Last revised Thursday, 23 February 2012 07:50:05

Forthcoming Book on P. V. Danckwerts by Peter Varey

Life on the edge

Peter Victor Danckwerts: brave, shy and brilliant

Here is what the author has written for CEB Focus, the newsletter for Cambridge University's Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology:

Peter Varey’s biography of Peter Danckwerts, aka PVD, will be available shortly. He explains how it came to be written and spills well-known and lesser-known beans.

One fine morning in March of 1984 I knocked on the door of Abbey House in Cambridge and waited. By reputation the property was the oldest continuously-occupied domestic residence in the city and in due course a suitably elderly-looking and rather over-weight man opened the door. He was wearing an apron, and perhaps I had caught him in the kitchen. Peter Danckwerts invited me in, and we sat in a darkened lounge. Did memories of those glamorous and generous parties of yesteryear still hang in the air? Not at all. It was all rather nerve-racking; I was new to the job of editor and acutely conscious of lack of background. And this man was a legend in the science of chemical engineering.

The idea had been to write about famous men in The Chemical Engineer and so provide chemical engineers with a sense of their inheritance. My new colleagues at IChemE told me that Danckwerts could help. He was reluctant at first, but eventually persuaded himself that he might manage two short articles. And he wrote wonderfully: first on the legendary Dudley Newitt, senior professor at Imperial College when Danckwerts had spent three years there, and then on Terence Fox, his boss in Cambridge in the early 1950s and predecessor as Shell professor. The writing glowed with Danckwerts’ characteristic and delicately-phrased irony.

But Danckwerts himself scared me stiff. What I didn’t realize was that he hadn’t long to live. Back at the office I dug up the brief, modest autobiographical sketch that fronted a collection of his best papers. The notorious Robert Maxwell had published it as thank-you for Danckwerts taking Chemical Engineering Science to the top of its tree during 24 years as executive editor. As I read and thumbed through the book, it struck me that I had met the theory of residence time distribution – just one area that Danckwerts revolutionized – in the industrial processes laboratory I had taught in Caracas for five years. A seed was sown.

I knew vaguely that Danckwerts had been brave in the war and was a great innovator, but when I started to research his biography in 2008 I found there was rather a lot I didn’t know. For instance, his account of wartime service during the London Blitz – when he won a George Cross for disarming unexploded parachute mines, and life expectancy in the role was measured in weeks – was buried in a 1945 copy of Blackwood’s ‘Maga’, long since defunct. A later issue covered Danckwerts in Gibraltar in 1942 countering Italian frogmen on midget submarines and swimming under vessels with limpet mines. When one such mine floated to the surface, Danckwerts sent a detailed description back to Portsmouth and got an MBE for his efforts. Handing over in Gibraltar to ‘Buster’ Crabb (the diver who disappeared in Portsmouth harbour in 1955 under the cruiser that had brought Khrushchev and Bulganin to Britain and provoked an international incident), Danckwerts landed with the British Eighth Army in Sicily on 11 July 1943. What happened next he rarely mentioned. It only came to light in a Bangor, Maine, newspaper in 1947. Absent-mindedly taking a stroll on D-day + 1, he walked into a minefield and broke bones in both legs.

Back in Blighty aged 27, on crutches and sporting his medal stripes, he found he provoked atavistic impulses in women. This attribute, and the slightly Germanic good looks inherited from his grandfather (who arrived in Britain from Germany via South Africa) led him to harbour thoughts of a career in Hollywood. But Hollywood had to wait. In a third Maga piece Danckwerts cautiously recorded elements of his subsequent role with Combined Operations. This led to 1946 talks on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) about things like launching recovered V-2 rockets and how man might get to the moon. Demobbed, he took a chemical engineering practice course at MIT and toured the USA in a Dodge. What he learned in America informed the rest of his professional life.

As a teenager Danckwerts had spent a gap year in Austria on the way from Winchester College to Oxford. He learned to speak passable German and fell in love with the mountains and skiing. His tutor at Balliol College thought he would be the last person ever to make a success of research: ‘This life of cultured leisure Mr Danckwerts…’ Yet after MIT – when no British industrial company appeared to feel the need for a chemical engineer – he spent six years of ‘academic indolence’ in Cambridge thinking. The research he published made him a huge reputation in chemical engineering science. After a break from academia with UKAEA, he arrived at Imperial College in 1956. In London he met his future wife Lavinia Harrison (née Macfarlane) on a ballroom dance floor. Danckwerts may have had the bearing of an aristocrat, but she was a real one, related to Lord Lucan. Then came the summons back to Cambridge, holding court in the most sought-after department of its kind and traveling the world. He died prematurely at 68, still in his intellectual prime and enjoying an Indian summer writing in New Scientist.

Danckwerts had no time for paperwork, so there isn’t much of an archive. The material already mentioned, the dusty drawers of his relations and the (marginally) better-ordered memories of his contemporaries and pupils yielded enough to piece together a story. His intellect ranged widely over matters scientific; shy with all but his family and close colleagues and laconic at all times, he could be very amusing. I quote a lot of it verbatim or as friends recall it. A word of warning: I have tried to write for the general public, explaining some of the science yet hoping not to offend you, dear readers. I hope you may enjoy it.

Life on the edge will be available in hardback in the spring of 2012 at an estimated price of £25.

Peter Varey was brought up as a chemist, took an interest in industrial chemistry and then switched to writing and editing. Eventually he ran what used to be called The Chemical Engineer as well as IChemE’s publications. Then, after ten years as a freelance, he turned – at least in this first instance – to biography.