Up to 1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1965
1967
1968
1969
1970s
1971 onwards
In April 1971 when Gerry was on a combined holiday and conference in Italy he suffered a stroke which incapacitated him.
Although confined to a wheelchair, he continued to enjoy life for the next 20 years until he died in November 1991.
Personal correspondence courtesy of St Cross College, Oxford
Note on the 1952 conference at Buckland House
The 1952 conference played a significant part in launching the construction of the PLA and Nimrod at RAL.
There is quite a bit of recorded discussion on energies of 450-600 MeV, and the PLA actually was initially going to be a 600 MeV machine (which was why, to allow for its length, it was built in B412/R12 pointing down the runway). The PLA as we know it reached only 50 MeV, but that was presumably because it was subsequently realised that going up to 600 MeV in a drift tube linac was both inefficient and expensive. But since construction of the PLA began only two years after the conference, it does seems likely that the PLA arose out of the conference.
The discussion on energies of ~10 BeV (or GeV as it usually is now) is consistent with the 7 GeV of Nimrod, and Nimrod was a weak-focussing machine like the Cosmotron which was referenced. Clearly some seven years elapsed between the conference and the start of Nimrod construction in 1959, but Nimrod was a much more expensive machine than the PLA and no doubt it took longer to get together the money and the resources to build it.
DF, December 2024
