I am Hal Sosabowski, I was Roger's student from 1984.

Michael, John and Anne gave me a carte blanche to tell anecdotes of Roger as they happened, so I am going to push the envelope hopefully without tearing it. They might create some mirth, and I am sure that Roger would like nothing more than to know that his friends, colleagues and family would be laughing fondly in remembrance and in line with Rev. Hirst's earlier commentary.

I knew him for thirty years, from age 19 to age 49, he acted as a mentor for those 30 years, long after his duty of care to me had passed.

He had a truly startling memory. These days we have PowerPoint and laser pointers. In 1983 lecturers were armed with chalk and notes. Roger eschewed notes. He could give a full hour lecture from memory with structures and FULL references including volume and issue numbers and even pages. I can clearly remember one when he was wearing his powder-blue suit and tie (he was always turned out nicely for lectures, dapper and elegant,  treating the pageant of The Lecture with the importance and attention to detail it deserved) when he told us about J F Bunnet and The Base-Catalyzed Halogen Dance, Angewandte Chemie, 1971. The only reason that I can recite that abbreviated reference from memory even now was because I was stunned at the time that he could. Happily for me it came up in the exam.

He knew melting points and boiling points of some of the most obscure compounds, and you could chat anecdotally about almost anything chemical and he would add a fascinating or germane factoid, always in a self-effacing manner, to amuse, educate and entertain of course and never to show off his encyclopaedic knowledge. I remember telling him once about one of my children who had trodden doggy-doos all over the house which had recently been recarpeted. I was grimly recounting the story and his brow immediately furrowed into frown of empathy which, I wonder, may have cloaked just a touch of schoolboy delight. I told him my recollection of the appalling smell, and the first thing he said was ‘ahhh yes, FAECES” not without some perceived relish, the one word guaranteed to universally curl toes. Not for him was any child like euphemism, apparently even with his 14 year old son, Michael, the universally accepted expression was ‘FAECES’ or even worse, ‘Faecal matter’. Anyway as I recounted the story he nodded gravely and helpfully made the observation that the compound responsible for my olfactory distress would have been skatole aka 3-methylindole.

When the same son disastrously threw up on me when I was wearing a silk and ermine gown and minutes before I was due to collect a Teaching Award at a graduation, upon hearing the story he seemed to visibly brighten up and say with an air of satisfaction:  ‘ahhh yes, they’ll never get the smell of butyric acid out of that – its detectable at parts per million’.

In fact nothing would surprise me less than to predict that when Roger is waiting at the queue for the pearly gates he will absent mindedly run his finger over the pearly balustrades and upon reaching the front of the queue will make an observation to a bemused St Peter along the lines of: 

‘pearls – nothing more than concentric layers of calcium carbonate – in the form of aragonite of course – accounts for the iridescence you know’

...before casually strolling on with a raffish wave of his hand as a bemused St Peter scrambles to check the fact on Wikipedia on his iPad. 

The above to one side. On behalf of all Roger’s students, all the industrialists, researchers, professors, lecturers, technicians, and maybe even accountants. I would like to say two symbolic words which will never capture the true meaning behind them. Thank you Dr Bolton. A true educator, a raconteur, a scholar, an academic and a steward of society’s knowledge whose mission it was to redistribute said knowledge. Your legacy is beyond measure and we all loved you.

A kind, funny modest and self-effacing man, with an impish sense of humour, who always gave far more than he ever took. His legacy is in all the people he educated and now are equipped to educate others and carry out research for society’s good. He was a true gentleman as well as being a true gentle-man……

I was thinking about Roger and what he did and how he changed his students’ lives. I knew him for thirty years, from when I was age 19 to now, age 49. I have outlined them below as little points which I hope you will enjoy…

Roger was my PhD supervisor for my write-up. He had a remarkable eye for detail – I think he spotted 75 errors in my thesis….he then became a mentor long after his duty of care to me had expired;

I remember on my first undergraduate day in the RHBNC (as it was) I passed him in the corridor he addressed me by my name. He had clearly looked at the photos of the students and taken the trouble to memorise the names and faces;

He had a truly startling memory. These days we have PowerPoint and laser pointers. In 1983 lecturers were armed with chalk and notes. Roger eschewed notes. He could give a full hour lecture from memory with structures and FULL references. I can clearly remember one when he was wearing his powder-blue suit and tie (he was always turned out nicely for lectures, dapper and elegant,  treating the pageant of The Lecture with the attention to detail it deserved) when he told us about J F Bunnet and The Base-Catalyzed Halogen Dance, Angewandte Chemie, 1971. The only reason that I can write that abbreviated reference from memory even now was because I was stunned at the time that he could. Happily for me it came up in the exam. He knew melting points and boiling points of some of the most obscure compounds and you could chat anecdotally about almost anything chemical and he would add a fascinating or germaine point (always to amuse and never to show off his knowledge). I remember once one of my children had trodden doggy-doos all over the house and was grimly recounting my recollection of the appalling smell, and he gravely and helpfully made the observation that the compound responsible for my olfactory distress would have been skatole aka 3-methylindole;

