Dudley Robert Craven was born in Shaftsbury, Dorset, England on December 8th 1944 to George and Marjorie Craven. His early life was clouded by the death of his mother from cancer when Dudley was 10. He and his Dad moved from place to place in the following five years and Dudley attended a number of different schools.
Despite the rocky start, by the time Dudley left school in 1959 he was an outgoing person with a keen sense of humor, a variety of hobbies and interests and a passion for radio and everything electronic. He started acquiring all manner of radio equipment or built his own from a rapidly growing stock of components. The story goes that a girlfriend of his grew concerned about the amount of radio equipment that typically occupied most of the interior of Dudley’s car and left no room for a passenger. She asked Dudley to choose between his radios and her. Dudley chose radio.
At sixteen, Dudley was already known as an electronics genius. He graduated from Townfield Secondary School in December 1959 with Royal Society of Arts (RSA) certificates in science and technical drawing. but his circuitry design and build abilities were already light years ahead of any formal certification. He was employed by EMI Electronics as an apprentice in the Engineering, Wiring and Equipment Maintenance training shops.
While working at EMI, Dudley was attending Southall Technical College part time, obtaining City and Guilds certificates in Radio/TV and electronics servicing. Apart from designing and building electronics, his main interests were amateur radio, piloting gliders (and later ultra light planes) and folk music. He liked to hang out in folk music clubs and had a ukelele banjo that he learned to play, although not very well.
In the Wiring Shop he was working on Airborne Radar and Surveillance equipment at the same time that Barbara Deane joined EMI as a secretary in the Airborne Radar Division. There were always apprentices milling around the department and she had no idea that one of them was her future husband. Dudley had left EMI by 1964 to work for Jim Marshall, eventually moving with him to the new facility in Bletchley. However, he quit and got a job as a Radio Mechanic at Pan American Airways after finding the pressure of working at Marshall too much to handle. He married Barbara at St. John’s Church, Hillingdon, Middlesex, in March 1968 and their son Ian was born at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, on January 10th 1972.
March 23 1968
New horizons
In January 1975 Dudley and Barbara emigrated to Canada and eventually made their home in Calgary, Alberta, where daughter Joanna was born in August 1976. Dudley soon became a member of the Canadian ham radio community with the call sign VE6AAP.
Ever the genius inventor with a fascination for the emergence of personal computers, Dudley created HCom in the early 1980s. It was a half-duplex modem that enabled well logs to be transmitted directly to oil company head offices from wellheads in the Alberta oil fields. Dudley wrote the software as well as building the hardware and was adept at molding his own liquid crystal displays. He also pioneered development of the first non-military GPS vehicle location system, the forerunner of SatNav. It was used extensively in Calgary transit buses and as far away as Venezuela, for tracking fishing boats operating outside of the regulated zone.
Dudley lived a very full life in Calgary for twenty seven years with Barbara and the children, spending summer vacations in British Columbia and making friends with radio hams across the country. Dudley could be found at most events and rallies where amateur radio clubs helped out with communications. He also became well known as a computer genius, writing software and building hardware for innovative systems.
Late Recognition
Dudley’s health declined in early 1997 and in July of that year he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of terminal cancer. Sadly, when he died in February 1998, he never knew that he had become famous. In 2003 he was acknowledged by Jim Marshall in his published biography for bringing the distinctive Marshall sound that Jim had heard in his head to a production guitar amplifier. Jim had apparently been trying to locate Dudley, to recognize his contribution to the Marshall organization, on the 50th anniversary of the JTM45 launch. Barbara did not find this out until 2005 when Joanna was idly googling her Dad’s name and discovered the many online “Where is Dudley?” articles. In one article Jim Marshall mentioned that he believed Dudley had gone to Canada but didn’t have any other information on his whereabouts.
Barbara was able to contact and speak to Jim Marshall in April of that year to convey the sad news. Jim expressed his condolences and sent Barbara a copy of his book, “the Father of Loud” with a dedication inside the cover “to Barbara, with Best Wishes from Jim Marshall, OBE, 2005”.
Dudley’s story still resonates with people all over the world and he is lauded as the creator of “the Marshall sound” to this day.