IN MEMORIAM MC BLACK
Imperial College Lodge #4536 UGLE
Ware Lodge #3002 UGLE
October 1950 - 26 January 2024
MC (Martin)Black (BSc,ARCS, CPhys, MInstP) passed on January 26, 2024.
Extracted from the IC Physics 1969- Year Reunion handbook, 2019
MC Black, Ware, Hertfordshire
After a sabbatical year as Hon. Secretary of Imperial College Union, I taught at Langley Park School in Beckenham. When the Headmaster appointed somebody else as Head of Physics, I realised that the time was ripe for change so I moved to Haileybury near Hertford.
After a few years, I gave up education and went to work at the University of London External Programme where I ran the Law degrees until I retired, after a period of poor health, in 2005.
That enabled me to care for my widowed Mother on an almost full time basis while she lived in a sheltered flat and her Age Related Memory problems worsened. She survived a broken ulna and neck of femur (separately) but continued to fall a lot. The local authority demanded that she live in a Care Home – but I chose it. The Home was run by a charity and looked after her until the inoperable tumour in her bladder grew enormous and she died three days after her 99th birthday.
I've been involved with the Royal College of Science Association, with periods as Honorary Secretary and President, and am a past member of the Court (i.e. The Governing Body) of Imperial College .
I'm currently Chairman of the RCS Association Trust and involved with the Institute of Physics Retired Members Section. I volunteer for a couple of charities and spend some free time Woodturning and Model Engineering. As a remunerative enterprise I lead Detective Walks on my mobility scooter.
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Dr MC Black, as he preferred to be known, was a great servant to very many organisations, It all began when he became Honorary Secretary the Royal College of Science Union for 1971-1972, That was followed by a smooth transition into the following year, 1972-1973, whereby MC was elected to the sabbatical post of IC Union Honorary Secretary, and was simultaneously Bar Committee Chair and one of very few who have edited Felix for just one edition.
Thus began MC’s decades of service to the RCSA, as Honorary Secretary (again!) from 1983 to 1994, and culminating in his years as President from 1998 to 2002, a period during which he would also sit on Imperial College Court, And from 2004, there followed twenty years at the helm of the RCSA Trust as its Chairman and as the RCS representative on the Imperial College Exploration Board. To all these College roles, MC brought his trademark characteristics: a formality and diligence in administration, a fierce custodianship of funds and strong adherence to tradition.
More recently, MC was proud to have established the ‘Dr MC Black Prize’ which has now been awarded twice to “one or more final-year undergraduate students within the Department of Physics adjudged to have produced outstanding laboratory based practical work not involving substantial use of computers”.
Outside of College MC gave similar levels of dedication and service to the role of teacher of Physics at the Langley Park School For Boys and, from from 1987 to 1990, the Haileybury School, delivering some fabulous A-level results. And likewise to his active membership of the Institute of Physics; as a Trustee and guide for the Waltham Abbey Royal Gun Powder Mills Friends Association; and as a meticulous researcher for the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Fifteen years of diligent research into Victorian Literature fed into his ‘Detective Walks’ around London, and, of course led to his Doctorate in Sherlockiana, a source of much pride. MC would tell of his earlier time as publisher for the University of London, based in Senate House which was built over 23 Montague Place, where Arthur Conan Doyle had lived in 1891.
But it’s probably true that MC’s deepest passion was reserved for Freemasonry. It all started early on, with the Imperial College Lodge, but over the years MC became involved with a great number of masonic orders. But on reflection, it was actually to his aged mother that MC reserved his most dutiful service. For over a decade MC became her near full-time carer and would shoe-horn his administration and communication into a few early-morning hours before his mother would wake at 9:30.
On the lighter side, MC was renowned for his atonal drunken singing in the Bar, for his flamboyant signatures invariably in red or green ink, and for his student prank whereby freshers, invited to take tea in his Southside room and offered ‘one lump or two’, would receive instead one or two dips of a sugar lump tied to a length of cotton.
Who doesn’t have memories of MC’s idiosyncratic dress style: his bush hat and his walking cane or, at the IC Boat Club’s Henley BBQ, his distinctive white RCS blazer; or memories of his fold-away ‘Travelscoot’ mobility scooter that would zip along slightly faster than the walking speed of his companions?
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