Professor Frank S. Stone, 1925–2018: The Life of a Solid State and Catalytic Chemist

Abstract

With the passing of Frank Sidney Stone on 5 March 2018 in Dorset, England, the solid state chemistry and the catalysis scientific communities lost a highly respected elder statesman. Always a gentleman, he was pleasant, unassuming and very knowledgeable with what might be described as a serious sense of humour that made his speeches especially entertaining. He was born and based throughout his life in the Bristol area of England. During World War II he was an undergraduate at the University of Bristol and after completing a PhD he was appointed an Assistant Lecturer and his career continued with an appointment as a Lecturer in 1951 and Reader in the mid-1960s. Perhaps because he was not promoted further in 1972 he moved to the nearby University of Bath as Professor of Chemistry. Here he held several important positions including that of Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1984 to 1987) and he formally retired in 1991. Then as Emeritus Professor he maintained a university office continuing as the long serving European Editor of the Journal of Catalysis until 1996. Stone’s first research involved copper and copper oxides and throughout his c career he worked with metal oxides and he did much to incorporate modern solid-state science into traditional heterogeneous catalysis that underpinned important advances made during the latter half of the twentieth century.

1 Introduction

Frank Stone was a highly respected senior physical chemist whose research centred on metal oxide bulk and surface chemistry including heterogeneous catalysis. He published widely and was involved in many international conferences in whose proceedings a considerable amount of his research appeared. Most of Stone’s publications were listed with a detailed commentary about their significance in a “curriculum vitae” he wrote that was published in 1999 [1]. Well into retirement Stone continued publishing, for instance with his good friend Alessandro Cimino they produced a wonderfully detailed lengthy review on oxide solid solutions as catalysts in 2002 [2], and in the next year a masterful review of the progress of catalysis during forty years of publications in the Journal of Catalysis which was established in 1962 [3].¹ From 1970 Stone devoted a lot of time as the European Editor of the Journal of Catalysis, a position he held for more than 25 years that ended in 1996 with the first issue of Volume 161. In his editorial in this issue Stone reflected on the many changes he had seen during his tenure with the journal [4].²

Stone’s “curriculum vitae” previously referred to is an excellent overview of his research so the present tribute article focuses more on the man—his childhood, school days, time at universities and domestic life etc. rather than just reiterate all of the details of his successful research career and academic publications.

The issue of “Topics in Catalysis” in which the present article appears contains a selection of papers presented at the 2018 Rideal Conference, a conference series Stone was closely associated with since the first conference was held in Belfast in 1962. For many years he was also a trustee of the Rideal Trust so appropriately this issue of “Topics in Catalysis” is dedicated to the memory of Frank Stone.

2 Parents and Early Life

Stone was born in Bristol on 11 August 1925 to Sarah Stone (nee Davis, 1887–1971) who with her husband, Sidney James Stone (1897–1976), and their older son Clifford lived at 18 Hedwick Street, a Victorian style terraced house with three bed rooms in the St George area of Bristol not far from the River Avon. Clifford was born in 1912 following the marriage of Sarah and Sidney in 1911. The family was “working class” and apart from Serving in the Army during the First World War Sidney Stone worked all of his life at a local Cooperative Society store.³ In 1925 he gave his job as a “clerk in grocery trade” and ultimately he was in charge of all the ordering of groceries for a large district of Bristol.

Although Sidney Stone left school very young compared with what happens today he was a great admirer of education and he was always keen to improve his own knowledge and skills. He attended night classes and became proficient in shorthand, typing and book-keeping. He taught his sons shorthand and typing—the former was a particularly valuable skill when his younger son later took lecture notes at the University of Bristol as well as during his later life. Interestingly Clifford went on to teach at a Commercial College in Bristol and at Brislington School and alongside his job he was concerned with Pitman’s shorthand and typing qualifications.

Sidney’s wife Sarah Stone was in charge of the domestic finances, she allocated the wages from the Cooperative Store between tins marked rent, gas, groceries etc. and then any small amount of cash remaining was returned as pocket money to her husband. The austerity of the difficult times experienced by the family before, during and after World War II with very few unnecessary things and hardly any comforts is really difficult to appreciate today, but it must have influenced Stone’s later life and perhaps explains a sometimes thrifty approach.

