IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Professor John Woods

Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

C1379/64

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/64

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Woods Title: Professor surname:

Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Physicist/ Date and place of 26/10/39, Brighton, Oceanographer birth: Sussex Mother’s occupation: Senior nurse Father’s occupation: Banker

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 8/12/11 (track 1), 16/2/12 (track 2-3), 17/2/12 (track 4-6), 18/2/12 (track 7).

Location of interview: Royal Overseas League, London (track 1) and interviewee’s home Genova, Italia (tracks 2-7). 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: 11 hr. 52 min. 30 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: Closed between 24:42 – 25:03 of track 6; otherwise no restrictions. Interviewee has assigned copyright to The British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

John Woods Page 1 C1379/64 Track 1

Track 1

Could I start today then by asking when and where you were born?

I was born in Brighton in Sussex. Family lived in Hove. And I lived in Hove until I went to university at eighteen.

And the date of birth?

26th October 1939.

Thank you. And can you tell me anything you know of your father’s life, either things that he told you about his life or things that you’ve discovered since?

He was the ninth child of one of these large Victorian families. He went to work in banking. Then the war came along, just after he’d got married, and he went into intelligence. He had spent holidays in Czechoslovakia and he spoke the language and in fact they trained him to drop him in as a spy. Well, thank goodness he broke his leg in parachute training and so they never dropped him in, because all of those who went in were rounded up and shot, so he survived. But instead they taught him Japanese and he worked at Bletchley Park.

Oh wow.

And had a fascinating time. And of course they were all sworn to secrecy. They weren’t even allowed to tell their wives – but he did, of course, tell me a few things. He told me they taught – he worked mainly on Japanese codes. And I mean, it’s a myth that the Americans did Japan and the Brits did Europe [laughs]. They weren’t going to – India was too important to leave to the Americans. And there’s a good story, I mean …

Yes, please.

John Woods Page 2 C1379/64 Track 1

He – one of – I remember he was telling me, you know, he said, an awful lot of terribly routine boring stuff, but there was a moment of great excitement and that was the Burma campaign, when the Japanese started to retreat. And they were obviously – he could tell from Bletchley that they were panicking because they used to code and then double code everything, which made life difficult to decode. And suddenly nobody in Bletchley could read any of the Japanese signals. And he told me, he had the idea just one night, maybe they’ve not done the second decoding and we’re trying to double decode it and they only did it – and suddenly, click, it was all clear. What he didn’t know was that his brother was there, he was in the Indian army, and they met afterwards and suddenly he realised that he was reading the Japanese signals and his brother was there – [laughs] because Slim was being fed information from Bletchley as to what was happening. So it’s a fascinating story. But like a lot of people in Bletchley, they worked themselves to death almost. A lot of them were just – well, broken sounds too dramatic, but they really were very, very worn out. And he came out, the bank was fabulous, they’d kept a job for him and everything, he had, you know, a good career, but he was tired. Interesting man though.

[0:03:25]

Did he tell you anything else about his work at Bletchley, of the things that he told you or those that stand out?

Well, he wasn’t meant to tell me anything [laughs]. He wasn’t even meant to say what Bletchley was. Of course I’ve been there and it’s a fascinating place. No, I mean, he wasn’t a linguist, not – I mean, he didn’t think of himself as being a linguist, but they had this school that he went to. ‘Cause they – he was involved in interpretation as well as in the – he wasn’t on the routine decoding. I mean, he was there because he played chess, he did all the usual things, you know, fantastic with numbers. I remember he could run down five figure numbers, pounds, shillings and pence, a whole column, and tell you the bottom. He didn’t go down successive columns [laughs]. No, he had what they were looking for. And it was obviously a fascinating life but tough. They knew how important it was. And of course none of them knew what the others were doing. It was highly compartmentalised. And he – [laughs] he told me, soon after he arrived, they said to him, ‘We’re sending you off to John Woods Page 3 C1379/64 Track 1 officer training.’ And he talked to the others and they were all sergeants. The professors were sergeants, everybody and that – they were the people there, the real people there. And if he’d gone into officer training he would have been doing a sort of office job, supervising it all but not part of it. And all the fun, he said, all the fun, all the chess playing and everything else – they were all just sergeants [laughs]. Well, you know, they never wore uniforms very properly, they didn’t salute anybody and so on. It was a very special environment, very special time. As I say, I’ve given you that highlight about the Burma campaign. I think that’s probably enough.

What sort of age were you when he was telling you about this?

Oh, I suppose I must have been – hmm, eight or nine, I suppose, after the war.

[0:05:43]

And what can you tell me of his parents?

His parents, yes. I didn’t know his father – ‘cause he was the youngest of this very long family. A large number of his brothers were killed in the First World War. His father lived in Brighton, had various businesses. One was shoemaking, all sorts of things. He was one of these entrepreneurs. His mother was a stiff Victorian woman [laughs], didn’t take much nonsense from grandchildren. Of my father’s siblings, I’ve told you one ended up as a general in the Indian army. Of course he was more junior during the Burma campaign. He had a – he was my great hero as a child. He had – he had one piece of advice for me. He said, he had done fabulous things by always saying yes when somebody came to him and said, would you be interested in, dot, dot, dot. Would you be interested in learning to fly, we want to have an army squadron over the Himalayas. He said, yes [laughs], and he did – his whole life was marvellous. He only had one injury. He started in the trenches in the First World War and went all the way through the Second World War and retired when India got independence. The only injury he had – he lost an eye. It was a champagne cork in the mess [laughs]. But he was a marvellous man. I adored him. It was his daughter – his two daughters we were having lunch with today. And he was one of the influences on my life certainly. He ended up – he always – he always loved the idea John Woods Page 4 C1379/64 Track 1 of trains, every boy likes trains, so he ended up running the biggest train set in the world, which was Indian Railways [laughs], just as a job when he retired, just for a bit. And his sister, his sister read engineering at Manchester and that was in the last – no, not the last century, in the 19th century, it was pretty interesting. Married a classmate, went to Africa, spent their whole life in Africa. Both uncle and aunt were members of this Royal Overseas League so I’m not first generation here [laughs]. And – because it was their home from home when they came in from India or Africa. And the – he was in Cable & Wireless, ended up running Africa for Cable & Wireless. Had a marvellous approach. He said that they had standard instructions, every month or so you go round tweaking – before electronics, so it was electromechanical switches, tweaking all the contacts. And then once a year they all got together, Australia, America, Asia and Africa, the bosses all got together and compared notes on their performance. And he always came top of the pops, always ahead, fewer mistakes, fewer errors. He said he didn’t let them do it, I wouldn’t trust these boys to tweak the contacts. He fixed it when it went wrong, no remedial work. So pragmatic, electrical engineer. But unusual – the aunt was unusual. She never worked, she was just his wife, but very good brain. So there are a few brains in the family.

Did you know her well enough to discuss …?

Oh yes, they used to come back once a year usually. No, she wouldn’t talk about that side of things at all. She adored her home in Kenya and …

And when you were talking about your father’s brother and saying that you – that he was a great influence and that you admired him, what sort of age were you when you were …?

Well, I met him when he came back from India at the end of the war. He then was back to India for a bit, running various jobs. He set up the – oh, he set up the army school in Pakistan because Pakistan had nothing, he had to set it all up from scratch. He set it up. That was the one just outside the place where they got the – who was the terrorist they killed, the Americans killed?

John Woods Page 5 C1379/64 Track 1

Oh yes, Bin Laden.

Yes, that big camp, he had set it up and created it and recruited the staff and everything. So he had various jobs after the war and then eventually settled in England. And then of course I saw a lot of him as a schoolboy.

Yes, I was wondering, what, as a schoolboy, it was about him that you admired? So from the point of view of a schoolboy, what was it – what were the qualities that you were admiring?

I told you the one piece of advice he gave to me, don’t be sulky and say no. When people say would you be interested in, say yes, and it will lead you – he said, ‘You may not have a simple career but you’ll do things which nobody else does.’ And that was pretty good. And he – no, nice man too.

Do you remember any things done with him, places been with him or …?

Not really. They had a flat in Green Street, just off Park Lane, and I used to stay there of course and he would take me to the Science Museum, you know, usual stuff that young kids get taken to, nothing special.

[0:11:46]

And what can you tell me of your mother’s life?

My mother was – came from – her grandfather was a ship broker. He’d been at sea since a boy, his father was a ship broker – King’s Lynn. And that was her father’s side. And she loved it, she used to go as a young girl to King’s Lynn, stay with his – she was there when King’s Lynn was bombed by dirigibles, you know, in the First World War. And they got the house next door [laughs], they missed her. So she described sitting up all night, watching these great things flying over. This is looking ahead a bit, but I know my brother, who does a lot of genealogy, looks into these things, discovered the name of the captain of the dirigible and he happened to have been the cousin of my first wife [laughs]. So very close family, Platen Hallermund. John Woods Page 6 C1379/64 Track 1

And he – so that’s pure wild, wild coincidence. So my great grandfather had a fleet of ships based in King’s Lynn and had – he had a house that is as good in England – as close as you can get to Buddenbrooks. You know, Thomas Mann? I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Lubeck and seen Buddenbrooks. It’s a house – downstairs the clerks were working, upstairs the family was living. Right at the top the servants had their quarters. The back of the house – the garden ended in a warehouse and at the other side of the warehouse was the quayside. And the boats would come in, offload or load up. And the house is still there, it’s a lovely house. It’s right opposite the Town Hall. He was the mayor of King’s Lynn at least twice, maybe three times. And he was a big man, you know, interesting man. I never met him, great grandfathers you don’t tend – my – he had five daughters, who were apparently the bright young girls of King’s Lynn [laughs]. One of them was my grandmother. She was – must have been quite – I did know her quite well and she did a lot for me. She was very interested in mathematics and had to be taken out of the girls’ school in King’s Lynn and put into the boys’ school, where she – the rest of her education was in the boys’ school. The school was just opposite the house. I know the house, I know the – and she – her whole life she loved mathematics. She never did anything with it apart from gambling. And she’s – I mean, she wasn’t, you know, a gambler who sort of got hooked on it or anything. It was her entertainment. She said, I pretty well break even over the year and I get a lot of entertainment, whether it’s the horses – in the winter she went down to the Riviera and used to go to Monte Carlo and gamble there. And she said, ‘Okay, I’d spend a bit of money, but if I’d gone to the theatre every night it would have cost me more.’ She had this mind, interesting mind.

[0:15:40]

And so that was my grandmother. She married a lawyer, who was in local government. He was in Birmingham as the, I think, assistant recorder, I think that’s the level he was at. And that’s where my mother was born. Then he became recorder of Surbiton, that was his first job as the sort of top man, and he was flying high. I mean, they – winter on the Riviera and – my mother was sent to a French school because they wanted her to – so she had – schooling was in French. Not in France, in England, a French school in England. And clever woman, she – like her mum, she was really clever. Wanted to be a doctor, her whole life was going to be that she John Woods Page 7 C1379/64 Track 1 wanted to be a doctor, and when she was seventeen her father – her father, my grandfather, who I didn’t know for this reason, he was an early motorist, had the first motor car in Surbiton [laughs], Lagonda. And unfortunately he had an accident and killed himself, motoring, terrible. Trouble is, there was no pension in those days so the family went from being well off to not so well off and so medical school was off the agenda. And so my mother said, right, I’ll become a nurse. She then, before getting married, had risen up to being night sister, that’s the deputy matron in Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. And she was slated for matron in the next year or so, then got married and dropped it all. She was clever and tall and personable, her father was tall, I’m tall. The whole family’s tall. My brother’s taller than me. My son is taller than both of us [laughs]. He was here today for lunch. So – and she had a brother, my mother had a brother, also a lawyer. Second World War, he joined the navy and was in destroyers. Well, I don’t know anybody who knows what destroyers were like in the Second World War, they was hell, absolute hell. Wherever there was action the destroyers were sent like a flock of birds. He was in The Somali – he was on The Somali and – two highlights, he was on all the Malta convoys, where they lost most of the ships, but Malta survived. Then he was in Arctic – the Arctic on – some [inaud] convoys were hell. And – but he did have – again, it links to my father. He was – it was the Somali that jumped the German weather ship and got the codes, famous story. The Americans have it that it was an American ship that did it in the Hollywood movie and it was actually – and it was an enormous operation. They had to get to the weather ship when it was in a patch of fog so that they wouldn’t have time to throw the codebooks overboard. And he was the man who went onboard this – he leapt off the destroyer onto the tiny little boat, weather ships were tiny, with a band of – he was a junior officer, a band of sailors with cutlasses, I suppose. And they got the codebooks and got them back to Bletchley. Of course it wasn’t my father, he was working on Japanese, but there’s a link there. And he – that was – I’ve got a photograph – ‘cause they actually had in support a battle cruiser. It was so important. And they were frightened that – you know, and there were German ships around. And so they had a fleet just to grab the codes from this weather ship and to silence the weather ship so they didn’t say we’ve lost our codes. But it wouldn’t have made any difference because they were distributed. And the ships couldn’t go back and get another copy until they went next into port, so they had codes for a month or so ahead. They were very important. So that was an interesting story. But John Woods Page 8 C1379/64 Track 1 unfortunately he was torpedoed on the way back. He was sitting on half the ship that was still being towed in but it sank just off the water when it arrived in – no brother. Erm … so the wars did terrible things to families.

[0:20:42]

You say that you did quite a lot with your maternal grandmother, that she …

Yeah, she was super. I mean, my mother was – my mother gave up work the day she got pregnant with me. So she wasn’t working, she was at home looking after me, bringing up a family, looking after the home and Papa was in the army. My grandmother used to – she always – she was – she tried to make sure – you know, gave me my first radio, first camera, first – you know, she took me to London.

[0:21:25 – break in recording]

You were telling me about the role of your maternal grandmother in supplying you with objects to support your development.

Also introducing me to things – I mean, she was the – I mean, we were living in Hove and she was living in Hove too, but she decided I should come up to London and chose it to be the day of the opening of Parliament so I should see the queen and – you know, the things that children should experience and what grandmothers do for children. She did all the right things. She certainly – my mother was a passionate photographer, not a good time with shortage of film in the war, of course. And in her notes she kept on saying, oh, I managed to get a film, so suddenly there was a little burst of photographs in the family. But my grandmother bought me a Kodak, just pocket camera, rather nice little camera actually, in, I don’t know, ’52 maybe, I was twelve. Yes, that sounds about right, because in ’53 I went to Paris and that was the camera I took with me and I have lots of pictures from – I went alone. I had a French godfather and stayed with him in Paris. So she did all the normal things an active friendly happy grandmother did without crowding out the mother [laughs].

[0:22:57] John Woods Page 9 C1379/64 Track 1

What do you remember then of time spent with your mother as a young child, sort of, you know, primary school age?

Well, it was wartime. Er … what memories does one have of the war? Barrage balloon in the local recreation park, which had been turned into allotments. A barrage balloon was a big thing, it made elephants look quite small, you know [laughs]. Watching it being fed, when these gas cylinders would come on the trunks and – you know. She taught me to swim – actually, I think it was her sister taught me to swim. At the end of our road was the front, seafront, and of course it had barbed wire and tank blocks, big blocks of concrete, and mines and everything. But the locals all knew their way across it. So I was taught to swim [laughs], going across the beach. It was the – my mother loved swimming but it was the aunt who – her younger sister, who was quite passionate, right to her death a few years ago she used to go swimming every day in Brighton, summer and winter. So she decided I ought to learn to swim [laughs]. So it was wartime. Then when I was four I went to the local school. In the notes that I have – my mother wrote, you know, a child book, you know, this year, today, how she had got me reading and writing and doing my sums before I went to school. She was very proud of that. Otherwise – oh, we had a bullet hole in the window in the front room. I remember I was very proud of that [laughs]. Some plane had gone past. I remember celebrating VE night with a young girl, who must have been about a year older than me maybe, and we celebrated by getting a fishing net – a prawning – no, prawning, shrimping, trimming net, you know what I mean. And I think she must have been riding the bike, I must have been standing on the handlebars or kneeling or something, and we would go off, turned on the lights, ‘cause the lights hadn’t been on, and they all worked. It was wonderful. We turned on the lights on the street to celebrate VE night. That was a stupid childish thing, but anyway, that’s it.

[0:25:42]

Were there any sights and sounds of sort of active warfare that you remember?

John Woods Page 10 C1379/64 Track 1

Planes, planes. And there was the barrage balloons to protect the power station at Port Slade, occasionally contrails and things, but I really wasn’t very much into it. Oh, I had some contact with the navy, because at four I got – my appendix, rushed to hospital with appendicitis, and there was no children’s ward so I was put in the sailors’ ward, where they’d been torpedoed or whatever. And they suddenly found a young boy, you know, they all found me – marvellous, spoilt me rotten, of course. The trouble is they gave me all sorts of other diseases so I was an awful long time in hospital. I know I had pneumonia and ear infections. I don’t think I got any venereal diseases but [laughs] … that was a long, long time before finally – because medicine wasn’t very clever in those days. And my mother of course, being passionate, it was her hospital, where she’d been running the hospital, so at least she – she was happier I was in good hands. And my aunt, her younger sister, was working as a ward sister so I had family. But that was – of course I heard all these stories about ships and the navy and I was given books of all of the – to identify all the warships. They all had these books and they came and showed me them. I had a whole collection at one stage. I was only four.

[0:27:29]

And apart from swimming, what other sort of places in the local landscape did you visit with your mother as a child?

Well, my father came home on leave occasionally and he loved the countryside. He always said – you know, he and his parents had been in Brighton and – but he loved to get out to the countryside. And we used to go along the coast to Rottingdean, Ovingdean, walking over the Downs. And I remember him telling me to lie back on the Downs and look up and see the skylarks, listen to the skylarks, they’ll shoot up in the air and they’ll hover. Still do it, marvellous. And we heard – through the war – my parents knew a lot of people, some had – one in particular had a farm. We used to go and spend holidays on the farm, as a young kid, learning to milk a goat and [laughs] …

Who went on those holidays?

John Woods Page 11 C1379/64 Track 1

My mother, my father if he happened to be on leave would join us for a day or so, and – oh, then I – there was a lot of self help. One of the surgeons in the County Hospital, who’d been – certainly my mother was there, was very good friends and he had married one of her very good friends. And so we – and he was worried his wife was left lonely while he was in the army and my mother was – so we all joined up and lived in their house in Hove. But there’s nothing special there, it’s just …

Tell me though about these experiences on the farm as a child. What was involved?

Well, it was rather like a – the parish priest needs a holiday sometime so he get somebody else to be a locum [laughs]. Of course we weren’t farmers. But it wasn’t – they had goats, they had – I mean, we hadn’t to do anything with the crops. That had been dealt with, they had people doing that. Water came in in a truck, I remember that. There’s a photograph of me standing with this girlfriend – girlfriend, daughter of these friends we were with, water babies playing with the water [laughs]. No big thing.

And apart from taking you out for walks and asking you to lay back and look at skylarks, what else might your father have done with you on his visits?

Taught me chess. He was playing with some pretty high level chess people in Bletchley, of course I didn’t know. He loved chess and he taught me chess. And he taught me cleverly because he didn’t try and make me learn all sorts of textbook situations. He just told me the principles, the strategic idea of what you’re trying to do. And I loved it, I soaked it up. And later on, when I went to prep school, there was a Russian teacher there, who had been a – not a grandmaster, a master in chess, good – pretty high level. And he picked up and, you know, we carried on. He played with my father and they both encouraged my chess. But that of course was when I came back from polio, so we’ve jumped ahead a bit.

[0:31:13]

Thank you. And before we go onto your very first school, as a piece of social history but also a way of perhaps exploring the roles that people had in your home, could you John Woods Page 12 C1379/64 Track 1 give us a tour of your family home in Hove? I think it’s the – from what you said before, it was just one home that you stayed in from …

Probably – as I say, we went and lived in a very large house with friends for part of the war. We had a small apartment, tiny, it was just the first floor of a house. We had access from steel steps outside through a conservatory into the – every night I had to go down – I had a Pinocchio gasmask, like kids did in those days, and to try and make it more acceptable they made it into the shape of a Pinocchio face. You’ll see them – I’m sure if you go down to the National War Museum they must have – I’ve never done, but they must have them there. And they had a – I think they’re called Anderson shelters, aren’t they, like a table but steel with very strong legs and wire mesh. I remember I was very cross, I had to spend the evenings in it, whereas the slightly older – the girl of the house would play outside. I said, ‘She should be in with me.’ [Laughs] But that’s – again, that – it was a – how big was it? It wasn’t a very big place, sitting room, dining room, couple of bedrooms, conservatory, kitchen.

[0:33:01]

Could you tell me about your first experiences of a school?

First experience of school was the PNEU School. Now don’t ask me what PNEU stands for, probably something like People’s National Educational Union or something. That’s wild guessing, I’m sure you can check up in the British Library. It was a private sort of thing. It happened to be just at the end of the road, very convenient. And I went there when I was, hmm, four ish, I suppose, like a – I don’t know how it’s called, is it kindergarten? No, it wasn’t a kindergarten, it was serious school. I remember I – at the end of the first year I got the prize for English, writing I suppose. I was furious, it was a book with no pictures and no conversation. I felt rather like Alice in Wonderland, you know, what’s the good of a book with no pictures and no conversation? [Laughs] But it was simple, nice, kept me out of mischief.

[0:34:07]

John Woods Page 13 C1379/64 Track 1

And then in ’40 – end of the war, Father was demobilised. It seemed after the war ended before – you know, these things lag. ’46, I suppose, he decided, well, now we’re out of – better buy a house rather than living in rented accommodation, which they’d had since they were married. Bought a house in Patcham. Now the family had – two or three generations back had been in Patcham. Patcham is in North Brighton. But it was a village which is now within Greater Brighton, on the Downs. And we were right on the top of the Downs; at the end of our garden there were fields. It was great. I mean, they were still – you know, it was mainly corn, so the harvest was fun. You know, we used to go out – my father was – because he’d been skiing in Czechoslovakia before the war he had a very nice Czechoslovakian backpack, haversack. And he – he used to go and fill that with – gleaning was legal. You could pick up the corn which was lying on the ground which the threshers had missed. And we used that for the chickens, we had chickens, because people had chickens in those days because you could put your egg ration into chicken food and the chickens would produce more eggs than your egg ration. Almost everybody had chickens. And if you get free corn in the harvest time, of course, that’s just a bonus. So we were living in Patcham, so I was then put in the local school in Patcham, which must have been – what do you go to when you’re six, junior school?

Primary school or …?

Primary – I don’t know, whatever it was. It was the ordinary state school. But I was only there a few months because in the summer of ’47 I picked up this polio, so schooling sort of disappeared for the next two years. And that wasn’t nice [laughs], not very convenient. People were very scared about polio then, rightly so, highly infectious. And so the first thing to do is to cart you off and put you in an isolation hospital. And this was in Sompting. Do you know Sompting? Incredibly inconvenient. Somehow my mother used to get there most days, cycling. We didn’t have a car then. Cars weren’t very popular ‘cause her father had killed himself in one. And then after some time I was carted off to Chailey. Chailey is right in the very – it’s the actual centre of Sussex. And a strange place. It was a hospital, privately set up by a very determined rich woman, on common ground, common land. And she had discovered there was a law that said if anybody could put a fence around some land, common land, and sustain it for twenty four hours, undisturbed, they could have John Woods Page 14 C1379/64 Track 1 the land. Apparently it goes way back. Of course the villagers would never let it happen. But she put notices in the press and – it was done extremely publically, that she was intending to do this and put her fortune into creating a hospital there. So nobody did disturb them and she got the land. And it’s there in the middle of rather boring heath land. And it has done various things. As different epidemics or problems have happened they have always been one of the places that took the kids in, children, to look after them. It happened to be polio in those days. And pretty harsh; it was a cold winter, that winter, one of the coldest for a hundred years. And I remember we were living outside through the winter [laughs], I mean, at night. We just had shutters on a balcony. But it was meant to be – you know, it hardens you up, I suppose. They were very nice. I mean, there was no – I mean, it was very loving and caring. They didn’t know what to do. They wanted to see whether we’d die or not. Those who didn’t, we were given the usual shock treatment and so on, which didn’t do any good. Then eventually, after about a year, I suppose, the news came that the callipers were coming. I had no idea what the callipers were. They came from America apparently. And it was – I was so – I didn’t know anything, you know. I was seven, eight. It turned out it was callipers. Callipers were leg irons, I never – they came from America, it was a sort of shipment of them came. They were very clumsy awkward ones, but they came from Roosevelt, of course, who had polio. It was a gift. So fitted with those and told, right, better go home. And so I went home. Hadn’t had any schooling then, just surviving and fiddling around – a bit of therapeutic stuff, like making necklaces of plastic bands [laughs]. Of course I was reading a lot. I used to get books. They all had to go in the oven to sterilise them and then I got the books. They were brown [laughs]. And the – so I came out, went home, by which time my parents had sold up the Patcham house and moved back into Hove, bought a house there. So that’s where I went. And the – they hired a tutor. I don’t know who or what he was. I can’t even remember his face now. But his job was to just try and get me back into some sort of state of being ready to go back to school. And so, you know, maths, English, you know, just to make sure when I started school the step wasn’t too impossible. And he was good because I remember him saying – my mother saying to me, ‘He said you’re a university boy.’ So obviously, even though I hadn’t had anything, he obviously recognised that I had something between my ears.

John Woods Page 15 C1379/64 Track 1

[0:41:24]

And then after about a year of that, I suppose, they said, right, you can go to school. And there was quite a friendly prep school nearby, day, so I could come home. And I had learn to cycle again – I’d learnt to cycle in the war, and I learn to cycle again and I was able to take my calliper off and put it on the back of the bike and cycle into school. And school was good. It was a very weird school. It was run by two – two co-headmasters [laughs]. But they were caring, they were – they had recruited a bunch of teachers, who were all misfits, who had – I mean, the maths teacher was a Professor of Geometry from the University of Vienna, who had, presumably he was Jewish, had to leave. And they’d got this Russian who taught me chess, or continued my chess education. He got me playing – I played junior for Sussex with his help. I mean, he pushed me quite hard and played correspondence chess. In those days we didn’t have internet, it was done by postcard [laughs]. You used to send a postcard off with your next move and then a postcard would come – whoops.

Where was this going between, the postcard?

Oh, played – one match was with a team in the Netherlands. Sorry, this is collapsing.

When, during the school day, was he teaching you chess?

He lived at the end of our road and I used to spend the evenings there [laughs]. They became family friends. My father helped him. He was – he needed some help. He’d been living in Egypt. He was a tennis – Egyptian tennis team too. He was quite a man. And he had job – anyway, my father had contacts and managed to sort of help him, so he – it was nice. And so the school had this bunch of people who really weren’t very experienced at teaching nine, ten year olds, but they were clever people. And so one way and another I got an education. But money was tight so the decision was made, I wouldn’t go on to public school, I’d just go to the – if I could make it into the grammar school I’d go into the grammar school. So I took the Eleven Plus. That was traumatic, because the school was a prep school for preparation for public school and it wasn’t geared up for the Eleven Plus exam. And I hadn’t got a clue, the questions they were asking were thoroughly prepared for the kids in the local primary John Woods Page 16 C1379/64 Track 1 schools, of course. And my mother panicked when – she got hold of some of the questions. And so she sat me down and crammed me with answers to these stupid questions. And I passed the exam. I remember the interview at the grammar school. They said the usual things, you know, what do you want to do? And I had made up my mind for a variety of reasons that I wanted to be an architect. My passion was to be an architect. And I remember them asking me – I can even remember it to this day, how the room was – you know, we were sitting and everything. And they said, ‘Well, we live in Brighton. Tell us a little bit about the architecture that you admire here.’ And I think they were thinking of the Regency Terraces and the Pavilion maybe. And I said the HMS King Alfred. They said, ‘What?’ This was the only modern building in Brighton and Hove. It was just in the Hove border. It was a swimming pool that had turned into a naval training place, HMS, where I’d picked up polio, as it happened, when I was swimming there. But it was the only – it was an interesting building, big span with no pillars. I mean, it was a clever building and I had been enormously impressed by it. They thought I was weird, you know [laughs]. They thought I’d be talking about these marvellous historical buildings [laughs]. So I was marked as being sort of funny.

[0:46:03]

Why do you think that you, by this stage, had decided that you wanted to be an architect?

I think a number of things. One of the things, when I was sitting those – year and a bit in Chailey, one of my joys was a building kit. There was a company in Hayward’s Heath that made bricks and various things to make buildings, for children. It was killed by Lego after the war. They never managed to make the transition. And it was sort of world famous in Hayward’s Heath but they didn’t have an export market [laughs], but very, very good stuff. And it was the sort of small thing you could have in a bed. And they were building all sorts of things, I had books on it and people would be – they knew I was interested and send me books showing pictures of things. So I must have got hooked, strange. And I decided that it was a marvellous mixture of – I wouldn’t have said it in these words in those days, but it was essentially engineering, science, art. I mean, architecture, it’s the only public art, you know. If John Woods Page 17 C1379/64 Track 1 you make a mistake everybody can see it until they tear it down. And it just struck me as – I got – decided – and that became – I was going to be an architect until I left school, I even registered at the Royal Institute when I was eighteen. And then I had a brutal art master, didn’t like me. This was at the grammar school. And he went to the headmaster and said, ‘We’ve got to stop this kid, he’s going to make a fool of himself. He can’t draw.’ And the headmaster, who was a very good man, he said, ‘Well, let’s set him some tests.’ So I was given a pad and pencil and told to go out and draw things, buildings. And I did and the art master was rather crestfallen because he thought I was hopeless. He just didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. The headmaster said, ‘I think he could have a go at it, you know.’ But by then I’d sort of lost heart ‘cause there was terrific opposition and my parents had said, ‘Well, you’d better think about something else.’ So I thought, well, maths and physics are easy, so I did that [laughs]. I mean, but it was the soft option, it was the easy thing to do when I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. So I looked around, and I had an uncle who was in Cambridge, one of my father’s brothers in Cambridge – oh, he must come to Cambridge. But they wanted mathematics, they wanted me to do – I had a very – I had some wonderful school teachers. I mean, both pure maths and applied maths were wranglers from Cambridge. I mean, they were top, superb, very supportive. But for whatever reason I didn’t fancy spending the whole time in mathematics. If you’re going to be an architect you want to be practical; mathematics is quite a long way away. And physics seemed to be a reasonable compromise in the middle. So I said, right, I’ll go for physics and where is physics good. And I sort of – I forget why. I learnt a bit about Patrick Blackett, great man, and I decided I wanted to be a student under Blackett. He’d left Cambridge and gone to Manchester, he was at Manchester. And Manchester in those days – physics was Manchester. What I didn’t know is the government had done one of these strange things governments do and they had – they wanted to build up Imperial College. Imperial College had – you know, the Royal College of Science was very good and so on, but it was perhaps a bit dreary. And they wanted to have much stronger – Imperial College was convenient, along the road from Westminster and they always had very close – and they took the whole of the physics department at Manchester and swapped it with the physics department at Imperial. Now some of the staff wouldn’t go but, I mean, all the leading ones did. And Blackett suddenly became Head of Physics at Imperial College. I had registered to go to Manchester, taken the entrance exam, everything was fine, and I discovered – John Woods Page 18 C1379/64 Track 1 my physics master maybe mentioned that he’d heard about this. So panic [laughs], better apply for Imperial College. And did so, passed their exam, got in, fine, and it was marvellous. He was fantastic, quite – he was an outstanding teacher, an outstanding scientist, and of course ended up Minister for Education. Of course all the time being excluded from the stuff he loved because he was, quotes, Communist, he wasn’t – I mean, it’s difficult not to be a Communist, I guess, when you’re fighting the Nazis. He wasn’t a Communist. But he – I adored that man. He was special, really special. I remember the first day of time as an undergraduate – I’m jumping ahead of bit.

That’s okay, we’ll go back over a bit. Just carry on.

First day of term as an undergraduate – first year students in physics were expected to be in the bar at whatever it was, six o’clock, seven o’clock, he was there buying the drink. Wow, you know, you’ve got this Nobel Prize winner that – he was taller than me and he strode down the street at such a – everything was at a high pace. That’s not bad, good introduction. Sounds very old fashioned. He was a bit old fashioned. And then he – the first day of term he took us round the department. It was in the old Royal College of Science building, which is – there’s a tiny little bit left, which is next to the Science Museum. It’s all been torn down. And he took us to the first year lecture theatre. He said, ‘How many people can you fit in here?’ And it turned out ninety. He said, ‘Now follow me.’ And charged up to the second year lecture theatre, ‘How many people can fit in here?’ Sixty. Charged up to the third year lecture theatre, ‘How many people can you fit in here?’ Thirty. ‘Got the message?’ [Laughs] That’s the way he spoke [speaks fast], ‘Got the message?’ It turned out that he had – he was very caring and those who – thirty who left at the end of the first year were found slots in other – went to King’s College or somewhere, University College. They were found slots. They were very welcome because they’d been, you know, good students but weren’t quite good enough for Blackett, and similarly in the second year. He was like that, a big man, big man. He’d been a bugler in Jutland, in the navy. He’d seen an awful lot.

[0:54:16]

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I was taking photographs. My granny gave me my first camera, I became passionate, it’s my hobby, still is. And I remember I took a picture of him when Niels Bohr visited to give lectures at Imperial, got a picture of him, very proud of it. Niels Bohr is the world’s worst lecturer [laughs]. You’d imagine, they have the main lecture theatre packed out, sound carried to other lecture theatres. Everybody on campus wanted to hear the great man. [Laughs] He couldn’t string a sentence together. Great man, of course. Anyway, sorry …

[0:55:03]

Why had you begun to read about Blackett before the …?

How did I encounter the name Blackett?

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t know, I can’t remember. I was at school, of course. Well, no, I can remember. Sorry, I haven’t prepared [laughs]. In Brighton, Brighton and Hove, the physics departments formed – I suppose the masters had formed as a society and each year they invited a really distinguished physicist to come and lecture. And it wasn’t Blackett, it was a chap from Oxford. He was a low temperature physicist, name doesn’t spring to mind. But he told us all about super conductivity and super fluidity and there is an absolute zero temperature. And we were sixth formers. And I’m sure that along the way he talked about a number of people that he admired in physics and Blackett’s name must have come up. That must have been it. I probably went round and asked – back to school and asked the teacher, who’s this man. So somehow the name – and I must have read something about him. That was quite an eye opener, those lectures. I’ve still got my actual lecture notes that I took and I then rewrote them in clean version and got both versions still. It was an eye opener. It was – that was the first time physics became an interesting – remember, I wanted to be an architect in those days. You know, it was the first time I thought physics, or even science, might be interesting. I guess that’s why physics became the option, when architecture, for stupid reasons, didn’t. I still would have liked to have been an John Woods Page 20 C1379/64 Track 1 architect, would have been an interesting career. Who knows where it would have led.

What was it about then the introductory lectures in physics that …?

He lectured us as though we were undergraduates, no holds barred, straight in, bam, bam. Didn’t try and talk down to us as schoolchildren. He was passionate about low temperature physics. He was the professor. He talked to us about – there’s a Dutchman Kamerlingh Onnes, I think, who was one of the great – discovered super fluidity, I think. He talked – because he had to talk to us about quantum mechanics because of – and my goodness, you know, we didn’t know a thing about quantum mechanics, we were doing heat, light and sound [laughs]. But at school we had these outstanding teachers, who had been recruited, I suppose, during the Depression, who’d gone into school teaching, perhaps was in other jobs, and absolutely outstanding, I mean, such as you only get in a good public school now, this was an ordinary town, you know, local grammar school. They were – in all subjects they were outstanding. The sciences and maths were terrific. Chemistry wasn’t so hot. The only thing I ever remember from my chemistry master was saying that water and alcohol are omissible, thank God. He had to leave because of alcoholism [laughs]. So I didn’t really like chemistry very much.

[0:59:01]

You said that you thought that you’d contracted polio swimming at …

Oh, I’m sure, yeah, yeah, in the King Alfred Baths in Hove, yeah. I was there all the time. Swimming was a passion. I used to cycle down from Patcham, yeah.

And I know it can take different forms, so I wondered how you were affected over the years.

Legs, legs. I didn’t have – my lungs didn’t get it, so I wasn’t in an iron lung. Arms were weak but not serious. But yeah, legs. I’ve got no muscles at all in that leg. Amazing how one can get by. John Woods Page 21 C1379/64 Track 1

But how did you sort of feel about it and cope with it at the time, the abrupt change in your life?

When you’re a kid you just roll with it, don’t you? You don’t think about it. You’ve got no context to think about things. You just do it, get on with life.

And so aside from building complicated buildings on your bed …

[Laughs] Probably not very complicated, but anyway …

What else did you do? ‘Cause I assume then you had to remain in bed for …?

Most of the time you did nothing, you’d just lark around with the other kids, boring.

So for those almost two years at Chailey …

Yeah, a year and a bit, yeah, a year and a half. Pretty boring, I did an enormous amount of reading.

What sort of things at the age were you – are you able to say you were reading

Well, I don’t remember, but one book sticks in my mind and that actually is relevant to what happened later. I was given a book – people giving me books, they didn’t know what to give me. One was a book, very, very beautiful book and I’d love to go to the library and dig it out because I haven’t got my own copy still. There must be a copy in the library. It was a book which was trying to explain to children what an ordinance survey map was. And it did it extremely cleverly, because on the right hand side of a double spread, double page spread, they would have the ordinance survey, little bit of an ordinance survey map. And on the left hand side they would have an artist’s drawing, painting, watercolour, of a couple of kids standing, maybe on a hill, looking at the scene. So you could see where there was a church tower, you could see where there was a post office, where the pub was and all of these things were on the map. And it was an eye opener, absolutely marvellous. I fell in love with John Woods Page 22 C1379/64 Track 1 maps and am still passionate about maps. History of Cartography, which you probably have in the – of course you have it in the Library, great books that are coming out. I’m about a third of the way through it at the moment, a fabulous series. Everyone who buys it – I’ve got newsletters sitting there from them. No, cartography, mapping – and it all starts with – you know, you never know, a tiny seed. I just – it just – click, you know, there it was, I could see the point of maps. I could visualise – you know, there’s a map, you can visualise what it means, what it’s showing.

How did it develop from that point, from this book where you’ve got the comparison across the page spread?

I made my first map. I suppose I must have been thirteen, guessing. I decided I was going to be a cartographer so I drew a map with another school pal. We used to get on our bikes. I decided I was going to map the railways all the way around us. So there was the Brighton line going off to Shoreham and going off to Portsmouth and so on. Of course there was an ordinance survey map, you could just buy it and there it was. I said, no, no, I’m going to make it as though it’s unknown territory. Went out cycling, getting up on bridges so you can – I don’t have it unfortunately [laughs]. Silly, silly thing; it’s what kids do when you get excited about something.

What other pastimes did you have at that sort of age, the age where you were – you’d learnt to ride again and you were able to spend time with friends? Apart from cycling and map making, I wondered how you …

Well, they tried to get me into school sports but that really wasn’t very practical. They thought I could be a goalkeeper and I wouldn’t have to run around, but you have to be quite energetic to be a goalkeeper [laughs]. That didn’t work. Played a bit of chess – sorry, played a bit of cricket. Erm …

Is this at the grammar school?

Yes. Quite enjoyed that, usual sort of house team, nothing special, but I enjoyed it, I enjoyed cricket. Cricket is a very interesting game. I don’t have to tell you that. I mean, it’s much more interesting than football [laughs]. It’s got layers of interest. John Woods Page 23 C1379/64 Track 1

And if you’re stuck on your back thinking for most of your life then things that have depth are interesting. I’ve always spent a lot of my time just sitting thinking. You learn to do that when you’ve got nothing else to do for a year or so. And so interesting things, worth thinking about. Cricket is. I was never any good at it but I used to play it. Cricket, you could – you see, you’d be a batsman with a runner, so I had a runner. That’s part of the rules. So that’s possible. I could – I used to field in close, until one day I got knocked out because the guy hit the ball, whizzed past me, fine, and didn’t know he’d let go of the bat [laughs], clunk. I came to in the school sanatorium some time later [laughs]. I didn’t stop playing cricket but fielding close wasn’t my favourite occupation after that. No, not much sport, not many hobbies. A lot of time in the library; Hove Public Library was almost my clubhouse. I’d spend hours there, weekends, evenings. Hobbies? My parents were very, very supportive, they were always trying to think of things I could do. So I learnt to swim again, in the King Alfred Baths. Basher Bates, the teacher there, got me swimming, which was good. Swimming’s very good when your legs aren’t. And then we had a lecturer at school – they had lots of people coming in giving lectures, you know. And it was an Olympic canoeist. In those days I don’t think they were winning but, I mean, they were – and he talked about canoeing and he showed us canoes and so on. I said, right, I think I could do that, because you just sit in it, I won’t use my legs. It’s all arms. So I went up to the boat show and bought a kit to make my own canoe, heavy wooden frames and polystyrene sheeting [laughs]. And I made a trailer to go behind my bike. I bought an old pram, or maybe I just found one, and modified it so that it would – it was in – you know, the wheels were under the middle of the canoe. At the front of the canoe, I invented a universal coupling, which was actually a gas pipe [laughs]. No, it wasn’t gas, it was electrical conduit, which isn’t sealed, it’s just rolled over and it could twist. People always thought that was very strange but it worked beautifully. And I would cycle down to the sea, ‘cause we were living quite close, of course, in Hove to the sea, and canoe. I enjoyed canoeing very much. Where we live now canoeing is an extremely active sport, you see a lot of it. So I did a bit of that. Cycling, I used to tour round Southern England with a school friend, staying at youth hostels. It was a good system, youth hostels were wonderful. You know, they didn’t – they cost peanuts and you did some duties, like you cleaned out the dorm, you peeled the potatoes or whatever it was, you know, everybody did something. Got to visit a lot of places, I liked that very much. I always had maps with me, I liked that. John Woods Page 24 C1379/64 Track 1

Who did you go canoeing with?

Who did I go …?

Canoeing with.

School friend, yeah, school friends.

[1:08:43]

And at the public library, apart from reading books on perhaps the local geography or architecture …

[Laughs] No, everything. I mean, I was a sponge, you know what kids are like, you know. If you’re not sporty and rushing around then you just soak up everything, everything. It was a nice little town library and they would get books for me if I wanted them.

What memories do you have of the teaching of science at the prep school, the …?

There wasn’t any. There was maths. But I know that when I went to the grammar school the maths teacher hauled me in, I suppose it must have been the second term, ‘cause they’d set us an exam to sort of – all the teachers set exams to try and find out what level we were and everything. And he hauled me in, he said, ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’ ‘Cause of course I was two years ahead of all the other kids. At state schools they hadn’t done any maths; I was doing algebra and geometry and so on. And so I was sort of a bit of a marked man at school [laughs]. I had a flying start. We were – I mean, we were being taught, as I say, algebra, geometry, in a way that state schools weren’t at that age so by the time I came to eleven I was sort of flying. Everything stopped with the others catching up. But they were very good, they used to have extra lessons for me, so I’d go on a sort of separate track. Super school.

How were those separate lessons established? John Woods Page 25 C1379/64 Track 1

Well, there were some lessons which I didn’t like [laughs] and the teachers used to get together and arrange that I didn’t have to do them and they would let me do the things I did like. Pretty good, pretty good. I didn’t get on with the music master very much. I hadn’t had much music at home. I had my radio, I listened – I used to have a radio. My parents weren’t very musical so we never went to concerts or anything like that. So I really wasn’t very mentally prepared for music at school. Everything had to be very sort of active. So the music master said, come on, if you want to go off and do that – he’d obviously spoken to them. So I went off and did extra maths.

Who was providing you with the extra maths, sort of setting it out for you, setting it up for you?

Well, the head of applied maths and the head of pure maths. As I say, both wranglers from Cambridge, I mean, terrific teachers. Were they terrific teachers? I don’t know, but they were very good at their subjects. They knew their subject.

And the teaching of other subjects, other …?

French, I spoke French, of course. I had a French godfather. I’d been sent off to – I was – I had my passport all ready to go to France when I was seven. I was going to go off to France and stay with my godfather in Paris but the polio rather mucked that up so I never went. But at thirteen I was sort of ready again so I went off. It was a bad year to choose. There was a national strike in France so I was meant to go for a couple of weeks, I ended up six weeks [laughs], no transport, nothing. I had a whale of a time, ‘cause all the public transport in Paris was on strike so the army took over. They had army trucks. And you had the same little bus tickets – they worked on the army trucks. I had this camera and you could get film again, so I had film, black and white. And I did Paris, went everywhere in Paris. And in those days kids went on their own, you know. I mean, I went to Paris on my own, I didn’t have anybody accompanying me. I was told to get the ferry and get off the other side and there would be a train alongside at Dieppe. I had to get in the right carriage, because the train divided into all sorts of – you know, continental trains. But one just did it, it was normal. Very nice couple with no children, my godfather and his wife. He was a John Woods Page 26 C1379/64 Track 1 stockbroker, and he was at work. He didn’t know quite how to cope with – had never had children, didn’t know what to do with a young teenager, and I just went off and, you know, did Paris. Marvellous. They used to take me to their country place at weekends down on the Seine, near Fontainebleau, and that was nice. And through them I met other people. So I spoke French. I was back in – when I was fifteen I was back in France. That’s where I learnt to dive, but that’s another story. And so at school of course I jabbered away in French, schoolboy French, and the teachers were terribly impressed. And the other kids were furious because they all got their homework much more accurate than I did [laughs]. You can fool – I mean, I wasn’t fooling the teachers, but, you know, they sort of form an opinion, they decide, oh, that kid’s okay in French, and they then sort of get a blind spot about whether you make mistakes in your homework. So we’ve talked about maths, physics, chemistry, geography, of course, I liked. History I adored, adored history, loved it, I still do. I think if I have any passion from reading it’s history. I’ve just written a book on history, a historical detective story. Erm … what other subjects? French I’ve talked about. English, well, okay. I came from a family where we spoke English. Some of the kids came – it was a school that had a lot of farm children, it was a catchment from Sussex, so it was an interesting bunch of kids. And I never had any problem with the language; I could read and write and articulate. That’s about it, isn’t it? What have I forgotten?

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Track 2

Could you start today by giving us a sense of the content of the degree course in physics that you started in 1958 at Imperial College?

Yes.

I don’t know whether you’re able to, in your memory, divide up the years of university and therefore give us a sense of what the first, second and third year involved. If not, a kind of view of the degree as a whole would be useful.

Well, you have to remember, as I mentioned earlier, that I did not want to study physics. I wanted to be an architect. So I was there in a sort of – not exactly a sulky mood, but it wasn’t a life passion to study physics. But physics was something that – I was told at school, oh, you’ll find that easy and I did. I found that I suited physics, physics suited me. You know, I just found it right. I never wanted to be a physicist but I – certainly as a result of those three years, and the PhD and so on, I think like a physicist. I approach a problem, whether it’s domestic or research or whatever, in the way a physicist would. And of course I – having had that training, I tend to believe that’s the right way [laughs]. It is a very formal way of thinking and it’s certainly had a big effect on me and I can’t imagine a better degree course for getting that in. When I started it was at the old Royal College of Science building, which has been torn down. But in the late ‘50s the government had decided to start to expand technical universities and Imperial, as usual, was the one that was labelled. And so it was decided essentially to double, it sounds modest, it was more like five times now, but the student population, and that couldn’t be done in the existing buildings. So the building – it became a building site. The new physics building was a very fine building. Blackett had very good connections and the quality of the architecture – the building is a fine building. But my first year was in the College of Science building. The second year was sort of roaming around and the third year was in the new building, which was still a bit of a building site. So the degree course was a little bit confused, shall we say. I don’t think the teaching suffered, but, you know, we never quite knew where we were. The old College of Science building was lovely. I still have a photograph I took of Niels Bohr outside Blackett’s – he came and lectured John Woods Page 28 C1379/64 Track 2 there, which is a – the whole university stopped for him coming to lecture. And he was – he must have been the world’s worst lecturer. They had overflow lecture theatres, of course, all wired up, and he was incomprehensible [laughs]. Of course, he was getting on. But he’d never been an academic and he didn’t know how to lecture. But he was a great man and it was marvellous as a student to have the great man there. The Science Museum library was housed in the same building and so very, very well served for libraries. The physics department – in those days Imperial – the departments had their own libraries whereas now they’re all centralised. And I remember the physics department librarian, lovely lady. She knew that we really liked to work there in the evenings because we didn’t have to put shillings in the meter and the gas in our digs. And so she had a coal fire, an open coal fire, with a notice from the librarian, please keep the coal fire going. Now health and safety wouldn’t allow that today. There was never any thought – I mean, Imperial College students in those days, maybe they still are, were rather nerdish and they weren’t in for silly pranks and, you know, seeing if they’d get the fire roaring with a few books [laughs]. But I mean, a university library with an open coal fire and the librarian leaving you to keep it going until the last one left [laughs], lovely. So it was like a club. That’s where I did all my revision, all my – rewriting my notes and so on. I liked that building very much. I liked – the atmosphere was very good.

[0:05:06]

By the end of the second year of course the time – well, during the second year one has to begin to think about specialising and choosing what to do. By then I was pretty cheesed off with physics. I could do it, you know, that wasn’t the issue, but I had made – I was clear that I was not going to go and work as a physicist in a Rutherford lab or something.

Why not?

[Pause] Well, first of all I still had this hankering for architecture and for – I mean, particle physics left me absolutely cold. I saw the research students with printouts from the experiments they did and they were looking for resonances. I knew that for three years as a research student, pouring over these reams of printouts in the hope John Woods Page 29 C1379/64 Track 2 that you see a little blip which – you know, it turns out you’ve discovered the omega minus or something, which was discovered while I was there and caused great excitement. You have to remember, when I went up there wasn’t a computer at Imperial. I studied computing in my third year but there wasn’t a digital computer in the third year. It was analogue computing. Now analogue computers are very interesting and the military love them for various reasons. They do certain – in those days they certainly could do things that digital computers couldn’t do. But okay, Manchester had its computer and Cambridge was into computers, I mean, digital computers, electronic computers, but Imperial lagged. They’ve caught up since. But it – so there was – and the computing was in the building of the Royal College of Needlework, which was part of the engineering building, the old City and Guilds building, which has been torn down. So there were all sorts of charming eccentricities, it was fun. But by the end of the second year I just could not see myself – we had been exposed to most aspects of physics, being taught by really good people, of course, and none of them excited me. And I was beginning to toy with the idea of something in the geophysics, geosciences, geophysics, which was taught in the Royal School of Mines but not – it wasn’t in those days part of physics. The nearest was meteorology and there was a very, very good department of meteorology as a separate department. And the – I spoke with them – that’s, of course, where I ended up. That was one of the options. The other areas that I looked at were cosmic rays – that was very lively – Harry Elliot was a very lively young professor, very successful. Remember that in those days accelerators weren’t getting the energy to really – to – that we now see in CERN, and cosmic rays were offering it. And so cosmic rays were very interesting from a particle physics point of view and there was some very good work going on. And I could see myself possibly in there. But in the end I spent my third year – we had to choose an option where we could go and work in, you know, some area, solid state or particle physics or whatever. And I left physics and I went to the City and Guilds, the engineers, and went and took a third year option in electrical engineering, which was considered to be – well, if you do that you’re a dead man, you see, you’re finished [laughs]. But it was full of the most wonderful people. I learnt about signal theory, which had an enormous impact on my research over the years. I really understand information theory, signal theory. They were hot on that.

