Professor Sir Tony Hoare Interviewed by Dr
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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Sir Tony Hoare Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/52 © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk . © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/52 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Hoare Title: Professor Sir surname: Interviewee’s Tony Sex: Male forename: (Charles Anthony Richard) Occupation: Computer scientist Date and place of birth: Mother’s Father’s occupation: Colonial civil servant occupation: Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 17/05/2011 (1-3), 08/09/2011 (4-6), 12/10/2011 (7-8), 12/12/2011 (9-10), 09/01/2012 (11- 13),27/02/2012 (14-15) Location of Interviewee’s home, Cambridge. interview: Name of Thomas Lean interviewer: Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz Total no. of tracks 15 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 10:06:37 (HH:MM:SS) Additional material: Copyright/Clearan Interview open copyright to British Library. ce: Interviewer’s comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Tony Hoare Page 1 C1379/52 Track 1 Track 1 How about we start with me asking you to introduce yourself? Certainly [laughs]. I’m Tony Hoare, often publishing under the name CAR Hoare, which stands for Charles Anthony Richard Hoare but in recent years I have come to be known as Tony. When were you born? 11 th of January 1934 in Colombo in Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka, at the Fraser Nursing Home and I spent my first eleven, ten years or so in Ceylon mostly. My father was a colonial civil servant and my mother was the daughter of a tea planter in Ceylon and they met out there and married out there. And had four children out there and I have two brothers and two sisters, one of whom was born in England after we came back in 1945. What were your parents’ names? My father was called Henry, HSM, Henry Samuel Malorty, and my mother was called Marjorie Francis Villas. Could you describe what your father was like to me please? Yes, handsome, fairly thin man and … [both laugh] … and he looked after us well [laughs]. What was his personality like? Very pleasant, quite humorous and sometimes a bit strict, but we had our usual sort of spats during adolescence but I’ve certainly come to respect him a lot more since then [laughs]. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Tony Hoare Page 2 C1379/52 Track 1 And you said he was a colonial civil servant, whereabouts in the civil service did he work? Well it seemed to be rather general, he had a spell as the secretary or aide de conct [ph] of the governor but the longest spell was probably as principle collector of customs at Colombo port, a post which he occupied throughout the war. During the war his – the entire family, who were then just three boys and my mother, because refugees in – in Africa, we went to Africa to escape the dangers of the war in Ceylon because on the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse and the fall of Singapore Ceylon became indefensible and everybody was expecting a Japanese invasion. Which fortunately never happened, all that happened was a single air raid while we were still on the boat crossing to Africa, otherwise he was untouched by the war, as we were in Rhodesia. My father arranged that we should stay initially with a school friend of his who was a tobacco planter in Rhodesia, that was our introduction to emigrate life [ph]. We spent eighteen months or so in Rhodesia, my mother took a job as a matron in a school in Bulawayo and I and my brothers went to school in Gwelo. My brothers went to a nunnery school and I went to sort of conventional school based on the English model of a prep school called the Kingsley Fairbridge School, whether I did very well academically at least, but I was a bit of a handful [both laugh] from the point of view of discipline and … and particularly with my mother, apparently had some difficulty [laughs]. In what sense a handful? I think just basically just rude and disobedient in the way that [laughs] children are. My granddaughter had similar attributes at a similar age [laughs]. No, I think my own children were better behaved than I was. Well after eighteen months there was a prospect that we would be able to return to Ceylon and so we migrated to Durban which was the port of embarkation for a trip across the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately I think there were some resurgence of hostilities and so we had to stay there for six months, I went to school again there. [05:50] © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Tony Hoare Page 3 C1379/52 Track 1 And eventually made it to meet this strange man who came [laughs] aboard to kiss my mother and welcome us home. And again went to school in Ceylon at a rather progressive school in Bandarawela. So I had a bit of a disturbed education which I remember chiefly from the fact that every school I attended I learnt least common multiples and greatest common dividers again [both laugh]. Then after quite a short time, oh perhaps six months in a school – in the school in Ceylon we got a passage back to England. Well I think it was delayed slightly by the birth of my sister, Dorothy Anne. And went to school in Oxford, Dragon School, which was the same school that my father had attended and started again with LCMs [both laugh] and … but I’d had very – very disrupted educational background, so I was starting in a fairly low form of the school and that they used to give fortnightly reports to the parents on the progress of their children and my progress reports weren’t very good. So after a month they put me down, down a whole year in fact, to – to learn with the brighter students who were a year young than me, that was a very good move. And in fact I was – after a few weeks I was no longer bottom of the class and by the end of the term I was top of the class. How did you feel about being put down that year? Well [both laugh] I didn’t – don’t remember resenting it [laughs]. But the school had a very progressive policy and when I was top of the class they put me up again to my standard year. And I followed similar progression from the bottom to the top and after a – a year I’d made it to the top form in the school in all my subjects so [laughs] I wasn’t quite top of that, in fact I was fairly low, remained fairly low down in the top class [laughs] [doorbell sounding]. [08:45] So my subjects were traditional at that time, Latin and Greek of course, mathematics, French, geography, divinity, physical education, which I never either liked or excelled at. And all these subjects I had effectively started my education when I came back to England. And made very rapid progress, sufficiently that they thought I would – had a good chance of getting a scholarship to a public school and there was a public school which had a closed scholarship which of course would be easier to get. The © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Tony Hoare Page 4 C1379/52 Track 1 Kings School Canterbury had a scholarship which had been founded in memory of Milner, the sort of colonial, African colonial apologist and guru. And indeed so it proved, I got the scholarship and it supported quite a good proportion of the expenses of tuition at that school at that time. Both my brothers also got scholarships to the same school so we had a somewhat cheapened education [both laugh]. And did you have to go through any process to get the scholarship? Oh there was an examination, examination I think held at the prep school as far as I recall, which was marked. Since it was at – the scholarship was closed to the sons of colonial ex-civil servants so probably [laughs] wasn’t a very great field. So I went through the normal – entered the school in the fifth form and went through the normal curriculum of taking the school certificate after one year, and did very well in Latin and Greek and mathematics I think, and something else. And so the year after I was entered for the classical sixth form where I continued more intensive studies of Latin and Greek and subsidiary French.