FELLOWS

IN MEMORIAM

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I begin this year’s ‘In Memoriam’ with a note of two members of the College Assistant Staff, who will be known to a number of Fitzwilliam alumni: Mr John Eisold, a Porter for many years and eventually Head Porter, and a University Constable, who died on 20 October 2019; and Mrs Audrey Cann, Hall Supervisor for a number of years, who died on 27 September 2020 at the age of 88. We have lost three Life Fellows, and fifty-six members of the College. As always I am grateful to those family members and colleagues who have contributed material to make it possible to compile the obituaries I have written. This will be the last contribution I shall make under this heading for the Journal. Although the task always makes the closing weeks of the year hectic, it has provided me with a unique insight into the membership of the College over nearly a quarter of a century. I am only saddened by the realisation that we often only know about the range of achievements of our members when it is no longer possible to congratulate them in person.

David Thompson

LIFE FELLOWS

PROFESSOR JOHN MORTON COLES, FBA, FSA (1955)

John Coles was born on 25 March 1930 and was educated at the University of Toronto. In 1955 he came to Fitzwilliam to read for the Diploma in Prehistoric Archaeology, which he gained in 1957. After three years as a Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at Edinburgh, during which time he secured a PhD, he was appointed an Assistant Lecturer in the Cambridge Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1960, and Lecturer in 1965. He became a Fellow at Fitzwilliam in the same year. His subsequent career in the University was rapid, being appointed Reader in 1976 and Professor in 1980, retiring in 1986, when he became a Life Fellow. He was also Director of Studies for the Prince of Wales, when Charles was reading Archaeology and Anthropology, since Trinity did not have a Fellow in the subject. John was awarded an ScD in 1978, and became a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year; he had been a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries from 1963, and served as Vice-President, 1982-86. Author of several standard texts in field archaeology, he specialised in wetlands, especially the Somerset Levels, which was one reason why in retirement he moved to Devon. For this fifteen-year project he was awarded ‘the British Archaeological Awards’ Country Life Award for the best project by a professional or mixed professional/voluntary team or unit’ in 1988. On the award in 1995 of the British Academy Grahame Clark Medal, he described it as ‘bronze, large and heavy – not to be worn, more like a door stop’. In 1998 he endowed a Travel Bursary at Fitzwilliam for either an undergraduate or graduate student, who needed support in travelling abroad during his or her course. He died on 14 October 2020.

DR GUY GIBSON POOLEY

Guy Pooley was born in Bedford in 1944, but the family moved to Nottingham ten years later where he did his secondary education, prior to winning a scholarship to Peterhouse in 1964. His introduction to Cambridge was the winter of 1962-63, with its biting winds and frozen Lent Term. Having secured a double first in Natural Sciences, Guy went on to do research in astrophysics under Sir Martin Ryle. From 1966 he published over 250 research papers, and developed a network of international collaborations (including the USA, Poland, South Korea). For several decades he was central to the operation of the radio telescopes at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory at Lord’s Bridge. Guy became a Fellow of Fitzwilliam in 1973, retiring in

2011 and a Life Fellow thereafter. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease soon afterwards. He worried about his wife, Christine, who went into a hospice late in 2019. (We reported her death in last year’s Journal.) At the same time Guy moved into Etheldreda House care home. The changes were mitigated by continuing pride in his three grandchildren, but he had to dispose of all his modelling equipment (and the models he had made over the years). He enjoyed teaching, and was good at it; he regularly received letters of gratitude from former pupils, who had often climbed further up the academic ladder than he ever did himself. But he retained his sense of humour throughout the last year. A life-long supporter of Oxfam, he had always lived by the 1960s motto, ‘Live simply, that others may simply live’. He died on 7 October 2020.

DR KENNETH CHARLES ARTHUR SMITH (1949)

Ken Smith was born in Birmingham on 20 March 1928, and was educated at Coventry Junior Technical Secondary School and Coventry Technical College, where he gained his ONC and HNC, while testing RollsRoyce Merlin engine electrical components for Spitfires. He came to Fitzwilliam in 1949, having nearly been rejected, to read Electrical Engineering; in this he demonstrated the perseverance which was to carry him through Cambridge. He rowed in his first year, but was advised to give it up to concentrate on his academic work, which he did. After graduating in 1952, he did research in electron microscopy in the Department of Engineering, receiving his PhD in 1957. After post-graduate work in the Department of Engineering until 1958, when he spent two years at the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada in Montreal, again in electron microscopy. Returning to Cambridge, he spent two years as a Senior Assistant in Research at the Department of Physics before becoming a University Lecturer in Engineering in 1965. Ken was elected to a Fellowship at Fitzwilliam in March 1966. In 1971 Dr V.E. Coslett and Ken were jointly awarded the Duddell Medal and Prize ‘in recognition of their outstanding achievement in designing and constructing the Cavendish 750 kV electron microscope. The microscope proved to be a great success and stimulated the great interest in high voltage electron microscopy in this country.’ The Cavendish microscope also formed the basis of the design of the 1 MeV electron microscopes later manufactured by AEI. The success of this venture owed much to the pioneering work of Drs Coslett and Smith.

More controversially, a letter from Ken to the Master in 1974 led to the first Governing Body discussion, since the drafting of the statutes, of admitting women to Fitzwilliam, but it came to nothing. In 1980 Ken was made a Reader, and in 1983 an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society. In 1986 he began to suffer from back trouble, which eventually led to his taking early retirement in 1988; however, he was elected to a Life Fellowship. In 1993 Ken received the Distinguished Scientist Award for the Physical Sciences from the Microscopy Society of America. As his back continued to make very slow progress, despite further surgery, Ken began to think about the future; and in view of his long-standing interest in Music he decided, with Ronald Smith (no relation), to endow an Alkan prize, later converted into a scholarship, to perpetuate the memory of the piano music of Charles-Valentin Alkan (181388), a French-Jewish pianist, contemporary of Chopin and Liszt with a similar reputation as a virtuoso pianist. This was effected at the turn of the millennium, with a dazzling inaugural concert in the auditorium. Unfortunately Ken’s health suffered increasingly frequent reversals. He died on 15 March 2020. Truly a long life marked by courage and determination. 71