Elegy written in a Yorkshire Laboratory¹

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day¹

The weary George plods homewards o’er the lea

Night falls upon the lab of G W Gray

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife

The sober chemists ply their honest trade

And in this cool sequestered vale of life

Tomorrow’s finest compounds will be made.

Full many an ester of the purest sheen

Is brought into this world with loving care

And many a mesogen is born to blush unseen

And waste its phase change on the desert air.

And in the lab as shadows fall

The air is hushed and Ken sleeps at the bench²

In his dreams he hears George call

“We’ll solve that problem Ken, for once and all.”

“By the door where Blondie struts,³ I heard the muse,

She whispered “Two rings with just one tie -

One bond to bind them irrevocably ⁴

In the Land of Green Ginger (where the shadows lie)”.⁵

We’ll cut the link and join the rings ⁶

The azoxy group can go to hell

Then we’ll see what fortune brings

And will someone stop that bloody bell.

Little does the sleeping Ken suspect

Tomorrow, after one more rosy-fingered dawn⁷

In this most inauspicious place

A scientific legend will be born.

No more will ambition mock their tedious toil

Their simple joys their destiny obscure

Lo the centre holds, the transition’s fine ⁸

Time I think, to open up the wine.

Then do the boasts of heraldry, the pomp and power

And paths of glory lie in store

And all that bounty, all that fame,

But Ken just grunts another snuffled snore.

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.