What is – before we go on, what is signal theory? John Woods Page 30 C1379/64 Track 2

Signal, the theory of signals, of sending messages, telecommunications and so on. And to actually know how to transmit the signal from A to B in the most efficient way, given the medium you’ve got available to you, whether it’s radio – or how to get a radio message to a pilot in a very noisy aircraft, for example. Bell Telephones, of course, had been amongst the great pioneers in America, but there was a very good group and I loved that side of it. It was new and fresh and interesting. Of course, there was a lot of good stuff going on. They were inventing the laser at the time. It wasn’t a laser, it was a maser. It was microwave in those days. But all the theories we’d done – they were inventing the hologram, that was coming through. That was bubbling out of the electrical engineering department. You might say why not out of the physics department. It was just – that’s the way it happened. So there were some really exciting – I suppose you’d call them applied physicists, but closely aware of applications, close to industry, close to – and some psychologists. There were psychologists in the electrical engineering department, because Colin Cherry, who was the Professor of Telecommunications, I suppose, made the point very clearly that it’s no good having a signal going from A to B along a wire. If there’s a human at the end you’d better understand how the brain works and how the brain will be able to interpret the signal and be different – if you can adjust the signal in a way that fits better with what the brain does. Very deep insight very early. And he recruited psychologists there. I have a friend who did his PhD with Colin Cherry. Colin Cherry became famous in the sort of popular world because he talked about the cocktail party problem. If you Google cocktail party problem you’ll find about that. It’s how you can cope in a cocktail party with a dozen conversations all shouting away all round you and pick out one. That’s signal theory, very interesting stuff. I was fascinated. We did also ray tracing for electromagnetic fields, a lot of it. None of it that I saw as being my career but actually I was picking up knowledge that became very relevant later on, as one does. That’s what university’s all about.

[0:12:43]

I should mention, because it’s important later on, that when I was at school I – in the war I learnt to swim in the sea, I mentioned that, and then I re-learnt to swim when I was about ten, I suppose, after polio. And so swimming was always very – I mean, John Woods Page 31 C1379/64 Track 2 there’s not many sports I could do and the support of the water – swimming. And when I was in France when I was fifteen, ’55, I first encountered scuba diving. Did I mention that earlier?

You mentioned that and I was going to ask you. With your godparents? But yes, could you tell the story.

I had a French godfather, who had been at school with my father in England. He was a stockbroker. And I went to stay with them when I was thirteen, ’53, and then with them and with other friends and we went down to Biarritz and I encountered, totally new to me, diving. And of course I got hooked. And I join’, when I came up to Imperial it was the year after the students union had set up a club for scuba diving, underwater diving. It’d become a branch of the British Sub Aqua Club; I saw the other day at the Geographical Club the man who’d helped to form it. He’s still around, Harry Gould. And universities – Cambridge had started the year before and then Imperial was the second and then each university helped others. We helped Oxford get going and it went out – most universities have diving clubs now. It was still quite new. You know, Cousteau’s great film, The Silent World, was very exciting. And so I joined the club immediately when I came up, learnt to dive and then as an undergraduate – the turnover’s awfully fast in these clubs. The first year you learn, the second you’re the secretary, the third year you’re the president of the club [laughs]. You know what it’s like. And the president was the one who was expected to plan the coming summer’s expedition. Being Imperial, like Cambridge but unlike most other places, Oxford does and Bristol, but most – Imperial was very strong on expeditions. The rector, Patrick Linstead, Sir Patrick Linstead as he became, had fostered an exploration board with the members of – people on the staff who had led expeditions, mountaineers or whatever, and he was very keen on it. He thought that, you know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So he put money in. So students could take their ideas for an expedition to the exploration board and then they would be interviewed and so on, and would be allocated some funds. And the college would sort of look after them, pay the insurance, do the diplomatic clearance, all that stuff, and tapped the Royal Geographical Society on the shoulder and said, we’ve got a nice one here, and off he’d go along and be interviewed by the Royal Geographical Society, which then gave another tranche of money but much John Woods Page 32 C1379/64 Track 2 more approval and prestige and so on. With their approval you could tap industry for equipment. And so in 1960, when I was the secretary of the club, I went on a diving expedition, led by the then president, Richard Garnett, geologist, mining – mining geologist, down to Cornwall, and we worked off North Cornwall on a project he had to see if it was possible to reopen a mine, tin mine, which ran out to sea, but there’d been a collapse and it had been flooded. But the price of tin was going up and the mining – the Geevor Mining Company was interested in the possibility. We went and found the break, the students. Rough weather, rough – quite interesting. The next year it was my turn and I thought, well, what am I going to do. I thought archaeology. And so I proposed that we should have an expedition in which – because Cousteau had done archaeology, amongst everything else, and thought it would be fun to go and find some Roman wrecks or whatever. And this was when I was meant to be doing third year physics, of course, and it really took a lot of my time. So I went and spoke to the director of the London Institute of Archaeology, Max Mallowan. His wife was Agatha Christie, that’s how he could afford his expeditions. And I got to know her. And he was terrific. He said, ‘Well, we’ve got a librarian who has just excavated a Bronze Age wreck in Turkey.’ Wow, I didn’t know about that. They had found the travelling ship of a bronze – the time of the Trojan War. I mean, fantastic. And she was fabulous, the librarian. He said, fine, you know, talk to her, put together a project. And we ended up – long story, we ended up – I wrote a book about it last year and it’s sitting downstairs if you want to read it.

Yes please.

So that was fifty years ago. This was the fiftieth anniversary. And we went to Malta and had a great time. And it was – it was a pivotal point. First of all I – Max Mallowan said, ‘Well, you’d better study some archaeology.’ And he allowed me to attend lectures in the archaeology – and so I was doing electrical engineering, a bit of physics and a bit of archaeology, and loving it, and putting together an expedition, which is a fairly fulltime business. When you were talking about fieldwork, you studied fieldwork for your PhD and know all about what it takes to take a trip out to a foreign country and get the funding and get the approvals and get the budget and build the team and train them and so on. And we had wonderful success. Discovered a site with the oldest pottery – this was underwater, was 2000BC. Wow. And the oldest – John Woods Page 33 C1379/64 Track 2 yeah, the latest was from the Crusades, which is when they switched from pottery to barrels and there was no more after that. And the book I’ve just written tells the story. But the reason I’m saying this is that the Royal Geographical Society asked me, would I give the Monday evening lecture, which wasn’t usual for students. Anyway, they were very taken with this expedition. They had supported it and, you know, they liked the thought – liked the idea. The Monday evening lecture is the formal lecture at the Royal Geographical Society every Monday, and you have all the great explorers who’ve done it in the past and little student me was invited to stand up and do the business. And it seemed to go down well. That was in ’62. So ’61, I led the expedition to – and while I was in camp in Malta I got a telegram from my mother saying, degree results okay [laughs], big relief. We were all in the same boat so we were all getting telegrams.

[0:21:08]

And I then – I had done some sniffing around the possibility of a PhD. I had applied for all sorts of jobs. I’d got job offers from industry and from government and so on. But I thought, I’m enjoying this, I’ll stay at university for a few more years. And it was a toss up between cosmic rays, I mentioned Professor Elliot, and John Mason, both very young professors, just, just made it their own – they’d been successful researchers but they’d just got their chairs. And a chair at Imperial in those days was, and still is, quite something to have and when you get it very young people really wonder what’s – you know, somebody’s got something between their ears. And so I wrote to John Mason, having visited his research lab with others, sniffing around to see – I wrote to him, sent him a picture postcard from Malta saying, can I apply to be your student. And that’s the start of my file at Imperial College, which has grown quite thick over the years. And he went to the department of scientific – DSIR, Department of Science and Industrial Research, I think it was, and they produced a studentship. I felt marvellously rich. I was on £400 a year, it was terrific. I had – my grant as an undergraduate had been £60 a term, so one lived on quite a small amount in those days. But we were all in the same boat, you know, there was no money. But suddenly untold wealth, £400 a year, I mean, I could go to the opera [laughs] and did.

[0:23:01] John Woods Page 34 C1379/64 Track 2

And so I had come back and started in John Mason’s research group, which was in the meteorology department and was in the process of shifting across to the physics department. So I found myself – thought I’d escaped from physics, I was back in physics. But I did the MSc in meteorology, because he said you’d – he liked the American idea of doing the first year of a PhD as formal training. And he said, ‘Learn meteorology.’ And they had some stunning people there in those days, really remarkable, so very – I mean, wonderful grounding in the subject. I knew no meteorology. I thought clouds were made of cotton wool. I discovered they were made of water droplets and ice crystals and how big they were and what they did. But also I learnt dynamical meteorology and, you know – Imperial had a meteorological department because the Met Office used to be in South Kensington. It’s the building where the director of the Science Museum has his offices now, little red brick building. You’ve probably been there. Yes, you’ve seen Chris Rapley there, I’m sure. That was the Met Office. It was the first building that the Met Office ever had purpose built. Anyway, it was right opposite the Huxley Building, where that department was. In fact, the Professor of Meteorology had his office initially in the Met Office. So there was a close relationship. And I enjoyed that very much. I did my PhD, got bored.

[0:24:44]

The project that John Mason gave me was a very good one. It was to try and understand the early stages of tropical rainfall. Very briefly, as the air rises the droplets condense on tiny dust particles, or salt particles, whatever it is. And the condensation goes like mad and comes to a shuddering halt when they’re about twelve microns radius, microscopic, because the curvature term has flattened. The – I won’t go into the physics, but anyway, the – even though the humidity is high, there is condensation going on, it gets slower and slower and slower, and effectively it would take too long, ‘cause the air is blowing up through a cloud and out the top and they evaporate again. And a twelve micron drop is no good to anybody, it doesn’t make any rain. It’s not heavy enough to drop out and make rain. And yet rain does drop out of tiny tropical – we used to look at these clouds in the tropical Atlantic. And so the other mechanism was that the cloud droplets would bump into each other and John Woods Page 35 C1379/64 Track 2 coalesce. And that was a process that was known to be – well, believed to be important. Nobody had actually seen it happen. And so – but that doesn’t get going until, it wasn’t known, around seventeen, eighteen microns, so there was a gap. The condensation stops before the coalescence mechanism can hit off. So that was my PhD, to try and understand that. First of all to check all the theoretical predictions about the rate at which condensation goes and the small early stages of the coalescence mechanism goes. I devised experimental apparatus to do that. But the gap was still there. And then there was the question, well, maybe it’s electrification. Maybe the droplets get different electric charges and that gives a force, a coulomb force, that’ll pull them together. And I checked that, I gave streams of droplets with different charges. And there’s – a droplet can only take so much charge. It just leaks away. So there’s a maximum voltage you can have and that wasn’t sufficient. And then I – I began to suspect you had to think of the cloud as a whole, not just these microscopic droplets. And the clouds – as the trop’ air condenses, goes from vapour to liquid, all of that latent heat is released and it makes the air warm, and so the convection goes up. Just look at a cloud, you see this great bubbling up of – and that’s why it is. And it makes the cloud very turbulent. And I thought, well, maybe the turbulence is somehow forcing the droplets together. And so I started to study turbulence, nobody around – oh yes, we had a – Patrick Shepherd, the head of the meteorology department, knew about turbulence, so he was very good. He didn’t – he gave a lecture course on it, which I attended of course, and he then – but he was very good at pointing me in the right direction, who I should read and – you know, ‘cause the particular aspect I was interested in wasn’t the one he was interested in, but he broadly pointed me in the right direction. So I read all the great papers on turbulence theory. And in 1960, I think it was, George Bachelor at Cambridge had translated the Russian work. And the Russians were way ahead in the war, ‘40s and ‘50s, but their stuff wasn’t translated. But he translated and wrote a beautiful book summing up the work of the Russians, and I devoured that and talked – went to Cambridge and met him and talked to him. I’ll tell you later on an interesting story about that. So I got into turbulence and started making wind tunnels with turbulence and, you know – and eventually it became clear, that was the answer. And the measurements were absolutely clear. It wasn’t just a – there’d been a theoretical work which showed it was not possible, but, you know, physicists love to do experiments and I had absorbed that culture. I mean, as I said, as an undergraduate I didn’t like physics but I absorbed John Woods Page 36 C1379/64 Track 2 the culture right to my fingertips. And I loved designing experiments and making measurements which couldn’t be argued with.

[0:29:59]

Before I ask you more about exactly how you studied this problem, in terms of what you built, and I think photography is involved as well, ‘cause I think I’ve seen streak photographs on papers.

Ah, you’ve done your homework [laughs].

Can I just go back over a number of things that you’ve said? And the first is what we’ve just been talking about there; that you said that physicists have a particular approach to solving problems.

Yeah.

And for the non physicists, could you say what that approach is?

I guess there’s a lot to it. But philosophically, I mean, one thinks of the inner circle and the – I’ve forgotten his name. Switch off.

[Break in recording]

I mean, the – the idea that a theory can never prove anything, but a theory is only a conjecture, where you’ve worked out the consequences of your conjecture by making a model or doing some sums, whatever. But to really – the purpose of experiment is to try and find the weak points in the theory. But of course, along the way the experiments come up with things that trigger off the theorists to think of new theories. And it’s this wonderful cycle, often a messy cycle, between theory and experiment. They’re both vital, neither can play the game on its own because the experiment does an experiment, but you have to work out the broad consequences, for which you need theory. And I think that’s what really made me warm to physics. And the fact that you could, with quite modest means – remember, I was in Blackett’s school, which John Woods Page 37 C1379/64 Track 2 came out of the Rutherford’s kind of simpler experiments that you can do with available materials. You know, we could make a cloud chamber with very simple things. And so the ability to do a crucial experiment simply, by thinking very hard about what an experiment should do if you wanted to check out an idea or sort out a mess – it may be exploratory rather than testing a theory. In my case with the turbulence, the hypothesis that it might be turbulence had been looked at by the theorists and shown it doesn’t work. I thought, well, it’s, you know, a bit like Sherlock Holmes, when you’ve tried everything then the last remaining thing must be what it is. And turbulence really was the last thing left. And so that’s why I latched onto it and then designed – what I – I read a lot about turbulence. I have always – usually I’ve been self taught. The physics I learnt at Imperial didn’t teach me about anything that I used, it taught me an attitude, it taught me a way of thinking. And I always think that that’s the most powerful thing a university course can do, for the rest of your life you have that way of thinking. And a historian has a very special way of thinking about documents and important – how you put them together and so on. It’s a different mindset. And physicists have their own mindset, other disciplines – musicologists have their mindset, very valid for the topic. And I – in my reading of turbulence theory, the Russians – a man called Kataigorodski was one of the Russian turbulence researchers whose work had been translated by George Bachelor. And it showed that as you – I mean, there’d been a marvellous man, LF Richardson. He will occur throughout my research life. He had studied turbulence, pioneering work, and he had suggested, and he was right, that turbulence starts with the great big eddies, which are unstable and make smaller eddies and smaller eddies and smaller eddies, and there’s a great cascade through the spectrum, way down the spectrum. And that was a seminal idea in the ‘20s, I guess. And the Russians had picked it up and thrown Russian mathematics at it. I mean, they’re very good. And Kolmogorov had put it together. But the question is, as the eddies get smaller and smaller and smaller, they begin to feel viscosity, the molecular viscosity, which suddenly, when they get small enough, soaks all the energy out of them and converts it to heat, the random motion of molecular rather than the random motion of the fluid dynamics. And the question is at what scale does that occur; and the Russians had worked that out. And I did the sum and worked out what the scale would be in the clouds. And it was amazing that the – I knew, because I’d done lots of experiments, about how far droplets fell as they rolled around each other and failed to coalesce, and how far they went falling through John Woods Page 38 C1379/64 Track 2 the air. And it was less than the minimum scale of turbulence, because the viscosity didn’t allow it to get to any smaller scale. It was pouring down from larger scales, smaller and smaller and smaller, and then at about a few millimetres it stops, it turns into heat. And so I realised that we can do an experiment in which you didn’t have to have turbulence. I’d been making wind tunnels with turbulence in, very complicated [laughs], difficult things to – I realised the whole thing was actually laminar flow. But if you sit on a droplet in the – imagine you’re sitting on a droplet in a cloud, rather like Einstein sitting on a photon, pretentious [laughs], but the same idea. If there’s another droplet around, will it or will not gobble you up. And it’s coming down but the stream flow around it is pushing you sideways and you – oh, got away with it, didn’t – the predator didn’t get me, because the predator’s own slipstream was pushing you around. The idea is maybe the sheer from the turbulence, the little eddy, is just countering that and pushing you together. And when the predator thought it was going to miss, or the prey thought it was going to not be captured, it finds itself in a sheer which is just pushing it – and the sheer, again I discovered from my reading of turbulence, gets bigger and bigger. The biggest sheers of all are at the tiniest size. So it seems everything was right. So I made a wind tunnel with a laminar flow, but in the middle the flow was steady and then there was a sheer that went down. And I had droplets go through so that they met just where there was a sheer of this magnitude that I had calculated would exist in clouds. Of course my professor, John Mason, was very sceptical. He – wonderful man and we still talk regularly, but he had this absolute phobia that no experiment is a good experiment if it needs statistics to explain it. He wouldn’t have done very well in social sciences [laughs]. He had been brought up in the school where you do an experiment and it’s a rock solid deterministic yes, no. But unfortunately turbulence is statistical fluid dynamics, that’s the other name for turbulence. You have to have statistics, you have say what is the probability that I’ve got a sheer of this magnitude, this orientation, that will just push the droplets together in the way I want. So I showed that if you had a sheer of the right magnitude in the right orientation, when the droplets were coming down, surely you can see them coalescing by streak photography. I showed it happening and he didn’t argue about that. He said, ‘So what?’ And I said, ‘Well, so what comes from turbulence theory. We can now extrapolate from this very simple laboratory experiment to the whole cloud and see that it actually ends up bridging this gap between condensation and coalescence mechanism.’ Well, it works a dream. But John Woods Page 39 C1379/64 Track 2 that’s what physics is about. It’s spotting something that allows you to do an incredibly simple experiment that costs almost nothing but actually hits the nail on the head. That’s why I love physics.

[0:39:27]

You also said that you had the impression that Imperial College students, I think you said were nerdish. I don’t know whether you were thinking in relation to students from other universities, but could you say more about that, that identity?

Oh, the nickname at University College was the South Ken Science Factory, you know. They were meant to be far too serious, that was the perception. I did possibly – I thought of going to King’s when I was at school and looking around. King’s College has quite a good physics – in those days very good physics department. But there – they – begging your pardon, it’s more like a geography department than a physics department. Imperial was very, very serious about its physics. They don’t joke about physics. And the students it recruited were those who were going to take it seriously. I think it’s recruitment. I mean, it’s who do you actually let in and who do you let go [laughs]. Remember the numbers going down. So, yes, I mean, there was a general perception that the Imperial College students were rather boring. Not the biologists, they were quite reasonable, but the physicists and the engineers were very …

Who was saying that and where?

Other students, other universities, employers. Employers were saying it because they loved it. They loved to hire Imperial College graduates. I had job offers when I was in my third year, including to work at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, which we’ll see later – it’s very strange, because I sorted out a problem for them from outside. But – and Mallard and – you know, employers loved it and they knew it and they would always take very seriously a graduate from Imperial because they thought there was a mindset, a way of – a seriousness. I don’t want to exaggerate it. I mean, it was a feeling that was around.

John Woods Page 40 C1379/64 Track 2

[0:41:44]

Could you describe perhaps an early dive? I don’t know whether this might be one with the godparents or one perhaps on the expedition that you planned and went on, the archaeology dive, to give us a sense of, a) what diving involves at this sort of level, in other words what does diving to a wreck involve? And also give us a sense of why that appealed to you, because it wouldn’t appeal to everyone.

Erm … first of all I mentioned that swimming was important to me ‘cause I do it, whereas I couldn’t play football. I did at school enjoy canoeing, another rather good thing if you don’t have any working legs. You can sit in the canoe. I made my own canoe and then bought a rather more exotic one when I was at school and used it a lot.

And you described the trailer that you attached to your bike to carry it.

Oh, I mentioned that, yes. But swimming was important. If I was going to have any physical activity, any sporting activity, it was going to involve swimming. And it was just encountering masks and flippers and so on. In ’55 – it wasn’t my godparents, they didn’t swim, let alone dive, I just did it myself. Almost everything I’ve done in my life, I have just discovered it and gone off and taught myself and read the books. Later on though, quite soon afterwards, I met one or two of the French pioneers. I met a Commander Tailliez, who was in the French navy, as Cousteau was. And his father had brought the flipper back from Tahiti to Europe, and so he’d been one of those who’d – I met Frédéric Dumas, who was the champion spear fisherman, but actually had a good brain and ended up writing a very good book on rain archaeology. And Cousteau, who was the publicist, as we all know, and television and so on, charming man – I met those, not in ’55 but only a year or so later. And, you know, you can get quite hooked when you meet the people you …

How did you come to meet them?

I met Cousteau – I happened to be in Capri doing a bit of diving for John Young, JZ Young, looking at octopus. [laughs] He had a – can you imagine it. JZ Young, of course, was the greatest anatomist Britain has had for generations, fantastic man, and John Woods Page 41 C1379/64 Track 2 he was flying high in those days. And he was studying the octopus because it had a brain that was – the animal was very clever and yet it had a brain that was simple enough that he could learn where every nerve went and what every one did from its behaviour. And he did that and he did it in Naples, where octopus was readily available. And he – it was all in the laboratory and he asked me to go and look at them in the wild [laughs], because he – they’d come up with all sorts of ways of training them to perform a trick. And then he would cut one nerve to see if they could still remember the trick, and if not then another nerve. And he would gradually build up this whole – and they had rewards and punishments in the usual way, in tanks. And he had no idea whether the reward they gave them was anything they liked out in nature. So he asked me to put together a team. So it ended up with a boat in Capri. And the Calypso turned up with Cousteau on board, just by chance. You know, divers get together and talk, so …

Could you – what happened then when you met him, when he turned up? What do you remember of that meeting?

He had his son with him and we were on board his own – in the harbour in Capri. And what do you say? He says, ‘What are you doing?’ [Laughs] And of course, he – they – some divers had just discovered, in the blue grotto in Capri, a couple of Roman statues. They’d been there for 2,000 years and divers, by chance, had realised – ‘cause it was all covered with growth and stuff, it’s difficult to stop them. A couple of divers had spotted them and everybody got very excited. And amazingly Calypso sort of wonders in – Cousteau was great at – ‘there’s something there, let’s go and have a look’. And he thought that we might be following that up too. He had no idea – and he didn’t believe me at first when I said, ‘No, no, no, we’re just studying the behaviour of octopus.’ [Laughs] He said, ‘Oh yeah? Who’s funding it?’ I said, ‘US navy – no, US air force, US air force.’ The grant came from the US air force, don’t ask me why [laughs]. But John Young was brilliant at getting money. And so we talked about octopus and we talked about archaeology and I asked him about his great – he had worked on a wreck, turned out to be two ships, at Grand Congloue, an island off Marseille, which was in his film on television. I went there later. So we were chatting, me with my schoolboy French. I spoke a fair – my mother went to a French school, I usually can muddle through in French. And of course he spoke some John Woods Page 42 C1379/64 Track 2

English. And his son Philippe, I think it was Philippe, was also diving. It’s great to meet one of the people, the pioneers. So where were we? We were …

Yes, I was – also, could you remind me, Young, who you were working for …

John Young, yes, JZ Young.

Was he – ‘cause you’re at this point at school?

No, no, JZ Young, I was a student.

Oh, so you were an undergraduate one? I see.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, no, I was doing my PhD. This was just a sideline. I thought I could have holidays even as a PhD student.

[0:48:37]

So you asked me what diving was like. It hasn’t changed very – I mean, basic diving that a holidaymaker would be trained when they when they go on holiday and there’s a diving school in the hotel perhaps or associated with the hotel, they will teach you how to use apparatus which is almost identical to what we were using in the early ‘60s. Compressed air cylinders on the back, a valve to reduce the pressure from the very high pressure in the storage tanks to the pressure that the water has around you, which – you therefore can breathe. And that’s what Cousteau had invented with Gagnon, that was the reducing valve. It was a calor gas valve, which he’d modified [laughs], you know, a valve you have – you know, in the country you have bottled gas. Very clever idea, it was Gagnon’s idea. Cousteau got the credit and built the company, made a lot of money. So you have stuck in your mouth a mouthpiece with this reduction valve. You have flippers, you have, if it’s cold, a rubber suit, which initially I remember we used ex navy, surplus, war surplus rubber suits, which were meant to be dry inside, so you wore woolly – the popper things, the submariners’ long john woolly things, because the submarines were quite cold and they used to wear thick woollies. And they were on the – ‘cause there was a lot of government surplus John Woods Page 43 C1379/64 Track 2 stuff. But the Imperial had a – well, the rector had a very strong insistence that we should have – for all of the clubs he funded in the college, everything from gliding to sailing to diving, we should always have proper equipment, not make do with surplus or – eBay didn’t exist then, but you know what I mean. He always said, no, we go to the best supplier and we pay the money, and he’ll provide the money. And so we were using standard stuff and bought our equipment at Lilywhites, which – the sports shop in Piccadilly, which in those days was marvellous, I mean, the serious – now it’s gone downmarket. So we had state of the art equipment and it’s almost identical fifty years later. I was watching the divers in Malta last summer, they were using the same stuff, slightly different but – and so it’s possible to swim around underwater regardless of the external pressure, because the valve adjusts to give you air at exactly the pressure of the surrounding water. So therefore the air inside your lungs and water outside have the same pressure, so you can breathe normally. You can dive safely with that apparatus. Well, the school let the students go down to about a hundred feet, 30 metres. Any deeper and the body – the bloodstream, in particular but also the tissues, absorbs the nitrogen. And if you come up too fast, that – suddenly release the pressure, it goes into bubbles in the bloodstream and you get what’s called the bends, and it kills people. So you have to come up in a staged slow ascent. When you get to a hundred feet that’s pretty trivial, when you go much deeper it becomes very excessive. And in Malta the wrecks that we worked on in Xlendi were between sixty and seventy metres. Now that was considered an absolute no-no. The navy were forbidden to go below thirty metres. And we were working with the navy. So that was rather good, that they had some students who were prepared to go deeper. The US navy – I was in touch with the Office of Naval Research. The US Office of Naval Research has one outside United States office, it was in London. It’s a sort of information gathering system for any science that might interest the US navy. But one could go and talk to them and I did. It’s another case, you see, you’re from Imperial, you’re serious. You give them a phone and say, ‘I’m from Imperial, can I come and talk to you about deep diving?’ ‘Yes.’ Imperial’s reputation as having these nerdy rather serious kids, who are likely to move on to interesting jobs, opened doors while one was a student. So there I was in my second year physics degree, talking with the US Office of Naval Research, who said, well, they’ve actually developed some dive tables – dive tables say how slowly you – what steps you have to come up from a certain depth. They had developed some dive tables in America John Woods Page 44 C1379/64 Track 2 for diving to sixty metres, and the Royal Navy stopped at thirty metres. I said could I have them, yes, you can have a copy. It was still sort of military use. It was for military use, for US navy. And so I was able to concoct a work programme that safely allowed us to go down – we could spend ten minutes on the bottom and we spent half an hour coming up. So it seems pretty inefficient, but otherwise we couldn’t have done it. And we were able to map this wreck. It turned out there were lots of wrecks, astonishing site. And so diving was fun and a bit techy, but nothing that a physicist would be daunted by. It was a lot of physics really, it was pressures. And I got to know most of the people who mattered and tapped them for knowledge. And we ended up not having a single accident or even an incident while diving day in day out seventy metres. I mean, sixty metres all the – between sixty and seventy. So it was considered rather extraordinary [laughs].

What does it look and feel like, to be diving among a wreck?

Well, it depends where you go. Malta in those days, there was no tourism, it was a navy base, and the water was crystal clear. It was so clear that from the surface, with a snorkel on you could look down and see divers at sixty metres. Now when I tell people this they say, forget it, you can’t do it. I say, you can. First of all, the water is – it’s like looking through a mist. Now usually the mist only allows you to see – in the English Channel you can see your fingers at the end of your hand if you’re lucky, maybe a little bit further, which is why the biologists take all their pictures of little things very close up [laughs]. But in Malta, and in Capri, that’s why we chose Capri for the octopus work, the water is astonishingly clear in the summer, in the Mediterranean, and the – for biological reasons, which I studied later. But the – so the – there’s plenty of light at sixty – you can read a newspaper at sixty metres. In fact we used to have a basket – on the way up you had to follow up the anchor chain of the boat and we had plastic shopping baskets at different intervals and we left novels in them [laughs]. It’s so awfully boring spending ten minutes doing nothing at one level and it’s no good looking at a watch every minute thinking, oh, is it ready to go. So we left paperbacks. Penguins amazingly didn’t fall apart [laughs]. Some of the others did. So you could – there’s enough light in those very clear waters – you know, other waters in the English Channel, where I learnt to dive, miserable, miserable, never do that again. Cornwall’s better. So it was light, it is the silent world, although there’s a John Woods Page 45 C1379/64 Track 2 lot of clicking of animals and shrimps and so on, crabs. And of course the Mediterranean’s special, no tides effectively, so it’s quite a benign place. So diving was – it’s very good to approach the diving having absorbed the concept of physics, you have the right mindset. So you do it as a – the problems all arise from physics and biochemistry, didn’t do the biochemistry but as long as you get the physics right it’s safe. And we were doing diving rather – we never had an accident. I actually went to eighty metres once with Nick Fleming and came back. There it was – even though – that was off an island off Marseille where the water was very clear, but by then it really is getting dark and you need torches, and we decided not to do that again. So diving became very important for me.

[0:58:18]

When I gave my lecture on that Malta expedition at the Royal Geographical Society, nothing happened initially. I suppose it was in the autumn. And a few months later I got a call from – I forget how he got in touch with me, but the president of the Royal Geographical Society got in touch with me. He was the hydrographer of the navy and he had been very taken with what these young students were doing. Obviously diving and archaeology wasn’t of any interest to the navy. But he said, ‘Come and have lunch.’ I had met him – because after the lecture you get entertained at the Geographical Club, very nice. So he – we’d talked but only sort of casually. He said, ‘I have an idea.’ He said, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ Well, I was just starting on a PhD in the physics of cloud. And I said, ‘I suppose I’m going to spend my life in one kind of physics research or another, possibly in meteorology.’ He said – I remember he – one word, ‘Boring.’ He said, ‘Physics, boring.’ I said, ‘Well, yes, I tend to agree, straight physics, classical physics, nuclear physics, all that I do find boring. But I’m quite interested in the environmental end of it, applying physics to the environment. And I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I suspect that when I finish that I will move into a job.’ He said, ‘But you like the sea.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Like to work for me?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve just started this PhD.’ [Laughs] And he said, ‘Yeah, well. Anyway, you can do it in your holiday, you can do it in your spare time.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Well, you obviously enjoy the sea and you like diving and we’ve got some problems in the navy.’ He was hydrographer of the navy and that included responsibility for oceanography and meteorology, as well as tides and things John Woods Page 46 C1379/64 Track 2 like that, surveying, had survey ships. And he was a very remarkable admiral. I mean, he had had what they call a good war. He had – do you want a drink? Sir Egg Irving, Sir Edmund Irving, EGG Irving – so he was called Egg throughout the navy. He had had what they call a good war. He had been responsible for clearing all of the ports in Northern Europe after D Day, because the Mulberry, you know, the artificial port they’d made in Normandy, which bits are still there, had been remarkable, but the volume of supplies that had to be fed into the army just couldn’t be handled. And the most urgent job was to open up Dieppe, Dover and the Belgian ports, as each one was – the front moved past them. And the Germans had left them full of wrecked ships, sunken block ships, booby traps. And he had opened those ports in double quick time with his divers, his surveyors, and he’d astonished everybody and of course – so he was a great hero. And after the war, as hydrographer – he was not the hydrographer, he was in the hydrographic service as a commander or whatever it was. He was zoomed up to admiral and – but he could ask for anything in the navy, they all knew – everybody knew him. He was a hero. And so he looked across the whole board and one of the areas – the navy sonar sets weren’t working [laughs]. In the Tropics, in Singapore for example, remember we still had bases in the Tropics in those days, the sonar stopped working in the afternoon, every afternoon, and if there was a submarine around they would lose contact with it. But more frustratingly, out in the Atlantic they were having awful problems with suddenly losing contacts. It was all Willow the Wisp stuff and they didn’t know why. And it was the time when the nuclear deterrent was being introduced, submarines. Submarines were the thing. They were the –I mean, they were the top priority in defence and nuclear submarines were coming in, so not – being blind, though using sound wave, acoustic sonar, and the damn sonars didn’t work. Now the Admiralty research lab, the Admiralty underwater research – weapons research establishment in Portland, they were all top priority. And they hadn’t got a – well, I’m quoting here, but they hadn’t got a clue. And their answer was to make bigger and better hardware and to increase the power of the transmitter and the sensitivity of the receiver by a factor of ten, took about fifteen years and untold millions of pounds. It was the time that was the problem rather than the cash. The cash was there but they just physically – all the trials that were needed and so on. And I saw some of the trials, because they were carried out in Malta later on. I kept on thinking, these are not physicists [laughs], they weren’t …

John Woods Page 47 C1379/64 Track 2

Why, what …?

They had lots of money and they were – they had a nice cosy job and they weren’t doing it with passion. And he had an idea – Egg Irving, Admiral Irving, had an idea. He said he thought you can cut through the problem by better understanding what’s going on in the sea to make the sound waves not do the business. He thought there was something going on in the sea, didn’t know what it was. But he was prepared to get whatever resources were needed. And his director of naval weather service, he later became director of naval meteorology and oceanography, as oceanography grew up with the submarine warfare story. He’d been told this is your top priority. His main job was weather forecasting, but I mean – and he said, ‘I want somebody who’s totally ignorant, who’s got a passion for the sea, who has had good training as a physicist, to look at it. You can ask for anything you want, people, ships, aircraft, you name it. I can’t give you a salary [laughs] and I can’t do it officially.’ He said, ‘Nothing ever in writing – you won’t get a contract and you don’t give me written reports.’ Already they were – even in those days they were worried about Russian spies. As we know, Gordon Longsdale was sitting in the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Estab’, I’ll tell you a story about him. And Watson was sitting in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, feeding stuff as fast as it was discovered back to Moscow, and he suspected something was going on. It was long before Philby and others were caught. But there was a feeling that things weren’t quite right. So he wanted to do this with nothing in writing. I would have oral contact with him or with his director of meteorology, Graham Britton. But he had done the business in the Ministry and he said if I took it on I would have PX priority. Now PX priority is the same as the Poseidon project had [laughs]. I mean, it was – research has no higher priority in the navy than PX priority, which meant – not that I needed to have a vast expenditure, but if I ever needed anything and somebody checked up there was a tick in the box, which helped a lot. And I said, ‘Well yes, but I’ll have to think about this.’ He said, ‘Well, don’t you want to say yes now?’ [Laughs] And so I – I think I mentioned my uncle I revered, who had been in the Indian army, and he told me to do – only one piece of advice. He said, ‘When somebody comes to you with an outrageous suggestion, say yes. You don’t know where it’ll lead and you can wiggle out afterwards if it’s …’ But it had led him to some marvellous experiences. And I said yes on the spot. He said, ‘Fine, I’ll get in touch. No need to tell your professor.’ John Woods Page 48 C1379/64 Track 2

[Laughs] I was first year PhD student with at least two more years ahead of me. He said, ‘You’re going to have to do that, you’ll have to do this in your spare time.’ And he then started a programme of educating me. I didn’t know anything about sonar or – and almost all the books were classified. So I was – I had access to classified stuff. I discovered in the Admiralty – the old Admiralty building at the top of Whitehall, Nelson’s old building, the statue of Nelson in the entrance – it goes down for so many floors you wouldn’t believe it, all, layer upon layer, deep down in the London clay, with big steel doors and – and there’s the ugly fortress building at the entrance to Horse Guards Parade, brown stone building. That sits on the top of it. And I was taken deep down inside and introduced to rows of naval weather forecasters, struggling to try and forecast what they thought was the weather inside the sea, with virtually no data at all. It was clear to me – from my signal theory, I could see that they didn’t have the data. But they had been told to plot these storms in the sea, and nobody had ever seen a storm in the sea, nobody knew if they existed. But there were – they had a few measurements of temperature profiles from instruments called a bathythermograph, dropped over the side of a ship and gives a temperature profile. And from the odd measurements that were coming in they were trying to forecast the weather in the sea. It was absolutely hopeless [laughs]. But they were a serious team of people doing it and they were no fools. And then I was introduced to some submarine commanders. Wow, they were hard people. This little student introduced to these [laughs] – and you’d go out in submarines and chase Russians. Very interesting. And I was allowed to read all sorts of documents, not to take them home [laughs], there, and then think about it.

[1:10:17]

And then they said, ‘Well, you know Malta, let’s go to Malta.’ The work was all going to be done in Malta. The commander in chief – Malta, all the resources were there. You want a ship, there’s a ship, you wanted people, there were people there. There was a naval weather forecasting office in Lascaris, in the headquarters, CNC’s headquarters. And so they had posted somebody there, who was expecting me to go and work – he would be the local guy. And they’d chosen somebody, a lieutenant commander, who could dive [laughs]. So he was expecting to pop along with me, great guy, Geoff Fossby. They had to promote him to commander in order to have the John Woods Page 49 C1379/64 Track 2 job. And he was so astonished because he was never going to make commander [laughs] and everybody else was astonished, but he did very well. And he ran the met service there. So there out of the blue was a life changing offer, absolutely devastating. I mean, so suddenly I’d got a life, a career. That’s what it was all about. Suddenly oceanography was on my agenda. Okay, I had to spend the next few years finishing a PhD in cloud physics, and John Mason, my professor, used to very angrily scream out ‘Woods, there’s an admiral on the phone for you.’ [Laughs] But heady days. So in ’64 I was back in Malta, but this time doing some preliminary work. We hadn’t really any idea how to do it. Graham Britton, the director of the Naval Weather Service, came out. He thought it was the way the sun was warming the water that was stopping the sonar working in the afternoon, and of course he was right, but it was clear that that was necessary but not sufficient. So he’d had the Admiralty research lab build a little apparatus, we called it the Britton buoy. It was a series of thermometers and so on and we measured it all. And there’s no way it could change the sonar. But then of course one starts thinking. And by chance I was saturated with turbulence theory and I thought, I just wonder if the sun’s warming the sea is somehow affecting the turbulence, which is affecting the way the heat is transported down into the sea. It turned out that was the answer for the afternoon effect, the fact the sonars didn’t work in the afternoon. It took some years. But I thought, well, you’ve got to try and understand – I sort of started reading up about turbulence in the sea, because some people had written about it. GI Taylor, the great – the man who invented modern turbulence theory, endless experiments in the wind tunnels in Farnborough and – I mean, he was – I mean, if there’d been a Nobel Prize for atmospheric work he would have had it. I mean, he was – he was still in Cambridge. So after the first year I realised that we had – I had to start looking seriously at turbulence in the sea. And I looked at turbulence in my little wind tunnel in the laboratory, but I was looking at it and I was reading like mad, and I read a paper by – do you want me to start …? I read a paper by GI Taylor, this man who was – I didn’t know he was still alive. He had been the physicist sent out to work out why the Titanic sank [laughs]. That’s how he got into environmental physics. But he – I mean, you Google GI Taylor, you’ll be flooded. I mean, he is one of the greats of all time. And he was studying in Cambridge, I didn’t know, but I read his stuff, and he’d written a paper, actually a series of papers, about turbulence in the sea, purely from the mindset of a theoretical point of view, saying it must be like this. Because he’d John Woods Page 50 C1379/64 Track 2 said it, everybody assumed it was like that and all the textbooks said it was like that. Nobody had ever made a measurement. Nobody had ever done anything to see if it was like that. And it was totally wrong. He was wrong for a very simple reason, that molecular viscosity was thought of as being the process that killed turbulence and the famous Osborne Reynolds, at the turn of the – 1890 something, somewhere about them, had done the famous experiment with pipe flow, in which he had shown that – what’s now called the Reynolds number, it’s the horizontal dimension, the length times the speed of the flow in a pipe, divided by the molecular viscosity, if you think, er, that’s dimensionless because length times speed is centimetres squared per second and viscosity is centimetres squared per second, so it’s a number. And he showed if that number is about one the turbulence just kills the – the viscosity kills the turbulence. It doesn’t take very many inches of scrap paper to work out what the Reynolds number of the Gulf Stream is [laughs]. The length scale’s enormous, it’s you know, tens of miles. The speed is thundering along at several knots. There’s no way the viscosity could kill the turbulence in this monstrous current, and even modest little currents. So the Reynolds number of the ocean, currents, was vastly greater than the critical number that Osborne Reynolds had shown. What they didn’t realise was they viscosity is not playing a part at all, that it’s the vertical density gradient. And this man, my great hero, LF Richardson, Lewis Fry Richardson, Fry of chocolates, he spotted it, but he did so many things that his work was sort of lost. The Russians rediscovered it years later, but the ‘20s, he was saying, a density gradient. So the sun makes the top of the ocean warm and lighter, deep is cold and denser, there’s a density gradient, and the turbulence is going to be suppressed by that. And if it gets sunnier in the afternoon then the water gets lighter at the top and it’s still cold just below, so the density gradient increases, therefore the turbulence is likely to be reduced, if nothing else. So I thought, well – I discovered these papers and I thought, ah, now I have an experimental plan. Next year I went out to Malta – oh yes, next year I went to – with dye, packets of dye, so I could colour the water. Every fluid dynamicist, if you want to understand what’s going on and you haven’t a clue, you use flow visualisation. You try and make the flow visible, by putting in smoke in a wind tunnel or, as I said, dye in the water. Nobody had ever done it. And it was astonishing, the water was not turbulent. It was turbulent really near the surface but the sun killed that in the afternoon [laughs]. And deeper it was not turbulent. Then it turned out later there were little patches of turbulence and that’s – but the flow - the John Woods Page 51 C1379/64 Track 2 ocean was basically in laminar flow, even though its Reynolds number was vastly more than the critical value for viscosity, and it’s due to the density gradient. About the same time there were some Canadians making some measurements with a probe on the nose of a submarine to look at turbulence. And they had found that it was very, very weak, but the noise in the instrument meant that they couldn’t say that there’s no turbulence. So it was a signal to noise problem. Whereas with one dive and a packet of dye, bingo, there was the answer.

How in practice did you use that dye to …?

Well, the first thing was I went in water which was, I don’t know, a hundred metres deep, with a vertical line and a float at the top, and attached a pack of dye. Now these packs of dye were from Farnborough. They were the packs of dye that were in the rubber lifeboat things that pilots have. If they dipped in the sea out comes this thing, it blows up, yellow, just big enough for a pilot to sit in. And then he rips open the side of this packet of dye and the sea all the way round him goes bright green, and he can be spotted by a search plane or boat. So these packets – I got tons of this stuff [laughs], ‘cause I could ask for it, and this PX priority suddenly – ‘Of course, how much do you want?’ And it was all delivered in large quantities to Malta. It turned out, I discovered later, that the bases, military bases, have what is called, what was it, the minimum strategic holding of every item of store. So they had in store – so if there’s a war they’ve got enough to be getting on with, on the assumption that Malta can’t be resupplied for five years or something [laughs]. So I was able to draw on the stuff there and then later it was replenished from England. That was a – I discovered that way later, several years later. So that’s where I got the dye from. And then later on I made, or had the workshop make, a little brass plate with holes drilled in it, which I filled with dye, made it wet and then when it all dried I had little pellets, about the size of aspirin pellets. And so the diver could just drop them and ask they sank down of course they dissolved, leaving a vertical trace of dye. I’ll show you some pictures. The – and so between them, those two, one – the dye pouring out or the sheet gave a great – the package at a fixed place gave a great sheet of dye, and the other one gave vertical lines, and then you’d use them in combination. So the – astonishing discovery.

John Woods Page 52 C1379/64 Track 2

[1:21:56]

And then I – we were measuring the temperature, lowering the thermometer, and it didn’t go down smoothly like the textbook said, it went in little steps, very complicated steps. It seemed to have characteristic sizes. Then I dropped a pellet of dye and it too had little steps, which matched up with the temperature steps. Wow. This was the discovery of ocean finestructure, which is now – you can get books on it, not by me. And – because all my work was classified [laughs], so for ten years all my work was classified, which was a bit frustrating later. But the – so I went back and so the Admiral said, ‘Anything come up?’ And I told him about this. ‘Show me the pictures.’ I showed him the pictures. ‘Show me the temperature probe.’ I showed him the temperature probe. He said, ‘What do you think’s going on?’ I explained turbulence, wasn’t uppermost in his mind. In fact, wasn’t uppermost in anybody’s mind because GI Taylor had said the ocean is turbulent and here’s some kid coming along saying no. So the word got back to Cambridge and I was invited to give the Friday afternoon geophysical fluid dynamics seminar. Now this is scary because this is where the good and the great in the Cambridge Applied Maths Department tear each other apart [laughs] and they were brutal. Oxforders are polite to each other. At Cambridge they’re not polite to each other, they’re absolutely devastating. The head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics was George Bachelor, the man who’d translated the Russian turbulence book. So of course he was fascinated with the idea of something new to talk about. And he was told, well, I was only a kid and please be gentle with him. So I gave this talk and there was silence. And then a grey haired man sitting on the front row didn’t stand up, he just looked up and he said, ‘I think what you’re saying is that the ocean is not turbulent. It’s in laminar flow.’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I was saying for the last hour, you know.’ [Laughs] He said, ‘Would you – it depends, I suppose, on how you define turbulence.’ So oh my goodness, here I am in Cambridge in front of all these guys and I have to now define turbulence. I thought, better be on safe terms, so I quoted from GI Taylor’s book. Turned out that was GI Taylor [laughs]. So I claimed to have actually defined turbulence to GI Taylor [laughs]. And he said, ‘Yes, I think I recognise that definition. Is it the one that works within the sea for you?’ I said, ‘Yes, exactly.’ He said, ‘Very interesting.’ He said, ‘Have you read my paper?’ ‘Yes’ [laughs]. So we went off and had coffee together and talked and lots of the John Woods Page 53 C1379/64 Track 2 others and they were all there. He was the god in the department, you know. They were all in awe of him actually taking me at all seriously. Then after that – so that – I survived that ordeal of fire.

[1:25:16]

How were you able to do that, given that the work was classified? How were you able to …?

I was able to talk – the – I asked the Admiral about that and he said, ‘Well, first of all,’ he said, ‘Give the talk in the Admiralty first.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ And he said, ‘I’ll organise a nice audience for you.’ So come the day a month or so later, I went deep down, layer upon layer in the Admiralty. They had a lecture theatre, they called it the Cinema, and it was full of submarine commanders [laughs]. These are the guys who have been called in and they hated it, they had to listen to this student talking about turbulence. And so I went – I gave the lecture with the pictures and the evidence and what I concluded and – and of course in that context, why was I studying it, what was the problem. And I went through the problems with the sonars. Oh yeah, we know about that, you know [laughs]. And I said, ‘I think that we can see how to overcome the problem with what I’m discovering.’ And I won’t bother to tell you about that but it did happen, they changed equipment, which took some time, of course, but they did it with a great rush. And – but I had – he said, ‘Now work out how to give that lecture without talking about the solar bit. Just talk about the fluid dynamics and the basic stuff, and then you can give that talk.’ I repeated the talk for him privately, with the meteorological service, the navy people, you know, the officers and so on. And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s okay, you can talk about that in Cambridge. That’s fine.’ And so I – they never had a clue that I was working for the navy. They thought I was just doing this as part of my PhD, and I didn’t dispute that. So that worked out.

[1:27:30]

Yes, sorry, I interrupted. You’d got to the point where you’d gone off for coffee with GI Taylor after this talk.

John Woods Page 54 C1379/64 Track 2

Well, there’s nothing more to say. I mean, just the fact that you can talk to a living legend in fluid dynamics – and he was the sweetest man. He was the ultimate physicist. He was nominally a mathematician but he was a – he did exquisite experiments of utter simplicity. I think of my one with – I told him about my experiment on the cloud droplets and he was tickled pink ‘cause that was exactly his sort of experiment, you know. He said, ‘Yes, that’s how it should be done. Doesn’t cost anything, does it?’ I said, ‘No, actually.’ No, he – throughout his life, and right into his eighties, he was still doing these experiments. The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in those days was right in the centre of Cambridge. It was the old Cambridge University Press building and in the basement was where all of the printing presses had been. And it made the most marvellous laboratory, take out all of the kit, and they had experiments for spinning things, for wind tunnels, for every – and they could set up an experiment. They had wonderful technicians. And I spent a lot of time over the next years going up there, ‘cause other – I gave other lectures later on. But it’s – yeah, he is – the simplicity of his ideas, but ideas that nobody had ever thought of that way to approach them, simple experiments. Then he said I had to write a paper, then I had to get the paper through the referees, so I had to put some algebra in. This god telling you you had to put some algebra in, you know. But that’s how he spoke and that’s clearly how he worked. But he was famous or infamous, every time some student would turn up, he’d be told by his professor, ‘Go and talk to GI about this.’ He would go and pull out a drawer and say, ‘Yeah, I think I wrote a paper about that, oh, fifty years ago,’ or thirty years ago, or whatever. And sure enough there was this manuscript that he’d never finished. So he got his name on the student’s work [laughs], which is – the word was out that that happens and so a student thought, oh God, you know, at least I have a paper with his name on at the start of my CV. So that was good to have. But the feeling that this man had thought about it and done a few experiments and then got interested in something else and just left it as an unfinished manuscript; he had done so much that was never published by – initially by him but later sort of merged.

[1:30:26]

John Woods Page 55 C1379/64 Track 2

And how did your discovery that it was laminar rather than turbulent help the navy to solve their problem? How did it help them? What did they have to do to the sonar in order to make it work now that they knew what they were doing?

