Profile of Rear Admiral jeremy de Halpert

A week in the life
Sunday Times
May 4 2008

This summer a sunken German U-Boat that has lain undisturbed for 90 years will be shifted from a busy section of the English Channel – to clear a passage for giant supertankers carrying Russian oil.

“The English Channel and the Dover Straits are the busiest shipping lanes in the world. On a single day, there are more shipping movements there than air traffic movements at Heathrow,” says Rear Admiral Jeremy de Halpert CB, Executive Chairman of Trinity House.

Trinity House has overall responsibility for the safety of shipping here and around the coast of England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. It works closely with matching organisations for Scotland and Ireland.

“I always call us the highways agency of the sea. We mark the roads and clear the wrecks,” says de Halpert, 60, who took over the £95,000 a year job in 2002 - together with the pro-bono role of Deputy Master, running its charity.

The Rear Admiral’s 40 years in the Royal Navy included action in the Falklands. More recently he has held such high-ranking jobs on dry land as Director of Overseas Military Activity at the Ministry of Defence.

“I still try to spend about four weeks a year at sea. For the past two days I’ve been at sea about our new vessel The Galatea.”

In the same week he visited retirement homes near Dover run by the charity which, as one of the largest endowed maritime charities in the UK, has £3 million annually to spend.

As Executive Chairman he saw the naming of a new cruise liner in Southampton, attended meetings in London, Harwich, Edinburgh and Paris and had a formal dinner with deep-sea fishermen.

Trinity House spends £30 million a year on a wide range of safety responsibilities – running lighthouses and maintaining buoys, and ensuring safe navigation in coastal waters. It has 300 people – 100 at sea in its three vessels. The funding comes from levies on vessels using ports.

Henry VIII founded Trinity House in 1514 and his portrait gazes down on business at its’ HQ near Tower Hill. But today Trinity House uses technology undreamt of in Tudor days. Things have evolved radically even over de Halpert’s career. His office displays a sextant, a chronometer and a star globe. “When I started in 1966 this is what you navigated with out of sight of land. They’re museum pieces now.”

Marine Satnav using GPS is standard, with Britain’s now fully automated lighthouses and buoys becoming primarily visual aids for mariners.

Trinity House and its French counterpart are now testing something called eLoran – a high-powered landbased navigation transmission system. de Halpert says it performed very well in recent trials investigating how easily GPS signals could be disrupted or jammed by atmospherics or terrorism. “eLoran was rock steady wheras GPS was all over the place.”

In the still precarious world of marine navigation a secure new aid is welcome indeed and bad news for terrorists, or anyone else, hoping to cause chaos at sea.