National Life Stories an Oral History of British Science
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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Anthony Kelly Interviewed by Thomas Lean C1379/54 IMPORTANT © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. Anthony Kelly Page 1 C1379/53 Track 1 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: Anthony Kelly Page 2 C1379/53 Track 1 [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 Anthony Kelly Page 3 C1379/53 Track 1 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 Anthony Kelly Page 4 C1379/53 Track 1 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.