George Wallace Kenner, 16 November 1922 - 26 June 1978

Abstract

George Wallace Kenner was born on 16 November 1922 at Sheffield, the younger son of a well known organic chemist James Kenner (1885-1974) who was at that time a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Sheffield. Details of the Kenner family’s origins are to be found in the biographical memoir of James Kenner (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1975, 21, 389) and need not be repeated here. His mother, herself a chemist, I can recall only as a rather ebullient, talkative woman devoted to her two sons, Donald and George, in a family dominated by an aggressive father and kept very much to itself as a result. Before George was two years old the family left England for Australia where in late 1924 his father became Professor of Organic Chemistry (Pure and Applied) in the University of Sydney. Not surprisingly, we know little of George’s time there since the family returned to England in January 1928 when James Kenner was appointed Professor of Technological Chemistry at the Manchester College of Technology. The Kenners took up residence in the Manchester suburb of Withington where the family home remained (nominally at least) until James Kenner’s death in 1974.