bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Max Leonard Rosenheim, Baron Rosenheim of Camden, 1908-1972
Authors: Pickering George White
Published: December 2006

Max Leonard Rosenheim, Baron Rosenheim of Camden, became a Fellow of the Royal Society by Special Election under Statute 12 a few months before he died. He was a distinguished clinician and medical scientist but his outstanding success was in persuading organized medicine in this country to face constructively the issues of the contemporary world. This he achieved through his immense vitality and through his remarkable capacity for making friends all over the world. He was born in Hampstead on 15 March 1908. His parents were both nonpractising Jews and members of the Ethical Society. Max received no formal Jewish religious instruction and never regularly attended any place of religious worship. His father, Ludwig Rosenheim (1869-1915), was the son of a wine merchant in Wurzburg. He left Germany as a young man and became a naturalized British subject. He was a member of the Stock Exchange on which he made enough money to leave his family comfortably off. He had wide interests and, as a young man, attended evening classes in London on chemistry, mineralogy, geology, etc. Max’s paternal uncle was Sigmund Otto Rosenheim (1871— 1955) (see Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal , vol. 2, November 1956).
Cecil Edgar Tilley, 1894-1973
Authors: Deer William Alexander , Nockolds Stephen Robert
Published: December 2006

Cecil Edgar Tilley was born in Adelaide, South Australia, on 14 May 1894, the son of a civil engineer in the South Australian State Service. His family was very musical and Tilley himself as a boy was keenly interested in the piano and was a proficient organ player. He expressed regret in later years that his enthusiasm for science had allowed this interest in music to lapse. He went first to the University of Adelaide where, in his second year, he accepted the post of Cadet in the Geology Department. This meant that he was granted remission of fees in exchange for making thin sections and performing other minor duties. The petrologist in the Department at that time (1912) was W. R. Browne, temporarily taking the place of Douglas Mawson who was in the Antarctic. The petrology class was small, with Tilley the only outstanding student. Browne’s appointment terminated at the end of 1912, but he spent some time in the early part of 1913 collecting from the granitic intrusives exposed at Victor Harbour on the coast south of Adelaide. Tilley acted as Browne’s field assistant and himself examined the related granites of Cape Willoughby on Kangaroo Island. The results eventually appeared in two papers in the
Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia
for 1919, representing his first published petrological work. He completed the four-year B.Sc. honours course in November 1914, and the following year he went to Sydney University, to which Browne had returned, and became an undergraduate again, completing the final-year B.Sc. course and gaining medals in both chemistry and geology. Both Departments wanted him for the post of Junior Demonstrator and he chose Geology.
Francis Martin Rouse Walshe, 1885-1973
Authors: Phillips Charles Garrett
Published: December 2006

Francis Martin Rouse Walshe was born in London on 19 September 1885, the elder of the two surviving children of Rose and Michael Charles Walshe, whose firstborn had died in infancy. Rose Walshe was from Devonshire, one of a family of eight; their father, Samuel Light, was a yeoman farmer from the neighbourhood of Brixham. They claimed kinship with the Reverend H. F. Lyte (1793-1847) who wrote ‘Abide with me’ and ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’. Michael Charles Walshe was from County Mayo in Ireland, the son of a small farmer. He settled in London, founded what was possibly the first nursing agency of the kind now so widely used, became a J.P. and died in 1933 at the age of 80. Of his paternal ancestors F. M. R. Walshe noted in his Personal Record: ‘The Walshes of Mayo (Barony of Tyrawley) derive from the Welsh followers of the Earl of Pembroke (Strongbow) who led the Norman invasion of Ireland in the reign of Henry II. They, with others of the same derivation (Barretts, etc.: see Sir Samuel Ferguson’s ‘The Welshmen of Tyrawley’ in his
Lays of the Western Gael
) have remained in Mayo since that time. References to these families are to be found in the
Annals of the Four Masters
. Tribal warfare appears to have occupied much of their time. None of these has been famous in science, but one of my ancestors was hanged for his part in the Irish rebellion of 1798 and his name is commemorated on a monument in the town of Ballina, Co. Mayo. A comparable, if less marked, turbulence has characterized the strain since that time.’
Thomas Archibald Bennet-Clark, 13 January 1903 - 24 November 1975
Authors: Brown Robert
Published: December 2006

The death of Thomas Archibald Bennet-Clark was regretted deeply by a wide circle of friends and admirers. The number in this circle was large since Thomas had a gift for friendship which he exercised enthusiastically. He was an indefatigable correspondent. Many will have been glad to receive from him letters written in his characteristic spindly handwriting. These were never arid and had the flavour of being written with the circumstances of the particular correspondent in mind. He was a witty talker. Friends will remember a slightly hesitant speech which was used to enrich a sympathetic but incisive conversation. It was never used to embarrass but always to promote a sympathetic atmosphere. He was physically a small man and in a peculiar way this characteristic seemed to be particularly appropriate to his own ebullient style of good nature. He was a sympathetic and attentive listener, and must have spent long hours in the course of a busy life in discussions of professional and scientific matters. His reward was the friendship and devotion of a remarkable variety of persons. Colleagues became collaborators, students became admirers and professional acquaintances became intimate friends.
Alexander Haddow, 18 January 1907 - 21 January 1976
Authors: Bergel Franz
Published: December 2006

