Derek Jackson

Derek Ainslie Jackson, OBE, DFC, AFC, FRS

Biography Derek Jackson was born in 1906, the son of Welsh businessman Sir Charles Jackson. He was one of a pair of twins; his twin brother was Charles Vivian Jackson (1906–1936), known as Vivian. Derek was educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a first in part I of the natural sciences tripos and graduated with honours in 1927.

In World War II, Jackson distinguished himself in the RAF, making an important scientific contribution to Britain's air defences and to the bomber offensive. He flew more than a thousand hours as a navigator, many of them in combat in night-fighters, with No. 604 (County of Middlesex) Squadron based at RAF Middle Wallop. He was decorated with the DFC, AFC and OBE. This war record stands in contrast to his stated desire at the war's inception to keep Britain out of fighting Germany. For the rest of his life, Jackson, appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947, lived as a tax exile in Ireland, France and Switzerland. He continued his spectroscopic work in France at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and was made a chevalier de la Légion d'honneur.

A "rampant bisexual", Jackson was married six times, and also lived for three years with Angela Culme-Seymour, the half-sister of Janetta Woolley, one of his wives. The others included a daughter of Augustus John, Pamela Mitford (one of the Mitford sisters), a princess (the widow of Ernest zu Hohenlohe), and several femmes fatales including Barbara Skelton (in whose obituary in The Independent is noted her remark that it was "not for love that (she) married Professor Jackson", he being identified as "the millionaire son of the founder of the News of the World").

Books and publications