two weeks ago one of my former
colleagues dr. harrell booth sadly died
he was quite old nearly 86 so he retired
almost 20 years ago but I like many
people that retire he had remained
involved with our School of Chemistry
and that we I saw him really quite
regularly
I think it's important for you to
understand that when I started working
at universities they didn't have
training two courses to tell people how
to teach I was given almost no
instruction at all just a couple of days
and then put in front of students and so
I and many of my colleagues who were in
the similar position relied on people
like Harold to help us to teach us how
to teach Harold had been at Nottingham
for a really very long time he was
already a lecturer here in 1958 and I
think perhaps even in the early 1950s so
he spent his whole life teaching at this
university and when I was telephoned
about his death I had somebody sitting
in my office who was a student here in
the early 1990s and Paul's immediate
reaction was how sad Harold got me
through my organic chemistry finals and
over the last few days I've had lots of
emails from people who former students
saying that they remember even from the
1960s how much he taught and how they
learnt from him Harold was a fantastic
example of how to be a tutor how to look
after the undergraduates whose care he
was responsible for in fact I once
discovered that Harold had driven with
the father of one of the students from
Nottingham which is the middle of the
England right to the south coast because
one of his duties was thought to be
suicidal and Harold sat in the car
outside the youth hostel all night to
catch the student before he could come
out and throw himself off a cliff
Harold's research interest was in
nuclear magnetic resonance NMR and he
was the first person in the School of
Chemistry who really understood in
spectroscopy and their generations of
organic chemists here who owe their
success of their thesis to his help in
unraveling the spectrum Harold was a
very pleasant and kind person
not at all conceited and always prepared
to help people
he was also somebody who worked very
hard but without boasting at about the
fact that he was working he was the sort
of person who when you had a problem you
could go and ask him what should I do
and just like everything in life when
you do it for the first time you get
worried about am i doing the right thing
and so just being reassured that there
was somebody there that you could ask
the advice with very important