Leonard George Holden Huxley

Leonard George Holden Huxley was born on 29 May 1902 at Dulwich, London, eldest son of George Hambrough (or Hamborough) Huxley, and his wife Lilian Sarah, née Smith, both schoolteachers. Although he carried with him throughout his life many attributes of his English heritage, Leonard considered himself very much an Australian; he spent more than three-quarters of his life in this country, including his formative years. His parents migrated to Australia in 1905. Following a brief sojourn in Western Australia, the family moved to Tasmania, where they were to remain.

From a small country school at Mathinna, Huxley won a State scholarship to The Hutchins School (1915-20), Hobart, where he excelled not only academically but also as a sportsman; in his final year he was dux, and captain of the athletics team. He continued to support his education through a series of bursaries and, finally, a scholarship to the University of Tasmania. There he won the Sir Philip Fysh prize for physics in 1922.

Awarded the Rhodes scholarship for Tasmania in 1923, he left for Oxford with his first degree incomplete. At New College, Oxford (BA, 1925; D.Phil., 1928; MA, 1929), Huxley relished the cultural as well as the academic experiences his new environment afforded him. In 1925 Huxley commenced work for his doctorate under John Townsend, who had pioneered the subject of his research, electrical breakdown in gases. Another of Townsend’s interests, electron transport in gases, was to become one of Huxley’s longer-term interests and the field to which he made many distinguished contributions.

After completing his doctorate, Huxley undertook post-doctoral research at Oxford. He married Ella Mary Child (`Molly’) Copeland on 5 October 1929 at the parish church, Esher, Surrey.

In 1948 (Sir) Mark Oliphant, himself about to become foundation director of the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, drew his attention to an advertisement for the (Sir Thomas) Elder chair of physics at the University of Adelaide. Huxley successfully applied for the position, taking up his appointment in February 1949. The university conferred on him a Ph.D., ad eundem gradum, in 1950.

Huxley’s appointment coincided with the introduction of Ph.D. courses throughout Australia, and the more generous allocation of Commonwealth money to the universities in the late 1950s following the report of Sir Keith Murray’s committee on Australian universities. Encouraged by an enthusiastic vice-chancellor, A. P. Rowe, Huxley took full advantage of these innovations. He recruited staff—some home-grown and some from overseas—and established Ph.D. training programs around new research groups. Drawing on his wartime experiences, he started a large and active group to track meteor trails and upper-atmosphere winds using radar. He formed another team to conduct laboratory studies of electron drift and diffusion in gases to complement his interest in electromagnetic wave propagation in the ionosphere. His staff began equally active programs in biophysics, solid-state physics and seismology.

Although Huxley now had a greatly enlarged and flourishing department to his credit, his later days in Adelaide were marked by increasing friction with the vice-chancellor. Huxley did not accept Rowe’s view that a university should be managed like a government department or research institution, or even a business enterprise.

Although Huxley had been actively involved in physics since his postgraduate years at Oxford, his heavy teaching loads at both Leicester and Birmingham, and his full-time service at TRE during the war, had left him relatively little time to devote to his research interests until he took up his professorial appointment in Adelaide. At Birmingham he had laid the foundations for the two research fields he was to pursue for many years. With J. A. Ratcliffe he explored the `Luxembourg effect’, a phenomenon whereby the transmission from one radio broadcasting station is superimposed on the other. This investigation brought home to Huxley the importance of laboratory studies of electron motion in gases, in this instance the constituents of air. He therefore initiated such studies at Birmingham, and a continuation of that work formed the basis of research at the University of Adelaide and later still at the ANU. To this program he brought a continuing flow of ideas and much of the theoretical backing.

The years in Adelaide were Huxley’s most scientifically productive and influential. In addition to his work on electron motion in gases and the Luxembourg effect, he produced papers reporting the first results from his highly successful project to detect the trails of ionised gases left by meteors, and hence to determine wind patterns in the upper atmosphere. Being mainly interested in theoretical work, he was content to leave the development of the laboratory and field-work to his group of graduate students, some of whom continued as members of staff. As at Leicester he found himself responsible for training the first batch of Ph.D. students to graduate from the university.

On his retirement, Huxley returned to physics. Many advances had been made and a major revision of his theoretical work on electron motion in gases was required. The publication in 1974 of a major monograph, The Diffusion and Drift of Electrons in Gases, written with R. W. Crompton, and the three papers that resulted from its preparation, brought to a close his many contributions to the field that he had pioneered.

Huxley was a member of the Council of the University of Adelaide (1953-60), the ANU (1956-59) and the newly established Canberra College of Advanced Education (1968-74). The University of Tasmania (1962) and the ANU (1980) both awarded him honorary doctorates of science. 

His wife died in 1981. Survived by their son and daughter, he died on 4 September 1988 at Camden, London, during a short visit overseas, and was cremated.