IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Professor Anthony Kelly

Interviewed by Thomas Lean

C1379/54

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British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/54

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Kelly Title: Professor

Interviewee’s Anthony Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Materials scientist, Date and place of birth: Hillingdon Middlesex, scientific civil servant, 1929 academic, university vice chancellor Mother’s occupation: Nurse, before marriage. Father’s occupation: Education Officer, Royal Air Force

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 23/06/2011 [1-2], 29/07/2011 [3-4], 24/08/2011 [5-6], 19/09/2011 [7-8], 11/10/2011 [9-10], 17/11/2011 [11-13], 10/01/2012 [14-17], 14/01/2012 [18-19]

Location of interview: Interviewee's home, Cambridge. Interview's office, Cambridge [14-15 only] Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital

Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz

Total no. of tracks: 19 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 11:08:01 (HH:MM:SS)

Additional material: Video interview

Copyright/Clearance: The following sections are closed for 30 years until January 2043: Track 8 [03:41 – 03:58], Track 14 [08:51 – 09:08], Track 19 [30:38-30:39] The following section is to be closed permanently: Track 5 [51:12 – 52:16]

Interviewer’s comments:

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[Track 1]

I’d like to start today, if you could introduce yourself please?

My name is Anthony Kelly. Last week I received a medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering, called the President’s Medal, and the President, when introducing me said, ‘Kelly is known throughout the world as the father of composite materials’. Now whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but it made me feel rather like the young man in the paternity case who said, ‘Well, maybe I am the father, but if so I’m not the only one’. President Browne was kindly giving me this medal because I was lucky enough to have been around at the time that carbon fibres were invented, because then I was working on high strength aluminium alloys and on ceramics and I had worked with Willie Watt at Farnborough – I was a consultant to him – that was over the making of what was called pyrolytic graphite, which was intended for the high temperature reactor. Watt says, or said, at a meeting organised by Cottrell, Frank, Bawn, in 1963 at which I spoke saying that it was a pity, that there ought to be a very stiff form of carbon. He says that stimulated him to go back to Farnborough and think of a method of making stiff fibres. Now, so that takes us back to 1963. At that time I was a lecturer in Cambridge University in metallurgy – it was called metallurgy then, not material science – and prior to that I had worked for a few years at Northwestern University, near Chicago, under a man called Morris Fine, who’s still alive and very active at the age of ninety-three. And prior to that I worked in Birmingham partly in lieu of National Service, and that’s where I first worked with Cottrell. Prior to that I was a PhD student at Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and before that I did a degree at Reading University starting just after the war. [03:49] In those days the Reading degrees were very much based on the same system as the Tripos at Cambridge. You had to do three subjects for a general degree and then you got an honours, so I did physics honours. I would have done chemistry but I blew myself up in the laboratory while watching a rather nice looking girl on the other side of the workbench instead of paying attention to what I was told to do. Now that takes us back to 1946. I was at school in Reading at the Presentation College, which was a school run by a set of Irish Catholic brothers, teaching brothers, and since then it has disappeared like a number of schools like that. It was a very good school morally, exceedingly good, but it was very limited in the subjects that you could do and you were just essentially trained, not educated, in a typical Irish teaching brotherhood manner. You were trained, so if they thought, in Latin

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you’ll get asked something from Virgil, particular parts of the book, they’d have you… you’d have learnt it all off by heart. No comment why it came from, why it was there, whum . So I rather liked the sort of certainty of that, particularly reading Latin, Latin seemed a doddle to me because you just learnt certain rules and then you could almost guess what – the vocabulary was very limited, it was all about Caesar marching his fifth legion into somewhere and devastating the village. You never learned a word like happy or thank you or anything, so I rather liked Latin. Now they had very limited science teaching, but I was given a chemistry set or I acquired a chemistry set, can’t remember quite when, certainly it was during the war, and we used to go to the local chemist and persuade him to give us in little bottles nitric acid, hydrochloric acid and sulphuric acid and I’d play around with these at home. Now, you have to remember that in that school, in Reading in the 1940s, in the forties of the last century, they taught you to what was called School Certificate standard, I think that’s now GCSE, and I did quite well at that but there were no science papers. My father, who was the only graduate in his family, not exactly an Irish immigrant family his, but, well my grandfather immigrated from Ireland but I never met him, he died in 1917. Father thought well, why don’t you – this was 1945, the war ended - and I did, I thought I did School Certificate in 1944. It must have been 19… Anyway, he then said why don’t you, Anthony, me, try for the scholarship exam at Reading, and so I said I would and there must have been some conversation with the school because there was a brother who wanted to teach science. That’s right, he just taught general science for GCSE. And he said, well I’ll try and coach Kelly for a year. Oh, I’ve got it now. I did GCSE in 1944 and got not brilliantly, but pretty well for the school. The following year I took just physics and just chemistry and got very high marks and it was that that then they said why don’t you go in for the scholarship exam in 1946. Now I then settled down to just study for the scholarship exam, which would have been in some time like March ’46, so we start in September ’45 to study just physics and chemistry. [09:50] Now there’s an interesting vignette there. I had a very good memory and this brother Canice – C-A-N-I-C-E his name was spelled – coached me and I looked at books and read very hard and he said I’ll give you a mock exam. And I remember he set it in chemistry and he said go into your room and do it, and I did it in the requisite hours that would have been the right time, and then he took it away to mark it and I remember him coming into the room – there were just two of us trying to do this – and he said, ‘I’m not going to teach you any more Kelly, you’ve cheated’. And I said… I don’t remember what I said. And he said you couldn’t have remembered all that so well and I had to say, well I’m afraid I did. And eventually I convinced him, because at that age, I trained myself during the war spotting aircraft and I have several

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certificates from the Ministry of Home Security for being able to sight recognise – they never used us, you see, that was set up at the beginning of the war, they thought people had… people didn’t know about radar, there was a thing called the Royal Observer Corps and then young people were encouraged to learn aircraft, so at the ATC, the Air Training Corps, we’d go and look at pictures of all sorts of aircraft, none of which we saw – well, we weren’t linked into any system. Now why did I… I think I liked science because then mistakenly, I thought science gave certainty whereas history didn’t. I think I must have been thinking along the lines of exams, you see, and if you got a question in Latin, or to a limited extent in elementary chemistry, was like mathematics, there was a definite answer. Whereas if you got asked a question in history it seemed to me it depended how you put it. This was very naïve and in English, oh goodness gracious me, I might be able to express myself in English but I might not say the right thing in the essay. That might be connected with having been brought up in a Catholic household where there’s a very strong feeling of right or wrong and that made me, I think – I’m just being an elementary psychologist, I don’t know whether this is nonsense from the point of view of psychology - but I did like the certainty of science. [13:18] So then I went up to Reading as a result of winning the scholarship, but the school had a day off because somebody had done terribly well, you see it’s a small school and it wasn’t very well known in the town. But I hadn’t done, I’d done GCSE – equivalent – I’m saying GCSE so you know what I’m talking about, but it was called School Certificate in those days. Now I hadn’t done Higher School Certificate because the school wasn’t set up for it. So I’d won this scholarship, so therefore when I went up I had to do an exam in the university which was the equivalent of the Higher School Certificate, which in those days in most universities outside Oxford and Cambridge, they were all modelled on London very much in those days, it was called intermediate and you did this exam. Nowadays the entry is supposed to be at the Higher School Certificate level, but of course in 1946 the classes were flooded by the ex-service people, the war had been over a year, and people like us who’d just come from school were just sort of little wimps at the end of the people who’d saved the country. Anyway, we had to do intermediate again. [14:50] But I did physics, chemistry, maths and geology. And I rather thought I might read geology, but I mistakenly got, I mistakenly believed I’d have to keep on studying fossils, whereas what appealed to me was physical geography and mountain building and orogenesis and things like this and igneous rocks and so forth. So after the intermediate exam, then we had to choose and I chose physics, chemistry, maths and extra maths. I think I would have then read chemistry except that I blew myself up looking at this good looking babe and then so there was only physics left, so I read

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physics. And I was ambitious person and I wanted to go to Cambridge and the department helped me by suggesting I – because Ditchburn had just been made professor of physics at Reading. Reading, I think it must have happened in a number of universities at the time, there had been a hiatus during the war as to appointments. About ’45, ’46, then things were moving about, and Ditchburn was appointed head of physics and a very brilliant man called Guggenheim who had worked with Fowler was made head of chemistry. I might have done mathematics but my father very wisely warned me that unless you are very very good at mathematics, don’t do it. He taught at a sort of, at the University of Southampton before it was a university. Southampton wasn’t made a university till something like 19… either forties or fifties. Anyway. So, it was arranged that I’d be interviewed at the Cavendish to see if they’d have me as a research student. I’d lived at home because we weren’t terribly well off and my father didn’t want to pay for me to live in one of the halls of residence at Reading, so I didn’t leave home till I came up to Cambridge. They accepted me, but there’s an important point I need to make about the interview. That would have been in 1950. Now, the interesting thing is, compared with present day arrangements, research students were mainly funded either by the ICI fellowship scheme, the ICI scheme, or by what was called the DSIR – the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. You’re looking puzzled.

I’m just wondering about the lawnmower actually.

What?

Just wondering about the lawnmower.

What about the lawnmower?

Background noise.

[pause in recording]

[19:00] We’re back running again.

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Well, I was talking about being interviewed as a research student from another university to go into the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge in 1950. In those days you were funded by the DSIR, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, just for two years, but you had to… it was no use just turning up and saying I want to be a research student, you had in those days to say I want to work on some particular thing. Now, at Reading the final year, that’s the special physics year for the honours degree, there was a wonderful practical teacher called Mills. He was a very quiet, silent man, but we were made to do very extensive experiments. You’d spend two or three days or maybe a week. You’d go to a few lectures and we would determine the charge on the electron by Millikan’s method and among other things, we studied what are called Bitter patterns on iron. Now, just understand that the domain structure of a ferromagnetic body was quite a new thing, that is the fact that it’s, you know, if a bar’s not magnetised – of iron – it’s because the magnets were all in different directions, independent of the grains, even in a single crystal. And those domains were rather difficult to see, but nonetheless they were there and we sprinkled tiny bits of iron filings on a magnet and you could see them orienting themselves in different directions. Now, in my final year I’d read a book by Fred Seitz, the great Fred Seitz of solid state physics fame, and this book had some remarks about cold working on metals and the breaking up of the crystals into smaller crystals. And so I said, well, I must have said something that they thought was quite clever about the relation between these two. Anyway, I was accepted and I was, my supervisor was to be the great WL Bragg. So we’d better stop there.

[22:25] Thank you. That’s a really, really useful overview. You’ve touched on all sorts of little things I’d like to pick up on in a little bit more detail. You mentioned your father. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about him? Can you describe him to me?

Yes. Well, he was born in 1889 and of an Irish Catholic family living in Clapham. He must have been… he was the bright boy of the family and it was an enormous family. My grandfather, that is my father’s father, had two wives, one after the other, and between them sired fifteen children, of which Vincent, my father, was something like the second son of the last seven. Now, he, I don’t know whether he won a scholarship or ever took one, I don’t remember. My sister, if she were alive, would. He went to King’s College London and got a degree in about 1912. Let’s see if that’s right. If he was born in 1889 then he’d have been twenty-three in 1912. And then he had, I think, some teaching post. I’m not quite sure what happened at that

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stage. He was a clever man and he wasn’t very physically prepossessed. He was slight build like I am. And the next bits that I know of his… he was called up in 1915 and spent the rest of the war essentially in France in the trenches. He elder brother, Tom, was killed on the Somme and my father saw his brother shot and killed. Pop would never speak of life in the trenches, so many of them apparently never did. He’d tell us stories about how they sang, ‘When we get to Berlin the Kaiser he will say, hoch, hoch, what jolly fine lot' and things like that. But they never spoke much about it. And I think he liked the camaraderie of the service but he wasn’t decorated like his brother and he probably hated it I should think, that was dreadful. Now, what is it exactly you’d like to know about him?

I’d like to know a little bit more about him. What sort of father was he…

[both speaking together]

Okay, well after the war, after the war he taught at the University of Southampton, taught mathematics, but taught I think mathematics to the education department. There were always education departments in universities then which were training teachers as distinct from others who did slightly different work. And he met my mother, who was a nurse, in 1926 and they were married and I was born in 1929. Now, he did have a strong intellectual interest in things and was a very witty man. He had certain character defects that come from a life in the trenches and he wasn’t… I remember his friends, they were all a funny looking… often they had shrapnel wounds and things, these people that… But he used to take an interest in our homework, particularly when we’d got up to say, the teenage standard. He was quite a polemicist. He was a Catholic and I can remember he’d have arguments, you hardly – well, I never hear nowadays about whether trans-substantiation was – quite arcane bits of religious difference with Protestants. Let’s think. [28:10] Well, he did influence me and I think he encouraged my going into science because he’d read mathematics, his friends were scientists, his job – oh I’ve forgotten to tell you that – after the war he worked at the University of Southampton and then he went into the RAF, because the RAF was only formed in 1918 and in the twenties, to begin with it was rather like a cavalry regiment, you either flew aeroplanes or you didn’t and if you flew aeroplanes you were everything. But in the middle to early twenties they came to the conclusion they’d need people who knew how the aeroplane engine worked and about navigation. So what was formed was called the RAF Education Corps [Interviewee meant RAF Education Service]

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and they were civilians who in the event of war or emergency would be put into uniform immediately, so they were reserves. So when I knew him before the war you never saw my father in uniform, but he was teaching mathematics and navigation and things like that to young officers or sergeants, because sergeants were trained pilots and so forth. So from 1926 on, or well, it might have been that he was married in 1926, I mean I’m not quite sure of the date, but say 1924, he joined the RAF and so he’d have stayed in the RAF until he retired in 1950. That’s right, because he was born in 1889. So my life was coloured by the connection with the service and also his interest in, well, mathematics and what you might call elementary science.

What sort of things did interest him along those lines?

Ah. I don’t think I know the answer to that, because his hobby, he was a man of many… but his hobby was reading Latin poetry. But he was a slightly unstable ch… well, I wouldn’t… they were odd, those people who’d been through the war, he was very restless, we didn’t see a lot of him at home. I don’t know whether he had technical interest. [31:10] An uncle who did influence me was my mother’s brother, Foster, and he was very much a 1930s liberal thinker who was fascinated by radio, I remember he built himself his own little radio with a cat’s finger and so forth. And he was interested in technical things like mayonnaise is a colloid, or things like that, which I found fascinating as a little boy. But going back to father, yeah, he did influence me in the sense that physics or chemistry or maths were good subjects, or engineering, but to do English or something like that was not quite, not quite what a man was supposed to do, though his daughter, my sister, did read English at Reading and he chatted with her, but somehow I think I was influenced in that way. Do you have any other questions about father?

I was wondering, do you know what he actually did during the war?

Oh well, he was, you see he was… oh, he didn’t leave Reading, he was at Shinfield Park.

I meant during the First World War.

Oh, during the First World War. All I know, he was at the Somme, he was near Amiens. He was in the… now, I could look all this up. I haven’t prepared that. He… they fought, well… he went in in 1915 and his brother was killed in the big Battle of the Somme which was the

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following year. I don’t know where they fought in France, I’m afraid, because he wouldn’t talk… or if he did, I don’t think he talked about it, he didn’t often mention it. He was in the, I think the regiment was called the Queen’s and if you’re interested I can probably… I probably have the… his commission thing. It was a Surrey regiment and he rose to the rank of captain. And after the war, immediately after he was very ill, that big wave of influenza that swept through Europe seems to have affected him. Well, it did. If we want more about my father I’d better look it up for you.

Who are these collection of people you said he had with injuries who were his friends after the war?

Sorry?

You mentioned a group of friends he had who were all ex-servicemen.

Yes, they had served in the war and I remember thinking that they were quite nervous in some ways and one chap, or two of them, had definite wounds from shrapnel. These are childhood reflections. I mean they might have been very rare, but it’s stayed with me enormously. I talked to Richard Keynes a lot about his father – I don’t know whether you’re interviewing Keynes.

Who’s he?

Well, he’s the… he’s a very well-known physiologist who I’m sure if the biological section will be doing… well, he’s dead, he died last year, so maybe you missed out. Anyway, his father had been in the army the same time as my father. They again, he said they never spoke about it. And I’ve talked to a lot of people whose fathers were in the trenches in World War I who are now my age and they say dad didn’t talk about it very much, compared with people whose fathers were in World War II, they do talk about it.

[36:30] Did you see much of him?

What?

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Did you see much of your father when you were a child?

Well, not a lot, no, because during the war of course, although we lived in Reading and he worked in Shinfield Park – you asked what he was doing – well, you see he’d been in the RAF educational service since it started in something like 1924 so when the war broke out he’d have been fifty or so and I remember he used to inspect the training in the various places, which were, enormous numbers of aerodromes and things. So during the war you’d know Pop had been to Biggin Hill, Pop had been all the places you hear now when they talk about the Battle of Britain and things. He used to go to Benson and Benson turned out, after the war, became Harwell, but it’s difficult to explain perhaps to… This part of the world was literally littered with airfields which you’ll now just see under the rubble. So he used to travel a lot and go and see the mathematics and navigation teaching was alright, because the sort of – this is a personal view on the early - Baldwin is always chided for not having responded to the Hitler threat, but from 1936 they did expand the RAF and that’s why my father was so busy just before the war, because there was… that was when all the chaps who later bombed and fought had been taught how to work the instruments in their Spitfires and things.

[38:41] You mentioned that your father helped you with your homework as well.

Ah yes, yes he always used to help with the math… well, when it got to a stage when there were mathematics problems, particularly at weekends, then he’d see if I could do them. He wasn’t interested, I remember, in geography or… it was mainly in the mathematics. But he was intellectually inclined and so there were… there wasn’t much discussion of art in the family, but a good deal on politics, on aspects of religion from a highly Catholic point of view. My mother read the novels. They didn’t get on terribly well, my father and mother.

Why do you say that?

What?

Why do you say that?

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Why do I say that? Because it’s a feature of my childhood.

Could you give me an example or an illustration of how they didn’t get on?

Oh, they’d shout at each other and quarrel a lot. Well, I thought they were quarrelling, I realise now later in life they might have enjoyed that sort of thing. The little boy at the time thought they were serious, I think they were.

Do you know how they actually met?

No, sorry. Sorry, no I don’t.

You mentioned…

Well, she was a nurse.

[40:25] What was your mother’s name?

My mother’s?

Your mother’s name, what was it? Violet Ethelwyn Mary – which she hated – Violet Ethelwyn Mary Vaughan – V-A-U-G-H-A-N. Now that is a Cheshire family. I think she had, was a very determined woman. She left home in nineteen oh… 1912 or so and ran away to London, became a nurse. She had a rather dominating father who was my maternal grandfather. She ran away to London, which was quite a thing to do in 1912, and she was born in 1894, so six and twelve is… yes, she was eighteen, yes. I think I get my, what strength of character I have from her more than from my father. That’s what the family has said.

Could you actually describe her character to me please?

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My mother’s? Gosh. [pause] Well, I think she had good self-control. She was probably a bit more intelligent than she thought, but she sort of revered my father because he had a degree, he must be clever, he’s very clever, so therefore she didn’t feel she could match him. But she was a kind, loving person, very devoted to her children, and she was, well, devoted to her husband because she more or less nursed him when he was ill, being a trained nurse I remember she laid him out when he died and she… so in those days a Catholic family like that would never ever think for a moment of divorce, it never occurred to anybody at all. She was shortish like my daughter and as I say, quite dogged and determined, not very bright. I think she probably had been quite pretty as a girl. Is that the sort of thing you need or you want?

I’m just sort of, you know, interested in the idea of what sort of person she was. That’s…

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about this to anyone who didn’t know her. She had a set of friends who would come to the house. But father behaved in a very odd way. Sometimes we’d have a maid and then sometimes we wouldn’t, and then mother would be, you’d find her cutting the grass as well as looking after the house. I think it was to do with whether… He died slightly in debt and I paid off his debts, so fathers who’d been through World War I were a bit like that, or many of them.

What sort of things actually interested your mother?

Well, she read novels. There was no radio in the house, understand, until… [1940] But immediately, as soon as the war started everything seemed to… I think it must have been their putting people from the volunteer reserve – there seemed to be more money about in the house as soon as the war started. [laughs] And for a year or two there was a maid, but then maids were called up. [45:15] Now you were asking me about my mother’s character. I think she was very good with her servants and she was, I would have said, a devoted mother to both my sister and to me, we both loved her very dearly. I think her interests were just those of a lower middle class housewife, if I can put it that way, without knowing what a lower middle class housewife’s [laughing] interests are. So she read novels, sometimes she liked to go to a concert but she’d go with friends. She smoked, as everybody did in those days. I find it a bit difficult… perhaps a reflection on me that I don’t know, but I don’t think I can tell you any more.

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Did she carry on actually working as a nurse when she married your father?

No. No, in those days… She’d had an interesting period in the early twenties, because she had been working at one of the London hospitals and she gave that up and became a private nurse. In those days there were still quite a lot of, not exactly stately homes, but well-to-do people who still had households so she, before she married had been the nurse in several households, some of which she was treated as downstairs, that is with the servants, and some of which she was treated as member of the family. And so she had some lovely funny stories to tell about the vagaries of these people and after she married a number of the women for whom had employed her kept up with her, so we met some interesting people, I remember, in Surrey and so forth, through that.

What sort of people? Any who stick in your mind?

Oh, playwrights and oh, I remember one particularly, a playwright. But I don’t remember mother talking much about that, we just knew so-and-so was - Margaret Muntzer [ph] was her name. Right.

Why does she stick in your mind in particular?

Well, this woman Margaret Muntzer [ph] – yes, then there was another woman who married very well, a younger woman who was a nurse like my mother, so my mother sort of adopted her and she married a chap at the Ottoman Bank whose son in fact is now the head of Downside, the Catholic public school. Mother was a convert to Catholicism, from the point of view of my father being so clever and so forth. So she struggled hard to be a good Catholic mother, which shone through, it would make her very bad tempered in Lent I remember, because she hadn’t had anything to eat or something. I don’t think… are we going to get back to science? [laughs]

I think it’s all sort of about adding context to you as a person, is the way I think about this. [49:15] But you raised an interesting point a few times about religion. I was just wondering if you could tell me…

Sorry?

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You’ve raised an interesting point about religion a few times and I was just wondering how heavily did that feature in your own childhood?

Oh, very much. Well, in the sense of religious observance, every Sunday we’d go to Catholic Mass and then to benediction, that’s the thing in the afternoon. At Easter we’d be going to Mass practically all the time, or it seemed to a little boy, and I was a server on the altar so it was very much a standard RC, Catholic family. Why they were limited to two children is a good question, because their parents, well mother hadn’t, father… my paternal grandfather had three children, but you see my maternal grandfather had three… my paternal grandfather had all these fifteen. Now, mother and father only had two. How that came about, we don’t know, because it wasn’t, contraception wasn’t… well, never heard about it, least as a sort of child, then. But yes, I think we would have been regarded as rather devout, my sister and I. We’d get up early and go to Mass sometimes. There was no such thing as family prayers, but there was an awareness. Yeah, I’d say from your point of view, it was a… in terms of religious observance, it was pretty pious. Whether that went with mental… mental, so to say commitment, I’m not sure, but we did, yes, you worked very hard at things like that.

Did that leave any particular… let me rephrase that. Did you actually believe in Catholicism yourself?

No, I do. Yeah, I believe in it now. You have to be very careful… I have to… I say yes, but I have to know what you mean by Catholicism, if you see what I mean, to really give you an honest answer, because I find particularly with labels on things like this, the interlocutor you’re talking to has a vision, it’s probably best not to tell them you’re a Catholic but wait till it emerges what they think a Catholic is, if you see what I mean. That’s a very important point right now in the scientific discussion of climate change, as to what the other guy thinks is climate change. But anyway, to get back to science, yes… I don’t remember having, I don’t think I have any intellectual hang-up about the existence of a god, but quite what I mean by a god is not what Richard Dawkins thinks I mean, if I can put it that way. On the whole, yeah, I’d be a loyal Catholic in the sense that on the whole I probably agree with the church’s teaching rather than not, but that’s as far as we need go, unless you’re particularly interested.

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I’m interested in what you said a moment ago about defining a version of Catholicism, as it were, by what I mean by Catholicism, but I was just wondering if you could just unpackage that a little bit and tell me, you know, what does Catholicism mean to you as a faith?

Oh well, roughly this, that I think there was a phenomenon called Jesus Christ, historical figure, that he asked St Peter to found some sort of organisation to remember him and that’s the Catholic Church today with Ratzinger sitting in Rome. [laughs] That’s… and, well, that’s, if you like, my main picture. Now, what Ratzinger says… I don’t necessarily say that what Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope says is necessarily correct, because if you listen very carefully to what he says, when he speaks as an infallible Pope, he very rarely tells you anything to do with how you should behave, it’s generally some theological construct.

[55:10] Do you think that Catholic belief has actually… how would you say that has actually affected your own actions over the course of your life?

Well, a sense of duty. I mean coming back to make sure military service commissions were carried out. Well, that was easy as it turned out because they just said, well go and work at Birmingham with Cottrell. But yes, I think on moral questions I on the whole go along with the Catholic line; not killing, telling the truth, and things like that.

I was interested in the point you raised a while ago about there being a certainty to Catholicism that…

Ah, I think that’s a good point. I think that’s right, I think I was attracted by that. I think I’m a Catholic now and likely to remain one, but I’m no longer attracted quite by that as I’m sure I was as a young man, yes. And following my father, you’d have learnt all the right arguments, you know. The argument from St Augustine, the sort of garden, all that sort of thing. How long are we going on for?

Would you like to take a little break?

Well, how long do you normally go on?

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It kind of depends. I’ll just pop this off for a second.

[end of track 1]

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[Track 2]

I was wondering if you could give me an idea of where you actually grew up?

Well, the family lived in Cheshire. Well, I was born in Hillingdon, Middlesex and I know the family moved about a lot as service people did in those days. We lived near Henlow for a time and I remember meeting Amy Johnson, the flier woman, and going to air shows in say, 1934 or five. But the main remembered childhood starts in Hitchin at about the age of five. 1936 we moved to Nantwich in Cheshire and that was because the RAF in those days designated anything to the west of a line, roughly from Southampton up to Carlisle was called inland area, the idea being that enemy bombers couldn’t get there, which they very easily did it turned out. Anyway, we went to Nantwich in Cheshire. That happened to be my mother’s home town because her father had been a builder there and she then insisted, I remember, that I learnt woodwork because her father ran a building business. I was to make sure I was good with my hands because my father was hopeless with his hands. So that would have been around 1936, we went there. And we stayed there till 1940 and then father was transferred to, well essentially Shinfield Park, without getting into difficulties. Shinfield Park is very near Reading, and so we lived in Reading. The rest of the time that I lived at home between 1940 and 1950 – gosh, only ten years, that’s right – I lived in Reading.

[02:40] What was your home in Nantwich like?

Sorry?

What was your home in Nantwich like?

Oh, it was… well the first one was quite palatial. It had been a rectory for a priest. I don’t think this came about because they were Catholics. People always rented things in those days, they didn’t buy houses. And that was a period when we seemed to be a bit short of money. [laughs] And then just before the war we moved to a smaller house next door to my grandfather and then January 1940 we came down to Reading. So I remember cycling around Cheshire and I was

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quite interested in birdwatching then, which later went with the aircraft recognition facility I think, good visual memory. What was the question again?

I was just wondering if you could actually describe what your childhood home was like to me?

Well, I think I’ve… it was just… It was just my sister, who’s two years older than me, my father and mother. When we were at Nantwich he was at home more because that was before the war and I remember long political discussions, now you come to mention it, about the Spanish Civil War. Now the Spanish Civil War, he was very much a Falangist, well, in favour of Franco. I think a lot of people were in Britain but they don’t admit it now. [laughs] They say… that would be because he was a Catholic, or partly. [05:10] I don’t know whether other people have told you this of my age, but there was a certain amount of anti-Semitism in the air. Moseley had quite a lot of following and it’s not talked about very much now because, you know, what do they say? History is the propaganda of the victors. So anyway, I think my father would have been described as very right wing.

Could you give me…

I’m not quite sure whether you want to know about living conditions or…

I’m interested in both, but I was wondering if you could describe right wing to me in terms of what it meant for your father. It’s a term that’s got a lot of different meanings to different people.

Well, I think… I think they believed in a sort of hierarchical government of the country and so although they would be kind to poor people, poor people weren’t meant to be, so to say, over- helped by the state I think. They were fairly, very much supporters of Churchill once the war started and father was before the war because beating hell out of the Germans was what we ought to have done the second time since we hadn’t done it properly the first time, because he was very anti-German. But they admired some of the elements of fascism because you must remember fascism brought a certain amount of peace inside Germany in the thirties, people loved Hitler because he’d stopped all the fighting and he was providing, a very good standard of living was coming through. Now mother of course would have voted the way father more or less

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– I don’t think he told her to vote – but she would, if father voted Conservative. He regarded 1945 as a bit of a disaster, the Labour won the election, oh gawd, it’s terrible. [laughs] I’m not saying I did, but I didn’t have a vote then anyway, you didn’t get the vote till you were twenty- one. Yes, there were the right wing elements, certainly, the way I think the family thought. It wasn’t uncommon, I’d have guessed, among the middle classes anyway.

You mentioned that your father used to talk a lot about politics, can you give me an idea of the sorts of things he would talk about, just an illustration?

Sorry?

[08:55] You mentioned that your father would sort of have debates about politics quite a lot. I was just wondering if you could give me just an illustration of one of those?

Well, what to do about Japan. Then they would argue as to whether the Japanese invasion of China was actually a good thing, because the Japanese were sort of a bit better organised than the Chinese, something like that. There’d be long-winded religious discussions, as I said, that I didn’t quite follow on peculiar points of religious observance. And then of course they’d be watching the rise of Hitler and that of course meant they were very anti that form of right wing things, but I think… I don’t remember debating the social programme in the thirties. I mean I was only, it was before I was eleven, but sort of say Labour was bad, Conservative was good, though the Labour people did quite a lot actually and introduced [interviewee meant supported] conscription in 1938.

[interruption – person arriving]

Well, I think I’ve said about as much as I can think of.

I was just wondering, do you think your parents’ political outlooks affected your own at all?

You what?

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Do you think your parents’ political outlooks affected your own at all?

Oh, I’m sure it did, yes. I’m sure it did. I’d be naturally inclined to… well let’s think, I went… I’m what you would call now a real floating voter. You know, I’ve voted sometimes for Labour, sometimes Conservative, I would never vote Liberal Democrat because my father would turn in his grave – whatever you did you shouldn’t be a Liberal. You could even be Labour. Yes, I’d say it did influence me and probably still does. In some ways I’m socially fairly Conservative, so yes, I think it did.

Do you want to stop there?

[end of track 2]

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[Track 3]

Tony, I was wondering if we could talk a bit about your school days today, actually. Which school did you first attend?

It was called Presentation College – oh, first attend? Oh, I went for a year or two in 1935 or six to a convent in Hitchin in Hertfordshire in 1936, I remember clearly it was the summer of 1936, we moved to Nantwich because my father had been posted to Ternhill – T-E-R-N-one word-H-I- double L – another which was in Shropshire, and we went to live in Nantwich because my mother came from Nantwich. That was in the summer of 1936. For the next year, possibly, I went to the primary Catholic school. In 1937 – we could check these dates exactly – but 1937 I went to the, not quite kindergarten, but the preparatory school for the Nantwich and Acton Grammar School. Nantwich and Acton Grammar School was a conventional grammar school between the wars and I went there in September of 1939, just after the war broke out. But between ’37 and ’39 I was in the prep school. It was run by a set of old ladies: Miss Grant, who had taught my uncle Foster, was the head teacher. So that gets us through to Nantwich and Acton Grammar School in September 1939. I happened to fall off a wall and dislocate my elbow just as war broke out, so there was a big laugh about Tony the little boy being the first casualty. During the autumn term, it would have been, of 1939 my friends and I lamented that nothing was happening in the war, because nothing seemed to happen. I remember the sinking of the Graf Spee, or not quite the sinking of the Graf Spee, the trapping of the Graf Spee and the Battle of the River Plate in early December 1939, we all thought ah, this war is waking up a bit. My father was then posted to Shinfield Park, which you have earlier, from Ternhill and we moved to Reading on January the eighth 1940. It was a bitterly cold winter, the winter of 1939 to ’40. We were put into accommodation which would be called, well, serving officers were moved about with their families into, I don’t know whether it was quite requisitioned accommodation, but we were in a furnished house furnished in a much better class of comfort than my sister and I had been used to in Nantwich. That happened on January the eighth 1940. [03:40] So that month I then started at Presentation College in Reading – P-R-E-S-E-N-T-A-T-I-O-N – Presentation, which was a Catholic school run by the Presentation Brothers, an Irish order. I don’t think we need spend more time on that. But earlier we’ve referred to Brother Canice and he was a member of that. So that was… then, during the summer of 1940 of course there was all the dreadful business of were we going to lose the war and so forth, and all sorts of… I remember

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the refugees arriving from France in the summer and we were most unkind, I remember, to the French boys, like little boys are. We just teased them at having lost the war, sort of thing. So I remained at that school until I went to Reading University on the scholarship that we’ve already covered, so I don’t know whether you wanted anything else about the school. That school itself has recently closed down. It was run by the Presentation Brothers until a couple of years ago, but they, like so many Catholic orders lacking – what is the word – you know, recruits to the brotherhood, the whole system packed up, essentially. It was a very good school in the sense of morally. I don’t remember any of the stories now about abuse of children and things, it’s completely foreign to my knowledge. The brothers, we had physical punishment, we were strapped on the hand.

For what sort of things?

Sorry?

For what sort of things?

Oh, probably being late or pinching things the way… cheating on exams or… I remember the school, if you were… the French mistress was a rather silly old girl and she would write the exam questions on the board before you were let in and if you went round the back you could see them coming up, and then of course you prepared the answer before you went in. If you were caught doing that you’d have been punished, but that’s the sort of thing. But I was just a day boy.

Could you describe what the school actually looked like to me?

Sorry?

Could you describe what the school actually looked like to me?

Oh, what it looked like? Well, it’s called Oakland Hall, one could go and see. But the brothers and the boarders lived in this old house. There was a long building which had been purpose- built and I suppose that must have been built a few years before I went, or certainly in the

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thirties, 1930s and it was a small school, I doubt if I could estimate the number of boys – it was only boys – probably a hundred and they were divided into classes which stopped at what would now be called GCSE, that is to say the highest class was the ones doing what was called School Certificate. And if you want an anecdote comparing that, I have kept my papers since 1944 when I did what was called School Certificate and my one son, Andrew, who is the scientific one of my children, I gave him the papers at the corresponding age and when it was explained to him, I remember, what pounds, shillings and pence were and the strange measurements that you had to learn about oh, converting bushels per, I don’t know, bushels per pound to some other unit, and once that was explained to them he found them quite easy. [laughs] And I remember telling this story, when I was vice chancellor and giving away prizes at a school to show that the standards haven’t changed. And I remember someone came up to me afterwards and said, you did know 1944 was a very easy year. Now whether that was true or not, I don’t know. Anyway, that son Andrew was the only one of the children who later took up science. Well, that takes, again I think we’ve dealt with the story that since the school didn’t teach beyond School Certificate and there was no Higher School Certificate, then I studied alone under Brother Canice and that bit you’ve already covered.

[09:20] I’d like to actually go over it in a little more detail…

Sorry?

I’d like to actually ask you one or two other questions about it. I was interested in the fact that the school didn’t actually do science, what subjects did you do?

Oh, well I can get you my… we could get the certificates if you like.

I think just going from your memory would be fine for now.

Okay, well we can check. In those days it was a cramming school in effect, I realised later that the brothers set out to get their boys through exams, so that you did what was called junior Oxford or junior Cambridge, which was a public exam set two years before doing School Certificate, what’s now called GCSE. And GCSE, or School Certificate was then, you could

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matriculate into a university so long as you had School Certificate. But most people, the better class of school, were doing Higher School Certificate, in which case they were exempt the first year at the university. Now, I’m now talking about School Certificate or GCSE nowadays. In order to prepare us for that the brothers would make us do a public exam two years earlier, so I would have done that exam in 1942 and the subjects will have been Latin, French, English, mathematics, geography, history and probably art, but I wasn't very good at art. So that would be it. Ah, that would be for this junior exam. Now for the GCSE, that is the School Certificate we’re talking about in 1944, we did general science. So there was a bit of biology, bit of maths, bit of chemistry and so I have to interpolate a little back to what we talked about last time. So in 1944 then, I would have had very good marks on the whole in… oh, distinction, credit and pass were the modes, and I would have had distinction in a lot of the subjects, certainly in Latin, mathematics - certainly not French – Latin, mathematics, history and probably in geography, English and general science I’d have got a credit. So then in 1944, between 1944 and 1945 I studied just chemistry and just physics, those two, and did the School Certificate exam again in ’45 in those two subjects and duly got the highest marks you could get, I don’t know what they were in numbers, but I’d have got a distinction. And it was on the basis of that that this last year I worked for the scholarship, which we’ve covered.

Right.

I think one reason they didn’t teach science then was that during the war, because they did immediately afterwards, was that the accommodation was so limited and I remember in the senior form we were in a well-equipped lab, but it wasn’t used as a lab, do you see what I mean, because there were Bunsen burner attachments and those sinks that you used to see in schools, but due to the pressure of the numbers and so forth. Things were fairly constrained in the war, you didn’t realise it at the time because this was one’s first experience, but you then realised it afterwards, so that would be why they wouldn’t have been teaching science. They didn’t have any anti-scientific bias at all.

[14:10] Which subjects did you actually prefer out of the several you’ve mentioned?

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Ah, well I liked general science very much, I liked Latin and history, and since I was good at mathematics, or at that level, I mean I really didn’t like Latin but it was very easy, it seemed to me it was just a set of rules. History I liked and geography I liked. English – oh, English worried me slightly because I wasn’t sure what the right answer was. That’s why I turned to science later, as we’ve covered slightly earlier. I was not sure… to some extent… well you looked puzzled. Because it seemed to me that if you were told, arithmetic say, there’s a definite answer. I don’t think I liked French because well, we all, schoolboys always made fun of a foreign language then, but Latin was just a set of rules – bang, bang, bang. The history was no comment, it was what happened in 1878, you weren’t allowed to say whether it was good or bad, but in 16… what is it, 17… which was the year of victory? 1759, the end of the Seven Years’ War, we’d won the Seven Years’ War and that was a good thing. [laughs] So again, you had a definite answer, whereas English, well you were never taught grammar and I remember when I was made a Fellow of the Institute of Linguists and I gave a talk, not many scientists are, because I’m quite interested in languages, but that’s subsequent to… and said I would never have had any idea of English grammar, only through learning Latin, but you learnt there was such a thing as grammar. I don’t seem to remember English ever mentioning… well, you had a vague idea something was a verb, but didn’t have a clue. But English, I think it was… we did The Tempest for I think junior Oxford and As You Like It for GCSE and maybe Twelfth … I can still quote large parts. Well, when I say large, that might be showing off, depends what you think’s large, but for instance, Jaques’ well-known speech in As You Like It , ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women are merely players, they have their exits…’ The Seven Ages of Man, I’ll give you that. If you punch the right knob, out it’ll come. So we were taught and we were taught to learn the Latin set books by rote. I couldn’t remember a word of them now. And so I think I liked the definiteness, and then science, particularly chemistry, seemed very straightforward because the elementary chemistry you were taught then, once you’d learned there were certain elements, chemistry was really acids and bases working, so you can write down Na 2 SO 4, whereas NaCl, that was marvellous stuff.

I was wondering if you could explain to me what the attraction of the definite is, bearing in mind I’m a woolly historian so it’s… it’s not something that does appeal to me.

Ah well, gosh. [pause] Well, it’s a reliance on facts, would that be what I’m saying? Of course it’s a sophisticated idea later in life that a fact is what a certain group of people decide is a fact,

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but then the fact that hydrogen was an element was a fact and that was so anybody who said hydrogen wasn’t an element was wrong. I suppose it was desire to be right, correct, not to be put down by uncertainty. Does that help?

Put down by who though?

Oh, the interlocutor or… don’t know that I can… I thought most scientists took up science because that way you get certainty. I mean it would never have occurred to me in history, the main thing in history was to know when Napoleon was born and died. Views as to whether Napoleon was good or bad would be much more sophisticated. Since I was English, Napoleon was bad. [laughs] I don’t think I can go much farther. You’re quite a perspicacious interviewer.

[20:50] I was interested in – just take this on a little further – when you first actually sort of made that move over to doing physics and chemistry, how did that actually happen?

Sorry?

How did it actually happen that you came to specialise in physics and chemistry?

Well, they were the subjects that attracted me in the general science. I was always slightly… biology didn’t seem to be anything like as definite and of course it still is, the way it’s taught – I don’t know whether it still is less – what is the word? At our stage in civilisation the rationale behind a lot of chemistry and physics and what you might call the Germans have always had the idea, exakte Wissenschaft , the exact sciences are rather different from the others, they had a logical structure and was mainly, I think it’s the mathematics, the mathematical background that will have attracted, though I wouldn’t have seen it in that light.

Were there many other people in your class?

Sorry?

Were there many other people in your science classes?

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Well, in that final, in that year 1945, ’44-45 there was one other chap, who I still am in touch with. He went up to Reading the year before me; he went up in ’45, I went up in ’46. In ’45 he went up, he subsequently went to Trinity College Dublin, I still keep in touch with him. So there were just two of us. And I don’t really remember in the… you see, the school was small and the classes, there were a number of years all in one room, so say Brother Benedict, the maths teacher, would come and he’d deal with – we were called the seniors at the end – and then having settled us, he’d settle some others. So it must have been rather hard on the teachers, but I felt the teaching was good. I mean I have experienced no other, but I haven’t regretted it since. But at the time, when I first went for the exam and met other boys who’d done Higher School Certificate at other places, and I felt at a disadvantage because somehow they’d had, well, much better teaching.

How was science actually taught in those 1944-1945 period?

[pause] Well, I have to say I don’t remember very much. The general science bit, which would have been up to 1944, but after, in ’44 and ’45 I was just doing physics and chemistry, you’d read the book and the master would say, read this and see if you can understand it and can you do the exercises at the end of the chapter. And that was what one would do. There wasn’t any experiment… there weren’t many lab sessions, [25:25] but I was given a chemistry set, which must have been something like 1943, so I used to do a lot of experiments at home. The common ones, and the chemists in those, the local chemist would give you, if you were nice to him, you could have some nitric acid, some hydrochloric acid, some sulphuric acid, which nowadays would be absolutely unheard of. You went to the local chemist, Mr Peskett [26:02], and he liked me, or I remember parents probably bought things from him. So we would take those home and I remember once, well we must have done some experimentation at school because I remember being given some sodium hydroxide. So I thought, oh this is good, I’ll take some home of this. So I put it in my pocket and of course it deliquesces, by the time I got home it had burnt – this was just straight cubes of NaOH, which is a very, very strong alkali, of course it had burnt a hole in the jacket. So I was a keen, now you’ve come to make me remember, a keen sort of chemical… and I used to make little models of things. I mean models of warships or aeroplanes, everybody did that during 1940 because we were all so proud of the RAF, so you got to know the properties of woods and things like balsa and things like that and then one would… a whole

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part of the country was geared up for the war, so you have to remember you were seeing fighting aircraft all the time, you were seeing fighters, although very rarely, we did see some Germans. But you’d cycle to Farnborough and watch the aircraft. And, you know, you’d see and as the war developed you see things like Focke-Wulf 190s which had been captured and were being tried out and things like that. [28:05] And of course we had to join the ATC, the Air Training Corps, because we were all supposed to be bomber fodder. So there we – ah, that’s right, we were taught some science there. That would have been from the age of fifteen, but my friend and I pretended we were older, so we joined at fourteen. So fourteen would be 1943, you see, so we learnt Morse and we were told the elements of radio communication, we were taught elementary navigation, which is all good physics. In fact I used that navigation years, years later when I first was taken on a trip and we said we’ll go across the Channel, who knows how to do the navigation. Well I could remember the triangle of forces and things like that, but now you’ve stirred up the memory, that came… and you see I was very good at aircraft recognition, but if you were interested in the aircraft you knew quite a lot of things at the age of twelve or thirteen, you understood the internal combustion engine, you knew the difference between petrol and diesel and things like that. That generation, of course the war ended so we never went on with the military bit, but particularly since my father was in the RAF anyway. I don’t know that it’s ever been written down, that that generation of boys who were in their early teens during the war, our aim was to, we were all going to go and be fighter pilots and shoot Germans down and bomb the hell out of everybody. No pacifist element in the home.

Did you expect to be doing that yourself?

