bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A bacterial carbohydrate links innate and adaptive responses through Toll-like receptor 2
Authors: Wang Qun , McLoughlin Rachel M. , Cobb Brian A. , Charrel-Dennis Marie , Zaleski Kathleen J. , Golenbock Douglas , Tzianabos Arthur O. , Kasper Dennis L.
Published: December 2006

Commensalism is critical to a healthy Th1/Th2 cell balance. Polysaccharide A (PSA), which is produced by the intestinal commensal Bacteroides fragilis, activates CD4+ T cells, resulting in a Th1 response correcting the Th2 cell skew of germ-free mice. We identify Toll-like receptors as crucial to the convergence of innate and adaptive responses stimulated by PSA. Optimization of the Th1 cytokine interferon-γ in PSA-stimulated dendritic cell–CD4+ T cell co-cultures depends on both Toll-like receptor (TLR) 2 and antigen presentation. Synergy between the innate and adaptive responses was also shown when TLR2−/− mice exhibited impaired intraabdominal abscess formation in response to B. fragilis. Commensal bacteria, using molecules like PSA, potentially modulate the Th1/Th2 cell balance and the response to infection by coordinating both the innate and adaptive pathways.
The algebraic entropy of the special linear character automorphisms of a free group on two generators
Authors: Brown Richard
Published: December 2006

In this note, we establish a connection between the dynamical degree, or algebraic entropy of a certain class of polynomial automorphisms ofR3\mathbb {R}^3, and the maximum topological entropy of the action when restricted to compact invariant subvarieties. Indeed, when there is no cancellation of leading terms in the successive iterates of the polynomial automorphism, the two quantities are equal. In general, however, the algebraic entropy overestimates the topological entropy. These polynomial automorphisms arise as extensions of mapping class actions of a punctured torusSSon the relativeSU⁡(2)\operatorname {SU}(2)-character varieties ofSSembedded inR3\mathbb {R}^3. It is known that the topological entropy of these mapping class actions is maximized on the relative character variety comprised of reducible characters (those whose boundary holonomy is22). Here we calculate the algebraic entropy of the induced polynomial automorphisms on the character varieties and show that it too solely depends on the topology ofSS.
Wallace Alan Akers, 1888 - 1954
Authors: Fleck Alexander
Published: December 2006

In writing about Sir Wallace Akers it is not easy, within limited compass,to do justice to so many-sided a personality. By profession he was a chemist, educated at Aldenham School and at Christ Church, Oxford. His speciality was physical chemistry. Upon leaving the University he joined the staff of Brunner Mond & Company at Winnington, Cheshire, where a laboratory had been established, one of the first of its kind in this country, to pursue fundamental research. While there he produced various reports, including one in which as a former colleague has testified ‘he showed an unrivalled capacity for elucidating crucial data from a welter of technical figures of varying accuracy and for applying to these data the principles of thermodynamics with clarity and effect’. In 1924 he joined the Borneo Company and proceeded as General Manager to the Far East, where he remained until, in 1928, he returned to take up a position as technical manager in the recently formed Imperial Chemical Industries, in which his old firm of Brunner Mond & Company had been merged. He joined the Board of the Company in January 1941. In the course of that year the war-time Coalition Government decided to set up under the general control of the present writer, then Lord President of the Council, a special organization to deal with the whole problem of atomic energy in its various aspects, including, of course, research and development. After the most careful consideration the choice of a Director fell on Mr Wallace Akers, as he then was, and his services were accordingly lent by his Company to the Government for that purpose. Experience showed clearly that no better selection could have been made. His wide knowledge, unbounded energy, even temper and absolute integrity fitted him admirably for a task which called for ingenuity, tact and organizing ability of a high order. He had not only to co-ordinate the activities of scientists of the greatest eminence here and abroad, but also to conduct negotiations of great delicacy in both the U.S.A. and Canada. His services were recognized by the award of a C.B.E. in 1944 and a Knighthood in 1946. In the latter year he reverted to his position on the Board of Imperial Chemical Industries and again took charge of research until in April 1953 he retired under the age limit.
Herbert Stanley Allen, 1873-1954
Authors: Wilson William
Published: December 2006

Herbert Stanley Allen, Emeritus Professor of Natural Philosophy in the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard at St Andrews, died on 27 April 1954 at the Manse of Resolis, Balblair, in Ross-shire, where he had passed the last few months of his life with his daughter, Mrs Walker. He was born on 29 December 1873 at Bodmin in Cornwall and was the fifth son of the Rev. Richard Allen, who was Wesleyan minister there. He was very proud of his Cornish birth and that was no doubt the reason why his house in Hepburn Gardens, St Andrews, was named ‘Lamorna’. On his father’s side his ancestry can be traced back to a certain Willielmus de Birkebeck who, as one of the adherents of the Earl of Lancaster in the reign of Edward II, was pardoned by consent of Parliament in the year 1318. A descendant of his, Thomas Birkbeck, was Governor of Carlisle and it is recorded that arms were granted to him, in 1515, for his brave defence against the Scots. Somewhat later, in 1553, the estate of Hornby, in the Parish of Brougham in Westmorland, was granted by the Earl of Cumberland to Edward Birkbeck and remained in the possession of the family till 1695. Allen descended from the Birkbecks through his great grandfather, John Allen of Caton, Lancaster, who married a certain Jane Birkbeck.
Alan Mathison Turing, 1912-1954
Authors: Newman Maxwell Herman Alexander
Published: December 2006

