German air raids forced Deacon’s laboratory to move to Ayrshire, the Anti-Submarine Experimental Establishment. It was there that the Deacons had their only child, Margaret.

In 1944, Deacon took charge of a new unit within the Admiralty Research Laboratory dedicated to studying ocean waves and swell. Deacon headed up Group W (for Waves) to help predict conditions for planning amphibious assaults. In the course of its research, Group W developed an instrument to analyze the spectrum generated from incoming waves, making it possible to distinguish between waves originating from different sources. For example, they now knew when waves generated by storms from Florida reached the coast of Cornwall, as opposed to waves from storms off Cape Horn. Deacon did much to promote this work and mentored the young scientists involved by encouraging them to publish their results, including an influential paper by Norman F. Barber and Fritz J. Ursell that he communicated to the Royal Society.

Group W undertook several other projects during the war. One of them was the Beach Reconnaissance Intelligence Committee, for which the group tried to make accurate devices to measure beach slopes and judge their effects on wave refraction. Deacon and his colleagues were using new techniques to account for a large array of influences over local conditions. By the war’s end, the work at Group W had set the tone for postwar research on physical oceanography. As in the United States, British oceanographers explored the explicitly physical parameters of their research, such as the transmission of sound waves, the propagation of surface waves, the influence of storms, and of a variety of new applications of spectral analysis. Deacon, however, still had no secure employment. Though he initially reverted to his post under the Discovery Committee, in 1947 he took what he thought was a more stable position as a scientist working for the Admiralty.

National Institute of Oceanography . Keenly aware of the importance of physical oceanography in naval operations, the Royal Navy wanted a new center of research. During the war, scientists and officers alike envisioned a major institute, focusing primarily on the physics of the seas, equipped with a vessel big enough to conduct first-rate research. Deacon agreed that physical oceanography needed long-term support, though he argued that it would be useful to have a marine biologist on staff as well. After a sluggish start, in 1949 Britain’s National Oceano-graphic Council was formed, with a National Institute of Oceanography dedicated to studying all aspects of oceanography. Deacon became its first director.

Deacon ultimately spent over two decades at the institute. The Discovery Committee disbanded as the institute came into being, and its ships now came under Deacon’s control. Eventually, in 1962, yet a third Discovery became part of the research arsenal of British oceanographers. The institute became involved in many international projects after World War II. Just as the Discovery Committee had existed to serve British interests in the Southern Hemisphere, the far-flung holdings of the British Empire gave the institute a mandate to conduct research worldwide in the service of Britain.

International Oceanography . As head of the institute, Deacon spearheaded British involvement in many international oceanographic projects. The first large-scale effort was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–1958. Deacon saw the IGY as a way to investigate subjects needing worldwide observational networks. Oceanographers acquired data on mean sea level, long waves propagated through the oceans, and the problems of large-scale general circulation. He was somewhat annoyed that the IGY planners had not set aside a seat for oceanography on the international committee that formulated the program. Nonetheless, he became chairman of a less prominent group, the Working Panel on Oceanography, which coordinated oceanographic studies.

When leading oceanographers from other countries, notably the American Roger Revelle, wanted to take advantage of the international cooperation of the IGY and develop a more permanent arrangement, Deacon initially resisted. He felt that the body that eventually became the Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research (SCOR) was too broad in scope. He wondered if SCOR would usurp the role of the existing International Association of Physical Oceanography, an organization that Deacon held dear. He firmly believed that physical oceanography was at a crucial stage of development, and he did not wish to see it decline in importance. But Revelle and others proved persuasive, and Deacon ultimately conceded that a coordinating body like SCOR was needed in order to put international recommendations about marine science on firm scientific grounds. When the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission was founded in 1960, SCOR became its principal advisory body.

Deacon tempered his enthusiasm for international cooperation with a healthy skepticism about the value of collecting heaps of data. Some proposals for international work, particularly those made by Soviets, seemed unimaginative and redundant. The past century and a half of ocean exploration already had yielded a huge storehouse of observations, like those of the Discovery cruises. He also was keenly aware of the financial difficulties at his own institute, and he resented that the superpowers did not seem to appreciate the struggles that smaller countries such as Britain faced. For Deacon, maintaining the status of British oceanography meant tackling important problems, not just collecting data.

Deacon’s institute took on major financial responsibilities for international projects, trying to keep up with better-funded institutions in the United States and Soviet Union. One of these was the International Indian Ocean Expedition in the early 1960s. The institute sent Discovery to the region to make observations and spent an extraordinary amount of money overhauling a vessel to do experimental fishing, the Manihine. This was primarily designed to satisfy patrons who supported the expedition because of its practical aims. These years were so difficult financially for the institute that Deacon lost his appetite for large-scale investigations. He was much more comfortable working with organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO's) Science Committee. In NATO, he could concentrate on physical oceanography without having to promise economic benefits and without negotiating scientific plans with Russian scientists.

Later Years . Despite Deacon’s successes in the 1960s, they were trying years. For one, there was the constant financial problem at the institute. Also, the entire British scientific establishment was reorganized by the Science and Technology Act of 1965. Despite Deacon’s efforts to keep it alive, the National Oceanographic Council disappeared, and the institute became part of the Natural Environment Research Council. It dealt a severe blow to his scientific autonomy and that of the institute. Even worse was a personal loss, as Deacon’s wife died of cancer in 1966. In 1971, he retired as director.

In the ensuing years, Deacon returned to the subject that had brought him to oceanography in the first place: the Southern Ocean. He went to sea aboard an American ship, Glacier, in 1975, and again aboard Discovery in 1979. When Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands in the 1980s, Deacon drew on his long experience to advise the government on oceanic conditions. His final work was a book titled The Antarctic Circumpolar Ocean, published toward the end of 1984. Some days later, he had a heart attack and died shortly after.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Papers of George Edward Raven Deacon. Deacon Library, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, England. This archival collection includes a large number of letters to and from Deacon to colleagues all over the world.

WORKS BY DEACON

The Hydrology of the Southern Ocean. Discovery Reports 15. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1937.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Ocean. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

OTHER SOURCES

Barber, Norman F. and Fritz Ursell. “The Generation and Propagation of Ocean Waves and Swell, I: Wave Periods and Velocities,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences 240, no. 824 (1948): 527–560.

Charnock, H. “George Edward Raven Deacon.” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society31 (1985): 112–142.

Deacon, Margaret. “Sir George Deacon: British Oceanographer.” Oceanus 28 (1985): 90–94.

Hamblin, Jacob Darwin. Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

Mills, Eric L. “Creating a Global Ocean Conveyor: George Deacon and The Hydrology of the Southern Ocean.” In Extremes: Oceanography’s Adventures at the Poles, edited by Helen M. Rozwadowski. Canton, MA: Science History Publications, in press.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin