He was born on 24 July 1900 at Nether Fordun farm near Auchterarder[1] the son of William Robertson, farmer, and his wife, Jeannie Monteath.
Under the advisement of G. G. Henderson, he produced a doctoral thesis entitled "The structural relationships of certain members of the bicyclic sesquiterpene series".
In 1928 he obtained a post in physics at the University of Michigan in the United States, but returned to the Royal Institution at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in 1930.
Mathieson and J. D. Morrison (now mass spectrometry) in Melbourne, Maria Przybylska in Ottawa, J. G. White in Princeton, Jack Dunitz in Zurich, Sidney Abrahams with Bell Telephones in New York, Walter Macintyre in Boulder, James Trotter in Vancouver, M. G. Rossmann in Cambridge, H. M. M. Shearer in Durham, and J. S. Broadley and D. M. Donaldson at Dounreay, Thurso (now atomic energy).
Ian Dawson (now electron microscopy), J. C. Speakman, George Sim, Tom Hamor and Andrew Porte (now nuclear magnetic resonance) are all back in Glasgow again, after adventures in other places, and are actively participating in our latest and most exciting work.
[6] With the structure, Robertson's group also demonstrated a clear path to apply novel computational techniques to solve the phase problem for complex organic molecules by using heavy-metal derivatives.