Catalogue description Department of Scientific and Industrial Research: Laboratory of the Government Chemist: Correspondence and Papers

Files on organisation, functions and research at the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, including entry books, registers of samples and applications for privileges, registered and unregistered laboratory files, work books of individual members of staff and the papers of Major A G Grimwade and J J Fox, Government Chemist, 1936-1944.

Also files of its predecessors, the laboratories of the Board of Customs and Board of Inland Revenue, and the Government Laboratory including the minutes for 1803 of the Hydrometer Committee of the Royal Society on New Hydrometers.

Subjects covered include testing on motor fuel, foodstuffs, drugs, tobacco, fluoridation and diamonds; preservation of works of art and environmental studies; the 'Piltdown Man' controversy of the 1940s and 1950s. The series also contains establishment files, and papers on the proposed dispersal of the laboratory in the 1970s.

See also PJ 10