The central figure of this biographical memoir, Alexander Haddow (‘Alex’ to many so that reference to him by this name will continue throughout the following pages), worked a year or two before his death on a draft for a full autobiography with its introductory chapter headed ‘Prolegomena’; it was never finished or published, except in form of a short version [94].* If it had been completed in time and edited, it would have been the ideal record of his life. As it will be gratefully acknowledged later on, I made, I hope, good use of these valuable notes (38),f dictated by a totally blind man, especially those pertaining to his origins, childhood, schooldays and university studies. In addition, I employed as excellent sources his own ventures into biographical studies, such as the extended version of the Fourth Kennaway Memorial Lecture [92], informative obituaries and his numerous publications of research results or essays with more contemplative, speculative and philosophical contents. Furthermore, apart from having access to some of his correspondence with eminent contemporaries, I was also greatly helped through recent contacts, mainly by exchange of letters with a considerable number of people who knew him well, to refresh my own recollections of him, stretching back over forty years, and to extend my knowledge of periods outside my personal experience.
Bennett Melvill Jones, 28 January 1887 - 31 October 1975
Authors: Hall Arnold Alexander , Morgan Morien Bedford
Published: December 2006

Bennett Melvill Jones was born in Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, on 28 January 1887. His mother, Henrietta Cornelia, whose maiden name was Melvill, came from South Africa. The family, on his father’s side, had deep roots in the Birkenhead area, the father, grandfather and great-grandfather having been born there. The father, Benedict Jones, was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, at St John’s College. He was a barrister by profession, with interests in local government and amateur engineering. He was an Alderman of Birkenhead and served as Mayor. Melvill Jones’s mother had first married George William Bennett, and it was following his death that she married Benedict Jones. There were three children by each of the marriages. Melvill Jones married Dorothy Laxton Jotham on 25 November 1916, and they had three children, Margaret born in 1917, Warren born in 1920, and Geoffrey born in 1923. Warren was killed in action in 1940 while piloting an aeroplane over enemy territory. Lady Jones died in 1955. His father’s interest in amateur engineering had a considerable influence on Melvill Jones. In personal papers he relates how, during his school days, he spent his spare time working with his father, helping him construct such things as a dynamo and a half horse-power gas engine to drive it, and a two-seat motor car which ran successfully for over a thousand miles and cruised at 15 miles per hour. He also relates that he had a great admiration for his headmaster at Birkenhead School, and particularly because he was allowed to give up playing cricket so that he could have more time to work with his father on engineering.
Michael Polanyi, 12 March 1891- 22 February 1976
Authors: Wigner Eugene Paul , Hodgkin R. A.
Published: December 2006

Michael Polanyi was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1891. He used to recall how his father, a civil engineer and entrepreneur involved in the planning and development of railways, would return from his travels in Germany and the West with tales of tunnels and washouts and with new scientific and educational ideas. But, as a result of some unfortunate mishap, he lost all his fortune in 1899 when Michael was eight years old. This placed a severe financial strain on the family which was greatly aggravated in 1905 when Michael’s father died. Michael or Mishi, as his early friends called him throughout life, then earned some of the money needed in the family by tutoring other high school students. The widowed mother, despite straitened means, was able to remain the centre of a social and intellectual circle of which many of the young poets, painters and scholars of that period in Hungary were members. Thus it was that his mother’s persistent interest in social problems, in poetry and art, came to have a great influence on Michael’s emotional development. He had two brothers and two sisters, older than him, who were all, in their ways, distinguished.
Philip Macdonald Sheppard, 27 July 1921 - 17 October 1976
Authors: Clarke Cyril
Published: December 2006

Philip Sheppard died from acute leukaemia on 17 October 1976 at the age of 55. He came to the University of Liverpool from Oxford in 1956 and was head of the department of genetics from 1959. He was particularly distinguished for contributions to ecological genetics, his central interest being how natural selection works and its effect on the genetic constitution of organisms. His genius lay in the experimental approach, whether it was with butterflies, moths, snails or man. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society and the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Philip was born at Marlborough on 27 July 1921, the only child of George Sheppard, the mathematics master at Bradfield College, and Alison, née Macdonald. His father had been a ward of the Harmsworths (Lady Harmsworth was Philip’s godmother) and his mother was related to the Cornfords and consequently, by marriage, to the Darwins, as the pedigree shows (p. 466). Philip therefore had no Darwin genes, and it is of interest that his Darwinian outlook was entirely the result of environmental factors—his upbringing, his teachers and his training—a good example of a phenocopy.
Robert Spence, 7 October 1905 - 10 March 1976
Authors: Glueckauf Eugen
Published: December 2006

