Dr Bob Parkinson Interviewed by Tom Lean

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Dr Bob Parkinson Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/05 © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk IMPORTANT This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk . © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no. C1379/05 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Parkinson Title: Dr surname: Interviewee’s Robert (‘Bob’) Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Aerospace Engineer Date and place of 1941, London birth: Mother’s occupation: Nurse Father’s occupation: Civil Servant Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 2010:02:15, 2010:03:29, 2010:05:19, 2010:07:15, 2010:11:08, 2011:01:19 Location of interview: The British Library Name of interviewer: Dr Thomas Lean Type of recorder: Marantz PMD660 on secure digital cards [tracks 1 – 6] Marantz PMD660 on compact flash [tracks 7 - 15] Recording format: WAV 16 bit 48 kHz, Total no. of tracks 15 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 19 hrs. 27 min. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Open except for section in track 15 [56:20 - 58:48] which is closed for 30 years until June 2041. Interviewer’s comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Bob Parkinson Page 1 C1379/05 Track 1 Track 1 February 15 th today isn’t it? Okay, we have [laughs] ignition, we have lift off [both laugh]. Right, this is an interview with Dr Bob Parkinson on February 15 th 2010. Right, I think we’d like to start off with talking a little bit about your early life and childhood really, when and where were you born? Okay, I was – I was started by World War Two [laughs], I was born in London, my … parents met in London and my father lived in London, my mother was a nurse who was working in London at the time, this was 1941 when I was born and – but my mother came from Sheffield so fairly soon after I was born my mother certainly moved back to Sheffield to her parents and my father followed – my father was a civil servant and got transferred up to the north of England and followed. So I was brought up – up to the age of thirteen in Sheffield, so I don’t really think of myself as a Londoner, I’m a Yorkshire man really [both laugh], except that I wasn’t born there. And to that extent – and then when I was thirteen my father’s job moved again and we moved down to Cheltenham which I stayed in until I went off to university. But in fact Sheffield is important in terms of why did I become a scientist which I guess is your next question, or why did I become an engineer actually. Because my mother was – as I said was a nurse and if she’d been anything else she could have been a singer, and my father was an excise officer in Customs & Excise at that time so that – and left school at fifteen and gone into the civil service. The family didn’t have enough money to put him through university in 1920, 1930 period. But my grand – my maternal grandfather was, being Sheffield, in steel, in wire actually was his particular speciality, he – in those days perhaps wouldn’t have called him an engineer but he was an engineer and got me the idea that this was interesting, this was something fun. He taught me how to use a micrometer I remember and I’ve still got one of them hidden away somewhere, and things of that nature. And because we were living in Sheffield we were very close to my maternal grandparents rather than the paternal ones which were still in London. And so that was an influence. And then I guess – I was trying to work this out … when I was nine or ten I went through a © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Bob Parkinson Page 2 C1379/05 Track 1 phase, I suppose lots of kids do, of wanting to know about everything and I remember having little notebooks that were sort of different things that you wrote down. And … found out I wasn’t any good at sports or football or any of these – these nature so you tend to go to more intellectual things. And I remember … about the only school prize I ever got was in my last years at the primary school and I actually – I think it was a second or third prize and I probably only got it because somebody was ill that day, which was a book about science. And it was actually probably – one of the secrets – it was probably a little bit older than I was, but I – but one of the secrets with kids that age and I did it with my son is if you don’t tell them that it’s outside their grasp and I actually read this with great interest and that kind of got me going. [04:40] And I remember that I then passed my Eleven Plus and went to grammar school and about that time the first edition of the Eagle came out with Dan Dare and so forth and all sorts of other things that kind of got me interested in space, I started reading science fiction, reading Arthur Clarke and things of that nature, and so that got me interested in – in science and space and so forth. But it – and at school I was reasonably – well I was good at physics, I was reasonably good at hard sciences, I was not very good at things like biology where you had to remember lots of things, I’ve never been much good at remembering a million names, but I was quite good at working out how things went together and so forth. And in fact it was basically I think that because of my maternal grandfather that ultimately when I went off to university I went off to do engineering rather than physics. So sort of practical rather than theoretical then? Yeah, and it was probably reverse prejudice [both laugh] at the time, all my sixth form compatriots went off and did physics or maths and I was the one engineer who went off and did engineering and didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge and did this thing. But it was – probably was a matter of I’d like to feel that it was something that you’re going to build or do things afterward rather than just do theoretical things, yeah. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Bob Parkinson Page 3 C1379/05 Track 1 Hmm, could we sort of backtrack over a few of the things you’ve mentioned already, it’s interesting saying you were born in London but consider yourself a Yorkshire man, do you have any memories about growing up in London at all? No no, I don’t know when we – exactly when we moved out of London but I was probably not more than one or two years old … yes, I was – I must have been – I was still in a pram [laughs], I know that from the photographs at the time when we were in – in Sheffield again. So I – probably didn’t spend more than a year in London, erm … What are your earliest memories then of being a child? Earliest memories of – in Sheffield, the house we lived in in Sheffield, I remember the first day we moved into that, that I have this – the first memory I have is this is your room in this new house that we were just moving into, I have no idea when that would be exactly, it was before the end of the war, so I was probably about three, three and a half at the time. Because I know that – that – I remember ‘cause my father had a job looking after a factory there, used to go off in the dark of the morning and so forth and I remember my mother teaching me the alphabet by firelight because we got up – ‘cause dad had gone off to [laughs] – off to do his work and we didn’t switch the lights on ‘cause of the blackout and things. But we had a fire and we – she had the cards which we laid out and remember this kind of thing, so that’s as far back as my memory goes. But what do you remember of your first home then? Well I was there until I was thirteen so I remember quite a lot. Er … I could probably even sort out – if I thought hard I could probably even draw you a picture how the house worked, it was semi-detached house in the suburbs of Sheffield and nothing particularly extraordinary there, but yeah. And do you remember what your room was like at all? © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Bob Parkinson Page 4 C1379/05 Track 1 Yes, it was a fairly small room but I had a – I was an only child, which this will get complicated later, but I was an only child and so I had a room to myself right from the beginning and, erm, it was at the time that my – my mother didn’t work after I’d … so it was – it was that period of – of a typical lower middle class family things.

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