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Name of creator

Miss E.W.D. Steel

Biographical history

Ella Wentworth Dyne Steel (“Miss Steel”) arrived at CERN in 1955 after career in refugee work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Her first task, as a Divisional Administrative Officer, was to ensure good administrative practice in the Proton Synchrotron (PS) Division directed by John Adams.

In 1961, she was appointed by John Adams, by then acting Director-General, to lead the newly created the Scientific Conference Secretariat, unit. During her mandate the SCS organized 39 Conferences and 10 schools of physics, and was also ‘loaned’ to laboratories in other countries to help with their conferences and schools. She acquired an international reputation for this work and CERN became the first physics laboratory in Europe to possess a specialized unit of this kind.

In 1971 she left the SCS to assist Charles Peyrou, the leader of the Track Chambers (TC) Division. A large part of her work involved the compilation of a list of reports from laboratories worldwide on the experiments carried out at CERN : Yellow reports CERN-76-02 and CERN-76-02-Add.1. It took four years to collect and list around 1,000 reports. She retired from CERN in September 1976, but was called back to organize the inauguration of the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) in May 1977, which was attended by 3,000 participants.

She continued her interest in travel and her work as a hospital volunteer during her retirement, and spent ten years assembling the archives of the English Church in Geneva and writing its history. She was awarded the MBE in 1973 and died in 2001.

* Source: 

- A 'one and only' looks back - Author: Steel, Ella Wentworth Dyne
- CERN Courier, February 2002 (p.33)

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

Miss E.W.D. Steel, January 1986