First Old Azurian at St John's College Cambridge

Dr Patrick Lever Willmore

Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge, Distinguished Seismologist

1921-1994

Patrick Willmore was the first Old Azurian to go up to St John’s College Cambridge. He was awarded a minor scholarship by the college in December 1938, to read Natural Sciences. On May 7 1946 The Times published his election to a fellowship of St John’s College, another first for an Old Azurian. He remained at St John’s College as a research scientist until the early 1950s.

One of the most unusual research projects he worked on involved a two-month cruise aboard the submarine HMS Talent in 1950. There were two main objectives. The first was to calculate the sea surface. Large land masses gravitationally attract the sea so that it slopes away from the land. This can result in navigational errors of up to half a mile when trying to fix a position by measuring the altitude of a heavenly body above the horizon. The second objective was to try to locate large rock masses buried beneath the sea bed. The instruments used were extremely sensitive to movement, making a surface ship unsuitable, hence the use of a submarine.

In the years 1950-51 Willmore, still a research student, became involved with a government-sponsored study of volcanic earthquakes in the Caribbean that had been causing considerable damage. As part of this study Willmore, who had previously designed the seismometer that bears his name, had to hurriedly design simple shock recorders that could be deployed in the field. As a result of this study Willmore suggested that monitoring major seismic events while they were in progress gave no insight into their cause, and proposed setting up a chain of seismographs to locate earthquakes and events leading up to them. The proposal was accepted, leading to the setting up of the Volcano Research Department, later renamed Seismic Research Centre, in Trinidad.

It must have been about this time that Patrick obtained his Doctorate. (The first reference that I have found to P L Willmore as Dr. Willmore was in February 1952. - Ed.)

Willmore continued to pioneer the concept of monitoring seismic activity, notably in Canada where he proposed setting up a network of seismographs at 500-mile intervals across the whole of Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic Circle to the Great Lakes. The idea came to him when he was Canada’s delegate at a conference on Nuclear Bomb Inspection. It is possible that the budget for carrying out the idea would never have been found if the network had not been dual purpose - locating nuclear explosions as well as earthquakes.

In 1964 the International Seismological Centre was set up in Edinburgh with Willmore as its Director. Prior to that Willmore had been the Director of the International Seismological Summary, an organisation that had been cataloguing earthquakes since 1918.

Willmore’s greatest expertise lay in seismological instrumentation. The seismometer that he designed whilst he was a research student at Cambridge was adopted for use throughout the world. He was the inventor named in several patents. The latest version of the Willmore short period seismometer (detecting seismic waves with frequencies of 1-10 Hz) is still being manufactured and sold. He died in Berkshire in 1994.