Australian Dictionary of Biography

Professor H. C. Bolton, 1962, by Terry Martin

Monash University Archives

Herbert Cairns Bolton (1921–2000), physicist, was born on 21 May 1921 at Sunderland, England, only child of locally born parents Herbert Lackenby Bolton, plumber, and his wife Lily Jane, née Cairns. In 1925 his father joined the colonial service as a public health inspector, moving to Tanganyika, East Africa, where his wife joined him in 1930. Bert was left at Sunderland to be brought up by his father’s unmarried sisters, seeing his parents only during their occasional periods of leave in England. He attended (1932–39) Bede Collegiate School, Sunderland, then King’s College, University of London (BSc, 1942; PhD, 1946), graduating with first-class honours in physics. While a doctoral student he worked as a demonstrator at King’s College and was thus exempt from active service in World War II. His thesis, entitled ‘An Experimental Study of the Reflexion of Electromagnetic Waves in Hollow Tubes involving the Use of the Impedance Concept,’ took classical electromagnetic theory as a starting point.

In 1946 Bolton was appointed assistant lecturer in physics at University College, Nottingham (from 1948 the University of Nottingham). There he met Mary Elizabeth Campbell, a lecturer in the school of pharmacy, whom he married on 20 December 1947 at St Christopher’s Church, Springfield, Birmingham. Promoted to lecturer in 1948, in 1951 he moved to King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was promoted to senior lecturer in 1957. At Newcastle he introduced a two-year undergraduate course in quantum mechanics and gave postgraduate lectures in this field. His first research papers were both experimental and theoretical in character but as he took up quantum problems the emphasis became increasingly theoretical, with a growing emphasis on problems in solid-state physics.

In 1962 Bolton was appointed professor of theoretical physics at the recently established Monash University, Melbourne. There he joined the founding professor of physics, Yorkshire-born Robert Street, a solid-state physicist whose appointment in 1960 had signalled that the new department would take a different line from the University of Melbourne, where there was a heavy emphasis on nuclear physics. Bolton and Street had been part of the same student intake at King’s College, and had later been colleagues at Nottingham, so they knew each other well. Bolton did not, however, become part of Street’s close-knit solid-state group. Nor did he develop a research group of his own, though during his career he supervised more than twenty-five research students and related well with students at all levels.

Bolton’s strength lay less in developing new theories than in working out the consequences of existing ones. His research interests ranged widely, including early studies of dielectric materials, gas discharges, and the charge distribution in diamond, and later papers on various issues in statistical mechanics. He also published a series of papers on the theoretical underpinning of the flame ionisation detector, many as a joint author with the inventor of the device, Ian McWilliam of the research group of ICI Australia Ltd.

Of a modest and self-effacing disposition, Bolton was happy to let Street run the Monash department. He became active in the wider Australian physics community, notably as a fellow (1966) of the Australian Institute of Physics, for which he was chairman of the Victorian branch (1974–76) and national president (1978–80). From 1968 he was also a member of the national committee for physics of the Australian Academy of Science. After Street moved to the Australian National University in 1974, Bolton served a term (1978–80) as chairman of the Monash department and associate dean of science, but it was a duty for him rather than a pleasure.

Bolton had broad interests outside physics. As a student in London, he was an oarsman with the Thames Rowing Club, and he later he took up mountaineering in Wales and England’s Lake District. He was a competent pianist and enjoyed playing for much of his life. In Australia, he contributed several papers to The Australian Gemmologist that linked to his earlier scientific work on diamond. He became an enthusiastic birdwatcher, publishing several papers in the Melbourne journal The Bird Observer (including two with his then teenaged son Martin), and he also developed an interest in genealogy.

In his later years at Monash and following his retirement as emeritus professor in 1986, Bolton became interested in the history of physics in Australia and published papers on scientific instruments and their makers. He was chairman of the advisory board of the Australian Science Archives Project, based at the University of Melbourne, where he became a senior associate in the department of history and philosophy of science. Survived by his wife, his son Andrew, and his daughter Isabel, Bolton died of a stroke on 11 July 2000 at Kew and was cremated. His younger son Martin (d. 1982) predeceased him.