Dr John Stanley Gooden

GOODEN JOHN STANLEY : Service Number - S42308 : Date of birth - 11 Apr 1920 : Place of birth - ADELAIDE SA : Place of enlistment - UNLEY SA : Next of Kin - GOODEN CLAIRE
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John Gooden and the Birmingham proton synchrotron
Brett A. Gooden
+ Author Affiliations
Historical Records of Australian Science 32(2) 141-155 https://doi.org/10.1071/HR20008
Submitted: 6 May 2020 Accepted: 18 October 2020 Published: 1 December 2020
Abstract
During World War 2, Sir Mark Oliphant began to plan for the construction of the world’s first proton synchrotron at the University of Birmingham. In March 1945, he offered a research fellowship to an enthusiastic and highly commended young physicist, John Stanley Gooden. Gooden had graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1941, and been working at the Radiophysics Laboratory, Sydney on radar research. With his wife, he arrived in Birmingham at the end of 1945, and immediately began work on the mathematical theory, design and construction of the proton accelerator. His enthusiasm and work ethic were infectious, and he soon became the project leader. In the latter part of 1947, Oliphant arranged for Gooden and John Fremlin to visit nuclear research facilities in the United States of America (USA) to gain knowledge about American plans for proton accelerators. They spent most of their time at the Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York. The United Kingdom (UK) was exhausted after the war, and despite the best efforts of Gooden and Oliphant’s team, the construction of the synchrotron was slow. In 1947, Oliphant accepted a position as head of the Research School of Physical Sciences at the new Australian National University in Canberra. Gooden was the first staff appointment to the school. Oliphant planned to build a cyclosynchrotron at the university with Gooden as team leader. Tragically, in 1950, Gooden’s chronic nephritis deteriorated, and he died on 9 June 1950. Described by Oliphant as ‘my most brilliant student’, Gooden pioneered the theoretical basis and construction of the proton synchrotron. The Birmingham machine was finally completed in 1953, a year after the Brookhaven Cosmotron.

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Extract from:
Holden, D. (2019). Mark Oliphant and the Invisible College of the Peaceful Atom (Doctor of Philosophy (College of Arts and Science)). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/270
In November 1950 a report was written by the director general of ASIO and sent to the officer-in-charge at the Australian Capital Territory. It noted that Mark Oliphant had written to the Peace Council in Melbourne, and then referenced Dr John Stanley Gooden, who had recently died but had been a member of the Communist Party of Australia. Gooden was an Adelaidean, who had travelled with his young wife, Claire, to Birmingham in 1946 to write a PhD supervised by Oliphant. In 1948, when Oliphant confirmed that he would leave Birmingham for Canberra, he offered Gooden a position at the ANU. Gooden accepted a role, making him the first appointed member of Oliphant’s new team. In 1950, as Gooden was making plans to leave Birmingham, he fell ill with a kidney complaint. Oliphant arranged for the ANU to pay for Gooden, his wife Claire, and child to be repatriated from Birmingham to Adelaide where he died, within weeks, on 9 June 1950. Claire Gooden, following the death of her husband, continued on to Canberra to become Oliphant’s secretary; a role that, at times, she had also taken in Birmingham. Claire Russel Crocker remained at the ANU until at least 1953. As Oliphant’s secretary in Birmingham and then Canberra, it is possible that she may have also fitted the description of ‘secretary to the technical adviser of Doctor E.’, and at this time she seems to have been of interest to ASIO. In early 1953, Claire Gooden is mentioned again in Oliphant’s ASIO files. Her name, and that of her deceased husband, were listed with those of close associates from Birmingham in a notebook seized during a raid of the Communist Party of Australia’s headquarters. Others named included Dr Leonard Ulysses Hibbard and Dr William Irving Berry Smith, B.Sc. (Adel.), Ph.D. (Birm.)., both of whom had travelled to Birmingham to work with Oliphant, and had followed him to the ANU. The ANU physicist, Dr Edward Kenneth Inall was also named. Oliphant intervened when it seemed that vetting was going toprevent Inall’s appointment to ANU in 1951. ASIO was clearly concerned at the network of left leaning scientists developing at the ANU