Text of the service for Alan's cremation.  8th April 2025

Introduction

Thank you for the music, Marcus.

For those of you who don't know him, Marcus is Alan's Great-Grandson, and is studying at the Purcell School of Music.  Composing and playing music specifically for your Great-Grandfather's funeral cannot be something that happens very often!

I would like to welcome everyone, and thank you all for coming.  We have representatives from all the branches of the family; from Birkbeck and the scientific world; and we have friends of Alan's going back for decades.

I would especially like to thank those of you who have travelled so far to be here:

Murray and Elaine from the Isle of Man

Catherine from New York

Alan from Switzerland

Rogan and Baerbel from Dorset

Claire and her family from Brighton

Andrew and his family from... all around the country

Kui from Paris

John Finney from Gloucester

Jacek and Margaret from Cambridge

Many of you from London and further afield

Thank you all for being here.

Many people have sent messages of condolence, and apologies for not being here, but I should mention Alan's sisters: Sheila from California and Mary from Tasmania, who have thankfully not attempted to travel here, but who are with us in spirit.

Lastly, there is Sheila, my mother, who was cremated here in 2014, and whose ashes are sprinkled outside.  She has been waiting for this moment for eleven years!

Overview

I am going to talk for a while, to celebrate some of the things that Alan did and achieved over his 98 years on Earth.

Andrew would like to speak to us, and to read a poem.

Murray is going to make a short speech.

Simon Hughes, a longtime friend of the family, who stayed in the house with Alan and Sheila, is going to describe his time there.

Alan Hodgkinson would like to deliver a message on behalf of his mother Sheila, Alan's sister.

Finally, I will read some of the messages that we have received from around the world from people who cannot be with us in person.

Eulogy

So, here we are...

Actually, we are rather fortunate to be here at all.  If Alan had been born a year or two earlier, he would have finished school and university in the middle of the war, and would probably have joined the air force, which would have been dangerous at the time.

At school, when he was Lewis' age, he had studied for 'A' levels in Physics, Chemistry and Navigation, expecting to be a pilot or navigator.  Thankfully, he worked hard, got a scholarship and went to Cambridge, which saw him through the next three years.  His final exams were three days after peace was declared and the war ended.  He recently blamed his poor exam results on the fact that many of his teachers were off in Los Alamos, working on the atomic bomb!

Meeting Sheila

Alan moved to London in 1946, immediately after the war, to take a summer school course in Russian at the School of Slavonic Studies.  For ten years, Alan read all the Russian papers in Crystallography as they were published, and made pocket money by creating abstracts in English for various agencies - curiously similar to what Sheila ended up doing for Anthropology!

The Russian school was where he first met Sheila.

The story is that they broke up after a while, as Sheila started dating someone else, but then this too broke up.  Alan apparently pinned a single rose onto Sheila's pigeon-hole post box.  The gambit worked!  It showed that he really did have a romantic side, but also that he was too shy to present himself in person.

Sheila's story was that she married Alan because she found out that he had been fixing the holes in his trouser pockets using a stapling machine!

Birkbeck

Alan started at Birkbeck in 1947.  He had intended to continue in Cambridge, but he probably got blocked from further studies there over security concerns.  He had been off to Yugoslavia to help on the Youth Railway - the reconstruction of the country after the war - and also had very left-wing connections while a student.  I don't think Alan was ever in the Communist party, but there were many around him who were.  In London, Bernal attracted such people.

He was very much a renaissance man, always interested in anything and everything.  At this point, I think it is safe to reveal that his university email password was "Almanac", which is almost, but not quite, an anagram of "Alan Mackay".  This showed his aspirations, and perhaps his ambition to keep up with his mentor, Bernal, who was known as "Sage".

It was not just science - he also had a good working knowledge of Russian, French, German, Serbo-Croat, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and even Latin!  He learned Japanese by memorising 2500 characters, although his speaking was held back by his deafness.

He published a book of scientific quotations, and a book of poems; he translated Haeckel from German.

Travels

As an academic, Alan was given a number of chances to travel abroad on sabbatical, having extensive periods in Russia, Japan, Korea and India.  In those days an air ticket to Japan cost a year's salary, but he broke up the journey into many small hops, visiting the Middle East and Far East along the way.

Between 1938, when he went biking round Holland with his father, to 2006, when he visited Ireland for a conference, he visited nearly 200 countries, although many of them the same countries over again.

I have been scanning in photographs from some of these trips.  He was not a great photographer, although some of his street scenes are amazing, and capture a time that is now long gone.

