Timothy Guy Harrison was born on 30th October 1959 in Pontypool in South Wales. He was a natural Chemist, obtaining his first Chemistry set when still at North Road primary school and using it to carry out a range of interesting experiments and of course making ‘stink bombs’. He was a passionate Welshman too, keen on rugby, in which he played (flanker) in his youth and at university. He attended Croesyceiliog secondary school and soon found himself at King’s College London studying Chemistry (1978-1981), where he met Bob Parker, who would one day be the CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Tim graduated with a degree in Chemistry having undertaken a final year project in nuclear Chemistry. He had wanted to join the Chemical Industry but the recession put paid to that and so he trained to be a science teacher and spent a year undertaking a PGCE at The University of Warwick. On passing his PGCE, he took up a secondary science teacher job at Crown Woods School in Eltham, London. As an aside, one of the many students he taught was Beth Budden, who was later to become a primary school teacher and win the Primary Science Teaching Trust’s Primary Science Teacher of the Year award. Tim attended Beth’s award ceremony, completing the circle. Tim was clearly an excellent teacher, working under a young head of Biology, a certain Jayne Marlow. Tim and Jayne were married in 1985 and decided to move to quieter South Gloucestershire and Rednock School, where they both taught science and had their two daughters, Mya and Megan. Tim became 2ic of Science and Director of the Science College as the School gained science specialist status. Tim led many trips to exotic overseas locations such as Singapore, Australia and Wales for the sixth formers at the school and many students were grateful for Tim’s excellent teaching and support, going on to become medical doctors, engineers and scientists. Tim ensured that students had opportunities to engage with outside organisations, was a strong supporter of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and was keen to expand the horizons of all he taught. Teachers under his mentorship speak very fondly of the support they received, and particularly newly qualified teachers were able to flourish and remain in the teaching profession.

In 2002 Tim Harrison met Dudley Shallcross at an RSC school teacher event at Birmingham University. Dudley had been a lecturer and the School’s Liaison officer at the School of Chemistry at Bristol University for 2 years and was building a school-teacher network, CHeMneT. Tim made a beeline for Dudley in the break and so a lifelong partnership and friendship was born. Working with Dudley, Tim introduced lab visits for schools, running the Salters Festival and many more at the School of Chemistry at Bristol University, all whilst Tim was still a full-time teacher at Rednock School. In 2005 the School of Chemistry was awarded a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in the teaching of practical Chemistry, called Bristol ChemLabS. Dudley and Tim devised the role of a School Teacher Fellow, a secondary science teacher to be seconded full-time to the School of Chemistry to work on outreach and in the utilisation of the new labs. Well, Tim applied and was the unanimous choice of the appointments committee.

In the summer before the official start of the project, Tim worked with Dudley on running a 2- week summer school for Gifted and Talented Students. On the first full morning Dudley recalls witnessing for the first time, Tim cast his spell on students. ‘He was introducing the first lab but seemed to have an ability to respond to the 16-year-old students’ unspoken responses and in so doing modified his approach as he went along. All great teachers do this without thinking but these 16-year-olds were transformed and transfixed by Tim, something we would witness time and time again.’

International outreach began with a trip to Grenoble in 2007 for the Science on Stage conference. Tim and Dudley were presenting a Pollutant’s Tale, a talk about air pollution and climate change that was intertwined with numerous demonstration experiments, more liquid nitrogen, elephant’s toothpaste, methanol whoosh bottle, iodine clock, dry ice and perfume sticks. This talk for secondary school and older audiences was paired with its sister talk ‘Gases in the Air’ for primary school audiences. By this time, Tim was a master of delivery and was looking forward to being one of the five invited talks. At that time a certain Al Gore had launched an inconvenient truth using his Lear Jet to travel around the world to tell us about climate change. The presentation was roundly praised with the chair of the meeting stating at the end that ‘You are better than Gore’. It was clearly Tim who was better than Gore. Invitations started to flow in and following a trip to Singapore, a ‘winter’ summer school was started in collaboration with the National University of Singapore and ran for many years. Tim and a team of postgraduates spent a week in Singapore working with Singaporean secondary school students and this was, as expected, a roaring success.