The sudden death of Alan Turing on 7 June 1954 deprived mathematics and science of a great original mind at the height of its power. After some years of scientific indecision, since the end of the war, Turing had found, in his chemical theory of growth and form, a theme that gave the fullest scope for his rare combination of abilities, as a mathematical analyst with a flair for machine computing, and a natural philosopher full of bold original ideas. The preliminary report of 1952, and the account that will appear posthumously, describe only his first rough sketch of this theory, and the unfulfilled design must remain a painful reminder of the loss that his early death has caused to science. Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing, of the Indian Civil Service, and of Ethel Sara Turing (
née
Stoney). The name ‘Turing’ is of Scottish, perhaps ultimately of Norman origin, the final
g
being an addition made by Sir William Turing, of Aberdeenshire, in the reign of James VI and I. The Stoneys, an English-Irish family of Yorkshire origin, produced some distinguished physicists and engineers in the nineteenth century, three of whom became Fellows of the Society; and Edith A. Stoney was one of the early women equal-to-wranglers at Cambridge (bracketed with 17th Wrangler, 1893). Alan Turing’s interest in science began early and never wavered. Both at his preparatory schools and later at Sherborne, which he entered in 1926, the contrast between his absorbed interest in science and mathematics, and his indifference to Latin and ‘English subjects’ perplexed and distressed his teachers, bent on giving him a well-balanced education.
William Michael Herbert Greaves, 1897-1955
Authors: Redman Roderick Oliver
Published: December 2006

William Michael Herbert Greaves was born in Barbados, B.W.I., on 10 September 1897, the only son of Dr E. G. Greaves, M.B., G.M.(Edinburgh). He was a pupil at Lodge School, Barbados, from 1905 to 1915, the last three years being spent in the Vlth form doing mathematics and English only. Then after a further year, at Codrington College, he came to England with the Barbados English Scholarship in Mathematics, entering St John’s College, Cambridge in 1916. He read mathematics and was a Wrangler with distinction in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos in 1919, being awarded the Tyson Medal in astronomy. Two years later he gained a Smith’s Prize and was also elected to an Isaac Newton Studentship. In 1922 he became a Fellow of St John’s College. Greaves started astronomical research under the late H. F. Baker, F.R.S., then Lowndean Professor of Geometry and Astronomy at Cambridge, and during the first few years was concerned mainly with problems in classical dynamical astronomy. One of his characteristics was to undertake any task with an almost painful conscientiousness, without much regard for the labour involved, and this may in part have grown out of his association with Baker, whose own conscience was a hard taskmaster. Greaves’s first published paper established the existence of two families of periodic orbits for an infinitesimal body moving in the orbital plane of two finite bodies in circular motion about each other. He next investigated two problems of commensurate, or nearly commensurate, motions in the solar system, the first that of long-period inequalities in the movements of asteroids whose mean motions are nearly half that of Mars, the second the question of the divisions within Saturn’s rings. Many years earlier Kirkwood had suggested that these divisions are due to near commensurability between the periods of the corresponding ring particles and those of the larger of Saturn’s moons. The theory had recently been developed by Goldsborough, but Greaves discovered a number of difficulties. He showed that the process of clearance of ring particles from such a division by this means would be slow. He also pointed out that if solutions were required to be valid for long periods of time it would be necessary to proceed to higher approximations than Goldsborough’s, and that these seemed likely to be too complicated for existing mathematical techniques.
Charles James Martin, 1866-1955
Authors: Chick Harriette
Published: December 2006

Charles James Martin was born at Hackney, in the North East outskirts of London, on 9 January 1866. His parents, Josiah and Elizabeth Mary, lived in one of the Georgian houses with large gardens in Dalston Lane which have since been demolished. Both of them had been married before. Charles acquired one sister by the latest marriage, but was already well provided with older step sisters and step brothers, to one of whom, Howard Rothery a son by his mother’s former marriage, he became greatly attached. His father’s family came originally from North Walsingham in Norfolk, while his mother, whose maiden name was Lewis, was of Scottish descent, her mother having been a Stuart. In Martin’s own words, ‘the family into which I was born was a Nonconformist middle class one characteristic of the period, with lots of children, a fading flavour of piety and a small revenue. My father had thirteen children and my mother contributed two more by her first husband. We were not all in residence at one time but it was a “full house” . We were well fed and well cared for but there was little money to spare for education and an occasional holiday at the seaside, and all the boys had to start to earn their living at 15 years of age.’
David Leonard Chapman, 1869-1958
Authors: Bowen Edmund John
Published: December 2006

