Dorothy Crowfoot

* Dorothy Crowfoot was born in Cairo on May 12th, 1910 where her father, John Winter Crowfoot, was working in the Egyptian Education Service
* Dorothy visited the Sudan as a girl in 1923, andacquired a strong affection for the country
* Her father gave most of his time to archaeology, working for some years as Director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and carrying outexcavations on Mount Ophel, at Jerash, Bosra and Samaria.
* Dorothy Crowfoot spent one season between school and university with her parents, excavating at Jerash and drawing mosaic pavements, andshe enjoyed the experience so much, that she seriously considered giving up chemistry for archaeology.
* She became interested in chemistry and in crystals at about the age of 10, and this interestwas encouraged by Dr. A.F. Joseph, a friend of her parents in the Sudan, who gave her chemicals and helped her during her stay there to analyse ilmenite
* By the end of her school career, she haddecided to study chemistry and possibly biochemistry at university.
* She went to Oxford and Somerville College from 1928-32 and became devoted to Margery Fry, then Principal of the College
*She was financed by her aunt, Dorothy Hood, who had paid all her college bills, and by a £75 scholarship from Somerville.
* Most of her working life, she spent as Official Fellow and Tutor inNatural Science at Somerville, responsible mainly for teaching chemistry for the women's colleges.
* Her research group grew slowly and has always been a somewhat casual organisation of students andvisitors from various universities, working principally on the X-ray analysis of natural products.
* She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947, a foreign member of the RoyalNetherlands Academy of Sciences in 1956, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) in 1958
* In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, son of one historian and grandson of two others, whose main...