John Dewey Interviewed by Paul Merchant

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Professor John Dewey

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1379/83

1 John Dewey Page 2 C1379/83 The British Library National Life Stories Track 1

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/83

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

Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: geologist Date and place of 22 nd May 1927, birth: Woodford, Essex, UK

Mother’s occupation: Housewife Father’s occupation: Various, including sign writer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 02/08/12 (track 1-3), 03/08/12 (track 4), 27/08/12 (track 5-8), 21/09/12 (track 9-11) Location of interview: University College, Oxford; interviewee’s home in Kennington, Oxford; Natural History Museum, London

Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks: 11 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 12:58:33

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: The following sections are closed for 20 years or until the interviewee’s death, whichever is sooner: Track 8 [00:11:12-00:19:32] and Track 10 [00:00:00-00:23:09] © The British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

2 John Dewey Page 3 C1379/83 Track 1

Track 1

Could you start by telling me when and where you were born please?

Yes. I was born in a nursing home called the Hydro on the edge of Woodford in Essex. And I was brought up basically in a small village called Chingford, which is south of Epping, and into an ordinary middle class family, very nice sort of comfortable neighbourhood, very pleasant. Went to the local Church of England primary school called Kings Road, where the place was run with a rod of iron by a headmaster called Mr Swindle – Mr Swindell, I should say, and a primary school head teacher called Miss Reeder. And both were immensely encouraging. And Miss Reeder, when I was a child, recognised I painted well and got me very interested in drawing and all those kinds of things. We had slates. Didn’t see any paper and pencil until I was into the junior school and we had slates, squeaky slates and crayons and chalk and so all our sums and writing were done on the slates, which was rather nice. Save on the paper, I suppose. And went up to the junior school at the age of, I suppose eight or something like that. Mr Swindell was headmaster. Rod of iron, lots of beatings. Kids were beaten with sticks. Typical Church of England primary school, I suppose. And we were fairly scared of Mr Swindell but he was actually – a heart of gold behind it all. And when I left I got a little prize and so forth. It was lovely. Third of a pints of milks in those days. I remember sort of halfway through the afternoon and through the morning we’d get a third of pint of milk in those tiny little milk bottles and that was great fun. And again, Mr Swindell would police the thing with a stick, his cane, and say, ‘Are you going to be all day getting your milk?’ So we had to drink it fairly fast otherwise you were beaten. So you were beaten at the drop of a hat basically. And all the teachers would smack with a couple of rulers, Mr Marr and Mr Salter, Miss Theakstone, a whole – I remember, all the names flashback now. But it was actually – it sounds awful but it was an idyllic time, lovely. I enjoyed that school very, very much. Playtimes and lots of friends I made there, it was lovely.

[02:20]

3 John Dewey Page 4 C1379/83 Track 1

Then at the age of, I suppose, ten, ten, eleven, I took the Eleven Plus examination and passed it. And also simultaneously took the entrance scholarship for a school in Woodford Green called Bancrofts, which I passed, so it was decided I was to go to Bancrofts. And I went to Bancrofts at the age of, I suppose, just eleven and, again, I had an idyllic, idyllic time at school. I loved sport, boxing and gymnastics and cricket and rugby and hockey and athletic. All those things I enjoyed very much until the age of sixteen. I suppose I was a poor scholar, it might be said with accuracy, a very poor scholar, who didn’t work very hard. I was obsessed with sport. I did just enough to get by, just enough to get by. And we had a housemaster called John Haywood, an amateur geologist actually, worked on the Lea Valley, the Pliocene deposits of the Lea Valley. And I went up on field trip with him and I got interested in geology that way. And he said, ‘Look, look John,’ he said, ‘You’ve got a decent brain. You’re too obsessed with sports. You’re never going to make yourself famous at any of those sports. You’re simply not good enough at any of them to become seriously good.’ So he said, ‘Why don’t you concentrate on doing a bit of work before O levels.’ It was the year before O levels came up at sixteen. And so I did start to work and I really worked at chemistry and all the usual stuff. And it was to the amazement of the school and all my friends that I passed all my O levels, all eight of them [laughs]. I’m sure they’d – I don’t know what sort of marks I got in them but anyway I passed them, which enabled me to go onto sixth form and choose what I wanted there. And I was a bit obstreperous in a way, I always was slightly obstreperous at school, and I was interested both in the sciences and the arts. So I took the A level courses in German and French and a bit of English but never took the examinations. Perhaps I should have done but anyway I didn’t because they liked people to pass examinations for which they were put in. So simultaneously I did the sciences, physics and chemistry, and also I was interested in botany, zoology and geology. I’ve always been terribly interested in natural history of various kinds. So the natural history led me to do botany and zoology and geology and I wasn’t going to do A levels in all those but I did and I passed them all, amazingly. And it was then a question what to do, you know, when it comes to eighteen. And again I was doing lots of sport and I loved the work as well. And I was gradually focusing in on either engineering or in geology, or possibly journalism. That’s the other strange thing, I actually liked writing very

4 John Dewey Page 5 C1379/83 Track 1 much. I loved writing essays and so I thought maybe I can become a journalist and that would be rather fun. And I was persuaded against that, not to do that, but almost all the masters at school. They said it’s a dreadful profession and a scurrilous profession and you don’t want to do that, why don’t you become a geologist if you like geology and the natural history side of science. So I did. So I applied to the University of London, Queen Mary College in Mile End, and that was the only place to which I applied because John Hayward, our housemaster in geology and chemistry, he took chemistry as well, he knew the professor, the reader as it was then, Jack Kirkaldy, who ran the department. He said, ‘You’ll love that department. It’s a small department, superb teaching and very friendly. You will enjoy Queen Mary College very much.’ So I applied there and it depended on getting all the A levels and I got all the A levels and it was fine. So I went to read geology at Queen Mary College. And that was really what got me going in the geological profession. But all that time I suppose, since an early childhood, I was interested in lots of other things, painting for example. Drawing and painting was always a very great sort of therapeutic satisfaction to me. My father taught me to paint and draw. He was a very good watercolourist and artist and he got me going. And I painted all through my childhood, drawing mostly in watercolours. And in fact, as I’ll tell you later, I didn’t do any oil painting until I was I think seventy-two [laughs]. I was a watercolourist all my life and I love that. So that was another strand in my interests. I love music, listening to music and particularly English music, which has been a mainstay all my life. Vaughan Williams and Delius and all the minor English – Elgar, all the minor English composers, Warlock and so forth. And I still have that as a mega hobby. I listen to music a great deal.

[7:02]

So here am I at the age of eighteen with a – sorry, age of twenty-one with a first class degree in geology and what to do. Natural consequence, PhD. That’s what one did in those days, you didn’t think of doing anything else because the PhD was a route to – I thought I might like to join the Geological Survey actually of Great Britain and I thought a lot about that. Didn’t really think of academia at all, ‘cause I was a fairly practical geologist so I liked the practical aspects of geology. For example, I loved

5 John Dewey Page 6 C1379/83 Track 1 fieldwork. I like making geological maps. That was for me the acme of – of geology. And while I was at Queen Mary College we had to do two – two mapping exercises, one in the first summer, one in the second summer. The first summer, we had to do a so called soft rock exercise where you went to somewhere in Southern England, where – on Jurassic cretaceous younger rocks that are relatively soft starter and you did stratigraphy and a bit of structure. You made a map of a six inch – so called six inch sheet. You’d got a six inch toposheet and you went out – and I went out with augers, went out with augers down to Dorset and stayed in Osmington Mills for a whole summer at what was called the Picnic Inn, now called the Smugglers in, on the coast at Osmington Mills, just east of Weymouth. And I spent a wonderful summer making a geological map, the chalk and the green sand and the Kimmeridge clay and the rest of it and so forth. And I had augers. And of course much of the rock is not exposed and as a result of which you have to drill little – hand drill holes. ‘Cause there’s no glaciation down there, no boulder clay or covering of younger deposits, so when you make a hole you’re into the actual rock of which that area is made, so – and I think during that summer I calculated, I made 520 holes in that area [laughs] and I had shoulders on me – very good for the sport. I had shoulders on me like nothing, you know, amazing for gymnastics and high bar and so forth. And that was quite wonderful. And that mapping was done in 1956. Then the following summer, 1957, we had to do a hard rock area and I was sent off to North Wales, to Dolgellau, to map the northern flanks of Cader Idris, which are Ordovician volcanics, some Cambrian rocks – mostly Ordovician, igneous rocks, low grade metamorphic rocks and volcanics and so forth. And that was a great lesson. I found that much harder and more difficult than the soft rock area, which I loved, but I learnt an awful lot from that and it was very good for me.

[9:44]

So by the time I’d finished my degree I’d had – under my belt I had two major mapping exercises and I really was learning really well how to make a six inch geological map. So naturally you think, gosh, you know, a survey, that’s a natural consequence. So what do I do? PhD. Do I want to stay at QMC or – I’d rather go somewhere else. So I cast around and I thought, well, I like London. Much of my

6 John Dewey Page 7 C1379/83 Track 1 sport was being played in the university at that stage and I wanted to stay there but change colleges. So I went over to Imperial College one day and chatted to a variety of people there, Janet Watson, John Sutton, John Ramsay, many of the great names of – Ian Carmichael, George Walker, some astonishingly clever people. And I sometimes wonder, my God, I could have had an undergraduate degree here, but I’m actually glad I went to Queen Mary College because there was Kirkaldy, Tim Whitten, Frank Middlesmiss and Trevor Greensmith, the four of them taught the whole of an undergraduate course, and they had research students as well. They were very hardworking excellent people and the course was quite wonderful, very, very good. Basic geology, nothing fancy, rocks, minerals and fossils, and you learnt them. You learnt the basis of structural geology, the basis of mineralogy, looking down a microscope for hours and hours on end until you knew minerals like the back of your hand. So it was actually very, very good training. So here am I in Imperial College now and what to do there?

[11:10]

And I was offered a field area in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland by Derek Ager, a very distinguished palaeontologist, and I thought, well, you know, it’s alright but I’d like something a bit more challenging than sort of a few folds and Jurassic rocks. And it happened that I was talking to a man called Gwyn Thomas, who probably – most people haven’t heard of him. He was a very nice man, a Welshman who, in his youth, had discovered in South Wales a very important geological relationships – relationship. On the Welsh side you have these old rare sandstone rocks, which are the continental red bits, and they have a fossil called bothriolepis, it’s an early ostracoderm, it’s one of these sort of big headed sort of early fish like creatures. And then in North Devon there were marine rocks with a brachiopod called spirifer in them. And nobody quite knew how these rocks correlated. And he discovered in South Wales a place where they were interdigitated, where the spirifers interdigitated with the red bits of bothriolepis. A very important discovery, but I think that was the only thing he ever discovered, but he was famous for that and he was a very nice man. He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You know, don’t go to the Jura. I’ve got some wonderful rocks in Western Ireland.’ So there’s an area in Western Ireland which really hasn’t

7 John Dewey Page 8 C1379/83 Track 1 been mapped since the great Kinahan and Kilroe and Strachan and various other people working for the Irish Survey in the 1870s, they mapped it. A wonderful variety of rocks and turgidities and structures and ignimbrites. And he said, ‘I’ve just had a student called Stanton, WI Stanton, mapping an area in the west of Ireland and he mapped one part of it but there’s lots and lots to do to the east of that.’ He said, ‘Would you like to go and start mapping and looking at the rocks in that region for your PhD?’ Remember, in those days we weren’t process oriented. Nowadays that would be undreamt of, to actually go off and simply map and area and see what’s there, you know, just a random data gathering in science, stamp collecting, as some physicists like to call it. But nowadays of course you have to basically have a theory, have an idea, test a hypothesis, which is probably the right way to do it, by collecting lots of data, the right kinds of data, but in those days you were simply sent out to find what’s there and some – duly something will come of it eventually. You will find some nice rocks and you’ll – it’s dead right of course, that’s exactly what happened. I mapped an area called Central Murrisk, between Clew Bay and Killary Harbour, which is the only fjord in Ireland. And mountainous area, wonderful variety of rocks, absolutely spectacular variety of rocks, mostly of Ordovician and Silurian age, but yet with Pleistocene boulder clays on top, a bit of old red sandstone and carboniferous and limestones and so forth. But I concentrated on the Ordovician Silurian rocks. There were turgidities, ignimbrites, various volcanics, lots of wonderful structural geology, cleavages and kink bands and crenulation cleavages. And I mapped all these and studied them in very great detail. And the first summer that – the first summer I went was I suppose 1955, it was the year I graduated I went across, I was sent out there, very summer. And I arrived and it was a shocking summer, it rained all summer. And I was camping and at night I would come home to my little tent in the valley. And the midges were – and flies were just unbelievable. I was going – I was in desperation sometimes, you know. And I didn’t have a net or anything like that. I didn’t have any bug juice on me and I had to go and buy some eventually and put that on. But anyway, I’d go mad with these things and I was so mad one evening that I thought I’m going to give this up and go and work in the Jura with Derek Ager [laughs]. That was after about a month. But I stuck it out and thank goodness I did, it was a wonderful experience mapping those rocks. Second summer it didn’t rain at all and I was there for five months in the field and I finished all the mapping. And the

8 John Dewey Page 9 C1379/83 Track 1 bogs had completely dried out. You could actually drive a car onto the bogs, astonishing. So I got around on the bicycle wonderfully all over the place. And I camped, camped up in the mountains and carried my food with me up there. And again, I had a – it was a mapping experience, you see, like the things I’d had with an undergraduate, so I was being really lured into the whole business of mapping and doing it for myself, which was learning it by myself. I think John Ramsay came out and spent about a week pointing out a few things and helping and so forth, which was very nice, but mostly I was there by myself. So at the end of this I simply came back and wrote it up. That’s what you did in those days, you wrote up the – you made a nice copy of the map, a beautiful copy of the map in ink and watercolours and so forth, and then you wrote up the greywackes and the ignimbrites and did a lot of thin section work and all the rest of it, and petrofabric work on the quartz c-axis and the quartzites and all that sort of stuff. And I had this nice thesis, chapters on this and chapters on that and so forth. And that’s what you did, it was written up as a descriptive – pretty well purely descriptive thesis. And that was again a wonderful training for all the subsequent things that I’ve done, I think. Wouldn’t be without that for one moment.

[16:38]

One of the troubles is with – I think with modern geology, a lot of very exciting things going on. You know, geology’s expanded tremendously into many, many areas, but I think much of the core of geology is being lost, you know. Much of that training, that really intensive detailed training in rocks, minerals and fossils, rocks in particular and minerals – for example, some departments are no longer teaching optical mineralogy, which is using the microscope and the physical properties of minerals to identify minerals in thin section. And I said, why aren’t you doing mineralogy, how can they identify minerals. They say, well, they can put minerals through various kinds of machines and they can measure the exact composition, they know. I say, well, that’s hardly the point because rocks also have something they call textures. I mean, rocks are made up of grains of various kinds fitting together. And of course you can do the mineral chemistry of that and find out what mineral it is, but how does that grain fit with the next one. And some of those textures are very important. For example, in

9 John Dewey Page 10 C1379/83 Track 1 modern times – there’s a lady in Cambridge called Marian Holness who’s looking at textures of igneous rocks from Rhum and various other places and how those minerals fit together, the triple junctions between them. You can’t do that from grinding rocks up and putting them through a machine. So anyway, so that’s a bit of a worry of mine, that – mapping, for example, some places aren’t doing very much mapping. The students can do lab projects and so forth. So I think they’re losing somewhat in the core of – what I call the core of geology. I sometimes think of it rather like a puffball, you know, you have these beautiful giant puffballs with a lovely shiny exterior, and if you catch them when they’re still relatively small and slice them and cook them in butter and garlic and so forth – if you leave them, they get bigger and bigger and you hit them and you find that you’ve got a nice hard shiny shell and the middle is a mass of decayed spores. And I think geology to some extent is like that. It’s expanding as a field enormously. I mean, we’re doing things we didn’t dream of – rather like the gymnasts in the Olympics, doing things we didn’t dream of in those days. And geology’s got this lovely shiny shell, very exciting and pushing out and so forth, but I feel the middle is rotting out. And that’s a bit of a worry but that’s another matter. Mm, for the moment.

[19:00]

Thank you. I’ll take you back over some of that, starting with – starting very early on and asking you for what you know about the life of your father, either things that you know because he told you or things that you know because you’ve discovered them. But tell me about the life of your father.

Bit of both, father and mother actually. My father was born in Walthamstow, East London, to a very – a sort of lower middle class family. His father was a – his father was a sort of plumber and inventor. He invented something called the one chain grab, that they now use in gravel quarries quite a lot. And that one chain grab is one thing – you know, you have a chain with a grab thing on and you drop it and as it hits the gravel it opens. And then you pull it up and of course it closes on the gravel. So you don’t have one chain and one chain to open and close it. It’s a very clever, clever invention, you simply drop it. And they’re used everywhere now, all over the world,

10 John Dewey Page 11 C1379/83 Track 1 and he made money from that actually. So that was granddad, William, William Dewey. But he did plumbing on the side. I think he was an inventor, he loved inventing. He invented quite a number of little gadgets of various kinds. But that was his big invention. They lived in – they moved to a very sort of large and rambling house in a place called Highams Park, which is quite – which is between Chingford and Walthamstow. We’re sort of – we’re basically all East Londoners, South West Essex, East Londoners. That’s both my father and mother’s family. And that big rambling house.

[20:33]

My father was one of eight kids, one of eight children, four girls and four boys, and they all became extremely good musicians. The girls all became pianists, as girls did [laughs] in those days I suppose, and they were – one was a concert pianist, Winifred. Winifred was of concert pianist standard, wonderful. I remember hearing her play. She was quite astonishingly good. And then Mabel and Ada and Elsie were the other girls and they played more jazzy styles, you know, sort of – they could play the classics but they played at parties and weddings and funerals and things – not funerals but weddings. And they were a lovely family. And then the four boys, one of which was my father – my father was the second in the sequence and they all played more sort of dance band instruments. My father played the saxophone and the cornet and the clarinet and then Uncle – he was John Edward Dewey. And my Uncle Bert played the – let me see, he played the banjo, beautiful banjo player. And then Uncle Frank played the trumpet and Bill I think played something else. I can’t remember what he played actually. But they ran a little jazz band together and they would go up playing in dances and things like that in East London, and there are some wonderful stories associated with them. But the funny thing is that they all had only one child each. Those eight kids all had – so I had seven cousins, of whom only three are alive, me and two other cousins, at the moment. And [laughs] maybe it was a response to being a family of eight, you know, but it’s an astonishing thing, isn’t it, eight kids and they each had one child. That’s quite amazing. But my father told some marvellous stories of when he was a youth. He, like me in my adolescent years, and perhaps we’ll come to that, was obsessed with explosions and fireworks. And he believed that

11 John Dewey Page 12 C1379/83 Track 1 anything involving potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal was a good thing [laughs]. And he and Bert were – he and Frank and Bert actually were the three principal firework enthusiasts and on one occasion they were going to – the girls were in the garden with their boyfriends out there and they’d had this big marble wash stand and they’d been mixing a huge pile of gunpowder, you know, grinding up the charcoal, mixing it with the sulphur, anything with ate in it – and I discovered that later, anything like permanganate and chlorate, lots of oxygen, very good for explosions. So they put lots of this stuff together and they thought, we’ve got to test it, so they put a little bit of powder over here and lit it. And unfortunately a spark flew into the big pile and apparently Frank was leaning over and the whole thing went up in his face. He was lucky not to be blinded. And his face was black with bits of things sticking in it and so forth. And another occasion, again the girls were in the garden with their boyfriends and they’d made a thunder flash, a big thunder flash, and Frank was all excited apparently and he said, ‘When are you going to light it, Jack? When are you going to light it?’ He said, ‘Wait a moment Frank, wait until we’re all sitting down and I’ll throw it right into the middle of them.’ And so he said, ‘Now, now, now.’ So he lit it and he threw it over his shoulder and the fuse was much shorter than he thought and it went off in Frank’s face again, so Frank had another face full of explosion [laughs]. There were various stories of that kind. And it blew the marble wash stand up, by the way. The marble wash stand was disintegrated. So I caught that bug, I’m afraid, like the art, when I became a teenager.

[24:07]

So he was basically – my father did lots and lots of things. He worked for the Post Office, he worked for this company, that company, and he kept a little record book of all the jobs that he had and I’ve still got it to this day. And in one place it says, not employed because of slackness of work. We thought, was he lazy. It was just there was no work available, slackness of work. So they were hard times. These would be in the ‘20s. My father was born in 1902, that’s right, so this would have been as a young man in the 1920s, the end of the First World War, which was a terrible period in Britain of course, so he was out of work for quite a while. But then he got – he was interested in – he was always very interested in the Post Office and the telephone

12 John Dewey Page 13 C1379/83 Track 1 systems, and telephone systems were developing a lot in those days, and he became the chap who – it came out of his art. He became the chap – a sign writer and he used to make these wonderful signs for shops. And that was a little business he had on the side by himself and he sold, you know, lovely shop signs, beautifully, beautifully painted things. And also he learnt – he went to evening classes and learnt to sign write beautifully and he learnt this technique of painting the most incredibly small numbers very accurately on all the telephone exchange banks. You know, you’d go into a telephone exchange with all these batteries of acid in the old days and relays and things, and each one had to have the number painted on it exactly, and my father would go round doing this. That was his main job. So he was a sort of telephone engineer really, a sign writer. And during the wartime actually he painted all Churchill’s telephones in the war room in the cabinet under Whitehall. And you can still see those to this day if you go in there, see all my father’s artwork on the telephones and on the telephone relays on things, so quite exciting. So that’s Dad. And he loved – he loved painting, he loved to paint, very good, good watercolourist. Drew beautifully as well. He got me going, as I said before. That was lovely. So that’s my father’s side.

[26:15]

And then Mother’s side, complicated family. Her mother died in childbirth, just after she was born, and they put my mother – apparently they put my mother in a cardboard box on a piece of cotton wool, she was tiny. And they said, oh she – and they put her under there, ‘She won’t live’, under the bed like that, the midwife said. And suddenly there’s a wail from under the bed, aah, and that was my mother [laughs] expressing her first entry into this world. So they got her out and they put a bit of brandy on a bit of cotton wool apparently, touched her lips – amazing things they did in those days. And they – from under the bed she went on the mantle shelf in a little cardboard box. And she grew to be a very big tough healthy woman [laughs]. Anyway, she met my father and married him of course and they came up to Chingford. They bought a rather nice house in a very nice part of Chingford and that was where I grew up. So that was my father’s family. Uncle Bert was a great character. He was in China in the army, as an officer in the army, during the ‘30s and he ran a bar in Shanghai called

13 John Dewey Page 14 C1379/83 Track 1

Bert’s Bar, rather like Harry’s Bar in Vienna, I suppose [laughs]. And he was very popular among the expats there. And he ran – he played – had a jazz band playing, which he played in himself of course, played the – he played the banjo in this jazz band in Bert’s Bar, so – and then after that he came back and he – I remember as a child going – saying, ‘What’s Uncle Bert doing?’ ‘Oh, he’s got a scrap metal dealership in Leytonstone.’ And we went to see Uncle Bert and he had this huge – underneath an – it was always underneath an archway, under a railway bridge, he had a [laughs] scrap metal business, you know, and then he’d be selling cars. And he’d always appear in a different car every time he came to the house. One was a Javelin and then all kinds of exotic looking vehicles [laughs] would come along. So that was great fun. So the family were quite exotic in many ways. There were quite a sort of unusual crowd.

[28:19]

Mother was one of three. As I say, her mother died and she was – my grandfather remarried and two further children born, Auntie Eileen and Uncle Freddie were born. And Eileen was born, I suppose, 1920. She’s seventeen years – yes, seventeen years older than me. And she died of ovarian cancer at sixty tragically some years ago, in about 1980 or thereabouts. Yes, 1980, I suppose it was thereabouts, yes, 1980. And Uncle Freddie died a few years ago and he lived – he came to live in Chingford as well. So that was a fairly ordinary but slightly – faintly exotic family [laughs].

[29:02]

The large rambling house in Highams Park that your paternal grandfather had, did you visit that as a child?

Yes, not many times. I suppose – hmm, maybe four or five times, something of that sort, yes. I remember it was a large gloomy rambling place, slightly – rather like the Addams Family, sort of, you know, slightly scared as a child of these big dark rooms and so forth. And I had – as a child I developed this incredible fear of things in the house and I had these two phantom – or these two imaginary ghosts. One was called

14 John Dewey Page 15 C1379/83 Track 1

Gnaw-Gnaw and one was Luke, and when I’d be in bed in my house in Chingford I was scared of – Gnaw-Gnaws were little – funny little creatures that went around the wainscoting like that, which I was desperately scared of, and a Luke was rather more frightening. It was a tall thing with a white sheet over it. And I remember once coming out into the corridor of the house and seeing my mother walk through and she was in a white dress and I thought, god, it’s a Luke, you know [laughs]. So that was rather – and I think what had happened, I think I’d seen a – seen a film of Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, which is a rather hooded sort of character. That was a Luke. So anyway, I got out of that about the age of seven or eight I think [laughs], or something of that sort.

Why those names?

I don’t know. Well, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you know, we were very big on the New Testament when I was a child. My father loved the New Testament stories and so – and I liked Luke quite well, I liked the Gospel According to Saint Luke, I think my favourite of the gospels. And [laughs] I think that would – but Gnaw-Gnaw, I just don’t know. Something would gnaw its way around the wainscoting – little grubby creatures, little rounded grubby creatures, rats, rattish little things [laughs]. Strange, weird, weird dreams one has.

What did you see, if anything, of inventions in the big rambling house? Was your paternal grandfather still inventing at the time that you were there?

He was always fiddling around with little gadgets. I remember he had a workshop right in the very bottom of the garden, which he didn’t like people going into, and maybe he was doing big inventions and so on [laughs], I don’t know. But he had little things with wires and god knows – I don’t know what they were, I have no idea to this day. But the one chain grab was the famous one he invented with another chap, who actually fiddled him and got most of the cash apparently, but – one of those things.

[31:33]

15 John Dewey Page 16 C1379/83 Track 1

The house in Chingford, your family home –

Yes.

Using your memory, could you sort of take us on a tour of it, so starting from the front door and going round it? And if, when doing that, you sort of imagine particular people in particular rooms, perhaps you could say what they’re doing as well.

Right.

So a sort of descriptive tour of the house but also things people tended to do in particular rooms.

It was a bungalow on the edge of Epping Forest and the bungalow – the back garden actually backed onto Epping Forest, which was wonderful, I could escape over the wall into the forest and maraud the place with my friends, you know, meet them in the forest and do things I’ll tell you about a bit later. But the bungalow was fairly smallish, a very pleasant looking bungalow. And through the front door there was a big passageway, a big corridor like this. There was a bedroom, my little bedroom, off to the left immediately as you came in, and I had – eventually had a desk in there and did all my homework there. It was like my own little cosy private area and it was wonderful, I played music in there and I used to take my friends in there and so forth, slept in there. Lovely, it was very cosy, cosy. I had all my books – bookcases and lots of books. And then my parents’ room was immediately to the right, big front – huge front bedroom overlooking the main – the street. And that was – my father and mother were obsessed with oak furniture. They wouldn’t have anything but oak, good solid English oak, in the house. So we had lots of solid English furniture made of oak. And I remember to this day, when my parents died and I had to move some of the stuff out, the weight of the stuff was truly amazing [laughs], a whole – an oak bed , you know, I can visualise, an oak chest of drawers and oak cupboards and things like that and wardrobes. It was extraordinary. So everything in the house was made of oak, oak dining table and all the rest of it. So then – that was my parents’ bedroom. And then immediately to the right behind that was a very nice bathroom, very art – it

16 John Dewey Page 17 C1379/83 Track 1 was a very art deco style place. I suppose it was built towards the end of the art deco – about two years before I was born, I suppose, 1935, which is the end of the art deco period. And there was lots of that lovely – the tiling in the bathroom was gorgeous. Still to this day – I went back and visited the house and had tea with the present owners, a visit down memory lane, it was lovely. And lovely – there’s a certain blue in swimming pools in Britain that are built in that period. It’s like a luminous sort of greenish blue. It’s hard to describe, like a manganese blue with a touch of green in it, very nice. Anyway, the wall – the tiling – then cream, beautiful cream tiling and that ribbing tile around the edges, and the whole was – it looked like something out of an art deco magazine. It was very nice. And some of the lights also had fans, you know. If you know the Poirot, modern Poirot films, a lot of the decorations in the bungalow were like that, you know, windows and things. So it was a real art deco place. And then further down the hall there was another little bedroom there and then beyond that was a nice kitchen with a – in those days we had a boiler, you know, we didn’t do – there was no central heating per se. Heating was done with fires and boilers and things like that. And the boiler simply heated the hot water in the house, a very plentiful supply. And in the morning my father would get up pretty early before he went to work and fire up the boiler for the day. So there was a big – and you would step out to the side of the kitchen into the side walkway and there were coal bunkers along there and every two weeks we’d have this tremendous supply of chaps hauling in coal on their shoulders and tipping it into the – there was coking coal for the boiler and there was ordinary coal for the fire, so we were well supplied with coke and coal. So he fired up the coke in the boiler for the day and got the hot water going and so forth, and then mother would come down and start the breakfast and things like that, come along and start the breakfast. So that was the kitchen. Again, it was rather art deco, sort of rather nice tiling and oak cabinets everywhere of course, oak cabinets, and so forth. And then you came through to a very large living and dining area at the back, with sort of some L shaped thing with some dining area at the back there and some sitting room in here, like that. And then big windows, French windows, overlooking the garden, which was very nice. There were lots of trees at the end. Mother was a very keen gardener and Father was keen upon aggrandising the garden with sort of little – trying to make it into a Roman terrace sort of system, you know. It was a bit overdone for a suburban garden [laughs]. But anyway, he was keen on tiling

17 John Dewey Page 18 C1379/83 Track 1 and so forth and edging and stone ornaments and ladies like this, you know [laughs]. And then my mother loved gardening, she had lots and lots of flowers. And during the war we grew a lot of stuff, of course. I remember – the war broke out when I was – well, the phoney war would start when I was about one and a half, I suppose, and by the time I was three the full war had broken out. And then, you know, the first eight years of my life were the wartime basically. And we grew a lot of stuff. We – the garden was all pulled up and we grew potatoes and cabbages and that was very nice, we had lots of fresh vegetables all the way through. We had a few chickens, rabbits, for eggs and so forth. We didn’t have a pig. Some neighbours had a pig actually, fed it on the scraps and then finally butchered it and pickled the pig’s head for Christmas and they ate the rest of it. No freezers in those days, it was salted – a lot of the meat was salted and dried, air dried, and so forth. So that was the back part of the house. And we had a coal fire in there and again an art deco – lovely art deco fireplace. It was a gorgeous thing. They’ve still got it actually and it’s preserved. A lot of people pulled out those things and modernised, in quotes modernised, but the present owners have really kept that art deco. It’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful piece of architecture and decoration. And again, lots of oak furniture, normal couches and things like that around and nice carpets. My father – we had lots of pictures on the walls, both my father’s pictures – my father, like me, is a bit like this, you know, the composer Delius. When he died – he had an amanuensis called Eric Fenby, wonderful character, and when Delius died he went around giving talks about Delius’s life. Apparently he was giving one talk in Philadelphia to the Delian Society, which is based near Philadelphia in America. He said, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘Delius was always playing records of his own music.’ And he said, ‘Yes, Delius,’ he said, ‘He loved his own music and only his own music’ [laughs]. And my father was a bit like that about his paintings on the walls, lots of his own paintings on the walls. And I’m getting like that, I’m gradually getting rid of all other paintings and putting my own oil landscapes up all over the place [laughs], terrible. But anyway, so we had lots of father’s pictures all over the house, of which there were lots and lots, so lining the walls really with pictures. So I remember the place as a sort of art gallery in a sense. And we had a lovely big radiogram, you know, the old fashioned radiograms with the old vinyl discs. And we had a lovely collection of Vaughan Williams and Delius and Elgar and Beethoven and Mozart.

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[38:54]

And I got to – funny thing, I got interested in music in a strange way. My grandmother lived in a road called Salcombe Road in Leyton, East London, and we used to go and see her regularly, of course. And I remember going at weekends and having lovely – lovely dinners. The dinners I do remember very well. She was very keen on salt beef and pease pudding, potatoes and carrots, which – to this day I love that combination, it’s a wonderful, wonderful East London dish, typical sort of East Londoner dish. But opposite, on the road opposite, there were a blind couple and he was a piano tuner, a man called Lol Jones, that’s it, Lol Jones. And completely blind from birth but he’d learnt to piano tune. And I used to go across and have chats – he seemed to like me and I liked him very much and we got – stuck up a tremendous friendship with this pair. And he had again a radiogram with lots and lots of records, all with Braille, you know, and so forth on them. And he would pull out – and I remember his pulling out Don Giovanni, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and I heard the overture to that and the Magic Flute and I instantly fell in love with classical music at about the age of six or seven, something of that sort. And that started me off and I never looked back since that time. And he had a wonderful collection of the classics and lots of English music, of Elgar and Delius, Vaughan Williams and so forth, as I said. And he introduced me to a composer called Moeran too, EJ Moeran, Ernest John Moeran, a wonderful composer, English composer. And since that time I’ve been terribly interested in English music and researched it and got a huge – massive collection of CDs of English – or British, I should say, British and French music actually, Faure, Debussy, Saint Seans, Bizet and so forth. So I’m eternally grateful to Lol Jones for introducing me as a very early – a young child, to music. That was my grandmother living in Salcombe Road, so that was quite fun. And the house there, I remember, it was a sort of terraced – typical East London terraced house. And – but she loved books, she loved pictorial books, particularly of the American Wild West. She read cowboy books, cowboy stories, ad infinitum while eating boxes of chocolates while she got older. Amazing [laughs], she consumed huge amounts of chocolate and huge amounts of – huge numbers of cowboy books and she had these volumes and volumes on the Wild West. They were beautiful books. I remember a

19 John Dewey Page 20 C1379/83 Track 1 sort of slightly mildewy smell of books they sometimes get. They weren’t rotten but there was a book smell, a distinct book smell, and I went into her house and it smelled of books. And again, she had – her – she was a walnut furniture person, all her furniture was made of walnut. She loved walnut [laughs]. It was a lovely house and we enjoyed going there. And I used to sit in the front room very often and sometimes pull down these big pictorial books. They were gorgeous things, they were done in – with gold lettering on the back, you know, and raised embossed patterns. You’d open them and they’d have these amazing pictures of Yellowstone. And I thought, god, what would it be like, where’s America, you know, and so forth. And eventually I went there of course. But it was a lovely childhood experience to thumb through those books of the American Wild West and the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada and so forth. It was tremendous. And the Californian coast and the gold rush and – incredibly exciting.

[42:09]

And so I got reading at that stage too a lot. I mean, my mother taught me to read – by the time I went to infant school I could read quite fluently. And so I started reading extensively and I got into the Biggles books very early on. I didn’t like Enid Blyton. I read a bit of Enid Blyton but I didn’t like her very much. So I liked Arthur Ransome, you know, the Arthur Ransome stories, and an author that you don’t hear a lot of these days but then he was a bit more popular, Malcolm Saville. Malcolm Saville wrote the most marvellous children’s books about Shropshire and Kent and Romney Marsh and so forth. They were called the Lone Pine Five and they were that sort of genre of books, you know. They were so – I read them these days, I read them even now, and they are beautifully written, beautiful, beautiful stories. So that was another sense of adventure, you know, what was Shropshire like, what was Kent like, you know. So I was probing out into geography a bit by reading. And so I read the Biggles books and then I discovered the William books and I loved the William books, I still do. I confess, I still read William stories [laughs] occasionally for a bit of fun at night. And they were quite wonderful. So I’ve got the whole set of Biggles still and I’ve got the whole set of Williams still and they’re great fun.

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What’s the content of the William stories, for those who aren’t –

Oh, William Brown. William Brown was a sort of ruffian child. Well, from a typical middle class family like my own, I suppose, somewhere up in – I think Hemel Hempstead, that sort of, some – around the M25 in Hertfordshire, somewhere just on the edge of London, you know. And he was a little boy who was a member of a gang called the Outlaws. There was William, Ginger, Henry and Douglas. And they were short stories, vignettes, about things that happened in the village and William would – he was a – he didn’t like washing, he didn’t like combing his hair, you know, and his mother was in permanent despair about his growing up. And his father used to read the newspaper and say, horrible child, get rid of him [laughs], send him out or something. And he had a brother, an older brother and an older sister called Ethel and Robert, who again hated William being around when their boyfriends and girlfriends came round. So it was that sort of genre of story. And if you haven’t read them you really should. They’re wonderful, wonderful stories. A wonderful example from the one in William the Bad, I think it is, William the Bad. There’s going to be an election, a national election, and I think the – you had the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Labour and the Communists were standing in those days. And so they decided they were going to have their own little election with all the kids in the village and so forth. And they had a place called – they had a hut they used to go to for meetings in the forest, in the woods, and they organised this meeting and all the kids were there and one of the kids said, ‘What’s all this about anyway?’ So William said, ‘Well, it’s like this. There are four parties,’ he said, ‘The Conservatives, Liberals and Labour and Communist.’ And one kid in the audience yelled out, ‘What do they do? What are they for?’ So he said, ‘Well, it’s like this,’ he said, ‘The Conservatives want to keep everything exactly as they are [laughs] and the Liberals want to change things a bit but not quite so’s you’d notice,’ he said. ‘And Labour,’ he said, ‘Labour want to take everyone’s money off them and the Communists want to kill everyone’ [laughs]. And I thought, my God, what a brilliant, brilliant description of a child’s view. It’s a child’s view of the world by Richmal Crompton. They’re lovely books and they’re not read a lot these days, I don’t think, but they’re lovely.

[45:32]

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What was it about them that appealed to you as a child? I realise it’s slightly difficult because you read them now and have a sense of them now.

Well, I think partly because I belonged to a gang, a local gang, when I was a – from the age of about ten up to about the age of fifteen. We were fairly ruffian like ourselves. There was Nigel Hardy, who eventually became a distinguished medic [laughs], and then Clive Baker, who became the harbour master in Sydney in Australia, you know. They all did extremely well, these kids, but – they went to various schools in the area, fairly decent schools in the area. And we’d – and during holidays we’d sort of get together and we’d go into the woods and maraud and so forth. Like my father, we were obsessed with explosives and of course, you know, it was pretty hard to get hold of the – nowadays you couldn’t even begin to get the stuff, but in those days you could by being very surreptitious. And what we’d do is this. In the village and the local other villages around Chingford – we’d go to Chingford, Woodford, Epping, Highams Park and Leyton, Leytonstone. We’d each go into a chemist and say, ‘Excuse me sir, I’d like sort of half a pound of potassium nitrate.’ ‘What for?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, my father needs it for the garden.’ ‘Oh right.’ So you’d get a half a pound of potassium nitrate. Simultaneously somebody else would go to another chemist and say, ‘I’d like a pound of sulphur, sir,’ you know [laughs]. ‘Sulphur, what do you want sulphur for?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s to put on the garden.’ It was always to do with the garden, you see, father in the garden. And charcoal is easy, of course. So eventually by going around we could get about ten pounds of potassium chlorate and twenty pounds of sulphur, we could make bombs. You can make huge amounts of explosive. And then we’d buy some potassium chlorate, sodium chlorate, potassium permanganate, anything with ate in, with lots of oxygen, of course. And once we mixed up – we made fireworks, quite good fireworks. We eventually learnt how to make rockets. They were tough. We learnt you had to sort of put it into a glue and let the glue set inside the rocket before you – ‘cause if you put the rocket – the powder would just fall out, you know [laughs]. So anyway, we made rockets eventually and we made mortars, little mortar bombs, by having a brass tube and a big ball bearing. I think one of the ball bearings we shot up must still be in space, you know. It just went, voomph, it was gone, you know. It probably killed somebody

22 John Dewey Page 23 C1379/83 Track 1 about twenty miles away [laughs]. Anyway, so once we made an amazing bomb in a Winchester bottle. Remember the old Winchester bottles in chemistry? They were ribbed, big ribbed bottles, mostly full of acid, you know, nitric or fuming nitric or something or other, sulphuric or hydrochloric. And so we got one of these Winchester bottles from school, from the chemistry – ‘Please sir, could I have a Winchester bottle?’ He said, ‘Just take it away, of course.’ They would come every six months and take all the bottles away that were empty so he was quite happy for me to take one. So we took it away and we lovingly took it home and we made an amazing mixture of powers with lots of ates, potassium permanganate, mixed it up. And you could buy things called Jetex fuses in those days for model aircraft, you know, the Jetex fuse, and you’d like it and it would go sssss, like this. So we packed this thing full of this incredible powder, gunpowder, with lots of ates, as I say, nitrates and chlorates and god knows what in it, permanganates. And then we started wrapping it up. We wrapped it up in cloth, put steel bands around, tightened the steel bands, you know, and so forth, and then another layer of hessian cloth, more steel bands, and things like this. I mean, it was a bomb, you know, it was a bomb. And then a Jetex fuse, of course, went in and the top was sealed over with lots of wax and more bands around that and so forth, and we’d cut off the Jetex fuse about there. So we went up – we took it into the forest. We thought, how are we going to set this off, how are we going to do this, and what can we do that’s spectacular that this bomb will do. We thought, we can blow a tree out of the ground. We reckoned we could actually blow a tree out of the ground with this. Small tree and there was – we found a place with a clearing, quite – what we thought was quite a long way from anywhere, near Connaught Waters, if you know where that is, in the edge of Chingford. And we found a clearing with a tree about, I suppose, a foot in diameter, something like that. I think it was an ash tree or something like that. And we dug under the roots, really dug, dug, dug right under the roots, made a huge hole in the roots of the tree, put it in, Jetex fuse leading out, and then packed in the earth all around it, you see. And then lots of wood and various other bits and shovelled some earth on top of that until it was all nicely sealed up. And we were all bending over, five of us. And I was determined to be the one to light the fuse, so [whistles], like this. They said, ‘Light it, light it.’ So I lit it. I said, ‘Okay lads, run to the edge and dive into the edge of the clearing and just lay down,’ you know, ‘Lay down. Get as far as you can.’ Unfortunately Gareth

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Jones was a fairly heavy sort of fattish guy and he tripped halfway across the clearing and tripped and he was just getting up when the thing went off. It went – it was unbelievable. The tree came – va-voomph, the tree came right out of the ground. It went straight up and tipped over and fell like that. So that was successful. But apparently the explosion was heard for ten miles around and the police – I think the police – I don’t know whether this is self libellous or something [laughs], but the police apparently investigated and they eventually found the clearing and poor old Gareth was – we weren’t damaged at al. Poor old Gareth was hit by a piece of flying glass, a piece of flying glass from the bottle, and it took the bottom of his ear off, clean off, like that. We looked for it, we looked everywhere in the clearing for the ear, and we couldn’t find it. But we thought, god, what are we going to tell his mother, what are we going to tell his mother. So [laughs] Gareth Jones went home and my parents were phoned, ‘What the hell have you done to my Gareth’, you know, that kind of thing. And Gareth didn’t rat on us, he was a good lad, and he said, ‘I fell out of a tree and I slipped and it was cut – the bottom of the ear was cut as I slipped out of the tree and cut it off and I couldn’t find it.’ And he was bleeding like a pig, really bleeding like a pig, so we got a handkerchief and stuffed it up there and I said, ‘Hold it until you get home,’ you know. But anyway, so that was a bad episode. That was probably our naughtiest episode. I think we would be labelled as terrorists had we done that today. I mean, you’d probably be in jail, in reform school or something like that. They investigated. I think my father knew who did it. I think he said, ‘You know John, this amazing thing happened today,’ and he went this, the police went and so forth. And he said, ‘It’s just been on the local news, unexplained explosion in the woods.’ And [laughs] Father, he didn’t ask me, he just looked at me and turned away and I’m sure that he knew it was our gang who’d done it. But there were no comebacks, just – you know. And the only damage done, I suppose, was the poor old tree in Epping Forest and to Gareth’s ear, Gareth Jones’s ear. There we are, that’s another escapade in childhood. We made a torpedo once. That was quite good. Our torpedo was really good. We tried it in the bath at home, the mechanism for running and so forth, and we discovered lead azide fuses, contact fuses, and the nose of the torpedo – quite a nice little thing with a little motor and batteries, battery driven. It was – it would go sort of at half walking speed, I suppose, through the water, something of that sort. And again we made a little bomb out of it and we torpedoed a

24 John Dewey Page 25 C1379/83 Track 1 boat on Connaught Waters. Connaught Waters was a place quite near where – nearby where – it was our stamping ground. We were – we used to maraud that area generally. And we let it off and it hit the side of a boat, you know. It was a pleasure boat, you could hire a rowing boat, and there was a sort of courting couple or a honeymoon couple or some – a courting couple probably, a young lad and a girl, and it blew the side out of the boat. It just blew the side right out of the boat and it worked perfectly, it was a serious torpedo. And they were – it was quite shallow, they were up to about there in water. And the guy, I’ll never forget, the swearing was terrible. He was swearing like mad, ‘Somebody’s done this, we’ll kill them.’ We were scattered by that time, of course. So those were the two incidents I’m perhaps most proud of as a child [laughs]. I’ve told very few people this actually [laughs].

[53:47]

Who made the torpedo, the motor?

We all – well, the motor was easy. We didn’t make the motor. It was a motor for a plane, you know, little motors they use in radio controlled planes, a little electric motor. They’re mostly little petrol engines now, aren’t they, in those things, much faster, but this thing just trundled along. We’d got a propeller, you know, a little model aircraft screw and – not a screw, not an aircraft screw, a ship – a little model ship screw and that was on the back, and we made a nice – we had – we used Meccano, you know. Remember the old Meccano? We made a Meccano frame and then built – at the back and then built the rest of the torpedo on it using, I think, some sort of – starting with a cardboard toilet roll tube in the middle and then bound things around it, then the lead azide fuse and the plunger in the front. It took us about a month to make and it was all over in five seconds, you know [laughs]. There we are. So that – I was – obviously chemistry was my abiding interest at school. I loved chemistry, really did, mixing stuff, you know, what would happen if you mixed phenyl and nitric acid? Well, I found out, it was terrible.

What did happen?

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Well, it – we did it in a lab when the master wasn’t there. And we didn’t use much stuff but it shot up in a jet out of the beaker and hit the ceiling and spread and then globs, glowing globs, dropped off the ceiling. I thought, Christ, what are we going to do. And eventually the master came back and he said, ‘What the hell has been going on?’ I think we were all beaten for that, had a serious beating from the headmaster, but that’s alright. It was worth it just to see what the hell had gone on. I suppose we were about twelve or thirteen at the time. But you see, we had access to chemicals in those days. Nowadays kids don’t get access to chemicals, you know. They can’t – we had access to white phosphorous, yellow phosphorous, sodium, metallic sodium, metallic potassium, fuming nitric acid, hydrofluoric acid. They were lined up as reagents in the chemistry lab, in the senior chemistry lab and in the junior chemistry lab. And we had a master who made a – a madman called Clanger Clayton who taught junior chemistry. He made his own car. He made an airship, which he let off in the school grounds. The airship went up – quite a large – a good sized aircraft with a basket, not to carry anybody – but this airship went up and he wanted to see what happened. It went up and floated over the school, went up to Woodford Wells, where it caught fire and crashed onto a garage called Gate’s Garage, and they had to put the fire out in the garage [laughs]. So that was – so he was as bad as anyone, you know. He made a – do you know a thing called thermite? It’s made of iron. And I can’t remember what else goes with it but it’s basically – the heat is tremendous. It goes to thousands of degrees centigrade. And this thermite – it’s a thermite bomb. It basically – if you put one here it would burn through this – it would burn through the floor and then keep on going in the ground until finally it was expended. But he put one in – he made a thermite bomb thinking the ceramic platform would contain it, but it went straight through the ceramic platform, through the bench and the bottom of the bench, through the ceiling into the junior lab and burnt its way into the basement and vanished to the bottom of the basement. A thermite bomb, look it up on the web, thermite, nasty substance. So my childhood was a mixture of sport, chemistry, geology, painting, model railways, I loved model – I had a model railway at home too, which I loved, a Hornby model railway, which I built in a shed at the bottom of the garden. So yes, it was an idyllic childhood, unusual perhaps, or maybe usual, I don’t know [laughs], it could be usual.

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[57:33]

Could you describe Clanger Clayton’s homemade car?

That was an extraordinary machine. He came to school in it once. He lived in Chingford and we were waiting – sort of playing – we had a game at school called assy, ‘cause it was played on the asphalt by the chapel, and – no, not by the chapel, by the chemistry labs, I’m sorry. And behind the chemistry lab there was this huge asphalt area in which the combined cadet force would parade every Friday. And we played assy morning and whenever we could. It was played with a tennis ball with a goal. It was football with a tennis ball. And the skill levels were very high, very good. So we were playing assy once and this monstrosity came roaring into the edge of the asphalt where the masters parked and we all looked. It was Clanger’s homemade car. And he’d built it, I mean, not from parts. He’d built it from scratch. It was aluminium plate. He’d built aluminium plate into this monstrous shape, a huge bonnet, and he’d actually built the engine. I think he bought the wheels ‘cause wheels are pretty tough to make and tyres, so he bought those, but the frame, the engine – and the noise it made was truly unbelievable, roaring in. And he reckoned – he demonstrated on the road outside school, which was completely illegal, he demonstrated how fast it would go. He got up from zero to ninety in about two seconds. I mean, just – it went off like a drag racing car, you know. He’d put a very seriously big engine into this. He’d built this huge engine. So that was Clanger Clayton. And then it was painted all navy blue for some reason. I thought, why not make it an interesting colour, but it was all navy blue. So that and the airship were Clanger Clayton’s too – we used to tease him unmercifully too. On one occasion we were waiting for him to come at nine o’clock one morning for the first chemistry class of the day and – do you remember in – an escape mechanism from buildings was at one time where – you stood on the windowsill, you put yourself in a harness and you jumped and this wire would slowly unwind from a decelerator machine up here. And it was a way of – if the chemistry lab came on fire at least one person could save themselves by harnessing and jumping out, you see. Anyway, once – one poor little lad who’d been sort of maybe teased by Clanger Clayton quite a lot, thought, I’ll show him, so he waited – he got up on the sill, strapped himself in this harness and hid

27 John Dewey Page 28 C1379/83 Track 1 himself slightly behind the curtain. And he said – and Clanger Clayton came in and as Clanger Clayton came in he said, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going to do away with myself.’ And he leapt from the window, you see, like this. And Clanger, he must have – poor lad, poor lad, terrible thing to do to a schoolmaster, but he just decelerated down the side of the building. And he got beaten for that, he actually got beaten for that, for doing that. Clanger had him off to the headmaster immediately. So it was that kind of school. Bancrofts in those days was a fairly hardy Christian muscular school, you might say. I think there’s only one left in Britain and that’s probably Sedbergh in Yorkshire. I think that still has the reputation of being a great rugby school and being a muscular Christian school. I don’t know, there we are. But that was what Bancrofts was like in those days. But the kids all did pretty well.

[1:00:53]

Many of the kids in Bancrofts – I think very few pursued an academic career like me. I’ll come to that a bit later. But when I left school, my colleagues who’d left school, the boys with whom I worked and lived and so forth, you know, for eight years, they went off – one became a tea taster in Ceylon for, what’s it called, Lipton, Lipton’s Tea. And he became one of the greatest tea tasters in the world, a very distinguished man. Hilditch, his name was, a very fine wicket keeper, I remember he was, too, a wonderful wicket keeper. And other went off – several went into banking and they did – they went into industry, much more into the financial world. Many became lawyers. They went to law school and so forth. One became a very distinguished barrister. One’s a lord now, Lord Pannick, the great jurist, he was an old Bancroftian. So kids went off into respected professions, medicine, but very few would go off into something wild like geology and academia. That was regarded as rather fringe, you know, a fringe activity. You get nowhere in geology, you may enjoy it but, you know, it’s not a thing for a gentleman to do, you know, it’s – so that was what was thought in those days, I suppose.

Are you quoting there something that someone would have said to you?

Oh, somebody actually did say it.

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Who said that to you?

