Celebration of Kathleen Lonsdale and Judith Milledge

UCL Women in Earth Science - a special event celebrating two of our eminent UCL alumnae; Professor Kathleen Lonsdale and Dr Judith Milledge

In February this year, the Women in Earth Science (WiES) Group invited Mike Glazer (Emeritus Professor of Physics at Oxford) to give a talk about the time he spent at UCL, in the 1960s, as one of Professor Kathleen Lonsdale’s last PhD students. In those days, the Building where we now work and study housed UCL’s Department of Chemistry, in which Kathleen was one of the Professors.

Mike presented an illuminating account of Kathleen’s career, with an especially lucid description of how she was able to use X-ray diffraction photographs to infer that the benzene rings in crystals of hexamethylbenzene were flat hexagons and not “boat” or “chair” shaped. It is this discovery, which was fundamental to organic chemistry, for which Kathleen is probably now best remembered. Mike was also able to give us some idea of what it was like to be one of Kathleen’s students. Although resembling a small, frail, and kindly grandmother, she was really very tough and very determined. Kathleen was an expert in the interpretation of X-ray diffraction photographs, “Laue photographs”, in which the crystal is exposed to the full output spectrum of X-rays from the source. He remembered that, when students were summoned to her office to discuss progress during their PhD, Kathleen would always ask them “where are the Laue photographs?” – and that, if you didn’t have them, you were in big trouble! Being summoned to see Kathleen was also referred to by her students in a variety of ways, one of which was “going to see God”, as Kathleen’s office was on the floor above the laboratories and the PhD students’ desk spaces. After finishing his PhD and leaving UCL, Mike went on to a most distinguished career as a crystallographer, at Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, switching in the process from studying disorder in crystals of organic molecules to looking mainly at inorganic materials, especially perovskites. Although he is now in his early 80s, he is still very active in research and teaching. 

Kathleen had no direct connection with the geologists at UCL, but the same was not true for her very close collaborator Dr Judith Milledge, who transferred from UCL Chemistry to UCL Geology (as it was then called) in the late 1970s. Kathleen and Judith (who died in 2021) published many papers together and it was largely at Judith’s prompting that the “Old Chemistry Building” was renamed as the “Kathleen Lonsdale Building” in 1981. In the 1970s, when Judith was still working in the Chemistry Department, Ian Wood was one of her PhD students. Ian, therefore, finished the session with a short presentation on Judith’s life and work, concentrating especially on her love of crystallographic apparatus, crystallographic computing and her studies of diamonds.

In this latter guise, Judith to some extent is still with us, as her friend and collaborator, Dr Monica Mendelssohn, commissioned the growth of a rather attractive blue diamond from her cremation ashes. You can see Monica holding this in the group photograph taken after the event.

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