Chris Rapley Interviewed by Paul Merchant
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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Chris Rapley Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/44 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. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/40 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Rapley Title: Professor Interviewee’s Christopher (Chris) Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Physicist Date and place of 8/4/1947; birth: West Bromwich, Staffordshire, United Kingdom Mother’s occupation: secretary Father’s occupation: engineer Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 1/2/11 (track 1); 31/3/11 (track 2); 27/4/11 (track 3); 22/6/11 (track 4); 18/8/11 (track 5); 14/9/11 (track 6); 3/11/11 (track 7) Location of interview: Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz Total no. of tracks: 7 Stereo Total Duration: 7:50:35 Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: The following sections are closed for 30 years until November 2043: Track 6 [00:51:03-00:52:24] and Track 7 [00:23:12- 00:23:42] © British Library Interviewer’s comments: 3 Chris Rapley Page 4 C1379/40 Track 1 Track 1 Could I start by asking today then when and where you were born? Okay, 1947, 8 th of April in West Bromwich, Wolverhampton General Hospital I think. [00:14] And could you tell me what you know of your mother’s life, either from things that she told you at the time or from your own research? Yes, she was brought up in Wednesbury in, you know, south Birmingham, erm, her father had been in the First World War and acted as an ambulance man in the trenches in no man’s land and was very badly shaken by that. And he was a driver and so he was a sort of delivery driver. And her mother died of – of cancer when my mother was in her late teens, which is a bit traumatic. She had some, you know, good friends, not many but one or two close friends, and because it was World War II she joined the – she was a secretary at a – you know, she did do Pitman shorthand and so on but she joined the fire service so she was a fire service volunteer. And my father – [01:19] Well I’m now switching to my father – That’s fine, yeah – If that’s alright, he was born in Bedford, he – his father was a very successful electrical engineer who specialised in designing newspaper conveyors and in fact was the designer for the newspaper conveyors for all of the Fleet Street papers and indeed some around Europe, so Dagens Nyheter [ph]in Stockholm and Belgium and so on, so they would take him to a new printing press and say, ‘Here’s the printing press, there’s the loading dock, it’s your job to get the newspapers from one to the other bundled up nicely so that they can be delivered round the country,’ and he was one of 4 Chris Rapley Page 5 C1379/40 Track 1 the few who did that so my father came from an engineering background, he trained as an apprentice I think with the Igranic company in Bedford which was taken over by GUC. He joined the army, volunteered when World War II broke out, was on the British expeditionary force to Dunkirk and got back from there and he was posted to Birmingham for some training and that’s where he met my mother and then they got married after the war. [02:35] And your paternal grandmother, what do you know of – My paternal grandmother, gosh, well she was born in the late 1880s or, yes, I think that’s right, of a rural family, I think she was one of seventeen children, not all of whom survived beyond, you know, early childhood. She lived to be ninety-nine point nine but sadly didn’t quite get the Queen’s telegram. And, you know, she was a prudent housewife, I remember her well, she had a lovely character, but my grandfather was very much the kind of Victorian breadwinner and she looked after the home. They had a nice house of which she was very proud in Bedford, it was a corner house in an area known as Poets Corner or Poets whatever, so they lived in Cowper Road. [03:34] What do you remember of time spent with either grandfather, obviously you wouldn’t have known your maternal grandmother but perhaps we – I hard – yes, well we – my father was – my father took a job at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern and so my earliest memories really are of Malvern and then fairly soon afterwards he took a job at a company in Worcester, I can’t remember the name of it, and then he got a job with the Admiralty in Bath. So I actually grew up in Bath and that’s really what I regard as my home city. So my maternal grandfather, erm, I only met a few times, and I do remember going to where he lived after he died with my mother who had to clear his house, so I can just about remember that, I can’t 5 Chris Rapley Page 6 C1379/40 Track 1 remember how old I was, probably five or six, something like that. So I only met him a couple of times, he used to smoke Wills woodbines, he had a little greenhouse at the back of his, you know, row – terraced house, classic sort of two up, two down. And he used to – his pride was growing tomatoes in it. His house was very grimy because it was Birmingham and there was a railway line very close by, lots of steam engines going by. [05:10] And your paternal grandfather, the engineer, what do you remember of time spent with him? Oh well we spent quite a bit of time with him, I mean he was by standards of the day, you know, quite well off because he had a, you know, a good solid job. He used to commute from Bedford to London every day so he would get up very early in the morning, he wouldn’t be back until about seven in the evening. Erm, he had always been fascinated by cars, he’d – as a youth he’d owned one of the first cars in the neighbourhood apparently, one which the lowest gear was reverse so you had to go uphill’s backwards I remember him telling me. And so his garage was full of old tobacco tins with nuts, bolts, ball bearings and God knows what that, you know, he’d gathered ‘cause he wouldn’t throw any of that stuff away ‘cause as an engineer there was always a feeling that there would be a use for it at some point. And he – he was a bit Victorian, a bit distant, quite formal, always, I never saw him without a jacket and tie and so on so he was always very proper in that sense. Whereas my grandmother was very kind of bustly and always keen to feed you up as hard as she could go and that was the deal [laughs]. Do you remember anything of your – of that particular grandfather making something or of perhaps even assisting? He liked order, so for example we would go there for Christmas and, you know, I was always keen on electric railways as I got older, well I mean older to, you know, six, seven, eight, and so he would kind of tolerate having the kitchen dinner table taken 6 Chris Rapley Page 7 C1379/40 Track 1 over with an electric railway for a while, but it would jolly well have to be cleared up in time [laughs] for dinner and so on, everything had to be done properly. So he was – he was a character you respected, he was a character – yeah he was a decent man, he was obviously a very bright engineer. He used to say – I remember that he went to work each day full of anticipation and it was always with a feeling of regret that he put his drawing tools and design tools down at the end of a working day and had to come home again. So he was a man who had found his metier [ph], he was absolutely doing what he loved doing, he was really good at it, there were very few other people, I think he was the leading person in the country. There are still – you know, he had 150 patents or so on and indeed when he formally retired from the company that he worked for, Igranic, he was hired by another company, Herne and Crabtree [ph], I hope I’ve got those the right way round, I think I have. Who wanted to become competitors and so he spent another three to five happy years finding ways around all of his own inventions and patents.