Cdr Peter Wippell
Naval engineer whose work on missiles helped in the Falklands
COMMANDER PETER WIPPELL, who has died aged 85, devised improvements to the Navy’s missile systems that helped Britain win the Falklands War.
For several years before the conflict, Wippell had been systems engineer for the Navy’s two generations of long-range, anti-aircraft missiles – Sea Slug, first designed in 1947, and the more modern Sea Dart.
Practice firings with Sea Slug had involved a countdown to the big day of some six weeks, but Wippell was keen that there should be as little warning as possible for a ship to fire its missiles on trials or exercise, thus simulating war as closely as possible, and he successfully introduced the practice that ships should be required only to certify that routine maintenance was up to date and there were no defects in the missile system before any firing.
Wippell also had in hand a number of hardware and software improvements to Sea Slug and Sea Dart, and he compressed their introduction into a few weeks as the prospect of battle loomed: some of this work was completed in the ships on their way to the South Atlantic.
Sea Dart was credited with seven confirmed kills, including high- and lowflying aircraft, and that some of these kills were outside Sea Dart’s stated technical envelope was attributed to the modifications instigated by Wippell.
He was appointed OBE in 1983.
Arthur Peter Risien Wippell was born in Valletta, Malta. His father, Engineer Captain Arthur Wippell, was a veteran of the Battle of Jutland, and his mother, Gladys Risien, a white creole from British Guiana. He grew up in East Devon, where the Wippells were long-established; his great-grandfather had founded the Exeter-based clerical and church furnishings supplier, J Wippell & Co. His uncles and cousins tended to be either admirals or clergymen.
Peter was educated at the naval colleges of Dartmouth, Manadon and Greenwich, and at Edinburgh University.
He specialised as an ordnance engineer and in 1954 on the battleship Vanguard claimed to be the last person to have fired her 15 in guns. Subsequent appointments saw him serving in the Admiralty at Bath, and in the guided missile destroyer Fife, before he joined Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment on Portsdown Hill.
As a young officer he won awards for middle-distance and cross-country running, discus and sculling, and later he took up golf.
Wippell’s musical interests ranged from the classics to Gilbert and Sullivan. A proficient flautist, when appointed to Fife he taught himself the bagpipes and founded the ship’s pipe band, telling a journalist, “Once we are at sea, out of consideration for the rest of the crew we use a compartment near the noisy engine room. It is secluded and we don’t annoy anyone and we are left alone to practise”.
As a qualified yachtmaster he cruised extensively in the Bristol and English Channels in his 26ft yacht Beehive, and he was an expert navigator who enjoyed rock-hopping along the coasts of France by dead reckoning (before the days of GPS).
His love of languages included French, and Russian, which he learnt at Dartmouth, and even in his last weeks in hospital he would join his wife in Latin crosswords.
Wippell was a technophile who enjoyed using and programming computers: once, when asked by his daughter what he used for printing Christmas card envelopes, she, expecting the name of commonplace commercial program, received a machine code program he had written himself.
Wippell valued his West Indian heritage and he liked to recall travelling by banana boat as a child.
He married, in 1957, Moya Schofield, who survives him with their son and daughter. Cdr Peter Wippell, born August 21 1930, died June 2 2016