David Leonard Chapman was born in Wells, Norfolk on 6 December 1869, and died on 17 January 1958. His father, David, was a none-too-successful builder in Manchester; his mother, Maria Wells, came from a family with a well-established malting business in Wells, and her mother was a friend of Lady Nelson. She possessed a strong Victorian character, and was determined that David, the eldest son, and his brother Sydney (afterwards Sir Sydney Chapman, Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester) should have opportunities of education. She sent them first to an old- fashioned dame’s school and afterwards to Manchester Grammar School. Here he was taught by Francis Jones, and in writing his obituary in 1926 Chapman states Jones started his work at the Manchester Grammar School in 1872, during the period of a great scientific awakening when popular science lectures attracted large audiences in the chief industrial centres. Nevertheless, science was considered to be rather vulgar by many of the educated classes. It was fourteen years later that the writer, in opposition to the wishes of the High Master, entered the Science V, the refuge of the incorrigibly stupid. The High Master in giving his consent uttered the warning that his (the writer’s) chance of becoming a well-educated man would thereby be lost.’ In due course Chapman won an Open Exhibition at Christ Church, Oxford, and was placed in the First Class of the Final Honour School of Natural Science (Chemistry) in 1893. In the following year he was awarded a Second Class for Physics in the same Final School. He then took a post as science master at Giggleswick, but was soon picked by Professor H. B. Dixon to be a member of the staff at the University of Manchester, where he spent the next ten years. In 1907 he accepted a Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, with the responsibility of arranging the equipment of the new College laboratories named after Sir Leoline Jenkins. He remained as College tutor with charge of the laboratories until his retirement in 1944.
Walter Elliot, 1888-1958
Authors: Boyd-Orr John , Tallents Stephen
Published: December 2006

Walter Elliot was a scion of the Scottish Border Elliot Clan, many of whom were prominent in the turbulent times of border warfare before the union of Scotland and England, and after the union many rose to high distinction in Imperial affairs as soldiers or diplomats. One Earl Minto was Viceroy of India and another Governor-General of Canada. Walter inherited the characteristics of his clan being distinguished as a soldier and reaching the highest level in politics. He had a powerful physique, with great physical and mental energy. His physical energy he worked off by walking and on every opportunity by swimming; his mental energy by reading science, philosophy, history, politics and indeed all kinds of literature, and by discussions with his wide circle of political, scientific and literary friends. He was an omnivorous reader. When travelling his luggage was weighed down with books. His extraordinary range of knowledge, his vivid imagination, his wide and facile expression enabled him to take a lively and leading part in discussions on almost any subject except sport and athletic games, in which he had little interest. His contributions to discussions which he enjoyed had original ideas on which he sometimes gave his lively imagination full play.
John Graham Kerr, 1869-1957
Authors: Hindle Edward
Published: December 2006

John Graham Kerr was born on 18 September 1869, at Arkley, Herts, the son of James Kerr, M.A., a former Principal of Hoogly and Hindu College, Calcutta, and of Sybella Graham, of Hollows, Dumfriesshire. He was third in a family of four with three sisters. His father was a well-known educationalist and the author of various works dealing with a number of topics including Indian educational problems, English orthography and aspects of human nature, and Thomas Carlyle. Graham Kerr, as he was known throughout the greater part of his life, lost his mother in early childhood and grew up under the influence of his father who although his tastes were mainly literary had a broad interest in general science, especially in natural history and evolution, in which he was widely read. His father superintended the early stages of his education, including latin and mathematics, and encouraged the reading of such books as Darwin’sThe voyage of the Beagle, Waterton’sWanderings, Wallace’sAmazon and Malay Archipelago, etc. In addition, his library contained a large selection of classical works, especially poetry and history, and Graham Kerr was brought up in a general atmosphere of literary culture. His schooling began at the parish school of Dalkeith, Midlothian, under William Young, a good example of the old-fashioned type of parish schoolmaster who did not hesitate to give special time and attention to any boy who in his opinion possessed the natural capacity to benefit by his teaching. After a short time at the Collegiate School, Edinburgh, he passed on to the Royal High School, where he was specially influenced by Munn, the mathematics master under whose tuition he became Dux of the Fifth Form. He subsequently enrolled in the University of Edinburgh and first concentrated on higher mathematics and natural philosophy. He then studied geology, botany and zoology and finally decided to follow out the curriculum in medicine. This was interrupted when on a wintry afternoon in February 1889, this young medical student of nineteen, returning home from his classes picked up a copy ofNatureat the book-stall in Waverley Station, and read an announcement which in his own words ‘determined the whole future of my life’.
Arthur Elijah Trueman, 1894-1956
Authors: Pugh William John
Published: December 2006

