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...Siegfried would turn up to visit his son at Oundle in a 1936 Humber, wearing a hat (worn back to front)
which he had rescued from a scarecrow and smoking his pipe upside down to keep
out the rain...

...He travelled in the then Communist Yugoslavia, reputedly learning
Serbo-Croat in two months, and finding there (particularly in what is now
Serbia) a world completely outside his own background: the people appreciated
his gregariousness, humour and skill at the piano accordion...

...He was also a keen student of international affairs, advocating a
solution to the problem of Gibraltar that involved offering Spain a reciprocal
enclave in southern England - perhaps Dover or Folkestone - which would become a
centre for bullfighting and other facets of Spanish life...

George Sassoon
(Filed: 17/03/2006)

George Sassoon, who has died aged 69, was the son, and only
child, of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and attained distinction as a scientist,
electronic engineer, linguist, translator of scientific papers, player of the
piano accordion and investigator into extra-terrestrial phenomena.

His book The Manna-Machine (1978), and its companion volume The
Kabbalah Decoded of the same year, investigated the origins of the manna that
sustained the Israelites in the desert; Sassoon went back to Jewish texts,
particularly the Zohar, a collection of 13th-century writings which he
translated from Aramaic.

A later work, The Radio Hacker's Codebook (1980), was of a more
practical nature. Sassoon's scientific experiments caused his last wife to say
that she was never sure what part of the house was radioactive; at one moment
there was rumoured to be a small but useful consignment of heavy water somewhere
on the premises.

George Thornycroft Sassoon was born in London on October 30 1936.
To Siegfried Sassoon the birth of a son was an occasion for ecstatic happiness,
shown in his poems To My Son and, later, The Child at the Window. George seemed
destined for an idyllic country childhood at his parents' house at Heytesbury,
in the Wylie valley in Wiltshire. But already there were cracks in Siegfried's
relationship with his wife, the much younger Hester Gatty, whom he had married
in 1933 soon after the end of his affair with the artist and aesthete Stephen
Tennant.

It quickly became clear that George Sassoon was a boy of
extraordinary intelligence and scientific aptitude. His genetic inheritance was
perhaps partly responsible for this: the Sassoons were originally Sephardic Jews
from Baghdad, but one of Hester Gatty's brothers was a science tutor at Balliol;
and Siegfried Sassoon's mother's family, the Thornycrofts, in addition to being
notable artists, were engineers.

From an early age George was assembling wireless systems and
conducting experiments over naked flames. These interests helped him to endure
the disintegration of his parents' marriage, which grew more complicated when
Hester left in 1947; despite a legal separation, she kept coming back to find
out what Siegfried was doing and to see their son.

George, and each parent's adoration of him, became a weapon in a
marital war. At the boy's prep school, Siegfried's visits were thought to be too
frequent; Hester came slightly less often after she acquired a property on Mull.
George won a scholarship to Oundle, where his spirited intelligence led to many
rows with his housemaster, the young Arthur Marshall.

"I much regretted that he chose not to attend the memorial
service for the late King," Marshall wrote to Siegfried, also reporting
experiments with explosives that partly destroyed a science laboratory and
primitive wireless broadcasts mocking the masters. Siegfried would turn up to
visit his son at Oundle in a 1936 Humber, wearing a hat (worn back to front)
which he had rescued from a scarecrow and smoking his pipe upside down to keep
out the rain.

George won a science scholarship to King's College, Cambridge.
Then, in May 1955, he married Stephanie Munro in Inverness, telling neither of
his parents. They had met on Mull, where George had been staying with his
mother. He went to Cambridge as a married man; soon Sassoon's tutors were
hinting that the boy's father should not come to the university quite so often
to visit his son.

After taking a disappointing Third in Natural Sciences, Sassoon
stayed in Cambridge to work for a firm of scientific instrument manufacturers,
resisting his mother's suggestion of a career as a diplomat, for which he
rightly believed himself to be unsuited.

He travelled in the then Communist Yugoslavia, reputedly learning
Serbo-Croat in two months, and finding there (particularly in what is now
Serbia) a world completely outside his own background: the people appreciated
his gregariousness, humour and skill at the piano accordion. On Mull, which he
also liked for its beauty and its people, he helped his mother run a sheep farm,
escaping there as often as he could.

After his father's death in 1967 (Sassoon played his accordion at
Siegfried's deathbed), he moved to Heytesbury to try to save the property which
had been neglected by the ascetic Siegfried, whose conversion to Roman
Catholicism had not been welcomed by his son.

Sassoon became involved in the unsuccessful battle to stop a road
going through Heytesbury's park, and the cost of preserving the crumbling house
led him to sell many of his father's papers.

George Sassoon's personal life was often turbulent; handsome and
charming, a popular figure on Mull and in Wiltshire and not notably monogamous,
he married three more times, and was touched by tragedy when the son and
daughter of his third marriage were killed in a car crash in 1996, a loss he
bore with immense courage.

A member of Lloyds, from the early 1980s Sassoon faced huge bills
in addition to the liabilities at Heytesbury. Finally, after a fire destroyed
some of the house, he sold it, moving to a smaller house at the village of
Sutton Veny; but he felt most at home on Mull, where he inherited his mother's
property of Ben Buie after her death in 1973.

Deluged with advice about Siegfried Sassoon's literary legacy,
Sassoon was content to leave this with Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, whom Siegfried had
named in his will as adviser on such matters. George Sassoon disliked the
intrusion of researchers, refusing to meet them until persuaded to appoint Max
Egremont to write a biography of his father that was published last year. To
Egremont he was remarkably generous, offering much new material - including
unpublished diaries, autobiographies and poems - and a brilliant cascade of his
own memories.

Despite increasing illness from a slow-moving cancer, George
Sassoon remained interested in many aspects of life. He liked to attend
conferences on extra-terrestrial activity, and wrote a number of articles on the
subject.

He was also a keen student of international affairs, advocating a
solution to the problem of Gibraltar that involved offering Spain a reciprocal
enclave in southern England - perhaps Dover or Folkestone - which would become a
centre for bullfighting and other facets of Spanish life. His final years were
made exceptionally happy by his fourth wife, Alison, who cared for him with calm
and amused devotion.

George Sassoon died on March 8. He married, first, Stephanie
Munro in 1955 (dissolved 1961); then Marguerite Dicks in 1961 (dissolved 1974);
and, thirdly, Susan Christian-Howard in 1975 (dissolved 1982). He is survived by
his fourth wife and by a daughter of his first marriage.

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