Did I what?

Did I actually expect to be doing that yourself?

Oh, very much so. Oh yes, well rather. And it didn’t put one, well there would be quite tragic things as you look back. I can remember the boys who were say, seventeen in 1940, they’d have all gone into the army and then you’d hear they’d all been killed and things like this. And then some boys would come back and tell very larger than life stories about what they done, so yes, yes, we expected we would have to fight, yes.

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Why did you join the ATC a year early?

The ATC – Air Training…

Air Training Corps, sorry.

Well, I think little boys like to, I mean it was… that was what everybody else was doing, all the young people. My sister, all the girls too, they were expecting to do some form of military service. [31:50] It seems…I kept rabbits on a sort of semi-industrial scale, if you can put it that way. You would buy a doe and get your friend’s buck to impregnate the doe and the doe would then produce a litter of six or seven little rabbits, which you then took to the cattle market and sold. And I can remember to this day, they’d be at ‘One and a half, one and a half, one and a half, one and three-quarters, one and three-quarters, going at one and three-quarters’. That meant one penny, three farthings, so I built, grown-ups helped me build hutches and you put, I had I think two does going fulltime and I was a little capitalist. So that all seemed very logical and scientific.

What else did you actually do as a hobby, as a child?

Well, the things I remember, used to make models of generally warships or aircraft and paint them.

Do you start from scratch or is this to plans or from a kit?

Well, if… the richer boys would have been given a kit like you would get nowadays. Well you’d see what they had and get hold of old bits of wood and start from scratch. So that would be one hobby. Another hobby, which isn’t often mentioned nowadays, at least living in Reading, you might well, well you could wander about the streets, you see, and often in the evenings one would, in the dusk, you might climb into people’s gardens, middle class gardens, bit like this, then you could stay in the bushes, see what was happening, and then you’d… and you didn’t get seen because nobody was expecting children to be there. Then I was quite keen at playing football and cricket. We lived opposite the university grounds, so when the groundsman wasn’t looking we went in and put some stumps in the ground and played cricket. There were

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restrictions on… life was, for a child in sort of semi-country, which was Nantwich or Reading, if you weren’t at a good school, so to say, you’re just at a school like mine and you came home in the evening, you’d done your homework, you could do all sorts of things. Go and walk round the gasworks, get into the gasworks and go and see what was going on in the gasworks. Go into a neighbour’s garden and pinch apples. I suppose we had an enquiring mind, is what it means. You’d go with a friend and scout… you could just wander into the fields, you see, and mother would say you must be back at such-and-such a time. Well, eventually you got interested in girls, that was sort of around the age of well, when I was starting to do exams, starting to do public exams then. You’d hang around waiting for the girls to come out of school, then try and chat them up.

[36:20] Were you actually in an all-boys’ school?

Sorry?

Were you actually in an all-boys’ school?

Oh, it was all boys, yes. There were not very many mixed schools then of this nature. They were nearly all what were called secondary schools, grammar – oh, the grammar schools were mixed, that’s true. But in Reading, because most of the time we’re talking about, from 1940 through ’46, then Reading School, which was the major school, was all boys, the Abbey School, which was the okay girls’ school, was all girls. Kendrick School was all girls. I mean these were all private schools, you have to remember. The state schools would have probably been mixed, I don’t know.

And who were your best friends?

Sorry?

Who were your best friends?

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Well, this chap Kevin I just talked about. I haven’t kept up with many of them. One, Hawthorn [ph – 37:44]. Oh, I was quite a keen athlete in the later years and I was Junior Champion of Berkshire in 1945 I think it was, or ’46. So I used to, a lot of evenings in the summer I’d go and train, running, because we lived opposite the university athletics ground, as I’ve said, and when we were sixteen, seventeen, we’d get to know some of the students and they would be interested in boys coming and watching their performance when they were training and so we’d talk about that sort of thing, so I spent a lot of time training quite hard. Oh, and that’s right, and one of my close friends who I have kept up with, he was older than me, a man called Balch – B-A-L-C-H – he was doing agriculture at Reading and he graduated in it must have been ’45, so he’d have been – in ’45 I was sixteen – so he’d have been say, twenty in… he was about four years [Interviewee meant five] older than me. But now he went to the National Institute for Research in Dairying and with him I would have talked science, and he’d have talked – and I still keep up with him – I’d forgotten him. And he was a pretty good athlete, he didn’t make the ’48 Olympics, but we went to every day of the athletics of the 1948 Olympics, it’s so different from nowadays. Went up from Reading each day, went to every… I can remember who won the 100 metres, 200 metres, all… I went to the Olympics again in 2000 in Sydney and I can’t remember who won apart from one or two people like Jonathan Edwards, but for 1948 I can tell you who came first in the 100 metres, in the 200 metres, because… So that was another… I started smoking, because that was sort of the done thing. Well after I’d left school, I didn’t smoke at school, but that’s what put an end to the athletics career. Anyway.

What was – I’m interested…

So, in the years we’re talking about when I was doing these exams and getting the scholarship to go to Reading, then I was very keen athlete, 800, well it was called half a mile and one mile and I ran for Reading Athletic Club at the junior, in cross country. I think I might have been a good athlete, but I was okay as a junior, but with athletics, nowadays everybody has coaches, my grandchildren are always being coached, we didn’t have coaches, we just went along and tried. The management from junior to senior is a very difficult one because you’re used to winning races as the junior and you’re the top of the bottom guys, as soon as you become the bottom of the top guys you’re find you’re nowhere and so you gave up, that affected me. But I played tennis quite well, as well. So at Reading I played tennis for the university.

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Were you a competitive teenager?

What?

Were you a competitive teenager?

Competitive? Very. Yes. Yes. I still am, I don’t like coming second in anything. Well, I’ve won medals. Yes, yes I would have been.

Why? Were you aiming for something or…

Well, I imagine, well why are people competitive? I suppose it’s a form of self-love isn’t it? I’ve got to be top guy round here. Are you competitive?

[laughs] I don’t know actually. In some things.

I think there’s an element of excellence in competitiveness, you want to… it’s also a form of… it isn’t a negative thing, I don’t think. I think it’s also striding for high standards. If this can be done at such a much better level than I’m doing it, I will try hard to reach that.

You mentioned that you still are now…

Well, certainly not in the same way. But we still joke, if we started, if there’s a little competition I would want to try and win it, I wouldn’t want to just sit there and let the others. Though you find when you get to my age you know you’re not as good as you were, so you’re not likely to drive yourself.

[44:00] On the subject of competitive as well, I was interested that you went to the ’48 Olympics. What was it like?

Well, in those days it was in Wembley Stadium and you bought a seat – Clive bought the seats – and you had the same seat for the whole lot. I mean it was very much like going to a football

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match now, it’s changed completely and utterly since, because getting tickets is extremely difficult, etc. We just wrote in the post for tickets and you of course a lot of people, but it was like going to Wimbledon. I went to Wimbledon every year probably from ’46 through 1950, just bought a ticket. It’s difficult to explain how these things were much more class conscious in a way, but much more easy to get into, because you just bought a ticket, you know. Didn’t have to apply, if you went and the tickets had gone, well the tickets had gone. But, yes, it’s difficult to…

It’s interesting compared to the online ordering system fiasco that there’s been recently, that it should be that simple. You mentioned that you still remember all the race winners from…

Sorry?

You mentioned that you still remembered all the race winners from the Olympics…

Well, I remember Harrison Dillard won the 100 metres.

Are there any that stick in your mind in particular, events you watched?

Well, Arthur Wint was a great hero. He was an Olympic… he came second in fact in the 400 metres, but he was very tall and had been in the RAF because there were many Jamaicans – he was a black, he was Jamaican. Sorry, what was the question?

I was just wondering if there were any races that you remembered particularly well from the ’48 Olympics?

Oh, I remember Zátopek. He was the Czech runner and there was some… didn’t the Russians take over Czechoslovakia in ’48, just before the Olympics, so there were some questions whether he would be there, he was a great hero. He won the 5000 metres coming from well behind. The 100 metres, Dillard won and he was the third American, because he wasn’t supposed to run the 100 metres, he was supposed to run the 110 metre hurdles but he didn’t get into the 110 metre hurdles team so he decided he’d run the 100 metres, and he won it. Now, what else do I… I’d have to think quite hard, because you’ve suddenly asked me this. Oh dear.

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Seems quite an apt sort of week to be asking you, given the Olympic news that’s been happening, but I was interested that you mentioned you’d been to the 2000 – was it the 2000 Games as well?

I went to the 1984 ones as well, but casually. I happened to be in Los Angeles. The Olympics were changed from the point of view of the average person by Atlanta in 1996. Prior to 1996 the Games were on the whole run at a loss, they were getting very expensive. The Americans captured the 1996, or the city of Atlanta did because they should have been really in Athens because that was 100 years after the first one, Baron de Couveville [Interviewee meant Coubertin] started them, a Frenchman, in Athens in 1896. The Americans turned the thing into a moneymaking arrangement, essentially, so that they would then receive great sponsorship and once sponsorship came in, then for instance now, the seats in the finishing straight close to the finish for the day of the 100 metre final, you’ll either get that because you’ve paid thousands of pounds or because you’re a guest of Microsoft or somebody or other. Furthermore, the accommodation now is totally controlled, so you’ll find the hotel prices from the fortnight today that it starts will be rocketed enormously high. That’s… and that difference started essentially in 1996… in 1996, so since there was… Barcelona was the last sort of amateur one, Barcelona in Spain, ’96 was Atlanta, 2000 was Sydney, 2004 was Athens, 2008 Beijing and 2012 Britain. Well, since, you see, I was in Los Angeles and I could go and buy a ticket. You’d find that you just couldn’t do that now. Well you might, I suppose there must be some empty seats.

Having done sort of both ends of that spectrum…

Well, this is a bit off the subject isn’t it?

It’s particularly sort of relevant at the moment though, it’s…

It’s what?

It’s quite relevant at the moment with the Olympics coming up.

Oh, it is, yes.

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I suppose as well that we’re also trying to get a slice of the broader social history of Britain around you as well.

Ah well, in that case then yes, it is a… the Games aren’t what they were at all.

I’m interested if you could just sum up that comparison as someone who’s sort of been there after that transition, but also there long before it?

Sorry?

I was wondering if you could sum up from your own point of view as someone who’s been to the ’48 Olympics and been to ones far distant, what…

Yes, well those days it was designed almost for the individual, from the point of view of the spectator it was designed for the individual spectators I think and the thought was that there’d be the normal mix of people buying tickets. Now, I didn’t buy the tickets for ’48 Olympics, my friend Clive did. Now it might be, unknown to me, that because he was quite a well-known athlete, he didn’t get into the Olympic team…

Clive Balch?

Yes. He – CC Balch – I published my first papers with him, I think I forgot to tell you that, which are on the inside of a cow. It’s quite different from material science. Anyway, he may have got the tickets preferentially because he was a member of Reading Athletic Club, but I was recently with him and we were talking about those Olympics and my experience, I was telling him that I’d been to the Australian ones in 2000, and he just, I remember said, well I remember that I just wrote up and got tickets for three of us: you and me together and for somebody else. So it can’t have been much of a privilege, they wouldn’t have allowed him to buy three tickets, so… I don’t think I’ve still got a ticket. But anyway, you went to the same place [position in the stadium] each day. It was just like going to a big football match now, as long as you got a ticket you just turned up. And I don’t remember any very marvellous opening or closing ceremonies, I think they’ve come since. Of course, and when I went to the… the next one I went to the for the whole lot was in fact 2000 in Sydney and there we didn’t bother to go to the opening ceremony.

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Well I don’t think we had tickets for it, the tickets were all very… you had to be very careful that you picked the right ticket for the right event and I wasn’t interested in watching Australians have all these Maori whatever it is, so I didn’t go to it, neither did I go to the closing down ceremony. I think I gave away the tickets for the closing down ceremony. So that nowadays I’d say the Olympics is geared to a world audience, television, everyone can watch it, I don’t think there was television in 1948. And the sponsorship is such that major companies expect to buy allocations of seats for the right places and the right events and as far as I was aware that didn’t happen in 1948. It was certainly happening in 2000, but then we were surprised because when we turned up that we didn’t have the same seat in the arena, because there are good places and bad places, but you were shifted about, you found. Though you got the ticket for the event you wanted, you weren’t put in the same place in the stadium and that can make a lot of difference. If for instance you’re interested in the javelin, the javelin’s thrown in one particular place. Of course it’s not as bad as it could be because there are big television screens.

What were the actual facilities like in ’48?

Well, much like – you mean the sort of, the loos or something like that?

I’m just sort of, you know, I sort of imagine a sports stadium now, I wonder what the comparison was in 1948. Could you actually just describe what it was like?

They were smaller. Well, I don’t think there was standing room for the Olympics. Certainly we had seats, I certainly remember that. But just going over to Wimbledon, because I’d been going to Wimbledon about those times and you could get in for the final at Wimbledon if you went early. Then there was room in Centre Court so you could stand. You don’t stand up nowadays.

[56:43] Why with all this interest in sport did you take up smoking?

Oh, I expect it was following the girls or something like that, or being sophisticated.

Did your parents smoke?

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Mother did. Yes, they both did, not very much.

Did they have any expectations on how you should behave as their son?

Oh, they didn’t want me to smoke. I was punished for smoking surreptitiously when quite young. I think again it was wanting to try everything. Oh, at eleven [Interviewee meant ten] I was caught smoking, because we used to buy Woodbines. For two penny you could get five Woodbines and we would go and smoke them – I don’t think we would inhale or anything – because my grandfather had a goat because my uncle couldn’t take cow’s milk and so they had a goat. Well we would go and sit in the goat’s pen and nobody else would ever come, which smelt of course terrible, and we would smoke. And then my mother found a cigarette butt in my pocket. We are getting a bit off the point.

Well, I think the point is you. That’s the important thing.

What?

The point is you yourself, it’s not just the science that you’ve done, it’s the… But okay, I’m interested in the chemistry kit as well.

Sorry?

I’m interested in your chemistry set. What does one actually do with a chemistry set?

Oh, made oxygen. A standard experiment was to mix – oh, what is it? Potassium… you heat one of these… potassium permanganate is it? One of the chromates, and it gives off oxygen, and then you bubble it through, yes, you – oh dear, I’ve forgotten what it is. It’s a white powder. Manganese oxide is used as a catalyst. If we got an elementary textbook I could tell you. Anyway, you heat that and you will produce oxygen in a flask, and then you had a piece of this flask went down into a bowl of water and you had an inverted thing like a milk bottle used to be, which was full of water, the gas coming through displaced the water. In the end you had a bottle full of oxygen and then you made some hydrogen, you put them together and got a big bang and it was all lovely. [laughs]

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Are you actually doing this to instructions or finding out as you go along?

Well, more or less. You might have read in a book what to do, yes. That’s the sort of thing. And then you’d get a battery and… because you could electrolyse things. It was much easier for a child to do elementary science because the radios, you had a high voltage battery and a low voltage battery. The high voltage battery needed to provide the high tension for the valves and the low voltage battery to heat the cathodes of the valves, and then of course your bicycle, if you didn’t have a dynamo, which was very upmarket, you had a lamp on the bike. Well nowadays that works with a battery. Well, that battery is two and a half volts; if you put little plugs on that and put them into water you’ll generate hydrogen and oxygen on each end. So that’s the sort of thing one did. In that sense it’s much easier to do… and there were some, although I didn’t like biology, yes, you’d go and get frogspawn and you’d go to a pool outside the house or nearby where… and you’d pick up the gooey stuff which is fertilised frogspawn, put that in a jar, take it home and watch it and a few days later you got little frogs coming out. I’m recalling now, this is what one did a lot of the time. And so science, elementary… elementary science experiments were very much easier for a child.

[1:02:33] How much do you think you actually understood about what was actually happening, the actual processes involved? Or was it just a case of putting a couple of chemicals together and see what happens?

Yes. Well in chemistry though, there was a pretty good background you were taught in terms of acids and bases, the periodic table was well established and that was the big breakthrough in chemistry really, was to understand the difference between an element and a compound. And so in the thirties, which is what we’re talking about, or early forties, chemical theory was fairly adequate and also, although you didn’t read it at that age, the explanation of the periodic table in terms of numbers of electrons per atom or atomic number, that was all very well-known. So if the school was teaching chemistry, was teaching science at all, as it was there was a periodic chart there. So that’s quite a long way up the scale. Did we understand what was going on? Well, we certainly didn’t understand in quantum mechanical explanation, I don’t think most people do nowadays anyway, who do a lot of the experiments. I don’t think one… well, I don’t

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think… one was sufficiently disciplined to, so to say, found out something that hadn’t happened. But you see, my last year at Reading, this chap Clive – oh, I must tell you, that’s right. We’re still not at – haven’t gone up to the university yet have I?

No.

No okay. But before I went up to the university, because we lived near the university, you talked to the students. They… so you’d talk about science. [1:05:27] Furthermore, I did, the year before I went up I got a job in the physics department just as an assistant, well a schoolboy. And I can remember doing an experiment, I was, man who later became quite known, well-known, a man called Henisch had me forming electrical contacts on a piece of silicon, silicon and – this you must remember would have been before the transistor was developed and semiconductors were something that was interesting him. And we tried to electroplate some contacts on to a large piece of silicon, and that would have been in 1945, ‘46. The only other feature I remember was the German prisoner of war would also be there as an assistant. The place, after the war ended the German prisoners of war, a lot of them were having, they were allowed out before being sent back to Germany. So they had great big brown patches on their back and things. Of course that all disappeared within a year, eighteen months, but I remember very strongly then, thinking oh my goodness gracious me, a German.

[1:07:15] How did you feel about the Germans at that time?

Sorry?

How did you feel about the Germans at that time immediately at the end of the war?

Well, I’ll tell you something I’ve often spoken of. In 1940, we were talking about it the other night in college, this is those who could remember 1940. I can remember looking out of the upstairs window in the house one day in the summer, and fine, and seeing opposite, in the university playing fields, a number of old men, as I thought, being drilled and some of them were holding bits of wood and some were holding an old rifle. And this was the emergency thing after the fall of France, immediately after the fall of France, the government started what they called

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the Local Defence Volunteers who then became the well-known Dad’s Army, the Home Guard. And I remember looking at this and previously we’d seen pictures in the papers of how the Germans had swept through France with paratroopers landing here and there, and I remember thinking, we’re going to lose this war, no doubt about it, because I can’t see those chaps standing up to these pictures I’ve seen of young men with Stahlhelm , so I thought I’d better learn German. So I went away and got an old, found a book from World War I, which my father might have had, in German. Thought, well I’ll learn German because [laughing] we’re clearly going to lose this lot, it would be better to speak German. Well, I didn’t persevere with that then, but I did get an interest in the language, so later I taught myself German. I can lecture in German, German I’m quite, not fluent in because it goes away, but that started my interest in… So although I, I don’t remember hating them, I remember thinking they seem to be jolly clever, these Germans, because they’re taking on the world and one was glad you won, but there was some admiration for, gosh, they must be a pretty impressive lot, sort of thing.

[1:10:15] Interested in…

And it was useful, the German knowledge, in my subject. Nowadays it doesn’t make much difference.

In what respect?

Sorry?

What German knowledge?

I could read German papers, papers in German, didn’t have to wait for a translation. Nowadays they don’t publish much, except in English, so all the things like Naturwissenschaft , they’re all in English, well most of them. When I was a student and my early career up to 1960 there were powerful papers in other languages and I could read German.

What do you actually do, apart from that one experiment with what sounds like a prototype silicon chip in the…

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Well, I don’t remember other… he would be trying to measure the conductivity because in that stage of the development of the understanding of semiconductors, the major point was that the thermal… the electrical conductivity increased with increase of temperature, whereas a metal it decreases, and that’s of course because of the liberation of holes and things like that. But that was a pretty hot topic. It was a man called, who happened to have the same name as mine, Kelly, who was a deputy leader of research at Bell Telephones, who spotted the idea that people ought to work very hard on semiconductors and that’s what led to the invention of the transistor and the whole take off of electronics, but you have to remember when I was an undergraduate, and for some years afterwards as a research student, you still worked with thermionic valves, the transistor only came in in the sixties and so in the forties and fifties you had to make your equipment work. And furthermore, if things didn’t work you couldn’t just buy another one. Nowadays, you see my first… we were very well taught at Reading. We did detailed experiments, as I think we’ve said the earlier part. We, for instance, determined the charge on the electron by Millikan’s method. That’s quite a sophisticated thing to do, you have to make a cloud chamber work, you have to observe carefully the passage of the drops. It’s real powerful stuff. This was one of my worries at present, as to how much is hidden in the computering and whether you’re really measuring what you’re think you’re measuring. I mean I was, I think… the calculator coming in and the computer and so forth and of course all the wonderful things in electronics means that the relationship to an actual, so to say, actually what’s happening is not so physically apparent. That’s a problem with science I think, that… You can see it particularly in the arguments about climate change. The computer models, which are no doubt logically absolutely very well done, and the relationship of those to understanding climatic processes is, it’s quite weak. So you can argue, well the predictions that are being made are not, could be borne out, but they’re not at the stage that they must be borne out, that’s what I’d say. And it’s because of – it’s happened in a lot of subjects – the grasp, the relationship of the physical models to what the computer is producing are not fully understood. But we’ve got ahead. When I was doing science and that wasn’t a problem then. Calculating machines did come in, hand calculator, when I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Reading.

Shall we take a short break?

[end of track 3]

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[Track 4]

You mentioned that you were taught by Brother Canice in your…

C-A-N-I-C-E. I don’t know his last name, I have been told it since. He died, oh not very long… oh, he died quite young in the West Indies.

What was he like, as a teacher?

Well, he was very good. He encouraged people and he was interested and he was a respected man so, I mean the secret of teaching is good, is good discipline and enthusiasm. As long as you can maintain good discipline and show enthusiasm that’s the best thing, I think, for a schoolteacher. And he was certainly like that. Well, also the mathematics man, Brother Benedict, was very good.

I was wondering if you could actually, before we move any further, if you could just paint a portrait of yourself as a late teenager before you started university.

Do you ask everybody that? Oh. [pause] Well, hard-working probably. Yes, hard-working. Fairly disciplined. Not particularly self-confident, except in an arrogant sort of way. Well, fairly ambitious to make one’s way in the world. At that stage it was in science, but science was the vehicle, as Hardy describes in the portrait of a mathematician, it was a way to social acceptance, coming from the background that I did, to… doing well academically was a way to (a) get a job – you see the war ended just before going to university, so then there was the question of National Service, should one do the National Service before you… some people would have then done their National Service then and I decided not to, principally on my father’s advice. I’m not sure it was the right advice, but you could get deferment, particularly in 1945, which was when the important decisions were made, because things like the Korean War only came later and the calling up people really didn’t know what to do, the war had ended and a flood of people… so it was relatively easy to be deferred. I think subsequently it’s perhaps a pity I didn’t do my military service then because it would have been good for me as a person because one thought one was a bit cleverer than one was, if you see what I mean. You’d done well at school, you’d won a scholarship, you went to Reading and looking back on it of course, there were some other

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people of one’s years at Reading, like Bill Chaloner, who subsequently are FRSs too, but the majority of the students in 1946 were all ex-service. Well, they weren’t necessarily particularly academically driven, they wanted a degree and get on with life, so therefore one did very well and won all the prizes, but that might have given one a – it probably did – make you think you were cleverer than you were, or me, so I probably thought I was cleverer than I was. I wanted to go to Cambridge mainly I think for social reasons, that Reading was Reading, Oxford and Cambridge were the places and my friends had gone there, so I wanted to go there. But of course we’re actually, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, you’re asking as a teenager going to university. Well, I knew I was clever, but it subsequently turned out I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was, if you see what I mean. But I’d have been hard-working, I’d have been good mannered. Yes, I’d have been good mannered and with the sort of moral formation that comes with a sort of religious upbringing. You didn’t sort of make love before you got married. Well of course it didn’t occur to you much at the age of nineteen, eighteen or nineteen. So I’d be the conventional middle class bright boy. That’s about the best I can do for you.

[06:00] Why do you choose to go to Reading?

What?

Why did you choose to go to…

Well, it was the only alternative, I mean there was no alternative. I mean my father had to pay for me, remember, I did get a scholarship but things were fairly constrained, I mean not too many boys from university went to… not too many boys went to university anyway, and going to university, it was only during the war that grants came out, you have to remember, and well, grants… fees were very low and the grants were for accommodation. Now that didn’t exist when I went up, so I lived at home because that saved the family money. I remember they said, but with your scholarship you could go into a hall of residence, but still it wouldn’t cover the whole cost, so it was financial. I mean the local university was what one went to unless one had been to the right school and had all sorts of clever scholarships. That was nothing… that was it. You were lucky there was a university in the town. It’s very different social conditions from now.

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I was interested in how you highlighted university education as being a sort of socially mobile engine.

Yes. Yes, well that would have come from my father, because he had done well, because he’d been the boy who’d gone to the university from the Catholic family. I think I… not a particularly well-known school then, only a small number of people went and that seemed to be the ticket for a good job. At least, you see lots of the people who went up in ’46 were going to be teachers in those days, schoolteachers went through university, there weren’t large numbers of training colleges. There were for some, but the better ones went to university, so in my first year at Reading, and of course I had to step back a year because I hadn’t got Higher School Certificate, so when I went up in ’46 I had to do what’s called intermediate examinations, I don’t think exists any more. That was for people who hadn’t done Higher. Nowadays you only get in on Higher so there’s no intermediate examination. Well, the ethos in the family was, you know, if you went to university you could either be a teacher or get some other regular job. The shadow of the depression – we haven’t talked about that – that in Nantwich before we moved to Reading, we moved to Reading in 1940, in Nantwich in the thirties some of the children at the primary school I mentioned, well I can remember feeling extremely sorry for them, they’d come to school dirty and not well fed. I remember throwing a snowball at a boy and hit him and the snowball water fell down inside his gumboots and I realised he hadn’t got any socks and he had just been packed off to school and the poor kid was just cringing and here was I, well fed lad who’d just come from a house just a few… it was quite… There were social tensions too, you didn’t walk easily from one part I lived to another. If you went through the areas where people were out of work the children would, not quite assault you, but they’d sort of say nasty things to you. And that was still true at Reading, I remember, because in the winter of 1940, a terrible winter, part of the wall at the back of the house we’d been put into fell down and that end was what you’d call a slum area. So all of this changed since the wonderful 1945 government, that’s excoriated by some, if it hadn’t put things right, the... So people would jeer at you, poor people.

Were you ever aware of growing up in any…

Sorry?

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Were you ever aware of growing up in any particular social class?

Yes, oh yes. Yes, we were middle class, yes, oh definitely. Oh yes. Mother intended us to be… she had social pretensions. She dressed me in a very odd way that embarrassed me.

What did you have to wear?

Well, she made me wear a hat, or the hat she’d seen public schoolboys wore. Well, I hated this bloody hat. [laughs]

[12:00] Do you know if your parents…

Mother was a social climber. That sounds nasty. She would have looked at it, she wanted to do the best thing for her kids.

Were there any people you weren’t allowed to associate with?

Well, you would be discouraged and you wouldn’t get to know them if they were very different, because there were genuinely poor people. There would be kids about with clogs in Nantwich in 1930s. Some boys would come to school without socks and, not wooden clogs, but they were leather with metal bindings. Now all of that passed very quickly because of all the excellent, well the… you see, the, Beveridge reported didn’t he, and then unemployment benefit etc, and of course the Labour government got in in ’45 with a tremendous majority and it set about setting up the welfare state, the last part of which you’ve been in now where we’ve got this reaction about the government doing too much, but then it wasn’t doing very much. So to be a social climber was not so much… it was to avoid penury. Because I can remember lying in bed thinking, gosh, when I leave school I’m actually going to have to earn my living. I don’t think that ever occurred to my kids or the grandchildren. Somehow there would be jobs available. We’d seen people out of work for long periods and well, you didn’t know them personally but that was in the air, that you’re going to have to earn your living mate, so do well at your books and say, yes sir, keep going and see how we get on.

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Had you had any particular thoughts on a career direction?

Well, I knew I wanted to do science. Yes, I think, I can remember thinking gosh, yes, Anthony Kelly, Professor of Thermodynamics at something or other. This would have been about the stage I was going to Reading, yes.

Do you know what your parents actually… what direction they hoped you’d go in?

Well, my father, I was doing just what he hoped, what I think he would have liked to have done.

Do you mean liked to have done himself or liked…

Yes. As we go on with the story, when I was appointed a lecturer here in about, well I remember thinking in 1961 or two, what you’ve really done is exactly what your father would love to have done, what the hell do you do now? And that was a conscious thought. Now of course up to that point I hadn’t seen it in that way. I’d seen that it was a way of earning my living in a way I understood because father was a professional you see, the officer class and the professional class much the same, they had jobs.

[16:10] What did you actually study at Reading?

Well, the first four – oh, wait a minute, I think they’re all out. Let’s just see what the total score is, if we may.

[pause in recording]

[16:28] I was wondering what you actually… what was the subject called?

Oh, at Reading. Oh, the first – this is interesting, this is – I had to do the intermediate exam and for the scholarship exam I chose myself to do physics, chemistry, geography and geology and I won this major open scholarship, which I was delighted with, marvellous. I learned that in

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something like April 1946. I think that contributed to my doing well as an athlete that summer because I was on top of the world. And I went up in ’46 and I read those four subjects. Sorry, I went up in ’46 having studied those four subjects. Now, I had to drop, well, I wanted to do physics or chemistry I think. I was slightly attracted to geology. Anyway, there was no point in carrying on with geography, so I did physics, chemistry, mathematics and geology for the four… essentially this is to the level of Higher, what’s nowadays… what’s the entry to university?

A level?

What?

A level?

Yes, that’s right. So after a year at the university we’ve done… and then I won a lot of prizes that summer, that would be the summer of ’47. So I’d read maths, physics, chemistry and geology. Now, what did I do then? Geology had stopped – I wish, in retrospect I’ve often wondered if it would have been better if I’d gone on with geology, but I didn’t like the fossil bit because we hadn’t been taught biology well at school, or subsequently, so that frightened me, oh my gawd. I like physical geology, all about mountains and layers of rocks and things, marvellous. And I was a keen cyclist, I used to – I’ve forgotten to tell you – in 1944 and ’45 I was a member of the Youth Hostels Association, I didn’t go on holiday with the family so much, I would go with a friend and tour. I mean you could do that, there were very few cars about. And I was interested in geology, the formations. But in 1947 I had to decide. Now I’d done very well at mathematics in equivalent of A level. My father said – he was a mathematician – don’t do mathematics, you’ll find it’s too competitive. Academically if you’re going to do mathematics it’s no use doing it unless you’re very good. So, well I had to do mathematics to do physics and chemistry, so then one dropped geology and for the… I then studied physics, chemistry, mathematics and additional mathematics. That’s very similar to what is now still done here, but in Reading that was… Reading still had a general degree, you see, you couldn’t specialise once you entered the university on just one subject, you had to do three and get a general degree and then when you got the general degree, if you were good enough you did the special degree, which was just doing one subject one year. So the structure of the course then at Reading was very similar to what it was then here, at Cambridge and in some other universities,

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but not all. So I read, ’47 I decided I would read chemistry, physics and maths and advanced maths, and that’s what I did until I got the degree in 1949 and then I specialised in physics. Now at the time in ‘47 I thought I would do chemistry, but I made a fool of myself in one of the chemistry practicals through spending too much time looking at a girl opposite when we were told what to do and I hadn’t listened and I blew something up, which didn’t please her because the acid was blown on her, the acid was blown on me and I thought I’d better give up chemistry. So it was a real example of cherchez la femme leading to, well we’d better stop chemistry, physics is the only one left.

Who was the girl?

Isa Steward [ph – 22:08]. She was a nice looking girl who rowed very well, I remember.

[22:15] You have many girlfriends yourself at university as a teenager?

Oh yes, yes a lot, yes. You tended to go to the… there’d be a ball every so often and you’d go to that and dress up in evening clothes and things like that. It was still… it was a bit above its station, looking back. Yes, I, yes I was interested in women, yes.

Why do you say ‘a bit above its station’? It’s an interesting phrase.

Well, maybe that’s… [pause] You were sort of doing these things that sort of people higher up the social scale would have been doing all the time, but you did it periodically. I find it difficult to put it other than that. They would dress up in evening dress and the girls would wear long frocks and somehow, well their mothers and fathers would never have dreamt of being able to do that. And by that I mean above their station. So because you were in university you’d moved into a social strata that you didn’t find in the schools, at least not in my school. So in that sense, having got into the university then you had to learn to tie a bowtie or something like that. In that sense you were sort of over temporally promoted up the social scale, if I can put it right.

Is that something you were conscious of at the time or is that something that’s occurred to you looking back?

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No, I think we probably were conscious at the time.

Did you have any serious girlfriends at university?

Well, I married one eventually, but yes, the same woman, yes.

How did you meet?

Through the Catholic Association.

Who was that?

Well, at universities nowadays there are Christian organisations for the undergraduates, usually centred on a chaplaincy. That isn’t so, that wasn’t so at Reading. You went to, you tried to join the various games playing. My father was keen I should do sport so I, the first year at the university went and tried yourself out for the cricket team, the football team, tennis team. You see, things were much less professional than nowadays. You hadn’t had any coaching and you went to the Catholic Association if you’d been brought up a good Catholic, that’s all. So they would meet and the priest who was the chaplain was dead keen we should all be versed in Augustinian arguments for the existence of God, that we found a bit boring actually, and we preferred to go and have a chat with the girls in the pub afterwards. But that’s how I met that particular woman.

[26:27] What was her name?

Christina Dunleavie.

What did you actually like about her?

Sorry?

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What did you like about her?

I think she laughed at my jokes.

So did you actually get married while you were still at university?

No, no, no. It was quite a long time later.

[26:55] You mentioned Catholic Society and one or two sporting activities – did you have any other interests and hobbies?

I tried for everything. The athletics was my keen one as I’ve told you, because the first year I was the top of the bottom guys, I came up to the university and I just got nowhere because I hadn’t been properly coached. If I’d been coached well, they’d have said, now you’re the bottom of the top guys, you’ve got to wait and… so I was a bit impatient to do well I expect, so I just gave it up and I played tennis and I was quite good at tennis. I played squash, tennis quite regularly. I didn’t play much cricket, I wasn’t very good. I played a bit of football, soccer. But then after, I remember thinking in my, something like my third year – and you must remember I’m going to talk of a four-year course because I had to do this, I had to make up the year up to A levels – I thought well you’d better go easy on the sport because you need to work. And so I just concentrated on cross-country running.

What was the workload actually like?

Well, it was pretty, we thought it was intense compared with – good lord…

[pause in recording]

[28:38] So you asked – what was the question?

Oh, what was the workload like?

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[28:50] I was saying I decided to work hard, and so I just did cross-country running.

I was wondering what the workload was actually like?

[both speaking together]

Oh, the workload, that was what you asked. Well, compared to the arts people we felt it was hard work. So far as I can recall, the schedule was pretty full for the week. In the morning you had lectures and in the afternoons you did practicals. And they really were two-hour practicals, so chemistry was jolly good fun. You made all sorts of preparations, you blew yourself up looking at Isa Steward [ph], but you did real experiments. I don’t think they do that, anything like that now, certainly don’t here. So you became pretty familiar and quite good with your hands. And when I was a research student you were supposed to be able to use a machine, you know, like a machinist. Now, that didn’t happen at undergraduate level, but nonetheless in physics you did all the classical experiments carefully and you determined oh, validity of Boyle’s Law, something like that, and derived the gas constant. It was pretty bookish stuff but it was done accurately. That doesn’t exist any more. Well, not so far as I can tell.

Did you have to do work outside class as well?

Did you what?

Did you have work to do outside class?

Well, as I remember David Clarke saying, the joy of this is sorting out the lecture notes. You sorted out the lecture notes, you talked to your friends, and some subjects you were given bits of work to do. But Reading didn’t have the expensive supervision system here, you didn’t see a lot of the teachers in between the lectures, you heard the lectures, you went and did the practicals and there might be some periodic type of test, but you didn’t talk to the teachers on the level you do at Cambridge, anything like. Completely different. I think that’s still true in most universities other than this place. And so, what more can I say? But we felt hard worked and I

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can remember because I, oh at school I’d been quite good at acting, you know, the way you act in school plays, which I liked. And I remember being asked at one stage in my, something like my second year if I would go in for one of the big productions the way the student union does, it would have, we’ll put on, I’ve forgotten what the particular play was, oh, it was one of these by Synge and they said, would you come and do it. And I remember saying no, I won’t because of the time. And I remember the chap saying to me, ah, that’s interesting because doing acting you would regard as a dissipation of effort and not as a development of yourself. He was dead right. In retrospect, it might have been best if I had done. Anyway, I didn’t because I was focussed on doing well in the science, because I actually liked it, it was good fun figuring out the lecture notes and so forth.

[33:00] Were there any particular parts of it you enjoyed?

[pause] This is before… this is the sort of first couple of years. I can remember being fascinated by the various types of hydrogen, because I think if – I’m not sure whether I’m right here – but I think tritium hadn’t been long discovered, I’m not quite sure of that, and then heavy hydrogen and light hydrogen and well, rather marvellous things that they could figure all this out, dead clever, wonderful stuff. Thermodynamics was attractive, but I didn’t feel I ever really understood entropy, I don’t think I do now. So I liked those bits. I liked mathematical analysis that involved vectors, I liked that, that was something I could see what was going on. You know, this one multiplied by that one, and then you’ve got this wonderful trick that you can have two types of multiplication. My God, Harry, that’s exciting stuff, that really is. So those were the things I liked. Let’s think. You’ve got to remember that elementary nuclear physics was fascinating because in 1945 they let off the atom bomb and in 1946 or seven somebody, I think it was Bronowski, suggested that people ought to be informed about atomic energy and a set of trains was set up, well a coach of a train that went to various towns and had in it examples of the atom. So they would start off by saying the atom’s almost all empty space. There are electrons and there are protons and these things, then they’d explain on the nuclei, that the nuclei got together, that the energy released. And I remember we were asked whether physics students could go and sit in the train when it was in Reading and explain it to the populace. Well, I loved doing that and we would sometimes talk absolute nonsense on purpose to see if anyone was listening. So I can remember, well [Brian] Cathcart’s recent book, A Bee in the Cathedral ,

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[Interviewee meant The Fly in the Cathedral ]which is about the emptiness of an atom because the electron… and I remember we used to say something like, we’d get some old… well, some person would come in and we’d say quite seriously now, it’s like this, you see, and if you look inside the atom you’ll be surprised what you’d see, you’ll see some bees the size of a cathedral. And they’d nod their head and go on and we’d kill ourselves, thinking what arrogant little twits we were. But nuclear stuff did seem rather clever stuff, quite exciting. And all sorts of elements of science that, well, really do captivate you when you’re learning it.

What sort of actual reactions to nuclear physics did you get from the general public?

Oh, I don’t know that I can…

Other than the sage nodding.

I don’t think… well, you would explain, I’m sure undergraduates do it now, you can see it all the time, they’d just learned this and they then talk to their friends about it and they tell their girlfriends about it and the girlfriend tells you what she’s just learned, and things like that. And you learn a lot more from the people you talk to. There was one, I had a close friend, Michael Wright, I don’t know quite what happened to him, but we used to discuss the lectures and the topics. So that was quite exciting time.

Is there anything elsewhere that was happening in the world of science at large that interested you while you were at university?

Well, I think it was, wasn’t Fred Hoyle terribly well-known or something like that? Wasn’t the Big Bang… no, this was… Hoyle and Bondi and those people who – they’re about ten years older than me – and they were all in the vogue, Bronowski was on the radio and Fred Hoyle was a great guru and there was a thing called The Brains Trust you listened to on the radio and this would have philosophical and scientific questions, all of that seemed jolly interesting. I remember going to debates in the union but I usually made a fool of myself because I was, like so many people you find if you’re honest about it, they want to have been someone who said something, rather than necessarily made a contribution. They felt they had to get up and say something. You can always tell in a meeting nowadays, can’t you, oh so-and-so will get up and

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ask a question. Well, I was a bit like that, but I would get up and make what I thought was one clever remark, which nobody took any notice of because it didn’t lead to a long peroration, it didn’t lead to a statement about the argument, it was sheer vanity, you’d got up and said something.

How much was…

[laughs] You’re beginning to convince me I’m crazy. [laughs]

[40:20] Honest was actually my thought. [laughs] What sort of friends did you actually have, to actually sort of go to debating societies with, to talk about science with?

Well, one or two, a friend who I used to do cross-country with, he read botany. He’s an FRS. We occasionally meet each other and we talk about dear old Reading and how we both learned some very bad German, and used to talk bad German to each other, just because, well young people do. Then there was Corbett [ph] who was very clever too. So of the undergraduate set doing what are now called natural sciences here, or in Reading would have been called doing science, those were three or four of us who, well, we would in retrospect have been the clever ones because we got firsts and went on and did research. And when one meets them you’re pleased to talk to them about it, it was quite a happy time.

What were your teachers like – are there any who stick in your mind?

Well, yes indeed they do. At Reading at the time it was not a very well-known university and in science it was, in ’46 the professor of chemistry and the professor of physics – and in those days there was mainly one professor, now there are half a dozen – both changed and to chemistry came a man called Guggenheim. Now, Guggenheim was extremely clever and also extremely rich. In those days that was quite – well he seemed very rich. He had a chauffeur driven car, which for a professor at Reading in those days, because I think his mother, his wife had money. Anyway, he’d worked with Fowler here and he was a brilliant young FRS and a thermodynamicist. The previous professor had been a man called Bassett who was a quite humdrum organic chemist. So Guggenheim had an enormous effect on the department and that

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was why I thought I was going to read chemistry till I blew myself up watching Isa Steward. [ph] Now, Ditchburn came from Trinity College Dublin, much less well-known, he wasn’t an FRS and that counted a hell of a lot in those days at a university like that. In retrospect he did much better for physics than Guggenheim did for chemistry because he knew how to work the university system. And Ditchburn was a rather poor… was a very, very good teacher in, there were two excellent teachers in physics who will always be a pleasure to… One was TB Rymer – R-Y-M-E-R – and the other, oh dear… was Wills, MM Wills. I don’t know where they – oh well, Wills had been at Oxford. Anyway, they were very good teachers. I can remember the lecture notes, I’ve still got the lecture notes from those people, they’re very good notes. There were one or two younger people like OS Heavens who was much nearer our age who inspired us and we would argue with him. And I’m confusing a bit the first two years after A level, that’s after intermediate, and the final year because the final year was when I was reading physics alone. Then Wills had an enormous influence. He was a very, very good experimentalist and as I was telling you, we did quite sophisticated experiments, for instance, we determined the charge on the electron. That’s not an easy thing to do.

[45:15] What’s difficult about it?

What?

What’s actually difficult about it?

Well, how would you measure the charge on…

I’ve no idea, that’s why I’m asking.

Oh well. The method then was to arrange to have a super-saturated atmosphere or air super- saturated with water so that it’s about to form drops, because the air molecules have got to condense and then they will fall to the bottom like rain. Now, Millikan had discovered that if you send ionising radiation into that in some simple way for a radioactive… the drops become charged and then if you put an electric field on the rate of falling due to gravity will be increased or decreased, depending on the charge, but if they were charged with an electron it so happens

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they’ll fall. So if you can see these and observe how fast they’re falling, you can work out what the charge is, the actual value of the charge in units of, in those days, CGS units of electric charge. That’s just changed with the SI system. Now that is sophisticated experiment. Where Wills was marvellous was that we all knew what the answer was. The answer’s 4.8 x 10 to the minus 8 electrostatic units and he spent ages penalising us when he knew that we were trying to rig the experiment to get the answer, which we quite naturally did, we weren’t dishonest. But he was a cunning man and he would see, he’d suddenly say, ‘This is absolutely hopeless, start…’ and then eventually we realised that what was important for Wills was to show that you’d coherently… so that he would say in the end you got full marks if, although your value might be way off 4.8 x 10, it wouldn’t be very… it might be off by a factor of two, but that was still damn good, because there were all sorts of corrections you had to make. I remember his teaching that very clearly and I learned then – and this is why I’m very distrustful of a lot of big computer programs – if you think you know the answer you’ll probably try and get it, and he taught that what you have to do is do the experiment carefully and nature will give you the right answer if you’ve done the right experiment. Well, that was a pretty important thing to have drummed into you and that’s the heart of experimental science. Have I made myself clear, do you think? Well, Wills was very good at teaching that and I’ll never forget it.

You’ve mentioned sort of experimental physics quite a lot. Was this your main area of interest?

Oh yes, I’m no theoretician, not very good at mathematics. I was quite good, but I’m not at the level that you need to be.

You mentioned…

I’m getting a bit tired.

Would you like to call it quits for the day?

