After the war Derek moved to Ireland, then to France, where in his own laboratory outside Paris he continued his scientific research. Divorced from Pam, he became entangled with a long line of lovely loose ladies, some of whom he married. Among them was that fascinating hell-cat, Barbara Skelton, and the beautiful Janetta Woolley, whom he left for her half-sister, Angela, while Janetta was in hospital giving birth to Derek’s only child. Another was a Princess Ratibor, a devout Roman Catholic, for whose sake the combatively atheistic Derek, who always referred to God as ‘the bearded monster’, agreed to take instruction; he gave up after the first session, however, claiming he ‘couldn’t swallow the story’. Finally he found peace of a sort with his sixth wife, a French widow in her thirties, with whom he settled in Switzerland, where he died aged 76 in 1982.
Full of contradictions and almost impossible to know, Derek Jackson is a difficult subject for biography, and Simon Courtauld is to be congratulated on marshalling a mountain of very varied material into a coherent narrative. He writes particularly well of Derek’s war, which he makes vivid and exciting, and he gives a clear account, as far as I can judge, of the impossibly complex subject of atomic spectroscopy. In recounting Derek Jackson’s private life he is not always as successful, some passages reading too much like a first draft, but on the whole this is an admirable account of an intriguing and remarkable man.
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