Robert Spence was born at South Shields, County Durham, on 7 October 1905, the only child of Rebecca and Robert Spence. His father was a marine engineer and since most of his life was spent at sea Robert’s upbringing was left largely in the hands of his mother. From 1911 to 1917 he went to the Stanhope Road Elementary School at South Shields and later, from 1917 to 1922, he attended Westoe Secondary Grammar School at South Shields where he obtained the John Heslop Scholarship. From his schooldays only a few memories survive: ‘We had one teacher known as “Boiler Smith” who made us learn poetry by boiling over and applying the cane. Another whom I remember with affection and respect was a true scholar. He was a historian and antiquarian who knew a good deal of science as well.’ It was the latter who first encouraged him in that direction. From Westoe Grammar he went, not yet 17 years old, to Armstrong College (now King’s) in Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham, where he obtained a first class B.Sc. in chemistry (1926), and M.Sc. and Ph.D. (1930) and finally the D.Sc. At Armstrong College he shared the Friere Marreco medal and prize for practical chemistry and the Senior Pemberton Scholarship. Apart from his academic studies, he took part in rowing and sculling; he rowed as stroke of college and university crews (for which his six foot height served him well). At this time he also developed an interest in industrial practice and spent a vacation course at the British Dyestuffs Corporation at Blakely in 1925. Other college activities were as secretary of the Newcastle Students’ Appeal in 1927, as President of the College Chemical Society, and as Secretary of the Bedson Club, a student scientific society at Armstrong College.
Archibald Vivian Hill, 26 September, 1886 - 3 June 1977
Authors: Katz Bernard
Published: December 2006

A. V. Hill was born in Bristol, the son of Jonathan Hill (1857-1924) and Ada Priscilla (
née Rumney
) (1861-1943). The father was the second of nine children; the mother one of four sisters. They were married in 1880, and had a son and a daughter, Muriel, who was born in February 1889. She became a biochemist and married Dr T. S. Hele, a colleague who worked in the same field and was later elected Master of Emmanuel College,Cambridge. Muriel died in 1941. A. V. (as he became known to his family and all his colleagues) traced his ancestry to the middle of the eighteenth century. To judge by the family tree which he himself drew, the name ‘Archibald Vivian' must have been a new departure. There were successions of Jameses and Jonathans, several Johns, an occasional Charles, George, Samuel, etc. among them, but apparently no precedent for Archibald or Vivian. A. V.’s forebears all lived in the West Country, mostly in Devonshire and Somerset. On the paternal side he was preceded by five generations of timber merchants at Bristol, carrying on the business which had been founded by James Hill in 1750. James had come from Ireland and later returned there to join a volunteer regiment. He is believed to have been killed during the Irish troubles.
John Edensor Littlewood, 9 June 1885 - 6 September 1977
Authors: Burkill John Charles
Published: December 2006

In 1900 pure mathematics in this country was at a low ebb. Since the days of Newton mathematics had come to be regarded as ancillary to natural philosophy. In the nineteenth century this attitude had been confirmed by the prestige of Stokes, Clerk Maxwell, Kelvin and others. On the continent the nineteenth century was as fruitful in pure mathematics as England was barren. The central property of functions of a complex variable was found by Cauchy, and further light was shed on the theory by Riemann and Weierstrass. France, Germany and Italy had many pure mathematicians of the first rank. The leading British scholars, notably Cayley, had been solitary figures and had not led young men into research. After 1900, the principal architect of an English school of mathematical analysis was G. H. Hardy (1877-1947). In strengthening the foundations and building on them he found a partner in the subject of this memoir, J. E. Littlewood (1885-1977). The inspiration of their personalities, their research and their teaching established by 1930 a school of analysis second to none in the world.
Richard Alan Morton, 1899 - 1977
Authors: Glover J. , Pennock J. F. , Pitt G. A. J. , Goodwin Trevor Walworth
Published: December 2006

Richard Alan Morton, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Liverpool, died peacefully at his home on 21 January 1977 after suffering a coronary attack a few days previously. He retained his fresh and enthusiastic approach to biochemistry right to the end. He had only recently returned from participating in an international symposium and at the time of his death was busy editing the proceedings of the Symposium.
Oliver Graham Sutton, 4 February 1903 - 26 May 1977
Authors: Pasquill Frank , Sheppard Percival Albert , Sutcliffe Reginald Cockcroft
Published: December 2006

Oliver Graham Sutton, the distinguished applied mathematician and science administrator, notable particularly for his fundamental theoretical work on atmospheric diffusion and boundary layer turbulence and for his direction of the Meteorological Office from 1953 to 1965, was born on 4 February 1903 in the village of Cwmcarn, Monmouthshire, and died in his home at Sketty Green, near Swansea, on 26 May 1977.
Meirion Thomas, 28 December 1894 - 5 April 1977
Authors: Porter Helen Kemp , Ranson S. L.
Published: December 2006

