A few days after war broke out I arrived in Oxford with a Ramsay Fellowship to work with R.P (Ronnie) Bell on acid-base catalysis. I had just spent a year with Prof. (later ,Lord) Wynne-Jones at University College, Dundee, where I had developed an interest in the thermodynamics of acid-base equilibria (and found early evidence for what later was called the “hydrophobic effect”).
Honnie Bell set me to work on the bromination of as-dichloroacetone. The first step was to prepare this powerful lachrymator in the highly unsuitable conditions of the Staircase 16 laboratory in Balliol College, where Sir Harold Hartley and his students had carried out their pioneering electrochemical work in the 1920s. The one fume cupboard depended on the draft from a single gas jet and was quite inadequate to handle both the vapors escaping from my preparations and the exhaust from a liquid ammonia cryostat. Today such a ...
