Janet Ramage, who has died aged 91, was a pioneering and enthusiastic teacher of physics and renewable energy. In 1958 she got a scholarship to the US. There she became the UCLA’s first female physics instructor, described in the newspapers as a “25-year-old striking blue-eyed blonde”.
Returning to her native England, she taught at Chelsea College of Science and Technology (now part of King’s College London), where she met her husband, Heinz Post, who set up a department for the history of the philosophy of science. The couple married in 1961, after which Janet moved to the Sir John Cass College (now part of London Metropolitan University) in Aldgate, where she is remembered as a first-class physics lecturer with an ability to engage with and inspire students.
In 1973 Janet and Heinz had a holiday cottage built in Switzerland, where they would go for summer holidays and winter skiing, as well as visiting friends in Europe.
Janet was also a successful textbook author. In 1979, Heinz took a sabbatical year, which the couple spent in the US. Janet used the time to write Energy: A Guidebook. It was ahead of its time in including three chapters on renewable energy. Published by Oxford University Press in 1983, it sold more than 23,000 copies.
In the 1990s she used her skills at the Open University (OU) to help a team including myself to create a resource pack for university lecturers to teach renewable energy. She contributed chapters to the successful OU textbooks Renewable Energy (1996) and Energy Systems and Sustainability (2003). She was particularly skilful at devising the student questions and answers, and the exam papers. She would work with papers piled on the grand piano in the living room, surrounded by hundreds of “historical” science books (a few written in Latin).
Born in the Isle of Wight, she was the daughter of Jane and George Ramage, who ran Pollard and Ramage, a popular chemist’s business. At the local grammar school, Janet, firmly supported by her mother, insisted on being allowed to specialise in science (not the done thing for girls at the time). She went on to study physics at the Royal Holloway College (now Royal Holloway, University of London), followed by a PhD in crystallography at the University of London, which she completed in 1956.
Janet continued working for the OU until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2014.
Heinz died in 2004. Janet’s younger brother, Peter, died in 2016.
