Barrie Marson obituary

My father, Barrie Marson, who has died aged 88, was the chief executive of a pioneering scientific instrument maker. He was part of a group of technology entrepreneurs who did not differentiate between science and management roles, taking risks that more traditional industries would have balked at.

Throughout the 1960s, some Oxford scientists, led by the physicist Martin Wood, had been working in a Thames-side boat shed, making and selling high-strength magnets for laboratory research. In 1971, and at a financial low-point, Oxford Instruments found in Barrie a managing director who could professionalise their operation.