William Hume Rothery OBE FRS
(1899–1968)

William Hume-Rothery
Image source: sadeghi via wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

William Hume-Rothery was born at The Pines, The Avenue, Worcester Park (the house was later renamed Wensleydale and later still became numbers 45-45B), on 15 May 1899 and baptised in St Mary’s Cuddington on 22 July 1899.  He was the son of Joseph Hume Hume-Rothery (b. 1866), a barrister and patents lawyer originally from Cheltenham, and his wife, Ellen Maria Carter,

The family returned to Cheltenham and William attended Suffolk Hall Preparatory School in Cheltenham.  The 1911 census shows Joseph (44), wife Ellen (49) and their children William (11), Mary (7) and Agnes (6) together with 4 servants living in Cheltenham.  In 1912 William won a scholarship to Cheltenham College and joined the military and engineering course. While there he became a college prefect. head of house. cadet lieutenant in the Officer Training Corps, and helped to run concert parties for WW1 troops.

In 1916 William took the Army Entrance Examination coming 5th place and went onto Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. In 1917, he suffered from a bad case of cerebrospinal meningitis requiring a long recovery in hospital. The illness left him completely deaf and with balance problems. His poor state of health led to his being invalided out of the Army.

He applied to his father’s college, Trinity Cambridge, who turned him down because of his deafness. However, in 1918, Magdalen College Oxford accepted him and he read Chemistry in the Honour School of Natural Science. In 1920 he was awarded him a Demyship.

Williams interests centred on metals and alloys. After graduating in 1922 with a first, he went to the Royal School of Mines working under Sir Harold Carpenter, the Professor of Metallurgy, on the structure and properties of metallic compounds. While there he also worked towards his Ph.D. which he obtained in 1925.

Hume-Rothery returned to Oxford in 1925 to research intermetallic compounds (alloys) and problems on the borderland of metallography and chemistry. His achievements and discoveries are far too technical for this article but he made major contributions to the science of metals and alloys.

In 1930 he discovered a new law of lattice constants of the elements which meant they could be calculated in terms of atomic numbers and quantum numbers.

On 28 March 1931 William, then aged 31, married 29 year old Elizabeth Alice Fea at St Mary Magdalene, Richmond, Surrey and in 1934 their daughter Jennifer was born.

In 1938 he became a fellow of Magdalen College and in the same year he was appointed lecturer in metallurgical chemistry. Through his efforts and with support of industry, a separate metallurgy department was established at Oxford in the 1950s.

William was appointed the first Isaac Wolfson professor of metallurgy in 1958 and, at the same time, fellow of St Edmund Hall. The opening of a new building for the department followed in 1960.  During his lifetime he published 178 papers and wrote seven books and was awarded many honours including:

• Sir George Beilby memorial award (1934)
• The platinum medal of the Institute of Metals
• The Francis J. Clamer medal of the Franklin Institute (1949)
• The Royal Netherlands Academy Roozeboom gold medal (1950)
• The Luigi Losana prize medal (1955)
• An Oxford DSc was awarded in 1935,
• The fellowship of the Royal Society in 1937.
• Honorary degrees – Universities of Manchester and Sheffield (1966)4
• Appointed OBE in 1951.

He was a watercolourist of note, a keen fly fisherman and in his later years cultivated exotic cacti in a greenhouse of his own construction. Following his retirement in 1966, he continued to write until his death at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, on 27 September 1968. He was survived by his wife.

Peter Reed 2023