Edmund "Ted" Bellamy 1923–2005
Edmund "Ted" Bellamy, who died aged 82 on 11 December 2005, was an outstanding scholar who made a significant contribution to the development of high-energy physics (HEP) in post-war Britain and the birth of experimental HEP in Pisa, Italy. Born in Liverpool in 1923, he graduated at King's College, Cambridge, in 1948, then worked on his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory.
In 1952, Ted took up a lectureship in Glasgow, joining the team preparing experiments for the 300 MeV electron accelerator. Never short of ideas, he developed a high-pressure ionization chamber for combined dE/dx-E measurements while waiting for the accelerator to be tuned and ready to start. In this creative period he interacted energetically with all of his Glasgow colleagues, in particular with Phil March who later followed him to Westfield College.
In 1960 he was appointed to the newly established chair of physics at Westfield College, University of London, and was charged with setting up a department there. First, however, he spent a sabbatical at the University of Pisa, working with a newly formed group on neutral pion photoproduction at the new 1100 MeV electron synchrotron at Frascati. The Pisa group was young and inexperienced, but included physicists who would later play a significant role in particle physics. With his young colleagues, Ted measured the lifetime of the neutral pion, exploiting the Primakoff effect – the first observation of this mechanism. He contributed enormously to the education of the experimental particle-physics group and Giorgio Bellettini and Lorenzo Foà remember with gratitude his intellectual generosity and openness.
Ted played a major part in transforming Westfield from a small, all-female, mainly liberal arts institution into a mixed college with a key position in the natural sciences. He served as dean of sciences and later as vice-principal. His profound knowledge of the foundations of physics enabled him to establish research programmes in nuclear and solid-state physics besides his own specialty, particle physics. He later created a small but influential HEP Theory Group.
The first particle experiments at Westfield, conducted with colleagues at University College London, included developing an original system that coupled optical spark chambers to vidicon cameras, a method used later in experiments at the Rutherford Laboratory on Nimrod, whose construction Ted had actively promoted. He spent 1966 at Stanford, in the groups of Robert Hofstadter and Martin Perl, then returned to London and joined the CERN Omega project. Having united the Westfield team with a small Southampton group led by Steve Frank, they contributed to a modification of the FRAMM spectrometer, installed at the CERN SPS by several Italian groups. The NA7 experiment accurately measured the kaon and pion form-factors in the space- and time-like regions. At the end of the analysis Ted presented the concluding seminar in the main CERN auditorium. From NA7 he moved with the same groups to start the ALEPH experiment at the Large Electron–Positron collider, at the forefront of physics of that time.
In 1984 Westfield College merged with Queen Mary and Royal Holloway Colleges, but Ted decided not to join them and returned to Pisa as visiting professor for two years; he also spent a year at the University of Florida. Returning to the UK, he and his wife Joan moved to Long Hanborough near Oxford and Ted, who had always been a keen sportsman and had as an undergraduate captained the football team at King's College, took up golf and captained a group of elderly golfers known as the Earwigs.
His collaborators from Pisa and his Westfield colleagues will forever hold a deep respect for Ted as a physicist and a fond memory of his delightful personality.
Giorgio Bellettini and Elliot Leader.
LRT 2006, the Topical Workshop in Low Radioactivity Techniques, will take place on 1–4 October at the CNRS centre in Aussois, France. The workshop, organized by the Modane Underground Laboratory, will bring together experts in low-background techniques for a variety of presentations and discussions. For further information and online registration see http://lrt2006.in2p3.fr/, or contact Pia Loaiza (e-mail ploaiza@lsm.in2p3.fr).
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