NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Professor Chris Rapley

Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

C1379/44

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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. And in fact we’ve got some family odds and ends, sort of little heirlooms, he – the bren factory [ph] were the factory that did the castings for many of the conveyor belt mechanisms and structures and at one point, I’m not quite sure how it came about, but they recognised him and we’ve got a plate somewhere that says Bren Rapley Conveyors [ph] so I’ve got that in a drawer somewhere [laughs].

[08:37]

Thank you, I gather from what you said that the first family home that you’ll be able to remember is the Bath one, is that right?

I can just about remember the Malvern one, I was sort of three and a half, four, you know, you have just little glimpses, so we – they rented a place and I’ve – it must have been a four storey building ‘cause I remember it being up lots of flights of stairs. So I can remember that, and I can remember little bits of Malvern, I can remember springtime, particularly vividly my father sat me on the crossbar of a bike and we rode out into the country which was beautiful but terrifying ‘cause I’ve always had a very strong sense of self preservation and it seemed to me to be extremely dodgy that if he had fallen off the bike I would not have come out of it very well. So I remember that.

7 Chris Rapley Page 8 C1379/40 Track 1

But yes, I grew up – they initially rented a place in – on Combe Down in Bath which is at the Ralph Allen’s drive where Ralph Allen’s quarries used to be and I remember very happy times there. We were right by a triangular field called the Firs Field and I used to be allowed to go across to go and play in the field and that was great. And my father was a great one for – he believed a lot in archery and so he had a – he’s managed to get from somewhere a real Yeoman’s longbow which I’ve – I think we just discarded when – because my mother died recently and we had to clear his house so I think in the end very sadly we let it go, because the string had broke and when it rebounded it split itself. But this was quite an antique piece, but he bought me a little bow and we used to go out into the fields around Combe Down where it was safe to do so and try some archery. But he was also a great one for building model aeroplanes and so on which always used to end up at the end of their first flights stuck in a tree somewhere so – or crashed into a wall, but anyway the anticipation was great.

[10:31]

I’ll come back to these sort of local landscapes in a second but before I do if we just go inside and would you be able to give us a sort of tour as you remember it of your family home in Bath?

Of the family home, well I mean it was rented accommodation with a lady called Mrs Hillier [ph] whose husband had been a sea captain I think who had been killed in World War II and she was a very dignified lady and very much one of the village elders if you like, so she was part of the community who ran the old people’s club and that sort of thing. She took to my mother and they got along very well to the point where even though she was our landlady she would let my mother and father go off to pictures, you know, once every so often and look after me. She had – so let’s start with the road, the road is – it was Moresby – the house is called Moresby, sixty-one and then I – the name of the road has escaped me but one could find it quickly on Google. As you went up into the house, it was a stone house, you went up a short couple of steps into the front door, I’m a little bit hazy about how we quite connected but we were up on the first floor, we had a sitting room with a fireplace and a table in

8 Chris Rapley Page 9 C1379/40 Track 1 the middle, big leather armchairs. Outside a little hall, you went into a kitchen, small, I suppose with a gas cooker, difficult to remember, a larder with those old punched hole mesh thing in front of it, no refrigerator, obviously this is 1951 or ‘2 thereabouts. And then a toilet, I think their – their bedroom was on the next floor and my bedroom was in the attic on the floor above which used to be terrifying for a small child because the stairs always used to creak when I’d been left up there for – source of some concern. She had – Mrs Hillier [ph] had a couple of – her three strapping sons who were in their late teens or early twenties, liked to go shooting and so she had a beautiful spaniel who was sort of first joint pet and – and she was a very intelligent dog and sadly was killed in a – she was going to retrieve a pheasant or something and was knocked down by a car. So she was replaced by two other spaniels who were a bit smaller and fatter and more stupid, but fun anyway. So we would – part of the deal was we would take the dogs for a walk for her. And in her kitchen she had some wonderful things, she had a – some sort of – one of those Chinese swords with a blade that has a sort of angled off end which she was using as a poker for her – her fire, but this was an artefact that her husband had brought back. The fact the house was called Moresby was because her sea faring husband had had something to do with Port Moresby. And she had a whole load of kitchen scullery cabinets in which there were wonderful things like a collapsible top hat. And she also had a wonderful huge model of a yacht which was in a large wooden case and every so often I’d be allowed with the help of one of the sons to take this thing out and then they’d allow me to rig it which took about a morning, it was quite complicated but once I’d been shown how to do it once it was great fun to do, it’s beautiful beautiful wooden yacht with all the rigging and so on. Can’t remember how many sails it had or whatever but a great sense of satisfaction to have done it, very beautiful thing to look at afterwards.

How old were you when you were assembling the rigging on the –

[Sighs] I don’t know, five – four, five, six, something like that, five, six I suppose.

[14:26]

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And at that age was there anything in the house, whether it was your own family’s or the landlady’s, that you regarded as particularly modern, you wouldn’t have used the word high-tech, but that seemed –

Well my father being an electrical engineer was always a keen radio enthusiast so he built a crystal set and we had some headphones and we used to listen to Dan Dare on Radio Luxembourg, and it would always be preceded by Horace Bachelor and his pools adverts. This was a guy who lived in Keynsham and I remember it used to go, spelt K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m, it’s not far from Bath, between Bath and Bristol. So we used to listen to this crackly crystal set which – and sometimes we would be disappointed because the reception would not be good. And as I say my father was always, he didn’t own a car at that point but he was always very much interested in engineering things, he had owned a BSA three wheeler car, I do remember that from Malvern, because it used to frighten the life out of me because it would always backfire, it was a complete source of embarrassment to my mother and they got rid of it in the end because it was so unreliable. He used to tell stories about one of the front wheels coming off and on a three wheeler that’s a bit debilitating so he has a – had – still has a whole raft of stories about that car. He did at one point get a seventy-eight gramophone and we had some records that my great aunt, my grandfather – paternal grandfather’s sister had given us, Auntie Winnie, she was still around. But that – that went back for some reason and I can’t remember what happened, it didn’t work very well or my mother didn’t like it or – it didn’t survive anyway, we had it for a week or so and then it went back.

[16:28]

Could you describe for people who won’t be familiar with this technology the crystal set that your father made for you –

Well I mean, you know, the idea is that you need a – something that will detect the radio signals, so something that will pass current one way and not the other and the classic way of doing it was you had a crystal with a – what they called a cat’s whisker, a little wire that you touched on it and it acted as a sort of diode, this was the essential

10 Chris Rapley Page 11 C1379/40 Track 1 part. And then you had some rotating interleaved capacitors that you tuned the thing with as a tuned circuit, and he – he had soldered this all up, but it was a bit beyond me at the time and it’s so long since I remembered [laughs] how these things work I’m struggling to go back myself, but that’s what we had anyway.

[17:19]

What do you remember of Dan – of Dan Dare?

Dan Dare, oh that was so exciting, Dan Dare, there were very few – a few very futuristic sound effects, always the air lock closing was a wonderful sound which I’m sure you can dig out of the archives. But he and Digby went to Mars ‘cause he featured in the Eagle comic as well which again I remember as a kid getting amazing thing because it was such high quality, you know, beautiful colour, beautiful paper and so on with something in the kind of post war austere era that was amazing. But they – they went to Mars and I remembered there was one episode where they were on a planet somewhere and there was some very weird plants that they encountered and that was quite thought provoking and scary for [laughs] – at that time.

[18:07]

Perhaps we should go from this point to talk more widely about other time spent with your father, so time spent with your father more generally up to and included sort of primary school age? You’ve mentioned riding on the crossbar, you’ve mentioned archery and listening to a homemade radio, his stories about cars, but other sort of key times that you spent with him, things done with him?

We – it was as much with – both with him and my mother actually, because on Combe Down there is some nice walks so there were some woods – gosh, Rainbow Woods, destroyed in the – partly destroyed in the 1989 great storm, but obviously there then. I remember that he and I used to go for walks there and often my mother would come, sometimes on a Sunday she wouldn’t. And I remember one occasion where he – there was a little sweet shop and I mean, you know, things were pretty

11 Chris Rapley Page 12 C1379/40 Track 1 tight so special treats were unusual and I was offered the opportunity to choose a chocolate bar and I chose a Bounty bar which was a coconut thing and was violently ill about an hour later, obviously coconut didn’t agree with me or something. But more than that, we would quite often on a Sunday walk over the back, down into the valley, we’d go some distance actually down – either along and down a hill called Brassknocker Hill or over the back of Combe Down down into the Limpley Stoke Valley, and there was an abandoned full gauge single track railway there which you could walk along. It was actually the railway that they filmed – filmed Thunderbolt on and we saw that part of that being filmed, that must have been when I was a bit older, that’s probably six, seven or something like that I suppose. Because the mother of one of my school friends was an extra in one of the scenes from that so we’d get to see Mrs Macfarlane being brushed aside by Sydney James at one point. But we would go for long walks along there and in the spring you could collect primroses and cowslips and bluebells and things like that. But that was a lovely walk and – and I was always very fascinated by trains and, you know, that sort of thing, so it felt quite exciting and privileged to be able to walk along a railway track and it was still in good – relatively good condition then, so there was still one or two signals along that you could clamber up. Every so often you had to be aware and jump out of the way because they’d go along with one of those little trucks where two guys pump a thing up and down and they’d be going quite fast so if you weren’t nippy you could get run down, I remember having to jump out of the way once or twice for that. But so we would go with him there. But in that valley there’s a little stream and he was quite a keen fisherman and so he taught me how to fish, so we’d go fishing.

And on those walks what do you remember of the interaction between your parents?

Hmm … not an awful lot really, I mean we just seemed a fairly normal family, you know, they got along very well, my mother had a good sense of humour, so did he. Erm, they were pretty austere times so you know you made you know the best of things. I became at some point quite interested in bird watching, and that was the influence of one of my school – first schoolteachers, not primary school, junior school, and he even managed to buy me a set of binoculars which were my sort of prized possession. So we used to do a lot of bird watching down there. I mean I think

12 Chris Rapley Page 13 C1379/40 Track 1 he – I’m trying to think back actually, I haven’t thought about it, you know, much at all. He taught me things, you know, as an only child which I haven’t mentioned before, you know, you tend to be quite a tight family unit. Erm, I think that’s really all there was actually, I got on fine.

[22:20]

Did they – either of your parents have a – aside from fishing and you mentioned collecting flowers, a specific interest in the natural environment in terms of natural history interests?

Not really, my father was always mad keen to find mushrooms, he – and so that was always something that we’d – was a – a major … aspiration in each of these country walks in the autumn, if we could find some mushrooms which he could cook for evening or breakfast that was great. And I remember on one occasion we did and they were a bit close to trees and they went a bit yellow when you bruised them and after he’d cooked them they smelt a bit strange and we decided that they were probably [laughs] there were certain mushrooms that are not edible, so we abandoned these, he was very disappointed. But that was a feature of him and the outside and the countryside throughout his life.

[23:14]

And one thing I haven’t mentioned is that my grandfather – I’ll just roll back a bit if it’s alright, I’m sorry if it’s a bit out of sequence. My grandfather had come from a very – his father was a very successful book binder and we still have a lot of his leather tooled books and so on, and he’d – the story goes that he took a bet that he could drink rather a lot of whiskey and – and that he was found to be dead the next day. He went home and – and obviously he’d drunk a bit too much whiskey and so the business which was very successful was run by the foreman, my – you know, his mother not being – you know, being a Victorian wife, not able to do so as I understand it and remember he had a sister Winifred as well, younger sister. And the story is that the foreman ran away with all of the gold leaf and so the company went

13 Chris Rapley Page 14 C1379/40 Track 1 bust and they were in desperate straits and so some friends of his late father’s took over. In the end they actually formally adopted Auntie Winnie and she became their adopted daughter, I don’t know what happened to the mother. But he was sent to a school, a boarding school where he literally had to walk seven or eight miles from a station near – it’s near the [inaud], it’s a place called Sibford and it was pretty – pretty tough school, I mean I don’t think there was any heating and they were very isolated and, you know, God knows what they were taught, I don’t know. But – so he – I think he felt that he had gone from – well he had gone from a life of relative luxury in London, I mean he was born a Cockney but, you know, well to do, to these rather desperate straits and, erm, he sort of pulled himself together and became an electrical engineer and then had a very successful engineering career. But even though I think had horrific memories of the school which was just like, you know, something out of a Victorian drama, he loved the countryside round there. And there’s a place called Sibford, there’s a little ford at Sibford, Sibford and that used to be a place where we would meet up, my grandparents would drive down from Bedford, we would drive up from Bath and meet there, and this combines with the mushrooming because there were some fields there where wonderful plate mushrooms used to grow so this used to be part of the objective.

[25:57]

Thank you. And you mentioned that you lived right next to a field called Firs –

Firs Field, yes.

Thinking now of yourself outside without parents, what did you tend to – this might seem a very specific question and you may not have memories of it but what did you tend to do as a very young child in the field, outside of –

Well the most lovely thing was to crawl through – I mean it was a wild field so you had wild, you know, plants growing, I’m not a biologist or botanist, I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they were but, you know, it was just a variety of different grasses, which used to grow to a height of I suppose two, three feet, maybe a bit more. And so just

14 Chris Rapley Page 15 C1379/40 Track 1 crawling through them was wonderfully exciting and I have very fond memories, it was a very safe place and, you know, I was allowed to spend hours just kind of wandering around in there. I do remember that – ah yes there’s a memory. I started at the primary school which was called – well the lady who ran it was called Miss – Claremont School which was literally six doors along the road to the left towards Ralph Allen’s drive and I remember one of my classmates there and I used to meet up in this field, I think he was a little bit older than me and he explained to me that the earth rotated and we sat and – and I looked at the grass and we were saying well that was very hard to believe, and he was explaining then, ‘No, everything is rotating, so you don’t see any relative motion,’ so I found this quite an interesting idea and went back and I asked my father about that that evening and he explained to me and, you know, used an orange or an apple or something or other to show how that all worked. Oh yes and that’s triggered something, my father being a draughtsman as well as an electrical engineer, electrical draughtsman, was very keen early on to teach me about drawing with perspective, I remember vanishing points was something that he was very keen to demonstrate, and because I was interested in railways and having a railway line going in, you know, converging to a vanishing point was something that he was keen to get across, I do remember that.

[28:01]

Could you say more about your interest in railways, I suppose there’s various ways in which you could be interested in railways so I’m interested in the particular way in which you were interested in railways, both in the landscape and as models?

Well, you know, even when we lived in Malvern, my father bought me an O gauge Hornby track, which was just a basic circle with a wind-up clockwork engine on it, they weren’t all that well off so that was all there was. I can’t even remember whether there was a – I think there was a truck or two, that’s about it. And I remember when I first went to school there was a kid who was slightly – his parents were slightly better off than mine and he had a rather more magnificent O gauge train set and then a little bit later on he even had an electric OO one. And certainly as I got older my father was very happy to indulge me in first of all a Trix twin electric

15 Chris Rapley Page 16 C1379/40 Track 1 railway set which was not so realistic because it had two rails that the wheels ran on and it had a central rail to pick up electricity for the motor, which was not so realistic. And then we upgraded to Hornby which had just the two rails and insulated sleepers so that you could deal with it that way. And of course, you know, wiring that up, I was given – my father bought two big half table tops and they were assembled in my bedroom and I was given complete freedom to, you know, construct and deconstruct the thing, so I had many many happy hours, and of course it teaches you a little bit about simple electric circuitry and so on. Particularly if you have electrically operated points and signals and so on, so I suppose that was important and he helped me with that initially and then just left me to it. But walking along this abandoned railway in the Limpley Stoke Valley was wonderful, first of all because it gave you access to the countryside in a way that was marvellous ‘cause it sort of cut through things that you could then get off and go and explore areas where there were little streams and what have you. But also it was – it was safe but it was fascinating because there were little marshalling yards, and places where you could still attempt to change a point and so on which is – gave you a sense of access and privilege, sort of forbidden pleasures really ‘cause the – you know, the railway lines were obviously out of bounds. And I – I’m happy to admit that this grew to the point when I was a teenager where I became an avid train spotter, you know, Great Western Railway enthusiast and used to go to Swindon Works on organised tours to see them, you know, constructing and repairing steam engines and later on diesels. But also it gave me great freedom because my parents, you know, it’s amazing how things have changed, the traffic was not so bad, the world didn’t seem such a tricky place and so once I had a bike, which I got I suppose when I was about ten or eleven, I was just allowed to go and bike off. And at that point we lived about four miles outside Bath, so I used to bike down into Bath, see my friends, some of whom were keen train spotters. We would watch the Great Western mainline going into Bath Spa from a place called Sydney Gardens which was a park near where one of my friends used to live and we would train spot there. But we would also go to Bath Green Park which is another, you know, station in Bath where very interesting things used to happen, trains would come down from the north and the pigeon racing would take place on a Saturday, they’d pull all of their wicker baskets out and release all the pigeons at a particular time and these racing pigeons would head off back north again. But trains that went down on the Somerset and

16 Chris Rapley Page 17 C1379/40 Track 1

Dorset railway would run from there as well, so that was fascinating too. But my parents were quite happy to give me whatever the money was or allow me to use my pocket money to go to Bristol, Temple Meads and train spot there and so on. And so it – it sounds very nerdish, it was I suppose, but there were a group of us who could tell you anything about the tracktive effort [ph] or the age of build or the size of driving wheels and what have you of pretty much any Great Western Railway engine at the time. And that was an area of great expertise and of course there’s a kind of nerdism because you always try to see the complete set of King Class or County Class or Castle Class engines or whatever, it was great [laughs].

How did you record, apart from in your memory, how did you record your observations?

Oh well we had Ian – Alan [ph] made a fortune out of producing these – these books for each region and there was even one for the whole of the UK, which if you really saved up your money you could buy the combined volume. And in it you could draw little – with ink pen or biro pen underscore the ones that you’d spotted. Prized possession, I’ve still got them somewhere [laughs].

[33:01]

Are there other indoor pastimes that were significant, other than building the railway, listening to radio?

Oh constructing things with wood – I mean all the things that kids do, constructing things with wood blocks, jigsaws. I was good at jigsaws, discovered that early on, could spot patterns in things. The dog Judy, the – the spaniel, when I was small would come in and she had a sense of humour because she would watch what I was playing with and she would chew – very deliberately chew something which would send me crazy and then she would have me chase her round and round the house until she’d just give it back and then go away. So, you know, that sort of thing, happy memories with that dog actually.

17 Chris Rapley Page 18 C1379/40 Track 1

[33:50]

And when you began to read, what did you tend to read at home?

Difficult to remember until I was at school where when I was a bit older an English teacher got me interested in Conan Doyle and so Sherlock Holmes , I was an avid reader of. And I see – I may be post rationalising but I think that was one of the important little bricks in – in building my interest in analysis and uncovering mystery and, you know, secrets and so on, so I think that was quite important.

That implies a little about this – the answer to this question but what about the stories appeal to you then particularly?

Well it was first of all Conan Doyle was a fabulous writer, but it was the puzzle, you know, what – you know, trying to solve the puzzle, you know, who did the murder or, you know, whatever the point of the story was.

To what extent did you engage what might be called now popular – cultures of popular science at the time in terms of magazines, radio broadcasts, museums, television when it started to happen?

Well the – the Eagle comic had its cutaway diagrams in the centre and – and I used to get an Eagle annual if I was lucky at Christmas. And there was one particular special edition of Eagle , again which I’ve still got, which looked to the future so it did – it studied things, it had articles on space rockets and astronomy and, gosh I’m trying to remember. But you know, those cutaways of how things worked were – were interesting. And I mean much much later, you know, when Sputnik was launched, things like that, you know, that was an immediate interest. You know, just having a father who was – well we always used to joke, he always used to – immediately he got something mechanical or electrical he would take it to bits and then wouldn’t necessarily be able to put it back together again, this was a kind of source of friction with my mother [laughs].

18 Chris Rapley Page 19 C1379/40 Track 1

[36:13]

Do you remember following in the newspaper the Sputnik story or even watching or –

Oh yeah, I mean that was much later on, that was when I was at King Edwards School in Bath, I was a member of the Combined Cadet Force, my father was very very keen that I should be in the CCF because when he was at his school, Bedford Modern, for one reason or another he’d – I don’t know if his parents were a bit short of money of whatever, but he didn’t go into the CCF which meant that in World War II he went in the ranks rather than as an officer, where if he’d been in the CCF he’d have gone in as an officer. I mean he didn’t mind, he had quite an interesting war, and – and, you know, was lucky enough to survive it. But he felt very strongly that he wanted me to be in the CCF, and although I wasn’t in the signals section I had a very close friend who was and so when Sputnik was launched we went up to the school and we tuned in to hear it go over. So I remember it still bleeping signals as it went over, no we were very excited by that, so that was what ’57 you see so that was – yeah gosh actually ’57, ’58?

So you’d have been ten or eleven?

Oh so wait a minute, yes that’s interesting. Well maybe I’m getting a bit mixed up there then because I was thinking it was later but it wasn’t, it was ’57, ’58, so I would only have been ten or eleven, well I definitely heard the bleeps somewhere and not just on the news, on the radio. No I’m puzzled as to – and I’m pretty sure it was up at the school, so maybe it wasn’t my friend Phil but somebody a bit older who allowed us to listen to it there.

Yes, okay.

[37:56]

Well your very first school which you’ve mentioned as being just down the road.

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Yes.

What do you remember of things taught there?

Yeah, well I was taught, we did – you know, we had those old classic exercise books with times tables on the back and we were taught our times tables by rote so could all essentially sing along and you’d go up to ten times and then as a – as a very special test and only for the really knowledgeable you’d go onto twelve times and occasionally some people would even be able to do thirteen and fourteen times, which weren’t on the back of the book. And I do remember that my first form primary school teacher, a lady called Miss McLorren [ph] who I can’t visualise but I have a ghostly memory, she was more like a nun than a teacher, but I, you know, I think that’s probably what she was. And I remember on one day and we – that could no doubt figure out when this was, we were all called forward to look at the globe with a very sort of serious and kind of melancholic atmosphere because I think India had got its independence and we were shown that the third of the globe which was still coloured pink was gradually unravelling and that this, it was implied that this was a terrible thing [laughs].

And was there any nature study or even science?

Yeah, there was nature study, we would go for little walks and we would see things, I remember, you know, those big furry caterpillars were pointed out and we were warned not to touch them because you could get stung by them, and deadly nightshade was pointed out to us as well. That was actually quite an interesting walk, that path running from just near the school, it runs off from the left of Ralph Allen’s drive and goes down into Bath through what was at one point the old leper colony and so on. That was the original horse route into Bath and there was a stone bridge thing, partway down it, all very dank and it’s like going down a little gulley because the traffic up and down it and the water had eroded it away into a gulley, and that was called Hanging Arch because that’s – high women [ph] we were told used to hang around there and if they were caught they were unceremoniously hanged from the arch. That was where my father and I used to go and practice our archery. So that

20 Chris Rapley Page 21 C1379/40 Track 1 was a – that was a well known off the road but I think quite historic little pathway down into – or route into Bath. I later on had a girlfriend whose house was just off that, and I used to leave late in the evening and it was absolutely pitch black and I had to make my way up through Hanging Arch touching the walls by hand because it was very dank and – because I used to leave my motorbike or motor scooter at the top, so that’s another story [both laugh].

And any teaching of sort of formal science at this stage or –

I don’t think so, no, I suppose a little bit of arithmetic and that would be about it.

[41:13]

Is the next school after that King Edwards?

Yes, junior school and then the senior school and that was a fabulous school. The first form teacher in the junior school was a lady called Miss Gardner and her husband or I think her fiancé had been killed in the war and she sort of was, you know, classic English dedicated bubbly characterful teacher, and she inspired in us an enthusiasm for – you know, she was enthusiastic about everything and of course she taught everything in that first year, English and so on. But she was very – a very keen ornithologist, well twitcher I suppose, ornithologist, birdwatcher, and one way or another, I can’t remember quite how it happened, she became friendly with my parents. And – and you know what it’s like when you know you’re a schoolchild, you know, that your teachers are kind of demy-gods and so the fact that she became a family friend was a sort of slightly weird but not unpleasant thing. And she had a little Austin A30 black car and every so often we would all go off on a trip and do some bird watching together, not least across to Slimbridge, Eastcotes Wild Fowl [ph] place, but to other places on the coast and elsewhere. So – so she was an enthusiast and she had some neat things. She would assign – this was the age still where ocean liners were commercial proposition for people travelling around the world, particularly across the Atlantic, very exciting, you know, Cunard and White Funnel and all the others, and so each of us would be assigned a vessel, good lord I think the

21 Chris Rapley Page 22 C1379/40 Track 1

Oriana is a name that suddenly popped out of nowhere, maybe that was the one that I was assigned. And so it was our job each morning to go – she had all the schedules and so it was our job each morning to go to the schedules, find out where she was and stick the pin in the map accordingly, so that taught you geography and a little bit about, you know, the commercial running of a transport system. So she – those were the sort of things that she did, so it was not science per se but it was the beginning of an organised way of doing things and an interest in both the outside, you know, human activities in the outside world but also the natural world.

And to what extent were you interested in or especially engaged by other subjects, non – subjects beyond natural history and science and geography?

I mean I should say straightaway that right up until I had to choose my A levels it wasn’t clear at all that I would be a scientist, because I frankly was a bit lazy and so relied on having a mind that could absorb a lot of stuff at the last minute and then make some sense of it and dump it all out again. So I had a very good exam technique which used to drive my mother to distraction because I would never do the revision that she felt that I should have been doing over a long period of time, I’d always leave it to the last minute which is a bit hair raising for everybody including me. But actually I had a very good history master, this was at O level and I enjoyed history, although again I don’t have a – I don’t have a photographic memory, I forget detail very quickly so it became obvious that probably being a historian wasn’t very sensible because there’s a reliant on – seemed at the time to rely on remembering quite a lot of – having a framework of facts in which to put other things and I tended to forget them. But you know, I was good at writing essays, I was good at English and in fact I used to struggle a bit with the maths, the maths wasn’t the thing I found naturally the easiest, although I wasn’t bad at it but, you know, it was harder work.

[45:15]

And it – so it wasn’t really until late on that, you know, I decided that – and actually it was chemistry more than physics that was just fun because we had a chemistry master who laid great emphasis on practicals and great emphasis on allowing us a certain

22 Chris Rapley Page 23 C1379/40 Track 1 wildness of spirit, so the manufacture of ammonium triade and other explosives and god knows what was something that he turned a blind eye to, he couldn’t turn a blind ear to it ‘cause he’d hear them go off. But you know he – he –health and safety I’m afraid these days militate against but he accepted that, you know, every so often somebody would be whipped off to the hospital to have a load of acid removed from [laughs] – washed out of their eye or whatever and it was – it was that wonderful empowerment to explore the chemistry, on the basis of a very good instruction from him so that it wasn’t anarchic, it was doing things that were genuinely interesting but based on very sound stuff. But the physics was good as well, I had a couple of extremely good physics teachers too. So in the end just the fun of being a scientist was what drew me into it, but it wasn’t at all obvious that that’s what I was going to do.

Could you describe any particular experiments in chemistry that you remember clearly including the sort of situation of them, where you were and what you were using, who was around you?

Yes, well we – we – I’ll just give you a sense of the atmosphere, we liked a good fug is what we called it, so you know the – the smellier and the more cloudy in the lab on a double period on a Wednesday afternoon, the more successful we genuinely felt the afternoon had been. I should say that we were the last single class, the last of the single stream going through King Edwards, they doubled up to – they increased their size, moved to new buildings and so on, this was in the new buildings. So yeah, whipping up a decent fug was seen as successful, anything that went bang was seen as successful. On the other hand we would do these analyses where you would be given a powdery substance and you would have to go through a series of tests to figure out, you know, what it was and so getting that right and there was always a degree of competitiveness amongst us being the first to figure out that it was magnesium chloride or whatever was important. But – oh and our – and there was a badge of honour was having a lab coat that had you know the greatest number of acid burns and stains and things on it, so that it was – well it sounds very childish now but that it was – it was just a lot of fun. And I suppose that’s what I remember. I do remember that there was one guy who much against the – Alan Bright was the chemistry master,

23 Chris Rapley Page 24 C1379/40 Track 1 much against his – well he didn’t even know it was happening, this guy used to taste the samples. Well given that we were being given occasionally potassium cyanide and so on we – the rest of us all thought this was bravado beyond [laughs] – as I say I always had a great sense of self preservation so it didn’t seem to me that that was a very good idea at all. But yeah that was the sort of thing that we’d be doing.

[48:44]

And from physics, any memories from physics?

Yeah, well we had an absolutely mad Irish man called Colonel McGee who used to enjoy most of the time telling us wonderful stories of the First World War which he’d been in. There was a – I can hear him saying it now, he was a cavalry officer and they had some ceremonial, er, occasion where the top brass were watching them and he had to ride ahead with his sword held high and there was a dense thunderstorm, violent thunderstorm going on and he said, ‘And the St Elmo’s Fire was a flickering up and down my sword,’ [laughs] and so on and so – wonderful vivid stories from this guy who had dreadful trouble keeping control of the class and the class used to bait him mercilessly. But he would get his own back with little things that he would do. One thing that he loved doing every – every year he looked forward to it, was the Magdeburg Hemispheres where you have these two half spheres which you grease up the lips of and you put them together and then you evacuate them so there’s a vacuum in them, and then you have a rope on each side and in the original experiments they had horses trying to pull them apart, but these were slightly smaller ones. But he would have the entire class, you know, fifteen on one side, fifteen on the other, tugging away and of course he would always have left a slight leak in it so that we would all be tugging away and then suddenly they would go and we’d all fall over each other, and he used to think that was absolutely hilarious, that was when he got back at us for all the baiting we did at him through the year. So I think the point is that science was fun, it was funny and fun and it had very characterful people who may or may not have been [laughs] the most wonderful science teachers in themselves but they added a character to the subject that gave it something special. It wasn’t limited to that, the English master, a guy called Bill Curry [ph] was absolutely crazy

24 Chris Rapley Page 25 C1379/40 Track 1 as well and in fact the school was characterised by a bunch of youngish to middle aged teachers who were full of character. A little bit wild, a little bit anti- establishment, nevertheless running deep through it was this sense of – what’s the word I’m looking for, you know, there was a deep rooted ethic that this stuff was played on top of but honesty and, you know, all of those values were very prominent there, but at the same time, you know, why should life, it’s a very austere time so why should life be boring. Bill Curry [ph] the English master was also the head of the cadet corps and it was absolutely apparent that he used the cadet corps as a means to get young people great experiences at the army’s expense, so we would do extreme outdoor training, outbound sort of training in Wales or up in the Peak District that the – or in the Lake District, that the army was very keen to have us do. And we did a great deal of shooting as well, we’d go out to the Quantocks and – and you know shoot at the ranges there. And in fact the Greek master was the guy who was so keen on that. But – so all of this added a great deal of colour and interest to life, it was fantastic school from that point of view.

[52:24]

Given that we’ve mentioned the cadet core again, I wonder whether you could say at this point what your father told you of his own service in World War II?

Oh goodness, well he’s still alive, he’s ninety something, he would talk to you endlessly about it if you want to know. He talks particularly about his experience with the British expeditionary force in Dunkirk, because he could ride a motorbike he was – he volunteered and was made a despatch rider so he used to take messages from the high command to his unit and other units. And he said the whole BEF was a complete fiasco, he had no weapon, no ammunition, no nothing, I don’t think he even had a radio. And it was all, you know, the fog of war was particularly dense, all very chaotic, and when the BEF started to retreat towards Dunkirk he was – he actually went to relieve himself down by the canal and he was idly watching a whole load of solders and trying to think, well what regiment are they, it’s a slightly odd uniform, and then he realised that it was field grey and that they were actually Germans setting up a little artillery place. So he [laughs] leapt on his motorbike and whizzed off, went

25 Chris Rapley Page 26 C1379/40 Track 1 back to his command headquarters where he says the – he was the aginent [ph] and a sergeant major were arguing about a guy called Potts Pay [ph] and wouldn’t be interrupted [laughs]. So he kept trying to interrupt them and they wouldn’t be interrupted so he said, ‘You know, there are Germans out there,’ and they said, ‘Yes yes yes,’ anyway then the telephone rang and he answered it and it was a call from high command saying, ‘We’re only going to say this once, you are completely surrounded by Germans, fight to the last man,’ so again he tried to interrupt these two [laughs] and they kept saying, ‘Just wait Rapley,’ you know [laughs]. So anyway they – he – there was a convoy leaving and he was told, ‘Listen, we’re not going to fight to the last man, go and get the last two lorries to turn around and come and pick us up,’ and he managed to do that on his motorbike and so they all got over to the beach. And then he tells, you know, a story about being strafed on the beach, you know, every half hour or so the Luftwaffe would come over, and he was saying how extraordinary it was because the bullets would go into the sand so they wouldn’t make much noise and he was saying, you know, every time they came over everybody fell on their faces and then when they all got up again nobody seemed to have been hurt, he said it was quite extraordinary. And then they stood waist deep in the ocean waiting for the small boats to get them to the larger boats, and I forget which this steamer was that the bomb went down the funnel and blew it up but they were in the queue, you know, not far from it and he – he describes it, he said, you know they just watched this bomb coming down, he said, ‘You know, it flashed,’ ‘cause it was spinning, it flashed in the sun and it just went right down the funnel and hit the boilers and the boar blew up and an awful lot of people were killed. But he – his friend Jack, his long, you know, standing friend Jack who has been a lifelong friend was with him and they were supporting somebody they knew who had collapsed, they supported him in the water for hours and when they finally were taken out and got to the side of the ship that brought them back to the UK there was a rope ladder and this guy was unconscious and so they, you know, he said how clever the sailors were, they threw down some ropes which already had sort of nooses and loops in them, so they got them round this guy and the sailors were hauling and he and Jack were on each side but the guys arms went up and he started to slip through the noose so he said it was real touch and go ‘cause if he’d dropped in the water they’d never have got him out again, but they managed to get him onto this boat. And then they were then instructed

26 Chris Rapley Page 27 C1379/40 Track 1 to go down into the hold but he said the hold was so diesel and claustrophobic and full of people they said, ‘Look,’ you know, he and Jack said, no, they’re going to sit on the back of the boat and if the sailors didn’t like it they could throw them off, so then he said they fell asleep and the next thing they remember was being back in the UK. So he’s got a lot of stories like that. When he was back in the UK he was – the reason he got to know Bath was that he was the technician who was put in charge I think of five searchlight sites and these are searchlights that had a radar system on them and so the radars would lock onto an aircraft and the search light, if it was properly aligned, would be kept off and then at the moment the gunners were ready so that the plane wouldn’t take evasive action they’d turn on the searchlight and that should illuminate the plane and then the gunners would try and shoot it down. Well it was his job to align these things and tune them and maintain them. And at first he had to walk miles between each site, there’s a field just outside Bath that he was camped in and that’s how he got to know the whole area ‘cause he found all sorts of little routes between these things. And again he tells stories about how inept the whole thing was, in order to tune these things up he needed an aeroplane and of course the RAF were pretty busy so they couldn’t afford to let him have one very often, there was no radio communication between him and the aeroplane, the signals were all done by laying out pieces of cloth on the ground in certain shapes to give them instructions. And two or three times an aircraft came out, he started to set up, he laid down a sign saying, I don’t know, ‘Fly clockwise around us,’ and the aircraft would go off and in the end he managed to get hold of a copy of their codebook and his codebook and the codes weren’t the same [laughs] so his fly around clockwise was, ‘Thanks very much but I’ve finished,’ so he’d managed to solve that. Again the radios between the headquarters and the batteries were pretty tricky and most of the people who operated them hadn’t a clue and so he came up with a scheme where he soldered the tuning dial on, I forget which way around it was, probably the HQ one, and then showed the battery people – no it must have been the other way around. And anyway, he solved a lot of practical problems in terms of getting this whole thing so people could – oh yes, he said they were supposed to talk to each other on the hour and none of them had clocks so made sure that they were issues with clocks and so on. And because of that he was promoted and that’s when he was promoted to go on this course in Birmingham which is then when he met my mother. So anyway – but if you want the

27 Chris Rapley Page 28 C1379/40 Track 1 full McCoy with all of the humorous anecdotes, and some more serious ones as well, he can tell you. Just one point, when he was at Dunkirk they used to send him off, they’d see parachutists come down behind the lines and they would order him to go off and arrest them and he had no weapon and ammunition so he wasn’t quite sure how he was supposed to do this but he enjoyed riding around the French countryside on a motorbike so he happily went off. But on one occasion a shell landed amongst the group of French soldiers and blew them to pieces and he said with some sort of misgivings he armed himself out of the debris, there was a rifle and some ammunition that he was able to gather from that, so yeah.

At what age was he telling you these stories, I mean was he –

He’s a great [laughs] storyteller, and for – I – you know, from the earliest age I can remember he was telling these sorts of stories. And particularly to anybody who would listen, he’s – he’s in a – a home for old people at present and I think all of the nurses have heard these stories about 10,000 times [both laugh] each so …

[1:00:09]

Now we’ve got to a time in your life where you’re of a certain age, where you’re sort of aware of – more aware of things going on around you and I wonder whether I could ask you your impression at the time of being a sort of secondary school child, of your parents’ political commitments, their –

Oh they … do you know I don’t really know what they’d vote, but they certainly weren’t socialists, but they weren’t really ardent – they used to read things like The Daily Telegraph I suppose so I suppose you’d say they were Conservatives, I guess they used to vote Conservative probably, I don’t know. But they weren’t politically strongly active.

And their religious beliefs or engagement?

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Not very, I mean Church of England but not very. My godmother who was my mother’s close friend, I remember on one occasion she came to visit us when we lived on Combe Down and she – she’s quite a strong character [laughs], she and I were walking ahead and the local church was ahead of us and she said to me, ‘How often do you go to it?’ and completely innocent I said, ‘Never been to it,’ [laughs]. And I was instructed to keep walking ahead and I heard her berating my parents for being insufficiently interested in my religious instruction. But they – they weren’t strong believers.

If we think of religion there’s often one sort of source of morality and if you’re saying this wasn’t a – this wasn’t a family who attended church much, if at all, but could you talk more generally about your parents in terms of the things that they – the kind of conduct that they valued, the kinds of conduct that they would have regarded as negative, so a sort of more general sense of their –

Oh I mean well tremendous pride, a high degree of what would the neighbours think, but a basic complete commitment to honesty and hard work, you know, puritan ethics sort of stuff. I – absolutely, and a … yes, I mean I’m not sure I need to say anymore, that was it, you know, there were expectations on behaviour and how you dressed and looked and so on. As I say my father was slightly more relaxed and my grandfather would wear more casual clothes and so on, when we went for walks my grandfather would always be very smart, wear a hat and so on. My father smoked but smoked a pipe, you know, cigarettes were seen as a bit – a bit common I suppose. Erm, what else? There was something else I was going to say there … yeah, it’ll come back in a minute.

Are there things that you remember being praised for as an older child, things being praised for and on the other hand things that you remember being, I don’t know, told off for?

Well I mean if I misbehaved I’d – you know, as a single child I didn’t have much opportunity to misbehave really, but no there were expectations of behaviour and so on. It – I think that – that so much of it was just sort of understood really, yeah, it

29 Chris Rapley Page 30 C1379/40 Track 1 wasn’t explicitly – but, you know, there were certain behaviours, honesty, you know, not lying, all of those sorts of things.

