Newly settled in the city, Phyllis was already in her 90s when she joined Winchester Women Graduates and she proved to be a very valuable member. She was a regular attendee until the COVID-19 lockdowns. She was always enthusiastic about our endeavours and ready with pertinent and searching questions at our speaker meetings.

When Phyllis celebrated her 95th birthday with a party for family and friends, her cake was boldly decorated with this strange design. Read on for an explanation!

In her speech Phyllis chose an optimistic theme – travel hopefully because, when things don’t go as you hoped, life can take some unexpected turns for the better. She illustrated this with anecdotes from her own life.

Phyllis was a pupil at Southampton Grammar School and was evacuated during the war to Bournemouth. After a third year in the sixth form, she gained a place at Girton College, Cambridge in 1943 but was called up for active service.

Thanks to an intervention from her school, her war work was carried out in the Organic Research Lab at ICI Plastics in Welwyn Garden City. The Head of Laboratory was Dr Crawford, the inventor or Perspex and her work involved strengthening Perspex, so the pilots of the Spitfires did not receive so many injuries.

ICI gave her one day a week to start her degree course, so she was able to gain a University of London degree from Sir John Cass College.

She met Stephen, her future husband, at ICI – that would not have happened at Girton! She and Stephen were the first married research students at Imperial College and, to their embarrassment, were often shown off to American visitors!

Having gained their doctorates, Stephen and Phyllis were offered assistant lectureships at Manchester University only to be told at a later date that the Vice-Chancellor at Manchester would not accept husband and wife in the same department! SHE was offered a post doc position instead which she had to accept as it was too late to alter their plans.

Their careers as academics took them all over the world and a lifetime of joint research in organic chemistry resulted in the publication in 1982 of The Chemistry of Allenes: Synthesis. C3H4 is the chemical formula for allenes. That explains the cake!