Arthur Elijah Trueman was born on 26 April 1894 at Nottingham. He was the son of Elijah Trueman and Thirza Gottee, who were both natives of Nottingham. He lived at various places near the borders of Nottingham which were always within easy reach of the country and he recorded that at an early age he was particularly interested in sketching from nature; this facility he retained throughout his life, many of his papers and books being illustrated by his own sketches and drawings. In later years, he was interested and adept in water-colours, especially landscapes, which gave pleasure to him and to his friends. In 1906, he gained a scholarship to High Pavement School, an old foundation established as a City Secondary School in Nottingham and he remained there for five years under the headmastership of Edwin Francis; before he left he had passed the Intermediate B.Sc. Examination of the University of London; it is indicative of his special interests at this time that he asked for a microscope as one of his prizes. The Field and Camera Club of the school exerted an important influence upon Trueman; he organized field excursions, and took an active part in exhibitions of natural history specimens. He also became secretary of the Nottingham branch of The Young Naturalists’' Association instituted by Percival Westall and visited other schools in the city on behalf of the Association. He took up the study of variation in the shell of the common banded snails, systematically collecting these shells and making careful distribution maps. This work resulted several years later in a short but interesting paper which is based upon a very large number of specimens. His interest in the variation in the form of shells and his assiduity in collecting them, which were to remain unabated throughout his life, were thus developed whilst he was a boy at school.
Anthony George Maldon Michell, 1870-1959
Authors: Cherry Thomas Macfarland
Published: December 2006

Anthony George Maldon Michell, mechanical and hydraulic engineer and innovator, died at his home in Melbourne, Australia, on 17 February 1959 at the age of 88. He had achieved a legendary fame through his invention of the tilting-pad thrust-bearing, a device which made possible much of the modern development of steam and water turbines and of propeller drives for large, fast ships. This invention issued from a fertile union of mechanical art with exact science, and it was this union which gave all Michell’s work its special quality; his motto, quoted from Leonardo da Vinci on the title page of his book on lubrication, was ‘theory is the captain, practice the soldiers’. Michell wrote for the archives of the Society a biographical note which illuminates his personality as well as his career, and it is fitting that this should be reproduced verbatim: ‘His father John Michell, 1826-1891 and mother Grace Michell,
née
Rowse, 1828-1921 were both reared at or near Tavistock, Devon, and there married. After their marriage they emigrated to Port Phillip, Australia, 1854-5. He (A.G.M.M.) was born 21 June 1870, at Islington, while they were on a visit to parents and relatives in England, 1870-3. He had one brother (John Henry Michell, F.R.S., 1863-1940) and three sisters, all senior to him by several years. ‘The paternal surname is pronounced with stress on the first syllable and with that syllable rhyming with “rich” and “which”. ‘His first name is that of his maternal grandfather, Anthony Rowse, 1798- 1866, the name being traditional in the family as that of a legendary French ancestor, Anthony (or Antoine) Rousse, of uncertain date and dubious authenticity, supposed to have brought the family stock from France. It seems probable, having regard to the persistent nonconformity of the family in England, that if there was such an ancestor he was an Huguenot. The paternal family, like others of the same name now diffused through the south of England, was also probably in part of French provenance, but of much earlier than Huguenot migration to England. But little is known to him of his ancestry beyond what is included above.
Hugh Hamshaw Thomas, 1885-1962
Authors: Harris Thomas Maxwell
Published: December 2006

Hugh Hamshaw Thomas was born on 29 May 1885 in Wrexham, Denbighshire and died in Cambridge on 30 June 1962. His home in the little Welsh town was a happy one. He was the second son of William Thomas, whose business was that of men’s outfitter. William Thomas was a Congregationalist, a life-long Liberal, a J.P. and a philanthropist. He was of Cornish extraction and was descended on his mother’s side from the Leicestershire Hamshaws. He went to Wrexham to do business, settled there and married a Welsh woman, Elizabeth Lloyd, whose family were farmers on the Denbighshire moors. She was a woman of great ability and loved books. Hamshaw Thomas’s elder brother was to carry on the business in Wrexham and there was one sister. Hamshaw Thomas was thus half Welsh and brought up in Wales and all his life he had warm feeling for that country.
Sidney William Wooldridge, 1900-1963
Authors: Taylor James Haward
Published: December 2006

Sidney William Wooldridge, who died on 25 April 1963, was the doyen of British geomorphologists and a great champion of field studies of all kinds. His publications on the physical geology and human geography of southeastern England are not only outstanding contributions to science but also documents of considerable significance for problems of town and country planning in that overcrowded region. Wooldridge was born on 16 November 1900 at Hornsey. His early years were spent at Sheen in Surrey where his father, Lewis William Wooldridge, was a bank manager. Subsequently his parents moved to Winchmore Hill and, with a brother and sister, he grew up in north London where he was to live for the greater part of his life. He was educated at Glendale County School, Wood Green, where he displayed a strong partiality for cricket and for exploring the local countryside of Hertfordshire. His tremendous enthusiasm for field studies developed at this early stage in his career as he became interested in the problems of the origin of the local gravel deposits and his capacity for accurate observation and logical interpretation were already apparent. While a schoolboy he attended evening classes at Birkbeck College where the lectures of J. W. Evans, F.R.S., still further fanned his geological interests.
Thomas Graham Brown, 1882-1965
Authors: Adrian Edgar Douglas
Published: December 2006