Meirion Thomas spent all but a year or two of his professional career at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (formerly Armstrong, later King’s College, University of Durham) following army service in World War I. An account of his arrival there says his advent was quite an occasion because of his Oxbridge accent, his air of culture and sophistication, his beautiful manners and his military bearing. At the memorial service for him it was said: ‘Through all the talks about him there runs a note of admiration for the research worker, the teacher, the quintessential bachelor, the regular worshipper at the Cathedral or the Welsh Chapel, and for the least warlike of men with a good first war record.’ Meirion was a quiet, naturally friendly man with a twinkle in his eye and a fine sense of humour, but a persistent shyness gave him a somewhat aloof manner and he maintained a personal reticence which none of his colleagues fully penetrated. He was extremely thorough in all he did and brought to his work high ideals and a sense of duty acquired in youth. He set the highest of standards and his students regarded him with some degree of awe, but in after years many expressed their respect and affection for him and gratitude for the rigorous training he provided.
Frederic Calland Williams, 26 June 1911- 11 August 1977
Authors: Kilburn Tom , Piggott L. S.
Published: December 2006

Frederic Calland Williams was born on 26 June 1911, at Romiley, near Stockport, to F. Williams and E. A. Williams (néeSmith). He was named ‘Freddie’ because the eldest son in the family had been called Freddie for several generations, and the tradition has been followed for two more generations. His father was a locomotive draughtsman with Beyer Peacock, and as Fred lived near a railway, he had from a very early age an interest in and a growing knowledge of engines. When he was nine or ten, an uncle had the first wireless set that Fred had seen; he studied this carefully and then went home and made one in a cigar box. In his Bakerian Lecture in 1964, Williams said: ‘My lecture is concerned with inventive research, a topic to which I have devoted my professional life since the age of ten.'
Edgar Douglas Adrian, Baron Adrian of Cambridge, 30 November 1889 - 4 August 1977
Authors: Hodgkin Alan
Published: December 2006

On his father’s side E. D. Adrian was descended from a Huguenot refugee, Richard Adrian, who fled to England from France or Flanders after the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572. There had been Adrians living in England since the thirteenth century and it seems possible that Richard Adrian was attracted to England for that reason. This suggestion was made by E. D. Adrian’s father, Alfred Douglas Adrian, in a private history written for his family. The genealogical tree reproduced on the opposite page summarizes what is known about E. D. Adrian’s ancestry on the paternal side.
William Lawrence Bragg, 31 March 1890 - 1 July 1971
Authors: Phillips David Chilton
Published: December 2006

Walking along the Backs in Cambridge one day in the autumn of 1912 William Lawrence Bragg had an idea that led immediately to a dramatic advance in physics and has since transformed chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy and, most recently, biology. He realized that the observations of X-ray diffraction by a crystal, which had been reported by von Laue and his associates earlier in that year, can be interpreted very simply as arising from reflexion of the X-rays by planes of atoms in the crystal and hence that the X-ray observations provide evidence from which the arrangement of atoms in the crystal may be determined. A few weeks of intensive work on simple inorganic compounds were enough to demonstrate the correctness of these ideas but the development of the method, at first in association with his father and later as the leader or guiding influence of a host of workers, was the labour of a lifetime. When he died on 1 July 1971, X-ray crystallography had revealed the arrangement of atoms in matter of all kinds from the simplest of salts to the macromolecules of the living cell. The story of his life is very largely the story of that achievement and the circumstances that led to his unique part in it.
Samuel Rickard Christophers, 27 November 1873 - 19 February 1978
Authors: Shortt Henry Edward , Garnham Percy Cyril Claude
Published: December 2006

After a life of great physical and mental activity, Samuel Rickard Christophers died on 19 February 1978, aged 104 years, the greatest age ever reached by a Fellow of the Royal Society. He followed Bacon’s ‘Regimen of Health—to be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and of sleep, and of exercise, is one of the best precepts of long lasting’ [i.e. for prolonging life]. He lived through a century of Science in general and medical science in particular including the immense progress in tropical medicine. In the latter field he was one of the great pioneers to rank equally with his famous peers, Sir Patrick Manson, F.R.S., and Sir Ronald Ross, F.R.S. Christophers was born in Liverpool on 27 November 1873. His father, Samuel Hunt Christophers, was born in Plymouth but the family came from the small village of Maunan in Cornwall and Christophers was vastly proud of the family’s Cornish origin. His mother, Mary Selina Rickard, was born at Redruth, Cornwall, and his parents were married at St Michael’s-in-the-hamlet near Otterspool on the Mersey. His father came to Liverpool and for many years was head of the Statistical Office of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board.
William Owen James, 1900 - 1978
Authors: Clapham Arthur Roy , Harley John Laker
Published: December 2006

William Owen James was born on 21 May 1900 at ‘Ravenscroft’, Mount Pleasant Road, Tottenham, London N.17, the elder of the two sons of William Benjamin James and his wife Agnes Ursula,
née
Collins; there were no daughters. The father, born in 1866, was for 32 years a successful primary school headmaster under the Tottenham Education Committee; he was especially interested in art teaching and had a reputation for training headmasters for other primary schools in the Committee’s area. He was a keen amateur botanist and, while working for his external B.Sc. of London University, had attended early classes in zoology run by H. G. Wells. His father’s enthusiasms for biology and art were recognized by James as important factors directing his own early interests. James’s mother was born in 1869 and the marriage, extending from 1894 until she died early in 1931, was described by James as ‘conspicuously happy’. After her death James’s father lived with his son in Islip, near Oxford, until he died in 1939. James was not aware of ancestors with scientific achievements or interests. There was a distant relationship, on the mother’s side, with Horatio Nelson, a connection admitted with reluctance by grandmother Ann Ursula Collins because of ‘the sort of man he was’.
Robert Gordon Menzies, 20 December 1894 - 15 May 1978
Authors: White Frederick William George
Published: December 2006