I’d love to.

We’ve done a good two hours. [end of track 4]

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[Track 5]

We spoke quite a lot last time about your time in Reading and I was just wondering, to sort of round things off a little bit, if you could tell me if there were any teachers who were particularly influential on you that you met there.

Well, I thought I mentioned TB Rymer in physics and a very, very good experimentalist… oh dear, we’ll have to leave his name blank for a minute, but he… when you did special honours, just physics for the last year, you did quite extensive experiments, I think I described this, and he was the man who impressed on us that the important thing was the data you were getting yourself, rather than referring to the handbook data. I think I did recall about measuring…

Millikan’s method.

Charging the electron by Millikan’s method. Well it was he who was a great influence. Now the professor, Ditchburn, when I told him I would like to go to Cambridge, he was really very helpful, RW Ditchburn, who had just been appointed, and it was he who suggested I applied to Trinity College as a graduate student because coming here you have to be accepted by a college. I remember I had an interview with Dr Shoenberg who was then here and someone else whom I don’t remember, in February or so of 1950. It was, I remember, the week of the general election. I came to Cambridge and I think, as I described, I had already said I would like to work on sub- grains in metals, and I remember Shoenberg saying, well if you get a first we’ll probably take you. And that was then, I worked to get as good a degree as I could in July 1950, or maybe it would have been June. And out of the six people who read part II physics, two of us got firsts. That was a man called Collins and myself and Collins, I believe, went to AWRE, that’s the atomic weapons place, which was recruiting then, was still highly secret. And I came here.

[03:10] What was your first impression of Cambridge?

Well, it was daunting in a number of ways, but very, very stimulating because coming as one had, where one had been, so to say, very good amongst one’s peers, one found yourself certainly not the leader. And of course entering as a first year research student with all these greats about

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like Bragg and Frisch and memories of Rutherford in the Cavendish, which was still very extant in 1950, you realised you weren’t as bright as you thought. Furthermore, though this is a little later, research students in those days, people like me, were supported by a grant from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and they lasted two years, those grants. They weren’t necessarily grants to get a PhD, they were grants so research could be done. That changed a few years later. Anyway, one supplemented one’s income – I remember, it was £250 a year, it rose to 300 while I was there – but you supplemented your income by supervising in colleges. Now, I arrived at Trinity and Dr Ashmead, who was the director of studies at Trinity, wouldn’t let any of his students reading physics be supervised by anyone who hadn’t been at Trinity [laughs] and certainly hadn’t been at Cambridge for the first degree. Well, eventually he did allow me to do some supervision for his worst students I think, one of whom turned out to be an extremely bright businessman. [05:56] But the point I’m rather long-windedly getting around to was that in the supervisions I remember very clearly sitting there, as you do in small groups with the students, with the undergraduates, and I remember thinking, my goodness, this chap is smarter than me, he’s seen the problem much better than me, what am I doing getting a supervision fee for, for this chap, because he ought to be running the supervision. And I think I did have the self-control to let him run the rest of the session. But that was very, very good for one. So, otherwise it was very exciting because I’d lived at home at Reading, which is something happening to undergraduates a bit more nowadays, or will do in the future. And so going away to be a research student at Cambridge was not only going from Reading to Cambridge, but going away from home for the first time. So those were all mixed up in… So yes, that was lovely I thought, yes.

What were the best bits about living away from home for the first time?

Oh, well my father and mother, they were quite liberal. I don’t know that I… I don’t remember any sort of much sense of… well, it was just one wasn’t at home, I don’t think I can manage any more thoughts at this distance in time. There was a strong connection with Reading, fortuitously, because the group in which I was put had been started under – Bragg had pointed out that if there were small grains, sub-grains inside metal crystals after the metal had been plastically deformed, then you ought to be able to distinguish the individual diffraction spots from them if you used a very fine beam of X-rays so that only a small number of sub-grains were irradiated. And to further this examination, you had to have a high intensity X-ray source,

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because otherwise with the small beam there wasn’t enough power going into the X-ray. And the man asked to build such a source, in those days you built things yourself, was a man called Keller – K-E-double L-E-R – who had been at Reading and after the war had come to Cambridge and he built the machine with a man called Hirsch – H-I-R-S-C-H – now the famous Sir Peter Hirsch at Oxford. Now, tragically Keller had been killed in an accident in Holland the year before I came and subsequently Hirsch married Keller’s widow. So the present Lady Hirsch – are you seeing Sir Peter Hirsch?

Well, I think he may be on a possible list, but…

Because he’s a very big name in the field, enormous big name in material science. So Lady Hirsch was, Steve – S-T-E-V-E – it’s a man’s name but she was called Steve, well she was Keller’s relict, so there was in a sense – and she had been at Reading, read dairying, so to some extent there was a, not quite family, but a friendly connection. Now Hirsch was very helpful to me. There was another man in the group called Gay who had to finish his PhD and then I was to take it over, and this I did so. But I was very much the junior figure. [11:40] The laboratory at that particular time, 1950 through ’53 when I left, the big thing in the laboratory was the fact that Cambridge was no longer the leader, the Cavendish was no longer the world leader in nuclear physics because that, with the atomic bomb and everything, had all passed to America. America had the money to build the apparatus. So the one talking point was we’re not in nuclear physics any more and of course Bragg was terribly interested himself in protein structures, no longer in… and of course Crick and Watson – well Crick, because Watson… - Perutz and Kendrew, and those famous names in protein crystallography, they were there and of course they were in the crystallography group, which I was, so I knew them well and all the brouhaha over which was the important thing, whether it was DNA or a protein that was passing on the genetic information. Although one didn’t at the time know the detail of this, the lab was very redolent with it because Rosalind Franklin, of whom you’ve no doubt heard, the one who should have got, they say, the Nobel, she used to visit. Now, she visited to see Hirsch, because Hirsch at the time was working on the structure of coal [laughs] because in the 1950s the National Coal Board was a really big thing in Britain and had lots of money and it was run, the research was run by a man called Bronowski, who was very well known, who you may have heard of. Now this is slightly by the way to my researches, but it shows the atmosphere in the Cavendish. And the other big group in the Cavendish then doing great things were the radio astronomers. So the

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crystallographic section I was in, in the sweep of history you can see was being run down. Since a man called Orowan left the day I arrived to go to MIT and he had been under Bragg, the main thrust in what is called metal physics, material science now embraces what was then called metal physics. Now metal physics was essentially about the nature of plastic deformation in metals. [15:15] So I soldiered on and I had one good idea and that was – and here the technicalities of X-ray diffraction need to be explained slightly. You have a specimen and with this tiny beam you fired X-rays at it and if you look at my hand, this is the specimen and here come the X-rays. Now, for reasons I don’t need to go into, well, pictures were taken in what is called ‘back reflection’. In other words, the beam came in and the scattering in the backward direction was collected on a photographic plate. And the reason for doing that was that the X-rays are very quickly absorbed inside the material and so you get better resolution of a number of small particles, if there were there, because you mustn’t irradiate too many in that mode. Well, the one new thought I had was, well, why not make the foil so thin that the X-rays will go through, and collect them on the other side.

The foil, sorry, the foil of the sample or…

Well, here’s the sample, my hand. Usually it’s a thick thing, so the X-rays come in, they’re not going to get through so you take the bits reflected back on to a plate here.

In front of, so in the same direction that the X-ray source is coming from, they bounce off the sample back on to the plate.

Exactly.

Right, okay.

And Kelly thought, well, why not make the specimen so thin that they go through. Now, there are theoretical advantages to that because the scattering is stronger in the forward direction than the backward direction so you’d have shorter exposure times, which was the trouble. We had to expose all night to get a picture, you see, because the beams were weak in those days. Nowadays it would take a second on a cyclotron. Well, that turned out to be quite clever because – and I did manage to find sub-grains in something like copper, which having a higher

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melting point than aluminium, which was the normal material, the sub-grain is much more difficult to see. But the fact that sending the X-rays through stimulated the idea, well why not use electron diffraction instead of X-ray diffraction, why not use electron microscopy. Well, after I’d left that’s exactly what Hirsch did and that was his big thing. He’s a very clever man, I’m not for a minute suggesting he might not have thought of this himself, because I’d kept in touch with him, although he wasn’t working on… he was working on coal, he was still very interested in the X-ray micro-beam technique as it was called. And those days he would have been struggling to get a job in the fifties, there were very few jobs about. So since he’d built this X-ray tube with Keller, he wanted to sort of get any credit that came out of the X-ray tube with Keller instead of trying to make his name in the structure of coal. So he took up the idea of using electrons and after I left, without any contact with me, I mean they did first observe moving dislocations, but it all followed from the micro-beam technique and firing the beam through instead of reflecting it.

[20:15] Where did you get the idea of actually… where did you get the idea of that method as opposed to the back scattering?

Oh, I remember thinking of it one evening.

Is there any particular inspiration?

Well, I remember feeling rather, a bit worried. People like that are very ambitious and I thought well what the hell am I going to do to attract attention. I remember, it was quite clearly, one Saturday evening in my second year I was sitting at the desk writing down, then I thought, well we keep on about firing the beam, taking the beam backwards, and I’m not getting anything out of these specimens of copper, I’ll roll the hell out of a piece of copper so it was very thin, and lo and behold it worked. I think it was just carefully thinking round the subject, how… you see, the thing that we all worried about was the exposure time. You could get pictures with a fine beam from aluminium in several hours and because aluminium so happens had a low melting point, relatively, it turns out that the sub-grains we’re looking for were rather well defined in aluminium. But aluminium is just one metal, it isn’t the most important for structural purposes, steel is the most… So I was really supposed to try and penetrate the high melting point metal.

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So, okay, we’ve got smaller grains, we could use finer beams. Well, lining up in those days a beam which was only a few microns in diameter was a pretty tricky thing to do. Nowadays it’s a snip, I mean nobody worries about it. But you can spend a long time playing around with the beam before the X-rays went down, went through the small hole you wanted them to go through. So, if you couldn’t make the beam smaller, you were making the beam small in order to irradiate a small volume, that was I suppose what struck, instead of, we kept on thinking about the area. Well, you can make the volume smaller with a bigger cross-section beam if you made the specimen very thin, and that seemed to work. So that was that main thing, if I did anything clever, in that at that period.

What does this equipment actually look like – could you describe it to me please?

Well, the – we can probably get a picture somewhere, if you wanted.

I think for the interests of the audio it might be good having an audio description of what it actually looked like from your memory, that would be quite…

Oh, I could get you a picture out of my PhD thesis, of the apparatus.

Yeah, but as well, for the audio as well just in case someone hasn’t got a picture there.

Well, put a note down.

Yeah, I’ll pop a note in there to…

Now I must make another point. What was I going to say? [pause] Oh, there’s one historic bit. The camera with the X-ray is a very small thing because the beam is only a few microns in diameter, but the apparatus for producing a high intensity X-ray beam, which we’re going to fire down it, was a massive piece of equipment, literally it filled half the room. A man called Spear thought how to do it much more simply, which when I went to America I then did anyway. This had to have a rectifier, because to generate X-rays, essentially what you do is fire a beam of electrons into something and X-rays come out. Now, the rectifier had been built from the pieces used by Cockcroft and Walton just before the war in the first famous splitting of the atom

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experiment, because that was a set of, they had a set of rectifiers to get a high voltage, they got something like a quarter of a million volts. We only needed 50,000 volts, so two or three of their rectifiers were what we used, but they were the same rectifiers, which if you go and look in the Cavendish now, those rectifiers are shown as a marvellous thing that Cockcroft and Walton had used in the 1930s. We’re now in the 1950s that I’m talking about, about fifteen years later with the war in between, but not much happened in the war because of the war. [laughs] So, but anyway, that apparatus was obsolete at the time it was built because it was a very stupid way to make high intensity X-rays. It turns out, well, you can use cyclotrons and things, and so X-ray tubes like that aren’t used any more. And it was also pointed out by Spear that if you wanted a really strong source of X-rays, then you should try and make it very small because although the intensity could be high without the area being very large, because if you make the spot smaller, the ratio of the perimeter, which is where the cooling occurs to the area, goes up and up and up, so with an infinitely small spot the cooling is infinite. So what you need is a small spot. We were trying to make a big spot, we were making a big spot. But Spear pointed out you’d get more intense X-ray beams if you made small spots and they built a machine to do that. When I went to America immediately after the Cavendish I built one of those machines, that was called, well it was called the Spear – S-P-E-A-R – micro-beam. Well, let’s see. [28:56] Well, I wrote a PhD thesis and the external examiner was AH Cottrell, that’s how I got to know AH Cottrell. Now, what more do you want on Cambridge, because we’ve nearly finished.

I’ve jotted down a fair few bits and pieces actually along the way. One of the things I was wondering about was, what do you actually see on the photographic plate that comes out of the X-ray, X-ray diffraction machine? Am I reading it right?

I wish you’d known… you were going to ask me that, because my thesis on things like that are all in the lab, whereas you’re talking to me at home. Well, I can sketch it.

You could sketch it and then perhaps describe what you’ve drawn as well, just in case someone in the future hasn’t got the sketch with it, that would be really good.

I was just looking for a piece of paper.

Do you want to borrow one of mine? I’ll pop this on pause.

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[pause in recording]

Could you just describe what you’re drawing as you’re drawing it as well perhaps please?

[30:25] The film on which the diffraction pattern would be recorded would be in size just what I’m drawing, about that size.

About how big is that size, just for the benefit of the tape?

Oh, exactly as I’ve drawn it, you can have this. What’s that? Twenty centimetres by seven or eight centimetres. And there would be a hole in the middle and what you would see are individual spots like that.

Scattered round from that position in the middle.

What has happened is, there is a specimen and here is that film and in the hole, the middle of that film there’s a hole, that’s that hole, and through there comes the X-ray beam from a generator back here. [pause] And behind that, if you looked at just from the side the specimen, film, generator, X-rays coming out here through a tiny little collimator on to there and being scattered back on to the film. Does that make sense? So that’s that film, over here there’s a big generator. The difficulty was this bit where it’s a very narrow tube and you have to get the X-rays to go down it, but if you haven’t got it pointing at the X-ray source nothing goes down it. Are you with me?

I think so, yes. What’s this bit called again?

This would be the collimator. It collimates the X-rays. In other words, X-rays are flooding in here, it just takes a little bit of them in the right direction. So it’s like putting a screen before a light source – imagine a light source and you want a point of light, you take a bit of cardboard paper and you just punch a small hole in it and the light comes through, but you also need it going in a particular direction through the hole. If you just had a screen and a hole, light’ll come

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out in all sorts of directions. We want it to come out in just one direction. So you have a tube instead of just a single hole. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yes. So that’s the thing and then you would count the number of these, which was related to the number of sub-grains in the specimen. But if you didn’t have a fine enough beam this was continuous, you wouldn’t… if you took the picture with a fat beam you just saw continuous rings. The trick was to take a very thin beam so that meant a very small number of these things were diffracting, so then the continuous rings split up into spots.

Right. Yes, I get it I think. Thank you very much.

[34:50] What practical benefit is there for actually knowing the grain size in a sample?

[laughs] Well, it’s the sub-grain size, but the whole of metal physics at the time was concerned with the properties of what are called dislocations. That’s to say, the disturbances on an atomic scale in a crystal lattice, which through their motion allow a crystal to plastically deform, that is to say, to change its shape under mechanical force. Now, metals are the materials in which that occurs under moderate forces, so you can roll metals, you can beat them flat, you can twist them and they don’t break, but other crystals like diamond or sapphire, if you try and do that to them at normal temperatures they’ll just shatter. So metals can plastically deform, and in the late thirties the nature of the disruption in the crystal lattice was called a dislocation and had been discovered by Taylor in this country and Prandtl [Interviewee meant Michael Polanyi] and others, Orowan, Prandtl – there are several names to it. So we were looking for the properties of the dislocation and of course since the properties of the dislocation weren’t known, and dislocations had not been observed, there was the thought that if we did understand this we might be able to radically alter the way in which metals are deformed, in which case you might deform, make a cooking pot by spinning aluminium very quickly or something. Now that turned out not to be the case as a matter of fact, but the metal physics community was looking for dislocations and talking about dislocations. There was no means then of looking inside a metal because Hirsch hadn’t discovered transmission electron microscopy. You see, it was my work that

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threw… well, he did it, don’t try and give the impression that I’m for a moment detract… I’m just saying that because I first did the transmission. Anyway, you couldn’t see dislocations, there was a lot of theory about them, but these sub-grains we’re talking about were clearly a manifestation that inside a metal grain it was breaking up in some way and it turns out that the breaking up was the alignment of the dislocations into particular patterns that were detectable. So we were funded in a sense to try and find dislocations and how they moved. Now, at the time in this country a physicist of commanding intellect and personality called NF Mott, Nevill Mott, who was at Bristol, he succeeded Bragg in the Cavendish chair in 1952 [Interviewee meant 1953] I think… no, it must have been 19… it was just about the time I left. I went to America in ’53 and I think Mott was appointed in ’53. But his personality and drive meant a lot of people worked on dislocations and the Bristol group under - Frank, Nabarro and Eshelby - under Mott produced the best sort of theories on dislocations coupled with people like Read in the United States and Van Bueren in Holland, and anyway. So it was a very fashionable field, is what I’m trying to say, extremely fashionable field. [40:30] And you asked about practical import. Well, in my opinion the most practical import that came out was the fact that dislocations, that’s these disruptions, in silicon, in silicon, a non-metal, are extremely important in understanding the properties of the transistor, because recombination of holes and electrons occurs at dislocations. So 1948 remember, the transistor was invented. So, in the 1950s when I’m working and they’re trying to make the transistor work and switching from – because it was originally discovered in germanium, but then for reasons that we don’t need to go into, solid silicon is a much better host for this playing around with holes and electron. Well, the lifetime of the holes and electrons, if you have imperfect silicon, that silicon and a lot of dislocation, it won’t work. So, you not only had to make extremely pure silicon chemically, you had to make it very perfect crystalline-wise. You had to get rid of the dislocations. So, to know about the properties of dislocations was a very good thing, even though my work and the Hirsch work and so forth, the first observations of moving dislocations were in metals, whereas silicon's I said earlier, the dislocations don’t move, but they’re there and had to be got rid of. So that’s why if you wanted to justify all the work on dislocations, that’s probably the main justification in terms of engineering effects for understanding the dislocation. Mechanical properties are concerned with materials in bulk and for silicon and things like that you’re concerned with small bits, so the commercial development takes, it’s completely different.

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Back in the 1950s were you thinking in terms of the electrical characteristics of the materials or purely the mechanical ones?

No, just thinking of the mechanical ones.

[43:30] I was wondering if we could talk for a little bit about, a little more about what it was like to work at the Cavendish in the 1950s. You’ve dropped in numerous little hints about what it was like to be there, but I think it’s something that…

Oh, it was very exciting.

It might warrant a bit more discussion in its own right.

Well, the groups… you see, it wasn’t a big lab, there couldn’t have been more than, well, I’ve got a photograph upstairs of the lab in 1953 [Interviewee meant 1952]. Shall I go and get it?

Maybe again, if we could get a copy of it later that would be brilliant, but I think for the purposes of the tape your own memory of it would be excellent.

Well, if you let me get it…

[pause in recording]

[44:19] Cavendish in 1953 and who’s there’s on the back if you… and that’s the whole lot, you see. Well, in a group, sociologists tell you that in a group of about a hundred everybody knows everybody else, if you see what I mean. It’s a well-known management fact isn’t it, that once you get above a hundred the chap who started the company doesn’t know everybody, but below a hundred he does. Well, I doubt if, there might be a hundred here but there’s not much more. So here’s Bragg, the great man. Taylor the reader. I can’t… oh that’s Pippard, that’s Ryle, the great radio astronomer. Helen McGaw. Electron microscope chap. I’d have to – oh that’s Pippard. Frisch doesn’t seem to be there. Oh there’s the chap who went to Oxford, Sir Denys…

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Wilkinson. Martin Ryle. And various others. That’s the secretary. But that’s, you’ll see that’s me.

Oh, at the back.

But somewhere you’ll see Crick and Watson. Well that’s Crick, and there’s Watson. You’ll find Perutz – oh, there’s Jimmy Renchew [Interviewee meant John Kendrew]. Anyway, the groups were crystallography, which was people like me left over from Bragg’s interest in metals, and Paul Black. And this would be led by Taylor, and then if we can find them, there’ll be all the clever people like Perutz and Kendrew, there’ll be on here somewhere. So there’s crystallography, then there was radio physics. That was Ryle and they were all fixing things, well in the later fifties they become terribly famous because they were the only people who could track Sputnik. Then there was the low temperature physics group led by Pippard and Shoenberg and people like that. So there was low temperature – oh, there was the rump of the particle, well it was called nuclear physics then, it’s become particle physics, but that was being run down so Wilkinson, you see, went to Oxford and set up a great empire because Cambridge ran down the nuclear physics lot. So there was nuclear physics, radio physics, low temperature physics, crystallography. There wasn’t much more was there? Radio physics, low temperature physics, nuclear physics, small theoretical group and crystallography.

[48:05] How much do all those groups actually have to do with each other?

Well, you see they’d all have tea together in one room. But they were a bit separate, but there were things like Cavendish parties – well, there still are – there was a Cavendish ski-ing group so I used to go ski-ing with the radio physicists because that was organised by a chap called Falloon – that chap. If we look on the map it might remind us. [48:51 – 49:57 opening map?] Hewish, you see, Tony Hewish you see, he got the Nobel Prize. What I was looking for was the big names like Peru… oh Kendrew, yes, there’s Kendrew you see. Now that man worked with Dirac, he only had a few, so there’s Crick, Watson, Huxley – another famous name in protein structures. [pause] Hirsch, there’s the great Hirsch, he must be in the back somewhere. Well, he’s up there, Peter Hirsch. Well, anyway – ah, there’s Mike Bown. Well, I’ve got it right.

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[51:05] I notice there’s not many women in the picture.

No, there weren’t.

[The following section is closed permanently: Track 5 [51:12 – 52:16]

Did you think that was unusual at the time?

What?

Did you think that was unusual that there were so…

No, it’s amazing, the social changes. It never occurred to us, well it’s difficult to explain without… It just never occurred to us that there should be women in the colleges. It’s because when you’re young like that, unless you’re of a revolutionary turn of mind, being brought up in a cons… you don’t to some extent question the social structure if it doesn’t… it’s just what it is. Now that may show a certain laxity of moral strength or thinking about these things in the sense that nowadays we’re not really doing anything about all those starving people in the Third World, but we know they’re there. So no, it is amazing. But of course the women there were about were rather sought after. [laughs]

How were they seen amongst the rest of you chaps?

What?

How were the few women who were there actually seen amongst the rest of you chaps, were they…

Well, she was very nice sensible woman, I remember. I remember Hirsch telling me off for not being kind to her.

Why were you unkind to her?

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Well, I probably… I was a fairly selfish man in those days, probably still am. It was a question of who would get the liquid nitrogen and I got the liquid nitrogen so I was alright Jack, pull up the ladder. We’re getting a bit off the point. I’m just enjoying myself nattering, so perhaps we’d better…

I think the sort of, the research environment that you’re actually functioning in is an important point, which is basically what we’re talking about.

[54:28] Well, I would say then it was competitive but supportive. I’ve written about it to some extent and Eric Howell saying of Crick, he’s absolutely insufferable, he needs a Nobel Prize to justify it. Well he got the Nobel Prize duly, quite quickly. I think there was, I may be wrong, but I’d have thought there was more personal ambition about in those days than now. You probably were less trained to try and work as a group. My job’s to get ahead, sort of thing.

I was interested in the fact that previously you’ve described yourself as both ambitious and as finding yourself somewhat not at the top any more when you got to Cambridge.

No, I wasn’t.

I was just wondering, how did you actually cope with that transition to suddenly being amongst all those people who would go on to win Nobel Prizes?

Oh, I think I was sensible enough to learn. I think I was sensible enough to think, well you’d better keep your mouth shut sometimes because you just don’t, it really would be better not to make a fool of yourself.

You mentioned that Rutherford was still a presence.

Oh, very much so. Yes, because you see he died in 1938 was it?

’37 or ’38.

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So his spirit, now let’s think. I think Bragg was appointed, must have been there during the war, but Bragg wasn’t a physicist’s physicist. He was in his thinking but the fact that they wanted to solve all these crystal structures, if you read… wasn’t regarded as the sort of fundamental physics that Cambridge thought it was good at, you see, because Dirac had given this theoretical edge to things. And if you read Hoyle and people like that, they thought Cambridge was no longer going for the deep secrets of physics, it was solving crystal structures, was relatively straightforward. But certainly, among the – there were some very good technicians, extremely able people who could make very delicate apparatus with watchmaker’s skills who I think you’d never get in a lab like that now, couldn’t pay them enough. They all harked back, I remember, to Rutherford. I don’t think they’d known him very well, but because he was so famous and died so quickly, died so suddenly - it’s a great help to being recognised, to die suddenly [laughs]. Any really ambitious person would die quite young. [laughs] Stupid remark.

You mentioned the technicians, how many of them were there?

Well, there are a number on here. Right, but we could look all this stuff up.

Just sort of wondering, general number and were there any you remember in particular?

Oh yes, Chapman. Yes, rather. He was a technician for the crystallography group. I think it may be that they were so class conscious in those days, I think it is the case, the technicians wouldn’t be on it. I’d have to be careful there. I think it might be, well certainly the people in the front were all the proper teachers, it wouldn’t be mixed up with the likes of me. I think it may be that they’re not on here. Well, there was a man called George Crowe – C-R-O-W-E – and he I think was the chief technician and he still remembered Rutherford, he used to walk around with a bowtie on, which was very unusual in those days, and he considered himself a sort of Jeeves, I think, you know, a bit smarter than… [laughs], a bit smarter than the professors. Right.

You mentioned the crystallography technician, Chapman.

Chapman, yes.

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What sort of chap was he?

Oh, extremely precise man. Well, he built, that micro-beam camera was a triumph of, well skill over intelligence because it wasn’t really a very – because of what I’ve told you about the sources, had we thought of the sources we didn’t need a camera like that, but he built it, so that you could gently move this little tube which was only five microns diameter, and get it to point in the right direction. I mean that’s, it was real precision work and that’s just done by mechanical screws. Now you’d do it electromechanically, because we’ve learnt to move things very small distances with forces other than straight mechanical force.

[1:01:10] What sort of other things did the technicians do other than building equipment?

Well, I don’t know. Oh, you’re all… in my first year, you all had to do a course in techniques. You had to know how to blow glass, you had to know how to make a glass to metal seal, you had to do your own elementary machining if necessary, to put something in a lathe. I don’t think that lasted very long. The electronics was unstable and one had to repair the electronics oneself. Now we didn’t use, we used a Geiger counter to line up the beam and the amplifier from that would go wrong, then you had to – this was before the transistor you see, so everything was thermionic valves, massive great piece of apparatus, and you learnt how to trace where the fault was in an electronic circuit so I mean the technicians were all jolly good at that sort of thing.

I was going to ask as well, you mentioned that there was this feeling in the Cavendish that now they were no longer the centre of nuclear physics.

Well I think the nuclear people felt that and I think Cambridge did as a whole. Well, 19… the shift over the war was massive, with England was a poor country after the war, we hadn’t noticed that before so much and all the intellectual effort on the bomb and so forth, it had all gone to the United States.

Was it something that was actually discussed at the time?

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Well, I think the ruling classes saw it, people like me hadn’t had much experience of before the war except as children, so I’m afraid I can’t answer that with any sense.

Speaking of… who were the ruling classes?

What?

Who were the ruling classes at this time?

Well, it was a Labour government until 1950, then in ’51 the Conservatives got in. It was the days before Beyond the Fringe , before… the world did change, England did change in 1960s or so, enormously. What with the pill and the television and everything, you pretty much knew your place to some extent. You might intellectually feel people’s equal, but the social structure was fairly well portrayed as in an Agatha Christie – if you read Agatha Christie, I love to - because she wrote novels from the twenties through till 1970s and she was middle class, like me, and if you read those novels she portrays exactly in the background the change in the social structure. To begin with the family has servants who are called just by their last name, and then at the end they’re all living together in… the women are all leaving home and getting jobs as soon as they leave school and so forth. So I’m afraid you’d do better to read Agatha Christie than listen to me. [laughs]

[1:05:42] That brings me two questions though, the first is, who were the ruling classes in the Cavendish Lab?

Well, I remember calling Taylor who… I would have never addressed a professor anything other than as Sir. Now I might have been rather better behaved than most or didn’t find that difficult at all, I would never have spoken to Bragg other than calling him Sir and also Taylor, who when Bragg stopped being interested in me and Taylor took it on, then I would always… On the whole you still referred to your equals by surname. You would say Crick or Kelly, you wouldn’t… So what was the question, who were the…? Well, the professors were very much in

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charge. And of course, you have to remember I’m quite junior, I’m telling you… I don’t know whether you’d get a true picture of Cambridge now from a first or second year postgraduate who came from another place, that’s what you’ve got to think of. So whether it’s a true picture or not, I don’t know.

Where would you actually sort of situate yourself in that hierarchy in the Cavendish as a PhD student?

Ah yes, I remember thinking about that when I’d gone to America and had to function on my own, because once you leave a place where you’ve done your PhD, you’ve more or less learnt what your undergraduate school can teach you and what your postgraduate school can teach you and then there’s just you, where do you go next. And the question was whether to go to America or stay here or go into industry or what. I remember thinking, well you’re not the first flight Kelly by any means, but you’re not the bottom of the rung either. You’re quite bright and I’d say you’re, on a scale of ten, you’re around seven. You’ve got quite a good track record, you’re not, certainly not brilliant and although you work hard at times, you give up if things get a bit too hard. [laughs] Or there’s more to life than just doing science. So I think that’s where I still am. And then of course luck comes into it a great deal. But if you ask my assessment of myself against other material scientists, I wouldn’t call myself at the very top, I wouldn’t think I’m at the bottom, but as I say, on a scale of ten I’d say I’m around seven. Shall we stop there or how are you getting on?

I’ve just got a few more questions actually.

Yes, okay.

Just to sort of wrap this up.

I can carry on, but…

Please do. I mean this is fascinating, I will be completely honest. You’re looking slightly incredulous.

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[1:09:45] Well, okay, carry on then. What’s the question?

One of the other things I was wondering about was, you know, the equipment that you were actually using, was it easy to get hold of the equipment or were there shortages at all?

I don’t remember at the Cavendish – if you’re still talking about my first period at Cambridge, then I don’t remember having the need to order much equipment. I designed a device that was supposed to strain things while being irradiated with X-rays, but it was a very cumbersome design and I will have had to put in an order for a material called pyrophyllite, I remember, but I don’t remember… I suppose if I’d been… I don’t remember making any big order and I don’t remember really complaining as a student might now, particularly the Chinese students we get, this apparatus is no bloody good, get me something different. That somehow didn’t occur to one. If it didn’t work, you thought I’d better make it work, instead of get rid of it. So there was a sense of parsimony.

I was just thinking, I remember reading in, I think it was Maurice Wilkes in his biography about the Cavendish storekeeper in the 1930s finding it very, very hard to get hold of experimental apparatus through him. I was just wondering if…

Ah no, you’re exactly right. The storekeeper’s job was not to, he regarded it as to keep the things in the store rather than to distribute them, that’s what we used to say. [laughs] The guy there feels his first loyalty is to maintain things in the store, he’s supposed to be giving us things. But yes, that would work with Wilkes’ idea, yes, yes. But you have to go and ask and sign. Yes, I think we felt… we weren’t used to sort of largesse and okay, we’ll have half a dozen of these things. I think that was just a holdover from the thirties and so forth. Next question?

I was wondering, who was your actual supervisor for your PhD?

It started to be Bragg for the first year and a half and then it was WH Taylor, but a man who helped enormously was Peter Hirsch, though he wasn’t my supervisor, he certainly was a great help. But Taylor was, as I said when he… Taylor was a very good supervisor and he was also an extremely good editor of the philosophical magazine which then was one of the principal solid

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state physics journals. He was a selfless man in a way, he knew he wasn’t of the brightest, but he did help other people and I remember writing to him when I got into the FRS, when I got… and saying, you had the ability to let people grow under you and you encouraged them to grow under you, you didn’t… Because some people, you can see it nowadays with a lot of the people with lots of research students, they insist on having their name on the paper whether they’ve made a contribution or not, and they use their group, so to say, to aggrandise themselves. Taylor was not like that at all, he was extremely good and I remember his saying to me in my third year, I don’t think I can help you on this, but what I will do is I’ll write to Mott at Bristol and suggest that you come and give a colloquium. Now that was quite a frightening thing because I hadn’t practised, but that was the sort of thing Taylor did and he didn’t only do it for me. Paul Black and other people who had him as supervisor, he was a very very good supervisor. So that’s the answer to that question, slightly.

How much do you actually see of your supervisor? Are you sort of closely monitored or left to get on with it?

Well, Bragg did not know who I was and I can remember distinctly that because it was, well, at the end of my first year he didn’t because he came into the room with a man who later turned out to be my boss at NPL, I didn’t know that then, a man called Dunworth. He came into the room to show him this micro-beam technique and there were three names on the door. They were Hirsch, Gay and Kelly. So he thought, ah, I’d better introduce this chap to Dunworth, and I can remember now the door was still open, so he glanced back and saw the names. Now he knew what Hirsch looked like because Hirsch had been there some time, so he said this is Mr Gay, so he didn’t. Now, after I’d thought of that transmission thing, he did know me because he would come round… he tried very well to go to people, so you’d get ten minutes. I don’t know whether professors do that nowadays. And I remember his coming and asking me – and he thought of several… why don’t you send the beam through the specimen and I said, well we’ve done that Sir. And afterwards Taylor told me yes, you’ve done very well, the prof thought you were quite good. Now he saw me once after that when I’d tried to write a paper and he was impatient and said you haven’t got your ideas very clearly, that was true, and that was sort of the end of the second year. Then, I think he must have… he went to – we’d have to look this up for certain – he went to the Royal Institution certainly before I had left. Anyway, I remember for the last year

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Taylor was the official supervisor. So it was Bragg for two years, WL Bragg for two years and then WH Taylor for the last year.

[1:18:10] I’m somewhat surprised that your supervisor didn’t know what you looked like at first, that just seems so different to current practice.

Oh, I’m not sure it is.

Really?

I think there are a lot of first year research students about whose supervisor wouldn’t be quite sure who they were.

He’s not your supervisor then. Who looks after you as a first year research student – if that’s the right word to use?

Well, you were sort of put in a group and as I say, I joined this, the junior of the group. So Gay, who was doing his… he wrote his thesis in 1951, I came in 1950, so during that first year working on the machine and trying to take pictures, I was told what to do by him so it didn’t seem terribly unnatural at the time because the professor was someone miles away up there.

So it’s you, Gay and Hirsch in the group?

What?

It’s you, Gay and Hirsch were the three people in the…

Yes, yes. Well, Hirsch actually wasn’t in that room any more, he’d gone to the end of the corridor to work on coal but his name remained on the door, but it was really Gay and Kelly. And in the third year a third chap came who was supposed to take over from me, but then they scrapped the X-ray method because the electron microscope was doing so much better.

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You mentioned Hirsch’s later career…

What?

You mentioned Hirsch’s later work on electron microscopy but I was wondering what he was actually like before that when you first met him?

Oh, he was a very astute, ambitious and very able physicist. I don’t think we envisaged his becoming a material scientist then. See, he was one of those Jewish boys who had not been called up, but yet hadn’t been declared an enemy alien. So he’d gone through the war at Cambridge and was a very, very good physicist and very ambitious at physics in the way that Central European Jews are, extremely able serious minded chap, you know, took the arts, didn’t seem to flirt with the girls at all, played bridge very seriously, that sort of chap. Oh, he’s a great man the way he’s built up the department at Oxford. I wasn’t in his class intellectually.

I was wondering…

He’s not as brilliant as he thinks, quite. [laughs]

You’ve mentioned World War II in passing there. I’m aware this is only five years after the Second World War finishes, which is often portrayed as being the physicists’ war. I was thinking about all those Cambridge physicists who went off and did things, physics related during the Second World War. I was just wondering if there was still any… was there still any overhang of that feeling at Cambridge from those experiences?

Oh I think so, yes, people were – who was it, Findlay, went to NASA to… he left in the fifties. Britain’s military activities, you know, were fairly constrained, they didn’t have the money in the fifties, but… Well, there would still have been a close connection with defence. A lot of the money for research was predicated not so much on a direct military application, but it would be, so to say, connected with it in the sense that, you must remember the Cold War was on, there was still a military feel about the place. That went on until the Suez debacle I think. I mean I wasn’t in Britain for the Suez thing, I’d gone to America, so I remember watching it from outside. Let’s think. Well, the atomic weapon, the atomic energy programme, which absorbed

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enormous resources in Britain from the late forties through the middle fifties was to do with power generation, but it was also very much to do with Britain having an atomic bomb, because we didn’t explode an atomic bomb until ’52, that was right in the period when of course everyone was very pleased then, so a strong military awareness if you like. Does that answer the question?

[1:24:44] Were there any defence links to your own work at this time?

[pause] I think we saw the military as a source of money for doing research and there would be people in the laboratory who when you graduated would not go and work in certain things to do with defence, whereas most people would be keen to get… because the jobs were all in Harwell or some place like – or AWRE – that was more so than going into British industry. The money was so… I don’t remember, because I didn’t attract funds, the funds were like first year, second year, third year research student, before you have your own group the money is whatever the supervisor’s managed to get or something. So I… but we were all very anti-Russian and well, some were. Inside the Cavendish, of course, there were some very left wing characters in those days, extremely left wing. Because you have to remember that – we’re really getting into sociology more – Burgess and Maclean occurred about then. But someone like… there were several members of the Communist Party on that picture and they were known to be members of the Communist Party, because the Communist Party was quite strong, well it never got more than one or two members, it got one Member of Parliament didn’t it? Russia was still regarded as, by some, as the sort of paradise. Yes, oh Wooster set off with his family to China, because China, Chiang Kai-shek had been defeated in 1949, the early fifties dear old Wooster departed for China with his family. When he got there he turned round and came back. Now he’s on this picture somewhere, he’s very well known, extreme left wing supervisor. You have to remember that – well you probably don’t know, that Hall, the American spy that’s never been un… who was never… Fuchs was arrested in 1951, the chap who leaked the implosion technique to Russia, a man called Hall in America, well he was never charged because to charge him in open court would have had to have revealed that the Americans had cracked some Russian code. So Hall though, knowing he might get arrested, came here – well he died a few years ago. He was in that electron microscope group run by Coslett, they were all very left wing.

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[end of track 5]

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[Track 6]

I was wondering, how much was actual politics the topic of discussion in the Cavendish at this time?

Oh, I don’t think… I don’t remember talking politics much with my contemporaries then. I was fairly right wing, it would be called. And I remember one or two friends like Mike Bown and so forth were similar, but we were interested in girls and what was on at the cinema and things like that rather than politics, I’m afraid.

Just wondering, what do you talk about in tea breaks, for instance?

Oh, the latest film or often about the research, I mean we’d often… yeah, I can remember Khrushchev dying – no not Khrushchev – Stalin dying and that was in ’53 wasn’t it? That got a certain amount of discussion, what would happen in the Soviet Union. Let’s think. That’s right, in 1952 Eisenhower was elected president wasn’t he? Yes. Now he of course was the great general who’d won the war. Oh, and well, there was all the politics of the Korean War. Ah yes, yes that’s right. Was it right for us to be involved. I think most people thought it was, but I can remember the scare over… Eisenhower was supposed to have threatened to use the atomic bomb and Attlee went to America to stop it. So we were very interested and would discuss, that’s right, things like who was behind the invasion, MacArthur’s brilliant reversion of kicking them out and going back to Inchon, that sort of thing was discussed a lot. That would have been 1951, yes. Difficult to recall these things. Yes. Let’s think. Oh well, there were questions of what was happening in France, we’d discuss. This was before the ‘Wind of Change’ speech by Macmillan, but France was in a pretty tricky position wasn’t it? The question of whether Italy would go communist. We’d talk about, yes, that sort of thing was discussed. And Tito, whether he was really independent. So foreign, if you like, geopolitics I remember being discussed much more than national politics. Because I think most people accepted, except the diehard right, that the Attlee government’s nationalisations and things like that were basically a good thing because England had been very divided before the war with the Jarrow March and things and that the generation did remember, to some extent. So yes, I can remember now talking more geopolitics than national politics in those years. We’re just talking about a narrow period in my life, ’50 to ’53.

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[04:55] I was interested as well, you sort of highlighted a number of your contemporaries along the way, people like Crick, Perutz, all those other people who were around. How much are you talking to other people like that in your department?

I don’t remember talking to… my friends were Paul Black who went away and became a big educator, in the Cavendish, he was a close friend. Mike Bown, who’s up there some place, then there was Rosemary, she was a pal, Rosemary Saunders [Interviewee meant Shaw]. Oh, Eric Howells. So Howells and I used to chase girls together because we were both members of the English Speaking Union. That was a cheap place to eat. [laughs] In Trinity Street, it doesn’t exist any more. Let’s think. I had one or two friends through the Fisher Society, that’s the society for Catholics, because I was, I wouldn’t call it devout, I was a church going Catholic throughout that period. And Black was a Catholic, that’s how we knew each other very well. I think that’s about all I can say.

What’s your social life like as a PhD student in Cambridge?

Well, one wasn’t very well off. You felt that being in Trinity because there were still quite a lot of people about, you know, to have had a motorcar was an amazing thing. Well, I was principally interested in girls [laughs], several of them. [laughs] I don’t think we’ll go into that.

Any who stick in your mind in particular?

Of the women?

Mm.

Well, one I married and one I didn’t marry. I think we’ve probably had enough now. It would be nice to get away from Cambridge.

I was going to ask as well, just to finish off this section really, what do you think the key findings from your PhD actually were?

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Well, as it’s turned out I think it was the idea to pass the beam through the specimen rather than reflecting it from the… that led to – not directly – that’s probably the most important development that could in some way be said to stem from it. Yes, certainly.

Do you remember what your viva was like? You mentioned that Cottrell was your external examiner.

It was, I remember swotting up solid state physics for it very strongly and never getting a picture [Interviewee meant question]. And they asked me about, it was rather a deep question as to what the difference is between the kinematic theory and the dynamic theory of diffraction. In the kinematic theory, the wave comes in and you just treat the medium it’s going through as having a set of scattering factors, but in reality you just can’t represent the medium, so to say, being a passive receptor of the rays and just dealing with them as single number. The X-rays going into a solid actually interact with the electrons in the solid and there’s a dynamic interaction between the beam coming in and the beam going out and the more exact theory is the dynamic. But the most… but trying to figure out where the atoms are to a first approximation, you use the kinematic theory. But Hirsch, so happened, was very interested in the dynamic theory and when you switch from X-rays to electrons you must use the dynamic theory. Well I didn’t understand the dynamic, well, I remember being asked about it at my PhD viva and I gave some sort of answer, but I remember thinking, my God, I’m not sure I know the answer to this question at all. Cottrell asked that. But on the whole you could tell they were very satisfied with the thesis.

[10:25] Interested, I was wondering, do you think of yourself as a physicist or a material scientist at this point?

Oh, I still thought of myself as a physicist then.

Had you had much thought about what you wanted to do next after the PhD?

Well, I knew… there were so many offers coming from America, because the Americans would come through and most people on graduating seemed to go to America if they were any good or

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working in a field that was fashionable because the salaries offered were enormous compared to what you’d get in England. The first salary I got offered was $5,500. That at the time was something like £2,000, but it would be more than Bragg was being paid at the time. America just seemed land of enormous riches, which it was compared to Europe which was still knocked about. And Britain, a bit more knocked about than most because we helped the Germans a lot in 1948. If you look into the Berlin airlift, the RAF contributed more to the Berlin airlift than the Americans did and that was when we were very strapped for money and cash and we were rationed. So the idea of someone going to America seemed lovely. That’s what I did. Right.

Shall we stop there for today?

Please, yes.

I think that seems a nice end point.

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[Track 7]

Why did you decide to go to America?

