Jermyn Street Research Articles

We Will Remember: Collective Reflections on Laughing Boy, the play, Jermyn Street Theatre, London (25 April–31 May 2024) and Bath Theatre Royal (4–8 June 2024)

We Will Remember: Collective Reflections on Laughing Boy, the play, Jermyn Street Theatre, London (25 April–31 May 2024) and Bath Theatre Royal (4–8 June 2024)

Performing the Jermyn Street Theatre's Staging of All That Fall: A Review Essay

Performing the Jermyn Street Theatre's Staging of <i>All That Fall</i>: A Review Essay

Wiggle-Matching Using Known-Age Pine from Jermyn Street, London

A slice of pine from the period covered by single-year calibration data (Stuiver 1993) was selected to serve as part of the quality assurance procedures of the English Heritage radiocarbon dating program, following successful wiggle-matching of 14C measurements from structural 15th century English oak timbers (Hamilton et al. 2007). The timber selected was a roofing element from a house on Jermyn Street, central London, demonstrated by dendrochronology to have been felled in AD 1670. Eighteen single-ring samples were dated by the 14C laboratories at Groningen, Oxford, and SUERC: each laboratory was sent a random selection of 6 samples. This approach was intended to mimic the mix of samples and relative ages incorporated into Bayesian chronological models during routine project research. This paper presents the results of this study.

New documentary evidence on the career of Sir William Boyd Dawkins, F.R.S

Sir William Boyd Dawkins (figure 1) was a prominent geologist in his day, well known as a university professor in Manchester and as a distinguished palaeontologist. Today he is largely forgotten, even in his adopted city, though his biography can be readily reconstructed from several published accounts. Boyd Dawkins’s career in geology began at Jesus College, Oxford, with a first class degree in natural sciences and the encouragement of the Professor of Geology, John Phillips, F.R.S. (1800-74). In 1861 Dawkins became the first recipient of the Burdett-Coutts scholarship, recently founded at Oxford to promote the study of geology. During 1861-69 he was a member of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and became a junior colleague of T.H. Huxley (1825-95) at the Royal School of Mines in Jermyn Street, London. For eight years he mapped parts of Kent and the Thames Valley, which furthered his interest in mammalian remains in the river gravels. His interests in this field had begun with the excavation of a hyena den at Wookey Hole, near Wells, Somerset, which launched him into a lifetime’s interest in extinct Mammalia and also a lifelong link with that county. This led to the publication of numerous memoirs and papers, dealing with subjects as diverse as the dentition of the woolly rhinoceros and the origins of the cave lion. His election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1867 was a recognition of this work.

Automated Information Delivery in a Pharmaceutical Company

The computer system described in this article automates the process to deliver on-line information daily. On-line data (for this study we accessed the Scrip daily update file available through Data-star [Data-Star, Plaza Suite, 114 Jermyn Street, London, UK, SW1Y 6HJ.]) is automatically retrieved, downloaded onto a personal Computer, and uploaded to a VAX computer with a software communication package PROCOMM PLUS (PROCOMM PLUS, Datastorm Technologies, Inc., Columbia, MO.). The information that was then transferred to a database system, System 1032, (System 1032, CompuServe, Data Technologies, Cambridge, MA.) can be accessed and managed easily with a customized menu-driven system. Not only has this automated system saved us a significant amount of time as information providers, but it also allows users to access and utilize important information as soon as it becomes available.

Palaeozoic studies in honour of Sir James Stubblefield

Sir James was born on 6 September 1901 at Cambridge where he attended the Perse School. He received his geological education at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal College of Science. In 1923 he was appointed demonstrator in geology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London University, where he stayed until 1928; for his last two years there he also served as Warden at the pioneer Imperial College hostel. While at Imperial College he studied the Shineton Shales of the Wrekin district of Shropshire under the guidance of W. W. Watts and in collaboration with his life-long friend O. M. B. Bulman, and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1925. This work in Shropshire provided the stimulus for his continuing contribution on the Cambrian system and its faunas, and on trilobites of all ages. During this period he also recorded his observations on Tertiary crabs from Zanzibar, a group he was to return to in later years. In 1928 he obtained one of the two posts offered by the Geological Survey, being appointed Geologist. He undertook field work in the Dorking district as a prelude to an intended posting to the Survey office at York, but the death of G. W. Lee, then palaeontologist in Edinburgh, determined that Stubblefield should remain at the headquarters of the Survey at Jermyn Street in London. Internal transfers of the palaeontological staff left no member available to determine the fossils then accumulating from the current survey of the Shrewsbury district, and Stubblefield was asked by the Director to undertake this task because of his knowledge of the Lower Palaeozoic faunas of Shropshire. This transfer became long-term and thus began his association with, and eventual leadership of, the Palaeontological Department of the Survey, and secured the continuation of his notable contributions to palaeontology. The Shrewsbury commitment led to visits to the area during which new faunal horizons were discovered in the local Cambrian and Ordovician, including the Nemagraptus gracilis fauna from the Breidden Hills; other finds included the then earliest British eurypterid subsequently described by L. Størmer as the type of a new genus under the name of Brachyopterus stubblefieldi.

