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William Thomas (Bill) Thurbon began working in the College in 1920 as a clerk under Ned Lockhart, chief clerk and college butler. Thurbon became the bursary assistant in 1931 and bursar’s clerk from 1955 to 1970. For another twenty years Bill assisted in organizing the records of the College. Bill Thurbon began working in the College in 1920 and was Bursar’s Clerk from 1955 to 1970. For another twenty years Bill assisted in organizing the records of the College. He was married to Alice Zillah Thurbon.

Gertrude Hayes was born in London on the 23rd of November 1872. She was educated at the Royal College of Art. During the course of her artistic career she exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy, and some of her works now reside in permanent collections across various museums including South Kensington, Liverpool and Los Angeles. She was a member of the Coventry and Warwickshire Society of Artists, and also spent a four year stint as Assistant Art Mistress of Rugby School from 1915-1919.

Hayes married twice, first to Alfred Kedington Moran, the Art Master of Rugby School. After his death in 1928, she remarried Edwin M. Betts, a former Art Master at Nottingham High School. She enjoyed travelling, motoring, and gardening, and died in 1956.

Professor Richard Perham was born on the 27th of April 1937, in Middlesex. He secured a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, where he sat A-Levels in Pure and Applied Maths, Physics and Chemistry, as well as the entrance exam for Cambridge. He was the first in his family to go to university, but before coming to St John’s he undertook his national service in the Royal Navy.

As an undergraduate, Perham studied Natural Sciences with a specialisation in biochemistry, graduating in 1958. While studying for his PhD (1961), Perham and his supervisor Dr Ieuan Harris identified a key cysteine residue required for protein activity-- this was far from his only contribution to the field of science. In 1965, Perham was appointed Demonstrator in the Department of Biochemistry, and was also awarded a Fellowship to study at Yale University’s Department of Molecular Biophysics, where he met his future wife.

Perham’s achievements were many. He was known for his work on the chemistry of proteins and giant protein complexes, including the introduction of important techniques in the chemical modification of proteins, among numerous other fields. He held positions on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine and the Scientific Advistory Committee, among others, and spearheaded a transformation of the European Journal of Biochemistry as its Editor-in-Chief. He was a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a winner of the Max Planck Prize and Novartis Medal of the Biochemical Society. He was an author on more than 350 scientific papers.

Within Cambridge, Perham was made a Research Fellow of St John’s College in 1964, going on to become Director of Studies in Biochemistry, Biology of Cells and Genetics, and finally University Professor of Biochemistry in 1989. He was also a Tutor in College from 1967 to 1977, and participated in the May Ball Committee and the Lady Margaret Boat Club. He was President of College for four years beginning in 1983, and was elected Master of College in 2004.

Perham married Dr. Nancy Lane in 1969. They had two children, Temple and Quentin, and two grandchildren. He was a keen gardener, photographer and musician, interested in theatre, antiques and opera. He died on the 14th of February 2015, aged seventy-seven.

James Wood was born on the 14th December 1760 in Holcombe, the son of James Wood of Tottingham. He was admitted to St John’s in 1778, and graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1782. He was subsequently appointed Fellow (in 1782) and Tutor (in 1789) at the college, and served as President from 1802 to 1815. He was Master of the college from 1815 to 1839.
Wood was ordained as a deacon at Peterborough in 1785, and as a priest in 1787. He served as the Dean of Ely from 1820 until his death.
Wood was also a generous benefactor of St John’s College. He gave money to the College to found scholarships, and upon his death on the 23rd of April 1839, left the College £20,000 which contributed to the building fund for the new Chapel, where he is now buried.