Thomas Graham Brown was a neurophysiologist well known in the twenties for the detailed studies of reflex movement and posture which he made by Sherrington’s methods, and perhaps better known in the thirties as the redoubtable climber who had found several new routes to the summit of Mont Blanc. He was born in 1882 in Edinburgh. His father, Dr J. J. Graham Brown, was to be President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1912 and was related to several of the eminent doctors who had maintained the reputation of the Edinburgh Medical School throughout the nineteenth century. It was natural therefore that the son should be trained to medicine and should go to his father’s school, the Edinburgh Academy, and afterwards to the University as a medical student. There were four children in the family, Thomas, the eldest, a brother who became a Captain in the Royal Navy, one who became an architect and one sister. The two elder boys used sometimes to sail with their father in the yacht which he shared with a friend, and in Thomas the interest revived when he was too old for climbing but could still make long cruises in a small motor boat. When he was a schoolboy he was fond of swimming and diving, skating and golf, but there was a period when his eyesight was troublesome and he was sent to an oculist friend of his father in Wiesbaden to be treated and to learn German.
Leslie Reginald Cox, 1897-1965
Authors: Rothstein Andrew , White Errol Ivor , Nuttall C. P.
Published: December 2006

Cox, whom his contemporaries of every age remember as quiet boy and quiet man, was born on 22 November 1897, the son of Dorsetshire people. His father Walter Cox (1867-1945) was a Government servant in the Post Office telephone engineers’ department; his mother, born Jessie Lucy Witte (1868-1946), worked in the same department. They were living in Islington when he was born, and after a few years moved farther out to Harringay. There, at six, he went to the South Harringay County School, and in 1909 entered Owen’s School, Islington, one of the old London grammar schools, with a foundation scholarship. He was not yet fourteen, in July 1911, when the boy responsible for form notes from V Remove in the school magazine recorded with a trace of melancholy: ‘Cox has held the first place in the Form for marks, and although a few may try, there seems no likelihood of anyone beating him for first place.’ No likelihood indeed. The school’s printed register, given to every boy at the end of each year, shows how the anticipation was justified. Here is the record: 1911, V Remove, 1st in all three terms, first prize and mathematics prize; 1912, Upper Fifth, 1st in all three terms, first prize and science prize; 1913, Lower Sixth, six distinctions in the University of London Senior School Examination, first prize; 1914, Middle Sixth, first prize; 1915, Upper Sixth, science prize, first-class honours in chemistry and in experimental physics at the University of London Intermediate Science Examination; January 1916, open scholarship in science at Queen’s College, Cambridge. ‘A typical swot’, some schoolboy might say. But the schoolboy would be wrong.
Alexander Thomas Glenny, 1882-1965
Authors: Oakley Cyril Leslie
Published: December 2006

Alexander Thomas Glenny was born at Dulwich on 18 September 1882, the youngest of six children. His father, Thomas Armstrong Glenny, was an Irishman of distant Scottish descent who was born in County Sligo and studied at Dublin with a view to becoming a Protestant minister, but before he completed the course turned nonconformist and joined the Plymouth Brethren. Though young Glenny never joined this strict sect, he was brought up with all the restraint imposed by it. Smoking, theatre- or concert-going and card-playing were all strictly forbidden; there were no pictures in the house and only framed texts on the walls. This life of restraint left a permanent mark on him, and he never lost the diffidence and shyness he attributed to it. Moreover, his next elder brother was six years older, so Glenny was brought up with his two sisters, and in addition he was always overshadowed by his eldest brother William Thomas Glenny, C.B.E., a man of exceptional ability, who held successive posts as Official Translator to the Board of Trade, Inspector General of Overseas Trade, and Trade Counsellor to Sweden. So long as Glenny lived with his parents he attended the meetings of the Plymouth Brethren; when he was married he was confirmed in the Church of England, and some years later took an active part as sidesman and member of the Church Council.
Herbert John Gough, 1890-1965
Authors: Dorey Stanley Fabes
Published: December 2006

Herbert John Gough’s name is one which will always be chiefly associated with the ‘fatigue of metals’, for it can be justly claimed he was one of the pioneers of research into this subject. Born on 26 April 1890 in Bermondsey, he was the second son of Henry James Gough, a civil servant in the Post Office, and of Mary Ann Gillis. His father, who had a delightful personality, was of very precise and meticulous habits from whom Gough probably gained many of his thorough and accurate ways. It is understood, however, Gough was the first in his family to be attracted to engineering and/or science. He first attended primary school in Ealing and afterwards at the Regent Street Polytechnic Technical School from which he proceeded to University College School by gaining a studentship. At school he was very fond of games, particularly football and boxing. For a time he was an L.C.C. pupil teacher but found teaching with no other outlet incompatible with his temperament and took up an apprenticeship with Messrs Vickers, Sons and Maxim from 1909-1913, followed by a year as a designer draughtsman on naval and military weapons and other armament with Vickers Ltd. During this pre-war period he obtained an Honours B.Sc. degree in the faculty of Engineering of London University and in 1914 joined the scientific staff of the engineering department at the National Physical Laboratory, where he began his first study of fatigue of metals under the tutelage of Stanton and Bairstow.
Ronald George Hatton,1886-1965
Authors: Salisbury Edward James
Published: December 2006

