Jon McCleverty talks about working with Geoffrey Wilkinson. Video by NCH

I'm John McLeverty. I did my first degree in Aberdeen, graduated from there in 1960 with a first-class degree which qualified me to get a Carnegie Fellowship, which meant I could take that fellowship anywhere in the United Kingdom. Before that, I've been thinking rather hard about what I might do. I was encouraged by my friends to leave Aberdeen, go somewhere else, and that's what I did. I went to London to see a couple of professors, one of whom was Geoff Wilkinson. It was Bernard Aylett who recommended I would go and see him, because I'd enjoyed making ferrocene as a project during my final year. That worked very well, and I was absolutely fascinated. In those days, there was a small textbook by a man called Geoffrey Coates who described organometallic compounds about an eighth of the chapter, or maybe less, about transition metals. That's what I was really attracted to. Bernard Aylett suggested I go and talk to Wilkinson, warning me that he was a bit of a rough diamond and was a bit controversial, but he was a very good scientist. Anyway, I saw the other guy in London. There were all colourless compounds. I wasn't interested in that. I liked colour. I went and saw Geoff, and Geoff explained what he wanted to do. What really struck me at the time was what an informal type of guy a professor was. The only professor I knew was the one in Aberdeen who was my personal tutor. He was a nice man, a very nice man, but he was a little formal, as you would expect amongst professors in those days. Geoff was completely different. Anyway, he told me a little bit about what I might do. It must have gone in one ear and out the other because I remember nothing about it. But he did say he would be away in September because he always went to the United States to the ACS meetings and to catch up with his friends there and do a bit of consulting, and then to Denmark, which was his wife's home. As a result of that, Malcolm Greenwood introduced me to the lab, which he duly did. Malcolm was an extraordinary man, as most people who met him would testify. He taught me how to make cyclopentadienyl tungsten dihydride and the trihyde protonated species using the equipment we had in the lab, which was basically rather crude, to put it mildly. Sometimes, and occasionally at night, we had fires with this stuff, but that's another story. Anyway, I did that, and then Malcolm went off to Cambridge, and Geoff came back from his summer, and we started. I had to make this diacyclopentadienyl tantalum trihydride. Geoff thought that must exist. He'd done a little counting with the electrons and all the rest of it, that stuff that people did in those days. We had to make tantalum pentachloride from tantalum and chlorine. I'd never done anything like that in my life, so I started off. The technician in the lab, Ray Shaddock, was an absolute wonder. He knew how to do all these sort of things. You put tantalum in a boat sitting in a glass tube, Pyrex glass tube, and it was heated to about 400 degrees, just below the melting point of Pyrex. You had to pass chlorine through it, and then at the end of the day, you had to extract all of that tantalum pentachloride from the tube. It was air-sensitive, moisture-sensitive, so you had to be very, very careful. We worked in a homemade glove bag from a large plastic bag into which two arm holes had been inserted. It was filled with dry nitrogen. You put gloves into that, and you had to work with gloves and manipulate all this stuff in a very, not a terribly comfortable way. However, the tantalum pentachloride was made. We got it out. We put it into a flask. We put it into tetrahydrofuran, which those of the days will remember how we used to dry it over sodium wire and all the rest of the things that you had to watch. No fires were allowed, but we sometimes did have them. You dissolved the tantalum pentachloride in that, and you added sodium borohydride. No, I get ahead of myself. You had to make sodium cyclopentadienide, and that was made from sodium sand, which you made by taking chunks of sodium, put them into boiling toluene under nitrogen, and thrashed them about with a wire stirrer. These days, you can probably buy sodium sand, but in those days, we had to make it. Then you had to decant solvent, and when it was done, you could put the dry tetrahydrofuran under nitrogen in there. Then you had to crack dicyclopentadiene to make it into monocyclopentadiene. That was done. That was a five-membered ring with two protons, one of which you could drag off with the sodium making sodium cyclopentadienide. If that worked, you knew it does because of a slight pink tinge to the solution. When that was done, you then under nitrogen in a three-necked flask, the same one where you made this sodium cyclopentadiene, you then added the tantalum pentachloride and a bit of sodium borohydride. We were never quite sure why you needed to do that, but it was probably because if you didn't, you would get mixtures of chlorohydrides and stuff anyway. That was it, a brown cruddy mixture, which you refluxed for an indeterminate period, which is a euphemism for overnight. After that was done, you cooled it, you pumped off the solvent in vacuo, and you're left with this brown stuff. That's what happened to me the first time I did it. We put this flask—you had to get rid of the solvent, so we extracted a whole lot into a single flask, and you had to pump it off in a vacuum, which was a fairly straightforward procedure. Having done that, you were