Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner, 1900-1960

Herbert Wakefield Banks Skinner was born on 7 October 1900, at Ealing on the western outskirts of London and died at Geneva while on a visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research on 20 January 1960. He was the only son of George Herbert and Mabel Elizabeth Skinner. His father was a member of the directorate of the shoe firm, Lilley and Skinner, and was in many ways a remarkable man. The interests of George Skinner lay more with motoring and engineering than with commerce and he appears to have been one of the first in England to own a motor-car. He brought over from France a Léon Bollée car; a type which originated as long ago as 1896. His interests in the mechanism of the internal combustion engine led to the invention of a new type of carburettor which was the subject of a British patent application in February 1905 and which was built in the first instance in his own house. Later the demand for an efficient carburettor led to collaboration with his brother, T. G. Skinner, and together they formed a company in August 1910. This company, known as Skinner Union, manufactured the S.U. carburettor, and it is of interest that some of its original features are retained in the present-day model. George Skinner had his own ideas on children’s education and did not believe in early schooling. His son Herbert was accordingly 9 years old before he entered Durston House School at Ealing. The son had evidently inherited some of his father’s ability for, five years later, he won a mathematical scholarship to Rugby School and entered School House in September 1914. His progress at Rugby was marked by success: he won prizes both in mathematics and natural sciences and, when he left school in 1919, he was head boy of the science side and also head of School House. In October of that year Skinner entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He had won both a major and a minor leaving Exhibition from Rugby in mathematics and the natural sciences respectively. After a successful undergraduate career he obtained in the summer of 1922 a first-class in Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos, having earlier been placed in the first class of Part I of the Mathematical Tripos. For the next five years Skinner carried out research work in the Cavendish Laboratory and for part of this time he held the Coutts Trotter Studentship of Trinity College.