Ronald George Hatton was a distinguished pomologist, an able administrator and a man who won the affection and esteem of his friends and colleagues alike. Ronald was born on 6 July 1886, in Yorkshire, a county for which he always retained a great affection. He was the youngest child of Ernest Hatton who was a barrister of the Inner Temple. Ronald’s mother was Amy Pearson, a woman of forceful character who came from a similar environment, since she was the daughter of William Pearson, also a barrister, who had taken silk. With such legal forebears on both sides of the family it would scarcely have been surprising if their son had followed the law, but perhaps this hereditary influence manifested itself, in later life, in a marked ability for administration and the handling of finance. But, though Ronald’s ancestry was mainly non-scientific, there was one very distinguished scientist on the mother’s side, namely his uncle, Professor Karl Pearson, F.R.S., the famous statistician and author ofThe grammar of science. The other members of the family were two sisters. The elder of these, Margerie, followed a successful career as a nurse. She became Matron of the Cottage Hospital at Lyme Regis and, later, for a period of thirteen years till the time of her death, was Matron of the hospital at Teignmouth. The younger sister, Dorothy, studied modern languages at Exeter and was indeed the first woman to receive the Batchelor of Arts Degree from the, then newly established, College of the South-West. She next turned her attention to chemistry, though at this time and subsequently, after her marriage, outdoor pursuits always claimed her great interest.
Arthur Holmes, 1890-1965
Authors: Dunham Kingsley Charles
Published: December 2006

With the death on 20 September 1965 of Arthur Holmes, the Society has lost a geologist of great international distinction. Born on 14 January 1890 at Hebburn-on-Tyne, he was the son of David Holmes and Emily Dickinson. His father was a cabinetmaker and his mother a school-teacher, but Holmes was descended on both sides from Northumberland farming stock, of which he was justly proud. He retained all through his life an affection for the Northumbrian countryside. He was educated at Gateshead High School, here receiving the first glimpse of the world of geology to which he was to devote his life, through the interest of his physics master who introduced him to Kelvin’s Addresses. From these he learned about the long controversy between Kelvin and the geologists. Kelvin, starting from the assumption that the earth had cooled from a molten state, estimated that no more than 40 million years could have elapsed since it solidified; whereas geological opinion, confronted by the slowness of earth processes, held that a much longer span was needed. Thus, through physics, Holmes was introduced to earth science, in which his interest was further aroused by reading E. Suess’s great geological masterpiece, Das Antlitz der Erde, at that time recently translated into English.
Edmund Clifton Stoner, 1899-1968
Authors: Bates Leslie Fleetwood
Published: December 2006

Edmund Clifton Stoner was born on 2 October 1899, at 4 Marshall's. Cottages, Pemberton Road, East Molesey U.D. in the district of Esher in the County of Surrey. His birth was registered in that District, Book 33, page 66. His surname Stoner was that of his father's foster-father, named James Stoner, who, with his wife Henrietta (
née
Palmer) brought up their foster-child from the age of a few weeks. James Stoner lived at Streatham, where he had a china shop and a smallholding. While at school the foster-child was known as Arthur David Hallett, but on leaving school his foster-father asked the boy to take the name Arthur Hallett Stoner, which he thereafter used. There is no reason to doubt that he was born on 11 May 1870, or that his father’s name was Hallett, but he had no other knowledge of his parentage or ancestry, or of the circumstances of his adoption, and there is no other reliable information concerning his father. James Stoner died a few years after his wife and a few months before Edmund Stoner was born. As registration of birth was not compulsory before 1875 the lack of knowledge of more details of Arthur David Hallett’s birth is readily understood.
Samuel Phillips Bedson, 1886-1969
Authors: Downie Allan Watt
Published: December 2006

Samuel Phillips Bedson was born on 1 December 1886 in Newcastle upon Tyne. His father, Peter Phillips Bedson, was born in Manchester, educated at Manchester Grammar School and studied chemistry under Sir Henry Roscoe at Owens College, later Manchester University. After a period of postgraduate study at the University of Bonn, Peter Bedson returned to this country and was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry in the University of Durham (Durham College of Science, Newcastle upon Tyne). He held this Chair for 37 years until his retirement in 1921. His wife was the daughter of Samuel Hodgkinson, cotton spinner (Hollins Mill Co.) of Marple, Cheshire. There were three children of this marriage, Sam being the second. Along with his elder brother and four other boys he was educated privately until the age of ten. Then after one year at Newcastle Preparatory School he went to Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire where he spent the next six years. This school had been founded by Cecil Reddie as an experiment in secondary education because of his dissatisfaction with the narrowness of the curriculum in most Public Schools. Reddie planned ‘a programme of general education catering for physical and manual skills, for artistic and imaginative development, for literary and intellectual growth and for moral and religious training’.
Charles Arthur Lovatt Evans, 1884-1968
Authors: Burgh Daly Ivan De , Gregory R. A.
Published: December 2006

