NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Dr Alan Smith

Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

C1379/65

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Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/65

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science

Interviewee’s surname: Smith Title: Dr

Interviewee’s Alan Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: geologist Date and place of birth: 24/02/37, Watford, Hertfordshir e Mother’s occupation: / Father’s occupation: Engineer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 16/11/11 (track 1-3), 5/1/12 (track 4-6), 26/1/12 (track 7-10), 1/3/12 (track 11).

Location of interview: St. John’s College, University of Cambridge

Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks: 11 Mono or Stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 11:38:16

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: © The British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

Alan Smith Page 1 C1379/65 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you tell me when and where you were born please?

I was born in Watford, Watford Maternity Hospital, twenty-fourth of February 1937.

And can you tell me anything you know of your father’s life, based on what he might have told you and anything you’ve found out since?

Well he, I think people who met him thought he was a genius really. He left school at thirteen and, I mean I can tell you a lot, but the most important point is he went to night school, taught himself how to do things and eventually ended up as a precision electrical engineer, and taught himself how to use these machines called Brown and Sharpe automatic tooling, or whatever, I can’t remember the names of them. But they were big machines and you use cams to activate the tools. I think the tool would come in and then another tool would come in. He more or less retired at the time that electronic tapes and computers were beginning to take over that role. But that was all self-taught and he was not allowed to join the forces during the war because the work he was doing was considered too important for him to go on the front actually. He worked for the Admiralty a lot of the time and various other people. He had a [laughs], he really was an amazing man. He was an excellent photographer and took lots of, made lots of films, very impulsive sort of person, stabilised by my mother. And I suppose my wife would have said that he spoiled me perhaps, I don’t know.

In what way?

Well, perhaps by putting me on some sort of, you know, can’t do any wrong, kind of thing. But he was, he would have been an excellent professor actually, but he never had a chance and came from a family of five. They lived in London for a lot of the time and his father at one time was a docker in the London docks when the unloading and loading of ships was all done by hand. He carried the sacks off the ships, he put them back on again. He was a big man, he could do that, but it must have been literally back breaking for some people. And I was the first member of the immediate family to go to university. I’m a product of the Butler Education Act I think, which I think was an immensely good thing for the country actually.

Alan Smith Page 2 C1379/65 Track 1

[03:06] What did your father tell you about his childhood then? So, his life before leaving school at thirteen and going on to teach himself?

He didn’t tell me a lot, except discipline was fairly tough, his father used to beat him. I mean my headmaster used to beat me, so that’s nothing new. But he loved playing practical jokes and he loved helping people as well. So he was, he was very good at school. Oh yes, I remember him telling me about he had a rival in the school – I forget his name, somebody Goldberg – and they always vied with one another in spelling competitions. He was very competitive, good sportsman, loved to play tennis and so on, good cricketer.

Did you know his parents, your grandparents?

I met his father, he was rather ill when I met him I think. Well no, he became ill, that’s right. That’s when my… his father having worked in the docks had enough money somehow to buy a farm in Essex, they farmed in Essex after the war and during the war. And his wife was also a very spirited woman, she used to look after the chickens and the animals and she ended, after her husband died and the farm passed to one of the sons in the family, in my father’s family, she retired to a gypsy caravan. [laughs] I had lots of relatives in Norfolk. I’m essentially, I think, seven-eighths East Anglian. The other eighth is French, somehow. I never follow that up actually.

[05:11] And what work did your father do for the Admiralty?

He made highly, well, precision parts of bronze and brass and copper which were a lot to do with electronic or electrical circuitry. There wasn’t much electronics in those days. They were mass produced. I know some of them went into submarines and things like that. It was just a small part which, you know, electrical pins for example, which had to go very precisely into sockets and that sort of thing. I don’t know the details of what they were used for because it was I suppose secret work or something, I don’t know.

[05:55] And what can you tell me about your mother’s…

Alan Smith Page 3 C1379/65 Track 1

My mother?

Yeah.

My mother, I never knew, well, I think they were very poor. She was an only child. Her father had a dreadful accident in the First World War and lost the use of one of his hands I think, and so he was an invalid almost in terms of working, I don’t think he could work easily. I never met him because he died long before then and I never met her mother. She died probably after I was born, but I never knew her. She was a very… she was also fairly competitive in a quiet way, she was really thoughtful and became an accountant somehow. I mean not a formal accountant, but she used to run the books for the company she worked for at one time and she ran the books for my father actually.

How had they met?

I think tennis actually.

[07:00] What memories do you have of time spent with your father as a younger child? So if we go sort of no higher than sort of primary school age – things done with him, places gone with him?

Well, he used to take me down to the – we had an allotment in the war – used to take me down to the allotment and show me things growing and show me how to grow things. I think he was pretty horrified by the war and he made sure that I knew at a very early age what it involved. I mean although he didn’t go into the forces he did act as a volunteer fireman and was in the London Blitz and fighting fires there and he was horrified by what happened, but he wasn’t a pacifist or anything like that. But we had, I think it was a… I can’t remember if it was a Wellington or a Whitley bomber crash on the allotments in the night and he went down to help. Couldn’t do anything, but in the morning he took me round to show me the crash and also show me what happens to a human being when it gets burnt.

Could you describe what you saw that day?

Alan Smith Page 4 C1379/65 Track 1

Well, it was just an outline mass of charred material really, you couldn’t tell it was human. Well, except from its gross shape. But I mean he was very, in that sense, you know, that was one of the more shocking things he used to do to me. And I remember when the first films came out of the German concentration camps from Auschwitz and Belsen and so on and there was a showing in London, he took me up there to see them.

Why do you think that he did?

I think he wanted to show me how awful it was actually. I mean as I say, he wasn’t a pacifist but he just wanted to show, you know. And it did leave a bit of an impression on me, I must admit. And I suppose he was very, you know, his experience himself, if you’re a farm person, if you’ve been on a farm you are really in touch with living things and you see them born, you see them grow and you see them die or sent off to the abattoir and so on, and it’s part of your life and I think, you know, he possibly thought he wanted to show me that’s how life is, actually. Because nowadays you go to a supermarket and something comes in a package, you don’t really think how it got there.

[09:27] So the farm that you talk about in relation to him, is this the farm that his parents took up when they…

Yes.

What experience did you have of that farm?

Well, it was lovely actually. It was a little – it was near Great Easton in Essex and it was very idyllic in a way, there was a little lane going down to it. We didn’t have electricity initially, or the farm did not have electricity, he’d managed to get that in. The water was, you had to pump the water. There weren’t any insecticides of any moment really, so everything was wild flowers everywhere, the sort of thing you read about actually happened at times. And I remember, you know, stooking sheaves of corn with pitchforks, putting them on to a cart and taking them off to be threshed.

What does that involve for someone who wouldn’t know? What is the practice?

Alan Smith Page 5 C1379/65 Track 1

Well, the old binders, the old first mechanical corn cutters would bind a sheaf and it would be about that width, that high.

Just under a metre.

Something like that. I could just about lift it at that age, at ten or so. It wasn’t that heavy unless it had been raining and the stuff was really wet. But what you did was to go behind the tractor and a cutter and a binder – I don’t know if they were all in one machine, quite small compared to what it is today - and you’d put them into stooks, which is about six or more, standing up leaning against one another so that they would dry out if it was wet, and also so they could be picked up by, or put into a threshing machine which would take the tops off and separate the grain from the chaff, from the straw. And then you used to burn the whole lot. Not the grain of course, but it wasn’t, nobody worried about smoke or fires in those days particularly. I have a vivid memory again involving animals and they always cut the field from the outside in and left an ever decreasing island in the middle in which all the rabbits and hares and everything else were stuck and there would be a lot of people, well not a lot, I’d say twenty or thirty people round the edge of this thing with sticks and so on waiting for them to come out and catch them for a nice piece of rabbit pie I suppose.

Who were you with when you were involved in farm work, who were you doing that with?

Well, with my cousin who’s a few years older than I am, who lived near us. He used to go down to the farm with me and my sister I think was down at the farm as well and well, the family essentially.

Your mother and your father?

Yes.

[12:37] What else did you do with your father? We’ve got the allotment, him showing you sort of graphic scenes, the farm.

Alan Smith Page 6 C1379/65 Track 1

Well, I know… yes, I can’t remember much else actually at that young age. Come in!

[person arriving - break in recording]

[12:57] I think I’d have to think hard about that actually. I mean he used to take me around – oh I know what he used to do sometimes, yes – whenever he had finished an order for parts he would take me with him to the places where these were to be delivered. I think it was in London, Camden Town I think I recollect as a place where things were delivered at times. And then he would take me, even in the war we went out to a restaurant, I mean it was very simple. And there’s a smell I still can, a smell - I’ve never come across it since, a spicy smell – which sticks with me. So that’s the sort of thing he used to do.

[13:45] And time spent with your mother at this younger age?

Well, I used to help her I suppose with things like washing up and occasionally going for walks and so on. Can’t remember a lot about her, being with her, basically, up to ten that is.

And where did you live?

In Bushey near Watford, and then we moved to Bushey Heath.

When did you move?

I think it was 1947. Yes, it must have been.

So the first house that you lived in, do you remember it clearly enough to take us on a sort of tour of it?

More or less. It was quite small and it was semi-detached. You went in through the front door and on the left it had a small sort of dining room/lounge and then the next room in the passage on the left was a bedroom, had been a bedroom or was a bedroom with an air raid shelter in it. It had one of these Anderson shelters, I think they’re called, with the great big steel plate from the

Alan Smith Page 7 C1379/65 Track 1 roof and steel or iron supports, the idea being I suppose if the house was bombed and badly damaged but not destroyed completely, the shelter would hold up the rubble on top of you and you wouldn’t be seriously injured, hopefully. So those were the two rooms on the left of the passage way, on the right there was a little stairway going up to the first floor and then there was a kitchen, a small kitchen. And then upstairs there was a bathroom with a toilet in it and two bedrooms, basically. I was born actually as a twin, identical twin, but during the war we both got gastroenteritis and he died and I survived.

How old were you both?

At least three. And the reason, well, he died, I think was that there were no, the drugs that were available were mostly going to the front line rather than for domestic use. And probably some, well I know my mother had acute appendicitis, peritonitis, at that time and she was able to survive because I think there was, I think penicillin had just been invented and there was a little bit for civilian use.

And how long until your sister came along?

My sister was two years younger than me. So we were initially a family of three and I think he died or we had this disease probably the early 1940s I would think.

And I should imagine you can’t remember the experience of having that at three?

No. Can remember having measles. I don’t know when that was, but it would have been before I was ten. It was quite a severe attack. My mother was worried because I kept on seeing these things going up and down the wall, images. I mean they were abstract shapes going up and down the wall and she was worried about that.

[17:32] Was there anything at home that as a child you regarded as modern, any objects that you thought of as being…

Well, we had a radiogram I suppose, a big sort of wooden typical 1930s model with a record player on the top, or gramophone on the top. I suppose that was fairly modern. I never really

Alan Smith Page 8 C1379/65 Track 1 thought of it in those terms actually. I think they must have been fairly modern because they must have furnished the house from scratch so they would have bought things that were current at the time. I remember some of the mirrors were very 1930s, not quite art deco, but that sort of inclined. Yeah.

[18:23] And how did you, as a younger child, how did you amuse yourself when you weren’t with parents, if you like, taking you to things?

Well, my father was, I had lots of good toys. I had a very nice set of bricks which I built all sorts of things with, you know, a bit like Lego except they didn’t hang together, which I really enjoyed actually. Yes, I could tell you another experience, war experience. During the late, latter part of the war, you know, we were attacked by V1s and V2s and one of the V1s landed on the cricket field next to the house, more or less. The blast from it blew my mother towards the place of the blast, because the sound wave had reflected off the house opposite and I was lucky to be at school because all my bricks were embedded with glass fragments, and I wasn’t there so had I been there I’d have been severely damaged I think, maybe even blinded or something, I don’t know. And ironically, we used to keep goats during the war to supplement meat and milk and one of the favourite goats - used to eat people’s prize roses when it got loose and so on – was severely damaged, had to be put down, so we had goat’s meat for several weeks on end, which was quite nice actually. But I do remember that. And, you know, like most boys used to go scouring for bits of shrapnel and this stuff called window – do you know window?

No.

It’s a strip, I don’t know if it’s aluminium or not, but it’s a strip that is still used in modern warfare to confuse radar. It’s a metallic strip, you drop it and it falls slowly through the air and radar screens get completely confused by the reflections from it so you can’t tell what you’re looking at. And we used to find this lying around in places and bits of shells, fragments on the street and so on.

What did you do with them?

I still have them actually. Some of them, just as souvenirs.

Alan Smith Page 9 C1379/65 Track 1

Do you remember what you did with them at the time?

Yeah, I put them in a little box and looked after them. I mean I can remember when we were on the farm in Essex, again, this is another war memory, as the sun set you’d hear the sounds of these very heavily loaded Lancasters and Halifaxes taking off to go and bomb Germany on a thousand bomber raid on Berlin or something like that, and the whole, the sky seemed to reverberate with noise, that they were getting assembled, basically. They took off and they gathered together and then they went off as a procession, as it were, to go to Germany and can remember seeing, specially American planes I think, coming back after daylight raids in Germany full of holes, engine stopped, that sort of thing. Flying perfectly well, but quite damaged.

You could see, so looking from the ground what did they…

You know, flying along in formation as best they could and there’d be a hole in the tailplane or an engine would be stopped or something like that. So I did, I mean I lived through the war and I didn’t notice, I couldn’t tell whether we were eating well or poorly but I never felt hungry or anything like that. But I do remember eating a rotten egg. [laughs] Because we didn’t have proper preservation. I think we had a fridge, I’m not sure actually.

How did you feel about the war going on, what were your…

It didn’t mean a lot to me really, but I used to cut out, I used to collect – my interests were very varied – I used to collect the names of Russian generals so when there was a battle reported in the paper I would religiously cut out that article if it had the name of a new Russian general that I hadn’t heard of before. Yeah. I mean though we were bombed and, you know, there was the Blitz and so on and V1s and so on, it didn’t somehow, it wasn’t as immediate as it would have been had I been a bit older and obviously not as immediate as if one had been in Germany itself. But I do remember these things about the war actually.

What other sights and sounds do you remember of bombing and other military activity?

Alan Smith Page 10 C1379/65 Track 1

Well, there was no… the only, as I say the bombings, well I didn’t hear the bombing except for when these V1s came over and blew up and so on. I remember seeing them actually, one or two of them, or at least one, at least and it had its typical sort of boom boom boom boom , vibrating noise. As long as you heard that you weren’t worried. It’s when it cut out that you started to flatten yourself somewhere. I remember also seeing the glider crews for Arnhem gathering together, the huge numbers of Hauser gliders being towed by, I’m not sure, Dakotas I suppose, just gathering in the sky and flying – this is, I saw these in Bushey, they were flying, obviously, towards Holland. Not making much of a noise but fortunately my father had a pair of binoculars and I used to use these all the time to see what was going on in the air, because we had a clear view from our house of the sky really. We weren’t closed in or anything like that.

[24:33] And apart from collecting the names of Russian generals or the articles containing them and bits of shrapnel, what other sort of pastimes or ways of amusing yourself do you remember?

Well, again, you asked about toys and my father being an engineer himself, perhaps he saw me as a future engineer, I think he might have done, to go into business with him or something like that. But he gave me a wonderful Meccano set and I spent, I really enjoyed making things in Meccano and that interest persisted until at least sixteen actually, because I remember one of my first, well my very first job when I earnt some money, I bought a very nice lens, a Taylor Hobson lens, and made a photographic enlarger with it, from Meccano, and I used to print things from it. It was very… I really enjoyed that actually. I quite liked photography and still do, but I don’t do much these days. So that’s another thing, you know. The nice thing about Meccano is you can make all sorts of things and they have wheels so you can move them around and you actually, I think I actually had a motor, clockwork motor that you could put on to Meccano things so they could move around themselves. And that was, you know, for a kid that was really excellent to be able to do that sort of thing.

[26:05] And to what extent were you playing with your sister, she was only two years younger than you.

We used to have lots of games together actually and we used to play word games with her. I remember one silly thing we tried to do was, specially on a long journey in the car, we’d be at the back and my parents would be in the front and we’d try and think of a word, we’d make up a

Alan Smith Page 11 C1379/65 Track 1 word and we’d try and think how we could make it come into general use so that we had invented the word. We made up words but none of them persisted as far as I know.

Do you remember any of them?

Well, one was a thing called a zake – Z-A-K-E. We thought that was sufficiently distinctive and I can’t remember what meaning we attached to it. It was to describe a person, but I have no idea what kind of person it was describing. Yeah, I do remember, as I say, playing like that a lot with her. But we didn’t do much together, I don’t think, as brother and sister.

When did you start to take photographs?

Well, my mother I think allowed me to use her, she had a little Box Brownie camera and I used to take perhaps one or two things like that. But I really got into it I suppose in my early teens actually. And I had a very nice, although my father didn’t go to university his younger, one of his younger brothers did, went to one of the polys in London at the time, it wasn’t Chelsea, I can’t remember which one it was, but because he had done that, he took, for whatever reason, he took a considerable interest in finding out what I was interested in and he used to leave me half a dozen books on the subject and I can remember him quite clearly leaving me half a dozen books on photography. He was a wonderful man in that respect. He’d find out what I was interested in and then at Christmas or birthday time he’d come along with this pile of books and I really loved reading them and so on, actually.

[28:17] What else did you read as a younger child?

Anything and everything really. I remember, I do remember going into our local library and there was a children’s section and I went through that and I decided I wanted to read something else and the librarian realised that I was a reader essentially, and I was given permission to go into the adult library and I used to read, I mean lots of… I can’t think of many things I didn’t take an interest in. I can’t remember them but I was very, I was a prolific reader, I do know that.

Who had taught you to read?

Alan Smith Page 12 C1379/65 Track 1

I don’t know. Well I think, I can’t remember whether my mother taught me at all or whether she read to me at all, I just can’t remember that. But I do remember very clearly in primary school, that’s when I was under ten, we used to have to read from books, simple books, and I do remember I had two places in the books, one of them was where the class was and the other was where I’d got to, basically. Sometimes got caught out by not, losing the place where the class was.

[29:34] Where was your primary school?

Bushey, or Bushey Heath. It was called Merry Hill, that was the primary school, and Ashfield was the school up to eleven. I don’t know what you’d call it actually. Maybe Merry Hill was the infants. It’s the school for younger people anyway.

What else do you remember of Merry Hill infant school then, we’ll take the first one first.

Not a lot. One or two fights in the playground, nose bleeds and that sort of thing. I really don’t, no I don’t have much of a memory of Merry Hill actually. Ashfield was more memorable. A headmaster called Mr Brothers who occasionally, as I say, beat me for doing things, I can’t remember if I did. Oh I remember, yes, I think it was at Ashfield and I can’t remember, maybe Ashfield people went to Merry Hill to eat, I can’t remember actually, but we had a meal. I didn’t like marmalade pudding, still don’t, and it was served and I had a look at it, didn’t eat it, and the headmaster who was sitting on a desk high up, high table, saw I hadn’t eaten it and he got up and he made a speech about it. He said, ‘Smith, you haven’t eaten your marmalade pudding’ and to cut a long story short, he wouldn’t let the school go back to class until I had eaten my pudding in front of everybody. That was a bit of a humiliation I suppose. So that was one of my memories at Ashfield.

Was it a mixed school, Ashfield?

No.

I thought the fact that he said ‘Smith’, yes. So it was a boys’ school.

Alan Smith Page 13 C1379/65 Track 1

It was a boys’ school. Merry Hill was mixed, but Ashfield was not.

Do you have any memories of science teaching at Ashfield?

No, it wasn’t on the menu, as it were.

Nature study or natural history?

Nature. Yeah, I can’t remember. We had painting classes, we had… I remember again, I must have been a bane to some people, but one of our mistresses – we had mistresses as well as men at Ashfield – she’s a very nice woman, and for some reason or other she wanted to talk about, she wanted us to find out about birds and my father had an interest in birds, this is one of the few things he was actually… he had some… we didn’t have a lot of books at home and one of them there was Birds of the British Isles or something like that, and I remember coming across this bird called a twite – T-W-I-T-E – and it stuck in my memory as being such an unusual name. And so I produced this in the class, I said there’s a bird called a twite. She said, ‘Don’t be silly’. So I was a bit miffed at this and next day I brought in the book and showed it to her and she was quite surprised actually.

And do you have memories of the teaching of other subjects at Ashfield?

No. No, I have no real recollection of the teaching at either of those schools actually.

And friendships at that school or at that age?

Yes, I had several friends actually from Ashfield, all local people, all boys. We used to get together and play. Some of them will be mentioned in that diary actually.

What do you remember of things done with those friends?

We used to go riding bikes and loved to ride, well I suppose what people do nowadays, you know, these skateboard… what do you call them?

Yeah, skate parks.

Alan Smith Page 14 C1379/65 Track 1

Skateboards and stuff. We didn’t have that, what we had was the common which had lots of paths and pits and steep pits in it and we used to go riding up and down these banks, I mean just like they do today actually, but it was all very improvised. And we used to go bike riding. Oh I do remember something, I can’t remember how old I was, but it was about that time. Again, I was collecting bus numbers [laughs] and I remember entirely on my own I went to the Old Kent Road garage where I knew there were some new, some very difficult to see buses in any other way and I remember going into the garage itself and being told off by the people in there, what are you doing here, and that sort of thing. But – and trains I used to collect, train numbers, cigarette cards, cigarette packets. I mean boys, we used to swap these things at school and so on, at Ashfield, not – yes, at Ashfield I would think. Possibly at the grammar school I went to afterwards.

Do you remember how you collected the numbers?

Yeah, there was a little book, they published books about these things, which is how you knew how far you’d got in collecting everything that was going.

[35:16] Any churchgoing?

Yes, my mother I think was more religious than my father. My father I think was not a believer, as it were, I think my mother was more so. We used to go to the parish church, more to social activities than anything else I think.

How did you sort of rate that experience, what do you remember thinking about it?

Well, it was interesting. I don’t think I was particularly religious. I mean I did, specially when I got to university, read a lot about, you know, people like Schweitzer and that sort of thing. But I think looking ahead, you know, jumping ahead a few years, I think this is my present position, I realised probably at university that had I been brought up as a Buddhist or a Jew or whatever, I would be that and I would think everybody else was wrong. So the question then is if you believe that is the case, how do you tell what is right or are they all different facets in the same thing. So I suppose that’s how I, I’m not really… I mean the Anglican church is an institution

Alan Smith Page 15 C1379/65 Track 1 which one would hate to see disappear, but I can’t take it as seriously as one should, if you were religious that is.

Do you remember as a child whether you believed in God?

I think I used to say prayers, so I presume I believed in God. But I can’t be sure of that. I mean I was never really definitely religious, but it seemed to be something one did, actually. It was more of a social activity than anything else. I mean it’s a place where you met all sorts of people, specially at Christmastime. We used to go around carol singing and that sort of thing. Yes, I say my… again, my father, he liked the social aspect of the church but not the actual requirement to believe.

When did you realise that? This difference between your mother and your father in that respect?

Well it wasn’t a strong difference, but I sensed it generally I think, because I think my mother was more, she really was sorry to have missed church, whereas my father I think sometimes missed it and it didn’t seem to worry him too much.

And your secondary school, where was…

Oh, I also went to Sunday school. Had a very nice deaconess who taught us and we used to collect Sunday school stamps, which was rather nice. [laughs] Yes, she was quite nice. I must have had, yes, that reminds me, I must have had an interest in astronomy by ten or before ten because I did know most of the constellations by that time, I remember, because I was walking back one evening with the deaconess and I was telling her, you know, there’s the Plough and there’s Orion, or something like that, and she didn’t know these things so she was quite interested. Yes, astronomy was another… because my father had binoculars you could actually see the detail which you can’t see with your naked eye, which was fascinating actually.

Do you remember how you pursued it, I mean how you learnt the names of the constellations?

Well, this would be one of the books I got out of the library. There was a very good book, it was like a star map but in small pages so you could tell where you were and all that sort of thing.

Alan Smith Page 16 C1379/65 Track 1

Who took you to the library?

I don’t remember who took me, but once I started I went on my own actually. I mean we were much freer in those days to do things that we wanted to do when we wanted them without a parent being in the background actually. I was talking to my cousin last weekend, who’s eighty now, how he used to take me to Merry Hill while he went to Ashfield for a few years and it’s quite a walk, one and a half miles, two miles, something like that, there and back, and you just wouldn’t do that today. Probably be not allowed or something silly.

[40:03] And your secondary school?

Well, that’s Watford Grammar School. Yeah, that was a four mile cycle ride each way every day, through Watford, through Watford high street. It was quite dangerous actually when I look back on it. In fact, one of the people who was, who used to cycle also from Bushey, I used to live at Bushey Heath at the time, but he was killed on his bike actually, because it was dangerous. Well, looking back on it. Can’t believe we did it sometimes.

And what, we’ll start with sort of general memories of the environment, of Watford Grammar School, the building and the routines and things – what do you remember?

It was a big, I think it was quite a big school for its time. I’m not sure how many hundred pupils it had, but it was, my guess is about 500, but I may be quite wrong, and I think the school had been built between the wars. It was a very well built, as most things were in the 1930s – I think it was 1930s the main school was actually built – parquet floors, solid woodwork, solid windows. I haven’t been to it actually since I left. But quite spacious, rather formal. The headmaster used to wear a gown at assembly in the morning, and that sort of thing. Playing fields on the spot, or one playing field on the spot, but others were some distance away. Entirely boys. There’s a Watford Grammar School for Girls as well, which my sister went to. So it was, no, it was a good school actually.

[42:10] We’ll look at each of the subjects in turn, but we’ll start with science for obvious reasons. What memories do you have for the teaching of biology?

Alan Smith Page 17 C1379/65 Track 1

Not a lot, we didn’t have much biology actually. I think that was taught more in the sixth form than lower down in the school and I opted for the physical and chemical side of things rather than biology.

Let’s look then at chemistry before sixth form – who taught it?

Very well taught. A chap called Knight – K-N-I-G-H-T – who we called Inky of course. He was a very good teacher. I mean there were very few teachers who weren’t good in that school actually, in my recollection. They could control the class, they were very clear in what they were saying and notes and everything else. I can’t think of somebody who was not a good teacher actually.

Do you remember chemistry well enough to talk about the content of…

Yeah, I can remember chemistry. What’s amazing again, by present standards, we had all these poisonous chemicals and acids lying – well, not lying around – but they were on the bench in front of you and you just couldn’t do that these days actually. And I had a chemistry set, I was given a chemistry set and loved playing around with that actually.

We’ll come back to the chemistry set. What do you remember doing in chemistry at school?

Well, I remember going through how you, not quite true to say analysis, but you had an unknown chemical and you wanted to find out what metals were in it, you know, did it have copper in it, did it have cadmium. These are the things we used to deal with at times. And there were tests that you went through systematically to try and eliminate some metals and reduce it to another group, and then you do another test and… it was just standard… that was probably fairly advanced. I can’t remember what we did early on actually. I do remember some poor chap, we were dealing with concentrated sulphuric acid or aqua regia or something and he decided he wanted some of this, so he filled a test tube, put a cork on it and put it in his blazer pocket. And halfway through the lesson you could see all this smoke coming out – he was lucky not to burn himself seriously. But I mean that’s the kind of thing that we used to handle every day in chemistry lessons. But I cannot remember, and I don’t have my… I don’t remember what we actually did in general.

Alan Smith Page 18 C1379/65 Track 1

Could you describe the rest of the room? You’ve talked about the chemicals sort of laying there or available there anyway.

We had benches, perhaps half a dozen benches, with sinks, with little shelves like spice shelves but they were bigger, containing standard chemicals that you needed, you know, dilute HCL, that sort of thing, and one or two other things. I just can’t remember them. And there was a platform on which the master would usually make a demonstration. I remember, for example, heating potassium permanganate I think it is, and I can’t remember if you just heat it alone or not, but I think it generates oxygen and we used to test for that and you put a taper which is glowing inside and it would erupt into flame, that sort of thing. But that’s one of the things I can remember. I’d have to think carefully about it.

Were there any sort of ideas or observations that were particularly striking, given that this was I suppose the first time you’d encountered chemistry, because I think you said that there was sort of limited science at the previous schools.

Yes.

I don’t know whether there was anything in chemistry in particular that was particularly interesting for you at that age?

[46:42] I don’t remember at school, but having a chemistry set at home made all sorts of interesting things.

Let’s do that now then before we move away from chemistry. Could you first of all say where at home you used the chemistry set?

Well, we had moved house from the small house I mentioned earlier to a much larger house in Bushey Heath and I had sole use of a little room, I think we called it the playroom. Yes, my sister didn’t actually have anything to do with it. It was a tiny little room, it must have been almost a box room, and I used to do most of the chemistry experiments in there. Things like, it

Alan Smith Page 19 C1379/65 Track 1 was fascinating, growing crystals, I do remember that, copper sulphate crystals sometimes as big as that, on a bit of string.

How did you do that, because of course again, this sort of chemistry set tends not to be available now. So, if you could take us, as far as you can remember anyway, step by step what you did with this chemistry set to grow a crystal.

Well, there’d be instructions with the set and it would tell you how to grow crystals and the simplest crystals to grow would be, I think sodium thiosulfate, I think it’s, is that hypo? I can’t remember. It’s used in photography I think. But you can make a very super saturated solution of it and you can seed it with a crystal and it’s like super cool water, you know, if you put a little bit of ice in it you can see the crystals growing immediately and the whole thing solidifies, and that was fascinating. But you can make very nice shaped crystals, not with that, but with copper sulphate. But they didn’t give you a lot in the chemistry set, but you could go down to the chemist and say can I have half a pound of copper sulphate, and they would give it to you, you know, you could just buy it over the counter. I mean you could buy things like magnesium powder over the counter and potassium chlorate. It’s the sort of thing that would be a dream for the IRA or something like that, you could easily make explosives from what you could buy in a chemist’s shop.

Did you make explosives?

Yeah, I did actually. [laughs]

What did you make?

Well, I tried gunpowder and then I made, I think the best explosive was potassium chlorate and aluminium powder. It’s a wonder I didn’t damage myself actually. Talking to most of the fellows here, they all did the same thing actually, one did in those days. Of my age, I don’t know about younger people.

And so how did you use that to make an explosive? This sort of thing wasn’t available to me.

Alan Smith Page 20 C1379/65 Track 1

Well, you needed a tube which you could make by wrapping newspaper round a broomstick with glue every so often, so you’d end up with quite a rigid tube which you could then, might – I don’t know whether we actually corked the bottom – but you’d have, the bottom would be filled somehow or stopped off and then you could pour the powder, the explosive, as it were, in and then put a little sort of tamping thing at the top. You could make a fuse easily from a piece of paper and saltpetre. If you dried that it’ll glow and it’s not like a fuse that you see on television which is hissing along, but it just glows and then gradually it will get into the mixture and it will go off. Gunpowder, I never got an explosion from gunpowder.

Where did you detonate these tubes?

Usually in the back garden. The house we moved to after the war was large enough to have a small tennis court in it, so there was plenty of space to set these things off and it’s only when – I remember, I did succeed with the potassium chlorate and aluminium powder explosion, that did go off with a big bang actually.

What was your parents’ view of this sort of activity?

Well I think they said, oh it’s just Alan doing something or other. [laughs] I was never reprimanded for doing it.

So explosives and crystals, what else did you use the kit for?

Well, another thing was sulphur. If you melt sulphur – again, this is maybe incorrect memory – but sulphur has many polymers, I think they’re called polymers, but it has many forms, there’s alpha, beta and gamma sulphur and all that sort of thing, and they exist at different temperatures and you could see how these things change as you cool them down. I thought that was fascinating actually.

How did these change visibly?

Well, they changed colour. Not dramatically but I think one of the, whatever it’s called, is quite deep orange, another is more yellow and that sort of thing, and you could see this happening, it

Alan Smith Page 21 C1379/65 Track 1 was fascinating. Oh yes, I do remember doing some experiments on my own which weren’t in the chemistry set, which was to distil coal.

How did you do that?

You had to have a flask. Yes, that was right. There was a very good optician in Watford - I can’t remember his name, Turner or something like that – who sold glassware including chemical things like condenser, you know, glass bottles and things for, reflux condensers and that sort of thing. I used to save up for them and take them home and if you got the right thing you could put coal into one of these with a tube coming off and some way of cooling it and you could condense out of the coal thing, you know, tarry liquids and other liquids. It’s like a fractionation coal, almost, though it was very crude. But I loved doing that sort of thing as well actually. [laughs] Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. [53:00] Oh and, yes, I used to make – well this is more physical but you can come back to that – I used to make little electric motors from scratch.

Can you just say how you did that, including where you got the bits from to do so?

Well, I couldn’t make this obviously without some guidance and there was a leaflet or a booklet about making your own electric motor and I remember it involved winding wire around a cork I think and the cork had needles at either end which was the spindle which the thing would rotate and you could make other bits out of tin. You’d cut up an ordinary can to give contacts, intermittent contacts and things like that. I can’t remember the details but I do remember I did actually get it to work once or twice, and it was very nice, to make something from scratch which showed you how an electric motor worked.

Was your father involved in any of this?

He was very interested. He didn’t actually, he probably said, well why don’t you do this or you could do it this way or something like that, but he didn’t actually, he did make one or two things for me. I mean he made a lovely gyroscope at one time with a little hole in the spindle and you put the string in and pulled it and it was a very nice… I don’t think I’ve kept that, I don’t know what happened to it. But he was also very pleased with that as well.

Alan Smith Page 22 C1379/65 Track 1

Was your mother involved in any of this?

No. I suppose she hoped I wouldn’t blow myself up, I don’t know. But she may not have known very much actually.

[54:50] Did your friends, to what extent did your friends have this sort of pastime?

Well, some of them, I remember one of them, he, when he left Watford Grammar School he, or he might have left early, he became an apprentice to a motorcar… well an engineer basically, an apprenticed engineer. And we were, I used to see him after he left school and we were talking about how to make a better sort of container for the explosives and he made what I think people would call now a pipe bomb. Basically a pipe with screws at either end so you could unscrew it and screw it up, and a little bit on the side where you put the fuse, and we did actually detonate that in Stanmore Common in a rabbit hole.

What happened? Can you describe the effect?

Well, it was just a big bang really. I don’t think we detonated it with a fuse, I think we had to light a fire, because the fuse wouldn’t work, so we lit a fire and when the ashes were really red, you know, a lot of ash and hot material around, put the bomb inside and then ran for cover, basically. So that, I mean that was the most dangerous thing I did actually, I think.

Okay, let’s…

Sorry about that. Since the war, basically.

Yes, what influence do you think the war had on this sort of activity? I mean would you have done this anyway do you think?

No, I don’t think, I don’t know, quite honestly. I just can’t say, but I know we used to have fights actually in trenches that the Home Guard used to use for training purposes. We’d be in one trench and another group of people, boys, we’d have catapult and BB guns and things like that and clay pellets. Have you ever heard of pugging?

Alan Smith Page 23 C1379/65 Track 1

No.

You have a long bendy stick and you get a nice piece of clay and you put it on the end and you can throw that, if you bring it back you can throw it probably fifty yards at least, or possibly more even. We used to pug one another. I mean it wasn’t dangerous, at least we didn’t think it was dangerous, because there was nothing hard in it. Well hard, a piece of clay, but the worst it could do to you would probably be to bruise you somewhat. But these were all simulations of fighting which we saw or heard of every day actually.

Where were the trenches?

Right next to the cricket field. We didn’t fight physically in the sense of fisticuffs and so on, but we used to fight with, as I say, catapults and guns and pugs and so on.

To what extent was it common for boys of your age to be making explosives? I mean were you and your friend who made this pipe bomb exceptional or was this the sort of thing that was happening?

I don’t know, quite honestly. But talking to other people in the college, they all tried this sort of thing. I mean it’s just the fascination that boys have with explosions I think. I don’t know if you had any experience like that.

I suppose the sort of materials weren’t so available. I mean the materials for the, for example the pipe bomb, where would they have come from?

Well, he would have got those from his work, just a bit of brass tube with a screw at either end.

And the contents?

I would have made those. But you see I know a friend of mine, I still see him occasionally, he was in his school’s army corps, whatever they call it, for schoolboys. The ROTC, whatever it was called, something Officer Training Corps. Anyway, he used to go out on exercises as a teenager - sixteen, seventeen year old - and they used to have to go from A to B and they were,

Alan Smith Page 24 C1379/65 Track 1 they simulated what it would be like in a war situation with letting off thunder flashes and things like that, I mean really big thunder flashes that simulated grenades. They weren’t, well they were dangerous if they landed on you, but that’s what the school army cadet corps used to get up to in their manoeuvres and so on. And I remember, he brought one of these home and you set it off, it’s like a match, great giant match at the top and you set it off by striking this match and that would set the fuse and there’d be a proper fuse and it would go off bang. And I remember he brought one of these over one evening and we were playing around with it on the side of the house and it started to go off, so we had to throw it away. So we threw it, I don’t know where we threw it, in the garden somewhere, and sort of rushed inside and watched the thing go up and it was really funny because all the neighbours’ houses, all the windows came open. They thought there’d been some crash or other, anyway, I think it was attributed to us without any evidence. [laughs] But I mean, it was really quite a violent time I suppose, thinking about it. Because I mean as a young child, one didn’t realise this, but one probably, it probably soaked into you in a sense, that people were doing things that were quite violent, but you didn’t think they were unusual because that’s what it was like in wartime. I don’t recommend it, but that’s how it was.

Is there any link between that sort of playing with explosives and your father’s keenness to show you the sort of negative effects of war?

Most of the young boys I know of, well I don’t know what they’re like today because they may not have access to these things, but people of that – yes, okay – people of that time used to do these things and my contemporaries in college here all had that experience of trying to blow something up. Whether that was due to the war and whether some of them actually didn’t live through the war because they were a bit younger, I don’t know.

Were you aware of any girls doing this sort of…

No. Girls played with dolls. [laughs]

[1:01:57] Physics then at the grammar school. Was it in a different room from the chemistry?

Yeah, it was the physics lab.

Alan Smith Page 25 C1379/65 Track 1

Okay. Could you describe the physics…

I can’t remember it in detail but it had nice benches, nice solid wooden benches, power points. People always, I mean I remember one boy who was lucky not to be electrocuted. He took a pair of dividers and put them into the power point, there was a big bang. He wasn’t injured. So that’s the sort of thing we had. Oh, there were always cupboards on the sides of both labs with things in them, with a locked cupboard. Locked partly because some of them were probably dangerous and partly because I think boys take things really, so you had to keep a check on things. In the physics lab there would be things like rheostats, meters for measuring things and as I say, in the chemistry lab there would be a locked cupboard where all the most dangerous chemicals were kept like sodium and mercury and so on. We had stools I think. Physics was fairly, wasn’t messy in the way chemistry was. You were, well, I can’t remember the details but you were always measuring something like, what? Resistances of things. I honestly can’t remember the details, but they were very simple physical experiments. Oh, we’d swing a pendulum and measure the time it would take to swing and relate that to its length, change the length and do it again. I think surface tension came into one experiment. In chemistry we used to have boiling points of things when other things had been added to them. There’d be a simple equation you could try and understand the relationship between the boiling point and what it contained. Yes, we used to make constant boiling mixtures and things like that and I can’t remember how we analysed them or anything. But getting back to physics it was fairly – oh, yes, there’d be experiments with lenses and mirrors and that sort of thing, lighting. But I can’t remember much about it actually.

What was your preference at that age, chemistry and physics?

Didn’t mind actually. I had a very difficult choice actually when I, in the sixth form, before I went into the sixth form at the grammar school, I had exactly the same number of marks in the arts subjects as in the scientific subjects and my French master wanted me to go into the arts subjects, you know, history and French and all that sort of thing, and I went into the science subjects because my father was an engineer, I think that’s really what tipped me into that side of things.

Because he was advocating it or…

Alan Smith Page 26 C1379/65 Track 1

No. Well, he might have been, he didn’t pressurise me in any way to become an engineer or anything like that, but somehow I just felt, I can’t say I enjoyed, well I did enjoy it I think a little bit more. It was to do with, you know, doing things rather than thinking about things. I can’t be sure what caused me to do that, but I do remember having this dilemma and certainly the French master wanted me to think about going into the arts and I thought well, you know, I did like making things and I think that’s a part of what made me go into the science actually.

[1:06:15] And teaching of geology at the grammar school?

None.

Geography?

Yes, I remember that.

Could you describe the content of that?

Now what I’m not absolutely sure is whether we had geography at Ashfield. Well, one of my earliest, I think one of my earliest lessons would have been on the rivers of Hertfordshire. We had to draw a, well, I think the schoolteacher drew a river which we copied into our little books, and then he drew another river, and he labelled them and put the towns on them, and I do remember that. Yes, that must have been – no, I can’t remember which school it was at. It’s probably the grammar school actually. We then got on to economic geography with product, how much coal X country produced and oil and cotton and goodness knows what. So that was the geography we had.

Any physical geography?

Well, apart from the river bit, which was physical geography really, we must have had some, yes, but I can’t remember it.

Any fieldwork, outdoor geography?

Alan Smith Page 27 C1379/65 Track 1

No.

[1:07:36] What clubs and societies were you in at the grammar school?

Well, I didn’t take part in many… I was a more independent individualist than some of the people who joined clubs. I mean I wasn’t… I was an adequate sportsman but I was not really good at sport, although I did discover right at the end I could actually run across country. But I didn’t, you know, I wasn’t a good cricketer, I got hit on the head by a ball once and I think that put me off. I did play, oh yes I did play hooker for the rugby team and that was pretty uncomfortable.

What’s involved in being a hooker?

Well, you’re right in the front of the scrum, front row of the scrum, in the middle and your job when whoever’s putting the ball in the side is to hook the ball back so it goes through the scrum and out to the forwards who then – not forwards, forget what they’re called now – but the people who run and try to get the ball on to the bit by the posts, you know, at the end of the pitch. But that was, I mean it was alright up to a point, but people, if the referee sees it it’s bad for the person who’s doing it, but they do it in such a way that the referee can’t see a hand coming up and twisting your nose or poking, trying to poke your eyes out and that sort of thing. I did, when I got here I did volunteer for the rugby team and I thought about it a bit and I thought well, it’s silly actually, I don’t want to do that. So I did run for the school once or twice in the school cross country team, not a very good cricketer at all. What else? Clubs. I did play chess for the school once or twice but I wasn’t an avid chess person, but I did play once or twice. Can’t think of much else actually. I didn’t act. I did start playing the cello and I quite – no, not the cello, the double bass – and I did like that actually. The reason I liked it in part was because I couldn’t take it home on the bus so I couldn’t practise at home, so all practice was limited to school hours or after school hours and once I’d left school that was it. But that was quite fun. And then the school, one of the cellists left the school orchestra, he might have gone to university or something, left or something like that, and I was asked to play the cello, step in. The trouble with the cello is you can take it home on the bus, and the other problem was that I didn’t like the master who taught us that, so I never continued with that. My mother wanted me to play the

Alan Smith Page 28 C1379/65 Track 1 piano, we had a piano at home, and I went, I sometimes played truant from the lessons because I didn’t like my piano teacher either. So as a musician I’m hopeless actually, really. I like listening to music but I can’t play it.

Can you remember why you didn’t like those two teachers, of the cello and of the piano?

Well, I think one, the piano teacher, it was terribly boring actually. It was all about exercises and scales and all sorts of… the structure of music, which is very interesting, I mean it would be interesting to me now, but I didn’t realise it was interesting at the time. And then the cello, cellist, the chap who was… he seemed rather effeminate to me and rather precious, didn’t get on well with him actually. We didn’t have a rapport.

[1:12:00] Mathematics at grammar school, what was your experience of that?

Oh it was quite fun actually. Hard, but I quite enjoyed it really. I’m not a mathematic… I don’t, I mean I have some ability. I’m not a mathematician at all but I could do it and it was quite interesting actually. And we had some very good, we had one or two very good maths teachers actually.

Are there kinds of maths or, I don’t know, particular theories or procedures that were particularly interesting or striking through this sort of stage of your education?

I can’t remember, I mean it was all interesting in a way, but I can’t remember being attracted to one part of maths compared with another. And we always found, I don’t… did we do? I can’t remember whether we did vectors at school or that was university. I can remember doing algebra and calculus and that sort of thing. I mean one of the great things about the education I had in maths and probably in other subjects is it was a broad brush thing. Today, talking to people when we interview them, they’re very good at a particular module in maths like statistics or something like that, but they know nothing about say, vectors. And other people know all about vectors but nothing about statistics and it’s very difficult here to teach people because you have to go back to basics for the people who haven’t had that and you bore other people who have had it. I’m just saying how education has changed actually in that sense. Whereas we had

Alan Smith Page 29 C1379/65 Track 1 a very, you know, we went through a standard maths course involving everything really. I didn’t like mechanics very much.

Why?

I don’t know. I’m not sure why actually. It’s strange when I think about it. But I do remember, I could do it up to a point but I didn’t think much of it. I preferred algebra and calculus because they were somehow more abstract I think and more interesting.

[1:14:26] And what was the sort of, the conduct in boys that was valued at this school, if we think sort of more generally about sort of the ethos of the school, what kinds of, I guess what kinds of masculinity was the school keen on or what kind of conduct was it attempting to promote in young people?

Well, it certainly hoped you would be interested in sports. In the class there was, I can hardly ever think of any misbehaviour in the class, it was very disciplined actually. And people, it was due partly to the teachers who knew how to enforce discipline. There were one or two teachers did come in occasionally and if they couldn’t… we could tell when they couldn’t control the class, basically, and we used to play them awfully. I remember one poor Latin teacher, he – Mr Fettes – he was a reader for Oxford University Press, proof their books and that sort of thing – very able man, but he couldn’t control the class. And when he was writing away we’d all advance our desks a few inches and eventually he ended up completely enclosed by all our desks and he didn’t know how to deal with that, just hadn’t got a clue actually. But most teachers, you respected them and you behaved accordingly.

So were there sort of techniques for controlling a class that…

Well, there was always the cane at the back of it all. I mean the individual masters wouldn’t cane you, the headmaster was the one who did that. I was never caned in the grammar school, but some people were. They didn’t seem worse off for it, and I know people will say you shouldn’t do that, but I don’t think we suffered enormously. Though of course there were different boys and different kinds of boys and so on, so he would obviously have a, well perhaps the ones who would have suffered didn’t misbehave and never were caned actually. It’s the

Alan Smith Page 30 C1379/65 Track 1 more, the alpha males I suppose in the class who were often caned. Well, not often, but were caned.

Where would you put yourself in that division?

I wouldn’t put myself as an alpha male. I tend to be an observer rather than a doer, in a way. So that’s where I would put myself. I don’t know how you’d describe it. Yes, as I say, I observe rather than lead things, if you like.

[end of track 1]

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[Track 2]

I wonder whether you could remember what your impression was as an older child now and becoming a teenager at school, your impression of your parents’ political views or allegiances.

Well, my mother never really expressed any political views. My father, probably as an independent sort of self-made person was very much against the unions. So I would have regarded him as a Conservative. I mean he really hated people, really disliked people who did not do any work. I don’t mean people who were unemployed, that’s a different… but people who were in positions and were not looking after other people in terms… I mean the reason he didn’t like – to get back to the beginning again – unions was they were not what he would like a union to be, which was essentially like one of the medieval guilds that if you were doing bad work you were told about it and if you continued to do bad work you probably lost your position in the guild. I’m not sure of the details, but he wanted the unions to sort of have a pride in what they did rather than just being a bureaucracy asking for better money for people. You know, the classic case for him I think was the case, you know, British Leyland which had a marvellous opportunity which it completely lost partly because of the managerial set-up, which was wrong, but partly because people somehow weren’t invigorated with the ideals of doing the best they possibly could. One of his philosophies actually was whatever you do, do the best you can. Doesn’t matter what you do, you know, if you’re a waiter, doesn’t matter, if you’re some assistant somewhere, doesn’t matter, just do the best you can because actually it’ll help you as well as the people you’re working for. So he always put his heart and soul into whatever he did, it didn’t matter what it was actually. And so he was infuriated with people who he thought were just getting the money and not doing their job properly, which at that time in his view included the unions. I think he was very much in favour of Mrs Thatcher, I think. But he never actually said he was a Conservative, he never went to political meetings or anything like that, but he did argue with people. We had some friends, or one of my mother’s friends was married to a chap who worked on the railways and my father and he were always having quite long and intense arguments about why the railways were so awful in his view. And this man was always defending them and so on and said you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and so on, and he just didn’t believe it, because I think of his own experience. The trouble was, he was talented so, you know, if you’re talented you sometimes can’t recognise that other people don’t have quite that way of approaching things actually. Anyway.

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[03:26] And what do you remember of time spent with your parents now as an older child and as a teenager?

Well, I think they were very supportive actually. They let me get on with whatever I wanted to do and because I think they didn’t have the background that university gives you, they to some extent were not able to help me to the extent they might have wished to be able to help me. But, you know, that’s what happens.

And what were your father’s enthusiasms at this time? You’ve mentioned photography but…

He liked, he always, he liked inventing things. I don’t think he invented anything that was patentable, as it were, but he just liked to solve problems and invent things. He loved growing things, as I say. He just put his heart and soul into whatever he did and as I say, gardening and his work and inventing, photography and so on were the sort of things he really loved.

What did he invent?

I can’t be specific, but I know he invented something for one of these machines that made his bits and pieces which solved a problem and it was very specialised but it was something he actually made himself and thought about himself. He was always thinking about how to make things better, technically anyway.

Did he do this sort of work at home?

Yes, when we moved house to what was called Bushey Heath, we were very lucky in the sense that we were given permission, or he was given permission to have a workshop in the house grounds where he could carry on with his work. I don’t think you’d ever get that these days actually, because it’s a totally residential area really. So he was very lucky to get that just after the war and able to essentially work on the site. I mean he had a workshop right next to the house. It wasn’t a big place, he didn’t employ anybody else, but it was full to the brim of all sorts of things.

Did you go there with him? Did you work…

Alan Smith Page 33 C1379/65 Track 2

I did once or twice and I wasn’t particularly good at it, so I didn’t.

And what were your…

He was a man – just to interrupt you, sorry – I think he was a man who was a bit frightened of money and what it might do to him.

Oh. In what way and what gave you that impression?

Well, I believe he could have earned a lot more, made a lot more money than he actually did, but he’d seen what had happened to some of his people he worked with, you know, they became essentially corrupt and he thought, I think he felt that it might corrupt him if he got too much money. I know that’s an unusual thing to say, but that’s what I feel about him actually.

In what ways had his friends become corrupt or his acquaintances become corrupt?

Well, through the war some of them were profiteering. Probably charging more money than they should for what they were doing and probably not doing it as well as he would have done it and he was asked to join them at one time, which is how he became… he left the company he was working for and set up on his own, because he just didn’t want to join that kind of thing actually. So I think he had a very strong moral sense in fact. He was a very complicated man really, but he had a… that’s one of the things he did have in him was a very strong moral sense of what was right and what was wrong. He wasn’t always right in the light of other people’s opinions but he had this view of how things should be actually and when they weren’t that way he really was quite upset, angry.

And what was your view of the relationship between your parents as you came to an age where you were able to sort of stand outside it a bit?

Well, I think they got on reasonably well. It was a time, I can’t say, I mean I don’t think they… obviously they were not always, it wasn’t a hundred per cent good relationship at times, partly because I think my father was so busy that he didn’t see that my mother needed things that perhaps he should have given her because he was so busy doing other things. I mean I know

Alan Smith Page 34 C1379/65 Track 2 again about late teens my sister and I were… took the bull by the horns and decided to redecorate one of the rooms in the house because we thought it was a bit, well needed it basically, scruffy. Now he should have done that, he didn’t. But actually he was quite happy once it was done, fortunately for us. Yeah, I just think he was… at times he could have and should have perhaps given more time to my mother. But they didn’t come to blows about it or anything like that and it was a time when if somebody, we never used the word divorce for years or recognised anyone as divorced because it was that sort of thing. Divorce was something that happened to other people and it wasn’t a very nice thing to talk about and people shouldn’t do it, so he had that attitude. And I think he really liked, he loved my mother, I’m sure, but he sometimes didn’t see that he should be doing other things he did do. So I think they got on reasonably well.

