Obituaries
Geoff Manning 1929–2006
Geoff Manning, director of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory between 1979 and 1986, died on 21 December 2006, aged 77.
Geoff was born on 31 August 1929 in Hackney, London. His father Jack Schwartz, a Russian Jewish émigré, was a gambler and his mother Ruby had little formal education. When Schwartz abandoned the family less than a year after Geoff's birth, Ruby struggled to raise her children alone. Despite this unpromising start, Geoff gained places first at Tottenham Grammar School and then (following a brief stint in the RAF) at Imperial College London. He read physics at Imperial and went on to study for a PhD in nuclear physics under Sam Devons. Geoff married his schoolgirl sweetheart Anita in 1951 and after his PhD emigrated with his young family in 1956 to work for the Canadian Atomic Energy Co in Chalk River, later moving to the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with many leading physicists, including Dick Feynman.
Returning to the UK in 1960, Geoff joined the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He moved into the exciting new field of particle physics in 1965, joining the Rutherford Laboratory as group leader. Over the next two decades he took on successively the roles of head of High Energy and Atlas Divisions, deputy-director and finally director in 1979, the year in which the laboratory merged with the Appleton Laboratory to form the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). A distinguished experimental physicist, he continued to take an active interest in the laboratory's scientific output throughout the administrative phase of his career.
While director of RAL he ushered in a new era of wider research, attracting Japanese, German and Indian funding, and overseeing the design and construction of a world-class neutron source, ISIS, opened by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in October 1985. The following year he received a CBE, and the Glazebrook Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics for services to science. That RAL's future remains bright is in no small part a result of Geoff's carefully considered broadening of research and expertise.
Always happiest with a new project or interest in hand, after more than 20 years at RAL he left to pursue a career in industry, as chair of Active Memory Technology Ltd from 1986 to 1992. He never fully retired, however, spending his last years making silverware, building furniture, inventing a novel DIY product and teaching his eight grandchildren DIY and business skills.
Single-minded determination and a belief in the power of will to overcome obstacles made Geoff successful at almost everything he undertook, in work, in leisure and in play. Fiercely rational and intellectually powerful, he could be uncompromising in argument and impatient with those slower or less sure than himself. But it was perhaps the difficulty of his early years that underpinned the other great driving force of his life; devoted to his children and grandchildren, he took immense pride in their achievements.
He will be missed by his extended family and wide group of friends, and in particular by his wife Anita, their three children Howard, Ian and Karen, and their spouses and children.