Arndt
At Dulwich 1936-1938
Dr Uli Arndt, FRS, was a research physicist, formerly a staff member of and latterly visitor in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he specialised in the design of X-ray diffraction apparatus used in the determination of the structures of biological materials. He was born in Berlin, his parents being of mixed German, Russian, Dutch and English stock. He was educated in Germany until 1936 when at the age of twelve he emigrated with his parents to England and continued his education at Dulwich College, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He obtained a first degree in Physics and a doctorate in Crystallography. He then worked at Birmingham University and for thirteen years at the Royal Institution in London, moving back to Cambridge in 1963, where he remained, except for sabbatical absences in the USA and France. In his autobiography Personal X-Ray Reflection London, Athena press, 2006, Uli describes his first impressions of Dulwich College:
"The school year of 1936-7 was indeed a momentous one for me. I had started the year in Germany; had then gone to school in Eastbourne and been in three different forms at Dulwich. I had learned to cope with the starched white collar of my new school uniform, been introduced to the mysteries of rugby and cricket and had overcome the feeling of strangeness when swimming in the school swimming baths in the buff."
Coppen
School No. 12718. At Dulwich 1935-39
Doctor Coppen has dedicated his life to research in psychiatry especially into major depression, which is ranked by the WHO as the fourth most important cause of premature mortality and disability.
Alec Coppen came to the college in 1935 and left in 1939. He served in World War II in the Royal Signals. Subsequently, he read medicine in Bristol and at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. He joined the Medical Research Council's Neuropsychiatric Research Institue in 1960 as Clinical Director and was head of the WHO designated centre for Biological Psychiatry in the UK. He is a pioneer in psychopharmacology, which has done so much to alleviate mental illness and to empty the psychiatric hospitals. He was a founder and president of the British Association of Psychpharmacology (1976 - 1978) and President of the International Society (1988 - 1990). He has received many international prizes and awards for his work. He has published over 400 papers and books on the biology and treatment of mood disorders.
Dowling
School No. 6827, at Dulwich 1906-1910
Was a dermatologist who, through his charismatic personality combined with humility, honesty and integrity raised the status of his profession. When he left Dulwich College he went to Guy’s Hospital to become a doctor and specialised in dermatology. He soon realised that his chosen speciality had very low status in the medical establishment. He was entirely self-taught and over 20 years made himself one of the best dermatologists in the country. His ambition was to raise the status of British dermatology to the highest level. He achieved it by total professional dedication and unusual methods. He started a journal club for trainee dermatologists with six members in 1946 and it grew to become an institution – the Dowling Club. By the time he died he has achieved his objective dermatology in Britain was recognised as first class.
Fellows-Smith
At Dulwich 1968-1977
Dr James Fellows-Smith, is a psychiatrist working in Western Australia in the area of forensic psychiatry especially drug and alcohol addiction. When he left Dulwich he studied medicine at Guy’s. He remembers:
"My first day was quite a shock. I visited theatres and saw a patient being resuscitated during open heart surgery saw a post mortem in the morgue and was introduced to the cadavers in the anatomy department!"
While working as an intern on the Isle of Man he switched from surgery to psychiatry. He qualified in 1983 and worked at Dover, Douglas and North Devon. When he moved to Leeds he was able to study for his Masters at York which he completed in 1989 with a thesis Sliding Limits to Safe Levels of Drinking which was published in the International Journal of Alcohol and Alcoholism in 1991. While on holiday in Australia he was offered his first psychiatric post in Fremantle, followed by jobs in Hobart and then Perth. During a heroin abuse epidemic he worked with Dr George O’Neill on rapid detox techniques and wrote a paper on Clinical Indicators for Opioid Treatment Matching. In 2002 he was made a founder fellow of the addiction medicine chapter of the Australian College of Physicians, of which he is also a fellow. His practice has becoming increasingly medico-legal giving advice and evidence in military compensation cases like the Melbourne-Voyager collision.
