1982. Honours and awards Penney was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946. He was its treasurer from 1956 to 1960 and vice-president from 1958 to 1969. He became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1962, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1970, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1973. He received the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1967. Among the honours he received in 1969 was the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society, the Glazebrook Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics and the James Alfred Ewing Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and he was awarded the Kelvin Gold Medal the following year. He was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Melbourne in 1956, the University of Durham in 1957, the University of Oxford in 1959, the University of Bath in 1966 and by the University of Reading in 1970. For his services to the United States, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1946. Penney was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1946, and was raised to Knight Commander of the order in 1952. He was made a life peer, taking the title Baron Penney, of East Hendred in the Royal County of Berkshire on 7 July 1967, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1969. As a life peer he was entitled to sit in the House of Lords, but did so only twelve times between 1967 and 1973, and voted for only three bills: for sanctions on Rhodesia in 1968, for an amendment to the redistribution bill in 1969, and for the accession of the United Kingdom to the European Communities in 1970. Death and legacy In later years he admitted to qualms about his work but felt it was necessary. When aggressively questioned by the McClelland Royal Commission investigating the test programmes at Monte Bello and Maralinga in 1985, he acknowledged that at least one of the twelve tests had unsafe levels of fallout. However, he maintained that due care was taken and that the tests conformed to the internationally accepted safety standards of the time. Jim McClelland broadly accepted Penney's view but anecdotal evidence to the contrary received wide coverage in the press. By promoting a more Australian nationalist view, then current in the government of Bob Hawke, McClelland had