Robin was born in Harrow on 1st July 1941 and graduated from UCL in 1964 with a BSc in Chemistry. He joined the Department of Chemical Physics at Battersea College in 1967 as an Assistant Lecturer in Crystallography and moved to the Guildford campus shortly afterwards. Robin commenced a secondment to Psychology in 1988 as a Senior Research Fellow in Information Systems. This was combined with a collaborative arrangement with the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford to allow for the continuation of his crystallography research activities in x-ray powder diffraction and crystallographic computational methods. The Psychology secondment continued until 1997 when Robin formally transferred over to Psychology in the new School of Human Sciences.
Robin assumed responsibility for teaching undergraduate statistics. Despite this being an unpopular subject, he was much loved by the students who valued his genuine concern to help them and his willingness to spend that extra bit of time explaining things. Robin was accessible to students and his student feedback often expressed gratitude for the pastoral role he willingly assumed. As well as his software development work for his crystallography research, Robin produced a complete integrated suite of instructional programs intended to promote understanding of statistical theory. It is unfortunate that more was not made of the software which was very innovative for its time. Robin was always keen to make improvements and he never regarded it as finished.
Although based in Psychology, Robin continued to develop and disseminate his work on powder indexing presenting his ideas around the world. He organised and contributed to the Crysfire 2001 suite of programs for determining powder structures which is widely used in the academic community and available in an industrial version. He continued to develop and demonstrate the programs up to the time of his death. Robin probably contracted the Hepatitis A during a visit to Egypt last November for a 5-day International Powder Diffraction Workshop at Assiut University. There his lectures went well but running his software for the lab sessions proved to be difficult because the computers were running an Arabic version of Windows!
In various committees and boards of studies Robin was notable for arguing strongly for what was just and right. Unwilling to sit back and let events pass him by if he thought something was not being dealt with properly, he was sometimes in conflict with colleagues but his views often prevailed and he gained respect as a man of principle. These qualities were carried over into his Union activities. As Chair of the local AUT branch Robin was intimately involved in a wide range of activities and came into contact with many people across the University. Initially a reluctant Chair, he became an effective negotiator on behalf of AUT members. He was able to bring a rational, logical approach to union activity and negotiations without ever losing sight of his responsibilities to the members.
Robin will be remembered by many as someone who was very intellectually sharp. He had an endearing habit of arriving late for Psychology seminars yet would still be able to ask (usually the first) penetrating questions that often got to the heart of the debates at hand. This was all the more impressive as he was not, until relatively recently, trained as a psychologist and still saw himself as a crystallographer, computer scientist, and English poet. He had a genuine enthusiasm for ideas of all kinds.
Away from work he was External Activities Coordinator and then Chairman of the Wey Poets (Guildford & West Surrey Centre of the Poetry Society) and he organised and took part in poetry readings and participated at various festivals. He also lectured, published and broadcast on the subject of computer poetry and the programmed generation of language generally. He was a member of the Computer Conservation Society and used to maintain a gallery of microcomputer exhibits at the Computer Museum, Bletchley Park.
He will be remembered as someone who was always to be seen at social events whatever they were. He was a Father Christmas at the staff-student Christmas parties for a number of years and also the target of many a fond student 'sketch' in the annual party review. He was always portrayed sympathetically (not the norm for many staff) reflecting the warmth and esteem with which the students regarded him.
Robin was one of the great characters of the University and he will be missed.
Chris Fife-Schaw,
Head of Department Psychology
University of Guildford
Notes
I was stunned today to receive the unexpected news that Robin Shirley had died on Easter Sunday, 27th March 2005. I had not known that he had been ill, and so this came as a complete surprise and a personal shock. It appears that he contracted Hepatitis A last November, probably during a visit to Egypt to attend a 5-day International Powder Diffraction Workshop at Assiut University, and this led to acute liver problems, from which he failed to recover.
Robin was born in Harrow on 1st July 1941 and graduated from UCL in 1964 with a BSc in Chemistry. In 1965, our paths first crossed, when I arrived in Kathleen Lonsdale's laboratory in the basement of the Chemistry Department of UCL to begin my postgraduate research. I well recall that on that first day there, I was surprised by a jovial baldheaded Lenin-lookalike with a loud voice bounding down the stairs from what we called the mezzanine floor. Robin had joined the lab a couple of years earlier to work on the crystallography of gall and bladder stones. Mrs Lonsdale had acquired a large collection of these stones, ranging in size from less than 1 cm up to one monster that was nearly as big as football, which Robin was most keen to show to me. If I recall correctly it was labelled "Mrs Olive Green". Needless to say, we quickly became friends, and "Mrs Olive Green" was often mentioned whenever we met in later years.
Robin, it has to be said, did not always hit it off with Mrs Lonsdale, and so he developed a kind of love-hate relationship with her (although many years later he did confide in me that looking back he realised how much he was indebted to her). Part of the problem was that he could sometimes appear to be abrasive, but this followed from a sharp and highly cerebral and critical mind. He was someone who did not suffer fools gladly. But at the same time he was warm and kind, especially to the other students in the group, and could always be approached for useful advice and help. It was Robin who first showed me how to use a polarising microscope, a technique that has remained with me to the present day.
In 1967, he was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in Crystallography in the Department of Chemical Physics at Battersea College (later to become the University of Surrey). It was then that he turned his attention to the problem of automatic indexing of powder patterns and he wrote an influential review of all the techniques then available, which is still read today. However, it seems that he didn't quite see eye to eye with some members of the Department and in 1988 he moved to the Department of Psychology as a Senior Research Fellow in Information Systems. I was very happy during this time to be able to offer Robin and his PhD student laboratory space in Oxford while he sorted out his position at the University.
The Psychology secondment continued until 1997 when Robin formally transferred over to Psychology in the new School of Human Sciences. Here he taught undergraduate statistics, which, despite being an unpopular subject, won the approval of his students. Indeed it is reported that they loved him for his genuine concern to help them and his willingness to spend extra time to explain things. I understand that he produced a complete integrated suite of instructional programs intended to promote understanding of statistical theory.
Several years ago, he was struck by serious personal tragedies that would have derailed most people, and indeed for a few years, he vanished from the Crystallography scene. I was delighted when he eventually resurfaced at a Crystallography conference to rekindle his involvement in the problem of powder indexing. As is well known, he began to put together the CRYSFIRE suite of programs, in which different powder indexing software was joined together in such a way that the user could easily migrate from one type of indexing program to another. CRYSFIRE rapidly established itself as an influential development, and very soon, Robin was invited everywhere that powder indexing was to be discussed and he was a popular figure at Crystallography conferences world-wide.
Readers may like to know that Robin was also a wellrespected poet, having participated at several poetry festivals. He also lectured, published and broadcast on the subject of computer poetry and the programmed generation of language generally. He was a member of the Computer Conservation Society. A few years ago I was fortunate to be invited to the Science Museum to see the unveiling of a Ferranti Pegasus Mark II computer that he and the Society had managed to restore and get working. This was the very same machine that I, Howard Flack and Robin used during our graduate research, and I believe that it is now the only working valve computer in the world. Robin and I felt quite nostalgic when it was switched on to play Teddy Bear's Picnic and Rocking through the Rye (we used to play this during long hours at night working on this machine). You can see this for yourself today in the computer gallery of the Science Museum.
Robin was a larger than life figure, a real character, and I shall miss him.
Mike Glazer