TIL "Mr. Whippy"

That van has a lot more character than the Econovans I tend to see.
credit: freeindex

Via a recent article in the New York Times, a reminder of somewhat unusual alternative chemistry jobs:

The Bank of England has decided to honor a scientist with its next bank note design. One of the nominees? Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female prime minister.... 

...Mrs. Thatcher, then Margaret Hilda Roberts, studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, and after graduating went to work as a chemist at J. Lyons, a British restaurant chain that also sold its own lines of food and, for a while, some of the world’s first business computers. 

The claim that Mrs. Thatcher helped invent soft-serve ice cream while at Lyons is widely distributed, even appearing in the address given at her funeral in 2013 by the then bishop of London, who described her as “part of the team that invented Mr. Whippy,” the major British soft-serve brand. 

Charles Moore, her authorized biographer, is skeptical. “She was quite a good chemist as a student at Oxford; she was a serious chemist,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. She worked at J. Lyons for about 18 months, he said. Of the soft-serve claim, he added: “I’ve never been able to establish that it’s definitely true.”...

As a very big fan of soft-serve ice cream (Dairy Queen, chocolate), I am amused to learn of "Mr. Whippy." Cute vans!