Shrewsbury's brilliant boffin who won the heart of the Prime Minister's daughter

If you were to describe a typical “boffin,” you would probably come up with somebody like the bespectacled Harold Shipton.

Yet this was the young Shrewsbury man who would win the heart of the Prime Minister's daughter, leading to a society wedding attended by many of the cabinet.

His bride was Janet Attlee, daughter of Clement Attlee, the great Labour premier of the immediate post-war period, and they wed on November 15, 1947, at Ellesborough Church, Buckinghamshire.

The newsreel cameras were there, and Attlee gave his daughter away. The guests included Winston Churchill's wife, and the King and Queen sent wedding presents. The reception was at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country retreat.

Harold, who was known as “Shippy” by friends and colleagues, was a scientific whizzkid who helped pioneer the electroencephalograph (EEG) machine, which measures the brain’s electrical activity.

His Shropshire background was to lead to some of the world's first EEGs being built in Shrewsbury, in a shambolic attic workshop at the top of A R Mitchell's premises at 32 St John's Hill, reached by a rickety wooden staircase.

Born in Birmingham, Harold soon moved with his family to Pant on the Shropshire-Wales border, and later lived in a council house at Coton Mount, Shrewsbury. Although still only a child, Harold wired it for electric lighting and to power a radio, something in which he had a passionate interest.

While at St Michael’s School in Shrewsbury he made an intercom. He went to Shrewsbury Technical College on a bursary.

During the war he served as a radar mechanic, mostly on top secret night fighter equipment. After being demobbed he got a job at the Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol where Dr Grey Walter was doing pioneering work on the EEG, and Harold would be a principal member of the team.

When the time came to do some prototype work and then start to manufacture, Mitchell's of Shrewsbury was chosen. In this immediate post-war period Mitchell's was the only private company making EEGs, perhaps making somewhere between 10 and 20 in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

It was at a party in Bristol that Harold had met Janet, who was working as a psychologist at Bristol Mental Hospital, as it was called then.

As romance blossomed, he had a tricky task of finding a way to ask the Prime Minister for his daughter's hand.

The young couple decided that the best time to broach the subject would be when her family were on holiday at a small farmhouse near Nefyn, North Wales.

Happily, Harold found he got on very well with her father.

“We had a lot in common,” Harold would recall in memoirs taped when he was in his 80s.

“He was well read in poetry and literature. The only awkward moment we had was when I told him that I was a devoted fan of T S Eliot, especially the ‘Wasteland’. He replied: ‘That poetry! Neither rhymes nor scans.’

“We also discussed the fact that I was relatively poor. I was earning only about £5 a week.”

During the afternoon, Clem Attlee and his wife discussed the pros and cons of the couple’s engagement as they took a walk along the shore.

“It was clear to him that we were serious about marrying. I am told that he said: ‘Would you rather see their names in the newspaper, or have a wedding?’ By the evening it was settled in favour of a wedding.”

In 1957 Harold and Janet emigrated to America where he was to hold various top level engineering and medical-related appointments, ultimately at Washington University in St Louis. On retirement in 1989 he was granted the status of Emeritus professor.

The couple moved to Florida in 2001 and to Utah in 2006. Shippy died in April 2007, aged 86, and Janet died in 2019.