[09:36] And what were your sort of thoughts about what you wanted to do? We’re getting now to the end of grammar school and your taking A levels, what had you in mind about…

I didn’t really know. In fact when I think about it, things happened to me, I didn’t take control of them at that time. We had a wonderful headmaster who was actually again another, from this college. He was in the French Resistance during the war, he was half French, and Harry Rée was his name, and he ended up as – well, ended up – but he moved eventually from being head of the grammar school, he became Professor of Education at York and he was a very unusual man. He did things that upset some of the school staff. I know that because he thought that the brown sort of Victorian aura you had in the school, which is a brown panelling and everything, he decided to get rid of that and paint it. Made it much lighter and colourful, but it was horrible for some of the older staff, they didn’t like it at all. And he was very informal, I don’t think he beat people very much, you know, cane them or anything like that. He gave you a dressing down, but he was a sort of breath of life or fresh air in the school really. Not a breath of life, a breath of fresh air. We’d been very, very conservative. I mean we had a headmaster, Percy Bolton was his name, when I first went there. And I remember we weren’t supposed to eat ice-cream dressed in school uniform, it’s that sort of time, and some of the people in school had been seen eating ice-cream in Watford and he raised this matter at assembly, he said, ‘Some boys have been seen eating ice- cream out of…’ and he couldn’t bring himself to say ‘tubs’. He said, ‘out of buckets’. I mean that was the kind of ethos he had, very old school, stiff upper lip. Very nice man. But Harry Rée brought in this different… things and I think, well it was through him I’m here actually.

Alan Smith Page 35 C1379/65 Track 2

How?

Well, in the sixth form we had to think about – this is where I hadn’t thought about what I was going to do – he said you must apply for university, and so he put me in literally for this college. I didn’t know anything about St John’s or university really, and he said try, you know, put Smith into St John’s and Richie in Trinity Hall and Shenkman can try King’s. And we all had these different, I imagine he had a sort of bit – well, I don’t know if he did – but you can imagine a big map of Cambridge and there’s X and there’s Y and there’s Z. And we all tried and depending on the outcome we got in or didn’t get in. So I didn’t have an idea what I wanted to do really when I left grammar school, because I knew I was going to university. I didn’t know what that involved in any detail at all and so I just went, came here, and that was it.

[13:09] What was the application process then?

Well, you went in for the scholarship exams which were held – this is when we had scholarships, we don’t have them any more, because they were thought to be unfair I think in some way. But you entered what was called, as I say, the scholarship exams which were held about now in December in, yes in the subjects you had been studying at school. It was several days I think, of practical exams and written examinations and based on your performance in them you were admitted and if you were admitted you might be a scholar or you might be an exhibitioner and that’s how it was.

And what was the outcome for you?

Well, I got a scholarship, so I was very lucky. Had no idea, you know. I thought I hadn’t got any chance at all. I remember being in the hall which we can see later and there was a chap about half a dozen places down, we’d just done the maths exam and he had a great booming voice, he said, ‘Well I managed to get about five questions done’, you see, and I thought God, I’d only done perhaps five bits of five questions and I thought well, I haven’t got a chance of getting in here, but it happened. He ended up as my roommate actually. He was a very nice man. I’ve never heard a bad word spoken about him, actually and he was at one time the university registrar and then he became Master of Downing College. Absolutely, you know,

Alan Smith Page 36 C1379/65 Track 2 very, he was a very decent man actually, always listened to you, never said a bad word about anybody and nobody ever said a bad word about him. But that was the beginning. He became that after those examinations and he did well at them. And I thought, as I say, I thought I hadn’t got a chance.

[15:23] What did you choose to read?

Well, we had a different tripos then, it was the natural sciences tripos but we had a, I think we had a – it wasn’t IA and IB – it was prelims to Part I and then Part I and then Part II, I think, something like that. And I read geology, physics, chemistry and maths. What I’d done at school actually, didn’t try anything new, except geology. And I think I tried geology because I remember at school one of my geography masters had been, he was enthusing about a friend or somebody he’d met who worked for Hunting Geophysics – I don’t know if you know them as an exploration company? And he was talking about this chap who went all over the world doing geophysics. And I thought well that sounds very nice. And I think that was where the seed for doing some geological, geophysical was planted by those remarks actually. Because I didn’t want to work indoors. The thought of working indoors all the time was something I just didn’t want to do, so here was a way out which involved keeping my physics going and of course when you got to university you could do geology as well, so I really liked geology. I wasn’t a person like some people have been, you know, a collector of fossils from day one. Geology was never, I don’t think I ever read a geology book actually until I came here. I was very interested in natural history, you know, plants and flowers and the weather and all that sort of thing, but never actually in geology per se.

What impression did you have then of what it might entail?

Which?

Geology.

Well, it was obviously, it became, it was obviously something to do with looking at rocks and I found that fascinating, once I got some lectures.

Alan Smith Page 37 C1379/65 Track 2

[17:29] Could you then give us some sense of the content of geology in the first year?

Yes. Well, it’s typical geology course. It started out, well I don’t know whether it started out, but there was stratigraphy was one of the major elements, tectonics. There was no geophysics in that at that time. Palaeontology, obviously. Incidentally, this is a footnote, going through my papers – I had to move my office two or three years ago and I came across my notes for geology for Part II, that’s the third year, and looking through them I thought well, they’re not… I used to take reasonable notes and so what I’ve done is to leave all my notebooks, collection of notebooks, to the department as an archive so they can see what was taught prior to plate tectonics in the third year.

Very interesting, yeah.

So I thought, you know, I didn’t know if they would want them, but as I say, they were complete and I thought they might be interested. So that was the third year, but the first year was, we had a lovely field trip to Arran in the soaking, you know, heavy rain. [laughs] Had cold and snow and I wasn’t properly equipped. Because I didn’t know if I was going to go on to geology, but I’ve always liked the outdoors and even though it was awful weather I somehow… it became interesting. What was interesting about geology in those days and possibly to some extent if you get the right field now, is that you could actually come up with an idea which might or might not be true and which nobody else had actually thought of before. You know, it wasn’t like physics where the frontier you get to in ten years’ time after you’ve graduated or something like that, there was so much in geology. It’s a complicated subject really because it’s a complicated organism, as it were. There are many bits that nobody’s looked at. It’s not like astronomy in particular where there’s over-employment. By that I mean I remember in this college we had a German PhD student, it was shortly after pulsars had been discovered and he was going to do a PhD following up on pulsars, thought about it, came up with a plan, and of course the next week in Nature somebody published a paper where it was all done, and I don’t know if he ever got a PhD actually. So, you know, in some fields there are too, well not too many people, there are a lot of people, very bright people, very capable people, doing things which you have to do immediately otherwise you’re not going to be able to do anything.

And why is geology different, because as you say, the size?

Alan Smith Page 38 C1379/65 Track 2

Because it’s so, it’s actually very complicated in a way. I mean you can simplify it, obviously, you know, crust, mantle and core and so on, but when you look into the details of any one of these things there’s still a huge amount to learn which we haven’t learnt yet. So the reason we haven’t learned it, because, partly because the techniques are changing all the time, but partly because there aren’t so many people in the subject that it’s saturated.

[21:06] Could you tell the story of that, the Arran field course, obviously in as much detail as you can remember? Yeah.

Go on, sorry. In what sense?

So just almost tell it as a sort of an account of the field course.

Well, we, I think we somehow got to Arran, I believe by train in those days rather than – we use a coach nowadays – I think we used the train then. And we had a ferry from Ardrossan I believe, to Brodick. It was one of those old ferries where I believe the car… it wasn’t a drive on, drive off ferry, it was a ferry where you lifted things off the boat on to the harbour, on to the quay. It was quite small, unable to dock in rough weather, you had to go down to Lamlash and really rough weather there was no ferry. You then went, landed on the quay at Brodick and we walked to this little hotel, the St Denys Hotel, run by a very nice couple who gave us very basic food, but it’s what we wanted, you know, mashed potatoes, swede, mince, that sort of thing. And we went out every day, whatever the weather unless it was a real blizzard, went out every day looking at the rocks of Arran. Usually we’d get a coach, the coach would drop us off somewhere and then we’d walk around the coast probably, or inland sometimes, and get picked up at the end of the day. Sometimes we’d be in the coach all day, well not all day, but much of the day. And it was led by staff members. There wasn’t a big party, the class was quite small I think, I can’t remember the numbers but I would have thought it was probably under forty. I just don’t remember, because we now have about 100, sometimes 150 people on the first year field and we have to run it for three weeks and we stay in much more comfortable accommodation with decent heating and drying facilities and so on, and quite good food. It’s extremely comfortable. And we probably work harder actually, at the moment, in the sense that in the evening we get the

Alan Smith Page 39 C1379/65 Track 2 students to give us talks about what they’ve been up to and we carry on teaching all the way till bedtime, essentially. Well not quite, but almost.

What did you do in the evenings when you were on the courses?

I’m trying to remember. I think we might have looked at thin sections of rocks. I think we took one or two microscopes. I can’t remember whether we took those up then or whether that was something introduced by – well, Brian Harland who would have been a very interesting person to talk to, he died unfortunately some years ago, two or three years ago, but he set up the field trips for the department. We never had any field trips for a time, as I recollect, and well, it’s partly the history of the department, but as I understand it, the Sedgwick Club, which is the undergraduate geology club in the department, was set up because the lectures were so bad. Now I don’t know how true that is, but it’s a good story. And a lot of the first year geology course was essentially descriptive, because we didn’t understand – well, I say we – people didn’t understand how to look at how things had originated, I mean we had no idea about, well we had very little idea about how granites form, we knew roughly how they form but not entirely, there were all sorts of contradictions and a lot of the teaching was essentially learning by heart what this kind of granite is or what that kind of granite is and so on, being able to give a name to it but not being able to explain anything at all really because we didn’t have the model or the theory.

And what did you do on the field course during the day?

We took notes of… we looked at the rocks, we looked at, as I say, the stratigraphy, there’s a very good stratigraphic section in Arran going all the way from essentially metamorphic rocks with a big unconformity on top of them, which was recognised by Hutton years ago, a classic unconformity. And on top of that are sediments that go all the way from old red sandstone to well, essentially the present day. So it’s a very good introduction to what the history of Britain has been like in terms of the rocks that were laid down at different times. And that’s one of the things, that was a critical thing. And we used to have, then we’d go and look at dikes, igneous dikes, cutting the coast and different kinds of dikes, don’t know why, and so on. As I say, it was very descriptive really.

Who was leading the…

Alan Smith Page 40 C1379/65 Track 2

Well, Brian Harland, as I say he’s died, but he was the person who initiated this course, I think. His wife’s still alive if you ever wanted to talk to her about things. And other staff members came along to help with the trip. One in particular is Norman Hughes. And it was almost a family occasion, I remember that, because people used to bring their wives along on these field trips. That never happens now, but I suppose we were a small department at that time.

So Norman Hughes’s wife?

His wife came along, Elisabeth Harland came along, Martin Rudwick came along. Now he’s somebody you might want to talk to, I don’t know. He’s more of a palaeontologist though, but he writes about the history and philosophy of science, but it’s more the Victorian era rather than the present day. I don’t know if Tony Hallam’s still alive. He was at Birmingham, but he’s written books about the history of this part of the development of geology. He’s written about plate tectonics I think. I’m sorry to say this, but he’s another Johnian. [laughs] But he may or may not be alive, I don’t know. Haven’t seen him for years actually.

What did the wives do on the field trip?

Well they’d go, most of the wives of geologists are people who like being in the open, outdoors and so on, so they’d go for walks. They’d go for a walk down one of the glens or something and come back and say what they’d seen and so on. Pam Hughes was an artist, she would sketch I think. I never saw her sketching, but I imagine she would when we were in the field. And they just enjoyed being away for a week I think in a nice area.

[28:48] And the undergraduates, what was the sort of gender make up of the field…

Interesting. Very few women. Very, very few. In fact I can’t, well, I don’t know about the first year, but in the third year in Part II, when I read Part II I don’t recollect any women in the class. It was a small class, possibly a dozen. There may have been one or two but I can’t remember them.

And on the field course? Which is in the first year I think, how many? What would be the sort of, I think you said there were about forty on this.

Alan Smith Page 41 C1379/65 Track 2

Forty or fifty. That’s a guess really. It wasn’t over a… I mean the reason I say it was probably of that order and not more is because we never ran more than one week. Nowadays we run three separate weeks, but in those days we ran one.

And one coach?

Probably. I would guess.

And so how many of those – let’s take that as a rough number then, forty or fifty – how many might be female undergraduates?

I can’t remember, but very few. That’s a very significant change that’s taken place in the sciences in the last, probably thirty years, that we now have a majority of women in the subject and when I was, you know, when I was reading it there were very few.

Why do you think that was?

Interesting question. I don’t know. I think it’s partly that geology overlaps with environmental subjects and that women in particular I think have more of an interest in that than men on the whole. I don’t know. Would be interested to ask them actually.

That’s an explanation for the increasing number since you mean?

Not just the increasing number, the increasing number and the increasing ratio of women to men.

[30:48] Could we look at the other subjects then in the first year? I wonder whether you could give a sense of the physics course?

I’m just trying to remember.

Is it difficult for you to separate the years out when we’re talking about these subjects?

Alan Smith Page 42 C1379/65 Track 2

Sometimes. Geology I can separate them out to some extent. Physics, at the moment I’m finding it difficult to remember, actually.

In that case shall we just go for sort of any memories you have of physics at undergraduate level?

It was very highly, well it was quite mathematical. I mean you had to… I did take the so-called B course, or the course intended for physicists, and that was quite mathematical and hard work, but I enjoyed it actually. Not well taught in general in the sense that the people who taught us, well it’s still true today, they don’t always have their best lecturers in physics in the first year and I talked to one or two people about this and I don’t know how true this is, but they say well that’s fine by… people are really interested in physics and it doesn’t matter how they’re taught, they’ll keep their interest however badly or however well they’re taught and if they’re not taught well it means what we in earth sciences get are people who intended to be physicists or chemists to some extent, and find it’s not what they expected and in some senses it’s not what they, they find the teaching is not as good as it is in geology, because we always put our best lecturers on in the first year if we can because we’re in a very sort of Thatcherite market driven situation. You know, people don’t do geology at school so how can we attract students into the subject. And one way is to give good lectures. Now, that doesn’t answer your question about what I remember about physics, but it was hard, I mean there’s no doubt about it that the physics course here is not easy actually and is not, in many cases not topical. We don’t, as far as I can see, the physics department doesn’t sort of start off by talking about Big Bangs and black holes and things like that, it’s very basic physics and if you don’t like it, it’s too bad.

What was there in terms of practical work?

Again, I can’t remember, separate out the details, but it would be things like – oh, yes, well I can remember some of it. And I can’t remember whether this is first year or third year, but you would be passing liquids, water say, through a glass tube and changing the pressure or something like that, or changing the diameter of the tube, different diameter tubes, and try to work out an equation that would describe the flow, relating it to things like surface tension I think came into it sometimes, pressure differences at the ends, length of… all that sort of thing. And then there’d be a rider at the end which usually I found quite difficult sometimes, perhaps other people did, I don’t know, but okay, you have this theory we’ve given you, you’ve verified it or something,

Alan Smith Page 43 C1379/65 Track 2 and it’s for a circular tube. What happens if the tube is elliptical? [laughs] Yes. They did make you think actually. And interestingly, this is related in a way, we have this supervision system, do you know about that? Okay. Some of our supervisors in physics were very good and others were not and I think all my contemporaries, I don’t think we had any theoretical physicists among them, but the ones who read the physics were more, certainly geared to the practical sides of things, we’d go wrong somewhere, we’d get the wrong answer numerically and we’d want to know where we went wrong and if a supervisor couldn’t tell us where we went wrong we didn’t think much of him, and there were one or two like that actually. And I remember going for supervision with again, this chap Stephen Fleet I was telling you about, to a supervision with him in King’s College, with a chap who shall be nameless, who had his feet up on the mantelpiece in front of the fire and so on and he said, ‘And what do you think about Onsager’s relations?’ and we had never heard of Onsager, didn’t know what he was, what he did, and we didn’t want that sort of thing. I mean you could say well, you should have been more curious. Well, that’s true but on the other hand we really wanted a practical, we’d like to get the practical stuff done first, then we could talk about Onsager, but he went straight into this and didn’t help us at all. So we complained about that and we got a change of supervisor actually. So we used to write essays of course in physics once a week, we used to do practical classes. As I say, I can’t remember the details of the practical classes, nothing stands out in my mind. Chemistry as an undergraduate, I think I did organic chemistry, that’s right. I think that involved synthesising things occasionally. I just can’t remember the practicals actually in either subject very well. I remember the lectures in chemistry. Organic chemistry was full of named reactions, which I can remember the names now but I can’t remember what they did.

What are some of the names?

I think one of them was called the Zerewitinoff reaction, Ponndorf-Meerwein. Things like that, that’s not the correct names, I’m sure, but you know, they had all these wonderful names but you had to remember what they did and I’ve forgotten now what they did or what they’re supposed to do. And we had a wonderful supervisor in chemistry, a chap called Kipping, who I think was a great table-tennis player, but he said, ‘Organic chemistry? You can summarise that up in one occasion’ and he took the chalk, wrote on the board, ‘Stuff + muck = junk’. [laughs] But he could get to you, you know, talk to you and he’d tell you if you were okay or not, or had done something okay or not. So that’s what I remember. And what I can’t remember is what the difference was between the prelims to Part I and the Part I itself. And I think, but I’m not sure,

Alan Smith Page 44 C1379/65 Track 2 that prelims to Part I, you took an examination at the end of the year but it was not part of your degree. In other words, you might have been classified but it somehow wasn’t part of your degree. But in the prelims themselves, I think you did have an examination, obviously, but what I can’t remember is whether you carried forward the subjects you’d had in the first year to that second year examination. It’s quite possible you did, which would have made it pretty tough actually at times. Because you had whole subjects and half subjects and things like that and I just can’t remember, as I say, the details of what I did.

[38:48] And the teaching and learning in maths?

Well, that was difficult sometimes, not always the easiest and the teaching wasn’t that good sometimes. There were sometimes very good teachers and sometimes there weren’t and supervision was, well I actually was supervised for one, a term at least, by Maurice Wilkes actually. He was very, he was good.

Do you remember any detail of that supervision or of him?

Well, I remember he used a dip-in pen and an inkwell, I think. If not that, a fountain pen with ink in it, and sometimes it sort of flew out of the pen on to his cufflinks. [laughs] A silly thing to remember, but he was good. I can’t remember who else supervised me in maths, but sometimes they were good and sometimes they weren’t.

[39:44] And did you have a sort of favourite, you know, subject within the natural sciences tripos that you were taking at this sort of stage in the first year?

I think I was, geology was just coming along. Physics was always interesting and organic chemistry. I mean they were all interesting, that’s the trouble. Oh, I do remember now something. Yes, I remember it was the bane of my tutor I think because I couldn’t make my mind up what to read and I do remember I had thought of taking biochemistry, because I thought there was probably some interesting medical things you might have a chance of certainly learning about. It was a time when, I think it was before – when did Crick and Watson discover DNA – I think that was before DNA had been discovered and there were lots of things about the

Alan Smith Page 45 C1379/65 Track 2 phosphorus cycle and things like that. But I didn’t do biochemistry, I didn’t read biochemistry. And then I was going to – when was that? For a time I toyed actually with electrical engineering, I suppose because of my father in part. I mean I actually did start work on a vacation job at Elliott Automation. They used to build, I think they built the first missiles, guided missiles. I remember, it was just like, do you remember Frank [Fred] Kite in one of Peter Sellers’s films?

I don’t actually, no.

I’m Alright Jack , I think it’s the film. And there was a chap in there, he was a union man, but in Elliott Automation, he wasn’t a union man, but absolutely archetypal chap with a white or possibly a brown overall, not overall, but a coat, work coat and he would, when he found me he would come along and say, ‘Come and have a look at this’ and we’d go through the curtain covering the entrance to this thing, and there was this missile being built actually, or the guidance system for it. That was all very interesting. And after, I think it was after a few weeks there I decided, again, I didn’t want to work inside.

What did you do there?

I was just a dogsbody really. I can’t remember what I did actually, but I might have been asked to do some winding some wire around, you know, for a coil of some sort or other. And I can’t remember what I did, I just cannot remember what I did there actually. I don’t think it was very useful.

[42:46] And can you say more about this feeling of not wanting to work inside, about that feeling, that sense of not wanting to…

I just felt cooped up, really. And funnily enough, after that debacle, as it were, not doing the electrical engineering, I decided I would go on to physics and possibly took an interest in geophysics and I did get a job at Hunting Geophysics, as I mentioned, which is right next door to Elliott Automation, quite funnily enough. And even though that was indoors, it was quite clear that at times you would have a chance to travel and go out and see, you know, completely different things. My job was to relate a thirty-five mil black and white film that had been shot on

Alan Smith Page 46 C1379/65 Track 2 an aeromagnetic traverse across Libya to photographs that the Americans had taken in the war, you know, large images and they’re different sizes, thirty-five mil is quite small and it’s quite a small area and you had to find out where in this huge area they had actually photographed the desert and link that small image to the larger one and then they could plot the data on these larger photographs and then they could put the values on the traverses and then start to draw an aeromagnetic map which helped them to decide where to, well, not, Hunting Aero Services weren’t deciding this but the people who’ve commissioned it would then decide where to ask for licences for oil. It was the days when, I remember having a chat from one of these people who’d been out in Libya, I mean it was awful in a way, it wasn’t just Libya they went to, they went to Algeria as well, and they had to live underground because it was so hot and there wasn’t any air conditioning. I mean it was just dreadful really. But it still attracted me actually.

When was this, was this a vacation job?

Yes. Yeah, vacation job.

Do you remember which year, sort of between the first and second or second and third?

Good question. Can’t remember.

And so you say it was relating the aerial photographs to the magnetic data?

Yeah. The plane would be recording a magnetic field all the time it was flying and shooting off this black and white thirty-five mil film with a little bit of overlap, but it’s no use to anybody because you don’t know where that little frame is until you can put it on a map, and there were maps made from these American air photos. So once you’d got the small frame from the thirty- five mil on to the big photograph, you knew where that was in the world because there was a map made from these photographs, and then you could then pinpoint where the plane had got this particular reading and as it moved to another place it would give another reading and then you could contour those readings and give you a map of the magnetic field, that’s how it was done. And the magnetic field I suppose, well obviously it would pick up volcanoes because they’re quite magnetic, but you can usually see that anyway in the air photos, but other times it would tell you where the magnetic material deeper down in the earth was nearer the surface or deeper. And you could then work out, make a guess as to the actual structure of the rocks and

Alan Smith Page 47 C1379/65 Track 2 basically, I think they were looking for anticlines, you know, folds that have crests and so on, because that was the major target for oil exploration in those days, because they’re very easy to find on the whole and were looking for more sophisticated things. And that’s what we were doing, it seemed quite interesting.

[46:46] Was there any teaching of geophysics within geology?

No. Not to my knowledge. Not to my recollection, I should say.

And whereabouts were the lectures in physics and chemistry and so on being given?

The physics lectures were in the old Cavendish Laboratory, which it’s almost like one of these old laboratories or lecture theatres you see portrayed in some of the old Italian medical lectures, very high rake, it was almost peering down into the lecture. It’s not quite like that, but it seemed it at the time and it seems more so now. So that was quite a claustrophobic feeling really inside those if you thought about it. I mean I’m not claustrophobic but when I think about it, it was claustrophobic, it could be claustrophobic. And when it was moved, when the new Cavendish was built in west Cambridge, it had to be cleaned because people like Rutherford and so on had been using mercury a lot in the lab, in the lecture theatre itself and there was mercury all over, under the floorboards and everything else and that all had to be cleaned out before they could let, I think the social scientists took it over. So that I do remember, that’s the physics lectures. [48:12] I did go to a course in geophysics in probably my third year, which was given by Teddy Bullard and that was part of the geophysics option you could get in physics. That was out at Bullard Labs, I think, or maybe he came in and talked. Maybe it was another lecture when we… I can’t remember where it was actually. Chemistry lectures were in a huge lecture theatre, one of the biggest at that time in the university, because I think that was probably the most popular science in the university at that time, may still be actually. It’s a central subject, you know. Chemistry is sort of halfway between physics and biology, if you like, so many more people tend to have done it at school, it’s a familiar subject if you want to carry on with it and you might try another subject as well. And geology lectures were in the Department of Earth Sciences. The main lecture theatre’s now gone completely, it’s been turned into a lab or one or two labs with mezzanine floors and so on in it. I do remember, in the geology lectures we had arc lights with carbon arcs. We had a technician called Albert, or he was the departmental photographer as

Alan Smith Page 48 C1379/65 Track 2 well, but he would adjust the carbon arc for these very nice, beautiful glass plate slides that people projected. I mean just absolutely gloriously detailed slides that people used before thirty- five mil slides came in. I can still remember the hissing of the arc as it was adjusted.

Could you describe, as far as you remember it, the lectures by Teddy Bullard on geophysics?

They were very interesting. He always got to the fundamental points. He was a bit naughty, he would show things he shouldn’t show in a lecture, but I won’t go into that in any detail. But he was a good lecturer.

But, you may not want to go into detail, but what sort of naughty things?

Well, I mean, he would say, now here we’ve got some really good figures and he’d show up some [laughs] figures which weren’t numerical. No, I mean he was a bit of a maverick actually. He was not ever liked by the university. He was a maverick, he could afford to be a maverick because he owned Bullard Ales, as they used to be, so he was quite wealthy and he was also, I think at that time, he was a director of IBM UK. So he was completely, I mean as far as financially, he was completely independent of the university. And I can remember, Carol [Williams] might have, I don’t know if she said this in her book, but I remember a very, well this is several years later, came back to Cambridge and worked in Bullard Labs and we had this big house called Madingley Rise, big Victorian house, obviously not big enough for the department because it was growing, and Teddy said, look, the general board are coming here some time or other, I want everyone to come into this place – and I don’t think he actually said this – but the essence of it was he wanted to make sure that it would be memorable for the general board and the way you do this was by knocking into them when they’re drinking their tea. [laughs] So I don’t know, they did come and we did get some new buildings, but he was a naughty character really. He, you know, I think before we had all this health and safety stuff he was approached by the university about what he did and he did this quite literally but he described it in very bleak terms, well, sparse terms. He said, ‘Yes well, in our research we have little boats in the Gulf of Aden and we drop dynamite off the end’, or something like that. [laughs] Which is perfectly true, because that was to make explosions for seismic waves and so on. No, he was a real character.

Alan Smith Page 49 C1379/65 Track 2

It may be difficult to separate sort of your experience of him later from this particular course, but do… No, no.

Oh, do you remember any more of the content of the lecture course?

Well, as I say, it was a very good course on things like heat flow in particular, that was a real problem in those days. Because the heat flow from the oceans was very similar, the first measurements were just coming in. He’d invented a gadget which would actually measure the heat flow, or actually it wouldn’t measure the heat flow, you would infer that, but it would measure the temperatures at different depths in the mud on the ocean floor and if you know, you know, you have a probe which is separated by two temperature, thermometers if you like, they’re not… thermistors I think they were, rather than thermometers. If you know what the temperature is here and the temperature is here and you know how far apart they are and what the thermal conductivity of the mud is, you can work out the heat flow. And it turned out the heat flow from the oceans and the very first measurements was very similar to the heat flow from the continents. And this was very bizarre, nobody understood it, because the structure of the oceans as we understood it, was quite different from the structure and the composition of the continents and they shouldn’t have the same heat flow. And it was a puzzle, it wasn’t solved until plate tectonics came along, really. So he talked about that, he talked about gravity because he did a lot of work in East Africa on measuring gravity across the East African Rift, you know, trying to find out what happened at depth under the rift, whether it was, some people thought it was due to things being pushed together, I don’t know how they came across that idea, or being pulled apart, which is the most logical thing. He talked about, he didn’t talk much about the origin of the earth, but he talked a lot about seismology and how you knew what the Moho was and how, you know, the boundary between the crust and the mantle, how that changed as you went from one place to another. Those are the sort of things he talked about and I’m sure there were other things he must have talked about. But he did it in a way which in a sense showed you what was being measured and why the measurements were important and what they might tell you and might not tell you and things that you didn’t know. So I mean I think he was a good lecturer.

[55:14] And can you describe geology in Part II, which was the third year, so third year geology.

Alan Smith Page 50 C1379/65 Track 2

Yes. Well, as I say, a lot of it was what I would call descriptive regional geology, you know, here’s North America. We had a thing, I’m probably one of the last people who’ve had what’s called a world stratigraphy course where you go round all the major continents and you say these are the major successions, this is how the rocks change as you go upwards coming nearer to the present time, and so I can remember, you know, quite a bit of some of the names of stratigraphy in say, South Africa or North America or Australia. We had this huge broad brush approach, which is very useful actually, but people couldn’t, we didn’t know why these things happened. We didn’t know why the old red sandstone existed, didn’t know why the new red sandstone existed or the carboniferous and what were they telling us, we didn’t know. And it was only, as I say, eventually, well Continental drift and plate tectonics that showed what it was actually, and lots of other things of course.

And fieldwork in the third year?

Third year. We had a trip to Northern Ireland to look at the Giant’s Causeway and the granites there and metamorphism created by igneous rocks passing through sediments and things like that. That was one field trip and might have been our only field trip then in the third year. Can’t remember any others, but we were expected to spend a month at least on our own mapping an area wherever we wanted to map it, providing it was approved of, and that still continues to the present day. It’s, I think it’s one of the things that is beginning to pick us out as one of the few remaining geology departments, or one of the few departments where that work is done. Most universities don’t have the money to fund that sort of thing. They used to and several of them now expect students to pay for that and we’re lucky in the sense that we do ask for money from industry to help us run these field courses. But that’s not the same as the mapping, but the field trips that we do are important because so many people are being trained now in geology and geophysics and they never really see many rocks, they don’t know what they look like, they don’t know how to interpret them. And it’s going to mean that some companies, if they employ these people, unless they train them themselves, which they don’t on the whole, are going to look for the wrong things actually, or find the wrong things. Fieldwork’s frowned on, it’s not, you know, fieldwork, I mean…

What do you mean?

Alan Smith Page 51 C1379/65 Track 2

What does it give you? Why does making a map on your own help you in any way in your subject? You should be sitting at a computer or reading in the library, you know. That’s the sort of attitude some people have, but people are going to make serious mistakes in the future actually.

What area did you map?

I mapped an area in Scotland, on Loch Fyne. Complicated, a very complicated area. I wouldn’t go there, I wouldn’t recommend anybody doing it again. But the thing was that the chap who had suggested it didn’t tell me, I don’t think he told me at the time, but he really wanted me to get up the hillside in this area to a place where there were some very interesting minerals created by some basalt magma that had passed through the Dalradian and created all sorts of rocks due to baking and heating, and I never got up there, never got to it. Because I got so interested in the Dalradian per se, even though it was highly complicated, I just stayed in that and worked on that for the time. And it was about, many years later that I learnt the whole area was actually upside down and nobody told me. So it was a good training, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And what is involved in geological mapping, for those who haven’t done it – what did you have to do day to day to map that over a month?

Well, what you have are the rocks at the surface. Those rocks in general will not have been laid down at the surface. They would have been laid down horizontally when they first formed, but subsequently they would have been faulted, broken up into blocks, or folded, or thrust, horizontal faults that move rocks large distances and so on. And in the case of the Dalradian they would have been heated and metamorphosed at great depth, you know, ten, twenty, thirty kilometres down, and then brought up again and eroded. So what you do, what you actually do is to make a map of what you see at the surface and try to, from the attitude of the rocks at the surface, to make a three dimensional portrait of it, as it were and from that you try and infer what the history of those rocks is. So you try and work out the evolution of the area geologically as far as you can. So it develops your three dimensional thinking, it makes you look at everything, if there are sediments you look at the, you know, are they marine, do they have fossils in them, what kind of fossils are they, what kind of sedimentary structures are they, were they deposited in fresh water, shallow water, deep water, marine water. All that sort of thing. If they’re igneous rocks, what kind of lavas are you looking at, are they lava flows in fact or are they sills that have

Alan Smith Page 52 C1379/65 Track 2 been injected into rocks. There are innumerable questions you can ask about an area that’s good for mapping. And when you, so you’re thinking all the time about things and you might have an idea and you say, well I have an idea, I’d better go and look at that area again, see if I was right when I made the first thing, or you might find you’re completely wrong. So it’s a good training in thinking really, about the relationships between things. That’s why I say geology, that’s the sort of thing that makes geology very complicated because you’ve got all these questions to think about.

[1:02:21] And what clubs and societies were you involved in at university?

Well, I was a member of the Sedgwick Club, which is the geology club, and I think I was a member of the Physics Society and I think I was, I was a member of the union society which is a debating society. I didn’t take part in the debates but I went along to them. I was a member of the United Nations Association. I joined the Mountaineering Club for a time, just to find out what was safe and what was not safe in mountainous areas. I don’t recollect any other societies, but certainly I remember belonging to all those.

And what did involvement in the Sedgwick Club involve? What did you do?

Well, I think we occasionally had field trips. I can’t remember going on one actually. But we had talks from outside people in particular, and we occasionally had a Sedgwick Club tea and this is again where the wives would come along and help sometimes, bring in cakes and all that sort of thing. And it was mostly, you know, third year students, faculty and wives. It was just almost like a nice cosy little family group actually.

Who were the, we’ve got, Brian Harland’s been mentioned as another one who came on the course. Who were the…

Norman Hughes was…

Norman Hughes. Who were the rest of the faculty then in the third year?

Alan Smith Page 53 C1379/65 Track 2

There was a chap called Maurice Black, a chap called Bill Black. They both taught sedimentology. There was a chap called Richard Hey – H-E-Y – who gave excellent lectures, actually. In fact I went to his funeral about two weeks ago, he was ninety-four when he died. But he gave really… he wasn’t, I wouldn’t say he was the most profound scientist, but he was such a good teacher actually. You came away out of his lectures with a bundle of notes that you could look at and learn from. That was long before the days of routine hand-outs. I’m not sure if he gave any hand-outs, Brian Harland did and Norman Hughes would have done I think. The professor was a chap called Oliver Bulman, who was a palaeontologist. Who else was on the faculty? That’s most of the geologists actually, and the mineralogists were a different lot. Professor Tilley was the head of the department. There was only one professor usually in the department at that time. One reader maybe, and everybody else was a lecturer. Your structure, your typical career was top of the lecturer scale, and that’s it. And then because Cambridge didn’t have a senior lecturer scale it meant that the people at the top of the lecturer scale were well into the senior lecturer scale pay-wise that you would get at other universities, which is why it was difficult to move from here except to a chair somewhere else, because when you take into account all the moving expenses, etc, etc, and there was no point in moving actually, unless you didn’t like the place.

[1:05:53] And what was the date of your last year in…

’59.

Was there, to what extent was there any discussion of continental drift in the teaching of geology?

Brian Harland said this is an idea you should know about, but I think virtually all the members of the department thought it wasn’t on. I mean there were some puzzles, obviously, and it may be that some of them, you couldn’t reject the evidence out of hand, but I think it was like, you know, there was no obvious mechanism. I think that was the main argument, one of the main arguments. You could always explain similarities between North America and Britain by land bridges. For some reason there was a bridge to allow all these peculiar animals to migrate from one place to the other and now the bridge isn’t there, but you know, it obviously was because they’ve gone from one place to another. Anyway. My own view about continental drift and

Alan Smith Page 54 C1379/65 Track 2 plate tectonics is the people, anyone who had significant experience of the southern hemisphere geology was very open to the idea of continental drift and many of them believed it. I mean the classic person in Britain is Arthur Holmes. He was absolutely convinced and, you know, gave diagrams about convection in the earth and that sort of thing. And Harry Hess at Princeton had worked in South Africa, he was convinced. And there are several other people who had worked in the southern continents and had seen not only the southern, a southern continent, from one continent to another, or heard about it who thought well, this is a very plausible idea. We don’t know how it works but it’s probably true.

Why were they likely, having had that experience of the southern continents to think that it was more likely than those who hadn’t?

I think it’s clearer. The time when the continents separated in particular, or supposed to have separated, gave rise to rocks, well before they separated, the rocks on Gondwana, the southern continents, were very similar in Australia, Africa, etc, and of course the person who put forward a detailed theory was Alfred Wegener and he used, I feel, to him the ice deposits were the most important actually. Because he was basically a climatologist by training, or an atmospheric physicist. He wrote a classic book on atmospheric physics in the early part of the last century and well, he wasn’t a geologist, but when he learned that there was ice, icy deposits probably of the same age in all the southern continents, they didn’t make sense on the present day earth but if you put them together like a jigsaw puzzle, it made perfect sense. I think it’s those kinds of things, we didn’t have ice in the northern hemisphere because we were in the tropics at the time, but with ice you know it’s presumably polar, you can get some idea of the directions of ice flow, you can, if you make this jigsaw puzzle it makes very good sense and I think it was that and Alexander du Toit, the South African who made one of the best maps of Gondwana before we had computers and so on, he advanced a lot of, put forward a lot of evidence that supported it. But the geophysicists on the whole were convinced by Harold Jeffreys’s arguments that, well Harold – I had to write about this some time ago – and Harold I think didn’t actually say that continental drift can’t occur, he, I think he said that continental drift according to the mechanisms that Wegener appealed to could not occur, which is perfectly true, but people took that as a, by extension, a generalisation that continental drift could not occur. So, anyway, that’s what I… I just feel that it was the people who had that experience who were probably in favour of drift. Maurice Black may well have been in favour, I never asked him, because he did do quite a bit of work in South Africa at one time or another.

Alan Smith Page 55 C1379/65 Track 2

[1:10:30] And is there something about the particular kinds of exposures of rock in these southern continents or of the correspondence between the structures across them that made it appear more likely here than further north?

I think for some reason, I haven’t really thought about this, but I think the geology of the northern continents doesn’t make it quite so obvious. It’s really the geology between North America and Europe that you would have to… that’s all you have in the northern continents really because you’ve got, we’ve got Siberia’s too, but the whole of the Eurasian continent isn’t obvious that it’s come together because Siberia’s collided with western Eurasia and it isn’t obvious really, though you can make a good case for it I suppose, that North America was joined on to Europe. I mean it’s plausible, but the trouble is that the kind of things that are used to bring those two together, and the things do match up, but the things you’re matching up, you can imagine would be reproduced by other processes in other parts of the world and you could make a good case for, as some people have done sometimes, of saying well, maybe Australia was joined on to something else. But you’re joining things which are not unique to those continents but are found in different parts of the earth and would not correspond to things that had been joined together. Whereas the southern continents, they all broke up, you have this unique sedimentary deposit, the ice deposit, and it makes much more sense actually. Much more logical and easier, I think, to understand. It’s just clearer. You’re not confusing with all sorts of other things which you get in, you know, try to match the belt of the orogenic deformation, the mountain building in Scandinavia with that in North America, or well, Scotland and Scandinavia, the caledonised belt, does have its equivalents in North America, but the trouble is, the mountain belt in Scotland and Scandinavia are of one age, that’s it, you know, they’re sort of, say it’s a late, well mid paleozoic in age. But in the Appalachians, because of the way things are worked out, the Appalachian geology is over-printed by some younger deformation which confuses the issue. It’s not so clear, it’s messier, basically. I think. I don’t know whether other people would agree with that analysis or not, but that’s my view.

[1:13:25]

Alan Smith Page 56 C1379/65 Track 2

And what sort of things were you doing while at university when you weren’t doing your undergraduate work or you weren’t involved in these particular clubs that you’ve mentioned. How did you spend your time outside of what we might call work?

Well, there wasn’t a lot of time outside work actually, if you were a scientist you had four subjects, three lectures a week in each subject, plus practicals in three of them. Plus supervision work, plus supervisions. It doesn’t leave you a lot of time, but I suppose what I used to do was, well, often go to concerts or go to the films or just have a chat. Didn’t do a lot of drinking. I think none of my classmates were, you know, we drank very frugally if we drank at all. But it was hard work here actually, you know, as an undergraduate. If you, as a natural scientist you haven’t got a lot of time to do much else. You have time but you haven’t got a lot, especially if you’re a sportsman or something like that. I always take my hat off to people who get firsts and play for the university. I mean some people were, well, you’re asking about myself, but other people, for example, might be choral scholars and they spent a lot of, most of their spare time was spent in the choir or something like that.

Could you describe your relations with your parents at the time you were at university, sort of timings of visits home and also…

I never went home in a term, I always spent eight weeks here, they might, sometimes I think my parents came up to visit, I can’t remember in detail. But they were very kind, I mean my father was very kind, he always drove me up here and picked me at the end of term, stuff to take away and so on. But in general I never went home in term unless there was a special event like a twenty-first birthday party or something like that, because you were just so busy. Go punting of course. I used to do some sketching. I have got some old sketches of the college, which took a bit of time. Don’t remember going on many trips outside the university. The university was really the centre of one’s life actually. Because the terms are very short here, as you know, they’re only eight weeks and as somebody once said, some of the senior tutors at the university counselling services always advocated having a longer term, but the staff faculty of most departments don’t want a longer term because they have less time to do their research. So I think the general attitude in the university is Cambridge is a place where you do sink or swim actually. And if you can’t keep up, you know, I’m sorry, it’s bad luck. And I think many of the tutorial problems that, supervision problems that one has are with people who feel they can’t keep up actually. It’s very ruthless in that sense. So you do, you are under pressure really to try and keep

Alan Smith Page 57 C1379/65 Track 2 up if you can. I mean I don’t, having been through it, I don’t regret it. It was just really busy, I mean Cambridge is a place where you learn to organise yourself well and you don’t mess around really. I know if you’re Jonathan Miller and you take part in the Footlights and all that sort of thing, well he’s an exception and so on. But I still think there’s room for people who don’t do very well in their degrees who do something else. But you do have to get through and, you know. And you see so many, well not so many, but you do see examples of people who’ve been pushed by their parents, got into here, and they still need pushing, they have to be pushed because they’re being stretched all the time. And if they come here and they’re fully stretched when they come here and then they come here and they’re further stretched, it can lead to breaking point actually. So it’s, as I say, it is a bit ruthless. And some people think they have to get a good first and if they don’t, that’s it. I remember I had a friend who spent a whole night persuading an Indian chap who said, if I don’t get a first I can’t get into the Indian Foreign Service, and if I don’t get into that I don’t know what I’m going to do, and he was going to commit suicide. People get, you get so caught up in yourself actually.

What was the nature and extent of your parents’ interest in what you were doing here as an undergraduate?

Well, they were, a very general interest but not a specific one because they hadn’t got any background for that really. My father tried to understand things and I gave him one or two of my things to look at at times, he said, ‘Oh it’s well beyond me, I never had this sort of thing’. So I mean they were interested but they weren’t able to comment usefully on it actually.

[end of track 2]

Alan Smith Page 58 C1379/65 Track 3

[Track 3]

Could you tell me about your sort of experience of academic and intellectual life at Cambridge beyond your own subjects at the time that you were an undergraduate?

Well, what amazed me when I first came here was just how much there was to actually listen to, see, whatever. Talks about all sorts of different things and often by people who had been in the news, especially politicians or whatever, writers and so on. They seemed to have a direct link to the university somehow, largely I think through the officers of the society would probably contact the previous officers and they would be perpetuating what had been done previously actually. But it was wonderful to get first-hand discussion of things. I can remember when – who was that chap who… long before Apartheid broke down in South Africa, he was a priest I think or… it might have been, did he… or maybe it was the person who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country , I can’t remember who that was – but he had first-hand knowledge of all these things and there he was, you could ask him, talk to him. And sometimes – I know, yes, I was here during the Suez and Hungarian crises. They were both kind of coincidence and I do remember collecting money for the Hungarians at least, not for the Suez Crisis of course, but for the Hungarians. Wasn’t much we could do, but I did go round. This was when I was a member of CUUNA, the United Nations Association, I did go round collecting for them. And they had very interesting speakers as well.

What was your reason for joining that particular group?

Well, I’m not particularly political but, you know, I suppose a bit of idealism in a way. I don’t know where that came from, but I suppose one felt this was one way in which one could improve things, somehow. I mean given its history, subsequently I’m not sure it’s done a great deal, could have done a great deal more, but it was - how long after the war – less than ten years after the war, is that right? Yeah, about ten years after the war we were still, I think rationing had ceased and sweets rationing had ceased and so on, but we were still a very poor country really, compared with where we are now. And one still felt it was possible to, well I think one can still feel that but it’s much more difficult to do something that would make a mark. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do and I didn’t actually spend a lot of time outside that kind of activity, going to meetings and talking to people and so on. I wasn’t in the offices of the society. I think somebody had asked me to join and I declined actually.

Alan Smith Page 59 C1379/65 Track 3

So apart from collecting money for Hungarians, what other sort of activities were there?

Well, I used to go, well as I say, I joined the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club and went on some climbs with them in north Wales, but again, you’d have the opportunity to meet all sorts of people who’d done these fantastic climbs after the war. Chris Bonington I think, was he one of them? I can’t remember the details but it was just so interesting meeting so many different kinds of people, talking about what they’d been up to actually. And the concerts we had were excellent. I don’t like orchestral music very much, but the chamber music here is really first rate. Talking about them for the first time for thirty years is a bit difficult because I can’t remember who they were, but it was really an eye-opener.

[04:25] Now, I know you’d come from a boys’ school and as you’ve explained geology was top heavy in terms of undergraduates, but I wondered about relations with women while at university?

Well, one had girlfriends, they were mostly from nurses and teachers at Homerton, places like that. Yeah, I mean I had one or two girlfriends at that time.

How would you meet nurses and teachers?

Good question. [laughs] I think sometimes at parties, somebody would have a link to Homerton or Addenbrooke’s or whatever, and sometimes, there used to be a thing, there used to be the Dorothy Ballroom, we used to have dances on Saturday nights or something like that, and women used to go there as well as men and I suppose that’s where one met people actually. I wasn’t terribly involved, I mean I just had one or two people I used to take out somewhere, I wasn’t serious about any of them. I remember going, yes, oh and there were the language schools as well, as there still are. I remember there was a German girl, she was very nice and, you know, I used to take her out, films and so on, and she was staying with somebody and I went round to have tea with them I think and eventually it got pretty serious because the people who she was staying with actually sort of approached me and said, ‘Are you thinking of marrying this girl?’ And I thought God, no. I just wanted a bit of female company but I wasn’t interested in marrying her at the time. Anyway.

Alan Smith Page 60 C1379/65 Track 3

[06:15] And then, could you sort of tell the story of what happens at the end of university and the next step for you, the various sort of options you might have pursued.

Well, I know when I graduated, and I can’t remember which year this was, I did have an offer of a job in Australia in seismics, commercial job, that’s right, doing exploration geophysics in the Australian outback somewhere.

How had that come about, that offer?

Well, I suppose looking back, I think what happened was that one started to look around for a job and I thought geophysics, I had probably more or less settled on geophysics or geology as a possible career so I used to, I think I let the, whatever it was called then, careers appointment, something like that, appointment board? I can’t remember the details of what it was called, but there was an organisation like there is today which would tell people about what was available in their field, or what they were interested in and that was when the offers came up, and I can’t remember whether they were the same year or successive years where I had another offer from, it was probably Shell, to work in, somewhere in Bolivia or somewhere, or Peru, in the jungle [laughs] doing the same sort of thing actually. Which appealed up to a point, and I can’t remember how on earth it came about that I decided I would like to do a PhD. I just cannot remember whether it was suggested to me or whether I thought about it, or what. It was probably suggested to me by one of my supervisors, Norman Hughes or Brian Harland in particular, because they were the people who looked after me. And so I looked into it and thought well it sounds like a good idea, and the way I selected where to go to for graduate school was there was a book called The Crust of the Earth published by, or edited by a chap called Poldervaart, who was I think a South African, and it was to celebrate some anniversary of Columbia University, but it was published as a book and it had oh, probably thirty or forty papers in it by different people, bringing one up to date, you know, what their current research was all about. And I went through this and said, oh that looks interesting and I, you know, went through the whole thing and came out with about half a dozen papers that I thought were very interesting. So I wrote off to the departments concerned and they all offered me a place, which was very nice, and the one I selected was the offer from Princeton. The reason for that was simply that Harry Hess, who was the chairman of the department at the time, wrote me a handwritten letter, personal letter. It’s quite clear he thought about me and thought about my

Alan Smith Page 61 C1379/65 Track 3 situation and put himself in my place and I mean I remember one of the things he said in his letter, he said well we’ll give you some more examinations. You probably don’t want those, but looking at it from my perspective, we think that’s a very good thing for you to do. And so I went to Princeton.

And do you remember why you’d written to Princeton?

Because one of the papers in that volume, by the Poldervaart volume, was very interesting, it discussed problems that were very interesting. It was Harry Hess’s paper actually. He wrote about what the ocean crust was made of and why the oceans were, you know, what they were – this is all long before plate tectonics – but he had been a captain of a supply vessel I think in the Pacific War and whenever he took supplies from California or the West Coast out to presumably Hawaii, I don’t know if he went to the Pacific Islands or not, but he always had the echo sounder on and he would always go by a slightly different route so he essentially was mapping the ocean floor and keeping records of what he saw and made several discoveries as a result of that actually. And it stimulated his interest in the ocean floor and ultimately gave rise to, well, probably what you talked about with Fred Vine actually, the notion of ocean floor spreading and things like that, which didn’t lead to plate tectonics immediately but it was one of the key elements in making people think differently about the oceans.

Because he wrote a sort of geo-poetry paper?

Yeah. I mean he was, he was very much on to things in terms of rigidity and the way the earth behaved. I mean he really, he regarded the ocean really, what we would call nowadays as rigid bodies and behaving like plates, but he hadn’t quite got the whole thing together.

What was your parents’ view of the move abroad?

They were probably rather upset. I don’t remember them saying so, but here I was going overseas for a time, and I thought well, I mean I didn’t really think, well I’m leaving my parents, you know, they won’t see me for some time and so on, but they didn’t actually say anything but I could tell they were, you know, they hadn’t expected it I don’t think. But I think my father was all for it.

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[12:07] Could you then tell the story of the arrival in America and the beginnings of this post?

