Dr Arthur Salmon

The following tribute has been contributed by Professor Colin Fishwick, Head of the School of Chemistry.

Colleagues will be sorry to learn of the death, on 27 March 2025, of Dr Arthur Salmon, former member of staff in the School of Chemistry and Reader in Radiation Chemistry.

Arthur was an undergraduate and graduate student in Chemistry at Leeds in the 1950s. He worked for his PhD on radiation chemistry, with Fred (later Lord) Dainton, who was Professor of Physical Chemistry at Leeds from 1950-1964. Dainton set up the Cookridge High Energy Radiation Research Centre (CHERRC) at Cookridge Hospital, shortly after he came to Leeds. In 1962 he obtained what was then a very large grant of £100k for a pulse radiolysis facility and CHERRC became a major international centre for the study of short-lived species, generated in solution by pulses of high energy electrons. When Fred left Leeds, Arthur was first Assistant Director and then Director of what became the Cookridge Radiation Research Centre in 1970. The Centre was separated from Chemistry at that time, but Arthur was an honorary lecturer in Chemistry and later became Reader in Radiation Chemistry.

Following his PhD, Arthur worked at the University of Oregon as a postdoctoral researcher, before returning to CHERRC and joining the staff. He worked initially mainly on the radiation chemistry of organic liquids, including studies of solvated electrons and excited electronic states. Following a spell in 1973 as Visiting Scientist at Chalk River National Laboratories (CRNL) in Canada, he started work on metal complexes involving anions of alkali metals, and then on metalloproteins. For several years, with his colleague George Buxton, he made major contributions to atmospheric chemistry through their work on the kinetics of aqueous radicals of relevance to aerosols and clouds. Arthur’s final publication, on a detailed chemical mechanism describing tropospheric aqueous phase chemistry, with George, their colleague Frank Wilkinson and atmospheric chemists across Europe, was his most highly cited paper.

Arthur was awarded the Weiss medal by the Association for Radiation Research in 1989 and the Maria Sklodowska-Curie medal of the Polish Radiation Research Society in 1998. He was also awarded a DSc by the University of Leeds. He was chairman of the Miller Trust for Radiation Chemistry in the early 1980s.

Arthur was a keen caver, rock climber and mountaineer and was, for many years, a leading member of the Yorkshire Ramblers Club. He was Treasurer and then President of the Club. He then became their librarian, which involved transferring the book collection from Leeds City Library to the club cottage at Low Stern near Clapham. With the help of his son, Graham, he set up a computerised system for cataloguing and borrowing so that members could use the library without the librarian having to be present. In his later years he remained a keen walker and also sailed extensively around the UK with Graham.

The funeral service will be held at 10.45am on Tuesday April 29, at Lawnswood Cemetery Chapel, Otley Road, LS16 6AH, on which day the flag on the Parkinson Building will be flown at half-mast in his memory.