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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Professor Bob Dickson

Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

C1379/56

This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk .

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British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/56

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science

Interviewee’s surname: Dickson Title: Professor

Interviewee’s forename: Bob Sex: Male

Occupation: oceanographer Date and place of birth: 4th December, 1941, Edinburgh, Scotland Mother’s occupation: Housewife , art Father’s occupation: Schoolmaster teacher (part time) [chemistry]

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks [from – to]: 9/8/11 [track 1-3], 16/12/11 [track 4- 7], 28/10/11 [track 8-12], 14/2/13 [track 13-15]

Location of interview: CEFAS [Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science], Lowestoft, Suffolk

Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks: 15 Stereo

Total Duration: 12:38:55

Additional material:

Interviewer’s comments: The interviewee has highlighted his false starts in the recording. Please note that this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it.

3 Bob Dickson Page 4 C1379/56 Track 1

Track 1

Could I start then today by asking when and where you were born?

I was born in the Elsie Inglis Maternity Home, Edinburgh, on the 4 th of December 1941 and as you may expect of any war baby my earliest memories were entirely about food. I can – my first memory I think was sitting on what we used to call the bunker [kitchen worktop], watching my mum making sweets and then another less welcome memory was the taste of locust beans. Lord knows why we ate locust beans but I do remember their wiersh taste. Both of my parents were teachers. My mum was a part time art teacher at various Edinburgh schools, taught Sean Connery amongst others; that’s her highest boast. And my dad was the head of the chemistry department at a place that used to be called George Watson’s Boys College. My sister Marjorie was born two years earlier than me, my brother Wullie was thirteen months younger than me and both of these were – followed the artistic side of the family so that Bill eventually became a successful architect in London.

[01.16]

But it’s Dad’s achievement that I should talk about to start with because his own achievement had been considerable and so he certainly rates more than a passing mention as a major influence on me. He was the son of a long line of herring and lobster fishermen in the tiny Berwickshire village of St Abbs perched up above the cliffs on the Berwickshire coast, and he would no doubt have been a fisherman himself if it hadn’t been for the redoubtable schoolmaster of St Abbs school, who decided that dad was meant for something more academic. ‘Better things’ he would probably have called it in his less PC way than these days. But anyway this schoolmaster wouldn’t take no for an answer, and bought or lent dad a bike to cycle each day to Reston, to get the train to Duns High School and he didn’t let the schoolmaster down. So I’ve got dad’s silver prefects badge from Duns High School, and then he got a first class chemistry – in chemistry at Edinburgh University. Taught at Annan Academy and then at George Watson’s Boys College and so that was the connection made for me. Amongst other things he founded the school Combined

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Cadet Force and won the Ashburton trophy at Bisley with the shooting team he set up; he was very proud when he was awarded the MBE in military division as a result. He had lots of friends in and around Edinburgh that we marginally knew, most of the chemistry Profs and lecturers at Edinburgh University were friends of my father’s. And he was ultimately elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His heroes were Niels Bohr, Churchill and the local Nobel Prize winner called C.T.R. Wilson who had retired to live in Carlops just south of Edinburgh. He was the one who invented the cloud chamber for showing the tracks of subatomic particles and I do remember every time C.T.R. had a birthday or every Christmas the Science 6 th and 5th and 4 th had to write him a card, and I’ve still got his card – his responses to our cards.

[03.42]

So the point of starting talking about me by talking about – so extensively about my dad is that dad’s achievements were just as well for me, without his leap I would have probably been a fisherman too and not a very good one. And as a schoolteacher at Watsons we could afford the reduced fees for me to attend Watsons too. It was a good school, especially latterly under Sir Roger Young who came – who was ex- Winchester, but it wasn’t a public school, it was a Merchant Company of Edinburgh School and I was there all the way through from five years old till university at Edinburgh. And the teachers – the important thing was the teachers never changed; they evolved. The head of the physics department would retire or die and the deputy head of the physics department would move up to take his place and his deputy would move up to take his place. As a pupil you didn’t realise of course that all schools weren’t this way, that all schools didn’t have a rifle range or – or a full sized, Olympic sized swimming pool, or a Scottish international: Donald Scott of Langholm to teach you rugby. Or its own Russian teacher: the phenomenal Madame Semeonov who wrote the textbooks. Or its own school choir and orchestra, or its own Combined Cadet Force: the navy section with its boat, the air section with its glider and the army section with its rifles. And it’s own scout troop. So since I was embedded in Watsons from an early age as I say you never realise that all schools didn’t have these facilities, but I can see now that this was quite a special school. And to add a little

5 Bob Dickson Page 6 C1379/56 Track 1 flesh on these bare bones of what the school had, I could dwell on a few of the – of these subjects: on music, the highest group achievement that the school had was undoubtedly the singing of the Halleluiah Chorus by the entire fifteen hundred man school one year after endless bouts of Commando-style training under our rotund head of music, Pongo Hyde. I do remember that the sacred quiet pause between the fifth and final hallelujahs, which we’d been told to observe in silence on pain of death, was used as a kind of billboard for verbal graffiti by the louts who had resented [laughs] being kept in for training in this feat: the Halleluiah Chorus. But my own musical high spot was a much smaller scale: I was a member of what they used to call the Small Choir and we toured. One year we toured Newbury and Glastonbury and Yeovil and Wells. I was an alto in this choir led by Pongo. And the only other memory I have of Pongo Hyde was that he became something of a bête-noir to my dad each summer when dad had to endure the caterwauling that was coming up from the room immediately below his chemistry lab from Pongo’s room. And anyway that was – that was the musical part of fleshing out that I was talking about. On my career in the school swimming team I have only one deep and dark memory: that was the being beaten by one length in a two length race by the team from Robert Gordon’s College Aberdeen, but my opponent at the time was Ian Black and he was the world record holder at the fifty metre freestyle at the time [both laugh], but that gave me scant consolation. The man might have been hauled out having a cup of tea by the time we all puffed up, so I have no pleasant memory of the school swimming team. But nothing but pleasant memories of the Combined Cadet Force and they were in our holiday, unknown I have to say to our parents. The detail unknown anyway. We enjoyed a succession of wonderful courses run by the regular army at Otterburn, blowing up hills with plastic explosive, firing a forty-five pounder field gun entirely on our own. A bazooka, once. Blowing up bridges with gun cotton and, at the Black Rock Range at Aberdeen, setting fire to trees using tracer and heavy machine guns, and the potentially lethal backward curling flight over our heads of a 4.2 inch mortar with extra rocket propulsion strapped on wrongly and asymmetrically onto its fins. The brigadier - the visit of the brigadier had been heralded for some time - and he brought us this wonderful extra propulsion for a 4.2 inch mortar. We got to strap it on under no supervision at all and I do remember us all standing there on the hillside watching this fire away and then curl backwards and backwards and backwards and

6 Bob Dickson Page 7 C1379/56 Track 1 backwards till eventually it went right over our heads and exploded on the hillside behind us. However, we all survived and I do have some graphic memories also of lectures by a broken down sergeant from the Royal Scots from Redford barracks, a man with – you could tell they were broken down; their patches - the sergeants’ stripes had been removed so many times that he had multicoloured arms on his jacket. And the one in particular I’m thinking of a: little five foot man – ‘how to kill your man eight ways in five seconds’, or was it ‘five ways in eight seconds’, and on a more practical note ‘how to smoke on sentry-go’. In case you’re interested, here’s how: you open the bolt, you insert your cigarette lit end first into the muzzle, you swivel the bayonet out of the way to take a drag and if anyone comes along, if danger looms, you swivel the bayonet back over the top of it again [both laugh]. So a good character building school and it had its own scout troop; that’s another thing I’m anxious to flesh out a bit because that was another happy time. I can’t remember very many unhappy times at school to be honest. I have happy memories of guddeling [‘ticking’] for trout to survive in the upland streams and burns in the Lammermoor’s as I did my – they used to call it the First Class Journey as part of the necessary step to getting the Queen’s Scout Award. And it’s funny how you hang onto all these things; I have my Queen’s Scout Award framed still: there it is. And if my life depended on it I could probably still find the log of my First Class Journey with maps. My patrol leader was Michael Steel, the clever one of the two Steel brothers, who I seem to remember later gained most of the gold medals in medicine at Edinburgh University that his wife didn’t get. His brother David, who I see we have these days to call the Right Honourable, the Lord Steel of Aikwood, Knight, KBE, PC and first Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, was a politician even then, and he won the school’s mock election as leader of the ILIKEME party. I still have photographs of him being carried shoulder high by his henchman with a toilet seat around his neck as part of that election campaign. And they’re ready to be unleashed for a fee if he ever becomes famous. We all kept out of politics in the group that I used to associate with. And my finest politically-related moment was as a prefect giving the larval Malcolm Rifkind fifty lines for running in the corridor. He won’t remember it but I do. Rugby under Donald - Donald Scott seemed to take up a good bit of our week. My high point undoubtedly was winning the Scottish Schoolboys Sevens at Murrayfield one year, with a huge silver trophy and much glamour. And the low

7 Bob Dickson Page 8 C1379/56 Track 1 point was being tripped by the butt-end of a shepherd’s crook as I ran at full tilt along the wing too close to the crowd at St Boswell’s, who are a wild and partisan bunch in the Borders [laughs]. I do remember that the headmaster’s young daughter appeared to develop something of a crush on me at one stage and dragged him out on Saturdays to watch; the piping treble of, ‘Run Bobby, run Bobby, run Bobby, run Bobby, run,’ punctuated many matches at home. Playing away: the dodgy moments were always in some low part of Glasgow where you’d kind of gone into a bar or some place or other to wait for the train at Queen Street and some little guy would sidle up to you and say, ‘Did you get the score Jimmy?’ and then I do remember the panic you were put in when you had to remember whether you were nearer to Ibrox or Parkheid, because there was only one game that this man had in mind and in order to survive till the next day you had to know which was the game he had in his head. Usually you got it right; you thought it out in advance probably. One isolated glorious memory of rugby: watching the Hawick prop, Hughie McLeod. He was a Border farmer about five foot cubed and legend had it among us rugby playing schoolboys that he used to knock down drystane dykes for training and then build them up again for the other half of his training. Watching him at Hawick lift almost the entire opposing side of the scrum off the ground when he was slightly peeved by the opposite prop [laughs] and the opposite prop never tried it on again. And all through these days at Watsons there was Valerie Elizabeth Faulds, my first and long term girlfriend who lived at thirty-nine Baberton Crescent, Juniper Green, when I lived at number forty and went to Cranley down the road, a little bit from Watsons. And although very tame stuff by today’s standards I’m sure, somehow our relationship didn’t survive the transition from school; me to Edinburgh University and she to the Western General as a nurse, but I still remember her birthday and wonder where she is every now and again. I suppose most people are like that. She was a nice person to grow up with.

[14.57]

I wonder whether you could tell me about, as a young child, time spent with your father, things done with your father?

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My father didn’t – wasn’t the sort of father who took you places. He didn’t take you fishing; or – he took you to St Abbs and you fished and he fished somewhere else. I’ll come to that [laughs] in due course. He had his friendships with – he had a lot of golfing friends and no car, none of us had. We didn’t have a car at all during my childhood, or a television set either, till I went to college. And my dad’s recreations were undoubtedly golf with his friends, but I can’t remember my father taking me many places to show me things. That may sound rather strange because I’ve explained how big an influence he was on the way my life developed, but that was more by example than anything else. Essentially, he was kind of a villager all the way through. Even when he got his – his Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he still had – he still knew exactly who made the best shoes, they were Veldtschoen, and which was the only jeweller to go to in Edinburgh if my mum wanted/needed some august present: that was Hamilton and Inches. And so he had these standards that were immutable all the way through his life and I suppose his – his heroes were set in stone in much the same way. So my – I couldn’t say that my father was modern in the sense of somebody who took you to football matches or anything else, but I knew that he – his example was what I unconsciously followed; and in quite a bit of my life I noticed that in what we achieved, we achieved the same sorts of things, and would have approved of each other in doing so. He never actually as a – as I became more competent in science – he never actually said very much about it. And in fact I gave a – the first lecture I gave in the Royal Society of Edinburgh, something about quite an important subject: the brand new idea that the currents at the base of [the ocean],--- - at the bottom of the North Atlantic---- could be modulated in their kinetic energy seasonally. That was a huge finding, and my dad undoubtedly was curious; as I stood up to talk I saw him coming into the room at the back of the hall and before the applause was finished I saw him sneaking away out the back. He never mentioned it when I got home, and I took that to be approval, but I think I’m giving – I’m not trying to denigrate the memory by saying that he wouldn’t have been extravagant in his praise; we all knew what he stood for and that was what mattered in directing what I did, I think. Most of it. Except for blowing up hillsides at Otterburn.

[18.46]

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And then time spent with your mother at a similar sort of – as a younger child, the sorts of things that you remember doing with her or sharing with her?

Yes, well in these days my mum, as lots of mothers used to do, stayed at home quite a lot of the time and her job at art – as an art teacher at – I would think she would be a supply art teacher at various schools, including Darroch, used to keep us in fits as she used to give us the - the funnier side of what it meant to be a Scottish art teacher in a Catholic school like Darroch. But, there again she - I think my mum would have taken us to art galleries and the occasional cultural show. And I certainly know she took my sister over to see the Van Gogh Museum in Leiden in Holland when she was a bit older. And that’s something my dad would never have done with us, so my mum was more demonstrative that way. She was - her family is an interesting one because her [mother], my grandmother was actually Mauritian: Constance Garreau. So my mum’s mum was of Mauritian origin and at one stage or another they seemed to have quite a wealthy estate in Mauritius because my first photographs of my grandmother on that side of the family [were of] her sitting on a big black horse called Sebastopol looking, well, imperial. But I think she had a number of marriages and the last of them was to - I’m talking about my grandmother here - last of them was to a Scottish minister who was as poor as the proverbial church mouse and so she ended her days in Edinburgh still speaking hesitant English. And I did spend quite a lot of time, as you do when you’re young, running messages as we used to call them for my – for my granny. I still remember her Co-Op number: 50032, I’ve just realised [both laugh]. And these useless facts cluttering up your head I suppose are the detail of – of these recordings. But, so my mother’s family came from the Royds side, that was her name Zoe Royds, and the Royds family was I think quite a distinguished one. But I found that the culmination of what my mum could teach us about art and what my dad would teach us about science was a good, if a rather stiff, education for a young – young boy.

What did your mum teach you about art and how?

About art?

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Hmm.

I doubt she taught me very much more than she passed on in the genes [laughs] because I was certainly not artistic, but the one thing she did teach me was cooking and now you mention it one of her biggest achievements was to actually win the occasional competition for cooking, and so in that she was certainly French and I still cook casseroles, for example, in exactly the same way as my mum taught me to do. I would say the artistry that my mum passed onto me was culinary. But to my brother and sister of course she was – who ended up as being artists or architects in their own right - I think that she would have had more of an influence, direct influence on them in that way. But she was a Scottish housewife all the way through and Scottish housewives are almost caricatures: they don’t bother the doctor (‘sorry to trouble you doctor but…’), and she didn’t feel the cold. You wanted to invite her in from the kitchen where she was slaving away; you’d go home from your job in Lowestoft eventually and she’d spend so much time in that kitchen cooking things for you, you’d say, ‘Come on Mum, talk to us about, you know, just chat,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh I’ll be in in a minute.’ But they were a kind of reserved couple, I hope I’m putting across the right idea, whose influence was nonetheless – [it was] obvious what they wanted, and important I think to me. But most traits of a lobster fisherman had passed when I - in the period I knew my dad. And most traits, certainly all traits of being landed gentry in Mauritius had certainly passed long before my mother brought me on the scene in Edinburgh. So they were just a normal Edinburgh mum and dad to me.

[24.40]

Did you spend any time with your maternal grandparents?

No, I tried – as I say, my maternal grandmother was – it was more or less a case of [I knew her] when she was very old. Because my mum was the youngest of her second family; her first family was a whole bunch of ancient French aunts who were even then getting old and dying themselves. Hortense- - I can’t even remember their names - Aureole and Henri, uncle, and we never knew them because they were - that first brood had been [born] so many years earlier. And my mum was the youngest of five

11 Bob Dickson Page 12 C1379/56 Track 1 herself and so she was probably ten down in the children of my grandmother so that by the time I knew my grandmother she was quite old and as I say rather – rather a pathetic figure in Colinton Mains where she was mostly on her own. My mother’s father ended up being the Minister at St George’s in Edinburgh, in Haymarket, so it was a big church, and I do remember him coming and going from time to time, but he was very old as well. So no, I didn’t actually have many interactions with them at all, I would say, that were significant.

And what about your father’s parents?

Well my father’s parents were much more a big part of my life; they were still at St Abbs of course, and as I’ll probably get around to talking about, the St Abbs days were [what] I regard as entirely the other half of my growing up. was in the fishing village of St Abbs. We used to go and stay – in these days people were much less mobile. They didn’t go anywhere on holiday; my father’s own description of his own holidays for example was that [...] my granny took him once to Wooler about twenty miles away from St Abbs and she got so homesick for the sea and the – what they used to call Coldingham Shore, that she had to bribe him with half a crown to cry and want home to the Shore. So these people never really left St Abbs. But my granny knew every raup [sale] and beetle drive and farm sale that was going on within ten miles around St Abbs and needed to know all the details of everyone’s lives around that area. My granddad was still a lobster fisherman when I used to go down there for holidays, and half my life was on the sea and some of that was with him on his boat. So they were much more prominent people [...] prominent in the sense of prominent in my upbringing. Having said that, my dad was the eldest of four, and I did notice that when you lived in a little fisherman’s terrace cottage you did what you had to do to adjust the sleeping arrangements. So my dad actually was brought up by his grandparents along the same street in St Abbs: Seaview Terrace. And he did regard his grandfather, my great-grandfather, as the big influence on him. And so the girls stayed with my granny and granddad and the boys stayed with my great-granddad. I can remember – I mean this – I can remember my granddad but certainly not my great-granddad. All I can remember were my dad’s stories of when he was at college; when times were good enough my great-granddad used to take a female crab. They

12 Bob Dickson Page 13 C1379/56 Track 1 used to call them for some unaccountable reason, ‘poos’. ‘Poos’ are crabs and a ‘Queeny poo’ was one that had a big flap underneath and he used to tuck a half crown in behind the flap and send it on the train to my dad as kind of extra money in case he needed it. And when my dad was eighty, I remember I bought him a Queeny poo and I went along to a coin shop and bought a half crown, stuck it in behind the flap and handed it over and saw if he remembered all these stories he’d told me. And the poor old boy he burst into tears; but then he stuck the half crown on the photograph of his granddad and I still have that. So that was the way things were in a small fishing village when you had two bedrooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs; you simply developed different ways of accommodating the family in that situation and there’s no doubt that, even though I didn’t know him, my father’s influence would have been my great-granddad.

You said that your father regarded his grandfather as the – as the influence on his life rather than his father because of that living arrangement.

I think so.

Do you remember what he said about his grandfather?

No, I got these stories about the half crown and whatever, but it’s certain – he would certainly have told me – they were kind of a long series of stories about the yawls and the fishing boats and the registration numbers of them, which in a way went over my head. The history of all the family boats that passed down; they were never in a big way in the boats but a big yawl like the Catherine certainly required a half a dozen of a crew to work it. And that I – my father did tell me stories about the sea; they had a long tradition of remembering all the events that had gone on in the past and relaying them. All I’m saying is that I don’t remember too many of them. But I do remember, for example, they used to remember ‘Disaster Day’ on the Berwickshire coast as if it was yesterday. ‘Disaster Day’ was actually a day in 1881 [14 October] when a major storm took out hundreds of fishermen along that coast from south of Berwick up to Port Seton and certainly including tens of people killed at St Abbs and many tens in Eyemouth. And I would get stories about ‘Disaster Day’ for example. My

13 Bob Dickson Page 14 C1379/56 Track 1 grandfather and great-grandfather were both [pause]. No, my great-grandfather was sunk on that day round St Abbs Head at Pettico Wick and he made the mistake of walking home when he floated ashore. [I say floated] because he couldn’t swim. [His mistake] of walking home over the Bell Hill, direct route to St Abbs and sitting beside the fire while my – let me just get this right - this was my great-grandfather and his father, they were the ones that were sunk off Pettico Wick in 1881. And they both walked back over the Bell Hill and when my great-great-granny, a formidable lady called Kate Spence who had gone around by the cliffs looking for them and came back, all he got [in the story] was that she slapped him across the face and said, ‘That’s for giving us a gliff [a fright]’. That was - I think that was emotion in the old days.

So I would be wrong to say that I didn’t hear about my great-grandfather from my father but it was kind of embedded in the history of the area and in the history of the fishing particularly. There was also [what one gathered for oneself] eventually, because I started looking into the weather patterns that made the ‘disaster day’ happen; it was the usual story of a very sudden wave arising and knocking over the yawls who couldn’t reef [furl their sails] in time. [But] I do begin to get the impression that it was only partly weather related. The forecast was actually –-- my great-grandfather’s diary did say that they knew the storm was coming and the problem really was the thing you would [suspect] – [that] there was some element of human frailty involved. The lines had been hooked and baited. The hooks had been baited for five days and to – and they were starting to go rotten and the business of – [in that state] you either took the greatline to sea and shot it or else you had to go through this horrible business of throwing away rotten mussels and re-baiting the line. And I do get the impression that when the disaster struck they’d been all unable to go for four or five days, but they decided to go to [laughs] shoot [the lines] before they had to do this [rotten] job. And so a part of the – a part of the problem on ‘Disaster Day’ I think was this problem of having to go to get rid of bait. Though you’ll never know about that sort of thing; that’s just an impression I began to get from this reading in my grandfather’s diary that they were expecting a strong wind.

[35.08]

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Could you describe your childhood home, I don’t know – you’ve spoken of sort of two halves to your childhood and I don’t know whether this implies that there was a move at any point but is there a childhood home that you remember clearly enough to give us a description of it, standing at the front door and giving us a tour.

Oh sure.

Starting with where exactly this was in –

Well the childhood home is an easy one to tie down because it was never anywhere else; it was 40 Baberton Crescent, Juniper Green and it was one of these bungalows in a suburb, Juniper Green, to the south west of Edinburgh, on the road to Currie and Balerno and in one of these streets where all the bungalows were the same. They were all covered in that horrible depressing pebbledash. Most of them had dark green depressing coloured paint like ours did. And when you went in the front door you passed on the left a room which was kept for, as far as I could tell, visits, that were so occasional as to be non existent, by great men. Or where you would, for example, have a wake after a funeral or Christmas Day when the overspill required more rooms but essentially the front room on the left was the front room and you didn’t really go in there very much. That ended up being of necessity where I slept as I grew older. The front room on the right was a bedroom and that’s where I – that’s where my sister would have slept. There was a rather nice – well it was a – there was the lobby in the middle from which led the kitchen and the bathroom to right and left respectively and rather cold chilly places both of these were. This was in the days of Crittal metal windows and single glazing and coal and windows being left open for the cat to get in and things like that that my parents undoubtedly could stand but became very hard to come back to [laughs] in that sense. And at the back of the house there was the – my mum and dad’s bedroom and the living room where there was an open fire, usually with my dad’s feet arched above it onto the mantelpiece from where he sat in a commanding position next to the radio set which was one of these big things about two and a half feet by two feet, on which he controlled the knob and the programmes and whatever that we listened to. But the glory of the place really was what happened

15 Bob Dickson Page 16 C1379/56 Track 1 behind the French windows which issued from the living room to the garden because the garden was one of these long and not very narrow gardens; it was quite a big allotment of land which had happened in these days when they built these bungalows. It was a – I guess an interwar bungalow. My dad said he paid 250 quid for it which seemed enough to him and – but he got a great deal of satisfaction out of using the lower half of the garden as a – more or less as a kitchen garden and digging tatties and [keeping] gooseberry bushes and all sorts of things across there. So the garden itself was a – was a much bigger than you would get in a development now; they’d [now] cram four houses onto that whole area. So, although the house was small, the garden was big. And we used to play cricket there; I remember given my mum a cauliflower ear when she was keeping wicket on one occasion. And I do remember the occasion playing hide and seek with my brother when he was very small - quite small, five say and I was six - and coming up behind him as he was looking for me through the glass of the French window, giving him a good shove and his head went right through it [laughs]. And because panes of glass in these days as I say were not double glazed and not very thick and so I did get quite a telling off and a larruping for that particular one. And I couldn’t even get his head out; it was there as evidence that I’d done it and nothing could be gainsaid. There he was bleeding, and I was the only one who could have shoved him through it. So yes that was – that was again the sort of thing people did: dad worked in the garden and mum went out there to play with the kids when we were little and I’ve got pictures of her doing so. But, she was in the house and he was in the garden; that was it.

There was a wonderful view across the – well I suppose it would be Corstorphine Loch or whatever they would call it in the old days out towards the Corstorphine Hill and the zoo, so that there was a big dip at the back of our house, with a very pleasant prospect of Edinburgh off to the right and a prospect of Corstorphine Hill in the distance. And you could see, looking left from the house, you could see the Forth Bridge and later the Forth Road Bridge. So it was quite – quite a vista and I imagine they are the sort – these bungalows, newly refurbished with all the mod cons are probably quite expensive places to buy nowadays for the upwardly mobile professionals in Edinburgh. The one thing I remember that ties the house to a date was the winter of 1947, [laughs], which was certainly a climatic memory if you like.

16 Bob Dickson Page 17 C1379/56 Track 1

Where the snow was so thick at the side of the house, because it had a drive that went past the side of the house, that the snow on the roof was contiguous with the snow along the edge of the house, directly contiguous; – you could have – if you’d ever been up there you could have slithered from the one to the other without a drop and I still remember that. The other thing I do remember, now you’re prompting these memories, was standing in the garden watching the Bristol Brabazon coming over. I guess that must have been 1950 or ’51. The big six engined thing. I don’t think it landed at Turnhouse but it certainly visited Turnhouse and it circled and circled and circled over our garden. Turnhouse was part of that view to the middle left, and there it was: the Bristol Brabazon. Lord knows what happened to that.

[42.24]

What did you do in terms of exploring local landscapes, places near to home?

I fear you’re coming upon some dark moments here [laughs]. We used to have a lovely [pause]. In fact that was what you got told: in the morning after you had your breakfast your mother would say, ‘Out you go and get some fresh air,’ and that was it. You – there was never the same sort of attachment to the apron strings as there is now thank goodness. And off I went. Alan Reid was the guy at the bottom of the road. He was the son of the manse and he and I used to go everywhere together and do things. Do almost anything: fishing with old champagne bottles with the pointy bit of the bottom knocked out in the water of Leith down – ‘cause they had a lot of old paper mills down there and weirs and pools and we used to love going down there and messing around and fishing like boys do. And later when I became a scout I guess most of that was taken up with scouting, but the dark deed I referred to was when I was a scout and when I'd gone with this chap Reid to what used to be called the Muir Woods, just north of Juniper Green and making dampers and twists. You won’t know about that if you’ve not been a scout. Anyway they were kind of doughy things that you stuck on a stick and cooked over a fire. And making dampers and twists on this open fire underneath an overhanging pine tree was probably an incautious thing to do but I do remember when the flame suddenly connected between the fire and the tree and then standing there in horror as the tree took off like a torch, and then touched the

17 Bob Dickson Page 18 C1379/56 Track 1 trees around to either side. And lying in this corn field opposite as the Muir Woods burnt down. I do take some satisfaction from it ‘cause it’s now a Muir Woods Crescent, Muir Woods Avenue, Muir Woods Drive, not a single tree to be found and I was more or less the instigator of the redevelopment of the Muir Woods. But of course there was nothing sinful about this; it was just a stupid thing to do in a stupid place, but - an accident. So one of the many thin ends of wedges that I didn’t see arriving when I was a kid. But I suppose I haven’t burnt down a wood since and there’s something to be said for that.

How do you fish with a broken champagne bottle?

Well you obviously are a man of the media and so you must have seen many a champagne bottle in your time; but they’ve got a dent in the bottom, that’s what champagne bottles do, so that the toffs have hold them with their hand cupped underneath; and in the top of this dent is a sort of marble thing that if you try to knock it out it can make a marble we thought, (but it can’t). But what it does make once you’ve made a hole in this thing, it makes an excellent fish trap because of course the fish can come in the mouth of the bottle if it’s lying in the water of Leith and it then goes either side of the other end of the bottle and gets itself caught in the same way that a salmon net does [works]. And if you build it correctly, I can’t remember building it terribly much more than that, but with a string around the neck you can hoik it up and the sticklebacks end up in the little V-shaped notch either side of this dent. That’s how you do it in case you ever want to know, which I doubt.

Where had you learnt how to do that; where did you pick up this sort of thing?

Just raw animal cunning and experimentation. So no there was nobody - as I say my dad wasn’t the sort to take you down there and show you how to catch minnows. You learnt it for yourself and people were very tolerant of these sort of things and I actually think it’s part of the great thing that we never talk about in these days, that there were always people around. People weren’t having two jobs really although my mum did have a part time job. People: the father went off to work [laughs] and the mothers were always at home and you’d be surprised how many curtains twitched

18 Bob Dickson Page 19 C1379/56 Track 1 every time you passed down Baberton Crescent. You were known. Where you went was pretty well known I would think and they [children] were passed from eye to eye and nothing really serious was going to go terribly wrong. Everyone knew who we were and we knew who everyone was and the kind of village of Juniper Green kept an eye on you in a funny sort of way; when you didn’t want it to you could sneak away a little bit, but only a little bit. Quite comforting actually and quite a useful thing. I doubt if it can happen today; they probably have dormitory towns or whatever they call them now. Juniper Green is probably one of them.

[47.49]

In thinking about this early part of your life you’ve sort of mentally divided up your childhood into two parts and I think you’re going to talk about the second part now but could you first say something about the logic for dividing it up in that way if you like or what makes you think of your childhood in those two parts? It may be obvious from what you’re going to say anyway?

Well Edinburgh was school and although I did, as I’ve said, manage to have good fun at weekends, mostly – most of the year, living in Juniper Green, our life was one of going to school and relaxing at weekends. But in these days you went to holiday at one point, one place, and that one place was my dad’s home in St Abbs and there I think the weighting factor of enjoyment for me was such that St Abbs took on at least half the joy of life and so I do regard this being a place where I did things that - I had [represented] all my happiest occasions when I was young; most of them were in St Abbs. Most of them on the sea. And as I may have said before, people didn’t travel very far in these days. My granny, as I’ve said, went to Wooler once with my father and he had to be bribed to want home. My dad eventually got as far as Copenhagen in later life and I’ve been all around from the planet, from here to Antarctica; that was the kind of change of scale that I think looking back I would have noticed. But then of course you didn’t ask where you going on holiday. You knew where you were going. You didn’t mind at all. Unless you were my mum and my sister because St Abbs was a heaven for boys but I guess a bit of a hell for women, who didn’t like to go to sea and get wet. Anyway it was announced that we would – we got long

19 Bob Dickson Page 20 C1379/56 Track 1 summer holidays then, and we would go; it was always the same way, we’d go by taxi to Waverley, we’d get the steam train to Reston and then Dod Broon’s bus would pick us up at Reston Station and take us to Coldingham and the Shore - it’s always called the Shore - to St Abbs. And that seemed to take an entire day and probably did. Nowadays in a car it probably takes about three quarters of an hour to do that bit, fifty miles away through – on the Berwickshire coast. And so St Abbs then itself was different. I do remember that you weren’t allowed to laugh loudly or play football on a Sunday for example. It just wasn’t done. And my grandfather, although he was an Elder in the Kirk and handed out the hymnbooks, he couldn’t bring himself to shave on a Sunday so it was a kind of stubbly Elder that handed you your hymnbook and pandrop combination as you walked in the door of St Abbs Kirk in these days. And then he would take his own pandrop which was a kind of mint imperial to you [referring to interviewer] and sit and sleep throughout the service. As a hardworking fisherman that was entirely all normal, but very strange now, when you think about what people do on a Sunday: the shops are open and everything else in St Abbs as elsewhere. But then, as I say, you couldn’t laugh, joke, play games on a Sunday and - or work. And so the fishermen all were off the sea on a Sunday unlike today. So that was one – that was one major difference that I remember from then. The other thing that I used to be quite amused about was the fact that all of the fishermen’s cottages seemed to have a harmonium in them, a big sort of organ thing that was powered by pedals, and this was – none of them could play the thing and I gathered eventually that this was the flotsam from a First World War wreck that was sunk off St Abbs Head and the harmoniums all drifted ashore with, according to my grandfather’s version, people saying, ‘Well ours is the next one, yours is the one after that’. And they all ended up as rather handsome nests for mice; I seem to remember, when they were broken up, there were ancestral galleries of mice nests in them so. There was also – it was in a certain way when I first started going there (I’m making a contrast been first going there and laterally going there) it was a communistic sort of place with a small c. The fishermen’s terraced cottages there were all faced by what they called the wudhoose which was a separate building opposite, across the street where upstairs was the net store and downstairs was the sink where you cleaned the fish and things. And I do remember, what I mean by being communally interested in these days, was that when my granddad was retired from the sea he would expect a string of a few

20 Bob Dickson Page 21 C1379/56 Track 1 haddies [haddock] or a crab to be sitting in the sink in the morning when he came down. It wasn’t so much that he would be grateful and go around handing out thanks for them; that was expected, that’s how you looked after the old boys when they couldn’t go [fishing] anymore. And there would be hell to pay [laughs] I rather suspect if it wasn’t there. So that was one thing. And another memory I have, quite strongly: I used to enjoy tatties and herring and I used to ask my granddad to make it for me. Most families in that small fishing village used to put up a small keg of salt herring to last them through the winter, just in case. And I used to enjoy them; they used to brand them on a griddle in the fire and have them with tatties in their jackets and raw onions I think. And – but when I asked my granddad for tatties and herring he would do it but it was plain that it was so much ingrained in his – in his head that this was failure food, that he didn’t enjoy doing it for me. Tatties and herring was a sign that the season had failed, [that] there’d been a poor one; to me it was a nice meal. And that was a memory I had; it didn’t stop me asking him but it probably stopped me asking for them quite so often [laughs]. So – and these are all the kind of differences that they had then from now.

[55.11]

But it was a wonderful place for boys to grow up; as I say lousy for my mother and sister and lovely for me. I used to lie – from dawn to dusk I was on the sea and even from my bedroom under the roof, I only had a little skylight to see out with and that just looked upwards, but I used to lie there trying to guess the weather from the noises that the gulls made on Mawcar [corruption of ‘Mew Carr’ or Gull Rock] which is a rock just off the mouth of the harbour; and you could tell: they would cackle in sunshine and they would have a long, low, crowing moan when it was foggy. And you could, I think, -----I’ve convinced myself ----that even lying in bed in the dark with the curtains drawn I could tell what sort of weather it was going to be. And then if the weather was at all decent which in my memory it always was of course, I’d be off at five o’clock in the morning to – with Wully Mills and the crew of the long blue salmon punt, the Mary. The first thing we did we all lined up our flat pies. You know, Scotch pies, these rather flat things, mutton pies? [asking interviewer] No I can see you’re needing educating in all these things [both laugh]. We’d line up our

21 Bob Dickson Page 22 C1379/56 Track 1 flat pies on the cylinder head - cylinder block of this punt as it headed towards St Abbs Head to warm up as we went around to Pettico Wick where the first of our staked nets was. And then you’d stop at the Wick around St Abbs Head and we’d all eat our pies; that seemed a natural thing to do. And then started at hauling our – the nets, you pulled... This was a stake net in the sense that it had a – it was moored in the sea. It had the same shape as my champagne bottle earlier on and the fish that went in were – couldn’t easily find their way back to the hole that they came in through, and they were directed into that hole by a ‘leader’ which went ashore. [The leader] was a deep net which was staked to rings set in the rocks around at the Wick. And so we would get the belly of the net aboard and undo the lashing and a stream of, you hoped, salmon would hit the floorboards in the punt. And I do remember the occasional danger when these ‘lion’s mane’ jellyfish got in with the – in with the catch cause the thrashing of the salmons’ tails on the deckboards of the punt would sometimes flick the swithers [long trailing stings] as they called them into the eyes of the fishermen. And they were just curled up in agony when that happened. It was certainly – you couldn’t really stop it; these fish were big, they were big twenty pound fish and they would thrash away on being dumped [out of the net] until you could get them all hit over the head with a – a little ‘priest’ [small club]. And very often that these – when the – in the summer when the ‘lion’s mane’ jellyfish were about that would be a hazard to avoid; I kept well back from them. And that was the early morning for me going off in the punt with Wully Mills. Then back at the harbour I’d go out on my own – rowing out on my own in a rowing boat, not very far. We’d go to Haven Rocks, Ebb Carrs, Starney, not far from the harbour mouth, but what I was intent on was to get lobsters in ‘single end’ cribs and that was my pocket money. Nobody ever gave you pocket money in those days but lobsters were six shillings a pound at Burgon’s in Eyemouth and so that was my main source of income. But I’d have done it anyway; it was a fabulous life to – to go off there hauling your own – on your own hauling your own cribs on a sunny morning on a calm sea. And that’s where you learned ----- I suppose that’s where this is old hat to fishermen’s families in that part, ----that’s how you learnt where the rocks were. I do remember one particular one where I was hauling away on my crib and all of a sudden the sea just fell back and there was a side of a rock like a whale lying there and I thought, ooh, I’ll never forget that one. And I didn’t; I know where that one is. Nobody came out on health and

22 Bob Dickson Page 23 C1379/56 Track 1 safety grounds and circled you and pleaded with you to come ashore or anything like that. That was how you learned to be safe: by, in a way, putting yourself into enough danger to see where the danger lay.

Anyway so that’s what I used to do, catch lobsters and I still have the receipts from Burgon’s somewhere [laughs]; the sort of things you keep. And a huge day, legendary among the small boys of the Shore when Burgon’s own big holding trunk that they used to keep all these hundreds of lobsters in- a big ‘trunk’ they used to call it - overturned in a storm, with enough fetch coming into the harbour mouth to turn it over, broke the lashings that held the lid on and hundreds of lobsters descended into the bottom of St Abbs harbour! This was wonderful for an army of small boys armed with kleeks [iron rods with a L-shaped bit on the end], going in and hauling these valuable creatures out. Dozens of them; I think I got a dozen. And you didn’t need to worry about being nipped or anything like that; they all still had their bands on from being inside, in captivity. So we, this was a – I still remember this as being a high point of my life: hauling all these lobsters in and selling them back, one liked to think, for the second time to Burgon’s. And so I also – you just triggered a memory of me saying to my granddad, ‘What happens if you get a poo nipping you?’ And he says, ‘What happens if a poo nips me?’ He was on the boat you see with this crab, and he was putting the things on, he says, ‘Watch,’ and he made this crab nip his finger and he just – as it nipped his fingers which were like three times the size of mine, he just smashed the whole thing to atoms [bangs table] on the gunnel. ‘That’s what I do if I get nipped by a crab’. [both laugh] And it was a very impressive demonstration of how not to get your finger nipped. Then continuing my day at St Abbs I would be off to Eyemouth and back on any of the yawls that happened to be going there [usually for bait]. And in the evening if my granddad hadn’t intercepted the big boats returning to Eyemouth, to get a few boxes of small fish:----- they needed them for the lobster cribs, the fleets of cribs; you would maybe have 200 cribs and they all had to have bait on a daily basis-----So if he hadn’t intercepted the big boats we’d go off and catch mackerel on his boat, the Polestar with George Scott, caught on ‘flees’ [hooks with feather lures] at ‘mackerel speed’ around St Abbs Head and it didn’t take long. In these days mackerel always seem to be abundant in the summer. I’ve even seen them once, only once, ‘brushing’ as they called it. When there’s so

23 Bob Dickson Page 24 C1379/56 Track 1 many fish so near the surface that their fins are making a sort of ripple. Not a ripple; like fracturing the surface with fins. But anyway you had fifteen flies on a – on a line and a great two or three, four pound lump of lead on the end to hold it all subsurface as you went along with George Scott running it at ‘mackerel speed’ as they called it. And when the mackerel hit, all fifteen hit at once so you had to be ready for it and then you soon got used to the intricacies of disentangling fifteen mackerel thrashing away and getting them de-hooked and put the thing [trace and weight] back over the side. And then mostly the – I even remember the chief places for mackerel:--- round the Skelly Rock or Nameless – just under the lighthouse at St Abbs Head. And then back to eat umpteen small haddies from the bait, which was my father’s favourite and mine, or boil up some of my small lobsters that were too small to legally land. On one hungry occasion I did have ten of them at one go once. I have never bought a lobster for money ever and the very idea of paying – I asked the guy at Lowestoft with all the fish here the other day, how much a lobster was and he says, ‘Oh that one’s eleven pounds.’ I thought, well I know it’s different days but the very idea of spending money on a lobster! So lobsters were a big important thing to me and beautiful creatures. And I do remember the day when we brought down a visitor from Edinburgh, James Marshall, he was – we found him cowering in the front end of a boat when I was hauling them in. He thought they were deadly dangerous obviously and I had to take him ashore. But to us they were money. And in the evening fishing for ‘baigmen’ as they called them. I don’t know what ‘baigmen’ are-----small, the young of Pollock I suspect ---off the moored boats or off the pier end and the occasional thrill when you dangled through – you dangled this bit of mussel right over the nose of a flatfish and you [found] you could tempt this thing. It’d jump up to get it.

[1.05.19]

So – and unlike today as I’ve kind of alluded to, the pier was a – a hive of activity with always enough adult fishermen around too. And [as] they always had their eye on you, you never – they were enough to keep you from doing anything too dramatically stupid although probably we headed in that direction quite often. And I do remember in the old days, they don’t do it now, my grandfather and his mates

24 Bob Dickson Page 25 C1379/56 Track 1 packing poos into barrels with a kind of – they’d do it in a kind of circular motion. They’d pick it up by the big toe, by the claw, and in a sort of circular motion they’d rotate this crab into barrels so they all packed round the outside; and then the creaking noise that all these heavy massive crabs made as you filled up the barrel; and then tacking wet sack over the top and putting an iron band around the top and then tacking it into place and that’s how Burgon’s got their crabs. They came in barrels in the early days. Or they would be a bunch of – every now and again the fishermen would get together to bark their cribs. Barking is – is – actually it’s more appropriate than it sounds; barking was when you take a – when you take a big vat of ‘cutch’ they called it which is probably some sort of tannin, and boiled up the vat on the Old Harbour pier, and dipped their cribs in it; because in these days the crib sheets, ----the netting that was covering the lobster pots, or cribs, ----the netting was cotton, made of cotton, and so it wasn’t made of artificial or manmade indestructible stuff and it had to be preserved. So every year a couple of times they’d boil up this cutch and they’d bark their cribs. And going down there, it’s still there, swaddling black layers on the pier where we used to have great fun barking.

[1.07.34]

Then the Lifeboat Days were fabulous as well because they had a big lifeboat in those days. Nowadays they’ve got a little tuppenny-ha'penny [pause] what do they call it? A rib: a reinforced [inflatable] rubber boat. But in those days they had a big lifeboat on the slip, and being a boy of the Shore, when they had a Lifeboat Day and they launched the lifeboat, you got to be on it during the launch. They’d grease up the groove down to the harbour and then we’d all climb aboard, with all the tourists looking on jealous. And then Bilch Laing would knock out the pin and you’d go shooting down there and there’d be a huge splash when you entered the harbour. Then Jim Of The Rock House had to make a – he was the coxswain - he had to make a very instant jink to the right because some architect had designed the St Abbs lifeboat slip so that it pointed straight at the pier end and you had to do a quick shimmy of course to get out. And then later on once you’d got all this fun out of the way the ‘towrist [tourist] kids’ as they used to call them got handed aboard at the steps later on, still heavily clamped to their mothers and we all went off to do

25 Bob Dickson Page 26 C1379/56 Track 1 something else. And it’s still a wonderful place for childhood and full of incident. There’s not many fishermen left nowadays. But some of the memories I had: I had great fun recalling them but some of them weren’t fun at the time. I remember a particularly dodgy moment round at the Wick when I was intent on a fulmar egg. I’m not sure this is very PC either. But along a very narrow ledge above the beach at Pettico Wick, which is round St Abbs Head, there was a place where you could get onto this ledge very easily and the cliff beside it hadn’t deepened, steepened, very much. But as you went along this cliff ledge, for every foot you went out, the land beside it dropped away about ten, and so by the time I'd reached this fulmar’s nest I suddenly realised I was a good hundred feet above the sea on some of the highest cliffs in the east coast of Scotland. I got the egg though, but then I took a long time coming, crawling backwards along this ledge and of course that was one of the things that nobody ever found out, certainly not my dad. And there were other memories too. One simple one was at the beach just to the west of Pettico Wick there were rocks that bounced. You’d pick up a big rock a foot across and throw it and it would bounce an enormous height off the other rocks. I’ve never seen that before [laughs]. Nowadays you’re not allowed to do it because it’s a Conservation Area but it still works I have to say! And then going to Lumsden shore after the ‘sea finns’, which I think used to mean sea finds, but they were big trees really, big timber baulks that my granddad wanted. And he’d go out there on the Polestar and hang onto one of these timbers and drag it back home where George Scott would piece together his circular saw and it would wheeze away and dismember this thing. But good fun! All these things were great fun. I went just recently and there’s still good fun to be had around that head. I was there with George Wilson on the Ailsa Jane and he says, ‘Oh aye, there’s still things to be done out here, there’s still interesting things’. He says, ‘look up there,’ and halfway down a 300 foot cliff, they’re the tallest cliffs in the east side of Britain, there was a little patch of grass with a sheep on it. He says, ‘That’s fallen down about six months ago and it’s been living there off this little bit of grass at forty- five degrees ever since’ [laughs]. May still be there, who knows, but no doubt it has fallen off since. Then there were goats which ran on little rocky paths out to the point at Fastcastle Head and even once he said, George said, ‘I caught a fox in one of my – in the tail end of my fleet of cribs when it washed ashore in a storm when I wasn’t there,’ and of course when the tide came in again he caught a fox in the last of the

26 Bob Dickson Page 27 C1379/56 Track 1 cribs. So you can’t make that up. That’s the sort of interesting fun things that you could almost depend upon being – well they were undependable but you could depend on something like that happening. Or ashore , to round off my days as a child at St Abbs, if we were ashore some time we’d go hunting sea cradles which were small cowries, always down at Lincom on the shore next to Eyemouth and nowhere else. Or huge horse mussels nine inches long for bait at the big rock, vertical rock called ‘the Kip’ near St Abbs, but nowhere else. Or following the reaper and binder in the Kirk field with men and small boys all armed to the teeth with sticks as the reaper and binder cut the square of corn down, smaller and smaller, and the rabbits started pouring out of it and – because we used to eat rabbits in these days and enjoy them. And wild mushrooms from the Bell Hill too. But the greatest thrill I used to have then and still do now, I have to say, is clambering down across the rocks at a place called ‘the Wittery Braes’, ---that must have been the watery Braes but they were ‘the Wittery Braes’ always, ----and at low water you could just about get onto a rock there which was fringed by tangle [seaweed] and sea urchins and you slipped and slithered on this rock. There was a ring cemented, one of the old salmon rings, cemented into the rock and that’s what you used to tie- off your single end crib and there was a spot of sand just below you, deep down, and the thrill I’m talking about was getting onto this rock at say six in the morning on a summer’s day and looking down through the water and seeing this big beast sitting there in your crib and you’d caught another lobster.

So they were – you can see I hope now why I divided my childhood into what I used to do in school and homework and Juniper Green and the occasional setting fire to the Muir Woods and what I did as a child at St Abbs which was an entirely different and to me very pleasurable life. I wish I was doing it now. And still after his Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and his MBE my father’s best boast was that he could ‘aye talk to the men on the pier’, and I guess that would be my best boast too.

[1.14.47]

27 Bob Dickson Page 28 C1379/56 Track 1

What do you remember of that talk, of the conversation of the men who worked here, of the adults around you, perhaps of the adults on the boat that you went out with as part of your day?

They were – they – it was kind of an almost Icelandic way of passing on the perceived – the received truth of the past and the doings of the past by recounting them to each other. So you often got – you often got stories from quite a long time ago being told again. Or – and my grandfather had plenty of stories to tell. I mean he used to go through the canal [through] the centre of Scotland --- the Caledonian Canal to the Irish Sea ---looking for herring. The - it was quite wrong to think of the fishermen as being restricted in range because though their families undoubtedly were, the fishermen would ‘travel the herring’ [as they called it] from further north, not maybe as far as the Shetlands, but all the way down to Lowestoft. So there’d be quite a few – there were some Lowestoft people had married into St Abbs because of their communications along the coast as fishermen or as the people who packed the fish---, the herring, the people who used to come to Lowestoft to pack the herring, ----there were communications that the whole community used to be engaged in but it was work. And you’d get all sorts of stories about the days when they were travelling that long distance. I suppose they were mundane to my granddad but, for example, one day he caught a whole net full of sea trout off Ardglass in Ireland, and there was nothing he could do about them except to salt them down in a barrel like they were herring because there was no refrigeration and there was no market and there was no this and no that. And if he had got them ashore, Portavogie or Ardglass there was no way of getting them to London or anything else; so here was this quite valuable thing that he tripped over and he more or less ate a few and kept the rest kippered or whatever. And just the way that the – he says that in his stories, that sort of thing was a totally different way of life to anything that was going on, even when I was there. He would say [that] in the ‘Welfare ‘or the ‘Flourish’ or one of his boats that he had, for a start when the owner of the boat brought the boat back to St Abbs every day (they were just day boats) or if they went away for a couple of days and came back with a catch, the crew used to come and be fed by my granny; the owner of the boat used to feed the crew and that would be rather strange to think of today. That’s where this business of boiling beef in kale [soup] came from, so you’d eat the vegetables and

28 Bob Dickson Page 29 C1379/56 Track 1 then you’d eat the beef. Also when he was going off further down to Lowestoft he would talk – whether it’s true or not I don’t know, ----he talked about putting – strapping a block of tobacco on the deck like ---[I’ve got this vision of this thing about the size of a biscuit box [laughs],---and clear off the seagull crap and the scales and rub a bit up in your hand and put it you’re your pipe and use it as you needed it. The very idea of having a block of tobacco strapped to the deck for everyone to use was rather strange. And then he even told me a story about when they got bugs. I guess they would be – I’m not quite sure what sort of bugs they would have. Anyway some sort of cockroaches or whatever in the main cabin below on this wooden fishing boat, they would spray kerosene into it, set fire to it and then rush in with [a hose] to put the fire out. That was apparently – I’m only passing on what he said - that was apparently a way of dealing with the problem of having an infestation of cockroaches, I imagine, on these voyages. But that was a period well before I knew them and it was only [mentioned] in my life because as your question implied, ‘what did your granddad talk about?’ That was the sort of things he was persuaded to talk about, and I got the impression he wasn’t just doing it to record these things for me but because this was the way that history was handed down. So he didn’t really mind talking about these days. It had to be wheedled out to him to some extent but that was – that was the way it was.

I could probably sit here and fill your entire day with - if I plotted the time with stories like that. But I did have a lot [of contact with my paternal grandfather] compared with my maternal grandfather who I hardly knew and he was a minister, and old. Well my granddad was old as well but I kind of had much more of an interaction with him and he did interesting things like go on a boat and so I would naturally be clustering around much more. So, I still have nice pictures of my granddad standing on the floor of the old harbour tarring the bottom of the Polestar and I think that’s a – these are all very happy memories. Nobody ever had anything in the sense of cars or possessions, but I think that’s – that in a way was the secret of happiness at St Abbs; you never had any more than your neighbour and they didn’t have any more than you. But by the same token, I do remember that when a visitor or I mean another member of the Shore population, would look in on my granny when she was ill, it was never seen really as, in the pleasant way it should have been seen.

29 Bob Dickson Page 30 C1379/56 Track 1

She would say, ‘I wonder what she was after,’ when she went away [both laugh], you know, the sort of thing that village people do; they’re a bit thrawn.

[1.21.22]

And another strange thing that, if you’ve still got enough tape left on that machine, that I remember from the place just right now was the fact that there were no surnames. There were I suppose so many – so few surnames in the place it wasn’t worth having one or mentioning it to anybody. And so people used their first names; so I’d be Wully’s Robert, and if you had to go back another generation since I’d be Robert’s Wully’s Robert because that was one thing they did, they alternated the [names of the] number one son. I remember the farce that descended on the place when – they didn’t see it this way; Jake Nesbit was a man that was called Jake and there was another man who wanted to be call Jake. So being tolerant they called this other man Jake and they called Jake Nesbit ‘Real Jake’. And then they dropped the Jake, and for all the time I was there he was called ‘Real’ so that he’d say, ‘Morning Robert,’ and I’d say, ‘Morning Real,’ and that was it. And so the man who wasn’t called Jake was called Jake and the man who was called Jake was called Real. There. But I do remember a nice – another nice vignette, going to shop for rolls, seeing the oldest inhabitant, Rachel Bell, meeting one of the youngest, two or three year old Charlie Crow and he’d say, ‘Morning Rachel,’ and she’d say, ‘Morning Charles,’ and that was it. That’s like a difference in age of eighty-five years talking there [laughs], and that was entirely right and proper in these days.

[1.23.04]

What did your sister and mother do on these holidays?

Ah, well to start with they moaned a bit because they or they went on walks and did things and went to the sands and it rained. And of course we did go as a family down to the Coldingham Sands and to the beach and we did have a hut there: a sort of ancient place that you could change and keep things [in]. But their life was very much more truncated than mine and so latterly I took to going down there on my own

30 Bob Dickson Page 31 C1379/56 Track 1 and living all summer with my Auntie Peggy, cooking me bacon and eggs on the fire and my mum and sister would come on for a sort of family bit in the middle and I would stay on both ends of it. And that was the right way to do it really. So my mum was much more interested in what was going on around her in Edinburgh, I suspect. She did jewellery classes, silversmith classes and things like that towards the end. And my sister certainly didn’t want to go off away from where the boys were and things like that to St Abbs and so, yes, I guess [pause] I guess [pause]; ...my memories were very largely those when I would have gone on my own to St Abbs and stayed there and got up to no good probably.

What about your brother was he –

My brother wasn’t really – didn’t really have the same interests as me in the sea. Neither did my cousin. And I’m not really sure why. There was – you see my father, as I said his boast was that he could ‘aye talk to the men on the pier’ because essentially he never stopped being one, and if he was down there he would be fishing for podleys [small colefish] and they’d be talking about the old days when they were going off on a boat together. But my father’s brother was a much more prigmadenty [fastidious; genteel] man. I’m not sure that’s English, but anyway it’s Scottish. He was a bank manager in Cambuslang in the end and that’s nothing to say against bank managers, but his family all went [for] walks and rarely went on the pier. He had two girls, Margaret and Dorothy, and they were nice kids but they never ever had any ambition, any of that family, to go on the pier. They were interested in going to gardens and he’s a great gardener with his wife but – they’d go to Dobbies every weekend when he lived at Musselburgh. But for some strange reason that side of the family never actually would have seen themselves as being fishermen; they would never have made it, even talking to the men on the pier.

[1.26.10]

And there was a great art to it as well, I do remember. I’ve got another story for you here [laughs] and it’s a rather strange but telling story about St Abbs. That if you came from St Abbs there were certain things that you did and didn’t do, and one of

31 Bob Dickson Page 32 C1379/56 Track 1 them was – I remember finding out at first hand what this was for myself when there was a plague of octopuses in St Abbs at about 1960 and I went up to this bunch of people on the pier and said, ‘Can I have some of the octopus Peter?’ (Peter Merry). And the group of people, the group of men I’d just barged into just stopped talking [pause] and then they waited a bit. And then they started talking again about the subject that they were talking about before, and I got the – I realised what was going on: you don’t eat octopus if you come from the Shore; foreigners eat octopus. So I went down the next day and I said, ‘Keith Brander’s mum’s German. We’re going up to see her in Edinburgh next week. Can I take a few octopus to her?’ And they said, ‘Oh aye, let me get that net down on the deck for you.’ They were still hanging up there. And it did show me that there are ways that you approach things on the pier and there are ways you certainly don’t. And the only way they could handle me apparently wanting to eat an octopus, which was an outlandish thing to do, was by pretending it never happened. I’m not sure whether that’s a metaphor for anything very dramatic. But I do remember that that’s part of what it involved, [what] ‘talking to the men on the pier’ meant, and my dad could do it and so could I eventually, once I’d realised what I’d done wrong.

And was it always men and boys on the pier, was there any – were there any girls going out in boats doing things on the pier?

Well no I wouldn’t say so. My Auntie Peggy who lived there all her life, ----that was what you did in these days. Granny and granddad would have a younger daughter and an older daughter, say, just like they had. The older daughter went off to become a nurse and matron in Dudley and got married. The younger daughter stayed at home and looked after the old folk and my dad and Uncle John the bank manager paid for her to be there, even (as a schoolteacher), rather resented by my mum because she could once they’d died have gone off and taken a job according to my mum and she probably could have done. But that wasn’t the way it was done. The way it was done was the youngest daughter gave up her chances of marriage by looking after the old folk at home and that was how it was and so you looked after her later on in life. And so that on the – now the reason I introduced my Auntie Peggy was that she never went on the pier, ever . I don’t imagine – I think maybe once. They had a film called

32 Bob Dickson Page 33 C1379/56 Track 1

Depth Charge that somebody ran, at St Abbs, it was filmed at St Abbs, and they needed extras and she was an extra on the pier. You can look it up: Depth Charge it was called. And all the fishermen with their [inaud] and suspiciously clean and new guernseys [fisherman’s sweaters] that plunged over the brae and down to the lifeboat when the maroon sounded. But no, the women stayed in their houses and there was none of this sort of going down to get – to meet the men coming up with the fish and all that stuff [laughs]; they knew w here they were. And even [pause] they didn’t go to funerals either,so that if you had a funeral in St Abbs, the funeral took place in the – probably in Coldingham at the Priory and it was all men. They’d all stand there kicking tyres and talking about the price of poos and – and once the – the dear departed was interred you came back to St Abbs and the women had the ham sandwiches and things all ready for you. But they would never go to a funeral. They do now of course and – but they led a much more – I’m not sure they were opposed to it, they led a much more narrow life in that sense. So the men would go to sea, they’d go all the way up and down the coast and they’d go to funerals and the women stayed at home and – and did everything [appropriate to] that. They certainly were competent housewives and they had to be but they never actually felt very much like going down on the pier. The ones – the girls that you saw on the pier were mostly tourists with – with shrimping nets and things like that. But [pause] and of course all that is different now, you’ll get whole families walking around the pier and touristy families there. But it was a – I’m making a distinction now between what people from the Shore did and what tourists did. And I might say that that is still brought home to you quite forcibly that somebody can, as a tourist, have bought a house thirty years ago and be there every day of the – every year since; but they’re still tourists!

