Operational instruments of the Royal Observer Corps
The Royal Observer Corps (ROC) was a civil defence organisation operating in the United Kingdom between October 1925 and 31 December 1995, when the Corps' civilian volunteers were stood down. (ROC headquarters staff at RAF Bentley Priory stood down on 31 March 1996). Composed mainly of civilian spare-time volunteers, ROC personnel wore a Royal Air Force (RAF) style uniform and latterly came under the administrative control of RAF Strike Command and the operational control of the Home Office. Civilian volunteers were trained and administered by a small cadre of professional full-time officers under the command of the Commandant Royal Observer Corps; a serving RAF Air Commodore.
Charles Meldrum
As the site at Port Louis was unsuitable for a meteorological observatory, with the support of General Sir Edward Sabine, then President of the Royal Society, he was able to organise the construction of a new observatory on a marshy site in Pamplemousses District. There in 1870 the Duke of Edinburgh laid the foundation stone of the Royal Alfred Observatory which was operational by 1874. As before, the principal work of the observatory was the study of the movement of storms, but from 1880 photographs of the solar surface were taken daily to supplement the series made at Greenwich and Dehra Dun in north India to create a continuous record of the number of sunspots. The Pamplemousses observatory would be demolished in 1961 and its meteorological work transferred to Vacoas.