Robert Gordon Menzies was born on 20 December 1894 in the country town of Jeparit in the State of Victoria, Australia. By the brilliance of his intellect he won the scholarships that enabled him to qualify with distinction as a barrister, and to be called to the Victorian Bar. He abandoned the successful professional practice of the law to devote the greater part of his life to a political career, first in his own State, but later in the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. He first became Prime Minister in 1939, four months before Australia joined Britain by declaring war with Germany. Then followed eight years in opposition until Menzies, now leading a new Liberal Party-Country Party coalition, achieved a resounding victory in the election of December 1949. He became Prime Minister and held the leadership of his Party in Parliament for the next sixteen years. Menzies dominated the political scene in Australia in those years. Much has been and will no doubt be written of the major political events and controversies of this period of recovery from the war. The judgement of political and economic analysts will vary widely, but there can be no doubt about Menzies’s contribution to education and to science. For 16 years he personally guided the policy of his government to transform the status and magnitude of education throughout Australia, and greatly to enhance the resources devoted to the arts, the humanities and to science. This was indeed a period of intellectual renewal and progress never equalled in Australia’s history.
Michael Abercrombie, 14 August 1912 - 28 May 1979
Authors: Medawar Peter Brian
Published: December 2006

Michael Abercrombie, Director of the Strangeways Research Laboratory since 1970 and sometime Jodrell Professor of Zoology at University College London was one of the most admired, respected and warmly liked biologists of his day. He began life as an embryologist, it is true, and was Professor of Embryology at University College London before he took the Jodrell chair of Zoology but no sectarian label really fits him. Michael Abercrombie was a
biologist
—one of those who strives consciously to see the whole picture. His great and enduring contribution to biological science belongs to the area of research that is nowadays called ‘cell biology’ of which Michael was a principal pioneer. Michael Abercrombie studied cells with the intentness, exactitude and clarity of mind that is characteristic of the foremost modern students of animal behaviour. Michael Abercrombie was, indeed, an ethologist of cells and his career illustrates how some of the most important scientific conceptions may grow out of the deep analysis of ostensibly simple phenomena.
Morien Bedford Morgan, 20 December 1912 - 4 April 1978
Authors: Broadbent Edward Granville
Published: December 2006

Morien Bedford Morgan was born on 20 December 1912 at Bridgend, Glamorganshire, S. Wales. He died suddenly on 4 April 1978 at the Master’s Lodge of Downing College, Cambridge, where he had been Master since 1972. After a school life involving a few moves for one reason or another, he read engineering at Cambridge University and, in keeping with his natural inclination, learnt to think in fundamental engineering terms. This was one of his great strengths. He was not particularly interested in academic work for its own sake unless he could visualize its being of use in an engineering project, but at the same time he worked hard to bring scientific thought and method into many aspects of engineering application. It was while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge that he became fascinated with aeronautics, and good at it too, since he won the Aeronautics Prize in his year. Partly owing to circumstances, he made one false start in industry after taking his degree, but within a year he had taken a job in the Aerodynamics Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (R.A.E.) in Farnborough, Hampshire. There he met Sylvia Axford, to whom he was married in Farnborough on 19 April 1941; there are three daughters, Carol, Deryn and Gwyneth. In aeronautics his enthusiasm was infectious, and for someone with his love of aeroplanes he could not have started his aeronautical career at a better place than in the Aerodynamics Department at the R.A.E. Nor could his career with aeroplanes have been better timed, at least for variety and excitement, than it was, spanning as it did the war years and the periods of rapid development both before, when the need was at last recognized, and after, when jet engines and sweepback were exploited on a large scale.
Edward James Salisbury, 16 April 1886 - 10 November 1978
Authors: Clapham Arthur Roy
Published: December 2006

Edward James Salisbury was born at Limbrick Hall, on Harpenden Common in Hertfordshire, on 16 April 1886, the youngest of the nine children, six boys and three girls, of James Wright Salisbury and his wife Elizabeth, née Stimpson. The Salisbury family had long been well known residents of the Harpenden area. James W. Salisbury was a business man and director of several companies. His half-brother Henry had two sons: Edgar, who inherited Kingston House, a large and successful household store in Harpenden, and Frank, the distinguished painter, whose former house, Red Gables, has for fifty years or so been part of Rothamsted Experimental Station. Another of Edward’s cousins was Thomas Wright, the authority on William Cowper. Artistic talent has been prominent in the Salisbury family. No others have attained the eminence of Frank O. Salisbury, but two of Edward’s brothers became architects, and he was himself a sufficiently competent draughtsman to illustrate many of his publications with his own drawings, while his sister Ethel provided illustrations for the book on
Farm Weeds
by Dr Winifred Brenchley, then at Rothamsted, and also for some of the Fritsch & Salisbury textbooks (pp. 506,513). Salisbury records that his eldest brother was an able mathematician and a very good chess-player whose infectious love for the game led Edward to become for a time so much obsessed by it that he had finally, at the age of fifteen, to give it up almost completely to enable him to pursue his other interests. His second brother became an electrical engineer, the third a schoolmaster with a life-long interest in classical archaeology and in particular in British finds of hoards of Roman coins. The other two brothers became architects.
Cyril Dean Darlington, 19 December 1903 - 26 March 1981
Authors: Lewis Dan
Published: December 2006