[1.31.48]

And I can go away for three years at a time, as I have done the last [few years] between going to St Abbs, and I can pick up the conversation where I left off when I left [laughs]; it’s very unfair I’m sure but it’s – that’s a fact of life that if you came from the Shore they kind of knew it and if you didn’t they knew that too.

So you’ve been going back there throughout your life?

33 Bob Dickson Page 34 C1379/56 Track 1

Yes, but less so since my mum and dad died. They came and moved down here. They were rather poor old souls when they came down here because like most old people they got to the point where they couldn’t move before they decided that they had to move, but that was really the reason for going up there. I’d go up there and spend days with then in Juniper Green because they never moved, and then snatch a few days at the Shore, and as I say I could still continue even – bringing my family up there, spending the odd fortnight. But that wasn’t really the same thing. If you brought your own family up there you were responsible for taking them places and showing them the places you used to go and all that stuff. But the freedom as a single young male at St Abbs, that was all gone forever. I can still find that rock with the ring on it and shoot a crib when they’re all still asleep and show them a lobster when I come back and boil it up before the women go ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ about boiling such a living creature so rapidly. But I still get some of – it’s mostly memories [but] I still get some of that from doing the odd thing, catching the odd lobster in the way that I used to do it.

But it was – the times I was telling you about were my childhood at St Abbs and that was essentially – it meant what it said: [pause] you were looked after, tolerated, shown how to do things and accepted in doing quite a large range of quite adult things. But there was a timescale to all of that and going off and – I could still go back there but it doesn’t mean that I have the same freedom as I used to have when I was a teenager wandering around and fishing.

[1.34.18]

Could you describe one of the things which you did and that’s the going out in the boat and catching lobsters, I wonder for people listening most of whom won’t have done that, could you describe what’s involved from the point of leaving the shore to coming back again with a lobster, practically what is involved in getting a –

Oh yeah. Well I’m not talking about the commercial lobster fishing ‘cause they’re – well I can tell you about both if you like. The commercial boys used to have fleets up

34 Bob Dickson Page 35 C1379/56 Track 1 to 300 cribs, thirty cribs in a fleet and a crib was a – a sort of netting tunnel on a base made of slats of wood and the tunnel was kept in an arched shape by, in the old days, willow sticks which were bent into place when they were young and then covered by a crib ‘sheet’ they called it which was made by a netsman’s needle; they’d make this out of cotton twine, in the old days, coraline today; then they would lash a large stone in the middle of the crib on the floor. And it [the crib] had two holes, one in each side, offset from one another for the lobster to get in; and up and down the middle, lashed to the slats in the middle of the crib and up to the peak of the arch of the crib, there would be two strings and a sliding knot. So you stick a mackerel in there, slide the knot back down on top of it and the last thing I have to describe to you about a crib was that it had a – an ‘eye’ which you could unlash to get the lobsters out. So you didn’t go in like the lobster did with your hand down through the convolutions of this – of this little tunnel it had to go through; you just opened the eye of the crib and dumped the lobsters and crabs out. So that’s what I used to aspire to make. The commercial boys used to go off all the way to Dunbar in the one direction and not so much to the south, probably as far as Eyemouth and little bit around to Burnmouth but there were fishermen all the way down that way and you didn’t want to get bad with them and shoot your cribs over the top of them. So the commercial people from St Abbs were mostly around St Abbs Head and up to Dunbar. And they’d – you’d go out there in the morning and you’d snag onto the dahn that marked the end of the crib end and coil it down the deck; and as the man was driving his boat forward, the hauler, you’d put the the ground line from the crib over the hauler and every now and again a crib would come up alongside. You’d … you’d ‘surge it’ as they called it on the hauler [ie hold the rope still as the barrel of the hauler kept rotating] so that the thing kept its place and didn’t haul in anymore while somebody disposed of the lobsters and crabs, put the new bait in and stacked it. And at the end of this fleet of cribs you had thirty newly baited cribs, re-opened with the lobsters and crabs removed, sitting there waiting to be shot again. They’d decide where – and the last thing you’d haul in [at] the other end of the crib fleet was another dahn and then steam off to where you want to shoot them, and the whole thing went into reverse after that.

Now for me it was different. I had a small boat; probably Wully Mill’s clinker built boat and you’d borrow that. You’d make some cribs, some – or some helpful

35 Bob Dickson Page 36 C1379/56 Track 1 fishermen would give you some that were too busted for them to bother with and you’d repair them; going down to places like Holy Island I’d always find a crib or two lying in the tide wrack and I never had any more than maybe five. And that was quite enough to keep up my attention. So you’d repair them as the first thing you’d do when you went there in the summer. And then just row yourself out there. I don’t remember ever having much of an engine on anything, no, just rowing myself out to Starney. You knew a few holes where you could shoot them and mostly places where there was a nice sandy bottom. And you were never going to get in anyone’s way because shooting single end cribs just meant a crib with a weight in it, hit the bottom and there was a string up to the top and you had a dahn or a buff or an old washing up bottle at the top of it that everyone knew was yours, and you knew it was yours and nobody interfered with it. But you were never going to lay it across somebody else; there was no string of them to lie across some of the local proper fishermen’s fleets. And so – but the one thing that you did which was probably rather sad was when you got lobsters in and they were only slightly undersized, I guess you would leave them in the crib sometimes and when you got a few of them together, like I did once, you’d just take them all home at once and scoff them. Later on I suppose parlour cribs came in where there was a third chamber to the crib which the lobsters could get in and then get even further into the depths of this thing so you they couldn’t get out but I never bothered with these. And later on still there were iron cribs which are big unwieldy heavy old things and they lasted a lot longer. But the cribs that I used to work as a boy were made up with essentially perishable materials and so that the willow hoops that you used to keep the crib sheet up with and the crib sheet itself was made out of cotton, I used to make that and but my grandfather was so much faster at it that he used to do most of mine. And so he – you would row, I suppose, around the back of the Haven Rocks which is really just the outside part of the harbour pier, [then] one at Starney which was maybe half a mile away past this Mawcar where I was talking about the seagulls moaning from. Then up to the Heugh which was a big, white cliff - ---[the White] Heugh where all of the guillemots and razorbills and more seagulls used to live, and that was a really beetling cliff, a beautiful place to be right underneath the Heugh on a pleasant day. And not very much further than that. Once you got out towards the – the end of St Abbs Head you were really getting a bit too far to be on your own on a small boat with an oar or something very – something could

36 Bob Dickson Page 37 C1379/56 Track 1 go wrong. But you were never really far from – from the shore, or from somebody’s eye, or from somebody on the cliff walking along. Everyone knew where everyone was; they wouldn’t even register it but they would – if somebody asked where you were ---it was rather surprising how often they knew exactly where you were [laughs]. And being a boy of the Shore you were tolerated and [trusted] to bring home these lobsters, wrapped up in your dopper [oilskin overall]. Doppers are a sort of formless yellow waterproof thing that you dived into head first, and everyone wore doppers in those days so you just dived in through the – the head came over the – over the hole in the middle. So you wrapped [the lobster] up in your dopper, climbed the increasingly rusty rungs of the ladder from the harbour, took them – took them into Eyemouth, to Burgon’s and sold them there. And it used to be one of – one of the sights where you go to in Eyemouth – to go to Burgon’s and see the holding concrete tanks where hundreds and hundreds of these things were waiting to be flown off to France, in these days even. There were lots of days I’m sure when – which weren’t fit for people like me to go out and on these occasions there would always be clambering across the rocks to the occasional one [rock] where you knew you could tie off the crib end and still catch something.

[1.43.20]

But I’m probably make – it’s probably like all these memories, it’s probably the pleasurable things are probably bulked up into something you spent more time on in your head than you actually did in real life, but they certainly made a big part of my day over there. They would have – my sister would have hated it, everything about it.

What makes you say that, that she would have hated it?

Well clambering over wet rocks to me was a means to an end and clambering over wet rocks to her was clambering over wet rocks. Picking up a lobster was six shillings a pound to me and picking up a lobster was something that might nip her to her. And there was, you know, I could have – that’s essentially just two of the differences between them – between us. That was the way all girls were. They didn’t seem to be particularly interested in fishing.

37 Bob Dickson Page 38 C1379/56 Track 1

[End of Track 1]

38 Bob Dickson Page 39 C1379/56 Track 2

Track 2

You have some stories and comments on higher education:

Yes, my definition of higher education is quite broad in this – in this tape, and I’ll try to explain why. Higher education will bracket Edinburgh University, the conversion to ocean sciences and the first few cruises, all of which were [laughs] essential in these days to developing an education in ocean science. And the point was in those days, with very few exceptions, it was less straightforward than now to get a degree in ocean sciences at any university in the UK. The way it worked or at least the way it worked for me was to get a physical sciences degree in some other discipline, and then convert. I don’t really think apart from Liverpool you could do it any other way.

[01.01]

In my case a year of honours geology at Kings Buildings, Edinburgh, in 1961 or so, was grafted onto a three year honours geography course at High School Yards with emphasis on geomorphology and the inspirational Brian Sissons and leading to a 2.1 MA honours in geography in 1964. A prize, much more kudos than cash, for mapping the glacial history of the Scottish highlands between Callander and Dunblane. Long summer days mapping the washboard pattern of meltwater channels across the Braes of Doune while being mugged by gangs of heifers. I remember it all well [laughs].

[01.50]

University holidays then were spent hitchhiking with friends and girlfriends to Bodø in Norway and then sleeping on the luggage racks of the coastal shipping line, on the Ragnvald Jarl, as we travelled as far north as you could conceivably go, to pack fish for Findus in Hammerfest. And after a while on this rather boring task we could even tell where the haddock had come from by the pteropod taint that we used to get off the [haddock] that they had used [as] their food off Bear Island. And I do have happy memories of when, bored with packing fish in the factory at Hammerfest, I was

39 Bob Dickson Page 40 C1379/56 Track 2 suddenly told that my request to go to sea on the fishing fleet with – that Findus used was now acceptable as the mate had knifed the cook and I could now go aboard as the trawl boss in charge of the forward ‘door’ [or ‘otter board’] ; you know, the – one of the two doors that keep a trawl mouth gaping open. I was in charge of what happened when the first of these arrived on the deck. So – and then so I went on this trawler and I kind of knew what a trawl boss did; it had ‘Built Selby, 1918’ proudly displayed on the casing, so an ancient rust-bucket of a trawler. Nobody there spoke any English and that didn’t matter at all, but the – certain strange things did happen and seem to follow me around. Take the story of our Norwegian skipper taking us into an exclusion zone near Novaya Zemlya [which] was probably one of the bigger stories. It was late summer, everyone had been forbidden to fish there in Tiddly Bank next to the Novaya Zemlya because Khrushchev was still posturing about letting loose his fifty megaton hydrogen bomb test in the atmosphere over Novaya Zemlya. And our skipper had got fed up waiting and heard about the haddocks there and went in. And so we were apparently there when the H bomb blew up and we were all hoiked ashore to Honningsvag and given quite an impressive anti-radiation treatment. I remember that many years later in 1991 when we honoured five guests at our first ICES - International Council for the Exploration of the Sea – decadal Science Symposium in Mariehamn in the Baltic, one of our other guests, Lars Midttun, began his talk with a statement, ‘I am the only one here who has been blown up by a fifty megaton hydrogen bomb,’ and we said, ‘No you’re not,’ [both laugh] and for once I had to disabuse him: he was not alone. What I remember most from these fishing trips as a student was standing long days gutting in the fish pounds with fish up to your thighs and wondering if that nipping around your toes was – could possibly be one of these ‘steinbit’ or big wolf fish, which – and whenever we came across them with their legendary jaws we used to get them to bite the trawl warp which was now running up and down the deck, having reshot the trawl, and get them to bite the trawl warp until we could deal with them later. Still, twelve hundred boxes of haddocks in ten days, I think earned me 1,200 kroner.

[05.35]

40 Bob Dickson Page 41 C1379/56 Track 2

I gained nothing of direct interest to oceanography in Edinburgh and as it turned out it was the days at St Abbs that then prodded me decisively to take my next step in the direction of the ocean. As a new graduate I was walking along the pier at St Abbs one morning in June, back from the salmon punt with a couple of hefty twenty pound fish hanging down my back, when a family friend and acquaintance of my dad’s, James Edgar, who had some sort of job in placing graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to good effect in the Civil Service decided since he knew us to do the same for me and so he suggested I accompany him on a visit to Lowestoft. ‘Where is Lowestoft,’ I said. And see his friend Arthur Lee. ‘Who’s Arthur Lee?’ I said. So – so I did and recruitment seemed to be a much less fraught business then than now and by the 10 th of July ’64 on the confirmation of my degree I was awarded a Development Commissioners Fishery Research Training Grant of £450 a year---- staggering really [laughs], ----to work at the fish lab at Lowestoft under Arthur Lee who was then the Head of Hydrography and later the Director. And on October 1 st 1964 I began.

[07.04]

In between these dates, as it seems hardly credible today, I was converted into some species of physical oceanographer during a two week course at the University College, North Wales, Menai Bridge. It must have been a good course as it set more than me off on a lifelong career in ocean sciences and [pause] it’s forged friendships that have lasted to this day. Of the others on that particular course, John Gould who was a physics and maths graduate from Kings College, London, later became the Head of Marine Physics at NIO Wormley [National Institute of Oceanography] and project director for both of the main World Climate Research Programme’s [two main] global experiments: WOCE and CLIVAR. Then there was Peter Liss, a chemist from Durham [who] became the Professor of Marine Chemistry at UEA, and later FRS and CBE in 2010, I think it was. John Edmond, another chemist from Glasgow became a leader of the world renowned GEOSECS tracer chemistry programme and was elected FRS too before his tragic death in 2001. And following my dad’s lead I gained a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1998, and then a CBE myself in 2007. We certainly had good teachers. Professor Derbyshire gave us our grounding in tides, John Harvey lectured on physical oceanography, a Scot

41 Bob Dickson Page 42 C1379/56 Track 2 called Sinclair Buchan, from Fraserborough I remember, gave us a smattering of coastal sedimentology and Peter Spencer taught us the elements of marine titration chemistry.

[08.54]

And maybe in the light of all his good teaching John Harvey’ll forgive one slightly [laughs] – one slight story to his disadvantage, but one that we all remember with pleasure. John decided one day that we were going to learn how far does the tidal excursion go up the Conway; he was going to sit in a rowing boat at the mouth of the Conway and drop in drift bottles from time to time and we were meant to hang over in pairs, ----to keep an eye on each other I suspect-----, hang over bridges on the way up the Conway and count the number of bottles that went shooting past under us. Well John Gould and I were unfortunately placed at the [one] furthest from the sea, ---- improbably far from the sea at a little place called Tal y Cafn in North Wales; a very warm day, right next to the pub at Tal y Cafn bridge and we did our best: the first – for the first hour we hung over the bridge fifty-five minutes and spent five minutes in the pub and for the second hour we spent fifty-five minutes in the pub and spent five minutes hanging over the bridge; we were very apprehensive then when [we were] wheeched down in somebody’s car to the mouth of the Conway to find out the answer,and saw this black faced John Harvey, evidently highly annoyed with something or other. And we knew it was us. But it wasn’t! He confessed: he said that ‘ actually, I got the phase of the tide wrong. I put the bottles out on the phase of the tide that took them straight out to sea’ [laughs]. None of them ever went up into the Conway and the only one that was ever seen by anyone was one I picked up myself as it came back in’. So [laughs] his annoyance was with himself and I’m sure he’ll forgive that story being retold. One thing I remember – reminded by John Gould just this week was the fact that we both spent that course in the same digs in North Wales, and the Welsh landlady gave us fish with a brown meat gravy, which even for Wales must have been a first we thought.

[11.17]

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Then in the first days of applying all this new scientific knowledge at Lowestoft I could hardly have had a more sympathetic boss than Arthur Lee, and his enthusiasms became mine really. He was – he’d been – he’d joined Michael Graham’s Arctic team at Lowestoft to attack two quite specific problems that the war cabinet, the White Fish Industry Committee, had been debating before the end of the war:--- whether the Bear Island fishery could have an adverse affect on the cod stocks in that area; and whether climate changes had played a part in the development of Arctic fisheries. His own contributions had been to do with monitoring hydrographic change along standard sections west and south west of Bear Island for the period of a decade from 1949. That was his novel response to the new realisations that the fishery could change and that climate could change it. So he was really quite modern in the way that he attacked these via long time- series of observations in the important warm salty Atlantic current that feeds north from here into the Arctic. So these were the directions he set me off in and in one way or another I would say they’ve shaped my interests ever since.

[12.44]

I’ve no hesitation in lumping these early cruises in here as part of higher education because that’s exactly what they were. As you’d imagine, with a university degree in some physical science, physical subject but with only really two weeks of practical oceanographic training, the training on the job became the important way that not only myself but John Gould and others developed [as] ocean scientists. So starting in 1966 which was the year of my official entry to the civil service I was off every autumn to join the International 0-Group Fish Surveys between Norway, Russia and UK, where we annually put in a huge mileage criss-crossing the Barents Sea and shelf round Svalbard in our old Arctic research vessel, [an] Arctic trawler called Ernest Holt . What we were doing was hydrography, what the temperature, salinity and other characteristics of the water were for this year as opposed to last, and then measuring the currents for the first time across the Barents sea shelf with [some of the] new self recording current meters that had just become available. Laying them on U shaped moorings with a buoy wire, a ground wire and an instrument wire up to a subsurface buoy and that was to avoid letting the wave motions work their way into the current

43 Bob Dickson Page 44 C1379/56 Track 2 meter records themselves. We lost quite a few rigs initially and that sort of thing prompted unworthy thoughts that the sort of mooring we were putting out was almost exactly – the wires involved were almost exactly the same as the trawl warps needed by a small Russian coastal trawler; and there were we putting out maps and diagrams saying when we would be putting them out and what the mooring looked like and how you could therefore hook onto it and recover it. So some of the – some of the losses that we had in the early days I’m sure were due to this sort of publicity that we had to put out by law.

[14.58]

I remember three vivid incidents from that period. [In] one of them, Leon Birkett who was a Lowestoft biologist of Russian origins very unwisely and without thinking picked up the ship- to- shore radio in the south eastern Barents Sea, talking in Russian, and there was an immediate response. I was working on the deck and immediately a submarine rose alongside and went down again, a bomber came across the sea at zero elevation, whipped right across the ship, and we were tagged by – we were followed around the south eastern Barents Sea by a Russian warship for the rest of the cruise [laughs]. So that was one thing that we suddenly realised: we weren’t in – we weren’t being unwatched, let’s put it that way. Poor old Leon Birkett died last year and he never knew quite why, one day, I picked him up in a bear hug on the afterdeck and set him down again a couple of feet away. We used to lay the moorings by paying out the instrument wire across the surface and then cutting away one and a half tonnes of anchor chain as it hung in its beckett [sling] alongside, to take the – the instrument wire down. And just as John Read, my – the technical guy who ran the moorings, yelled, ‘Let go,’ Leon had stepped into the bight of wire on the – coiled on the deck and he never quite knew how near he was to being a couple of hundred metres down in the Barents Sea and we never bothered to tell him. So he never worked out why I gave him an affectionate bear hug either but I’m sure he must have wondered about it. Memory two was steaming down the Kola Inlet past the entire Russian Arctic fleet, battleships, submarines and destroyers, the nuclear ice breaker [Lenin], and the whole lot with our fishing skipper, the redoubtable George Argumont from Hull at the helm drawing in any missing details in an admiralty manual that they

44 Bob Dickson Page 45 C1379/56 Track 2 used to issue to fishing skippers so that they could fill in any missing details that they saw. This was a great idea I suppose on fishing boats but probably not with a Soviet pilot standing at his elbow and in a period where the Cold War was still a very real, real thing. Still we got away with that one. And then the third memory was all the annual visits ashore to Murmansk to compare notes with parties organised by the then PINRO director Alekseev, the inventor of the Alekseev current meter and a wonderful old boy. He used to be – I think there was some notion that if you were a dissident in this – in Russia, often that meant you were quite a Westernised, quite an easy going sort of chap for us to meet, [and so] you were parked further and further north. So the people that were in Murmansk were usually very friendly --friendly to the West certainly --and we always had nice times. But there was very little doubt about what the chief entertainment was in these days. As you went into his lab for a party, your arms were wheecked up and you got a bottle of brandy and a bottle of vodka handed to you, one in each hand. And similarly when they came aboard our ship to have the reciprocal party, and I was stationed at the bottom of the companionway to ask them whether they’d like whiskey or gin, their usual response was to take both and empty them into one another [laughs]. So that was the – that was the sort of entertainment that one got in Murmansk and in those days, staff like me on the Ernest Holt , I think we were Royal Navy reserve, we used to get quite a good [tot] drink of rum on a daily basis and gin was eight and thruppence a bottle. So though we – we rarely got drunk there was always certainly capacity for parties to be had either on the ship or ashore.

[19.35]

And I think we did a good job in mapping out both the hydrography: the currents and the young fish ecosystem off the Barents Sea, Svalbard. We did this every year from 1965 and I think it still goes on; it’s given us the geography of the marine ecology of the Barents Sea as we know it today.

[20.02]

I have some biological memories as well; that baby red fish are blue, you may never know [that] but – or never need to, and that comb jellies, these sort of ctenophores

45 Bob Dickson Page 46 C1379/56 Track 2

[comb jellies] that you may see on the telly from time to time, are voracious eaters. The story I have on that one was being asked by Professor Raymont of Southampton, who should really have known better, to collect him a sample of live plankton from the Barents Sea. He gave me a big jar to put them in. I collected him a sample off Bear Island, teaming with life, and by the time we neared Tromsø on the way home which isn’t very far down Norway, there was essentially one big fat ctenophore sitting in the middle burping gently and it had eaten the lot. Another thing I remember, the fondest memory I have of being up there was the absolute tameness of the birds that came aboard; and they did come aboard; they came aboard like a feathered rain. We’d have all sorts of land birds fetching ashore, seeing us as the last platform in sight before they died somewhere in the – either the Norwegian Sea or the Barents Sea. The – the best of them was [laughs] when Anna Lincoln, another scientific officer and myself were bagging capelin on the after deck to take back to Lowestoft, we suddenly felt this ‘furry’ capelin and pulled it out, and it was this little brambling that was totally submerged [laughs] in slime, guts and everything else; it had been dumped on by a few tonnes of capelin. So we soused him out in a bucket of sea water and fed him and for the next three or four days this bird, beautiful little thing with a brown chest, it would either sit on the fingers, head or shoulders of me, or Anna, and even if we were down below watching the – a film on the telly, it came down below to find us, sat on our finger, put its head under its wing, went to sleep and all I remember was it’s very charming to start with but after about three hours of having a bird weighing a few grams on your finger it suddenly comes to be quite heavy. Anyway this nice little bird flew off to Novaya Zemlya after three or four days and never saw it again. But the – the fact is that most of the birds up there would never have hardly seen a human being, and so it was a revelation to me how tame were birds that back home you would simply never have met in such an intimate way.

[22.57]

Then my liaison with John Gould from [the] Menai Bridge [course] also helped direct my higher education and sea time in these earliest days as he or we or John Swallow himself decided we should both go on Discovery , the big research ship of the IOS Wormley to take part in the big international MEDOC ’69 expedition to the Western

46 Bob Dickson Page 47 C1379/56 Track 2

Mediterranean when five or six ships from France and the USA and UK were to work together to understand how, essentially how air -sea interaction processes under the fierce and freezing mistral winds coming out of the Rhone Valley might stimulate deep convective overturning in the Gulf of Toulon. And it’s an important subject. This fierce convective cell, once it’s set up and mixing fiercely from top to bottom in the ocean south of Toulon, this convective cell and the variable climate that drives it ultimately determines the character of the deep layer out-flowing the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar and that influences the deep water column right across the Atlantic. So the questions of ‘how does the convective cell form in the Gulf of Leon?’ ‘Why does it form there and what are the processes that modulate it from year to year?’ these are important ones. This MEDOC ’69 cruise was a winter one, that’s when the mistral blows and it was a higher education in itself. I’ve just looked up Arthur Miller’s laconic text about it and all he says is, ‘With the onset of a prolonged mistral storm condition the density was increased to the point where deep overturning took place, with marked changes in the deep water and general distributions.’ And I would add to that that we very nearly joined it!; I – I was working the NIO bottles, sampling bottles in these days, from a chains platform in the bow of the Discovery . This chains platform you have to understand is a piece of the side of the ship up to the gunnel which is lowered and you then are standing on a platform which has chains to left and right of you and straight ahead; so the chains platform was where the person stood right over the sea with - watching in horror as the Discovery ’s bow rose and fell and as it came out of the water there was this hurdy-gurdy of a bow-thrust cranking around right underneath your feet to get you if you ever fell over the side [laughs]. As it dipped its nose in, so the water came up fairly perilously toward you. John Gould was working the hydrographic winch and I was putting the bottles on on the platform and all of a sudden the water came up around my waist and I grabbed hold of the chains and hung on. So John and I looked at each other and we said to ourselves, that’s enough, that’s – the ship even at – on station was in sixty knots of wind [and] was dipping its nose in too much for us. As we walked back towards the superstructure out came John Swallow our great hero and he said, ‘Hey lads, are you stopping already?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, it’s sixty knots of wind John.’ And he says, ‘But we come here to study sixty knots of wind on the Mediterranean,’ he said [laughs] and just at that moment on the next wave, the Discovery buried her nose in

47 Bob Dickson Page 48 C1379/56 Track 2 again and the next wave took the entire chains platform out leaving a gaping hole in the rail [laughs] where I’d been standing and part of the gantry that John had been working had been removed as well. And John Swallow said, ‘Aye, right then lads, perhaps it’s time to call it a day,’ and so we did. I remember that story for years and years and years, but for the benefit of making sure I asked John and there it is, yes, it’s – it’s entirely written down again for all to see in the book they’ve just produced last year Of Seas and Ships and Scientists [laughs]. So it actually happened and it was one – it must have been one of the closest squeaks that I came to in these early days.

[27.49]

But with some of the world – some of the wisest and greatest of the world’s oceanographers swarming over the gunnel of the ship as we worked in the Mediterranean, most of them called Henry: Henry Charnock, Henry Stommel, Henri Lacombe, our higher education was completed by the great men of our science and how many men can say that.

[28.15]

John Swallow had – we developed a special affection for and I must say he deserved it. He trusted us [pause]. By that I [mean]; I’ve got one illustration that is in the back of my mind. We were passing south to the Mediterranean on Discovery , had to lay this big full depth mooring with all of his year’s instruments on it, west of Spain and he showed me how to wire[-up] the acoustic release. In these days you put down something [so that] the top of the mooring was below the surface of the sea, a good few hundred metres down, as I say to prevent the buoy motion from being transferred into the current record. But anyway it all depended on the working of this acoustic release down below; you talked to that through a hydrophone and the way the release worked was by something called a pyro which case it burnt through a little connection, dropped the latch and the mooring started up. [Back to] John Swallow - I was practicing wiring up puffers which was the – the mini pyro that you tested on wire to make sure it worked and that your wiring was correct.So I put this together and I was shocked to see John Swallow pick it up, this wired-together acoustic release

48 Bob Dickson Page 49 C1379/56 Track 2 that I’d made myself, and put it on the bottom of his mooring. I said, ‘John, I’m not an electronics guys, use one from one of the guys who is,’ and he says, ‘No,’ he says, ‘your puffers passed their wire test didn’t they?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he says, ‘Right then,’ he says and he put it on; I – I know if it’d been me in his position I’d have thought, well, I’ll leave that down to experience and choose somebody I can have faith in, but of course that was John having faith in even the young new guys on the ship. And praise be, when the button was pushed and the hydrophone called, the pyro worked and the mooring came up. But my point is not to say that that was a lucky break, I obviously had wired it right. My point is that John Swallow was somebody who inspired confidence in us because he had confidence in us. So, that was a – quite a lesson from John.

[30.52]

I’ve dealt with Arctic cruises in a way; they were the first of mine [together with] this MEDOC one, but aside from these two big cruises, a third tranche of voyages consisted of what you’d call figurehead cruises when we were called on to act as the NIC for a whole – that’s the Naturalist In Charge we used to call ourselves in these days - a whole repertory of subjects whenever the PI of the day, of the cruise was judged too lowly in experience to lead it for himself, and that might involve almost anything. What I remember fondly was the – a trip which I led in the North Sea for and on behalf of Alan Jones who’s a – who was a turbot researcher then and the cruise was all about catching turbot. Alan is now a famous caviar farmer in France stripping twelve tonnes, twelve million pounds worth of caviar a year from Les Esturgeons d’Aquitaine. He was newly-joined then so they gave me his cruise and I used to just say, ‘Where do you [want to] go now Alan?’ ‘Fisherbank.’ ‘Fisherbank Captain.’ And off we went. But the humorous side of that was that I was staying in digs with Alan at the time and every time a huge turbot was landed on the deck, a really nice impressive one, he’d say, ‘I think that should go to the NIC,’ and the crew used to put it aside for me, little knowing that this meant that we would [both] have it when we got home. And when we did get home the funny side was having this huge seventy- five centimetre female turbot sitting there on the – on the table, all over the table. And the only way we could think to deal with it was to put a frying pan on top, cut a

49 Bob Dickson Page 50 C1379/56 Track 2 circle out of the middle of this impressive fish [laughs] that was entirely frying pan shaped and drop this disc which must have been worth hundreds of pounds today [laughs], tens of pounds today, into the middle of this frying pan. These were the days.

So my slight – I have a slight aside to make about the NIC business because NIC [was what] we were then; the logbooks all said NIC, Naturalists In Charge of somebody or other; then [came] some bureaucrat who shall be nameless and not knowing the origins of the word, the phrase, -----this was a title that was first thought up for Joseph Banks when he went on the big expeditions, in the very old days, when he wasn’t the ‘scientist’ and he wasn’t – well they didn’t have a name for a scientist, and he wasn’t in the Navy or whatever and so they invented him a title called Naturalist In Charge. So all the way back to Joseph Banks this NIC title went and some uncomprehending bureaucrat changed it because it wasn’t modern enough and we became scientists in charge thereafter. And as usual with bureaucrats , with unbelievable speed, thoroughness and permanence NIC was [laughs] – was totally wiped off the face of all documents and SIC was put there instead. Well it didn’t make any difference practically, I don’t think, but it did make a difference of continuity and sometimes it was nice to think of ourselves [as Naturalists]; it sounded as though we were caring for the environment. That was [what to me was] recognised in the term Naturalist In Charge, and I still regret that change was made. I do agree it’s a little bit more archaic than Scientist In Charge but I prefer it.

[34.55]

Can I ask some questions about the MEDOC cruise, the 1969 Mediterranean one and I wonder whether you could give me any memories of what you saw of the interaction between the senior oceanographers on the boat, the sorts of things that they appeared to be doing when they were working, self-consciously working and when they weren’t.

Yes [laughs], I think the answer to that is definitely yes and people who know John Swallow would know more or less what I would say. John Gould and I – well let’s start on the ship. On the ship John Swallow would do anything that you would do and

50 Bob Dickson Page 51 C1379/56 Track 2 that’s how we learned on the – on the ship. And his passion for getting good data was the thing which showed us how – how to do it. He’s a man that would certainly not ask you to do something he wouldn’t do himself and so he was always around, always doing things, working the TSD [temperature-salinity-depth recorder] winch as they used to call it in these days and he had a dry – he was a big Yorkshire man and he had a dry Yorkshire wit. If I was to choose the second dodgiest moment that I had in my life, apart from the one where the chains platform disappeared, it would be to – when I was standing amidships working the bottles on the [midships A-frame] with John working the TSD winch beside me. The point was this: that when you lowered away the TSD, which today would be a CTD but it was the same sort of thing, the Conductivity Temperature Depth Probe, it sat at the end of this wire, and went down. And as it went down you hung bottles on the wire at certain intervals, at which you – when the wire was out you’d calculated you want to catch water for sampling; and so a string of these bottles would go out as the winch stopped and then carried on, stopped, carried on, stopped and carried on and you’d maybe end up with ten or fifteen or twenty sample bottles and the CTD below. This was all very fine providing the weather was fit and providing the ship could keep head to wind because the wire whistled up and down past your nose. But whenever a big unwieldy old windy vessel like the Discovery got [pause] couldn’t stem the wind, then things started to go a little bit wrong. The wire would lead away from the ship and you’d have to stand on tippy toe to take the next bottle in; and you knew that you had to get all the bottles in before you could wind the CTD, the precious CTD, in ---there was no way they were going to go through the block on the A frame! So I was standing there watching this wire getting further and further from the ship’s side and then I stood on the lower of the two bars across the A frame to get the next one in and I had a couple more to go. Then I got to the point where there was no way you could even reach the bottle as it was coming in for the last one unless you stood on the top bar across the A frame and leant on the bar tight cable: the wire itself. And so I was lying on this wire and grabbing the bottle and I heard John [laughs] – heard John muttering in the background and I thought it might be words of caution and whatever, and I said, ‘What was that John?’ he said [adopts accent], ‘Eeh,’ he says, ‘Bob, if your mother could see you now,’ [both laugh] and that was – he certainly respected people who tried with the same sort of passion that he had and gave them any responsibility he

51 Bob Dickson Page 52 C1379/56 Track 2 could have. But [to] your question –he had a lot of very admirable friends that were all great gods to us, like Henry Stommel. We still think of him as the World’s Greatest Oceanographer. But Hank didn’t, he came aboard in a chequered shirt and a stogie out of his mouth and climbing over the gunnel and chatting away about this that and the other. He never was [stuffy] - none of John Swallow’s friends seemed to have any stuffiness about them whatsoever, they didn’t even realise that they were the greats of their subject [laughs]; they were just people who liked to talk to you about oceanography.

But by the same token as I tried to say they were slightly driven people. I remember when we did come ashore after the storm John Gould and I were walking through Toulon and it was rather peculiar; we suddenly realised that we were missing something, for – because six big ocean ships were in: the Atlantis II , the Oragnie , the Bannock , the Jean Charcot , the Discovery , and we couldn’t find any scientists anywhere in Toulon. And so we went back to the ship and said to John, ‘John, are you sure there isn’t a party somewhere going on?’ And he said, ‘Oh,’ he says looking guilty, he said, ‘yeah, some foreign Johnnie came aboard and said how would we like to go to a party and I said we weren’t much for parties on Discovery [laughs] and so he went away. Now come and do some W minus D curves.’ So we sat in his cabin doing W minus D curves, which was some calculation we had to make to – to work out the depth the bottles went off at, while everyone else was having a good time in Toulon with the mayor of Toulon presiding. And I guess that’s how I would see John Swallow’s [pause] John Swallow ashore, somebody who didn’t mind you going to a party but he wouldn’t go out of his way particularly to deflect you from the – from the cause. But we – we loved him for it anyway, so. So that’s the best I can describe it for a – describe it in answer to your question, a fairly passionate [man].

[41.32]

No, that’s very – and what was there in the way of social activities onboard, leaving aside parties that might happen offshore but, you know, times when you weren’t working on onboard, how was that time spent?

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Well quite a lot of it was sleeping actually. It seems – we worked pretty hard; it wasn’t a luxury cruise of the Western Mediterranean: it was snowing off Majorca and as I say blowing sixty knots and there were [pause] nonetheless there were times in the day when you relaxed and had a drink in the bar but it was certainly not a sort of bar that stayed open all day and all night. Things have got much more relaxed in that way on ships, later on in my career up to the point where the bar was almost open and you helped yourself and you wrote it down in a book; I wouldn’t say that the net result was particularly favourable [laughs]. But in these days you had a drink before lunch and you had a couple of drinks in the evening when you were sitting around but that would be it and you no doubt played darts or read books. But it wasn’t – it wasn’t a venue for partying, and as I say most of us were fairly glad to get to our – get to our bunks on that particular cruise. It varied of course when you were coming up through Pru [inaud] to the west of Spain, it was – you were probably doing quite a lot of looking around you and you only had to work when you came to a mooring. But I would say that the – the social side of the cruise was not a major one, other than the fact that you were interacting with the people who were going to be your social contacts and friends for the rest of your career. It’s a very small subject [Oceanography]; maybe when you’ve done a few recordings on the ocean side of [our] science, that point will come through because it comes through to us all the time, we – we keep meeting up with the same people doing, ---under maybe a different name---, doing the same sorts of things and we’re very glad of it. They are the sort of people who in the end you know very well and who if you do need something fast will always deliver it. And so it is a small and – and very friendly community. So although I would say that [there was an] absence of formal social life on the ship, it wasn’t totally absent,; although the social side wasn’t a huge one, the contacts and socialising that we made were very important for the rest of ones career.

[44.36]

And what of relations between the scientists and the crew, how would you characterise that relationship?

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Well they were different in one important way, that on the Ernest Holt and on the Cirolana , the crew ran the winches for example. The ship would stop, the crew would run the winch and be responsible for not putting your precious gear through the block and on Discovery the scientists ran the winch. They certainly had crew but the people who took responsibility for driving the TSD winch in that case was John Swallow and up in the forward chains it was John Gould running the forward winch on the day that I was mentioning. And the crew were there to move you around and get you on station, head you into the wind and steer the ship and all that stuff, but you were definitely different from that in that you were responsible for deploying your own gear and running the winches that deployed it.

[End of Track 2]

54 Bob Dickson Page 55 C1379/56 Track 3

Track 3

You have an account of your first scientific conference?

Yes, the - I think the first scientific conference for any scientist must be a formative time because you have no idea of whether you are going to be well received, you have no idea how you’re going to come across and what the reception is going to be. And I found when I was asked to do this series of tapes [laughs] the thing that sprang to mind was the illustration of my first scientific conference because it was such a surreal experience - actually it was more surreal than any other conference I've ever experienced since - that I thought it might make a good initial test of the system of how you record your life. It took place in Moscow; it was the Second International Oceanographic Congress in Moscow in May/June 1966.

[01.08]

Before I even start talking about it I’ve got to talk about the social contrast that existed between the venerable and scary David Henry Cushing, who was the head of our delegation for Lowestoft and MAFF, and myself as junior life form and junior delegate from Lowestoft. And to do that I’ll have to give a brief description of Cush to describe all the things that followed. So I just wrote down the description I gave of him in his festschrift when he was seventy-two, seventy-five, ‘A man determined to test the accepted wisdom himself, however well established, un-erring in identifying the log jams and sticking points that were hindering further progress and positively fizzing with energy and determination in sweeping these away.’ So certainly one of the great pioneering geniuses of fisheries ecology but his drive and determination were legendary and I give you two examples. First of all he had to – one of the things he had to do to advance his science was to remedy the great unknown in fisheries acoustics which was: which part of a fish - was it its bones or it flesh or its swim bladder - is responsible for the acoustic return when you ping at it? I mean, it underpins all of the science of fish location, echo sounding and whatever. And nobody knew; to Cush [who] wouldn’t be stopped, he spent the summer of 1951 on a small boat on Windermere with Richardson and Bridger with raincoats over their

55 Bob Dickson Page 56 C1379/56 Track 3 heads so that they could read the CRT [screen] in front of them, pinging away at a netting frame at three uncertain frequencies and this netting frame held successively: fish skeletons to give the acoustic return from bone, small balloons to represent swim bladders and ultimately a gross of condoms filled with fish flesh to represent boneless bladderless fish. And all of this, as all of these tour boats on Windermere diced in and out looking at whatever mad thing [it was that] was going in this rowing boat [laughs] with all these strange scientists with their raincoats over their heads, moving [them] up and down and causing them to get more and more annoyed. But the answer was that by the time he’d finished he could show conclusively that more than fifty per cent of the acoustic return is from the swim bladder, and nobody knew that till then and there it was, known for all time. Or, my second example I would choose, and there are many, would be the thirteen successive research cruises that Cush put in between March and June 1954, sampling a single patch of Calanus [a copepod] as it drifted slowly down the North Sea in order to trace out for the first time the entire cycle in stock of plants and animals over the complete production cycle in the sea. And that simply had never been done before. Nobody would want to go from their families for thirteen successive cruises, or to stick with the same patch using dahns to range in on, sampling it all the time for six months while it went through its cycle of plants growing, herbivores catching up, and dying off, and nutrients rising to a maximum and then falling. All of the results from that were quite new as well and taught us how the dynamics of the production cycle worked. So he gets a lot of – he was certainly one of the founding geniuses of marine ecology, but as I also said in the same festschrift, ‘Seen through the wrong end of the academic telescope such a phenomenon seemed off-putting, insensitive, eccentric, and unpredictable to the raw recruit and a certain source of trouble.’

[05.26]

And trouble was not long in coming; as I went into Moscow airport with Cush and as we touched down the first trouble arose [laughs]. He reached in his pocket and hauled out this brick of – my memory of it was probably exaggerated by the subsequent thing [laughs]. But he hauled out this packet and I said – and he said, ‘Could you take this in? Stick it in your pocket,’ and I said, ‘What’s that Cush?’ he says, ‘Roubles,’ he

56 Bob Dickson Page 57 C1379/56 Track 3 says, and at the time, I mean this was ’66, Stalin had died only a few years earlier, the penalty for financial speculation was death and – and I carried Cush’s roubles in through immigration half wondering how I was going to tell my mum that I was up for a firing squad the next day [laughs]. But we got through, nobody found them and that was only the – but that was only the first of many surreal bits and pieces of that conference.

The second strange thing happened when we got to the hotel: one of these wedding cake hotels, the Ukraine, that Stalin had built; and when we were – when we arrived they told us at reception that the French communist delegation were still in our room, they’d rather liked it, they weren’t used to people liking their hotel and when the French asked if they could stay on a couple of days they just said yes; ‘ so you are sleeping on the floor in the anteroom to your room, with two other people while we wait for the French delegation to go home’ . I came in late [laughs] to that – to that anteroom and there lying on the floor, slightly snoring and snuffling and like two big whales either side where I was meant to sleep and leaving about fourteen inches down the middle - were John Swallow FRS on one side and Michael Longuet Higgins FRS on the other [laughs]. I – I eased my way into this crack down the middle and lay sleeplessly awake all night.

That was the second surreal bit, and the third one was when I was in my room properly ensconced and this lady that David Cushing had introduced me to as a westernised Yugoslavian lady called Tamara Vucetic, she suddenly knocked on the door and said, ‘Can I use your shower?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ So she came in and standing in the shower looking up at the showerhead, she said, ‘ I am Tamara Vucetic. I am chairwoman of session. Chairwomen of sessions are supposed to get a room on their own. I am sharing with somebody,’ and she said, ‘thank you,’ and left. And I said to her the next day, I said, ‘Did it work?’ and she said, ‘Sure, I am in now in a room on my own.’ That was a very strange moment I must say but one which I was becoming used to in this [event]..

Then the next evening, second day in [laughs], we got Treshnikov’s cocktail party, and David Cushing hoiked me up to his room and he said, ‘Tonight is the cocktail

57 Bob Dickson Page 58 C1379/56 Track 3 party of Treshnikov, he is an important man, he’s the head of the Arctic and Antarctic research effort in Soviet Union and I will go and so will you.’ ‘Right,’ I said. And he said, ‘I suffer from a rare heart condition called tachycardia. It means that I'm not allowed to drink; but they will offer it to me and I will accept and it’s your job to take it from me and dispose of it,’ so I said, ‘Err, I’ll do my best.’ And all night long [laughs], Lord knows what the assembled multitude made of it, there was this – as I say this larval life form wrestling his boss for whiskeys and then, ---I can’t even remember what I did with them. I must have drunk the first few myself, found potted palms for the other ones, but as I say I can’t imagine what the assembled delegates made of this sight of me wresting drinks from the grasp of my revered head of equipe, but that’s what I had to do. And to his great credit the next day he thanked me for it most profusely and realised [laughs] what a difficult job he’d given me.

[10.07]

Then the second day was the – the second night was the surreal experience of sumptuous living in the Kremlin which had really only been opened up to Russian Soviet citizens not that long before when in we went for the banquet of the – of the congress. We sat there in these big plush red seats that you’ll have seen at the Palace of Congresses and we watched the Bolshoi Ballet do Swan Lake and then up the stainless steel escalators to the top of the Kremlin where - with these huge curtain, glass curtain walls [showed] St Basil’s Cathedral’s big gold domes just beyond [actually the Cathedral of the Assumption (rrd)]. We – we – I was amazed. I’ve never eaten higher on the hog than that. We had a pot of [beluga] caviar each, a pot of salmon caviar, Kamchatka crab legs were like a little bundle of sticks in the front of you, and smoked sturgeon in aspic and all sorts of things, and this was the first course. You had the – of course the ubiquitous, obligatory brandy and vodka to get through as well. 2,000 people were sitting in there in sumptuous luxury and as I say I’d rarely eaten better. Thank goodness the person sitting opposite me was the almost spherical Hermann Einarsson from Iceland who saved my life probably by drinking his own bottles and – and then reaching for mine, thank goodness and – but by the end of that evening the speechifying going into the microphone was becoming more and more wild and almost everything was toasted in the end.

58 Bob Dickson Page 59 C1379/56 Track 3

[11.58]

But then :– my talk then went down on the – on the Wednesday of that week: ‘Atmospherically Induced Salinity Fluctuations in the European Shelf Seas’ and that was a serious lesson for me. It was my first object lesson in what constitutes a Great Man and I can – I can remember it to this day exactly as it happened. There was this poor guy in front of me, I was after the coffee break [laughs]; I still have the programme here. Before the coffee break this young chap stood up and he gave a talk; sounded good to me; and then a very important man called Bob Stewart from Canada [and I’m sure he wasn’t like this all the rest of his life but he was on this occasion], he stood up and gave the guy, this young guy a hard time, more or less on the lines of, ‘Why did you come here to tell us that? I could have worked that out for myself on the plane,’ or something like this. I remember thinking, I'm just after coffee, I’m going to suffer from the same thing [laughs], how do I know what reception I’m going to get?; and I was really terrified. I was standing behind Bob Stewart in the coffee queue when this young guy came up to him and said, ‘Professor Stewart,’ he says, ‘Don’t you remember, I said this and that and the other,’ and to his great shame Bob Stewart said, ‘Ah, oh, that’s what you said, I’m afraid I came in halfway through your talk and I hadn’t appreciated that,’ but … the guy was almost in tears and I could just tell that that was his first and last day in Oceanography. That would never have encouraged him into the subject. I gave my talk after coffee and thank goodness nobody made such pointed remarks. I was – but I was sitting alone that evening in my hotel room in the – in the Ukraina hotel wondering how I did because you have no real way of knowing. And the phone rang and I got this wonderful call from the other end saying, ‘I enjoyed your talk, I would like perhaps if you could come up to my room and go into some of it in more detail, you will never have heard of me, I am Jacob Bjerknes.’ Now Jacob Bjerknes was [laughs] a god in our subject and to be sure we’d heard of Jacob Bjerknes. He was one of the Norwegian frontogenesis school, led by his father – Vilhelm, and it included Carl- Gustaf Rossby and Tor Bergeron and all these amazing heroes that you’ve only heard about who worked out the idea that air masses and fronts explained the life cycle of mid latitude cyclones; all the work that underpins our weather forecasts today; and

59 Bob Dickson Page 60 C1379/56 Track 3 he’d been the guy in charge of support meteorology when Roald Amundsen first crossed the Arctic in the airship Norge; and he founded the UCLA Department of Meteorology [laughs]. And around about the times we’re talking about, he was professor at the University of California. He was helping for the first time to [develop] an understanding of El Nino and showing the first – being the first to see the connection between unusually warm [equatorial] sea surface temperatures and weak [equatorial] easterlies and the heavy rainfall [there]; and how this ominously hot spot in the Eastern Pacific can weaken the east-west temperature difference and disrupt the trade winds and transfer the influence of the tropics to higher latitudes via the Hadley Cell. And so this man who said, ‘You won’t have heard of me, I am Jacob Bjerknes,’ [laughs] ; I tell you, I took the steps about five at a time and we had the most wonderful evening in his room in the Ukraina hotel; it was obvious that my talk had gone down [well]. And compared with the other guy who would probably go straight into insurance selling or something like that, that gave me a kick that lasted for twenty years of inspiration from this one evening. I had the job of leading off the introductory lecture to the Bjerknes Centenary conference on climate change at high latitudes in Bergen in 2004 and that – that story took up the first five minutes of my talk and they clapped at the end of the story. Because that was really him; he didn’t see himself as a Great Man, but you sure did and the difference between these two ways of behaving to a younger scientist was a lesson that didn’t – that wasn’t lost on me.

What do you remember of that evening, of what –

I don’t remember anything of the evening. I remember the euphoria of getting the phone call, I remember being up in his room, I remember talking to him and although it seems silly to say it I should have been [pause] I should have memorised, ---you would think, ---every word he said, but the evening passed in a kind of a happy blur. It was certainly not for booze, we didn’t have any, but it was just a nice warm moment that you remembered pleasurably and gave you the urge to carry on, and that’s all the great guys of our subject needed to do in these days. So what with John Swallow, Henry Stommel, Henry Charnock and now Jacob Bjerknes I was meeting people that in any other subject you would have no chance of interacting with or talking to. And

60 Bob Dickson Page 61 C1379/56 Track 3 here they were not only talking to you man to man, but they were actually giving you a – a stimulus that would last you for years, they were like pushing your flywheel every time you met these guys.

[18.07]

Anyway back to the final bits about the congress; we had another night to go, another afternoon to go and this was the official excursion, on a – at about eighty miles an hour on a hydrofoil on the Moscow -Volga Canal [laughs]. Again a surreal experience, where I had a close encounter with Professor Michitaka Uda who was a lovely old boy, he was like one of these little spherical Japanese people. But in Japan – and he was little - in Japan he was almost a god by that time because he was the one that worked out for the Japanese fishing fleet that certain tuna species they were after were associated with certain isotherms, and he would map out where the isotherms were and radio these to the fleet, and they thought the world of Uda for this because it showed them where to go and make money and catch tuna. So this old boy, he took a liking to me and he said, ‘I read you a Japanese poetry,’ and I said, ‘I don’t read – I don’t understand Japanese,’ and he says, ‘If it’s good poetry it should not matter,’ ! So we spent [laughs] the – a good chunk of the Moscow-Volga Canal [laughs] going past in a blur while Michitaka Uda read me Japanese poetry declamatorily in purple ink from right to left out of the back of his diary. And I must admit [laughs] in his memory I – as soon as my grandchildren – like I’ve got five grandsons now, as soon as each one of them has emerged, two days later I take them on my knee and I read them Tam O’Shanter [both laugh] because as the great Michitaka Uda said, ‘If it’s good poetry it should not matter,’. So when my daughter objected I’d say, ‘Well they’ve been listening to you rumbling outside there for nine months and now I’m going to give them, ‘well done Cutty Sark ,’, and some of it - according to the great Professor Uda will go in. So that was – that was the last memory of actual – of actually being at this Second International Oceanographic Congress in Moscow. But it had a kind of – as you’d imagine a surreal ending as well because eventually when the paper from my talk was published in the Deutsche Hydrographic Zeitschrift I discovered I got paid for it by the page, and I think it was a paper with Arthur Lee; then Rose Bedford, a nice lady but she ran our library, here, accessions budget with a

61 Bob Dickson Page 62 C1379/56 Track 3 rule of iron, she came up to complain to the Director, Arthur Lee (by then), that Bob Dickson was taking money from Deutsche Hydrographic Zeitschrift that could have been spent on buying the reprints for the lab. Arthur Lee called me in to give me a rollicking as you’d imagine, and he went through the whole bit about Rose saying this, and I said, ‘Arthur, Arthur, Arthur, hang on, this was the one if you remember [where] we decided to split the money fifty-fifty.’ There was a long silence [laughs] and he said, ‘Ah, that paper. Right, leave this Bedford woman to me,’ and I never heard another word about it. Neither – I’m sure this was not typical of Arthur, either to take the money or to – or to berate Rose Bedford [laughs] but on that occasion it was a – it saved the day.

[21.46]

I kind of round off my surreal first experience at my surreal conference with that, but it wasn’t an unimportant conference as I hope you’ve – as I hope has come across: it was my first talk, first talk that went down well and the person that it went down especially well with was a superhero and it was out of that that came the charge to – to carry on. Because like all of us fail to do I’m sure, the Great Men in these days certainly knew how to – if they were properly Great Men - they knew how to stimulate somebody’s career forwards instead of in retreat [laughs] and I got all of that from the people I’ve been mentioning.

[22.33]

It seems that you were aware of some of these big names before you met the people, and I wondered when it was that you first gained the knowledge of who was important in oceanography or in climate science more generally. When would you have first learnt the name John Swallow or learnt the names of these other important people that you were meeting in oceanography and meeting at this conference, was it a particular course or was it through certain experiences that you began to realise who were the big names in your subject before you met them?

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For a start there weren’t too many of them it seemed to me. They were – there were some huge – I shouldn’t use the word dinosaurs, but they were huge people that were peopling our science in these days; maybe they don’t exist so much now. But John Swallow, Jerome Namias who I’ll talk about later because I used to work with him, [and] Jacob Bjerknes were, certainly; – Jacob Bjerknes and Namias were known to be the two people who were contending for this huge subject of how does the ocean affect the atmosphere. Namias said it was the mid latitude thermal gradients in the Pacific that were driving change in the mid latitude westerlies which retarted the equatorial easterlies which made El Nino. Bjerknes said much more convincingly and correctly as it turned out that it was what went on in the equatorial Pacific that caused a warm pool to develop, that caused a Kelvin wave to flow [east], [that caused a Rossby wave to flow [northwestwards] across the Pacific; all of these things came later. But what Bjerknes did was to show an association [between] what was going on at the equatorial Pacific, the warming of the – that Pacific zone, the rainfall and the stimulation of the Hadley cell that would transfer equatorial change to the mid latitudes. So these were two people who were contending nicely, they were both very gentle people, but passionately they both believed in – they both believed in their own idea and not really in the other one’s. They were contending, and it was obvious that they were the two contenders; in some sort of way these two people were – were the custodians of that debate. They had lots of people under them, but you knew very well that these were the ones who had advanced the case., one that the equatorial Pacific... The trouble was of course that the dataset was so poor in these days in absolute terms that Namias could correlate the mid latitude temperature gradients in the Pacific with the strength of the mid latitude westerlies and get a lag, and [then] to correlate the mid latitude westerly strength with the easterlies at the equator and get a lag; and correlate that with the warming in the western end of the equator and get a lag. But the fact is that there was always enough slop in each of these correlations that if you had then taken – had the trouble to correlate the end point with the first point, you would probably have got no lag at all and there was always this [pause] slop in the data that allowed both of these ideas to persist. The other thing that [pause] I’m slightly driving away from your subject but I hope it’s relevant, but the other thing that was obvious to all was that it’s much easier to prove Bjerknes’ case because it’s much easier to have ascent by moist convection at the equator simulated

63 Bob Dickson Page 64 C1379/56 Track 3 than it was ever – and therefore to model Bjerknes’ idea, than it ever was to model ascent in a mid latitude cyclone which is a very difficult thing to do even now. And so Namias was always on hiding to nothing in pushing his point of view simply because if he wanted to show in a model that the temperature gradients at that latitude drove something at mid latitudes, he had to crank up the [Pacific sea surface] temperature gradients to such an unfeasibly large amount to make it burst through that you knew this wasn’t likely to be the case [in nature]. It wasn’t just a matter that we didn’t know how to simulate the real thing; nonetheless some of us thought that Namias was wrong but he wasn’t as wrong as he was made out to be.

[27.33]

We certainly knew the large [important] people populating that particular subject. Similarly in the Atlantic, John Swallow had developed this whole new technology based on neutrally buoyant floats and out of it he and the people at NIO, helped by Henry Stommel and people, this small community were all happily moving around together showing [the existence of mesoscale] eddies in the ocean by deploying these neutrally buoyant floats. That whole community was centred on people like – we could see who the main people were in that as well; we knew John Swallow, we knew Henry Stommel and Henry Charnock, all these people who were at a higher level of being in our subject than others. They’d developed an idea, they’d developed it into the machinery needed to test it and the tests that they were showing were showing us – that the tests that they were running were showing us a whole new part of oceanography demonstrating that the fluctuating circulations of the ocean were important and universal.

Now of course I would have run across them t----by being in Moscow, for Bjerknes [for example] or suddenly finding myself on the Discovery with John Swallow, [with] Henry Stommel coming over the gunnel. Because you’ve heard of these people you kind of pay attention in the wardroom in the evening when they’re talking to you; and they’d pick you up and put you in their working groups of one sort or another. I was in Henry Stommel’s Working Group on Oceanic Behaviour for SCOR. And then you’re actually starting working directly with the top people in your field. I

64 Bob Dickson Page 65 C1379/56 Track 3 don’t know whether this – this – I’m getting across the idea that there are – there were only a few lynchpins in any sector that you might be interested in in our field. But you had direct access to these people. I mean, one of the great joys I remember was going to see John Gould along the corridor, top corridor at the old Wormley lab and you had to pass John Swallow’s room to get there; and as you went past heading for John to study some – to plan some current meter expedition in the Atlantic you’d get this small voice coming out of John Swallow’s room saying, ‘Hello Bob, have you got a minute?’ And you’d go in there and he’d be standing there looking at maps of the western Indian Ocean and for the next hour he would absolutely fascinate you with the new ideas he was coming up with about the changing monsoon and the point at which the Somali Current upwells and leaves the coast. You’d just be – he’d have got out some old merchant ship observations, he would plot it all out, and there without any doubt at all he was demonstrating to you some quite new thing. you would – the time wouldn’t matter, you’d stand there for a couple of hours and you’d go away thinking, hey, I’ve just been at – right at the coalface there with one of the best coalminers in the business. I’m not sure that , ----because I’ve not been in any other sciences, ----- I’m not sure that any other science would have had such a direct hands- on feel for interacting with these great men as we had the chance to do. I am sure I didn’t mean to offend any of the people who I haven’t mentioned in any other branch of oceanography, tides for example I hardly got into, there would have been the same few great men, I wouldn’t know who they were because – or I could guess. But the ones in the fields that I was interested in which was ocean variability and climate were certainly accessible and I certainly knew who they were from the start. And as soon as I felt the need to interact with them they were accessible.

Thank you.

It’s a long answer to your short question.

[32.05]

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And last question today, could you say in what ways the Cold War was evident at this conference, in Moscow, alongside all of the … surreal happenings, to what extent were you aware that you were visiting Moscow at a particular time?

