Dr. Elizabeth Allin

Born July 8, 1905, in Blackwater, at the time a hamlet of six houses and a store, Elizabeth Allin went on to earn a PhD at Cambridge in atomic physics. This after attending a one-room school in Sunderland and high school in Port Perry where she developed a love for basketball and mathematics. Eventually, as a student at the University of Toronto, it was the love of mathematics that won over and led her into the field of nuclear physics specializing in atomic and molecular spectroscopy.

In 1934, after returning from her study in England, she worked as a researcher with the National Research Council of Canada and in 1941 assumed a professorship at the University of Toronto from which she retired in 1972. Accounts of her work offer particular recognition of her involvement with the Canadian military during the second world war.

Her research was set aside and she may have been the only woman in Canada instructing Canadian soldiers in radio and radar mechanics. To this endeavour she is noted to have stated. “The boys, airmen and sailors, didn’t seem to be surprised to have a woman teaching them.

They took it in their stride like they did everything else.” In The Green Pastures of Old Brock, Jack Gordon opines that “Dr. Elizabeth Allin will be remembered as one of Brock Township’s most gifted daughters”.