A letter from Richard Phillips, F. R. S. (1778-1857) to Michael Faraday, F. R. S. (1791-1867)

Richard Phillips, the son of a well-known London printer and book-seller, was trained as a chemist and druggist under William Allen, F. R. S. Phillips was a breezy, able and versatile chemist who left his mark in pharmaceutical chemistry, in mineralogy and in scientific journalism. In addition he held a number of teaching posts and he was his colleagues’ first choice as President of the Chemical Society when it was founded in 1841. Phillips declined the honour but later was elected President in 1849. He rendered conspicuous services to pharmacy by his accurate and incisive criticisms of the London Pharmacopoeia in 1811 and his advice was sought about subsequent editions. He was a well-known mineral analyst and in 1823 he discovered the nature of uraninite. His interest in minerals no doubt led to his appointment in 1839 as chemist and curator of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, a position he held until his death in 1851. Phillips lectured on chemistry at the London Hospital and at Grainger’s School of Medicine in Southwark and was also Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Under his joint editorship with Brayley of the Annals of Philosophy from 1821 onwards and later of the Philosophical Magazine with which it was merged, the Annals became an influential scientific journal. In addition to original communications, it contained reprints of important scientific papers, many of them translations from foreign journals, and also excellent summaries of scientific progress. Phillips was a friend and admirer of Michael Faraday and in 1821 he, fortunately for science, directed Faraday’s attention to electromagnetism by asking him to contribute a series of articles on this new field of investigation following on Oersted’s discovery of the effect of an electric current on a magnetic needle in 1819.

Martin Alister Campbell Hinton, 1883-1961

Martin Hinton was born in London on 29 June 1883, the eldest of three children. His great-grandfather Thomas Hinton was a flax farmer of Market Drayton in Shropshire. His father Martin Hinton was a legal shorthand writer and foreign correspondent. His mother Helen Campbell came of a Ross-shire family. His paternal aunts kept a school where he became a studious pupil; at the age of three and a half he had learned to read and from the age of five voraciously devoured every book he could find in his father’s library, be it on law, Latin, Spanish, natural history, travel, history or mathematics. The young Hinton’s interest in nature study was early stimulated through contacts with his Shropshire relatives, the de Carle Sowerbys, and it was Arthur de Carle Sowerby, one of a line of great Victorian naturalists, who influenced young Hinton. When Hinton was a boy of ten his father died, and two years later the family finances were so distressing that he had to find work. A legal friend of his father introduced him to the Temple where he started as a junior clerk in barristers’ chambers in Goldsmith Building. The work does not appear to have been onerous though the hours were long, and he was able to make use of legal hours to prosecute research. At week-ends he collected from gravel pits near his home and spent the evenings in the museums at Jermyn Street and Bloomsbury when they were open and in the Patent Office library when they were closed. Hinton’s peculiarities soon attracted sympathetic attention. In 1897 Mr John Cameron Graham, a patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry from University College, London, invited him to enter his service in Garden Court. Mr Graham was to have an immense influence on Hinton over the next decade; he appears to have been widely interested in both natural history and the physical sciences. He gave Hinton opportunity and encouragement, and —so important for the impressionable teenager—he became the idol for hei oworship. Hinton has written of Judge Graham ‘he gave me a great example of methodical industry, taught me to think accurately and express my thoughts clearly; his own honesty of thought, generosity and simplicity made a lasting impression’. Upon Mr Graham’s elevation to the County Court Bench in 1908 Hinton continued as Senior Clerk to his successor Mr William Neill, and on the latter’s retirement in 1916 Hinton too quit the Temple. His experience and interest in legal matters lasted throughout his life.