Well, he, a man called PA Beck – B-E-C-K – who was a Hungarian, I think he was Hungarian, metallurgist who had lived in the United States some years. The University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana was wanting to get into what was then called a metallurgy department. The physics department was very well known, but they wanted to build up metallurgy and they had hired Beck and Beck was asked to bring in new science into a rather mundane but good teaching department of metallurgy. Now, that I must, well that’s from general knowledge. He turned up in the Cavendish in my last year and he was interested in what are called sub-grains, because he had ideas on crystallisation and when he spoke to me, he then offered me a job at $5,500 a year, which was over £2,000 and was probably more than the Cavendish professors’ salary at the time. So I said I’d go and I then wanted to finish my thesis and go to America. I had to get permission from the military service people, that wasn’t difficult. So off I went. Now, what could I say? I’m pretty sure, though I cannot quote this from… I infer this. Fred Seitz, later the dean of, doyen as they call it, of solid state physics in the United States, was then the professor of physics in Champaign-Urbana and with him was Bardeen who had won the Nobel Prize a few years earlier for the transistor. And he wanted to see a strong metallurgy department and he, while I was there, because I was only there eighteen months, brought a man called TA Read – R-E-A-D, from Columbia, who had been Seitz’ colleague. And Seitz and Read wrote the first paper about dislocations in crystals in the United States. Now if you want more detail on that little story, remind me and I will give you a printed version of – perhaps I might give it to you earlier. I have written one or two papers on the history of composites and things and it starts by telling you what I’ve just told you now, you see, about Read and Seitz. So that may help you. [04:13] Anyway, he wanted… now I was into the metallurgy department and I was a bit on my own because I was in physics and didn’t know much metallurgy. So I used to talk to the physicists quite a lot and made friends with them and I was to build a micro-beam machine like the one at Cambridge, which I did and we then got much the same results as in Cambridge and that got me interested in defects in metals generally and in particular the question was, whether they could detect what are called vacancies in a crystal, which had been predicted just because, you know, thermodynamically, an array of atoms all bouncing about, there ought to be some missing. And Seitz and Balluffi figured out a very powerful experiment to prove directly that

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vacancies were there by very cleverly measuring the thermal expansion coefficient very carefully and then when you got near the melting point, the thermal expansion coefficient went up more than it should have done. Do you see what I mean, because thermal expansion is due to the atoms getting farther and farther from each other, but if you put in vacancies then it would be like a sack, you would put in a bit of extra volume. Now actually that experiment wasn’t done till Balluffi left Illinois and went to Cornell, but I had a strong interaction with them because they thought I knew about X-rays you see and help. The experiment wasn’t done while I was there. So all in all, at Illinois I just got interested in metallurgy. [06:50] Now, I had to come back before I was twenty-six to do my military service and I applied to work with Cottrell who had been my PhD supervisor and he was at Birmingham. When I did come back Cottrell had gone to join the Atomic Energy Authority and so he moved to Harwell, and I came back and the military people said, well you might as well work with Cottrell, because military service was being phased out, they didn’t know what to do with you really. But Cottrell didn’t find a position for me at Harwell so I stayed at Birmingham for a year and during the period I was at Birmingham… now what the hell did I do? Ah, that’s right. Well, Cottrell was extremely well regarded, young, bright metallurgy professor who had written a superb book on dislocations that everyone was reading and dislocations were the thing to be in, and he suggested that I did some experiments on straight mechanical properties, nothing to do with X-rays, that I looked at the deformation of crystals of aluminium. And so I started to do that at Birmingham, liaising with him who’d gone to Harwell. And to deal with the social side of things, I found England pretty awful after a year in America, having been paid enormous sums, and I thought this isn’t for me, I’m going back. And because I’d been in America and made friends with the people from Columbia who went to Illinois, they had a friend called Morris E Fine. Now Morris E Fine is crucial in my career, just as Cottrell is, Fine and Cottrell were two lads who, you know, I started off as a protégé and then grew. And again, all of this is written down in this history, if you like. Before you go, remind me to get it and it might be better if I sent it you. I might have a copy here, in which case I could give it to you and then if you read that. Anyway. [10:31] So Fine, Morris E Fine who had been at Los Alamos making the bomb, he was going to Northwestern University from Bell Labs. Now, just briefly about him, he had been in the Manhattan Project and I was flooded by people around the Manhattan Project because that was the great success story of the time, the early fifties, of the Cold War and all this. Fine had been asked to set up a materials department at Northwestern and he wanted someone who knew about X-rays. Since I worked on X-rays he offered me a job. And so at the end of 1955, to anticipate, I’m going to go

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to America. But now I must dilate a little on the science done at Birmingham because that’s quite important for how I got into composites.

Before we go any further actually, why don’t we just, so we don’t have to go back to it later, you’ve raised a few little issues along the way…

Right, go on.

…that I’d just love to pick up on as well.

Yes right, fine.

[12:03] The first one was actually this question of National Service and having to get permission from the military to actually go to America in the first place.

Well, they would defer you a certain amount and you were allowed to study and roughly, if you played the system a bit and went on getting deferred, eventually you didn’t get called up, to put not too fine a point upon it. But I was honourable, I came back because I didn’t sort of… I could have stayed abroad till I was twenty-seven, in which case… I came back and said, well I’m still here and there’s time to send me. They said, oh well, it’s too complicated, essentially. But there were a lot of people in that… a number of people did that.

Why did you go back if you had the option?

To America?

No, why did you back to Britain if you had the option of actually avoiding National Service and that career break?

Well, I didn’t feel, I suppose it’s honour, if you like. I didn’t think it right to, so to say, evade. I was near the line, I mean I knew I’d given them a problem. Well, that’s all there is to it really.

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I was wondering as well…

Well you see, Britain, what happened over military service was that I think the Labour Party, you see, it had become a slight political issue as to, I can’t remember whether it was harming the labour market or helping the labour market, it was very expensive and the army didn’t want these people, they weren’t fighting. Well they did fight the Korean War but they wanted a professional army, they didn’t want all these people who were just there eighteen months. So the services themselves didn’t know what to do with these people and then you find a lot of people who did daft things, they didn’t do anything much, they sat around cataloguing a library or something like that. So there was no brouhaha about stopping it in 1957.

Do you think you would have enjoyed it?

I think in retrospect it would have been good for me.

Good for you in what sense?

Sorry?

Good for you, how?

I’d have done, it would have been better for me to have roughed it with people.

That’s a curious expression. Can you just explain it a little bit to me?

Well, I’d had a very sheltered life, middle class boy, went to Cambridge and no sort of hardships about really. Regarded yourself as a bit special because I was clever. It would have been better to have been through the rough and tumble of military service, you know, which is quite equalising and builds up an esprit de corps. Now, of course I might be wrong but you’ve asked me and I’m telling you frankly, it might have made me worse. It’s very good for getting people to mix with all sorts of people.

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When you said that you got back to Britain and the military more or less said, or the military authorities more or less said, just go and work with Cottrell, did you see that as a substitute for the National Service?

[16:05] Yes, yes I did. So if anybody said, well you buggered off to America, I would say look, I came back and I did exactly what I was told. Yes.

I have to ask as well about the sort of original offer of a job to America – how was it made?

Well, they were called research associates, which would be called postdocs here. And the universities in America had lots of money for research then. And so I was offered a, which would have been a yearly thing renewed each year if you did well. But the salary seemed enormous.

Did it take you long to decide?

Oh no, no, it didn’t. Well, I thought gosh, this is a bit of alright, this is. Yes. You had to get a visa, which was messy, I remember. You had to have your fingerprints taken, because I was going to be employed on an Atomic Energy of America contract, which Beck, this chap had and they were, well, they were… America was even more chauvinistic then, it’s gone chauvinistic again since the attack on the Twin Towers, but it was very chauvinistic at the end of World War… well, when I went in the fifties, because the Cold War was at its height. John Foster Dulles was a minister and that madman, LeMay, was in charge of the US Air Force. [laughs] The guy who was going to take out… he was going to take out the USSR if the Russians had actually stopped transport completely. The Berlin Blockade was a very febrile time and it could have gone to war because the Russians knew they had an atom bomb. They thought they were going to have one, this was the last sort of show before they got one. Anyway, I think we’re getting off the track a bit.

It does bring me on to a question though, you sort of mentioned this Cold War context happening in the background. How much of that are you actually thinking of at the time…

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Oh a lot, because you see, 1951, or 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. Now the Americans of course fought the Korean War. We had some auxiliary troops, that was why I thought I might get called back from America to get called up, I didn’t. No, no, no, that was before I went, that’s right. By 1953 the peace treaty – well there’s never been a peace treaty – but the line of demarcation in Korea was fixed, but thereafter the antagonism between America and the Soviet Bloc and China was very intense and a lot of my friends, I joined a fraternity called Gamma Alpha, and lived as a fraternity brother at Illinois and lots of them were all going into the services for short periods, just as people had done in England seven years earlier during the war. So the war, the Cold War was pretty hot topic because McCarthy, who you may have heard of, was, Senator McCarthy was hounding people who, for un-American activities. So the place, it was slightly well, febrile atmosphere as to whether, you know, people were being refused jobs in certain positions in universities because they were supposed to have communist leanings. If you’re not familiar with that period in America, that seemed to last until Eisenhower became president, then it went out a bit. Because when Truman was president, Eisenhower was elected in ’52 and he essentially put a stop to it, but not as quickly as he should have done. By ’56, which is now… ’55 was my last year, ’56 and I went back to Northwestern it was getting better but I’m describing the social situation between 1953 and 19… and the end of 1955.

[22:04] It does actually bring me on to another question. You talked a little bit last time about the sort of left leaning people in Cambridge. How…

Well, I might be more politically aware than a lot of scientists. That’s all.

I was just curious to know what the equivalent situation was in the department in the States in your first stint there?

Ah, well of course you can’t get involved in American politics in quite the same way as you can with your own country’s politics. On the whole the academics are liberally minded and therefore they would be, didn’t like McCarthy. But on the other hand, the university administrations probably had to pretend they were very pro McCarthy. I hope… I’m giving you a very personal opinion, I mean it might be crap compared with some more studied historical… I’m giving you my impression.

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That is essentially why I’m here. It’s…

Yes, I can remember being surprised and pleased that some of the postdocs – it was mainly, because Gamma Alpha was a graduate fraternity, so no undergraduates, and it was very reflective of the American attitude to university education because a lot of the graduate students were supporting themselves and so when we sat down for dinner in the fraternity house, you’d find some of the members would then serve the dinner because… we all slept in a dormitory, I remember, which was not insulated, the Illinois winter is jolly, jolly cold. But people were struggling, they were committed to getting educated, which I hadn’t seen quite so much as I did in America. But on the whole they would have been left wing, well, they would have been more liberal and didn’t like McCarthy.

What was the frat house like, fraternity house?

Well, it was a bit of fun because I was on my own, I was a bachelor, I was interested in girls, as I’ve told you, so you lived cheaply. And used to be able to help the others, because I was used to the Cambridge supervision system and I remember helping people with the mathematics of alternating currents and things like that. But I had to build this bit of apparatus, which I did, which worked, luckily. [25:20] We ought to just make a scientific point, to pick up the story, because I said at Birmingham under Cottrell I had got interested in what’s called work hardening, that’s as you strain a metal it gets more difficult to strain. And the theory of work hardening was quite a hot topic in the best labs in the world, so Cambridge, the Germans were coming through now, they’d restored their metallurgical research laboratories. And I worked on a thing called, well, perhaps I can explain it very quickly. Cottrell had an idea to do with when you pull a metal it gets harder to pull. It gets harder linearly and then all of a sudden it softens relatively. In other words, it doesn’t go on getting harder as you would expect, and that was due to breakdown of some sort of barrier that was building up, which made it harder to pull it. And if you had a metal at which the temperature at which you were pulling, say room temperature for aluminium was sufficiently high, it stopped hardening. So Cottrell’s clever experiment was to pull a thing at low temperature, which would have got it into the region where the barriers were strong, if you then brought it up to room temperature it would suddenly soften. So I wrote a paper called Work Softening in Aluminium, which attracted quite a lot of attention because it

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proved this point, quite dramatically. So… that was done at Birmingham. So when I went to Northwestern, hired to teach X-rays – we can come back to the social bit in a minute but I want to get this in – I was less interested in pursuing the X-rays than pursuing where I’d got a little name for myself in deformation of metals, which is different. So I dutifully set up the X-ray lab, and people now say it was set up alright and so forth, and I lectured on X-rays, but I didn’t really like, I didn’t really want to try and make my name in X-rays, the theory was too clever, I remember thinking, and I liked my pulling crystals of aluminium, it’s easy to do. So, we have to get ahead of ourselves to get the scientific story right. At the end of… I go back to work with Cottrell, you see. No, I do the work hardening experiment during 1955. In early ’56 I go to this new job to do X-rays at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, but I had fallen in love between accepting the job in America in something like July ’55 and there was a railway strike, I remember, that confirmed my opinion of… [telephone ringing]. [29:35] This is quite crucial for the career progression. So I decided to leave, but I asked this lady to marry me and we got engaged, so the arrangement was I would go to America, to Northwestern, and then I’d come back in the summer of 1956 and get married. Right. Well now we can, that point is very important for how I came back to Cambridge from Northwestern, you see. So have you got it?

Mm hm.

Okay.

Who was the lady?

Sorry?

Who was the lady?

Oh, well she was called Christina – C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-A – Dunleavie – D-U-N-L-E-A-V-I-E. She’s the woman up there. She died twelve, fourteen years ago, but I was married to her for… So what, shall we go on with the science or the social bit at this stage?

Which would you prefer?

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Well, it would be quicker to just deal with the social connection. So in 1955 I’ve been in Birmingham. I’ve gone to America in early 1956. In the summer of 1956 I come back, full of American dollars and to marry this beautiful woman and take her to America. And I go to see Cottrell, at Harwell of course, in the summer of 1956 and Cottrell then made a statement which is probably made nowadays but you’re never allowed to say it at the time. He said, it’s now 1956, in 1958 Wesley Austin’s Chair of Metallurgy at Cambridge becomes vacant and I expect to be offered it. That’s the sort of thing used to happen in those days. And of course he was right. And if I am offered it, I expect there’ll be… [phone ringing]

[32:40] Sorry, you were saying about…

Well, Cottrell said, he expected to be elected and I think in those days it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say because there were very few Chairs and he knew who he was and Mott was a Cavendish professor by then and subtended an enormous angle, and what of course he said, he couldn’t necessarily deliver but he paid me a… He said, if I do get the chair I expect there’ll be a vacant lectureship and I would like you to apply, which means if you do apply… So for the time at Northwestern – this is important for the science – I had in mind that with a bit of luck in ’58 I would go back to England. So from ’56… even though I’d gone to America because I was fed up with England, but Cambridge is Cambridge and so that was slightly different because if I was going to have a job at Cambridge, in those days the salaries were bigger than in other universities and the prestige was enormous, more than now. Are you with me? You might find Cottrell, if showed that, might want to equivocate because it shows a bullish self-confidence that he had at the time that would now be mellowed in the grand old man, sort of thing. [laughs]

[34:35] Can you actually describe to me, what was Alan Cottrell like back in the 1950s?

Well, I never got very close to him, he’s a very serious minded man. I think he liked my dynamism. I don’t think he thought I was his intellectual capability and I probably am not. He’s a very reserved person, very hard working, very shrewd scientifically. Oh, one of the best physical minds I’ve ever dealt with. A great ability to see the physical essence of problems.

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See, he had the chair of metallurgy in 1960 or so here. When Blackett retired from Imperial College, Cottrell as I understand it was offered Blackett’s chair, now that’s a major chair in physics. So he subtended a very big angle because (a) he’d, well at Harwell he solved the problem of the Wigner energy release, I mean he must have told you that – did you interview Cottrell? Oh, how… What was the Windscale accident, was due to the graphite getting too hot and he was in charge of putting that right and that was why Cockcroft thought he was marvellous, and he was marvellous. And he understood the creep of the fuel cans in the Magnox reactors. Well all of this, his standing in the world is very impressive in those days, well went on till… he got the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and that’s the thing. So I was very lucky that I was his white-headed boy, or one of them. I wasn’t the only one by a long shot, but from the point of view of going to Cambridge as a new boy as he would be, I can see his mind working, well if Kelly comes, Kelly will know the system because he’s been at Cambridge. I don’t know whether he thought that, but it’s very reasonable that he thought that. [37:15] But to get back to the science, that meant that while I was at Northwestern I wanted to do experiments on deformation of metal crystals and although I’d been hired to do the X-rays, Morrie Fine, who wanted to encourage research in his department at Northwestern, helped me because he thought this is a good idea, I’ll help Tony get into that field. And so he obtained money that we could do experiments on the deformation of crystals. But we then thought, here we are in a metallurgy department, the physicists are all looking at very pure materials, the ones that you do physics experiments on. But we’re in a metallurgy department so we ought to be working on commercial alloys and not on just pure metals. So, he and I got into the alloys of importance practically, which in the case of aluminium are the aluminium alloys used in aircraft construction, used in making pots and pans wherever aluminium is used. Well, it was those, not pure aluminium. Are you with me? So we started to work on those and when I came back from America in early 1959, well late 1958, I proposed to work on them and Cottrell thought that’s a good thing, but you have to understand another technical point, most of the strong alloys, though not all of them, are strong because the metal host lattice, say aluminium, copper, iron, most important, they have embedded in them particles of things that are very hard like the titanium carbides and aluminium oxide, otherwise they have ceramics in them. Now, Cottrell left Harwell and came to Cambridge in the summer of ’58 and Kelly arrives late ’58, Cottrell had massive contracts from Harwell, he could do anything he wanted, but the important thing that Harwell was working on then in a, research-wise was the high temperature reactor. And the high temperature reactor needed ceramic bits, it needed uranium oxide, for instance you see, as the

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fuel bearing element, not uranium metal. So, his interest in ceramics, my interest in metals containing ceramics and the fact that ceramics were becoming very important in a technical sense, and that was what was happening in the world at the time. I was very fortunate to be into ceramics at the start, and in a minute I’ll tell you one of the main ceramics is carbon and we’ve got the carbon fibre story. But I’ve given you the historic plus social bit that leads to it.

[42:10] Right. Gosh, there are a lot of different threads coming together here aren’t there?

Well, as I see them. I might be wrong.

You always have to remember, I’m here for your opinion, your impressions, that’s…

Yes. You see, it’s worth, well as I see it, the 1955 agreement, not quite sure about going back, because I wasn’t in a position to know. 1955 the Americans and the Russians revealed a lot of, so to say, the secrets of atomic energy. They showed people how they’d done things. And this interest in atomic energy generally reinforced by the Cold War meant that all sorts of materials that have just been known of as curiosities began to get researched. So if you look at the periodic table the mechanical properties of something like boron were quite unknown, boron was just a strange chemical someone had found. And if you go through the periodic table, hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, start again, sodium, etc. Those materials were either very funny like lithium, or a bit odd, beryllium was very difficult and toxic, boron nobody knew much about. Well, carbon, well that was a mystery. There was carbon in the form of diamond, carbon in the form of graphite, carbon in the form of graphite single crystals. Nobody then had made, well until ’56, nobody’d made diamond from graphite. A lot of people had tried. Now, those materials happened to be the very strongest you can get, as it turns out, so you’ve now got boron fibres, Kevlar fibres, God knows what. But it all started in the late fifties that these became apparent.

I’ve drawn numerous boxes round things that have come up along the way that I think…

Right. Well, let’s try and join up the boxes.

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…deserve a little bit more attention.

[45:35] I think one of the big questions I want to ask you about is how life in the USA in an American university actually compared with your experience in Britain?

Oh good, okay.

You’ve talked about the salary being so much higher and that was the reason you went out there, but what sort of environment actually greeted you when you arrived?

Well, when I came back here and gave my first lecture, I was amazed at the sort of protocol here. Now remember, I hadn’t… yes. Well, for instance, in America as a young teacher, you taught many more hours than the corresponding junior lecturer or lecturer would here and I think that, well, because I’ve only taught at Cambridge here, because I was at Reading as an undergraduate. So you tended to get through much more material but go much slower because you had to fill up the time. And furthermore, you would be given a course in America. I think the world has changed since I did a lot of teaching. Then, the professors, even in America, they said well you’ll go and teach… I was hired to do X-rays so I had to give lectures on X-ray. I also said well I would like to give a lecture on dislocations, so Fine said okay, you give a lecture on dislocations. But the American classes were much more… you went in and you’d have to clean the blackboard yourself from the last guy, there’d be no assistant. You’d then lecture, if somebody couldn’t understand you they’d stop you halfway through the lecture, which didn’t seem to occur here at all. Furthermore, when you had the grading system, you’d set exams in a very informal way, you’d come and write a lot of exam questions on the board because there wasn’t much mimeographing then, that was very slow. Remember that Xeroxing just wasn’t known. Well, there were Gestetner machines. And then you’d mark these things and the students might come and argue with you about the marks afterwards. They’d come and give you some sob story that oh, I’d have done much better except I couldn’t do those questions. So the whole thing, you’re much nearer the student body than you would be in an English university other than Oxford or Cambridge, because Oxford and Cambridge, the system is supported by the supervision system in which you do sit down with the individuals. But in say, a normal English provincial university the lecturer would give his lecture and then he’d set formal exams, but the

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interaction with the students would be far more hierarchical. In America it wasn’t hierarchical at all, I mean they would argue with you, and that was very good for one. Now, the difference also that I’ve campaigned for ever since, but never got anywhere, was that in America for a PhD you not only had to do research and write a thesis, but you had to do a certain amount of coursework. Now as I understand it, that doesn’t occur here even now, you don’t get a PhD… in order to get a PhD at Northwestern you had to have done an exam in a language and you had to have taken a certain number of courses which were postgraduate. Now those were very good for a young teacher because your teaching wasn’t just at an undergraduate level, you had to teach at a graduate level and that would mean teaching from – and you might, if you couldn’t understand a paper, you might give it to the class and some bright guy would figure it out with you. In that sense the American graduate student course, though it was longer, I think basically is better, still than here. But of course I haven’t taught here for forty years, so I wouldn’t… But I don’t think people would have disagreed with that in the 1960s. Does that answer your question to some extent?

That’s answered part of my question, yes. But it’s inspired some more, which is always the problem with this, it’s…

What?

It’s inspired one or two more as well. You mentioned that there was less…

Well, you have a fertile mind. Perhaps you ought to exercise some self-control. [laughs]

[51:41] I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did. It’s… You talked about this less hierarchy amongst American students and staff, I was just wondering, how did that… was that the same situation amongst the staff then as well as the students?

Oh yeah, I think so. Yes. It’s probably worn away now, that we’re more like them. But certainly, well when I taught in Germany it was… see in Gottingen I taught one summer in Germany, after we’d come back here. That was very different. I think it still is slightly in Germany. I had to be very careful to address the professor correctly.

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You talked a bit about the teaching side of this, I was wondering, I’ve got a few questions about the research part of it.

Yes.

[52:50] You mentioned getting funding to do some research on alloys when you were at Northwestern.

Yes, well it was relatively easy, because it was mainly, I don’t remember applying just on my own, it was Morrie Fine who applied. You see, 1957 Sputnik was launched and that meant that engineering schools could ask for almost anything, because the Americans really were scared stiff. I can remember the night it was announced, we went out and looked, you could see the thing. Northwestern, the management of Northwestern played it very well because when we went there in the fifties, it was regarded as a nice class of finishing school for girls, that particular university. The technological side wasn’t regarded as very hot, that’s probably why the salaries were good, to attract us. But all that changed and the, I think – I didn’t know the people, but I know who they were, Gottes [ph – 54:09] and Eschbach and people like that, and Fine, must have played their cards very well because Northwestern got a great deal of money and rose from being nowhere to one of the top ten or so, with Illinois and the big universities on the west and east coast. I mean this country, particularly around Cambridge, you’d think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Chicago are more or less the great universities. Well, they are, but the Midwestern universities like Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Stanford, places like… well, leave out Stanford because that’s private, but they are very, very good universities. They’re enormous, they have all sorts of crap as well as top Nobelists, or you could get a degree in good driving or something, which people will sneer at, but on the other hand you’ll also get Bardeen with two Nobel Prizes teaching in the physics.

I was wondering about, you mentioned Sputnik and being there when it went up, and I was just wondering what were the reactions amongst your colleagues?

Well, we were all, we were all amazed, because the Russians can actually do something. Goodness gracious, you see, because they caught up very rapidly. Americans exploded their first

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bomb in ’45 and Russians blew up a fission bomb in ’49, the Americans then pressed on with the H-bomb, which I think they blew up in ’52. You’d have to check this. And certainly the Russian H-bomb was within a couple of years of that and furthermore was a better design, it was actually deliverable whereas the American first one wasn’t. Now all of this leads to America wondering, is it losing its top class status, spending a lot of money to stop it because they’re very dedicated people, the Americans, very ruthless when they get down to it.

Do you remember anything that was said at the time?

Not… well, I don’t think I’ve got a quote, but we were all concerned. I mean I didn’t want to become an American citizen, but we were there with our friends and we were definitely on the American side so yes, this is what’s going to be done about it, something’s got to be done chaps. I suppose, well that’s… it did have an effect, it made money easy to get.

[58:00] I was wondering, yes, so… funding was part of the thing I was going to ask about, but the other one was, how was it being a British person in America at that time?

Ah well, we worried about whether to become American citizens, but because we thought we’d come back and we were only there, as it turned out, we did come back, but there was an unfortunate, I suppose we might not have come back but my wife lost a child, our firstborn, and it was due to very bad American doctoring. I don’t want to bore you with the details, but then that made it much easier when the Cambridge job came up to decide we’d go for it. I think if that hadn’t happened I might not have done, because America’s a very good place to do research; people are open, they talk about their research, they’re all interested in new ideas and I found it very stimulating. Now, being British, well you would, particularly in the field I’m in, you would very often run into, ‘Are you a citizen Mr Kelly?’ If you’re not a citizen then well, you won’t get this bit of… That still happens. I have been a consultant for Rolls-Royce, as I told you. Now John Coplin, going to the Allison bit that they built, that they bought, would find certain bits of the technology not available to him.

So there were sort of topics that you weren’t allowed to know things about?

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Well, yes, anything to do with [incomp – 1:00:04] and much to do with nuclear energy. And it would have been an advantage to have been a citizen.

You used a very interesting phrase once or twice today, which was, I was fed up of England.

Yeah, I was.

Fed up of what?

Well, it was a grimy place, the standard of living was so low. No central heating, all essentials were much more expensive here than in the United States. Motorcars were cheap and so forth in United States. Living – have you been to the United… Ah. Middle class America lives very well now, compared to us, and it was then. So you’d think… well, you’d think expansively of holidays whereas here… you just felt a lot richer in the same position, or I did and I think most people shared that. It’s a richer country. Well, the population is, wait a minute, we’re sixty million and they’re three hundred and a bit million, so the population is five times, the GDP is twelve times. So – and the middle class are the people who… So yeah, it’s just much richer.

Are there any things…

And travel is easy and don’t forget that in those days in Britain until Mrs Thatcher took over we could only take twenty-five pounds a year abroad.

Didn’t know that.

So we all cheated.

Were there any sort of, any things in particular you liked about life in America? Out of that higher standard of living set?

Well, I didn’t like being an American. I don’t think we would have liked that. I think we would be the same as a lot of English people, I don’t admire it, who make, enjoy all the riches and then sort of slightly sneer at the brashness of it all. I’m sure we’d have done the same. Sort of feeling

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superior while in fact envying them in a way. I think I… well, of course the child died. We had decided we didn’t want our children to be brought up American and after we’d returned here one was always getting very lucrative offers. I remember Cottrell saying, unless you’ve refused at least a million dollars’ worth of offers, you’re no good. Now of course you’d have to uprate that to ten million now, but it’s true, people were always getting offers. And I went to America a lot, you see, so I didn’t really in a sense need to… Cambridge is a very good place, you’ll find a lot of the professors here, they’ll go to America in the summer and things like that. Oh, Teddy Bullard had a wonderful remark. He said every scientist has two countries, his own and the United States of America because the United States of America does so much. Did you want a break?

I was actually just going to reattach your mic which has just dropped.

[end of track 7]

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[Track 8]

Have you got enough light there?

Yes, I’m actually okay, thank you. I was just wondering, as an aside, when did you come across Teddy Bullard?

Well, he was one of the first Fellows of Churchill and he was a great friend of Cockcroft’s and so I knew him quite well. In fact it was he who gave me the best piece of advice I ever got when I left here and went to NPL, because he’d been a director of the NPL, and he said – because a lot of people said you must be crazy leaving Cambridge and going to the NPL – and Bullard didn’t say that, he said, use the system Kelly, use the civil service system, don’t fight it, use it. And I tell the story now, I’m sure that I got into the Royal Society because being at NPL I could do an experiment that here they’d never… it would have taken years to organise, but once you knew the buttons to press in NPL – boom, boom, boom – out came the… You had a magnificent drawing department, you had wonderful assistants. We wanted a cement mixer, then Pilkington you see was churning on about fibres in cement. Well here, if I’d said in the metallurgy department I want a cement mixer, well it might have been… they’d have to apply for a grant to get a cement mixer. There, you just ordered a cement mixer. [laughs] Got hold of some chap in buildings and works who, give us a cement mixer, start putting fibres in, no problem at all. Done the next week, you know.

I’ve got…

That was what Walter Marshall realised about Harwell and why he stopped Harwell being closed down compared with the government labs because I’ve emphasised the flexibility of a government lab if you knew what you were doing, but you could only do that on a relatively small scale, like my one cement mixer, not twenty. So Bullard, yes, had an influence on me.

What was he like as… someone I’ve sort of read about but…

Oh, tremendous show off, but you always felt better having listened. He couldn’t understand, he thought I was barmy, because he learned I was a Catholic so he’d immediately categorised me.

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‘You on the line to the Pope tonight Kelly?’ or something. [laughs] But he was a wonderfully stimulating and clever chap.

[03:15] Talking of other chaps who’ve come up in passing, I was wondering if you could tell me what Morris Fine was like? As you’ve pointed out, he’s one of those other big people.

Well, he’s still alive. Morris Fine is ninety-two or three. A tall, kind, very dedicated Jew with lovely family… he…

[The following section is closed for 30 years until January 2043: Track 8 [00:03:41- 00:03:58]

He’s a wonderful man and still producing patents on steel. Rather lovely, kindly figure. Not as sharp as Cottrell or as ambitious in a way, but I greatly admire Fine, as you might guess.

What was he like as a boss?

Good. Well, of course I saw him under… I’ve never seen him under bad pressures. Very generous hearted, hard working. What were his weak points? Don’t think he has any much, as a person. Well, it’s difficult to… I suppose you might say he’s a bit slow at getting things done at times. That might be the case, yes. He didn’t drive himself.

[05:30] One of the other things that I was wondering about as well was when we talked last time you said you were still very much thinking of yourself as a physicist. I’ve noticed that your first move to the United States and you’re in that metallurgy department…

Yes, I’d become a metallurgist. I don’t know a lot of physics. But the physics training is the important thing. That’s really I think why people who’ve done physics… I’ve said in notes I’ve written about Crick, who I knew quite well before he was famous, that having a degree in physics gave him a great deal of self-confidence. I think if you’ve mastered physics with its mixture of concept, experiment and mathematical ability, you can face anything with a sort of

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arrogant… if I work hard enough at this I’d understand it and if I’ve worked hard and haven’t understood it, then it isn’t expressed properly. That sort of thing. And of course that fades with the years, when you know, but I think it gives a very right and proper attitude to scientific questions and makes you very leery of woolly generalisations and things like that.

I was wondering how you actually, how did you personally manage that transition from being in that physics environment to being a metallurgist? Was it a great change at all?

Well, yes, some people are very rude about physicists, they didn’t know enough about practical things. But on the other hand, on hard scientific points you always felt you were their equal. You might not know that such-and-such an element added to iron under some conditions does certain things – they’re very knowledgeable – L-O-R-E – the lore of what goes on and you were ignorant of the lore so you could be made to look a fool. I remember when Nutting, who didn’t like me coming into the department, at a dinner shortly after it was announced I was coming, he picked up a spoon and said, ‘What’s that made of Kelly? What’s that made of?’ very aggressively.

Who was this and where?

Nutting. Don’t need to…

We’ll put a restriction on it for thirty years.

Well, the metallurgy departments in a number of universities are a bit worried by the physicists. Well, because the physicists have often a better grasp of the fundamentals of the science, but as I’ve said, they tend to work on very pure materials if you can mix it and use your physics on difficult materials. As I said, Cottrell’s one of the best physics minded people and he was trained as a metallurgist, so I don’t think we should categorise people. I had to learn the art of metallurgy. I didn’t have to learn any basic science that I was going to be told that was too difficult, which is the trouble for the metallurgist, he’s come up just learning things like a blast furnace has such-and-such in it and not being told the basic of why that’s there, because sometimes it isn’t known in industrial process. Some industrial processes today aren’t fully

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understood, people who’ve not worked in industry don’t understand that quite. Physicists think it’s all known down to the last – you’re looking at something, can I help you?

Someone’s just come in.

Oh, that’ll be David, the lodger. Now he’s a very clever chap, you want to interview him. He’s going to solve the dark matter problem, single-handed.

We should probably talk about this.

No seriously, he is.

[09:50] There was one other thing you mentioned in passing I’m going to have to pick up on, which is, I knew Crick before he was famous. What was he like before he was famous?

Oh, bombast, but a clever bombast. I’ll give you my pen portrait of…

I was just thinking, an impression of as he appears to you in your mind now from that time before he was famous would be wonderful.

He was a very clever chap who knew he was very clever. He’d mellowed slightly, now, but he… we used to say, ‘Francis is insufferable’ [beeping sound], his attitude could only be justified if he got a Nobel Prize, which of course quite quickly did. So I knew him in nineteen fifty… between 1950 and 1953 when he wasn’t famous, but he was doing all the work. And I remember the party when they’d solved the DNA thing and sent off the paper to Nature . We didn’t know quite what had gone on, but they were on top of the world. And he was very kind to me actually because he gave me advice on where to buy second-hand furniture. He was always putting you right on things. And he was a very serious minded chap. I don’t know whether… I looked it out the other day. Can I get over to there without…

Sure. Pop this on pause for one second. [11:38]

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[break in recording]

[telephone ringing]

[11:47] I was going to ask you as well about your brief time in Birmingham – how did you actually come to be in Birmingham?

Oh, because Cottrell was there, you see, and he had been at… he was a Birmingham graduate. But you want a pen do you?

I’m afraid I’ve lost your NPL pencil somewhere. Thank you.

Cottrell was an undergraduate at Birmingham before the war. His military service would have been, because he’d have been a reserved occupation working on armour or something, he’ll have told you all that. And he was very bright and recognised very early, he was elected to the Royal when he was something like thirty-one or two, I don’t know exactly. And he was there, so I wanted to work with him, so I… so this was before we had any idea, or he’d told me he was going to Cambridge, but it seemed the obvious thing, having to come back to England, to ask him for a job. And he got me what was called an ICI Fellowship, which were one of the few postdoc things around then. So I came back and I felt, as you said, it was awful after America because Birmingham itself was pretty poor and there was very high inflation, so after a few weeks I found I could hardly afford it because I had, well you wanted a motorcar, would have a motorcar then of your own. But I had a social conscience then so I went and worked in the settlement – I don’t know if you’ve heard of settlements – well, they’re nineteenth century things in which people lived among the poor and indigent and helped them. This is, I don’t know quite what’s happened to them now, but if you did work in one of them then you lived very cheaply but you had to do social work like look after delinquent children and so forth, I mean young thugs, rather brutal kids from broken homes and things. So I lived there for most of the time.

[14:41] What sort of place was it, physically I mean?

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Oh, well it would have been a rather grand old house in a slum area. There was a real slum area. They were being cleared then, this is after the war, this is the fifties, they were being cleared but they were still pretty messy areas and we would live there quite simply and they’d carry out good works for people and people who were on remand and things like this. I was just a young active man and I used to take people who came to the social club, we’d take them for walks in the country or something like that. They’d never been out of the slums of Birmingham. Of course they’d run riot when they got abroad. But I was only in Birmingham a year, you see.

How did you actually come to be in the settlement at all?

Well, because it was cheap to live and I also heard about it through the Catholic Church, there was a strong Catholic element in that particular settlement, but most of the Cambridge colleges in those days and most religions would have had a settlement in areas like that. I don’t know enough about… it was a convenience for me and I think I must have moved out of that after about six or eight months because I then lived with a man called Jorro, who later became a scientist at the National Coal Board, and we lived in a house in Strensham Road and we were the last house with white people in it because that was the days when all the West Indians were flooding in and two old ladies let us the top floor, I remember. But after America it was a mess. And I bought a van for fifteen pounds, which would only start if you ran it downhill, so we had to keep it on top of a hill and then push it and jump in, but in those days you’re full of energy and it’s quite fun.

[17:30] What does one do for fun in fifties Birmingham?

Sorry?

What does one do for fun in fifties Birmingham, socially?

Well, actually we worked jolly hard or chased girls. But the girls were getting a bit thin on the ground then, so that’s when I looked up the woman I later married, because I’d kept in touch with her, and Jorro did the same.

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You mentioned you had an ICI Fellowship. How does that ICI Fellowship actually work, do you…

Well, it was a means of the department hiring a postdoc and I remember they paid £600 a year and it was a normal, what would now be called a postdoctoral position, you see. So, as I said, Cottrell said, why don’t you work on this work hardening thing and work softening, and then you’re a member of the department, you had, I think I had some very elementary teaching duties as well, but nowadays it would just look like a normal postdoc. May do some teaching, but you get on with the research that the professor wants carried out, that he’s got the money for. So very similar. It was just that ICI was one of the few companies around providing the money.

Were there any sort of ICI connections that came with this or did they just leave you to get on with it?

No, there weren’t. Oddly enough. Though later I did have a lot to do with ICI, but no it didn’t. That’s a very good question, but it’s just the name.

[19:20] What did you actually work on at Birmingham?

Well, as I said, it’s all there if you go back. I wanted to work on – I get confused now, we’re coming back to Birmingham. Ah, now wait a minute, Birmingham. That’s right, I’d been in Illinois, I’ve come back to Birmingham – oh, again, Cottrell partly hired me for the X-ray expertise but he gave me this problem on work hardening, so you’ll find that earlier on, we were talking about…

Was this stretching metals?

Yes, exactly.

I was wondering actually, what practical benefits are there from…

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Well, this is the interesting… There was a great deal of intellectual effort going into understanding work hardening and in fact it has had zero impact much on the forming of metals, which the expectation might be that if you understood work hardening, somehow you could make metals deform much more easily. As it turned out, it was absolutely useless for that, absolutely, completely useless. [laughs] But it was very fashionable at the time. If you talk to people of my generation they’ll say – because Cottrell and Mott had views, the Germans had views and the French had views. This is what happens in science before a problem’s cracked, it can seem a very important problem, but it hasn’t turned out to be of much practical significance.

I was wondering, once you’ve actually sort of… once you have actually stretched your metal – how are you stretching the metal, to begin with though?

Well, you put it in a machine called an extensometer, which is a thing that grips it at two ends and now they’re driven electronically and they, at a steady rate they’re pulled apart and you measure the force that is necessary to force the two bits to come apart. To begin with it’s elastic, but if you stop and unload it’ll go back where it was before, but after you’ve got plastic, it’s then permanently deformed so then it won’t go back. If you forced it to go back it would bend into…

You mentioned you did this at different temperatures as well though. I was just wondering how?

Oh well, you used to put things in a bath of liquid nitrogen, that was the coldest one easily then. Nowadays they do it in helium if they want it to go really cold.

Who are your closest colleagues while you’re at Birmingham?

Sorry?

Who are your colleagues while you’re at Birmingham?

Well, my friend was a man called Jorro, M A A Jorro, who went to work at the Coal Board. I was only there a year. Now let’s think. This is ’55. Well, one or two people I’ve met since, like Westwood who was head of the research council labs a few years ago. Bob Stokes, Henry Otte – he’s dead. But Jorro is the most remaining friend. Now let’s think. Yes, I was still in touch

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with Cambridge because they hadn’t yet made the breakthrough of seeing dislocations, they did that the next year. So yes, I was still in touch with Peter Hirsch, who was having a hard time then because he was working on coal and not getting anywhere. That’s just the year of 1955 I came…

Back to Birmingham.

At the beginning of, end of ’54 and I left just after Christmas ’55.

You mentioned – I guess the other connection I wanted to pick up from on Birmingham was Cottrell who you said was going to be there, then wasn’t, and went to Harwell. I was just wondering, how much did you have to do with him in this period?

Well, a lot because I was still in a sense his postdoc, so he just picked up the phone.

Do you actually go to Harwell yourself at all?

Yes. A couple of times I think.

[24:38] When did you get the potential offer of a future job at Cambridge?

Well, that was… at the end of ’55 I got engaged and arranged to come back to marry Christina in the summer of ’56 and I went to see Cottrell during that holiday period, which was partly my honeymoon, although that’s – well, we got married and then we went, the honeymoon was in America. But anyway, so I was home in England with this fiancée, waiting for the wedding, and I went to see Cottrell and then he said what I have told you, in 1958 I expect to get the chair at Cambridge and if you apply I will… it’ll be a good thing if you apply. So that’s what happened and in the summer of ’58 at Northwestern he, I think, sent me a copy of The Reporter , which is the university magazine saying what the jobs are, so I duly applied and got the job. So then I came back. And that’s where we’ll pick up next time.

[end of track 8]

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[Track 9]

So, over Christmas 1958 Christina and I were on board, I think it was the Queen Mary, coming back to Britain and I started work at Cambridge in January 1959 and I, of course my friends were in the Cavendish Laboratory, whereas I was in the metallurgy department and the reception wasn’t all that friendly because the previous metallurgists were a rather, in my opinion, slightly inward looking group: Nutting, Smith and TP Hoare, and they regarded the Cavendish as slightly, well, the sort of – what’s the word, quite? It still exists to some extent, between pure metallurgists and physicists, the physicists think the metallurgists are too crude and the metallurgists say, well we’re doing practical things and you people aren’t, and there’s a measure of truth in both. But my friends were with Peter Hirsch, you see, who was still in the Cavendish then, by which time he’d become quite famous because he had observed moving dislocations, which was the big breakthrough that pleased Mott. And of course Mott, who was then the professor of physics, Cottrell it could be said was Mott’s protégé. So Cottrell asked me to set up a group working on ceramics and I had to first of all devise teaching of essentially physical methods to metallurgists which involved X-ray diffraction, electron diffraction, things like physical techniques using isotopes of… using tracer methods for checking reaction in metals and things like that. So I was quite busy just writing lectures the first year or two, but we had plenty of money for research because Cottrell attracted this from Harwell and they were quite lavish in providing him with grants because they’d been sorry to lose him from Harwell. And the thrust of the research was mainly then on materials to do with the high temperature reactor, which a commercial one was never made, but I think they built a pilot plant at Dounreay – we’d have to check on that. [03:12] So, I started to work on ceramics but I was also interested in hardening of metals, the phenomenon of age hardening, that is to say, how is it that aluminium alloys particularly are used in many applications and the basis of their utility, one basis, is that you dissolve another metal in the aluminium, say copper or zinc or magnesium, and that is put in at a high temperature and if you then cool the material it will on cooling cause precipitates to be formed inside the crystal and these precipitates, which are often of an inter-metallic compound, so rather harder than the aluminium, prevent dislocations moving in the aluminium and makes the material harder. So this was the well-known phenomenon of age hardening, used a great deal in the working of aluminium and it was discovered by a man called Wilm – W-I-L-M – a German, in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. We could check the date. Now, so I had some people working on that, I had some people working on ceramic materials, and also,

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because of the high temperature reactor, I had some people working on graphite and the graphite people were concerned with the definition of deformation of graphite single crystals. Now, if you fast forward, the Nobel Prize for physics last year went to the discoverers of graphene. We must have made graphene, but didn’t have the technique for handling very small specimens or seeing very small – we used to thin the graphite crystals by putting them between bits of Scotch tape and pulling the Scotch tape apart. Well, if you go on doing that carefully you will end up with graphene, but we didn’t know that then and did not have… we weren’t particularly interested in very small flakes, perhaps we should have been. Anyway…

Why were you investigating graphite?

What?

[06:14] Why were you investigating graphite exactly?