Queen of England (1558–1603) during a period, often called the Elizabethan Age, when England asserted itself as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts.
Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich Palace, the only child of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
She was proclaimed to be heiress presumptive to the throne, displacing her seventeen-year-old half-sister Mary (1516–1558), now deemed illegitimate.
Elizabeth received the rigorous education normally reserved for male heirs, consisting of a course of studies centring on classical languages, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Elizabeth's education came through her tutor William Grindal, a favourite pupil of the greatest educationist of the age, Roger Ascham, who had himself been taught by John Cheke, now tutor to Prince Edward. These men were all products of St John's College, Cambridge, which was a leading centre of humanist erudition. As queen, Elizabeth appointed as her secretary and leading counsellor William Cecil, whose mind and rhetorical skills, the essence of his statesmanship, had been formed at the same Cambridge college.
Mary's accession on 19 July 1553 soon proved bad news for Elizabeth. Mary made a decision to marry her Spanish cousin, Philip of Spain. It was an unpopular choice, and by late January 1554 provoked a rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger. It was in her name that Wyatt rebelled and Elizabeth was taken to the Tower and only narrowly escaped execution. Two months later, she was released from the Tower and placed in close custody for a year at Woodstock.
From 1555, when Mary's health began to break down and on 6 November 1558 Mary acknowledged Elizabeth as her heir. After the death of Mary on November 17, 1558, Elizabeth came to the throne. Her great coronation procession was a masterpiece of political courtship. As queen, Elizabeth reduced the size of the Privy Council and restructured the royal household. She carefully balanced the need for substantial administrative and judicial continuity with the desire for change; and she assembled a core of experienced and trustworthy advisers, including William Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, Francis Walsingham, and Nicholas Throckmorton.
Through the 1559 Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity she began to restore England to Protestantism. Elizabeth’s government moved cautiously but steadily to transfer these structural and liturgical reforms from the statute books to the local parishes throughout the kingdom. Her religious settlement was under threat throughout her reign from both Protestant dissidents and from English Catholics. The Catholic threat took the form of a number of plots against her life, the most serious of which were in 1569, 1571 and 1586. Both earlier threats were linked at least indirectly to Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom in 1568 and had taken refuge in England. However, In the Babington plot of 1586 Mary’s involvement was clearly proved and she was tried and sentenced to death. She was executed in 1588.
Elizabeth never married and many scholars think it unlikely that Elizabeth ever seriously intended to marry, for the dangers always outweighed the possible benefits, but she skilfully played one off against another and kept the marriage negotiations going for months, even years.
She also cannily played a complex diplomatic game with the rival interests of France and Spain. State-sanctioned raids, led by Sir Francis Drake and others, on Spanish shipping and ports alternated with conciliatory gestures and peace talks. But by the mid-1580s it became clear that England could not avoid a direct military confrontation with Spain. Word reached London that the Spanish king, Philip II, had begun to assemble an enormous fleet that would sail to the Netherlands, join forces with a waiting Spanish army led by the duke of Parma, and then proceed to an invasion and conquest of Protestant England. When in July 1588 the Invincible Armada reached English waters, the queen’s ships, in one of the most famous naval encounters of history, defeated the enemy fleet.
In the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, her control over her country’s political, religious, and economic forces and over her representation of herself began to show severe strains. Bad harvests, persistent inflation, and unemployment caused hardship and a loss of public morale. Charges of corruption and greed led to widespread popular hatred of many of the queen’s favourites to whom she had given lucrative and much-resented monopolies. A series of disastrous military attempts to subjugate the Irish culminated in a crisis of authority with her last great favourite, Robert Devereux, when he returned from Ireland against the queen’s orders and then made an attempt to raise an insurrection. He was tried for treason and executed on February 25, 1601.
By 1603 Elizabeth was suffering from a chronic melancholy. She was refusing food and unable to sleep, not even going to bed, and not speaking much. In this condition she died a slow death, succumbing to bronchitis and, perhaps, pneumonia on 24 March 1603 at Richmond Palace, Surrey. The throne was handed to James I whose path of succession was smoothed by Cecil, but it is not known for certain whether Elizabeth actually named James as her successor. Elizabeth's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 28 April.

The exact date of Anne Boleyn’s birth is unknown, but it was likely be around the year 1500. Her parents were Thomas Boleyn, earl of Ormond and of Wiltshire, and his wife Elizabeth. She was the second of their three surviving children, another of which was Mary Boleyn, a future mistress of King Henry VIII.
Anne learned the skills of a court lady in the households of Margaret of Austria, Mary Tudor, and Claude, queen of France. After leaving for Austria in 1513, she did not return to England until 1521. There, Anne’s continental education won her many suitors.

