NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Bob Dickson Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/56

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British Library Sound Archive Interview Summary Sheet
National Life Stories 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:

Father’s occupation:
4^th December, 1941, Edinburgh, Scotland

• Schoolmaster
• Mother’s occupation:
• Housewife , art

• 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: Type of recorder:
Dr Paul Merchant Marantz PMD661

• Recording format :
• 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks: Total Duration:

• 15
• Stereo

12:38:55

Additional material:

• Copyright/Clearance:
• © The British Library

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.

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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 5^th 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 exWinchester, 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

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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

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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

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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