April , 19581 0 BIT UARY Obituary JULIAN LEVETT BAKER JULIAN LEVETT BAKER, who edited The Analyst from 1907 to 1920, died at his home in Xaidenhead on January 29th, 1958, at the age of 84. Julian Baker was born in London on February 24th, 1873, and educated a t the City of London School, to which he was unable to return after the Easter vacation of 1888, as he had been in contact with a case of scarlet fever. This proved actually to his advantage. Tcnowing that Julian was set on becoming a chemist, his father consulted R. J. Friswell, then managing chemist to the old dyestuffs firm of Brooke, Simpson and Spiller, and Friswell advised having the boy coached for the next entrance examination to Finsbury Technical College, where Meldola, who had formerly been on Friswell’s staff, had recently succeeded L4rmstrong as Professor of Chemistry.The boy passed in, as he would not have done had he remained at school another term. At Finsbury in the eighties, the chemical students had not only their professor to look to, for Meldola had on his staff Streatfeild and Castell-Evans. What the students thought of Streatfeild is shown by the institution of the Streatfeild lectures. If Castell-Evans was less spoken of, he was not forgotten, as was shown by M. 0. Forster in the course of his 1938 Streatfeild lecture. M. 0. Forster was a man of Baker’s year and remained throughout his life one of the most intimate of Baker’s friends. G. T. Morgan was Baker’s senior by a year at Finsbury, but was another life-long friend. It was during Baker’s time at Finsbury that Meldola invited E.R. Moritz, the well-known consulting brewer, to deliver five lectures on brewing, lectures subsequently embodied in a printed book and later translated into German. Young Baker was kept at Finsbury for three years, the normal course in those days being of two years only, but he had been very young at entrance and was still under nineteen when he was appointed assistant chemist to the London Beetroot Sugar Association, under A. R. Ling, who subsequently became Professor of Brewing at Birmingham. Association with such a man as Ling was another piece of good fortune. Ling had been one of Armstrong’s earliest pupils at Finsbury and Armstrong kept in touch with such of his old students as could be persuaded to engage in some research, so far as their other duties permitted.Thus 4rmstrong would drop into the laboratory of the Sugar Association and advise these young men as to what they might usefully do. So began that long intimacy with Armstrong that has led the writer of another obituary to state that Baker was one of Armstrong’s students.188 PRIBIL RECENT DEVELOPMENTS I N CHELATOMETRY [Vol. 83 That he never was, but he was one of the people the old man welcomed even when helay a sick man. At first Ling and Baker published work on the halogen derivatives of quinone, but their interest lay increasingly in the degradation of starch. They published one or two papers on this subject, but were not encouraged to work in this field, which some of their seniors thought should be reserved to Horace Brown.In 1900 Baker, who had been for some time chief chemist to the Sugar Association, did what he had long hoped to do. He gained entrance to the brewing industry, being appointed chemist (at first, sole chemist) to Watney, Conibe, Reid and Co. Before taking up this appointment, he spent some months in the laboratory of Adrian Brown, then Professor of Brewing at Birmingham, and thus began another life-long friendship. His duty to his Company permitted him to publish many papers in the chemical and brewing journals. His services to his Company may be judged by outsiders by the facts that he deferred his retirement until after the war and that for many weeks he and his chairman, a near neighbour and as old as Baker, drove daily between Maidenhead and London when railway services could not be depended on.From 1920 until 1948, he edited the Journal of She Institute of Brewing. Baker had been a Member of the Council of the Chemical Society and of the Institute of Chemistry as well as a Vice-president of the Society of Chemical Industry and of the Institute of Brewing. As Honorary Secretary of the London Section of the S.C.I. in 1905, he was largely responsible for the success of the (for those days) ambitious programme for the Annual Meeting of the Society in London. Members went by launch to Woolwich, to be shown over the Arsenal, all the men of the party in frock coats and silk hats. Baker was one of the few Finsbury men to be elected a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. Another honour that fell to him and gave him pleasure was the award of the Horace Brown Medal of the Institute of Brewing. Aged 84, he would sometimes say, after visiting his London club, “I hardly saw a man I knew.” But a generation ago, among a crowd of chemists, the writer remembers reflecting that “Baker seems to know everyone here and everyone knows Baker.” No one who saw Baker at work in his laboratory, or for that matter in his garden, which he loved, can have failed to note that he had very nice hands. In 1948 he married Mrs. Catherine St. Paul, who died in 1956. Those were days. He married Eveleen Daniels in 1901 ; she died in 1945. He is survived by a daughter and two sons. G. C. JONES