Alexander Todd - A Time to Remember

While in the American Zone we drove down to Darmstadt (although strictly we had no authority to do so), in order to see another chemical friend, Clemens Schopf, who was professor at the Technische Hochschule there. He and his wife were well, but living in a rather battered house standing in a sea of rubble. Thereafter we returned to Frankfurt, and set off northwards to Dusseldorf to begin our tour of some of the places in the British Zone where, as in Gottingen, there were signs of a renascence of scientific activity. On the way to Dusseldorf we chose a route which took us through old haunts in the Taunus hills, and, in particular, to the little town of Idstein, where I knew that the family of my former co-worker, Anni Jacob, lived, and where her brother-in-law was the village pharmacist. We called on him in the forenoon of a crisp sunny day, and were greeted with great enthusiasm. The entire Jacob family was summoned, and Anni's brother-in-law and nephew went off to the bottom of the garden and dug up several bottles of their best wine, which they had carefully buried to protect it from the American occupying troops. We had a hilarious time, and, much later in the day, departed in a somewhat tattered condition, complete with some wine and a bottle of home-made spirit rather flatteringly called 'gin', the production of which seemed to be a flourishing cottage industry in Idstein. (That bottle ultimately fetched up in the mess at Gottingen, where it was labelled 'Echtes Toddka' and stood there in a cupboard for about two years before it (allegedly) exploded.) We arrived late at night in Dusseldorf, but my recollections of the journey and our arrival are a bit hazy! After discharging some official duties with the British authorities in Dusseldorf, our route took us on to Hamburg, Kiel, Cologne, Bonn and Elberfeld in succession. Thereafter we went back to Gottingen and I returned to England.

During this trip I saw enough the realise that, with the kind of encouragement that Bertie Blount was giving to the German scientists, it would be possible to get science in the British Zone into reasonable shape quite quickly once the general economic situation improved. I also learned, to my great relief, that the two great German chemical encyclopaedias, Gmelin's Handbuch der Anorganischen Chemie and Beilstein's Handbuch der Organischen Chemie, had been rescued from Berlin by the efforts of Blount and Professor Roger Adams who was, as a civilian, performing the same kind of duty in the American Zone of Occupation. The editors, staff, and most of the material belonging to these works were now located in the West - Dr Pietsch and Gmelin in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, and Dr Richter and Beilstein in Hochst, near Frankfurt. They still had many problems to face, not least among them being the procurement of current scientific literature, which they could not afford to buy abroad. It seemed to me that I would probably be back in Germany again before long, and in this I was quite right.

Within the next eighteen months I paid two further visits, based in each case on Gottingen as before. On the first of these trips I was accompanied by H. W. Thompson (now Sir Harold Thompson) and H. J. Emeleus. Thompson was already an old friend of mine, and an even older one of Bertie Blount; we had all three studied in Germany at the same time; Emeleus, of course, was now my colleague in Cambridge, and he had studied in Karlsruhe at about the same time as I had been in Frankfurt. We three, like Bertie Blount, had the great advantage of being fluent German speakers, which made everything go more smoothly. During this visit we had a gathering in Gottingen of all the German chemists who could be mustered, at which the new Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker was formally set up, replacing the virtually defunct Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft. The meeting, which included participants from both the French and American Zones was, I think, the first scientific meeting held in Germany after the war. It was a great success, and we had a symposium at which Thompson, Emeleus and I read papers on what had been happening in chemistry outside Germany. Emeleus and I had a good look at the problems of Gmelin and Beilstein, and I then created, unilaterally and without authorisation, a Beilstein — Gmelin Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (subsequently whitewashed by Professor Delaby, the Secretary General of the Union) and wrote on its behalf to the publishers of all the main chemical journals in the world, asking them to donate copies of their publications to each of the two Institutes. The response was magnificent; almost without exception, they sent two copies of each issue to me in Cambridge and I had them transmitted to Germany through official channels. It involved Emeleus and me in a lot of work until mails were reliable enough for journals to be sent direct from the publishers, but I like to think it was worth it; had it not been done these two great encyclopaedias might well have foundered and disappeared. Of course, all was not smooth sailing - we had to cope with disputes between Dr Pietsch and his German governing body about what weight was to be given to the history of chemistry, and there were numerous alarms and excursions over attempts by publishers in England to get hold of Beilstein. But it was all good fun and very interesting, as also were the visits we made to German industrial research organisations on our 1947 visit. Looking back on things now, it seems to me that Britain really did a very good job for science in its zone of occupation, and I believe that much of the credit for this must go to Bertie Blount; his services in this respect are remembered with gratitude in Germany, but have received less than their due recognition at home.

Prior to 1946 I had little contact with national or international scientific organisations, and my interest in chemical education did not extend much beyond the day-to-day involvement with teaching in my own department. However, the visits to post-war Germany, which I have just mentioned, introduced me to some of these matters and in the years that followed I became increasingly involved in them and in the promotion of chemical research by the award of postgraduate scholarships and fellowships, serving on a variety of charitable organisations concerned with such matters. Of these, one of the more interesting was the Salters' Institute of Industrial Chemistry which was a major activity of the Worshipful Company of Salters, one of the twelve great livery companies of the City of London. The great livery companies of London are the descendants of mediaeval craft guilds. Although many of them - like the Salters - have long since lost their significance, they own much city property and spend large sums charitably, mainly on schools, almshouses and the like. Early in this century the Court of the Salters' Company decided that it would like to devote at least some of the Company's wealth to promoting the chemical industry, as being perhaps the nearest equivalent to its ancient, but vanished, involvement with salt production and distribution. Accordingly, it established a body known as the Salters' Institute of Industrial Chemistry, to provide assistance by way of grants to boys wishing to study chemistry, and by making awards at the postgraduate level to young men wishing to pursue research preparatory to taking up an industrial career. Admission to the livery of the Salters (which numbered only about 120 in all) was almost exclusively by patrimony, and so it happened that when, in 1946, the Company sought to reactivate the Institute (which had been inactive during the war years), they found that the livery contained no members concerned in any direct way with chemical education or research who might assist in its work. The Court of the Company then decided to break with its traditions, and to invite two chemists - myself and Charles Goodeve - to join the livery and help run the Institute. This we did, and, although because of war damage to its London properties the Company for a time had only very limited funds available, the Institute restarted its operations and has grown steadily in its scope ever since. My association with the Salters' Company has always been a happy one; I served as Master of the Company in 1961-62 and my son and son-in-law continue the family connection as liverymen and members of the Institute Committee.