Ted had more than 40 years’ experience as a fisheries scientist working mainly on the conservation of migratory salmonid, eel, and freshwater fish stocks and the sustainable management of the recreational and commercial fisheries that are dependent upon them. Shortly after graduating from Oxford University in 1973, he joined the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food (MAFF) Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory, based in Whitehall Place, London.
Ted worked on salmonid population dynamics and the management of major national and international salmon fisheries initially, and when he moved to Lowestoft in the early 1980s, he became involved in the early development of radio and acoustic telemetry techniques to study the migratory behaviour of salmonids at various stages in their life cycle.
In the late 1980s, he became the principal advisor on freshwater and diadromous fisheries in the Directorate of Fisheries Research, providing expert advice to Defra, the European Commission (EU), and other customers on the status of stocks, management approaches, and related legislative controls.
He held a range of advisory roles in the UK, including Technical Advisor to a number of Ministerial committees and Public Inquiries, was a Fellow of the Institute of Fisheries Management and a member of the Atlantic Salmon Trust, Honorary Scientific Advisory Panel.
He was particularly active in the work of the North Atlantic Salmon, and he was a stalwart of the Working Group on North Atlantic Salmon (WGNAS) for many years, helping to develop many of the assessment approaches fundamental to that group. He first attended an ICES meeting on salmon in 1979. From then until taking his leave from WGNAS in 2016, he contributed immensely to our understanding of these migrations and the ecology of salmon and was instrumental in developing mathematical models to estimate pre-fisheries abundance.
Ted was a member of and chaired a wide range of ICES expert groups related to diadromous species and led the development of assessment methods to support national and international management of salmonid stocks. He was also a member of ICES Consultative Committee and subsequently the Science Committee for five years.