Well the short answer is when you got on the plane coming home, some sort of weight lifted off your shoulder and you realised that what you hadn’t realised all well was that you felt freer. But the longer answer I suppose would be the time when Tamara showed us what the ninth floor in the Ukraina hotel did. The lift went from eight to ten and as she stood there talking to the shower head, either she was crazy or else she was – as a Yugoslavian she was well aware that there was a – we were being surveilled on by whatever it was that was in the ninth floor. The other thing that you could see was the state control around you; they were being very affable about it but the fact of the matter is that as westerners you could walk to the head of the queue in the Red Square with all these Russians queuing for hours. God knows, they might have been queuing for days to see Lenin’s tomb. And we – nonetheless we with owners of Western currency could – not that you could spend it there but you could walk up to the head of the queue and just walk straight in, and we never felt comfortable doing that. I never have been Lenin’s tomb as a result. The other thing that you could remember was the state’s influence on the contents of the stores. If you ever went into GUM it was all very – it was as though the meat had been wrenched apart by trolls in some way, everything was just – there was no attempt because no attempt was needed to dress things up in a decorative way to sell them because everything sold as soon as it came in. And the – you had inklings of the state’s control that way. The only times it really impinged on us apart from worrying as you took Cush’s roubles through immigration, were up in the north when we were driven around on excursions from Murmansk as part of these 0-Group Fish Surveys [coughs] … I remember we were – they were very keen to show us examples of the high state of technology in Russia; there was a big salmon ladder - actually built by Scots and Finns through a mountain near Murmansk – that they took us to, and [there] we could take photographs. Then down the road past this little hut perched on the edge of a chasm through which this river plunged. They took us out to entertain us by showing us this lady salmon fisher; all she did all day was she watched the – she had – like a lift cage, like one of the old lift cages that you – you know, these latticework

66 Bob Dickson Page 67 C1379/56 Track 3 lift cages with the doors closed. And whenever she wanted to catch anything in the way of salmon she opened the upstream door, the salmon came through, the water went out the other side and the salmon stayed flopping on the floor [both laugh]. And then she pressed the button, the door closed in the upstream side and the whole thing rose on high. And we thought this was the best way of fishing you ever did see because the woman hardly needed to get her feet wet. But this was old technology and so anyone who had a camera that was rash enough to have photographed this, which we were told from the start we must not photograph, was made very well aware that this was a no-no and showed up the Soviet Union in a bad way. So it – I suppose we were – this was peanuts compared with the sort of shenanigans that were going on all over Russia [laughs]. But you could tell that state control was finely divided. And as I say the only real time when I felt the combined effect of this was when we got on the plane, the plane took off and all of a sudden some blonde SAS stewardess with a figure stood there asking us what we wanted to drink and then you knew we were moving – you’d moved out of a rather oppressive place and into - back home.

[37.17]

And do you remember what you and your British – your senior British colleagues said about Russia at this time, or said about Russian science at this time?

There was a feeling that the Russians were very, very competent clever people but that their equipment was – would have been far better if it had been western equipment and I think they would have agreed because many of the subsequent expeditions between the west and Russia have been based on the instruments being provided by the west and the Russians being the recipients of them. So I would say that we had no illusions that they were just as clever as anybody else, why wouldn’t they be? And that the great men were just as clever as anybody else, but that in two ways: the equipment; and possibly the dataset that resulted from their equipment was at one time, -----certainly I’m choosing my words carefully,----at one time less robust than ours. I do remember dear old Joe Reid, a long term professor at Scripps saying if he was going to be made famous for anything, it [would be] for throwing away Russian salinities. By which he meant he had combed deck after deck from the Indian

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Ocean or the southern ocean or wherever, whichever ocean Joe’s huge brain had landed on, and the improvement of the dataset had been partly in putting new stuff in that he collected himself and partly by throwing Russian data away. And I am afraid that that was the sort of opinion that certainly clouded or coloured my view of the Russians. They of course have moved on from that point and but I still – we still have instances where, even in the IPY, a Norwegian-Russian experiment on the flows into and through the north eastern Barents Sea comprised the Norwegians paying for the equipment and the Russians taking it afterwards. So I think it still goes on and in many ways it’s not the scientists at our level that we need to convince of this; they know that right well. ‘Please can we have our current meters back’ is probably not far from the Norwegians’ minds right now after the IPY. But it’s – at the scientist level they would get a clear ‘fine by me’, but it’s up in the higher reaches of some Moscow institute that somebody has ‘taken a view’. Let’s just hope that working more and more and more and more in programmes like the IPY, the edges will be sufficiently blurred that one day there’ll be no problem and no mismatch between the two sides. That’s just how it seems to me to have moved recently.

[End of Track 3]

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Track 4

Okay. And before you begin today could I ask you just one follow up question on last time and that’s what do you know of the background of – I think it’s Leon Birkett, the scientist at Lowestoft who had a – a Russian background? What do you know of how he ended up being in Lowestoft and working as he was?

I really have no idea. I imagine he was one of these people who washed westwards but he didn’t speak with a Russian accent, [so] it must have been a while since he was Russian, or of Russian origin. After I knew him in Lowestoft he ended up in the Indian Ocean expedition in some way or another. So he was interested in [laughs] remote field work at sea. We had him along as a biologist and since we were physical oceanographers, the biologists were people who came and went, and in this particular case I regret to say I didn’t really pay much attention to where he came from. I was only happy I managed to preserve him a little bit longer in order to go where he was going. But no I’m afraid that – I could find this out but it’s not something which I know.

[01.20]

Fine, thank you. And we’d go to cruises in the 1960s and it’s from this point I think that you’re continuing today.

Yes, the next piece really, it’s a bit hard to describe your life as though it goes from one segment to another like the links on a watchband, because very often they are lying side by side and overlap, and that’ll come out today as well. But the next chunk I have organised it around is to talk about California, something called NORPAX, and somebody called Jerome Namias who was the next great mentor that I had in my career. So it starts with my interest in ocean-atmosphere interaction which led to my PhD which was taken externally at the University of East Anglia under Jack Dainty, Professor Jack Dainty, in 1967. The lab was only just establishing ties with the Environmental Sciences Department [‘ENV’] at UEA and my PhD was I suppose one of the earliest expressions of their collaboration. So it was all a little rushed-along.

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The title of the PhD is less important than the paper that subsequently came from it, in 1971. Dickson RR 1971, ‘A Recurrent and Persistent Pressure-anomaly Pattern as the Principal Causes of Intermediate Scale Hydrographic Variation in the European Shelf Seas’, Deutsche Hydrographic Zeitschrift 24 . Though it was plain that interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere was a two-way process and that the ocean’s thermal field had memory while the atmosphere had not, what we were all intrigued about in these days and certainly what I’d been intrigued about in my PhD was the idea that the ocean might lend its greater thermal memory to the atmosphere, forcing repetitive behaviour in the atmosphere that might on aggregate have the same effect as persistence.

[03.34]

And I think this must have caught the – this paper and these ideas must have caught the attention of the next major influence on my career who was Jerome Namias. Jerome was the archetypal meteorologist of the old school from Fall River, Massachusetts and although he had little in the way of postgraduate training, as he would say himself, that didn’t seem to matter. He thought of little else except meteorology; his team while I was there gave him a radio hardwired to the weather channel and he could not have had a better gift. He didn’t want to think about or discuss anything except his subject, weather/climate/ meteorology. And once when I was rude enough to ask about his early career he said he was – he got the sack from his first job, so I said, ‘Weren’t you any good at it, predicting hurricanes in Miami?’ and he says, ‘No,’ he says, ‘I was great at it! I was thrown out of town by the Miami Chamber of Commerce, who said, Don’t you know this is a tourist area Namias? and here you are predicting hurricanes!’ [laughs]. Anyway, later he had worked with the great Carl-Gustaf Rossby to winch instruments, packages of instruments into the atmosphere in a synchronised way over North America to demonstrate the existence of planetary Rossby waves, something we see every day in every weather map and it was his huge regret in later years that the graphic of the world’s first omega-pattern Rossby wave, ---that’s what I have to call it, ----that he constructed had been lost. Like a Greek ‘omega’ [ Ω] over North America. I see it now, and the reason I can see it now, as he could, was that this original graph was only present as an image in an

70 Bob Dickson Page 71 C1379/56 Track 4 image on his wall; in his room he would have a picture of himself and the great Carl- Gustaf bending low over a table doing some work, that’s [the subject of ] the photograph, and on the wall behind them was - on the wall [in the photo]- was this omega pattern Rossby wave. He spent a lot of his time in the old days trying to find this lost graphic because of its scientific importance. Anyway, from about 1941 to ’71 Jerome had been chief of the Extended Forecast Division of the US Weather Bureau, and in the 1940s he developed the five day forecast with monthly and seasonal forecasts in the ‘60s. So he was a great man, a pioneer and he’d been around a lot. In 1971 Jerome Namias switched to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla in Southern California to found the Experimental Climate Prediction Centre in order to see if he might exploit any persistence that the ocean might confer on the atmosphere in order to improve weather prediction. So that was the reason he turned to SIO, Scripps [Institute of] Oceanography. And he had evidently noticed what I was up to with my recurrent and persistent pressure anomaly patterns and he invited me over to work with him. And so in consequence I spent some part of each year from the early ‘70s to 1981 working with Jerome at Scripps in La Jolla, and even though marine climate fluctuations were my job in Lowestoft and Arthur Lee’s consuming interest and even though I was a member and later the chairman of Henry Stommel’s SCOR Working Group 34 on monitoring ocean climate fluctuations, even so I am intrigued to recall how little palaver there was about my annual disappearances to Scripps. From my memory of these days, which is no doubt defective, I just seemed to close my door and go! Looking back at it [from] these [coughs] rather more straightened times, that was quite a degree of freedom.

[07.59]

These were exciting times for that subject, the role of the ocean on the atmosphere and I certainly found myself in the right spot to observe the protagonists and help them explore it. Namias thought that the mid latitude ocean and specifically its persistent sea surface temperature gradients might be the means of spinning up mid latitude storms. Jacob Bjerknes thought the equatorial Pacific and especially the warm El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO], that these episodes were the primary driver acting to influence mid latitudes via something called the atmospheric Hadley

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Cell. And both of them were part of the vast and all embracing NORPAX, North Pacific Experiment. It was always going to be a harder task for Namias to demonstrate his argument; modelling ascent in storms at mid latitudes was a difficult and delicate task then and it probably still is, whereas modelling ascent by moist convection in the equatorial belt was relatively ‘easy’ as they would say. And when I tried to peer into what was going on, the delicacy of what were apparently robust pressure anomaly cells at mid latitudes was clear: an anomaly cell apparently robust, when you deconstructed it into its component highs and lows, would turn out to be simply the effect of one extra storm in a particular month, or a bunch of the same number of storms staggering or stalling briefly at a particular point over the ocean. But still with Namias leading the charge we quickly learned the nuts and bolts of what we called ‘persistence’ in the Pacific and the characteristic space and timescales of change in both the ocean’s s sea surface temperature field and the atmosphere, the sensitive areas for heat transfer between the two, and some more distant effects that we thought might be associated with major abnormalities of the ocean’s temperature field. Namias’ method was based on what he called ‘specifying and predicting’. From twenty year fields of sea temperature, sea level pressure and upper air height, equations were developed by Namias to specify the geographical distribution of one variable from the distribution of another in the same season or to predict the future state of one field from the behaviour of another, for example winter sea level pressure as a function of fall surface temperature. I suppose the thing that led us on was the fact that there did certainly seem to be recurrent patterns of sea surface temperature anomaly at the surface of the Pacific that didn’t appear to persist in the surface layers through the intervening seasons. So this kind of carried the suggestion that the memory of ‘recurrence’ must reside elsewhere, ---[that] the subsurface layers of the ocean must also be considered.

At one time or another in that decade of the ‘70s I was engaged in all of these subjects at Scripps. First housed in a delightful shack known as T2, Temporary Two, much mourned and regretted, right on the beach at La Jolla Shores and long since demolished to make way for Hirohito on one of his visits to Scripps. But then [at that time] occupied in perfect harmony by a Scottish Presbyterian, that was me, a red haired Irish Catholic called McNally from Queens with whom I stayed and became

72 Bob Dickson Page 73 C1379/56 Track 4 practically a family member, an Arab of some persuasion or other called Hassan and a Jew called Buzz Bernstein. And we got on like a house on fire. In the early ‘70s I spent my time backing up Namias when the task was to examine the characteristics of persistence in the Pacific. Later in the mid ‘70s when the sea surface temperature anomaly gradient of the open Pacific seemed, to more people than me, impossibly weak to spin up storms, I switched my attention to the place where this seemed to be much more likely to happen, which seemed to be the temperature gradient along the US eastern seaboard in winter, where we could clearly show a dramatic effect of the land-sea temperature gradient on storm frequency and their development rates in a tight zone along the coast during winters of extreme cold there, compared with winters when the south east US was abnormally warm. I’m happy that this 1976 paper with Namias was realistic and not too far away from what the old boy believed, so it was a help to him. But I don’t believe Jerome ever ceased to believe, as I suppose I did about that time, that sea surface temperature anomaly gradients of the open ocean might act as a significant local and remote control on the mid latitude storm belt, let alone on its more remote ‘teleconnections’ as he called them. By the late 1970s I was still sufficiently unreconstructed in the philosophy of Jerome to be working with Warren White and Buzz Bernstein on what was going on at depth in the Pacific, specifically the effects of wind stress in varying the depth of the main thermocline across the central mid latitudes of the North Pacific. But by then, if I was to sum up that era in a word, it would be that Bjerknes had won . Nobody needs convincing anymore that the El Nino- La Nina cycle is the dominant control on climate almost everywhere from Australia to Alaska. And most of its dynamics and remote effects are known and modelled from sea waves in California to bugs in Maryland.

[14.10]

I met more great men than Jerome of course at Scripps: Joe Reid and Walter Munk were as inspiring then as now. Chip Cox and later Russ Davis as head of physical oceanography were brought in to adjudicate on the more immediate matter of whether Namias’ ideas might be sustained. And Russ in particular was just the right man for this task: he was a graduate of chemistry or chemical engineering and a hard man to

73 Bob Dickson Page 74 C1379/56 Track 4 convince and he had a reputation as somebody you don’t mess with. I well remember my own first tilt at telling this person who I didn’t know at all that some method he was using was wrong [laughs]. We were sitting there in the Del Webb Kuilima hotel at the NORPAX meeting in Hawaii in 1976 and this person on the stage, Russ Davis was –-- it was the days when people were doing empirical orthogonal function [EOF] analysis, and he did something wrong; instead of asking himself what was the – the [amplitude of the] primary winter [EOF] pattern he would – he was showing us the winter amplitude of the primary annual pattern. So I stood up and said so [laughs] and the response I got was [so] amazing and immediate and I ducked my head beneath the seat in front; it was like tracer bullets coming back at me from the stage. Denny Kirwan and McNally next to me said, ‘Don’t you know that’s Russ Davis?’ and I said, ‘Who’s Russ Davis?’ But the point I would make is this: that even as he was doing this automatic response, he was listening, and by Thursday of that week when I heard him give the same talk again at Scripps, he’d fixed it; he was no longer doing it wrong, he was doing it right. Ever since then I had never any problem with Russ Davis and in fact quite the reverse; he was a – a great help in getting me funded. He even got me some NOAA funding. He came up to me one day and said, ‘Why are you looking so glum?’ I said, ‘Well there’s lots of money around in NOAA for this sort of thing but I haven’t got any,’ [NOAA couldn’t easily fund foreign scientists]; and he says, ‘Well NOAA can fund me and I can fund you,’ and in fact that’s what happened for a piece of my income. The great thing was that as the judge of Namias’ legacy he did take great pains to let Namias down gently.

[16.54]

My spare time there in California was just as exciting as the oceanography. I was bored at weekends and pretty soon discovered these knowledgeable old rock hounds who led trips into the western desert in their four-by-fours in search of mineral crystals and gemstones under Josephine Scripps, the niece of Ellen Browning Scripps, who was another of the surreal persons that seemed to come into my life from time to time. And a total original. Her piece of the Scripps-Howard newspaper money helped of course. But she was a single woman of some considerable size and age, already well into her sixties when I knew her in the 1970s. She was rumoured to have

74 Bob Dickson Page 75 C1379/56 Track 4 been the fire chief at Santee till she burnt the station down; and later she was a successful breeder – breeder of Holstein cattle and American cockers and a fanatical rock hound and Curator of Minerals at Balboa Park in San Diego. Before long I had my own bunkhouse in her Hi-Hope ranch and spent most of the weekends off somewhere driving trucks; I have to be stopped from time to time in telling Big Josie stories but some of them are instructive, even in a discourse like this [laughs]. For example our first trip to collect sulphur crystals in Baja California at a place called San Felipe was amazing. We – we’d drive off down past Tijuana and Tecate, passing these Los Angeles clapped-out taxis pushing each other, I guess one of them had no engine, the other had a battered one, and down the Kantoo grade to this place where the sulphur mine was. And I remember feeling very uncertain when we arrived at San Philippe to discover it was a Saints Day and there were no shops open; we all ran around like headless chickens wondering what we were going to eat. Then somebody noticed that Josephine Scripps was absent and what she’d simply done is to go down the beach, find some fishermen with a turtle, tell them to – pay them to build a fire, put the turtle on the top and when it was ready she came and hollered for us. She was a bit like Mack and the boys in Cannery Row by Steinbeck who reasoned correctly that the country was where the food came from and if the shops were closed it didn’t much matter. And my finest moment after trips to find aquamarines in the Sonoran Desert and pink tourmalines in Pala and district in the South Eastern US, my finest moment was the finding of the first bicolour tourmalines on the dump of the famous Himalaya mine east of Pala after rains in February 1981. And that’s kind of instructive as well so I will go into that one a little bit. Josephine and I were sitting there [visiting the mine]; – the – Bill Larson had been digging, the mine owner had been digging 690 feet through solid black rock to get in behind where the old miners used to find these beautiful bicoloured tourmalines, pink at one end, green at the other. Highly valuable stones. He was getting close; [or] he was rumoured to be getting close but he hadn’t actually found any yet. Josephine and I were invited up to have a look in the mine and we went up there in the rains and sat there in her big LTD and she says, ‘Go have a look on the dump,’; I said, ‘What are we looking for Josephine?’ and she said, ‘Well it’s [shaped like] a pencil and it’s kind of pink at one end and green at the other; so I went and got one, brought it back. And she says, ‘Hey, go find me another,’. This apparently was the first pocket that the Mexicans

75 Bob Dickson Page 76 C1379/56 Track 4 hadn’t noticed that were digging the mine; they’d thrown it onto the dump and I’d happened on it. So I went and got Josephine another stone and she stuck both of them in her cheeks, I remember, because Bill Larson’s truck was seen coming up the grade below us. I said [to Josie] ‘Well you said that if we found anything good on the dump we had to hand it over,’; she says, ‘Not this good,’ she says through her clenched teeth. Even at that time the two eight carat stones that we had cut out of these two gemstones were worth 400 dollars a carat. Deanne still has her one. But the [impressive thing ] – it was the unstopability of these people. The old guys in their four wheel drives, they had a different attitude to getting things done,. They would not be stopped and no doubt it was wealth and accustomed influence that helped but it was certainly very impressive to me [laughs]. And delivered with absolutely no pomp at all. To just give you one or two illustrations of that, as it was an important indicator of these people, I remember the Mexicans arriving cap in hand to announce that they’d found a new mine, the Josefina mine they wanted to call it, with lavender coloured tourmalines sprays, in Mexico. And Josephine said, ‘I want to see my mine,’ and he said, ‘You can’t see your mine Josephine; there is no road,’ ‘Build me a road,’ she says [laughs] and sent them down a bulldozer. This is the sort of thing where you and I would have stopped and they just carried straight on. I also remember when Josephine had the croup or some sort, taking her down to the Scripps Clinic, the place that all the expensive and wealthy people frequented for their medical problems in California and of course it was built on Scripps money. She says, ‘Line them up,’ in the foyer and she picked the doctor with the ponytail. I said, ‘Why did you pick that one for Josephina; he looks like a sort of hippy,’ and she says, ‘Listen if he works here and he’s – and he looks like a hippy then he’s bound to be good,’ and so that was her philosophy on life.

[23.38]

Anyway we had a great deal of fun with these weekends and evenings at Josephine’s and one of the funnest weekends I remember we spent in a – the apartment in Fallbrook of somebody called Buzz Gray who was a top international gemstone cutter, worked for the Smithsonian amongst others. And he owned the rights to the last mine for the California state gemstone. As nobody at all remembers these days the

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California state gemstone is something called a benitoite and it’s a beautiful flashing blue crystal, that lives in a white, thick white natrolite vein. There’s only one place where it exists and it’s this Dallas gem mine, north of San Francisco. As the mine – as the natrolite vein got thinner and thinner, Buzz just put it into cardboard boxes and took it off back home to Fallbrook [laughs]. So at that time and probably today the only type locality for the California state gemstone was in boxes underneath Buzz’s bed. And what we had to do was to etch it out with oxalic acid in the sink at this apartment block, to the great detriment of the plumbing every now and again but it was such fun. You’d take this block of white stuff, not knowing whether in the middle of it was a flashing blue benitoite worth 50,000 dollars, or nothing at all. And you’d just sit there having a beer and watching it emerge and then stop it by washing it, and I can’t imagine any funner thing to do on a weekend than that. I bought my engagement ring stone from Buzz, a one carat benitoite. I could, but won’t, go into lots of these stories, but the reason for mentioning Buzz in particular was the fact that having such a cutter talking to me at weekends, I began to be interested in cutting gemstones myself and I do remember we had gemstone cutting classes at Balboa Park Museum in the evenings. Going down there and working there under Leo Horensky, learning how to cut gemstones on a faceting machine, I do remember distinctly how three hours of instruction and careful cutting would seem to pass in ten minutes and you could not believe that only – that three hours had passed in what seemed like a ten minute evening; you really knew then that were totally gripped by this whole experience. Anyway, I cut my brother-in-law’s engagement ring stone, a peach coloured morganite, for Mike Morgan [and very recently, a pretty little pink topaz for Jamie and Jenny’s engagement].

[26.49]

But these days in California were tapering off and one of the main and nicest reasons why it should taper off for me was my own wedding in 1975 to Deanne of the MAFF lab at Lowestoft. She came complete with Miles and Sarah, aged eight and nine, or nine and eight respectively, and then there was the arrival within the year of Jamie and our move on secondment to Scripps in the bicentennial year from January 1976. Of course that was a completely different experience from being free and single and

77 Bob Dickson Page 78 C1379/56 Track 4 roaming around the desert with Josephina because I was then staying in a – in a proper house in La Jolla, sending my kids to school and discovering the sort of things that people do when you’re a parent in California. It’s a little known fact, certainly wasn’t known to the people paying my salary there, that even though you had five of a family you were still classified as a single person, as a non resident alien and it made no difference to walk down to the taxman in Mission Valley and say, ‘Look, I’m not a single person, you’re taxing me as a single person but I’ve got these, my wife and three kids standing here,’. They [just] said, ‘All non-resident aliens are single and what’s more you’re taxed at a higher single rate than an American single person,’ so all of these things were big lessons. It was a beautiful year to go - the Bicentennial year - and it was a very good school where the kids went to: Torrey Pines Elementary School. I remember the headmistress saying, ‘Our pupils are ninety-nine per cent above average for the nation,’ [laughs] and when I queried this she just pointed around the horizon at the Scripps Institute, the Scripps Clinic, the Salk Institute and all these other places which were ringing the horizon and all these professorial kids were the reason that she could make this claim. But we also saw our first and met our first eleven year [old] alcoholic which was a big shock to the system. He was one of these poor kids of parents with ‘lifestyles’: one a pilot would be in the Philippines and the mother would be a hostess and somewhere in Japan and he would come home in the evening and pour himself two fingers of scotch and settle down to watch the telly. This was a very weird thing for us to discover in such a prosperous neck of the woods as Torrey Pines. So we did the family things: we went to Disneyland lots of times and we went – the kids always got me to take them to Balboa Park to see the Padres play baseball because they had twigged the essential truth that Ray Kroc who owned McDonald’s and the Padres would redeem any ticket stub from a winning game with a free Big Mac. This was a total fallacy because the Padres never won any game when we were there; we were only there for a year and I guess that baseball’s only a part of the year but I do not remember the Padres ever winning any game or any redeemed Big Mac being given to the kids. So Ray Kroc won again. After the year in the States, when they all came back to Gisleham School near Lowestoft, it was quite a change in the other direction for the kids. Not only from the kids locally saying, ‘Say something,’ to Sarah all over again just like they had in the States to get her [laughs] American accent this time. But Ron Jones, the head of the Gisleham School saying,

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‘And another thing, we don’t allow jeans here at Gisleham School,’ [laughs] which was another big shock. But the basic point in raising this under a sort of ‘tapering off’ heading from my activities in California was the essential fact that if I went there on my own I could no longer spend a lot of time there, enough time to write a paper. And if you did spend enough time to write a paper, you were away from your family too long and you didn’t want that either; so tapering-off was rightly what I did.

[31.37]

The other – I suppose the second reason for tapering off was that Josephine, er, lost her job as curator of minerals in Balboa Park Museum some time in the mid ‘80s. I notice her – the ‘Basement Blats’ that she delivered regularly ended in 1984 and she did make hard for herself, I'm afraid. She was very passionately interested in filling the museum with beautiful gemstones. A lot of her friends could supply the material but she didn’t get on well with the museum authorities because she threw out what she called the ‘dirty black rocks’ which was really their reference collection. And she started to get their finance people on her back as well; they used to say, ‘But you’re developing a slush fund for the buying of these mineral crystals,’ and when she protested they said, ‘But Miss Scripps, you have ‘slush fund’ printed on the cheques,’ [laughs] from which there was no way back. Just to round up Josephina, she had a stroke and in of my later trips to Scripps ---because of course they didn’t stop; that was one of the big oceanographic centres of the world, – my last and I think important memory of Josephina was this one. She was [just] lying there; she had enough money to afford twenty-four hour nursing, they came and went, and to all intents and purposes she was staring into space and didn’t recognise anything at all. One day on impulse when I was up there, I went and got one of her favourite crystal specimens that she’d found herself . She’d found the mine and she called it the ‘Green Sphene from San Quenteen’ [San Quentin]. These – this particular one was a big twinned crystal, they are [mostly] always fairly twinned, green thing, gemmy and it was about the size of a big broad arrow. But the important reason I’m telling you the shape of this thing was that down the inner margin of the two stones, the crystal twin, there was a bevelled groove and I took this, her favourite stone, the Green Sphene from San Quenteen, and pushed it into her left fist, and I watched her index finger on her right

79 Bob Dickson Page 80 C1379/56 Track 4 hand run down the groove in the inside of this crystal and then just drop to her side again. Tere was no doubt at all at that moment that she knew what was in her hand; she didn’t even look at it but I knew I’d got through to her somehow or other, so it’s a – an object lesson, even if they look as if they’re in a vegetative state, at least for that particular moment, I think something was in there. I tried it again with other favourite tourmalines and things but it never worked again. Josephine died in 1992.

[34.57]

The third point about tapering off I suppose was Namias’ illness and subsequent death and I include it here to round off that particular and most pleasurable episode in my life, but it was much later on, in November 1989, that Jerome suffered a brain haemorrhage. He did it at the San Diego Symphony when there was a lot of noise going on and nobody noticed his plight. Thereafter he lay in this convalescent hospital, Torrey Pines Convalescent Hospital, and as I’d go to Scripps for one or other meeting I’d call in en-route to the airport to go over one of his papers. The reason I did this was he had this most unfortunate injury to his brain that [meant] he couldn’t initiate thought; so if I took one of his papers, the multiple causes of frost in Florida in 1963 or something, tracing back the origins to something off Hawaii, he would listen avidly and understand every word as I went through the paper with him. But as soon as the words passed through and went out the other side they were gone. He enjoyed it immensely, he couldn’t really speak but he had his hand underneath my elbow all the time just jigging my elbow as if to say, ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going,’ and a big smile on his face. But in a way it was a bit like – the analogy I have is like these red electronic letters that you see in Times Square: the words pass and they’re gone. And after I had been and gone on my plane there was no way that Jerome could say to himself, ‘that was a most pleasurable afternoon, I will now recall the things we talked about’. He just could not initiate the thought or [recall] the things that he’d so clearly understood all afternoon. And [his wife] Edith couldn’t – didn’t know enough about the subject to do it. But it was a little enough thing to do [for me], so it was the sort of thing that infrequently, because I only went to the States about three or four times a year, infrequently it was the sort of thing you – you had to do. He was a much loved and clever man, and anything I did was a small enough price to pay for all his

80 Bob Dickson Page 81 C1379/56 Track 4 inspiration. I very much liked the quote that John Rhodes attributed to him in his obituary: on his election to the National Academy of Sciences, Namias said, ‘Something I thought would never happen because of the fuzzy nature of my field of research and my poor formal background. It is an honour that strengthens my belief in our system, where a person is judged solely on the basis of his contributions,’ ; and his contributions whatever he says, were great.

[38.17]

Thank you, can I take you back over some of that and ask you some –

Yes.

And the first thing that I’d like you to do if you can is to describe what constituted the Experimental Climate Prediction Centre at Scripps that Namias had established. What did it – you said that there was a hut on the beach, with – but what did the – what did this Centre look like?

No, I was – I have given the wrong impression if I gave the impression that the Prediction Centre run by Namias was a hut on the beach. The four of us, of which only a couple of us were working on his Prediction Centre were housed there. We were there either because we were temporary or because we hadn’t been found other places. But Namias had a – the best part of a floor in one of the main buildings at Scripps, was it Sverdrup Hall? Sverdrup Hall I think. And his team, Bob Born and Dan Fauts and Madge Sullivan and other scientists who were working on that field under him, under his general direction, they were all housed along this – very well housed along this corridor and they really wanted for nothing in the way of [pause] equipment at the time and computer power. So I’m sorry if I gave the impression that Namias was housed in a – in a hut on the beach [laughs]; that’s not true and it was true only of me as a temporary migrant. And the – it’s true also to say that in these days it was a very real issue’. It looks easily resolved now that El Nino is a – is the winner of the prize for ‘how does the ocean affect the atmosphere?’ , and we see its affects clearly. But in those days as I tried to point out it was a much harder case to

81 Bob Dickson Page 82 C1379/56 Track 4 make, to say that the sea surface temperature gradients of the Pacific and the persistence that they showed were capable of affecting the atmosphere ---handing over the ocean memory to the atmosphere and engendering persistence. I would think that that case is lost now, but at that time it was a very really interesting issue. And as I said I think before, the fact that sea surface temperature anomaly patterns recurred with no sign at the surface of the ocean of these patterns in the intervening seasons, gave one to believe that the subsurface layers of the ocean were themselves holding the memory for the upper layers and that these would affect the atmosphere. I suppose in hindsight it’s always going to be easier to point to the huge temperature gradients between the snow-covered eastern side of Asia and North America, and the offshore, relatively warm waters of the ocean. That in effect is what I ended up demonstrating, that changes in the temperature gradient at that eastern coast of the continent is really the way that storms get affected by temperature gradients, not the relatively weak ones offshore. But that case hadn’t then been made and it – it is made now.

[42.17]

Walking through that corridor or that floor that he had, what would you see in terms of equipment or personnel even, if you were going to describe what was there, for people who have never visited an oceanographic institution of any kind, what – what sort of physical instrumentation, what kind of computing can you actually see as you walk through it?

Well in his particular case, he wasn’t somebody who collected oceanographic data himself at sea. What he was doing was using oceanographic data and atmospheric data to form datasets. Then he would – and so that the thing you actually saw along the corridors were maps showing the current and predicted state of the atmosphere at different levels in terms of the sea level pressure and 700 millibar height, and the anomaly from the mean, and the forecast of what it’s going to be next fall. Because his would be one of the few groups that would dare to predict a season in advance based on what the situation was in the antecedent season. So the corridors would be lined with these, Namias’ room would be lined even more so with these, it would be –

82 Bob Dickson Page 83 C1379/56 Track 4 and so would his researchers [rooms] just opposite, ----Bob Born’s room. They would have access to – they would be doing the computing and they would be producing the specifications that he called for, which were more or less the normal correlations between what happens when you get this particular sea surface temperature anomaly pattern in fall and what has tended in the past to be the response of the atmosphere. He would call it [the] ‘response’, the associated atmospheric sea level pressure anomaly pattern. So these specifications and their predictions would have generated contoured fields and these would be filling the walls. The other thing that Namias had: he took great pride in being able to answer anyone on the phone in amazing detail about any particular season of any particular year back for the last twenty years. He used to show me how did it with great glee. He had this ‘magic book’ he called it and in it there would be the basic maps, about thumbnail-sized of the pressure fields, the pressure anomaly fields, the sea surface temperature fields, etc – and so if somebody said, ‘I had a problem in 1979,’ Namias would flip it over; and [to] this guy was [maybe] phoning from Florida he’d say, ‘Yes, you had a north easterly air flow there that was quite unusual,’ and these people were amazed at the way Namias’ ‘magic book’ gave him these instant answers.

Along came some people. Tim Barnett for example was one of the people who had a different point of view and used a different method of trying to foreshadow what might happen in the atmosphere from what was going on in the ocean. And in a sense Tim’s method and Namias’ method [were similar]: Tim would take an – would use an analogy method which was not entirely – it overlapped with Namias’ ‘specifications’ and ‘predictions’. But the two men never really got on very well because of their different approaches. And [pause] when Jerome made a prediction on the basis of the sea surface temperature anomaly pattern in a particular season, I think it was unfairly said of him that because he remembered so many hundreds of instances of this pattern appearing and what happened afterwards in the atmosphere that his predictions were less a priori, as a forecasting exercise, than merely recalling the sort of pattern that happened after that analogous situation in the past. So there was all of that undercurrent, but still and all, Jerome had a considerable following at Scripps, a considerable loyal and loving workforce to – to test his ideas out. He got a very fair test under the regime of Russ Davis. He, as I said, Russ Davis bent over backwards to

83 Bob Dickson Page 84 C1379/56 Track 4 see Namias’ point of view and to let him down gently if he thought that Namias was overemphasising a particular, and maybe unjustified, predictive skill. After he retired I think they did have Namias commemorative symposia there which would have been centred around his ideas.

[48.19]

And how real for him was this sense of a competition between two different schools working on relations between atmosphere and ocean, that in other words what did he say about the El Nino work that was going on elsewhere?

Well [pause] he certainly had a very real idea of what – of the fact that Jacob Bjerknes was emphasising the equatorial Pacific and he was emphasising the role of the mid latitude Pacific. And there was a – there was a problem that a passer-by like me could instantly see; that was that Namias would take a correlation field that - for example the sea surface temperature pattern of the Pacific. He would then correlate it at each five degree square intersection with a time series of the mid latitude westerlies in some way, and he would come to the conclusion that there was a correlation between them and that there was a time lag between them. And there was. He would end up with a – say a 0.4 correlation and a little bit of a time lag. And then between the mid latitude westerly strength and the equatorial easterly strength there would be another time lag and correlation. And between the easterly winds on the Pacific and the warmth of the equatorial Pacific Ocean there would be another correlation and another time lag. But the problem was this: that even though he had a chain of correlation which seemed to lead and lag in a consistent direction ----from the ocean at midlatitudes to the atmosphere at midlatitudes to the atmosphere in the tropics and to the ocean at the tropics, ------if you ever went to the two end points of that correlation [sequence] and correlated them there would be no lag. In other words there was such a lot of slop in each one of these correlations that you could fool yourself with the notion that the lag you were looking for was there. And that was the big problem. Bjerknes would take the ocean in the [equatorial] Pacific and correlate it with the – with the – directly with the easterlies above it and find a correlation. So you could, due to the discrepancies in the rather long dataset, mislead yourself handily

84 Bob Dickson Page 85 C1379/56 Track 4 in both directions. And as it turned out Bjerknes’ school of thought was the correct one. But I can see this as having been an area [of science] where Namias persisted a little bit longer than he might have done in pushing for the mid latitude ocean as a control on the atmosphere. Is that plain?

[51.21]

Yeah. And practically, on a sort of day to day at your desk or in the field working level, what did you do there, what was your contribution?

Well there were quite a lot of areas where I would be asking Bob Born and Fauts to run an analysis. They knew the computer system, I didn’t. They also knew the datasets and I didn’t. And I would busy myself with trying to do some of the more intractable analyses based on the wealth of paper records that people had around there. So it was a mixture of modern computer analysis and, as I say, EOF analysis by Bob Born, expressing what happened most of the time in ocean and atmosphere, and trying to pick apart a dataset that nobody had bothered with up to now. Because the likelihood was that the dataset had not been bothered with because it was a hard one to work with. For example one of the hardest ones was this business of the amplification of storm activity at the US eastern seaboard. We had maps showing where the storms were and we had them on a monthly basis, but trying to pick out the number of storms passing the east coast from twenty years of maps and recognising the same storm from one map to another was a hard, hard task. It was the reason why nobody had done this exercise before and it was the reason why when we finished in 1976 it was a worthwhile exercise to have done. But that was just hard labour: picking out storms, following them, counting the number of storms in small squares and comparing the incidence and prevalence of storms and their – you also had to, of course, measure their central pressures on a daily basis as well so that you could see the development rate of a storm as it tracked among this tilting [thermal] gradient at the American seaboard. So like so many things in science, it’s the ones which are hard physical labour that people leave till last [laughs]. The ones that you can number-crunch are easily done and have been done, and where you’re likely to add

85 Bob Dickson Page 86 C1379/56 Track 4 something, it’s in taking a dataset that is intractable. As I say. and that’s – I partly did that and I partly did the other.

So you had maps of the storms and it was a matter of flicking – flicking through these in order to track events?

Well, yes that –

What other data did you look at and use; what did the data you were using actually look like?

Well the data you used was partly ‘civilised’ and sitting there on a computer. For example the snowfall of American eastern cities was all recorded, and part of the deal in trying to associate storms off the eastern seaboard with warm south-east months and cold south-east months was easily accomplished. You could pick the coldest south-east group of months very easily: they would be months where the temperature was more than two standard deviations from some long term mean at everywhere to – from - all the way down the eastern coast. So that was something you could do easily by computer and you could just about do the same with snow cover but that was a harder dataset. It was important though because snow cover was in a sense the persistent chilling element on the land that you were looking for to match up against the persistent warm element offshore in the western Atlantic.

So I can’t say it any clearer than to say that some aspects of the dataset you needed were the ones where you worked out which were the coldest group of south eastern months in the States in winter ever and which were the warmest ones. That told you which months you had to work with. Then you had to find out the – some idea of the persistence of cooling based on the southern extent of snowfall. And then you had to – and you of course had the sea surface temperature deck offshore to work with. That was all well-constrained and weeded and checked. And the hardest thing in these days, as I say, was the business of storm frequency and central pressure and these had to be more or less read off a succession of maps. So it was a mixture, and I guess if

86 Bob Dickson Page 87 C1379/56 Track 4 they’d [the data sets] had all been as hard to do as the storm one, I would never have started it.

[56.49]

Where was the oceanographic data coming from because you said that Jerome wasn’t himself organising the collection or observations and collection of data.

No, NORPAX as a whole, of course, collected Pacific data. In my particular case the Atlantic dataset had to go back several decades because I was working on the coldest south eastern group of US winter months ever , and for comparison, this required datasets offshore that were going back in time over decades. In the North Pacific experiment of course there were major ocean observing programmes and one of the biggest of the lot was the new thrust by Warren White and Buzz Bernstein in dropping what they called expendable bathythermographs (temperature- depth bombs) using a succession of merchant ships all the way across the Pacific. It wasn’t a new technique but they developed it to an amazing degree and had thousands and thousands of these [XBT] things dropped by tens of merchant ships on a daily basis. So they built up this huge deck of data. The other things that people were just getting underway with in these days were the – the drifting buoy programme, where buoys would drift around and have sensors underneath them and relay their position to satellites; and that was what my friend McNally was in charge of. He worked on that for a man called Denny Kirwan who was essentially a visitor to NORPAX from Texas A&M University. On the equatorial Pacific of course they had huge [moored] arrays of instruments, the – the – I’m not sure if the TOGA-TAO array - the big modern array that’s been there for a long time along the equator which eventually was there to tell us the state of this important ocean area on a regular daily basis - I’m not sure whether that was there then but certainly NORPAX covered off everywhere from the equator right up to the – to the Aleutians with new observing systems. And that continued of course. Russ Davis’ main contribution I think in the end was his development of the ALACE float: the Autonomous [Lagrangian] Circulation Explorer which was a - a temperature salinity sensing float that he put into the ocean that cycled down to a particular depth and then came up again, radioed its data to satellites and carried on down again and up

87 Bob Dickson Page 88 C1379/56 Track 4 again. That has really been the basis of a huge modern Argo float network in - that now covers the world. So I – I may have got the details of Russ’ instrument wrong, I wasn’t involved in it myself, but the – it was just at the beginning of a period when autonomous profiling instrumentation took over from expendable bathythermographs and merchant ships ; we really know nowadays a very great deal about the thermal structure and thermal field of the upper ocean from these, from these new instruments.

[1.00.43]

Could you tell me because I’m quite interested in this – what seems from the outside to be an unusual interest, that of collecting gemstones, how you – how you met Josephine, how you came to meet Josephine, how you came to be part of this world because you might – we might think that you could have gone to Scripps and have worked in oceanography. And then I don’t know [laughs] done sort of normal sorts of things or different sorts of things anyway that – at the weekends and your time off but this is what you did and I wondered how it is that that happened?

Well sitting there in my apartment in El Paseo Dorado in La Jolla in the first year I was there, I didn’t stop going out. I had a car and I drove around a bit; but the idea of going into the western desert or Mexico on my own was not one that I relished because even then it was a dangerous place to go. I started looking around to see who I could go with and then I heard about these Balboa Park Museum excursions: the field trips that Josephine organised among her very competent group of miners, prospectors, gem and mineral collectors, and I decided to link up with them. And as soon as I did of course it was something which I thoroughly enjoyed. They all seemed, as I’ve pointed out, to be people who wouldn’t be stopped and who certainly weren’t going to be mugged by some bandit somewhere, not with that lot. And the gemstones that we collected at the end of the day seemed worthwhile things to have in their own right. But I was very interested in the gemstones of San Diego County because it is a particularly rich place to find them. They also had a – a thorough network of gemstone- and mineral- collectors around there, in fact the big shop in that area is called ‘The Collector’ in Fallbrook and people collect, preferentially collect, the natural shape of a mineral crystal on the matrix, rather than the cut stone. And

88 Bob Dickson Page 89 C1379/56 Track 4 value it for its perfection as a natural gemstone. They have the – they have parties, they – they meet up and show each other their particular new finds, and some of them: I defy anyone not to be interested in some of these things. One of them in particular -- -Bill Larson was always the one who seemed to me to be exploring new mineral mines as opposed to gemstone mines, and when I was there for example he found a mine at La Paz on the south end of Baja California: the long spike of land that goes down the west side of Mexico; and this mine had boleites in it. I said, ‘What’s a boleite?’ and he said, ‘Well it’s a blue cube sitting on a vaguely white rock,’ and when I saw one, it would really blow you away. It was a perfect blue cube. Then they said, ‘Well come and see this one,’ and then they showed me this cumengeite. A cumengeite was the alteration-product of boleite. And it ended up with a pyramid on each face, equally blue, on each face of this cube. When you opened up a vug in the rock and found one of these cumengeites it was like a Christmas star. It was a – if you can imagine a cube with a – a four sided pyramid developed on each face. How could anyone not be amazed at this thing? And the other thing of course was that there are – these minerals were vanishingly rare and worth a lot in their own right. For example, the only place they found boleites -----I think was at the time, it was a [pause] a copper silver chloride, and the reason it was there in Southern California was because incursions of the sea next door into the copper mines or the silver mines of Baja had produced this mineral species. The only other place they found them was in the slag that the ancient Greeks used to tip into the sea off Laurium in Greece and where some of these products formed in the ocean. So they were so vanishingly rare that you were just naturally impelled to go and have a look at them anyway. And so that’s what we did, and it wasn’t just the boleites and the cumengites. They were very rare. But San Diego itself, northern San Diego County was hugely important for tourmalines, and pink tourmalines in particular, and had been opened up by the Chinese at the turn of the last century to supply pink tourmaline, a lucky gemstone in China, for the Chinese trade. How could you not be enthusiastic when you were invited along for a Christmas dinner in the ‘Empress of China rooms’ in the entrance of I think it was the Tourmaline King mine in the – in Pala, and you saw the – the big hole in the ground that the Chinese had excavated away and [that] was still being mined for specimens today. I don’t think it was just me; I took Miles my son up to some of these diggings, at a place called the ‘Elizabeth R’ mine and he burrowed as

89 Bob Dickson Page 90 C1379/56 Track 4 enthusiastically as anybody, aged nine, finding morganites and tourmalines. In a sense it was because most of the ones you were found were dinged in some way. You were looking for the perfect crystal specimen, with its perfect faces intact, but nine out of ten times you’d find a dinged one and that was – the only thing to do with them was to cut them. So I did and found I was totally enrapt in doing so, and I haven’t found that with many things. You hear about people fishing and getting lost in their mind and spending all day doing it and thinking they were just spending a few minutes. Well that’s how it was for me with cutting stones.

[1.07.52]

What do you think it is? Why do you think that appealed to you so much the cutting of stones?

Well partly it’s because you have to concentrate, you’re watching – you’re cutting the ‘mains’ [main facets][--[pause]--- I should explain how you do it.

Yes, please, describe how you do it.

You take a piece of gemstone, which – cut more or less to size, a bit of rough in other words. You stick it with wax onto a dop stick. You mount it on a lap, on the central column of the lap; you set the angle off that it’s about to meet the revolving lap wheel at, and the angle that you set for a tourmaline will be different from an angle that you set for something else because it’s the refractive index of the stone that determines the – the shallowness or steepness of the mains. So you then start cutting and you cut something which begins to develop as a – as triangles around the base and you revolve it on a index wheel until you’re cutting all of the triangles that must meet at the point. And of course it’s then – it’s not an automatic process ------that you’re cutting these triangular flats so that they are all exactly the same size. You watch and keep turning the stone on its lap until you – until they develop towards that point at which they just touch at the end; and if you do that right you will end up with perfect mains, each one of them meeting in a single sharp edge [the girdle at the middle of the stone], and coming to a point at the tip. Then you simply reverse the stone onto a

90 Bob Dickson Page 91 C1379/56 Track 4 different dop stick, sticking the bit you’ve cut in other words into the wax on this other dop stick, and then you start cutting the ‘table’ at the far end of the stone and the ‘star facets’ around the girdle. And these take so much attention that to get them just right you really have to concentrate; so that was one thing; also anything you really enjoy doing you focus on to the point where you’re not – you can’t even hear anything going on around you. As Buzz Gray, a great cutter, [said] ----- talking about me being a – a painstaking cutter -----what he said in the end was something which really [laughs] pricked your balloon. He said, ‘ Amateurs always start by getting them perfect. They [the cut stones] don’t flash when they’re perfect. What you do after that, once you’ve learnt to make them perfect,’ (the mains and the star facets) ‘ is you put a bit of English into them!’ In other words he – he would cut them on a slightly different angle than they should be, so the light bouncing around inside would [flash]. You do this thing to excess of course and you’d end up without a gemmy-looking stone at all - ---but he knew enough to put this ‘bit of English’ into it. [By] ‘English’ he meant a bit of a twist, which is not very complimentary to the English; but you put a bit of twist into the – the cutting of the facets and that repaid itself. A professional gemstone cutter would know how to make that look like a flashing stone whereas mine would come out fairly dull.

[1.11.48]

And what sort of person was involved in collecting and cutting? Was this men and women all ages or how would you characterise the group of people who tended to be involved in this activity, of both collecting and of cutting?

Well they were all ages, from little ‘uns up to quite venerable old people, I hesitate to name them [laughs] but Josephine let’s [say], Josephine wouldn’t mind, bless her, saying she was in her mid sixties. She would kind of organise a trip to a mine and organise the date and organise some sort of – any facilities that were needed. But essentially it was the younger element that went off with their geological hammers and picks and whatever, according to the mine, and get stuck in. Mostly I would work on the – the dumps of a mine, because there was quite a lot that was discarded in these days that would be thrown onto the dump in digging the mine. That’s where I got

91 Bob Dickson Page 92 C1379/56 Track 4 most of my stuff from. So mostly we were working on the tailings on mines and only every now and again did you get a chance to see somebody blast something. That was for the field trips. Now of course I suppose that Josephine had to be circumspect about unleashing the forces of nature to these groups of citizens from San Diego. But I gather that didn’t always apply when Josephine was out on her own and I’ve certainly heard stories about her going to find a blue tourmaline on Old Mack- on Old Man Mack’s [pause] indicolite [blue tourmaline] mine near Pala,sticking a stick of dynamite in among the pegmatite and letting her go, and the consequences that a loose stone going through Max’ roof caused. So they were fairly fearless people and – but the –you could tell who were the leaders of the – the young faction. I mean I used to see Bill Larson as he emerged from just being a rock hound. Over the years he became the largest importer of coloured gemstones to the United States and he was a man that worked hard to find stuff when he was on one of Josephine’s trips. He subsequently ended up buying whole mines in – I think in Japan he bought a stibnite mine there, he bought some lazulite mines in Canada, all for the purpose of supplying the trade in his shop The Collector with the mineral crystal species that he – that they prized around that area.

And leaving aside Josephine, men and women doing this sort of thing at the weekends?

Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Much more men I suppose. But it was such a fun thing to do and you just needed to look at one of Josephine’s barbeques that she held every now and again; there were just as many women and children swarming around and messing with rocks as there were men. But on the [pause] on the field trips, there would be people as I say there just for the trip and there were people there to do some hard rock mining and in between there was everything [laughs], including myself.

[1.15.55]

How did you meet Deanne?

92 Bob Dickson Page 93 C1379/56 Track 4

Deanne was – [pronounces name Deanne]. I think her mother got it wrong. She was trying to call her Deanna, like [the film star] Deanna Durbin, but she mumbled at the font and the vicar called her Deanne and that’s how she was: D-e-a-n-n-e. I knew her when she was here [the Lowestoft Lab], and she was certainly – I was certainly dating Deanne for a while. Then I went off to Scripps and it just developed from there. She was certainly a – she certainly has been a wonderful wife. She has not [pause] quibbled at all about my wilder trips here and there---- it’s pretty well everywhere these days and still [she] still continues to be very indulgent of me going off and doing things. Like I’ll be doing in a couple of weeks time in Svalbard for the Norwegians and Oslo after that, and maybe Salt Lake City, Utah next February. She is very tolerant in that way and a very gentle and calming person. Just the sort of person that somebody like me requires I think.

And what was her role here when you –

I think she was in the library. She had had training as [pause] now I’ve got to get the word right but she was trained at Moorfields Eye Hospital in [pause] ophthalmics would it be called? I’ve got that word wrong [note: it should have been orthoptics !]. But she never actually took it up as a profession. She got married and lived in Jersey and had Miles and Sarah. And when their marriage broke up Miles and Sarah were only like two or three year old. She came back to Lowestoft at that point and it must have been a couple of years after that, when she was still living with her mum and dad in London Road South, in Lowestoft, that I met her and we dated and then got married. I’ll come to – I have decided to have one of these tapes devoted to the rather stranger things that happened in – in one or another of our houses, because houses are after all where quite a lot of the family develops and things like that. So we’ll get around to that in due course; but yes we married and almost immediately after Jamie was born - he was born on the 1 st of November 1975 - we were off to California on January the 5 th 1976. So Jamie would only have been a couple of months old at that time. It was, as I say, it was a very fun thing to do but something I’d never actually had to do before, find a way of – well I had to buy a big car to drive five people around in and [all] the impedimenta of babies. I had to [pause] cope with the rather strange person we borrowed the house off in La Jolla, his name was Professor Traylen

93 Bob Dickson Page 94 C1379/56 Track 4 and the strange person was his wife. Prof Traylen was off for a year as it happened on sabbatical in Germany from – from UCSD. He came to us just before we moved in and said, ‘You’ll have a lot of trouble from my wife,’ he said [laughs], ‘At the end of your year she’ll accuse you of all sorts of things and try to claim for them, but don’t be moved: stand your ground.’ And when she did after a year - I didn’t really meet the woman, she was off in Germany - but when she did start making these claims all I had to do was point the real-estate lady that was renting us the place, I had to point her at this letter and say, ‘Look, it’s down to you. Do you want to show this lady her husband’s letter to me predicting that this would be her tack.’ I never heard from her again. But it was – it was a very different life in California with a family than without. Lots of trips to Disneyland, all that stuff.

[1.20.28]

What effect did it have – you’ve mentioned that it was part of the tapering off of work at Scripps, but what effect more generally would you say having a family had on your scientific career, or on your –

Oh a very important one from the point of view of maintaining a calm working environment for you at home and away and giving you an interest outside the science. That bit is absolutely clear. The bit I was maybe emphasising earlier was the fact that as a single wandering scientist, I could go for as long as I needed to in the past before I was married, and get a job finished and then come home and do it without really thinking about having anyone to ask. As soon as you were married you realised that you couldn’t stay away for as long as you needed, as I pointed out, to write this paper with somebody and you didn’t want to stay away for as long as it would need to write this thing. So in that sense you got half the job done and came home and that was never very satisfactory.

But the actual fourth point of tapering off wasn’t – I haven’t actually got to yet and that was the – what we’ll be discussing in the next tape I imagine. That was because back home a new job was developing that needed me to be here.So that was – and so the first thing was certainly the tapering off through marriage; another one was the

94 Bob Dickson Page 95 C1379/56 Track 4 tapering off of Jerome I suppose, of losing quite as much enthusiasm for Jerome’s ideas as he had himself, without losing enthusiasm for the man himself. Josephine we’ve dealt with and she was certainly mid sixties when I met her and getting old. And the fourth one was the fact that a job was developing in Lowestoft that I had to come back and do. So that was the four – these four things together meant that my long sustained trips to the States, though they were wonderful things to do when single, I couldn’t do forever.

[End of Track 4]

95 Bob Dickson Page 96 C1379/56 Track 5

Track 5

The next segment of what I would call a – an interesting and lucky life was – I have more or less mentally called, ‘exploring the deep Atlantic’. In 1977 two decisions opened up a wonderful opportunity to explore the deep Atlantic for a decade, allowing me to go not quite wherever I wanted to go but very close. And a third Departmental decision allowed John Gould to travel much the same ground at much the same time so the close collaboration of the class of ’64 continued. The driving decisions that affected me directly were these, and I apologise in advance heavily for the acronym soup that must follow. There was something called the Multilateral Consultation and Surveillance Mechanism for Sea Dumping of Radioactive Waste that the OECD Council established in 1977. The Nuclear Energy Agency were required, via something called its CRESP programme (that’s Coordinated Research and Environmental Surveillance Programme) to assess the suitability of existing radioactive low level waste dump sites every five years. I think you’ve mostly got through the worst of the acronyms in that little slug there. But the main point is that following a preliminary assessment of the low level waste dump site in the North East Atlantic in 1980 the task that was before us now was to fill in all the important gaps in knowledge by 1985: the next time when a – an assessment was needed. Secondly, the second Departmental decision that affected me was the very sensible one that as the Government Department that had to authorise the sea dump, MAFF took the view that it would not just buy-in that expertise, but would wherever and whenever possible get involved in making the measurements itself , so as to know at first hand how good was the dataset on which the case was made. In a very real way they were absolutely right to do so. Whatever the data said would determine whether this dump – the dump was safe. So the data itself was more or less the decider of this thing and you had to know at first hand, not just rely on somebody telling you so, that it was good or bad or whatever.

[02.37]

So – and in this particular case our observational shopping list was set by a most competent group of modellers, and John Shepherd who’d been on GESAMP which

96 Bob Dickson Page 97 C1379/56 Track 5 was – I lied, this is another set of acronyms - GESAMP was the Joint Group of Experts on Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution. John Shepherd had been on GESAMP with the Canadian George Needler, and Paul Gurbutt was a systems analyst and mathematician that we recruited from Cambridge. These guys thought up the essentials of how a model should be [designed], that would – on which the case would be based:--- a nested box model covering the lower watercolumn and upper sediments over the NEA dump site itself and the surrounding waters of the North East Atlantic that was most relevant to the dose to the ‘critical group’. This would be set into a ninety-two box model on density coordinates to extend coverage to the rest of the world ocean that would be relevant to what they called the ‘collective dose’. And to run such large computations as this ninety-two box model would need, the computer power of the National Radiological Protection Board at Didcot was required and Marion Hill and Shelley Mobbs of NRPB were responsible for these runs. So that was the modelling team and the model that set our shopping list as ocean observers, and that set our field programme.

[04.10]

And as the head of physical and chemical oceanography group at Lowestoft from 1980 and as the chairman of the Physical Oceanography task group of CRESP----- you’ll remember I’m sure! You’ll be askd questions later what CRESP was! -----as the chairman of the Physical Oceanography task group of CRESP from 1983, the leadership of that observational programme devolved onto me.

[04.37]

Much of what the models needed to know of course concerned the spreading rates and pathways of dispersion that waste would follow if and when it leaked out, on all scales from the site itself out to the world ocean. At that time the flow field of the deep North Atlantic was almost totally unknown. Two out of many technical advances at the time were important to developing that knowledge and the first was the development of the self recording current meter which is a device with a rotor to register the flow, a magnetic coupling in the end cap to transfer the rotor revolutions

97 Bob Dickson Page 98 C1379/56 Track 5 from the outside to an encoder inside and then onto the data storage unit inside the pressure case, a fin to direct the instrument into the flow as it hung in wire on part of a mooring, and thus determine the direction of the flow with reference to an internal compass. You’d put these – a string of these things out and leave them for a year and come back and get them and then decode it, and the instrument that became our workhorse had been developed quite a lot earlier by a chap called Ivar Aanderaa in Bergen, as part of a NATO contract in, I think, 1959. Jimmy Crease of NIO, the National Institute of Oceanography, had tested this in the Indian Ocean by the mid ‘60s and so now the Aanderaa RCM4, as it was called, was now available commercially for our use and was ideal for our purpose. Typically we recorded speed and direction and the temperature of the flow every hour for a year. But it was capable of longer or shorter data intervals according to purpose. The other development was to have some reliable acoustic release that you could call up to release the mooring from the seabed and bring it to the surface where you could get the data, so the acoustic release was just as important as the current meters themselves. And here the story was a little bit less straightforward. Again the device was first used by Jimmy Crease from Discovery in 1965 (we used the NIO release), [Jim] used it in the Faroe Shetland Channel and its principle was to burn – use a pyro link to burn through and then drop the anchor chain below. It worked well enough [but] in long deployments, to start with at any rate, the products of crevice corrosion tended to fuse the two sides of the latch together, frustrating our attempts to bring it up and frustration is exactly the right word here. We could see the command release pinging away, we could see it was there in other words; we could see that it had received our cut command, because the pings doubled in frequency when it did that; but we could equally see that nothing was happening and it didn’t separate from the seabed. This and other corrosion problems were solved by switching to titanium which I think we were the first to do. This was the more expensive but cheaper solution to the problem.

