Elegy written in a Yorkshire Laboratory¹

"Elegy written in a Yorkshire Laboratory1." Liquid Crystals, 42(5-6), p. 940

Notes

1. This is of course, a parody of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

It was a wow in its day. It is recorded that General Wolfe was so taken with it that he read it to his officers on the evening before the decisive battle for Quebec.

2. This is a reference to Ken Harrison (then one of George’s research students) who first synthesised 5CB. (I hope he will forgive me for this poetic licence – as far as I am aware, he was not prone to fall asleep in the laboratory).

3. For many years the door of George’s office was decorated with a poster of Debbie Harry, pulchritudinous singer of the pop group Blondie.

4. This is an allusion to The Lord of the Rings (‘One ring to bind them all – in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie’). Tolkien was a lecturer at Leeds and probably wrote these lines a few yards away from my laboratory.

5. There is a street in the centre of Old Hull, romantically called The Land of Green Ginger. (Green Ginger is thought to be an old name for opium.)

6. Earlier mesogens with promising temperature ranges, involved two aromatic rings joined by an azo or azoxy group. The drawback to these molecules was their instability. The linking group was the source of the trouble. It was George’s idea to remove it altogether and use the biphenyl nucleus.

7. The description of the rosy fingers of dawn is one oldest recorded poetic images. It occurs at the beginning of the second book of the Odyssey.

8. ‘The centre cannot hold.’ is a quote from The Second Coming by W B Yeats.