Her future husband, King Henry VIII, began to take an interest in Anne somewhere around 1526. At this time, Anne’s sister had just ceased to be Henry’s mistress, and it is likely the king was looking for a replacement. As well as this, Henry had already decided that his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had to be annulled. Anne refused Henry’s advances until he made her an offer of marriage. The wedding did not take place until 1533, after Henry was able to divorce his first due to the English Reformation. Anne and her family had thrown themselves behind attacks on the church and their influence during the interim. Anne was already pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth I at the time of her marriage, likely out of a belief that a pregnancy would encourage Henry to commit himself to her. The couple were married in January, and Anne was crowned queen later in the year.
After the birth of Elizabeth, Anne’s subsequent pregnancies ended in miscarriages. The marriage was strained by her failure to produce a male heir, a poor relationship with Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon (the future Mary I), and Anne’s public unpopularity as queen. Despite this, she exercised public influence to engage in foreign affairs and religious reform.

By 1536, King Henry had become enamoured with Jane Seymour, who had served as lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne; and Anne had lost a powerful ally in the form of Thomas Cromwell. With many who wished to see her gone, Anne was accused of adultery several times over. She, her brother George, and several other men were arrested and sent to the Tower of London. Although Anne was innocent, and adultery by a queen would not be considered treason until six years later, she was beheaded at the Tower on the 19th of May, after her marriage to Henry was declared null and void. She died without ever confessing her guilt.

Charles Brandon was a magnate, courtier, and soldier, and a member of King Henry VIII's privy council.
He was the only surviving son of Sir William Brandon (d. 1485) and his wife, Elizabeth Bruyn (d. 1494) of South Ockendon.
By about 1503 Charles Brandon waited on King Henry VII at table and became well-known for his skill at jousting. He became close to the young Prince Henry (who succeeded Henry VII as King of England), and although he was some seven years older than Henry VIII, and eventually predeceased him, he remained his lifelong intimate.
At Brandon's uncle's death in January 1510 he became marshal of the king's bench and in November 1511 he added the parallel post of marshal of the king's household. In October 1512 he became master of the horse. He was knighted on 30 March 1512, elected a knight of the Garter on 23 April 1513, created Viscount Lisle on 15 May 1513. Then, on 1 February 1514 he was named Duke of Suffolk.
As Cardinal Wolsey fell from power in 1529, Suffolk was appointed president of the king's council. But as the new regime settled down from 1530, his attendance in council and parliament was erratic, his influence limited, and his position uncomfortable. He did, however, serve on the increasingly well-defined privy council. In the household reforms of 1539 he was appointed to the great mastership of the household, an upgraded version of the lord stewardship. He led both the party which met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in 1539 and the team which negotiated with her the terms of her divorce from the king in 1540.

He had a varied military career, including leading a successful assault in the siege of Tournai (1513). He was also instrumental in suppressing the Lincolnshire Revolt and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. The king commanded him to move his home to Lincolnshire, and Suffolk eventually became the greatest landowner in Lincolnshire, with a dense belt of estates spread across the centre of the county.
In the 1540s he took a major part in Henry's last wars against France and Scotland, while between campaigns he sat more regularly in the privy council, as a senior statesman and military expert. In October and November 1542 he guarded the northern English border while Norfolk and others invaded Scotland. From January 1543 to March 1544 he was the king's lieutenant in the north. Based mostly at Darlington, from there he supervised regional government and border warfare and planned for a major invasion which he never had the chance to command. Nevertheless, his work laid the basis for the capture of Edinburgh by Edward Seymour, in May 1544. By then Suffolk had been called away to France, where he led the siege of Boulogne with conspicuous bravery and skill, from July to November 1544 commanding the king's ward in the huge army which eventually captured the town.
Charles Brandon was married four times. Firstly to Dame Margaret Mortimer in 1507 and her niece Anne Brown in 1508 who died in 1510. He then married in secret (later in public) Henry VIII’s sister Mary (1496–1533) who had been recently widowed by the death of Louis XII of France. Mary died on 25 June 1533 and Suffolk married again in September 1533: his fourth wife was the fourteen-year-old Katherine Willoughby, originally intended as his son's bride. His son Henry, earl of Lincoln, died on 8 March 1534.
When Charles Brandon died of unknown causes at Guildford, on 22 August 1545, the king decreed that he should be buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Charles Brandon left two sons, Henry Brandon (1535–1551) and Charles Brandon (1537/8–1551), successively second and third dukes of Suffolk.