3 School and Undergraduate Studies

Stone attended the local St George Primary School which entered the brightest boys each year into scholarship examinations for some of the large Bristol schools. No doubt to the great pride of his parents Stone won a full scholarship to the immensely impressive “Blue Coat” boys school “Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital School” (known as QEH) founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1586 in the Clifton area of Bristol that continues to have an excellent academic reputation as an independent school today. Stone boarded at the QEH School and he thrived on its rigorous well defined academic structure. He particularly enjoyed science subjects and excelled in Greek and Latin and the use of these languages in later life gave him considerable pride and pleasure (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Frank Stone in the formal uniform of Bristol’s Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital School that was founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1586. (From Frank Stone’s personal collection)

When the Second World War began in 1939 Stone was fourteen and still at the QEH School which remained in central Bristol throughout the very heavy bombing of the city during the war. There was an emphasis on scientific subjects and the country’s need for people with science degrees was stressed to the pupils. Stone did well in examinations and in 1943 he successfully applied to the local University of Bristol to read chemistry in the September. His matriculation qualification was Higher School Certificate physics, chemistry and mathematics and he was awarded a Bristol City Senior Scholarship. While at university he once again lived at home with his parents.

During the Second World War Stone’s elder brother Clifford served in the Royal Air Force and while an undergraduate Stone was an army cadet in the University of Bristol Contingent (Fig. 2). Degree courses were truncated by a year to get as many students completing their courses as swiftly as possible and to achieve this holiday periods were shortened. Also the Chemistry Department of King’s College, London was evacuated to the University of Bristol so the Chemistry Department there was very overcrowded.⁴ Stone worked hard and he gained a first class degree just before the war ended in 1945. His degree was formally awarded in 1946 and in that year he was jointly awarded the Albert Fry Prize.

Fig. 2

The University of Bristol Contingent, Senior Training Corps RMC, Camberley, July 1945. Frank Stone is at the centre of the back row and enlarged in the insert. (From Frank Stone’s personal collection)

4 Postgraduate Studies

After completing his undergraduate studies Stone stayed at the University of Bristol and in 1945 began research for a PhD supervised by the amiable Professor William Edward Garner (1889–1960) [5] who had just returned full-time to the University after his war duties. Garner was an explosives expert and he had lost fingers doing this work. He was well-known for his significant research in the 1930’s on adsorption calorimetry and the surface chemistry of oxide catalysts. He was also amongst the first to systematically study the kinetics of solid-state reactions.

Stone was set by Garner to investigate copper and cuprous oxide whose surface chemistry had not previously been studied in detail. Then the possibility the electronic band structure of solids influenced their catalytic properties was topical [6]⁵ and cuprous oxide provided new insights into this possibility since it is a classic p-type semiconductor and non-stoichiometric with excess oxygen. Stone confirmed adsorbed oxygen on cuprous oxide was anionic by an increase in its semiconductivity and the large heat of adsorption involved.

Stone’s PhD research was supported by a maintenance grant from the Government Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and later a Fellowship from Monsanto Chemicals Ltd. His October 1948 thesis entitled “Studies in the copper–copper oxide system” was in two parts the first “Activation and embrittlement” and the second part “Adsorption and catalysis” His first paper on the activation of metallic copper by oxidation and reduction was published with Garner in 1946 in the prestigious journal Nature [7]. With his research contemporary Thomas Gray⁶ Stone attended one of the first major international scientific meetings after the Second World War which took place in Paris in 1948 that became the first in the still running conference series “International Symposia on the Reactivity of Solids” (ISRS).⁷ Gray presented the results of work they had done on chemisorption on cuprous oxide [8].The event was exciting and enjoyable for Stone and it made a deep impression on him who thereafter regularly attended such conferences especially those that took place at regular intervals. He seemed to like the continuity of such conference series and he carefully retained and filed all of his correspondence with the organisers together with the published proceedings of the conferences he attended.

5 Later Work at the University of Bristol

Professor Garner thought well of Stone and after completing his PhD appointed him as an Assistant Lecturer in 1948. His PhD was actually awarded in the following year, 1949. As an Assistant Lecturer Stone demonstrated in undergraduate laboratories and no doubt began to develop lecturing skills that later he became well known for. He now had some research independence while at the same time able to collaborate with his former PhD Supervisor. Figure 3 shows Stone as youthful man.

Fig. 3

Portrait photograph of Frank Stone as a young man (Courtesy of Catherine Atchison and Diana Armstrong)

Soon Peter Tiley became Stone’s first PhD student. He was already married and because of having served during the war and trained in Canada as air crew was sponsored by a special government grant. Ronald Dell, Stone’s second research student was a University of Bristol graduate who also had attended the QEH School in Bristol some 4 years behind Stone. He began his PhD research in 1950 and was supported by a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Several publications resulted from the research Tiley and Dell did, much of which was based on and extended that of Stone’s original PhD work as did several of his early PhD students [9,10,11,12,13,14]. For instance, Dell’s Ph.D. thesis was entitled “A Calorimetric Study of the Adsorption of Gases on Copper, Nickel and their Oxides” and highlights the importance of adsorption calorimetry then and later in Stone’s research.

