Professor Emeritus Robert Woods alumni memory

Professor Emeritus Robert Woods (Chemistry 1948, PhD 1951) alumni memory.

When I entered the College as a second-year undergraduate student in 1946, direct entry from school was a privilege and something of a battle as 90 per cent of places were reserved for returning servicemen. In practice entry into the Royal College of Science (one of the three constituent colleges at the time) required success in the Royal Scholarship examinations (two days of mixed theoretical and practical examinations in chemistry in my case). The scholarships were only tenable at Imperial, so winning one gave reasonable assurance of acceptance by the College and, equally important, probable deferment by the authorities responsible for shepherding 18 year-old schoolboys into the armed forces.

The first three weeks at the College were an eye-opener as we quickly covered the entire three years of chemistry I had carefully studied at Regent Street's Polytechnic Secondary School. I was in awe. Given the threat of immediate induction into the military (when I registered for service this included the three recognised services, the Indian Army, the Palestine Police and the coal mines) upon failure, we studied hard. Our ex-service colleagues were a wonderful source of stories and information but, fortunately for us, not devoted to science to the exclusion of all else.

While our two undergraduate years were years of hard work and little pleasure, most of the school-entry students ended up with first or high-second degrees and were offered modest grants for three years graduate work - many accepted, pushing national service a further three years away. I don't recall being given any choice of area (organic, physical or inorganic chemistry) or supervisor for graduate work, but potential graduate students in those days seem to have accepted the wisdom of the faculty in these matters. Regardless of undergraduate success, we were told in no uncertain terms that we were being admitted as graduate students on probation - happily, most of us survived.

Graduate work was a great deal more relaxed than undergraduate studies, and we found time for other activities. One summer I spent a couple of months updating the entries in Heilbron's Dictionary of Organic Compounds covering the very many organic compounds whose names began with the letters 'm' to 'p'. Professor Heilbron was my senior research supervisor and this was something of a perk since it actually came with a small stipend. Interesting, but somewhat baffling since I was a rather feeble physicist and mathematician, was a year as editor of the Scientific Journal of the Royal College of Science. This resulted from a casual meeting with the departing editor in the washroom, and inability to come up with a quick reason why not.

Other activities included making fireworks in a laboratory behind the main Royal College of Science building for 5 November. The recipes were handed down from year to year, but (as past head of a university chemistry department) now seem incredibly foolish and dangerous. Safer, were a couple of years as Vice President of the Imperial College Ballroom Dancing Club. The club seems to have had only two executive members, the President and the Vice President, the latter being a sort of general dogsbody who retrieved and stored the record player in a cupboard behind the bar in the Union. Remarkably the Union provided funds for a professional ballroom dancing instructor for our weekly evening meetings, but not much for new records (our overworked foxtrots, quicksteps, rumbas and waltzes remain embedded in my memory after nearly 60 years). In those days the College was mainly male and the club executive was expected to circulate London's women's colleges and town-hall dances for partners. We also had to make sure that any girl who came to our sessions had someone to dance with - not difficult, but unexpectedly rewarding since several friends married dancing partners introduced in this way.

Graduate work at the Royal College of Science in the 1940s lasted 36 months and was structured so that most of us left with DIC and PhD degrees. Following graduation we departed to the forces, the civil service, industrial posts and the colonies, all approved (and possibly encouraged to some extent) by our joint recruiting boards.

Professor Emeritus Robert Woods (Chemistry 1948, PhD 1951)