1959 Colonial Survey Atlas of Kenya (First Edition!)

Douglas Ernest Warren (June 8, 1918 - September 22, 1993) was a British surveyor and civil servant. The son of an Army officer, he received a grammar school education and went on to get a First in Mathematics just as the Second World War broke out. Commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals, he was posted with the Malaya Command, which was disbanded when it surrendered with all other commonwealth forces in the Battle of Singapore. Warren was made a prisoner of war by the Japanese, and records put him in a Thailand POW camp in November of 1944. But he survived the ordeal: he returned to England and married. The first of two daughters would be born in the Spring of 1947. His ability with mathematics led him to become a surveyor with the Colonial Service, first in Tanganyika 1946-55. He was made Superintendent of Surveys in 1955, then moving to Kenya to become the last British Director of the Kenya Survey Department, a position he retained until after Kenya's independence in 1965. Afterwards, he would join the Foreign and Commonwealth office, eventually becoming Director of Overseas Surveys. He would be appointed CMG for his service in 1973. He remained a Director and Survey Adviser for the Foreign Office until 1980. During his long career he was instrumental in mapping Britain's remaining colonies just as they gained their independence. Under his guidance the Directorate of Overseas Surveys mapped nearly 3 million square miles of 80 developing countries, in Africa, the Caribbean and the Far East. Throughout his career he was noted for pushing to employ more modern methods in the Diretorate's surveys, employing aerial photography, photogrammetric machines, and other up-to-date techniques, including the use of Doppler and satellite imagery. Against his strenuous efforts, the DOS would eventually be broken up by the government in the early Eighties, to be absorbed by the Ordnance Survey. He retired in 1980. More by this mapmaker...