That was a master at school, a man called Owens, who was one of the English masters at school. He went to live in Ottery St Mary and died about, hmm, fifteen years ago, something like that. A great rugby man. All the masters at school were wonderful in the sense that they – that most of – not all, most of them were really deeply engaged in sport with the boys. I mean, one, Emptage, had played cricket for the West Indies. He was one of the last white men ever to play for the West Indies. And I remember Emptage giving us catching practice. He would stand at one side of the field and hold a bat in this hand, bang, with one hand. The ball would sail. We were waiting in trepidation, boom, caught, and one ball after another just straight up in the air. Enormous strength, enormous strength. So there was Emptage in cricket, there was Owens in rugby. He was at Llandovery School in Wales. And then another one had played – was going to play scrum half for Wales and he got pneumonia the week before so he was out of it. That was Jenkins, Ivor Jenkins, taught French, wonderful man. When I look back, maybe it’s rose coloured spectacles when you look back, but it was a wonderful period in my life, that school period at Bancrofts. I can’t imagine having a better period from ten to eighteen. And it just got better my life, you know, from eighteen to twenty-one at Queen Mary College, my research, and then there’s my other life, which we’ll come to subsequently. It has been just incredibly good. I’ve been very, very lucky. I went to the right place at the right time, the right schools, you know, and the right university for what I was interested in and I got the right PhD project. It all just worked like clockwork and it was just serendipity and pure luck. It could have gone pear shaped had I done something different. One tiny thing different, it could have all been very different, you see, yeah. So anyway.

[1:04:11]

Could you tell me about time spent specifically with your father as a younger child, the sorts of things that you did with him, even – and it’s quite a big ask in terms of memory, but the sort of conversations you had with him as well when you were a

29 John Dewey Page 30 C1379/83 Track 1 younger child. We’ll come onto you as an adolescent or as a slightly older child later.

It was – the relationship between my – I was an only child, you see. As I said, each of the eight had one child. And my relationship with both my – with each of my parents, it wasn’t – I don’t think it was a communal family, a sort of real triple all coming together. I had a relationship with my mother, a relationship with my father and my father had a relationship with my mother, all very close but it never – it was never a sort of – except maybe on holidays. We used to go to Bridport for a seaside holiday or we’d go to Kent, usually Romney Marsh, ‘cause my father – my father loved history and loved walking in villages. He’d go into churchyards and study the gravestones and make notes [laughs], it was extraordinary. Mother loved that too. So we’d have this wonderful time sort of walking along Romney Marsh and looking at the history and the smuggling history, walking up and down, looking at the sink ports and the Martello towers. So we had that sort of family holiday, that was lovely. But those are the only times, I think on holiday – and down in Dorset, we’d go to the fossil coast and collect fossils, you know, and so forth. And we had a dog called Lassie and we’d take the dog with us on all these holidays and we’d – we’d mostly go on long walks and very often inland from the coast. Father liked to go into little Dorset villages and study the church and so forth and study the graveyards and so forth. So they were lovely. But my mother was – I think my mother was much more ambitious for me than my – well, than was my father. My mother insisted that I – you know, I had special tuition, ‘cause she wanted me to get into Bancrofts, she was very keen on that, which was the sort of best school in South West Essex, and I think still is. I mean, they’re way up at the top – near the top of the A level table still. But she was – so she got special tuition for me. My father would say, oh, that’s nice, you know, but he wouldn’t do very much about it whereas Mother was much more pushy. She was keen on my, in quotes, getting on, you know. So that was nice in a sense. And I owe a very great deal to my mother but in a different way to my father. My father’s conversations with me were mostly about music and art. As I said, my father’s a very good artist. He loved art, loved music, both jazz and classical. He was a very eclectic – he’d broadened his interests in music and indeed art. He didn’t like modern art, abstract art, very much at all. But we’d talk about painting a great deal.

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We’d wander round the garden, we’d sit and paint together and he’d teach me the elements of watercolour painting and how to do this. Very heavy on sort of precise technique. He got me very early learning how to grade a wash properly and how to – and wet onto dry and wet onto wet and all those – which are essential techniques, you’ve got to learn those things, and graded colour and so forth. So yes, most of my conversations with my father were art and music, almost entirely, until I broke a windowpane in the greenhouse with a cricket ball and my father said, ‘Oh, you’re not playing in the garden again, you and Michael.’ So we had to go out to a local field to play. But we used to play cricket endlessly in the garden until we broke the greenhouse window. So that was another conversation I had. I got a bit of a smack for that, I think, when I was young. So yes, again, it was a very loving family, a loving relationship, between all three of us in different ways, you know. It was very nice.

[1:07:48]

Why do you think it was your mother and not your father who was particularly encouraging in terms of doing well at school, getting into the right school and doing well in life?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. Possibly it’s the kind of people they were, you know. The kind of people they were – Mother was an incredibly kind – a massively kind and generous woman. I never heard her say anything nasty about anybody all her life, except her brother Freddie who she couldn’t stand. But Freddie could do no good, everyone else could do no ill [laughs]. So she was a wonderfully kind lady and for that reason she had lots and lots of friends. And she was always helping people, she was a great helper. She would always think of other people before herself, immensely kind and generous person and I miss her greatly for that reason. I miss them both actually. But Mother came from the same sort of family as my father and she was brought up fairly strictly and harshly by her grandfather. ‘Cause, as I said, my mother’s mother died in childbirth and she went to live with my grandfather and then – then her uncle, my Great Uncle Will, who was my grandfather – they were the Davies family. My grandfather was a Davies. He came from a Welsh family,

31 John Dewey Page 32 C1379/83 Track 1 somewhere in Haverford West, I think – yes, Haverford West, that’s right. And Grandfather Davies, my mother’s father, he was a fairly tough sort of person. He died at the age of sixty from cancer. But – where was I going with this? Sorry. Erm, let me think. I’ll just think back a bit. Oh mother, yes, mother. So he was a bachelor for about five years and then he married my step grandmother and my mother didn’t really want to go and live with them. She went to live with my Uncle Will – first her grandfather, then he died. He was a very kind but very strict man, lovely – obviously lovely person, by an account, very religious man. And then she went to live with my Great Uncle Will in Hythe in Kent. Great Uncle Will was in the army and he was officer in charge of the musketry training for the British Army. He was in charge of the whole thing and he won Bisley three years running, this chap. He was a wonderful shot. I actually remember his shooting, a 303, a perfect range, ‘cause he took me out once and, God, he was unbelievable. I mean, just bull’s eye after bull’s eye, just – he couldn’t miss, you know [laughs], extraordinary. So she lived in Hythe in Kent for five years and then her father decided he really wanted her back, ‘cause Freddie and – they had Freddie and Eileen by that stage and he said it would be nice to have another child in the family, so – and Mother cried all the way back from Hythe to London apparently, terrible. And her grandmother was a bit of a sort of Cinderella type mother, you know, the step mother, not an – she wasn’t an evil woman but she was fairly tough and she – my mother had to do all the work and so forth. She was treated as a scullery maid, you know. And I think she – the hard life she had – the sort of hardening of it softened her in some way and she became – and she was obviously always a very nice, nice, nice little kid [laughs]. But then when she married and had me she was determined that I wasn’t going to have the sort of hard life that she’d had, I think, and I think that was probably the reason. It’s the only reason I can construct. I never talked to Mother about this. It was sort of embarrassing, I didn’t want to embarrass her. So I think that that was probably the reason that she pushed me quite a lot. And she was quite hard in pushing, making me do homework, really, you know, really making me work hard, which was actually probably quite good for me ‘cause I was sport obsessed and rather lazy at academia originally. And Father somehow sort of left it to my mother, ‘Oh yes, you can do all that stuff,’ you know, whereas Father nurtured my painting and love of music. So it was actually quite a nice combination on the two sides. And also Mother was an

32 John Dewey Page 33 C1379/83 Track 1 inveterate reader. She was a tremendous reader. She devoured books. Apparently when she was a child that was her great consolation was reading, to take her out of her world and into a sort of imaginary world, and she read all the classics. I mean, she – Mother’s knowledge of literature was quite extraordinary. I mean, she could have lectured in English quite easily without any formal – and she passed a scholarship – two scholarships, one at eleven and one at thirteen, and her mother, step mother, simply wouldn’t let her go to high school. She said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘We need her in the house. We must have her in the house.’ So poor Mother, you know, could have had a – could have become a very, very well educated woman whereas she was forbidden by the evil step mother [laughs] from doing that – not evil, that’s the wrong word to use, but tough step mother. So that was my mother’s – I think the reason for my mother’s interest in me getting on very well. And it worked.

[1:12:48]

Thank you. Something you mentioned that I’d like you to describe, if you can, and that’s your train set that I think you said you had in the shed in the garden.

Yes, yes. I had a Hornby – it was a Hornby – well, first – I had two gauges, Hornby made two gauges. One is O gauge, which is a one to forty-five scale, and the other is OO, which is one to seventy-six. Now the interesting thing about – I’ll say a little bit about scales in railways. The other – very close to OO is something called HO. HO is continental and American and that’s one to eighty-seven, so – but the track size is the same but the locomotives and carriages are perfect scale for that 16.5 millimetre, whereas OO, typical English small trains, they were slightly too large for the track, and hence there’s something called EM in which they make the – they enlarge the track. They keep the OO size but they actually enlarge the track to 18 millimetres, a very strange and difficult gauge to work. But I had O and OO. The O gauge would be an engine about sort of, you know, a foot and a half long, something like that. And I had some lovely locomotives, the Duchess of Athol I seem to remember. So I had an O gauge thing – layout. The first one I had was an O gauge layout but then I realised with an O gauge layout, which the track is, I suppose – I can’t remember – what is a couple of – two or three centimetres in width, three centimetres maybe, the

33 John Dewey Page 34 C1379/83 Track 1 trouble with that is you need an enormous area to have anything like a realistic railway. And this shed wasn’t enormous. I suppose it was about fifteen feet by ten feet. You could have a decent track running round the edge, but I suddenly realised if you wanted a more realistic railway you needed a smaller scale. So I switched into OO and I bought – and my – each Christmas – I got train sets for Christmas or Meccano. I had wonderful Meccano sets, you know, as well. I was that way inclined and wanted railways and Meccano sets for presents. And my aunts and uncles gave me this stuff too. [Coughs] So I’ve still got my Meccano set somewhere. I don’t know where it is. It’s up in the attic somewhere, I think, in the house.

[1:15:06]

So this double OO railway – I developed quite a substantial railway in the shed and built scenery and learnt quite a lot about electricity and points, how you wire points and switches and so forth, and had signal cabins with lights in and little villages and things like that. It was quite – but eventually of course I left home and my father said, ‘You can’t leave all that stuff. We’ve got to do something else with the shed.’ And so I dismantled the whole thing and I – in fact we sold most of it. But I’m back into a quite different railway system now, into HO, one to eighty-seven, Swiss prototype. So I’m mad keen on Swiss – Swiss railways are my big interest in life – one of my big interests in life, so I’m building one at the moment in the – I’ve got a big double garage which we built when I first came to Oxford, and I’ve got a billiard table in the – a snooker table in the middle and all round the outside I’m developing this big Swiss HO layout [laughs]. I haven’t done much of it in the last few years but I will get back to it sometime.

I mean, just while we’re on this then, would you be able to say something about the sort of context of this railway that you’re building at the moment, the sort of landscape?

Ah yes. Well, of course, Switzerland has – Switzerland is in a sense a railway enthusiast’s paradise. A, the Swiss railways have wonderful track systems. If you’ve ever been on a Swiss train you’ll know that the railways are incredibly smooth.

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They’re beautifully laid track and the suspensions on the carriages are wonderful. It’s like riding on a cloud of cotton wool, you know, marvellous. So first of all they have a wonderful railway system and very efficient, the trains are always on time. They have a wonderful variety of locomotives and carriages. And most importantly, it runs through wonderful scenery, particularly the ones around the edges of the mountains and through the mountains, the Gotthard Tunnel and all the big tunnels and so forth. So – and the geology of that is very exciting. I’ve always been interested in the geology of Switzerland quite a lot. So what I’m gradually doing is building a – it’s mostly track work at the moment, but – ‘cause you have to do that first. You’ve got to get the track right, all running perfectly, all wired perfectly, all the signals and everything, then you can start building the scenery, ‘cause you can’t do the scenery and then, you know, do the wiring and the tunnels afterwards. So you’ve got to get all the track perfect to begin with. So I’ve got it all planned and it’s going to be – I’ve got – I’ve already built bits of scenery here and there, some rock cuttings and things. I’m trying to make it really accurate and I’m using rock castings, using rubber castings of actual rocks. Actual rocks are too heavy, of course, to put on the layout so I make these plaster moulds, thin plaster moulds, and they go onto Styrofoam. You can use Styrofoam and various other things. So I’m trying to make the scenery as close as I can to that of the Bern Lotschberg Simplon Railway that runs from Bern to Brig through the Alps, so – and up through Spirals and Kandersteg and places like that, with the big folds and faults and things like that, quite accurate geology. I’m trying to make the geology as accurate as I can possibly, possibly make it. So there is a nice relationship with my geology there. Same in the pictures, I try to make the pictures, my paintings, in – I’ve always painted watercolours all my life, but recently, since retiring, my wife does – my wife got in league with some of my colleagues when I retired from my California job, the last job I had, and they – they said, ‘What would John like as a leaving present?’ And Molly said, ‘Do you know, he’s never pointed in oils. I’ve never asked him why. Why don’t we buy him an oil painting course?’ They did and I went off to the Cotswolds to a wonderful place called Farncombe Estate and I got the most wonderful four day painting course from a wonderful guy called Ian Coleman. And it was in a sense a beginner’s course, I thought I’d do that to start with, and I learnt a lot about oil painting and I’ve taken to it like a duck to water. I love it. So I paint about – every two weeks I paint something

35 John Dewey Page 36 C1379/83 Track 1 now if I can. I’m doing a picture of Venice at the moment, which is unusual for me. I don’t like architectural things generally, but it’s a very nice picture of Venice that I made some notes on while I was there in January and started the sketches and then I’m trying to finish it off. But mostly I paint landscapes with geology in them, Western Ireland, Newfoundland and New Zealand, where I go to do fieldwork, and each of the paintings has a geological connection. You can sometimes see the geology in the picture. Other times you can infer the geology. I know about the geology so – they remind me of pieces of geology that I’ve done, many of them, you know, so that’s quite fun. And also I find that scenery and painting has a strong affinity with music for me. I was painting – I was in New Zealand doing a sketch of the Seaward Kaikoura Mountains one evening, it was getting dark. There was a bit of moonlight coming from the water and I was just finishing it off. And suddenly Frank Bridge’s tone poem The Sea came into my head and I could hear the music and saw the picture and the painting was coming. So there’s a strong affinity with – particularly English music, British music. It’s very – what’s the word? Erm, it’s G minor, they use G minor a great deal, the key of G minor. It’s very, very sort of emotive and landscape driven. It’s very descriptive music, like In the Fen Country by Vaughan Williams and things like that. It’s very landscape related. Holst is very similar, Egdon Heath and so forth. So that sort of music fits with my interests in painting and my emotional attachment to England as well and the English landscape very strongly.

How does having geological training alter the way you paint things?

I don’t know. It maybe makes me a bit too … fine scale accurate. I’m trying to, in quotes, loosen up at the moment. In watercolour you have to loosen up, you’ve got broad washes and colours and so on, but in oil paints you can really become much more meticulous ‘cause you can go over things again and, you know, it’s a very – it’s a very interesting difference in technique. But I’m trying to become broader. Still accurate, I like accurate representation, I don’t do abstracts – well, I do occasional comic abstracts like Kandinsky and things like that, but mostly they’re pretty representational pictures of landscapes, but they’re a little bit – I think they’re quite decent, I mean, they’re quite good pictures, but I think they’re a bit tight at the

36 John Dewey Page 37 C1379/83 Track 1 moment. I need to loosen up just a bit, you know, to make it slightly more expansive somehow.

What did your dad paint, the paintings that were around your house?

Landscapes almost entirely, landscapes and also portraits. He was quite a good portrait painter. He did a lovely portrait of a Roman Catholic priest once, which was a beautiful thing. He was very, very – he was technically a very good painter, technically superb. He painted in both oils and waters but he never got me going in oils, which was – I don’t know why. I think he liked watercolour much more than oils and didn’t want me to spoil my watercolour painting by painting in oils [laughs], I think so. But that was great fun. Dad was lovely, he was very kind and giving of his time to me actually in terms of teaching. He spent hours with me, teaching, and we’d paint together quite a lot, go out and paint together in Epping Forest. And he’d stop and he’d say, ‘Oh, you haven’t done that right, you know, you’ve got to be more careful.’ And show me how to sponge out whole sections. I’d say, ‘Oh Dad, I’ve made a terrible mess of this whole …’ ‘Don’t despair, lots of water, sponge,’ and he showed me how to sponge the whole thing out and almost, not quite, almost start again. It was fine, lovely.

[1:22:54]

And as you became old enough to be aware, what did you come to understand about your parents’ political views or even sort of activity?

Both my parents were – not leftwing but they were socialists. They were old fashioned socialists, I would say, sort of – not terribly religious but sort of, you know, the Christian socialism that characterised much of the early Labour movement in this country. They believed in the rights of the common man and they were very – they weren’t particularly union oriented, I don’t think, although my father belonged to the Post Office union. I think he did – yes, he did. But I think they were – they were very – they were very keen for politicians to be caring people. They only liked politicians who they thought – and it was quite hard to find. They loved Aneurin

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Bevan. Aneurin Bevan, the great Welshman, a truly wonderful person, they were great admirers of his, and they liked Attlee too. The early Labour government, the Bevans, Aneurin Bevan and Ernest Bevan and so forth – when the National Health System came in in 1948 they were over the moon with the system, you know. So yes, they were sort of – I suppose they were sort of rightwing socialists – not rightwing but somewhere to the right of centre of the Labour Party. Tony Blair, I suppose something – not exactly like Tony Blair, but – [laughs] not at all, but they were old fashioned socialists, I think you’d have to say, both my parents, father much more so than my mother. Mother rarely expressed a political view at all whereas Father did express political views quite strongly and they were socialist views, yeah.

[1:24:37]

And their religious faith?

Well, they were both Church of England but I’d have to say Mother – when my father died Mother fell back on it. I think my father in a sense believed in all the things that go with religion, like don’t steal from people, be kind to people, and all – you know, all the things you expect of a Christian, but never practised faith. He was a very spiritual person in many ways but he never practiced – he never went to church. I think he went to church occasionally but not very often. Whereas Mother, I think Mother was more inclined to want to be, but she felt my father didn’t go to church so she wouldn’t either. But when my father died she became confirmed. She’d been baptised of course but she became confirmed Church of England, joined the Mother’s Union, went to church every Sunday twice, and she became really quite strongly overtly religious. And I think she’d held it back for quite a while because of my father, not in a nasty way but, you know, it was a release. I mean, she missed my father terribly when he died. He died in 1980 and my mother died in 2001 so she had twenty-one years without Dad. She was born in – she was five years younger. She was born in 1907 and he was born in 1902. So yeah, and she was ninety-three when she died – was it ninety-three? Yes, ninety-three when she died. And religion for I think became very important, very central in her life, and not for Dad.

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[1:26:07]

And you as a child, a, I suppose you’re –

Oh yes, I was very – I mean, gosh, I was quite a religious child for quite a while. I mean, Sunday School and – do you ever remember something called the Crusaders? The Crusaders were a sort of muscular Christian organisation and we used to get together and study the Bible on Sunday after church – no, usually in the afternoon actually. And had a little badge. We thought of ourselves as the new Richard the Lionhearts, the Crusaders, I’m not kidding. And, you know, you’ve got to convert people. But they did some good. I mean, I remember at Christmastime we’d go round collecting food, tins of food and packets of food, from neighbours and people around Chingford, we’d put together these food parcels and then take them around to poor people in Islington and the slums of London. And that opened my eyes, my God it opened my eyes, to some terrible conditions under which some of the old people lived in, in really dirty wet cold damp flats in Islington. This would be, I suppose, you know, early 1950s. And people were still living under shocking conditions then. So I sort of moved from muscular Christian into a much more socialist view of the world [laughs], I must say. I was sort of – because of the school I went to, I was much more rightwing than my parents and not really knowing what rightwing was but I tended to – I suppose had I voted I would have voted Conservative. But when I saw those people, those poor old people and they were so grateful for the parcels we gave them, the food parcels we gave them – and I cried sometimes. It was terrible, I was distressed. And I’d say to our Crusader leaders and say, you know, ‘These poor people, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?’ He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Some people live like that and nothing we can do about it. Just give them a few parcels now and then.’ I said, ‘There must be a different way of doing it’ [laughs], you know. And of course there is and we have done it mostly, thank god.

What did you see specifically? Can you describe what you saw?

Well, I saw a rat – I saw in fact two rats in one house. They were eating from the cat bowl, two – and the smell of the place. They didn’t have an inside toilet and they

39 John Dewey Page 40 C1379/83 Track 1 were urinating in a bowl. This old chap, poor old chap, he couldn’t go three floors down, you know, to get to the outside toilet. I mean, it was shocking, the smell. And the bedclothes, I mean, they were dank and rank and, you know, they didn’t have washing machines. One had a sort of little tiny dirty old stove in the corner. People living under shocking conditions. I mean, you wouldn’t expect, you know, anybody, I mean, in the world to be living under those conditions, and this was in London, Stoke Newington, Stoke Newington, Islington. I bet there’s not a place in Stoke Newington or Islington that even vaguely approaches that nowadays, thank god, you know, that things have improved.

Did you discuss it with your parents?

Yes.

What did they said?

They said, yes, they said, it’s shocking. My father said, ‘I’ve known about this for years and I’ve not known what to do about it. I talk to people about it. I suppose there are organisations you can join to help. It means the whole society’s got to change its attitude.’ And that’s what gradually happened. And it was the Atlee government, it was the Atlee government, they got the National Health Service, that was a huge step forward in British – the way people treated each other. And, you know, it gradually – and the National Health Service led to other things as well, the way we think about welfare and looking after people and looking after neighbours and so forth and making sure that everybody has a decent way of life. Even if it’s their fault, you know, you’ve got to find a way in which people share – you share much more than grabbing. And I think we’re still – we’re going back into a rather materialistic world at the moment, which distresses me a little bit, and I think the last Labour government actually were partly responsible for that. They were sort of Conservatives in disguise in a way [laughs]. But there we are.

[1:29:57]

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And did you believe in God?

Oh yes. I mean, through – until I was … I’m trying to get this accurately. I think until I went to university. And then I started talking with people about God and religion and so forth and I began to have quite serious doubts. I used to go on – in my first year at college, in Queen Mary College, I went off to sort of weekend retreats. I have to say, one of them because of the girl I liked very much and she went off to this Methodist retreat and I thought, gosh, I’ll go too, you know [laughs]. So – but then after a year in college – I mean, I was a Crusader, as I say, I prayed and I believed in God all the way through until I was eighteen I think, yes, that’s right. And then at eighteen, eighteen and first year in college, I realised – that’s the wrong way to put it, I thought that it was all nonsense. And I thought about – I thought about the time and the history of the earth, you know, why would God wait to put man on the earth, wait four and a half billion years since the origin of the solar system and the earth – the origin of the earth, sorry, the origin of the earth, and then thirteen billion years since the origin of the universe. It doesn’t make sense, why would God wait? They said, well, not ours to reason why. Once people started saying that to me, it’s not ours to reason why, you’ve got to have faith, I said, I can’t do it. I want to be able to – not necessarily prove things but things have got to be logical to me. If something becomes illogical – and it’s the last thing, I suppose, in the earth, isn’t it, that still doesn’t have a logic about it, you know. You can either – it’s either believe or – it’s faith, you either believe or you don’t believe and that’s fine, you know, but I think religion has a lot to answer for in the history of the world and also in stopping people thinking for themselves and stopping people thinking. It’s a way of controlling people. It’s a very neat way of – in the old days of course, of the leaders of the country using religion or God to control the people, very neat, a very neat way, you know. Oh, you have a terrible life here now but think what it’s going to be like when you get to heaven, it’s wonderful, you know. But I don’t go for that and I didn’t go for it since the age of eighteen. I’ve become firmer in my atheism since the age of eighteen and now I’m absolutely convinced and firm that it’s all complete nonsense

[1:32:16]

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Now at the Bancroft School, I wonder whether you could say a little bit more about science teaching, including within science subjects like geography and geology and so on. It might make sense to take them in turn. Because we’re going to get to Queen Mary College in a little while –

Later, yeah.

You’re going to go to – you’re going to be studying geology and we sort of need a sense of why. So could you start by describing physics teaching?

Physics teaching was – physics was taught by two masters, Mr Matravers and Mr Houston. Mr Houston taught the seniors, taught senior classes, Mr Matravers taught the juniors. Matravers was a sadist. He used to break metre rules across the back of children’s heads, or boys’ heads. Matravers was a Martinet, tough and fair. Both actually were very good teachers, they taught physics very, very well. Lots of experiments, I mean, lots and lots of experiments. None of the science that I had at school was very theoretical. I suspect a lot of science that was taught in those days wasn’t taught very theoretically. It was taught by hands on doing things. We had gas jars, we made water, you know, putting oxygen in the same cylinder and putting a taper underneath it and making – oh gosh, water, look at that, clever, two gases make water, astonishing, you know. We actually proved things by doing. And we did – and in senior chemistry we did titrations with – we had lots of glassware, burettes and pipettes and all kinds of lovely things, retorts – we made gases in retorts, all kinds of things. It was wonderful. And, you know, the theoretical chemistry a bit as well but it was mostly hands on. Everything was taught hands on. When we learnt about pulleys, pulleys and levers and fulcrums and so on, we always did it, you know, with a balance and added a weight at that end, how much weight do you need for that length of the stick. Obviously if it was short you need a hell of a big weight to pull it up. And you calculated and we had to graph everything. Everything we did we put on a graph, the actual data on it, oh look, look at the curve. Okay Dewey, can you derive a mathematical expression for that curve from that curve. So you’d measure things like this and you’d measure the slope, so it’s kind of like a reverse calculus.

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[1:34:30]

We were very lucky actually. We also had two masters – Emptage, this chap who played cricket for the MCC, taught mathematics and then we had a wonderful chap called Belchamber who taught junior mathematics, one of the junior maths masters. He taught maths utterly brilliantly and I still love maths to this day because of the way he taught it. He taught us calculus at the age of twelve. We were doing calculus from the age of twelve, you know. Everyone said you can’t teach kids at twelve calculus, they’ve got to learn arithmetic and simple geometry, trigonometry, simple algebra, simultaneous equations, you do all that stuff before you start into high level mathematics. Not true at all, he integrated all the way through, a bit of geometry – I mean, he started calculus by doing it this way. ‘Okay kids, or boys, draw an ordinate and an abscissa on the graph paper. Okay right,’ he said, ‘Now from the origin I want you to strike a line at forty-five degrees. Okay, what’s the ratio of that line all the way along?’ ‘One sir,’ you know, one to one, it must be one. And then he said, ‘Okay, change the inclination,’ made you calculate different angles. So you learnt trigonometry that way, you start learning – ‘Draw a right angle triangle there, measure it up.’ You actually – we derived out own sine tables, very crude sine tables and tans and coses and cosecs and secs and cotans. We actually made our own tables, so we knew what trig tables were really all about from the first principles. So he taught us that and having done that – that was all in straight lines, he said, ‘Ah, we’re going to make it more difficult now. What we’re going to do is take that straight line and calculate the area under that curve.’ ‘Easy sir, that by that over two.’ Very good, you know, all very pleased, all very pleased with ourselves. He said, ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘We’ll make it slightly more difficult. What we’re going to do now, we’re going to divide that line into two, one shallow segment and one steeper segment. What’s the area under the curve now?’ ‘Ooh, ooh yes.’ So we started – there’s a square there, there’s a triangle there, a right angled triangle there, a right angled triangle there, do the calculation, bang, bang, bang, jolly clever we are sir. He said, ‘Now what we’re going to do, now we’re going to take that line and divide that into two, into two different segments.’ So getting a bit more difficult, all this terrible calculation we’re doing, this little triangle here, this little triangle there. So the whole blasted sort of – all these tangents – tangents of the curve are tangents, you see, there was no curve

43 John Dewey Page 44 C1379/83 Track 1 there yet, sort of straight line segments with lots of triangles and squares. And it took ages to – and he said, ‘Ah, now we’re going to make it much more difficult. We’re now going to – we’re going to make that continuous, a continuous curve. Imagine all those triangles getting smaller and smaller and smaller until they’re infinitely small, so small you can’t imagine it, you know, but until that is an absolutely smooth continuous line.’ He said, ‘But it still has tangents, doesn’t it? You can draw tangents any way you want along it.’ He said, ‘How are you going to calculate the area of the curve now?’ I said, ‘We can’t do it sir, can’t do it. Can’t do it.’ He said, ‘Yes you can. There is a very clever way of doing this.’ And he showed us calculus and we got it immediately. Limits, you do limits first – didn’t really even do limits to begin with, but it was – and then he did the calculus of a circle, how do you calculate the area – circumference of the circle, you know, from simple calculus. And so at the age of twelve we were imbued with really good mathematics, mathematics that a child could understand, you know [laughs]. And by the time we were sixteen we were doing A level maths, I mean, really doing quite advanced A level maths. So we all sailed – I mean, I think everyone sailed through O level mathematics and many of us went on to do A level mathematics as well because it was relatively easy, you know, it became second nature, we were just doing it. So that was maths.

[1:38:20]

So we had a very good underpinning for the science. There was no biology in the school, interestingly. It was not the sort of school in which biology was taught. Girls did biology. Woodford High School up the road, they did biology [laughs]. You don’t do biology at Bancrofts, it was a sissy subject. But I was interested in biology so I – I studied botany and zoology by myself. And I got the A level syllabus and I got textbooks and I read them, just read them. And we had a little room that the natural history people in the school – we had a little natural history club. We were given a little room as our own little room and in that I used to cut thin sections of plants, stain them with – stain them and same with animals. I’d dissect frogs, I’d dissect dogfish and so forth. I got all – went right through the syllabus. So I did A level botany, zoology and geology, which I knew anyway, you know, from general

44 John Dewey Page 45 C1379/83 Track 1 knowledge, together with maths, physics and chemistry, so that was wonderful. But maths was the underpinning.

[1:39:22]

Physics was taught in an immensely practical way, as I’ve said, beautifully taught. So it was very nice to have the maths and that practical physics – one could really use the maths to underpin that practical physics. It wasn’t at all theoretical. And the chemistry was very, very similar, it was taught with smells and bangs, which chemistry basically is, practical chemistry. We didn’t do much organic chemistry. It was really inorganic, which I think you mostly – inorganic and physical chemistry, you know. We did gas laws and boil and all that sort of stuff. So by the time I was eighteen I’d really learnt one hell of a lot of basic science and it was very – and maths. It was very, very well taught and we loved it. All the kids who did it loved it. And we had a maths club and a physics club and a chemistry club and a natural history club, that was all great fun. But all the way through it I was getting more and more interested in geology because of John Hayward, our housemaster, who loved geology and it was his life really. And he got me into it, he got me going into applying to Queen Mary College. So anyway, so I – all the way through I’d loved geology and got into college and that was it. That was the end of school.

Was there any formal geology teaching?

None at all, no, none at all, no. I did geology, botany and zoology by myself completely, absolutely – well, with a few other people. I think there were three or four of us wanted to do those subjects so we all did it. And we all passed examinations, funnily enough. We taught ourselves. We taught ourselves [laughs] those three subjects at A level, which was great fun, which was a great lesson in life, that you can learn things without a teacher. You don’t have to have a teacher if you’re keen enough. People learn Sanskrit by themselves, you know [laughs]. So there you are.

And when you said you knew geology from general knowledge, what do you mean?

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Well, I mean, there was John Hayward, of course. From the age of fourteen or so – oh, I’ve forgotten to tell you. The – from the age of about thirteen or so, maybe thirteen, fourteen – thirteen probably, John Hayward used to take cycling tours of Great Britain, somewhere in Great Britain. Could be Northern Ireland, Scotland, the Lake District, Devon and Cornwall, Shropshire and so forth. And I went on five of those, five of those, as a boy at school. We’d take off for two to three weeks, about, hmm, ten to fifteen of us. Some just went for the cycle ride, they loved the cycle ride, and we’d get fit and enjoy the – we stayed in youth hostels and – but all the way through we would look at rocks on the cliffs. And I just – I accumulated a huge geological knowledge on those things. And I read a lot. And John Hayward used to lend me his collections of fossils, trays of fossils, trays of minerals, trays of rocks. He said, ‘Okay John, you do those this week. Here’s the book to go with them.’ And I studied them. And he gave me a little microscope to work with, I’d look at the microscope and so forth. So again I taught myself geology in a sense, you know. But it became part of my – botany and zoology I simply learnt, took the examinations. Geology was part of my nature from the age of thirteen onwards really. And as I said, I had a very distant relation in the Geological Survey, Henry Dewey, who I met. He didn’t influence me really. It happened I met him actually after I was at Queen Mary College and eventually went to his funeral down in Devon. Maybe it was in the blood, who knows. I don’t believe that really. But I’ve certainly loved geology ever since that very first bicycle tour with John Hayward. And read a huge – I just read and read and read, read lots of university books, you know, things that were way above A level geology. And by the time – my first year in college, you know, I didn’t – I played a lot of rugby actually [laughs] because I knew the course extremely well.

[1:43:08]

What was it about that experience – on, say, the first cycle ride then, what was it about geology that appealed to you at that age?

Being out in the fresh air, but that’s an obvious sort of thing. The exercise you get when you’re doing fieldwork. The intellectual curiosity of seeing something that had

46 John Dewey Page 47 C1379/83 Track 1 been dead for millions of years frozen into the rocks and yet you could decipher things from it about the conditions that were extant at the time that those rocks were formed. I thought that was absolutely delicious, it was incredible, how you could take, say, a sediment in the Hampshire Basin, Bracklesham Bay, for instance, take an example and look at the clays and shells. Those shells were living, you know, sort of thirty million years ago. And you’d go to the Barton Beds and you’d find beautiful gastropods like those you find in the Pacific in the present day. So it was obviously a tropical sea, warm tropical sea, lots and lots of shells. You could find shorelines, old shorelines, where – you could actually reconstruct the palaeogeography, extraordinary. And, oh, I should say something I’ve forgotten at school. The teaching of geography was extremely good as well. We had a master called Mr – well, first of all Dickie Dale, a tiny little man, but he left, went somewhere – I think he went to university to teach actually somewhere. Then we had a chap called Mr Middleton, who was very, very – he came when I was about fourteen, wonderful man, very good geography teacher. And he got us terribly – he was a physical geographer. We did hardly any human geography at all, so it was all geomythology and, you know [laughs], all the things I liked in geology anyway. So we used to go out with him and look at landforms in Essex, the gravels, the gravel deposits, the landforms, the rivers, how do rivers cut in. We started to think about the evolution of landscapes as well as school boys, you know. And we derived a model for hill slope development that probably still stands actually as schoolboys, with Middleton. I suppose we were about sixteen at the time, about the time of O level, and we realised that you had this – you know, you had – solar fluxion would turn a cliff gradually into a slope and then the cliff would work back and you’d get an exponential working back at the top of that cliff until there’s no cliff left and you had a rounded landfall. And then subsequently there was a paper by Alan Wood in 1958 that said exactly that in the proceedings of the Geologists Association and we said, oh my gosh, we thought of that, you know [laughs], already. But there we are. So yeah, geography was wonderful at school. I mean, in fact all the teaching, when I think about it, was pretty darn good, pretty darn good, because we had dedicated masters. The masters were tough. They expected good results. They demanded good results and if you didn’t do – if the results were less than expected there was always the cane, you see. So [laughs] – and boys respect that. And I think I – it didn’t do – it sounds an old truism, it didn’t do me any harm,

47 John Dewey Page 48 C1379/83 Track 1 but I don’t think it did me any permanent harm. Other people might say it did [laughs], but who knows. But teaching was wonderful and it led to a very successful university career because it taught me how to work. From the age of sixteen to eighteen I worked like mad, a lot of sport as well but I really worked like mad. And I worked like mad all through college even though I was playing sport and gymnastics and so forth. It was quite wonderful.

[End of Track 1]

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Track 2

Could you expand on the decisions that you were making as an eighteen year old about what you might do at university? You mentioned that you had engineering, geology and journalism in mind. How did that decision – can you remember in detail how that decision was made?

Well, I thought of – I was sort of turned off journalism, as I mentioned before, by a master, Mr Owens, who said it wasn’t a career for a gentleman, it was a career for some hack, you know. He was pretty – he didn’t like journalists or lawyers actually either come to that. But he [laughs] – but I was interested in serious writing. I loved to write, I really enjoyed essays, I enjoyed writing for science, so whatever I was writing about – I still do, I love writing papers, it’s an enormous pleasure, constructing a really good sentence, you know, a perfect sentence in good English. So I knew I could do journalism. Whatever I did at university wouldn’t affect about journalism or not journalism when I finished. I could always be a – you know, go and apprentice to a paper with a degree in anything, you know, it didn’t matter. So that was out. But engineering, I sort of – I was always sort of vaguely interested ‘cause it was a very practical sort of subject and I thought a very useful societal subject, as indeed geology is come to that. So it was either geology or engineering and I was leaning really strongly towards geology because I loved being out in the field and making geological maps, you know, and looking at rocks in the field, very practical, practical side of geology. And yet I was still vaguely interested in engineering. So when I – the first year at Queen Mary College, I went to a lot of the engineering classes. I asked the instructor whether I could – if I could join the class, the introductory class. He said, ‘Yes, you can sit in.’ I said, ‘Do I have to take the exam?’ ‘No, just come, you’re most welcome to sit in the course.’ So I did and that cured me. The first year, mechanical engineering, was so boring, it really was. It was – and I knew all the maths really quite well, I knew the physics and so forth. It was just a bit of applied stuff and it just wasn’t very interesting. Had I done maybe civil engineering or something like that it would have been closer to my heart. Aeronautical I didn’t want to do of course, electrical I wasn’t interested in, but mechanical I thought was good practical science. But that cured me, that year cured

49 John Dewey Page 50 C1379/83 Track 2 me. And I did the first year of geology of course and sailed through it without any problem ‘cause I knew it all anyway. And then dropped the engineering and that was it. But the teaching was quite wonderful at Queen Mary College. There were – none of them were great scientists. Frank Middlemiss was probably the best of them, the palaeontologist. He wrote some very, very good papers on the evolution of brachiopods, cretaceous brachiopods in particular. And he was a world expert on the systematics of brachiopods. But the others were okay, you know, they were perfectly decent scientists but nothing very special, but they were dedicated teachers. My God, they gave themselves to the students, not just classes but field trips, weekend field trips. They would, you know, take us to Shropshire in a van. There were only five of us, you see, there were five doing the course. Nowadays you get thirty, forty, sixty kids in the first year class, which is very different. So we could develop a relationship with our lecturers that I think is very difficult nowadays. So we used to go out to Shropshire and to Dorset and, you know, to East Anglia, to Norfolk, all over the place, and the Wash, look at the modern sedimentology of the Wash. It was wonderful, we had a super time. So our weekends, when I wasn’t playing rugby – of course that was the other thing, I had to balance rugby against weekend field trips. But it was superb. They were very, very good teachers. And the – of the five compatriots that I had in the first – at QMC, one – another one joined the Philip Drummond, who went on to do a PhD at Chelsea with – lovely name, William Smith [laughs], the second William Smith. But he worked on the chalk and the greensand of Eastern Devon, Western Dorset, Eastern – he wrote a very, very good thesis on it too. He was a very clever geologist, Phil Drummond, PVO Drummond. Philip – that’s right, Philip Victor Oliver Drummond [laughs]. But he joined – when he went – when he got his PhD he joined the Malaysian – the Colonial Survey and went to Malaysia, and within a year fell down a waterfall 100 feet and smashed his back and he was in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. And as a result of course – you can’t live in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, you eventually die, and he did, he died about fifteen, twenty years ago now and I was very sad. But that was Drummond and then there was – the others didn’t – I think they went into school teaching. Dave Freeman became a schoolteacher in Helston in Cornwall, he was a Cornishman. And the others – Geoff Orridge, they vanished – Morris Clark, they sort of vanished into the woodwork and I don’t know what’s become of them. I think school teaching, many

50 John Dewey Page 51 C1379/83 Track 2 of them. And then – I realised – Phil Drummond and I were the sort of – immoral to say so but we were the stars of the class, both got firsts, and he and I loved maps and we used to vie with each other for the best essay with a description of a map.

[5:24]

The way they taught the regional history of Britain, the geological history of Britain, was wonderful. Kirkaldy was a wonderful lecturer. He systematically worked through the stratigraphy of Britain – very old fashioned in a way, just worked through the stratigraphy and what it meant and so forth and the uplift and tectonics and all the rest of it. But the way he thought we should learn it was to give us a map a week, you know, the British one inch Geological Survey maps. Every week during the term time over my three years at Queen Mary College I had a map. We were all given a map, the same map, take it away, take it home, take it to your digs, wherever you are, and for the week we want you to analyse that map, analyse the structures, analyse the stratigraphy, unconformities, shapes of things and the full geological history and the structure. And we had to write an essay, a fully illustrated essay with coloured diagrams and sections and so forth. And I think during that time – I don’t know how many maps I – a hundred in my undergraduate career. What a way to learn geology. And of course one would go into the field in many of these areas, go to that very area and look at the rocks that you’d been describing on your map. It was a – it was wonderful. But I used to spend hours and hours on that. That was my main energy. Most of my energy at college – geological, was put into those maps. And we had lots – you know, classes in palaeontology. Lots of practical work. We had lots of lectures of course but we had very long practicals with trays of fossils and trays of minerals and trays of rocks, and you had to describe them. You had a thin section for each rock, you had to describe it thoroughly. You know, you’d have a little field of view, you had your compass, you drew the compass like a circle and you had to draw in detail everything you saw in that field of microscopic view and describe all the minerals using optical mineralogy and so forth. It was incredible training, incredible training.

[7:12]

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So after three years – I described what happened then. Is that okay for the undergraduate, do you think, or is there anything more you want on that?

Yes. Could you say – looking – for those people who haven’t studied geology themselves, looking through the microscope at a thin section, how do you go about describing what you see other than the very general thing that anyone could do, there’s a light bit, that bit looks sharp.

Yes, right, the straight bit, the curved bit, yeah.

Yes, yes.

It’s – thin section – it’s called thin section of petrography and mineralogy. In order to do that – to do a thin section of petrography – let me describe what it is first of all. When you’re looking down a microscope at a so called thin section, what you’ve done is to cut an incredibly thin section of a rock now – with a plant of course. You can do it with a microtome and a razor, you know. But rocks are hard so how do you do it? What you do, you make a polished surface of the rock, okay, or make a surface, and then you cut a slab parallel with that surface like this. So you can cut slabs, thin slabs of rock, and then you’ve got to get that right down to something the light will pass through. So what you have to do is you first of all polish one side, immaculate, right down using finer and finer carborundums and then zinc oxide to make it very, very smooth, almost talcum powder smooth. Wash it off. You then stick a glass slide with Canada balsam. They may use other things now but in our day it was Canada balsam. Stick it on and then you put it on a grinding slab. Nowadays it’s automated now, completely. And the slab grinds away. And you’ve got one side already on a piece of glass, so you gradually cut, cut it right down. And you’ve got to be very careful towards the end ‘cause one extra – you lose the whole thing. So you’ve got to catch it just as it gets down to the perfect thickness to allow light to pass through. Having done that, you then polish that surface, finishing up with zinc oxide, and then you wash it all off cleanly. You stick another glass slide, a so called cover slip, onto it like that and you’ve got a thin section. And you can put that on the microscope and you

52 John Dewey Page 53 C1379/83 Track 2 have transmitted light coming through it from the bottom, shines through, and using what we call an analyser and a polariser – you polarise the light in one direction, it comes through, and then you have an analyser at the top which allows you to cut out all the light by crossing the thing. Or you can rotate that to various degrees of extinction of the light and you can study the optical properties of the minerals through which the light passes. You can study the birefringence and the pleochroism. All these names don’t matter, but how the thing changes colour as you move it. And every mineral has its own distinctive extinction angles, its own – and you can measure those with a grid on the side of the stage you’re rotating. And you can look at the colour changes in plain polarised light and in cross polarisers. And you can then work out a great deal about the chemistry of the minerals, you know, what sort of plagioclase you’re dealing with, is it a calcic one or a sodic one, and so – anyway, one can use the – this is called optical mineralogy. And in order to – to study rocks in thin section you’ve got to have good optical mineralogy because you’ve got to be able to identify your minerals first of all, learn something about their chemistry, the composition from their optical properties, and then how do they fit together, the textures of the rock. And those tell you an awful lot about how – like for example, is one mineral enclosed entirely within another, which means it must have formed and then the other mineral formed around it, or did it grow within that mineral. All those kinds of things you can work out in immense detail. And some of the patterns one gets in – under the microscope are quite beautiful, they’re really quite beautiful. I often think that one – somebody should have started a women’s clothing – a women’s – designing cloth for women’s dresses using mineral patterns because some of them are spectacular, they really are, and I think they would make lovely, lovely dress materials and so forth. So that’s what that is.

[11:28]

The other thing is, I’m assuming that as an undergraduate this was the first time that you learnt formally anyway the techniques of geological mapping. Am I right to assume that?

Mm, mm, correct.

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And so would you be able to describe – because I assume you’re then going to have a career which involves applying those techniques in different ways throughout –

Mm, mm.

So – but it might make sense to describe that practice, the first time you encounter it, in other words as an undergraduate.

Right, yes.

You may like to pick one of the field weekends or one of the field courses in order to exemplify this.

Right.

But what we need really is for the non geologists, a sense of how you encounter the landscape in geological mapping, what you do when, what you use, etc, etc, etc. So describe geological mapping.

Okay. I’ll describe two probably to start with.

Alright.

I’ll describe the very first mapping exercise we had at Queen Mary College. We went to Shropshire and stayed in Church Stretton and the way that field course was organised, we had a week in the field doing the regional geology of Shropshire, looking at Wenlock Edge, at Aymestry Limestone, Caer Caradoc, the Long Mynd, all the rock types, you know, the Precambrian ones, the Cambrian, the Ordovician, and you get a feeling and you’re taking round – ‘Dewey, you’ve seen this rock before. Where did you see it and what is it?’ [Gasps] ‘It’s the Aymestry Limestone.’ ‘No, wrong, it’s not the Aymestry Limestone, it’s got the wrong – look at the fossils. It’s not the Aymestry Limestone, it’s the Wenlock limestone.’ So gradually you learnt the

54 John Dewey Page 55 C1379/83 Track 2 rock characteristics, you know, limestone, sandstone, shale, grit, arkose, greywacke, igneous rock, metamorphic rock, all those kinds of things, schist and gneiss. So you gradually learn your rock types in that first week and that was a very, very good – and that had all ancillary people, the botanists and geographers and zoologists. It still was only about twenty people [coughs] and the five geologists, the five of us [coughs]. Then the others went home and we stayed on for another ten days. And during that ten days it was a mapping exercise. We were taught to make a geological map of chunks of that area that we’d been looking at, you see. And I remember I was given the south half of Caer Caradoc and part of the Church Stretton valley and the Hope Bowdler Hills on this side, and I had to make a geological map – and the Cumberly – the Cumberly area, so classic – very complicated, difficult place to map. But I had to make a geological map and I remember the fear that was in me when I first went out. I was scared stiff. I was by myself with a six inch topographic sheet, not knowing how the hell to map. I had no idea. And I knew that – you know, I knew what a geological map looked like and that was ‘cause I’d looked at these one inch sheets through the previous year and I knew how to do that and boundaries and faults and things like that. But how do you find this in the field? How do you actually extract the information from the landscape and the quarries and the little roadside exposures and put it all together to make a map? Mysterious. So I thought – we were all left alone for three days to begin with, then the instructors will come round with us and say, well, you know, this is ridiculous, you haven’t done anything, or that’s not the way to do it, or tell me what you’ve done, you know. So anyway, I worked out that the first thing you had to do is to put all the outcrops on the map. Where do you actually see rock? Not infer rock, see rock, and it could be an actual exposure in a roadside cutting. Obviously you had to make all the observations on that, where’s the dip and strike of the beds, are there any faults, you know, fractures cutting it and what do they do, do this side drop relative to that side. You record all those things in your notebook. And you’ve obviously got to give it a number, you put a number on the map. And if I can see a boundary there between two rock types I will put that on the map, do a little stroke on the map in pencil. And then of course at night – we were all doing pencil observations on the map, in those days you used Indian ink and a pen, a fine mapping pen, called mapping pens, and these little fine pens, you could then ink everything in carefully. So you gradually build a map up that way. So I realised you

55 John Dewey Page 56 C1379/83 Track 2 had to have all – but I said, ‘Look, all these outcrops, how do you fit them all together? How do we know whether that goes after this?’ And then I was lucky in my – my landscape painting, you know, when you’re painting a landscape you make observations that people who just look at a landscape don’t, you know, where are the changes in slope. I’d say, now, a change in slope must mean something. If there’s a change in slope between a steep part and a flat part, is it the edge of an old lake or is it between two different rock types, one that weathers out more easily and one that sticks up? And I thought let’s try that. So I traced the changes of slope across the fields like that and then I found that if you look at the debris in the soil in the field, one side was all shale and the other side, and the steeper side, was all sandstone. I said, ‘My God, that’s a boundary.’ You can’t – I didn’t actually see it in the field but I can infer it from the change in slope. And then I found some springs that emerged on that boundary too, some little springs, sapping springs, feeding tiny streams. I said, ‘That must mean again it’s a change in – the sandstone is more porous, the shale is more nonporous, so the water wants to come out of the sandstone and flow across the shale.’ So – and when I – then the instructor came round and was quite pleased with that in the first because I’d actually found out ways of mapping by myself, but he showed me others like, you know, colour of soil, vegetation, vegetation changes. So if you – you’ve got to start plotting changes, all the geomorphological things, changes in slope, botanical things, vegetation changes, spring lines, they’re all important in mapping. And then of course most important, the actual rocks themselves and you can either observe the rocks or if you’re in a soft rock area you can take an auger, a drill, a little hand auger, you know, and put that down and pull it up. So it was a great thrill, that ten days. And so I had this – it was all hard rock, it was Precambrian volcanics, Ordovician shales and sandstones. And I had this limestone, little strip of limestone, and I thought, god, is that the Aymestry or the Wenlock. And I couldn’t find any fossils and I’m sweating, you know. And I don’t want to get this wrong again, you know, I’ve got it wrong once. And then I did find some fossils and they were Wenlock brachiopods, Wenlockian brachiopods, so I knew it was Wenlock limestone. So we had ten days of doing that, it was wonderful. And at the end of that a map emerged, an actual – I made my first geological – and I’ve still got it framed actually at home, my first and – first geological map, all neatly Indian inked, you know, with observations on it and change of slope and spring here, spring there,

56 John Dewey Page 57 C1379/83 Track 2 change from thick long grass to lots of cow parsley on that side. That turned out to be a boundary too. So, you know, you gradually put it all together. And that was tremendous fun. And you realise that a map is not a mysterious thing, it’s a very practical thing. It comes – and what it – the way you make a geological map is incredibly carefully. You don’t generalise. You don’t start putting lines all over the place, guessing, guessing where things are going. You do it meticulously in immense detail. And that’s the technique that is taught to the Geological Survey people. When you join the Geological Survey of Great Britain they take you out and teach you how to map if you don’t already know. And even if you do already know they actual make you do it all over again. And the people – in those days the people who were taught to map in the Geological Survey were some of the best mappers in the world. You know, the great one inch – the one inch maps all over Britain, not complete of course yet but they’re fairly complete, all those maps were made by dedicated geologists going out for field season after field season, making meticulous maps.

[19:11]

Temporary exposure’s another one. Someone digs a ditch to put a cable in. Make sure that when that ditch is dug you’re in it looking at the rocks, ‘cause you know it’s going to be filled in eventually so you’ll lose that information. So temporary exposures are really important. So that’s the way you make a geological map, carefully basically.

How do you make sure you are there to cover these temporary exposures?

