Henry Hulme

Henry Rainsford Hulme (born August 9, 1908 in Southport , † January 8, 1991 in Basingstoke ) was a British physicist. He was instrumental in the development of the British hydrogen bomb .

Hulme attended the Manchester Grammar School, where he distinguished himself as a student, and studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge University (Gonville and Caius College) from 1926 . In 1929 he received his bachelor's degree after the mathematical Tripos exams and in 1932 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the absorption of X-rays in atoms. He also studied at the University of Leipzig. At Cambridge he also excelled as a student in theoretical physics (he received the Smith Prize in 1931) in the group of Ralph Fowler . From 1932 to 1938 he was a fellow at Gonville and Caius College. 1936 to 1938 he was a lecturer at the University of Liverpool . In 1938 he became chief assistant of the astronomer Royal Harold Spencer Jones at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (as successor to WMH Greaves). He was considered a possible successor to Jones when the Second World War broke out and he was posted to work essential to the war effort. At first he led the development of the demagnetization of ships as a measure against sea mines (degaussing) , from 1942 he was in the Operations Research Group under Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett . Most recently he was Director Operational Research at the Admiralty. After the war he did not return to the observatory in Greenwich, but was a consultant at the Department of Aviation, where he also visited the Manhattan Project in the USA. In 1947 he became rector of Canterbury University College in New Zealand. There he was also secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. In college, he soon came into conflict with his colleagues through unauthorized acts and, after a vote of no confidence, submitted his resignation in March 1954. He was to hold his position as rector until January 1955, when the murder trial of his daughter (the Parker-Hulme murder case) prompted his departure in July 1954.

After returning to England, he was a scientist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) in Aldermaston , then headed by William Penney . He was instrumental in the development of the British hydrogen bomb and in 1959 became Chief of Nuclear Research at AWRE. He was the UK spokesman for the international negotiations on nuclear weapons tests in Geneva and was involved in many tests of British hydrogen bombs. In 1973 he retired.

In 1947 he received an honorary doctorate (Sc. D.) from Gonville and Caius College. As an astronomer, he dealt with, among other things, observation errors and the solar atmosphere.

He was married twice: in 1937 to Hilda Marion Reavley Hulme, from whom he divorced in 1955, and soon afterwards to Margaret Alice Ducker. He is the father of crime writer Anne Perry (Juliet Hulme, * 1938), who was accused with her friend in 1954 in a spectacular murder trial in New Zealand (Parker Hulme case), filmed as Heavenly Creatures . In the film, Hulme is portrayed by Clive Merrison . Hulme himself did not take part in the trial, but had previously left with his son Jonathan, convicting his daughter in front of the press (the only time that he commented on the case).

literature

• Lorna Arnold , Britain and the H bomb, Palgrave Macmillan 2001
• RJ Tayler, Obituary, Quarterly Journal Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 32, 1991, p. 313, online

Fonts

• Nuclear Fusion, Wykeham Publications 1969