Well, I can tell you something about the voyage over. It’s about five days I think, I think I was on the Queen Elizabeth – was there a first and second? I can’t remember. Anyway, I was on the Queen Elizabeth of that time, because I got a Fulbright Scholarship which paid for the travel to and fro, one year, you know, one way there and one way back, and we were steerage essentially, third class I think or economy class or whatever it was called, and we were always trying to get into the second class or the first class. The way we did that was by finding some girls or other who would invite us into their class and then they would invite us into the first. So we used to play those sorts of games on the boat, it was quite interesting. And one met all sorts of people, I mean we hadn’t met many Americans before and I can remember one chap who was just come back from some big game shooting in Kenya or Tanganyika and so on, you know, like a Hemingway sort of character. And all these young women from American colleges who’d taken the summer off to go to Europe, to do Europe as they used to. So there were quite a lot of interesting people on the boat. And then we landed. I can’t remember how I got to Princeton actually. I just cannot remember who told me how to get there, somebody must have done. And I was very lucky because I was given a room in the so-called graduate college at Princeton, which is very much like an Oxbridge college, modelled on it, so I didn’t have to worry about… or maybe, no maybe I wasn’t actually. No, I think I had to find my own lodging. I just cannot remember, sorry. Sorry, backtrack. I was given a room and a roommate, a chap called Eldridge Moores who’s still alive, been a lifelong friend. He was from Arizona, very interesting person. He became, well in his case, he teaches at Davis in California but he founded or started the journal called Geology . It’s a sort of geological news magazine, with serious scientific articles in it and it’s the best journal around actually for short articles. If you want to find out anything… We’ve tried in Europe, I think Ron Oxburgh has tried to set up a similar journal called Terra Nova , but it doesn’t work really, I don’t think, it doesn’t get the quality of the papers that Geology has and I think in our library at the moment we don’t even take it. There’s no point in… you don’t want to imitate the Americans, or imitate anybody’s, what they’ve done, unless you can do it really much better, you want to do something different and we didn’t. And it’s never worked. Anyway, I don’t think it has. If you see Ron Oxburgh you can ask him. [laughs] And he was a wonderful musician as well as being a good geologist actually. I remember in my time at Princeton, I know this is not quite to do with my arrival, but I remember one evening after we’d had dinner and I was probably going back, I was going to go to the place where you

Alan Smith Page 63 C1379/65 Track 3 read newspapers, I heard this wonderful music coming out, some room nearby and I thought well there isn’t a concert on tonight, who’s playing, and it was Eldridge who was playing a Mozart concerto and it was absolutely beautiful. So I was very glad to have met him, so we kept in touch. [16:19] And he also comes into what I did next when I returned from America, which again I know, it’s not quite time for that as it were, but he, there was – I will tell it now because it’s very important. Harry Hess was always interested in the ocean floor, as I said, and there was an argument at that time about what rocks, which were called ophiolites were, the things that are in Cyprus and Oman and so on, and there were ideas around at that time that they were actually bits of the ocean floor that had been pushed up during continental collision on to the continents, so you could actually see what the ocean floor looked like by going to look at one of these ophiolites. Well, Harry got an NSF postdoc position for Eldridge Moores to go and look at one of the ophiolites in Greece. Now it turns out that isn’t the best place to go to look at ophiolites, but it was, at the time it was pretty good, so Eldridge went out to Greece and on his way back home to Princeton where he did his work, he used to come and see us in Cambridge sometimes, because it was almost on the way home. And he used, Eldridge is a great enthusiast and he enthused about Greece and at that time, which is after I’d got back here, I was looking for somewhere to work – and we’ll come back to this later – but I was looking for somewhere to work and I ended up in Greece as the result of his enthusiasm. So that’s another story, that’s another part of the link to be continued. [18:02] But getting back to what you were asking me about arriving in America. I remember coming up, you know, to New York, at the harbour there, and what amazed me were the colours of the cars. [laughs] Because at that time virtually every car in Britain was black and here were all these pastel shaded cars, pinks and blues and some yellows and so on. And of course the skyscrapers and everything else, it was very exciting actually. And the scale of the thing, you know, huge roads, huge buildings, huge cars, totally different to Britain. And as I say, I got to Princeton somehow and I just cannot remember how actually. I do remember something funny after I got there, I got my bike sent over, I think after I arrived, my parents sent it over and I picked it up, after I’d settled down in Princeton, got the bus into New York and went to the docks and picked it up and thought oh well, it’s not that far, so I’ll cycle to Princeton from New York and so I did and I came to this junction which said, a green sign, I think with white lettering on it, just said no lorries or trucks of course, no bicycles. Oh no, it didn’t say anything about bicycles, it said no trucks. I thought well, it isn’t banning bicycles, so I actually found myself on a freeway. I was stuck on it. I actually cycled, probably the only person probably in Britain, probably in the world, I don’t know about that, but the only person who’s actually cycled across the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey. Because we didn’t have

Alan Smith Page 64 C1379/65 Track 3 any motorways here then – oh I think the first one had just been built or was being built at that time - so I didn’t expect to see roads solely for cars, and I got sworn at many times as I cycled across but… [laughs] Anyway, I made it without being arrested and got to Princeton with my bike. [20:07] And Princeton was actually a wonderful, it was absolutely marvellous for me actually. I did a lot of different things there because when I first arrived, having graduated in geophysics, or physics rather, I was put on to a geophysical project initially, which meant in the first summer going out to Wisconsin and building electronic equipment for seismic recordings and things like that. I mean I’m not an electronic… I can read a circuit but not very well, but I couldn’t build anything without guidance. Anyway, we went out and we shot explosives, again, explosives coming into it again. Looking for the Moho, you know, the discontinuity at the base of the crust, and you had to have very long lines to do that, probably a couple of kilometres or something like that, and you had to have lots of vehicles spaced along these lines. Not lots, but half a dozen or so. And you had to get up at dawn to record because that was the quietest time. And we started out, we tested the equipment in Wisconsin, this was in the summer before I really became resident in Princeton, and we tested out the equipment in the summer in Wisconsin, showed it worked and everything else, and then we went out to the West to Montana and Wyoming and I just fell in love with that country actually. And we recorded a lot of seismic data in that area and the question was, what to do with it and it was run by a chap called John Steinhart who was from the Carnegie Institute in Washington and it was clear to me that he would be in charge of the project and he was doing a PhD as well, he was quite old, but he was a mature PhD student, and that I wouldn’t really get much of a look in, so instead of opting for a geophysical project I decided not to do that and I accepted a geological project in mapping, again, mapping rocks in a mountain range west of Glacier Park. I didn’t do any mapping that year because that year was supposedly the beginning of, the first part of my PhD and since I hadn’t really cottoned on, didn’t really go for it, I had to start the end of my first year at Princeton. Oh, and there was some suggestion I might be interested in palaeomagnetism because we had a little, well it wasn’t the best place to do palaeomagnetism, but they had tried to make a non-magnetic hut, or not a hut, but tried to create in a room in the geology department a place that was essentially non-magnetic or where the magnetic field was very, very little so that you could do palaeomagnetic measurements.

[23:11] What were your relations with Harry Hess?

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Well, I mean they weren’t very… everyone got on well with Harry Hess, I think. Well, nearly all the graduate students really liked him actually, we thought he was a terrific person and he was very kind. I mean lots of stories one could tell about him. I think some of them might have been published in a book, I’m not sure, but he was just a wonderful man actually.

Are there things about him that you know having known him and met him that you think might not appear in the published record already?

Yes.

Aspects of his character?

Yeah, I’m sure. I mean I’ll illustrate by a story. This is going to get slanderous if I’m not careful, but there was a very, well I won’t give you his name, but there was a Texan in the department, a graduate student who was quite tall, six foot six at least, and those of us, we used to call him the tallest living Texan in the world, his name was Hank Ohlen, he was absolutely dirt poor and he had run out of money for his thesis, so he used to eat and sleep in one of the labs and that was difficult so he used to do it very early, five o’clock in the morning every day, he’d have breakfast and so on. And one day one of our, one of the professors there – I won’t give you his name – but he was a bit uptight, he always wore a tie and everything else and jacket and was very, a bit formal, a bit English in a way, and he came in early when Hank was having his breakfast, he cooked it over the Bunsen burner in the lab and so on. And he could smell this smell, went into the lab and found Hank cooking his breakfast or eating it or something and he said, you know, I’m going to tell Professor Hess about you and he’ll doubtless, you know, he’ll deal with you accordingly. Anyway, it was quite a severe ticking off and Hank was terrified, so he didn’t do anything else, he cleared up and so on and he waited for Harry Hess to come in in that morning. Harry used to keep odd hours, he often came in at ten o’clock, and he was a chain smoker and Harry came in smoking, went upstairs to his office, followed by Hank or at least accompanied by Hank; he was telling him what he had done and what Professor Dorf had told him and so on. When he got to his office and opened it up, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, ‘Didn’t hear you Hank’. Now, that might have appeared in a story. I know that story appeared, but I don’t know if that characteristic was given to Harry in the book about Harry or not, but he was a wonderful man. He had a great sense of humour actually. There was a time when the space programme was just starting up and, you know, Kennedy had decided to go to

Alan Smith Page 66 C1379/65 Track 3 the moon and so on and Harry thought well, you know, why don’t we have a project to drill through the Moho in the oceans, you see, need a special kind of drilling ship and so on, and it was quite expensive, but there was a lot of money around at that time. So Harry Hess and I think William Bascom or somebody, and one or two other American scientists, formed – Fred Vine may have told you about this – but formed a society called the American Miscellaneous Society and they had a very funny motto, because they realised they were in competition with NASA, and I think their motto was, ‘The earth’s bottom is more important than the moon’s behind’. [laughs] And I’m pretty sure Harry, he could well have made that motto up actually. And he was always coming into our optical mineralogy classes where we’d be identifying a mineral and working out its properties and so on, smoking again, he’d take his cigarette out, one o’clock in the afternoon he’d say, or two o’clock, and say, ‘Sorry chaps, I’ve got to go to Washington now’. Because he had kept his membership of the navy up after the war and he had risen to the rank of Rear Admiral, so he had bit of clout in the Pentagon, and he used to do down to the Pentagon and argue about declassifying, part of his work was declassifying military secrets, one of which were what we used to call the blue charts. They were big oceanographic charts about, I don’t know, perhaps twelve of them covering the whole of the earth. They were not detailed but the military thought they were state secrets, basically, and they wouldn’t release them. He got those released. And in fact it was those charts that I used when I came back here and did this business about moving continents and that sort of thing. So yeah, Harry was a great man. He drank too much and he smoked too much, that’s all it was. It was a fatal recipe. He died quite young really, as people, as scientists go.

[28:36] And what was he saying at this time about continental drift, for example?

I never heard him speak about continental drift and I didn’t really ever talk to him in detail about continental drift. Ron Oxburgh might have done because Ron was, Harry was Ron Oxburgh’s supervisor for his work in the Caribbean and I know they would have talked about these kinds of things, but I don’t know what Harry would have said or did say.

Was Ron there at the same time as you?

Yes, he was two years ahead of me and he, well he was married also, so we didn’t see a lot of him. But he worked with Harry in the Caribbean. So I don’t know, I mean I, the trouble was

Alan Smith Page 67 C1379/65 Track 3 that having been here with Harold Jeffreys with a very good book on geophysics, well he started the subject really I think, of geophysics, he had very clear physical arguments about continental drift and how the earth behaved and it was all beautifully set out and I was very much influenced by him, so because there was a good physical argument of why it couldn’t happen I believed it. And when Harry talked about things moving, well he must have talked about things moving a bit and so on, I sort of thought yes, maybe, but I don’t believe it, you know. So at that time I was very sceptical about the whole thing. I didn’t listen to Harry as much as I should have done, I think.

[30:06] And could you describe what was involved in the beginnings of your PhD work, which you say you started at the end of a year of being there.

Yeah. Well, as I say, I fell in love with the West and there was another faculty member at Princeton called John Maxwell who had a project to map a big thrust it’s called, a low angle fault that move rocks horizontally for at least fifty miles, if not more, and well the question wasn’t so much how it formed but how it linked to what was happening in Canada, because as you came across the 49 th parallel from Canada down to the US, the geology changed dramatically on the map, and the question was, why. Was this mis-mapping and if it wasn’t, why on earth did it change. And the answer or possible answer was to be found in mapping this range west of Glacier Park, called the Whitefish Range, which is in the Rockies just east of the so-called Rocky Mountain Trench, which is a great big valley goes all the way up, a long way into Canada. And it’s a very simple answer, it’s basically that this big fault is a single fault in the older rocks and as it comes nearer the surface it splays into several faults and the geology is such that the splays are essentially going down into Canada and they’ve been removed in the States. So there’s what appears to be a boundary fault at the boundary. It’s not that the mapping was incorrect, but the geology is such that it produces that effect and that’s one of the things that… I met with another chap who mapped the eastern Whitefish Range, we mapped together and showed it, that’s what it was. It’s very simple really, but nobody knew that at the time. And I just loved being in these mountain ranges. You know, I was in the National Forest area and once you got off the logging roads I never saw a person, single person for three field seasons, there was nobody, just the animals, the wild animals actually. Bears and moose and stuff. And I just liked it, you know. It was amazing, we didn’t have any mobile phones, we had no GPS, nobody knew really where I was and I could easily have crocked myself on a dead fall and not be here.

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We just didn’t worry about it. Well, I suppose you were slightly concerned about it but we just had confidence in our ability not to do that sort of thing. You couldn’t do it nowadays.

[end of track 3]

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[Track 4]

At the start of this session I understand you’ve got some additional memories, especially memories of school, that you’d like to add.

Well, I don’t know how… it’s interesting in a way. I took the eleven-plus examination and at the end of the year the class was told where they had come in the eleven-plus and I did not do very well, I was certainly at least halfway down the list. But I don’t know how again I ended up top of the list. [laughs] It’s one of those bizarre things actually. Can’t explain it.

You ended up top of the list?

Top of the class, basically. Well, I know throughout school I had two or three other people I used to compete with and sometimes, you know, one of us would be first, somebody else would be first, but we were always up there vying with one another. I could never do as well as some people in maths, but I did better than other people in physics. I mean it was very competitive really, but good fun, it wasn’t serious competition. But that’s the way it was all through the school actually.

[01:16] And there’s some travel during the school as well that you…

Right at the end in the sixth form, our geography master – I can’t remember his name at the moment – but he was a very nice man and he loved to organise things for us to do and one of the things he organised was an expedition as it were, based on North Sea trawlers sailing from Grimsby and we, there were at least half a dozen of us, we were distributed amongst half a dozen ships – oh it was Mr Reeves, that was his name – distributed amongst half a dozen ships and our project was to collect samples of water at different points on the voyage using, we didn’t have any GPS, but we could get latitude and longitude from maps, come back to the chemistry lab and determine the salinity of the samples we collected, put those on a map and from that you could actually see how the salinity varied from the River Humber into the open sea. That was quite an experience.

How did you collect the samples?

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It wasn’t very scientific I don’t think. We probably – I just can’t remember – but I imagine we put a container over the side like a small bucket or something, hauled it in and filled up a test tube, which you then corked.

And how do you remember the sort of relations on board of the sights and sounds of being on a North Sea trawler as a schoolboy?

Well, it was very smelly. [laughs] It was a real insight into the lives of these trawlermen. They earned an enormous amount from their catches and they had so much money that some of them when they landed just kept a taxi permanently on call, so they’d have a taxi twenty-four - not quite twenty-four hours of the day - but certainly in the normal working hours they’d have a taxi on hand. Rather like having a chauffeur. It’s a great pity, the way they used that money, because they just dissipated it, some of them dissipated the whole of what they’d earned rather than saving it up for something else. They were very down to earth people, as you might expect, lots of swearing and so on. And I remember one chap in particular, he had been in the British army when it freed the prisoners in the concentration camp at Belsen and he told me some pretty horrific things about what it was like there. But they worked very hard and they earned what they got, but it was a slice of life that I’d never seen before.

What did he tell you about the release from the camp, do you remember?

Well, he didn’t go into great detail as I can remember, but he was just, obviously he was horrified by it and, you know, I’m sure they told me lots of other stories but I don’t think I kept a diary for that in terms of writing them down. But it was, they were a very good group of people actually.

How did they respond to having a, albeit a sixth former, but a schoolchild on their…

Well, I got along alright with them actually. I think this chap who’d been through Belsen, I think he might have been the cook, or one of the cooks, and in odd moments I would do a little bit of gutting of fish, but also help to peel the potatoes. And there’s nothing, it was really wonderful, there’s nothing nicer than fresh fish for breakfast or lunch or dinner. I mean we ate a lot of fish,

Alan Smith Page 71 C1379/65 Track 4 not fish all the time, but the fish we had was absolutely delicious. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything quite like it actually since.

And where did you, what was your accommodation on board?

It was a bunk, not a lot of space. You couldn’t sit upright in it, at least I don’t think you could. Maybe you could just. But it was a very low ceiling, as it were. And the toilets were very, just a hole in the ship, a pipe going down to the bottom of the sea. It was quite exciting in rough weather.

And how did your parents feel about this?

I don’t know. I mean I think they trusted the school. I don’t suppose you could do it nowadays, I don’t know what the situation would be. There’d be all sorts of insurance problems I imagine, but one just, at that time you could just do that sort of thing.

Do you remember anything of the scientific aims? I realise it was to produce this map of salinity, but what was the sort of context for that?

I think it was just a project he thought was achievable, the schoolmaster thought was achievable in the time we had, as well as opening our eyes to a wide variety of things apart from the project itself actually.

[06:33] And then how did you, you followed up this experience with…

Yes. After I left school I thought, I really enjoyed in a masochistic sort of way I suppose, the trip on the trawler, and I knew that some of them went out, deep sea trawlers, and I asked, I can’t remember whether I did it through my schoolmaster again or whether I had made contacts in Grimsby myself, but I asked if I could go on a deep sea trawler, from Grimsby. And I got on to one, I’d been accepted for a place in university here, and so I took up some books that I thought would be useful for me in what I’d be doing here, I remember taking up some maths books actually, which I would read when I didn’t want to do anything else. I think I might have been a paying passenger, as it were, I can’t remember, but I wasn’t a fulltime deckhand or anything like

Alan Smith Page 72 C1379/65 Track 4 that, but I did do quite a bit of fish preparation, that sort of thing. And as I say, we sailed all the way round the North Cape in Norway, I think it is, into the White Sea and saw the Russian navy, in international waters of course, undertaking target practice on targets they had. I don’t think we saw any icebergs or things like that, and we had some very bad weather coming back, I do remember, because we had to run from a gale which meant we didn’t sail around Norway, we sailed through the fjords in Norway to escape the bad weather.

What was the sort of view of the crew, the workers on board to the Russian…

I think it was just part of the scene. I can’t remember that they commented on it in any way. They were in their fishing grounds and the Russians were in their target thing and that’s how it was.

Can you describe the work in preparation of fish on board, for those who, most people who haven’t been on a trawler, what did you do?

I didn’t do anything, but the seamen, they trawl the bottom of the sea and they pick up fish, bottom, you know, benthic fish I suppose, or anything else that’s around, you know, sole, flatfish, probably cod if it’s around. I don’t know how they catch fish that was not on the bottom. But when they feel it’s full they haul it up on cables and that’s where some of the worst accidents happen because in a rough sea with a full load those cables can snap and they’re just like whiplash and completely, certainly would break a man’s leg really seriously and I can imagine they could actually sever it if it was really bad. So it’s quite dangerous, that bit is quite dangerous. Then they bring it up with a little crane and it’s like a bag and it’s tied and they just release the knot somehow and the fish just fall out on to the deck and then they throw away stuff that’s not wanted or wrong type of fish, or in some cases they haul up things that are, I remember on the North Sea trawler we hauled up an old 1914-18 mine, which I don’t think would have gone off in any way, because the casing had rusted but the explosives were still there. And I know they have at times, they thought – I didn’t see this happen – but they hauled up an airplane wheel and as it came up the tyre expanded and made a huge noise when it burst and they thought they’d hit a mine. It wasn’t one, it was just an old tyre that had blown up. Anyway, so they’d have all this fish on the deck, they’d sort it a little bit and then they would spend time gutting it with a very sharp knife and then having gutted it they would put it down below into holds that had ice in them to keep it fresh.

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And you helped with which part of that?

I helped with that.

With the gutting and the storing?

The gutting, yes.

What appealed then to you about this sort of travel, which seems to be, well not obviously picturesque, difficult, cold and involving the gutting of fish. What appealed to you at this age about that thing enough to want to sort of volunteer for it a second time?

I think it was just the sheer love of adventure at the time. I used to love reading exploration books, people, you know, about that fateful expedition to Everest. And there was a chap called Colonel Fawcett who got lost in the Amazon jungle. I used to love reading those things and imagining. I wouldn’t want to do several of them now, knowing how things are, but it was just as a schoolboy, one, and I suppose perhaps even during the war, one had a sense of excitement about things and I’ve always been curious about all sorts of things, so I can’t say any more than that I don’t think.

[12:25] And any other experiences of significant travel over the period that we covered last time?

Well, I know that when I was at university in the vacations I did a lot of hitch-hiking around Europe. I probably went at least two or three times, and again it gave you an insight into all sorts of people you wouldn’t normally come across. Seen kindness in many cases. I remember I was in France once and had spent all day getting a lift outside of Lyons, on the outskirts of Lyons. I was hot, tired and no lift, then a car drew up and gave me a lift all the way to Paris and it turned out what had happened was that the driver and his wife had come down to Lyons to see their son who’d had a very bad accident and was being treated in Lyons, I think, he might even had a brain injury, I don’t know. They put me up in their house in Paris and I continued on my way home. And I kept in touch with them for a little bit afterwards, but they were so nice actually.

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And what did you choose to look at on these travels?

All sorts of things, but principally museums I think, and sights like, you know, cathedrals, architecture, that sort of thing. I remember hitch-hiking down to Marseille once to look at one of le Corbusier’s constructions. It was called L’Unité d’Habitation , or something like that, because I’d read about it and it seemed like an interesting new idea and a new way of housing people in flats rather than just building in boxes. It was a kind of box, but it was an interesting box, and I actually went down there and had a look around actually. The colours were quite metallic and not to my liking, but the actual, the way it looked was so much more interesting than what we were building at the time. So that’s one of the things I did. Another time we tried to get down to Vesuvius because I was going to join a chap, a New Zealand mathematician who was in this college and he had an absolute mania for volcanoes, being from New Zealand – that’s a non sequitur – but anyway, he did and he even had, I know people laugh about them, he had spring- heeled boots. He’d invented these boots which had sort of things like bedsprings on the bottom which kept you off hot lava flow [laughs] and he had photographs of himself with a helmet on and all sorts of ash falling around him. He was quite a, I mean he was probably reckless really, but he wanted to see Vesuvius and I had started geology at that time, being here, and I thought well, that would be an interesting thing to do so I tried to join him in Rome or Vesuvius or wherever. I never got there because I fell ill actually, some stomach upset or something.

Do you remember the name of the person with the spring-heeled…

Yes, it’s Ron Keam. I saw him actually about fifteen years ago in New Zealand. He didn’t recognise me at first, but he was an interesting, he’d followed his enthusiasm up so that he’d actually put together a detailed account of New Zealand’s active volcanoes and he had tried to get, well I don’t know if he did try to get funding for its publication, but whatever happened he actually published the book himself, paid for the publication. And it’s a very thick book, lovely colour plates, extremely expensive, I think over a hundred pounds, probably 200, I don’t know. And because of the way he had done it, it wasn’t easy for him to sell these books so he had a lot of spare volumes and he had one room in his house I think, it was almost full from floor to ceiling of these books. And when I got there they were beginning to sell and he was beginning to recoup his investment as it were, I’m not sure… well I’m sure he didn’t regard it as a purely commercial enterprise, he was just interested in recording what had happened in New Zealand.

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But he was, it was very nice just to say hello to him actually. I think he lives in Auckland, I’m not sure.

[17:25] To what extent was geology the sort of motivation for other places that you visited on these hitch-hiking vacations?

I’d have to think, I can’t honestly remember without further thought. Largely they weren’t. But I don’t think geology did play a major part actually. I’m the sort of person that can switch off my subject when I’m in places that have other things to offer. When I used to work in Greece I drove down through Europe more than once and I didn’t take a great interest in the geology, I was much more interested in the sights, the normal tourist sights, especially galleries and museums and castles and things like that. So one is obsessed in a sense, as all academics are, by their subject but I can switch it off.

[18:30] Now, last time you told me that you’d actually had a twin brother.

Yes.

And I wondered what your parents said about that, either when you were a child or perhaps later?

Very little actually. I mean they did refer to him because we had photographs of twin brother and so on. Talked about Douglas. But it didn’t seem to weigh on them in a way that would make it obvious to me that it weighed on them.

And apart from the photographs, I realise you were three and that’s sort of when very early memories happen, do you have any memories of him?

No.

No.

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It’s possible it did have an effect on me but I couldn’t possibly say what it was. Though my wife did suggest that, you know, it might have had an effect, especially a loss at that time of a twin brother.

What’s your wife’s view?

Well, she’s not around any more. She died, unfortunately, last year or two years ago. But she thought that some of my, the sense of loss might have affected me in some way and it would be nice if she were around to ask, but it’s quite possible that she’s right because she was very shrewd with people.

I think you mentioned also that she had a view that your father had spoiled you. I wonder whether you wanted to say more about that? Perhaps this was your own perception.

Well, father and mother, both. I can’t, I mean I may have been spoiled but I don’t feel I have been or was, but on the other hand, I’m not the best person to judge.

[20:37] I wanted to ask about the souvenirs that you’ve kept of the shrapnel.

Yes.

Why do you think that you’ve kept hold of these? In other words, why do you think that you haven’t thrown them away?

I suppose I have to some extent a collecting instinct for things that seem in some way memorable, you know. Besides which, I think most boys used to do these things. At that age, not all boys of course, but boys just collected anything and everything: cigarette packets, cigarette cards, train numbers, bus numbers, car numbers. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what we used to do in those days. I can remember even cutting out from the papers articles about people, unsolved murders, and I think, used to think, well maybe we could do it. [laughs] It was completely naïve and silly, but it occupied the time. So it was probably a, certainly a boy’s thing, I don’t think girls do that actually. I don’t know any girls who did that, can’t think of anything girls do like that actually. Sorry.

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What else have you kept? You’ve kept these pieces of shrapnel and you showed me today some of the very intricate parts that your father engineered. I wonder what else you’ve kept from childhood? What objects?

Well, I’m not sure if I still have them, but I did make a collection of seashells which I mounted, from holidays in different parts of Britain. Swanage we went to once or twice and – this would be when I was ten, eleven, that sort of thing. You know, they’re all mounted and it’s in a big box. I don’t know if I’ve still got it actually. I might have thrown these away. Photographs, I’ve got lots of photographs somewhere. Used to collect stamps as well, I still have a lot of stamps actually, I don’t know what to do with them. Probably quite valuable, some of them, because… Well, my father used to buy stamps, I think more as an investment than anything else, but not seriously. So we have, I have somewhere at home sheaves of stamps of the Channel Islands, issued just after the war, silver jubilee – silver jubilee or the coronation – or something anyway, some of them with high denominations like five pounds. I don’t know how much they’re worth today, but they won’t be worth very much because I think they’re all stuck together, unfortunately. But they’re not things I collected myself but I have not thrown those away, I have kept those.

I wondered whether there was a reason why some things are kept and some things are thrown away, that you can identify?

Well, at one time I used to collect cigarette cards and things like that, I just didn’t see any point in hanging on to them actually. Or bus numbers or whatever, train numbers. They just, you know, they seemed interesting at the time, but apart from having done it, have no interest at all. Those have been thrown away actually.

Why then keep the shrapnel? Why has that retained its interest?

Well, it’s a very dramatic incident in one’s… I mean it’s a, it’s a time when things were very dangerous and very dramatic, I just felt it was worth having a record, if you like, of what it was like at that time. Not a written record, but a material record actually.

Thank you. Could you, I’ve just got two more things on last time and then we can move on. [25:16]

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Could you clarify for the non-specialist listener why Arran was a particularly good introduction to British geology? What about Arran made it a good site to visit if you were introducing young people to British geology?

Well, this is looking back because I used to lead trips to Arran when I was employed here. I used to run what we, yes, run what was called the Arran field trip, but of course I didn’t set it up, it was set up by a remarkable man called Brian Harland who died a few years ago, and if you look at it standing back with the knowledge I now have and if you asked somebody to make an island which illustrated a wide range of geological processes and effects and so on, you couldn’t come up with something much better than Arran, except for the fact it’s a bit weak on fossils. There are fossils, but there could be a lot more, and there are metamorphic rocks, there could be different kinds of metamorphic rocks and so on, but in that small space there is a huge range of things to look at. And I suppose one thing in geology, you need to know what kinds of rocks have been deposited at different times to build up the succession of rocks through time and, you know, everyone’s heard of Jurassic Park and so on, Jurassic’s one of those periods, which makes up what’s called the timescale and the ones that are interesting to most people, those that contain fossils and they start in the Cambrian and they go up all the way to the present day, and in Arran you have more or less a complete representation of all those rock systems or, you know, rocks of the Cambrian period, they’re not very good, actually they’re all messed up a bit, been metamorphosed, but you eventually get into the carboniferous rocks where you have coal seams, you have fossil plants, fossil ferns, sometimes the coal seams are covered by marine rocks which have corals in them and things like that. And you can appreciate how different kinds of rocks have been laid down at different times and how they vary compositionally, that is some are chalk, some are sandstone, some are boulders and things like that, and how the fossils have changed, and then you can relate that – which is what we do in the trip – relate that to the changing position of Britain as it moved north from the southern hemisphere to the present day position of the northern hemisphere. And that is quite exciting for a student I think.

Presumably when you went, first went on the course, you didn’t do that though with this place?

No, I was wondering if you would ask that. No, we didn’t do that, but on the other hand just to see these different kinds of rock. You could see that sometimes - there’s a very nice desert deposit on Arran, the new red sandstone, and you can see beautiful sand dunes and you know they’re desert deposits because if you look at them with a hand lens it’s what called millet seed

Alan Smith Page 79 C1379/65 Track 4 sand, they’re very small grains the size of a millet seed, a millimetre or so or less, which are beautifully rounded and you don’t get that kind of thing except locally on a beach and a wide area, windblown sand.

How was the sequence interpreted then, pre-plate tectonics when you were going there as an undergraduate?

Well, changes in climate, that’s basically what was done, but not related necessarily to changes in position. I mean you go all the way up to the present day, you can see the ice, they see the moraines and glacial grooves and u-shaped valleys cut by the ice, and it’s not there any more. And we know, I think at the time we knew it was about 10,000 years ago the ice essentially left Britain. So you got actually a terrific history of how the earth had evolved in terms of changes of climate and everything else, and also in changes of topography, because the old red sandstone, the lower old age sandstone is made up of conglomerates, that is, rocks made of large boulders and some of these boulders are almost a metre in size. So to transport those and round them, (a) you had to have very powerful rivers and (b) those rivers indicate very steep gradients, otherwise you wouldn’t have the velocity necessary, which implied in turn that you had high relief nearby, ie mountains. At other times though, specially I suppose in the cold swampy area, you know the topography was very low because you wouldn’t have cold swamps. So there are all sorts of things. And then of course the other things, well several other things, but that’s one of the basic things you see in Arran and there are not many places where you get such a complete succession as in Arran. In other parts you might get just a bit of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and not much else, in other parts you might have just metamorphic rocks, but Arran has all those things as well.

Is it necessary to travel across Arran in order to see these different things or are there particular sites where quite a lot of it can be seen at once?

Nothing can be seen at once really, because the succession is quite thick, I mean there are thousands of feet of rock laid down. So the way we used to run the field trip and probably still do is to have a base, used to be in Brodick, and we’d go out each day, a bus would pick us up generally, drive us to the start of a traverse or walk, ending in Corrie, which is north of Brodick, and we’d spend the whole day walking through these rocks and then get picked up at the end of the day by the bus. But in addition to all that, the central part of Arran is a granite and it’s got

Alan Smith Page 80 C1379/65 Track 4 marvellous granite scenery on it and you can see at the edge of this granite how it’s baked the rocks and in some cases forcibly intruded the rocks so that the rocks are overturned and things like that. And you can also, it’s associated with, on the southern part of the island there’s a huge, called a dike swarm, a dike being like a wall, vertical wall of rock a metre or so in width, and these are mostly not granite but they’re basic igneous rocks, so basalts and things like that. And quite apart from the fact just looking at them as a phenomenon, you have to try and think of a way that this could have come about and that’s never been easy and today we relate it to the activity on the fringes of the Iceland hotspot. So that’s another, we didn’t know about hotspots then, but you can talk about them now. All these things continue, you know, they add to the interest and value on the island and it makes it more interesting in fact for the people who teach it actually. In fact, it would be fair to say that most of us who’ve been to Arran in one way or another have actually written a paper about it, because we have found things that have not been recorded previously, even though it’s probably the most tramped over area geologically in the world, there are always new things to find and see. Students don’t know what they mean, so they may see something new but they don’t realise it’s new and as a leader you’re always trying to find out, you know, are we on time, shall we do this before this school comes along and all that sort of thing. But occasionally you do see things that seem worth writing up.

[33:55] Thank you. Now, at the end of the last session we left you in the White Fish Mountain Range and you’d said a little bit about this PhD project. Why was this particular project identified as something that needed to be studied or something that was interesting to study?

Well, on a purely map point of view, if you go across the international border between USA and Canada, which the White Fish Range abuts against, you can see in Canada on the Canadian maps lots of structures called thrusts. These are low angle faults rather like a deck of cards in cross- section where the cards have slid over one another, and you can see a lot of those in Canada. Come down to the US and look at the US maps that were extant at the time and you don’t see them. You see a big thrust called the Lewis Thrust, but none of these small thrusts and the question was, what is going on, how does the big thrust change into small thrusts as you go across the border? Is this a mapping problem, ie people haven’t recognised small thrusts in the US, what? And then having discovered what was going on, the question is, how do these things form. So that was really the problem and it turns out it was a very simple answer, that the thin thrusts, the ones in Canada, are in rocks that are at a much higher level in the earth’s crust and if

Alan Smith Page 81 C1379/65 Track 4 you go down into deeper levels those thrusts coalesce into one big thrust and the attitude of the rocks south of the border is such that the big thrust sheet is inclined to the north and disappears under the Canadian rocks and the rocks in Canada on top of this big thrust are made up of lots of little thrusts. So it’s a very simple explanation and then the question then comes, how do you get these big thrusts. This is one of the biggest thrusts in the world. It’s like the Moine Thrust in Scotland which moves things several tens of kilometres horizontally and the Lewis Thrust does exactly the same thing, maybe eighty kilometres or more horizontally. And that’s a question that, I think it’s still not completely solved actually, the problem of big thrusts and what they are Anyway, it was a very simple thing, the big thrust had been cut up, the thrust sheet which makes this big thrust has been cut up by high angle faults which are faults that aren’t related to things being pushed, but things being stretched slightly and that’s another problem that we solved, but didn’t solve, we had no actual explanation of why those large high angle faults cut the thrust, where they came from, why they came when they did and so on. So if you like, structurally it was a very simple problem. You had to walk around a lot of rock or through a lot of forest to solve this problem, to find out where the rocks where, but the actual solution is simple and as a result of that my thesis had to expand into, well, stratigraphy, the sort of thing that I was talking about in Arran, the succession of rocks. And then that led into trying to understand how these very old rocks, they’re about fifteen hundred million years old, what was the setting and where do they form, why do they form, because the basin in which they form is about the size of Wales. It’s an intriguing problem. The rocks are at least fifteen kilometres thick, without any thickening due to tectonic processes, and a lot of them are very shallow water because they’ve got mud cracks throughout. How on earth does that happen? And we still don’t know today I don’t think, how that really happens, how you get fifteen kilometres of shallow water rocks. So I still keep an interest in that, having… and in big thrusts, because as I say, they’re intriguing problems that haven’t been solved yet.

[38:44] Was there any physics or geophysics involved in your PhD work?

I did try and model thrusts using simple physics, yes. Essentially sliding a large slice of rock horizontally, which did lead to one or two papers subsequently on thrusts and how they might form. Because people talk a lot about gravity sliding, that is to say you have a high area and if it’s high enough the rocks on the high ground will slide downhill on to the rocks on the low ground and I think you can show that’s unlikely to have happened in these cases so I’m not in

Alan Smith Page 82 C1379/65 Track 4 favour on the whole of gravity sliding, though I’ve become much more favourable to it in the last ten or twenty years. So I do think they are somehow pushed and the question is, what’s the origin of the force that pushes them? I mean you could say, well it’s just due to plate tectonics, but I don’t think it is entirely, I think it’s related, some of it may well be related to the fact that as you go west of the White Fish Range towards Idaho, you get into a thing called the Idaho Batholith, which is a huge volume of granite created, that probably was created by plate tectonics, ie subduction, but that huge volume of granite would have behaved like a fluid and if rocks are fluid they act differently to… they can exert a much greater push than they would do otherwise because they’re essentially exerting hydrostatic stresses on what they’re next to, and I think, my own view is that those, fluid like behaviour is one of the driving forces for these big thrusts.

And who was supervising this work?

My supervisor at the time was a chap called John Maxwell. He was a very nice, he’d been in the oil industry in Texas and ended up in the faculty in Princeton. He was interested in tectonics, basically. But because of my interest in sedimentology and stratigraphy and one or two other things, I also got a lot of advice from the sedimentologist in Princeton who was a chap called Van Houten who was very nice, and in particular a chap called Al Fischer who I think, I can’t remember if he’s still alive or not, but he was a very dynamic professor actually, a wonderful man. Complete contrast to anybody here at the time that I went to Princeton.

Really? In what way?

Because he was so informal. You know, we were a very formal department really. Everyone wore a collar and tie every day and jacket and he, I know it’s a different climate in New Jersey, but when I arrived, the first thing, when I first got to Princeton I stayed, I don’t know if I stayed with him but Harry Hess who was the chairman at the time asked me round. I came, I was sitting in his garden in his house, I think it was, and Harry Hess, I was having a drink or something with Harry Hess and the lawn sprinkler was on and it was quite a big lawn, it wasn’t on where we were sitting, but suddenly you could hear this tremendous roar of laughter coming from where the sprinkler was, because Al Fischer, who it was, had walked right through it and he was in shorts, you know, open-necked shirt, it was summertime, quite hot, I mean it might have been in old money ninety degrees or something like that. And he was just such a jolly person

Alan Smith Page 83 C1379/65 Track 4 actually and so enthusiastic. He was a very serious person, I mean excellent scientist, but he was just so interested in everything actually and he was one of my supervisors. [43:19] He made me, he made a suggestion about a very peculiar structure called molar tooth structure, which I won’t go into any details about, but it’s a very peculiar structure which is probably due to squashing of sediments as they get buried, but its origins are to me quite unclear. And it seems to be something that occurs at a particular stage in the earth’s history in the sense that I’ve only, the only other place where I’ve seen it, not in place, I found a pebble once in a bit of road aggregate when I was doing a field trip in the Urals and it looked just like molar tooth structure and it’s about the same age and it’s something that’s always intrigued me since. We don’t have a solution, I don’t think we have the answer to it. I tried to persuade Andy Knoll who was at the – can’t remember what the mission was called in Harvard – but I tried to persuade him that there was some organic relationship, I don’t mean fossils necessarily, but something organic was involved with this and he just wouldn’t accept it. But I still think that’s possible.

[44:34] And what can you tell me about time spent when not working while you were in America, pastimes and friendships and so on?

Well, a lot of the time, Princeton being an all-male institution at that time, I probably mentioned how I met my wife – or have I, I can’t remember? Okay. Well, one of the things you, the classic at the time is the American mixer – have you ever heard of that? A mixer is a sort of, what it says, it’s a mixing device of bringing young men and young women together in a – who don’t know one another very well – into a sort of situation where they meet and talk and dance and eat and everything else. And so at the weekends quite often we used to go off to one of the neighbouring women’s universities like Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia, or sometimes we drove up to Smith in New York state or Vassar, and I think once we went up to Amherst, just to have an evening with women actually, young women. So, you know, I spent quite a few weekends doing that. Other times I had a friend who was, a man called Tom Simkin, he ended up as a curator of the Smithsonian Institution, he was doing a PhD in Princeton on igneous rocks. I can’t remember where he… I can’t remember where he did his thesis. It might have been in Skye actually, in Scotland, but he, he was a climber and I went out climbing once or twice with him. Pretty scary stuff I think, I mean I’m not a… I did, I never said it, I did join this mountaineering club when I came here as an undergraduate just to see what was safe and wasn’t safe in mountainous areas and I went out with him and we used to climb the Shawangunks I think in

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New York state, so that was another thing. And sometimes I’d go to New York just to have a look around, stay in, I think Columbia University used to have accommodation available when students weren’t in residence, like we do here, but they used to hire it out to anyone who wanted it and you could get a very reasonable room in Columbia right in the centre of New York City and I used to go up there, sometimes two or three days at a time, and just walk around New York. I don’t think I did a lot of walking or hiking then. I’d have to think actually about how else I might have spent time.

[47:37] Could you describe the mixers or tell us a story of attending one?

Well, we’d all arrive, I mean there’d be a contact person in both universities and then we’d arrive and like a reception room, a place where you might have a small dance, something like that, and you would just start chatting with the girls. It was extremely… it was like a very… force feeding of… [laughs] The most extremely rapid, you didn’t know these people when you, well perhaps I think we did, we asked for return matches as it were and we did keep in touch with the women involved and they kept in touch with us, so it was a way of meeting women and getting to know them extremely quickly.

And were there significant relationships that developed out of mixers for you?

Not for me. No, I didn’t meet anyone I kept in touch with from the mixer, but… and I can’t recollect – oh yes, I do – one of my best friends did meet his future wife at one of these things, they’re still married, happily married. So some people, in some cases it led to permanent friendships and sometimes to marriage and other times it was just a nice way of meeting some girls and having their company for a time.

These were undergraduates?

These were all undergraduates, yes.

[49:26] How then did you meet your wife, you mentioned…?

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Well, I met her in Princeton because, oh that’s another thing we used to do, there was a folk dance evening or group within the town which met once a week and we used to, most of my friends who I’ve kept in touch with used to go along to that and we used to do folk dances and that did lead to several permanent, more permanent relationships, including, that’s where I met my wife actually.

Could you tell the story of meeting your wife and then how that relationship developed?

Well, I met her at one of these dances and eventually, you know, after several weeks we became quite friendly and she was an editor at the Princeton University Press and she graduated from Barnard in New York, which at the time I think was essentially, I think it’s now – no, it is separate I think still – but it’s essentially like Radcliffe and Harvard used to be, so Barnard and Columbia were and maybe still are. And we became serious and got engaged and after some time we got married.

Where were you married?

In, [laughs] well, another story. Her family was divorced, her father and mother had separated rather acrimoniously so we both decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to be married in a formal way with the family being present, so I suppose in a sense I eloped with her, I don’t know if that’s true or not. Well, we didn’t have any relatives present at the time we were married. We decided not to marry in New Jersey and she loved a place called Marblehead in Massachusetts and so we went up to Massachusetts to marry. And it was very funny getting the permission to do so because it wasn’t New Jersey. Went along to the, I suppose it was the equivalent of the, I don’t know, registry office or something, can’t remember the details. And we were asked, you know, tried to get permission for this to take place and the question was, why do you want to be married in Massachusetts. And so Judy said well, we like Marblehead. And they didn’t quite know what to put down, but I think they put down on the reason for choosing Marblehead, ‘for aesthetic reasons’. [laughs] And I think we were married in probably Marblehead Town Hall by the Chief Justice there or whatever he was called, a chap called Justice Blagdon, as I recollect, and that was it. Came back to New Jersey, I continued studying, Judy continued editing and she also helped, she taught me how to write, basically. I think she was very good at teaching. Well, she used to write herself actually, she used to write stories and novels and things and well, we

Alan Smith Page 86 C1379/65 Track 4 were totally different people with totally different interests, but that was one of the nice things about it actually.

What were your wife’s interests?

Well, she graduated from Barnard, she did two senior theses, you normally do one. She did two: one in religion and one in philosophy and I’ve started reading – as I say, she died a couple of years ago – and I’ve started reading some of her books recently, fascinating stuff which I’d never come across before. There’s a book I’m halfway through called The Pre-Socratic Philosophers and I hadn’t come across this way of analysing old texts, or fragments of old texts and it amazes me how much the classicists get out of such little evidence. But, you know, she had a very wide range of interests. She was always interested in, especially in poetry, loved reading, wasn’t very… she probably could have developed her artistic talents but she didn’t. She loved music but didn’t play any instruments, though she had a good singing voice. And she was, you know, she was a wonderful wife actually.

[54:25] What at this time was the level and nature of her interest in your work?

She was interested but not deeply, I think. I mean she made a joke about one of her encounters with geology, because in American liberal arts education you get exposed to some science as well as arts and history and so on, humanities. And geology’s a favourite subject because it’s regarded as a soft science, or it was regarded as soft science then, or soft subject because there aren’t many equations in it. A lot of it was descriptive, qualitative, and so she used to, for her science subjects she did actually take or read geology. I think the Americans call these courses, for men at least, they call them’ rocks for jocks’, which is a standard subject to take and she told me a funny joke about it just shows you how, well, I let you draw your own conclusions, but she was talking about, she said she had talked about indigenous rocks when she meant igneous rocks, and so on. But she, I mean she did take an interest in it and did help me with it. But I know one of the things she edited at Princeton was a book called Physics for the Enquiring Mind by, oh, I can’t remember, it might have been somebody Rogers, which was intended to be a book explaining physics to people who had no mathematical background, which is quite a task. And I tried to help her with some of that. But I think she might have regarded me, well at times she did say so, that I was so dogmatic about some things that she thought could happen, which couldn’t

Alan Smith Page 87 C1379/65 Track 4 happen scientifically, so she accused me of being arrogant about this, which is perfectly reasonable.

What sort of things?

Oh, I can’t remember an example, but I would say, no, that’s not possible. And she’d say, how do you know, and I said well, scientifically it’s just not possible, you see and I’m very dogmatic about it and I did try and explain it sometimes, but in a sense you do need a background, especially if it’s physics and so on. So she, I’m not sure if she ever accepted these as explanations but she realised what I thought about them.

And you say that she helped you to some extent?

Well, she helped me a great deal, as I say, when I was writing my thesis. She wrote my thesis, I mean she typed my thesis and used to, as an editor, she would edit it in the terms of the English and also the sense and the way of expressing things and it read much better subsequently and I learnt a lot about how to write properly. Well not properly, but you know, write well, better. Not well but better, through her. And it’s interesting actually, looking back, how one wrote a thesis in those days. You had these stencils actually, which had wax on them. The typewriter would essentially release or cut out a hole in the stencil somehow, interesting to think how that happened, but anyway, you’d end up with a stencil which had all the letters cut out and then you put that on a duplicator or I think it was a Roneo machine or something like that, and the ink used to come through the bits that had been cut out and you could then run off as many copies as you wanted. But it was a real pain and if you made a mistake you had to paint the holes made by the wrong letters, had to paint over them and create a waxed film which could then be cut for the proper words and letters. So she did all that typing for me.

[59:03] And what happened at the end of your PhD?

Well, we had a public examination, as is typical of American PhDs, and what that meant in Princeton was that anybody who wanted to could come along to the examination and usually PhD students got their friends sitting in the back row, not exactly waving rattles, but supporting, morally supporting the defence and I don’t remember much about my defence at all except that I

Alan Smith Page 88 C1379/65 Track 4 got through. I mean I can remember a funny – well, it’s not really funny – but we had a chap with a wonderful name called Elmer Bierwagen who was the only one of our class actually who left the subject and became a realtor, as they say in the States, an estate agent. But he wrote a thesis on similar rocks to the ones I wrote on. I wasn’t there at the time but people, there was a chap on his committee, examination committee, rather fierce sort of person who said, ‘Well Elmer’, and one of the problems with the rocks he was looking at, which I had been looking at as well, was were they deposited in the sea or in a lake, and he was asked, they said, ‘Well Elmer, are these marine or lacustrine?’ And Elmer was so terrified he fainted. The story is that as he… he was heard to say as he collapsed, ‘Shallow seas, shallow seas’. I don’t know if that’s true, but apparently the department didn’t cancel the examination, they just put some, revived him and carried on. But it’s quite a, well I suppose all PhD examinations are quite difficult and fearsome, depending on how you feel you’ve done and what your nature is, but it was quite a public occasion actually. I’ve done an examination in France for a PhD, or a doctorat de l’etat , I think it was. I can’t remember actually which one it was, but everything there was fixed up beforehand, but in the sense that the candidate had been approved, all he had to do was to sort of make a plausible defence but you were not allowed to ask penetrating questions which would show some deficiency in what the candidate had done, whereas in the States it’s very much a, you know, you can ask anything you like and anybody passing through the department at that time, if they want to can take part in that public examination. So if it’s a sabbatical visitor or a day visitor even, if they wanted to could sit in and ask questions. I think the American PhD was and probably still is better than the British PhD on the whole, partly because it takes longer and you get more of a chance to chew over the problem than you do here. And very few people finish here in three years. I know they’re supposed to, but it’s now three and a half years. When I went to Princeton they hoped we would finish in three years and mine was three and a half years, I was working part-time for the fourth year, and now PhDs generally are about five years in the States. But I think you’re working some of that time for your, in quotes, your professor. I don’t know.

[1:02:45] And then what decisions did you make at the end of the PhD, what to do?

Well, I first of all, I thought I could stay in the States and I probably could have done but I didn’t know at the time. I probably could have stayed in the States because my wife was American, but I didn’t realise that at the time, or we didn’t realise that. Though I did apply for and get

Alan Smith Page 89 C1379/65 Track 4 interviewed by and did accept an offer of a job from one of the oil companies in the States, Standard Oil of California I think it was, and it was a fascinating job. They were, there was a geological structure which was quite important in some oil fields they were looking at and they didn’t understand how they formed and the project was to go to a place where they were very well exposed and you could see what was going on and try and come up with a better understanding of them, and this place where they were very well exposed was actually in the Grand Canyon, so I would have been doing fieldwork in the Grand Canyon.

So why didn’t you…

On industrial salaries. [laughs] Which sounded very nice, but it never came to that because I thought I had to go back and so what I did, I wrote to my supervisors here and said, you know, I’ve finished a PhD at Princeton and I’m going to be looking for a job, do you know of any, and they all suggested academic jobs, none of them said, you know, although I had been offered these industrial jobs, which I would have been quite happy to take, I mean I haven’t really… I keep in touch with industry and we’ve been supported by industry in my research. I don’t regard industry as a sort of dirty word, which some people used to do. I mean just as an aside, industry has a tremendous amount of data which they never have time to look at properly apart from how it affects the existence or non-existence of oil and gas, not just the oil industry. And because it’s, you know, so much is involved they are one of the driving forces behind new technologies. So they have access to wonderful data which in universities we don’t have access to. It’s a pity. I can understand it, but it’s a pity that we don’t. It’s a pity that they can’t write it up and let us know what’s going on. [1:05:28] Anyway, so I wrote off to my supervisors and there was a job offered at geophysics here, working with Teddy Bullard, Sir Edward Bullard as he was, and a chap called Jack Miller on dating rocks. I also had an offer of a lectureship at Durham – no, was it Durham? – Newcastle, with Keith Runcorn’s group, and an informal approach by people at Oxford. So I had several offers and I took the one at Bullard Labs because it was the most interesting one I think.

[1:06:19] What was the informal offer from Oxford, which group there?