Sheila was left at home in London, looking after the three of us and managing everything on her own, while also holding down her job at the Royal Anthropological Institute.  It cannot have been easy!

Even when Alan was home, he worked long hours lecturing, since Birkbeck was centred on mature students and lectures were often in the evening. He got home just in time to see us off to bed.

The weekends were reserved for long muddy walks on the Heath!

Children

Alan and Sheila had three children, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.  So far!

They taught the three of us to think for ourselves; to be independent and responsible, and to enjoy travel and new places.

They were completely unprepared when we each in turn thought for ourselves, and independently set out to travel to new places; first Claire, then Andrew and myself.

We never really came back!  It must have been a huge transition to having an empty nest, except that they always had lodgers living in the house and had a constant stream of visitors from overseas.

Science

I subscribe to the Science Citation Index for Alan.  Even now, there are about three hundred papers a year that refer to his work, with more than 8000 references in total.  Curiously, the most popular paper, by a factor of two, was one written in 1962.  This describes how to  pack together spheres in a series of layers, to form a ball.  This structure is known today as the Mackay Icosahedron.

In the early days of Crystallography, it was believed that all crystals consisted of atoms, assembled together to form a regular lattice, where a simple subunit was repeated indefinitely in all three directions.  Crystallographers had determined that there were 230 different ways in which this could be done. All crystals had to follow one of these possible arrangements.  And that was it.  Cut and dried!

There were some complications!  First there were sheets of atoms, as found in graphite.  These could be rolled up, to form 'nanotubes'.  Or, like the domes designed by Buckminster Fuller, atoms could combine to form spheres, like Alan's icosahedron, but hollow.

Alan's contribution to science was to find that there was also the possibility of 'quasi-regular' arrangements of atoms, not following any of the 230 known lattices.

Atoms don't know that they are supposed to form a crystal - they just know what other atoms they find attractive!  

Alan's contribution was to invent 'generalized crystallography', where solids could be made up of atoms combined in new ways.  He was able to predict the X-Ray diffraction patterns that such materials would display, although I think that at the time, he did not really expect that actual crystals would exist.

Ten years later, Dan Shechtman showed that they did!  In 2011, Shechtman received the Nobel Prize for this.

Alan received a very nice letter from Roger Penrose, hoping that  "there could some consolation in seeing your clear predictions having become accepted as mainstream crystallography".

He also received a prize from the American Institute of Physics, and was featured on the front cover of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In 1988, Alan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and got to sign their book, along with others such as Newton, Babbage, Faraday and Darwin.  This gave him a new lease of life, since it extended his scientific life beyond his retirement, although his deafness held him back from committee work.

Graphic Arts

In the 80s and 90s, Alan started working on minimal surfaces, which are soap-bubble like shapes filling space.  One day, it might be possible to make these from carbon, at the atomic level, but for Alan, it was enough to make beautiful computer graphics to show their structure.

He used to go round crystallography conferences with a set of posters showing these images.  Being Alan, he included esoteric text, or background pictures around the graphic images.  Since 'arty stuff' seemed to be somewhat unprofessional, he invented a pen-name for himself, Sho Takahashi, and a whole back-story about this being the work of a struggling Japanese student with subversive tendencies!  This went down very well at conferences!

Sho Takahashi has a web site where you can see some of them.

Friends

I have recently been going through my mother's card index of addresses.  I'm going to read the names of a few of these people, just to give a feel for the international scope of Alan's friends, and as a sort of last roll-call for those who would have been here today if they could have been.

Most of them are now gone, of course, although we often hear from their children and grandchildren:

Felix Aprahamian *
Philip Ball *
Desmond Bernal *
Sanjay Biswas
Tom Blundell *
Donald Booth *
Mary Boyce *
Siv Chandrasekhar
John Cloudsley-Thompson *
Gennady Dobrov
Reinhard Drifte
Maurice Goldsmith
Drago Grdenić *
István Hargittai
Eric Hobsbawm *
Ken Holmes
Nahum Joel
John Kendrew *
John Kerridge
Aaron Klug *
Ivan Kostov *
Erle Leichty
Eric Lord
John Maddox *
Khudu Mamedov
Kanji Nakajima
Gisaku Nakamura
Ruslan Ozerov
Ashok Parthasarathi
Roger Penrose *
Abdul Rahman
Siv Ramaseshan
Shrinivasa Ranganathan
Dale Riepe
Stephen Rose *
Kaoru Saito
Marjorie Senechal *
Vladimir Shevchenko
Ichiro Sunagawa
Tibor Tarnai
Humberto Terrones
Boris Vainshtein *
Heinz Wolff *
Vasilii Zakharov
Branka Zodan

What an amazing selection of names!