The – there was a step between. The fact the things weren’t working in the afternoon was the clue, of course, so it was something to do with the sunshine. And the – so I thought I – it’s the usual business, you do an experiment, you get some results, but then you’ve got to answer the so what question, and that usually involves doing some theory and then taking the theory as the core for a model, which will make predictions, a mathematical model. So I started to play around with theories for the diurnal variation in the upper layers of the ocean. About then I – no, it was later. But I was talking to some Americans and they said there’s nothing in that, it was all worked out, read the standard book by Proudman or whoever. But they didn’t factor the turbulence in. And so I factored the turbulence in as essential, you see, and I knew that if the wind blows over the sea of course it stirs it up, you do have turbulence there. And if you’re in a strong current there’s turbulence there. But when the sun comes up it suppresses it and vastly more than anybody had suspected. The impact of a density gradient on the turbulence was exactly what dear old Lewis Fry Richardson had said back in the ‘20s, but which had been ignored. The Russians looked at it and had followed it up and were writing papers, I discovered later, about it. So in order to answer the so what question, how can you relate a discovery like that, which is a basic, basic discovery, to something that’s useful, you have to develop the theory, which includes the sun, the turbulence, the temperature of the water, the sheer due to the currents and momentum, and the wind blowing over the top and so on. And the – I must admit, I mean, looking back, the model that I made in those days was pretty primitive and I’ve since done some much more sophisticated modelling. In the – in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, I was still working on it, getting a decent model working. And my peers in places like – American institutes like Scripps, the great American institutes, were all saying this is not an interesting problem. And I couldn’t say why it was an interesting problem, er, but I was able to show that it was doing exactly – it was exactly the cause of what was happening, it was the refracting – the sound is refracted, just as you have a change of refractive index and light is refracted. It goes back to Newton, I suppose. Sound is refracted if the – well, the speed at which sound goes through water depends on the temperature and the pressure effectively. John Woods Page 56 C1379/64 Track 2

There are a few other things but dominated by that. And if you have a temperature that varies with depth, it’s like having glass with a different refractive index, or a prism. Of course the sound is refracted. So the submarine is there and the sound just misses it. The question is, why does it refract that way at that time, and that was what I was grappling with. And so I was able to show, even with the rather crude models, that, you know, one could – it was pocket calculator stuff. So that was considered to be quite worthwhile. And the fact that the answer had come out rather fast encouraged Admiral Irving to keep me going at the bigger problem of why in general, day and night in the ocean, the sound – they were getting – the sonar was pinging and they were getting targets and they were tracking the target, but then suddenly it would disappear and they didn’t know why. And that wasn’t this diurnal effect, that was something much, much more universal and fundamental. And so I – by then I had finished my PhD. I had a couple of years as a post doc at Imperial, a research assistant, paid by the college. I was doing some teaching in first year physics, my God, somebody who wasn’t in love with physics teaching it [laughs] in the laboratory. But that was okay. But it allowed me to continue to develop my ideas about the physics of clouds. But of course I was really time sharing with the navy problems and working more on that, without anything being said. And John Mason, I must say, was extremely tolerant with his students; as long as they delivered they could pretty well do what they liked.

[1:36:42]

What did he know of what you were doing, do you think?

He – he sometimes asked me why I got these phone calls from admirals [laughs] and why I disappeared for long periods to Malta and so on. And I said, ‘Well, I’m just following up some ideas on fluid dynamics,’ and mentioned Cambridge and so on. I don’t think I ever lied to him but I didn’t – but I was asked not to talk to people. But then suddenly, bang, he becomes Director General of the Met Office in ’66, I guess it was. Very young but very lively person, just what they needed, absolutely right for the Met Office. He was there for eighteen years and he was the round peg in the round hole, you know, he was the perfect fit. And almost everybody who works there now was recruited by him. I mean, he recruited marvellous – top people, super John Woods Page 57 C1379/64 Track 2 people. He made it an attractive place to work, lively. He made people realise that weather forecasting involves really, really good science and some very, very clever mathematics. Some of the mathematics that goes into weather forecasting is mind blowing. And he was able to recruit very, very well. And when he rather unexpectedly was offered the job, he took it before they could withdraw it [laughs]. He then had this group of students, or in my case post doc, still at Imperial. And he arranged that we – most of us were given research fellowships to work in the Met Office. He expected us to work on the physics of clouds, so we set up a branch of the Met Office to pursue the work he was doing on the physics of clouds. But I then sort of outed myself, ‘cause after all, Director General of the Met Office is part of the Ministry of Defence. And with the Admiral’s permission I told him what I’d been doing and that the Admiral said he couldn’t pay me a salary but wanted me to carry on for a few more years.

What was his reaction?

Oh, he’s a very good rational guy. He’d been in the army in the war, he’d been in the military, and so he bought it. I think the Admiralty may have taken him out for lunch and done the business [laughs]. I never knew.

[1:39:34]

But I was agreed that – each of us who was going to be transferred from Imperial to the Met Office had to go through a civil service board. Now we weren’t going to be ordinary civil servants, we were going to be scientists in the civil service, so we didn’t have to have the civil service training, but nevertheless there was a formal board. And it was agreed that my formal board would be in the context of my doing this work for the navy but hosted at the Met Office, which was a perfect place, they’re forecasting, they’re fluid dynamics, they’re – it’s almost – if you had to think of the perfect environment within which to do this work, and they were Ministry of Defence, ideal. And in those days the Met Office didn’t have a budget, they just spent money as needed. It’s a bit different now. So if they needed a new – they needed an aircraft or they needed – it’s part of the air force, they got a new aircraft and so on. And so the board was fun, because I remember the rather senior civil servant and there was John Woods Page 58 C1379/64 Track 2 somebody from the navy, somebody from the air force and somebody else, who I never worked out what he was. And I remember the closing remark after – they said, ‘Well, how are you going to do this?’ ‘It’s alright, I’ve fixed it all up with the navy. They’ll provide everything.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Check with Admiral Irving.’ They obviously had, you know, they were just getting me to go through the ritual. And the final – there was this uniformed, I don’t know, group captain, I suppose he was, in the air force. The chairman said, ‘Well, thank you very much, young Woods, you can now toddle off.’ And he looked – ‘Anybody want to say anything as he goes?’ I remember the air force group captain said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be young?’ [Laughs] And that was my interview, of course it was fine. And I discovered later that, although the interview was for scientific – senior scientific officer, which was the standard rate for a PhD, they had said actually he should be a principal scientific officer but can’t be just yet, because later on they promoted me without any – but it wasn’t scientific – it was senior research fellow and principal research fellow. It was the equivalent. So anyway, that was over. Shall I stop now for a bit?

[End of Track 2] John Woods Page 59 C1379/64 Track 3

Track 3

Could you describe your work then for the Admiralty as it continued after the move to the Met Office?

Yes. The Met Office was a marvellous place to work, weather forecasting, but it was the – in ’66, when I moved there, that was the year then when they started to publish weather forecasts based on computing rather than analogue hand forecasting. Previously they’d used rules, I mean, they – if it’s like this then that will follow. But LF Richardson, back in the ‘20s, had written a book called Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, I think, it’s downstairs. And he just wrote down all of the equations that would be needed to forecast the weather from first principles, no rules, no – you know, on a Friday, if it’s been wet in the morning it’s going to be dry in the afternoon, none of that, just the laws of physics. And it had sat – he was in the Met Office when he wrote the book, or he was in the Met Office shortly afterwards. He wrote it during the war, when he was in the First World War. And he described in meticulous detail how to do it and he then used his method to make a forecast, which was grotesquely wrong, for reasons which he couldn’t have understood but which are now the heart of weather forecasting. But it – I mean, it was thought of as a magnificent concept but never realisable. But suddenly, in the mid ‘60s, computers were beginning to be powerful enough that it might just be possible to have a crack at it. And the Met Office – I don’t think it owned a computer then but it had access to a computer. I think it was using the Lyons Tea House computer, if I remember correctly. Maybe it was the Manchester one. They used a number of computers. The answer is – the history of the Met Office has just been published, so I can check the facts. But the – it was a very exciting time, very exciting time. Suddenly science was coming through for meteorology, which had always been slightly – well, it’s witchcraft. It had worked, because after all, it had been used every day in the war for aviation. I mean, it was known to be – and for D-Day, I mean, it was – so there was a lot of good track record. But it still wasn’t soundly based on physics. And going back to dear old LF Richardson, but with the modern computers, he did it by hand, his forecast.

What was John Mason’s view of …? John Woods Page 60 C1379/64 Track 3

He was the one who pushed the go button. The staff all said we’re not ready yet, it’s a research tool, we need a few more years. And he came in, new groom, and he says, we’re going to go for it, it’s going to be published, and the staff were aghast but he was right. And it gave the UK a lead, which it’s never lost, still in the lead. He was the right man for the job. So I mean, there was a lot going on. I used to go every lunchtime – for a quarter of an hour before lunch, the senior staff, the forecasters, would discuss yesterday’s forecast; why it had gone right, why it had gone wrong, what you can learn from it. And I think there was – John Sawyer, director of research, very sharp comments. He was essentially my boss. I learnt meteorology. I’d done the Masters course at Imperial but I learnt meteorology day after day in the Met Office. They’ve abandoned that, the staff don’t like it now. They don’t do it. They stopped it – they kept it going when John Mason was there and John Houghton was director general, they kept it going, and then they had a number of rather bad appointments as director general and they just stopped it, they found it …

The meeting before lunch?

Yeah, yeah. It was marvellous.

So the meetings were discussing the numerical forecast?

They were discussing – yes, because it was just starting and there were a lot of people sceptical that it was really ready to be released to the general public and so on, and are we really going to advise – because the Met Office had staff at every airfield, are we going to really tell – ‘cause every air crew would go and pop into the Met Office for a briefing before his flight. Are we really going to tell him this stuff based on a computer? They had to, that was the game. And so there was a lot of feedback, it was terrific. Of course in those days it wasn’t a global forecast, it wasn’t even a northern hemisphere. It was just one – the Atlantic European segment of the northern hemisphere, which led to awful problems because the side walls, what’s coming in from the sides, is an unknown quantity; you have to try and tie it down with observations but they’re never enough. And of course the gleam in the eye was that as computers got bigger it could be opened up for the whole globe and that was the John Woods Page 61 C1379/64 Track 3

Global Atmospheric Research Programme, but that was the ‘70s. That was a few years off, not many years off, ‘cause ’66 was when I went to the Met Office and I was there for six years, ’72. And GARP, Global Atmospheric Research Programme, had already been launched by then. So it was – going global was very much – but the computers just weren’t big enough in those days.

[0:06:28]

What did the sort of – the practical set up for this numerical forecasting look like in terms of charts or punch cards or …?

[Laughs] You’re right, it was punched cards in those days, great stacks of punched cards. The – one of the problems with – I mean, met forecasting – weather forecasting code is immensely long, it’s big, and the chances of mistyping something, making a mistake, are enormous, and then you have to copy it, then the chance of copying mistakes are – [laughs] the Met Office had a contract with Broadmoor, the prison for the insane, criminally insane, which was very close to Bracknell, the Met Office. And the Broadmoor inmates may have murdered their granny or whatever, they may be thoroughly bad characters, but often they were very clever people, and so they used to earn a few pence per week punching cards. And so they got – everything was triplicated, so there were three independent teams made in Broadmoor and then they were checked whether there were differences and they’d spot the errors. So that’s how they – that’s the manpower [laughs]. I’m sure – it’s not in the history of the Met Office but it was going on every day when I was there [laughs]. A truck would pull over to Broadmoor with a deck of cards, come back with them punched up – it was better than merely sewing mailbags [laughs]. And some of these guys, you know, they were white collar murderers [laughs], and the difference between madness and sanity maybe patchy. There may be some things they could do perfectly well and punching out cards was one of these [laughs], some of them could do very well. But it was a lovely place to work. They were serious, a large number of them were graduates from Imperial College. The man leading the team that made the ten layer model, the first really serious weather forecasting model, Fred Bushby, had been top of the maths class at Imperial and recruited instantly into the Met Office. He was just very clever. And his boss was John Sawyer, who was – John Sawyer, when he left John Woods Page 62 C1379/64 Track 3 school, entered for the civil service exam and he came out number two in the country in his intake. Now they start at the top and offer them – well, what would you like to do, and usually the thing is Treasury. And as they go down the ones who – above the line but only just, get the Department of Transport [laughs]. And they came to number two on the list, what would you like to do, thinking he’d say ‘Treasury’, he said, ‘I want to go to the Met Office.’ They’d never heard of the Met Office [laughs], they had no idea that such a place existed. But he was – had this passion for meteorology as a child and he was so clever. He was the person I reported to in the Met Office. He – everybody – he would just have people come into his room and talk to them about – ‘tell us about, you know, your work, what are the problems, what are the ideas?’, And in fifteen minutes they’d go off with a string of new ideas, and he would switch from problem to problem to problem, each person totally different. And I would go in and suddenly he was thinking about what’s going on below the surface of the sea, wasn’t his subject at all. I would come out with ideas. For example, one – fairly soon after I went there he said – I told him about what I had been doing and the diurnal variation and the afternoon effect and so on. He said, ‘What’s next?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s this broad issue out in the Atlantic.’ And he said, ‘What’s happened so far?’ And I said, ‘Well, there are these officers working away deep in the Admiralty, thinking that they’re plotting weather charts but the data is grotesquely inadequate.’ He said, well – he just said one thing. He said, ‘In the atmosphere all the weather is on the fronts.’ They now call them weather fronts on the forecasts, ‘cause that’s where the air gets pushed up and that’s where the clouds form and that’s where the rain forms.’ He said, ‘Are there any fronts in the ocean?’ I didn’t know. I said, ‘Well, from my reading, the only fronts in the ocean are the ones associated with the major currents, like the Gulf Stream is a front.’ In other words it’s cold one side and warm the other. So it has the attributes of a front in the atmosphere but it – I said, ‘But there aren’t anywhere else.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ That’s it, next please. I was on my way. And so I started doing some sums about how big they’d be if they were in the sea, ten, then there was a thousand times ten, so then the seawater is – so after a bit of thought and chatting to some Cambridge people, it seemed that if they existed they’d be tiny, but they’d last for much longer. They’d last not for a few days but probably last for a few weeks. And I wondered if there’s a sharp step in temperature from one side to the other and you’ve got a submarine that just pops round the back of it, maybe the sound would bend away and – it just – he, it turned John Woods Page 63 C1379/64 Track 3 out, I discovered soon afterwards, had written the definitive article on the dynamics of fronts, solving the problem of how they grow. Beautiful, beautiful simple – like a GI Taylor paper, it’s just elegant, simple and right. And I built on it over many, many years, building mathematical models and interpreting data and so on. So he was that sort of person. You could go into his room and you’d come out with the agenda for the next few years [laughs]. And of course then you’d be back in, how’s it going, you know, did you follow up that idea.

Was it possible to discuss Admiralty matters?

Oh absolutely, because I was inside, you see, and the Ministry of Defence – the Met Office is Ministry of Defence. They’re all top – had much higher security classification than I had. I had a very high classification but only for those things that I needed to know. They had it for everything. Then of course I could talk about – so that was wonderful because it was the perfect environment from which to go to the next stage.

[0:14:24]

And so I started to think about what would be the experiment to do to pursue this throw away line, maybe there are fronts there, everywhere, which had carried with it the implication that there is weather everywhere inside the ocean, but it’s not weather as we know it. It doesn’t rain, for example [laughs], it’s wet already, but there would be storms, there would be anticyclones, there’d be fronts, there’d be jet streams, all sitting inside the ocean. Well, nobody had ever suggested that, nobody had ever made any measurements of it, nobody had to set out to look for it because nobody thought it was there. I mean, it wasn’t on the agenda. But by being – by good fortune, by being in the perfect place to explore that – and when I said I wanted to explore it, it seemed to be eminently sensible from their point of view, so I found I had – the Met Office had three aircraft, one for very high level – a Canberra, which was – briefly had the world altitude record, very, very specialised aircraft, ‘cause they wanted to get up into the stratosphere, which is after all where jet aircraft fly. It had a Hastings, which was a great big workhorse, lumbering thing. That was – there were an awful lot of aircraft in the air force to do with keeping colonial wars under control. They didn’t have any John Woods Page 64 C1379/64 Track 3 opposition, there were no ground to air rockets, so they would just come over with this plane, drop a few bombs. I remember my uncle talking to me about it ‘cause he’d been involved. He learnt to fly in the Himalayas. He said, ‘Well, we’d go over and drop pamphlets saying, your village will be bombed because we know that you’re harbouring naughty people. It’ll be on Thursday, we suggest you get out.’ And on Thursday this plane would lumber over and this time they’d be dropping the bombs and go back again. And the air force was full of planes like this and they’re – they were designed before the war; they were well past their useful date and so it wasn’t difficult to allocate them to the Met Office. And then there was a smaller one, the same sort of thing but it –well, I’ve forgotten what make it was, a propeller, and underneath there was a Perspex bomb aimers, a couch under the fuselage, a couch, and then it was surrounded by Perspex, and your job was to push the button at the right moment, which was marvellous because I could search for fronts. And we had a system – there was a hole in the back, this had been modified for research, so that things could be pushed out of the back, so instruments in tubes that could be dropped through the atmosphere. You’ve heard of radiosondes, which are carried up in balloons. Well, sometimes you want to go to exactly the right place and drop it from the plane. And so it had the capability of pushing something out of the back, which would drop. Well, I discovered that the air force had a cylindrical – it was about that long [demonstrates].

About a couple of metres.

Yeah, getting on that way, and about that diameter, about thirty, forty centimetres. And it was a smoke – a smoke flare. It would – when a pilot ditched in the sea, if a search plane found him it was awfully difficult to mark where it was, there was no GPS or anything, so that a boat could come up and rescue him. So they had to have – and they dropped these tubes, which – when they hit the water, they had a manganese lock and the seawater dissolved it and it set off the smoke, which lasted for hours. And then out of the bottom fell a little parachute, which locked onto the water so that it drifted with the water rather than the wind blowing it. And this belched out smoke. And they were marvellous. So I ordered a lot of these and so when the aircraft found a front – how did we find a front? We had an instrument on board which would measure, by the infrared radiation, the temperature of the sea surface. Now these John Woods Page 65 C1379/64 Track 3 instruments were available commercially, a company called Barnes in America sold them, and they had an accuracy of two degrees plus or minus one degree. The Met Office said they’re absolutely useless, and without knowing why, had got their instrument people to make one that was accurate a hundredth of a degree, in principle. We did it by having a triple point calibration every few minutes, wonderful. I mean, seriously good piece of instrument. And why they did it nobody knew but they – somebody had had the idea to do it and it was just what I needed. So we flew over and this little thing went click when we got over a front, where the surface of the front had changed from cold to warm water. And the air crew that I went – there were all RAF air crew and they were joking and saying, ah, it’s a wild goose chase, we’ll never find anything. The first flight, within half an hour, click, we’d gone through. And they said, oh, it’s just an instrument failure, don’t – I said, right, drop one of the markers in. Plane goes round, goes over it exactly again, then we go round that way, then we go round that way and that way. And so we got a series of measurements, we could look at the mean and the standard deviation. Wow, the instrument was doing the business. And it was a front. So the very first flight out in the Ionian Sea we found a front. That didn’t mean to say they were everywhere but it means at least one had been found. If we found it the first time probably they’re going to be fairly common. Turned out they were very common, they were everywhere.

[0:21:22]

And so I then arranged – I need a boat, because the aircraft could find it but the boat then had to make the measurements by lowering instruments into the sea. Now in Malta – this was in Malta, in Malta there was a squadron of rescue ships, which, if a pilot crashed into the sea and there he was in his rubber boat, the boat – the high speed boat – they were very – they could go fifty knots, incredibly fast, made by Vospas, absolutely fabulous boats. And there was a squadron of them and they were busy doing their own things. Amongst other things they provided – if the Italian islands in the Sicily straight – they had no airfield, there had just a small population, but if somebody had a medical problem they had to get a doctor to him. And now the options were the Italians would send a doctor by sea plane from Naples. Well, Malta’s much closer and these boats would shoot out with a doctor from Malta as just a service to the community and would always get there long before the sea plane John Woods Page 66 C1379/64 Track 3 could. We used to go out on practice runs to Pantelleria, Linosa, Lampedusa, all the places where the refugees are coming in now from North Africa, you know. So these boats were marvellous, fast, very exciting. Every kid would love to have one. I had a whole squadron if I wanted it. We’d just take out one. And so the boat could go almost – the plane was incredibly slow [laughs], it wasn’t built for speed. It was a low level bomber for keeping tribes under control in distant colonial places. And this boat could go – well, I suppose the plane would do 120 knots, the boat could do fifty on a calm day. So the plane would go out and find a front, the boat would then zoom out and find the smoke marker and then put out a whole series of its own smoke markers so that we could see how the current at the front, the jet at the front, pulled them out in a shape, so we had a way of measuring the speed. And then the boat would go systematically through lower – getting the temperature profile at each place, but able to do it very fast. The thing is with these fronts, the weather systems are changing and you’ve got to get on and – it’s like you’ve got to get a snapshot. You can’t get a snapshot ‘cause it takes an hour or so, but that’s enough.

Who was taking the measurements on the boats?

I had a colleague, who was actually – I think I mentioned that one of my friends had studied with Colin Cherry, the Professor of Communications, and he was in the diving club but he never led his own expedition. But he agreed to come along with me. And then he didn’t have an idea what to do with his life. I said, ‘Join the Met Office.’ And he did and for the first – while I was in the Met Office, he worked with me, and we would – and so he and I were equals, we were both PhDs, he from electrical engineering, me from physics. We’re still very good friends, I mean, lifelong friends. And he would go in the aircraft one day, me in the boat, and then we’d swap. So we both knew exactly the mindset of each other and it worked beautifully. It was a good partnership. We were both doing some diving to pursue some of the other stuff, but mainly it was aircraft and boat in those days. And it became increasingly clear we were able to plot the fronts, get some of the structure of the fronts from the temperature measurements in the sea.

[0:25:50]

John Woods Page 67 C1379/64 Track 3

So now we’ve got an observation – it took two or three years. Now we’ve got enough data to say, yes, we’re beginning to feel what this animal is like. And we were finding them everywhere, so, I mean, they were common. I suppose the average spacing between them must have been less than a hundred kilometres. The – so it wasn’t surprising, if they were causing trouble to the sonar, that they were cropping up by chance everywhere. And if a submariner didn’t know that they existed then it would be like Willow the Wisp, magic, you know, suddenly now you see it, now you don’t. And so the – now it was time to stop and do the same as usual. You’ve got – you need a theory, you need to – luckily my boss had written the definitive theory of atmospheric fronts. And so we talked about how it could be modified and he had some good ideas, but the basic dynamics were the same. And he was rather tickled by the idea that, here was a real discovery. And he understood that it might have implications, because we’d talked. And he said, ‘Yeah, better think about applying the theory,’ and so on. And I did it in a sort of simple way. Later on, when I moved onto Southampton, I did some really heavy computer modelling, and then in Kiel further still. I followed this up over the years and really sort of sorted out the theoretical side and – well, the theory was clear, because he had worked out the theory, but to actually apply it to the ocean models required quite a lot of – it took several years. But on the basis of a rather simple initial theory and some back of the envelope sums about what it might possibly do for sound, I wrote a paper for him, for my boss. I know I’d been told not to write anything down because it might be seen, and there was paranoia about spies, rightly so. They were everywhere. They were in all the worst conceivable places. And he said, ‘Well, do write it down, just for me, inside the Met Office,’ John Sawyer did. And I wrote it down, took it to him and he read it. He said, ‘Hmm, did you keep a carbon copy?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Bring that here to me too. You can’t have any copy, you don’t have security clearance high enough to keep it.’ He realised that it was serious. And he said, ‘I’m going to take this to the navy. Let me do it.’ So I did. And of course the Admiral called me in a meeting and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s gone up a notch.’ And the next year they said – there’d obviously been some talk at a high level and the next year it was decided there’d be an experiment with a submarine, with an aircraft, with my boats, with ships from Portland. The Admiralty underwater was specifically designed to have hundreds of hydrophones and everything to measure it all. And my job was to go out and find a front, position them on either side and see what happened. And then John Woods Page 68 C1379/64 Track 3

I did my back of the envelope sum about the sound carried through into reality. And it did and it had quite a big effect. They couldn’t keep it to themselves so they had to talk to the Americans about it. It was so big that if it was right then NATO had to know. And the next year NATO dropped their annual MILO, military oceanography – they had an annual thing, and concentrated on this and threw everything at it, and they agreed that was right. And then I was told, I’m out, this is now in the hands of the big boys. And so the whole of NATO took over. And that was pretty well the end of my research fellowship at the Met Office, and largely I think I earned my keep. It was satisfying to feel that I hadn’t just been an intellectual curiosity but had been actually rather useful, but of course I couldn’t tell anybody. I couldn’t tell anybody in the Met Office. There are people I worked with very closely, like Raymond Hide, still a very close friend, and I couldn’t tell him. It didn’t matter, I knew. I couldn’t get a scientific paper out of it though. But anyway, they decided that my fellowship – it was six years, it was a fixed term and they had to decide, either I then stay in the Met Office to continue the work or not. And John Mason made the decision that the Met Office has got more important things to be doing. If the navy want to do it, they should do it, which was probably the right decision, although they’re doing it now. They’ve opened up an ocean forecasting group in the last few years at the Met Office. But in those days the computers weren’t powerful enough and they really had to concentrate on their day job, which was weather forecasting. So looking – I was a bit cheesed at the time, but – I thought I’d done quite well and now they were sacking me. Well, they weren’t sacking me but they weren’t offering me a permanent job. And I discovered from one of the staff that the plan had been, before John Mason became director general, that they would create what they called an air sea interaction branch, which was the first step into thinking about the ocean. But he had needed all of those posts for other purposes and so that just never happened. Well, not for another forty years, it’s there now. But those were wonderful years, wonderful years.

[0:33:03]

I’ll tell you one anecdote though, just – and then if we stop. The – I did continue the theoretical work after I left the Met Office. I no longer had ships and aircrafts then but I still could do theoretical work, which I did pursue after I moved to Southampton and even in Germany. But in Southampton the navy – I was Professor of Physical John Woods Page 69 C1379/64 Track 3

Oceanography in Southampton and the navy started to send to me for a year successive high flying officers in the naval weather and ocean service division. It had gone from just national – the navy weather service, to navy meteorological and oceanographic service, so beginning to get the ocean. And the – I mean, these were naval officers who were thought of as being likely to be the director of the service, you know, years ahead, and they could take a year out and study oceanography. And I put them onto pursuing some of these projects ‘cause I could talk to them about it, because they were inside the – and then I had an idea that the – all of the navy calculations of sound were about sound being bent in the vertical. I said, what about bending in the horizontal too. And so I set, as the Masters project for one of these – the second of these guys, David Willis – Richard Willis, who did become director of the service. He was the first one not to be a captain, he went up to commodore because he – the empire had grown. And he, being a sensible guy, took the idea and went down to the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment and said, my professor’s told me to study this, what do you think about it. And they laughed at him and said, don’t waste your time, we thought about that years ago, and of course they hadn’t. They said it’s a nonsense. Luckily he thought, well, I’d better humour the professor [laughs] ‘cause I can get my degree and I can’t go back to my boss saying I – so he did pursue it and I was right, and it does have a big effect. And the way to understand it is – let’s imagine that’s a front.

So for the recording, we’re pulling a wire into a sort of …

Front line.

Frontal contour, yep.

And so on one side the water’s warmer and on the other side it’s colder. And so you’ve got a submarine sitting there and of course the submarine will be tiny [laughs]. And you’ve got a ship, destroyer, chasing this submarine. Now if the sound is being bent horizontally and they don’t know, they think the submarine’s over there. They know the distance but they have no idea. And so what they did, they shoot torpedoes through the air, they go into the water and then the engine fires up and it looks around at the submarine and chases it. And this is the standard Russian way of antisubmarine John Woods Page 70 C1379/64 Track 3

– they had the weapon that the navy were scared stiff of. It was – but it turned out this refraction moved the submarine further than the range of the fuel in their weapon, so it just neutralised the major Soviet weapon for antisubmarine warfare at a stroke. And, you know, the first I heard about that was when I met the chief oceanographic advisor to Gorshkov, the Soviet navy, at a meeting, both of us pretending to be civilians and very sweet and innocent but both knowing who each other was. And he came up to me and said, ‘Woods, I’ve got two words for you, azimuthal refraction.’ He knew all about it. Gordon Longsdale had passed it from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment to the Russians almost before NATO had heard about it. But they knew about it but it killed their weapon. Their weapon was useless. I thought rather good [laughs], amazing. So these – this young naval lieutenant commander did go up to be commodore and did have a good career and he’s still – and we meet, we meet at the Meteorological Club, he says, ‘Aye, that was fun.’ [Laughs] So that was my swansong.

So did the Underwater Weapons Group start to work on that?

Oh, I have no idea because I was no longer in the circuit. I was out of the Ministry of Defence, I was a professor teaching young kids about oceanography. So no, I completely left it. But that was my swansong, getting this naval lieutenant commander just to follow up a possible idea, turned out to be enormously fruitful. But that’s what I love about physics, simplicity can – simple ideas can have big consequences.

And how could the ship have used that knowledge to evade the torpedo?

Well, that’s when we get into tactics, which I won’t talk about.

But in some way, knowing that allows them to avoid …?

Well, of course, you then start getting some sensible naval heads together and they work out how to deal with it. There’s standard ways of dealing with it now, which – but that’s not my business. I know what they are but I don’t need to talk about it, yes.

John Woods Page 71 C1379/64 Track 3

[0:39:23]

Well, while I was at the Met Office and beginning to get involved with these measurements of fronts and getting enough data over two or three years to see the structure, it became clear that the fronts weren’t straight but they had waves on them, as fake fronts do. And if you know enough meteorology and you know that the rain is on the bits that the – the anticyclonic – the anticlockwise bit of the curvature of the wave and not on the cyclonic and you know how big they are, you can time your trip to the shops and back in the dry period even on a rainy day [laughs]. You know, that sort of stuff one – if you know it. And not only does this curvature have a front but it throws out tons of water from one side, where it’s warm, intruding into the other side where it’s colder. It can do that because in the sea, unlike the atmosphere, the density depends on two things, not just the temperature but also the concentration of salt. So you can have a hot salty tongue with the same density as the fresher colder water on the other side. And so they – these fronts were shooting out great tongues of water, which I – explained some of the measurements I’d made with my dye, this strange steppiness, suddenly became clear. Well so what? The – when they go – if you make a measurement through, suddenly you’ve got a hot salty tongue of water, so the thermometer has a little kink in it, the temperature profile has a little kink in it, which is very striking. And we were seeing them all the time and in fact we started using that as an indicator where the front was. And I thought, well, that would be rather useful for the navy. So I spoke to the hydrographer, or rather to the director of naval weather service, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s a cute idea. And we’ve been accumulating thousands of these temperature profiles, we made measure them wherever we can, wherever we go.’ He said, ‘We’ve got a great database of them down at Taunton.’ He said, ‘What I’ll do is I’ll put some RENs’ – these Royal Navy Service – they have hundreds of RENs, they do all of the basic plotting and analysis work for the naval weather service. ‘We’ll put some RENs on to searching through and we’ll draw up a map of the ocean showing where the kinks are found and then we can say, well, that’s where the fronts are.’ Wonderful. And then a month or so later I hadn’t heard anything and the time went on and finally I saw him and I said, ‘By the way, anything came of that?’ He said, ‘Oh, I was going to tell you, I’m so sorry, very embarrassed. Turns out whenever there’s a kink in the temperature profile they assumed the instrument has malfunctioned so they throw the data away.’ [Laughs] So of course John Woods Page 72 C1379/64 Track 3 from that date on they were keeping the data and using it and now it’s one of the standard indicators. But it’s so funny. If you don’t know, don’t throw the data away until you’re sure [laughs]. But that’s not the way the navy was working. Anyway, end of anecdote.

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Track 4

Could you say something about your relationship with your parents during the period of time we covered yesterday really, so that’s while you did your post doc in the Met Office?

Well yes. My father died in – when I was at the Met Office, young, heart attack. So that was the end of my relationship with my father. My mother – oh, they had – when he retired – he worked in Brighton, in a bank. When he retired they decided to move – sell up the house in Hove, big family house, and move to Steyning, which is a village, very beautiful village that they used to visit at weekends, and decided that’s where they were going to retire. Steyning is – well, it’s a – it was a big town in Saxon times. It was owned by King Alfred, private, royal. And it’s still sent – as a result it was a royal borough and sent two members of parliament from this – I think they had six electors [laughs], until the great Reform Act. But it’s a lovely place and they chose very well. And that was great because when my father died a few years later my mother was in a very happy environment. She got on extremely well there, had good relations. There’s a Steyning Preservation Society and she became the president. She was an active woman and had extremely good friends. One was an architect, who I liked very much. So she had in her widowhood – she was exactly in the right place, with a nice bungalow that she could handle, a big garden which she loved, and campaigns that she ran with her buddies in the Steyning Society, you know, defending common ground against rapacious development by Chichester County Council. Anyway, the things that make a small community alive because everybody is solidly for it, but it needs somebody to actually – or a few of the – and although she had no other connection other than just having visited the place earlier and deciding to go there. So I used to go to Steyning. In those days before Beeching there was still a railway to Steyning, so I could go from up here in London or down to Steyning. And then later in the Met Office drove down from – I was living in Ascot, because Bracknell itself is not a particularly glamorous – it’s a new town. But Ascot was nice. So she used to drive up – she had a great friend – she had her buddies from when she was working in a hospital. They were strong and they used to visit each other and – I knew them all as aunties when I was a tiny boy, of course. And one of them lived in Bletchley. So Ascot was sort of half way from Steyning to Bletchley so John Woods Page 74 C1379/64 Track 4 she would pass, stop, start and then carry on. She was an active driver. And so, yes, I saw quite a lot of my mother.

What did you tell her about your work, about what you did?

[Sighs] Not a lot. She – I told her about diving and life in Malta and so on, told her a bit about the Met Office, but she – remember, she’d been married to a man who was in Bletchley, who couldn’t say a word about what he did, so she didn’t ask questions and it never sort of came up. We had a very good relationship, very, very happy. And yeah, I think that’s it really [laughs].

[0:04:18]

And what were you doing – when you weren’t diving for pleasure, what were you doing when you weren’t working, what other pastimes did you have as a young adult while at London?

What interested me? I regretted the fact that at school in English system, English grammar school where I was, at fourteen you have to make the big decision whether you’re going on the science side or what we called the arts side, humanities side. And I – you know, most of the kids in the class were told, well, you’re science, you’re humanities, that’s it, don’t ask, and I – a small number of us could choose. And I was really torn between the two. I wanted to be an architect and therefore that meant the humanities, but I was getting on very happily with some excellent teachers on maths and physics. So I enjoyed that. In the end I chose the sciences but that left a big gap in my education, because I dropped geography, English, French, history, bang. So from fifteen onwards I wasn’t – I mean, here in general it’s considered absolutely unbelievable that one can arrive at university not having a full education across the baccalaureate where you do the whole lot. On continental Europe that’s the norm. In England, we had in those days anyway, I suppose today still, this intense streaming, which gives you a flying start when you arrive at university because you’re way ahead of your continental equivalents in your chosen subject, but it leaves enormous gaps. Music, history, geography, languages, English, all of those, I never received anything in the fifth form, sixth form. And I guess that one of the … John Woods Page 75 C1379/64 Track 4

[Interruption – person enters the room]

So at school I decided to go on the science side but that left the whole of the humanities a big gap, which – on the continent there’d be four years that I don’t have. And so when I was in – at Imperial as an undergraduate I started systematically reading the Penguin translations of all of the Greek and Latin histories. I’d done Latin at school in a panic at the end, because in those days you couldn’t go to Cambridge without Latin, you had to have A Level – O Level Latin. So I had – you know, a number of us who might have gone to Cambridge had to frantically do Latin to get the tick in that box. And that had introduced me to Virgil and of course, being a boys’ school, Caesar’s Gallic wars, but no Horace, no Pertwee. So it – I felt I’d missed out. But the marvellous thing about the humanities is you can treat it as a hobby. You can read, you can talk to people, you can go to museums and libraries and educate yourself in a very relaxed, easy way. I’ve always – when I wanted to learn something I’ve always been quite happy just to teach myself. I learnt when I was lying on my back in Chailey that you think for yourself, you don’t have to have a teacher. So I had a passion for geography, mainly maps. I love maps. We’re sitting in a room surrounded by maps, old maps. And so I pursued that, I – in my reading about Greek – Herodotus and so on, Thucydides, that’s where I got the idea of leading the expedition to Malta to look for sunken ships. It was one of the things that divers were beginning to do in those days. And so I was devouring all of these classic texts in English translation and loving it and thinking, yes, it would be fun to actually go to – one of the ideas was to go to Siracusa and see the great – not the Peloponnesian War – yes, Thucydides, the great – the end of Athens, when they surprisingly lost the battle in Syracuse. What I didn’t realise, but I was quickly told about when I went to the Institute of Archaeology, full of these ideas from my reading, that warships were very likely built and they didn’t last. It was the big merchant ships that were found on the bottom of the sea. Strangely enough, they then found a warship, a Venetian warship, quite near Malta in Marsala, a friend of mine. But the – so when you say what do – what interested me in my spare time, it was filling those gaps, not because I had an agenda to fill them but I just felt the desire to, music. Strangely enough, my family – we had no music in the home, none. My mother had been forced to play the piano as a child, hated it and said she wasn’t going to have any music anywhere. We never John Woods Page 76 C1379/64 Track 4 went to a concert as a family. We never had a record player. My grandmother gave me a radio and so in my room I used to listen to the radio, including music. But it – and a group of us schoolboys, sixth formers, used to go down to the Dome in Brighton and – trad jazz was coming in, we loved that. So we – that’s where I discovered jazz. But when I was up in London I used to go to the Albert Hall. The Albert Hall was just next door – South Kensington, Imperial College, Albert Hall is all part of what’s sometimes jokingly called Albertopolis, from Prince Albert. And on Sundays in the Albert Hall there were so called industrial concerts. They were concerts and each one was sponsored by Imperial Chemistry Industry or Rolls Royce or whatever, one of the big – or Morris Motors, I mean, one of the big companies agreed to sponsor the Sunday concert. And if you go up to the gods, where you had to stand or just sit on the floor, it was nine pence. Now even as an undergraduate on £60 a term I could afford to do that and I heard all – it was – not popular music, it was the standard classics. So I heard all of Beethoven and Czechovski and – and I loved it. Remember, I hadn’t had it at home and I didn’t have it at school because I opted out. The music master and I agreed to go our own ways. I did extra maths and he didn’t have to worry about me not knowing anything about music. So that was what I was doing in my spare time, doing the humanities, not in some heavy handed way but just because I felt I missed out and I loved it.

And key friendships and relationships over that period?

There were four of us from the same class in school who went to Imperial for physics, amazing [laughs]. And so of course one of them I shared a room with – and we were all bumping into each other. But actually we were all rather different personalities and our interests, recreational interests, scarcely overlapped. So although we were there, we saw each other in class, we’d have a beer together or whatever, we were each doing our own thing. One of them, Colin Casemore, was a passionate sportsman, very – he played county cricket later, wow, as an amateur. And he was captain of the Imperial College football team. I mean, he was a serious sportsman and – whereas I was seriously into underwater diving, and that didn’t overlap. So we were each doing our own thing. But of course at that time my diving led me to some lifelong friendships, friendships at Imperial. Roger Wiley and I are – he was my best man at my wedding. I mean, we’re lifelong friends, we still see each other whenever John Woods Page 77 C1379/64 Track 4

I’m in England and he comes down here. But a lot of the friends were from Cambridge, interestingly, because Cambridge had an active underwater club and we interacted a lot. We organised expeditions together. And I guess my closest friend of all was Nic Flemming from Cambridge, geographer. He studied – for his PhD studied sea level changes using evidence from coastal cities. So as the sea level changes the height of the quayside in a Roman port – you know how big the ships were, you know roughly how high it had to be above sea level. If it’s now sitting below sea level or stranded – and he used the Mediterranean for his PhD because of the great classic concentration of shipping there. The trouble is, the Mediterranean is tectonically very active, so there’s land going up and down like mad and the sea slowly changing. There are some places that are less active, round Marseille it’s much more stable. And he did a very interesting PhD with that and we, the two of us, went off on a diving expedition in ’62, going from Spain, France, Italy, staying at marine stations, which were happy to host a couple of young students and provide diving equipment and boats and locals to guide us. So that was really fun. Of course I was already a graduate doing my PhD at that stage. He still studies it. He has become the – I was going to say world expert, but he was the only who’s only started it, finding evidence on the sea floor of the great migration of humanity from Africa through all round the world, because it essentially followed the coast, because they lived on fish. And they’ve now found Neolithic villages in the sea, he found the first one and still the oldest, off the coast of Greece, which was mind blowing. People though the wave action would destroy it long, long ago but they are thousands of years old, 5,000 BC, villages where you can see the streets and the buildings and so on, just the foundations, like any archaeological site. But it has become a very major subject. There’s a UNESCO programme – oh, there’s a European commission funded programme to do it. And so he’s still sticking with his sea level change in a very, very interesting way. We – one of the – we had a near miss. We were looking at evidence for times when the sea was lower in the last 10,000 years and the sea doesn’t continuously rise at the end of the ice. It comes up in spurts, resting at one level for quite a long time before then moving up to the next level, and in doing so it leaves the tip along the limestone cliff. It leaves a notch and a string of caves, which you can dive down and find. And when we were in Marseille staying at the marine station there the locals said, oh, we’ll come and show you some good sites, and one of the caves they took us to see, the Cosquer Cave, has become famous, and we were within John Woods Page 78 C1379/64 Track 4 an inch of discovering its secrets. You go in underwater, about thirty metres down, you go through a long tunnel and then it comes up to the level – sea level but inside and it’s dry. Downstairs I’ve got a couple of stalactites that I accidentally knocked off with my head [laughs] from that cave. They’re in the bathroom, you’ve seen them up on the – that cave is full of paintings, paintings which rival the great caves of Lascaux and so on. It is amazing. There’s a book that you might like to have a look at. And we were there, we were in it. We surfaced – the sea is relatively warm, you come – and suddenly there’s this freezing level of freshwater. I suppose it was a few degrees, whereas the sea was maybe twenty degrees. And so – and then you got your head above and you – ‘cause we didn’t have proper lighting equipment. And we were looking for evidence of sea level, we didn’t – it didn’t have in our minds that it was full of wonderful paintings and so on, which it is. And later on a diver went in, a French diver went in, a man called Cosquer and the cave is named after him. So that’s the sort of thing we were doing. And when you do that sort of thing together you make friendships for life. Friendship comes from doing things together. So then a – several of us, mainly Cambridge, and myself from Imperial and Roger Wiley from Imperial, we four, we decided to form a society for science underwater. And that – we formed it, we got it registered as a charitable trust, it still exists. It’s been absorbed into the much bigger Society for Underwater Technology now, which is essentially offshore oil based, so it’s rich. And we had annual meetings, we had an annual publication, a book every year, and those papers are still cited, I’m amazed. And everything from biology to geology, sea level change, my work on fluid dynamics, very sort of eclectic mixture of young people discovering how to use the new technique of diving, which was becoming popular for recreation, for club diving, how we could use it for science. And we were amongst the first. Of course there were others around the world, but we were the only ones who – being English – the English, you always form a club, don’t you, or a society, it’s the English way of doing things, and it really worked and it – it gives life to it. And then we – after a few years we decided to produce a book, Oxford University Press produced this – published this book called Underwater Science, to which we each contributed a chapter. And John Lythgoe from Cambridge and I edited it. And so that was – so friendships – those friendships are very, very deep. We all went on to have different careers, of course.

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Could you now describe the sort of – the details of the practice of the use of photography, first of all in your PhD work, which I think involves setting up photography in order to photograph droplets of water, I suppose?

Yes. Well, of course I mentioned earlier that photography had been very much my principle hobby, still is. It’s a lifetime. In fact, I’m just putting the final touches to a book of my life in photography, about 100 illustrations. It’s a big of an ego trip [laughs], but it’s – so I arrived at Imperial, my professor, John Mason, suggested, as professors suggest, a topic, which turned out to be one that was great. I loved it, because other topics in the group were looking at ice crystals and solid state physics but this was fluid dynamics and fluid dynamics seemed to fit me. Maybe he spotted that. Anyway, that was the topic he gave me. And I mentioned that the problem was to understand how droplets that grew by condensation but then stopped growing had to bump together to coalesce to form large droplets and eventually rain droplets, rain drops. And so it was microscopy essentially. And he suggested that it should be done in a bulk way, by creating, with a droplet generator, a spinning top thing that kind of dropped water on it, it sprays out tiny droplets of the size you’re interested in, letting them fall down and seeing how many of another size they captured on the way past. And after – the question is how to do it. So the idea was to have, at his suggestion, a microscope slide at the bottom, which had been coated with a kind of wax, so that the droplets left a little crater as they landed, and then under a microscope you could measure the crater. And the trick was then, how do you know whether they’ve captured a small one on the way down or not. And so you had to mark either the big ones or the small ones, the small ones I’m not – and I – one way was to put some salt into them, but I ended up putting a radio isotope tracer, phosphorous I think it was, radio phosphorous. And that’s a funny story because he didn’t come up with this, I came up with this idea, and there was I, 1961, twenty-one years old, I just wrote to Amersham, the radio chemical factory where they supplied radio chemicals for industry and for the medical world, and I said, can I order so much. It came from Imperial so they assumed it was pucca. And, you know, a day later came this box and inside was this lead container and inside that was a little file of the radio chemical. It had a fairly short half life, I remember. From memory it was a few days. So it had to come fast and it wouldn’t linger around contaminating the lab, so it was sort of in that John Woods Page 80 C1379/64 Track 4 way safe. And I was on the top floor of the old Huxley Building, which is now part of the V&A, and – that was the only building of Imperial College when it was first founded and named after the founder, Huxley. And the – so I was gaily doing this and coming up with some hard numbers, the first hard numbers for the collection efficiency of droplets over the maximum – over the size where they could do it, and testing the existing theories based on fluid dynamic theory, actually getting some – the first measurements, and it was all published. But there was no photography in that. That was – but then there was a panic because it turned out John Mason, although he knew what I was doing – he was very laidback, he let us get on. It was the traditional – if you like, the Cambridge tradition, that research students did their own thing with a light touch of – from their professor, and it worked very well for me. It suited me fine. I kept him informed. But he didn’t apply his mind to it very much until somebody must have said to him, I assume he’s wearing a radioactive tag to check that his dose isn’t too large. So I was rushed off to – I forget where it was, somewhere – St George’s Hospital, I think, where they had a centre for that, and they discovered of course I’d been getting far too large a dose, and so I had problems with my – is it white corpuscles? Anyway, whatever it is. So they decided I’d better stop [laughs]. It was very sloppy. I mean, these days you would never think of doing that. ’61, the combination of letting students do what they liked, the combination of that with Amersham providing radio chemicals to somebody because of the label Imperial College, they didn’t look and say this is a twenty-one year old student, and a professor who hadn’t thought about radioactivity, had never encountered it personally, although he of course knew about it as a physicist. So radio chemical protection was not on the agenda. And so I was told very firmly, no, you’d better think of another way of doing these experiments. I wasn’t ill or anything. I mean, they decided that enough’s enough. And the – so I thought about it and I thought, well, maybe, rather than look at a whole cloud of them, I should look at them individually. That means getting in microscopically, really microscopically looking at them. And so with the help of the optics department in – the research group at Imperial, they – splendid optics – it was set up by the government in the First World War, because all the optics weren’t available from Germany, lights and all those famous – suddenly the – so they had, in a panic, set up – and it’s still there and I still meet people who’ve been through the optics course. But they had, of course, some marvellous lenses and they knew optics and they were quite interested in the idea of remotely looking at droplets interacting, John Woods Page 81 C1379/64 Track 4 microscopic droplets interacting, and helped set me up. And the – and that’s the argument for being at a university, there’s always somebody on the campus who can – has the knowledge, well, especially at a place like Imperial. And what I had in mind was to film them with a high speed movie camera. And so we borrowed a high speed movie camera from somewhere, I don’t know where it came from. John Mason found somebody who knew somebody. This big monstrous thing turned up, sixteen millimetre film. You loaded up a cassette and the whole cassette went through the gate in about a second with an enormous noise, smoke pouring out [laughs], it was really quite dramatic. But it took movies. I can show you some stills from the movies. They’re in my PhD, which is downstairs, the thesis. And we could see droplets colliding, coalescing. And when two droplets coalesce and make one they’ll end up as essentially a sphere with a much smaller surface area to mass, so there’s a lot of surface tension energy that’s released and they wobble like mad. And I remember we had each year a stand at the Royal Society conversazioni, which is the show of what’s going on in science in Britain. And one year I showed this and there were lots of oohs and ahhs, movies of droplets colliding and wobbling and coalescing. But in fact it was all very dramatic, great for public relations, but it wasn’t giving any hard numbers. It wasn’t actually solving the problem. And that’s where I came up with this invention of streak photography. By aligning a light of axis but towards – from behind aimed towards the camera but not straight in the axis, in each droplet there was a little highlight, a bright spot, and as the drops fell, if I opened – now I was back to still cameras. I’d open the shutter and as the drops went down this little white highlight left a vertical streak. Now if two of them came down I could see them moving apart as they failed to coalesce, but if they did coalesce, two highlights became one but the one highlight, because of this wobbling due to the surface tension release, darted around. But it darted around with a frequency which was sufficient to tell me the size of the drop. And it turned out – and I didn’t know but one of the lecturers in the research group said, read Lord Rayleigh’s book on sound, but he had studied the vibration of a droplet, exactly why I don’t know, but he had the formula. So I was able to take his formula and use it to calculate the size of the droplet that I’d coalesced. Now I had hard numbers, because that was – and then I put a strobe on it to give pulses at regular intervals, so I knew the time interval. As the streak went down I could measure the fall speed, the fall speed told me the size of the droplets before, the size of the droplet afterwards. From the oscillation – the oscillation John Woods Page 82 C1379/64 Track 4 frequency I knew because it was the number of oscillations between two flashes of the strobe. And it was wonderful, it worked beautifully. I was just using a simple thirty- five millimetre camera. But then it occurred to me I actually needed very large numbers of measurements to get some decent statistics. And I wasn’t going to get them by thirty-six exposures on a film and then develop it. I was never going to get enough numbers.

[0:34:10]

And so what I did was I switched to an ordinary sixteen millimetre movie camera, not for movies but to get vast numbers of still pictures, each one with a streak. So the exposure was enough to get the duration of the streak and I had this movie with thousands of images, so I could get statistics. Then I thought, do I have to send this off to the local cinema unit to get it processed. And I thought, well no, because I – I used a developing tank, a large plastic developing tank, like you’d normally use for developing thirty five millimetre on a spiral, took the spiral out, there was a lightproof box. I took the sixteen millimetre film and scrambled it up like spaghetti and crammed it into the box, put the lid on. Then in the light I could pour the chemicals in and out, shake it and develop it. And of course occasionally there were frames lost because two bits of the spaghetti were in contact but it didn’t matter. I mean, there were enough samples that way. And so I got good statistics and that gave the technique that was – so I don’t know if anybody’s ever used that kind of photography. I never found in the literature any previous use of it, I’ve never heard any subsequent use of it, I think it was just a one shot thing. But it was a very unusual application of photography. It needed the very good lens and set up I had from the optics department. It needed a little bit of imagination on my part to get away from trying to make vivid but useless pictures and just get the hard numbers.