Because of the high temperature reactor. Graphite is the main moderator in all the… the first generation of UK nuclear power stations, graphite is what’s called the moderator. It has to be a solid material of low atomic weight, as near the atomic weight you can get to that of neutrons, so them banging into the atoms, neutrons get slowed down because in a reactor the reaction, you need slow neutrons, whereas for bombs you need fast neutrons. So there was a great deal of interest in graphite because there was this famous accident, you remember, the Windscale accident in ’57 or so which Cottrell had solved what it was due to, that’s why he was so well known. The phenomenon is called the Wignor energy release. Graphite gets damaged by, when used in a reactor and you have to get rid of that damage so you heat the graphite up so the damage which is individual atoms misplaced or foreign atoms introduced by radioactive activity have to be annealed out, that is to say if you raise the temperature they will get out. But, if you don’t do that under the right conditions, the damage inside the graphite means the graphite has high internal energy. So if you heat it up and get it released at the wrong time the graphite heats itself up and it starts to go on and you can’t control it and you have a fire or you have… So there was a great deal of interest in understanding radiation damage, as it’s called, in graphite. So I had somebody on that, somebody on high… measuring the high temperature properties of graphite and I had people working on the strengthening of aluminium by particles. [08:55] I

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was incredibly lucky and well placed because at the time, in 1961, Cottrell gave a talk on very high strength materials and he said the best way to have a high strength material is to have it in the form of a fibre, because well, really high strength materials in principle are those in which dislocations do not move, that is to say are non-metal. But, if the dislocations can’t move the material is very brittle like glass is brittle. And glass breaks due to the passage of cracks through it, but if you have a long straight thin fibre, the cracks cannot be very deep because the diameter of the fibre isn’t very big and so roughly put, this is very crudely put, fibres of materials in which dislocations don’t easily move will be very strong. And of course glass fibre was known to be very strong. Now, the question is, or one question was, could you make materials out of strong fibres? Now, it was known that wood could be quite strong and it consists of fibres. During the war a man called de Bruyne had introduced plastics into aircraft because they were easily mouldable and quite light in weight, but they could not replace aluminium because they were not sufficiently stiff, that is to say, they didn’t have a high Young’s modulus. So de Bruyne put fibres of flax and hemp and sometimes asbestos into plastics, so that was known. Now after the war we had strong glass fibres, but unfortunately glass is not very stiff. So, you can use glass in a resin, the glass reinforced plastic, and it will be quite strong but it won’t be very stiff. Now of course it’s lighter in weight than… glass in a resin, glass reinforced plastic is slightly less dense than aluminium and for aircraft construction you want the lowest density. Now you have to put those two strands of thought together and just note in passing that the Mosquito aircraft which was made with that sort of material was effectively a wooden aircraft and wood is bad in damp conditions, so Mosquito aircraft didn’t last. Now, all of this background knowledge was known in about 1960/61 when I hear of Cottrell’s suggestion that if we had some stiff fibres and they were put into the right matrix, whatever that might be, we might have a very good material. Right. Now, we might shorten this interview to say that I was able to put these ideas together in a report for what is called, or what was called The Inter-Services Metallurgical Research Council, ISMET. Now that was a committee set up during the war and it still was quite powerful in the fifties and early sixties. You have to remember, this is before the SERC, before the Robbins Report, before universities sprung up all over the place and there were lots of universities. So young dons in teaching metallurgy like me had a nice little consulting job in the Inter-Services Metallurgical Research Council. [15:50] Now this mixture of ideas, that I’ll go into in a little more detail in a moment, I was able to put together in a report for ISMET and then a book called Strong Solids and Strong Solids became a very much quoted text, adumbrating the principles of fibre reinforcement applied to metals rather than applied to plastics. Now, we all

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realised then – this is ‘61/62, that we did not have a stiff fibre. We had glass reinforced plastics, we had plywood, understood, but it was not very stiff. What stiff materials were there that could be made in fibre form. Well, in 1959 a man at United Technologies produced a boron fibre. He decomposed boron, the element boron, on a thin wire of tungsten and made a very thick but very stiff fibre, and the stiffness was three or four times that of glass. This attracted a great deal of attention. Now we all knew that the ideal material would be graphite, because graphite is a very low atomic number – four, carbon – is it four? Hydrogen, helium, lithium, br… it’s six, six. It has a low density, it’s got an enormously high melting point and diamond, which is another form of carbon, the element carbon, is extremely stiff and hard, but could you make a fibre of graphite. Now, so the for the first few years of the sixties you couldn’t make, but we were all interested in it. But the principle was now being well established and if you could have stiff fibres and put them in a metal as distinct from in a plastic, you’d make a very strong and stiff metal. And there were other stiff things, they are mainly ceramics. So, things like silicon carbide or aluminium oxide. Now as I’ve said in one of your previous recordings, the early sixties, due to the Geneva Conference where atomic energy was shared with the world, all sorts of materials whose properties hadn’t been looked at were all being looked at by the American military, the Russian military, God knows who. And we were able to get hold of specimens of small amounts of silicon carbide or magnesium oxide or tungsten – well, tungsten carbide wouldn’t be much good because it’s too heavy – but they would be relatively light compared with most metals, they would be denser than aluminium, but you could demonstrate the principles, if you like, by using these things. [20:30] Now what happened was, some Americans at NASA, they made a model of a high strength metal using tungsten wires in copper. Now it would have no, at that stage, practical application, because tungsten, though very stiff, is extremely dense, the density’s the same as gold, something like eighteen, whereas the density of aluminium is about two point six. We picked that up and being metallurgists and in a metallurgy department, we worked out the principles of how strong the material would be, depending on how many fibres you had, whether they were long or short, whether they were oriented in funny directions. And that caught people’s attention, but it was a model system. Now, the graphite community were all working hard on graphite because of its importance in nuclear reactors and as a high temperature material in rocket exhausts, so there was a lot of work, military work in the USA, in Russia, etc, and a number of people tried to make carbon fibres. Now we knew of this, though in the public literature there wasn’t very much said because whoever got through first was… but I happened to know the people at Union Carbide in United States, a man called

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Bacon, the group at Farnborough under Watt who had worked on graphite for the high temperature reactor under contract to the Atomic Energy Authority and the Japanese, because I had a Japanese graduate student, it was very rare in those days. The Japanese coming to Cambridge in the 1960s was very unpopular because Cambridge regiments had been terribly badly treated on the Burma road. Anyway, Farnborough found out how to make a stiff carbon fibre, then of course the subject took off. And of course I knew the people at Farnborough because we’d worked on graphite together and I was a consultant to them. So, all of a sudden my group was in the position of having worked out some of the principles of strength on a metal system and said, wouldn’t it be a good thing if we had stiff carbon fibres. Lo and behold, somebody made them. So I was one of about six or eight people in the world who all of a sudden were excited by this and that really, that’s what made me write the book Strong Solids , which got my name noticed as Kelly understood the principles and here, lo and behold, we’ve got these fibres. I had nothing to do with the invention of – well, Watt says I did, but I’m not mentioned in any of the patents. [25:10] Well, that was all very exciting. Now, how do we go on from there?

I’ve got a lot of questions to pick up on some of the things you’ve mentioned going through. I actually thought it was a very clear explanation so I didn’t want to chip in anywhere. Ooh, I don’t know where to start. Let’s talk about the textbook for a moment, if I may. How easy is it actually to produce a textbook in… had you intended it as a textbook to be used for teaching or for…

Oh no, no, no, it was a research monograph. Oxford University Press had a series. But I had had experience already because I told you I was working on what’s called age hardening, or precipitation hardening of aluminium at Northwestern and I came back and went on with that at Cambridge. Now, electron microscopy, which Hirsch and others had put on the map, and the universities throughout, well, the material science community throughout the world were desperate for very good quality electron microscopes since Hirsch and others had shown you could look through a specimen. Previous to Hirsch and others’ work, nobody had thought of looking through the specimen by electron microscopy, they just made replicas because they thought the electrons would damage the specimen. But once the thin film technique was invented, that again was an enormous breakthrough and everyone was then, with thin films you could look at anything, it turned out, because the received wisdom was, well you’ll never be able

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to look at ceramics because they don’t conduct electricity, but as soon as you did try it, that wasn’t true, you could look at ceramic. And Robin Nicholson, later Chief Scientist, was doing electron microscopy in the metallurgy department at Cambridge and he was looking at the alloys that I’d been looking at in Northwestern and we wrote together in 1962 a review of what is called precipitation hardening and that consisted of showing that all the previous work on this phenomenon of age hardening or precipitation hardening – it was called precipitation because if you age the specimen, that is, heat it at an elevated temperature for a short time the precipitates occur, so the ageing was due to precipitation so the two words mean more or less the same thing. So he wrote up all the recent electron microscopy and I wrote the section on why the precipitates made the thing strong. Now that became a citation classic, it still is. It was Kelly and Nicholson on precipitation hardening. So I’d experience of writing a review, which made the writing of the book, Strong Solids , I sort of dashed it off one summer because I was all tuned up. Right, now you had some questions.

Were you expecting the book to become as popular as it did?

Well, I hoped it would be, yes. It was nearly published by Pergamon Press, but I’m glad it wasn’t. But it was published by Oxford and it was an immediate success in the sense that books like that don’t sell enormous quantities. It must have been 2,000 copies, which would have been big in those days. And interestingly enough, the Japanese published a pirate edition that went to 8,000 copies and we never ever got a penny royalty. And they had the sense to call it Composite Materials instead of Strong Solids .

Pirate edition?

Sorry?

I had no idea pirate editions happened of scientific texts.

Oh well, penetration into the Japanese market then by publishers was very uncertain. The Dutch were the people who made friends with the Japanese and the Japanese were still the enemy, you see, and the economic miracle you’ll know about hadn’t occurred then. Though Japan was very

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good at making motorcars, or becoming so, but intellectually everything in Japanese was in Japanese, very few people read it.

[30:45] You mentioned you had a Japanese graduate student as well.

Sorry?

You mentioned you had a Japanese graduate student as well.

Well, I had one, yes. But he was working on ceramics. I don’t…

I was just wondering how common that was at the time, when as you point out, it was…

Well, they were very… they were few and far between, yes. Anyway, the book, Strong Solids was a big success, but also the review was quite well known. And Nicholson of course, very bright, was made the professor of Manchester very early on. He’s another man Cottrell regarded as his… you said he regarded Nicholson, me and somebody else as his shock troops.

[both talking together]

I think he mentioned both of you in his interview, yes.

Well, the third one must have been Jim Charles who Cottrell recruited from British Oxygen to work on steel.

I was wondering how you actually worked out the properties of the composite materials? You mentioned that to produce the textbook and to do the research for that you’d had to work out the properties of other composite materials before carbon fibre. I was just wondering how did you go about it?

[32:15]

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Well, perhaps we’d better just have a little homily on composite materials. If I went to one of my writings I’d find you a very good def… Composite materials are an engineering material which is made of two engineering materials but you can’t see the difference with the naked eye, that’s roughly it. But that’s not the same as say, a resin like, well take any resin, any age hardening – epoxy resin. Epoxy resin with little particles in it, because that wouldn’t be called a comp… it would be a composite in a sort of strange sense, but that’s not what’s conventionally called com… What’s conventionally called composites are fibrous things in some type of matrix, which is usually a plastic, it’s only very rarely a metal. We did model work on metals and that was very influential of the point of view of the teaching of the subject, because metals were understood, whereas plastics weren’t. Plastics were only talked about in chemistry departments. So a composite material is two materials put together to get properties that neither would have on their own. So, a simple example would be this. If you had a tungsten fibre it would have a very high stiffness, say, 200GPa [interviewee meant 400GPa], and a density of eighteen megagrams per cubic metre. If you had a fibre of carbon, a thin fibre of carbon, it would have the same Young’s modulus, say 200GPa [interviewee meant 400GPa], and a density of about two. But the carbon fibre is no use by itself, it’s just a thready thing. So you put it in a resin and you can, by putting in sufficient carbon fibre, you could get carbon fibre slightly stiffer than the tungsten and then that would be diluted by putting it into the resin, but you could end up with something as stiff as the tungsten fibre, but about the tenth the density. So under those conditions you’ve got a previous property, but combined with another property that wasn’t obtainable with the first material, namely a lower density. And that’s really what composites were about.

When you said…

So the latest heat spreaders in your… any little computer, in these things, you know, if you get out a computer, they should all carry something like this thing here. That little computer…

Oh, the microchip in your credit card.

Yes. It’ll have a heat spreader in it, which has to have a very high thermal conductivity. Not in that particular one, but in my later work here a few years ago, we were putting diamonds into copper to give it extremely high thermal conductivity which you wouldn’t get from the copper

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without the diamond in, so there’s a good example. And diamond by itself, you couldn’t have the big bits of diamond, you only get tiny bits of diamond. Does that make the principle of the composite clear? It doesn’t have to be just mechanical properties. Is that clear?

[37:30] When you said you did model work to find out the properties of these materials, what is model work?

Well… [pause]. Well, one example would be before you build an aircraft you might build a model of the aircraft, that is something much smaller but of the same shape and so it would have some of the properties of the real thing. Now, all science in one sense is based on models. Predictions of the weather are based on a model of how the air a particular temperature is circulating on the surface of the globe, so that is a model. It isn’t the real thing. But the particular case I’m talking about, it was that we didn’t have a stiff fibre because tungsten… because carbon hadn’t been invented, but we did have a stiff material in the form of tungsten and we could get tungsten in the form of thin wires. So, from the point of view of understanding how strong a… how strong a… a thread of it would be - you have to understand a thread of most fibres doesn’t consist of continuous fibre all the way through, it consists of short lengths all stuck together in wool. Wool, when it’s cut off the sheep is only that long in bits.

About an inch.

But you get a long thread of wool by spinning to make the thread, which is lots of little bits of wool, as in a rope. So we could model that, if you see what I mean. Without having carbon fibres we could imitate that with something that would be rather like carbon fibres. But because the important thing was something like if you have fibres lined up like my hands, how strong is it going to be sideways, how far can you bend it without it snapping. If you have fibres going in various clever directions, what will the properties be. So you can do all that without using real fibre. Does that make it clearer?

Are these mathematical models or physical models?

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Both. Because you can do the mathematical model, then you’ve got to check out that it’s right. Yes. But for strength, for modulus you have a theory to do that, for strength you don’t have a theory to do it, so you have to do experiments. For breaking strength it’s not a well defined property like stiffness or refractive index. Breaking strength is a messy property. It all depends on the perfection of the thing you’re pulling. Does that make it any clearer?

Yes, thank you.

It’s getting complicated isn’t it?

[42:00] I can see what you mean though. You’ve used the phrase, we were all very excited, we all…

Sorry?

You’ve used the phrase, ‘we all’, quite a few times so far today. ‘We all knew that graphite was the way forward’, ‘We were all very excited’. I’m just wondering, who is ‘we’?

Well, what would then be the military community in the Cold War making aeroplanes or rockets or armaments that required rocketry or anti-rocket missiles and things like that and aircraft constructors generally, because aluminium was the material to build the aeroplanes with and it could be superseded if you had something stiffer. So it would then be some of the plastics departments of universities, because the plastics people were interested in composite materials because nearly all plastics that are sold are composites. So the aircraft construction companies, the chemical companies. Who else is ‘we’? Well, some of the materials departments, some physics departments, the governments, clearly because we’re in the middle of the Cold War and everyone is concerned with beating the Russians and the Russians were concerned with beating us. So, well that’s what I mean by ‘we’.

How much are you personally as part of this we, in connection with those other people you’ve mentioned?

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Well, I’d have just been a rather clever young… probably slightly brash young Cambridge teacher who happened to be doing some nice clever experiments. You see, Rolls-Royce were terribly interested and they of course went bust, poor darlings, with a composite failure. So those are the people whom one knew at the time and they’d have been, not all materials scientists, but many materials scientists, many plastics people, both in industry and in universities, that’s the community I mean. Nowadays they’d all belong to composite societies, but there weren’t any composite societies.

How do you all keep in touch in the days before there are composite societies?

How…?

How do you keep in touch with those other people?

Well, they have meetings all the time now. The International Committee on Composite Materials runs big conferences every two years with 2,000 people there.

How about before those meetings existed though, back in the late fifties, early sixties?

Well, in those days you wrote letters or met at small conferences, because there was no internet.

I was wondering…

Or wrote books. But you must face this talking to other scientists, this burgeoning of a field.

In different ways, yes. I think, you know, the way that we think of the internet today, information is so readily there in a way that it may not have been before, I mean how did people actually get information?

[46:25] Well also, in the sixties when this happened, was when publishers were realising they could make a lot of money out of what were really increasing government spends in all developed countries on universities and that had to be through the journals, so all sorts of journals spawned

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then. And I think I was on the board of something like five journals. What were they called? Journal of Composite Materials , Journal of Materials Science , Metals and Ceramics , Advanced Materials Engineering . God help us, there were about twenty of them where someone like me would be put on the board because that was okay for starting it off. Some of them went bust and now they’re all struggling because… it’s difficult to imagine the enormous growth of things. But most of those journals in materials science all started in the sixties.

How do you end up on the board of so many of them?

What?

How did you come to be on the board of so many of them?

Well, you’d be, if they see a new field, presumably they say we must start a journal, it must be happening now. I mean I’m over the hill, I’m sort of halfway down the other side. So then they’d say, well we’ll need a board of editors, we shall need to be an editor someone well known in the field who will set up… who will attract papers and referee the papers. So who are the sort of well-known names, so you go and ask them and say will you come and be on the board, we’ll pay you a couple of hundred or something and you have a nice dinner once a year, is that alright, and you’d say yes, because it was easier to say yes than no.

What do you actually have to do?

Well, I, I mean people like Robert Cahn at Sussex started the Journal of Materials Science , that was a very successful venture. He started it in, well I don’t know now, ’62 or three, and it’s built up and become a major journal, the editorship’s now in America because they’re modelled on the big prestigious journals that have always been there, like Pro Ro Soc [ Proceedings of the Royal Society ] or Physical Review . But in a field like materials there are lots of journals. They still, they’re still starting now. I mean the latest one in composites was Smart Materials a few years ago. And now they’ll be Nano Materials and all the buzzwords. Super-conducting materials, God knows what materials.

What do you have to do on the board of a materials journal?

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Oh, just turn up and recommend some authors. If you had a big research group, which I never had, then you made sure your students published in that journal, because the journal wants enough papers, doesn’t want too many because if it has too many it takes too long to publish them. It’s a tremendously thankless task. A very well-known one in materials is Acta Metallurgica which was set up by Pergamon Press about 1950 something, that developed and is now called Acta Materialia , to get away from just being metals. That’s a bit of a digression.

It’s an area that not that many people know that much about.

What?

It’s one of those areas that isn’t that well known outside…

Well, I’m surprised that the other people you’re talking to, that this won’t have…

Mm. Bearing in mind I’ve probably interviewed more engineers than scientists.

Sorry?

Bearing in mind I’ve probably interviewed more engineers than scientists, but at the same time, you know, not all scientists will have served on the board of a journal and know how it works.

Well, anyway.

[51:30] I was interested in when you talked about your connections to William Watt at the RAE and you mentioned Roger Bacon as well. I was just wondering, you mentioned that you knew Watt through your consultant work over graphite for high temperature reactor?

Well, he was working on what is called pyrolytic graphite and that’s graphite made in sheets by decomposing a hydrocarbon in a limited atmosphere and it deposits as layers, graphene-like layers, but they’re nothing like perfect, because to grow real single crystals of graphite so far as

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we know, requires geologic time. So the pyrolytic stuff, it can be quite thick and it’s a black looking thing. Well, looks a bit like ebony. Pyrolytic graphite is used as what are called heat spreaders, because it has very high thermal conductivity in its plane. So most rocket exhaust cones are made of pyrolytic graphite. It’s also used in what are called monochromators for high intensity X-ray sources and high intensity neutron sources, so you’ll find lots of pyrolytic graphite if you go to CERN to Hadron Collider. So it’s kind of well-known technical material. Now Watt was in the early days of learning how to make it and what its properties were, and I was working on graphite single crystals, so we had a common interest. That was how I knew him. And he was also, well I can’t quite remember, but the work was all funded from Harwell, the Atomic Energy Authority, and because they wanted to know how graphite behaved in high neutron fluxes, they’d have been using pyrolytic graphite, and I was playing with experiments on radiation damage, so we would meet each other and he hired me. I’m not quite sure why I was hired as a consultant, but I was, and then of course once they had the carbon fibre breakthrough then, since I’d done the modelling work on what it’s like in different directions, then I saw quite a lot of that.

What sort of things do you have to do as a consultant to the graphite work?

Well, usually comment on their experiments. They’re very quick and know more about it than you. They often want you just to make sure they’re not making a mistake. They don’t tell you everything, by any means. They’re there to check that… you’re not doing the experiments, they’ll tell you a limited amount.

So you’re sort of there as a second opinion then?

Yes, that’s pretty much so, yes. But I wouldn’t, I don’t think I made much contribution to them, but they’d know my work and that would guide what they did I think.

What sort of chap was Bill Watt, anyway?

Oh, well, I can point you to his autobiography if you like. A very dour, determined Scot. You had to do things his way, but he was a very inventive chemist because he’d figured out new ways of making pyrolytic graphite and other things he’d done, because there was a great deal of MoD

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interest in organic resins and things because they’re used in oils in all sorts of ways, in aircraft engines. All of that sort of work was done at Farnborough then and Farnborough’s been closed down years, many years ago.

[56:50] How did you know of Roger Bacon’s work as well?

Well, through the graphite community. Not quite sure I can recall. You see, I’d worked in America at Northwestern and some of them, they said, were disappointed when I came back [to England]. But of course I had American friends and it still happens with most of the dons here, they go to America in the summer because you got paid extra, so you supplemented your salary by going to America. That still happens, most of the people here go to America for large parts of the year.

To do what?

Oh, consult. They might sometimes be asked to do some teaching there, the American university. They might be asked to teach a course. They’d have a little, they can make a lecture, if you had some interesting research you could compile yourself a lecture tour. You’d write to your friends and say, can I come and give a talk, and they’d say yes, delighted, because they wanted to fill their seminar slots so they paid you to go, paid you $100 and put you up for the night and you just travelled round America and came home.

Did you make many of those trips yourself?

Oh, I must have made – yes – I must have made lots over the years. Yeah, I should think so. At one time I’d have been going to America two or three times a year.

I was interested in the way that you…

What?

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I was interested in the way that when we were talking about the start of the composite work you sort of highlighted these two sort of strands of things coming together. On one side there was that knowledge about how wood behaved, how fibres behaved in plastic. On the other hand there was that suggestion from Cottrell that if you could put stiff fibres into a matrix, gosh, you’d have something strong. When does that actually come together for you and how? Is it one of those eureka moments or is it one of those growing…

Well… is it one of those what moments?

I just wonder, you know…

Eureka?

Is it one of those click moments or does it, was it something that slowly comes together?

[both speaking together]

It was for me, for me. No, I don’t think it was to him and I don’t think it was to people in the plastics… but it was to me. I thought by God, yes, he’s got it and I shall now switch my attention to trying to understand this. So that was a eureka moment for me, yes. But I didn’t realise he was citing what a lot of other people had said but I hadn’t heard. It wasn’t that he’d dreamt it up himself, but he was a great expositor, extremely brilliant at exposing the fundamentals.

When does that actually come together for you though?

It might be helpful if I gave you… I’ve promised you one or two things to read. I think I’d better give you that now. Now, the question is, are there… I think I might have copies.

Okay. Shall we… I’ve got one or two other questions just on this general area. Shall we get it in a moment once I’ve got…

Which would you like to do first?

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I think the other questions actually, as we’re…

What?

I think it might be good to take a break in a few minutes.

Yes, it is.

Shall we stop?

Well, we can make a cup of tea.

Okay. That sounds a brilliant idea.

[end of track 9]

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[Track 10]

We were talking about composites and one of the things that came up early on when you said part of the reason why you first got interested in them was a paper you wrote for the Inter- Service Metallurgical Research Council. I was just wondering, how did you come to be involved with them?

How did I?

How did you come to be involved with that Council?

Well, because I was a member of it and somebody must have suggested, look, something’s happening in composites, can we get somebody to write something. And so I imagine they said well, Kelly seems to be the young man interested in this, and so one was pleased to do it. I think I had a sabbatical that year and of course one was paid for doing it, so that was quite nice. Well, I was very pleased to be asked to do it, as a young scientist, if his peers or superiors ask him to do something, on the whole he wants to do it. So it… but it was very useful because it was then practically two chapters of the book already written, you see, so I then only had to pad out the book, so the book was written very quickly in the summer of 1966. [Interviewee meant 1965]

What does the Inter-Service Metallurgical Research Council actually do?

Well, it would offer advice to the Ministry of Defence on what was going on. These things were all relics of the war, they weren’t closed down. I mean Britain took ages to get over the war, organisationally as well as… well, we’re still stuck with one of the most stringent applications of the Official Secrets Act in the world. I mean this silly thirty years rule all comes from then. We were the most organised country in the world, apparently, more so than Germany, geared up to… and having won, it wasn’t all smashed up so it had to be taken apart bit by bit and the trouble is we haven’t, in my opinion, got over it quickly enough, we’re still thinking about it, which is a great pity.

I was just wondering if… did you actually go to meetings as part of the…

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Yes. Well, we used to meet, something like once a month and there’d be papers and we’d discuss them and they’d usually be from the young research workers saying what was going on. Because I think during the war they’d have been placing contracts on people and saying why don’t you investigate this and come back next month and told us what you’d found out. Well, these things were all wound up by, well, the big defence review when we stopped going east of Suez, that was the big one.

’65-ish?

Well, before 19… still, we still felt we had defence responsibilities in the Far East right up till 1969 when the country was nearly bust again.

I was just wondering, could you talk me through maybe one of those meetings that you remember – if any of them stick in your mind?

Well, there was a… the main feature of discussion was often to do with brittleness, because it was only – you’ve heard of the Comet disaster?

The Comet airliner?

Yes. Now, the Comet airliner was a jet airliner developed from one of the Gloster Meteor jets and was the first jet airliner and it was produced in this country and it was flying around in the fifties. But one taking off from Rome blew up or broke up and so the whole thing was grounded and in fact the first jet that flew consistently was the American KC-135, which was the Boeing 707, the first one. Now, that Comet disaster must have been something like 1957 or ’58 and the question was, how had it happened. Well, it turned out that the phenomenon of fatigue wasn’t understood and furthermore, the effect of notches in highly stressed structures wasn’t understood. So I remember a lot of the discussions were on things like fatigue of metals and what’s called brittle fracture, because during the early sixties – well, it would have been the late fifties, early sixties, that problem got solved in the sense that there were sufficiently good engineering design rules that you could then design highly stressed structures. And the KC-135, which became the Boeing 707, worked because it had been a military aircraft and they knew what to do if a soldier thrust his bayonet through the roof, so they were aware of what effects of

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notches, so they’d worked that out and there was no trouble with that. But during the years that I was on the Metallurgical Research Council this was all the buzz of the talk, you know, what was it. And the big breakthrough wasn’t made by Cottrell, though he played a quite prominent part in this country, was a man called Irwin in the United States that came up with the solidly good design rules that we all use since. But that was the sort of thing that was discussed, which alloys were better than others, which showed more fatigue than others, which were more resistant to fracture than others. That’s the sort of thing we talked about. Some of it was quite confidential to the services. There was always a mixture in those meetings of what you were supposed to know and what you weren’t supposed to know. [laughs]

[07:50] What sort of other people were there?

Well, officials from the Ministry of Defence, essentially, ran it. The Ministry of Defence was very big then. Russell, I remember, was one chap and the chairman would be someone usually from Farnborough, quite well-known person. I’m afraid I haven’t kept the documents – well, you had to give all the documents back when you came off it. Oddly enough, I had to hand them all back when I became a civil servant myself. We had to lock them up in a safe at home, they were perfectly innocuous I think, but… to a young man it sounded quite exciting, you know, you felt you were in touch with Cape Canaveral or something.

Where were the meetings actually…

And rockets to the moon, all that came off then. It wasn’t known whether the Americans would make it.

Where were these meetings actually held? Were they just in…

They were held in Shell Mex House in London. That’s on the Embankment, it’s all civil now, but the government was everywhere in those days. It seemed polarised on ISMET. ISMET we used to… Inter-Services Metallurgical Research Council. And we were on the basic properties committee, I remember now, this was basic properties like fracture. So a new thing like fibre

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reinforcement, they’d naturally ask for a… I’ve probably got the copy somewhere of the original thing.

Did you meet any interesting people on the committee or were they already people you knew?

Ooh, I met some very eminent people. Well, I remember Finniston was there. Now, Finniston was probably one of the senior metallurgists in the country then. He was head of the metallurgy division at Harwell, that was the one that hired Cottrell, and they’d done all the work for the British bomb and the British reactors. And we had to, although the Manhattan Project had done everything for the Americans, we were not allowed… we were not allowed any interchange of information after the war until something like 1960. So the whole, the British nuclear programme and the British fission bomb and the British hydrogen bomb were all developed independently, which for a country in the economic position we were was quite amazing at the time. We’re getting a bit off my contribution.

I was just wondering if nuclear materials came up in those conversations as well?

If what?

If sort of nuclear related materials came up?

Ah, now that’s a very interesting question. No, I don’t think they were. No, I’m sure I was never involved at all and I think that was because Zuckerman – well I heard this from Cottrell later, because Cottrell became Chief Scientist, succeeding Zuckerman as government Chief Scientist, and he said Solly would never share the nuclear side with anybody and so I think, I was never involved in nuclear things at all.

[12:22] To return to the carbon fibre, composite materials part of this, I was wondering, when you were doing the early modelling work were you thinking in terms of practical applications at that point or was it just an interesting theoretical problem?

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Oh, practical applications were central, but that didn’t mean specific components. You knew what combination of properties were needed and they had to be better than aluminium, it’s as simple as that. And aluminium had a density of two point six, is it, and a modulus of – gosh, can I remember the units? I ought to be able to. Well, we used to think in terms of psi, it was ten million psi, whereas iron was thirty million, so you had to have – and glass is the same as aluminium. Now come on Kelly, what are the modern figures? Anyway, aluminium was the thing we had to beat. We also had to worry about whether the thing would be tough and my contributions to composites with my group that would be recognised was essentially pointing out how they are tough. That is to say, although both components are very brittle, how it is the whole thing isn’t brittle. So no, the whole thing… each individual strand of a glass fibre, if you bend it sharply it’ll snap and most carbon fibres, though not those in the car, if you put them through a very small, if you sort of try and bend them through a… they’ll snap. And the resin is also something that by itself, if you bashed it with a hammer it would fracture into pieces, but the whole thing isn’t, if you bash the whole thing with a hammer, you get boing , it rings like a metal, and if you cut a notch in it it’ll still be tough and that’s due to the interaction between the bits, which, I wasn’t the only person, my group worked out, both here and I moved to NPL halfway through this – we haven’t… we’d better leave NPL for another day.

That was my thought.

Because after NPL I become a vice chancellor and then my direct scientific contributions that you want are much less, because I stopped being a fulltime scientist, I still went on writing papers but nothing like the intensity of devotion. But that story goes over into NPL. So that would be, if anything, my major contribution that the composite community would recognise. And then I’m very fortunate because having been in the game early, I’ve been the editor of lots and lots of volumes on the damn thing, other people writing. It was because you were the sort of father figure, you could always persuade people to write.

[16:20] Did you appreciate at the time that you were at the beginning of something new, or is that something you’ve…

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Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. One knew, this is different. Of course you weren’t sure it would work. And the big Rolls-Royce disaster put it back, but we can deal with that next time. That was…

The RB211?

Exactly. The RB211 fan blade, yes.

I’d like to ask you some more questions…

They weren’t tough, but I think had they consulted me in detail, I can’t pretend I would have been able to set them right. A few years later I would have been able to, but anyway, they didn’t ask me specifically because they were so… they were a very closed group. Although I mentioned – well, if we ever go into the… carbon fibres were more or less invented simultaneously in Japan, the United States and Britain. In one of those books, one of those things I gave… it’ll tell you. The British method, making it from polyacrylonitrile is the one that on the whole has become the major source. But the Rolls-Royce by themselves, quite independently produced a carbon fibre at about that time and wouldn’t tell anybody, and it was that carbon fibre they used in their RB211 fan blades, which very unfortunately, they didn’t have the right pattern of the fibres so they turned out to be brittle.

I think we should move on to that next time perhaps.

Sorry?

I think we should talk about that slightly later aspect next time.

Yes, okay. Well now, if you read – what do you want from me? If you read the thing called Very Personal Recollections , read that and then the one I’ve ringed called – about 2005 - Very Personal Recollections , that will repeat what we’ve gone through to some extent.

Thank you.

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Now you also wanted…

[19:25] I was going to ask you some questions about what it was like actually working at Cambridge? Talked quite a lot about the actual sort of, the science that’s being done but not so much the context it’s happening in. I was just wondering how you, well to begin with, how did you feel about returning to Cambridge after your time in the States?

Ah. Well… first of all it felt very cold and miserable because we came in the middle of the winter and we were put up in some dreadful place that didn’t have central heating and we felt poor because the salary had dropped. But because we’d saved money in the States we were able to buy a new house in Rutherford Road and so that was very lovely. And then we had a reasonably… the major reason we came home was that I was offered a job at Cambridge, but more importantly my wife lost our first child and so she wanted to come home and the first year we were here we did have a baby and it worked and so then there was not much question of us going back to America immediately, and then I suppose, because the research worked out so well, I was becoming a known figure and, so to say, there wasn’t any need to go back to America. And then I, once we had children I don’t think we wanted them brought up as Americans and so we never went back. I mean I went back quite a lot, professionally. But I don’t think my wife liked it particularly much, so it never really came up as a decision between – or maybe it did over… we nearly went to Toronto at one stage but then we decided not to.

I was interested, you brought it up again now, something you touched on last time, which was you didn’t want to become an American citizen. I was just wondering why?

Oh, I think it’s sort of vanity. Didn’t want to feel you’d had to change over, sort of thing. I don’t know. Would you like to become an American citizen?

Can’t say the idea’s ever actually occurred to me!

Well, I don’t know. Now, what else did you want to know?

[22:20]

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Where did you actually work when you returned to Cambridge?

What?

Where did you actually work when you returned to Cambridge?

Why?

Where?

Well, in the metallurgy department, it had a small building in the New Museums Site – we can go and show you if you want, quite easily – and in 1958, which was the year Cottrell was appointed, the chemistry department, which had a big building, moved to its new building in Lensfield Road, and that was handed over to us, to the materials people. So we went into the old chemistry department and the department stayed there till 1973 when it got a new building in that site, but it still kept – because it expanded greatly – it still kept the old chemistry bit. So when I came back in 1994, well first of all they put me in that old place and then I went into the tower, so that’s where I am now, but a new building will go up, is going up next year. So the short answer to your question is, in 1958 when I came back, Christmas ’58, then I went into what was the old chemistry department. But that is very close to the old Cavendish where I’d been – you see, the new Cavendish was built in 1974, but in 1958 it was still the Cavendish that had last… which was built first of all in 1874 and the latest wing, the Austin Wing, in which I’d worked in 1950-53, was built in 1939. So I knew the area, it was all familiar.

What sort of building was the metallurgy building?

Well, it was an old chemistry department full of rows of things with Bunsen burners and lab, old- fashioned labs. And we moved things and built our apparatus. In those days you built a lot of your apparatus yourself. Don’t so much now.

Was there any apparatus that you needed to build when you started off there again?

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Well, earlier you see I’d built a micro-beam camera in the United States. My students, you see I had a group once I came back in ’58, I was a lecturer and Cottrell had money and so I had six or seven research students. Well they built things and we built an apparatus we were very proud of for testing graphite crystals at 3,000 Centigrade in a vacuum, which is a non-trivial exercise. [laughs]

I can’t picture what this apparatus would look like. That sounds rather [incomp – 25:55].

Well, it would look like a great big cylinder with a viewing port with a thick piece of glass in for looking inside and when it was at 3,000 C of course, you’d put a blanket over because it was quite bright light coming out. And then it would have bits coming in at each end, like all these, they just look like a mass of tubing from outside. Tubing and vacuum flanges, that’s what they were, things all poking out, you know, not at all pretty.

[26:30] What sort of other equipment do you actually need to do metallurgy in the late 1950s?

Electron microscopes, X-ray microscopes, polishing equipment, machines for testing things, pulling things, machines for bashing things to test their toughness and a genuine workshop full of lathes and - we’ll meet in the lab, we’d better go to the lab, I really think we had. Because I can then give you any references you want. So when you’ve fixed up the next time, tell me, remind me we’re going to my lab.

I will bring a camera.

Okay?

Yes, thank you.

And you can walk round the department and see the sort of things that happen now.

How – this all sounds surprisingly… I’m interested in this contrast: on one side you’ve got hi- tech electron microscopy equipment, micro-beam machines, and on the other hand you’re hitting

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bits of metal with hammers. That’s quite a contrast. How… how do the two activities actually come together?

Well, that’s very interesting you say that Thomas, because…

Well, I say this as someone looking outside.

…now I, I for many years, until when I was seventy-four, as consultant for Rolls-Royce and I can remember one day sitting in a room at a long table and I’m one of the members around this table. There must have been between twenty and thirty people there, small enough so they could all just about shout to each other. Now right in the middle of the table there was a small metal object about this big, say, no bigger than your cup. And I remember thinking, gosh, the brain power assembled here: there was Cottrell, there was me, there was someone else, all Fellows of the Royal Society for good or bad, there was the director of Allison Engines or somebody, there were several very high powered engineers and we were all looking and discussing this thing, exactly what it should be made of and how it should have been treated to get it to… and I remember thinking, my God, if you don’t work [laughs] it’s not for lack of people thinking hard about you. [laughs] So that’s the answer to your question in a way. I mean jet engines don’t fall out of the sky, you get into the aircraft and off it drives and the [thermal] loading on those blades is five megawatts per square metre. That’s… a megawatt is, whatever it is, 1,000 kilowatts per square metre. And the temperature is something like 1500 degrees. The pressure is something enormous, but it’s working.

[30:30] I was wondering as well, these two sorts of different types of equipment: the hi-tech new and the banging metal old, is it a case of one replacing the other or do they complement each other?

Oh, they complement each other. I mean in the end you’ve got to have something you can handle. Well, materials science is, it’s quite a science, although it doesn’t have the big name. But the last, the Nobel Prize in chemistry given last week to Schechtman is for materials science, it’s for finding tenfold axes in crystals, and the Nobel Prize in physics last year for graphene straight materials science, so it’s quite a deep science, but it’s also so embedded in engineering that people don’t think of it as a – well, it isn’t a pure science, it’s sort of partly engineering.

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[31:45] We’re touching again here on something you mentioned at the start of this, which is people who come from a physics background like yourself and the people who come from metallurgy background. I was interested in the interaction between the two of you.

Yes, well it’s, we’re talking very openly now. Well, I think I told you what Nutting said to me. I think the practical metallurgists had to solve problems quite urgently and therefore didn’t like the physicists’ analytic approach. Now, certainly that’s disappeared now because the course now that’s taught is quite mathematical and analytical. In fact I might go so far as to say I think in materials departments in this country they may have got too analytical and physical like, so that I found out the other day we have no foundry. Please don’t put that down and quote it. No, you mustn’t, you mustn’t.

We can pop a restriction round it if you like.

What?

We can pop a restriction on this.

I was telling you this, because…

Oh well, we’ll need to put a restriction on this part of the recording for donkey’s years.

Well, don’t even write it down, please. But we should have, to be a metallurgy department and not have a foundry means you can’t make up an alloy of the kind you want. Of course, the argument would be, well you can get some jobbing foundry to make it, but shows how… the research students used to, when Robin Nicholson was a research student he got married earlier than most because he married before he had a PhD, now he cast his own wedding ring. [laughs]

Did you do much of that practical metallurgy yourself?

Not much, no. But I always admired those who did.

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I was interested as well, you talked about there being a foundry and a workshop, but is that something that scientists like yourselves are using or are there lab technicians there to help out?

Well, nowadays you wouldn’t let the graduate students loose on the machines, unless they were very skilled.

But then?

Well, we had to do a course. That was in the 1950s, it doesn’t happen now.

Were there people like lab technicians around then to help out though?

Yes, yes.

What sort of things would they do?

Well, much the same, and they did it rather better than the research students.

[35:00] I was interested in the fact that you… you mentioned that you actually sort of had to set up your own research group and I was wondering, how does one actually set up a research group from scratch like that?

Ah well, the first thing you do, to some extent the professor or whoever’s in charge, they’ve hired you because you are known in a certain area. Now that means you’ve got a track record for having had a grant or two in that area, so it’s tantamount to saying we’ll give you lab space and we’ll give you all the overheads and things, but you’ve got to get a grant to pay for your research students, etc. So it’s really a question of finding the funding for any sort of major programme, as distinct from just doing some quick and dirty experiment. So it’s really a question of once you have the funding then of course you buy the equipment, you pay the graduate student or your postdoc helps him to get settled in and you have to keep an eye on the money and so forth, so then you have to interact with the department that don’t want you to

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overspend, etc, etc, etc. It’s relatively simple, but you do have to keep an eye on how the money’s spent and…

How much time do those sorts of admin activities actually take up for you compared to…

Well, it’s a long time since I did it, so I mean I’d be out of date now. I think it takes a lot of time now.

How much time did it take then, compared to say, research or teaching?

Well, the administration of the research, probably not more than a couple of hours a week at most, but I think people would say it takes a lot longer now, because there are all sorts of forms they have to fill in, all sorts of safety regulations they have to fulfil, all sorts of safety things. And they complain a lot about the admin. Luckily I don’t know.

What sort of places did you get money for research from?

Well, in the sixties the Atomic Energy Authority. What was called DSIR, that was before SRC was set up, but SRC was set up sort of mid sixties, so the end from the Science Research Council. That’s what it was called, it’s later called the Science and Engineering Research Council. And sometimes, I remember having a small grant from Hawker, the aircraft people, on what were called whiskers. And nowadays they’re quite entrepreneurial, the professors, the young professors and they’ll get money from quite a lot of places. In biology, the biological people have a lot of money nowadays and the materials people do a lot of work on prostheses and bits and pieces in the body and making sure that you, you know, if you have a hip implant it’s made of something that encourages growth of the tissue on it. So there’s a certain amount of money about. It’s the medical charities that have the money.

How much paperwork do you have to do to get that money?

Oh I think now – you mustn’t quote me on it, I just don’t know.

I’m wondering about how much paperwork you had to do to get that money in the fifties.

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Not very much. Not very much. Well, I was lucky because I usually, both with Fine at Northwestern and with Cottrell at Cambridge, they attracted funds anyway and so to some extent you got what they weren’t using or you… When I went to NPL then I, well of course there was a major… the money came very much more easily, provided the programme was okay.

I was wondering, you mentioned you had your research group underneath you, research students, were there any research students you remember in particular?

Sorry?

Were there any research students you remember in particular from those early years?

Oh of course, I’ve kept up with most of them. But I didn’t have very many because I was relatively short career here and I went to NPL, but of course I’ve made friends that I’ve kept up with. I only had something like nine or ten altogether. Nowadays people have something like twenty-five, thirty, forty, over the course of the years. But I only had a short career.

Are there any you remember in particular?

Well, which one do you want to talk about? Geoff Groves…

I don’t know who they are.

George Cooper, David Smith, George Bonnar who tried to patent the professor’s lecture and had to be sacked, and all sorts of people. Tyson in particular, a Canadian who worked out that modelling very well. Cooper was a brilliant experimentalist who went to work in Switzerland, then went to United States. A number of them I’m afraid have died, because I’m of a certain age and my research students would all be seventy or so now. [laughs] I’m afraid three of them have died. [laughs]

[41:40]

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I’m wondering, with a research group, you know, how do you decide on what they’re going to do?

Ah, now, that’s a very good question. I usually, well, when I started and went to the Cavendish you were supposed to turn up with a problem and they’d say, ah yes, we think that’s a sensible problem. In these days of funding grants you get the grant and then you say to the student, I’d like you to work on this. And that means that you have to choose a problem that you think is soluble, because otherwise he won’t be able to write a thesis for a PhD. Now that’s actually a very bad step because nobody’s going to go in to attack something really difficult or do something really new because they’re not going to be asked to do that because you have to try and guarantee you’ve got a PhD, so generally it’s some slightly trivial extension of what’s gone on before, if you look at what everyone’s doing, they’re just following on from the next guy. And that’s why a lot of research, well, we’re now into the philosophy of research. A lot of research is absolutely bloody useless because it goes on working up a line that they’ve won the money for and it just goes on repeating itself, whether it’s useful or not. I don’t think we want to get into that in your examination of me.

I was just wondering though, how back in the 1950s, how did you decide what areas your research students were working on?

Well, I think I’ve… I wanted to work on aluminium, the age hardening, precipitation hardening phenomenon. It was known to be a problem, so I can’t remember exactly whether we got the money from SERC [Interviewee meant DSIR] or whether we got it from the AEA, but it was a known problem, so yes, if you wrote the right sort of beguiling proposal with the right sort of funding, you didn’t ask for too much of this or that. A lot of work nowadays, and I’m not speaking personally because I can’t, is done where a major piece of apparatus is needed that’s only situated at one place, so people will then co-operate in six or seven universities, for instance, on thin film research. Someone’ll make the thin films, someone will undertake to characterise the thin films, someone else will say I’ll do Hall effect measurements on the thin films, and that’s how they all get one vast grant that is then administered by one of them and that must take a lot of time. For instance, Colin Humphreys’ present grant on gallium nitride for lighting, so someone has to make the gallium nitride, someone has to… somebody else has to do

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the… so there’s quite a, you know, it’s a million pounds’ worth spread among several universities.

How much are you actually managing your research students? Or are they just free to go off and do their own thing? How much supervision do you have to exercise?