Well, they wanted – it was quite a small department at the time I think – and they wanted somebody to do geophysics at Oxford. And I wouldn’t have been suitable for that really because

Alan Smith Page 90 C1379/65 Track 4 although I can understand geophysics I can’t, I don’t originate it. I mean they really wanted somebody who’s not a geologist. You can’t be a geologist and a physicist in the sense of originating things in both fields I don’t think. Because to originate anything in any field you have to do a lot of work and understand the ins and outs of it and if you choose geology you may understand what geophysicists are doing but you wouldn’t have had the time and energy, unless you were really exceptional, to originate something in geophysics itself. You probably need to have, well you need to understand more mathematics than I would have time to try to get into, and so on. I mean it’s very nice to be offered a possibility of a place at Oxford, but as I say, I took the stuff at Bullard. There’s a long story here which actually still reverberates through my career. When I arrived at geophysics the project initially was to collect rocks, or get hold of rocks I should say, from South America and Africa, date them and see if the dates on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, that is the bits that would have been joined together, whether they were actually of the same age. So this would be a verification of the fit between South America and Africa at some time in the past. Now the chap who made the fit initially was a chap called Jim Everett. [1:08:22] Do you want me to tell you all the background between this, because it’s quite fascinating. Are you warm enough? Is that radiator on, do you know? Yes, there was an extraordinary Tasmanian called Sam Carey, some people used to call him the Tasmanian Devil, but he was convinced continental drift had taken place long before it was considered respectable academically in the northern hemisphere. And he had a very good delivery, very much like a Baptist minister, and when I was at Princeton he came through to give us what we call a, I can’t remember if it’s called the Tea Club or the Coffee Club talk at about four o’clock in the afternoon or five o’clock in the afternoon, intended to be one hour long where somebody would talk about their research. And he came along, talked about his research and showed qualitatively why he believed the continents had drifted and Harry Hess, who knew him, stopped the proceedings at six o’clock or something like that and said look, why don’t we all go home for a bit, have some supper and then we’ll reassemble at eight o’clock, we’ll continue, because it was very interesting stuff, it was fascinating stuff actually and it was so well delivered by this preacher almost, and we went on for another two hours and we realised that he was on to something but nobody could put it all together in a way it’s now put together in plate tectonics. But in addition to doing this he wanted to show how well the coast – not the coastlines – the edges of the continents of South America and Africa fitted together. And you don’t do that at the coastline because the coastline migrates very rapidly with a small change of sea level, you do it at the edge of the continent where it goes down to the oceanic depths. And he had done this as well as you could possibly do visually; he’d made a big globe, traced off the bathymetric

Alan Smith Page 91 C1379/65 Track 4 contours, that is the contours at the edge of the continents going down into the oceanic depths, selected one of them at about, I don’t know whether it was a thousand fathom or two thousand fathom, I can’t remember. A thousand metres or two thousand metres, it doesn’t matter. But he traced them off very carefully on to plastic caps that he could move around on this globe, he then fitted the two contours of Africa and South America together as well as he could visually and that was his starting point. It really was a very good fit. Now, this was published by, in a symposium I think he organised, and it looked very convincing to most people and it was shown to Harold Jeffreys who was in this college as the senior fellow at the time, or I don’t know if he was senior fellow at that time, in the 1960s anyway, and Harold denied that there was a fit. He just said, I deny there is a fit, you see. When Bullard heard about this he said we must do something about this, so what he did was to get hold of a graduate student, Jim Everett, and said look Jim, can you write a program that fits these two contours together, which he did. It was a very elegant program because the computers were not very large at that time, they were some of the first computers. EDSAC I think was the name of the computer he had that did this. And for Jim and Bullard and myself, the question was not so much do they fit together but how good is the fit. I mean you can have different degrees of fit. And so Jim’s program quantitatively defined how good that fit was. [1:13:12] And I got involved with fitting things together partly because I had this physical background and understood the mathematics involved and partly because I’d had some experience with computers at Princeton because I had been a research assistant in computing when I first got there for one year. And also because I was a geologist I was the ideal person in a sense to say whether or not you could keep Iceland in a reconstruction, whether it was plausible to keep Iceland in a reconstruction or whether you could get rid of it. Should you keep Rockall or get rid of it. And I just adopted a purely pragmatic point of view with a bit of geology saying well, obviously Iceland’s in the way, it wasn’t there when they fitted together, so we’ll get rid of it. But Rockall looks as if it’s, if we get rid of Rockall we’re going to have a big hole in this reconstruction so we’ll keep it. It was almost as basic as that. I mean it was very, almost unscientific, but on the other hand essentially what we were trying to do was to fit continents together so there were no gaps in the fit, because we I think intuitively felt at the time that if the continents fitted together they fitted perfectly and they had just been changed, their outlines had been changed as a result of separation and anything that, having fitted together things as well as possible that lay on top of that and spoiled the fit, as it were, we thought there must be a reason, geological reason for that and in the case of Iceland it’s obvious now, but we didn’t know that at the time. So I was able to use my geological knowledge to fit together the north Atlantic, whereas Jim Everett had fitted together the south Atlantic. So we fitted North

Alan Smith Page 92 C1379/65 Track 4

America to Europe and Greenland and North America to – we had to rotate Spain, close up the Bay of Biscay as Carey had said – and Africa and so on, so we got a, it wasn’t Pangaea quite, it was the major continents around the Atlantic Ocean were fitted together. And the reason I was involved with that was simply because we wanted the best fit possible on which to plot the data we were going to get from dating these rocks from around the margins of Africa and South America. So that’s basically how I got into this business which is again, another substantial part of my research about what the world looked like in the past.

[1:15:43] Before you go on with that, I’m going to pick up on lots of things.

Do you want to do that later or…

I’ll just do a couple of things now, then we’ll pause. One of the other offers that you had was Keith Runcorn’s group. Can you say a little more about the nature of that offer or interview or… This was the, of the three things, this was one of the three things that you might have done when you returned.

Yeah. It was, well he ran the palaeomagnetics group at Newcastle, which along with Irving and so on had really shown that continents drifted paleomagnetically and for some reason, which I can’t – if you’re going to see Carol Williams, be interested to know what she feels about this – but to my mind Irving and Runcorn and possibly Updike – I can’t remember who was in the group, but certainly Runcorn and Irving were the two principle people in the group, and Blackett perhaps to some extent, although I think he was more involved with the techniques and the field rather than the implications of what they were finding. They had shown really, I won’t say convincingly, but they had shown that it was highly likely the continents had drifted long before this business of the fitting the continents together quantitatively had been undertaken, and I don’t know why that was never sort of part of the mainstream. I know Jeffreys’ arguments against palaeomagnetic evidence was that it wasn’t, the areas are too large that you couldn’t, because the areas were so large you could not say that the continents had drifted. That was his, I think that was his basic argument for all of his life as to why he didn’t believe continents had drifted based on palaeomagnetic data, apart from the mechanism which is another story. So I presumably would have gone to Newcastle and worked with Runcorn in his lab and with my physics background and my geological background would have been able to help possibly understand

Alan Smith Page 93 C1379/65 Track 4 and develop the data necessary to show that continents had drifted and just make that much more precise. I don’t know. Because I don’t remember what he actually said to me in terms of what he was offering.

Was this a telephone conversation or…

It was a letter.

Letter.

Oxford was only a casual remark by Professor Wager, nothing recorded to sort of… I think I went to Oxford to give a talk about the reconstruction and he came up to me afterwards and said, you know, would you be interested in something, and I declined that. Because I thought, you know, it wasn’t quite for me really. Not that I knew what was quite for me, but anyway. I really did enjoy working up at geophysics, it employed all my training and it was something that was completely new and we didn’t know where it was going to go to actually.

[end of track 4]

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[Track 5]

Could you say some more about the year you spent at Princeton as a computer research assistant?

Yes. When I arrived in Princeton I hadn’t got a scholarship or anything like that. I had a travel grant, a Fulbright travel grant which took me over on the Queen Mary – the Queen Elizabeth. And so I had to work as what is called a graduate assistant and there were several kinds of them, the principle ones being teaching assistant or a research assistant and as I say, there were one or two others. And I became a research assistant for one of the geophysicists in Princeton who had some money from the NSF to interpret gravity anomalies and he wanted me to write a program that would do this. I didn’t know anything about computing at the time but there was a large computer out at, I think it’s Forrestal, which is a physics centre. They were working on trying to understand plasmas, ultimately trying to understand what would happen in a fusion machine – this is the 1960s and they still haven’t got there yet. But it was essential to do these calculations and at night anybody else in the university could book in to use this computer. So I was able to learn how to program, I suppose I taught myself mostly, and carry out the programs by working at night. And I used to quite often work at three or four in the morning or something like that, which I didn’t mind. And it was extremely clumsy way of doing things in the light of what we do now, but you had business cards, IBM business cards, which had your program on it and you had to do I think two or three passes through a machine that would turn it into machine language that the machine could read and it would actually work fast. But of course, the program wouldn’t work if you’d left out a particular hyphen or a comma or something like that, so you were much, much more careful with writing a program and checking it out than you would be nowadays, because nowadays you just write the program, if it doesn’t work it tells you what’s wrong and you correct it and off it goes, almost instantaneously for small programs. But that’s how I learnt how to compute so that’s another reason why I was very lucky, I had a little extra arrow to my bow, as it were, when I came back to Britain. I wasn’t just a simple physicist who’d done something or a simple geologist, I had a bit of programming experience, which meant I could use Jim Everett’s program after a bit of training to help fit the northern continents together. So I was very lucky in that way.

What was the programming language?

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[laughs] I can’t remember. I know it ended up as Assembler language. I think there was, yes I remember an acronym – S-O-A-P, SOAP – which stood for something. It’s probably, AP might be Assembler Program and I don’t know what S-O stands for. But it was very clumsy, very primitive by what we do nowadays and what we’re likely to do in the future, but it enabled one to do these things. And actually while I was at Princeton I did my thesis in four years, as I said, three and a half years really because as at the last year I had also run out of money, but I got another, a continuation of my research assistantship and I was able to use this huge IBM 7090, or something like that, which seemed to occupy a large room all by itself and served by lots of people. And that was the university mainframe computer, so that was a day when everyone thought everything had to be done on a mainframe because the PC hadn’t been invented and that sort of thing.

And so this is, you continued, you worked on this after your PhD?

Oh, I worked, at the end of three years I hadn’t finished my PhD but I talked to the chap I did the first year’s work with and said, you know, is there any chance of getting a job for the fourth year. And he said, well I can give you some money for part-time work and you can finish your thesis around that. Because in the second and third year I was lucky, I got two fellowships based on what I did in classes and so on. So I was able in the second and third years to, I had no monetary worries at all. In fact I was able to save enough in those two years to fly back to England for one Christmas actually. [05:27] It was an interesting experience in itself because they were all, I think the first, I don’t know whether the first jets had come out, but I remember, we used to, we flew first to Goose Bay in Labrador where we refuelled and then we flew to Reykjavik or Keflavik or somewhere in Iceland where we refuelled again, so it took quite a long time to get from A to B and it was nice because when you got to Iceland they served you, we had breakfast in a café, not on the plane – or restaurant – and we had china, which I’d forgotten all about, basically. And we had a tablecloth and things like that, which on the whole you didn’t tend to get in American restaurants. Well, I suppose you got china but I’d forgotten about what it was like to be essentially a European, compared with being an American.

What was your parents’ view of the marriage?

Sorry?

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Of your marriage in America. What was your parents’ view of that given that…

Ah, they…

They weren’t there, yeah.

Well, they were probably sad and unhappy a bit but they were, you know, when they met Julia they were delighted to… they got on very well actually.

You’re saying ‘we’ about this flight home so I assume…

It’s a royal ‘we’. [laughs] Sorry.

[06:54] Could you say more about Sam Carey’s talk in the department at Princeton on the qualitative fit. Perhaps you could start with describing in more detail the model, if he had that with him, I don’t know?

He didn’t have his model with him and he didn’t refer to it a great deal, possibly because – and I can’t remember the sequence of events, I’d have to look it up in the literature – but possibly because he was toying with another idea at the time, because he’s probably best known not just for his – well, he isn’t well known for the fit of his continents so much as his ideas that the earth had expanded and there are several other, several other people had suggested this at one time I think. And it was partly due to the discoveries of the kinds of things that, Sirius in particular had a very, a dwarf companion which was extremely dense and he had the idea somehow that when he looked at the earth and saw all the seas and the continents he wondered whether you could actually put all the continents together into one earth covering mass and the seas would presumably be on top of that. But if you’re going to put them all together and get rid of the ocean floor, what you would have to do would be to make the earth much smaller, or significantly smaller than it is today because the oceans are about two-thirds of the earth’s surface. And he came up with the idea that that’s what actually was the whole history of the earth was related to expanding earth. And in fact, I mean I don’t know how true this is, but it’s a good story, that he had people, graduate students, who actually looked for a mineral they called Careyite in the field, which would have this mysterious property of being able to expand

Alan Smith Page 97 C1379/65 Track 5 appropriately. I don’t know how true that is, but it was a story that used to circulate about him. So I think he was, he was really baffled and well, he didn’t have a solution really. He was baffled by things he called sphenochasms, which were things like the Bay of Biscay, which like triangles that opened out, and also he was baffled – or not baffled – but he was very interested in what he called oroclines, which were sharp bends in mountain ranges in particular. And it’s these that gave him the ideas about, certainly continental motion and break up. I mean he thought, I think one of his little mottoes might have been you can solve all these problems by straightening out the oroclines. So you had something like the Carpathians going down into Turkey eventually and they have this big bend in them and he thought well, they weren’t like that originally, they were straight, so you had to change the geometry of the continents so they became straight. Or there was this big, you know, the Aleutian Arc has this has an angular relationship with the Rocky Mountains as you go towards, along the Cordillera towards Alaska and he thought that could be solved just by straightening that out. But there was clearly something in what he said and we didn’t know, well nobody knew what it was, but you could dismiss it but it should have left a very nagging feeling in your mind because he was on to something important.

And if not his globe then, or his model, what did he show in this talk in order to make the argument?

I think he showed maps that appeared in his book, from his book which was called Continental Drift: A Symposium or something like that. He wrote all his ideas up, I think published them in colour in a book which was published by Hobart, the University of Tasmania, Hobart, and my recollection is that he, well my guess, I can’t be absolutely sure but I think what he did was to make slides of these and show them in his talk.

Do you remember your response to what he was saying?

My response was, I don’t quite believe it but on the other hand I don’t know what… there’s something here interesting, don’t know what it is.

And what about other members of the department who were there?

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Well, we all felt it was fascinating and I don’t think anyone really came out and said it’s a lot of nonsense, because we, at that time we had a very vague idea of what the earth was like and how it behaved and that sort of thing and he obviously, you know, especially with, well, other people had done this sort of thing before and there was a chap, I can’t remember if he’s Swiss or French, but Argand had actually applied the same kind of logic that Carey used globally to the evolution of the Mediterranean region. I mean he thought, Corsica and Sardinia had swung away from France, the Bay of Biscay had opened because Spain had swung away from France, which was essentially what Carey was saying, but he was saying look at it globally, not just locally. But it was a very, you know, very interesting time. I mean after we had done all this fitting, Jim Everett and I and so on, Bullard’s Lab, well, what used to be called Madingley Rise at the time, had large blue charts, I don’t know if you know those blue hydrographic charts which were digitised by Jim and me to get the reconstruction going. We used to have lunch there and, you know, even people like Dan McKenzie and so on, we were all sitting round, puzzling about what on earth was going on. We used to have a little idea and discuss it over lunch and realise it was nonsense and we just didn’t cotton on to these things, even after the discovery by Fred Vine and John Matthews of ocean floor spreading, we still didn’t understand how it all worked.

Do you remember any of the little ideas that you had sitting there?

No.

Theories about…

No. Baffled. No, I don’t remember.

What year did you come back to Britain to work with this chap?

’63.

[13:42] ’63. Now what I’d like to do is sort of to go quite slowly step by step through all of the work on the fit of the continents, so what happens first when you come back in 1963 and you’re appointed to work with Jack Miller, I think you said, on the dating of rocks either side of the Atlantic. So what are you doing first, sort of practically day to day when you come back?

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I can’t remember, they’re bound to be mixed up in terms of what I did. But my first approach to this problem was to find out what the countries were around this area. We knew some of them like Brazil and so on, but there were lots of others and also of course in Africa as well. Then I would try and find out some contact in one or other of these countries, usually either geological survey and/or an oil company working in those countries, and then I would write a letter explaining what I wanted, or what we wanted and why and what kind of rocks we wanted, basically. We wanted dateable rocks so they would be metamorphic or igneous rocks and we needed a certain size sample and after a few months, weeks, the samples started to come in. Not everyone sent them, but there were probably, I’m not sure whether the British Colonial Survey or whatever, the Overseas Survey still existed in places like Nigeria, which were important, and Sierra Leone and so on, but irrespective of that, many of the people, specially in South America, they sent us what we wanted. And the next job would have been to break these up, separate the minerals out and date them. I did start a little bit of that, but I, well, as I say, to cut a long story short again, I passed the project on to somebody else. But during that period I also got to know Jim Everett and saw his fit of the continents, but I can’t remember when that happened, though I do have the tapes in my department room, the original paper tapes, we were using paper tapes rather than paper cards. I had the paper tapes which we used to make the fit of the North Atlantic actually.

[16:27] So what could you see of what Jim Everett had already done on the fitting of Africa and South America, what could he at that stage show you, because this isn’t published work, but this is something that he’d been doing. What could he at that point show you?

Well, the paper with the maps in it was published in 1965.

Yes, that’s with you and…

Yeah. So we had finished that work, written it up and it had been published by about two years after the work was done. Now Jim’s work was probably done a little bit earlier, well it would have been done a little bit earlier. What I don’t know, and you’d have to ask Jim about this, what I don’t know is whether he had drawn large maps showing how these things fitted together at that time. Because the actual, the way we made the maps was quite primitive in a way

Alan Smith Page 100 C1379/65 Track 5 because I think we were able to digitise the submarine contour and the coastline, but because these were maps of the earth and you were displaying a spherical shape on to a flat piece of paper, you had to find some way of doing the projection correctly not only for something like Africa which we might have fixed and brought South America in, but you had to, if South America was brought in to fit against Africa without any distortion of the actual geometrical relationships, you had to have a program that rotated things as well, and Jim wrote that. And in fact to make the map, what we did was to put in what we call the grid crossing points, like every ten degrees we’d put a, like say along the equator we’d have zero zero, which is zero longitude and zero latitude, and then we’d go – or perhaps it was the other way round – we would have zero, zero, zero – ten zeros – we’d have all these crossing points which were just crosses on the map. So to draw the map, we didn’t actually draw the map by – can I borrow this? We didn’t draw the map, we didn’t have the gridlines, the geographic gridlines like this, what we had were a series of crosses representing the crossing of latitude and longitude lines and then by eye and using drafting curves and so on, we would construct the map manually. And having constructed that geographic grid we would by eye take the numerical values of the coastlines and the bathymetry and draw those in manually as well. So it wasn’t drawn by computer in a sense, it was drawn mostly by hand using computer generated crossing points and visually putting in the latitude and longitude points of coastlines and the bathymetry.

And to clarify for the listener, bathymetry is because you were matching the continental edge…

That’s right.

…which I think from the paper you took to be 500 fathoms on the slope?

Yeah, Jim tried two values of the edge of the continent and he tried not just two, three or four actually, and he showed that the minimum was the closest to a particular value and that was a value that I used to fit the northern continents. I didn’t try the whole series of things. The northern continents are much messier, basically, specially trying to fit Greenland to Labrador, things like that. But it was a huge amount of manual labour in making those maps.

Where was that done?

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At Bullard Labs. We had a big table and spread out, we probably drew them on what’s called Permatrace, which is a semi-transparent, can be opaque, not completely transparent, but I think it’s a semi-transparent, well like a plastic film almost. Can’t think of anything… don’t think we use it very much today. But it was quite strong and it was the standard drafting material and used by engineers for making blueprints and things like that. And it had to be transparent to some extent, a greater or lesser extent, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to make blueprint or dyelines from it. So we made this map, get it just right, and then we would print the same size dyelines off it, big ones.

What are dyelines?

Sorry, they’re like blueprints. They’re not quite the same as blueprints, but it’s a way of printing on paper from a diagram that’s transparent. I don’t know how it works. It’s not quite the same as a dyeline, because a dyeline usually has a background which is dark and the actual lines are white, but the prints we had, the lines were black or dark blue, but they were called dyelines. You used to take them up to a shop on Regent Street I think, where they had a big machine that could do this. It was a standard engineering method of printing things.

[22:14] Why had Jim Everett embarked on this construction of a computer program to match the southern…

It really, well it was Teddy – it’s a long story – but essentially Harold Jeffreys saw Carey’s reconstructions of the continents, of South America and Africa and just thought they didn’t work. Don’t know why. But Bullard having heard Jeffreys’s comments and using his own eyes saw that the fit was actually very good, he thought, given all the uncertainties, and probably couldn’t be bettered visually. I mean Bullard was a great believer actually in the human eye as a good judge of pattern recognition and pattern fitting. When the ocean floor anomalies became known through Vine and Matthews’s work, he I think more or less said that if it doesn’t fit by eye it’s not going to fit. So he realised it was a very good fit but he also realised that it would be a really, a significant advance to have a quantitative fit, and so he asked Jim if he could write a program that would do this and Jim’s a very good physicist and he wrote this program and that’s how the maps were produced.

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[23:51] And for the, obviously there’s a description of the operation of this program in the paper, but I wondered whether you could, for the non-scientific audience, say how a computer program is able to produce a quantitative fit between two continental edges.

Well, the first thing you do is to look at the curves that are the edges of the continents, edge of South America and edge of Africa, those curves would be represented by points along, well it’s like a dot-to-dot reconstruction. And what you do, what you get the computer to do is to essentially move the two lines together by turning them about a point that’s on the earth, you can move any two lines together by doing this, and it then measures the misfit, that is the difference in longitude actually, the difference in the east-west direction, between the corresponding points on those curves. So if you had a place where there’s a big overlap, the difference in the points on the same latitude line, which is what you’re… you use the latitude line as, you use the position of those points on a latitude line or the interpolator’s position of those points on the latitude line, and the difference between those points, the longitude points on those two curves is a term you use in the misfit. So if you have a big gap there’s a large difference along a latitude line of the two points, if it’s a perfect fit there’s no difference at all. So what you do is to go, choose a particular point about which you turn these curves and then you find the actual amount of turning minimises the gaps and overlaps for that particular point that you’re turning them about. And then you go to another point in the globe – the computer does this of course – do the same thing again and you build a mesh almost, it wasn’t a mesh in this particular case, but it’s equivalent to a mesh, of the values of the misfits for different rotations that you make on the globe. And the one which is least is the one that you select as the best fit.

So it’s like a kind of a trial and error where the computer does all of the repetitive turning and testing?

Exactly. As I say, it wasn’t… because computers were rather slow and those days Jim had a very good program that would actually sort of track along, well it would make its own track and find a minimum of its own, rather than looking at a whole grid it would somehow find its way into the minimum. And what we hoped and Jim hoped, and generally it was true, that you would find the deepest minimum, because obviously when you’re fitting curves that don’t really match together but did match in the past, they’re slightly different, there will be another, you might find two points, one of which gives the best fit, but another point might give you a very similar fit or

Alan Smith Page 103 C1379/65 Track 5 it might in some cases give you a better fit. But we didn’t examine all that possible space, fitting space if you like, at the time, but I think the eye, the fit by the eye was very good and the fit that Jim made was very similar to that made by eye, for South America and Africa.

[27:54] And so when you first met Jim, were you helping him to turn what he’d already done with the computer for the southern continents into the maps?

No. He, I’m pretty sure he must have made a map himself originally. I can’t see how else he could have shown me what he did and I’ve never read his thesis, I probably should, but basically I think Teddy said, I think he thought – I don’t know whether I suggested it or Jim suggested it or Teddy suggested it – but we all felt we should do something on the North Atlantic continents as well and that’s what, as I say, I think I did. It’s very interesting, when I met Jim, I saw him, as I say, a few years ago in Perth, and we were trying to recollect how it had happened, the sort of questions you’re asking now, and we both realised we had faulty memories. Because Jim thought he’d done the North Atlantic and I said no, I did it because I have the tapes at home that show this, and then there was an equivalent in my case where I couldn’t remember what had happened. Oh, he said yes, don’t you remember, you used to come in at night, at midnight sometimes, and run this program, and I had no recollection of that at all. So it was very interesting writing this up to realise some, what, thirty or forty years after the event, just how our memories were playing tricks with us actually.

So it seems as if you had operated the program.

I did operate the program eventually, but I don’t remember sitting down with Jim and doing it with him while he taught me how to do these things. It’s just something I’d forgotten about completely. And he didn’t know or remember that I had actually fitted the northern continents together.

[29:53] How did you go, if we can now take as slowly as possible, step by step including details that might seem rather boring to you, but I’d like to know sort of precisely day to day, because presumably this took quite a long time, how you practically went about doing what Jim had done for the southern continents, but doing it for the more complicated Europe, Greenland…

Alan Smith Page 104 C1379/65 Track 5

North America.

North America.

Well, I don’t know if Jim did this, but what I did was to get a large sheet of tracing paper and trace off the edges of the continents in those regions and visually with another piece of tracing paper try to make a visual fit, more or less the way Carey had done. And in, well certainly up in the polar regions it’s much easier because you can regard the earth as flat to a good approximation over a large area there because it’s quite close, you’re not moving things a great deal if you’ve got reasonable maps. Though it was a little bit tricky I think in that case as I recollect, again I can’t be sure, but I was thinking it was a bit tricky because the maps, most of the maps, or most of the world was on a Mercator projection which you can’t do this sort of thing with and there may well have been some polar maps, North Pole and South Pole, which I must have used because otherwise I don’t see how I could have done it. When you can’t show the North Pole on a Mercator map anyway so there must have been a different map for that region. But I tried to do what I thought was a visual fit. And that’s where I suggested getting rid of this and keeping that and that sort of thing. And then I would computerise it by reading off the co-ordinates of the points on these curves and then using Jim’s program would fit two curves that seemed to have a reasonable fit, do exactly what he did, look around the area of the places where you could rotate the earth and get a good fit, or rotate the curves rather, and get a good fit. And then it was an iterative process, I kept on, just kept on doing that until I had what seemed to be a visually good fit that I could justify also by computer output.

How did you move from the tracing paper when you’re joining visually to the computer? I mean exactly how did you do it?

Well, you have a curve, so a continuous curve like a line on a piece of paper with wiggles in it, and then you put little points on the lines. If the line’s fairly straight you probably wouldn’t put a lot of points on it, but where it goes round a curve you try to simulate the curve as well as you can by putting in the appropriate density of points that you pick so that the curve – you know, it’s like, again, like a dot-to-dot thing. If you have an animal’s nose and you’re trying to draw an animal on a dot-to-dot, you have to have a fair number of points around its nose, whereas the jaw would be fairly straight. So there was, I think, what I can’t be sure of is whether we tried to have as even distribution of points along the line as possible or whether we put more, I think we put a

Alan Smith Page 105 C1379/65 Track 5 higher density of points in places where there was a curve to bring it out properly. But in other cases sometimes, again, it’s not really scientific, or very scientific, we could see visually – and Jim did this I think with the South Atlantic, it’s more obvious there – there’s something like the Walvis Ridge comes off Africa, sticks out into the Atlantic and it just wasn’t, well, we felt that was, or he felt that was a younger thing and I think he truncated the ridge so it wouldn’t appear in that curve. There was a lot of fudging really. We wanted to get as good a fit as possible and obviously, by cutting out these funny areas the fit was improved and we didn’t know at the time that it was actually younger than the time the continents broke up, which confirmed the fact that it was anomalous, but it just seemed intuitively I suppose it wasn’t, it can’t have been there when the continents were fitted together. So there were bits of, you know short stretches where the bathymetry was completely ignored and other places where it was put in.

[34:39] What did you choose to ignore in terms of the northern fitting and why?

Well, I ignored Iceland because when you made a fit of the northern continents using Iceland it was a very poor fit, you couldn’t make a good fit of it. And I think actually Carey kept it in, as I recollect, I’ll have to look at his work again. But it made much more sense to remove it and there was every reason to remove it because there was no sign of any old rocks in Iceland, they were all volcanic, it’s erupting today at quite a phenomenal rate. I don’t know whether dates had been obtained for Iceland at that time, but it just seemed highly plausible that you could remove Iceland as something that had happened or been created after the continents separated. There were also bits in the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland – is it – yeah, Canada and western Greenland, which, where the bathymetry is difficult to digitise because the Davis Strait has a ridge going across it, this is a high area, a submarine high area going across it, which if you wanted to make a fit you had to remove. And that again is something which we now know is younger than the time the continents broke up, but it was an arbitrary decision at the time which was taken to make the fit as good as possible. And we had very little evidence in the case of the Davis Strait I think because it’s submarine, I don’t think there was much known about the geology of it at the time, but I think it did connect up with igneous rocks of quite a young age on Greenland certainly, so again, it was plausible. Again, Rockall Bank, that does have volcanics on it, you could say well why didn’t you get rid of that entirely, but it seemed obvious when you started looking at the geometry that it was an essential part of the jigsaw puzzle, if you like. And I think it, is it Porcupine Bank or Porcupine… yeah, there’s a Porcupine Bank and I think there’s

Alan Smith Page 106 C1379/65 Track 5 the Porcupine Bight and it’s not a big thing in the Atlantic and I don’t think we did much with it, but it looked as if it was one of these pieces where the bight was created by moving Porcupine Bank away from whatever it joins on to. But we didn’t get into those details. And to fit the whole lot together, that is the northern continents and the southern continents, it was obvious that we had to close up the Bay of Biscay, so that was another thing we did. But we didn’t go on to do the whole thing, that is reconstruct Gondwana, or extend our fit of the northern continents, certainly of Europe, we didn’t go into Asia or anything like that.

[37:55] Having done your dot-to-dot, as you explained, where it’s more curved you’ve got more dots and so on, how exactly did you then take those and input them into the computer, and it may be important to say what the computer at this time consisted of, in order to say how you interacted with it.

Well, you, having got the dots, you read those off, the latitude and longitude values off perhaps using dividers or something like that to do interpolation. So they were pretty crude, I think we read them off to a tenth of a degree or something like that, and then we made a paper tape which had a list of the points on those curves in order and a list of the second curve in order and that was the data for the program, and then we chose a point on the earth’s surface about which we’d move one of those curves and I think the program determined the angle, yes it must have done actually.

How did you choose the point of rotation?

Just visually. You know, we’d say if you turn it about this point it’s going to get a reasonable fit, and then we just let the computer get on with it, basically.

So you’d pick a place near to where you think it probably is and the computer makes the final adjustment by trial and error to see where it actually is.

Yes. It walks around that point, basically, and comes up with some numbers and the one that’s the best fit is the one which has the minimum overlap, minimum gap. I mean Jim had actually the same experience and I can’t remember whether he removed the Niger Delta, but I think he did remove the Niger Delta, because it was obvious to him that it just overlapped on to South

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America and it probably wasn’t there when the continents were joined together, but we didn’t know anything about the timing of that and I think he probably just joined it, removed it, as he did with the Walvis Ridge and one or two other things like that and subsequently he was proved correct. Well, I think people had said before, but that’s how it was treated.

[40:20] And for those who wouldn’t know, how at this time did you make a paper tape? You said you’d made a paper tape with the numbers on.

Yes. Ah, you had a tape which was about an inch or half an inch, well, half a centimetre, I mean a centimetre – whatever – wide, completely blank, no holes in it, and then you fed this through what is essentially a typewriter and you pressed a key and that would then automatically put in the appropriate number of holes in their correct position, so it represents say the figure nine. And say it was ninety-one you were putting in, you’d press one and you’d get another series of holes, different ones this time, so you’d have two series of holes next to one another representing ninety-one, and then you’d put in ninety-one point four and so on and then you’d have to have some space symbol, it wouldn’t have been a blank tape because it wouldn’t make sense. There would be a code for a blank tape, it might be five holes – I’m just guessing, I don’t know, don’t remember – and then you put in the next number. And that gives you a tape which has holes in it and each row of holes corresponds to a particular letter or number or symbol which the computer can read with a card reader, with, yes, to read that into the machine, what you did was to feed the tape through a tape reader which was essentially a very fast, it moved the tape in very quickly, it had, there was a light involved and I can’t remember… I think the light would go through a hole in a row and if there were two holes in that row, go through those two holes, and that would be translated somehow into code in the machine. And you get an idea of how slow things were then, the computer, the people in the computer lab were very good engineers and I think we used, I think they used valves at times rather than transistors, and relays and you could hear the program working its way through your data and it would go, rrrhhh , and whirrr , and you knew exactly where you were in the program. And sometimes it didn’t work and you knew exactly where it had crashed from the noise that you could hear from the transistors and relays, well, I say valves and relays. That was the old EDSAC machine and then of course you can do this in a fraction of a second almost, no, a few seconds on a PC these days.

So where did you make the paper tape?

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In the computer lab.

So you made it and then fed it in in the same place.

Yes.

And when did you have to use the computer, could you go whenever you wanted?

We had a ration of time I think, all the scientific departments had a certain amount of time available and of course Bullard being head of geophysics would have arranged for that somehow. I don’t know how. I can’t remember actually how we queued up. I know there was a queue at times, but I just, I cannot remember how the scheduling was done actually.

[43:46] And what was the output from, other than the noises which helped you, what was the output from the computer?

It was a series of, it was a printout on computer paper which you controlled, I mean you put in the headings and asked the program to put out what you wanted. I mean the first thing you’d probably print out would be the time, the date and who you are and everything else. Or perhaps that was all done automatically, and then underneath that you’d put, you’d output your data, in this program we output the data, wasn’t a lot, and then below that we’d have a list of all the points we’d used to turn things, the angles, and the misfit. And I presume the last one was the smallest and the best fit. I may actually have some output, I’m not sure. I know I’ve got the tapes and I’ve got the program, but I don’t know if I’ve got output.

So you’ve still got as a sort of personal archive the tape that went in?

Yes.

And when you say you’ve got the program, is that a…

It’s another tape. Oh, I may have a printout of it actually. But I think the printout may not be the original program because computing being what it was, the computer lab got rid of the old

Alan Smith Page 109 C1379/65 Track 5 program language and this program I have I think is written in what’s called Titan Autocode, which was run on the new computer that was called Titan rather than EDSAC. So that was what the output was and it was several years later that we were able to put that out as a map showing the actual misfit. Because now you can actually, in theory, and I don’t think I’ve got a program that does this, but in theory you could just put in your data and come out with the best map. I think I’d still do it in two steps, that is find the best fit, you know the latitude, longitude and angle you have to rotate things through, put that into another program that will make you a map.

But actually in this case you had to do that step by hand?

Yes.

Which you described.

Yes.

[46:13] What was the reaction of other members of staff, research students at Madingley Rise, seeing you and perhaps you and Jim doing this work?

Well, I think they were intrigued by it again, you know. We didn’t, we believed it showed there was a very good fit. What we didn’t know was what age it was and having been influenced again by Harold Jeffreys’s book when he talks about early convection, or convection in the early earth, you could make a case which is rather superficial really even at the time, because the geology didn’t quite support this, but you could and probably mentally did make a case that this was a fit when the continents were joined together way back in the early history of the earth, not that they were joined together less than 200 million years ago, which is a twentieth of the age of the earth. But, you know, it was just another intriguing piece of evidence at that time.

[47:15] And to what extent was Teddy Bullard involved in this work?

Well, he was the overall supervisor, he conceived the original project in the sense that he realised that the thing to do was to quantify this work and realised it could be done, I suppose he

Alan Smith Page 110 C1379/65 Track 5 probably thought it could be done fairly straightforwardly using the computer that was available, but I don’t think he actually, I think Jim said it, he didn’t take any part in actually running the program or writing the program or producing the results, but he conceived the original idea. So, you know, we all contributed in some way to this thing, but without Teddy’s original idea it wouldn’t have been done and without Jim’s initiative and well, expertise and abilities it wouldn’t have been done and I suppose without my background there’s a part of it wouldn’t have been done. So we were all involved but I always think that Jim did the real work actually.

Because?

Well, he wrote the program really, you couldn’t have done it… He showed how, he found out how you could do this thing on a computer which meant, you know, essentially answering the sort of questions that you’ve just asked, how do you get this data into a machine and what is going to be your measure of the best fit, what do you mean by the best fit and how do you actually get a computer to make that for you, and nobody had done that before. So I always think he, you know, all three of us contributed to this piece of work but I think Jim’s was probably the most important, though you could argue that Teddy’s was because he thought of the idea in the first place.

[49:14] When you were doing the work on the northern part of this, what input did your geological training have at this stage to that process, when you were for example identifying the continental edge or deciding on omissions and inclusions? To what extent at this stage anyway, I realise there’s explanation later, was it important that you were a geologist?

Well, as I say, you couldn’t make a good fit without removing some things and adding some things and the things that one added, or kept in rather, and the things one removed, you needed a geological knowledge to do that. I mean the geological knowledge was rather patchy at the time, but on the other hand none of it was implausible and some of it was, you know, it was all plausible and you wouldn’t know that unless you had had a geological training. I think that would be fair to say.

In order to know what it was you were excluding?

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Yes. You weren’t throwing out huge lumps of continental crust, for example, which wouldn’t make sense to throw them out. You were throwing out things that very plausibly were quite young and not part of the continent. And keeping in things that were plausibly, pieces of continent that in the case of Rockall had actually been covered up by younger rocks, but they were bits, underneath those younger rocks there were bits of continent. You couldn’t see them but it was plausible to make them.

[50:51] You’ve described Teddy as you saw him as an undergraduate when he was giving the lecture course. What did you learn about him professionally or personally through this work, through coming back to Madingley Rise and working there on this? I suppose, what did you learn of his character from that experience?

Good question. Well, he was almost avuncular in a way. He was, also he was very interested, I mean he was fascinated by science and was always talking to people at teatime and coffee time in badinage. We had some of the best discussions I know of at Madingley Rise at that time, largely through his leadership. He would sit down with people and say, you know, what are you doing and they’d tell him. And he’d say, well that’s interesting, is that related to this, or something like that. He wasn’t so serious as some scientists are, he had a sense of fun and practical joking actually. But he didn’t like authority, he liked to be his own man and he just… I remember, I think he said this, I think I quoted him on saying this anyway, he said look, I don’t mind when you work or how you work as long as you bring home the bacon. And that’s, you know, as long as something comes out of it, that’s what’s interesting really. So he was very, he didn’t keep tabs on you when you came in or when you left, what he kept tabs on is what you were doing and how you did it. And in other words it was a very freewheeling sort of department at the time.

What do you remember of the practical joking which you’ve just mentioned?

Well, it’s not, well, I do remember, it’s hardly, well it’s almost a practical joke. He, at that time Madingley Rise had quite a few students. It was becoming better known I think in the world and we were crowded, we needed more space and Teddy always wanted a new building I think, and I don’t know whether he wrote to the university authorities asking for a new building and I don’t know the ins and outs of how you did this, but I do remember he did invite members of the

Alan Smith Page 112 C1379/65 Track 5 general board to come to Madingley Rise to see how crowded it was. I don’t know whether I was actually there at that meeting, I was certainly in the department at the time, but what he did, he said look, the general board’s coming up to see how we are, how crowded we are – I’m putting words into his mouth – but bring your friends along, make sure you come along and bring your friends if you want to. And so the place was absolutely crammed and Teddy said, before they came along, he said, look, make sure you bump into some of these people when they’re drinking their tea. [laughs] Just to give them a recollection when they thought about Madingley Rise that it was really a very busy place, crowded out. I mean that’s the sort of thing he would do. And I can remember he was rather unkind sometimes, I remember once a chap from one of the London colleges came up to talk to him about a theory he had about how the earth worked and it, I can’t remember his name, it might have been Dollar or something like that, but even to somebody just starting in research, as it were, it was clearly nonsensical and I think Teddy essentially, you could hear – he spoke quite loudly when this chap was there – and you could quite clearly see he was leading him on all the time and all of us were sort of going, huh, behind our cups of tea or whatever. It wasn’t very nice really, but on the other hand it sort of appealed to Teddy’s sense of humour. And there were other things he did and I can’t remember them but I think if you talk to anybody else who knew him well he would say these. I mean one of the things, the general board, or I think the general board, asked various research schools or departments, what do you do, and so Teddy said, well basically, we go out to the Red Sea, which is true, and we have a rowing boat, I think, or boat, which is true, and we let off dynamite. [laughs] Well, I mean it was a pretty bald statement, I mean I think he realised the effect that such a statement would have in the administration, the schools, and they were horrified of course. He just liked to tease people. And he, I don’t think he had any respect for people who he thought were not very good. But that’s true of many people.

What makes you say that? Were there things that you…

Well, this chap who came up and talked about things. It obviously was a lot of nonsense really, so Teddy just sort of listened to him but made his own comments which put him in a rather unfavourable light. Anyway, how are we doing?

[end of track 5]

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[Track 6]

Could you tell me about the division of labour, if you like, for the writing of the paper that comes out in 1965 on the fit of the continents work?

My impression is that the overall structure and arguments and presentation was probably that of Teddy Bullard’s. He was a very good writer of science and Jim and I would not have had the experience. It was almost my first paper and we would not have had the experience of putting together a scientific paper, although I don’t know what Jim’s… Jim probably described the program, with a bit of help from me, and then we described the maps and how they’d been done, but the overall framework I think would have been provided by Teddy.

And what decisions were made about the presentation of the maps in this paper?

In what sense?

Well, I seem to remember there’s a number of sort of black and white ones and then there’s colour plates…

Yeah, three colour plates.

Yeah, with the colour, and I wondered whether you made any particular decisions about how to present this to make it sort of more in order to maximise the convincingness, if you like, of the fit?

The medium is the message.

Yes.

It’s funny you should ask that because I do remember very clearly halfway – well we presented the result at a Royal Society meeting on continental drift and that was published as one of many papers in the Philosophical Transactions volume and before that, or sorry, during that meeting, I don’t know who presented it and I don’t know what the nature was of the presentation. It would have been slides, but whether they were coloured up I don’t know. I have absolutely no

Alan Smith Page 114 C1379/65 Track 6 recollection of that actually, but I do remember one day when I came into Madingley Rise and Teddy wanted to see me and he said, ‘Well Smith, I want you to go down to the Royal Society and negotiate these maps to be printed in colour’. So I had to do that. I can’t remember anything about the negotiations, but we obviously were successful and I’m very glad we did print them in colour actually because they are so much more convincing, and interesting actually, because you can see at a glance where things, where there are gaps and where there are overlaps. Well, I think it was a very good decision by Teddy to try and do that. I don’t know how he got the money for it, but it obviously did cost a bit.

Did you go to the symposium?

Yes, I did and I can’t remember a thing about it. It’s very bizarre when I think back, a complete blank actually.

[03:08] And could you then tell me about the reception of the paper, so – and this could include the sorts of things that colleagues close to you, perhaps even in the department, might have said to you about this work once it had been published - but also any wider reception scientifically or even a kind of popular response to it.

It’s very strange for me to say this, but I can’t remember very much about it at all actually. I mean I don’t remember people coming up to me and saying, oh that was a terrific piece of work, or you could have done this better, or whatever they might say. I just cannot recollect any comments at all actually. I think geologists were quite, well, those who weren’t, those who were friends as it were, thought it was a good piece of work partly because I think it was quantitative and geologists are not used to having quantitative bits of information. In fact, you could say it was a geophysical paper rather than a geological paper, though it did require geology as well as geophysics to do it.

And it has a discussion towards the end, which I suspect that you might have been behind and it’s the sort of geological argument for the fit not being due to chance.

Ah, I don’t recollect… You’ve obviously been doing some homework. I haven’t looked at the discussion, I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at it actually, I’m sorry to say. Once I’ve done

Alan Smith Page 115 C1379/65 Track 6 something I tend to sort of move on. So I’m sorry to be so… my memory’s gone. I mean I can’t even be sure that I went to the symposium meeting, but I think I must have done, but I cannot recollect it actually.

And towards the end of the paper there’s a little statement which is that, it reads: ‘Some of the most important data will come from detailed comparative geological studies across the gap’ and it says that ‘for such studies the authors can supply dyeline prints of figures five, seven and eight’.

Yes.

I wondered whether that happened, whether there were requests for that and the extent to which research spread out from that, the use of these maps.

Good question. I have no recollection of anyone asking for a dyeline, though I might have given dyelines to people. No, I cannot recollect that being the case actually. I think what’s, looking back over the years, its importance or significance perhaps has grown in time, whereas at the time it was, you know, one among many things that was going on which was a new approach but wasn’t so, you know, it wasn’t like plate tectonics for example, in the sense of it being obvious that something was happening which was very important and we had done a good job of making the fit, you know, we had a good fit but we didn’t know what it meant, whereas in the plate tectonics thing people knew or interpreted things like earthquakes in particular in a way that made a lot more things seem evident than they would have done otherwise. So I don’t recollect that, no.

Because you said that Teddy’s plan was to make this sort of qualitative fit more convincing by having a quantitative version of that. I wonder to what extent that plan worked, you know, was it more, did it become then more convincing?

Yes, I think it did. I think there’s no question it did become more convincing, but again, its meaning was not clear. I mean obviously it fitted but how, you know, we just didn’t know how to think about the earth properly at that time.

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[07:35] Was there any response that you yourself noted from Harold Jeffreys to this…

No.

…now enhanced fit, no?

No. I don’t know if Teddy showed the fit to Harold. I don’t know actually. That’s an interesting question. I wasn’t in the college at the time. I was elected a fellow in 1970 I think it was, some years after I’d been back, I’d done this work and moved on to other things actually. But it’s true, what was really funny was, I’d started doing a lot more global stuff, global maps at about that time, and the British Antarctic Survey, or was it the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey at the time? I can’t remember, but one of those, it was essentially our people in the Antarctic, they saw some maps I did with Jim Briden some time later – I can tell you about those because they were quite important apparently at the time – but they used some of the maps we made of the Antarctic at different times, put them on a series of postage stamps, which is rather… And this is when I was a Fellow here and there was I doing this and there was Harold Jeffreys saying it couldn’t happen. We didn’t talk about it though. I didn’t know how to talk about it with him really. But it was strange to be in the same college as Harold.

[09:17] What then happened after, as you say, the fit of the continents work was one of the things that was going on, and so once this paper had been submitted and the symposium had happened, what are you then working on? So we’re in the sort of mid sixties now and you’re at Madingley Rise.

Well, one thing that happened was I got a job in the Department of Geology, as it was then, because there were three departments at the time: Mineralogy and Petrology, Geodesy and Geophysics which is Madingley Rise, and Geology. Three small departments, basically. And an advertisement came up in the University Reporter which advertised a demonstratorship, which at that time was essentially assistant lecturer. I think it was a three plus two position, ie three years initially and if you looked as if you were going to carry on doing things that were useful you got another two years and it was a five-year term. And then after that you either got upgraded, and not everyone did, or you found a job elsewhere. Well this university demonstratorship came up

Alan Smith Page 117 C1379/65 Track 6 and people kept – I knew people in the department down here because I knew Brian Harland and we had talked to one another and one or two other people I knew down here, and a chap called Bulman who was head of the department – people said to me you should apply for this, Smith. So I said why, because I believe it’s true to say that the salaries were identical and I’d have more work down here because I’d be teaching. On the other hand I did like teaching or I decided I would apply and did apply, but only after talking to Teddy Bullard about it and he said, I said why should I apply for this job, what’s the advantage, and he said well, he said, ‘Smith’ he said, ‘When it’s time for you to leave you can say you’ve been on the university staff and that counts for something’, whereas being a mere research assistant didn’t for some reason. And so I applied and didn’t hear anything about the job for a long time actually, it just shows you how things were done in those days. I was in the downtown site in the Sedgwick Museum on the ground floor waiting to see Brian Harland about something – oh, it might have been about the timescale actually, because he got me involved with that – and Brian, I said to Brian, no he was in his office seeing somebody else at the time, and I was looking at an exhibit on the ground floor which at that time was a museum and Professor Bulman turned up and he had a rather high pitched voice, he said, you know – it was quite funny – he said, ‘Are you still interested in what we were talking about?’ and I thought, what on earth were we talking about, because I had seen him once or twice, and I just couldn’t bring myself to say, you know, what were we talking about. And it occurred to me he was asking me about was I still interested in this demonstratorship. So rather than say, I’m not sure what we were talking about, I said yes. And he just said, ‘Oh good’ and walked away and the following Monday I got an offer of a demonstratorship. Had no interview, didn’t have to go round talking to people about what my research was and where it was going, as one does today, and that’s how I got my job in the Department of Geology. And of course, luckily for me Bullard’s comment did apply in the sense that I was on the university staff but I didn’t have to leave because after finishing my demonstratorship I got upgraded to a lectureship.

[13:54] Before we start on the Department of Geology could you just say when you came back to England in 1963, where did you live, so I can get a sense of what’s happening in your personal life. You’d been married in America, you’d come back to England, how did you set yourself up privately?

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We had a flat in Arbury Road, just on the edge of the Arbury Estate. And then shortly after that, once we settled, got our finances organised, we bought a house on Eachard Road, which is quite close to Madingley Rise, which is why we decided to buy there. Like many people, today as well as then, our parents helped, or my parents helped with the purchase of the house. I don’t think it was a lot of money but it was enough to get us the house that we wanted. It was sort of semi-detached 1930s house, a house I don’t like actually, but it’s all we could afford, and we lived in that for several years. And then, yes, I can’t remember the timing of it, some years after that we bought a house in Newnham, a new house, a lovely new house actually. Not quite right, but not bad, and that’s where we stayed until my wife became ill.

And I wonder if we need the timing of children?

Yes. We have one daughter, or I have one daughter I suppose. She’s now forty-one, which would make – she was born in 1968. No, sorry, 1969. 1968 both of us were in Prague when the Russians invaded, so ’69 that would be – is that right? Yes, ’69, that would be six years after we had left America.

And the date of this appointment as demonstrator in the School of Geology, this was nineteen sixty…

Don’t remember.

After ’65 anyway?

Presumably. Though it could be during ’65 because that’s the date of publication of the paper. I don’t know.

[16:46] What did your wife do?

Well, when we, before we left America she was an editor at Princeton University Press and I think she was in line to become, I know she was quite young, but the stories used to run around was that she was being groomed to take over as managing editor one day, but I took her away from all that and she came here, worked freelance as an editor for Cambridge University Press

Alan Smith Page 119 C1379/65 Track 6 and was rather horrified to find the differences in the way editors are regarded in the States and here. I mean as an editor in the States I think she felt more or less equal to the author and could talk to him as an equal and make suggestions, quite substantial suggestions which the authors would listen to and take note of, whereas here she was much a junior position, editor was somebody who did a job for the author rather than being treated equally. Now that might be a function of age because I know some editors in Britain are on the same terms as editors in America, but it was quite a difference. She was just, you know, used to being listened to and wasn’t listened to to the same extent as she was in the States. So she did some editing, she did some writing, wrote stories and started a novel, that sort of thing really. Got to know – I think she found Cambridge difficult as an American, specially a young American woman, I mean an example of which is not so much Cambridge as the university was difficult because she wanted to read books in the university library and she couldn’t get a ticket, they would not let her have a ticket and if she wanted a book I would have to get it out for her, whereas in Princeton she could go to the library, get whatever she wants, even though she wasn’t involved in the university she could do these things. And that was also a rather, a difference basically, which I don’t think she liked at all.

Why did you say that she found it particularly difficult as a young American woman?

Well, if you’re used to essentially being listened to and treated as an equal professionally with other people and you have access to the libraries which you want and so on and you suddenly come to a place which doesn’t give you these things, I think that makes life difficult for you. Because there’s no obvious reason for it. I mean it’s all changed now. I think it has. I’m not sure about the university library and so on, but I presume people like her would be easily able to get a reader’s ticket nowadays, especially if they’re married to faculty and so on, but it wasn’t the case then.

Did being female make more of a difference here than it did in America?

I think so, because I think American women on the whole were treated better at that time than they were in Britain. You can see that in a way, you know, we’ve just had lunch and there aren’t too many Fellows in the college who are women, whereas you would expect in general there should be a lot more. I mean the problem with women in particular of course is the biological problem of having children and raising a family, but some people manage it perfectly well. So I

Alan Smith Page 120 C1379/65 Track 6 think it’s a sort of Britain, certainly academic Britain has just been playing catch-up for the last forty or fifty years and still may not have got to the stage that some American women academics have got to. I don’t know, you’d have to ask a lot of other people to see if that is the case. Cambridge was very much a male dominated university I felt at that time. There were very few mixed colleges. I don’t know if there were actually any mixed colleges at that time. So it was, you know, strange for her.

What would have been the view of someone like Teddy Bullard, for example, on male versus female research students, do you think? I ask only because Madingley Rise, and I’m not saying this was any different to any other part of the university, but if you look at Carol’s book for example, very few female research students.

Yes.

And I wondered why and perhaps what his view would have been on any…

I don’t know. I never heard him express a view. He must have been used to young women because he had three daughters. [laughs] But I don’t, I never heard him say anything about women, either in praise or derogatorily. And he just, I just don’t know what his views were actually.

Your…

Oh, I think they might, some of them might have been… he might have been favourable in some ways. The reason I say that is I recollect him talking about a Russian geophysicist, a woman, who did a lot of work on heat flow. I can’t remember her name, but he obviously thought she’d done some good work. So professionally I don’t think he worried about what sex you were.

Your wife had helped you by typing your thesis and helping with the construction of sentences and so on, I think you seemed to imply, or the writing of it anyway.

Yeah, what an editor would do normally, yes.

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To what extent was she involved in or interested in your work when you came back to Britain, when you were working for example on this fit of the continents work?