[0:36:10]

Thank you. And could you also describe the use of underwater photography in work for the Admiralty, while at Imperial and the Met Office? And as well, the role of diving in positioning the underwater camera in relation to the thing that you’re photographing. John Woods Page 83 C1379/64 Track 4

Well, as I mentioned earlier, the challenge was to try and discover the nature of the flow in the sea. Was it the most basic level, was it laminar or was it turbulent? Turbulent is chaotic motion, which is unpredictable in detail, in phase, and therefore is best studied statistically. And the man who introduced that was GI Taylor and I mentioned how I had, in quotes, defined turbulence for him in a lecture. So there was a well understood concept of what turbulence was. It was the fact that the flow is – has a sheer, in other words it moves faster at one place than another, so it’s a change in the speed and/or direction, with position, with depth in this case. And that that would produce instability in the flow, which led to wavelets growing, which then broke and forced a whole – those large eddies then broke up into smaller and smaller eddies in the way LF Richardson had predicted, or described, predicted – no, he’d envisaged it. He had envisaged it. He didn’t see it. In his mind that was what was going on and he was right. A lot of work has shown he was right. And so the assumption, as I mentioned earlier, was that the ocean was universally turbulent, and this was going on everywhere, all the time, and that if you put in some dye it was just disperse, it would diffuse by the turbulence and dilute until it was invisible. And so what I did, I put the dye in and it did not diffuse. It slowly was spread by the currents but it did not rapidly disperse. It wasn’t patterned, it wasn’t broken up immediately by the turbulent motions. So the flow by definition therefore was not turbulent, which means it’s laminar flow, which stuck in the throats of dynamicists who had been convinced that the ocean and the atmosphere were turbulent. And there are some, one in particular, who thinks of himself as Mr Ocean Turbulence and writes books – he’s recently written two big books on the subject, and he is still in denial. He still says it’s weakly turbulent, it’s not laminar. And I give him the evidence, I’ve known him for many, many years, and he’s not going to change his mind until he’s dead and buried, and so I talk to his students and try and tell them the truth [laughs], or show them the evidence anyway. But the – so the problem, the challenge, was to just discover the nature of the turbulence. There’s another phenomenon in the ocean, which is very important, and that is what’s called internal waves. On the surface of the ocean we’re used to the idea of waves and the waves grow when the wind blows and the waves travel from one place to another, swell. Nowadays that is forecast extremely well by the Met Office. So if you want to go sailing in New Zealand the Met Office will tell you what the waves are before you arrive and what they’ll be for John Woods Page 84 C1379/64 Track 4 the next ten days. I mean, it’s – of course none of that existed, although there had been one enormous success of wave prediction and that was for the D-Day landing, and it was done by an America – actually an Austrian but he was living in America. And it had been done with some quasi empirical quasi theoretical – Walter Munk, arguably the greatest living oceanographer, who became a very close friend. The work I was doing fascinated him and we spent a lot of time together. So he had shown that predicting waves was possible at some level. Now of course it’s done in a very – computers, weather forecasting, machinery. It’s done very accurately. But that’s on the surface of the sea. Inside the sea there are waves because – well, no let’s start – at the surface of the sea it’s because there’s a big density difference between the air and the water. The water’s a thousand times the density of the air. And as it goes up and down and as it goes up the extra weight is a restoring force. Gravity pulls it down again. So you have it going – wobbling up and down, waves. It needs a restoring force of gravity. It needs a different density above and below. Inside the ocean, the ocean is lighter at the top and denser at the bottom. Of course it’s not a thousand to one ratio, it’s one thousandth. Nevertheless there is the possibility of water going up having a restoring force, due to gravity, to bring it back to the level it was at before. And these waves exist and they are called internal waves, they’re inside the ocean. And the books talked about – I read about them when I started to learn about oceanography. I learned about what was published about oceanography and they were a curiosity. They ought to be there but nobody had seen them. But when I started filming – when I put a packet of dye attached to a vertical moored line so that the dye poured out at the same depth, it formed a great sheet on the surface of the – inside the water, maybe twenty metres down, thirty metres down. And it’s – I started to see undulations and they were internal waves. They were there. So I was the first person to ever seen an internal wave. I thought, well, still pictures are quite interesting, but I managed to get a – I talked to the Met Office. I said, ‘I think I ought to make movies of these,’ because there’s nothing more convincing than see it moving, propagating. And so they – at Farnborough – we had very good connections with Farnborough, our aircraft were based at Farnborough. Farnborough was the royal research establishment for aviation and the royal aircraft establishment. And they had all sorts of cameras, cameras specially designed for test flights of aircraft, cameras for testing guns. So you see in war movies sometimes the guns firing on spitfires, it’s because one of the guns has been taken out and a camera put in there John Woods Page 85 C1379/64 Track 4 instead. And these cameras were readily available. Some of them were very clever, they actually had the ability to record data in little dots on the side of the frame. So you could put in a thermometer, you could put in whatever it is you wanted to as a sensor and record frame by frame the numbers. And I thought, hey, that’s for me. So I got hold of one of these and the National Institute of Oceanography provided a suitable tube of light but very strong material and glass ends, actually Perspex ends, so that I had a camera. It was a long tube that I could – with handles attached, which I could swim around with as a diver, filming. Now I wasn’t the first person to make a film, Cousteau had got movie cameras, but he didn’t have one as sophisticated as this. His was for public, for making movies for the public, for television. Mine was for science and it was – it was lovely. It was very well designed. I said I want it to be neutrally buoyant, so it wasn’t heavy, I didn’t have – and it didn’t float up on me. If I let go of it, it would just stay where it was, at that level. That’s very important for apparatus that divers are using in the sea and they all tend to be designed to do that. And so this was a funny kind of diving. Almost all recreational diving you went straight down to the bottom to see the coral or the life on the bottom or the – whatever it was we were interested in, caves or anything. Floating around in mid water was a rather odd idea because there was nothing there, unless you’re surrounded by fish or whatever, but the Mediterranean is – we didn’t see fish in mid water. I later did in America and the Gulf Stream. I repeated all the work in America because there was criticism in conferences that it – ‘Oh, it’s all very well but the Mediterranean is special.’ It’s not, of course, it’s an ocean [laughs]. But – so I thought, well, I’ll go the wildest place in the world, the middle of the Gulf Stream off Florida. And so I spent a sabbatical in Miami at the Oceanographic Institute and with their help, used to take their research ship and just stop the engines in the middle of the Gulf Stream, drift with the – jump over with the camera and the dyes and everything. It was a partial success. Everything was exactly as in the Mediterranean, the internal waves, the different patches of turbulence and so on, but then the sharks turned up. And the sharks got fascinated by the dye, they thought that was breakfast. They didn’t think I was breakfast, they thought the dye was. And if you’ve seen a shark just a couple of metres in front of you open its mouth and then – to spring forward they bend the tail right the way back, so it’s closer than right angles, it’s almost like a spring, and then they suddenly flip it and they shoot forward at incredible speed and get a mouthful of dyed water. You could almost see the thought process going on in their mind, oh, John Woods Page 86 C1379/64 Track 4 what was that [laughs], you know, it wasn’t very nutritious. And then it occurred to me that they might turn round looking for something a bit more nutritious, so it was time to get out of the water. So every dive we had in the Gulf Stream – there’s so much life there. It’s full of amazing – it’s like – in places it’s like swimming in minestrone soup. The plankton is so rich, the fish are there. Great experience. Got enough film to show that it actually was behaving but the film was very short clips [laughs], each one ended when the sharks turned up. And they sniff things, they hear – they’re very curious animals, of course.

[0:48:27]

Going back to the Mediterranean, the point I was making is that this was mid water. In jargon it’s pelagic, it’s what happens – when biologists talk about pelagic fish, the fish that live in mid water, like tuna and sharks, as against the bottom living fish, the benthic fish. So I was doing pelagic diving, which was considered rather eccentric and odd, but I was filming these – the crucial thing was to be able to hover alongside the dye, close enough to film it but not so close that ones actual – the motion around the body is disturbing it. It’s a careful judgement. Now one of the reasons for going to Malta was that the water was so extraordinarily clear that one didn’t have to be that close and could stay far enough away, and we chose a lens for the camera that was appropriate. Most diving – if you want to get right up close to minimise the amount of water between you or the fish or whatever it is you’re filming, and so they have very wide angle lenses. They were rather surprised I wanted a telephoto lens because I wanted to keep away, not so far so that I lost the visibility of what the target was. But I had this brilliant dye against a blue background, the colour contrast was very strong. So I – the trick was to be able to hover. Now as a diver, when one breathes in your volume increases and you go up. When you breathe out your volume decreases and you go down. You don’t – not very fast but you drift up or drift down. And so by carefully controlling breathing one could just adjust one’s height to be level with the dye or from above it or from below, whatever it is you wanted. Because using flippers to do that disturbs the water and there is a risk you break up the patterns. So it had to be gently, gently. We learnt in the first year or so to be very – to take it very slowly, very gently, to creep up on the dye, as it were, maybe approach it knowing that it would be a destructive process but before it was blown away by your own John Woods Page 87 C1379/64 Track 4 motion around the body you’d get the film. Then you’d go and find another one to film. And so we found – I found – I did all the filming. I had to have a team of six for safety reasons and I recruited these from friends and then a couple of the people from the Met Office dived and they would come with me. And the – the filming – we began to see the internal waves, which was fabulous, the first time we’d actually seen internal waves, which are universal in the ocean and play actually a very important part in the dynamics of the planet. Walter Munk, who I mentioned earlier, spent a lot of time studying the rotation of the earth and why it’s slowing down. It’s slowing down because of friction, but where does the friction come from. It comes from the turbulence in the ocean. What causes the turbulence in the ocean? That was the mystery and that was why he was so fascinated that I discovered that there are patches of turbulence in the ocean. It’s not all laminar flow, but these internal waves break occasionally, just as waves break on the sea surface. And I filmed breaking internal waves. Now that is a sensation. Strangely, again and again it happens. There was a fluid dynamicist at Cambridge, in the famous Applied Mathematics, Theoretical Physics group, Owen Phillips, who had written his fellowship dissertation – to become a fellow in the Cambridge College you have to write – after your PhD you have to write another dissertation for that. PhD is supervised, therefore you never know how much the professor has nudged or help. Your dissertation for fellowship is all your own work, no supervision, ad that’s the test and if you’re successful you get offered a fellowship. His fellowship dissertation, Owen Phillips’ dissertation, was purely out of his mind. I didn’t mean out of his mind [laughs], it was purely from theoretical principles, no measurements at all, no observations at all. It was about the book, you know, it was published as a book, second edition now. It was the Dynamics of the Upper Ocean. And he asked about internal waves and about turbulence in the upper layers of the ocean, the upper ocean meaning the bit I could get at with diving, amazing book. He talked about waves on the sea surface, he talked about waves internally and he predicted that these waves would break by a particular process, called Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. And that was what I was seeing. The strange thing is that his book assumed, as everybody did in those days, that the ocean was universally turbulent and the instability process of the breaking of internal rays could not exist if the water had pre-existing turbulence. So there was an internal inconsistency. But he had – he had somehow put out of his mind the fact that the turbulence would stop the process and imagined that it was happening. He never says John Woods Page 88 C1379/64 Track 4 in the book, this will only happen if the flow is laminar. He says quite explicitly, the flow is not laminar, and that’s the internal inconsistency in his book. But he laid out all the mathematics, astonishing. That book came out in 1966. I started my work in 1964 and by 1966 I had a movie of the process that he had described. And it was a great pleasure going to Cambridge and running the movie.

[0:55:06]

In ’67, I think it was, ’67 or – I’ve forgotten, there was – the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, IUGG, has its big meeting every few years – well, every year but every few years it comes together with other oceanographic organisations, called a joint oceanographic assembly, big. And that was held in Switzerland, of all the stupid places for oceanography, on top of mountains [laughs]. And I went and gave a talk there and it was sensational. There for the first time people saw internal waves, they saw internal waves breaking. They saw a current changing with depth and sharp steps. That was fun. And in the front row was the head of the Shirshov Institute, the great oceanographic centre in Moscow, Andrei Monin, who was an expert on turbulence and subsequently wrote books on turbulence in the ocean, building on what I had shown him, and I feature a lot in his books. He had written some of the standard books on turbulence, mainly from the – thinking of the atmosphere. He and another Russian fluid dynamicist called Obukhov had considered the idea of a density gradient affecting the turbulence, building on the very early work of Richardson. And they had carried the whole thing forward enormously. They had shown, for example, how, at night when the sun goes down, the air, the turbulence in the air, calms down, the evening becomes calm. Even on a stormy day, if it’s not too windy, the air becomes calm and fog can form. I mean, this is an everyday experience in the atmosphere. They hadn’t thought of applying it to the ocean. But suddenly, you know, click, it was like switching them on. And we started having meetings. We had a memorable meeting in Vancouver, where essentially the world’s ocean turbulence community met and we all could have got into a cab [laughs]. It was, I don’t know, half a dozen of us, Walter Munk, Bob Stewart, Andrei Monin, Oberkov Kataigorodski, oh, and Grant from Canada. And we had a marvellous meeting, ‘cause it was all so new and so exciting, everybody saying, well, where do we go, what should be the next experiment, and so on. That was a fabulous time. It was one of John Woods Page 89 C1379/64 Track 4 these small little workshops, which – you had all the right people and we all became close friends. So the diving was unusual, it was floating in mid air diving and doing it very, very stealthily and gently. Long answer to a short question.

[0:58:40]

Thank you, that’s wonderful. Could you comment on the role of female scientists in the Met Office at the time that you were there?

I don’t think this feminist sort of question would have arisen in those days. Nobody was – there were women scientists in the Met Office doing their work, they were chosen on merit and there was no – one of them was actively involved with Fred Bushby in creating the world’s first weather forecasting computerised primitive equation model. She subsequently married him [laughs]. And she was pulling her own weight as just being a first rate mathematician. Never occurred to anybody, well, she’s a woman, you know, it doesn’t – in close – in my group – well, she became a friend because she and her husband lived in Ascot, very close to where I was living in Ascot, and initially I didn’t – I couldn’t drive, I didn’t have a car, so she used to drive me to work every day and we were in the same physics group in the Met Office, and she was a good physicist doing the job as well as any man there. She was a charming woman, she was married and, you know, very friendly. But there wasn’t a gender issue in the Met Office. Of course the statistics were that there were very many more men than women and I guess – there were women forecasters, there were women in research. There was lots of women in administration and so on. But I – one of the solid bread and butter jobs that the Met Office had, and one of the reasons it was in the Royal Air Force rather than in the Board of Trade, which is where it is now again after many years, was that Met Office staff – there was a Met unit on every airfield, a big one at Heathrow, but every RAF base had a Met Office unit with staff, who had to give briefing to every pilot before he took off. And I think there might have been a little bit of hesitancy of having a woman forecaster in those positions. I’m just guessing, ‘cause I can’t remember any woman at the sharp end of delivering forecasts to air crew. And certainly in Malta, at the RAF Luqa airfield, which was the main RAF airfield in Malta, very busy, very important airfield, there wasn’t a woman in the Met unit there. That was a typical field Met unit. But on the research side, at John Woods Page 90 C1379/64 Track 4 headquarters, it just wasn’t an issue. Nobody thought about it. They recruited – and John Mason did the recruitment. He decided that the recruitment had not been as good as we thought it should be under his predecessor, Graham Sutton. Graham Sutton was a rather reclusive man, brilliant and led the Met Office very, very well, but he didn’t like going around the universities banging the drum, saying meteorology is the most fascinating subject you can possibly – don’t waste your time on nuclear physics, come and do some real stuff with meteorology, and that’s what Mason did. And he didn’t care a damn whether he recruited men or women, he just wanted the very best of the best. So it may not be the answer you were expecting, but it was my observation [laughs].

[1:03:04]

Thank you. And the last question before we move on to Southampton, could you describe the Cold War context, especially when you were based in Malta, the …?

It was a big factor, of course. In those days the Mediterranean was still important. Remember that since 1800 the Royal Navy had moved into the Mediterranean and very soon, at the end of the Napoleonic War, become the dominant – the dominant force. The Battle of Aboukir Bay pretty well ended Napoleon. I mean, he lost his fleet and you can’t run a campaign in the Nile from France without a fleet to supply you. Supplies are everything, an army needs a continual supply chain and without a fleet to protect it you can’t run overseas operations. And Nelson just stopped it dead, sailed into Malta – it took two years to prise the French garrison out of Valletta. It was impregnable, the knights had left the most fabulous – in the end they did surrender and Malta became British, by invitation of the Maltese as they proudly said and it was the truth, but then very soon started to act like a colonial power, which suited the Maltese well because they’d always had colonial power. If you read my book – did you read it last night? They’d been in colonial power since Venetian times. So it was nothing new and they rather liked it ‘cause it brought employment. They had very few products locally, they were not a trading nation ‘cause they had nothing to trade, so employment in the docks, employment – it became the major employer. So it was a fairly happy relationship. And the Commander in Chief Mediterranean was a plum job in the Royal Navy. The Mediterranean was very, very John Woods Page 91 C1379/64 Track 4 important. And people say, oh, it’s because of the Suez – it was long before the Suez Canal and even afterwards that was a – most of the ships to India went round the cave, they didn’t go through the Suez Canal. People forget that. But the Mediterranean was first of all to bottle up the French, of course, and then later on the Italians built a great navy and that had to be dealt with, and then the Turks and so on. But Cold War, the Cold War then became – the Mediterranean then became a great meeting point of the two sides of the Cold War. The Russians, since Catherine the Great, had had a port in the Crimea. They’d got a warm water port, which was what she desperately – Peter the Great had wanted but she got it. And from that base they controlled the Black Sea and they had ambitions, after the end of the Turkish Empire, to control the Mediterranean, as the Turks had. Turks have controlled the Mediterranean pretty well. The Russians on the one side, on the eastern end, and NATO, based in Gibraltar, Naples, Malta – headquarters Allied Forces Mediterranean was in Naples, but they had a very large office, sub headquarters, in Malta. And Malta was sitting at the interface between the Soviet empire and NATO. It – there was almost – it wasn’t an agreement but it was very close to being an agreement. In the Cold War they didn’t sign treaties to say this is your sphere of activity and this is ours, but after a bit the two sides had a sort of nodding agreement that the Russians had free play east of Malta and NATO had free play west of Malta. And Malta was right in the middle. Malta – I was – my office – ‘cause I went out every summer, for ten years. My office was in the staff headquarters of C&C Mediterranean. A base like that is enormous and fantastic. It has everything to survive a great siege if necessary, they’d had a great siege in 1565 and the knights had survived by the skin of their teeth. There was another great siege in the ‘40s, ‘in ’41. It was vastly – the bombing was much more than London. They’d hung in there just. They were very nearly starved into submission but they hung in there and they then proceeded to break the supply lines to North Africa from Malta. It’s an awfully important place. I was in Lascaris. Lascaris is a bastion from the days of the knights in Valletta where the headquarters’ staff of the Commander in Chief Mediterranean – he was the other side of the grand harbour in Fort St Angela. And so all his staff, including the met service, including all the technical staff, there were junior admirals and captains, they’re senior people. And the bastion is big, we all had suites and offices, and it included the Fleet Scientific Officer with a suite of laboratories and so on. Come a war, who knows what his job was going to be but he had to be fully equipped with all the – and every summer he John Woods Page 92 C1379/64 Track 4 was invited to go on gardening leave and my team moved in and occupied the laboratories and offices of the Fleet Scientific Officer. I think he was quite happy, he got an extended holiday with the family [laughs] in the hottest time of year and it wasn’t the best time to be in Malta. So – and this was next door to the fleet, the met service. Now the navy runs its own met service, the air force runs the Met Office and deals with aviation, but the navy have always argued that they needed an independent met service because they needed to put meteorologists on ships, particularly on aircraft carriers. And in a war you lose all communications, including the satellites, and they had to be able to cope on their own. And in the Falklands War it happened. So in fact one of my ex-students, who was by then a captain, was the Fleet Met Officer in the Falklands War and he has described to me what it was like, ‘cause you’ve got two carriers there and they’ve got no communications, nothing, and he had to forecast the weather. The navy, rightly, have always wanted an independent weather service, they still have it, and every now and again the Met Office try and say, don’t be silly, come on, let’s work together, it’s an economy of scale, and the navy have always managed to see them off. So they had their own service and it was – the oceanographic side was growing, partly with the work I was doing. And the – underneath us in Lascaris was layer upon layer, a bit like the Admiralty building in London, of atom bomb proof layers and layers. Amazingly, I was there a few years ago, five years ago or six years ago, and it’s now a museum and the public can go there. And there are places which were the holy of holies and nobody without the very highest level of pass would never get anywhere near when I was there in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but now you can wander in. There was a delightful exhibition of the famous attack which eliminated the Italian navy, by aircraft carrier and biplanes. They were the only ones that could lift a torpedo. They went so slowly. And that was the – that became – the Japanese, when they heard about it, that was what Pearl Harbour was designed on, that attack on Taranto. I had the pleasure of taking around what now is a museum, a man whose father had been on one of the ships in Taranto, very emotional time for him. Anyway, underneath us was this great centre and their job was to prepare for the worst, to cope with the present. RAF Luqa, for example, every day a V bomber took off and photographed every plane in the Mediterranean, every ship in the Mediterranean, it was a reconnaissance. So they had an enormous aerial reconnaissance centre. They used seventy millimetre film, which is why I bought a Hasselblad because that uses seventy millimetre film and I could get them to process John Woods Page 93 C1379/64 Track 4 it for me [laughs]. And that’s one of the points, that a base of that size and importance had everything, often not used. It was there in case. I remember when I needed some electrical part fixed, I was told, oh, there’s a specialist unit that handles that, and I went to visit them and they said, you know, we’re posted here for two years and then other people come for two years and we haven’t seen anybody ask us for anything. And they were delighted, finally a customer. But the whole island was a fortress and it was full of every – it could pretty well do anything on its own on the assumption that it couldn’t be supplied. They – and they had a real bread and butter daily job, photographing every ship in the Mediterranean, knowing – tracking every ship. They were also using all sorts of tricks of – submarines come up towards the surface to take on air through the snorkel. They’re not visible but they leave waves and those waves could be recognised in photographs, so they started to know where the submarines were. So, big task.

[1:14:40]

Every summer there was an exercise, NATO exercise, which involved getting a carrier taskforce from the Western Mediterranean into the Eastern Mediterranean. Okay, that’s Russian territory, nevertheless it’s high seas, we have the right to go there if we want to. And there was shipping going through the Suez Canal, of course, so there was western shipping. And it was Western Europe, I mean, it was – but the Russians had nominal control of the sea. It was a free go place for the Russians. The summer exercise involved taking this carrier force from the Western Mediterranean into the Eastern Mediterranean and hopefully not losing too many ships going past Malta. So in Malta – Malta was designated to be a base for Russian ships, to try and stop the fleet getting – when that happened I use to lose my research ships. Remember, I was using these very fast RAF rescue ships and they were designated to be a class something Russian faster boat with rockets and torpedoes and so on. And one year the captain of the RAF group said, this year I’m going to get that carrier. And so he got his boats hiding behind the Italian islands, they’re wooden boats, invisible on radar, and the commander of the task force, usually an American, had two ways to do it. Either he went blasting through, all guns pointing and radar going, everything, just, you know, kick down the swing doors in the saloon and go in with your guns, real American style, or he did it British style, which was to try and sneak John Woods Page 94 C1379/64 Track 4 through, no radio messages, all radars off, creeping through, no trap, nothing. And that’s what they did that year. And out popped these little motorboats, invisible, and said, bang, you’re dead. And I went to the wash up meeting in HAFMED, Headquarters of Allied Forces Mediterranean, the Malta part of it, and the American admiral said, ‘Dammit, you got me.’ [Laughs] So the Cold War was a real thing. I mean, it was going on – I mean, taking account of it – I mean, in Malta in ’58, in ’58, just before first went there in ’61, the colonial office built underground grain stores and mills for making flour, and they had them all the way round Malta and one in – strangely one in Xlendi, where I found the wrecks, under the – deep in the cliff, under the – atom bomb proof, because Malta had been starved by the Turks in 1565, they’d almost had to surrender, were within days of having to surrender in ’41, and it was thought that there was a real chance of another great siege. And they were determined to make sure that there was a food supply. So there was investment going on. I mean, it was not trivial. It wasn’t just a joke, it was everyday, real stuff.

[1:18:32]

And how did an awareness of the Cold War or tensions around it play out in that small group of scientists that you described concerned with ocean turbulence, that included Russian scientists? How did it – I suppose how did it come up when you were meeting Russians, when you were working with Russian scientists? How was it sort of negotiated or talked about or not talked about?

It was a great game. We were talking about theoretical concepts and fluid dynamics as an abstract thing, never mentioning of course that it might be useful to our side or theirs. But the only time – I told you, the only time when it really came right up to the surface, my friend Brekhovskikh, the chief advisor to the Soviet navy, met me at Brest, of all places, at a scientific meeting, and said, ‘I’ve got these two words for you, azimuthal refraction.’ And he spat them out because it absolutely – he had had to go and report to Gorshkov personally what it meant and had to admit their major weapon was no longer worth having. So, okay, that was the only time it ever surfaced. All the other time it was all waltzing around as scientists in an abstract, pure geophysics way.

John Woods Page 95 C1379/64 Track 4

[1:20:02]

Thank you. Could you now tell the story then of moving from the Met Office to Southampton University, including any change in the focus of your work or the style of your work?

Yeah. So my six years research fellowship in the Met Office came to an end in 1972 and during the last few months it – I mean, it was made clear to me that they had decided not to pursue that line of work in the Met Office. They resumed it forty years later but that – they had other priorities, the bread and butter job of weather forecasting and they were going through this enormous change of starting with numerical weather forecasting, with computers which were soaking up – that was their attention and the distraction of doing something for the navy – I think I’d have made the same direction – decision if I’d been the director general. I wasn’t best pleased at the time, I thought it was the most marvellous place to work. I was in love with the Met Office, it was science and environment and real things that – it was my – the kind of physics that I thought was great. But it was not to be and so I had to start looking for a job. I – by then it was clear to me that that was going to be my life work. I mean, every scientist sort of, hopefully when they’re very young, hits on something that is so big with so many potential applications and so much – it’s like, what’s the metaphor, you open the door to a wonderful paradise, a wonderful garden. And, you know, there’s so much to do, you’ll never do it all in your lifetime, but you’re going to spend the rest of your career in that garden. There is no question of going off and doing something else. So the upper layers of the ocean were essentially ignored by the oceanographic community. The big boys, the ones who were serious and respected, were making measurements of the deep ocean, lowering instruments down, and that was – because the ocean is on average six kilometres deep and, you know, that requires very different kinds of instruments. Seawater at that depth becomes very corrosive. Stainless steel fizzes. So there’s a whole engineering, there’s a whole mindset and the kind of ship you need – great big ships like Discovery. And that was what the serious oceanographer was doing and it was painstakingly slow, the number of observations collected per year was a fraction of what was needed for a decent job. The database that was available could not support – even if you accumulate all the data that had been collected in the last – I don’t John Woods Page 96 C1379/64 Track 4 know, since it began, 100 years, the amount of data available was nothing like the data available every day to the weather forecasters. The ocean was desperately under sampled. And the discovery that it was full of weather, intense storms – and there were experiments, mode and polymode, a series of experiments, set up soon after I’d made this discovery about the fronts and so on, not as a direct cause but it was in the air. And they were about deep storms penetrating down to the bottom of the ocean. And it became clear that the storms were the game, that the energy in the storms was vastly more than the energy in the Gulf Stream or the other major circulation patterns in the ocean. The ocean has a circulation pattern that goes all the way round. We now know it takes about a thousand years for water from one place to get to the other, extreme and so on, slow, long. And the kinetic energy in those slow motions, which is still not well described, is one per cent of the energy in the storms. Ninety-nine per cent of the energy is in the storms. And so the oceanographic community suddenly had a major new agenda, to try and get to grips with the eddies. They weren’t concerned about the fronts, they were – the eddies were – the storm anticyclones and cyclones on the ocean and why were they there. The theorists were looking at it, the ships were going out making measurements, there were international collaborations to get to grips with it. Nobody quite knew what it meant.

[1:25:08]

And I remember in – jumping ahead a little bit, in ’77, there was another of these joint oceanographic assemblies, where all of the different international societies touching on the ocean one way and another, physics, biology, chemistry and so on, met up. They’ve stopped having them now, it’s very sad. But that was in Edinburgh. And the hot subject were these eddies. And Walter Munk, the doyenne of oceanography, I’ve mentioned him many times, gave the keynote lecture about ninety-nine per cent of the energy of the ocean is in these eddies and we don’t know much about them and we’ve got to get going and study them. And I – by chance, ‘cause I was a local boy, it was in Britain – I guess in Edinburgh, but that – I was asked to give the closing address, summing up the conference, a rather miserably difficult job [laughs]. But in my summing up I thought, oh, I’ve got to make a joke about this ninety-nine per cent of the energy. So I thought, oh yes, the Bible. So I had a word with the director of the National Institute of Oceanography, George Deacon, knew him well of course. I said, John Woods Page 97 C1379/64 Track 4

‘Do you happen to have a Bible with you?’ I knew he was a very religious man. He said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘What is it?’ I said, ‘The parable of the good shepherd, the 99 sheep are left because the one that’s got away has to be rescued.’ So he turns up with his Bible and we go through it and of course I make this a highlight of my speech, the parable of the good shepherd. Don’t forget the lost sheep, the one percent. Even though it’s the hot subject of the day, the ninety-nine per cent of the energy, 99 sheep. And of course I couldn’t resist saying, ‘And of course, here we are in Edinburgh and of course I’m reading from the King James Bible.’ [Laughs] It was an international meeting, most people didn’t know what I was talking about. But the message was the first step towards the world ocean circulation experiment, which was about the one per cent. I didn’t know it at the time [laughs]. It was a joke at the time but it actually had a very, very serious consequence.

[1:27:35]

But going back to your question, it was clear to me that the upper layers of the ocean, which were not fashionable, it was the deep ocean was the – the big boys did the deep ocean ‘cause it was difficult and challenging and there and had to be studied. The upper layers of the ocean were considered rather superficial [laughs]. And they were interesting to the navy but you couldn’t talk about that, not in polite society. They were interesting to the fisheries people because that’s where life, the plankton, are there where there’s light, and so the start of the food chain was in the upper ocean. But the fisheries people were thought of as rather clodhopping country folk. They were not the serious heavyweight oceanographers. I hope my friends in the fisheries lab don’t get [laughs] – but I’m saying what the feeling was at the time. Nevertheless, it was clear to me that the upper ocean was an untilled field. It was just waiting. I mean, if in day one I can make a discovery about the fronts, in day one I can make a discovery about laminar flow, what else was there there to be discovered? And it was clear to me, coming from the Met Office, that the atmosphere in the ocean, in ways we didn’t yet understand, worked together. The one influenced the other, the other influenced the other, and it was a two way trade. And to do so it had to get through that upper layer of the ocean, which became called the seasonal boundary layer of the ocean, that was my name for it. So there was this great subject. So essentially I thought, where can I find a job where they’re going to cherish this. So I went to John Woods Page 98 C1379/64 Track 4

America, I went to the – arguably the greatest oceanographic institute in America, Woods Hole in New England, and they offered me a job, very happy to have me as a scientist there. And if I had gone there I would have spent my life there and it’s a mecca for oceanography. It’s one of the great places, was then, still is, and immensely cherished by the US navy. In fact it’s largely existed because of the US navy in the war. And that would have been a great place to go. I also was offered a job in Princeton, which was very seductive. After all, Einstein had been in Princeton. And I fell in – it was a marvellous – I could just see myself – it was – it would have been like going to Cambridge, incredibly bright people in a lovely environment. But I’d just got married and my wife took one look at it and said, ‘I’m not going to live there.’ For whatever reason she thought – she said, ‘Oh, it’s artificial. If you want to live in a place like that do the real thing, do it in Europe.’ [Laughs] And I went to Miami. There they are crazy. The director, the founding director of the Miami Institute of Oceanography, was planning to retire, and he was – he was a graduate of the Royal College of Science in Imperial College. And suddenly this guy turned up from Imperial College, he had a gleam in his eye and said, ‘Oh, you’ll take over from me as director.’ Are you kidding me [laughs], I don’t know any oceanography. I have no street cred in the world of oceanography. There are a few people who know what I have discovered and think it very cute. As a person at the start of their career, I’m not ready for that. So I turned down the deanship of the Miami – yeah, I turned down an assistant professorship at Princeton and I turned down a research position at Woods Hole. And the director – the Professor of Physical Oceanography at Southampton had resigned to take up the directorship of the National Institute of Oceanography in Wormley. So the job was advertised, so I put my name in for it. I was unlikely to be – how old was I? This was 1971, early ’72, so I was thirty-one, didn’t seem very likely that they would offer me the job. They offered it to a chemist from Liverpool, Riley, lovely, clever man, one of the best chemists in oceanography. But in the end he decided for family reasons to stay in Liverpool as a reader. And so rather reluctantly they had to go to number two on the list and they offered me the job, which I took. Rather than go to America, I decided that I’d stay in Europe. And the department was tiny, there were four members of staff … no, six, two biologists – the founder was a biologist - zoologist. There was a second biologist, there was a chemist. I was the – no, there were two physicists. There was a – there must have been eight of us, I suppose, essentially two for each of the disciplines. And the John Woods Page 99 C1379/64 Track 4 geology department separately had a marine geologist, so. But it was a tiny department. And luckily the rector – not the rector, the Vice Chancellor, Gower, his son was an oceanographer in Canada, so he had a soft spot for the department, so we had our protector, but otherwise the heavyweight departments tended to elbow us out of the way. The founder had been asked to really drop everything and help set up the university medical school and the hospital, which was an enormous task. I mean, you don’t say no when you’re given that chance. It’s now really one of the best medical schools in England, very closely relate to its teaching hospital. And John Raymont pretty well said, okay, I’m going to have to concentrate on that, you can run the department [laughs]. So not only was I parachuted in – in fact, the first lecture that I ever went to on oceanography ever, I’d never been to a lecture – I gave as a professor [laughs]. I mean, I learnt an awful lot, I’d read everything. I had talked to some of the leading people in the business, I had done it in my own little niche. But when you have to give the standard lectures in physical oceanography to a bunch of students you’re meant to know something about the subject [laughs]. Oh, I had given some lectures at the Met Office, the Met Office training school, so it’s not true that I hadn’t ever given a lecture, but I’d never attended one, I’d never received one. So Southampton was exciting, small. It was like a family, we all got on extremely well. And strangely, I got on very well with a biochemist. And we were both young and we felt that there ought to be a mechanism for the different disciplines in the department at staff level but with the students listening in, having a sort of way of getting to know about each other’s work. And so we chose plankton ecology as the topic for a running seminar that just went on all the time I was there. With professors, we invited visitors and so on. It was just – and nobody was studying it as a subject, so it was sort of neutral territory, but it – the founder was one of the leading people in zoological – in zoo plankton research, wrote a big two volume book on it, I mean, seriously good, very respected. So plankton were kind of very much in the air, and that’s where it became clear to me that my commitment to the upper ocean fitted very well with the plankton world, because that’s the phytoplankton – the plants, the microscopic plants, live where there’s light, which is the upper layer of the ocean, of course. And so there was a meeting point. And we mutually – it was a sort of bootstrap operation, we each contributed to mutual learning about ecology. Ecology is a fascinating subject. It’s not the sort of subject you could teach at a junior level because you’ve got to have input from all the disciplines. You’ve got to have physics, chemistry, biology, John Woods Page 100 C1379/64 Track 4 microbiology, biochemistry. You’ve got to know that the atmosphere is sitting on top of you and having a very direct effect. You’ve got air sea interaction. And in coastal waters you’ve got all the problems of the seabed and so on. It is a very, very complicated subject. And nowadays, as I’m Professor of Complexity Science – it was the start of my realising that some things are so complex, it needs a very special way of thinking. And it started – the germ of that idea started – and it was great fun, it was enormous fun. And we were not teaching it to the students, we were learning it ourselves and the students were sitting in, especially the research students, asking difficult questions, of course. And it wasn’t a subject on the agenda, it wasn’t – you couldn’t buy a book on marine ecology. There might have been a few descriptive books but as a subject – to me as a physicist, you don’t understand a subject until you can make predictions about it. Physics – people asked me to define physics. I said, it’s D by DT, rate of change with time. It’s the only science that has that. Biology is about describing what’s there. Geology is about describing what’s there. Okay, you try and deduce something about the past but you don’t make computer models with rate of change of rocks [laughs]. Physics is about – intrinsically, at the very heart of it, it’s about the rate of change with time. And you – the models you make have the rate of change of time built into them. It’s very central. Force equals mass times acceleration, Newton’s great equation. The rate of change of velocity depends on the force divided by the mass. Rate of change, rate of change, always – that’s physics is rate of change. That’s what makes physics fascinating. And you can’t do ecology without that, ‘cause it’s changing all the time and you have to have equations which tell you the rate at which the change occurs and what the consequences are and what happens next. And biologists were not geared up to that. Physicists weren’t when I started. It meant that the ethos of physics has to permeate ecology. If you pick up a book from the 1970s on ecology – physicists, come on, we didn’t have – oh temperature, yes, temperature, you have to know the temperature. There’s no – none of that ethos of making a model, making a prediction, rate of change. If it’s like this now it’ll be like that in the future.

What did it consist of then, before the infusion of this …?

Well, people collecting crabs from pools on the seashore. That’s going too far. There were biologists going out trawling plankton into great nets, enormous nets. Tow a net John Woods Page 101 C1379/64 Track 4 for a kilometre and you end up with a little test tube of plankton. Plankton, the word – the research began in Kiel, where my next job was, so strangely enough I moved onto Kiel, which was the birthplace of the study of plankton. But it was descriptive, what is there. It never occurred to people it might be different tomorrow. Okay, there was seasonal spawning and so on, there was a rhythm, but it didn’t occur to them that the season would be different in different places for different – for predictable reasons. The fisheries people knew that the fish stocks changed with time and they knew that they didn’t know why. There were conjectures. It was all wrapped up in a mystery black box called recruitment, how many recruits do you have to the next generation. There’s the black box, don’t open it [laughs]. I wrote the first paper that just came out on recruitment, predictions. I’ll show you that. So it – ecology came on my radar, as it were, as a possible subject where the ethos of physics might make a contribution, and it would do so in the upper layers of the ocean, which was my declared home territory. And it was at Southampton that that began to form in my mind and with colleagues, you know, in our minds, but I was the one – I was the physicist – I was professor of – there were only two professors, the Professor of Biological Oceanography, John Raymont, who was off doing medical stuff, and myself, the physical oceanographer. But that just meant I had all the chores, like the faculty finance committee, which I loved [laughs]. They were crooks. They had a formula for allocating money. Money came into the university and had to be allocated to the departments and I discovered what the formula is and worked out that the allocation of resources for MSc students was the same as for PhD students. And it was very easy to expand the number of MSc students, which I did dramatically, to which the response of the university was to change the formula [laughs]. They were all crooks. I mean, there’s no trickier person than a university administrator in my experience. So I learnt the hard lessons of what it is to be an academic, not on the teaching, in the administration. So I was thrown in at the administration quite young, well, from the start. Remember, my first job in academia was as a professor. I’ve had a very anomalous academic career. When I see colleagues that are vastly cleverer than myself at Imperial struggling to go from senior lecturer to reader and from reader to professor, they hope they’ll make it by the time they’re fifty, I have to keep very quiet [laughs]. At Southampton I – you see, I had made that decision first of all to stay in England, second to pursue, come what may, the study of the upper operation, even though it was not fashionable, the National Institute didn’t touch it. The Met John Woods Page 102 C1379/64 Track 4

Office had chosen not to touch it. And so the two great institutions were saying, not for us. The fisheries people were doing it but not really my way. And so the, erm, the question was how to make progress.

[1:44:52]

So I went to the Natural Environment Research Council and said, look, this is my agenda, the department is going to concentrate on the upper layers on the ocean. I’m not going to stop it, you can’t stop academics doing whatever they want, but this is going to be the theme, at least from the physics side. But probably the zoologists, especially the plankton ones, would get interested again. So I laid out and agenda and NERC, bless them, sent down an investigating team of the good and the great, mainly, I must admit, from competitors, especially Cambridge, with the result that – my programme was quite ambitious and would have required substantial resourcing from the – from the NERC, but they did that. So this investigation team, established by NERC Council, came down and discussed the matter with us, went back, reported to NERC and the decision was made by NERC Council not to fund Southampton at all, which was a bit of a difficulty. But, bless them, the National Institute of Oceanography, which came under NERC but which was more autonomous, said, don’t worry, we will provide some support, because they saw – and they still do, I mean, the Southampton centre is there in a national support role as well as doing their own in house research. And it was not formal but it was a sort of – and they didn’t want the Southampton oceanography department, a small department, tiny group, nevertheless they wanted to foster it to the extent they could. So they became very helpful and helped equipment and made available Discovery and the gate crews and so on. So there was a viable way ahead but it was quite a slap in the face. And the university was – my little coup was rejected by – when I tried to increase the number of students to increase our departmental budget enormously, but nevertheless there was a compromise at the end, which meant that we had a bit more money.

[1:47:42]

The – so at a personal level, I had two lines of research that I wanted to pursue, both growing out of the work with the navy. One, you remember, was the daily variation, John Woods Page 103 C1379/64 Track 4 the diurnal effect, and the other one was the study of ocean fronts, both of which had a lot of mileage still in them. The diurnal variation, I decided, needed a new set of measurements. The measurements had been largely diving and measurements from one point by ship lowering instruments. I thought I needed to look at the spatial dimension. And there was a very provocative measurement by a researcher at Woods Hole, he was English and he came back to – in fact I brought him back to England, to the National Institute. He had flown an aircraft with an instrument rather like the one I used a radiation thermometer - measured the infrared radiation coming from the sea to deduce the temperature. And he had flown this in Chesapeake Bay, I think it was, backwards and forwards repeatedly through the day. And the – he then made a spectrum of the variation horizontally, from end to end of the flight track, so everything from variations with the whole length of the track down to quite small solar spectrum of wavelengths, of the variants in the temperature of the sea, how much it varied on all the different scales. An interesting measurement, nobody had done it before. But the fascinating thing was that when he repeated it an hour later and then an hour later and then an hour later, through a calm sunny day, no wind, no clouds, bright sunshine, the variant spectrum increased at all scales, the whole range that he was measuring. Well, you would think that the temperature would increase, yes, we know that it might increase by a degree or even as much as two degrees in the tropics from day and night, but for the variant spectrum degrees, what on earth was going on. And he made these measurements, he never published them but he showed them to me. And I thought, wow, there’s something going on I do not understand at all. And so I started to think, what – well, of course one starts to have ideas what might be going on. I thought there must be patchy variation in vertical motion. Now at a front the convergence into the front forces the air to go up and the air in the sea goes up in some places, down in others. There’s no symmetry. It goes up in a narrow sharp motion, not a jet but the uplift is concentrated into quite a narrow region, and that’s why we get the weather on fronts in the atmosphere. The downward is more distributed and slower, but of course mass continuity means the same amount goes up and goes down. But there is this asymmetry and it was John Sawyer at the Met Office who had explained this to me and his brilliant theory of frontogenesis, which became central to my thinking. And I wondered if the patchiness was due to vertical motion and then I started to do some crude sums. I wouldn’t call it a model. And I could see that, as the water comes up, the sun’s heating would have no effect there. The cold John Woods Page 104 C1379/64 Track 4 water would be coming up to the surface. In other places, where it’s going down, the sun would have plenty of time, ‘cause it’s going down much more slowly, to increase the temperature. So maybe it was the vertical motions related to the dynamics of fronts which were – which are universal dynamics, it’s not just something specific to fronts, would explain this strange observation. I couldn’t think of anything else. So I started to think what measurements I might make. Clearly the aircraft had just measured the temperature at the very surface, skin of the ocean, because the infrared comes from there, so what’s needed to actually make measurements are different depths in the ocean. So I thought if we had a rod vertically from the surface down into the ocean with thermometers at intervals, ten centimetre intervals, over a metre, and if we could work out a way of pushing this through the water – you couldn’t tow it behind a ship because the propeller would be stirring up everything, so it had to be in the front of the ship, it had to push ahead of the ship. And of course there are waves. The water’s going up and down so that the depth of a particular thermometer is varying. So one had to measure exactly where the height of the surface was. That needed another instrument. And I was in touch with the University of Liege that had a marine station in Corsica that was looking for a science – they were looking for some physics. And the Professor of Mathematics at Liege and I were buddies and we got – he listened – I was – you know, what are you doing, and I’d tell him about these ideas. And he said, ‘We’ve got a catamaran, a motor catamaran, and you could mount the thermometer in the front of it, ahead of the twin hulls, and it could just cruise along slowly across Calvi Bay, North West Corisca, and you could see if you could get the measurements.’ And I got the – there’s a very good ship science department in the University of Southampton and they put a student on, as his MSc project, to design a little mini catamaran that would support the instruments and which would be towed from, boom, out beyond the nose of the ship. So that brought in the engineers and they were, yeah, tickled pink. They always like a nice challenge and this was – it was the days when semi submersible oil rigs were the rage, where most of the buoyancy is below the surface, so the water goes up and down but the rig doesn’t go up and down like a ship. And so they designed it to be like that, so the waves would go up and down but this rig with the instruments on it would go ploughing through the water, not being disturbed vertically, at least not much. And so a clever design. And so I took this – got a PhD student, Canadian, and – that was his project and he rather liked the idea of spending the summers in Corsica. And it sort of worked. The – I John Woods Page 105 C1379/64 Track 4 guess the last field season must have been in ’76 and he had all the data and now it was a matter of working it up, which meant making a model to interpret the data, see if the model and the data were in agreement. Unfortunately I then left for Kiel and the poor guy was stranded. But strangely, my predecessor of Professor of Physical Oceanography had had enough running the National Institute. He thought – he wasn’t a natural administrator, to put it politely, clever man, Henry Charnock. He decided that’s enough, he heard I was going to Kiel and he went back to his old job at Southampton [laughs]. And so I talked to him about it, he liked the project and he took it up and saw the project through to an end. And sure enough, it did – but it turned out that the models we had of the vertical motion were still far from adequate to do a thorough job. It needed a new class of models of the vertical motion, which went well beyond what was possible there. So that was one of the things I did at Southampton and it turned out to be very interesting and unexpected. And Peter Saunders, who made the aircraft measurements in Woods Hole, then was looking for a job to come back – in fact, I invited him to Southampton as a senior lecturer. He came and he’s still there [laughs], retired of course but still goes in.

[1:57:26]

And the other half of the story was the front – that was the diurnal variation. The other half of the story was the fronts story. Now they’re beginning to overlap, as you can see, but the pure fronts story was great fun. John Sawyer had come up with this very elegant fluid dynamical model of how fronts – the structure that fronts have. Between eddies and the atmosphere storms and anticyclones there tends to be a convergence and that pushes air, warm air and cold air, together. And then the theory of frontogenesis is, so what happens in the middle. A front forms but how does it form, what does it look like, what are the vertical motions, because that’s what produces the rain and so on. And he cracked that problem, beautiful work. And as I mentioned, when I was in the Met Office I was entranced with that and with him. He was so clever and flexible. So I decided to make a formal model of frontogen – that process in the ocean, which hadn’t been done before and it needed – really didn’t have very good computers in those days [laughs] and so we had to make some approximations. It turned out that Brian Hoskins, Sir Brian Hoskins as he now is, Head of Climate at Imperial College, he was a research student working with – in John Woods Page 106 C1379/64 Track 4

Cambridge, back in the applied mathematics – I was so close to them, I knew what was going on. And his professor had come up with – Francis Bretherton had come up with an idea that simplified the problem, made it more attractable on the limited computing power, semi geostrophic theory. It has died a death long since but at the time it was a way ahead. It was a useful step, which, once the computers grew bigger, wasn’t necessary. So he’d done his PhD on that. I said, fine, we’ll take that technology, apply it to the ocean. I got a very good research student, Malcolm MacVean, still working in the Met Office, and we applied it to the ocean. The – but there’s a difference between the atmosphere in the ocean, a very fundamental difference, that the density of the air depends on the temperature and the pressure. As you go up the air gets thinner. But that can be taken account of, the compressibility of that can be easily taken account of, so effectively it’s the temperature, whereas in the ocean the density depends on the temperature and the salinity, the concentration of salt. So there are two factors and the question is how to apply the model with the same dynamics but take account of the fact that one side of the front might be warmer but it might be saltier and the other side might be colder but it might be fresher. And so they are to some extent – salt and temperature may be working together or against each other. And so it greatly complicated the effect. And the literature of fronts was very thin and it was all descriptive. It was – no theory or anything. And people talked about three different kinds of fronts, temperature fronts, salinity fronts and density fronts, as though they were different species. And it was obvious to me they must be the same thing but there must be something going on with the way the salt and the heat, the temperature and the salinity, are structured as the result of the Sawyer effect, the frontogenesis process, which leads to rather different structures. And so I developed a way of handling that theoretically. Erm, the trick was very simple really. One way of tackling the atmospheric problem was to have the computer points not on a horizontal layer, a series of horizontal layers like you have for weather forecasting, but to have them on layers with the same temperature, or therefore the same density. So the meteorologists called it the same entropy, which is a bit dodgy, but that’s the – they called them isentropic layers. What they meant is layers of the same potential temperature, the same – from the dynamical point of view it was the same density, after you’d taken account of the pressure. And the horizontal surfaces by definition are horizontal but these surfaces of density, uniform, varied, so they – and that – the slope of the one to the other is a property that meteorologists call John Woods Page 107 C1379/64 Track 4 baroclinity. It’s just a label but it means that the density surface is not horizontal. And when you have them at a different height, one side and the other, and you squeeze it together, clearly the slope increases. And when you have the slope increase a jet forms and you get a jet of air in the atmosphere or water in the sea due to this tipping up of the densities ever steeper as the water gets squeezed together and the front forms, and this is what Sawyer had described. And there was a perfect balance in his theory between the width of the jet and the width of the baraclinic zone, the width of this zone where the density surface was inclined to the horizontal. It was matched beautifully. So I thought, well, let’s go to the next stage and say, if you look – we’ve now got all our grid points on a computer model laid out on density surfaces, not horizontal surfaces. But I said, the water at this side may not have the same temperature on that density surface to water that side because it’s compensated by salinity. So we can draw another set of surfaces which have constant temperature but they will be inclined to the surfaces of constant density. So now we’ve got three different things, we’ve got the horizontal, we’ve got the surfaces of constant density inclined to the horizontal and we’ve got the surfaces of constant temperature inclined to the surfaces of constant density and to the horizontal. So the ocean is rather more complicated, we had to have these three things. But the inclination of the density is the dynamic bit. That’s what gives pressure and therefore force and therefore a current. The inclination of the temperature, you’ve already taken out the dynamical bit by having the density, so the temperature – the fact the temperature was varying along a density surface was dynamically passive. You could take a bit of water this side of the density surface, swap it with one the other side. The temperature would be shifted around but it wouldn’t have any affect on the density and therefore on the dynamics and therefore on the current, the jet. So we had baraclinity, which was the dynamical bit, due to the slope of the density surfaces to the horizontal, and I invited the word thermoclinitiy, which was the slope of the temperature surface. The baraclinity was dynamically active and created a great jet and it’s windy, when the front goes over you can feel the wind. But the thermoclinity had no affect at all on the dynamics. And when we started looking at Sawyer’s theory we realised that one of the stunning effects is that as the convergent goes in and the density surface gets steeper and steeper and steeper – but this forms what I call the Sawyer circulation, which is a vertical motion, which stops it sharpening after a bit. So in the ocean the jets are mature but they never get narrower than about a kilometre. And we measured John Woods Page 108 C1379/64 Track 4 this from the aircraft at sea with our drifting smoke floats. I knew it, I knew it because I’d measured it. But the thermoclinity has no way of resisting compression so it can come up until it’s like a step. So the front that you see – that’s why, as we flew over the jet the radiation thermometer went click from one temperature to another as fast as we could measure it, because the frontogenesis had sharpened up the thermoclinity but the dynamics had resisted the sharpening up of the baraclinity. So they were the same animal, different facets of the same animal, but they looked, when you went and measured it, as utterly different things, hence the fact that the oceanographers talked about salinity fronts and temperature fronts and velocity, as a different – they’re all part of the same thing. And that’s physics, when you can show a lot of disparate things are actually all the same, they’re part of the same story. It’s like getting unified theory in particle physics. You suddenly say, oh my goodness, here we go, right, this just slots in there and all the others – they’re not just wildly different fundamental particles, they’re all part of the same symmetry argument theory. And this is what emerged for fronts. And this was delightful. It made a very nice PhD thesis, as you can imagine, a good start for a guy’s career, to come up with something which sorted out a jungle, a mess, in the subject, with this beautifully elegant idea, which worked through in the model and so on and it agreed with the measurements that I made earlier in Malta, solved the problem. And he was then immediately recruited to the Met Office and proceeded to have a nice career. And that was pretty well what I did in my Southampton days, three – four things, one, deal with the administration of the department, boring but I learnt an awful lot, don’t trust anybody on the academic – [laughs] universities, they’re all – they’re too damn clever and they use their cleverness to promote their own ends, whether it’s at the departmental level or personal level or whatever. There’s a learning about life, I suppose. It’s the first time I’d encountered that. Secondly, the work on the diurnal variation, this strange variation with space, which, if my theory was right, could only be understood by better understanding of the way fronts worked. So there was a coupling between the two but each had to be sorted out separately first. Then there was the work on fronts, which had this very nice, very theoretically satisfying result. Who was it, it was Rutherford said that the role of science is to take a mystery and make it a commonplace. One of my favourite quotes. It was a mystery why all these different species of front were around and suddenly it all became clear, they’re all part of the same animal. And the fourth thing that I did in Southampton was the first steps John Woods Page 109 C1379/64 Track 4 towards thinking about ecology, which proved to be fascinating, because ecology was also in a mess. It was descriptive and people thought they were making predictions, fisheries people, but they weren’t. They weren’t scientifically based.