Katherine Brandon was born in 1519, the only child of William Willoughby, eleventh Baron Willoughby de Eresby, and his wife Lady Maria de Salinas, a Castlian noblewoman who was maid of honour to Catherine of Aragon. After he father’s death, she became the ward of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.

The Duke was married to Mary, sister of Henry VIII, and their son together was created earl of Lincoln in 1525 as well as being a potential heir to the throne. The acquisition of Katherine’s lands would help Brandon to develop his growing sphere of influence, and he married Katherine three months after Mary’s death in 1533.

Katherine was known as a pious woman. After her husband’s death in 1545, she became associated with the circle of Queen Catherine Parr. Once Edward VI ascended the throne, Katherine became involved in shaping a new protestant culture in England. Many books were dedicated to her, including biblical translations, and she also printed her own: The Lamentacion of a Sinner, in 1547. The hope was that the book would help to lift restrictions on Bible reading by women and the lower classes.

After the coronation of Queen Mary, Katherine and her servants travelled to the continent. Their exile lasted until 1559, and its story was incorporated into John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as well as becoming the subject of a popular ballad. Katherine had a strained relationship with Elizabeth I, due to the puritan tone of her faith which contrasted with the Queen’s.

Katherine had four children: two sons with her first husband, who both died of sweating sickness in 1551, and two children with her second, Richard Bertie. She died on the 19th of September 1580, two years before Bertie.

Abbot of Peterborough from 1528. First Bishop of Peterborough on the diocese's creation in 1541.

Adrian Boeyens was born on March 2, 1459, in Utrecht. He was the only Dutch pope there has been, elected in 1522. He was the last non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978. He lost his pious father, Florentius Dedel, at an early age, and was kept at school by the fortitude of his widowed mother Geertruid, first at home and then at Zwolle with the Brothers of the Common Life.
He then studied at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain). After a thorough course in philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence he was created Doctor of Divinity in 1491. His two chief works were Quaestiones quodlibeticae (1521), and his Commentarius in Lib. IV Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (1512), which was published without his knowledge from notes of students, and saw many editions. The great Humanist Erasmus was one of his pupils. As dean of the collegiate church of St. Peter in Louvain, and vice-chancellor of the university, he laboured to advance the arts and sciences and live a life of singular piety and severe asceticism.
In 1506 the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I appointed Adrian tutor of his grandson Charles (the future Charles V), who afterwards entrusted him to perform many of the highest offices. Transferred from the academic shades into public life, the humble professor rose to eminence. Within a decade he became Bishop of Tortosa (1516), Grand Inquisitor of Aragon (1517) and Castile (1518), Cardinal of the Roman Church in 1517, and finally Regent of Spain.
He was elected pope on January 9, 1522, succeeding Pope Leo X and was crowned at Rome on August 31. Adrian came to the papacy in the midst of one of its greatest crises, threatened not only by Lutheranism to the north but also by the advance of the Ottoman Turks to the east. He had a difficult job before him – to clean up abuses, reform the corrupt court, calm the princes who demanded war, stem the rising tide of revolt in Germany and to defend Christendom from the Turks. He took up the tasks with great earnestness, starting with reforming the Curia, but could accomplish little in the face of opposition by the Italian cardinals, the German Protestants, and the Turkish armies. Through the reckless extravagances of his predecessor, the papal finances were in a sad state. Adrian's efforts to retrench expenses only gained for him from his needy courtiers the epithet of miser. Vested rights were quoted against his attempts to reform the curia. His nuncio to Germany, Chierigati, received but scant courtesy. His urgent appeals to the princes of Christendom to hasten to the defence of Rhodes from the Turks failed and on 24 October 1522 the city was taken.
His unrelaxing activity and Rome's unhealthy climate combined to shatter his health. He died on September 14, 1523 in Rome. He bequeathed property in the Low Countries for the foundation of a college at the University of Leuven that became known as Pope's College.