As the Outreach programme developed Tim and Dudley recommended the School Teacher Fellow and Better use of Labs elements to the RSC, which they adopted in their Chemistry for their Future programme and some memories from STFs Prof. David Read at Southampton and Nick Barker from Warwick University are included here.

David recalls:

I remember my first day in the job at Southampton in 2007, when I sat at my desk feeling a bit overwhelmed and I wondered what they hell I was going to do next. The first thing I did was look up Tim’s number and I gave him a call. We chatted for about 45 minutes, during he which gave me a plethora of ideas for projects and activities to work on. He invited me to Bristol to shadow him for a day, and I can still see the whoosh bottle and elephant’s toothpaste demonstrations imprinted on my memories of the day.

Over the next 15 years, Tim continued to be an influence on my direction, despite the fact that my role evolved continually over that period. On the rare occasions that I found myself sending emails in the wee small hours, I would typically get an immediate response from Tim, illustrating his commitment and enthusiasm for the job. I was privileged to spend many a lunchtime and evening with Tim, and he was never happier than when eating fine food with a glass of wine, and he was always great company on such occasions. I will miss those times hugely.

Nick Recalls:

I first met Tim in 2007 in Burlington House, London. He was interviewing me! The outcome of that interview was that I gained a new job and a new friend. I went to work at The University of Warwick where I started a chemistry schools outreach programme. Tim was my guide and my inspiration. Nothing was ever too much trouble: the loan of apparatus, funding for collaborations and the gift of every outreach resource he ever created. I have travelled far to join Tim in performing demonstration lectures for school audiences when Tim liked to pretend he was my technician! Tim would ask me not to tell him what experiments I had planned so that he had to guess what was coming next during the lecture! I tried very hard to catch him out but his knowledge and comic timing meant that I always failed to trick him and Tim’s skills just made the lecture better! Tim knew how to use humour perfectly in a lecture; he could make an audience laugh and relax so that they would absorb the serious stuff and leave feeling encouraged and inspired.

I am grateful to Tim for all of the support and kindness he showed me and for enabling and shaping so much of the outreach work I have gone on to do myself. I feel lucky and grateful to have known him and almost dizzy at the thought of just how many young people Tim has inspired and informed about chemistry during their school lives. He was such a force for good.

Working with postgraduates was a real delight for Tim and many have recounted amazing stories of their time working with him and over the years what impact he had on their lives, giving them opportunities to hone their communication and planning skills and trusting and encouraging them to lead. Many went with Tim to far flung places in the world, such as Singapore. All the Ph.Ds. stated that Outreach has been immensely beneficial to them, Dr. Andy Chapman, Dr Chocolate demo, stated that ‘Tim was such a great influence on my life I will never forget him’, a sentiment echoed by many.

At a summer school for physically disabled adults somewhere in Hampshire, a lady in a wheelchair was clapping and laughing after a hydrogen balloon was exploded, she shouted to her carer that she had wet herself, ‘I have literally wet myself laughing’ she said but refused to be removed until the lecture was over.

Tim was always up for a challenge, when told he was doing a summer school for visually impaired adults he said ‘I’ll have to think how we can allow them to do some combustion experiments’, he was serious and with the aid of some talking instruments constructed a brilliant summer school. When asked, ‘we have a group of disaffected year 6 girls, what can you do Tim?’, ‘Nothing but I know some outstanding female role models who can’ and two female postgraduates put a day of activities together, which Tim facilitated, and these year 6 girls were not disaffected anymore. When asked by a reporter at the Cheltenham Science Festival what was the secret to a good talk Tim replied jokingly ‘90% alcohol and 10% common sense’, Tim never took himself too seriously but was serious about education. No magic shows for Tim, explain everything you have demonstrated at a level appropriate to the audience.

