
A year ago this weekend my father died. Peter worked for pretty much his whole career at University of Edinburgh, at Kings Buildings, in the Darwin Building. He was a molecular biologist, although at Oxford he had studied Physics. I know that his time at Oxford (Wadham) was very happy and he was delighted when I chose to spend some of my career there.
My memories of being a child visiting his lab include the smell of the foyer, the enormous slices of wood from Forestry, playing with plastic molecule models and spinning around on the office chairs.
Peter was the expert in using Edinburgh’s electron microscope and he took pictures of tiny, tiny things*. The microscope was a huge heavy piece of kit which needed to be absolutely still and absolutely flat in order to work properly. In their wisdom Edinburgh colleagues decided to put it on the top floor of the tallest tower which was known to sway in the wind.
Using his knowledge of physics Peter built a sling in which the microscope could sit, making it possible to use. He must have saved the University a fair bit of money because this thing was not cheap.
I am not quite sure what my father’s research was, I suspect it was research into microscopy. I’ ve found a few journal articles and I remember stories of Anne Mclaren and Martin Pollock so his work must have been linked to early genetics. When I was a teenager at school he arranged for me to have my first summer job making fruit -fly food in Mary Bownes’ lab**.
As the executor of his estate I now have a collection of these early electron-micrograph images. If I get time I will digitise them and add them to Wikimedia in the hope they will be useful to someone.
I know that Peter earned royalties from them during his career, but I can find no evidence of an ongoing relationship with an image agency, so it is time for them to become OER. I’d love to hear from anyone who might be able to identify which of the images are of more interest than others.
Fun update to this blog post: Clare (Project Archivist, cataloguing the papers of Sir Kenneth and Lady Noreen Murray )*** has found a picture of Peter in this line drawing by Edith Simon, which has been digitised (he’s top row, fourth from the right, in case you can’t distinguish him from the other beardy scientists).



*Highton, P (1968) The minimum mass detectable by electron microscopy
** Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.
*** I have updated Noreen’s Wikipedia page in the past.
You do not know me, but I was school friend of Peter at Hitchin Grammar School. We moved in different circles he was more concerned with swimming than anything else and mine was the school scout group. He and I one other cycled down to a scout camp in the New Forest. It took us 2 days and we stopped a night sleeping under a tree in Windsor Great Park. On another the same three of us made a two week cycle tour of Devon and Cornwall, staying in Youth Hostels. I recall that we met up with Peter’s sister in I think Plymouth. She and some friends were also touring Deen and Cornwall.
I do not know why I suddenly thought of these events but I am now old and clearing away much clutter. I am 90 and I only met Peter twice after leaving school. Once when we were both serving National Service and both happened to be in Malta. Peter in the RAF and me in the Royal Marines. The next time was many years after at an Old Boys Dinner at the Hitchin Grammar School. Peter had asked the secretary for my address and we arranged to meet at that function. I do not know the year but i thin it was after both of our retirements.
The next time I heard was when there was a notice in the School Newsletter that he had died. It came as a shock to me as he was at least one year younger than me and certainly much fitter. What was the cause of death?
I always regret that I lost contact with most of my old school friends. But I moved away from Hitchin, spent 2 years on National Service with the Royal Marines in Malta and Cyprus. I then worked in local Government in various parts of the UK before taking up an appointment with the Colonial Service in Uganda for 5 years. This was followed by more years with Local Government in England before deciding to uproot myself and go to Australia where I stayed. I had a wife and teenage family and the two sons went to University there although my eldest son did spend a year a t London University and a year at the Royal Militar y College Sandhurst before the British Army decided that he was not for them and he finished up at University in Canberra.
I have moved again and have lived in Thailand for the last 20 years.
I of course realise that all this is of no interest to you and I apologise but when you reach my age, I am now 90. You start thinking of the past and wish that you had not lost contact to the past. I always admired your father for his very good nature, his swimming ability and also for the fact that he moved in the more scholastic circles than I. Another friend ended up County Planning Officer for Hertfordshire and another won the Sword of Honour at Cranwell. He is sadly now deceased’
Again I am sorry for this message. But it has made me feel a lot better.
Sincerely
Geof Allenby
I am very sorry to hear about the death of your father. I was a PhD student in his lab from 1975-1978. I spent many hours/days/months with that electron microscope!
Thank you for commenting Rhonda. You may recognise some people in this image
https://images.is.ed.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/UoEart~1~1~73432~168006:Line-drawing-of-staff-at-the-Dept–;JSESSIONID=9d9fd25e-2847-4c8a-9844-4c8fc80c09c9?qvq=q%3Aedith+simon&mi=1&trs=2
and a picture he took of the Darwin Building https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darwinbuilding1967.png