That’s a big problem. Now at one time – at one time temporary exposures by law had to be reported to the Geological Survey. I think they still do over a certain size. So if Sainsbury’s, for example, or a big company is excavating a site to put the foundations for a major new store in, that has to be – and I think the BGS will send somebody immediately to record as much as they can before the site – like archaeological sites, you know. If somebody found a Roman fort or something like that they would have to report it. But I think under a certain size, like ditches and things, you know, if the telephone system cuts a ditch it doesn’t have to be reported. And I’m afraid that a hue

57 John Dewey Page 58 C1379/83 Track 2 amount of geological information is lost all the time by temporary exposures not being reported. And that’s why every geologist living in his or her area should always – sees a ditch, go and look at it and if it’s an interesting piece of geology then record it and send it to the Geological Survey, you know. I found Cambridge clay in this ditch in a place it shouldn’t be, you know, it should be Corallian limestone there according to the map, it’s Cambridge clay, got to change the map [laughs]. So that’s important and it’s of enormous economic importance too. Geological maps are the basis for everything we do in terms of road building, in terms of siting of buildings, reservoirs, you know. You’ve got to understand the geology before you do anything serious. Landslides, the danger of a landslide, mostly geologically controlled, or geomorphologically controlled. And so I think those things have to be recorded very, very thoroughly. A lot of the landslides, the dangerous landslides in the world, have been ignorance, serious ignorance. Los Angeles, for example, some of the landslides on the edge of Los Angeles are scandalous. People just don’t – people build in absurd places and have a forest fire and then a huge rainstorm, the soil is terribly unstable, steep slope, house on it, tiny earthquake, [whistles] down. And, you know, sometimes tens of people are killed by those things unnecessarily. It’s not as bad in this country ‘cause the slopes aren’t as great in general [laughs]. But I mean, a lot of – the Aberfan disaster, do you remember that, the Aberfan disaster, when a whole coal heap, tip heap, collapsed and buried a school and killed a lot of children and teachers. Now that was just, you know, stupidity and unnecessary. Scientific principles weren’t being properly applied.

[21:57]

So that was – you said that there were two memorable geological maps. The second one?

Oh yes, yes, the – and the next one was one I alluded to already, was in Dorset, when I stayed in Osmington Mills and I mapped a wonderful structure called the Spring Bottom Syncline. It had been mapped by the great geologist, WJ Arkell and Kirkcaldy sent me down there, said ‘There’s a wonderful area to map. We’re going to send you down to Dorset with your agreement.’ There are other – he offered me

58 John Dewey Page 59 C1379/83 Track 2 various places, but the map – he showed me the quick map of Arkell’s once. He said, ‘I don’t want you to look at this too long because you may be – you know, may – won’t – well, the dangers of plagiarism, of course, but you may remember certain things and I’d rather you did it from scratch.’ So, you know, I looked at the map and said, ‘It looks interesting.’ So I went down there and indeed it was. It was a wonderful place to learn how to really map a big – this was a small area – in Shropshire, it was a little postage stamp area that I did, whereas in Dorset I mapped everything from the Poxwell Anticline – that was – the Poxwell Anticline houses a village called Poxwell in it, hence it’s called Poxwell Anticline [laughs]. And it was from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It’s called Poshersville Manor in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and it’s a lovely old house. So it went from there all the way down to the coast, from White Nothe in the east all the way to the village of Osmington and the cliffs to the south of it, quite a good chunk. I suppose, what would it be, distance? It would be about four miles north south, by about five or six miles – five miles east west, about twenty square miles. So it was a good chunk of country, you know, to map. And I was down there for four months, staying in the Smugglers Inn, or the Picnic Inn as it was in those days. And think of the – you know, nowadays students would not be able to afford that. And it – you know, it was very cheap. I think I paid £5 a week all in, you know, something like that, all meals and packed lunch and all the rest of it [laughs], but nowadays the cost would be prohibitive to do that and I think most, you know, students wouldn’t be able to afford it. They’d probably camp or live in a caravan or something of that sort. But I was lucky so I had a nice place to stay, a nice place to work in the evenings and lovely food and so forth. But it was lovely because it – a wide variety of soft rocks. It was a soft rock area. It was chalk, greensand, various kinds of clay, limestone, evaporite deposits in the Purbeck part of it, many – and also very distinctive lithologies. All the rock types were very different so, you know, there was no doubt about what you were on. Portland stone is another, had the Portland stone in one part of the area. And there was a very nice structure, there were folds, gentle placations or folds of the strata. And there were unconformities where there’s a big discordance between the rocks beneath and the rocks above. So all in all it had everything. But in terms of solid actual exposure, there wasn’t much. And you say, well, how can you map it? Well, you’ve got the coast for a start, cliffs on the coast, you can do – you’d do that all

59 John Dewey Page 60 C1379/83 Track 2 thoroughly first to make sure you knew the stratigraphy. And then as you worked inland the exposure sort of crumped out but there were streams. There were several quite steep little stream sections with lots of exposure in the bed of the stream. So I did all those. Where are the boundaries between one rock type and another? Which was is the rock dipping, where are the beds dipping? And you’d use a clinometer and a compass for that. But then I started into change of slope and vegetation, have you got a bare slope, a bare grassy slope with sheep on it or have I got a steeper slope with gorse on it? Got to mean something. It does, you know, it’s two different rock types. So I traced all those – without seeing any rock at all, I saw – I traced these changes in slope. And I had sets of changes of slope all over the place and some meant a lot, some meant much less. Changes in vegetation, plotted all those up. And then I had the trusted auger, the drill, and I could drill – I think the deepest hole I put down was twenty-five feet. And you – pulling it out was the problem. Getting it in was one thing. ‘Cause it has a little – it’s about, I suppose, a centimetre across, something of that sort, a centimetre across, maybe a bit less, and you drill it, turn it, turn it. And then you have sections, you keep on adding, adding, adding sections onto it, you see, and you keep on turning and turning and turning. You make sure you don’t turn it the other way and leave sections behind on the ground. So you always turn it clockwise. Even when you’re pulling it out you’re turning it clockwise, clockwise, clockwise. So you can – you could drill down. Mostly I didn’t want to drill deeply, I wanted to go down simply below the soil, into what sort of rock did they have down there. And mostly the rock types like chalk, greensand, they were semi – they weren’t very hard rocks. They were soft rocks in which the drill would go. I mean, you couldn’t go far into the chalk but, you know, you’d go, say, a foot through the soil and then you’d pull it out, ah, got a mass of chalk in the end. Sometimes I had a very pure clay like the Kimmeridge clay. That’s the rock from which oil is generated in the North Sea and the first oil well, the D’Arcy oil well in the Poxwell Anticline, was made in the 1920s. The source rock for the oil is the Kimmeridge clay. It’s a rather bituminous sort of smelly clay, quite – you know, hydrocarbon rich. Anyway, some parts of the area had this pure Kimmeridge clay. Other parts of the area had a clay that looked like the Kimmeridge clay but it had sand in it. It was a thing called the gault, the gault clay. It forms in subsume – it forms in low lying pondy areas going round the North Downs and South Downs. And the gault had – towards the top it started getting

60 John Dewey Page 61 C1379/83 Track 2 gritty, little tiny sand grains in it. And, you know, the only way you can distinguish between those two clays, I found, was to actually chew it. And if it was very smooth it was Kimmeridge. If – gritty on your teeth – grating on your teeth with – probably very bad for your teeth but it had sand in it, so I was able to chew – auger it, ah, gault, Kimmeridge. So, you know, there are lots of techniques in mapping [laughs] that one doesn’t think of to begin with. So you’ve got the change of vegetation, you’ve got the change in slope. You’ve got the chewing the rock if necessary. You’ve got the auger, which – and chalk is easy. Greensand is easy, it’s a glauconitic green sand, you know, so it’s fairly simple. Some things you couldn’t get into it all and it ground and ground away. That was Portland stone, you know, you simply couldn’t get into it. So, you know, you gradually picked up these little nuances of the – and then of course in some places the fields – the soil had little bits of rock in, little bits of sediment or whatever it was in. And you’d think, ah, that looks awfully like Kimmeridge, pick it up, chew it a bit, smooth, yes, it’s Kimmeridge. So, you know, you could gradually – right across a field – I once had a contact between the greensand and the Kimmeridge clay and right across this field there was little except a slight change in the soil and walking across the field chewing the rock, was it sandy, was it – you know. And eventually I produced a map and I got it back. I hadn’t looked at Arkell’s map at all, I promise, all the way through. And you had to have – you had to have your so called field sheets in which all the field observations were portrayed, and you had to – what was called a clean fair copy of what you thought the geological map would look like properly based upon the field data. So I produced these to Kirkcaldy, he was terribly pleased and he compared it with Arkell’s map and said, ‘I think you’ve made a mistake in one place.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe Arkell’s made a mistake in one place’ [laughs]. And it was – I had in fact made a mistake in one – I went back and remapped it the following – a few months later actually in November. And I had in fact made a mistake and Arkell’s map was correct. It was a fault, I hadn’t noticed a little fault in the Spring Bottom Syncline and I’d mismapped one edge. I’d probably mistaken Gault clay for Kimmeridge clay [laughs]. Anyway, that was great fun. It wasn’t actually Gault, sensu stricto , it was the lower part of the greensand with clay in it, ‘cause the Gault actually cuts out before you come to Dorset, but it’s something like the Gault clay.

61 John Dewey Page 62 C1379/83 Track 2

[29:52]

And in that place, what do you remember of relations with local people, perhaps farmers or –

They were lovely, they were absolutely terrific. The lady who ran the Picnic Inn was a lady called Violet Box. Her husband had died and she liked taking in young people and so forth, and she had a – she ran a very good B&B. And I was her longest – I was going to say longest living, longest serving client that summer. And people would come and go and so forth and it was a lovely place to live. But the farmers – I got to know a lot of the farmers really well and they were much more welcome in those days than they were nowadays. I think the problem is that in those days there were few very people around, you know, many less tourists, many less walkers, many less people leaving gates open and breaking barbed wire fences, and I was always very careful in, you know, shutting gates and all the rest of it, all the Country Code stuff I’d learnt up and so forth. And they knew that. And there were less people to muck their farms up, you know. The fact is that – you know, it’s not necessarily bad but there are many more people going through the countryside now, paths are much more worn. I mean, paths that went across fields in those days were hardly recognisable. Nowadays they’re deeply incised [laughs]. So there’s a big, big difference and it’s – you can see why the farmers get upset nowadays and say, well, nobody’s coming on my land. And there’s another factor of litigation. Those days, if you went on somebody’s land – I don’t know what the law actually said but if you went on somebody’s land and you fell into a creek and you killed yourself, you know, it’s just tough, you know, you shouldn’t – either you – you know, you take your life in your hands when you go out in the field. Nowadays somebody would immediately sue the farmer for not putting up a barrier or something of that sort. So there’s that kind of legal thing that I think inhibits the relationship between – a good relationship between geologists and the farmers. Geologists at one – sorry, farmers at one time got used to the idea of geologists going anyway, because Geological Survey geologists had a legal right to go – with proper – you know, going to see the farmer and so forth. They had an absolute right to go anywhere in the country because they were His Majesty’s geologists, you know, working for the Survey and they could go anywhere. But they

62 John Dewey Page 63 C1379/83 Track 2 would maintain a good relationship and people were used to that, geologists going anywhere. Nowadays it’s different, I think the law has changed in that actually, and geologists don’t have the sort of rapport with landowners that they once had. But I had wonderful relations – I used to get lots of tea and cakes from farmers in the middle of the afternoon, all coming – ‘Hello John, how nice to see you again. Haven’t seen you for a couple of days.’ ‘No, I’ve been working up at Poxwell,’ or something. ‘Come and have some tea and the Missus just made some nice cake.’ So I’d go and have cake and tea and so forth [laughs]. And that was lovely. So it was super.

To what extent was the local knowledge of these other people useful to you?

Sometimes very useful because, I mean, when I was working – let’s see if I can think of one particular example. North of White Nothe somewhere there was a very strange corner where the chalk comes around behind Ringstead Bay and there’s a funny little patch, a funny little patch of Jurassic dropped down onto – sort of upper Jurassic dropped down with a fault across there. And I had missed it completely, it’s a tiny little area. And I’ll tell you another funny story. I was there – I was working in that area and auguring the base of the greensand against the Kimmeridge and trying to find where it came out from Ringstead Bay and around White Nothe and up. And I saw two people wandering, sort of looking around, looking at the rocks and so forth. I thought, good god, they look like geologists. They look older. And they were, they were two geologists. One was Michael House, who was – not – he was a lecturer in Oxford at that stage. He eventually became professor in Hull. He was the world’s expert on Devonian goniatites, a great palaeontologist, a very intelligent superb geologist. And his home country was Weymouth, he was born in Weymouth, his family lived there. He was down on holiday and bringing a friend from Oxford around, looking at the geology. So he saw me, saw me with auger. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You’re a geologist, are you?’ He said, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘I’m Queen Mary College, London.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You’re doing your summer mapping, are you, here?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Let me see your map.’ So I showed him. He said, ‘Oh, that’s quite good, quite – yes, it’s quite – oh dear,’ he said. He said, ‘There’s something around here. I’m not going to tell you what it is. There’s

63 John Dewey Page 64 C1379/83 Track 2 something around here you’ve missed, a serious omission.’ He said, ‘There are some rocks around here that you haven’t seen and you’ve got to start scouring this area much more carefully.’ And I did scour it, I spent two days in there and I eventually found this little patch of Portladian stone tucked in under the greensand. And it was a salutary lesson, how careful you’ve got to be. You’ve got to go every – when you’re mapping an area you’ve got to go everywhere. You’ve got to have covered every field in detail, every little bit. You’ve got to do traverses – you do one traverse here, one traverse – not good enough. You’ve got to have been everywhere in that area. And I made sure by the end of that summer, and then by the end of – I went back in November and did some extra mapping to get things perhaps a bit more correct. And I realised that at the end of that period I’d been everywhere in that area, everywhere. And I suddenly realised, that’s what you have to do in mapping, you’ve got to know the area intimately, every field. You can’t say, oh, I haven’t been in this field. How do you know? There might be something terribly important in there, you know, even though there’s no obvious rock in it. It could be a boundary you haven’t seen or something, you know. So that was a salutary lesson and I enjoyed that. It was Michael House, the great Michael House, who got me going on that. So that was that summer. That was wonderful. I finished up with a jolly nice map and the external examiners liked it eventually a couple of years later, yeah.

[35:50]

And before we go onto your PhD, could you just tell me something about friendships and possibly even relationships at university?

Yes.

As an undergraduate.

Well, my main – my main geological colleague was Philip Victor Oliver Drummond, the chap who fell down the waterfall in Malaysia. He was a wonderful man, very intelligent. He introduced me to rock music. I’d never listened to rock music before. I’d sort of vaguely heard of it. It was Bill Haley & the Comets and Buddy Holly and

64 John Dewey Page 65 C1379/83 Track 2 all that kind of stuff in those days and I began to like some of it. I thought, this is quite rhythmic and really quite good, some of this music. Bill Haley – what’s the thing – Rock Around the Clock, that’s – [laughs] oh God, Rock Around the Clock. He loved it, he played it all the time in his digs and he sang it on field trips and so forth and I sang along with him. So there’s Phil Drummond, he was a lifelong friend and I was really terribly upset by his death. It was awful. Well, by the accident in Malaysia when I heard about it was terrible, ‘cause he never walked again, never walked again after that. But he did lots of very good geology, not – based upon his PhD work on the chalk and greensand of West – of East Devon, very nice – with William Smith, a very, very good piece of work. He eventually taught in Brighton Polytechnic, became a lecturer there and a very good one. The students loved him. And he used to go out on field trips in his wheelchair with them and do the best he could. He obviously couldn’t get in some places but he would get to lots of places, quarries and things like that. And there was a geologist called Rory Mortimore, who was one of the great world experts on the chalk of Southern England, and he was – I think he is or was President of the Geologists Association very recently. And he was Philip Drummond’s compatriot, he’s a bit younger, I think, but he was another one of the lecturers in Brighton Polytechnic. They had quite a good geology department there, as many polys did, like Oxford Poly here had a superb geology department, very good people. So he was my main – and my wife of course I met in Queen Mary. She was a botanist, did botany. Eventually became a plant pathologist and she’s – I mean, I’ll talk about her later. Her work in plant pathology became world class. She’s an incredible scientist. So I met her there so that was a good move. That was nice. And those are the two principle figures, Phil Drummond and my wife Molly I think were my two best companions there. Although I have to say, at QMC she was a sort of more distant figure. I didn’t really – it wasn’t until we both happened to land up in Imperial College doing research, that’s when our relationship really took off suddenly, you know, just suddenly – perhaps in our last term at Queen Mary we realised we were both going to – and then we suddenly fell in love. It was weird, very interesting. But otherwise I don’t think I really had a strong relationship with people in the university. I played rugby with them but I – then I played sport for the Old Bancroftians, I played rugby and a bit of cricket. I used to go back to Woodford, you

65 John Dewey Page 66 C1379/83 Track 2 know, and to those days and go to my old companions from school. I suppose I was closer to my old school companions than I was to my university companions.

Were you still friends with the gang?

Yes, oh yes. One of them, Nigel Harding, lives in Oxford now, this distinguished medic. He’s now retired but he – he had a stroke about ten or more years ago and he’s now – he’s not confined to a wheelchair but he’s disabled down one side. But he lives in Headington actually, that’s close and I see him quite often. Gareth Jones and the torn off ear, I don’t know what happened to him. Clive Baker died. He was harbourmaster, as I mentioned, in Sydney, Australia. He ran the harbour, the whole bloody harbour, in Sydney, Australia. He died a few years ago. Who else? Michael Pearson, he lives in Ilford, retired, never married, he lives in Ilford. Turned Roman Catholic and became a very highly religious man. Never was as a child but there we are [laughs]. Reverse of me, the other way round, you know. But the others, no – I mean, there were five of us, five of us and me. One I can’t remember his name. I can see him today, cannot remember the name. But I –

Did it have a name, the gang?

No, not really. No, I don’t think so, no. But I think we all read William books and we thought – we sort of rather fancied ourselves as William and the Outlaws, you know [laughs], although we were much more dangerous than William and the Outlaws with our bombs. I mean, my God. There we are.

[40:30]

What was your parents’ view of the degree that you were doing, of your –

Oh, they loved it. They – cat’s whiskers, ‘cause my father – again, interesting. John Hayward got to know my father quite well actually. They used to go to the pub together and have a half – never drank very much but they’d sort of nurse half a pint for the whole evening and chat, you know. And Doc Hayward, we always called him

66 John Dewey Page 67 C1379/83 Track 2

Doc Hayward – John Hayward ran an evening class at South West Essex Polytechnic and he made a bit of private cash out of this, you know. It was a way of supplementing his income. The schoolmasters were not paid a particularly princely salary in those days. So he ran this class and he was having difficulty getting people up to the required number. He had to have ten, I think, in order to run the class and get paid for it, so my father and I were roped in to attend this class and my father sort of fell in love with geology. This, I suppose, was during my undergraduate days – yes, it was, undergraduate days and it went on into my graduate days as well. And so we used to go to John Hayward’s evening classes and – regularly, year after year. He’d do something different. I’d learn a bit from it, it was quite good, and my father learnt an awful lot. He loved it and he fell in love with geology and he thought geology really was the cat’s whiskers. He said, ‘I wish I’d known about this when I was younger. Oh God.’ It was marvellous stuff. So it was rather nice. That was a very encouraging thing. So there was – added to the painting there was – and model trains, there was now geology, which was lovely.

And your mother, what would –

Well now, she never got interested in the geology a bit. She encouraged me. I mean, she thought it – she was very pleased with what I was doing and when I got a first she thought that was wonderful. And when I went on to do research they thought, my God, reaching the heights, ‘cause, you know, nobody in their family had been to university. So that was – parents were very encouraged by that and they encouraged me fully. I was very lucky, really lucky. There was not a word of criticism or, you know, anything at all. It was very good. Mm.

[End of Track 2]

67 John Dewey Page 68 C1379/83 Track 3

Track 3

You’ve said a little bit about going to Imperial for your PhD. Perhaps it would be sensible to start with the content – you know, with the research question that you were doing and perhaps you could describe – well actually could you say why you were doing what you were doing in your PhD, why you were –

Yes. I think I mentioned a little while ago that I was offered two things. I was offered a PhD in the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, to work on limestones and their brachiopod fauna, the fossils that were contained therein, which would have been a very different kind of PhD from the one I eventually chose. I mean, it would have been stratigraphic and palaeontology, very interesting, nothing wrong with it, but it would have set me on a quite different career. I would have become a palaeontologist, I think, which was entirely possible. But the other PhD that I was offered was in the west of Ireland on some Ordovician Silurian rocks in the so called Wild West. Western Ireland in those days was not the sort of rather manicured place it is at the moment. The roads were mostly dirt roads, gravel roads, and there were very few metalled roads in the west of Ireland, all – I mean, a few big ones were metal, Galway to Clifton and things like that and Galway to Westport and so forth, but many of the roads were unpaved. And I was getting round on a bicycle so that was interesting in itself. So I eventually chose this area ‘cause I thought that it was going to be much more of a challenge. And I was simply sent out into the wilds of western – South West Mayo, an area called Central Murrisk, between Clew Bay and Killary Harbour. It was about twenty miles by – twenty miles. It’s about – yes, about 400 square miles. It was quite a good chunk of country. And I was sent out to map it, ‘Go here Dewey, go and make a geological map of that. See what you find.’ So I found all kinds of things, it was wonderful. But anyway, I made a map and the mapping was relatively easy there because the rocks are hard, they’re much better exposed and really – it’s been glaciated. And much of the landscape is just solid rock, you know, mountains made of solid – I was unused to that, you know. It was almost too much rock, it was embarrassing, a surfeit of rock. So, you know, you could really see the rock, see the stratigraphy, see the structure and – not many fossils. The fossils were rather few and far between, which was a shame because it would have been nice to

68 John Dewey Page 69 C1379/83 Track 3 have better paleontological control on their age. ‘Cause we didn’t have geochronology in those days, you couldn’t – there weren’t – there were very few independent methods for measuring the age of rocks, which we can now do much more easily using zircons and things like that. So I was sent out and we had greywackes and volcanic rocks of all kinds, lovely geomorphology, very interesting glacial deposits. And we had to do everything in those days. You couldn’t just concentrate on one thing. You had to make a map and describe everything, even the complete history of who said what in the first place. So you had to delve into the history completely of all the early workers, how they’d made their map, what they’d find out, why your – how your map is different from theirs. Their map was much more generalised and I was able to make a much more detailed geological map than Kinahan and Kilroe and Leonard and Symes and so forth, and even Geikie had been out there, the great Geikie, director of the Survey. He’d been out in the west of Ireland, looking at the rocks and trying to decide things about them. Because in those days of course, in the nineteenth century, the Scottish Geological Survey, the Irish Geological Survey and the English Geological Survey were one and the same, before the independence of Ireland, of course, and before the separation of the Scottish office. So anyway, poor old Geikie was responsible for all this stuff. It was a huge – I mean, a huge for which to be responsible. And I was sent out on this great chunk of country and it – in the first season, as I said, it rained like mad and I had a terrible time and did quite a lot, you know, I persevered and persevered and persevered. But the second season was dry as a bone and I spent five months there and I did a huge amount of geological mapping and made a – and completed the geological map of the area in that. And the funny thing is though, you know – I suppose all sciences are the same but geology is particularly – it’s particularly true of geology. Once I’d made that map I was desperately proud, strutting around, I’ve got this incredible geological map that I have made, you know. And couldn’t be better, couldn’t better it, a detailed perfect geological map. I now know that not to be true because every time I’ve been back subsequently I find out something different, how did I miss that? That’s the nature of science I’m afraid, you know [laughs], you do miss things, partly because you see things in different ways the more you know. As you learn more and more geology you think, ah, I understand the structure now that I would have dismissed them, just an innocuous looking thing in the greywacke, nothing. Now you’ve seen

69 John Dewey Page 70 C1379/83 Track 3 that structure in California or New Zealand or somewhere like that, good god, it’s a beautiful example, and it means an awful lot and you can reconstruct an awful lot from it. So I’m now actually – with a colleague who’s a retired professor of geology in Galway, Paul Ryan, we’re actually doing mapping in the west of Ireland, remapping quite a bit of – bits that I thought I really knew in detail. So we’re, you know, making even more detailed geological maps to solve particular geological problems. So that was a salutary lesson, another salutary lesson, was making that map. It was yet another step in learning how to do it. And thank goodness it was like that in those days because it meant that you trained yourself in the basic elements of geology, which I think people don’t do now so much. They tend to work rather more like chemistry graduate students. They’re given a problem, maybe a geochemical problem, they work in the laboratory, maybe collect a few rocks in the field, bring them back, but they don’t make a geological map and that’s a great sadness because you learn so much about the history of the earth that way. And when it came, as we’ll see later, to, you know, plate tectonics in the late ‘60s, it was of an inestimable, inestimable value. I couldn’t have had a better initial training, although it was a very practical non theoretical training. But it all came to the good eventually. So that PhD mapping was wonderful.

[6:17]

And I liked Imperial College for many, many reasons. It was a – a, it was a good sporting college and, you know, lots of nice sports to play. There was a very good bar with a darts board and I became quite proficient at darts in the bar in those days [laughs]. It was great fun. Used to play with the Metropolitan Police and one year we beat the Metropolitan Police. It was unbelievable [laughs]. They got very upset. ‘Remember laddy,’ he said, ‘If I see you on the beat I may have a different opinion’ [laughs]. Anyway, it was a joke, but we beat the Metropolitan Police one year, which was very nice. And there were bawdy songs, like Eskimo Nell was sung in the bar on a Friday night and so forth. But it was a lovely time because the Department of Geology was a fabulous department. It may have been the best geology department in Britain. I was extraordinarily lucky in going there. I had a flat for £3 a week in Queensgate. Can you visualise a flat for £3 a week in Queensgate, just around the

70 John Dewey Page 71 C1379/83 Track 3 corner from the Albert Hall? I mean, those are sort of $20 million houses now [laughs]. I mean, different world, different world. But anyway, Imperial College was wonderful. The geology department was wonderful, largely because the people, the staff, the faculty, as the Americans would say – the staff there, the lecturers and professors, were incredibly good. I mean, there was George Walker, the greatest volcanologist that has probably ever lived, Graham Evans, one of the greatest sedimentologists that’s ever lived. Ian Carmichael, who just died. George Walker died sadly recently. There was Ian Carmichael, who eventually became Professor of Petrology at Berkeley in California, marvellous work on granites and rhyolites and things like that, superb. John Ramsay, the great structural geologist who’s ever lived. I mean, it was that sort of department, I mean, truly distinguished. And they were young in those days and they were full of vinegar, you know, and other things and they were keen on what they were doing and they were wonderful with the students. And there were people like Doug Shearman, who was a very great geologist, who’d spend hours with any student who’d go in to talk to him, and John Sutton was the same, Janet Watson. When I think of – I list these people, you know, it was extraordinary. And as a result it was – a lot of people wanted to go to Imperial College to do research because it was a mecca, it was a mecca for hard rock geology. For metamorphic rocks in Scotland, in Africa, people who were working all over the world, mostly in Scotland and Ireland. I was working in the west of Ireland. But a lot of people were working with Ramsay and Sutton and Watson in the Highlands of Scotland. They were really trying to have a new generation of mapping in Scotland to understand the Moines and Dalradian, mostly the Moines of the Scottish Highlands. And all my colleagues – we had this system called the horseboxes. There was a huge area, a big room, that has been divided up, partitioned, and – god, we all smoked in those days, pipes and cigarettes, and the place was a haze of smoke. And everyone was working on their map and looking down their microscopes and we’d wander into each other’s rooms, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ ‘Oh, come and have a look at this.’ We learnt the – we learnt from each other. It was a wonderfully vibrant research school in which people shared information and went out to have meals together, went to parties together. It was another – it was two years, an idyllic two years. And I mention two years. The reason it only took two years to get a PhD, it was the kind of PhD. If you’re doing a big geochemical PhD there’s a huge amount of instrument

71 John Dewey Page 72 C1379/83 Track 3 work, which takes ages to get used to the instrument. It takes a minimum of three years, you can’t do it in less, whereas if you’re just making a geological map and describing it, [clicks fingers], as long as it takes, you know, it takes to describe the rocks, you’re done. So several people did two year PhDs when I was there and fairly easily, you know. But it was wonderful ‘cause I learnt such a lot from other people, not necessarily – both from the students, the post docs and the staff there. They were wonderful. John Ramsay was superb. I used to go to the undergraduate courses as well, ‘cause I wanted to learn some volcanology so I went to George Walker’s course, structural geology, went to John Ramsay’s course. I went to a big range of courses while I was there. So again, it’s all education, education, education, wonderful.

[10:22]

And it was unusual at this time to have a female lecturer in geology?

Yes, it was unusual, very rare in fact in those days. I can name on one hand, Janet Watson in London, Dorothy Wisden in Reading and Dorothy Rayner in Leeds. I think – I think – oh, Nancy Kirk in Aberystwyth. There were four, four lecturers in geology that I can think of right away in the British Isles. And that was quite – very uncommon, whereas in botany or zoology – not so much zoology but in botany I’d say many of the lecturers were – in my wife’s degree, when she was doing botany, most of her lecturers were female.

Therefore to what extent was it commented on by other staff, by students, by Janet herself? And I don’t – I’m not leading you and saying to what extent was it commented on negatively. I just meant what was the sort of discussion around it, what was said about that novelty?

Do you know, in – I can’t remember any negative or positive comments. I don’t think we ever discussed it. It was the way things are, you know. And it was unusual – perhaps unusual to have Janet there but, you know, she was such a wonderful geologist and she was a nice person, we didn’t think of her as a woman. Well, we did of course as a woman, but I mean, we didn’t think of her as different from anyone

72 John Dewey Page 73 C1379/83 Track 3 else. She was just a wonderful – and lovely things. We were working away, say on a Thursday afternoon, at our microscopes and the smoke was going up and so forth, and we heard a little trip of footsteps. It would be Janet on her rounds and she’d go into almost everyone and say, ‘Oh, what are you doing, John? Show me what you’re doing.’ And I’d say, ‘Well Janet, I’m having this terrible problem with these textures of these ignimbrites at the moment. I’ve been reading such and such, you know, on the Valley of 10,000 Smokes and the Montpelier eruption in Martinique.’ And then describe – she’d say, ‘Well, let me have a look. Well,’ she said, ‘There’s a structure that I think – there’s a young lecturer in Liverpool called Dr Nick Rast,’ and I wrote the name down, Nick Rast. ‘He’s been working on it in the Lake District recently and he’s been finding these interesting certain textures that tell you about the temperature at which this ash fall was erupted.’ I said, ‘Really? Gosh.’ So she’d go around and she knew so much geology, she’d do a little vignette in every – some little piece of information. And she did that on a regular basis, every week, different day, never knew when she was coming, and she’d go round, and her own students she’d spend a bit more time with but she was – all the staff would do that at Imperial College, they were wonderful at disseminating the knowledge, irrespective of whether you were their student or not. And Janet was particularly good. And eventually I – the following week actually, I went to a lecture at Bedford College, Nick Rast was giving one on Lake District ignimbrites. And I took some thin sections with me, some of my thin sections, and I said, ‘Dr Rast,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry to ask you this but could you possibly – could you find a microscope and …’ ‘Delighted, delighted.’ He was a wonderful Iranian German character, he was a wonderful character, died about seven years ago in Kentucky. And he said, ‘Delighted.’ So he said, ‘You have the most lovely welded tuffs here.’ ‘Welded tuff, really?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you must read so and so, read some of – here are some of my papers, read some of my papers.’ And he gave me a few reprints as well, which was very nice. He had some with him. And again, you know, that was the way geology worked in those days, it was dissemination and nobody would sort of tightly hold their information in. We tended to share it, a great deal of sharing information, which was lovely, yeah.

[13:59]

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Do you have memories of Janet in the field?

Yes, a bit. I was once in Scotland with her on a field trip, a small field trip, up at Portsoy on the Banffshire coast, and she was showing us some of the work she’d been doing on so called Dalradian rocks along the Moray Firth, on the southern shore of the Moray Firth. And she was so meticulous. Her maps were wonderful, her sections, her drawings, her thin section works. She was a very great geologist. And she’d found out some very interesting things about the Dalradian rocks of the Moray Firth. She found the biggest – everyone thought that all the structures there were thrusts, they were shortening structures, but she said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve got this incredible sheer sense indicator that shows these top rocks have actually dropped down, they’re extensional structures.’ And she was the first person to realise, in the Scottish Highlands there are huge extensional structures, which we now characterise – all mountain belt, pretty well all big mountain belts, these late extension – an orogenic belt can collapse and spread. And she discovered these things by sheer brilliant mapping on the Portsoy coast. So I went there with her and she – I took hr to my area in the west of Ireland with her husband, John Sutton, and a few other people, she came to see what we were doing. In fact we had a field trip for the undergraduates and I helped lead it in Connemara. And she came on that and we went to look at some rocks that none of us had ever seen before and she was such an observant woman. She would see things quickly, you know, things that I wasn’t seeing at that stage. I see them now, I have techniques for seeing them now, but she – I learnt a lot from Janet, observation in the field mostly. She was a very, very clever person.

[15:35]

Thank you. And finally on the PhD, in the chapter that you wrote in [Naomi] Oreskes’ book on plate tectonics, you talk about – I think it’s possible a final chapter of the thesis and you were –

I know what you’re going to say, yes.

You attempt what you call a synthesis of –

74 John Dewey Page 75 C1379/83 Track 3

Yes.

Of the area, but sort of looking outwards and suggesting some sort of correspondence with rocks of different sizes of the –

Yes, of the Atlantic, yes.

So that raises two questions. One is why you did that, why you attempted that chapter, and two, can you say – tell the story of the viva or the examination where that was questioned.

Yes, it was very interesting, that. My external examiner was a wonderful – my internal examiner was John Sutton, Janet Watson’s husband. My external examiner was Mad Black Dan Gill, he was called Black Dan Gill. He was a Professor of Geology in Trinity College, Dublin, and he would go round Dublin in a top hat. He used to be an oil company geologist in India and eventually he got the chair in Trinity College, Dublin. He was a marvellous character, a wild man, tremendous drinker. I mean, all the pubs in Dublin knew him well and all the pubs in London got to know him well in addition when he came – he eventually became an oil petroleum geologist in Imperial College actually, years after I left. But in the – I was always interested – I mean, I was always interested, not only in the very small, like even thin section work, up to the outcrop, but I was always interested in the landscape, what’s the landscape telling you. And I mean, you can learn a hell of a lot from landscape, the geography of a landscape. I mean, we still don’t know how to do it, a lot of it. And there’s a tremendous area of research at the moment, particularly in America, tectonic geomorphology, it’s called, and they study erosion rates in relation to climate, the tectonics, how the climate is affecting landforms and how the tectonics is changing the shape of the landforms. There’s an atmospheric – there’s a sort of atmosphere internal structure relationship we’re just beginning to understand, how rocks erode, where the sediment flux, where’s it’s going, how the slopes are formed, the climate and runoff. It’s an incredibly complicated integrated system. And I was always interested in landscape and what it told you about the geology underneath and also –

75 John Dewey Page 76 C1379/83 Track 3 and from the practical industrial aspects of where you can build, where are the landslips going to be. So I was always interested in pulling it into a larger perspective. [Coughs] And I read – I started to read some of Du Toit’s and Lester King’s and Wagner’s work on continental drift. And it was very interesting in those days because in America it was absolutely anathema, you couldn’t even talk about continental drift as an undergraduate – as two undergraduates. In fact it’s always said that if you were an adherent of continental drift in the 1950s in America you would never get a position, never get a position in an American university. They were very practical on a smaller scale, you see, regional scale. Nowadays if you adhere to an anti plate tectonics position you wouldn’t get a job, you know [laughs], so things change. And in this country it was much more – it was a much more open system for continental drift. I mean, as I’ll say probably tomorrow, there were – the geophysicists were absolutely opposed, most of them. Harold Jeffreys, Littleton, the Cambridge crowd were absolutely opposed. They said it was physically impossible to have continental drift because the soft continents couldn’t plough through hard oceans. Well, of course that’s not the way to put it, that’s not the way it happens. So, you know, it was the way they framed the question that produced the answer, you know, the incorrect answer. But to his death he was like that. But the South Africans of course were looking at the geology of the edge of Africa in relation to South America and Francis Bacon had noticed this – in fact, several people had noticed, you know, back hundreds of years, that the coastline of America pretty roughly fitted the coastline of Africa, so they argued maybe it was once together or things have eroded back from that. Anyway, Lester King – Lester King was the great – Lester King and Du Toit in South Africa and Wegener, who was a meteorologist who worked up in Greenland, realised that, you know, that continental edges fitted together and moreover, when you fitted them together the geology began to fit in their orogenic belt – an old mountain belt comes out of here, you put it together and it goes on in South America. That can’t be a coincidence [laughs]. So I started to read some of this stuff and I thought, gosh, you know, my little area in the west of Ireland is actually part of a much larger orogenic belt. Now how does that orogenic belt work? I mean, it must have formed by some mechanism. And we had things like tectogenes and geosynclines, all kinds of weird and wonderful concepts you couldn’t actually see

76 John Dewey Page 77 C1379/83 Track 3 in the modern world, you know, but they were sort of mysterious things, rather like God, you know. It was strange [laughs].

What are they?

Well, a tectogene is a thing that Van Bemmelen, the Dutch geologist, said happened. He thought the deep trenches of the world, where we know now that one plate goes underneath another, were actually big down folds in the earth’s crust, they were huge – the crust simply went down into a huge fold downwards. That was called a tectogene. And then there were mega undations. He had all these wonderful terms for them. A mega undation is a huge uplift, a big bulging uplift, like a plateau of some kind, formed by interior forces of unknown origin forcing it up. And then they had things called geosynclines and they were based upon the idea that in mountain belts there were zones of shales and things we called greywackes and volcanics that looked vaguely like what you see in modern island arcs, and of course they are, that’s what they are, they are modern island arcs. But they wouldn’t make that step towards the modern earth. They said, oh, that big assemblage means there’s a big linear trough of some kind having all these thick deposits in and some big mega – and some tectogene – start with a tectogene and a geosyncline forms and the shales go in and the cracks form, the volcanics and so forth, and then it folds up and the tectogene forms and it squashes the rocks into a mountain belt. That was the – that was one of the ideas at that time. And I’m reading this stuff and I thought, gosh, you know, maybe the Caledonian – if you do close the Atlantic the Calendonides fit against – straight into the Newfoundland Appalachians, you know. Again, that can’t be a …

[22:03]

So I started speculating in my last chapter. I started speculating about how my little area fitted into Scotland, you know, along to the Southern Uplands, and the rocks looked vaguely similar. And I said maybe this is some kind of geosyncline going through to Newfoundland. And it was a very speculative last chapter. You could have cut it out, of course. But anyway, this – and Dan Gill actually said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I kind of like this last chapter. It shows you’ve got some imagination here.’

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And Sutton said, ‘Well, I don’t like it,’ he said, ‘I don’t like it at all.’ He said, ‘I’m going to ask him to cut this out of his thesis.’ And he said, ‘You can’t do that.’ He said, ‘Once a thesis is written …’ You know, he said, ‘You can’t make him cut it out.’ ‘I can’t make him but I can ask him.’ And he did ask me and I said no [laughs]. And so anyway it’s still there in the thesis. And he said, ‘You know Dewey,’ he said, ‘This kind of thing gets geology a bad name, this kind of large scale – it’s called tectonics and I think it’s very dangerous.’ He said, ‘Do the detailed geology and that should be good enough, you know.’ I said, ‘Well, surely it’s got to mean something.’ ‘Yes, but we’ll never really find out because it’s too complicated.’ And [laughs] turned out to be rather simple, funnily enough, in a broad scale. And he said, ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘People of your age should not be doing this.’ He said, ‘You want to be at least sixty or seventy by the time you start doing this kind of stuff. Look at the greats of geology, they can do it and everyone thinks they’re a bit mad ‘cause they’re old.’ He said, ‘But a young chap like you with a career in front of you shouldn’t be doing this kind of stuff. It’s very, very dangerous and very bad for the science.’ So Dan Gill was sitting there smiling. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I think it’s alright actually’ [laughs]. So I fell in love with Dan Gill at that stage. And he said, ‘Don’t make him take it out of his thesis.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m going to ask him.’ And he said, ‘So will you take it out?’ And I said, ‘I don’t see why I should. My other examiner likes it.’ ‘Oh alright then.’ Anyway, they passed me so that was okay [laughs].

[End of Track 3]

78 John Dewey Page 79 C1379/83 Track 4

Track 4*

Before we then continue today, I was looking at a profile of you written by a – you might remember doing this in 2005. This is a science journalist called Regina Nuzzo.

Yes, for the National Academy of Science.

That’s right, yeah. And in that it talks about how you became a geologist and it says that you went on holiday in Devon and learned field geology from your great uncle.

Yes.

And then that was – your interest in that was then confirmed when you talked about it with your schoolmaster. But I didn’t gather yesterday that this – you felt that this great uncle –

Yes, it’s the wrong way round actually, that is, it’s the wrong way round. You see, it was the schoolmaster. And it was a very – it’s a kind of distant great uncle, it’s not a direct – it’s a – it’s family, it’s a distant branch of the family. And he was – Henry Dewey was District Geologist for South West England, working for the Geological Survey. And I got a letter from him when I was doing research. He said he’d heard there was a young Dewey in geology and he’d like to meet me. And so I went down to Torquay, to Newton Abbott actually where he lived, he’d retired by that stage, and took me out on the field around Torquay and so forth and showed me a few things and it was very nice. But it wasn’t really him who got me going, it was after I got going that he really – he really sort of encouraged me and helped and so forth, yeah.

[1:22]

Thank you. And the other thing was that it mentions some teaching or rather lecturers that you gave to school children while an undergraduate, I gather from this, and that this was partly responsible for you wanting to go into research rather than, say, a petrol company or –

79 John Dewey Page 80 C1379/83 Track 4

Yes, that helped. It was really more when I was a postgraduate.

Ah.

When I was doing research, ‘cause, you know, I got offered – a school friend actually who lived in Buckhurst Hill in Essex said, ‘Look, we’re looking for somebody to teach geology in the evenings at South West Essex Polytechnic,’ which is in Walthamstow, you know, the big South West Essex Tech, a very good place actually. And he said, ‘We’ve got an evening class and we’ve got nobody to teach it. And a lot of registrants who really want to do this course, something like thirty or forty, and we’d love to give it.’ He said, ‘Would you consider doing it?’ And I said, ‘Hmm, yeah, do it, experience, some teaching experience.’ So I developed this course for them, evening course, and I taught it for two years actually, two successive years, and it was tremendous fun. I went – I came down from – I lived in South Kensington in Queensgate, in the £3 flat I told you about [laughs], and I came down – my parents lived in Chingford still so I’d come down and stay with them overnight and do the course at – do the lectures, a three hour lecture course each – once a week at South West Essex Tech. And I had some very good students and I took them out on field trips. We went to Guildford and Dorking and so forth to look at rocks and so forth. And I really realised that I actually enjoyed teaching very much, I loved it, ‘cause I found that it was very stimulating. It wasn’t simply the pleasure of getting information over to people, but when you’re lecturing something very strange happens, at least it does to me. I start having ideas, you know. I’m lecturing about something, oh my gosh, oh, I hadn’t thought about that before. It sorts of triggers your brain. And I think the – and it taught me that the relationship between teaching and research is very, very close. And I think if you divorce them one’s in trouble. That’s why I don’t like research institutions and some – the idea of some universities being research universities and some being teaching universities. It’s nonsense because I think the best researchers generally make pretty damn good teachers as well and vice versa. Not so much vice versa but certainly good researchers generally make good teachers ‘cause they’re enthusiastic. It’s enthusiasm and energy and all those kinds of things. So that South West Essex Tech experience was very good and that

80 John Dewey Page 81 C1379/83 Track 4 really made me think about academia a lot and – ‘cause I was thinking about the Survey, ‘cause I loved mapping, you see, and I wanted – I thought, well, I’m going to go into the …

[03:50]

And anyway, when I was about to finish at Imperial College, my research, in 1960, I applied for a number of jobs. I applied for a job in the Survey, Colonial Survey – Survey and Colonial Survey, had to do it together, and I was offered a job in Fiji in the Colonial Survey, to go and map in Fiji. And I really thought about that a lot and I was about to – I was courting my wife at that stage and she wasn’t too keen on going to Fiji [laughs], although it would have been a great experience, I suppose. And she said, ‘No, think about an academic job.’ And simultaneously I had applied for a job in Keele and a job in Manchester and I was interviewed for the Manchester job and I was appointed there. Interesting experience, that was. Went up to Manchester – Alec Deer was the professor there at that time, subsequently went to Cambridge, and – in ’64, I suppose it was. Anyway, in 1960 I went up to this interview in Manchester and there was a job as a palaeontologist and a job for a structural geologist. And I consider myself as a structural geologist, you see. And anyway, I think there were about ten of us applied for these two jobs and we were all sitting like schoolboys in an anteroom being – waiting to be interviewed. They did it that way in those days. And you used to get called in one after the other and you were interviewed by the registrar and the professor and a committee and so forth. Anyway, there was a very nice chap who became a very good friend called Robin Nicholson, who’s now retired, living in Berwick upon Tweed. His father drove the Flying Scotsman, by the way, he was a very distinguished engine driver and I envy that greatly [laughs]. Anyway, Robin and I were interviewed and the other chaps were interviewed and then the registrar came out and said, ‘Would Dr Nicholson and Dr Dewey like to come in please?’ We looked at each other, that’s two structural geologists. What’s going on? So we went in and Dear said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We like you two best of all out of the lot and we’re going to offer you – we’re going to offer you two chaps jobs as lecturers.’ And we looked at each other, strange, two structural geologists. He said, ‘But we have a problem here.’ He said, ‘We need somebody to teach palaeontology at an

81 John Dewey Page 82 C1379/83 Track 4 introductory level and we need somebody to teach structural geology at an introductory level. Now Robin Nicholson is a year older than you so he gets the option. He’s just slightly older and more advanced than you are so he has the option of teaching either of those and the other one will have to do the other.’ And Robin said, ‘I’ll do the structural geology’ [laughs]. So I was lumbered – not lumbered, it turned out to be very good actually. He said, ‘Okay Dewey,’ he said, ‘You will teach palaeontology in the first year.’ Turned out I taught palaeontology for four years there. And my very first course was vertebrate palaeontology, about which I didn’t know a great deal except that I had been to Janet Watson’s father’s lectures in UCL, in University College, London, as an undergraduate as part of the intercollegiate lecture scheme. And he was wonderful, I think I mentioned him before. And he taught a wonderful course in vertebrate – and I had all my notes from that. And then I bought his book, Palaeontology and Modern Biology, and various other bits and pieces, and I boned up during that summer heavily and I taught vertebrate palaeontology as my first course. And I loved it, I actually did – I enjoyed doing it very much. And I taught various other things in that first year. I taught vertebrate palaeontology, I taught geomorphology, I taught the micas and the amphiboles in the mineralogy course. I was a dogsbody who had to do sort of jobs that nobody else wanted, you know [laughs], so I picked up all these bits and pieces. Plus, best of all, I was given the introductory course in geology for all the subsidiary people in the first year, the first year course, which was like, you know, three lectures a week for the whole year, but no labs, no practicals. And so I lectured on geomorphology and rocks, minerals and fossils. I developed a very interesting course that I loved actually and I gave that for four years running. But while I was at Manchester I didn’t teach structural geology.

[7:50]

Manchester was very interesting. I didn’t like Manchester per se but I liked Liverpool very much and I had lots of friends in the geology department in Liverpool, and particularly the professor, Robert Shackleton, wonderful character, Nick Shackleton’s father. And he and lots of other people, Nick Rast, who I mentioned before, this Iranian German, and Jack Treagus and Dennis Wood, a whole bunch of wonderful,

82 John Dewey Page 83 C1379/83 Track 4 wonderful people, Derek Flynn. And I used to go across there for weekends and parties and things and we’d go out on the field and to Snowdon and various other places. And I’d sort of crash around Liverpool with these chaps, drinking in the Philharmonic, you know, the classic Philharmonic pub. And I loved it. And we used to go to the theatre. And then there was always a party on Saturday night. Commonly it was in Beryl Bainbridge’s house. You probably – do you know Beryl Bainbridge, the authoress who died just recently? She lived in Camden Town when she died. And she was responsible for writing some marvellous stories like Weekend with Claude , the Bottle Factory Outing and so forth, a wonderful writer. But in those days she wasn’t a writer. Her husband was the – one of the lecturers in Liverpool College of Art and she used to throw these – and she’d, I think, separated from him at that stage, but she used to throw these fantastic parties and everybody was invited and all the – and she knew Shackleton well so all the geologists came, and raving parties; the house was shaking for the Saturday night. And I remember one time in ’61, I suppose – yes, it was in ’61. I wasn’t married, I was living in Manchester at that stage by myself in a flat, in a house with other boarders and chaps. So I had to get away from Manchester at weekends and I went to Liverpool. So anyway, I – at one party I was – I went into the front room and there were three or four chaps strumming banjos or strumming guitars and singing and so forth. And then they finished and I sat down and had a – I had a glass of wine in my hand, I was chatting to this – sat between these two chaps. It was Paul McCartney and John Lennon [laughs], before they were famous. Terrible nice people, wonderful, I mean, just really charming delightful people. The reason they were there was that they were at the Liverpool College of Art, being taught by Beryl Bainbridge’s husband, you see. So that was the kind of thing that happened in Liverpool at weekends – not every weekend, but it was pretty good. So my memories of Manchester were really a rather dull boarding house I lived in with Robin Nicholson and some other people before I was married and going to Liverpool at weekends where I’d lead my social life, and enjoying the teaching, of course, and research at Manchester.

[10:30]

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Now the interesting thing about – the other interesting thing about my Manchester experience was that having finished my PhD in London on these rocks in Ireland and being warned off large scale thinking by John Sutton [laughs] and regional [inaud] global thinking in geology, tectonics, I thought – well, I took that – I said, maybe he’s right, you know. So for three years, from ’60 to ’63 I suppose it was, I worked on very small scale structures, kink bands – things we call kink bands, slated cleavage, the origins of slated cleavage, lineations in various kinds of low grade rocks and rocks that hadn’t been strongly metamorphosed where you can still recognise bedding. So I got really heavily into that stuff and wrote some papers and enjoyed it enormously, working in North Wales, Ireland and Scotland, various places where you see these rocks, kinds of rocks. And so I completely eschewed large scale thinking at that time. And then along came – I just thought, well, I was settled in Manchester – and by that time I’d been married for two years and we had a child, our daughter had arrived by that stage in ’63. And I was working in Waterford in Ireland, Wexford, mapping Palaeozoic rocks, volcanics and structures and enjoying life. And I thought, well, here I am as a Palaeozoic geologist and I’ll carry on mapping and doing it and enjoying it and working out things on a smaller scale. And then I was invited by the Irish Geological Survey to map an area in County Waterford on the coast west of Tramore, a wonderful coast section of Ordovician volcanics, and they wanted somebody to work out the structure and the volcanic rocks and so forth. So I became a sort of temporary geologist with the Irish Geological Survey for the summer and it was tremendous fun. And I – and they said, ‘Well, while you’re doing this can you think about sort of the relationships between the volcanics here and the volcanics there and these various inliers in Ireland, around Ireland, where you have these Palaeozoic rocks.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been warned off that kind of thing by – I’m not sure.’ They said, ‘Yeah, please do it, we want someone to synthesise our …’ So I did a big synthesis of – and that wetted my appetite again. So, you know, going from the detail to the regional to the general, that was great fun. So I got a taste for that again. So here was I doing that, plus detailed structural geology in the John Ramsay style, who’d helped me greatly in Imperial College as a graduate student, who I revered, I still do revere.

