Ken Brookes

Energetic right up to the very end, he was working on Zoom before what proved to be a very short hospital visit, Ken Brookes has passed on.  A regular contributor to BTN, usually on air shows but sometimes cruising, Ken was an enthusiastic member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists (CIoJ), the world’s oldest professional body for journalists and President for its centenary year 1983-84.

He was evacuated to Woburn Sands during the WWII, went to St Albans County Grammar and graduated from Imperial College London.  When possible, school holiday times were spent at De Havilland, Hatfield.  For more than 50 years he was the author, compiler and publisher of the World Directory and Handbook of Hardmetals and Hard Materials and allied publications and Chairman of a British Standards group associated with this side of the engineering business.  

As a writer and photographer, he claimed to be the only journalist to have attended every Radlett and Farnborough post war show (and still possessed all the catalogues).  

His library contains about 150,000 original Kodachrome slides pre-digital and uncounted thousands now digital.  He was a great defender of copyright representing CIoJ on the British Copyright Council and a trustee of various journalist charities. 

In 2019 he reported on the Paris Air Show for Business Travel News. 

Our condolences to wife Sandra, son Simon and daughter Liane. Ken was 92.

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Philip Birtles, Stevenage

Ken's photo archive should be preserved in a national collection in his memory.