Jermyn Street

Journal Article Jermyn Street Get access Sayar Sayar Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 180, Issue 23, 7 June 1941, Page 411, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/180.23.411d Published: 07 June 1941

Jermyn Street

Jermyn Street Get access Ambrose Heal Ambrose Heal 1Beaconsfield Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 180, Issue 21, 24 May 1941, Page 377, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/180.21.377 Published: 24 May 1941

Prof. H. E. Armstrong, F.R.S

HENRY EDWARD ARMSTRONG, whose death on July 13 in his ninetieth year we regret to announce, was born on May 6, 1848, in Lewisham, where he lived all his life. Of the influences during his early youth which inclined him to chemistry, little is known, but when he left Colfe's Grammar School at Lewisham his father, acting on the advice of an engineering friend, allowed him to become a student at the Royal College of Chemistry, Oxford Street, in the summer term of 1865, actually Hof-mann's last term before his departure for Berlin. Chemistry was the only subject taught, but the College was affiliated to the Royal School of Mines, then housed in Jermyn Street. A free lance, he attended such courses at the two institutions as he thought fit, including among them those given by Tyndall, Huxley and Ramsay, being also for some unexplained reason an almost regular attendant on Saturdays in the operating theatre of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. This roving quest came to an end when Frankland, who had followed Hofmann as professor and, towards the close of 1866, had been appointed with two other members a Royal Commission to inquire into the pollution of rivers in Great Britain, took him into the private laboratory, where together they developed the combustion in vacua method of water analysis, which played so important a part in the campaign for ensuring the safety of the domestic water supplies of the country.

An Etruscan Bronze Mirror in the Victoria and Albert Museum

In the early years after its foundation in 1857, the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington pursued its policy of acquisition with a vigorously catholic taste. Since then its scope has become gradually limited to exclude work of the pre-Christian era, but in addition to the original purchases of Greek vases, the accession of large miscellaneous collections containing antiquities has contributed to what is now an excellent group of Greek and Roman objects. Important Greek vases were included in the big collection of modern European ceramics transferred in 1901 from the Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street, and in 1910 the late George Salting bequeathed his entire collection, other than paintings, to the Victoria and Albert Museum. His good taste in every other direction was sufficient guarantee that the Greek civilisations should be represented by work of more than average merit. Unfortunately, Salting kept few records concerning the provenance of his acquisitions, and so one of the finest Etruscan engraved mirrors in existence came to the Museum without a past history.

Geology in Great Britain

PART 1 of the “Summary of Progress of the Geological Survey of Great Britain” for 19331 contains - the usual annual reports of the Geological Survey Board i and of the director and gives particulars of routine \ work carried out during the year under review. As in the succeeding year, there was some slowing down of normal activities on account of the immense amount of additional work involved in preparation for the transfer of the collections to the new museum at South Kensington. Nevertheless, thirty-nine maps were issued, together with five memoirs, which, with one exception, have already been noticed in our columns (NATURE, 134, 782; 1934); the remaining one, the Merthyr Tydfil memoir7, is reviewed below. The old Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street closed its doors to the public at the end of 1933. Sir John Flett contributes an interesting outline of its history from its opening in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (see also NATURE, 134, 129; 1934).

Geological Survey and Museum

FROM the opening of the Geological Museum at South Kensington on July 3 until December 31, 159,000 visitors passed through its doors. This compares with an average total of 18,000–20,000 a year at the old museum in Jermyn Street. Recent additions and presentations to the Museum include a fine collection of cut zircons, one royal blue stone of 44 carats, being unique in size and colour; a collection of multi-coloured doubly-terminated tourmaline crystals from Mesa Grande, California; a large composite photograph of the moon from the Mount Wilson Observatory, and other series of enlarged photographs of earthquakes and other geological phenomena; more than two thousand British building stones and other collections illustrating economic geology, bequeathed by Mr. B. E. Laine-Pearson; and some 250 rocks recently collected for the Museum from southern Norway.

Centenary of the Geological Survey of Great Britain

THE Geological Survey of Great Britain is the oldest national geological survey in the world, having now been in active existence for a hundred years. It owes its inception to the private enterprise of the late Sir Henry Thomas De la Beche, who became its first director. Geological material was quickly accumulated and De la Beche was compelled to ask for museum accommodation. This was provided in a house in Craig's Court, Charing Cross, where it was opened to the public in 1841, as the Museum of Economic Geology. In 1851, the Museum was transferred to Jermyn Street, where it has continued until recently. For many years past, however, the space available has been inadequate, and it has been impossible to display to full advantage the very extensive collections of rocks, fossils and minerals in the possession of the Survey and Museum. In 1912, the Bell Committee recommended the transfer of the Museum and Survey to a site in South Kensington next to the Natural History Museum, but no action was taken until the Museums Commission met in 1927. The Government then agreed to the transfer, and the new building was completed by H.M. Office of Works in 1933. Occupation by the Geological Survey was, however, delayed by its utilisation as the meeting place of the World Economic Conference, 1933.

