Odile Crick

Odile Speed, artist: born King's Lynn, Norfolk 11 August 1920; married 1949 Francis Crick (died 2004; two daughters); died La Jolla, California 5 July 2007.

Odile Crick had the Bohemian temperament of the artist she was. Yet probably her most famous work will always be the simple and precise diagram she drew to her husband's instructions, in March or April 1953, of the structure of DNA, the first sketch ever done of the famous double helix - used to illustrate the scientific paper in Nature announcing the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson. It has never been bettered as a simplified depiction of that shape: two intertwined ribbons linked by 10 rungs per turn.

Odile Speed met Francis Crick in the Admiralty in 1945 when, on her way home one evening, she spilled a bag of Brussels sprouts on the floor of the office where he was temporarily working. He helped her pick them up, asked her out and was refused. A few weeks later, he tried again. Crick was already married, though separated, and was to be an incorrigible flirt throughout his life, but his marriage to Odile lasted 55 years until his death in 2004.

Odile Speed was born in King's Lynn in 1920, the daughter of a jeweller and his French wife. She showed an early interest in art and studied in Vienna in the 1930s. She was about to go to the Sorbonne when the Second World War broke out. She joined the WRNS and drove trucks for some months before her fluent German caused her recruitment to a special unit listening in on German radio traffic. Later she transferred to a job translating captured torpedo manuals. This was how she met Crick, who was working on circuits in German acoustic torpedoes.

Relieved to be out of the tedium of military employment, Odile returned to art school, to St Martin's in London, and married Crick in 1949, wearing a dress of her own design. They moved to Cambridge and lived at first in a tiny, spartan flat in some poverty: twice they had to pawn their typewriter for cash.

She taught at the "Tech" (now Anglia Polytechnic University) before child-rearing took priority. Gabrielle was born in 1951 and Jacqueline in 1954. A fine cook and a convivial host, Odile often fed and entertained first Jim Watson and Maurice Wilkins as they schemed their way to the double helix, then later the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who became a good friend and convalesced in Odile's care after her ultimately unsuccessful operations for cancer.

When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: "He was always saying that kind of thing." But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable.

In the 1960s, the Cricks' parties at their home in Portugal Place, Cambridge or their cottage near Haverhill became much wilder, especially when shared with the polygamous pornographic sculptor John Gayer Anderson or the wealthy LSD dealer Henry Todd. At one party, a nude model posed on a couch to encourage the guests to be amateur artists. Fascinated by the female form, Odile liked to paint curvaceous nudes, the models including her husband's secretaries or au pairs hired to look after the children.

In the 1970s the Cricks moved to California, dividing their time between a suburban hilltop in La Jolla and a house in the desert. Odile never lost her grace and charm as she cared for Francis selflessly during his three-year battle with cancer, though in her eighties herself. Fit till the end, she died after a short illness.

Matt Ridley

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