Well, I used to see them, oh I’m pretty sure it would have been no more than a fortnight between finding out what they were doing. And Nicholson and I, we learned afterwards the students had a name for it and some of them introduced them in their own research groups. We would make, every Monday evening during term, one of them had to get up and explain what they were doing to the others. So to some extent they were self-supervising. I took a, some people take more attention than others, but I can’t generalise.

Who are your closest colleagues when you’re at Cambridge?

Well, I suppose the closest was Archie Howie, but he was in physics still. Robin Nicholson was very close, but – we still write and see each other at Christmas, or see each other once a year – we were very close for a few years. Let’s think. So those are two I’ve kept up with. Oh, Groves who died, he was a research student. I mean he was very close because we wrote books together. In fact the third edition is just coming out, with another person, Knowles, who used it, and he was a student, a research student of mine. So Groves… oh, Cooper. Cooper. And Tyson I still see. I go to Canada most years, I usually see Tyson in Canada. That’s about it.

What sort of interaction do you have with your colleagues?

What now or then?

Then.

Sorry?

Then.

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Well, some, like any group, some I liked better than others, some were better than others. They always said they could tell my mood by whether I signed a thing, if I left them a note, if I put ‘Tony’ that was very close, if I put ‘AK’ it was… ‘AK’ it was not too friendly, if I put ‘TK’ it was, you’re doing better, if I put ‘Tony’ that… [laughs] So they say. I can believe it.

[49:00] What sort of… in very practical terms, what sort of interactions do you have with them though? Popping into each other’s offices, meeting up for tea or drinks parties – that sort of activity?

Well, now, we’re now talking, we’re talking about Cambridge, not the NPL?

At Cambridge, yes.

Well, there was and still is a coffee break and a tea break and people will gather and discuss things then and usually you’ll see the research leader with his table, with his research group, his postdocs in other words. That’ll be one interaction. Then, most people will have their students to their home at some stage for a meal or something like that. There’ll be a little celebration if somebody wins a medal or gets married or something like that. So there’s quite an easy social relationship in a happy research group. I think that’s about all I can say. And some of course, as in any group, will be more popular than others, some’ll be better than others. And the real test often of who’s the best graduate student is not the supervisors, it’s the other graduate students. Your peer group is often a better judge of one’s ability than either someone above or below, in my opinion anyway.

Could you give me an illustration of that? I’m not quite seeing…

Well, Groves, when there were something like six or eight, had clearly the best analytic brain and you’d find when you talked to them that if they’d talked to Groves they’d got ideas a bit smarter than if they hadn’t talked to him. And he was a quite introverted chap who was certainly cleverer than me, he was analytically better than me, and that’s how you would find out which one was… And you might find out that one was much better at manipulating things than another because he was the one who didn’t break the apparatus or…

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[51:50] There was one other set of connections I was going to ask about and it was you said that you retained a lot of links to people in the Cavendish…

Sorry?

You mentioned that you retained a lot of links to people over in the Cavendish…

I retained a lot of?

Links to people over in the Cavendish despite being in metallurgy.

Oh, when I first came back. Yes, it was quite lonely, but then I made friends with Nicholson and Nutting left and Charles was appointed and one worked one’s way into the department so that soon passed. But then in 1966, [Interviewee meant 1965] Cottrell left and the question was who would replace him and Hirsch was in fact offered the job but then went to Oxford instead. I was very keen to get Hirsch to the metallurgy department and I retained a friendship with him, quite close. It isn’t very close now because it’s years and years ago and we just exchange Christmas cards or his wife’s been unwell. Somebody gets a medal we might write to each other. But Howie is a close friend who’s remained a close friend. Well, that’s all I can say. It was more difficult going to NPL because that was leaving, going into the civil service was very different from – it’ll be interesting when you ask me questions like that working as a scientist in the civil service.

I have a whole bunch of questions I want to ask you.

Shall we stop now?

I’ve got one last question if I may…

Course.

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…just to wrap things up really. I was wondering if you enjoyed working in Cambridge? And if so, what did you enjoy about it?

Well, I think I’ve said, well if I haven’t said to you, I’ve been asked, what was it like as a scientist working in universities and industry and for government, and I’ve said industry was the most rewarding, government the most demanding, and the universities the most exciting. So that’s the best I can do for a quote for you.

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[Track 11]

We’re about to leave Cambridge are we?

Yes. I was going to ask why you decided to leave Cambridge?

Ah, well now, let’s think. I’d have to go back over the dates a bit. I think it must have been early in 1966 [Interviewee meant 1965]. Cottrell announced he was leaving. Now Cottrell was my sort of hero and he was the head of the department and he had two Young Turks, as he’s called them to you, well he had three, but one was Nicholson, one was me, and one was, I think the third one we figured out was Jim Charles. Anyway, I think it must have been early in ’66 [Interviewee meant 1965] – we can check the dates later - anyway, Cottrell announced he was going to become Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, that’s to Zuckerman, so he was going to leave. Well, the question was, who would succeed him. The department was very upset because he had been completely different from Wesley Austin, his predecessor. He’d made the department something, proud of itself in Cambridge because he was a young, bright FRS, a great friend of Mott’s and everybody thought highly of Cottrell and here was Cottrell announcing he was pushing off. So we all rushed around a bit. First of all, a group of us rang up Bruce Chalmers, who was then at Harvard, very well-known English metallurgist who’d made a name for himself by investigating solidification and introducing the idea of understanding solidification, which as a matter of fact for practical metallurgy was one of the most important steps made at the time. And I remember being told to ring Chalmers up and say please come as the head of department. Well anyway, he didn’t wish to leave Harvard. I think he hadn’t been at Harvard very long, because he made his name at Toronto and then went to Harvard. So the question was then, who else. Well, there was a division in the department between those who feared physics and those who liked it and Peter Hirsch came into the… and it must have been in the summer of ’66 I think, though it could be ’65, [Interviewee meant 1965] but we could go back and check all this, Hirsch, I think Hirsch had been offered a chair at Warwick in physics, accepted it and perhaps turned it down, or subsequently turned it down because they expected him to do something before he went. Well, briefly I, and probably Nicholson – certainly Charles was a bit worried about it – I was pushing hard for Hirsch and in that summer Hirsch found himself offered both the chair at Cambridge, that is Cottrell’s chair, the Goldsmiths’ chair, and the Oxford chair, which was the one Hume-Rothery had had and which was the other major metallurgical chair in

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the country. And I remember trying to persuade Hirsch to take the Cambridge one, but I think he felt he was too – well, you could check that by talking to Hirsch. Anyway, Hirsch went to Oxford. Well, then that was a blow. What was going to happen? Well, the next choice was a man called Petch and in those days the electors would meet and decide on a candidate but Cambridge in those days, it was very sure of itself, it hardly ever advertised, it was known that there was a chair and they would get together. And this hilariously fell apart, because what they did, they got together, I mean I was nothing to do with this, I might have been asked my opinion but then Gerry Smith, Sam Hall, the others would have all have been asked their opinion, they elected Norman Petch who was then professor at Newcastle I think it is. Anyway, Petch had not applied for the chair, I don’t know whether he knew the chair was vacant. Well, he must have known the chair was vacant because he would have known Cottrell very well and they thought highly of each other. And we all thought oh, that’s wonderful. Well, Petch when asked – the electors met and they announced Petch will be the next Goldsmiths’ chair – well, Petch said no, [laughing] I’m not interested in coming. So that threw the thing back on itself. And then I was interviewed for the chair and a chap I didn’t like at all, Robert Honeycombe, was also chosen to be interviewed. Now, one of the electors was the then head of department at Sheffield and we’ll have to look his name up, but anyway, just before Christmas, I think it must have been either ’65 or ’66, we were… they interviewed three people: Menter, who was then in charge of the lab at Hinxton Hall; Robert Honeycombe from Sheffield, and me. And I was quite touched, the people in the department were faced with a very young chap being the preferred candidate in a sense, because they didn’t interview Charles or Hall or Smith. And I’ve forgotten the chronological order, quite. That’s important. At some stage at that time, or maybe it comes subsequently, anyway. The chair at Manchester came up. Now, I remember being interviewed and thinking I hadn’t done very well and it’s true, I hadn’t done very well. The preferred candidate was Menter. They offered it to Menter and he said, well, he didn’t want to leave industry. He’d gone to Tube Investments and was building up Hinxton Hall and doing very well. They then offered it to Honeycombe who said, yes please. So Honeycombe was elected. I was extremely disappointed, not that I hadn’t got the chair because I was very supportive of Hirsch and Petch, but the fact that Honeycombe had been appointed I didn’t think was as good as me, quite frankly, and a number of other people, I may say so, thought so as well at the time. Now it might be that he was much better than I would have been, I don’t know, he might well have been. But also at about that time, certainly before Honeycombe came, Nicholson at a very young age was given the chair at Manchester. So here was the department with a new head of rather unknown quality,

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certainly wasn’t of the quality of the Hirschs or Menters, well, at least judged by FRSs and things like that, I mean they might have been better. So I was very unsettled and didn’t look forward to working for Honeycombe, or working, you know, because in those days you did rather think of a professor as head of the department. [10:00] Now, at that time what had happened in the outer world other than Cambridge was that the big question was being asked about the status of the government labs, you know, the country was as normal, as usual this country, it’s usually bust or near bust [laughs] and it’s trying to save money and things. Now the AEA had worked out its remit really, providing Britain with a bomb and making a power station. So what did the AEA do? This massive research establishment at Harwell and of course there was Capenhurst and the places concerned with bomb making, but also there were the electricity generating stations which were all run by CEGB in those days and the AEA had very little to do, Atomic Energy – what was it called - AEA was Atomic Energy Authority and a major research activity, very expensive one, all based at Harwell. So what was to happen to it? Now, the AEA people were not quite civil servants but they were an authority and they chose Walter Marshall, a young man, same age as me, well, maybe a year or two older. He was a theoretical physicist, head of the, well, second in command of the theoretical division, as I remember. And he was made head of Harwell or whatever it was and was a brilliant choice, absolutely marvellous, because he was very, very clever, very dedicated and moved to being a businessman extremely easily and turned out to be a wonderful salesman for… Now, that affected the whole government lab situation, all of which was being called in question, you see, in the sixties, we were, what were we doing, we were withdrawing from east of Suez, we couldn’t afford anything, we had to cancel TSR-2, and all that sort of thing was going on. So a rather beady eye was turned on the government research establishments generally, of which there were lots because there’d be the naval people, the air force people, the people who’d built the bomb at Fort Halstead and all of these people. Now, well we’re going to have to sort this lot out. Now the National Physical Laboratory had a rather special position because it was not a defence lab, it had never been set up to serve a particular department, except it had been set up in opposition to the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, in the late nineteenth century it had been set up because the Germans were being rather good at technical things and they had a standards institute and so the NPL had been set up as a civil station, a civil research activity, to support British activity generally. And it had a big materials department and so far as I’m aware, Walter Marshall as head of Harwell had a strong materials activity. Well, these things like the high temperature reactor requiring graphite research, and lots of materials research. And NPL had a

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big materials research department, but so did the other government labs, so did Farnborough, so did Fort Halstead, so did the naval research lab. Then there was the National Engineering Lab up in East Kilbride and all of this was being looked at with a view to slimming it down. Now, the director of… the NPL had a much higher prestige than these other places because (a) it was older, it was set up in 1901 or 1899 or something like that, it had had a succession of well-known scientists who’d been directors and at that time the most recent ones had been Sir Gordon Sutherland, Sir Edward Bullard, and before that Bragg who had become Cavendish professor. So it was quite well connected with Cambridge. And the director, a man called Dunworth, who had worked in the AEA and had been head of reactor division, had been made a director of NPL and he was looking for someone, as he said it, to defend his materials group from the predatory activities of Walter Marshall. [laughs] So I was approached via Sir John Baker who was then head of the department of engineering, apparently told Dunworth that Kelly was a good materials chap who could talk to industry. And that would have been because the fibre business was going along. So I was offered the job at NPL and I took it. But it was partly, honestly, because I was disappointed at not getting the chair here. I think that was honestly the main reason. So I thought alright, well, stuff this place, I’ll go to NPL. [17:05] And so I went to NPL, I took some of my group with me, which was very warming at the time, they wanted to come, but some others of the group said you must be crazy, why are you going there? And I remember being surprised that the research students could see that I was doing better than I could, if you see what I mean, it’s rather surp… Anyway, so off we went to NPL.

Who did you take with you?

Oh, the main person was George Cooper and Rayner Mayer, those were two. Now, there were some… those are the two who came, but when you got there, Geoff Groves, who was very good, had gone to Oxford but you could get people to come and work in the summer at NPL. I remember Groves came, worked in the summer. But at the same time my name was becoming known in composites and a man called Ken Street who wanted to work with me and found I was leaving and going to NPL, instead of applying for Cambridge, NPL had some sort of relationship with Imperial College whereby you could do a PhD at NPL but be nominally a student of Imperial College because NPL didn’t give away degrees. He came, but he was new to the system. And then a wonderful Italian man called Crivelli Visconti who was I think self- supporting, as Italians are well-known, and he would have come here, but when he found I was

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going to NPL he came to NPL. So there were four people came with me, two of whom had been research students here, that’s Mayer and Cooper. So I had, four people in sense went with me. Then of course I could hire some people because I’d gone to NPL. Well, that’s really the story of leaving Cambridge. In retrospect it was a very good thing because I spent then a large number of years outside universities and I think people who stay in universities all their life don’t really know how the world works. Being a civil servant may not help. It shows you a great deal how the country works. So, and then I went to America, I knew I was going to leave. I didn’t finally accept the job until June 1967 – no, no, April 1967, but I had some sabbatical period because you could take a sabbatical term every seven terms or something, and I decided to go to America for the Lent and Easter terms, 1967. So I pushed off to America and Groves, who had been my student at Cambridge – this was before he was appointed at Oxford – he was assistant professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, which became the Carnegie Mellon University in the summer of ’67. So the short period I was there from Christmas ’66 till the summer of ’67, it was still Carnegie Institute of Technology, which had been set up by the great steel mogul Carnegie and had a very good materials department. [21:50] And Groves and I wrote a book called Crystallography and Crystal Defects , of which the third edition will be out next week or something like that. A great big fat book on crystallography that is still very much in demand.

Despite the fact you wrote it in 1967?

Sorry?

Despite the fact you wrote it in 1967?

We wrote it, we wrote it together at Carnegie Tech between January and June 1967 and it was published in – it took some time to get it published because we fell out with the… we wanted it published both in Britain and America by separate publishers and nobody would agree to that, but in the end we sort of forced it, so it didn’t hit the presses till 1970 I think. It’s still, well, it’s…

But why the separate publishers?

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Well, the original publisher was to be Butterworth here, who don’t exist any more, and they wouldn’t let us have a separate publisher so we sort of manoeuvred them into a position by a sort of trick and in the end it was published by Butterworth and by Addison-Wesley. Now subsequently Addison-Wesley were bought by Wiley and the second two editions, or this one, the one that’s coming out now and the one that came out ten or fifteen years ago, were both by Wiley who’d bought Addison-Wesley. But Butterworth’s all disappeared and Wiley are more an international company than existed in those days. The big book publishing companies were very much more national in the sixties before the seventies things changed with Elsevier and people like that and the growth of the publishing industry.

Did you think that forty-four years later the third edition would be coming out and it would still be in use?

And what?

Did you think in 1967 when you were writing it that it would carry on being used for this long?

I don’t know the thought occurred to us much. It was good on, well, it’s about classical crystallography and the classification of defects, and that doesn’t change a hell of a lot, so the third edition, a lot of the basic matter is the same but there are lots of more recent references on the detailed measurements of particular properties like stacking fault energy or something like that, or energy to form a vacancy or surface energy, all much more sophisticated and up to date, and of course atomic simulations of defects were not heard of then and are heard of now. It’s nice that the atom by atom calculations turn out to show that the sort of half-guessed, half- imagined view turns out to be pretty accurate.

I’ve got a couple more questions on leaving Cambridge as well. Why were you so keen for Hirsch as chair?

Why?

Why were you so keen on having Peter Hirsch as chair?

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Peter Hirsch’s chair?

No, why were you so keen on Peter Hirsch becoming chair?

Well, I admired him. He was very good. He hadn’t been… he was very helpful to me when I was a research student because it was his… the group that Keller and he, if you go back over your notes, and he, when I joined the micro-beam group he’d left it but he was very helpful to a young research student, he was just a few years older than me. And then of course he and Whelan saw the dislocations and his star shot up enormously quickly. I mean he was quite a friend and he was a very able man. I mean he’s a bit cleverer than me, so I’d have served under him willingly.

What did you see as the problem with Honeywell [Interviewer meant Honeycombe] becoming chair?

Well, I didn’t like the chap and didn’t think he was very, well, I don’t think he had a tremendous amount of imagination and so forth. But probably the chemistry didn’t work. Don’t think we can pursue that much more.

[27:10] You talked a bit about the reasons for actually leaving Cambridge, but I was wondering, what actually attracted you to actually taking the job at the NPL? Were there any sort of things pulling you there rather than just pushing?

Well, it was a recognised position in the field then. The director of NPL – sorry, the chap in charge of the materials group at NPL, the chap in charge of the materials group at Farnborough, the professors at Sheffield, Manchester, Cambridge, that was the – Imperial College – that would have been the ruling or the senior group of professional materials scientists or metallurgists as they were called. So the government labs had a much higher standing in those days because it’s since the, well, they’d existed before the war, they’d done all the things during the war. So it was a step up in position in the field, even though it didn’t carry the title of professor, it had a very archaic title, it was called superintendent. And like Ashby said, it sounded as if you were in charge of a public lavatory. [laughs] And then of course, well though it didn’t worry one so

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much at the time, the funding was much more… I mean you had a position where you had money to spend, it wasn’t like adopting a chair where you had money for teaching then you had to go away and find money to do research, the NPL job had a budget. And you had a staff, big staff, well it must be a hundred people, something like that. I’d have to get… I don’t know. I can’t remember. Well, it certainly would have been with the assistants a hundred… I can’t… probably thirty or forty professionals. That’s a big operation, really big operation compared with the metallurgy department at Cambridge which was something like six or seven staff. And you had equipment, massive equipment. High voltage microscopes and…

Contrasting the two, you sort of mentioned the department was bigger at the NPL, what about equipment? Did you have better equipment there than at Cambridge?

Yes, and superb workshops and get things made tomorrow by professional people.

What was the comparative situation in Cambridge?

Well, the workshop at Cambridge, they wouldn’t have been very highly skilled, you know, in machining or making accurate equipment. Might be slightly different in the Cavendish within the metallurgy department, but the NPL, you had materials branch, materials department was only part of a very big lab where you were part of a national… there was an aeronautics lab, there was a ship division, there was a radiation division, there was a basic standards division and you were part of that group. Now all of those were big departments in those days, it’s all been run down since, but in those days you were part of a big national research activity of some size. Well, a thousand people. I can look up the figures because I remember giving a talk on materials at the NPL in about… just before I left. So we can look – must have been a thousand professionals at the NPL altogether. The aeronautics division got… or the ship division was a very big one, well a ship tank a quarter of a mile long and all necessary to test ships. So, some interesting colleagues.

Any you remember in particular?

What?

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[32:17] Interesting colleagues, any you remember in particular?

Well, there was Jim Dyson, who was a very able physicist. There was the head of ship division, who was quite friendly, I admired him greatly. He went and actually served with our trawlers in what’s called the Cod War, you know, which was the dispute between Iceland and Britain. James Paffett. Now he was a good colleague at head of division level. Dyson, Paffett and I, yes, were friendly and well, there was Alan Cook who was head of quantum physics or something, and he left and went to Edinburgh while I was there and then came back as Jackson Professor of Physics, so he was a pal. And I was a young man, I was only thirty, whatever it was, thirty- seven and in that sense it was, well for me it was a… I was meeting lots of people, able chaps in high positions that I wouldn’t otherwise have done so, because I’d only been a lecturer here, so it was a major promotion. It didn’t carry… nowadays because of the obscurity of the government labs it wouldn’t quite be so recognisable, do you see? Because the universities, since nineteen sixty… when was the Robbins Report? ’64. And all the money spent on universities, the rise of the universities since, that vision of research in the UK is so totally different now.

I was wondering…

So that was an attractive position to go to.

[35:00] I’ve never actually been to the NPL – what’s it actually like there? Could you describe it to me please?

Well, it’s situated in a very attractive part of London, in Bushy Park, and the working conditions extremely good; lovely buildings, nice surroundings, used to cycle to work through Hampton Court and then through Bushy Park into the lab. That part of London’s quite nice to live. It was getting crowded then, but this is fifty years ago isn’t it? When is it? 1960s, fifty years ago. And this was, well this was ’67 so yes, it’s practically fifty years ago, forty something.

When you said nice buildings, were they old, new?

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Well, some were rather old but some were new and some were being built. Yes, the chemists there, Pople was there, Pople who got the Nobel Prize somewhat recently. It was rather hilarious, he was sent to American to try and understand the brain drain, why all the young, bright young scientists were leaving, and he never came back. [laughs] He joined them. I’m afraid I have to make…

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[Track 12]

What was the actual atmosphere like working at the NPL?

Well… it was different from a university of course because there’s no teaching function and so a lot of young people are absent. Now, NPL had a reputation for being a slightly sleepy place. I didn’t find that because I sort of am of a slightly nervous disposition that generates activity in itself, but certainly you found, you didn’t automatically find a sort of enthusiastic response to a new suggestion, things were rather looked at rather carefully and I remember the secretary to the lab saying I must explain to you how we do things here. Now of course I’d been hired by Dunworth, the director, to in a sense galvanise the materials people so they could emulate what was happening at Harwell. And of course where Harwell had done so well happened early in 1967. I may not know the whole story, though I had a close friend, Freddy Clarke, who was then head of the ceramics research at Harwell, under Marshall, he greatly admired Marshall. So I knew Harwell as a consultant because I’d spent summers there while at Cambridge, I’d spend say, three weeks in the long vacation at Harwell. I knew Freddy Clarke very well. Now, this big question, what do we do with the AEA, and I don’t know whether you remember – well, you wouldn’t remember – but in the spring of 1967 there was the Torrey Canyon ran on the rocks off the Isles of Scilly and a great oil slick spread out and the question was, what happens to this, what do we do. The Wilson government were screaming, what happens, big oil spill, it’s going to go into the Scilly Isles and ruin it – what happens? Now, as I understand it, as soon as Marshall saw that happening, he said we’ll deal with it in Farnborough [Interviewee did not mean Farnborough], because nobody was set up to do anything about oil spills and he sort of stepped up, said the AEA will do something, and started experimenting with burning oil off seawater. Well of course that was tremendously impressive, he’d actually done something. And that made people realise, well these government labs, instead of just working on their own programmes that they’ve worked out by the logic, what are they doing to help British industry. And the materials people – materials is the handmaiden of engineering, it’s, nobody wants a material just because it’s a material unless it’s a jewel, about the only thing that ever… material qua material. So this mood was going through the country, what the hell’s this materials research for? The AEA were saying, well we know, we’re going to revolutionise British industry, the white hot technological revolution that Mr Wilson’s talking about and we’re it. And so sleepy old NPL had to say, well, what the hell are they doing? Of course that was why

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Dunworth had hired me. So I had to go in and was supposed to get the materials department doing something which you might call ‘with it’. And of course I was slightly lucky because I knew about composites and composites were the new thing then. [05:30] So, I did find it difficult to get anybody to do anything and I made several mistakes. I know I went in well because my research students who came with me could tell me what it was like down at the bottom, but I certainly thought I could alter people and I couldn’t. When I tried to fire some chap I nearly ended up getting fired myself, because the civil service did not understand the idea of firing another civil servant, however bad he was, you were judged in the civil service by the number of staff you had, so whatever you did, you just always had more staff and that’s how you got clout and how a department wins battles in the Cabinet.

What happened? Why couldn’t you fire him?

Well, that’s only a minor incident. Anyway, I did set up some research in composites. I got the right equipment coming in. There were various committees I sat on that were quite interesting, and so on and so forth.

Which committees did you find interesting?

Can’t remember now. Well, there were various promotion committees, I remember, and for the first year or two under Wedgwood Benn, we were integrated with a large part of the defence research because he had the idea that the defence labs, that not only the civil labs should be helping British industry, but that the defence labs should too. So – these were internal committees inside the service. And so we saw the research in the other establishments and things like that. It was particularly interesting what was going on at Farnborough, because that not only had been the home of the carbon fibre bit, which I knew a bit about, but also all sorts of other materials research. That was very interesting and then we used to look at the work of the Warren Spring lab, we used to look at the work of the hydraulics people, used to go up to the National Engineering Laboratory. But most of the time you were defending your own work against a successive number of advisers came in from outside and it was then during that period that I realised that if I was to do any good in the civil service I really ought to spend some time in industry, because how could I relate the work to industry unless I understood industry. So that’s in effect what happened.

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What, while you were still in the civil service?

Yes, I was seconded to ICI for two years. So I spent two years with ICI.

That’s a chapter I hadn’t even noticed in your…

What?

That’s a chapter in your career I didn’t even know about.

Well, that was fascinating.

[09:25] Before we go on to that, I was just wondering, a promotion committee. What gets you promoted in the civil service from someone who’s been on one of those committees?

Well, most of them were what was called the scientific ladder, and so you were looking at people’s scientific work. But also you had to give comments on the whole research programmes of somewhere like Warren Spring, I can’t remember what they were doing, but they were, whatever it was they did then. They’re now the Building Research Establishment, so it’s whatever the Building Research Establishment did umpteen years ago. Yes, when one’s an administrator, in an administrative position like that, you spend a lot of time on committees to do with promotions, committees to do with how much should we spend per year on capital equipment and things like that. So it’s all very boring from the point of view of a life story.

Oh, on the other hand, it is sort of how the system functions isn’t it?

What?

How much it is, I guess, how the system functions isn’t it, to an extent?

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Yes, yes, yes. And of course the whole period was one of negative growth. All the government labs were being run down, in effect, so you were really faced each year, well we’ll have to reduce the staff of this. And then the break-up of NPL was occurring you see, first of all Paffett… first of all there was an influx of people in ’67, because something, I’ve forgotten what had been transferred to NPL. There was a brilliant man who’d been the head of the TSIR-2 programme, and he came to NPL the year I did, Fred Cook. He died shortly…. he was a really brilliant engineer, because TSIR-2 was the last British tactical strike aircraft that the Wilson government had to cancel. The ship division moved out, the aerodynamics division moved out, and so you were spending your time worrying which building went to which. I was quite a senior position you see, I was one of the three deputy directors, and there was interesting work going on in ship division then, that you saw from the outside, such things as monitoring traffic up and down the English Channel in the early seventies, was only the time at which they started to make sure that ships going up channel go on the northern lane and going down channel on the southern lane. And there were questions like, what happens if rogue ships go in different directions, do you call in the British navy, and things like that. It turned out there was some difficulty in identifying ships that wouldn’t answer your radio calls because it turns out people running ships for profit don’t naturally tell everybody else where they are. They might if they run into trouble, but if an aircraft comes over and says, who are you, they say FO! [laughs] Interesting vignettes like that I remember, it’s a pretty interesting time, but away from my discipline.

[13:15] What was the scientific ladder you mentioned a moment ago?

That was promotion. They were then – what was it – Scientific Officer, Senior Scientific Officer, Principal Scientific Officer, Senior Principal Scientific Officer, Deputy Chief Scientific Officer, Chief Scientific Officer A, Chief Scientific Officer B, and all these positions which people, then you had to write reports each year on how people were doing. It was much more organised than universities or… all your staff you had to sign a thing each… giving them points for hard work, discipline, etc, etc. So there’s quite a lot of work attached to just being a superintendent and then deputy director.

Where are you actually on that ladder?

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Oh, I was, well then as now, there’s another little story here. I was a Deputy Chief Scientific Officer when I was appointed as superintendent in 1967. The director had promised me that I would be made a Deputy Director when the then Deputy Director, a man called Allen, left. Now Allen was a difficult old man and I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, and he had a chap who reported to him who he was expecting to be made the superintendent, whereas I was brought in from outside. So Allen regarded me with great suspicion, but in two years he duly did retire because he was known to be, you had to retire at sixty in those days, so he retired. And then Kelly was made Deputy Director and was then made a Chief Scientific Officer B. Now, I then proceeded a year or two later to hopelessly blot my copybook from the point of view of promotion, because this was the time when Fulton was reorganising the civil service. So no longer were the civil service grades to be principal – Permanent Secretary was the head - and Deputy Permanent Secretary, Under-Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Principal and then something… And the Principal in the civil service is essentially the career grade. So above Principal was Assistant Secretary, then Deputy Secretary, then Perm Sec Second Class and Perm… Now Fulton changed all that and said there would just be grades: one, two, three, four. And of course he based his arguments on what’s called the administrative grade. Now the people you’ll hear about in the civil service are the administrative grade, they’re the ones who advise the Prime Minister, look after the Cabinet Office or run the various departments. They’re still called Perm Secs, but I think they’re called grade one or something. Now, these people are all jockeying for positions and getting a slight pay rise because they were put in the right slot. Fulton came along and looked at the scientists and said, oh well, we’ll have to cut down on this number of grades for the scientists, we shall make all Chief Scientific Officers, Deputy Secretaries. Now, right, that was agreed. Well then, when you got your next pay cheque we were told ah yes, but you’re only a Chief Scientific Officer B and only the Chief Scientific Officers A are going to be made Deputy Secretaries. You are the level of an Under-Secretary. So everyone said, oh well, that’s what happens. I didn’t. I said, ah ha, I’m quite young in this place, I am going to organise a protest. Now, it so happened I knew a lot of the Chief Scientific Officers B and I called a meeting at the Royal Society of all Chief Scientific Officers B and said we ought to be made Deputy Secretaries. Well, that upset the [laughs], that upset the people of Lord Fulton. Well, the head of civil service came down to see me and my boss nearly wet himself because he was a man who got on by being nice to everybody and never putting the right

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thing… and he brought this madman in from Cambridge, you know, who’d done this. Oh lord. So it was really time to leave.

What happened at the meeting?

Well, I was told, that’s not it, that’s what we’re going to do. I remember the union wouldn’t support me. What was the name of the union? The IPCS or something, the International [Interviewee meant Institution of] Professional Civil Servants or something. They wouldn’t, because it was too elitist, if you see what I mean, it was just helping the top brass, which was what Kelly was about. [laughs] Wasn’t interested in the poor chaps at the bottom only getting three and tuppence an hour. So that was pretty clear, I’d probably better leave.

What did the other CSOBs make of your idea and your meeting at the Royal Society?

Well, don’t remember very much. Some said bully for you. Well, they were all getting near retirement anyway, you see, whereas I was only forty-five or something like this. I think I was quite young. I haven’t told anybody that, except my wife, for years. Quite funny.

I was…

You can put that in the thing if you like.

[21:00] Yes, but it’s on tape now. You mentioned that when you first arrived at the NPL, there was this idea that generally that the government labs were being seen as inefficient. Did you ever see any of that inefficiency yourself when you were there?

Oh yes. Oh yes. The bureaucracy, it was just, the place was overstaffed. There were people who you weren’t quite sure what they actually did. I mean they had a job description but it wasn’t… there wasn’t a sort of rapid dynamic through – though some people were, but bit slow and ponderous. You could always see it in security and so forth. There were half a dozen people sitting around smoking cigarettes in the security place and things like that. And then there were

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drivers for top brass without too much to do. The cleaners were all civil servants and so they just worked to rote. Oh yes, it was pretty inefficient.

When you say bureaucracy, how much bureaucracy are we talking about?

Well, that’s what I’m calling bureaucracy, I mean because the defined positions. That’s the way you brighten things up isn’t it, I mean if you’re running a restaurant and tell the waitresses - you serve this table, this table and this table. And B gets lots of people at her tables and not at the other tables, but then because they’re looking after those tables they don’t help the girl in the middle, that’s what happens. It’s a good illustration. Whereas in one where they’re told you serve any table that’s empty, they then are kept fully dynamic, that sort of partition of work. You see, for instance, I started an intelligence unit. I asked some chap who was working – I can’t remember what he was working… he was working on some organic chemical synthesis. Now why the hell would you be working on organic chemical synthesis at a government lab like that unless it was synthesising something for some specific company to make… So I said to this chap, he found it was very boring, what we need to do is to look into the rise of energy prices and start doing some work on this, because in 1970, shortly after I got… I got there in ’67. Now the big oil crisis was ’71 wasn’t it? So I’d been there a few years. Anyway, it was about that time, energy costs were becoming – and furthermore, oil was coming out of the North Sea and that was, oh there’s one very interesting thing that happened. And I asked this chap to look into the cost of energy, you know, look into it more than superficially. And the director then sent for me and said, but he’s supposed to be doing organic chemistry. But he doesn’t want to do organic chemistry, I want him to get into information. Ah, but we’re not in information. And the director knew how to run the thing according to civil service rules, that information was provided by whoever provided information. So in other words it sort of stifles initiative to go slightly outside your field, that’s the trouble. So they are grossly inefficient. Mind you, if you know what to do on a particular project then it can move very quickly.

[25:30] I was going to ask actually, how much freedom do you have as a scientific civil servant to carry out the scientific activities you feel you need to?

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Well, if you know what you want to do and when we did, Cooper and I, or Cooper had the idea and we did some of the best work on the toughness of composites. At the time Pilkington had invented a glass fibre that was resistant to alkali. Silica on the whole is a, silica is slightly acid, so you put it in cement, it reacts with the cement. Now asbestos cement is a known and used material, but asbestos was having to be phased out because everybody was catching halitosis, whatever it is. And Pilkington invented this fibre and we thought well, we’ll do some work on reinforcing cement. As a result Cooper discovered multiple fracture. But now, sitting there as superintendent of the materials division I said well, we need a cement mixer. Right, we’ll have a cement mixer from the buildings and works people. We’ll go there, that afternoon, get a cement mixer sent to… and Cooper said, well I’ll make some carbon fibres, or whatever it is. We went along. Now, you couldn’t do that anywhere else. Suppose I’d been here and I’d been in the metallurgy department, said I want a cement mixer. Uh. Well, you’d have to… So if you use the system you can move very quickly, but what you’ve got to… you’ve got to know very firmly what you want and you will upset the people who will then say, the building and works people, why has the superintendent got my cement mixer. [laughs] It’s difficult to describe, except have you ever read Catch 22 ? Well, it’s very like that.

[28:10] How do you actually learn to use the systems, you know, is it…

Well, I think you find out who you can work with and who you can’t. I made mistakes, as I told you. I was a bit of a disaster really. [laughs] Doesn’t matter now.

Are there any benefits to being a civil servant?

Yes, you learnt how the place worked, how the country worked. Furthermore you were loyal to the service. If journalists ring you up, I don’t understand some of these people who are now called bell ringers, or what is it they’re called? Whistle-blowers. I think they should be sacked, quite frankly, because you sign the Official Secrets Act. And so you just don’t talk to journalists, because you’re not supposed to. And you do, when… you can see the difficulty of the Minister. We were scientific civil servants, only very occasionally would we get called in if the Minister had to make some statement that involved say, materials. One occasion they did filter down to me, but we were very remote from… but you could see what would happen and

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you have sympathy for politicians. Something blows up like oil, like Torrey Canyon, the Minister for whatever it is is faced with a question tomorrow, he doesn’t know what to say, but he’s got to say something. He can’t as a Minister, that’s the difficulty from not being in politics, it’s easy to say well, Christ, let’s forget about the whole bloody thing until it settles, you can’t say that, you’ve got to say something. So you say something fatuous like normal political phrases. ‘The situation is very fluid but we’re working in the government.’ ‘Yes of course we’re talking to Mr Monti about what will happen in Italy, and Mr Monti of course, you understand… I knew Mr Monti and I trust him…’ lalalalala. You can see why… you’d do it yourself if you were in the same position. So in that sense it’s rather fun. Now, I never got to the… I refused a promotion and they wanted me to go to headquarters, then I really had to leave.

Why did you refuse the promotion?

Because my family was in Thames Ditton, I didn’t want to commute to London every day. When I looked at the living conditions in Abell House I thought, Christ, this is not for me. [laughs]

[31:15] Do you think you were loyal to the service?

Sorry?

Do you think you were loyal to the service?

Yes. I definitely do. Yes. Because there was an occasion when I was rung up. I was very lucky that I didn’t blurt anything out and I suddenly realised during the conversation, you’re being bugged. You can somehow tell. But afterwards the people who monitored the conversation, the guy went to headquarters to Heseltine with the tape and I remember the, well, the civil servant advising the Minister, said you really did rather well Kelly, we didn’t expect you would have done. [laughs]

Who was bugging you?

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Well, someone who wished to… he wanted to get a large sum of money from the government for making some things and he had a special means of making them and we at NPL tried out the method and I’m afraid it didn’t work. So he wanted to show that we weren’t really trying and so he rang me up who was in charge of the group and tried by a set of questions to get me to admit it was… anyway, it was, I realised what he was up to. And Heseltine, I was terribly impressed actually when he went to Heseltine, who he knew, because when people get elected to positions like that they still have old friends who’ve helped them get elected and so forth. So Heseltine was minded to help this chap. So I’d a sense that Heseltine could see that somehow he, although he was my minister he wasn’t quite on my side unless I could convince him that… I remember thinking, oh this chap’s very sensible and honest.

Heseltine?

Yes.

Who was…

He’s seen what this man’s up to, he’s seen that we are trying hard, we really are, and he told the chap to get lost. And I was very impressed.

What was the actual technology involved or method?

It was to do with ruling gratings. These very finely ruled things that if you… you can easily make a grating for light, it was concerned with making gratings for X-rays where you have to have a much finer spacing. Real nano-technology ahead of its time.

Who was it? Who was the chap? Materials…

Which chap?

Who was the person with the technique?

Well, the person in the NPL with the technique was a man called Franks.

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Who was the person outside the NPL?

Oh well, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you that.

Oh, we can pop a restriction on it for thirty years, I’m just curious.

He had a double-barrelled name. I can remember his… I’d have to… I mean I met him after I’d left when I was at Surrey, his wife worked in the vice chancellor’s entourage somewhere. What the hell was his name? He was chairman of the Conservative Party of somewhere like, one of the London boroughs near Kennington. It’ll come in a minute. Ah, what was his name? Anyway, I’m sure when you write it down I shall think of it. I think I’ve got to go and pay my gardener.

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[Track 13]

I was wondering how much, working as a scientific civil servant, I was wondering how much secrecy and having signed the Official Secrets Act actually, did it make a difference to the work you were doing?

Well, not a lot at the NPL because we weren’t working on defence contracts. We were working to support British industry. So what… I’m not quite sure what your question is.

I was just wondering, were there any occasions when the Official Secrets Act and the fact that some of the stuff you were doing might have been secret cause you problems in your work?

Well, I was privy to… quite a lot of knowledge about carbon fibres when it would have been covered by the Official Secrets Act. That was… but then these things pass out of the… they don’t last forever in the… they become open. After a time secrecy gets lifted. Some things go on for thirty years, a lot doesn’t, I mean once you find out everybody else knows it there’s no point in keeping it secret. But you do have to be careful with secret files. I probably saw more really confidential memos in ICI than in… sort of company secret things, not too different in my experience from official secrets inside the civil service because I was always on the technical side of the civil service. So I haven’t been involved in, so to say, position papers on highly political questions, so I don’t know about them. But in ICI the ones that were, our relationship with the unions, it was a difficult time in the early seventies because the unions seemed to be in charge of the country before Margaret Thatcher got hold of them and in a company like that you had to be very careful what you said. But that’s the only time I’ve been involved in, in so to say, that sort of secret. The secret I’ve been… has been a technical process or something like that. How do you make lanxide, something like that. Does that answer your question?

I think so. I was also wondering as well, how much does secrecy actually impact on your life? Is it something you have to take seriously or…

Well, it often seems footling. You know, you have to make sure everything’s locked up when you go home and things like that and then someone’ll come round and you might get told the next morning you left something on your… there are all sorts of snoopers inside the civil service,

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you found that the security people, somehow I always thought MI5 or something was spying on the Russians. You find they’re also spying on… there’s usually someone, if you go to a government lab, you spend any time there - or you did then, it may all be completely different now – there was usually someone in some, highly intelligent person, in some meaningless job, like he was an assistant to the director of personnel or something, nothing to do with personnel. He was actually the Secret Service chap [laughs] who was keeping an eye on us.

[laughs] You mentioned as well that you have a safe at home, you said, as well for documents.

What?

You mentioned previously you had to have a safe at home for documents as well.

Yes. Oh yes, it had to be screwed to the floor. [laughs]

[05:40] Working in a national government lab, is there any sense of duty to the nation as part of it?

Yes. Oh, very much so. Yes. And I think people feel it and there is, yes, yes I think there is. Yes, there is a certain patriotism about it. I don’t know whether there still is, but I’m beginning to think it’s getting a bit frayed, but yes, there is.

Is there something that…

And that brings with it of course a sort of – I have to be very careful now – distrust of foreigners. Well, because they’re the people you’ve previously fought wars with and things like that, so Americans okay, French – ooh, be careful about the French, dreadful. After all, they’re still thinking of Napoleon or something. That’s the other side of the coin.

Were there any ever times that you thought of your work as being of national importance?

Sorry?

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Were there any times at the NPL that you thought of your work as being of national importance?

Yeah, I felt over composites, yes. Because the Rolls-Royce debacle occurred while I was there and we were dead keen to help Rolls-Royce if we could, yes. Then of national importance, in a commercial way, yes. When we entered the European Union there were all sorts of committees, so we entered in 1973 and before we entered, whatever the treaty was, I don’t know what it was, that whereby we adhered to the Treaty of Rome, there were all sorts of discussions on all sorts of things and I was involved in what was the national attitude to what are called standard reference materials. So we used to go to Brussels to see whether if we entered the EEC it was going to affect the sale in this country of standard reference materials. Well, you found out what was going on in your country, namely Britain, and then when you sat down with the others, your first job you felt was well, we’d better look after our lot. Now of course that may sound very Euro- sceptic, but I’m sure the others were doing the same in that sense. You first of all briefed yourself on the British position and then you attempted to maintain that position, yes, I think so. That’s perfectly natural. It may not be very visionary but it’s perfectly defensible and perfectly moral position I think.

[09:17] We’ve talked quite a lot about what it’s like working in the scientific civil service, but what sort of projects were you actually working on on the technical side?

Well, I just happened to have a personal interest in the composite work, because that was my, so more than most superintendents I still maintained a first-hand activity because I knew the people well. But the materials group at the time was working on the provision of standards in sort of weights and measures and things like that, means of properly measuring things. The question of high temperature materials was quite important at that time. Was there any proper interest in developing chromium, it so happened was one important thing. Let’s try and think what the others were. There was quite a lot of work on the understanding of solidification, some very good work, which of course had application in the casting industry and things like that. Careful measurement of the way grains are formed as an ingot solidifies and things like that, and the segregation of impurities. That was one very important section. Oh, that’s right. There was quite a massive programme which was shared between other national labs on long-term

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properties, because most engineering structures that are built and are supposed to last for a hundred years, you haven’t got the data for a hundred years. So there’s long-term creep programmes, long-term fatigue programmes, trying to understand fatigue, but trying to measure it because you need machines running for a long time. But that’s the sort of stuff ideally suited to a government lab. It may sound rather boring but it’s quite important. So that’s the sort of thing the materials group was doing. And that the government was prepared to support and that we could do better than Harwell could as a fly-by-night organisation.

I was wondering, how much do you actually have to do with other government laboratories? You’ve talked about Harwell for instance.

Well, Harwell was a sort of competitor, but the Bureau of Standards and the German PTB were the three then big standards labs. Now, the PTB didn’t have a materials section because in Germany the materials work, like the materials work at NPL was and still is carried out by the Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung – BAM. The Bureau of Standards, it’s now called something quite different, it’s now called NIST, the National Institute for Science and Technology, did have a materials section. So I used to interact with NIST or the Bureau of Standards Materials group and with the German BAM because the main lab interacted with the PTB, which was the place in, one’s in Braunschweig and the other’s in Berlin, so the only time I went to Berlin was to visit the BAM. And I think that’s still the same, because this is all forty years ago isn’t it. I mean I left in ’73. ’83, ’93, a thousand and three, it’s thirty-eight years, so it’s a bit… things have changed a bit. And the Germans are very well organised because the work is supporting the writing of standards. So my staff at NPL would sit on British Standards Institution committees. It all sounds very boring to young scientists but, you know, the size of screws and things like that and the right viscosity for paints and God knows what. It’s all quite important in an industrial society.

[15:15] You mentioned that to young scientists it seemed boring, did you find it boring?

Sorry?

You mentioned that to young scientists it seemed boring, did you…

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No, I didn’t say that. I mean explaining it to someone like you it seems boring, but if you get into the detail there can be some quite interesting things. Like understanding viscosity or measuring of colour or something like that. Not an easy thing to measure, colour, very subjective.