[1:03:42]

Yes, and aside from the cadet force at your King Edwards upper school, other clubs or sports or –

Well later on became the stage manager, did a lot of shooting and was good at it, my father was a good shot, had a very good eye, he’s left handed and so – but had been forced to be right handed so that was a problem for him always and I think that – that had some sort of an impact on him and his self confidence really. But I was strongly right handed and I had been fascinated by sighting through things, so yes I – my aspiration was to be a TV cameraman, God knows why, or a film director or photographer or something, he – he developed his own films, I forgot to say that and we used to do contact prints, yes he taught me how to do that, again I can’t remember quite how old I was, probably ten eleven or something like that. And he was always very keen on cameras, he had bought himself a Agifold camera which is a rather nice camera at the time. And, erm, so I’d always had a thing about sighting through things. I remember at a little kind of – it was an upmarket toy projector that you could project, I don’t know, little Disney slides on, but actually I dismantled it and used the lenses as a magnifying glass and there were two of them that slid into each other so you could focus them and you could change the magnification. Oh and he got a lovely brass telescope that his father had owned and we, you know, I was allowed to use that, although it was not much use at night but it was great for just, you know, looking around the countryside, even just from the house and sort of seeing things close to. So I was always really interested in that. And – and those things linked together, the – the shooting, the seeing the world through a frame and trying to take pictures, and as I got older I became quite a keen photographer and although I couldn’t afford my own enlarger I had a friend who lived about a 45 minute bicycle ride away whose father had bought him an enlarger and all of the chemicals and they were quite happy to let me go over there and just use it, so I used to develop my own films and print my own stuff. But shooting was good, I found I was good at that and

30 Chris Rapley Page 31 C1379/40 Track 1 our team at the school won the Country Life cup one year and then we used to go out and do full-bore shooting. I was a lous – I was not physically strong at – had no ball eye or anything, was lousy at cricket, lousy at rugby, hopeless at football, pretty bad at hockey, just didn’t like them and wasn’t really very interested in them. And there’s a downward spiral when you’re always the last one to be chosen for the team, it kind of puts you off. And whereas with these other sports, shooting and so on you know it doesn’t rely so much on those sorts of skills, or the team skills so much, even if you are in a team it’s your individual effort that really matters. And so there was something a bit exciting and fun about those, the Greek master used to pile us all into a – what was a three ton truck in those days and we used to drive from Bath up onto the Quantocks which in itself was quite, you know, it’s an hour and a half’s drive at lunchtime on a Tuesday and sometimes on a Thursday as well, we wouldn’t get back till late in the evening but we would have been firing, you know, 303 rifles up on the army ranges up there and that was very good. So I went to Bisly [ph], I was fourth in the schools’ 100. When I went to Oxford I immediately joined up with the university team, or University Rifle Club and shot for Oxford four times and became the captain of the 22 rifle team against Cambridge and we – we beat Cambridge for the first time that Cambridge had been beat at [inaud] thirteen years or something, so that was good. Erm, but you asked earlier, you know, what else did I do at school, there was the shooting, stage manager, because I was interestingly terrified of going on stage and I think now looking back at it because I was just so lazy and had such a poor memory I knew I would never remember my words, but I felt self conscious about going on stage anyway, but by being stage manager you could be an integral and key part of the whole production and yet not have to go on stage, so that was important. And this close friend of mine who was all – who we always used to compete with, he became the head of the lighting stuff, so I stage managed, he did the lighting and sound and – and that worked well. What else? He and I both became the joint junior under offices of the cadet corps so we kind of, you know, moved through the ranks there. There was a company sergeant major who was also the sort of janitor of the school called CSM Dodge [ph] well named, who I remember once driving me through somewhere in Wiltshire and looking wistfully at a field and saying, ‘There are 10,000 boots buried in that field Chris but I daren’t touch them because they’re still watching,’ so he was [laughs] quite a character. And he – he was a head of the stores,

31 Chris Rapley Page 32 C1379/40 Track 1 what do you call that, gosh. Name will come back and it’s a technical term. Anyway, he showed me how when the army used to come and inspect the cadet core each year there’s a way you can make one tie by folding it through a piece of cardboard to look like about ten ties ‘cause he’d always – a lot of kit had always been lost and he’ll always get into trouble because of it so there were ways that you could deceive these guys and if that sort of trickery were no good there was a deal with Monkton Combe School where a truck would rush in the dark of the night [laughs] from one set of stores to another so that they’d actually be inspecting the same kit at Monkton Combe the next day that they’d – God knows how he – he’s been dead a long time so I don’t think he’ll worry too much at this stage. But I learned a lot from him because that was interesting because, you know, there’d been this emphasis on honesty and loyalty, but again it was honesty and loyalty but there were certain types of dishonesty which were kind of fair game, because they weren’t really dishonest but they were just the – you know, an exposure to the way the real world functions and that was always seen as quite amusing.

A kind of resourcefulness?

Exactly, yes that’s a good word for it. And of course we used to go on, you know, arduous training as I say up in the Peak District and – and the Lake District, you know, under canvas and so first of all, you know, we would trek and hike through some quite tough conditions. We came down over Snake Pass in terrible conditions on one occasion, I mean we really shouldn’t have been up there, the conditions came in on us, there was snow and rain and God knows what and there’s an area up there which is incredibly boggy and very difficult terrain. And I was in charge of five or six people and I remember it suddenly dawned on me, God, you know, they rely on me, you know, somebody could die up here and it really is up, you know, this isn’t a game, this is real and so – and I didn’t like it very much, I didn’t – I didn’t feel comfortable with that level of responsibility, you know, it’s a shock to suddenly realise that. So anyway we – we got – I got them off and so there was a sort of recognition, ‘Well, you know, it’s your duty, that’s your rank, you know, this is your accountability and responsibility and authority,’ but, erm, that was a shock to suddenly find it real but that was really important. Oh I was also librarian and that’s

32 Chris Rapley Page 33 C1379/40 Track 1 where I – oh and a monitor and then a prefect and that’s where you learned – or I learned that as I guess President Mubarak is realising right now, that authority is one thing but there are limits beyond which you can push people and there was one particular guy who came from one of the country villages and was a bit tougher and rougher, who threatened quietly to knife me if [laughs] – so you suddenly realised that having this title was all very well but you could overstep the mark by attempting to discipline people and that they would react. So there were kind of limits to – which was good to learn.

What were you – what, were you attempting to sort of control him in respect of –?

Oh god, he was being disruptive in the library and I balled him out and – and I humiliated him in front of other people I think, I don’t know, something like that. But his reaction, I mean from his point of view I’m sure his reaction was perfectly reasonable, but it was a bit of a shock to me to be threatened [both laugh] I was going to be knifed. ‘Cause I believed him, I knew he’d got a knife so [laughs] –

[1:12:30]

And what – when you talked about your father’s photography, what did he tend to photograph?

Oh he’d got a good eye, he’s been a great ornithologist but I mean the sort of cameras you need to do ornithology properly were kind of beyond, you know, his means at the time, but we – we just always – when we went on holiday and so on we just took, you know, holiday snaps and so on. It’s quite ironic actually, I’ve recently acquired a quite good digitiser and I am right now working through some of these old negatives and digitising them, basically so that I can throw them away because having just had to clear my father’s house – and in fact that’s where some of them had come from, from his loft, I don’t want to leave a legacy of all of this stuff for my daughters to have to sort out so I’m getting it all digital and then we can throw away the material stuff.

33 Chris Rapley Page 34 C1379/40 Track 1

And you mentioned that you thought that the –

Oh and he used to buy Amateur Photographer and I remember that Amateur Photographer , we were talking about Eagle centrespreads, Amateur Photographer used to have a series where each month or each week, I don’t know when it came out, probably monthly, they would have a couple of pictures and somebody would analyse the – the construct, you know, the – you know, what made – what made a good picture, you know, so not having a head bang in the middle but having it on, you know, so the – what’s the word I’m looking for, the –

Framing, the composition?

The composition, that’s the word and – and I kind of got that to the point that – and I became really enthusiastic and I used to take my camera everywhere and, you know, if I could afford it I’d buy – because it’s so cheap to do through these various arrangements. Oh yes and in fact when I went to Oxford I joined Cherwell as a photojournalist, simply so that I could have free access to their darkrooms and so on, I also had access in the physics labs as it turned out. And that was good because I was then sent on assignments so I had to go and get a picture for a purpose to illustrate a story, which was a different sort of discipline which I found interesting. But in fact this whole thing of composition became almost an obsession and at one point, can’t remember quite when it was, I think it was just before I went to university, I sort of went on cold turkey from photography because I was getting to the point where I couldn’t look at the world without seeing it in terms of a rectangular frame and a composition and began to worry about it ‘cause I felt I was detaching from reality, sort of stepping back and constantly seeing it in those terms, so … yeah.

[1:15:06]

And going back to this business of wanting to be a TV cameraman. My mother was a great royalist, I forgot to mention that, so we had lots and lots of pamphlets and books about the royal family and the opportunity to see the royal family at Badminton, which is an estate not far away when they did horse trials there was something that

34 Chris Rapley Page 35 C1379/40 Track 1 they used to take up and so, you know, not only have I got pictures of the Queen looking, with the Queen Mother, magnificently at a small boy taking a picture of them with a Brownie 127, but also pictures of the horse trials but also pictures of the BBC outside broadcast. ‘Cause for me, I don’t know why, but it just – I couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling than to have that extraordinary bit of technology, that camera with the rotating turret of three lenses on the front and so on, and be composing moving pictures of the action, that was incredibly attractive. And in fact I used my Meccano to – I remember it now, to construct a TV camera which I had in the home I used to play with and – and that’s what I really wanted to be, my parents were absolutely dead against it, they said, ‘That is not a profession,’ you know, they were very conservative in that sense and the idea that I should go to university and do something proper, you know, something along – you know, physics, chemistry or whatever, was something that they were determined I should do. You know, photography was too wild, you know, too off piste to be something that they would encourage. And I haven’t said but I was the first member of our family to go to university, and of course to get to Oxford was a great thing anyway, to get – I got an exhibition there and indeed my – interestingly I didn’t know this, but my primary school had said to my parents when I was, you know, little, ‘Oh well he’ll go to university,’ so I mean obviously they had seen that, you know, I had some capacity to do academic things then. So yeah, so that great thing, and indeed a friend of mine who’d been a few years older than me at school became a commissioned photographer and he took me with him on a day out at Castle Combe when they were filming Dr Dolittle with Anthony Newley and gosh, who was Anthony Newley wife’s, the – oh dear, come back in a second. But anyway, and he was the person who for the Hollywood Film Company was taking the picture on set and it was a very tough life for him, he worked all day taking the pictures and then he worked all night developing and printing them and giving them, you know, passing them on the next day and I don’t think he was making that much money out of it. So I had been dis – by that time I think I was already going to go to university, I knew what I was going to do and it sort of made their point that pretty tough business to be successful in.

[1:18:00]

35 Chris Rapley Page 36 C1379/40 Track 1

Have you thought more then about this link between shooting and photography and interested in moving pictures as well, the sighting through lenses?

Yeah, it – it – that – again there’s a sort of – I found shooting to be whimsical in the sense that whereas in other sports your degree of success is dependent on a great deal of skill but also a lot of exertion, the thing about being a really good shot is that you have to essentially slow your whole body down to the point where the breathing and the pumping of blood around the body and so on is so rhythmical and so calm that you can maintain a bead on your target, and not just home in on the bull and hit it once, but do it ten times. So it’s got to be completely repeatable, so it seemed whimsical to me that at great expense, because my rifle was costly, the ammunition was costly, being part of the club was about as much as I could afford, it was all being heavily subsidised even so at – at – and to be a good shot you have to practice, you know, three nights a week, you know, so you had to like any other sport, you know, you have to be really dedicated to this and driven. And so with all of this expense and effort and the technology of both the rifle and the ammunition, you know, the ammunition has to be absolutely repeatable, you know, each bullet has to have exactly the same characteristics, not easy so you had to buy good quality ammunition, manufacturers have to know what they’re doing. And at the end of all of this effort what you’re doing is at some distance, fifty yards, twenty-five yards, fifty yards, sometimes we used to shoot at 1,100 metres which is extraordinary, the bullets go subsonic and you have to worry about density of the air and the wind and all sorts there, after all of this effort and expense what you’re doing is punching holes in a piece of cardboard with lead and you’re actually trying to get pieces of lead to all go through the same hole. So there was just something very whimsical and funny about the whole thing but it was a great sport, I had to give it up when I got married because I couldn’t continue doing three nights a week.

Where were you being taught about the – the long distance shooting and the –

That was at Bisly [ph] and that – the 1,110 yards stuff was when I was part of the Oxford team and we used to use special rifles with that, with very long barrels and so long that it’s difficult to hold them in the prone position with a hand under them

36 Chris Rapley Page 37 C1379/40 Track 1 because the centre of gravity is forward of where it would normally be. So we would lie on our – you’d lie on your back and you have the barrel across your instep, and so first of all you’ve got to have a good strong neck and back because you’ve got to tilt yourself up to sight through it, but then you just learn by experience. You know, you’d fire off a couple of shots and, you know, get the sighting and everything, you’re allowed a few shots before, you know, you declare and start shooting seriously, but if the sun came out it would make a huge difference in terms of the density of the air, and you can see there are flags which give you an indication of how strong the wind is and where it’s coming from and whether it’s varying and so on. But as you can imagine it’s, you know, it requires a lot of skill to make all of these judgements and be able to fire the rifle, you know, in a repeatable way. And a lot of the fun is that you spend part of your time shooting but you also then, kind of your penance is that you go down to the buts [ph] and you operate the targets and so on. So you know, you know, targets go up, you bring them down, you mark where the bullet went through so that somebody with a telescope can see where it was and you also flag whether it is a bull, an in or an outer, or what have you. So there’s a certain camaraderie, but there’s a certain just interesting to be doing that sort of thing, nice open air stuff.

[End of Track 1]

37 Chris Rapley Page 38 C1379/40 Track 2

Track 2

Could you start today by recalling your response to what might be called Britain’s involvement in the space age, last time you mentioned listening to one of the Sputnik satellite anyway using some radio equipment, and I’ve read a piece by you called Museum of Me in which you mention a trip to the RAE in the early ’60s in which you saw a satellite, but I’d like sort of general memories of that and your response to that?

Okay, my father, through his job, because he dealt with a lot of contractors who were providing sonar systems for the navy, they were also the same companies that were providing systems for the air force and for commercial aircraft I suppose, and so he used to get tickets to go to the Farnborough commercial days. And on two occasions he took me there and I particularly remember the Avro Vulcan – the V bombers being flown over the assembled crowds and in those days, you know, before there had been a number of accidents where they kind of changed the rules of engagement, the pilots could have fun flying these things at the crowd. So coming across the runway to us, and I think it was a couple of Vulcan bombers, they just pointed their noses up and put them on reheat over the crowd and the pressure waves were so enormous, I mean the noise was fantastic but the pressure waves were so great that you felt you couldn’t breathe. This had a tremendous impact [laughs], I thought that was wonderful and looked forward to be able to go back again. Now I took some photographs the second time that my father took me there so I can find out what year it was but it was probably, I don’t know, ’62, ’63 something like that. And I took a picture of a model of Ariel 1, first British spacecraft, this was part of an arrangement between the United States, I guess it must have been NASA, and the UK, the United States knew that the UK had some extremely good space technology in terms of attitude control systems and also very good space science community who could build instruments to study the outer atmosphere and then also space. And so this was a bit precent [ph] in a way ‘cause I took a picture of Ariel 1, probably didn’t think that much more of it but I mean it looked great, it’s sort of gold plated and so on, I think the model is still around somewhere and – and that was that, so my mention in that article was a sort of retrospective, because subsequently I got very much involved in – in the UK space

38 Chris Rapley Page 39 C1379/40 Track 2 science, er … sort of field. And the people that I worked with, people like Peter Wilmore and so on had been involved in Ariel 1 and the subsequent Ariels and I used to kind of poke fun at Peter a little bit by ongoing out that I had seen the spoils of his effort as a schoolboy [both laugh] which made him feel – ‘cause he was always – I think he’d feel quite young and [laughs] spritely. So that it – sort of we pick up that story later on.

Do you have other memories of the sort of popular – popular accounts of Britain’s involvement in the space age, reports in the newspapers of satellite orbits and that sort of thing?

Not much and I think probably it’s difficult for me to remember how much I was aware at the time, I was interested in that sort of thing so when you heard about Blue Streak and Bloodhound, and remember I said I used to be an avid reader of Eagle at once – Eagle comic, whether I was you know, I can vaguely remember their cutaway of a Bloodhound rocket for example. So these are exciting these. Oh yes and actually there was an Eagle annual, a – it was called Eagle Wonders of the Modern World it wasn’t one of their normal Christmas annuals, it was a sort of compendium, and that had a – I’m pretty sure that had a section on space in it that sort of talked about, you know, the future and the sort of things that space could be used for. And remember there was a lot in the popular culture then, I mentioned Dan Dare and so on last time, it was a kind of – it was symbolic of a technology based future, so it was exciting. I don’t think that I paid especial interest in space, I had no plan to go into space science for example at that point, it was just part of the kind of exciting culture that was around.

[04:42]

Could you tell me about your decision to study physics at Oxford?

Yes [laughs], I think I mentioned that at the kind of O level stage it wasn’t particularly obvious in the results or my capabilities that I would necessarily do science, you know, I was okay at English and history and so on, not very good at languages, but on

39 Chris Rapley Page 40 C1379/40 Track 2 the other hand science did seem to be that much more fun, particularly the practical aspects of it, I very much enjoyed the practical aspects of it with both physics and chemistry and I think as, you know, and so in the class there were two or three of us who used to vie all the time for, you know, being first or second or third and this sort of continued through my career. And there was one particular guy who was a great friend but we competed and when it got to the point of doing A levels, we had both I think done maths, physics and chemistry, in fact I’m sure we had and I then went on and split maths to do double maths because I was a bit worried that my maths wasn’t quite as strong as it needed to be, so I did maths, applied maths pure and physics S level, the point being that I had to stay on an extra year to do Oxford – Oxford and Cambridge entrance because in those days, you know, that’s what it took, you had to do another year. He did the same and I also had to resurrect my Latin O level which I had abandoned. I did very unusually in those days, the norm was six or seven O levels, I did something like ten O levels, you know, sort of including art which was a – seen as wildly radical thing for that school to do. We’d just got a new art master and managed to get through that. But I had abandoned Latin and I was in the last year where a requirement of Oxford and Cambridge entrance in science was that you had Latin, so I had to do my O level Latin in a year which I managed to scrape through on. Anyway, this – this close friend of mine applied to Oxford and he was determined that he was going to do chemistry and I was – I’d, you know, it made no difference to me really, I was as interested, equally interested in both but I thought, well you know, now is the time to kind of cleave apart and become distinct. I think I had to go off and do physics and so that’s what I applied for [both laugh]. So on such weird and substantial and irrational [both laugh] basis are big decisions made but that was honestly the truth.

[07:28]

Then if we go to Oxford, I wonder whether you could start by remembering particular lectures from the – lecturers rather from the – I’m not sure how it was organised, whether it makes sense to talk about the first year and then the later part?

40 Chris Rapley Page 41 C1379/40 Track 2

Yes, yes, well in the first year you’d – there were a whole load of first year courses and then you took a particular set of exams at the end of that first year. Well the first surprise [laughs], I’d – my school had got – it was good, I think I mentioned before, I’m very proud of that school, it was an extraordinary melting pot for teenagers. It’s young enthusiastic staff completely encouraged slight antiestablishment, but nevertheless a – a way of living which had probity and all the other things about it. Anyway, but – and its academic standard was quite high but it didn’t have a strong tradition of sending people to Oxford or Cambridge, but a physicist – I think either one year or two years ahead of me had got to Jesus College Oxford to do physics, and somebody who was again a couple of forms ahead of me but had always taken a slight sort of paternalistic interest in me had got to Queens College to do probably PPE, something like that. And that he – those seniors to me had offered a number of us the opportunity to go up and spend a weekend kind of sleeping on their floors to find out what Oxford was like. And so I was attracted to Oxford because of this broad interest I had beyond science, rather than Cambridge because it seemed to me to be a scientist in Oxford, you know, rightly or wrongly it was my view, offered the opportunity of – of a rounder education because you would mix with people from many other – strong people from many other subjects, whereas the impression I had was that Cambridge was very focused in the science, so that’s the background. So I got to Jesus College and I hadn’t fully appreciated that I was the token [laughs] West Countryman in a college which was solidly and resoundingly Welsh and had a – had a strong tradition, you know, West Countrymen usually went to Exeter College, this was part of the school and my naivety in – on not even really knowing this. Lack of due diligence I suppose. Anyway, that was – that was culturally a lot of fun, because you know what I found was that the Welsh culture there was very strong, I mean you know, Welsh was spoken in the – in the junior common room by a number of avid – I suppose Welsh separatists, the sons of – the sons of Glen Dure [ph] and so I was tolerated and – and treated as the – as the token West Countryman because there was intense rivalry between Jesus and Exeter College which is on the other side of the road, of Toll Street [ph]. So sometimes I almost wondered if they thought that I was a – a West Country spy in there, in the various rivalries that went on.

[10:33]

41 Chris Rapley Page 42 C1379/40 Track 2

So then to the tutorial system, my – my senior tutor in my first year was actually a very accomplished mathematician, applied mathematician called Claude Hurst who looked about 150 years old but had a shock of – of pure white hair, big shock of white hair which over the left hand side was stained deep brown and yellow because he gave – he spent his entire life with a cigarette smouldering in his lips [both laugh], including tutorials, he used to make your eyes sting. But Claude was very wise, very kind of Oxfordian character and recognised that I had been concerned about my maths and so took a lot of trouble to make sure that in tutorials that my maths was kept up to scratch.

[11:24]

And during the first year the – you know, the lectures were pretty good, I found them pretty interesting. There were lots of other things to do, learning how to punt and, you know, all the things that you do as a – as a kind of liberated undergraduate in a – in a new and interesting city with lots of new and interesting friends. I did take up shooting immediately, I think I mentioned before that I had put a lot of effort into shooting at school and been quite successful at it. And, er, initially, you know, a kind of million cowboys signed up for the rifle club but within the first few weeks the numbers exponentially dropped and there was a hardcore of us left. And I can’t remember how quickly it was before I was seen both as a prospect and then incorporated into the team fairly quickly, and part of that story then goes on that I got, I think it was four half blues shooting against Cambridge, three of – three of them for – actually maybe it was more, I must have been in the prone 2 2 team [ph] at least twice. In fact I captained it and we beat Cambridge in my last year in the – and the match took place in the range, the London Transport range, which is alongside the platforms in … which tube station, the one – Baker Street tube station. Quite funny to arrive by coach and with rifles slung over shoulders disappear down the escalators amongst the thronging crowds, something that wouldn’t be allowed these days. Also the shooting and kneeling – standing and kneeling match which I was also a member of the team once was held in the range at the Bank of England. A and again walking up to the Bank of England, knocking on the door and the little thing slides back,

42 Chris Rapley Page 43 C1379/40 Track 2 somebody peers out and there’s a bunch of eight armed men outside and they say, ‘Oh yes, come on in,’ was good fun, made a big impression.

[13:24]

So anyway, back to the – back to the lectures. The lectures were good but probably one of the best was a guy, I’m afraid name I don’t remember, who was a mathematician and gave us a lot of our basic mathematical lecturing [laughs] and he was so so shy that he couldn’t face the audience. And so he used to stand facing the board writing on the board and just speaking over his left hand shoulder which meant – he spoke quite quietly as well, the only people who could hear him were people cramped in – crammed in the front left hand row. And so about eighty per cent of those who should have been attending gave up and went off and did other things, but there was a loyal group of us who used to crush into the left hand corner and listen to him [laughs]. And he was good, he provided a lot of very basic stuff that was very valuable. There was a – at the back of the lecture theatre there was an old wooden classical lecture theatre with chalkboards and so on, at the back there was a spiral staircase so that those who wanted to sneak out could do so, but one of the steps we think was deliberately loose so that as you went down it it would clank very loudly, revealing the fact that you were on your way out [both laugh]. Second year, oh what – now second year one of my tutors was Sir John Houghton, well he wasn’t Sir John then but became director of the Met Office and has one way or another his – my career has sort of intertwined with things that he’s done ever since. And he taught – or attempted to teach nuclear physics and atomic physics and so on and that was okay. But in the second year I had been so looking forward to hearing Professor Bleaney, when I was at school one of my school prizes was a book called Electricity and Magnetism by Bleaney and Bleaney, him and his wife, and it was a radical departure from classical science books at the time in that it was – it had a beautiful typeset, nice quality paper. I’ve even got it here probably, it’s up there somewhere I expect, where is it? I can find it in a second, but it – if we don’t become disconnected let me see if I can see it, it’ll be along at the end, yeah, sorry I’m going to –

That’s alright.

43 Chris Rapley Page 44 C1379/40 Track 2

Okay, yes here it is, let me find it [reaching for book]. So there is Bleaney and Bleaney which I won as a school prize in the sixth form in 1964, ’65.

Thank you.

But it was – it was a revelation in the sense that it wasn’t – it – you can see it’s got beautiful diagrams, it’s nicely laid out, it’s written with good English in a way that is really understandable so – and electromagnetism isn’t a straightforward subject, it’s a very important subject for a physicist. And it was just a wonderful book to read and of course it was part of our lecture courses at Oxford. And so I’d been so looking forward to hearing Mr Bleaney, Professor Bleaney, and I couldn’t believe it in the first lecture, oh God I hope his descendants will forgive me [laughs], he was the most boring person you could ever have imagined, and – and I struggled to go to two or three of his lectures and in the end I felt I just couldn’t – it was just so dreadfully dull. And I suppose it was such a disappointment having had such high expectations and anticipations from having read his book. So I kind of ducked out of those and I can’t remember how I managed to gather the material together, partly from the book and there was one other lecturer who covered similar material who was very good. Anyway that became part of a pattern and I frankly began to … not really lose interest but be a bit disappointed in physics, just found it, you know, a bit of a grind. So I let this be known to Claude Hurst who said, ‘Aha, well I’ll see if I can – I’ll have a little bit of a think about this,’ and my next tutorial he said, ‘I’ve arranged something for you,’ and this was remember in the days when mix and match courses at university were unheard of, you know, you went and you did a particular set of lectures and there really was – until you got to your third year there really wasn’t much by way of options, he said, ‘I’ve arranged for a young ex-student of mine, a young lady called Madge Adam to give you some lec,’ or, ‘How would you like it to go along to these lectures by Madge Adam on astronomy and they would be in the observatory. So this is a sort of hallowed place where undergraduates didn’t normally go and – and it’s quite exciting to think, in those days it was a very male dominated business physics and so on, so the fact that we were going to be taught by this bright young thing. Well anyway when we saw Madge Adam – I didn’t know how old she was then [laughs]

44 Chris Rapley Page 45 C1379/40 Track 2 but she was grey haired and bent, which just confirmed the view that Claude must be 150 years old which is what he looked. Anyway, Madge gave us a course on optical astronomy, she didn’t know anything about radio astronomy other than the fact that it existed, this new fangled stuff, but she gave us a wonderful course on optical astronomy. And there were five of us and there was – was it Geraldine, anyway, one of them married Simon and then I’m trying to think of his second name, it’ll come back in a second, but anyway I had been sort of introduced into part of the astronomical mafia that continued on through their careers, and still involved in part of their careers, Simon is at Cambridge and I’ll think of his second name in a second so I always have this problem with people’s names. So I found – one of my friends at school had been very interested in astronomy, it wasn’t included in the curriculum so he’d done it all – he’d bought himself a load of books, even bought a little telescope and I’d always been kind of envious that he knew about these interesting things in astronomy but I’d never put the effort in myself to finding out about anything. I think I got The Observers Book of Astronomy and that’s about as far as I’d got. So when we took the exam at the end of the year I got 140 per cent because you only had to answer five out of seven questions but I answered all of them perfectly because I had been so interested in it, and I suppose it can’t have been that difficult but I found it really fascinating. So then when I got to my third year I signed up for an astrophysics course where there was an option, but that didn’t work out, I didn’t quite – there was something to do with – there was a younger lecturer, I’m sure he was absolutely brilliant but somehow or another I’d – didn’t really connect with him and I found what he was doing a bit obscure and difficult and decided that I would concentrate on my – on the main sort of core subjects to get my degree. Which is what I did and remember at the time I was already trying to juggle three evenings a week and probably quite a bit of the weekend shooting because if you – the full-bore shooting was either done out at Otmore which is a range, you know, ten miles away from Oxford, or down at Bisley which is a good distance away. That was fun because the people in the rifle club – I wasn’t at rich, I only had a Honda 50 to wander round Oxford on, but they had – they had Mini Coopers and one of them had a Railton Special, a straight eight 1930s, you know, equivalent of a Bentley I suppose and so we used to whiz off down to Bisley on those. And, you know, balancing those involvements plus my photography, I was a photojournalist for Cherwell ‘cause that

45 Chris Rapley Page 46 C1379/40 Track 2 gave me free access to their darkrooms and supplies, although I could use the darkroom in the labs as well. And I did some photographs for somebody who was producing an opera and a play at the playhouse and so on. So life was pretty full and – and in the end balancing, you know, work lifestyle balance was something that was important to get right in order to get a degree out at the end of it.

[21:59]

Could you say more about Madge Adam, and given that she is a kind of female pioneer in a male dominated subject, to what extent it drew comment at the time or – or to what extent it actually had an effect at the time?

In her field I don’t think it was seen as – as quite so odd, Professor Blackwell who ran the astronomy – the observatory there and was very obsessive about his solar furnace, he was a solar physicist and he was constantly trying to generate in his furnace spectral lines that he could compare with solar lines and so on, he took an interest in us and it was a privilege because we were permitted into an area which was, you know, very superior, normally not open to undergraduates so that was really nice. Madge was just a really nice person and you know quiet, gentle, clear in what she presented, I think once we had – I think it was more the overall package of the privilege rather than her being, you know, female particularly. Although when we were – when I was first told of it that sounded interesting because we didn’t have that many – I can’t remember whether we had any other women lecturers, either in maths or physics in our courses, trying to think, I don’t recall them. And certainly in the labs all of the – all of the people who helped in the lab, demonstrators, were male. And that’s interesting, of course there was a – out of the hundred of us that were doing physics in Oxford during my year, there must have been probably eight or ten of that order, maybe a few more women from the various women’s colleges and of course they were a source of interest. But one of them that I got to know a little bit when we were all looking for jobs towards the end of our last year was telling me how depressing it was that as soon as she would walk into the room in – for her interview in major companies that all of us were going to, she said, that the interview boards were always all male would just visibly go, ‘Oh yes, alright,’ and just not take her

46 Chris Rapley Page 47 C1379/40 Track 2 seriously at all. And she got the – well no doubt if you looked it up you’d be able to work out who she is, I won’t give her name but she got the top 2:1 in her year and was interviewed to see if it would be a first, she was the borderline individual in our year so she was, you know, a really good physicist. But I don’t know what happened to her in the end but the last time I saw her she was very dispirited that the – the British industry’s capacity to employ women physicists was about zero at the time. And in fact some of them had been very blunt with her and said, ‘Well you’re just going to get pregnant at some point and all of our investment in you will have been wasted,’ so you know. You know.

And did Madge draw attention to her – or comment on her own novelty?

Not that I remember, no.

And how would you account for this very low number of female students actually taking physics in the first place?

I think it was – I mean we’re talking about, you know, I matriculated, I went there in 1966 and in those days that kind of science was seen as a boys’ subject and I think culturally that was – you know, that was the norm. So as a girl you had to be really interested and worst than that, I – God I may offend lots of people, but the strong suspicion was that the quality of teaching for girls in science you know, that it was a self fulfilling situation in that the quality of science teachers they had weren’t as good as the quality of science teachers that we had as boys. And it goes back to Alan Bright and Peter Rouse who was my physics teacher during the sort of fifth and sixth for years, Mr McGee had been at a lower level in the school. These were very very keen to emphasise the practical side of science, very keen indeed, and I just don’t think that the lab facilities and so on in the girls’ schools were anything like they were in, you know, for us. So I think they were suffering a disadvantage all the way through.

How did you get that impression about the quality of the laboratory facilities in the girls’ school?

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Well I used to – I mean obviously I had girlfriends, you know, on and off at the time and if we – I mean I don’t remember having explicit conversations about, you know, science, but the impression that one had was that science wasn’t dealt with in the same way in the girls’ schools as it was in the – or certainly at King Edwards.

[27:18]

Now over the three years of – of studying physics at Oxford, are there key concepts or images or ideas that – I know you – you’ve said that at one stage you found – you were beginning to find it rather dry and routine, but at this level you’d done physics before, but at this level were there particular concepts or ideas or images that were –

I think the part of it that I enjoyed most still was the experimental side, and I put a lot of effort into that and I was really cross with myself, I went – I had a purge, you know, ten, twenty years later on and I had kept all of my lab books and I decided to throw them all away, and I really regret that. Although quite what I would have done with them I don’t know, but I put a lot – I had a good – a practical partner I called Alan and – and we worked well together. And, erm, there was a slight resentment that the other – my friends who were doing other subjects, you know, could lie in bed a lot longer than we could and take the afternoons off and so on, when we were sweating away in the lab three days, three afternoons a week. But actually I really enjoyed the lab work. Yes, and in [laughs] lab work there was the beginnings – we dealt with exciting things like lasers and so on which most people didn’t have access to, or hadn’t even seen in those days, but I remember [laughs] there was an electronics experiment that we did where we had to characterise a field effect transistor, I mean characterising thermionic valves was something you did, you know, you changed the various voltages and plot, you know, how the thing responds and so on, so this particular experiment was to do something that was quite a classic and quite – something that I think we had probably done at school. But with a field effect transistor which was this new amazing solid state device that was kind of symbolic of the opening up of a whole new age of electronics. And I spent an hour or so trying to plot the – the various characteristics of this thing, they made absolutely no sense

48 Chris Rapley Page 49 C1379/40 Track 2 whatsoever. The device itself was in a little cast box and there were some connectors on the outside that you connected to it. And anyway the professor of electrical engineering whose name I can’t remember, was Dennis Shaw [ph], something like that maybe, turned up because it was a new experiment and he wanted to see how it was going, and he looked at our plots and he said, ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear,’ [laughs] and he said, ‘I know what’s wrong with this.’ And he picked up the box [laughs] and banged it on the table and said, ‘Try it now,’ and we tried it now and all of a sudden it started to make sense, it was a dry joint, the solder joint was – you know, sometimes when you solder pieces of – a copper leg onto something you actually get a crystalline bifurcation so that you don’t actually – it looks like it should conduct but it’s not actually conducting. And so one of the – one of the [laughs] legs had a dry joint. But the idea that you take a piece of extraordinary high tech wonderful technology, you bang it on the desk to make it work made a big impression on me [laughs], I’ve banged a lot of things since remembering that trick and it’s often [laughs] helped a lot.

[30:43]

Are there other experiments that you remember at – to – to give us a sense of what was involved practically in carrying out one of these afternoon experiments?

Oh well, actually the experiment I probably remember best of all was the – the one that we had to take as an entry qualification to get into Jesus College in the first place and so we all rolled up, you know, from our schools and rolled into the – into the Clarendon Lab and we had – we were each given a little card – like a shoebox and the shoebox contained a piece of red gel, a piece of green gel, you know, a filter, some bits of plasticine, a little stick and then it was either two or three pieces of broken record, one of which was obviously a 33, one was a 78 and one was a 45. And we were told the grid spacing of one of the pieces of record and then we were – the instruction was using the apparatus that you’ve been provided and nothing more, calculate – or estab and measure [ph] the wavelength of green and red light and then knowing that measure the grid spacing of the other two pieces of record [laughs]. So you used it as a – you know, you interfered the light off it and you had – oh you had some little optical sighting piece and so on as well, I can’t remember all the bits and

49 Chris Rapley Page 50 C1379/40 Track 2 pieces, I hadn’t thought about it until we’ve just started discussing it now. And my approach to that was to lay the whole thing out in the workbook first, I knew exactly what method I was going to use and I knew exactly what process I was going to do but I was worried that I wouldn’t get it all done in time, and indeed I didn’t. But I had completed enough of it, I had in fact estimated what the wavelengths of red and green light were and I had I think managed to take the – take the readings but not calculate the pitch of the – of one of the other pieces or maybe both of them. And I remember Claude Hurst who I didn’t really know was necessarily going to be my teacher but I remember him coming around and asking me what I was doing and why I had approached it in a certain way. And he – he made no comment at the time but we then had an interview afterwards and he said well he thought that – he said it was a pity that I’d not gone on a bit faster, he said, I was being too laborious in I take too many measurements, you know, an unnecessary number of measurements and therefore had been a bit slower at making progress, but that by showing what my methodology was going to be and what I would have completed that was a good approach because they then could see that, you know, it was going to work. If I’d have had a little bit more time I could have done it. So I remember that vividly because one of the guys [laughs] who I’d got to know I suppose in the pub the night before was saying – you know, we were all talking about it afterwards saying, ‘How did you get on?’ and he’s saying, ‘Oh I got on fine, I got all the right answers, I finished it,’ and I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, you know, how did you finish it, you know, I was still struggling to work through this,’ and he said, ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘I knew what the – I know what those – what the wavelength of that red gel and green gel is so I didn’t bother to measure those, I said I did but I just wrote them in,’ [laughs]. And I thought, oh you know, I’m not sure that’s a very smart strategy and I have to say I never saw him again so [both laugh] – so it proved. But at the interview which had John Houghton and Claude and I suppose a couple of the other tutors at – at Oxford, I remember that vividly, they – you know, they asked all sorts of things, really pushing the limits of, you know, what I had been taught and what I knew and at one point they said to me, ‘Would you describe,’ – we were talking about kinetic theory of gases and they said, ‘Would you describe the molecules of a gas as mathematical points?’ So I – you know, at that time, I mean goodness, you know, it was a sophisticated question so I didn’t really have – I couldn’t figure out what, you know, what they were after

50 Chris Rapley Page 51 C1379/40 Track 2 really and I certainly didn’t know so I said, ‘Well yes,’ and I saw their reaction, so I said, ‘Well no,’ [both laugh] and they said, ‘Oh, oh, well what made you change your mind?’ and I said, ‘Well your reaction, obviously it was the wrong answer.’ And Claude in his wonderful dry way, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t be influenced by anything that we might do,’ but we had a bit [both laugh] – you know, that kind of broke the ice, they all thought that was quite funny actually so yeah it went well.

[35:38]

Would you be able to describe a couple of the spacers that you’ve mentioned, firstly the Clarendon Lab as you remember it at the time that you were there?

Well it was classic, it was something I was very familiar with but bigger and better, mahogany and brass but with lots and lots of really exciting equipment in it, I mean oscilloscopes and I mean the schools one had – there was a certain set of equipment that one had, the most sophisticated piece of equipment that we had in the physics lab was a Millikan’s experiment which had been purchased where you drop little oil drops vertically and because they get charged you have a couple of plates you put an electric field on and you can suspend these oil drops. I can’t remember whether you strobe them or not, it’s a long time since I did it. But I remember that as a sixth former being able to measure the charge of an electron through that experiment was you know, god at the end – you know, you went home at the end of the day, saying, ‘Christ, you know, I have actually measured and got roughly the right answer,’ well the right answer within the aero bars, of the charge on electron. There was a sort of extraordinary feeling of accomplishment to do that and it was the elegance of the experiment, I mean it’s always seen as a hugely elegant and wonderful inspiring experiment. But clearly the kit that they had in the Clarendon Lab was far more spectacular and it was just great fun, you know, it was just exciting to go along and do these experiments. Honestly I’m struggling to remember what we were doing, funnily enough I think I mentioned I’m digitising a whole load of photographs and I found a strip of black and white film from those days where I’d taken a couple of pictures in the Clarendon Lab of one of the pieces of apparatus that we were using, which was a whole load of glass vacuum apparatus with mercury in it. I honestly can’t remember

51 Chris Rapley Page 52 C1379/40 Track 2 what the purpose of the experiment was, you know, evacuating some stuff and doing something or other, but anyway I actually have a picture of that which I came across just the other weekend. We did work with lasers, I mean we did all the usual stuff, you know, sound, electricity, magnetism, heat, you know, all of that stuff, it’s a long time ago, I don’t remember the details now. Oh but actually one of the features was some of our lectures were in the – goodness, actually in the – you went through the museum, trying to remember, the Pitt Rivers Museum, there’s a – was a lecture theatre up on the first floor there and so one would have to queue waiting for the previous lecture to finish, and it was slightly bizarre because on the steps going up on the left there was a little glass cabinet I think set into the wall I think with the remains of the last great auk [both laugh]. So I always remember thinking that as a physicist you know staring at this great auk that was quite whimsical and funny, you know, yeah, odd things.

