Jack Drummond

He was murdered, together with his wife and 10-year-old daughter, in what became known as the Dominici affair, on the night of 4–5 August 1952 near Lurs, a village or commune in the Basses-Alpes department (now Alpes-de-Haute-Provence) of Southern France.

[9] He was the son of Colonel John Drummond of the Royal Horse Artillery and Nora Gertrude McQuie, who had resided at 65 Howard Road, Clarendon Park, Leicester.

Their marriage lasted 24 years until in 1939 it broke up because of Drummond's affair with his secretary and co-author, Anne Wilbraham (born 10 December 1907).

In 1914 he moved to the Cancer Hospital Research Institute where he worked with Casimir Funk who had coined the word vitamine (from vital amine).

[14] In 1919, he moved to University College London (UCL) to work on physiological chemistry, the precursor to modern biochemistry.

He published the results of this study as the book—co-authored with his future second wife Anne Wilbraham—The Englishman's Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet in 1939.

He recognised that rationing was the perfect opportunity to attack what he called "dietetic ignorance" and that, if successful, he would be able not just to maintain but to improve the nation's health.

Thanks to Drummond's advice, the effect of rationing was to introduce more protein and vitamins to the diet of the poorest in society, while the better off were obliged to cut their consumption of meat, fats, sugar, and eggs.

It was also surprising that a man who had publicly advocated the exhaustive testing of new agrochemicals should have been responsible for the development of possibly harmful products such as Cornox, based on Dichlorprop, one of the chlorine-based phenoxy family of hormone weed-killers descended from ICI's wartime invention MCPA.

"[23] On the evening of 4 August 1952, while on holiday in France in their green Hillman estate car, the Drummonds stopped by the side of the N96 main road, less than 200 metres from a farmhouse called La Grand'Terre.

It was Gustave who claimed to have found the three dead bodies around 5:30 am on the morning of 5 August, and who flagged down a passing motorcyclist, Jean-Marie Olivier, telling him to fetch the police.

Near the stone bridge over the railway, a cross with children's votive offerings marks the spot where Elizabeth's body was found.

However, both the police investigation and the conduct of the trial had been widely criticised and, after two inconclusive inquiries, President René Coty commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

Coty was succeeded in 1959 by President Charles de Gaulle, who ordered Dominici's release on humanitarian grounds, but did not pardon him, nor grant his request for a retrial.