[07.53]

With a working system and a blank canvas, then, the question was naturally where to start and, as you would imagine from my previous comments on these tapes, the first

98 Bob Dickson Page 99 C1379/56 Track 5 person I went to was John Swallow, consulting with him as to where to go. His most useful advice [was] ‘Put your current meters where you like, nobody knows nowt. But,’ he said, ‘if you want my opinion I’ve noticed the abyssal currents on the tail of Rockall Bank beat with a ten day period, and that’s very interesting.’ So that’s where our first moored current meters went. But covering all of the diverse and not to say daft notions that people might dream up and filling in any holes in the model data imposed a huge variety on what we did. We worked out the local near-bed diffusion, the mixing rate on the dumpsite itself, from the natural radon-222 profile in the layer just above the seabed, from two to fifty metres up from the seabed. This was in 4,750 metres depth so we’re working right close to the bottom in great depth. We then hauled multi ton water samplers, a cluster of huge 270 litre Gerard Barrel samplers we called them, up from five metres or less off the bottom in 4.7 kilometres of water to check the daft notion that the Kd, ---I’ll come to that in a minute,---- for plutonium, altered by two orders of magnitude under pressure of abyssal depths; it didn’t of course. The dissociation constant, Kd, indicates the strength of the binding between a contaminant and sediment in terms of how easy it is to separate them. And so this suggestion, however daft, was an important one to check. Ten tonnes at the sheave certainly impressed the crew, and the scientists hid. We also laid hydrographic fish trap moorings to check dump site fish and amphipods for radioactivity; there was essentially none on the dump site. We dropped dummy waste drums free-fall to see if they split and they did. We made the first measurements of the connecting flow through the mid Atlantic ridge between the eastern and western basins of the Atlantic via the deep southern trench of the ‘Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone’ it’s called, one of the main connecting trenches between [the] east and west Atlantic. We did receive before we went, as you always did in these days of ignorance, you’d receive some daft advice that these deep trenches ‘might be full of mud so we’d lose our gear’; and actually of course they weren’t. But we did have some trouble we didn’t anticipate, [in finding] that the clefts were so steep-to, 1 in 18 slopes on these ocean trenches through the mid Atlantic ridge, that we had great difficulty a year on sending an acoustic signal precisely down to the acoustic release without it bouncing off the walls and going off every which way. But we got them back, and as the main deep gap between and west and east Atlantic and not too far from the dump site, its rates of through flow were something fundamental that we had to establish for the model. We

99 Bob Dickson Page 100 C1379/56 Track 5 helped Pete Kershaw here catch dump site mud from four kilometres down with a giant box corer for bioturbation rates (that’s more or less biological mixing of the sediment) which Paul Gurbutt then modelled. We moored, unrolled and recovered waste drums on the waste site from year after year to check if they became colonised and eroded by bugs, and they didn’t.

[11.55]

As we could hardly fail to do on such a blank canvas we made some fairly fundamental and even startling discoveries, and five in particular proved illuminating both to Oceanography and to the sometimes unpredictable reception of new ideas by oceanographers. So I’m going to describe these five because they are I think the lasting contributions to oceanography. Most fundamental of all as part of what we called the NEADS group, that’s the North East Atlantic Dynamics Study and that’s myself, John Gould, Tom Muller at Keele and Catherine Maillard in France, we mapped out the mean circulation in the deep layer, deeper than 2,000 metres, of the eastern North Atlantic, which proved to be predominantly north going at a few centimetres per second, and we sustained these measurements for years in order to establish the geography of their characteristic fluctuation timescales. Even after ten years it would be hard to say if Tom Muller’s NEADS 1 mooring west of Spain had any mean flow at all!

[13.06]

Then as a second major discovery I think, in 1982 with John Gould again we were the first to show that ocean fluctuation kinetic energy at mid latitudes can undergo a seasonal variation in amplitude even at abyssal depths, with peak eddy energy, if you like, developing in late winter and early spring. We published this in Nature in 1982. This [was a] quite unexpected result; these moorings, you see the top of these moorings would be four kilometres down, [so] there was no way this was being stirred in by surface motion acting on the mooring and it shouldn’t have happened, but somehow the seasonal signal was getting down there. This quite unexpected result [was] subsequently confirmed to be of widespread application. From the North

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Pacific, Koblinsky and Niiler and Schmitz found it all over the place, subsequently. This is of general importance to our understanding of the oceans deep eddy field at mid latitude remote from the dominating effects of the western boundary currents like the Gulf Stream, and it was obviously and directly relevant to the CRESP assessment. It was very satisfying that the ultra-long records we needed to make this discovery included the ones that John Swallow had pointed us to in the first raw days of our North Atlantic programme. It also showed us something fairly startling about the contrasting attitudes of modellers to new ideas and here I’m afraid I’ve got to be rude about [laughs], only temporarily rude about Alan Robinson of Harvard, Professor of Maths at Harvard [laughs], whose response to being told about this seasonality in eddy kinetic energy was, ‘It can’t be true, it’s not in any of my models,’ [laughs] which was fairly – which I have had a hard job believing ever since. And the contrast between his reaction and that of the wonderful Peter Killworth who simply said, ‘Give me an hour’; in an hour he phoned me back and he said, ‘It’s hard, but I understand how it works now,’ and that’s why it’s Dickson, Gould, Gurbutt and Killworth in Nature in 1982. Peter Killworth was a wonderful person like that, he would never have said, ‘My models don’t show it, it can’t be true,’ and as I said in this case, his attitude was much more, give me an hour to work on it and I’ll tell you how it works. The perfect theoretician for physical oceanographers like ourselves to interface with.

Where was he working?

He worked at – well he worked at the Department of Applied Maths in Cambridge and then he was moved to the Hooke Institute and given command of the OCCAM modelling group [from] there. And then they – NERC or somebody - closed down the Hooke Institute and they all moved back to Southampton with Peter and that was where he ended his days because very sadly he suffered from motor neuron disease and we all watched in horror as our old friend and one of the world’s most competent people, somebody that as I say observers like ourselves really had to have around, slowly died. Before he did so we managed to get a nice symposium going in his honour. Being Peter, who spent half of his time on social science and half of his time on oceanography, and in a theoretical sense, the theatre they hired for the purpose in Southampton had a equal mix of talks on both sides of his – the way he spent his life

101 Bob Dickson Page 102 C1379/56 Track 5 and it – all I can say is he was much loved then and is much missed now. So: we – he did after his hour come and tell us why it worked and [pause] it also showed us later on that the impact of some of our most satisfying discoveries may be less than we fondly believe if people don’t read far enough back [in time] to know that they exist! Nothing deflates our pomposity quite so much as reading many years later of the same discovery or a variant of it being remade [laughs]. Here we are in an article in Science dated 29th of April 2011, so nearly thirty years after our Nature report, we find Diane K Adams et al reporting that ‘surface generated mesoscale eddies transport deep sea products from hydrothermal vents’ with the conclusion ‘although the deep sea and hydrothermal vents in particular are often naively thought of as being isolated from the surface ocean and atmosphere, the interaction of surface generated eddies with the deep sea offers a conduit for seasonality and longer period atmospheric phenomenon to influence the ‘seasonless’ deep sea’ [laughs]. Ah well, it’s probably good for the Soul is all you can say.

[18.37]

A third of these findings:- I suppose we were the first to use the deep sonar fixing and ranging [SOFAR] floats to measure basin-wide dispersion rates in the eastern basin. Once again this discovery was made in partnership with John Gould of Wormley and I should explain why he was able to join us. Something had changed in terms of the – his terms of engagement at IOS Wormley. His work on the Rockall storm belt had been, I think , a part of their normal blue skies interest in air-sea interaction and that was part of something called JASIN, the Joint Air Sea Interaction Study. But after Henry Charnock took over as director at IOS in 1971 [coughs], excuse me, the recommendations of something called the Rothschild Report forced IOS to develop a customer-contractor relationship where a portion of their pre-existing funding would be handed over to Government Departments to spend, and IOS would now have to bid for it. Under this arrangement in the later ‘70s, Henry Charnock won an eight year contract from the Department of the Environment, this time to study the feasibility of disposing of high level radioactive waste to the deep ocean by dropping it in large pointed projectiles into the seabed sediments. So though our programme for MAFF was fundamentally different, ---we were low level waste as opposed to high level

102 Bob Dickson Page 103 C1379/56 Track 5 waste, and ours was on the sediments in drums rather than in them, ------the MAFF and IOS studies nonetheless had elements of common interest and deep ocean dispersion was certainly one of these. So our SOFAR float study was a development of John Swallow’s invention of neutrally buoyant floats but one that used the double sound channel of the eastern Atlantic, one above and one below the Mediterranean water sub-layer, to send acoustic signals right across the basin from freely drifting floats to listening stations around the basin margins. And using the different times of arrival of a signal from a given float at each listening station this would fix the position of that float by triangulation and of course successive positions of a flock of floats would trace out the large scale dispersion rates through the mutual separation of these floats. It might not have worked but in fact it was a nice exercise. John and IOS tested the effectiveness of the deep sound channel and laid the listening stations around the basin margin and we on the Cirolana ballasted and launched the SOFAR floats themselves west of Spain. The experiment worked beautifully and the results fitted Taylor dispersion theory beautifully also.

And there were of course as usual some wholly surreal moments. One of them I do remember distinctly was sitting there waiting for a whale to finish making amorous advances to a SOFAR float that we were ballasting off Spain, miles - 400 miles to the west of Spain. The problem was that this was a transponding float and if you made a noise it tweeted back at you., and while it was tweeting back it turned its ears off so that it wouldn’t deafen itself. There we were trying to send a signal down to drop some ballast and come up to the surface but the whale was talking to it, and then as soon as the whale talked to it the float would talk back to the whale, and the whale then talked back to the float; I remember leaning on the gunnel on this sunny day waiting wondering whether Her Majesty knew that her research vessel was engaged in waiting for a whale to get skunnered with talking to this inanimate object. Always getting a reply, but not able to get anything intelligible back from this beast down below.

So deep – the deep SOFAR float experiment I think was a – another first. Of course SOFAR floats and neutrally buoyant floats had been used [before] but here we were using, because of our interest in deep dispersion, we were using them as deep as we

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dared so that they would comment most relevantly on the dump site and the dispersion of waste. These things were based on inch and half wall thickness glass spheres as buoyancy and as instrument packaging. And they used to go down to 2,500 metres.

[23.25]

Then fourth, the fourth new result that I think of here was with Nick McCave at Cambridge. We used the plumes of suspended sediment and current measurements, what they call the nepheloid plumes, to describe and explain the occurrence and properties of zones of intense mixing along the upper continental slope west of Britain. Although the tidal currents were locally weak there, the mechanism involved the intensification of near-bottom water movements at the shelf break through the development of a match between something called the characteristic slope of the internal tide, and the bottom slope. It also told us something along the lines of one man’s signal is another man’s noise! Nick and I had shown clearly, --- he did come to sea with us frequently, ----we had found the – these nephel plumes emerging from the point at which the continental shelf becomes the continental slope in just in the manner predicted; we knew the density surface of the ocean on which they were formed and we knew where this density surface would pass offshore. And so we naturally were keen, having identified this particular shelf break site, as one which would generate nephel layers, we were keen to look offshore in the datasets and see whether our – the plume could be detected offshore in these sets. The first paper we looked at was a paper by Lonsdale and Hollister from Woods Hole and they had, just offshore [from] where we were on Porcupine Bank, they had mapped the vertical distribution, one beside the other, of maybe five or ten properties of the ocean, and one of them was nephels. So we naturally looked at their paper in Journal of Marine Research and lo and behold there was no plume there at the place that we were absolutely certain it should be at. Next time Nick was in Woods Hole, he went and dug out the original data from the Knorr , the research vessel that they have up there, and there it was, the nephel plume was strong and banging away [laughs] right at the point, at the density level that it should have been at. He actually tackled Charlie Hollister and Charlie said, ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘that one. We were – when we laid the vertical profiles of all these

104 Bob Dickson Page 105 C1379/56 Track 5 properties, one beside the other, your nephels plume overlaid so many of the other ones and obscured them in places that we weren’t interested in showing that we simply Tippexed that plume out.’ So that was the explanation: the plume was so strong that it laid across and obscured the vertical profiles that Charlie was interested in near the bottom and caused it to be removed [laughs]. Apologies all round from Charlie and we were able to get it in time to include that spike in our paper with Nick McCave so no harm was done, but it does show you ‘one man’s signal is clearly another man’s noise’.

[27.00]

Fifth, we completed the first successful moored array across the Denmark Strait overflow in 1986, and as quite a lot of our life after that was devoted to this feature so that should be described in a discussion of its own, and will be. In the end the low level [waste] dump was never faulted on safety grounds. As Peter Kershaw reminds me here, the peak individual annual dose from all radionuclides to the critical group of potential sea food consumers, was estimated in the 1985 site suitability review as 20 nanosieverts per year [ie 20 x 10 -9 Sv, where the Sievert is the SI unit of equivalent effective radiation dose committment], or approximately a quarter to a fifth of the dose that you will receive on a single flight from Paris to Washington DC; 90 nanosieverts [is what they] they estimate for a round trip, due to the increased solar radiation at high altitude. Or as Jan Pentreath, the head of our radiological protection group at Lowestoft at the time and later our MAFF chief scientist, he used to reply to his audiences at that time, ‘I get more of a radiation dose flying here to tell you it’s safe.’ The collective dose to the world population as a result of the sea dump is also very small. It’s not my field but I hauled John Hunt in from retirement to remind me that the 1985 review estimated the collective dose commitment over 10,000 years from the start of dumping was less than the annual dose that you get from natural radionuclides in the ocean. So the sea dump for low level waste was stopped not by science, but by the refusal of the National Union of Seamen to carry it to sea and even that had its dafter side [laughs]. Professor Feldt who accidentally trawled up a waste drum from the dump site after the moratorium on further dumping had been declared,

105 Bob Dickson Page 106 C1379/56 Track 5 felt unable to dump it in again as the rest of us would have done and brought it back to Hamburg to the great consternation of everyone [laughs].

[End of Track 5]

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Track 6

I’ve just got a couple of questions on the various scientific practices involved in the assessments of the low level nuclear waste work and the first is could you give an account of the – the very practical day to day step by step methods of deploying and retrieving the floats which were used to measure the dispersal basin wide of the potential nuclear material?

Yes, the basic principle of the SOFAR float is one that John Swallow invented at NIO. He was the – the discoverer of what we called for years ‘Swallow floats’, neutrally buoyant floats---- and the family of floats all has the same principle; that it may be possible to make an instrument less compressible than sea water, which is what John Swallow managed to do, and yet with enough buoyancy to give it a useful payload. If you could invent this instrument and then suitably ballast it, very finely ballast it, it would gain buoyancy as it sank and the – and as the ambient pressure increased, and at some depth it would have a density equal to that of the surrounding water according to how much you ballasted it, and it would then sit at that depth and then trace out the movements of the water at that depth. So that was the general principle of the Swallow float and it’s nicely described, and the history of it is nicely described in Jimmy Crease’s chapter in the recent book Of Seas and Ships and Scientists . So that bit of it is the fundamental principle of the floats we were using. We were using big SOFAR floats and the problem that we had was to find a way of ballasting them to 2500 metres which was the depth that we were planning to use them at. Now on the ship we could determine how much weight we’d have to add to them to ballast them for that depth but when you put them in the sea it’s a rather – it’s rather too late to find out whether you’d ballasted them correctly because they would either dive to too shallow a depth or go right straight down into the bottom. That’s not the sort of thing that we wanted to leave to chance. So the way that we used to do it was to take what they call a ‘minimode float’, which had the capacity to drop ballast weights, and this minimode float was then strapped to the large full- sized SOFAR float. They were both ballasted to 2500 metres and then we deployed them, and if they correctly deepened to the working depth of 2500 metres then we knew we’d ballasted them right. The idea would then be to send the minimode float, this

107 Bob Dickson Page 108 C1379/56 Track 6 transponding float, our signal saying, ‘please drop your ballast’ and then it would drop its ballast and bring the two of them up to the surface. You would then take the minimode float off and re-release the main SOFAR float. So that was the – that was the way we ballasted all umpteen of our SOFAR floats in the Iberia [Abyssal] Plain and that was the problem we encountered when we met the whale. What we were trying to do was to say on one occasion to this minimode float, ‘drop your ballast weight [corrects inadvertent error on tape] and come on up, you’ve gone to the right depth’, and the whale kept getting in the way and interfering with this process. So normally once your float is ballasted to the right depth and it’s and you’re happy with it and it’s been released you don’t aim to get it back. It’s released and it will swim around in the ocean forever. The principle that we were using also was the fact that there was a kind of wave guide at a certain depth in the Atlantic that John Gould tested and found to be suitable for our needs, where if you make a – a noise at a particular depth, it will – the sound from that noise will be channelled along this wave guide and end up crossing the entire basin of the Iberia [Abyssal Plain] west of Spain, [and the] eastern Atlantic basin. They would be therefore receivable by the listening stations which were deployed around the basin. So they would be the – the two things that we were testing were: Did the wave guide work? And would the deep immersion Swallow floats work? The experiment as a whole was a success and it all worked beautifully as I pointed out.

[05.55]

Can you tell me about the roles of scientists, versus or and crew on the research ship in deploying and retrieving the floats. Who does – who practically does what?

Well the scientists would get the equipment ready and on the Cirolana it was different from the Discovery . Cirolana would have the crew to work winches and whatever: in recovering the moorings, for example, they would drive the net drum winch on which we spooled our moorings when it came up. On Discovery, I think it’s true to say that – it certainly was true when I was aboard it -----that the scientists themselves worked the winches and the crew were there in a – first of all to get the ship in the right place and to help with the work involved in putting the equipment together, the heavy

108 Bob Dickson Page 109 C1379/56 Track 6 equipment together and getting it over the side and whatever. But the actual deployment operation on Discovery tended to be done by the scientists. So it differs from ship and ship.

And what of sort of informal relations between scientists and crew, on both –

The relations between us and the crew of our – first of all with our early ship the Ernest Holt , and later on the Cirolana -----were [pause] good. You looked forward to seeing your old friends among the crew. They looked forward to seeing you. You’d stand there, it’s not too blush-making to say, at three in the morning singing the chorus from the duet from The Pearl Fishers with Tommy Yarborough on the hydrographic platform probably waking up the people down below. But you – because the crew were so [pause] most of them were so constantly present on all of the cruises you went on you were – they tended to be career crew - that you really developed affection for some and I think the same thing applied the other way around. There have been occasions of course when you had to take pier- head jumps and all sorts of people aboard. In general that didn’t necessarily mean that they were trouble-- - you hardly ever had trouble from the crew. There was quite a disciplined – they were quite a disciplined body. But it was in your interests on a long cruise to make sure that you didn’t provoke any trouble and your relationships with the crew had to be carefully thought out. In other words you wouldn’t go down into the crew’s quarters without – even with -----their permission very often. You would ret – they would retain their space. They would have the same relationship to your quarters; you wouldn’t bring a crew member up to your cabin for a few drinks or anything like that. You might have a few drinks at the end of a long and hard deployment exercise because we – that’s the sort of thing you do to celebrate, but that was their home much more than it was your home and you made very sure that the good relationships that you always had with the crew were maintained by keeping your own separate spaces for the main part. On the deck of course good relationships were essential and the crew were very often the ones who would stop you from doing something silly when you’d forgotten something. I even remember one set of Grimsby crew who were very clever people. They’d never been to sea before but they were very clever, and they very quickly worked out on Arthur Lee’s cruise off Bear Island on the Ernest

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Holt what depth you had to put the bottle at to – the sampling bottle at to lower it away and find them correctly spaced on – when you’ve paid out the hydrographic wire. I remember one of them saying, ‘Mr Lee, you’ve got that wrong,’ just like that [laughs] and Arthur Lee to his great credit, thought a bit and said, ‘You know, you’re quite right,’ and after that he left the – that sort of thing to them [laughs]. And so it – it – it was something we were always conscious of but something where the crew was – if they were friendly, as so many of them were, they could really be a help to what you were doing.

[10.55]

And finally on this, there’s some pictures in the material that we’ve got of – of the kind of – I don’t know, the informal social side of cruise. For example this one which you’ve included as part of a talk to a group possibly of people who remember this sort of thing and there’s another one where there’s a collection of people around a central – where is it [looking through papers], with a comment about draining the gin to the label – oh here, and I wondered what you remember of this sort of side of cruises?

Well, it was certainly not the sort of thing that got in the way during your working period on the ship. For a start in their early days in the Barents Sea when the main purpose of the Ernest Holt, on this 0-Group Fish Surveys I’d described, was one of tracking larval fish, we would be given two days non-stop to get all of our moorings out on one group lickety-spit run across the Barents Sea and you weren’t stopping for parties and drinking sessions during that. You did the work and then went to bed for a couple of days. But by the same token on the early days on the Ernest Holt you did get a rum ration. You were part of, I suppose, the Naval Reserve; I don’t remember people abusing it very often and if you were it would have been stopped and that’s the sum and substance of it. On the way home it’s a different matter. I mean I’m sure you would have a party and singing and all sorts of things going on. But it never got out of hand and as far as I can – I can remember, the partying on the ship was no – not really very much different from the partying that we have ashore. If [you had] something to celebrate then you had a party and the usual amount of drink went down

110 Bob Dickson Page 111 C1379/56 Track 6 people’s necks, but it was never a major thing at sea and we certainly didn’t get sloshed every day just because we have a rum allowance on a daily basis.

And this says Carroll Baker adjudicating in this particular picture which makes me ask – ask the question, to what extent were female oceanographers involved in let’s take – let’s restrict that question to this nuclear low level waste work, to what extent were –

Oh I don’t think we had too many on that work but in the north in the Barents Sea we had certainly ladies along. But that business about Carroll Baker adjudicating, it was simply that when you took your docking bottle ashore the rummagers at Grimsby would, when Ernest Holt used to go in there, they would let you go ashore with a bottle if it was down to the label, and of course it was a – a nice task to decide when you were quite down to the label, how much you could get away with;-- that’s all its talking about there. Carroll Baker was – Carroll Baker is [pause] ----maybe you’re maybe misconstruing; Carroll Baker was a man and that’s him there with a beard [laughs] and he’s got a lady’s name.

Ah.

He’s certainly not a lady. So yes we had lady scientists and in fact during the time that – I suppose in the 1990s -----I happened to notice that we recruited more women than men in our particular unit of – of Lowestoft. So it was one of the early equal opportunity jobs, was a job with CEFAS and MAFF because I don’t think there was any distinction in salary. There was certainly no distinction at sea and if they could – the only distinction might be one of strength but I’ve seen women that could lift more than men [laughs] on occasions at sea. So I wouldn’t say there was any great discrimination at sea between women and men and they all contributed where their expertise and their university training allowed.

[15.26]

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And you’ve said that the – the nuclear waste work came to an end to some extent because the – the crews refused to take the material out anyway so the question of whether this was going to be used as a dump or not – continue to be used as a dump or not went away, and that a different kind of work opened up which I think is the next thing.

That’ll be next :– as I see it ---the next logical step was [pause] happened to be, let’s put it that way, the last piece of the shopping list that had been asked for by the low level waste modellers, [and it] turned out to be the first thing that the climate modellers would want. So as we went from a period when the business was really ‘can we safely deliver low level waste to the seabed at the North Atlantic?’ to the point where that question was overtaken by events: the – the moratorium on sea dumping - we continued to – to try to study the – to measure the Denmark Strait and its overflowing circulation, simply because it was also one of the primary targets of observation for the new science of how does the ocean affect the climate. So that’s the bit that I feel should be described now. it’s more or less, if you were to take its title, in our case our main focus was on what we call the Denmark Strait and the Denmark Strait overflow.

So to repeat myself a little, in the shopping list of unknowns that were handed down to us by the modellers in the ‘80s there was never much doubt that some were more important than others, and assessing the rate of the dense water overflow passing south through Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland was definitely one of these. The reason is clear enough, that only in the Atlantic sector does such saline water pass north to the polar seas in the upper layers of the ocean, and as this inflowing stream cools the resulting overflows in the opposite direction attain a higher density than anywhere else on earth. So overflowing the submarine ridge that exists between Greenland and Scotland, the descent of this cold dense water from the sills of the Denmark Strait and the Faroe Shetland Channel into the North Atlantic: these are the flows that ventilate and renew the deep oceans and so in a very real sense these are the flows that drive the abyssal circulation of the world ocean. I’ve seen it estimated that all the waters of the World Ocean deeper than about 1500 metres, and there’s an awful lot of ocean below that, are ultimately renewed via the Denmark Strait and it’s

112 Bob Dickson Page 113 C1379/56 Track 6 overflow. And of course it’s not too much of a stretch to envisage that the warm saline surface waters passing north, and the cold dense waters passing south at depth, form a coupled wheel-like system or an Ocean Conveyer or a Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is what it’s more usually and more formally called, and perhaps even that this overturning circulation in the Atlantic might form part of a Thermohaline Circulation that is global in extent. So getting a measure, any measure at all, of the rate of the large scale ocean circulation and its variability was clearly important to our modellers in assessing the collective dose that might arise from the sea dumping operation. But its importance went very much further than that because, driven by fluxes of heat and fresh water at the ocean surface, the Thermohaline Circulation I’ve just mentioned is an important mechanism for the global redistribution of heat and salt and is known or suspected to be intimately involved in the major changes of Earth climate. Since the first pioneering modelling work by Frank Bryan at Princeton in 1986 and Syukuro Manabe and Stouffer in 1988 most computer models of how the ocean system will work in a climate with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations predict a weakening of this Thermohaline Circulation in the North Atlantic as the subpolar seas become fresher and warmer.

[20.25]

But the fact remained that until we could measure the rate of this circulation at some convenient point and over a long enough period of time, we could never be sure about whether Thermohaline slowdown is actually underway. So that was the climate argument and many more eyes than ours were turned towards the Denmark Strait, awaiting our chance. For many years the extreme violence of the overflowing stream kept us all at bay. In the end our progress towards measuring the Denmark Strait dense water overflow was made step-wise over two decades, and to see where we contributed I really have to – one has to understand what the early steps were and who they were knocked over by.

So here are the heroes that made the initial steps. The first to make the attempt was Valentine Worthington, Val Worthington of Woods Hole, and in his first heroic deployment that was conducted over a month in the winter of 1967, ----[the] first

113 Bob Dickson Page 114 C1379/56 Track 6 deployment trying to measure the Denmark Strait overflow at the Denmark Strait, ---- none of his moorings survived on the western side of the Strait where the coldest and fastest flows were expected. And the one complete record out of thirty that he recovered from the middle of the straight showed a highly energetic flow of up to three knots where he’d been expecting essentially zero flow. Reflecting on the fact that his array had been funded by the Office of Naval Research he’s famously supposed to have consoled himself on his loss of gear with a statement that ‘at least that’s money that won’t be available for use in Vietnam’ [laughs]. It took another six years for the first successful attempt to be made, by our second hero in this session: Charlie Ross of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography [in Canada]. During the ICES exercise called Overflow ’73, he recovered a remarkable set of twenty-five five-week current meter records from three arrays, north and south of the Denmark Strait sill itself, and he only lost one mooring in the process. So this was really quite an eye opener. His month long records from the stream just south of the sill confirmed this vigorous bottom-intensified flow following along topography, with a core of the current lying halfway up the Slope on the Greenland side, and an average speed of a knot but maximum speed exceeding three. Then it took another three years before the first long term measurements proved possible; Knut Aagaard who was I think then at the NOAA Lab in Seattle, and Sven Malmberg of the Icelandic Institute of Marine Research, they managed to maintain year-long moorings, two of them, from August 1975 to August 1976 as part of what was called the MONA study: Monitoring Overflow to the North Atlantic. They again showed one knot mean and a maximum of over three, but for the first time, these one year records were of course long enough to demonstrate a lack of seasonal fluctuation in either the speed or the temperature of the overflows and these were details were worth getting. They certainly – these moorings certainly were worth their place in even a personal narrative like this for what might be seen in any other field as a fairly halting progress towards measuring this flow over a decade or more is actually – we who took part in it would see that as being a heroic series of steps and the information they produced as significant and a hard won gain.

[24.19]

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And I’m very proud to say that the next major step forward was our own but it took a further decade to achieve it. Borrowing the big new Finnish research vessel Aranda from my friend Pentii Maelkki who was the director of the Finnish Institute of Marine Research, [speaks with accent], “She is in Antarctica just now but I will bring her north for you’’ I remember him saying,’ [laughs]. And he did, and with moorings redesigned for the purpose by my colleague John Read who was responsible for designing the – the largest part of our deep sea moorings, and now able to use the new low-drag Kevlar cables that had just become available, I then completed the first successful recovery of a year- long multiple mooring array spanning across the full width of the Denmark Strait overflow in 1985/86. So it’s a long struggle from Val Worthington’s first attempts in ’67 to success, largely success, in 85/86. Expanding our effort to – right away to include Jens Meincke’s team at the University of Hamburg, he was the professor there, and Pentii’s group in Helsinki, our UK, Germany and Finnish team continued to regard these arrays as our joint responsibility under one or other EEC programme with minimal losses ever since. So we passed through something called the VEINS programme (EC MAST3-VEINS) [Variability of Exchanges in Northern Seas] in 1997 to 2000. Then the ASOF project 2000 to ’05 or ’06 [Arctic Subarctic Ocean Fluxes]. And most recently the EC-DAMOCLES project to 2010.

[26.12]

Typically our annual deployments by these three groups of people have taken the form of a picket fence array of seven or eight current meter moorings set across the South East Greenland slope in a place where it intercepts the descending dense plume off Angmagssalik, South East Greenland, and since that’s 500 kilometres or so south of the Denmark Strait sill we were really measuring the overflow transport after most of the local waters that are entrained into the descending plume had been recruited. So it’s measuring the overflow plus entrainment which is really what we wanted to measure.

[26.53]

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And as we make mention of our own successful arrays this must be as good a time as any to record, for the uninitiated, what must surely be among the greatest thrills on Earth which is the gradually evolving six step process that one goes through in successfully recovering a deep sea [current meter] mooring. I think you have to be there and to have several hundred thousand pounds worth of gear depending on the outcome to achieve this full sensation. But I think it’s worth trying to describe it. First of all arriving on station after a year away, the first question you pose is: is it there? And in such vigorous flows as these, this isn’t the question that can be taken for granted. It’s soon answered though; if you run out the hydrophone as soon as the ship stops, as we always did, pinging at the specific interrogation frequency of this particular acoustic release that we are looking for, the steady beat of the return signal picked up as a trace on the precision depth recorder, as well as audibly all around the lab, is our immediate indication that it’s there and has heard us. Good, that’s step one. What’s more from the small separation in range, visible on the PDR, between the direct signal from the pinger and that arriving via on a slightly longer path by bouncing up from the seabed, we can see that the mooring is still standing up as it’s meant to do. In other words that the mooring line is taught between the subsurface buoyancy and the anchor weight and so our inline instrument should be working, not part of some jumbled heap on the bottom. Then by the IOS system of release that we habitually used we would then switch to the cut frequency and continue pinging until we hear the signal from the release double up in frequency, and that’s a wonderful moment in itself; it’s going from [says ticks in a rhythm] to suddenly [taps table faster] and that’s the point (step 2) at which you ---that’s the point at which you know that the release has heard our cut command. Step three is the important one and we can’t do more than continue to send the cut frequency until the pyro release is triggered and releases the small latch to cut the mooring free of its anchor. If it does, the PDR immediately tells us that the mooring is coming up from the growing acoustic separation or distance between the direct signal that’s coming to us from the acoustic release on the bottom of the rig as it rises, and the indirect signal coming to us via the indirect path from bouncing off the seabed. So as this happens and as the mooring rises, the pattern on the PDR develops into the familiar Y shaped trace [from signals] that were once together, the signal via the seabed and the signal via the unit. As they separate the – this familiar Y shaped trace develops on our precision depth

116 Bob Dickson Page 117 C1379/56 Track 6 recorder. Then after a wait of about an hour while the buoyancy hauls the instrument and – instruments and mooring wire up from the depths, the surfacing of this large raft of glass spheres in their yellow hard hats will be obvious from the bridge and from the PDR trace where the pinger to seabed range has now stopped increasing. And if darkness or poor visibility prevents the bridge from spotting it, as it often did for example in a fog, then we move off in search, conning the ship from the PDR in the direction that most rapidly shortens the range to the pinger signal. That process ends with a grapnel thumping into the raft of buoyancy spheres as they roil in a tangle alongside and from that point to the winding of the mooring onto the net drum winch by the crew in the case of the Cirolana the mooring recovery is very soon completed and step four is achieved. But there are two more steps. That when the rack in the main lab is full of the pressure cylinders from each current meter, the end caps are popped open and the data storage unit of each is hauled out in turn. In the old days when the data was stored on Mag Tape, it was relatively easy, well very easy to tell, as the storage units were – data storage units were drawn from their cases whether or to what extent we’d achieved step five: a full tape indicating a full year of some sort of record. But only after the tapes had been processed into listings of hourly data, each indicating speed and direction and temperature of the flow at hourly intervals of time, do we know we’ve achieved step six, -----that the records made sense. So many species of gremlin can intervene in this year long process that we can and have been thwarted at any stage in it. So a full recovery of instruments and a complete record from each is a mark of high achievement and it was, as I used to tell John Read, ‘what your annual report mark is based on!’ and though it would have taken him most of the year in preparation to achieve it, he rarely failed to do so.

[32.19]

After that initial recovery in 1986, so that was the first array, full array of maybe eight moorings across the overflow, after a one year deployment. After that initial recovery in ’86 progress was very fast and we with our project collaborators quickly built up a detailed picture of the overflow, it’s sources, rates and pathways. Updating an earlier account in Nature, our main 1994 paper represented the first successful attempt to describe the downstream evolution of mean speed, depth and entrainment in the

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Denmark Strait overflow; the first to establish the variability of the overflow current in space and time; and by reviewing the likely contribution of the other three main constituents of North Atlantic deep water production, it was the first to propose a transport scheme for these deepest and densest waters throughout the northern North Atlantic. As such it was gratifying to find these results described as ‘very influential’ by one of the greatest explorers of the ocean circulation, Bill Schmitz of Woods Hole, as he did in 1996 in his own paper.

Not all of our findings were instantly believed though. One of the most surprising was our conclusion that we’d proposed in 1990 and reemphasised in ’94, that in the longer term, the Denmark Strait overflow transport was essentially steady. Who would have believed that? I like Carl Wunsch’s [Professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT] take on this result in 1992. It was in a lecture he gave in Scripps that I heard and he subsequently published in Oceanography . And what he said was this, ‘The ocean is a turbulent fluid in an intimate contact with another turbulent fluid: the atmosphere. Although I’m unaware of any formal theorems on the subject, experience with turbulent systems suggest it’s very unlikely that any components of such a complex non linear system can actually remain fully steady. Why then does the oceanographic literature have so many papers expressing surprise when some element of the circulation appears to be changing? To the contrary, expressions of surprise ought to be reserved for a determination that something has not changed over some time interval, for example the recent three year results of Dickson et al for the North Atlantic overflows.’ [laughs] I was quite impressed with that take on it. But it did seem to stand up, and Peter Saunders’ [IOS] complete careful reworking of our Angmagssalik dataset in 2001 for the WOCE volume prompted essentially the same conclusion as we had drawn. As Saunders observes, ‘Before these measurements were made a conjecture that the overflow would show such overall steadiness would have been met with derision.’ The powerful team of James Girton and Tom Sanford and Rolf Kaese later supported this conclusion with their modern rapid high resolution expendable current profiler [XCP] and expendable conductivity temperature depth probe [XCTD] survey of the Denmark Strait sill which, to quote them, ‘Added more evidence to support the view of the Denmark Strait overflow as an unchanging, hydraulically controlled flow on timescales longer than a few days’.

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[35.49]

Though the overflow transport was demonstrated to be relatively unchanging, its hydrographic properties though (that’s its temperature and it’s salinity) proved far from steady and by tracking hydrographic anomalies both upstream and down, we were able to identify the primary source of this variability in changes 2,500 kilometres upstream in the Fram Strait, three years previously. We used this fact to make a series of successful predictions of the abyssal density of the Labrador Sea a further one year later downstream.

Later still, we were able to demonstrate in Nature that the entire system of overflow and entrainment that ventilates the deep Atlantic had undergone a remarkably rapid and remarkably steady freshening over the past four decades contributing to a full- depth freshening of the Labrador Sea that was the largest change ever observed in the modern oceanographic record anywhere . And in 2003 with Ruth Curry we introduced a quite new idea, also in Nature, that the expected change in the Thermohaline Circulation may arise from a general ocean scale restructuring of salinity as a result of a change in the water cycle. Acceleration of the global water cycle is the expected accompaniment of global warming and we produced a paper that seemed to show, on the only section that we could ever have achieved through the north and south Atlantic, the only one with enough data, that such an acceleration of the water cycle seemed to be underway.

[37.31]

Now it would be quite wrong to convey the impression that we did it all in describing the Denmark Strait overflow and that’s certainly not my intention. Many, many observers, theoreticians and modellers have since been responsible for building our present detailed picture of how this important element of the ocean circulation behaves. But we can justifiably lay claim to have contributed some of the important initial steps in this understanding and we can be proud of that. And in fact our contribution didn’t go either unnoticed or unrewarded because in 1998 at the AGU

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Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego I became the seventeenth person to be presented with the Albatross Award in recognition of this achievement, becoming the fourth British recipient after John Swallow in 1960, Sir Edward Bullard in 1976 and Sir George Deacon in 1982. To quote the citation: ‘Robert Dickson, for attempting to stem the flow through the Demark Strait with a weir of current meters. It was a yeoman effort with ninety-one instruments on twenty stations arranged in three arrays.’ So this was surely a high spot in my career.

[38.46]

The Albatross Award itself originated in an after dinner conversation in 1959 between John Knauss of Scripps, Gordon Lill and Arthur Maxwell in which the lack of awards and prizes for oceanographers was discussed and deplored and solved. They would invent a prize for oceanographers, and they founded the American Miscellaneous Society to administer it. John Knauss appropriated an elegant elderly dusty Laysan albatross from the bowels of the Scripps museum, Walter and Judy Monk had a cage built for it in Tijuana, Mexico and the award was born. From the start it was intended to come at some intellectual cost to the awardee. To prove his worth the awardee had to be smart enough to get it home and to test this it had to be presented far from his or her home turf and the bird and its case were intentionally made far too big to get through the security systems at airports.

[39.53]

In my own case this involved persuading the head of customer relations at American Airlines, a woman with the unforgettable name of Marianne Sipperlee, to grant it a free seat of its own all the way through to London, and by using the then director of Scripps, Joris Gieskes who happened to be on the same flight, as blocker and explainer, we got it there. Actually the hero of the hour wasn’t the head of customer relations of American in Dallas but the local customer relations man at San Diego, one of whose names was Keith. I can’t remember whether it was his first name or his second name [laughs]. It wouldn’t have worked without Keith. Initially my dealings with him were very strained. There didn’t seem to be a good moment that Friday

120 Bob Dickson Page 121 C1379/56 Track 6 evening to butt in with my Albatross in hand into an intimate conversation he was having with his boyfriend as the latter flew off to Lake Tahoe, but once he got his wild up Keith was unstoppable and invaluable. When his overall boss, this Marianne Sipperlee person, told him on the phone from Dallas that she had, ‘No recollection,’ of offering me a seat for the Albatross, he said, ‘I have your letter to Dr Dickson right here and I demand that you should honour what you offered,’; and so she did and a seat was found on the flight, I hope without actually having anybody bounced off it. Keith also told me to leave the bird right there and he would spirit it around security by the time of the flight the next morning, and so he did bless him, and in the Albatross Annals, there should be a place for enablers like Keith. My troubles weren’t quite over. Even though the big bird in the cage had a cloth cover it wasn’t long before some sour-faced woman on the flight started to putter and it was Joris Gieskes who’d realised that the woman thought the bird was live and he disabused her. She then started muttering about albatrosses, alive or dead, stuffed or not, being deadly unlucky things to her fellow passengers, and so it was something of a relief when she got off in Dallas. Anyway my Albatross Award was and remains a signal honour. The collected literature that surrounds the bird records the fact that when the great Roger Ravelle, the founder of so many oceanographic institutions, was honoured with the highest honour of the American Geophysical Union - the Bowie Medal - he said in his acceptance speech that there was only one award he would rather have: the Albatross. And as it says in the paperwork, those members of the selection committee that were present took note and after a proper delay voted him in.

[42.29]

So what now of the Denmark Strait and its overflow? Actually we live in exciting times, we think it’s finally going to slow down. The Atlantic current that flows into the Arctic through the Fram Strait has recently warmed to such an extent that as it circuits the Arctic and drains south again through the Nordic seas it is currently predicted to have the right characteristics of depth and density to slow the overflow, and simulations by Michael Karcher’s group at AWI Bremerhaven predict its arrival, the arrival of these anomalous conditions, at the Denmark Strait sill between about 2016 and ’18. You may be sure that under the coordination of the present ASOF-

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Group chairman, Tom Haine, we will all be foregathered with our instruments to watch it pass, and if it meets the predictions of Karcher’s NAOSIM model, the overflow should significantly slow down as it does so.

[43.26]

Could you describe what in particular was involved in laying out the current meters in this particular place? We’ve talked about deploying pieces of oceanographic equipment in various places, but what was particularly difficult or challenging or interesting or particular about putting them there, this – these arrays of current meters?

Well the – the thing that made it difficult of course was the speed of the flow and [pause] it made it difficult for two reasons. As Val Worthington found, if you didn’t have thin enough mooring cable it just blew them away. The drag of inch or inch- and-a- half cable would be quite enough to not see them ever again. But we had the answer to that in the Kevlar one centimetre very strong cable that we used throughout for our moorings there. And so in a sense technology came to our assistance. The – I think there would still be an effect of the flow, in so far as you had to have a lot of buoyancy as well as a lot of anchor weight to keep the mooring line, even one centimetre Kevlar, tense and taut and with the current meters working correctly along their length. And when you put a lot of buoyancy in, that in itself gives a lot of drag to the upper part of the mooring. So what we had to learn to do was to disperse the – distribute the buoyancy along the mooring line and our moorings were therefore - certainly had most of the buoyancy at the top but quite a lot of buoyancy at places in between. Even so, I suspect that, ----in fact we know that, ----quite a lot of knockdown happened and it’s a matter of analysing the data with this in mind so that you have a pressure sensor on the current meter and you can tell how much knockdown is going on.Actually that’s going to be more of a problem the higher up you go on the mooring line, ‘cause near the bottom it simply hasn’t got all that space to knockdown.

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But it’s always going to be a difficult place to moor anything and so the – the thing that I think saves our records and makes them useful is the fact that the flow speeds are similar over quite a large slab of depth near the bottom, that most of our instruments were in this layer and that if there was a little bit of knockdown or one mooring – or a mooring would come up with a current meter that hadn’t worked, ---- you were able to correlate between the two instruments above and below to fill in any gaps that that missing instrument would have caused. So we were saved in a way by the slab-like nature of this violent flow and we could make interpolations where the data for one reason and another didn’t exist. We’ve seen just about everything we can imagine in terms of strange pieces of record in these flows through the Denmark Strait. We’ve even seen records where for six months the flow will show all the symptoms of changing current as we – that we expect. Then all of a sudden the current meter would appear to die, the flow would not be – would be zero for maybe a month or two and then it would come banging back in again. How that happens or how many of these strange happenings in the record occur nobody will ever know of course; you’re not down there looking when they happen. But some things you would think were practically impossible did happen and we had to adjust for these and interpolate across these points and make full one year records out of them as best we may. But the dataset I have to say was one that held up, [in] that if we found an unusual event on one instrument on one mooring, ------for example we found some very fresh events passing through the moored array in 2004, ------that weird event would be present in the moorings that the Finns put out or that the Germans put out using their instruments as well as ours. In fact what I’m saying is that many of the anomalies that we observed and worried about were anomalies that were present in all of the records from all of the moorings on all of the – on the whole array. So we have to accept that these were just happenings and try to devise mechanisms for them.

Which doesn’t that make them more significant that they occur across the instruments?

Oh sure, the – the – once you’ve convinced yourself that that’s real, in other words that the numbers you’re getting are data and not just numbers [laughs], then it’s highly significant and very useful to have an extreme anomaly going through because they’re

123 Bob Dickson Page 124 C1379/56 Track 6 usually the ones that you can trace from somewhere upstream and follow downstream somewhere. No, that’s absolutely correct that it’s usually the extreme events that you can follow through our rather inadequate hydrographic record. Because of course our hydrography was only kind of annual:----every time we went to service the moorings we would do a hydrographic survey. But that still meant that we were doing hydrography around that area on an annual basis, and filling in further detail throughout the year using Standard Section data from the Icelanders nearby, or from the Woods Hole team when they went up there, you’d collect the data together as you would expect. Everyone was very collaborative in the sharing of that data. And so would you – but still and all you would find that the hydrographic data for the year was very much more patchy than the current meter data and it was therefore very useful to see in this record, which was far more hole than sock, that something was big enough to be tracked from one section to another through even this [pause] record of hydrography to north and south that had so many holes in it.

What did you mean when you said there might be some knockdown?

Ah, knockdown is simply that instead of – what you’re trying to do of course is to have a [pause] a taut mooring line sitting on the seabed with a big anchor chain running straight upwards to buoyancy, with current meters sitting in between recording the flow at the depth you deployed them at. If you’ve got a violent flow, the – there is no guarantee that the mooring won’t – that the drag contributed by the buoyancy won’t knock the mooring over. It doesn’t knock it down but it – what we mean by ‘knockdown’ is that the mooring will adopt some sort of shape whereby the surface buoyancy is depressed in the water column. Maybe by 50 or 100 metres; and that could mean that the current meters are no longer recording at the depth you think they are but maybe 50 or 100 metres below that. As I said the – this won’t apply near the seabed where much of our interest lay, (that’s where the fastest flows were), because there simply isn’t enough space down there to knock it down by more than a few metres [laughs]. But certainly the upper instruments on our mooring line will have ‘knocked down’ considerably and by that I mean by 50 or 100 metres, or so. that would have been – it would have been possible to find out where these were and make allowances for them in analysing the dataset.

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[52.47]

And can you remind us how many of these moorings were set out across this space each year?

Seven or eight. Of course it depended on the losses from the previous year. As you’ll imagine, when you went out there it – you weren’t aware of how many of the moorings you would get back and it’s no use bringing them all home and sitting them on the shelf and cosseting them and changing their batteries and – and servicing these moorings at home because that means you’ve lost a year’s data. So what you did was when you got the moorings back you serviced them on the ship, you put new batteries in them, you of course made sure that the – that there were no damage – there was no damage to the fins or the rotor or anything like that that you needed to pay attention to, and you deployed them again. Now the fact of the matter is that if you lost the mooring you no longer had that one to put back in again, so you’d tend to take an extra mooring along with you and deploy that in the place of a lost one; but if you lost two then you’ve – you’ve got seven mooring stations next year instead of eight. And if you lost three then you’ve maybe got only five. So we did find that there were certain places on the Slope off South East Greenland where we were more unlucky than others. And we – conversely we found that ‘UK 1’, which was right in the core of the overflow, had a charmed life and we managed to recover long, long time-series from that one without very much damage at all. So the business of how many moorings you put out in your picket fence was largely a matter of how many you lost when you got there, because they would essentially be turned around and redeployed with improvements, modifications and servicings in between.

[54.58]

Where did the picket fence description come from? Is that your own?

I think that’s what oceanographers tend to call a line of moorings. Since our array was designed to cover one particular flow and we know that that flow was aligned with

125 Bob Dickson Page 126 C1379/56 Track 6 topography, the picket fence that we used was one which ran straight down the continental Slope off East Greenland. Of course the dense water didn’t quite stick to a contour as it deepened into the deep ocean, it would cross the contours. It was a bit salutary I suppose, once we’d worked out precisely what the contour-crossing angle of this flow was, to realise that the great Professor Bowden in Liverpool had calculated the same contour-crossing angle of five degrees that we discovered; he’d calculated this theoretically in 1950 without going anywhere near Denmark Strait and its overflow [laughs], so we rather took our hats off to him. The – the angle at which the flow deepens into the deep ocean across the contours depends on the friction of the bed and, to start with at any rate, as it starts to overflow it also depends on what we call ‘entrainment friction’ where you’re dragging in a whole lot of water from the surrounding ambient watermass that it’s flowing----, that it’s descending through. So to start with you’ve got bottom friction and entrainment friction and this causes it to cross the contours of Greenland’s Slope rather faster. Once it’s done its entrainment and the flow has become more steady, then the contour-crossing angle was five degrees and that’s what Professor Bowden had the nerve to predict for us in 1950.

[57.08]

And what does each current meter look like?

Well –

I meant – I realise there’s a string of them and they’re at different depths, but just taking one of them at a particular depth, what does that look like, the flow meter?

Well the current meter itself is ‘in wire’, which means that you have to have, as an integral part of it, a stainless steel rod that is coupled up with a shackle to the mooring wire above it and by another shackle to the mooring wire below it. So then you have to clamp the current meter to this rod and that has to be done in such a way that the current meter is free to swing; so that tends to be done in a – a kind of gimballed mount. On one side of the – of the mooring wire will be the cylinder, that contains the – that has the Savonius rotor or other different kinds of rotor on top of the thing

126 Bob Dickson Page 127 C1379/56 Track 6 that are – whose revolutions are describing the speed of the flow. Inside, starting with Mag Tape and ending up with a solid state data unit, you have the place where the data is stored inside the cylinder, and the cylinder of course has to be proof against six or 7,000 metres of water pressure because you might use it anywhere on Earth. So that’s the, let’s say, the ‘business end’ of the current meter. On the other side of the mount that is attached to the current meter suspension rod is a rather long fin in the case of the Aanderaa current meter, which was shortened in subsequent marks of Aanderaa instrument, which directs the current meter into the flow. So I would say that the answer to your question is that something maybe – a cylinder with a fin linked in through a vertical steel rod into the mooring wire so that it hangs as part of the mooring, not off the mooring but ‘in wire’ as we would call it.

That’s only one current meter. It tends to be the one that we used. We were never going to get much money to replace the instruments that we used as our work horse in the North East Atlantic with anything more recent, just because they were more recent. So we tended to use the same Aanderaa RCM4 or 5 instruments for quite a while. But gradually towards the end of our – of my involvement with the programme we were beginning to get more modern current meters but they essentially were – had the same components as mine. They probably did far more, and they probably had much more storage of data, but they were essentially the same sort of principle.

And how did you then determine these – the changes in salinity and – and temperature that came later? Using different equipment?

Yes, we had both different and the same equipment. We had a – a salinity sensor on [only] some of the instruments because you had to pay for that; but we also had some [specialised] salinity sensors:-- ‘microcats’ we called them ----which were specifically designed to measure salinity accurately on the mooring; these microcats would be deployed in between the current meters as a data source in their own right and as a check on the quality of the salinity data that was coming from the Aanderaa instruments. The temperature sensor on the Aanderaa instruments was remarkably good anyway so we didn’t need to double up our measurement of temperature. But in fact the microcats had a temperature sensor on them as well so we tended to have a

127 Bob Dickson Page 128 C1379/56 Track 6 range of instruments that could give us salinity and temperature ‘in wire’ on the same moorings and the – only the cost of the microcats would prevent us from putting out many units of them. We tended to have five or seven across the whole array because they were quite expensive things.

[1.02.07]

The – the problem of course was one of calibration. When you’re out at sea redeploying what you’ve just recovered, then that’s not a good way of recalibrating instruments. You don’t get much of a chance to recalibrate the instruments between one deployment exercise and another. So deliberately of course you’d bring back some of the instruments every year and in our case we would probably send them off for calibration to the factory that made the microcats. Similarly with Aanderaa we would send the salinity sensors to them for calibration.

And what kinds of damage did you observe on these instruments once pulled up? You said that you saw a full of range of problems –

Oh yes [laughs]. You could almost depend upon it that whatever was the problem one year it would never be seen again.You would invariably check for it and not find it but some other gremlin would creep in from somewhere. Just to give you one example of this, the worst example was when we were laying instruments down the east side of the Mid Atlantic Ridge in the eastern basin of the Atlantic, where the flows were rather slow, and [pause] if I organise my thoughts what had happened was this. We had demanded pressure cases for the current meters from Aanderaa that were made of a strong enough material to go down to great depth. And because these pressure cases were non standard, Aanderaa didn’t include our current meters in the ‘all-temperature check’ that they normally ran in their [pause] heat-control baths in - in the factory. And in one particular case that :– ---I may have mentioned to you that the rotor on top of the current meter had its rotations transferred to inside the case by means of a small rotating magnet that rotated in a chamber in the end cap, so there was no physical link between the rotor and the inside of the case but there was a magnet which was going around and around following a magnet on the rotor, if you follow me. Now this

128 Bob Dickson Page 129 C1379/56 Track 6 magnet on the inside, in its little cylindrical port, was mounted off centre by mistake by Aanderaa. If he had subjected it to his normal ‘all temperature check’ he would have realised that as the case cooled and contracted it’d just touch one of these magnets after another, because that’s what happened when we deployed them. [Immersed] in the deep Atlantic, when the cases cooled, the pressure cap contracted just a touch, the magnets just touched the side of their ports so they were now no longer free to rotate and so we had no data after the first hour of deployment until the first hour after recovery on the deck when they all started blowing around in the wind and recording flow again. So for an entire year, I think eleven instruments or even more had this problem. It was a problem that Aanderaa had caused; they were very apologetic, but it was our fault for having insisted on pressure cases that were made somewhere else so that he couldn’t actually give them an all temperature check. Now you may depend upon it that every year after that John Read would have looked, you know, visually at these magnets and made sure that they were central in their little port and plenty of room to rotate but we never – of course we never ----found that again because everyone at Aanderaa would have been doing the same thing [laughs]. So what tended to happen as I say was that when a gremlin struck it tended to be one which you’d never see again; you’d watch for it all the time, but they were fairly inventive these gremlins in thinking of ways of getting at us without us predicting their arrival. It didn’t happen too often. I mean it would be wrong to get the impression that our data was a mess. It wasn’t; we had a – a consistently high data recovery from a consistently high number of possible instruments. But when things did go wrong you had to smile ruefully at times that some damn unlucky thing had gone on; usually [you] could see what it was but not always.

[1.07.19]

And when it was magnetic tape that was recording the data within these things, before as you say solid state recorders in there, what did the data look like once you’d pulled the thing up and recovered it, what – physically, visually, what did the data look like?

Well that was where John Read would first translate the data into lists: columns of figures in the early days on paper records, and [apply] the calibrations that applied to

129 Bob Dickson Page 130 C1379/56 Track 6 each instrument. Each instrument had a specific set of calibration figures to be incorporated in the data processing and I really wouldn’t see the [rough] dataset. Ken Medler would have a look at it after that; he was our data man for the deep sea and he always went on these deep sea cruises. And it was only after Ken pronounced himself [satisfied] ---– I used a computer programme that I’d brought back from Scripps, pretty well intact, the Vecplot routine that I brought back from Scripps, and they kindly handed over; we used that for years and years with great success – --and only after Ken had been through it and made sure that as I said numbers were not just numbers, they were data, would he ever release the thing to me. He had – he was a very good man to have in that position because Ken Medler and his sceptical eye, no matter how much I wanted to have the data from that instrument, if he did not like it yet or hadn’t satisfied himself that it was a proper record of the anomaly that I was looking at and getting excited about, if he hadn’t convinced himself that it was real and not just some sticking of the instrument or something wrong with it, I wouldn’t get that data from Ken. And that’s a very good position [to be in; a] very good sort of service to have at your disposal: somebody who won’t give you it until he’s satisfied with it, providing he’s the sensible kind of guy that Ken Medler was, and John Read. It was only when these two people had checked it out and made sure it was data that they handed it over to the likes of scientists to – to interpret.

[1.09.45]

And what – what was their job title then, those two figures?

We had a unified promotion system. where In the old days there would be – and actually I think it was a better system, ----they had the Scientific Officer stream (usually the people that had been to college and had degrees and they would be the people who would be called PIs on cruises): the scientific officer, higher scientific officer, senior scientific officer, principle scientific officer, deputy chief scientific officer. God knows where they go after that. And there would be the Experimental Officer grades and they would have the same parallel structure. It wasn’t as though one stream was always paid more than the other, there was a lot of overlap in pay but it did mean that you wouldn’t have – that an Experimental Officer grade would have a

130 Bob Dickson Page 131 C1379/56 Track 6 better chance in the old system of convincing a promotion board that he had fulfilled more than his due in – in any promotion board. Whereas once they were unified, [in the merging] of the two streams, I did get the impression that the Scientific Officer grade always had the advantage over the Experimental Officer grade, as used to be, because we had papers in Nature and all sorts of things to adduce as evidence that we were worth promotion. Whereas the fact remains that there was just as big a reason to promote the good qualities of the Experimental Officer grade as the Scientific Officer grade. So it was one of these things that I suppose was done for equality but I was never very convinced that it was a good thing to do.

[1.11.46]

And so once you’d been handed the data that was thought to be an actual measure of something that happened rather than an instrumental error, what did you then do with it, you mentioned the name of a programme that you –

Well Vecplot would do all sorts of plots. For example it would show the time dependence [of flow speeds] for the whole year at each instrument and at each depth, and the temperature that went with it. All the other datasets would be comparable one to another in graphic form. They would plot one – you would have, for example, plots one against the other of the two main directions of flow, of u against v let’s say, and you would often see an incipient problem with a current meter or its suspension making itself known to you first in these plots. You would get a scatter plot of the – the speed against the azimuth bearing that the instrument was swinging on so you would know instantly what the [dominant] direction of the flow was at that point; and very often that was the – the flow was always going to be along the local contours but you didn’t know what the local bathymetry was, so that was often the angle that you resolved the flow along; that was the one which you used when you calculated the speed of the overflow at that point. So although it’s been many a year since I’ve looked through Ken’s large reams of Vecplot, it was very quickly apparent from the Vecplot output what was right and what was wrong [in the dataset] and what was characteristic [direction] of the flow. It was always very a good routine from that point of view. There were still some areas where you had doubts that something was

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– something was creeping into this particular instrument’s records that wasn’t seen [in the instruments] above or below, and you naturally kept these in mind, and Ken kept them in mind, and John Read kept them in mind as we recovered that same instrument year after year. Of course if something convinced them that there was a – that the data wasn’t data but there was some error creeping in they would allow for it. But that was the – so the first use of the dataset frankly was to ensure - give us a visual check on what was the average flow, what was the maximum and minimum flow, what was the histogram of flow [directions or speeds] at the point that you were measuring; and if there were anomalous readings in the record they would flag them up and you would have a chance to consider them. But we had a good team and a very experienced one. After our many years of working the East Atlantic from the position of our low level waste programme, I would think we had pretty well as much experience or more than anyone else in the deep ocean. So in that sense the – the MAFF philosophy of becoming expert ourselves in a particular line of work and the sort of expertise on which the decision, ---for example, to [continue the] sea dump was based - that decision was vindicated I think because very quickly we had as much expertise as anybody else in that – in that craft.

