Provided by Mrs Margaret Maddock
Alfred’s career was very fulfilling - he loved both research and teaching. He was with the Tube Alloys project during the war and became interested and knowledgeable in Nuclear & Hot Atom Chemistry. He designed the first chemistry lab at Cern. He gave courses in many countries for the International Atomic Energy Agency. These assignments led him to have international groups of Postgraduate Students working for PhDs in Cambridge. He was awarded an honorary degree at Louvain University, received the Gold Medal of the Order of Merit in Science. Alfred was awarded the first Becquerel Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
He was interested in climbing, walking, travel, theatre, food and wine.
Two of our sons have PhD’s from Imperial College.
John - Chemical Engineering - now a professor in Brazil, and Robert - Geology - now VK Geoscience Manager for Baker Atlas Oil Service Co.
While at Imperial College Alfred blew all his own apparatus for his PhD work and together with a colleague Chris Reed, was noted for the explosions he had. Luckily in those days St George’s Hospital was near and attended to many IC students.
Article text (excluding photos or graphics) available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
Photos and graphics subject to third party copyright used with permission or © Imperial College London.