Hartley
School No. 4508, at Dulwich 1894-1897
H B Hartley (1878-1972) A physical chemist and industrial consultant. While at Dulwich Sir Harold Hartley studied under H B Baker and was secretary to the Science Society 1894-95. In 1897 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, on a Brackenbury scholarship. In 1900 he graduated with first-class honours in natural science (chemistry and mineralogy), and in 1901 was appointed tutorial fellow of Balliol. During the First World War and up to 1950 he gave chemical advice on German gas attacks, chemical weapons and chemical defence. In the 1920s Hartley organized summer schools at Balliol so school science teachers could learn how to teach physical chemistry. He researched the electrical conductivity of solutions. Realizing that a study of non-aqueous solutions afforded the best test, Hartley began a systematic series of conductivity measurements of salts dissolved in alcohols and other organic solvents, so making a contribution towards the understanding of ionic solutions. In 1930 Hartley fulfilled a desire to work to unite science and industrial technology by going to work for the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway Company. He was the first chairman of the Electricity Supply Council to which he attracted distinguished scientists as researchers. Hartley constantly urged the upgrading of British chemical engineering and was an active president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. As adviser to the construction firm John Brown he develop the idea of replacing batch chemical and biochemical processes by continuous plant. Sir Harold Hartley was a College Governor until 1970, when he endowed two school prizes one for art and one for science.
Hearn
At Dulwich 1985-1990
A powerful force in the conservation of the African rhino. An unremarkable school career left him well short of gaining entry to university. However, his determination saw him raise the money to become unpaid office boy for Save the Rhino Trust in Namibia. He later graduated to another unpaid position monitoring a unique population of desert-adapted black rhinos in north-west Namibia. In 1998 he was admitted to the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, to do a Postgraduate Diploma in Conservation Biology. Mike progressed well through his coursework and was soon upgraded to an MSc. His dissertation on density-dependence in black rhinos gained him his Master's with Merit. He also won the Maurice Swingland Prize for the best DICE postgraduate student of his year, in recognition of his progression and all round contribution. He returned to the desert as Director of Research for Save the Rhino Trust, to continue monitoring rhinos. In 2002, DICE was awarded a grant from the Darwin Initiative for the Survival of Species and it was Mike who used it to expand the research to include possible impacts of tourists upon rhinos, and how rhino conservation could be reconciled with people centred approaches to conservation. Mike’s late entrance to the academic world is now tragically offset by his early death. Mike was due to return to DICE to complete his PhD thesis in Biodiversity Management in 2006. Mike suffered from epilepsy, for which he took medication. However, he never made a fuss about it, nor would he let this get in the way of living life to the full. He died while surfing at Swakopmund, probably due to the onset of a fit.
Murley
School No. 11596. At Dulwich College 1928-34
Sir Reginald Murley was President of the Royal College of Surgeons from 1977 to 1980. A vociferous critic of the National Health Service, he was also President of the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine, which believed that patients, not governments, should employ doctors. In 1975 he was one of a delegation of doctors who spoke against state medicine to a US congressional sub-committee.
After leaving Dulwich College, Murley went on to St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School as a medical student, where he gained scholarships in anatomy and physiology and was awarded the Sir William Dunn Exhibition. He graduated in 1939 from the University of London with honours in medicine and surgery. At the outbreak of the second world war, he joined the RAMC and served in the Middle East, Africa, Italy and North West Europe, rising to the rank of major. After the war he practiced general surgery at St Albans, the Royal Northern and Bart's hospitals.
Murley served on the council of the British Medical Association, and in later life spent eight years as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hunterian Collection, set up in 1799 to oversee the care of the collection of specimens assembled by John Hunter, the father of scientific surgery. One of Hunter's staunchest admirers, Murley's devotion to the collection knew no limits, and he relinquished the chairmanship only when ill health forced him to do so. Murley was appointed KBE in 1979.
Nicholls
At Dulwich 1983-1991
When Henry Nicholls left Dulwich he went to Cambridge and took his first degree in Natural Sciences at Gonville and Caius. His PhD is in Evolutionary Biology and he use to write for BioMedNet, he now writes for many of the world’s leading science periodicals including The New Scientist, Nature and Science. He used to edit The encyclopaedia of Life Sciences and now edits the history of science journal Endeavour. In 2006 Dr Nicholls published his book Lonesome George –The Life and Loves of a Conservation Iconwhich is described as a swashbuckling tale of exploration, obsession, adventure on the high seas, sexual dysfunction, Charles Darwin, cloning, hostages, DNA fingerprinting and ecotourism. In an Alleynian twist, his book was reviewed by Colin Tudge. The book details the efforts of Conservationist like Henry Nicholls to preserve the Galápagos’ unique biodiversity and illustrates how their experiences and discoveries are echoed the world over. He brings together the islands’ geology, evolution, history of human exploitation and imperilled future.
