Lives in Brief

In 1939 Sinclair and his mother set out on a trans-Atlantic crossing. The Second World War brought an abrupt end to the pleasure trip, stranding the two in America. Making their way north, they established themselves in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Sinclair enrolled at the University of British Columbia. He later moved east and obtaining his MA from the University of Toronto.

In 1944 Sinclair signed on with his adopted country’s national radio service, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, beginning an association that, while changing in nature and function regularly, would endure well beyond his official retirement date.

A prolific writer with more than 400 radio productions to his credit, Sinclair also hosted, acted and produced dramas and documentaries. His first work for the CBC was during the war years and can easily be categorized as propaganda, designed to keep spirits up at home or remind the audience of the moral correctness of the task facing the Allied nations.

His 1949 play, Hilda Morgan, drew headlines and outraged comments in newspapers and the House of Commons, for its portrayal of a woman who, with child before her marriage, loses her fiancé in an accident and ponders terminating her pregnancy.

As television sets became common in Canadian households the CBC moved into the new medium. Working on both sides of the camera, Sinclair involved himself with numerous productions, often turning up on variety and comedy programs as well as continuing to produce and present both fiction and non-fiction programming. He was one of the first hosts and producers of The Nature of Things, a long-running science documentary series that began in 1960 and is still on the CBC schedule.

In 1972 Sinclair’s career took an abrupt turn when he was named vice-president of the network. Quickly discovering that he had no affinity or inclination for administration he returned to the creative side of things at his first opportunity.

Returning to radio in 1983, Sinclair took the helm of a new program, Ideas, one that was tailor made for his eclectic expertise. For the next 16 years he held forth on topics from music to chemistry to philosophy and physics, finding complexity in the commonplace and simplifying the intricacies of more esoteric concepts. Discussions of science, music, mathematics, the nature of man, society, freedom and faith filled hundreds of hours of airtime with Sinclair at the microphone, examining concepts and constructs in unconventional ways, often from more than a single frame of reference.

Retirement in 1999 did not mean inactivity for the 78-year-old veteran of 55 years in the broadcast industry. Sinclair continued to contribute regularly to Ideas and was the focus of a three-part conversation during which he shared the leading influences in his life with his long-time listeners. He was also a popular lecturer at the University of Toronto.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) in 1985.

Ronald Ackroyd, electrical engineer, was born on April 18, 1921. He died on May 26, 2006, aged 85.

Beginning his working life in the Royal Navy Scientific Service in 1942, Ron Ackroyd went on to join the newly created United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 1954. On retirement, he continued as a visiting professor at London University, first at Queen Mary College and then at Imperial College.

The youngest son of a solicitor’s clerk, Ackroyd was educated at King George V Grammar School, Southport, and Liverpool University, where he took a first in electrical engineering in 1942. During the war he worked on demagnetising ships, underwater explosions and marine acoustics. He developed new kinds of sonar systems to detect torpedoes and mines, and for wave recording.

Using an inverted echo sounder on the submarine Seneschal, he made the first accurate measurement of wave heights and frequencies in North Atlantic storms. This had significant implications for the D-Day landings.

After the war, during which he took his MEng, he was appointed Munition Fellow in Engineering and then lecturer in electrical engineering at the University of Liverpool, working on a unified theory of electrical machines. He received his PhD in 1949 and then worked on a secret project, the stability problem of the gaseous diffusion plant, to enrich uranium for defence purposes, planned for Capenhurst in Cheshire. He became a senior principal scientific officer and continued to be an honorary lecturer in electrical engineering and PhD supervisor at Liverpool University.

During this time he worked on the design of nuclear power stations, the processing plants at Windscale and the performance of the first Dounreay fast reactor.

He made a range of non-nuclear inventions, including a car that is fumeless in urban areas and burns fuel only on the open road. He proposed a very-deep-diving non-nuclear submarine as a countermeasure to the titanium-hulled, very-deep-diving Russian nuclear submarines; his invention, he was sure, would have comparable underwater speed and endurance.

Other inventions included a conveyor belt that can simultaneously convey, side-transfer and collect multiple loads in preset positions, and a hybrid analogue-digital computer. This computer was built in the electrical engineering department of Liverpool University with the results published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers.

His wife, Thelma, survives him with their daughter and son.

Professor Anthony Gale, psychologist, was born on April 23, 1937. He died August 22, 2006, aged 69.

Tony Gale’s career as an academic psychologist spanned a period of rapid growth in the field of psychology within the UK. In 1970 there were already about 50 departments of psychology, but many of these were tiny places with a handful of staff and not many more students. There are now 110 departments recognised by the British Psychological Society, and about 12,000 students take up psychology at undergraduate level every year. The well-established professional areas of educational, clinical, and occupational psychology, have been augmented by the new and influential specialisms of health, forensic, and sports psychology. Gale played an important part in promoting all these developments, and in restructuring British psychology to reflect its new prominence and responsibilities.

Gale was a larger-than-life figure, with a subversive sense of humour. He cared passionately about psychology and about university education. His academic career began with lectureships at Exeter (1965-70) and Swansea (1970-71), and a senior lectureship at UWIST, Cardiff (1972-76), before taking up professorships first at Southampton (1976-94) and then Portsmouth (1995-2002).