[2:10:24]

To what extent was there resistance from traditional ecology to the introduction of physics to it?

Oh, in those – in the Southampton days it was a self learning exercise, it was a mulling it over. We weren’t going public, we weren’t publishing anything. We weren’t producing any results. It was a time of beginning to think about the possibilities. So there was no resistance, nobody knew we were talking about it. People came down and gave us interesting talks but they – and we chatted, but it was very preliminary, very early days. But it was laying seeds for what became a real line in my research.

[2:11:09]

You said that you – part of the reason for not at any rate going to Woods Hole, of all of the options you had, was that you’d recently married …

No, that was Princeton.

Princeton, yes, that’s right, Princeton. So when and how did you meet your wife?

Erm … in Cuba. The – she was working as the secretary, the sole employee, the – they could have given her a fancier label, administrator, secretary, do everything, girl Friday, I mean, of an organisation set up by Cousteau. He was a great promoter of diving, of course, it was his thing, but he thought very broadly about it. And as the subject grew as a popular recreation all of the place, in the UK the British Sub Aqua Club was set up, it was – they had a good training scheme. It was sort of – the training scheme was franchised at different branches all the way round, of which Imperial College was one. It was well organised in a typically British clubby way and John Woods Page 110 C1379/64 Track 4 it got official recognition by the government. So the government has – recognises an organising body for each sport, whether it’s football or baseball or gliding or rugby or diving, and it recognised the British Sub Aqua Club is the organisation. And similar organisations were springing up, France was well ahead because they had been largely the starting point of it, but in Germany and Austria with the – do you remember the Hasses, they made a lot of movies. So it was growing everywhere. America was doing its own thing, which was rather different, highly commercial, but in Europe it tended to be amateur clubs learning how to develop rules that made it possible to do adventurous diving safely. In a nutshell that was what it was. And yet, of course, the associations, the clubs, in each country tended to be different. So the French style is different from the German style, which is different from the Russian style and the Spanish and the – all perfectly legitimate and all adjusted to the national spirit. But when an English diver turned up in the Mediterranean and wanted to dive in Italy and said, but I’ve got this certificate from the British – they said, oh, doesn’t mean anything to us. Cousteau had the idea to form an international body with representatives at each of these national organisations on its council and to gradually form a set of rules that would be acceptable qualifications, that would be acceptable everywhere, and to – he invented – which was very clever – or rather a man who worked with him worked on it many years, a man called Sasha de Fe, a Russian baron who was living in Italy and then England. He invented a system of equivalence. So you had the – this was the CMAS Confédération Mondiale des Activités Sous-marin [Subaquatiques], was the organisation Cousteau created, CMAS. And so they had a level one, level two, level three. And so the British Sub Aqua Club, whatever it was, beginners’ certificate, was equivalent to the level three, the next intermediate was equivalent to that, and then all of the other countries negotiated and ended up with equivalents. So when you turn up in Italy on your holiday you can say, I’m BSAC intermediate level diver, this is equivalent to CMAS so and so, here’s my CMAS certificate, and you can dive, because there was – in many countries you aren’t allowed to dive. The law says you have to have a certificate. Britain is much more relaxed, of course, being Britain. And it was a brilliant idea and they organised conferences and they promoted international links, which hadn’t previously existed. And they had this office in Paris and they had a secretary and they then decided that they would have a scientific conference, because, as you know, we’d set up the Underwater Association in Britain as the society for divers who used diving for John Woods Page 111 C1379/64 Track 4 science, and sort of similar things were happening elsewhere. So they thought, well, not only the qualifications for diving but the way one does – and there was a real driver and that is governments began – because of the offshore oil industry, with an enormous number of accidents happening, they began to tighten up regulations, safety regulations about diving, driven by the need for the commercial – in the North Sea and elsewhere, all round the world. There were enormous numbers of deaths, it was awful. And the problem was that those regulations were for professionals and they labelled university divers as professionals because we were doing it for our research and that – the regulations were not relevant. And so work was done, and the person who led it was my friend Nic Flemming, the sea level man. He came up with a set of regulations which were intrinsically the ones from the club activities, the recreational divers, but with another layer to take account that for science one had to have a bit more serious control, but not the full heavyweight of having to have a big ship with a crane and a recompression chamber. It was unimaginably expense and cumbersome and it would have just stopped the – and in some countries the insurance companies refused to insure science divers because they were not following government regulations and university sort of leant on by government to stop it. And so this international organisation became a way of spreading a set of rules, which the British government had agreed and then they were spread through this organisation to other countries and they agreed or slightly modified it, but adopted – they recognised science divers as a different category. They were doing things more adventurous than holiday divers but less adventurous than the commercial deep oil exploration divers. And so this organisation was really a lifesaver for the divers doing scientific diving. I was okay ‘cause I was in the Ministry of Defence and they didn’t listen to the Board of Trade and their stupid regulations anyway, but it mattered when I left and went to Southampton. The – and so the organisation held a conference in Cuba, the Cubans invited – the Cubans were very active in diving, but it was Castro – Castro had come out of the jungle and he – this was in 1970. And I was still in the Met Office. I was the Ministry of Defence going to Cuba. I had to be taken to – deep down inside the old Scotland Yard building, where there was a man from MI something or other, who told me how to behave. Don’t do anything that makes you visible, just be on the wallpaper, you know. Don’t look at girls but for God’s sake don’t look at boys [laughs]. It was very old school stuff. But there was a very clear briefing that, you John Woods Page 112 C1379/64 Track 4 know, I must not go around parading the fact I worked in the Ministry of Defence, I was just a club diver, but I wasn’t at a university like most of them.

Why was it advised that you didn’t look at girls, for example?

Don’t get entangled with anybody [laughs]. I remember him rolling his eyes when he said or boys [laughs], very funny. I mean, it was a sort of jokey – but there was an underlying message, don’t allow yourself to get involved. And it’s good advice. I hadn’t got any plans but I did end up getting involved with a girl [laughs], who became my wife. So there we were in Cuba, she was the secretary of the organisation that was organising it, but the – there was a committee of eminent people doing the organisation. I gave my talk about the dive work in Malta and it was – we quite liked each other. But she was based in Paris, of course, so we saw each other afterwards and – came from an interesting family. Her grandfather was the last chamberlain of the Kaiser. To be a chamberlain you have to have forty-eight quarterings in your family, in your crest. Forty-eight of the great families have to have been in your ancestors, I mean, otherwise you couldn’t show yourself in Austria or London or something. So came from a very, very aristocratic family, one of the grand families of Germany. I had no idea, discovered that when I visited her sister in Frankfurt and discovered – they answered the phone – the maid answered the phone and said, ‘Graf Arnim’. I said, ‘What’s this “Graf” ?’ ‘Oh the Earl of …’ I went, ‘Oh. Arnim, who’s “Arnim”?’ ‘Oh, that’s the oldest aristocratic family in Germany.’ [laughs] So that’s when I found myself in a different world. Anyway, it was nothing to do with them, we just got on. And we got married. We got married just at the moment when the Met Office was saying we’re not going to give you a job, so that was a good start for marriage, hadn’t got a job. And so we trawled around America and various other places and ended up in Southampton, which was socially and family wise very – Southampton’s a nice place and we enjoyed the mood there and it was good. And that’s – in ’75, my son was born, our son was born, Alexander. So I was still in Southampton. So family life at that level began, crazy wedding in the family schloss in Germany. Anyway, different world, different world. So I’m trying to educate my son, Alexander, a little bit about his German ancestors. He sort of is in denial. He wants to be thought of as English; he went to an English public school, he’s got an English job, but he does speak German fluently, he does speak French fluently, which John Woods Page 113 C1379/64 Track 4 gives him an edge at work, not only speak the language but know the culture. When you’ve spent time with your family, your cousins, your uncles, your aunts, you – well, I’m saying you know the culture, you know the culture of a very strange stratum of society, shall we say [laughs].

[2:24:35]

But it was a factor in why, when I finally – when NERC really said we’re not going to support anything at Southampton, I seriously began to think about going somewhere where there was support. Because what I wanted to do was scientifically ambitious and required serious equipment, resources, of the kind that I’d had without asking in the Met Office, thanks to the navy, but which were just not ever going to be available in Southampton. Now the National Institute was very helpful but it’s not the same as – from time to time – and they were very supportive. But it’s not the same as having your own system, your own equipment, your own resources. In, let’s see, ’72, I went to Southampton. Almost the first letter I opened in my desk, at my desk in Southampton, was a letter from Kiel. It was from Kiel, it was from the Kultur Minister, the Ministry of Culture, which in our terms would be Minister for Education and Science. And it said, would I like to be a professor in Kiel. I’d just started work at Southampton, forget it, no way. Five years later the same letter came again. They said they were very sorry I didn’t reply – of course I replied to it, I didn’t reply positively to it. They had kept the job open in the hope that I might change my mind, would I be interested, would I reconsider, five years later. And by then NERC had really said no and although I, as I say, managed to do some interesting stuff and I don’t regret at all my Southampton years, in fact they were very formative and quite productive, I couldn’t see the way ahead. I couldn’t see the way ahead with the rather ambitious ideas I had. And so I said, well, maybe come over and give us a talk and – usual thing. I didn’t know how they knew I existed. I didn’t know why they targeted me. They had obviously realised that I had this rather strange German wife, who had been brought up after the war. The Russians had – their family estates had been mainly round Konigsberg in East Prussia, which was the heartland of the Junkers. And the Russians of course had just walked through it and they’d had to flee as refugees, and luckily one of the family scholosses had been just – what turned up just this side of the Iron Curtain. And that’s where we got married, that’s – and they’d John Woods Page 114 C1379/64 Track 4 been refugees and living very poorly. I mean, the family – the father was dead but the mother, with her four children, had, amazingly tough woman, ended up in Weissenhaus, which is just near Kiel, it’s on the Baltic coast. And the family has come – her branch of the family, her mother’s family, had come from that part anyway, from Rügen, which is an island in the Baltic, so Prussians and Baltic and that whole area. And so Kiel was there. And so they sort of – and there were enormous – it was a prolific family, to say the least. Her grandfather, who was the Lord Chamberlain, was one of twenty-three surviving children, two wives [laughs]. Killed the first one after the first dozen [laughs] and proceeded to have a dozen with the second wife, wow, big family. So there were cousins everywhere, they were thick on the ground. There was one working in the marine institute, it turned out. So anyway I went over there, they talked about it. It turned out – I had no idea about the German system at all. I mean, I’d only just learnt about oceanography, at least I knew some after the Southampton years, that when they are recruiting a professor to replace somebody who’s retired, it’s a very formal thing, ministry stuff. And there’s a formal call and nominations, shortlist, so on. The academics have to submit three names but the minister will choose the one – it’s rather like choosing an Archbishop of Canterbury here [laughs], you know. There comes a time when the bishops back off and the prime minister chooses the man who’s going to be the – with advice, of course. So anyway, in ’72 they had chosen me. I had no idea when they sent me this letter, I just thought it was a letter going out to hundreds of professors saying would you be interested in this job. It was not at all. They were intensely embarrassed because the man they had shortlisted and then selected said, no thanks, without even so much as I’ll pop over and see you. But they had then left the job unfilled for five years, asked me again, explained to me – my future colleagues explained to me what had gone on and this time please think about it, by which time I was a bit worried about the future in Southampton so I said yes, which led to nine years in Kiel. I said yes with a calculation, that the director of the National Institute of Oceanography was going to fall vacant in three years and I thought, ah, that’s a job I might go for, very pretentious [laughs]. I mean, a professor at thirty-two, to think that – you know, 1980 it would have been, that job was vacant. And everything was thrown in turmoil when, instead of seeing through the job, Henry Charnock, instead of staying at the institute until he retired, said, blow it, and went back and took my job in Southampton when I John Woods Page 115 C1379/64 Track 4 left. And a young man was given the job with an indefinite future and all my – and there I was in Kiel, trapped [laughs]. So, shall we pause?

[End of Track 4] John Woods Page 116 C1379/64 Track 5

Track 5

Could you start to describe the research that you undertook while at the University of Kiel, which is where you moved to next in 1977?

Yes. I had one big project in mind and it was the fact that I couldn’t do it at Southampton led me to finally agree that I could do it in Kiel. And Kiel – an old institute of oceanography, one of the oldest in the world, with a long tradition and very good support, it had just been given a new research ship, which was a bit over a thousand tons. That sounds tiny and it is tiny but research ships are tiny. But it had the great advantage that unlike a big ship like Discovery, which I’d been on a few years before, where you have to have several teams to justify the ship, and you have to take it in turns and there’s a continual problem for the chief scientist on board to allocate time and competition and so on. This ship could be allocated to one team, do what you like with it, and that suited me fine. And what I wanted to do was to start to look at the large scale patterns in the ocean of the phenomena that I had been studying both in the navy and at Southampton, namely the diurnal variation and the eddies – and the fronts between the eddies, or the fronts in the ocean, all in the upper ocean. And I wanted to use a tool called the Batfish, which had been invented in Canada, which had been refined in England at the National Institute, but which was essentially designed for short distance towing in coastal waters. And I felt it could be used for long distance towing on the high seas. I thought it would be the ideal instrument. It’s not an instrument, it’s an instrument platform. It’s like a glider, which is towed something, half a kilometre, behind a ship and the ship, along the cable, one sends down signals to the fish, the Batfish, and that changes the inclination of the wings so that it dives down or comes up and you can set it to go in a regular cycle down and up, down and up, down and up. So it’s like making a series of vertical profiles at intervals. But it’s a nightmare to stop a ship, do it, the ship drifts, you have to get back in position for the next one. It takes far too long, whereas this, you could just go – the ship could gently steam in a straight line along the chosen track and would get profile after profile after profile regularly along the track. The Batfish was capable of taking a payload of instruments. It’s not very big, it’s less than two metres from front to back with the wingspan about similar. The payload could be, and in my case was, an instrument for measuring the temperature, the conduct – the salinity and depth of John Woods Page 117 C1379/64 Track 5 course. So that the depth was telling you how deep the instrument was at any given moment, the temperature and salinity combined control the density, so from that you can calculate the density, the temperature and the depth. And you remember the three – the trick I had developed for modelling fronts, saying if I knew the levels of constant depth, the levels of constant density and the levels of constant temperature, I could calculate the whole process of the front formation. And this would make a series of measurements from which I could deduce those slopes. So that would be a – nobody had ever thought of doing it, let alone trying to do it. This really seemed to be the instrument. And it was the fact that I couldn’t develop this system in England, so do it in Germany. As it stood, the Batfish really wasn’t engineered for long distance towing on the high seas. But with the help of the – the German navy had its – the German navy is based in Kiel. There are not many places you can have a – the German base was Kiel. And so it was – there were lots of navy there and the Navy Research Laboratory was there and they had been tipped off by my friends in the Royal Navy and they agreed to provide instrument support, which was great because they had very good engineering. And they made – they reengineered the Batfish for long distance towing, they made the payload instrument. And I said, well, if I’m going to be towing it from one side to the other of the Atlantic, for example, which we did, St John’s and back, surely the instrument is going to lose calibration or drift off or get a bit of plastic wrapped round the sensor. So we had to have three of everything. And we were continually monitoring the differences between them and if suddenly one of them went way off it had obviously got something damaging the sensor and we’d haul the instrument up, swap it over and send it down again. We never did, in all the years I was there, have to do that. It was so well engineered, the instrument never lost calibration, never got covered – you know, these terrible stories you read in the newspaper, the ocean is full of plastic pollution and so on. We never picked up anything and we were in the upper ocean where all the pollution is if it’s there, but it wasn’t. It’s in coastal waters but in the high seas it’s not. One doesn’t have to believe what the newspapers say. The – I also had as payload, I had an instrument to measure the light and another one to measure the clarity of the water. So it had a transmitter and receiver and the light going through the water is attenuated by the plankton. So in a way it’s a measure of the concentration of plankton. Another instrument measured the concentration of chlorophyll, that’s therefore the plant concentration, the microscopic plants. So I had a package fitted on the ship itself – on John Woods Page 118 C1379/64 Track 5 the hull of the ship was an acoustic Doppler current profiler. It sends down three acoustic beams and gets the back scatter echo from them. Because they’re three and they’re inclined it can calculate the component horizontally – in the horizontal direction and speed. So it’s giving a vector of the horizontal current at a number of depths. So that – I mean, if you wanted to describe a front, I’ve got the frontal current, I’ve got the temperature, the thermoclinity, I have the baraclinity, the depth. I mean, in principle the whole structure was there. Here is an instrument that ought to be able to really get the data that would test my theory of the – why the fronts had the structure they had. That’s what I had specified in Southampton, that’s what I said when I went to the ministry in Kiel, and I said, ‘If I come here this is what I want. I want to have a dedicated ship, not for the whole year, just for a couple of months a year, and I want this instrument package and I want two of them on board, so if one goes down I’ve got them instantly going, ‘cause I can’t interrupt a long measurement. And I want engineering support.’ The German navy provided that, very helpful. And they all said yes, yes, yes. And I said, ‘I need a few more people.’ So I took my key people from England. Malcolm MacVean, who had made the model of the front, went with me. Harry Leach, who was sort of my experimental support man, went with me. They all got positions. And Peter Minnett, who was a PhD student, got – they provided the positions. This is what they do, the way the German Kultur Minister works. When you’re getting a job you’re able to negotiate for what you need. And I was inheriting massive resources of the institute. I mean, in my department there was a cartography department. I could draw maps. I produced atlases, I literally produced atlases while I was there, specialist atlases of the upper ocean.

[0:09:45]

So it was all agreed and the next year we started. As it happened, the next year, the first year I was there, was the year of one of the world – no, of the GARP, Global Atmospheric Research Programme, projects on air sea interaction, called JASIN, which is Joint Air Sea Interaction experiment, in which ships were all – different countries who belonged sent ships and aircraft to a location west of the Hebrides, the Atlantic, west of Scotland, at a place chosen because it was under the track of a satellite that had just been launched by NASA. NASA had launched the first satellite John Woods Page 119 C1379/64 Track 5 that was observing the ocean with a whole set of different microwave instruments, radars. And this was expected to revolutionise oceanography and indeed it did. But of course a brand new set of techniques had to be checked out, had to be calibrated. And so this experiment was designed to be there. And the instruments were going to perform best in rough weather. And we had the most almighty storm, perfect for the experiment, quite miserable on a thousand ton ship [laughs], but – so that was – and that was good because – one has to have a very good working relationship with the captain of the ship and he – it was his first command and he was very nervous. I was a new boy, I was very nervous, but we got on well. Herr Schmichler, Captain Schmichler. Later on I was able to help him personally when his boy – he did some schooling in England. So we formed a very good relationship in that cruise. And so from then on we knew that we could work together. The tension between a captain and a chief scientist, it’s a very strange relationship. The captain is the captain of the ship and what he says goes. The chief scientist can be either dismissed as a passenger, which he is not, he’s acting as the owner, because the university owns the ship. I was the professor from the university so I was representing the owners. So the tension between captain – and the captain can’t go back and say, you know, we didn’t succeed because I decided the ship shouldn’t – it was too dangerous to do what they wanted to do or something. The captain’s motivated to make sure the science worked but had to be the captain. So getting on well is very, very – any oceanographer will tell you that the relationship between chief scientist and captain is absolutely vital.

What was your strategy then for making sure that you did get on well?

No more than all chief scientists, you make sure that at the end of the working day you sit down and have a drink with the captain and talk about what’s been achieved and what you want to do, and make sure that there’s absolute transparency, that he knows what’s in your mind, he knows what’s working and what’s not working, no surprises. So that he feels that one isn’t going to suddenly pull a rabbit out of the hat and say now I want to do this, which wasn’t on his agenda at all. Trust, trust and the feeling of – the only problem I had with him was that he was German and I was English and the Germans and the English have slightly different senses of humour. And I had terrible trouble at making jokes. Now he once went into a black mood for two days, when the captain’s in a black mood the whole ship is unhappy, because I John Woods Page 120 C1379/64 Track 5 had made some stupid little joke as we were turning in for the night after a drink together. And he finally came to me, he said, ‘I want to come up to your cabin and have a word with you.’ And I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ He said, ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about that story you said.’ He said, ‘In Germany we only ever make jokes at somebody’s expense.’ I said, ‘In England we only make jokes just to be funny.’ He said, ‘That’s what I realised it must be. It took me two days to struggle with myself to work out who you were getting it.’ And he said, ‘I thought you obviously were getting at me but I couldn’t work out how or why or what was behind it and finally I worked out there wasn’t anything behind it.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ So then, you know, that sort of settling takes time, different cultures. Much easier on Discovery where you’re dealing with an English captain and an English chief scientist, then you can talk about Winnie the Pooh, but you can’t do that, you know [laughs]. So it took some time. But he had a lot of goodwill, I think I had goodwill, and we formed a good relationship for the next eight years.

[0:15:24]

So each year we went out. And I decided that the best measurements, the best data in the environment, are usually when you choose some very simple plan and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, so you get a timed series of measurements, because if you just go around scattershot everywhere making measurements you get – you think you’ve got lots of data but none of them can really be supported by the others. So I decided that we would choose a standard ship’s track, starting in the Azures and going up to Greenland. Didn’t go all the way to Greenland, we stopped at sixty five north, if I remember correctly. And that was our standard track, every time we – the team, the equipment, all went out to Portugal, then out to Lisbon and then out to the Azures. And the ship, of course, was used by other teams for other purposes. And in the institute I had a good enough relationship with others that I convinced them that there was work they could do from the Azures, which is the middle of the Atlantic It’s a wonderful base from which one can radiate out. And so a lot of them kind of bought into the idea of using the Azures as a forward base each year, which suited me fine and suited others very well, both biologists, chemists, physicists, they all could see a lot in it. And one of the reasons was that the International Law of the Sea was coming in, allocated 200 mile zones to coastal states, and they were – it was all so new, they John Woods Page 121 C1379/64 Track 5 were nervous about having foreign research ships prowling around in what’s now their land. Ships had every right to be there, according to the Law of the Sea, but they had the ability to send a boat and say stop. And technically before every cruise one has to have political clearance from the host state, the state you’re going to, whose waters you’ll be working in, and that clearance had to be organised and there was somebody in the Kiel Institute who did it. Every institute has somebody who does that. And it goes through the embassy and it’s a very formal thing. And if the hosting country just sits on their hands and never actually responds positively, the ship can’t go there. We couldn’t get Discovery into Indian waters for ten years, not because Discovery was doing anything but they wanted to show they had the power to say no, very sad. But Portugal had a very good relationship with Germany. Germany was providing, I think, quite a lot of aid to Portugal at the time and there was no question of automatic approval for everything. And once we’d started going there regularly they got so used to it, it was just, you know, done on the nod. So it was easy and that made a lot less hassle for lots of scientists doing different things. They could go to a place with lots of interest without any political difficulties. For me, I chose this line. It passed through from the Sargasso Sea Gyre, of which the Gulf Stream is part, up beyond the North Atlantic front, or the North Atlantic drift, into the Arctic Gyre. So it was going through quite a big regime change, so one had a long enough line to get a good idea about how fronts were in different places and how – then I said, well, we’ll do it at a different month of the year every year, so we could build up – with some repetitions, we could build up the seasonal variation. So we couldn’t do all the months the same year because we couldn’t get the ship out, and we’d exhaust ourselves, but we’d do an April one year and a May another year and June another year and so on, build it up, and then we’d go back and do repeats. And so this simple, simple plan, one line, do it regularly, look at the seasonal variation, repeat to make sure that, you know, you see the internal variation and – so that’s what I did for the next eight years.

[0:20:11]

And it was very worthwhile, a lot came out of it, a lot of good scientific papers came out of it, and it provoked a lot of thinking, theoretical thinking, about why the structures were as we saw them, which – they key question, which hadn’t been John Woods Page 122 C1379/64 Track 5 resolved in oceanography, is exactly how the water in the deep ocean, or the middle of the ocean, gets its properties. It’s known it must get its properties when the water is affected by the atmosphere and then the water is forced down, by processes that were not at all clear, into the deeper interior of the ocean, retaining the properties that it had acquired last time it was up near the surface, and that might have been hundreds of years ago or ten years ago. And I developed a theory for that, which is now the standard theory and is widely used, about how the seasonal variation in the upper levels of the ocean, in the winter the water’s cooling because the days are short, the amount of sunlight per day is less, putting in less heat than the amount of cooling sucked out by the atmosphere, by the wind blowing over. Like drawing laundry, it pulls out moisture and therefore latent heat. So in the winter the ocean is cooling down and getting mixed by strong winds and so the convection drives deeper and deeper and deeper, but it only gets to a certain depth. Then one day in the spring the sun finally puts in more heat that day than the atmosphere takes out and then for the rest of the summer, more and more and more. And so suddenly this depth of the mixing gets less and less and less and superimpose that, the diurnal variation, which we’d looked at in Malta. So I realised that how deep it gets in winter isn’t a single universal depth, it varies geographically. And putting all that together, I was able to show how the water in one place, mixed in one place, as it drifts around the ocean due to the ocean circulation, finds itself in the interior of the ocean rather than in the surface layers of the ocean, and then retains those properties. And that process is called ventilation of the thermocline. The … so that all was hanging together. It was a classic example of exploratory fieldwork, going to see what was there, but with some ideas – to call them hypotheses would be too much, but one isn’t with eyes closed. I mean, after all the Malta years I knew a lot of what might be going on, but that was the Mediterranean. Now we’re out in the open Atlantic with much bigger annual cycles and big geographical variation as we went up to Greenland from the Azures. I mean, from the subtropics up to the sub Arctic. And the – it provoked a lot of thinking about how the atmosphere in the ocean – the mechanism of how they worked together. And of course that was extremely relevant to climate. And as I had been working for a number of years on international committees concerned with climate change, the work I was doing in my own research, suddenly the upper ocean, instead of being something that real oceanographers thought was a bit, you know, of a sideline, became central because of the climate issue. John Woods Page 123 C1379/64 Track 5

Should we then …?

Shall we pause for a …?

[0:24:34]

Yes, you’ve mentioned your involvement in global climate research there. So I think it would be sensible just to pop back to Southampton and to explore the origin of your involvement in what might be called international climate science, I suppose. And I think this begins with a joint organising committee for a particular project, but you’ll explain.

Yes. I was at Southampton. I can’t remember the year that I was asked to do it. It must have been about ’74, ’75. Out of the blue I was asked, would I be interested in joining a committee that was looking to help weather forecasting become global. And it was called the Global Atmospheric Research Programme and it had been started a few years earlier, triggered by a speech that Kennedy, President Kennedy, had made at the United Nations. Just as he had called for a great move forward to put a man on the moon and get him back again, he said, now is the time to get meteorology a step forward. The last big international programme had been the International Geophysical Year in the ‘50s, when I was at school, and I’d kept a scrapbook with everything I could find about it. I was fascinated by it, especially the Antarctic. But he said, now let’s have another international programme and let’s get meteorology – the numerical models are the way ahead, they’ve proved themselves but they’re very limited in region of the globe, both the British one, where it’s just a sector of Europe and the Atlantic, and the American one was just the American continent with a bit of Atlantic, bit of Pacific. And he said his advisors told him with a great push it would be possible to have global weather forecasting models, computer models that – and then they didn’t have any sidewalls because the – the whole lot, and it was a dream. And he said but he was advised that it would take a substantial research programme to design and test the computer models and to collect the data that would be needed globally, because almost all the data was in the northern hemisphere and they were very patchy too. Africa was – there was almost nothing. There were a few places, John Woods Page 124 C1379/64 Track 5 like Kenya, where the East African Meteorological Service was doing a good job, South Africa, North Africa too. But Africa is an enormous area, really enormous, and there were almost no observations coming in. And that was going to be a serious problem for weather forecasting when it went global. The southern hemisphere was almost an unobserved region. And it wasn’t clear how to tackle that problem. The first preliminary prototype satellites to look at the atmosphere had been flying, NASA had been flying them, so it looked as if satellites were going to play a part, but it wasn’t at all clear how. So he called for this Global Atmospheric Research Programme, the United Nations backed it, countries discussed it at the World Meteorological Organisation and then they invited the International Council of Scientific Unions, the scientists’ union rather than the UN side, to join in. And they came in as the poor partner but they could tap the scientific community in a way that the UN was unable to do so. So it had backing from those two international organisations. It had enthusiastic support from the leading countries in weather forecasting and the general nod of approval at the UN. It was a good time to try something like that. And a small committee was formed, called the joint organising committee, a dozen people, and they were charged with progressing – deciding what should be done, how it should be done, coming up with blueprints if necessary for experiments or for model tests or whatever. And an invitation to sit in that group of twelve, wow, they were the leading meteorologists of the day. My boss was there, my old boss from the Met Office, John Sawyer, was there. I mean, they were – the people one would want to sit round a table were all there.

Which other British scientists were …?

Erm … I was the British scientist and John Sawyer. John Sawyer from the Met Office, me from the academic side, ex Met Office but labelled – so he was nominated from the Meteorological Office and I was nominated by the Royal Society through the International Council for Scientific Unions. So one from academia, one from – and two from Britain was out of proportion when you think there were only twelve people for the whole world, but Britain had played a leading role in the development of the subject after all. LF Richardson had invented the method that was being used. The Americans were strong. Joe Smagorinsky was very important. He had studied – he had been a bright young kid, who Neumann, von Neumann, you know, the pioneering John Woods Page 125 C1379/64 Track 5 of computing in America, Turing in Britain, Neumann in America – Neumann had taken this young boy and said, ‘We’re going to use these new things called computers to forecast the weather.’ What a life chance. He was given the life chance that I was given in his way, very clever, interesting man. Later on he became chairman but when I first joined he wasn’t. Anyway, it was a very marvellous experience. They were people you didn’t have to say things twice to, you know. They understood the point you were making and if they didn’t they would ask questions until they did understand, but you didn’t have to treat them like students and say it three times. It became very exciting ‘cause the – it was decided that they would publish, the committee of twelve would publish or commission, a series of definitive papers, not peer review, just written by them or commissioned by them of people they wanted to write sections, on different aspects of what it would take to do global weather forecasting. Those papers became the documents of the generation. Every young kid read them, every professor wanted to read them and the chance to put them together was marvellous. It was a very, very respected and high powered group of people who were charming and we had great fun together. There was a little bit of pushing and shoving with the Russians sometimes, but the people were good scientists and in the end they forgot where they came from and got on with the science.

[0:32:55]

What did that consist of, the pushing and shoving?

Well, I’ll give you an example later. First of all, the reason why I was chosen. The remit that Kennedy had proposed, which was accepted, was to essentially do two things, find out what it would take to forecast the weather globally – yes, globally, for a month ahead, very optimistic. We now know for theoretical reasons you can’t do it for more than about a week ahead because of the chaotic nature of the – unpredictable nature of the atmosphere. Even with perfect observations you wouldn’t be able to do it more than a week or ten days ahead. But that wasn’t known then, just – it wasn’t known that the atmosphere was chaotic; the whole theory hadn’t been developed. And there were very bright academics who were beginning to think along those lines. And that knowledge was assimilated into the thinking of the committee, so what it would take to do global forecasting. So the first question was, can you make weather John Woods Page 126 C1379/64 Track 5 forecasts for ideally up to a month ahead, that wasn’t possible, and can you do it globally. Second question is, can you understand how the weather changes from year to year. It didn’t say so but essentially it was looking at climate. By the time I joined the committee it had been running for a few years. I was recruited to help accelerate the second part of it, because it was felt that no progress would be made without taking account of the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean. There was already one oceanographer, two oceanographers on – no, one oceanographer on the committee, a Canadian, Bob Stewart, who had been trained in Cambridge inevitably, but strangely enough, had spent his post doc years in Moscow, spoke Russian, had learnt himself about the Russian work on turbulence, had done subsequently a lot of work on turbulence. One of the few people who’d thought about turbulence in the sea. And working in Canada, he talked the Canadian navy into making instruments to measure turbulence in the sea. And he was one – he was the host of that famous meeting in Canada of the half a dozen of us who were actually starting the whole subject of turbulence in the ocean. He was a big man, he was a fine man. We became extremely close friends. He and I were charged with thinking about what came to be called the second objective of GARP, which now we think of as the climate. The Americans had some thoughts and Joe Smagorinsky put them on the table, and that was that in the Pacific there’s a particular phenomenon called the El Nino, which – every few years suddenly the water off the American, South American, North American coast, suddenly becomes much warmer, for reasons which were far from clear. But it ended up with a massive killing of the anchovy fisheries in Peru. It was a mega – and it was felt that this was not global but it was a good start, to have a crack at that. The Pacific’s a big part of the world. And so the Americans had – and it affected America [laughs] and their clients in South America. So the Americans were pushing hard for the focus of the second objective to be to look at this problem. At about that time a – I suppose he was German born but American citizen by then, Klaus Wyrtki, working in Hawaii, came up with a hypothesis as to how the whole thing worked. And it was due to a very interesting – he turned out to be right, that it was a disturbance of the monsoon, so on the western side of the Pacific, triggered off a special class of planetary wave, called an equatorial Kelvin wave, which took about nine months to get across the Atlantic – no, the Pacific, until it arrived at the coast of the Americas, where it split and one half went north along the coast of North America and one part went – they went poleward, in other words. And that in doing so it either John Woods Page 127 C1379/64 Track 5

– in some phase of the wave it brought up cold water, in other phases it pushed it down and warm water accumulated. It was an elegant simple theory, just the sort of thing academics should be doing. But it had enormous implications because that wave took enough time to get across the Atlantic that if you could spot it when it was still on the western side of the Atlantic, you had six months’ warning before it arrived. Wow, forecastability, useful forecastability. And so the Americans got extremely excited by this and proposed that there should be – that should be the focus of the GARP second objective. The, er … and it did become a major experiment later under the World Climate Research Programme and it had – it was strong American support.

[0:39:04]

But there were people in Europe who said, well, the Pacific’s important, it’s a long way away and there are other things that are interesting [laughs]. And one of the things was, well, what about hurricanes. There’d been a long period with very few hurricanes and so hurricanes weren’t so high on the agenda. And the insurance companies, like Lloyds, were able to collect less and less in premiums because there didn’t seem to be any hurricanes happening, or very rarely. So there was a suggestion that there should be something in the Atlantic. Now it was thought that hurricanes began when a certain meteorological condition occurred off the west coast of Africa and the hurricanes then migrated across towards America, growing until, as they arrived off the Gulf of Mexico and either went up the American coast or into the Gulf of Mexico and around Texas and so on – there was very little possibility of predicting the course of a hurricane in those days. The Hurricane Centre – I was actually staying for my sabbatical in Miami in the Hurricane Centre, strangely enough, so I saw it firsthand. It was in ’68. And so I had seen it firsthand. But they said, we may not be able to predict in detail how they track and whether they suddenly veer off to California or Mexico or whatever, but at least we need to know if one’s coming. And by looking at the conditions off Senegal, it was going to be possible to get early warning of the onset, probable onset, of hurricanes. And that led to the Global Atlantic Tropical Experiment, which happened long before the Pacific one. The Pacific one took a long time to spin up. This Atlantic one spun up rather rapidly. There was a lot of support for it, a large number of research ships were allocated to it, and I was on Discovery, we went down. The ships were essentially platforms for John Woods Page 128 C1379/64 Track 5 launching radiosondes to carry – balloons that carry instruments up into the atmosphere to measure the temperature and humidity. And so ships may have been research ships but really they could have just been a merchant ship because all they did was have to have the ability to pump up a balloon with hydrogen and get it out and up into the air. But the feeling was that – the ships were spread out over a substantial area, but within the location, nominal location, of each ship, it would be possible to move around a bit. And that meant the oceanographers got interested because they could begin to move their ships around, still staying nominally close to where they were launching the balloons, a little bit north, south, east, west, as long as it wasn’t too far, wouldn’t affect the analysis of the atmosphere from the balloons being launched. And I thought, marvellous, I could begin to test the ideas, which I subsequently developed in Kiel. I could test them in like a trial. And I managed to get the Canadians to join in with their big research ship, and the Miami people with their tiny research ship, so that we had three ships going around an agreed pattern, all measuring the upper ocean with whatever instrument we had to get – get our hands on on. And so that was a – for me, it was a wonderful trial of what subsequently became a very serious programme in Kiel. It wasn’t – I didn’t expect it to make any big discoveries but it did, it made one discovery, which wouldn’t have needed all three ships on it [laughs]. But what we found was that the density surfaces I’d been talking about before, they go up and down with internal waves and they get tipped up by these fronts, or tipped up – when fronts form they tip up. But one of the important ideas that John Sawyer had had, his theory, was that the spacing between pairs of density surface, density a bit less, a bit lighter, one a bit heavier, spaced maybe ten metres apart on average – on one side of the jet they’d be further apart and on the other side they’d be closer together. And that was an absolutely vital part of his theory. And so I thought, well, at least we can have a look and see if we can see that. And what I discovered is, there were enormous differences in the spacing. It wasn’t just a subtle ten percent, there were factors of ten. I thought, wow, what on earth is going on, this is far more than I had expected, because I hadn’t thought about it, but the scaling in his theory included the latitude. And that the amplitude of the difference, when you looked at his theory carefully, would be much greater as you get towards the equator. In the jargon it’s because of the absolute vorticity rather than relative vorticity, something that had been overlooked because it didn’t really matter in the mid latitudes like the Mediterranean. But when you got down at – we were John Woods Page 129 C1379/64 Track 5 down at, if I remember correctly, eight degrees north, and the – these enormous changes. At first it just seemed to be, oh, there’s something stupid going on, but of course you get back to Southampton and think about it, start doing some reading – should have gone and spoken immediately with John Sawyer but I thought at least I’d do some homework before I talked to him. And it became clear to me that it was this affect of low latitude and what I was seeing was an extremely important phenomenon acting. And this was the first time there’d been any measurements of it, of conservation of potential vorticity. Now this is the very heart of dynamical oceanography and dynamical meteorology, that there is a property of a water – taken a bucketful of water, but – it has something called potential vorticity. It’s related to angular momentum. One things of the famous laws, conservation of angular momentum, if something’s spinning then it retains its – without a great talk on it, you can’t change it saying a momentum. There’s no way of putting a talk into the ocean other than from the wind. And if this was deep inside the ocean it was slippery, it was laminar flow. So this – once some water had got this angular momentum, this – it’s not purely angular momentum but it’s potential vorticity. It’s related to angular momentum. Once it had got it, it could not change it. It was a very, very conservative property. The water could drift around the ocean and it would retain it. Only would it lose it, change it, if the water was turbulent. Now I’d discovered the water is not turbulent, which opened up a very, very interesting possibility. Whereas before it had assumed the ocean was wildly turbulent and so the conservation of potential vorticity was a curiosity rather than something that could be used as a great dynamical weapon. And it hadn’t occurred to me that that was a consequence of my discovery of laminar flow, but when I got back to Southampton and started thinking about it after GATE, I realised that there was a big, big story here, that it was possible, with the sort of equipment that I had board on Discovery, and much better with the new equipment I had in Kiel, with the system I had in there – it was designed specifically to measure it properly, that we could relate observations to theory in a way that previously had been unimaginable. It would really be possible to make measurements for the first time of this elusive quality, property, called potential vorticity. And any dynamist was saying, if you measure that we’re home, that’s the – all the theories had that at its very heart. I was – the man who first identified it as the key property was a man called Eady, who was a reader at Imperial College in the meteorology department. And he lectured me when I was a Masters student there so I John Woods Page 130 C1379/64 Track 5 knew all about potential vorticity. And he had shown how it leads to weird affects in the atmosphere, this law of the conservation of potential vorticity. It leads to something called negative vorticity – negative viscosity, I’m sorry. Negative viscosity. Viscosity we think of as something that smears out. So if you have a narrow jet and you’ve got viscosity gradually the momentum will diffuse and the jet will come broader and broader and weaker and weaker, like diffusion of a chemical. You drop a spot of dye into the sea, if it’s turbulent it will diffuse away and get more and more dilute as it gets spread over a large area. Negative viscosity, if you work on it, it concentrates it. It’s sort of pretty counterintuitive. But it is a direct consequence of the conservation of potential vorticity and Eady had discovered that. He was a strange man, very, very dreamy. Halfway through the lecture course he was giving me, he committed suicide sadly, so never finished it. But he had sewn the seeds of modern dynamical meteorology.

In what way dreamy, what made you say that he was dreamy?

He was a lateral thinker, who – although in his own research obviously he was able to concentrate mightily to have these fundamental ideas, but in giving a lecture on dynamical meteorology he started with the formation of the universe [laughs], because it fascinated him and he thought he would put it into the lecture course. And when challenged he said, ‘Well, you know, you have to start big and then you get smaller.’ So he got the formation of the solar system. It was a very badly constructed course because it didn’t concentrate on what the course was about, but his mind was on other things. Very, very sad because he was a great man.

[0:51:46]

But the – so I had the seeds and the elements were there in the back of my mind and it was when, as I say, I got back to Southampton, started thinking about it, I suddenly clicked, I’d been measuring potential vorticity. Oh, it is possible to measure it. I’d measured it because the signal was very strong near the equator. More difficult up near the pole but with care and good instruments it would still be done. And if one can map it then that was really the start of serious dynamical oceanography rather John Woods Page 131 C1379/64 Track 5 than theoretical dynamical oceanography. It was real physics where we had both measurements and theory back and forth.

How did the wider spacing of the flow layers at either side – on one side of the front compared to the other, relate to the conservation of potential vorticity?

I don’t want this to turn into a lecture. But the metaphor, which is a very useful one, is, if you think of an ice skater showing off, spinning around – we’re all used to seeing this on television, maybe you do it yourself. Anyway, but then the ice skater’s spinning like mad, will put the arms out and will spin more slowly, and then bring the arms in and spin faster and faster and faster. That means the mass is spread out horizontally further, which is the equivalent to the mass being compressed. If it was a cylinder, the only way to make it go horizontally is to make the top go [demonstrates] [laughs]. So think of a cylinder defined by two density surfaces. If they’ve become closer, that is like the arms going out and so the rotation slows down. If they go further apart, the rotation spins up. And so the conservations is as this changed the water spins up, slows down, spins up, slows down, but ultimately there is a fixed amount of potential vorticity in the water, which says, for a standard thickness they’ve got a standard rotation rate. And that’s intrinsic to that lump of water. Another lump of water the other side of the jet, at the other side of the front, has a different intrinsic amount. They both will change in the same way if they stretch or not, but they’re different. And that means that if, in a simple way, the lower density surface were flat, if the whirl is closer this side and further apart that side, there has to be a slope. Ah, that’s baraclinity, that gives a jet. So the spacing between them is intimately related to the jet. And as they’re pushed closer and closer together, the relative dense slope changes, it gets steeper and so the jet accelerates. So there’s a close relationship between the flow and the spacing between the density surfaces. And so what I was seeing for the first time was that I could measure the spacing between the density surfaces. I couldn’t at that stage measure the velocity but with a new instrument in the Kiel boat I could. So anyway, so I got a great personal payoff. My research student who was with me, Peter Minnett, wrote it up for his PhD and got a very nice PhD out of it and he’s now a professor, well established in America. So that was the first sort of sniff into the world of the ocean by the Global Atmospheric Research Programme, but it was overwhelmingly targeted at the first objective of GARP, which John Woods Page 132 C1379/64 Track 5 was to get the weather global and for longer periods. The – it became clear that on the timescale available, the second objective had to be kicked into touch, and it was already being considered a possibility there might be a follow up international programme that would look at climate rather than weather. And it was felt that the Global Atmospheric Research Programme better concentrate on the first bit. And the members of it, the two of us, Bob Stewart and myself, would start to prepare the ground for the forthcoming World Climate Research Programme. It hadn’t been through the UN at that stage, but it was talked about and it was felt if we could put together a package from the authoritative – by then the JOC for GARP was the authority, so if we came up with a package of something sensible, that could form the basis of a World Climate Research Programme and then GARP could concentrate on number one job, which was weather forecasting. And that decision was made soon after I joined. In fact I think they had probably made it before I joined. And so I was taken on board to help prepare for what was coming next, a sort of John the Baptist [laughs]. And so the GARP focussed on the weather and allowed two of us – we were involved in all the discussions on the weather project, but the ocean was not playing a large part in the weather programme, but we were given, you know, the remit to begin to prepare for a serious World Climate Research Programme.

[0:58:15]

From this vantage point, what did you see or hear of discussions of climate modification as a weapon, which I think was supposed to have occurred in and around the Met Office at this time? And what partly inspires that question is that Nature artic’, little sort of ‘from my [our] correspondent’ pieces in Nature at the time written about GATE, report that there were certain countries, probably I think it’s talking about African countries, who were sort of suspicious almost of the presence of this research project and this exercise.

Okay. Well, it was not on anybody’s radar, not at all, because we were in – we were the professionals in the business and we knew the forces of nature were vastly more than anything one could do to affect the weather, let alone climate. Well, the weather anyway. Of course, pollution of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide has affected climate, but not as a weapon, as an unwanted side effect of industrialisation and John Woods Page 133 C1379/64 Track 5 population growth, so – meaning food and methane. So it was not at all on the agenda and if there’s any speculative correspondence floating around – there’s always stupid speculation. But I do understand that in the developing countries, or quite frankly the undeveloping countries, Africa was going down the – I mean, Africa has never from deglobalisation. I know it’s not politically correct to say that, but I’ve been in Africa and seen what’s left now after – Kenya was wonderful and it’s a mess now. Only South Africa is hanging in there and only just. But politics like that was not at all there. But there was a lot of suspicion from – I mentioned earlier that there was suspicion in coastal states, which had suddenly been told you can have 200 miles of your coastline to exploit economically, and they thought every research ship from in a country was sneakily prospecting for oil or something. Even though you always took local scientists on board, who knew the business and could see that it was happening, nevertheless they thought there were secret compartments under the ship or – there was suspicion. But the big boys in the old colonial powers, and that includes the United States, were charging ahead and telling everybody else what was going to happen, and the other countries weren’t in a position to argue. So it was a difficult – but climate as a weapon, no, I don’t think – I never heard of anything like that. And it would have been laughed out of court by the simplest back of the envelope sum by any member of the JOC.

[1:01:55]

To what extent did the JOC have a role in attempting to encourage developing countries to take part in global climate experiments, particularly as, as you say, the places where there were gaps in data tended to be the places – tended to be tropical places.

I think the simple answer is none at all. The responsibility rested with the World Meteorological Organisation, which had representatives from every country in the world, and it was their job to do it. There was a very strong feeling that the joint organising committee was very small, it had an enormous task on its hands and it shouldn’t be distracted. Nevertheless, there were reports each year to the annual meeting of the World Meteorological Organisation. The chairman would go along and give an annual report to brief all the member states about the current thinking. John Woods Page 134 C1379/64 Track 5

And of course the publications were extremely important. Publications were pouring out, really – documents that made the textbooks look very old fashioned. I mean, these were the state of the art accounts of modern thinking about the atmosphere. So it was lucky because if the UN system had asked, or insisted, that the JOC should get involved in the difficult political process of discussing such matters, the progress would not have been made. It would have been a distraction. And luckily there were enough sensible voices around to make sure that that didn’t happen. And I must say that the ICSU, the International Council of Scientific Unions, was very helpful there, ‘cause their job was to continually tug it back to the hard science and not let it get bogged down in politics. I don’t think it was a difficult job because I think there was an absolute understanding all round that it was a wonderful endeavour but it would only succeed with a lot of hard work and let the guys get on and do the design work.

[1:04:23]

And so, as you say, the two of you, while the rest of the joint organising committee tended to be involved in planning for this attempt to improve – or this weather forecasting focussed on hurricanes and …

Well, no, no, that was just one tiny aspect. It was like the Dieppe raid before Normandy. That was can we – it was almost planned like that, it was almost a sacrificial anode. If it hadn’t worked the planning still would have gone on for the bigger experiment, which was the Global Weather Experiment. But it was very, very good because it was a real project and it was a test, will countries come in, will they put their resources in, and they did. Even though it was highly focussed in a narrow – so it – it was a worthwhile experiment, it was not global, it was about one local phenomenon, hurricanes, rather important local phenomenon but nevertheless it was not global. It was largely promoted to see if the world would join in, and they did. A lot of resources were put in. But the experiment, which the GARP was working towards, was the Global Weather Experiment, which was to say, for a limited period of time, can we throw everything at the global atmosphere, get the data, and can we, before that happens, prepare the models so that they’re ready to accept the data when it’s flowing. On the JOC, one of the – they made some very, very important decisions. One decision, strategic decision, was to set up what became called the John Woods Page 135 C1379/64 Track 5

Numerical Experimentation Group. It was the club of those met services that had decent computing facilities and were already beginning to make weather forecasts, albeit on a partial global level. And there were only a handful of them. But that club was a committee of – a subcommittee of the – it was a group within the JOC for GARP. And it was absolutely vital, as it became clear that it would be necessary to try out this idea or try out that idea, somebody had to do it and this club had the resources, had the computers, and they got together and said, well, we’ll do this one if you do that one. They shared the jobs out. And it was dramatically improved when the European centre was established, which had big resources and didn’t have – it wasn’t a retailer for weather forecasts. It didn’t have the day to day job of briefing pilots before they took off. It just concentrated on wholesaling. It did global forecasts, which it then handed to national weather services to do with what they wanted. And it was roaring ahead and it was – had some brilliant people there and they cracked some very big problems. When observations are collected, they’re never everything you want, they’re patchy. Even after you’ve cleaned them up and thrown out the ones that had feet instead of metres and so on [laughs]. I mean, this is all very round the world. There are all sorts of things or people who measured above the heights where the radiosonde was rather than above sea level. There was a lot, a lot of cleaning up and correction. Even when all that had been done, they were under sampling what you wanted. And it was learnt – a very important trick was learnt and it was largely the European centre that cracked it, although the man who did it was actually from the Met Office. He’s now back in the Met Office.