Giulio de’ Medici was born in 1478, a few months after the death of his father Giuliano de’ Medici. His parents had not been married, but as they were betrothed, Giulio was declared legitimate.

The young Giulio was educated by his uncle, and made both a Knight of Rhodes and Grand Prior of Capua. After his cousin Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope Leo X, Giulio was made cardinal on the 28th of September 1513. He was a favoured candidate for the papacy after Leo X’s death, but ultimately, Adrian VI was elected instead.

It was after Adrian VI’s death that Giulio was chosen as the next pope, on the 18th of November 1523. He took the papal name Clement VII. The political situation during Clement’s papacy was a complex one. Francis I and Emperor Charles V were at war, and despite the Medici family’s friendship with Charles, Clement sided with France. Clement helped organise the League of Cognac, ad was imprisoned in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo when Rome was attacked by Charles’ allies. He took refuge there again during the later sack of Rome. Eventually, Clement settled on terms of peace with Charles.

Clement was still a prisoner in Sant’ Angelo when he was visited by an envoy of King Henry VIII. Henry sought a divorce from his wife, Catherine of Aragon, and to marry Anne Boleyn. Although Clement made many concessions to Henry’s demands, he ultimately resisted the request to grant a divorce. Henry was forbidden to marry while Rome deliberated on whether his marriage to Catherine was legitimate, but secretly married Anne Boleyn anyway. The death of Archbishop Warham in England allowed Henry to install Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, who proceeded to pronounce the marriage between Henry and Anne valid. Clement excommunicated Henry from the Catholic Church and declared his both his divorce from Catherine and his marriage to Anne as null and void. The marriage between Catherine and Henry was decreed fully legitimate, and England broke with the Catholic Church.

Clement VII died on the 25th September, 1534.

Ronald Derek Hayes was a student of St John’s College. After being educated at Latymer Upper School, he came up to the Cambridge to read Geography and received a grant from the Worts Fund to study the peasant economy of Northern Portugal. He gave a talk to the Purchas Society about his research, and became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Hayes died on the 30th August 2018, at the age of eighty-six.

Nigel John Spearing was born on the 8th of October 1930, to Austen and May Spearing. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, before going up to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

After his graduation, Spearing worked in education at both Wandsworth and Elliott School. However, he was best known for his career in politics, which began when he joined the Labour Party. He became the MP for Acton in 1970, and Newham South in 1974; he would hold this seat until the abolishment of the constituency in 1997. During his time in politics, he promoted the Private Members Bill, which became the Industrial Diseases (Notification) Act 1981. A noted Eurosceptic, Spearing chaired a panel on European Legislation and campaigned both against the common market and for British independence from the European Union.

Spearing occupied his spare time with rowing, cycling, and reading. He married his wife Wendy in 1956, and they had one son and two daughters. He died on the 8th of January 2017.

Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist, zoologist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He was among the last generation of "explorer" scientists, exploring the Alaskan and Siberian Arctic, the Galapagos Islands, and the Amazonian jungle on a mission to discover the history of the climate.
Colinvaux was born on September 22, 1930 in St. Albans, England. He grew up in London during the Battle of Britain, studying, even as a boy, the ecology of plant regrowth in the craters left by German bombs. He attended University College School in London, where his activities included rowing in the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.
After graduating from UCS, Colinvaux served in the British Army of the Rhine in occupied Germany as a Second Lieutenant, Royal Artillery, 42nd Regiment. After leaving the army, Colinvaux studied at Jesus College, Cambridge completing his BA in 1956 and his MA in 1960.
After graduating, he emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was employed by a government soil survey and where he met his wife, Llewellya Hillis. Hillis and Colinvaux emigrated to the United States where Colinvaux earned his Ph.D. as a paleoecologist in 1962 from Duke University.
Colinvaux extracted fossilized pollen from the bottom of ancient lakes as a tool to investigate climate conditions at the end of the last glacial maximum. The pollen buried in the mud could then be dated and used to identify pre-historic climate conditions. In a pre-Google Earth era, without benefit of GPS technology, Colinvaux explored in the old ways, quizzing tribal fishermen and local traders, interviewing bush pilots, and poring over aerial maps to identify sectors of jungle to search for tiny, unmapped lakes undisturbed by streams or human activity. His research was instrumental in laying the foundation for modern thinking and research on Amazonian species diversity. In 1966, he discovered a new species of flower in the Galapagos, which was subsequently named for him (Passiflora colinvauxii), as was the Galapagos diatom, Amphora paulii.
After completing post-doctoral studies at Yale University, Colinvaux and Hillis both took up appointments in the Department of Botany & Zoology at Ohio State University in 1964. He became Professor Emeritus in zoology there from 1964 until 1991. In 1971 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His skill as an orator was renowned. During his years at Ohio State University, Colinvaux won every teaching prize that could then be awarded for undergraduate teaching and he was the recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1985. During the Vietnam-era student uprising and occupation of Ohio State in May 1970, Colinvaux addressed, impromptu, a throng of demonstrating students, using the power of his voice and words to disperse the crowd. In 1991 Colinvaux and Hillis left Ohio State University to take positions with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. They then moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they were affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Colinvaux was the author of several books. His most famous 1979 book 'Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare' uses the second law of thermodynamics to argue that big meat-eating animals are rare because the available energy in each step in the food chain is degraded. In 1973 he authored the first undergraduate textbook in Ecology, which was used, in various editions, to educate generations of students He is also the author of 'The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History' (1980) and a scientific memoir 'Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice Age Equator' (2008).
In 2013, he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Quaternary Association. He died on February 28, 2016 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, leaving two children (Catherine and Roger) and four grandchildren.

James Beaumont Neilson was an engineer who contributed greatly towards the expansion of the British iron industry in the 19th century. He was born on the 22nd of June 1792 in Shettleston, Scotland, to Walter Neilson and his wife Barbara. Walter was an engine-wright at Govan colliery, and Neilson joined him there after leaving elementary education at fourteen. Neilson’s brother John would become a prominent engineer, and after two years at Govan Neilson became his apprentice at Oakbank. During his spare time, he studied physics and chemistry from Anderson’s Institution in Glasgow.

In 1814, Neilson was appointed as an engine-wright at a colliery in Irvine, but it was not to last; he lost his job when his employer’s business failed. Neilson then moved to Glasgow, and became appointed foreman at the Glasgow gasworks at the age of twenty-five. He rose through the ranks to manager and engineer, and used his influence to improve both the manufacture and utilization of gas and the lives of his employees. Neilson encouraged the men to educate themselves, establishing a workers’ institute which featured a library, lecture room, a laboratory, and a workshop.

Neilson is best known for his discovery of the value of hot blast in iron manufacture, a breakthrough which he began to research in the 1820’s. He came to the conclusion that the manufacture of iron would be more efficient if hot blast was used rather than cold. The prevailing view at the time was that cold blast was more effective for the manufacture of iron, and the ironmasters were reluctant to allow Neilson to test his theory on their furnaces. However, when the hot blast was finally tested at the Clyde ironworks, it was so immediately successful that two other men—Charles Macintosh and John Wilson—entered into a partnership with Neilson to patent the invention.

With refinement, hot blast allowed the same amount of fuel to produce three times as much iron, and with a wider range of fuel than had worked with cold blast. Neilson’s success—to the tune of £30,000 a year—led to controversy. In 1832 the Baird ironmasters challenged Neilson’s patent and refused to pay the licence duty that allowed them to use his process. The resistance snowballed; in 1833 Neilson had conducted three legal cases against iron companies who challenged his patent. He enjoyed several more years of success until 1839, when the Bairds challenged him again. This began a four year legal battle involving twenty separate court actions against different British iron companies, with many in Scotland forming an association against Neilson. The case was finally closed in England at the end of 1841, in Neilson’s favour. The Scottish trial in 1843 set a record for the longest trial conducted at the time and called over 102 witnesses before settling, again, in Neilson’s favour.

Neilson married Barbara Montgomerie in 1815. After her death, he remarried Jane Gemmell in 1846, but she would also died in 1863. In 1832 Neilson became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1846. He retired in 1847, and purchased a property in the Isle of Bute, before moving to Queenshill in 1851. There, he founded an institution similar to the one he had set up for his workers in Glasgow. Neilson died on the 18th of January 1865, survived by four sons and three daughters.