Many other postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers subsequently worked in Stone’s University of Bristol laboratory and later at the University of Bath and these PhD students are listed in Table 1 (28) and Table 2 (15) respectively. In addition during his time at The University of Bristol 21 Postdoctoral Fellows and Senior Research Associates worked with Stone and later fifteen at The University of Bath.

Table 1 Frank Stone’s PhD Students at the University of Bristol

Table 2 Frank Stone’s PhD Students at the University of Bath

During the early phase of academic independence there was a high level of laboratory activity and the preparation of papers for publication. It was then when Stone met Professor Hugh Taylor at a conference in the Spring of 1950, and having been awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship (Harkness Fellow) for research and travel in the USA asked if he could work in Taylor’s laboratory in Princeton—he left Bristol for America in the autumn of 1950 sailing from Southampton and he returned a year later [15].

Taylor was very well known in the heterogeneous catalysis area for his pioneering work and who earlier with Eric Rideal [16] had co-authored the influential 1919 book “Catalysis in theory and practice” [17] that was written in the evenings during the First World War while they were scaling-up parts of the catalytic ammonia synthesis process at Wapping Gas Works in London. Later he made many notable contributions including the concept that catalytic surface reactions take place at specific “active sites” [18, 19].

At Princeton Stone was introduced to practical photochemistry and he studied the photochemical and thermal decomposition of hydrogen peroxide and during this work Stone had a serious explosion that resulted in his hospitalisation for some time, but he later said it was nothing serious! [20]. Much later at the University of Bristol he initiated work on heterogeneous photocatalysis, for instance he showed zinc oxide irradiated with UV light catalysed the oxidation of carbon monoxide at room temperature [21, 22]. Stone made many friendships at Princeton including with Michel Boudart who had just obtained his PhD and with Alessandro (Sandro) Cimino who became a life-long colleague and a family friend.

In the autumn of 1951 Stone returned to Bristol University where he was promoted to Lecturer and the flow of his publications continued including the notable discovery published in 1953 that the reaction of nitrous oxide (N₂O) with copper is a strictly limited surface reaction and later it formed the basis of a widely used method for the determination of the copper surface area in, for example, low temperature shift catalyst and methanol synthesis catalyst [23,24,25].

A decade later in 1962 Stone was awarded a DSc for his “Publications on reactions in solids and at solid surfaces” and shortly afterwards he was made a Reader in Physical Chemistry, a position he held until his resignation from the University of Bristol in December 1971.

At this time Douglas Everett [26] held the Leverhulme Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bristol and there was a decade before his retirement was due. There were several strong internal potential candidates to be his successor and interestingly most of these potential candidates also later moved to senior positions elsewhere. The vacancy created by Stone leaving was filled by the colloid scientist Brian Vincent who was later appointed a Professor.

6 Move to the University of Bath

In 1972 Stone moved to the University of Bath and since this was not too far from his home there was no need move house—something that strongly appealed to him! The University received its Royal Charter in 1966 officially establishing “Bath University of Technology” although it had a long history as Bristol College of Science & Technology and the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College in Bristol to the Bath School of Chemistry and Pharmacy founded in 1907. In 1971 just before Stone arrived the title was formally changed to the “University of Bath” and prior to this. Robert Bolland the Professor of Chemistry left in 1969.

Stone’s appointment as Professor of Chemistry began on 1 January 1972 in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. The School had a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Stone led the Chemistry Group within the School. In 1974 there was a separation forming the School of Chemical Engineering and the School of Chemistry headed by Stone who may be thought of as a “founding father” of the University’s School now Department of Chemistry. He held important positions: from 1972 to 1984 he was Head of the School of Chemistry, from 1975 to 1979 Chairman of the Science Area, from 1984 to 1987 Pro-Vice-Chancellor and from 1987 to 1990 he was again Head of the School of Chemistry.

