Reginald W. James

Early life James was born on 9 January 1891 in London. After displaying adolescent skills as a maths prodigy, he was awarded a stipend to pursue studies in St. John's College, Cambridge.

Career James signed on as an expedition physicist in the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, which departed England on the Endurance in August 1914; James had expected to winter over at the expedition's projected base on the Weddell Sea but the ice-beset expedition vessel never made Antarctic landfall and, with the rest of the ship's company, James found himself a castaway. His journal of life on a Weddell Sea ice floe and on Elephant Island survives.

He specialised in problems of X-ray crystallography. His professional career reached culmination in 1953–1957 when he served as Vice-Chancellor of the university. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1955.

James began the process of his retirement in 1958 and, beset by progressive cardiovascular disease, wound down his teaching duties over the following five years. He died in Cape Town at age 73 on 7 July 1964, and was survived by three children.