Owen-Smith
School No. 15423, at Dulwich 1948-1957
Dr Brian Owen-Smith went first to Queen’s College, Cambridge and then to Guy’s Hospital. His first appointment was at Prospect Park Hospital, Reading. He also had a spell in America in a Community General Hospital in Indianapolis, before returning to England and specialising in rheumatology.
In September 2005 Dr Brian Owen-Smith was short listed for one of the Medical Futures Innovation Awards when he developed a test to detect the potentially lethal condition of pre-eclampsia which threatens the lives of around 600 pregnant women every year. He developed the idea from his work with patients suffering from gout. Using a machine converted from a blood testing device, doctors will be able to detect the threat of pre-eclampsia by simply taking a saliva sample. “The whole point,” says Brian, “is that it's terribly simple”. Yet it could save lives.
Brian has retired from day-to-day hospital work but holds an honorary research post at St Richard's Hospital, Chichester. As well as undertaking vital lifesaving research, he made news at the College recently as one of the four intrepid canoeists who paddled the length of the Thames to raise money for the Bursary Appeal.
Pickering
School No. 9814, at Dulwich 1920-1923
While at Dulwich, George Pickering was President of the Science and Photographic Society. He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, during Pt II of his Natural Science Tripos he took physiology, which remained the basis of his approach to clinical medicine. He moved to St Thomas’s Hospital for his clinical training, augmenting his income by teaching biology at Westminster School. On qualification in 1930 he became Casualty Office and Head Physician at St Thomas’s as well as assistant in the Department of Clinical Research at UCH, where he began a lifelong study of arterial circulation. His subsequent career had two other parts: first in London from 1939, as professor of medicine at St Mary's Hospital medical school; and finally in Oxford. From 1956 to 1968 he was regius professor of medicine and student of Christ Church, and from 1968 until he retired in 1974 he was master of Pembroke College, Oxford.
Pickering would have thought of himself as a medical scientist, but, though he did make significant contributions to our understanding of the control of blood flow and the cause of raised blood pressure, it was his influence on education that was his most important contribution to the medicine of his day. As regius professor he played a vital part in the development of medical teaching at Oxford. Largely as a result of his foresight and determination, the independent departments of postgraduate medicine that had been set up under the Nuffield benefaction were brought together to become the central focus of the rapidly expanding clinical school.
Pickering was made FRCP in 1938, knighted in 1957, and elected FRS in 1960.
Rudmose-Brown
School No. 3853, at Dulwich 1891-1896
Was a naturalist and geographer by training and inclination and an explorer towards both poles. When he left Dulwich he went to Aberdeen University and the Université de Montpelier. From 1900 to 1902 he was assistant Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee, until his appointment as naturalist to the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition which returned in 1904. He was the co-author of The Voyage of the Scotia – being the record of a voyage of exploration in Antarctic seas. (he can be seen on the front cover playing the bagpipes to a penguin). On his return he gave a lecture to the Dulwich College Science and Photographic Society on The Antarctic Regions which was reported on in The Alleynian Vol. XXXIII, February 1905, No.240 pp 16-17. He became an assistant at the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory until 1907 when he went to Burma to report on the pearl oyster fisheries for the Indian government. He was surveyor and naturalist to three more Scottish Arctic Expeditions to Spitsbergen in 1909, 1914 and 1919. In 1908 he had been appointed Lecturer in Geography at Sheffield University, becoming a Professor in 1931. He retired in 1945 and was made Emeritus Professor.