[13:02]

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And then suddenly a lectureship in Cambridge was advertised and several people said, ‘John,’ they said, ‘Why don’t you – you might enjoy Cambridge.’ They said, ‘Why don’t you apply for that job?’ So I applied for it and it went like this. I was invited down for an interview and I thought, well, it’ll be a formal interview with a register – like the one in Manchester, we’ll all be sitting there in a group. But we were all invited individually on different days, which was a much better way to do it. Didn’t have to give a lecture in those days, which is amazing. I was called into – went to see Bulman, he was the professor, in the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, in the geology department, and he invited me in and said would I like cup of coffee, love one. So we had a general chat, not – he said what are you doing, what sort of research are you doing and why do you want to come to Cambridge, all the usual questions. It was a very sort of avuncular sort of experience with Bulman, it was very nice, a very nice fellow. He worked on graptolites, he was the world expert on graptolites, Ordovician and Silurian graptolites, mostly Ordovician. And anyway, a sort of – he said, ‘Well, thank you very much for coming, Dr Dewey, it was very nice.’ He said, ‘How do you enjoy Manchester?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s fine, nice people in the department, very nice crowd of people, but I find Manchester a bit dull.’ He said, ‘Yes, yes.’ And he said, ‘So what do you do?’ I said, ‘Well, I go to Liverpool.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘ Much nicer.’ [Laughs] So he liked Liverpool very much. And he said, ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘By the way,’ as I left, he said, ‘We’re going to appoint you.’ ‘What?’ [Laughs] Amazing, I couldn’t believe it. So it was just done on the basis of that one chat, you know, no investigation of my capabilities of any particular – but I’d obviously got some very good references from Manchester and various – and John Ramsay and various other people, I suppose. And so anyway, he said, ‘Oh by the way, we are going to appoint you’ [laughs]. So I moved to Cambridge in ’64. I suppose this was early ’64 this happened, that’s right. And so I moved to Cambridge in ’64 and I liked it very, very much. I liked the college life. I was a junior member of Trinity College and subsequently I actually became one of the founding – first fellows of Darwin College, which is a graduate college, which I enjoyed greatly as well. So for many years I spent – the first few years I was there I spent in Trinity and enjoyed that and I’ll tell you about that in a moment. But the department was very nice. It was – they were nice people. It wasn’t a very great department. There were no – Bulman was by

85 John Dewey Page 86 C1379/83 Track 4 far the most distinguished person in the department. They’d had a succession of very, very distinguished palaeontology professors and sort of Palaeozoic in particular, it was a great tradition of Cambridge’s. There was Johnny Marr, OT Jones and a whole sequence of really very, very good people, going right back to Adam Sedgwick, of course, who – after whom the museum is named. And so it had a great very distinguished – and Woodward was there in the nineteenth century. Darwin, of course, had been a student in Cambridge, learning geology from Sedgwick. And so it was a very distinguished department with a long and interesting history, with a wonderful museum. The palaeontology museum is quite – it still is quite superb. And some very great palaeontology has been done there over the years, very truly world, world shattering stuff in many ways. And so I enjoyed that department very much but I also enjoy college life.

[16:25]

And I would eat in college regularly. I’d eat at least once a week, dinner. They’d expect you to come to dinner once a week. But it was a very sort of male oriented society. There were no women fellows in those days, god forbid. My wife wasn’t allowed to come to dinner. She had to have hamburgers and fish fingers at home, you know, with the kids. So here was I [laughs] going and having this fabulous dinner. But women were allowed to come and watch from the balcony, watch. It was rather like Oliver Twist, you know, the film Oliver Twist, where the poor boys are observing the Christmas feast [laughs]. It was something like that. I thought it was strange but one accepted it. And there were some wonderful characters in Trinity, many historians, people like Kitson Clark and Gow and Simpson and some wonderful, wonderful very amusing and distinguished people, from whom I learned a great deal. But there was one particular character that I really loved very much. It was a man called Charles Tressilian Nicholas and he was called TC and – Tressilian Charles, that’s right, TC Nicholas. And he had been a lecturer in the geology department – god, I mean, decades, decades before. He fought at Gallipoli, for example, in the ’14- ‘18 war. His PhD was on the St Tydfil’s Peninsula in North Wales, on the Hell’s Mouth Grits, and he wrote a very, very fine paper on it. And his PhD was submitted in 1908 and here he was living in Cambridge in the middle ‘60s. And he eventually

86 John Dewey Page 87 C1379/83 Track 4 died at 102 or 103 and he was cycling until he was – he was an emeritus fellow at Trinity and lived in Trinity after his wife died and he would cycle when he was 100. He was still cycling around. And he’d fall off his bike quite regularly and the police would pick him up – the policeman would pick him up. That was in the days when the police actually patrolled the streets. And they picked him up and they knew who he was, took him back to college and they said to the porters, ‘Look, you’ve got to stop him cycling; we keep on picking him up and bringing him back’ [laughs]. He eventually did give up cycling. But he was a lovely, lovely man. So I used to dine with him, he used to dine at the same time that I dined and we used to go back to his room – go to his room for a sherry before dinner and a brandy afterwards. So that was a lovely, lovely experience. Prince Charles actually was a student in Trinity at the same that I was there for a short period of time. But it was a very nice, a very warm welcoming college. We’ve had some nice – had some jolly nice masters, particularly I remember Rab Butler, who was Master for much of the time that I was there and he was a very charming generous man, with Molly, his wife. And they were very kind to the lodge. They would have the young fellows in after dinner and entertain them and play the – people would play the piano and a bit of a singsong. It was very – really very nice indeed. And then there was also sport in – I played a lot of cricket in Cambridge, staff teams, geology and for the Trinity College fellows and things like that. So I played a lot of cricket, had given up rugby by that stage, I was getting hurt and wasn’t recovering on Monday after weekend matches [laughs], so I gave all that up. So I played cricket a bit. But I did a lot of gymnastics in Cambridge, that was perhaps my main sport there. There was a very good gymnastics team, undergraduate team, and I worked with them and went twice a week into the gym with them and practised and helped them and they helped me. It was very, very good. So it was that. And I’ve just remembered some characters. There was a doctor that we had, whose name I can’t remember, who was a wonderful – he was a rowing man originally and his philosophy was that most illness was imaginary, so he wouldn’t see them until the pain – ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘Just go for a – have a darn big game of squash. Go for a game of squash, you’ll feel a lot better after that.’ And most of the time he was right actually [laughs], strangely. And I played squash a lot in Cambridge with my students and others and so forth. So – Dr Bevan, that was his name, Dr Bevan, who lived – had a – in Trinity Street, he had his offices. He used to

87 John Dewey Page 88 C1379/83 Track 4 call it his consulting room. So I rarely went to see him and when I did I was advised to play squash and it mostly worked. I bicycled everywhere, of course, as one did in those days in Cambridge. The chief technician was a wonderful guy in the Sedgwick Museum, a man called Warren, Mr Warren, and he was Mayor of Cambridge. It was his other job, so to speak [laughs]. And it was tremendous fun. So we’d be invited to all these various functions in Cambridge that other people didn’t get invited to, sort of mayoral parties and all those kinds of things. It was very great fun.

[21:08]

The other nice thing was that – or bad thing in some ways. In Cambridge the three departments in those days were separated. There was geology in the Sedgwick Museum. There was mineralogy and petrology and the Bullard Labs, like geology and geophysics, as it was called in those days, and they were out at Madingley Rise. Now geology and mineralogy were in the same building but they didn’t mix at all. In fact the door between them was locked, was kept locked, to keep those nasty mineralogists out on that side and those nasty geologists out [laughs]. And the two professors were at daggers drawn. I mean, they always were. And in fact we had several meetings to discuss the question of whether we were going to join – you know, fuse the two departments, and they always ended in bitter acrimony. I mean, absolutely amazing flaming rows. They said, ‘We’re not going to mix with you horrible second rate geologists.’ ‘Well, what about you lot?’ You know, it was like children. It was appalling. And Norman Hughes, I remember, our palaeobotanist in the Sedgwick Museum, a very clever and distinguished – worked on plant spores, angiosperms mostly and pollen, that’s right, and he asked – we were having this wonderful meeting, it was going very well, and Alec Deer was leading the delegation [laughs] from min and pet and I was – I had to be called in as part of our team. And Alec Deer said, ‘Well, we’re not discussing that,’ after some particular point had been raised. And Norman Hughes said, ‘Well, you can’t do this. You must discuss it. We must.’ So he said, ‘Right, that’s it,’ and he got up. And he said, ‘Come on chaps, we’re leaving.’ They simply all left. And you heard the door being locked again [laughs]. It was – anyway, that all changed subsequently when Ron Oxburgh became professor of min and pet. And Ron is a wonderful character who can very easily

88 John Dewey Page 89 C1379/83 Track 4 smooth things over and he – it was really Ron, I suppose, who got the whole thing fused together, and it’s now called the Department of Earth Sciences and it’s geophysics, geology – the three departments were fused together and it’s made a huge difference to Cambridge, as you know. The level of research has gone up massively as well. It’s probably one of the best departments in Europe now. And lots of good people were hired. A lot of the old dead wood was sort of gradually cleaned out, nice people but they weren’t world shattering researchers by any means. So things – that was after my time unfortunately so while I was there we had this tripartite arrangement.

[23:35]

But when, as I’ll explain a bit later, I got involved in really large scale tectonics, whole Appalachian, Caledonian system, global tectonics and so forth, by a quirk of fate really, which – I was very lucky, I got to know the geophysicists very well. I knew them a little bit. So I used to go down to Madingley Rise a great deal and I think they realised that geologists weren’t as stupid as they thought and I realised that geophysicists were much more useful than I thought [laughs] they were. So I got to know Teddy Bullard and various other people. Teddy Bullard was a wonderful man. He was tremendous at encouraging the young and he would give you iconoclasting advice of all kinds. He said, ‘Dewey,’ he said, ‘Never let the old tell you what to do. Never let them do that. You do what you want to do and find the money for it and get support of those who will support you,’ he said, ‘But you must not let the old run things,’ he said. ‘We’re not very good at it.’ He said, ‘You young people have the ideas.’ And, you know, it’s partly right of course but not entirely. But he was quite wonderful. And he said, ‘And don’t be scared to have ideas.’ He said, ‘I have lots of ideas, ninety percent are wrong, but people forget those, they just remember the ten percent that are very good and probably right.’ So he gave me a lot of advice and was very, very kind to me. I mean, he was a very distinguished man. He’d been Director of the National Physical Laboratory. He was one of the most senior professors in Cambridge, an FRS. I mean, a truly, truly clever man. And anyway, so that was wonderful. So I got to know the geophysicists very well. I also got to know the petrologists quite well in spite of this locked door, ‘cause you could go in through the

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– go down through the courtyard and in through their door and up, you know. And that wasn’t kept locked obviously ‘cause people had to get in. But I go to know the professor then, a man called CE Tilley, who was an Australian, and Tilley was always regarded, I think, by the geologists as a very standoffish and difficult figure, but he was immensely kind to me. I mean, largely I think I was one of the first geologists to go in and to ask for advice from somebody in petrology. And I had some rocks that I was having a terrible struggle with, some metamorphic rocks, and I needed a really good mineralogist to help me with identifying the minerals, which was rather difficult at that time. So I went to see CE Tilley, who was very good, and another man called Stuart Agrell. Stuart Agrell was probably one of the world’s greatest mineralogists and he could take a thin section and say, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘Interesting rock this. It’s probably – I think this is from the Four Corners region of Colorado,’ etc. ‘Oh yes, it’s about ten percent analcine, two percent melanite …’ He’d just give you a complete description of rock just by peering down a microscope. So he helped me an enormous amount in identifying some of the minerals that I was finding very difficult. So there were a few little feelers into other departments. And then of course Dan McKenzie was a student in min and pet, one of Bullard’s students, working on convection in the mantle, and I think he was pretty sympathetic towards – I think he still is, sympathetic towards the geological profession in addition to the geophysical one. And so there were a few little tentative feelers at that time but they came to nothing because the general mood was, we don’t want anything to do with these other people. Crazy. But, as I say, Ron Oxburgh I think was really the person who pulled it all together in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s and then they never looked back from there. It was a wonderful integrated department with everything from geophysics to palaeontology, so quite superb. So Cambridge was great fun.

[27:12]

And I carried on doing mostly – in the first few years, I carried on doing mostly sort of regional Ordovician stuff in the Caledonides, Ireland. I was getting broader, you know, I was getting interested in rocks in Scotland and Norway and so forth, but I wasn’t involved in anything that you would call global at that stage. And then two things happened while I was in Cambridge. Three things happened, I should say.

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First of all the great Harry Hess came on sabbatical leave from Princeton. He was in min and pet but he used to wander round – he was a geologist as well, he used to wander round and talk to everyone. He’d bang on doors – he was a truly great man. He was a guy who, with other people in the States and Holmes, the great Arthur Holmes, in Edinburgh and David Griggs in UCLA, they started thinking about mantle convection, shallow convection and driving surface motions, sort of subduction and something that was happening at ridges, you know. They were just beginning in the sort of early ‘60s, really beginning to think – together with Bob Dietz, Robert Dietz in America, of course as well. That’s D-I-E-T-Z. And he – those chaps were really beginning to think about global geology. And Harry Hess would come in – banged on my door one morning, I think in ’65 – I think it was in late ’64 or ’65, I’d only been in Cambridge for less than a year, and he said, ‘Oh, what are you doing? What’s your name? What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Oh, come in and have a coffee.’ And we got a coffee and we had a chat. And he told me what he was doing in the Caribbean and other parts of the world. He was the guy who started the whole business of measuring gravity at sea. I mean, gravity at sea is difficult because if you’re in a ship, the ship’s bouncing around all over the place and it’s hard to stabilise it, but if you’re on a submarine that’s different, it’s nice and calm. And he was in submarines during the war, the Second World War, and he got going – he got going the whole business of gravity at sea, which is really – and got this sort of – and bathymetry. He started investigating the ocean floor and realising some of its characteristics, which of course were critical in developing plate tectonics eventually. So Harry was wonderful. He was really a – he was interested in petrology and in mafic and ultramafic rocks. That’s the very heavy rocks, rich in iron and magnesium. He’s worked in the Stillwater complex in Montana and he was also interested in ophiolites. He was one of the first people to really get interested in ophiolites. He worked on the Vourinos Complex in Greece and various other ophiolites around the Caribbean, and he put people on them. And people like Eldridge Moores had been put for a PhD on the Vourinos Complex. And So Harry was wonderful and he was very good at drawing you out. So he came into my room, we chatted and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I told him what I was doing. ‘Oh jolly good. Can you show me some of your maps?’ And I – ‘Lovely maps, yes.’ So I showed him all my maps. ‘Oh, they’re jolly nice.’ And he said, ‘Have you ever thought …?’ He said, ‘Look, there’s

91 John Dewey Page 92 C1379/83 Track 4 something very strange about Newfoundland.’ Because by that stage – I’ll come back to it in a second, I started working in Newfoundland as well. And he said, ‘Have you thought that it’s very interesting how this belt of volcanic rocks runs down this side of Newfoundland and there’s a similar belt down the others and these rocks are called ophiolites and they’re associated with them.’ I said, ‘Well, I’d sort of realised it but I hadn’t seen any particular significance to it.’ He said, ‘Oh well, you want to think about that. It’s interesting on that scale, you know. Think about things on a large scale. Where do those belts go?’ And I’ll come to that a bit later again. ‘Where do those belts go in the Appalachians, where do they go in the Caledonides? What could they mean in terms of looking at the modern world?’ And that was a new concept to me, looking at the modern world, my goodness, you know [laughs], in relation to the old stuff. So anyway, Harry was wonderful at encouraging me to look at things in a more integrated larger scale.

[30:56]

I’ll go back to Newfoundland. I’d started work in Newfoundland for a simple reason. There was a professor in Columbia University in New York called Marshall Kay and he had got – he was very interested in Caledonian Appalachian geology generally, interested in Scotland. He was a great philatelist, he collected stamps and he came to Edinburgh regularly to buy rare Newfoundland stamps. He eventually had the best collection of Newfoundland stamps in the world, phenomenal, a valuable, valuable collection. So he came across to Britain quite a lot and he’d realised I was a young sort of Palaeozoic geologist in Cambridge and he wrote to me and said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Would you like to come to Newfoundland next summer?’ This would have been in ’64, summer of – yes, summer of ’64. And he said, ‘Would you like to come to Newfoundland and look at some of our rocks? You might be interested.’ And so I went. And I also at the same time had been invited to Nova Scotia by a chap in – who was then in MIT in Boston, a man called Art Boucot, who’s now – now in his late eighties, retired in Corvallis in Oregon. And Art Boucot had been working on the palaeontology of an area in Nova Scotia called the Antigonish Arisaig co-section, a very fine section of Silurian Ordovician rocks, my cup of tea in fact in the sort of rocks and the structures and low grade and so forth. And Stuart McKerrow, who was

92 John Dewey Page 93 C1379/83 Track 4 a lecturer in Oxford, who I knew extremely well because he’d worked in Western Ireland on areas adjacent to me and we got – became very good friends. And he simultaneously said, ‘John,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Nova Scotia this summer at the beginning of a big American – Canadian and American trip. I’m going to wind up in Caltech on sabbatical with the family. We’re going to drive across in a campervan [laughs] all the way across the States.’ His kids were very young then. And he said, ‘Would you like to join us in Nova Scotia for a few weeks doing some mapping?’ Eventually I spent six weeks in Nova Scotia. And so I had this double invitation, one to Newfoundland – so I integrated them and I said, okay, I’d love to do both. I’ll come for two weeks to Newfoundland and I’ll come for what I thought was a month but turned out to be six weeks in Nova Scotia. And I did a lot of mapping with Stuart McKerrow and Art Boucot on this area at Arisaig in Antigonish in Nova Scotia, beautiful rocks and very, very exciting. And we published that eventually as a special memoir for the Geological Society of America in 1967 or ’68, quite a few years later. So anyway, that was great and I spent this time going across and back and forth across Newfoundland. Now Newfoundland in those days did not have the Trans Canada Highway and if you wanted to travel in Newfoundland the most – the best way to do it was by train. There was a narrow gauge railway that went right across – it’s now taken out practically but it’s one of these great railway journeys of the world from Port aux Basques, where the ferry goes to Nova Scotia in the south west corner, all the way through to St Johns, all the way through the mining camps and the logging camps of Central Newfoundland. There’s no Trans Canada Highways. The main road across Newfoundland was essentially a gravel road and it went in and out of all the out ports, all the little bays around the headlands. So if you wanted to go from one end of Newfoundland to the other it would take you three days. Nowadays you can do it in less than a day easily, easily less than a day. So I flew into Gander, I suppose – because I went to Nova Scotia first and I finished that work and then I joined Marshall Kay and he picked me up at Gander Airport, drove me out and we started looking at rocks all over Northern and Western Newfoundland. It was quite delicious. And the coastal exposures – I realised this is a wonderful area to work because the coastal exposures are phenomenal. Inland is covered in trees and you can see – you can do a little bit of work inland in the higher areas where there are less trees and where you’re on the kind of rocks that don’t support much vegetation. But the coast

93 John Dewey Page 94 C1379/83 Track 4 section is virtually continuous, almost continuous across the whole of Newfoundland, around the whole edge. So that’s where most people work is on the coast section because the rocks are so beautifully, beautifully exposed. And I suddenly realised I’d love to work here. The rocks are very similar to the west of Ireland that I knew very well and I think I’d like to compare them and – you know. So then in 1965 I came across on a big trip and decided I was going to work in Newfoundland and I applied for a big – well, it was called a DSIR grant in those days, a Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and I got quite a lot of money and bought a Land Rover and shipped it over and we – and I did a lot of work in Newfoundland. And luckily the Trans Canada Highway was being built in sections, you could actually get around much more easily. So anyway, that’s why I worked in Newfoundland and that’s Harry saw some of my early Newfoundland maps and – not the maps I’d made. He saw the Newfoundland maps I was thinking of working on, you know. So that was one lovely experience in Cambridge ‘cause that sort of got me very excited about the Newfoundland work and what I could do in the Appalachian Caledonian belt as a whole. So I started reading extensively on the rocks in Alabama to Spitsbergen and Greenland, I wanted to know everything that was known at that stage about the whole belt. And it was clear to me at that stage that you had to close the Atlantic, you had to close the Atlantic to fit them together. It was just ridiculous to – because they fitted, you brought them together and they fitted beautifully and everything worked extremely well.

[36:30]

And then Tuzo Wilson, the great Canadian geologist geophysicist from Toronto, was also – I think a bit later than Harry Hess, late ’64 sort of – and ’65, he was in Cambridge on sabbatical, mostly based at the geophysics department down at Madingley Rise. And like Harry Hess, he would wander round – he was a very, very collegial person and he – a very, very nice kind man and all – but mostly he was desperately interested in everything, you know. He wanted to know everything. A bit like me now actually, I can’t resist finding out things from people. And so Tuzo Wilson came around and I got to know Tuzo quite well and we chatted about the Appalachians and like Harry he said, ‘Have you ever noticed that these two belts of

94 John Dewey Page 95 C1379/83 Track 4 volcanic rocks and ophiolites on either …’ I said, ‘You know what, funny you should mention that ‘cause Harry Hess …’ He said, ‘Oh yes, Harry is interested in these kinds of things.’ And I started thinking about that and I’ll show a bit later, that led to something very interesting. So anyway, Tuzo would come in regularly for coffee and we’d chat. One day he came in, he said, ‘John, John, I’m very excited. I’ve discovered a new class of fault.’ I thought, you’re mad, what are you talking about, this new class of fault. I mean, we know everything about every kind of fault. There are normal faults, thrust faults, strike slip faults, transcurrent faults, curved faults, listric faults, planer faults, you know, we know all about faults. He said, ‘No, no, no, it’s not like that.’ He said, ‘On the ridges there’s this strange thing. You’ve got this phenomenon called sea floor spreading that everyone was talking …’ Harry Hess and Dietz had clearly shown that – and then people like Pitman and Heirtzler at Lamont had shown that the ridges were in fact being pulled apart and strips of new material were coming in and laying down these magnetic stripes. And that had been – by that stage was really just beginning to be recognised. He said, ‘Look, we’ve got this place and we’ve got these strange things called fracture zones at right angles to the ridges.’ And I said, ‘Okay, so what?’ I said, ‘They must displace the ridges.’ ‘No, no, no, they don’t, they don’t. That’s the strange thing, because there’s a chap called Lynn Sykes at Lamont – in Columbia, Lamont, who’s just shown that the sense of – from earthquakes, first motions in earthquakes – that the sense and motion where two ridges are offset, the sense of motion is exactly the opposite to what you’d expect. And also the earthquakes don’t go on beyond the ridge, they’re confined to the offset.’ So he said, ‘The sense of motion is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect from the displacement of the ridge.’ And he said, ‘These are essential for connecting spreading centres together. If I spread that one and spread this one, you’ve got to have something with that sense of motion to connect the two.’ And he said, ‘I’ve got a little model. I’ll show you. I’ve made a little model.’ And he pulled out this wonderful piece of very thin cardboard, paper, and there was a ridge like this, some stuff hanging down here. And he pulled it apart and gradually the sea floor spreading stripes would appear, you see, with a fault. He said, ‘I’m going to call these transform faults because they transform the motion from there to there.’ He said, ‘Oh, and by the way, there are lots of other kinds of transform faults between subduction zones and triple junctions and all kinds of things.’ And that was when he wrote his great

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Nature paper on transform faults, wonderful paper, which he virtually had plate tectonics in his hand but he didn’t quite call it that. He didn’t understand about real plate rigidity, although plate rigidity was implied in his model, in that transform model, in all his transforms models. So he said, ‘Look, these are the way that different kinds of transforms evolve, some get longer, some get shorter.’ I thought, my God, he has indeed discovered a new class of fault, fundamental new class of fault, and I sort of bowed down before him, amazing. And that – it was that that really led in many ways to plate tectonics, understanding that there are geometric kinematic rules. Once you assume plate rigidity and you’ve got boundaries then you can’t do anything you like with those boundaries. There are a number of very rigorous geometric rules. And so then very quickly after that McKenzie and Parker published their classic paper in 1967 on the – I think it was entitled the North Pacific, an example of tectonics on a sphere. I think it was written while they were on sabbatical leave in Scripps in California. It was a wonderful paper. And that really established the concept of three or more spherical caps or rigid caps on a sphere that were called plates and that there are – indeed there are many more rigid rules of the evolution of plate boundaries. And of course McKenzie and Morgan went on to write about triple junctions and – the whole thing exploded.

[41:18]

And at the same time of course in Lamont, Isacks, Oliver and Sykes – Oliver was the leader and then Sykes, who’d done this work on first motions and transforms. Indeed it showed that Tuzo Wilson’s thing is correct. They did lots more and they turned out to all be the same. And they wrote a great classic paper called Seismology and the New Global Tectonics in ’67, or ’68 maybe it came out.

[41:44]

Now the third thing that happened after Harry Hess in Cambridge – and Harry Hess and Tuzo Wilson wanted another Lamont geologist called – geophysicist called Chuck Drake, Charles Drake, who was on sabbatical leave in the Bullard labs and he was on sabbatical leave I suppose in 1966, that was it, ’66. And I got to know Chuck

96 John Dewey Page 97 C1379/83 Track 4 extremely well, a lovely character, a wonderful – again another collegial man who liked walking round talking to people. And I took him on some field trips, I had him home for dinner and so forth and I got to know him really quite well. And I told him what I was doing in Newfoundland and he said, ‘Well look,’ he said, ‘This is incredibly interesting.’ Oh, by the way, a year before in ’65 I’d also been to a conference in New York. It was called the Goddard Conference, run by a man called Bob Jastrow, who was director of the Goddard Space Flight Institute in New York. And Marshall Kaye invited me over, that was the year after I’d been in Nova Scotia. He said, ‘Look, there’s going to be a big conference on continental drift in New York.’ He said, ‘Would you like to come?’ He said, ‘And we can write a paper,’ he said, ‘Comparing Newfoundland and Ireland, that the Atlantic must have opened.’ So we did that and that went down very well. Dan McKenzie came and gave a wonderful talk on convection. So that was where I really got to know Dan really quite well on that trip. And I led a – I went out on a field trip to Vermont with some American friends and I said, ‘Dan, would you like to come?’ So Dan leapt at it and we had a very nice week in Vermont. We showed him all the limestones and the Taconic Rangers and all those kinds of things, and I think he enjoyed that very greatly. But anyway, that conference was very good. So Chuck knew that I was interested in the Appalachian Caledonian system as a whole. He said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Why don’t …?’ He said, ‘You’ve got a sabbatical leave coming up.’ He said, ‘I’m in fact due for a one term sabbatical leave,’ you know, you could either take one year in seven or one year in seven. I’d done my requisite terms and I was overdue for a term’s leave. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to Lamont for six months?’ So I – I didn’t go for six, I went for five months, as it was, including part of the summer until Christmas. And I was given – Chuck gave me a little salary, which was very nice, and I had a very nice little office and I shared the big lab with a huge light table – so everyone used big light tables in those days. You’d spread your maps out and you could trace them and so forth, or in my case. And so I was given this and I thought, do you know what I’m going to do while I’m – I planned this in detail. I’m going to make a map, a detailed map, of the geology of the whole Appalachian system while I’m here, from Newfoundland – and luckily the Columbian library was tremendous, they had all the maps I needed, all the state maps, all the state geological maps. So over that period of five months or so I spent pretty well all of it, pretty well all of it, making this – on a

97 John Dewey Page 98 C1379/83 Track 4 huge – used to have this stuff called tracing linen and great rolls of tracing linen, so they gave me this mass of tracing linen and I outlined a huge map from Newfoundland to Alabama [laughs]. I think it had two pieces, one was Newfoundland to New York and one was New York down to Alabama for the Southern Appalachians. But I spent the whole of that time synthesising the maps and generalising them and plotting them all up, a miracle, extraordinary. I realised after three months, this belt of volcanic rocks and ophiolites that Harry Hess had talked about runs all the way intermittently down the whole western side of the Appalachians. There was another one on the eastern side. And I started looking at the petrology of these rocks and the chemistry and so forth, all the same. They were mostly – the volcanic belt were andesites and rhyolites and basalts and then they’re part of the so called calc-alkaline suite. I said, where do they live in the modern world, island arcs. I said, my gosh, could these belts be ancient Ordovician island arcs like the ones in the West Pacific and Java and Sumatra and so forth. And my answer was of course, yes, there’s nothing else they could be. Well, it wasn’t simply one long arc, it was made up of lots of bits and pieces. They’d all been – imagine you took the West Pacific at the present day with all the island arcs going in different directions and running and so on and Australia comes smashing in along the edge of Asia, smearing it all out into a – it would be a linear – a big linear deformed belt like the Appalachians. It’s exactly what we – and I realised that this was what was happening in the Appalachian, it was a sort of smeared out sort of South Pacific.

[46:24]

And so I got terribly excited. And Isacks, Oliver and Sykes at that moment were writing their paper on Seismology and New Global Tectonics, where they looked at subduction zones and ridges and so forth from a seismic point of view and some of their physical characteristics. Also Le Pichon, Xavier Le Pichon, was on sabbatical leave while I was there and he was writing a paper on using magnetic anomalies and poles of rotation for plate, so that sort of – the dynamics – not sort of the dynamics but the kinematics of plate motion around a planet. So here we’re getting all this new information on – it was called the new global tectonics at that stage, it became plate tectonics a bit later. And also at Princeton Jason Morgan had been writing a very

98 John Dewey Page 99 C1379/83 Track 4 classic paper called rises, trenches and great faults, and again it was, you know, basically transform faults, ridges and subduction zones. And he again outlined the kinematics of – so basically Jason Morgan’s paper, the Isacks, Oliver and Sykes paper, the Le Pichon paper and all the sort of associated papers by Walter Pitman and Heirtzler and so forth on the magnetics and Lynn Sykes on the seismics, it all – in 1967 it all came together quite suddenly. And I was literally in the middle of it. And I used to go to all the lectures and everyone was interested in what I was doing. And I said, ‘Look, this is exactly the Appalachian Caledonian system. What you’re describing, it’s a smashed up version of the Pacific and it’s obviously some form of plate tectonics going on there.’ So I wrote that up for a Nature paper and I think it was published in 1969.

[48:11]

So the thing is, I came back to Cambridge after that all terribly excited and thinking everyone else was going to be just as excited as me, but I found Britain a very sort of reactionary sort of – not reactionary but a sort of – yeah, reactionary I suppose it was in a sense. I went around the – all over Britain and Ireland giving lectures on this new idea and how the Appalachian system worked like this and they said, hmm, I don’t know, it’s a bit of a – it’s too simple, it looks too simple to us, they said, and we don’t believe it. And John Sutton was very scathing. He said, ‘It’s all nonsense.’ He said, ‘You can’t do geology that way. You’ve got to look at the detail and gradually from the detail you …’ No, it’s the other way round, you – you know, or it’s both, both, you do the detail and you do the big and the two fit together and you – one helps the other, you see. One gives you ideas about the other end of the scale. So it took – it must – from the time I got back in Christmas 1967 it must have taken five years in Britain for this stuff to really catch on. Now McKenzie of course was not part of the reactionary group, he realised and he was just – he carried on doing all this wonderful work with Morgan on triple junctions and analysing the whole sort of basis of plate tectonics. So it was Dan in this country who really got plate tectonics going from his initial work with Parker. And in Lamont of course and Scripps and Woods Hole, the great oceanographic institutions, the Americans had ran with it and left us way behind

99 John Dewey Page 100 C1379/83 Track 4 for quite a while. But it eventually caught on and became accepted and people started doing all kinds of geological things related to plate tectonics.

[49:51]

But by that stage I got pretty tired of Britain actually and the sort of reactionary nature [laughs] of the Brits, British geologists. They were very good geologists but they seemed to have very limited horizons about what you could do on a larger scale. So I was offered a job in – a sort of double job. It was mainly in Albany, the University of Albany in New York, upstate New York, and an associate job in – as an associate professor in Columbia University in Lamont. So I spent large – most of my life teaching in Albany and doing research there in a wonderful department and the other, say, one day a week I was down in Lamont working with the people down there. And that period in America, that first period in America, from 1971 to 1980, 1981, that ten years, was quite phenomenal. In Albany – it was a small sort of rather undistinguished department when I went there but they had tremendous plans. They said, ‘John, if you come, together the university will give us four new positions and we can hire who we want to run the world.’ ‘Oh really? Good gracious.’ So we offered jobs to some wonderfully distinguished people – Miyashiro, the great Japanese petrologist, offered a job, he accepted like a shot. He said, ‘I’m tired of Japan,’ he said. And he was already on sabbatical leave in Lamont at that time and he just came up to Albany. He was a wonderful colleague and a brilliant petrologist and had some marvellous students, superb ideas. It was Miyashiro, for example, who realised that ophiolites are not parts of oceanic ridges but actually born in island arcs. That was done on the basis of chemistry and petrology, but that’s another thing. But anyway, so we had Jeff Fox, Kevin Burke, Win Means, George Putman, a whole series of – I think we were eight altogether, quite a small department. But we started thinking, if we’re going to develop this department we have to have top rate students. You can’t have a great department in which the students are second rate. So we literally were very, very fussy. We advertised for – and we went mostly to the great four year colleges of America, Colgate, Hamilton, Pomona, and some of the better universities, and we said we’re only going to get absolutely grade A students. We’re not going to have anything we regard as second rate. And we did that and we hired

100 John Dewey Page 101 C1379/83 Track 4 top people, top students, who came with tremendous references and, you know, immense grade point averages, people like Jack Casey and Jeff Karson and Shibato from Japan, Tsugio Shibato. We had a number of international students as well. And absolutely, absolutely tremendous and they were very hardworking and they – we gave them interesting problems to work on and we worked with them. It was a wonderful department, a very collegial – oh, Celal Şengör, of course, the great Turkish geologist who is now professor at Istanbul. And we were very collegial in the sense that students and the faculty were basically one. We didn’t think of them as students, they didn’t think of us as faculty, we just – it was Geoff and John and, you know, we just simply worked together on problems. And it was a – the stuff we did during the ‘70s was – oh, I mean, a tremendous range of plate tectonic related geology. I mean, we found out all kinds of things – well, the students in particular, because the students were – we insisted all the students had to go out mapping some major problem in Newfoundland and other places, the Appalachians – the Appalachians mostly. Some went to the Rockies but – some went to Norway to map, some came to Britain to map, but they were basically – they were out mapping and also thinking on a large scale at the same time. They were thinking tectonically and using their detailed information to plug into their bigger models. And it was phenomenal. I mean, some of the papers those students wrote, you know, are now great classics in the field. And I’m very proud of them. I think I’ve had fifty-four PhD students and Masters students in my career, which seems quite a lot, but it didn’t seem it at the time, you know. They were all integrated and working with me and so forth. And most of them now are all senior professors, distinguished people, and some have even retired. I mean, that’s the shocking thing [laughs] that some of my students have now gone through retirement age and are now retired. I think of them as children still, you know, or young adults [laughs]. So that was a tremendous period, that period in – it was integrating – and we all worked at Lamont as well to some degree and some of the students would go down to Lamont and work with the people there, Walter Pitman and Lynn Sykes and so forth. Ian Dalziel was another, who is now in the University of Texas, a very distinguished geologist and works in Scotland and Antarctica and South America and all over the place. So it was a lovely sort of experience. It was a hotbed of geology and plate tectonics in Lamont and Albany. It was a very, very fine period.

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[54:59]

But then I was offered a job in – I was offered several professorships back in Britain and I accepted one in Leicester. Then that didn’t work out because I’m afraid they promised the earth when I was appointed and as time went on before I was due to come to Leicester they started withdrawing – oh, we can only give you one lectureship rather than three, blah, blah, blah, and eventually I said, ‘That’s it, finished.’ So I said, ‘I’ll stay in North America, stay where I am. I’m perfectly happy.’ And then I was offered the Durham chair, the chair in Durham, and I went for an interview there and chatted to them and so forth and they were much more obliging in terms of what they were going to offer. I explained what had happened in Leicester before. They said, ‘No, it’s not going to happen here. Once we make a promise, we’ll make the promise in writing, we will stick to it.’ And they did. So I went to Durham, I came back to Durham, and spent a very, very happy four years from 1982, I think it was, to ’86. And I thought, well, I can live out my geological career here quite happily and it wasn’t – I mean, it was quite a good department. It’s a much better department now. A man called Bob Holdsworth became professor and really developed a tremendous department there. But it was fine, a lot of nice people and I hired several very good young people, Donny Hutton and Gill Foulger and various others and they’ve done jolly well since. And I carried on doing the kind of research I was doing. I went to Tibet – I’ll come to that bit perhaps a bit later. So I had a very good four years in Durham. We built a house in a small village called Brancepeth, outside in the grounds of an old castle, which was an idyllic place. And that was great fun, lovely neighbours and had a very happy four years there in Durham. And then the Oxford chair came up and I was offered that and I was in two minds for a long time. Molly said, ‘No, you know, we’re quite happy here.’ And she’d established herself as a – in the botany department doing her research there and she said, ‘Well, you know, Oxford may be more competitive and I might not be able to have a sort of lab or something of my own there.’ And we investigated that and it turned out the Professor of Botany was very eager to have her and working on what she wanted to work on, monoclonals and so forth. And so we accepted and then spent a very profitable and happy period from, what, ’86 to 2001 – that’s right.

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[57:39]

And I decided – and again I was getting tired of the department in many ways. I didn’t like some of the things that were going on. I felt some people were sort of – not usurping authority but they were basically in it for their own careers. And there were clearly various cliques plotting sort of takeovers and so forth. And I was no longer a professor, no longer head of department then, ‘cause you do it in five year stints. So I was head of department from ’86 to ’91 and then Des McConnell, the mineralogist from Cambridge, came and took over, and then Keith O’Nians was hired and he became professor. So, you know, I wasn’t directly involved in it. But I felt that people wanted to change the nature of the department. We were a very good classic geology department, modern in many ways, lots of modern geology going on, but it was very – a lot of field based geology, a lot of very good classic palaeontology and, you know, good classic things were going on and I felt that, particularly the geophysical group were plotting and really wanting to change. And indeed since they’ve taken over the department it has changed fundamentally. It’s still very good in its own way but it’s sort of – what I call the core of great geology seems to have mostly vanished from the department, so I don’t have much to do with it now. I go for coffee once in a while and see old friends and so forth, that’s quite pleasant, but I work here in college most of the time or work at home, or work in the Natural History Museum that I lectured in before. Did I mention the Natural History Museum? I did, I think. Yes, that’s right. Anyway, that brings us up to 2001.

[59:26]

And I was sort of hankering in a way after North America – so I retired, I said I’ll take early retirement and I didn’t like the way the department was going, I wanted to get out of it. So I took early retirement and that was also partly triggered by the fact that several places in the States were saying, you know, are you interested – I think several people had learned of what was going on and my disquiet and they said, well, if you’re not too happy in Oxford, would you like a – something like ten, fifteen offers around the States, around America. And I’d been in Davis, in the University of

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California in Davis, once before on sabbatical about five years before that and I had a lovely term. I enjoyed Davis. It was a lovely university town in the middle of the Great Valley, a very good university, a very science oriented university, one of the ten campuses of the University of California. So I thought about it and thought about it. And Davis also has a very interesting department called the Department of Viticulture and Enology and Molly knew that and she’d already been talking – when we wanted a sabbatical leave she did a bit of work with the people in that department and she got to know them quite well and she thought, gosh, their research is very interesting. So we decided, okay, we’ll go to Davis for a few years, you know, and see how it works out. Eventually we stayed seven years. And it was the best thing I ever did was getting away from a situation I didn’t really want to be in and doing something brand new at the age of – I suppose I was, what, sixty-four at the time? Yeah, sixty-four. And just I broke out and did something completely new. Molly did the same thing. Even though she was doing very happy work there, and retained her association with the department, she’s still working there actually, in Oxford, she got a position in the Department of Viticulture and Enology. And, as I said, was funded for all the time she was there by the Californian Division of Food and Agriculture. All her research was completely funded, wonderful. And I had phenomenal money from the university to do research and I got money from the US Navy, I’ll explain that a bit later. So I had a fabulous and productive seven years. I very much liked the American teaching system in which students come to university, they don’t have to concentrate initially on a subject, to read a subject. They do a range of courses, all kinds of courses. They do – in fact they have to do some – they have to do an English course, a maths – everyone has to do a maths course, which I think is a very, very fine thing, and a science course, a social science course, you know. There are basic requisites. And the 100 great books they do in English and all that kind of stuff. Harvard started that but it happens almost everywhere now. So kids – and then they decided they were going to concentrate on one thing and it becomes their so called major, their major subject, but they still have to do all the way through lots and lots of subjects and as a result it’s pretty hard to get a really good degree. Obviously you do an exam for each course. You bone up for that course and do the exam and then, you know – but you’re doing sort of, you know, three or four courses every semester and by the time you finish after – it’s a four year course, you’ve been through a

104 John Dewey Page 105 C1379/83 Track 4 tremendous range of intellectual experience with a tremendous range of professors and it really – I think it really works very well. And the kids in Davis were a very clever lot. I was very, very impressed. So what did I do there in terms of teaching? I did sort of mostly graduate courses in tectonics in the department. I did – I think I did almost – yes, I did some undergraduate teaching ‘cause the undergraduates were allowed to come to some of the introductory graduate courses. So my tectonics course, I had both undergraduates and graduate students, about thirty or forty, in it. But the course that I really loved and enjoyed most of all was called Natural Hazards and it was a course that somebody – it was called Earthquakes before I took it over. And it was on earthquakes and how earthquakes were – California is an obvious place that students should know about earthquakes [laughs]. But I expanded it into earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, meteorite impact, dangers of mind subsidence, land subsidence, all those kinds – anything to do with – and dangerous – radon, mercury, arsenic, all the dangerous chemicals in the period table, elements in the periodic table. I did a lecture on that. It was a twenty lecture course. It wasn’t a lot of lectures. But I developed this course and I put it all on PowerPoint, you know. I think I had 800 slides for the twenty lectures, which seems quite a lot. Some were just for reference and so forth and others were for detailed teaching. And I used to have 300 kids twice a year – I taught the course twice a year, so 600 – I taught 600 undergraduates and they were terrific, they were wonderful kids. And that course, the Dean loved it because it basically paid my salary. That’s the way it works these days, FTEs, you know, full time equivalents. And so it paid my salary and gave me a big research fund that I could use. So, you know, I was actually making money for the university [laughs] out of this course, or that’s the way – their accounting procedure works that way, bums on seats, you know, it’s that sort of system. And so I taught that, enjoyed it greatly. And I was most thrilled, I think, by the fact that one year I had a blind student in and another year I had a completely deaf student doing the course. Both of those students got A pluses, staggering. I mean, they were both wonderful students. And I think probably Coby, who was the blind student, explained to me, he said, ‘I’ve been blind since birth and I think I’ve compensated for the lack of sight in other ways and my brain has developed in other ways and I can completely visualise shapes of things, colours, I can describe colours. I’m not sure about colours,’ he said, ‘But I can really …’ And he was doing a degree in chemistry,

105 John Dewey Page 106 C1379/83 Track 4 including practicals. His dexterity was truly – and spatial awareness was – I’ve never seen anything like it, phenomenal. So that was a great thrill to have those two – and I was very much against the concept of multi choice examinations until I went – until that time, because when I was in Albany teaching a course called Planet Earth, a huge introductory plate tectonic course, ‘cause students – I used to get another 300 for that. I used to set an essay, essay questions. Now the paper would take me about ten minutes to write, the questions, but then it would take me four [laughs] weeks to mark all these essays – well, it didn’t take four weeks but it took a long time of slaving long into the night. Now the thing about multi choice examinations, to design a really clever multi choice one that really spreads them out – I mean, with 300 kids you can expect a decent Gaussian curve of results and then [inaud], it rarely skewed, a just perfect bell curve from the very top to the few at the very bottom, the failures. But a multi choice exam takes a lot of ingenuity and thinking to design. Sometimes I spend three weeks really thinking about this. Each question – you know, you’ve five possible answers, you have a question, five possible answers. And you think, well, that’s just random. It’s not, it’s actually – if you get it right you can really spread them out from the very good people and the people who haven’t done any work and so forth. So – but the trouble is it takes a long time to set but it takes five minutes to mark. You put all these sheets, these cards, through a machine and it spits out the results [laughs]. It’s wonderful. Then of course you’ve got to decide where the boundaries are in the Gaussian curve and so forth, but mostly the machine does it. So I’m actually quite in favour of multi choice for very large numbers of students. I think it works – in my experience it works extremely well. And I’ve talked to a lot of people, educators, about this and they think it’s educationally very sound for large numbers and at an introductory sort of level. So that was enormous fun, teaching that course and I learnt a huge amount from that, ‘cause whenever you teach you’re learning, learning, learning, learning, because if you’re just teaching what you know it becomes rather tedious. It’s far better to teach a course about which you initially don’t know a great deal and you can develop it and learn and read and so forth. I’m thinking of eventually writing a book on natural hazards but the trouble is there are so many of them and they’re all very good [laughs], you know, so I probably won’t. So that was the Davis experience.

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[1:08:14]

Davis was interesting in many other ways. It’s a small town. It’s about fifty miles from the coast and geology – I used to go at weekends and do a lot of geology along the coast. But the great thing about Davis that I found was that it got me going in a completely new kind of geology. You know, I’d been working on Palaeozoic rocks and structures and rather older mountain belts in Africa and New Zealand – well, New Zealand’s a bit younger, but you go to California, it’s all happening. There are active faults, you know, faults that are moving now, uplifts that are going up now. Sierra Nevada is tilting now. There’s volcanism going on now. So it’s a very live active tectonic laboratory. And I got very interested in – because in talking to a couple of colleagues, Rob Twiss and Geoff Unrew in Davis, I got very interested in the east side of the Sierra Nevada. You’ve got the Sierra Nevada, which is a mass of – it’s basic cretaceous island arc, tonalites, all kinds of granitic kinds of rocks and the guts of a continental edge island arc. And on the east side you start off into a structure you call the Great Basin, the basin and range, this is the hot low area that the trekkers came across and many died, you know. They saw the Sierra Nevada in the distance and it was a long, long way away [laughs]. So the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada drops down very sharply into a valley called the Owens Valley, in which they had a great earthquake in 1872. And in the Owens Valley and in adjacent areas there’s a very interesting phenomenon going on called transtension. The Sierra Nevada is moving to the north but not quite parallel with the valley. It’s moving sideways, northwards with respect, to Death Valley and Telescope Peak on the east side, Argus Range. And it’s not only moving northwards, it’s moving slightly away, so it’s a sideways and pulling apart motion as well. It’s sort of a general sheer of extension plus what we call strike slip. We call that transtension. It’s trans plus the pulling apart. And the structures you get in there are very, very complicated, you know. If you’re dealing with an area that’s simply being pulled apart, you have sort of kinds of faults we call normal faults. It’s not simple but it’s relatively simple. If you have a pure sideways motion you have something involving these great strike slip faults or transform faults that Tuzo Wilson described and the tectonics is again relatively simple. But where you combine the two things get very complicated. It’s very hard to develop models that combine the extension with the strike slip, particularly when the rocks are brittle.

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And that’s what I started doing. When the rocks are ductile, deep in the crust, it’s relatively easy to accommodate that, but when the rocks are breaking there are all kinds of kinematic problems related to the way the faults – different kinds of faults intersect and the blocks rotate. It’s very – so we started mapping an area called Coso, which is just north of the town of Ridgecrest and it’s on – the area is actually a US Naval weapons testing station, so you think, god, what an amazing place to work [laughs]. It’s not only a naval weapons testing station, this rugged desert area, east of the Sierra Nevada, along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, going up into the Owens Valley, it’s also – seems to be the home of the Mojave green rattlesnake. I’ve never seen so many in my life as I did when we were working there. So there were two big hazards [laughs], there’s the navy dropping bombs and – well, not while you’re there, of course. But we were lucky, we got permission to work there from the US Navy and we got tremendous logistical support from a thing called the Geothermal Research Programme, run by a wonderful man called Frank Monastero, who has now retired and gone to live in Reno. But he was very interested in the work we were proposing to do and he said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can probably get you some money for this work, maybe quite a lot of money.’ And I had a student called Tasha Taylor who really wanted to work on this problem, this transtensional problem, how these blocks fit together – and you can do it by mapping there, you can – and earthquakes, lots of little earthquakes, so you can look at the mechanics of those little earthquakes in relation to the way the blocks were rotating, the faults were moving, and this is what we did. And we also developed theoretical models, it should be like this, is it like this, so we – and our modelling, theoretical modelling plus kinematic modelling, plus the detailed mapping we were doing, proposing to do. And Frank said, ‘Look, put in a proposal.’ And I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Will the US Navy fund this?’ He said, ‘Well, remember that I run this Geothermal Research Programme.’ And the reason is this, that because of the way the rocks are being pulled apart and sheered, these brittle rocks in the upper crust, as they break apart they granulate and make holes. Lots of holes appear. And you’ve got the Sierra Nevada to the west, you’ve got the Argus Range to the east. When it rains the water comes down, okay, filters through and fills the – flows through the pores, these pores that are made by this transtensional process. He said, ‘Well, that’s alright but also there is volcanism. There is volcanic activity. It’s actually a volcanic area.’ Not – there are no active

108 John Dewey Page 109 C1379/83 Track 4 volcanoes in it today but there is what we call a magma chamber of very shallow depth, this molten rock at shallow depth. And all the way along this transtensional area from Coso all the way to Lake Tahoe up in the north, all the way through the Long Valley, through Mammoth, the Great Mammoth ski area, all the way up that eastern side of Sierra, this transtensional process is of course not only sheering the rocks and making the faults, it’s also pulling apart – making faults but it’s pulling the lithosphere apart, which means that the hotter material from beneath is coming up and melting the crustal rocks. And hence we have this magma chamber of only four kilometres’ depth, so the heat flow is tremendous. So here we have this magma chamber eating the rocks above like mad and you’ve got water coming in, almost Artesian – Artesian water coming in fed by gravity through those rocks, it flows in and it heats up and it comes up, of course. And in fact – not most but many of the faults you can map in the area, you can map them because steam’s coming out of them [laughs]. There’s literally steam coming out of cracks in the ground. So that’s what they mine in Coso. It’s a geothermal area and the hot water is used to drive turbines and they manufacture a huge amount of electricity, which is fed into the Californian Grid, greedy for power of course, and they sell it. They sell it to the Californian Grid. And the US Navy makes millions and millions – maybe – I don’t know how many but hundreds of millions of dollars by selling the power. And they say, well, you know, that’s good, that’s nice for the US Navy, we can buy some more planes and stuff with that money, but we think it’s important to keep research going there. So they put back something like – I think it’s something like ten million dollars a year is given back to this Geothermal Research Programme for Frank Monastero to distribute to researchers who want to work on those rocks. And so as a result, for six years we had a staggering some of money. I think we got almost two million dollars from the US Navy to support our research, which is, you know, really ample. So we were able to, you know, buy vehicles and we had total access to the thing, which nobody else really had very easily, and we – I could support a couple of graduate students in their salaries and so forth, all their fieldwork expenses, all our travelling expenses to conferences and so forth. It was really a – the money flowed like water, it really was tremendous. It’s a way to do research [laughs]. No money worries, you’ve just got to do the research. So we worked there for seven years and we wrote a number of, we think, quite good papers as a result of that and really solved a lot of

109 John Dewey Page 110 C1379/83 Track 4 transtensional problems. And our work was very welcomed by Frank, he loved the maps that we produced, and they subsequently used some of those maps in addition to some detailed borehole measurements and things to work out new possible fields for the Geothermal Programme, where are we going to drill the holes, you know, where are the rocks most cracked, you know, here, there and blah, blah, blah. So that was very good.

