Ann. occup. Hyg., Vol. 46, No. 7, pp. 643-644, 2002
© 2002 British Occupational Hygiene Society
Published by Oxford University Press
Obituary: Peter Isaac
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A university may rarely decide that one of its professors is so distinguished that he or she deserves an honorary degree. Peter Isaac’s possibly unique distinction for an engineer was that he was awarded a Doctorate of Letters 16 years after his retirement, not as an honorary degree, but by the normal route of submitting a range of publications in a literary field. BOHS knew Peter as its founding secretary and editor of its history, but this was a small part of his many-sided career.
Peter received what he described as a classical education at Felsted School, London, but nevertheless became an engineer with the Great Western Railway in 1940, at the age of 19. In 1946 he moved to Newcastle to become a Lecturer in Civil Engineering at King’s College, which later became the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. An interest in public health engineering rapidly developed, and in the autumn of 1951 he benefited from a Rockefeller Foundation studentship to study in the Graduate School of Engineering at Harvard. He spent some of his time on a course in industrial hygiene in the School of Public Health, and there met another Englishman, David Hickish. He was able to visit various industrial concerns, and in Pittsburgh met Ted Hatch, then a leading industrial hygienist. David and Peter both attended the 1952 AIHA Conference in Cincinnati. When they returned to Britain in September, they approached Thomas Bedford, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, about the foundation of a British society. Bedford wrote to various contacts, and the meeting which led to BOHS was held in the January. Peter was on the initial ad hoc committee, and when the Society was formally constituted he became honorary secretary (and David became honorary treasurer). Peter held this post until 1961, becoming president the following year.
Peter remained interested in the Society: he was on the committees of the first two Inhaled Particles symposia, he designed the first tie (the one with cogs and test-tubes), became an honorary member in 1983, and edited our history, The First Forty Years (Isaac, 1993). From 1959 to 1966 he was on the Ministry of Labour’s Industrial Health Advisory Committee. He frequently attended AGMs up until the end of the century, although he was by then unknown to most of the members. He was interested in seeing things done properly, typified perhaps by his initiative that the society’s name should officially have a definite article with a capital letter! However, professionally his interests settled more firmly in the broader field of public health engineering. He published a book on the subject in 1953, and through his period as secretary of BOHS, Peter was Senior Lecturer and then Reader in Public Health Engineering at Newcastle, becoming Professor of Civil and Public Health Engineering in the newly constituted university in 1964. He had a growing role in developing countries, and also in 1964 he spent six months in Thailand, establishing a postgraduate course in public health engineering, and beginning an association that lasted into the 1980s. He was Dean of Applied Sciences at Newcastle from 1969 to 1973. For ten years, he was a partner in an engineering consultancy. Through most of the 1970s he was on the Council of the Institute of Civil Engineers; he was president of the Institute of Public Health Engineers in 1977–78, and became an honorary fellow in 1986, and was awarded their gold medal in 1987. Newcastle still has a Peter Isaac Prize for the best all-round student in environmental engineering.
Occupational hygienists might regard public health engineering as Peter’s second career, but perhaps his greatest distinction was in his third, his study of the history of the British book trade. While still secretary of BOHS in the 1950s, Peter had begun publishing in this field. Simultaneously with his period on the Council of the Institute of Civil Engineers in the 1970s, he was on the committee of the Bibliographical Society. In 1983–4 he was Sanders Reader in Bibliography at the University of Cambridge, and in the years following his retirement in 1981 he was able to add to his long series of publications on various aspects of book trade history and its personalities, which led to his D.Litt. in 1997, and which continued up until his death in June this year. The British Book Trade Index began under his direction in 1983. This is a computerized index of the 70 000 printers, publishers, booksellers, stationers, papermakers, engravers or auctioneers who worked in England or Wales between 1269 and 1851. The work is available on CD-ROM, and its development continues at the University of Birmingham.
Young and even middle-aged members who saw him at an AGM might wonder who he was, but if they engaged him in conversation they would find expertise on fascinating byways of scholarship. I once made a throwaway comment to him about Roman engineering, and he sent me a reprint of his paper on Roman water supply and drainage (Isaac, 1980). It is hard to improve on the summary in The Times obituary (3 July): ‘Peter Isaac will be remembered for his peppery yet benign nature, his ready wit and uncompromising didacticism and, above all, for his sharp intellect and scholarship.’ We knew him as a founder of BOHS, but we knew less than half.
Peter is survived by his wife Marjorie, whom he married in 1950, and by a son and daughter.
TREVOR OGDEN
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Isaac P. (1980) Roman public health engineering. Proc Instn Civ Engrs Part 1; 68: 215–39.
Isaac P. (ed.) (1993) The British Occupational Hygiene Society. The first forty years. Derby: The British Occupational Hygiene Society. ISBN 0 9520332 0 8.
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