In 2010, Tim assumed the role as the Director of Outreach for Bristol ChemLabS and the show just continued, funded from monies generated from certain events and activities and in total ran uninterrupted for 17 years. In around 2010, Tim began an annual trip to Perth in Australia to work with Dr Magda Wajrak at Edith Cowan University. Tim and Magda met via email back in 2009 when a mutual colleague, Emeritus Prof Bette Davidowitz from University of Cape Town in South Africa, sent a copy of Magda’s ‘Chemical Demonstrations’ booklet to Tim for comments. Tim did an amazing job at almost re-writing the whole booklet and sent it to Magda. That was the beginning of a very successful outreach collaboration and deep friendship. Tim’s first trip to Perth, Western Australia, in November 2010, was as an ECU visiting academic, where he presented a ‘Pollutant’s Tale’ to hundreds of WA students and teachers and ran professional development workshops for chemistry lab technicians. Over the next 10 years, Tim visited ECU each year and the outreach events increased exponentially. With the ‘Pollutant’s Tale’ presentations being seen by around 10,000 students and 200 teachers from all over WA (as far as Margaret River) and over 500 science lab technicians from both primary and secondary schools attended Tim’s workshops. Tim was also a guest speaker at the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, WA Branch monthly presentations and at ECU School of Science seminar series. He also became part of ECU’s award winning ‘Old Ways New Ways’ program, running workshops for Aboriginal students and afterwards being invited by the WA Chief Scientist, Prof Peter Klinken and ECU DVC of Equity and Indigenous, Prof Colleen Hayward, to dinner to discuss future contributions to this program. Magda’s collaboration with Tim resulted in five publications in Chemistry Review School Science Magazine and Contemporary Topics in School Science, with the most recent publication in November 2022. However, most significant publication is the ‘Chemical Demonstration’ Booklet, which contains both Magda’s and Tim’s favourite demonstrations, including the videos of Tim performing those demonstrators, which were recorded during 2020-2022 by Jonathan Furze. The booklet is used by many schools around WA and other parts of Australia and even in other countries. At the end of 2019, the Vice Chancellor of ECU invited Tim to be part of the celebration of the opening of the new Science Building at Joondalup Campus in 2020, unfortunately due to COVID-19 that was not possible. Tim has left a significant mark on ECU staff, WA students and Magda has plans to continue to run professional development workshops for WA lab technicians and teachers in honour of Tim.

In 2013 Tim, joined by Dudley, gave the 1000th rendition of a Pollutant’s Tale to a packed Wills Memorial Hall at Bristol University full of primary school children. We can only estimate but a Pollutants’ Tale or its little sister Gases in the Air have been given approximately 3000 times by Tim and probably several hundred times by partners in other countries. We know that from 2005 to 2020 before the pandemic, Tim worked directly with 30-50,000 teachers, students and other audiences each year. Who knows how many he interacted with via indirect activity. Tim has worked with colleagues in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Spain, France, Italy, Malta, USA, West Indies, Hong Kong, Ireland and many more. He has run teacher training in all these places, giving confidence to teachers to undertake the more exciting experiments, summer schools and been comfortable working with First Peoples in Australia, and people of all faiths and genders. Tim published over 150 papers, won the 2004 RSC Teaching Award, the Big Tick award in 2008, 2009 and 2010, was part of the team that won the Times HE ICT award in 2009, the Merrill Lynch Science Education award in 2009 and the big one, the Royal Society Hauksbee award in 2009, which seems to be only awarded every 300 years. When sorting out his office numerous awards from Turkey, Malaysia, Hong Kong and one no one could work out where it was from, were found.

The Primary Science Teaching Trust in 2010, started a Virtual College of their Fellows, winners of the Primary Science Teacher of the Year Award. As part of the award process they had a visit from Tim and this later became part of their cluster programme activities thanks to Sophie Franklin and Peter Sainsbury. So many Fellows expressed their grief, to say how fantastic Tim was, how supportive he had been and how he had advised and trained so many teachers in the cluster. You just couldn’t stop this force of nature.

Of course, cancer was diagnosed in 2015 and although Tim seemed to defy the odds and predictions on so many occasions, the pace did slow. However, in around 2018, a postgraduate Dr. Jonny Furze, teamed up with Tim, becoming a winning team. Jonny’s muscle and no little practical ability and excellent communication skills allowed Tim to carry on effectively for at least two years. Tim was also finally able to record all the experiments he planned to do many years ago and now reside on You Tube, thank to Jonny. COVID impacted us all and obviously Tim needed to shield more than most but if you thought that would slow him down think again. On-line talks and events continued and once he was able to get out and about, he did. Inevitably his ability to lecture stopped but his impact did not.