The kind of secret space that you were allowed into as an undergraduate, the observatory, could you describe that?

Ah yes, well now that – there I do – ‘cause of course I took a set – did a series of experiments there as well including setting up a telescope and getting its mounts set so that it was aligned with the earth’s rotational axis and so on and actually doing – observing the night sky. So that’s where I began to find my way around the night sky ‘cause up until then, you know, I couldn’t have told you one constellation from another. It was just that – and they had a nice library in there which they allowed us to use, er, learned about spherical trigonometry which was wonderful because there’s a guy called Smart, again I’ve got that book, a wonderful book which allowed you to do all sorts of things which had practically, you know, you could calculate the great circle distance on the earth from one place to another and that was a bit of mathematics which is all sine and cosine transforms which I just found really easy to understand. And I was really quite good at, you know sort of figuring out areas and sides of triangles on a – on a spherical surface rather than on a – on a flat surface. So it was a huge boost, very smart of Claude to have done that ‘cause it completely revived my interest and enthusiasm in things.

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What did the place – the observatory look like, I mean –

Ah, I’m struggling to remember, I mean it was a – I think it was a one storey building with a dome on top and probably a heliostat [ph], one of these things, this is a mirror that rotates round to reflect the light from the sun down into an observing system which Professor Blackwell was using, and others no doubt, in the – in the observatory. It – that’s about all I can remember of it, it was slightly more modern than the Clarendon itself [laughs].

[40:40]

And could you just explain for the – for the non expert, what’s – what is involved in altering the mounts so that you could align –

Well what you want is the axis of rotation of the telescope to be aligned with the earth’s rotation axis so that you can then set a clock. So that if you – if you’re observing or taking a photograph of a particular star or astronomical object that the telescope will rotate so as to counter the earth’s rotation. Now obviously if the two axes aren’t aligned then it’ll skew off and, you know, I haven’t thought about it for, you know, fifty years so I can’t remember quite how I went about doing it [laughs]. One of the things that you certainly had to start by doing was finding the horizontal, I seem to remember we used – I think there was a mercury bath where you looked at the reflection of maybe the sun’s image in the surface of the mercury to find out where horizontal was. It – I don’t recall but I recall that it was a slightly involved business, but once you got it set up it was terrific because all you then had to do was set this little clock going, mechanical drive which just drove the telescope round and whatever you had pointed the telescope at remained perfectly centred in the – in the crosshairs of the sighting telescope.

Thank you.

Not that Oxford was a particularly wonderful place to be doing astronomy ‘cause it was cloudy and the atmosphere is a bit – a bit messy. Oh yes, and they had built the

53 Chris Rapley Page 54 C1379/40 Track 2 chemistry building which was at – probably six storeys high or – and so that that cut off a particular segment [laughs] of the sky and if one was interested in trying to have a close look at the young lady technicians in there you couldn’t focus the telescope on them ‘cause they were too close, so I remember that being [laughs] utterly disappointing [laughs].

[43:24]

Who were the – do you remember anything of the group of people who you were allowed into this world with, a fellow under –

Not really, I mean the other – all the other five – the other four people on the course were from other colleges and I did – you know, I got to know them a little bit, but remember this was only one lecture a week or maybe it was two lectures a week out of a whole set so we didn’t strike up any great friendships or anything like that. I had a very close group of friends who – in the college who I spent most of my time with.

Could you tell me something of relations with your parents while you were studying in Oxford for three years?

Well they used to, you know, rattle – I mean I think they were very proud and they used to rattle up there in the car to dump me off at the beginning of each term, after – at some point, not immediately, probably in my second year when I moved out of college ‘cause in my first year I was an exhibitioner, so I had guaranteed rooms in college or a guaranteed room in college for my first year but I had to move out in my second and third year. And one of my friends and I found some digs down the Iffley Road, he had a car which he used to get up and he [laughs] – he would drive the whatever it is, two miles in one and a half miles from where we were, and then spent an hour spirally slowly outwards to find a parking space and usually end up about the same distance out from the middle of the city but on some other point of the compass. So that all seemed a bit pointless to me and I couldn’t afford a car anyway so I got a Honda 50 and that was – I had a bike but the bike got stolen and then so I got my Honda 50 so that was the way I got around. Erm, yeah, so not – missed the question.

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I was sort of thinking about the development of the relationship with your parents while you were still at –

Oh the parents, oh yes.

While you were studying?

Oh yes, no well the point of that part of the story was that they would drive up from Bath with my stuff and once I got the Honda 50 going I wound ride up from Bath on my Honda 50 which wasn’t the speediest of – of vehicles and it’s quite a, you know, I don’t know how far it is, what forty, fifty miles from Bath to Oxford, so it’s quite a trek on a Honda 50. But they always used to set out, you know, half an hour or a bit after me but they never beat me which is always [laughs] a source of some pride. And when I was back in the – in the holidays I was very short of money, so I wanted to get for example a new rifle, you know, my own rifle rather than use one of the club rifles so I spent six weeks working as a labourer on the building site of this – of Bath University, I helped build the original physics department so I know a lot about that, you know, pretty shoddy set of builders [both laugh]. Could never build a lift shaft straight so none of the lifts would ever work properly. But I earned enough money to buy myself a really good BSA Mark III rifle which I thought was wonderful and my father drove me over to Bristol, there was a place up new the Red House and that sold rifles and ammunition and so on and so he helped me buy that, it was very – well I mean he didn’t help me financially, I earnt the money but he took me over there and he got that. And we used to go off on holidays, they – we went to Dartmoor and stayed in, you know, a hotel there and so on, so we got on alright, yeah.

[46:33]

And are there any – were there any relationships at Oxford that become significant in terms of your personal life history?

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Well I mean, yeah, I mean I met my wife there in my second year and yeah so that was quite important [laughs].

Your wife was – what was your wife studying while?

She was – she was actually training as a nurse, she had come from South America, from Guiana, or what used to be British Guiana, and I met her in the post office. She was ahead of me while queuing to buy some stamps or she was, I don’t know, going to send a parcel somewhere and a close friend of mine from the rifle club who also lived in Bath and we got on very well together, had invited me to the Air Squadron’s Halloween party. Halloween was not such an event in those days, I mean culturally it was a very American thing so it was a bit odd Halloween party, strange time of the year. And I was looking for somebody to take so I invited her to go to the party and thereby hangs a long story [laughs].

[47:40]

Do we have time to just discuss the –

Yeah.

The beginnings of the next stage which was the move from degree to masters, that transition?

Yes. Yes, because Norma was still you know finishing her studies in Oxford I sort of toyed with the idea of – I wasn’t sure what quality of degree I was going to get and I thought it was unlikely I’d put – I have to say I hadn’t really put the effort in to get a first because I’d been doing so much with the shooting and so on. And so it looked to me like it was going to be difficult to do a PhD at Oxford even if I wanted to but I’d actually decided I really didn’t want to, there was something – I enjoyed my three years at Oxford but I wanted to get out. My close friend Mark in the engineering department definitely wanted to stay and he did and he did a PhD there and another friend of mine did a mathematics PhD there. But because I had got to know quite a

56 Chris Rapley Page 57 C1379/40 Track 2 few of the PhD level people through the rifle club I’d seen a sort of strange dissoluteness that I didn’t like about Oxford, people kind of went native in a very strange way there and I wanted something a bit fresher, I wanted to go off and do something else. I mean I guess being part of my character, you know, to not – you know, in my subsequent career, you know, I’ve not tended to hang around in one place for too long, and I felt I’d had enough of Oxford and I wanted to go off and do something else. So first of all I looked at what employment there might be in the area and actually there wasn’t anything that was really worth doing, I went to – there was some advertising agency, I think it’s still there and I went – I actually had an interview there and the – not to put too fine a point on it, these slick guys in sharp suits looked shifty from the moment that I arrived there [laughs] and it seemed to me that culturally this was not going to work, although they did offer me a job but I turned it down. So I tried a few things, I applied for an astronomy PhD at Sussex, Sir Roger Taylor and somebody else interviewed me there. And they really caught me out, it was so stupid, I went there really not prepared, when I think back I go hot and cold, goodness knows what I thought they were going to do, but they gave me an extremely technical interview, you know, they asked me to do something which I think they felt was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, that was come up with the equation of hydrostatic balance for a star, which in – in retrospect is not difficult to do but I remember being caught on the back foot and really making a hash of it, so – so they politely declined my offer of my presence and support. I went to Jodrell Bank, they were advertised for MSc students and I got an offer. I went to Rolls Royce in Derby and they were taking in undergraduates to work on the – well people – post – postgraduates to work on the RB211, which a year later, you know, went bust and collapsed. And I was offered a job – oh and that was exactly the opposite of the Sussex interview, I went there and there were two guys and it’s the best interview I’ve ever had in my life, I remember it vividly. I’ve no idea what their names were but they said to me, ‘Ah, you know, so you’re a physicist, you know that we’re switching over to these, you know, big turbo fan engines, you know, why do you think we’re going to for turbo fan engines rather than small aperture shrieky old jets?’ So I said, ‘I’ve no idea,’ so they said, ‘Well you’re a physicist, let’s start from first principles and work it out,’ so with a very pleasant supportive atmosphere, which was very different from the one I found with Roger and whoever was with him in the Sussex

57 Chris Rapley Page 58 C1379/40 Track 2 one, which was a bit adversarial, although maybe they were just frustrated, this one was, well it was a series of little nudges, ‘Well, you know, what do you think so and so does?’ and we went from nothing in forty minutes to the point where I’d written down all of the, you know, equations, basic equations, that demonstrated that was a good idea, why – you know, why that would be the direction that you would go in, just based on momentum transfer and energy inputs and so on. So they offered me the job because obviously they judged from what they had seen that I was able to do that and I found on the train going back that I’d really learned something and I quite liked it. I didn’t think much of Derby and so that featured in my thinking. And then the third interview I had was with Kodak, and they were looking, it must have been – they must have had somewhere in North London, I can’t remember quite where it was but they were wanting to put together a – what they called a Tiger Team, a group of about five or six, you know, young post grads, they were looking for a physicist, a chemist, or maybe a couple of physicists, chemist, engineer and so on, and the idea was that this would be a team that would work to senior management so it was – it was very nice, you know, it was you had direct input at the highest level in the company, but what your job was was to go anywhere in the Kodak operation in the UK and possibly abroad, but to troubleshoot issues so, you know, they would have some problem with a process, you guys would be sent in to kind of figure out, you know, what the problem was and come up with some solutions. In practice I’ve no idea what the locals would have felt about this team coming in and wandering all over their patch, probably criticising them so it might not have worked, but it sounded very exciting and I was very attracted to it, not the least because of my keen interest in photography, it would have given me, you know, it would have supported that no doubt. Anyway on – so I had those three offers and actually there was no competition really, the Jodrell thing – I mean Jodrell in those days had such a rep – it was iconic, Sir Bernard Lovell was iconic, he’s the only – I think I’ve said to many people, ‘He’s the only person that was reg – that I’ve ever known, only scientist in the UK that’s been regularly lampooned in Private Eye ,’ he was a national institution. And of course I had had – I’m not sure I mentioned this but my maths master at school had a close friend on the physics faculty in Manchester University who had a close friend in the computing department where the Atlas computer was being run and they had an arrangement whereby a couple of school kids, you know, sixteen, seventeen year olds

58 Chris Rapley Page 59 C1379/40 Track 2 would be taken on for a few weeks in the summer when the computer operators were off on their holidays, so you were trained to run the programmes. And so I’d already been to Manchester and quite liked it, you know, it had a lot of atmosphere, it’s very different from Bath, you know, very industrial, we were on – to get to the university we had to walk through Moss Side which was a frightening experience in those days, probably still is but policemen went round in threes on horseback with big truncheons to protect themselves, so that was part of a good experience. But whilst I was there some of the big programmes I had had to run and transmit back and forward on the telephones lines were the – Jodrell Banks lunar radar, yes, lunar radar and Venus radar measurements where they synthesised imagery of the moon’s surface and Venus’ surface by using very powerful radars at the Jodrell Bank site. So there was a kind of association that made it kind of inevitable that I would go there. And I had a – it was a year with half taught lectures and then half a project, half the year project to get your MSc, and it was the most intensive bit and extraordinary bit of technical and scientific training I’ve had in my life, I learned more there faster and more thoroughly than anywhere else in my career. It’s extraordinary from that point of view, but at the same time I was quite unhappy there because I felt stifled, you could only choose your projects from a list that were prescribed, whereas I had my own, you know, I had some ideas of my own. And I felt that for the first time in my life, up until then, however much one behaved as a child one was treated as – as an adult, both at my school and at Oxford, there I felt it was a bit the other way around, however much you tried to act as an adult you were kind of treated as a child at the bottom of the heap and it led to kind of childish frustrations and behaviour and so on. So although they offered me the chance to stay on, although not to do a PhD because Bernard Lovell said if you were taken on as a postgraduate RA you could not then do a PhD because you were accepting money as opposed to a grant, I had decided I wanted to leave at the end of that year anyway. So I had a – had a great time there, we’d got married in the meantime so Norma was living with me there, we used to go out on my motorbike by that time from Alderley Edge to the site, because they had the only colour television in the area and we used to watch Star Trek on it, everybody used to pile in to watch Star Trek on whatever night that was. So there were lots of wonderful things, wonderful aspects of that year there but I knew I wanted to get out at the end of it. And I suspect that we ought to move onto that next time, I –

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[End of Track 2]

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Track 3

Could you just give a description of the work that you did as a schoolboy on the Atlas computer?

Oh gosh, alright let me think back to that. Funnily enough I just digitised some photographs that I found of that from a long time ago so – and I was amazed at how small the control console of the Atlas was, I remembered it being much more impressive. Well we were operators, we – it was summertime and to allow the normal operators the opportunity to go off and have a bit of holiday I suppose it was a Clegg- like internship [ph] actually, I’m sure it did us a great deal of good. And we had to feed – I think they had just moved from five hole punch tape to the much more exciting and splendid for us a modern seven hole punch tape, and we had to feed various programs into the computer, which just meant putting one of these reels on and feeding the tape through some reader head and onto another spool and setting it going. But also because Jodrell Bank was much involved and they were of course off – you know, thirty miles off site and it was at the time that they were doing their lunar radar mapping work which was very exciting at the time, and so they would send code, I suppose data, up to the telephone line and we would have – we would receive a telephone call, a scheduled telephone call, I think at ten o’clock or something in the morning, and we would have to call the operator and ask them to take the pips off the line ‘cause otherwise every three minutes there were parity errors on the tape. And there was a reader down at Jodrell Bank that would read an enormous – I mean probably a foot diameter reel of paper tape and that would very slowly, goodness knows what the bit rate was, I dread to think, that would be copied and punched by a reader that was attached to the phone on a sort of modem. And when we’d – and it would take an hour, an hour and a half I seem to remember for it to come through, and so once one had got this enormous reel of tape then of course that was an extremely valuable item [laughs] ‘cause it just cost a lot of time and effort and money to transmit. And one would run it on the – on the Atlas, you know, read it into the Atlas and then when the job was finished it would print out an equivalently large spool of output tape and you would run the stuff back down to Jodrell. I only forgot to get the pips taken off on one occasion and we only had to redo things once [laughs]. Now

61 Chris Rapley Page 62 C1379/40 Track 3 there was an innovative new – ‘cause the Atlas was constantly being worked on, it was an experimental machine and for that reason it kept falling over, you know, it wasn’t – and because the university accounts and all sorts of other things are on it that’s a bit of a disaster so there was a – did I mention this last time, Chinese textile – some Chinese textile merchant? Well there’s some peculiar story and I may not be remembering it exactly right but there was a guy who I remember being called Yow Chan [ph], I think that was his name, and he had come over to Lancashire to look at the textile industry because the – his father was running some big textile company back in China and they wanted to pick up some – some tips on how to do it effectively. And somehow or another the story went that in a pub he met the designers and programmers for the Atlas control module, you know, the interface, using the administrators interface and this is a – I have to say that there seemed to be a correlation at the time, I don’t know if it still exists between computer programmers and very heavy drinkers in – in the pubs round about the university. So somehow they got to know this chap and somehow he turned out to be a mathematical genius or a design genius and somehow he got involved in designing the control module for the Atlas computer. So whenever the computer came to a grinding halt with a parity error or some infinite loop or something like that there was a – there were a few moments of horror while the operator on duty, you know, tried to get the thing to restart and remember, you know, the accounts and all of these other things were on there so if – if the computer finally went down and couldn’t be restarted it was a major disaster. So if they were really stuck they would call for Yow Chan [ph] and he would – he would, you know, sort of sashay in through the doors and have a look at the pattern of lights and poke a few of those great big plastic buttons that they used to have, to see if he could get it going again and every so often he’d get the whole thing up and running, there’d be a little round of applause and he would wander off back to his office. Sometimes he couldn’t and then they had to go through the restart. I do also remember that they were running experiments in speech synthesis at the time, so they were actually trying to synthesise speech and I remember this was, what did I say, it was ’62, ’63, something like that. And I know there was one occasion where all of the senior professors and heads of department, or heads of the computing department I suppose, were brought in to hear the computer speak some words. And two things happened, firstly the words it spoke were completely [laughs] unintelligible, they

62 Chris Rapley Page 63 C1379/40 Track 3 were just sort of strangulated noise and as it did so all the fire alarms went off because one of the professors was smoking his pipe [laughs] and the – and the smoke sensors detected it so it was all very exciting. But I was saying that it was an innovative, you know, there was never a dull moment, they had just produced an extremely fast seven hole punch, output punch, so you know, most of them kind of chuntered away and you sat forever waiting for the things to punch out these reels of tape. But there was one that streamed stuff out at extremely high speed, but the take-up reel would often jam so reams and reams of tape would be showering out of this thing and there was an emergency offset, you know, cut out button to stop it doing this but it was very blood stained because it – the emergency cut-out button, the red button was just where the tape swept out, kind of snaking up and down, and you know how you can get very nasty cuts from paper, particularly when it’s running at very high speed and it’s quite good quality paper, so those who tried to hit the emergency stop button did so at risk of losing fingers and thumbs and arms and so on. So yeah, anyway, so what we were doing, we were doing that, but we were – because we were both young physicists, going, you know, were we doing A level, maybe we were just working up to S level, I can’t remember quite exactly where it fell but it was either A level or S level physics, Phil Whitemore [ph] and myself, my school colleague and I who were doing this together. We were hijacked pretty much soon after we got there and asked to run through the first year kind of physics electronics practical course to test out the new experiments that the lecturer demonstrator had put together, I don’t recall his name. And in fact I’ve found a few of these rather faded old black and white and scratched black and white photographs of that and looking back I’m kind of horrified that [laughs] we were measuring the characteristics of triodes and – you know, with apparatus that looks like it was out of the arc. But I do remember that one of the experiments I did was a x-ray diffraction experiment which is using one of the Bragg’s goniometers [ph], so there was a nice little bit of history with that. So that was really it, I think we were there for two or three weeks and it was quite a – we had to walk through Moss Side to get back to the accommodation which was in Alexander Park, which is all very exciting. We got to know these heavy beer drinking computer programmers and I remember sitting with an ever increasing snaking line of – of pints of beer which there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to handle [laughs]

63 Chris Rapley Page 64 C1379/40 Track 3 and stumbling back, how I got home I’m not quite sure. But yeah it was very exciting.

And do you remember who the programmers were?

Gosh, I don’t, but the guy who was – seemed to be shift master and in charge appears in a couple of these photographs, so it might be possible that we can track him down and see who he was.

[08:42]

Thank you. Now we’d got last time to the MSc in radio astronomy which you started in 1970, is that right?

Yes, let me get – no ’69, it would be October ’69.

’69, as soon as you graduated, yeah.

Yes, exactly.

And first of all I wonder whether you could describe Jodrell Bank itself at that time as a place?

Yes, well it was a hugely exciting place to be. Erm, it had extremely good people in it, and they put a lot of effort into lecturing us in the – because the MSc was half by coursework and then half by a project, so for the first – up until probably the February or so I suppose we were doing lectures, and of course very exciting time ‘cause pulsars had just been discovered, the radio continuum surveys were being done, you know, quasars were trying to be understood and so on. And we – and they had some top notch people there, they had Rod Davies [ph] who I think later became director who was, you know, world expert on neutral hydrogen mapping, they had Glyn Haslam [ph] who had worked with Quigley [ph] on the radio continuum mapping of the sky which I got very interested in. A guy called Dennis Walsh [ph] ran the course

64 Chris Rapley Page 65 C1379/40 Track 3 and who was his sidekick who went off to be the director of the Onsala Radio Observatory, his name will come back in a second. But really all the heavyweights, you know, all of the senior researchers gave us lectures, John Ponsonby [ph] gave us lectures on I think fully transformers [ph], we learned a lot of – we learnt Algol programming and … what else? Well I think we may have done a little bit of FORTRAN but we learned machine code because that’s what they had to work in to drive the telescopes in the equipment. And very exciting it was, I think there were about – somewhere between a dozen and fifteen of us on the course, maybe been a few more, Alfia Pulfury [ph] and – continued and is still around somewhere I’m sure. Rudolf Shunhart [ph] came from the – came from Germany, I got on particularly well with him so it was good, but the one down – and so I learned more from the lecturers in that first six months than I had learned from any others in my career, it was really really good from that point of view. What I found frustrating was that the project work that one was then offered was prescribed, you know, there was a list, you had to pick from it. And I felt a bit stifled by that and I was also frustrated by the fact that it was going to be difficult to stay on and do a PhD there because they only had so many SERC PhD grants and they had taken on a lot of others on their own money on MSc grants. And I have to say there was a bit of confusion, maybe we only heard what we wanted to hear but some of us were quite disappointed to discover that there wasn’t much chance that we could stay on and do a PhD afterwards, even if our results were better than those who’d got PhD grants ‘cause obviously you can see that’d be a bit unfair.

[12:21]

So anyway being a bit rebellious and hot-headed, I decided first of all I wanted to do a project where I had a bit more scope to flourish and so I did a – for the second half of this thing I did a project in cosmic ray air shower work and the idea behind it was that everybody was fascinated and I think they still are to know what the highest energy cosmic rays are that hit the top of the atmosphere, you know, you know, what are – what’s the energy. What – you know, are they protons or you know what is the nature of the – of the particle, but also where does it come from, and so when these very high energy particles hit the top of the atmosphere they cause a – they shatter into

65 Chris Rapley Page 66 C1379/40 Track 3 fragments and cause an extensive air shower to come down through the atmosphere particles. And because they’re travelling at relatively-istic speeds [ph], they’re focused into quite a narrow cone, and so if you try and detect them with particle detectors on the ground you’ve got to have a very dense array of particle detectors, you know, not to miss some of these things that will go through the gaps. But of course it’s quite expensive to lay out particle detectors in a dense array, but at Jodrell there was a dense array and they were detecting particles and that obviously the number of particles of very high energy that fall on – in any particular area, over any particular time period, falls of logarithmically with energy. So you can detect quite easily, I don’t know, ten to the fifteen, ten to the sixteen, ten to the seventeen in the particle showers [ph]. But as you go to ten to the eighteen, ten to the nineteen, ten to the twenty, they get rarer and rarer, so in order to be able to detect one you need a very large collecting area, so you need a very dense – a very large well filled network of particle detectors. So anyway the argument went, well look as these charged particles come down through the atmosphere, in particular the electrons and positrons are separated, they veer apart under the action of the earth’s magnetic field and they radiate in the radio way, radio bands. So this being Jodrell Bank, you know, could we design a radio array that would pick up these things and would it be able to detect them further off axis than the particle detectors could? Because if that was so you could then build a large area array and have fewer detectors in it and so that would be less costly to set up and run and analyse the data and so on. Well – and so this experiment had been run in the Hafren Forest in Wales by Bob Porter and again his name will come back in a second, he will kill me for not remembering his name, I can – while we’re talking I can find out, I’ve got some publications, so – and they couldn’t understand the data, they had expected to get not very many pionec events [ph] and if they were getting thousands of events and interesting, missing the one thing I’m looking for [both laugh]. Oh here it is, no here we are. [Looking through papers]. So they got these thousands of pulses, oh and the way the system worked was that there were for conical unipole antennas, very wide bandwidth and they had to have radio filters to slot out the TV signals and so on, but they – they acted as a passive radar so you had timing circuits that detected when the four corners, when each of the four corners of the array received the signal and you’re then assuming a plain wave, you can work out an azimuth and an altitude angle that the thing must

66 Chris Rapley Page 67 C1379/40 Track 3 have come from, a zenith angle. And so they gave me all of – and it was all recorded on photographic film so it was all a bit – you know, nowadays a bit archaic. But anyway I analysed this stuff and I finally – I suddenly made sense of it all, I went out and had a look at the site and I realised that there was no solution for plain waves coming from outside the array, but there was a solution [laughs] for stuff being radiated for something inside the array, and in fact they’d had a fire on the diesel generator that was running this thing and it had smoked out the generator a bit which had obviously become rather sparky. So most of the pulses they were detecting were their own generator, but it just took a bit of thinking to realise what the solution was, so that was very satisfying actually. And I wrote my MSc thesis on that plus the design of a real-time piece of circuitry, and I was helped very much by Bob Porter on this I have to say as it was right at the limits of my electronic design capability. But I built a display that allowed real-time display of pulses on a cathode ray tube, so that around the clock face was azimuth and distance towards the centre was a zenith angle, you know, so the zenith was pointing upwards. And you could just sit there in this nice caravan, sitting in this beautiful field, it was a lovely summer, I had the doors open, there was a guy called John Jelly [ph] from the Royal Aerospace Establishment who had provided a lot of the equipment and the caravan, he was interested, he popped up and took a lot of an interest in it. Explained to me that the caravan had thick shutters because it had been used the Christmas Island atomic bomb test so I was always slightly worried about the dust I was breathing in it, but anyway it had a touch of history associated with it. And all of that went very well, I wrote my thesis, was very happy with it but I wanted to leave Jodrell Bank. One thing that was frustrating was it was a very hot summer and round about three o’clock, four o’clock every afternoon, or many afternoons out there on the Cheshire Plain, you get thunderheads building up and a thunderstorm would break out, and on my display I could watch electrical discharges going on in the clouds above, long before there was any real thunder activity or much rumbling, you could see fizzing going on. So it was actually a super way to study electrical phenomena in clouds, in the atmosphere, and that was something I would have loved to have done but unfortunately I, you know, couldn’t stay and do it. And Ralph Spencer was the other person who was working with Bob, they liked the idea but they never actually got around to doing it, I think that’s a real

67 Chris Rapley Page 68 C1379/40 Track 3 shame, if – if you know, I had my [inaud] I’d set the whole thing up and do that again now.

[19:23]

But anyway I’d decided to leave, I went to see John Houghton who’d been my tutor at Oxford to see if there was any chance of a PhD, doing a PhD with him but he said all of his studentships were full, but he told me he’d just been at a conference and met a guy called Eric Dorling who was the administrator at Mullard Space Science Lab and Eric had told him that they were desperately looking for a PhD student because a researcher had been brain drained away to NASA and they had several projects that needed to be picked up. One was the rocket project and I think did I tell you last time about ringing Robert Boyd and so on?

No.

No, oh okay, well Robert Boyd, then Robert Boyd, later Sir Robert Boyd was director of Mullard Space Science Lab in UCLs Mullard Space Science Lab which is out at Holmbury St Mary, a lovely old country house which he’d managed to get the Mullard company to purchase, or at least Mullard had given UCL I think 60,000 pounds which is what they bought the estate for, which is 19 – early 1960s, I think it’s worth several million now obviously. And so I called this Eric Dorling and he said, ‘Well you’d better speak to Robert Boyd,’ and so I spoke to Robert Boyd and he said, ‘Well, you know, you’ll have to come down for an interview,’ and I said, ‘Gosh, you know, I’ve only got a motorbike,’ and this is quite a long way from Manchester down to Surrey. So I said, ‘Well alright,’ and he said, ‘Well I’m a bit busy, I’ll have to try and call you back and give you a date,’ and a few days later he called back and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just come,’ [laughs], he said, ‘you know, we need somebody,’ and I don’t know whether he’d rung up people at Jodrell or what he’d done but anyway he said, ‘Why don’t you just come.’ So duly, I suppose it must have been in the October or maybe late September I turned up at MSSL on my motorbike, left it parked in a spot where the janitor who was a miserable old so and so came rushing out and said, ‘You can’t leave that there, move it somewhere else,’ so that

68 Chris Rapley Page 69 C1379/40 Track 3 was my start – that was my first impression, my second impression was to walk into this place that was just full of, you know, young people working on rocket experiments, I mean, you know, incredibly interesting looking stuff absolutely everywhere and two fascinating labs, and they sort of looked at me and said, ‘Well who are you?’ and I said, ‘Well I’m a new PhD student,’ and they said, ‘Oh yes, that’s right, yes, somebody did say something about you turning up. Well look there’s a rocket experiment over there that needs to be launched from Woolmera in oh you know, not all that long and I’m sure the other PhD students will help you, you know, if you have any problems.’ So that suited me down to the ground, you know, far from being stifled about what I could and couldn’t do, you know, here we were given enormous responsibility. So I was – I think I was the only new PhD student that year, previously – the previous year Andy Fabian had gone there, prior to that it had been Mike Cruise, and then there’s a sort of distinguished list that run backwards beyond the Timothy’s and Wolescroft and Woodgate [ph] and, you know, all sorts who made their names in space science, subsequently in the year John Zarnecki turned up so, you know, a host of really quite famous names in UK space science so it was a privilege to be there.

[22:53]

And so I embarked on – on this experiment. Now Mike Cruise who had had – who was running a series of modulation collimator experiments which were studying the x-ray sky and by spinning double sets of grids in front of a detector because it’s very difficult to focus x-rays, Robert Boyd had led the advance in glancing incidents optics and they had equipment onboard the orbiting astronomical observatory at Copernicus so US mission. But the idea was that you could cover a large area of the sky so Mike had these modulations – rotation modulation collimator rounds which required some quite sophisticated mathematical processing of the data to sort of – a bit like the inverse fourier transform but a little bit different in order to produce images. And so he’d been out to Woomera quite a few times and knew the ropes pretty well and so he said to me, ‘Look,’ they were having trouble finding an electronic technician to go out with him on his next rocket launch from Woomera and mine was the one after that, so he said, ‘Well look, you know, there’s a double benefit here, why don’t you come out

69 Chris Rapley Page 70 C1379/40 Track 3 and help him,’ which I was very happy to do and he would teach me the ropes and at the same time he would have some support when he was out there, you know, getting the experiment ready. Which – which we did, he also – it was clear I needed a car licence ‘cause you needed to be able to drive out – it’s a long way from where you stayed in Woomera Village up to range head, so I’d just bought a van, an Austin A30, 1956 van and so he very kindly sat in the passenger seat while we veered around [laughs] the narrow lanes of Holmbury while I was learning to drive, so he helped me get my licence. And that’s what I did, I went out, he flew Skylark 973 which I think – I can’t remember – I think that one worked fine, you know, in those days we were really pushing the limits, they didn’t always work and so I was then ready to fly Skylark 402 which went the next year.

[25:10]

Now 402 had originally been set up by a guy called Bruce Woodgate who had gone off to the States which was why they needed somebody to pick it up and it was – it was – everybody saw it as a bit of a jinxed mission because it used a moon sensor to orient the rocket once it was up above the atmosphere, so the thing – the rocket pointed at the moon and it then rotated and I’m trying to think – it used the – yes it used the earth’s magnetic field to organise its rotation. So it had magnetometers onboard, it’s a long time since I’ve thought of this, I’m struggling now. And the idea was to point an x-ray detector which about a half degree or maybe one degree field of view at a number of spots in the sky, sort of tracking across this small magellanic cloud. And the idea was that it should be – it was working at soft x-ray, sort of quarter kilovolt x-rays where the ori – well the origin of the x-ray diffused background even at higher energies wasn’t understood then but it was suspected to be unresolved, very distant sources, but the softer stuff that comes from – could come from gas at a million degrees or just under, it wasn’t known whether that was local, in the galaxy, well it might have been very local, generated around the earth, it might have been local generated in our galaxy or it might have been a soft x-ray glow from the cosmos. And the idea was that the small magellanic cloud has a lot of hydrogen in which there are other elements as well and so if the – if the radiation dipped as you went over the small magellanic cloud it cast a shadow, then that would tell you that

70 Chris Rapley Page 71 C1379/40 Track 3 the soft x-ray background came from all this [laughs]. Now another – there was another group in the United States in Wisconsin, a guy called Dan McCammon and his people had tried this experiment but their rocket had failed, I forget what happened exactly but they hadn’t got any results. So they were extremely helpful, I flew over there and they helped me with the manufacture of – well they provided me with some – I think it was called Capton [ph] large area thin windows which you need to – over your proportional counter to make it sensitive to these soft x-rays. So they were very generous and very helpful in that respect and also showed me how to coat the back of the hexagonal metal honeycomb grid that you put in front, both to support the window with the pressure of one atmosphere inside it against the vacuum of space, but also to provide the collimation so that you just had this one degree or half degree field of view on the sky. There was another experiment onboard run by a guy called Cyril Dyonkeer [ph] from the Met Office which was pointing at the moon and looking at ultraviolet reflection from the moon, so the ultraviolet albedo of the moon. But 402 was regarded as jinxed because the altitude control system had caused – been very painful thing to get ready and well, you know, the numbers of the rocket tell you where it was in the original sequence, so 402 had been sitting around a long time given that 973 went just before, so I mean five years or something had really been struggling with it. And I can’t remember the name of the people now who were working on the altitude control system that I got to know, and the British Aerospace people, Robin Street [ph] was down at British Aerospace and Mike somebody or other was at Huntings I think who were working on this system. So we finally got it out to Australia, I got the star field camera, you know, all aligned and said how we’d got the experiment working fine, we were supported by an electronic technician called Barry Lee [ph] and a mechanical technician whose name again will come back in a second. And so what was it, October the 22 nd 1971 or ‘2, I’ll have to check. We launched and the altitude control system worked flawlessly but the gas leaked out of the detector and I got no results, either because the window burst or we had a mechanical valve so that we could flush the detector with neon methane which is the gas which get poisoned if oxygen diffuses in through the window, which it does in air. And so it had a snatch connected on the launch and there was a worry that maybe the snatch connector hadn’t sealed off properly when the thing was launched. So that was a year and a bit in, yeah, it must have been ’71 I suppose, now let me think, ’69 I went to

71 Chris Rapley Page 72 C1379/40 Track 3

Jodrell, ’70 I went to MSSL, yeah probably the end of ’71. So I came back, oh and Dyonkeer’s [ph] thing worked fine, but I had no results. Now I had been doing some work analysing data from Copernicus and Ian Toohey [ph] and I had done some good work on that. Optical identification of x-ray sources, that was good stuff, the papers are there. I’d also linked some features that Dan McCammon and the others had found in the soft x-ray background with things I’d – I told you I was interested in the radio continuum sky at Jodrell and I’d done a little literature survey of that and so I was able to suggest that there were possible links between features in our galaxy and things in the soft x-ray sky that nobody else had noticed. I published a Nature letter on that, and even got some nice postcards and things from some of the senior astronomical community at the time which was very encouraging. But things looked very dark because I didn’t have an SERC grant, Robert Boyd had given me, I don’t know, a year and a half’s money or something like that, two years money I suppose ‘cause I’d already had one year at Jodrell, and we’d hoped we might get something done in that time, I suppose that was pretty ambitious. So when I got back it all looked pretty grim but Robert called me in and he said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘It must all look pretty black to you,’ so I said, ‘Yes, that’s true,’ and he said, ‘Well there are three things that I want you to know,’ and let me try and remember what they were, he said, ‘First of all,’ he said, ‘the people who are successful in this world are the people who turn their greatest catastrophes into their greatest successes,’ so he said, ‘I want you to go away and literally sit on top of Holmbury Hill and figure out what went wrong, not saying it was your fault, you know, it might have been, it might not, who cares,’ he said, ‘but you want you to figure out how next time you know what you would do to make yourself more robust and resilient and less likely that something like that would happen. The second thing is that I’m going to find some more money for you,’ which he managed to do, and I think that involved me doing some lecturing, I can’t remember quite when that happened, but anyway one way or another he got me another deal. And then the third thing was, you know, ‘now get on with it and come up with something else.’

[32:31]

72 Chris Rapley Page 73 C1379/40 Track 3

Well again building on this radio continuum stuff I’d seen at Jodrell I think I wrote it pretty much myself, somebody – maybe Len Culhane who was my supervisor helped me, he must have done actually, but we wrote a grant proposal to SERC to study whether there was a correlation between the soft x-ray diffused background and these large scale radio features which show kind of huge bubbles and wafts of gas being lifted out of the plain of the galaxy. And so the next rocket was called 1203, SL1203, it was the first to fly on the Raven 11 rocket which lofted it higher and longer above the atmosphere. It was the first to align itself on the earth’s magnetic field and use moon sensors to orient its roll because we need the roll to be very accurately done. We designed it with three detectors so that if any one of them failed, you know, we had redundancy. And we also carried an ultraviolet – an ultraviolet, was it a spectrometer, an ultraviolet imaging system from the University of California, Berkeley, a guy called Stu Bowyer, Professor Stu Bowyer who’d been a pioneer of soft x-ray astronomy had moved on down into the extreme ultraviolet and so he came over and, you know, well I could spend the whole afternoon telling you stories about Stu, he was quite a character. But so we knew – and we were collaborating on that. So we knew that one way or another, you know, there would surely be something out of this rocket payload that would allow me to get my PhD and indeed one of the detectors only lasted about half the flight, but we recovered data from all of them and we showed that there was a sort of correlation between these features and I was able to calculate that a substantial part of the emissions seemed to come from a hot gas surrounding – the highest probability was that it came from a hot gas surrounding the, you know, within the galactic halo, fairly close to the galactic plain. We also detected some of the first extreme ultraviolet sources with the Stu Bowyer thing so that was a great success.