Well, I think she was interested but I don’t recollect her reading any of my papers. I think she accepted that I was really interested in geology and she would help me to the full extent she could actually. That’s all I can say I think.

[23:15] When you’d moved to the Department of Geology, I wonder whether you could give us a description of the Department of Geology at the time that you were appointed in the late sixties, and if we could start with it as a physical place and then go on to…

Well, I can give you a good idea of how it seemed to somebody because when my daughter was old enough, five or six or something, I don’t know how old she was, but I used to sometimes do babysitting for her while my wife did other things, this is at weekends sometimes, Saturdays, and I remember telling my daughter who was, you know, I said I’m going to go to the department and – or we are going to the department – and she wasn’t sure what the department was. So she said, ‘Oh Daddy, do you mean the church?’ That was the impression at that time that the department gave to a very young girl. I mean it’s a lovely building, the Department of Geology, it’s one of the first modern buildings I think in the country in the sense that the internal walls do not carry loads. It’s the floor that carries the load and there’s a very strong concrete floor supported by an iron framework, deliberately built that way to support all the load of the rocks that are in the place. So it’s a very strong building and there was talk, I think a long time ago, when I was around at the beginning of actually moving to west Cambridge and even knocking the old museum down and I’m sure anyone who tried to do that would lose a fortune on it because it’s such a well-built building actually. So you didn’t see that inside, what you did see are large pillars, iron-frame windows, the whole of the ground floor was not paved, had glass cases which held examples of building stones from around the world. So it wasn’t terribly interesting, except to architects, and there were, there have been at times suggestions of screening these off and having moveable displays of what the department gets up to, and it’s never been done. So it’s a funny place, it does look like a Victorian museum, but it’s a very noisy place in term time especially, because we let our students have coffee as long as they pay for it, and the noise is quite incredible at times. So architecturally it looks very Victorian I think. I think it’s an early Edwardian building in fact, much bigger than it was originally planned to be

Alan Smith Page 122 C1379/65 Track 6 because of the way the money came in and so on, was quite an interesting story there, but it’s still the way it was fifty years ago. [26:40] Now, the department is very, I mean as I came in, it was almost Victorian again, very conservative. There was Professor Bulman – one professor – one reader, Maurice Black at the time, several lecturers like Richard Hey who we talked about earlier. As I say, very conservative and rather, I can’t say… it was full of people who were not as well-known as the people I had met at Princeton, and I can say that because when I came back, possibly when I flew back in the middle of my time at Princeton, I mentioned some of my, you know, Princeton professors and all of them were well-known or people in the department knew who they were, but going the other way when I went to Princeton and talked about people in the department, not all of them, in fact a few of them were known to the people in Princeton. So from that I assess that we had a very competent staff but very few stars actually. I mean some of the lectures we had were absolutely first rate from a student’s point of view, but scientifically some of them were not very good at all. I don’t mean they were incompetent, but they didn’t publish much. They were very smart, didn’t publish much though, and they were not well known outside Cambridge, or not as well-known as you might expect them to have been. [28:28] And there was a very funny social hierarchy amongst the staff, there was a chap called Bertie Brighton who had a long moustache, coughing all the time because he smoked like a chimney and he was the curator of the Sedgwick Museum and his room was on the ground floor near the entrance. Now at that time the entrance, which is now a proper reception area, was actually a parking place for the staff’s bikes. You came in through the front door, off Downing Street, and you had bicycle stands for staff’s bikes, which is quite amazing really. On the left of that, as you came in from Downing Street, on the left was his room. His name was Bertie Brighton, as I say, curator of the Sedgwick Museum, and at coffee time he used to have a little clique, which consisted of four other, three other members of staff whose surnames began with ‘B’. There was Maurice Black, who also smoked, Bill Black who didn’t smoke, Oliver Bulman who was the head of the department. So there were four ‘Bs’ in there actually, yes. And what was so amazing in a way looking back was he always had a lighted fire in his - open fire - in his room, a coal fire and that was always maintained by one of the museum assistants. His job, whoever it was, was to keep that fire going and clean it up and prepare it for the next day. I mean it was extraordinary. So I found that fascinating, because that was where the, essentially anything that happened in the department was decided there.

In Bertie Brighton’s room?

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Mm. The impression I had. So younger members of the staff like Brian Harland and Norman Hughes and one or two other people disliked this arrangement and there was a bit of a conflict between those two groups actually. And it wasn’t immediately apparent that there was a conflict but it’s almost a parochial department, quite honestly. Now, you could say well, it’s a tradition in Cambridge in most departments not to boast about things and most people are very modest and you don’t, you know, in this college for example, you wouldn’t know that somebody had just got this prize or that prize or whatever because they don’t talk about it, but somebody might say congratulations, that’s how you might find out about it. But you could say well, you’re misreading parochialism, actually they were just being very modest and it’s true, they were on the whole very modest, but I think they were also a bit parochial. And having been in America and seen a different way of doing things and so on, I would have left the department had we not united as a single department in the 19… whenever it was, when Ron Oxburgh became the first chairman. I mean it was, I just felt it was a bit, almost claustrophobic at times really, very narrow, you know. So although it was in Cambridge I didn’t feel that it really opened its eyes as much as it should to the rest of the world. That was quite different from Bullard Labs or Madingley Rise because Teddy was always having people coming in from especially the States, sabbatical visitors, and we had, I don’t know if you know of a chap called Menard? He came for a sabbatical at one time. A chap called Bob Fisher who did a lot of oceanographic work in the Pacific, he came for a sabbatical at one time. Tuzo Wilson was always coming over and dropping in and he did have a sabbatical at one time as well. So there was quite a different kind of person who’d had quite different experiences to what was available, you know, what the Department of Geology was like at that time. [33:18] And because my wife is American, so I was quite open to considering offers from the US. I had several in fact. I think everyone in Cambridge seemed to get an offer from the US until people take no as meaning no. And Judy and I used to talk a lot about it at times, but I didn’t… she would have been happy if I had gone to a place called Newbury College, I think, in New England, it was a liberal arts college. Harry Hess told me about it and I declined. Maybe I shouldn’t have done, but somehow I didn’t feel that Newbury was doing the kind of research I wanted to do. I had an offer, well, it wasn’t a firm offer but there was a suggestion I should go to MIT, but Judy didn’t like the idea of being in Boston I don’t think. So we had these discussions and all the time I found, you know, that Cambridge was getting better and especially when we eventually decided, brought about a union of the three departments, I was very happy.

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[34:41] What were the relations between the Geology Department and Madingley Rise at this time?

Very little. Brian Harland was probably the only one who had any relationships. The real problem I think with an earlier amalgamation which had been planned, was that Teddy was head of geophysics and the thought, the thought was that, the likely thought was that he would become overall chairman or head of an amalgamated department and I don’t think quite honestly people in geology – I’m not sure about the other department, mineralogy and petrology – but I’m not sure that people trusted him. I think they envisaged that he might shut different parts of the departments down, you know, like palaeontology for example, which was where… which was based in geology at the time, there were several palaeontologists at the time and I think they were a bit afraid of Teddy.

Did they have reason to be based on Teddy’s view of geology?

[laughs] Well, again, I can only quote you something that I wasn’t at and it may not be entirely true, but there was a dinner celebrating some anniversary of the Sedgwick Club, I think it was, this undergraduate geology club. I don’t know what, it might have been its hundredth or something, I really don’t know. But Teddy was the guest speaker and Bulman was there as well and Teddy got up and started, I mean as reported to me, as I say I wasn’t there, he said something like, you know, ‘You palaeontologists should do something interesting’. And he said, he was really cheeky, he said, ‘Look, you’ve got these dinosaur eggs in the museum from the Gobi Desert, why don’t you inject them with DNA and hatch them out?’ [laughs] Or something completely ridiculous and absurd. But you could see he was impatient with what was being done in the subject at the time and that’s one of the reasons I think, and probably others, that people were rather wary of amalgamating while he was head of Madingley Rise. The amalgamation occurred after Teddy had retired to California. And I think also the relationships between mineralogy and geology were not good and we were adjacent departments. And I can remember one meeting where we had, it was a discussion about a joint lecture course and again, I’m sure I’ve got the gist of the thing but I may not have the actual data absolutely correct, but there was a discussion about whether I think mineralogy and petrology should give thirteen lectures or whether geology should give thirteen lectures or whether they should give twelve each or something. It was one of these really stupid things, and there was a member of a department, I won’t name him, bless his memory, he did help me a lot, but he was a bit of a spoke in the wheel

Alan Smith Page 125 C1379/65 Track 6 kind of person and he said something which antagonised the Head of Mineralogy and Petrology which was Professor Alex Deer at the time, and cut a long story short, Alex wrapped up his file, folded it up, and led all his staff members out of the meeting. I mean it was just like something out of I’m Alright Jack really. It was quite extraordinary. And so it wasn’t auguring well for an amalgamation between mineralogy and petrology and geology, so we kept on all these little ways and fortunately Deer was a very sensible person and ultimately, I can’t remember, I know I did have a letter – I was on sabbatical at one time in Switzerland at ETH and a chap called Stuart Agrell who was in mineralogy and petrology, wrote to me out of the blue saying, you know, who do you think would make a good head for the combined department. And I did mention Ron Oxburgh’s name because I knew him from, he was in Princeton with me, two years ahead of me and I just thought he was very good and he was very good at administration as well as science and I said, you know, he was a young chap at Oxford at the time, I think you might consider him. And Ron did come, though I don’t know how influential I was in that because Stuart wrote to me because he was on the, one of the electors of the chair, actually. But I like to think I did help a little bit in getting Ron Oxburgh here. And Ron made a great success of the place. I mean he made it, he was the absolutely ideal candidate for that position and ever since then we’ve gone from strength to strength.

[40:03] What were other members of the department working on at the time you joined in the 1960s?

Well, Brian Harland was the closest, he was interested in tectonics, he was extremely imaginative, he was very, extremely hard working, but I sometimes felt he didn’t have, I mean his mind was working so fast sometimes somehow it didn’t always gel into something that was easy to understand. But he was a very inspiring lecturer. You couldn’t get good notes from him but he was one of the few people in the department who talked about continental drift and told us about it and what people felt and I think he was pretty much in favour of it himself. So he did a lot of work in Spitsbergen and he was the one who set up CASP, this Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme, which is still going strong, and he, well he got me interested shortly after I arrived back in Cambridge, in one summer I hadn’t got a field area and I was a bit disillusioned after I’d done this work at Bullard’s that I didn’t get out into the open, and one summer when I wasn’t out in the open I was working with him on a project to put together a geological timescale book, which I did, helped him with that. And Brian, bless him, that was the first publication, special publication of the Geological Society of London, of which he was secretary I think at the time.

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Again, having done that, stayed indoors one summer doing abstracting work and all that sort of thing, I felt this isn’t really what I want to do and I can’t remember when I started it, but in Princeton one of my roommates, well I had a roommate called Eldridge Moores, who I might have mentioned in my earlier interview, where as I say, we shared a room together and Eldridge stayed on at Princeton as a postdoc with Harry Hess and Harry Hess had an NSF postdoc to go and look at some rocks in Greece, which might have been ocean floor, might not have been, we didn’t know at the time. And Eldridge used to come through Cambridge to stay with us on his way home to America and he enthused about Greece so much, his great enthusiasm, terrific chap, I thought I would start a project in Greece, because I felt as a university lecturer or demonstrator – I can’t remember – no, must have been a demonstrator at the time, I felt I wouldn’t have much time, I needed to go to do fieldwork in an area which was well exposed, where the rocks weren’t covered by forests and, you know. The White Fish Range wouldn’t have been the best place to do work really from my point of view of being a university teacher and so on. And that really meant you had to go to either something like an Arctic place or high latitude place where there’s plenty of rock exposed, or a semi-arid or arid place where again, there would be plenty of rocks exposed. And Greece was sufficiently semi-arid that there were very good exposures of rocks in Greece and so one year I settled on starting some fieldwork in Greece. [44:03] That was a lovely time actually. It was a very interesting area. I spent my first summer doing a reconnaissance of much of Greece, finding out which areas would be of interest scientifically, and settled on one in central Greece and spent probably ten, fifteen years either working there myself or looking after research students who were mapping there. And it was a very good decision in my view in a sense.

Very interesting that you chose the place almost before the, well, before the problem or before the…

No. Well, yes it is, okay. I think I was interested in ophiolites and that was Eldridge Moores’ influence and Harry Hess and so on. So in a sense I chose the place because there were ophiolites there, but I chose the place, the specific place because I went out the first season with a chap who was collecting small fossils called fusilines, I went along with him almost as the field assistant but keeping an eye on the geology, and one of the areas we went to had what appeared to be, what were called ophiolites, very, you know, not very well mapped by the Greeks, unfortunately, or fortunately because that meant I could go there. These were bits of ocean floor perhaps but they were overridden or overlain by sediments that were shallower, they were not

Alan Smith Page 127 C1379/65 Track 6 ocean floor rocks, but the interesting thing was, they were actually older than the supposed date of the ophiolites and how on earth that happened at that time was unclear. I mean it obviously involved thrusting like I’d been mapping in the White Fish Range and so on, but how that happened and what it signified was completely unknown and not, you know, it wasn’t in the literature and that’s why I started work in that area, why I went to Greece. So I suppose the country came first, but partly because there were ophiolites there and they seemed very interesting and partly because once I got there I found a place that was very well worthwhile mapping.

Yes, could you explain why you picked this area in central Greece based on this reconnaissance of the whole potential area?

Well, as I say, there were lots of these peculiar rocks called serpentines and rocks made of olivine. They were considered, we didn’t know at the time, but they were probably parts of the earth’s mantle which is under the crust. But they were lying around on the surface, they were probably, the guess was that they were probably about 150 or so million years old and they were overlain, they had rocks that were quite a bit older, about 300 million years old which had shallow water fossils in them and that’s, unless something structurally is going on which is of considerable magnitude, that doesn’t make sense. The question then was, what are the relationships between these shallow water older rocks lying on top of very deep younger rocks. And that was the basic problem. As I say, it involved, well… it was very complex structure, it wasn’t the best place to answer that problem really, the best place was actually Oman, probably. Well, I wasn’t, didn’t expect to go out there. So I started mapping there and all sorts of interesting stuff. I mean I think I was one of the first who found that there was an episode of intense deformation in the Cretaceous or late Jurassic in Greece and I don’t think people had come across that before. And then of course the plate tectonics hypothesis or model or whatever you want to call it, concept, was introduced shortly after I had started work in Greece and it became obvious then that these were bits of ocean floor and that we were dealing probably with what happens at plate margins, which was a new way of talking about these areas, to create an orogenic belt. And eventually, as things evolved, the question then became, what starts an orogenic belt off, because prior to the deformation the area had been almost exactly as you would model it. The shallow water rocks were part of a continental crust, or they had been deposited on the continental crust, the deeper rocks were part of the ocean floor, so as you went from the shallow water older rocks out into what is an ocean you had a passive continental

Alan Smith Page 128 C1379/65 Track 6 margin, rather like the Atlantic, you had something like the edge of a continent, an ocean going off into an ocean, and then something had happened that had caused that margin to collapse if you like, to be deformed in such a way that the ocean floor rode up on top of the continent. Now that was a puzzle too because how is it these old dense – it’s not old – but these younger dense rocks, because the ocean floor was much denser than the continent, how is it these end up on top of a less dense continental crust whereas in other places in the world as we’re beginning to understand it, at the time they should have been subducted and you wouldn’t see the ocean floor, it would go underneath and disappear. So all these problems suddenly emerged as mapping continued and some of them, well, they’re not solved today. I’m still interested in them and write papers about them. I don’t do fieldwork any more but I do go on field trips and talk to people about it, but we haven’t really solved these problems. And the more you look into them, the more you realise that there are yet more problems to solve that don’t fit the model.

[50:36] What do you remember of plate tectonics sort of emerging and becoming accepted, altering the way that you thought? How did that happen suddenly?

It happened suddenly for me I think. Suddenly realised that, you know, this new way of looking at the earth was the correct way, because everything fitted together, really. Well, not everything, but it all made much more sense than the old way of looking at the earth as an apple that was shrinking as it cooled down and wrinkling and giving rise to mountain belts, it wasn’t that at all, it was something else much more interesting.

Where did you first sort of meet the idea?

Of plate tectonics? I can’t remember, but I do remember it had a profound effect on the way I was thinking about things and I think there were two conferences I would have liked to have gone to but I was doing other things at the time, I couldn’t get to them, they were both in America and probably the most important one was, I don’t know if Fred Vine talked to you about this, but it was in Wood… I think it was in Woods Hole, I’m not sure, but it was in 19… probably 1968. I can’t remember the details, but the most important papers there were, well the most important paper I think was probably one by seismologists principally from Cornell and Lamont and it was – and also a chap from Princeton called Jason Morgan – and also a Frenchman named Le Pichon, there were three papers and they all appeared in Journal of

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Geophysical Research . The first paper on earthquakes showed how the earthquakes, if you interpret earthquakes as places of active deformation, the new seismic data that was coming in from the instruments that had been set out to verify the nuclear test ban treaty, well that was public domain knowledge of the earthquakes and you could see that the earthquakes weren’t just scattered all over the world, they were confined to very particular places and if they were places where the earth is being actively deformed, you then get the idea of a plate, the interior plate not being deformed and the margins are where the deformation is taking place. And you could see that actually in the earthquake distribution, it was so much better than it had been previously. And you could actually – or I don’t know if that was done at the time – but you can determine how things are moving relative to one another as a result of an earthquake, and it all fitted in not only with the earthquakes, but fitted in with the previous ideas about ocean floor spreading which hadn’t really given rise to the idea of plates. You know, we knew how the ocean floor was growing, we knew how fast it was growing and how it was growing, but at that time nobody came up with the idea of plates from that stuff, but that all slotted into this whole new idea of looking at the earth. And Jason Morgan, he wrote a paper called Rises I think, and Trenches and Great Faults and showed how transform faults, which Tuzo Wilson had talked about, also fitted into this picture and lots of other things as well. And then finally, this Frenchman, Xavier Le Pichon, he showed how you can actually calculate from the ocean floor record and assuming plates, how you could calculate what was going on at each plate boundary on the earth. So you actually had a predictive quantitative theory that explained so much and, you know, that to me was when I realised that it was correct. I mean to my mind there’s no argument about it, that’s how it is. So if people say this is a hypothesis the fact is you can make predictions from it, numerical predictions and verify these predictions, so at last tectonics has become a science and I can’t conceive actually any other way of looking at how the earth works. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t bits we can’t explain, but the bulk of the earth and its history and everything else, except perhaps very early on in the earth’s history, is due to plate motions and the existence of plates and their coalescence, their disappearance and all that sort of thing, and it was very exciting.

[55:39] What was the response in the Department of Geology?

Well, at that time we had, there was a new lecturer appointed – John Dewey, you may know, you may have interviewed him actually.

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Not yet.

Not yet. Well he was very much involved with the geological application of plate tectonics and that went straight into his lectures and we started teaching it straightaway more or less, in the first year lectures, you know, it was so interesting and easy to understand really, and exciting and so on that it went straight in. So people like John and Brian Harland etc, were, well, and myself, we all – Ron Oxburgh – we all got into, you can say it’s a bandwagon, but we realised that this was a new theory of the earth that was correct. And you asked about who else was in the department at the time; the two Blacks I mentioned, one of them had been a carboniferous limestone stratigrapher who knew a lot about the stratigraphy of the carboniferous rocks, that’s the coal bearing rocks, in northern England, so he was really a stratigrapher sedimentologist, to some extent a palaeontologist. The other Black was a very clever man, bit reticent and reserved, but he did a lot of work on algae, both present day algae or algae in the Bahamas, and algae in the fossil record. He was a sedimentologist who was interested in essentially, he did a lot of work in the southern uplands on present day limestone deposits as in the Bahamas and places like that. He didn’t publish a lot but he was extremely good. Oliver Bulman, the professor, he was essentially a palaeontologist interested principally in graptolites – I don’t know if you know anything about them but they evolved a great deal in the Ordovician about four, five hundred million years ago and they have no living relatives. To my mind they look like little fretsaw blade lying around on the rocks, some of them do anyway, and they’re very interesting and our department has probably had a… we’re one of the leading graptolite departments in the world because after Bulman retired Barrie Rickards eventually came to the department, he was an authority on those sorts of things. But who else was there? Norman Hughes was there. He was a palynologist, he looked at pollen – what do you call them – grains? Anyway, pollen. And in fact, a bit of an aside, he and Brian Harland supported me considerably through my… in getting me to be able to stay on for a fourth year to study geology and I have a lot to thank them for actually. Richard Hey you probably know about. He studied glacial deposits and did a lot of good work on the glacial deposits of, well the area around Cambridge in particular. Colin Forbes was an assistant curator at the museum, he did a lot of work on sea urchins I think, until he became interested in water supply. So that, I think that was more or less the line-up of the Geology Department at the time. It wasn’t a big department at all. There may have been other people, I can’t remember now.

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[59:48] And could you say how you were involved in moving plate tectonics from a new academic theory to something that was taught in schools? I don’t know how soon after it happened.

Yes, well I, Maurice Black, he used to run the Oxford and Cambridge Geology Board, or Oxford and Cambridge geology section of the Oxford and Cambridge Examinations Board and it was a very, it was a very good thing to do. There were only about, as I recollect, there were less than a hundred people taking geology through that board at the time, so Maurice used to mark the papers, he awarded the marks and had a meeting presumably and set the papers and did this year after year. When he retired he asked if I was interested in doing it and I did accept it, the position as an awarder, and after being in it for a year or two I, I don’t know how long after plate tectonics was discovered, I said why don’t we get this into the school syllabus, because it’s, you know, you can explain it to people, it’s so easy to understand really. Not the nuances of it, but the overall idea of plates and so on. And I put forward, you know, a short syllabus about this and suggested it to the board and I can’t remember how it was accepted but it was very little bureaucracy involved and it was just put in and I think one or two other things were taken out, I can’t remember, I think you’d have to take something out, I would think. And it got into the school syllabus straightaway. I mean compared with what you have to go through nowadays to get any changes, it’s extraordinarily easy and I was in charge of the whole thing. Anyone who studied geology for the Oxford and Cambridge Board I examined them and graded them and didn’t think about dumbing down or anything like that, you just gave them grades and you didn’t mark to a curve or anything like that, you just said, well this is a good answer and deserves this mark, did a lousy answer, deserves these marks. And sometimes you had to make a little allowance for the teachers, because some of them weren’t up to scratch, so you were marking the teaching rather than the candidate at times, or at least the teaching, teaching wasn’t as good as it… there was a range of teaching in the candidates, you could see that. You know, I can’t remember, I think Stonyhurst used to put in several candidates each year and I think they had a very good teacher and you could tell that. And there was some school in Cornwall who put in candidates every year and the chap wasn’t – I presume it was a chap – wasn’t a very good teacher.

How could you tell the difference between teaching and the candidates?

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When you get the same mistakes appearing only in a particular school’s candidates you know something’s wrong. I mean I don’t… I couldn’t say I consciously, you know, I had a little piece of paper which would say how to correct for this, but you would have a, you would realise that the person who was answering this question was completely right about some things and then there was a little something that obviously wasn’t right actually. And I can remember, it was very funny, because I can remember marking one chap’s papers and he got into Cambridge subsequently and I ended up as his supervisor in the department. And when I first encountered him I remembered him from his school – it was a school in Cornwall, as I say – and he was all over the place in terms of organising his knowledge but he was extremely knowledgeable and it was partly, that was partly himself but partly his teacher. And it was very interesting because through the years, we only had a three-year degree at that time, he gradually became more and more organised and knowledgeable and, you know, thought about things and I think he went off to Canada for a PhD, but he’s now a professor in Toronto I think, and he’s completely different to what he was at school. It’s very interesting to see those changes happening in somebody actually.

[1:04:33] And what decisions did you make about either what aspects of plate tectonics ought to be included or how it ought to be converted into school curriculum?

Well, I can’t remember how we did it in detail but there had to be something about earthquakes and volcanoes and their relation to plate tectonics and things like the San Andreas Fault and how continental drift actually was, it was continental drift in a sense, but it was actually you’re looking at plate motions rather than just slabs of continents riding across different parts of the earth, there was a very definite mechanism involved. So I suppose it’s the sort of thing you do in any simple discussion of plate tectonics, you talked about plate margins, the kind of geology they have, and show illustrations or discuss illustrations that – or discuss things that illustrate these properties, you know, like the San Andreas Fault, Mount St Helens, for example, Iceland, hotspots and that sort of thing. And obviously you can go on for a long time but there’s only a limited amount of time in a school syllabus for this but you try to get the essence of it across really. It’s… what surprises me at the moment is well, I’ll give an example. I used to supervise, well I supervised last year, but I can remember supervising two students from this college, they came into the supervision looking very tired and I’d set them an essay on, probably something about plate tectonics, and they, I’m not sure if they sent it in on time or not, but they were tired

Alan Smith Page 133 C1379/65 Track 6 but seemed to be happy. And it turned out after a little bit of interrogation that they had written these essays, which were quite long, using material from the web. And it was quite, some of it was quite wrong, and what surprises me is that you can have this stuff on the web and it’s quite wrong. You would have thought, you know, there would be a consensus of what goes on and people would know about this and somehow you could refer people to, you know, this is the best explanation there is of subduction. You really have to look hard to find something that would satisfy that criterion. I find it quite extraordinary. Because I always imagine that, you know, bit like Wikipedia, here’s all this knowledge that gets into Wikipedia, and I must admit I find that an extremely good source of information, but you don’t find that in terms of teaching. Different departments teach in different ways and some of them get it wrong. I just find that bizarre in a way.

Different school departments?

Different university departments. Because these people were writing, these were undergraduates writing an essay about something on plate tectonics, and I said where did you get this stuff from and they say oh, we got it from the web. I said well, what about books? I mean, didn’t we recommend a few books you should have a look at, and they said yes. I said, well why don’t you use those? And they obviously thought the web was superior to the printed word, which I found very interesting actually. And I would have thought it could be, well not superior, but it should be equal to it, but it isn’t. There’s an opportunity there for somebody to do something about it but of course most people don’t have the time. Anyway.

[1:08:49] Could you describe what was involved in the ophiolite fieldwork, once you’d decided on this particular part of Greece that you were going to focus on, and I assume that you’re going out in the summer vacation period each year?

That’s right, yes.

What is sort of involved in practice, step by step, in actually working in the field on this problem?

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You have to have a base map. We had, I managed to… the Greeks would not let you have the base maps you wanted, they were military secrets. But, for some reason, the Greek Geological Survey had published geological maps with very good topography – well, not very good, but pretty good topography on them – which were available to the public. These were probably the same maps that the military held to be secrets. So I used to buy these and make enlargements of them for use as field maps, ie, just like, they would be like Ordnance Survey maps, basically. It was as if the Ordnance Survey maps were top secret but if you had a geology map with topography on it, it wasn’t. Don’t ask me to explain that, but… So I had reasonably good base maps and we also had friends in America who had access to Department of Defense maps and we could, we managed to get copies of those which helped, but we never ever did show those in the field, because if the Greeks found out we were using what was essentially military maps for our mapping, they would not have been happy.

How were your friends able to get them?

Well, we had connections. [laughs] Anyway, they were very helpful. So you have a map, a base map, and you go out into the field and you, if you’re mapping you’re looking for the boundaries between different types of rocks and what happens at those boundaries, what kind of boundaries are they. Are the boundaries between one rock type and another a boundary between rocks that have been deposited one on top of the other and you’re looking at the original relationships between those two rocks, or are they boundaries between two rocks that have been moved relative to one another by some sort of deformation, and what is that kind of deformation if they have been moved. And if they’re in stratigraphic order, they haven’t been moved, how on earth is it that say, this rock down here which – have you ever heard of chert?

No.

It’s like flint, it’s like layers of flint overlaid by layers of limestone, how on earth does that come about because it’s a dramatic change in chemistry. So all the time you’re mapping these boundaries looking at what they are and thinking about what they might mean. And when you have a large enough area mapped you can begin to unscramble what’s happened to them tectonically, they’ve been completely smashed up in some cases, they’ve been folded in many cases, thrust in others, you can unwrap that and look at the regional relationships rather than the little area you’re mapping in and see how it fits into that and well, does it fit into that and what

Alan Smith Page 135 C1379/65 Track 6 people are saying about it and if it doesn’t, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to explain this and how are you going to verify your explanation? And you often have to be a bit of a sort of fence sitter in the sense that there are often several explanations, you can’t tell which is the right one and you have to carry these explanations round in your head when you’re looking at these rocks. I think Chamberlin was a late Victorian American geologist who said geologists have to carry around the theory of multiple working hypotheses in their heads, because there are many ways of explaining, quite often many ways of explaining a particular relationship you see in a small area and you just can’t, it’s not a good idea to be definite about that until you’ve got some evidence from other areas. So it’s quite different from physics. So you go round making all these maps, picking out the significant boundaries, and then try and make sense of it all.

[1:13:41] And so where did you stay while you were in Greece?

Well, the village I ended up at was the end of the road at the time in these Greek mountains, there were no roads beyond this village, it had no electricity, had no running water, had standpipes or sort of like troughs which were fed by springs from the mountains, and we had a little room in a little house which is now under a preservation order. [laughs] It’s quite bizarre really. But we had this little cottage, well not cottage, but the top room of a house where an old Greek peasant couple lived, and that’s where we lived.

We?

Sometimes, well, I had a field assistant sometimes. At other times, my wife came out with me twice actually. Complete… we were the first foreigners to be in that village since the war, so they used to treat us like royalty almost, because we had a car. Nobody in the village had a car, except people who were in the cattle trade or something like that. They were desperately poor. There was hardly any meat when I first got there, except canned meat, Spam or something like that. I think they ate meat once a week when we first got there. They had all sorts of ingenious ways of flavouring things, they would stuff marrow flowers with rice or something like that and actually, sometimes we bought our own food, or I bought my own food. There was a bus service and I used to go down to the little, this little town called Lamia, at the weekends just to have a decent wash actually, because the washing facilities were pretty primitive, and bring back quite

Alan Smith Page 136 C1379/65 Track 6 often canned food or something like that, often tinned vegetables or something, because we didn’t have… we had a camping gas stove for cooking on. It was pretty basic actually.

Did your daughter ever come?

Yes, she came not to the village, but she came to Greece once when she was about two or something like that. We drove down through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and so on. Yeah. She doesn’t remember much about it.

What did your wife, on the occasions when your wife came and on the occasion when your daughter came, what did they do while you were in the field mapping?

Well, Judy came into the field once or twice and it wasn’t, it didn’t work out. She wasn’t a geologist so I had to dictate everything to her and so on, and although she would have loved to have carried on being in the field, it just took too long really and so, because she wrote and read and so on, she used to spend the time in the village in the room either writing her own stuff or sometimes the children would – she loved children – and she would gather the children around her and learn Greek and teach them English and show them things. She got on very well with them actually. So she wasn’t, I mean although she was on her own, she was able to find things that she enjoyed doing while she was there, rather than twiddling her thumbs, as it were. And when our daughter came out we rented a, had a long term let in a hotel room in Kamena Vourla, as it’s called, which is a Greek resort where Jessica learned, well, saw the sea for the first time I think. And it was a lovely place to be. That probably wasn’t as good a place as the village actually. There was less going on, it was much more of a resort and of course you’d have to pay attention to, well, you’d have to look after Jessica, our daughter, but that’s how she spent her time.

And did you go out from this resort to your site?

No. What I used to do was to spend, if you like, the working week up in the village and then I would come back to the hotel and spend the weekend with them both. We looked, both of us looked back on that time with great fondness actually.

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And having done your work in the week, what memories do you have of time spent with the family in this resort? What did you do, even if these things don’t seem to you exceptional, what did you…

Well, we’d probably spend at least one day just relaxing on the beach, as it were. We didn’t do any cooking when we were in the hotel of course and we used to go to different restaurants and tavernas and bars occasionally I suppose, and sometimes we would just, we would explore the neighbourhood in the car, looking in different places, different villages, different towns. And we had a lot, well we, there wasn’t a lot written at the time, but we used to go to places in the Blue Guide and that sort of thing. I’m just trying to think actually, how we spent the time, but it went very quickly, I know that, and we enjoyed it immensely. Oh, and Judy of course, when she was at the hotel she made friends with several Greeks and discussed all sorts of things with them, because I remember one, there was one Greek woman she made friends with who used to bring her mother to this resort town for the summer, and she was – I can’t remember what she did actually – but it was a similar job to what Judy had been doing before she married, probably editing or something like that, so there was a common interest in reading and writing and books and so they used to swap, I suppose books and things like that, and she kept in touch with her after we got back to England, kept in touch for several years actually. So there was no shortage of things for my wife to do and my daughter was perfectly happy and I was beavering away in the mountains. [1:20:57] But it was extraordinary because I was paid, I had a grant to do all this work from Shell oil company. You know, it’s wonderful to look back and think you’ve been paid by Shell to wander round the Greek mountains. But it’s how it happened actually.

How were you able to get the money from Shell for this work?

Well, I think it was partly, after Bulman retired – I’d forgotten this – but after Bulman retired we had a new professor come over. He was an Englishman, had done his – he was actually… I think he was on the staff at Harvard at the time – a chap called Professor Whittington, very nice man, and he, I think he used to… Shell at that time had a field fund or something which they would give to different universities, probably, I’m not sure of that. But he was probably written to by Shell to say who should we, who can we support, or what of your staff members need support, basically, and I think Harry probably said well, Smith could do with a bit of money, and that’s how I probably got funded actually.

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Why were Shell doing it?

Well, they had had a project in Arabia, in Oman, the place I was telling you about, trying to understand what on earth ophiolites were. This is all pre-plate tectonics, 1950s, 1960s, and they had had some very good geologists out there who wrote a report on Oman, on the geology of Oman, which included a detailed study of this thing called an ophiolite, which at the time nobody knew what it was, but Shell thought it was important to understand what these things were because they were all over the place in a sense. I mean there are lots of ophiolites in Turkey and Asia and some in Scotland, well all over the place actually. I don’t mean they’re extremely common because there’s only one really in England, which is down at the Lizard, and there are one or two in Scotland, but if you look at it globally there are a lot of them around and they just wanted to understand how on earth these things, what were they. So they had a long- lived project, several years, in Oman because that is the best place I think to look at ophiolites and try and understand them.

[1:23:45] Why is Oman better? You’ve mentioned a few times that Greece isn’t the best.

Well, Greece isn’t the best for two reasons. One is that these ophiolites that we see in Greece have been hit by two different, possibly three different times by deformation, so you hit them once and they get in a bit of a mess, and then you hit them again and make a bigger mess, and you might hit them a third time, but certainly twice, and so they’re difficult to disentangle. Oman has only been hit once by forces that have put this ophiolite on the edge of Arabia, and it’s a desert, so you either see rocks or you don’t. They’re either covered in sand or pebbles and a wadi or something, or they’re just completely bare. That’s exaggerating it a bit, but they’re beautifully exposed and you can see what’s going on. And so you can understand not necessarily how these things form, but you can understand the relationships of different rock types, you can see it very clearly. And from that you have a very good chance of coming up with an idea which might explain how they originated. So that’s Shell’s interest in Oman. Also Shell, that’s right – I’d forgotten about this – Shell had discovered oil in Oman, or I don’t know if they discovered oil, but there is oil in Oman near these ophiolites and there is a company which is called PDO – Petroleum Development Organisation – which is essentially Shell in Oman, although it’s probably been – what do you call it, where you convert – when all the personnel become not expats, but the native people, there are lots of Omanis now running that

Alan Smith Page 139 C1379/65 Track 6 show and they have oil and they need to understand how it forms and I’m sure it’s true that the emplacement of the ophiolite in Oman has had a profound effect on the distribution of the oil in Oman, so again, they need to understand that to understand fully what’s going on.

[1:26:19] If in Oman you could expect very clear exposures, perhaps a little covering, how did that compare to the landscape where you were attempting to look at them in Greece?

Greece is not bad at all, it’s much better than most of the UK except for the Scottish Highlands. But there are still wooded areas, there are still forests in these areas, second growth forests, but I mean I remember talking to somebody about this, a classicist about this, because Athens at the height of its power used to get a lot of its wood for its ships from Othrys, so there are parts of Greece which are forested, you can’t see much going on, there are other parts which are not forested but they’re covered by this stuff called holly oak – have you ever heard of that? It looks just like holly but it bears acorns, it’s a type of oak where the leaves have adapted to being chewed I think by goats and things like that, but I don’t know if the goats do that, but it’s a very prickly waist high to head high shrub which is impossible to walk through, so you can’t tell what’s underneath and you can’t see what rocks there are there. So again, there are significant areas even in Greece which are covered up, to all intents and purposes, and you have to guess what’s happening under them.

[1:27:55] And what relations did you have with local people while you were staying in this area and walking in this area?

Well, we had to get in touch with the police, we had to have a permit to do work in this area from the Greek government, which we got from the Greek Geological Survey in Athens, and we had to produce this permit when asked for it. So those are the relationships with the authorities, if you like, and with the local people we used to say hello to them and so on and they didn’t understand what they were doing, and some of them thought they’d discovered gold, which was pyrite of course, fool’s gold as it were, and had lots of, you know, little encounter… I can remember going one year, taking part in the Greek Orthodox Easter procession round the village in the dark and things like that. I mean all sorts of little adventures. I remember one man came up to me in the dark and wanted to know, he wanted to sell his wife to me. [laughs]

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Extraordinary. And we had a Greek wedding one time I was there. It was an old-fashioned Greek wedding, they wanted to do it in the old days, there was a little village called Philiovon, which was about three or four miles from Anavra, which is where I was working, and the bride and groom rode horses from Filiadhon up to Anavra and accompanied by a band, a little band with Greek instruments and everything else, and then we had a twenty-four hour wedding feast in the village. And they showed us the bride’s dowry. There was this huge pile of stuff. I know it included mattresses and what as a visitor I was supposed to do was to stuff money between these mattresses. And then I was there during the coup of the colonels, which was quite exciting. And I made a good friend in a place called Lamia, as I mentioned earlier, where we used to stay, I used to have a room in a hotel when I cleaned up at the weekends, and made friends with a very good, very intelligent Greek who had learned English and he used to tell me what was going on, politically and so on, and the Greek secret police used to track me around. He used to tell me, he used to point out the people. He would say, you know, ‘Those two people over there, they’re Greek police and they want to know what you’re doing’. Didn’t ask me, but they asked him to find out what I was doing. I don’t know if I said this, but one… the chap who I went round with first had discovered this area, who collected these little fossils, had a friend in America who was also completely obsessed by these little fossils and would collect them from all over the world. He was a nuclear physicist who worked in the, I think the Battelle Institute in Idaho or wherever it was on nuclear problems. But for fun he used to collect these things and he came to Greece one day, and I think it’s where I met this English speaking Greek, because he drove into this village while I was in the field, at great speed, got out with this Greek who spoke English and disappeared up in the mountains after I’d left basically, to go and do my work. And when we got back, all of us were arrested by the police and we’d apparently been tracked all day by some farmers who had rifles which were loaded, didn’t know anything about this, and eventually, because we were lucky to have this Greek who spoke English because he told us what they thought we had been up to. They thought we had been involved in the civil war, which of course carried on after the Second World War well into the 1950s I think, I don’t know how far, early 1950s I think, and during that time in the civil war a lot of material property was, you know, people were robbed by one side or the other and in some cases they hid their ill-gotten gains in various places and they thought we had come back to find one of these places where the gold or jewellery or something had been hidden and we were going to take it away. And so that’s why they followed us. Anyway, we told them no, no, no, we were looking at these tiny little fossils. And I have this wonderful memory of going into this police station in Greece and there’s a little dais where the sergeant, the enormous sergeant was sitting and interrogating us, looking down at

Alan Smith Page 141 C1379/65 Track 6 us, and the Greek was translating for us and for him, and he didn’t quite understand what we were doing but we had collected a lump of rock which had these fossils in it. So we gave it to him and said look, you can see these things, you see. He said I can’t see anything, so we gave him a magnifying glass and got him to look at these rocks and fortunately we had some scientific papers which this chap had published on these fossils and there was a scientific paper with an enlargement of one of these fossils and he could relate that to what he saw with his eyes and although he didn’t understand what we were doing he realised that we were telling the truth. [laughs] And I can remember coming back one evening, they used to have open door, people used to come round with, you know, a cinema projector and they would show films, it was before television really got going, and when television did get going they had a big screen in the village square and it was just during the first moon landings and they saw these people jumping around and also collecting rocks with hammers and they realised that what we were doing was what they were doing. [laughs] So, you know, lots of little adventures actually.

[1:34:26] To what extent were local people ever, I don’t know, helpful in some way in…

Not really. No, they were mystified I think rather than helpful. I found a phrase which I learnt in Greek to tell people what we were doing which would actually sort of satisfy them up to a point and essentially stop them asking further questions, because they kept on asking us about metallo , was the thing they kept on asking us, about if it was metal, you know, gold, chrome, etc, etc. And that was that I was trying to understand the history of the rocks in the area, and that was a totally alien concept but it, you know. They didn’t understand quite what I was saying, but on the other hand it satisfies them that that was the reason. And the Greeks are very good at, well, we would call them fibs basically, but they’re good at telling things that aren’t quite true which they wish to believe to be true. So you have to learn to distinguish between that sort of thing.

What do you mean?

Well, this little room I had in this village, I got there early one year – oh, I told the lady who rented to us that we’d be back in April or May or whenever, and I don’t think she really believed us, but we did turn up in April or May, or whenever, and there was a great pile of carpets outside the house and this had been rented out to the carpet seller. So, you know, this carpet seller was

Alan Smith Page 142 C1379/65 Track 6 selling all these carpets to the villagers and obviously we couldn’t live there, but we could go and look at other places. So we asked him, we said, how long are you going to be here for, and he said a week, roughly. So we thought okay, maybe ten days. And we went off, but before we went off we got talking a little bit about him and he said where do you come from, he mentioned a village called Almyros and we said, any hotels there. And he said, oh yes, about half a dozen hotels there. So, oh thank you. So we timed our arrival at Almyros after doing some work to the early evening, drove down the main street, couldn’t see a hotel, drove down other streets, couldn’t see a hotel, so we asked at a garage, where are the hotels in Almyros, because there are six, you know. He said, no hotels here at all, none. Well, this chap had just wanted to give the impression that Almyros was a big and thriving place and so he invented these hotels and he wouldn’t have considered it lying, it’s just the way that they like to fantasise in a sense, making the town better and bigger than they really were. But that often happened in other – I can’t think of anything else but I know we came across it more than once.

[1:37:35] And apart from observation and mapping, did you collect anything on this fieldwork?

Oh yes. You have to collect samples for analysis when you get back.

What kind of analysis was necessary?

Well, if they were sediments with fossils you often had to make a clean surface and polish it so that somebody who was an expert could identify the fossil and give it an age, which is very important in an area which is complicated. Other cases you had to make thin sections, that is very thin slices of rock so that you can actually see through them, they’re thin enough to see through, and you would use that to identify microfossils, that is extremely small fossils. That’s what you would do for identifying fossils. Other times you want a thin section to see actually what the rock is made of, you know, what the bits and pieces are in it and sometimes they were interesting bits and pieces and you could tell, for example, you might have a sediment that had a certain kind of mineral in it, like a mica, muscovite, which is a white mica, or a brown mica, which is unusual. But the contents of all these rocks would tell you something about how they came into being, basically. Which all adds up to the history and the evolution of the area. If they were igneous rocks – I didn’t do this myself, but I had students who did this – they would make thin sections and look at the minerals in the rocks, find out what it was, and then they

Alan Smith Page 143 C1379/65 Track 6 would analyse the minerals using X-ray fluorescents or the electron microprobe and so on, to find out what kind of igneous rocks they were and what their chemistry was and again, how they might have originated. In fact it was one of my first students, Andrew Hynes, who’s now Chairman at McGill in Canada, who was the first person from the Geology Department to use a machine in the Mineralogy and Petrology Department when we were two separate departments. Very first one. And that caused quite a lot of raised eyebrows, which gives you an idea of the feelings at the time. But there was no adverse comment about it. So that’s what you do with the igneous rocks and I suppose that’s, yeah, you’re always trying to find out how these things came into being and if what you infer from one rock fits in with what you infer from another, and if they don’t, you know, don’t fit together, how on earth, you know, what’s wrong.

[1:40:21] Did you do any or have any of your samples dated?

Yes, sorry, that’s something else. We didn’t do, although I had been in dating at Madingley Rise, I don’t think Jack Miller was doing as much dating when I was working in Greece as he had been previously. I’m not sure what the situation was, but we didn’t actually ask Jack to do any dating for us. I think he needed some money and we hadn’t got enough money to pay for this sort of – well, we didn’t use the money to pay for that sort of thing, we went elsewhere. We went to Leeds in fact for dating rocks. And that was fascinating again. In fact we wrote a paper about the area, we had some dates, we didn’t know what on earth they meant so we didn’t publish them. Didn’t see any point in publishing dates we didn’t really understand, so we didn’t, and they turned out to be quite important, subsequently, when we did publish them. Because that was another thing that we discovered. I don’t mean we were the first to discover it. But when these big sheets of ocean floor come trundling across a continent as in Oman, they’re actually quite hot for some reason, which again is another interesting problem. So when they override these cold rocks they heat up the rocks they’re overriding, metamorphose them, you know, change them into different minerals which you can date, so you can date when this happened, and you can show that the date when this happened is very close to the time when these huge sheets of rock were created and that’s a real problem and it wasn’t solved for a long time. And it’s been solved up to a point now, but basically most of these so-called ophiolites that are on continents were formed very shortly before they were put on to the continents, and we don’t know why and it’s a general effect.

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No, that does seem confusing because you would have thought they’d be…

They’re not old rocks that have been pushed on to the continents because you can date the rocks and you can date the metamorphism caused by them and if they were old rocks they wouldn’t be hot enough to create those metamorphic rocks, because they would have cooled down. The ocean floor being created all the time is cooling down all the time and by the time, you know, if these rocks were cold, which they should have been, they would not have metamorphosed the rocks that they override, because they would have been cold and they wouldn’t have recrystallised the rocks.

So it means that something is coming up quickly?

Something is being… the ocean floor, and these are ocean floor rocks, but they’re a rather special kind of ocean floor rocks which are created at a given time, T say, and then within perhaps as little as one or two in some cases, or three million years, they end up on the continent. Now how that happens and why it happens isn’t fully understood. So we got, although I got into the Greek area trying to understand the overall relationship of ophiolites to the shallow water rocks underneath, but as we went on mapping this stuff and thinking about it and reading what other people had done and so on, we found there was a whole pile of problems we hadn’t even thought of that suddenly emerged. Well not suddenly, but emerged over the years and it’s still true actually. Even now there are – well I’m not doing any fieldwork – but people are discovering things in these rocks which have a very, must be very significant in some way but we don’t know what the significance is. So I mean it was a good area to work on and it’s still got a lot going for it actually. But as I say, Greece is not necessarily the place to understand all these problems because it’s been so highly deformed.

And how did you get samples back to the laboratory?

Ah, well we had to go through the Survey again, we had to get a permit to – and they had to be inspected. So we used to, we found the best containers were actually olive oil cans because they’re metal and if, you know, the carriers, if they drop these things they wouldn’t split open, they’d just get dented, whereas if you use cardboard boxes or wooden boxes, unless they were relatively small they were heavy and people do drop them, they do fall off backs of lorries and so on, and you lose your samples. So we used to get somebody to inspect the rocks in Athens and

Alan Smith Page 145 C1379/65 Track 6 then I think, I don’t know how we did this, but I think they gave us a certificate to say that these had been inspected and we used to take them down to a welder who would weld the lid on so it wouldn’t come apart. So it was a completely contained metal box which you could kick and hit and everything else, but at least you wouldn’t lose your samples. We had to have them inspected because the Greeks quite rightly are afraid that some people would be exporting archaeological relics, which some people did do that, so that’s why they instituted this inspection. So it was fairly straightforward. We found ways of getting it done quickly and safely. Still got some of the rocks. Well, they’re archived in the department’s collections actually.

[end of track 6]

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[Track 7]

On this track I’d like to ask about the diary which you lent me, which is a diary which you kept for a year, for 1948, so you were either ten or eleven during 1948.

I was eleven in February.

Yes, that’s right. And before I ask you about the content of it, I wonder whether you have any memories of writing it?

I think so. Not very clear and I have very little idea what’s actually in it, I think you probably know better than I do what’s in it. But I do remember keeping records of weather, ie wind direction, rain temperature. Now whether they were in this diary or in subsequent or previous ones, I don’t know. And sort of natural history things, like when things come out into flower and that sort of thing, and possibly what I did. As I say, I haven’t read it for years so you can probably ask me questions and I’ll try and answer them.

Do you remember when you, sort of when during the day you wrote it? Do you have a picture of yourself somewhere as a child writing this diary?

If it was 1948 it would have been in our new house, I mean not new in the sense of new build, but a house we had just moved into, because my father needed a larger workshop for his work and fortunately we were able to get permission for him to have his workshop in the house itself. Well not in the house, but in the outbuildings. So that would have been in there, which would have been probably – and I can’t remember – I can’t remember if it was in the dining room at home or my bedroom. I just can’t remember.

And do you have any sense of the experience you’d had of seeing other diaries by this age?

No. I think my father kept a diary, a very small pocket diary. This was a much larger affair and I don’t know why I started it or how I started it. I don’t think, I don’t recollect reading any books about diaries or books that had diaries in them.

And have you looked at it or read it since you…

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I’ve only read it, glanced at it since, you know, we’ve made contact with one another, and that was very, very briefly for, you know, five minutes almost.

[02:27] What then do you remember at this age of ten or eleven of interest in the weather?

Well, I was always curious about how the weather worked, and I’m still curious because I don’t understand it properly. And it’s much more complex now we have… we can see it’s much more complex now that we have these radar images of rainfall and things like that. In those days it was largely a matter of tracking anticyclones and depressions, as they were called, as they came across Britain. And there seemed to be a pattern of the weather coming from the west moving east and sometimes things didn’t happen like an anticyclone stayed over Britain, we had some wonderful weather for a time, especially in the summer, but it was very difficult to find in the library any books that explained all this, actually. And I still have puzzles about the weather. I’ve asked some of our Fellows who are physicists about why certain things are true and the answers are not always clear. One of the things I’m still puzzled over, and I think it is related to the earth’s rotation as somebody said when I asked them, is that you never find really storm force or gale force winds in an anticyclone, you always get them in depressions. Now, why is that, and some people give me an answer and other people don’t know. And they’re people who are physicists, basically. But I think it is related to the earth’s rotation, but again, I haven’t followed it up.

What do you remember of any weather equipment that you made or acquired?

Well, I remember there was a wonderful shop in Watford which is near Bushey, Bushey Heath where I used to visit, I think it was called Turner’s and they were primarily an optician’s but they sold all sorts of scientific equipment like condensers, you know, reflux condensers, beakers, test tubes, microscopes, and I think that’s probably where I bought a thermometer I used. And I can’t remember what I used for a rain gauge but I did have one and I might have made a little weather station in the sense of a little box which had free access to the air, but was in shade or at least kept the direct sun off things. But I can’t truly say I can remember that actually.

And you actually had a homemade rain gauge, according to the diary?

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I don’t think so, I might have again, bought it at this place called Turner’s and I can’t remember how I even calibrated it. What I can’t remember actually is whether I did actually measure the amount of rain. I think I did, but I can’t – it’ll be in the diary – but I can’t remember.

And do you remember a temperature chart on the wall of the playroom?

No.

Or apparatus that you made for telling air pressure?

No, I never remember that. No. I wouldn’t know how to do that… I’d have to think about how to do that today actually.

And what do you remember of making forecasts?

Nothing. But incidentally, the best forecast – if you want to be more correct than the Met Office the best forecast you can make is that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it is today. And we get that more, that forecast is more correct than the Met Office, because the Met Office has to deal with transitions and things like that. Anyway.

Do you still make weather observations or measurements today?