Charles Lovatt Evans, Emeritus Professor of Physiology, University of London, and a former Vice-President of the Royal Society, died on 29 August 1968, at the age of 84, at his home at Winterslow, near Salisbury. He was the foremost pupil and a lifelong associate of E. H. Starling, Jodrell Professor of Physiology at University College London, and eventually occupied the same chair. Lovatt Evans was born in Birmingham and spent the whole of his childhood and early manhood there. His father Charles Evans taught music— piano and violin—and was a man of many interests, of which ancient history was one, and he started to learn Greek when in his sixties. Although a humorist he had somewhat rigid views on religion, life and death, and held the view that the more you do for people the less they do for themselves, so Lovatt Evans was largely left to himself to decide upon his future and surmount the difficulties of finding ways and means. His mother seemed to him to be of rather an aloof nature, spending much of her time in intellectual pursuits often at the expense of her domestic duties. The result was that in his home life he was lonely.
Herbert John Fleure, 1877-1969
Authors: Garnett Alice
Published: December 2006

Herbert John Fleure died at his home in Cheam, Surrey, on 1 July 1969, at the advanced age of 92 years. His great eminence in not one, but a range of disciplines that in the course of his career he professed as head of university departments of zoology, geology, anthropology (physical and social) and geography (particularly human geography) must be unique. Even to his last days he was engaged in research in fields of physical anthropology and human history to which subjects he was closely drawn throughout his life. To him, Man was a part of Nature; living organisms and their environment were inseparable, and must be studied together, hence his desire that geography and anthropology should form a combined study. For more than half a century he was revered as a father of British geography, first as one of a small group of pioneers in the subject’s early formative years, and later as a lone survivor and leader known personally to, and regarded with warm affection by thousands of teachers of geography the world over. For their interests he strove relentlessly, seeing in the teaching of that subject a keystone in the promotion of international understanding and peace—a theme for which he was pleading to the end of his career, and which coloured his whole philosophy. Family history He was born on 6 June 1877 in Guernsey and by his ancestry was very much a ‘Channel Islander’. His father, John Fleure, accountant to the States, Guernsey, lived from 1803 until 1890, and was a member of an old family of both Guernsey, Alderney and Sark ancestry. He married Marie Le Rouge tel of Jersey, who lived from 1841 until 1914. There were two children of this marriage; Herbert John was the younger (his elder sister died unmarried in 1913) and he was in fact only thirteen years of age when his father died at the age of eighty-seven. This remarkably long combined lifespan of father and son—from 1803 until 1969—must surely be rare, covering, as it did, a momentous period of world history and social and technological changes.
Lise Meitner, 1878-1968
Authors: Frisch Otto Robert
Published: December 2006

Lise Meitner’s name has become widely known for her part in the discovery of nuclear fission, which made atomic power possible, as well as atomic weapons. But among physicists she had been known for many years as one of the early pioneers in the study of radioactivity. Einstein nicknamed her ‘the German Madame Curie’; but though most of her work was done in Berlin she came from Austria and retained her nationality through her life, even after she became a Swedish citizen about eight years before her death. She was born on 7 November 1878 in Vienna where she spent the first third of her life, a town to which she always remained very attached. Another third she worked in Germany. When Austria was occupied by the Nazis she found refuge in Sweden where she stayed for over 20 years. It was only at the age of 81 that she gave up scientific research and retired to England to live out the rest of her days in Cambridge, close to her eldest nephew (the author of this memoir). Her father was Dr Philipp Meitner, a respected lawyer and keen chess player. She was the third among eight children; thus she was used both to being ruled by her two older sisters and ruling over the younger children. Although her parents came from Jewish stock, her father was a freethinker, and the Jewish religion played no role in her education. Indeed, all the children were baptized, and Lise Meitner grew up as a protestant; in later years her views were very tolerant though she would not accept complete atheism.
George Ingle Finch, 1888-1970
Authors: Blackman Moses
Published: December 2006

George Ingle Finch was born in Orange, New South Wales, on 4 August 1888, the eldest son of G. E. Finch, Chairman of the Land Court of New South Wales. His early education was at Wolaroi College, but he was privately tutored in Europe. After a short period at the Ecole de Médecine in Paris, he switched from medicine to physical sciences and studied at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zürich, from 1906 to 1911. He won the gold medal of the diploma course, and served as a research assistant at the E.T.H. and later at the University of Geneva. As a consequence of his discovery of an improved ammonia catalyst for the synthesis of ammonia, he became associated with ‘Badische Anilin and Sodafabrik’ and spent a period as manager in one of their subsidiaries. This interest in technical application of science aroused and stimulated by his period in Zürich, remained a feature of all the diverse scientific activities of Finch in later life. An enthusiasm for mountaineering, dating from his school days and enhanced by the opportunities afforded during his years in Switzerland, formed a permanent feature of his later life.
George Lindor Brown, 1903-1971
Authors: MacIntosh Frank Campbell , Paton William Drummond Macdonald
Published: December 2006