[34:52]

Now – but, you know, for belt and braces reasons I’d also been developing position sensitive low energy proportional counters in the lab so that, you know, even if the space stuff failed I would have some good, you know, lab work to report and write up. And these allowed you to divest yourself of the rocking mechanism in a Bragg crystal spectrometer, you could now curve the crystal and disperse an x-ray spectrum into

73 Chris Rapley Page 74 C1379/40 Track 3 these detectors and that was exactly what was needed to study solar flares or rapidly varying x-ray sources. Because obviously in a solar flare in milliseconds the intensity goes up and the line ratio, spectral line ratios all change and if you’re just scanning crystal backwards and forwards, you know, everything is blurred and is time multiplexed and lost. Whereas if you can disperse the spectrum then you can watch what’s happening. So we had been collaborating with Lockheed Palo Alto Research Lab, I’d been over a couple of times and they had flown a small trial, bent crystal spectrometer on their solar payload from White Sands which they called Old Yellow, the payload was called Old Yellow ‘cause it was painted yellow. And again interestingly they had designed the digital electronics and it’s just like the story really from Jodrell Bank. The first time it flew the data was garbage, we couldn’t understand what the problem was, so I went over there and had a look and it turned – there were two things that were wrong, firstly they had wired up their digital electronics slightly wrong so it was missing coding and things, and they were incredibly embarrassed about that ‘cause they were a very professional outfit and they had not done their testing adequately. But secondly it turned out that from the sun there was so much ultraviolet radiation coming into the detector and it was aluminium detector, it was generating lots of low energy pulses in the detector down at the sort of noise level. And that wouldn’t normally matter in an ordinary proportional counter, but in this position sensitive proportional counter it completely disrupted the capacity to resolve where an x-ray had come in, I can describe it but I won’t bore you with it. So the task before the house was to reduce the ultraviolet sensitivity of the detector by orders of magnitude, whilst keeping the soft x-ray sensitivity, you know, fairly high. And so I had said, it’s something I was really quite proud of, I – sat and thought about that, I was left pretty much on my own with the help of their extremely competent technician, a guy called Kernet Smith [ph] who sadly died later on, rather youthfully. But Kernet [ph] was there to help and with a combination of sputtering aluminium onto the back of these plastic, thin plastic polypropylene windows for the detector and a carbon diode coating, it did exactly that, reduced the ultraviolet sensitivity, I think it was – I think it was by something like ten to the five, I mean it was an extraordinary figure, I’d have to go and look it up but it was some enormous factor. But with a loss of about a factor two or so in the x-ray sensitivity and next time they flew it it worked a dream. So that then led onto the next stage of – of my career because Lockheed

74 Chris Rapley Page 75 C1379/40 Track 3 were bidding to put a very sophisticated x-ray spectrometer, solo flare spectrometer on the Solar Maximum Mission, which is a NASA observatory mission, and NASA were really interested to have these bent crystal spectrometers on because they provided a completely new, absolute new window on what was going on in these flares. And so essentially MSSL was commissioned to produce these things and that’s what we did, we produced the detector systems and the whole of the bent crystal spectrometer, it was an eight channel device for the Solar Maximum Mission. So that had me move out to the States for a – one year to work with Lockheed to integrate the experiment with their stuff and then another year to integrate all of that into the spacecraft in Goddard Space Flight Centre and then the successful launch and then a year of acting in observatory mode with all of the other teams who were, you know, part of that mission to actually operate the observatory and catch various flares, you know. So each day you would look at what were the most likely active regions that were going to go off and then you would point the, you know, spacecraft and set up it modes in particular ways. It’s one of the first spacecraft to have – I think it had about twenty microprocessors in it, you know, which these days nobody would think twice about but it was completely revolutionary at the time, and it was run as an observatory. And of course NASA was still very much a blue ribboned organisation to work with in those days so it was very influential. Could tell you a huge amount about it but that probably gets us to that really rather important point.

[40:10]

Now in all of – in everything that you’ve said you’ve mentioned quite a few lines of collaboration with space scientists in other countries and I wondered whether in this period whether there was anything specifically British about the British contribution to this, is there anything peculiarly British about the particular contribution it made to instrumenting these spacecraft, the approach?

Gosh, well I mean the bent crystal spectrometer was, you know, unique to Mullard Space Science Lab, and I mean I think Mullard Space Science Lab was seen as a kind of hot bed of innovation in terms of experimentation in that, you know, in space rocketry and satellite work, just as Jodrell Bank was seen as being technically

75 Chris Rapley Page 76 C1379/40 Track 3 incredibly competent. I mean just going back to Jodrell Bank they were very wounded at the time, there was the science policy research unit at Sussex, Ben Martin and somebody or other, wrote a paper where they compared Jodrell Bank and Cambridge. Because it was SERC policy in those days to kind of set up two competing centres I guess and or at least that’s what we always assumed was the policy, that’s what seemed to happen a lot, and so Cambridge of course had – had gone into aperture synthesis and the sort of very clever synthesis of antennas where you have individual antennas and you combine them through clever electronics and mathematics to produce, to synthesise, it’s as if you had a much bigger telescope, whereas Jodrell Bank, you know, went in those days, you know, the sledge hammer where you just built a bloody great big telescope, you know, and you know had some advantages and some disadvantages. The accusation that was made about Jodrell Bank was that it was – it had overdosed on the technology and wasn’t – was more interested in the technology than it was in the astrophysics, I think was very unfair from my experience there. But you know, in order to make progress in these fields you have to be incredibly good at the technology. So in the UK there were very very effective people and certainly in the post-war period with the rocketry, the – you know, the collaborators in Lockheed were very jealous of the Skylark, British National Rocket Programme, because the performance of the rockets and the performance of the communications system, the performance of the – certainly of the altitude control systems were better than anything that they had access to. So I think there was, you know, and you know there Bluestreak and you know when you were out at Woomera you saw Bloodhound and Sea Dart and all of these, I mean it was a real hotbed of – obviously a lot of military oriented, but a real hotbed of technical innovation. But there was – there was a feeling of frustrating building up because it was becoming more and more high bound and bureaucratic, and indeed the guy who was working on the altitude control system for 402 I think – it was either 402 or 1203, I’m getting them mixed up now, but he said that he used to sneak out in his lunch break and go down to radio spares and buy components to put in additional circuitry to get this thing working the way it should, to overcome the heavy hand of the finance officer and, you know, the bureaucrats within his company. Now I mean I’m sure that’d raise [laughs] eyebrows now because it clearly wasn’t a very well controlled process. But he knew what he was doing and we were just coming out of the era

76 Chris Rapley Page 77 C1379/40 Track 3 where people who knew what they were doing were allowed to get on with it, kind of unfettered. And it was becoming more and more bureaucratically controlled and, er, I mean less fun in many ways. And really the British space industry, you know, gradually all of these small very innovative companies were all kind of observed into GEC and others and the individual very bright people just became squashed down to the point where they didn’t have the traction anymore to do the innovative stuff that they had been so that was a shame to watch.

[44:40]

And could you describe this very interesting, the Mullard Space –

Mullard Space Science Centre?

Yes, could you describe it as as a place, as you remember it?

Oh yeah, well it’s a beautiful country house for a start and so it was – it was odd, you know, occasionally – I lived in Cranleigh for a while and we moved to Guildford and people would say, ‘Ah, you know, where do you work?’ you know, people from round Surrey and you’d say, ‘Oh I work at Mullard Space – I work in Holmbury, Holmbury St Mary,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh are you in antiques then?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not in antiques, I’m in space science.’ It was – it was a classic, almost sort of wartime model of this beautiful estate, you know, the wonderful old country house with oak panels and so on which had been turned into this high-tech hotbed. And, erm, I think it was – it was a really exciting place to be, probably when I got there probably only about seventy of us there and there was always – I mean there were so many missions going on, there was always something going on and people – of course travelling a lot, I’d not had the chance to travel like that, I mean going to the States for the first time and so on was very exciting. And so it’s this weird mix, you know, ‘cause Frank the gardener who had been the gardener there for, I don’t know, forever, ‘cause it had previously belonged I think to a school and prior to that to some, who is it, gosh, some senior business guy in the ‘20s or ‘30s used to fly an autogiro out to it, I mean it had an interesting history. But Frank the gardener would come into the lab each morning

77 Chris Rapley Page 78 C1379/40 Track 3 and you know chat or even joke about, ‘You know, oh what’s the weather going to be like,’ and it was just a very nice atmosphere, there were some students flats in the old stables, they had been slightly converted. Some students hated it there because they hated being stuck out in the country without much access to London, others just loved it. Of course if you were demonstrating or later on I was lecturing you had to commute up to UCL here. Erm, but the – the individuals were characters, I mean Peter Wilmore was there, a guy called Pete Sandford, Len Culhane, Robert Boyd, all of them were, you know, leaders in their field but they were all really interesting characters. So there was a social life as well as a work life but it was terrific fun.

Could you give me a sense of those different characters?

Since [laughs] many of them are still alive I think I’d better not [laughs], yeah, it was – I mean this was the ‘70s, it was – they were very interesting, very interesting events going on, I mean some people lived in – moved to live in communes and oh just scandal everywhere so yeah [laughs].

Among the scientists?

Yes.

Were those living in communes?

There were some, yes, the – there were connections with – British Aerospace had an airfield over at Dunsfold and they were – that was where they were testing the Harrier Jump Jets out, and somehow – being high-techy sort of people somehow people had to got to know them so there was – there was just an interesting kind of social set of social connections, but that didn’t detract from the science in any way, just made it all a wee bit more interesting, but fairly wild people [laughs].

How did a kind of commune spirit and high-tech space science –

78 Chris Rapley Page 79 C1379/40 Track 3

Well let me say that [laughs] only a small number got involved in this but it was all regarded with – even in those days as a bit scandalous and, anyway so – but I mean I was happily married so we were fine [laughs].

[48:28]

And when you arrived you said that someone said, ‘Over there, there’s someone working on a rocket experiment.’

No, there was a rocket experiment with no one working on it and that’s what they wanted me to do [laughs].

And so if you sort of walked around the place at that time, what would you use people doing? Even if you didn’t understand what they were doing as I wouldn’t if I was there, what would you see happening around you?

Alright, well there were two big experimental labs and they were just like, you know, ordinary big physics labs but they had vacuum chambers in and all sorts of apparatus, so you would see large rigs of apparatus, physics type apparatus with cables snaking everywhere, where people were carrying out their laboratory work to develop the instruments that they would then fly. You would also see people working on the payloads there, their experiments that they were going to fly on a – on a Skylark rocket. Now a Skylark rocket has a – had a long main motor, not main rocket, it was a nineteen inch diameter long tube, must have been what, I don’t know, ten feet long with fins on the bottom, and it had an – a second stage which was actually the first stage, the cuckoo or gold finch booster which essentially shot the thing out of the launcher and then the main booster picked up and took it up on the rest of its journey. But it then had a whole series of nineteen inch circular magnesium bays into which all of the support services went, so there’d be a parachute in the bottom base so that hopefully it would deploy and you could recover everything when the space log had finished, up range. There would be a battery bay which, you know, provided the power. There would be a control and communications bay that not only timed all the events, there were mechanical clock timers which only one guy could manufacture the

79 Chris Rapley Page 80 C1379/40 Track 3 cams for so he was a bit of a bottleneck, this is all British Aerospace and Royal Aircraft Establishment equipment. And each of these nineteen inch bays would manacled together, so you’d have a manacle that would clamp you know the – and you’d build it up Lego like to be this long payload and then your experiment would sit on top of that. So in the lab you would see the experiment part and then you’d use external power supplies and timers and so on to simulate what the rest of it would do. And you would then check that your electronics, you know, the high voltages and the digital – well it’d be analogue electronics, maybe a little bit of digital, you’d check that all of that was working properly by holding x-ray sources and other things over the detectors in various set up ways to demonstrate that they worked. I’m talking about the x-ray side but there was work on space plasmas as well going on, so space plasmas there was solar work and there was cosmic x-ray work basically. So in those days they could – they still had a lab technician, a guy called Harry Goddard who sat in the lab GO5 and then elsewhere round this lovely old country house there was the computer room where there was an IBM 1103 computer that would kind of have filled half this office and had eight k of magnetic core in it, but I did all of my calculations in double precision kind of spherical trig to work out, you know, how to orient and point my rocket on that, used to take it a day to do the calculation. But that was the onsite computer and there was a modem link up to here so you could then, you know, by that time using punch cards rather than paper tape, that you could send programs up to the IBM 370 I think it was that sat up here, pretty much analogous to, you know, my Atlas and Jodrell Bank story, so if you had other computing to do you could do it up here and a day later it would come back and there would be some error in it and you’d have to resubmit it and so on. And then there were other labs, there was a mechanical design area where there are guys, you know, with big drawing boards, you know, designing the … payloads. There’s an electronic design office where they would be designing stuff and then out at the back again in the – in another set of old stables were the workshops where the technicians would be manufacturing the pieces of the experiment, milling them, you know, with lathes and so on. And there was a store where you could go and help yourself to resistors and transistors and what have you to develop stuff in the lab which would then be turned into spaceworthy equipment by the professional designers, and there was of course these rockets have quite complex harnesses in them because, you know, many many different signals had

80 Chris Rapley Page 81 C1379/40 Track 3 to be taken around and power supplies and earthing systems and so on, so there was a guy, a Dutch guy called Joe Ootes, O-o-t-e-s who was the master at producing the harnesses that connected up all the different bits of the equipment so he had a particular lab that he would work in. There was a library, oak panelled in which we used to meet to have discussions and meetings about things, planning meetings, there was an admin area where the secretaries were and then we all had offices, sort of in, you know, I was up in the attic initially which we would share.

[54:15]

And then there were beautiful grounds and there was quite a tradition that every lunchtime we would stop work and go for a walk, you could walk up onto the top of Holmbury Hill, there’s a tree point up there, beautiful view across the weald, or at the very minimum just walk around the perimeter of the estate, there’s a – there’s a road that runs round and a drive that diagonally runs across the middle. And those were opportunities, you know, everybody of all ages and disciplines used to wander round, it was completely voluntary, it was a mixed bunch each day, but it was an opportunity to find out what was going on and talk to each other and learn things. So it was very important from that point of view.

[54:55]

Are you able to say why you were particularly interested in what you described as the radio continuum sky and in diffuse x-ray background in particular?

Well because you see just in the same way that – I’ve always had this interest in connecting things and what I found was that that year at Jodrell I’d learned a little bit about cosmic rays, that didn’t really have too much relevance to what I was doing at MSSL, except the detection of particles and particle detectors was something I’d – I’d sort of learned a tiny bit about, but I had to learn a huge amount more very quickly when I got to MSSL, ‘cause I mean I knew nothing about building x-ray detectors and I had to learn to get good at that pretty quickly. But I liked Glyn Haslam and he had told all sorts of fascinating stories about mapping the radio continuum sky, including

81 Chris Rapley Page 82 C1379/40 Track 3 one where he’d had to build his own inkjet plotter, you know, huge one because nobody manufactured them in those days, and after three days of continuous observations when he was very tired and just about to pack up he saw the pen vibrating and it had been playing up, he’d had all sorts of trouble keeping the whole thing going for the three days, and he thought, oh you know, not another problem then, it’s stopped. Then he just caught sight of it doing it once more and it stopped again and didn’t think anything of it until a few years later after the discovery of pulsars when he was literally lying in his bath one day and he thought, oh my God, you know, I’d discovered the first pulsar, I didn’t realise what I’d seen [laughs]. So he never told the story other than as, you know, there but for the grace of God go any of us, but I liked Glyn and I just – it just seemed to me fascinating for somebody who had only ever thought of the sky having dots in it, you know, point sources to discover that there was all of this gas out there, the neutral hydrogen and then the ionised gas that was producing this radio continuum, this – you know, this sort of field of stuff out there, and to see these huge features, the north polar spur was something that when I did my – have I got it here, no, when I did my – oh here we are, see this is – this is the very thing, there is High Latitude Radio Continuum Studies of the Galaxy and the Radio Spurs by CG Rapley, MSc literature project. So I’d done this piece of work where I’d looked at these, you know, these large features, very poorly resolved here, gradually better resolved, here we are, that sort of thing, and nobody really knew quite what they were. So you could either use them as a means of finding out what something else was because if they cast shadows then whatever the other thing was it was further away, or maybe if you saw emission from them that would give new insights into what they were. So I’d done this – this very thing, you know, here it is, faded and looking a bit yellow now. But I’d done this and at – at MSSL nobody knew anything about radio astronomy, you know, absolute blank spot because they had been – those that had been taught some astronomy had never been taught any radio astronomy ‘cause it was all too new, just hadn’t filtered out into the general area of – of knowledge, so I knew something they didn’t and it seemed to me that it would be, it was, you know, you could connect these two things together and the SERC thought it was a great idea as well which is why they, you know, agreed to sponsor it. But similarly when I was working with Ian Toohey [ph] on the x-ray data from Copernicus which was, you know, finding not only old supernova remnants, but in the

82 Chris Rapley Page 83 C1379/40 Track 3 large magellanic and small magellanic cloud, these nearby small galaxies, irregular galaxies, it had seen some point sources, or what appeared to be very bright point sources. So I said to Ian, well why don’t we go on – I’ll go and look at the Mount Palomar survey, so I went up to the Royal Astronomical Society and there was a young woman there who was the librarian who was extremely helpful and she helped me find the prints from the Mount Palomar survey over the large magellanic cloud and the small magellanic cloud and in those days you couldn’t digitise things but I guess I got my ruler out and kind of measured where things were relative to other reference points and we were the first to identify bright OB stars, very hot large stars, which appeared to be coincident, you know, with the x-ray sources in the – in these objects. So it was – it was just something that I found fascinating, you’ve got a piece of information over here, you’ve got a piece of information over here, you’ve got a piece of information over here, if you put the two things together, wow, you know, you learn something. And I was in a privileged position because I had been taught about the Palomar survey, both at Oxford and Jodrell Bank and also knew about the – this radio stuff that other people didn’t so it was great.

[End of Track 3]

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Track 4

Last time you talked about your work on position sense of low energy proportional counters and told the story of the way in which helped Palo Alto Research Labs to set those up properly resulted in an invitation for you at MSSL to take part in the NASA Solar Maximum Mission, and what I’d like to have for the recording is details really of the day to day work involved in that particular satellite work, covering the details that aren’t likely to be apparent in published sources.

Okey-doke. Well the first thing to say is that the work on precision sensitive detectors in the lab was very much a sort of second or third string to my bow in case, you know, rocket experiments and others, you know, failed, because it is quite commonplace for those rocket experiments not to deliver sufficient data to, you know, write a PhD with. So – but it’s really interesting anyway and I became something of an expert at a particular type of position sensitive linear – one dimension position sensitive detector that could resolve not only roughly the – if you like any proportional account of the energy of the x-ray that had gone in so you could discriminate x-rays from cosmic rays which was an important thing to do. But it could also tell you to within 100 microns or so where it had arrived along the axis of a proportional counter that was probably twenty centimetres long, fifteen centimetres long, I can’t remember exactly. And we could make this work with x-rays in the sort of kilovolt also range, but I also tried to get them to work with somewhat lower energy x-rays. Now that was really interesting, there was no other way of doing that, but what it allowed you to do was for the first time to bend a Bragg crystal and disperse a spectrum into the proportional counter rather than have to have a mechanical rocking mechanism which allowed you to sort of by physically scanning the crystal and the detectors in a collimated beam of x-rays from either the cosmos or the sun, the sun being a very bright source, to essentially successive scan through a spectrum. Now people had been building scanning x-ray spectrometers for some time and there was a whole load of physics that had gone on in looking at line ratios and line widths and how they could be used as plasma diagnostics on the quiet sun, but of course the thing you can’t do with a scanning device is study a source that changes in its intensity very quickly because you muddle up the intensity variation and the line strengths so you can’t interpret

84 Chris Rapley Page 85 C1379/40 Track 4 them properly. On the other hand if you can disperse the whole spectrum simultaneously and just read it out continuously then you can just watch like a movie the various lines changing in their intensities, you can see Doppler shifts, you can see broadening and so on. Absolutely fabulous plasma diagnostic, particular using the helium like emissions from helium like ions where essentially the plasma is so hot that it’s stripped the atom down to two remaining electrons, and it turns out that they’re a series of lines called dialectronic satellite lines, that are particularly powerful to give you the plasma temperature and the electron temperature and so on.

[03:38]

So working with Alan Gabriel from the Culham – originally the Culham lab and then Rutherford Appleton lab, MSSL and Loren Acton’s group at Lockheed Palo Alto Research Lab, where there had been this longstanding collaboration, we jointly put together a proposal for a set of instruments, a set of spectrometers that would fly on the Solar Maximum Mission which had been conceived as an observatory that would cover x-ray emissions to solar flares right from gamma rays down to the ultraviolet. And a key part of that was this set of x-ray spectrometers, so it was a mix, there was a so called flat crystal spectrometer which had a series of conventional scanning spectrometers which looked at the active regions prior to the flare going off, but my instrument was the eight channel bent crystal spectrometer, so called, because it had these dispersed spectrometers in it that could follow the behaviour of the flare. Now that was completely novel and NASA were very interested in it and so they essentially took the whole package of the x-ray polychrometer and, you know, to cut a long story short it turned out to be a very successful instrument, allowing completely new insights into what was going on in solar flares. So I worked with the designers at MSSL to design the instrument which is the biggest instrument that the U – that MSSL had ever – biggest single instrument MSSL had ever built, and probably one of the most complex, and we delivered that to Lockheed in 1978 and integrated it into the instrument package, the x-ray polychrometer and then took that across to NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, must have been in early 1979, integrated it into the spacecraft, tested it, checked it out, it was launched on Valentine’s Day in 1980, so that’s February the 14 th and we operated it for the best part of a year as an

85 Chris Rapley Page 86 C1379/40 Track 4 international observatory. So all of the teams relocated to – well the vicinity of Goddard Space Flight Centre just outside Washington and on a day by day basis we had a so called observing tsar [ph] who planned the next day’s observations based on what we could see about the state of the sun, the active regions on it, what looked likely to go off. And everything was fine for the first nine months until the fine pointing control on the solar max failed, at which point only rather coarser observations could be taken and so the teams, you know, the observatory teams disbanded at that stage and most people returned to their home countries.

[06:34]

So in the literature, you know, one can find an account of a bent crystal spectrometer and a whole host of papers that emerged from it, but I guess for me it was a fabulous learning experience, working firstly with Lockheed on a really serious big mission like that, and then with NASA which was still very much a blue ribboned organisation. The project manager at NASA was a guy called Pete Burr who I still have the most enormous respect for, I learnt a huge amount from him about how you go about organising and driving forward and project managing a major project, he was the most insightful and thoughtful and effective project manager who I got on with very well. And, erm, it was really the start of several things, it was – it was the start of internationalism for me because that really – one was really working on a day to day basis with the people from, mainly Americans but, you know, the Dutch and the Germans and people around the world, but also it was something that resonated very strongly with a sort of natural belief I had of a holistic approach to a piece of science. You know, previously the measurements of solar flares had been a bit piecemeal, you have one sort of instrument or another sort of instrument, but you could never assemble the whole package that attempted to look at this phenomenon over a very wide range of – of wavelengths and using a very wide range of techniques to get a grip on what was going on.

Are you saying that this belief in a holistic way of studying something emerged then or that you’d had it before and –

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I think it – it had always been inherent, I mean remember I said before when I got to MSSL I was slightly taken back but very pleased because it put me in a powerful position that people didn’t know anything about really what was going on in the radio bands. And so that multidisciplinary approach to identifying x-ray sources, understanding what they were telling us, was something that I had always seen as a very powerful way of moving forward, so it’s something that I was very sympathetic with and, you know, was just inherently interested in but this was really reinforced by that experience on the Solar Maximum Mission.

[08:47]

And of course it was exciting, you know, we went to the Cape – what I didn’t say was that we – I also supplied, or MSSL also supplied the thin plastic window detectors for the flat crystal spectrometer, and remember I had been the person who in the UK pioneered the use of these very thin plastic films as windows, which is very tricky because they’re only a micron thick and yet they’ve got to hold an atmosphere’s pressure in the – in the detector so obviously you have a mesh or grid supporting them mechanically. But they have to be stretched, they have to be calibrated, they have to have a conducting coating on the underside, and although others, particularly in the United States had – had been doing this for a while, I was really the first person in the UK to try and tackle that, that sort of low energy end of the spectrum, so our – our detectors, the experience that we had had on Skylark 1203 for example was a – it just segged [ph] straight into the detectors that we’d produced for the, you know, low energy detectors for the x-ray polychrometer. So Peter Sheather and the – and Jim Bowles, Peter Sheather was the mechanical and thermal engineer and Jim Bowles the electrical engineer who had worked on – with me on the rocket stuff, worked very closely with me on the Solar Max package, and that was I have to say an extremely exciting time, great time, fabulous.

[10:20]

Could you give me a sense of the sort of things that you saw or experienced in America in terms of assembling and even launching perhaps of this?

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Well I mean you know California in the mid to late 1970s was a pretty exciting place for all sorts of reasons. I remember that – I think you recall that I had this collaboration, or we’d had this collaboration with Stu Bowyer over at University of California, Berkeley which was seen as a pretty wild and radical place, and the engineers at Lockheed were often quite conservative people and one of the senior engineers was working with me on some detailed technical stuff one day and I remember saying to him, ‘Well I have to stop now because I’m, you know, going off to meet some colleagues in Berkeley,’ and he looked shocked and said – took my hand and sort of said, ‘Do you know about Berkeley?’ [laughs] and I said, ‘Well yes,’ and he said, ‘I never go there myself, you know, too wild a place.’ [laughs] So from the social point of view, you know, California was still quite a melting pot and fabulous, but from the point of view of the science, you know, Lockheed was a pretty slick well organised place, I mean a massive company, the research lab was where they put their – to some extent their bright misfits who they couldn’t employ or didn’t want to employ or didn’t want to be employed in the missile plant down in Sunnyvale, the missile plant, and so that they were a bright interesting energetic crowd of people to work with. You know, what you – what you got working with them as a tremendous can do buzz, you know, there was never any doubt that you would succeed and if things – if technical problems or other problems arose the issue was to just solve it, you know, so by whatever means, you know, try this means, if that doesn’t work, you know, try this means. It was terrific, that there was quite a contrast with the UK where things were much more subtle, much more complex, much more rich but tended to operate at a bit of a slower place, that kind of original pioneering spirit which when I look back, you know, was – compared with now was still very very free, nevertheless it didn’t compare with the energy that was going into the American programme. On the other hand the American programme often seemed quite crude and unsophisticated, it was – I think it was a product of a kind of pioneering mindset and I suppose you would say that what they were trying to do with their engineering was provide something that was sufficient to the need but didn’t have, necessarily have much – or didn’t always have much elegance, whereas in British engineering there was still this kind of feel for beauty and elegance and a sort of simplicity, I guess elegance is the word that I’m looking for.

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Was that different then, visible in – in the instruments that the different groups put onto the spacecraft?

In the end the scriptures [ph] that are necessary in order to get an instrument that will withstand the vibration and shock and acceleration of launch and then can withstand the incredibly harsh environment of space, the vacuum, the particle fluxes, the radiation fluxes, the temperature variations and so on force you to very similar conclusions actually. And so the Lockheed group agreed to produce the ten arc second mechanical – multi-grid collimator for the flat crystal spectrometer so you could identify just tiny spots on the sun and work on those. And nobody had ever produced something like that before and that was a beautifully elegant design I have to say, but that was because it had to be, on their rocket experiments where you didn’t always need something quite so sophisticated it was much more – I won’t say it was a kind of garage job but you know there was just that feeling that they – where they didn’t have to spend money they didn’t spend it and although it may – it was very logical it just jarred slightly against the sort of beauty and elegance of British engineering [laughs].

[14:44]

Now it sounds to me as if you’ve very much enjoyed this international work?

Very much so, yeah.

But did – to what extent did this difference in approach cause difficulties for others, in other words, the meeting of something a bit slow and precise with something rather, I don’t know, slightly more bombastic or slightly more –

Well I – funny enough it wasn’t – the two cultures were not so far apart that they didn’t work quite well together, that – there were one or two examples I can think of where there were frustrations with some of the Brits, partly from MSSL but really from Rutherford lab, and the Americans who – the Americans were a bit frustrated at

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– at, you know, the lack of pace and so on occasionally. But by and large it – those little tensions were extremely beneficial, you know, they made people who were going slowly speed up, they made people who were probably trying to go too quickly slow down a bit and think a bit more carefully about things so I think it actually worked really well. Where I saw those sort of cultural clashes become much more tricky was when I was at the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, which we’ll come onto later, where the biggest clash would be between you know the Californian kind of, you know, enthusiasts, let’s get on with it, and you know, a Japanese or Asian senior individual who – whose concepts of courtesy and … well courtesy and thoughtfulness allow them to be, unless the chairman was very very careful would allow them to get complete overwhelmed and overrun so that the, you know, the noisy ones, the talky ones would get too much airtime. So the chairman would have to – if it was me or anybody else would have to very very carefully maintain the balance by encouraging, you know, holding back the rather impetuous westerners and allowing others to get their words in. And quite often it took a lot to get somebody to say something because if you’re afraid of being seen to be silly, you know, if you’re afraid, if you must keep maintained face, then you’re unlikely to just toss out mad ideas in the same way that, you know, perhaps somebody from California or the UK would do, so I saw it later on, not so much in that project.

[17:25]

Now I realise that because of this work you’re – you’re not at home in this period a lot, in other words you’re in America a lot of the time.

Yes.

But what I wanted to get for the recording was a sense of the sorts of things that you were doing when you weren’t working in this period which I’d hope would include stories of things done in the UK, I know that you’re by this married and presumably –

Yes, had twin daughters. Well – but they moved across, you see I spent a lot of time commuting over there but this was a sufficient commitment, three year commitment

90 Chris Rapley Page 91 C1379/40 Track 4 that we moved and so my daughters were seven, I think it was their seventh birthday within a few days of our landing or possibly even the day we landed, I mean I knew my way around a bit but it was the first time that either my wife or the children had been to the States and so for them on the one hand they were upset to be leaving their friends and, you know, stable life in – in Guildford in the UK, but on the other hand it’s very exciting for them. And of course the, you know, anybody who’s moved their family to another country, even one that speaks the same language knows that it – along with that comes all sorts of incredible problems. I mean the trip – we transferred a substantial sum of money so that we could pay – we stayed in a motel for a while while we found a house to rent, and the money disappeared, the international banking system lost it. And it took weeks to sort that out, so that we had to borrow money from one of the colleagues in the United States simply to survive, but we still couldn’t afford to pay the motel bill so we couldn’t leave and – and, you know, all sorts of horrendous things [laughs] that happen to everybody when they – they, you know, different versions of that happen to everybody, but. So that there was a whole parallel story alongside, you know, the pressing integration, testing calibration of this instrument which, yeah, was very sophisticated, had microprocessors in it, this was the first spacecraft that had any significant number of microprocessors in, all of the instruments were microprocessor run and in those days you had to work in machine code and so on so, you know, hugely technical issues of getting this whole thing together and working. And in parallel the whole business of getting children into a school, you know, figuring out where to live, and so there’s dozens of anecdotes I could tell you about that but I won’t. But at the same time it’s hugely exciting because, you know, we started to – every time we had the opportunity to we would drive off to, you know, I don’t know, the redwood parks or Yosemite or wherever and sample California while we had the chance and, you know, if – I don’t know if you know California at all but it is a magical place in many ways and a wonderful place to go.

[20:33]

What did – is it your wife Norma?

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Yes.

What did she do while – during this three year period and –

Well with two seven year old daughters, you know, basically looked after them, she – she had learned to drive in the UK before we went because I knew, you know, that would be an essential thing, she hadn’t – hadn’t previously learned to drive. That was quite funny, we – you know, she learned quite quickly but just to make sure that she passed her test I got in the car with her in Guildford, this is back in England, and said to her, ‘Right, we’re going to – we’re going to, you know, follow – take my directions,’ so I got her to drive up the A3 to the middle of London in, you know, the sort of late afternoon, made her drive once round the Aldwych and back to Guildford and said, ‘Well, you know, if you can do that I suspect you’re going to get through your test alright,’ which she did. And of course it was essential but we invested in quite a nice big American car which cost less than a medium sized, not very good car in the UK [laughs]. And buying a car, you know, in a foreign country is an interesting experience because dealing with car dealers and negotiating with them is something that’s tricky in any country, but Larry Springer, one of the people I was working with had a vendetta against the American car industry and dealerships because he felt he’d been – been swindled a couple of times and so he trained me on how to negotiate with a standard car salesman [laughs] to get a good deal, which we did. We made friends with the car salesman actually and in the end he got to know us. And he congratulated me afterwards saying I had got the best deal [laughs] that it was possible to get, having been through the theatre of getting up and leaving and all of that stuff. So yeah, there was – there was a whole rich experience going on around this, I mean not least the American fast food chains and so on which weren’t so prevalent in the UK in those days, and you know, travelling down to Los Angeles, my parents coming over and staying with us at Christmas, their first experience of the States. So from that point of view it was a terrific time for the family.

[22:42]

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And although one of the reasons – I mean at the – at the – when the Solar Max fine pointing system failed obviously, you know, I was thinking of planning to come back to the UK and one of the reasons was that the kids were coming up to eleven years old and what we could see from the previous cohort of brain drainers who’d gone out about ten years before us, was that once their kids got to, you know, become teenagers, to be fair to them you were then committed for ten years or seven or eight years so that their education could be consistent and not interrupted. But what we also saw was that if you did that, if you stayed in the States, your kids became Americans and that very hard for some, you know, the expat Brit Diaspora there to cope with. I mean teenage years are difficult enough times for families anyway but we saw several families who were really struggling because they still identified themselves as Brits and they found it quite hard to handle the fact that their children were Americans. So we had made up our mind that we – for that reason and others we wanted to come back. I had several very good job offers from other American research institutions who I had, you know, got to know as part of the SMM, one in Boulder which would have been very attractive. But we sat and thought about it and decided to turn those down. Another interesting little anecdote, we – by one means or another we ran into a guy who was an entrepreneur and who had had one of these classic American boom bust careers where he had, you know, set up companies that had gone bust and recovered and so on, only in America, you know, absolutely … unbeatable optimism. Anyway this guy had finally made his fortune as the builder of Hollywood film stars’ swimming pools, so he built the piano shaped pool for Liberace and you know, and so he was very well-known and very sought after and very rich and if he needed a bit of extra money he had a small office on Sunset Boulevard which he would just open, he wouldn’t advertise it, it would be closed most of the time, word of mouth would go round that it was open, people would flock to get one of Richard’s Jacuzzis put in, he would earn himself 20,000 dollars and he would shut the shop again. So we got to know him and he got to like us, he – he liked the kids, we met him on a holiday and so we went and stayed with him in Los Angeles [laughs] and his wife, who was his second wife, was the senior executive on – in the company that imported Booths Gin and you know, so she was kind of very well to do in her own right, so this was a very rich couple. And he had – he had fallen out with his daughter who had become estranged with his first wife and so on. So anyway we –

93 Chris Rapley Page 94 C1379/40 Track 4 we got to know them well when we were down in Los Angeles, we were wandering around Los Angeles zoo and he was coughing a bit, the smog was getting at his lungs, and he must have been in his late fifties or early sixties maybe and he said, ‘Chris, you know, I’m going to leave, I’m going to go up to Red Bluff, you know, I’ve bought a place up there, the air is good, you know, I like it up there, I can just relax and fish and so on, that’s fine,’ so I said, ‘Oh that’s very interesting Richard,’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘the only thing is,’ he said, ‘it seems a shame to close down the business,’ so I said, ‘Oh, yeah, okay, well I’m sure it is,’ and he said, ‘Well, you know, how about you taking it over?’ So I said, ‘Well I don’t know anything about building swimming pools,’ and he said, ‘Oh you don’t have to worry about that,’ he said, ‘I’ve got people who can build the swimming pools,’ he said, ‘it’s your accent,’ he said, ‘you know with your accent and your way about you you’d do fine,’ so I said – this was [laughs] – we were just about the XRP to Goddard Space Flight Centre so this didn’t quite fit, but I said to him, ‘If I did what would you pay me?’ and he said, ‘Well I’d give you a basic half million dollars a year and if you, you know, made more than that then you could keep the rest,’ so Norma and I have often looked back [laughs] on that and said, ‘What were we thinking about?’ But actually we thought it through, we were saying to ourselves, ‘What sort of lives would our kids have, you know,’ I mean it just didn’t fit, you know, I was committed to – I was interested in and committed to the Solar Maximum Mission. But on a relatively modest post-doc salary, you know, half a million dollars a year and anything else you could keep in 1980, 1979 was – well was an interesting proposition.

[27:29]

What – you’ve mentioned a couple of times that you sort of discussed career decisions with – you’ve said, ‘We discussed it,’ sounds as if your wife was very involved in these decisions that you were making?

Yes, I mean … to some extent you know the long suffering wives of people who are – who do their work because they’re really really interested in it, not because they get paid very much for it, although we weren’t – in the States, you know, we were, you know, comparatively well off, I mean we’d never been that well off in the sense that

94 Chris Rapley Page 95 C1379/40 Track 4 the financial support that we had while we were out there was – was respectable. But you know, we’re a small, you know, very tightly coupled family and we were very conscious of the fact that those three years in the States were on the one hand a very rich experience for the children, but on the other hand very disruptive for their education. And when they came back for example they – they were way behind on mathematics and so on and we had to – you know, we had to get them extra tuition. So on the one hand they had an amazing yardstick by which they could assess or judge and make up their own minds about their education back in the UK that other kids couldn’t, you know, unless they had similar experiences, but on the other hand there were lots of things that they were just, you know, a year or two behind on. So yes – so yes we took that pretty seriously.

And in making a decision, how – I don’t know how seriously you took the offer, but in making a decision about whether to sell swimming pools or continue to be a scientist, did you have any sense at all about, I don’t know, the value of different kinds of work or – or a kind of sense of morality about things that are useful or things that are not, or things that are exploitative or things that are not and so on?

Well I suppose you could say that the primary motivation, if one’s just very harsh about it, was a sort of indulgence, you know, it was what I was doing was really really interesting and satisfying. I mean incredibly frustrating, very very very stressful, you know the hours we worked and the pressure we were under and the number of technical problems that, you know, we had to deal with meant that you never had a very relaxing time. And even when we were off, you know, enjoying California there was always that pressure on you and I mean that’s been a feature of my entire academic career, it’s very true at British [inaud] – you know, waking up sweating at four in the morning worrying about things is something I’m a bit prone to unfortunately, others seem to be a bit more sort of phlegmatic about these things, but you know that was – that comes with the package. So I’ve forgotten where we were going on the thread there.

Yes, I was asking about your – if you had a sense at the time – I’m partly asking –

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Oh, morality, yeah I mean, you know, honestly yes. You know, I hadn’t become a scientist and I had chosen my career to some extent rejecting I suppose slightly rebelliously the idea that all that one should be doing in life was going out to earn lots of money to acquire material goods and impress other people, wasn’t very interested in that. In fact that was sort of antithetical to my values. So although in – in the swimming pool case the sum of money involved would make anybody stop and think for a minute or two, there was never really any question that we would have gone down that route, I mean … you know, just wasn’t on the cards.

[31:18]

And a slightly related question and that’s could you give me a sense of your sort of personal political views and even voting habits in the ‘70s and early ‘80s and this could cover America with a very different political scene?

Completely apolitical really, not – not in any way politically active and quite taken aback and interested when, just going back, a bit I had the opportunity to go to a Cospar conference in Bulgaria when I presented the SL1203, the soft x-ray diffused background results, and ran into young Russian scientists and eastern block scientists, you know, at – the Hungarians hated me calling them eastern block, they loathed that. But running into those guys, mainly guys and finding how intensely interested they were in how society should be political with the small pin, not party political, but wanting to stay up and talk all night about, you know, what the – you know, the social dynamics of an appropriate society should be, and really how largely disinterested I was and most people were. You know, I was never interested in, you know, CMD or anything, so – so although my – my parents certainly came from a kind of conservative view of the world, middle class, you know, white small c conservative, read The Daily Telegraph , again I sort of rejected that to some extent and so when – when kind of forced to vote I’ve kind of reluctantly voted Liberal or Liberal Democrat. But without – because it seemed to me that they’ve served a purpose in gingering up a bit more of an ethical and social view of – of society, and we could talk about where they’ve gone wrong now but, you know, they were better in – when they

96 Chris Rapley Page 97 C1379/40 Track 4 weren’t in power it seems to me. But in – in the States yes, I mean I – you know, more democrat than republican but actually not that engaged.

[33:37]

Could I ask you then now why you didn’t continue to work on detector systems and satellite equipment for interrogating the universe if you like or the cosmos and what – yes, simply that question, why not continue to do that?

