The Foxhill Memorial is a roadside display outside the Rutherford Memorial Hall next to the Foxhill School. Location map. The Hall was the school building in Ern's day. His family lived over the road in a house that was demolished in 19XX. The display tells the story of his life at Foxhill.

   Ernest Rutherford started research at Canterbury College in 1893 as a requirement of his Master's degree. The college didn't have a physics lab so initially he worked in various spaces in the Chemistry department, "the old tin shed" but had nowhere where he could leave his equipment set up. He tried various corridors and then the Great Hall, until it was needed for end-of-year exams. In the early summer of 1893-4 he worked in one of the dens below the tiered seating under the Clock tower lecture rooms. It is not known for sure which one. In April of 1894 he and Jack Erskine applied for the den under the west end of the clock tower rooms. There he completed the work on the high frequency magnetisation of iron for which he was to to be awarded an Exhibition of 1851 Scholarship.

   Prior to Rutherford, the Den had been used for undergraduates to hang their gowns when they were leaving the college grounds. In the 1950s it was used as the rooms for the Christian Students Association. In 1956, when there was a belated move to honour Rutherford, a bronze marker was mounted on the wall outside this room. In 1977, when the University of Canterbury completed its shift to its new site at Ilam, the old Canterbury College buildings were presented to the city for use as an Arts Centre. A committee comprising representatives of the Arts Centre, the University of Canterbury, the Royal Society and the Canterbury Museum, was established to make the most of this small space as a memorial to Rutherford. I was on that committee and suggested the layout that was adopted. A floor to ceiling window divided the space into half. Behind the window I and the museum display staff created Rutherford at work. Jack Fergusson (Chemistry) worked with the display staff to utilise the four remaining bays. They used display panels to tell the story of the four periods of Rutherford's research life (Cavendish, McGill, Manchester and Cavendish). A smaller display on the entrance wall told a little of his life and work in New Zealand. (We were pretty ignorant about this at the time.) The display was opened on the 20th of September 1978 by Murray Gell-Man, the Nobel Prizewinner in physics for 1969.

   Two directors later in 1986, without consulting the other partners, the Arts Centre buggered the Den when it wanted the tiered classroom above turned into flat display space. The Den was a national disgrace for many years thereafter.

We owe the existence of this collection to several people but principally Howard Barnes, Ern's colleague and one of his first collaborators, at McGill. Usually scientific equipment continues in use and gets modified out of recognition or cannibalised for use in other experiments. Barnes argued that Ern was world famous and it would be a crime against posterity to destroy his apparatus. The equipment was therefore stored in a cupboard, where it remained undisturbed until 1937. After Rutherford's death, Arthur Eve (ex-McGill) was asked to write the official biography. Eve wrote to his old colleagues at McGill for photos of the apparatus to use in his book. (facing page 90). Ferdinand Terroux, a lecturer and former Cambridge graduate student of Ern's organised the photos. From time to time the apparatus was taken out of storage to show visitors. In 1950 Ferdinand Terroux proposed to Norman Shaw, the department chairman, that an official Rutherford Museum and Conference Room be constructed. In 1964 Norman Shaw bequeathed C$2000 to establish the museum and the McGill Graduates' Society supplied the rest of the funds for its construction in one room of the Macdonald Physics Building. The Museum was officially opened in 1967 and Ferdinand Terroux was appointed the honourary curator, a position he was proud of for the rest of his life. (I met him in 1982 whilst researching my book.)

Monty Cohen, a medical physicist at McGill, became honorary curator in 1984. (Monty died of cancer Jan 29th 2002. A new honorary curator will be appointed shortly.) In 1977 the Physics department moved to its new building, the Ernest Rutherford building, and the decision was made to leave the museum in the building in which Rutherford had done his work. In 1993 this decision was reversed and on the 1st of Oct 1993 a new museum was opened in a larger room on the first floor of the Physics department. It is open by appointment only, Monday to Friday. They are planning their own web page.