I first met Peter Plesch in the late 1950s when he had established his vacuum techniques
in Keele and I was embarking on my PhD. My visit to Keele was to seek advice (freely
given) on handling sensitive reaction systems. I rapidly came to appreciate that Peter
operated on a somewhat higher intellectual plane than many academics. All might claim
a common goal in achieving an understanding of how reactions or other processes work.
But, while some are happy with an easy, sensible-sounding explanation, Peter took no
easy line and needed to know how things really worked.
Throughout his scientific career, Peter worked on cationic and related polymerisation
processes for which he coined the collective term cationoid polymerisations. Compared
to free-radical or living anionic polymerisations, in the earlier days cationoid
polymerisations were theoretically and experimentally difficult and constituted a
Cinderella field limited to a few aficionados; most of us positively avoided the subject. A
feature of meetings of the High Polymer Research Group in the 1960s and 70s, held in a
room with a small balcony at the Manor House Hotel in Mortonhampstead, was that
Plesch and Pepper, two of those aficionados, inhabited the balcony. When relevant, they
contributed enthusiastically to discussions (often disagreeing with each other) and their
mutual discussion on detailed and probably obscure mechanistic features descended as
‘from on high’.
Solving the detailed reaction mechanisms to produce rational explanations of cationoid
polymerisations and reliable values of kinetic parameters has been Peter’s consistent goal
for over 50 years. Unlike many people who devote their lives to a single topic, if, in order
to advance the subject, some new experimental technique was required he and his group
developed it; over the years they developed several devices and procedures to generate
more-reliable data. Peter, therefore, was a serious experimentalist as well as a careful
analyser and scrutinizer of data, data of his and of others. Over the years he freely
criticised not only the work of others but also his own work (as is apparent in this
volume) in order to develop a more complete understanding of systems. Thus, this book
reports his contributions ‘warts and all’ where one paper may criticise a preceding paper.