Ronald Sydney Nyholm

Ronald Sydney Nyholm

Sir Ronald Sydney Nyholm was an Australian chemist, born on 29 January 1917 at Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia, as the fourth in a family of six children. He attended Burke Ward Public School and Broken Hill High School. Nyholm married Maureen Richardson of Epping, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, at St Mary Abbotts Parish Church, Kensington, London on 6 August 1948. Ronald Nyholm’s father, Eric Edward Nyholm (1878–1932) was a railway guard who worked for the Silverton Tramway a railways line that ran from Broken Hill to the South Australian border with NSW. In 1915, Eric Nyholm was the guard on the train of picnickers that was subjected to fatal attack by Islamic militants in the Battle of Broken Hill. Nyholm's paternal grandfather, Erik Nyholm (1850–1887) was a coppersmith born in Nykarleby in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, who migrated to Adelaide in 1873. Ronald Nyholm valued his Finnish roots and was particularly proud in his election in 1959 as Corresponding Member of the Finnish Chemical Society. Nyholm was educated at Broken Hill High School; the University of Sydney (B.Sc., 1938; M.Sc., 1942) and University College, London (Ph.D., 1950, supervised by Sir Christopher Ingold; D.Sc., 1953). On graduation Ron became a High School teacher - a contractual requirement of his scholarship to university. He then joined the Eveready Battery Co as a chemist where he was frustrated that his work to make longer lasting batteries was not well received by the marketing department. He then returned to teaching but now in tertiary education. During World War II he was a Gas Officer as the civil defence forces were very concerned that the likely Japanese invasion would include gas attacks. He was lecturer, then senior lecturer in Chemistry at Sydney Technical College from 1940 to 1951, although on leave in London from 1947. From 1952 to 1954 he was associate professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the New South Wales University of Technology. In 1954 he was elected President of the Royal Society of New South Wales. In 1955, Nyholm returned to England as Professor of Chemistry at University College London, until his death in a motorcar accident on the outskirts of Cambridge, England, 4 December 1971.