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Monday 1 December 2008

As I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson

The triumph of hope over experience

Selina Hastings

Born in 1906 Jackson was one of a pair of identical twins, sons of the wealthy Sir Charles Jackson who for 20 years was chairman of the News of the World. Derek and Vivian looked the same, thought the same, and were always happiest in each other’s company. At Rugby they both won prizes for chemistry, and it was here that Derek first became interested in spectroscopy, the field in which he was to conduct many of his most significant experiments. He was only 22 when he produced a paper for the Royal Society (on ‘hyperfine structure in the arc spectrum of caesium and nuclear rotation’) that, as Simon Courtauld tells us, was recognised as a scientific tour de force, earning him a place in the history of atomic physics. At Cambridge Derek worked under Rutherford, but after graduating was scooped up by Professor Lindemann and installed in Oxford’s Clarendon laboratory. Here in what was then a poorly equipped workplace Derek purchased his own spectrograph and interferometer, which he later donated to the university.

‘Oxford bought me,’ Jackson was later to say, ‘just as you might buy a promising yearling.’ The simile was apposite as Derek and Vivian were enthusiastic to the point of obsession about all matters equine, and specifically hunting and steeplechasing. ‘What are men for?’ Derek used to ask rhetorically. ‘Looking after horses.’ Two of his racehorses he named after inert gases, Niton and Xenon, and he became a conspicuous figure in racing circles, not only for his dare-devil riding but also for his rudeness in the face of authority. ‘Steward!’, he would shout from the jockeys’ enclosure, as though a passenger on a liner, ordering some

dignified official to come and help him unsaddle. The jockeys, too, were taken aback by his eccentric behaviour, not sure how to react to this odd character who kissed them in the weighing-room and showed off his painted toenails while taking a shower. But then Derek never made any secret of ‘riding under both rules’, as he put it, once so smitten with Desmond Guinness, then a ravishing schoolboy at Eton, that as a proof of love he ate the little chap’s photograph.

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