Sikora
School No. 17588. At Dulwich College 1959-65
Prof Karol Sikora has made a name for himself in the field of oncology and the teaching of medicine. He came to Dulwich from Southmead School, Wimbledon and went on to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he took his MA, MBChir and PhD before going to Middlesex Hospital in 1972 and the Hammersmith Hospital the following year. He then returned to Cambridge as the Medical Research Council Clinical Fellow in the Molecular Biology Laboratory. He spent a year as Clinical Fellow at Stanford University before becoming director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research back in Cambridge. He was made a deputy director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1995 with responsibility for clinical research. In 1997 he was appointed chief of the World Health Organisation Cancer Programme in Lyon, France. He is visiting professor of cancer medicine and honorary consultant oncologist at Imperial College School of Medicine at Hammersmith Hospital, as well as scientific director of Medical Solutions plc, and strategic advisor to HCA Int on cancer services.
In 2004 it was announced that Professor Sikora was to head the first independent medical school to be set up for more than a century. As the dean of the school being established at the University of Buckingham, Prof Sikora plans to "dramatically diversify medical school entry" and provide "a new approach" to training doctors. The department will provide a route into medicine for graduates who want a change of career and those who were forced to abandon their ambitions after failing to secure one of the limited places on existing university courses. "Motivation, determination and ability are the keys," said Prof Sikora.
His publications include:
Monoclonal Antibodies (1984),
Fight Cancer (1989),
Treatment of Cancer (4 edn 2001),
Cancer: a positive approach (1995)
Thomas
School No. 143
Solved a great scientific problem – the elimination of phosphorus in the manufacture of steel by using a basic lining for the converter and adding lime to the charge. When he left Dulwich he became a Civil Servant, instead of going to university due to the early death of his father. He worked as a clerk in an East London police court and carried out chemical experiments in his spare time in the family home in Camberwell. He attended evening classes at Birkbeck Institution and passed all the relevant exams at the Royal School of Mines, but because he had not studied during the day he was denied his metallurgical degree. His cousin, Percy Carlyle Gilchrist (1851-1935), was appointed chemist in 1876 to the Blaenavon Steel Works, and Sidney started to travel from London to Blaenavon every Friday night, returning on Sunday. The cousins worked together on the problem of the phosphorous content of pig-iron re-entering the metal and rendering it too brittle for steel production. In 1878 the cousins submitted their paper On the elimination of Phosphorus to the Iron and Steel Institute. Thomas method was tested and found to work. This meant that in Britain cheap low grade pig iron could be made into steel, instead of importing expensive high grade iron ore from abroad. By 1884 three-quarters of a million tons of steel had been produced using this method. Sidney Gilchrist Thomas was awarded the Bessemer gold medal for his work. To this day basic-Bessemer steel is known as Thomas steel in Europe. Unfortunately, Thomas died young and was unable to benefit from the financial rewards which came to him through his invention.
Thomson
School No. 6217, School No. 6217
Arthur Thomson was a Queen’s Scholar, Ingleby Scholar and Russell Memorial Prizeman at Birmingham University Medical School, where he was also awarded the Gold Medal for Clinical Medicine. He had qualified by 1915, and was appointed a Captain in the RAMC, with whom he served in France, he was awarded MC in 1917 and the French Croix de Guerre with Star in 1918. After the war he returned to Birmingham to lecture in Clinical Medicine and as a physician first at Birmingham General Hospital, then in 1925 he became consultant physician in the Ear and Throat Hospital. In 1930 he was appointed Consultant Physician, United Hospitals, Birmingham, Dean of the Medical School and a part-time Professor of Therapeutics. Between 1951 and 1965 he served as a member of General Medical Council. He advised on medical education in Kenya and various other colonies.
In 1968 he established a scholarship for a Dulwich College boy at Birmingham University Medical College and in 1966 he was president of the Alleyn Club.
Thwaites
At Dulwich 1936-1940
Mathematician closely associated with the 3n+1 Conjecture, aka the Thwaites Conjecture.
Professor Sir Bryan Thwaites, MA, PhD; CMath, FIMA, went from Dulwich to Winchester for sixth form and from there went up to Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Wrangler in 1944. He was scientific officer at the National Physical Laboratory for three years, he then lectured at Imperial College before becoming an Assistant Master at Winchester College. In 1959 he moved to Southampton University as Professor of Theoretical Mechanics, he was Principal of Westfield College London from 1966-1983.