[1:16:53]

So that was a new experience for me, a whole new way of doing geology. We call it neotectonics and it’s something that I’d not been very interested in for many years, being interested in old hard rocks deeper in the crust. But I learnt a huge amount from that. And I think that’s part of the secret of research, change what you do every few years – not every few years, maybe every five to ten years, do something different and then you learn new things. If you keep on doing exactly the same thing all the time, for me that would become rather boring, you know, and I’d want to do something different. So at the moment I’m working on quite a range of things actually, a lot of detailed structural geology, sheer zones. I’m interested in little tiny sheer zones in outcrops. I’m interested in island arcs colliding with continental margins as a bigger scale thing. I’m interested in the ophiolite problem, I’m really seriously interested – I’m working on that extensively at the moment and writing on it. But I’m also working on something that I hadn’t even thought I would ever work on and that is deposits of storm waves and storm waves, rogue waves and tsunamis, in particular the boulder deposits that are thrown up by these things. And this is largely because of the fact that my daughter lives in New Zealand. I went to visit her – she lives in the North Island, right on the coast in North Island, New Zealand, north of Auckland, and as one does, when I stayed with her I walked down to the beach and I started looking at the rocks and the cliffs and so forth. Good gracious, these are extraordinary, there are boulder deposits – I mean, these are Miocene Age, about sort of twenty-five million or thereabouts. And clearly there are places where there are one hundred ton boulders embedded in sedimentary deposits. I said, well, how did a one hundred ton boulder – I said, well, it might have fallen off the cliff. But this is a unit that’s spread out over a large area down the coast. I think this must be some mega event. And we

110 John Dewey Page 111 C1379/83 Track 4 know it – I realised it must have come from the ocean because there are – it’s full of something we call Bathylasma, which is a deepwater barnacle that is mixed up with this stuff. So it’s obviously come out of the sea, this stuff, and I think the only way it can come out of the sea is a storm wave of a tsunami or a rogue – freak wave or something like that. So I’ve been working on that for some years now and am about to publish on it. And simultaneously I got interested in rocks that I hadn’t been interested in in the west of Ireland. I started looking at some of the cliffs and on top of some of the cliffs there there are boulders, fifty ton boulders that have come from the beach, been thrown – how do you do – how do you throw it up a cliff? Well, there’s a man called Mike Williams in Galway who’s worked out a mechanism for it and a few Americans who’ve been working on the Aran Islands doing similar things, but Paul Ryan, the retired professor in Galway, and I have been looking at one of these big boulder deposits, mega boulders, at a place called Annagh Head up in North Mayo, very, very spectacular, a trail of boulders coming right up into fields, out into fields, you know. And obviously if any sheep were there they were killed by these boulders. In fact a geologist died there and I think he may have died in one of these events. So we’re mapping that in great detail, going back each year and looking at the boulders and seeing if they’ve moved. We photograph them and measure them and so forth. And it appears to be storm events that move these things, big storm events. So I’ve been working on that, so it’s quite dissimilar from anything else I’ve ever done before [laughs], as was transtension and neotectonics. So I’m always casting around for new things to do outside the box that I normally work in. Hmm … Now where are we in terms of the story, if there is a story?

[1:20:30]

Can I take you back over some of that?

Of course, please.

When you were a lecturer for the very first time in Manchester, what was being said to students about continental drift at that time?

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Nothing.

And then as –

Nothing at all [laughs].

And then as lecturer at Cambridge, ’64 to ’70?

Not much. I would say virtually nothing until – this is not an egotistical statement. Dan McKenzie of course wasn’t – was in a non teaching department and I’m not – I don’t think he taught at that stage in ’67 because he was – I mean, he must have finished his PhD about the time that I went to Cambridge and I think he was probably a post doc. He spent a lot of time in America developing his ideas. So he wasn’t on the teaching staff so I think he wasn’t teaching at that stage. Had he been teaching, of course, he would have been teaching mobilism and so forth. And it wasn’t until I got back in ’67 from my Columbia Lamont experience that I started teaching it and then I taught it with a passion. And so ’67, bang, I really started teaching plate tectonics and related things in the – not ’67, sorry, ’68, because I was on sabbatical leave in ’67. So essentially until ’67 I would say in Cambridge nothing was taught. Manchester, certainly nothing was taught. And in many places nothing was taught until the early to mid ‘70s because people thought it was nonsense, you know, so [laughs] – it caught on, it could on rather late here in Britain compared with the States. I suppose in most American departments, by 1970 pretty well every department in America, even a small four year college, was teaching it.

[1:22:20]

And what did you then at this point in the – while a lecturer at Manchester and in Cambridge for the first time, what did you believe about issues of mobilism or fixism or continental drift or the history of the earth?

Do you know, like many people – like perhaps most people in geology, there were exceptions, Lester King in South Africa, I think Teddy Bullard. Even the great Tuzo

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Wilson was totally anti continental drift until the ‘60s, until he came out with some of his ideas of mega mobilism. And I – and – oh, there was one person who was very strongly pro continental drift in British geology right the way through and that was Sir Stanley [Sydney] Hollingworth, who was Professor at University College, London. He taught continental drift and he was a bit of an outcast as a result of that, you know. Many students said, oh, we don’t believe all this stuff, you know, it’s necromancy. But he said, ‘Look, they fit together and if you fit them together, you know, the mountain belts and so forth and the geology fits.’ He said, ‘It must be, it must be true.’ So he was a great adherent of continental drift and he knew Lester King very well. Lester King came over actually on a lecture tour in, I suppose, late ‘50s and he went around giving talks and everyone was shaking their heads, madness, madman. And yet he had all – he produced all the good evidence for continental fits and the opening of the South Atlantic and so forth. It was obvious in a sense but it – it didn’t – it didn’t appear on – as the expression goes, on people’s radar because it didn’t seem relevant to what they were doing. It sounds a strange thing to say that but I – most geologists were working on the continents. Many, many geophysicists were working at sea on research ships, like for example the Vema was the great ship that – the Conrad that – the two ships that Lamont had, and they were sailing the oceans of the world. Morris Ewing who got that whole thing going and Lamont going – after the war a lot of war technology began to be used in ships at sea for research after the war and I think that’s why – and also plate tectonics is much more obvious on the ocean floor than it is on the continents. But until that oceanographic work was done we didn’t know very much about the ocean floor. So it wasn’t surprising that plate tectonics as such didn’t come about, although continental drift was obvious. And strange thing is that people like Harold Jeffreys and – not Littleton, Littleton was an earth expander so he believed in continental drift in the sense that continents would part as the earth got bigger, not that they would move around at all but you’d simply expand the earth and they got bigger. But Harold Jeffreys, I mean, I remember talking to him when I was a young lecturer in Cambridge. I said, ‘Harold, but the continents fit together, they fit.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s an illusion of something, it must be an illusion, because, you know, you cannot plough – you can’t plough weak continents …’ ‘Cause continents are made of a lot of quartz, which is a very weak mineral. We know that the oceans sit down and are made of much, much denser

113 John Dewey Page 114 C1379/83 Track 4 rocks, stronger rocks full of the mineral olivine, peridot. So – and that sounded correct, you know, that you can’t plough – like ships, soft ships ploughing through a hard ocean floor. It didn’t make sense. And of course – but that’s not what happens. You’re simply pulling them apart and adding new material all the time. So, you know, Harold Jeffreys was dead right in the way he was – with the question framed in that way he was right, you couldn’t have continental drift, even though the continental edges fit together. And it’s amazing that at that stage, that nobody had figured out that maybe – you simply fill the hole between the continents and they separate [laughs]. If you do that of course they’ve got to be shortening and subducting elsewhere. But Harold was – he wasn’t sort of aggressive about it. He just said, ‘No, I don’t – it can’t happen, it can’t happen.’ So he went on to do his other thing, theory of the earth and all the clever things he was doing. A wonderful scientist, Harold Jeffreys, I mean, he did some – the book The Earth is a phenomenal book. It’s a marvellous book on the physics of the earth.

[1:26:40]

So at that time how did you account for mountains? Was it through things like – we were talking about yesterday –

Tectogenes and geosynclines? Yes, these mysterious semi religious phenomena [laughs] that the Dutch had talked – Van Bemmelen and company had talked about a great deal. But it sounds a weird thing to say again, I say that again, it sounds a weird thing to say but as geologists we tended to go around the continents, making maps and looking at local things. It was much more of a local phenomenon, you know. There were ore deposits. If you were interested in ore deposits it didn’t matter so much what was happening elsewhere, although now we know that exploration for ores in certain kinds of rocks is a regional global things, you know. You need to know the distribution in certain kinds of rocks. But people worked on a smaller scale because they were working in the continents. Continents are of course much more complicated geologically than are the oceans. The oceans are relatively simple, they’ve been made by one process basically, that sea floor spreading. So we now know it’s much more complicated than we thought, as everything turns out to be.

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There are all kinds of processes that slow spreading ridges involving pulling the mantle up along things we call extensional detachments with big mullions in them. So much of the sea floor is now made of basalt but is actually made of ultramafic rock, as in fact Harry Hess had suggested years ago. He said, ‘There must be a lot of serpentinite , you know, wettened ultramafic rock, on the sea floor.’ And indeed there is but it’s not formed in the way he suggested. But anyway, so the oceans are relatively simple, relatively simple, but the – and of course they’re all young. They’re all younger than 160 million years because they’ve been made by sea floor spreading in that time and the same volume – the same area of oceanic crust has been subducted in that time. So it’s a constant turnover machine with the continents, poor old continents, sort of – I like to say non geo degradable because they’re soft, they’re light and they simply won’t go down the hole. They simply won’t – it’s like trying to push down a cork into water, it bobs out. Even if you do push them down a subduction zone they tend to flow out by a thing we call channel flow, they come flying up again and back to the surface as great structures, thrust structures. So the continents are very complicated, immensely complicated, ‘cause they’ve got four and a half billion years of – well, four billion years of history are recorded in them. And they’ve been made and – continental crusts have been made and modified in lots of different ways, squashed around, deformed, whereas the ocean crust and lithosphere, once you’ve made it, is quite hard to deform. It’s pretty rigid, pretty rigid stuff. So that – here we are with the geologists, working on these very complicated rocks and hence – they’re so complicated – I mean, there are some belts, like the Appalachian Caledonian system, going through that you can study, but mostly they’re very complicated local stuff and that’s why geologists concentrate on local things, whereas the geophysicists were looking at things with a much broader brush in the oceans. You know, nobody had been down to the ocean floor to make a map, so they tended to use instruments and they had a much broader picture of the ocean floor. And that’s why plate tectonics came out of the oceans essentially, because they were lucky in a sense of – had they been forced – water had come off, the seas all evaporated and they had to go to the ocean floor to map them, I think it would have taken rather longer to get there because you would have had to – you’d be in the detail of the ocean floor, which actually locally is very detailed indeed and complicated, mostly basalt and flows and

115 John Dewey Page 116 C1379/83 Track 4 pillow lavas and these mullion structures and so forth, but nevertheless quite complicated.

So the fact that there was a depth of water separating the geophysicists from their object of study was an advantage then?

It was an advantage in the sense that it tended to homogenise things on a slightly bigger scale than local, because, you know, you had these magnetic stripes and – which Raff and Mason had discovered off the coast of Vancouver in the Juan de Fuca Plate, which then Vine and Matthews of course studied south of Iceland and realised that they were symmetrical about the ridge, an immense breakthrough. And that was the Reykjanes Ridge work of Vine and Matthews that got it going. There were two other scientists at the same time of course, Morley and Larochelle, and they wrote a rather difficult sort of complicated paper trying to describe that – very similar, same sort of process, but it was rejected by Nature and so Vine and Matthews got the credit, which they probably should have done ‘cause they wrote a – they wrote a very coherent sensible paper showing how they had thought it happened.

[1:31:24]

As a young lecturer then in geology, what was your view of geophysics, of marine geophysics as it was developing, if you had a view of it?

Didn’t really have a view of it. I was a continental geologist at that stage and my large scale integration stopped at the continental edges. In fact Walter Pitman will tell you a funny story. Walter’s a dear friend of mine, I go and see him in New York quite a lot. He’s now retired, he’s eighty-three, I think, now, something like that. And when I went to visit – went to the [Bob] Jastrow conference, this – Goddard’s conference in 1965, Marshall Kay took me up to Lamont, which I visited for the first time. He said, ‘I’d like you to meet some people like Walter – there’s some very clever young men up there like Walter Pitman, Lynn Sykes. They’re doing some wonderful work on oceanic rocks, these magnetic anomalies they’re discovering and their patterns on the ocean floor and the seismology on the transform faults by Lynn

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Sykes and so forth. And so I’d like you to meet these people.’ And so I went up for a day and we had lunch up there and I met Lynn Sykes and Walter Pitman. And Walter Pitman sort of showed me his maps of ocean floor magnetic anomalies and he said, ‘We’re separating like this and that’s moving this way and that’s moving this way. There’s something we call the subduction going on, we think, as well, like this.’ And I said, ‘Well …’ And apparently I said – I can’t actually remember saying this but I’m sure I did. I said, ‘Well Walter, that’s fantastically interesting but for god’s sake keep it in the oceans’ [laughs]. And Walter always remembers that, remembers that phrase that I used. I vaguely remember saying something like that because it was obviously – that process doesn’t happen on the continents. And it doesn’t, you know, continents are different. They’re the dross or the scum that’s left behind from all these other processes. So it was an interesting remark in one sense but it was very ill founded in another [laughs]. So you’ve got to put it all together, of course, integrate everything. So – but as I say, it didn’t – so the answer is to your question, it really does – it didn’t make any impact on us. I didn’t care about the oceans very much ‘cause it wasn’t obvious that they had anything to do with the continents and I was interested in the continents ‘cause I’m a geologist, go out in the field. You can’t go out in the field on the ocean floor. In Iceland you can of course, St Paul’s Rocks, Muvay, Ireland a few places. Tristan de Cunha, but mostly, mostly you can’t and so I was restricted to continental rocks, which in a way was probably a good thing, I think, you know, ‘cause I – as I said before, I learnt an awful lot of basic geology, simple basic geology, which became very useful when I started putting everything together.

This is a time when physics is sort of asserting itself in a number of subjects.

Yes.

It’s transforming glaciology in a way and we can see it –

Yes.

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Here in the earth sciences, and I wondered what you experienced of the views of physicists of geology, if you like, the sorts of things that physicists and geophysicists at this time were saying about geology.

Well, remember, there was sort of in a sense two kinds of geophysicists. I don’t mean sort of different subjects like magnetics and seismics and so forth, I mean, there were those geophysicists who went to sea and studied big scale processes, you know, bathymetry and they’d have sparker profiles, you know, send seismic waves down to the ocean floor and study the sediment layers and so forth. There were all those kinds of people who were looking at the – Maurice Ewing and his group at Lamont and Scripps and so forth and the National Institute of Oceanographic, which was at Godalming in those days with Tony Lawton running it, side scan sonar, a lot of instrumentation, and – wonderful stuff. But then there were another group of geophysicists who mostly worked on the continents, who were what I call practical useful geophysicists, who studied gravity of a variety of structures on the continents, magnetics and so forth. And they used their magnetics and gravity to basically understand geological structures. They weren’t doing rather – not abstract but bigger scale structures in the oceans ‘cause you can’t do that in the continent so much. I mean, there are big magnetic patterns but they tend to follow the geology. The geology dictates, as it does in the oceans but on a simpler sort of pattern. So there were those two kinds of geologists, people studying induced polarisation and hammer surveys and all those practical useful chaps on the continents, and then there were the oceanographic group who worked in the oceans and did rather different things. So I knew about the practical geophysicists’ work in the continents. I worked with them in many places doing little surveys here and there where I wanted to know what the structure – you could actually sometimes work out the structure of a deposit or a fold, something like that, from the geophysics. So I was unaware of what was going on until I went to Cambridge in ’64 and I got talking to Tuzo Wilson and Harry Hess. Then I realised that there was some interesting things going in the oceans. When of course Tuzo showed me that transform fault model then my eyes were opened and then I got very interested in what was going on in the oceans. And then, you know, gosh, within two years the whole thing exploded and developed. And I was lucky enough to be in it, you know, it was just pure serendipity. Had I been working in –

118 John Dewey Page 119 C1379/83 Track 4 stayed in Manchester, working on Western Ireland, I wouldn’t have been involved. I would have carried on working in the Scandinavian Caledonides and sort of dull old regional geology that – not dull but, you know, not sort of globally exciting.

[1:37:02]

And can you describe as much as you can remember of that Goddard Institute conference in New York in 1965, because I noticed in the chapter in Plate Tectonics you said that there were spectacular – as well as your own paper that you presented with Marshall Kaye, there were spectacular disputes between – I think you say Gordon MacDonald –

Gordon MacDonald, yes.

And Art Boucot on one side and Teddy Bullard and other people –

Dan McKenzie and so forth, yeah.

What – do you have any memories of the sort of detail of the discussion or the argument?

I can’t say I remember the detail very much but I remember the tone very well. Gordon MacDonald, geophysicist and – was rather like Harold Jeffreys. He said that his position was that there were – there was no known mechanism for doing – well, that’s not very helpful, is it? There’s no known mechanism for this happening. Mind you, there was no known mechanism for genetic transfer of material, you know, before Crick and Watson, so … [Laughs] That’s not an argument. But he said there was no known mechanism for it happening therefore it doesn’t happen. Or rather I think he put it that there was no reason for believing that it has happened. And then of course Bullard said, ‘Well, what about when you fit Africa and South America together, you know, this Precambrian belt comes out and goes into one in Brazil exactly and has the same history?’ He said, ‘Oh, just serendipity, just …’ Because they were so obsessed with mechanism. I think Jeffreys and MacDonald, they were

119 John Dewey Page 120 C1379/83 Track 4 so obsessed with not knowing what the mechanism was that they ignored the data and that’s one of the worst things you can do in science. If you don’t know how something happened, then to reject the data that says something must have happened is very serious indeed because it puts you down the wrong path forever. So there’s MacDonald saying that. And Art Boucot was saying that – even worse in a sense [laughs], although I know – I’ve got to know Art extremely well and worked with him in Arisaig, as I said, in Nova Scotia in ’64, the year before. Art was saying that – he worked on Devonian Silurian – erm … Yes, brachiopods, brachiopods and other fauna as well but mostly brachiopods, Silurian Devonian. And he said, ‘Look, if you look at the distribution of Silurian Devonian brachiopods around the present distribution of continents, it’s quite clear that those continents have not moved with respect to one another ‘cause the belts of brachiopods, you know, they make sense in modern terms. If you shove them around they’re not going to make sense.’ And nobody had an answer to that until they started looking in much more detail at distribution, they found that, you know, they were – he was lumping together all kinds of things that shouldn’t be lumped together. And in fact they do make immense sense [laughs] when you plot them on reconstructions of the Palaeozoic world. So Gordon was coming at it from a geophysical standpoint and Art was coming at it from a paleontological stratigraphical standpoint and, you know, both were wrong. And it was very annoying to Bullard ‘cause Bullard – I mean, I wouldn’t say annoying. I mean, Bullard was a very amiable, wonderfully amiable man. He would make a joke out of everything, you know. He said, ‘Well, I think you’re talking nonsense,’ he said. ‘We can see that it must have happened.’ You know, he said, ‘If – supposing we didn’t know about …’ Oh, he did say something. ‘Supposing we didn’t know about gravity and I push a bottle of ink off there and it falls to the floor. Because you don’t know how it happened it hasn’t happened?’ He said, ‘That’s different.’ ‘Why is it different? It’s exactly the same’ [laughs]. And I think that’s a very good argument. We still don’t know how gravity works but we know that – we don’t understand gravity properly but we do understand that gravity – you can measure its effects in great detail and see its effects, ever since Isaac Newton, I suppose.

I’ve been told that Teddy Bullard could be quite scathing about certain kinds of science. Did you –

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Oh yes.

Did you experience that?

He didn’t like – I think he didn’t like science that wasn’t quantifiable. When I say quantifiable I don’t mean that you had to have an equation for everything, although Teddy liked equations [laughs]. But he liked things to be – well, I remember saying to Teddy, I said, ‘You know, much of geology …’ He said, ‘A lot of geology is airy fairy sort of stuff and it’s opinion and so forth.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s a very rigorous – a rigorous binary system.’ ‘What do you mean?’ He said. I said, ‘You know, it’s,’ I said, ‘Left, right, up, down, forward back, grey, green and so forth. We have colour charts to measure colours, that’s a quantifiable measurement.’ And he began ‘Ooh, maybe …’ So I took him out on a field trip once actually to some quarries around Huntingdon and Cambridge one Saturday, we took our lunch out and I said, ‘Come and …’ ‘Oh okay, I’ll come if I must, I’ll come out.’ So I took him to chalk quarries and showed him the fossils and the flints and the bedding and so forth and what you could do and he began to say, ‘Ooh, quite interesting, quite interesting, yes. I see what you’re doing. It’s not as airy fairy as I thought,’ he said [laughs]. So he was a very – as I say, amiable but he could be quite scathing. If he saw somebody – if he saw somebody or heard somebody making an argument that was patent nonsense, just making an argument for – to prove themselves right, he would absolutely tear them apart. And yet for the young he was – for me he was – I know Dan McKenzie says the same thing, that immensely helpful, I mean, just very kind and would spend lots of time talking to you and encouraging and I derived a lot from Teddy. He taught – in many ways he taught me how to do research, to really ask questions. Don’t just go out and – I mean, going out and making geological maps is something the Survey do, it’s fine, but science is beyond that. You should be asking questions, how, why, how does it work, why does it work, where’s it going, what’s going to happen next and all those kinds of things, predicting the future. I mean, science should be a predictable thing. If you go around the corner and you see a particular structure you would expect to see the structure, you know, appearing on the other side of the outcrop, that’s scientific prediction. And if it doesn’t then something strange has happened, you

121 John Dewey Page 122 C1379/83 Track 4 know, a fault’s in the way or something of that sort. So Teddy was wonderful at asking questions and expecting all scientists in his sphere to ask questions and not simply collect data, which I think was very, very, very important and very good. So I’ve tried to do that all my life, I’ve tried to ask questions, you know. The thing I’m working on at the moment is the – with Jack Casey, one of my old students, who’s a Professor in the University of Houston in Texas. We work together very closely on ophiolites and we’ve been worried for a long time about an interesting problem. When an ophiolite complex, which is a piece of oceanic crust and mantle – great slices of this stuff are pushed up onto continental edges, thrust up. It’s called obduction, the thrust obducted onto – instead of – most oceanic crust goes down in subduction zones, that’s called subduction, and Bob Coleman coined this term obduction for meaning things – instead of going down, it goes up on top, on top of a continental edge instead of going underneath it. And this process of obduction is very interesting and how do you do it. I mean, how do you take pieces of oceanic crust and mantle out of the oceans and raise them up many kilometres to thrust them up into continental edges? Well, in fact it turns out that’s not how it happened, we were asking the wrong – we were framing the question the wrong way. Miyashiro, the chap I mentioned, the Japanese petrologist who we hired in Albany, realised that chemically and petrologically ophiolite complexes were not like oceanic ridges. That is they were chemically much more akin to island arcs. They have a particular kind of rock called boninite in them from the Bonin Islands south of Japan in the Marianas Island Arc and these are rocks that are much more akin to andesites. They look they’re pillowed basalts, they’re pillowed, they look like basalts, but in fact they’re high silica high magnesium, very hot, very low pressure andesites, wet andesites. And these things have been mistaken for basalts all over the world until the boninite concept came in. And it turns out that ophiolite complexes have a large component of boninite in them, which oceanic ridges don’t. And yet, and yet if you look at the structure in ophiolite complex, you know, you’ve got pillow lavas, extrusions, then dykes coming in that feed basalt into those pillows. You’ve then got something called gabbro, which is a deeper Plutonic rock, which is equivalent in chemistry to the stuff above formed in a magma chamber, and beneath that you’ve got the mantle, the residual mantle from which all those basaltic rocks have been stewed out to make the crust. So you’ve got an eight kilometre crust with mantle underneath, depleted mantle

122 John Dewey Page 123 C1379/83 Track 4 underneath. And ophiolites have – and oceanic crust in the oceans have that structure. We know from seismology geophysical measurements that that sort of structure, the eight kilometre structure, is the same as we have in ophiolites yet the chemistry is different. So you’ve got to – so we started thinking, well, how do you get sea floor spreading associated with an island arc in some way? Well, there are places in island arcs that are back arc basins, intra arc basins, where sea floor spreading arcs are ripped apart, maybe it’s that or maybe it’s in a fore arc. It turns out that it’s almost certainly in the fore arc of island arcs, where sea floor spreading has been going on very close to an island arc. Anyway, so that stuff becomes much easier to abduct because if you have a subduction zone and you’ve got an ophiolite in the fore arc of an island arc and a continent comes along like this and tries to get out of the subduction zone, the natural thing is for the fore arc to be thrust up onto the continent. And that’s how we think it happens. But that’s just the beginning of it. There are all kinds of sub questions and difficulties associated, one of which is something that happens at the base of most big ophiolite complexes like the Bay of Islands complex in Newfoundland, the Oman – the Semail Complex in the Oman. In New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, there’s a big ophiolite there. They have associated with their basins – the basal structure is something we call a metamorphic oriole and that metamorphic oriole is made up of oceanic rocks that look like those of the oceanic crust of ridges. So the question is how – you’ve got this thin sheet, sometimes a couple of hundred metres thick, running along the base of an ophiolite, so how have you – and it’s up at something like – oh, temperatures up to almost 1,000 degrees centigrade, it’s been very, very hot, but most of all, most important, very high pressure, pressures appropriate to thirty-five kilometres. Now ophiolites are only about ten to twelve kilometres thick so that so called dynamo thermal oriole at the base of the ophiolite cannot have been formed in that position. The pressure is too shallow. It was formed down here, we think in the subduction zone. There’s the subduction going down here and somehow you detached those rocks that went down the subduction zone and got hot at high pressures. You somehow detached that to form the base of the ophiolite. And we’ve been working on that problem of how it happened. We think that the subduction zone flattens and they become attached to the base of the ophiolite in some way. But that’s a mysterious process we don’t fully understand. So I’m working on that at the moment and it’s a very, very interesting

123 John Dewey Page 124 C1379/83 Track 4 problem. So from that all kinds of questions have arisen, how does the stuff get off there and attach itself at a much higher level to the base of the ophiolite? And we’re working on that or thinking about that. And the way we work in the modern world much more is this. People – I think when I was working in the ‘60s people did their own thing. They’d squirrel away themselves in a room and they’d be working away at their rocks and so forth. You’d talk to other people a bit at coffee and so forth. But nowadays we’ve got a problem like this, say, god, who can help us with this around the world [phone rings]. I’ll just quickly get that.

[Recording paused - 1:49:08]

What we tend to do now in the modern world much more – I mean, there are geologists who work by themselves of course but I think there’s a much greater tendency, given the fact that communication around the world is so much easier nowadays through the internet, through emails and so forth, we tend to – in this case for example there’s a man called Taras Gerya in the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, ETH in Zurich, who’s absolutely – one of the world’s great – a Russian who’s one of the world’s great experts in modelling convected upper mantle flow. And obviously this problem we have of attaching these rocks from the subduction zone onto the base of an ophiolite involves somehow pulling that slab up and attaching it and some suction processes going on. So we’ve now invited Taras to come to work with us on this problem. He thinks he may have a solution to it. So, you know, you can do that much more easily now. And you can do it by email, I can talk to people – you know, or I can phone of course, you can do that but it’s expensive, but I can much more easily email somebody in California, I’ve got an answer back in five minutes, phenomenal. And so you can network very much more and I think science is improving enormously as a result of that kind of networking, where people really pull together in – not so much teams but they – well, they’re teams in a sense, but the common interest in a problem and to solve a problem is much broader than one’s own little – one’s own tiny world. So I do a lot of networking now around the world. If I have a problem I immediately start thinking who knows about this and I simply fire off a question to that person. Sometimes they fire an answer back and, oh, thanks very much. Sometimes they’ll say, gosh, I’ve

124 John Dewey Page 125 C1379/83 Track 4 been working on this, do you want to do some joint work on this. And so it’s wonderful, you know. The danger of it is you have sort of fifteen projects going [laughs] and you don’t do any of them, you never – so I tend to be a bit of a butterfly, working from project to project. But I’m trying to learn my lesson in my advanced years and trying to – you know, trying to finish off a project before I really start another.

[1:51:12]

What was the effect on your work of having – of becoming married on the one hand and having children?

Ah … erm, sounds selfish in a way but not very much [laughs]. I mean, obviously one – you spend time with family, otherwise you’d be spending it in the lab working or playing sport or – one of those two or painting or playing with model trains or whatever. But I found it – it really didn’t interfere with my life very much. I spent a lot of time with the family, taking – we used to go walking together and cycling as the kids grew up and so forth and helping with their homework and all those kinds of things you do. But, you know, life should be very full and you shouldn’t be bored. You should never sit down and say what can I do, you know. You see a lot of people sitting down, oh, I’m bored, I’ve got nothing to do. God, get off your backside and start – go for a run or – I feel like Dr Bevan, saying you must play squash or something [laughs]. But, you know, just do something. Bullard said that. He said, ‘Look, if you – in science the most important thing is to do something, you know. Don’t sort of cast around, oh, shall I do this, shall I do that. Just do something, anything and it’s bound to – in science it’s bound to be interesting if you approach it in the right way.’ So the family were like that. I mean, I found that – I have two kids, a daughter, Anne Penelope, who’s now forty-nine, and a son, Jonathan Peter, who’s now forty-seven, and they’re wonderfully dependent now but they’re still dependent emotionally, of course they are, and you never – your children never become completely dissociated from you. But as young kids they were terrific, you know. They were good sports and we were trying to bring them up in a sporting kind of way and be interested in painting and music and science and everything, and they have

125 John Dewey Page 126 C1379/83 Track 4 retained a great interest in all those kinds of things even though they do very different things. And I found frankly that – I’d come home at night and you’d have dinner with the family and so forth, but – I’d work in the evenings, I’d go to my desk and do some work when the kids had gone to bed. But it didn’t affect my productivity at all. In many ways it stimulated me, you know. Young minds to talk to is a good thing, you know.

And how did Molly combine children with work, ‘cause she was –

I think it is tougher for women. In those days it was tougher certainly. I think nowadays that people distribute – I mean, I did the best I could to help with, you know, housework and vacuuming and all the things that need to be done in the house. We shared that, we really did, I did a lot of help. I think I did, I’d like to think I did [laughs]. And cooking is one of my great loves and I did a lot of cooking. But I think women have a harder deal and I think they have a – I think they do work harder than men. I think women are much more dedicated and committed and – ‘cause they have things with the family that – you know, things that are regarded as sort of the wife’s jobs to do, like changing nappies, although I think I did change nappies as well. I think I did most things but maybe not as much as I should have done, you know [laughs]. Gardening, I suppose, digging holes in the garden and stuff like that. But I can’t remember – I can’t remember at any time saying they were a hindrance. And maybe it’s selfish in this sense, that if there was a conference in Australia or a conference in North America, I’d simply take off and Molly would be left with the kids. So in a sense, you know, that was tougher on her than on me ‘cause I was going off doing my thing and leaving all the work to Molly. I don’t know what one does about that. It’s very, very difficult.

[1:55:00]

We’ve got a sense sort of later in life of how you were able to combine two academic careers, because you’ve told us about decisions about where to go next and it seemed like a consideration was always, well, what could Molly do while you were doing that, ‘cause you talked about these other departments that she – that you’d sort of made

126 John Dewey Page 127 C1379/83 Track 4 contact with before you accepted the post and things like that. But as a young woman how did her career develop? In terms of this interview, we’ve left her when I think she was doing a degree in …

Botany, an undergraduate, yes.

Then what happened?

Yes, degree in botany. Then she did a PhD in plant pathology at Imperial College as I was doing my – but she took three years over hers, so I went up to Manchester in the job and she remained in London finishing her PhD off and we got married at the end of that, her third year doing research, just after she had her PhD awarded. And then we went off to Manchester and she worked initially in – she got a job in the old – in what was then called UMIST. It was the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. It was the other Manchester University. They’re now fused into a single – I think it’s the biggest university in Britain now but they were – it was a very interesting place. She went into a department that was the Department of Brewing [laughs]. It was an amazing department, amazing department. And she worked with – I think it was Professor Eddy ran the place and she worked as an assistant to him. He was working on fungi, I think. I’m not sure what – something quite similar to what she’d been working on. So she worked for most of the time until the kids arrived – the first kid arrived in ’63. So she worked for two years in UMIST and I think enjoyed it and derived a lot from it in this Department of Brewing. The Department of Brewing is amazing because every Friday night they were compelled by law to pour the results of their brewing for the week down the drain [laughs]. So all this wonderful beer – apparently they made some phenomenal beers, experimental beers of all kinds, you know, and they’d pour this stuff down the drain. And apparently they worked out that – or they saw one Friday evening, all the indigents from Manchester, all the sort of down and outs, would come with jugs and they’d wait for this stuff to – oh, it’s coming, and they’d put a jug underneath [laughs] and they’d take away jugs of beer. Very clever. So anyway, so yes, she worked there. And then when we went to Cambridge I think it was tougher, ‘cause the kids were young and she – she became a housewife basically for a while. And I think she kept – she did

127 John Dewey Page 128 C1379/83 Track 4 keep an interest in what she – in botany and she subscribed to journals and read them and so forth. But when we were in Cambridge I think it was a lot tougher in retrospect, you know. I was probably selfish at the time and, you know, doing my thing and enjoying it as a young lecturer in Cambridge, developing new courses. That was when I started teaching structural geology for the first time, which was wonderful, and I developed what I thought was a very good course in structural geology. Anyway, she was at home with the kids. And then in – and that takes us through to the end of the ‘60s. She came on sabbatical leave, the kids came on sabbatical leave with me, of course, to Lamont in that ’67 year and spent that lovely five months in Columbia. And – but again Molly was – again, she wasn’t employed at that stage, so – but she had the young kids to look after, so – and she was doing that and I was doing my thing in geology. Then we decided to go – I was offered this job in the States and we discussed it. We were on sabbatical leave in Newfoundland at the time funnily enough. I spent a very, very nice six months in Canada in 1970. I was invited to take a commonwealth travelling scholarship, which I accepted, and they gave me a nice salary. I think it was 10,000 or something like that for the six months [coughs], which seemed a hell of a lot of money to me at that stage, being on a British salary [laughs]. And we went on a big tour of the US, the west of the United States, and I got a taste for America then. I got very sort of excited by meeting lots of people up and down California, Oregon and Washington on the trip and went out on field trips all over California with local geologists and so forth. It was wonderful. And then we came back and spent – came back to Newfoundland and I gave a course there in plate tectonics on sabbatical and that was well attended, and I carried on working on some of the Newfoundland rocks with the people there. And while I was there I got offered this job in Albany and Molly and I discussed it extensively. And I was getting sort of a little tired of Cambridge. I tend to get a bit footloose and fancy free every few years, after I’ve been in a place for five, ten years, you know. So anyway, I thought, gosh, a change in life would be nice, let’s just go to the States for a while. Went there for ten years. And we discussed it and eventually we said, okay, let’s do it. And then when we arrived in Albany, the first year Molly really had cabin fever. She was in a strange land, in a strange house. It was a lovely old farmhouse we’d bought in upstate New York, very nice indeed, swimming pool, lots of land, it was very beautiful. And the kids loved it and had lots of friends and so forth. Molly

128 John Dewey Page 129 C1379/83 Track 4 was a bit starved of company, ‘cause I’d go out all day to work and the kids would go to school and she’d be stuck, you know, in the house. And on reflection – anyway, eventually she got a job in the local community college, teaching, and she taught there for I think a year or so, taught microbiology and sort of things and fungi and so forth, I think microbiology to nurses. And then she got a job, a much better job, in the Junior College of Albany, which was actually quite a nice little college, and she taught there for really quite a number of years. And she taught microbiology to nurses, ‘cause it was right by the big Albany Medical Centre and the nurses were looking for microbiology courses and so forth, so she taught this really quite super course in microbiology. And the nurses, all the nurses would come to that. So she was enjoying – she enjoyed that enormously. She enjoyed junior college very much. So that was a much happier time. And then when we moved back to Durham it didn’t – it sort of worked okay. I mean, she talked to the Professor of Botany, who was really not very helpful and he put – typical, he put up all the barriers, you know, oh, there’s a problem here and a problem here and so forth. But eventually she got a sort of – a research position and got some money to do her research. Then of course came to Oxford in 1986 and things were very different. She went to see the professor – Professor Whatley, who’s Professor of Botany, a great, great chap, and he said, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘What you’re doing sounds incredibly interesting.’ And she’d learnt about monoclonal antibodies at that stage and she realised this is the way to go in her research – a bit in Durham too I think actually. But they gave her space and she managed to get money through grants and things like that and really started out on a research career from ’86 onwards. I mean, it’s astonishing. So for the last twenty- five years, you know, she’s really been on top of her area and become, you know, internationally very distinguished. So anyway, this worked very well in Oxford and then we decided to go to – I got tired of Oxford, as one does [laughs], and I was offered all these jobs around the States, took the job in Davis and we talked about that. And as I said, we’d been on a sabbatical leave there for a while a few years beforehand and she got to know the enologist – enology and viticulture people and they welcomed her with open arms. I went into the geology department, she went into that and she was almost immediately incredibly well funded. So she really fell on her feet there tremendously well. And in the years since, what, since 2001, she really has become the principle figure in her field in the world, quite astonishing. I mean – well,

129 John Dewey Page 130 C1379/83 Track 4 not astonishing, a very clever woman, but it’s worked extremely well. Now we’re back here, in quotes retired, she still goes in and she has space in the plant sciences department. She works with people still there and does bits and pieces of research and – and it’s a different field, daylilies, she works on daylilies and all kinds of other things now. So I think she’s pretty happy. She likes gardening, she does that as well. So yes, her career sort of developed much later than mine but it developed into a pretty substantial career once she got going. It makes one think, what could she have done if she started when I did, you know. One never knows.

[2:04:12]

Yesterday you talked a little bit about the relationship between geology and art and I was curious about – at any stage really, when you were doing your PhD fieldwork or when you were doing fieldwork as a young lecturer or when you were doing fieldwork in – you know, abroad. Did you take paints with you out into the field? If we could see you in the field then, how would we know that you were doing geology and how would we know that you were doing maybe something else, sketching for pictures or painting? So to what extent did the two run alongside each other or did you make separate trips to do, a, geology and, b –

No, no, they were together. I had a little box of watercolour paints, a tiny one with little brushes, you know, and so forth, and I would – and sometimes I’d be up in the mountains and I saw a great view, a wonderful view with some geology and bedding and so forth, gosh, that would make a nice sketch. So I’d then simply sit down and take out – and I actually did them in my field notebook. Still got those somewhere, yeah, at home somewhere, you know. Fresh page, I’d make the sketch, perhaps a little bit of watercolour, a few washes on it, just a little sketch of the scene, and then if I really liked it, if I really liked it, I’d maybe work it up when I got home, you know, sort of reconstruct it from that little sketch, do it on a larger piece of Whatman paper, you know, and so forth. I did about four or five of those, something of that sort, which are hanging in the house now. So they were thoroughly integrated. And of course, you see, when you’re doing fieldwork in geology, remember that one is doing a lot of sketching anyway, you know. Outcrops have structures in them and you make

130 John Dewey Page 131 C1379/83 Track 4 detailed drawings of outcrops. These are the days in which we had old fashioned photography, no digital cameras, so film was expensive, relatively expensive, so you didn’t want to waste a lot of film. I mean, you’d take a shot of – the reason I didn’t take lots of pictures of scenery when I was doing my sketches – nowadays I would simply take a – I’d do that sketch, plus I’d take a shot of it and work it all up when I got back using – but then we were using film and I didn’t have a lot of money [laughs]. I was living on about £5 a week, I think, in the field, something of that sort, which was enough but I didn’t have lots of cash to waste on lots and lots of film. So it was – you had to sketch in your field notebook and I did a lot of sketches. Nowadays I would take many more pictures, photographs, ‘cause you can wipe them out and start again, you know. Digital photography is wonderful. And every outcrop I go to I take maybe, you know, fifty pictures. Then I’d maybe take one or two pictures but I’d sketch lots of things in my notebook, little drawings of folds and faults and this particular structure, sometimes a drawing of a landscape, sometimes a bit of watercolour on it. So it was very heavily integrated in those days by sort of – by force. You had to integrate it that way because digital photography hadn’t been invented.

How then was a sketch, a geological sketch, different from a sketch that you might do purely as a – you know, when you were sort of self consciously doing art? How was that sketch different from the sketch that you were doing when you were –

Mm. I think – I suspect – well, I don’t suspect, I’m certain that many of the sketches that I drew in my notebook, watercolour sketches, had some geological content. I suspect – I’m sure that none of them, none of them were just a beautiful picture, you know, oh, that’s a nice scenery, you know, piece of scenery, that anybody might admire. It was always something in it geological. I mean, I remember being up on the Shehy Mountains in the west of Ireland, I was camping up there, ‘cause it’s quite remote, some of the country, and, you know, you’re looking at over 2,000 feet of climbing up to the tops of the hills. And you didn’t want to do that every day. I mean, you know, you’re living in a village at the bottom, oh, a big climb before I start work. So what I did, I’d go out for a week at a time with food and find a little tarn up in the mountains, camp by the lake, so I had a good supply of water, and I had a tiny

131 John Dewey Page 132 C1379/83 Track 4 little bottle of whisky so I had a little tot every night. I’d just allow myself a little tongue watering every night with a bit of whisky. And I would sit and I smoked a pipe in those days and I’d sit and have my little tot of whisky and have my pipe, looking out over a glorious sunset to the west over the sea. I mean, it was quite idyllic, it was very nice. So I used to go up there for a week at a time very often and map up on top, you know. You’d just wander around and do your mapping and then come down for a couple of days doing some work in the lower ground, and that worked extremely well. And I remember being once up in the Shehys camping by a tarn, a little tarn, looking out to the west and I saw something I’d not noticed before. I was looking out to a village called Lewisburg and beyond to an island out in the sea called Clare Island and I saw a structure, you know. The sun was beginning to set and the light was exactly perfect to see a fault line that I’d not noticed before running through, very distinctive. So I immediately made a sketch and a little watercolour sketch of that. So that was done for strictly geological reasons. And so, yes, I mean, all my sketches were pretty well of that kind. They were relating to a beautiful piece of geology rather than a beautiful piece of scenery.

Does the watercolour have a value in a geological sketch in some way then?

Oh yes, oh yes it does. Colours of landscape – colours, you know, different kinds of green – on one side in fact – there was a lot of gorse on one side and little yellow – the gorse came out on this side and there were fields, green, paler green fields on this side. So yeah, the watercolour was very important actually. And just emphasising, reminding me like of the colour contrast across the fault. And some of the rocks are red above and some are green below, you know, things like that. So yeah, I mean, I’ve done a lot of geological sketching subsequently and I – the other person in history who did a lot of wonderful geological sketching was my bette noir, Geikie, Sir Archibald Geikie, who’s a very good artist. I went down to give a talk on his life actually at a meeting in Haslemere some months ago and it was really lovely actually, I think back in early May. The meeting was held in the Haslemere Museum, beautiful little museum in the heart of Sussex, and they had – in the Haslemere Museum they’ve got a wonderful Geikie collection, all his notebooks and – because he went to live in Haslemere when he retired. He built a house in Haslemere and became sort of

132 John Dewey Page 133 C1379/83 Track 4 very closely tied up with the museum. He left all his stuff, all his geological stuff, his hammer, everything, it’s all in the museum. And he left most of his sketches, geological sketches and they are lovely, absolutely lovely. They are very geological. And Geikie obviously, when he went out to look at a landscape and look at a piece of geology, drew it as a geological phenomenon. There’s one picture of Glenrosa in Goat Fell in Aran, it’s just almost like a map on its side. And you can see the structure in the granite, you can see the structure of the Highland boundary fault coming through, very, very good. I mean, he was a very, very good artist. And on many of his walks in the Highlands he would stop and sketch, make very detailed sketches of the geology, which actually are some of his best legacy really. His drawings are very, very good. So I think a lot of people do that. John Ramsay, the structural geologist now retired in France, his notebooks are filled with beautiful, beautiful sketches and quite a number of my geological friends actually do that kind of thing. There are several Swiss geologists who are very, very good artists and their notebooks are filled with beautiful little pencil sketches, sometimes coloured with crayon. Mattauer, who died recently, was a French geologist who drew the most wonderful things in his notebooks. So I think a lot of geologists do this actually. It’s in one’s nature to try to elucidate structures and the scenery and so forth. Scenery means much more I think to a geologist than most other people, maybe botanists and zoologists, but I think geologists in particular ‘cause, you know, you’re looking at – the foundations of the scenery is geological by definition. So I think most people appreciate that in my experience.

[2:12:54]

Why do you describe in one place the fieldwork in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in 1964 as the most critical event in your geological life?

Well, most critical event for several reasons. I think it was getting me out of the west of Ireland, where I’d been working all this time, and Ireland generally, I worked in Waterford. I told you I did this general synthesis of the volcanic rocks of Ordovician Age for the Irish Survey, but that involved the detailed mapping of them in various places. This was the first time that I’d spread my wings and gone across an ocean into

133 John Dewey Page 134 C1379/83 Track 4 the same mountain belt, something that was clearly the same mountain belt, but broken off and gone away by continental drift. And so it was – that sensation of arriving in Canada in a new world sort of – it invigorated me enormously. I’ve had several times in my life I’ve been reinvigorated. Going to America in 2001 to California, that was a massive reinvigoration in teaching and research and – you know, I think one should do this occasionally. In fact when people retire I think they should go somewhere completely different and do something completely different for a while. But anyway, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, that was one reason. Secondly, same sorts of rocks but not the same rocks. And it was very stimulating being thrown into two environments, one in Newfoundland, one in Nova Scotia, where I had to start from scratch, where the map – hardly any maps had been made before. And I was really starting from scratch. In the west of Ireland there’d been mapping in the 1870s, quite good mapping by Kinahan and Kilroe, Leonard, Symes and all those people, working under Geikie funnily enough when he was director of the Survey. And he – and working in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland opened my eyes to a new kind of geology, you know, a continuation of but a new kind of geology, and also it sort of woke me up to a new world, arriving in a new continent and meeting new people. Art Boucot I knew a little before that. But arriving there and working with a whole bunch of Americans – there was Dick Bambach, who was a palaeontologist, Fred Zeigler, who has now retired from Chicago, a very distinguished palaeontologist, Stuart McKerrow who I worked with a bit before. But it was a brand new environment in two ways, a, the continent and, b, the geology. It was very exciting.

How did fieldwork differ in this landscape or these landscapes compared to the ones you were used to in Ireland?

Newfoundland, very different. I mean, in Western Ireland, Western Ireland, there’s much more inland exposure. You’re up – there’s a lot of mountain geology, you know, really mountain geology and you can map rocks all through the Shehy Mountains and the Connemara, the Twelve Pins of Connemara. You can make geological maps inland beautifully. In Newfoundland you can’t. Well, you can but, I mean, it’s much more difficult because it’s all covered and trees. I mean, it’s trees

134 John Dewey Page 135 C1379/83 Track 4 and bog, pitcher plants and sphagnum moss and so forth, wet bog up to the needs, I mean, hardly any outcrop. Occasionally you’d get one little outcrop here, the next one’s a mile away. Mapping under those circumstances, even finding the outcrop, is difficult, whereas on the coast it’s the inverse. The coast is absolutely marvellous, perfect virtually continuous exposure. So you’re not making geological maps as such, you’re making geological traverses and sections along bits of coastline, recording relationships. You can make maps in places, like in a place called Ming’s Bight where Jack Bird and I made a map of the ophiolite years ago. In Western Newfoundland you can – where you have the ophiolite rocks exposed, plants don’t like growing on those rocks, they’re starved of calcium, so they’re very bare, just bare rocks, so you can make maps inland. But that’s rather rare in Newfoundland, just Western Newfoundland, a few places in the north. Most of Newfoundland is quite awful, I mean, for geology [laughs]. Wonderful geology but not very well exposed. So that was the great difference, it was coast versus mapping inland, and that was again a great experience, working on coast sections and working from a boat. We had a – we started off by getting local fishermen to take us out and we paid them for a day’s – you know, days out, and you’d jump from the boat to the rock, you know, and then you’d spend an hour or two, and he’d go off fishing for a while working on the coast and he’d come back and you’d go on a bit further. But eventually we started buying our own boats. We didn’t but Zodiacs in those days. I wish I’d known about Zodiacs, rubber boats, you know, big inflatable rubber boats, which I’ve used in Norway with a Norwegian geologist. They’re wonderful because you come up against a rock and they give way, you know, give and you can go right – whereas a hard boat is constantly banging into the rock. So we bought aluminium sort of boats, which were much more hardy. Wooden boats tend to split and, you know, they’re – you had to keep on corking them and making sure they were okay. But the aluminium boats were wonderful and with an outboard motor. We tootled round the coast all over the place for many, many years, all through the ‘70s. It was quite wonderful. And did a lot of geology, you know, really mapped enormous sections of coastline. Plus we did this work on the ophiolites in the west with my students.

[2:18:23]

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At the time that the fishermen were taking you out, did you get any sense of how they viewed you and what you were doing?

Very interesting question, that. The answer is yes. We were working at a place called Sop’s Arm in – I think it was when I was still in Cambridge actually, before I went to the States. And I had a student – I had several students who worked in Newfoundland. They were Brian Lock, who’s now in Louisiana, Martin De Wit, who’s now professor in Cape Town, Dutchman, a wonderful hockey player and squash player, and Bill Kidd, who’s just retired from the University of Albany, and a man called John Bursnall, who’s now teaching, or maybe he’s just retired, but he was teaching in a small college in upstate New York. So many of them went off and they went into different countries and so forth. And those four students were working with me in Newfoundland. Then I had another bunch of students when I was working – when I was in Albany, four or five people worked on the ophiolites with me and they were equally good. They were very, very good indeed. So I had some very good students and – where was I getting here? Sorry, I got a bit lost.

I asked you about how the fishermen viewed you –

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. Brian Lock – I was working with Brian Lock and Stuart McKerrow. Stuart McKerrow from Oxford was over and we went up to Brian’s – it was while I was still in Cambridge in 1968 or ’69, I suppose it was. And we went to see Brian Lock in his field area, to help him for a week or so, and we were out on a boat one day in Brian’s – he actually – we bought him a boat from the grant and he had an aluminium boat and we – beautifully little tiny outport, idyllic. It was a lovely day, sunny day. The sea was like a millpond. And we were chugging on the coast and we stopped off and we found a wonderful place where there were some superb fossils, I mean, really beautiful brachiopods in these Silurian, calcareous Silurian sandstones. And we said, well, let’s have lunch here. It was about twelve, one o’clock. So we got out and got our sandwiches out that the lady had given us who we were staying with, Mrs Obadiah Ricks, amazing. And we got out onto the rocks and looked at them and we were sitting down having our lunch, and then we suddenly heard the put, put, put, put, put, put of a single – we called them one lungers, a diesel

136 John Dewey Page 137 C1379/83 Track 4 engine, a sort of put, put, put, put, the boat came round. And he saw us and the boat came over and he said, ‘Oh, how are you doing?’ We said, ‘We’re fine.’ He said, ‘What are you doing?’ So I said, ‘We’re looking at the rocks.’ ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ And so he said, ‘Ooh,’ he said, ‘Can I have a look?’ So he pulled his boat up and tied it and jumped out. And he said, ‘Well, what are you looking at then?’ And Stuart McKerrow said, ‘We’re looking at these fossils.’ ‘Fossils?’ he said. He looked at them, ‘Them shells, they’re shells.’ And Stuart said, ‘Gosh, great.’ ‘Yes, they’re shells.’ And he said, ‘Gosh, they’re not – they’re quite like some of the modern shells, aren’t they? But they’re in the rock. That must mean the sea was up here at one time.’ And Stuart thought, my goodness, incredible, you know [laughs], the guy’s developing a geological knowledge. And so Stuart said, ‘Yes, yes.’ And then he said, ‘How long ago was that?’ And Stuart said – he wanted to be accurate. He said, ‘About 435 million years ago.’ And the guy blanched and he turned to me and said, ‘He be an atheist then’ [laughs]. That was wonderful. So that’s my only real experience of how they viewed us. But the locals were very helpful and I think they were totally disinterested in what we were doing. They thought we were mad, why would anybody get up and knock bits off rock and so forth [laughs]. All they knew, they were getting ten quid a day to take us around in a boat, you see, so that was fine. But that was the one experience we had of a local fisherman. It was wonderful. There were several other incidents like that but that was by far the best one, the best one of the lot.

[2:22:44]

Thank you. I wondered how you – at this time you went – you were able to get grants for this work, because I suppose a lot of people will have a modern understanding of how you go about getting money, where you have to write a detailed proposal and sort of claim value for certain sorts of things. What was it necessary to do in order to get – I think you got a NERC grant to go to Newfoundland in ’67, for example.

