Professor Jake Hancock

Geologist with a special interest in chalk

Jake Hancock was a colourful, kind, and much-loved geologist and oenologist whose reputation extended from Japan to Georgia, Norway to North America, and Tunisia to the North Sea, in all of which he worked as a professional scientist.

John Michael (Jake) Hancock, geologist and oenologist: born Salisbury, Wiltshire 10 August 1928; Assistant Lecturer in Geology, King's College London 1955-57, Lecturer 1957-70, Senior Lecturer 1970-77, Reader 1977-86; Professor of Geology, Imperial College, London 1986-93 (Emeritus), Senior Research Fellow 1993-2004; died Shaftesbury, Dorset 2 March 2004.

Jake Hancock was a colourful, kind, and much-loved geologist and oenologist whose reputation extended from Japan to Georgia, Norway to North America, and Tunisia to the North Sea, in all of which he worked as a professional scientist.

John Michael Hancock (John when travelling in the US was useful; Michael to friends, and Jake in his profession) was born in Salisbury in 1928. Childhood in Wiltshire was followed by war-time attendance at Dauntsey's School, Market Lavington, where fellow scholars included Martin Wells (later to rise to great distinction for his work on the brain and behaviour of octopus and other cephalopods), and Richard St John Lambert (who was to become a pioneer in the radiometric dating of the oldest rocks on the planet).

The school was close to MoD firing ranges on Salisbury Plain, a favourite target for excursions, and for the amassing of considerable stocks of unexploded munitions, to the extent that on one occasion a general amnesty was declared, and the Bomb Squad called in. This interest continued, and in 1945 Hancock and Lambert gave a lecture to the school on the principles and construction of the atomic bomb, at that time a highly classified topic.

Dauntsey's, built on the Chalk, was unusual in that Higher Schools geology was taught - but so few specimens were available that one boy could identify the whole collection blindfold. In spite of this paucity of practical material, Chalk and geology were to be Hancock's abiding interests.

The years 1947-49 and National Service introduced Hancock to the Middle East, as a wireless mechanic fitting radio beacons to airfields in protectorates and relics of Empire (and at the same time to relics of slavery). Thereafter, with his schoolfriend Lambert, he attended Queens' College, Cambridge, gaining both a BA, and a doctorate, working under Maurice Black, again with Chalk as a theme.

Appointed to an Assistant Lectureship at King's College London in 1955, while still a graduate student, he rose to Reader and, with the closure of the King's department, in 1986 moved to Imperial College with a Professorship of Geology. Retiring in 1993, he continued to teach at Imperial up to 2003, with new courses planned for 2004.

Hancock's great geological interest was the Cretaceous epoch - from 65 to 145 million years ago, a world much warmer than today, without icecaps, and with sea levels at times hundreds of metres higher than at present. Unique to that time was the accumulation of chalk - the rock that forms the White Cliffs of Dover. Composed of the calcareous remains of innumerable microscopic planktonic organisms, it spread from Ireland to Kazakhstan to the interior of the United States, Australia and beyond, as well as flooring vast areas of the oceans between.

Building on the largely unpublished work of his tutor and mentor Maurice Black, Hancock's researches in the 1950s and 1960s formed the basis for subsequent research by students and colleagues that came to have great economic significance. Remarkably, the earliest oil discoveries in the North Sea (in 1966) came from chalk reservoirs, which in the decades that followed yielded most of Norway's, and all of Denmark's oil production. Hancock worked as a consultant with the industry, but his major contribution was in his lectures and notes for the Joint Association for Petroleum Exploration Courses (Japec), where he was an acknowledged expert on North Sea Chalk. Hancock's key publications during this period included The Cretaceous System in Northern Ireland (1961), The Upper Cretaceous of Norfolk (with N.B. Peake, 1961), and the Cretaceous section in the series Introduction to the Petroleum Geology of the North Sea (1981).

Another lifetime interest was the rise and fall in sea level during the Cretaceous, and the question of whether this was a local or a global phenomenon. This led Hancock to the use of fossils, usually ammonites, to determine the timing of rises and falls in sea level, and field work on Cretaceous exposures in far-flung parts of the world, including the mine fields of the border area between Algeria and Tunisia in 1965, Japan, Kazakhstan, the US and Georgia.

Education was his passion, not merely at King's and Imperial, but also as a teacher and a member of both corporation and council of the Working Men's College in north London, where he taught physics and mathematics, as well as his own field of geology. He was willing to talk to amateur and undergraduate societies, to lead field trips, and in particular to speak on his two combined passions, geology and wine. In retirement he devoted his attentions increasingly to the relationship between the two, and, beginning in the late 1990s, publications began to appear in Science Spectra, Journal of Wine Research and elsewhere; his membership of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Wine Research was a matter of great pride.

The school nickname Jake - short for Jacob - reflected an Old Testament profile. Hancock had a laugh of volume, pitch and tone that once heard was never forgotten, an exuberant joy of life and geology: he was a geological institution, beloved of workers on Cretaceous rocks and fossils world-wide, especially the many young scientists whose visits to the London museums and quarries and coastal outcrops of southern England were made possible by his generosity and that of his life partner, Ray Parish.

Jim Kennedy