Yeah, well the world of solar physics which I had been sucked into because of this detector work, and found very interesting and thoroughly enjoyed and, you know, solar physics has considerable relevance to humanity, you know, every time a solar flare goes off there was a large chromyl mass ejection, or your changes in the solar wind it can have impacts on satellites and on earth communication systems and transmission lines and so on. So – so there was an element of this being slightly less indulgent in terms of being purely kind of cerebral and in – you know, curiosity driven, there was some genuine practical spin-offs from this stuff, that was slightly satisfying. But I – there was an expectation – there was a tendency in those days and I’m parodying this a bit, you were either a solar maximum person or a solar minimum person, you know, you either were interested in flares and the active sun and then there was a perhaps slightly smaller group of people who were more interested in the quiet sun and how the corona worked and its internal workings and so on. So – and of course there’s this eleven year cycle which is quite nice for satellite work ‘cause it generally takes you a minimum of two to three, you know, usually these days much longer but let’s say five years to develop the new systems and get them up and working on a satellite, you then do a few years of observations and it then takes you a number of years to analyse the data, by which time you’re just about ready to go back into the next cycle. And so that sort of rhythm kind of permeated certainly the solar flare side, the active sun side of solar physics, so there was an expectation on the part of my colleagues and superiors and so on that I would, you know, having – having if you like emerged as – as somebody at a relatively young age made a reasonable contribution, you know, sort of rising star, that I would continue and, you know, go through the process of doing a lot of the analysis and then prepare for the next – the

97 Chris Rapley Page 98 C1379/40 Track 4 next set of missions. But I thought about it and I thought, well you know, this has been a fantastic experience, I’d started on the Solar Max probably in ’74, ’75, they were the first glimmers of proposal writing and so on, and this was now 1981 so I’d spent six years of my life on it. And I’ve always been of a slightly sort of restless disposition and a guy called John Vesecky from Stanford who was a bit more of a polymath, he was interested in solar flares, radio missions from solar flares, but he’d worked on the Stanford Lunar Accelerator and, you know, he was just generally interested in a wide variety of science that was going on, used to claim at the time he’d published in a wider range of journals than pretty much anybody else he knew. And he, I suppose over a beer or something like that started talking about the latest data from SEASAT which was the American, the first American civil earth observation mission launched in ’78 I think it was, and he showed me some of the images, some of the synthetic aperture radar imagery of the ocean and internal waves in the ocean, and also talked a little bit about the altimetry. And so that sounded really interesting to me, you know, turning the instruments over so they looked down at the earth was really appealing because it would be just as interesting scientifically, you know, from the engineering and technological point of view but it would actually be of, you know, could be of value. Even then people were beginning to talk about climate change and the impacts of humans on the planet, changing poles and so on, so it sounded to me like that could be something really interesting. So I called Robert Boyd who was, you know, still the director of MSSL from the States, very unusually, you know, in those days international telephone calls were still pretty expensive and you didn’t call your director all that often, I spoke to Len Culhane my PhD supervisor and ex-PhD supervisor a lot. But I called Robert and said, ‘You know, I’m planning on coming back,’ obviously I’ll continue – I had some PhD students who I was supervising on the solar flare stuff and clearly there was a lot of work to do on analysing the data but I said, ‘you know, I’m really interested in getting into earth observation,’ and he said, ‘Well that’s really interesting because I should be retiring in the next year or two,’ and he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about one last diversification before I go to leave the lab in as robust a state and resilient a state,’ as he could so he said, ‘that’d be a great idea.’ And people at Rutherford lab in and around the UK were beginning to talk about doing a bit more earth observation than just the

98 Chris Rapley Page 99 C1379/40 Track 4 atmospheric physics work that John Houghton had been doing in Oxford and similar stuff at – at Rutherford lab.

[39:04]

So when I got back David Llewellyn-Jones came over, David was responsible for the Along Track Scanning Radiometer project at Rutherford lab and said, ‘Well look, would you guys like to collaborate on this, you know, it would help us greatly if there were some university collaborators and in particular if you took on the black body calibration sources which were, you know, very very demanding technical spec. Now I knew nothing about infrared – I mean I knew a bit about radio waves, I knew quite a lot about x-rays, a little bit about ultraviolet but I had never worked with infrared kit before so this was a big challenge. But we took it on and we worked for a little while with the National Physical Lab, we essentially commissioned them to help us with these black body calibration sources because they were the UKs most experienced people, you know, building calibration sources, but they built them for labs so they had huge copper things that weighed you know tens of kilograms and had water flushing through them and so on. So the – you know, the translation of that into something that weighed a kilogram, used ten watts of – of electrical power, couldn’t have water going through it and yet reached a specification that they found quite difficult to reach even in the lab, was something that after working with them for over a year or so and their contractors who became AEA Technology, we – the penny dropped, they were never going to do it. They were simply so stuck in their ways and thinking they could not restart, so a physicist who was working at MSSL called Ian Mason who retired recently, and … Peter [laughs] God, senior moment, but anyway the engineer who I worked with all those years, Peter Sheather, together produced one of the most beautiful and elegant fusions of basic physics and basic thermal engineering that I’ve ever seen, oh and Jim Bowles as well with the electrical design, so they produced these – what were they ten centimetre diameter aperture infrared black bodies that had a blackness of .9999 and a temperature uniformity in space of better than a tenth of a degree, something like that. And these – these were just a beautiful piece of work, beautiful piece of work and, you know, an absolute thrill to have been associated with them, those three guys together, you know, the design they

99 Chris Rapley Page 100 C1379/40 Track 4 came up with was a quantum leap on anything that anybody had done before and it just went right back to basics, it was beautiful.

And just to clarify for the – for a non scientific listener, what was this – what was this thing for?

Well the Along Track Scanning Radiometer was attempting to read – to measure sea surface temperatures to better than .3 of a degree Kelvin and they looked through the atmosphere with three channels in windows, infrared windows in the – in the atmosphere, but also at two angles so you had two path lengths, you know, one route too longer than the other, and you could use this to correct for the atmospheric absorption and reemission. So you could get this incredibly accurate and precise measure of sea surface temperature and sea surface temperature is – the skin temperature tells you a great deal about the heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, so this was a quantum jump forward in terms of our ability to measure sea surface temperature and do that work. But the point is you always need an onboard calibration, a reference temperature, a cold temperature and a hot temperature, because the detectors drift and so you need that. And so we had a cold source, I forget what temp – and probably one of them was at nought degrees and the other one was at fifteen degrees, I don’t recall exactly, be something like that. But these had – these had to look into the mirror, you know, the mirror spun and it saw both these black bodies on every spin and the point is that the whole of that aperture had to be completely black, i.e., emissivity [ph] of one as close as you could possibly go, and also had to be completely uniform in temperature across it. And designing that black body cavity which is a physical and mathematical perfection but it came in its physical reality, it came as close to that as I think you could possibly go, that was a beautiful thing. So okay, so there we were, we got into the ATSR and that was a great project and, you know, MSSL stuck with Rutherford lab and continued to build those black bodies for the series of satellite ATSR1, ATSR2, AATSR and they actually franchised the design to AEA Technology and they managed to sell a few, commercialised it a bit. Sold a few to other – other satellites and instrument users but in the end I think they gave up because the market was just too small in the end to maintain such a specialised team. So that was a good story.

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[44:26]

But [laughs] just as we had agreed to do this a guy called John Powell from Rutherford lab turned up and said – you know, he said, ‘I’m working with European Space Agency who are quite keen to do polar work and oceanography with radar altimeters, we’re very keen to do the ocean side of this, working with the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences originally at Wormley,’ but he said, ‘we don’t have anybody who could look at the ice stuff and ESA are very keen to have a study done on this, you know, would you lead it? And that would be working with Scott Polar Research Institute, British Antarctic Survey, IOS and Rutherford lab,’ and there were a few others, I think there were seven or eight, probably still got the report, I could tell you, I’ve got the report right here. So who was it, it was MSSL, Scott Polar, oh yes Kinesse [ph] [inaud] Spaciale [ph], Rutherford lab, okay, doesn’t seem to have BAS in here although we did talk to BAS quite a bit. But so this is 1983, A Study of Satellite Radar Altimeter Operation over Ice Covered Surfaces which was commissioned by the – by the … by the European Space Agency. Oh and we had – that’s right, we had the – as well as [ph] commercial support, there’s a company called EG&G, Washington Analytical Services Centre in Maryland help us as well. And so John said, ‘Would you,’ you know, ‘Chris, would you run this?’ and my first reaction was, I said, ‘Well I want to think about it,’ my first reaction was to say, ‘Goodness, I’m still trying to deal with the data from the Solar Max,’ I only had one PhD student, a guy called Peter Waggott [ph] to supervise, but there was a lot of work to do on that and after all I’d invested all of that time and effort into building this instrument, I hadn’t published very much in that time period, it’s the fate of all instrument developers, and so I needed to get some return on – on that investment. And it was quite hard as well because there were a lot of other analysers of those data who hadn’t spend their time building the instrument and so were in a stronger position to analyse it than I was, so it’s difficult to keep your end up. I had this new thing with ATSR which was quite a challenge, you know, we were getting into new waters, and so the idea of doing this as well seemed to me to be a step too far, but I went to see Robert Boyd and said, ‘What do you think?’ you know, ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ and he irritated me a bit by saying, ‘Oh come on Chris, I’m sure you can handle it,’ so I

101 Chris Rapley Page 102 C1379/40 Track 4 thought, oh well that’s all very well for you to say but, you know, when your director says, ‘I think you should do it,’ it makes you go away and have a think and so I thought, well I don’t know, it’s worth a try. And so we – we did that and then you could see there’s a whole series of – of reports that we did for European Space Agency, not only on using these altimeters over the – over the polar regions, but we discovered you could use them over inland lakes, water and land and so on, all sorts of previously unthought-of applications for these data. Jay Zwally who ran the Goddard Group, who I had met when I was in Goddard, was incredibly helpful. I mean he knew basically he was building up an international rival, he’s hugely generous in helping us get hold of the SEASAT raw wave form data to analyse, and European Space Agency paid for that, we became the custodians of it. And so really a very interesting story developed from there which leads, you know, directly to the UKs involved in Cryosat and, you know, ESA’s flying of Cryosat and, you know, people along this corridor, you know, Seymour Laxon working on sea ice and all the team here, Duncan Wingham who ran this department for a while, are all products of that story.

[48:29]

And the fact that the European Space Agency focused on altimetry and exploited it over the polar regions in the way that it did is very much traced back to that series of – of studies that we did for them. And again everybody felt that was a hugely exciting time. My group went from me, you know, in 1981, quite quickly to two or three others to work on the ATSR, Ian Mason being one of them, through to contracts that we had from European Space Agency, contracts from the Royal Aircraft Establishment who had the responsibility for building the UK data centre which was one of the data processing centres for ERS1. So we did a lot of contract work for them and we got to the point where I think I had – I think we got to about thirty, thirty-five people employed in the group, probably some of – some students, PhD students as well, we began to get NERC grants which was the first time that MSSL had ever had anything than SRC or SERC grants. And studentships, which, you know, the department had to essentially approve and cope with and there was some resistance to that. And there was one point where I alone as an individual was

102 Chris Rapley Page 103 C1379/40 Track 4 drawing in eighty per cent of the whole department’s external income on all of these contracts that we’re running. I think we had fourteen different contracts and studies going at one point, it was a kind of mad period. But it was hugely productive and hugely fun and of course that gave me a lot of experience in building up my own group, my own team, so we had, you know, particular views about the way that should go. Every Wednesday afternoon was sacrosanct and we would have a roster so that people would give a presentation and we would separately criticise, positively, creatively, the delivery and the content, and we’d then have a brainstorming session which anybody could offer a problem to and we would all try and sort out what the solution was, you know, whatever it was, technical, scientific whatever, and then have some, you know, wine and cheese and stuff at the end of the afternoon for social cohesion, so it was an opportunity to try out lots of things in the way that you lead and energise teams and I – you know, certainly I enjoyed it and I get the impression a lot of other people enjoyed it and look back on that as a very productive time. Ad it’s interesting, these reports up here, Stefan Anbrutsi [ph] who was one of the senior commissioning executives in ESA headquarters, I ran into him a year or so ago, years, you know, not having seen him for years and he said that he had just had to move office in Paris, in his Paris headquarters, and he said he used it as an opportunity to chuck out, you know, have a real cull of lots of old junk that had accumulated over the years, so he’s throwing away all the old stuff about the origins of ERS and so on. And he said he got to our reports on altimetry and he was just about to throw them into the bin and he thought, you know, that was such a good time and so he held onto them, and that’s – that’s, you know, the way I feel about it too, it was great, it had a lot of good fun. And we did some really interesting work.

[51:50]

Were you taking satellite data and showing how it could be interpreted in ways that told you about the poles?

Yes.

Or were you developing new instruments to put onto ERS1 satellites to collect –

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Both, both. And the two things were completely intertwined. So we were using satellite data, SEASAT data, then GEOSAT, there was another satellite they ran called GEOSAT, and also radar data from the Rutherford labs airborne radars, and although we were not building the instruments, because building – building radars is something that electrical engineering departments generally do, it wasn’t something that it was sensible for MSSL to get into, nevertheless we specified – helped ESA specify how the radar should perform, when we got deeply into it. And that was, you know, I hired Duncan from electrical engineering but we also worked with Hugh Griffiths [ph] from the electrical engineering department because they knew a lot about radars and, you know, how they function. And between us we provided quite sophisticated design criteria and specifications that ESAs subcontractors or contractors then delivered. You know, working closely with – with Richard Francis and people like that in ESA, I mean it was a very tight networked team.

[53:14]

And to what extent at this very early stage was climate change either a motivation for the work or a way of constructing arguments to argue for its value in making applications for money and so on?

Both those things, I mean it was – it was well understood that, you know, the polar regions, that there’s an amplification that goes on at the polar regions, the polar regions are much more vulnerable to, you know, warming than other parts of the planet and also have an influence on the rest of the planet. So we knew it would be, you know, the minus [inaud]. Well I have to say the fact that the polar regions respond very strongly to changes in the heat balance of the planet means that the natural variability up there is very large as well. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody demonstrate that the signal to noise ratio in terms of – of detecting human induced climate change, you know, rising above the background noise is any – you know, the signal to noise ratio is any greater in the polar regions than it is anywhere else. In fact I could easily be persuaded with the right data that, you know, where you have less natural variability you may detect the human induced component more

104 Chris Rapley Page 105 C1379/40 Track 4 easily. However the point is that we know that the polar regions respond, we also knew two other things; polar orbiting satellites, their orbits converge on the polar regions so as the planet spins underneath you get quite wide spacings between the ground tracks at the equator, but they all close together so you get very dense coverage at the poles. And also it’s hugely expensive and hazardous and hard going to actually do work on the ground at the poles, so remote sensing is a very powerful way of dealing with the polar regions, plus ice is by and large pretty uniform, whereas you know, a mixture of agriculture and land and so on is very complex, so even with relatively low resolution passive microwave images or radars, you can learn a lot about the polar regions from relatively simple instruments.

[55:24]

To what extent were people who wanted to have satellites looking at, I don’t know, water or land or crops or so on, competing for satellite time for attention in –

Sure, that you always have to make trade-offs but the trick with altimetry was – sorry I shouldn’t have used that word should I these days after – after climate gate but I’m using it in – in the sense of the, you know, the clever way of sorting this out is that the – well the neat thing about the altimeter is that it operates over the ocean and gives you fabulous data on – on the geodes currents sea level rise and so on, wave heights and what have you. But as soon as it encounters land or ice with the right design and the right algorithms for processing the data you can process that data and get useful geophysical information out of it too, so in that sense there was no conflict. Now on – on Cryosat the data rates are so high that you had to choose where you focus on the earth’s surface and so that, you know, there are trade-offs, there are conflicts if you like that have to be resolved. But, you know, that’s always true in any mission. The Solar Maximum mission you had to decide what mode to operate in, there are – unfortunately there were bewildering – there was a bewildering menu of different modes even with the individual instruments, let alone the whole suite of instruments and so that was the job of the tsar, to agree with the teams what combination of observing modes you would adopt for the next day. And sometimes you would hit the

105 Chris Rapley Page 106 C1379/40 Track 4 flare with exactly the right combination, and other times you wouldn’t and, you know, that’s just the luck of the draw.

[57:16]

I don’t know whether you’d like to now say how this – how this work in earth observation developed over – over the 1980s, I’m not sure of the time period that you’ve been covering, you seem to be talking about the beginnings of this and the building up for the group?

Yes, well you see I’m … I suppose the group started in – the group started pretty much as soon as I got back in the sense that I had, you know, committed to working on the ATSR. And one of the consequences of – of Robert Boyd’s encouragement to take up the altimetry was that it soon became pretty all encompassing and so the amount of time I had to deliver stuff on the solar side, you know, dwindled away and once I had seen Peter Waggott [ph] through his – his PhD thesis I don’t think I contributed much more to the solar physics. So basically I abandoned the solar physics after that, which, you know, was a shame because I’d invested a lot of time and effort into it and it meant that my publication count was you know, not as strong as it should have been as a result of that. But on the other hand I found this other stuff, you know, really really interesting and fascinating. So we started in ’81, I was – there were all sorts of battles, there was a thundopause [ph] as we called it between the SERC and the NERC. NERC owned the planet and its environment, but SERC was responsible for building satellites, so why should SERC spend money on satellites that were delivering NERC science. At the same time NERC had a bit of a tradition of being a kind of bucket and spade, you know, send out an ecologist with a one metre quadrat and let him count the number of bugs that walked in and out, so they weren’t really used to, you know, talking in budgets of more than 100 quid, let alone, you know, 100,000 or million or whatever, I’m parodying a little bit. So there were some real structural problems to resolve in the UK about how you funded this stuff and how you funded a group like mine to do research. So for an awful long time we existed on these ESA studies and RAE studies and, you know, one thing you learned quite quickly is that people who give you money to do a study want you to do

106 Chris Rapley Page 107 C1379/40 Track 4 the study [laughs] and they don’t want you necessarily to publish papers or do research. So we had this huge engine going supporting the group, out of which we managed from the overheads to equip ourselves with computers, I mean we had to do everything, equip ourselves with the computers, Derek Roberts when he arrived [inaud] was hugely supportive and even got us a whole small portacabin city that GEC – was surplus to GEC’s needs and they gave it to us and it’s still down there, that’s what the Remote Sensing Group still exists in down at MSSL. So we had all of this hard work to do, you know, to build up the physical infrastructure and the funding and it was incredibly difficult to get money out of either NERC or SERC, they couldn’t make up their mind who was responsible and we just kept falling between the gaps, in order to exist as a proper research group and start to do proper research. Now the fact that ERS1 hadn’t flown and I guess it didn’t fly till what was it, was it ’96 or ‘7 or something like that, meant that it wasn’t the end of the world but it did mean it was very difficult for us to publish, you know, we published all of these grey literature things but we had no spare capacity or little spare capacity to do other stuff. So we – so I had got to the point after ten years, and remember I tend to think in five year chunks, you know, did five years, you know, cosmic x-ray astronomy, five years on the SMM roughly, two chunks of five years to get this group up and running and it was clearly, you know, very well known, very successful, invited to all the best conferences, you know, seen as a major player. But it was frustrating that I wanted to leave it with a – essentially a block grant that guaranteed its longevity, and so I stayed on really till ’94, 1994, and actually that was probably two or three years longer than, you know, I wasn’t learning much new then, we’d got the whole thing running, it was running quite well, I mean you know there were day to day things to do but I wasn’t really learning anything new and I’m not sure that I was delivering that much new, you know, it was just struggling, irritatingly trying to get this money to secure the future of the group which we more or less did by about ’94.

[1:02:04]

And in the interim I had met Charles Elachi who was – who is now director of Jet Propulsion Lab but was then in charge of their earth observation radar programme, not just earth observation, their planetary radar programme. And I’d met him at a

107 Chris Rapley Page 108 C1379/40 Track 4 conference in Florence where he had presented a typical JPL high energy over the limits presentation on a type of imaging radar altimeter that they were thinking of putting on one of the shuttle missions. And I had caught him the next morning and I had sat up all night ‘cause I thought what they were proposing was impossible because Hugh Griffiths [ph] and I had been doing some work on something similar and we’d decided that there were really sever technical issues. And so I went to see him and I said, ‘You know, I just don’t see how this thing you, you know, proposed yesterday with all the usual JPL flash bang, wonderful illustrations, I just don’t see how it works, unless you are talking about this and this,’ and he said that’s interesting, he said, ‘Well that is exactly what we are talking about, why don’t you come over to JPL and spend a little bit of time with us because, you know, you seem to have some insights that would be very helpful to us.’ So early in ’94 I went and spent three months, January through March working at JPL on a leave of absence from MSSL and they even then paid for me to do another month working at Goddard Space Flight Centre because JPL and Goddard are – are competitors for NASA funds so they don’t normally – they normally compete rather than collaborate but I wanted to go there to work with Jay Zwally on the altimetry stuff. And whilst I was there I saw this advertisement, well actually the MSSL PA, goodness knows why she did it, just sent me – she said, ‘I thought you might be interested in this,’ it was the advertisement for the director of IGBP, this International Geosphere Biosphere Programme, and that really is the next chapter. So what was I working on at JPL, oh yes what I was working on at JPL directly, although I was doing work on altimetry as well, was the design of the radar which is on the mission which is orbiting Saturn and observing Titan, so it’s the Cassini Titan Radar that I worked with the JPL team on and we designed it so that it could operate in a – in a very flexible set of modes so that it could do radar altimetry maps of Titan’s surface.

[1:04:50]

Just one final question, were you – I’ve noticed that your job titles over the period that you were setting up this earth observation group are sort of academic job titles, lecturer and then professor of remote sensing, and I wondered to what extent you were teaching and –

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Oh yes, I – well when I – this goes back to the, you know, the time when SL402 had failed and Robert said he’d find me some more money and then SL1203 was successful. Robert got me the – that he sort of sold his soul to the devil, the SERC came up with a scheme where a senior person could essentially sell themselves off into some sort of retirement mode where the university continued to pay their salary but the SERC would pay for a young person’s salary to replace them as a lecturer, it was called the Special Replacement Scheme I guess. And so Robert you know, bless his heart did that for me, and that gave me a secure position but [laughs] what he did was, there was always tension between MSSL and the Department of Physics and Astronomy here. Bob Wilson who was the head of the department, there was a degree of tension between him and Robert. I mean basically I’ve seen it before, Jodrell Bank and the Astronomy Department at Manchester had a similar kind of tense relationship, it’s when a substation and particularly a remote substation becomes more famous and successful than the host department, and it’s bound to, you know, rub up, you know, people’s hackles and so on [laughs]. Anyway, what Robert did is he – he took on the – what was it, Astronomy 111 or I suppose these days what you call 101, Foundations of Modern Astronomy and he said he would deliver the course and I think – I’m pretty sure without telling Bob Wilson, who was an astronomer and head of department, that he then [laughs] substituted me through this scheme and gave me the job of giving the Astronomy 101 course. And as I understand it there was a huge row because Astronomy 101, the first course that astronomy students in UCL come to, it was felt should be given by a seasoned and well experienced lecturer and the idea that this young bloke should have been given this [laughs] did not go down well. Anyway, I put a lot of time into it and I really enjoyed giving it and the students seemed to enjoy it and the results were good, so in the end of all that calmed down. After I’d – but you’re only allowed to do, you know, a particular course for a certain number of years, I can’t remember how many years I did it, maybe four years, maybe five. And then it became necessary to move on and do something else, so I was then given the third year course on sort of physics of the earth and that got me into, you know, solid earth stuff and so that I had, you know, no direct experience of, but again it was a really – really interesting experience learning that and teaching it. And of course I was also doing quite a lot of MSc teaching. University College London and

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Imperial College set up a couple of joint courses on remote sensing and I was very much involved in – in teaching those as well. So yeah and I had – we got a lot of bright young summer students, you know, third year students to do projects with us, we also got MSc students and we had a number of PhD students and I supervised a number of those, and that was all great fun and that all worked really well.

[End of Track 4]

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Track 5

Could you continue to tell the story of the origin of your directorship of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme?

Yes, I think previously we’d discussed the thirteen years I spent building up the – establishing and building up the Earth Observation Group at our Space Science Lab [ph]. And, erm, I’d got to the point where both my learning curve and my contribution there I felt was flattening out so I really was looking for something else and I had – was given the opportunity to spend these three months, two months at Jet Propulsion Lab and then a month at Goddard Space Flight Centre. And I was trying to write a big review of radar altimetry, for one reason or another that never actually got finished, because whilst I was there I heard about this opportunity at the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme in Stockholm, or its headquarters are in Stockholm, or its secretariat. And that caught my interest because it – it linked with the earth systems view that I had been so impressed by when I’d read Jim Lovelock’s work and I knew that Jim was associated with this programme, he’d been involved with some of the original thinking, and the chair of the science committee at the time was Peter Liss from the University of East Anglia who I had sort of – I think I’d bumped into, I didn’t know him very well and you know we weren’t colleagues or anything but I’m pretty sure I had met him or at least if not when I rang him up and asked him about, you know, what this would entail he, you know, very affable, very friendly, very nice and bright guy. So it just sort of peaked my interest and I applied, although I thought it was a real long shot because this was all about biogeochemistry and palaeoscience of which I was far from an expert, and anyway I was shortlisted and invited to Stockholm for interview and I was interviewed by Peter Liss, Julia Marton-Lefèvre who was the director of the International Council of Science in Paris who’s, you know, were the organisation that was the overarching sort of – you know, establisher of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme. And, oh, and Jim McCarthy who was the previous chair of the science committee. And anyway that went well, as I understand it, there were three candidates of which I was – as I thought seen as the kind of, you know, odd one out, the other two were much more established and well known in the field, but I’d done quite a bit of reading, I’d actually done my

112 Chris Rapley Page 113 C1379/40 Track 5 due diligence [laughs] and read a lot of the documents and I felt that IGBP had kind of lost its focus, you could tell, even from the documents it was producing. ‘Cause it was originally set up with a grand vision of earth systems science integrating science together, and there was a certain amount of rhetoric about what value this would be, this had been set up in what the mid 19 – late 1980s and the purpose was to deliver knowledge and understanding. In fact its subtitle or tag line was ‘reducing uncertainties’ which would be useful to responding to the threat of climate change and more than that biogeochemical change in, you know, the disruption of the nitrogen cycle and so on. Subjects which ICSU had sponsored studies by Scopes [ph], the Scientific Committee on – and then I can’t remember the acronym but I’m sure you can find that somewhere. So IGBP was setup with a purpose in mind, it seemed to me that it had a vision of what it wanted to deliver and reading the documents of the large number of projects that it had spawn I think it had about eight by the time I took it over with three more, you know, gestating and about to be – about to be approved, I felt that it – it had got into a mode where it was still – it had fallen into sort of curiosity based research, which is kind of fine, but it – each of these projects seemed to have no sense of what it was actually going to deliver and how it was all going to be integrated together. Each project was beginning to be rather standalone so it looked to me like the kind of herding cats business where the cats were all beginning to escape. And I – in the interview I remember making, you know, quite a point of this and it really caught the attention of – of the interviewers.

[04:43]

Anyway Norma came over for the interview as well, I mean, you know, she wasn’t in the interview, she was out shopping or something, but that evening we – we went to quite a nice restaurant, the Astralarb [ph] I think in – in Stockholm, and I began to think, no no no, they’re not going to – they’re not going to for me, you know, that’s – you know, I don’t have the background in this. And I remember feeling, you know, I’ve wasted their time, I’ve wasted my time and, you know, I should never have got into this, you know, what a silly thing to have done, I should have stuck much more to what I know. So I had this, you know, strong reaction. Anyway, low and behold the telephone call came through I think while we were still in the restaurant from Peter

113 Chris Rapley Page 114 C1379/40 Track 5 saying that they had decided to give me the job and I was absolutely thrilled, I have to say absolutely thrilled. So I was I think in a subsequent trip I met Thomas Rosswell who was the director and had been the director from the inception of IGBP, it was set up in Sweden, the Swedes very much wanted to have the secretariat, they passed an act of – of law which established their commitment to their funding which was three times the normal kind of UN related rate and so, you know, Thomas had been an extraordinary kind of bulldozer of a builder up of it. But I think what we all saw and probably Thomas would admit it too was that Thomas’ construction of this out of nothing, which took an enormous amount of energy and an enormous feat had reached the kind of end of its – of its life and it needed somebody else to take over and now shape and guide and direct it into a purpose. And so really what I suppose I contributed over the three and a half, nearly four years that I was there, was convincing the science committee and the participants that we had to demonstrate what the value added was, that this wasn’t just another way of combining international collaboration on some interesting bits of science and very important bits of science, but that it actually added something. You see the budget which was cobbled together from contributions from – there were seventy-five nations involved but only about fifty something of them actually contributed, because some of the smaller nations just found it so difficult and we kind of waived the rules on them ‘cause we wanted them to be involved. But the budget for the secretariat was of the order of 2.7 million dollars a year, even then in 1994, which was a substantial sum of money, so over twenty – you know, over ten years or twenty years – ten years was the sort of normal lifetime of a project, that was somewhere between twenty and thirty million dollars worth of investment and the agencies that were providing that money, although obviously their contributions were much smaller, I knew would at some point start asking questions about, ‘Well what – you know how is the world different as a result of this investment?’ And I felt it was very very important that we should be able to show some synthesis, results, which demonstrated what new science, what new insights and particularly integrated insights had emerged as a result of the presence of IGBP. Very very difficult because, you know, you can’t know what might have happened had it not been there.

[08:15]

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But that was a vision that I managed to get all involved to – or pretty much all involved to commit to, not without an initial very difficult meeting of the science committee in Thredbo in Australia where I – not having really discussed it with Peter or the others, you know, gave a presentation, my first presentation which announced this vision. And it proved to be incredibly controversial because there was a very strong feeling from at least one of the rather senior individuals who’d been on the science committee for a long time that you cannot direct science, you know, you cannot determine what science will produce and therefore you cannot run it like a project and say what it’s going to deliver. Which I think was a misunderstanding of what I was trying to do but it provoked a very strong reaction and then a lot of discussion. Wasn’t at all clear that we weren’t going to part ways if they [laughs] had not – had not come round to general consensus that this was a worthy thing to seek to do which they did and I was supported in this by – strongly by Peter and others. And so once we got over that hurdle then from then onwards, you know, the thing ran its course. And we did, we – by the time I’d left we were beginning to produce synthesis reports which proved to be much harder to produce than the community had ever thought they would be, you know, they thought it would be possible given all of the research work they had done, each of the projects to say, ‘Well, you know, here’s what we’ve achieved,’ and they found that being able to crystallise that and demonstrate what was different at, you know, as a result of their projects having been in place, was much more taxing than they’d imagined.

[10:11]

Now the other thing that I felt very very strongly about was – I’ve always been interested in interdisciplinary science of which this was, you know, an extraordinary example, but [laughs] Thomas Rosswell and Pierre Morel who was the chair of – who was the executive director of the World Climate Research Programme which was the sister programme and predecessor which had existed some, at least some five, maybe a few years more prior to IGBP, didn’t get on. And in fact there had been a very sour relationship between World Climate Research Programme and IGBP, perhaps not at individual science levels but at the organisational level they – they competed with

115 Chris Rapley Page 116 C1379/40 Track 5 each other and were unhelpful to each other. And as I say I think it’s fair to say that this was quite a sort of personal thing as I understood it anyway between Thomas and Pierre, you know, maybe if you dig into it you might find it was different but that was certainly the impression I had and as luck would have it somebody I’d known for years called Hartnet MacRussel [ph], Professor Hartnet MacRussel [ph] who had an incredibly similar background to me in physics, climate science and satellite earth observation, and was appointed as the new director of WCRP. Now the odd thing was my secretary obviously didn’t see the advert for WCRP so she didn’t send it to me, had she done so I might very well have applied to that and history would have been completely different. As it was, because I didn’t know about it [laughs] Hartnet [ph] was appointed more or less simultaneously with myself we immediately made contact and immediately agreed that a major priority for both of us would be to ensure greater integration and much closer working between WCRP and IGBP. And that’s what we strove to do. But what we further agreed was that we knew that there was another programme called the Human Dimensions Programme, not at that time the International Human Dimensions Programme, but HDP and we felt very strongly that earth systems science incorporated all of these components and so we worked with a lady called Ellen Vegan [ph] who was the executive director of HDP, to try and draw all of these things together and at least the three directors constantly met, I know we had a formal meeting at least once a year but we met at all sorts of other events as well. And our objective was to bring these three programmes together so that we could genuinely say that we were doing earths systems science, covering the science in all the different disciplines.

[12:56]

And in fact important in this was a diagram called the Bretherton Diagram, now an expat British scientist called Francis Bretherton who had emigrated to the States and was a professor of I think climate science at University of Wisconsin, and a very very bright, a wonderful guy with an extremely loud voice. I remember sitting with him in a restaurant in Madison in Wisconsin and gradually all the people on the tables around us moved somewhere else [laughs] because he was so loud but very entertaining. Anyway he had produced a diagram in a paper for NASA advising them on earth

116 Chris Rapley Page 117 C1379/40 Track 5 systems science which showed how the earth system was connected including the human component, although he didn’t expand the human component but it was demonstrated to be there. And I took that diagram and I modified it, I coloured it so that you could see which bits were WCRP and which bits were IGBP and which bits were IHDP and you showed that if all three worked together you could genuinely cover the whole system. And while we’re talking I’ll see if I can – I may still have a copy of it on my computer. And that became a kind of symbol of what we were striving to do and we had some success, Ellen [ph] left after a year and a half or maybe a couple of years and the name of the guy who took over [laughs] was just was on the tip of my tongue, it’s escaped me, he later went on to become the director of ICSU. And we all continued to strive to bring these programmes together, and I think we made a lot of progress. There was considerable scepticism, [showing diagram] oh look here’s the original Bretherton Diagram but without my – so it’s got volcanism and solar as external impacts on the system, this is all the internal stuff showing the connections between the atmosphere, the land surface and the oceans, and then humans are both impacted and drivers over here in the way they interfere with the chemistry of the atmosphere and so on. So this is the Bretherton Diagram as it was and then so – oh there’s another version of it and if we keep – oh and – no if we keep looking we’ll hopefully find my modified version which as I say became something of a sort of symbol for what we were trying to achieve.

[15:35]

Now what did I have to do, well there were eight programmes, it became eleven programmes by the time, you know, after a year or so, you know, a couple, you know, three programmes were approved. I have to say that I wasn’t very pleased about that, eleven programmes were far too many and had I had my – had I been director earlier I would have tried hard to persuade the scientific committee not to take on such a huge programme because it was – it took quite some oversight. But essentially the central secretariat provided the support for the overall programme. And then each of the individual projects tried – tried to find ways of setting up its own secretariat, often very small, to run those research activities. And of course the objective was to write a science plan that identified the biggest priorities, the most important priorities in the

117 Chris Rapley Page 118 C1379/40 Track 5 particular sector, whether it’s atmospheric chemistry or palaeoscience or whatever, and then to, you know, bring together the best experts in the world in that area and then to – both identify and implement a programme of research that was coordinated worldwide, used standards so that there was interoperability of – of experimentation and data and data analysis. And to share the load so that, you know, if it was oceanography then, you know, one country would take one bit of the ocean and another would take another and therefore allow relatively small resource to get the maximum global impact.

[17:20]

So I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. Norma and I enjoyed very much living in – in Stockholm, although living Stockholm is a bit of euphemism for me because I was on aircraft travelling around the world an awful lot.

[17:34]

We very much sought to draw in developing nations and indeed part of the ICSU structure was an organisation called START, the acronym of which it was something like System for Training Analysis and Research but it’s not quite, I always struggle to remember how to unravel it, it’s still around. And its job explicitly was to capacity build in developing nations, and in fact the Americas, well America – USA, European Union and Japan agreed to sort of divide the world into three north south segments, from the point of view of capacity building and integrating the efforts of – of nations in different longitudinal sectors and start work very closely with them on that. So what else can I add, I mean I think we were successful, I felt at the end of it I’d, well, learned a huge amount and met some extraordinary and worked with some extraordinary people. I felt very strongly that the secretariat was not a research place, it was a facilitating engine and I think we ran a good secretariat, it was a very happy secretariat, you know, the small team, there were nine of us in total, certainly I get the impression they look back on it, you know, as a goodtime, we had – we had fun as well as working very hard. Interestingly Will Steffen who took over from me, an Australian researcher, ecologist, he was much – he was a scientist and he was more

118 Chris Rapley Page 119 C1379/40 Track 5 determined to stay as a publishing scientist as the director and so at that point the secretariat shifted in its role again to being much more a science director and a, you know, to actually generating the science, or high level science. And I hadn’t seen that as the secretariat’s role, I’m still ambivalent about whether I agree with that, although I have to say that Will was extremely effective and produced some very high quality synthesis books which sort of built on the synthesis documents that we’d started when I was there. And of course what it led to was a thing called the Earth Systems Science Partnership which has struggled to integrate the three programmes into a single global programme. And in fact ICSU is currently going through a major review where it has concluded that now in 2011, so that’s thirty years or so after WCRP was set up and twenty-five after IGBP, the programmes are arguably no longer fit for purpose and so they’re looking at ways that they can restructure and reorganise these efforts to – to deliver science – unique science, a unique contribution to science, you – in an improved way. I have to say it’s very difficult for them because what – one of the complexities of this is that every single one of these programmes, the secretariat for it, funding for it, was cobbled together through the initiative and efforts of individual very bright and energetic people. And these are historically contingent and very explicit arrangements, often which are like kind of photographic – fading photographic images of a state of play ten years previously where bureaucracies are still continuing to support things, but if you ask them to review them they might very well decide, you know, gosh, why on earth are we doing that, we hadn’t noticed. And so rationalising this whole system is fraught with the difficulty that if you dismantle this kind of, you know, grown like topsy structure, it’s – it’s not obvious that you can replace that with a streamlined system that would be more ideal. So messy may – you know, locked into a messy set of arrangements may be better than trying to rationalise it and losing all, it’s very tricky for ICSU.

[22:06]

Could you talk about the difficulties of – or the challenges presented by the fact that you had particular scientific disciplines involved in trying to organise science along a systems approach which sort of stressed I suppose the integration of different parts of

119 Chris Rapley Page 120 C1379/40 Track 5 the earth and different systems within the earth, and yet you’re dealing with established scientific disciplines?

