Audrey Stuckes

Stuckes was born on 15 September 1923 at Bristol, England, the only daughter of Frederick Stephen Stuckes and Beatrice May, née Cogan.[1][2] They had married on 8 January 1916 at St John the Baptist, Bedminster, Bristol.[1] Her father worked for Bethell, Gwyn, and Company (Bethell Gwyn), at 11 Baldwin Street, Bristol,[3] a shipbroking firm dealing mainly with Australasian trade.[4] During World War I, he volunteered as a sergeant in the 1/4th Battalion of the City of Bristol Rifles,[1] and on 27 June 1917, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.[5] He relinquished his commission on 22 June 1918 after he became ill while on active service.[6]

After the war, Stuckes' father returned to Bethell Gwyn, and in March 1953, he was elected president of the Bristol Steamship Owners' Association.[7] He had been elected a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers in 1945,[4] and in August 1953, he was elected chair of the Bristol section of the institute.[8] In the 1950s, he was secretary to the Apsley Players,[9] a musical quintet based in Bristol.[10] In September 1956, he retired from Bethell Gwyn after forty-eight years of service.[11]

Stuckes' elder brother, Jack Stephen, was educated at Merrywood Grammar School, Knowle, Bristol,[12] and studied electrical engineering at the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, Bristol.[13] During World War II, he was a corporal in No. 34 Service Flying Training School of the Royal Air Force, based at the Royal Canadian Air Force station Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada.[14][lower-alpha 1] At the end of the war, he took a position as a cashier and wages clerk for Christy Brothers,[17] an engineering company based at Bower Ashton in south west Bristol, that was contracted to the North Somerset Electricity Supply Company.[18]

Colston's Girls' School, Bristol, where Stuckes was educated

Stuckes was first educated at Merrywood primary school in Knowle, Bristol.[19] In June 1934, she gained a foundational boarding scholarship to Red Maids' School, Westbury-on-Trym.[20] She went on to study at Colston's Girls' School, Montpelier, Bristol, where, in July 1942, she passed her Higher School Certificate in natural sciences with a distinction in chemistry.[21] She was offered a Pfeiffer scholarship at Bedford College, University of London, and awarded a Gamble scholarship by the school of £50 a year (equivalent to £2,500 in 2021),[22] that was tenable at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and at the Royal Free Hospital for Women.[23][lower-alpha 2]

However, instead of taking up the scholarship at Bedford, Stuckes entered Newnham College in the University of Cambridge,[24] to study the Natural Sciences Tripos.[25] In 1946, she graduated with a BA degree,[26] and in the same year, she was elected a student member of the Physical Society of London.[27] In 1950, she was elected an associate of the Institute of Physics and awarded an MA by Cambridge.[28]^: 6 In 1969, she returned to Cambridge to complete a PhD, and subsequently, she was elected to the senate of the university.[26]

Stuckes meeting William Waldegrave (left) and vice-chancellor John Ashworth (right), at the University of Salford's heat laboratory in 1981

After leaving Cambridge, Stuckes joined Metropolitan-Vickers, Trafford, Greater Manchester, as a graduate trainee in the research department.[29] Metropolitan-Vickers was a British heavy industrial firm, known for manufacturing electrical equipment and generators, street lighting, and electronics.[30] The company had a relatively favourable attitude to placing graduate women in professional electrical engineering positions. For example, when Stuckes joined the company, Beryl Dent led the computation section and supervised the laboratory team that investigated the physical properties of semiconductors.[31]^: 232[32]^: 11 Stuckes collaborated with Dent on Stuckes' first published paper on the heating effects that occur when a current is passed through a semiconductor.[29] Dent suggested methods to solve the equations and computed the numerical integrations.[33]

From 1953, Stuckes published a series of papers on the thermal and electrical conductivity of semiconductors. In one such paper, she investigated the electrostatic force between polished plates of a semiconductor and a metal when placed in contact and a voltage applied.[34]^: 183 The force is caused by the free charge that accumulates between the semiconductor and metal surfaces.[35] This force, or attraction, is known as the Johnsen–Rahbek effect, and is proportional to the square of the applied voltage.[36]^: 59–60 Stuckes constructed a clutch that consisted of a plate of magnesium orthotitanate, a hard, ceramic semiconductor, that rubbed against a highly-polished steel plate.[37]^: 12 She proved the existence of the effect and proposed an electric circuit model to explain the data.[38]^: 59 She also found that abrasion at the contact surfaces caused the force to decrease as the number of operations increased.[36]^: 59–60