I have a rain gauge in my garden, primarily for the garden and just to get some idea of whether the aquifers around Cambridge are going to fill up or not. I don’t keep a written record but I do look, I mean I looked at it this morning and we had about three millimetres last night. We’ve had quite a bit of rain recently, we’ve had over an inch, in old money, in the last couple of weeks. But I don’t keep a record of it.

Why do you take an interest in whether the aquifers will fill?

Because if they don’t we’re going to have a hosepipe ban and the garden’s going to be struggling. But I have got water butts at home now so that there’s a reserve of water which will keep me going for two or three weeks. But that’s why, basically.

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[06:48] What do you remember at this age of your interest in astronomy?

Oh, I loved it actually. I do remember being very interested in astronomy. Before we moved house, that would be before 1947, because I remember I used to go to Sunday school and I can’t remember, it might have been in winter, winter Sunday school, I was going home, it was dark, with a lady we called the Deaconess and I knew all about the constellations, I’d got this book on the stars and I’d found out where the constellations were and worked out what they were. And I told her about this and she was fascinated. [laughs] But it was, I did discover a very good book on the sky, it not only gave you the constellations but told you stars in those constellations and why they were particularly interesting. I mean like, I can’t remember which one it is in Sirius, it has this dwarf companion, it’s very dense, you can’t see it with the naked eye but you can find out where the – well it must be the brightest star in Sirius whose name I forget. But that’s, and I found all that fascinating actually and that was a very good book for somebody of my age and my interests actually.

How and where did you look at the sky?

Mostly with my father’s binoculars, he had a pair of binoculars, and you’d have to have a dark place so presumably I did it in the back garden. I can’t remember doing it. But I do remember seeing things like Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons and things like that. And I used to track Venus in the sky. It, you know, reached a maximum distance from the sun, therefore set latest relative to the sun and as it goes, well as we went around the sun Venus gradually approached the sun and there was a time when you couldn’t actually see it. And the other thing I tried to do, which I did once or twice, was to actually find Venus right in the middle of the day, it’s a tiny, small point of light. And that was very pleased, when I could find that, seeing a star, well not a star but a planet, in the daylight.

Do you remember calculating tables of astronomy?

No.

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[09:12] Thank you. And what do you remember of your interest in ornithology at this age?

At that age I can’t remember, but I always have found birds fascinating and I’m not one of these, what do you call them – twitchers – but whenever I go somewhere new I always try and find out what the birds are that I’m looking at and in fact I have, I’ve got a bird list actually from my travels around the world which is several pages long. So that’s what I do. And I do remember, I don’t think… it was much later than 1948, but I do remember going, taking, well my father took me to Liverpool Street Station, I think, and I travelled overnight to Orford where there used to be, well, Havergate Island in particular. I was a member of the RSPB at the time and I do remember going to Havergate Island which was absolutely marvellous because it was like a living collection of virtually all the British waders exposed to view. And it was just at the time I think when the first avocets had arrived and that was quite a thrill actually to see them. I can remember, I took my bike on the train, cycled from probably Ipswich to Havergate and I remember I got there before the rowing boat – can’t remember the man’s name who used to row us across to Havergate, or who rowed across to Havergate – but he, you know, probably got there about five o’clock in the morning and I thought well, I haven’t had any sleep so I moved my bike over this forestry fence into the forest and sort of tried to sleep with my back against a fir tree and I have never woken up so cold in my life, I was shivering and damp. [laughs] And I had to, I literally put on all the clothes I had with me to get warm again. But it was a wonderful trip actually. I think his name was Harold, the boatman, I can’t remember. We took off from, oh, can’t remember the little – Orford somewhere I think, Orford Ness or something like that to row across to Havergate Island. I don’t know if you’ve been there at all?

No.

No, it’s, it was wonderful. So in other words, I’ve always kept an interest in birds but not a serious interest in the sense of being a twitcher, I don’t collect birds in that sense, but I do keep mental observations of when the first chiffchaffs arrive or the first swallows or the first swifts or cuckoos are more difficult because you can’t hear them from where we live in town, but it’s always a pleasure to hear them when you’re out in the country.

And when you were on fieldwork abroad, for example in Greece, what’s the nature and extent of your birdwatching or bird noting there?

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Well, I did keep a note. I mean the birds that really fascinated me, because they’re rare in Britain, were the hoopoes and the bee-eaters, which are very colourful, and of course the birds of prey, I think they have four different kinds of vultures in Greece, I think it’s four, but there’s certainly two. And you could see them in the area I was working in actually, and that was quite interesting. I always meant to go and look at the migration paths that birds take from Europe to Africa during the winter because great numbers of them glide across the Bosporus from Greece to Turkey, basically, and it’s a wonderful thing to see but I’ve never actually got there.

[13:01] What do you remember of using your microscope at this age, including any memories you have of things viewed through it?

Oh, I mean it was really thrilling. I think one of the thrilling things, it’s a very simple thing, is to look at a human hair in the microscope, just to have a look at it. You know, we always think human hair, or we thought then that a human hair was the finest thing you could come across, and then to see it, I think quite a few millimetres across in one’s visual field was amazing actually. And I also liked to look at the life you could get in a sample of pond water. I remember seeing, oh some of the things that we talked about in biology class at school, I can’t remember, possibly amoeba, and I know there’s something else, I can’t remember what its name was, but to see these living things as tiny little objects was absolutely thrilling. And then of course there’s all these routine things. You could take a plant and a razorblade and cut it up and look at sections of it and see all the cells and all that sort of thing. But I never, I was never sufficiently interested in biology to take it up as a subject. But I did like using the microscope.

If I can mention some of the things that you say that you looked at and just see whether this sort of triggers any memories. A fly’s wing with pollen on.

Oh gosh, no.

A dead wasp?

No.

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Blood?

No, I can’t remember those things.

Starch grains?

Yes, I do remember that.

And zinc sulphate crystals?

No, I don’t remember that.

[14:47] What memories do you have at this age, or any age as a child really, of making maps?

I can remember both making them and looking at them. Now I don’t know what age I was, but I think just after we had moved to Bushey Heath where we had this much larger house I do remember making a plan of the whole house, at least a ground plan, I don’t think I included the first floor, but I do remember measuring out the garden and the house ground plan. And painting it up with watercolour paints and so on. That’s somewhere at home, I can’t remember where it is. And I do remember what really fascinated me was I could look for hours and hours at an atlas. I just loved looking at maps actually.

Why?

They engaged my imagination in terms of, you know, if you look at a map of Arabia and you see this huge empty space, empty quarter and so on, you wonder what it was like there and it’s a matter of imagining oneself into the countries which were displayed in front of you. I think partly, I mean I don’t know if it’s true, but I don’t know if it was stimulated by this, but I had an aunt who lived in – well, quarter of an aunt – who lived in India during the war and she sent us the most marvellous letters about Indian life and Indian animals and so on and sent us, well the letters always had exotic stamps on them and I felt somehow that, well perhaps that stimulated me, I don’t know. But I always loved to read what explorers had done and there was a chap called Colonel Fawcett – I think F-A-W-C-E-double T – I think it was he, who got lost in the

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Amazonian jungle. I mean I don’t think I would have liked to have been with him because it really was horrible, but I used to love reading travel books like that actually, and that coupled with the atlases I think has stimulated my imagination.

[17:05] What do you remember of making maps of outdoor places?

I can’t remember actually making a map of an outdoor place, but I used to do a lot of exploring around the neighbourhood on my bicycle and I do remember buying Ordnance Survey maps and taking them with me and seeing how far I could cycle from our house and then back to the house in the same day. I mean I can remember going up to Tring, or near Tring, up to Aston Clinton, that’s right. That was about the farthest I went north. And then I almost got into, I went past Basingstoke on one cycle thing, back to where we lived. So I did do quite a lot of exploring, so to speak, on a bike, with maps.

What do you remember of Stanmore Common?

Oh, that was a wonderful place actually. It was a real common land in the sense it had no buildings on it or anything. It was really a wood, not a common in the old sense, well in the sense that I envisage it as being sort of open grassland and so on. But it was really a wood and again, it was a wonderful place for finding different kinds of mushrooms, flowers, birds, trees, anything like that. And it was a wonderful place to cycle in actually.

Who did you go there with?

Well, when I was young I went on my own, but at school, when I was a bit older, I had two or three friends and we used to cycle around, play games.

And Elstree Reservoir?

Oh that’s another place, yes. Forgotten about that. There are two reservoirs actually; there’s one south of the road that goes between them, small one, which I never really went to, but the one on the north side was excellent for birdwatching again, especially if you were lucky I think you might have one or two waders though I can’t think of any at the moment, but you certainly had

Alan Smith Page 154 C1379/65 Track 7 lots of things like grebes and gulls and that sort of thing and it was an ideal place for those birds actually.

Can you picture it now?

Yes.

What do you see?

An expanse of water with overhanging trees and I think there was a concrete wall on one of the, probably the thing that made it into a reservoir. Yeah. Walking around the edge, basically.

You did, according to your diary, make maps of Stanmore Common and Elstree Reservoir.

[laughs] I can’t remember that at all actually. That’s interesting. There’s an interesting object or thing in Stanmore Common and I don’t know whether it’s related to the last century’s wars or not, but it was an earthworks, for want of a better word, there was a big ditch around it like a little wall, made presumably from the excavations from the ditch, and I always wondered whether it had an archaeological significance but I never bothered to look it up, actually. You say I made a map of these things? I don’t remember that at all actually. Interesting.

You also, on the fourteenth of August this year, in 1948, said that you were making maps about geology.

Did I? That’s interesting.

What memories do you have of making…

Absolutely none. If you, I mean I have absolutely no recollection of doing that at all, actually.

Interesting.

No, I can’t think of where I would have put them either, at home, if I kept them.

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[21:04] The Collins Magazine .

Oh yes.

What do you remember of reading that, because you received this sort of periodically through this year?

That was a wonderful magazine. It folded I think, well it has folded, like so many magazines, but I don’t know if it was devoted to natural history but it was certainly devoted I think to outdoor things and I think it did have articles on natural history in it and it was beautifully illustrated and beautifully produced. It might have been, it might have been the same publishers who published the New Naturalist series, I’m not sure, but when those books came out and that magazine came out it was a real step upwards in terms of interesting magazines. I used to love it actually. I think my mother subscribed to The Children’s Newspaper , edited by AJ Mee, etc. And I do remember she, yes, well, my father and mother together bought me – and I can’t remember when they bought me these things – a set of the Children’s Encyclopaedias . I used to read them from cover to cover actually, it was fascinating. So, you know, if couldn’t get a book in the library I would often just sit down and just go through the Children’s Encyclopaedias because they were so interesting actually, and so varied.

What did the Collins Magazine look like, what do you remember it looking like?

I remember, I think, that it was about an A4 size, bit less than A4 probably, glossy cover I think, glossy pages. I don’t remember whether it had any colour illustrations, I can remember black and white.

Are there any – this is asking quite a lot – are there any images or pages that you remember in particular?

No.

[22:57] Thank you. And bus numbering?

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[laughs]

As you called it.

Gosh. Bus number collecting. Yeah, bus numbers. Yes, like most of my friends we went through phases or manias of collecting things. You know, it could be anything. I can remember at least three or four different things we used to collect, one of which was bus numbers. Because there were little books or booklets you could buy which listed all the buses in the London Transport system, for example. And I don’t know what it was, but I do remember going off on my own, I don’t remember how old I was, I even went to the Old Kent Road garage I think, because that was where some of the prized numbers, some of the instances of a small number of coaches which never actually made it into the mainstream were run by London Transport and to get these was a real achievement, you see. It was good fun because I used to go up on the tube, on the Bakerloo line and make my way there somehow. Probably got thrown out of the garage once or twice because I was not supposed to be there. And that was one thing and then another thing we did was collect train numbers, you know, because we were quite near the London Euston line, used to go down to Oxhey and collect train numbers, get the Flying Scotsman and so on, things like that. That was a great thrill as well. We used to collect cigarette packets. I can remember the Passing Cloud, an old brand of cigarettes and, you know, if you got one of those you could swap it for quite a few other not so… And stamp collecting of course, yes. And then we used to collect transfers. I don’t know if you remember those little books of transfers. You could float the transfer off – I don’t know how they’re made, they’re fascinating things, transfers – and you could put them in a book and so on. And they often had a series of things, but they were very difficult to do because they often broke when you were floating them off or mounting them. And there were other things like cigarette cards. I was never really interested in football cards, cigarette cards, but I did like the natural history cigarette cards and you’d swap these at school. And I don’t know how one fitted all this stuff in, but those are the things that one did. I used to collect, I had a book of unsolved crimes as well, from the paper. I used to cut out, regularly cut out stories of dreadful murders and that sort of thing and I don’t know what I was expecting to do with them, but it’s just the sort of thing one did as a boy actually. Oh, I had a book of pressed flowers as well which I’d collected from the neighbourhood and so on. That’s around somewhere, but I don’t know where it is.

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[25:55] Any fossils?

Very few. I never, I was never one of the kind of geologists that from the age of year dot they collect fossils. I used to collect shells, but not fossils. And the only fossil I ever found actually in our house and garden was, I don’t know if I kicked it, but a piece of flint had inside it a beautiful little shell, or impression of a shell, mould. And that’s the only fossil I can remember collecting until I started geology at university. Geology was not a major interest, even though I made these maps you mentioned, while I was at school.

Is that because of lack of teaching in it or because of the competition of other interests which were…

Both, I should think actually. We were not in a geologically favourable area, we were essentially on the, probably on the London clay and the chalk which was, well, parts of London clay are superb but it’s very poorly exposed around the area I was living in. One or two streams, but that was after I started geology. No, I would never dream of actually collecting fossils, it never occurred to me to do that.

[end of track 7]

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[Track 8]

Yes, more memories of weather recording.

Yeah. One thing I really was fascinated by were the types of clouds that the weather produced, you know, all these high cirrus, cirrostratus and stratus and then the cumulus and cumulonimbus and altocumulus. I just, I liked the names – oh and nimbus of course – but the actual patterns they made in the sky were fascinating and they were particularly important because you could actually read the weather if it behaved normally, as it were, from the changes in the clouds. You could, you know, one day have a clear sky and then suddenly – well not suddenly – but cirrus would appear and then that would become a cirrostratus with a layer and you knew that something, some bad weather or probably some rain was on its way or something like that. So the clouds did have a predictive importance and relevance and I quite liked that. But I never understood why there were different kinds of clouds and I still don’t actually. I mean I always love watching them from an airplane when one’s flying. One of the things I found particularly interesting is actually why some clouds show shadows or dark colours and others are in essentially bright sunlight. It’s obviously to do with the shape of the cloud, the three- dimensional shape which you can’t get just by looking out of a window. But there are, there seem to be some anomalies which I don’t understand and if I keep flying I shall have another look.

Before we go on with your recording today, you mentioned when I arrived today that you’d had a dream which you think might be influenced by the sort of fact of doing these interviews and I wondered if you wanted to describe that before we go on?

Well, I’m not pointing a finger or anything like that, but I think by asking these questions it makes me think or remember things I have forgotten about for years, you know, well over sixty, seventy years. I had a very vivid dream just before waking up today. I was in a little house, or I don’t know about a little house, but I was on the ground floor of a house, I think it was a fairly modern house decorated with plain walls, white walls and so on, looking out through the window to the garden and there was a young wood, a stand of trees at the bottom of the garden, and I was suddenly, well I don’t know, I can’t say I was woken up because I was dreaming, but I suddenly heard this enormously loud noise and rushed to the window and saw this huge plane, it was a Lancaster bomber, completely black, going through this, about to hit this wood, or going through

Alan Smith Page 159 C1379/65 Track 8 it actually – that sort of thing happens in a dream – and then I thought God, is it going to crash, and then somehow the pilot started going vertically and turning back on himself, which is exactly towards where I was looking, and I woke up with a start. But it was a very vivid dream and I think it must be related, well obviously is related to the war and one’s fears of what might happen to you at the time.

[03:24] Thank you. You mentioned that you were in Prague in 1968.

Yes.

I wondered whether you could tell the story of how you came to be there and what you saw when you were there?

Well, the prime motivation for going to Prague was the International Geological Congress, held, organised by the Czechs under communist rule, and they had put an enormous amount of effort into getting it running. They had several, well certainly a few thousand geologists there. It’s a congress that takes place every four years I think, international congress. People from all over the world come and give talks, meet other people, discuss things, and the reason I went there partly was because it was the congress, though I was a young faculty member at the time and wanted to present a paper there, which has never been published, incidentally. One of my unpublished papers drawers. It was about work I’d done in America and I was going to meet my wife. She was being driven to Prague by one of our heads of department before we amalgamated, a chap called Harry Whittington, and his wife Dorothy. She was American, he’d been at Harvard and had been appointed as Woodwardian Professor. Very nice man, and they agreed, well they didn’t agree, they offered to take my wife Judy with them to Prague in the car, so they drove there. And I was going to meet Judy in Prague and then we were going to have a holiday I think. I can’t remember the details. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a very good field trip from my point of view, because I’m interested in tectonics, to what’s called the Carpathian bend, which is, if you look at a map, it’s where the Carpathians turn almost through 180 degrees and well, have a bend, if you look at the mountain range itself. And the question is, you know, what caused that, was it an original bend from some reason or other, or had it been straight originally and then bent subsequently, and I was curious about this because we didn’t understand these things and I went on this trip. It was a bit disappointing because the

Alan Smith Page 160 C1379/65 Track 8 exposures, that is the rocks you can see, are rather covered up by quite thick forest and vegetation. You can see things but they’re not as well exposed as they were in Greece, which is where I’d been working. Anyway, it was a good trip, they were very nice people and the trip was actually in Romania and I took the train from Romania to Prague and it was a very crowded train, went through Budapest and it was quite an eye-opener, because we went through, right through the centre of the city, as I recollect, and you could see all these bullet holes and well, shell holes in some cases, resulting from the Hungarian uprising in 1956 was it? Can’t remember, actually. I think it was 1956. Same time as Suez almost. And, you know, you realised what could happen if things went wrong. Got into, I got into Prague, got into my hotel, met my wife, who went to sleep, woke up in the morning, put on the radio above the bed, and all we could hear was martial music. And we thought well that’s perhaps how they do things in this country. And we could hear sort of rat-a-tat-tats outside, didn’t know what they were or anything like that. Anyway, we got up late, went down to the restaurant for breakfast, which is on the first floor, and everyone was, it was completely full, people sitting down, but it was quite silent or quiet and nobody seemed to do anything. So I signalled to the waiter to come across and take an order for breakfast, and he spoke good English and he said, ‘Have you looked outside Sir?’ [laughs] or something like that. And I said no, so we went outside and from the balcony we could see all these tanks coming up the street and what was worrying about the tanks or the people in the tanks was, I think most of them were essentially Asiatic, Mongolian or something like that, who clearly didn’t understand, well I don’t know if they understood Russian, I suppose they understood some Russian, but they didn’t understand English or the Czechs or anybody. So here was a group of soldiers, heavily armed, with tanks, people walking the streets, armoured cars and so on, who obviously wouldn’t understand what they were doing in terms of the setting. So if they were ordered to do something they would do it without question. Fortunately, it didn’t come to a shooting war, but you know, the question was, having got there, how would you get out. And we were there for several days I think. The congress was cancelled eventually. The reason it was cancelled, well, there was too much pressure I think, but it was a terrible thing for the Czechs, they spent all these years planning this conference and as long as the conference was going on the Russians could claim that everything was perfectly normal, and of course it wasn’t and if they cancelled it they would lose this wonderful opportunity to meet other people and discuss things with them. So they did cancel it eventually and I think the people who’d flown there or taken the train just waited for their embassies to do something. And I think the Canadian Embassy essentially rescued us in a sense by organising a train from Prague to Paris, which we got on. And one of the most touching things I remember leaving Prague was,

Alan Smith Page 161 C1379/65 Track 8 both of us were very touched by this, was the railway lines were lined with people in many places who were waving to us, because they knew who we were, and saying don’t forget us, tell everyone about us. It was very, it was a very tense time really, because you just didn’t know what was going to happen. And I remember, having been through Budapest and got into Prague, we were staying right, I think we overlooked Wenceslas Square at this hotel we had, and you realised it was full of little passageways and alleys and so on, which would be absolutely ideal for guerrilla warfare. So if the Czechs decided to start, or if the Russians decided to start something, we’d be in the thick of it, basically. I mean there was a complete, well, I won’t call him a maniac, but he was verging on being rather silly. I didn’t know him, I can’t remember his name actually, but he was a young chap about my age and he used to go out, he was on his own, he used to go out walking the streets and seeing what was going on, and occasionally tanks were set on fire, Czechs would walk behind a tank and set fire to the sacking at the back of the tank, which was fuel soaked, and start a fire on a tank and the tank would blow up, or at least catch fire. And they did fire things. So when he got to know us he said, look, can you look after these things for me, and these things turned out to be empty shell cases which we were supposed to hide under the bed for him. It was a really sort of surrealistic experience in a way. So that’s why, that’s how I came to be in Prague.

[11:55] Thank you. Last time you said that plate tectonics very rapidly changed your conception of the earth, or the sort of working hypothesis that you were using, what conception of the earth were you operating with before?

It was rather a vague one when I think about, but it was based on Harold Jeffreys’s book and people like him. Harold Jeffreys was in this college actually. He was a Fellow for over seventy years, which gives you an idea of his distinction and antiquity and so on. But Harold essentially founded, I think, the subject of geophysics and wrote several books, but his book The Earth was absolutely splendid. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to set up seismological tables about travel times of earthquakes using mechanical calculators, he didn’t have any electronic calculators, and that was done with Bullen, one of his students I think, Keith Bullen. And that was a real milestone in seismology. But because of this and partly because he did not believe that the earth could convect and if it did, convection occurred perhaps, I can’t remember he said this, convection probably occurred in the core, but not in the mantle around the core. And therefore continental drift, if it occurred, would only have occurred when there was convection,

Alan Smith Page 162 C1379/65 Track 8 which would have been very early on in the earth’s history, according to his views. So the idea of continental drift was complete anathema to him and I think he proved that one of the exponents of continental drift, Alfred Wegener, who put together the evidence for drift and had a theory about how continents could move based on his exploration in the Arctic I think, and looking at ice floes and regarding those as an analogue of how continents move around. Harold shows that his ideas of how continents could move were completely wrong. Now, whether Harold regarded that as a proof that continental drift could not occur, or certainly other people regarded that as a proof that continental drift could not occur from a physicist’s point of view, geophysicist’s point of view, and as you probably know, it gave rise to one of the most interesting arguments in the twentieth century about whether continental drift did occur or whether it didn’t. And academically in, specially in I think parts of America, it was rather frowned on, it didn’t help your career if you believed in continental drift. It became almost a religious thing, almost in that sense. And what Harold said was okay, we have mountains and they have folds and the rocks are crumpled up and so on, the earth is cooling down, it therefore contracts and what you’re looking at are the kind of wrinkles you would get on an apple that was drying and shrinking and the crust has to adapt to that shrinkage, and that was his model for drift. So there was a model for mountain ranges, it wasn’t predictive in the sense that plate tectonics is, but it gave a reasonable explanation of what you could see. And then when plate tectonics came along with this completely different way of looking at things, I could see how it would apply to the earth and it just completely changed my views of things. I can’t remember how long it took, but you know, it was obvious, somehow that it was right, basically.

So you would have, if asked, before plate tectonics you would have probably gone for the earth cooling down, shrinking and buckling the earth.

Yes.

[15:57] In terms of the Greek work, what were the advantages of the Department of Defense maps, the US Department of Defense maps which you were able to get over what was available freely?

They were just better maps, that’s all. In fact, we never used them, we used them very little because ironically the Greeks sold geological maps, their Survey, Greek Geological Survey, sold geological maps which had topography on them and since the main purpose of getting the

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Defense maps was to have good topography and good maps, having the topography on them, which is supposed to be a military secret, for some reason they took out every other contour. I can’t remember the details, but they didn’t connect the two, they didn’t connect the fact that you could buy geological maps with topography, the fact that actually they also had what they in any other terms would regard as a secret. They weren’t very good maps, I mean there were, I must admit… well they were much better than anything else, you couldn’t buy topographic maps at the time but they were, there were occasionally times when I was mapping in the area and a valley would be there on the map which wasn’t there in front of my eyesight, as it were, looking at it, and vice versa. But they were much better, they were perfectly okay for mapping on the scale we were doing the work.

[17:25] And if you knew that Oman was a better site for doing the sort of work that you were doing, why not work in Oman?

Well, I didn’t know about this until I really got into Greece and I wanted to, well, I wanted to complete the work in Greece. It never occurred to me actually to go to Oman because I knew a lot of people were going there. I did get out there. Ian Gass at the Open University very kindly flew me out one season and showed me with his students the rocks in Oman because he knew I’d been looking at similar rocks in Greece and we had some ideas about them and he wanted to find out what we thought about the stuff in Greece and whether it was applicable to Oman. And I did go out once or twice to Oman through Ian Gass’s good… He, we kept in… he and I got on quite well and we used keep in touch and our students used to work with one another and so on and we used to send students from here, Cambridge, to the OU because he liked the training they had I think. Ian was very good at picking up people who could work in Oman, it’s not easy to work in Oman, it certainly was much more difficult when he was working there than it is now, but he had a knack of finding the right people to do that kind of work.

And more difficult to work there than Greece at the same time?

Yes.

Because?

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It was more of a closed country. I mean you had to have – I don’t know how true this is – but after the war, probably after the war, the sultan who was in charge or ran Oman, I don’t know whether he invented it or whatever, but the government of Oman in addition to having a visa you had to have I think – I don’t know if it’s in addition to or whether this was a substitute for a visa – you had to have what was called a ‘No Objection Certificate’ and the story is, and I don’t know how true this is, but the story is that when the first plane, airlines used to drop off there, the Sultan, so it was said, used to watch people coming down the steps and, you know, he said, ‘No objection, no objection’ and then he would get a certificate or she would get a certificate, but somebody else might not and they would get sent back. It was quite strict. I mean I think Alastair Robertson, Edinburgh might have not had a ‘No Objection Certificate’ for one of his visits and was sent back to Edinburgh. And it was a very, I mean the towns, when BP were working – I think BP was working there, or maybe British… yes, it was BP I think – the people who used to work there, I think most of them have gone now but it would be interesting to talk to them because I think Muscat and the cities in Oman used to have a curfew, literally, I mean the town gates would close and everything would shut up, basically, for the evening. And it changed from that to what it is today in the space of fifty years or so, and Ian was at that transitional stage.

[20:43] You said something last time that intrigued me and it was about the Greek work and you said that in geology you look at a small area but you can’t be sure about that area until you’ve got evidence from another area, and then you said so that’s very different from physics, and I wonder whether you could expand on that difference?

Well physics, you’re always trying to isolate phenomena. I mean specially in particle physics or something like that. You try to pare down all the factors and you just have a small number of variables looking at a particular feature. So you try, you ignore everything else except that particular thing you’re working on and you try to eliminate all extraneous factors that would upset that, and you do experiments and you come up with equations and you solve them and see if your results conform to those solutions of those equations and if they don’t you adapt the equations or change your experimental set-up, because you might have mistaken it. So the physics is really focussing on very small things, well not small things, but small questions, not small questions, isolated phenomena, it tries to isolate a particular phenomenon as much as it can, whereas in geology you have to take it as it is, you can’t experiment, it’s there. It’s like

Alan Smith Page 165 C1379/65 Track 8 astronomy, you know, you can’t do anything about the galaxy, you have to observe and make different observations and put them together and make a story, which is quite different from having an experimental set-up. You can’t experiment on what is there, you can experiment in a lab on things that resemble what is there but it’s not what is there.

[22:25] Thank you. I wonder whether you remember what members of the Department of Geology when you first joined it would say about the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics?

Well, quite frankly I think they were rather scared of Bullard.

What did they say about him?

Well, he was a bit of a maverick. He was independently wealthy, he owned Bullard Ales at the time, he was a very good scientist, and I think they feared him actually. I don’t know if I said this last time, but this is one of the reasons why we didn’t amalgamate into one department until whenever it was, twenty-five, thirty years ago, whereas Deer, when he was Professor of Mineralogy and Petrology and also Master of Trinity Hall, he wrote a report called The Deer Report, which again, memory may be in error, suggested or proposed that Geology, Mineralogy and Petrology and Geophysics should amalgamate into a single department and that we should move out to west Cambridge near Bullard Labs, as it is now, Madingley Rise as it was then. But there was no possibility I don’t think of Geology agreeing to that unless we were pushed by the university, say, agreeing to that until Bullard had retired. I mean I think, I do think people had the view that Bullard just wouldn’t support many of the staff in Geology and if they retired or something he would get somebody in who was more in his line of country. Whether that was true or not, just can’t say.

Were there things that geologists tended to say about geophysics in the way that different subjects will say things about others?

Yes, they did and I’m trying to remember what they said actually. I honestly can’t remember but the impression, the residual memory that I have was that they were a completely different subject. Didn’t relate, you know, didn’t have to worry about geology. Don’t know. Sorry, I should know but I don’t. If I remember I’ll let you know.

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[25:04] Thank you. Could you start to tell the story of the origin of work on the calibration of the geological timescale which I think you start in the mid sixties.

Yes, that’s correct.

And the first edition of A Geological Timescale , Cambridge University Press, comes out in 1982.

Yes. There was an earlier book published by the Geological Society of London. It was their first special publication, I think, which Brian Harland was the driving force behind and I got involved with that work. This is how I got involved with it. I came back to Cambridge from the States, I didn’t know what I was going to do in terms of work, but I knew that I liked working outside and, you know, looking at rocks, as opposed to doing geophysical measurements, which I did some in the States. And I didn’t want to do experimental geophysics or anything like that. It was the idea of, I just liked going out and looking at remote areas I think. [laughs] I was delighted when I had the opportunity to do that, which was triggered in part by Brian Harland’s interest in the timescale because I spent one summer, probably 19… I don’t know, sixty… let’s think. Might have been 1965 even, I can’t remember. But it was one summer and I did a lot of data abstraction from publications of age dates, rocks that had been dated and the idea was to document what had been done, what measurements were made, what the results were, what the setting was geologically and put all these into a timescale volume. I can’t… I can’t remember what it was called actually. It may have been called The Phanerozoic Timescale , I just… I think there was a timescale in it. But as I say, Brian Harland was in it and our job was to abstract virtually all the data which was relevant to setting up a geological timescale. We didn’t abstract all dates because some of them were completely irrelevant, but those dates that might be relevant to setting up a geological timescale. And I seem to remember that we had a meeting in Glasgow and I can’t be sure of this, it’s probably in the preface to the book, where Holmes is actually present, I met him briefly, Arthur Holmes. He was quite old, his mind wasn’t as clear as it had been earlier and physically wasn’t in the best of shape, but it was very nice to meet the man who’d really dated the earth, years ago. And geology suffered from the lack of a decent measuring stick, if you like, if you regard timescale as a measuring rod in time, we didn’t have a good one actually. There were huge gaps in it. And Brian realised this and he may have realised this partly because he couldn’t solve some of his own geological problems from mapping in Svalbard with the timescale that existed at that particular moment.

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[28:56] So what did, for those who don’t know what a geological timescale is, what did exist before you started this work?

Well, Holmes had set up a timescale. That is to say he had, you know, the rocks laid down from the beginning of the earth, we don’t have those preserved, but as you come forwards in time you get rocks that are younger and younger and younger and the most familiar geological name for people at the minute is Jurassic, as in Jurassic Park and they know it’s something to do with, whatever, what Jurassic was. And Jurassic was, you can say, what, 150 or so million years ago. And you’d have another, the oldest rocks with fossils in them are about, well, with fossils because they’re useful for dating things, because you can date things by fossils, you know, the evolution of life. To understand how the earth’s evolved you do need, specially if you’re doing physics and chemistry, you do need to know some numbers about when the Cambrian was in terms of millions of years and dating rocks by radioactive minerals in them allows you to do this. So the geological timescale is essentially a table listing what we call Precambrian, Cambrian, etc, all those rocks that have fossils – well not the, Precambrian doesn’t have many fossils in – but the Cambrian and subsequent rocks have lots of fossils in them and you can set up a timescale based on the evolution of life, you know, from simple to more complex as we usually do it, but it doesn’t have numbers attached to it. If you want to understand anything about rates and processes and how fast things happen, how slowly they happen, you have to have a number and a timescale gives you that number. It gives you a number for the names that we give to rocks with fossils, basically. And the numbers available to Holmes were very small and because they’re small, you might have a rock that has some fossils in, you wanted to know what its age was, you’d have to guess it and there’d be a, the bottom of it, you would know it was bracketed by two numbers but the rock itself, the uncertainty might be several tens of millions of years, certainly in the worst cases, certainly several million years, and that’s just not good enough if you’re going to be a science really. So Brian was really trying to make, collect data, put it all together, because it’s scattered all over the place, put it together to give us a timescale which would be better than the preceding timescale. And that’s been the story ever since. I know it doesn’t answer your question about how I got involved and so on, but that’s where I first got involved and then Brian some time later, I think, was it – I can’t remember if it was 1980 or not – but Allan Cox who was at Stanford came over for a sabbatical in Cambridge, Brian Harland was writing a book about tillites, that is old ice age deposits, I was working in Greece, and Peter

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Llewellyn who used to run the BP research labs in Sunbury, or maybe he’d just started doing that, but somehow or other we all realised – I might actually have initiated this in some ways – but we all realised that the timescale had existed even after Brian’s efforts in 1965 weren’t good enough. We kept on finding anomalies that we couldn’t understand because things weren’t dated properly or they had no dates and so we all of us collaborated to – I think it was in 1980, timescale, I can’t remember actually, or 1982. Anyway, doesn’t matter. That was the second timescale volume, concentrating particularly on the timescale without all these itemisations that we had put in the previous one. I worked on that and that was very interesting because it did actually give you a better understanding of what you were looking at, and that’s the reason, really the only reason I suppose that I’ve ever contributed in some way to a timescale. I mean the most recent one was in 2004, it was published, a big volume, I didn’t have a lot to do with that except I did start, again, I did start that off and Felix Gradstein and Jim Ogg sort of ran with it and produced this marvellous volume. I did a lot of the editing on it and that sort of thing, but I did it because in part I found that successive timescales give you a much better inside picture, a picture of what’s going on in the earth than a bad timescale, or you know, a poorly documented or, yeah, a poorly documented timescale.

[34:04] So in terms of the first timescale, the…

Yeah, Brian’s timescale?

Yeah.

You – sorry?

Did that sort of begin your involvement in it rather than being something you worked…

Yes.

So what was involved in helping with the second one, apart from, as you’ve said, collecting dates from publications and sort of compiling them, what else was involved practically in this work, what did you have to go and look at or…

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We didn’t look at very much. Certainly never looked at anything in the field. That’s interesting, I can’t… Just trying to remember the dates. I know Allan Cox wrote a chapter on the magnetic polarity timescale, you know, when the earth’s magnetic field changes every so often, what was normal polarity becomes the reverse polarity and the magnetic field of the earth flips. It does this randomly and that provides a very good barcode, if you like, it’s like a barcode, for dating things. You can’t put numbers on it, except by actually dating the rocks and of course you can put numbers on it from the ocean floor because the polarity timescale is tape recorded in the ocean floor, as it were. Well, that’s fine for going back to about 180 million years or so and earlier times we just have… at that time we had a relatively few number of dates that were relevant to the timescale. Oh I remember, yes of course, we got Richard Armstrong involved in British Columbia, he was a wonderful geologist. He ran an age dating lab and was also very much a field geologist as well in the Western Cordillera in Canada in particular and he compiled a database of several hundred dates that were relevant to the timescale and he criticised each one, he looked at each one and evaluated them. And that was the data that we used to set up that revised timescale along with the magnetic stripes. And then there was quite a lot of work had been done on further sub-divisions of the timescale using fossils from all over the world and so on and Brian in particular put all that together. I think my contribution was sort of general putting together I think and working with Allan Cox and Richard Armstrong, I did go and see Richard Armstrong actually in Canada and we went through the stuff together.

[36:58] What use was made of dates from British laboratories?

Well, there weren’t many… to be able to have something useful for the timescale you have to have a rock which has minerals in it that you can date, which were formed at the time the rock was laid down, they’re usually volcanic rocks or ashes, and they have to be in fossiliferous sediments otherwise you can’t link it to the biological timescale and there aren’t many of those in Britain. There are some and in fact there were quite a few in, I think in Wales where they have ash beds, volcanic ashes inter-bedded with rocks that carry a very rapidly evolving fossil known as graptolites and you can get quite a few dates from them. But at that time the technology was so slow really and so expensive that it took a real effort, I mean if you were zircon dating, little what are called zircon, which is very stable once it’s formed, doesn’t change its age by being heated again and things like that, unless you heat it very much. The zircons, I think people used to get samples of a hundred pounds weight, or two hundred pounds weight,

Alan Smith Page 170 C1379/65 Track 8 crush them all up, separate out the zircons, and that took forever. I mean I didn’t do it but knew people who did it, and they were delighted to get one date. But now, I mean the present time, people talk about zircon spectra or zircon age spectra where they’ve dated several hundred zircons and you get a spectrum, you can see the whole range of what they are. And I mean it’s extraordinary what technology, changes in technology, the influence they have had on geology as a whole actually. Many of them are of military origin, I mean specially in geophysics. We can do things we just couldn’t imagine doing years ago.

Did you have any links with Stephen Moorbath’s laboratory in Oxford?

I never, I mean I was going to work with Jack Miller, as I said, and I never got to the stage, I never actually measured a single date. But I knew Steve Moorbath and we used to talk to one another so, you know, I would talk to him as a colleague but not professionally in the sense of age dating and… so I’ve never really worked, once I got into Greece I never really looked back and I never really, you know, it’s all part and parcel of not wanting to spend my summers in a lab, I just didn’t want to do that.

And this work is indoor work, it’s…

Yeah, well you go out and collect stuff and that’s very interesting, but you collect a sample. I like to do work where it gives me an idea of how the earth has evolved rather than just dating things or measuring magnetic things and that sort of thing. I mean I just like to look at… well, it’s probably related to the fact I have interest in all sorts of things and I just think the earth is a very interesting body and I don’t want to get stuck into a particular part of it. I mean you have to get stuck into part of it, but not in the detail that would be necessary to measure age dates. You know, when I started working Greece we didn’t know much about the dating there, we sent rocks off to Leeds for dating and published with the people from Leeds with that information, but I didn’t want to do it myself.

[40:36] Thank you. Could you talk about work, which I think starts from the early seventies, on essentially producing world maps. I mean I don’t know very much about this work at all, except that I know it involves computer programming to a certain extent. But can we start with how this work started if it didn’t start with the fit of the continents work.

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It did start with that. Yes, when Bullard, Everett and Smith, so to speak, published that paper, computers were very rudimentary in terms of what they could do. As I mentioned last time, the maps are not drawn by computer, the numbers for drawing the maps were calculated by computer but the actual maps were hand-drawn and it was rather tedious and it was done in 1965 and I’d started work in Greece in about ’67 I suppose, ’66. That took a lot of time, so I sort of left the whole business of map making or fitting continents together, I dropped it for a time. And what stimulated us to, or stimulated me in particular, to start it again, keep it going, was a request by people who were running a geological meeting through the Geological Society, the Palaeontological Association, and the Systematics Association in London, about 1969, 1970. The dates I can’t remember, but basically the idea was to have a meeting about fossil evolution. It must have been after plate tectonics had been thought of because they wanted maps of the world as it was in the past. Now, Stuart McKerrow, who was a very wide-ranging and interesting man, geologist at Oxford, asked Jim Briden who was a palaeomagnetist at Leeds at the time, and me, here, who could make some maps maybe, he more or less browbeat us. He said, look Jim, look Alan, you’ve got to make some maps for us. And we said, well we can’t do that, there’s not enough data, you see. He said, course there is. And he was a very optimistic person. And to cut a long story short, Jim Briden and I - Jim is still at Oxford, he’s retired now but he lives in Oxford - I made the maps, I wrote some programs that would move things around a bit, which the old map making programs didn’t. Computers had moved ahead a lot, you could draw maps by computer very easily compared to what we used to be able to do. We had enough knowledge of the ocean floor, more or less, in the Indian Ocean, in the Antarctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean and so on to reconstruct where the continents were at the time and we had palaeomagnetic data that Jim looked at to know what the mean position of the, where the mean pole was for a given time. And so we put it all together. We published these maps. I think I had a grant from NERC at the time as well to do this. It all came together, I can’t remember the details, but I had a research assistant called Gill Drewry who did a lot of the work and the three of us published these maps. And they were the first ever, I think, although I’d have to check with some of what Ted Irving did in Canada, but I think they were one of the, they were certainly one of the first ever series of maps of the world as it had been in the past. And they were, you know, people thought this was terrific actually. Both Jim and I are very pleased that we did this piece of work.

[45:16] So, starting with the writing of a computer program that could…

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Well, I modified a computer program. We had a program that had been written, a program called SuperMap. It was written by a chap called Bob Parker who was a graduate student doing his PhD at Bullard Labs, or Madingley Rise and he wrote a program that would make maps, present day maps using a computer.

How did it do that, how did SuperMap work?

Well, it was a Fortran program, pretty crude, well I think it’s pretty crude language nowadays. What you did, you fed in, I think we used paper tape, as I mentioned last time. You fed in the co-ordinates, geographical co-ordinates of the coastlines of continents and then got the computer to calculate where they were on a flat piece of paper, as it were, and that’s a map. So Bob Parker wrote this program to put, I think some of his own data or some geophysical data on to present day maps, which was very convenient and I mean it was a very nice program actually, very elegant program. And it didn’t have at the time any facilities for moving things relative to one another, which you needed to do. I mean if you’re making a fit of the continents you need to move things relative to one another and Jim Everett had written a program to do that, but it wasn’t part of SuperMap and I probably got into Jim’s code for rotating things and put it into SuperMap so that you could then not only make a map of the present day, but you could make a map of where the continents were in the past if you knew how to rotate them. That’s what I did. And that’s what you need to do if you’re going to make maps of the past. And Jim had all this palaeomagnetic data and I don’t know whether Jim did this or I did this, but we managed to take that data. Say you went back 200 million years and you had all the measurements of the magnetism at 200 million years ago and put it on a present day map, you would find there was a consistent pattern of where the pole was if you looked at the data from Europe, a slightly different pattern for North America, a very different pattern for Australia and the southern continents, and yet at the time all that magnetism was being put into those rocks, they would have all had the same pattern, they would have been part of a unified pattern and the break up of the continents would have moved those palaeomagnetic data to different positions, they wouldn’t make sense. So by making a reconstruction and moving the palaeomagnetic data with the continents that you use to move, or sorry, that you move to make the reconstruction, by moving that data with the continents, you could then find out where the mean magnetic pole was at the time the rocks were laid down and we assume that the mean pole of the magnetic field was the geographic pole, ie the North Pole or the South Pole and that enabled us to make a geographic map of the past. So that’s what we did and nobody had done it before I don’t think and it was

Alan Smith Page 173 C1379/65 Track 8 really quite exciting. And I’ve kept, well, I’ve kept in that field up to the present time actually. One of the things I have kept going.

[48:55] So, how sort of step by step did you take Jim Everett’s code for the rotating around a pole and insert that into SuperMap? For those of us who haven’t programmed, how do you do that?

It’s probably difficult to explain, but I’ll try. A program simply commands a computer to do something. So a computer would read some numbers to make a map and latitudes and longitudes, which is what you use for making maps, are latitudes and longitudes on a sphere and a map is obviously a representation of a sphere on a flat piece of paper. So if you, well the easiest way I suppose, one way you can realise it is take a sphere, which is transparent, and you put something on it, you put a light inside, put a line on the sphere, put a light inside and see where that shape that’s on the sphere, what it looks like when you put it, project it or put the light in the centre of the sphere and project the sphere on to a wall for example, like the wall in this room. So I think one can imagine doing that. And there’s a geometrical relationship between the numbers on the sphere, of the latitude and longitude numbers on the sphere and if you like, the co-ordinates on a piece of paper. Imagine it’s a piece of graph paper and you can project one point on to the graph paper, another point on the graph paper, and you’d end up with a map. Now you can never, well, there are lots, well there’s an infinite number of projections you could use but a common one for visualising things is graph paper and I suppose you could imagine… difficult to… no, I don’t see how you could do that one. But you could imagine wrapping a cylinder of paper around a sphere, putting a light inside and doing exactly the same thing again and you would end up with outlines of the continents on your piece of graph paper which would represent the continents on a map. So that’s how you could make a map using a computer, if you like. And then if you go back to the sphere, to move things on a sphere is very straightforward. All you need is an axis, a line passing through the earth’s centre, that cuts the earth’s surface somewhere and then you fix your continent – do it with a piece of plastic, you have a plastic shell covering the earth – draw a continent on to the shell and then if you imagine this axis you could imagine that it’s actually like a pencil or a knitting needle coming out from the earth’s surface and you rigidly attach that continent to that knitting needle and then turn it so the earth is rotating about that needle, you will get a new position for the continent. You won’t have changed its shape, you will have changed its position. And all you have done geometrically is to turn the points that represent the continent to new positions. It’s simply a rotation if you like, on

Alan Smith Page 174 C1379/65 Track 8 the sphere, and all you need to know to make that rotation is where the axis and the knitting needle if you like, where that cuts the earth, that’ll have a latitude and longitude, and the angle which you need to turn it through. And it’s obviously much easier to demonstrate with an actual sphere. You can’t do that if you’re talking I suppose, but you can rotate it and given it’s a rotation, geometrically it’s very easy to work out, or relatively easy to work out where the new co-ordinates are. And once you’ve got those new co-ordinates you can do exactly the same thing you did with the present day earth, you can project those new co-ordinates on to a piece of paper, make a map which shows where the continents have moved to. Now, so some geometrical relationship, so you put this formula into the program, I mean it’s fairly straightforward but… so you command the computer to turn these co-ordinates to their new positions using this algorithm which rotates things. So that’s a very crude outline of how you can make a reconstruction using a program and what you need to – all you need to do is to put a rotation algorithm, that is an equation that turns points into a computer and it’ll do it for you. So all you need to make the map are the places where these axis emerge at the earth’s surface and the angle through which you have to turn different continents through to find out where they were in the past. If you integrate that all together you get a reconstruction.

[54:23] And how did it display the results?

As a map on a flat piece of paper. Is that a satisfactory answer?

Yes. I mean when did it first start to show you the reconstructions on screen?

Well, you can start at the present day and you could do it, you could rotate things through a year and they don’t do very much and you won’t see it, but if you go back say ten million years you’re beginning to see the movement in the continents. If you go back 100 million years you really do see how they are moving and this has been going on presumably, well, we know it’s been going on for at least 2,000 million years, but there’s a huge amount of argument and very little data to say where the continents were and what they looked like at that time. We’re pretty sure, we’re absolutely sure where the continents were, the major continents were, back to 180 million years, because we have now got excellent satellite control on where the magnetic anomalies are in the oceans. We can date those anomalies and therefore we can, well, an example, for example, the South America to Africa motion, if you wanted to find out what the

Alan Smith Page 175 C1379/65 Track 8 world looked like there 100 million years ago, you go into the oceans and you find out there the 100 million year magnetic anomaly is next to South America or on the side of the Atlantic Ridge next to South America, do the same thing for Africa and bring those two together, getting rid of all the magnetic material that is younger than 100 million years, and that will tell you where the two were at that time. And since we now have satellites to do this, the maps we make are extremely precise, I mean better than a kilometre I would imagine. Or, of the order of a kilometre error. Whereas before it was tens, hundreds of kilometres, or we didn’t believe it.

What do you remember of first seeing the results of this works, using the modified SuperMap?

I don’t’ remember much about it actually. I don’t think it was a great surprise because having fitted the continents together, as it were, I mean I had fitted Gondwana after I did the work with Bullard and Everett, fitted Gondwana together, you knew they had to move and in fact, you know, people like du Toit in South Africa had made very good reconstructions without a computer or anything like that. And so you had a very good idea of what the likely motions were and in a sense it wasn’t a big surprise. The details were, I mean lots of interesting stuff came out of it, but if we were just moving continents around as rigid masses which is what these things did, the positions of the continents do change and you do see all sorts of relationships that you wouldn’t have seen any other way and they are very exciting, but I don’t remember, I mean I think we were so immersed in the work I never really sort of stood back and said this is terrific, or something like that. But it was a very interesting time.

[57:43] And so what, when you were first doing this work, what data was available for making judgements about how far things should move…

Well, a lot of it, or all of it was really the magnetic anomaly maps in the, yeah, the magnetic anomaly maps in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and to some extent the Antarctic Ocean. And there were many people involved with that, I mean people like Lamont especially, a chap called Pitman was very prominent in that sort of thing. I can’t remember who did the, oh, Klitgord was also involved. I can’t remember who did the South Atlantic, but Dan McKenzie and others, John Sclater, Bob Fisher did a lot of work in the Indian Ocean. And you took all that work, got the rotations, this is the fundamental thing you need, and just put them into the programme, just make a map. And the real problems are, not so much for the major continents but with the bits

Alan Smith Page 176 C1379/65 Track 8 and pieces on the edge of the continents that have been deformed, like the Alps, the Himalayas and the Carpathian bend I was telling you about. We really don’t know how to unscramble those, even today. Not properly. It’s very difficult. It’s partly because I think, well, the tectonics I think of the ocean floor are extremely simple and the tectonics of the continents are incredibly complicated, partly because I suppose that when you tear things apart it’s fairly straightforward, but when you squash them up together you get a mess [laughs], putting it very crudely, but that’s the difference between extension, which is what happens in the ocean floor and compression and mountain building and subduction and everything else that happens on the edge of the continents when they move together.

How did the computer model deal with that then?

It doesn’t. You just say, we know this isn’t right, and all you can do is to, if you like, separate those bits of the continents that we know have been highly deformed and keep them on the edges of the continents which aren’t deformed. I mean a very simple example is I suppose in Britain. If you go down to Devon and Cornwall the rocks of about 300 million years ago are very complicated; they’ve been squashed up, intruded by granites, broken aside, moved as little blocks, just one another, but then if you go across the Bristol Channel to the rocks of the same age in Wales they are deformed but they’re much more regularly deformed, they’re folded and you can unscramble folds, especially the folds that occur in that area. So it’s like rolling up a carpet, or not rolling, but wrinkling a carpet in that case. And then if you go north of that the rocks of that age are virtually undeformed and they continue undeformed all the way up to Scotland and if you close up the Atlantic they would continue all the way across North America to the west coast. So it’s only those bits that have been, well, crumpling up like a carpet is perfectly easy to, it’s easy to unscramble. Or sometimes they are like tiles on a roof, they make sheets that have been pushed one on top of the other and unscrambling those is straightforward, it’s when you get into rocks that have metamorphism and ductile deformation and things like that, that the difficulties are immense and we don’t have a good way of unscrambling that at the moment. Got rough ways but not really good ways and the computer doesn’t, can’t handle it because we can’t tell it what to do because we don’t know what happened.

[1:01:47] And where was the computer that you were using for the first reconstructions?

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Well, initially we all, everything was done on the mainframe computer, EDSAC I think it was, or Titan as it became I think. And then with the advent of PCs, I can’t remember when they came out but I remember PCs, well everything is done on PC now. There’s been a transition between the mainframe and the PC.

Roughly when did you first start to have your own, a computer on your desk and to be doing this work at it?

Good question. I can’t remember, quite honestly. I do remember we had a period when we used the BBC Microcomputer, but I don’t think we used that for making reconstructions, that was just to calculate. And what I think the first PC that would do the reconstructions, I think it was an IBM AT computer or something like that. I can’t remember, I’m sorry, really but… and of course now, you know, absolutely standard now that computers can do this sort of thing much more.

How did developments in the computing technology change what you were able to do?