Yeah, it’s – I think I’d said, one of the things I enjoyed at – at MSSL was when we employed a geographer and, you know, placed her amongst these kind of hardcore mathematicians and physicists, oh and I’d always had this interest in a system’s view and also when I – when I had to teach both physicists and geologists, remote sensing, it’s a tricky business because, you know, one lot are very mathematical and one are not. So I was well aware of how difficult it was to get the different tribes to, you know, to come together and work together and it was absolutely clear that the way to do it was to ensure that you had a really really interesting problem that would capture their attention and interest and enthusiasm, recognising that they could only contribute part of the – of the solution and that they needed other people to help them. And once you get over that begin to see, you know, the other researchers as really interesting people with great and interesting ideas and new ways of looking at things, so really is very enthusiastic. So really both within IGBP and across IGBP, WCRP and IHDP it was just the same issue, you know, how do you get people to stop being tribal and defensive and narrow focused. And in fact following the direction that the academic reward system tends to drive people into to be a greater and greater expert of less and less, but really to take the time and effort and recognise that it was not just worth it but also really interesting to expand horizons and work with other people and so it’s just a question of constantly I suppose providing some leadership and vision in terms of saying, ‘Look, this is what we need to be doing, encouraging people.’ Now to do that I had to pick up enormous amounts of – of new insight and understanding in all of these fields myself in order to be accepted as a sort of credible colleague by specialists in those fields, and that – you know, that was both fascinating and interesting but hard work, but you know, that’s something that I think is something I can do. We saw it again when we get onto British Antarctic Survey, the same thing happened there. And so for example jumping ahead one of my colleagues at British Antarctic Survey, you know, said that he would – would never have trusted anybody else to make a presentation including his results on his behalf ‘cause he didn’t think they’d be able to do justice, but one of the things that I think I did have a strength at was – was seeing what was important and what was the kind of mean, what was the really, the so what

120 Chris Rapley Page 121 C1379/40 Track 5 about the research that somebody was doing and being able to convey that both to a public audience and more general audience of the funders of whoever it was and to other scientists and gain people’s trust to allow, you know, so that they would give me their latest results so that I could use that, the silver bullets if you like. And I guess that’s the other point about IGBP. The funding agencies had formed this network or this grouping called The – oh gosh, what was it called, IGFA, International Group of Funding Agencies of Global Change, a guy called Bob Carrell [ph] who’d been very much a kind of senior player in the US and global system networks of – of funding agents and who had – who later went onto develop the Arctic Climate Impacts Assessment and so on. So, you know, a really major player, inspired and inspiring individual. And his team but particularly his oppo Lou Brown who retired recently, these had set up IGFA and the funding agencies met each year to sort of talk about what they were funding and what was important and where the things were, and of course the major – the big programmes that they were supporting had to go and report to them. And they liked the message that I was giving them about what we were trying to achieve with IGBP because I think they – it helped them justify what they were doing, you know, because you could show that there was a serious attempt at giving value added so that you could show that there was something extra coming out of all of this compared with, you know, if it didn’t exist. And on that scale given, you know, their total budgets I think we estimated that the – that the total budget of nationally funded research, the IGBP was having a kind of steering or guiding influence on, now gosh, am I going to get this figure right, I think we said it was two billion dollars a year of which one billion was in the United States, half a billion was in Europe and Japan and Australia probably and then another half billion sort of scattered around the rest of the world, Brazil and places like that. So at that point IGFA could say, ‘Well, you know, two million dollars a year is a very modest sum on that scale, particularly ‘cause it’s divided up, you know, at least fifty different ways, albeit very unevenly,’ to if you like get – enhance that investment elsewhere. So the objective and the vision that we were pursuing with IGBP was one that resonated very strongly with the funding agencies and so everybody was happy.

[28:11]

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Thank you. Given that your approach here depends on a particular view of the earth, especially influenced by I suppose a system approach, could you outline your sort of discovery or your – the beginnings of your interest in that approach, including the – I suppose the key work in it, I know that Jim Lovelock’s work will feature.

Yes, it’s hard to say. It was just inherent and it’s difficult to think back that far, it was – it just seemed – I think I said before when I was working in astronomy, I had this early experience where coming from – and having been trained in optical astronomy at Oxford, having done radio astronomy at Jodrell Bank and then having gone to do x- ray astronomy at UCL, at a time when those tribes hardly talked to each other. Because they were so busy, particularly the new fangled radio and x-ray world, just finding out, you know, how to do it and what they were discovering. So what I – what I could see there was that if you just put them together, I mean it was just so easy, you know, you put these results together and huge new insights emerged. So it was like low hanging fruit, so the idea of an integrated scientific approach had been something that I’d just been involved in from early on and also internationally as well, you know, working with the Americans and the British programme or what have you. So I think it as a general concept was just deeply embedded from my earliest experiences and interests. Jim Lovelock’s article in New Scientist I mentioned before, you know, I just read that and I just went wow, you know, that is the way to look at the earth as a single integrated organism where the biosphere isn’t a passenger, the biosphere doesn’t just sort of get carried along by the geosphere and have to put up with it, you know, the biosphere shapes the geosphere and vice-versa, all of this is highly interconnected. And also again we’ve got a diagram somewhere that says, ‘You know, the earth system is a jigsaw puzzle,’ and there’s a nice cartoon of a globe with, you know, a whole bunch of people round it scratching their heads sticking little different bits of the jigsaw on. And that’s the way I had just always seen it and so IGBP was a fantastic opportunity for me to fulfil a kind of vision of – of the way you should do things. And as I say it is counter to the way that academic reward system very strongly drove people to be individual, you know, discipline focused, chip away at some tiny bit of the frontier sort of people in those days, and to some extent still is, I mean it’s, you know, a lot better than it was but there’s still that tendency.

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[31:00]

And apart from developing a certain amount of expertise in all of the fields involved so that you could as you say become a credible representative –

Articulate, yes, yeah.

And the use of the diagrams as a way of –

This is it by the way, there’s my version of it, so this is the slightly simplified Francis Bretherton diagram with the sun, volcanoes, the atmosphere chemistry and, you know, with the oceans and so on. And all I did was say, ‘Well look, here’s a physical part of the system, that’s what WCRP investigates, here’s the biogeochemical part of it, that’s what IGBP looks at and here’s the human dimensions part.’ Now you can see human activities are just blobbed in this big ellipse and somebody else then went on and expanded that and showed how that trades out into economics and psychology and, you know, goodness knows what else. But this was a hugely helpful diagram to say to people, ‘Look, here’s the earth system, if we’re to ever understand how all of this works together you cannot do the blue bit and the orange bit and the pink bit separately, you’ve got to bring them together,’ and no reasonable thinking person can argue with that, but it’s just that it hadn’t been presented in that kind of diagrammatic way before. So in many ways if there’s a single icon of what I contributed to IGBP is that diagram, although it’s Francis Bretherton’s diagram.

Are there though particular – you seem to have been successful in bringing about a kind of institutional change.

Yes.

And I wondered what are the – what do you see as the important tactics for someone like you in doing that? You said that there was considerable scepticism?

[32:36]

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Particularly from one – one quite influential and powerful individual.

So how – I mean how on a day to day basis do you go about getting your own way if you like?

Well you keep pecking away at it, I mean it’s – it’s organisational change, again I was very interested in that and you can see there’s a whole bunch of books up here about project management and how organisations work and how you go about, you know, changing the way things work. And, you know, I’d been very taken by the Machiavelli point which I’ll – you know, which is more or less, you know, change is – organisational change is the hardest thing ever to embark upon because those who are going to lose out in the change will recognise it and will fight very hard and those who might gain aren’t so sure that they – you know, they can’t be completely sure they’re going to gain, and so they’re lukewarm in their support, so there’s an imbalance in those terms. So you’ve got to be pretty convinced of what the end point is you’re trying to achieve and then you need to bring a critical mass of movers and shakers onboard so that they agree with that and they commit to it and then you need to go through a process where they develop that idea themselves ‘cause people support what they create, not what they’re instructed to do. And then you just have to keep working at it and both at IGBP and at British Antarctic Survey it took time and there were very dark days and nights where, you know, it – one felt that one – you know, it wasn’t going to work where that you just simply hadn’t got the momentum going. But the way to do it is in my view incredibly simple. You identify clearly what the organisation is for which is what I’ve always called its mission, although other you know, if you talk about a mission to a military person then they have a different view of what mission means, but in organisational theory mission by and large is taken to say, what is this organisation for, what is its function, what are we here to do? And it’s incredibly important to get that absolutely crystal clear so that IGBP firstly with the secretariat and then with the broader range of the secretariats of the other – of the individual projects, we discuss that and we came to an agreement about what is the organisation for. You know, people hadn’t necessarily really clearly articulated that or thought about it, except right back at the founding father stage

124 Chris Rapley Page 125 C1379/40 Track 5 where obviously people, you know, had written something down. So we agreed, you know, first of all I remember very early on in Stockholm with Peter Liss the chair, Neil Swanburg [ph] who was my deputy and I think initially that might have been it, just the three of us, might have been one other. We had a – you know, a chart and and a pen and we spent a two day brainstorming session figuring out, well what is this organisation for and it was to add value in an earth system integrated way and so on, I can’t remember the – but you come up with a sentence, I don’t remember what it was but you crystallise it and you get everybody else to understand it and buy into it. So that’s what we’re for, so now let’s think about where we are now, you know, we’ve got eight programmes, they’re diverging, they’re not necessarily, you know, that well coordinated, some of them are a bit shaky, some of them are stronger than others, where do we want to be in five years time, you know, what would the world be like if we regarded – how would we say that we were successful, what are the criteria, what are the particular achievements that we would like to tick to be able to say that we’ve not only delivered something but we’re in a state that you want to be in. So you come up with a vision and we went through that process as well. Now I’d seen a little bit of this when I’d been at MSSL, again I think I mentioned that Robert Boyd let me go on a course that Erica Jones had – two and a half day course on project management and although that was all about how you run projects, you know, running an organisation or going through organisational change is just a project and so all of the principles applied. So again that had been something that I’d been very interested in and we applied the kind of theory and in a – in a slightly messy and imperfect way that’s what we managed to do.

[37:13]

And I’m very interested in your – your use of books on the management of change and I suppose the theory of institutions, when did you first start reading those and a related question, are there sort of key authors that have been sort of most –

Oh gosh, yes, well again this is all way in the past now and so I have to think back but John Adair is a – was a British military organisational theorist and so I was very taken with him. As I say I was extremely influenced by Erica Jones and the training that

125 Chris Rapley Page 126 C1379/40 Track 5 she gave me and I’ve still got her notes here, they are right here, that Frost and Sullivan file is – is the set of notes I took, or that she provided, there might even be a date in here [looking through papers]. But that must have been 1991, so that was when I was still at MSSL, but, you know, I – you know, I used to travel a lot through airports and if there’s one thing that you find on – or used to find, I’m afraid airport bookshops aren’t what they were, but in those days if you went to the science section in an airport bookshop you wouldn’t necessarily find very much, but my goodness if you went to the business management section, you know, you would find a huge number of books. So I was always interested in buying, you know, whatever the latest fashion – fashionable book was in organisational management, and they’re all up here somewhere, I’m afraid not very well organised, but where are they, perhaps they’re more over – up there but who would – there are – there are a well known set of American in particular organisational theorists and gosh, where are they all? Ah dear dear dear dear, sorry, I’m afraid things are in a bit of a mess, I’ve not really sorted them out since I moved in. So they must be up here somewhere. [Looking for books]. Well keep asking me questions, oh there they are, they’re all along at that end up there, that’s why I can’t see them. So yeah everything from Sun Tzu and the Art of War , yeah, Charles Handy, oh Antony Jay, Management by Machiavelli . Charles Handy Gods of Management . There was a particularly good book on critical path analysis, that one there, I can’t read the author, it’s too high up there yeah there’s a John Adair, Effective Team Building, Effective Leadership, Developing Leaders again John Adair. And there are a whole bunch of others up there, I’m afraid, you know, it’s twenty years since I bought them, more, thirty years since I bought them and I – more than that.

You said that you were struck by John Adair’s approach, do you remember what about it was striking?

Oh gosh, just frankly it’s just such commonsense, I don’t remember the details now but all of that was stuff that I – you know, we’d sit on aircraft and while I was, you know, on an eight hour flight I’d be reading through that. And so that had a big influence on – on how I actually ran things and how I was trying to do things.

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[40:38]

Could you then tell the story of the transition from the end of this period directing this programme to becoming director of BAS?

Yes, well you see I had been given initially a three year and then a four year leave of absence by Sir Derek Roberts, the provost here, with whom I got on very well. When Derek first took over at UCL he came down to look at MSSL and was very impressed with MSSL and he was very impressed with the earth observation group and he made no secret of that, he was a very down to earth kind of – was he Yorkshire, yeah, Yorkshire man. And in fact we over impressed him because he – he’d looked at the estate at Holmbury and said, ‘Oh you’re constrained by your physical boundaries here,’ and he found us a new site near Gatwick Airport which we were all very unhappy about it [laughs], we’d prefer to be where we were and in the end – I have to say now I think I can admit much to our delight that the whole plan fell through for one reason or another. But anyway, Derek had given me at critical moments in the development of the remote sensing group some important support, so – and indeed he was very supportive when I went for my professorship which I got before I left to go to IGBP, although I didn’t give my inaugural until after I’d been I think in my first few months at IGBP and Jim Lovelock and others came along to the inaugural so that was a nice success. And at the end of the – at – well at – I did three years and then they wanted me to stay on so I did another near year and then actually they would – they would really have liked to have reappointed me, or at least a core set of them would, I don’t know, probably not necessarily everybody, I’ve no idea, but certainly Peter and Julia and others would have been very happy for me to stay on. And in – in some respects I was very tempted to stay on but I was really worried from the career point of view that these were quite unusual posts, I hadn’t been, you know, I had deliberately taken the position that it was not for me to do science, I was there to – you know, I wrote some general articles and did the newsletter and all of that stuff but my job was to run the thing and direct it and I felt that you couldn’t combine the two, rightly or wrongly. And so I did begin to worry that my publication count had dried up really in terms of refereed journals and if by the time I’d done eight years at which point I probably would want to move back out of Sweden I might be unemployable.

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So much as we liked living there, much as I very much enjoyed the job I decided the best thing to do – oh and also I couldn’t in all fairness ask Derek for another four year leave of absence so I felt I would lose my position at UCL which he had held open for me. So at the end of the four years it was evident that it would be sensible to come back so and that’s what we did. And I rather hoped that Derek had got some, you know, grand idea of something new for me to take over, I was eager to do something else. Again after four years at IGBP I felt I’d made a big difference, we’d achieved what we had set out to achieve, you know, a new vision and it seemed to be running quite smoothly, everybody understood it, seemed to be onboard, results were coming out from the various projects so by and large it was all going well, people saw it as a success and my learning curve and my contribution curve again were, you know, beginning to flatten out so I thought it was time to go and do something else and I’d hoped I’d come back to UCL and Derek would say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great new initiative I’d like you to run.’ Because I had also made it clear that I would not go back to lead the MSSL remote sensing group and handed that over to Duncan Wingham and that I disagreed completely with what I had seen others do in similar circumstances, where they had put somebody in as a sort of placeholder but left it set up so that they could then go back and reoccupy that seat. That’s not fair on anybody on the group, on the individual, you know, that’s not the way to do things, so I had burned my boats on going back to MSSL. Anyway Derek was – I came to see him, you know, a few months before this was all going to end and he was kind of disappointingly vague, I guess he was preoccupied with something else and he basically said, ‘Oh well, you know, good to see you back, have fun,’ and really didn’t have this great thing that I’d rather hoped he would have, and when I kind of hinted at it, didn’t get it or didn’t respond to it. So I thought, oh well, goodness, that’s a bit disappointing, well, you know, I could think of something, you know, a new thing to take up. But I then went to the IGFA meeting that year which was in Arizona at Biosphere Two and John Krebs who I don’t think had been knighted then but was the chief exec of the National Environment Research Council attended that meeting, normally David Drury [ph] his head of science did but John decided to go to that one. His visit was a bit controversial because he had berated his colleagues in IGFA for having a two and a half day meeting, he said it was ridiculous to have a two and a half day meeting, you know, they ought to cut it down to one day and not waste time, and

128 Chris Rapley Page 129 C1379/40 Track 5 they were a bit miffed about that because John hadn’t been – and I’m not sure he’d even been before, maybe once, and actually there was quite a lot of substantive stuff going on and as often the case in these situations it was the coffee room gossip and discussion as much as the formal meetings that were, you know, where the important trading and knowledge dissemination was going on and John simply hadn’t understood the dynamics of that. And he turned up and on – on the first morning he – I think – I don’t know what had happened but he stayed in his room on the internet ‘cause he had to deal with some crisis or something and I gave my grand finale presentation on what I’d achieved and what the IGBP had achieved under my direction. And it went down, you know, very well, and there was a very strong and positive response from the assembled IGFAites and so at lunchtime I remember there was a buffet and we were – and they were talking about it and there was a bit of a buzz about it and a lot of – ‘cause it was the last talk before lunch and John turned up [laughs] and after a bit came up to see me and said, ‘Oh, you know, I hear you gave a very good talk this morning, you know, can you run me through it this afternoon?’ and I said, ‘No, if you wanted to hear it you should have come to it,’ [laughs], you know, taking crap like that [both laugh] so – so he said, ‘Oh, mm, alright.’ Anyway there was – as is, you know, normal in these things they had arranged some dinner at some Mexican restaurant away from the conference centre, away from Biosphere Two that evening, and John parked himself on the – on the seat next to me on the coach and said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘please just tell me [both laugh] a little bit about what you said,’ so since I was a captive – I was captive there, I was – I said, ‘Oh well look the nub of it is as follows.’ And he said, ‘Look, there’s an opportunity as the director of British Antarctic Survey and would you like to come and, you know, present yourself as a candidate for that ‘cause I think you might be, you know, the sort of person that we’re looking for.’ And of course that was based partly on my previous work as – in altimetry where we’d done quite a lot on the polar regions, so I was sort of known as a kind of polary person albeit one who observed from above and through a computer rather than, you know, actually in situ. And my initial reaction was to say, ‘Oh no no no, you know, I haven’t figured out what it is yet but I’m going to go back to UCL and, you know, build up some new initiative there.’ And then – and so that was that and then strange to say I had an email from one of the senior researchers and somebody I’d known for some years, a colleague at British Antarctic Survey, quite

129 Chris Rapley Page 130 C1379/40 Track 5 independently saying, ‘Chris, did you know that the directorship is up, you know, quite a few of us think, you know, it’d be noticed if you came and – and, you know, made yourself a candidate for it, we’ll be, you know, very happy for you to be our director.’ So I actually went and visited BAS and had a look round and the more they showed me about, you know, operating ships and aircraft and, you know, the kind of hairy Antarctic, you know, eating your own penguin and all that stuff, I thought, I don’t know, this isn’t really anything again that I know too much about, it’s not something I’ve ever – you know, I hadn’t ever – I knew a little bit about the Scott legends and all the rest of it but I’d never been a great avid reader or enthusiast for that. So I thought, no, my initial reaction was to say, ‘No no no, I don’t think this is right.’ But then the sort of combination of – of what I was going to do at UCL, still remaining quite unclear and then just sort of thinking about it and thinking, well you know, BAS is actually quite an extraordinary opportunity because under the same roof you’ve got geologists, you’ve got biologists, you’ve got atmospheric scientists, you’ve got oceanographers, you know, you’ve got a big mix of people, and the more I looked at what BAS was doing at the time it was clear it was just individual silos. In fact the more I heard about it and talked to people about it the more I realised they were tribal in the extreme, silo’d and probably at war with each other, as it turned out they were. So I thought, well you know here’s another opportunity, it’s an organisation that needs a major rethink, which is what I had kind of done at IGBP and successfully so I felt confident about the principles of doing that, although this was on a different scale. And it was science that was really important for the assisting the polar regions, you know, we talk about the jigsaw but, you know, the polar regions are big and important jigsaw pieces for the – for the system, and of course I knew a little bit about it and I knew the community a bit because of the remote sensing work I’d done, so gradually it began to sink in that maybe this would be – this would be a really interesting opportunity. So I – in the end I sent off an application and found myself in the end shortlisted and then interviewed at – at NERC and –

[51:37]

The [laughs] – there was – John I think very much on the basis of the interview wanted to offer me the job as did a number of the other panel members but what I

130 Chris Rapley Page 131 C1379/40 Track 5 understand was, I don’t know who but one of the panel members was worried that the largest organisation I had run was thirty people at UCL and that I’d spent four years running, albeit a two and a half million dollar a year operation, but with nine people and this was I think in – in the time I took over, it was probably thirty million pounds a year, big operation with ships and aircraft and so on and so on, you know, 400 – 500 employees and that the step was – was, you know, a bit too big, you know, how could you take – how could you be sure that somebody who hadn’t had that experience of running a big organisation could do it. So I – I’d heard on the scuttle buck that this was causing a bit of a, you know, a delay in their thinking, they weren’t sure whether to go ahead or not, and so Derek was – Derek Roberts was one of my key referees and I can’t remember whether I called him or he called me but quite how it worked but we talked about it. I think it was afterwards he told me actually thinking back, but Derek said to them, ‘Look, if you can run a small organisation well, you know, they’re just basic principles and you just scale them up and they are scalable,’ and, you know, ‘Chris has got the track record of having run at least two organisations very successfully, you know, the remote sensing group and IGBP, both of the, you know, one starting from nothing and building it up to something but the other one taking something that existed and turning it around. And so, you know, what are you worried about, you know, go ahead,’ and that apparently swayed the answer and so I was appointed. And of course then I discovered that, you know, BAS was at a turning point in its history, it had had a somewhat devastating review which the staff were – the senior staff were in denial about for one reason or another and so here was a fantastic opportunity to apply all the things that I believed in and felt I had some experience in, you know, giving an organisation a new sense of purpose, a new direction, a new vision, and also that being not only interdisciplinary science, so getting the silos busted and getting them working together, but also placing Antarctic science in the earth system in a way that it – it genuinely contributed, rather than being an Antarctic cul-de-sac. So as it turned out it was the most fantastic opportunity for me because it appealed to everything that I was interested in and built on the experience that I had had in the previous decades, so it was good.

[54:38]

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Do you remember the detail of what people told you about the institutional culture of it before you were appointed, you said that there were various people giving you the impression that this was groups working in competitive silos?

Yes, I think I discovered the extent of that more once I’d got there, but there were – there were certainly hints of it and the strange thing was that at least one of the individuals who was most keen to get me to go there [laughs] was one of the people who was most culpable at – at [laughs] generating a antipathetic silo, everybody else is the enemy kind of attitude and became somebody I actually had to, you know, handle and deal with and manage in the transition because they were not very happy about the – you know. People – in many respects many of the people in – in BAS had been favoured by the management system and were very comfortable, I mean basically they had a – they had everything they wanted, they had a flow of financial and other resources, access to the bits of the Antarctic in the way they wanted to access them and so they were very much the Machiavellian people who knew that they were not going to do necessarily – or put it this way it was going to be much harder work to sustain that level of resource under a new system where we looked very carefully at the three questions, so what, why us, why now, in ways that had just been … what’s the word I’m looking for? You know, just favoured, you know support from up on high previously.

Which parts had been favoured?

There had … it was complicated, but there were certain people who through a combination of history and … internal politics were doing quite nicely and there were others who were having to fight much harder and what did was we introduced a system where we first of all figured out, you know, what is BAS for, secondly, you know, what is it that we’re trying to achieve, and we had several stages of that. And then thirdly and how are we going to go about interdisciplinary research and I commissioned Erica Jones to come over and do training sessions so that people actually managed and planned their project science in an open transparent and professional way, rather than it just being left to individuals to figure out how to do it without much direct oversight. So I think in answer to your question it emerged once

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I was there, you know, that there were two over snow seismic groups [ph], one in the geology division and one in the ice and snow and cryo-hydrology division, and they had more or less identical equipment and they did more or less identical work but they hated each other and they didn’t collaborate, because one was doing it in respect of geological work and one was doing it in respect of something else. So it was ridiculous and we had to deal with that.

[End of Track 5]

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Track 6

Could you give us a sense of you out of work, I mean outside of work after you moved back to the UK, you covered this sort of thing for your time in America but when you came back to the UK you had children now growing up and becoming teenaged and I wondered about life at home. All we know about you at home is that you wake up in the night worried about work sometimes –

Occasionally, yes [laughs].

But if you could give us a sense of what you did out of work including relations with your children?

Oh yes, of course, well I mean we have twin daughters and when we came back from the United States they were ten or eleven, let me think, just eleven I think, and we were quite keen that they should go into the state system but in that first year were very unhappy with the state system and we put them into – into a private school after that at St Catherine’s School in Bramley not far from Guildford. And the reason we did that was that in the British system they decided to separate twins, you know, they had been through various experiences in the United States, in California they were together, in Maryland they had been separated, people have different views, sometimes they think it’s better to keep twins together, sometimes it’s better to keep them apart. But what we found in the state school in the British system was that one of them was doing pretty well, they were both – they both required remedial maths teaching, we got a special tutor just – and that’s just the mismatch between the systems, so we had some work to do there. And one of them is also – was – is and was also very musical and again the training that she’d had in the United States had got her into some bad habits so we had a music teacher, actually in the end quite a famous music teacher, a guy called Cox who is very famous British flutist [ph] but that was in his early days, so we used to trundle across to him. Michael Cox and he taught her how to overcome some of the bad habits she’d got into in the States. But what we found in the state was one of them was doing well and one of them wasn’t and we were deeply puzzled because they’re both of roughly equal capability. And

134 Chris Rapley Page 135 C1379/40 Track 6 we then discovered, almost by accident from her form teacher, that one of them was in a – in a sort of remedial class for kids who were having difficulties and of course this wasn’t doing her any good at all so we complained and said, ‘Look, this, you know, this is fine for social engineering, a social experiment, but we have twins, we know they’re of equal capability and we can see the impact this is having, it’s having a significant deleterious impact on her education and on her confidence,’ because she could see her sister, you know, doing other things. And the answer was, ‘Yes, but she’s such a good influence on the other kids,’ and you know, we sat and thought about that and thought, well that’s all well and good but, you know, if she only has one education and one chance, it’s just not fair. So since we could get no satisfaction out of the school we moved them to – to private school which it – for various reasons, we – you know, was not – we had hoped that the state system would be good enough but it wasn’t.

[03:25]

So privately our private lives were what everybody has with active youngish just sub- teenagers and then teenagers, used then an awful lot of time trundling around, taking them to [laughs] music classes and arranging to get them to and from school and, you know, going to prize givings and doing all the things you do. One of the – one of the really happy features, one of the nice features, was that Mullard Space Science Lab has, you know, it’s set in this – it’s located in this wonderful old country house in beautiful grounds and with a – with an old but large outdoor swimming pool which the staff used to club together and, you know, formed a little social club and used to keep running in the summer. And so it was possible quite often to take them out there and even take their friends out there, so for example, you know, birthday parties and so on would be swimming parties out there ‘cause their birthdays are in the middle of the summer. And talking to them now they look back on – on that access to this huge wild estate which they could sort of roam in safely, you know, on their own and perhaps with their friends as – as sort of idyllic memory, idyllic time. So that was great. Blackberrying in the autumn, you know, picking daffodils in the spring and so on, so they have very happy memories of that.

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[04:57]

And at the same time I in the summer of ’82 went on an absolutely life changing course in Grasse, in the south of France, maybe I didn’t mention this but it was when I was converting from astrophysics and astronomy to remote sensing, and it was – and I knew, you know, it was satellite remote sensing that we needed to do. And the European Space Agency and CNES had sponsored this one month course in the south of France in Grasse and I was a sort of ‘mature student’ [requests quotes] most of the other students, a lot of them were French, PhD students or students from ACOL, Superiere [ph], you know, doing research work but there were student – you know, there was an American, there was a German, there was an Israeli, I can’t remember who else there were, must have been about thirty students in total. And we had this intensive course of lectures from some of the best people in the world, Carl Wunsch oceanography, and others, and there’s a volume somewhere here of the lectures which the students sort of wrote up as a book. And it was absolutely transformative because first of all it was one of the best training experiences I’ve had, secondly the networking was fantastic because this was the next – this was the tranche of young researchers who are now, you know, the investment has paid off because they’re all in, or many that I know are in really senior positions running labs or research, you know, labs in France or wherever around the world. But it was my first experience of the South of France and so – and it also got me connections with people in Toulouse and what have you which were important because the next year I went to Toulouse and did six weeks at a CNES research lab and that’s where I published my first high impact paper in satellite remote sensing, it was a letter to Nature , single author letter to Nature based on that six week’s work. So from the social point of view or the private point of view it got me introduced to the south of France, so the next year we drove down and had a holiday. A friend of ours had a flat in – in Cannes, which, you know, obviously is very close to Grasse so I knew that area quite well. And it really opened up, you know, driving around on the continent and staying in these places, that’s where I learnt to windsurf on this course because it was too hot between the hours of about one and three to do anything so we used to dash down to the beach and many of the young French students could windsurf so they taught me how to windsurf which was great. And we’d bought a windsurfer and, you know, it was in the early

136 Chris Rapley Page 137 C1379/40 Track 6 days when windsurfing was a relatively new sport so that was quite kind of fashionable to be involved in that. And so then we started taking holidays in Corsica and Sardinia and places like that. So it – it kind of opened up new horizons in science and in, you know, exploring the world with the family.

[08:03]

Did you have any hobbies or enthusiasms out –

Photography was always my big hobby, and I used to religiously develop my own black and white films but in the States, maybe I haven’t mentioned this before, in the States it was cheap enough that you could indulge in doing colour photography as well and I bought a colour enlarger and, you know, it was half the price of less to do colour printing in the United States. And I found that after I’d had a stressful day to have a shower and then disappear down and do a couple of prints was a way to separate, you know, the pressures of work from the home life, so that – and I was then less of a bear and more able to, you know, be a father and all of the things that you’re supposed to do. So I brought that back to the UK and continued to do a certain amount of colour photography and always found that, you know, creatively very satisfying and, you know, a – something I just enjoyed doing. The sequel now is that I have an enormous archive of slides and colour and black and white film which I’m working my way through digitising.

Thank you.

Currently up to about two terabytes of storage [both laugh].

[09:21]

What’s the nature and extent of your daughters’ interest in your work as they grew up and became aware?

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Well they – obviously they were always fascinated by it, it led to all sorts of opportunities ‘cause, you know, I’d travelled round the world and people, you know, Japanese professors and other people would come and stay with us, so there was always that background, that was always interesting. Wouldn’t over emphasise that, it wasn’t like a hotel but, you know, they clearly enjoyed that side of it and I mean they came up to things like my inaugural lecture where, you know, we had Jim Lovelock and people so they’ve always – that’s been the backdrop to their lives. But neither of them were particularly scientific, one of them as I say was very musical and in fact ended up going to Wells Cathedral School in the sixth form and then onto Royal Northern College. And the other one was very artistic and she won a scholarship to go to the sixth form at Charterhouse where she did art, she even came up here to UCL one summer and did a course at The Slade. Although in the end neither of them have pursued those as full careers, you know, quite difficult to actually make a living that way, and in any case they’re both busy mothers now. So that was really the extent of it, but I suppose the biggest impact was of course when we went to the States and lived in California and then in Washington DC which was all to do with that project, so their lives were very much, you know, their experiences were very much dictated by the consequences of that career and they were used to meeting scientists and their families and – yeah.

[11:03]

Thank you. There’s a story which you’ve mentioned but haven’t gone into in detail which I find interesting, particularly as it relates to a later interest in systems science and the joining up of different disciplines, and that’s of employing or perhaps deliberately employing a geography at MSSL.

Yes yes [laughs].

And I suppose seeing how that went in relation to the mathematicians and the physicists.

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Yes, what we found was that, you know, the group started off as one and then it gradually built up and then the sort of people that I acquired and hired were people with mathematics engineering physics sort of backgrounds. And what we found was a completely open niche in the sense that the – we were focusing very strongly on radar altimeters, and these instruments of satellite radars, look vertically down at the earth as they orbit around it and they had been designed and in many cases their operation, their function, relied on the fact that they had been designed to look at the ocean surface. However, they were still left on when they went over the land surface and ice surface and if you looked at the data, the echoes from the surface were much more complicated often over these other surface, but nevertheless they contained really useful information, not least just how high the surface was relative to the earth’s centre, so we started to find for example that there were all sorts of errors in the mapping of central Australia, you know, several metres difference between where the surveys said the height of the surface was and where it actually was. And it also allowed us to look at inland water, the variable levels of large rivers and lakes in a way which was impossible on the ground. If you take the Okavango Delta or the Sudd Wetlands in – in Africa, we’d – we came across a guy who had spent his entire career wading chest deep through these leech infested and crocodile infested waters, surveying the level of the water and he had managed to do three transects or something in his entire life. Well these days we just gathered, you know, every fourteen days or ten days or whatever the repeat cycle was and we could not only map, you know, what the water level was and what the shape of it was but how it changed over seasons. We could see over the deep lakes in Africa, Lake Tanganyika and so on, the effect of gravity, the fact that the water is pooled towards the sides of the lake by the mass of the lake – mass of the, you know, the rock on each side, and the geode surface, the shape of the surface, has a – has a direct relationship to the depth of the water so we could actually measure essentially the depth of these lakes. So over the Amazon Rainforest the altimeter saw through gaps in the canopy and it could see where the so called Varseers [ph], the flood waters when the Amazon is in flood, spread fifty, 100 kilometres to one side and we could measure where the water had got to and how deep it was. So there were a whole host of things that we could do which were solutions to problems that people didn’t realise they had, so we as a bunch of physicists and what have you started trotting off to hydrologists, we went to the

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Institute of Hydrology, and other researchers in other fields and sort of burst into their offices, you know, sort of full of the joys of spring and said, ‘Hey, you know, have we got a solution for you,’ and were very naive and very surprised when [laughs] quite a lot of them said, ‘Go away, I don’t want to know what the levels are every week because my whole life has been built round sending a boat out, you know, with somebody with a red and white pole in it to measure the level of this or that and you’re going to be completely disrupt my way of life.’ It was a disruptive technology and those in established ways of operating often were not very grateful to have their whole world sort of threatened in this way. And particularly with these disciplinary tribal suspicions and, you know, who are these people anyway, a bunch of physicists, what do they know. So we felt the need for an interlocker, somebody who could act as a bridge and so we hired a geographer, a lady from Oxford, got her PhD there in forestry I think, but who had – I forget quite how we had originally made the contact, I think we’d been to her – see her supervisor and they had suggested that she was somebody who could do a bit of work for us, and she ended up doing three things for us. Firstly she could provide that geographers bridge so that it kind of softened the blow and was a more acceptable means of delivering these opportunities, so a number of them became more fruitful as a result of that. Secondly she was an extremely good project manager, so you will recall that the way we were surviving ‘cause we sat in the Thundopause [ph] between NERC and SERC so we had a lot of contracts from the European Space Agency and Royal Aerospace Establishment to do research work and we needed, you know, good project managers to run them. She was a good project manager and that way even though – I mean I say it this way, even though she was a woman and a geographer she kind of won over the respect of the physicists and others who might otherwise have been a bit prejudiced, ‘cause they could see she was doing an effective job. But thirdly in the Thursday afternoon brainstorming sessions that we had, she thought differently, you know, geographers tends to think different and so she thought more taxonomically perhaps and mathematically, and once, you know, the social dynamics had sorted themselves out, it became an extremely lively way of doing interdisciplinary research because, you know, whatever problem you looked at, it was being looked at through different lenses and that was very helpful to everybody.

[17:13]

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Thank you. Now if we – we started to talk about BAS last time and I’d like to ask a number of things about that and the first is whether there’s anything about BAS’ sort of awareness of its own history that was sort of difficult or challenging for someone who was attempting to redirect it? You said for example that when you first were considering the job they showed you round and showed you sort of outfits and penguins things and equipment and I wondered whether the way that BAS thought of itself, strongly through its history, I wonder whether that became difficult in any way?

It – it was certainly a feature of the place, it had – it has a very strong sense of its own history. Erm, previous directors, particularly Bunny Fuchs and then Dick Laws were seen as sort of magnificent, you know, gargantuan figures and so there was certainly a feel of gosh, you know, one was stepping into some very large boots and there were expectations. I think I probably said before, I have no history of, you know, extreme outdoor rock-climbing or skiing or any of that sort of thing, in fact that was really not a part of my makeup. And so there was a question of how you won the respect of people who had seen what, you know, Bunny Fuchs and his, you know, was – you know, part of the ongoing tradition of Scott and Shackleton and, you know, the great explorers and so on. But of course I didn’t – didn’t see BAS and BAS could not be an exploration outfit and it had realised that some years before, but the vestiges of that tradition and how you gained esteem were still there, or at least I felt as if they were there. So I was projected down into the Antarctic pretty soon after I took over, I think within a month, certainly within five or six weeks, and of course one of the first things they did because you have to is that you have to go through the field training so that you can – if you are flying around and you’re forced to land somewhere, you know, you’re not a complete liability, you know, you can put up a tent and cook some food and generally not be stupid enough to fall down an obvious crevasse, that sort of thing. And the field training included abseiling down a crevasse and getting yourself back out and so on, which to be honest was the sort of thing that, you know, in my earlier years I just simply wouldn’t have even considered, you know, why put your – I have a very strong sense of self preservation, you know, why do daft things like that when you don’t have to. So on that first trip down there I, rightly or wrongly, I definitely felt the eyes of all the base, you know, trying to take the measure of me, so

141 Chris Rapley Page 142 C1379/40 Track 6 anyway as it turned out I quite enjoyed it, I was surprised myself, I quite enjoyed doing the field training and, you know, I had done some camping before so it wasn’t that different. I had never done any rope work so the, you know, abseiling down a crevasse and then having to unhitch yourself whilst you’re still in the crevasse and then work your – you know, there’s one moment where if you do it wrong you can fall [laughs] off the end of the rope so that makes you think quite hard, particularly when you’ve only done it a couple of times in a shed. So yes there – that had – that had its – but you know in the end I was bringing to the place what I was knew that I was bringing to the place, what it needed, that is a focus, an absolute focus on the science which was the important thing and bringing that science into the mainstream and using all of the capabilities that BAS had and I felt very strongly that in the end, you know, that would be seen as the right thing to do and indeed it was.

[21:19]

So I suppose the only other comment I’d make is that the history of BAS is further reinforced by the book by Bunny Fuchs on the first whatever it was, thirty years or so. So it’s sort of, you know, it’s all there encapsulated in it. And at first in a way I felt I suppose a bit intimidated by that because you read that stuff, you think, oh my goodness, you know, these people were magnificent pioneers, you know, and they took such huge risks and so on. But then I was down in the Falklands and in the bookstore there and, you know, every other day in the summer or I suppose more now, a ship will come in and kind of double the population of Stanley as, you know, people pile – tourists pile off the ship and wander around. So the tourist shops do quite well and they have a – obviously people have – they do quite a lot of reading on these ships so lots of books there about the Antarctic and exploration and so on and there was one particular book by a guy called Len Airey on the – a phase of BAS’s history, I suppose the late ’50s, something like that. And when I read it I was absolutely appalled because it was a terribly bitter quite nasty and incredibly critical, rather awful expose of what BAS looked like from the other end of the telescope when you were down in the Antarctic and very unhappy with the way things were working. And it was pretty horr – it was so horrific and the idea that tourists today, you know, I don’t know if they’re still selling the damn book, but that tourists were

142 Chris Rapley Page 143 C1379/40 Track 6 buying that book and forming their opinion of BAS based on what it said was pretty horrific, I was tempted to buy, you know, the whole stock myself and incinerate them somewhere but I couldn’t afford it. But that actually cast a bit of a different light on BAS and – and, you know, you hear a lot of grumbling in the coffee room always in a big organisation about how when you’re down the food chain, you know, this is – you always know better how it should be run than – than it is, but this was a poisonous encapsulation of that and that actually in a very perverse way kind of cheered me up because I thought, well, you know, one of the things that we are doing is sorting out the way BAS runs to the – and overcoming some of these polarisations and tensions between the outstations, the bases and the headquartersm which I refused to let people call it, You know, it’s BAS Cambridge, not the headquarters, the point being that the important stuff was going on in the Antarctic, not in Cambridge. So in many ways it reassured me ‘cause I thought, well actually, it’s not that these great figures of feet of clay but they were not perfect, you know, they may have been magnificent and extraordinary individuals in their own right and they may have done extraordinary things, but the organisation had been through some pretty rough times where it’s clear that all sorts of thing were not working properly and so that was one of the things that we were trying to set right and so I felt, well, you know, my contribution may be different but it’s something that one can be equally proud of.

[24:46]

Could you tell me about the process through which you’d decided to focus BAS’ activities on climate change? I understand, I may be wrong but from reading something that there was a virtual focus group towards the beginning of your time where you decided what the sort of key role of the Antarctic was.

