Later years and honours

He was knighted in 1914.[19] During World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve the
practical problems of submarine detection by sonar.[20] In 1916 he was awarded the Hector Memorial
Medal. In 1919 he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor
and Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron
(in 1932), John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for an experiment which was to be known as splitting
the atom using a particle accelerator, and Edward Appleton for demonstrating the existence of
the ionosphere. In 1925, Rutherford pushed calls to the Government of New Zealand to support
education and research, which led to the formation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial
Research (DSIR) in the following year.[21] Between 1925 and 1930 he served as President of the
Royal Society, and later as president of the Academic Assistance Council which helped almost 1,000
university refugees from Germany.[2] He was appointed to the Order of Merit in the 1925 New Year
Honours[22] and raised to the peerage as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, of Cambridge in the County
of Cambridge in 1931,[23] a title that became extinct upon his unexpected death in 1937. In 1933,
Rutherford was one of the two inaugural recipients of the T. K. Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal
Society of New Zealand as an award for outstanding scientific research.[24][25]

Lord Rutherford's grave inWestminster Abbey

For some time before his death, Rutherford had a small hernia, which he had neglected to have
fixed, and it became strangulated, causing him to be violently ill. Despite an emergency operation in
London, he died four days afterwards of what physicians termed "intestinal paralysis", at Cambridge.
[26]
After cremation at Golders Green Crematorium,[26] he was given the high honour of burial
in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and other illustrious British scientists.[27]