Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 377
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[Page 377]
186
he was always "Charlie". It was his custom to stand at a lectern behind a very long bench littered with chemical apparatus, with a staff demonstrator. After a short talk about the uses, characteristics, composition and manufacture of a particular substance, he would chalk the relevant chemical equations on the blackboard behind him, in the neatest of handwriting, and then signal to his assistant, at one end of the bench, to demonstrate the making of it from its elements. He, himself, would stand at the other end and describe what was being done, step by step. Occasionally he might say, "You know sometimes the preparation of this substance can be quite dangerous", and edge a bit farther away, leaving the unhappy-looking demonstrator to carry on, bravely juggling with the apparatus until the desired reaction was successfully, and safely, completed. Though our ranks had been very much increased, for the Chemistry lectures, by the addition of the first year medical students, the few budding architects and most of the Arts students were not in attendance. Four girls sat in the front row, two of them very noticeably "bottle" blondes. One morning "Charlie" was lecturing on hydrogen peroxide, and when he got to speaking of its uses he described it as being a great bleaching agent of many fibres. "It will bleach hair quite white", he went on, with a straight-faced downward glance at the two blondes, whose ears perceptibly reddened.
Our third lecture-hour of the morning was devoted to listening to one Doctor Edgar H. Booth, senior lecturer in Physics I, and later to become the first head of the Wool Secretariat in London. He was a very good teacher who knew his subject well and how to impart it by apt allusions, but he was rather facetious, and often put over some very forced humor at which we were expected to laugh. Towards the end of his lecture he had the habit of walking out from behind the apparatus bench, leaning back against the front of it and rubbing his forehead on one of a pair wires that were stretched from floor to ceiling to carry a small lantern screen. One afternoon some of his class