David TilleySend a message to

David Tilley

David Tilley

I first met David when I took up my appointment as a young Physics lecturer at the University of Essex in 1967. David had been on the staff for a couple of years then. We became friends and indeed remained friends as well as colleagues thereafter. David’s research field was somewhat remote from mine so our professional contact was about teaching and administration. Many of our memorable meetings with David and Jill were abroad in various places. We spent the summer of 1979 in Boulder, Colorado and one evening David and Jill with baby Alastair turned up absolutely shattered after driving right across the prairie. Big gin and tonics took away much of the pain. Much later, David took up his appointment in Hong Kong at the new Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) a little while before I moved to the Science University of Malaysia in Penang in 1994. Although the distance between the places is not so small, we enjoyed several visits to David and Jill in Hong Kong. I remember on one occasion my wife Pat’s enthusiasm for tourism led her and Jill into many parts of Hong Kong. David’s main responsibility at HKUST was to establish a materials characterization laboratory, which he did very well indeed. Previously his outstanding abilities as an electron microscopist had led to collaborations with colleagues with very wide-ranging interests and likewise in Hong Kong his laboratory was helpful in many ways. David once told me that he had to advise the Hong Kong jade merchants that there was no simple test equipment that they could install in their shops to detect forgeries. The forgers were just too good. We came back to England and moved to Weeley in 2001. David and Jill were already well settled in to their house in Tendring, just around the corner from us, and they were very helpful in so many ways in getting us established in a new area. For many years I was a rather incompetent crew in David’s beautiful Wayfarer dinghy, which we used to sail from the Royal Harwich Yacht Club around the Orwell. My main contribution was not deploying the anchor properly, so quite often as we ate our sandwiches down river we realised that we were slowly drifting towards the shore or perhaps into the main channel. It was very sad over the last few years to watch David’s slow decline from his cruel and untreatable illness. Nursing him through these final years was very hard for Jill, and I am sure like everybody we hope that she is able to enjoy some peaceful years with family and friends.

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