Godfrey Stafford

Godfrey Harry Stafford CBE, FRS (15 April 1920 – 30 July 2013), was a British physicist and directed the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories from 1969 to 1981. He went on to be a master at St Cross College, Oxford and president of the Institute of Physics. In 1950 Dr. Stafford married Helen Goldthorp Clark, an Australian biologist. He has a son and twin daughters and lived near Oxford.

Early life and the Navy Stafford was born in England in 1920 but moved to South Africa at the age of 8. He attended the University of Cape Town, where he came top of his class for physics and subsequently did an MSc researching cosmic rays in 1941. He joined the South African Naval Forces as a lieutenant electrical officer concerned with degaussing in the southern hemisphere.

With the end of hostilities, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as Ebden Scholar of the University of Cape Town, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1950. He later accepted a post with the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as the head of its Biophysics Sub-Division. In 1954 after years in Pretoria, Dr. Gerry Pickavance offered a job at Harwell in the Cyclotron Group.

Rutherford Laboratory The Rutherford Laboratory came into being in 1957 with Gerry Pickavance as the first Director and Stafford as the head of the Proton Linear Accelerator (PLA) Group. The PLA achieved its first full energy beam in 1959. By 1963 with the PLA a well established machine he became responsible for the high energy physics programme for the Nimrod (synchrotron). Stafford became Deputy Director on 1 April 1966. He has had close association with CERN, where he participated in the SC polarization experiment and various committee work,

Later work and titles Stafford was the second master of St Cross College, Oxford from 1979 to 1987.