He was a true scholar and there seemed no end to his knowledge. As many of us were relatively underperforming students I could have imagined that he might get exasperated with schoolboy howlers but he managed to explain mistaken concepts without making the subject feel inadequate;

He was also truly unflappable. I remember the lab fires that used to happen, often because some wool-gathering student had used a flame with ether. Whilst all about him were squawking and running about he just calmly picked up a fire blanket and gently laid it over a towering conflagration as if he were tucking one of his children into bed;

He was generous in the way he was generous. When I was a very junior lecturer, he asked me to ‘help’ with publishing a chapter about Acridine in Rodd’s Chemistry of Carbon Compounds. I did some of the routine spadework but I think in hindsight it was nothing that he couldn’t have easily done himself in an afternoon or two in the library. He was giving me a leg-up, but allowing me to feel that I had truly earned it. And he even sent me half the honorarium which I didn’t deserve….

All of the above he did in a modest and self-effacing way. He was a true gentleman as well as being a gentle-man……

When you have had a brother for seventy-seven years it is hard to imagine a world without him, and yet my earliest memories are of such a world. I was nearly six when Roger was born.  My parents had wanted another child for some time, and when they informed me of the impending new arrival, I decided that I wanted a little sister named Jill.  Then I changed my mind a week or so before the delivery date.  It would be more fun to have a brother named Roger. Co-operative from the beginning, Roger duly arrived on 28 October 1937.  Although in later years we lived in different hemispheres and followed somewhat different career paths, we had some unique experiences in common, and in our old age when we met there was pleasure in sharing the memories of those experiences.

Of course like all siblings we had our squabbles, but fortunately our qualities tended to be complementary rather than strongly competitive. The family always said that he was the one with the charm, an idea that seemed to have its origins in his first year at primary school when he was sent for chastisement to the notoriously crabby old dragon of a headmistress, Miss Marsden, and returned from the encounter with a chocolate that she had given him. We were less impressed when he brought home the chicken-pox at a hot Australian Christmas, escaping with a mild dose while our mother and I both suffered severely, and Dad was left with the housekeeping. Memory suggests that it was later during those summer holidays that I began to tell him stories about a pugnacious white cockatoo called Cocky Feathers, who with his friends Leo the Lion and William the Goat used to take journeys in a time machine to ancient Rome, where they helped Julius Caesar to scatter his enemies.  Roger fed these stories with ideas, and the Cocky Feathers saga survived to be told to children and grandchildren.

We both recognised our good fortune in growing up in a house where there were books and a piano and parents who encouraged us to make use of both. The piano was especially central in our lives.  When young we listened to our parents playing duets, holding our breath until we knew they had reached the end at the same moment.  We listened to our father’s agreeable but untrained baritone as my mother played old favourites ranging from ‘Up from Zummerzet’ to ‘The Holy City’ and Tosti’s ‘Goodbye’.  Later we were both taught piano by the diminutive but formidable Miss Molly Kavanagh.  While with great perseverance I reached the stage where I could knock out a tune after the party had consumed a few beers, Roger had the gift.  He came within sight of high professional standards.  But, with his sometimes almost excessive sense of realism, he measured the chances and took another road.

Our father was an Anglican lay reader, and for several years used to take Evensong in a small colonial church, All Saints at Osborne Park, now a suburb but then still a largely rural environment of market gardens.  Dad delivered his sermon - in summer wearing shorts under his cassock and surplice, which was thought rather unorthodox in those days - while Roger played the organ. It was a modest instrument, but he coaxed some wonderful variations out of it in his voluntaries.  Also during the hymns he was able to conjure up a fortissimo that matched the stentorian bellow of the senior parishioner, an aged but feisty Mr Lewis.  I like to think that the memory of these Evensongs helped to confirm Roger in his lifelong adherence to the Anglican tradition.