George Lindor Brown—‘Lindor’, ‘Lin’ or ‘G. L.’, never George—was born in Liverpool on 9 February 1903. On his father’s side he came from a family of London tea-merchants. They were well-to-do, but his grandfather, George Alexander Brown, left home as a young man after an argument with his stepfather and joined the army. Eventually he rose to be a colour-sergeant and came with his Irish-born wife Mary Evans to live in Warrington. Their son, George William Arthur Brown, Lindor’s father, was born there. He became a teacher, and soon after Lindor’s birth he returned to Warrington, where he had been appointed headmaster of a large parochial school, the position he held for the rest of his career. G. W. A. was a successful teacher and administrator. He exercised his authority with firmness and good humour, and could easily handle the vicar’s occasional attempts to interfere with the running of his school. He was a well-known figure in Warrington, where among his many activities he took a leading part in starting the men’s club at which he later spent a good deal of his leisure time. His wife, who had been Helen Wharram from Yorkshire, was lively, talkative and competent, and the atmosphere at home was one of cheerful badinage, though G. W. A. had strong opinions on many subjects, and there was no doubt that he was in charge there as well as at school. He and his wife both lived to be elderly and their relationship with their two children continued to be one of mutual affection and respect.
Frederick James Dent, 1905-1973
Authors: Hutchison William Kenneth , Hebden D.
Published: December 2006

Frederick James Dent was born on 12 October 1905 at Horbury in Yorkshire. His father, Frederick Dent, had been in business at one time as a professional photographer, and appears to have brought to his work artistic talent and an inventive mind. He exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society and invented a photographic process for making prints on silk; perhaps because he always sought perfection the business failed. He joined the National Telephone Company on the engineering side, and supervised the construction of telephone exchanges at Batley and Horbury. The family came from York where they had been in business as military tailors. Dent’s mother, Sarah Liddle Pearson, came from a family connected with the sea. She won a Bede’s Scholarship and became a school teacher. Her father’s home was in Sunderland and he had held a master’s ticket in sail. The family had opposed the marriage and it was a number of years after they went away together that they were forgiven. It was a small family, consisting of Fred and one sister, and they eventually moved to Leeds when the father became an engineering inspector in the Civil Service. Dent entered the Leeds Boys Modern School (now the Co-education Leeds School) in September 1917 from Blenheim (Leeds) County Primary School. He was an outstanding pupil, and his reports showed that he excelled in every subject that he undertook. His first intention was to follow an artistic career, but towards the end of his school life, and with little more than a year to spare, he changed over to science. His sister recalls the long arguments when their father finally persuaded him that art may be a good hobby but there are better ways of earning a living.
Samuel Tolansky, 1907-1973
Authors: Ditchburn Robert William , Rochester George Dixon
Published: December 2006

Samuel Tolansky was born on 17 November 1907 in Newcastle upon Tyne. His parents had migrated to Great Britain about the turn of the century. They came immediately from Odessa but were of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Samuel was the second child in a family of two boys and two girls. His father was a tailor and, like most immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late Victorian era, he started in this country near the bottom of the ladder both in regard to material wealth and to social position. He became known later as a ‘first-class tailor’ and it is probable that there was a substantial amelioration in the family fortune though they never became rich or even ‘well off’ by middle class standards. There is no doubt that the first 10 years of Samuel Tolansky’s life were lived in conditions of considerable poverty and that his progress up the educational ladder was, at every critical stage, dependent on his ability to win scholarships and other awards. It is a fair criticism of the educational world of the first quarter of this century that it placed so many obstacles in the way of the advancement of children of poor homes. Yet a defender of that system could at least point to Samuel Tolansky as an example which shows that it was possible for one who started at the bottom to reach the top. The glittering prizes were available for a few who could take them not with sharp swords but with honest hard work (combined with great natural ability), perseverance, thrift, courage; all virtues which the Victorians praised and which today it is fashionable to undervalue.
John Wilfrid Linnett, 3 August 1913 - 7 November 1975
Authors: Buckingham Amyand David
Published: December 2006

John Wilfrid Linnett (known as ‘Jack’ to all his friends) was born at 4 Earlsdon Avenue North in Coventry, on 3 August 1913. He died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage at his club, the Athenaeum, on 7 November 1975. He was the only child of Alfred Thirlby Linnett and Ethel Mary Linnett (
née
Ward). His grandfather, John Linnett, married Sarah Ann Thirlby, the daughter of a Leicestershire farmer, in the Baptist Chapel in Ashby-de-laZouch in 1864. He is described on the marriage certificate as a printer. He was also a photographer; he died young of pneumonia contracted while taking photographs in North Wales. He invented an early method of obtaining moving pictures by flicking over the pages of a little book; the patent was apparently sold to an American by his widow who was left with three children. She continued the printing business, married a Mr Knight and had four more children; her second husband also died young, leaving her with seven children and the printing business.