Compared to the Frankfurt Chemical Institute the Dyson Perrins Laboratory in Oxford was rather primitive when I joined it in 1931. No micro-analysis facilities were available, and analyses were carried out down in the semi-basement by the laboratory steward, Fred Hall, using the classical macro-procedures. Fred had been Perkin's chief assistant and in my time ruled the Dyson Perrins - and its professor - with a rod of iron; many stories are told about him but I always got on well with him and found him very helpful. [I did hear, years later, that he told someone that the only two real gentlemen who ever worked in the Dyson Perrins were Alex Todd and Donald Somerville (who later went into the law and politics and became Attorney General).] Blount and I used to send our materials to Schoeller in Berlin for micro-analysis and it was not until 1933 when Drs Weiler and Strauss came as refugees from Nazi Germany that routine micro-analysis was developed in the Dyson Perrins. Blount and I also introduced catalytic hydrogenation and ground glass joints to Oxford but, during my time, the other equipment available amounted to a very indifferent polarimeter, a visible absorption spectrometer and an American pressure hydrogenator which didn't work. Robinson was like his teacher and predecessor Perkin in having little interest in gadgets - he was firmly attached to the degradative and synthetic methods of classical organic chemistry and was slow to adopt such things as ultra-violet and, later, infra-red spectroscopy as aids in structural work.
In those days Robinson was at the height of his powers and he was the most inspiring director of research with whom I have ever come in contact. Certainly one had to be reasonably tough and independent to appreciate him fully, and many a budding chemist who came to Oxford from another school where 'spoon-feeding' of Ph.D. students was the rule, found it difficult to settle into the rather haphazard Oxford scheme of things. Robinson had a razor-sharp mind, but he was interested in many topics and his interest would flit from one to the other with great frequency. He was liable to concentrate all his attention on the topic interesting him at any given moment, to the exclusion of everything else. This made many people regard him as frequently tactiturn if not downright rude, and his collaborators had to get accustomed to being alternately badgered about their progress several times a day, and being almost totally ignored for weeks on end. Perhaps because of the proximity of my laboratory to his, I only observed but did not suffer much from his behaviour. Robinson did not pursue solid experimental work, and differed in this way from his predecessor Perkin. Generally he confined himself to a few preliminary experiments, usually in glass boiling-tubes, and left the follow-up to a junior collaborator. He was very emotional in his reaction to events and impatient with those holding views contrary to his own. This perhaps helps to explain the enormous range of his contributions and the reason for his name being associated with the discovery of a prodigious number of reactions used in synthesis, but with relatively few completed syntheses of complex molecules like steroids. His instinct when confronted with a difficulty in experimental work was at once to seek an alternative route to his objective, or even to change the objective itself; this practice led frequently to the discovery of new reactions, but also, at times, to the premature abandonment of synthetic routes which were later shown by others to be practical.
My sojourn in Oxford was a very important period in my career. Quite apart from establishing a permanent bond with Robert Robinson I learned to know and made lifelong friends among the host of young chemists who, like me, came to the Dyson Perrins to work with him, or followed him there from elsewhere - Gulland, R. D. Haworth, Baker, King, Erdtman (Sweden), Sugasawa (Japan), Walker, Schlitter (Switzerland), Morf (Switzerland), Ramage, J. D. Rose, Briggs (New Zealand), Watt (Australia) and many others. We also had two refugee professors from Germany during the latter part of my stay -Arnold Weissberger and Fritz Arndt, whose chain-smoking of cigars ensured that his presence in the laboratories was always well advertised!
In 1932 I completed the synthesis of the flower colouring matters hirsutin, pelargonin, malvin, and cyanin, chlorides, and so effectively rounded off the anthocyanin field leaving, as far as synthesis was concerned, only some mopping up operations. Accordingly I was looking around for some new subject when Harold Raistrick asked Robinson if he would like to look at the chemistry of some red pigments in certain plant pathogenic moulds of the Helminthosporium group; the problem was turned over to me and much of my time was devoted to it during my last two years in Oxford. Before getting immersed in that problem I had prepared a quantity of gossypol from cottonseed, but never got around to studying it; indeed, I rather think I still have the material in a bottle in my specimen collection in Cambridge. I dropped it in favour of a very brief foray into the steroids following the first (erroneous) structure advanced by Rosenheim and King in 1932. I began to check certain degradations of cholesterol but abandoned them when the correct structure was put forward shortly afterwards by Wieland and Dane. Thereafter, it is true, I devoted a few weeks to a rather hare-brained scheme whereby I sought to generate a tetracyclic nucleus of the steroid type by a very short route beginning with a somewhat unlikely reaction between hexatriene and methyl cyclohexenone. The first problem was to prepare hexatriene; the literature route via divinylethylene glycol was rather unattractive. While I was doing some preliminary work on possible modifications, Robinson travelled with Professor J. F. Thorpe to Manchester on a consulting visit to the Dyestuffs Group of Imperial Chemical Industries and mentioned my problem to him. Thorpe immediately said there was no need to synthesise hexatriene since it was readily available as a major constituent of the so-called 'railway hydrocarbon', the low-boiling residue left behind in the gas cylinders still used for lighting railway carriages in those days. All that you needed to do was to warm it slightly and pass the gas evolved into bromine whereupon you would obtain a copious supply of hexatriene hexabromide. It was characteristic of Robinson that, before returning to Oxford, he ordered a quantity of railway hydrocarbon from the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company. The stuff was duly delivered in a thirty-gallon metal drum which was dumped in the laboratory yard where, it being high summer, it lay gently hissing and smelling to high heaven. It was closed by a large hexagonal nut which appeared to be immovable. However, aided by the laboratory handyman, a monkey wrench and a hammer, I forced an entry. With difficulty we capped the resulting gusher and managed to collect some of the contents. Following Thorpe's instructions I then used up every particle of bromine in Oxford but obtained only a mixture of ethylene dibromide and butadiene tetrabromide contaminated by - at most - a trace of the hexatriene compound. I returned to the preparation of divinylethylene glycol and the railway hydrocarbon - at the urgent request of the local inhabitants - was returned to the railway company.