As for chemistry - I had almost forgotten the episode when Ron Bowyer and he did their best to sabotage the Angove Street tramline, probably because he swore me to secrecy at the time.  By then I was a university student, often keeping later hours than my brother.  We shared a bedroom, and coming in to the unlit room after midnight one night, I removed one shoe before remembering that Roger was asleep.  Stealthily I got out of the rest of my clothes, donned my pyjamas, and was half asleep when a world-weary voice from the other bed said: ‘When are you going to drop the other one?’ We hardly overlapped at The University of Western Australia, where Roger had a harder time than I, because his professor, although eminent in his field, had a preference for hearty young beer-drinking footballers.  A softly-spoken piano-player with a knack of discreet irony in his conversation wasn’t on his wavelength.  But Roger persevered, and was admitted to PhD candidature at a British university, never again to live permanently in Australia. However he has been remembered.  Since his death several old friends dating back to those days have written to express their sympathy and their pleasure in their memories of him.  That goes also for the three generations of his Australian family.

In his twenty-one years in Australia he and I forged bonds that survived the tyranny of distance for more than half a century, and our friendship matured in ways beyond the shared experiences of youth.  We both had the good fortune to enjoy loving, enduring and supportive marriages, and to take pride in our children and grandchildren.  Professionally I’ve always wondered if Roger was sufficiently appreciated by his peers.  Like myself, his research was based more on the patient accumulation of data than the lightning flash of intuition, but as a teacher and a mentor he was peerless - and the number-crunchers at universities find good teaching hard to evaluate and reward.  But he grew content in the knowledge that he had done a useful and excellent job. He endured his years of illness with grace and patience.  I am proud to have been Roger’s brother.

I first met Roger in 1948, when we were both new boys at Wesley College.  A large group of the boys in our class already knew each other from the local South Perth Primary School, so as “foreigners”, Roger and I were more or less thrown together.  We also invariably shared the same bus when travelling from the city to the school in South Perth.

I hadn't realised at the time that Roger was a year younger than me, being a mere 11 years old at the start of that school year.

It was when we started doing some chemistry that Roger's already amazing knowledge of the subject drew my astonished attention.  This led rapidly to an interest and enthusiasm marked by us spending a lot of our spare time on chemical “experiments”, which typically for boys of that age, focussed on flashes of light, minor explosions – and smells.  The necessary chemicals were readily available at that time to any who knew their way around naming systems, and the various common names for chemicals used in pest control, and gardening in general.  Of course charcoal, a necessary ingredient for our “black powder”, could be readily produced at home!  I'll refrain from detailing some of the surprises we caused, but needless to say they engendered in us an increased degree of caution when trialling things in public!!

The other thing I remember most about Roger at school was his musical ability.  Particularly in our final year, he would aim for the piano in the main hall at lunch time, armed only with a scrap of paper on which he had written down the items he was going to play. Sonatas, symphonies, many themes which I recognised but would not have been able to name – these all were played beautifully from memory, usually to just a small group of fellow students who were in awe of this talent.  Afterwards, if I started whistling one of the passages he had just played, he would invariably stop me, point out that I was in the wrong key, and whistle the tune correctly.  He had perfect pitch!

Not surprisingly after our school chemistry experience, we both went on to study chemistry together at University, our paths only starting to diverge in 3rd year when I took a pathway towards Organic Chemistry, while Roger was into more Physical Organic.  Then his postgraduate studies were shattered a year into his PhD studies when his supervisor took up an appointment in Khartoum, and Roger had to make difficult choices about the future of his research and its supervision.

This lead him to a new supervisor, but working in almost the same area, in Hull – and the rest, so they say, and certainly from my point of view, is history.

Roger and I stayed in touch over the years though, always exchanging phone calls at both birthdays and at Christmas.  We saw Roger back here in WA on a couple of occasions and I certainly knew the geography of Roger and Anne's home in Wheatlands Road.

I shall miss my dear friend and former mentor deeply.

Ron Bowyer

8th December 2014

Claremont, WA  Australia

I am honored to send you these deeply felt few words about my beloved teacher Roger Bolton, your father, my mentor at Bedford College who put me on the path of my career in organic synthesis (1966–1969).

Roger Bolton was my very first mentor of my very first research project in organic synthesis.  I remember how caring he was about his students, always by their side, to advise them in the laboratory, pointing out special techniques, safety issues, and doing all of that with great humanity and sincere concern about our learning.  His wonderful personality and confidence in me encouraged and inspired me enormously.  When I asked him where in London I should apply for my Ph.D. degree, he did not hesitate to recommend the top two groups, those of Professors Franz Sondheimer at University College London and Sir Derek Barton at Imperial College London.  I chose the former, and thus began my voyage to success that took me from the old world to the new world.  I owe it all to Roger, for his advice and faith in me pointed me in the right direction, a path that I still enjoy following, doing research in the subject he taught me and trying to teach the way he taught me.  He will always remain in my mind, as I am sure he will be in the minds of all of his students.  We are all a part of his legacy, part of his School of Chemistry, part of his extended family.  He was a rare, but highly influential Teacher, and I will miss him dearly.  May God bless his soul.

K.C. Nicolaou