Who was that?

Hmm … sorry, I’ll have to go back. It’s slipped my mind. It’ll come back to me. The trick that was learnt was that if you take the data, which you know are badly sampling the system, and reconcile them with the laws of physics that the model is using. And we know the laws of physics are right. But if you feed those data in initially the whole thing wobbles because the data don’t sort of sit comfortably. And what’s happened is the model is run forward in time until those wobbles have settled down and one ends up with what is called a balanced system. And that is then the initial state from which you make a forecast. Now it turned out that there are a variety of ways of doing this balancing and it ended up with some extremely sophisticated John Woods Page 136 C1379/64 Track 5 mathematics, which involved going backwards and forwards in time with different scales. It really is one of the triumphs of twentieth century mathematics that that was learnt. Turned out that that’s why LF Richardson’s model gave a lousy forecast when he did it by hand. He had no idea about that. He thought that – he didn’t think about the observations not being consistent with the equations until there was a balancing process. And that balancing process made weather forecasting what it is now. It is the very heart of the matter. There’s still various ways in which it can be done and the research is still progressing, but those were the sorts of things that the numerical experimental group were grappling with. Without success with that problem, and a number of other problems, there would never have been global weather forecasting. Another problem was that it was realised that there are many places in the world where there are no ships to let off radiosondes in the middle of the ocean, and in the southern hemisphere, well, there’s very few places from which to release – South Africa, a few in South America, then a great gap. And it was thought satellites were going to fill the gap. Satellites were being developed which, using infrared, could measure the temperature profile. They measured a series of radiances with different weighting functions from which you could invert it to work out a temperature profile. And that temperature profile could be fed into the models as though it had been measured as a temperature profile and that was the great hope. It didn’t work, it just didn’t work. For years and years and years it ought to have worked but it didn’t work. They showed that if you didn’t have the measurements you got as good results as if you did have the measurements. And all of these experiments – there were experiments called OSSIEs, observing system simulation experiments, where you try the same forecast with this kind of measurement, that kind of measurement – and this is what the experiments largely did, they provided a whole suite of measurements from which one could discover which one really had the impact on getting the forecast right. And finally the solution which emerged led to a complete reworking of the entire suite of weather forecasting models, so that they didn’t assimilate a temperature profile that had been deduced from the radiance profiles. They assimilated the radiance profiles directly. The models were taught to be able to use the direct satellite observations. And then, click, suddenly that data was valuable, because a lot of the value had been lost in the conversion process. It took years to sort that out. But that’s what the Numerical Experimentation Group got their teeth into, those fundamental problems. John Woods Page 137 C1379/64 Track 5

[1:13:34]

They of course – that became the template later on for the ocean experiments. We kept going on numerical experiments. Of course we focussed it on the ocean issues. But that trick was wonderful. The trouble is, when it came to the oceans, not a single ocean lab had a computer of that class. And the meteorologists, with the best will in the world, weren’t into allocating their scarce resources. They were onto sorting out weather forecasting. And the solution, thank goodness, came from getting hold of the computers used for nuclear research at the great nuclear research labs, where they had computers much bigger than the weather forecasters had for simulating the early first microsecond of a nuclear explosion, which meant they didn’t have to do the nuclear explosion. They didn’t have to have atmospheric tests, they were able to do it on a computer. Wow, that was big science. That was brilliant science. But those computers – some of their power was allocated to the Numerical Experimentation Group later on for the oceans. Without that we couldn’t have done the ocean stuff. But that’s looking ahead.

[1:14:53]

The Global Weather Experiment was very exciting ‘cause it was going to collect data and by then hopefully the models would be ready to receive it. Still lots of improvement afterwards but, I mean, nevertheless the data have been used and used and used again, of course, because you can sometimes sustain a much richer observing system for a limited period than you can afford to have running permanently. That’s what these great experiments are about. So you then have a database which can be used as a test for lots of technical advances on the modelling side. The discussions in the joint organising committee of course focussed on what sort of measurements. The satellites were very new and unproven. But the satellite radiometers, the ones that gave a profile, hopefully a profile of temperature in the atmosphere, were very new. Turned out actually it was many years later that their full value – now they are absolutely crucial and they do fill the gap in the places where there are no other observations. But in those days they were still difficult. And remember that the wind was calculated from measurements at two places, so that the John Woods Page 138 C1379/64 Track 5 pressure here is more than the pressure there and that’s a force, pressure gradient is a force, and that leads to an acceleration, which gives you the wind, the so called geostrophic wind. So it’s only a network of measurement gives you the wind, one measurement doesn’t give you the wind. And it can only be inferred from this so called geostrophic relationship, which relates the difference in pressure to the latitude in the earth’s rotation, from which you can deduce what the wind speed must be at that place, standard calculation. Fine, but it does depend on the latitude and the relationship gets a bit flaky when you get to the tropics, where the Coriolis Effect, the vertical component of the earth’s rotation, is getting weaker and weaker and weaker. So the geostrophic calculation sort of runs out of steam in the tropics. It’s great up at mid latitudes with – where we are here in the north, get down to GATE, it just wouldn’t have worked at all. So another method had to be found to measure the wind in the tropics and that was one of the central discussion points, how – because the tropics, if you take the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, that’s half the size of the globe, half the area of the globe, so the tropics are a very, very large part of the globe. And if you don’t know where the wind is there you’re not going to do a very good job in forecasting the weather globally. It was a sort of show stopping problem and there was a lot of discussion about how to solve this problem. The French came up with a very clever idea and there was a young Frenchman, young – I was just a bit younger than him and he was very upset about that. But he was the Benjamin on the committee, the young boy on the committee, until I turned up and then he discovered that he was no longer the youngest kid on the block. He was certainly very, very much cleverer than me, well, in his way, in a French way. And he had picked up an idea that was around in France, that one could put into the atmosphere balloons that would settle at a fixed height in the atmosphere and drift, and you could track the position and therefore deduce the wind. It’s now an absolute standard measurement in the ocean, to drop a drifter into the ocean and let it settle at a depth. It’s done by having the compressibility slightly less than the compressibility of water, so it goes down until, by sheer squeezing of it, it reaches a level where its density is the same as the water at that density. It can’t go deep, it can’t go up. And that’s a very important measurement in the ocean. And these balloons were thought to be a wonderful solution in the tropics. They were quite cheap, they could be launched in large numbers from home bases, places where you could have sort of launch sites, and the wind would smear them out and they would John Woods Page 139 C1379/64 Track 5 last for quite a long time. And that was on – that was part of the key programme for the Global Weather Experiment. That was definitely built in, that was going to solve the tropical problem, now we can get onto the other problems. So the French did a trial. They thought they’d done the trials but they did another trial to see how long the balloons lasted. And what they hadn’t allowed for is the balloons got wet. Maybe not the first day or so but sooner or later they got some moisture on them and started to sink down. And so the lifetime of the balloons was very much less than was expected. It turned out to be devastating that it just – they were not going to last long enough, yet it was – by then it was a very advanced stage. It was all built in as being the way that it was going to be done and everybody felt very comfortable about it, and then the French, Andre Morel, Pierre Morel, Pierre Morel on the committee were coming and saying, ‘Chaps, I’ve got bad news.’ Difficult for him because he’d been the great advocate of it and it seemed to be a wonderful way of saving the problem. It was under control, it was cheap, it was easily done, and if you needed a few more you just reduced – you know, it wasn’t like satellites. You can’t send up another satellite ‘cause you need one ‘cause it takes fifteen years to get a satellite launched. The thing is, you just turn the gas on and launch a few more. It seemed so wonderfully simple and it didn’t work, for unexpected reasons. Well, of course, with hindsight we can say, well, of course, but research isn’t like that. It was a genuine proposal which could well have worked and it could well have been a routine measurement made every day now.

[1:22:06]

So suddenly the tropical problem was back on the table with a vengeance. And I forget who it was, somebody said there’s this professor in Wisconsin who’s got an idea. He was on the next plane out to join the committee [laughs], Verner Suomi, Finnish, as you’d expect, but American citizen. And he had been using the very first geostationary satellite. Remember, the idea that if you have a satellite at the right height its orbit speed is the same as the rotation rate of the earth, so it hovers over the same place. And these were seen as being an important part of the Global Weather Experiment because they could take pictures, not – they could just about get to London, that was on the fringe. And you see the pictures every day now on the television. I mean, it is an absolutely routine system. And he’d been looking at the John Woods Page 140 C1379/64 Track 5 prototype and he thought – they take pictures every fifteen minutes and they’re not scanning, they just take a picture. And he thought he could see the movement in clouds. The same cloud could be identified in successive images fifteen minutes apart. And from how far it moved, he could work out the speed at the level of the cloud. The infrared told you the temperature and therefore the height of the cloud. So you knew the height of the cloud, you knew the speed, wonderful. And this was his academic research and it was going nicely and he didn’t expect to suddenly be tapped on the shoulder and told that the whole Global Weather Experiment is now going to depend on your method. But he was very good. He was also on very good terms with NASA, they liked him. In fact, they’ve just launched the latest American geostationary satellite called the Verner Suomi satellite in his honour, which is nice. So suddenly the Global Weather Experiment had the pieces in place and it was a wonderful success and it did lay the foundation for global weather forecasting. So GARP went out with a – having achieved what they’d been asked – well, half of what they’d been asked to do. The other half had been kicked into touch for a future World Climate Research Programme. So I learnt a lot of meteorology, because they were the right people there. God, everyone learnt a lot.

[1:25:12]

You said that there was some tussle with the Russians that you were going to tell me a story about later. Does that come later?

It really became – after the World Climate Research Programme was started. That started in 1980, I guess, if my memory’s right. And it was a very smooth transition. I mean, I forget, four or five of us just moved from GARP to the Royal Climate – there was Bob Stewart, myself, Pierre Morel, a Russian, Iszael I think it was, and Joe Smagorinsky. Joe Smagorinsky had got a very strong remit from back home saying that it’s this tropical Pacific El Nino project that’s going to be the project. Turned out to be one of two projects. And I was considered to be the person who didn’t play the game and insisted on the other project, but anyway, they both ended up beautifully so that’s fine. Jumping ahead, once we got going it was – I mean, we had to start from a clean sheet of paper. If you want to forecast the climate, what is the name of the game? What on earth – what measurements are needed, what kind of computers are John Woods Page 141 C1379/64 Track 5 needed, what is the whole nature of the thing? And we started with the hypothesis that all of the technology that had been developed for weather forecasting ought to be jolly useful. The climate obviously included the atmosphere [laughs], it was the bit that we were interested in. Again, jumping ahead a little bit, I, as you will be – I mean, I was obviously out of a meteorological state – well, I’d done an MSc in meteorology, I’d done a PhD in meteorology and I had worked in the Met Office, so I was pretty much in sympathy with meteorology. On the other hand, I was working on the ocean, indeed on the very uppermost layers of the ocean, which are in contact with the atmosphere or more in contact with the atmosphere than the deeper ocean, more frequently in contact with the atmosphere. And the – nevertheless, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the ocean must be the very heart of the World Climate Research Programme. If only because it was becoming increasingly clear as GARP proceeded, the results were coming through about the nature of predictability, which hadn’t been really studied. And there were theorists, one of them in MIT, who were banging the drum about limits to predictability. And in the end the European Centre did a series of experiments, brilliant numerical experiments, using their weather forecasting model and measured the limits to predictability in a very vivid way. And it was very clear that there was no way the weather could be forecast for a month. But in a way, the value of the observations made, you know, synchronised all around the world, twelve o’clock, midnight – the value of those instruments – the value of those observations rusted away by about a week. After that what was being predicted, having started with that state of the atmosphere, was no different from random. But, er … I’m simplifying. But the memory of the atmosphere, from the point of view – let’s be very clear, from the point of view of weather systems, weather forecasting, which ultimately means great attention to phase as well as amplitude. We want the phase, meaning when does the weather hit us [laughs]. It’s no good saying there are storms around, we want to know is it going to be stormy on Wednesday morning. And so phase is very, very important. And it was the phase that got lost after about a week. The phase then – if you ran a computer model, a weather forecasting model, ran it and ran it and ran it, you had storms that looked perfectly like storms and you had fronts that looked perfectly like fronts and it rained perfectly like rain and everything else, and you couldn’t really at first glance tell the difference between day one and day thirty-one, but what was lost was the phase. They weren’t where the real storms were after about a week. Even though, during that week, new John Woods Page 142 C1379/64 Track 5 storms were forming, nevertheless the information value of the data that was put in to kick start the whole – after all the balancing and everything else, that value was lost after about a week. Some certain weather conditions it may last ten days, but, you know, a month, forget it. And so I argued that if you want to forecast the climate for a month ahead – for a year – start again. If you want to predict the climate for a year – sorry, if you want to predict the climate for 100 years ahead, it’s not good relying on atmospheric measurements which lose their value in the first week or so. So what element of the planetary system had a memory longer than the weather in the atmosphere? That was the question. There were certain – if you change your questions about the atmosphere and get less preoccupied with the phase of individual storms, there are things, the monsoon, for example, which may have longer predictability, although at that stage that was purely a conjecture. There are other things that – people have said, well, maybe the storm track across the Atlantic, which is a stream of storms – at the moment they’re going up off Scotland, they were coming down here a couple of weeks ago. That storm track moves around and the way it moves around may be predictable beyond – it may be seasonably, although the history of attempting to do seasonable forecasts at the Met Office has been – which is typical of other places, has been very disappointing. Every now and again they seem to be getting onto something and then it sort of seems to slip through the fingers.

[1:33:02]

So I said, well, let’s forget the atmosphere, let’s assume that the job of the atmosphere is to deliver what the weather is like in a hundred years’ time, but to do so we’ve got to know what the surface temperature of the ocean is like and the surface of the continents are like, and the atmosphere will then settle to whatever it – it’s the boundary conditions of the atmosphere. And so the problem for climate is to predict the hundred conditions for the atmosphere. The boundary condition on land is almost unpredictable because of the anthropogenic changes. I wrote a paper about anthropogenic boundary conditions for – I forget. Oh, I gave a – I know, I gave a talk at the House of Lords and I talked about anthropogenic boundary conditions, and this got written up in Hansard. And I had a group of MPs asking me to pop in and talk to them about – I don’t know what they wanted me to talk about, I thought climate generally. And they said, ‘We want to know about the ABCs.’ I said, ‘What are the John Woods Page 143 C1379/64 Track 5

ABCs?’ They said, ‘Well, you invented it.’ I said, ‘No, my ABC, I don’t know.’ ‘This anthropogenic boundary conditions.’ ‘Oh fine, I’d never thought of them as ABCs.’ So I very strongly said, unless somebody can give me absolute case for showing I’m wrong, evidence that I’m wrong, then we should build the World Climate Research Programme. The target should be to predict the boundary conditions for the atmosphere. After all, we want to know the climate in the atmosphere, that’s where we live, that’s where our industry is, our agriculture is. I mean, that’s what the goal is. But you can’t do it by atmosphere alone. In fact, the atmosphere is the tail at the end of the dog, it’s not the dog, dynamically, from a planetary climate system point of view. And I think the general mood is, well, we’ll think of something, but meanwhile press on with that thought. In other words, they didn’t buy it, but they did say, well, let’s see where that thought leads you. And so I said, well, we can’t do much about the land because of the ABC problem, so it’s the ocean which is essentially doing its own thing regardless of what man does. There’s very little anthropogenic change that one can make to the ocean.

[1:36:04]

There had been a very interesting analysis of weather observations, the data they used for weather forecasts. To calculate how – forgetting individual weather systems, but in general sense – forget about even the longitude, just the meridionally averaged, in other words, from North Pole to South Pole through the equator. It’s clear from a planetary system that the sun puts more heat into the tropics than it puts into the poles. So that’s where dominated – the heating is dominating. Remember, it’s half the area of the globe anyway. And the planet doesn’t warm up so it must be shedding heat at the same rate, a kilowatt per square metre or whatever it is. It must be losing heat at the same rate to outer space. And it does so because it’s a sphere, which is radiating as a black body in infrared radiation. But from the point of view of zero degrees Kelvin, it’s pretty well uniform temperature. Okay, it’s a little bit warmer in the tropics, a little bit less in the poles, but in absolute temperature degrees, which is what matters for black body radiation, it’s like a uniform sphere of a uniform average temperature. So the heat is radiating away uniformly into outer space but is going in more in the tropics, therefore heat has to flow from the tropics towards the poles. And how does it get there? That was the question that was asked. And so an analysis was John Woods Page 144 C1379/64 Track 5 made of all the best meteorological data over a long period of time to see if it was possible to calculate the rate at which heat was flowing carried by the wind through the atmosphere from the equator to the pole and how it varied with latitude. And those data were coming available when we were starting to design the World Climate Research Programme. The … the back of the envelope sum tells you that it’s about two petawatts of heat has to be flowing, two times ten to the nine watts of heat, because you know how much sunlight’s pouring in, you know how much is radiating out. You know that it’s got to get that much heat from the tropics to the poles, towards the poles. And all of the very best calculations showed that the atmosphere was only transporting half of that. And the experimental errors were not enough to say, well, you know, the sum isn’t good enough, that it probably is doing more. There was a – half of the heat flow was not carried by the atmosphere and there’s only one way it can be carried and that’s by the ocean currents. So suddenly that sum, which was a residual, it wasn’t a direct measurement in the ocean, it was just a residual from the atmospheric measurements, put the ocean centre stage, so that if – the most fundamental thing about the climate system, forget about the details, the most fundamental thing is that the ocean is carrying half the heat to the poles. Then you’d better start to make computer models that include the ocean as well as the atmosphere because otherwise you’re not in the game. I mean, that’s about a zero order, that’s a baseline statement, but it’s a very important statement. And it had a big impact on our thinking in that first – in fact, that was coming out of the last year of GARP and before we moved in the – so we had that high on our thinking, not yet in a position to say what you do about it, but it certainly had to be factored into any plans we had. And then some further work was done by oceanographers to see if they could try and understand where in the ocean the heat was going, and it was pretty clear that the oceanographic observations were totally inadequate, just there wasn’t enough accumulated data. There was a hint that the heat was going north – in the northern hemisphere that the heat was going north in the Atlantic and south in the Pacific, but that was very, very flaky. I mean, if it was true, why [laughs]. It seemed odd that the Pacific, which is the biggest ocean – the heat was going the wrong way to supply the global balance. Okay, but the Pacific has a Kuroshio, which is just as important as the Gulf Stream. I mean, it’s not as if – I mean, the Pacific is – okay, it’s the Pacific, its name, but it has a pretty big current system. So why, something very odd going on. And it wasn’t understood at all, it just was not. So lots of thoughts were going on John Woods Page 145 C1379/64 Track 5 about – well, we’d better have a crack at this because if we don’t understand this we won’t even begin to – so this hint that the North Atlantic was playing an extraordinarily important role rather took the wind out of the sails of the Americans, who wanted to concentrate everything on the Pacific. They had a very strong case. The ENSO, El Nino Southern Oscillation phenomenon was a very strong signal and well worth having a go at and we included it without any argument, fine, that’s on the agenda. We set up a group to start planning it. But clearly it wasn’t enough, though it was a very good thing to be doing and kept the Americans happy. Joe Smagorinsky smiled. But I mean, it really was important but I decided that, as far as I was concerned, I was going to concentrate on the global rather than that particular project, starting with this weird observation. There were attempts to refine the atmospheric analysis, atmospheric data, to see if they could see – divided by Pacific versus Atlantic by different latitudes. The data really weren’t very strong. They all did suggest – they suggested not only was the heat flowing north in the North Atlantic petawatt of heat, enormous amounts of heat, but it was flowing north in the South Atlantic. So not only was the North Pacific an anomaly but the South Atlantic was an anomaly. So there were some pretty powerful messages that we didn’t understand the way the ocean was working and that the database that we had available to us was not sufficient. One idea that popped up, which – said, well, let’s put some effort into refining these atmospheric measurements to see if we can get a stronger handle by making even better measurements. Then we thought, let’s put in some additional atmospheric measurements specifically to tackle this problem and in particular make measurements all the way round the Atlantic, ring the Atlantic with very high quality dense network of atmospheric observations to say what the residual transport had to be in the Atlantic. And that never happened but it was called CAGE, it was CAGE around the Atlantic. But we were tossing around all sorts of ideas. The only thing on the agenda with a tick on it was the El Nino project and that was no longer a controversy, it was clearly worth doing, and there was going to be plenty of funding from the United States for it and the Japanese were interested too, and so it looked like that was fine. It turned out that, like all these things, it was much more complicated than first thought and took a lot of work, but the work was done and there was now an operational observing system making the measurements. So I really don’t want to talk much more about that because I left that on one side and didn’t pay myself any attention to it. Of course, I was receiving all the … John Woods Page 146 C1379/64 Track 5

That was TOGA?

TOGA, yes, yeah.

Okay.

It was very good.

[1:46:11]

But I was involved in struggling to try and think of ways of getting to grips with the fact that the ocean circulation was doing something very fundamental at a planetary level, which we didn’t understand. And we were thinking of all sorts of very specific focussed experiments, particularly in the North Atlantic. I had hosted a meeting in Kiel of a group to look at a North Atlantic project but it looked a bit parochial and it didn’t really seem to be tackling – there was an awful feeling of, okay, you’ve solved that problem but so what. It wasn’t really – and then we had a meeting in Miami, a small group of us. Carl Wunsch from MIT came in, big reputation – two big reputations, one, brilliant, young – well, youngish, late forties, oceanographer, the great pet of the American – of Henry Stommel, the Woods Hole guru, great man, who was a real physicist. I loved his work, he was like GI Taylor. He thought of very, very elegant simple ways of looking at things and put the algebra in afterwards [laughs]. He was a brilliant man, lovely man, and he always had a tray full of papers he hadn’t published and when somebody came to him with an idea he would pull one out, I had a thought about that a few years ago [laughs]. He was that sort of person. And he had got Carl Wunsch his chair, marvellous. Carl Wunsch was super bright, super, super bright, very, very good mathematician, difficult man, purist. Everything had to be 100 per cent right. He could never work like GI Taylor or Henry Stommel or the others. He’d had a gut feeling for what really mattered and you have a few frayed edges it didn’t matter ‘cause we’re getting at the real issue. Carl Wunsch, sort of German in – his family had been German. But I mean, he had this very rigorous. I mean, he’s written books which are wonderful because they’re so rigorous. But it reminds me of the famous way in which the French and the English play the game John Woods Page 147 C1379/64 Track 5 differently. The French meticulously plan everything with their army, but if something breaks they don’t know what to do. The English muddle through all the time, tie a knot in it and carry on [laughs]. He was not for tying knots in things, it had to be absolutely right or he wasn’t going to play. And he thought an awful lot of oceanography was sloppy and was not rigorous and right and he wrote books about it. And of course he was right. Sometimes you have to be a bit intuitive, you have to follow your nose. You get there but along the way you have to say, trust me, I think we’re onto something. And he would never say that, he would say, got to get the maths right, got to get the measurements right, everything. Anyway, he came along and he said – he’d been listening to our chatter. He wasn’t a member of the committee. He’d been listening to our chatter and he said we should stop fooling around and we should go for a global experiment to measure the ocean globally. He said, ‘It’s going to take a long time even just to get around the ocean once, it may take ten years, but treat is a snapshot, as though we’ve done it instantly.’ And he said, ‘Those data don’t exist but until you’ve started to do that you’re just in fantasy world because you’ve got a biased haphazard sampling, grossly inadequate.’ And he didn’t call it a world ocean circulation experiment at that stage but that’s what it became. And we started to debate this and we – the question is how on earth do you do it. It’s all very well to say it. And he said, ‘Well, we’ve just had this glorious demonstration of using radars in space to measure the ocean currents and to measure the ocean waves.’ This was the Sea Sat mission, which was what we had been testing in JAYSIN, in the air sea interaction experiment. We had been right under it, calibrating it. The experiment that – the whole satellite failed after ninety days, an utter failure in that sense, but during those ninety days there was enough ground truthing to say it was right. And so those instruments were then put onto other satellites and became the workhorse instruments. And one instrument in particular measured the height of the satellite above the sea, so what? It measured it to an accuracy of about two centimetres. That’s the most accurate measurement ever made in geophysics. Satellite’s a million metres up and you’re measuring it to two centimetres [laughs], wow. And that had been proved to work in the ninety days since that. Now why was that so exciting? It was so exciting – it was called the altimeter, or for long, radar altimeter. What it could do, it could work through clouds, it could work day in day out. It could work continuously all round the globe as the satellite went round until it covered the whole globe. The sea surface below the satellite – you’d have to know John Woods Page 148 C1379/64 Track 5 exactly the track of the satellite to two centimetres too, which can be done with lasers. That had been tested and that worked too. So the orbit of the satellite could be tracked sufficiently accurately so that you knew the distance from the satellite to the surface of the ocean but that told you the difference between the surface of the ocean and the centre of the earth. Wow, that begins to be interesting. If you – the earth’s gravity – the earth is a sphere, roughly speaking, which means you would expect a horizontal surface to be a sphere, but the horizontal surface – what is a horizontal surface? If it’s not horizontal you can roll a ball down it, if it’s horizontal you can’t. In fact, the horizontal surface on that definition is not a sphere, because in some places the rocks are more dense and that lowers it. Because it’s a surface where the gravitational potential is the same. That’s what horizontal means in geophysical terms, you can roll a ball down it. And it was known that this surface – let’s call it a horizontal surface. Of course it’s almost a sphere. If you knew exactly the shape of that horizontal surface, and it’s called the geoid, then you’d know how high the surface of the ocean was to a geoid. And if it was higher here than there, that means there’s more pressure of water on the geoid here than there. It’s like having a barometer. So the altimeter was the equivalent for oceanographers of the barometer for the atmosphere, which of course was the start of measuring the pressure on the surface of – that was the start of weather forecasting. That was the key instrument that made weather forecasting – still is a key instrument. If you knew the pressure you knew the force, if you knew the force you knew the velocity and you’re away, you’re in business. Two problems, you had to know the shape of the geoid and secondly, you had to measure very accurately the distance from the satellite, or rather the distance from the geoid up to the surface. The shape of the geoid was not known. It was known very equivocally. But the range, the deviation from a perfect sphere, is in places 400 metres. It’s not trivial when you’re talking two centimetres. So you’d better know the shape of the geoid. There’s an instrument now measuring it for the first time in the 21st century, years and years and decades later. It’s a very, very, very difficult measurement, involves pairs of satellites, measuring their relative motion. We hope it’s going to work. It looks like it’s working but it’ll take years of accumulated data to map it out and get – but the point is, why not get on and measure the shape of the surface of the ocean in anticipation of the geoid becoming available? Meanwhile the geoid doesn’t change very fast [laughs], I mean, incredibly slowly, the rate of sea floor spreading and so on. But the ocean currents change. And even if you John Woods Page 149 C1379/64 Track 5 don’t know the geoid, if you see a change in pressure it means the current has changed. So we can talk a lot about the variation of the Gulf Stream and changes in the current, hey, the changes in the currents, we’re getting into climate. So even if we may not know the DC component, we can measure the AC component, the variation, and that begins to sound awfully like something of use for climate. And he made a very good case, Carl Wunsch did. He became the great advocate in NASA of altimeter missions. And the Europeans had to keep up so we started doing it too, the Japanese did it and it became the heart, the core measurement, which was the only measurement that was global, only measurement that was global, for the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, but it was a global measurement. It was the same instrument calibrated that was not drifting, it wasn’t different instruments calibrated in different labs and maybe they’re not - you know, that it’s a NASA instrument, could be compared, and as each mission ended its time and a new one was up there was an overlap period so that they could be checked together and so on. The altimeter - you cannot say how important the altimeter was. It was the instrument that made climate research possible. And it’s a big claim but I think it’s right. And Carl Wunsch was Mr Altimeter and he was respected, very much respected, by NASA, and he was a very powerful advocate – when he got his – got the bit between his teeth he would make his case pretty powerfully. And Bob Stewart and I and the others agreed that if the altimeter was going to really deliver what it seemed in principle it could deliver, then it was worth switching from a regional experiment for the Atlantic to going for broke, for the whole globe. If we could do that, that was in the spirit of the World Climate Research Programme, that was really hitting it centrally, just as the Global Weather Experiment was hitting – of GARP was hitting the weather problem centrally. It was not fiddling around on the edges, it was going for it. And it looked like we could, thanks to the altimeter, go for it. That was very exciting, very exciting. But of course, the altimeter is necessary, it’s the only global measurement, but it’s not sufficient, because knowing the pressure gradient of the surface tells you the flow, the currents, at the very surface of the ocean. But it doesn’t take much calculation to say, unless you know how the current varies with depth, you’re not going to be able to calculate this heat flow in the ocean. And that was where everything got into detail [laughs]. I mean, it’s what measurements would have to be made in the ocean to be commensurate with the terrific power, or terrific potential, of the altimeter in space. John Woods Page 150 C1379/64 Track 5

And that’s where we started really sort of getting into details and committees and design and so on.

[2:00:40]

Let’s go back to the altimeter for a moment. What is the pressure gradient across the Gulf Stream? Remember, the altimeter could measure to about a couple of centimetres, a very difficult measurement but it could be done. Across the Gulf Stream there’s about two metres of water head driving the Gulf Stream, so that’s easily measured from the altimeter. The storms that were now – and ninety-nine per cent of the kinetic energy in the ocean is in the storms, by then it had been accepted and experiments had been made, mode, polymode and various other experiments, that the ocean was universally full of weather, and the weather extended from the top to the bottom of the ocean. It wasn’t just something skimming around on the surface. These storms reached down and felt the bottom and the way they developed depended on that fact. But what’s the pressure difference across a storm? You know, we’re used to looking at pressure maps of storms in the atmosphere and we know that we’ve got, you know, 1,010 millibars in the centre of an anticyclone and in the centre of a cyclone it may be 900 and something millibars. We know how many – what the pressure difference is, of course. And what’s the pressure difference from the centre of a storm to outside a storm in the ocean? About twenty, sometimes thirty centimetres. Wow, the altimeter can measure individual storms. That’s exciting. So not only was it going to get at the one percent of the mean flow, it was going to get at the ninety-nine percent of the transient storms. And because the storms were transient, the geoid may not be known but it wasn’t changing, but the storms were moving around. And so it was possible to think about coming up with a climatology of the storms. It would take some years of measurements, it took many – ten years of measurements, but it would be – it was a conceivable objective. And once you’ve got the climatology of the storm you can see which parts of the ocean are more stormy, which are not, you can begin to calculate the rate in which heat is moved by the storms, how much the storms are contributing compared with how much the Gulf Stream is contributing, and so on and so on and so on. Suddenly you’ve got a game. You’ve got a game in hand. It was very exciting ‘cause we could see that – I mean, all the details had to be worked out and we had to get people to sign up to it, but there John Woods Page 151 C1379/64 Track 5 really was a serious possibility of doing something that would have an impact on climate as big as the Global Weather Experiment was going to have on weather forecasting, which was our remit. And all this was in the first year of the climate programme so we really – we’d had this run in of two or three years under the cover of GARP, to begin to clear the ground and think about things, but it – the World Ocean Circulation Experiment hadn’t been called that but it was beginning to gel and it was beginning to come together as something. And what do you do, you set up a committee [laughs] to pursue it. And so we asked Carl Wunsch to chair it and he said, nah, he’s too busy. So we compromised with having co-chair and there were three of us who sort of rotated the co-chair. So we each gave ourselves a sabbatical every now and again to sort of get our breath back [laughs]. There was Francis Bretherton, Carl Wunsch and myself. Francis Bretherton was an interesting guy. He was another of these Cambridge geophysical, fluid dynamisists, very successful. He was the one who’d set Brian Hoskins onto doing the numerical model of fronts. But he was told by his head of department, George Bachelor, that there wasn’t room for much geophysical fluid dynamics in the department, it was going to be mainly concerned with turbulence. And when somebody started to really get the bit between their teeth they had to go out and find somewhere to pursue it. And Owen Phillips, the man who did the upper ocean dynamics as his fellowship study, went off to John Hopkins and has been there ever since doing wonderful work, spun off a number of others. And Francis Bretherton was – it was suggested he could stay on in his present level, but if he really wanted to begin to sort of follow his ideas and have a bigger group and so on, he should find somewhere to do it. So he went to America and is still there. And he went to the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, which is a wonderful sort of monastic place in Bolder, Colorado, on top of the Rocky Mountains. And it had the remit of being a sort of laboratory where atmospheric scientists from all over America, and increasingly from all around the world, would go and spend some time, a few years, pursue their idea in a free wonderful atmosphere with no distractions, and then go back and carry on with their career. And he went there and became director. He’s very good. And after some years he moved on and he moved into looking more at space and NASA used him a lot for developing their contribution to the climate programme as their principle advisor. And interestingly, when Verner Suomi retired, the man who worked out the cloud movement in the tropics from space, when he retired Francis Bretherton took his chair and is now at Wisconsin, retired of course but John Woods Page 152 C1379/64 Track 5 still there. So Francis Bretherton was a strange choice. He was a geophysical fluid dynamisist, not an oceanographer, not with specialist knowledge of the ocean, but he was thought of as being a sort of – very clever. I always thought of him as the nearest we’d had to a sort of Francis Crick, you know, Francis Crick? He was too clever for what he was doing always and he needed a bright student to bounce ideas off. He ended up with DNA. So he was that sort of person and he could turn his hand to a lot of things. And he agreed that he would join in to help steer this experiment, of which he had no axe to grind. He had no – Carl Wunsch wanted to do it his way. I was there because of my knowledge and experience on GARP and also my knowledge of the upper ocean and so on, and Francis Bretherton was considered to be an interesting person. So the three of us ran the experiment, usually as co-chairs, which was fine.

[End of Track 5] John Woods Page 153 C1379/64 Track 6

Track 6

Could you describe the scientific work which led to the plankton multiplier effect story? I know it sort of predates that.

Yes. The plankton multiplier I’ll come to in a minute. It’s the link between the microscopic organisms in the sea and climate change. So my interest in plankton ecology, my general interest, grew of the discussions we had in Southampton back in the ‘70s, but I didn’t do anything about it from the research point of view. I had an awareness, I had some thoughts about it, but it grew in Kiel. Now Kiel was where plankton research began in the world, so there’s a very strong planktology group in Kiel to this day. And so there were lots of people there who could help a physicist get started. But why did I get started? The reason grew out of climate. I was – I think I mentioned that the World Climate Research Programme steering committee that I was on had decided that the key to making progress in climate was to actually find a way of protecting the way the boundary condition of the atmosphere would change, and that essentially meant the sea surface temperature, and to the extent you can, the processes on land, although that’s very difficult because of the interference by mankind. But in the sea it was a sort of free system, unaffected by man, and the question was, how can you accurately predict for, say, a hundred years ahead or a thousand years ahead, whatever it is, the way in which the surface temperature will change. So I started making more detailed models of the way the interior of the ocean produced a change in the temperature of the sea. I mean, I wanted to get a grip on what the physical processes were in the upper ocean that controlled sea surface temperature. And one of the things I looked at was the way in which sunlight is absorbed in the ocean. If the water is extremely clear and the sunlight penetrates deeply, ultimately it is absorbed. Almost all of the red component of the spectrum of sunlight is absorbed in the top one metre regardless of how – even in the clearest water, that’s true. But the blue and green penetrate very much deeper. So the question is, how deep does it go if the water’s not so clear. Now there’s a Danish optical oceanographer, Jerlov, who pretty well had the market, and he had written a standard book – he’d divided ocean water into different levels of clarity. And so I started putting these numbers into simple models and it became clear that the – if you wanted to talk about the way climate changed we had to know about the clarity of the John Woods Page 154 C1379/64 Track 6 water because that could make a difference of a degree or two. And we had decided quite early on in the World Circulation Experiment that a tenth of a degree would be a good benchmark target. So if the uncertainty about how clear the water was, or would be in the future and how it would change in the future, would be changing it by ten times the sensitivity that we were interested in then we’d better begin to get a grip on what it is that changes the clarity of the seawater. Now in the coastal waters there are all sorts of things that change the clarity of the water but most of the world ocean is out in the open ocean, well away from the coasts. So I thought, well, let’s concentrate on that, because from the global point of view it’s the open ocean that is likely to be the dominant factor. And so I started looking at what it was. Now it’s not soil washing off from the coasts. That’s going to be in the coastal waters, it’s not pollution from industry and so on, it’s going to be the natural processes in the sea. And the micro-organisms living the sea vary in their concentration seasonally and from year to year and that’s what controls the clarity of the water. Nothing new there, that’s textbook stuff. But what was new, I think, was the recognition that the impact of that change of clarity was not a minute factor, it was first order from the climate point of view, and anything that changed the clarity of the water would have a potentially important factor. Now there was no knowledge at all about what controlled the plankton or how they change from year to year, or models of how they might change from century to century. I mean, it was just – there was nothing.

[0:06:11]

Ah, but something interesting happened. NASA launched a satellite that could measure what they called ocean colour. It had three wavebands which between them could be manipulated by having a ship, taking a sample of the water, seeing the concentration of chlorophyll in the water from analysis in the lab and the satellite could be calibrated to give the same chlorophyll number when it went over. So the satellite was – they called it ocean colour but what it was targeting was, what is the concentration of chlorophyll in the surface water. Surface water means the bit mixed by the wind. And it was an eye opener. It was quite astonishing when the first images, global images, were published. For the first time we saw how the concentration of plankton varied from place to place around the world ocean. And as the satellite rolled forward in time we began to see how it changed seasonally. And John Woods Page 155 C1379/64 Track 6 we all, oceanographers, planktologists, knew that in the spring there was a bloom and then the animals came and ate it and so on. But to see it happening all round the world, this was – and this suddenly grabbed the attention of planktologists. But from my point of view, that plankton concentration was changing the clarity of the water. That was what interested me, because that says there are more plankton here than there and this year there are more plankton than there were last year at the same time of year, and so on. It was possible, but early days but one can envisage, such measurements being made, perhaps with better instruments in the future and so on, to get a climatology so that we’ve got a database for testing our models. But what models?

[0:08:34]

Clearly what we needed was a model that would have the plankton internalised in the model of predicting the surface temperature of the ocean. So it wasn’t just represented as a clarity of water but the plankton were living in the water and growing and changing from year to year. And they were integrated into the physical model. And nobody had thought of doing that. And I talked to the planktologists in the institute in Kiel where I worked and they said, fine, well, if you want to make a model of the plankton with that in mind, for that purpose, we will put together for you a simple set of species that – of course, there are thousands of species and there’s no way one could do all of that. So one wanted to have some sort of starting point of one kind of plant, one kind of animal that eats the plants, the herbivores, one kind of animal that eats the animals that eat the plants that the zooplankton – the carnivores, a very simple food chain and the plants would depend on one limiting nutrient. They needed sunlight, they had the right temperature, but they needed a chemical nutrient. They needed actually a lot of chemical nutrients, but usually most of them were there in sufficient abundance. One of them ran out before the others, that was the limiting nutrient. And there was a lot of debate whether it should be phosphorous or nitrogen and in the end we said, well, let’s go for nitrogen, although we know that in different circumstances it’s better to treat one or the other as the limiting one. But you have to start somewhere. And the – so I made a – well, I thought, well, I’d better make a model, and so I’d been given the equations and some data from my colleagues in the planktology group. I knew very little but I did recall the discussions we’d had back in John Woods Page 156 C1379/64 Track 6 the ‘70s in Southampton, so that was good. But I hadn’t done anything about it in those days. Now I was – when you start to make a model you have to chase up all the details. You can’t fudge things because mathematical models don’t like fudge, they have to have hard numbers for each bit of it and hard equations for each process in it. It’s a good discipline because it forces you not to shove anything under the carpet. You’ve really got to have everything up there. And then I did something incredibly naïve, stupid even. It never occurred to me, because nobody was making – I didn’t know anybody making models of plankton ecology. I didn’t know that there is an enormous body of literature used by the fisheries researchers making models. They treated the plankton as though it were a continuum, as though it was like another dissolved chemical. So you’ve got dissolved phosphorous, dissolved nitrate, dissolved chlorophyll. Well, it’s not, it’s actually in particles, it’s in living organisms, but their equations treated it like that. Worse still, with hindsight, I was totally ignorant so I didn’t realise that I was doing something different, but they – the equations they used came from a very brilliant Italian mathematician and an equally brilliant American biologist, Mr Lotka and Dr Volterra, who had written together, or independently but then the equations are called the Lotka–Volterra equations, equations which essentially where the state variable was the concentration of the phytoplankton, how many per millilitre or how much biomass per millilitre, how much you weigh them, and similarly for the herbivores and similarly for the carnivores. And so you had equations, usually didn’t deal with the carnivores, just the herbivores and the phytoplankton and the nutrients. And the equation said, well, you’ve got this concentration of these and that concentration of those, these eat these at a certain rate and so their numbers will go down and these will get fatter and reproduce and so on. Essentially those equations were demographic. They were about whole populations. They treated the plankton as a crowd rather than as a bunch of individuals. I discovered this later, I was just blind, ignorant. And I’m awfully glad I didn’t discover it because I might have done it myself and it would have been grotesquely wrong. I thought these bugs are individuals, I will treat them as individuals, sort of – seems logical. You want to study processes involving these individuals eating those individuals and these individuals reproducing and so on, you actually have a computer model where you model individuals. When I started talking about this I was reminded that computers weren’t very powerful and I was pushing my luck. But then I got a phone call from the Ministry saying – this was the Federal John Woods Page 157 C1379/64 Track 6

Ministry, saying that the – they had decided to buy a Cray computer for science and they were ringing around to see if anybody could think of anything to do with it. And they were going to put it in Berlin because they had a policy of supporting Berlin, of course Berlin was still behind the wall, and did I have any ideas. And I said, well actually, it just so happens I’ve got this idea for a model of – ecosystem model of plankton. It’s very simple but I want to follow individuals so I need the most powerful computer – it was going to be the most powerful computer in Europe. They were very proud of spending the money, but they hadn’t done it because they were asked to do it, they did it because they wanted to spend money. They had lots of money.

[0:15:49]

And anyway, I became one of the first users of this machine and was able to make a model which showed how, in a very simple way, only over a few days, how the plankton – the nutrients, the plankton, the change of the physical environment with the sun coming and going and the turbulence coming and going. And it threw up an unexpected mechanism, which was that during the day the sun comes up and the flow stops being turbulent. Well, I had known this since my days with the navy, of course, nobody else knew it. And the plankton, instead of being mixed around up and down, up and down, into the brightly lit and dark and back up to the light on the basis of it every fifteen, twenty minutes or so, when it was sunny they were just sitting calmly at the same level. Some were near the surface, some deeper down. And that dramatically changed the way they grew because they got a steady – they could adapt, they could adjust. They were very clever at adjusting themselves, the plants, to the light level. But they had great difficulty when it was flickering, changing. But it actually wasn’t changing, they settled down very quickly to a steady level. And that helped to explain some rather puzzling observations. And the leading planktologist at Lowestoft, the fisheries laboratory, who was a physicist actually, wonderful man, he heard about this on the grapevine, don’t know how, somebody from Kiel had been gossiping, David Cushing, and he flew over of his own initiative, just flew over to see me, spent a few days. He said, ‘It’s early days but that is going to be the way fisheries research is done in the future.’ He was absolutely bowled over by it because he knew that the established way was this population crowd sort of approach, demographic. John Woods Page 158 C1379/64 Track 6

He said, ‘This is the right way to do it.’ He said, ‘I’ve been waiting all my life and now it’s happening.’ And we stayed pretty good friends, as you might imagine. The point was that the equations that I was writing were not the equations saying the rate of this eating that or the rate of this consuming these nutrients, it was how does one individual bug work. So these were physiological equations, not community equations. It was physics, not social sciences. And that’s a very, very big step because the equations that I was using, with the help of the planktology experts, those equations had been studied from cultures of plankton in laboratories where they have the – they keep – the population of the same species and they can study in intense detail the way they grow, the way they respond to changes in light, the way they respond to changes in temperature and so on. These are the kinds of equations that the meteorologists used for weather prediction. They’re the class of equations that LF Richardson said should be at the fundamental base of weather forecasting, what the meteorologists call primitive equations. What they mean by that is that these are equations that don’t depend on anything but an experiment that can be reproduced by anybody else in the laboratory and you’ll get the same result. They are solidly based by reproducible laboratory experiments under controlled conditions. So those are solid equations and you can build on them. So instead of top down, where you start with a population and look at some gross aggregate changes in it, this says, no, I’m going to build from my absolutely solid knowledge of how this plant responds if the light is brighter or darker or the temperature changes or the nutrient concentration in its vicinity is different, I’ve got equations for exactly how it responds.

Did you yourself do any of those experiments?

No, no, I relied entirely on the planktologists. But those experiments were being done, there weren’t enough people doing it because in principle you should reproduce it for every species that – I mean, it did lead to an unimaginably large number of laboratory experiments, but they were being done for a representative species, which is a starting point. But it is an enormous change. It is night and day. You’ve gone from social sciences to physics. Now I know it’s biology, why do I call it physics? Because I was dealing with micro-organisms which have a very special property, if they have a brain at all it’s a very little brain [laughs] and they don’t learn anything. They don’t have a brain that can allow them to learn. Big whales and things, they John Woods Page 159 C1379/64 Track 6 learn and you find in some places the same species of whale does one trick and another species, they do a completely different trick, you know. Look at David Attenburgh’s films. But these micro-organisms, like the bacteria in our blood and so on, they’re one trick things and those tricks are in their genes and they can’t change them. They don’t – Mummy can’t teach them a new birdsong [laughs]. They can’t teach them, this is what you do to avoid a predator. It’s in their genes or it doesn’t work. Why is it – well, Darwin, you know, is it the ones that have survived have got the trick by chance and that’s the trick they use, so if they’re being attacked by a predator they shoot off sideways and let off a flare. That’s what mini zooplankton too, just like our jet fighters do [laughs]. So I mean, I had stumbled on a very, very big change, not because I had wanted to make a change but because it didn’t occur to me there was another way of doing it. And I was deeply impressed and committed to the concept of primitive equation modelling. I’d lived it when it became active in the Met Office and revolutionised weather forecasting. It was clear to me, that was the way environmental sciences – and suddenly I could see a way ecology could be done.

Is it – so it’s because the zooplankton could be treated almost like an object or a material, because they had predictable behaviour based on their properties, which couldn’t change by something learnt or …?

That’s right. You could learn how they responded to different stimuli in laboratory experiments and they would not change as they grew older or so on. Or some of them, copepods for example, as they grow they get too big for their shell so they moult and come up with a bigger shell, but in doing so they – a different set of genes express themselves. So when they go from stage three to stage four they can do different tricks. But all stages fours would do those tricks. It isn’t that they learn them, it’s in the genes and certain genes are expressed at different stages in their growth. That means we have a stage growth in our model. With each stage we put in what the behaviour, what the physiological response is at that stage, and at some stage they are able to get pregnant and reproduce, but when they’re younger they can’t. At certain stages they can’t do it. So because we’re used to this in higher animals – but these very simple organisms, they don’t – they can’t change, their stuck with what their genes tell them. [Closed between 24:42 – 25:03] So there was a – I had stumbled on something, which excited me enormously, ‘cause I realised what I was doing and I John Woods Page 160 C1379/64 Track 6 knew that I could only have 100 plankton in my first model. That was using the whole capacity of the Cray computer in Berlin [laughs], a hundred. I’m using 100 million now on a laptop, you know, every day. My students are doing. But, you see, that was the other thing, it didn’t worry me that the numbers were not statistically significant. If you could get the mechanisms right it was possible to physically – if you could do it right then, Moore’s law, the rapid growth of computing power, which was giving us bigger and better computers at a startling rate, only had to wait a few years and, bingo, I’d be able to do statistically significant numbers of plankton with no problem at all. The main thing is to know exactly how to do it right. So when the computers are available you just put in the larger numbers.

[0:26:17]

How practically did you – for those people who have never encountered a Cray computer and perhaps not ever thought about doing programming or modelling at all, how did you actually practically sort of step by step day to day interact with the computer to make a model of plankton ecology based on a hundred individual species? And by that I mean, what sort of thing do you have to type to …?

It had two species, not … [Laughs]

Oh sorry, a hundred individuals, was it?

A hundred individual bugs.

Across two species?

Across two species.

Okay. But I mean, how – could you give us a sense of what the work involves? So if you’re in front of the computer, what are you doing in order to …?