[1.16.01]

It tended to [pause] Government cuts and a lack of capital money tended to be slowly creeping in on us so that if we – so that we knew that if we lost too much gear, we wouldn’t be – they wouldn’t be terribly pleased and – and allow us automatically to replace it. So sometimes if a mooring was lost it wouldn’t be replaced and the array would shrink a bit, and that tended to be the distinction between our array and the [pause] the big-funded agencies in the States like Woods Hole. They would arrive in the Denmark Strait, or these days they would have [with] eight or ten moorings and they would have very modern systems. They would all be brand new. There would be many more instruments per line and often then ---– or nowadays ----that would make all the difference between [them] getting them back and [us] getting them back if we were using old equipment. So you did tend to feel eventually the effect of being ‘first up’ in the Atlantic; that you were working eventually with older gear than other people and [with] rather less of it than you should have. Certainly there was [pause]

132 Bob Dickson Page 133 C1379/56 Track 6 there were certain pieces of instrumentation that we could have done with at the end that we felt we couldn’t afford. Still we made our contribution and it was a good one.

[1.18.02]

Were other people doing this work at the same time that you were doing it?

Well there were other people; for example the Faroese and the Norwegians were working with the Scots in the Faroe Shetland Channel, the flows around the Faroes where the other overflow at the other end of the Greenland-Scotland ridge was going through. It didn’t attain such a great depth in the Atlantic, in the end, and so the Denmark Strait one was more important from the point of the abyssal flow. But the ‘North East Atlantic Deep Water’, as it’s called, coming out of the Faroe Bank Channel was still important. Now these people, funded in the Faeroe’s, funded by the Nordic Council, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, they never seemed to have too much of a problem with investing in the systems that they would need to make sure of measuring these fast flows. And what they tended to [do]– and what they won on really--- was the – they built huge trawl-proof concrete bevel-edged platforms in which they put instruments that were newer than the ones we had, which were – which made the measurement by acoustic means. So in the same sort of velocity of flow, in fact rather stronger flows than we had, they were usually able to get this – their equipment back and they made an excellent job of measuring the overflow through the Faroe bank Channel. Whereas we never really could [pause] .....we could never really match them in some aspects of measuring the flow, for example the flow thickness. We simply didn’t have enough equipment to bracket the top of the overflow itself. They could do it acoustically and we couldn’t do it with our more conventional current meters spaced out as they were on our mooring line.

[1.20.25]

Where was your money coming from for your – for this work?

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Our money would come from the MAFF vote originally and from DEFRA more recently. But [though] we never really felt that we had a shortage of it; we were always well aware that if we lost too much gear we would not be encouraged to replace it [laughs] and we we’re also well aware on an annual basis that anything that we might want as brand new equipment that was coming out and may be used in Norway or Faeroes, that we wouldn’t be encouraged to go that route. So our vote was from DEFRA and still within CEFAS that would be the case [CEFAS is an agency within DEFRA].

[End of Track 6]

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Track 7

Well so far I’ve been mostly talking about the science of what I do and the people that inspired it. I think it’s appropriate though that instead of discussing houses and homes as we go along I should give them their own time slot in this discourse [laughs] and the reason is this: that houses and homes are after all where your lifelong friendships and your experience of life are developed in the days of our youth. And later on where ones family developed into the way it is today.Both are worth much more than a passing mention in anybody’s life. But rather than attempt a complete list which would be boring for everybody and probably for myself as well, I’d like to pick out three contrasting examples from it. First of all bachelor life in Mancroft Towers, Oulton Broad [near Lowestoft in Suffolk] and that would be the ‘60s. Secondly life with the McNally’s in Encinitas California, and thirdly my present and past family life in my home in Elm Tree Road, Lowestoft. Even with just these three the objective is not to describe the whole of every day life but to illustrate three or four separate episodes in particular that are memorable and unmissable, at any rate to me.

[01.31]

First the cottage, Mancroft Towers, in the late ‘60s. Early on of course the reason why we develop friendships that last so long comes from a shared experience of events that might range from the happy to the frankly terrifying and might even start off with one end and end up with the other. I’m impressed looking back on these early days how many times through innocence or over optimism we would totally fail to spot the arrival on the scene of the thin end of some wedge or other that was bound to lead to trouble, or more likely the thin ends of a succession of wedges arriving in waves to disturb our peace. I will have no trouble at all finding examples. After initial spells in digs near the lab, Alan Jones, the turbot man and I moved in the ‘60s to the cottage of Mancroft Towers which was a decaying red brick pile in the wooded fringes of Oulton Broad overlooking the Somerleyton Marshes, where we joined, or were joined by, a group of junior petroleum engineers from the Shell base at Lowestoft: Ian Dunlop, John Carter, Howard Brain. The main house was occupied by the owners, Nicholas and Renee Back and by old Mr Edward, a strange old chap who

135 Bob Dickson Page 136 C1379/56 Track 7 argued some mystical connections between the lengths of the internal passageways of the great pyramid of Cheops in feet and inches and the events of the life of Christ in years, and who had constructed a scale model of the Darjeeling railway in our back woods for us to trip over. There were events aplenty and usually it is the dire embarrassments that come to mind. Here are two toe-curling examples in which the ends of the wedge when they arrived could hardly have been thinner and which certainly went unnoticed till their consequences hove in sight. Thin end one I would say was the midsummer party and its midwinter sequel. The first of these problems arose innocently enough, as they all do, in the form of a wooden crate of a dozen of wine from an oil industry contractor called FOREX, which naturally prompted thoughts of a midsummer party, and from that the organisation of a lavish spread of food and drink was the work of a few days. Amazing to Alan Jones and myself at the lab: the amazement was that the Shell people when they arrived at the door for a party were rich enough to bring along bottles of scotch rather than the usual Blue Nun that was more usual at lab parties [laughs]. But the main thing was the abundance of food that we managed to achieve with the – the blessing of the Shell guys [laughs]. Three turkeys ringed the table and in the middle of it there was an absolutely huge fresh fruit salad in a monster ancient bowl three feet across that we’d borrowed off the wall of the house to put it in. This was so big that the three whole pineapples perched on the top looked like the proverbial peas on a drum. The reader is – is to be advised the thin end is already present in this mix somewhere undetected. The fact was that everyone was so stuffed towards the end of the main buffet that very little of the fruit salad was shifted, and removal of the whole shebang to the kitchen for use on our morning cornflakes seemed the obvious thing to do. Eventually of course not much was taken and it started to rot and from there its removal to sit under the mimosa tree in the conservatory was the work of an instant. As it started to smell, the placing of the wooden Forex case on top to kill the smell seemed an obvious thing to do; and come the chills of mid winter, [so was or were] Howard Brain climbing into the crate to kick the wooden ends out to rekindle the Aga, and then the whoosh as the medieval bowl gave way and the tidal wave of rot swept across the floor. Finally, and inevitably, the almost to be expected unannounced arrival of Mrs Back the owner as we sat there Seccotine-ing bits of medieval bowl back together. And that – I go over

136 Bob Dickson Page 137 C1379/56 Track 7 that in my head every now and again, and I still can’t see where anything went wrong at all [laughs].

Thin end two was a much more terrifying fiasco, but again it was very hard to spot. It was the fiasco of the Shell flight and its – when I’m dead and opened it’ll be written somewhere on my viscera. It was 1968, Ian Dunlop and his lovely Australian fiancée Margaret Shannon were to be married in Kilbirnie Scotland, they were our flatmates, and how could we afford the fare. ‘Don’t worry,’ says John Carter of Shell, ‘I’ll put you on the Shell flight to Aberdeen as an oceanographer bound for the rigs. A large number of Shell folk are going, nobody will notice,’. So on the morning in question we turned up at a misty Ellough airfield just south of Lowestoft to find nobody there. John Carter is pushed by me into the little hut they maintained there to enquire why and was told, ‘ Oh the trip has been cancelled for most of the passengers as a meeting had suddenly been called at the Shell base at Lowestoft. But its okay the plane is still coming for the oceanographer,’ at which time a four engine plane, I think it was a Heron, landed at Ellough airfield. What do you do next? John Carter said, ‘Well you’d better get aboard,’ and with the co-pilot bringing me cups of coffee and copies of the Financial Times to his sole passenger as we flew over Newcastle and me with visions of paying off this flight for the rest of my life or jail or any damn thing. In the end the only thing I could think of actually worked. As we landed in Aberdeen I ducked under the belly of the plane and over the fence and off to the station and it’s still a mystery in Shell where the oceanographer went. It was a very nice wedding. But John Carter who was later Head of Shell Exploration and Production UK, now retired, ---I don’t think he still dares tell the true story, even today. But if he does I have a word for Shell, that it’s John Carter’s fault and if you want anyone to pay for it ask him [laughs]. So there again it was a – I tend to have sympathy with the young because thin ends of wedges are something which I have never spotted and if they end up with the same fiascos as I ended up with that I would tend to have sympathy.

[08.40]

So the second house that I wanted to give a few memories about were the – those in Encinitas California with the McNally’s, which I – who I used to stay with when I

137 Bob Dickson Page 138 C1379/56 Track 7 was in the early days of my days at Scripps. The McNally’s were Gerry, who helped Denny Kirwan of Texas A&M to run the NORPAX drifting buoy programme at Scripps, plus his red haired Irish wife Gerry, and the kids, Gerard: Jennifer, Charlie and Alyce- from-the-palace who then was aged around four, plus Duke the dog. And in the early ‘70s, as I say, I used to board with them and I have many happy memories of it. One of the most pleasant memories I have was of Alyce aged four reaching forward from the back seat of my hired [Ford] Pinto on the freeway going at full speed to pull the automatic gear shift back into first while travelling. ‘Because I liked the nice noise,’; many a – I don’t really know how much damage she caused by this but she was rather prone to doing it. And the other thing we loved about Alyce was that, from about the first of October, aged four, she was anticipating Christmas and singing all that stuff about ‘you’d better not pout, you’d better not cry’, until by Christmas Day she was absolutely unwakeable. But my most treasured memory was of teaching Alyce to write at the exact moment when she was receptive to it. I’m sure lots of mums and – well parents, have the same sort of feeling. One day Alyce was ready to learn to write and I happened to have her sitting on the sofa with me, so I showed her how to write Alyce:- A-l-y-c-e and the next morning the entire house was stickered with a hundred or more ‘Alyce’s’ on post-its, all with a – a characteristic five barred E. When she got married, about twenty years later, I sent her a tourmaline that I’d collected on one of the mines of San Diego county; I attached a little gold leaf to it and on it I wrote ‘Alyce’ and got an engraver to write a five barred E on this Alyce. So I hope she remembered why that was [laughs], but I certainly do.

[11.26]

And third my memories of my own home at Lowestoft, or actually homes because there was two of them. In the early ‘70s when the inmates of Mancroft Towers started to get married and move out, I bought my first house which was 28 Rowan Way. It was the biggest type of house on the new Burnt Hill Estate and I had to bribe the foreman on the building site, Billy Butcher, with cigarettes, to ensure it would still be there and unsold on my various returns from sea, and for 200 Bensons per trip Billy continued to tell everyone it was sold till I could rake the deposit together, even though Paddy Hardiman, our genial mortgage broker, told me afterwards that he was

138 Bob Dickson Page 139 C1379/56 Track 7 on the verge of phoning to warn me that the sale price looked to be fifty pounds too much at 4,050 pounds [laughs]. Remember this was 1971. Anyway Rowan Way did Deanne and me at a pinch for our first married life together but after our return from California at the end of ’76 something bigger was called for, for the five of us, and so in ’78 we started looking around for a local farmhouse or something. Andy Liddon, a friend of Deanne’s from the Lowestoft Players who was then a manager of a local building society and knew what we were looking for, phoned us in some puzzlement about what to do. He said, ‘I’ve got a nice farmhouse, a nice old farmhouse built around 1620, but the old boy who’s selling it doesn’t want any publicity of any kind, no notice boards in the grounds, no ads in the paper, nothing, so it’s a puzzle to let people know it’s even for sale.’ So he suggested we just walk up the drive one day and look interested and that’s what we did. The house was in a funny old state with a very strong smell of cat wee, an electrical wiring system that simply ran along the skirting boards to another fifteen amp round-pinned socket and then resumed its journey with another plug and another length of flex. The wires had all burst through their woven silk sheathing where they bulged away from one another and bare wire was exposed to view. And did it spark? Probably. I seem to remember it did. And as we soon discovered, old Mr Hugman’s idea of a damp proof course was to stick thermoplastic Marley tiles to the wall with tar and then paper over the lot. Unsurprisingly this acted as a wick so that beneath his various layers the walls were soaking wet. However, we were all charmed by the personality of the place and the kids liked the idea that two mammoth or more likely elephant molars from the Ice Ages had been dug up with Mr Hugman’s potatoes. So when he simply asked us if we liked it and we said yes, he said, ‘It’s yours,’. That was on the Friday, and on the Monday a woman who disarmingly said she had two days left to find a property before the amount she was allowed on loan was reduced by her lender, walked into our home in Rowan Way and bought that. So that was that: bought and sold in two days. Of course other snags came to light in due season: high winds blowing powder snow up under the pantiles that first winter built cones of snow in the attic four feet high. They were quite a surprise when I peeked in through the hatch in the bathroom ceiling. It was like something out of Cocoon, and it all had to be shovelled out before the melt set in and the roof properly felted and battened. And both my wife and I learnt to dread the tapping of the death watch beetle in the spring until we managed,

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(we think!), to kill it off, and even now laying in bed in March and April we have uneasy moments if some distant tapping appears to show that they are once again munching through the beams. It’s a very comfortable home now, as I’m sure you’ll have noticed, -----I’m talking to my interlocutor Paul----, and so it’s – it’s a – a nice place. But it – there can be very few of its walls or ceilings or floors that I haven’t had to restore or replace in some way or another. When it comes to choosing family stories the list is of course endless but for me the story of Sarah and Miles’ adoption is special to me and it stands out. Sarah aged eight was a girl who liked to get things sorted in her mind and she once asked me if he , with a jerk of her thumb in the general direction of Australia was her father, what was I then ? We decided I was her ‘dad’ and that satisfied her for a while. But eventually back she came and said, ‘When will I be, you know, yours?’ and it was my luck in reading that day in The Times [that it took] ‘seven years to replace every cell in your body’. So I told her, ‘In seven years time I will have fed and renewed every piece of you and at that moment you will be officially mine,’ and off she bounced. Seven years later she and Miles came and asked to be adopted. And as I said when I told that story at her wedding, I never had the courage to ask if that story was the reason for her question after seven years. I’d forgotten they weren’t mine of course after all that time, but we were very happy to go along. The wise old judge sent us away while he made up his mind that they really wanted adoption and, that decided, he gave us a blue print for obtaining the other party’s approval, even if he failed to write back which he failed to do. And it worked. They were adopted in 1983 and that removed all the worry that Deanne had about taking the children to Scotland, which strictly should have required their father’s permission from Australia every time. Since my parents then still lived in Edinburgh, ‘every time’ was quite often. So now she and Duncan, Sarah and Duncan have provided two grandsons, Will and Jack, and Miles and Jilly have provided three: Joe, Tom and Sam, who is currently a Jedi [laughs].

How could this narrative have been complete without this small flavour of homes and families, or if I could sneak them in my two dogs. First the story of the confused old woman who arrived at the door and brought us Foggy the Great, ‘I hear you’re looking for a dog,’ she said, ‘here he is, here’s his bed and here’s his bowl and here’s his blanket,’ and ran away. And we sat this little dog down on the floor [laughs] and

140 Bob Dickson Page 141 C1379/56 Track 7 asked what his name was because she hadn’t actually told us. We tried everything from Baldrick to – well everything - and it was only when I was reading out to Deanne something about Princess Anne’s husband who at the time was called Foggy Phillips that when I said ‘Foggy’, Foggy sat bolt upright and we knew that he’d chosen his name. Then sadly when Foggy died we took the decision to take onboard a massive hairy ornery, totally untrained, three year old bearded collie called Harry. They were both wonderful beasts and both great enthusiasm factories for me. When I was pole-axed with an angina operation, a quadruple bypass in 1990 and was forced to lie straight and still, Foggy took up more or less permanent residence under my bed until I recovered, and a reach-down never went unlicked even in the middle of the night. How good is that! Even after the boy Harry went abruptly and totally blind from something calls SARDS----: Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome,- --- he still used to try to chase after footballs and Spillers Shapes along the beach from their skittering sound, and would still have liked to have disembowelled any horses or milkmen that we happened upon ---a symptom, we think, of the abuse that he must have suffered from in his past life before the dog rescue place took him on. So maybe all dog owners love their pets but not all pets have personalities like these two, and I wonder from time to time if I still have time for another one. It’s coming to that point now.

[End of Track 7]

141 Bob Dickson Page 142 C1379/56 Track 8

Track 8

[starts abruptly] That’s really been quite a lot of my work here: to do with long term variability in ocean and ecosystem because since my arrival in Lowestoft, so getting on for forty-five years now, the primary driving interest in my career has been the theme of long term variability in the ocean. Measuring change, interpreting change, keeping the time series going, setting up the conferences at which the time series’ worth was assessed and setting up the mechanisms for keeping them going. It helped greatly of course that from the start, my Head of Division was Arthur Lee, later Director at Lowestoft, and that David Cushing [ultimately became his Deputy Director] who was the – who had the scope and the genius to put together the first complete account of ‘marine ecology and fisheries’ in all its aspects. They were the people at the top at the lab in these days and so I never had to argue too strongly in my annual Project Reviews to – for the continuation of my work on investigating variability, and I had a supportive and most interested audience for my results. It makes a difference when you’ve got somebody upstairs that you can take something to and say, ‘Hey, look at this,’ and that they stop everything, close the door and listen and ask interested questions. That made a great deal of difference all the way through my career here.

[01.40]

And the environment itself played a thoroughly starring role, as vast and important changes continued to pass through. The greatest of these and the thing I think I’ll be remembered for, if anything, was the Great Salinity Anomaly, which I always have in capitals GSA, that I published with my co-workers in 1988. I remember [I] first caught a glimpse of it, or rather its precursory events, in a curve that was published showing the air temperature at Franz Josef Land, far to the north of Norway, next door to Spitsbergen, that had dropped by a whopping four degrees in the decade mean between the 1950s and the 1960s. I would have found much the same thing in the – if I’d looked in the mean air temperature at Jan Mayen at the other end of the Norwegian Sea, as the cause of both of them was an unprecedented northerly air flow which simply howled out of the Arctic in the 1960s and down the Norwegian-

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Greenland Sea towards Iceland. Before it, this northerly air flow drove the Great Salinity Anomaly, the GSA, a vast volume of extra ice and fresh water that passed south in a swollen East Greenland Current to enter the North Atlantic through Denmark Strait and which then took fourteen years to propagate around the circuit of the Subpolar Gyre from 1968 to 1982. I even remember the moment when I ‘got it’ which is not something – --maybe the general public think that scientists get things in a flash,-----but I do remember the moment when I saw the point of the Great Salinity Anomaly. I was just lying there thinking and reviewing the salinity time series in sequence around the northern gyre in my head, because I’d been pondering the shape of them and what joined them together, and I suddenly realised I was dealing with a connected lagged event going around the ocean circulation gyre, ----- that the time- series were all recording a huge drop in salinity at a slightly later time as you go around this gyre. So I realised then I was dealing with a connected series of extreme salinity minima.

What is a gyre, just to –

The gyre is the – I even have a picture for your edification. This is the - the ocean circulation is divided into mean currents, such as the North Atlantic drift crossing the ocean; and that acts – that flows along the boundary between two huge loops of flow: one of them is called the Northern Gyre, and this would be the Subtropical Gyre further south than the Gulf Stream. This is the Gulf Stream here and then the north Atlantic drift. The Great Salinity Anomaly was a creature of the Northern Gyre. It went from the – down East Greenland, around Cape Farewell into the Labrador Sea, then it crossed the ocean to the Mid Atlantic ridge, then passed the site of the old Ocean Weather Ship Juliet , passed [through] the Faroe Shetland Channel, back up past Norway and back west of Bear Island, curving back into the Greenland Sea from which it sprang. And it would have done that [ie returned] fourteen years later. The amazing thing to me, reviewing these time series lying in my bath or on my sofa [or] wherever I could, ---I had all these time series in my head --- [is that] with some sort of [pause] some sort of [perverse] synchrony, the observing effort had been pulled out just before the arrival [laughs] of this Great Salinity minimum, just before it arrived; and then often put back again after it had gone. So the sort of evidence we

143 Bob Dickson Page 144 C1379/56 Track 8 had for it was certainly gappy . At places like Ocean Weather Ship Bravo or Charlie or Juliet, you tended to find that the salinity staggered along for a bit and then dropped like a stone as this thing arrived. Then either they sacked the observer or they decided that something had got too costly so there was a gap just when this thing was passing through, and the gap was itself lagged around the gyre. I couldn’t understand [the reason for] this, but we did have impressive evidence when we pieced it all together -- -that the gap was filled with a big deep hole in the salinity. Then as we became more interested [in describing the GSA, we found] we could construct the series after it [the gap] again. There it was [the salinity] going up again and back to normal. All I’m saying is that it would have been a much easier event to spot if we had had complete records, but it was still impressive enough in itself watching this thing take a dive and come up the other side of a hole without a – without a base. Anyway the – it was quite an event and it was quite a moment to suddenly see that it was connected together.

[07.20]

To give the GSA some vital statistics: it brought south an extra 10,000 cubic kilometres of freshwater through the Nordic Seas between the ‘60s and ‘70s according to the careful analysis at Woods Hole by Ruth Curry and Cecilie Mauritzen. It caused a temporary slowing of the Atlantic Thermohaline Conveyor according to the models of Sirpa Hakkinen and Helmut Haack in the end of the ‘90s [or] beginnings of the 2000s. It caused a northward shift of the Gulf Stream path according to Zhang and Vallis’ model; and as the Great Salinity Anomaly returned northwards to the west of Bear Island in 1978 -79, a decade after it began or so, observers were absolutely startled to find that there was absolutely no ‘Atlantic water’, as it is conventionally defined, in the Norwegian Atlantic Current. ‘Atlantic water’ is defined as a salinity of thirty-five or higher. And because the salinity had dropped so much, the Norwegian Atlantic current had no ‘Atlantic water’, as defined, in it. Of course it didn’t mean that the current had disappeared, it just meant that our definition of it had failed a little. But it was still a startling fact. It caused a southeastward shift of the Ocean Polar Front that was large enough to disrupt the annual migration patterns of herring between Norway and Iceland. And in general if I can pull out a quote from Jakob

144 Bob Dickson Page 145 C1379/56 Track 8

Jakobsson who was one of the long term directors of the Icelandic Institute of Marine Research and who knew a lot about the fisheries of that area of course, he said, ‘It generated more variability in fisheries during the last quarter of a century than any other hydrographic event.’ To David Cushing it caused a significant reduction in recruitment in eleven out of fifteen deep water fish stocks that he examined, according to Cush. It was such an – it was a large event and actually it was such a celebrated thing that eventually people stopped referring to it as Dickson et al 1988 altogether and simply cited in their papers and in their modelling of it as ‘the GSA’. That’s quite a complement really, but it’s the sort of thing that stops me believing in bibliometric analysis, if I ever did I certainly have never looked up my own bibliometric stats partly for that reason. I mean I would imagine the Great Salinity Anomaly paper to have a large bibliometric spike, but as I say it’s very likely that it hasn’t anymore than an average one because people just call it ‘the GSA’, and away it goes.

[10.12]

Although variability and papers on variability are never ending, I don’t propose to go through any more of them here. The Great Salinity Anomaly is a story that’s special enough to tell. But keeping the time series going [is an issue] as time-consuming and important a task as that. It takes as much time and as much effort to maintain time series, and it’s worth dwelling a little on that endeavour. It’s a sobering fact that was captured by Carlos Duarte in 1992 in Nature, that although there’s been an exponential increase in the initiation of new time-series monitoring programmes in European marine stations in recent decades, there’s also been an exponential increase in their termination. So that, to quote Duarte, ‘long term monitoring programmes are paradoxically among the shortest projects in marine science . Many are initiated but few survive a decade. In blunter words, policymakers are rather easily startled into initiating actions, but the time-scales of policy and funding and even of scientific fashion are not usually imbued with very much stamina.

[11.32]

145 Bob Dickson Page 146 C1379/56 Track 8

The story of transforming the ICES Annales Biologiques into a more affordable and therefore sustainable form is one way out of that problem and this particular solution still seems to be working. I can claim to have played a part in it, so I want to describe a little bit about the Ann Biol and its successor. The Annales Biologiques was a journal of ICES that can be traced back to the great Johan Hjort at the time of his Presidency of ICES during the war, when he needed a journal to explore a new watershed in scientific thinking that was based on the coming together of three new ideas. First of all, the notion that the statistics of catches by fishermen might be considered representative of a [fish] stock. Secondly the idea that the samples collected from a series of years might disclose fluctuations in stock size from one year to another. And thirdly the conviction that environmental changes might be the cause of such fluctuations. These all seem ordinary ideas to us, but the coming together of these three was quite a revolutionary set of ideas, and Johan Hjort needed some sort of journal to explore how these stood up. The idea of course was that environmental changes might eventually extend the hope of prediction of commercial fish stocks. The hope at any rate was there, and once World War Two was over the Annales Biologiques series began and it built into an annual statement on the status of ICES waters from every viewpoint: physical environment, marine chemistry, plankton, fish stocks, and eventually contaminants. While there was never much doubt that an annual collation of data was useful and convenient it was also very costly.

[13.39]

So in deciding that volume forty-one for the year 1984 should be the last, ICES sought to meet the same scientific purpose via a different and more affordable route and a small working group, including myself as Chair, the then Chair of the hydrography committee of ICES, recommended that the same essential purpose could be met by promoting Symposia on the ‘overviews of the decade’. Once accepted by ICES Council, Pentti Maelkki, the Director of the Finnish Institute of [Marine] Research, and I were given the job of organising the first of these on the decade of the 1980s, which we decided should be held at Mariehamn in the Aland Islands in June 1991. Of course it was [held in] 1991 to discuss the decade of the ‘80s in order to give scientists a year to get their last bits of data together on the ‘80s. Actually I

146 Bob Dickson Page 147 C1379/56 Track 8 remember the origins of that as well. I once was sitting in a – I suppose in a pub with Pentti in Helsinki and I said, ‘How can we get to go to the Aland Islands where Gustav Erikson ran his ‘Flying P-line’ from?’ and he says, ‘We’ll have a symposium there,’; and eventually that’s the – that was the origin of why we went there. There were undoubtedly many unsuspected snags in such a small venue: there were only a handful of taxis to bring us in, and people kept phoning us up in Aland Island dialect, phoning me up to say innocuous questions like, ‘How many hotel rooms should we block for you?’ and, ‘How many zanders should the local fishing fleet catch for your Symposium Dinner?’ [laughs]. Questions like that which presupposed that we had a – any – the first idea about how many people would come. But in fact the reason that Pentti and I are not in jail to this day is that we guessed it more or less right [at] about 100, and we got 110. We never regretted going there; the Alands Parliamentshus was perfect, it fitted us like a glove with 110 seats, immense local pride and something which I think the world of science needs: a small choir of little girls with daisy chains in their hair arrived unannounced every three or four talks it seems to me, but it was probably rather less frequently than that. They sang us songs and then they trooped off again and it was just like a sorbet between courses in a big heavy dinner and quite lightened the whole place up again. I still don’t know where these troops of little girls came from but they had the so much local pride that they would have organised that, I’m sure, themselves. Apart from the venue it was perhaps one of the best design features of the Decadal Symposium idea to acknowledge and honour the contributions made by a few of the individuals who had been the most responsible for keeping the time-series going. Arthur Lee for example was one of these for the first symposium, [though] he was too ill to go. We repeated the process in 2001, June 2001 when the decade of the ‘90s was our focus, and this time the organisers, that was Pentti and Jens Meincke and myself, mindful of our Aland Island difficulties, we decided on a venue with more than five taxis ---which was Edinburgh during the festival. We all drowned in the rain at the Tattoo, high up on the castle walls but we didn’t care, and we dined in high style and at an unmentionable rental cost, actually 3,500 quid for the night I remember, right down the middle of the towering gothic atrium of the Royal Scottish Museum. To close off what I hope will be a continuing success story, we’ve recently, in May 2011, achieved a third ‘Decadal’, this time on the 2000s in Santander in Spain, which is again a beautiful venue but one where the others did the organising

147 Bob Dickson Page 148 C1379/56 Track 8 this time and Jens and Pentti and me were listed among the grateful Honourees. So I hope that changing the idea of having, getting your data together every year in the Annales Biologique to promoting it as a decadal look is one that’s saved money and therefore saved the point of the Annales Biologique . I think and I hope it’s one that will continue; and of course after every one of these Symposia the – a volume is published by ICES in which all of the status reports are listed.

[18.35]

Could I just ask you while you were for example working on the analysis of the Atlantic Ocean in relation to nuclear waste and then working on the analysis of the Atlantic Ocean not in relation to nuclear waste but in relation to climate variability, could you give us a sense of what else was going on at the laboratory at the time? To give us a sense of how typical your work for example was of the laboratory and a sense of I suppose the other kinds of activity that were going on here?

Well it was a period when there was a lot of support as I mentioned for the idea that environmental variation would be of use not only in telling us what contaminants would do and how the ocean circulation would change, and disperse these contaminants, but also there was a strong notion, and still is, that changes in the environment might affect the success of commercial fish stocks for example. Although we were aware that environmental variation would likely take effect through the plankton, the food of the – the food of the fishes as well as direct [coughs], excuse me, as well as direct effects on the variable drift of larvae from their spawning area to their nursery areas for example. So it was undoubtedly – the idea of environmental variation and its analysis and investigation was something which must have pervaded most of the sections of the laboratory; we used to have a plankton section that was heavily into how plankton changed. And certainly marine fish management depended on the idea that there were causes [of variability] in the environmental change of the fish stocks from year to year. In other words it wasn’t just a matter of fishing effort and over-fishing that caused the stocks to go up and down from one year to another and regulate their Total Allowable Catch. It was partly thought to be some effect of environmental change. Now I still think that – that

148 Bob Dickson Page 149 C1379/56 Track 8 was the great idea of Johan Hjort in the past [but] it wasn’t as simple as Johan Hjort would have thought it. He was absolutely quite sure that, in fairly short order, they would be able to predict fish stocks from environmental change and it’s not been as simple as that. It’s still a general truth that the countries that put a great deal of effort into understanding their waters from the point of view of environmental variability, like Norway and Iceland, they have the best cod stocks for example and somehow or other [laughs] there’s a link between these two facts. The Norwegians in their ecosystem management programmes are absolutely certain that environmental change has a stark and discoverable effect on the ecosystem, to the point where they can begin to use it in management. Of course they’re at the pointy end of climate change up in the Barents Sea, for example, [or] the Norwegian Sea, where the Ocean Polar Front divides Atlantic warm influences from cold Arctic ones, and where a change in the distribution of the Polar Front can make a huge change not only in the distribution of cod but in the distribution of their food fishes like capelin, which tend to keep on the cold side. We would expect them to be correct in thinking environmental change and fisheries success are related. But as I say the general truth is that those who keep, who spend a good deal of money understanding how their environmental – how their seas vary are those which have got good fish stocks and they’re quite adamant that there is a connection.

[23.05]

At any point did you consider moving elsewhere to conduct your research of applying –

It’s – the answer I suppose is that I did move elsewhere. I was in Scripps in California for a year in the ‘60s and in the – sorry in the ‘70s ---and I used to go there most years. But the fact of the matter is that the scale of the problem was such that it didn’t much matter where you were sitting, and it still applies today that you can’t do global change on your own. You have to link in with a whole team of people and you can do that [anywhere]: --you meet up with them, of course you go to sea with them from time to time and you certainly piece together what you’re doing with that of what other people are doing in order that you can see how the whole pattern is

149 Bob Dickson Page 150 C1379/56 Track 8 behaving. So when we talk about the NAO for example, the North Atlantic Oscillation, as the principle recurrent mode of atmospheric behaviour in winter, the [main] thing that drives change in our seas and in the Atlantic, we would look to Boulder Colorado and the National Centre for Atmospheric Research and Jim Hurrell for education on how that is; and how frequently it is; and [how much] is the variance in atmospheric variability that it explains; and use that as our basis for explaining changes in the convective systems of the Labrador Sea, the Greenland Sea, the Sargasso Sea. the – that – On the scale of the ocean and the atmosphere, as I say, it didn’t really much matter where you were based, you were by definition drawn into working with a whole group of people on both sides of the ocean, and more widely now of course when your study is global change, it didn’t matter where you were. So I was quite happy to be based here and I had a supportive Director and Deputy Director to stimulate it.

[25.32]

Could you then tell me now about your work in relation to the Continuous Plankton Recorder then?

Ah yes, the [CPR]--– in recording ones life story, which is what this series is all about, when the emphasis is inevitably on laying out one person’s deeds and doings in sequence or at any rate as he or she remembers them, it’s very easy to overdo the first person singular; of course one is rarely if ever responsible for making all of the running in the events of one’s life. Far more likely that one acted as part of a group to get some idea across or some paper written or some achievement made. But I do know that for a short while I played a pivotal role in one particular achievement which was the rescue and the revival of the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey, the CPR. The CPR was the brain child of Alister Hardy, a true original and pioneer who had ideas way ahead of his time and an absolutely unstoppable determination to put them into effect and if that sounds [laughs] familiar it should do because in the course of these reminiscences I’m aware that I’ve already described five of my six all time heroes, all of whom were in that mould: Henry Stommel, John Swallow, David Cushing, Jerome Namias, Josephine Scripps. All of them, [in] their portraits, beam

150 Bob Dickson Page 151 C1379/56 Track 8 down from my walls at work to give me inspiration and all of them shared these characteristics of genius and determination. Alister Hardy is the sixth, or was the sixth. As early as – just to give you an idea, we all know how to measure ocean colour from space now, from radiometry, but as early as 1923 Hardy was mapping these changes in ocean colour in the Western Channel by looking out of the windows of a small biplane as it chugged along the Western Channel looking – as he tried the idea of an aerial survey [looking] for mackerel shoals. And he was startled to discover that the Western Channel showed large discontinuities in colour which he knew would be associated with plankton. He was therefore [led into] trying to relate these to mackerel shoals in a kind of predictive way. Well that particular idea failed but by 1930 he was offering to investigate possible links between the position of herring shoals from year to year and the changing distributions of their planktonic food, using something he’d invented in the southern ocean called the Continuous Plankton Recorder, towed on regular merchant ship routes across the North Sea. And from 1931 off he went, funded by the fishing industry at the princely sum of £100 a year he got from them and I think an extra £50 from the fishmongers company. That was what he used to start up his Continuous Plankton Recorder survey on merchant ships across the North Sea from 1931.

[28.41]

Let me explain what the CPR is because it may [be that] somebody listening will not know. What it is is a large brass towed submersible box with a hole in the nose and into that hole goes the plankton as the – as the plankton recorder is towed behind merchant ships. So, towed along these commercial ship routes, the plankton recorder receives a flow of water coming in the nose with plankton in it, and inside the nose cone this – the plankton become the filling in a sandwich between two rolls of silk, one above and one below, which are, which gradually unwind at a rate that is proportional to the speed of the ship, because that’s regulated by a little propeller at the back end of the towed vehicle. Then this plankton sandwich, -----silk, plankton and silk ----are wound together onto a third spool of silk sitting in a formalin bath to preserve the plankton. As the merchant ship tows along its own particular route, and that can be transatlantic, then this roll of - this silk/ plankton/ silk sandwich records

151 Bob Dickson Page 152 C1379/56 Track 8 the distribution of a whole range of plankton species at the depth of ten metres or so at which it is towed. So this is the basis of the CPR. It’s been the basis since the beginning and the [pause] great joy of the Survey in a sense is that it – what it does it does well and that it’s not been altered significantly with time. Of course there are – have always been ideas for improving it and catching the elements of the plankton that it doesn’t catch very well; these will come as well from different vehicles. But the great utility of the CPR is that it has been unchanging and that its time series therefore really do reflect variations in – real variations in ---the plankton species that it catches. Well anyway the hope for prognosis that Sir Al was hoping for, between the herring and their planktonic food, eluded him, but as the time-series grew in length and as the distribution of the survey [has] spread from the North Sea to the Atlantic, the direct and applied benefits of mapping out the plankton in this way became abundantly clear and increasingly complex and valuable with time. From simple maps of species distribution and abundance in the early years including the finding of new fish stocks from the distribution of their larvae, such as blue whiting west of Scotland in 1964, from these distributional changes we find from the 1960s to the 2000s papers on the systematics of the plankton, then on their seasonal changes, then on their seasonal dynamics, then on inter annual changes to the point where the changes right across the ecosystem from plankton to sea birds began to be revealed. [Also] their use in marine management expanded to eliminate and at times to referee the debates on important issues such as the possible eutrophication of our shelf seas, -----that’s where the inputs of nutrients are increasing and [are] having some noticeable, significant and adverse effect on the ecosystem. So [its uses to marine management span]: eutrophication of our shelf seas, the changing biodiversity of the plankton and its causes, the invasions of our shelf seas by non-indigenous species, for example from the ballast water of commercial ships, the impact of global change on the marine ecosystem and the mechanism of regime shifts in the sea, which had often been reported but never, till quite recently, explained. The late 1980s was where I came in. A visiting group in 1988, including Brian Bayne the local PML director and my own Director David Garrod at that time, and some others, visited and closed the survey down in Plymouth. The pretext was the usual one of saving money I suppose. But the roar of rage that this provoked came from more than just me. We had benefited greatly in the UK from the use of CPR data to show (for example) that a long term decline in

152 Bob Dickson Page 153 C1379/56 Track 8 zooplankton abundance between the ‘60s and the ‘80s was not just a feature of the southern North Sea, where man’s activity might possibly be blamed, but it extended into and across the whole eastern Atlantic where no significant anthropogenic influence could be claimed. Its cause was therefore accepted to be large- scale and natural, not simply due to some local factor such as increasing inputs of contaminants or nutrients or the usual suspects. Similarly when an abrupt three- or four-fold increase in the Ceratium group of diatoms was found off the Rhine in the 1980s, where the world was on a hair trigger to explain this as the effect of – an effect of eutrophication, the CPR had the coverage of the whole North Sea and Atlantic to show that this was just the tail, this bit off the Rhine was just the tail end of a general increase in this type of dinoflagellate whose centre, a 17- fold increase(!), was located east of the Shetlands, far from any significant anthropogenic influence. Its cause was in fact attributed to reinforced haline stratification, which dinoflagellates like, through the extreme westward spreading of coastal fresh water from the Norwegian and Jutland coasts. These were not just interesting case studies, they powerfully reinforced at the time our case, the UK’s case, in the scientific arenas where such things were decided, that the UK waters were not generally eutrophic, and they did it convincingly. As the penalty for having eutrophic coastal waters in these days and probably still was a fifty per cent reduction in the agricultural use of nutrients, this was no small achievement for the UK. So we found it useful [laughs] and the closing down of the survey was greeted with roars of rage by me and others. ‘Okay’, they said ‘if you like it so much go get the money to run it.’

[35.45]

So with Mike Whitfield of the MBA [Marine Biological Association of the UK] as my main co-conspirator we did just that. I have to tell you the story of the first place I went [which] was Canada, who have always been interested and admiring of the type of survey that the CPR represented and aware of its benefits. I went – I flew straight to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia to the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and I – that the amusing part of the story is this, ---I walked into the Regional Directors office and he simply said, ‘Okay, I agree, now what?’. I said, ‘Hang on a minute, [I’ve come trans- Atlantic to ask you...... ].’ I wish I could remember the man’s name, such a sensible

153 Bob Dickson Page 154 C1379/56 Track 8 cove. He said, ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I’ve asked around, I knew you were coming,’ they said, ‘Dickson’s a reasonable guy, he will tell you a story and at the end of an hour you’ll say, ‘Okay, yes, I agree, now what?’’ ; so he said, ‘I thought we’d save us both an hour,’. So he says – He was very supportive; I said, ‘I think I see what you’re driving at, you want something for you to take where I can’t go,’ and he said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.’ And so I came straight home again and put together a CPR brochure called Monitoring the Health of the Oceans ; and I think that was instrumental in doing just like this assistant director said, taking – going to places where I couldn’t possibly have gone. Very rapidly thereafter a mix of I think eight countries started to put together the funding that----- including the UK, started to put together the funding that the CPR needed. And though the near demise of the survey continues to be starkly clear in the horrible dip in the samples analysed around 1988, Sir Alister Hardy’s grand design is now well funded at about two million pounds a year.

[38.02]

At the celebrations to mark its eightieth year of continuous operation in Plymouth, in September 2011, the CPR recorder still largely unaltered but now run as a charity by the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, SAHFOS, it was able to boast a total of five million route-miles of tow over these eighty years, 250,000 samples analysed and the Director, Peter Burkill was reporting on moves to set up a more worldwide coverage through something called GACS, a Global Alliance of CPR Surveys, with coverage extending now to South Africa and Australian waters, southern ocean and Arctic water as well as the North Atlantic and North Pacific. And it still continues to startle us with its science. The recent revelation by Gregory Beaugrand and Martin Edwards and his co-authors--- in 2006 I think it was ----that variability itself in the phytoplankton, zooplankton and fish is tightly tied to a narrow band of isotherms around nine to ten degrees. That could only have been made from the full-ocean perspective of the CPR, coupled with the full-ocean perspective from satellites:--satellite databases. But this result has given us a new and precise mechanism for the phenomenon previously vaguely described as ‘regime shifts in the ocean’. And since isotherm distributions are now routinely modelled by the IPCC and

154 Bob Dickson Page 155 C1379/56 Track 8 others into the future, according to the various IPCC scenarios, even showing – the CPR is even showing us now, with that explanation, where we should lurk with our observing systems to capture the next regime shift before it happens . That’s a powerful thing to say. Secondly, identifying the changes in the planktonic ecosystem that will follow the extension of shipping activity (commercial ships, oil and gas exploration, tourist ships) along the northern sea route around Russia and differentiating the changes due to these invasions by shipping and the changes due to global change, [through] for example retraction of the sea ice and changes in the light climate, and increases in Atlantic warmth spreading in there, that will be another question that we will require the CPR survey to eliminate and referee. And [so] the CPR has begun to have negotiations [there], not just in towing across the mouth of the Barents Sea in the north, (it now tows from Svalbard, Longyearbyen, to Tromsø), but they’re looking to extend the survey into North Russian waters where these changes will take place. That’s important. When you’ve got - Of necessity you’re going to have change in the plankton there. The ice is going away, the light climate is increasing [pause] and the primary and secondary production cycles are bound to be affected. Secondly when the shipping drives into these seas, discharging some of the 3,000 species of non-indigenous plankton that are meant to be going around in the ballast water of shipping around the world, that’s going to have an effect as well. One day somebody is going to phone up somebody in the Norwegian Government and say, ‘Hey there’s toxic bloom developing in the northeastern Barents Sea, is that normal?’. And then, we are going to need a baseline from some source or other to tell us A) what it normally is, and B) what the change in [toxic bloom] prevalence has been. If you don’t have that you will have no idea which tap to turn off, as it were, when something startling happens. So the CPR may be old but it lacks nothing in modernity regarding the science issues that it has in hand.

[42.21]

For any part I played in its revival, the restoration of the survey was reward enough for me and I hope repaid Sir Al for his benevolent presence on all of my later promotion boards. But it came with three distinctions that I treasure. First in Spring 1995, I was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, like my old dad before

155 Bob Dickson Page 156 C1379/56 Track 8 me, and as the case was made and led by the late Alistair McIntyre, the first president of SAHFOS, and supported by others who happened to be in the management of the survey, I have no doubt that the two things are related. A little while later that year in November ’95, I was awarded the ninth annual silver medal of the Plymouth Marine Sciences. And in May ’97 I was elected to be its first Fellow by SAHFOS itself. As I tried to explain at its eightieth birthday lunch, it was the usefulness and value of the survey that demanded and forced its continuation. Nobody could possibly have flogged a dead horse, and anybody might have saved such a valuable creature as SAHFOS. But the warmth of my welcome from the denizens of the survey, ancient and modern, at that alumni lunch showed that denying my role was not accepted and to be honest that was the most special thing about that day.

[43.44]

Why do you think that – that this survey was going to close at the time it was – why – you said it might have been a – might have been a financial reason for it but I think it was 1988 you said it was going to stop, why then do you think there was this pressure?

Yeah, 1988 – 1988/89 was when it was actually closed. At the time I suspect that they’d gone in – that [but] the CPR team itself, which continued to carry out the analyses but on a – (you can see from the time series of analyses made, that they’d been kind of slowly tapering down since the ‘70s)---I think they had begun to feel unappreciated. Also to begin to feel that they had developed some sort of ‘laager’ mentality, where they were not going into the canteen for coffee, they were having it at their bench in a little cluster in the corner. And you almost – I’m almost hinting that people might not even have known that they were still there. They were very quiet and very clever people but they were very quiet about it and their head was down, and when it came to the point of saving money I can imagine Brian Bayne saying, ‘What about the survey, how much do they spend, [how much] can we save on them, I don’t seem to have seen any of them around recently,’ and I think all of these things were kind of compounded. Nowadays of course they’re up, and very aware of their importance and their – and the importance of having kept the time

156 Bob Dickson Page 157 C1379/56 Track 8 series going. But just then I suspect they were at a low ebb, as happens in the middle of a long effort where [doing] the same old thing from year to year is failing to spark enough interest to maintain forward momentum. I suspect that that was beginning to slow them down, and therefore that the visiting group might well have decided just to finish the job off. However as I said the – there was no other way that Britain could maintain such a – a clear and obvious stance on issues that were important to its economy such as eutrophication. It was a little after 1988/89 to be sure but you just need to think of the Rio Conference in 1992 where all the nations of the world signed up to maintain biodiversity. I don’t know anybody else around the planet that didn’t have the CPR [laughs] that could actually come through with that boast other than the UK having coverage of a certain component of the plankton through the CPR. So on the other side of 1988 it wasn’t just the UK and UK waters and the UK interest that argued for its revival, it was the general consciousness that biodiversity and the biodiversity of the oceans was part of where we have to be in global change and maintaining that biodiversity was something which we’d not only been aware of as an important thing but which we’d all signed up to [laughs]. When I say that the Plankton Recorder doesn’t record everything, that’s certainly true and that used to be one of the main charges levelled against it, that it – it measures at a particular set depth of around eight to ten metres in the sea, the depth at which it’s towed behind the merchant ships. And it doesn’t measure the micro plankton which goes whistling through the silk without registering much except a little bit on ocean colour. But it does a very good job of measuring the zooplankton. For example it measures 308 taxa of copepods, so the biodiversity of marine copepods in the North Atlantic is something that not only that the CPR does extremely well, which couldn’t be done any other way, but which has led to a great deal of new insight by Beaugrand and others into linking biodiversity, -----that we’re all pledged to maintain!----- with climate change. So it doesn’t measure everything but what it does measure it does well and what it does measure it has measured in an identical way forever. So if we only keep an eye on what it does, it’s certainly still a very valuable vehicle for maintaining. Of course now I suspect that after eighty years of continuous operation it is almost unkillable. You would find a global roar of rage, not just a local one, if anyone suggested now that – that it was closed down. It’s still not an easy job to maintain its funding and there will still be lots of people saying, ‘Well surely we

157 Bob Dickson Page 158 C1379/56 Track 8 should do this that and the other with lasers and whatever too,’ and of course all these things have to be done as well. But maintaining the CPR is now I think so embedded in the psyche of the planet that [laughs] it’s safe and that I think is [pause] is a good outcome.

[49.56]

And when you were putting together Monitoring the Health of Our Oceans, the document on the CPR, in order to persuade people to support it, do you remember the decisions that you made in attempting to sell it or attempting to argue for its value, what did you think were going to be –

Well I found no difficulty at all finding supporting statements. For example here’s a statement on page – I don’t think I’ve paginated this brochure at all, should have done: ---- ‘The problem is that long term monitoring is often incompatible with short term decisions about funding. Once a continuous sequence of data is broken it can never be recovered.’ That was Nick Carter of the Rothamsted Insect Survey for example in The New Scientist in 1989. Here’s Trevor Platt, who’s still a great Canadian ecologist [using satellite measurements] from space : ‘It’s important to emphasise that ecological models will never be the universal panacea to biological oceanography, nor will it ever replace the need for a well designed observing system on the real world.’ That’s Trevor Platt. Here’s Tim Parsons, of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver: ‘The CPR programme is perhaps the epitome of a well thought out time series observational programme which is unique throughout the world.’ And here [laughs] – and here right at the back of it I find Brian Bayne, the Director of PML: ‘Both in order to satisfy the requirements of the MAFF contract and to ensure the long term future of the survey, it is essential for vigorous effective action to be taken to set up a funding consortium,’ ; but right at the end he’s writing a very nice piece supporting the maintenance of the survey on science grounds. And he’s right. I found no problem at all finding people, including, and I started with Margaret Thatcher incidentally on page two : ‘ It is possible that we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with a system of this planet itself,’ the Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, FRS MP, 27 th September 1988. And Professor Carl Banse - I let him share

158 Bob Dickson Page 159 C1379/56 Track 8 the stage with Maggie: ‘ Without the CPR survey, we cannot know and say thirty years from now whether genuine change has occurred in the biota of the North Atlantic, let alone in the rest of the oceans.’ I found no problem at all, in very short order, finding eminent people saying exactly the right supportive thing to piece together into a rather slim document like this proposal. And it was a proposal and everyone knew it was a proposal: give us your money. Don’t just say how nice and how pretty the proposal document is, but fund it. And I say also that everywhere I went I got funding and everywhere I didn’t go but wrote to say please could you chip in I didn’t get funding so it made it very clear to me what you have to do to succeed in [attracting] that sort of scale of funds.

The quote from Margaret Thatcher, where was that taken from, do you know?

Err, let me see, I’m not sure.

She’s talking about climate change in general presumably?

I think she was – I probably got it out of The Times [laughs] at the time but I must admit I haven’t written it down, 27 th of September 1988, it sounds like a newspaper to me, it’s not a science document with a date like that so yeah it’s probably something worth looking for. And –

[53.44]

There seems there’s quite an interesting parallel between this and the history of the recordings, for example, of ozone and that a little bit earlier than this there was a little bit of a threat that the recording of ozone by the spectrometers was going to be stopped, and so I – and I wondered whether at this time there was anything in the sort of context of British science and the way it was funded and organised that meant that these very long term recording systems were under threat, was there a reason why at was time –

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[Sighs] Well you could say the same thing about the destruction of the tenements in Glasgow. After a while it became the fashion to change, and [so] some local bureaucrat ripped down these sandstone buildings and put up some jimcrack development at Castlemilk and decided that this is the future; and of course it wasn’t at all. The Castlemilk things have all been demolished since I imagine and any tenements that were left are still standing and being gentrified [laughs]. I think after a long history of time series measurements, it becomes almost an article of faith for a new incoming funder to change something, and unless they can identify something really radical, some good ammunition coming plainly out of the time series to argue for its continuation, then some other idea will start up. That’s what Duarte was pointing at, he says, ‘There’s nothing more – there is an exponential increase in the setting up of long time series stations and there is also an exponential increase in their demise.’ That’s exactly it: people are spooked into – rather easily ---into setting up, with the best of intentions to last forever I’m sure, setting up time series to comment on the changing state of the Planet, and after these new initiatives have had their glamour taken off, some incoming administration says, ‘Ah, let’s close that down, it’s not produced very much’. And so within the decade the things are gone. The point I would also make from the CPR survey, as I remember when I was writing up that piece on Ceratium in the North Sea, [is this]. The – the time series went on for decades. Ceratium is a dinoflagellate that is kind of spiky-shaped. So compared with most dinoflagellates that are little round invisible things that go whistling through the silk, it actually captures Ceratium species well, and it’s our notion that, since we’re interested in dinoflagellates particularly as the source of toxic blooms, harmful blooms, then we might get some analogue between the – what the Ceratiums are doing and the flagellates, the dinoflagellates that we’re [primarily] interested in. But the [pause] the CPR record that I had to analyse went through decades of ‘blah’, unchanging abundance, for maybe thirty years before all of a sudden the abundance of a whole bunch of Ceratium species in the North Sea suddenly rose precipitately. The point I’m making is that the forty years of ‘blah’ that preceded this rise was just as important in setting the benchmark for prevalence or abundance as the blip that followed. It’s no use just hoping that the survey will give you glamorous big events; it’s as important that the CPR was mapping out the non-changing elements of the plankton so that if one day something changed we would know for sure that

160 Bob Dickson Page 161 C1379/56 Track 8 something very strange has happened and try to explain it. And that I think is the mission for the changes that are bound to happen around the northern sea route [to the north of Russia. There, something very, very, very strange is going to happen [laughs] and somebody’s going to say to the politicians, why is that? Is this normal? And they won’t understand if you don’t have a baseline [ie the normal prevalence to answer their question].

[End of Track 8]

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Track 9

The previous discussions on time series, on marine variability and the atmosphere, and [on] ecosystem change, are all of a piece and the next [pause] line of discussion that I'd like to put out is actually the biggest one of all and without – this is the World Ocean Circulation Experiment - because without any question the WCRP’s (World Climate Research Programme) WOCE experiment, they called it, was the greatest venture ever attempted in oceanography. It had two far reaching goals which were related to what we’ve just been talking about. The first goal was to establish the role of the oceans in the Earth’s climate, and the second was to obtain a baseline dataset against which future changes could be assessed. And that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. Anyway the accomplishments of WOCE speak for themselves, thirty nations, 20,000 hydrographic stations of high quality, twenty-nine ship-years devoted to standard and repeat hydrography alone, over 1,500 instrument-years of current meter records, and over the eight years of its field phase , which ran from 1990 to 1997, the description of the global ocean that WOCE provided seemed very nearly complete. But it suffered from two flaws, one of which was inevitable and the other less so. The primary WOCE goal of compiling a coherent global ocean description was certainly achieved so that our general circulation models of the ocean now had a whole new global dataset to work from. But the aim of providing a global ocean description also required us to ask whether the new WOCE dataset is in any sense representative of the long term behaviour of the ocean and here lay the first and inevitable flaw. Simply that to assess how the WOCE period varied from some pre- existing state we need pre-existing data and that requirement simply can’t be built into the experiment design. Of course when we did piece together our patchy bits and pieces of evidence on the ‘representativeness’ of the WOCE dataset, ----I was given the job of leading this little team and writing this paper called ‘The World During WOCE’ it was called: how was the world during WOCE ----we discovered that the answer to our question, how was the world during WOCE?, was, as you’d imagine, ‘most unusual’. To give just a couple of instances from the Atlantic alone the principle recurrent mode of atmospheric forcing in the Atlantic sector, the winter North Atlantic Oscillation had been amplifying over three to four decades to the most intense positive state generally in a 176 year instrumental record by the mid ‘90s

162 Bob Dickson Page 163 C1379/56 Track 9 when WOCE was taking off [laughs]. Secondly, driven by wind and buoyancy forcing associated with the changing NAO, convective activity at the three main sites: the Greenland Sea, the Labrador Sea and the Sargasso, had evolved over decades to a long term extreme state also, in a phase but of differing sign, so that by the ‘90s vertical exchange in the Labrador Sea was reaching deeper than we’ve ever observed it, to 2300 metres or so, while convection at the other two sites was tightly shut down. And thirdly, just to give you a third ‘for instance’, as Ruth Curry and Mike McCartney explained at Woods Hole, the increase in the NAO had also been accompanied by a thirty per cent increase in the transport of the main North Atlantic Current along the gyre-gyre boundary ( we discussed that earlier). From about fifty Sverdrups in 1970 to sixty-five Sverdrups in the mid 1990s, and that’s a huge change. You can hardly imagine three greater or more far-reaching extrema than these. (A Sverdrup by the way is [a seawater transport] of one million cubic metres per second).

The other flaw that I alluded to was more preventable and I still don’t know why it wasn’t prevented. It concerns the first of the WOCE goals.These days you would hardly attempt to establish the role of the oceans in Earth’s climate, which is their ostensible goal, without including the Arctic, the place where the climate was changing twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet [laughs]. And since it’s now entirely demonstrable that the two way oceanic exchanges that connect the Arctic and the Atlantic through sub-Arctic seas are also of fundamental importance to climate --- --the changing poleward ocean heat flux is central to determining the sea ice for example and the signal of Arctic change is expected to have its big climatic impact by reaching south through sub-Arctic seas to change the Atlantic Thermohaline Conveyer ----- because of these you would hardly leave out the sub-Arctic seas either; and yet that’s exactly what happened. WOCE did not extend north of Iceland while the ACSYS coverage, that’s the WCRP Arctic Climate System Study, the ACSYS coverage of the high latitude ocean was focused north of Fran Strait. So the sub- Arctic seas were largely excluded from consideration, even though they were, we would now see them as of crucial importance.

[05.44]

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Now we in Lowestoft, we carried out two main jobs for WOCE, apart from helping to build the assessment of ‘the world during WOCE’ at the end that I've just mentioned. First from 1991 to 95 we suspended our coverage of the Denmark Strait overflow as the driver of the abyssal limb of the oceans great Conveyer and we switched our current meter efforts south to attempt to do the same thing by leading the Antarctic Deep Outflow Experiment called ADOX. And there John Woods, who was the Director of Science for NERC, had been as good as his word: the five million that NERC had subscribed of extra funds for WOCE for the UK was indeed for UK WOCE, as he’d always said it was, and although we were non-NERC, we were given the Discovery and the funds to run ADOX, and off I went. In two seasons, 1993-4 and ’94-5, by combining highly advanced tracer chemistry with CFCs and even carbon tetrachloride in the deep ocean, by Tom Haine at Oxford at the time and Andy Watson at UEA, with full depth current meter coverage from fifty-seven instruments in the main gaps either side of the Crozet Islands, we established the transit time (twenty-four years or so), the dilution (thirteen fold or so) from the surface Weddell Sea source to the Crozet-Kerguelen gap which was the [deep] gateway to the Indian Ocean. And from the Antarctic Bottom Water transport there, we concluded that a volume flux of a little under a Sverdrup entered the abyssal Indian Ocean past Crozet Island. So in a way it’s like an extension of what we’d done in the north; we’d measured for the first time the Denmark Strait overflow, and here we were, as a contribution to WOCE, measuring for the first time the southern ocean outflow as well: water coming from the Antarctic shelf, deepening, heading east, and passing into the abyssal Indian Ocean where we measured it. It was quite a – it was a wonderful thing to do, place to go and sites that we wouldn’t see ever again in – in my career. You’re seeing them a bit now when Attenborough’s doing his [laughs] wonderful last series. But it’s quite a place, the southern ocean.