Do you have much interaction with other government labs in Britain?

Well, we oversaw them. We were in competition with Harwell, if you like. But yes, I said we went to, in my position we’d go to the various labs and comment on their programmes. It wasn’t a very trenchant comment because it was another civil servant, it wasn’t going to knock that chap. It’s like the universities looking at each other. On the whole, the supposition is, all the universities are doing a grand job, some better than others. From outside universities, the question is, what the hell are they spending all that money on anyway. It’s completely different from inside the system.

Do you ever get any sense of being inside a system, working in the civil service?

Oh yes, oh very much so, yes. Oh yes. Oh indeed, mm.

Could you give me an illustration of that?

[pause] Well, you often knew things a bit before the public, because you knew what was in the wind. When the government changes, then you get all sorts of feelers for what these new people are going to do before the public would, because they’re trying to instruct the senior civil servants and that filters down to you. I’m getting a bit tired.

Shall we take a… stop for today?

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[Track 14]

I was wondering if I could ask you a few more questions about your time at the NPL?

Yes.

And I was wondering what were the highlights of your work while you were there?

Ah. Well I think the thing that was most important was that with a man called George Cooper and John Aveston, we quantified the way in which a fibre composite breaks up and that is seminal to understanding why that material is tough. I noticed you looked at the corner…

Of the sheet of…

Where I’d thrown it on the floor.

Of the sheet of carbon fibre?

And it’s all cracks and broken. It’s that energy absorption which makes it able to understand impact if you did try and break it. In other words it’s quite subtle point that it gets its toughness by breaking up, whereas the metal deforms plastically and you see people have always worried about would composites be fully tough. Now, as a result of that work, the concept of what is called multiple fracture was introduced into the subject and the whole subject in composite materials of what is called damage mechanics flows from that work because the composite is imperfect, the fibres are not all of the same strength, and so they break up irregularly because they’re not all of the same strength. And the surprising thing was, that this was the means of providing the ultimate toughness. As Alan Cottrell said, this was one of the major surprises in materials science and it’s really due to Cooper having first noticed it, brought it to my attention and we wrote a paper and called a little conference at NPL. Now, other people throughout the world were groping for the same thing, but I think we introduced terms like, oh, the density of cracks and things like that, which was seminal to it and that’s really my major contribution to composite mechanics, because I had nothing directly to do with the carbon fibres, though I stimulated them. But that’s a direct piece of work that is due to A Kelly and that’s quite seminal.

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You see, nowadays an extreme example is that helicopters, fighting helicopters have composite floors that can take bullets and shrapnel and not break. They don’t fall into one… they don’t fall apart as a big crack because they’re cracked so much everywhere, the crack doesn’t know where to go, sort of thing, if I can make it clear. And that’s the most important thing done at NPL.

[04:55] What sort of actual work did you have to do towards that discovery?

I did the mathematics. I went to my office one afternoon, I was at the height of my powers. I was early forties, I knew everything, I just sat down and wrote it out.

Just by hand?

Yes. And Mrs Lee [ph] typed it. Yes.

How long did it take?

Oh, a couple of days, and I had to show Cooper and Aveston and they said yes, that’s right, that’s roughly what it is.

Was it based on any experimental work as well?

Oh yes, Cooper’s experiments. Cooper did experiments on, essentially it sounds rather recondite, taking carbon fibres in epoxy and suddenly cooling them. When you did that, the epoxy wanted to contract because the temperature was lower and the thermal expansion co- efficient of the epoxy is much bigger than that of the carbon fibre. So in attempting to contract, whereas the carbon fibres wouldn’t contract, it broke up into a series of cracks and we explained the density of those cracks and how many were, etc, and related that to the temperature change. Quite a sort of fundamental looking experiment, but closely related to the practice of banging a thing.

How do you actually go about analysing cracks, in this case?

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Well, later you see, it was necessary to – I’m not very good theoretician, I can do simple sums rather well and firmly, it took some years before the crack, the elastic crack in the composite was understood, and that was principally McCartney at the NPL and also a group at Harvard who did the same thing. But I think empirically, cracks were understood by the practitioners who were making things. Yes. Now, see I knew the people at Farnborough quite well and the realisation that a crack in the sense of if you took that thing and cut a notch in it, the question would be, would that notch expand under a stress as it would in a metal. Well, people like… they did that experiment properly at Farnborough and I communicated that paper to the Royal Society.

[The following section is closed for 30 years until January 2043: Track 14 [00:08:51- 00:09:08]

I was wondering initially how you went about analysing the cracks? And you mentioned you had contacts with the people at Farnborough.

Cracks are studied by cutting notches in those things, putting that whole plate under tension and putting strain gauges on and seeing what happened.

How do you get from breaking that material with the strain gauges attached to it to actually you doing the maths at your desk? What’s the step in between?

Well, you have a picture of fibres. You make up a little model. The model was something like… [10:00] I ought to give you a paper or two. Like this. Ah, where’s the book? Well, a first edition would be best.

Of Strong Solids ?

Oh wait a minute, there is a first edition, yeah there is a first edition. [pause] I think it’s in the first edition. [pause] Probably sort of start thinking like this, you see, here’s the crack and it’s going to shear ahead of the crack and you work out whether that fibre’s going to break, depending on the properties you put in there. It is going to break, it’ll either be knocked

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insensitive or if one breaks, if as soon as this breaks that breaks, then whoops, the whole thing goes catastrophically. I think there’s a diagram. It doesn’t seem to be in this edition. Perhaps we hadn’t thought of it then. No, we hadn’t thought of it then, that’s right, and so it must be in the next edition. [laughs]

Do you actually have that model in your mind or written down on paper?

Yes, yes. Let’s have a look at cracks and notches now. I could write that down immediately in those days. [pause] There’s a nice diagram somewhere. Here’s that same diagram.

Just pop this on pause for a moment.

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[Track 15]

It’s a question of whether after one fibre breaks the next one immediately breaks or whether the deformation has to be spread over two or three fibres ahead of the crack. If it’s the latter then the crack only progresses slowly. If it’s the former, the crack progresses very quickly. But what we had done, we could put numbers on how much it shears so you could make the argument quantitative and we could put numbers on how much it shears because we’d measured the separation of the cracks when the thing had broken up into a whole set of cracks, that’s basically what it was.

You’ve mentioned the example of the helicopter gunship later on, but were there any more immediate industrial applications of actually having that knowledge?

Well, if you watch Formula 1 cars, if a chap runs into something, you’ll notice the whole body is smashed up and it’s the energy of smashing it up that’s saved the life of a Formula 1 driver. That’s the best application I can give you. But all that’s far removed from me. I mean these were just ideas, that’s the way science works. So others might dispute whether our input was the main one. You can certainly trace it in the literature.

How significant do you…

But at the time when we did that Pilkingtons had a new cement which could be reinforced with glass, whereas asbestos cement which was a known building material, was being phased out because asbestos was killing people. Pilkington came up with a glass that wasn’t, didn’t… the glass was alkaline so it was okay in cement, because normal glass is acidic so it’s attacked by the cement. This one wasn’t, so they were making then and they marketed successfully for some time a cement filled with glass fibres instead of asbestos. Now, we told them what to do and they showed that when you bent this thing it cracked up the way we said it would crack up. So that’s why people took a lot of notice of it. But I think that particular material failed for some other reason of Pilkington.

[03:25]

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I was interested as well in what your actual links into industry were actually like while you were working at the NPL?

Well, they were very minimal at NPL, but once I left and went to Surrey then I had quite a big consulting practice. I didn’t know that I’d be able to do that, but I did. So you’d get that story if we leave NPL and go to Surrey.

I’ve got one or two other quick questions about NPL if I may as well. I was interested as well in how much of your time do you spend doing research compared to actually admin?

Well, very little. You see, the trouble was, in the civil service like that, you get promoted so that you have no direct contact with the work in a way because you’re spending your time looking at the budgets, you’re spending your time assessing people and writing interminable reports. There’s a whole bureaucracy which is now very big in universities and universities of course have saved a bit by having young people acting as research students who are terribly productive in the sense that they work very hard. They may, some of them may be daft and do silly things and they have to be controlled, but from the point of view of labour per unit buck, they’re marvellous. Now the government labs don’t have them. At least labs like NPL didn’t have many research students and so the things are… it’s difficult to… unless you’re very closely involved you couldn’t go away and write those formulae like I’m saying. What can I… So in a sense you get kicked upstairs and less productive. I haven’t liked that as a person. So I’m not quite sure what to say.

Why haven’t you liked that as a person?

Well, you’re just not doing… if you want to have a career then… well. The reason for leaving NPL was essentially that they wanted to send me to headquarters and to run after Rothschild had made his report, in 1972 I think, on the government labs. He said, among other things, now what did he say? He said among other things that there should be a Chief Scientist in every department, every department, most departments should have an in-house scientist. Now that’s thirty years ago so most of them do now in some form or another, but there they didn’t. And the Department of Trade and Industry, which was what we were in, said one Chief Scientist, we do so many things across British industry that a single scientist won’t do. We’ll set up what are

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called Requirement Boards, and so the Labour government - have to get the years right now – Heath lost the ’74…. Ah, it must have been earlier than that. Yes, it is, it is, sorry. It was under the Heath government that Rothschild reported and the Heath government decided that in the case of the DTI, they couldn’t do it with a single scientist so they would have Requirement Boards. Now, for what comes later, Mrs Thatcher axed them as quangos in 1979, but by then I’d gone to Surrey, but in the – this would have been ’70, ’71, ’72 – these Requirement Boards were to be set up. And they would consist of people from industry and some other departments who would say yes, this might be a good thing to work on or that might be a good thing to work on, because the scientists inside the government were accused, quite rightly, of just generating their own programmes and not really looking as to whether anyone needed those programmes. [09:40] Now I was a bit of a rising star and they said, well we need someone to service these Requirement Boards, that is to set up who we put on the Requirement Board, write all the programmes of the department which should go to the Requirement Board, they’d say yes to this and no to that and yes to that. They needed somebody of standing to do it, so they said would I go, and I said no. Well that put them into a bit of a tizz because you’re not allowed as a civil servant to refuse promotion. So then I knew I had to leave. That’s the brief story.

[10:25] You mentioned you had a year or two at ICI – was that next?

Well, at that time you see, I then said to them – oh, and there was all this talk about, historically you see these labs had all grown from the war years and they were very difficult to dismantle. So, you see, I was there supposed to be running a group, the materials group at NPL that was serving industry, but I’d never worked in industry and it so happened that the Ministry of Defence, or one Ministry, said what we need is more interchange between scientists in government and scientists in industry and we will get Hermann Bondi, who had a big name then having been head of the European space programme, a very clever professor at London University. He was the chap who first got London University properly into computers, Hermann Bondi, and they set him up in charge of this taskforce, it was called, to send scientists into industry. I happened to know Hermann Bondi because… how did I know Hermann Bondi? Well, he was at Cambridge you see, and I’d been at Cambridge and I think I’d been to his lectures and couldn’t understand… Anyway, I wrote to my boss and said, I think I ought to be sent into industry. And they said, but you’re too senior. And I said, well I’m going into

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industry, and so then it was arranged that I would go into industry. And so from 1972 I was to be seconded, I was seconded to ICI and to just lump ahead, of course I made a lot of contacts in ICI so that when I became a vice chancellor I had all these contacts in industry, so I had a readymade consulting job. The whole thing was on a plate.

Why did you get sent to ICI in particular?

What?

Why did you get sent to ICI in particular?

Oh, because there was a notable man called Duncan Davies who was a general manager at ICI and he was part of the group including Bondi that had been asked to do something about the government labs, so these were all advisers to the government, what to do about the labs and Duncan Davies was one and the later Master of Trinity Hall was another who had been in charge of the Shell laboratory. Well, remind me later, his name’s crucial. There were two of these chaps and they were looking at the government labs. You see, this was all at the same time that they were asking what the hell Harwell was for. Enormous spend on… so I just got to know… and Duncan Davies who was a very clever man, but also rather wicked man, he did strange things to people. He suddenly thought, oh I’ll get Kelly to shake up ICI. So I was his tool in a sense and sent to ICI. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[14:55] What did you actually do at ICI?

Oh gawd, all sorts of things.

Perhaps we should start at the beginning. ICI where?

Well, I went to headquarters and I had a roving commission, I was very lucky. I could go and see any research group as the man from headquarters and there you learnt… you got into some very interesting situations where they really didn’t want to know. So you’d arrive from headquarters and if they were being polite they’d tell you what they did politely, but if they were at slight

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loggerheads with headquarters they treated you like dirt. I mean they might be very rude. And they’d say, ‘What the bloody hell do you know about dyes? Well, we’re not going to tell you mate, you’ve just been sent from headquarters, bugger off’. No, I’m not exaggerating. Some areas you were able to convince them. You had to have your intellectual boxing gloves on, there was none of this nice and kind… Sometimes it worked out, but of course you got to know quite a lot of people and some people… And I had quite a good track record and luckily while I was there I got elected an FRS and that carried a hell of, that carried a great deal of cachet, it opened a lot of doors.

What do you actually do when you encounter a situation where staff were being obstructive like that?

Well, you just went back with your tail between your legs, there wasn’t much you can do. I mean you could issue a report to your general manager saying the people at organics treated me like dirt, but industry’s much more realistic than… they’re doing these things for real and they feel we’re making dyes that we’re selling to the public and we’re doing a service to the public. It’s a very north country atmosphere in ICI. [using northern accent] ‘We don’t want no side.’ ‘What do you bloody know about it Kelly? Here you are, you come around, long-haired from Cambridge. Where the bloody hell’s that? Well, I went to local grammar school, my son, and I know more about making dyes than most of the buggers with PhDs.’ And that’s actually true. In industry the people who know how to make things are often, if you take out the assistants the whole place will collapse.

Did you actually manage to develop any strategies for working with people under those circumstances?

Well, I learnt not to be too short-tempered and so forth, yes. And not to rely on position. Because in universities then, and still to some extent, and certainly then in the civil service, the sort of hierarchical concept was much more marked than it is. Now, America’s really what’s democratised the world. You couldn’t pull rank, so you have to not pull rank.

Where do you actually fit into ICI?

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Well, I was located for a time at paints division and for a time at headquarters. I would report to Duncan Davies and you see you did find some people in some of the divisions who wanted to make use of you. There was one chap who was determined that PVC should be more widely used than it was. PVC was sold by plastics division in vast quantities for things like – still is – for drainpipes and sort of rather heavy duty stuff where the corrosion resistance is good. He was determined that you replace all cast iron sewers with… so he used me. Ah, well this bright young man from headquarters, he knows about composites, we want to persuade the main board to give us millions of pounds to expand in that area, we can use this chap, yes, thanks very much. Please come down Tone, when would you like dinner? [20:05] That was the opposite from the people at Blakely who didn’t like headquarters. And of course I made internal friends, some of whom are very bright, like Birchall. Birchall was a wonderful inventor inside ICI, I wrote his obituary. He didn’t have a degree, got an FRS without a degree, and that’s, to do that in the twentieth century is really something.

What sort of chap was he?

Oh, a lovely man. But he’d been brought up as, you see he came from a rather poorer background, he hadn’t a degree because when he, as soon as he’d done his military service, or before he did his military service he was employed by a chap who, with the most strange name that I’d have to dig out for you. But this man was in the, well, he sold sort of fire extinguishers. Now, after World War II fire fighting was changing completely because houses were not just made of wood or a bit of metal or plaster, plastics were every bloody where and plastics of course when on fire, give off rather nasty fumes and oil had to be dealt with. Well, this chap employed Birchall and Birchall had an uncanny knowledge of all sorts of chemical reactions that he’d absorbed when looking for strange fire extinguishers. When he brought that to bear, professors of chemistry would be amazed, they’d come in with all their quantum mechanics and he’d know exactly that if you put aniline with polypropylene and mix some mercury you’d get fulginate of dioxy… and it would all blow up or something like that, amazing man.

Are there any other colleagues you’d highlight from ICI?

Well, he stayed a great friend till he died. Well, he was, he used to get over-excited. And it was very sad, he had a drink and he got over-excited and he walked down to those, you know where

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Carlton House Terrace is, you know where The Mall is, well if you face Buckingham Palace on the right-hand side are all sorts of mansions. Now one of them belongs to the Royal Society and there’s a slope from these mansions down to The Mall called St Georges Steps or something. Anyway, he ran down these steps one evening after a drink or two and wasn’t too careful looking at the taxis and a taxi knocked him down and he died. And he’s an amazing man. I wonder whether… I was just sorting out the reprints. If you wanted a picture of a really exciting scientist in the twentieth century…

Just pop this off for a second.

[end of track 15]

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[Track 16]

Are there any other staff from your time at ICI who you remember particularly well?

Let’s think. Well, I was seconded and they used me in two ways. I was building up contacts in composites but that political period, ’71-3 was very fraught because this was the time of the three-day week and the weak Callaghan government – no, the weak Wilson government. No sorry, it’s not the weak… and the Heath government and the three-day week leading up to the ’74 election when, unexpectedly, Heath lost. So there was considerable, so to say, unrest in the country and ICI was worried, as were other people who, it’s passed away now, it only lasted a year or two, as to whether Britain was governable because the coal miners seemed to be in charge or they were calling the shots, a man called Gormley. Now when I came in from outside I had notions that I might be able to help and one of the principal Labour supporters who was head of one of the biggest unions had headquarters in – we can look up all these names – in Claygate, somewhere in Surrey, and I went to see him and talked to the people concerned with labour relations inside ICI. Well, we understood each other. What they eventually told me, ICI, you’d better keep out of this Kelly because you’re not really a member of ICI, you’ll confuse everybody. But I found that very interesting and the impressions I could form that some Labour people were very keen to support industry because they were, that’s how people got jobs. That was one interesting incident during that period. Secondly, the Germans were, their economic strength since the war, it was then just about coming up for thirty years since the war. Germany was becoming the predominant economic power in Europe without any doubt. And Germany had a massive chemical industry. We still had a chemical industry then, I was working for it, ICI. The French had a chemical industry. The Americans had a chemical industry. And this was the time of – I’ll have to get the date exactly right – of the first oil crisis. Well maybe that came a year or two later, but anyway, there was a dominant German chemical industry. I could speak German and had German friends and off my own initiative I suggested that the planning department of ICI should go and visit the German major chemical companies who were then Hoechst, Badische, Bayer and Hüls. And so we set off with all the panoply of going as with high-powered people from industry, who stayed in the right hotels but also went round the German chemical companies. And they were all having rather similar problems with labour, but much less in Germany. So this ICI regarded as rather good, and that I did while I was still seconded. So, during the secondment period, which would have been… it must have been – I

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went to Surrey in ’75, so the secondment period must have been about late ’72 through ’73, ’74. That would be right. [06:30] And so during that period I went round ICI trying to stimulate the people in things that Duncan Davies, my boss, wanted them stimulated in. I wrote several reports. One major one was on ICI getting into making large pipes of large diameter. And the other was the initiative on the, getting on with the unions, type of thing. And the third was looking at the chemical industry. Now, there’s another thing you have to remember. I wasn’t fulltime with ICI, I think I was three days a week, but sometimes that meant you spent two or three weeks at ICI and then had to go back to NPL because I was still supposed to be organising the materials group. But because I blotted my copybook in the civil service I was looking for another job and I was offered two jobs and then the job at Surrey and the three jobs were: one, to go and head what’s now ISPRA. In those days Euratom, the EEC had a set of nuclear laboratories and one of the biggest was in northern Italy where what came out of it – and they’ve all disappeared these things since, was this man with a hydrogen economy, he was very well known at the time. Would I go there? The University of Melbourne got in touch with me because it wanted someone who’d got experience outside universities. And also I noticed that there was a vice chancellorship going and I wouldn’t have thought of becoming a vice chancellor except that a friend of mine, an engineer here who had been senior tutor of Peterhouse and we were very friendly, his wife and mine were very close, he got a vice chancellorship in New Zealand and I remember thinking, gosh, if he can be a vice chancellor anybody can be a vice chancellor including me. So I put in for one at York and got nowhere, but I’d kept up with Cottrell, Cottrell is a key figure you see, in my life, because he had gone to Whitehall, leaving Cambridge in 1966 [Interviewee meant 1965]. That’s right. And then I’d gone to NPL shortly after. We kept in touch and he was very highly regarded, as he still is, at that time. We ran a conference together for the Royal Society on composite materials. I wasn’t a Fellow then. Well, he had influence and I remember mentioning to Cottrell I might try and be a V-C. That’s right, because he… and he said, ah yes, well Surrey is looking for a V-C, I’ll suggest your name. So he did suggest the name and in ’74 I was interviewed and got the job. But they, like vice chancellorships still, they sort of appointed ahead of time, so I was appointed in ’74 and to go in ’75, so the last year at NPL it was known I was leaving and so I really spent a year more or less as a consultant to ICI, just charging round the place doing things. And that set me in good stead because when I left the civil service, because I was always nominally, you see, a civil servant, then I had very good contacts in ICI, so ICI hired me as a corporate consultant. Now they don’t have very many corporate consultants, you’re a consultant to the headquarters of the organisation

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so you could go anywhere on the… and so I was. The other person was John Davidson, who’s a very well-known chemical engineer here, he was the other corporate consultant they had. And we went on as corporate consultants till ICI disappeared. [laughs] Which was in something like 19… 1992 or so, when it split up into AstraZeneca and ICI.

What sort of things do corporate…

[13:42] So then when I came to Surrey, I kept my connections with ICI and I think I was very helpful to the scientists inside ICI because I had this position I was outside but trusted by them.

What sort of matters did you consult on?

Now shortly after that Cottrell – ah, now about the time I went to Surrey Cottrell left the Cabinet Office having been Chief Scientist. Between ourselves, he got sidelined by Rothschild, because Rothschild’s a much more dynamic character; rich, powerful and very clever, an unbeatable combination, and he really for a year or two in that middle seventies, he told the government what to do in this area. Of course Cottrell is a quiet, academic type giving very good advice, he didn’t have the personality or oomph. Two wives, ten grandchildren, a fortune, name of Rothschild, FRS, God knows… [laughs], formidable. Course it was Rothschild who suggested that the Cabinet Office had a think-tank. It was Rothschild who told the Cabinet you’ve never seen an overhead, it’s time you got modern. Anyway, Cottrell then came back to Cambridge and I became vice chancellor of Surrey at that time. Now, as soon as Cottrell left the Cabinet Office he had before he went to the Cabinet Office numerous important consulting activities. Well, not very many because I don’t think he was terribly interested. [16:16] Anyway, a crucial one was that he was a consultant to Rolls-Royce. Now, Rolls-Royce in the late, well, it’s a story of Rolls- Royce and composites. When carbon fibres were invented by Watt, Phillips and Johnson at Farnborough, almost at the same time Thornel was produced by… the chap who died recently… at Union Carbide.

Roger Bacon? Was it Roger Bacon?

What?

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Was it Bacon at Union Carbide?

Yes. That’s brilliant, Bacon. And the Japanese said Shindo had, but anyway, it all got… Rolls- Royce actually made a carbon fibre too, a man called Standage, and they had their own carbon fibre and they went ahead and made fan blades and the fan blades were no bloody use, well known story. Now that happened when I was at NPL and although I didn’t know it at the time, Lindsay Dawson rang me up and said, you can help us. Now, Lindsay Dawson was the man in charge of the RB211 project for making the big fan blades. And I went and saw them, but it turned out that since I was a civil servant, they never actually explained the problem to me. Now, whether I would have solved it, I don’t know, but the solution was eventually found some time later. But, the important thing is, that when Rolls-Royce went bust then in 1971, Rolls- Royce was then nationalised, Cottrell left the Cabinet Office in ’74 and I think, I don’t know who was in charge of Rolls. Well, very shortly afterwards, Lord Tombs, who managed the de- nationalisation, made Cottrell their chief materials consultant. They then hired me as the composite man. So then, when I’m at Surrey I had two major consultancies: ICI and Rolls- Royce.

[19:45] I was wondering, as someone who’s involved in…

What?

As someone who’s involved at a consultancy level with both companies…

Yes.

… and I understand that they’re in quite different industries, but how do they actually compare from your point of view?

Well, shortly after I was also made a director of Johnson Wax. Now Johnson Wax is a company that sells things to housewives for cleaning the carpet and stopping the smell on the landing and things like that. It’s run by a man called Sam Johnson, fourth generation from a Johnson who

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used carnauba oil pine to make polish for woodblock floors in the United States towards the end of the nineteenth century or early twentieth century. A very successful private company, wholly owned. They started a subsidiary in Britain, I think just after World War II or might have been just before, and the headquarters were a place called Frimley in Surrey. Now it’s a very interesting company that, because it not being a public company it could do exactly what it liked provided its performance was such that the bankers would lend it money. They had a policy of going abroad, they had a very interesting policy of non-executive directors, which is actually relevant to the present brouhaha in British companies. Johnson insisted, he never let his non- executive directors get involved in fixing salaries, which is what they do in British companies. He said I want independent minds and I want them reporting to me and to nobody else. And he happened at the time for his English company, he thought he needed a scientist, and a member of the court of the University of Surrey, who happened to be the treasurer of the university, had appointed me, said to Sam Johnson, you ought to try Tony Kelly. And I was interviewed by him in a very high-powered way in the Dorchester Hotel and I was made a non-executive director. The reason I was made a non-executive director was principally because I had been at Northwestern University and so had his family, and his family sponsored Northwestern University and Cornell in vast amounts by English standards, you know, they’d give fifty million, they weren’t giving peanuts. So Kelly being from Northwestern, you’re my boy. [laughs] [23:25] Now, it was very interesting company and it turned out, there’s a very important vignette to this to do with climate change that’s coming. Sam Johnson appoints Tony Kelly. Now... I have to get the dates quite right. In 19… about that time Concorde had just been produced and Concorde made its major flight in 1976. The designer of Concorde was a man called Sir George Edwards, the doyen of British aircraft design and he designed the Viscount which was a very saleable plane. The Americans set out to destroy the Concorde project. Finally, they succeeded thirty years later. Now the question was, Concorde was going to fly much higher than any other aircraft. If you’ve ever been in it, it’s marvellous, you know, you see the others who’ve left an hour before down there as you whip across the Atlantic, and the pilot always points this out. Anyway, we were flying in the stratosphere. Most airliners fly at 10,000 – it’s ten kilometres. What’s that, 30,000 feet. Now that, as I’m sure you know, is the border between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Concorde flies in the stratosphere and the earth’s climate is partly controlled by ozone in the stratosphere and the Americans said this bloody thing Concorde’s going to pump ozone into or out, it’s going to be an environmental disaster. Right, so investigation was put in hand. And it was then that the meteorologists

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discovered that ozone was accumulating in the atmosphere – or no, no, ozone was decreasing in the atmosphere [interviewee meant stratosphere], not because of Concorde, but because of the fluorocarbon propellants – are you familiar with this?

CFCs?

Exactly. Who was one of the major makers of CFCs? Probably the second or third in the world, namely Johnson Wax, because it was in the aerosols that you squirt round your landing to take away the smell from the old bugger who’s just used the loo. So they were a major producer of [laughs]… CFCs. A major user of CFCs. Who makes the CFCs? ICI. [laughs] Here’s Tone, sitting a director of one and a consultant to the other. Johnson Wax behaved extremely well and led the country, it led the world actually because DuPont wanted to resist. But this stuff you might have to keep a bit quiet for some years, this bit. But when Sam Johnson heard, [in American accent] ‘You mean my CFCs is altering the climate for my grandchildren? I’ll get rid of CFCs’. And Johnson Wax did and they use one of the normal hydrocarbons. Rolls-Royce went into, and ICI went into overdrive and removed the fluorine from the propellants. Hence A Kelly has a slight interest in climate. [laughs]

As someone who’s between ICI and Johnson Wax at that moment, what do you have to do?

Well, just luck. I don’t know that actually they paid a hell of a lot of attention to me because I wasn’t, you know, the executive position. Though it has enabled me now to speak with some authority in the climate change debate. We’ve sort of fast forwarded a bit. So, that was the sort of thing I was involved with.

[29:20] Can I ask you a quick follow up question to that while we are on the subject though? Do you remember any of the discussions you did have with ICI and Johnson Wax over climate change and CFCs?

No. Because by the time I got interested in climate change it’s nearly thirty years later, if you see what I mean. The Kyoto Protocol was the thing invented about carbon dioxide following the success of the Montreal Protocol, Montreal Protocol dates from the time that I’m talking about,

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early seventies – you’d have to look it up – when people agreed to not use fluorine and it was as a result of the success of the Montreal activity that the Kyoto Protocol about carbon dioxide was introduced. If you get into the detail of climate, they will still list as some of the nasty gases the fluorocarbons, and they’ll show that the present concentration is quite tiny, they’re still going down as a result of the… so, well, that’s all… that’s a sort of separate story.

I was wondering how much you’re actually involved though with ICI and Johnson Wax’s reduction of fluorine?

I was – not very much, is the answer. I was certainly, because I didn’t know the chemistry of these things or… I was certainly consulted by - I can’t remember which the gas making division was, and usually you were asked for contacts, what you could provide, who should I talk to. As big companies they often know what they would like to talk about to another company but they’ve got to find the right person to talk about it, otherwise it all… that was one thing. There was also, where I was involved, ICI had an invention – let’s get it right – for crop spraying. It turns out if you, you’re spraying some like, in the old days it would have been DM… whatever that stuff was that they stopped using.

DDT?

Yes. [laughs] If you spray that as a powder, but you charge the particles, when they come up to a bush, these charged particles, if you don’t have them charged they just go in the direct line of flight, so they all rest on top of the leaf if you spray from above. If you charge them they go round and… because the thing is, whatever, the electrostatics, the lines go underneath as well. So you spray the bottom of the material as well as the top. That was used, or still is used in some types of crop spraying. So it was suggested to Johnson Wax that we should sell dust remover things that charged the particles, because then if you charged all the particles of the dust it would collect or do the opposite. Maybe it dispersed it because they were all the same charge. Anyway, it got rid of… So there there was some to-ing and fro-ing and I went from the Johnson Wax people – no sorry – the ICI people who knew about crop spraying, to the people at Frimley who invented aerosol sprays. Well, I didn’t have any particular… I mean I’m a competent physicist, understood it, but I didn’t have any particular… That was one interesting example.

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Talked about the ICI and Johnson Wax examples, could you give me one from your Rolls-Royce experience as well from consulting them?

[35:10] Well, Rolls-Royce, the important thing with Rolls was and still is, that prior to the sixties, all the major large engine makers only used metal in their engines. So the fan was sucking the air in, was made of aluminium or something and then it went through a… it’s heated up, compressed, fuel is burnt in it, chucked out at the back. Everyone was interested in raising the temperature at which the metal could be used, reducing the creep strength of the metal, lowering the weight. So there’s an intense interest in plastics for some bits that were cool, intense interest in where you could use titanium because of its high temperature properties, instead of nickel, but oddly enough nickel and titanium don’t have terribly different melting points, in fact titanium has a higher one, but nickel is used at a much larger fraction of its melting point and nickel has a density of eight and titanium of four. And that coupled with could you use oxides or nitrides which have good oxidation resistance to make ceramic bits in engines and could you make ceramic composites. That’s to say, ceramics with a bit of carbon fibre in them or something to stop them cracking à la the story we went through this morning. So I was able with Cottrell, with Sir Peter Hirsch for a time, and John Knott, we were the three wise men and we used to look at all the programmes and say yes, we thought this was good or that was bad or did they think of doing this. That was quite intense work and we’d write reports in detail. I saved them an enormous amount of money by saying one composite wouldn’t work, so they were pleased with that. That went on till I, they retired me in 1970… when I was seventy, which is whenever it is, 1979. [Interviewee meant 1999] No, two thousand and… No, wait a minute. I was seventy in 1999, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Is that right? Yeah, I was born in 1929, yes, so it must… I don’t think they actually… they gave me a thing when I retired so I must have been more than seventy. Can I just take this…

Shall I unplug you for a second?

[end of track 16]

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[Track 17]

That’s a section through the blades that work. It’s 2000, I was seventy-one, that’s right.

That’s your award from Rolls-Royce. It’s an interesting inscription on it: ‘For all your help and for challenging our thinking about material’.

That’s what we were there for.

How much do you think you challenged Rolls-Royce’s thinking about things?

Well, I told you. They at one stage were going to build a… it was to do with using an oxide fibre… I think in an oxide matrix. The French invented carbon fibre, or was it silicon carbide fibre, that’s right, silicon carbide fibre coated with graphite. And they sold this to Aerospatiale and the Rolls boys invented somewhat similar thing in oxides and I, you must understand, again it’s like being at ICI headquarters, the guys who wanted to do something new knew they had to convince the bosses, but since they knew the bosses were listening to the materials advisory board – that’s the things referred, with Cottrell as the chair, or Peter Hirsch, Kelly and Knott, so there are four of us, whatever it is. Maybe there was somebody else. They said well, we’ll convince these consultants as well. It’s not the consultants who will make the decision, it’s the boss, but if the consultants have got the right story, then they’re our boys. So I was a bit unpopular with them, I told the boss, I don’t think it’ll work because I don’t think they’ve proved the creep resistance. Well, it wasn’t a very popular thing to say, but later the board said, well you saved us from [laughs]… you’ve paid for the board for several years. Because that is the difficult thing, often. You have to be very sure of yourself and most consultants, you see, are hired because they don’t really want the consultation, they just want you to further those ideas. So you go to your boss in industry, I’ve got a wonderful consultant, professor, God knows what, Nobelist and so forth, because what he’ll do is say what I’ve told him to say [laughs], sort of thing.

In general, how much do you think the companies you were working with were receptive to your advice as a consultant?

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I know perfectly well ICI was in not setting up a lab in America, which would have cost them at the time.

Why did you advise not setting up the lab in America?

Because they didn’t have the contacts into the American academic consultancy network, unless they were all American citizens, were spending umpteen times their… Because if they’d hired high-powered consultants like – oh, I can’t remember their names now, but they’re all, you’ll have heard of them. Ernst and Young or somebody would have some – well, maybe it isn’t Ernst and Young, but that sort of name. ICI will hire these people, shall we do this, and they’ll probably spend, it’ll cost them 100,000 to get an opinion. I could give them an opinion for 5,000. [laughs]

[04:40] On the subject of ICI as well, I was struck by the variety of different activities they have you involved in.

Yes, that was so lovely, it was very exciting.

But which…

Well, basically I knew about composites, quite a lot about materials, quite a lot of solid state physics, not much chemistry from their point of view, but I knew the words in chemistry.

How much of that actual variety of work is actually technical work and how much of it is an understanding of how organisations work and that sort of knowledge?

What?

How much of… I was struck by you mentioning some things that don’t seem to have that much to do with sort of scientific activities, labour management for instance.

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Oh well, that was a different thing. Yes, but well, I’ve been very lucky. I do tend to sort of try and get interested in a lot of things. And the labour management one was rather special to ICI at the time, and to British industry at the time. But the others arise essentially from commercialisation of ideas and how things get into the marketplace and why they fail in the marketplace. When I retired from Surrey there was a symposium by people who’d worked with me called ‘Materials in the Marketplace’. If you unhook me again I think I can give you a copy, I think I’ve got a spare.

[pause in recording]

[06:45] …story of my vice chancellorship, what I did technically.

‘Advanced Materials in the Marketplace’.

It’s all about the power of new materials. Carbon fibre, dual use. These are all people I’d have interacted with that came when I retired and wrote things germane to what I’d done, essentially as a consultant to the… you can have that if you want.

The hard copy or…

What?

As a hard copy?

Yes, I think I’ve got some others.

If you’re sure, thank you.

But I also, early in my period at ICI, this was very influential – you can’t have a copy of this – but this is how modern materials get into – there are failures in here as well as successes. We went through with specific examples.

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‘Modern Materials in Manufacturing Industry’.

Yes, that’s right. I don’t think I’ve got a spare one of these. This was a working party that I chaired and Collier was on it, [Sir St John] Elstub, Robin Nicholson. These are quite high- powered people. And we took evidence from Japan, Germany. You might be interested in the bit on design, about how to get a good shaver. [laughs] I could probably get you a copy of that.

The British Library might already have a copy, it’s always possible.

I’d rather not give you that one.

No, that’s fine. That’s by the Fellowship of Engineering.

But you can certainly have that other one.

Oh, thank you, that’ll be very handy for research.

That’s the sort of thing that I’ve been able to do because I have a pretty wide knowledge and I think when I left, the next vice chancellor was told he mustn’t do quite so much consulting, which rather upset him.

How much did these consultancy activities actually take up time?

I used to say, I used to be asked that and somewhere in the writing’s the answer. Whether I can remember the answer I don’t know. Well, I used to, I told them I would take a day a week, whether they liked it or not, sort of thing. But that was… I think I used to say it took me forty per cent of my time to run the university, oh twenty per cent to keep myself fresh technically, which was the consulting, oh twenty per cent on sort of making the right contacts for the university, something like that, fundraising. But I could look this up, I’ve written it all down. I didn’t know where we were going. Because we’ve rather got…. well, we haven’t, I mean that’s the story since 1975, roughly.

I was interested…

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Plus there are all the things about student sit-ins and nonsense like that, but you want the scientific bits, you don’t want the student sit-in bit.

[11:00] I think from a sort of social history of Britain perspective that’s interesting as well, but I had one or two other questions about ICI just to tidy things up.

What?

I had one or two other issues you’d raised about ICI I’d like to ask about and one of them was the idea that around 1973, 1974 the country seemed ungovernable, and I was just wondering, from the point of view of industry how that political problem is actually seen and what problems it causes?

Well, it’s really rather difficult to put yourself back into the years before Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister and the Falklands War. The country seemed to be quite leaderless or not knowing at all where it’s going. It’s returning, this feeling of not knowing where they’re going. But she knew where she was going and the Falkland War, possibly for the wrong reasons, restored a sort of self-confidence across the political spectrum, because if you remember – well you don’t – that Michael Foot was leading the Labour Party, he was an absolute wet in many ways, but he said we had to do something about the Falklanders and luckily we’d chosen an adversary who wasn’t our size and beat hell out of it, and that’s usually the way to plan things isn’t it? Find a dwarf and beat hell out of him. [laughs] But then the unions, with the best will in the world, some of them were in very nasty hands, some sinister hands. I mean it was important to restrain them. Whether that was good for manufacturing industry in the long term, Margaret Thatcher, you see, wouldn’t subsidise things and a lot of manufacturing requires a rather subtle mix of government help and it’s often cloaked under commercial help. The Americans helped their aircraft industry and all sorts of things in sort of non-direct ways. So manufacturing, no there’s still twenty per cent of the gross domestic product, which is more than financial services, so still quite important. But ICI collapsed like a lot of chemical companies because it couldn’t handle the transition from bulk chemicals to specialty chemicals. You see, if you look at the growth of the chemical industry, there’d be, the bit I’d be familiar with would be

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the switch from coal-based chemical products to oil-based chemical products and biologically- based chemical products. If you knew what, say you wanted to make polyethylene, then if you made polyethylene in Britain you had a monopoly, because if the Americans were making it and the Germans were making it, the shipping costs were enormous and so they sold it. Well that all disappeared and people started to buy across the frontiers and then, unless you had… you didn’t have a safe home market, unless you could handle that, which most of them couldn’t, they all went to pieces, but they didn’t go to pieces quite as badly as the metal industries did who saw this even later. You see, we had a big steel industry, but we couldn’t realise that to have a big steel industry you’ve really got to grow it near a port because you’ve got to import vast quantities of limestone, you’ve got to import large quantities of iron ore, you’ve got import vast quantities of coal and you’ve got to ship the stuff out. And you’ll not find, except the very special, the big, big steel makers who aren’t on the coast and things like that. I’m getting off what we’re talking about, but these changes all occurred during my lifetime or my professional life.

[16:55] Before those changes though, what was it actually like being in industry at that point of crisis in the seventies?

Well, I wish I’d stayed in a way, but I didn’t because I went back to university. I think I’d have been alright but I’d been brought up by a very cautious father who had seen the big depression and so you just had to have a steady job and ICI wanted me to go to them, Pilkingtons wanted me, I just didn’t have the nerve and my wife wasn’t feeling very… she didn’t mind what I did so she didn’t give me any advice much. I might have gone into industry, but I didn’t. Now, let’s… where are we going from here?

[18:00] It does bring up another question as well, you mentioned your wife there. I was just wondering what life outside work was like for you?

What?

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You mentioned your wife, I was just wondering what life outside work was like for you at this time?

Ah, well my big desire was to have a yacht and my situation, if you want a seagoing yacht you’ve got to get to a certain level of salary before you can buy the seagoing yacht. Well, that’s got to be early enough in life that you can use it before you become decrepit, so there was a window between the ages of sort of, yes, late forties, yeah through to about sixty, a bit more than ten years, when I had a nice seagoing yacht and I could take off and sail down to the Mediterranean and sail round large parts of the English coast and Scottish coast, and I enjoyed that enormously. That was a big outside… otherwise, helping my wife with the children and things like that, it takes quite a lot of time.

How many children did you have?

Four.

Could you tell me a little bit about each of them?

Sorry?

Could you tell me a little bit about each of them?

What?

Could you tell me a little bit about each of them?

Yes. The eldest girl, she became a physiotherapist, just before physiotherapists got degrees. So she went to a hospital and trained, at Newcastle. And she is married and has three children. And the eldest boy is a schoolmaster, he teaches history at a private school. He’s been at Millfield for a long time and now at Wycombe Abbey which is a very expensive, very highly academic girls’ school. Then the third child is a boy and he was the only one who did science and he went to Liverpool and read chemistry, but didn’t want to do a PhD, so he went to work for Laporte, which is a local chemical company that got bought by a German chemical company, Degussa,

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[of] which [his business] then got bought by Solvay. So he worked for Solvay company, he decided to get out of Solvay and he now works for Grace, an American chemical company that makes cement additives, and he runs the Middle Eastern business for them because that’s the only part of the world where there’s a lot of construction going on. So he’s done quite well. And the fourth child is some sort of computer specialist and he works for Indian companies that will take large sections of another company’s business and say, we will do all the computery you want in say, present in energy in selling energy and billing your customers and oh, dear, dear, dear, all terribly complicated computer programs that I don’t think he understands at all, but he’s a wonderful salesman, he’d sell you anything. [laughing] And he sells that quite successfully.

That’s quite a diverse range of different occupations. Did you have anything you wanted your children to do in particular?

What?

I was interested in that’s quite a diverse range of occupations.

Yes it is, yes.

I was just wondering, as a parent was there any sort of particular direction…

Well, we never had plans for them, we just said we wanted them to be happy. I think afterwards they blamed us, some of them, for instance for not insisting we did, particularly over piano lessons. I mean the daughter went and didn’t like it and she must have told her brothers, so she played up and the piano teacher said she wouldn’t teach her any more and the boys went and did the same I think. [laughs] Now they tell me we should have insisted. [laughs] Well, we just sort of wanted to be happy with them. My wife was a very serene person, very serene, so she didn’t get upset about it. She just loved the kids.

[23:40] Can you give me a little insight into what family life was actually like in, say the 1970s?

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Well, my boys always say they never wanted to be a scientist because dad always seemed to be working. And I think it’s true of academics actually. In industry you work very, very hard but from nine to five and you don’t waste time in nine to five by going and having a coffee or smoking a cigarette or something, or chatting up someone you work with, then you stop. Academics go on, you know, Saturday morning they’ll start thinking about things. I think that’s… although they’re quite right. I notice now when they come home, they switch off.

Do you find it difficult to switch off?

What?

Did you find it difficult to switch off?

Yes.

Even when you were working with industry?

Ah, well you see I was never quite… that’s not quite true, because I was for a short period in one job for IMI actually, where with the team you worked from nine till five, but by and large I never had that experience. If you were a headquarters man you came in, you know, roughly at the right time.

When did you actually start as vice chancellor?

Sorry?

[25:15] When did you actually start as vice chancellor at Surrey?

1975.

I’ve been to Surrey University since, but what was it like in 1975?

