Gordon Cox and Jackie Truter at the 1954 Paris IUCr
Jackie Truter (Lady Cox) died from leukaemia on 26 November 2004. Her career in X-ray crystallography began in 1945 and at her death she was still active as Visiting Professor in the Chemistry Department at University College, London. She was the widow of Sir Gordon Cox FRS.
The following obituary draws heavily on the short autobiography she completed in March 2004 for her family and friends; direct excerpts are in quotation marks. Mary Rosaleen Jackman was born on 19 December 1925, the only child of Douglas Jackman, research chemist and subsequently general practitioner, and Agnes Browne, lecturer in chemistry. `Jackie' was the nickname she was given when a Girl Guide in London. She was a scholar 1936-1942 at St. Paul's Girls' School, which she loved. At the end of her first year at Imperial College, London she "got a first in the special Inter BSc exam for intending chemists, to the astonishment of people who assumed that with my looks I could not have a brain". She graduated in 1945 with a II1 in chemistry.
A.J.E. Welch, who had given excellent lectures on crystal chemistry, started her on research with X-ray powder photography. After hearing Sir Lawrence Bragg at the Royal Institution she "was hooked on crystallography." In late 1946 she saw an advertisement for an assistant lecturer with `an interest in, but no necessary knowledge of, crystallography'. She applied and got the job in the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry at Leeds University, starting in January 1947. Her fianc� Dr. Eric Truter, whom she had met as a chemistry student at Imperial College, obtained a Fellowship in the Leeds Textile Department and they married in March 1947.
The University of Leeds 1947-1966
Her head of department Professor E.G. Cox
"said that he would teach me and
then I should teach the post-graduate students. I started a new research
project and registered for the External PhD of the University of London. I
did not want to be registered in Leeds because people would discover how
young I was. I got the PhD in 1952".
"The PhD problem was to determine the crystal structure of nitronium perchlorate, NO2* ClO4. The crystals had to be kept out of contact with air; for comparison I also studied Na*NO2. I took photographs, made visual estimation of the greyness of the spots and did the necessary computations with an electro-mechanical calculator and Beevers-Lipson strips." Soon she joined in the development of punched card methods and computer programming. She investigated S-O and S-C bond lengths in various valence states of sulfur. This led on to comparisons of bond lengths in small molecules in their crystals and as ligands in metal complexes. All the while she carried a heavy teaching load.
With her research students she achieved a considerable reputation with a series of papers on trimethyl platinum compounds, arising from syntheses by R.C. Menzies dating back to 1928. A paper in 1956 described a di(trimethylplatinum) complex involving three ethylene diamines, only one of which was bridging. Crystallographic methods had now reached a stage where C and N could be located and distinguished despite the presence of Pt and I. Of particular interest were the unusual structures of dimeric trimethylplatinum α - diketonates in which each α - diketone made two O-Pt bonds to one Pt and one C-Pt bond to the second Pt. New compounds were synthesised to study the character of the relatively long sixth Pt-C bond in the octahedral coordination around platinum.
As a close colleague of Jackie's at Leeds, I found her unfailingly cheerful and patient in tutoring me in chemical matters; reciprocally I appreciated the good use to which she put my contributions to mathematical and computational methods. My interest in tetrahedral oxyanions, and the heuristic dπ - pπ bonding hypothesis, arose directly from her structures. We were beneficiaries of Cox's leadership and his success in building up a strong and lively all-round group in chemical crystallography.
She was promoted Reader in Structural Chemistry in 1960. Shortly after, Cox left to become Secretary of the Agricultural Research Council. He was eventually replaced by an inorganic/analytical chemist. Her lab space was reduced, and teaching with larger classes became less pleasant. In January 1965 her marriage with Eric Truter broke up.
London 1966 - 2004
In 1966 she was invited by Prof. Ron Nyholm,
Head of Chemistry at University College, London, to become Deputy Director
of the ARC Unit of Structural Chemistry.
This was a new venture to allow him, as Honorary Director, to expand his research interests into alkali and alkaline earth metal compounds. Since there was insufficient space in College, the Unit started in October 1966 in a government office building in the Strand. By 1968 the place had been made into a proper laboratory with its own computer and automatic diffractometer. There were four post-doctoral members of staff as well as visitors and students.
"I had taken a big risk because the idea was to look for complexes of alkali and alkaline earth metal cations to see if we could understand and even emulate the discrimination shown by biological systems between e.g. sodium and potassium. We were not sure there would be any complexes but we soon made some and then had the good fortune to determine the crystal structures of several of Pedersen's crown ether complexes. [Pedersen, Nobel laureate 1987, had shown by 1967 that macrocyclic ethers extract metal salts into non-polar solvents and act selectively on these metals. He spent three months in the Unit in 1969.] Many papers were published. Ron was delighted with the progress of the Unit, and I was made a Professor of the University of London". Jackie's 1973 review in Structure and Bonding of `Structures of organic complexes with alkali metal ions' was an ISI Citation Classic in 1989. She received a Chemical Society Award for Structural Chemistry in 1976.
In November 1962 Gordon Cox's wife Lucie had died of a heart attack. Jackie married Gordon in May 1968. He retired as Secretary of the ARC in September 1971.
In December 1971 disaster struck when Nyholm was killed in a road accident. The whole future of the Unit was uncertain, but eventually the ARC decided that it should be moved to Rothamsted Experimental Station in Hertfordshire. Initially scattered around the Rothamsted complex, the renamed Molecular Structures Department moved in 1977 into purpose built accommodation.
"Our work in Rothamsted remained the same as in London. We did a small number of crystal structure determinations for other people in the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), particularly the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation; we had already done some pyrethroid insecticides before moving to Rothamsted. The main thrust remained synthesising compounds with potential to complex selectively with alkali and alkaline earth metal cations" and examining the transport of these ions within biological systems, particularly membrane transport. At Rothamsted, "we changed from an animal (rat liver mitochondria in UCL) to a plant (opening of stomata in leaves) bioassay." The Molecular Structures Department was a happy group and highly productive in several areas.
"When I joined Rothamsted officially, April 1973, morale was very high. It was the oldest, biggest and best agricultural research institute in the world. This continued during 1981 when the universities were hit by Mrs. Thatcher's cuts. ... In the spring of 1983 the then Secretary of the ARC (Ralph Riley) visited Rothamsted and other institutes to warn of coming cuts. On Sept 7th 1983 the Director told me that I and all my staff were to be made redundant, essentially because our work was too basic with no immediate pay-off. His hope that we would all be gone by the end of March 1984 was not fulfilled as we fought back. The borrowed time allowed my staff to get other jobs and I was given 6 months notice in July 1984. In November 1984 I moved out of Rothamsted and into a room in University College."
There she did some teaching and, in the earlier years, continued with research more or less full-time. She had mutually valued relations with both her Jackman cousins and the Cox family. Gordon suffered increasing ill-health from 1992 and died in June 1996. Her own leukaemia was first diagnosed in 2002. In periods of remission, she continued to visit the College. She died in November 2004.
Especially as a younger woman, Jackie cut an attractive figure, elegantly dressed and independently stylish. At Leeds she entered fully into the general and social life of the University. She was a founder member of the BCA, a past chairman of the CCG and a trustee of the CCDC. At Rothamsted colleagues were always impressed with her dedication � to the work, to her staff and students and to the laboratory. Her many friends in the UK and around the world mourn her passing.
Durward Cruickshank