Oxford University Association Football Club

Biography

Harold Warris Thompson was born in Wombwell near Barnsley, South Yorkshire, on 15th February 1908. His father was chief executive of a colliery and a town councillor. He was educated at King Edward VII School, Sheffield, where he specialized in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and German. He obtained an open scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1924.

At Trinity, Thompson thrived under his tutor Cyril Hinshelwood. He excelled at his work, obtaining a first in chemistry in 1929. He was immediately offered a fellowship at St John's College, but decided he would like to spend a year in Berlin before settling in Oxford permanently. Working in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Fritz Haber he met great scientists like Planck, Einstein, Nernst, von Laue and Schrödinger. He received a Ph. D. from Humbold University and returned to Oxford to take up his fellowship at St John's convinced of the importance of international communication in science.

Thompson soon gained a reputation as an outstanding tutor and supervisor. He continued to work on gas kinetics, which he had been introduced to as a first-year undergraduate in Hinshelwood’s lab in the long vacation of 1926, and on which he had continued to work in his Part II year and in Berlin. He became increasingly interested, in the relatively new field of spectroscopy, with encouragement from Hinshelwood and Lindemann. He threw himself into his work, travelling by car to Imperial College to learn techniques from Prof. A. Fowler, and set up visible and ultraviolet spectroscopic apparatus in Oxford. He began to work on infrared spectroscopy and was to play a big part in transforming it from a field of limited academic interest into an essential tool for chemists as it is today. During the war he worked for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, assembling a library of infrared spectra of hydrocarbons in an attempt to determine the origin of enemy aviation fuels. In 1945 he studied the infrared spectra of penicillins in an effort to decide between the oxazolone and β–lactam structures then under consideration. In the late 1960s Thompson acquired a photoelectron spectrometer and began a whole new line of work.

Thompson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946, joined the Council of the Royal Society in 1959 and became the Society’s Foreign Secretary in 1965. He iniated an European exchange programme to encourage visits by European scientists which was a huge success. He was Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office Civil Defence department from 1952 to 1963 and was knighted in 1959. In 1971 he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and awarded the Grand Service Cross in Germany.

Thompson attended freshmen’s trials and became a member of OUAFC in his first term as an undergraduate in Oxford, but an injury in his second year preventing him from earning a blue until his final year. He became Treasurer of the club in 1931 and continued in this position for 22 years. Throughout that period he was constantly involved in club affairs, even helping with team selection, and rarely missed an important match. Together with the treasurers of the athletics and tennis clubs he was responsible for the upkeep of the Iffley Road ground, and was the driving force for getting a new track laid and new stands built. He replaced Charles Wreford-Brown as the University representative on the FA Council in 1941 and became OUAFC President in 1953. In that year, together with Sir Stanley Rous, he established the Varsity match at Wembley. He organized the Oxford side of the anniversary dinner after the 100th Varsity match in December 1983 and, just weeks before his death, was present against doctors’ orders and even gave a speech.

Amateur football was one of Thompson’s passions (he often treated professionals with scorn) and in 1948 he set up the Pegasus club, to provide a combined Oxford and Cambridge side to play in the FA Amateur Cup. Initially membership was restricted to current University players and those who had left the previous year, but this was later relaxed. In 1950/1, the club’s third season, Pegasus beat Bishop Auckland 2-1 in the final of the FA Amateur Cup final at Wembley. The club won the Cup again in 1953/4 but by the early sixties membership had fallen, with many members defecting to the other great amateur club Corinthians Casuals, and Thompson disbanded the club in 1963. The success of Pegasus had aroused huge public interest in amateur football and proved that the standard of university football was still exceptionally high.

Thompson became Chairman of the Football Association in 1976. Significant amounts of money had been accumulated from international match receipts, thanks to England’s success in the 1966 World Cup and increased profile thereafter. Thompson used these reserves to set up a nationwide coaching network, to fund youth development projects and to fund grants to schools and universities. £350,000 was spent on floodlit hard-play areas aroud the country and £500,000 was invested in a new coaching centre at Lilleshall, opened in 1981. In 1974 Thompson joined the Executive Committee of UEFA, where his linguistic skills and enthusiasm for international cooperation gained from his scientific background were invaluable.

Thompson married Grace Penelope Stradling in 1938 and they had two children together: Richard and Alison. He died on 31st December 1983 aged 75.

Adapted from an article by Sir Rex Richards FRS in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 31 (Nov., 1985), pp. 572-610