At the University of Bath Stone maintained a strong research group investigating old and several areas new to him with results contained in some seventy published papers. He became deeply involved with the bulk and surface properties of alkaline earth oxides and using UV–visible diffuse reflectance and infra-red spectroscopies three, four, and fivefold coordinated surface adsorption sites were identified. Particularly interesting was the reaction of carbon monoxide at room temperature on magnesium oxide to form a pink negatively charged adsorbed cyclic hexamer characterized by a broad absorption band at about 450 nm, similar to that, of the well known cyclic rhodizonate C₆O₆ ion [27, 28].

During this time Stone continued to attend international conferences helping with the organisation of several of them while maintaining active family holidays as well as having several sabbatical visits to America (see Sect. 8 below). He maintained strong links with the University of Bristol regularly attending physical chemistry seminars and lectures there by visiting scientists. He was also a long-time member of the prestigious Bristol Scientific Club,⁸ occasionally going to meetings with his wife and sometimes with Professor Brian Vincent.

When almost 65 years old in 1991 Stone formally retired from full-time academic life and the occasion was marked by a 2 day meeting of his former students and co-workers and a selection of the papers presented were published in an issue of the Faraday Transactions. In 1994 in his departing editorial from the Journal of Catalysis Garry Haller thanked Stone for the help he gave him as co-editor and noted the individual letters Stone sent to contributors even if their paper had been rejected. Then in 1999 a special issue of Topics in Catalysis in which Stone’s Curriculum Vitae appeared was dedicated to him [29].⁹

Stone became an Emeritus Professor and retained a university office for many years and once with some relish he told the present author this was paid for by the publishers of the Journal of Catalysis. In retirement he dedicated several days a week to duties as the European Editor of The Journal of Catalysis, a role he had for more than 25 years. In this role he was keen papers of significant scientific merit were published and he was helpful to authors in a variety of ways especially those whose native language was not English. Once the scientific merit of a paper was established he was often meticulous about the correct use of English grammar—for example even the position of a coma could be the topic of correspondence! He relinquished the Editorial position in 1996 and he was replaced by Professor Roel Prins of ETH Zurich.

7 Marriage, Family Life and Hobbies

Before leaving in 1950 for a year in Professor Hugh Taylor’s laboratory at Princeton University in America Stone and Joan D. Hayward, who came from Cheltenham, were engaged. Joan was a Bristol University chemistry graduate in the same undergraduate year as Stone. Previously during the war they were both volunteer fire-watchers studying during by day and fulfilling their night-time duties from upper rooms of the University buildings. Despite the war they had a great deal of fun, for example they frequently attended dances in the “Victoria Rooms” and even when watching for incendiary bombs landing on university roofs they gathered with a gramophone, dance records and coffee in the “observation room” and after their stint they had fish and chips on the way home. After graduating just after the war Joan did a teacher training course and then taught school chemistry.

Shortly after Stone returned from America he and his Fiancée Joan were married on 29 December 1951 in Cheltenham. Their first house was in Henleaze a residential area of Bristol, and subsequently they had two daughters, Catherine born in July 1954 and Diana in July 1958 and later in 1968 they moved to their final house in Coombe Dingle. Stone and his wife continued to live there after their daughters had left home until they were too infirm to remain there; Stone finally left in January 2018.

Stone had several hobbies in addition to having a keen interest in the history and development of chemistry and especially catalysis. He admired many of the scientists in the generation ahead of him including his PhD supervisor William Gardner, Eric Rideal and Hugh Taylor who laid much of the groundwork for developing the understanding of heterogeneous catalysis. Stone felt indebted to Professor Garner for lunching his research career and when he became a Professor at Bath he had a 1954 portrait of him in his office. Stone also held in high regard long established academic societies such as the Chemical Society of London formed in 1841, the Faraday Society founded in 1903 named in honour of Michael Faraday and German chemical organisations such as the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für Physikalische Chemie with origins going back to 1894.

Like his PhD Supervisor Professor Garner, Stone was a keen gardener and in the late 1940s he gave him some irises which he cultivated and nurtured in his garden each year carefully recording the number of blooms the plants had—Stone enjoyed his garden and being outside. He took great pleasure in cycling and camping and for many years he cycled to and from the University of Bristol each day. As an undergraduate he went on long cycling and youth hostelling trips sometimes in a group but often on his own covering long distances each day with camping equipment. Figure 4 shows Stone with his bicycle in later life.

Fig. 4

Frank Stone enjoyed being outside and he travelled far and wide by bicycle often with camping equipment on lengthy trips. Here he is seen framed by the suspension bridge over the River Severn not so far from home. (Courtesy of Catherine Atchison and Diana Armstrong)

His lifelong love of Wales began when he was sent there on a summer “Harvest Camp” as part of his wartime contribution. He would cycle from Bristol to Wales and explore the area around the farm where he worked, and in later life he also made extended bicycle trips to the distant North West of Scotland. As a part of his love for the outdoors Stone held annual summer camps for his Research Group in the Welsh Mountains or on Exmoor.

