OBITUARY

SIR KENNETH SWAN

Authority on Patents law

Sir Kenneth Swan, OBE, QC, who died yesterday at the age of 96, was an authority on the law of patents, and in his day a leading exponent of that branch of the law in the courts. On his retirement from the Bar after the Second World War, he was appointed deputy chairman of the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, which considered claims for rewards in respect of inventions of national importance arising out of the wvar.

Kenneth Raydon Swan was born into a world of science and invention, as the third son of Sir Joseph Swans FRS, best known in connexion with the development of incandescentelectric lighting, and especially with the invention of the carbon-filament lamp.

He was born at Gateshead-onTyne on March 13, 1877, educated at Rugby and at Balliol College, Oxford. He wa6 called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1902, and devoted himself to patent work.

From 1914 to 1919 he served with the rank of lieutenantcommander in the RNVR in HMS Cylops, and at the Naval Barracks at Buncrana. Before resuming his practice in 1920 he was in the 0 Branch of the Board of Education.

He took silk late; and it was not untili the death of James Whitehead, KC, in 1936, released a large amount of patent work that he took his seat within the bar. There he continued the success he had enjoyed as a junior. He was made a Bencher of his Inn in 1943.

In 1944, he was appointed chairman of the Board of Trade Patents Committee to advise what changes should be made in the practice of the Patent Office and the courts in relation to patents. Tn 1946 he took up his appointment on the Royal Commission on Awards to Tnventors; his ample private means enabled him to retire from active practice at the Bar.

Swan was a man of wide in-

terests and many accomplishments. His knowledge was both technical and scholastic.

In 1940 he was made chairmean of the British Sailors' Sodiety, in which he had long been deeply interested.

He was made Master of the Garden of the Middle Temple, and in 1949, after a sloping plane tree had been cut down In front of the hall, he obtained from Norfolk a scarlet-flowering hawthorn which the Queen Mother (fhen the Queen) planted.

He was an ardent bee-keeper; and when he became the Lent Reader of the Middle Temple in 1954 he delivered a learned and highly entertaining treatise entitled "A Receiver of Stolen Property ", being a "Discourse on the Liabilities and Rights of Beekeepers ".

He had a gift for writing verse, both serious and gay, and his book, Occasional Verses, published in 1954, is typical of his far-ranging imagination.

But perhaps music was his special source of enjoyment. He was a leading member of the Westminster Abbey Voluntary...