Sir John Charnley Interviewed by Thomas Lean
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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Sir John Charnley Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/30 IMPORTANT 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. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/30 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Charnley Title: Sir Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Aeronautical engineer, Date and place of birth: Liverpool government scientist 4 September 1922 Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Carpenter Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): (Tracks 1+2) 2010.10.07, (Tracks) 3+4 2010.10.13, (Tracks 5 - 8) 2010.10.27, (Tracks 9- 11) 2010.11.19, (Tracks 12-15) 2010.11.24, (Track 16) 2010.12.02, (Tracks 17-20) 2010.12.03, (Tracks 21-23) 2010.12.16 Location of interview: Interviewee's home, Camberley. Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz Total no. of tracks 23 Mono or stereo Stereo Total Duration: 26:11:43 (HH:MM:SS) Additional material: Video interview, photographs. Copyright/Clearance: © The British Library Interviewer’s comments: Sir John Charnley Page 1 C1379/30 Track 1 [Track 1] This is interview with Sir John Charnley, seventh of October 2010. John, I’d like to start this interview just by asking you when you were born. Fourth of September 1922. Zero four, zero nine, 22 is a thing that I quote to everyone. In Liverpool. It was a suburb of Liverpool, the south end of Liverpool, the south end of Liverpool docks, a little suburb called Garston and Springwood - we’ll probably come to that later - but essentially born in Garston. Shrewsbury Road I think it was. In Garston, on a hill and just a big Victorian house. I think it might have belonged to my grandmother, I don’t know. But that’s where I was born. And lived there until I must have been about… five or six, something of… maybe seven, don’t know, but that’ll slot in. And… my father was a Liverpool man: George Edward Charnley, and my mother was Catherine Wederburn Mathieson [ph], native name, from Workington in Cumberland. And her mother was still alive, she was my Nana, my grandmother, my Nana. Very important member of the family. And my father’s family, there weren’t any other generations and he was the only one still alive. So there was my father and my mother and a grandmother on my mother’s side. That was the way it all started. Was that the grandmother who owned the house? That’s right, yep. Whether she owned it or whether she was a tenant, whether she was renting it, I wouldn’t know because I just wasn’t old enough at that stage to understand that. But she was a, quite a powerful person that I loved very much. And my mother – well, both my parents – I did love them. My father, going on, my father was a joiner in the building trade, a carpenter, a joiner in the building trade and he was one of three brothers. He was the youngest. There was Bert who was the oldest and Tom the middle, and George my father, the youngest. And they’d all served in World War I. My father just about, the other two served in, during the war my father served in the war but I think only towards the end, 1916, 17, something like that, when he was in the Royal Engineers and worked on a searchlight battery in London at the time. But very clever woodworker, dad, and that’s where my interest in engineering came from. The family was an… the eldest brother worked for Cammell Laird’s in the dockyards. The youngest brother worked on Garston Docks railways and my father was a joiner in the building trade. So they were very much a working family of practical – none of them had been to university or anything like that, not a thing. Sir John Charnley Page 2 C1379/30 Track 1 [04:26] Could you describe your father to me? As I say, a very good practical man, very much in love with my mother. The two of them loved each other, no doubt about that. Very sensitive, my father. Let’s see, he lived until he was eighty-eight, strangely enough he lived until… I’m conscious that I’m going to outlive him, or maybe that any time now I might go because that’s when he went. We enjoyed great fun together and we had, in this house that I’m speaking of, there was a cellar and there was no garden, it was in the suburb of Garston around the docks and he just went to work every morning, came home at night. I can remember in 19… in the Depression when I was about seven or eight, whatever it might have been, he was out of work and I can remember when it was settled and there was a union strike or whatever, he came home on a Friday night and announced to my mother that yes, he’d had a rise of a halfpenny an hour, and that was a rise. And so he was a tradesman, he was a good tradesman. Nothing like a motorcar or anything like that. He went to work on the tram, the Liverpool tram, if that was convenient. If it wasn’t convenient he rode to work on a bike. All weathers; I can remember him coming home covered in snow on one occasion. But I’m moving on a bit here because we left that house when I was about six, must have been about six. I’d certainly started school. I went – they were both church people, Anglican – and I went to the local Church of England school. The headmaster was a man called Ashcroft, the deputy headmaster was a man called Billy Davies [ph]. Ashcroft left soon after I arrived, I was not very good news for him. Billy Davies [ph] took over and he it was that taught me to swim and I always enjoyed swimming, very much. Why do you say you weren’t very good news for the original headmaster? Just that he left soon after I arrived. Nothing… no, no. No, no, no. Just that he left soon after I arrived. He was tall and he was succeeded by a little round man, Billy Davies [ph]. Can you describe the school to me? School was in, formally was Grassendale rather than Garston and it was on a crossroads essentially. One, two, three, in fact I think there’d be four roads and it was on that junction. It was, again, a Victorian school, which you might expect in that sort of background. Davies [ph] Sir John Charnley Page 3 C1379/30 Track 1 was the headmaster really I think of. A Miss Charleston, a Miss Forrester. Teachers were mainly women. Two-storey and a playground that was not, was pretty gravel. It was, you didn’t fall over otherwise you were grazed, no doubt about that. You’d be rushing around doing, playing this, that or the other and if you fell over you were covered in blood in no time flat. It was co-ed, again, as a church school and I can remember that the girl I always used to look at and think gosh, she’s lovely, was a girl called Phyllis Roberts [laughs]. And that was as far as it got. But when I was about five or six, can’t remember precisely, there was a new estate being built some three miles away perhaps, something of that sort, at a place called Springwood and we moved, my father and mother took me. [09:33] I was an only child. I think, I’m pretty certain, that my mother had lost a child before I was born. I’m sure she did, yeah. Why do you say that? Was it something that was discussed or something you discovered later? I discovered it later, I didn’t know at the time at all. I just discovered it later and I think it was my cousin, Jean, that knew more about this than I did. My cousin – let’s get this… my mother’s sister didn’t live far away and she had a daughter the same age as me and she, Jean was born in the August that I was born in the September. And so these two mothers with their youngsters in prams were to be seen pushing around the district as a pair and as we grew up, Jean… gosh, certainly thought the world of my mother and knew a lot about my family circumstances, in many ways more than I did. She talked to my mother about it, where I just in a sense couldn’t care less. It wasn’t something that interested me particularly at that stage. And Jean now, she’s in Canada, still alive and she has an enormous plot of the family tree and adds to it as more information becomes available.