left with this brown mass of stuff, which you then had to break up. I did that, and we put the brown cruddy-looking powder into a sublimer tube, and using a cold finger with dry ice and solid carbon dioxide and acetone in a vacuum, start the sublimant. We hoped for a white powder or a yellow powder. By golly, it was there. I couldn't believe it the first time. Les Pratt was the chap who ran the NMR machine, which was one of the very few—I think Malcolm Green said there were probably only two or maybe three in the country, one of which was at IC. We took it down there at 56.46 megahertz. I remember that. You had to be careful not to tune into Radio Moscow. We took it down there, and that was in a non-chlorinated solvent. I think it was probably deuterobenzene. We looked for the high fuel lines, and by golly, they were there. It was an A2X spectrum. Les said, I think you've got it. I said, I better go and tell Jeff. I went back up to his office and said, I think we have some results. He said, let's go and have a look. He did, and we came down. He said, yes, that's it, that's it. He gave me sixpence. I thought, well, that's not very nice. I said, well, it's a good day for me. It's almost my birthday. He said, here's another sixpence. For a Yorkshireman to give a Labradorian money is unprecedented. That made my reputation, such as it was. That was done in November, just having started in September. It took me until the following July to repeat the experiment, partly because we think the batch of tantalum we used was an impure batch that had some sort of catalytic stuff there or not. Who knows? In the end, I did repeat it, but it was a hard six to eight months to do that. I spent all the time trying to find this wretched hydride. Fortunately, we got all the data we could get from the very first sample. That was my introduction to the Lab. I always remember Jeff saying to me, oh, you want to go to the States? Al Cotton would be delighted to have you on the Lab. I said, well, yes, I want to go to the States. That was done and dusted. Al came over during the year. I remember giving a small seminar in which I described what I'd done. He was duly impressed, I thought, and we agreed. That was the end of it. After that, Jeff, of course, went off in the summer. Davison and I spent a lot of time doing experiments which were of no particular connection. Jeff had said, well, he obviously thought I should try and make a niobium analog. I tried to do that and got something, but it was paramagnetic. Therefore, the NMR was useless. Being relatively inexperienced and not really understanding everything that one should at that stage, we abandoned that experiment. Many years later, it was discovered that the niobium compound was a paramagnetic material. It wasn't a trihydride either. You win some, you lose some. Anyway, Davison and I did some NMR experiments in organometallics, which were quite interesting, trying to measure electronegativities of transition metals and low oxidation states and all that sort of stuff. Jeff came back and said, well, what have you been doing? We sold this project to him. Jeff could be a bit gullible at times. We probably knew more about NMR than he did. We published it, but it wasn't anything particularly important. After that, the second summer when Davison was just about to go off to the States, we spent some time trying to repeat the work of Laurie Vasca, who was a big name in those days, square planar low oxidation state compounds of rhodium and iridium which were relevant to homogeneous catalysis. He had made an iridium compound which used to do oxidative addition reactions, which were very fashionable in those days. It would add a hydrogen. We tried to do it with rhodium. We boiled triphenylphosphine and rhodium in an alcoholic solvent, a long-chain alcoholic solvent, which is what Dwarf Vasca had done. We didn't get in carbonyl in the product. It was a red compound, so we chucked it away. That was Wilkinson's compound, which John Osborne in later years made really hay with. Jeff's catalysis program was well supported then. If you're not looking for something, you won't find it. I did various other things. I did some fluorogarbutylic chemistry, which pleased Jeff, because that was a competition with Gordon Stone. Gordon Stone was one of the big rivals in those days. In fact, there were several. There was Joe Chatt. There was Gordon Stone. E.O. Fisher, Ernst Otto, as Jeff used to occasionally call them, the Munich Plagiarist, which I thought was a calumny. Years later, at a conference in Atoll, where all the Oregon metallic chemists of the Western world and a few Russians were assembled, they were really very good friends. I have a picture somewhere of Jeff and E.O. Fisher dancing together. I thought it was an extraordinary conference. I finished my PhD and went to work with Al. That was a wonderful year. We made many, many friends in the States. I was very strongly tempted to emigrate there, but as both our mothers were widows and I didn't want my children to grow up, particularly as Americans, we decided we would come back. I had an offer of a post-doc from Jack Lewis and an offer of an assistant lectureship from Ron Mason, who had just been promoted to chair in Sheffield. I apologized to Jack, who said, no problem. I went to Sheffield. That's the start of my academic career. I spent 16 very happy and productive years there. Then I got the chair of inorganic chemistry in Birmingham, the first professor of inorganic chemistry ever there, which I'm very proud about. But it was a