https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0499-9291
John Perkins who, after a ten-year struggle with cancer, died just short of his eightieth birthday, was a prominent historian of chemistry, particularly French, and for many years a stalwart of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC). As Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent puts it, Perkins was a “key actor in the renewal of historical studies in chemistry during the past decades.” With a magnificent head of hair and beard, this tall, gregarious man was a delightful raconteur, with whom it was always a pleasure to meet, talk, eat, and drink. As Lissa Roberts, with whom he collaborated, remembers: “When I think of him, I don’t think of a particular encounter, but rather of his presence – how his looming height was softened by the comforting timbre of his voice and his gentle engagement with colleagues.”
Perkins was born in Sutton, Surrey, the son of Brian Perkins, a senior gardener at Kew and his wife Doris Perkins, née Evans, an accountant. He moved to Worthing, Sussex, with his mother and sister after his parents’ divorce, where he attended the Grammar School. He read the natural sciences tripos at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he was a precise contemporary of John Brooke and John Pickstone. For the first two years he focussed on chemistry, but in the third, he and Brooke took the “Certificate in the History and Philosophy of Science” (the precursor of the HPS Part II). As Brooke writes:
It was a year in which the history of chemistry was covered by Satish Kapoor who introduced us to the colourful controversies and animosity permeating French organic chemistry in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Kapoor was a charismatic teacher whose enthusiasm for discussing figures such as Dumas, Laurent and Gerhardt was infectious. John followed him to Sussex.
The Wisconsin history of science programme was one of the oldest and largest in the United States, with history of chemistry being represented by Aaron Ihde. On paper studying under him at Wisconsin looked like a good proposition, but in practice Perkins found it a dispiriting experience primarily because Ihde was a very hands-off supervisor. Furthermore, during his entire time there Perkins was unable to visit any French archives and, in the end, he seems not to have had a firm idea for a dissertation. Also, universities in U.S. in the late sixties were major sites of conflict chiefly over the continuing war in Vietnam; Wisconsin was among the vanguard. As Fisher puts it:
The University of Wisconsin was a centre of student activism during the Vietnam war, an education to us both. There were student riots when Dow Chemical, makers of napalm, came to recruit. A fertiliser bomb outside the Army-Math Research Center killed a postgraduate student working late, and blew my wife Beth out of bed. One time, the National Guard came down our residential street casually lobbing tear gas canisters through all the front windows. More academically, the solidarity brought about by a Teaching Assistants’ strike in 1970 against graduate students being treated as rehearsing and grading machines, an American first, cemented friendships and ensured a lasting radicalism.
In 1971 he and Fisher applied for the same position of liberal studies lecturer at Oxford Polytechnic, later (1992) Oxford Brookes University. Fisher was deemed too interested in research, not then a feature of most polytechnics, and Perkins was appointed. He remained there until retirement at the age of sixty-five in 2008. During that time he was promoted to Senior Lecturer and held the positions of Head of the Department of History, Dean of Arts and Humanities and, finally, Pro-Vice-Chancellor. Nevertheless, a colleague described him as “a rather mysterious, bohemian figure and a member of the ‘awkward squad’” – the latter referring to his active involvement in the trade union.
As a teacher Perkins was excellent and inspiring especially in his modules on the Scientific and French Revolutions and very effective as an administrator. In that role he established a strong research culture in the History Department, including developing research centres, masters degrees, and a research student programme. So successful was he that in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, the history submission from Oxford Brookes (masterminded by Perkins) secured a higher ranking than that from the other, older, university in Oxford!
Teaching and administration put severe time constraints on Perkins’s own research. Nevertheless, he began exploring a whole host of French departmental and other archives. His aim was to show that during the Ancien Régime and Revolutionary period, chemistry was not just a Parisian science, or indeed restricted to just a few prominent individuals, but one practiced in many different ways by thousands of individuals throughout France. This research bore fruit in two long papers published in Ambix in 2003 and 2004 focusing respectively on chemistry in Nancy and Metz before the Revolution.
