Thinking about Murray......

There are countless examples of how Murray’s originality and brilliance were an inspiration to all of us and the eulogies of Lawrie, Dominique and Daniel highlighted some of these. As my personal tribute, I would like to recall two particular episodes – separated by nearly 50 years – that cemented my admiration for this thoughtful and caring man.

Around 1966, I was in the 3^rd year of my PhD and started to put together the various programming ‘chunks’ for analysing the raw data from the SUGAR Pilot array, including the calculation of the direction of the shower. One day, Murray came to me with 3 sets of raw timing data, supposedly collected from an ‘event’ detected by the 3 pilot stations, and asked me to tell him from where in the sky the primary particle had originated. The intention was to check the accuracy of the program’s calculations. After several days’ of digging deep into high school trigonometry, my feeble knowledge of astronomy and various star maps – I came up with the answer of ‘Betelgeuse’ – which was correct. Not sure why Murraychose this particular star. I think he just liked saying ‘Beetle Juice’.

Fast forward to 2013, after Evelyn’s passing and while chatting to Murray at one of our Phillip’s Foote gatherings, I mentioned that I had been for several years a volunteer with Lane Cove council, providing transport for (mostly elderly) people needing to get to various appointments. Murraypiped up “I could do that”!  So, I sent him the  contact details by email and phoned a few weeks later to see if he had started yet. He said that he hadn’t received anything from me. It’s then that I learnt that although he was quite adept with a computer, he wasn’t connected to the internet. In the end, I sent him all the details by snail mail and he performed several months of transport duties, much to the delight of his ‘clients’, who were invariably much younger than Murray. It turned out that one of my ‘clients’ lived round the corner from Murray in Greenwich, so this was a good excuse for our frequent coffee meetings near Murray’s home, after I had completed my drop-off. Don joined us on one of these.