About half of these people have Wikipedia pages (*) and several have knighthoods!

Life after Sheila

Sheila died in 2014, when Alan was 88, leaving him to face old age without her.

However, he was very well looked after by Donna, his housekeeper, and an endless stream of wonderful carers who came in for the day to look after him and to force him to walk round the block twice a day, keeping him active and alert almost to the end.  For the last year, Pat lived in the house full time and somehow kept Alan going.

He joked that we were treating him like a toy, where the objective was to see how far we could make it go!  We did pretty well!

Alan attributed his deafness to excessive antibiotics given to him during the 1950s, when less was known about their effects, but I think that his hobby of amateur radio, with its high-pitched noises, also contributed.

The macular degeneration came later, restricting his reading, and eventually affecting his balance and ability to move around on his own.  He was left very much shut in and isolated from social life and conversation.

He lost his teeth.  A series of strokes affected his speech, his balance and his alertness; he lost his sense of time, leaving him with only the senses of touch, smell and taste.  He REALLY enjoyed Donna's cooking, but not much else.

The end was very close.

Talk by Andrew

- Thanks for coming

- This is not a sad occasion

- Representatives of the family all present

Mary Kille book 3

"To my brother Alan, from a barbarian in the Antipodes"

My Dear brother Alan
I read your poetry
at regular intervals
and, not for the first time,
I am struck by the curious fact that
some of a poet's words may outlast
the one who has strung them together.

Apoptosis

Equating to the death of a single cell to protect the organism as a whole

I laid a place at our table
   For Death.
Death is an old friend
   Of the family,
Who looks in now and then.
He is not like Jehovah or Baal,
   Created by men seeking power.
Death is neutral
   Part of Nature
Part of the system
   Which replaces the old by the new.

Floating World book of poems

For Robert

We launch this Argosy
loaded with everything
that we may expect
to carry over to the future.

What may we give him
for the journey
and for life in a new land
- there is no map
and the compass varies - ?

Only the little black notebook
with what his grandfather
had found useful,
when he went to the wars.

Talk by Murray

I'm not quite as old as all that, you know!

Noting that Alan went to Oundle school, with all the rationing and difficulties with teachers off to the war.

He survived and did well.

Finished is education at Birkbeck, with Bernal.

Recommends Harvest of a Quiet Eye selection of poems.

Thanks for coming.

Alan married Sheila Hague, whose father was at Glasgow University.

Don't be vague - ask for Hague!

Talk by Simon Hughes

Like so many others, I benefited hugely from the generosity of Alan and Sheila in opening their home to me.  When I told Andrew I couldn’t find somewhere to live in London, he immediately asked if I would consider living with his parents?  This struck me as weird; would I offer my own parent’s home to someone else without asking them first?  But Andrew is such a considerate person, that I knew I must be entering an unfamiliar world, peopled by unique characters: that certainly applied to Alan.

My prime memory of Alan is of him retreating back to his study each evening immediately after supper and continuing to work late into the night.  He taught me what enthusiasm for, and dedication to, scholarship can achieve.

Alan’s laser-like attention focused on inner essences and what could or might be, not only about what was plain on the surface.  As he once emphasised: “Those who believe only what they see are usually much better at believing than at seeing”.

Alan saw the World in more dimensions than the rest of us ordinary folk.  He learnt Chinese characters ‘for the fun of it’, and he had unique scientific insight that made the heretical expected.  I arrived in Lanchester Road on 2nd January 1985, just days after two publications had triggered a scientific revolution that was partly derived from earlier work of Alan’s.  I remember Alan trying eagerly to explain it all to me, enthused by having an aspiring young scientist in the house.  And I remember feeling utterly lost after about the second sentence.  There were whole regions of space that were visible only to Alan.

I am relieved to learn that almost everyone had this experience.  Alan’s niece Alison, who spent a long time in Lanchester Road, wrote recently “Then there were Alan’s relentless and terrifying questions - and my eternal feelings of fear that he would unmask me as being both poorly educated and limited in my critical thinking.”  I remain unsure whether Alan would have been surprised, mortified, or secretly slightly pleased to have this effect.

