Obituary: Dennis Brown

By ARNOLD PICKMERE (with Warwick Brown)

* Physicist. Died aged 100.

Professor Dennis Brown, whose life spanned all but two years of the 20th century, was a witness to most of the scientific discoveries that have changed our lives.

His speciality was nuclear physics, and in a long career he met many of the greatest physicists of the century including Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Bohr and Fermi.

As a scientist he spent more than four decades in various roles teaching and administering in the University of Auckland physics department.

He became its head from 1957 until his retirement in 1964 and was also acting head from 1940 to 1945.

Dennis Brown spent his life in Auckland from 1929 but was English, born in Weston-Super-Mare in 1902. His father, a furniture retailer, died when Dennis was 12.

The family was not well off, but as an exceptionally bright student Brown won a scholarship to the local Merchant Venturers' College.

A classmate was Paul Dirac, who became one of the most important physicists of the century and one of the founders of quantum theory. Brown's association with Dirac continued at the University of Bristol, where Brown studied physics.

After obtaining his PhD, Brown taught at the University of Leeds but found chances for advancement limited in Britain in 1928, and applied for a job as a junior lecturer at what was then Auckland University College.

At that time the Auckland institution, separated by a long sea voyage from Europe, had to rely on an appointments panel in Britain to do interviews.

One of the panel who interviewed Brown was a New Zealander famous for several outstanding discoveries in the field of atomic physics, Lord Rutherford.

He must have seen Brown's potential, because Brown got the job.

He sailed for New Zealand in 1929 leaving behind his mother, a sister and four brothers.

Despite his nuclear specialisation, he became involved involuntarily with other scientific work, most notably in 1934 in a sensational double murder trial.

William Alfred Bayly, a 28-year-old farmer from Ruawaro, northwest of Huntly, was eventually hanged for the murders of his neighbours Samuel and Christabel Lakey.

In that case, Brown's expert role involved work as a pioneer of ballistics and microphotography in New Zealand.

His evidence in relation to the identity of numbers of bullets and comparisons between a knife found at Bayly's place and cuts on timber in the Lakeys' implement shed was crucial in obtaining Bayly's conviction.

Also in 1934, Dennis Brown married Adele de Marr and settled in St Heliers, which was then on Auckland City's outskirts. He lived there the rest of his life.

His work during World War II included radio research, and he also invented a means of photographing soundwaves. He obtained a doctorate from Leeds University for this work.

Dennis Brown saw the extension of research work in the physics department at Auckland and also studied nuclear techniques overseas, particularly at the Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell in Britain.

In the late 1950s he acquired an obsolete Van der Graaf accelerator from Harwell and set up a "Kiwi ingenuity" team at Auckland which reconfigured the machine and doubled its output. Much useful internationally recognised research was done on this machine, and many nuclear physicists were trained on it.

Teaching was really Brown's life, but as a tireless and imperturbable administrator of the physics department he became embroiled in the bitter disputes about the siting of the university in the central city.

The scientists wanted a new campus at Tamaki, and the arts faculties wanted to stay in town. The arts won, and Brown became involved in the detailed planning for the department's new buildings on the Princes St site, although he retired in 1964 before their completion. Four new professors were appointed to replace him.

Dennis Brown, a Fulbright Scholar and a member of the Royal Society of New Zealand from 1963, is survived by his two children, Warwick and Denise, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.