War veteran Michael Cobb's PHD at 91

A 91-year-old war veteran who collected a PhD from Cambridge University said today: “I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

Michael Cobb is believed to be the oldest recipient of such a qualification from the university.

Forty members of his family joined him at the ceremony yesterday.

Col Cobb, of Plymtree, Devon, earned his doctorate by creating an atlas which records and maps the railway stations built in Britain between 1807 and 1994.

His son Stephen, 60, who flew in from Canada, said: "We're all very proud of him. To get a PhD at 91 is incredible. No one else in the family has got one. There are a few masters degrees but that's about it. It was an incredible surprise and means an awful lot to us all."

Col Cobb, however, who was among the British troops evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, said: "I don't know what all the fuss is about. It's something I wanted to do and something I loved doing."

A university spokesman said The Railways of Great Britain: A Historical Atlas was Col Cobb's magnum opus and had involved 18 years of research.

Col Cobb gained his first degree 70 years ago, studying mechanical sciences at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and graduating in 1938 before his wartime service. He began work on the atlas at the age of 62.

"It is a remarkable piece of scholarship," said Dr Richard Smith, head of the university's geography department.

"I was deeply impressed by the systematic way the cartographic enterprise had been carried out." The academic distinction of doctor of philosophy is awarded for "original contributions to knowledge".

"The supermen marched us, without food, water or sleep to Limberg, a distance of about sixty miles, I think, where we were loaded and locked up..."

"... sixty men to each small, unventilated, unheated box car. There were no sanitary accommodations—the floors were covered with cow dung. There wasn't room for all of us to lie down. Half slept while the other half stood. We spent several days, including Christmas, on that Limberg siding. On Christmas eve the Royal Air Force bombed and strafed our unmarked train. They killed about one-hundred-and-fifty of us. We got a little water Christmas Day and moved slowly across Germany to a large P.O.W. Camp in Muhlburg, South of Berlin. We were released from the box cars on New Year's Day. The Germans herded us through scalding delousing showers. Many men died from shock in the showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn't."

From a letter from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., dated May 29, 1945, in Newsweek and in his new book "Armageddon in Retrospect."