Cyril Dean Darlington’s paternal great-grandfather was Henry Robertson, a merchant of Liverpool, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and a cousin of W. E. Gladstone, the nineteenth century Liberal Prim e Minister of Great Britain. Henry fathered a son illegitimately by his Welsh nursemaid, Mary Davies of Wrexham , at Salford in 1873; this son was given the name Henry Robertson Darlington, the name Darlington coming from Mary Davies’s later husband, William Darlington, a black smith and iron-founder. Henry Darlington married Alice Dean who gave birth to Cyril’s father, William Henry Robertson Darlington (1866-1943), a schoolm aster and secretary. Cyril has described this change of his paternal name with his characteristic light-hearted and irreverent style— ‘The business end of my Y chromosome therefore comes from Fife and not Durham ’— the county containing the town Darlington. Cyril’s maternal grandfather was a Frankland, son of a Unitarian minister of Whitby, married to a Cowling, an old family of solicitors of York. His mother, Ellen Darlington
née
Frankland (1874-1949) had two sons, Alfred Frankland Dean and Cyril Dean.
David Victor Glass, 2 January 1912 - 23 September 1978
Authors: Wise M. J.
Published: December 2006

.
Ludwig Guttmann, 3 July 1899 - 18 March 1980
Authors: Whitteridge David
Published: December 2006

Ludwig Guttmann was born on 3 July 1899 in Tost, Upper Silesia, which was then in Poland. His father was an innkeeper and distiller, who with Ludwig’s elder sister and her husband all perished in Auschwitz. Both Ludwig’s grandfathers were farmers, and he spent many holidays in the country on his grandfather’s farm where he watched his grandmother dispense herbal remedies to the country people. He was brought up in the Jewish faith, but early rebelled against ‘meaningless forms of orthodoxy’. He went to school at Konigshütte, a coal mining town of 70 000 inhabitants. While awaiting call-up at the age of 17 he became an orderly at the local accident hospital. Here he saw a miner who had broken his back have the deformity reduced by extension and direct pressure, a manoeuvre recommended by Galen. He was told not to write case notes, ‘as he will be dead in a few weeks’, and this defeatist attitude deeply impressed him (Ross & Harris 1980). In later life he found familiarity with the duties and ways of medical orderlies very valuable. He picked up from a patient a severe throat infection which was followed by a sub- thyroid abscess and drainage tube. When he was called up in 1917 with the abscess drainage tube still in place he was rejected for military service and began medical studies at Breslau. He recovered his health, was passed fit for service with the artillery, but when he was again called up on 9 November 1918, he was, not surprisingly, sent home.
Rudolph Albert Peters, 13 April 1889 - 29 January 1982
Authors: Thompson Robert Henry Stewart , Ogston Alexander George
Published: December 2006

Rudolph Albert Peters was born in Kensington on 13 April 1889. His grandfather, Ralph Benjamin, had been born in Denmark, the son of Rudolph Daniel Benjamin Peters (1781-1861) who was a Captain in the Danish Army (2nd Battalion, the Altona Infantry) under King Christian VIII, and who had been appointed by him a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog for his services in defending the neutrality of Altona in the face of Napoleon’s army. His father, Albert Edward Duncan Ralph Peters, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (1863-1945), was a younger son of Ralph Benjamin Peters, who had come to England as a young man and had married Elizabeth Sewell Pape, who belonged to a Lincolnshire family said to have been friends of the Wesleys. His mother was Agnes Malvina Watts (1867-1950), the granddaughter of Commander C. N. Watts, R.N., whose father, Admiral George Edward Watts, C.B., had been engaged in many naval actions in the time of Napoleon. Admiral Watts was himself the only son of John Watts, an officer in the army who fell while serving under the Duke of Kent at the storming of Fort Bourbon, Martinique, in 1794. The Watts ancestors also include a Captain of Infantry who had fought under the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden, and who was a first cousin of Dr Isaac Watts, the writer of a number of well known hymns including ‘O God, our help in ages past’.
John William Sutton Pringle, 22 July 1912 - 2 November 1982
Authors: Wigglesworth Vincent Brian
Published: December 2006

