Sir Walter (Wally) William Herbert died on the 12th of June 2007 at the age of 72. Having been accepted to work for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in the early 1950s, he began to specialise in geology and topographic surveys. He embarked on various expeditions; hitch-hiking solo from Montevideo back to England where he was employed at the Directorate of Overseas Surveys, partaking in a physiological research expedition to Spitsbergen and spent a summer season surveying the area between Mill Glacier and Axel Heiberg Glacier. In 1968 he published his book A World of Men covering his Antarctic adventures from 1956-1962. In 1963, he conceived the idea of sledging across the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Spitsbergen. This crossing, supported by the RGS, yielded substantial contributions to the fields of glaciology, gravity, magnetics, oceanography and meteorology. This achievement was one of Wally’s many that was recognised with a knighthood in 2000, the Livingstone Medal of the RSGS in 1969, the Society’s Founders Medal in 1970, as well as the Polar Medal, and medals from the Paris Société de Géographie and the Explorer’s Club.
A full obituary was published in The Geographical Journal