Yes. That’s right.

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And you mentioned earlier a DSIR grant. How did you have to sort of frame what you wanted to do in order to get money to do it for this time?

It was very different in those days to modern times. Nowadays you’ve got to – you’ve got to sort of make it sound very sexy. You’ve got to make it sound as if it’s desperately important, you’re testing – you must be testing a hypothesis, you see, which in those days people did of course as well. And then also you’ve got to say how is it important for Britain for wealth creation, quality of life, all those sorts of things [laughs], much – it’s pretty difficult to justify a lot of science in that way. All you can say is that a lot of science is random and when Pasteur was doing his work he had no idea that it was going to be important in what it eventually became important in. So – and that’s true of a lot of science, it’s a sort of random walk, you know. You can’t design science very easily to be important to the quality of life and wealth creation. So in those days you – like today you had to write a proposal, so I wrote a proposal. It wasn’t a very long one, I don’t think. It wasn’t, no. Nowadays they write these giant things, certainly in America. It takes them a month to write one of these things. I think I knocked it off in a weekend, saying why I wanted to go to Newfoundland and why it was important and what I was trying to do. I was trying to work out a complete cross section – a ridiculous thing to say but it seemed to work okay then. I wanted to go across Newfoundland and look at the coast section and try to work out the amount of shortening that the rocks had undergone during the orogenic process that formed the Appalachians. And in so doing you’d have to look at all the structures and so forth, so it’s a bit of an impossible task anyway. So I got the cash and bought a Land Rover. I think it was £4,500, which doesn’t seem much these days but it kept me going for three years, you know. And buying – I think the vehicle cost £700 or something of that sort, you know [laughs]. And, you know, I – when I was mapping in Newfoundland those first few years in the late ‘60s, the accommodation and food was unbelievably cheap. There was a lady called Mrs Wheeler in Summerford, I remember her very well, and I went along. Somebody had said, oh, Mrs Wheeler takes people in. And she was a lovely woman and her food was phenomenal, wonderful sort of basic – lots of fish and reindeer and moose and – incredible. So I went along to Mrs Wheeler and said, ‘Could you take me?’ She said, ‘Yep,’ she said, ‘Dollar a bed, dollar a meal’ [laughs]. So I got my bed for a dollar,

138 John Dewey Page 139 C1379/83 Track 4 each meal – bed for a dollar and each meal cost me a dollar, so I was living on basically three dollars a day, which is – you know, which is £1 a day basically, extraordinary, extraordinary. So I mean, I had plenty of cash to do my research. So funding wasn’t a problem. And then also when I was in Cambridge Oliver Bulman called me in one day, the chap who’d hired me, and said, ‘Oh John,’ he said, ‘Good news.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’ He said, ‘I’ve managed to find you £4,000.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Oh yes, a chap from Shell came round the other day and said is there any research you want funding, we’ve got a bit of spare cash and we’re quite happy to give you some money.’ So he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘[Inaud] blah, blah, blah. There’s a young chap called Dewey who goes off around the Appalachians and he’s looking for extra cash to hire more students and so forth and support them.’ So he said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘How much do you want?’ ‘I’m sure he could use a few thousand.’ ‘How about four?’ He wrote a cheque for £4,000 [laughs]. So I thank Oliver Bulman greatly for that. So while I was in Cambridge I had £8,000 for that period and, you know, it was a hell of a lot of money in those days and supported anything I wanted to do, you know, conferences and travel and so forth. So I used the NERC money for, if you like, legitimate research per se and I used the other money to send students – if a student comes and says I want to go to a conference, easy, here’s 100 quid, away you go, you know. It was very nice. But then I went to Albany and when I went to Albany money – it was – the funding system was very different. It was the NSF, National Science Foundation funding system. I got a bit of seed money from the university, not very much, a few thousand dollars, which was quite inadequate to do what I wanted to do, but I then started applying for research grants from NSF and they funded me – the money flowed like water. You had to write a slightly longer grant and justify it in more detail but, you know, I was never short of cash in Albany to do research. And it does make a huge difference. If you can’t get cash to do your research, particularly for fieldwork, you see – I didn’t have the kind of background to – financial background to support all my own research, it would be impossible, so I needed money to – not just for me but for my students as well. So NSF funded me extremely well. And also I got money from NASA, Department of Energy, US Coastguard, you know, all kinds of sources, and a bit of local funds from Albany too. So overall I had millions of dollars during that period to support my research.

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[2:28:20]

For those various funders, was it necessary in any way to argue for a kind of practical value or …?

Sort of, yes. I mean, they had money to dispense and they wanted to dispense it by hook or by crook or come high water and so forth. And so they were looking for ways of helping you and so all you had to say to NASA, for example – I wanted to – I’d started working in Turkey and I got very interested in the neo tectonics of Turkey, my first brush with neo tectonics. I mean, how Turkey was moving with respect to the squashing of Arabia and squeezing westwards and how it related, and it involved lots of local detailed mapping. I wanted to really map the Anatolian fault in various places, the East Anatolian fault. We made very detailed geological maps. So I needed money for that so I convinced NASA that I was interested in large scale motions. And they had various ways of measuring – not GPS, it wasn’t invented in those days, they had something called satellite laser ranging. And I said, ‘Look,’ I said, ‘We can do satellite laser ranging with you and we’ll do the structure on the ground.’ They jumped at it, absolutely jumped at it. So there’s another 300,000 dollars, yes [laughs]. It wasn’t difficult to justify in those days. I think it’s probably – I don’t know whether it’s difficult now but I mean, I think this business of wealth creation and quality of life, I don’t know how you answer that in a proposal. You can say, yes, it may well do in the future but in detail how can you tell, how can you tell? I think it’s mostly nonsense is that. It’s to satisfy ignorant politicians, I think, mostly.

[2:30:00]

In your ’67, ’68 sabbatical at Lamont, you say somewhere that you felt – you say, eerily I felt the restraining influence of Walter Bucher of Columbia University.

Walter Bucher, yes.

In conversations with Maurice Ewing. Can you –

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Yes, yes. Very interesting problem, that. You see, although Lamont was becoming the hotbed of oceanographic exploration, which Maurice Ewing had started of course. I mean, he was the genius that got all that oceanographic work going, measuring gravity at sea and doing magnetics and sparker profiles and all those kinds of things, looking at the structure of the ocean floor, bathymetry – I mean, we didn’t know a lot about bathymetry, the exact shape of the ocean floor, until those oceanographic surveys were started. And now we’ve got tremendous data on them from satellite systems and so on. So Maurice got that whole thing going but there was a chap in Columbia, a professor in Columbia, called Walter Bucher. Walter Bucher was a confirmed fixist. He thought continental drift was complete nonsense, like many geologists did at that stage. As I said before, if you believed in or you adhered to concepts of mobilism in those days you couldn’t get a job in a North American university. And Walter Bucher’s influence was quite profound actually in many ways, not only on North American geology but on his students and on his colleagues. And most of the people who had been taught by Walter Bucher in Columbia – even my dear friend Chuck Drake, for many years he was totally opposed to anything mobilist and he was dragged kicking and screaming into plate tectonics. Eventually he accepted it of course, but he was very sceptical of a lot of the stuff even in the late ‘60s. And Walter Bucher’s influence was still profound because of the people he affected. There were several of Walter’s students who then became professors at Columbia who were sort of sceptical, you know, and he had this sort of – it was a back – sort of vague uneasy feeling in the background that what you were doing wasn’t quite kosher, you know [laughs], and a decent sort of thing to do. And Maurice Ewing of course was the arch example of that because Maurice was a great friend of Walter Bucher and Walter Bucher told Maurice, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘Forget this continental drift stuff. It’s complete and utter nonsense. All geology of the continents tells you this doesn’t happen.’ Well, it’s just asking the question in the wrong frame, you know, it’s like the old problem of Harold Jeffreys and so forth. And Maurice took that to heart and as plate tectonics evolved in Lamont he fought it, absolutely fought it. He said, you know, ‘I don’t really like this stuff. It’s using my data and misusing all the data we’ve collected over all these years.’ He not only had tremendous amounts of geophysical data, they also cored, shallow

141 John Dewey Page 142 C1379/83 Track 4 coring. They did lots of shallow coring all through – and they had this core lab in Lamont which had a library of information on the world’s oceans and which has subsequently turned out to be terribly important in climate research and all kinds of ways. And that core lab, the core lab in Lamont, actually is a repository to actually prove continental drift [laughs], interesting, and yet Maurice couldn’t see that because he’d been influenced deeply by Walter Bucher. So there was the influence of Walter Bucher hanging on – and I was given a little office in Lamont in the oceanographic observatory, up the Palisades on the Hudson River. Also they gave me a little office in New York in the main campus, which was very nice, so when I went down to New York I could work there and use the library and so forth. And I had this little office and it happened to be Walter Bucher’s old office. And it was an eerie feeling that – I felt the presence of Walter Bucher in it, because all his reprints were still there, all dusty boxes covered in dust and so – they’d been there for some years. They hadn’t wanted – they didn’t know what to do with them actually. And so anyway, I sat in this office with these smelly old boxes of reprints of Walter Bucher’s and I felt him sitting at the desk and I was very glad to get out of there actually [laughs]. So that was what I really meant by that.

[2:34:20]

Thank you. And you returned to Cambridge with your great sort of map that you’d been producing on the light table and these new ideas about the connection between Ireland and America.

Yes, right.

And you said that you met quite a lot of resistance. You went round lecturing, you said, all around Britain.

Yes, yes.

Do you remember the sorts of things that people said that made you feel that they were resistant, if you see what I mean?

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The main thing they said was this. They, like me, were continental geologists, most of them were continental geologists. And when I went to the Bullard Labs to give a talk on this, you know, just to a department in geophysics in the same university in Cambridge, and I gave a talk in I think early ’68, they loved it. God, geology’s beginning to make sense at last, absolutely wonderful, it all fits the plate tectonic idea very nicely. And Bullard was delighted. And so [laughs] – I remember Bullard said something very interesting actually. And I said in the lecture, I said, ‘Well, you know, geologists have resisted this – still resist to a large extent.’ I said, ‘But you mustn’t blame them too much.’ And I was going to explain why and Teddy Bullard yelled, ‘Why not, why not?’ [Laughs] He said, ‘They’re mostly idiots’ [laughs]. It was wonderful. And several of my geological friends were in the audience and Brian Harland was there and he went rather red and angry [laughs]. So that was funny. So yes, I mean, as I went around – when there were geophysicists in the audience they were very happy and people who worked at sea and so forth, ‘cause they tend to think in bigger terms, which you needed to do of course if you wanted to understand the Appalachian Caledonians and stuff. But when – I went to Newcastle once, for example, and – to give a talk and I went to Birmingham, to Trinity College, Dublin, and I must have given ten or twelve places. I wangled talks in lots of places. I’d, you know, phone them and say, ‘Invite me over and I’ll give you a talk on the new stuff.’ And the resistance I met was mostly – not that they had – they could pick holes in the arguments and the logic, it wasn’t that. It was mostly – and Robin Nicholson said it to me actually. I went back to Manchester to give a talk and after the talk Robin said, ‘Crikey,’ he said, ‘You’re in trouble.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, Robin?’ He said, ‘If what you’re saying is correct, we’re all out of a job.’ He said, ‘You’re explaining everything suddenly in big terms and what are we going to do?’ I said, ‘Robin, nothing can be further from the truth.’ And it’s proved that way. Once you’ve got a big idea like that, you’ve got to make all the details fit and that’s an immense task and it still is an immense task. The stuff I’m working on on ophiolites at the moment involves a tremendous amount of immensely detailed fieldwork and chemistry and geochronology and so forth and it’s integrating the big with the very tiny. But a lot of people were saying what Robin said, ‘Oh god,’ he said, ‘You’ve simplified things so much now that, you know, if it really is – if this big sort of all embracing model of

143 John Dewey Page 144 C1379/83 Track 4 plate tectonics is explained in geology, there’s nothing for us to do.’ And they hadn’t realised that they’d got to fit all that wonderful geology, not to prove plate tectonics per se but to actually make plate tectonics real and work in terms of real rocks, you know. And that’s what we’re still doing. I mean, it’s – plate tectonics is by no means over. I mean, people think – many of the geophysicists say, ‘Oh, it’s finished now, you know, we’ve done it and we’re doing other things. We’re doing climate change and we’re doing some modern isotope geology in the Precambrian, all those kinds of things,’ but nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the planet needs remapping in detail, it really does. I mean, rather like the old story of the Geological Survey during Victorian times when De la Beche got the Survey going in the early 1800s, sort of post William Smith – that was when they were in German Street in London, the old offices. They were given a subvention by Parliament. He went to Parliament and said, ‘Look, we’ve founded this Geological Survey with a few blokes, going out mapping and so forth. We want to make a geological map of Britain.’ Because they realised that you could actually use – this is what William Smith had shown, you could actually start mapping and making detailed geological maps from the rocks. And so Parliament gave him a subvention and they continued to give it for several years and then every year, every year the question was asked – somebody would ask in Parliament, ‘When is the Geological Survey going to finish mapping Britain?’ And [laughs] they’d say, ‘Well, they’re still working at it, you know, they’ve got a lot to do, a lot to do.’ And every year chaps would ask, ‘When are they going to finish?’ He said, ‘We’re getting pretty tired of giving them lots of money. Haven’t they finished yet? Surely they can finish.’ And of course the answer is you never finish because, you know, new ideas come in. And you see rocks – I mean, I see rocks in different ways. I go back to areas that I think I know in the west of Ireland, that I’ve looked at for years, and sometimes with a student field trip. We’ll go to an outcrop and a student will say, ‘Hey John,’ they said, ‘What’s this?’ And I look. ‘My god, not seen that before’ [laughs]. You see, I mean, those simple eyes can see brand new things in rocks. They’re coming at it from fresh, of course, you know. I tend to look at the things I know in that outcrop and maybe I subconsciously ignore the things I don’t know. So geology is never finished. That’s the great thing about any science, of course, you never ever finish. You don’t complete anything. The map of Britain can never be completed because it’s evolving continuously. We

144 John Dewey Page 145 C1379/83 Track 4 see new ways of mapping, new ways of putting things on maps, new boundaries, new ways of looking at the rocks and so forth. And I fear though that the Geological Survey of Great Britain has moved into a phase where mapping is much less important and it shouldn’t be. I mean, it’s very, very important to do much more detailed – I mean, most of the Highlands needs remapping, well, for a start. Much of the Highlands hasn’t been mapped properly. There are chunks of Scotland and the North West Highlands that are big yellow patches on the map. They’re called big yellow patches ‘cause nobody’s really mapped them in detail. So those are the things that need doing, so lots and lots of things. There aren’t many people out of the Geological Survey in the field mapping every summer now. In Scotland there are, they’re still doing – and they’re starting work in the Welsh borderland again, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Radnorshire, and some very interesting, interesting people starting mapping in there again and finding phenomenal new things, which is very exciting. And it’s always true, wherever you go mapping, in the areas that you think you know you will find new things. So basically, you know, it’s true of all geology. It can never be true that some simple big idea will explain everything suddenly. It gives you a frame of reference in which to work, that’s all it does. And I mean, I don’t believe in plate tectonics, I don’t – all I can say is that plate tectonics appears to be the best way of describing the large scale behaviour of the planet at the moment. If somebody finds – if somebody, for example, did some GPS work and showed conclusively – I don’t think they will but if they showed conclusively that Africa is not moving with respect to South America and they could prove that over a ten year period, we’re in trouble, we’ve got to start thinking again, you know. I think it’s pretty unlikely to happen [laughs] because all the GPS that’s been done actually verifies the notions, you know. So science is a very complicated random walk but it can be directional, you can test hypotheses, but overall it’s a very, very complicated interlacing random walk with bits shooting ahead and other bits catching up, bits stagnate for a while. It’s human behaviour, it’s all humans. It’s humans doing it and humans are rather fallible, you know, so … [Laughs]

[2:42:07]

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What’s the – what was the nature and level of interest of your family in your work at this time in the late ‘60s?

I would say sort of – I think they were proud. Yes, they were. They didn’t really know much about it. I mean, Molly knew nothing whatever. Father knew a bit and I explained things to him. Mother wasn’t desperately interested in – she was just proud, I think, and pleased that I was having a good life and had a nice family and appeared to be getting on quite well, you know, and so forth. They liked that. But the level of interest of my immediate family, of my father and mother and cousins and aunts and uncles and so forth – they thought, well, it’s all very amusing but academics are a strange lot, you know. They were practical people, they ran businesses, you know, and were practical, people who did things, you know [laughs], whereas I was off teaching and doing rather abstract – to them rather abstract research. So the family I suppose were disengaged from what I was doing really.

And what about your own family, your wife and your children as they grew up?

They came out on fieldwork with me quite a bit. I mean, when I went to – when we were in New York and I was working in Newfoundland, commonly they would come up for a few weeks or even longer and camp with me and so forth and I’d take the kids out in the field, but I can’t say that either kid ever really engaged in the geology. I tried to explain things to them and they were wandering off looking at grass and flowers and butterflies, you know, and scenery and all those kinds of things and running up and down the hills. And Molly was interested in the botany of course, she was interested in the flowers and plants and so forth. So again the family weren’t engaged with what I was doing. It’s probably – maybe it’s the nature of science. I suppose if you’re doing the arts – perhaps it’s an unfair thing to say but many of my scientific friends read, they play instruments, they paint, they do a lot of humanities sorts of things, whereas most of the humanities people I know don’t do anything in science. And it’s a very interesting contrast. I know that Leavis and Snow had this big discussion. Snow said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You artists, you humanities people, you’re totally ignorant of the sciences so I’m not interested,’ you know, he was very dismissive of Leavis. And Leavis said, ‘Well, scientists are all peasants.’ ‘It’s not

146 John Dewey Page 147 C1379/83 Track 4 true,’ he said, ‘We read and we – we don’t read at the right depth and …’ All those sorts of arguments, you know, but I think it’s a fairly arid sterile argument. People do different things in different ways. So no, my family never engaged really. I’ve been interested in what Molly’s doing vaguely but, you know, not – I know what she does roughly and Molly knows what I do roughly, not in any depth at all. I mean, she wouldn’t be interested in – one of them would be interested in going to the field with me and really working on the geology for a day, you know. They sort of accompany me, they’re sort of amusing accompaniments around me, dancing around and so forth [laughs].

[End of Track 4]

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Track 5

You mentioned last time that you think it was your mother who taught you to read, and in fact you said that you could read before you went to primary school. I wonder whether you remember anything about the circumstances, how she taught you to read, you know, where it was, how she did it, anything like that. I realise this is going to be quite a long shot in terms of memory, but do you have –

Yes, I do, I remember quite well. It was by – the books involved with the AA Milne books, Winnie the Pooh and then the Wind in the Willows and those sorts of books, which she thought, in quotes, I ought to know [laughs]. And she taught me literally on her knee, sitting with her and she would read – I suppose it started with picture books and letters, you know, and then words built up. But we had a session every day. I mean, it was quite rigorous, or at least twice a day, at least twice a day for an hour probably in the morning, an hour in the afternoon. And I would sit with her and learn to read. And I certainly was reading Winnie the Pooh by the age of four, ‘cause I remember it so well, and Wind in the Willows, another one. They’re the only two I remember quite well now.

And do you have any views on the affect of your mother’s experience, which was of, a, a stepmother, I think, who made it difficult for her, impossible for her, to continue with her education, the effect of that experience, her experience of that and her approach to being a mother herself in relation to you.

Of course, mother – when I was a small child mother didn’t work and she’d spend all her time sort of in the house and looking after me, you know, as a baby and a small child and so forth. When I went to school, to primary school, at the age of I suppose fiveish, you know, something like that, then she got a bit frustrated at home, I think, and wanted to do other things and – she was a very active woman was Mother. And she found a job running a dry cleaning business in Chingford and that she enjoyed ‘cause it dealt – lots of people, office staff and all kinds of things and quite a responsible job, and she loved that and that was great fun. So that was a sort of surrogate education – result of an education for her. Erm, it wasn’t up to the sort of

148 John Dewey Page 149 C1379/83 Track 5 thing she was capable of doing, that was for certain, but – then didn’t – you know, qualifications were everything, you know. You had to have a Masters degree for this or a BSc for that, a BA for that and an educational diploma for the other and god knows – I mean, she would have liked to school teach but of course she hadn’t been to a teachers’ college and as a result she couldn’t do it, although she would have been wonderful as a teacher, I have no doubt, ‘cause she taught me and lots of my friends. She taught other kids to read in the neighbourhood as well, it wasn’t just me. I think she spent a lot of time with me but she certainly got other kids interested in books and reading and so forth. So our house was quite a reading place in general, which was rather nice, mm.

Did she say anything at any point to you about that experience of not being able herself to continue with education and if so what did –

Oh, she described the frustration, the intense frustration, but in those days you were – you know, the rebellion was unknown really essentially, or very, very rare, and as a result – you know, this is sort of around the time of the First World War and just after and she – she – let me put it this way, she had – I think I mentioned this before. She had been living with the great uncle, my Great Uncle Will, down in Hythe, who was a musketry instructor, and she learnt to read down there. That’s where she really got going with Auntie Cissy and Uncle Will, with all the cousins, Dora and Joan and so forth. And she learnt an awful lot from them and had a wonderful time in Hythe for the first ten years of her life. Then she came to live with her grandfather, I think, and – no, no, she lived with her grandfather before her – I’m a bit confused actually, but – and then her stepmother decided she wanted her back, I think probably as a workhorse, you know, and yet another pair of hands in the house and so forth. And I know – then she wasn’t allowed to continue with her education, ‘cause she wanted – Nanna wanted her to go out to work of course to raise some extra money for the house and so forth, so I – she describes with – she described – she was never bitter, my mother, she was a lovely person, very kind, loving woman and disliked nobody except her brother Freddie. Did I talk about Freddie at all? I did [laughs]. Anyway, so she wasn’t bitter about it but she was immensely frustrated, I think more in retrospect than at the time. I think she probably at the time – well, I can’t do it and that’s all there is

149 John Dewey Page 150 C1379/83 Track 5 to it, you know. But later she realised that she’d missed out on something very big, probably even going to university, you know, and she would have been wonderful. God knows what she would have done. Become an author, a writer, I think. She read avidly, starting in Hythe with her uncle, and by the time she died she must have read thousands and thousands of books, I mean, literally thousands, and all the great classics, Dickens and Chekov and Tolstoy and everything. I mean, there was nothing she hadn’t read. You could – and she remembered it all too, that’s – had an amazing memory did my mother. So she made up for it, I suppose, by educating herself. But that was a shame.

[5:41]

You said, I think off the recording, last time that speaking to other – speaking to friends of yours who are themselves scientists, they also have stories of mothers whose own education was cut short in some way and who were also very keen on their children getting on.

Yes, I think that was typical of my mother’s generation, you know. People had been born, let’s say, in the first ten years of the last century and people of my age naturally have parents of that sort of age. And I think there was a period, a terrible period of great interruption, the First World War and the terrible flu epidemic that followed it. I think there was so much disruption that things weren’t at all normal, although they led to all kinds of new things, you know, the independence of Ireland and all the rest of it. But erm, yes, at least three friends whose mothers experienced a very, very similar frustration at not being educated when they were young and then sort of vicariously lived through their kids. I mean, my mother was certainly one of those and several of my friends who’ve done extremely well – I’ve got a very good friend, Nigel Harding, who’s become a distinguished doctor and he’s now retired, a chap who became – Clive Baker, who became harbour master in Sydney, I’ve mentioned that I think to you. But they all went to university, did extremely well and I think it was their mothers, not their fathers. I think fathers tend to be rather passive at this kind of thing, quite pleased when it happens but they want to read the paper and get on with the gardening and things [laughs].

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[7:21]

Thank you. What I wanted to return to is someone very significant and that’s John Hayward, your schoolmaster.

Yes.

And to ask, in the light of what you said about the status of geology at the school in relation to other subjects, to ask how John Hayward was viewed by other masters.

Very interesting, yes. I think with great suspicion. That’s the – perhaps even more than suspicion, probably dislike, because they thought – I mean, most of the other chaps who had been to Oxford and Cambridge and had done their mathematics in Oxford – you know, mathematicians, classicists, historians, you know, all the great classical subjects – and that was the dominance of my teaching at school. I mean, I was taught – you know, there was Latin, Greek, German, French, with a bit of reluctance. The modern language people were – the people – the masters who were regarded as top dogs were mathematicians and classical scholars and the rest tailed off. French, German, not bad, English, okay, you know, you had to do English. History was fine, it was good. But then into the sciences, sort of physics and chemistry, okay, but then the really peripheral things like the natural sciences of botany, zoology, geology, great suspicion and hence they weren’t taught, they simply weren’t taught, and if you wanted to do them you had to learn them yourself. And I learnt them with the – simply ‘cause I was interested in them. And I taught myself, I read a huge amount and went out in the field and looked at rocks and plants and god knows what. And Hayward helped me greatly by providing me trays of fossils and rocks and minerals and so forth, so … But the rest of the masters regarded him as very, very – as a figure of fun, in a way, sort of like Clanger Clayton who I mentioned, who made his own car in a balloon and god knows what. And he and Hayward were regarded as two peculiar masters at school, although they were both extremely clever people. Hayward was regarded as peculiar, a, because he’d got a degree in geology and chemistry, and it was a London degree. That was regarded as

151 John Dewey Page 152 C1379/83 Track 5 very inferior, to have a London degree. And I think it was an evening degree at that, from Chelsea or something of that sort [laughs], you know, so that was regarded as very peculiar. And Clanger Clayton was also a London – Imperial College graduate. He was a very – he was truly – he probably – he may have been the cleverest master at Bancrofts, brilliant mathematician, superb chemist, but simply couldn’t deal with small boys. But there we are. But I think with great suspicion and sort of contempt in a way, you know, mm.

Did he physically appear different to them in dress or anything else?

[Pause]

Would you have known by looking at him that he stood apart from them slightly?

I think so. He lumbered a bit. He was a very sort of anthropoid looking chap, fairly biggish sort of head and a big nose. I’ve got a picture of him. Would you like to see it? You see, he was regarded as peculiar because he wore shorts sometimes in school [laughs]. And he was regarded as rather lower class actually to most of the masters. Most of the master I suppose had come from fairly sort of upper middle class homes and he was distinctly – he wasn’t working class, he was somewhere at the top of the working classes, if you want to use a horrible British classification. And he – but he was a wonderfully kind man. He was very good, very irascible. He could get very angry sometimes with people, particularly if people made fun of him. He hated being made fun of. And maybe that was a function of the other masters who took the mickey out of him quite a bit, I think. I saw examples of that. So yes, he was regarded as a figure of fun and a bit of contempt, you know.

What would they say about him then in order to tease him, the other masters? What would …?

I’m trying to think of specific things. A bit of a – what did I hear one of them say? ‘Oh yes, Hayward, bit of a ragtag,’ or something like that, a bit of a sort of er … But I can’t remember the exact term but there was a term like that, a very derogatory term,

152 John Dewey Page 153 C1379/83 Track 5 a bit of a – sort of obviously where he came from, some slum or something of that sort, you know. But many of the masters were like that, I’m afraid, as they were all over. Those times, thank goodness, have changed a great deal.

And did you get any sense of his view of them?

[Pause]

Hayward’s view of the other masters?

Jealousy, I think. I think jealousy, wishing he were more like them. He kept himself to himself a great deal as a result of that. And eventually, actually before I left school, he went down to become – probably as I left school actually, he went to become master at the local high school. He was given a huge increase in salary, made head of science in the local high school. He was a very good chemist actually, he taught chemistry very, very well, in retrospect. And he went to the local high school. But we kept in touch a great deal, he still helped me a great deal, you know.

And ended up teaching your father?

Yes, at evening classes. We were dragged in to keep the numbers up, you know [laughs], to make sure he could do it, at the South West Essex Tech of all places, yeah.

[12:58]

And could you expand on the view of the school of biology as being a somewhat sort of feminised subject, their view of – I think we were sort of – I’ve understood now their view of geology –

Yes.

Through their view of Hayward, but what did they think about biology?

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Well, there was no biology, you see. There was not a single biology teacher. And I think it was regarded as something that the girls did in the local high school up the road and they did – there was Woodford High School for Girls, which was a really good school, you know, it was like Bancroft really, I mean, a pretty high level of educational attainment of the students and subsequent lives. I mean, you know, a lot of famous girls came out of there. And Buckhurst Hill High School down the road – it was taught at Buckhurst Hill, presumably with girls and boys at Buckhurst Hill, girls at Woodford High School. And it simply didn’t come on the radar in a sense, to use a silly expression. It didn’t come on the radar at Bancrofts at all. And the fact that I was doing biology was – I took them at A level just for the hell of it ‘cause knew that I took – I’d taught myself. So I thought, well, to hell with it. So I persuaded them to let me go in for it and I passed and they were astonished that one could teach oneself a subject at A level and pass, you know [laughs].

What was their view when you said that you wanted to go in for these at A level?

They thought, well, he’s going to university, which is good, London unfortunately. I didn’t apply to Oxford or Cambridge because Hayward said that the Oxford geological department wasn’t very good and the Cambridge geology department wasn’t very good. He said, ‘Go to one of the London colleges. They’re doing modern very good geology.’ And he was absolutely dead right. I mean, the teaching at Queen Mary College was outstanding, it really was outstanding. They weren’t great scientists but they were perfectly respectable, did do some research on rocks in the South East England. But they were very dedicated superb teachers and they spent all – they lived vicariously again through their students. I know Jack Kirkaldy was terribly pleased when I got a first. He was puffed up with pride [laughs]. Because remember, in those days individual colleges didn’t give the degrees, it was the University of London who gave the degrees and the various colleges like Kings, University College and Queen Mary, Westfield I suppose, Chelsea and Bedford, the girls’ college, Bedford College, they all prepared the students individually and they came together for the examinations. So it was a common examination. And certainly from some lectures – we had an intercollegiate lecture programme, which was really

154 John Dewey Page 155 C1379/83 Track 5 very good. Janet Watson’s father, I think I mentioned, taught us vertebrate palaeontology. And so it – when I left – when I went to London they were pleased, I think the masters were all pleased, but they thought, well, you were good enough to have got into Oxford or Cambridge if you’d tried. And I said, ‘Well, I was told not to because the subject I want to study there is not very good.’ So that was it [laughs].

[16:14]

And would you be able to describe one of the bicycle tours that John Hayward led –

Oh yes.

In as much detail as you can.

Yes, of course.

Almost from setting off to getting home.

Yes, of course.

Because again, this seems to have been significant. I don’t know whether the first one is the most memorable or perhaps it’s one of the other ones, but if you could pick one of them and almost take us on the tour, as it were.

The tours I remember most of all were Devon and Cornwall and then Northern Ireland. We did a wonderful tour of Northern Ireland, it was superb. One of Scotland – but let me tell you about the Devon and Cornwall one ‘cause I think that was probably either the first or the second. I think it may have been the first actually. Yes. We started – of course what we’d do with our bicycles, we’d have panniers, you know, these pannier things on the back, and I proudly had my – with straight handlebars and a very nice bicycle, a Raleigh bicycle, and spare inner tubes and all that kind of stuff all packed away. And I certainly spent at least two weeks thinking about things to pack and Hayward would tell us what to pack and don’t bring too

155 John Dewey Page 156 C1379/83 Track 5 much, you know, just the bare essentials. ‘Cause I didn’t shave in those days at that stage, I suppose, so I didn’t have to take all that sort of stuff. And everything packed in the pannier bags. I think we each had about £5 to spend, but we paid – I think my parents paid Hayward a sum for covering all the food and youth hostels and any incidentals, train fares and so forth. So anyway, we took the – we all met at Paddington Station. I suppose there’d be twenty of us, something like that, twenty of us at Paddington Station, and we hopped on the train. And I can remember the train to this day. It was a King Class locomotive, giant King Class locomotive. And we trundled off to Torquay, went down to Torquay on the train, sandwiches. I remember having some sort of – almost certainly cheese and pickle if it was my mother packing the sandwiches, cheese and pickle sandwiches and a flask of tea, a small flask of tea. And we got off in Torquay and went to the youth hostel that evening. And of course we’d all – there was no going out to supper or breakfast or anything in cafes, we’d simply cook in the youth hostel and Hayward would supervise the cooking. Wouldn’t actually took everything but he’d sort of – ‘Do this, do that’ [laughs], supervise the cooking of the bacon and eggs. And I quite remember distinctively that a chap was frying the eggs in this youth hostel in Torquay and suddenly one with a – a big one with a big double yolk came and Hayward, without batting an eyelid, said, ‘Yep, that’s Sir’s egg,’ [laughs] which I remember very well. And anyway, we – then the following day we sort of did the geology of Torquay from Paignton up to Babbacombe, I suppose, and we were taken around by a quite extraordinary man. He was very good at getting local people – if there was a geologist locally he would use them, you know, and get them to show us around. And this chap – I can’t remember whether I mentioned him before but perhaps I did. His name was Edwin Beer and he had a wife called Phoebe Beer and even – he looked terribly old. I mean, I was, what, a thirteen year old child or something like that and he looked awfully old at that stage. And I remember – and he kept on having to vanish behind rocks to pee, ‘cause, you know, as you get older the prostate changes [laughs], as mine has and I have to pee quite a lot. And he kept on vanishing [laughs], ‘What’s he doing?’ ‘Ssh, he’s going to have a pee.’ So anyway, he kept – and he would show us – he gave us a very, very good trip. He died, by the way at the age of 117. He must – I worked it out. He must have been about middle fifties or early sixties or something like that at that stage and he came around in this dirty old mac and big glasses like this and he was a – he was a

156 John Dewey Page 157 C1379/83 Track 5 local luminary of the Torquay Natural History Society and a wonderful character. And he took us to his house in Paignton for tea and Phoebe gave us tea. She died, by the way, a few years ago at the age of 113. Now there may be something about Torquay air and water that keeps you going [laughs], but he was 117, you know, it was astonishing. Anyway, Edwin Beer and he published papers on the local geology. He was an amateur, a very sort of – fairly well heeled amateur geologist, I suspect. Well, I think he was well heeled ‘cause his house in Paignton was lovely. And we saw the Beakite Breccia, we saw the Torquay limestone, the new red sandstone that was, you know, permo triassic, red beds and the volcanics. We saw an amazing amount of stuff actually in that day. He really ran us all over the place. He’d have a car and we’d cycle, you know, and he’d said, meet me at such and such a place. So we worked all the way from Paignton to Babbacombe along that coast, which is amazing, amazing piece of geology. Still lots of things poorly understood, not properly, why is – Torbay, why is it a graben, it’s a big dropped graben, you know, riff valley of some kind that drops those rocks down. It runs off into the Crediton Valley to the west in Devon. And then we – the next day we cycled down to Dartmouth, through Dartmouth down to Salcombe and we did the geology of that coast from Salcombe, Bolt Head to Start Head, you know, that strip running round the – what’s it called, the Hams, the Hams District of Devon. And again it was just fabulous geology, I mean, metamorphic rocks and – thrust over the Devonian. And we did a lot of walking there as well, we walked along the cliffs, ‘cause you couldn’t cycle, and we’d scramble down the cliffs to look at things and so forth. We did an astonishing amount of geology. He was a very keen man was – a very determined – you can probably see by the stance, very determined sort of chap [laughs]. And then we stayed in a youth hostel, I think at Salcombe. I think it was – yes, somewhere near Salcombe. And then the next day we went down – we cycled off to Plymouth. We did the – it was quite a long cycle ride, I suppose, for kids of that age. Anyway, we cycled down to Plymouth and we saw lots of rocks on the way. We did – more of a sort of social day, that was. We went to Plymouth Hoe. John Hayward waxed extensive about Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh and all the great maritime people of – who dominated the English Navy in the Elizabethan times, which was lovely. It was very nice actually. And he was very keen also upon visiting interesting memorials, churches, abbeys and so forth, and so he instilled a love of architecture in

157 John Dewey Page 158 C1379/83 Track 5 me as well actually. He was a remarkable man. So the geology – no music or art, I don’t think, but the architecture he was very keen on. He loved ecclesiastical architecture in particular, so – even though he was an atheist, strangely. And then we were trundled on through Lostwithiel and then we went down to the Lizard – we cycled through – we went to Mevagissey and parts – we stayed somewhere near Mevagissey in a youth hostel. It was a two week trip basically, it was two weeks altogether and entirely by bicycle. And then we went down to Kynance Cove and the Lizard Peninsula and looked at the ophiolite down there and – phenomenal, Mullion Cove and Kynance Cove and so forth, and spent a couple of days trundling all over that southern coast. And then westwards next day – yes, next few days, we went down to Penzance, St Ives. I think we stayed in a youth hostel in Penzance. And then one day we cycled all round the Lands End Peninsula and looked at the granites. Lamorna Cove, St Just and looked at the tin mines of Geevor. Oh, I know – sorry, on route to Penzance we stopped in a youth hostel in Redruth and he got us taken down the mines of – South Crofty and the other one, I can’t remember what the other one was called, South Crofty, went down the tin mines. They were still working in those days. And we looked at the tables sorting out the tin and we each got a little tube of cassiterite, SNO2 tin oxide, off the table. I’ve still got it somewhere, I guess, in my collection. I’ve never really thrown a rock away all my life, you know. I’ve – all the – I’ve collected things that interested me, like the sponges from Farringdon and bits of this and bits of that. It’s not a systematic collection but it’s a sentimental collection. And I’ve got that tube of tin oxide somewhere, very heavy. Anyway, so we went down the South Crofty mine and then we went around the Lands End peninsula later, went down the Geevor mine – was it Geever? Yes, Geevor, and looked at the mineralisation around the edge of the granite and so forth, adinole mineralisation of tin and various other minerals, and then round through St Ives and back to Penzance. That was a long day, I remember that one. And then we cycled up along the North Cornish coast to Padstow – yes, Padstow. We looked at some of the slates, all the slates. Went to the Delabole slate quarries, I remember that, and looked at them cutting – splitting slates, which they did in those days. And then we went along the – right along the coast, staying in various places. Erm … gosh, I think we stayed in Bodmin on the way back as well. Was it Bodmin? Yeah, it was Bodmin probably, ‘cause there was a very cheap youth hostel there. And we tried to do all the things –

158 John Dewey Page 159 C1379/83 Track 5 the whole thing had to be really cheap, you know, essentially. And then we went along through Padstow and then up through – all the way along through Bude, up through that coast, Bude and looked at the turbidites, and finished up at Hartland Quay. And then cycled through Exmoor and stayed in a youth hostel somewhere – gosh, where was it? It was somewhere in Northern Exmoor, I can’t remember the name. It was Ex-something, Exley or Ex-something, I think it was. And then we wound our way down to Minehead and then got the train back. So it was a remarkable trip. I mean, we saw – in the field, the data acquisition rate in a young mind is enormous, because he was very good at explaining things, you know. The idea of turbidites had just come in and we saw these turbidites of carboniferous age on the Bude section and he described how turbidites work, with big flushes of sand coming down a continental margin. So, you know, he was up to date in many, many ways was Hayward. He read a lot and he went to lectures. He was an avid supporter of the Geological Society of London and I didn’t know at the time but he used to go to all the meetings, all the meetings, and he’d listen to papers on this and papers on palaeo, papers on igneous petrology, you know, and so forth. S he was very up to date and very good and he read widely. So yes, that trip was wonderful and that sort of – it was – at the age of thirteen I really got really interested in geology from that trip, because I went on the trip – I was interested in natural history and I thought that would be an interesting trip to go on with Hayward and – but it changed my life, that trip, it really did. It was field, of course, field work.

[28:19]

What was it about – ‘cause I suppose there’s various ways in which you could enjoy a trip like that, ranging from just liking walking about in the outside to being fascinated by one particular thing that you saw. So are you able to sort of isolate the aspects of that cycle tour that changed your life, that were so influential? What was it about that?

It was simply looking at outcrops, rock outcrops, in the field and being able to work out some aspect of earth history from them, that it’s not just a stone or a rock. Most people, I suspect, would just go past a rock, it’s just a rock, you know. But the idea

159 John Dewey Page 160 C1379/83 Track 5 that you could actually get a story of some distant – millions of years ago [laughs], some distant past event that was actually quite like a modern event. He said – I remember Hayward said, these Bude sandstones, you know, they’re flushing down a – they’re slides down of sand getting unstable and flushing down a slope and a continental margin. He said, ‘Oh, just like the sort of things that are happening off the East Coast of North America in the present day.’ Amazing, god. It’s not exactly the same environment but the same sort of process is going on and happening all over the world in the present day, of course, in many margins. So that was very exciting. And it’s not just a loose sand, it’s now a rock, how does it get to be a rock? Why does it get hard? And he described lithification and digenesis and how you make a rock out of unconsolidated material. He was a remarkable guy. I think he was – again, he was frustrated, perhaps not to the extent of my mother, but he was frustrated in that he wanted to be a professional geologist and yet he didn’t have the opportunities or wherewithal to do it, so he had to become a schoolmaster. And I think he didn’t – I don’t think he really liked being a schoolmaster. In fact I’m sure he didn’t ‘cause he told me that at one time, he said, ‘I had to get a job, you know, and a job at Bancrofts looked pretty good. And they wanted a chemistry master and I – chemistry was my equal subject with geology at college.’ And he said, ‘I’ve learnt a lot more chemistry now to teach kids and god knows what.’ I must stop saying god knows what [laughs], it’s a habit, a nasty habit. He – I think he was very frustrated. He would have liked to become a university lecturer, I think, where he would have the chance to do the research he wanted to do. The research he did, by the way, was very, very interesting. He was a – he was studying the very youngest deposits of the Lea Valley, running up from the Thames all the way up through into Hertfordshire, you know, up to South Mimms and the Great Water, district of South Mimms. And he was studying the deposits, the young deposits, trying to get at climate – he was studying the fossil shells and he was saying, how did the climate change through the sort of post glacial period? And it was very avant-garde for the time. I mean, nowadays people are doing that and studying the chemistry of the shells and the isotopes and so forth and – but he had an amazing collection of bugs, of small gastropods and shells from the – freshwater gastropods from the Lea Valley. And he would – he was doing piston coring as well, you know. He’d find a field where he knew there was a big deposit and he’d use a big auger and drill a hole and he’d pull this stuff out and record

160 John Dewey Page 161 C1379/83 Track 5 precisely the layers and collect them and put them in little tubes and so forth. So the guy was actually quite a remarkable scientist doing work on palaeoclimate from fossils that was immensely avant-garde, I mean, way, way ahead of its time, and he saw it.

Did he publish?

Yes. There were – and it was always published in – he never published major things in major journals. I think it was – a, he was reticent and, b, he lacked confidence. I think this – you know, he felt sort of slightly inferior to the other masters and to the geological profession generally so he didn’t publish a great deal in the major journals, not at all in the major journals. It was sort of the Lea Valley Historical Society – I’m not sure that’s an actual name but, I mean, it was that sort of thing, and also published in the preceding to the Geologists Association, so – I mean, he published quite a bit actually, he wrote it all up. He drew wonderful maps and sections of his geology. I went out with him quite a bit in the Lea Valley and helped him drill all these holes and so forth [laughs], which was fun, mm.

[32:54]

Did – sorry, yes, okay, thank you. The other thing that I wanted to pick up on, and it’s something that you just said and that’s that he was an atheist and I wonder how you – I suppose when you knew that and then how you knew that, ‘cause I suppose you might have known that when you were a schoolchild or you might have known it years later when you were going to these things with your father –

Well, a suspicion then a certainty later, ‘cause we had chapel every day. You had to go to chapel at 8.45 every morning. Everyone had to go to chapel, that was what you did. Now I think they still do it actually, I’m not sure, maybe – I don’t know, but – ‘cause there are a lot of Sikhs and, God, all kinds of people, you know, at that school now and Muslims and so forth so they can’t do it in that same way. But we all had to go to chapel and the masters came to chapel too. And you could see him wandering around and looking around and obviously disinterested and wishing he weren’t there

161 John Dewey Page 162 C1379/83 Track 5 and so forth, didn’t like it. And I heard him make remarks, and say, ‘Oh, this religious stuff is jolly silly,’ to some of the – a senior boy. I can’t remember which one it was, he was talking to a couple of senior boys and they were saying – they were obviously realising religion was a pile of nonsense at the age of seventeen or eighteen and he was chatting with them and saying yes. So I overhead that and knew that that was the case then. I was about fifteen or sixteen when I realised it. But then we chatted later quite seriously about religion and science and he said, ‘It’s all complete nonsense.’ He said, ‘I can virtually prove that God doesn’t exist.’ And he quoted the history of the earth, you know, back to four billion years, why did God wait for this huge length of time. I thought it was a jolly good argument actually, you know. There were bacteria for two billion years and then maybe a few algae and then the big metazoan explosion at 540 million years and the late Precambrian, early Cambrian, and then all the evolution and trials and misfits, things that don’t work. It was obviously a random work, he said, ‘It must be. It’s not designed, it’s just something that happened and a lot of things didn’t work, you know, and they died out. Now why would God do all those kinds of experiments? He doesn’t need to do experiments. He can just dictate and that’s it. And then why man just – last few million years, all that building up to man a couple of million years ago.’ And I thought that’s a very good argument, so that’s one that I use even now. So yeah, he was a – now he wasn’t a militant atheist because you couldn’t be a militant atheist in those days. You were in fair trouble in your school for a start. He would have been sacked, I think, almost certainly. And of course nowadays, I mean, you can do as you please and we have Richard Dawkins and so forth. But no, he was an ordinary atheist, just thought it was nonsense, you know.

[36:04]

Thank you. The parties that you went to in Liverpool, including those at Beryl Bainbridge’s house –

Beryl Bainbridge’s house, yes.

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And you told the story last time of meeting the Beatles or some of the Beatles, I can’t remember.

Yes, yes. Two of the Beatles it was, yes.

And I wondered whether the other people who were going to these parties knew what you did and if so what they would have thought of – what they would have thought, a, a geologist was and what it meant and how it related –

I think they – I think the answer is probably yes. Beryl had all her art college friends – ‘cause her husband Austin taught the Beatles at Liverpool College of Art, or – I don’t mean all the Beatles but some of the Beatles, certainly Paul McCartney and John Lennon were taught by her husband. So her friends were arty crafty literary friends and the sort of – the bohemian crowd of Liverpool [laughs], wonderful people, all kinds of scatterbrained and just delightful wonderful people. And they interfaced quite strongly with the geological crowd in Liverpool because Beryl – Beryl took in lodgers at that stage and two of my good friends, Jack Treagus and – I think it was Jack Treagus and Dennis Wood – Jack Treagus is still alive in Manchester but Dennis unfortunately is dead, he died ten years ago in Bangor. And they – she knew about geology, you know, and had all the geological friends back there, so when she had the parties all her friends came and all the geological friends came. Then she got to know Shackleton, the – did I mention Shackleton? Shackleton was a truly great geologist, Robert Shackleton. His son was Nick Shackleton in Cambridge. I think I’ve been through all this before, I suspect.

No, I don’t think you – I’m not sure that you mentioned the connection here though with Robert Shackleton.

Ah, with Robert Shackleton. Anyway, yes, Robert – Judith’s – sorry, Robert Shackleton’s wife, second wife, Judith, was a very good artist and she knew this crowd and I think they got to know Beryl through Judith. He got to know Beryl through – they used to – he started going to the parties. And then there were – it wasn’t all the geologists in Liverpool but it was a lot of the research students, the

163 John Dewey Page 164 C1379/83 Track 5 people who aggregated around Robert. So that was an interface. So I think they were used to geologists, they knew what geology was and I think to some extent – I don’t know how much they knew about it but they were – they didn’t think it was peculiar, it was something they did in the university, you know. It was another thing they did in the university, so – and then I got involved as well and – I was the only Manchester person, I think, to go across there. I may have mentioned this at the time. Manchester I found an immensely dull department, immensely dull. It was run by a chap called Alec Deer, who was one of the most wooden people I’ve ever met in geology and with – anyway, I won’t go further into that, but a lot of nice people, Bob Howie and McKenzie and Fred Broadhurst and so forth and I didn’t – but I didn’t really interface with them very much socially, in fact not at all, because they were sort of family men, they – my first year in Liverpool I wasn’t married – in Manchester I wasn’t married. I lived in a bachelor place with a few other lecturers. And so looking – I got to know Robert Shackleton through the Geological Society of London and he said, ‘Oh, there’s a …’ I think in my very first week in Manchester he said, ‘Oh, don’t stay in Manchester this weekend, come across and stay with us if you want to or Dennis Wood’ll put you up, I’m sure.’ You know, he was that sort of person [laughs]. ‘There’s a nice party – there’s a party at Beryl Bainbridge’s house on Saturday night.’ So I went and I didn’t look back [laughs]. I went almost every weekend. I occasionally stayed in Manchester to work but I just worked when I was there, I didn’t do much else. I went to Oulton Park racetrack a few – it was a motor racing place, that was quite nice, and got to know a few motor racing types. But mostly in parties and geology in North Wales, Liverpool. We’d go off to North Wales for the weekend, Llanberis and Snowden and Anglesey and I learnt a lot of geology that way too. It was very good.

So what – so if I was at a Beryl Bainbridge party at the time, what would I see going on around me?

A lot of people drinking, a huge amount of noise, thick smoke. I mean, those were the days in which people smoked, you know. I mean, I smoked in those days and I’d just started smoking, strangely enough. I didn’t smoke until I was – I didn’t smoke until I became a graduate student, a research student. It was just – I don’t know why I

164 John Dewey Page 165 C1379/83 Track 5 started smoking, I just did, but I was smoking quite regularly by the time I got to Manchester. And so thick smoke, lots of noise and lots of discussion. People would bring art out. Art was quite big, a lot of art on the walls and they’d be chatting about art and this latest artist, this artist, that artist, this latest writer and – oh, you must meet so and so, he’s just written a wonderful book, you know. It was that sort of society, maybe a bit like the Bloomsbury set, who knows. It was certainly – it was great fun for a young chap like me who hadn’t seen anything like that before, you know [laughs]. So I loved it, it was great fun. They were very nice people. Beryl was a wonderfully welcoming woman and very kind and I was very sad when she died a few years – a couple of years ago now. But I wrote a little thing in the Times, did you ever see it? I suppose you didn’t. There was an obituary of Beryl, of course, and then you – they encouraged people, if they want, to write a little subsequent thing and I wrote a little subsequent thing following Will Self. You know Will Self? He’d written a wonderful article about Beryl, saying what a lovely person she was. I think he lived in Camden quite close and they were very good friends and he wrote a little article and I was just saying I agree with Will Self, he’s described her absolutely perfectly, it was exactly how she was, and I described something about the parties in Liverpool and so forth and that. It was lovely, it was lovely. So yeah, it was – they were Bloomsbury type parties, I suspect [laughs], although I didn’t see much of the sexual side of things. It may have been going on but I wasn’t aware of it and I wasn’t interested in participating, so … [Laughs] I don’t know, I just don’t know. But I was – it was just – and a lot of people – oh, a lot of people cooking, frying eggs and bacon and things like that, during the party as well. Perhaps it was rather like – do you know Cannery Row, Steinbeck? Cannery – that’s a book you should read, it’s wonderful, the great party at Mac’s where people are cooking steaks [laughs]. Anyway, it’s a marvellous – Cannery Row, the great party, and I think probably Beryl’s parties were something like that.

What do you remember of her – sort of the details of her character?

Erm, scatty, slightly scatty, immensely generous, very kind and interested in everything. I mean, she was just interested in everything. She wasn’t writing at that stage of course. I don’t know what she was doing, I think she was – maybe she was

165 John Dewey Page 166 C1379/83 Track 5 writing but she wasn’t telling anybody, but she certainly didn’t – ‘cause the first book she wrote, called A Weekend with Claude, had as one of its characters Robert Shackleton, a thinly disguised Robert Shackleton [laughs]. So she was obviously taking notes or thinking – you know, it was becoming part of her thinking. But I don’t know what she did. I mean, she had two young children of course, I can’t remember their names now, a boy and a girl. But I – she was looking after them. She lived in – the house in Hudson Street was a lovely house, it was warm and welcoming and there were always I think two graduate students living there and they were always geology graduate students living there. But what she did I just don’t know. But she was a very – she was always very pleased to welcome you. Sometimes I’d just pop round there for – if I was in the department in Liverpool, oh, I’ll go and see Beryl for a couple of hours or something, and I’d go round and she’d give you a coffee and even say stay to lunch, you know, and say, ‘I’ve got to run out and do some shopping but just help yourself.’ It was that sort of house, very open sort of loving people, very nice woman. And it comes out of her books actually, if you read her books, there’s a lot of love in those books.