We could do it faster and more accurately. You just do things so much more quickly than you used to be able to. You can ask questions. I mean making reconstructions now, you can make a reconstruction very easily and you can zoom into it and you can plot all sorts of data on it in a way that you couldn’t have done when the first computers came out. And that sort of change of technology and everything else, the databases that are available now, that’s going to continue and one can’t see an end to it actually. It’ll be available to everybody on the web, apart from a few, you know, commercially valuable things. But everybody will have access to this sort of thing and well, it’s almost miraculous, the changes that have taken place actually. And it’s not just making maps on a computer, as I said, it’s the technology of dating things. Not only can you date things much more quickly, but you can do it much more precisely. I don’t know if I said this at all, but I remember reading a paper very recently about the age of a meteorite, which is about four and a half thousand million years old, and the error quoted for that age was plus or minus one million years. I mean that’s quite extraordinary compared with what it used to be. And of course, high precision always turns up new problems which are the source of many PhDs of course.

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[1:04:59] What did you do with these reconstructions in terms of publishing or selling the results?

Well, we published them initially in this book that I think Norman Hughes of this department was very much involved with along with Stuart McKerrow. So we just published them. And then a curious thing happened really. We showed these to commercial companies and they said we’d be interested in getting hold of programs to do this, but I don’t think – no, sorry – commercial companies did not take an interest in this initially, I mean specifically oil and mineral industries. People did not take an interest in reconstructions on the whole, but BP did and I think in the 1980s, I think it was about then, again this is through the influence of Peter Llewellyn who was running Sun… had a lot to do with Sunbury at the time, he learned of our work and he and other people in BP realised that it could be important from the point of view of oil exploration, because oil isn’t everywhere, it’s only in certain places and one of the controls on it is, one of the controls is latitude, past latitude when the oil was forming. And so our maps which would show past latitudes suddenly became of interest – I don’t know if they suddenly became of interest – but they came of interest to BP and – yes, that’s about right – BP said, look, we’d like you to collaborate with UEA – University of East Anglia – and make us some maps, reconstructions, high quality maps if you like, on which UEA will plot the old coastlines of the past. So we had a four, I think we had a four-year contract with, UEA and Cambridge had a four-year contract, extramural research award it was called, with BP and we used to meet regularly with them and discuss things and BP released some of their confidential data and put them on these maps and so on. And I don’t know how true it is, but they had a big – well this is true – they had a big geochemical database which listed where there were rocks in the world that had, well they were carbonaceous, they were source rocks for petroleum and gas. They were rocks that when heated up would give you petroleum and gas, depending on the temperature. And they had a big library of this stuff and they plotted all these things on to their maps and they said after we’d finished the project that they helped BP to become a bigger company than it was because BP could say look, there’s not a good chance of oil being, gas being in this area or these rocks, but it’s almost, you know, this is a very good area to look at and I think we helped them to expand. So that was very nice to know that actually this blue sky research we had been doing actually had a practical commercial application, which in fact, now I think about it, meant that in our case the time lag between doing it as a blue sky project with no idea of commercial reward and the commercial impact of that was fifteen years. So, you know, it’s not five years, not the electoral cycle, and it’s not ten years which is a nice number, in this case it was fifteen years.

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But having done this and I imagine BP talked to, well they’re always talking to one another, other companies used to come through Cambridge and when they saw these maps they said how can we get hold of that software. Oh, we said, well, you know, we could sell it to you, we thought. And we went to the university’s commercial arm at the time and we said to them look, we’ve got one or two companies interested in this software, they want to buy it from us, how do we get the money into the department. And they had no idea. [laughs] I mean in particular they had no idea how much money the department would get and when it would be paid to the people who were doing the work and you can’t, that’s no way to run a commercial operation. And to cut a long story short, we went to the commercial arm of the university and we said, we set up a little company to do this for us actually, and that’s been doing this work for the last quarter of a century. It’s, we don’t, I mean I don’t, we have directors but none of the directors, they’re all geologists and a mathematician, but we don’t make any money out of it. I think that’s… my view is that if you’re using the facilities in the department to do these things you don’t put it into your own pocket, you plough it back into the business, keep the research going. I mean I find these, what is being done in terms of the maps and what you can do with them and so on and so on is essential for my own research. But it also happens at the same time to be of interest to industry and value to industry, so you know, I’m very happy. There isn’t a huge market for this sort of stuff but there’s enough to keep a programmer going.

[1:11:29] How did the involvement of BP and the interest of oil and mineral companies more generally change the content of the program?

Well…

Apart from adding their own data, which you’ve said?

Well, one thing we did, Lawrence Rush, the programmer I work with, he set up the reconstruction program for BP. They took it on board and then having got the code they modified the code so that it would interrogate their databases and plot the data on the maps and that sort of thing. The sort of thing we didn’t do or wouldn’t do. Not that sort of thing anyway. And how did it evolve? Well, several things happened over the years. I mean, as I say, we had this Fortran program initially and then we found that, we felt that C++ was a better programming language, especially if you’re using graphical stuff, and so we moved that program over to C++.

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That was still mainframe programming at that time, that was in the early 1980s actually. And then we got another contract from a consortium of oil companies, I think it was a sort of tax write-off thing really, or something like that, where they supported us to convert those programs to programs that would work on a PC, and that was very useful. And then having done that, that worked for several years, ten, fifteen years, what we have found in the last five, ten years is industry doesn’t want this program any more because they have to train people to use it and they don’t like doing that, they like to, you know, time is money as it were, and there are much more powerful geographical information systems as they’re called, available now commercially than the program we wrote. Not many people would use this so it was quite a bit of expense from their point of view to use the program we had written. So now we are working with, well we have moved over to ArcGIS, which is a big commercial program for making reconstructions. We use that now for our own purposes and we are now involved with a company in Australia which is interested in doing this sort of thing. So there’s been a change of the language, a change in the machinery as we go on and it gets more and more complicated so that I couldn’t, I don’t, I know I couldn’t… I don’t want to program any more, it’s just too complex. ArcGIS is a real mammoth program and it’s very clever but very difficult to understand how it works, you know, compared with what I’m used to.

[1:14:52] How did you go about developing your ability to program? We know how you started programming from your assistant work in America, for example, but as you started to program in different languages how would you go about learning those languages?

You just try it out. It’s a silly answer but I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever been to… I’ve been to one or two courses early on. I mean I even learnt Assembler language at one time. But there are plenty of books, good books, and probably CDs these days, which tell you how to do these things. I usually buy a book and look it up in the book actually and try and emulate what’s in the book. It’s not difficult really. I mean as long as you start with simple things. What you mustn’t do is to jump in at the deep end and expect things to work next week. It takes a long time and some languages are dreadful and others are very friendly really. And I mean, I probably said last time, that if you were writing a program, the worst thing that can happen, you go through all these compilers, I think you had to go three steps and it would take an hour or so to get all this stuff ready to run, and you’d find you’d missed out a hyphen. Well nowadays, if you miss out a hyphen, usually the diagnostics are so good that it will tell there’s something wrong with this

Alan Smith Page 181 C1379/65 Track 8 line, it might even fix it for you. So you get very careless actually, I’m much more careless than I used to be. I just sort of write something down and hope it works and then if it doesn’t work it’ll tell me what’s wrong and I fix it. I’m afraid that is a much more efficient overall thing for me, but it’s a rather lazy thing to do. But computers are becoming so good at these things that you don’t have to worry about it.

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[Track 9]

Could you talk about the roles of yourself and your collaborators on the world map work? I know that you collaborated with different people at different times. You’ve got Brian Funnell for example, and Jim Briden. So how you sort of divided the work among you in this project.

Well, our group in Cambridge, that’s working with Lawrence Rush and – was he around at the time? No. The early work that we did for this symposium requested by Stuart McKerrow, that was divided between me, Jim Briden and a research assistant called Gill Drewry. I would have been responsible for the computing and the geology, Jim would have been responsible for the palaeomagnetic data and also since he knows a lot of geology, well he may have been trained as a geologist, I forget, but we would have collaborated on any geological problems.

What did Gill Drewry do?

She was responsible for drawing the maps and in fact, I’d forgotten that all those maps were drawn by hand again. Whether they were redrawn from computer printouts, I can’t remember. It’s quite possible they were. But she was essentially a research assistant putting together, well making sure the data was there and coming and checking with us and so on and she did all the drafting for the maps. They were some of the best maps I’ve ever made actually, because there was enough time to do a proper job. Machines can’t do it always, the way we like. But she did a very nice job of it actually. Yeah.

[02:08] What decisions did you make about the presentation, the appearance of the maps, either on computer or once they’d been, as you say, transcribed?

Computer maps, the appearance on the computer didn’t matter at that time, but it was important to have good maps on bits of paper. They were all in black and white for publication and for use in this meeting. And in fact, very interestingly, a chap called Bert Bally who – I don’t know if he’s still alive – but he was very much involved with Shell in the States, employed by Shell. He might well have been one of their chief scientists or whatever position they call, he took our maps, redrew them and coloured them up and sent us some slides of them. So, you know, we didn’t do that. We could do that nowadays but we didn’t do it then. And we could do that on

Alan Smith Page 183 C1379/65 Track 9 computer nowadays but we didn’t do it at that time. [03:11] And moving on to the next set of maps which were the ones where we worked with BP, Brian Funnell provided, he had a research assistant called Richard Tyson, I think he went to Newcastle or Durham, and his job was to go through the literature, put it all together, I think he put together 2,000 references at the time, and use his judgement as to where the coastlines had been at the time of the map concerned and document it and so on. Brian Funnell oversaw all that and I had Lawrence Rush here doing the programming for that particular set of maps and I did the palaeomagnetism in fact, that was necessary for that.

And could you expand that a bit – when you say you did the palaeomagnetism?

Yes. Well, what I did, I had a, I think it was at this time, again I can’t remember the timing but I know there was a move at about this time for one of the associations of the geophysical community, probably one of the committees of IUGS, which is the International Union of Geological Sciences, to, there was a proposal to put together a database of all the palaeomagnetic measurements that had ever been made. I didn’t have anything to do with this, I didn’t write letters in support of it, and it did start and it was put together, well I don’t know whether Jim had – he must have had some influence on putting the stuff together – but essentially the people who make measurements of magnetism in rocks and get the magnetic pole of the time concerned, put together a database which continued until very recently, ie in the last five years, which has about 8,000 or so measurements from all over the world, all through the geological column as it’s called, you know, different ages in other words, from which you can reposition a continent, a given continent, you take the, whatever measurements you have and if you have more than one of course you average them and you can then reposition the continent on the earth as it was in its proper latitude and orientation. You don’t know what its longitude is, but that’s an arbitrary thing anyway, but you know what its latitude and orientation are and that’s essential for drawing maps when you go back into the time when there was no magnetic stripes, ie prior to 180 million years, there are no stripes so how are you going to reposition things, well you have to use the palaeomagnetism. Palaeo of course meaning old, it just means old magnetism preserved in rocks. And I remember talking to Fred Vine about this and he said, ‘Alan, you know if you really think about it this shouldn’t work’. There are so many things that can go wrong. You may not be able to magnetise a rock at the time it’s being laid down, it can be re-magnetised and it can be imperfectly re-magnetised so you might partially re-magnetise so that you get a blurred, you know, you get several components and trying to find out which component is the proper one

Alan Smith Page 184 C1379/65 Track 9 is difficult. But it does work and it’s remarkable in a way that it does work and it’s the only way we have at the moment of repositioning continents prior to about 180 million years, which is essentially most of earth’s history. So when I say I did that, what I meant was, I went into the database, there’s enough information in the database to choose magnetic poles that are reasonably well dated, some of them have very wide range of uncertainty and I rejected those, others have re-magnetised components and if they are re-magnetised or thought to be re- magnetised you reject those. Others are well, incorrect in some way. Others probably have been re-magnetised but they haven’t been detected as being re-magnetised, but they give a pole which is quite different to most of the other poles that you’re looking at. And anything that was in deformed rocks I got rid of, I mean you couldn’t use magnetic poles from metamorphic rocks and I don’t like poles from granitic rocks either because I think they can be re-magnetised. So my job, initial job, is to select the poles that you think are reasonable and fairly stable and pass several tests that you can ask of magnetic poles. I’m not a palaeomagnetist, I just take their word for it these are the things you can use, having selected the poles you can then find the mean pole for different continents at different times and use those to make maps. When I said I did the palaeomagnetism, that’s what I meant, really.

Selecting the poles which were…

Selecting the poles, finding the mean pole and then using those poles to reposition the continents at different times.

[08:58] How did the result of this work change from the first time you did it to this second time that you were doing it for BP? In other words, how did the outcome, the former position of continents, you know, the great continent, how did it look different from the first or the second based on presumably more or different data and a different program?

Program wouldn’t make any difference, it uses the same algorithms, just a different code, like a different language, computing language. Frankly, very little. I mean they looked very similar, except I can qualify that by saying that the maps from 180 million years to the present day are very similar, that’s because you’ve got the ocean floor data. Now the ocean floor data has changed but not very much in the sense that the ages might be slightly different, but there’s very little change in that. Once somebody’s done a survey of the ocean floor and found which

Alan Smith Page 185 C1379/65 Track 9 magnetic anomalies are present, I mean that’s it, that’s the data. Prior to 180 million years there’s still a lot of uncertainty about where some of the continents were relative to one another, partly because the palaeomagnetism is much more prone to re-magnetisation, and this is particularly true prior to 540 million years prior to the Cambrian, ie in the Precambrian, because dating is much more difficult, you don’t have any fossils really that you can use for dating things, you’ve got only age dates and you can’t always be sure that the magnetisation is of the age that you get from an age dating program and there’s not a lot of it. I mean Precambrian rocks, eighty per cent or more of the earth’s history, they get deformed and folded and are much likely to have been messed around, so to speak, by deformation than the younger rocks are. So the Precambrian has poles, there’s often a question mark about whether they’re the correct poles, and this is why there’s so much uncertainty about, you know of Pangaea when all the continents come together, about say 200 million years ago, there are suggestions there was a Pangaea called Rodinia at about, well I’m not sure, I think it’s probably a wide range of guesses about when it was around, and there’s no consensus at the moment at all about what it looked like or whether it was actually a Pangaea, we just don’t know. It probably was, but it’s very dodgy. I mean… So that’s, you could say that there’s much more Precambrian palaeomagnetism now and that does help to constrain the way the palaeomagnetic, where the continents were, but you have to remember that a lot of the palaeomagnetic work in the Precambrian on, say if you take Africa for example, Africa is a mosaic built up of different Precambrian blocks. There might be half a dozen or a dozen due to past continental - well, I was going to say continental drift - but past plate collisions and separations and so on. So instead of having a big continent with lots of data on it, you have lots of little blocks which have much fewer data and it’s much more difficult to know what’s going on. So I don’t think, you know, that’s going to be, if we continue to fund that sort of work, it probably won’t be sorted out for years, if ever.

[12:59] And how did the way in which you presented the maps change, if they did, when you were starting to sell these to companies? What differences were made about presentation then, if any?

We wouldn’t present them as maps, as paper maps, we would sit them down in front of a computer screen and just show them how the program worked and what it could do. So that, yeah, that’s all we do nowadays. We don’t make maps. Not for industry anyway. I mean I’m not, I don’t make maps for industry, I use the program to make maps which are interesting, but

Alan Smith Page 186 C1379/65 Track 9 industry’s got tons of data which can go on to these maps and it’s up to them what they do with the program once they’ve got it. I’m not, haven’t got the time to go into their, what they’re interested in unless it happens to coincide with what I’m interested in really.

[14:10] Could you describe the Department of Geology in the 1970s in terms of…

It was even the 1960s when I first came here, 1963.

Yes, we…

Do you want me to go that far back?

Yes, we’ve done a little bit of that, but nothing thorough so if you could, yes.

I need some notice to make it thorough, but it was really a, almost like a club, like so many places were then. You always wore a tie, many of the older staff always wore a suit, or certainly a jacket. You always lectured in gowns. I mean I never lectured in a gown except for – no, I don’t think I have actually – but as a student one was lectured to by professors and lecturers who wore gowns and I do remember seeing on occasion, I know it was our head of department, but at least one person I saw had a mortar board, a square. So it was very formal, very conservative, or fairly conservative, rather small, working on problems that interested people, but didn’t have a broad outlook as far as I could tell, really. People worked hard though, well most people did. It’s partly possibly inherited from the war in the sense that my understanding is that the department was depleted in much of its staff during the war because they were involved in fighting or doing something, and of course you were then trying to run a department with a much smaller staff and possibly quite a few students, certainly after the war, people came, demobbed and so on, had come to Cambridge for a degree and I don’t know what the numbers were but I can imagine that the people after the war had to work jolly hard actually, to do a decent job. I mean there were very few people who were not interested in teaching, I mean they were selected in part because they were good teachers. They were good teachers actually. But they were rather old-fashioned in that sense. I think, well it’s like most things, Brian Harland, as I say, he was very interested in continental drift and thought there was something in it, but most people didn’t and they thought he was a bit of a radical and possibly not sound sort of person. [laughs]

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I mean I don’t know how true that is, but the department at that time was not brim full of ideas, unlike geophysics. When I joined geophysics it was just bubbling with ideas, we didn’t know what was going on in the earth, we knew something new was going to come out of it, or we hoped something new was going to come out of it, but it was always an interesting place to be, specially at tea and coffee with Bullard, he would always ask people what they were doing and come up with new ideas and so on, but that was never true at that time, except perhaps one or two people, in the old Department of Geology.

Why do you think that was, why was the atmosphere so different? Why were questions being asked about the sort of fundamental structure and history of the earth there but not in a geology department?

Well, I think geology was almost at, I mean I remember talking to one staff member about granites and how they were taught before the war, and he said you had a roomful of different kinds of granites which had different names and different minerals in them but you really didn’t know how they formed and what they represented, and it’s almost as if by giving something a name you had solved the problem. I don’t know how true that is, that’s an impression I had. And it was only a few people who were really questioning what was going on. Now, Mineralogy and Petrology might have been different because they did do experimental work and it might have been that there was much more discussion about things scientifically, I just don’t know, but I didn’t have anything to do with them really. I mean a lot of the remarks I made just there, some of them are things that I noticed as a student and some of them will be things I noticed as a young faculty member. Yes, I think there was probably a lot more discussion in Mineralogy and Petrology because Tilley, the chap who headed the department when I was an undergraduate, and Deer subsequently, well certainly Tilley, he was always going off or talking to people from the Carnegie Institute in Washington which did a lot of experimental petrology and, you know, that was a very… so you had experiment and observation going on at the same time and you could experiment on things like that in the lab. You could take a piece of basalt and melt it and find out when it started to crystallise and when it was thoroughly crystalline and so on, and you could see what sequence of minerals came out of these things, and probably having that kind of experimentation, which is very difficult to do in palaeontology, for example, and you can do to some extent, but not easily in sedimentology, it may be that that made it a more lively place, I don’t know. But Mineralogy and Petrology was a very, all of us, or both departments were very

Alan Smith Page 188 C1379/65 Track 9 hierarchical. Bullard, at Bullard’s, he was much less worried about hierarchies and things like that. He was much more interested in the science.

[20:24] How did the Department of Geology change in the 1970s?

Well, new people came in. I was very lucky when I came in, plate tectonics had just, well, I think 1967 was supposed to be about the first paper on plate tectonics, but the real breakthrough and the whole torrent of papers started in 1968 I think, probably resulting from a conference at Woods Hole, I think. I can’t remember the detail, I didn’t go to it or anything like that. So when I came in in 1963, yeah, I was there before plate tectonics was thought of and I remember as soon as it became clear that it was a new earth, as it were, I just rewrote my lectures, or the ones I did on plate tectonics, you know, got to put it in this context.

What lectures had you been doing before?

I used to do the first year, I had a first year course where I taught essentially what was called mineralogy, microscope, taught the distribution of igneous rocks, some igneous rocks, at a first year level. Metamorphism, structure, that sort of thing. And then when plate tectonics came in, rewrote the whole thing. Not the whole thing, but I mean certainly the tectonics, granites and that sort of thing, we related to completely different things. And probably changed our lecture every year because new ideas came up. So, how did it change? Well, for a time it looked as if plate tectonics was going to be the basis of everything, which it is in fact, but there was a time when you thought well maybe sedimentologists and palaeontologists and every other ologist would base all their work on the notions of plate tectonics, which they do to some extent and there was a feeling that maybe people would talk a lot to one another about what they did and what the importance was. I think, looking back, I don’t recollect that people talked much to one another about what they were doing. It’s almost as if it was not the thing to do at tea and coffee, so where else would you do it, well it isn’t clear. But there wasn’t the sort of, what I thought… the people were genuinely interested in what they did but they didn’t want to enthuse about it to other people. I think enthusiasm was frowned upon. [laughs]

Really?

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I’m not sure, but it’s a feeling, you know. Didn’t want to show too much enthusiasm about anything.

Why’s that?

I don’t know, this is the impression I had and I don’t know how true that is. People were excellent scholars and they knew what they were doing but they didn’t somehow communicate that to other people. As an undergraduate I don’t remember being, having that, you know, spirit of enquiry and enterprise come across in any of the lectures I had, except Brian Harland’s, as I say, I think he had that.

And where was the department coming together for coffee and tea at this time? In an earlier period you described a sort of divided department with certain lecturers meeting in the curator’s…

Yes, that’s right.

Did this break down in the seventies or continue?

I think it broke down only when we became one department. That was largely Ron Oxburgh’s doing.

So this continues all through the seventies then?

I think so. I mean I can’t see why it wouldn’t have. I don’t think it… there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have done, because the people who would have changed it were quite happy with what they had. That’s my view actually. I don’t know how true this is, but yes, I think, I mean the story I heard – you’d have to ask Ron Oxburgh if this is true – but the story I heard was that Ron insisted on having a common room which was a common room and I don’t know how true this – this is the bit I’m not sure is true – I don’t know if he said this or not, but the story is that he would not have come here had we not had that. And maybe it’s just gossip, I don’t know, but it’s a good story and it illuminates, that’s what he would have done, I mean that was the kind of person he was, because he saw the value of having everybody coming together. Now, we still have tables in the department where you can always guarantee to find X or Y or something like

Alan Smith Page 190 C1379/65 Track 9 that, but there’s much more mixing than there used to be and in particular, I think it would be fair to say, and I can’t remember what happened prior to coming together, but research students mix with staff and, you know, you might go and sit next to somebody, talk to them about what they’re doing and so on, whereas before I think we were much more segregated. I just cannot remember what we did for tea and coffee actually.

[26:28] What do you remember of relations between the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at this time in the seventies?

Well, I remember there was a very roly-poly chap called Albert who was our departmental photographer and whenever he left at five o’clock, I think it was, promptly, he had a great big key which fitted into a lock which was the dividing door, on the dividing door between the two departments and he would really take great pleasure in locking that door at five o’clock. So that gives you an idea, there wasn’t a free to and fro. And one, I know that Andrew Hynes, one of my first research students, was one of the first people, if not the first person to use a piece of equipment in Mineralogy and Petrology. He used an XRF to do some analyses and there were a few raised eyebrows when this happened. [laughs] So that’s the kind of place it was, it was very compartmentalised actually. And as I probably mentioned, we were so compartmentalised that had we not come together in the 1980s or whenever it was, I would have gone back to America. I just didn’t like, well, it was very cosy and comfortable and everything else, but it just didn’t seem to be, you know, thriving scientifically, which I like.

And there was a relationship with the microscopes?

[laughs] Well, this is a story that I will tell which may be completely untrue, but it probably captures something. My recollection, and the person who could tell you if this is true is a chap in Trinity, he’s retired some years ago, he’s a very good storyteller, Graham Chinner. Very young at the time and his head of department was Professor Tilley, also an Australian, who saw Graham walking across the courtyard between the two departments carrying some microscopes, that’s the story. And Tilley saw him and I’m sure that Graham will tell you the proper version, but Tilley is supposed to have shouted at him out of his office saying, ‘Chinner, where are you going?’ or ‘Where do you think you’re going?’. And Graham said he was going to return some microscopes to the Sedgwick, that’s what we used to be called sometimes, because I think the

Alan Smith Page 191 C1379/65 Track 9

Sedgwick had particular types of microscopes that Mineralogy and Petrology didn’t have but Mineralogy and Petrology needed at times in the year and borrowed them from us. So while Graham was returning these Tilley said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ and Graham said, ‘Returning these microscopes to Geology’ and Tilley is supposed to have said, ‘Well, don’t!’ [laughs] Now I don’t know how true that is but it does illustrate the kind of thing, the spirit that existed, or lack of it or whatever, between the two departments.

[29:29] Where were you living in the 1970s?

Let me just think. We started out, when my wife and I first came to Cambridge, we had a flat in Arbury Road, north Cambridge. Shortly after that, a year or two, I don’t know how long after that, we managed to buy a semi-detached, pre-war semi-detached house on Eachard Road and we moved there because it was close to Bullard Labs which is where I was working at the time. And then when I became a junior faculty member in geology I, yeah, I had to go down town, so was in the centre of town then, but living in Eachard Road, and then I can’t remember when it was, let me think. Probably in the mid 1960s we managed to buy quite a large house, completely detached house in a new development in Newnham, which we lived in until my wife became ill, which would have been, let’s see… probably in the 19… late 1970s she became ill and she had Parkinson’s Disease and she realised that she couldn’t keep the house going on her own, you know, so to cut a long story short we, after two other moves, we moved to Archway Court which was a small townhouse, but it didn’t suit us really, didn’t like the atmosphere so much, and we bought a house in a Victorian terrace in the centre of town just off Mill Road and spent a year in a college accommodation while that was being modernised, basically, and we’ve been there ever since. So we started out in a flat and ended up in a little Victorian terrace, which suited us. I mean I didn’t like it at the time, but now, looking back – well, not looking back – but as time went on I realised just how good a choice that was by my wife actually, because it’s a very easy house to run, it’s got enough room, very private even though it’s a terrace, and as I say, that’s where we are, well, that’s we lived ever since.

So in the seventies you were at Newnham in the large house?

Yes.

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[32:32] What was the effect of having a daughter on your sort of working life, if you like?

I can’t remember the details. I can remember I used to take her to school. She used to ride her bike to school. She was educated at Newnham Croft, which is a primary school, very nice school. Lot of… I think – this is an aside – but one of the great things about Cambridge is the state system is very good because a lot of the fathers and mothers are academics and make sure that it is good. So we put Jessica, she’s always been in the state system and I think that’s actually been very good to her because it’s exposed her to all sorts of people she wouldn’t meet at an independent school. But the teaching’s good, so that’s what matters, in a way. But there’s this additional bonus of meeting all sorts of different kinds of people, which I think is a useful thing to have done actually as a child. I can remember as an example, when we were in this townhouse in Newnham Jessica had a birthday party or something, had lots of friends round anyway, and I can remember coming down the stairs and I could hear her speaking and her friends speaking and they were talking very much in the local Cambridge dialect, which is very close to Cockney, and as soon as I appeared Jessica started talking in standard English, it was really funny. But I think it did her a lot of good actually.

What memories do you have of things done with her in the same way that we looked at the things that your parents did with you when you were a child? What sorts of things do you remember particularly doing with Jessica?

Well, I… riding to school and back, well not riding to school, it was quite a little adventure for her, specially at times. I don’t remember I did anything independently of my wife except sometimes on a weekend, or Saturday in particular, I would take Jessica into town and look after her, possibly, well in the Department of Geology actually. So she would she would be doing some drawing in my room in the Department, I would be doing a bit of work perhaps or some teaching even. And whenever we went on holiday we did all sorts of things, like walking and making sandcastles, all that sort of thing. I think Jessica’s bringing up in terms of being read to or listening to music was something my wife did mostly. So I can’t claim to remember doing a lot of things with Jessica actually, except later on when she was in her thirties and twenties and thirties and so on, I did go away with her occasionally because my poor old wife was an invalid at the time and couldn’t travel, really. So she used to go into respite care and I often had a holiday with Jessica. But as a child I can’t remember much, when she was a child I can’t

Alan Smith Page 193 C1379/65 Track 9 remember doing… We did things together on the whole. So probably if we were doing the same things now I would be doing a lot more with her and my wife would probably be doing more of her own things actually. Because I think she felt devoted to, she felt she had to give, as women did in those days, felt they were expected to bring up the children. Whereas I think today it’s much more of a joint effort, and I’m sure that would have been the case in my case actually.

[36:52] And what do you remember of Jessica’s interest in or involvement in what you were doing professionally as she grew older and aware and…

Not very much. [laughs] I did try and explain to her, one of these things when we went away for a week. I had to, I think I had a PhD exam in Scotland or something like that, in Edinburgh, and she met me, she was in work at the time, but she took the train up and we had a few days in Scotland and I did go up to a place called, nearly, I went to Isla and we looked across to Jura and I was trying to explain to her about some rocks that were in the harbour. It might have been Port Askaig I think, in Isla, rather unusual rocks in the British context, they were very old glacial rocks, about 600 million years old, and I was trying to explain to her why, you know, what these were and she said, ‘Oh yes, thanks dad’. Well, not quite, but she clearly did not, she does not have an interest in geology, or science in general. Well, she does have an interest in science but more biological sciences than physical sciences. No, she’s not that way inclined. [laughs]

[38:17] And could you talk about your interests outside of work at this sort of time in the 19…

1970s?

Yes. What would you do out of work?

Well, with my, you know, again with my wife we’d often visit art exhibitions and art galleries, that sort of thing. We would often go to concerts, we would often go walking. Those are the sorts of things that we liked doing. Or not just art galleries, but looking at little towns in England or wherever we were actually. I suppose what most people do, I don’t know. We didn’t have a very specific interest, it was a very general interest. I mean you can probably determine it from

Alan Smith Page 194 C1379/65 Track 9 some of the diaries that we kept together. I think, I can’t think of anything that we concentrated on. Just liked to do those sorts of things.

How would your wife respond if you pointed out something geological to her on a walk?

Well, she was curious about it but not in any depth. I mean she was educated at Barnard and Oberlin in the States, had a year at Oberlin and she had, most of her education was at Barnard, which is a sort of sister college to Columbia in New York, and she did take a course on geology, but it was for liberal arts people so it was very general. And she did make a joke of it because she did say once that she had written about ‘indigenous rocks’ instead of igneous rocks. So she was interested in what I did up to a point but she wasn’t a scientist in any way. Her own work, I mean she loved reading and writing and she used to write short stories and novels and things like that when she was healthy.

Do you know the content of those, did you read them?

Yes, I did. I often – well, it was difficult because she wanted me to act as a sort of editor cum critic at the same time as I was establishing myself as a young faculty member, so it was quite a lot of work in a way, but I did organise the… I used to organise… I mean, I’m not a good critic, I’m very good at finding typographical errors but not criticising short stories very much, but I did help her by making sure that she got her stories off to editors and people like that in the States. She never published anything formally but she got to the stage where editors were actually interested in what she was doing and encouraged her to keep at it and came up with some useful criticisms, you know, develop this character, why don’t you develop this character or why does this person do this, couldn’t he or she do that, or something like that. But unfortunately, as I say, she became quite ill about, in the 19… when would it be? 1980, yeah, late 1970s, early eighties, and she really wasn’t able to continue with her writing, unfortunately. So that’s… I think she would have, I mean she has a novel which has never been published, which – she died about two years ago – I’m hoping to get together and get it on to an electronic medium as it were, you know, a CD or something, and then give it to somebody to look at and criticise and to see whether or not it is publishable or what needs to be done to make it publishable.

What is the sort of general plot or content of this unpublished novel?

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I don’t know, I’ve never actually read the novel. She’d started it after she’d written some short stories. I have read some of the short stories. They’re mostly about people. She’s very interested in people and how they react and especially people who don’t come into… ordinary people, if you like. And she, you know, I can remember one was about some people who look after pictures in a museum, there was a very nice little sort of sketch of these people and their interactions and so on. And I have got some of those into an electronic format. But I think, the trouble nowadays probably is that, well, America has been the place where these things are published, the short story is still important in America but so many of the little magazines that used to publish these things have just disappeared. I don’t know if they, you know, things like The Sewanee Review and, I mean she, well I don’t know if The Atlantic is still going, used to be a very good magazine. But there’s less and less space for these sorts of things and people are less and less interested in reading short stories, so I’m not sure what to do with her stuff actually.

How did what she was writing relate to her life in Cambridge as far as you can see?

Not at all, it was completely separate from it. She never wrote, as far as I know, about Cambridge. I mean it’s always… possibly based on, well I suppose it has to be based on your personal experience in part, but a lot of it was imagined and observed. I mean not, in other words, it wasn’t personal in the sense of something she had experienced, except perhaps by observation of what people did with their lives. But it was a great pity, I mean I think she had a lot of talent and it never really got to the stage where she was able to achieve what she had set out to do actually. Well, she was able to achieve what she set out to do in the sense of writing something that was complete, but never got to the stage where it got to the stage where other people published it, which is what I think, you know, one would like to do.

[44:51] What was the effect of her illness on your working life?

Well, it made it rather difficult really, specially in the early, well… I really don’t know, I’ve often worried, not worried, but often thought about that, but I haven’t actually come to any conclusions. Except my daughter says, you know, it obviously did have an effect on you, on me that is, and it obviously affected her as well because she was about ten when it was diagnosed, I think. I think that’s about right, yeah. And she had it for over thirty years and got progressively

Alan Smith Page 196 C1379/65 Track 9 worse and it’s a horrible thing to have actually. I don’t know if you know of anybody with Parkinson’s?

I don’t, no.

Basically you lose, it’s a bit like multiple sclerosis in the sense that you lose control of your body. The only good thing about it is you’re not in any pain, but the drugs they use to treat it are effective initially. I mean normally you start off with shaking and not being able to walk properly, but initially the drugs that are possible to take you wouldn’t know that somebody had Parkinson’s for a few years. Oh, of course it varies, I mean there’s lots of different ways this develops and so on. But it does affect the mind at times and specially later on and I’m never sure whether the way it affected the mind was due to the pills she took or whether it was due to part of the condition. But she eventually, the last I suppose, I honestly can’t remember the details, but for a long time she was actually an invalid and couldn’t get out except for in a wheelchair and that sort of thing. But one thing, she was a marvellous woman, she never complained about it, which I’m sure I would have done, but she never complained about it at all actually. And it means as time goes on you can’t lift things, you might drop them, you can’t cook because you might set the place on fire or scald yourself or something like that. So she was reduced really to watching television, listening to the radio, listening to music and so on and having occasionally people read to her. But otherwise it was pretty awful.

Why could she not read, was reading difficult?

Holding things is difficult. Her grip was rather difficult at times and I’m not sure, I think her sight was slightly affected as well. I mean you can see a television picture but you may not be able to resolve it into the detail that you would have done if you hadn’t got it. But she was very well looked after, I mean I know this is not science, as it were, but the National Health Service in Cambridge was terrific actually. They wouldn’t always anticipate or deal with things unless you told them, but once you told them something was wrong they would make sure something was done about it. So she had a whole series of bits of equipment come into the house. She had a whole series of carers who came in and they gradually increased the care as she got worse and so on. And I have, you know, absolutely no complaints whatsoever about the way she was treated by the National Health Service actually, it was wonderful really, what they did for her. And what it meant was that during the day, she had three visits during the day and one in the evening,

Alan Smith Page 197 C1379/65 Track 9 the evening – well, and one at night as well – but in the day her carers used to wash her, give her food and that sort of thing and then if they had time left over they would sometimes take her out for a little walk in a wheelchair and talk to her and so on. And it left me free to do things like the housework and the groceries and shopping and cooking and so on. I always used to cook for her in the evenings and do everything else about the house and I couldn’t have done that, I would have to have… I don’t know what I would have done actually if I didn’t have that help at hand.

[49:52] In what practical ways did it affect sort of working routines or practices?

Well, I probably never had a holiday, as such. Always regarded geological field trips and conferences as my holiday, except occasionally, as I said, in the last few years with my daughter, we used to have a break. And it meant I always, I sometimes declined to do things in the college for example, I never accepted the job as a tutor which I might have done at one time, because I just felt I couldn’t do those extra things and look after her at the same time. And I suppose you could say my social life was centred around the college rather than anything else, you know, we didn’t have dinner parties and didn’t go out to dinner parties because I was on my own really. The college has been wonderful in that respect in the sense of giving me something which I wouldn’t have had any other way, for which I’m extremely grateful, really. But – and I think, as I say, it affected my daughter quite a bit. I think, I’m not sure, you’d have to ask her, but I think she had… it was difficult for her. But I know it’s difficult for many teenagers anyway, so I don’t know how you can distinguish between the difficulty of being, growing up as a teenager and difficulty of having a mother who’s also not very well at the same time.

Did it change your relationship in any way with your daughter?

I think it, the only way it would have changed it, I think, is that… well, definitely due to Parkinson’s, I think I grew much closer to my daughter in the later stages of her illness, yeah. I think the problem is that sometimes, well, in Judy’s case it was difficult for her to imagine what effect it had on other people. So she would want to do something which was totally impractical. I mean she would love to have gone on a cruise, but she would have needed a fulltime nurse with her to do that and she thought she could manage without that, but she couldn’t actually. So in a sense it was… she wasn’t being realistic about the boundaries of her condition at times, which is difficult for her. But as I say, she, well I can remember about two years before she died or

Alan Smith Page 198 C1379/65 Track 9 something, we had a very wet summer in Cambridge and I tried to get her out into the garden but there was so much wet in the lawn that you couldn’t push the wheelchair around. So I thought this isn’t any good, so I remodelled the garden with raised beds and paved it and so on, and she used to love coming out into that. Even two or three months before she died completely, she used to love going out into the garden and looking at the flowers and everything else, so that was a real, her mind was very clear at times but she was physically extremely weak actually. It may sound… she weighed just over four stone when she died. That gives you an idea of what it does to you. Because I think the problem is your muscles gradually, you can’t use them, and so you can’t exercise easily and you can’t eat easily because you can’t chew stuff and all that, so it gets very difficult. I mean scientifically I find it a fascinating disease because we don’t really know what causes it, you know. Our Master, Chris Dobson’s working on that kind of thing, but if it’s related to the folding of proteins or proteins that don’t fold properly, what causes them not to fold properly? We don’t know, I don’t think. I mean there’s a very good story about some young people in California who were brewing some drugs up in the kitchen or something, took them, and they overcooked them or something like that, and they all ended up with Parkinson condition. So that’s a clue as to what might cause it. But in essence, the main problem is – do you know about neuron messengers and things like that?

Not very much, no.

Well, I mean when you pick up your hand and you close it and open it you’re aware of saying I want to… we don’t actually in words, but you know you want to move your hand so you just move it. What happens is, somehow the act of deciding to do this sends a messenger, biochemical messenger down to your hand which enables you to do this. And I think it’s dopamine, one of the things is called dopamine, that enables you to do these things. If you have Parkinson’s disease dopamine is not produced or is gradually, the quantities produced necessarily for doing these things is reduced as time goes on so you can’t do things as you want to do. You might want to do something but you can’t do it because you haven’t got the biochemical messenger. And why that dopamine cell, dopamine producing cells are not doing their work or whether they’re dying off, they’re actually dying off, nobody knows.

Did you look into this while your wife was ill, look into the…

Alan Smith Page 199 C1379/65 Track 9

Yes. I mean there’s a very good magazine called The Parkinson which tells you what research is going on in Parkinson’s disease and the theories that are coming to, trying to explain this. And I think they’ve almost got to the stage – I haven’t kept up with this recently – where they do have some good theories and once you understand what the cause is then you can try and think about a cure. Well, we don’t absolutely know what the cause is. But it amazes me in a sense in this day and age of, you know, the genome and everything else, that we still don’t really know what causes Parkinson’s disease.

[56:43] Did you at any point stop work entirely or work only part-time in order to care for your wife?

No. Not before, I mean, no. When I was employed I worked up to the age of sixty-seven and afterwards, I don’t think I really, I didn’t consciously stop work for days on end or anything like that, but I might stop work for a little while. Used to take her out occasionally when I could, but I never stopped work for days on end because I mean in a sense you couldn’t do very much because she was, she often slept a lot and she couldn’t move around very much and got tired very easily. So all you could do in a sense is to keep her company, which I did at times of course, specially in the evenings when I got home. But she had this, quite a variety of changes throughout the day because of the different carers that would come and look after her and see her and so on. And she was a bit like me, we both don’t mind our own company in the sense that we’re used to being on our own for long times, so we don’t miss, well we do miss, but we don’t feel lonely when we’re on our own. I think that would be fair to say. But, yeah, well it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years with this disease actually. It’s very similar to Alzheimer’s in some ways, except it doesn’t affect the memory quite so much as Alzheimer’s disease, but I think things happen in the brain which are related to one another, but exactly how isn’t clear.

[end of track 9]

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[Track 10]

Could you talk now about work which I think started in the early eighties on investigations of the past magnetic field and plate motions with Fred Vine?

I never worked with Fred actually. We always get on well when we meet and talk science and so on, but I’ve never actually worked with him on the magnetic field and – although we did share a postdoc called Roy Livermore, which Fred might have mentioned, I don’t know if he mentioned him or not, but worked on the magnetic field with Fred and me I suppose, though we didn’t meet about it particularly well, or particularly, because he’s very much a self-propelled person and can do his own work, as a postdoc should do actually. So, yes. Yes, I did work with Fred in a sense on Pangaea, which I’d forgotten about. There are different versions of Pangaea, that is different versions of how the continents fitted together about 250 or so million years ago. They’re not, two or three of them are not very significantly different, but one of them is quite extremely different, based on palaeomagnetism, because what it does is to put the north-west part of South America – that’s places like Colombia and Venezuela – into, it joins them up to North America in that great embayment into which we normally put Africa and the question is, why does the palaeomagnetic evidence suggest putting South America into that slot rather than Africa. We know Africa fitted into it most recently because of the ocean floor data which we can backtrack in time and bring South America – oh sorry – bring Africa into North America, into that part of North America which seems to fit. But South America isn’t a bad fit there, but geologically it doesn’t make sense and the question is why does the palaeomagnetism suggest that South America could have fitted into there rather than Africa.

Why geologically doesn’t it make sense?

Because you can’t trace the rocks from one continent to another easily and you can trace them across from Africa to North America. I mean it’s not the best of arguments because this kind of argument is more pattern recognition and pattern fitting rather than anything quantitative. Whereas the palaeomagnetic data is quantitative, ironically. And the question is, why is this? And the, a popular explanation, so to speak, which I did write a paper about with Jim Briden and there was a chap called Van der Voo in America, I think he’s at Ann Arbor, I’m not sure. Also wrote the same, had the same idea, that is that the earth’s magnetic field at this time was what we call a non-dipole field, that is to say, at the present time the earth’s field is very much like that of

Alan Smith Page 201 C1379/65 Track 10 a bar magnet, which is a dipole. It’s got a bit, you’ve got some extra components in the field which make it slightly different to a dipole, and these non-dipole components today are fairly weak and not really significant in any way, but you could make a case for believing the palaeomagnetic data providing the non-dipole components of the field at that time were very strong. Physically there’s some difficulties there, but they’re not insuperable. So to fit the palaeomagnetic data from South America and North America together, to make them match, you would have to have a non-dipole, a strong non-dipole field component. And that’s really what we were working on. I think that’s right. No, sorry, backtrack on this a little bit. To make them fit together palaeomagnetically with the field of the kind that we have at the present time you would have to put South America into that slot off North America, to have them where they are relative to one another on the old Pangaea fit, or the standard Pangaea fit, you would have to have a very funny field, a strong non-dipole field. And that physically isn’t easy. I mean people who’ve studied the field make models of the field and how it behaves and models of the circulation in the outer core where the field is generated, I think find this a little bit difficult to get such a strong non-dipole component at the earth’s surface, but it’s something that you could imagine. Now, Roy Livermore, Fred Vine and I didn’t go that far. What we said was, let’s suppose the field was normal and that you would have to put South America into that North America slot, to go from that model to one where Africa fits into that North America slot requires a huge structure which enables South America and Africa together to slide past North America so you get a transition from one position to another to make the magnetic fields agree. Now, if they slide past one another they can’t collide because the collision is over. Pangaea’s a time when there’s no more collision, it’s finished. So the only kind of structure you could have to enable that sliding to take place is what’s called a transform fault, rather like the San Andreas Fault, but it would be huge and the question is, where is it, and we couldn’t find it. I’ve just… we did write one or two papers, which said different things. But basically, we can’t find the geological evidence for this putting South America opposite North America.

[06:57] And what did the work sort of practically involve in generating theories about this and making arguments about this, what was the scientific work that was actually happening? In previous work you’ve been programming or plotting – what was involved here?

It involved gathering all the palaeomagnetic data together, as we’ve done in other papers, and finding the mean pole of the magnetic field, assuming that the earth’s magnetic field then was

Alan Smith Page 202 C1379/65 Track 10 the same as it is today and then showing that the pole you get, the mean field from say, one continent, doesn’t match the mean pole, or can be made to match the mean pole from another continent if you arrange the continents in a certain way. And if you go back to Triassic time which is a bit younger than the time I’m talking about, say about 220 or so million years, you can find that the field at that time fits perfectly on what we call the standard Pangaea. But if you go back to 280 million years or 300 million years, it doesn’t. And that’s a time, that interval, there’s no collision going on, it’s all… Pangaea is made as a continent, but the magnetic field suggests that there is… You either, you suggest there’s a huge fault that enables the continents to slide past one another, or you suggest that the magnetic field was peculiar, or you suggest the data’s wrong and there’s, as I say, Van der Voo I think in Ann Arbor has been a great component of a dipole, a non-dipole component, a strong one, but I think I’m right in saying, I think he said this in a conference in Turkey last year, that I think his view is currently that the data is actually wrong and there isn’t a problem. But that’s the kind of thing you get involved in. But the thing I worked with Fred Vine and Roy Livermore was essentially looking at the different Pangaeas, not the one that requires this huge sliding motion, but there are two other versions which are subtly different and I think I’m right in saying it’s difficult to tell the difference between them using palaeomagnetic evidence, because the scatter of the poles is quite large. But Roy Livermore did actually use the ocean floor data, well used our maps in the past to look at a reconstruction, put all the palaeomagnetic data on to the reconstruction and try to see if the magnetic field for those periods, which is the Jurassic, the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, implied a peculiar field as well. What he showed was, I think, from my recollection, is that the strongest non-dipole component, which is called the G20 component, it’s called the quadrupole component, is more or less the same as it is today, there was no evidence for anything peculiar in the field. And he also looked at what’s called the octupole component, which I think is G40, and basically he said the data was such that we can’t tell whether there was a significant… well, how big the G4 component was, because the data aren’t good enough. So in other words, Roy, when I worked with Roy, he showed the magnetic field as far as we could tell was perfectly normal all the way back to 200 million years, and with Fred we looked – and Roy – we looked at the different Pangaeas and I think the paper I wrote about the geological evidence was with Roy and we couldn’t find any evidence for a big structure that could accommodate the motions that the model would suggest.

And what were you using at this time to sort of visualise the possible position and orientation of things?

Alan Smith Page 203 C1379/65 Track 10

It was a program that made reconstructions and that’s all we used, with the data plotted on it. Not only the data, but the, what’s called the polar wander path, that is, how the pole appears to move from a particular continent, we plotted that on it as well. I mean it’s very straightforward really, but although it was straightforward, it was at that time useful to review the evidence because people were talking about extreme views and we thought they didn’t work and we showed they didn’t work actually.

So by the 1980s, where is the computer that you’re using for all of this work?

I think it’s transitional between the mainframe and the first PCs that we bought. Well, I can’t remember.

And once you’d got a PC was that in your office…

Office, yes.

…at the Department of Geology?

Yeah, mm. And it’s been there ever since. I mean, different PCs. And as I say, we went through a stage of using BBC Microcomputers but that wouldn’t be for reconstructions, that would just be for programming simple things and getting numbers out, because they weren’t big enough. It’s a great shame it didn’t take off actually. It was, at the time it was one of the… it was a world leader and typical British story, they have a very good thing but it doesn’t sell, or you can’t sell it or something.

[12:23] I wonder whether you could sort of sketch out what you regard as other significant work in the 1980s and nineties.

You don’t want to go back to the seventies?

You can do, yeah.

Well, did I talk about my work in America?

Alan Smith Page 204 C1379/65 Track 10

After the PhD, no.

I did write up a paper for the Geological Society of America’s bulletin, along with my co-author, although he didn’t actually do anything with this paper very much, on how the rocks I’d been looking at for my thesis could be correlated, that is linked together throughout the full extent of the rocks of the basin in which the – the sedimentary basin – in which the rocks were deposited. It’s an area about the size of Wales and there were arguments about how you should match a particular limestone with – should you match it with this limestone A or this limestone B and so on, and I went into that and put together what I thought was a reasonable correlation and it’s turned out to be correct. In fact, it sounds a bit like boasting, but it’s a fact that I saw some people who worked on these rocks, still work on these rocks, at a conference this year in – or just last year – and they said that was a key paper for kicking off all sorts of projects in that area. So I felt very lucky actually. And so that was a paper just on rocks and correlation and stratigraphy, nothing to do with physics or geophysics, but it does again raise all sorts of questions which I haven’t had time to look at, I may look at if I live long enough, sometime in the future. So that was one of the outcomes of my thesis, actually. [14:35] Oh, there was another outcome, yes, which was quite interesting. There’s some funny structures, there’s these funny markings, well they look like markings on rocks, look like wiggly markings on rocks and you can cut the rocks open and you can see that they are not just markings on the rocks, they go right through the rock and they look like wiggly things that have been put into the rocks and the question is, how did that happen. It’s called molar tooth structure, and I’m still interested in that and I think somehow it’s related to organic activity. But they’re not fossils but they might be related to organic activity in a way I just don’t understand and to my knowledge nobody has actually come up with a good explanation of why they exist.

When did you first see these?

In 19…60.

While working on your…

While doing my thesis. I had a very interesting – I can’t remember if I said about my thesis last time.

Alan Smith Page 205 C1379/65 Track 10

Yes, yes.

Basically, the structure or the problem I had was a very simple one, I didn’t realise it at the time, but it had a very simple solution and I had to get interested in other things to get a thesis out of what I was doing and one of the other things I got interested in was sediments and sedimentology and this molar tooth stuff, it’s part of that story. I think it probably is restricted in time, which either means it’s an integral part of the earth’s history as it developed, which could either be part of the history which is inorganic in origin about changing the atmosphere and all that sort of thing, or it could be related to some organisms that lived at that time but weren’t, had no hard parts and weren’t preserved in any way. I still don’t, I don’t know the answer to that.

[16:38] What’s quite interesting is that in other scientific fields you’ll have a scientist who works on a particular problem for a certain number of years and then concludes that and moves on to something different, works on that, but doesn’t necessarily or usually return to those things. But what seems to be happening in your life story is that, for example, you’re seeing something in 1960 and still thinking about it now.

Yes. I’m not working on it now, but mentally I do think about it.

Thinking about it, but also saying you might go on to look at that, given time. And so this raises the question of why you think it is that you work on things at certain times and not on others and the reasons for taking up certain things at certain times throughout your career and also the reason why some things remain questions or, you know, it’s almost as if there are certain phases of interest that, you know, ebb and flow throughout. Have you any thoughts on why that is possibly a feature either of the geological career or of your career in particular?

