Clerihews on scientists

In Competition No. 3219, you were invited to supply clerihews on well-known scientists, past and present.

The subject of the first ever clerihew — a pseudo-biographical quatrain, AABB, playful in tone, metrically clunky — which was written, for fun, in about 1890 by schoolboy E.C. Bentley (and illustrated by his chum G.K. Chesterton) was a scientist:

Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium.

But it was all downhill from there, it seems. In his introduction to The Complete Clerihews of E.Clerihew Bentley, the poet Gavin Ewart contends that ‘nobody much except Bentley has ever written really good clerihews’. Even literary giant W.H. Auden, he says, doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

That didn’t put you off, though, and in a large and spirited entry honourable mentions go to Barbara Knight, John Maddicott, David Shields, Nicholas Stone, Philip Wilson, G.N. Crockford, P.T. Brown, Iain Morley, Max Gutmann and Rachael Churchill.