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Well, it was still very much Battersea College of Technology and at that period the… it’s difficult… you see, I was not the first vice chancellor, the first vice chancellor had been the head of Battersea College of Technology and he took the university to Surrey and set it up and people were very loyal to him, and I was hired by Lord Robens who said we want you to raise the standards of this place academically and get it into research. And I went there and I was a bit of a disaster to begin with before I realised that I couldn’t really get them to change their ways unless – and I wanted to go on with my own consulting and so forth and I was very lucky, because all these clever things I’ve told you I’ve helped with, the National Physical Laboratory was only fifteen miles away and there were all the people there who I’d worked with, I’d kept up with them while I was seconded to ICI and after the first year at Surrey I went back and carried on with some of the projects I’d started there. So I could do that, I had a flow of experimental results from NPL, I didn’t need to use the materials department at Surrey, which would have been fatal if the vice chancellor started working in one of the departments, it would… he’d be favouritising it and… So I could do that and that was very interesting and fruitful, and that was really how that, well, then people at NPL left NPL and went to other places but I had contact with them and they got elected to the Royal Society and things like that, so you had a bunch of friends about, because I couldn’t have done it – I’m an experimentalist, you see. Well, for instance, when I told you I stopped that programme at Rolls, I’m pretty sure, but I’d have to check again with my notes, I’ll have gone to John Aveston at the NPL and said, what do you really think of this fibre, mate? And it’s crap, he’d say. So I’d go back and tell them it was crap and it turned out it was crap, but it wasn’t just me deciding it was crap without some… and I suppose it all broke the Official Secrets Act. Well, it didn’t really because you were very careful as to what you did say, but you felt you still had a hand in the lab, you know, as to whether the… and that’s very necessary in materials science. One of the troubles of science generally presently is that people have got so divorced from experiment in their computer programs that good hard basic facts of how forces and chemical reactions work can get a bit lost in the…

I’m fascinated that you… I always think that when people actually get to be vice chancellors they stop research work. It’s interesting to hear that you carried on doing it.

Well I was different, yes, people said I was different. I might not have been a very good vice chancellor as a result.

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[30:30] Yet you mentioned something else a moment ago as well that I was wanting to pick up on…

I’m sorry about the hearing… go on.

What did you actually have to do as your first sort of vice chancellor duties towards the university?

Oh well, you have to do all sorts of things. You have to pay attention to visitors, you’ve got to chair lots and lots of committees, you’ve got to take notice of promotions, you’ve got to ascertain whether a new course is a good thing. You don’t do this single-handed, but you’ve got to encourage good academic relations, good academic work. You’ve got to be friendly to the students, you’ve got to sort out problems where the staff don’t get on with each other and try and find some extra money to do something. [31:40] I mean I’m very proud of having supported the satellite programme at Surrey. Sir Martin Sweeting, as he now is, was a… he got a third in electrical engineering and he started making for fun little satellites that he could persuade people to launch. That’s now a major business and when it was sold it was one of the largest sales of companies by British universities and I take credit and Sweeting will say thanks, for having supported him. He knew how to handle me, he’s a wonderful man at handling people, but he… I might as well tell you the story. He got a third in electrical engineering, but as an amateur he was a keen supporter of an American programme – this is in the very early seventies – concerned with getting young people interested in satellites and in space and they used to provide money for talks on these things. I used to remember all the acronyms that go with this sort of thing. It was called, it wasn’t Sat Nav, it was…

It’s not Oscar is it?

What?

It’s not Oscar?

I don’t know. Anyway, he as a just, I think he was a research, he might have just been a research assistant, because he’d only got a third, he didn’t have a good enough degree to get a research

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grant. Just after I went to Surrey a man called Quinn Davis, who was a reader in electrical engineering and a sort of sponsor or Sweeting was his protégé, he came to me and said, this chap wants to build a small satellite that he has got contacts with NASA or whoever it is and he’ll get it launched if it can be put together. And this seemed amazing. And would I, not provide any money, but would I guarantee that if they spent 70,000 that I’d support them and they expected to get the 70,000 back when they sold this thing. And I didn’t know what to do, but it occurred to me, well I’ll see if this chap’s any good. Now, I told you I was interested in yachting, and I had recently bought a cruiser and I wished to pass the radio operator’s test. It may sound strange to you, but as late as the 1970s you couldn’t use a radio on a yacht without having a certificate as a wireless operator because the wavelengths were all 200 megahertz [interviewee meant meters], which was the Radio 4 programme in long wave. Now I wanted to practise to make sure I [incomp – 36:34] and of course I could receive alright, but I couldn’t send. So I said to this chap, well does this young man know anything about radio? Of course he knows something about radio. Okay, I have a yacht in my garden at present on a trailer, can he fix me up with some apparatus to send to 1500 metres? The chap said, I’ll ask him. And that afternoon Sweeting went round and fixed up the yacht and that evening I was broadcasting. So I thought oh, this chap’s okay, I will guarantee the… and it was a great success and the reason it was a great success. [37:30] And correspondingly he built up his business was, that instead of using components… you see, you must certify the components won’t go wrong, so at that time most people, they’d have a component, even the elementary electronic bits on the computer board, that they’d had enormous care making. Sweeting said that’s one approach, the other approach is to buy the apparatus of which ten million have been made and they’re all working and they’re much cheaper. And so he built satellite, a small satellite, and of course he had graduate student labour which cost him nothing, and he built up the business from that. But he, looking back, he was the one man I met who was tremendously good at managing those above him, widely, extremely respected by his colleagues and the peer group and greatly respected by those who worked for him. Very few people meet those three criteria, but Sweeting does. And he built up this business, now he’s Sir Martin, Professor Sir Martin, great man. But it was sponsoring, helping that chap was… And then I set up the Park, Surrey, University of Surrey makes a lot of money from its land.

I had one other question. I’d like to move on to some of this next time I think in more detail, but I was… you mentioned…

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I’d like to stop now, I’m getting a bit tired.

That works with me.

[end of track 17]

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[Track 18]

One of the things I was going to ask you about that you mentioned last time was student sit-ins as a problem, you just mentioned it in passing, I wondered what you meant by that, whilst you were at Surrey?

Well, I only saw the, really the end of student sit-ins, they were at their most aggressive in the early seventies, but by the time I went to Surrey they were quietening down. We did have one big one in 1976 I think it was, within my first couple of years. They were quite frankly unpleasant and one found that there was a sort of bow wave, you could tell one was coming through whether the students’ union president would talk to the vice chancellor or not. And when they did occur you found that there was a rent-a-crowd among the people who threw you out of your office. I remember they were, some were very well behaved, because my secretary left because I knew it was coming, and they came up the back stairs and then evicted me and this was all a sort of ceremony because it had been done in other places, so everybody knew what to do, so to say. I didn’t know quite what to do. Some of them were quite honourable because I remember some disturbed my books and later they were all returned in perfect order. In other words, there was someone there… they slept in for two or three days and then they left and left an awful smell, I remember. But it’s quite amusing the way I tell it, because I didn’t know what to do so I didn’t go into the university for a couple of days, I went to the races at Sandown Park instead and won on two races, which I’d never done before. I then went back to the university and found that the head of department of mechanical engineering, who was a very determined Pole, had told the civil engineers who were a large proportion of the student body, relatively, that they ought to go to the meetings and stop the sit-in, because if they didn’t, he would not recommend them for membership of student members of the Institute of Civil Engineers, so they duly went and threw it out. When I got back, the first meeting of the Senate, I hadn’t any idea what I had done and one of these bearded wonders you get under those occasions, some left wing member of the Senate, got up and thanked the vice chancellor for the extreme subtlety with which he’d handled the situation. I’d done absolutely nothing actually. But they left… they were not pleasant, because there was always the danger of things getting out of hand, you see. I mean that’s really all I’ve got to say on sit-ins and demonstrations, but it was very much that… they were all connected, weren’t they, with the student outbursts in Paris in the ’68 or so, and

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then the Baader-Meinhof and that lot in Germany, there was a strong undercurrent of student unrest on the Continent that had some connection here I think.

That was my other question actually, was, why were students actually disgruntled at the time?

Well, ostensibly the sit-ins were about raising the fees for overseas students, which the Labour government hesitated to do drastically. The Conservatives, as soon as they got in, went the whole hog. And I remember with great admiration, the V-C of this place, I was then of course the V-C of Surrey, but he was the one man who told the Vice chancellor’s committee that the public has absolutely no sympathy with subsidising the fees of foreign students, and I remember thinking I wish I’d said that, because it’s true. So they just sort of passed away. I think also with the passing of the Callaghan government in ’74, yes, well – when did she get in? She got in in…

’79 I think.

Oh, ’79 she got in, sorry. So it was after… these things took place, my sit-in was during Callaghan’s government, something like 1977. Once they got in there was a realism about things, because Mrs Thatcher in my opinion saved the country in many ways and then the students, so to say, had to realise they were going to have to pay their way and the miners’ strike took care of the idea the world owes me a living among the young. Well, that’s my very simplistic attitude.

[06:05] I was wondering, as vice chancellor of Surrey, did you have any sort of plan or grand vision for where the university would go?

Well, the ethos of the place has been carried on since. It was proud of its origins as Battersea College of Technology and it aimed to produce students who were going to do things rather than talk about things, if I can put it that way. They were mainly engineers, professional courses, where the accent would be on highly professional approach to what you’re doing, like for instance, hotel and catering. If you were doing a language, then your language should be very proficient and you should be knowledgeable of the laws of the country you were talking about. In music, a certain amount on musicology, but Surrey set up one of these Tonemeister courses

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where you learnt about recording techniques in connection with the physics department. And in sociology it was applied sociology using a lot of statistics rather than musing about the philosophical subjects. And we used to claim we had a very good record of our students getting jobs and I think Surrey’s still one of the best if you look at Christmas after the graduation, very few Surrey students don’t have jobs. I mean these months will be right down, that’ll be tested. So it was a highly vocational place. And it didn’t claim to be anything else. I mean I was hired because you can’t be a very good university without – as I think I’ve said this before – I was hired to get it into research and I was aided in doing that because I kept up my research, which was rather oddly reviewed by some people. And we were enterprising, the Surrey Research Parks I set up is a major money earner for the university, it’s one of the proportionately best endowed in the country, is Surrey, as a result of that. So it was, I think that’s all I can… I think successive vice chancellors have carried that through, but it was I think the aim of the chap who was before me, Dr Leggett, and it’s gone on and now the vice chancellor’s now one of those in line for a K because in my day you weren’t in line. If you got a CBE you were lucky. Now it’s all moved up so Ks will be considered for Surrey and that might, some people might say the standard of K has gone down. [laughs] But I wouldn’t say that for a minute. It’s been a successful university of its type, I am very proud of having been at Surrey.

[10:00] How does the science park actually get set up from your point of view?

Oh well, very much. I went to Switzerland in the summer of nineteen seventy… ’77 and I remember finding – well I was on my holidays because I was still a working scientist, I was hired for the summer by a firm called Atlas Copco which is a Swedish firm that makes equipment for boring into mountains and things like that, so it’s naturally, has a base in Switzerland. And it had its research base in Switzerland and if you can make a note, I can give you a reference to all this when you come to it, it’s written up. And I noticed that there were lots in those days, research outfits for major companies: DuPont, Union Carbide, a German firm, a Swiss firm, all in that part of Switzerland. Why? Because the Swiss Romande was a nice place to be, the salary structure was unfettered, communications were excellent. Disadvantage was you had to speak French to get the assistance to do anything, and I remember thinking Surrey is perfectly situated for this; it’s got very good communication, it’s in London, the language is English, you can communicate throughout the world much better than you can from Geneva

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because of the flights and so forth, why can’t we do something, couldn’t we set something up like that. Well, nothing happened for a year or so but we had a new secretary who was very much my man, if you like, I’d appointed him as the previous secretary was rather antagonistic to the vice chancellor. You often find that in universities, the vice chancellor and the chief executive officer don’t necessarily get on very well. Well Kail, Leonard Kail and I did, we both respected each other. We weren’t particular friends, but it was the university getting a cut that actually got us moving. We got this very large cut in 1981 and we said to ourselves, right, we must do something about this, and we were helped by two factors. One, the local council who controlled planning permission, they wanted to help their university – we’d only been there nearly a decade, they went there 19… before I went, they went there in, wait a minute, when did they go there? Went there 1966, that’s right. Well this was now 1981, so it was established they were proud of their university, they wanted to help it. And a man called Twyford was in charge of the local government. There was also a very outstanding member of the council of the university called Gerry Leonard, who had worked for Shell, he’d been in charge of Shell India, and he was our treasurer and he clearly would like to see something done. So with my stimulation and I suppose imagination, we three, we three from inside the university: Gerry Leonard, Leonard Kail, myself, and Twyford, the borough planning officer, decided that the university had land, it owned the land and it could start a research park or science park. Now, science parks were very fashionable then, very fashionable and Warwick was spoken of as a dream. Where we were smarter than most, because of Gerry Leonard’s help, a suggestion was, he said you can hand over this, once you’ve got planning permission to do something – and it was usually to develop part of what had been the green belt in association with the work of the university – you can either hand that over to some developer or do it yourself. And most other people were handing it over to a developer. We didn’t do that. We said we’ll do it ourselves. And we were helped by the fact that there were, due to the cuts, there were some academics not too happy about their jobs. [15:30] They couldn’t lose their jobs then because tenure still worked very fiercely, it doesn’t any more like that. Anyway, there were staff willing to help and we didn’t make the mistake of consulting the Senate, we just went ahead and did it. So in one sense it could be said we went ahead without the authority of the university. We’d never have got it if we’d asked the university.

Why don’t you think you would have got it?

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Well, bunch of academics, fifty, arguing about what was to be a commercial enterprise, which we insisted it was a commercial enterprise. You’d never have got them to agree. So we went ahead and we were very firm about the buildings, the people we would attract. Well, we were very lucky because British Oxygen – what’s it called now – yes, British Oxygen wanted a headquarters and we allowed them to come and that gave it a certain name. And then we did it by getting permission to start buildings on the land and then getting… we acted as the developer, so we would get someone to come along and put up a building which we would own and design and then we would let it. And that, and you can say why were you able to be successful. Well, quite frankly we were able to be successful because in competition with another developer we didn’t have to borrow money to own the land because we owned the land. So therefore your rates are always highly competitive.

[17:30] I was wondering, how do you go about financing something like this?

A very good question. How could we start? Well, it so happened that the… we had to juggle what we could do with what the planners would allow us to do and the big breakthrough was that the Associated Examining Board, which was doing very well selling British, well, selling exams like the Oxford and Cambridge Exam Board. I don’t know what happens now, but these are people who set and mark the school exams throughout Britain and the Commonwealth, as it was. They wanted a headquarters, so we sold, I think we charged them a million for coming and sitting on our campus, and that was perfectly in consort with the planning permission for the site. So the borough naturally said yes. We then had a million quid. Also, we were very lucky that Lord Forte, who was then in charge of the Forte hotel group, which as a major thing in those days, he favoured the department of hotel and catering, so we gave him an honorary degree and he wanted a hotel in the area. So we said, ‘My son, we have just the place for you. Of course it will cost you’. So he gave us a million for some piece of land that he could set up his hotel. We then had two million so we could put in the services for the land we were allowed to go ahead and develop and off we went. That’s the inside story.

[19:38] Once you’ve got this sort of science park space, you’ve got your buildings, how do you go about actually attracting companies to actually fill it?

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Oh well, you just have to advertise and you have to have a property agent. We had Strutt and Parker who are a major… and there was one help we got too, because I happened to have been at Trinity and the Cambridge park was very much what people were admiring and I knew the man who’d set up the park, namely he’s now Sir John Bradfield, but he was the junior bursar when I was here. And Strutt and Parker looked at… were property agents for Trinity as well and they had surveyed our land at Surrey and said you could start a research park here. They called it a science park, we had to alter the name to research park because it had to be germane to the research of the university, but that was a phrase to satisfy the planners. And we took some advice from them, but not very much. We modelled things a tiny bit on them, but we could get much, much better rents than they can now, to hire land in Surrey it’ll cost you £ x a square foot, here you’ll get it for x over 3. But that meant that every time we moved there we had much better rents, we had highly profitable rents from the point of view of the developer. But you’re quite right, that is where the money came from to get started. Now once you’ve got started, then of course you have an income stream. And Surrey’s done terribly well, apart from the park, since I left, it was started while I was there, was Surrey Satellite Technology that Martin Sweeting set up. That was one of the most successful… the sum involved when he sold was one of the largest sums ever given to a British university by a commercial organisation buying a start-up. Oh it’s something in the order of thirty million or something like this. This is nothing to do with me, this happened after I went, but I do take credit for having got Sweeting going and he will say so.

When you were starting it up, what did you think a research park was actually for, what was it supposed to do?

Well, you see, I was keen on my consulting activities and so forth, so yes, I thought universities and industry can work together and that’s what it’s about. It’s not quite what I think the politician thought of at the time, namely that somehow the university would make inventions that would then be exploited, but that isn’t the way things work. It is that the companies know what they want to do and they can hire people and get publicity and other contacts through the universities and the universities are stimulated in what they then teach and so there’s a supply of graduates from… it’s much more complicated than being an invention by some long-haired professor. That occasionally happens, but it isn’t the way things happen in practice.

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I was wondering what the feeling within the university at the idea of building a science park was?

Sorry?

What sort of reactions did you get from inside the university to…

Well, as I say, we kept it quiet for a bit, but of course once it gave the… they became very proud of it because it was a success, there it was. They were only benefitting from it. There were people who complained. I remember one chap who had an invention coming to me and saying, vice chancellor, I’ve got this wonderful invention, I just need, I’m going to hire some space, will you give me space on the science park. And I say sure, of course I will. How much will you charge me? Twenty pounds a square foot. But that’s the commercial rate, vice chancellor. I’ve got a start-up, I want… It’s twenty pounds a square foot. I will go away and come back… what about fifteen? No, the going rate’s twenty pounds a square foot. Whereas they said they didn’t like it, because you’ve got to be hard-hearted in order to be kind. Once you started dithering with the rent you were going to charge because of somehow you ought to be helping some poor devil, it doesn’t work.

I was wondering actually, how important did you actually see university spin-offs as being?

Not very. That wasn’t part of the planning. If they came about, good, but that wasn’t the main… It was a commercial venture to support the university because we owned the land and could open that land up. Some vice chancellors said, all you’ve done Kelly is busted the green belt.

The green what, sorry?

The green belt. And one very, very crude sense, you could say that but everything, what about these buildings here, are they busting the green belt? They weren’t here a few years ago. Can you see the buildings I mean?

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I can see some tower things sitting…

Yes, exactly. That was an open field ten years ago.

Oh. Was your hedge that tall ten years ago though?

No. [laughs]

Were there any other key companies apart from BOC and Surrey Satellite?

Kobe Steel was very important – well, Surrey Satellite Technology never had space on the park, it might now. Kobe Steel was important because the Japanese were quite… A firm called Smiths Industries was important. A firm called Borax was important, but they may have gone bust by now. I mean the things… I’m talking about literally thirty years ago, the eighties. The eighties are now thirty years ago aren’t they?

I was just thinking, with all your sort of consulting activities to different companies, did you already know any of them?

Yeah, I knew Kobe Steel.

And are those pre-existing contacts important at all in attracting them?

I didn’t have much to do with it. We had a very energetic man called Malcolm Parry who we put in charge of marketing. His department had been axed, his department was called home economics, and when the cuts came in 1981 the Senate voted to close it down and I remember he put up such an excellent defence of his department, which failed because the Senate was determined to close it down, that I remember thinking, you could advertise my park for me. So I sent for him and asked him and well, he would try it, he said yes I’d love to, but first of all I want you to give me enough money to buy a decent suit of clothes. And he enlisted Eirlys Roberts. Eirlys Roberts then, who was the managing director, woman, of Which? knew a bit about advertising. He was a pal of Eirlys Roberts and he was superb, he could sell you anything. So

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he would be the man who did all the work, I didn’t have anything to do with it. I was just lucky enough to spot the talent.

[28:50] Brings me on to another question on the subject of cuts as well. I was thinking, once the sort of 1980s cuts hit the university, other than home economics, what do you decide to cut and why?

Oh goodness, now. Well, I didn’t do the mechanics of cutting. The mechanics of cutting were done by a pro-vice-chancellor called Otto Pick, and I thought I should do it but he said, no, that would all go wrong if you try that because people will want to feel that a judge, to which they can appeal when we make these nasty decisions. So we closed philosophy, we closed home economics, we amalgamated a lot of the biologies, because the biologies at that time in the British universities had something that was called Balkanisation. Balkanisation means splitting up into lots of little things. So there was a thing called human biology and there was microbiology and so on, and we pushed all them together and we got rid of the smaller departments, that’s essentially what we did. Well I take pride that I think no – oh, of the philosophy department there were five members of staff and they had no job because the philosophy was closed, and I got jobs for all of those five in other universities.

Why cut philosophy?

It didn’t fit in with the ethos. It was a sort of child, I think, of the first vice chancellor who was a kind of saintly man in some ways. But the big battalions wouldn’t have it. A vice chancellor doesn’t run a university, you know, he nudges and can stop bloody nonsense, he can’t stop nonsense, and he can stimulate things but he doesn’t have a lot of direct power. The power at Surrey comes from the big battalions, the civil engineers, the electrical engineers, the mechanical engineers. [laughs] They’re the boys because they’ve got the votes in the Senate. They’re the Prussians.

So if a vice chancellor can’t directly intervene in these sorts of things, what does he do?

Well, I’ve just told you. He brings about these marvellous things. [laughs]

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Is there anything else to it or is it just, you know, direction and…

Well, I’m not quite sure how to answer that, truthfully. I was lucky at the time, I could have done things better but the university, it did react quite well to the cuts, it didn’t… I think where I and the high officers, that’s to say the people from outside the university like the chairman of council or people like… they were pretty determined to look after their university, particularly this man Gerry Leonard who died quite soon afterwards, but he was a very staunch supporter. So the university held together. I think it got the third or fourth worst cut in the country, proportionately, because it was a small university, I mean it was only a small bit of the action, but the cuts were much bigger and Salford got an enormous cut. But the other clever thing about the cuts, which often suggested to other governments, if you’re going to make a cut, you’d better get on and make a big cut, but mainly the political will isn’t there quite to do it properly. So they make the cut small and building up, so they say you lose ten per cent this year, twenty per cent… It’s much better to give you eighty per cent the first year because then people get on and do something about it. It’s not very nice if you receive it, but it concentrates the mind. [laughs] You know, it’s happening before I can get another job, I’d better do something about it.

[34:00] Did you have any impact at a policy level as a vice chancellor at a university?

Well, I’ve just given you the whole policy. You asked me where the university, what sort of university, I told you.

I know, I wonder if you as a university vice chancellor are involved in sort of setting national university policy at all? Government committees, that sort of thing?

Not much, no, no. I always used to maintain there were three types of vice chancellor. One, people who were so eminent that if they were made a vice chancellor the university felt so pleased to have them they tended to listen to it. Then there was the second set, were those who wanted to use their position to influence national policy, because you are quite visible in a way. And the third set, to which I belong, is those who were going to do their best for their institution.

How do you think you were seen as a vice chancellor in the university?

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Oh, I couldn’t answer that. I mean some people would admire me and some will dislike me intensely. I’m not a particularly affable person. I’m quite a witty person but I’m not a particularly lovable person.

[35:20] You mentioned the start of Surrey Satellite Technology the last time we spoke. I was just wondering, did you have any involvement with it after that point?

Oh, I had a lot to do with allowing it to grow, encouraging it, yes. Because we had to really rather make special provision within the department of electrical engineering. But of course they were very keen on it and once we formed the company, and I was the, oh, I was the sort of, nominally I suppose was… well I don’t know. What was I? What does it say in my Who’s Who entry? Chairman, I suppose I was. You see, they could obtain certain amounts of money to build their satellites but they were using, compared with commercial satellite makers, slave labour because they were using graduate students who could get a PhD by studying how to make a satellite. But of course the students were more or less paying to come and do the work and we weren’t charging them rent or anything like that. Sweeting knew how to handle things very well, he could handle me, he could handle his peers. I’ve told you that on another occasion. I think we’re going over a bit the same ground.

I was just wondering if you, as I had noticed in the Who’s Who entry it did mention I think you were chair of the board or whatever, but I was just wondering what you had to do with the company after that starting point?

Oh, I went on being in charge of it till I left.

How much had it grown in that time?

Well, in terms of, I mean it was just an internal bit of the university, you couldn’t say what it was worth till… we did think of selling it before I left, but Sweeting was dead against it. It didn’t get sold, it didn’t get sold under Dowling, it waited till it… it only got sold about twelve or thirteen years after I left, by which time it had attracted funds that it could build buildings of its own, you

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know, because of what it was paid for its satellites. You see, we did a deal with the Koreans. They sent serving officers, South Koreans, who would become students to learn how to make a satellite, because they wanted a satellite, every country wanted at least something up, some bit of hardware and Sweeting managed to… they’d come and they’d be charged enormous fees. [laughs]

Were there any other sort of key moments in the growth of Surrey Satellite that you remember?

Oh, I remember very… we made a lot of money out of losing a satellite. That was how we got the money equivalent to… we insured a satellite. I can’t remember the details, but they would launch these little satellites as what they got piggy-back rides so if they were going to fire off a big rocket, the Americans, they would have five or six little satellites attached round the edge of the big one. Now, where Sweeting had done so well was to show to the authorising authorities that he could produce a satellite, little simple thing, completely compatible with their regulations for – because it had to have all sorts of technical things so it didn’t interfere with anything else and it didn’t sort of spread corrosion, spread all… Now he had that and I think it was, we used to watch the launch, you know, of the big rocket, knowing we had a bit on that big rocket. Well, the breakthrough was pure luck in the sense that we insured one and it just got lost. And I remember we got 850,000 quid, so to say, because it had gone. That’s like a lot of insurance things, you couldn’t… it’s difficult to… it’s only worth 850,000 to the person who knows what to do with it, sort of thing, so that was just cash. Because he can build another one for ten quid or something like that. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the moment I remember when the go- ahead was going to be fairly clear. And they could always say to me, well, come on vice chancellor, what are you doing about 850,000 quid, or what’s the university secretary doing. The university secretary and I worked very closely together, as I’ve told you, he was in charge of the finance and we had similar views. So he would respect mine, I would respect his and that’s actually not all that common in a lot of universities. In my opinion and experience.

[41:50] Summing up your time at Surrey, what do you consider to be the high points of your time as vice chancellor?

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Oh well, probably, oh gawd, I don’t know. It was getting the Queen to come, was quite a thing because it raised the, raised everyone’s morale. You’d be surprised how everybody buckles to. That was… well I think the Research Park. Yes, I think that… I’m very proud of having started the Research Park, yes, that’s probably the, if you ask me, that’s what I’ll tell you about. Because I don’t think, I certainly didn’t do anything very big in the detailed science. But I think did… I think… I moved quite easily because I’d been in ICI before I went there. I moved quite easily in business circles and that certainly was recognised in government circles, which when I was at Surrey, after ’79 until ’94 were almost, well, were always Tory circles, the Conservative Party. And the Conservative Party, lots and lots of important members of the ministers and backbenchers and so on had come from that part of the world. Because I can remember at an open day at BP, BP’s lab, Keith Joseph was there and a director of BP, Sir Robert Malpas was there. And Joseph came up to us and he said to Malpas, ‘Do you know this vice chancellor?’ and Malpas said, ‘Very well indeed’. And I remember that was a good thing for the university from the point of view of being, from the view of presence in the government, so it meant… So I think I was instrumental in that. It was a nice place and I think I was quite well supported. I think the academics – I’m not a particularly clubbable chap. Certainly the academics on the whole respected me because I had a good scientific record.

[45:36] When did you eventually decide to retire?

Well you just get, you had to retire at sixty-five. In retrospect my wife and I thought I should probably have gone a bit before I did.

Why do you say that?

Well, just because she died not too long afterwards. It would have been nicer to have had more time with her. But you can’t tell. Anyway, I think I’d done all I could, I was there a long time, you see, and there’s a limit to what one person can do. You run out of ideas and things, people do this. They needed somebody different and I should have probably gone a bit earlier. Might have been better for everybody.

Shall we take a short break, because that seems a…

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Yes, shall I make us a cup of tea?

Sounds good to me.

[end of track 18]

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[Track 19]

I always knew I’d come back here.

Cambridge?

Yes, because we had our first home here, the children were all born here and Churchill, of which I was a founding Fellow, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year. No… yes, nineteen sixty… well, it must… yes. In 2010, two years ago. They re-elected me a Fellow in 1985 so I had my Fellowship here and we intended to move so we had a house here. About eighteen months before coming back I went into the department and said, will you give me house room, would they give me an office? And they said yes, we will, because you are a member of the department, we’d be pleased to see you. So I came back here. Now the first year was taken up by the fact that I’d been asked to give what’s called the Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society, and I chose to speak on composite materials. So I spoke on composite materials. I had an interest then in, essentially through the consulting with Rolls-Royce, on the use of composites at very high temperatures, and composites. There was a composites section, there was also a ceramics section. So the ceramics and composites section allowed me to get in, interact with students and so forth. And I cast around for something I could do myself and – because I’m an experimentalist essentially – and I came to the conclusion that where composites, where one can do things on a small scale were not in structural composites because you’ve got to have facilities for making things. But in the ceramics group we could look into electronic properties, or rather better put, simple electrical properties like could you make a very high thermal conductivity and could you couple that very high thermal conductivity with a low dielectric constant and a small coefficient of expansion. Because if you could, you would make the ideal substrate for the chips in a computer. They have to communicate with each other, so you want the, when acting as a wave guide, the dielectric constant to be as low as possible. You also, because silicon has a very low thermal expansion coefficient compared with most other things, you’ve got to make a very low coefficient of

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thermal expansion. You also need a high thermal conductivity. Now the high thermal conductivity things are essentially silver, gold and copper metals. They have very high thermal expansion coefficients. So you’ve got to lower the thermal expansion coefficient. Well, I could think – and well, control the thermal expansion coefficient. Now you could do that either of two ways. You could think of a raise of fibres that would do it with no material having a low thermal expansion coefficient, but because of the interaction between expansion and the elastic properties, believe you me, you could make it low even with two things that were both big. Or you could go the particle route. Now, what particles would you use? Well, it turns out that nowadays or the last few years, diamonds are practically a commercial commodity if you’ll do with small diamonds and you don’t care what colour they are. So I’ve published a few papers in that area, briefly. And there was one hilarious incident, if you like, I was co-operating with a Swiss man who, we would send specimens through the post and he on one occasion just popped the specimen in a normal envelope and shipped it out on the normal mail and it was too fat for the sorting apparatus which broke it open. So it arrives here with this thing all torn to bits and the department says, oh they’ve ruined your letter, we shall have to go back to the post office and explain so that we get compensation, so would you tell us what it’s made of. So I had to say well, it’s silver encrusted with diamonds. And of course if you’d said that, the post office would immediately assume you were some criminal. So we thought, forget it, we’ll just make another specimen. So I’ve quite enjoyed that. [06:45] And then lately, but we probably don’t need a lot of this in here, I became very suspicious of global warming and so lately I’ve, last two years, and my last published paper is what you might call a sceptical view of global warming. So I now spend my intellectual time on that.

[07:17] I did mean to ask as one of my closing questions if there were any big issues in science, more generally outside your own field today you’re interested in?

That one. Well, I’m particularly interested because, not that it may well be the case, but all that CO 2 we pump up is changing the environment, it certainly –

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because we know we’re changing the environment, you’ve only got to look out of the window. But whether we’re changing the climate in the way that is claimed, I have serious doubts. So, the attitude of the British government is there’s a possibility that we’re going to do harm, which is called the precautionary principle, so therefore we will try and do something about it. And the thing they’ve chosen to do is to institute what’s called a carbon tax. Now I think the carbon tax is unnecessary because I’m not sure that things are going to do harm, and (b) the way they’ve chosen to do it, they essentially raise the cost of energy. Now I think the most important problem in the world today, the one involving the whole of planet earth, is looking after the developing countries, looking after the poor in Africa and raising their standard of living. And the major way to do that is give them cheap energy, I’m afraid. So anything that raises the cost of… [microphone dislodged]

Pop your mic back on.

[09:12] Anything that raises the cost of energy for poor people I’m against. I’m sure that we must all, well, if you read one of my papers, the Finniston Lecture, we’ve all got to maintain, you and I have to maintain our standard of living or if we wish to improve our standard of living we’ve got to do so with less use of natural resource. So therefore we’ve got to be clever and among natural resources is of course all forms of energy, so we’ve got to reduce the cost of energy, we’ve got to reduce the energy input for all the things that we do. That I agree with, but raising the cost of electricity the way they’re going about it I think’s not right. So that’s the motivation. Now when you get into it, it’s difficult to make this argument without getting immediately labelled as sceptic. Now of course there are some sceptics who I wouldn’t want to be associated with, just as there are some Greens I wouldn’t want to be associated with. So I am just interested in sustainable development, but with a strong proviso that what you mustn’t do in sustainable development is (a) raise the cost of energy or the cost of the cheaper foods. And those aren’t the two criteria that tend to get

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emphasised. Now if this thing’s going to stay for thirty years then I will tell you something quite confidential.

Okay, so I’ll make a note of the time.

[11:47] I with several others persuaded the Royal Society that its stated policy on global warming, climate change was preventing adequate technical discussion, because the Royal Society under several presidents had said, and Lord May said specifically, people who are questioning global warming are either crackpots or in the pay of the oil companies. Well, I’m not in the pay of the oil company, I might not be quite as clever as Bob May but I’m not a crackpot and he’s not all as clever as he thinks he is. So that’s where I am at present. I don’t know quite what will happen, but inside the Royal Society it is beginning to think what we should say. But now, backtrack and tell you something, I’ve been a member of the Royal Society quite a long time, forty years next year, and I’ve seen these young men come up and make their names, and I remember, in fact if you look at The Times today, you’ll see the obituary of the man who discovered that chlorofluorocarbons used in propellants are harming the ozone layer. Now, as you will know from my biography, I was a director for many years of Johnson Wax plc and a corporate consultant to ICI. Johnson Wax plc was and still is one of the major manufacturers of aerosol propellants, of aerosol and – well, aerosol canisters with their things to take away the smell on the landing – and ICI was a major maker, like DuPont was. Now, I was connected with both those companies and when it was first announced that the ozone layer was being hurt, they said oh nonsense, must be something else. But they did look into it and they became convinced and as a result what was called the Montreal Protocol was brought about in the mid eighties. I remember it very distinctly. And then Johnson Wax and others said we will stop using these things, we’ll look for a substitute. And there was a substitute became developed quite quickly and now major aerosol makers don’t use cholofluoro – well, they still use choloro but not fluoro, it turns out that if you look at the CFCs, which are used because they’re odourless, they’re not carcinogenic or anything and they’re colourless, they just

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go away. But you do have to take the fluorine in certain things out and that’s been done. Now that was a good example of an environmental problem, the science was clear-cut and the science was clear-cut in this sense, if you did experiments in a lab with chlorofluorocarbons and ozone you could show one destroyed the other and the lab conditions would be fairly similar, in a sense, to what goes on in the stratosphere because there isn’t much else. Okay, so it’s a big vessel, the stratosphere, but the relationship between the two pretty clear. Now that Montreal convention was a very good sensible convention about man altering the environment badly and something ought to be done. But, the IPCC, which is now the major international force, preaching the difficulties with carbon dioxide, more or less decided they would say the same thing about carbon dioxide. But the relationship between carbon dioxide and the climate is a hell of a sight more complicated than was the ozone case and climate is terribly complicated and messy and you can’t make simple statements. So that again gives me a hunch that it’s a plausible case but it’s taken far too seriously [17:25] and the precautionary principle can work both ways. If you’re going to say I’m going to be precautionary about CO 2, you’re going to have to take certain steps. Now, have you been precautionary about carbon taxes, because one of the risks with carbon taxes is, hurting the Third World, etc, so that’s my philosophy at present, for what it’s worth.

[17:58] So not so much scepticism about global warming, climate change or whatever as a thing that is happening, more the fact that there were more important things to be worrying about?

Yes, more important things to be worried about and when you do look into it, I mean really seriously look into it, this talisman about the world average temperature changing, well look into how the world’s average temperature is measured. It’s nothing a physicist would recognise. And this is nothing to do with the fact that the climate-gate people fudged the answer. Whether they fudged the answer, they have an impossible task because they don’t have coverage of most of the world’s surface because the satellites, if you use

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satellites they can’t go above… is it, something like eighty degrees north and south, most of the stations for measuring are on the land, the land’s only twenty- nine per cent of the earth’s surface, so seventy-one per cent of the earth’s surface is sea, of which ten per cent is permanently glaciated. To come up and to claim that you can measure temperature changes of a tenth of a degree, which is what they’re doing, ah well. Be your age. [laughs]

I understand the reasons, but I wonder why this issue in particular of interest to you, as opposed to…

Ah, that’s a good question. Well it’s because of the experience with the Montreal thing, and furthermore, as a materials scientist I know, everybody else should know, the biggest greenhouse gas is water. If you think about it, the

IPCC argument is, this extra CO 2 in the atmosphere comes from the burning of fossil fuels. And certainly we know for certain that we burn more, we produce more CO 2 from fossil fuels than actually sticks in the atmosphere. But you’ve got to remember, well a couple of things, one, there have been ice ages and it can be argued and some people do argue, that we’re still recovering from the little ice age, so the earth is getting warmer anyway, which would liberate CO 2 from the oceans and various things. So maybe some of this CO 2 isn’t due to fossil fuel, though a large part of it certainly is, it could be due to just coincidence this happened about the time of the Industrial Revolution. Well, the point is that that CO 2 is going on up there, but the relationship between that CO 2 concentration and the temperature is very uncertain. When you look into it, it gets more uncertain than ever. Now why am I saying this? Because if it’s claimed that the changes are due to man sending up much more CO 2 since the Industrial Revolution than he did before and that is the cause of any change, then you have to recognise one thing that never seems to get mentioned. All that extra CO 2 comes about by burning either a fire or fuelling a jet engine, and if you think about it you recognise it also produces hot water, not just water, hot water, because since the Industrial Revolution we’ve had fires and we boil our… so there’s a lot of extra water going into the atmosphere. Now, the climate scientists will say, huh, that’s very clever of you Tony, but forget it because it all

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gets rained out and the rain will, as soon as you put up extra water, the rain’ll take it out and if it doesn’t get taken out by the rain it freezes out at a certain level, that’s what the clouds are, well the CO 2 doesn’t. And I say yes, but will you please put into your models extra water and hot water. And they say no, we won’t, because we think it’s all rained out, and I don’t know whether it really is rained out. Because the carbon dioxide gets taken out, the amount put in per year, the additional amount sticking up there is in fact in appropriate units, eight, and that is petagrams of carbon in that CO 2. But throughout the year, plants are growing and decaying and you’ve only got to go into my greenhouse, there’s no

CO 2 in there now, in June it’ll be bloody near full of CO 2 in the form of foliage. That turnover in the same units as the eight that sticks up there is 120. Are you with me?

I think so.

In other words, the turnover per year due to natural causes is nearly two orders of magnitude. It isn’t two orders, it’s… it’s at least one order of magnitude, ten times eight’s eighty and it’s 160, so it’s twenty times. And man may be interfering with that, he certainly is because he irrigates part. So again, I think that quantitative uncertainty, when you look into it, isn’t very well dealt with. And you also have to say to me, well why is it, Tony Kelly, sitting here, an old man, losing his marbles, why is it so few climate scientists aren’t of the same opinion as you, because you’re not a climate scientist, though you have boned up on it recently and published a paper. Well, my answer to that goes back to this business about the Montreal Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. The public were told by the IPCC, CO 2’s raising the temperature. That’s gone on for thirty, forty years, so young people going into climate science have that mindset, and so you’ve grown up a whole generation of climate scientists who naturally think it’s true and they then… and that does affect your mindset, scientists aren’t, and I think that’s why there are so few of us. And the funding follows one particular path. So I’m giving you an indoctrination at present. [laughs]

[27:15]

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Pop your mic back on.

[27:19] So there’s a problem and there’s a problem for science. You can say, well you should have woken up to this some time ago. Well, we haven’t because we weren’t climate scientists. And most of them were vociferous arguers. There are some very well-known climate scientists who differ from the main view - Professor Lindzen at MIT - and I’ve been in touch with them. We can’t prove the others are wrong, but my precautionary principle works the opposite way to the standard precautionary principle, I think we should be very… For one thing, there’s been no publicly sensible discussion. Oh, the advantages of CO 2. The

CO 2 concentration in a nuclear submarine is 8,000 parts per million. Well, what’s in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million. People are working quite happily in nuclear submarines. Secondly, if you go to the greenhouses in

Trumpington where commercial greenhouses pump CO 2 into the greenhouse to increase growth and it reduces water, etc, so that’s never been properly… anyway I’ll stop indoctrinating you now.

Interested to see how much of that you knock away for thirty years afterwards.

What?

I’d be interested how much of that you’re going to put away for thirty years afterwards, but we can talk about that.

Well that, I think you can publish that lot.

Good, good.

That’s the case.

[29:22]

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I was interested in your membership of the Royal Society as well and you mentioned it had been forty years since you joined, I was just… I had a few sort of questions about… what does an FRS actually do? How did you become one anyway?

Well, I don’t think he does anything, it’s an accolade. It’s got great prestige and you don’t get into the Royal Society unless a lot of other competent scientists have said yes, this chap seems to publish competent stuff, that’s all. I don’t think the Society should, in my opinion, be giving opinions as a body. To begin with it said it wouldn’t, now it does and it hasn’t really organised itself for doing that. The president though has tremendous prestige and so when he speaks, the press and everybody else will automatically assume it is on the part of the… even if he says it isn’t. Now Lord May, I think made

[The following section is closed for 30 years until January 2043: Track 8 [00:30:38-00:30:39] use of that. And the present chap – have you met him yet - Paul Nurse, he’s a lovely man, but he believes it because his predecessors believed it and it has become quasi-religious.

What do you actually do with the Royal Society on a practical basis?

I don’t do much now.

How about before? I remember you mentioned ages ago you hosted a meeting of senior scientific civil servants there, but I’m wondering what other roles it’s actually had in your life?

Well, that was because we’d been left out of the reorganisation of the scientific civil service. It does a lot of good, the Society, you know, it argues for the scientific principle. It’s very necessary to have a body arguing for the scientific principle and because I believe passionately the scientific principle is one of the

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main ways to truth on most things. I wouldn’t say it’s the only way, but it’s certainly the most important practical way, someone’s got to stand up for that. And then it funds things. But as a member you don’t do anything… there are a lot of scientists who aren’t Fellows of the Royal Society and some would say there are some Fellows who shouldn’t be Fellows [laughing] of the Royal Society. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. So it’s just one of these… it is a bit like a church actually, it does behave in some ways a bit like a church.

How so?

Well, you see, the way it… it behaves as if it has a certain truth that you’d better believe or you can… no, maybe, I don’t think we want to pursue that very much.

What did you actually…

Well, what I’m trying to say is something like this, that the FRS after your name, to a lot of people, gives you a sort of prestige analogous to a priest in some sort of community. Somehow this chap has the wisdom, like an imam or something, because he’s got the goods and in the, presumably in the Mohammedan religion Allah has given him the goods. Then correspondingly, Kelly to the neighbours is an FRS. Well, in this part of the world the FRS is discounted because they’re two a penny around here. [laughing] But somewhere else it’s taken more seriously.

What do you actually get made an FRS for?

Well I got made an FRS for establishing the rules for whether things were brittle or not and for composite materials. That’s what the citation said: He understood the principles of fibre reinforcement.

How’s it actually changed?

What?

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The Royal Society in the forty years you’ve been a member.

Well yes, it’s become much more funded through government funds and much more assertive in wanting to give statements on things. Yes, that’s what the battle inside that I’m talking about is all about. Some of us are saying you shouldn’t be doing this. And we don’t just mean climate change, that happens to be something I’ve looked into. It should be very careful when making pronouncements on any matter of public policy because the matters of public policy should be settled in the laboratory, not by ex cathedra statements, that’s why it isn’t… it just shouldn’t be giving statements on policy. If asked what the scientific content of something is, it should say well, we’ll get the bunch of Fellows in the Society who are most proficient with this and they can give you a scientific judgement, but that doesn’t mean it’s on behalf of the Royal Society, nor does it mean that every Fellow of the Royal Society agrees with it. That’s my view anyway. Can we stop now?

[36:10] I’ve got just one final question really. I was wondering how you’ve actually found doing this interview?

Oh, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been good for me, I wouldn’t record all these things otherwise.

What do you think of the idea of the project as a whole to go out and interview…

Oh, it’s quite fascinating.

Is there anything about the interviews that have surprised you?

Yes. I have been surprised that we seem to spend so much time on… we never seem to discuss much detail of the science, it’s all why did you do… it’s all

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about me as a person rather than me as a scientist. Me as a person rather than the science I’m supposed to know about.

I guess it’s a sort of different way of looking at it. The science is written down in so many places already.

What?

The science is already written down in so many places. The route of how we actually got there, it’s a bit less known I think.

Oh well, you explained that to me at the start, yes. As I’ve told you, I think I get on with you. Old men love talking about themselves don’t they? An old man’s mind is like a cemetery full of things that happened. The young man’s mind is like a flower garden full of things that are about to happen.

I think historians have slightly different views on that one. Well, I think that seems a good place to stop.

[end of track 19 – end of recording]