Yes, I hadn’t thought about it but I have got some views about it, now you mention it. I mean in the extreme case, Dan McKenzie has criticised me at times for working on what he calls impossible problems. In other words, I have a problem I’m interested in but I can’t get a solution to it or I can only get a partial solution. And that is perfectly true, I wouldn’t say it’s working on impossible problems, but it’s working on problems that you will not solve at the time that you’re looking at them. And I think most of the cases I can think of for the things that I have worked on

Alan Smith Page 206 C1379/65 Track 10 and haven’t solved, I’ve solved them as far as I mentally could and technologically could at the time that they were being worked on, but I couldn’t get any further. I mean one of the things I’ve also been interested in are these things called ophiolites, as mentioned in Oman. At the time I first worked on them we didn’t even know their ages really. We didn’t understand how they were formed and we had no data to suggest that and we were just floundering around in the dark, but nevertheless you did have some new data which you could write up into a paper, but you knew perfectly well there was a lot more that you could say if only you knew what it was that was around and you had to wait for the development of new methods of analysis, new ways of looking at things, before you can get on to the next stage. So in the case of ophiolites, for example, we worked on very elementary papers on ophiolites, and then we started to get some data, specially some age data, and that gave a new insight, and then people in Oman in particular came up with a whole new idea about what these ophiolites represent, which took some time to assimilate mentally, as it were, and that, I haven’t written about that in any detail, but I can see that there’s a whole series of new things that have been discovered about ophiolites which would make them a much more, well, I won’t say more interesting story because they’ve always been interesting, but there’d be a much detailed story and all sorts of implications that we haven’t even, well, we don’t know what they are yet because nobody’s really worked on them or thought about them, and so this story of coming back to something successively is in part related to new ideas that come out, not necessarily in your own field, and new data. So, you know, you don’t have a problem that you can wrap into a nice parcel and tie it with a string around it and say that’s that, you can get the brown paper and wrap it up a bit but you can’t tie it up with string because there’s a lot more to discover. I mean the earth is a very complicated place really in some ways. I mean, you know, are you a lumper or a splitter, sort of thing. But if you stand back from it as a planet it’s a very simple thing, the lithosphere and plates and everything else, but if you go into the details of it and how these things move around and how they interact, it is very complicated and very interesting. So getting back to molar tooth structure, so much more is known about the age of the rocks, or the rocks of that age and the way palaeobiology, you know, of poorly preserved organisms is much better known now, that I can see that in a few years’ time you’ll be able to say quite a bit more about molar tooth than you could in the 1960s. So I think necessarily one goes as far as you can at the time, but there’s a lot more, a lot further to go but you can’t do it because you haven’t got the data or the ideas yet.

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[21:43] When Dan McKenzie said that you work on impossible problems, what was behind that comment? Was it you work on impossible problems and that’s fine, or was it you work on impossible problems, why not work on something else?

I think the latter actually. I mean he really does go to a problem and solve it as best as he can and comes up with something quite interesting. Now whether he returns to things I don’t know, but I do like working on problems that, you know, I find challenging. And okay, they’re impossible to solve at the time, but gradually over the years you do see more and more. I mean this ophiolite story is extremely interesting actually, it’s still evolving, as I say, even now as we speak. You know, one of the things that used to be thought was that a continent breaks up and it goes from a continent, a continental margin out into the ocean floor, and the ocean floor is generated in the same way as it is at the mid ocean ridge, and that’s how things work. But it looks now as if many continents break up but in the initial stages where you might expect ocean floor you don’t get ocean floor, you get continental mantle coming up without the normal ocean floor sequence in it. In other words, you get mantle rocks at the surface covered by oceanic water, but you don’t have gabbros, you don’t have basalts, you don’t have dikes and all that sort of thing and it’s only when that extension’s gone a bit further that you start to get these things. That sort of thing has only been realised probably as a general effect, I don’t know how general it is, but it happens on many margins now and nobody realised that. And when you realise that is happening, you look at the magnetic anomalies on the edge of the continents with a different light. You don’t try and find out, well you try and find out what the oldest anomaly is but it probably isn’t at the edge of the continent, it’s probably a little way off in this zone which is transitional between the oceans and the continents which people didn’t realise existed in the way it seems to exist at the present time. And then, so you look at this and you think this is happening, you say well where can we go and look at this stuff rather than drilling it, and lo and behold you go back into the Alps, have a look at ophiolites there and you say gosh, yes, that’s exactly what we think we’re seeing on the ocean floor today. And there’s this constant feedback between observations in some areas and observations in other areas which gives you new ideas. And because you can see it on land, if you like, in the Alps, you’ll be able to get a much better idea what it actually consists of than you can from remote geophysical surveys and then you might find something in the Alps which might explain some of the things you can’t explain on some magnetic or seismic traverse across the continental margin. So there’s always this constant interaction and development of ideas. Which I find very interesting actually, and rewarding, I

Alan Smith Page 208 C1379/65 Track 10 mean not just interesting, but I find it very satisfying to, you know, you realise that you’ve actually got on to the next stage of understanding, but having got there you also realise there’s a bit more to go but you can’t go there at the moment because you haven’t, you know, we haven’t got the ideas or the techniques to look into these things.

[25:21] What do you read or do in order to keep up with arguments about particular geological questions which you might have worked on twenty years ago or…

Just reading the literature that’s been published since then, that’s all.

And where, for those not in the field, where is the literature for your work?

Well, there’s a huge number of journals, I don’t know, probably hundreds of journals out there. But there are some key journals which you would go to first of all because you know they’re the top journals in the subject and so you try and find something about what you’re interested in in them, and you know, you find the authors who have written these papers and you go and talk to them sometimes, or meet them at a conference or something, or you email them I suppose these days. And that’s how you would find out what they’ve done, what they’re thinking and so on.

What are the top journals?

Well, I always regard Earth and Planetary Science Letters as a very good journal. Journal of Geophysical Research is excellent. Geophysical Journal International is very close to Journal of Geophysical Research . And then there are the journals, the publications of people, societies like the Geological Society of America, Geological Society of London, and so on. Each field has its own, what I think people regard as top journal, basically. So if you get a… I don’t know, this is probably all related to the Science Citation Index and impact factors and things like that which I never look at, I’m afraid. I mean I’ve never actually looked up my own citation index. If somebody said to me, that’s what it is, that’s fine, but I can’t be bothered to go and look it up.

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[27:13] And while working on the geological timescale, while working on the maps of past distributions of continents, what else at this time are you working on, what other questions are you working on, what other projects?

Right now?

No, I mean through the…

Oh, then?

Yeah, through the seventies and eighties and nineties, even things that might just catch your attention for a short while and occupy you?

I’d have to look at my bibliography, such as it is. Well, in Greece there was a lot of, quite a wide variety of things to think about and write about. Not just ophiolites, the ophiolites in Greece are not very good ones really, except for Vourinos and places like that. But the general structure of, I mean the area I mapped in, I was very lucky, I mean I didn’t know it was going to turn out like this, but it looks like a very small telescoped continental margin, the sort of thing you get in Oman where the ocean floor rocks lie on top of, have been pushed out on to continental slope and then on to continental margin and then on to the continent. So you can see the transition from ocean to continent in Oman, if you drive for a day or something like that. In Greece you see exactly the same transition but you can walk it in an afternoon. Now why is that, I mean that’s ludicrous really, to have all these things walkable in an afternoon, and I have no real explanation as to why you can do that. And that’s one of the things, I mean I haven’t written about that in detail. I have written about the area in Greece and described that but I haven’t got an explanation for it, actually. So I mean that’s one of the things I wrote about and I suppose in a sense, I didn’t write a lot about Greece, but spent quite a bit of time supervising students who were working there who would write it up, hopefully. And a lot of things you work, well in Greece, a lot of things I’ve worked on are sort of tucked away in my mind, I hope, to think about what I was just talking about, you know, I’ll come back to them sometime if I have the time. Yeah. I mean one does rely on the work, enormously on the work of other people, because you can’t do it all yourself, just too big.

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I’ll ask you about research students in a moment.

Yes.

[30:02] Before that though, could you describe, would you be able to describe in as much detail as you can, you know, an afternoon’s walk from the coast up through that sort of transition of rocks that you’ve just described? And then after that I’ll come, I’ve got another question about the advantages of having it in such a compact section, but what would we, if we were with you walking on that afternoon’s walk, what would we see in terms of, what would this transition that you’ve described historically, what would it look like now?

Well, imagine you are starting out on the top of a mountain, I suppose it would be about 5,000 feet or something like that. To go across these different rock types you would start out on top of a mountain say, which is nothing but limestone. Very shallow water limestone, you can show that from the sedimentary structures and some of the fossils in the limestone. You know, water depth when the rocks were being laid down would be a few metres or tens of metres at most and they give rise to very thick rocks which might be a kilometre or two kilometres thick and they do this because the limestone was deposited in an area which was gradually sinking. And as it sank the organisms that can make limestone flourished and deposited limestone in, well, they flourished up to the point where they were very close to the surface. So you get a very thick sequence of shallow water limestones. And then as you go to the top of this limestone you get into what’s called, well a tectonic zone. It’s a zone of shearing, where rocks have been moved horizontally and a sheet of rocks has been moved on top of the limestone which – and these rocks are not limestone at all, they are characteristic of quite deep water, but they are of the same age as the limestone. So if you unscramble it you have, imagine say to the east you have limestone which passed, you know because they’re the same age, it passed laterally into rocks that are not limestones at all, but characteristic of deeper water deposition with deeper water fossils in them, usually microfossils, you don’t get many big fossils in these rocks. And as you go, you know, the limestone rocks aren’t horizontal, they have a gentle slope or dip towards the west, so if you go towards the west you’re gradually going from the base of the limestone in the east, going through the limestone because it’s sloping west, up to the top of the limestone and then you have a sheet of rocks which are highly deformed which don’t belong to – they’re not limestones but they’re the same age as the limestones. I mean there are interbeds of limestone

Alan Smith Page 211 C1379/65 Track 10 with these deeper rocks, but basically all these rocks were deposited in much deeper water. And then as you go further west, eventually – this is very simplified – but eventually you would get into ocean floor rocks and ophiolite which has been pushed on top of the deeper rocks which were probably on the continental slope, that sheet of ocean floor rocks has been shoved on to the slope, which it was at the time, and shows the full sequence of ocean floor rocks, you know, the mantle, the crust and the pillow lavas at the top. So making it very simple, you have limestone which is the continent, very shallow water, we can see the bottom of the limestone is resting on metamorphic rocks which are typical of continents, so we know we’re on a continent, and to the west we’ve got oceans, or an ocean, floor rocks, and in between we have the rocks that lie between the ocean and the continent, ie the continental margin. That’s very simplified, but that in essence is what you’re looking at.

[34:40] And what’s the advantage of having that, as you say, so much more compressed spatially than in Oman?

Well, the only advantage, and it wasn’t chosen because it had this advantage, it was found by accident, the only advantage is that it’s very easy to examine and look at. The disadvantage in Greece is that the Greek rocks have been deformed twice, severely, so seeing through both those deformations to the earliest, what it was like before the deformation occurred is much more difficult in Greece than it is in Oman. So in Oman it’s much more widely spread, it’s much less deformed, so you can get even more detail than you can in Greece, but Greece is accessible, easy to look at, highly deformed, and if you take, if you have some faith that one’s got the geology right, it gives you a nice story.

[35:35] Could you then, starting with your research student, talk about what’s involved in supervising a junior geologist, in the field I think, because I think your research students were associated with the Greek fieldwork.

Yes. Some of them were. Well, we did what at the time was essentially basic mapping. Well, not just basic mapping, but the first thing you had to do was to make a decent geological map because there weren’t any. The Greeks had made some maps but they weren’t good maps and you couldn’t make sense of them, you couldn’t understand what was going on by looking at the

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Greek maps. What you knew was, from the Greek maps, that there were very interesting problems but you didn’t know how they were going to work out. This is why we went there really. So, as a field geologist, a research student would be briefed, I’d brief him on what to expect in the field and say what the problems were as we understood them at the time. He would have access to any maps that had been published or had been drawn, compiled from previous research students and previous workers, and he would go off for a field season. And if you’re mapping, what you do is to walk the contact, that is the boundary between different rock types, and transfer that boundary to a map and try to understand what the rocks above that boundary represent and what the rocks below represent and what the boundary represents, because sometimes the boundaries are just a change of sediment type as you go up in time, that is you might start with limestone and then it might get covered by sandstone and then the boundary’s simply the transition from limestone to sandstone. At other times it might be what’s called a tectonic boundary where you might have, the limestone was deposited, then it was raised up and eroded and the sandstone was deposited on top of the eroded limestone, that’s an unconformity. Then you might have another kind of tectonic boundary, a thrust fault, where the limestone was deposited in one place, the sandstone in another and they’ve been brought together horizontally by shearing. So you have to keep that in mind and you have to keep in mind the ages of the rocks as far as you know them, are they upside down, are they right way up, because in a complicated area like Greece there are places where rocks are upside down. And if they’re upside down how on earth did they get there and how do they relate to right way up structures. And you have to bear all that in mind when you’re making a map. And then having made the map you look at the, bring some rock samples home, you try and find out if you’ve got small fossils, microfossils or something like that. If they’re igneous rocks you would analyse them to find out what they’re made of, what minerals they’re made of, what is the composition of the minerals and all that sort of thing, and then you try to fit all that into a geological history of the area and hopefully you have found an area which is going to reveal new things in that area, well it will reveal new things in that area, but also new things about the processes in general that you have been studying. And then you write it all up.

[39:07] But how do you supervise them? I mean, in the field or…

Both. I mean I used to go out, spend a few days, a week or so, in the field each year when they were mapping. Basically, I would meet them in Greece, at a place where we were staying, and

Alan Smith Page 213 C1379/65 Track 10 we’d go out each day looking at something that they wanted to show me, and occasionally I’d pick an area, I’d say can you show me this area because I don’t understand what’s going on here. So that would be each field season, they might have three field seasons if they were lucky, of about two months, three months each, and then when they came back into the lab we would just, you know, as they were writing things up and analysing things we would have – wouldn’t be formal about it – we would just meet as and when necessary. I mean some students are brilliant in the sense that they can go on entirely on their own for a long time and they don’t need any help whatsoever for a long time and they’re very good at ferreting out things that are important and relevant from the library or from talking to other people, to students who – well I had one student, I won’t give you any details about him, but he didn’t get a PhD because he wasn’t… he was an excellent research assistant. If you told him to do something he would do it beautifully, but if you asked him, well, what are you going to do next, he hadn’t got an idea of what he was going to do next. He wasn’t creative, hadn’t been trained to think about things, but he’d been trained to be a very good research assistant. And that kind of person is the sort of person who takes an enormous amount of time and energy to try and get him finishing a PhD. This chap could have finished a PhD, but for reasons again I won’t go into, he didn’t, which is a great shame because he had a very interesting area which is still not understood. And I won’t say where it is either. But I mean, you know, you have to, with students you just have to judge where their strengths and weaknesses are and you have to know your own strengths and weaknesses because sometimes you realise you can’t help them because you don’t know enough or you just can’t… it’s a difficult problem or you’re just ignorant about it. I mean I’m not an igneous petrologist so when people got on to ophiolites and their chemistry, I let them get on with it because I couldn’t comment because it wasn’t my background actually. And in fact, it was very funny because when we first started working on these things, even the people at that time in mineralogy and petrology couldn’t help us, which is surprising, but they couldn’t because they hadn’t had any experience of these things. And the people who used to help us in particular were people, either visitors to the department, either short term visitors or people on sabbatical leave. And they didn’t know a lot because it was all pioneering stuff at the time. We didn’t know whether ophiolites, at the time we started working on them we didn’t know whether they were bits of ocean floor or mantle or anything. This is partly a result of working with Eldridge Moores who worked, as I say, on the Vourinos complex in Greece, he didn’t know whether that was ocean floor or not at the time, Harry Hess didn’t know. It was one of several possibilities. So, you know, one… well, you have to work on something unknown, otherwise you’re not going to advance things very much. But that’s how I used to supervise them. And then of course they

Alan Smith Page 214 C1379/65 Track 10 start writing up and then you get the red pencil out and the red pen and mark it up, as happened to me.

[43:09] What do you remember of seeking the help from the mineralogy department concerning ophiolites?

Well, I remember we had these messy rocks from Greece and we just made thin sections of them and looked messy and we asked these people, you know, what do we do, I mean how do they get like this, why aren’t they fresh and why are some minerals preserved and others not and does their preservation mean that they are particular kinds of rocks or not. Those sorts of questions. And you analyse them and… [43:48] I mean one of the things, I don’t think we could explain very well, well we couldn’t, and this didn’t involve mineralogy and petrology very much so much as just a fact that the bottom of, well, associated with some of these ophiolites, even there’s a little patch in the area one of my first research students looked at and he found typical metamorphic rocks, ie rocks looking like schists or gneisses, with typical gneissic and schistose minerals in them. They had been seen elsewhere by the French who did a lot of work in Greece and they thought they were part of what we call the metamorphic basement, ie the sort of rocks on which these limestones I was talking of been laid down. Bits of continental crust had been picked up as these ophiolites moved out on to the continent, and then somebody dated them, we dated them in fact, and they were so young, you know, they were about 180 million years where if they were basement they should have been 300 million years, and we, I think I’m right in saying, we didn’t publish these dates because we didn’t know what to make of them, we just didn’t know whether they were dates that had been re-set by being heated. We didn’t understand them and it turns out they’re very important because when these ophiolites are emplaced, moved on to the edge of a continent, they’re hot and because they’re hot, when they move over suitable rocks they metamorphose them, you get new minerals, high temperature minerals and a metamorphic texture, ie a shearing texture, and they create rocks that look just like metamorphic basement rocks but they’re not, they much younger and associated with the ophiolite. And that, you see, if you… before we knew that we just thought they were bits of basement, and then we dated them and didn’t understand it and then other people in other parts of the world, especially in Canada, I think possibly Newfoundland or Quebec, possibly in Oman, I can’t remember the time or the details, show that these rocks were hot because the ophiolite was hot when it was emplaced. But if the ophiolite is part of an ocean floor and you know the depth of the ocean

Alan Smith Page 215 C1379/65 Track 10 crust that you’re looking at, you can calculate what the temperature should be as the ocean floor gets older and older. Essentially it cools down and as you go away from the ridge the level, the temperature at the base of the ocean floor, that is the ocean crust, shall we say, say seven kilometres down, gradually decreases. You can calculate what that decrease is and you can calculate the temperature at which these metamorphic rocks form, and you can show that the only way you can get this metamorphic band at the bottom of the ophiolite is if the ophiolites are emplaced on to the continent when they are very young. Well, previously we didn’t understand how ophiolites were put on to continents, thought they came from the mid ocean ridge and somehow got to the edge of the continent, but this means that you’re pushing something on to the edge of a continent within perhaps two or three million years of its having formed at a ridge. Well that didn’t make sense and still doesn’t make sense in some ways, so this is how things develop. I mean if you don’t know that age you can’t start speculating about this. If you know the age you can start speculating about it but it means you’re into new ideas and new territory, which you didn’t imagine existed before. [47:24] And then say, in Oman, this is a good example again, in Oman the Open University group showed that the ophiolites were not, didn’t have the composition of typical ocean floor, the sort of thing you get in the mid Atlantic ridge, because they had the composition of the minerals and some of the minerals themselves indicated that they came from an environment in which there was water present when they were being generated. In the mid ocean ridge, okay, you have water above which is cooling the rocks as they come up, but you don’t have water in the mantle because the minerals in those igneous rocks are dry, there’s no structural water in them, they don’t have any, you know, very little sign of water in these minerals. But the minerals in Oman do have a sign of water in them when they were molten. Where does that water come from? Don’t get it in the mid ocean ridges. And this is how they came up with the idea that the magmas from which these ophiolites formed had water put into them because they were near a subduction zone. And now it turns out that most ophiolites, I don’t know how many, but I would guess more than ninety per cent of the ophiolites we see in the world are formed near subduction zones and emplaced on to the continents very shortly after they’ve been created. Well, why is that? I mean we still don’t understand this properly, but all these little bits of information come along and you just have to change your whole model. It’s not, you know, big scale planetary science stuff, but it’s very interesting from a point of view of how these things happen.

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[49:13] To what extent is there a division in geology between that big scale planetary science stuff and the kind of geology that you and others are concerned with, such as the work in Greece on ophiolites?

Well, I would think there’s a transition, you know. I wouldn’t generalise, but in my own field I feel you have these details which are very interesting and very important but they do, they must fit into the large scale planetary picture, you know, plate motions and how plates work and how subduction works. So I wouldn’t say that they were small scale in that sense, I think they do throw light on to the large scale processes that we see about how plates interact with one another and how they are created and how they’re destroyed, but you have to do detailed work to find that out. I mean there’s a real pattern we don’t understand which is essentially a global pattern, not only global in the sense of being widespread, but also it goes through time, geological time. There are times in the earth’s history, of earth’s development, when ophiolites are created, and then you don’t get any for a long time, well not a long time, but say, 50, 100 million years, then you get another bunch of ophiolites suddenly being created and this is all related to subduction somehow and we still do not have a good understanding of the interrelationships of plate motions, ophiolite creation, all that sort of thing, subduction zones, and I’m sure in a few years’ time, well hopefully, say in a decade or so, we will understand that, that’ll illuminate a whole series of other things which we can’t imagine at the moment. So that, I mean it’s… I like to go from the detail to the big picture and back again because I find it so interesting.

[end of track 10]

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[Track 11]

I’ve been looking at the diaries from the Greek fieldwork and things from other fieldwork and…

Greek travel?

Yes. And I wondered, one of the entries in that is a description of the story that you told of being asked to go to the police station and account for why you were there and the…

This is actually in that account?

Mm. And there were a number of details in that account that didn’t appear, as you might expect, in your account and I wondered if I could jog your memory about them you could say a little more.

Yes.

One was that the two Englishmen who turned up I think in, is it the village of Anora?

Anavra.

Anavra, Anavra.

A-N-A-V-R-A.

One was a mathematician called Nestil.

He was an American, a nuclear physicist.

What was he? I wondered whether you could say what he was doing there?

I don’t know what he, well, I can tell you what he was doing there. He was trained, he worked at the Battelle Institute I think in America, western North America, I think it may be in Idaho, I’m not sure, as a nuclear physicist, but he had a hobby which was collecting fossils which were tiny

Alan Smith Page 218 C1379/65 Track 11 fossils called fusilines, which are a kind of foraminifera. You can see them with the naked eye but they’re not big, they’re not like ammonites or anything like that. And it was just his hobby, apparently he had a whole basement of his house, was devoted to preparing these specimens for collections and examination.

And I wonder whether you remember the reaction of the sergeant and his deputies when you showed a sample?

Well, I think, I can’t remember the details, probably the diary, the travelogue is a better description of what happened, but my recollection is that that they were a bit sceptical when we first talked about what we were doing and eventually when they saw these photographs and the fact that they corresponded to something they could see with their naked eye, they began to believe us and then when we showed them what you could see through a magnifying glass looking at the rock, they were convinced I think. Didn’t mean to say they weren’t still suspicious, but they realised that we were telling the truth about that.

Thank you.

[02:27] I wonder whether you could, concerning another interview, if you could say who Nicolaus and Magda are?

Nicolaus?

Nicolaus. I wondered whether they were part of the family that you were staying with. I’ll read you the entry which might jog your memory. This is your wife writing: ‘Alan arrived home about 7pm followed shortly afterwards by Nicolaus and at his heels Magda, who’s been inserted by grandmother. Alan and N (I assume meaning Nicolaus) discuss rocks, fossils, quote, ‘200 million years…’

Ah yes, I do remember.

‘…it astounds Nicolaus. He’s come to invite us to his brother’s wedding. So I wondered, who’s this person that you’re discussing?

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I’d forgotten all about him, he was a very interesting chap, he was the only person in the village who spoke English. He was a student I think in Germany at the time, had come home in the vacation to see his parents and he was very interesting really, because he was very able, would have liked to have read mathematics somewhere, but the scholarship he had was offered by the church, it was the only scholarship he could get, and so he ended up as a theologian and actually he did become a theologian and may well, I don’t know whether he taught theology, but he was in Athens as a theologian eventually. That’s the Nicolaus. He was an only son as far as I remember. His parents were typical Greek peasant family, very poor, but very nice. And Magda I think was the daughter of, the daughter of our landlady.

And yes, I wondered whether you could say a little more about interaction with Nicolaus then?

Well, we talked about all sorts of things for a time. His English wasn’t perfect but in fact my wife may well have talked with him a bit more because she was very, she was very interested in theology and philosophy.

Did he come out with you?

He never came out on a geological field traverse or anything like that, but we walked around the village once or twice. Thank you for reminding me, he was such a nice chap actually.

[04:54] And I’d like to just read another short entry, because it seems to contain a sort of joke between you and your wife concerning geology, and also indicates that you and your wife did different things when she joined you on field days.

Yes.

And so Tuesday the twenty-third: ‘Sky cleared, it was warmer and I joined Alan in a long but good field day. Took trail north of village, stopped at spring, climbed higher, intense folding. Lunch with cows overlooking a valley. Then Alan climbed up to look at his favourite rocks (limestone, a joke) and off to follow a contact while I went ahead to a wide, very beautiful meadow over rough limestone into another meadow where a horse grazed and a shepherd had to

Alan Smith Page 220 C1379/65 Track 11 chase his cows away. Alan found an interesting conglom (meaning conglomeration)’. What does the limestone thing refer to, can you remember?

I can’t, I can’t remember, but the area I was working in had mountains of limestone, maybe Judy was referring to that, I don’t know why it was funny though.

Perhaps you’d been complaining that this was all there was to see, I don’t know?

It could be something like that, yes. ‘Conglom’ is short for conglomerate, which is a geological term for a rock made of boulders, basically.

And could you, this indicates that she almost took different routes when she went out with you, in other words she didn’t go and do exactly what you did. How did that tend to work out?

She didn’t come out very often. That was right at the beginning of our stay there and for a few days she did actually take my notes, or take notes for me in my notebook, but I think we found that it, I can’t remember exactly why, but it was difficult for us to continue that kind of pattern, possibly because it involved a lot of walking and scrambling and it wasn’t the sort of thing… she could do it but she wouldn’t be as fast as I was and I just needed to get on with things, basically. So we didn’t do it very often. But I think she was intrigued.

And I just wanted to know the identity of someone else.

Yes.

I don’t know how to say it, but I wondered whether this was the landlady?

No, that means grandma. Yiayia .

Okay. So your wife at one point was talking to grandma – grandma being, in terms of who…

She was the landlady of our little room that we had in this village.

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Oh good. I just wondered if it was because your wife had had a conversation with this person and they were telling her that she shouldn’t be going out climbing, that that wasn’t a job for women or something.

Probably. [laughs]

Okay. Thank you for those specific memories.

[07:56] I wanted to ask whether you could say over the period of your career how you think that maths and physics have impinged on the earth sciences. So from your vantage point in the earth sciences, and working as you have, how have you seen physics and mathematics introduced into geology or earth sciences more widely?

Well, I think I would go back to about the 1950s, before plate tectonics came about. There really were two disciplines in the earth sciences. There was geology in which I would include petrology, mineralogy and looking at rocks at the surface in particular, and there was geophysics which largely, and not entirely true, but large scale geophysics was mostly seismology, which it probably is today in many ways, but there was very little in seismology that seemed to have a relevance to what geologists did on the surface if you like, but subsequent to plate tectonics they came together very much actually and they still are together. I think certainly in our department in Cambridge we expect people to be familiar with at least the rudiments of maths and physics, even if they’re palaeontologists and I think that’s where the advances have been made, without question, the advances have been made by applying physics to the earth as a whole, but realising that the upper part of the earth is made up of these plates that move and it’s the motion of these plates that actually determines most of what you see on the surface. So there’s interaction between, or feedback between what geologists find and how plates move and so on. A lot of things we still haven’t quite worked out, but they’re very much closer than they used to be. I mean physics, geophysics is the only way we have of knowing about the earth’s interior, really, and that’s done mostly through seismology, though not entirely. But we got to the stage now where you can look at the train of waves generated by an earthquake and you can model how those waves were formed in much more detail than we ever used to be able to and that precision or increase in precision and understanding is continuing and feeding back on to what, I suppose what geologists would call, what essentially is on the surface because geologists imagine what is

Alan Smith Page 222 C1379/65 Track 11 present at depth but of course they can’t see it unless it’s been drilled in some way or other. It’s very difficult to, well you can’t experiment easily on the earth. I suppose the only sensible way you could experiment is by letting off a huge bomb and watching how the seismic waves behave, but you can’t sort of take the earth apart, you have to infer it from your measurements.

[11:19] Thank you. And I suppose a related question, how has the status of detailed observational field geology changed over the period of your career, if it has?

Well, I think the emphasis nowadays, it’s very difficult to get support for detailed field geology, for doing work of that kind any more, justifiably in a sense because the earth really, a lot of the earth is really well known now in that sense, but there are quite a few things that we don’t understand that do require field geology, but it’s not easy to get funding for that sort of thing.

Why’s that?

Well, I think it’s, I mean quite honestly some of it’s just simply it’s unfashionable. You know, there are flavours in science, people follow things through and another thing is it doesn’t yield results very quickly, because you have to spend, I would say you don’t really understand an area you’re mapping for at least two years, possibly five years, and even then you might think you understand it but as you get into it more and more you realise you don’t and I mean I’ve worked in Greece for many years, still don’t understand the area at all in detail. I mean up to a point yes, but there are many things I would like to understand which I don’t understand, but as more and more work is done in these areas, specially with new techniques and new tools, you understand more and sooner or later we’ll understand it properly.

Can you expand a bit more on the fact that you think it’s an unfashionable area now in terms of the timing of that change and…

Well it doesn’t make the headlines. I’m just trying to think of… A good example, there are good examples and I can’t think of them at the moment. Oh I know, yes. There’s this idea of the ‘snowball earth’. I mean I’ve never accepted that as a model, but when it, you know, it’s been the source of television programmes, newspaper headlines, even possibly the cover of magazines like Time and so on, who quite rightly regard this as a very interesting idea, but it’s

Alan Smith Page 223 C1379/65 Track 11 probably not true. And if you put forward the evidence to show it probably isn’t true, it’s often not listened to. I mean the BBC had a television programme about the snowball earth, but as I recollect they didn’t have a single person who said, how do you explain this, how do you explain that, and you can’t have this, and so on. It was very one-sided. It’s a bit like the time that they found these very curious things in meteorites from Mars. You can joke about little green men from Mars and so on, but everyone believed it and it probably isn’t true and it became very fashionable, you could get money for doing these things, looking at these things and so on. And it does help push forward the subject, there’s no doubt about it, because you increase the knowledge and you ask all sorts of questions you hadn’t asked before, but it’s not correct. So I mean in the sense that it doesn’t make news, I think unfashionable science is science that doesn’t ever get into the news actually, but it’s very important but doesn’t catch people’s imagination. Which is fine, I mean that’s how things are, I’m not going to say it shouldn’t be like this, but people do get swept along by these new ideas and so on. I remember talking to somebody who shall be nameless I’m afraid, but came from a very good institution in the US and one of his faculty members had made a splash, I think he actually sort of was featured on Time magazine or something like that about something, which, you know, unlikely to be true, and I said this to him because he was here for a time, he said I don’t understand why people make such a fuss about it because I don’t think it’s true at all and he said, oh, doesn’t matter, he’s on Time magazine, that’s good for us. And that’s the kind of science that… or kind of reaction I don’t like. I mean he had an interesting problem, he came up with an interesting answer, but I think you could argue that there were other answers which were equally probable, that’s all.

[16:28] And if detailed observational field geology isn’t as fashionable as it might have been in the past, what is a fashionable way of working in geology?

Well, you could take one of these things. When hotspots became important, I mean there had been proposed or I think named even, I would think probably in the 1960s or possibly the fifties, I can’t remember the details, and I think Tuzo Wilson might have actually coined the term, I can’t remember, but you could get money to go off to some, you know, Tristan de Cunha, Ascension Island, Pacific islands which were hotspots, and there might be a preference to giving money for looking into the rocks on these islands, because they are sort of hotspot rocks if you like, because they suddenly appeared to be very, well they were very interesting, they are very interesting, but you couldn’t get money to do a similar sort of thing on some other igneous rocks

Alan Smith Page 224 C1379/65 Track 11 which weren’t quite in the public domain but in the long term they might be equally important. I mean I don’t mind that, but I think there’s been an emphasis, certainly in the last decade or so, on lab work and computer modelling and that sort of thing, but unless you actually go out and look at rocks your model’s only as good as the rocks themselves, as it were. Unless you actually test your model against the evidence, which tends not to happen sometimes, it’s not very useful.

How can you do geology, how was geology done without going into the field and looking? How are these people doing geology on a computer with models?

How do they do it?

Mm.

Well, I suppose a lot of it is actually, well, that’s a big subject. But… and I really haven’t thought about it enough. But, for example, people model how a river deposits its sediment and you can put in the parameters concerned and come up with something that’s plausible. But unless you actually go out into the field and go to some sediments that are laid down by rivers and measure their thicknesses and distributions and so on, you really don’t know how good your model is although it may look very nice on the screen. That’s not a very good example. You always have to come back to the evidence, which is always in the rocks. If you don’t test your model against the evidence, you might be right, you might be very wrong.

When did you notice that it was first becoming difficult to attract funding for field mapping and detailed geological work?

Well, that, it’s not so much – I haven’t been affected by this myself actually, because I’ve always been able to get money to do what I wanted to do or I’m also not very expensive, I don’t need big equipment and so on. But one would come across colleagues in other universities who were interested in something, seemed quite important in a way or very interesting anyway, and they just could not get any money for it, so they didn’t do it, which is a pity really. I mean I think it is extremely difficult to know what to do, even a country like Britain which is quite big and had a big survey and had a colonial survey, cannot cover everything in the earth sciences adequately really. I think the way this has happened is by the people who run committees and give grants and so on, more and more of them don’t actually have any experience or have very little

Alan Smith Page 225 C1379/65 Track 11 experience of field geology, so they’re unable to judge in the facts quite often whether some projects are very good or not. I mean you can see this actually, what’s happening in the oil companies, for example, very few of them have field trained geologists coming into the companies these days because universities have progressively cut back on field trips and training for fieldwork because it’s expensive, quite honestly. So you get people coming into companies who have very little field experience and some companies I think are starting to run their own field trips because they realise it’s necessary to actually have some experience of rocks in the field to understand what you’re looking at when you’re looking at, say, a seismic profile or something like that. And in fact we have in Cambridge, in the Department of Earth Sciences we have this charity called CASP, the Cambridge Artic Shelf Project, which was set up by Brian Harland years ago, which is really, does work for industry, it does fieldwork for industry because industry no longer has the capability of doing that sort of thing themselves. And that’s what’s missing, basically. You know, it’s not so much a worldwide phenomenon, there are countries which do train their field geologists, or train people in field geology very well and this is where the oil companies will get some of their future geologists from, but we used to do that very well ourselves, we don’t any more, or not as well as we used to.

[22:32] You mentioned that you had a box file concerning your work on Pangaea, a number of box files.

I’ve got a, yeah, I’ve got lots of box files.

I wonder whether you could, as we haven’t covered that specifically, if you could say something about that work beginning with the origins of it, when you started to work on it.

Well I suppose it started with the work with Bullard and Jim Everett and so on. We made a fit of the continents by computer, then I got on to this business with Jim Briden of making maps of the world at different times, and then I realised that in fact you could do something which had never been done before, which was to calculate how two continents collided in terms of their relative motions and rates of motions, in particular the collision between Africa and Europe in the Mediterranean region in the broad sense of the term. So you could actually do some calculations about how fast these things approach one another, the directions in which they approach one another – that’s more difficult because there are lots of different fragments involved – but you could set some boundary conditions and then having got these quantitative values you could

Alan Smith Page 226 C1379/65 Track 11 compare those values with what actually you saw in the field, and that was something that we’d never been able to do before. So you’d have mountain belts like the Alps and the Himalayas and so on and you could calculate how much crust had been consumed in the approach of Africa to Europe at different points at different times and compare that with what you actually saw in the field. And you could also show – the interesting thing about plate tectonics, because a lot of it is essentially geometry – you could see how the geometry of the collision varied along the length of the collision and would, could and did give rise to entirely different effects depending on where you were on that collisional belt. So sometimes, you know, specially towards the eastern Mediterranean there was a lot of motion going on and it was largely at right angles, the motion was at right angles, in other words Africa and Europe, collided at high angles to one another, whereas if you went to the west, say Spain or even out into the Atlantic, there was a collision going on but it was very oblique and gave rise to quite different effects. So you could begin to understand, this wasn’t the first time this was done, you could begin to understand how totally different geological effects were due to exactly the same cause in terms of the geometry involved. The geometry’s very simple but the effects were quite complicated and different, which is why you’ve got geologists arguing about all sorts of things, how could this be the same age as something else because it’s quite a different thing, but it’s actually just, it’s just how the geometry is.

And what was involved in terms of work not in the field and work in the field for this?

Well, not in the field was simply calculating the motions between Africa and Europe, which you could do because you knew… essentially what you do, you set up what’s called a plate tectonic circuit; you go from Europe to North America because you have the spreading pattern between Europe and North America in the Atlantic, and then you go from North America to Africa and you know the spreading pattern south of the Azores in particular, and the difference between those two, or the sum of those two motions was the motion between Africa and Europe. So that’s how you got the motion and the overall motion which set the boundary conditions and then you would go into the field and find out when this type of deformation occurred, did the deformation occur at the time you would predict from your calculations and how much was it and what effect did that have and that sort of thing. And it’s the sort of thing that’s still going on, we haven’t worked that out at all actually, really, in detail. We’ve got an outline, a good outline of what’s happening but in detail, well in parts of the Mediterranean we still don’t understand what happened. It’s easy for places like, well easier, for places like Sardinia and

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Corsica which have just been moved away from France, mostly France, so you can understand what’s happening there and you can quantify it and so on, but the trouble is there are so many bits and pieces in the Mediterranean that they interact with one another in a way that would cause a second order theory, so to speak, or with geometry and we can’t do it, we haven’t… we get the outline, but we still haven’t got it properly yet.

[22:46] Can you tell me something about debates with or disagreements with other individuals or producing different reconstructions of the continents, different Pangaeas, different Gondwanas, and so on?

There are small scale differences, especially in places like the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. When I say small scale I mean you’re talking about less than 500, perhaps less than 100 kilometres and so on. And some of those differences are significant in the sense of trying to understand the details of what’s going on in a particular place, but the only large scale differences I know of concern Pangaea. Pangaea was formed by the collision of the southern continents with the northern continents, ie the collision between Gondwana and the southern continents and the northern continents being mostly North America, Greenland and Europe or Eurasia. And this is all based on palaeomagnetic work, especially the work of Jim Briden and Ted Irving and people like that, where there’s a real puzzle which may be resolved now, I’m still not absolutely sure, but if you make, if you fit the margins of the continents around the Atlantic together and around the Indian Ocean together to get Pangaea, you get quite a nice geometrical fit, you put the palaeomagnetic data from the northern continents on that fit and the palaeomagnetic data from the southern continents on that fit and assume the fit applied to 250 million years ago, which is I think just about the beginning of Triassic time, or if you make a fit by closing up, using the ocean floor data, the magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor to make a reconstruction, they’re very, very similar and the palaeomagnetic poles on those two major continents, super continents if you like, they are in agreement with one another if you use the dipole field model, which is the standard model for interpreting palaeomag, they are in agreement with one another within their limits of error. If you go back into Permian time, which is just before the Triassic, so you go back another 50 million years or so, we have no reason to suppose there’s any large motion between Gondwana and the northern continents. In other words, we would still have the same Pangaea, but if you plot the poles from the northern continents on that Pangaea and the poles from the southern continents on that – or Pangaea of

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Permian time, same reconstruction but slightly different age – they do not match. And the question is why. And there are lots of answers to this. One possibility, which I wrote a paper with Jim Briden, we speculated that they didn’t match because the magnetic field at the time might have had some non-dipole components in it, and this is a model that’s been used by many people to explain why the palaeomagnetic data doesn’t match. But other people have said, oh you can’t do that, the magnetic field is a dipole field and what you have to do is to move the southern continents relative to the northern continents so that the poles do come in, do match with one another assuming a dipole field. To do that requires a very large zone of shearing between the northern continents and the southern continents and a displacement of several hundred, if not a few thousand, kilometres, something like that, which you just can’t see in the rocks, you cannot see where the shear zone would be and so the only way out of that is to say well, that shear zone is being covered up by younger rocks, that’s why we don’t see it. But I don’t think you can cover every possible site where this shear zone is likely to be by younger rocks, so as a geologist I would say it doesn’t exist. So what do you do? Well, those two positions, a large shear zone or a non-dipole field are essentially how that palaeomagnetic data was explained. But I think I’m right in saying that quite recently some of the protagonists of the strong non-dipole… I was never a protagonist with Jim about a strong non-dipole field but some people were and my understanding, and I’d have to check this, I can’t say this is absolutely true, but my understanding is that they now believe that the magnetic poles from Gondwana in particular have been re-magnetised so you’re not comparing poles of the same age when you put them on that reconstruction. And if that’s the case, that’s fine, it’s a nice solution. The field is still dipole, Pangaea hasn’t got this huge shear zone in it, and it conforms more or less to what you would expect.

Just for the listener, what is a dipole field?

It’s a very simple… imagine a bar magnet, you know, that you get in a compass or something like that, it’s the field created by that magnet. It’s a sort of… the easiest way to see it is to take a little magnet, put a piece of paper on top of it and I know most people won’t have it, but if you had some iron filings and you sprinkle it on the paper you can see how the lines of force come out at the north pole of the magnet and go back to the south pole and so on, that’s all it is.

And so a non-dipole field is?

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Something which has got a little bit of extra, well, mathematically you can break the field down into all sorts of components and the next component, the next strongest component in the earth’s magnetic field is what’s, I think it’s called G20, which means it’s essentially a quadrupole field which is made of two little bar magnets in opposition, plus a dipole. And those two little magnets in opposition create what’s called a quadrupole field which is a small fraction of the present day field. There aren’t any bar magnets in the centre of the earth or anything like that, but that’s the way you can model it mathematically.

Thank you. And what has been the…

But – sorry.

Yes, carry on.

[34:55] Just to continue, this is important because what it means is that you can probably be fairly confident of using a non-dipole field, sorry, the dipole field as long as you can go in time. There’s no evidence that we had a strong non-dipole field. So that’s good, but what it also means is that there are cases which have survived for many years where palaeomagnetists have felt the field was, the directions of magnetisation that they had were the correct directions when in fact they weren’t, because they were of a different age. So if you go back into the Palaeozoic and especially in the Precambrian, you don’t, it’s very difficult to tell how much re- magnetisation has taken place in those rocks, which means it’s very difficult to be sure when you make Precambrian continental reconstructions using palaeomag, and that’s virtually all we have, that you’ve got the right one. So it’s a bit worrying in that sense.

And how can you determine right from wrong palaeomagnetic data?

Well, I’m not a palaeomagnetist, but there are tests you can apply and I would say that they’re very difficult, I mean it’s difficult to be sure actually. The real problem is you can’t date palaeomagnetism except in very special circumstances as you can’t date when the magnetisation in a rock was acquired and worse still, rocks often have at least one other component of magnetisation and they may have two or even three and they may be incomplete. So what you measure in a rock, in a hand specimen, is a magnetic field or direction of magnetisation, but it

Alan Smith Page 230 C1379/65 Track 11 might be made up of two or three components and the skill in the palaeomagnetist’s work is trying to find what those components are and what their ages are. And that’s a very difficult thing to do actually. I mean you’ve probably, I don’t know if you’ve talked to Fred Vine at all, but if you talk to him about the palaeomagnetism as I have at times, he – I can still say this - he would say well, Alan, when you think about it, it shouldn’t work should it? [laughs] So it does work but you have to be very careful and very skilful and I think in the next ten years there’ll be a whole re-run, if you like, of palaeomagnetic poles in rocks because the technology is getting to the stage now where you can clearly separate the different components out.

Thank you.

[37:42] What’s been the effect of retirement on the way you work or perhaps the amount you work, I don’t know, but the way…

It’s terrible, if anything I work harder than I used to when I was… no, I can’t be working harder but I’m able to spend much more time following up things I’m interested in without having to worry about teaching at a certain time or preparing for a lecture or going to a committee and writing reports and all that sort of thing. And I’ve also developed other interests as well, so I’m very… I recommend retirement to anybody actually.

In what way has it opened things up? You said you’ve developed other interests.

Oh well, I joined the U3A, University of the Third Age, and at least for two or three years I joined a walking group and went walking around Cambridge, admittedly we often drove to the starting point of the walk and so on. But it actually increased my knowledge, my geography of Cambridge is so much better than it ever was actually, because I didn’t know where all these little villages were. People talk about a town like Erith and I’d nod my head sagely but hadn’t got a clue where it was really, so it was out in the Fens somewhere, so that was lovely. But the trouble was I also still had a college connection and I couldn’t do a lot of the walks because of the college meetings I had to go to, but what I decided to do instead was to make up my own walks and I walked nearly, well, most of the major rivers in Cambridgeshire and the cuts of the rivers and so on, which I found very rewarding actually. I did it on my own, but I don’t mind that.

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What, I’m not saying… but why, why walk the rivers, why pick those as the routes for your walks?

Well, I always find rivers interesting. I suppose that’s the real reason and, you know, it’s just rivers, even though they’re in the Fens and very flat at times and so on, there’s always something going on in a river, there might be boats on the river, bends in the river, little villages built on the river, birds on the river. You know, there’s a lot going on where you have a river against the land and so on. And that again, also of course helped me to increase my geographical understanding of the area. I haven’t finished it yet.

And what note do you take of the birds as you go along?

I’m just curious to know what they are actually. I have a friend who I work with occasionally, he lives in Holland, he’s retired like me and we went out in the spring, I think it was, to St Neots and walked the river from St Neots north to, I can’t remember the name of the place but it has a nice pub to eat in anyway. And we, instead of looking at the birds, we looked at the butterflies. We found at least eight species of butterflies in that walk, many of which I’d forgotten all about, I used to know them as a boy but I hadn’t seen them or recognised them for a long time. And, you know, we’re both enthusiastic about that sort of thing. And the cinnabar moth – do you know that at all? It’s, I think it’s a red and green moth that flies in daytime. Doesn’t look like a moth actually, it looks more like a beetle in some cases, but its caterpillars are made up of red – sorry – orange and black rings around it. It looks like a tiny Michelin man actually, and we saw all these things all over the ragwort and that sort of thing, hadn’t seen that for a long time, hadn’t noticed it for a long time. So, you know, that’s the sort of thing I quite enjoy actually.

[41:37] And has it changed the way you work, the times of day, where, the amount?

Not really. I did change my way of working when, as you know, my wife was ill for a long time and when she got really ill I used to spend more time at home. So I’ve got to the stage now where I’ve kept that habit going. I’ll often work a bit in the morning at home, work in the evening at home and just come into the department perhaps for half the day or less. I usually come to college for lunch which is very, again, very useful. Or not just useful, it’s a wonderful

Alan Smith Page 232 C1379/65 Track 11 thing to be able to do actually, given the company, not to mention the food of course. So that’s how I’ve changed. Being able to do those sorts of things, you can’t do that if you’re teaching because you have a definite schedule and it’s very, it’s very intense, teaching, actually. There’s a chap I, one of the younger members of the department, I sent him an email about something two or three weeks ago and he’s only just replied to it because he just couldn’t, he felt he couldn’t devote the time to answering a simple email. It’s just so, you get so immersed in teaching, basically. But of course once he’s finished his lecture course he can relax a little, catch up. The other thing I’ve taken up is I’ve started doing a bit of watercolour painting which I’m beginning to enjoy very much actually. I’m not very good at it, but, you know, I thought it was so difficult, I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but it actually isn’t that difficult really, you just have to learn certain techniques and then apply them and use your imagination. So that’s something else I do. Do a lot of reading. I’m [laughs] busier than I ever was actually. But it’s very good.

[43:51] And for someone listening to your interview who would like to investigate what archives you have, I realise you may not know where you’re going to put archive material and so on, but could you just give a sketch of the range and type of archive material that you’ve got concerning your work?

Well, as you know, I’ve got some of the original maps for the Bullard and others’ reconstruction. I think they’re worth keeping. I don’t know what to do, but I do have the original paper tapes that we used for the data input for the programs and somewhere I’ve got a printout of one of the programs, but I don’t know where it is actually. But it’s a very simple program conceptually to write, I mean you could easily write it, reproduce what it did. And then what I got, well, one doesn’t know how important these things are. I’ve got my thesis, my PhD thesis and a paper I wrote based on that which people said started a whole lot of hares running in the western US, so to speak. Because we, well, I was the principal author of the paper, wrote it with another person, we just made a suggestion about how certain rocks in Montana were related to one another, which nobody had suggested previously and the interpretation, yes, the interpretation we made of those has led people to look into this area in a different way and started other things going, which is nice to know. So I don’t know if that’s an important archive or not, but that’s one of the things I have. And then I went on, as I say, with the maps for this conference, Organisms and Continents Through Time, that was the first set of global maps anyone ever made, I made that

Alan Smith Page 233 C1379/65 Track 11 with Jim Briden and Gill Drewry. So that’s another archive if you like. And I think prior to that I had also reconstructed Gondwana by the computer, which was the first reconstruction of Gondwana by computing. So again, that might be of interest. And then, as I say, I thought about how the relationship between Africa and Europe, how that motion influenced the geology in the Mediterranean region and wrote a paper on that, I think that’s probably something worth keeping. Don’t know about much else that’s… well, I’ve forgotten what I’ve done actually over the years, but more recently I made a compilation with Felix Gradstein and Jim Ogg on the timescale, this is inherited really from Brian Harland. Did I say how that originated? Yes. Well, that won a prize, apparently, for being one of the best reference books of the year it was published. But I don’t have any archive material for that, it’s already, you know, it’s essentially in the book, because in fact the three of us were essentially commissioners of chapters for that book and, I don’t know how many chapters there are, but it’s probably ten, twenty chapters. So the people who wrote those chapters would have their own archives but we don’t have those archives at all. But it was a good thing to have done and, you know, there’s several other things I’m working on at the moment. But, you know, some of the stuff, you get asked to go to a conference and present a paper on something and you may not have a new idea and you’re just recycling what you said two or three years ago and I don’t think it’s worth keeping at all actually.

And what do you have in terms of letters and…

Very few.

…notebooks?

I’ve got some field… I don’t think the field notebooks are worth keeping. I mean when I look at some of what the old Victorian geologists did, I haven’t seen their notebooks so much, but their maps are absolutely superb, you know, and my maps aren’t like that. They’re messy. Yeah. I wish I had made better, I could have made better maps and I wish I did do so, but I didn’t.

And the material that you do keep, what are your thoughts about where that might go at the moment?

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Well, I, being in a college of course and having a library and lots of archives going back centuries, the college is the first place I could think of actually. And I have talked to the librarian about whether he’d be interested and he is interested, but there might be better places, I don’t know. But I just don’t think, I haven’t got a huge correspondence like, you know, Harold Jeffreys’ for example, or somebody like that, probably would, well, he didn’t have email for example, so I imagine a lot of the stuff that would have been preserved a long time ago or fifty years ago gets deleted. I don’t, I mean I don’t think I can retrieve any emails before about 2004, because the trouble is the machines change so the format changes and unless you’re going to spend the time and energy being able to read the old tapes or whatever they were at the time, and put them into new format, it’s going to get lost. Or you may keep the tape but – well, I haven’t kept the tapes, I think I returned them all to the computer lab because you couldn’t read them anyway. I mean so much science actually is getting lost at the present time. [50:12] I heard a story, I think it was one of the American oil companies, worked in South America, they had a huge survey, it was probably millions of dollars if not a billion dollars, seismic survey of all the basins on the west coast or the western margin of South America, absolutely invaluable data really. Nobody’s ever going to do it again, especially when they didn’t find any oil in these places, and all that data, it wasn’t thrown out initially but what happened to it, it became unreadable. The formats had changed, the machines had changed, so what did companies do, they probably throw it out. There was a lot of data which, in industry, which probably would be of use or of interest to academics which is not preserved. And we’re never going to find that data again I don’t think. But that’s not my data, basically.

[51:15] And finally, can you say something about your experience of being interviewed for National Life Stories, how you’ve found the experience, how you’ve responded to it?

Well, I found it very interesting actually because it’s made me think about things I hadn’t thought about for many a year and I’ve been reminded of things I’ve forgotten about and it’s stimulated me to try and find stuff that would be of interest in an interview which is buried at home somewhere, for example. And stuff buried in the department, well, not buried but one would hope it had been preserved in the department but it, unfortunately it isn’t, that sort of thing. So no, it’s been a very interesting experience actually.

[end of track 11 – end of interview]