Background

About two and a half years after joining ICI’s Bozedown Laboratory from Cambridge as a Technical Officer in 1964, when Graham Neilson (who sadly died in June 2019) became my Laboratory Assistant, I became responsible for a section of 6-9 other Technical Officers (graduates and PhDs) each of whom had a project with supporting technical staff. After a further three years, I was appointed head of the Process Technology Group of about 25 Technical Officers and 30 supporting staff, together with direct access to a substantial workshop and the Company’s KDF9 digital computer at Wilton on Teesside (North Yorkshire). I reformed the Group into five project teams with about five Technical Officers each, covering the following fields: Gas-solid catalytic reactors (Dr M L Brisk, later Professor of Process Control & Dean of Engineering, Monash University); Free Radical computation kinetics (Dr P Dyer); Gas-liquid reactors (Dr C Ramshaw, later Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Newcastle); Two-phase & polymer reaction flows (M J Shires, later Senior Engineer with Foster–Wheeler); Gas-phase reactors (self). The scope and scale of the five teams made the Process Technology Group (PTG) the largest chemical technology research group in Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which in the 1960s was the largest chemical company by turnover in the world, and still in the first five two decades later.

Projects carried out at:

• Runcorn
• Wilton
• Pontypool
• Harrogate
• Blackley