He was quite old, nearly 86 so he retired almost 20 years ago.

But I, like many people that retire, he had remained involved with our school of chemistry.

And then I saw him really quite regularly.

I think it's important for you to understand that when I started working at universities, they didn't have training courses to tell people how to teach.

I was given almost no instruction at all just a couple of days and then put in front of students.

And so I, and many of my colleagues who are in the similar position, relied on people like Harold Toe help us to teach us how to teach.

Harold had Bean at Nottingham for a really very long time.

He was already a lecturer here in 1958 and I think perhaps even in the early 19 fifties.

So he spent his whole life teaching at this university on DDE.

When I was telephoned about his death, I had somebody sitting in my office who was a student here in the early 19 nineties and pulls immediate reaction was how sad Harold got me through my organic chemistry finals.

And over the last few days I've had lots of emails from people who former students saying that they remember even from the 19 sixties, how much he taught and how they learned from him.

Harold was a fantastic example of how to be a tutor, how to look after the undergraduates whose care he was responsible for.

In fact, I once discovered that Harold had driven with the father of one of the students from Nottingham, which is in the middle of the in England, right to the South Coast, because one of his two teas was thought to be suicidal.

And Harold sat in the car outside the youth hostel all night to catch the student before he could come out and threw himself off a cliff.

Heralds research Interest was in nuclear magnetic resonance NMR, and he was the first person in the school of chemistry who really understood any mile spectroscopy and their generations of organic chemist here who owe their success of their thesis to his help in unraveling the spectra.

Harold was a very pleasant on dhe kind person, not a ttle, conceited and always prepared to help people.

He was also somebody who worked very hard, but without boasting about the fact that he was working.

He was the sort of person who when you had the problem, you could go and ask him.

What should I do?

I'm just like everything in life.

When you do it for the first time, you get worried about Am I doing the right thing?

And so just being reassured that there was somebody there that you could ask, the advice was very important.