Desmond King-Hele Interviewed by Paul Merchant

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Desmond King-Hele Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/13 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the oral history section at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ( [email protected] ) British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/13 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: King-Hele Title: Dr Interviewee’s forename: Desmond Sex: M Occupation: Physicist Date and place of birth: 03/11/1927; Seaford, Sussex Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Civil Servant (HM Customs and Excise) Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 15/3/10 (track 1-3); 13/4/10 (track 4-6); 1/6/10 (track7-8); 8/6/10 (track 9-14); 5/7/10 (track 15-21) Location of interview: Home of interviewee’s friend, Farnham, Surrey Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48kHz Total no. of tracks: 21 Stereo Total Duration: 10:45:01 Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Open. The audio and transcript of tracks 16 and tracks 19 are only accessible at the British Library. Interviewer’s comments: Desmond King-Hele Page 4 C1379/13 Track 1 [Track 1] Okay, can I start by asking you when and where you were born? Yes, I was born on 3 rd November 1927 and it was at Seaford in Sussex, and my father was baptised as Sidney King-Hele but in fact he was always called Tim afterwards, my mother called him Tim and so on. He was born in 1896 and died in 1976 when he was almost eighty. My mother was called Bessie Sayer, she married my father in 1925 and she was born in 1901 and died in 1996 at the good age of 95 [laughs]. My father’s family came from south Devon, King-Hele, hyphenated name, goes back to the 18 th century and there were a family De La Heale, h-e-a-l-e, back in the 14 th century, they were around for quite a long time obviously. My mother’s family, the Sayers, came from Yorkshire going back to the 14 th century, and actually they were recusant Catholics in the 16 th century. I don’t know how they did after that, perhaps they were better behaved [both laugh]. My father was an officer of Customs & Excise and he was really proud of being a civil servant. He was not like people in trade or commercial travellers, you know, who tried to make money for themselves, and he wanted me to be a civil servant and I was for forty years. My grandfather on my father’s side had moved from Devon to London and that’s where my father grew up in the West End. Actually they lived about – not much more than a hundred yards from Selfridge’s, and my grandfather had a business, I think it was really maintenance of carriages for the West End gentry and he carried that on until the war in 1939. My grandparents lived actually sort of in a second – a second floor flat over the shop as it were in North Row, in the same place as I mentioned. My father was, I think, the only child though there were sometimes suggestions that he might have had a – a young brother who died very young. My father went to school at Clephane’s College in London and he was very good at music and singing, and it’s a family tradition that he had to sing a solo in St Paul’s Cathedral in front of King Edward VII, and he was so nervous that he had to have a palm tree to screen him from the king. I don’t know whether it’s true but he didn’t deny it, so I presume it might have been [both laugh]. And my father began work at the Post Office Savings Bank in South Kensington, about 1912 at a guess. So far he’d been known as Sidney King because they didn’t use the double barrelled name at that stage, and so when he arrived at work he had to go to the full – the proper name obviously and at work the man who was on the next Desmond King-Hele Page 5 C1379/13 Track 1 desk to him was an Irishman called Michael Collins who always brought his breakfast in to eat at the office, father was very disgusted at this [both laugh], says that it wasn’t quite the right thing to do. Anyway, Collins was fairly … dominant I should think, and he nicknamed my father Tim Healy after the Irish Nationalist who later became head of the Irish free state I think in the 1920s, and the name stuck, and so he was Tim King-Hele from then on to most people, and indeed in – that was what we sort of knew him – that’s how we knew him. Michael Collins meanwhile of course, ten years later, negotiated the treaty for Irish Free State and also got assassinated. [05:04] On the pronunciation actually, I should say that there are some cousins, some fairly distant cousins of mine, who use the pronunciation King-Hele [pronounces so Hele sounds like heel], and who’s to say who’s right? But I – I just don’t know, it might have been that the Michael Collins name was the cause for it, it might not have been, I can’t really tell. During the First World War my father volunteered for military service but was turned down because of poor eyesight. He tried again and was accepted for the Durham Light Infantry, and he was on the way to the front in 1918 when he was taken to hospital in France with what was called Trench Fever, though he’d never been in the trenches of course but I suppose it was rampant around then, and he was never fully fit in later life. Meanwhile of course the war ended and he never in fact got to the trenches at all, which is perhaps just as well [laughs]. He became a junior Customs & Excise officer in the early 1920s I believe, and was posted to Hereford and then to Burnley in Lancashire where he met my mother and they were married in 1925. My mother, Bessie, was the fifth of eight children, so I had seven aunts and uncles on her side. Her father came from Aysgarth in Wensleydale in north Yorkshire and worked as an accountant for a large firm in Burnley. He had quite a big house which of course I visited at times, and of course he needed a big house with eight children but that was the norm really for those days for fairly prosperous people. My mother was twenty four when she married in 1925 and my father was transferred to Eastbourne on the Sussex coast quite soon after their marriage. I expect he applied to go there but I’ve no idea what – how it arose. And then a year or two later he moved to Newhaven harbour which was ten miles west of Eastbourne and he stayed there for the remaining thirty-one years of his career, apart Desmond King-Hele Page 6 C1379/13 Track 1 from a break in the war years. So in 1927 they came to live at Seaford which was a seaside town only about two miles east of Newhaven and nine miles west of Eastbourne. The South Downs run into the sea between Seaford and Eastbourne, and they form the magnificent Seven Sisters cliffs, flanked by Beachy Head on the east and Seaford Head on the west. I was very lucky to be brought up at Seaford with its two mile shingle beach stretching to Newhaven. Seaford had about 10,000 people when I was there, it had a good quota of shops but was not congested, it was somehow just about the right size for most things to be fairly efficient and there was enough of it, just about, to – and then there was the great open expanse of Seaford Head, a 300 foot cliffs uninhabited, free to roam, with wonderful views for a great distance around, along the coast. And Seaford had the best sunshine records in the country in the 1930s, so that was an advantage too [laughs]. And Seaford had been important historically, one of the Cinque Ports, it’s as limb as they called it or Hastings, until the Seaford Haven as it was called was blocked in a storm in about 1560, and the River Ouse which had previously come out at this haven in Seaford, proceeded to come out instead at Newhaven, where, [laughs] so it was the source of the name Newhaven of course. And as a Cinque Port, Seaford had returned two MPs to parliament, including two prime ministers, William Pitt the elder and George Canning, and of course all that was taken away in 1832.

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