Burglary at the Geological Survey and Museum

THE burglary that took place at the Geological Survey and Museum, Jermyn Street, London, S.W.I, on Friday, August 25, was fortunately not so serious as would appear from some of the accounts in the press. A small case was forced open during the night, and about one-half of its contents abstracted. These comprised a colour-set of cut tourmalines, a handsome piece of rough beryl, a few cut sapphires showing colour variation, a set of cut blue and yellow zircons, and a few specimens of diamond-bearing and auriferous concentrates. Several large and valuable specimens were left in disorder in the case and it seems clear that the burglar was disturbed by the night-warder on patrol. The building at Jermyn Street is crowded with scaffolding to support the roof, and very special precautions have to be taken against the risk of fire. The condition of the building has increased the difficulties under which the night-watching of the Museum is carried out.

Edwin Tulley Newton, 1840-1930

Mr. E. T. Newton, who died in London on January 28, 1930, was for forty years on the staff of the Geological Survey, and made many notable contributions to our knowledge of British fossils. He was born in London in May, 1840, and at an early age was apprenticed to a handicraft from which he acquired special skill and patience in delicate manipulations. At the same time he was much interested in natural history, and had the opportunity of attending Huxley’s lectures at the Royal School of Mines in Jermyn Street. He thus became well equipped for making preparations of both recent and fossil organisms for research, and in 1865 he was appointed assistant to Huxley who was at that time naturalist to the Geological Survey. Eventually in 1882 he was promoted to be palaeontologist to the Geological Survey, a position which he occupied until his retirement under the age-limit in 1905.

Congress of Quaternary Geology

A MEETING of the Association for the Study of the European Quaternary will be held in Leningrad on Sept. 1–7. There will be two short excursions during the Congress and a long excursion from Sept. 8 until Sept. 29. Special arrangements have been made by the organising committee for the reception of members, and it is requested that geologists, archæologists, and others who wish to attend should send in their names to the Secretary, Mr. K. Lebedev, V.O. Sredny Pr., 72-6, Leningrad 26. Particulars relating to the Congress, with programme of excursions, etc., can be consulted in the Library of the Museum of Practical Geology, 28 Jermyn Street, London, S.W.I, or at the Office of Intourist, Bush House, Aldwych, W.C.2.

The Talkatome Home ‘Talkie’ Equipment

HOME film projectors were popular a few years ago; but apparently silent films are becoming out of date. A demonstration was given by the British Talkatome, Ltd., at their offices at Wells Street, Jermyn Street, London, S.W.I, on March 16, of a sound apparatus for home use. The device consists of a synchronised turntable attached to the projector by a flexible drive. A special sound disc is used in conjunction with the film, and this is placed on the turntable. An electrical pick-up carries the gramophone needle, which is connected to a loud speaker either by the user's radio set or alternatively by a special amplifier. The makers have prepared a library of films, including comedies and travel and educational films. The device shown worked quite satisfactorily, and the operation of the equipment is simple. In some cases it might be useful in colleges and schools. The turntable is listed at twenty-five guineas, and the hire of a film from the library is 10s.

Mr. E. T. Newton, F.R.S

EDWIN TULLEY NEWTON, who died in London on Jan. 28, aged nearly ninety, was for many years a leader in the study of fossils in Great Britain. He was born in London in May 1840, and at an early age was apprenticed to a handicraft which gave him special skill in designing and carrying out delicate manipulations. He was at the same time deeply interested in natural history, and was fortunate in attracting the notice of Huxley, whose lectures he attended at the Royal School of Mines in Jermyn Street. Eventually, in 1865, he became assistant to Huxley, who was then naturalist to the Geological Survey, and henceforth he was able to follow his inclination and devote himself to the study of life, both recent and fossil. His official work, however, led to his dealing chiefly with fossils, and in 1882, when Mr. Robert Etheridge left for the British Museum, he was appointed palæontologist to the Geological Survey, a position which he occupied until his retirement under the age-limit in 1905.