[08.24]

I can illustrate the epic nature of what we had to do by one particular incident, which again involved John Read in a starring role. He was always our – the man who put our current meter rigs out and got them back. And in – in our main mooring line in the hole between Crozet and Kerguelen, which forms the gateway to the Indian

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Ocean, south of – well south east of South Africa and south west of Calcutta [laughs] I imagine if you can project yourself far enough south, that’s where we were. I remember trying to get back this one vital mooring with eight current meters on it that we’d had out for a year. We got that – we had two acoustic releases on it, but still something had gone wrong. They heard us, they triggered their ‘we have fired’ signal, but nothing came up. And so we tried to do something that we had never done successfully before or since: we paid away eleven kilometres of strong multiplait rope with the University of Plymouth’s – we call it a ‘creeper’ (a very heavy bar with hooks on it) ----paid away that over the stern, and then using Sat Nav we were able to go around and around the position of this mooring and hope that we could lasso it and lasso it far enough down to make it work. And it worked! Unfortunately, and of course we knew that this would be an unfortunate aspect of it, having cut it, we cut it within 200 metres of the bottom which was good, because seven current meters were [now] heading for the surface. But the pinger [laughs] was located now on the seabed, that was the bit that was sitting on the acoustic release that would normally have come up with the mooring but [which] was not going to come up with this one. And so we just had to keep a close look out for [it], in storms and gales – you never get anything but gales down there. In a very confused sea, we were looking for a raft of yellow balls to hit the surface which was the main subsurface buoyancy. And as it came up we were thinking will we be able to haul back the multi plait rope that we had out there? Eleven kilometres of rope takes some hauling in at full tilt on our net drum winch. And though the University of Plymouth has never complained or even noticed I eventually chopped that away with an axe and so maybe eight kilometres of rope is now tethered in the bottom of the Southern Ocean. Because at the time when this thing hit the surface and when we had to go and get it, it was dusk, and a pingerless mooring containing vital data was about to head eastwards towards Elephant Island and [laughs] and Kerguelen. Certainly if it had gone any later we wouldn’t have got it. So in the last of the dusk – the deckies, I remember the grapnel finally landing with a lump into this yellow raft of floats and heaving the first of the rafts of buoyancy onto the deck. Then, after that, you knew you were going to get what was left of the mooring back but you didn’t know where you’d cut it of course with your ‘lasso’. Eventually we found seven out of the eight current meters lying on the deck, [with] John Read, in a sort of cross between icy spray and perspiration as he

165 Bob Dickson Page 166 C1379/56 Track 9 completed his job there with Ian Waddington who was the – the – his equivalent in NERC. Both wonderful people at mooring things, but I think that took the last of their stamina [laughs] :--to have circled the wagons all day long and then followed it, looked for it, tracked it down, grappled for it and heaved it in, they had their reward: seven out of eight current meters lying on the deck and the data is still of lasting value; we’ll be using it as part of the upcoming US- UK DIME study, Diapycnal and Isopycnal Mixing Experiment in the southern ocean. So that it was worth putting that story in because it’s very – it must seem very clear to most people that getting data from the sea is an easy thing to do [laughs],----all these dots on the map showing where you were are always nice and neatly spaced where you wanted them to be. But in fact it can be a most daunting thing requiring stamina and ingenuity all the way through till you’ve recovered the data.

[13.37]

And as one further side story I do remember the wonderful Richie Phipps who’s a – a biker, a Hell’s Angel I think, motorbike chassis builder and a highly skilled model- making technician; shortly after that [laughs] he decided he wanted my boots. ‘I want your boots,’ he said, and [in return] he proposed to make me a working replica of the Aanderaa current meter, the RCM5, that we’d been using. During these storm-tossed weeks in the Southern Ocean he did so; he made this beautiful little model current meter with a plastic fin just like it should be. The whole thing opened with little Allen keys and it was about a foot long I suppose; the end cap came off with little Allen keys; there was something inside it; the Savonius rotor went around at the top; and he even made the – the paint-spray gun from scratch, and made the paint! We ended up with this perfect little model that eventually I presented in one of our meetings in Bergen to the – in a glass top case to Ivar Aanderaa at Aanderaa Instruments in Bergen, and it had a little silver plate on to record the thanks of all these WOCE people, including ourselves for the – the aid he’d given to the small observing community that worked [with] his machines during WOCE. It’s probably still there in his entrance hall.

[15.11]

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I think also it’s worth tempering these stories of daring do with the commonsense of John Swallow again, which was highly important in its impact for the WOCE dataset and it’s working-up, and a reminder of how leadership could be and should be and isn’t always. What we were about was a UK WOCE PI meeting where the Principle Investigators met in the Royal Society, and what was on our mind was to determine the length of the embargo period for our datasets. The current meter people said, ‘Let’s have a year, it’s going to take us that long to work up our data and get them into print and we don’t want anyone pinching it before we’ve got it in print; so give us a year embargo-period for current meter data,’; and the tracer guys needed their isotopes to grow in and so they wanted two years or maybe three. John Swallow simply stood up and said, ‘I should be very worried if nobody wanted my data,’ and that brought the meeting to an abrupt halt and we all walked out [laughs]. In other words he was saying, ‘Give everyone your data, as soon as you know it’s data and you will get far more back than you ever hand out,’ and that’s exactly what happened and what we did. We never regretted taking our lead from John Swallow, ‘I should be very worried if nobody wanted my data,’ was [laughs] our motto from then on and much more data flooded in than flooded out and nobody ever abused the process by publishing our stuff without permission.

[16.52]

My second task for WOCE was more ocean geography. As early as 1983 I’d made the first comprehensive global review of the oceans’ eddy field in Alan Robinson’s volume Eddies in Marine Science, [in which I] joined together eddy’s statistics from all available long term current meter records in the World Ocean to establish regional characteristics and interregional differences. In my dim recollection I was [for that earlier exercise] given an air ticket by Alan Robinson with ‘Round the World’ written on it, ----I still wonder whether that was in fact possible and whether it’s a memory that’s real,---- and told to go and get the statistics. And so I did. Essentially that meant a tour of the US in those days. The horizontal distribution of fluctuation kinetic energy was mapped and described for a range of depth layers in the ocean and related to the corresponding estimates of the kinetic energy of the mean flow. The dominant

167 Bob Dickson Page 168 C1379/56 Track 9 eddy timescales and their variation with depth and location were described and compared for long transects through the equatorial [and] temperate ocean. And the vertical eddy structure was described and shown to compare well with the theoretical structures predicted in the numerical-theoretical models of Rhines and others, Peter Rhines. Now in WOCE, I was allowed to reprise that role as the chair of the WOCE Eddy Statistics Scientific Panel. I was also the sole member of the WOCE Eddy Statistic Scientific Panel! I never missed a meeting of my one man committee and got a spoof prize for such perfect attendance at the final WOCE meeting at the end of the ‘90s in Halifax, British Columbia [Oops! should be Nova Scotia I need hardly say] [laughs], presented by John Gould. I appreciated it very much. We take them wherever we can find them. Still we did piece together a considerable volume of work in this inventory and from the 454 instrument years that formed the global current meter inventory in 1981, the inventory pre WOCE had risen to 2,369 and Lord only knows what the post WOCE version amounted to. The holdings on the WOCE website suggest at least another 1,574 instrument years were added during WOCE and so almost 4,000 years of data were pieced together in total and that was well worth my spoof prize.

[19.31]

So WOCE ended and for more than a decade after , the local observing community set out to meet the deficiencies in our observational coverage throughout the sub-Arctic seas. And this brings me to ASOF which is [pause] one of I think – one of the best and most enjoyable periods in my career, ---Chairing the ASOF Group. Originally the job of exploring the sub-Arctic seas to meet the lack of attention during WOCE was the task of a group who had already learned to work harmoniously together in the ICES Working Group on Oceanic Hydrography and had learned to rely on each other’s strengths and to bridge any weaknesses. It was highly important that they developed this capability because the world had moved on now from the days when we all went to sea as individual PIs or institutes that had been the case up to the ‘90s. Now this group delivered a first regional programme covering all the significant ocean fluxes through the Nordic Seas in the EC VEINS study (Variability of Exchanges in Northern Seas) that took place between 1997 and 2000, so just after

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WOCE, with the EC project steered through the thorny thickets of EC bureaucracy by the calm and pleasant Jens Meincke who became my closest partner in science until our ‘retirements’ in quotes. (Retirements in science [laughs] merit quotation marks). Thereafter – so that was we’d moved from [individual] institutions looking at the ocean, to a [collaborative] regional study, which I think was a derivative of the ICESs hydrography committee itself, to look at the exchanges between the Arctic and the Atlantic through Nordic Seas.

[21.37]

This regional VEINS study quickly developed and expanded in scale once again to become a full multinational pan-Arctic ASOF study (Arctic Sub-Arctic Ocean Fluxes) from 2000 to 2006. So in two steps we’d moved from the non coverage of the sub- Arctic seas to regional coverage in the Nordic Seas to pan-Arctic coverage. I clearly remember being cornered by Lou Brown and the late Tom Pyle in NSF after giving a talk at NSF headquarters in Washington and being fed large rum and cokes while they fed their plan into my left ear, ‘We want you to start something called ASOF,’ they said, and I said, ‘Could it be called this other thing?’ and they said, ‘No. ASOF,’ so ASOF is what it was. And when two such important figures in the National Science Foundation, -----the one who was in the charge of the Arctic desk in the Office of Polar Programmes and the other was in Geosciences and was also the secretary of the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board, -----when they determined to do something, very little will stop them. So ASOF succeeded VEINS at larger scale, with Jens Meincke once again competently and calmly steering the EC component, a job that would drive many people mad, and Peter Rhines leading the western component and with me chairing the whole orchestra. From the regional scale of VEINS to the hemispheric scale of ASOF, the primary scientific objection – excuse me (!), objective ---remained the same [laughs]. “To measure and model the variability of fluxes between the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean that we needed to understand the high latitude oceans’ steering role in decadal climate variability”, there I can remember its – its practically carved over my bed head: ‘to understand - measure and model the variability of fluxes between the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean that were needed to understand the high latitude oceans’ steering role in decadal climate

169 Bob Dickson Page 170 C1379/56 Track 9 variability’. It’s quite a mouthful, but it meant what it said. And from the first moment to the last this was the most pleasant and productive period of my career, chairing a clever, inventive, friendly and self-motivated group of PIs on whom you could absolutely rely to deliver in a venture that was at the time the largest ocean observing exercise on the planet. And they did deliver. By 2008, a 101-author benchmark account of all these fluxes, the ASOF volume [was published], quantifying the ocean exchanges through sub-Arctic seas, describing their importance to climate as we currently understood it, explaining their variability, setting out our current ideas on forcing of these fluxes, and our improved capability in modelling the fluxes themselves and the processes at work, and with much of the evidence assembled for the first time. All in all, this volume defining the role of the northern seas in climate which was the subtitle of the volume, was a benchmark book.

[24.55]

Just to give some idea of how pleasant it was to work with such a collaborative [pause] a collaborative group of people who were not only clever in themselves but looked out for each other. That was what made such a difference and what made the job of chairing them so – so easy. I give you one story; it was the story of one of the chapters in the ASOF volume which was actually –or it should have been -the best. It was the one that dealt with the wonderful things that people were measuring and the completeness of that measurement programme in the eastern end of the Greenland- Scotland Ridge where the deep overflows from the Nordic Seas were heading into the Atlantic. As I say that was one of the most strikingly good parts of ASOF and it was badly written in – as a chapter. The reason was simply that Svein Osterhus's [lead author of that chapter] wife was dying, [so that] the poor man’s mind was distracted and he was, –as you would be, elsewhere in his thoughts.[pause] So, quite unlike him before or since, that chapter was not up to his standard. I more or less remember looking across at Bogi Hansen who was the – his counterpart in the Faroes and a member of that group; it almost needed no words. Bogi just nodded and went away and rewrote the whole thing as Svein Osterhus would have wished it to be. As a result if you look at the volume today it is one of the most, as it should be, one of the most beautiful accounts of a brand new programme and impressive results that you

170 Bob Dickson Page 171 C1379/56 Track 9 can imagine. So a group of people who were looking out for each other and clever and I got the job of chairing them. It was as I say a wonderful experience.

[27.01]

The pleasant finale of the ASOF conference in the Faroes is something which I should end with because Bogi Hansen organised that, ----he’s the Faroes’ only nuclear physicist [laughs] and professor of ocean science at their university. We all had troubles getting to Faroes; it’s not an easy place to get to. Lennart Bengtsson was our guest of honour, he had a hard job getting through Copenhagen to get there, and Jim Hurrell from NCAR, who was our other guest of honour from Colorado, he nearly gave up three times as various flights circled Pittsburgh in a succession of storms and he said to himself, ‘No, Bob would expect me to be there,’ and he was. We had a wonderful time at the meeting; an introductory Sea Symphony was played on the stage, composed by the foremost, not to say only, composer in the Faroes, and then we had a beautiful sunny excursion on two old wooden sailing trading vessels to islands named Colt and Horse, drinking soup stiff with scallops on route, made by the skippers, and with huge beetling cliffs and a sheepdog where we landed on the Colt to throw sticks for. It was hard not to share the pride of the Faroese then and since in their islands and in their abilities. And ASOF, in ASOF we also had the example of the ACSYS book to chasten and hasten us along. ACSYS had had a – ACSYS as I mentioned a little earlier was the Arctic Climate System Study - and they had an intention of writing a book and they let it drag on. I don’t think it ever has emerged and we had this horrible example to – as I say, to chasten us. With that in mind, that horrible example in mind 101 [ASOF] authors delivered on time and all drafts were in within a year in July 2007, one year after the conference. Then with a big flurry in Vigo with Roberta Boscolo, who was our able Science Officer, doing the editing, and Jens and me sitting there going blind proofreading, the job was done in six months after that. Then we had a book launch by Springer at the AGU meeting in Orlando, Florida in the spring of 2008. There are still no obvious errors in that book and I’m proud of it. And so I think are the others in ASOF; there remains no better statement of the climatically-important ocean fluxes that connect the North Atlantic to the Arctic.

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[29.54]

I wonder whether you could tell me about the work of the – I think you called them the ‘tracer group’ in the Antarctic seas work, I think Andrew Watson was one of the people mentioned?

Yeah, Andy Watson and Tom Haine.

Yes, I wonder if you could tell me what their role was?

That was work at, totally mind blowing to the rest of us, but work that was absolutely at the cutting edge of the science. What we were doing was trying to measure on the bottom – the floor of the southern ocean the dense water that was flowing out from higher up on the shelf near Antarctica which then descended into the Weddell Sea along its western boundary, and then passed eastwards along a mountain range towards Crozet Island and then whizzed through between Crozet and Kerguelen into the Indian Ocean. The reason we were so interested in CFCs was that they were manmade tracer chemicals that were coming from the atmosphere into the ocean and so if you found them on the bottom of the – in the abyssal southern ocean you knew you had tagged water which had previously, not too long ago, been associated with the surface waters of the southern ocean. And because people, the tracer chemists, knew what the profile of these chemicals in the atmosphere was, you also had the suggestion that you could tell from their diluted version down below in the abyssal layer of the southern ocean when these things left the surface. So the reason we were interested in carbon tetrachloride and in the other CFCs, the sort of things that you might get when you spray your underarm deodorant, was simply that, that they were modern in the atmosphere and therefore gave a modern tag to water which we were trying to specifically trace: the deep outflow from the shelves of the southern continent down into the deep ocean. It’s not altogether divorced from the Denmark Strait overflow of course because the North Atlantic Deep Water as it comes over the Denmark Strait overflow in the north and then percolates south in the general ocean circulation does ascend onto the shelves of Antarctica and is ‘re-densified’ if you like.

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So the stuff that’s going down from there does have [coughs] relations in the north. That was why we were doing it and the – the impressive thing though was [this]. That these people like [...] Andy Watson and Tom Haine were measuring atoms in – atom by atom quantities in the samples we were collecting using the rosette sampler next to the bottom of the southern ocean. The impressive thing was that they could actually keep their system of tubing and their chemical systems from the sample to the counter so clean that they could actually be quite sure that they were measuring a few atoms of carbon tetrachloride, say, in the abyssal ocean. That was all there was, it was heavily diluted, I mentioned thirteen fold in going from the top of the Weddell Sea to the Crozet gap. That was all you had to play with and these were the only people on Earth that could do it. I think there was probably Ray Weiss in the States could probably do it as well and a couple of others, maybe one in Canada; but we were very lucky to have on successive cruises two of the ones – two of the very few people that could use tracer chemicals in this way.

[34.16]

And were there any – I wondered whether there were any female scientists involved in either the WOCE work or in the ASOF work?

Oh absolutely, I mean the; – not in that particular instance but we had very clever lady oceanographers along with us. One of the cleverest of the lot continues to work in the southern ocean and has just had the Georg Wüst Prize a couple of years ago. Her name’s Heywood, she’s the Professor at – Karen Heywood at University of East Anglia. One of the girls I took along ---, she was a girl in these days, ----on the ADOX cruises, was [Rebecca Woodgate]. That was her first trip to sea and she had listened very attentively when I – this is Rebecca - when I asked around, ‘We need a few extra people for going on the Discovery cruise in the southern ocean, does anyone want to go?’ She had moved from the – doing some abstruse thing in the University of Oxford to say, ‘Yes, please, I would like to do it.’ And she’s now one of the chief scientists in the [pause] in [polar] oceanography in one of the big Seattle laboratories. Rebecca Woodgate is her name and she went to sea for the first time with us on – on ADOX. The ASOF group was[pause] ---it was one of the nice things about it that you didn’t

173 Bob Dickson Page 174 C1379/56 Track 9 actually count how many [laughs] ladies and men there were but certainly there were a good sprinkling – in fact I would say a third of the scientists involved in ADOX were female. And the nice fact about it was that [pause] nobody ever knew, nobody ever minded whether the ladies were leading the charge on certain aspects of it; that was regarded as their right if they had that qualifications and the interest. It has been the same in the north during the IPY, rather more so in the IPY I would think, where many, very many of the cruises – well WOCE and the IPY - were led by women. So no, I think there was no distinction between men and women; it was all down to ability and you took with you what you needed to do the job as you perceived it and with a little slack to allow for learning something [laughs] in the process. Whatever people’s skills were was the – was the question. I've already mentioned the analyses by Ruth Curry and Cecilie Mauritzen. There were what we – Ruth was at Woods Hole and Cecilie Mauritzen then went on to become the [oceanographic] Head at MetNor, one of the big climate institutes in Norway. Their analyses of the global and northern hemisphere datasets are often what I relied on in describing, for example, the size of the slug of freshwater in the Great Salinity Anomaly or the increase in the flow of the North Atlantic current along the gyre-gyre boundary as the NAO speeded up: that was Curry and McCartney. So we saw them more as experts rather than for their particular gender.

[38.19]

Was it necessary to make any particular arrangements for example when you took Rebecca on the ADOX cruise?

No, I – of course there I didn’t go into their cabins nightly to find out what they were up to, but I’m sure there – there was – there was [pause] no hint that they would be … shoved off into some sort of harem, where behind locked doors or anything like that. People just respected them as they would as working colleagues in the lab. We have many ladies and women and girls in the CEFAS and there – they – we just get on and work with them as you would imagine we would do. So no there are no special [pause] I don’t think there are any special [pause] arrangements that have to be made. I remember once when we were doing a review of the British Antarctic Survey

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[laughs] that the ladies kept complaining that the X4 suits that they were given were designed for men, and I think one of the things that I recommended was that instead of treating women as small men, from which hot air kept escaping the suits of, they might considering building X4 suits for women; and I think they do now. But I mean apart from that obvious example then no, we made no special allowances for them being women.

When did you do a review of the British Antarctic Survey?

Oh lord, I think that must have been about 2005 and we [pause] though I should look that up; it’s easy enough to look it up. Yes we reviewed all the workings of the British Antarctic Survey in a working group and there were tetchinesses when – as there always are when people come in to review. But by and large the things that we found out that needed drawing to their attention were worth drawing to their attention. I’m not going to go into details of these now, they’re all water under the bridge. There were things that they needed to change and a visiting group is often very good at spotting something which has been going on for too long and may even be ingrained in the system, without anyone noticing. And I think it had effects. One of the effects was definitely not welcomed down at BAS: they used to have a ring-fenced [funding] allowance for working in the southern ocean and we suggested that if they wanted to work in the northern ocean, as Arctic people, they might give up a small percentage of this ring-fenced sum. we – They would then be allowed to bid for research in the north and others would be allowed to bid for a small percentage, I think fifteen per cent of the previously ring-fenced income in the south. I don’t know how that worked out but I’m very well aware that BAS do work now in the north and that others do work in the south so it was that sort of thing that one drew to their attention; what about giving up some of this ring fenced-ness and in exchange we will look forward to your proposals for work in the north where previously we expected that to come from others. So there were all sorts of suggestions that that review group made and these review groups come and go once a decade or so I imagine. Like most review groups they’re not particularly welcomed and like most review groups we would have suffered from the usual degree of myopia till we became - until our eyes became adjusted to what was going on, you’re just a visiting group after all. But I

175 Bob Dickson Page 176 C1379/56 Track 9 think I could put my hand on my heart and say that quite a few of the suggestions we made were valid ones and one of them I think was the – to produce X4s [cold weather survival suits] shaped like women instead of like small men (!)

[End of Track 9]

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Track 10

The dominating science event in the first decade of the 21 st Century was the Fourth International Polar Year. These things have happened before every fifty years or so but unlike its predecessors, this one didn’t have a charismatic origin story of its own, like the famous dinner at James Van Allen’s house in April 1950 that gave momentum to the International Geophysical Year, ---that was the previous polar year. Instead this IPY seemed to be argued and wrestled into existence over many years by a few people who believed in it as a driving force for polar science. And we’ve every reason to claim that the UK’s Chris Rapley, the director of BAS, played the real role in its inception. His was certainly the earliest to appeal for a new IPY, his proposal [appearing] as early as 1997, and though that proposal went nowhere it was once again Chris Rapley with Robin Bell on behalf of the European Polar Board and the US Polar Research Board who jointly submitted the successful proposal to ICSU in February 2003, arguing for the fourth international polar year in 2007 and for the creation of a Special Planning Group to prepare its science programme. This time ICSU supported the idea. For anyone who thinks that was that, I could be quite sure having seen Chris stand and make the IPY case time and time and time again at venue after venue [laughs] that it was his stamina that gave the IPY much of its essential momentum. From a Planning Group in 2003/4 which he chaired, a new joint committee was established, a central IPY programme office was created at BAS in Cambridge, expressions of intent were called for and off it went, and it was a huge success. Over the two years March 2007 – 2009 (it calls itself a polar year but it’s actually two years), according to David Carlson who directed the project office in Cambridge the IPY represented a fifty per cent increase in the funding of polar science, a major expansion of the observing effort across the polar and sub polar seas, the deployment of a huge range of new and complex observing techniques, and for me the best aspect of all, a gratifying new degree of international collaboration in their use. So that one would find a Chinese – here’s one of my reports on the IPY – a Chinese icebreaker, the Snow Dragon with a German, French and Finnish hydrographers onboard deploying Ice-Tethered Profilers from Woods Hole Massachusetts. That to me was what the IPY was all about, in making everyone work, simply because of the lack of the platforms available, making everyone work

177 Bob Dickson Page 178 C1379/56 Track 10 together to the greater good. And as a result it revolutionised our polar datasets to provide our first real glimpse of the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere operating as a complete system.

[03.32]

As a member of the Royal Society’s UK committee for the IPY, also chaired by Chris, my own role was a minor one helping to assemble UK interests into some coherent national plan. But as a member and later chair of the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board, -- --sorry, deputy chair of the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board, ----I was invited or drawn or cajoled or bullied by Sarah Bowden, the secretary of the AOSB, to write an extended four year essay for the AOSB on the common theme: What should an integrated Arctic Ocean observing system look like? How should we design an effective international ocean observing plan for northern seas in the legacy phase of the international polar year based on what we’ve learnt? The result I think was most worthwhile. The first two iAOOS [integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System] reports which were written during the IPY itself were largely descriptive, detailing some of the main advances that were made in the difficult business of observing the Arctic and sub-Arctic seas during the IPY and describing some of the main results and the new ideas that were emerging from these observations. In doing so, thanks entirely to the willingness of PIs to chip in their brand new data and results while they were still wet from the ocean as it were, they gave a complete panoramic view of the IPY in northern seas that was not readily available elsewhere. So these two reports were I think appreciated as a context setter by the PIs involved; they got to see where their own research fitted into the pan-Arctic picture and I do believe that the funding agencies, even NSF, also appreciated seeing what the full picture looked like. The third report for AOSB used these results and ideas to begin the task of establishing what was the rational mix of observations to sustain into the future, and the need for such a forward look is clear enough. If we are to develop the predictive skills and usefulness of climate models, we need to observe, understand and build in a whole list of processes that are not yet represented realistically or even at all in climate models and in fact that list is quite a long one. The reason for emphasising the longer term outlook period, the legacy phase of the polar year, is simply that it’ll be during the

178 Bob Dickson Page 179 C1379/56 Track 10 five to ten years of that when we test our emerging ideas that we will develop the techniques and the information and the theory to the point where they can be of use in climate models, it’ll not be the two years of the polar year itself. They will have certainly prompted the questions but it’ll be the test of these questions over a rather longer period in what we call the ‘Legacy Phase’ of the polar year that we will actually develop them to the point of usefulness in models. And some of the new ideas we’ve been seeing emerge are quite startling. To illustrate just six or eight of these, we learn for example from Bert Rudels at the University of Helsinki that the supposedly lesser inflow of warm water to the Arctic, the one through the Barents Sea, is probably the one that carries most of the warm water signal from Nordic Seas around the Arctic most of the time, not the Fram Strait inflow which is what we’d always supposed to be the main inflowing route. From Jean-Claude Gascard’s DAMOCLES programme, – project we saw the transpolar drift carry the polar yacht Tara twice as fast across the Arctic as Nansen had managed in the Fram a century before. [recording stops; restarts] We saw the transpolar drift carry the polar yacht Tara twice as fast across the Arctic as Nansen had managed in the Fram over a century before. From Jen Jackson’s Canadian hydrography in the upper part of the Canada basin, Jim Overland in Seattle was able to show that the heat stored in the ice free polar ocean in summer was able to destabilise the polar atmosphere in fall , thus altering the regional atmospheric circulation. For many this lagged response of the atmosphere over the pole to the newly opened polar sea was the big deal of the IPY so far. From Andrey Proshutinsky’s explorations of the Beaufort Gyre, --his programme is based at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, began before the IPY but continuing through it, ---we learned that the largest marine reservoir on Earth was the – freshwater reservoir on Earth was in a state of rapid transition, building up rapidly. From John Toole of Woods Hole we learned the riveting idea that the warm layer of Pacific origin just sixty metres down in the Canada basin might be a ‘ticking time bomb’ as he called it from the viewpoint of sea ice melt if the depth of mixing in a newly opened polar sea might extend just a little bit deeper. From Michael Karcher’s simulations at AWI Bremerhaven, we learned that the climatic impact of an abnormally warm Atlantic-derived sub-layer, currently circling the Arctic deep basins at 300-400 metres depth, might be a delayed and remote one, finally slowing the Denmark Strait overflow around 2016 -18. And from a whole international grouping

179 Bob Dickson Page 180 C1379/56 Track 10 of people we learned that almost all of our ideas about the future freshwater flux passing Greenland: ----how much, which side, what effects of the ocean on the Greenland ice melt, what effects of Greenland ice melt on the ocean and what might be the combined impact of all this on the oceans Thermohaline Conveyor further south? ---all of these ideas have changed and the new ideas that the replacement – replaced them were demanding to be tested. So just to underline that point: from having a data desert virtually in the – let’s deal with the Canada basin, one of the Arctic deep basins - from having a virtual data desert before the – at the time of the late ‘90s, the polar year and its explorations had shown us that in one dip through the Canada basin you could successively pass at twenty metres or so through a subsurface temperature maximum in the ocean which had been – which was formed by warmth passing in through leads and melt ponds in the summer that capped itself off by melting a little bit of ice into a freshwater lid and then being able to release this warmth again in the autumn to produce a change that was dramatic in significance: a significant [change] in the regional atmospheric circulation in fall. Go a little bit further down and you found this layer that John Toole talks about from the coming from the Pacific which has had no particular impact on climate right now because it’s too deep to be reached from the surface by mixing in the highly stratified polar ocean; but if this Pacific sub layer was reached as – by slightly more intense mixing as the polar sea becomes ice free, then it would have a significant impact on sea ice, able to melt one meter of sea ice on its own. And below that again as your probe, let’s say this hypothetical probe you’re lowering through the Canada basin, as it got down to 400 metres it would find a layer of Atlantic water which was at its warmest for at least fifteen years and possibly for 100 years which would not have an effect on the local circulation or on the sea ice, it’s too deep for that, but would be passed east of the Fram Strait and drain south where it might for the first time, we believe, slow down the Denmark Strait overflow, the climatic impact of which is expressed in its effect on the global thermohaline circulation. So in one little area, one little CTD dip if you like, we have the regional ‘here-and-now’ effect on climate, a‘potential’ Pacific-origin effect below that, and a lagged, remote far-away climatic effect of the Atlantic derived layer below that. So we began to see, and that’s in one dip through the Canada Basin, we began to see fairly clearly but we began to see with enough complexity to understand the details of the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere system working as a

180 Bob Dickson Page 181 C1379/56 Track 10 system for the first time and that was really the point I was trying to get across. We’ve learnt enough complexity to look realistic in our – in the ways we would describe the role of the northern seas in climate.

So finally at the Arctic Science Summit in Seoul in April 2011 my fourth report to AOSB, ---now the marine working group of the International Arctic Science Committee, IASC, ---that fourth report laid out a plan for an observing system that might test these new ideas in this Legacy Phase of the IPY. And endorsed by AOSB and part-funded by IASC, a new body called ACSNet the Arctic Climate System Network has now been established since this Seoul meeting in April 2011, under Mary-Louise Timmermans of Yale, to coordinate the Arctic deep basins part of this investigation into the role of the northern seas in climate. Under Tom Haine the ASOF2 group, the successor group to the one that I used to chair, are shaping to follow with a plan to test our new ideas about Greenland freshwater and the MOC. So in 2009 we started – sorry 2007 we started to learn the real complexity of the ocean’s role in climate in the north, we learned which I – which were the ideas worth testing in the Legacy Phase of the polar year, with the idea of testing them for sure one way or the other in five or ten years. The latest developments have concerned setting up bodies to test the ideas one after another to see which ones were valid.

[15.26]

In 2009 more or less in the middle of my four year extended essay into the Arctic observing system for AOSB came one for the greatest moments of my scientific life when Eddy Carmack, one of the greatest of the present great crop of Canadian Arctic oceanographers and incidentally the great-grandson of George Washington Carmack who discovered gold on the Yukon [laughs] in 1896, Eddy invited me to join him on the largest of the Canadian icebreakers as it smashed its way through the North West Passage from Resolute to Kugluktuk on the first through-voyage of the year as part of what he called his ‘Philosopher’s Cruise’. What was on his mind was a dilemma:-- that although we can’t understand global change in the ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere system except at the largest space and timescales accessible to us, that’s Pan-Arctic and years to decades, we can’t do much that is useful with that understanding unless

181 Bob Dickson Page 182 C1379/56 Track 10 and until we can find some way of downscaling the science to the local and regional scales that make sense to people. We now also know from model studies that observing the system and its changes at finer scale is vital for narrowing uncertainty in our regional climate predictions. And so a large part of the rationale for Eddy’s Philosopher’s Cruise was to bring together a disparate group of people to talk about how this finer scale of observation might be achieved. And so it was that on a sunlit cruise through the North West Passage aboard the Louis St Laurent in the summer of 2009, while the ship got on with its established oceanographic tasks, a group representing a broad range of science disciplines and those concerned with Canada’s northern strategy explored ways and means of downscaling science to inform policy at the local level. And the upshot was immensely practical. In fall [and] winter 2010, that’s a year ago, the Canadian Rangers Patrol Group operating out of villages across the Canadian Arctic initiated a first trial of the resulting plan, compiling a simple yet climatically-valuable set of measurements throughout the North West Passage at a much finer scale than the Louis might ever achieve in its annual voyages. But leaving behind transmitting buoys frozen in the ice to record ice temperature profiles for example. The real issue under test of course is whether the science of change in the Canadian north can in any practical sense be downscaled to the point where it begins to make real and practical connections with a whole web of local needs, but if it can and if it does then this cruise will have attained a most practical end point. One in which the seas immediately offshore of the indigenous communities are bridged and the people engaged. In its close interactions with a wonderful and creative group of people including the great Buzz Holling, the holder of the Order of Canada, Ron Kwok from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena who’s the world expert in sensing sea ice thickness from space, as well as those trained in local knowledge and the local territorial Senator, all of these were aboard that cruise, and the cruise was therefore a highlight of my life. And that statement is despite or perhaps because of the fact that my own talk onboard [laughs] was interrupted terminally by a call from the bridge that a female polar bear and her cubs were walking alongside [laughs] and I led the charge; I don’t think that talk ever finished or it may have finished very much later.

[19.16]

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Could I ask you in that – in that year that wasn’t a year 2007 to 2009, can I ask what you did in particular or a little bit more detail about what you did in particular over those years. You’ve said that you were involved in sort of assembling the UK contribution as a sort of national plan but what did that mean in practice, what did you do, also related to that if you did anything in the field in those years?

Well we met frequently at the Royal Society, and what we tried to do, what I tried to do was to, ---apart from informing people on what we ourselves were going to do --- and that was two fold: one of them was to keep the Denmark Strait overflow moorings alive - but also to try to see how the general observing of the polar seas might be helped by piecing together a little bit more effort here and there from the UK. For example there was a – a great effort in the Seattle group to try to work out the circulation from space based on bottom pressure [plus] the dynamic topography of the sea surface, [estimated] in the presence of ice, and to use that to explain not only the changes in the water column of the Arctic deep basins but also the circulation changes that were driving around the Arctic to deliver water from here to there and cause some of these changes. So for example I would contact the Proudman Lab to see if they had any bottom pressure gauges that the British effort [might use], led by Sheldon Bacon in the western Arctic; if they had any bottom pressure gauges freed up from their work in the south that might be devoted to the Arctic; ones they weren’t using, [yet] ones which might make a very great deal of difference when you’re trying to produce ground truth for what you think the satellites are seeing from space. Actually I should find out a bit more about whether these overtures were successful and to what extent. But the other thing we were doing was to marry the [laughs] sea going of, for example the University of Fairbanks, Alaska people, with Sheldon Bacon’s group from Southampton, in a meaningful way. I think these were the sorts of discussions that led to the polar year into being such a – a useful international mix on the few available platforms.

[22.33]

And could you say some more about the specifically British contribution to the International Polar Year and I notice that – I don’t think you did mention them in

183 Bob Dickson Page 184 C1379/56 Track 10 relation to the sort of five or six key new understandings that came out but which I suppose region were they working in and what were they doing, precisely the British scientists on this?

Well Southampton, for example, had two principle endeavours in the north which have led to a new project since then. One of them was the – as I say Sheldon Bacon’s participation onboard the NABOS cruises: the boundary flows of warm water around the edge of the Arctic, coming in through Fram Strait and going around to the Canada basin; he would be working [on NABOS] with the scientists in the University of Fairbanks, Alaska. And there the – he took with him the scientists from the University College of North Wales and they were measuring turbulence directly in the ocean, one of the key factors in one of the questions that I was mentioning earlier. They would do it with – at the time things were very quickly moving, at the time they did it a particular way by having to go to sea and now in the fourth of my reports, in the first of two of my reports you’ll find the University College of North Wales effort in measuring ocean turbulence [described] there. In the final one you’ll [also] find a brand new system from Woods Hole where a new version of their Ice-Tethered Profiler is now equipped with something to measure turbulence directly called MAVS: the Modular Acoustic Velocity Sensor. So in many ways the technology changed throughout the polar year but Britain was certainly a part of it. I don’t know as I said whether the bottom pressure gauges of Proudman Lab were ever brought to bear in the Beaufort Gyre, as we’d hoped that they would, and that’s just - I really mean I don’t know whether they were put in place. The other attractive bits that Britain contributed to the polar year were certainly that Sheldon Bacon’s group tried to map out the salinity distributions around the Arctic, had a very impressive stab at assessing from the inputs of heat and salt at all of the inputs and outputs, [inlets and] exits of the Arctic, what the imbalances were in what we regard as being the circulation in and out. Now that’s the – Sheldon’s account of that is simply the only one that I know of and he had the scope to put that together. The – the scientists at Southampton were also those responsible for measuring [and] trying to partition the freshwater flux passing Greenland into its local and remote origins, and as I tried to explain the issue of freshwater passing Greenland and its future course and it’s effect on the Thermohaline Circulation is certainly one of the big questions; you asked me

184 Bob Dickson Page 185 C1379/56 Track 10 how they fitted into these big questions. That would Penny Holliday leading the charge on that at Southampton, and still is, and the impact of that freshwater flux on the Thermohaline Circulation, as measured in the Mid Atlantic Bight, is going to be one of the big initiatives in the future. So one of the things I should have mentioned at the beginning was that we, in writing these reports had been absolutely adamant that they will not just deal with the Arctic Ocean; they have to deal with sub Arctic seas as well, because a lot of Arctic change is passed into the Arctic Ocean from sub Arctic seas, and as I said at the beginning, the big impact of Arctic change, one can imagine, [is] being where the [freshwater] efflux from the Arctic passes south through sub Arctic seas to affect the Thermohaline Circulation. So we– in the AOSB reports we did make the point[that] you can’t study the Arctic – you can’t understand Arctic change [just] by studying the Arctic, you have to extend your focus to include sub Arctic seas and that is where the UK, traditionally, [has contributed]. Steve Dye and the current meters of the Denmark Strait for example, [as] part of the EC programme THOR; these were all relevant to what was being discovered in the polar year because the polar year is not just an Arctic business, a polar seas business, but a sub Arctic business also.

[27.58]

Are there national differences within this large international cooperative exercise in science, are there national differences in the extent to which people appreciated that need to study the sub Arctic seas as part of the Arctic, you seem to imply there a little bit Britain – British scientists in particular recognised that, perhaps because of your influence, I don’t know, but were there national differences in the extent to which the sub Arctic seas were valued as a site for observations alongside Arctic sites?

Yes, in a sense I could see at the beginning – to people who were not directly connected with the IPY, ---they would see the bit north of Fram Strait as being the Arctic Ocean ---and it is. But the place where change comes from, as I say, is further south and you would have no particular argument that that was the case. The fact of the matter is that when a body like NSF [the US National Science Foundation] issues what they call an ‘announcement of opportunity’ for the polar year, it would be for

185 Bob Dickson Page 186 C1379/56 Track 10 studies in northern sea, in the Arctic Ocean specifically. And they would expect more regional programmes like [ours] or Woods Hole’s own programme, to deal with the study of the Denmark Strait [say]. So there was a lot of – I would say that the polar year spurred on a number of calls for study that were focused on the formerly ice covered Arctic Ocean, let’s call it that. The scientists however would have no problem in grasping the point we made in the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board that you can’t understand Arctic change just by studying the Arctic. And because the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board was letting me hold the pen that was certainly the view that came – that would have come across in these four reports for AOSB. And these were appreciated by the funding agencies; I mean I remember [that] Karl Erb, who was the head of the Office of Polar Programmes, north and south, in NSF came up after receiving the first of these reports and he simply said, ‘Good report, do it again next year, twice the size, I’ll pay.’ Now you realise that you’re giving these people [laughs] a perspective that they don’t necessarily have. He was the biggest funder [but] he was saying [that even so] ‘I only actually get access to the bit I fund, and seeing the whole pattern, Arctic and sub Arctic, is important to me’. So none of these people would have been surprised to find that the sub Arctic was part of the deal, and if they did then they – I hope we disabused them of that; [actually] I can’t believe it to be true. We all know that the warmth and salt come up from the south through the Nordic Seas and that has a big effect on climate in the Arctic. We all know that the freshwater flux passing south to the Atlantic again through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and the Nordic Seas through Fram Strait is one of the big ways that the Thermohaline Circulation may slow down. And if they didn’t know , we have Bert Rudels again coming up with a brand new and interesting idea that pretty soon the freshwater melting off Greenland and discharging itself into a current which is circulating into the Baffin Bay may, within the foreseeable future, change the density structure in Baffin Bay itself, to the point where the flow of freshwater through the Canadian [Arctic] Archipelago slows down or changes its route. So these it – as I said if anyone was enamoured of the idea that the Arctic is a closed box that you can study on its own then everything we’ve found since and all of the new ideas that we’ve been testing since, certainly the new plan that we have under ACSNet and under ASOF to test the ideas that we’ve seen in the polar year, these all are predicated on knowing about the sub Arctic seas and the Arctic as a combined system.

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[32.43]

And British contributions in terms of the financing, you said that NSF was the major funder, but –

Yeah, NSF and Canada were the major funders I would say. But I wouldn’t know – and I would suspect that Germany was up with Canada in terms of its contribution because it tends to have a system where the national projects that are thought highest- rated attract the infrastructure without charge, so that the big icebreakers in Germany might go to the AWI [Alfred Wegener Institut für Polar und Meeresforschung] Group led by Ursula to go and s – work in the – Ursula Schauer I mean, to go and work in the Arctic deep basins, and you would hardly see this [ship-cost] as a major element of [her project] costs because these, in the German mind, these large infrastructure units like the – their huge icebreaker, the Polarstern , w ould simply be regarded as an existing asset and given to the best project. Nonetheless [the PI mix aboard would be] one of these international groups of people with Japanese and – and Koreans, French, Woods Hole people, as well as Germans on the Polarstern , off doing things which will not only be pan Arctic, -----they held the record for the biggest coverage I think from the north of Svalbard all the way around to the Canadian basin on the Polarstern , ----but the techniques that were being used were also partly German and partly international. That’s part of the reason I’m finding difficulty with answering your question; because some techniques were of such universal benefit, but came from one or two point laboratories, that they tended to be distributed all over the place by the people who had asked for their use or paid for one of these units to be built for them or whatever. So that Woods Hole, the – let me just give you an example. Before the IPY at around the time when ---, let’s say at the millennium, 2000, ---- there was very little in the way of hydrographic stations across the Arctic Ocean. There had just been an exercise between US and Russia in pulling together all the [Arctic hydrographic observations], and this international working group –[the Environmental Working Group] it called itself, a US -Russia thing, came up with a [sparse] scatter of dots. It was a data desert. Then Woods Hole and Rick Krishfield in particular came up with this idea of having something which was tethered to the ice

187 Bob Dickson Page 188 C1379/56 Track 10 and which profiled [a CTD probe] through the upper ocean, up and down, left to itself, day after day, year after year. And this system, since it was introduced I think in around 2003, has produced 25,000 dips of CTD across the Arctic Ocean as it drifted along. This would have been joined by a Japanese idea which did [essentially] the same sort of thing with a different system called POPS, Polar Ocean Profiling System, and Kikuchi San would have gone on Ursula Schauer’s ship the – the Polarstern to deploy his systems on that. As a result, therefore, once the ships have – long after the ships have gone home, these systems that are producing this stellar work and which I haven’t costed to either of the owners of the icebreakers, are working their way throughout the year, all the way through the polar year certainly and because they’re only the product of two laboratories then these laboratories were [of larger than average importance]. Their big contribution was to lend the system, to train the technicians from, let’s say from AWI at Woods Hole in their use, and then give them [units of the system] to go away and use. Or to actually build systems for money and sell them to them. It becomes therefore a very long winded and very difficult thing to do, to analyse who put most of the money in. I think the Canadians, ---I remember them putting 150 million Canadian dollars into the IPY and they certainly were the ones we went to whenever we [laughs] wanted to print reports like this. The NSF and NOAA were responsible for the huge US programmes, and in particular NOAA would have been responsible for something called the Pacific Arctic Group [PAG] which sat over the Baring Sea entrance to the Arctic and did things there. But – and I think in the UK though Karen Heywood has bravely made the case over many years, not having an icebreaker of our own, like the US or Canada or Germany, we would have to go on other people’s ships and use – at other people’s tolerance and do things that fitted in with other people’s programmes; and I think we did that to the best of our ability, as well as working off conventional ships further south in the sub Arctic seas which are also, as I’ve been trying to point out, important.

[38.57]

And were – that research, the British research, where would people have gone to to fund particular projects, whether on someone else’s icebreaker or on ships further south?

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Well in MAFF we had a small role continuing the Denmark Strait overflow stuff and because we don’t lose too many moorings these days that would have been not a huge cost. We would have however been going on a German icebreaker, most years, that’s what we did, and the [pause] the Southampton people as I say would have been going on their own ships or on icebreakers in the Arctic owned by other people.

Did you go on any icebreakers in these years?

No, not in this particular thing [the IPY]. Till Eddie invited me on his philosopher’s cruise and then we didn’t touch an oceanographic instrument in anger,. We were [laughs] philosophising while the ship got on with its job.

[40.03]

I do think though that we had a positive outcome and that it fitted in well with what Canadian policy in the north ought to be. Coming down in scale to actually attack these problems at the level at which people experienced them. It’s hard – it sounds a sort of waffley woolly sentence, but there’s a very good article in Nature Geosciences by Martin Visbeck that explains the point I’m trying to make rather clearer. He says, ‘I’m an expert on global sea level rise, and in general on climate and its effects on the ocean and the other way around. For the third time this week I had to take my shoes and socks off to get on the Kiel ferry and all of my fellow passengers know that I – what I am is an expert on sea level rise, and they said, ‘Can’t you tell us how many times you’re going to need to take your shoes and socks off this week,’’ and he suddenly realised that he had not the foggiest notion at the level at which it would be of interest to people about his very own subject. And so what he was – what he has really doing and what he did in this Nature Geo article was saying ‘supposing it’s time for the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, to be allowed to get on with its job of addressing climate change, while national panels act to downscale the projections that they’re coming up with to the point where they’re of practical value to people.’ In fact at the third of the WMO conferences a couple of years ago in Geneva that was specifically what the initiative of the WMO was directed to be: the

189 Bob Dickson Page 190 C1379/56 Track 10 delivery of climate services useful for policy makers, which is what we’re talking about here. The subdivision of big change down to the sorts of scales of change that make – that make sense to people. And that is therefore the way that WMO is going. It sees that as being the practical way to – you see the dilemma that I mentioned earlier is that until you build up, integrate the picture of global change to the full pan Arctic scale, you can’t see what’s going on. But you can’t do anything useful with that until you then act to downscale it to the point at which some guy spearing a seal north of Canada knows whether his ice floe is going to be still there. And that is therefore the big challenge: downscaling. Building the big picture [is what] we’ve now done essentially; we know what’s going on and though we can’t predict it we know what has gone on and what the scales of variability are. But actually learning your trade to the point where you can downscale advice and make it of practical use is a way of – means that we will need to develop a whole higher intensity of observing, because observing the local scale is not simply a matter of dividing up the number of grids in your model or whatever.

[43.44]

To what extent do the indigenous local people themselves have a role in that higher resolution observing system, in other words during the IPY or after to what extent have kind of indigenous observations been recorded and I don’t know even incorporated into models or understandings, you know, local people’s own accounts of local change?

Well in Canada which is ---I mention Canada because it is the scientifically typical case [laughs] in that it’s the only case I suspect I could come up with where they’re actually doing that as a result of this philosophers cruise approach; Eddy Carmack set up the Canadian Rangers Patrol Group which is an indigenous group working out of villages across the Canadian Arctic. And what they’re doing is they’re – as they see the Louis St Laurent going past on its annual sweep through the North West Passage, they are taking over and doing, let’s say, weekly measurements through the North West Passage to fill in between one Louis cruise and the next – and the next years cruise. And when they can’t get there they are freezing in observing systems to

190 Bob Dickson Page 191 C1379/56 Track 10 remotely comment on the –say the temperature profiles through the ice in the North West Passage when the ice is too thick for anything to go through. So yes, these are the people who will be affected by our ability to downscale climatic advice and they are the ones who are actually producing the infill data that will do it. Whether it turns out to be practical or not is the result of that test and we don’t know whether it will end up being worth a docken or not, and if it isn’t then it will stop. That’s what I – you can say without fear or favour [laughs]. If they don’t find any practical outcome from it then these people will – the Canadian Arctic Rangers Patrol Group actually, -- the Canadian Rangers Patrol Group will not persist and it will be a failed experiment. But we hope of course that it doesn’t fail, and so do they I imagine. I see in a range of other situations I can predict that – one could predict that there will be local populations helping out with the infill detail in observations, beyond the traditional scientific ones led by the major institutions. And that’s simply because these are the people on the spot and the people who will benefit from the outcome. So we don’t really know where that’s going to go but that’s certainly what the Met Off – sorry the World Met Organisation regards as the next big thing to do. Provision of information for policy making.

[47.00]

What are your most striking memories of the philosopher’s cruise, either intellectual content or just leisure enjoyment sort of content?

The whole thing was enjoyable and I remember the polar bears, I remember being taken up in a helicopter and shown the narwhal and all that stuff. And that’s – I mean I’d be fairly thick skinned if I didn’t find that appealing. But I remember too the accidental discovery of stuff just by being stuck alongside people that you don’t normally converse with. I got on very well with Ron Kwok, who’s this little guy from Pasadena [Jet Propulsion Lab], whose normal office is in California where he calculates the thickness of ice from space, and where they have this laser system where he can actually – and it’s a very sensitive one, ---you could actually see the freeboard of ice dip where open water develops in a lead and back up to the ice again, up again where the snow and ice. He’s the one that’s been measuring the ice thickness

191 Bob Dickson Page 192 C1379/56 Track 10 across the accessible part of the Arctic, ----it’s not all accessible yet from space, ---- and giving us the volume of ice on a continuing year to year basis [laughs]. He was standing there alongside me in the bow of the Louis St Laurent and I saw this look come across his face [laughs] and I know what he was thinking, and I asked him afterwards, I said, ‘Look, there’s a seal lying there,’ in what looked like open water. And it wasn’t, it was lying there on a – the floor of a – of a melt pond, and underneath that melt pond next to the seal you saw this large hole which is where it went down to get its dinner. And you suddenly realised that ice was still half a metre thick beneath this seal. And then what was passing before Ron’s mind was, ‘if I’d been assuming that all of the wet stuff in the Arctic is open water and all of the bits with ice on it were ice I’ve suddenly discovered that for this distribution, where half of it was melt ponds, it’s not the case; you’ve got half a metre of ice masked by melt water. What do I do about that? My volume calculations are all hooey’ . They weren’t of course and he will make an adjustment for this. But being on the spot and seeing this thing, I could just see the wheels going around in the Kwok mind trying to work out what this meant from the point of view of the pan Arctic picture. That sort of thing, like of course I would only get it by standing next to Ron but Ron would only get it by being hauled into the Arctic, willingly of course, and shown what was actually up there. I’ve no doubt he’s working on some [laughs] correction factor as we speak.

Had he not been to the Arctic?

No, I don’t think he has – his son runs the – is part of the USC Trojans I think it is, backroom boys of that American [college] football [team], and Ron himself holidays in Yosemite and does things like that. [The NW Passage] It’s not the sort of place you would normally go, even though he goes there every day on his satellite. And, that’s the point.

And what other British scientists were on the philosopher’s cruise?

None, but we did have – we had some nasty people onboard as well, just one I think. He was this rather [laughs] – I say nasty, he’s not nasty at all. There was this Canadian lawyer and he obviously had the brief – he was a hard nosed individual who

192 Bob Dickson Page 193 C1379/56 Track 10 had the brief of demonstrating whether the Lomonosov Ridge flicked towards Canada or flicked towards Greenland as it came up towards the North American continent. The whole point was that if it flicked towards Canada then Canada not only owns all of the part of the Arctic Ocean that is within 350 kilometres of the shelf, but 350 kilometres from the foot of the mid ocean ridge. Russia and Canada are very pleased to endorse that idea. And if the Lomonosov Ridge, this big ridge that goes right through the middle of the Arctic towards and had flicked at the end towards Canada, then Canada owned the whole of this piece; from the bottom of the slope of the Lomonosov Ridge it would own 350 kilometres [laughs] off into the deep basins, plus the bit that they own from being 350 kilometres from their own shelf. And so he and he impressed us with the fact that he had hundreds of people or tens of people back in Ottawa who were - had this as their mandate, and his brief was to find than the Lomonosov Ridge headed towards Ellesmere Island at the top end and not towards Greenland, which would have meant it being somebody else’s. We just didn’t see eye to eye with that man. He tried to tell us that the North West Passage was not – was entirely within Canada. It was no different from the French Canal du Midi and it’s not an international waterway, it’s somewhere – you have to ask my permission to go through, thank you very much. Whereas the one going around the north of Russia was certainly international waters, it was not in Russian waters, it was around to the north of Russian waters. And so we got a bit fed up with this sort of approach because essentially it kind of meant that Canada and Russia owned the entire [laughs] Arctic Ocean except for two kidney shaped bits either side of the Lomonosov Ridge and that may well be what they come up with in the end in the Law of the Sea conference, [but] I don’t have any interest in finding that out [laughs]. But what I did – you know, he was the only one who was [pause] I won’t say – the word isn’t ‘offensive’ but he was certainly aggressive in his – in making this rather strange statement about the North West Passage and the Canal du Midi.

[54.11]

There were more people onboard that were interesting, very interesting, people to be aboard with. One of them was the regional Prime Minister, the – I can’t remember his name and his wife who were there from North West Territories and they were very

193 Bob Dickson Page 194 C1379/56 Track 10 interested in what the local population could do to chip in; they were – he would have been important to the Rangers Patrol Group for example. And there was a girl aboard and you catch me at an evil hour ‘cause I can’t remember her name either but she was educated in one of the native people universities up in the north and so she had a different take on things, an interesting take on things, compared with us as well.

What – in what way was hers different?

Well hers was based on local knowledge and the local knowledge was based on repetitive patterns of lifestyle and caribou and whatever, and so she was interesting to me from the point of view of telling us what sorts of climatic variables were important to the – to the [pause] indigenous Arctic people. And they may not have been the sort of things that we were interested in. Think again about sea level rise as one variable and about number of times Visbeck needs to take off his socks and shoes to get on the Kiel ferry as being the real variable that he was interested in and you get some idea of the contrast that this lady brought to the discussions, but she was good news. We wouldn’t necessarily have thought of the things that she was thinking of. I am racking my brains to think of other people, there was the great Buzz Holling, as I say he was – he was an elder statesmen of Canadian science and always informative, always worth closeting him after dinner and you always got something good coming out of it. And Eddy Carmack himself who’s such a great integrator with the whole population of the northern seas that only somebody like Eddy could have put together [such] a programme and had it taken into effect. But as I say, as a final word on that, if it works it will keep going and if it doesn’t work then like so many of these things somebody will find a reason for stopping the funding.

[End of Track 10]

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Track 11

What I do now I guess. Yes. So to the end of, well, of these reminiscences, and to what I do now which is reviewing programmes, collecting books, writing stories for kids and ‘inspirations’. I retired from CEFAS myself in May 2006 officially, and, as I’d almost totally forgotten to mention in the course of these recordings, my father’s predisposition to angina: ----my father, my mother, my sister, my brother and me, a full house, that led in my case to a quadruple bypass operation at Papworth in August 1990 was, by 2006, showing signs of failure. Actually as it turned out the operation that had been carried out using my mammary arteries (‘you won’t be needing these’), plus a little piece of vein by a very confident surgeon called Stephen Large (‘It’s a newish procedure but I’m the best in the world at it’) had almost failed. His grafts had almost failed; as they now discovered these swish new arterial grafts had occluded almost from the start so that for twenty-five years I’d been running on that little piece of vein from my leg and that was showing signs of age. So it was ten days after a new stent was fitted in Papworth in October 2006 that I did the post retirement thing and pushed off for a slow trip around the world with Deanne. When I asked the collected surgeons at Papworth what was the recommended period before flying following a stent, their answers ranged from ‘one year’ to ‘don’t know; let us know if you survive’. On the first day of a new business class service around the world that Air New Zealand was introducing and with their introductory offer making business class affordable, off we went. Hong Kong for a breather then the more or less obligatory three weeks around the south island of New Zealand from Christchurch by campervan, with no one other than more retirees and campervans to clutter the roads. Then an offshore resort hotel in Fiji and finally some shows in Las Vegas. Our intention was to pick places for their contrast and excitement and we certainly got that. In fact the excitement peaked right at the end when the phone went as we lay asleep in our Vegas hotel and Deanne, who answered it, announced that it was 10 Downing Street on the blower asking to speak to me [laughs]. Naturally I suspected this to be a – a wifely ploy to get me up to make the tea when it wasn’t – wasn’t my turn, and it wasn’t, but when she insisted, I was surprised to hear Tony Blair’s office asking me if I would accept a CBE if offered in the Queen’s New Year Honours of 2007. And naturally, in a slight daze, I said yes. And that happy event: investiture by

195 Bob Dickson Page 196 C1379/56 Track 11 the Queen on February the 21 st 2007 with Deanne and Miles and Sarah all in attendance (Jamie was in Fiji on a diving course), and joined by my brother’s family for lunch afterwards in the Farringdon Road, that was a wondrous start to my retirement. And that I suppose should have been that. In fact when I attended the first reunion of our Edinburgh University class, the class of ’64 including my friends and my girlfriend Judy Marshall that I had been so close to in our college days, it was after most of them had retired! Since the last time I’d set eyes on all of them was the day we’d all graduated, the most appropriate thing to say, bizarrely, was, ‘How was your life?’ Of course retirement to them, some of them, retirement was synonymous with shutdown and a lot of them were fairly sessile folk now and hadn’t – didn’t really have an active engagement with the subject of their – that they’d worked on throughout their lives. Some of them were still busy: Bill Whitfield with his soil science and others but I think we were in a minority.