Well, first of all it wasn’t done online. One wasn’t sitting at a keyboard which was linked to the computer. One was submitting a job which would be run by a computer John Woods Page 161 C1379/64 Track 6 centre. And we didn’t have a computer in the institute in Kiel and the – Germany was very compartmentalised into states, Länder, Schleswig-Holstein was the one I was in. And in those days there was no broadband links between states and it was the dreaded DDR between us and Berlin [laughs]. So communications were immensely difficult. It had to go through Hanover and then from Hanover there was a link to Berlin, along a canal or something, which, according to the treaty with Russia, was a conduit to Berlin. But it was a very slow line and so one submitted a job as a job, which eventually – the computer centre would work out how to get it into the machine and then the answer would come back and you would look at the results. And the results – how did the results come back? They came back as a printout on a great swath of paper. We didn’t have any – I didn’t have any terminal that I could receive the results in. And how did I submit the results? Golly, I’ve forgotten. I think it must have been punch cards still. I think it was, I think we were punching up the cards and sending them in. It’s a long time ago and – I think that was it. It must have been because that was still how the Met Office was working so I doubt if we were doing anything more sophisticated. And there were computers in the institute but they were used mainly for data logging on ships. I had one for that. But they couldn’t do the sort of modelling we’re talking about. An awful lot of sums have to be done, an awful lot of equations have to be churned through, which is why it can only handle a very small number of agents, as they’re called, computer agents, one agent representing – in order to try and make it more statistically significant I introduced a trick. I said, I can have – the computer could handle a hundred agents. What it does is it does the sums for this one, then it moves to that one and then it moves to the next one and so on. And of course each agent, say it’s a phytoplankton, it gains some energy. When it’s got enough it can reproduce. And meanwhile it depletes the nutrients around it, so you have to take account of that reduction in nutrients. And then you do it for the next one, that depletes the nutrients, and then you do the next one and next. Trouble is, it’s tough on the last one you do because the previous ones have already depleted, so you have to have a trick for making sure that you don’t bias it in favour of one against the others. You have to start randomising. So it gets quite complicated. But the – I mean, it would be utterly stupid to only have 100 plants in a water garden when there are thousands in every millilitre in reality. So somehow I had to have a way of those 100 representing the realistic concentration in the water. So I said, well okay, let each one of these have associated with it, in a theoretical sort of sense, what John Woods Page 162 C1379/64 Track 6

I called a subpopulation, a fraction of the total population, as associated with this agent and that and that and that. Now, some of the agents got a bit more sunlight than the others because they happened to be nearer the surface and so they reproduced more often. So the number of planktons in their subpopulation increased faster than in others. So you started them all the same but very rapidly some did better than others and so on. So they really were acting as individuals with – but you only had 100 different life histories, whereas in fact you should have a separate life history for every one of these millions of plankton. But you have to start somewhere. Obviously 100 isn’t a very statistically significant number for the kind of variations that are going on, they lead to millions before you start getting a sensible stable answer come out. But the idea of attaching a notional subpopulation to – each one acts as though it’s one individual but it has a subpopulation which all do exactly the same thing, but it’s different from what another subpopulation does. So the different subpopulations – they’re having different life histories, different experiences, growing at different rates, and different ones are being attacked by predators at different rates and losing a fraction of their – so you can imagine a – if it’s a herbivore being attacked by carnivores, the carnivore would be the wolf that jumps over the fence and eats a few of the sheep and then goes off. It doesn’t eat them all, there’s a fraction that are consumed, so the number goes down a little bit. And others weren’t attacked by the carnivores in that way, so they have losses and gains. So what was emerging was something that looked, to the planktologists, as remarkably right. It looked convincing, it looked the sort of thing – and that’s what David Cushing – when he saw this he said, ‘Wow, that is the way to go.’ As a physicist, I felt very comfortable with it because I was using equations which were as solid as Newton’s law of force equals mass times acceleration, which has been tested rather thoroughly in the laboratory, which was like the laws of thermodynamics, which had been tested very thoroughly. They’re the basis of weather forecasting. I mean, so the laws of physics, of fluid dynamics, of thermodynamics, which are built into weather forecasting models, all have been so thoroughly tested. Nobody argues about the laws, the equations. And I thought, if we could have biological equations, which are as absolutely solid, there’s a problem that they’re solid for one species. In fact, the water’s full of lots of species and you don’t have enough people making the measurements to get the equations separately for all the species. So you have to – the starting place, you have one species, which sort of represents a whole group of species. We call it a functional John Woods Page 163 C1379/64 Track 6 group. That group is deemed to have the same functions. There are tricks you can play and later on we did so and we had different species and so on. And jumping forward thirty years, and this is thirty years later, we are still vastly under representing the large number of species that are in the sea, but our models are much more sophisticated than they were thirty years ago, of course. But this was the first time it had ever been done. This was the first time an individual based model of plankton had been done. I discovered later that in Poland there had been some work, treating trees as individuals in a forest. And one or two other specialist uses where this trick of agent based computing had been started. There’s now a great big community that has conferences and so on. So I can’t claim to be the first one who ever did agent based computing of living organisms, but I was the one who applied it to organisms that were so small they couldn’t change their equations. Their equations, once you’ve learnt them, are going to be right. You couldn’t have them – oh, in that bay they’ve got a different trick. If you’ve got the same species they were going to be like that. And that opened the door to primitive equation modelling ecosystems in a way Richardson had opened the door to primitive equation modelling of the weather. That’s rather exciting. And the first paper came out in 1982 and it’s – I think it’s probably my most cited paper. I mean, it’s – looking back on it, it was so simple, but the key idea was there, the key idea was there. The scaling up from a few that you could compute to the total population with this notional subpopulation, which has subsequently been reinvented by some Americans who don’t read the literature [laughs] and even think they invented it, but that’s been sorted out. But it doesn’t matter. And it’s another case where one has suddenly opened a door to an enormous paradise. You can do so many things. I mean, woosh, away you go. So that was the fundamental step. It was done through plain ignorance and the fact that I had an absolute love of the concept of primitive equation modelling, which had made it possible, from a few equations, a lot of equations, to forecast the weather. A tremendously chaotic system like the weather and you can actually say, oh, the sun’s going to get through the clouds at three o’clock in the afternoon, and you look out and it does, wow. And do that globally thanks to the GARP. So you could – so I had this deep respect for the concept of primitive equation modelling and I had the motivation to do something about the plankton because they were going to affect the climate in a big way. And so put the two together and suddenly we had a way forward, not yet sophisticated enough to have a big impact on predicting how climate would change, John Woods Page 164 C1379/64 Track 6 but fast forward thirty years, the Met Office climate model, the Hadley Centre Climate Model, has plankton in it now, for fundamentally important reasons. So it’s rather pleasing. They unfortunately don’t do it my way but that’s because my way is fine for very small areas but it’s still – the computers aren’t big enough to do it globally yet. But that’s just a matter of time. That’ll come.

[0:39:01]

This sort of use of physics within ecology, presumably it wouldn’t work with a more intelligent species where you couldn’t treat the individual as predictable in the way that you can treat a plankton?

That’s right. If you wanted to include learned behaviour, which is what we’re talking about – as soon as you go to higher animals and not very much bigger, just fish, they learn how to school, they learn how to do all sorts of tricks, and some of them learn it and others don’t learn it. Now the question is, can you capture in equations that learning process. There are laboratories that have tanks to try and understand the learning behaviour of fish. John Young was doing it for the octopus, remember, carving up the brain to try and understand how the octopus learnt different things. I don’t believe it’s impossible but I don’t know and I don’t think it is known to what extent learning could be captured by primitive equations. It’s well beyond our grasp at the moment. But I certainly – and it won’t be done in my lifetime. But I wouldn’t exclude the possibility. It’s a – what’s going on in the brain research at the moment is so shattering. I mean, the advances are so rapid. I think it would be very foolhardy to suggest that we can’t ever put learned behaviour into ecosystem models. The fisheries people gaily do it with almost no evidence. The trouble is, the mistake that’s done – and I’m not here to rubbish fisheries people, some of them are my best friends. David Cushing was an enormous friend and very, very clever. What they do is they observe, for example, the schooling behaviour of a species of fish and they – there’s a very good French group that does it, that has been doing it for years around the fisheries around South Africa. It has strong links with the research community in South Africa, Capetown, and I’ve spent time with them down there. And they observe that fish school in certain ways and on years which are different they school differently and so on. So they build up an empirical base so that they can say, if this John Woods Page 165 C1379/64 Track 6 happens it’s likely that they do that. The trouble – and that’s – that’s induction, that’s – go back, you know, to seventeenth century, Francis Bacon, that’s the method of induction. The method of induction assumes that in the future what controlled behaviour now will be the same. And that cannot be assumed for climate change, can’t do it. It just makes me shiver to feel that people are relying on the fact that – because, I mean, just think about learned behaviour of us over the last thousand years. Do you think people learned in the same way in 1066 as they do now? Of course not. So I mean, what people learn, how they learn, why they learn, what the benefit of the learning is, has changed enormously in human populations, and I bet it has in fish populations and so on. So I just don’t believe that you can do it by the method of induction, by observing what happens now, building up a database of all the possibilities that you observe now and say, oh well, we’ll just choose one of those in the future. It’s rather like a camera nowadays. You have in the camera a thousand different scenes stored and when you take a picture the computer rapidly scans all these scenes and says, oh, it’s like that one, it’s got backlighting from the left, so on and so on, and it compensates for the shadows and, bingo, it comes out as – my goodness, what a beautiful picture. It’s doing it in a few milliseconds. But it is saying that we have analysed a lot of photographs taken in the past but it’ll always be like that. Of course it will, because that’s just simple optics. It’s just – there’s no reason to believe the laws of optics will change in the future. But learned behaviour, no.

[0:44:22]

How do you feel about climate history, so the sort of – the looking for patterns in climate change in the past as a way of performing in the future?

It’s essential, it’s essential, because if we didn’t we wouldn’t know about the ice ages. If we didn’t we wouldn’t know about the little ice age. If we didn’t we wouldn’t know about the El Nino phenomenon. Of course, you’ve got to have a knowledge of the past to know the kind of things that might happen or have happened. But do you build your prognostic model, your forecasting model, on the basis of assuming that what happened in the past will happen in the future? No. But to charge ahead totally ignorant of the kind of things that might happen is ridiculous. No, it’s fundamentally John Woods Page 166 C1379/64 Track 6 important. I mean, you know the system you’re playing with. But that’s the difference, the physics attitude to forecasting a prediction is at its best, it’s not based on Francis Bacon’s method of induction, which works well if you have a stationary system. So that as far as the future goes, it’ll just be more of the same. The future will look different, things will come and go, but you covered all the different possibilities in the past so you can say, oh, that’s going to happen because, you know, a cold winter follows a wet Friday or something, I don’t know, whatever it is. But the system has to be stationary. Stationary means the statistics don’t change, the average doesn’t change. The phase changes, so knowing exactly what happens when of course is something you want to predict and you might be able to get some laws out of the method of induction to say that, but if the system is fundamentally changing, as our climate is changing now, as our ecosystem is changing – look at what happens – the cod collapse in the Grand Banks, other predators rush in and take their niche and so the cod can’t get back in. They can’t reoccupy the niche, it’s no longer there for them. So you’ve got irreversible ecological changes. You can’t extrapolate from what it was like when the cod were there to the future. It’s a new ballgame. And that’s what climate is about. So the only way to do it is bottom up from solid – I mean, in my opinion, bottom up, from rock solid equations. And luckily, microorganisms rule the world. The big cuddly things that Brigitte Bardot likes to preserve are there, their biomass is negligible compared with krill or plankton. Ants are interesting. They’re on the borderline between learning and not learning and there’s an awful lot of research on ants to see if one can come up with equations for how they learn. I think the jury’s still out on that but it’s worth a try because they are a very major factor in the ecosystem of the world. And if one could reassure oneself that one could do ants then it might be interesting. So it’s – and the biogeochemicals, global biogeochemicals, are largely controlled by microorganisms, which are not using learned behaviour.

[0:48:41]

Which is why - going back to your first question, where did my Plankton Multiplier come from, it came from the model I’ve just described. So I applied it to understand what would happen if the carbon dioxide concentration grows, as we know it is growing, and if it continues to grow in certain ways. That changes the reason that we John Woods Page 167 C1379/64 Track 6 have a greenhouse effect. It’s that the gases in the air change the infrared balance, including the balance at the top of the ocean, by a few watts per square metre. And that radiation affects the turbulence just the same way the sun affects the turbulence. So just as you change the sun, you get a diurnal variation in the turbulence, you turn up the infrared radiation and the turbulence gets weaker, noticeably in the winter. That’s why I made models of it. And I was astonished how sensitive the turbulence is to the infrared. So the greenhouse effect is changing the depth to which the convection, the mixing it gets in the winter. And that controls how much nutrients are brought up to the surface for next year’s seasonal growth. And if the mixing doesn’t get so deep there’s less nutrients for the plankton next year, so there’s fewer plankton. That’s biology, fewer plankton means they’re using up less carbon dioxide, so the drawing of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere gets less. So if there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to man’s pollution, it affects the turbulence, which affects the nutrients, which affects the plankton, so the plankton consume less carbon dioxide and so more remains in the atmosphere. That’s positive feedback, that’s the Plankton Multiplier. And I made the model and published it and it created a – it got the front page of the Times, so that’s fun [laughs]. In fact, the Plankton Multiplier was a term invented by the headline writer in the Times, who was an economist, and he was thinking of the economic multiplier. And so I grabbed it immediately, that’s too good to miss. It was a lovely, lovely way of talking about positive feedback to the – because you can talk to politicians about a multiplier. They all think they understand economics. You talk to them about positive feedback and, er, what’s that. So the Times did me an enormous service [laughs].

By making it kind of more convincing for a particular audience?

Making it a term which was familiar. It said exactly the same thing but it was a familiar term. It was in the comfort zone of the average politician, some of the leading ministers. They’re dealing all the time with economics, especially the Treasury ones, especially the first lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher loved it [laughs], really. She almost giggled with surprise and delight.

About the Plankton Multiplier?

John Woods Page 168 C1379/64 Track 6

Yeah. She loved that. I told her about it and she was just tickled pink with it. Jim Lovelock had educated her about the climate and plankton and so on, but the Plankton Multiplier really got her. So it was fun.

Why do you think that is, why in particular that?

First of all she’s a scientist, chemist, and she thinks like a scientist. And she thought that what Jim Lovelock was telling her was beautiful, she adored – she treats him as her kind of patron saint – not patron saint, like a – not a guardian angel, that’s not right, but her – she thinks he should be made a saint. She thinks he’s clever, wonderful, dreamy, mystical. But she doesn’t actually think that he’s going to do anything that will be useful to the government. He’s the court jester, a very clever one. Court jesters often were very clever people who could give unpalatable messages to the king and not lose their head. That’s going too far but suddenly there was something that – exactly in line with what he was saying but had hard modelling with prognostic value. That’s what really grabbed the attention, because I showed that the change in the radiation due to global warming was the same magnitude as the change in radiation due to the Milankovitch Effect, which controls the ice ages. Ah, John Mason saying the ice ages couldn’t happen on his physics model, ‘cause the sun couldn’t melt the ice, it just reflected the light. We all know sunlight doesn’t get the ice, the snow, to go away. It’s when the air gets warm that the snow melts. So how do you warm the air? You do it with the greenhouse effect, and how do you do that? With the plankton. So I showed trivially that the Plankton Multiplier makes the ice ages happen and will accelerate the greenhouse effect that’s changing our climate now. It’s trivial sums. And immediately plankton were put into the Hadley Centre model, too big a factor to ignore. So strangely, the reason for my studying plankton, which was the sea surface temperature, this subtle effect, well, it’s in the model so it’ll be there. But it’s the chemical effects that are – carbon dioxide, that are having a much bigger direct – and that wasn’t on my agenda when I started it. So the Plankton Multiplier came out – it was curious.

[End of Track 6] John Woods Page 169 C1379/64 Track 7

Track 7

Before we continue with the scientific career, given that it’s a life story interview, I thought perhaps we could have some details of home and family life. And we’d got to the point, just before moving to Kiel, where you said that you’d married and I think a son had been born …

Yeah, ’75, in Southampton.

So I wonder if you could take us from that point to the late ‘80s, sort of surveying the sort of key developments in home and family life over that period.

Soon after we got married – my wife has a twin sister who married into a French family and the French family was quite an interesting one in that they had been for many years in Corsica. In fact, the Savellis and the Rocca Serras were the two families sent by the Pope to clear the Muslims out of Corsica as gradually Christianity recaptured Corsica and then the south of France, and then eventually, in 1492, captured the last of the Spanish occupations, long slow programme lasting 500 years. Corsica was first. And so the Pope took the – he chose two of the Roman families to do it. The payoff was they got half of Corsica each and they’re still there. Corsica later, of course, became a Genoese holding, certainly for, say, 900 years, it was Genoese. The Corsicans all speak a dialect which is Genoese. So when Sylvana and I go to Corsica, as soon as we get off the beaten track she chats away in Genoese to them and they’re perfectly happy. They’re very surprised. And so my sister in law was established in Paris but with a strong presence in Corsica and so she wanted to have her twin sister spending summers in Corsica too. So to cut a long story short, they found a plot of their land that wasn’t used for – actually, part of a vineyard but it was just a little triangle of vineyard, a hectare that was left. And they gave that to us. We built a house there. When I say we built a house there, we built the house there ourselves with our own bare hands, and that was quite an experience. My wife’s brother, living in Berlin in those days, later in Munich, joined in, because the idea was that the siblings, the family, would all get together there in the summer. I got on so well with him, marvellous chap. And so he and I essentially built the house. We had a local builder, who would tell us where we were going wrong, and of course we had John Woods Page 170 C1379/64 Track 7 to have the local ready mix bring in the cement for the foundation. He had an architect friend design it specifically for somebody to build it themselves. And it took us some years because we – I wasn’t earning very much, he wasn’t earning very much, so we did it out of cash flow. We reckoned on spending £500 a year and each year we would sit and plan what we could afford to do the following year, you know, put the foundation – well, no, a bulldozer to clear the site was year one and drill a well, ‘cause there was no water. Of course a few years later the town – we’re on a tiny little unmade up road, but the local mayor, a Rocca Serra, decided to tarmac the road to the town, it was quite isolated, went right past our property. So he ran a water pipe along so we suddenly had town water, having dug our well. But we were independent. And so clear the site one year, foundations the next year, start to put the bricks around, and so the building went up year after year, leaving holes for the windows, then the roof went on. And we sort of camped in the summer. Each year we camped, first in tents and then sort of in the unfinished house. And it was big enough to have the two families. My brother in law had two children and they came down. I went down initially, my wife, then my son, and later daughter as well. And so Corsica was great fun. I absolutely fell in love with it and we still go back there every year. It’s marvellous. So building a – it wasn’t on my agenda at all but it was – you asked about family life, it – apart from the normal family life in Southampton and then later in Kiel, Corsica was something special and we always looked forward to our trips there.

[0:05:39]

How did being married and having children affect your working life, change it or shape it?

Well, in Southampton there was nothing special. I mean, we, being professors, would invite the staff and students round occasionally. We had a nice house, walking distance from the university, with quite a big garden, so in the summer we could have sort of drinks with the – open house for the whole department. At Christmas I started a tradition of going up to Winchester for the carol service. And the idea was everybody would make their way – Winchester was – I don’t know if you know the cathedral, it’s marvellous. It’s the longest cathedral in Europe. And so when the John Woods Page 171 C1379/64 Track 7 choir process from one end to the other in a candlelit cathedral it’s beautiful, wonderful choir. And so everybody liked that. They all made their way to this enormous cathedral, not sitting together, just – then afterwards they all came round to our place for mulled wine and mince pies and so on. So that was the sort of – the Christmas event, and then there was a summer event. So twice a year we had the whole department, open house. Otherwise nothing special. My wife’s very keen on tennis and we made – we discovered, through university tennis courts and tennis club, some very interesting people in other departments, who were keen. Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Harvey the composer, was a reader in music there. He later went to Sussex University. And he actually became godfather of my son, our son, and we regularly – we still see a lot of him, marvellous man. And others, I won’t go through the whole list, but we made friends in other departments, interestingly largely through my wife’s tennis [laughs], which was nice, nice way to do it.

[0:07:59]

We then moved to Kiel in ’77. There’s a nice story. I stupidly – they said, ‘Well, how quickly can you start?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ So I spoke to the vice chancellor and he was a bit upset that I was – I’d only just started and I was young and he had planned that – he expected me to stay in Southampton, of course. And I explained that I was going, I’d made my mind up. And he was very helpful. For various pension reasons I had to be in Southampton on 1st January 1977 because that then made a big difference to my – some calculation they did. Anyway, and then I buzzed off on 1st January, ferry to Hamburg, drive up to Kiel, and it was cold [laughs]. There was snow everywhere. That was my real first exposure to the Baltic winter, which is quite interesting. And I remember we were moving and we’d found a very nice place. I think I mentioned, my wife’s grandfather had been an admiral in the German navy but had then gone to become a courtier and he ran the court for the Kaiser. But his house was known as Graf Platten’s house, big stone house, and we found a place just along the road from it, which was nice, in Caprivi Strasse. But that was very convenient ‘cause it was a short walk to the institute and it was in the heart of Kiel. Kiel was a navy place, of course, but a pretty town. Before it was Germany it was Danish, before Schleswig-Holstein became part of the German empire, and so a lot of its charm is the old Danish charm, a lot of the buildings, apart from the ones that John Woods Page 172 C1379/64 Track 7 were flattened in the war. So we moved to Germany, partly because – well, first of all because they offered me a job, but secondly because my wife came from exactly that part and she was surrounded by family, really, I mean, bumping into them all the time, and lots of people to visit at weekends, and the big house, where she and many of the relatives had been after the – at the end of the war and brought up as a child with her brother and sisters. So we were back to the big schloss and, you know, that was a – that was the life. And meanwhile, come the summer, dashing down to Corsica, of course. And then I was off on cruises. In 1980 my daughter was born. So she was born in Germany, five years after my son, and she – young kid, perfectly normal, nothing special.

[0:11:19]

What was the nature and extent of your children’s sort of interest in or even involvement in your work as they grew up and became aware of what you were doing?

None really. The institute had a fine building on the water’s edge on the fjord in Kiel and in front of it there was a public aquarium with a pool right over, so people walking past there – with seals, that is. Of course, the kids loved that, they loved the aquarium, and they were popping in to see me at work. I mean, it wasn’t unusual for family to suddenly turn up. But no, nothing special.

[0:12:12]

And before we go back to specifically science, how would you sort of characterise your sort of personal political outlook at this sort of time? I mean, I don’t know whether you were involved in campaigning or this might simply be about how you tended to vote or what your views tended to be. How would you describe your sort of private political self?

I was – I came – my father always voted Conservative and I guess my mother did, although she was a bit of a free spirit. And when I was in Germany I suppose I could have voted in local elections, because there was a European agreement that foreigners John Woods Page 173 C1379/64 Track 7 living in another country within the European Union can vote in local elections if they’re registered locally, as I had to be of course. But I was not involved in politics at all. One of my students, who seemed to be taking an awful long time on his research project, spinning it out over several years, I discovered after a year that he was a member of the Kiel Council [laughs]. So there was – just occasionally politics sort of emerged but in a very low key sort of way. There was no politics.

[0:13:53]

What I – while I was in Germany – I had always planned and looked forward to returning to England in some – I had no idea what job, but I sort of half suspected it would be in government sort of service or something related to that, I didn’t know. But I started to read political memoirs and to read – Harold Wilson wrote a book on governance but lots of – I mean, a simple book but it’s actually quite interesting when a prime minister writes a book saying, actually this is what is involved in governing a country. Of course I read the prints [laughs], all the usual books. But I got quite interested – not for Germany but for England, to soak myself in what it was to be involved either in civil service or government or whatever. I had no intention to become a Member of Parliament or little expectation of being made a member of the House of Lords, as several of my friends were. But I did a lot of reading and thinking. But it was in – like everything else – I told you earlier that at school, because of having to decide to do science rather than humanities, I filled the gap on the humanities by reading and going to concerts and all the other – museums and so on, so that I gradually filled the gap. And so I approached this, I suppose, in exactly the same sort of way, curiosity. How does it work? I didn’t know anything about politics and we had no politics in the family. And so I – a lot of things I read about, think about, explore, just out of curiosity.

Why at that time do you think you developed this interest in …?

I don’t know. I’d done other things, I was just ready for that, I suppose. There wasn’t a motivation other than curiosity.

[0:16:24] John Woods Page 174 C1379/64 Track 7

And before we go to NERC, could I just ask you precisely how you were invited to be a lead author for the IPCC, which must have come just before, I think?

Well, the IPCC was formed in a great rush and in order to do so, those who were leading it, Bolin the chairman, and then they had three panels. The science panel was led by John Houghton. So we had a Swede, an Englishman, then an American led one of the panels and a Russian led another one, so it was spread around. And to recruit people very fast they drew on the existing people involved in the World Climate Research Programme, so there was a readymade network of people and we all knew each other very well, you know. Some of us went back to GARP days. And so it was able to get off the starting blocks very fast by people who didn’t have to get to know each other, they already knew each other, who’d been thinking a lot about climate from a research point of view, not from a political point of view and advising governments, that was a new aspect of it. But it was quite easy to make the switch. We’ve just been talking about the fact that I had been doing some background reading out of pure curiosity about how governments make decisions and so it was quite – I was in a way mentally prepared for becoming a scientist who was advising governments rather than doing it purely for research. But of course, remember that the IPCC, as it developed, had to do a number of things. It had to clarify what they could say for sure, what they could say they knew was an issue but it needed more research to clarify it, and then there were some things they just didn’t know, we didn’t know. And so what emerged as one of the spinoffs from the IPCC was a clarification of priorities for climate research, but those of us who were involved had already been thinking a lot about priorities for climate research. We were pretty well versed in what we perceived to be the priorities. And that sort of just moulded in very well with the development of advice. And I was always very taken with Donald Rumsfeld’s famous aphorism about – there are some things you know and those are the things you know and there are some things you know you don’t know and some things you don’t know that you don’t know. And our job was to say, what is it we actually know, can we say with confidence that the science has reached the stage where we can say, this is pretty solid advice. And we had to be absolutely clear where we were not able to say but where we knew that there was an issue but the uncertainties were still there and give some idea of the lead time for research perhaps to begin to clarify them. John Woods Page 175 C1379/64 Track 7

And then we had to be very straightforward and there were some things we just couldn’t. The state of the art was not able – for example, global warming became a catchphrase. The reason was that it was possible to use radiation theory, the solar heating of the earth, the radiation going out, and as we learnt about it, the movement of heat by wind and current to balance out the – from the warmed tropics to the cold polar regions. The global average could be calculated and you could calculate how the global average temperature would likely rise as carbon dioxide, which was mixed thoroughly very quickly around the whole globe, would affect the temperature. And that became something – global warming, the temperature’s going to rise by one degree or two degrees or whatever it was, to which there was an almighty so what. It changes by ten degrees between summer and winter, sometimes twenty degrees in some places, so what’s two degrees, you know, why is that important. It’s an indicator of other things that do matter, like the frequency of extreme events like drought and flood, hurricanes, problems with agriculture, problems with transport, opportunities for transport. If the temperature rose by – this century it rises by two degrees, in all probability the arctic ice which forms in the winter and then decreases in the summer – the decrease in the summer will be sufficient to allow a regular trade route between Europe and Asia, which will save ten days and be very – it’s not there yet, it’s too dangerous, still needs icebreakers and every now and again a hard winter can – the Russians have discovered – they had a hundred ships locked on the ice because they thought they could do it. It’s not – but that’s the sort of thing that a consequence is highly probable. But there are some things – for example what one would like to say is, well, I live in France, we had an awful drought ten years ago, a lot of people died, what’s the chance of that coming back again? Can we expect those extreme events? And there hadn’t been one for hundreds of years before as bad as that. Can we expect such extreme events to reoccur more frequently because of global warming? And quite frankly it’s not possible, with the present state of the models and the knowledge, to say. We have to be honest and say, it can’t be done. It doesn’t say it will never be possible to do it, but there’s no prospect of saying, well, give us the money for five years’ research and we’ll knock that one off, no. It’s a long term grind and we don’t know when – gradually, gradually, gradually it will become – so the – predicting the regional pattern of what will happen with the climate place by place around the world and how that will change over the next century, say, is beyond the capability of the science today, not – there’s no evidence that it is like John Woods Page 176 C1379/64 Track 7 the nature of weather, where there’s a chaos which says you can’t in principle ever do it, forecast the weather beyond a couple of weeks. That is just undoable for good theoretical, well understood reasons. It’s not known whether the regional climate problem is like that or whether it’s just we can’t yet do it because we don’t yet have the resources to do it. So there is a big uncertainty. And the IPCC had to lay that out. But the start of the IPCC was an incredibly smooth operation because there was a readymade team.

[0:24:22]

Thank you. Could you tell the story then of your appointment as director of marine and atmospheric sciences for NERC, which was 1989?

Can I jump back …

Yes.

… nine years to my appointment?

Yes.

‘Cause I told you it came a bit unexpectedly. I’ve remembered a story which might be worth mentioning. When I had my interview there and accepted the job and started work, after a month or two my colleagues started teasing me. They said, have you sworn the oath of allegiance to the – they said the Prussian state, but by now it was the federal republic, of course, because it – civil servants, like soldiers, had to swear a bloodcurdling oath of allegiance to the state. It used to be done – well, the army still does it with flaming torches at night and it’s all a bit secretive [laughs]. But civil servants – and I was a very senior civil servant. My appointment was as a professor but also as a senior civil servant. So – and I hadn’t done it and they said, ‘Well, are you getting paid?’ I said, ‘Yes, every month, my pay cheque is coming through.’ And they said, ‘Oh, we don’t understand this.’ And then finally, I suppose it was about three months after I’d been working there, I got a phone call from – my secretary got a phone call from the Ministry, ‘would it be convenient to pop over and John Woods Page 177 C1379/64 Track 7 have a word’. When the Minister’s office says that the answer – it was the next building, the Kulturministerium, the Ministry of Education and Science was the next building to the Institute, so popping over – in fact, it was their canteen that we used every day, so in and out all the time. Went there and so the head of the – the civil servant at the head of the department, like what we’d call a permanent secretary, was there and I was English and everything was conducted in English. And he said, ‘Have you heard that we expect our civil servants to swear an oath of allegiance?’ I said, ‘Yes, my colleagues have been teasing me about why hadn’t I done it and was I getting paid.’ He said, ‘Yes, they’re right.’ He said, ‘We’ve been thinking about it.’ I said, ‘We?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s out of our hands in the land of Schleswig-Holstein, it was taken over by Bonne, it was the federal governments thinking about it.’ Wow, little me? [Laughs] It turned out I was the first senior civil servant in Germany who was not German. And they said that the feeling in Bonne was they could have made a ruling that, oh well, it doesn’t count for scientists, you see, or it doesn’t count for academics, but they had decided that would start to split the professors away from the civil service and the professors were fully embedded in the civil service, and they didn’t want to do that. Because a lot of very senior civil servants and ministers also have professorial appointments and they didn’t want to split that, so they decided that there must be one rule for all civil servants. But this German state, which was founded out of the Prussian state, was very jealously – and the civil servant was a very, very special person. The honesty and administration of the state, going back to William, was considered to be very, very... Well Paul, these people were – you only have to read the play, the … the Kopernik the Captain and the Kopernik, the story of the civil servant turns up – anyway, take it from me, it’s taken very, very seriously. And so they had decided that they had to invent a new oath of allegiance that would be appropriate for non Germans. And it stuck a bit in the throat but they said, well, we’re members of the European Union, we have to accept that from time to time this is going to happen. And so they had debated and read and they’d consulted the German Embassy in London and they had had a quiet word with the British Ambassador in Berlin, in Bonne in those days, and come up with a form of words. And he, this is the permanent secretary, was saying to me, ‘I now have to read this to you to see if you can go along with it.’ And it started with, you are deemed to have refused to – you are deemed to have refused to have swear the traditional oath of allegiance for fear that it would prejudice your loyalty to the throne. I thought, wow John Woods Page 178 C1379/64 Track 7

[laughs], they had been doing some talking with the Embassy in the London and with the Ambassador. This was pure English civil servant-ese, you know. And it went on for two pages in that spirit, beautiful, perfect. But the punch line at the end was - and we have now got a watered down version which is designed for civil servants who are working for Germany but are coming from another country and still have the nationality of the other country. There was no question of my changing nationality or anything. There was no suggestion ever that I might like to do that and the answer would have been a very sharp, no thank you. And essentially the revised oath of allegiance said I wouldn’t actively work to bring down the German state [laughs], which was a very, very watered down version of blood and thunder [laughs]. And so of course I said, that’s fine, you know. And I had to raise my hand and cross my heart, I didn’t have to roll up my trouser leg but it was a little bit free masonry, and do it. But it was done extremely elegantly and very, very well. And then the permanent secretary had obviously been trained quite well. He said, ‘I think a glass of sherry would be in order.’ I don’t think he’d ever had sherry in his life because he tried to use a corkscrew to get the cork out [laughs] and I had to gently take it from him. But I thought you’d like that story.

Yes, thank you.

[0:31:22]

But you wanted to talk about the going to NERC nine years later.

Yes.

Bondi, Hermann Bondi, great mathematician, wonderful man, thought of and reputed to be the greatest mathematician in Britain in his lifetime and probably rightly so. Famous for his work on cosmology. He was one of the small group that explored the continuous creation idea rather than the big bang idea. Turned out the big bang seems to be all the evidence that it’s a big bang, but the continuous creation was extremely fruitful because it explained where the elements came from. So he had been right at the biggest end of the - you know, creation and so on. And he was a great thinker, Austrian. And he knew people like Karl Popper - remember, we were talking about John Woods Page 179 C1379/64 Track 7 the Austrian philosopher yesterday, Karl Popper, of course, I forgot the name, who was also great and also living in England. Bondi was appointed chairman of the National Environment Research Council. Now while I was in Kiel I was a member of the Natural Environment Research Council as a councillor. I had been appointed as a councillor. It was terribly convenient for them. They wanted to demonstrate they were being very European and having people from other countries [laughs]. I tended to speak with a rather English accent. So I had been on council when Bondi was chairman and when I left – when my term ended, he was still chairman and he decided that he felt the headquarters didn’t have enough in-house understanding of the science that they were responsible for managing. Unlike the other research councils, NERC had inherited a substantial number of research institutes, the geological survey, which is the biggest, the Institute of Hydrology, the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology and three, four, oceanographic institutes. And so there was a big management job in NERC. It was unlike the Science Research Council, where the job was really dishing out money to universities, the university grants. Of course the Science Research Council did have responsibility for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory but that was the only one, the two laboratories, the Rutherford Laboratory and the Appleton Laboratory. I was involved with John Houghton in the merger. He was – again, it was convenient to have somebody from abroad who could give an independent view. So I’d been – John Houghton – I mean, there was this little club of people who’d been in World Climate Research Programme, IPCC, we were helping each other in all sorts of ways and space and so on. I wasn’t involved in space but I found myself on a lot of committees to help those who were. So Bondi had decided that he had to increase the fire power, the scientific in-house knowhow, so that it wasn’t a bunch of people who scarcely knew – but who could actually, because they were the bosses of the directors of these institutes – and directors of the institutes really knew their subject and were very frustrated that when they went up to headquarters or had discussed budgets with headquarters or whatever, they were dealing with very junior people who really didn’t know the issues. And they found themselves – and this is one of the reasons Henry Charnock went back to Southampton rather than stayed as director. He got so frustrated with it. He said he’d rather go back and be a professor than carry on with this nonsense. Bondi was right and so he managed to get Treasury to agree to appoint three directors of science, grade three. Grade three, you know, under secretary they’re the – above – I mean, grade one is the permanent secretary, head of a ministry. Grade John Woods Page 180 C1379/64 Track 7 two, the deputy secretary, is responsible for working personally with the minister on framing legislation, and grade three is the one – there are a number of grade threes who do specialist work in a ministry. So grade three is a very senior civil servant. And Bondi amazingly managed to get Treasury to agree to appoint three grade threes as directors of science. So this was considered quite revolutionary but he was appointed as a very powerful – he’d been in the Ministry of Defence, he knew his way round Whitehall. He knew about the governance of Britain and how to pull the – where to – what levers and strings to work on. And so that was what they were looking for, somebody to – there was one for geology, one for terrestrial ecology and hydrology and one for oceanography. Later it was oceanography and meteorology. And it was the third of those that they were looking to fill. They had a committee, shortlist, adverts. I didn’t know about this. I wasn’t tracking it at all from Kiel. They chose the winner and then one of the council members said, no, he won’t do, and effectively vetoed it.

For what reason, do you know?

I do know and I’m not going to say [laughs]. He would not – in my opinion, he would not have been suitable. Very clever fellow at the Royal Society but he would not have been the kind of person who would have had the confidence of the directors and of the universities. It was a subtle job. I mean, one had to gain the confidence of these people whose job it was to run big institutes. You can’t start dictating to them. I mean, you have to win them over and then discuss possibilities for the future, and then the job of the director of science was to go out and get the money for them. And I saw – so I was appointed.

[0:38:01]

Apparently it went to the House of Lords and the House of Lords Select Committee – this is governance of Britain. If you don’t realise these things are going on – House of Lords Select Committee for Science and Technology is extremely important in Britain when it comes to science and a lot of decisions, which are never publicised, pass through the members either formally or informally. And a couple of the members were members of NERC Council. And so the – and they’re very distinguished John Woods Page 181 C1379/64 Track 7 people, I mean, people like ex rectors of Imperial College or whatever. Then they become life peers. So a lot of knowledge, a lot of good sense. Hopefully it’ll continue after the next reform of the House of Lords. I hope they don’t lose that. But they – several of them knew me and said, well come on, you’ve got this guy in Germany, see if he’ll come back. So I was asked to come back. And after some negotiations – I mean, pension and stuff like that, and what would happen after – it was a five year term, what would happen if – when my term ended I had to think - you know, I knew what I was like. When I’d been in the Met Office and my six years ended I had nothing, I had to go out and start scurrying around for a job, and I thought I was too old to start scurrying around for a job. So I got them to agree that my salary would continue until civil service retirement age and if I finished my term at NERC and we shook hands and said thank you and goodbye, I had a salary I could take to a vice chancellor and say I want to work – I had arranged that it would be Oxford. I was living in Oxford and I was a fellow of an Oxford College. So it was all arranged, I knew where my cushion was [laughs], even before I started. And so I started. And of course there never had been appointments at that level, nobody knew what the job was, how to play it. I had a very – I had a team of four at headquarters. I said, I don’t want to build up a great empire, I just want – I need somebody on the money side, because I was responsible for, I don’t know, three quarters of a million or something initially, and somebody on the personnel side, somebody to support me, a junior scientist but nevertheless somebody who knew about the oceanography who could help me, and a private secretary. That’s what I had. Of course, NERC had its personnel division and its finance division and all these different divisions, but they were like civil service divisions in a ministry. They weren’t particularly knowledgeable about the needs of geology or oceanography or building a new research ship or whatever. All of that now passed my desk – well, it was on my desk to decide what to do about it.

[0:41:24]

And I had about three months in Kiel before I actually started work so I had some time to think. Luckily I’d done all this reading about governance. By chance I was – immediately I just knew how the civil worked. At least – memoirs are sometimes very revealing, civil servants’ memoirs and ministers, politicians, so I wasn’t going John Woods Page 182 C1379/64 Track 7 into a totally unknown, luckily. And also I knew quite a few MPs and Members of Parliament who – members of the House of Lords, I mean, because there were quite a few geographers. I mean, the Geographical Club is a very strange club, it’s the inner club of the Royal Geographical Society, and I’d been a member of the club for a long – before I went to Germany I’d been vice president of the Royal Geographical Society. And I mean, I knew Shackleton. Shackleton was the head of the House of Lords. He and I were on first name terms and, you know, I’d helped him out and he’d helped me out. So I knew quite a lot – I knew my way – I knew who to talk to if I needed to talk to somebody. Interestingly, the other two directors of science didn’t have that sort of background contacts. I was in a comfortable position.

[0:43:02]

And before I left Germany I said, well, I’m going to be there five years, what can I achieve in five years. If you’re sensible you don’t try and set yourself impossible tasks and you don’t go in just saying, I’ll do it day to day and see – you actually have a plan which has to be adjusted in reality of course, but you have to start with a plan. And I said, I think one of the things that’s wrong with science in the institutes and in the universities is that they’re struggling year to year to get the money for the research and they tend to tackle rather small problems, doable, elegant, nice science, but not very ambitious. Remember, I had been spending time thinking about the big problems of climate and atmospheric forecasting and so on and I had been versed in what are the real, real problems that ought to be tackled. And I found that the academics and the institute scientists were tackling this elegant nice science at a personal level or small group level, but they weren’t geared up to tackling the real ones. And I thought, well, if Britain, with a great tradition in science, isn’t going to be able to contribute to the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, for example, that’s ridiculous. The mindset wasn’t – people were not buzzing in the – it’s different in other disciplines. The astronomers were used to having big meetings and planning big new telescopes or whatever. So it was different in different disciplines. The oceanographers and the meteorologists – remember, the academic – the Met Office was different, were tackling elegant small personal problems, not the big problems. So one of my ambitions, and I sketched down on one sheet of paper the things that I would like to achieve in five years, would be to talk to them and say, look, if we pull John Woods Page 183 C1379/64 Track 7 together we can be part of the big project, whether it’s chemistry, physics, biology, doesn’t matter what it is, doing the science they wanted to do but in a bigger context, so that it fitted together and if it works they would then make a substantial contribution, one of the big issues. And that became my number one ambition and essentially that was the ambition, because then a lot of necessary adjustments and changes had to take place to take account of that. One is I invented a new way of – a new strategy for the whole marine and atmospheric sciences, supported by NERC, but that was a lot of it – I did some homework and discovered that the navy budget for oceanography was almost identical to the NERC budget. They thought it was about a hundred times bigger but they were including all the cost of weapons, sonar sets and torpedoes and stuff. And I said, we’ll strip all that out. When it comes to real naval research, like following up the work I’d done when I was working in the navy, there was research to follow and I had a lot of – there was a lot of money going into research, as part of NATO. And I went and spoke to the First Sea Lord. See, I was now a civil servant who could knock the door at Number 10, I could go talk to the First Sea Lord, and the door would be open.

For those that don’t know, who is the First Sea Lord and what does he do?

He’s the head of the navy. He is the – there are two heads of the navy, there’s a political controller of the navy, who’s the First Lord of the Admiralty, who is a politician, minister, and there’s the First Sea Lord, who is the top admiral and he runs the navy, under political control of course, and so used to getting his own way. And he said, ‘Well, we’d better bring in the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defence on this one.’ I said, ‘Oh, you want Ron Oxburgh, don’t you?’ ‘Cause I knew Ron, he was a geologist. I’d known him for – he was in Oxford. In comes Ron and I said, ‘I’ve got a proposal.’ I can talk about it now, I couldn’t a few years ago. I said, ‘I’ll put my entire budget on the table if you put your entire budget on the table and between us we will do much bigger things.’ They’re all about doing bigger things, more bangs for the buck, if you like. Of course instant reaction was, forget it, but not really. I, of course, had some reputation for having worked with the navy so it did – they were polite and listened to me. And they knew that some of the things that were really interesting to them, they would quite like some civilians to do it so that they weren’t so visible. They’d quite like Discovery to go and do some work in a place John Woods Page 184 C1379/64 Track 7 where they didn’t particularly want a Royal Navy ship to be doing it, a hydrographic survey ship, for example, which could have done it just as well. And so over the next – I mean, gradually it became clear, there was a win-win situation if we did it without telling anybody. I didn’t ever tell NERC Council, but we set up a committee, CAROS - Committee for something or other. I think the R was research, O was ocean and I’ve forgotten. But it was a name that couldn’t have been decoded if somebody didn’t know what it was. But it had very senior navy people, representatives of the navy labs, myself, I brought in one or two people, my senior directors, who I could trust and who loved the idea because they could see that resources that they needed and couldn’t get by the usual mechanism might just quietly be made available, like they had been made available to me when I was a young student. So those were the things I could do, I could do other things. And I did, I introduced the community, the institute and university, oceanographers, to the idea of doing things which they found fun themselves, they were doing good – they felt comfortable with the research as such, but it was in a bigger context, including the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, the JGOFS, the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study, which was about biology, and deep drilling programme. There was something for everybody. It wasn’t saying you’ve all got to stop what you’re doing and do this. On the contrary, it was do what you’re doing but fit within this – this package.

[0:50:31]

And it took some time, of course. I made a point of never asking an institute director to come to my office in Swindon. I always went to his office, in his own – sat in his room. Stupid things like that really help.

Why does that help?

They think you’re not a bureaucrat telling them what to do. They think you’re a colleague going and talking to them about possibilities. They know that you’re technically their boss, they know that you have big ideas and they have to run the show and they think you’re being a little bit too ambitious, but what I said to them is, you can’t stop doing – and it’s a classic problem in science, you want to introduce some new project, later on at Imperial this became very clear, you can’t tell a person John Woods Page 185 C1379/64 Track 7 to stop doing what they’re doing ‘cause they’ve built up a team of technicians, they’ve got a research group, and drop it and suddenly do something else. You can only do that if the something else is very generously funded, so that it has the money to hire technicians and so on and then gradually they’ll move into it. So the deal I struck was, this is the direction I want NERC marine science to go, my job is to get the money, big money, and if I get the money then I want you to put the best people into this, initially continuing to finish off what they’re doing, of course, no disruption, but then gradually – ‘cause these projects – WOCE was going to be a twelve years project. I mean, it wasn’t going to be overnight, plenty of time to finish off what they were doing before they – but to get involved. And so my job was then to get the money.

[0:52:32]

And I decided that NERC had been a little bit – it was keeping its light under a bushel. I hadn’t really been banging the drum very much about how good it’s – it did some good science. And I thought, well, I’ll start to publish – first of all publish a nice glossy brochure with the new strategy, this is set out what we’re going to do. And I gave a lecture at the Foundation for Science and Technology, which is a – I don’t know if you’ve come across that organisation. It’s had a few changes but by then it had settled down to a fortnightly evening in the Royal Society with three talks, discussion, dinner, discussion continues after dinner. And the people who went were by invitation only, they were parliamentarians, they were civil servants, they were industrialists, they were all the people that mattered. And if there was a particular theme then experts in that theme would be brought in in addition. And I had been going to – I was on the list of people who got invited, so I used to get the notice saying the next meeting would be on so and so on this topic, please tell us if you’re coming, if so do you want to stay for dinner, very civilised. But my goodness, in the audience of maybe a hundred of people for dinner, but maybe 150 or 200 even for the lectures before, you had everybody who mattered, everybody who mattered in the country, and often there would be foreign implications, so the ambassador or the chief scientist from the embassy of whatever country would come along too. In fact, some chief scientists became such regulars they got an invitation automatically, including a chief scientist from France, French Embassy and so on, who I ended up getting to John Woods Page 186 C1379/64 Track 7 know and then they started inviting me to their meetings in the embassy. It became a terrific network. And so I presented my new strategy for marine sciences at there – I mean, what a – everybody who mattered heard it and could comment on it, discuss it, challenge it. So it had been launched. And there was a glossy brochure that they all took home.

[0:55:06]

And then I thought, well, okay, that’s the broad strategy, now for each of the projects, WOCE or JGOFS or whatever, I will make a glossy brochure for that particular project, ‘cause I’m going to need funding for it, and I got the scientists themselves to write it, a little bit of editing. And I was spending quite a lot of money on printing and it was done to high quality. And it had never been done in any of the research councils. They all do it now. So I started to – I remember, Margaret Thatcher got interested in climate. She could see that it was going to be an important thing internationally. The Americans were not interested in taking the lead so there was an opening for the UK to take the lead. And she was a scientist and so she made sure she was thoroughly briefed and kick started it with a big speech at the Royal Society and then proceeded to put it on the agenda at G5 and – I used to go to G5 and all these other meetings. And she had a meeting all day with the entire Cabinet sitting there sulking and fed up with being stuck with an invited group of scientists to talk about the science of climate. Of course, who were we? We were the World Climate Research Programme, the Brits involved in that, and the IPCC, it was the usual suspects. And I did the ocean bit. And there were moments when even the Prime Minister was beginning to get a bit bored with some speech or other, but I had brought along a stack of glossy brochures for everybody on my next big project, which happened to be for plankton research. The biologists wanted to have a big programme for plankton research. The Americans had agreed, the French were in it, but we needed the UK funding. And it was a joy to see her with a whole Cabinet there, us scientists down there, and as one or other of them gave talks which she was finding – she picked up this brochure and started flipping through it. I thought, gotcha. And she called me over at teatime and said, ‘Drop in and we’ll talk about it.’ So the money was there. Every time I went out I reckoned I came out with a fifty million tip [laughs], which was enough for these big projects. Well, not always exactly fifty John Woods Page 187 C1379/64 Track 7 million but it was at that level. That was petty cash to a prime minister and she was quite able to say, ‘How much do you need for this?’ And I said, ‘Well, I need thirty million.’ She said, ‘I’ll give you thirty-five.’ She wanted the science to work. People said she was mean, she was – she was cautious, you know, daughter of a corner street grocer. She looked after the money, she didn’t waste money, but she knew how to spend money and she spent money on science if she was convinced the science fitted with government policy and when she checked it up, was grudgingly admitted by other scientists that it was okay [laughs]. So that was my game at NERC, I brought in the money. In fact, I tripled the NERC budget for oceanography and meteorology during my five years, first five years, tripled it, which was – because on top of the baseline stuff I put these big projects. Now you can’t go to the Prime Minister and say I’ve got somebody who wants thrupence ha’penny for a new microscope or something, don’t waste my time, do it out of your own money, but when it’s obviously beyond anything the research council could fit into its normal budget then she would listen. Sometimes I would have spoken to some friends in the House of Lords who would have warned her something was bubbling up. Sometimes I – well, I always spoke to the Minister and Permanent Secretary in Education and Science to make sure that she didn’t pick up the phone to them and they didn’t know about it, because that would have been a disaster. But I had learnt enough before I started about how to play the game. Of course, I still learnt an awful lot doing it. There’s a very big difference from reading about it and doing it.

[0:59:51]

The first week, the first week I was in post, I got a call from the Cabinet Office. And in those days NERC and the research councils were in Cabinet Office, before they got pushed out to the Ministry of Science. I pop up, there’s a problem. There had been a – before I went there’d been a House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology report. They spent a couple of years investigating a particular aspect of science or technology and they had done marine science. And they had been extremely critical. I’d read it, when I was in Kiel I’d read it. It had just come out. And it says – the subject is – I think the word was balkanised, it was broken into little pieces and it wasn’t pulling together. The fisheries people were not talking to the oceanographers and the meteorologists weren’t talking to – and so on. The British John Woods Page 188 C1379/64 Track 7

Antarctic Survey thought it was on another planet. It could well have been, but they were doing marine science but it was not – in no way it was – there was no sense – the sum of the parts was much less than it should have been. And the House of Lords was right. They often are right, they’ve got a lot of expertise and they take a lot of trouble to go around and check their facts. And what I discovered was that government had to have a debate on these reports and had to decide whether they were going to pooh- pooh the report, rubbish it, or they were going to give a calm rational, thank you very much, it’ll disappear into the shelves and you’ll never hear of it again, or they’ll say they’ve got to – yes, we will do something serious about this. The general feeling in the Cabinet Office is, they had pooh-poohed two previous reports and they couldn’t do a third [laughs]. So this time they had to take it seriously and they had to come up with something as a positive response. And so a representative of each of the ministries in marine science – every ministry in Britain one way or another is involved in marine science. Transport because of maritime transport, fisheries obviously, environment obviously, but Home Office, why? Because they licensed diving in the North Sea. I mean, every ministry one way or another had a finger in the pie and was not going to have that finger taken over by anybody else. They would defend their patch. So they had representatives of each of these sitting around a table and me, new boy, who the hell is he. They had all been at civil service college with each other, they were always – civil service is very – they know each other. These are the senior people who do legislation, they know each other. And I – who is this and what the hell’s he doing calling himself a grade three civil servant ‘cause he hasn’t been through any of the training or anything. And we met and it was a joy. We met in the old Cabinet room, round the old Cabinet tale of George III. If you go inside the Cabinet Office, it looks a bland little door in Whitehall. Behind is the remnants of the Palace of Whitehall. The other bits the other side of the road are the Ministry of Defence. So when the whole palace burnt down, bits of it were kept, including the Cabinet room with the great golden throne and the door where the king could slip in and listen to the Cabinet discussions, and George III used to. It’s still there, the same wooden table. And we were meeting round this. For me this was heaven. I’d read about it, I knew about it from reading, but I never thought I’d – the first week I was sitting round this table and we – there was a very smart woman from the Cabinet Office who was chairing it, and she explained that the weren’t going to rubbish this one, they’d better come up with something sensible, and the others all started pleading John Woods Page 189 C1379/64 Track 7 their special itty-bitty thing. And I said, well, the nub of the criticism, which everybody accepted was right, was that it was balkanised, everybody was doing their little bit and the sum of the parts was pathetic. I said, well, let’s try and invent a – what I called a Coordinating Committee for Marine Science and Technology, which would have people sitting round the table and would be a forum for proposing things which were more than the sum of the parts, which involved several ministries where – whatever was appropriate for the particular thing. And they agreed to do it. And they wanted to have an independent chairman, fine, because they were all going to be civil servants defending their own ministry and they wanted to have some very senior independent chairman who knew government. They thought – it was the time when everybody had to be an industrialist in charge, it was very fashionable, but no industrialist would touch this with a – they wanted the head of BP to do it and he said he’d be too busy, and they wanted to have the head of Rolls Royce, he said he’d be too busy. In the end they asked me, can I think of anybody who’d do it, and I said, ‘Well, the Director General of the Met Office has been there eighteen years as a deputy secretary, great tool, he knows government inside out. He knows the Ministry of Defence, which is a major player. He knows NERC, which is a major player. But he knows also the other ministries and they all know him. And he’s a pretty tough guy, he doesn’t take any crap from junior civil servants. He would be the ideal person.’ Anyway, they agreed. He was my PhD professor, of course. And he agreed to do it. And then the Cabinet Office can sometimes be very mean. They said, ‘We’re going to have to pay him.’ And he said, ‘Yes, he’s a deputy secretary and he’ll be doing the job of a deputy secretary part time.’ And the rule is that in retirement a civil servant can never earn more than they would have had if they’d carry on in full employment. So he’d got this pension – so they paid him the difference to bring him up to – as though he was still – which was a good deal for them and for him and he was very happy. But it was a sort of – a third of his income was the top up. And then I found him an office in NERC’s headquarters in London. We had a pied a terre in London. And so he had a room and then they said that they were going to furnish it appropriately for a deputy secretary, so it has to have nice polished furniture and everything. When he arrived the first day, I took him in to show him his room and the desk was one third the size of the desk because he was only getting one third the salary. That’s what I call mean minded. They somehow resented it, they’d wanted an industrialist. He couldn’t get his legs under it [laughs], John Woods Page 190 C1379/64 Track 7 so they gave him another one and told him to use that. So I think this gives you the flavour for the kind of life that I found myself living in as Director of Science in NERC. I hadn’t expected it to be so intensely political. I was in the heart of government, right – in and out of Number 10, Cabinet Office, First Sea Lord’s office. I mean, but I just breezed in and did it. Remember, I had been working with admirals since I was a student and it didn’t frighten me. Frightened isn’t the right word, but I felt relaxed talking to them. After all, in Malta, when I was on – my office was in the Commander in Chief Mediterranean’s office, the boardroom where you have your lunch was for captains and admirals only. So little me, a student, was embedded in that atmosphere. So years later, when I found myself parachuted into being a grade three civil servant, director of science, it didn’t phase me at all. I must say, my two colleagues were a little bit surprised [laughs]. And I had a wonderful time.