Alan and Sheila not only opened their home to me, but never complained when I came in and cooked curry after midnight, right next to their bedroom.  It seemed I was also free to invite in strangers to stay.  My brother turned up at Lanchester Road, with a homeless young Chinese woman whom he had just met.  As far as I recall, no permission was required, no advance notice was given, and yet a bed for Xiaolin was found.

Despite his encyclopaedic memory and huge intellect, Alan was very modest.  But in his intellectual rigour and personal generosity he had huge influence, both on science and, shared and deepened by Sheila, on the many, many of us who passed through Lanchester Road.  So I finish with a heartfelt thankyou from all of us for their kindness and the privilege of knowing them.

Talk by Alan Hodgkinson

I am here representing Alan's sister in California, Sheila Hodgkinson.  My name is also Alan and I am Sheila's son.

To say I hold Alan Mackay in great esteem is an understatement. He was the most fascinating person I have ever known.

He knew lots about everything, and was able to find connections between the most divergent things.

His insatiable curiosity and ability to think things through led, inevitably, to his scientific success.

I believe he will be one of the giants upon whose shoulders future scientists will stand.

I've been told I share some character traits with Alan, specifically his interest in all things.  I take this as a great complement.  But I must confess that I don't have the mental strengths required for greatness.

There is great history in names.

And as we are all descendants from Scots, there is certain economy of names in the family.

Alan Mackay was named by his father Robert Mackay, in honor of his best friend Alan White, was killed in World War one.

Alan named his eldest son Robert, after his father.  And I'm named after Alan.

My mother, originally Sheila Mackay, married Peter Hodgkinson, and became Sheila Hodgkinson.

Alan Mackay married Sheilia Hague, who became the new Sheila Mackay.

And Hague shows up as the younger Robert's middle name.

I find it comforting that names are recycled, as it reminds us of those who came before us.

I do hope that this tradition continues.

Condolences from afar

We have received dozens of messages from friends and relatives around the world.  Some of them are short and formulaic - which is fine: these things are difficult to put into words.  Some of them are more personal and anecdotal.  And then there is Alison!

I would like to read some of these to you, at least some extracts.

Mary Kille, Alan's sister, wrote:

I remember, when I must have been about five, being detained by my big brother Alan, and being taught how to spell "PHLEGM!", just before a dinner party given by my parents.

After all the guests had arrived, I found myself announcing to the assembled company:

"I CAN SPELL PHLEGM!   P-H-L-E-G-M !".

The first lesson in public speaking: how to capture an audience!

Mary is now 95 years old.  She has been holding this thought for 90 years!

Humberto Terrones, Alan's PhD student, wrote:

I had the good fortune to meet Alan as my PhD advisor.

In the beginning, I thought my PhD would be 3 years and that was it.
However, my journey with Alan lasted longer: 37 years!

I knew the journey would be special because after over-using his Commodore Amiga pc in his office at Birkbeck, he decided to set up a table for me, and thus we shared the same office for most of my PhD.

In his office I learned more than one subject, met a lot of people and answered the phone when he was not in; this was great practice for my English.

He retired before I had finished my PhD but the office was not taken away. We continued sharing it and continued working as if nothing had happened.

Alan - I will miss you.

Alison Mackay, Alan's niece, wrote extensively.  I will give you just some snippets:

I have been reflecting on what role Alan and Sheila (and all of you) have had in shaping my life. He and Sheila were so unbelievably generous in providing a home for me and No 22 is by far the most significant house in my life.

I cannot tell you how important that was to me and what fun it was to arrive so late at night and to try and guess what fascinating and exotic strangers would appear at breakfast: the Japanese writers and academics, the Russian nuclear physicists etc etc.

And I recall being in hospital with a suspected burst appendix when Alan waited all night for me, quietly transferring all his old contacts into his new diary.  He never said anything with any emotional content to me but him being there meant so much.

So thank you all for being such an important part of my past and for still including me in your lives which is a great joy. Please send Alan off with my enormous admiration, love and gratitude.

Farewell

[Marcus Music]

So now it is time to say our final farewells to Alan.

Unfortunately, Alan's remains are not going to be converted into quasicrystal, although there should be some Buckminster-Fullerine, C60, like the Mackay polyhedron.  Mostly there will be carbon dioxide and water vapour.

The remaining ashes will be sprinkled outside, finally joining those of my mother Sheila who has been waiting so long for this moment.

I would like to thank everyone for coming and for celebrating with us Alan's time on earth.  We are going to re-convene shortly at the very appropriately named Five Bells pub, where I, for one, will be needing a whisky.

[Pause to hear music]