John William Sutton Pringle was born in Manchester on 22 July 1912. He was the eldest of four brothers. His father was John Pringle, M.D. (Dublin), a well known medical practitioner in Rochdale and Manchester. The origins of the family have been traced back to one Robert de Hoppryngil, which is a hill near Galashiels from which the name Pringle was derived. They moved to Ireland in the time of Cromwell, where they became farmers and bailiffs. J. W. S. Pringle’s father had come over to Manchester in 1900. His mother was Dorothy Emily (
née
Beney), whose family claimed to be of Huguenot extraction. The Scottish branch of the Pringle family produced Sir John Pringle (1707-83), the founder of modern military medicine and originator of the Red Cross idea. He secured improved ventilation in jails, ships, barracks and mines; he named influenza and defined the forms of dysentery; he eventually became President of the Royal Society. And J. W. S. Pringle had a more recent link with the Royal Society in that he shared a grandfather with the malariologist J. A. Sinton, V.C., F.R.S. As a boy, John Pringle enjoyed a happy family life, escaping from the grime of Manchester for summer holidays in the Lake District, in Donegal and in the Alps. He was educated at home and at a local ‘high school’ until ten years of age. He then started attending Manchester Grammar School (1922-23) but the Manchester fogs induced broncho- pneumonia in two consecutive years and he was therefore transferred to a preparatory school, Langley place at St Leonard’s-on-Sea, Sussex (1923-26). Here the teaching under W. J. Roberts was very good and he won a senior scholarship to Winchester College.
Charles Sykes, 27 February 1905 - 29 January 1982
Authors: Allibone Thomas Edward
Published: December 2006

Charles Sykes, born in 1905, spent almost all his scientific life in industry, first with the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Co. in Trafford Park, Manchester where he did the work on which he was elected into the Fellowship, and then in Sheffield with the Thomas Firth & John Brown Co., steel makers, first as Director of Research, then as Managing Director and finally as Deputy Chairman. He graduated in Sheffield University and later in life became one of its Pro-Chancellors. He was a man of quiet and kindly disposition, of few words, extremely thorough and able, making a success of almost everything he touched. After retirement he spent 11 years devoted to perfecting the art of gardening and died from a heart attack on 29 January. He and his wife, Norah, had celebrated their golden wedding in 1980 together with their family, Howard and his wife, and Patricia with her husband and two children. Both of them had enjoyed lives of good health and great happiness in Sale, Cheshire, and in Dore, near Sheffield, with a brief sojourn during the war at Teddington.
Emmanuel Ciprian Amoroso, 16 September 1901 - 30 October 1982
Authors: Short Roger Valentine
Published: December 2006

Emmanuel Ciprian Amoroso, or ‘Amo’ as he was affectionately known to his thousands of friends and acquaintances around the world, is the only Trinidadian, indeed the only West Indian, to have been elected into the Fellowship of the Royal Society— a signal achievement. That he was able to overcome the prejudices of race and colour, so prevalent in British society particularly in the earlier decades of this century, is a tribute to his great personal charisma, his ability to speak in many tongues and so endear him self to people in nations and cultures very different from our own, and to the sheer force of his intellect. His studies on the formation, structure and function of the mammalian placenta and its role in the evolution of viviparity form the basis of his international scientific reputation. He will be remembered m ore for his ability to absorb a mass of factual information scattered throughout the world’s scientific literature over the last few centuries and to produce a concise, succinct summary of the present state of the art, than as an experimentalist. His skills lay more in observation and interpretation, in the correlation of structure with function, than in the design and execution of planned experiments. But it is as a speaker, indeed as an orator, and as a teacher that he will be best remembered throughout Europe, Australasia, Africa and the Americas. Listening to him deliver a lecture on a formal occasion, one had the distinct impression that if he had not succeeded as a scientist he would have becorme a great actor, or even an inspiring preacher; in a bygone age he would have been one of those great storytellers who could have held his audience enthralled. As Professor Courtenay Batholomew said of him , ‘He had a charisma and an aura about him w hereby when he walked into a gathering one had to enquire: “who is this man?” ’
George Edward Raven Deacon, 21 March 1906 - 16 November 1984
Authors: Charnock Henry
Published: December 2006

Although he devoted his life to the service of marine science, becoming an internationally famous oceanographer, George Deacon had no family connection with the sea. He was born in Leicester on 21 March 1906, the second child of George Raven Deacon and his wife Emma, born Drinkwater. His father was also born in Leicester: one of six children, he often said he would have liked to have studied medicine but he was obliged to leave school at 14 to work in a boot and shoe factory. His mother was the eldest of five children: after her father died when she was ten she took what was then called the ‘labour exam’ and left school when she was about twelve to work in a hat and cap factory until she was married. The Deacons were devout nonconformists, of the Strict Baptist faith, so Ted Deacon (as he was then called to avoid confusion with his father) and his sister Grace, who was 18 months older, were brought up in a Christian home, with strict but kind discipline. They were given every encouragement to work hard: their mother often quoted from Ecclesiastes ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might’. She was extremely deaf, so must have missed much of her children’s chatter, but they had a great love for her and their childhood was a very happy one.
Thomas Maxwell Harris, 8 January 1903 - 1 May 1983
Authors: Chaloner William Gilbert
Published: December 2006