[04.20]

But of course retirement doesn’t need to be synonymous with shutdown nor would I particularly want it to be and three things seem uppermost on my actual retirement agenda. First, I’d like to continue to write and if possible complete [laughs] and publish books and plays for kids. Children seem the perfect people to write for and they’re all aware as most adults are that the stories will have something of a common shape. They kind of descend into some sort of trouble in the middle of the play before rising again to the happy ending that will send them all off home or to bed happy, or at any rate relieved. But unlike adults children half believe the ups and downs of the stories so they’re much more responsive to any emotion you might want to get across, or so it seems to me from my present, very un-lofty perspective of one unpublished book and a few plays. I haven’t been particularly fast; the book I’ve written was begun when Jamie was born with the idea of keeping him amused as a toddler and it’s slightly shaming to realise that Jamie is now thirty-five years old and Harriet Sivyer who I borrowed from her mum Lisa at the lab to test-run the complete prototype of the book at aged seven is now eighteen years old [laughs]. Although Harriet gave it the nod, happily staying up all night to complete it, it’s still not rounded off or submitted. This all seems curiously reminiscent of that lovely correspondent who

196 Bob Dickson Page 197 C1379/56 Track 11 wrote in The Times letter page, not very long ago, that: ‘Today I took down my blackout curtains. It’s a job I’ve been meaning to get around to for some time,’ and I think we all know [laughs] all about him. I’ve done rather better with my plays, with ‘Woody’s Birthday Surprise’ wowing them at the local theme park of Pleasurewood Hills some time ago, and also something along the lines of the Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs pulling then in a little later. And a world tour with a professional cast for a third offering called ‘A Time of Snakes’ which briefly circulated, well not quite around the world but around the resorts of Clacton, Lowestoft and Skeggy to no great acclaim at all as far as I could see. Still I'd like to write some more and to do it better.

[06.43]

Second on my list of retirement activities: I have a real passion for 17 th Century books and spend an inordinate amount of time searching for them. Their crackle as you open them, the heady musty smell of their ink and their beauty as leather-bound objects all heighten for me the intrinsic value of such rare books and tracking them down has always seemed a much more worthwhile way of disposing of my pension than PEPs and SIPs and ISAs. I have two main quarries: the 17 th century works by Ben Jonson, and those by my superhero Sir Kenelm Digby. Ben Jonson needs little introduction as the man who preceded Shakespeare by seven years in being the first to bind up his plays as ‘works’ in 1616, instead of throwing them away as mere ephemera, but nobody has ever heard of Kenelm Digby these days and I can’t ever imagine why. It was Digby who put up Jonson’s works for printing after his death and compiled them for the printer; he accompanied Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, into exile in France to protect her; he bombed Cadiz; he helped found the Royal Society; he married the greatest beauty of the age: the Lady Venetia; he brought Cartesian philosophy to England, deriving in part from conversations which he’d held with Descartes himself when he was in France with the Queen. [It was Digby] who presented the first defence in print of Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, who gave the first printed account of the use of sign language for the deaf and who wrote, amongst other things, on the nature of Man’s Soul, on the vegetation of plants and on something called the ‘powder of sympathy’. And on how to make metheglin which I gather is spiced mead and cider. And his dad was

197 Bob Dickson Page 198 C1379/56 Track 11 executed as one of the Guy Fawkes’ band of gunpowder plotters, and yet still nobody has ever heard of him. Narrowing one’s focus to hunt for just these two authors is wonderfully exciting on the rare times that you find them and two years ago I found a copy of Jonson’s Second Folio which may be unique. This is normally made up of two volumes and only the first ever has a title page but I actually found one with a general title to both parts. The listener may sneer but Clive Hurst, the head of rare books at the Bodleian, has never seen one and neither has his counterpart at the British Library. And last month I found, mis-described and unremarked, on eBay my first Ben Jonson quarto after twenty years of looking. These quartos were the printed copies of single plays that were used by the actors and were later marked up by Jonson to form into his works. Very few survive and according to Rupert Powell, the chief executive officer of Bloomsbury auctions, ‘No copy of Catiline his Conspiracy,’ which is my one, ‘can be found in book auction records at all’.So an anorak is born.

[09.43]

The third main string to my retirement bow comes under the head of reviewing major programmes and I think it’s a chance to put something back. Although they can’t beat Eddy Carmack’s trip on the Louis for glamour and excitement, reviewing of one sort or another still continues. For the Research Council of Norway I’ve just in August this year, 2011, begun work as part of an Evaluation Panel for Norwegian Climate Research under Thomas Rosswall, the chair of ICSU, which will be busy until the spring of 2012 working out if all the climatic bases that Norway should cover are in fact covered. From the early part of this year, 2011, I’ve also been part of an evaluation panel for the Svalbard Integrated Observing System, SIOS, with the requirement to visit Spitsbergen this month for their annual assembly which we held just a couple of weeks ago in minus eight degrees [laughs]. Much reviewing activity but I think when the current crop is ended, in the spring of 2012, I will then be seventy and should stop.

[10.47]

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I won’t stop everything though. From October 2011 I am asked to act as the first Johan Hjort professor of marine ecology at NorMER, ----that mouth breaking acronym stands for the Nordic Centre for Research on Marine Ecosystems and Resources under Climate Change. I wrote that one down because there’s no way I could remember it. Anyway to – I will be the first Johan Hjort professor of marine ecology at NorMER, a new [Nordic] Centre Of Excellence of the University of Oslo with the untaxing brief of coming to Oslo once a year and inspiring them, to quote the head of NorMER, Nils Christian Stenseth. And that certainly has resonance with me. There can be few in this relatively small community of oceanographers who have had as many inspiring contacts with so many inspiring people in our field as I have. From Jacob Bjerknes, on my very first outing, how lucky was that, through John Swallow and the greatest of all oceanographers, Hank Stommel on my first sea trips, Jerome Namias at the height of his powers when he was contending large scale air sea interaction mechanisms with Jacob Bjerknes and the benevolent presence of Sir Alister Hardy at judicially spaced intervals whenever inspiration was needed, including just about every one of my promotion boards. In my room at CEFAS, one above the other, the portrait photographs of Sir Al, Josie Scripps, John Swallow, Hank Stommel, David Cushing and Jerome Namias continue to look down and inspire, and so it has continued ever since, with the greatest of the present day stars in our field to work with and learn from. Against that backdrop how should I go about inspiring the young of the University of Oslo to fulfil my brief as the Johan Hjort Professor? Well I have a plan based on my own experience that seems worth a go and at any rate I am bound and determined to try. The experience I had in mind arose when I received out of the blue a slim 1988 volume on station S off Bermuda with the following inscription on the fly leaf. ‘Dear Bob,’ it said , ‘I was most impressed by the Great Salinity Anomaly and thought you would be entertained with this, Henry Stommel.’ And coming from – I feel my [laughs] – the goose pimples on my arms again [laughs] all these decades later, coming from the world’s greatest oceanographer this gave me a charge that still has power all these years later. So in hopes of setting off a similar charge, I’ve gathered together four books whose inscribers and inscriptions should achieve the same trick to others and I intend to send them off like little inspirational time bombs at annual intervals as the annual University of Oslo Awards for Inspiration. The four are these: The Biology of a Marine Copepod by Marshall and

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Orr, signed and inscribed by both Sheina Marshall and A P Orr to another great planktologist, RS Wimpenny, and from his estate to David Cushing and signed by him also. So it’s a scruffy little volume really and not terribly valuable and – but it’s positively humming with electricity and inspiration as an association copy. And if people aren’t inspired by having these wonderful people’s inscriptions in the front then nothing will turn them on at all. So, [now] in its leather slip case and tooled with the name of the winner for 2011 this has now gone to Nils Christian Stenseth, the founder of NorMER as the first of these University of Oslo inspiration awards. And the idea is that a year or two later the book will be on the move again with some second award winner, chosen by him, tooled on his slipcase and so on. For the physical scientists of ocean and atmosphere I have Temperature Changes of the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Atmosphere by Helland Hansen and Nansen 1917. A delicate volume, one of these volumes with a thin paper cover that’s very easy to detach. However it was once given to me by my old friend Odd Saelen of the Geophysical Institute in Bergen and the magic thing is that it’s inscribed and signed by Fridtjof Nansen to ‘Ritmester Gunnar Isachsen...’, the leader of the Isachsen Expedition to Svalbard in 1912. And that volume, now preserved snugly in a clamshell case, has just been presented to the wonderfully inspiring Jim Hurrell of the National Centre of Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, a man who introduced us all to the NAO and its impacts and its variability. And Jim is extremely pleased to get it. I presented it to him on the 150 th birthday of Nansen in Oslo just recently, just after he’d given a talk before the Norwegian King – and Queen and Crown Prince and Crown Princess ---on the weather that affected Nansen during his polar drift. Jim is doubtful that he can liberate this around the planet again anything under five years because he’s so passionately fond of it. Anyway it’s gone to Jim. For 2012 I have two more of these to liberate, A Year on the Great Barrier Reef by Sir Maurice Yonge, the leader of the Great Barrier Reef expedition of 1928/29, inscribed to Prof A S Ashworth FRS and including the expedition Christmas card signed by Yonge and the party from Low Isles, North Queensland, and that volume too seems to have power. And finally the last of my four, perhaps one for the physicists again, on the Cloud Method of Making Visible Ions and the Tracks of Ionising Particles , CTR Wilson’s Nobel Prize speech from Stockholm in 1927, now bound impressively in scarlet calf describing his invention of the cloud chamber for tracking subatomic

200 Bob Dickson Page 201 C1379/56 Track 11 particles and signed and inscribed by CTR to my old dad, together with some tipped in letters from him to my dad’s chemistry class at Watson’s thanking them for their annual Christmas wishes at his home in Carlops. So that’s the lot and that’s the plan for the four University of Oslo award volumes that I've sent or will send at either end of my professorial year. As I say there are no rules other than to send them on their way within a year or two, each to a new awardee so Lord knows where they’ll end up but keeping tabs on them as they spread is perhaps going to be part of the fun and talking with Paul Merchant here it may well be that the British Library finds a shoebox to keep track of these annual or two yearly or five yearly liberations of these four awards and learn where they all get to. And I will feel that somehow even when fully retired or conked out, something of the same process that inspired me will still be in circulation. And that seems a particularly fitting way to end this particular person’s life story.

[17.54]

But there’s perhaps one even more fitting line and I hope it’s not too corny to notice the words from the Queen’s message on my Queen’s Scouts Certificate: ‘On your journey through life, may it prove for you a joyous adventure,’ but I did notice them as I got the certificate out and if it was ever possible to summarise a life in three words the last three could hardly be improved upon.

[End of Track 11]

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Track 12

Could you comment on the nature and extent of your children’s interest in your work as they’ve grown up? So I suppose through the ‘80s and ‘90s they’re becoming older children and aware of what’s going on and I wondered to what extent they were interested in your work and perhaps even involved in some way?

I know what you mean, I know exactly where that question’s coming from, it’s the sort of thing that I wish I’d asked them all them years – and in fact I do remember when I was asked to give the eulogy for David Cushing at his funeral, his daughter came up to me [afterwards] and said, ‘I didn’t know my dad did any of these things.’ What I’d been doing was running down the list of world firsts that Cush had led the charge on for decades. And in some sort of funny way, but in another way not funny at all, one doesn’t ask ones father very much about what they’re doing [laughs], it’s your dad. In another way though I suspect that the kids are quite proud of what I’ve been doing and they certainly know from seeing me disappear and – and go away in a big orange jacket somewhere and go around the North West Passage with Eddy that they know what I do. And they [pause] down to the level of advising Joseph, a nine year old, Miles’ son, on how to make an experiment that illustrates something from global change in the classroom, yes, they are getting involved. For that particular one I asked the difference between [effects] on sea level, of sea ice melting and Greenland melting; so I had a block of ice held up on a piece of wood as Greenland on rocks, and a piece of ice that’s floating in the – in the beaker, and of course when the one melts it makes no difference to the sea level and when the other one melts it does. I think that’s – that’s the latest one that comes to mind from this question which I hadn’t prepared myself for. my – by the nature of things my kids aren’t involved in science, so Miles is [pause] I think he’s high up in the design department for The Telegraph and so he sees science stories and he certainly knows of what I do, but he’s not directly involved. My daughter is a wonderful teacher and is a special projects teach – Director for a school near – in North London. Again she’s not directly involved in Arctic science or the currents of global change but I think she’s secretly quite proud that I have been involved on piecing together some bits of the story. Jamie is features editor of Guitarist magazine in Bristol, just the job for him, gets to

202 Bob Dickson Page 203 C1379/56 Track 12 interview Duane Eddy and his twanging guitar last month and no doubt a whole - Brian May was sticking his head around the door and all this stuff, so he’s living in a – he’s in a different sphere from me altogether. But where I notice that my influence has been, has been on his interest in the books that I bring back, and his interest in books is as strong as mine but for a different group. I started – it’s very satisfying when you show your kids the sort of books that you find interesting and they, although there’s no reason to, they like them too, and Miles and Sarah and Jamie have all been excellent kids from that point of view. Miles grabs the book out of my hand when I'm dealing with a particular set of – a particular series right now and reads them afterwards. Jamie, I remember showing him Steinbeck and Ricketts, you know, -- Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday ---when he was quite young and he was so inspired and besotted by these books that when I found – I found the The Sea of Cortez which was the Steinbeck and Ricketts book and inside I found – in – this was in Norfolk, at Keys Auction House, so far from The Sea of Cortez I have to say.---- it said inside, ‘May he who buys this book have as much fun reading it as I found writing it,’ signed Ed Ricketts in May 1941 or something like this. I gave this to Jamie and, even though he is in that netherworld of trying to buy a house where deposits have to be saved up for, I don’t think he’d ever sell that to Pacific Book Auctions for 6,000 quid, which is probably what it’s worth these days. Certainly more than the ninety quid I paid for it at Keys of Norfolk. And then I found, for Jamie again [laughs], the actual catalogue of the [Doc Ricketts’] Western Biological Laboratory; and then I found Henry James writing ‘ to that plenipotentiary of the subaqueous realm, Ed Ricketts from his old friend in memory of many an evening spent in the laboratory. ’ So Ed Ricketts: I seem to have passed on a love of Ed Ricketts and his stuff to Jamie. And it’s the same with Sarah, although she has a much more highly developed personal interest in books that she’s interested in. I’m glad to say that all of them have benefited I think from having a booked lined – essentially a book lined house. So I would say that they’re aware of what I do, in answer to your question, I think they’re quite proud of it, they look quite proud when we took them to the Palace and some aspects of it have inspired the grandchildren’s science class. But I would say that it’s mostly our retirement activities like book collecting that continue to motivate them.

[07.01]

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And what memories do you have of time spent with them as they were growing up, one of – what is in my mind when I ask that question is the construction you showed me in the back garden which I think that you said that you built and it looks a bit like a boat that I think the grandchildren now play on.

Yeah.

But much wider than that, what memories do you have of playing with young children at weekends and evenings and on holidays as they grew up, to capture that side of your –

Well I think I was – I’m a much better grandfather than a father, I never actually was one of – probably like my dad, my dad never took me to football matches but now and again I'd smell his Balkan Sobranie tobacco coming in from the side at one of the rugby matches in Edinburgh when I was at it and realised he’d snuck in and snuck out again. But it wasn’t a demonstrative thing, and I can’t say, I – I felt bad about it. for some time, I can’t say I’ve ever taken [the children] on the Broads for example which are five feet off [laughs] – just down the road from our house. By saying I'm a better granddad than a dad in that sense, I do – have taken my grandchildren out on the Broads and I have built tree houses for them and I have enjoyed them swinging from ropes and shimmying across rope bridges over shark infested waters and things like that. I think when you are a grandparent it – it does confer on you a much greater obligation to be a different voice from their mum and dad and [pause] and in a sense [with a] more tolerant or different point of view. The – the [pause] I can’t say it’s ever [pause] my [pause] not taking them on the Broads is one thing but I did on the other hand take the whole family to California in ’76, [where] we went frequent times to Disneyland, Jamie permanently- as a new baby --permanently asleep all the way through four such episodes and the others enjoyed it. So I think if travel broadens your mind I think that’s one role I've had----- that they have actually travelled with me---- and it’s been one of the great pleasures to take my big daughter shopping in Hamburg, for example, shops that I know where she can get some nice boots and things. And these days aren’t entirely over even though she has a family of her own

204 Bob Dickson Page 205 C1379/56 Track 12 and forty-five or whatever years old now. So I would say that [pause].... that to summarise that rather rambling account [laughs] I do feel that I could have done more to introduce them directly to things when they were growing up, but I do feel that they have had some opportunity to travel and to learn from what I have been doing [and from] what I do, and to appreciate it. Now – I now have five grandsons [laughs] who come down like the wolf on the fold, lovely little things. One of them’s called Will and he’s not little at all, he’s bigger than me, he’s thirteen, and Jack is ten and then there’s a – I think he’s ten. And then there’s Joe who’s nine and Tom who’s eight and Sam who’s five. So they’re of graduated sizes and they are an absolute delight. If you get grumpy and see them off and stomp off with your book to a different room, the thing I’ve noticed is that doesn’t put them off, in fact it rather attracts them in [laughs] and they rather like you the better for it, I think. It’s hard to tell, but this afternoon they – another draft of the grandchildren are coming in to see me again and it’s a nice thing to have happen.

[11.28]

Why do you think that you didn’t for instance take your children on the Broads, when you think back and think, you say you think you could have done more, why do you think that you didn’t?

I’m not sure that Scottishness comes into it but certainly its the way my dad did things. He wouldn’t take you fishing in St Abbs, but he would go fishing at St Abbs off the end of the pier and magically you would find yourself reaching for a rod and going off too and fishing off the back of the rocks. He would show you if you got stuck and how to get unstuck and how to make – how to mend the crib that you were dealing with for lobsters; and how to do -. In other words if you – he was more of an – doing it by example than by actually leading you by the hand and saying, ‘Let me take you to the Heart of Midlothian Football Team son,’. He would – he would show you the things that he did, like golf, and you would go and do it too, but there would be more of a disconnect than you might suppose between the two [laughs]. He would encourage it in other words but you had to make as much of the running as he did. And I rather suspect that’s the way with me too. Jamie’s just come back from St

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Abbs where his postcard talks about catching a – a five pound lythe off the Haven Rocks, just like I would have shown him by example when he was little, going off in the small boat with Beetle and his three horsepower engine. Beetle being our [ancient] local guide and gillie and friend. So [pause] I think what I'm saying is that they are aware of the sort of standards that I would have endorsed and the sort of things that I would have done and I’m very pleased to say that they seem to be – and the same with Deanne of course, and the – I’m very pleased to say that all of the kids seem to have taken note of what Deanne and I would regard as the right things to do, and to do it. But I suppose I should have been less like my dad and actually taken them by the hand and taken them off to football matches and – and up trees and things when they were young instead of dealing it – instead of remedying this through their children.

What did you do then when they were young, when you weren’t working?

Oh well that would have been for me I would have, I think [pause]--- well we would have gone to Scotland because that was when my mum and dad were there, we’d have gone to St Abbs, we’d have done fishing from small boats with Robert Aitchison – [that was] Beetle and – but I wouldn’t say that that was exactly the sort of thing that anyone except Jamie did. See Jamie was a long time later than Miles and Sarah and, in the family tradition, I’m not sure that Sarah would have liked St Abbs very much; girls tended not to. Miles I think would have done and did, he enjoyed the sort of, you know, picnics and swimming and the beach and things like that that we did. Certainly when the [pause] when Miles and Sarah and Deanne and I and Jamie was a much younger child, we’d go to France in the summer in our cranky old car. The car in these days was never a very modern one and it was always liable to breakdown so our family excursions to the continent were always into Brittany or some near part. And there we did watch Miles as he tried to sailboard and we did take the kids to picnics and to do the tourist thing and all the usual things that I'm sure you do yourself. So yeah, I – I’m not sure that there’s anything terribly to reproach myself for in these things [laughs], but I do find myself – although this statement is really saying I do find myself doing more things more actively with the grandchildren than – than I felt the need to do with the kids.

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[16.17]

How different from your approach was Deanne’s in terms of the children?

No, I don’t think there was a great deal of difference. Deanne would have been much more of an influence on Sarah because of the things that they did. Deanne is the present Chairman, second term, for the Lowestoft Players who are a wonderful [amateur] group and quite ‘professional’ if that’s the – -that’s the wrong word but you know what I mean. They are not an amateur dramatics group [in terms of standard. In that] they are a professional dramatics group, they’re – and they are as professional as any professional troupe can be, and they wow them at the Marina Theatre. And I think Sarah has the gene that Deanne has for acting, which certainly I don’t, and so I think Sarah would have, as she grew up, would have been much more interested in drama because of her mum than because of anything I was doing. When Sarah got a job it was – she, at the Theatre Museum, after going to Royal Holloway College and what she teaches is theatre at school. So I think that’s Deanne’s responsibility and I’m not genetically connected to Sarah, though it sometimes takes quite a lot for me to remember that [laughs]. I'm her stepdad and so I do think that Sarah is – has been swayed by the interests of Deanne more than me. Certainly fishing off the pier would not be regarded by Sarah as a – as anything other than a chore. Also gardening. Also building tree houses, do-it-yourself and other things.

[18.13]

Could you tell me about the writing of the – the children’s book in terms of first of all the timing of it and then sort of when and how you worked on it?

Yeah, that is a shameful episode but I hope it will have a future. I wrote it – it was when Jamie was a baby and he’s now thirty-five as I pointed out. And it was about - a book written about the doings of a group of moles on the Herringfleet Hills which is just down the road here, an old end moraine where they – one of the last but three ice ages landed near, just to the west of here. I did it in a way that I - appealed to me. The

207 Bob Dickson Page 208 C1379/56 Track 12 chapters – it’s meant to be a year in the life of a group of these moleys, and they certainly went down well with Jamie who was so much younger than Sarah and Miles that they never really had a chance to appreciate it; they were all above that sort of thing at that age. The chapters were designed to be like the year: get longer as the year progressed and then shorter again. And there was another circle involved in it as well, they started off in Herringfleet, they ended up through misadventure after misadventure getting through the new cut to Breydon Water and out to sea and back in again. So there were kind of currents going through this thing – more than just these two, ---that I knew about when I constructed it and I hope that subliminally they kind of go into the reader, and I hope the reviewer, and make it something which, whether they notice it or not, is a – an easy and exciting read for kids. So when I’ve finished all these reviews for Norway, I do intend to put it together and shape it up and blush and correct the English and make it better and send it in. The British Library might be quite a good sponsor here, pointing out how useful is the prose, but I mean it is, as I say, it is the sort of thing that I enjoy doing is – is playing with the emotions of kids in writing plays. And I – I’ve written, as I pointed out, quite a few plays.

[20.41]

Just to give one example, for example, there was this silly thing at the time when all these dinosaur stories were in sway and I found that was a – a really good chance to see how kids respond. Because I had this story about [microphone detaches; reattached]. So I – I wrote this thing which is for the theme park in Pleasurewood Hills up the road, and I went along to see how it worked on these little kids ‘cause they’re only six or seven or eight or something like that. What I had was this Professor Brainstorm or whatever his name was on the stage and [next to him] was this cage covered with a cloth; only the kids in the audience could see that there was a door hanging wide open on the other side of the cage and the cloth had parted and there was nothing in the cage. This professor was explaining to the kids how this bird would disembowel you if it ever got out among you, and all the kids started wondering whether the professor had seen that the cage was open and that the bird had gone. And then – then they draw it to the – in no uncertain terms, the kids tell the

208 Bob Dickson Page 209 C1379/56 Track 12 professor that the cage is open so you know it’s working. And he says, ‘Oh well it’s alright, they’re only really deadly in the mating season when they have nests and eggs,’; and of course at that point you have these little spotlights subliminally illuminating nests around the little ledges that were around the walls of this theatre. The kids noticed this right sharp, I can tell you, and then the professor starts to get messages from the audience [laughs] that these nests are developing all around the place and – and then there was one of the nests at the far end you have [arranged to] hatch, and this little scrawny looking thing comes out of the egg. At that point I had this like eight foot wing span pterodactyl, did I say it was pterodactyls in this cage, I should have done. And this lady pterodactyl with a huge wing span on a bungee was propelled over their heads to swoop down through the theatre and snatch up this newly hatched chick, of scrawny and hideous aspect, and take it through the curtain. And the professor says, ‘That was the mother bird and now she’s got her chick, you are safe, she’s happy now, she knows the kid is safe: but,’ and at this point the – the curtain behind that was being used to mop the professor’s bow ---he’s actually parting it and there are these two huge knobbly legs behind the curtain, [that have] suddenly become apparent, to the audience but not to Brainstorm. He’s saying, ‘But if that had been the male bird, which is ten times the size of the female and these huge great knobbly legs, none of you would ever have got out of here alive,’ and they’re all going, ‘Behind you!’ Eventually he sees this – all you need to do is have the legs, you don’t need anything else, they’re huge [laughs] ----and then they start to attack him through the curtain; and he’s saying, ‘If you only sing the Lost Dinosaur song: ‘I wish I was a million years and a million miles away, back in the lonesome valley where the pterodactyls play.’ Sing it to him; it’ll get all homesick and weepy and calm down,’ so they all start singing away like linties and the flapping and the attacking through the curtain dies away. And he says, ‘Right, one more time, and sneak out while you’re singing,’; and when they’re going out, they’re all believing it, they’re all sneaking out. Although that may sound corny to the sophisticates of your audience, believe me it worked for the kids in the Pleasurewood Hills theme park. And you get – I only went into such great detail, not to like form myself a new career, but to let you get some actual examples of what I mean by saying you can – you can actually control the moods of these kids. They’re all sitting there with their grannies; they

209 Bob Dickson Page 210 C1379/56 Track 12 know they’re not going to be disembowelled really . But kids are that sort of useful combination of belief and disbelief that it’s good to write for.

[25.19]

What made you first start to do so, to write this sort of thing, to become interested in...?

I’m not sure, Deanne had contacts I think with Pleasurewood Hills and she said, ‘They’re looking for somebody to write Woody’s Birthday Surprise,’ and I started doing that. It’s a very difficult thing to do I might say because this gormless looking - I can say that because Woody no longer exists I think - but he was about fifteen feet high and he had a fibreglass grin on and how could you make any play of emotion happen on that . Anyway Woody’s Birthday Surprise was the first and I think Deanne got me an intro and I discovered that if I wrote it I got like 500 quid. And not only that if they played Woody’s Birthday Surprise again the following year my contract said for a year, so they had to pay up again and it did seem to be a good way to keep the wolf from the door. But it was very, very instructive, just listening to little kids about what you needed to bear in mind. Beause the second year, well the third year they wanted Woody’s Girlfriend to heave in sight and I thought, well what the hell would Woody’s Girlfriend be. He’s a bear, right, about ten feet tall. And you could have made it a racoon for all these people wanted, but I asked this little girl who’d been telling me she’d come with her nanny eight times to see Woody’s Birthday Surprise and had a Michael Jackson and a Woody’s Birthday Surprise CD. It’s the only time I ever shared the billing with Michael Jackson. Anyway I asked this young thing, aged six, ‘what would Woody’s girlfriend look like?’, hoping to get some pointers to next year’s production and she said, ‘ I am Woody’s girlfriend,’ and that just stopped it in its tracks. If I’d written Woody’s girlfriend into this thing for the following year she wouldn’t have come eight times with her granny. And the grey faced men would have not received their ticket price. So you do have to - I think it’s rewarding anyway to listen to them and for a while it – I think it was Deanne’s theatricals that got me into it in the first place but I quite enjoy it.

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[27.44]

And when did you and do you do it in relation to your scientific work, I mean is this – do you have set times when you do this sort of writing or?

No, no, Lord no. It’s the sort of thing that you do in odd half hours [laughs]. And it’s – it’s a bit like doing The Times crossword. I mean, for example, I had to do an animatronics thing for – for the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. A group from local businesses were going up there and they asked whether I could devise some words for animatronics. It takes no time at all to do it but you’ve got to think about how to do it first and that takes time. Animatronics are like when you’ve got – well the one I can illustrate is the one from that day where there was an owl sitting on a hunk [of cheese]– an owl and a mouse, and the mouse had his tail and things going through the holes in the cheese and all that; and it was a mouse and an owl talking to you. It was plain, you realised from the start, there was no use in having you – you had a minute, so it’s no use in gradually looming across their consciousness slowly; you had to say, ‘Oi!!!’ as they passed. But the thing that I noticed you could do was with the same lip-syncing from the owl and the mouse, as long as you knew when they happened, you could write three or four or five or six [different] scripts, all of which looked like they were coming out of that [same] sort of lip-sync. So for the same money, I think it was 500 quid, I got five scripts coming out of these mousies, but they all had to start with some sort of fairly explosive remark so that you didn’t walk slowly past and wonder whether perchance there was something going on. You had to be riveted and turn at that time. You’ve got thirty seconds to put your message over and then –the message could change: and the following thirty seconds, you could do another one. So I think that was quite an important thing for me to learn, to reason. I don’t think I did anymore animatronics but you see what I mean; it was like, the challenge was like that of the FT weekend crossword that usually takes me a week to do, usually finish it, but it takes me a week. And it’s the thinking of it out that makes you want to do it, so it’s a bit like doing a crossword puzzle to me. It’s really the same with the plays: you try to think how the words might – I’m a strict believer that if you have properly written words it makes it very easy for actors to deliver; they might never know why they like your plays but they should be aware that in speaking

211 Bob Dickson Page 212 C1379/56 Track 12 your plays, they scan and they – they flow and they learn them easy. I think that’s what I think you can put in and which takes the time. You can put in a sense of flow and leave out all the rocks and brickbats that you would normally trip over and try to make it a play that, whether they know it or not, they found it easy to speak and the audience found it easy to listen to. You listen to David Attenborough. Did you see that thing on the polar?

No, I will.

Go see it, you – the man in The Times the next day said, ‘It’s his lyrical words that makes such a difference to David Attenborough.’ He wasn’t sure whether the statement about being the last time we will see these northern lights, he wasn’t sure [laughs] whether it was Attenborough saying it or whether it was the world saying it, but he said it would be a great shame if either of them disappear totally, the ice covered Arctic and David Attenborough, and he was right. Listen to the words that man produces. And I also remember it from Alistair Cooke. Do you remember Alistair Cooke? He said, ‘I can drop a book on the floor and tell just by looking at it from head height whether it’s well written, whether I can read it easily or not, whether the words are’[pause]. He didn’t mean he could read it from that height, he meant that something of the words came across to him that he knew would be interesting and smooth when he came down to reading it. And I think that’s the challenge to make writing – to make writing a help to the reader while conveying what you’re trying to convey.

To what extent do you take this care in writing a scientific paper?

I think so, I think though it’s probably not down to me to say so, in fact I don’t need to. I was at the – I blush to say I don’t know her name - but one of the SAHFOS team came up to me at their eightieth birthday [2011]. I’m now going to tell you this but it’ll sound big headed, she said: ‘Dr Dickson, I have to say that when I read your papers I find them very clear,’ (she was a foreigner, Spanish I think) and she says, ‘I’d like to thank you for that.’ Now that was – that made my day and I do take time and trouble over making it that way. That’s what’s such a pain in the arse when [the

212 Bob Dickson Page 213 C1379/56 Track 12 editor of ] Nature writes to you and says, ‘I’ve trimmed out fifteen words from this page,’; and they’re all the ones that you battled over in your head to say that that is the right word for that space and Nature have changed it to something else. Or it doesn’t need to be Nature , some editor has changed it, and you do think ‘I took trouble over that word, and is it worth fighting for?’. Well usually the answer would be yes if you had infinite time but you don’t.

[End of Track 12]

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Track 13

There’s a bit of a gap since our last recording but you’ve been thinking about a number of issues and you’ve got some notes from which to begin to say the next and final part of the life story.

Yes, we both, you and me, had a fairly long break of almost a year owing to illness of one sort or another in our families and other distractions and if I could I’d like to try to handle this wash-up session in three particular ways. First I’d like to answer some of the specific questions that you asked me back in November. Then I’d like to bring the series up to date: some eventful things have happened to me and my family in the past year, since we met on tape. And finally I think it would be interesting and appropriate to ask myself what I have learned from the process of trying to construct my life history on tape; it’s not the sort of thing that people [will] have ever done before, certainly not me. So first of all I intend to try and to deal with some of the specific questions you asked me and one of them that appealed was ‘practical intellectual reasons why you have tended to be drawn northwards in your work on the oceans.’ In fact the scientific pull of the Arctic and sub Arctic has always been very strong at Lowestoft, though for a totally shifting mix of reasons and I could maybe describe the succession of these reasons, while at the same time answering your subsidiary questions: the details of the early cruises on the research vessel Ernest Holt and the importance of Lowestoft as a coastal site to what I was doing. The answer to that [the latter] will be not at all [laughs], but I’ll answer that. And finally leading up to something which is very interesting to me, ‘what would an ideal global ocean observing system look like?’ I don’t propose to answer that at all but show you what the question should maybe really have been about.

So after the war as Arthur Lee explained in his history the primary attractant in the north was simply fisheries. The post war years had been years of huge expansion in the global total fish catch and the fisheries doubled every decade until about 1970, when it tapered off. People naturally asked two questions: are there any stocks that are unexploited, and what may we have done to cause the tapering-off. It was just the same in the north east Atlantic: four point five million tonnes total catch in 1947 rose

214 Bob Dickson Page 215 C1379/56 Track 13 to twelve point five million tonnes in 1976 followed by a slight decline. Helping to understand the role of hydrographic change, in this case in the fisheries of the Barents Sea, was what was interesting the fisheries lab at Lowestoft and Arthur Lee as my – my boss as head of hydrography. So it became the first problem that I tilted at in the, in Arthur Lee’s Arctic team, and the research vessel Ernest Holt was our platform. Although it was conceived from the start as a fisheries research vessel, you have photographs of it in front of you that you can maybe scan in, the Holt wasn’t really an ideal platform for physical oceanography. It was launched in 1949 and she followed the design of an Arctic commercial side-winder trawler which was then I suppose at the height of its evolution. So as a catcher of fish it was probably fine but, and its hull shape fitted beautifully like a glove to the Arctic swell and its slow revving triple expansion steam engine was so quiet that you couldn’t even tell when you’d arrived on station. Thirdly to the young, appreciated by all, a steam pipe ran under the gunnel all the length of the ship to warm your hands on, I – I remember. But as a platform for lowering stuff away, which is mostly what physical oceanography consists of, it was quite a bit of a challenge. We worked our hydrographic stations from a small lab perched high up right aft, and again that’ll be evident in the picture, and without the means we have today to keep the ship on station, keep her head to wind, she swung and rolled and pitched wildly about when we were trying to get things done. In those days, the mercury in glass reversing thermometers which were [attached] to the Nansen bottle (sampling bottles) were rare and hard things to replace. There weren’t many of them around. And so our worst fear was that the hydrowire, which had a breaking strain of about a ton would snap as the ship sheared away on station and drop the whole string to the seabed. But fortunately Arthur Lee, as our boss and head of hydrography, had thoughtfully accomplished this feat before us and – in almost his first Arctic cruise, so we remembered him fondly for that and we had that event as our security against us doing it ourselves. The other problem seems nonsensical in these days when GPS is present on your very phone, but it was the problem of knowing where you were. And in the more outlandish parts of the Arctic, sometimes in perpetual dark, that could be a real puzzle. By the time I worked in the Barents Sea from 1966 things had moved on from the old days of star or sun sights certainly which our Marine Superintendent Ross Jolliffe tells me was once the way. But even from the 1960s onwards we had DECCA and LORAN and Ross suggests that the master -

215 Bob Dickson Page 216 C1379/56 Track 13 slave cathode ray tube display that I remember our navigators peering at in their tiny little cabins on their knees like they were praying for guidance, and in some cases I guess they probably were, that master slave system was probably LORAN; and with that a skilled operator might get an accuracy of about half a mile when the coverage of the system was okay. The obvious difficulty that that had on our aim of understanding variability and change in the ocean, its temperature field, salinity field, was that what we did then to find out about variability was to go there one year in say August, September, make a – a transect of stations west of Bear Island where Arthur Lee had started in 1949 and do the same thing the following year; by subtracting one profile of temperature from another we could see how it had changed and then we could try to explain it. So this was – we certainly knew where we ought to be and Arthur Lee had decided quite correctly to run standard hydrographic lines across the main Norwegian Atlantic Current as it flowed to the west of Bear Island and carried warmth and cod larvae northwards and onto the Barents Sea shelf. But the plain fact of the matter is that the – when we arrived on station, we very often came to the conclusion that we weren’t quite where we thought we were because the seabed was maybe a few hundred metres deeper or shallower than it should have been for that standard station; and so it – we – it was an issue in these days as to whether the position that you achieved was actually good enough to detect change in a clear way. You still see the impact of these years of positional uncertainty when you read the early papers from the ‘60s and you see these straight lines of where we went and these serried dots evenly spaced in idealised locations which is where we did our stations. Well I would suggest that don’t believe a word of it, life isn’t as neat and tidy as that and it was only when positionally we became more competent that you start seeing these charts of stations as slightly more untidy maps of where the work was done. But thankfully, despite the narrowness of the warm currents and the abruptness of the seabed topography, the amplitude and size of these departures from the mean in temperature or salinity proved to be more than large enough to detect. When we include these remarkable sections west of Bear Island from 1978/79 when the Great Salinity Anomaly was coming back home after it’s fourteen year transit of the Northern Gyre, the salinity of the Norwegian Atlantic current dropped below thirty- five in salinity almost everywhere for the first time. It was such a huge event, there was no doubt that it was happening and no doubt that we had detected something real.

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[09.53]

So, not entirely helped by the customary stiff daily rum ration for all hands which we participated, including scientists, and gin at eight and thrupence a bottle I remember very well, and a vastly rotund captain of deep and low cunning in Ted Binnington, in my years aboard anyway, and a somewhat feudal messing system where the technical grades of scientists were required to dwell and mess aft of the engines in segregation from the graduates, still and all the Ernest Holt swarmed all over the northern shelf from North Cape to the north of Svalbard to Novaya Zemlya doing its bit to describe the ocean climate and its variability in northern seas during a vital period of change, so contributing link after link to the long chain of data that is our principle means, well our only means, of connecting climate and fisheries in a practical way. As a deep sea trawler the Holt was always based at Grimsby where deep sea trawler men can be found as crew and usually this was fine, but sometimes certainly with dire results. And I do remember one particular cruise led by Arthur Lee, a pair of cruises, where we were warned to look out for a bunch of lads from the Marsh at Grimsby, they were called the Martians: that’s how people describe people from the Marsh at Grimsby. None of them were very tall but they were all about five foot cubed and very strong and they confessed openly when they came aboard that they were escaping the long arm of the law and we were warned to watch out for [pause] not to offend these people on this particular cruise, and all would be well. And actually [we] did our job very well. We – we started teaching them how the – the business of where you put the bottles on the wire in order to get them to the right [sampling] depth and of course they were highly intelligent people and they started telling Arthur Lee when he’d got it wrong and to his great credit he reflected for a bit and then left it to them. Then we taught them how to play chess; they’d never seen it before and within three days they came back and beat the scientific staff six nil at chess. And then [in return] they started telling us things that they knew, like ‘how I’d done the mayor of Grimsby’s safe’ I remember which apparently was a – a large steel thing with a big iron lion on the front but around the back you could practically get into it with a tin opener. So we actually got on very well with the Martians on that trip, though we had to be careful of what we were about and every now and again the – one of the

217 Bob Dickson Page 218 C1379/56 Track 13 particular Rigall brothers, called himself Ringbolt from the thing hanging in his ear, we had to restrain him every time he passed Ocean Weather Ship M from trying to clip it, trying to get as close as he could. So that was a very boring cruise going seventeen times back and forth through the position of Ocean Weather Ship M looking for [pause] what Helland Hansen called ‘puzzling waves’ west of Norway. It could have been a very boring trip but in fact it was one that I remember fondly. And again, another memory from these days if we have time [laughs] is simply the realisation of how much of a feathered rain is appearing from above and descending on the ship. , and that we found that the Martians of course kicked them all over the side until we pointed out that if they built little baskets into containers for these things, they could hang them under the whaleback and revive them with a bit of water and some food. And you’d be amazed what they – once they took this point onboard, they were catching beautiful golden plovers and lapwings and all sorts of land birds, wheatears, and before a week or two was up they had a – the forecastle was loud with the sound of [laughs] land birds which had no business being 400 miles west of Norway at all. So it did make you wonder, offhand, how much of a feathered rain happens that nobody ever knows about, how many of these flocks of birds are blown west of Scandinavia and just drop into the sea. Anyway that was the Martians. And since they were from Grimsby as I say and since I always worked in the deep sea, and always worked – we always worked out of Grimsby as well. So we would carry all of our gear north by lorry before each cruise and return it to Lowestoft afterwards, and this practice continued in the early days of the Cirolana before the upgrade of the berthing facilities at Lowestoft to take her. That would have been about 1986. So Lowestoft as a base was never important to me, to answer your question, other than for the occasional research cruises that we had on the local research vessels, Clione and Corella .

The Holt was to meet as undignified end. As I remember it after a spell renamed the Switha and working as a fishery protection vessel, she ran aground in 1980 south east of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth and was blown up and sunk by the RAF as a – a hazard to navigation. The aim – her aim --of linking climate and fisheries that she and we spent so long investigating I have to say still remains. Projects such as the Norwegian BARCORE Project which is actually still underway I think, started in

218 Bob Dickson Page 219 C1379/56 Track 13

2009: a huge comprehensive project covering every facet you can imagine of how will the warming north affect the ecosystem of the Barents Sea and effect of environmental or human stresses on the plankton, the benthos and the fish. All of these things were part of this BARCORE project (Barents Sea Ecosystem Resilience under Global Environmental Changes) is its [full] name. I came across it when I was doing a review last year of climate research in Norway and so I thought I’d ask one of the main PIs, Benjamin Planque, what is the key question now, you know, have they answered the big question. And he rather startled me; he said that, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘the key control for biology in the Barents Sea is the inflow of Atlantic water which brings in heat and nutrients and around eight million tonnes a year of mesozooplankton, and from a biological perspective,’ he says, ‘question number one is how much does the inflow of Atlantic water contribute to the productivity of the Barents Sea shelf?’ And I thought, well that’s [laughs] – that could be Arthur Lee standing there in 1949 asking the same question. And the more modern take on that -- -- question 1a maybe---- is ‘what would be the biological consequences of the projected future changes in inflow that our models are suggesting’. So Arthur Lee was right, and I think his – the question he posed is still being answered, and one day we will have faith that they have answered it.

[17.46]

Well I’ve answered – I’ve expanded a little more on the first reason for us being pulled north in Lowestoft, that was the issue of fisheries; and I have already described the next set of imperatives that drew us into and through the sub Arctic seas and I don’t really need to do more than briefly restate these. These had to do if you remember with measuring the Denmark Strait overflow as in some sense the driver of the abyssal limb of the global Thermohaline Circulation. And that was needed by the modellers to model the collective dose arising from the NEA low level waste dump site. Thereafter we were pulled north in making good the rather surprising deficiency of the otherwise wonderful World Ocean Circulation Experiment which managed to miss out the whole of subArctic seas from its global [laughs] purview. And our Denmark Strait programme therefore became part of the hemisphere- wide effort to measure and describe all of the fluxes, ocean fluxes, that connect the Arctic with the

219 Bob Dickson Page 220 C1379/56 Track 13 oceans further south, and that’s what became the international ASOF programme that I chaired from 2000 to 2006. Then as ASOF reported its findings, the International Polar Year began, April 2007 to 2009, ---actually it’s two years ---and although we’re not strictly Arctic observing folk at Lowestoft, I found a busy and I think appreciated role as the deputy chair of the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board in piecing together the various doings of the international effort in the north during the IPY, at the behest of the AOSB, with the aim of pointing up any gaps that might exist and on the basis of the new dataset trying to define for the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board where do we go from here, what do we do in the Legacy Phase? So in answer to your original question, --‘practical intellectual reasons why you have tended to be drawn northwards in your work on the oceans’--, I found looking back that these reasons have been continuously present but different. Fisheries, low level waste, ASOF, the IPY and most recently programme evaluation have all had a strong influence in pushing us north and keeping us there. One vital difference that may not be quite so obvious, which we ourselves have to think twice about before we realise, but real nonetheless has been that the scales of scientific collaboration have had to change continuously as we’ve done so. In the early years of me going to sea certainly we went to sea as Lowestoft or as England or as Britain and did something in a place that Lowestoft or England wanted us to investigate. Later on in the 1980s, by the time we get to the 1980s we were combining our resources to carry out [regional] EC programmes like VEINS which was the Variability of Exchanges in Northern Seas. That was my first big regional study where all of the fluxes through the Nordic Seas between Norway and Greenland, between the Arctic and the Atlantic, were being studied at once by the whole community that we could bring together. From a regional effort, requiring regional coordination, we moved onto ASOF which was a hemispheric effort, necessarily so, requiring hemispheric collaboration. And finally, it’ll come as no surprise to you to learn that the International Polar Year was a global effort. The [pause] skills of the scient – my point is this, that the skills of scientific coordination - which very often were imparted by my old friend Jens Meincke of the University of Hamburg. He was very often, for example, our EC coordinator - they [the skills of scientific coordination] become very much more arduous and complicated with time and he became very very good at it. It’s not an easy thing to

220 Bob Dickson Page 221 C1379/56 Track 13 take on and appease this increasing family of scientists and fit them all together in some collaborative way. And Jens did it beautifully.

[22.33]

Before getting down to the serious business of what an ideal ocean observing system would look like, one of the remaining issues that you wanted to know more about was the – the effect of language, words, names in science, including the naming of the Great Salinity Anomaly. Well this one won’t take very much space. In oceanography there’s a slight tradition of tagging features or events with the names of their discoverer or simply in honour of somebody. The Dooley current is named forever after the Aberdeen and later ICES Hydrographer Harry Dooley (ICES is the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea). Named after Harry Dooley who discovered this density driven flow and described its role in transporting fish larvae from west of Scotland to the northern North Sea through the Fair Isle channel. And another, the Ellett Line, continues to be used to describe a repeat hydrographic section worked westwards across the Rockall channel at about fifty-seven and a half degrees north that the late David Ellett established and championed in order to monitor changes in the flows passing north to the west of Britain. The repeat hydrography stations S and W off the US eastern seaboard are named after Henry Stommel and Val Worthington for sentiments sake. And the Great Salinity Anomaly is just another convenient shorthand, this time proposed by myself in 1988 to describe in a couple of words a huge unprecedented and, as far as I’m concerned, unrepeated slug of up to 10,000 cubic kilometres of extra freshwater that passed south from the Arctic, sub Arctic seas through Denmark Strait between the – in the 1960s to entertain and amuse us all as it passed on its fourteen year passage around the Northern Gyre, going back to the Greenland Sea I think about 1982. I described its main features and effects and importance a little earlier in these tapes and I also described how quite quickly, the Great Salinity Anomaly became the GSA in the literature; quick, convenient and eventually without any citation to the original paper [laughs]; but that degree of fame or notoriety or usefulness, call it what you will, is and was reward enough.

[25.08]

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Could I just then ask about the decision to call it the Great Salinity Anomaly, did you – you may not be able to cast your mind back and think about this as you thought about it then but were there other names in contention for you that you thought you might call it and why did you call it precisely that. I ask because it has a – it has a literary quality I think the Great Salinity Anomaly, I don’t know whether you would agree that –

Well the – it was a lot of work to make sure that we actually had a Great Salinity Anomaly in the first place. What we tended to find, and it was almost perverse of the worlds observing systems, but as this thing passed through first at Greenland; and then Ocean Weather Ship Bravo, and they closed down Bravo; and then passing through [Ocean Weather Ship] Charlie in the mid Atlantic, they closed down Charlie just as it passed; and then when it arrived in the East Atlantic they closed down Ocean Weather Ship Juliet which is where we would normally[have expected to look for its arrival on this side of the Atlantic]. So we have a lot of these records were things were seen going down, [sharply decreasing salinity], and then when people realised they wanted to know and started the time series up again in some form or other you see it going up again. All of that was a lot of preliminary work and the Great Salinity Anomaly itself has to be one of these things that you finally saw a pan Atlantic thing, before you could even think to give it a name. When we did eventually see that all of these time series were kind of lagged versions of each other round the gyre of the North Atlantic, by then we were fairly clear that this was an unprecedented huge event in our – in our scientific observations at least, and that something quite remarkable had gone on. It wasn’t so much that we were trying to make more of it than it was, as I’ve described earlier, it actually was one of the big events of hydrographic change in the north, northern seas. As I say, by the time we’d worked out that this thing was on a pan Atlantic scale, it was bigger than any change that we have since seen. So I suppose the urge to call it something like the Great Salinity Anomaly was for two reasons. First of all you couldn’t say ‘now I want to talk about that thing that passed out through the Demark strait in 1968 and then went around the North Atlantic coming back through the Faroe Shetland Channel in 1976 and up to the west of Bear Island in 1978’!: you needed something to describe this big thing going on in a word

222 Bob Dickson Page 223 C1379/56 Track 13 and the Great Salinity Anomaly seemed to fit that bill. And the fact that it was ‘great’ as well was – was another point. I think people also, modellers especially, they liked an event like that to hone their models on, and very many hydrographic models attempted to emulate and then fill in the gaps in our Great Salinity Anomaly so it proved to be attractive from that point of view to have a sort of throwaway line that you could use for it. As I say, the Great Salinity Anomaly anyway became the GSA and is printed as that in lots of the literature. So it was a – I think it was a happy thing to do but it was also an appropriate thing to do.

But was the name intentionally sort of come up with in order to sort of invite interest ‘cause it seems to be a phrase that would invite the interest of people outside –

Well you’re never trying to put people off your research, but no it wasn’t – it was as I say, it was described as the Great Salinity Anomaly in order to bring people’s attention to it, certainly, but more to be – from then on to be a – a shorthand for a major thing. Often these things just pop into you head. I remember lying in my bath when we were trying to think of a name for the new Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, and somewhere at home I’ve got this damp piece of cardboard on which I have written down all sorts of permutations of Sir Alister Hardy and continuous plankton recorder survey and things, and SAHFOS is the happy outcome of that. I’ve suggested that I [should] take my soggy bit of cardboard down there one day and they can stick it wherever they like [laughs]; but yeah sometimes a name sticks, even as long a one as the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, SAHFOS seems to fit and you know it has fitted when people use it unofficially; then and for the rest of the time it becomes the way things are. But there’s – you know, you rarely try to vaunt yourself in these things, you’re trying to think of something which sums something up in the minimum amount of words and that proves its utility; so that’s what we do.

[30.53]

And the early cruises on the Holt from 1966 I think was your first one.

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Yeah.

Was there any surveying of fisheries themselves, in other words was there any biological recording alongside the – the recording of physical things.

Oh yes, yes, they –

And if so how did that happen, how in practice did you do the actual fish surveys if you like?

Yeah, we were there as physical oceanographers very much as the [pause] afterthought to the biologists. Now I think afterthoughts the wrong word, we were all trying to fit our ideas to the same question which was how does environmental change affect fish stocks. To do that you need to measure what the environment was doing and what the fish stocks were doing. And the way we did that was to go there every August-September and, in company with the Norwegians and later the Russians, we would work a huge grid of stations across the entire Barents Sea shelf, literally all of it including west of Novaya Zemlya and around Svalbard. What we were trying to do was to catch 0-Group fish, which is fish in their first year of life: the fish which were drifting in there or being spawned there before they had had the effect of fishing experience themselves. The theory was, and I think is , that at that stage in their life history you get a better measure of whether this is a particularly productive year for redfish or whatever. So as hydrographers we had to map the temperature and salinity and density distribution and to measure the flows into the Barents Sea but when we’d done that we weren’t allowed to sit on our backsides and read books; we became little, ---instructed certainly,--- biologists, using TinTow nets and whatever to catch on a whole grid of stations all of these tiny little fish. And I soon became - like everybody else, we made mistakes and I do remember when – I do remember learning what a capelin looked like when it was little, only about an inch long. A capelin you will know from your mother’s knee has a fatty adipose fin and that’s the sort of thing that none of us knew when we went there. When we reported in on the radio every night I remember the first night when we found capelin, we on the Ernest Holt said, ‘And fifty-five sand eels,’ and then the Russians reported in – now what did they

224 Bob Dickson Page 225 C1379/56 Track 13 make them, I can’t remember, they had some other fancy idea, anchovy I think; and then the Norwegians came on and said, ‘And 132 capelin,’ and we all heard the airwaves buzzing with retracted statements [laughs] as people reported in. The little fish didn’t make it easy on us; the baby redfish have got spikes on their – the plates at the side of their heads like the adults have ---but baby redfish are blue and this is something which the world doesn’t prepare physical oceanographers for; but eventually you learn all these things. And so the answer to your question is certainly yes, Britain had a – still a major fishery up there, in what the Hull and Grimsby people called the White Sea. We still wanted to know what the changing year class strength of a whole range of species were from halibut to redfish. And they were necessary, the – [that was necessarily] the other blade of the scissors in making up this – trying to answer this question of how does the ocean change effect the ecosystem.

What is a TinTow net, did you say a tinto net [ph]?

Oh yeah, well I – I’m the wrong person to ask about that, but basically you had a [pause] a large tube with a nose cone in it and a net within and you deployed it over the side and after towing it for a certain period, at a certain depth, you recovered the little jar at the end where the small fish were building up. You washed them in by hanging it over the side and then you counted them up and became an expert in blue redfish.

And was – the physical oceanography that was going on as you say alongside this, did it differ in any way from the physical oceanography that you were doing later that wasn’t connected so closely to fish surveys and concerns about the fish stocks?

Not really. The standard hydrography that we were doing at the time was what we could do, and there’s an awful lot more that we can do now with sea gliders and whatever. But in these days what you could do was to catch water [samples] on hydrowire at predetermined depths by hanging a string of Nansen sampling bottles and when you – and that technique had been going on for well a hundred years as [Fridjof] Nansen brought it in. It was a very elegant system in its way. You hung the bottle on and tightened up the butterfly nuts at the top and bottom and the – dropped it

225 Bob Dickson Page 226 C1379/56 Track 13 and then when you had the thing deployed in the sea and hanging there with the bottles at regular intervals, and they had to be regular intervals; you wanted to subtract the temperature salinity at that depth next year from what you were catching this year. Then you dropped what they call a ‘messenger’, [a bronze weight that] you fitted it around the wire and closed it at the top. It slid down and hit the first bottle and that turned over, releasing its messenger which carried on down the wire and hit the next bottle, turned that one over and so after waiting ---well you actually, you put your finger on the – on the wire and felt these little collisions going off down and down the wire. When they were all turned over you hauled them up, took the bottles off; by this time the mercury thermometer had turned over the – at a little constriction, the mercury had broken off and was now measuring against a vertical scale what the temperature was in situ when you – when the bottle turned over. And of course it had a stopcock on it that you could take samples for nutrients and salinity. What I’m – what I'm – what I think - in the ‘60s that’s what everyone did and it wasn’t till, in my experience, the ‘70s when we had reliable dependable current meters that we could leave out there. The Aanderaa current meter then became for a lot of us the workhorse. It was developed as a – under a NATO grant by Ivar Aanderaa of Bergen and he developed this thing into a nice robust workhorse. He did it in 1959 but by the time they reached us it was in the, I think, the ‘70s. And so we knew what it was that we wanted to do when the instruments became available but very often what we were forced to do to represent environmental change was temperature, salinity, nutrients ---the usual chemistry that we could easily do and which people had been doing for decades.

[39.28]

Thank you. And finally I’ve read an account of a fisheries research at Lowestoft in the ‘40s, and this is by someone called Sidney Holt who perhaps was still on the –

No, different from Ernest.

Yeah, but – and he talked about two things that I was curious about, one was a kind of left wing politics in the – in the lab, connected to something called rational fishing,

226 Bob Dickson Page 227 C1379/56 Track 13 left wing politics in a number of the individuals, I don’t know whether this means anything. And the second thing is he talked about Cushing as a sort of, a practical – David Cushing as a sort of practical joker and this wasn’t a sort of – an impression of him that I’d gained from what I heard from you. I wondered could you shed light on any of this?

Well, no I can’t really. They – from our modern perspectives a lot of them seemed very weird people. They were very driven people, they did – they were the pioneers but [coughs] but they were from a different era. I remember J N Carruthers, who used to work here, saying to me, I’ll give you a couple of his remarks to me [laughs] because it shows better than I could do how that era was. What he used to say was, ‘You’re living at Mancroft Towers?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I used to live there, and why don’t you do like we did? I used to climb up on the pitch of the roof, in my tails and top hat, and my batman used to bring me up my dinner and I used to hurl the plates into the night when I’d finished.’ And I said, ‘Well a) I don’t have a batman, I don’t have a taily coat and if I did throw plates into the night I’d be arrested,’ and he said, ‘Well it’s a changed time,’ he says, ‘I used to put a postcard on the final tram at Lowestoft saying, ‘Two kippers, breakfast, Carruthers,’ and they would be there.’ And I said, ‘Well I’m afraid we don’t have trams and we rarely have kippers.’ but it was a totally different era. And of course yes they did have a [pause], probably before the period that Sydney Holt is talking about, they did have a – weird notions about how to have fun. Cushing used to have this game called ‘straight lining’ where him and his mates used to arrive in their ancient Army greatcoats and put the names of two places in two bowler hats and then pick out one as to where they would start from and pick out the other as to where they would end up,--- and go in a straight line . Now if they’d gone through a garden pond and through your front window and across your sofa and out the other side and over your garden wall that was what they did; and in these days there was a kind of temptation to say ‘hark at the young masters at their sport’, but these days you would undoubtedly end up in jail for doing this. So there were eccentrics and I’m not really sure why but we did tend to see back to that period as being a – an era of great eccentricity. I think one of our past directors decided to have a time-change every day. Instead of changing to British Summer Time by an hour I think he slipped it daily. There was another who arrived on a horse with a light

227 Bob Dickson Page 228 C1379/56 Track 13 on his bowler hat. Weird stuff to us but obviously tolerated in these days. And when later on I describe how some of these pioneers pushed and pushed their subject forward in the absence of gear or theory or of anything else you were very glad that these people existed and were people, like Cush, who were totally driven and not likely to be stopped by anything, ‘straight lining’ or not. We’ll get to that eventually.

[43.49]

Thank you. If you then continue, I think you were going to tackle the – my slightly naïve question about what an ideal observing system looks like, is that next?