The love of walking and camping was shared with his family, and each Easter they would go to the same cottage on The Lizard in Cornwall and walk along the cliff paths around the south west peninsula. Each summer the family went camping for 3 weeks, often to mid-Wales which remained a favourite area, to Ireland and to the north west of Scotland and once to Northumberland. As the daughters grew older the camping trips extended into Europe and especially to France and Belgium. He had a love for America no doubt a fondness formed during his sabbatical year at Princeton University.

8 International Conferences and Sabbaticals

Stone enjoyed travel and the intellectual stimulation of meeting fellow researchers at international conferences and he attended most of those concerned with areas in which he worked. At various times he served on the organising committees of many of them, for instance the 1965 Rideal Conference was held at the University of Bristol and Stone was the local organiser and similarly the 7th International Symposia on the Reactivity of Solids (ISRS) was held there in 1972 and he was Chairman of the organising committee with Dr. R. M. Dell the Secretary. Stone co-edited the proceedings with J. S. Anderson and M. W. Roberts (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5

The prolific solid state chemist Professor Paul Hagenmuller (1921 – 2017, University of Bordeaux) and Professor Frank Stone (right, University of Bath) at the 1972 International Symposia on the Reactivity of Solids held at the University of Bristol. Frank Stone was the Symposium Chairman and Ronald Dell the Secretary. (Courtesy of Dr. R. M. Dell)

The range of places Stone travelled to attending conferences is illustrated by the venues for the ISRS conferences (Table 3) and the Rideal Conferences (Table 4) most of which he attended and many others which are too numerous to list here. It should also be mentioned Stone’s long involvement with the Faraday Society—he often published in Transactions of the Faraday Society (and later when it became incorporated into The Chemical Society) and he participated in many Faraday Discussion Meetings. On 7 May 1996 Stone was presented a large certificate signed by fifteen committee members thanking him “For his services to The Faraday Division”. Stone was widely known as a long serving reliable committee member including for instance the Royal Society of Chemistry and Society of Chemical Industry Rideal Trust that oversees the distribution of student travel bursaries.

Table 3 Dates and venues of the International Symposia on the Reactivity of Solids (ISRS) over seventy years

Table 4 Dates and venues of the Rideal conference series

Stone arranged regular sabbatical periods in overseas universities especially in America. Although alone on his first trip to Princeton University later his family usually accompanied him on such trips. He was awarded an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Visiting Lectureship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and North Western University at Evanston, Illinois during 1961, and the family travelled to America on the Queen Elizabeth. During 1967 Stone had a short (April–May) visiting Professorship at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and in the following academic year (1968–1969) the family returned to Baltimore for another period there when Stone was awarded a National Science Foundation Senior Foreign Scientist Fellowship for a year at John Hopkins University. As a further example of Stone’s visits to America in March 1976 he gave a lecture entitled “Surface coordination and heterogeneous catalysis on oxides” at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio in their Frontiers in Chemistry lecture series. There were also enduring associations with Italian and Spanish research groups especially with Stone’s old friend Alessandro (Sandro) Cimino in Italy that was facilitated by a NATO Grant.

Stone’s sabbaticals were not restricted to just work and a lot of holiday travel also took place. On one occasion in America a large used blue Chevrolet station wagon was bought on the east coast and driven across the country to California—en route it often served as sleeping quarters and later in California it is was sold for a profit! Places the family visited ranged from New York, to San Francis and included the Grand Canyon, the Rockies and Yellowstone Park. Although both Stone and his wife enjoyed being in America enormously when he was offered a lucrative position with Sun Oil he decided not to accept the offer and the Bristolian returned to home in Bristol to be close to his parents and to carry on his academic career there.

Stone continued consultancy work with the chemical industry, and he once suggested he could supplement his stipend in America by consulting with chemical companies there. For several years he made consulting trips to the North East of England and when this was during the summer his family would go with him staying at the Grinkle Park Hotel on the North Yorkshire Moors. His wife and daughters would then spend the day at the seaside town of Saltburn-by-the-Sea while Stone had discussions at the nearby Tioxide company who sponsored his photochemical research or at the ICI site at Billingham that produced vast quantities of bulk chemicals especially ammonia and methanol involving key copper-based catalysts and he must have marvelled at the progress made in this area since his earlier PhD work! More recently, in the 1990s, Stone consulted with the present author at Johnson Matthey in Royston on applications of alkaline earth oxides.

