Cyril Hurcomb, 1st Baron Hurcomb
British amateur ornithologist and civil servant (1883-1975)
Cyril William Hurcomb, 1st Baron Hurcomb, (18 February 1883 – 7 August 1975) was a British civil servant.
Career
Hurcomb was Permanent Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Transport from 1927 to 1937; of the Ministry of Shipping from 1939; and then of its successor the Ministry of War Transport from 1941 until 1947. He was the first chairman of the British Transport Commission between 1948 and 1953. He was also a keen ornithologist and conservationist, and played a key role in the 1954 Protection of Birds Act. He served as chairman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' council, as president of the RSPB, and president of the West Midland Bird Club from 1960 to 1975 (when he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Tony Norris, the husband of his daughter Cicely Hurcomb (d. 1976). In July 1950 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Hurcomb, of Campden Hill in the Royal Borough of Kensington.
He was awarded by the Netherlands with a Grand Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Royal Decree no. 34 of 13 January 1947 ("in recognition of services to Netherlands interests during the war"). For this he retained British permission to accept and wear on 19 January 1948.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5200770. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1883, 1975, 1927 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cyril Hurcomb, 1st Baron Hurcomb” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.