My mother, Beatrice Baxter, who has died aged 102, was one of the last surviving wartime boffins. She was a secondary school chemistry teacher in Ilford, Essex.
After teaching at two mainstream Essex schools – Gearies and Fairlop – she worked in the town for the rest of her career at Ethel Davis, a community special school for disabled children, where she became adept at helping pupils in wheelchairs or with cerebral palsy to carry out chemistry experiments.
She was born Beatrice Jeanne Fox in 1923 in the City of London maternity hospital, in theoretical earshot of Bow bells, making her a genuine cockney. Her English-born parents were William Fox, an accountant. and Dora nee Austin, a seamstress. As a child she lived in Finsbury. Her paternal grandparents had been married in the Great Synagogue by Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler, so her family has belonged to what is now the United Synagogue since before it was created.
A brilliant student, she won several prizes at primary school. When a mother sneered, “Jews’ luck,” her mother replied “No, Jews’ brains.” She won a scholarship to the exclusive Skinners’ Girls’ School. She hated it there; as a scholarship girl, she was the constant victim of snobbery, and was even less popular when she came top of the class.
She left school at 16, just before World War II, she went to work at Co-op Dairies as a milk tester. However, her boss would not trust a little girl to use most of the equipment. So she moved to Imperial College where she worked a laboratory assistant for most of the war, helping a group of Dutch expatriate scientists who had escaped the Nazis, to develop better gas masks. This would earn her a post war medal from the Netherlands. She also qualified as a first-aider and tended to people injured in bombing raids.
She often went to a café on the other side of Cromwell Road to get coffee. On one occasion, there was heavy traffic. While she was waiting to cross, a German doodlebug bomb fell on the café and blew it up. The heavy traffic saved her life.
In 1945, after the Dutch scientists went home, she moved to the GEC Research Laboratories at Wembley. The firm was visited by the then Queen Mother, Queen Mary, and a young Princess Elizabeth.
In 1948 she received a degree in general science from the St John Cass Technical Institute, later part of City, University of London. She was one of those few women to gain degrees in those days, and quite remarkable for one who had left school at 16 without the equivalent of A levels, to get a science degree. Doing so in three years in evening classes was even more amazing.
Feeling that her general science degree was inadequate, she again registered as a part-time student. In 1950, after just two years, she took a degree in chemistry and was accepted as an Associate of the Royal Institute of Chemistry. In the same year she married fellow chemist, Herbert Baxter, the son of one of her father’s clients, and they remained happily married for nearly 60 years until his death in 2010.
After a break to have children, she trained as a chemistry teacher at Brentwood College of Education in Essex, now part of Anglia Ruskin University, and taught at Gearies boys’ school in Ilford. She also taught maths when there was a shortage of maths teachers. For much of her career, she taught physically handicapped children, which often involved helping children in wheelchairs or with cerebral palsy to do chemistry experiments. She retired from Ethel Davis, a community school for disabled children in 1983.
After she and my father retired, she assisted him in his new career of producing high-level reference works on chemistry, undertaking the computer work involved, and drawing diagrams of the molecular structure of complex organic compounds. Unable to go out very much, she became something of an armchair astronomer, enjoyed knitting, until eventually she found the needles too difficult to handle, and found friends while surfing the internet
Her son Laurence became a professor at the State University of New York and tragically died of cancer. She is survived by myself, my sister Gillian and four grandsons.
Beatrice Jeanne Baxter: born August 11,1923. Died April 2, 2026.
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