tough job. The chemistry was fine. They set up a lab and had good people in that, but the reputation of the department was very low. Anyway, we did our best to improve that. Ten years later, Gordon Stone retired. He was another of the big rivals. We moved to Bristol. I spent, it must have been 13 years there, I think, 1990 to 2013. No, 2003. That was fun. That was also a tough job. I didn't want to be involved in administration. I'd done that in Birmingham and enough of that. That was something which I really appreciated. I had a very good coworker, Mike Ward. He and I had a great time. Having met Jeff briefly in the early summer of 1960, I didn't really know what to expect. When Malcolm Green introduced me to the lab, he found me full of stories about Jeff, some of which I think were absolutely spot on. The lab in those days was a great place for taking the mick. There was a letter there from Walter Heber, who was a carbonyl chemist who worked during the war in 1939-1945 war. There was a letter from him allegedly saying that metal carbonyls were a German problem and he should find something else to work on. It was actually a forgery, I think. I don't know if Malcolm had a hand in it, but certainly some of the other guys who preceded Malcolm had done this as a joke and put it into an envelope with a stamp, a German stamp, and some tracking marks. Jeff was like a dog with three tails because he was, look at this, look at this. I didn't. That was a story which Malcolm told me. There were various other stories at that time of taking the mickey with Jeff. Jeff, I think, he wasn't an ogre. He wasn't a fearsome individual. He was a very shy man, I thought, particularly with women. Once he got to know his group and the women in the group, he was very relaxed. When I was in Birmingham, I invited him, persuaded him to come up to Birmingham to give a talk. He was visiting his daughters in Oxford, I think, at that time. He and Lisa came and Diane took care of Lisa. I took Jeff over to the department. He gave a typical Jeffrey Wilkinson lecture, which I was delighted about. It was full of information about the competitors and all the rest and all the standard things which he used to say. One little trick he had, which I don't think anybody else has mentioned so far, was that during his lecture, he would light up a cigarette and would puff away for a bit and would carry on waving around with a bit of chalk in his hand. Then at some point, he would transfer the chalk to another hand and take the cigarette and go to write on the board. Of course, people by that time were aware of this. There was a huge cheer when he did this. Of course, he laughed. We all thoroughly enjoyed it. I can't remember if it was when I was in Sheffield or I was in Birmingham. I think it was probably Sheffield. Jeff had either a birthday or an honour or something. Malcolm Green and Bill Griffith had organised a conference. I think it was at Queen Mary College, but I don't remember the details. Anyway, a lot of the people who had worked with were invited to perform, and I was one of them. I was remembering before I did that that Jeff had given me two sixpences as a commemoration of making the tantalum trihydride. Diane, my wife, found two sixpence bits dated 1960. She had them made into cufflinks. At the end of my talk, I thanked Jeff and expressed my appreciation and said, By the way, I have a present for you. You gave me two sixpences. The remark you made at the time was Scotsmen are like Yorkshiremen, both the generosity squeezed out of them. A standard remark he used to make as a tease. I gave him these two sixpences and he looked at them and he snorted and said, Oh, thank you very much. He wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I always remembered that. It was a very nice touch. As a very young, very ignorant inorganic chemist in 1960, it really gave me a boost to my confidence. The other people around at the time, I don't know how much has been said because many of them have died. George Parshall was from DuPont. He was on leave, a sort of study leave. He worked at DuPont and Dunemore's lab in Wilmington, Delaware. A very friendly guy. I many times invited him to talk there. He was there in the lab and he did various things. Then the following year, Sam Grimm came. He was from Maryland. He was a very entertaining guy, but he didn't make much of an impression in terms of the chemistry. Then Flavio Bonatti came. He was Italian from Malatesta's group. He was a very nice guy. He did some nice chemistry and we had a good time with him. Subsequently, we visited many times when we were going to Italy. Sadly, he died. The other people in the lab was Bill McFarlane and Christine Manners-Gantz. We used to come in on Saturday mornings. Jeff used to indicate he would be pleased if we worked weekends. He would come over, usually at some point, just to see what was happening. Also, Jeff did a bit of glassblowing. He sometimes brought the children, his two daughters, with him. He would make little glass objects with them. He was quite good at that. I thought the man was a real nice guy. I think a lot of people, particularly at Imperial College, got the impression that they regarded Jeff as really not quite one of us. I may be completely wrong, but there was always a feeling that the Wilkinson people were different. Well, we certainly were. We were there all the time. We worked our socks off and for pleasure. Of course, we managed to get to the hostelries before closing time, but it was a marvellous experience. I'll never forget it.