[2] During World War I, despite severe deafness, he saw action in France with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and lost his left leg in February 1918 to a British shell.
He returned to England to join the HM Nautical Almanac Office at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he became deputy superintendent in 1926.
In the same year, he became the first person to use punched card equipment for scientific calculations, by using Fourier synthesis to compute the principal terms in the motion of the Moon between 1935 and 2000 (improving upon the predictions of Ernest William Brown).
Wallace J. Eckert, an American student of Brown at Columbia University, would later use IBM's vast computational resources to refine the predictions even further.
[1] Comrie is also remembered for his work in astronomy, as he published both scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from predicting eclipses to the green flash.