Do you appear in any of her books, do you think, having read them?

Not to my knowledge. I’ve not read them all so I’m not sure whether I do or not. Erm … I must [laughs] – actually, do you know, I hadn’t thought of that, it’s interesting, ‘cause she – I don’t know how many she wrote. She must have written twenty or thirty books or so. Maybe I should have scoured them for [laughs] suggestions. I suspect not because, I mean, I was a very peripheral sort of character in her life and – although we were sort of good friends in a way but not like Shackleton and Judith and all her other arty crafty friends from Liverpool College of Art. That was where she mostly lived, I think, in terms of her life. And she led a domestic life with her kids of course, you know, and looked after them very well, cooked – it wasn’t a hand to mouth existence for them, they had proper meals and they were looked after and taught to read and all those kinds of thing. They were very educated nice kids actually, yeah.

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How was Robert Shackleton identifiable in the – I mean, was he identifiable because you knew him and if so what was it about the character that allowed you to spot that that was who it was?

Well, I think it was generally – I mean, she told me. I mean, she actually told me that she’d modelled this character on Robert. So, you know, my mind was already prepared for it [laughs]. But then I read Weekend with Claude and said, oh god, yes, that’s Shackleton. I mean, it’s just a dead ringer [laughs]. So it was – but it was Beryl telling me really rather than my – and then the word got out and everyone bought the book. All Robert’s friends bought the book [laughs].

Does he appear as a geologist in the story?

No, no, but he’s a professor in the university. It’s not clear what he did actually in terms of subject but he could have been Professor of Geology, I suppose, yeah.

[46:21]

Thank you. You told us last time about your – quite a lot about your childhood and I was curious, because you’ve worked in various university departments and been involved in various societies and therefore you meet a lot of scientists, and I wonder, when you talk to other scientists, perhaps other geologists, about their own childhoods, what sort of stories do they tell and to what extent do they echo your own?

Let me think about that. Erm … gosh.

I mean, you might tell them the stories of blowing up the tree and that sort of thing and they – one reaction might be, what an unusual – you know, what a mad childhood you had, or they might say, well, and I did this, well I did this, I did this. I wondered which.

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Do you know, erm … Very little of that, very little. I mean, I know a little about the backgrounds and childhoods of some friends, like Robin Nicholson, for example, who was a lecturer in Manchester. He’s now retired, lives in Berwick on Tweed. I’m going to see him at the end of September actually. He lives in Berwick on Tweed. His father drove the Flying Scotsman, wonderful thing to do. I mean, gosh, to have a father who drove the Flying Scotsman, that would [laughs] – oh wow. Anyway, so Robin’s father drove the Flying Scotsman and he was a great union man, you know, a strong socialist. And Robin acquired – a Unitarian too, and Robin acquired that from his childhood. So I think he had a sort of socialist upbringing but nothing special, just that sort of background. I know the background of many, many of my friends. John Spring, for example, who started Punchcard Services in London, he got out of geology, his upbringing was in Glasgow. His father was Professor of Chemistry at Strathclyde University, or College of Engineering I think it was called in those days but it’s Strathclyde University now, and he was brought up with a fair rod of iron. And he remembers Glasgow Academy and the tours, being strapped with a leather, you know, and so forth. But apart from that, you – I hear those sorts of stories but nothing sort of untoward or unusual or peculiar. I can’t think of anyone. No, not really.

Scientist friends who made bombs or made explosives and that sort of thing?

Well, just my immediate – just Nigel Harding and my friends, you know, our group. I think – I’m not sure how unusual we were but maybe the others wouldn’t admit to it, or – I suspect people – people made fireworks and things like that in those days ‘cause the ingredients were readily available from chemist shops, you know. You could walk into a chemist – you couldn’t order sort of four pounds of sulphur and three pounds of charcoal [laughs], you know, they’d know what you were at, but you could get the stuff fairly easily. Thank god we didn’t know about petrol and fertiliser because had we known about that god knows what would have happened [laughs]. I mean, it’s horrible to think of, you know. There we are. No, I can’t think of anything special, except for Jack Bird maybe. I was just thinking of – Jack Bird was my very good friend at – my first real friend in the United States and he got me to go to Albany actually. It was – we became friends because of our interest in the Appalachian

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Caledonian system and I was beginning to think of, you know, all these various models for ancient island arcs and oceans in the middle of the Appalachians and the Caledonides and so forth and Scotland. And Jack was sort of thinking of the same sorts of things and we got to know each other very well and he’s still a very good friend. He’s a professor in Cornell now, just retired actually, retired from Cornell. And he described some pretty remarkable things in his childhood. His mother was a teacher, an English teacher, in a school, a very prim and proper lady, and his father was a – I met them both actually. His father was a very quiet sort of self effacing chap. His mother was a dominant feature in his life and she taught him to read, strangely, and educated him a lot before he went to school. And he described some of the shocking things that he did as a child and – blowing up things in old quarries in upstate New York and so forth. I think he led a rather similar childhood to mine in a way. And crashing round the woods. And of course they had guns in those days. I didn’t have guns but he had a gun, he’d be hunting and so forth. So I didn’t get all the detail but I remember a number of stories he told about his childhood involving explosives and quarries and stealing dynamite from a shed in a quarry somewhere [laughs], that sort of thing, you know. But that’s the only person, the only one of my friends and acquaintances, whose childhood was unusual in the sense that mine was unusual.

[51:21]

And one last thing about this very early period that I wanted to pick up on and that’s that when you first were an undergraduate I think you said that you said in on the engineering courses because you were sort of half thinking about that as well.

Yes, yes.

And you went to various things. And one of the things you said was, and of course I didn’t want to do aeronautical engineering, and I just wanted you to expand on the of course bit. I don’t –

Did I say that? Okay.

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Yeah.

Well, I think that the engineering at Queen Mary College was straight up and down mechanical, I guess electrical. The bit that I sat in on was the mechanical engineering. Aeronautical engineering, I maybe said of course because it’s a great speciality in engineering. I mean, most places will do electrical, mechanical, maybe chemical. Chemical’s sort of special as well and aeronautical is rather special. Civil engineering is sort of special in a way. I think Imperial College in London was the only college that did all the engineering aspects. Aeronautical is a great speciality and it involves a sort of – some way out stuff in terms of aircraft design and, you know, wing design and so forth and huge labs, huge labs for testing and so forth, and I think for that reason it’s quite expensive to do and many colleges simply stick with the cheaper basic stuff and Queen Mary College stick with it. So I did the mechanical section of – which actually was quite good in some ways. I mean, I learnt quite a lot about stress and strain and deforming materials and beams and elastic versus plastic and viscous behaviour of solids, which actually has been quite useful in some of my subsequent structural geology. But I couldn’t see – I said, well, you know, do I really want to become an engineer, and the answer after that year was clearly no, absolutely not. I couldn’t see myself doing that for the rest of my life and I wanted to be in the field doing geology, mostly in the field actually, that’s what I love most of all. So mechanical engineering went down the tubes as a result of that. And as I say, chemical – I think chemical and aeronautical are only done in Imperial College. I think Queen Mary did civil engineering. I should have sat in on that, I suppose, given the overlap with geology, but I didn’t, mm.

[53:41]

What connections did you have with – or experience did you have of the Geological Society of London both before and after the late ‘60s, plate tectonics sort of stuff happened?

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Yes. While I was a student at Queen Mary College I joined the Geological Society of London as something they call a junior associate, and you paid a small fee and you could go to the meetings and use the library and so forth. So I joined in my first year at Queen Mary College, I joined as a junior associate and I used to go to pretty well all the lectures. It was sort of every three weeks on a Wednesday two papers were read and I used to go to them all and they could be on anything, the geology of East Africa, you know, the sort of palaeontology of the carboniferous of Scotland [laughs], anything, you know, chalk, anything, anything at all. And I absorbed the stuff and I – and that’s – I think that was probably why I kept my interests very broad in geology. I mean, even today I think of myself as – what kind of a geologist are you? I’m a geologist, you know, I just do geology. And it can be anything, it can be – I’m mostly structural and tectonics and that’s my main field from which I’m known, I suppose, but, you know, I love soft rock geology, stratigraphy, I mean, even very interested in palaeontology, extinction, you know, what the fossil record tells us about the history of the earth, and that’s a fascinating area, extinctions and evolution. So the Geol Soc was very good in promoting a broad general interest in a young person in that way. So yeah, every three weeks I’d – and I had a friend called Philip Drummond, who’s now dead, poor chap. I may have mentioned this before, he fell down a waterfall in Malaysia and broke his back and was a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Became a lecturer at Brighton Polytechnic. But when he and I used to – we were both undergraduates together in Queen Mary, a very bright guy, good geologist. Did his PhD on the upper greensand and chalk of Western England and Devon and West Dorset. Anyway, we’d go up and then we’d have dinner out. It was very exciting, we’d go to a Chinese restaurant [laughs] and have dinner afterwards, you know, and that was great fun. And it was a habit – having acquired the habit then, just kept going all my life and I still go to – I go to some – it’s quite different nowadays because there are all these specialist groups, which I think is a shame in a way because – you know, you have the metamorphic group, the volcanic studies group, the tectonics studies group and so forth, history of geology group, and so they tend to have their own meetings in their own specialities. You don’t have this wonderful thing every three weeks of having two papers, it could be anything, read that everyone went to. It was the old parliamentary system in those days. Nowadays they’ve redesigned it as a lecture theatre. It used to be the old parliamentary system in which you’d have a bank of

171 John Dewey Page 172 C1379/83 Track 5 seats on this side, a bank of seats on that side and the president would be sitting up on a big stage with the two – with his foreign secretary sitting up at the end. And it was a debating chamber, of course, and after the paper there was a great debate about the paper. It was wonderful. And people would make observations and the speaker would be asked to answer them and so forth. It really was – I learnt a lot about debate then and how you debate a subject and, you know, you’re faced with papers read, conclusions are drawn, anything wrong with it, can we see any – can we pick holes in it. And, you know, it’s quite a sort of tormentous chair to actually [laughs] – a tormented chair to go up and give a paper. I gave two, two in the ‘60s, and fearful and quaking but you learnt a lot, you know. Chaps would tear you to shreds [laughs]. Another chap would say, ‘I think you’re being unfair because so and so and so and so,’ and I could respond. It was very good. So the Geological Society of London was wonderful in those days. I think it’s less wonderful now ‘cause it’s become much more applied. They’ve become much more obsessed with money. They’re running it as a business. Maybe they have to, I suppose, it’s like universities that are now being run as businesses rather than academic institutions where scholarship is the most important thing. But nowadays it’s run as a moneymaking business and it’s not quite what it was.

When did it start to become less wonderful in your –

I suppose … less than fifteen years ago. Late ‘90s, I would say. Started – people became – the presidents of the society were generally picked, or suggested by council, as pretty distinguished scientists, distinguished geologists. And they were – you know, it was Oliver Bulman and Stubblefield, people who’d done really great palaeontology, you know, the real graptolite man, Oliver Bulman from Cambridge. It was people with – of some substantial distinction. And it was a scholarly organisation in which they were concerned with geology for its own sake, you know. I mean, sort of hydrocarbons and the petroleum companies and the mining companies, they would come, you know, and send their people to meetings and they’d take part and so forth, but it wasn’t driven by – nowadays it’s much more driven by money and there’s a lot of petroleum and mining related things in the society now and it’s a much more applied organisation, which – it’s one of those things. And it was a shame because

172 John Dewey Page 173 C1379/83 Track 5 the petroleum people have a thing called the Petroleum Exploration Society of Great Britain, PESGB, but yet they seem to want to take over the Geological Society as well. The library’s still very good but it’s much less used than it used to be. I mean, people don’t go – maybe people don’t use books like they used to, everything’s online, you know, and they can sit at home and get a lot of stuff online. And then many of the presidents in the last ten, fifteen years have been – let’s say no more than fairly ordinary, non practicing geologists, people who’ve maybe done a bit of geology sometime in the past and then become chairmen of companies and things like that. So it’s become sort of the great and the good rather than the great scientists, which I think is a shame for a society like the Geological Society, which is not true of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, presidents of that society have always been absolutely top dogs in their field, top dogs. Present one, Paul Nurse, you know, the great cell biology man, you know. There’s no one better in the world at what he does. So it’s become a sort of applied society, which I think is a bit of a shame.

[1:00:45]

How did the Geological Society of London respond to plate tectonics coming along as a new theory?

Very interesting. We’ve been through a bit of this before, but in the late ‘60s I was in – you see, a lot of it didn’t happen in Britain. It happened – bits of it happened in Cambridge with Dan McKenzie and – I mean, Dan was foremost of course in the whole thing, but he did a lot of it in America, remember. He was at Scripps when he wrote that classic paper in ’67 with Bob Parker. Many of us sort of did a lot of our work in North America. I mean, I happened to be in Cambridge at the time, Dan was in Cambridge at the time, but it wasn’t – Cambridge per se was not important as a place to have great ideas. I – I would say that most of my great ideas have come in North America actually in my various times, a, on sabbatical leave in the ‘60s in Columbia, in Lamont, that was truly wonderful. That was an astonishing period, ideas were coming thick and fast because people like Le Pichon were around and Jason Morgan in Princeton, you know, some astonishing people, and Dan of course came through quite a bit. He was in – he spent time in Scripps in California, months and

173 John Dewey Page 174 C1379/83 Track 5 months in Scripps he’d spend, and I think he had a lot of his ideas there, in fact I know he did. So I think we both have a lot to be grateful for in North America.

Why do you think it is that you’ve had your great ideas in America rather than Britain?

It’s a very interesting question, whether it’s just a random phenomenon or it just happened that I – or whether it was something special about the two environments, the different – I suppose in Britain, I don’t know, I think that we tend to be very much more sort of straight up and down. There’s something very peculiar about Britain in terms of success both in business, in – people think that if people make money in this country that they’ve done something corrupt, you know. Americans don’t think that way, they think, well fantastic, you know, you must have done something rather good to make a pile of cash [laughs]. And I think the same is true of scholarship, you know. Americans absolutely adore people who’ve had ideas and have done well in academia. Britons sort of reluctantly admire them but they regard them with some suspicion and love to find a way to drag them down. And maybe I – in North America I felt freer in some ways. I think you go on a sabbatical leave to a new place and you’re sort of – your life opens up, you know. You must have read the David Lodge books, you know, Changing Places and – do you know those books?

No, tell me about them.

They’re books you must read actually, they’re very good, the two first David Lodge books, of a very ordinary chap called Philip Swallow at the University of Rummidge, which is Birmingham of course, and he goes off to Euphoria [laughs], a place on the Californian coast, a university, changes place with a chap called Morris Zapp, who was a cigar smoking go getting American, you know. And he goes off and his life opens up into a new kind of life. And I think America’s like that, it’s – I know many of my friends who’ve gone to the States say their life has opened in quite new ways. And you can come back and you can bring a lot of it with you. I mean, I brought a lot of American attitudes and sort of freedoms and so forth back with me to my jobs in Durham and Oxford and so forth, and to some extent Cambridge ‘cause I spent

174 John Dewey Page 175 C1379/83 Track 5 sabbatical leaves over in America, you know, in the late ‘60s and brought some of those attitudes back. But I think it – I’m not saying there are constraints, actual design constraints, but I think there is a sort of conformity and a constraint that exists in British academe. It may be better nowadays but then of course things are happening for the worse in terms of universities being turned into businesses and everyone’s got to get money, bring money in. Mind you America’s always been like that, everyone – bringing in money for the overheads, research grants for the overheads. And university administrators love this. So I think it’s the sort of attitude to success that’s very different in Britain and America.

[1:05:25]

Sorry, I slightly diverted you there. I’d asked you about –

No, it’s alright.

About the Geological Society, how it responded to –

Oh plate tectonics. Yes, yes, okay. Let me see, I’ll tell you how with one illustration. You remember that I said that John Sutton, who was Professor in Imperial College, he was my internal examiner and during the examination he said, ‘I don’t like this chapter at the end, this broad general chapter in which you’re speculating about how your area relates to everything else. You should leave that to the older people and people with experience who know what they’re doing and so forth.’ And I said, ‘Well, okay, maybe you’re right’ [laughs]. And I’m afraid I came back from my sabbatical leave in 1967, had a wonderful six months in Lamont, Columbia, New York, and everything was happening, I mean, plate tectonics was just exploding and I naturally became sucked into it. And I was going at it from the geological perspective, what does it mean, what does this whole thing mean for geology, and of course it means everything for geology, or a lot for geology [laughs]. And so I started getting interested in that and I was trying to synthesise, as I said, the Appalachians, because I knew the Appalachians to be a continuation of the Caledonides when you close the Atlantic up. So I was interested in how the Appalachians worked and I got

175 John Dewey Page 176 C1379/83 Track 5 all the state maps and did this huge map of it. And all around me things were happening, so I was interfacing with other people and they were looking at my maps, my God, you know, it’s fantastic. So that was immensely exciting and I brought that excitement back and I went around – first of all when I came back the Professor in Trinity College, Dublin, a man called – he was a temporary sort of chap because the previous professor had gone off to London to become Professor of Petroleum Geology in Imperial College, Dan Gill, who was my external actually examiner from some years before. And RGS Hudson was Professor and he and his colleagues – ‘We’ve heard about all this new stuff that’s come, you’ve just been in America, could you come and give us a lecture on it?’ So I went across and gave them this huge lecture or a couple of – two enormous length [laughs] lectures on plate tectonics and the new – we called it the new global tectonics in those days, plate tectonics and how it – its importance for geology, it could explain subduction zones and god knows what, you know, and trenches, island arcs, mountain belts, and they were all open mouthed, absolutely open mouthed. And they accepted it very well, the Irish crowd, they loved it, god, fantastic way to look at geology, except for one person. Adrian Philips didn’t like it, he said ‘It’s all too generalised and it doesn’t explain all the details.’ I said, ‘Of course not, nothing explains all the details until you actually understand how they all fit together.’ And then I went up to Manchester to give a talk, you know, I was invited all over the place to give talks, and I was met with varying degrees of resistance by the community [laughs]. Went to Manchester, they sort of liked it, very interesting. And Robin Nicholson, the chap whose father drove the Flying Scotsman, said, ‘God, I hope it’s not all right otherwise we’re all out of a job.’ And I said, ‘Robin, nothing can be further from the truth. It’s given us a new way of looking at the earth and now we can really start doing geology properly, you know.’ And that’s what’s turned out to be the case of course. But I went to Newcastle to give a talk and they hated it. Stanley Westell said, ‘You’ve got to get out of this stuff. It’s going to give you a very bad reputation if you keep on doing this.’ He said, ‘It’s all sort of airy fairy nonsense.’ He said, ‘Go and look at the rocks,’ he said, ‘The rocks are what matter.’ I said, ‘I look at the rocks, I do look at the rocks and I can explain the rocks in terms of these ideas.’ And he didn’t like it, went mad. And John Sutton, and I come back to John Sutton now, John Sutton resisted it for five years. He said, ‘Nonsense, don’t like it, not having it in my

176 John Dewey Page 177 C1379/83 Track 5 department.’ And as a result he didn’t have it in his department, so Imperial College really fell back from the great department it had been when I was doing my graduate work, PhD work there, to a really rather second rate and ordinary little department where other places were taking off and accepting. So John Sutton fought it, fought it and then finally came round and his widow – not Janet Watson, he’d left her and married another – a barmaid type [laughs], Betty Middleton, who was a designer of some kind, and she was convinced that John Sutton had invented plate tectonics [laughs], extraordinary. Anyway so, you know, varying degrees. And the Geological Society of London, I suppose, didn’t offer an opinion as such ‘cause it was simply a collection of people and it didn’t have a collective view, I don’t think, although I suspect that the community was divided, or not so much divided, it was – there was a spectrum from those who adopted it, grabbed it, used it, which was very small, myself, McKenzie, who else … That was about it, you know, in the very early ‘70s. I was going – I had an uninterrupted free passage [laughs] in a way.

[1:10:51]

But of course then I went to America and then I took off in Albany and Columbia with lots of colleagues who were just gung-ho. It was wonderful and we had fantastic research students. Did I describe that period?

You did but I have more to ask.

Wonderful period, it was a – Albany was – it was like a Camelot in a way, you know, and fantastic. But I remember in Britain during the ‘70s it was a rather dull period, people were not doing it very much. They were doing their palaeontology and their sedimentology. And it wasn’t until, let me get this right, something like the late ‘70s, early ‘80s when it became de rigueur and everyone was interested and doing it and so forth. So the ‘70s was a rather bad period in many ways. Politically it was the time of Callaghan and Wilson and, you know, a collapsed British economy and rather – everyone was rather depressed in Britain at that time in the ‘70s, but I was away, I was in North America at that time and it was fine [laughs]. I was lucky not to be here actually. I’m glad – had I stayed in Cambridge I think I might have become a wine

177 John Dewey Page 178 C1379/83 Track 5 steward or, you know, become a rather dull don. As it was I was in a very vibrant exciting place with wonderful students and a great society that, you know, enjoyed – loved success and encouraged us. And it gave us – the grants we got in Albany were enormous. We just – we’d only have to ask for money from the government and we got it, you know, it was extraordinary, whereas here it was a struggle to get anything. Can I have a quick pee?

[End of Track 5]

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Track 6

I wondered what you could tell me about the very small number of female geologists in the early period. You named them last time and you’ve already told us about one of them obviously, Janet Watson, who was in the department.

Yes.

But the other ones you mentioned were Dorothy Wisden, Dorothy Rayner –

Rayner.

And Nancy Kirk.

Nancy Kirk, yes.

Are you able to tell me anything about them based on, I don’t know, contact with them?

I knew – I daren’t say I knew them all but I was acquainted with them all and I’ve met them all. Nancy Kirk was an iconoclast. I mean, she gardened in the nude. I may have mentioned. She lived in Aberystwyth. Oh, didn’t I mention –

No.

Oh, Nancy Kirk was quite extraordinary. She was a student of Bulman in Cambridge and they didn’t get on, because I think – the reason might have been that she had pretty peculiar views about lots of things, socially and so forth, but she – she never married and she believed that graptolites – classically the graptolites were supposed to be one way up. Nancy Kirk was convinced that in fact they lived the other way up and she and Bulman fell out desperately. What a silly thing to fall out over, you know, it scarcely matters in a way. They mostly live sideways [laughs]. Anyway, she became a lecturer in Aberystwyth and she wrote papers on graptolites, always having

179 John Dewey Page 180 C1379/83 Track 6 them her way up, you know, and so forth. She found difficulty in getting some of the stuff published. I think it was mostly Silurian graptolite she worked on whereas Bulman, I think, was mostly Ordovician graptolite, yes, that’s correct. And anyway, Nancy was a very keen gardener and she owned a cottage, which I visited actually with Nick Rast some time in the early ‘60s. And Nick said, ‘Oh, we’ll go out and visit Nancy. She’s not in the department, we’ll go out and have tea with her.’ So we drove up her path, up the little winding road up to her cottage, and Rast suddenly said, ‘Good god.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong, Nick?’ He said, ‘Look, there’s Nancy over there completely naked.’ And she was in boots, she was gardening. She was a naturalist, she believed in – what are they called? Erm … These people who live their life naked, prefer to live it naked?

Naturist.

Sorry?

Naturist.

Naturist, yeah, naturist, yeah. She was a naturist and she had a hat on to keep the sun out, it was a hot day, and she had boots on to protect her feet, otherwise completely naked, starkers. And Nick said, ‘Good god, there’s Nancy over there.’ So she saw us coming, ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘Come in and have some tea.’ So [laughs] it was my first – I’d never seen a naked woman before, I think. I think that’s true, yes, never seen a naked woman before. 1961, I suppose this would have been. So anyway, I thought this is extraordinary. And then so we went into her house. She didn’t put anything on, just went in and got the tea as if it was completely ordinary, you know, you’ve got to get used to it, I’m naked and that’s the way I am. So it was fine, I got used to it, you know, that’s it [laughs]. So we had tea with her and cake and so forth and it was very nice and chatted about this and that. And so I asked a polite question about something or other. I said, ‘What did you think about so and so and so and so?’ And she said, ‘Fucking awful.’ Good gracious [laughs], I’d hardly heard swearwords in my – well, I’d heard them but, I mean, I didn’t swear in those days and I was shocked [laughs], this lady was naked and had uttered a foul word [laughs]. So Nick behind

180 John Dewey Page 181 C1379/83 Track 6 me, he said, [whispers], ‘Oh no, don’t worry about that. That’s the way she is.’ And that’s the way she was, completely natural, a natural naturist, said what came into her head without fear or favour but actually a very nice woman, apparently quite a good teacher too. She didn’t teach naked. The university insisted she dressed, apparently. She tried to teach naked on one occasion but there was tremendous resistance from all these Welsh students [laughs], they went and complained, and so she was told she had to wear clothes to – so when it – and also when she went shopping she had to – apparently the shops she insisted that she did not go naked into their shop [laughs]. But she would have done, she would have lived her life in – not in the deadest of winter, I suppose, when it was freezing cold. So that was Nancy, Nancy was an iconoclast and an extraordinary woman. And I suppose maybe she felt that she was one among – you know, a rare woman in a male profession and she had to make a show of it in some – I don’t know, it may be completely unfair to say that, but maybe she was – or maybe she became a female geologist because she was like that anyway, you know, and – because geologists are a fairly raunchy bunch in general.

[5:01]

But then there was Dorothy Rayner. Dorothy Rayner was quite the opposite, very proper lady. Her sister, Mary Rayner, married Maurice Black, the Cambridge palaeontologist. And Mary – they were – maybe they were twin sisters. I think they might have been twin sisters, Dorothy and Mary, and she became Mary Black. Dorothy Rayner never married. In fact I – yes, I think Janet Watson was the only one of those four I mentioned who married, married John Sutton. But Dorothy Rayner was a lecturer in Leeds and she wrote quite a good little book on British stratigraphy and she did research on carboniferous stratigraphy and fossils in Britain and apparently she was regarded as a very good lecturer, very thorough, you know. If you got notes from her course it was a very good set of notes you got, and she was very thorough and very good. Not a great outstanding scientist but, you know, pretty good. And then there was Dorothy Wisden, she was in Southampton, I think. It was either Reading or Southampton, I’m not sure which. I’m not going to swear to that. But I think she was somewhat like – she was a rather more mousey character, I think. Dorothy Rayner was a fairly ebullient character, a sort of Miss Marple, you know, she

181 John Dewey Page 182 C1379/83 Track 6 knew what she was doing and it was fairly apparent. She wore nice costumes, you know, and beautifully polished shoes and a nice hat. A nice woman, Dorothy, I liked her very much. But Dorothy Wisden was much more shy and retiring and – she did perfectly adequate research but nothing special. Janet Watson of course was the genius among the four. I mean, she was a truly superb geologist whose insights into British geology in particular were remarkable. I mean, she was a – she and John Sutton for their PhDs mapped up in the Lewisian rocks and they elucidated – they developed all kinds of new techniques with dikes and so forth, this dike cuts that. They developed the idea of polyphased defamation, how to read rocks, which were eventually used in Greenland by Vic McGregor and others. But she was a truly clever lady and her knowledge of geology was extraordinary. When I was a graduate student in Imperial College she would come round, just – she’d walk around all the people’s – we were all in stalls, you know [laughs], in a divided room and – we were each given one of these things. And she’d come in and say, ‘Oh hello John,’ she said, ‘How are you doing today?’ I said, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem with this thin section.’ ‘Oh, let me have a look.’ And she’d spend an hour just looking down the microscope with me, then she’d wander to somebody else, you know, fantastic, not just her students but all the students. So she was a natural trainer of students, a teacher of students, and I really mourned her death terribly. She was only sixty something when she died of cancer, terrible, terrible, in the ‘80s, a wonderful lady. So those are the four that I knew. There may have been others but I can’t think of them at the moment.

[8:19]

Can you describe Nancy Kirk’s house, cottage?

Yes, it was a typical stone Welsh cottage, up a driveway on the side of a hill with a very nice garden. I mean, she was a very keen gardener. She had lovely rows of flowers and she grew vegetables, of course. She wore glasses. A rather nice face. I liked Nancy’s face, it was a very robust sort of sparkling face, you know. She was a – I don’t know how old she was when she died. She’d been retired some years. But her cottage was lovely. It was very nice, it was very small, stone cottage, very rustic

182 John Dewey Page 183 C1379/83 Track 6 inside. The furniture was very ordinary rustic sort of furniture. She had nice pictures on the walls. She liked pictures and I saw some lovely watercolours in there actually. And she was quite a good cook. She ate well and – she didn’t stint herself, I don’t think. I mean, she just lived a very pleasant spinster life, you know. I think she just wasn’t interested in sharing her life with male, female, anyone. She just wanted to do her own thing in her own way in her own cottage in her own time. And I admired that, it was very great, knew more people like that. That’s about it. I can’t think of anything more about Nancy.

And what were her unusual – leaving aside naturism, what were her unusual social views that you seemed to imply might have been part of the reason for not getting on with Bulman?

She hated politicians and she didn’t like politicians of a national scale or university politics or anyone who – she hated sort of – I think what she called – I’m not sure what she called it but I think she clearly disliked anything pretentious, anything in which somebody was trying to get something over on somebody else, trying to dominate somebody else. She didn’t like that and I think that’s why she didn’t like politics, it’s a constant fight over silly things, you know, ya boo sort of stuff. And she was a very sort of honest straight woman, you know, she believed in calling a spade a spade and being very honest in her dealings with people. Totally non devious, so that’s why she didn’t like politicians, I think [laughs], or the political life of universities or councils. She mistrusted authority, she disliked authority intensely, although she – I mean, the only way she didn’t conform, I suppose, with – she was scrupulously honest apparently too. I mean, you know, if she found that she’d been over – somebody had given her too much change in a shop she’d go back and give them the penny, you know, she was that sort of person. The only sort of non conformist thing was her naturism, you know, the nudity [laughs], but that was only in the confines of her own garden and house.

Was there any sort of final result on who was like about the way up?

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I don’t think so. The person – actually, I was going, the person you’d ask is also dead now, Bulman died, and Barry Rickards, who was a wonderful man in Cambridge. He was curator of the Woodwardian Palaeontology Museum, Sedgwick Museum, fantastic – still a fantastic museum of fossils. I don’t know who’s curator now, is it Chris Hughes? I just don’t know, probably not. Erm, although the vertebrate palaeontologist, it’s Norman something. Anyway, he – Barry Rickards would be the person to have asked but he died. He was Bulman’s successor as a great graptolite man, you know. Skevington possibly, he lives in Glasgow, he retired. He’s about the same age as me, a bit older maybe, lives in Glasgow. No, I don’t know who you’d ask nowadays. I suppose there are graptolite people, there must be, people must study graptolites [laughs], but I don’t know who they are.

I wondered whether –

Richard Fortey would know, Richard Fortey, to resolve that question. Tell him I told you to ask him. He probably won’t thank me, but … [Laughs]

[12:30]

Thank you. You spoke last time a bit about Teddy Bullard. I wondered whether you had any contact with Keith Runcorn at the –

I knew Keith very well, I knew Keith very well actually, yes. The reason – I got to know him very well because when I was Professor in Durham – I went to Durham in ’82 –

Of course, yeah.

He was Professor in Newcastle. Gosh, he would have been a very interesting bloke to interview, you know. Oh, before I forget, the other person you might want to interview lives in Victoria, a man called Ted Irving. Have you come across that name?

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Yes, yeah.

The great palaeomagnetist. It was he who really started using palaeomag to define the relative motions of continents, a very clever piece of work, again in the Bullard Labs in Cambridge. Then Runcorn of course was there as well and he took it up. But Runcorn was a quite extraordinary character.

What are you able to tell me about him, as – because I actually – on this project I haven’t met anyone yet who knew him well. I mean, there’s a few people who perhaps talked to him at a conference or – David Davis – Runcorn occasionally came into the Nature offices, but –

Yeah, Di Davis. Di Davis knew Runcorn a bit, I think.

But we haven’t got anyone who could tell us much about him.

About him personally.

Yeah.

He was a loner, a bachelor, homosexual, you know, quite an active – apparently quite an active homosexual. He died in San Diego in suspicious homosexual circumstances, you know, one of these weird things with wires and god knows. I won’t go into the details ‘cause I don’t know the details, but he died in a sort of male red light district hotel, seedy little hotel, and it was quite clear that something weird was going on. But that’s his own private life, does what he wants, you know. But I liked Keith. He was a very – what is the word? Let me think of a single word to describe … Supercilious, supercilious I think is the word that I would use to describe Keith. He always had his nose slightly in the air, ‘Ah yes, I don’t know.’ It was that sort of attitude [laughs], very – but I don’t think he was unpleasant. I never found him unpleasant. He was certainly a man who thought a lot of himself. He knew he was quite good. He was quite a smart – a very smart guy. He had a very broad and eclectic view and knowledge of geophysics and geology. He didn’t know geology in

185 John Dewey Page 186 C1379/83 Track 6 the classic sense, in the way that I do and other people, but he knew physics fairly – ‘cause he was I the physics department in Newcastle, not in the geology department. Many places have geophysics in physics department. Toronto for example, Tuzo Wilson was in the physics department. Even though he was a geologist turned geophysicist he was in the physics department. Keith Runcorn, physics department. He was a rugby player, very keen rugby player, and quite good. He was a forward. I think he was a prop. I think he was a tighthead prop, that’s what it – I mean, if you went in his office there was always a jockstrap hanging on a peg and a scrum cap [laughs] there and his rugby boots were there, and he liked people to see those ‘cause, you know, I think basically – I’m the big sort of – and I think it was a sort of foil for the homosexuality. So I got to know him reasonably well when I went to Newcastle. I used to go up and have dinner with him. Never made an approach to me, thank god, ‘cause I think his – that life was separate. I mean, he just had his own friends and so forth. But then he ran quite a good little department there. Ron Girdler was another person who was there, who lived part of his life in Durham. But it was a very small – I mean, the group of geophysicists there was very small. A man called Tozer, a man called Tozer, that’s right, who – quite a good geophysicist actually, a practical geophysicist, interested in electromagnetics and all kinds of things, methods of expiration for minerals and so forth. He was good. Convection in the earth, he worked on too. Runcorn worked on the moon. The moon was his great thing, the earth moon system, and he really made some very great discoveries about the earth moon system. A very active man, he really – he worked very hard and read everything. He read, you know, widely and he went to every conference that was available. I mean, I – every conference I ever went to I saw Runcorn there and always had something to say. It always started with – he’d say, ‘Some years ago …’ [Laughs] And he was off on a tirade about something or other. But he was great fun was Keith. Had very pale yellow green eyes, I remember, gingerish – he had gingerish hair, curly – fair gingery hair, curly, curly sort of – wavy, wavy hair, a fairly large nose and supercilious demeanour [laughs]. So that was what I remember about Keith.

How was he viewed by other scientists at the time, by other geologists and geophysicists in his sort of field?

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I don’t think he was – I think he was admired but not liked. People didn’t like Keith very much. They thought he – again, supercilious. They thought he was talking down to them and you know – but I didn’t find that, I think maybe ‘cause I wasn’t competing with him. I was doing quite different things. I was a geologist, the new Professor in Durham, and I think he basically didn’t see me as a threat in any way, you know. But I think he did see some people as a threat and he would argue the toss at meetings with people. I think he got on well with Dan. I think Dan and he seemed to get on quite well together, although they probably didn’t interface very much, not a lot. I mean, he didn’t interface with people really at all. He was in – he was Professor in Newcastle but he spent a lot of time in America, Australia. He was always somewhere else. He spent more time, he spent much more time, with scientists abroad than he did in Britain. I’m not sure I ever saw him in the Bullard Labs, ‘cause I went to the Bullard Labs regularly. I was the only geologist in Cambridge who actually regularly visited Dan and other people and talked to them and so forth, ‘cause the other geologists weren’t interested in that stuff, you know, they were palaeontologists and stratigraphers and mineralogists [laughs] and so forth. It was just my interests happened to overlap with Dan’s and various other people’s and with Teddy Bullard too. So he – Runcorn did not – didn’t interface with the British community very much. He was very big in the Royal Astronomical Society. He didn’t interface with the Geological Society at all to my knowledge. I think he thought of himself as a physicist doing geophysics and I think that’s what he was actually. I think his first degree was in physics, I’m pretty certain it was. I don’t know that for a fact.

[19:52]

How did he get on with Teddy Bullard?

I think pretty – I mean, Teddy got on with everyone. Teddy was a very amenable, very happy man. He was always smiling and chasing the girls. He loved the ladies, Teddy did, astonishing [laughs]. I think Molly Wisdom kept him under control, the secretary in Bullard Labs. She was a great character. He was the – he was one of the

187 John Dewey Page 188 C1379/83 Track 6 two great beer characters, of course. Bullard Ales, that was the Bullard family, and then Arkell of course here in Oxford. Arkell Ales is an Oxford ale. And W Jocelyn Arkell was from that family, hence independently wealthy and didn’t need a job so he worked in the museum on his own account all the time. But no, I think Bullard and Runcorn got on reasonably well. I don’t think there were any altercations. They were both interested in the same sorts of things. I mean, convection in the earth. [Interruption – phone rings]

[21:03]

Given that he was such a sort of influential character on geophysics at this time, I wonder whether you could tell me as much as you remember about the character – just as you’ve done about Runcorn really, about the character of Teddy Bullard. You’ve told me a little bit about him, especially his advice to you and that sort of thing, but his sort of – as much as you can tell us about his character, the sorts of things that perhaps wouldn’t be obvious from standard biographical accounts and obituaries and that sort of thing.

He was – in summary, he was a very happy, incredibly friendly man. He would talk to anyone, especially females. He loved people, he was terribly happy at parties. I mean, he was the centre of attention at parties and he would be telling jokes and enjoying life. He spent quite a bit of time in California at Scripps. He loved California, he loved Southern California. He rented a house when he was there, the same house, next door to John Steinbeck, literally next door to John Steinbeck, and he got to know Steinbeck quite well. This would have been, I suppose, in the early ‘60s, late ‘50s, early ‘60s, ‘cause Steinbeck died in, what, middle ‘60s was it, something like that. Anyway, he loved Southern California, he loved Scripps. He liked watching the girls on the beach outside the Scripps laboratory. There would be girls running up and down the beach, [gasps] he loved that apparently [laughs]. And old admirals would be running up and down. Anyway, he was immensely friendly, a very pleasant man, very kind and incredibly encouraging. Encouraging the young I think was what he was very good at. Dan McKenzie, for example, was promoted. And he’d always say the same thing, he said, ‘Don’t let the old tell you what to do. You

188 John Dewey Page 189 C1379/83 Track 6 do what you want. Never mind what I want and what people of my age want, it’s what you want to do. What are you interested in? Just do it.’ But he said, ‘For god’s sake do something. Don’t complain about life. Just get on with your work and work hard and do it.’ And he said, ‘It can be anything at all, from fossils to core of the earth, but if it interests you it’s going to be interesting, you know.’ Wonderful. So he told me that. But he was a nice man. He came to parties at my house actually. We invited him. You know, it would be a student party of some time. I knew Teddy would enjoy it so he came. And I remember at one party, I remember Jonathan was about five or six and he was into pirates, he loved that sort of stuff, and for at least an hour – I looked out in the garden and there was Teddy and Jonathan fighting with toy swords, you know [laughs], fighting him back off the pirate ship, you know. But he was that sort of bloke, he just loved kids. He liked people. He liked everyone. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, I loved him very much, very kind. And he ran Bullard Labs, you know – well, it wasn’t Bullard Labs in those days, but he ran the geophysics department, Madingley Rise, in the same way, very open, ‘Do what you want, chaps.. I’m not going to tell you what to do. You do what you want, you know. This is what I’m doing.’ He was interested in convection in the earth and that’s why he got Dan McKenzie – Dan McKenzie’s PhD was on convection, convection in the earth. I mean, plate tectonics hadn’t come along at that stage. And it was only when Dan went to Scripps, I suppose, that things started, ’67 I suppose that would have been, you know. But he was interested also in the core and the magnetic field of the earth, that was – magnetohydrodynamics was his real field. He was a real – of course he was director of the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington for some years before he got the chair in geophysics in Cambridge. But no, that’s what I basically remember about him, very friendly, nice, pleasant, encouraging and no character flaws that I can really think of that – and everyone liked him as well, he was terribly well liked, for obvious – you know, obvious correct reasons.

[25:12]

I think I heard somewhere that sometimes he was a bit impatient with people if he thought that their ideas weren’t – you know, were sort of absurd or off beam or –

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Oh yes, he could be. If you said something really silly, that he thought was really silly, he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s stupid, don’t say that.’ And I’d say, ‘Why?’ He’d say, ‘Well, it’s obvious, you don’t have to say that.’ He never said it to me, thank god, but I heard him say that to people. And yes, if people would unnaturally, for instance, fight continental drift, they’d always find arguments against it – he was terribly dismissive of Harold Jeffreys, ‘cause Harold Jeffreys said continental drift was impossible right to his death. I mean, it’s just stupidity, ‘cause he had the wrong idea of how it happened. He had the wrong mechanism. He was tied to a mechanism that – rather than look at the facts – he wasn’t interested in geological facts and how continents fitted together, it didn’t matter to him. If he didn’t understand how it happened, it couldn’t happen, you know. It’s just the wrong way to do science. Because he was a mathematician of course, he wasn’t a scientist, in my view. And I think Littleton was rather like – RA Littleton, the expanding earth man in Cambridge at St Johns, was very similar too. He didn’t like continental drift. Well, he liked it but it happened by earth expansion, growing the oceans in between, very peculiar.

So did you see anything of that conflict between Jeffreys and –

Not really. I remember at coffee once in Madingley Rise, probably sort of mid ‘50s – sorry, mid ‘60s, ’65, ’66, somewhere around there, Jeffreys – whenever Jeffreys died, it was just before he died, I think. And I saw them sort of with fingers at each other in the corner, you know, over coffee, and they were both wagging their fingers like this [laughs] so I suspect there was some ghastly argument going on between him and Bullard. But overall, terrific chap. You’re right, he could be impatient, impatient and dismissive of ideas that he thought – not sort of nice new exciting ideas, he wasn’t dismissive of those, as people can be ‘cause they’re jealous and they don’t like it and all those kinds of things. If something was clearly wrong he would just – please don’t do that in my presence, it’s nonsense, you know. If somebody said, no, continental drift’s impossible – I mean, I’m sure if Harold Jeffreys had said that to him, which I’m sure he did, he would just dismiss it and say, ‘You’re talking nonsense, Jeffreys,’ and that’s it, you know.

[27:52]

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He seems to have been important in attracting American scientists to Cambridge, to the laboratories at Cambridge –

Yes, certainly.

And aside from what you said about him liking America, what were his views of American science?

I think he liked the openness and the excitement and the fact that they liked success and new ideas. It’s a country of new things and, you know, that’s very exciting, exactly the antithesis of the sort of suspicion of success we find in this country. I think he liked that very much because that was his nature. That was exactly the way he thought. And certainly he got Tuzo Wilson to come to Madingley Rise for a sabbatical, a year – he came for a year actually. That’s where I first met him, in ’65 I suppose it was. Wonderful, he was a wonderful man, opened my eyes. Well, we went through it before, but he was terrific. And Harry Hess came – now Harry Hess was invited by the petrologists, he wasn’t invited by Bullard, ‘cause he was a petrologist was Harry Hess, and I got to know him reasonably well too. Erm, who else did he get? What other Americans came? Oh, Chuck Drake, yes, Chuck Drake from Lamont, and I – that’s when I really got to know Chuck Drake as a scientist and got to like him. He became a very good friend actually did Chuck. And he was very keen on getting me to North America and when I was offered a job in Columbia and Albany he said, ‘Take it, take it, by all means do it.’ And he was – god, he was right, absolutely dead right.

[29:31]

Another question I had is were there things that you’d seen and mapped in Western Ireland during your PhD and afterwards that were completely mysterious or completely unexplained before plate tectonics and then explicable afterwards?

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Oh yes. I mean, the whole structure of the so called South Mayo trough, this thing I mentioned, this big Ordovician syncline with the Silurian rocks on top – particularly the Ordovician. I mean, it was just a sort of – a hole in the ground in which sediments accumulated, that was clear ‘cause of the thickness. It was an enormous thickness of sediments and volcanics. There were sort of, you know, andesites and – they made no real sense. Because I tell you what, you know, we never really thought in those – in pre plate tectonic days there were very few people who thought about a particular piece of tectonics and what piece of the modern world might be explained by it or what piece of the modern world might explain that, can you draw analogies between a big piece of geology? We can do that. There are exceptions. Emile Argand in Switzerland, the great Emile Argand, who explained the Himalayas and Tibet by the collision of India and squeezing of India into Asia, that was amazing. The Alps by squashing Europe against Italy, you know. And who else? Van Bemmelen – I mean, Argand was amazing, probably the great tectonician of the early – and then of course Wegener, Wegener and Du Toit in continental drift. So they’re three names. And then subsequently I suppose Van Bemmelen and Ungrove, two Dutchmen who worked in Indonesia, and they had this peculiar idea of – the trenches were something called mega undations and they had all kinds of weird names. If geologists don’t understand something they give it a weird name. That’s a good general clue [laughs]. And they had these things called mega undations and tectogenes, big downfolds of the earth’s crust to form the oceanic trenches. It was sort of – they were trying to – they knew things were going down n some way but they didn’t understand that it was – obviously that it was a subduction zone and a slab going underneath ‘cause they hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Part of the fact was of course that until plate tectonics and – well, until the great oceanographic cruises of the late ’50s and ‘60s, so little was known about the ocean floor. And it was very hard to draw analogies between – when I was doing my PhD in the ‘50s it was hard to draw an analogy between the South Mayo trough and anything in the modern oceans ‘cause we didn’t know very much about the modern oceans. We knew there were trenches, I suppose, and ridges, but the details were very, very obscure. Nowadays we – our knowledge of the ocean floor now is prodigious through satellite altimetry in particular, wonderful stuff. I mean, you can – the most intricate details can be observed without even going down there, you know. It’s incredible. So I suppose the plate tectonics really began

192 John Dewey Page 193 C1379/83 Track 6 to – before plate tectonics there wasn’t really very much, what’s the word, rationale, there was little rationale in explaining geology except bits of it, volcanoes, turbidites, structure. You know, you could describe these things but it was very hard to put them into any rational framework, to understand them. And then plate tectonics suddenly exploded – I mean, suddenly here was a rational explanation for most of the geology of the world and the old – not just the modern world but the old stuff as well, not necessarily for all the Precambrian, something was – I believe that something – a lot of different things were happening in the early Precambrian that were nothing to do with plate tectonics, maybe plumes, big mega plumes and all kinds of blobs going up and down happening then. But once plate tectonics started in its modern form, which is about 600 million years ago then – the Phanerozoic world can be explained by plate tectonics plus probably hotspots as well and –

Phanerozoic being?

Phanerozoic being Cambrian onwards, the fossil record, where we have fossils, from the beginning of the Cambrian up to the present day.

[34:01]

Was then plate tectonics over applied to some extent? In other words, applied to periods sort of before that? I suppose the more general question would be to what extent was plate tectonics sort of over applied or misapplied by certain people?

Oh, I think – you mean in terms of the history of the earth?

Yeah, or …

Yes, I think it was. I mean, there are two ways in which it’s been misapplied in my view. One is that when plate tectonics became accepted as the principle paradigm, people felt they had to – whatever they did in geology had to be fitted into a plate tectonic framework. So I mean, you had literally papers like the origin of the Hudson River gravels – that’s right, the postglacial history of – I’m just making this up, the

193 John Dewey Page 194 C1379/83 Track 6 postglacial history of the Hudson River, its gravels, its fossil elephant remains and plate tectonics, you know [laughs]. It was nonsense. I mean, every paper had to have the word plate tectonics in it otherwise, you know, they thought, I can’t get it published, you know, that’s the new thing, you’ve got to somehow do it. So that’s one way and the other way is going on still today and that is that plate tectonics is truly a wonderful mechanism to – it’s the best mechanism we have so far that anybody’s thought of to explain the modern world. You know, you look around the world and it – and then take it back in time through the magnetic anomalies and back through the Mesozoic – Cenozoic, Mesozoic, works beautifully. Palaeozoic, seems to work extremely well. Come to the late Precambrian, it looks – things start to look a bit different, that is the geology of the world looks a bit different. Now maybe some form of plate tectonics is generating that geology but it’s not like the Phanerozoic. I mean, there are certain rock groups in the Phanerozoic and belts of rocks and so forth that occur in the Phanerozoic and don’t occur in older rocks. And then as you go back in time it looks worse and worse and worse until finally you come to 3.1 billion years, back into the early Archean and the Paleoarchean and I think it wasn’t happening at all. I think something quite different was happening then. I think there’s been a secular revolution of the planet, you know, the planet’s evolved and it’s evolved into a plate tectonic earth. So that’s how I think there is misapplication, that’s the other form of misapplication in my view. They feel, oh, plate tectonics is wonderful, we’ve got to force it into every bit of rock in the earth, you know. That seems to be the wrong approach.

[36:30]

How – are you able to say how something that was called the new global tectonics ended up being called plate tectonics as opposed to anything else that we can imagine it might have been called, slab tectonics or – I don’t know, whatever? The question is, why plate tectonics, what is the origin of that name that stuck?

Well, the first major paper that I wrote, I suppose, with Jack Bird in the Geophysical Journal – sorry, the Journal of Geophysical Research, was called Mountain Building and the New Global Tectonics. And the reason was the paper that had just come out

194 John Dewey Page 195 C1379/83 Track 6 the previous year explaining earthquakes in those days was called Seismology and New Global Tectonics and we felt that was an appropriate title to do mountain belts and new global tectonics. But I think that was the last time that I used that term. I think once it came to – certainly late ‘60s, 1969, ‘70s, we were using the term plate tectonics. And I – was it McKenzie’s ’67 paper that used it for the first time? Do you know, I can’t remember. Was it Tuzo Wilson who coined it? Although Tuzo Wilson said, you know, ‘Had I known Euler’s theorem properly I would have had plate tectonics in 1965.’ ‘Cause he wrote that wonderful paper on a new class of transform faults, a new class of faults. And then – the key papers really were Tuzo Wilson, 1965, McKenzie and Parker, 1967, erm, Jason Morgan, about that time. Rises, Trenches and Great Faults, I think it was called, but the same principle, examining plates on a sphere and how they work. Le Pichon’s paper, about that time, and of course Seismology and New Global Tectonics by Isacks, Oliver and Sykes. So those were the great papers but then there were derivatives of papers that contributed to that revolution, like the Magnetic Anomalies by Walter Pitman, the Use of First Motions in Earthquakes on Transform Faults by Lynn Sykes in the middle ‘60s, so there were a group of papers at that time. But it wasn’t called plate tectonics. I mean, McKenzie’s paper, McKenzie and Parker, it was called the North Pacific, an Example of Tectonics on a Sphere. So it had the idea of Euler’s – in fact he had Euler’s theorem in that and Tuzo Wilson said, ‘I should have known that and used it in my papers as well.’ But I think that McKenzie and Parker was the first rigorous paper that illustrated how plate tectonics worked, the concept of triple junctions and spherical caps, rigid – torsionally rigid spherical caps, without which you don’t have plate tectonics. So that was the paper in my – a paper in Nature , very short paper in Nature .

I was just wondering why – where the term plates came from?

Do you know, I’m just – as I’ve been talking I’ve been trying to figure out that in my head and I don’t know. I don’t know who first used the term plate tectonics, you know.