Yes, yes. Climate change was a major feature but it was not – it was not the only feature, I mean Southern Ocean Fishery pretty important and, you know, managing that. So I would say if you’ve got the impression that it was solely climate change that’s wrong, but climate change was clearly hugely important part of the programme because the Antarctic peninsula was the fastest changing – you know, fastest warming place on earth and still is one of the fastest changing at two and a half degree in thirty

143 Chris Rapley Page 144 C1379/40 Track 6 years or whatever it was and, you know, a massive response in the glaciers and surrounding ice.

[25:52]

Yes, I struggle to remember exactly how we did it now but the – we did have a number of away days and discussion groups and as we got into it, as we went through the different phases from Antarctic science in the global context, to global science in the Antarctic context, we opened it up so that anybody could – oh yes you see that’s right, no early on we – we did a call to staff and said, ‘You know, what do you think are the scientific topics that we should pursue?’ and the executive went off to a place near Newmarket and Dougal Goodman had put every idea on a postcard and we played it – we all stood round a table and we taxonomised and, you know, we took the whatever it was, 100 cards and placed them in piles and we found we had about ten piles from memory. Nine of which were clusters around clearly, you know, related central topics, one of which would be, you know, ice coring and, you know, studying carbon dioxide, atmospheric chemistry from the past, one would have been glaciers and how they flow, one would have been southern ocean ecology and so on, I don’t remember them all now. And then the tenth one was a miscellaneous bag of odds and sods, but the point is that that was the bottom up part of what then became a top down shaping because we then said, ‘Well which of these are the most powerful, which are the ones which we’ll go for, we can’t spread ourselves all over the shop,’ so our first strategy was based on that exercise. And then as I say when we went from Antarctic science in the global context to global science in the Antarctic context we had a similar exercise, but this time very dramatically and much to the surprise of NERC and BAS, we opened it up to anybody in the UK. I forget quite how we advertised it now, but we said if anybody has got, you know, really good ideas about a programme that would be a winner for BAS to run, you know, and satisfy a bunch of criteria which we set, we’ll hire you, and we did. With complexity science, we – we hired a bright and rising young star and he stayed at BAS for four or five years and ran the programme and then was head hunted and moved on. But that put the internal staff absolutely on their toes because now they weren’t just competing with each other but they were competing with the outside world and that was a real demonstration of

144 Chris Rapley Page 145 C1379/40 Track 6 whether or not, you know, they were actually at the level of the, you know, the best of their peers and by and large they were, it was great, because there are extremely good people in BAS, but it was giving them the confidence and the opportunity to recognise their own weight and capacity and to do it in a – in a competitive way and win through, you know.

[28:47]

Were there kinds of observing and measurements that you thought just ought to not continue?

The – the geologists had a real difficult time, there had been a momentum that had carried on the division of the spoils if you like in terms of access to assets and funding and so on which had – which had become kind of rigid in the organisation and in this much more open environment the geologists did not do so well. Because in the end, you know, they had figured out how Antarctica, particularly west Antarctica, had been constructed by lots of fragments of other terrains that had been brought round by plate tectonics, they’d looked at the Scotia sea [inaud], Scotia Arc, it’s long enough now I’m beginning to forget. But they had looked at a very interesting phenomenon where the tip of the peninsular and the tip of South America had moved across and allowed a flow of ocean floor through and it had formed the South Sandwich Islands and so on. So that was – and there’s a big – what do you call it, when the one plate sub ducts under another and magma comes up and forms these volcanoes and so on, so there was a lot of interesting stuff that they had done there. They – but where they had a new opportunity was a new piece of kit, we had this wonderful imaging sonar system that was fitted to the James Clarke Ross and it started to produce Bathymetric maps of the – of the south ocean, Drake passage and the area around the peninsular, you know, giving new insights into how it had been formed, close to the coastal shelf where glaciers in the last – glacial maximum had scraped across the coastal shelf and dumped into the sea. So it opened up all sorts of new opportunities for them but the traditional stuff that they had been doing by and large, you know, did not prosper and they were very upset by that.

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What was that sort of traditional, landing and collecting?

Yeah, I mean just finding exposed areas of rock, you know, figuring out what the geology was and trying to see how it all fitted together and what the story was, so – and looking at things like, you know, hydrothermal processing of rocks and so on, and you had to say to yourself, well wait a minute, it’s very expensive, incredibly expensive to do this sort of stuff down here, what– you know, is it really adding anything fundamental to our geological knowledge, or is it a sort of local stamp collecting, just telling you a little bit more about how bits and pieces of Antarctica were assembled. Which is all well and good but is it really the most important thing that we should be spending these assets on? I may have mentioned before that up until the time I was there there are these so called Nunataks, these tips of mountains that stick up through the ice sheets, you know, pretty much all over West Antarctica and you find them around the periphery of East Antarctica and up until the time I was there the only people who had ever been flown there at great expense and dumped off, you know, somewhere where the plane could land and then they would scale the heights and get up to these exposed bits of rock. The only people who’d been there were geologists and they would chip around and figure out what the terrains were and so on. But actually it was much more interesting to send biologists there because you’d got these very primitive and very basic ‘soil eco systems’ [requests quotes] of nematodes and, you know, whatever the other – you know, also endolithic communities, these sort of – of communities that live within the rock and photosynthesise within the rock. And there was some fantastic questions to ask, well where did they come from, were they here before the ice sheet formed, were they wafted in by the air since the integrated and sometimes symbiotic communities, how did they start up, were they wafted in, you know, integrated or did bits and pieces arrive and if so how did they start up, what’s the history of them. So yeah, you know, the traditions which had become like Brighton Rock, you know, something that was very stable were, you know, the dice was thrown and things were – were shuffled about a bit and some people lost and some people gained and the people who lost obviously weren’t terribly happy about it.

[33:24]

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Could you tell me about your relations with what might be called political power as director of BAS?

To partly – mediated of course through Swindon and NERC, you know, but the – both John Krebs who was chief exec of NERC, when, you know, and hired me and then John Houghton were content to allow me to act as the director of an institution, so I wasn’t completely shadowed by them and of course it was easier for me in many ways because there was the connection with the Foreign Office that – Foreign and Commonwealth Office, you know, with British interests in the South Atlantic and so on. So I would deal with the Foreign Office directly, whenever there was an issue and every so often the Foreign Office would go to the chief executive NERC Swindon and they would touch base and make sure that everything – everybody was happy. But you know, I had this sort of unusual violation of best management principles in that I was really reporting to two bosses, clearly reporting to NERC was very important because that was where the money flowed, because money from the Colonial Office many years previously had been retransferred into the research councils so that there was a single stream. You know, that was when the British, you know, land claim and so on had originally been established, the Post Offices set up, all of that sort of stuff. But the Foreign Office were very interested in what BAS did as were the navy because we had a third of HMS Endurance’s operating time, so I had a freer hand than other directors of other NERC institutes to, you know, talk to the minister for Overseas Territories and the Americas and the environment ministers and others. So I put a lot of effort into that and in particular established a routine where every year we would take some senior people down to the Antarctic and try and do the whole trip, you know, down there and back in ten days. And so I took Baroness Patricia Scotland down when she was the Labour Minister for Americas and Overseas Territories, the first time a British minster had ever set foot in British Antarctic territory, and so yes I had quite a lot to do with – we had Michael Meacher come when he was environment minister because it was some anniversary of the ozone hole discovery and so on, so it was quite a lot of that and I put a lot of effort into it because it was very valuable to us.

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[36:07]

And what did you do in terms of attempting to raise the public’s understanding of climate change through your role as director of BAS, if anything in that –

Oh well one of the huge assets at BAS was a fabulous media outfit run by Linda Capper and we – when we reorganised the science divisions and went from five, you know, specialised divisions into a matrix management system where we basically had physics and chemistry, biology and geology as the – as the core divisions where our science resource was built, and then all projects were run by project leaders which drew on talent from those divisions, we had a couple of bits leftover which was the environment division which looked after environmental issues including satisfying the various constraints of the Antarctic Treatee in terms of environmental impact. And we had media and you know media – well schools, education, that sort of thing. So we put those together in a single – in a single division with one of the previous science division heads, David Walton in charge of it, and that became a hugely powerful engine because there was – you know, the environmental story is often much more directly interesting and saleable than the science story. You know, how do you clear away the – you know, fifty years of human intervention in the Antarctic, old bases, old oil tanks, you know, when you know from eras when worrying about the environmental side was something you simply couldn’t afford to do, you just simply didn’t have the logistics to go and take stuff out so there were – by each base there was just a big dump, you know, which got covered with snow. But ironically the warming that was going on was blasting away the snow and these awful old dumps were re-emerging full of medical syringes and human excrement and oh, you know, you name it, it was all sitting there happily frozen and we had to do something about it. So having that division proved to be, we thought it was a clever thing to do but we didn’t realise how clever it was until we saw it in action, it worked really well. John Shears who now runs – well who ran it when Dave Walton stepped down and now runs something similar, you know, was a rising star and played a big role in that. So we had a lot of work going on to remediate, you know, what BAS had done and that story was told through the media unit, but what Linda and her team were absolute experts at was understanding the mentality and the needs of journalists, they had

148 Chris Rapley Page 149 C1379/40 Track 6 really got into journalists’ heads, and I tell this little story, each year as you probably know the – what used to be called the – what is now called the British Science Association but it used to be the British – can’t even remember what it was.

Association for the Advancement –

Exactly, yes, has a jamboree somewhere in a – on a university campus somewhere, and a whole bunch of journalists go there and the organisers try and put forward some scientists who they think have got some interesting stories, because it’s in their interest to maximise press coverage and the press want stories and so it’s a great opportunity. But – it’s getting better but certainly, you know, fifteen, ten years ago relatively few scientists really understood how to package their story in a way that the journalists could easily adapt and sell, you know, get their subs to – to put near the front page. And so most of the journalists by about three o’clock on the first afternoon, you know, the Monday, would be in the press room tearing their hair out, wondering – you know, desperately trying to get some copy in, you know, before the deadline. And I watched Linda and Athena [ph] who had spent enormous amounts of effort building up a very strong relationship with the science journalists who trusted them, trusted that the story would be well written, that it would be reliable, it could be trusted and you know that if challenged it could be defended and what’s more if it picked up would – they would be able to provide video material, photographs, a talking head, a person to back it up if necessary so this was high quality pre-packaged, you know, stuff. So Linda and Athena [ph] would allow them to get a bit desperate and then they would just walk into the press room and I went in with them and you see all the ‘hacks’ sort of breathe a sigh of relief because there was somebody who would be able to give them something that would get them out of their mess. And, you know, as often as not, you know, there would be a BAS story in the media on that first day almost regardless of whether or not the story [laughs] actually deserved, but it was just delivered to – delivered into the machinery of the media in a way that was easily exploited by them, made their life easy. So I had this adage, if you’ve got a good story to tell, you know, use a megaphone, and what we were finding with BAS was that we had lots and lots and lots of good stories to tell, scientific stories, environmental stories, all sort – you know the organisational story and so on. So I

149 Chris Rapley Page 150 C1379/40 Track 6 probably spent more time, you know, in the coffee room or, you know, in meetings with media, with Linda and the media people, or as much time as I did with the science people because, you know, what – you know, why not, why not take advantage of the stories that you’ve got and really project them, so we put a lot of effort into that. And Linda and Athena [ph] were – still are I have no doubt [laughs] extremely inventive. You know, they were the people who prior to my time with one of the scientists had commissioned Peter Maxwell Davis to go down to the Antarctic and write his symphony and then that was premiered on the South Bank, you know, in those days, you know, to have science connecting so overtly with arts was – was extremely unusual, and it caught the attention of a whole sector of what you might call education British society, in a way that nobody else was exploiting. I mean now with Tipping Point and others, you know, this has become, you know, a way of propagated science into provoking people to think differently and so on and I’m still very much involved in that. But in those days it was very unusual to do this sort of thing. The – and of course there was a follow up that Peter Maxwell Davis is hugely motivated to encourage and inspire young people to become composers, and so we worked with a software management company whose name will come back to me in a second to produce a teachers’ resource that used real Antarctic data from BAS’ studies, you know, sonar data, going over shoals of krill, I can’t remember, oh yes data from the all sky cameras that were looking at auroras, a whole variety of data which were then digitised and used to provide the rhythm and indeed the melodies and the harmonies for musical compositions, synthesised compositions. So schoolchildren could do this and at the end of the first year there was an award on – in the South Bank where in the middle of a public concert there was a fifteen minute intervention whilst the two girls I think who had won were presented their trophy, I think by Peter Maxwell Davis, certainly I was part of it and then their piece was played, you know, premiered on the South Bank. Well of this – oh Braunarts was the company that put this resource together, anyway we won a BAFTA so we were the first science organisation in the country I suppose anywhere to win a BAFTA and David Puttnam was, you know, responsible for the BAFTAs and he specifically singled this out for praise at the BAFTA award ceremony so, you know, there was the Nintendo table and there was the Sega table and there was the Channel Four table and so on with all of their, you know, people around it and there was the little BAS table

150 Chris Rapley Page 151 C1379/40 Track 6 at the back and to the amazement of all of these other people who were pouring huge sums of money into projects that were up for BAFTA awards, you know, the BAS one came through. And in fact BAS subsequently was nominated and I think won a second BAFTA. So yes that whole media side of things I regarded as incredibly important and gave it huge support and had a lot of fun, very bright people once given the ability, the permission if you like to – to think off the page, just did so and delivered.

[45:29]

Would the Live Earth concert four years ago –

Oh yeah, Live Earth, well that was ‘cause of course I’d had this wonderful experience when I was with some people – I was on a tour in Canada, the British Council asked me to do a lecture tour in Canada on climate change which got increasingly more [laughs] hostile reception as I moved westwards into the oil [laughs] districts of Canada, but that was fun. But I was sitting in a restaurant and I got – my mobile rang and it was – it was Al Gore asking for a favour and the first favour was to get Oprah Winfrey down to the Antarctic and him so that they could do an Oprah Winfrey show on climate change in the Antarctic. And we’d pretty much got that set up and at the very last moment for one reason or another Oprah backed out and so it didn’t actually happen but it was right at the beginning of the season and it was – we had really really really pushed things in order to be able to do that but didn’t come off. But then a year or so later I got another call from Al Gore saying, ‘Could you fly a rock band to the Antarctic [laughs] for the 7 th of the 7 th of 2007?’ because he wanted all seven continents, if you count the continents in a particular way, you know, Antarctica makes up the seven. So it was winter and so I said, ‘Well no, sorry, there’s no way we can – we can fly a rock band into Antarctica, but there is no need because the staff on the base at Rothera have a long tradition of having a rock band to entertain themselves through the winter,’ and there had been some very good ones, obviously the staff changeover year by year. At that stage I have to say I had no idea what the quality of the [laughs] Rothera rock band was that year but I’d heard them play previously on other occasions when the minister went down there, when Patricia

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Scotland went down there, she got so into it she became one of the girl singers at the back actually, but anyway that’s an aside. So I took the chance and as it turned out they were fabulous, a band called Nunatak, they’d played two numbers, they had to be pre-recorded and pumped up from the Antarctic but they played on the day and to many people they – they were the stars of the show, they had quite a following for a while I understand. But yes, that again was Linda’s people and particular Peter Bucktrout and others who were the film cameramen and so on who – who I guess tutored them on how to do the filming in a way that would be of sufficient quality to be broadcast. And so that worked pretty well, you can still find the clips on You Tube, well a –

[48:13]

Could you tell me about time spent with Jim Lovelock over this period? And the detail I’m after is sort of you know what the sorts of things that you did with him, the sorts of things you discussed with him, where you were, how you did it, that – if you would?

Right, okay let’s have a think about that, I had – I think I mentioned before, I first came across Jim in this article that he wrote in – in New Scientist and the first opportunity I had to really go down and meet him was when I was IGBP director and I think, but I’d have to look back, I think I got down there and saw him before I went to – went to Stockholm, spent a day or half a day meeting him at Combe Mill, you know, Launceston. And he and Sandy were very gracious and very welcoming and Norma and I went down there in our little red sports car and we immediately hit it off. And so when I was at – and you know, whenever I had the opportunity to meet up with him I did. I saw him in I suppose it was Copenhagen when – or perhaps it was Brussels when he was awarded, oh which – the Volvo prize, no it’s probably Stockholm then wasn’t it, anyway, you know, we met on a number of odd occasions and he invited me to go to the second and third of his series of Gaia conferences in Oxford so I got to know him even better then, I got to know Crispin Tickell and others, you know. Peter Liss I already knew him and Peter and I were working in IGBP together. So by the time I got to BAS our relationship was well established and

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I would go down and still do, Friday before last I was down there with them, spent a day with them, and that was basically it, we’d go down and see him or when he was up in London we would – we would meet. He came to BAS to give a – he had said he wouldn’t do lectures but he came to give a dialogue and Q&A, I think when we took the – all of the artists from what had been called Climate and Art but became Tipping Point, up to BAS, because the experience that they had had at Christchurch in Oxford was that they had not – they didn’t – they were, you know, frustrated that they had not heard enough about the science. They’d had these five presentations from John Shellen, Hoober [ph] and myself and others but they wanted more, so I said, ‘Well look if you want more why don’t you, you know, come up in a sharabang and we’ll give you an afternoon or a day at BAS.’ Which they did and I’m pretty sure that it was – that was the occasion that Jim came along and gave them a – you know, gave them a talk on his view of sustainability and earth’s systems science and Gaia and so on.

[The following section is closed for 30 years until November 2043: Track 6 00:51:03-00:52:24]

[52:25]

And the role of walking in your relationship of –

Yes, well Jim is a great walker, I mean he’s ninety-three this year I think, certainly ninety-two – no, he’s ninety-three this year, and one of the – one of the features of going to Combe Mill was that you’d talk for a bit but then he and Sandy would – would want to go out for their walk which is usually, I don’t know, two or three miles, something like that, either a shorter walk round their estate or a longer walk around the roads around Combe Mill and so – so one would be talking and discussing issues, it was on a walk like that that Jim and I came up with this idea of the ocean pipes which proved so controversial and, you know, that that was great. But I have to say I was always embarrassed that I’d be – I was quite fit a lot of the time, I’m not so fit now but I would be puffing along and Jim would be effortlessly gliding along which [laughs] was a kind of salutary lesson.

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Track 7

Could you start today by telling me about any aspects of the ocean pipes project that we don’t know from reading the Nature article, in other words the kind of conception of the idea and the development of it behind the scenes if you like, any experimentation?

Okay, well actually the story is pretty simple but rather interesting because it was a wonderful example of how human affairs can for all sorts of, you know, reasons just events, get much more complicated than they need to. I went down to see Jim for my kind of annual day’s chatting with him which I’ve been doing for some years now, so that was when, 2007, something like that, I don’t remember exactly and we were both very exercised that – I mean Jim had sort of concluded or was concluding in his book at the time that essentially we’re in serious trouble, very – you know ‘doomed’ [request quotes] that’s there’s a high likelihood that there will be a small number of humans left scratching a living until we recover, you know, he’s taken a very gloomy view, sort of existentialist crisis for humanity. Not – I’m not quite sure I’m as gloomy as that but I do think there could be – that society could fracture, you know, there’s always that possibility and, you know, we are doing things to the climate system that are so extreme we actually really don’t know what the limits of possibility are, the system has never been tested arguably in this way before, it’s had some other very dramatic tests. So that was the sort of background to our walk round – sunny walk round the Devon lanes and we were saying, ‘Well under these circum –’ oh and geo- engineering was beginning to sort of bubble up and we both – well I’m very nervous of geo-engineering, I think that one is – if one’s not careful, particularly with the radiation balance one is – you know, where you put mirrors in space or aerosols in the atmosphere, you’re likely to just do more harm than good, you know, complicate the situation, just add another human factor into messing up the system. So there we were, wandering around the lanes and Jim and I got onto this, what could we do to encourage the earth system to heal itself. So this is a very Gaian sort of concept, you know, Jim’s view is that the system self-regulates, not theologically, not with a purpose in mind but it just so happens that there are processes in it that cause it to be stable, more stable than it might otherwise be. And his argument really is simple, it’s

155 Chris Rapley Page 156 C1379/40 Track 7 been around for four and a half billion years, it’s seen a lot, you know, had a lot of massive shocks of one sort or another, either external or the – you know, evolutionary appearance of aerobic organisms, all of these things had a huge huge huge devastating impact on the state of the system at the time, and yet it’s always managed to sustain conditions conducive for life as we know it Jim. So we were wandering around the lanes thinking, well what could you do and of course people have been – already been doing this, they’ve been planting trees, you know, and storing carbon in wood and we know that there complications if you plant the trees in the wrong place, there – they actually affect the radiation balance because they’re darker than the current surface so they draw in more heat, so it’s not at all straightforward, you know, there is no simple single silver bullet. But the oceans cover seventy per cent of the earth’s surface, many parts of them are arid, biologically deserts because the nutrients aren’t there and just in the same as on land you can fertilise biological activity by providing nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous and so on when the soils actually lack them, there’ve been a number of experiments to boost ocean photosynthesis by adding ion or missing nutrients. The idea being that when you do that in addition to the physical absorption pump, the fact that carbon dioxide dissolves in water, there are biological processes that will draw down carbon, photosynthesis, and that the food chain then causes some of that carbon to be deposited in ocean sediments and there’s sort of two biological pumps. It’s not a very – the biologists, social biologists, marine biologists know that it’s not a particularly efficient system, only about ten per cent of the carbon you generate in the photic layer, the layer where you can get photosynthesis going actually ends up down in the – in the sediments but, you know, the ocean’s a big place and if you manage to stimulate it that would be great. So Jim had had this idea that – and I’m not sure where he got it from but he’d had this idea that if you had these 100 metre long pipes that went down through the photic zone where the nutrients tend to have been used up by what biology is there already, you could draw up from the deeper cold water which is nutrient rich the nutrients required that would then allow a bloom to take place and then the biology would take over and you adopt this that – and it sounded a great idea. Where you have to the western sides of continents, you have a certain set of physical conditions that cause upwelling of very cold water, you have this happening, we know that it happens, you have this – these nutrients are drawn up, you get a strong photosynthesis going, the herbivores that float around eat

156 Chris Rapley Page 157 C1379/40 Track 7 the plankton, you know, eat the photo plankton – phytoplankton and then the zooplankton eat them and then the fish eat them and you get a strong food chain. And that was what – that was where the Peruvian anchovy fishery drew its – its nutrients and energy from, its wellbeing from. And interestingly that’s when the sea birds dumped all the guano and then the guano was a wonderful fertiliser that was used for the land surface, that all collapsed after a particularly El Niño [ph]. So we thought, hey, that’s a good idea and Jim was saying you simply extract the energy to bob these pipes up and down so that a flap at the bottom opens and you draw in water and then as the pipe goes up it closes and you pump the water up, by having a collar that makes the pipe float on the ocean waves, so the ocean waves just bob up and down and you just draw essentially free energy from the ocean surface. So it’s beautifully elegant, you know, you don’t need batteries or anything like that, you just build the pipe, drop it in the ocean and away you go. Now – and so that was the idea and Jim was just about to go off to the States and so we said, ‘Okay, come on, let’s write it up,’ not because we particularly thought the ocean pipes was the answer, but it was to stimulate thinking about ways we could help get the earth to help itself, to heal itself. You know, what else – what could you do to give the earth a tonic, so that it did more of what it already does to draw down more carbon. Now several points, first of all at that time the whole business of ocean acidification hadn’t really come over the horizon and so there is a serious flaw in that if you do end up drawing lots of free carbon dioxide down into the ocean you do increase acidification, although it’s not clear that these biological pumps wouldn’t divert the carbon dioxide into living material and then dead material that wouldn’t increase ocean acidification. But I have to say we really didn’t think about that and it’s something that – that one would definitely have to have a look at. And what we also didn’t know but what we discovered after all the furore was that other people had this idea, commercial operators in the United States, because the side benefit of increasing the nutrients in the upper layer is an enhanced fishery, and you can make money out of that and so there are companies out there that have been thinking about this and even doing some trials. And I know that Jim has been talking to them, you know, subsequently, I have to say I dropped out in the end.

[08:34]

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But anyway this story goes on like this ‘cause it’s fascinating, we wrote something up, a letter to the editor of Nature and we intended it to be a peer reviewed paper and in spite of, you know, Jim’s exalted name and standing, the editor rejected it out of hand and said – I can look back at the detail, so I’m drawing on memory now but something along the lines was, ‘Oh no, this is too specialised or not enough interest,’ or whatever. And Jim was just about to go off to the States and sort of said, ‘Ooh, well what shall we do?’ so we were mulling over somewhere else that we might submit it, maybe reframe it a bit. But before we had a chance to we had another letter, perhaps not from the editor but from one of his assistants saying, ‘Oh the editor has changed his mind, but we would like you to submit it as a real letter, not a peer reviewed ‘letter’ [requests quotes], small paper, but just a letter to the editor, but you’ve only got 300 words.’ Well the paper we had written was short but it was a lot longer than 300 words. So I said to Jim – or Jim said to me, ‘You know, could you do that?’ because he was in a rush so I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll do something,’ and I think we conversed on it but I cut it down to 300 words. And I’ve got to remember which way we went, I went the direction of heeling the earth heal itself and took out all the stuff about the ocean pipes, so it was just a concept, you know, the Gaian concept of the earth regulated itself or there’s some evidence that it does, can’t we help it regulate itself a little bit more forcefully in our interest. And I got an immediate reply back from Nature saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t want you to take that bit out, we thought the ocean pipes bit was the interesting bit,’ so I said, ‘Well alright, but I can’t do it in 300 words then,’ so we, you know, adjusted it and off it went. And of course because it caused huge media interest and I got interview by David Shukman and people at the Science Museum and newspapers had diagrams that they drew of bobbing pipes all over the ocean. And Jim and I were quite pleased actually, we thought, well that’s great, you know, that’ll get people thinking. Anyway we had this ferocious and very negative response from the marine biologists and the climate community who were absolutely outraged, and at first I couldn’t quite understand why. It was partly this sort of territorial tribalism I think, you know, what the hell do they know about marine biology, you know, how dare they, you know, sort of [laughs] – I think I said to you once before, I saw a poor young student once years ago in an astronomy conference stand up and give a paper about SS -43.1 and the professor who owned

158 Chris Rapley Page 159 C1379/40 Track 7 that astronomical object was outraged and tore him to bits, so there was a sort of element of, you know, how dare they. But when we got to the bottom of it it was more than that, what really outraged the community was that it hadn’t been peer reviewed and they felt that we had deliberately attempted to subvert or divert around the peer review because they knew that the biology, the biological pumps that we were assuming would be straightforward are very complex and that it wasn’t at all obvious that these pipes would actually work, they might actually do more harm than good. And they were outraged that – that this idea had not been through the process of peer review but had yet – at the same time got into Nature . I think they were just really jealous that it had got all this huge coverage and jealous – no actually I think I should back off. In that sense they were right, an idea that had not been tested by the community had got into the public domain and it wasn’t at all clear that it was right or wrong. In that sense I suppose the results that we saw last week from this Berkeley land temperature study are not peer reviewed and all of us had taken a very pious position saying, ‘Well we can’t really comment on it till it’s been peer reviewed,’ so I – they were right, they were right. But it – but it was not intentional, it was a chain of events driven by the editor of Nature and the strange way that they responded to this submission.

[13:12]

Well anyway the community then got into gear and there was a lot of very dismissive stuff about our models show that it can’t work. But when the dust had settled six or seven months later Peter Liss organised a small workshop in Oxford of, you know, experts in marine biology and carbon exchange between ocean and atmosphere, and what emerged from there is that in – in certain ocean areas, probably ten or fifteen, I’m remembering these numbers, maybe ten or fifteen per cent of the ocean surface, it probably would work. And in the rest of the ocean it probably wouldn’t, it would probably do more harm than good. So it wasn’t as cut and dried as this kind of ferocious outburst had implied and in any case Jim was very dismissive ‘cause he said, ‘You know, what goes on is so complicated the only thing you can do is an experiment, what you should do is an experiment,’ because the models weren’t designed to test this particular concept, and there’s good reason to believe the models

159 Chris Rapley Page 160 C1379/40 Track 7 don’t know enough about the way the biology might work. After all the experiments with ion fertilisation of the ocean showed that the situation was much more complicated than they had originally imagined when you’d – when you toss ion in, well actually a chemical – a mineral that contains ion that fertilises bits of the ocean that need ion to – to flourish biologically, there is an initial bloom and an initial drawdown but then all sorts of processes kick in that mean that the net result is not at all what you expected. Now I know that it may very well be that the pipes, you know, are just absolutely useless, but there was sort of so many layers to this thing, it was bewildering really because it – the pipes were a bit of a delusion, you know, a bit of a diversion, what we were really saying was, ‘Come on everybody, it’s time to get serious, can we think of other ways that we could get the planet to do better than it’s currently doing, and I’m afraid that message rather got lost [laughs].

Was an experiment conducted?

Well interestingly one of these commercial companies did have a go but the design of the experiment they used which had kind of flexible netting or mesh pipes and heavy weight on the bottom and a collar on the top, they got destroyed by the ocean, they just weren’t robust enough to really work out. But my recollection is that the results that they had even from this, you know, failed ultimately experiment, but the initial results that they had were extremely encouraging, they did see an enhancement of biological activity in the – in the upper layer. And I think I’m not dreaming, they kept sending me stuff these people ‘cause they felt that we might be champions for them and, you know, they were out to make money and good luck to them, I think that they said that they had enhanced the fishery somewhere by some similar sort of technique, but if you really want to track that down Jim kept up with it much more than I did and I sort of rather let it go, I got involved in other things. And I felt a bit burned and bruised by the whole thing because it had – it had gone in directions that we absolutely had not intended at all [laughs].

Thank you.

[16:46]

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In that you mention that you differ from Jim in your sense of the sort of prospects for the earth almost you were talking about, him having a slightly more pessimistic view, but I wondered whether there are differences in your conception of the earth system, leaving aside its prospects but –

Erm, yeah, there are, I mean you know hard Gaian, soft Gaian, you know, the various ways that this is expressed, it’s absolutely, you know, there’s no question that the earth is a highly interconnected complex system and that it’s – it’s almost certain – well I mean I would be prepared to lay a strong bet on it, that we not only don’t know of all of the interconnections and the way that things interact, you know, the biology, the geology, the chemistry, the physics, the, you know, and then the bits of the oceans, the atmosphere, the trees, the land surface and so on. You know, it – we probably haven’t even catalogued all of the different important ways that things interact and of course there may be ways that are latent, that interactions aren’t happening now but could do under different circumstances into which we’re driving the system and it’s clear that there’s an enormous number of net positive and net negative feedbacks, the negative feedbacks, you know, stability and regulating the positive feedbacks driving in an uncontrolled direction. And what seems – I have this gut feeling, scientists are always in very dangerous ground but, you know, I have a hypothesis I suppose that if you have very large numbers of positive and negative feedbacks, statistically it’s almost like a central limit theorem, statistically they kind of all average out and I wouldn’t be surprised if you could – if somebody bright enough, I’ve tried and I can’t, could demonstrate that that introduces a level of resilience and stability in the system. The ecology – there’s a hint of this in ecology where ecologists have demonstrated that there are plants that have a functional type, so they’re different species but they perform the same function, and having a diversity of those and also having a diversity of functions appears to provide additional qualities of resilience to an eco system so that it’s – it has the capacity to respond and con –and deal with what you might call attacks of a whole variety of types, even ones that it may not have previously experienced. It’s like having an array of weapons in your quiver so to speak, and so I see an analogy with this complex interconnected system, the greater the number of interconnections it seems to me probably the more

161 Chris Rapley Page 162 C1379/40 Track 7 resilient it is. So in that sense I’m with Jim. Jim then goes onto this metaphor a bit like the human body because of course he comes from a medical background, with this kind of self-regulation that these self-regulating systems that the body has within it. But here I worry a little bit and I’m sort of with the, you know, the sort of Dawkin’s argument that evolution, you know, the evolutionary filter operates at the sort of species level, but it’s difficult to see how it could operate on a – on a single organism, you know, because [inaud] as a single super organism. So I – I’m left not quite as convinced that Jim is – that there really are self-regulating systems in the system that we could rely on in quite the way that he does. I’m – I’m – there’s another point here, I see lots of features of the earth system where the answer is the result of the difference of two numbers. So for example the heat balance of the earth, and it is the difference between the heat that comes in which is a very large number and the heat that goes out which is a very large number, and they’re more or less imbalance so not quite, so you know, you take one large number from another large number and at some decimal place there’s a difference and the earth responds by warming up or cooling down. What interests me is that the process by which the heat comes in is a different set of physical processes from the process by which the heat goes out. Similarly with an ice sheet, the process by which frozen water gets added to an ice sheet are completely different from the processes by which frozen water gets extracted from an ice sheet, so the mass balance of the ice sheet is to – is to some extent – is not predefined, it just happens to be what it is, it’s like the carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere. Now it so happens that the end result of one set of processes balancing a completely different set of processes has tended to leave us with about the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we have, about the amount of ice that we have in ice sheets, about the amount of water that we have in the oceans and so on. But that’s not regulated, not directly anyway and maybe indirectly because the processes that are driving things one way and the processes that are driving things another way are connected through this complex web of things, but I wouldn’t see that as cybernetic, that’s not like having a feedback loop round an operational amplifier where you can see exactly how it is you’re controlling the thing. So maybe even after all these years I still haven’t quite understood what Jim is really saying, but I’m left feeling that he and I see this thing just slightly differently, you know, it doesn’t mean that the net conclusions, that it’s a very complex system and

162 Chris Rapley Page 163 C1379/40 Track 7 it’s probably very unwise to poke about in it and change these links [laughs], I think we both completely agree on that. But I’m a sort of softer Gaian than Jim is.

[The following section is closed for 30 years until November 2043: Track 7 00:23:12-00:23:42]

Could you say something about the origin and development of your ideas on population control since they’ve been mentioned [ph]?

Oh okay, well you see it’s interesting, already you’ve gone down – you’ve used a phrase that I’m quite uncomfortable with. I’ve never – I’ve never actually talked about population control [laughs], although that has been inferred and it’s a very natural step from where I have been. But what I’ve – all I’ve been – all I started out to do was to say that if you look at the human impacts, the aggregate human impact on the planet, you know, let’s represent it as I and when whether it’s land transformation or disruption of the nitrogen cycle or whatever it is, the impact is the product of the number of people, on average, on the – on the planet, or at least the number of people, the average activity that they exert on the planet in relation to whatever this impact is, nitrogen fertilisation or carbon dioxide emission. And then some sort of technological factor, the technological factor being the one that could turn the volume down because you could become much more efficient at whatever the action is and – anyway you see what I mean. But the point is that the number of people appears in that rather simplistic equation directly, so if N is twice – you know, if N goes up by a factor two then the impact goes up by roughly a factor two. And I felt that, you know, ten years ago, whenever it was that – that this – nobody wanted to talk about this, for all sorts of good – you know, for all sorts of reasons, some of them good, some of them bad but it’s just too controversial a subject and it’s because of the history of eugenics and the – you know, the superman view and all – you know, fascism and all of that stuff. But by not – not admitting that it’s an issue, you know, you’re potentially not exploring the full nature of the problem. Now, you know, I always recognise it has to be done very carefully because you can extremely quickly inflame emotions so that you can no longer have a sensible discussion. But one of the things that I noticed and felt surely was – I thought it would be not controversial

163 Chris Rapley Page 164 C1379/40 Track 7 except obviously in the Catholic Church which is, you know, kind of well except in the Catholic Church, would be that the need of – the unmet pregnancy rate each year is apparently 80 million people a year, that’s the UN estimate. So this is people who have not got access to birth control technology, and after all one of the things that everybody supports surely as a – as a ethical good, a moral good, is the delivery of all aspects of medical science that help save life, but for some reason the advances in medical technology that allow people to make choices about how many children they have are somehow seen as – seen as different, you know, not as prestigious, not as – as worthy, they’re set to one side. Yet actually if you don’t deliver the two together then you – you rapidly increase the number of people on the planet, you know, if you reduce the number of people who are dying over a ten – over a decade period or maybe a bit more, society by and large does if it can choose to limit the number of children that it has, but in-between there’s a huge burst of fecundity and people. And – but it just seemed to me that those two dots on the medical landscape needed to be linked together and joined up with the climate and, you know, the sustainability issues and it would be just good to talk about it. And I was pointing out that I’d been involved in interdisciplinary science where, you know, it was hard enough originally to get the physics, chemists and biologists and geologists to talk to each other and gradually we’d got that happening and begun to draw in the social scientists, you know, the economists and so on, but the point I made in that very original article that I wrote on Richard Black’s green room was that I’d never been to a conference where there was a demographer, or – or that many medics, and certainly not medics interested in the – in the family planning, you know, the – that sort of side of medicine. A few had been in, you know, worrying about increased threat from mosquito and other disease expansion, that sort of thing. So all I was saying was, ‘I really think that these, you know, people ought to be brought into the fold and maybe we could have a sensible discussion about it,’ and I suppose that if – I wouldn’t call it control but I’d – what I did a calculation, and I was pleased to see that London School of Economics did a proper calculation some years later, but I did a calculation which was along the lines, well wait a minute, suppose I were the master of the world and I had a pile of dollars on my table, and I could invest in nuclear power or wind turbines or, you know, whatever it is to reduce future carbon emissions, where would I get the biggest return on my dollar, the sort of thing that McKenzie [ph] had done, you know,

164 Chris Rapley Page 165 C1379/40 Track 7 and in some places you find you don’t even have to have any dollars, you know, it would – you can get a return even by doing it anyway. But if you looked at things like electric cars or hydrogen economy or whatever you could see that per gigatonne reduction it was going to cost a trillion dollars of investment or five trillion dollars. But if you looked at reducing a gigatonne of carbon by not having people, by – by meeting this unmet need, it was 100 – I calculated 1,000 times cheaper, you could get 1,000 the reduction per dollar in carbon emissions that way than you could be any other investment. Up to a point, you know, then you have to do these other things as well. But that said it was really worth looking at and it didn’t have to be intrusive or it didn’t have to do anymore than just simply liberate people to do what they wanted to do anyway but weren’t able to for various reasons. And the more I got into it, I talked to a guy called John Gilobow [ph] who showed this graph of the fertility rate in a particular country, an unnamed country where up until 1970 or so women were having six or seven children a year, sorry in their lifetime, and then it suddenly dropped over ten years to two or two point five or something and this it turned out was Iran because the Mullers [ph] when they deposed the Shah, you know, they get a bad press but they were quite sharp. What they could see was that because of the economic sanctions imposed by the west, the growth of the economy was, you know, very very low if not stagnant but their – but the number of people was increasing at, I don’t know, three per cent per year or something or other. So that if that was to go on they were just destined to become a poorer and more and more impoverished nation. So they said, ‘Well, whilst sanctions are imposed it’s difficult to do too much about lifting the growth rate of GDP, but we can reduce the birth rate,’ so they did three things. It turned out they had a sort of basic health network that – what I was told was that the – you know, a bright young person from each village would be taken off and trained to the paramedic level, so – so there was somebody in each village who had some knowledge of modern medicine. The educational system was pretty good so girls and women were quite well educated, so – but actually it’s a bit of a myth, you know, even ill educated women know perfectly well how many children they want, you know, they don’t have to be able to write and spell in order to figure that out, it’s all determined by their economic circumstances. But the critical thing, so the critical thing was to supply contraceptives to these people in the villages but it was the acceptability that was crucial and so the Mullers [ph] passed to the fatwa which I

165 Chris Rapley Page 166 C1379/40 Track 7 always thought was a bad thing, but it turns out it’s like a paper bullet [ph], could be positive or negative, which said that it was not un-Islamic to – to make use of this. So having unblocked the supply chain, the delivery, sensible delivery, you know, the explained delivery and the social acceptability, you got this fantastic result but there’s nothing coercive or dreadful about that so I don’t feel that that’s control, that’s – that’s liberation actually. Now the – it runs out of steam because I said eighty million a year which coincidentally is exactly the rate at which the human population is increasing, so if you – if you stop that eighty million in principle, you know, the numbers of the people on the planet would instantly stabilise, except that about half of those are dealt with by abortion already so this – all you would be doing is addressing the other half so – but nevertheless you would half the rate at which the population was increasing. But also you would provide a means for those people who are having abortions, you know, terrible business with all sorts of dreadful consequences, you would overcome that as well so it seemed to me to be a wholly a good thing to aim to do.