He rapidly achieved an international reputation as an experimental psychologist for his psychophysiological studies relating psychological processes to physiological measures including the electroencephalograph (EEG), galvanic skin response, and heart rate. His initial research critically examined the physiological basis of Hans Eysenck’s theory of individual differences in personality. As an expert in the field he chaired the British Psychological Society working party on the use of the polygraph in the detection of deception. Its critical report, published in 1987, led to the rejection of polygraph evidence in the British judicial system unlike the US. In contrast to many experimental psychologists, Gale encouraged the development of alternative methodologies. For example, in the 1980s, along with his doctoral student, Arlene Vetere, he embarked upon pioneering qualitative research involving participant observation of families in their own homes. What unified the wide diversity of his research was a “systems approach” that treated the person not as a passive recipient of stimuli but as actively shaping their circumstances.

In the early 1980s there were serious deficits in university funding across the country. The centre at Southampton threatened extensive job cuts, but thanks to Gale’s boundless concern for colleagues and his tireless energy, he managed to elicit the financial figures on which the cuts were based. Working with a colleague from economics, he subjected the figures to intensive scrutiny, and they proved unsound. Such battles hardly ingratiated him with the university establishment.

Gale became a leading figure in the British Psychological Society. He served as president (1989), honorary general secretary (1998-2000), and also chaired numerous committees, including those devoted to ethics and research, public relations, and the future of the psychological sciences. He was responsible for introducing new regulatory structures to protect and enhance the reputation of British psychology and its good practice. He played a leading role in tightening up the ethical standards within research and professional pratice.

Undergraduate psychology degrees are accredited by the British Psychological Society. The imposition of a standard curriculum has had a big influence, ensuring, a highly empirical approach in the UK, unlike, for example, a more psychoanalytic approach as in France. Gale promoted accreditation in the British Psychological Society but he eventually became its most outspoken critic, insisting that it had become a straightjacket stifling creativity in the teaching of psychology. This about face was characteristic. Despite holding senior positions in British psychology he never became an establishment figure, and even seemed to enjoy challenging authority by deploying his piercing wit or, if that failed, declaring all out war. He successfully supervised more than 20 PhD students, many themselves now holding chairs in psychology.

Gale was originally destined to become a rabbi. He came from a devoutly Jewish family and among other things, was obliged to attend three-hour long religious classes after school each day. At 13 he rebelled and became an atheist.

Having formally retired in 1994, he moved to Portsmouth on a part-time basis. In 2001, after several months of poor health, he was discovered to be suffering from myeloma.

He is survived by his wife, Liz, and their son and daughter.

Professor William Parry, FRS, mathematician, was born on July 3, 1934. He died on August 20, 2006, aged 72.

Bill Parry was one of the most innovative mathematicians in Britain in the last 50 years, and a powerful influence on the field in many ways.

He was born in 1934 into a large working-class family in Coventry. He failed the 11-plus exam, but a shrewd and sympathetic mathematics teacher at the Coventry Junior Technical School noticed his mathematical talent and persuaded him to prepare instead for university. This he did through evening classes and self-teaching and was offered a place at University College London.

There he flourished, devoting his spare time to the Communist Party and to playing poker. After graduating he obtained an MSc in mathematics from Liverpool before returning to University College to study for a PhD under Yael Dowker, which he completed in 1960.

At this time diffuse ideas about the nature of probability were widespread in mathematics and in such branches of physics as statistical mechanics and thermodynamics — a rigorous theory of the subject had been established by the Russian mathematician Kolmogorov in the 1930s. Parry took the lead in bringing these new ideas to Britain and to deepening and extending them, and he did much to develop the modern sophisticated subject, drawing as he did so on his profound appreciation of number theory.

The proper scientific appreciation of probability is one of the chief themes in the mathematics of the 20th century, and Parry was one of its architects. His name survives attached to such important concepts as the Parry-Sullivan invariant and the Parry measure.

Parry took the view that many topics in mathematics boiled down to various ways of counting, and the Parry measure is a way of assessing how likely certain outcomes of a dynamical process are, but its creation involved bringing together the formalism of thermodynamics and the mathematics of hyperbolic dynamical systems.

Russian mathematicians were at the forefront of this work, as were a growing number of Americans, and Parry’s work soon found an appreciative international audience. This esteem was recognised by the accolade of an invitation to an address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1970.

Having spent a useful research year at Yale and three years teaching at the new University of Sussex, Parry joined the University of Warwick as a Reader in 1968, becoming a Professor in 1970. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1984.

At Warwick he promoted his subject by his teaching and his research. His introduction of the ideas of subshifts of finite type and on nilflows was fundamental. He published some 80 influential articles and four books, and he helped to found the journal Ergodic Theory and Dynamical System. His teaching was always thoroughly prepared, and he devoted time and energy to a score of doctoral students.

Parry’s reputation attracted distinguished visitors to the university, and this in turn helped raise the Mathematics Institute there to its present position of international eminence. He remained at Warwick until his retirement in 1999, when he became an emeritus professor.

Parry left the Communist Party over Soviet actions in Hungary in 1956 and joined the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League (SLL) while in Liverpool, only to leave some years later, repelled by the Stalinist methods of an avowedly anti-Stalinist leadership. It was while he was in the SLL that he met Benita Teper, a Trotskyist émigrée from South Africa, whom he soon married.

Thereafter Parry’s left-wing activity was more eclectic although he retained a deep interest in politics, a strong sense of justice and a profound hatred of the capitalist ethos and practice. In later years he was active in collecting academic books for Palestinians. Unduly modest about his own achievements, Parry was a source of considered advice and enthusiastic encouragement to all he adopted, a group that extended beyond his former students. On his retirement he found, as he put it, that mathematics had left him, and he turned to his love of poetry, reading widely and himself writing poems, some of which have been published.

Parry is survived by his wife, Benita, and their daughter.