At the time I entered the university, the school of chemistry was adequate if old-fashioned from a teaching standpoint, and not unduly distinguished in research. That is an opinion based upon hindsight, of course, for, at the time I entered, I had no idea whether the school was good or bad. In this respect I differed little from most other school-leavers then and now; in my experience, in non-academic families the choice of university, where it is not made simply on proximity grounds, is usually determined by schoolmasters or, where there is an academic family tradition, by parents who tend to select the institution they themselves attended. It is indeed difficult to see how it could well be otherwise. In 1924, the first-year course for honours chemistry in Glasgow consisted of two terms of lectures on general and inorganic chemistry by G. G. Henderson, the Regius Professor of Chemistry, followed by one term of organic chemistry given by T. S. Patterson, who was Professor of Organic Chemistry. Both professors were good lecturers and the courses given were interesting. This is more than could be said of the accompanying practical class which was devoted to quantitative (mainly gravimetric) and qualitative inorganic analysis. We were given virtually no preliminary instruction apart from one lecture demonstration, and then set to determine the amount of silver in a given solution gravimetrically. If the result obtained was more than two per cent in error, the demonstrator in charge simply wrote ' Repeat' in large letters across one's laboratory notebook and handed out another solution. When, eventually, one got a satisfactory answer, one proceeded to repeat the operation successively with lead, copper, arsenic, bismuth and so on through the traditional sequence of elements and acid radicals used in qualitative analysis. True, we had a few lectures on analytical chemistry on the side, but their relevance to the course was obscure. This probably taught us to become proficient in quantitative analytical procedures, but it was a soul-destroying business. My first - and only - personal encounter with Professor Henderson during my first year was on a November afternoon in 1924 when he was making a tour of the laboratory. He paused at my work bench, looked at the name-label on it, and said 'Ah! Mr Todd, and what are we doing today?' I told him I was endeavouring to determine the amount of silver in a given solution having already failed in three previous attempts. He shook his head sadly, said 'Too bad, too bad!' and passed on his way. I well remember debating with myself whether to abandon chemistry after my fifth 'Repeat' on silver! However, I weathered the storm and went on. Our second year was given over to organic chemistry which I found fascinating, both as to lectures and laboratory, and after a third rather dull year given over to physical and inorganic chemistry - with (believe it or not) a further bout of quantitative analytical chemistry as applied to materials containing more exotic elements and radicals - we were able to devote our fourth and final year to one of the three branches of the subject, the practical course including a small research topic on which a thesis had to be written. I chose organic chemistry and, perhaps because I had shown up prominently in all the examinations in that branch, I was put under the professor's supervision. T. S. Patterson's field of research was optical activity. This he pursued in somewhat desultory fashion, since his primary interest was in the history of alchemy, a subject which had occupied most of the attention of his predecessor Ferguson (known for some obscure reason as 'Soda') who had bequeathed a large collection of works on the subject to the university library. It was through Patterson's insistence that the history of chemistry was made a compulsory subject for all undergraduates in their final year, and I have always been grateful to him for thus introducing me to it.
The topic allotted to me for my final year research project was the action of phosphorus pentachloride on ethyl tartrate and its diacetyl derivative. The object was to see whether the nature of the group to be replaced had any influence on the course of the Walden inversion. Needless to say, such results as I got threw no light on that problem, although they did lead to my first publication in the Journal of the Chemical Society. Patterson was interested in optical rotatory dispersion and sought to interest me in it also. I read up most of the available literature and began some work on the rotatory dispersion of mannitol and its derivatives which we subsequently published. In June 1928 I graduated B.Sc. with first-class honours in chemistry, being placed first in my year, and was awarded a Carnegie Research Scholarship of £100 per annum to continue research with T. S. Patterson.
I thus returned to Patterson's private laboratory in the autumn, and continued work along the same lines as before. This I did with some diffidence, for I was already getting uneasy about optical rotatory dispersion as a subject for research. For one thing, I did not find it very exciting; I really wanted to do natural product work, holding as I did to the Berzelius definition of organic chemistry (the chemistry of substances found in living matter) rather than the alternative one due to Gmelin (the chemistry of the carbon compounds). More serious, however, was the fact that the subject, as then pursued, seemed to me to have no theoretical basis and was unlikely to acquire one without the application to it of a great deal more mathematical insight than I, T. S. Patterson or even the Lowry group in Cambridge (the other British workers in the field) possessed. It was difficult to see how a junior research student like myself could break loose from it and remain in the Glasgow chemistry department. Furthermore, apart from T. S. Stevens, there appeared to me to be no member of the Glasgow staff with both enthusiasm for organic chemistry and real research ability with whom I would really have liked to work. The others - or so it appeared to me - got on with teaching and made only perfunctory bows in the direction of research. To cut a long story short, by the end of the autumn term of 1928 I had already decided that, if I wanted to make my way in organic chemistry I must leave Glasgow and go elsewhere. Somewhat to my surprise, when I spoke to T. S. Patterson about my feelings he agreed fully, and offered to help in every way he could. I accepted his view that it would be valuable to spend a year or two abroad, if only to learn how other people lived and to acquire real command of a foreign language. Not surprisingly, in view of his own background, he wanted me to go to Paris; I on the other hand wanted to go to Germany, where there was more going on in the natural product field, and in due course I prevailed. The problem, of course, was to decide where to go. In those days, Windaus in Gottingen and Wieland in Munich were the big names. Their laboratories, however, were crowded with foreigners (especially Americans) and English tended to be the lingua franca among the research groups. I was anxious to get as much German as I could as well as chemical experience, and my choice finally lighted on Walther Borsche at the University of Frankfurt a.M. Borsche, a pupil of Wallach, had been an associate of Windaus and did natural product work; the other organic professor in Frankfurt was Julius von Braun, well known as a reaction chemist. The set-up seemed to suit me well, so I wrote to Borsche and was accepted to start with him as a research student in October 1929.