[1:08:56]

I mean, I managed to get new research ships. The biggest thing was to actually bring together the institutes, the research vessel base, which is in South Wales in Barry. Nobody ever went there but it was very important ‘cause that’s where the research ships were maintained and prepared for particular scientific cruises. Everybody hated having to trug out to Barry to talk to them. So I said, fine, I’m going to bring that in and we’re going to have it alongside the institute, which was in Wormley in the stockbroker belt. Nobody could afford to get a house there. And we’re going to move it to Southampton or Plymouth or Liverpool, but it ended up in Southampton. And we’re going to put a spanking new building in to house that and the university as well. They’re going to be five – initially we thought 400 people, there are now 600 people there and the – because it’s grown, it sucks in more resources. And some industrial work would have part of it, where small specialist firms might want to have a place on the campus, good contacts, a lot of tradition of that in Farnborough, for example. The ships were alongside. The – and then I worked out what it would cost. I went down to Southampton and poked around, listened to the gossip and discovered that the port was drawing – the port of Southampton is very big, of course, and it’s got this fabulous double high tide, which gives it a competitive edge. A strange phenomenon which actually one of my students solved, why its double high tide is there, it’s a non linear effect as the tide from the Atlantic forces its way into the ever John Woods Page 191 C1379/64 Track 7 narrower Channel. It promotes the harmonic – that’s by the by. Anyway, Southampton, big, active, thriving port, nevertheless was moving up river and the old Victorian docks were becoming a bit redundant. And one of them had been sold off as a yacht basin. And the next one to it, the Empress Dock, was in sort of limbo. It was used by the tugs and a little bit of this, a little bit of that. There was a grain store there. There was a Ro-Ro facility, which was the only one that could get tanks on board, so for the Falklands they’d had to use that. Rolling a tank onto a ship was a quite a – and so it had a few facilities but it was – certainly it looked a bit rundown. So I thought, that’ll do us nicely, nice bit of land behind it, all on Victorian – infill, outside the old coastline, the old waterfront of Southampton had been extended by the Victorians to build these docks. So I went to see the owner, the chairman of Associated British Ports. They owned Southampton and a number of other ports, including Barry where our research ships were. And I just sketched out what I wanted to do, to bring the whole lot together and plonk it right beside the Empress Dock. And he said, ‘Sorry, no way. We need that dock. We can’t just give it up. We’ve the one next door to it, we can’t give up another dock.’ I said, ‘But you’re not using it.’ I said, ‘You’ve got a few tugs there, you’ve got the occasional use of exceptionally heavy Ro-Ro facility, you’ve got - the old Fyffes Banana base had been closed but they were using it as a grain store for chicken feed. Well, that’s ridiculous, that could have been done anywhere. And I said, ‘I know exactly what’s going on there and the dock’s exactly the right size for us and we will be vacating your docks in Barry to move the ships here, so they’ll stay within ABP.’ And certainly it was an absolutely categorical – don’t waste my time, no. That was from the headquarters up in London. And I don’t know – somebody must have spoken to him and hinted ever so gently that he would of course be due for a knighthood fairly soon but it wouldn’t happen if he didn’t say yes to the – [laughs] I mean, I don’t know who said that to him. A civil servant couldn’t possibly say it. Maybe a member of the House of Lords Select Committee said it to him, possibly Lord Shackleton but I don’t know.

How do you know that someone did?

I couldn’t say [laughs]. It would have been entirely improper for me to put a member of the House of Lords up to doing my work for me, wouldn’t it? And then I got a call from the secretary, he’s having second thoughts, would I like to pop down and discuss John Woods Page 192 C1379/64 Track 7 the matter. So it was now a yes and now it’s a matter of the details. He said, ‘We can’t sell it to you. I will not sell it to you. I’ll lease it to you.’ I said, ‘150 years.’ After a bit he said yes. And I said, ‘You know the law, don’t you?’ ‘What law?’ I said, ‘The law is that if you’re a setting tenant you can have the same again. So by giving us 150 year lease you’ve committed yourself for 300 years.’ I said, ‘It’ll be off your watch by the time that happens’ [laughs]. But I said, ‘I just want to be clear what you’re doing. Essentially it is a permanent …’ And it was a peppercorn rent, it was nothing. The deal was the ships using it, even though we, quotes, owned the Empress Docks, would still pay harbour fees as though they were in Southampton. So there was an income stream for him. And we flattened every building round the docks and put up this wonderful building. I managed to get fifty million from government and there’s a – everybody who does something like this has long stories and I won’t bore you with them. But it involved pulling all the strings that I had. The Chief Scientific Advisor to the Cabinet, to government, was another old friend. He had been head of the Biological Research Council. We knew each other well. And I went to see him. He said, ‘I can give you fifteen minutes.’ He said, ‘I know why you’re here. What’s the issue?’ I said, ‘I want you to tell me what boxes I’ve got to tick, ‘cause I don’t want this to suddenly fail for something I haven’t thought of.’ And so he went through that, yeah, thought of that, thought of that, thought of that, and then he suddenly hit me with something I hadn’t thought of, so that fifteen minutes was very valuable. He said, ‘The present ethos in the Conservative government, the Thatcher government, is that we’ve got to start to exploit the output of our science, especially from government, including research councils. And they don’t want to do it. They want scientific papers. We’ve got to start showing them we can get – that we’re getting something good out of it.’ And I looked at him and I said, ‘You know and I know, there’s no direct benefit. It’s an indirect benefit. It comes in unexpected ways. And you can’t set up a simple – I’ve put this money in, I want some benefits out.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘But I’m Chief Scientific Advisor to the Cabinet, I can’t say that,’ and winked. He said, ‘That’s a box you’ve got to tick. You’ve got to find a mechanism that when Treasury go through it, as they do in minute detail, they don’t get stuck on that box and say, well, we’d love to fund it, but …’ you know, brilliant. He said, ‘That’s what – knowing people and knowing how to ask the right kind of question of the right kind of person.’

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Who was he though? He was the Chief Scientific Advisor?

Oh, I knew you were going to ask that of me. I’ve forgotten his name, a Scot. Stewart, Bill Stewart, good scientist, who became chairman of the Biological Research Council. And he had been chairman of the Biological Research Council before when I was on the NERC council, as a councillor rather than as an employee, so I knew him from those days. You see, marine science is unusual because it’s all the scientific disciplines applied to understanding the issues of the sea. So it’s geology, it’s physics, it’s chemistry, it’s biology, they’re all there, and you end up talking to people in other research councils quite often. The – so I had a problem. I had to have an answer for this and I didn’t know what to do. But I happened to know a very senior industrialist. He wouldn’t call himself an industrialist, he’d call himself an entrepreneur, and his definition of entrepreneur is it’s somebody who comes up with a totally new industrial line, which had never been thought of before, or a product. Of course Macintosh does it: iPads and – nobody had ever thought of – and suddenly, bing, it’s there. He’s says that’s entrepreneurship, that is – you spend years thinking hard, researching, putting everything together and suddenly you astonish the world with something totally new. He’d done it twice already. He’d done it once in optics. He had bought up every small company doing medical or defence optics, little – he described how he did it once, a hundred of them, and he made a great big company that delivered what was needed. And it was the time when optics were suddenly being very important. He did the first head up display for a jetfighter, for example, his company did. He could see that those little companies, rather like I could see the oceanographers acting as individuals, just were never going to hit the really serious targets, so the Americans were doing that and selling their stuff to us. And he said, ‘We can make that stuff but we’ve got to really be configured to do it.’ And he’d made a vast fortune doing it, serious money. And then he sold it. That’s how he made the money, of course. You don’t make the money from the income stream, you make the money from the IPO and you go to the stock market and launch it. And then he had decided to go into molecular biology. He’s not a molecular biologist. He said, ‘I don’t care if I don’t know something, I’ll hire somebody who can tell me.’ He was very bright. And he had – he too had very good connections with government and he had talked government, Margaret Thatcher, ultimately the prime minister, to give him the rights to everything that came out of Porton Down. John Woods Page 194 C1379/64 Track 7

Now Porton Down is the biological and chemical warfare research establishment, deep, deep secret stuff in the Ministry of Defence, doing astonishing things, which I knew because interestingly the Met Office has a unit in Porton Down and I used to go there. So I knew a bit about Porton Down. One of my colleagues who’d left the Met Office had gone to work there, I used to visit him. But it does seriously spooky things like biological warfare and so on, to prepare against the risk of attack, of course. Much bigger now than it was in those days because of the fact that somebody could put something nasty into the underground system, like they did in Japan. How do you protect yourself against that? I ended up on all sorts of committees for that. So I got to know this man. I sort of knew him before the question was put and we had been doing a few things together. And I just took the problem to him. I said, ‘Look, I’ve been told I just have to come up with a solution for this, otherwise I’m not going to get the money for my oceanographic centre in Southampton.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ll come down and look at it and see if I can see from my perspective whether what they’re doing is likely to be able to earn any money.’ And he did, he went through the whole show. Turned up in his big Bentley [laughs], with me beside him, of course, made quite an impact in the institutes as we went around. And he’s a man with great presence, tall, big man, big industrialist used to having his own way, but fascinated by science. Really, his first science was optics and his second big money spinner was molecular biology. And he said, ‘Well, maybe my third one is going to be the marine world. I want to sniff around and see if just possibly there’s another great industry to be founded here.’ And after some time, it was a bit of a crash programme because we had to get moving, because it was about to land on Treasury’s desk, I said to him, ‘Okay, now what are we going to do?’ He said, ‘There’s nothing.’ He said, ‘Bill Stewart’s right, that the benefits are enormous but they come in very unexpected indirect ways. They go into a sort of cultural understanding of a problem, which then suddenly pops up in a way that you’ve never thought of before, and I can’t see a way of founding an industry on this, building up a great …’ As an entrepreneur he couldn’t see it. I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to have an answer.’ So he made me an offer, stunning offer. He said, ‘I’ll set up a company whose sole purpose is to exploit the output from this – all the marine groups involved in this new – in fact, I’ll do it for the whole of lower marine science.’ He said, ‘I want you to give me a monopoly.’ I thought, that’s going to be difficult to sell to Council. And he said, ‘But I tell you, my expectation is, once you’ve got your Southampton oceanography centre, this company’s going to die. John Woods Page 195 C1379/64 Track 7

I’ll never trade. This is a company that won’t trade, there won’t be anything.’ So it was a phantom company. It had all the registration, it was – you know, we had Anderson, the top - you know, Anderson, top lawyers, top accountants, everybody, glittering statement of intent and everything. Treasury were very impressed. And he was famous, he’d just taken over the monopoly for all over the products from Porton Down. So the tick was in that box, with the promise that, once – oral promise, handshake, no more, that once the oceanography centre existed he would unwind the company and it would evaporate. I had to give him monopoly rights on everything produced by marine science and I didn’t tell the Chairman of NERC, ‘cause I couldn’t, ‘cause he would have vetoed it. So there are times when you have to actually – you know, and I was a great reader of Mott, the German general, who says there are times you have to go for it. And bless him, after we got the oceanography centre, next time he saw me he said, ‘Okay, I think it’s time now to unwind the company.’ He didn’t – he was straight, absolutely straight with me, and nobody ever knew we set it up, apart from Treasury. That was the final tick in the box, the rest – I won’t say it was plain sailing but we got the money. I chose the architects, I took the architects around America looking at oceanographic buildings. I found the man who had designed most of them, a man called Schiff in New York, a top New York architect, and he said – he was so tickled with the idea. He said, ‘No fee, I’ll come with you and tell you what’s right and wrong about these buildings.’ Amazing, he would walk around a building with us asking the users, did they like the building. Architects don’t usually do that. Marvellous man. And so we sort of bonded with the architects and I chaired the committee kind of linking with the design side, the architects, engineers and the users. I was essentially the customer of the building, representing government. And we end up now with this marvellous building in Southampton, which is thought of as being the biggest science building put up during the Thatcher years. And it goes back to the time when I saw Leon Britton back as the professor in Southampton, seeding the idea of moving government labs out of green field sites and putting them on university campuses. Here we put them in the university and they’re all on the same corridor of the university and it’s working beautifully.

[1:28:17]

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What was the reaction of the smaller institutes that were moving?

Well, there was a selling job. That was my job, to make them feel they wanted to do it. The civil service is quite good about paying moving expenses and helping resettling expenses and all that, so financially they weren’t going to suffer. Some of them – it was going to be disruptive of their school’s education, so they said, would we fund a pied a terre there, leaving the family where they were until the kids finished school. There was a lot of case by case, individual by individual. And there were some who said we’re just not going to move. And fine, they were given the option of a redundancy payment or if there was a – perhaps they were the kind of person who would fit in with the university and we asked, would you like us to find you a job in a university of your choice, a lot of that. And there was a good support team at NERC that took over all of that, so I used to go and give talks to them but then the follow up, a lot of nitty-gritty follow up, was done by the very good human resources people at NERC. They knew about being fair to individuals. And quite a lot of money had to be spent but it was transitional costs.

[1:29:56]

And who was the industrialist?

I think I won’t mention his name.

Okay, fine, yeah. Are you able to say how he – just because I’m confused about how you could, how he was able to make money – I can see how he made money out of optics in terms of designing, for example, head up displays, but how could he make money out of the products of the Porton Down research?

It was the time when – there’s a lot of money around, the City of London is awash with money, the pension funds mainly but others. The BT pension fund in those days was sixty billion and the person who ultimately manages that money has to beat the FTSE curve to show that he’s actually doing something which is more than just following and tracking the – and they are always looking for something that’s big and new. Because the money that they put in, they expect to be multiplied by ten when John Woods Page 197 C1379/64 Track 7 there’s an IPO, initial public offer, on the stock exchange when it’s launched. Think of – what’s the social networking programme?

Facebook.

Facebook, which is just in the process of being launched, and everybody involved is going to become a millionaire, billionaire, whatever. It’s at that moment when suddenly the money – the payback comes, the earnings don’t count, because at that stage the company has been nurtured and strengthened and brought to the point where there is a prospect of big earnings in the future. Why did Apple shares hit 500 dollars this week, 500 dollars? It’s enormous. They were one dollar when they were launched, because there is a perception that if they continue like they have in the last few years, you’re going to make a lot of money. It’s all about expectations, the whole stock exchange is about expectations. And in the ‘80s, late ‘80s, early ‘90s, the hot thing was molecular biology. It was going to solve medical problems. It was going to come up with cancer solutions and all of that, pharmaceuticals. It was going to be enormous. Nobody knew quite how but they knew that the sudden insights that had come from the human genome project, which hadn’t been absorbed and hadn’t been converted to drugs or very, very few, but it was going to happen. Everybody knew it was going to happen, it’s a matter of hard work and time. And the companies that got in in the beginning were going to be the ones that really were going to be big, either because they grew themselves or because even bigger companies bought them for a high price. And the expectations were very, very big. And unlike the bubble in internet companies, which was all froth and burst, a lot of people lost everything, molecular biology is big, human health is big. Human health will always be with us and people are living longer and needing new kinds of drugs. I mean, it probably won’t happen in my lifetime but in our children’s lifetime, they will see a change in medicine which is unimaginable today. And I don’t think anybody doubts that but we know it’s going to be a long haul and it’s going to need some seriously big companies capitalised to do it. And it’s not going to be done by government research labs, it’s going to be done by industry. So you’re going to have your big pharma companies doing it and he was in that league. He really was one of the top people. So it was pretty heady days. Remember, ’53, the discovery of the double – the DNA – Watson and Crick, very exciting, and it took a long time to actually get the human genome – John Woods Page 198 C1379/64 Track 7 the human genome had been done, so that meant human health was on the agenda, how and - you know, so expectations – and money. The City of London is awash with money, people desperate to find something to put money in which will earn big returns, knowing that a lot of it will just earn nothing but one big return can make up for several failures. And I got to meet the man – one or two people in the City through this friend of mine. And the way they talked about money, it was – and this is long before the stupid banking crisis now. They weren’t banks, they were people who wanted to put money into industry, to make money for their pensioners, and it was their job to do it and still is.

And you said that you’d visited Portland and been on the committee. Is there anything that you could …?

Visited …?

The Portland – the secret research establishment?

Porton.

Porton Down, yes.

Porton Down. No, I hadn’t been on the committee or anything. One of the jobs they had had in the First World War was poison gas. Remember the use of poison gas in the First World War, a lot of people got gassed? And the meteorology was important because you have to know which way the wind’s blowing and where the stuff is going to go, and if you’re going to use it you don’t send it if it’s going to blow back on your own troops. So it was pretty obvious that the Meteorological Office was going to be involved. And one of the director generals of the Met Office, Graham Sutton, the one before John Mason, had been a great expert in that problem, turbulent diffusion. And one of my – in the branch of the Met Office I worked in as a research fellow, when I was doing the navy stuff, they had to put me somewhere and they put me in the turbulence group, which – well, the leading person was Frank Pasquill, who wrote the standard book on dispersion of chemicals and things. And there were lots of experiments that had to be done to check out – and that was all done at Porton. John Woods Page 199 C1379/64 Track 7

Salisbury Plain is a great big area where you can release things without really inconveniencing people, not poison gas but they have – little spores, for example, that are so light they move as if it’s a gas and they then see where they end up. The Met Office had a computer there and it was doing some good stuff and it was the branch I was in so I was popping over there from time to time. But nothing to do with the committee, nothing to do with the steering, it was just – Porton wasn’t an unknown place for me.

I think you said there was – after the gas attacks in the subway, that you were perhaps …?

Oh, that was years later, it was later. I mean, I … yeah, I got involved in a few strange committees.

[1:38:12]

We haven’t talked about the Container World Project, which is something I did after leaving NERC and went to Imperial College. Did you want to talk about that?

Yes I do. I’m just going to ask a couple more questions first. These strange committees, are these ones that you can’t talk about?

Which strange committees?

You said you got involved in a number of strange committees?

Did I?

Concerned with the – after the gas …

Can’t remember.

Okay. One thing I wanted to ask about, given that not many people will have had such close working contact with Margaret Thatcher, and she has this reputation as John Woods Page 200 C1379/64 Track 7 someone who promoted British science in various ways. I wondered how you went about convincing her of things that you wanted to convince her about. In other words, what was necessary, when approaching her, specifically her, in order to try and secure funding for something? How did you approach that individual in order to try to get your way, if you like?

[1:39:15]

First of all, she was trained as a research chemist in Oxford and that had left a lifelong interest in science and a feeling that she knew the mindset of a scientist, research scientist. She felt comfortable sitting talking with scientists. One almost felt sometimes that she felt it a blessed relief to let her hair down, metaphorically, and chat science for quarter of an hour. You don’t get more than – a quarter of an hour’s a lot of time with somebody at that level. And so sometimes you felt that you were just her coffee break [laughs], you know, non stop, the impossible job of running the country. To the extent that she had – let’s call it a hobby or something for – something different that she could just enjoy. I think science was as near as it gets for her. If it also had some relevance to some aspect of her broader policy, great, why not. And she wasn’t the minister for science. It must have been quite difficult being minister for science [laughs]. But Sainsbury, of course, was great. He knew how to play the game. The – so I would never waste her time, you don’t ever waste somebody’s time at any level, more junior or more senior. I mean, you never waste people’s time so I’d only ever try and get a meeting with her or with anybody else – I mentioned the First Sea Lord, these are people with big jobs, they can’t – if you ever go and waste their time you never find the door open again, ever. And it may apply to your colleagues and you may be damning the whole so and so. You’ve got to be very, very careful. And so I would find something that I knew that there were hints, or I’d been tipped off, that she was interested in. I knew that she’d been talking to Jim Lovelock, who she adored, my sort of man. And I knew he’d been talking to her about the fact that the biology might be an important factor in global change, in climate, and he’d given her some ideas. And I knew that she was – it was a sort of agenda item that was there. And so when an opportunity came for me to just come up with some specific way of moving that agenda forward, not wasting her time, but here is something that we can do, we can move ahead and I’m in a position to make it John Woods Page 201 C1379/64 Track 7 happen but I need your support. She never signed the cheques [laughs], but she would talk to the minister of science and science education or whoever, and it would sort of happen. Word from her was really very powerful, as you can imagine. And so it was a matter of choosing the moment and hitting when the door was unlatched. And you have to have an intelligent service, you have to have people who do meet her, who tip you off and – she’s getting interested in x or y, whatever it is. For example, there was – the French were hosting the G5, G5? G6? I know it’s now G8 but, I mean, it was smaller in those days. Call it G8, I forget what it was. And it was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution so they were going to make a big splash. And they had decided to focus the big splash on planet earth, so they created in Paris an Institute of Planet Earth [Institute for the Study of the Earth]. I knew the man, Claude Allegre, who became the first director. We’d been sitting on European committees. And she – Mitterrand, who was president, had invited – agreed to set up – it hadn’t yet happened but it was planned to set up this big institute, rather like Margaret Thatcher created the Hadley Centre when she wanted to have a big splash. So he set up this Institute for Planet Earth and it was going to look at things like climate but other things as well. And he got a top man to agree to do it, he later became minister for science. And so just before the G8 meeting, or G5, whatever it was, the French launched a big conference in the Elysee Palace, Paris, in the ballroom of the Elysee Palace, incredibly elegant French uncomfortable seats to sit on [laughs]. And they wanted to show that it was international and European and this was to be their card on the table for the G8. And so they had – they looked around and found – they chose subjects and then they found people to lead each subject, and they asked me to lead the oceanography, the marine sector. Well, planet earth is – so marine is quite big, it has sea, it covers a lot of it. And they put together a very decent team of people and we sat, had beautiful thoughts and came to beautiful conclusions over a period of a few days, sitting in the Elysee, and then presented the results to the assembled people, including these representatives of the G8. Okay, now, Margaret Thatcher isn’t going to take that lying down. She’s going to have something to put on the table herself. She’s not going to let the French jump her. So I knew she was looking for something. So you keep the antennae going. By chance I knew very closely the head of the French – my opposite number in France, the French research – it’s different but it’s – essentially he had the same job as I had but in France. We had agreed early on that we would share everything we could. We would pool resources whenever we could John Woods Page 202 C1379/64 Track 7 so that we could get more – like with the navy. He didn’t speak English so it was all in French, which stretched my French quite a bit. But I was buzzing over to Paris all the time when I was at NERC, buzzing back and forth, and he was coming over and we were – so it was fairly natural that when they’re looking for somebody abroad to chair the oceanography, my name would pop up. It was interesting. It’s not often you get your word to go to the G8, the leaders of the eighth richest industrial countries, wow. And I knew that she was wanting a repost. And she’d done the Hadley Centre, which was a pretty good thing and it’s become the world leading climate research centre. John Houghton was instrumental. And so I then took along a little package to her and said, ‘We can lead on this internationally but we’re going to need some seed money and so on.’ It’s the way it’s done. You don’t just barge in for a chat [laughs]. You have to know that there’s a need for something. And as I used to tell people in the – the directors in the institutes, when they can’t see where the money’s coming from, have the plans meticulously worked out, in a drawer ready to pull out, because you never know when suddenly there’s an opportunity going to come. And the others won’t have got a plan ready and you will and that’s the one who’ll get funded. Because the politicians suddenly need something, they need it yesterday, and if you just turn up and say, yes, well this plan might just serve your purpose, and it’s all beautifully laid out and the price is right – and it’s fun doing that, it’s fun. I got such fun in that.

[1:49:05]

Given that the ozone hole is one of the big environmental stories in the period covered by this project, could you say something about your role directly in, I suppose, allowing the measurements to continue, was it, or …?

I had a very small role. The work was done by a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, a man called Joe Farman, who was – I don’t know what his original training was but he was essentially in the role of an atmospheric chemist. And he, erm … he was a loner by temperament. The British Antarctic Survey’s primary job is to support the bases they have, ships which are essentially freighters which go down but they’re equipped to do a bit of science on the way there and back. And he had been analysing data. And there was a man called Dobson, who was, I think, reader in atmospheric John Woods Page 203 C1379/64 Track 7 science in Oxford, who had invented Dobson sonde, which measures ozone. And this was deployed by international agreement at places around the world, including Antarctica, ‘cause why not, you’ve got the opportunity, not because of any expectation. And then I think it was the Americans, I forget who the scientist was, suggested that there may be ozone depletion and if so it was likely to happen more in the polar regions, and the Americans launched a satellite to look for it and couldn’t find it. And so it seemed another of these ideas that – they had spent a lot of money on this satellite and couldn’t find anything. Of course it was one instrument on the satellite with lots of other instruments, it wasn’t the total cost. And so it sort of went off the agenda. And yet Joe Farman felt that his measurements were showing ozone depletion as had been predicted. But then he was up against the fact that the big boys had looked and it wasn’t there, and who was he to – but he was a good enough scientist, meticulous, he checked and checked and checked. But he unfortunately kept very quiet about it, he didn’t go round the conference circuit talking about it, because he’d obviously just be laughed out of court. There is this feeling that sometimes there’s a fashion in science, which can destroy good science because, for whatever reason, people have got the wrong conclusion prematurely. And he wasn’t doing anything else, this became a sort of – he became sort of passionate about it. And I mentioned earlier that the British Antarctic Survey liked to be their own place and they didn’t want to be lumped together with any others. And they have a very special funding arrangement. Their funding comes from the Foreign Office because it’s more about showing the flag. So although the money is channelled through NERC, whenever NERC starts hassling them, they pop along to the Foreign Office and the Foreign Office tells NERC to shut up. So they have some clout and they love to do things their own way and they’ve developed great expertise. They know how to work in the Antarctic and it’s not easy, and they know that the conditions can be bad one year and all your research plans have to be abandoned so you can’t deliver as planned. It’s not like laboratory work. And yet over the years they’ve done some very good stuff. And so not only was the institute very sort of – keep out, we’re the British Antarctic Survey – they didn’t exactly have barbed wire round it to keep me out [laughs]. They sort of resented the fact that I’d been appointed with a remit to look after their science, to the extent it was atmospheric and marine, as well as any other institute. They said, well, they’ll talk to me about it, they’ll – but they’re not going to have any orders from me. John Woods Page 204 C1379/64 Track 7

[1:53:59]

But there was a little bit of a – to say it was a war is far too much, but a bit of shoving and pushing between NERC headquarters, the chairman and secretary at NERC, and the British Antarctic Survey, and I ended up as sort of in the middle, I guess. And I was told they had decided to kick arse at the British Antarctic Survey and so they were going to sack somebody there. Who were they going to sack? They were going to sack somebody who wasn’t publishing. They’d looked at the list of publications, Joe Farman hadn’t published anything for years. And I said, ‘Well, actually, what he’s doing is quite interesting.’ ‘Well, tell him to publish then.’ So I went up and he said he wasn’t ready to publish. He showed me. He was very open about what he was doing, he showed me it all and it was pretty convincing to me. But, er, he was on the list. And later on: ‘Go up and sack him.’ I said, ‘If you want to sack him you sack him.’ They said, ‘No, no, it’s your job, you’re in charge.’ So I went up and said I’m not going to – I told him, ‘I’ve been told to sack you but I’m not going to do it.’ But I said, ‘I’ll back you up if you decide to publish and even if you feel you’re worried that you may get rubbished in publish, I’ll back you up and I’ll come in and say - you know, I’ll tell the Americans to shut up because this is actually good science, and I’ll defend you.’ And he then published and I didn’t have to defend him because his own data and analysis spoke for itself loud and clear. He was unduly worried. In fact, he’d done the business and the rest is history.

[1:55:50]

Thank you. Could you tell the story of the Container World Project?

I left NERC in, ooh, when was it, ’94 I think, after some – it was longer than my five years. My time was extended for a few years. But in the end they got a new boss and he wanted to change things. Oh no, and the Treasury said this was ludicrous, having three directors of science, this was way over the going rate. And although they recognised we’d been earning our keep, they thought that the time had come to slim it down and just have one. And it was up to the incoming chief executive, Krebs, John Krebs, whose wife daughter my daughter at school in Headington, we were John Woods Page 205 C1379/64 Track 7 neighbours – of course, his father, Nobel Prize Winner for the Krebs Cycle, and he had this desperate desire to prove himself as good as Papa. He was a damned good scientist and he did well at NERC, but he then went on to run the new Food Safety Agency, where he was brilliant and he transformed the whole thing, and ended up in the House of Lords. So he was very, very good. And he said he had been told in no uncertain terms that NERC was jolly well going to make do with one grade three, not three, and they could decide how to handle it, they could choose one of the three existing ones or get in somebody new or whatever they liked. And he then sent each of us a request to write down a blueprint for one director of science. And I think we all said, well yes, absolutely very good idea and I’m happy to do it [laughs]. So he was there – I mean, we would, wouldn’t we? And I was very happy at NERC, I felt it was going well and I had brought in the money and got things going better and the scientists were doing good things, perceived internationally as being much bigger. And in the end he – only popping into his home and he said, ‘I’ve spoken to the other two and I’ve said no way with them and now it’s your turn.’ [Laughs] He was very nice about it. And he said, ‘I’m going to ask David Drewry, director of British Antarctic Survey, to come down and do it.’ Well, I said, ‘You’re the boss, that’s it. I have a contract that says you’ll now continue to pay my salary and a modest amount of money per year for research support.’ And he said, ‘Yes, we’ve checked that,’ and did I have any ideas, and I said, ‘Oxford.’ We were in Oxford, I was living in Oxford. He was living in Headington. My daughter was being taught by his wife, teacher in Headington School. I mean, pretty close. I was a fellow of Linacre College in Headington and it had all been agreed that I would move from being an adjunct fellow, where you don’t actually have to turn up at every meeting, ‘cause I was too busy, that I would become a normal fellow and be there every Monday for the fellows’ meeting and so on. And there was a joint NERC Oxford institute, which I had been involved in setting up, because of a problem in the Met Office, as it happened. I needed a perch. But it was agreed that that would be a very nice little cosy research centre for me. So I had an Oxford base, I lived there, I had an Oxford college – wine and dine, interesting colleagues. And the Linacre had made a speciality of environment and had launched an annual environment conference and I’d give the opening lecture. And the Robert Hook Institute was a place to – I could do my research. He said, ‘Nevertheless, I’ve decided.’ And that’s fine, we stayed friends and we still meet. I went to talk to the principal of Linacre College. I said, John Woods Page 206 C1379/64 Track 7

‘I’m now going to move here.’ And almost before I could finish speaking I got a phone call from Ron Oxburgh, the rector of Imperial College, saying would I pop in for a chat. Of course, he had been chief scientific advisor at the Ministry of Defence when I had stuck my budget on the table and if he would put his budget on the table, which had raised a very firm eyebrow on his – but we did it, secretly. So we knew each other, you know. And he said, ‘We’ve had a committee and we’ve decided that the reputation of Imperial College is muck and brass and that we want to be a bit greener.’ And environment is – my predecessor closed the meteorology department, which was not deemed to be a very green thing to have done. ‘And none of the other departments have any particular green credentials. And the – we’ve decided that we’re going to set up a graduate school for the environment, which will span all the departments but will show that embedded in the departments without much visibility there’s some good work going on relevant to the environment, and it will send a message to the heads of departments that they should actually factor that in positively in somebody’s career prospects rather than negatively.’ Change the mood, change the whole mood, and change the external perception. And then he said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do and you’re going to be the leader of it. You’re going to direct it.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ [Laughs] He said, ‘Forget Oxford.’ He said, ‘You can stay a fellow of the college, pop down and have a nice meal occasionally with them, but you’re going to come up here and do this.’ I didn’t know that NERC had offered him my salary [laughs]. He said, ‘We’ll continue to pay your salary.’ NERC had done a deal with him, so he was getting me free [laughs]. But I mean, he then put that money into the expenses of setting up a graduate school and hiring a couple of staff and so on. And I did it. And the challenge was to get round all the departments and talk to them. And they all said, it won’t – our staff are very busy doing the research that they’ve chosen and which they’ve got funding for and so on, they can’t suddenly switch to grandiose – so don’t try and play that trick that you did in NERC of coming in with big grandiose projects that span departments, unless you come in with a whopping big amount of money. And money talks. So don’t expect us voluntarily to tell our staff to switch what they’re doing to something which is collaborative, because they won’t do it and we as head of department won’t ask them to do it. There were lots of other things I could do. I set up essentially a mini foundation of science and technology and we had wonderful meetings because I got members of the staff to give lectures, a day’s meeting followed by a splendid dinner and a discussion, same formula that the John Woods Page 207 C1379/64 Track 7 foundation had at the Royal Society. A bit of overlap with people, of course. So that changed the external image of Imperial College. Suddenly it was a green place. The main beneficiary was Ron Oxburgh, the rector, he became director and eventually chairman of Shell, which was not a bad payoff for him [laughs]. So his pension must be in the million or so mark now thanks to work I did. I asked him for a fraction of it but he said ‘nah’ [laughs].

[2:04:29]

But I had – one of the absolute things I had to do was to find a project that would be big and require drawing in expertise from across a number of departments. I looked at some – I thought about medical ones. And the college had just doubled in size by accreting all the West London medical schools. It was one of these periods of great reform. And the Rector said, ‘Leave off the medics, we’ve got enough problems with them settling down.’ He said, ‘Choose something on the – what’s called Old College, not the medic side.’ And, er, I was sitting on a committee called the Foresight Committee. Have you come across the Foresight Committee? That was a government committee, Cabinet Office, which was – periodically the government thinks they will try and stimulate new thinking in science and they think the research councils are getting a bit old and stodgy and they need – I assured them that NERC was not old and stodgy, not least when I was there. But they wanted industry to be the main driver, industry to say what were their problems, and then they would – and it was agreed, they would instruct the research councils to put part of their resources into addressing the problems that industry had identified. And so I was – they had a number of panels. I ended up on the Marine Foresight Panel. And one of the problems that industry identified was trade, or rather the transport of overseas trade, Britain and Ireland, everything goes overseas. And the – of course containerisation had happened in the ‘60s, ‘70s, so everything was much smoother and neater. Containers, I mean, revolutionised the whole thing. And the industry was growing at eight percent per year every year, year after year. And so new ports were being built, new ships were getting bigger, the new ships wouldn’t fit into the old ports so they had to be expanded. All round the world it was – and globalisation was really coming in. And so the amount of goods being shipped around the world was increasing and increasing at a fantastic rate. And yet the company – and the companies were doing John Woods Page 208 C1379/64 Track 7 it. And one of the biggest companies in the world was P&O Containers, so there was big interest in Britain in it. And also, when the containers arrived at the port, they had to be then transported to the customer and the railway network was absolutely incapable of handling it. You could only get three trains a night out of Southampton and nothing in the day because the passengers were using the lines. And you couldn’t – there were pinch points round the country where, if you didn’t get the train through that point before the rush hour, it had to be stuck in a siding. It was a mess. So the big companies tended to put everything on trucks and so the stream of container trucks, as here in Genoa, made – you do not want to be on the motorway at eight o’clock in the morning outside Genoa port. I mean, it’s just miles – a long trail of trucks. And that was true at Southampton, it was true at Felixstowe, it was true at all the ports. And the roads were getting clogged up and these were big trucks that were doing more damage to the roads than a thousand cars. I mean, it’s the big trucks that damage the road, require repairs. And so the whole thing seemed to be wrong. And the companies had no mechanism, no theory, for planning the future. They knew things were getting bigger, they knew globalisation was roaring ahead. The cost of sea transport is so low, so cheap, that when you get, say, I don’t know, a television set on sale at Dixons, the cost of the set to the customer contains a small element for the cost of transporting it from Japan, Korea, China, whenever, and that is in the noise level, it’s minute. So transport was cheap, efficient but causing problems on the road and rail and was causing – the Dutch were going bananas because Europort was growing like mad and they couldn’t physically get the trucks and the rails – get the stuff out of Europort. Rotterdam was just – the Dutch were really getting – and yet it was a major port for Northern Europe. Hamburg was better but the Dutch were leading companies, of course. So globally it was really – the thing was growing so fast and it was easier to just buy new ships and lean on the port of Southampton or Felixstowe to increase facilities. There’s an enormous new port just about to open in the Thames Estuary because of that, despite the present recession, ‘cause the planning goes ahead even if there’s a recession.

[2:10:24]

And yet there was no, as I say, academic underpinning. There was no theory, there was no – so I said, well, I think using the techniques that we have for modelling John Woods Page 209 C1379/64 Track 7 nowadays, we might have a crack at primitive equation modelling, like I had done for the plankton. If you can do it for plankton you ought to be able to do it with containers. And I did – I asked the industry, I said, how many containers are there in the world, how many ships are there in the world, how many ports are there in the world. They came up with lists. And there were fewer containers in the world than I had as plankton in my computer agents for the plankton that I was dealing with, millions. Things had grown since Kiel days. And – so I said I thought it might be possible to have a crack at making a fundamental model of the global system, which would include P&O and its rival in Denmark, Maersk, and all the other big companies, the whole lot, everybody. And they raised their eyebrows. But there was an annual competition for the – to see who would come up with the winning proposal and I won it that year with this proposal, so it got funded. And the research council didn’t have to dig into their budget, it was new money from the Treasury, five million. Not big money but for theory – that’s cheap and we didn’t have to pay for the computing, so it paid for people. So I set up a quarterly meeting. I recruited – I asked the companies to name representatives – often they named the boss, or at least initially, and then the head of a relevant division. So we had representatives of the real big companies. We had representatives of all the government departments and agencies, like British Rail and so on. And they didn’t usually sit round the table, so first of all we had to introduce each other and then we had my academic team, and I got people from the Department of Transport. The civil engineering department had a transport research unit in it, which was serious. The Department of Computing had some fantastic – they were helping me with my – well, helping me, they were fully embedded in my plankton research, so I knew the people and they said, fine, it’s a lovely new application of our computing. And, well, to cut a long story short, we made the model, we had wonderful cooperation from the industry. When we needed data we got it, even though these were data they’d never show a competitor, but I managed to convince them we’d keep it to ourselves and not pass it on to competitors. Trust was very – I mean, industry doesn’t trust competitors. They all have intelligence services trying to discover what their competitors are – they all know which of their competitors placed an order for a new ship and if so what size and worked out what they were going to do with it. And it takes three years for the ship to come into service, so they’re all watching each other like mad. But there’s no way they were going to give their data to their competitors but they gave it to us. And John Woods Page 210 C1379/64 Track 7 those data were essential because we had to write the equations. We had to use the data to work out the primitive equations of how containers, starting with a shipper here, a customer, ended up with the recipient at the other end and all the different stages in the chain, how the – I mean, the investment of the companies in new facilities. A crane costs fifty million, fifty million for a crane, one of these big container cranes, so you’ve got to get your money back over many years. The cost of dredging ports – I mean, everything, everything, everything. We had the – in the model we had every single container port in the world. We had every container ship in the world. We had every container in the world. We had – we knew every crane in every port in the world and what it cost and how long it was going to last for, in a big model, but still much smaller than my plankton model. And it had never been attempted and never been thought of and industry was fascinated by the whole concept. And then strange people started appearing and asking me about it, people who were concerned with drug smuggling, ‘cause they – Customs and Excise can only open one in a hundred thousand containers passing through the ports and they have to know which container to open. But if we’d been tracking every container, we knew that this one happened to have spent some time in Venezuela or happened to have had a mystery six months when it wasn’t at sea but it was in an interesting place – so all sorts of very interesting things came out of this Container World Project. And I pleased the college ‘cause I’d brought in some money, which did have a new start but with new money, which spanned several departments, including the business school. They were very helpful because they helped us make sure that when we developed the equations we took account of proper business – the kind of models they were using, economics. We had an economist from the college. And it worked. The model actually worked. And we were given some tests by industry. One was that one of the companies had been thinking of – can you pause it for a minute? [break in recording] So the industry decided, when the model was working and tested and demonstrated, that they would set us some tests, and one test in particular, the heavy saturation almost of the roads by container lorries up the East Coast, Felixstowe and so on, was reaching the point where the Department of Transport was – they didn’t have an answer because they weren’t in a position to create a new railway or a new road. The timescale was too long anyway. So the question was, could the containers be shipped up to Scotland directly from the Continent rather than be landed at a British port and then trucked up to Scotland. The biggest export Britain has that goes John Woods Page 211 C1379/64 Track 7 in containers, biggest export by value, is Scotch whisky, and the Scotch whisky was going out of Southampton, but it’s actually produced in Scotland and it’s trucked down to Southampton. This is nonsense. There are very good ports sitting in Scotland, not least navy ports which are becoming available because the navy is decreasing their use of them. And so the container companies are looking at the possibility of – the ships that are used to go to Japan, for example, are enormous; they’re 6,000 containers, even more these days, and they can’t get into the small ports. It’s only the very big ports like Southampton and Felixstowe that they can handle. They can’t get into the small coastal ports. So what happens is, they would have to in, say, Rotterdam, tranship into smaller ships, which could run up the east coast and pop into small ports in – or a key port in Scotland. And the question is, do the economics work out, does it make sense, what are the real benefits. And so they said, plug this into the model and see how it works out. And we did and it made a lot of different possible assumptions about the volume and so on, and it – of course it dramatically reduced the flow of trucks on the roads, which was a major benefit. The Department of Transport loved it. But the economics from the shipping company looked as if they would actually – it would be cheaper for them than the cost of getting it onto trucks, taking it up, to put it on a smaller ship, run the ship right up alongside where the customer was. And so that was the kind of test they asked us to do and that particular one, it was P&O that took the lead, but the other companies were all interested in how it worked, as a demonstration. There were other ones but I think that that was the best example. And so at the end of the day, the project ended, we handed the software to each of the partners, each of the ones who were in it, not to anybody else, so that, you know, they could put the effort in. The project was judged by the Engineering and Science Research Council, who actually put it at the highest grade of international level science, so they thought intellectually it had worked out well. The industry was happy. But it’s now up to the industry to use it if they want to. P&O were interested in funding a second phase where it would be more tuned to their particular needs. But then Maersk bought P&O so that stopped. Maersk had been involved right from the start in the project, they were a partner in the project, so they had all of the model and data and so on. The whole – at the end of the day, whether or not the model is used operationally depends on the availability of the data to the companies. It’s much more likely that the very biggest companies can get access to the data. Maersk is the world’s biggest but they can get access to the data. They’re bigger, they go to more John Woods Page 212 C1379/64 Track 7 places, they’re running more ships, and so the most likely one is Maersk, but another company came out of the woodwork, Greenfield I think it’s called, which was a Japanese company, I think, that decided to set up its headquarters in London because that’s where the money is [laughs]. You know, shipping is still very much – insurance, Lloyds and all that is in London. So foreign companies often set up in London because that’s where they’ve got the expertise. And they’re looking at it and the other – Customs and Excise are looking at it, and of course the Department of Transport just use it to run what if – it’s for what if-ing. So you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but you put in an assumption that trade is going to grow or decline, whatever, pattern of trade is going to change from trade with Australia to trade with China, for example, so suddenly the pattern change or the global change opens up the Arctic so that the routes are different. It’s not forecasting in the sense weather forecasting is forecasting. This is a tool that a company can use for planning purposes, in which they say what if we make this assumption, what if we make that, what if our competitors do this, what would be – it’s in that spirit. It’s now in their hands.

[2:23:03]

Thank you. Can you just bring the recording up to date by saying something about your life here, where we are now, in Genoa, and you may like to mention any continuing interest in science. I have in mind, for example, the aqua marina projects that combine your interests in photography and science. But something about your activities now, recently, here.

Yes. Well, I retired from Imperial College at what was in those days the compulsory retirement age, sixty-six. Nowadays of course the law has changed and you can’t be forcibly retired on the grounds of age. But quite – I had mentally thought that I would continue at Imperial College, they made me an emeritus professor, they paid me a small fee and they make available the facilities. I am a member of Imperial College. I am actually still on the active list of professors, even though I’m retired, but that’s a technicality. So I can use all the facilities at Imperial, I’ve got a desk if I want it, though I don’t use that very much. But more importantly, my research group, which had been pursuing the plankton research, going back to 1980 in Kiel, carried on when John Woods Page 213 C1379/64 Track 7

I was at NERC, because I was able to fund two research assistants and they were located in Southampton. But when I moved in ’94 to Imperial, I discovered there was talent on the campus that was interested in – and in particular the Department of Computing. It’s one of the best departments of computing in the country and it has a lot of expertise relevant to the kind of modelling I was doing. In particular, one of the readers there, Tony Field, became a collaborator, close friend, and he was tickled pink with the idea because he said that we’ve got – in the department people were making models of robotic creatures which only exist in the minds of the programmers, that don’t actually exist in reality, and it was wonderful to be applying the techniques they’d got to real plankton in the sea, doing real things and tackling real problems like pollution or fisheries or whatever, and we’ve looked at climate and the Plankton Multiplier. We’ve looked at all – even academiology, we looked at what happens if the plankton – we think many of the plankton die from disease, but the epidemiology amongst plankton seems a strange thing to do, they’re microscopic, and yet it may be important. One of the sicknesses that plankton get is shared with man, so there are two hosts, plankton and man, and that’s cholera. And cholera is a killer, especially in tropical regions. It used to be in London, there were cholera epidemics in London in the 18th century. And it’s a disease that always starts where there’s water, usually on the coast, because people swim or seamen pick it up or whatever. It also happens where there are wells. In London it was from wells, which they had to close. Of course the Victorians rebuilt the whole water network. So there’s a medical side as well, there are lots and lots of really exciting applications. We get a stream of really top rate students from the Department of Computing, who have to do a final year project, which is a substantial project, or MSc students, who do a longer project, or in some cases PhD students, who do a full three or even more years. And Tony Field has a – first of all he completely bought into it. He does other things but he loved it and he spots students coming up through the system who he thinks might find it interesting. Some of the students want to go into banking or work in code breaking or something, and some just don’t want to touch industry or spookiness, they want to be in kind of an ethically clean world, and yet are very, very clever and perhaps have got enough money so they don’t have to concentrate on becoming rich. And so he has recruited to this project and when I finally left London, closed my flat in London and moved here fulltime, he took over as head of the research group and he’s doing marvellously. It’s keeping the momentum flying. He’s got students, he’s got new John Woods Page 214 C1379/64 Track 7 results coming out. And so – and I go up to London from time to time and we have progress meetings and talk about issues, but he’s in the driving seat now. I am – he’s bringing to bear a lot of computing expertise but he has along the way, in the last ten years, picked up a lot of the science. So I still bring in the science when needed, because I’m coming from a science background. I must say, I haven’t picked up the computing [laughs]. It’s really very sophisticated computing. For example, one of my long term dreams – the codes are enormous, they’re as big as weather forecasting codes. They’re very, very complicated codes. And when you want to change something you’ve got to have a programmer who goes in and changes the relevant code, but then you have to debug it because inadvertently it may have effects that have to have secondary changes, and it’s a nightmare. It may take months to debug such a programme. Now the Met Office, they run it day in and day out and only change it every few years. They debug it and then it’s done. Whereas for science, you want to change it – every time you have a new idea you want to change it and change it. And so the programming became an absolute – the critical power, a show stopping problem, and I said, can’t we have a programme that writes the programmes with no bugs, cute idea. I’d already started talking to the computing service in NERC about that and we’d done some preliminary work, but it was the Department of Computing at Imperial, Tony Field, who cracked it. And he had a very clever research student wo – Wes Hinsley, who was one of these people who likes to work in ethically benign areas and isn’t too worried about money. His family – wife is a doctor and so on. And he made what we call the virtual ecology workbench, which allows the scientist to just type in what he wants to make a model for and it writes the model, and there are no bugs, it’s perfect, and it then runs the model. And they modify it again. And of course the turnaround time has been reduced to one per cent of what it was when you were hand coding. And that’s made the whole science project viable. It’s the crown jewels. It’s the key to success. And that has come from the very, very clever people in the Department of Computing. So being at Imperial has suddenly opened up a wonderful new possibility. And it’s rolling forward, there are other things that are bubbling up. So the change from NERC to Imperial involved graduate school administration. They – when I went there in ’86 they said, ‘Well, you’d better be in a department, I suppose.’ I said, ‘Yes, I suppose back in physics, you know, my old department.’ And they said, ‘Ah no. We’ve got a department where we can’t find a head of department to run it. You can do that on the side.’ And John Woods Page 215 C1379/64 Track 7 it was the Royal School of Mines. I didn’t know anything about mining, engineering or so on, but for five years I was head of that department until they found somebody else [laughs]. So they kept me pretty busy. But all the time this plankton work was marching on and it really has been turned to be a very fruitful field.

[2:32:50]

The latest project that we completed was to look at the classic problem in fisheries, fisheries recruitment, the black box called recruitment that stopped sensible fisheries planning. And I thought, well, come on, we can make an explicit model of that with primitive equations which really does it, and we’ve done it. It’s published, it came out recently. So one by one we’re exploring the different aspects of the plankton world, from the climate to epidemiology to fisheries to pollution. And they’re all – and pollution is a lovely example. I discovered that the flow in the upper ocean is laminar, so the turbulence isn’t moving pollution up and down. Molecular diffusion is so slow. So that if you have some holiday resort and they say, fine, we’ll put the outlets from the sewage works, after they’ve been treated, down at, say, 100 metres so that it never affects the swimmers, you know, swimmers don’t like swimming in the sewage, erm … I thought that the animals, the plankton, the animals, zooplankton, go down in the daytime to hide in the dark from predators and they come up to feed at night where the food’s near the surface. And they go through this pollution and they pick it up and they end up transporting it. And so I discovered that you put in pollution at one level and it pops up a few days later at the surface and it’s transported there by the plankton. So there are so many fun aspects to the problem. It’s a rich field. It’ll take years to explore all the possibilities. You need a string of very bright students, Imperial has them, you need somebody to run the show, Tony Field’s doing it, taking over from me, and I’m now a backseat driver in retirement who goes along and keeps in touch and tosses in a few ideas occasionally. And that’s my retirement life.

[Track 7]