Leslie Mrs. Burr

Leeds most famous chemical alumna was May Sybil Leslie.60 Leslie was born on 14 August 1887 in Yorkshire and studied chemistry at the University of Leeds. She graduated with first class honours in 1908, and was awarded an M.Sc. for research with Harry M. Dawson01 the following year on the kinetics of the iodination of acetone, work that has since become a classic in its field.62 In that same year, 1909, Leslie was awarded a scholarship, which she decided to use to work with Marie Curie63 in Paris. Her letters from Paris to Smithells are among the few accounts of life in the early Curie laboratory.04 

Leslie spent 1909 to 1911 with Curie, the only English woman in Curie s group.05 Leslie s work involved the extraction of new elements from thorium. For a chemist used to working with grams of pure chemicals in beakers, the manipulation of 

In 1915, she entered the world of industrial chemistry, being hired to work at His Majesty s Factory in Litherland, Liverpool, a position that she obtained as a result of the call-up for military duty of the male research chemists. Her initial rank was that of Research Chemist, but in 1916 she was promoted to Chemist in Charge of Laboratory, a very high position for a woman at that time. Her research involved the elucidation of the pathway in the formation of nitric acid and the determination of the optimum industrial conditions for the process. This work was vital for the munitions industry, which required massive quantities of nitric acid for explosives production. In June 1917, the Litherland factory closed00 and Leslie was transferred with the same rank to the H.M. Factory in Penrhyndeudraeth, North Wales. Leslie was awarded a D.Sc. degree in 1918 by the University of Leeds, mainly in recognition of her contribution to the war effort. 

With the return of the surviving male chemists at the end of the First World War, Leslie lost her government position. She returned to the University of Leeds as Demonstrator in the Department of Chemistry in 1920, being promoted in the following year to Assistant Lecturer. Leslie then moved to the Department of Physical Chemistry in 1924 and was promoted to Lecturer in 1928. In 1923, Leslie had married Alfred Hamilton 

a Lecturer in Chemistry at the Royal Technical College, Salford.67 She had first met Burr at the H.M. Factory in Litherland, where he, too, had worked in 1916. She continued to be an active researcher at Leeds after marriage in addition, the famous British chemist, J. Newton Friend, invited her to author one volume of the classic series A Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry and to co-author another.68 

---