Professor John Woods Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor John Woods Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/64 IMPORTANT Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. The British Library 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.

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