Abstract
Colin Siddons, who died on 8 November 1999 aged 86, was one of the most brilliant of the generation of physics teachers who came into teaching out of necessity rather than vocation in the 1930s. He elevated physics teaching into an art and it was for his inspirational physics teaching that he won international recognition. He was made an Honorary Life Member of the Association for Science Education, awarded an Honorary Master of Science degree by the University of Leeds in recognition of his `Outstanding Career in Science Teaching', and in 1992 the Institute of Physics awarded him its prestigious Bragg Medal for services to physics education.
He was one of those science sons of Bradford who, along with the Noble Prize winner Sir Edward Appleton and the outstanding cosmologist Fred Hoyle, are hardly recognized in their own city. Colin wove together his politics and humanism in a career that could not but collide with the stuffy, class-ridden and prejudiced society of Britain in the thirties. He left Cambridge with a first-class honours degree in Physics, a product of the University Physics laboratories of Thompson and Rutherford, who did so much to break the mould of nineteenth century science, launching science into the modern era.
With his degree he applied to work as a Meteorologist at the Air Ministry. His scientific competence was not in doubt but the fact that he read Tolstoy made him unacceptable to the interview panel.
In the Britain of the thirties, with a working class background and a father out of work Colin had to get a job. After 83 applications and 13 interviews, in which he learned the hard way that teachers' personal lives were not allowed to deviate from convention, he got his first teaching post in Devon. He soon found that his school governors did not take kindly to teachers publicly challenging the support their local MP was expressing for Hitler and Mussolini. Later, when Colin had returned to Yorkshire, Chamberlain's notorious Munich agreement in 1939 drove the 26-year-old, who had been horrified as a six-year-old at the pointless slaughter of the 1914-18 war, to join the Communist Party.
His public opposition to the war led to his arrest for criticizing the British Government. He spent three months in Wakefield goal and was suspended from his teaching post by Bradford Education Committee. On his release he worked at Marks and Spencer's as a porter until he was called up.
The British Army were unable to recognize the value of a first-class physics degree from Cambridge when associated with political conviction. Even by the end of the war they had not recognized that Colin's political views were the same as our allies', the Russians. Colin spent the war in Egypt as an ordinary soldier with the Eighth Army, learning Russian and educating his fellow soldiers in politics, physics and astronomy.
Demobbed in 1946 he first taught at Penistone but he was soon back in Bradford after his suspension was lifted, not without a good deal of opposition, by the casting vote of the Chairman of the Education Committee. He became Head of Science at Thornton Grammar School, where his genius for using common household materials to demonstrate physical principles was honed. Washing-up bottles, kitchen foil tapes, polystyrene plates, baked bean tins, 78 rpm vinyl records, dandelion and feathers all featured in Colin's Aladdin's cave of Physics, with which he first charmed and inspired his own students. His demonstrations were, for many years, a highlight of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Science Education. After retirement he was as at home doing experiments with primary school children as he was with delegates at international conferences.
His first wife, Joan, was a teacher and also a very practical woman. Colin was always trying out new ideas for experiments with her and their three children. Colin was heartbroken when she died of breast cancer in 1968. Eventually he married Mary, an old school friend of his first wife, who continued the tradition of feeding Colin many of the technological titbits of an active kitchen.
Colin's humanism, left-wing politics and zest for physics and physics teaching continued right up to the end of his life. He read the Morning Star, and his instructions for his funeral service led to a dignified celebration of his life without `religious hypocrisy'. He was particularly disappointed not to be able to go to Cornwall and see the August Eclipse for himself, but it was probably the Institute of Physics' citation on the Bragg award that best captured Colin's passions for physics:
``Colin Siddons, during a lifetime in physics education, consistently produced experiments of wit and ingenuity that simultaneously make difficult principles accessible to the young and can be extended to tax the most able prospective physicist. As well as delighting thousands of students with his lecture demonstrations, he has illuminated physics for many teachers in revealing his art of teaching.''
Friends of Colin who have been in touch since learning of his death, including several from overseas, all agree that physics teaching is unlikely to see Colin's like again.