AbstractMartin Hotine was many things to many men and women; to the Army he directed the British surveying effort during World War II; to photogrammetrists he wrote one of the first great English texts on the subject; to field surveyors he was the architect of the East African section of the Arc of the 30th Meridian and of the re-triangulation of Great Britain; to mathematical geodesists he was the writer of vital papers on three-dimensional geodesy; whilst to countless others around the world he was the instigator, and for many years the first director of the Directorate of Overseas Surveys. To me personally he was a tough manager, wholly dedicated to the job which had to be done, hard, and single-minded in his pursuit of knowledge and excellence. He said to this conference in 1951,‘I still study higher mathematics on long and tedious journeys by air. In fact, the worse the conditions, the more there is to be said for some concentrated means of taking one's mind off them.’Yet notwithstanding all of this, he remained an intensely human man, and to me, a man capable of much compassion and personal kindness. He gave some of the best advice that I have heard:‘The ability of a good leader’, he used to say,‘is the ability to let subordinates make mistakes’, although brevity, in this case, concealed some important reservations.