Yes, it’s a – I’m not going to go global here as I mentioned, even though you asked me to, but I’ll concentrate on the high Arctic as the place which combines the fastest rate of global change with our area of greatest ignorance. And it’s also the area I know most about from having worked through this four year extended essay on the doings of the polar year and ‘where do we go from here’ for the Arctic Ocean Sciences Board. As I mentioned earlier two questions had interested the AOSB most, what should an integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System look like. If I lapse into saying iAOOS that’s what I mean: integrated Arctic Ocean Observing System. How should we design an effective international ocean observing plan for northern seas in the – what we called the Legacy Phase of the International Polar Year, based on what we’ve learnt. The insights that we gained in the polar year were what allowed us to even consider such a plan, you know: where are the gaps? In the 1990s, in the late 1990s when the US- USSR Environmental Working Group it called itself, tried to piece together all the available hydrographic soundings from the Arctic Ocean, they found that there was virtually a data desert. I could show you the maps, in fact they’re – I think they are present in one of these volumes, and there are no dots at all across large chunks of the Arctic Ocean. Over the two IPY years from March 2007 to 2009 as I say this fifty per cent increase in the funding of polar science and also the – the major deployment of new equipment and thirdly the fact that everyone was working to a common goal, all of these things meant there was a huge and revolutionary increase in the dataset across the Arctic Ocean. In one of these volumes that you have in front of you, I think the second one down, that picture of a – a Chinese icebreaker

228 Bob Dickson Page 229 C1379/56 Track 13 coming to a halt to do some work in the Arctic Ocean in the middle of all the ice, that was actually leading an expedition of Swedes and Finns and Frenchmen all doing, and Germans, all doing different things on a Chinese research vessel using Woods Hole equipment. And I think that that par excellence was what the IPY was all about: everyone was forced to crowd onto the available platforms and to use, as a common wealth, the equipment that was coming available in places like Woods Hole. And so as a result we began to see for the first time our first detailed glimpse of how the ocean and the atmosphere and the cryosphere might work as a system. But glimpses need to be confirmed and in – and an earlier session of this narrative when I dealt with the IPY, I’ve already described half a dozen of the new ideas that I think we learned from the IPY and that now need to be reinvestigated, confirmed, understood and, if applicable, built into our climate models if we are to develop their predictive skills and usefulness.

It’s not my intention here to repeat these particular examples, but in order to take our discussion a little bit further towards an ideal observing system, I’d like to describe the – repeat the ideas that we thought we detected, connecting environmental change in the Arctic with climate, then the reason we think it’s important from the point of view of climate modelling, then the means of testing it by observations. And if all this can be done successfully I may have achieved – I may have laid one layer upon layer upon layer of an observing system. But as we’ll find it’s a very – it’s a varied one. If I do wreak total confusion in trying to do this then the detail can be found in the iAOOS report to the Seoul meeting which is the final one of these four. Well the first of these new ideas about the Arctic’s role in climate can be introduced in a single elegant CTD profile that a Canadian called Jen Jackson worked from a Canadian icebreaker, Louis St Laurent , in the central Canada basin on August the 29 th 2006. We have both got the picture in front of us, it’s on page twenty-seven of this last one, and I do believe it’s – even though I feel a little bit like the radio ventriloquist [laughs] in describing something which nobody can see, I’m going to try to describe it well enough that you can understand what I'm getting at, which is the main thing. In the single profile through the Canada basin by Jen Jackson using a CTD, she shows the presence of three subsurface temperature maxima in just the upper part of the water column and each of these temperature maxima, we think, has a different and an

229 Bob Dickson Page 230 C1379/56 Track 13 important role in climate; please forgive the detail in what I’ll be describing because it will eventually – it is needed to make my eventual point about the observing system that we would need to tackle climate in the north, which is what you asked. So if you and the imaginative listener can imagine a first temperature layer as Jen Jackson went down into the top of the Canada basin, only twenty to twenty-five metres down, there you find something called the Near Surface Temperature Maximum, the NSTM, that creeps into the Canada basin through leads and melt ponds in summer and then conveniently caps itself off by having melted a little of the ice from below and giving itself a freshwater cap that allows this warmth to persist into the fall when the renewal of air-ocean or ice-ocean stresses are able to deepen the surface mixed layer again. The point of this rather slight feature, apparently slight feature, has been shown by Jim Overland’s group in Seattle, in NOAA Seattle, and is to many the Big Deal of the IPY so far. That is, that this warmth ---stored away in summer and capped off by melt water and released in autumn ---is capable of destabilising the Arctic atmosphere and slowing down the circumpolar wind belt in the fall. Jim provides tantalising evidence that this – what he called the Ice Insulation Positive Feedback Effect actually does take place to slow the circumpolar vortex. To test and make use of this, we know now what question we should be asking of our observing system, which is what you asked. [It is ] ‘ What continued coverage of the upper water column would be needed to keep track of ocean atmosphere heat exchange as the sea ice dwindles away? And actually the prospects for this are good. In addition to the Woods Hole Ice-Tethered Profiler programme which will continue to sound the upper layers of the Arctic Ocean unattended until at least 2014, we are in prospect of a new system from iAOOS- France, there’s me using iAOOS again, that will add atmospheric soundings and ice mass balance estimates to the upper ocean soundings. So in a way this is a triple sounding buoy; it’s not just looking at the upper ocean, it’s looking at the temperature profile and its changes through the ice, measuring the ablation from below and the accretion on the top, and for the first time looking upwards through the atmosphere and beginning to sound the lower atmosphere where satellites are at their most myopic. This ‘triple sounding buoy’ must eventually, as they wander around the Arctic Ocean, give Jim Overland much of what he needs to answer his question. And it’s already underway: it’s a ten year project in iAOOS France, budget of seven million Euros, fifty platforms, with fifteen platforms maintained continuously for

230 Bob Dickson Page 231 C1379/56 Track 13 seven years. As I say they will have a CTD profiler looking downwards in the ocean, an ice mass balance string of sensors for sea ice and snow, which actually is of the SAMS [Scottish Association for Marine Science] type from Oban and a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and optical depth sensor of the French type for atmospheric soundings; quite a new development, absolutely bang on what is needed for the elaboration of the effect of the near surface temperature maximum on the atmosphere.

Back to Jen Jackson’s profile through the Canada basin layer two, the Pacific Summer Water layer, which is only sixty metres down and it enters the Arctic through the Bering Strait, as you’d imagine from its name. At present it has no discernable effect on climate, but John Toole at Woods Hole who’s the Arctic scientist that most of us have the most respect for, John Toole is sufficiently anxious about it to call it the ‘ticking time bomb’ because as he points out although it’s only sixty metres down and currently inaccessible to mixing from the surface, it could melt one metre of ice if this warmth becomes accessible to the surface. And so John Toole’s question is: will the depth of mixing increase to reach this level after the ice disappears? And two new observing initiatives again are needed to help us find that out. Firstly, of course, you have to find out where from year to year the Pacific Summer Water layer is, and the Japanese and Koreans, Koji Shimada and company are going to do annual hydrographic sections across the Canada basin to find that out. Secondly, though, we might measure mixing directly, if it could be done, and one emerging instrument has that capability: it’s a new Woods Hole Ice-Tethered Profiler with something called MAVS, sorry about that, Modular Acoustic Velocity Sensor, so it’s an Ice-Tethered Profiler V, [ITP-V] they call it, [the ‘V’ standing for] velocity, which will crawl up and down the wire through the upper water column and has already provided the delicate measurements of all three components of velocity that are required to estimate mixing; that’s a – the subject of papers by Williams et al in 2010. So that plank of the new observing system seems to be underway as well. Then layer three. Going down with Jen Jackson’s CTD, she eventually reached a warm layer at 400 metres and this we think is merely passing harmlessly through, and is an Atlantic- derived warm layer on its 12,000 kilometre circuit around the margins of the entire sub Arctic and Arctic oceans, from its point of entry north west of Scotland to it’s

231 Bob Dickson Page 232 C1379/56 Track 13 point of exit in the Denmark Strait. It’s chugging along and its climatic ‘point’ is not to melt the ice, it’s too deep for that, but its climate point is this: since it’s been at its warmest for fifteen at least and maybe hundred years, Michael Karcher’s [AWI] Bremerhaven group has suggested its impact will be a delayed and remote one, draining back into the Nordic Seas to slow the Denmark Strait overflow around 2016 - 18. It will be the subject of an ASOF-2 all hands alert after 2014, we have Michael Karcher’s NAOSIM model to predict its time of arrival, and we have a range of conventional techniques to observe its impact on the overflow when it gets there. And then I’m going to try and – test the [laughs] – the concentration of the listener, with one more thing. The freshening of the pan Arctic, which is the context for this particular dip of the CTD by Jen Jackson. The more localised observing efforts we’ve just described are set into the context of pan Arctic hydrographic change, and since 2003 when Andrey Proshutinsky of Woods Hole began applying his Beaufort Gyre Observing System we’ve become aware not only that the Beaufort Gyre is the largest freshwater reservoir in the world ocean, but it also that its freshwater content is strongly increasing. By 2008 the Arctic Ocean as a whole might have gained four times as much freshwater as the Great Salinity Anomaly of the 1970s, raising the spectre of what would happen to the Global Thermohaline Circulation if even a piece of this freshwater loading drains south. So the potential relevance to global climate is clear, and it became hugely important to know where this freshwater was coming from and where was it headed. Almost exactly a year ago in a wonderful Nature paper by Morison et al, they described the first use of a powerful satellite to seabed approach to allow us to keep track of the hydrographic change on the scale of the Arctic. What they do is they’ve combined the use of satellite altimetry, the ICESat in their case, to look at ice thickness and ice distribution, satellite gravity from GRACE the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, [plus] oceanic hydrography with ships and autonomous platforms, and ocean bottom pressure. Using these four strings to their bow they have a system which will not only describe change in situ in the ocean but describe the circulation changes that passed around the Arctic Ocean and brought say freshening from one area to another. Using it in fact, they were able to establish a role for a shift in the ocean pathway of Eurasian runoff, such that the Russian river [input] was brought on an S-shaped path into the Beaufort Gyre to supplement the freshening that was going on in situ there. And so from 2005 to 2008,

232 Bob Dickson Page 233 C1379/56 Track 13 when this was ramping up in terms of the freshwater loading in the Beaufort Gyre, the dominant freshwater content changes there were shown to be an increase in the Canada basin balanced by a decrease in the Eurasian basin, which is a very useful thing to [be able to] do.

So let’s recap and get to the ocean observing point. How does this impact your question ‘how do you devise an observing system for climate in the Arctic?’. What we’ve seen in one dip by Jen Jackson is a layer near the surface which is generated in situ, locally, a layer below that which comes from Pacific, a layer below that comes from the Atlantic, all driven by their local, Pacific and Atlantic thing . We also know that they had different effects on climate. The one near the surface seems to be capable of retarding the circumpolar vortex in the wind field, the one deep down at sixty metres, deeper down at sixty metres as I say is only a potential effect but it’s capable of melting a large chunk of ice. And the one below that is a lagged remote effect, where Michael Karcher’s warm layer is going to drain away south and affect the Denmark Strait overflow. These are huge effects, they all have to be brought into our compass as we think up an observing system for them and I could, believe you me, come up with a book-full [laughs] of similar things from the Arctic. But the point I – the reason I use these three is this : that to make the observations that John Toole will need, he’s working on microstructure in the ocean. To make the observations that Jim Overland will need, he’s working on the macrostructure of what – how the upper few hundred metres of the ocean communicates with the lower few hundred metres of the atmosphere. And to take that third one, we are looking at a warm layer which is already chugging around [a circuit of] 12,000 kilometres and may well affect the global ocean circulation. So my point is this: that you’ve got to be very, very careful in – in establishing this observing system that will connect [the] Arctic Ocean to climate because I would imagine that if we put our minds to it we can think of influences on all time and space scales from the microstructure to the world ocean. Plainly you’re not going to establish an observing system that incorporates everything. It must be tightly focused on the actual thing that you believe you’re seeing in order that you can answer the question and go onto the next one.

[1.03.18]

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The[pause] thing that is heartening though is something which you may not have thought about when you’re trying to invent an observing system for climate and that is that the – in a new thing called the Strategy for a Svalbard International Observing System, SIOS. the [pause], Kim Holmen, the International Director at the Norwegian Polar Institute and our own Cynan Ellis Evans are suggesting that Svalbard might become an important capacity-building activity, might develop a capacity building activity, which is developing new observational techniques for environmental monitoring in frigid and sensitive areas. In other words becoming a place where people learn how their instruments, often unattended these days, might survive the Arctic. So it’s a hugely important step. Svalbard is the obvious place to do it. It’s sitting up there as far north as you can go on earth, it has accessibility to scientists, it’s got a huge cosmopolitan population of different countries’ scientists and the – it’s very much needed to know how instruments can be developed to be deployed across the Arctic and measure something in an independent way. Because if you listen to the stars of atmosphere-observing in the Arctic, like Michael Tjernström, he’s pointing out that if you’re not careful the riming of your sensors [with frost] on something [that is] sitting on the ice, or the sublimation even of water vapour onto the sensors, or the coating of ice will not only mean that your sensors don’t work but it may well mean that you don’t know that they’re not working. And so it’s a very big ask to develop the systems that I’ve been describing, none of which will work as they emerge, into systems that you can dependably deploy for year after year and which will give you the answers you need. So Svalbard and the SIOS are one very important component of an observing system for Arctic climate. Michael Tjernström was by no means giving a put-down when he said these systems won’t work, like the French iAOOS buoys, triple sounding buoys, they won’t work, he’s saying they can’t be allowed not to work , and the engineering that we now require is the thing to put your money into. In fact the current discussions on the prioritisation of research in SIOS go a bit more to the case in point. That is because Svalbard is aspiring to be a region- scale input to the fundamentally global aspirations of something called the Earth Systems Science Partnership [ESSP]. I don’t know whether you have come across this in your doings but the Earth Systems Science Partnership was established in 2001 by four global environmental change research programmes: the IGBP (the International Geosphere

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Biosphere Programme), the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environment Change, which is IHDP, the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the International Biodiversity Programme (DIVERSITAS). From the start this ESSP has stressed the study of the Earth’s environment as an integrated system in order to understand how and why its changing and to explore the implications of these changes for global and regional sustainability. But later they become a lot more practical. I mean it’s all very well to come up with a global something or other and everyone has to work to it, but around 2009, as a result of an independent review, the ESSP developed a new strategy that will integrate natural and social sciences from the regional to the global scale . In other words they will be trying to fit together regional efforts and make this global thing happen. And there, as I understand it, sit the aspirations of the SIOS. Without losing sight of its Earth’s systems science focus or at the other extreme becoming in their words ‘an uncoordinated sum of infrastructure that happens to be fundable’, a reshaped SIOS which is now called Svalbard Integrated Earth Observing System will set itself up as a far north platform, with all of these nations contributing, that will eventually act as a model for and coordinate with other regional initiatives. And if it can be achieved, the location of Svalbard, the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of its research community and the fact that it seems to sit right in the middle of a lot of these climate environment questions, must give this regional platform a – a global importance.

So that would be my answer to your question: that the two points I’ve been trying to make from Jen’s profile onward are: You need to be careful what you are measuring if you are – you need to be very specific about what you’re measuring and tune it to the question that you’re asking; test it yes or no and throw it away. And secondly you should try – I mean if we do aspire to join the Earth System Science Partnership, we could do worse than observe and support the use of Svalbard as an international cosmopolitan platform which happens to sit in the middle of many of the questions that we’re asking ourselves, and to look to integrating that with other regional efforts in forming this Earth System Science Partnership. These things change, other ideas form, but I think that one’s got legs; it’s been around for a decade now almost since the Amsterdam Declaration on global change in 2001. So that I would say is the best answer I can give to how you would set up an Arctic observing system for climate.

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Very good, thank you. Would you mind just elaborating on why Svalbard is positioned centrally as you say in relation to many of the questions, what – what is it that makes Svalbard a good place, well positioned for this?

Firstly you can get to it by air. I’ve done it myself, I’m a member of the Svalbard Gap Analysis Panel and it’s – the reason you can live there and get there is partly the answer to your question as well, because this is where the warm flow that Arthur Lee measured west of Bear Island passes north into the Arctic and becomes a feed of warmth and salt to the Arctic Ocean: one of the principle feeds of oceanic warmth and salt into the Arctic Ocean itself. In fact the – one of the biggest questions that we have is whether that [main] feed of warmth goes through the Fram Strait, the place that I’ve been talking about west of Spitsbergen, or the feed of warmth that comes through the Barents Sea in the branch of the Norwegian Atlantic Current that passes out to the Arctic Ocean north of Novaya Zemlya: which of these two actually pass oceanic warmth around the Arctic Ocean? We’ve forever believed it to be the Fram Strait branch, ----it’s the warmer and the more saline branch, ----but we now have grave doubts whether that particular flow can jump the Lomonosov Ridge. According to Bert Rudels it doesn’t very often, and so the flow of warmth and salt that goes the other side of Svalbard, through the Barents Sea shelf and out through the St Anna trough north of Novaya Zemlya, may well be the feed that takes oceanic warmth through the Arctic, not just into but through . And what I mean by saying that Svalbard sits in the middle of it is that Svalbard sits right in the middle of it: [both laugh] the one flow goes to its west and then turns right and the other flow goes passes north-eastwards to the south of Svalbard. As I also put in one of these – in that final document, one of the things I didn’t have time to go into was the question of getting access to look at both of these flows as they first time flow together north of Novaya Zemlya and pass onto towards the root of Lomonosov Ridge. Because that’s where you will discover the answer to the question that Bert Rudels in Finland is proposing, is asking: does the Fram Strait branch, is the Fram Strait branch able to jump the Lomonosov Ridge? So it – it turns out that that is another element therefore of your observing system, but it’s a political one. We know how to do it, if we were given access to the two flows where they flow together for the first time. And I have

236 Bob Dickson Page 237 C1379/56 Track 13 a map in that final volume showing exactly where we should go and what we should do when we get there. But the Russians regard that as their backyard, and it’s still, from the experience of the IPY, where working between Norway and Russia certainly resulted in deploying current meters across the inflow branch north of Novaya Zemlya, the current meters certainly came back, the current meters are now in Moscow, the data is now in St Petersburg, or the other way around. And it becomes a political issue as to whether we have access to these waters in order to do what we all know to be one of the interesting questions from the point of view of environmental change and climate. So let me just, before leaving that, refer to the page involved: ‘sorting out the inflows’, is the section of this ‘where do we do go from here in the Legacy Phase of the IPY’.

Page forty-seven.

Page forty-seven [laughs]. As I say I do feel like Brough and Archie Andrews: the [...] radio ventriloquist. But there you’ll see in the little yellow marks what we’re trying to say should be done. This area of the Laptev – running up to the Laptev Sea from the – from the Fram Strait where the two flows talk to each other (notice the little crinkly lines) the one from the Fram Strait and the one from the Barents Sea. Studying these two flows together and their interchange will tell us what we need to know, and what we need to know is which one warms the Arctic Ocean. So that one is a political element from the point of view of your – of your observing system. More generally I suppose, we also have Ny-Alesund as one of the bases which iAOOS France will use, not only for deploying its triple sounding buoys, that currently don’t work but will have to, but also it is one of the four places where you actually have nicely-controlled atmospheric soundings from the land. There are only four places, Tixi in the north of Russia, Eureka [in the] north of Canada, Barrow in North America and Ny-Alesund in Svalbard, and these four places, which are kind of like at four evenly-spaced spots around the Arctic Ocean, are certainly remote from the middle of the Arctic Ocean, but they’re going to be the one way we have of having a nice dataset to control what the new atmospheric sounding buoys will see as they begin to make a sensible go at doing it from the – on their own. So yes Svalbard is front and centre.

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Thank you.

[End of Track 13]

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Track 14

This next section I’d like to call ‘a personal update on my gap year’, which is the period since our last session on tape. And it’s been quite – quite an eventful one for all sorts of good and bad reasons. First, almost exactly a year ago on January the 14 th we lost our son in law Duncan to a brain tumour which was certainly a big event in our lives. They had told us from the start that his was of the type that gave no hope, rather dramatically underlined, maybe a little brutally, when the life insurance paid off a year or more before he died and it certainly shows that the money men know their odds. And so our daughter Sarah has been ably feeling her way into what all that means ever since and, considering that neither she nor us has ever had much experience of such a thing, she’s doing it very well. I then suffered a return of my angina which is a big thing in my life, at the end of April 2012, and we’ve spent an interesting year working out what to do about it. And what this experience has impressed on me is that the high quality of the cardiologists that have been working on me. The one I was issued with, as it were, when I got checked in late one night in the local James Paget Hospital, Toomas Sarev who I think is from one of the Baltic states, he turned out to be a real star and able to see and explain all the time what is best from my viewpoint as an active if ancient and decaying Arctic scientist, rather than like some – Sir Lancelot sprat used to do on the films ----handing down his judgement from on high, from Mount Olympus. Well he really does seem to sit next to you and discuss it from your point of view as to how you might give talks still, after dinner still, in the Arctic still, and still survive. By the time he’d reached his verdict it was that I was unstentable and, I’ll spare you all the details, but the problem wasn’t in his skill as a surgeon but in my cardiovascular anatomy where the individual branches branched and were each too wee to insert a stent even when dilated artificially. So if you can’t go through you have go around and so it’s back to Papworth for me some time in the early part of 2013 for a second bypass operation [actually took place on 13 June 2013], and my surgeon there is to be the redoubtable Stephen Large who performed my first go at Papworth back in 1990 and who told me then, ‘I am the best in the world at this procedure,’ [laughs]. He wasn’t a modest man. Well he got me twenty-two years then and as I suppose he must have picked up the odd tip here and there ever since then, [so] I couldn’t be happier that I am in the

239 Bob Dickson Page 240 C1379/56 Track 14 best of hands. I could quibble a bit about the eight month waiting list of the great man but I suppose great men have great lists. The third event in my life, and it was a large one, has been the evaluation of climate, Norwegian climate research which was conducted at the invitation of the Research Council of Norway and has been almost my last major task as a scientist before I fully retire. As over 200 Norwegian institutes are dealing, one way or another, with climate, this was a huge task, carried out by a nine person international panel under the clear and decisive chairmanship of Thomas Rosswall, the recent director, Executive Director of the International Council for Science. It was a fairly full-on commitment for all of us between August 2011 and the publication of our report in June 2012. ‘A sound impressive report with important conclusions and recommendations,’ as the Norwegian director of their Energy Resources and Environment Division described it, and I think it was. I doubt very much whether – if it proliferates very much more, whether you could actually do that sort of thing again in Norway; it’s just becoming too large a task. Fourth has been the further development of my role as the first Johan Hjort professor within the new Nordic Centre of Excellence which we call NorMER, the Nordic Centre for Research on Marine Ecosystems and Resources under Climate Change, and although it’s administered with the University of Oslo, NorMER aims to combine the expertise from all Nordic countries in order to explore biological, economic, societal consequences even of global change [and its] effects on fishery resources in the Nordic region. As I mentioned before, my role as Johan Hjort professor was suggested to be one of inspiring the multidisciplinary research teams in some clear and focused way and the Inspiration Awards that I conceived to meet this task were my means to that end. The four award volumes that I described earlier have since grown to six, all inscribed by past great leaders in each of the six fields of meteorology, marine biology, the marine ecosystem, science administration, physical oceanography and numerical climate studies and to date four of them have been awarded with the final pair, physical oceanography and numerical climate studies, due to be presented in Reykjavik, Iceland in September 2013. As I probably also mentioned earlier, repeating yourself tends to be an old man thing, the idea is that within five years or so each of the recipients will then decide who has inspired them and in turn tool the new recipients name on the slip case and send it to them with a note to the library of the University of Oslo who are setting up a tracking centre to

240 Bob Dickson Page 241 C1379/56 Track 14 keep track of where all these little inspirational time-bombs go off every few years. And so, without any effort further from me, I can sit on my armchair and imagine these things going off here and there for as long as it is maintained that way [coughs]. Excuse me. What I like best about the idea is that it’s designed to reward scientists not on the lofty plain of a Nobel Prize or an AGU medal but on the level in science that most of us occupy. And I expect that the Reykjavik meeting of NorMER in September 2013, when awards five and six will be set free, will be my final science meeting.

[End of Track 14]

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Track 15

Picking up on what you just told us in the previous track and that’s about angina being a part of your life. I wondered whether it has had as a sort of physical condition, had any effect on the way you have gone about living or the way you have thought about, I don’t know, sort of strategies for life in general?

No, absolutely not until this year because when I was first diagnosed with it was just before the opportunity came to go to the Antarctic in charge of Discovery for WOCE and there they were very insistent that if I showed the sign – the slightest tweak of angina I had to be bypassed if I’m going to the cold polar regions. And so I actually was fairly fit just then. Stephen Large said, ‘I don’t want to operate on you if you’re not fit, get fit,’ so I built a shed and laid some paving slabs and all sorts of things. I was probably fitter then than I've been since. What I’m getting at is that after the bypass and before it I hardly experienced any symptoms of it at all and that lasted twenty-two years until now. I'm not exactly guaranteeing – asking to be guaranteed another twenty-two years but only in this last year between the onset of – repeated onset of angina and the time when the Great Man’s list can be brought down and I get operated on again, only then do I feel the time in any way constrained in what I do by angina. The reason for being constrained, of course, is that if you do suffer from angina the very worst thing you can do is stand up and give a scientific talk when adrenalin is necessary to see how your slides run on from here and how your your talk should go. You need to be able to see that perspective at every point in your talk in order that you can be fluent and go from A to Z in a sensible way. So adrenalin is inevitable to scientists talking at meetings, and adrenalin is the very worst enemy of somebody who’s trying to keep their heart rate and their oxygen supply to the heart within bounds. The Arctic is not a good thing either [laughs]. And having just had a meal in the Arctic and giving a talk is probably the worst combination that you can possibly do, but it’s the sort of thing that we’ve been doing for a long time. I had to give up on a couple of these occasions this year. When I gave the Albatross; I managed to hand over the Albatross to Peter Rhines and Sirpa Häkkinen in the tenth anniversary of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research [in Bergen] in October. It was a lovely occasion but I hope nobody noticed that, as I gave my only ten minute

243 Bob Dickson Page 244 C1379/56 Track 15 introduction to these new Albatross awardees, I stuck my head behind a pillar at one point and took a quick squirt of the nitro-glycerine spray [laughs] because I could feel that it was beginning to compromise what I was doing. It would be a terribly bad thing, though not an unpoetic one, to die as you actually hand over the Albatross to the next recipient [laughs]. And so that was a bit of a squeak and I knew enough then that when I handed over the, a couple of weeks later, I handed over the next two inspiration awards at the second NorMER meeting which was in Helsinki, one to Gregory Beaugrand of the SAHFOS and the second one to the – a wonderful Norwegian science minister lady called Tora Aasland, I gave myself only ten minutes for that job and I made sure I had a quick ‘nitrolingual spray’ as they call it before I did that, but I was very conscious then that I couldn’t have gone for twenty minutes or so. So yes I am [compromised by angina now]– Keith Brander, an old friend of mine, wanted me to give the oration after his [retirement] dinner in Copenhagen in December and I simply couldn’t see myself going there in the cold time of year, eating a lot and giving a talk, so I had to pull out of that one. So yes, just recently, I have been compromised by it but that’s why I’m really looking forward to getting my next go at a – a proper bypass from the – from the greatly renowned world’s best Stephen Large.

[05.35]

Can you say why the Arctic is bad for this condition for those who don’t understand anything about angina, why – why –

Oh: cold. Cold conditions are what narrow everything down, it’s not the only condition that can do this. I – I first got angina way back in 1984 I think in Acapulco when the water was such dreadful stuff and liable to keep you on the toilet for a very long period of time if you just drank it, and so I wasn’t drinking at all and I don’t know whether it’s feasible or true or anything else, but that’s what the naval hospital told me when I got the first signs of angina there: that, because your blood volume had decreased and your arteries are elastic then you had more or less induced angina in yourself by not drinking, they said. They assigned a very capable lady who climbed like a mountain goat from one layer of chairs to the next every time she saw

244 Bob Dickson Page 245 C1379/56 Track 15 me in the auditorium, armed with a plastic bottle of proper clean water and kept dosing me with this in Acapulco at regular intervals during the day. So cold is the bad thing and they always say cold following exercise; walk the dog after a big meal in the Arctic and give a talk at the same time and you are just about in the worst set of circumstances for angina.

[07.08]

Could you tell me something which has come out of the discussion and that’s tell me more about your experience of another kind of public speaking, you’ve covered the giving of sort of conference papers if you like, but what you’ve seem to suggest is that you’re also asked to do a slightly different thing which is the after dinner talk, a sort of more informal, I assume, kind of public speaking and I wonder to what extent you’ve done that kind of thing in the past. You’ve mentioned that you’ve been recently – you’ve had to turn down invitations, I don’t know how much of this you’ve done in the past, and whether those sorts of talks contain any efforts to sort of recollect things that have happened in the past. So is there any life storying in those sort of after dinner type speakings, talkings?

Well I suppose as you get older you get asked to do more of these things because you become some sort of [pause] ---I’m not going to use the word venerable, dinosaur is probably more like it, ---you’ve been around a long time and you have met people that are now gone and you have some interesting things to say about the days when capabilities and personalities conspired to make, let’s say, interesting happenings happen. And so yes I do feel I am giving more of the wind-up talks after people’s retirement dos and I’m very glad to do so. One of the nicest occasions I had recently was – not so recently, maybe two or three years ago, --was when my very oldest friend in oceanography Jens Meincke retired from the professorship of the University of Hamburg and I did put a lot of thought into making a talk for Jens that would cover his life story as well as the things he did, the coordination work that we loved him for and his sailing and everything else that goes with him. I wouldn’t say it’s different from a science talk because in all of these things you have an array of PowerPoint slides stretching in front of you and if your adrenalin can’t show you what the next

245 Bob Dickson Page 246 C1379/56 Track 15 five slides are then you might as well forget it; you’ve got to actually see the progression of your talk with half an eye as you give the talk in – on the hoof as it were. And if you are sharp that way, it is surprisingly pleasant to deliver a talk where you are in control of the delivery. Only once had I given a talk so … that I’d given so many times that I more or less woke up in the middle of it and wondered where I was in my talk; it’s a funny thing to say; happened in Paris at the UNESCO building [coughs]. It was a very weird occasion and I've never done it again; I’ve never allowed myself to start thinking extraneous thoughts while allowing my talk to come out of my mouth. But that was one occasion when it happened and so I think [for] any kind of talk, what I'm saying is that you need to have a properly ‘sharpening’ dose of adrenalin to make it work. You don’t have any control over that of course but it tends to happen anyway as you talk.

So that’s something which is common to the scientific talk and the after dinner talk, the – the role of adrenalin and the being able to visualise the slides going forward, but what is different, what - what is different about the way you might construct a sort of after dinner talk to a sort of more formal presentation?

Of course it’s just the matter that you are setting out to be entertaining as well as informative and in the case of retirement talks affectionate as well. You want to show them the image of this guy that they will say, ‘Yeah, that’s him,’ and in most cases when you’re doing it, you’re doing it because you have a great affection for him. You want to do it well, you’ve actually conspired around a bit to find some scurrilous slides from their mum or their sons or whatever, but you’re not giving it in a scurrilous way, you’re giving it in a way which you hope surprises him with the extent of what the work you’ve put together. But really it’s all for the same purpose: to paint an amusing and entertaining vision of what this man and his life’s work has been all about, some of it serious and some of it – some of it humorous. I started my talk I remember for Jens by saying, ‘My colleagues have suggested that I should be careful to give talks in Germany because being Germans they probably have a recipe for how many minutes of humour per hour and how many minutes of science one must put together, but anyhow this is how it’s done in Scotland,’ so they liked that [laughs]. This is the sort of thing that you give a lot of thought and time to and in that

246 Bob Dickson Page 247 C1379/56 Track 15 sense it’s no different from giving a science talk; you want it to be all of a piece and to be informative.

Would you – in either of those, the scientific talk or the after dinner talk write out what you were going to say beforehand?

In a sense, no. Unlike today when we’re recording on a tape, what you tend to do is to put the PowerPoint slides together, ---what I tend to do is put the PowerPoint’s together in a sequence which makes sense and even if you did drop off asleep halfway through as you’re giving it, you press the button and it reminds you where you’re heading. As I say that calamity only happened once and nobody noticed, but it – it’s [pause] it’s, the sequence of slides itself are enough to act as a script. So you don’t stand there with a sheaf of notes; you use the notes surrounding each PowerPoint slide to progress from one to another. And I do think if you do your job right, in a science talk or in an after dinner talk, the audience should be waiting for the next slide; they should actually anticipate what you’re going to be showing them. They should say okay if these two things happened then I want to know whether this happened, and you at that point put it on the – put it on the screen. If you’re doing your job right they should not only be following you all along they should actually be slightly anticipating what you’re about to give them.

[14.36]

Thank you. Before you carry on could I just pick up on two things which I was interested in from much earlier in the recording, one of those was something you talked about that happened in 1961 where you found yourself within the testing sphere of influence of a Russian H bomb and you told that story but I wanted to know what you saw, heard, felt at the time, what was it like to be there at that time? You – what you told us was that you then started to think well did that actually happen and then you – it was confirmed almost by meeting someone much later who had by some coincidence also been there at that time in a sort of slightly different situation, but what – for those people who haven’t been in with – you know, in the sphere of influence of a nuclear bomb test what happened?

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And there are many. Well actually it was – what you’re referring to is the, I think it was October 1961, Khrushchev atmospheric hydrogen bomb test that he had been holding over the heads of the international community for quite a while and threatening, and which had resulted in a ban on fishing in – by Norwegian ships anywhere Novaya Zemlya. I happened to be on a – acting as a deck hand on a Norwegian ancient fishing boat called the Angle at that time and my skipper had got fed up waiting for the ban to be lifted and without any of us knowing about a ban or knowing that we were about to relieve a ban, he steamed into Tiddly Bank in the Eastern Barents Sea, not particularly close to Novaya Zemlya, but not far away either and proceeded to catch haddocks, unfeasibly large [ones]. It was only when the thing had happened and whether it’s anything to do with [it] the – the things that we saw were probably nothing to do with an atmospheric test nearby. I could imagine waves and I could even remember waves getting up, but I’m certain it wasn’t to do with the – the bomb which was an atmospheric test. The first we were told about it was when the ship suddenly diverted into Honigsvag and we were all tested all over with geiger counters [laughs] and then we started hitting on the captain to let us know and what it was that he’d just subjected us to. I don’t even know, because nobody told us that either, whether the – there were higher levels of radioactivity aboard the ship. I was just amused that when we had the Mariehamn meeting of the Decadal Symposiums of ICES and Lars Midttun stood up and said, for it was he, stood up and said, ‘I am unique here in having been blown up by a fifty megaton hydrogen bomb near Tiddly Bank,’ I was able to stand up and say, ‘Well not quite, there was another of us there at the time.’ So I would say that it’s unlikely that one would have any such direct effect as a blast or even a sight of anything going on, though since we weren’t looking for one it’s very unlikely we’d have seen it anyway. All I do remember as I say was being checked.

[18.39]

Thank you. The other is I wanted to know how it actually felt to be followed by the Russian warship and for the submarine to surface next to you ‘cause told sort of – I don’t know, thirty years later or more, it’s a sort of almost – it seems almost comical

248 Bob Dickson Page 249 C1379/56 Track 15 and it sort of makes a good story but I wonder whether at the time you could say at the time how it felt?

Well it was a pain in the neck actually. I mean we were probably not differently surveyed before. I think it was Leon Birkett picked up the ship to shore and started speaking Russian, his native language, his mother tongue, when the Cirolana it was was in the Barents Sea, but we were probably under surveillance all the way through. It was only after he’d done this that suddenly this conning tower came up alongside and this Badger, Bison or Buffalo, or whatever they’re called, bomber came thundering across the surface of the Barents Sea at zero height and – and buzzed us. And relations ashore were distinctly cool. It was in other words only my perception of it that things got more stiff and formal; they were probably quite stiff and formal already underneath the surface, but yeah, we did discover some events which were humorous now, almost, but which were quite serious at the time. Shall I tell you a humorous scurrilous story? Well the point about Murmansk, where we always went in, you asked me just a little earlier today about what did we do about the 0-Group Fish Surveys. Well the place we used to come into halfway through the cruise was Murmansk way up in the north . I make a distinction between the people who ran the labs in Murmansk------people up there were usually fairly like us, they were people who had offended in some minor way the Soviet regime and had been parked in the north out of the way. So they were very westernised sort of people, like Alekseev himself, in charge of the PINRO lab. ----and the people who were more or less on official guard duty up there, who were very stiff and formal and not nice. So the distinction I make is between the people we regard as colleagues who wanted us to come to a party and have parties alongside in our other ships, and the people who didn’t want to facilitate this at all. And this humorous evening came about when we were – we had the GO Sars alongside us, the Ernest Holt , against the pier; and behind us we had the Johan Hjort , and the Johan Hjort wanted to have a party for everybody. The Soviets as they were then decided that we all had to have a passport to get off and the passport consisted of a photograph that they took of us each and then when you went ashore the idea was that the man with the arm – the armed guard at the end of your gangway would take half of your torn in half photograph and you would keep the other half and when you’d had your sort of run ashore you’d hand your half into

249 Bob Dickson Page 250 C1379/56 Track 15 him, he’d match them up and let you back aboard. That was the idea, see, but we said, ‘It ain’t going to work,’ we said and they said, ‘Yes it will,’ and we said, ‘No it won’t, because when we get off our ship and hand the guard our half picture, how are we going to get on the ship along astern of us?’ They thought about this for a while and decided that you didn’t need to worry about that one but you had to have your photograph as you came back aboard. We all got back aboard with this system quite happily, and then this drunken six foot five Norwegian sailor came staggering up the pier from the Johan Hjort determined to get back across the Ernest Holt onto the one alongside. [Arriving at] the guard, he’d lost anything he ever did have, and this guard turned hopefully towards the far end of the pier looking for reinforcements to deal with this huge great Norwegian, and I remember the Russian was wearing flare away boots and long greatcoat. We were standing up on the bridge watching the scene from the top of the wheelhouse in the Ernest Holt and somebody said, ‘Isn’t that Norwegian pissing down that Russian’s boot?’ And he was: [both laugh] he’d spotted this inviting urinal-shaped top to the back of his boot and was now relieving himself into it. The man’s trousers must have been very thick because it took a while but eventually he just whirled around with his gun out and marched this guy strait off to chokey. And in answer to your question [laughs] yes it did interfere with things quite a bit because we had to wait another three days waiting for this huge Norwegian to be allowed out of chokey in Murmansk for us to proceed on our merry way, 0-Group fish surveying the Barents Sea.

Was it at any level frightening, when this sort of thing happened, when a submarine comes next to you or anything –

No, we knew they were unlikely to do anything [laughs] serious to us, it was just an indication of – of that you were in a place that wasn’t like back home. I remember feeling the same thing coming away from Moscow in my first meeting, you didn’t feel oppressed when you were there, but when you got on – when you got on the SAS plane going home and you found a stewardess that was blonde and pretty and handing you drinks and things you suddenly realised that something a little bit lighter was surrounding you now than what you’d experienced before in – in your room in the Ukraina hotel.

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And at the end of the congress in 1966 you had an excursion and you told us about your relations with the Japanese oceanographer who was onboard and his reading of poetry, but I wondered what was the significance of the Volga canal for that trip, you know, what was the excursion to there and B what else was going on on this excursion apart from you sitting next to this chap. You know, so why there and what –

No, nothing much was intended by this excursion. In the middle of one of these big conferences there are always tours, and sometimes they have a whole programme of tours every – for accompanying persons for example, every day of the week during a big international conference. The idea was for the Russians to show us, in this case, the Russians to show us what they’re good at and how they had hydrofoils and how they could zoom along at great speed, and it was all dressed up as being ‘the excursion for the Second International Oceanographic Congress’ and off we went. So there was nothing scary or political about any of this other than the touchy sensitivity I would say of the host and that’s pretty general it would think: that what they want to show you is what they’re best at. And it was very clear if you still have the time for these ramblings [laughs], it was very clear in – in Murmansk one trip where we went – it showed us their desire to be shown to be modern back then in the ‘60s. Nothing showed it better than the two places they took us for the excursion, one of them was this fish ladder through a mountain that they’d drilled to get salmon to migrate properly around a dam. This was a very super duper modern facility in gleaming concrete with lights all the way, and it actually was built by a Scottish and a Finnish firm consortium. But the Russians wanted us to see this as being a modern facility that they’d put in place. Until somebody asked them the dreaded question, ‘How many salmon have been through this thing, this ladder?’ as it were and they said, ‘None,’ and that was the question they didn’t want [us] to ask. Then coming home on that same excursion we came to this – what I think of as Baba Yaga’s cave which was a kind of place where the road went over this deep, deep ravine with a river plunging through underneath and on the edge of the ravine – stop me if I’ve told this story before [laughs], ----was this like hovel where this lady worked. What the lady’s job was was salmon fishing and what she did was to press a button and something like an old lattice lift cage veered away downwards into the river. She then had the job of

251 Bob Dickson Page 252 C1379/56 Track 15 leaving the upstream door open and shutting the back door and the salmon presumably rattled into this lift cage. She then pressed another button which closed the upstream side of the lift cage and a third button brought it up again with salmon lashing about on the bottom of the lift and I never saw a more wonderful way of fishing in my life; she just needed to go up there and bang them on the head. But the Russians were not pleased with this because this was a very ancient technique that showed no – the Soviet Union in no good light at all and those of us that threatened to take photographs of this old dear doing her own thing were rebuffed and told not to do it. ‘No photographs will be taken here’ and that was that. These two illustrations on the one excursion were enough to show you what the host aspires to, to be shown to be modern and do something modern and as well as giving you a good time and I think that’s the only significance of why we were zooming along on a hydrofoil on the Moscow- Volga Canal.

[29.41]

Thank you. I think you have some thoughts on the life story interview itself?

Yeah. Well it – it all came from me not quite knowing what you meant by your question ‘how do you view the construction of your life story as a narrative?’ I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether you meant as something you wrote down [and] as used as a kind of musical score or, in the way I see it, the narrative is us both trying to think out a way forward through your life and also the saying of it on tape. In my case, I suddenly found myself being immediately intrigued with the issue of how accurate I’ve been in the statements I’ve been making, particularly the early ones.It may surprise you that I bring this up but it seems to be no different than the standard science task of setting caveats and error bars to the statements we make and I would be very surprised indeed if all of your interviewees don’t find this a valid and a nagging question, whether they confess to it or not. Being younger yourself, a stripling of a lad, you probably regard your own memories as absolutes, as no doubt we [all] did once. But after describing an event repeatedly for maybe half a century it does cross one’s mind to ask whether it happened that way or even whether it happened at all. So I've been indulging in some self checking and I propose to bore

252 Bob Dickson Page 253 C1379/56 Track 15 you with some sense of it. Let’s start with an easy one and that was that momentous event I described back in 1969 during MEDOC ’69 when John Gould and I were perched high on the bows of the Discovery putting on Nansen bottles, or NIO bottles in these days, to investigate the effect of sixty knots of wind in the Mistral on convection in the Gulf of Leon. As you may recall I was on the chains platform that lets out of the bow putting hydro bottles on the bow and John was standing – John Gould was standing right behind me operating the winch and the ship was plunging heavily as it sat on station and on one particular deep plunge the water came up right around my waist. I don’t know how high that is on Discovery , but high enough for me I tell you, forcing me to hang onto the chains. As we very quickly decided to retreat and give up and wait for better conditions, the chains platform that I'd been working on was ripped right out of the bow in another savage plunge leaving a gaping hole in the side. Well I must have told that story dozens of times and it’s such a stark event and such a close shave in my life that the fact of the thing and its details must be undoubted surely mustn’t they? Well fortunately it could all be checked and I stayed overnight with John and Hilary Gould in Romsey and confirmed all these facts from the book that John had recently helped to produce called Of Seas and Ships and Scientists; and although he gets the year slightly wrong citing MEDOC ’70 instead of ’69, there it is on page 136: ‘ We observed for the first time an ocean in which the temperature was uniform to within a few milli-degrees down to 2,000 metres, but the weather that caused the mixing was severe and resulted in damage to Discovery when – even when hove-to on station, a wave carried away a forward hydro platform,’ and very nearly me he might have said, ‘ and shattered portholes. The other ships Atlantis II and Jean Charcot faired equally badly and several people suffered broken limbs.’ So confirming the detail proved easy in that case and while we were at it we talked over our memories of our earliest days together at the ocean science course at UCNW to corroborate other less traumatic memories of these days. And although John added some nice touches that I’d forgotten, such as the meat gravy on the fish that our landlady in Wales provided, I was once again pleased to find that my memories held up perfectly well. Okay then what about some of the third party happenings that I remember describing? What for example to make of my recollection that of the two Steel brothers I knew at school, David Steel who is now the Lord Steel of Aikwood, a Knight of the Thistle, KBE, Privy Councillor and First Presiding Officer of the

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Scottish Parliament, and his brother Michael who was my patrol leader in the school scouts, Michael was the brainier one who with his wife won all the gold medals in medicine at Edinburgh University. Well this seems to me a worthy candidate for self- checking [laughs]. You may object that this concerns people and events that were only tangential to my own life story, and I wouldn’t disagree, but I would find it impossible to recount my life story without painting in the matrix of people and events in which my doings are embedded. And to do so in some detail, how much detail is a matter of taste and you’ll have to leave that to me, But Michael Steel deserves inclusion if only for the photo that Deanne unearthed this very week of me and him and Ally Weir in our kilts and our school scout uniforms in the Champs Elysee in Paris some time in the 1950s en-route to a jamboree in Switzerland and that afternoon, as Michael remembers, en-route to view most of Bridget Bardot in Et Dieu Créa la Femme , something you couldn’t get in Scotland in these days. So was my story of his gold-medal-winning prowess true, as popped into my memory and onto your tape, or was this just a ‘misspeaking’ as Hilary Clinton would say? Well I tried diligently to plough through the Edinburgh University website under ‘medals’ for confirmation around the time in question but I got nowhere, and coming across a site called theyworkforyou.com, I took them up on their kind offer to relay messages to the peerage and I asked David Steel if he could please point me at his little brother [laughs]. And a day or two later there it was: a lengthy and most kind reply from Judith saying, ‘Yes, Michael and I did share the Leslie gold medal for top of the year in medicine in Edinburgh,’ followed by one [letter] from Michael himself confessing that he’d also won the other two, the Annandale gold medal for surgery and the Royal Victoria gold medal for chest diseases, with Judith picking up virtually everything else, to quote him. What a feat and what a relief [laughs], my memory had held up again. And what I’m really saying I suppose is partly inward-looking and partly outward-looking at the life stories process itself. Although in an ideal world we should all check everything in advance before committing our recollections to tape, in practice that’s just not feasible. Just these two short examples, taking seconds to tell, that’s Discovery and Michael Steel, will have taken four or five days to work through and in fifteen or so of hours recording constant detail, there’s bound to be examples of memories pushing themselves to the fore and onto the tape without the prior checks needed to prove them all valid. So although I’ve certainly felt it part of my task to

254 Bob Dickson Page 255 C1379/56 Track 15 check up on myself, that process has had to be partial, --spot checks. I’m very glad I did them and by and large I’m happy and not a little relieved to discover that most of the things I said happened, and happened much as I describe.

[37.41]

Well there are caveats to that like everything else [laughs] and naturally I can accept that the scales of the events to the young are very likely to be different from those when you’re older, however well you remember them. And what I mean by that is when you set fire to a small bunch of trees by mistake when you’re only eight or nine years old, it’s likely to seem like a forest conflagration rather than the small burn-up that it very likely was. So I accept that the Muir Woods episode was probably less in fact than the horror that I remember, -- I even printed you off a picture of John Martin’s painting, The Great Day of His Wrath which is pretty well how I remember the Muir Woods forest fire [to have been]. You may suppose that I should have gone back and checked through yards of newspapers over several years to find out what the actual facts of the Muir Woods fire was, but if so you would have supposed wrong; you’re going to have to take it as it seemed to a horrified eight or nine or ten year old as the only account I have conveniently to hand. Finally I should report one huge and unexpected benefit of these recordings and of the self-checking process itself. Namely that it led me to stumble across facts that I'd not known or simply forgotten and these were largely about my father. Again you could say that that’s tangential to my life story but in fact it was probably the nicest thing that came out of these recordings, and certainly the one which I’ll look back on with pleasure. I’d no idea, until this retrospective checking began, that the Dominie at St Abbs Village School, Colin McCallum had conspired with the Director of Education no less to get my dad a place in Duns High School, that the rector of Annan Academy where my dad had his first teaching post had commended him to Watsons College as one of the ‘ablest persons I’ve ever had under me’. That in additional to his Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh he also became the first schoolteacher to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and, from the messages received on his death, just how much his pupils thought of him. All of these points I've found or I’ve found again, I’m not really sure which – in a delightful little memoire that his old

255 Bob Dickson Page 256 C1379/56 Track 15 headmaster at Watsons, Sir Roger Young, had pieced together as a kind of a memento for the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The affection between these two had been the most important mainstay of my dad’s teaching life and I learned much from this retelling of it. So what was it that I learned that was important to my life. Well it wasn’t as it turned out whether I had my facts right, though most of them were. I had Dad winning the Ashburton Shield at Bisley with his Watson’s shooting team, instead of the bronze medal in 1947 that was actually the case. But even though these details of my dad’s early life were undoubtedly tangential to my own, my point is that they were certainly not unimportant to me. What they allowed me to do was to see past that skinny, annoyed, cantankerous old man that my dad had become at the hinder end, resentful of the powerlessness and indignities of old age, and to let me see again what my old dad had been like in his prime. Until then that image had been largely blocked behind the near field, if I can put it that way. And when you prompted me to consider what was the key in this ‘construction of your life story as a narrative’, this for me has been the part that has made the whole process worthwhile. In constructing my life story as a narrative, it’s perhaps worth saying that the best bit about the guidance we were given in advance about length and degree of detail was that we weren’t given any. Just asked to sit and speak to our own self-devised plan. In the end of course I weakened as we passed the ten hour mark to ask whether I was being particularly long-winded compared with others [laughs], and I was glad to hear that mine was in no way atypical, ----did you say somebody went [on for] a hundred hours? Good God. Well it was good to hear at that stage I might say; but can you imagine being told at the outset to aim for fifteen hours? I can’t imagine any of us would have conceived of having fifteen hours of life story in us to tell! And the temptation would have been to begin loading it with extraneous detail to make it fit. But with no guidance as to length here we are [at] the usual number of hours without any conscious effort to make it so.

[43.01]

Earlier in the recording you told us about the – I suppose you’d call it a hobby that you have of writing a children’s book which you described, the plotting of, and also of

256 Bob Dickson Page 257 C1379/56 Track 15 plays for children and there were two examples of things that are very definitely literary and very definitely something that we could describe as having a narrative structure and of course like any writer you think deliberately about that. I wondered whether there is any common ground between that kind of work and the way in which you went about thinking about telling your life story for this recording. Both, for example, involved developing a kind of – a structure in your mind at the very least and perhaps some notes to talk to. But in what ways are those two processes, as you’ve experienced them similar, if they are?

In one way I think they’re similar. It may not be evident from my fifteen hours or whatever it is, but you don’t start this business on tape one without having some idea of what will be involved in the whole of the recordings. And I think this must also be true with any sort of children’s story or any novel of any sort, you have to have some vague idea that it has a shape. It’s very easy for us to say that, in fact, from the point of view of writing children’s stories because from birth, it seems to be children know the shape of a children’s story. They know, without being able to lose their enthusiasm for the words that are coming out of you at this moment, they know that the shape of the story is going to be downwards to start with, something bleak is going to happen, and when it – things look as though they can’t get any worse, something better is going to happen and eventually you’re going to take the whole story through to a happy ending and they’re all going to go home with their mum. They know that this is the shape of stories; every story they’ve ever seen is like that [coughs]. In the case of the children’s story also, I think you do have to think out much more of the structure than the people will see; so they’ll know what one part of the structure should look like and then there should also be any number of undertones to this. Just to give you an idea, when I was writing the book for Jamie, it was a simple minded story, but quite amusing, all about moles in the Herringfleet Hills near here. And I consciously from the start had the book shaped like the year: the chapters got longer as the summer got longer and shorter as the winter came on, for example, that was one cycle that I hope nobody noticed. That’s how people’s activity should be, I mean they’re shut down in the winter and they’re doing more in the summer. And then there was the cycle that went from the Herringfleet Hills down the New Cut, the waterway that runs from there as the moles got drifted away, and into Breydon

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Water, out through Yarmouth, picked up at sea by the Corton Light and brought back in at Lowestoft and back to the Herringfleet Hills. There were these sort of cycles running through the thing that you thought out before you started, you couldn’t really imagine them as – in that detail as you go along. You think them out to start with: I'm going to have a cycle for the year, I’m going to have a cycle for the geography of the place and as well as the usual dark-light cycle of a normal children’s story. So you do have to think that out but every other part and every story that happened to them on the way was thought out more or less on the spot as you write. And I must admit that’s the only connection I can think of with these tape recordings. I have sat down expecting you for the first time with an idea in my head [about] what are the parts of your story. It’s pretty easy really [laughs], you start off trying to divide it into blocks that make a unifying whole, and … that’s more than just some sort of time record. You stick to that in the back of your mind as you go along, but still and all it would be very stodgy, and I hope it hasn’t been, if you were to write down every word that you say and then read it from a piece of paper . That’s not what has been happening. So with the overall structure in your head to start with you then populate it with facts and details more or less as you sit and talk.

[49.01]

Are there any sort of themes and undercurrents that you think run through the life story that you’ve told? One that occurs to me is that might have been something that you thought of in advance and that’s the role of sort of the greatness or otherwise of men in particular at different points in your career, that I think that’s one –

Shall we leave that till this last section because I have a coda that I thought-up last night. As you were coming, I thought: how do you sum all this up because that’s what I guess is our job today? And it was very clear to me not only that there were major currents running through it, but that this – that we joined the subject at a very fortuitous time in our science and that’s what I propose to call the coda that goes at the end of these – this narrative. If I can start with the words that I put at the end of the explanatory brochure that accompanies each of the Inspiration Awards for the University of Oslo, I use these words from the autobiography of the great Henry

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Stommel: ‘The freedom to work in science on one’s own with congenial colleagues, unfettered by supervision, with a scientific problem in one’s mind when one goes to bed and awakes next morning, to be able to give undivided attention to unravelling some puzzle of nature, is a privilege beyond compare.’ That’s what the great Henry said and as usual Henry Stommel was right. But in fact as I’m sure my contemporaries would admit, the timing of our arrival on the scene made this privilege even more magical and perhaps unrepeatable today, that’s the point I’m making, ---that I’ve been passing through a – a magical period to be working in the ocean. For when we arrived as budding scientists still wet behind the ears, the indomitable pioneers and the leaders of our science were still on the scene. Without techniques and theory, which had yet to become established by them, they had all, each of them, needed an absolutely unstoppable drive to take their subjects forward. There was no established theory when Cush needed to know whether it was the swim bladder or the flesh or the bones of a fish that returned the acoustic echo when he pinged at it. So he had to find out for himself, pinging at uncertain frequencies ---and they were uncertain, ---there was this horrible sparking machine generating pings of an uncertain frequency from a small boat towards a gross of fish-flesh-filled condoms, if I can say it that way, or small balloons suspended from a frame in Lake Windermere. We’d never do it today, [but] that’s what he had to do in order to find out that the swim bladder is fifty per cent of the acoustic return. Or Jerome Namias: can you imagine arranging the synchronous winching up of instruments through the atmosphere suspended from kites to describe the first omega pattern Rossby wave over North America which was I think his proudest achievement, never mind one of his proudest, he had it front and centre on the wall right above his desk. And he spent weeks, months hunting for this thing when it got lost in the end. Or Alister Hardy in 1923 with no SEAWIFS satellite to rely on as we do today, but still wanting to know, mapping the changes in ocean colour in the Western Channel by looking out of the windows of a small biplane and plotting them on his knee on this chartered plane. You’d never imagine somebody going – needing to know to the extent of doing that. Or John Swallow virtually discovering the ocean’s eddy field by thinking out and constructing a whole new generation of neutrally buoyant floats from nothing much more complicated than lengths of metal pipe, appropriately ballasted to take them to a depth of his interest.

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From my first science meeting in 1966 when I found myself spending my first ever night in science jammed up against the sleeping John Swallow in the anteroom of the hotel Ukraina in Moscow, and a couple of days later swapping ideas with Jacob Bjerknes in his room ---- imagine that! ---we found ourselves interacting and working with all these clever, encouraging and I might say gentle men, John and Hank Stommel in the Med, Jerome in La Jolla, Sir Al on seemingly all of my promotion boards, Cush whenever I needed somebody to show interest. They never failed to show or excite interest, and it’s very easy still for me to recall the buzz of passing John Swallow’s open door at NIO Wormley and catching his, ‘Bob, have you got a moment?’ I can still remember that as though it was today. And then he proceeded to take up your entire afternoon [both laugh] showing you something about the Somali current that totally engrossed you until it was kicking out time.

But there was more to this lucky era than that. With the second strand of good luck we arrived on the scene just as dependable new current meters, strong thin low- drag lightweight Kevlar cable and reliable acoustic releases eventually made the exploration of the deep ocean circulation, even the violent Denmark Strait overflow, a practical possibility. We could go where we liked and it was all new.

And as our hydrographic records lengthened to decades a third wonder: so the great men, [the] new availability of machines to go exploring an unexplored ocean, and the third wonder was that when we pieced together our hydrographic records, the changes we unearthed turned out to be of an amplitude and an importance that we could never have dreamed of: the Great Salinity Anomaly in 1988, our later demonstration in Nature in 2002 that the entire system of overflow and entrainment that ventilates the deep Atlantic had freshened steadily for four decades contributing to a full depth freshening of the Labrador Sea that appeared then and now to be the largest change ever observed in the modern oceanographic record, anywhere . And then with Ruth Curry in 2003 introducing the idea, also in Nature that this huge change in the freshening of the north might just be part of a change in the salinity structure of the whole west Atlantic, north and south, consistent with the expected acceleration of the global water cycle as the world gets warmer. I don’t mean to imply that such major

260 Bob Dickson Page 261 C1379/56 Track 15 changes have stopped; the changes observed during the IPY particularly in the Beaufort Gyre and more generally in the newly opened polar sea would soon give the lie to that one. But the combination of having the great pioneers to work with, newly reliable gear to spread across a largely unexplored ocean and huge and significant changes passing through, on a timescale of decades and on the space scales of an ocean, that lucky combination can’t surely be expected to recur.

[56.46]

And for the last thirty-eight years or so at least, my wife Deanne and our nice family and their nice families are still there to keep me going, not especially fortunate in health or anything else as you’ll have gathered, but a vital support nonetheless and it would be wrong to end these recordings in any other way than to mention again how much their support and they have meant to me, especially on Valentine’s Day 2013. A final word: last week I listened to the biopic of that great cooker and baker Mary Berry on the telly and I especially liked the comment with which she wound up her own life story: ‘I have been very lucky, and I know it!’ What a great way to end. Me too!

[End of Track 15]

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