9 Extended Publications

During his long career Stone wrote a number of substantial reviews and chapters in books. As early as 1955 he prepared two extensive chapters amounting to 85 pages in “Chemistry of the Solid State” a 417 page book edited by his former PhD supervisor then Emeritus Professor W. E. Garner [25]¹⁰ and in 1958 with Douglas Everett he edited the Proceeding of the Tenth Symposium of the Colston Research society held in the University of Bristol that year. He continued producing such articles over the years and well into retirement [32,33,34]. However, in spite of completing a number of long writing tasks he never completed writing a book.

Early in 1969 Professor E. M. Loebl (Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York) arranged for Stone’s lectures given while a Visiting Professor at John Hopkins University to be published as a monograph in a series published by Academic Press he edited. The provisional title was “Catalysis from the Standpoint of the Solid State” and the first two chapters (“Viewpoints for Catalysis” and “The Energetics of Surface Complexes”) were written and neatly typed. The typescripts included complete lists of references and many clearly drawn illustrations, but in spite of having done this careful time consuming work it would appear time ran out because the project was abandoned. The exact reason for this are unclear but it was a negative experience that appears to have marred Stone’s view about writing a monograph or a book, and this became apparent when the present author tried to encourage him to write a book in the series edited with Professor Michael Spencer [35].¹¹ He gently declined merely saying he did not think it appropriate for him to write a book without further comment giving the impression he had a deep reason for not wanting to entertain such a task.

10 Move to Complete Retirement

After Stone’s formal retirement in 1991 extra hours became available for his editing work for the Journal of Catalysis that earlier had been a difficult juggling act with his many University commitments. Stone was happy with this new arrangement and he spent several days a week in his university office so his wife noticed very little difference between his full-time employment and retirement! Five years later in 1996 he relinquished the Journal editing so there was then more time for gardening, visiting his daughters in Dorset and Northumberland etc. Stone maintained some scientific contacts and he regularly attended Bristol Scientific Society meetings. With his wife they travelled extensively making enjoyable memorable trips to Australia and New Zealand and also to America and Canada. Stone also took a keen interest in all of his five grandchildren’s activities and their academic progress, one of whom became a chemist.

11 Move to Dorset

In later life Stone cared for his wife Joan in an extremely patient and caring way for several years, first alone then with family help and later with daily carers as increasingly she developed severe dementia. After leaving hospital following an illness she moved to a care home in Dorset to be close to her daughter Catherine who lived there. In the autumn of 2017 Stone was diagnosed with myeloma and he became increasingly frail and in early 2018 he moved to the same care home as his wife where he spent his last few months. However, at the care home Stone remained alert and very much the man we all knew and for example he took great delight in excelling in daily quizzes and crosswords!

Stone passed away peacefully on 5 March 2018 in the presence of his two daughters. Following a private family funeral there was a Service of Thanksgiving for his life at St Laurence’s Church in Holwell, Dorset on Thursday 29 March 2018 which was attended by family members, friends and former colleagues including Dr. Ronald Dell (one of Stone’s first PhD Students), Dr. Roger Bickley (a former University of Bristol Post Doctoral Fellow) and the present author representing The Royal Society of Chemistry and The Society of Chemical Industry. Fittingly there was a short oral obituary given by Professor Brian Vincent followed by a minutes silence at a meeting of the Bristol Scientific Society and the same took place at the opening of the Rideal Conference held at The Cosener’s House, Abingdon on 26 March 2018.

12 Conclusions

The way many of those who knew Stone will remember him will be as he appeared in the photograph he had in his 1999 “curriculum vitae” [1] that was taken around the time of his formal retirement—an amiable, wise and knowledgeable person who formed enduring friendships (Fig. 6). His path from a humble working class background to become a distinguished Professor via the prestigious Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital School in Bristol is a marvellous story of achievement reflecting not only his personal drive and intellectual capabilities but surely also the help, support and encouragement of his parents during his early years and later at university when their wartime finances were severely restricted. Once an established academic he continued working hard and developed a vibrant research group with a constant flow of graduate students and attracting many post doctoral students and senior research associates from around the world. He is deeply missed not only by his extended family but also by a huge number of people he worked or was involved with around the world.

Fig. 6

Professor Frank Stone’s University of Bath “official” portrait photograph from around 1990. (Courtesy of Lizzie Richmond)