The prospect of retirement enabled him to begin devoting much of his time to the history of chemistry. He joined SHAC’s Council as Treasurer and Membership Secretary in 2007 and transformed how the Society operated and increased its membership base, contributing immensely to its modernisation. This allowed him the platform to promote the subject. Under his guidance, SHAC developed a programme of awarding small grants for research and meetings. It also notably promoted support for young scholars engaged in postgraduate research, and initiated and sustains the Oxford Seminar in the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, whose annual programme at the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO) he planned, along with Jo Hedesan and John Christie.
These developments contributed to expanding his own research programme into a large collaborative effort, going beyond eighteenth-century France in both time and place. The first stage was a roundtable discussion, “Chemistry Courses and the Construction of Chemistry, 1750–1820,” at the sixth International Conference on the History of Chemistry held in Leuven in 2007. This he organised with Christine Lehman, whom he had met at the MFO the year before, and with whom he formed a close friendship staying with her and her husband on his frequent visits to Parisian archives. The papers from the Leuven meeting, which in addition to France also covered Scotland and Germany, appeared in a special issue of Ambix published in 2010.
Perkins next organised a major series of closely linked themed conferences, funded by the Wellcome Trust, with support from SHAC, entitled “Sites of Chemistry, 1600–2000.” The first conference, held at the MFO in 2011, discussed where chemistry was practiced in the eighteenth century and was followed by meetings on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2012, Valencia; 2013 Uppsala) covering most areas of Europe. Each meeting resulted in a special issue of Ambix, published roughly two years after the conference. One of his collaborators on this project was Lissa Roberts of Twente University who obtained funding from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschapplijk Onderzoek (NWO) to organise with Perkins a series of conferences under the title “Situating Chemistry,” perhaps best seen as the successor programme to “Sites of Chemistry.” Starting in 2012 and ending in 2015, meetings were held in Oxford (twice), Leuven, London, Berlin, Florence and finally (jointly) in Haarlem and Leiden. At the second Oxford meeting plans for a database of chemical sites were developed where the data would be represented and accessed graphically using an interactive map. This allowed Perkins to translate the vast quantity of notes he had made locating chemical sites in France written on index cards in his pretty illegible hand and make the data freely available on-line. As Lehman puts it: “He was not stingy with his discoveries, which he shared generously, and I keep like a treasure the many EXCEL spreadsheets in my computer, the fruit of his long research in the archives” (At the time of writing this database is currently off-line, but SHAC is working to revive it as a permanent memorial to Perkins).
By 2013 Perkins began suffering the first symptoms of cancer. He resigned his SHAC roles, but sought to keep his research going for as long as possible. Sadly, in the end, he was not able to contribute a chapter to the book Compound Histories (edited by Lissa Roberts and Simon Werrett; Brill, 2018) that was one of the outcomes of the “Situating Chemistry” project. In recognition of his tireless “dedication and enthusiasm” the book was dedicated to him.
In 2004 he had moved to Tackley, a village to the north of Oxford. There he kept an allotment and became very active in the Tackley Local History Group, serving as chair. He developed a new passion for archaeology including undertaking excavations and contributed much of the content of the Group’s web page. Also, in Tackley he met Sue Whitaker who was like-minded and with whom he shared his remaining years and she should have the last word:
Living in a village, our paths had crossed many times, chats about growing vegetables, a mutual interest in France, the weather, you get the idea. Until one memorable day and we connected, un coup de foudre, and that was it. We have spent ten or so incredibly happy years together, recreating the garden, recreating our youth, field walking, an education in archaeology, drinking wine, competing in the kitchen, and sharing our love with so many friends. Even during Covid with our separated tables outside in the pouring rain or freezing cold, John manufactured umbrellas, fire pits, anything to keep the joie de vivre. And during all these years he had a rare sarcoma cancer which metastasised throughout his body until he could no longer fight off the inevitable. But my goodness, he did fight, with such resilience and perseverance. Rest now my love.
And this was our song - Bob Dylan: I’ll Be your Baby Tonight.
With thanks to Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, John Brooke, John Christie, Michael Daly, Nick Fisher, Christine Lehman, Roy MacLeod, Malcolm Ridout, Lissa Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Anna Simmons, and Sue Whitaker.