Geoffrey Howard Stern, scholar of international relations, writer, broadcaster and composer: born Liverpool 5 February 1935; Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in International Relations, LSE 1960-2001; married Elisabeth Tucker (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1987); died Montreal 3 October 2005. Geoffrey Stern spent all his working career as an international relations specialist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, but had a higher public profile as a BBC radio presenter on World Service programmes such as 24 Hours and News Hour. He soon met up with the handful of Britons in the city and together they formed the Tom Mann Centuria - named after the dockers' union leader. Among the 13 others was Tom Wintringham who, like Marshall, would go on to write many fine poems about the war in Spain.On hearing of the creation of the International Brigades, Marshall and the others travelled south to Albacete, where the foreign volunteers were being organised into fighting units. Franco was denied the quick victory which he had confidently expected and Madrid, along with the Spanish Republic, held out for another two and a half years. Arriving in Barcelona early in September 1936, less than two months after Franco's putsch against Spain's elected government, Marshall first enlisted with the anti-Fascist militia in Catalonia. David Marshall was one of the small band of British volunteers who took up arms to defend Madrid during the early days of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.
In the suburbs and villages to the west of the Spanish capital they helped fight off General Francisco Franco's Army of Africa, which had been airlifted from Morocco by Hitler's Luftwaffe. More than 100 graduates attended, many travelling great distances, drawn by the chance to meet Tony Orchard again and to exchange news and gossip. All of us at that dinner have lost a great friend and mentor.Andrew Hamnett. David Ronald Marshall, political activist, poet, joiner and civil servant: born Middlesbrough, Yorkshire 27 March 1916; married 1939 Joyce Ritson (died 1975; one son, one daughter); died London 19 October 2005. Perhaps the most remarkable testament to Orchard's popularity was the attendance at the first dinner held by University College for its graduates in chemistry earlier this year.
He worked tirelessly for the university, helping to ensure that it continued to attract chemistry students of the highest calibre and trying to ensure that students unfamiliar with Oxford could navigate the admissions process with confidence. But he continued his scholarly work, with a text on photoelectron spectroscopy for the Open University, and the volume Magnetochemistry (2003) for Oxford University Press, both models of clarity and skilful presentation.To his students, Tony Orchard was a fund of good, solid common sense; indeed, to many of us later in life, he continued to offer insights and advice. Working with a small group of committed research students he helped create, in a series of papers in the Sixties and Seventies, our modern understanding of electronic structure and bonding in a wide variety of systems.At the same time, he became increasingly involved in college life, steadily withdrawing from active research, but becoming a successful Dean of his college, a post requiring patience and tact. He found, in the techniques developed initially by David Turner and Bill Price in London, the perfect experimental vehicle to test his new ideas. The way in had to be through intuition and ingenuity, and Orchard realised that he must work closely with experimentalists, checking his methods at every turn. Ballhausen, he began to extend their ideas on bonding to a wider range of compounds than those then regarded as tractable.Intellectually, the challenge was immense: whilst the equations governing bonding in inorganic compounds could be written down, they could not be solved save by making simplifications that were often difficult to justify.
