Walter Eric Spear

When Walter Spear retired in 1988 he was succeeded in the Harris Chair by Peter LeComber. However LeComber died suddenly in 1992. LeComber's death effectively marked the end of Spear's active research career.

In 1972 Spear was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 1976 he was awarded the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society and in 1977 the Max Born Medal by the Institute of Physics. In 1980 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and awarded the Makdougall Brisbane Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1988 he was awarded the Rank Prize, and the same year presented the Royal Society Bakerian Lecture. In 1990 he was awarded their Rumford Medal, and he retired soon afterwards. His nomination for the Royal Society reads .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}

One of his PhD students at Leicester was Alf Adams, the British physicist who invented the strained-layer quantum-well laser. Walter Spear left Leicester in 1968 after being offered the Harris Chair of Physics at the University of Dundee.

Walter Spear was survived by his widow, born Hilda D. King, whom he had married in Middlesex in 1952, by the couple's two daughters and by their grandchildren.

Spear graduated in 1950, but obtained a Research Fellowship that allowed him to stay there to do additional work. He left Birkbeck in 1953 to take up a position at University College, Leicester, where he did research on amorphous selenium films.

Wanting to pursue a scientific career, Spear attended evening classes for the University of London entrance examination, which he passed before the family were interned on the Isle of Man as suspected Axis sympathisers. They were soon released, and Spear joined the Royal Pioneer Corps in 1940, later moving to the Royal Artillery where he became a Bombardier before being demobilized in 1946.

Walter Eric Spear FRSE PhD FRS FInstP (20 January 1921 – 21 February 2008) was a German physicist noted for his pioneering work to help develop large area electronics and thin film displays. He was born in Frankfurt to a Jewish father and a Lutheran mother; by the time he finished his school examinations in 1938 life for Jews and people associated with Jews was becoming difficult. With the support of friends and relatives in Britain, the family were able to move to London, where he arrived in 1938 "with a small suitcase and a large cello".