On 4 December 1962, Stuckes was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics,[39]^: 22 and in the following year, she left Metropolitan-Vickers to work as a lecturer in the department of pure and applied physics at the Royal College of Advanced Technology, Salford,[40] that became the University of Salford in 1967.[41]^: 198 In 1975, Stuckes, together with John Edwin Parrott, published a textbook that reviewed the theory and experimental data on thermal conductivity in solids and semiconductors. Parrott was a scientist at the Aldermaston Court research laboratory of Associated Electrical Industries (the then holding company of Metropolitan-Vickers), and later, professor of physics at University of Wales, Cardiff.[42] In 1956, he had obtained a PhD from the University of Reading on the thermal and thermoelectric properties of semiconductors.[43] Paul Gustav Klemens, late professor of physics at the University of Connecticut,[44] reviewed the book at the time of publication and stated that "[it] is most unique and valuable; the theoretical problem is very difficult, and nowhere is there such a good summary of the useful approximations and the salient results."[45]^: 61

By 1979, Stuckes was a senior lecturer in the department of applied acoustics at Salford,[46] and in the following year, she was in charge of the department's heat laboratory.[47] The laboratory was supported by grants from the Polymer Engineering Directorate and the Building Subcommittee (she was a member of this committee in 1982)[48] of the Science and Engineering Research Council,[49] and the Building Research Establishment in the Department of the Environment.[47] These grants funded a study to investigate how moisture in cavity walls affects the surrounding insulation.[50] At the time, no one knew the exact efficiency of standard polymeric insulating materials as data was based on material in "dry" condition. Stuckes led a team to obtain experimental data that would allow builders to calculate a standard level of insulation.[50] The study concluded that heat transfer in buildings can be modelled adequately by simple, one-dimensional, steady state models.[51]

In 1982, Stuckes presented a television programme for the Open University that demonstrated the usefulness of these simple models of thermal conduction.[51][lower-alpha 3] The programme was first broadcast on BBC One in the morning of 3 May 1982 and formed part of the Open University's unit on heat transfer.[52][53] In the 1980s, she continued to publish research on the thermal properties of building materials. In one study with Anthony Simpson,[lower-alpha 4] they found that the shape of air inclusions within vermiculite concrete affected the thermal conductivity of the concrete.[55] This finding was explored further with British Petroleum and resulted in a joint patent being granted on a thermally insulating filler.[56] By May 1986, she was awarded Chartered Physicist status by the Institute of Physics, and by September 1988,[57] she had retired from her position at the university.[58]

In retirement, Stuckes resided at 58 Carlton Road in Hale, Trafford.[59] In October 1947, she had become engaged to Douglas Perrin Jones, the eldest son of William Henry Perrin Jones of Port Sunlight, Wirral.[2] At the time of their engagement, Douglas was an electrical engineer in the research department at Metropolitan-Vickers.[60]^: 716 When they both worked there, he would assist in her research, including in 1953, an investigation into the heating effects that occur when a current is passed through a semiconductor.[33] After their marriage at Bristol in 1949,[61] she continued to use her maiden name in her academic life and scientific publications.[59]

Douglas retired in 1984 after 46 years' service as a research engineer with the General Electric Company. He died in hospital on 15 July 1995, aged 75 years, and his funeral service was held on 21 July 1995 at Altrincham Crematorium, Dunham Massey.[62] Stuckes died after a long illness on 26 September 2006, aged 83 years,[63] at Faversham Nursing Home, Urmston, Trafford.[64] Her funeral service was held at the same crematorium on 3 October 2006 and her ashes were later interred in the crematorium grounds.[63]

The following table contains academic conferences where Stuckes was known to have organised the conference and/or read a paper.

• Byers, Nina; Williams, Gary (2006). Out of the shadows: contributions of twentieth-century women to physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-82197-1. OCLC 1050066680. Retrieved 10 December 2022.
• Jackson, Veronica Mary (2016). Metropolitan‑Vickers: Arthur Fleming's influence on the origins and evolution of apprentice training and technical education, with particular reference to female college and student apprentices between 1945-1967 (PDF) (PhD). Manchester: Department of history, politics and philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University. OCLC 1064617499. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 October 2021. Retrieved 11 November 2022.

• One-dimensional steady state heat transfer via the Wayback Machine. The link opens a video of the Open University television programme presented by Stuckes that was first broadcast on BBC One at 7:05 am on 3 May 1982. It constitutes programme twelve of thirty-two for the mathematical models and methods module (Open University module code MST204, unit 12).
• Image of the thermal wall laboratory, taken in 1976, at the department of applied acoustics, University of Salford.
• The Thermal Measurement Laboratory at the University of Salford.