Obituary:John Agar

John Agar was an electrochemist who spent his academic career at Cambridge. His association with electrochemistry and with Sidney Sussex College lasted for the whole of his life.

Electrochemistry is that branch of physical chemistry which deals with the solutions of salts and also includes conducting solids and liquids (such as fused salts, the basis of many "fuel cells").

He was born in 1914, and was educated at Bradfield College in Berkshire. In 1932 he went up to Sidney Sussex with an Open Scholarship and read Natural Science, obtaining First Class Honours in both parts of the Tripos. He was elected to a College Research Studentship in 1935, and began research with the eminent chemist F.P. Bowden.

He completed his PhD in 1938, and that year saw the publication of a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on the kinetics of electrode reactions, including reactions in molten caustic soda. Reference has continued to be made to this for more than 50 years. His co-author Bowden was ill at the time, and Agar's contribution to this paper was a major achievement. He had by then moved to U.R. Evans's Corrosion Laboratory, where another colleague was T.P. ("Sam") Hoar. The advent of the Second World War saw Agar involved with ship corrosion problems, including two years with the Admiralty Metallurgical Laboratory.

In 1945 he returned to the Department of Physical Chemistry at Cambridge as an ICI Fellow, becoming successively Demonstrator in 1947, Lecturer in 1948 and Reader in 1965. He retired in 1981, but remained active in the department and college for some years thereafter. He was Head of the Department of Physical Chemistry for two short periods, a post which he was probably glad to give up, as administration was not really to his taste. In college he held sundry posts including that of Vice-Master.

Agar was an academic and a scholar when those words did not carry pejorative undertones. His subject of electrochemistry can involve complicated mathematics. Perhaps that is why an irritated F.C. Tompkins, for years the Secretary of the Faraday Society, proclaimed the subject as "unfit for study". (He went on to say the same applied for chemical engineering; thus am I doubly disadvantaged.) His published works are few by modern custom, but by standards of quality they are very high. His reputation was truly international and he was often sought as an author to give an authoritative review; his 1963 paper in Advances in Electrochemistry is an example. His works are still being referred to long after his retirement.

In 1952 I became Agar's research student. I cannot say that I chose him as a supervisor because of his charismatic teaching in Part 2. John Agar sometimes found it hard to perceive the difficulties which students could have in understanding what seemed simple to him. He was the gentlest of men, but carried an aura of scholarship which a subsequent colleague of mine, now a Reader himself, described as "frightening". Both of us found him anything but frightening if you talked to him. He was incredibly knowledgeable about a wide range of physical science (his wartime work had had a strongly practical orientation). His office was lined with notebooks dealing with all sorts of topics which had caught his attention. He lent them to me from time to time, and it was a struggle to keep pace with both the science and the handwriting.

He was a most unassuming man who always seemed to wear the same tweed jacket. He had the least inflammable pipe I have ever known - it consumed more matches than tobacco, and its knocking out on the central heating pipe in his office told everyone else that he was in. He drove a small open-top car of similar vintage to his pipe and jacket, and was the least materialistic of men. He could be very funny, in a kind way, about the modern trends in academia, which were certainly not to his liking.

In 1952 he married Delia Simpson, a Fellow of Newnham, who also lectured, in spectroscopy, in the Physical Chemistry Department. They had no children. On my return visits to Cambridge in recent years, Delia's care of John was clear, not least in his long final illness.

Robin Turner

John Newton Agar, electrochemist: born 11 August 1914; Fellow, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 1950-81 (Emeritus); Demonstrator in Physical Chemistry, Cambridge University 1947-48, Lecturer 1948-65, Reader 1965- 81; married 1952 Delia Simpson; died Cambridge 11 July 1996.