The Group’s first formal scientific meeting, attracting about 150 attendees, was held on 22 May 1964 at the Northern Polytechnic, London. This meeting was chaired by David Whiffen, and Norman Sheppard was formally elected as the first Chairman of the Group after lunch. The meeting was attended inter alia by Ed Randall and two of his then PhD students, Duncan Gillies and Derek Shaw, all of whom were later Chairmen of the NMRDG.
       

A second meeting was arranged that year on 14 September at the National Physical Laboratory, where there was already a flourishing NMR Group, including John Pople, Ray Freeman, Keith McLauchlan and Ray Abraham, and this had about 100 people attending. Finally, a third meeting was squeezed in on 17 December at The School of Pharmacy, University of London.

In 1965, there were again three NMRDG meetings, at Nottingham University, University of Sussex, and at Queen Mary College, London University (QMC), the latter hosted by Ed Randall. Thereafter the number of meetings per year varied, but three was the norm, with three in 1966, two in 1967, three again in 1968, two and an International Meeting in 1969, but only one in 1970, a meeting at Christmas having been cancelled.

A full list has been obtained except for the program of the 1982 meeting at Aston University held as part of the Royal Society of Chemistry Annual Chemical Congress. These were mainly one-day meetings but occasionally a two-day meeting was held, often in collaboration with another scientific group. The programs for all of these meetings are available on this web site.

The involvement of industrial companies and organisations has always been prominent in the NMRDG from the early days. In 1966, for example, it comprised about 44% of the total membership. Industrial talks began with a paper from Sid Knight (BP Ltd) on ‘High Field NMR’ given at the very first meeting. Many industrial scientists, such as James Page (Glaxo), attended the first and most if not all subsequent meetings. Also amongst early talks were those of Harry Willis (ICI, Plastics) ‘The problem of NMR documentation’ at the 3rd meeting, and Perkin-Elmer’s L. K. Parker on ‘The search for an optimum field strength’ at the 4th meeting.

During John Elvidge’s tenure the one-day meetings were held at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington (16/3/66), University of Swansea (22/3/67), Royal Holloway College London (19/12/67), University of Strathclyde (10/4/68), University of Birmingham (10/7/68), Explosives Research Defence Establishment (ERDE) Waltham Abbey (17/12/68) and University of Bristol (4/69). ERDE was a government explosives research site and John Elvidge recalls having to make the announcement - “Those who wish to smoke can do so in the buildings, but smoking outside is strictly prohibited”, since there were tethered rockets and explosives around.

For some years there had been a Summer School, arranged jointly with the Royal Institute of Chemistry (RIC) and held in some suitably large British university. This was largely slanted towards chemical applications which were the major interest at the time. For example, an early meeting was the RIC Summer School in Spectroscopy, held at the School of Pharmacy in London from 6-12 September 1964. The NMRDG has had no formal involvement with the organisation of these meetings, but many members either taught or attended.

Other groups have held NMR-based meetings and these include the British Radiofrequency Spectroscopy Group (BRSG) and the Industrial NMR Users’ Group (INUM).