In the 1950's he invented the Thwaites Flap - an interesting configuration involving a circular cylinder and a flat plate attached to its rear used in aeronautics to minimizes vortex shredding turbulence. He was involved in the reform of mathematics teaching in the 1960s. The inspiration came from the Royaumont Seminar of 1959, organised by the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation. Mathematics curricula reform gained significant momentum with a follow-up conference chaired by Professor Bryan Thwaites in Southampton in 1961. The outcome of the discussions and lectures were published as On Teaching Mathematics. In 1970 he was the leader of the British team in the International Mathematical Olympiad hosted by Hungary.
He is best known to the Dulwich community as the Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the Dulwich College Mission from 1946-1957, his donation of a pipe organ and as a Fellow of the College since 2006.
The 3n+1 or the Thwaites Conjecture
Many things in mathematics are very easy to state but very hard to prove. The 3n+1 Conjecture is a little known example of this.
Take any positive whole number. If it is even, divide it by 2. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat this process over and over again. Eventually you will reach 1. For example, start with 3. This goes through the numbers 3, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. Since it has reached 1, we stop. It doesn't matter what number you start with, you will always end up at 1. Nobody knows if this is true for all numbers or not, but it is certainly true for those numbers that have been tested. Try it for a few numbers. There is a strange fascination in doing this and seeing how high the number gets before it starts to head back down towards 1. The number may grow and shrink many times, without any apparent pattern, until eventually it reaches the final resting point. If anybody out there comes up with a proof that it is true, or an example of a number which never reaches 1, they will achieve a small amount of fame in the world of mathematics.
This conjecture appears to have been proposed independently by a number of people, including Professor Bryan Thwaites and Lothar Collatz. As a result, it goes under a few different names: the Thwaites Conjecture, the 3n+1 Conjecture, the Syracuse problem, the Collatz Conjecture and the Kakutani Conjecture. In the UK, Bryan Thwaites has taken many opportunities to broadcast this conjecture and it was in the 1970's that, through The Times newspaper, he offered a prize of £1000 for a rigorous proof (or disproof) of the conjecture. So far, no-one has claimed the prize.
Twinn
School No. 11622 At Dulwich 1928-34
Peter Twinn came to the College from the Prep. He won both the Junior (1928) and Senior (1932) school maths prize. He won a Mathematics Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford. In the middle of his postgraduate studies he answered an advertisement for mathematicians to work as Enigma cipher-breakers at the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS).
The Enigma machine, which dated back to 1919, had a keyboard into which the message was typed. Each letter then passed through a series of rotating wheels until the enciphered letter appeared on a "lamp board" above the machine. In July 1939, Polish code breakers, told Knox that the Germans had wired A to A, B to B and so on. "I know in retrospect it sounds daft," Twinn said. "It was such an obvious thing to do, rather a silly thing, that nobody, not Dilly Knox, ever thought it worthwhile trying." It fell to Twinn to try out the Polish technique. So Twinn was credited with being the first British cryptographer to break an Enigma cipher, something that always embarrassed him. Twinn also worked on the Abwehr Enigma, one of the hand codes used by the German military secret service. Breaking this code made it possible to deceive the Germans about the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
After the war, Twinn worked for the Ministry of Technology, becoming director of hovercraft. He served in other government departments before being appointed secretary of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. He also developed an interest in entomology. [Longer biography]
Vernon
At Dulwich 1884-1888
Was a pioneer in the scientific study and research into health and safety at work in factories and time motion studies. When he left Dulwich College he went to Merton College, Oxford where he took first class honours in chemistry and physiology. He spent two years at the Naples Marine Zoological Station followed by clinical work at St George’s Hospital. He took a degree in medicine in 1898 and was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford where he taught physiology until 1920. In 1915 he went to Birmingham to work in the production of shells and he immediately noticed the signs of illness and fatigue in the munition workers. He spent his vacations from Oxford investigating the causes and problems and this led to great improvements in working conditions. After the war he extended his areas of research to coal mines as well as factories with the objective of improving conditions so the workforce would remain health and be most productive. He published several books, two are shown here.