Thomas Maxwell Harris was the son of a Leicester engineer and inventor, Alex Charles Harris. His grand father, Thomas, had been the active partner in the Caine bacon firm, Charles and Thomas Harris. Harris wrote of his grandfather that ‘he had a rudimentary education and a terrific sense of duty, rather often mitigated by humour’. Tom’s mother, Lucy Frances, was the youngest daughter of Arthur Evans, the Leicester town flour miller. She had had ‘a very good education, including Cheltenham’. He recorded that she was ‘full of love, not merely for her four children but for all the lame ducks around. She had an enormous circle of friends and was constantly writing letters.’
Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, 7 February 1897 - 22 February 1984
Authors: Adams John Frank
Published: December 2006

Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman (‘Max Newman’) deserves to be remembered for at least three aspects of his life. He was the first in Britain to work on modern topology, and he did significant research in that subject. In the 1940s he contributed to the British success in deciphering German messages, and also to the early development of electronic computers. In Manchester he showed unusual talents as a leader and manager of a mathematics department.
John Fleetwood Baker, Baron Baker of Windrush, 19 March - 9 September 1985
Authors: Heyman J.
Published: December 2006

John Fleet wood Baker returned to Cambridge in 1943, as Professor of Mechanical Sciences and Head of the Department of Engineering, and as a Professorial Fellow of Clare College, where he had been an undergraduate. In the conflict of interests, sometimes trivial, sometimes painful, between ‘University’ and ‘College’, Baker was clear, at least officially, as to where his duty lay. His staff was large—Engineering forms one tenth of the University of Cambridge, and consumes proportionately more than one tenth of its resources—and his staff were in demand, as men of affairs, for various College offices. He pretended to deplore this, and would occasionally, in the Departmental Common Room, rail against the College system, which seduced his lecturers away from their tasks of teaching and research to the time-consuming offices of Bursar or Tutor. In fact, when a young lecturer—and all his lecturers were, to Baker, young—when a young lecturer would summon the courage to confess that a College was proposing an appointment of this sort, Baker was not altogether displeased. He took immense pains with the appointment of his staff; he was quick to terminate employment of those who did not meet his high standards, in a way that is not possible in these more bureaucratic times; and he gave unstinting support to those he thought of as his team. If one of these should catch a College’s eye, it was only confirmation of the qualities of those in his Department.
Edward Crisp Bullard, 21 September 1907 - 3 April 1980
Authors: McKenzie Dan Peter
Published: December 2006

Edward Crisp Bullard, known to everyone as Teddy, was the most distinguished and best known British geophysicist of his generation, whose experimental and theoretical work contributed to every aspect of the subject. He will be remembered as one of the major figures in the development of the Earth sciences during the 20th century, both for his own contributions and for his influence on his colleagues and students.
Frank Dickens, 15 December 1899 - 25 June 1986
Authors: Thompson Robert Henry Stewart , Campbell P. N.
Published: December 2006

Frank Dickens was born on 15 December 1899 in Northampton, the youngest of six children, five boys and a girl. His father, William John Dickens, was a master currier and leather merchant, whose family all came from Walgrave or the adjacent Northamptonshire village of Holcot. According to some notes written by one of his brothers, the village church records show that ‘in 1750 a Stephen Dickens paid five shillings for No. 9 pew in Walgrave church’. His mother, Elizabeth Ann (
née
Pebody), came from a long line of millers and farmers who, from about 1630 onwards, had lived only a few miles outside Northampton, at Rothersthorpe and later Harpole Mill. His father’s family were firmly nonconformist, whereas his mother’s side was Church of England. Frank has recorded that ‘this did not seem to have caused any difficulties’, but his upbringing was strict and he was taught to think that alcoholic beverages were very wrong. His father was a lay preacher in the Baptist church at Walgrave and took an active part in all the affairs of the church, including playing an instrument in, and conducting, the village band. He must also have had considerable business abilities and ambition, for by the time he was 43 years of age he had gathered together from very small beginnings enough resources to build a fair-sized leather factory in Northampton, to which town the family had moved a couple of years earlier.
Albert Charles Chibnall, 28 January 1894— 10 January 1988
Authors: Synge Richard Laurence Millington , Williams E. F.
Published: December 2006

It was almost by chance that A.C. Chibnall was inducted into the second generation of British biochemists. He made important studies of the nitrogen metabolism of plants, crowning this work with a remarkable historical review. He also initiated serious chemical study of the natural waxes. For a quarter of a century he was the central figure in British protein chemistry, itself, for the first time, at the centre of protein chemistry in the world. He was instrumental in sending scientists into many of the variegated branches of British agricultural research and was, moreover, a distinguished historian of medieval England. Space, time and our personal limitations prevent us from doing justice to all of that. What we have mainly tried to do is to indicate starting points for future scientists and historians, wishing to go over any of this ground in greater detail. We try at the same time to record some of the personal impressions made on his contemporaries (including ourselves) by this unique and lovable man. In an age of male address by surname, Chibnall was familiarly known to colleagues as “Chib”, “Chibby” or “Chibs”, though latterly more people spoke about him thus than dared so to address him. To his parents and siblings (also H.B. Vickery) he was “Bert”. In his family, and with a few friends in his last years, he became simply “Charles”. Here it is convenient to use just the initials A.C.C., with which he signed many of his less-formal letters.