[33:33]

I tried to pursue it ‘cause the population ‘circus’ [requests quotes] in the UN is a different circus from the climate circus. I went to some meetings at the House of Commons in which the population circus arrived and I explained, you know, climate change and how the two things could connect together, and I was extremely disappointed in that they were so focused in their own rut and their own feeling of victimisation that nobody would take them seriously, that I couldn’t find anybody who’d got the imagination to connect the two things together and lift themselves out of, you know, this sort of rather unhappy place that they are.

[34:18]

But actually if I can just say one other thing, the connection between the two is really interesting because in –when was – 1992 was that Rio, yes, I always get the dates mixed up, in the year of Rio when the climate change bit of the UN, the UNSCC said it set itself the target of limiting carbon dioxide, concentration of the atmosphere to a

166 Chris Rapley Page 167 C1379/40 Track 7 level, you know, beyond – to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate system, so they wanted a number and a lot of effort has subsequently gone into coming up with 450 parts per million or two and a half degrees, you know, whether you believe it not doesn’t matter but that’s a target which then the binding agreement that was supposed to follow would aim to not exceed so a boundary. A few months later in Cairo the equivalent UN body looking at population decided not to set a limit on the total number of people on the planet beyond which they would be dangerously interfering with the Gaian system. Because they could see that, you know, that smacked the population control, exactly the word that you use, and that would an athma [ph], that would be unacceptable, that would just raise emotions, they’d never get anywhere so they said, let’s not define a level at which human – the number of humans is a dangerous interference with the system, let’s simply go around in a more oblique way and try and deliver these contraceptive, you know, birth control services and that way we will end up somewhere. It’ll be lower than it would have been if we hadn’t intervened, we don’t know quite where it will be, but better to get some result than just get bogged down in no result at all. And there are some who are looking at the – frankly the less than satisfactory progress of the UNFCC over twenty years and saying, ‘Hmm, might have been smarter to do something like that on the climate change thing as well, it might have been better to say, ‘Well let’s not set ourselves a target but let’s just recognise that there are huge risks pumping large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, let’s put all of our effort into trying to find ways just to reduce CO2 in principle,’ and we might have done better than we actually have, you know, taking the strategy that we did.

[36:37]

Have your personal views on religion changed as an adult?

No [laughs]. I went – I tried – because my parents – I think I might have said this before, because my parents didn’t push religion and because you could meet girls at the – at the club I used to go to church, a sort of high church, and I tried very hard to see if I could break through this business of faith, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t have faith

167 Chris Rapley Page 168 C1379/40 Track 7 in this stuff and everything that’s happened since has just left me convinced that that was the right decision.

[37:19]

Thank you. Could you tell me about any aspects of the origins of the International Polar Year that are not publicly known or that are not apparent from …

Well there’s this – first of all publicly known there’s this huge tone that’s been produced, maybe you’ve seen it, and that’s – that’s a pretty good account of what happened. Erm, yeah, there was – that I think one thing that isn’t in that is – is that I’ve – and I can’t remember that we talked about this before but I felt I was just the right place – I was the right person in the right place at the right time and this combination of different careers that I’ve had, you know, in IGBP and BAS and so on, had just left me in a position where kind of like a spider in the web I could see and knew and was to some extent trusted and respected by a whole array of players that – that very very few other people had access to. So I was able to ring up Thomas Rollwoll [ph] in ICSU, I was able to ring up contacts in WMO and go quickly to know Ed Sercanyan [ph], I knew people in NASA, I knew people in ESA, I knew people in SCAR, IS, European Polar Board, all – and had positions of authority and power in many of these, or had had. So I was able to weave things together. Now sounds a bit pompous because obviously a lot of other people, you know, were – you know, it wouldn’t have happened if a lot of other people hadn’t been involved as well, and you know, their names are – are kind of you know recorded. But actually there – there are, you know, as a historian for you, there are twenty of these green ring binders which contain a lot of paper, erm, there are twenty-seven of those I think now stored in Scott Polar Research Institute in their archive and – which is the paper record of the emails and letters that I wrote over, what, a two, two and a half, three year period to really get the IPY up and running. And it became my mission, it happened at a time when I’d got British Antarctic Survey to the point where it wasn’t coasting but it was going really well and I had both an interest to do something over and above that, you know, the next big challenge, and you know, I really got a lot out of it and it really really worked. I mean Robin Dell [ph] a lady, so make it clear, over

168 Chris Rapley Page 169 C1379/40 Track 7 in the United States was my, you know, collaborator in all of this, but we put in a huge amount of legwork, you know. We – I not only spent probably from five o’clock to seven o’clock, you know, every evening you know for a long time just pulling people along, you know, sorting things out, moving things along. So that that doesn’t come out, you know, there’s just the sheer amount of legwork it took to get the thing up and running which I really enjoyed, I got a lot out of it.

[40:31]

The other thing was that, you know, there was a degree of scurellesness [ph] that went on in the academic community or in the polar community who didn’t like the idea of the Brits getting … what they saw as so much power and influence through the governance system of the IPY, so one of the big contentious issues was – I had managed to persuade John Houghton, chief executive of NERC that the UK should offer to support the programme office, you know, you need a small secretariat to run these things, and he liked the idea and the UK pumped a lot of money into that and it was great. But it was also clear that Robin and I were the leading lights in this and that, you know, one or the other or both of us would – were the obvious candidates to run the steering committee, not the planning committee but the joint committee that WMO and ICSU sponsored. And that was intolerable to other nations and their polar communities and it was made absolutely clear – there was a lot of disruption, disruptive tactics, which in many ways were unforgivable because they put at risk the programme, but the deal was essentially, you know, Chris Rapley can’t be chair of the joint committee if the UK has the IPO or vice-versa. So I thought, well it’s much – I didn’t see where money and effort would be committed for an international programme office elsewhere, although there were some other people who were interested and claimed they were and would have put something in, so I said, ‘Look let’s – you know, I’ll step back,’ I wanted to be on the joint committee which I was but I stepped back and let others, in fact persuaded others to step up in order to resolve this issue.

[42:36]

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And actually looking back the IPY, I think that was – that was very very unfortunate. I won’t go into all of the deals but just the management of the programme office then became quite loose and complex, so if the – if the person who was running the IPO, the International Programme Office, had been reporting directly to me then I could have provided a much firmer steer on directions that they went in. And – whereas the people that they reported to in the project, one was in Canada and one was in Australia, so the linkage between their guidance, you know, their guidance was quite loose in that respect. And I was left in a position where I could not interfere or – because if I did I would be seen as subverting this deal where I was no – you know, where I was out of it, I was not the lead, you know, the leader of this thing. So I think – and actually that proved to be a bit problematical because the – Dave Carlson did an amazing job, I mean you can talk about energy and commitment, but Dave’s view of the direction that the IPY should go in differed in some areas quite strongly from the view of the joint committee and also from me and others, and this led to stresses and strains which – which were very unfortunate. It was unfortunate on David because, you know, the IPY should be an absolute glittering legacy, the highlight – the highpoint of his career, but there’s been just a slightly bad taste left about differences of opinions about the way things should have been done and in principle all of that could have been avoided if we hadn’t been forced into this strange arrangement, which was purely because others just simply didn’t like the idea that the Brits would appear to be totally in control of it, you know, that it had to be more democratically shared out. I’m a great believer in, look, you know, if you want to get the job done why don’t you just get the, you know, the right combination of people and affairs to do it so I would have been – if it had been the other way around I’d have been much more relaxed about it.

What were the disruptive tactics then?

Oh [laughs], oh I won’t go into all of that [laughs].

What – could you just outline then the difference in vision for the project between the joint committee and between David?

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Well it was a question of emphasis. The project had a number of goals and one of which was to develop the next generation of young scientists and that was something that Dave did absolutely brilliantly and something that he was absolutely passionate about. But yeah I’m a slightly – in that respect I think I’m a slightly more wizened and hardened observer of the way science prospers or doesn’t, and of the various things that we were trying to do, you know, connect to the frontier people, you know, develop the next generation, have a stunning outreach programme, you know, be comprehensive in the way we get the social scientists in, I mean there were all sorts of things that we were trying to do and, you know, to a high degree all of which were fulfilled. I mean the programme I think was amazingly successful, not – not at least because of the effort that Dave put into it, but for me if push came to shove the bottom-line had to be the quality of the science because in the end that’s what the research council’s, that’s what the public and it’s what the science community would expect, so – so that the hardest priority in terms of the firmest priority was to ensure that the science really delivered. And I know from previous experience with other, you know, with the IGBP and running BAS and so on, you know, there is a tendency, and again the community will probably get very upset with me in saying this, that unless you manage that it – it won’t fulfil its possibilities in the way that if you just step back and say, ‘Oh I’m sure there’s a hidden guiding hand that will drive the community towards achieving this.’ You’ve actually got to manage it, you’ve actually got to make sure, you’ve really got to keep on people’s tail and say, ‘Well wait a minute, you know, we accredited you as part of the IPY because you agreed to play by certain rules, you agreed that you would have – you know, that you would genuinely collaborate with people who are not so familiar with the science,’ I don’t know, you know, just to ensure that – that you achieve absolutely the topmost science. You – in the end it will always come from the bottom up but you – but you can see where it’s not happening and you can intervene. And Dave’s attitude was, ‘It’s just too complicated, there’s too much going on out there, I can’t – there’s no way that I and this small programme office can even have a management system that keeps track of what these people are up to, let alone go and intervene if we think that they’re off course from delivering what they said they would.’ And it’s quite possible that he was absolutely right, but the joint committee wasn’t convinced and it – over the – over the lifetime of the project we – we’d just got further and further apart on that

171 Chris Rapley Page 172 C1379/40 Track 7 issue, you know, in the end the science is the core and all the rest of it is important but not quite as important. And so that was really where the discomfort and the tensions set in.

[48:29]

Thank you. What relations had you had with the Science Museum before you applied or were invited, I don’t know how –

I went to it as a kid [laughs] and that was about it. What else? There had been a – BAS had provided some ice to a – an earlier kind of climate exhibit they did with Michael Meacher who was the environment minister and I remember going to the launch event of that, but other than seeing it as a distant and highly respected organisation I hadn’t paid it much attention actually and I’d had absolutely no thoughts at all about having anything to do with it in a professional way.

[49:14]

How was it that you ended up having?

I was down south and I had an enquiry from Martin Earwicker actually, well – oh through – yes through John, John Houghton and Martin Earwicker, Martin had just become the NMSI director, the director of the overall body, the National Museum of Science and Industry and he – he had – and previously the NMSI director had also been the Science Museum director and Martin decided that that didn’t work and that he wanted a separate science museum director. So I don’t know, in some casual conversation over a glass of wine or a beer he’d talked to John, John knew that I was planning to leave BAS, you know, that I was looking for pastures new, and I think I was down south and I got an email saying, ‘Did you know that this job was up, you know, do you want to have a look at it?’ So – so I’d been looking at a number of things and one or two quite attractive things, erm, none of which though were sufficiently different from what I’d already done to feel quite right. In fact after having done BAS and being on such a kind of buzz because it had worked so well, so

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– many of the things that I’d – or the things that I’d looked at all seemed a bit just the same – you know, not satisfying in the fact that they were just the same really.

What were they, we ought to –

I can’t really – I don’t think it’s worth saying, but, you know, there were some things that I’d looked at. So anyway I went down, so I thought, well I’ll go and have a talk to Martin and we got on well and I’d – and I liked what he was doing and of course, you know, I’d looked at the museum and, you know, it’s such an amazing organisation, you couldn’t fail to be, you know, proud to be, you know, contribute something to its – its history. So – so I applied and it wasn’t – it was far from a foregone conclusion that I would get it, but I got it.

[51:16]

And what did you – in the same way that you described BAS at the time that you arrived or just before you arrived, what did you find as an organisation?

Yeah, well [laughs] the museum had been through a very turbulent decade and … the director prior to … Martin had sort of left under a bit of a cloud and … you know, I never knew him, Lindsey – God I can’t even think of his second name now, gosh getting terrible how my brain just switches off when I don’t, you know, I left it a year ago and I don’t think about it much anymore. His name will come back in a second. And he was clearly an interesting, a very interesting guy, you know, he was – he’d come I think from the – from Canada or somewhere with, you know, quite a track record behind him as an innovator. And he – but his managerial style was apparently completely wild, and so the place lurched about all of the place and Martin had been brought in, Martin had of course risen through the ranks of – of the MoD and gone into the Office of Science and Technology and become, you know, what was he, a head of research councils or something, reporting to DGRC, so that’s how John Houghton had got on with him and knew him well. Martin had also been involved in the reorganisation of DSTL when part of it went commercial to become QinetiQ and then all of the other labs had to be rationalised. So he was – he’d got a track record of

173 Chris Rapley Page 174 C1379/40 Track 7 reorganising and rationalising large complex organisations, so some extent I imagine that’s why he had been hired to sort out NMSI because it was in a mess, after Lindsey’s regime it was all over the place, it didn’t know where it was going, didn’t know what it was doing and its commercial side was losing money and – and, you know, no – there was no real clear strategy and so on. So Martin had said to me, ‘We – I want NMSI to be the most admired museums in the world,’ you know, [clicks fingers] little catchphrase. So I took that to be my job to be to translate that into something real, and of course I’d done that with IGBP and done it with BAS and we first of all had figured out, you know, what we are for, what is the market niche we want to get into, the vision, how do we get from A to B, blah blah blah blah. So I tried to go through that exercise in my first year, the what are we for exercise, but what I found was that Martin was a great believer in this, you know, very fashionable kind of services approach to large organisations, so rather than own everything yourself and have the director with a huge staff and him divided up either into classical pyramid of divisions and hierarchy or to a matrix management system, which is what I introduced at BAS, he – he felt that the central core should be quite small and that everything else should be delivered by service companies, even if they were actually – it was an internal market within NMSI. So there was an IT group and there was a learning group and there was a major projects group, so there were all – and then there was a front of house group, so there were all of these kind of service bits which I didn’t own, so I found myself on a – on a senior board and there would be a director whose job it was to run buildings and services, or IT or whatever it was. And I and the other two directors of the museums, the National Museum of – sorry the Media Museum and the Railway Museum sat on this board and in principle, you know, these other people delivered to us these services. It wasn’t pure in the sense that the front of house was delivered by a bunch of people in the Science Museum who were not coordinated with the people geographically separate, but buildings and services and IT sort of were, you know, and you could see the plan that across NMSI you had this thing. And that way Martin felt that he could achieve efficiency gains in the same that he’d sort of done in the DSTL thing and so on. Like having a – an integrated single back office that does all of the – oh yeah that was the other thing, personnel, you know, the human resources and so on. So on a piece of paper it looks great, but what it means is that if one of those services isn’t delivering to my

174 Chris Rapley Page 175 C1379/40 Track 7 requirements as the director of the Science Museum, I have to go across to the other director and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m not happy,’ and it then relies on the NMSI director making it clear to those other directors that they are the service part and that they must listen to my requirements and respond to them. And if that doesn’t happen then the whole system begins to fall to bits, and I have to say that’s really where we came unstuck because I found that – Martin got very frustrated because he felt that I was not introducing a new programme and a new strategy quickly enough, but what I found was that even – I had to get everybody onboard, you know, people – people support what they create and I had to get all of these directors into this what are we for and where are we trying to get, because otherwise it’s no – it was no use me thinking of that, because I could see that if they didn’t believe in it or didn’t understand it they weren’t actually capable of delivering what I wanted because they wouldn’t understand it. So it actually took forever, just simply to – ‘cause people’s diaries were so busy and they were running around doing stuff for the organisation overall. Also there was no history of a science museum director there was a history of the NMSI director being the Science Museum director so my status was quite uncertain; was I really somebody they took seriously, or could they just walk around me and talk to Martin if they didn’t like what I was saying and get him to say, ‘No that’s alright,’ and then, you know, I had no traction. So I found myself – I found myself much surprised in that I was in a position where I had responsibility and accountability but very uncertain authority, and I was not satisfied that when some things came to a head that my authority was reinforced, it wasn’t. So actually if Martin hadn’t left I would have left [laughs], but Martin – with – to my surprise left before I announced that I was leaving, it would have been very upsetting because it would have been in less than a year but it took me that long to figure out that this was not – not right, not the way I’d expected. And then of course because Martin did leave it would have been very destabilising for the organisation if I had also left so – so I decided to hang on. It was – but I wanted to hang on because I loved the museum and I felt there was a lot I could contribute and in the end we did, you know, we drew in, I don’t know, 12 million pounds of extra funding for, you know, completely rebuilt the Wellcome wing, the atmosphere exhibit is hugely successful whereas that was an absolutely minefield to deal with, you know, given all of the problems with climate science and the climate causalities of UEA and IPCC, you know, it would have been

175 Chris Rapley Page 176 C1379/40 Track 7 very easy for the museum to be the next very spectacular casualty in that area, so we did a lot.

[59:17]

But when Ian Blatchford took over as director, my strong recommendation to him and to the trustees, who would listen, was don’t replace me and he didn’t. Because the Science Museum is the core of NMSI, you know, if the Science Museum isn’t flourishing then – then whatever happens the media museum and the railway museum are in trouble because it’s the main gateway for funding to come in. And it – the conse – you know, having seen the way it had set itself up with this internal services structure which Ian has adjusted but not completely radically changed, is that the only way the system can flourish is if the NMSI director is the Science Museum director. Not because they have the – not just because they have the authority then to make decisions, proper decisions on behalf of the Science Museum that the other directors must respond to because they’re the boss, but also because they are back to being accountable for what happens in the Science Museum and they then realise what the real issues are and are forced to make the right decisions which then follow-through. So it was a fascinating experience and a wonderful example of how an ideology can have a huge impact on the ability of an organisation to flourish or not flourish.

[1:00:52]

Once you were in a position to make these decisions and have the authority to carry them through, what – what were your aims in terms of the presentation of science and of the history of science?

Well I think it’s best exemplified by the – oh gosh, that’s such a complicated question. I mean let me back up, first of all the Science Museum is unusual as museums go in that if you go to an art gallery the rules of engagement are fairly obvious, you know, everybody understands the principle of a painting. Now, you know, you may or may not know all of the collateral and wonderful information that allows you to appreciate why a painting might appeal to you or not appeal to you or –

176 Chris Rapley Page 177 C1379/40 Track 7 or a painting that visually may not appeal to you can nevertheless appeal to you when you understand a bit more about what it’s trying to say, so I’m not saying that it’s that simple, but on the whole a painting was – was designed for an audience, just like a theatrical play was designed for an audience, that’s what it was for. But the objects in the Science Museum weren’t designed for an audience in that sense, they were designed by and large to do something, either a – explore a bit of science and a piece of experimental equipment, or to do something in the real world like help, you know, increase personal mobility through steam engines or the motor car or whatever. So that’s different and often the bits of – of – you know, the objects that you’ve got on display aren’t even the whole object, they might be some part of it or they might be a representative piece of it but the function that they perform may no longer make any sense in the modern world, you know, it may no longer exist in the modern world, the modern world has moved on. And so to appreciate the objects in the Science Museum, many of which are not beautiful, you know, they weren’t designed to be beautiful, they’re quite grubby, sometimes quite off-putting looking things, particularly if you’re a technophobe and you feel overwhelmed by the complexity of technology and engineering. So the Science Museum has – had to develop a different way of presenting its objects so that people connect to them and take an interest in them. Now there will always be a subset of people who love that sort of stuff so you don’t have to work too hard for them, you know, let’s call them nerds, they just love that sort of stuff anyway, so that’s fine, but actually you want it to be much broader than that. So what I learned in the time I was there was that first of all this was much more complicated than I might ever have imagined ‘cause I hadn’t really thought about it very much, but also that there were clever ways that you could do things. I mean the most obvious is theatre, when I was at the museum and up until about a year before I left one of the first things that you encounter when you walk through the door was the undercarriage, the wheels and the structure of an Airbus A3 whatever, which is just huge, you know, the wheels are as tall as – as you are. Well every – that’s wonderful because pretty much everybody has either flown on an aeroplane or has – most – you know, these days an awful lot of people have flown on aeroplanes but they’ve never stood that close to one and it’s difficult to realise just how big they are, and so people would come in and stand proudly and have photographs of themselves taken standing in front of these wheels, this undercarriage because it was just so big.

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And that was fun, that was a connection with something in their lives. Up in the aviation gallery there is a section through a Boeing 707 so you can just look at this metre deep section hung up on the wall, you know, with the seats in and imagine God, you know, I sat in that seat and that’s what surrounds me, I never realised. So showing the familiar in a theatrically and unusually close way is one way that you can connect people. Another clever way is down in Secret Life of the Home, rather old gallery now but it really works, there are things like mangles and old electric fires and things that your grandma would have used in the kitchen that your children will never have seen because their – you know, the technology has so moved on. And so you get – you get a lot of intergenerational groups going into the museum, so you get a parent or uncle or teacher and, you know, a child, and so what you stimulate through that is not the child having to read the sixty word label but mum and dad doing the job of the curator, saying, ‘Hey, look, yeah, God goodness me, we used to have a mangle like that, and what you do is you, you know, you rotate the handle and you push the clothes through and it squeezes the water out,’ so it’s too expensive in – it would be impractical to have a curator standing by every object which would be the best way of connecting people because the curators can always come up with a million different interesting stories, but you get the public to do it themselves. So I began to realise how interesting this issue was of connecting people and the many different ways that you can do it. And so it was extending that through modern technology that was of interest to me, how could – every – you know, these days most people have got a mobile phone, how could you make it so that walking in with a mobile phone allowed you a greater interaction with these devices than otherwise? How could you have an electronic display that was better than a sixty word label? And there’s a downside with an electronic display, only one person at a time can use it, so how do you multiplex that out to a wide number of people. So there was all of that.

[1:06:42]

But then there was just the straightforward stuff of the, you know, the Wellcome wing was a contemporary science wing, it was ten years old, it was, you know, getting hugely out of date, we needed to do something about it, there was this desire of the trustees to have a climate change or a climate science exhibit, which I was I have to

178 Chris Rapley Page 179 C1379/40 Track 7 say extremely dubious about with me as director. I didn’t go there to do that, I’d – I went there to, you know, take the museum forward into the 21 st century and it seemed to me that it would be all too easy for the accusation to be levelled that I ‘as an activist’ [requests quotes] had taken over this august body [ph] and was using it for advocacy or activism, which I thought would be very dangerous both for me and the museum, I mean that wasn’t at all what was going on. But William Waldegrave the chairman of the board of trustees and the other trustees very much wanted a climate change exhibit and so we went ahead and did it.

[1:07:33]

And of course we had this very unfortunate experience with a small exhibit called Prove It that we put in place which got roundly criticised for both good reasons and bad, but it – it caused us – well the trustees then asked me to become head of content, you know, to take a direct interest in the intellectual underpinning and the content of the real gallery, and it was at that point that I really got engaged. And it was just timely, everything I had learned in the previous three years came together at that point, plus what we learned from this exhibit which was that if the museum veered too far to what people interpreted as advocacy or activism, that was a no no, people – and the fact that people did not wish to be told what to think, you know, very bad. So we – we moved from a tagline, ‘changing the way people think talk and act about climate change’, which makes me cringe when I think back to it but that’s where we were, you know, at that stage, to, ‘increasing engagement, deepening understanding, letting people make up their own minds.’ And that formula has really worked, numbers have doubled more or less what we had – had anticipated in our wildest dreams and the summarative evaluation which is still underway is exposing the people who are sceptical about climate science are going to the gallery, they’re not necessarily changing their minds but they’re walking out respecting it, saying that they enjoyed it, that they thought it was pitched right and that they learned something. Well what more can you ask than that, I mean that is a real testament, you know, testimony to success. Sorry that was a very long answer to a short question but – but that [laughs] – that’s the way I feel about the Science Museum.

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[1:09:22]

Regarding the atmosphere gallery could you – can you remember in enough detail to – to tell me about the decisions made in – including the particular objects that are included there, the Hertfordshire puddingstone, the forum [ph] for the tree ring, the sedimentary rock, the ice core, which is I think from BAS, it has a Robert Mulvaney story around it, and the Keeling flask, let’s look at those. Are you able to remember the sort of – given that you’ve just said that you had to think very carefully about how you presented climate change given who you were and the experience of – of the Prove It exhibition that had come before it?

Well the most important thing was that we realised that climate science is a hugely interesting story regardless of – of, you know, what it’s discovered and the conclusions that it’s led to. So how – you know, how do you study the planet, what evidence is there, what means do you use, so everything from the palaeoscience to the satellites to the Keeling flask, you know, the radar altimeters, lots of things that I’ve been involved in in different parts of my career, amazing stories, any of them, you know, fascinates people when you explain it to them. And they have by and large no idea of the extraordinary skilled army of people out there who are doing absolutely stunning things, you know, how do you measure – get a single figure for the average depth of the ocean, or how it changes from year to year to a millimetre? I mean for God’s sake, just look at the ocean, how would you ever measure it to a millimetre, you know, in a patch in front of you? So these are extraordinary stories and so we realised that telling the story of climate science was a completely legitimate and proper thing for the Science Museum to do regardless of all of a hullaballoo and nobody could blame us for that, nobody could accuse us of doing anything other than doing our job. So that’s where we started and that’s quite subtle because if then by telling the story of climate science, the science tells the story of climate change, that’s nothing to do with us, that’s what comes out of the science, so – so the museum steps itself back and is – and cannot be accused – as soon as you say, ‘Oh I’m going to give you a climate change gallery,’ then that seems to be saying, ‘because I think that you should know that this is true’, so you’re already – even if you don’t intend to be you are already in an advocacy position. Whereas if you say, ‘I’m going to tell you the

180 Chris Rapley Page 181 C1379/40 Track 7 story of climate science and I’m going to let you make your own mind up, you know, what emerges from that, but the evidence is absolutely clear that by doing all of this stuff we see that the world is warming, you know, there are the data points and dah dah dah,’ so it’s fundamental. So then we said, well what is the story of climate science, you know, not only the how do you go about it and who does it, ‘cause people are very interested in the who, and the history, but – but, you know, what – what is it, what are the key messages that we want to get across? So the key messages are that climate science has done all of this stuff and we’ll show you how it was done and who did it, and what it’s come up with are five things, you know, the climate system has been all over the place for all sorts of reasons in the past and we’ve got lots of evidence for that, most of that was nothing to do with humans but that shouldn’t make you feel warm and comfortable ‘cause it says it’s a frisky system and now that humans are becoming a driving force we could expect that they could have a big impact, you know, inadvertently, unwittingly, point one. Second point, greenhouse gasses, you know, heat trapping gasses trap heat and Fourier and others discovered that, go along to the Royal Institution, you can see the apparatus, you know, that’s what they do and so if you add heat trapping gasses the planet will get warmer and we can show you that through interactive and, you know, other things. Third thing then, if the planet gets warmer we will expect to see, you know, the ice sheets change and we’ll expect to see a response. So there’s nothing controversial up until now, who could argue with that, some people do but they’re on very very, you know, soft ground. So then we – we have a fourth message which is actually this – this introduces real risks to things that – that humans are interested in like food supply, water supply and so on and, you know, we’re not as resilient against even changes, you know, fluctuations in the climate that exists already as we should be, they can disrupt us, you know, lots of different ways, and if we provoke even more variability and change in the system that honestly is not a good thing, you know, from a risk point of view we should try and avoid that. And then the fifth message is, by the way it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to do some things about this and actually there’s money to be made here, you know, there’s all sorts of new technologies which – which aren’t necessarily competing with existing technologies yet, but it’s not just climate change that drives us in these directions so there’s lots – there’s a message of hope that there are technological and behavioural things that we could do that would

181 Chris Rapley Page 182 C1379/40 Track 7 alleviate the situation. And our research beforehand showed that people had very very muddled understanding or knowledge of all of this, you know, a fact here, a bit of misinformation there, but not able to link these things together, and particularly not able to link it to the positive note that actually there is something we can do, it’s not all hopeless, it’s not, you know, gloom and doom. So those were the five messages that – that were the underpinning of the whole gallery.

[1:15:22]

And then what objects were gathered together and made available and what interactive were chosen were from the skills of the team, we had – you know, we had a good exhibition team, there were some people in it who knew exactly what they’re doing and are intelligent and quick witted and hard working and smart enough to figure out what sort of objects would illustrate this and – but then made the contacts with the people who had these objects and got them into the gallery. I mean there was a larger range of possibilities than we actually ended up with because certain things weren’t available, you know, and other things were. And they really worked at it, that’s what the museum is really good at, so once we knew what the objective was and what the structure was, the intellectual structure, it was then over to the designers and the exhibition people and the team to assemble that into something that worked, including the stuff on the web. And then I as – as content director and scientific expert just checked everything and every time I felt they were veering off message in one way or another, saying things that I wasn’t comfortable with, you know, for whatever reason – you know, simply because they’re not – you know, how could they be experts in all of this and I mean we – and neither am I an expert, you know, at that level of detail and everything so we had an expert body vetting stuff as well, but as a team effort we – we went to enormous lengths to ensure that this stuff was defensible and true and spoken in as honest a way as possible.

To what extent were you involved in choosing the objects that appear there, in –

Well … Steph Millard was the curator responsible for the objects and I have enormous faith in Steph’s ability, and I have got enormous faith in Steph’s ability to

182 Chris Rapley Page 183 C1379/40 Track 7 do this, she’s a doer, a deliverer, ‘cause she’d done a gallery for me on Formula One, you know, the twenty things that spun out of Formula One that changed your life and – it’s called Fast Forward but it – you know, its subtitle was the twenty things that spun out of Formula One, she’d done a brilliant job on that. Got an amazing set of objects and wheedled and twisted arms and got stuff delivered that you would never have believed would have been possible in a very short time. So I just had complete confidence in her, you know, she’d told me what – what things that she was going for and they were great choices.

[1:17:59]

But the one thing that they got panicky about, the exhibition team got panicky about, was the ice core because they got frightened that it would melt and it has, it did melt recently [laughs], had a disaster and they’re had to replace it. And – but that was the one thing where I really put my foot down and I said, ‘No, you know, I insist that there will be an ice core.’ It was not just that they were worried about whether they could be sure that it wouldn’t melt, the freezer, specially designed freezer that they needed to put it on display was always on the critical path to the opening of the gallery and a few months before the gallery opened it looked impossible to deliver, and so they came to me and said, ‘We don’t think we can deliver it, you know, can we back off?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and I think it was Steph again who went out and managed to find a commercial freezer so when the gallery opened the wrong freezer was on – it wasn’t the design freezer, but it didn’t look too – you know, it looked fine anyway. And actually it was the specially designed wonderful super freezer the failed and caused the ice core to melt. So I believe that they’ve now – I haven’t seen the gallery since they’ve been through this trauma, but they’ve got it back. It was quite funny though, on the day that the Prince of Wales was coming to open the gallery and launch it and, you know, that all the masses and the sponsors and so on, at eight o’clock that morning I snuck up onto the gallery just to make sure that the ice core hadn’t melted overnight [laughs] and I found the project manager [laughs] and the other person who had been responsible for most of the exhibits, we all bumped into each other, tried to look as if we were looking somewhere else but we had all gone in there just to make sure that the damned ice core was still frozen before the Prince of

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Wales saw it. And in fact it survived for, I don’t know, eight months or something before they had a catastrophe because this stupid freezer that they had designed burned out or did something dreadful, I’m not quite sure what the details are.

[1:20:05]

It was certainly frozen this morning when I –

Yeah, oh good, you saw it did you, excellent, [laughs].

And what was the Prove It exhibition?

Okay, Prove It. This – I – yeah, I’ll put the time into this, we had consciously decided not to do something prior to Copenhagen, in spite of all of the hullabaloo about Copenhagen, we’d thought about having a small exhibit on climate change, a sort of – a kind of trial run for atmosphere really. But we’d got a lot on our plates, you know, not only was there this turbulence with, you know, who was in charge of NMSI and all of that stuff, but I had to deliver the centenary, which hadn’t been well planned, people had been talking about it for ten years but actually they had got no idea of what they were going to present for the centenary. And the centenary is a big thing and the, you know, the supporters of the museum were expecting something fairly special and that certainly the trustees were. So the – and then there was the revamp of Who Am I which we were committed to by then and the revamp of Antenna, and there were, you know, all of these other things, delivering Fast Forward and, you know, I can’t remember all the – you know, I can’t remember quite where all of this was. But we’d sort of decided that that was a step too far, that – to be honest I wasn’t overwhelmed at the team that was trying to prepare for this climate change exhibition, it wasn’t called Atmosphere then, I just – I just couldn’t get out of them what was the big idea. And under those circumstances, you know, getting a little idea out of them, you know, I kind of gave up on. So that was the way things were, and it’s honestly true and this is again, you know, where things started to go a bit wrong, I was invited by Ed Milliband with a really eclectic mix of others, you know, the head of the trades union movement, people from the CBI, somebody from the Bishops Council or

184 Chris Rapley Page 185 C1379/40 Track 7 whatever, a whole eclectic bunch of people to talk to Ed and Richard Betts and, you know, and others who were leading the negotiating, the UK negotiating team to Copenhagen and what Ed was saying was, ‘You know, if – if we’re to really have some traction and some power behind our negotiation position it would be good to have clear evidence of public support so, you know, if there’s any way that you can get evidence for,’ you know, because the public by and large still and still do have other day to day concerns; the economy, jobs, health, you know, all of these things. Climate is out there with a very high level of interest and support, but it’s not – it’s far from being top of the agenda so it’s not filling the politicians’ postbags. So I went back to the museum and I thought, well on the one hand, you know, we’re not the [inaud] of the government, you know, we’re not a government propaganda agency, but on the other hand, you know, Copenhagen, you know, with Obama going into it and the chance that there might be big progress and so on, it’s pretty odd that in our Antenna gallery we don’t have – I mean this is one of the hugest contemporary issues of the day, like it or not, whatever your position is on it, and so maybe we really should have something here and can we put something together very quickly. So I think we decided that we were going to try and do something in July and we got something in in October, you see which is a very very short turnaround time for a – you know, for a gallery. And we scrabbled together funds internally to do it ‘cause it wasn’t on the plan and of course people have to be siphoned out of other things in order to do this. Anyway, but it was still very much along the lines of ‘changing the way people think talk and act about climate change’, because we’d got into all this because William Waldegrave and in particular had said, ‘You know, the Science Museum shouldn’t be neutral on climate change, the Natural History Museum isn’t neutral on evolution, it wouldn’t sit back and say, ‘Oh yes, on the one hand you know perhaps we ought to present the creationist case,’ you know, because the science is to that extent done and dusted and so you know, it’s the Natural History Museum would make a statement if challenged saying, ‘No no no, you know, there’s scientific evidence that evolution is, you know, the right way to look at things is overwhelming,’ and William’s view was that, you know, ‘And the climate science evidence is overwhelming and so we shouldn’t be saying, ‘Oh yes it’s uncertain,’ we should be saying, ‘No, it’s clear.’ So with Prove It that’s what we attempted to do and, you know, a small team put something together, I have to say I didn’t – it didn’t

185 Chris Rapley Page 186 C1379/40 Track 7 pay as close attention to the detail as I should have done in retrospect, so that the attractor screen, it was – Abe Rogers [ph] was the designer and it was very clever in being one of the things they set themselves was to have as low a carbon footprint as possible to dematerialise what was quite a large exhibit, and it was made from strings and projectors and so on so it actually had very little material in it which was great, that was good, that worked really well, it was very attractive, caused – you know, drew you to it. But the attractor screen had a whole load of messages flashed up on it which, you know, I have to confess were pretty glib and a little bit alarmist, on the alarmist side, you know, the ocean – you’re all going to fry was sort of the tone, which was not good. But then real exhibit, what you were supposed to do you were supposed to be drawn into the space and then you could inter – there were three electronic, you know, interactive devices. And there was quite a clever thing then, you could – you could look at climate change through, I think it was five different lenses, through the mind of a negotiator, the mind of a scientist, the mind of an economist, the mind of a man off the street and so on, I can’t remember what they all were, but from that point of view it was – it was a much more advanced and more sophisticated way of looking at the problem than Atmosphere is, which is simply the voice of the science community telling you about climate science. But [laughs] a fundamental error was made. A green carpet was laid out, a circle with a rim around it and the reason they did that was that in the Antenna gallery there had been some criticism of some of the previous exhibits there, because it’s in a rather open space next to the cafe and next to some other things, you know, the kids gallery and the simulator, and apparently people had said, ‘Well I was never – I wasn’t sure when I was in the gallery,’ and, you know, ‘it was undefined so I never knew where it started and where it finished.’ So they said, ‘Oh well, we’ll define it, we’ll make this ring so that you step into it.’ Well it turned out that people were terribly self-conscious about stepping into it so a lot of people just crept round the outside and they never got into the real exhibit, they didn’t even realise it was there, so some of the criticism was of the attractor screen, which was sort of I think quite justified, but they hadn’t actually seen what the real exhibit was about, which was much better. But even those that did didn’t get down to a – it was called Prove It, so we set ourselves up to Prove It but we didn’t give that very lower level of nitty-gritty fact that people were looking for, we sort of operated at a level above that. But the real mistake was then to have a station

186 Chris Rapley Page 187 C1379/40 Track 7 at the end where you could get some feedback from people and the way this was expressed was, bearing in mind, you know, echoing in mind, there was this political need for, you know, a view from the public of whether they supported, you know, a firm and fair, you know, negotiated settlement of a binding agreement on emissions or not, and so we gave people the opportunity to look at this statement which said, ‘I do believe,’ you know, ‘I do support our negotiating team in getting this fair settlement or I don’t,’ and of the people who went to the Science Museum, saw the gallery and bothered, eighty per cent said, ‘Yes, I do, I think you should go,’ and, you know, and twenty per cent disagreed, but we made the mistake of [laughs] putting it on the web. And of course it – we were a beautiful, a sitting duck for all of those who feel passionately that this is a load of nonsense, I mean what a target, the Science Museum, so we sudd – as soon as we opened up the website on the – on the web, thousands of no votes came in, ‘No, I don’t want the – you know, this is all nonsense,’ and then when that happened the – the green activists went, ‘Oh wait a minute, what’s going on here, we can’t allow that,’ so they started, so it just became ludicrous, it just became a silly game between those that strongly disagreed and those that agreed. But because we then disallowed automatic voting which is what the green side were tending to do, they’d got these cyber bots putting in 1,000 votes at midnight and so on, because we disallowed that and put in a system whereby you had to demonstrate that you were a real person, but we did it a bit late and I don’t remember how the dynamics went out but in the end a very much larger proportion of people said no than said yes. The media picked up on the story and we were made to look fools, and that’s when the trustees got all panicky and thought that, you know, we could be the next – science museum could be the next climate casualty, you know, following UEA and IPCC and so on. And so that’s when they asked me to take direct control of the content of Atmosphere and although I’d – you know, it was a team effort, I’m really glad I did because I think it was that fantastic experience, I mean how lucky were we that we did that ‘cause if we hadn’t done that we wouldn’t have been thinking clearly about the principles that we followed with Atmosphere which had been so successful.

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