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Were there such things as plates before the new global tectonics? Did it mean something else before? Or was it an entirely new –

No, not in geology, no. Nobody would use plates at all, no, absolutely not. But I think the – it’s logical, if you think of a torsionally rigid spherical caps rigid cap as a plate or a shell like a ship, a plate on a ship, you know, that was the analogy. Easily bent that way but not bent that way, very low flexural rigidity but a very high torsial rigidity. But by the time we got to 1971 we were using the term plate tectonics, because my first course that I gave in Cambridge in 1970, in my last year there, I was using the term plate tectonics. And certainly when I went to the States and I started giving courses in Albany and Columbia I was using the term plate tectonics. But, you know, I just don’t know how that came about. Can’t think. It’s interesting, I’ll find out. I’ll find out that one and let you know, but I don’t know offhand. It may be in Naomi Oreskes’ book, is it? Have you read through that?

Not that I’ve found, no. The reason I’m asking is because when people who are completely outside science ask me about what I’m doing and I tell them this is one of the things, they often say why is it called plate tectonics. I mean –

Ah, well why it’s called – that’s easy.

Ah, but why – they mean why is it called that rather than anything else, not what does it mean.

I think that’s an – somebody thought of that term, thought of a plate on a ship or a plate, a rigid plate, you know. Because that’s what a plate is, it’s a rigid thing, and they thought, well, plate tectonics, it seems logical. And it is logical. But I don’t know who first used it and when and how and why. I think it must have been around 1969. It’s somewhere around 1969 that somebody coined that term and I don’t know who it was. Did Dan talk about this when you interviewed him?

No, but then again I didn’t ask him, but yes.

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Didn’t ask him, no.

[End of Track 6]

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Track 7

Now we know that you went to Lamont in 1967, New York in America, for three months. I wonder if you can take yourself back and describe the differences between the general sort of society culture and life, US compared to Britain, at the time. This is America – one particular bit of America at a particular time, 1967.

Mm.

I’ve got a sense of what was going on in the department but I’ll follow up on that later. I ask partly because in the interview that we discussed last time briefly for the Academy of Sciences, you say something like, I got to love America, it was a cultural delight, it was a lively and freewheeling place and it was a free and exciting period. So it raises the question, for people who weren’t in America – weren’t in New York in 1967, what was the sort of tone or character of the kind of general society and culture from the point of view of someone who’d just come from Britain?

I think it was a – the differences were so striking. How should I summarise it? Well, there was New York itself, of course, which was a capital city, or a city that’s so different from London. I mean, it’s chalk and cheese. It’s very unstuffy, unstuffy city, a lot of noise and vibrancy and very good theatre, very good theatre, and music, the Met, Met Opera, fantastic. I mean, any night of the week, I suppose just as in London, you can find great concerts and operas going on, ballet and great art galleries. I mean, gosh, the art galleries in New York are phenomenal. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is just truly beautiful. I mean, great collections of modern American painters like John Singer Sargent and – the collections are staggering, they’re beautiful. So it’s just the difference and – difference in food as well. I was introduced to pizza. I hadn’t had pizza before. And just the smell of pizza on the New York streets, you know, and the smell of hamburgers and – it was – I think almost everything was different. I mean, the clothing – you could buy – the clothing was very cheap as well. I mean, I bought quite a lot of clothes in New York and bought really nicely tailored clothes and it was a delightful place to shop. And lots of fresh vegetables. The stores seemed to have masses of stuff in them compared with

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British shops. It may have been an illusion, but – in New York you could really shop amazingly for the most staggering variety of things. The fish, the meat, the vegetables, it was just a superabundance of really quite cheap things as well. I was struck by the cheapness of things as well. Even in those days America was much cheaper. Nowadays it’s even more pronounced, the difference in prices in America. What you pay £1 for here you pay $1 in America for or less. So there was that. Social attitudes of people, very open and always terribly interested in what you were doing. Everyone was interested in what you were doing, what are you doing, tell me about it, you know, oh gosh, that’s interesting, what does it mean, why is it important, those kinds of things, and not just my fellow scientists but people on the street, I mean, people just in adjacent houses in the place we lived. We lived in a small little town called Tappan, which is just quite close to the – in upstate – in – it was either in – is it New Jersey or New York? I can’t remember, it was one of the two, right on the boundary, but anyway Tappan. I think it’s New York. And we got to know the people in the neighbourhood in which we lived. We rented a very nice house. Rented a house from the third base coach for the New York Mets, I think it was [laughs], so I got to know baseball and I got interested in – quite interested in American sports. I liked the baseball, I liked the football, American football. Didn’t like basketball or – basketball I thought very boring, still do, very boring. But baseball and football were great fun and I got to know them quite well. A lot of travelling we did too, I mean some lovely country in New York. And we went up to the Helderbergs – we went to upstate – ‘cause we had a – we spent – I spent most of the time of course in New York on sabbatical but we’d get out and go to New England colleges to give lectures. I was invited all over New England, to Dartmouth and Middlebury and lots of nice little places, and they put us up and we had lovely times. Very friendly, the people were so friendly and polite and everything was so clean. Americans are very clean people, you know, they take showers every day [laughs], which I find quite agreeable. That’s changed in this country too, of course, you know, but it wasn’t true in those days. So it was just the cleanliness, the freshness, the vibrancy, and also the – going back to the geology, the openness of the geologists. They were always terribly encouraging. They weren’t jealous, they weren’t saying, well, here’s somebody who’s in competition with us, they were always out to help you in every way they can. They would always like to work with you as well, that’s the other thing. They were very

199 John Dewey Page 200 C1379/83 Track 7 good at – Americans are very collegial people, they like working with people. English people tend to be more secretive. And I found in Cambridge people weren’t – I don’t have to mention any names but people there I found, they were much more conscious of what they had and wanted to keep it to themselves and they weren’t actually interested in what you were doing. They wanted to do their own thing. But Americans tend not to do that, they tend to want to incorporate they have with what you have and make something better out of it, which I found a very agreeable trait. That’s always been true of America, I think, and certainly true now. So those are the – that’s an outline of the – also the weather, the weather was somehow more delightful [laughs], a lot of sunshine in the summer. It’s quite warm in the summer, of course, in New York, perhaps too hot, maybe a little humid. But it was different and I was able to wear shorts and – you know, I wore different clothing. I wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts and sandals and – you know, and that’s the way people dressed. People tend to have ties in Cambridge and white shirts and a bit stuffy, you know [laughs].

And was there any sense that this was 1967? Am I right in thinking it’s the Summer of Love? Was there anything of that in the visible –

Not around where I was, no. I heard about it, you know, in San Francisco, all kinds of – Berkeley, Berkeley and the Bay Area of California was really sort of all lovey dovey and flower children and parties on the streets and poetry sessions and – I suppose Alan Ginsberg and Schneider were going strong then and Kerouac, you know, On the Road and that crowd. The Beat generation, I think they were called. But I didn’t see much sign of it around New York, in fact not at all, not at all. No, I may – I was introduced to Bob Dylan, I think for the first time. I had never come across – well, he was fairly new, of course, at that time, I suppose, and his music was becoming very popular and very good. Who else? A few rock musicians. I knew the Beatles and the Stones from here, of course, from Britain, but a few other southern bluegrass players I got to – some of the popular music. I got to know some American classical composers as well, Samuel Barber and Copeland and Hanson and so forth and I got to like those very much. So all in all it was a wonderful new experience, you know, just total sort of new way of looking at life.

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[7:47]

I gathered that some of those who were working around you, Lynn Sykes and Walter Pitman and people – I don’t know to what extent there was a sense of young scientists working on the new global tectonics with an older generation of scientists more sceptical. Did that apply here? Was there a sense of –

In America, you mean?

Mm.

Not at all, no, absolutely not. The – the older generation I think in America – America went from – in less than a decade, I’d say, it went from a situation in which if you espoused continental drift you couldn’t get a job in North American universities, to a situation in which if you didn’t espouse continental drift and plate tectonics you couldn’t get a job in North America [laughs]. There was just an absolute switch in attitudes. In Britain it was a more progressive sort of attitude, progressive change, kicking and screaming, you know, and that kind of thing, but in America the older generation – there were a few resistors, people like Walter Bucher, for example, in Columbia who just abhorred continental drift and thought it was all nonsense. And he actually affected, I think – did I mention this before? He affected the way that the director of Lamont, Maurice Ewing, thought about it. Maurice Ewing resisted plate tectonics for a long time. I’m not sure he even liked it to the day of his death.

Could you tell me about what you gathered about the character of some of those people who were working on the new global tectonics at the time that you were there in 1967? In other words, when you describe yourself as being in the thick of it, who – tell me about the sort of characters of the people who were around you.

Well, Walter Pitman – they were all – from the outset, as I say, they were all very generous of their time and ideas. That’s the thing I’ve always found in North

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America, people are always keen to tell you what they’re doing, give you data, you know, say use it if you want to, you know. They’re not secretive with their ideas and so forth, much more open. And that was certainly true of Lynn Sykes and Walter Pitman, they were – I learnt a huge amount, simply by sitting in their offices being instructed by them, talking to them about geology and seismology and magnetics and so forth. That’s where I really received my sort of plate tectonic education and mobilist education in a way. Walter since then has remained a dear very close friend and whenever I go to New York I always stay with him, so – and they were working like crazy and having phenomenal ideas. And, you see, they were data heavy. That was an institute that was absolutely data heavy and I learnt to respect that greatly. I said, you can’t do much in science without superb data, you’ve got to have the data. You can have ideas but ideas are nothing until you test them. You can have a great idea but let’s test it and see how it works and that takes data. And so they were – it was a repository of a massive amount of data, of oceanographic ship born data, magnetics, gravity at sea, seismology and – the seismology, of course, they used for plate tectonics came out of the Worldwide Network, the Worldwide Seismic Network and the Harvard Catalogue, so they were using all that sort of stuff. But there were piston cores of sediments at sea, magnetic records. And Pitman just had enormous amounts of magnetic data and he was analysing all the little wiggles, oh god, this is – if you – and he realised if you reversed it, my God, it’s identical, you know, fantastic, symmetrical seafloor spreading. So that was very exciting. And they quantified the timescale thoroughly after Vine and Matthews had the idea in the first place. They quantified it very thoroughly and they found that it correlated with the age of the ocean floor as measured by sediments from – and they extrapolated four centimetres here in the South Atlantic and said, my God, if – and that means that the continents were together 125 million years ago and that’s what the geology tells you, exactly 125 million. That’s the split, the volcanism, the first salt deposits and so forth. So everything just began to come together wonderfully in a very simple sort of – simple sounding ways. But Lynn Sykes was similar with the seismic data. He went off – after that initial period of plate tectonics and he became famous, he went off and got very much involved with the nuclear weapons testing programme around the world, you know, ‘cause there was a great worry about Russian nuclear testing, possible Chinese nuclear testing. And the Russians were saying for a long time, oh no, that

202 John Dewey Page 203 C1379/83 Track 7 was just a – that was just a bloody good earthquake in Siberia, oh no it wasn’t an earthquake. And the way of course is the radiation pattern from the seismic waves. The radiation pattern from an earthquake in general gives you four quadrants, you know, two of compression, two of dilation and that’s – then you can tell which four moved from them and so forth, whereas a nuclear explosion gives you a radiation pattern with compression in all directions. That’s the nature of explosion. So Lynn Sykes went off into that and became very big in the American, you know, sort of nuclear test ban treaty and all that kind of stuff. I think he’s still doing that. I’m not sure he’s still doing it but he’s retired now. Everyone’s retired, including – we’ve all retired now [laughs] pretty well. I think Dan’s retired now, hasn’t he? I think he’s retired.

[13:34]

And what were these sorts of people doing when they weren’t working, Lynn and Walter for example?

Gosh, it’s an interesting question. They were workaholics actually. When I – the times I’ve lived in America I’ve been a fairly workaholic. America is an environment that encourages people to work and work hard because the rewards are great. If you do well in your subject and you become famous and you’re in demand for a job, the salaries are enormous and you can earn truly massive salaries, unlike here where things are more constrained and, you know, you have the regular salary – things are changing actually here. They are rewarding the truly distinguished people with much higher salaries now and that’s good. But never been true in North America, they reward people according to what the dean thinks they’re worth, you know. So outside the science Lynn Sykes, I don’t know, I don’t think he did a lot to my knowledge. I mean, he may have had a secret hobby of which I knew little, but I was fairly close to Lynn and I think basically he just worked all the time. Americans really know how to work. Gosh, they work hard. Walter worked all the time. Walter had a family, he had two daughters and a – he lived in a very nice apartment in New York. ‘Cause Walter came to it rather later in life. He was a sort of businessman in New York wearing Brooks Brothers suits and things like that [laughs], you know, for many

203 John Dewey Page 204 C1379/83 Track 7 years, and then he suddenly got interested in the sea and oceanography and that’s how he came into it. And he joined the ship and registered as a research student. I think that’s what led to the breakup of his marriage. His wife, who ran the Miss World contest in New York, I think couldn’t stand the notion of – her husband was a grotty student and not a Brooks Brothers suit wearing businessman in New York going to posh parties and all that kind of stuff, so – and Walter hated all that kind of stuff, so he became a very distinguished scientist instead, fine, you know. So, yeah, they worked, they worked. I don’t think Walter really has hobbies except reading. He reads a staggering amount of stuff. And in – ‘cause Walter’s gone into archaeology to some degree as well.

[15:48]

He’s interested in sea levels. He’s always been interested in sea level and how it goes up and down and floods, mega floods, and the biblical flood is one of his great interests in life, the Black Sea, the great Black Sea event. And he wrote a wonderful book called the Noah Arkian Flood with Bill Ryan and that’s a fabulous book. It’s about the drowning of the Black Sea 7,500 years ago, which he thinks is probably the biblical flood, and very interesting. So he – go on.

I was going to – while you were on the flood, I was going to ask you about that because I found a reference to a television programme on this –

Same people, that’s right, yes, that’s right.

It was irritating, I couldn’t get the programme, but in the notes it says that it was British associate John Dewey who first put up the ingenious idea that a flood could have been – there could have been a real flood that became the biblical flood.

Mm, mm, yeah.

So I wonder what you remember – if that it is true, I wonder –

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It is true.

I wonder what you remember of being at that –

Yeah, it started in late ‘60s, early ‘70s, I can’t remember exactly when, but we were having lunch together in the old – in the restaurant in Lamont Observatory, in the refectory, the canteen or whatever they’re called, and we were chatting about this and that. And Walter was beginning to get very interested in sea level change. In fact Walter and I wrote a very big paper on sea level change some years ago. And Walter was always interested in the mechanisms of sea level change, the rates. I mean, how do you change sea level, you know? Well, obviously ice, building big ice caps is a way of dropping the sea level very fast. If you see huge drops in sea level very fast over short periods, like, you know, a sort of – you know, 12,000 up to half a million years, you know that it’s ice doing it. So the big sea level, massive sea level, fast sea level changes of the past – you can see in the late Ordovician there was a huge glaciation in the Sahara and sea level goes down and then there’s a huge sea level rise, a marine transgression, across the whole world and we know that – and that’s fast and we know what it is, it’s deglaciation. And of course it’s happening at the present day, sea levels are rising. We’re coming out of a glaciation, have been for the past 12,000 years. So we – Walter’s got very interested in this and other mechanisms, you know, and tectonic mechanisms, subsidence and sea floor spreading rates. They all change sea level quite slowly over tens of millions of years. So Walter – we’re all getting interested in this whole thing. And we were just speculating and chatting and I remember Walter and Bill Ryan were there, who was his co-author on the book eventually, and I think maybe Bill Ryan said, ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘What about the biblical flood? Could that – do we know how fast that was?’ Well, if you believe the early books of the bible then it was pretty damn fast and poor old Noah had to build an ark to get the animals into it [laughs]. Anyway, it obviously was a very quick event. And what is interesting – he said, ‘Well, I’ve been reading about this and there appears to be a legend in many countries in the Middle East, it’s not just the Bible, there are old legends about floods.’ Well, of course there are generally about – as there are about earthquakes and men falling out of the sky and all that kind of stuff. But there appears to be a roughly common thread of a flood around 7500, that sort of

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– in the Persian Gulf and various other places. And Walter became to think, he said, ‘Well, how could that be? What are the mechanisms?’ Then I asked the question, I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘How about, you know, if you drain an ocean basin, if you have a closed ocean basin and you evaporate the – the climate changes and there’s no – there’s freshwater, a little freshwater, coming in but the evaporation rate is greater than the rate at which the freshwater’s coming in, what’s going to happen?’ He said, ‘The sea’s going to progressively evaporate and you’re going to get a bloody great salt deposit on the floor of that basin. And if a break comes you’ll get an absolute massive inundation and it could happen very fast.’ And I did a calculation about the Mediterranean because we know that there was a – six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up completely and Gibraltar just was closed off for some tectonic reason, ‘cause, you know, North Africa’s moving with respect to Spain and it just simply closed the gap. And so the amount of water coming in through the rivers of the Black Sea and North Africa, they’re negligible of course, the Nile and so forth, those rivers supplied very little water overall. And they – I worked out the rate at which the thing had happened. It was bloody fast, it was extraordinary. And then I said, if Gibraltar broke and a waterfall broke through, how long would it take to fill the Black Sea? And I reckoned forty years – not the Black Sea, the Mediterranean. The whole Mediterranean would have flooded in about forty years, ‘cause the waterfall would have been truly – something that you would not want to be anywhere near. It would be – I reckon it was at least 1,000 or 2,000 times the size of Niagara minimum, minimum, and it was probably just a roaring torrent coming from the Atlantic through that gap. So Walter said, ‘My God,’ he said, ‘Could that be?’ I said, ‘Well, the trouble is that was six million years ago. That’s not biblical. So you’ve got to look for somewhere that’s a similar kind of thing.’ And then Walter and Bill started thinking, what about the other oceans? The Black Sea, could the Black Sea do it? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t – so they went off and that was the start of it. They started doing masses of research on the Black Sea and they discovered that – they discovered deposits, strandlines, way below sea level. Clearly the sea level had dropped like crazy. And they dated these things with shells and it turned out it was 7,500, astonishing, I mean, absolutely amazing. And then they started doing lots of other research around the Black Sea with the Russians and with the Turks on the north side, Sinop and that northern Black Sea coast of Turkey. And then they realised that

206 John Dewey Page 207 C1379/83 Track 7 what had happened was that the climate changed and there was a very hot dry period and the rate at which the rivers were coming in from Russia, donets and dnieper and so forth coming into the Black Sea, was much less than the rate at which evaporation was taking place. You can literally work it out from the temperature. And they showed that the Black Sea must have lost at least half its volume, something like half its volume. And then they started thinking in this sort of way, they started thinking, okay, if that were true and mankind were around at that time – we know at that time that man was cultivating cereals. There were farmers, there were farmers who – with domesticated animals and with agriculture going on, primitive agriculture. And they said, okay, if that’s the case and you’re on the edge – say you’re in the Romanian plane on the Danube delta and there’s the Black Sea and you’ve got farms, okay, then sea level starts to drop. So the sea level goes out and when it’s – if you’ve got a profile with the plane like that and then a drop off into the Black Sea like that, obviously the sea will retreat fast from here but when it comes to here the strandline will recede much more slowly ‘cause it’s going downhill. But anyway, it will go downhill and naturally the farmers will follow it down. Well, I say – it’s not like that, you know, it’s a fairly small slope actually. So they would naturally start farming those areas that had been covered by sea until recently, until recently before then. So the strandline is dropping, dropping, dropping into the Black Sea and people around the Black Sea are naturally commandeering the land and pushing their farms out towards the edge. And then climate changed again and – oh sorry, and what happened was that as the Black Sea progressively dropped, also the level in the Aegean was dropping ‘cause the Mediterranean was dropping. There was actually a slight drop in global sea level at that time. So the Bosphorus was probably a dry cut between the Black Sea and the sea at Marmara. And then climate changed again and global sea levels started to rise and the sea level in the Mediterranean generally started to rise and more water was coming in and producing local sea level rises and eventually the sea level got up to the Bosphorus level. So it started trickling through the Bosphorus towards the Black Sea. And of course when you came to the northern end of the Bosphorus there was a drop off into the sea way – the sea was way below you. You could look out into the Black Sea and see the sea right down there at the bottom. And then water started trickling, the trickle became a river and the river became a flood, then it started really cutting down a gorge. And you can see that, you can actually see

207 John Dewey Page 208 C1379/83 Track 7 that in the seismics of the Bosphorus today. And it started cutting down and the torrent became a roaring cascade and it started cutting – and you had this huge waterfall. It must have been a truly spectacular – rather like the Mediterranean, the one six million years through that and through Gibraltar, which the waterfall would be pouring out in a jet of water. And again, one or two thousand times the size of Niagara is the sort of speed at which these things move. And it would have filled the Black Sea in about forty years again, maybe even less ‘cause it’s a smaller sea. And they calculated the volumes, they calculated the noise. The noise could probably be heard 100 miles away. The noise of that waterfall coming over was a thunderous roar, so people would start to hear that around the Black Sea and wonder what was going on and people would travel a bit and they’d find this bloody waterfall, good god [laughs], extraordinary. And you couldn’t get across it from – that’s the other thing. Getting from Asia to Europe across the Bosphorus would be absolutely impossible. You’d have to go round through the Sea of Marmara and go by boat. You couldn’t get – so that may have had some very important local sociological consequences in the Neolithic and – no, it was probably – it was the beginning of the Bronze Age, wasn’t it? Yes, Iron Age – was it Iron Age? Well, it depends where you are in the world, Iron Age, Bronze Age, but I think it was sort of – we’re coming into the metallic period. So anyway ‘cause – yes, they did, they had instruments of various kinds, iron and bronze instruments. So we have this situation now, the sea level’s rising like mad, the Black Sea is filling up. And these farmers of course sort of – they’d cultivated – for a century or so they’d cultivated down to sea level. Now the bloody sea was coming back at them, you see. It must have been a bit of a shock sort of moaning and trudging up, oh God, sea’s coming in, like East Anglia in the present day [laughs] only much worse. And then of course – the trouble is, when sea level comes – like the reverse of that lip, sea level comes rather slowly up – sorry, comes up at the same rate but the advance of the shoreline is quite low. But as soon as the sea lip hits that and starts coming up that way, sea level is – sorry, the strandline is coming in very fast. You can calculate the rate, it’s a kilometre per day. The sea – literally the shoreline is a kilometre [laughs] of slope every day. Now that’s a flood, that’s a flood and that’s probably – they think that that’s what the origin of the flood is. And it’s not just around the Danube delta, which is the most prominent part, but all round the Black Sea it would have happened simultaneously. And there’s a

208 John Dewey Page 209 C1379/83 Track 7 common legend. It might have happened also simultaneously in the Gulf, in the Arabian Gulf, because again there’s a lip – at the Strait of Hormuz there’s a lip from the main ocean that’s in the Sea of Oman, you know, the Oman Sea and then the Gulf is very shallow, so you may have had the same relationship there. So the Black Sea and the Gulf may have all happened at about the same time so there was a common legend around all those shorelines. And that’s what the book’s about and it’s a book worth reading. It’s a wonderful book. I think it’s called the Noah Arkian Flood, or is it Noah’s Floods? Something like that, mm.

[28:25]

Thank you. Now the longer period in America, which is 1970 to ’82 –

Yes.

Which is Albany, what I want to try and understand is what is specific about US and British scientific culture in geology at this time, which you’ve covered a bit with the shorter period of research in ’67. And so – and in detail sort of how the sort of traditions and practices and sociability of, for example, fieldwork was different and the same compared to Britain, or laboratory work or sort of relations between scientists in this period. Last time we spoke about the – in detail about the sort of work that you did there and about the grants and students and so on, but being in America now for a longer period, are you able to say – yes, that really, how the scientific culture in geology was different across the two places. You’d had that short period back in Britain lecturing and the resistance and so on.

Yes, very short, that was, like three years, you know, something like that.

It’s almost at the level of – almost, you know, how people dressed and spoke to each other and how conversations about science happened in the department and whether there were any differences –

Yes, I see what you’re saying.

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Were there any differences in what happened on fieldwork and how it was arranged, what happened when you went there, all that sort of thing?

Yes. Let’s deal with those in turn. Perhaps fieldwork first of all. I and my students did fieldwork in Newfoundland. That was our main stamping ground. A bit in the Appalachians in New England but mostly up in Newfoundland. And we’d go up as a group. There were always a group of us, so I’d have maybe three or four students at any one time and we’d sort of camp together and work together. And I would go from person to person, you know, this person’s mapping here, that person’s mapping there, and I’d go around and I’d be doing some of the work too, mapping with them and so forth and helping them, yet they were independent. I made it clear to them, they were independent, had to do their own thing, don’t depend on me, you know, I’m doing my thing and you do your thing and come up with your own material for your thesis, your PhD thesis. But it was a very communal thing and we all went round each other’s area and looked – you know, what’s Suzanne doing, what’s Jeff doing here, what’s Eric doing over there, and we’d sort of go around and talk to each other and meet together and have meals together and so forth sometimes. Sometimes we were in different places and we – but we were all up in the field together and it was treated as a kind of communal activity. That happens much, much less in Britain. People tend to be – I think it’s a question of individualism, you know. I think British people, as I said before, in their ideas, they want to make their own mark quite separately, they want to be individuals, they want to be separate and special. And I think people tend to do fieldwork independently, the students work individually independently, the faculty, the staff who go with them tend to maybe go to help them for a while and then come away. There isn’t this communal attitude towards fieldwork. I mean, I think the communal attitude is a very powerful way of finding out things, ‘cause, you know, sort of five pairs of eyes are better than one pair of eyes and you’re all looking at something, what’s that, what’s – you know. But that’s not the British tradition. The British tradition is individualism and it’s – in some ways it’s good, some ways it’s bad. I think it’s mostly – the American way is better, the sort of communal attitude towards fieldwork.

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[32:10]

So there’s that. In terms of the way the department operated, we had some wonderful graduate students because we were very fussy about the students we took in, really fussy, and we said we’re only taking students that we’re pretty sure are pretty damn good. We want, you know, kids who’ve got a tremendous grade point average with very good references from their professors. And we tended to take students from, you know, the typical four year colleges like Oberlin and Colgate, Hamilton, Middlebury, I mean, really great colleges. And we knew they’d been taught well as undergraduates, they’d really learnt their basic geology. So we got these kids, people like Jim Pindell and Jack Casey and Karson and [David] Rowley and a – I mean, a whole string of names, probably twenty names I can give you, people who’ve done very well subsequently, become professors in their own right, even one of whom’s now retired, just retired, shocking thing [laughs]. But anyway, they came to us and we – the department, the sort of sociology of the department, wasn’t professors and students and undergraduates and graduate students, undergraduates, it was very much more of a sort of common – a common room. We were all together in a sort of – the students had their rooms close to us and we’d be in and out of the students’ rooms all the time, they’d be in and out of our rooms, ‘John, I’ve got something that puzzles me, you know, can you come and have a look at it?’ So it was a – like the field, it was a common effort. I mean, people were individuals, of course they were, and doing their thing and finding out things for themselves, but in general there was much more sharing of information and – you know, for that reason students advanced very quickly. Now of course in America it’s different in the sense that students come and they have to take courses, you know. It’s not just research all the time, they take longer, they take probably four to five years very commonly, ‘cause they’re taking lots of courses. And if we feel their maths is not up to it then we make them take a maths course or chemistry or – they do courses in tectonics and petrology and they share courses with the undergraduates. But it was that kind of department in which we were – it was like a Camelot in a way, it was – everyone was friendly and everyone got on well together. There were little spats and arguments, of course there are, they’re among people generally, but it worked extremely well and as a result we were – we were publishing papers with the students. I mean, the students – we’d say,

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‘Okay, you write it up and give it to me and I’ll have a sort of think about it and add bits and pieces and god knows what.’ We were publishing Nature papers and papers in the major journals. I mean, the productivity of that department was – I’ve never known anything like it. It was quite extraordinary. I’m not saying that’s absolutely typical, it just happened to be a department in which there were I think, what, eight teaching staff, quite small, and at least three times as many students as there were staff and as a result it was very productive. And we got very good people, gave them tremendous research problems to deal with. They were either working in Newfoundland, the Caribbean, quite a lot in the Caribbean area, a few in Europe, Shetlands, Norway, a few places like that, but mostly they were in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. And I was in charge of the sort of Newfoundland area and Kevin Burke, whose name you – have I mentioned Kevin, Kevin Burke? He was a wonderful character, an Englishman who came to Albany in 1973, I think, about two years after I arrived. Anyway, he knows an awful lot about the Caribbean and he had a team of students working down there. So they were the main two field areas. And then there was a man called Win Means, a delightful chap. He’s now retired, living in upstate New York with his second wife and living in a pub and he’s the general factotum now in the pub [laughs]. But anyway, he was an experimental structural geologist and very good. He had all kinds of deformed rock analogues of various kinds and did some superb work. So there were a few people like that who did more sort of practical laboratory theoretical work, but we were mostly a field oriented department, Newfoundland, Caribbean, but we also thought about the globe, the geology of the globe. We all basically learnt the geology of the globe. We discussed it. Kevin knew about Central Africa, I knew quite a lot about Asia and Australia, and we shared information and we talked about it over lunch. We’d all have lunch together. I mean, certainly all the faculty, the field oriented family and any students who wanted to join us. We had a huge – I had a massive round table in my office and lab in Albany and people would just come in with their sandwiches and coffee and sit there and chat. We’d chat about all kinds of things, the Benue Trough, I mean, we talked about – and that’s the way to do it. If you’re talking about some piece of geology we don’t understand – what the hell’s the Benue Trough all about, you know, how does it work. And Kevin would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got – here’s a paper,’ and would go off and get a paper. And this is the stratigraphy and he described this stratigraphy.

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Ah, I wonder where those turbidites come from, you know, it’s that kind of wonderfully integrative discussion involving the faculty and the students. It was marvellous. So that was what Albany was like academically. It was an extraordinary place and I’ve never been anywhere before it – anywhere like it before or after, except Davis. See again, back to America the second time in the – in 2001 to 2008, 2009, that was an extraordinary experience because it was very, very similar to Albany, not quite as open and so forth, but again the students got on and had sort of sandwich lunches and salad lunches with the faculty. We discussed things and chatted and there were seminars all the time and we had visiting people coming and giving a seminar and everyone would sit around afterwards and drink wine and chat about things. So that’s the way Americans do things, much more open, and that’s why I think they’re scientifically more successful, ‘cause I think they feed off each other in a sort of mutual feeding thing that doesn’t happen here, just individuals doing their own thing.

[38:35]

Yeah, so how did that round table conversation and communal fieldwork – how different was that or how alike to what you found in Britain either before you went to Albany or after, when you came back? If that’s how it operated here, how –

The answer is it just doesn’t happen in Britain.

So what is the relationship between staff and students?

Very friendly and – very friendly, but it’s a one on one basis, much more of a one on one. And my students in Cambridge, for example – I had one, two, three, four, five, six – I had seven research students – eight research students over a – is that right, eight? Yes, I had eight research students over a six year period, six or seven year period, in Cambridge, so the number was much, much less than I’ve had subsequently. I’ve had fifty-four PhD students overall. And most – well, most of those are either in Albany or in Oxford. One year I had thirteen PhD students going on the trot, which is actually quite a lot and I was exhausted. I came home everyday. I’d been talking to most of them during that day [laughs]. You know, it takes a lot of

213 John Dewey Page 214 C1379/83 Track 7 looking after – not looking after but helping and encouraging and so forth. So I think here it tends to be – it’s much more of a one on one. You have a good relationship, you’re working – they’re doing their thing, you’re doing – and I’m not interfering with them. I always said – my philosophy has always been I never inflict help on research students [laughs], which sounds strange but it’s right. If they’re really stuck – and I said, you must be honest, you know, if you’re really stuck come and see me, don’t feel hesitant, just come and see me and we’ll work it out. And then – and I found that works beautifully ‘cause – and I try to make sure that the research students I choose I know from the beginning are pretty damn good. I made just two mistakes, that’s all, out of fifty-six. I had fifty-six and two sort of dropped out and we just didn’t get on, they wouldn’t work and peculiar and had psychological problems, that kind of thing. But fifty-four of them, fantastic, you know. And think what they’ve accomplished, those kids. I’m very proud of them.

[41:05]

Are you able to hazard a guess at the sort of reason for this difference in culture between America and Britain at this time, why it was more one to one in Britain and more communal and around the table or together in –

Well, I think it was – as I said before, it’s a national – I think there is a national characteristic difference. British people tend to be more reserved, they tend not to show their feelings very much. They don’t have what I call the Latin temperament. I have much more of a Latin sort of Mediterranean temperament [laughs], I think, or a more American temperament perhaps. But I think most British people tend to be tight and sort of hold their cards close to their chest and for that reason it’s very difficult for them, I think, to sit round regularly in a big round table thing where you’re bearing all your information, I’ve just discovered so and so, you know, if somebody steals it, tough. That’s always my philosophy. I had lots of ideas stolen from me, you know, but I reckoned that if I’ve had five ideas that are stolen I can have lots of other ideas and I do. I’ve had – you know, so, you know, if I had 100 ideas, maybe five have been nicked, who cares, that’s too bad. As long as they’ve enjoyed it and made something of it, you know. So I think the British tend to be very much more

214 John Dewey Page 215 C1379/83 Track 7 introspective and tight and tight with their lives and their information and so forth, whereas Americans are much more naturally open and I think that – it’s a national characteristic, I believe. I’m not saying all Americans are like that but I’ve never known an American geologist who is tight in the same way as an English person is. They’ve always been fairly – and very excited about what you’re doing. I mean, suddenly – very often, you know, if I’ve won a prize or a medal or something, I’ll get lots of emails from Americans but very few from English people, even from friends, you know, it’s er, not – it is – I don’t know what it is, it’s a very peculiar thing. And I think Dan has told me once he had the same thing, you know. He’s had lots of prizes and medals over the years and it’s always Americans who are so pleased and they’re genuinely pleased, you know. They say if he can do it I can do it, you know [laughs]. I think that’s the American thing, isn’t it? An entrepreneur has a fantastic idea, my God, that’s wonderful, that’s fantastic, if he can do it, if I do the same I can do it too, and I think Americans think that way, so it’s a can do – I would say it’s rather like – if you tell an American something, ‘I’ve had this idea,’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh god, yes, it’s wonderful and we can do so and so and so and so.’ If you say the same thing to a British person they say, ‘Yes, that’s true, but …’ You know [laughs], it’s yes and versus yes but, a national characteristic, I think.

[44:03]

Can I ask you about a specific collaboration? This will probably be easily explained. But in your 1970 Nature paper, Plate Tectonics, Orogeny and Continental Growth, it’s you and –

Horsfied?

Yes. I wondered –

Strange, it is very strange.

I only ask because she’s down as the further education television department of BBC London on this paper, you know, that’s her sort of institutional attachment, so –

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Yes, that’s right. I haven’t seen Brenda or heard from her since. It’s really weird. I tell you how it happened is this, 1969, I was in Lamont every year. Every summer I’d go to Newfoundland to do fieldwork but I’d also go on and spend a month in Lamont, chatting to people. It became a sort of intellectual home for me after that ’67 period. And then of course I became – half my job in the States, Albany and Columbia, it was wonderful. But anyway, ’69, here I was in Lamont, working away in the office one day, and I heard sort of voices outside and a woman’s voice and I thought, oh, it sounds English. So I think Walter was in – came to my office and said, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘John, I’d like you to meet this lady, Brenda Horsfield. She’s a sort of science journalist, interested in science and she writes about it and so forth and she thinks she’s had an idea.’ So ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Bring her in.’ So we sat and we got on very well and we had a coffee together and so forth and we went out to dinner in New York that night, carried on chatting, and – yes, I mean, she had a sort of – and she’d realised – she’d realised, I think quite independently, that if you take a plate tectonic world and some oceans are closing, other oceans have to be opening. And, you know, it sounds awfully obvious in the present day but in fact people weren’t thinking – even then weren’t thinking in that way. The Wilson cycle, if you like, of – you know, it’s like a – she said it’s like a string bag, you draw the string and it affects the whole bag, and I can see what she was saying. So – and I said, ‘Well, I’m just about to write a paper on something like this at the moment, a short Nature paper probably, on the Wilson cycle and mountain belts and geosynclines and how the world works in terms of, you know, bulk geology.’ She said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘That’s very interesting.’ She said, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing something like this for a magazine.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you like, you know, I’d be very happy to share authorship with you if you like.’ She said, ‘Would you?’ She was quite surprised. ‘I’m only a journalist.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, very happy.’ She was an extraordinary woman. She jumped out of aeroplanes, she was a parachutist as well, and a horse rider, a very tough woman, a very sort of rather masculine tough lady. And I said, ‘I’m very happy to have you as a co-author.’ ‘Oh well, okay, fine.’ So she wrote – I said, ‘You write a first draft.’ And she wrote it and it was very good actually, it was very intelligent. And I took it and I rewrote bits of it and added the figures and so forth and shoved it off – Nature , was it Nature ? I think it was Nature , was it? Yeah, Nature . And to my astonishment

216 John Dewey Page 217 C1379/83 Track 7 they – I got a letter back almost immediately, yes, we’re publishing it in two weeks’ time. Good gracious [laughs]. So Brenda was very pleased and I was pleased. But, do you know, I haven’t – I’ve not seen her since then, even heard from her. That’s, what, thirty – god, it’s forty-two years ago. Isn’t that amazing? I wonder what she’s doing. Is she still – have you come across the name?

I don’t know yet, no, I don’t know. Do you know what she was doing for the BBC at the time?

It was something to do with science journalism, science programmes in Bristol, is it Bristol?

Yeah.

I think she lived in London, somewhere in London. I know she lived there, yeah. I don’t know. But it’d be worth following up. I’ll do that actually, ‘cause I reckon she was a – she might have been about five years older than me. She’d be eighty now, I would guess. Striking woman, striking looking woman, very sort of big angular gaunt woman and tough as – I mean, anyone who leaps out of planes regularly must be [laughs], can’t be all soft. But there we are, that was the story of that one. It was just a chance meeting, she came to Lamont, she was doing – going around America to the oceanographic institutions following up plate tectonics, or whatever it was called in those days, and she just happened to come into my room. That was it.

[48:38]

Thank you. In this – we’ll talk about Earth Story, which comes much later, later on in the interview, but to what extent were you asked to do sort of popularising type things, including television programmes, in the ‘70s, following up plate tectonics? Obviously this is the sort of thing she was doing perhaps.

Yes.

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But I wondered which, if any, you were involved in that.

Well, there was one big one, I think it was called Continental Drift. I think it was called Continental Drift, ‘cause – I’ve lost track of – I’ve not sort of thought about them much, they just happen and, you know, they go. And there was a man called Philip Daley, the great – he was a great science filmmaker in the BBC, and there was Doug Mawson, who was a soundman, I remember. And the chap came to my office in Albany once. I’d just arrived in Albany and he came in and he said, ‘I’m Phil Daley, can I talk?’ ‘’Course you can.’ ‘I’m from the BBC. We’re thinking of making a film about continental drift and all this new global tectonics stuff.’ So he said, ‘Would you like to take part and if so what could you contribute to it, do you think?’ So we sat down for a day, about a day, I suppose, and he stayed with me and we had a very – I got on very well with him. And I said ‘Well, you know, we’re working in Newfoundland and we’ve got these rocks called ophiolites and we think they’re bits of the old ocean floor, an old ocean floor that have been thrust up somehow on land.’ ‘Oh gosh,’ he said, ‘It sounds fantastically interesting. Is it very photogenic?’ I said, ‘Fantastically photogenic.’ You know, Western Newfoundland, the ophiolites there are big bare masses of orange rock and wonderful landscape with bears all over it and so forth [laughs]. So he said, ‘Okay, we’ll come and film it in the summer.’ So we arranged a time and he said, ‘Can you write a – write a script, a rough script, of what you would like to do and where you would like to go and what you would like to say and so forth.’ So I did. He said, ‘Terrific, we’ll do it, we’ll do it.’ So they came back and we met them in Newfoundland and we went to Betts Cove and the Bay of Islands and all kinds of places like that and we made the film. And it came out very well actually, it really did. It was beautiful. So that was the first one I ever did.

[50:53]

And then subsequently – gosh, I’ve done quite a number actually when I think about them. There was this thing with Aubrey Manning, that was one, with – there was another one called Planet Earth. I’ve done a lot of radio interviews, countless radio things, you know, one offs, quick one offs. When there’s a volcanic striking or an

218 John Dewey Page 219 C1379/83 Track 7 earthquake striking or something I go on. But no, it – I reckon I’ve been involved in about five television films, something like that, yeah. I’ve been invited to do quite a lot more but, you know, it’s a lot of work. I mean, that thing with Phil Daley was a week’s work in getting the thing – you know, the script together and ideas and so forth, another week’s filming in Newfoundland, so that’s a couple of weeks out of your life when you’re not doing research. And when I was young then in the ‘70s I was doing research hard all the time for obvious reasons, ambition, all the usual things, you know, and sheer interest of course. I mean, making films was not what I wanted to do but I was happy to please people by doing it occasionally.

[52:03]

Are you able to say how decisions were made – let’s take the Daley film, how decisions were made about what to say and how to say it, if you like? How did you come up with the final script? Was it – you could imagine that in one model you write it all and the BBC says fine, just read that, that’s fine.

Yes, yes.

Or there might be some sort of discussion.

Well, when I say script, I didn’t write out precisely what I was going to say, ‘cause I’ve never done that, even in lectures. When I give a lecture, I mean, I go in, I have no idea – I maybe have a rough first sentence and once the first sentence is away, I’m away, you know. And I basically have very good slides, a PowerPoint presentation of some kind, and I simply talk to the slides. And I find that’s by far the best way to lecture, no notes. I never have any notes of any kind in any lecture I’ve ever given. I don’t – it’s not so much don’t need them, I don’t want them. Maybe I do need them but I don’t, you know, want them, I want to just let it go where it’s going to go. And I find that conversations are like that and lectures and presentations on TV. Sometimes I find myself talking about something that I hadn’t even planned to say, you know, but it’s interesting, it’s interesting. Everything’s interesting. And so the Phil Daley thing, I wrote out where I wanted to film and what I was trying to show rather than this is

219 John Dewey Page 220 C1379/83 Track 7 what I’m going to say. And I said I’m – and Phil was quite surprised. He said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to write out a script and tell me, you know, what you’re going to …?’ I said, ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to say yet.’ He said, ‘Well, you must know roughly.’ I said, ‘Roughly, of course I do.’ And he said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll trust you.’ And it worked out very well. So it was basically saying where we’re going to go, what outcrops we were going to look at, what you can see in those outcrops, what I can tell you in terms of what the outcrop means, in terms of plate tectonics and modern earth and so forth. And he accepted that, it was absolutely fine. No script as such, classic script.

But even without a script, what sort of internal decisions were you making about how to translate something which – if you read one of your papers, coming from the outside it’s quite – being a non specialist, it’s quite difficult to understand ‘cause it’s very complicated and there’s lots of terms and so on, so what decisions did you make about how to, if you like, translate complicated first time science into something that could be –

Ah yes, I see what you’re saying. Well, I simply had in my mind – and Phil Daley said this, ‘Remember, the people you’re talking to – you’re talking into the camera about these rocks and so forth but it’s like giving lectures to an audience who are interested in geology, otherwise they won’t be watching the film. They’ll be interested in geology but they won’t know what a Jacuparanguite is and so don’t use terms like that. You can use terms like granite providing you say what a granite is, it’s a silicic rock that melts at rather low temperatures and it’s something of which the bulk of the continental crust is made, you know. So like – and oceanic rocks, a gabbro is something that sits in the oceanic crust and is heavier, it’s made of heavier minerals, you know, you do that.’ So he said, ‘Remember you’re talking to a non specialist audience, they’re literate people, they’re interested, they’re intelligent and you can educate them providing you don’t use silly terms, lots of complicated terms. Tell them about process in a simple way.’ So that’s what I did. And so without scripting, without the script, he said, you know, right at the beginning – he came on saying all the way – in fact all the way during breaks, he said, ‘Keep on talking. It’s

220 John Dewey Page 221 C1379/83 Track 7 excellent. Keep on talking in this fairly simple way and then people will understand what you’re saying.’

And did you get any sense of his motivations for doing this over the day that you discussed it and the time he stayed with you and actually doing it?

Well, I think he was – I mean, Phil made – oh, and the other person – I’ll tell you who else was involved was Nigel Calder. You’ve probably seen his books. He’s very good. He came with Phil Daley actually. I guess Phil Daley was the producer – that’s right, this is the way it works. Phil Daley was the producer, Nigel Calder was designing the whole series, though I think there were – I think it was a two – it was two one hour programmes, was that right or was it three one hour …? Maybe three one hour programmes. And I must have had about a half hour in one of them, at least half of one of them. And Nigel Calder had a very good idea of what he wanted, process. He said he wanted to know how the world works. He wrote a very good book actually relating to the series as well, to the three programmes – it was three programmes, yes. Phil was the producer, he was the mechanistic man. He knew roughly the sort of thing he was after but it came out of Nigel Calder really, I think, the sort of motivation.

[56:57]

Let’s redirect that question at Nigel Calder then.

Yes. Well, Nigel Calder is a man who’s been constantly – a science journalist, desperately interested in a range of avant-garde ideas in science, you know, the double helix and plate tectonics, things of that type, black holes, you know. It’s always something really very cutting edge and new in a science, how can we get this – why – how can we get this across as important to the general audience who are paying the taxes. I think that was one of his motivations. He said, ‘Look, in order to get science supported people have got to understand that it’s important and it’s telling them something new about the earth and it may lead to new mineral deposits …’ In fact it has, plate tectonics has led in some places to discovering important new deposits of

221 John Dewey Page 222 C1379/83 Track 7 minerals and petroleum. And he said, ‘So that’s important. So, you know, if they’re going to pay for it, if the government are going to pay for that and tax payers are going to fund it, they want to know it’s important and why it’s important.’ So I got some copper mineralisation into it as well, you know, and things like that. Nigel was very good actually. I haven’t seen him for yonks, a long, long time. I don’t know whether he’s still going, still alive. He’s about five years older than me, I suppose. Phil Daley was about ten, fifteen years older. He’d be ninety, I suppose, now, something of that sort. So I think it was genuine love of the science but also much more practical business of making sure that it came across to people watching these BBC programmes as something that’s really important and it’s not just some trivial thing that some eggheads are doing, which I think was very good actually. He was very early in that was Nigel.

Yes, ‘cause that’s quite a sort of – it’s quite a topical thing now, isn’t it, demonstrating the public value …

Yes, it is. They’ve got some very good people. I think Ian Stewart is very good. Have you ever seen the geological programmes that Ian Stewart does?

No.

Ian Stewart, he’s Professor at Plymouth University. He’s very, very good. He’s a Scot. Scots seem to be awfully good at this, I don’t know why, but they have a lovely way with them. There’s the chap who does the coast of Britain, coast of Scotland, you’ve probably seen him, a historian. I think he’s Professor of History somewhere. Superb, absolutely superb programmes on the coast of Britain, wonderful. So yeah, I think we’ve got some very good people actually. And that physicist chap, what’s his name? Erm …

Brian Cox.

You know the chap I mean probably.

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Brian Cox is the one.

Brian Cox, yeah. He’s very good, I think very good, not necessarily a great scientist, but people who have a wonderful ability to explain things really simply and well, and Cox is very good at that, no question. And there’s an Iranian born physicist as well, he’s very good, on the radio more. I can’t remember his name but anyway he’s awfully good too. So I mean, I think the BBC are quite good at selecting and finding these people and – I don’t know whether they go out looking for them or whether they come to the BBC with an idea, I’ve no idea at all, but they seem to be very good at finding these – well, you know, liaising with these people, mm.

[1:00:14]

Could you tell me about some work on particular committees and one that I was intrigued about was that you were involved in something called the US Committee for International Geological Correlation Programme from ’74 onwards, and then the same but the British National Committee for International Geological Correlation in 1988 to ’94. What – essentially what was that about, the International Geology Correlation Programme and what did you do?

IGCP, yes. IGCP is really about trying to promote the study of particular topics in geology that we regard as – that somebody regards as important by getting together groups of people from widely diverse countries. I mean, ideally Chile, China and Britain would be wonderful, you know. It’s a way of pulling together science, trying to pull out the elements of people’s interests, into a common problem and it’s had some fantastically good results as well. It’s enabled science to really go international in ways that it never was before. I mean, I found that, you know, when I grew up in science Imperial College was doing its thing in the Highlands and Western Ireland and so forth, but it was all very parochial things. Nobody would ever think of working with somebody in South Africa or – well, not necessarily never but much less so. Nowadays – I mean, there’s a very good friend of mine called Brian Windley who’s an Emeritus Professor of Geology in Leicester, BF Windley, Brian Windley, he works with the Chinese, with Madagascans, with Africans in different parts of Africa,

223 John Dewey Page 224 C1379/83 Track 7 with South Americans, and much of it was started by IGCP, by liaising and writing to places, anybody in China in your institute interested in such and such a thing. And that’s what the IGCP did, it promoted international cooperation in science, in geology, and very successfully. I think there have been at least 180 projects and they have their – they’re given a little bit of seed money and sometimes quite a bit ‘cause it all involves international travel, seed money and encouragement, and once you’ve got the imprimatur of the IGCP on your project it becomes much easier then to get money from a national authority, at least hopefully it does. I think it generally does. So it’s promoted a lot of very good science, a lot of very interesting projects. And the BGS have been – British Geological Survey have been very good at getting themselves involved over the years with this projects. The British Antarctic Survey, the same, very good. So all the sort of major British institutions and the – and British institutions, American institutions – I think every country in the world has really pulled its weight as best it can. Some countries have no money and they can’t do anything, some of the African countries have to be supported in their contribution. But it’s been a wonderful integration of international geology and I think lots of things have happened that otherwise would never have happened in terms of new ideas and new pieces of data, mapping projects in Angola, you know, all kinds of things. It’s been very exciting, still going on, I think it’s coming towards an end now. I think there still are IGCP programmes going on, but I decided to get out ‘cause there was quite a lot of work involved, a lot of travelling. I was going around and, you know, giving lectures in various parts of Africa and god knows what and pulling things – trying to encourage this and that and the other. And it was getting a bit much actually and I felt the amount of time I was being sucked into was increasing [laughs] and I said I’d better get out of it.

What did you – what in particular did you do on it though? I’m trying to imagine – so you’re on the – whether you’re on the US committee or later the British committee, what do you –

Well, judging whether a particular project that people were suggesting was good and why was it good, why was it not good, and how much seed money should it get to be successful. And that involved quite a number of meetings. That involved a – I used

224 John Dewey Page 225 C1379/83 Track 7 to go to Washington quite a bit for this. But for that reason I’d never sat on the – what’s it called, the IGC, the International Geological Committee – IU – International Union of Geological Sciences, sorry. My friend Eldridge Moores and other people have been on that, but I’ve been invited to go on it but it’s – I think it’s a lot of old men travelling round the world, staying in hotels and not doing very much, so I decided against getting involved in that. And in retirement I want to do geology and paint and do all kinds of things. I don’t want to get involved in anything that keeps me away from geology and painting and model railways and that kind of stuff, you know. I’ve become selfish, I suppose, in my old age [laughs].

[1:05:20]

And what did you do – this is somewhat later, but what did you do for NERC between ’83 and ’85?

Oh, I sat on NERC Council.

Council, yes. What was involved in that, for people who don’t understand what NERC is or what the council could possibly be doing? What did you do in it?

National Environmental Research Council, yeah. It’s the all – it’s the overarching embracing organisation that looks after mostly geology but anything to do with environmental science, the environmental sciences. So it looks after British Geological Survey, British Antarctic Survey, I think Silwood, some of the research going on at Silwood, the Imperial College research station, so – not the Met Office though. The Met Office is separate. That’s always been a – and the Ordinance Survey, the Ordinance Survey has been a separate organisation responsible for the maps of Britain and so forth. It’s very strange that they didn’t come under the arching of the NERC. So – and I was asked to go on that because they wanted some senior so called distinguished people sitting on council. But frankly, between you and me and the gatepost, I didn’t find it very interesting or indeed I couldn’t see why it was particularly useful. I mean, we used to go to Swindon to have meetings and sometimes we’d have meetings elsewhere in the country and we’d sit around

225 John Dewey Page 226 C1379/83 Track 7 discussing things and I’m not sure very much came of it really. I mean, most of the work, serious work, was done by the permanent staff of NERC, looking after BGS and so forth. We didn’t sort of design policy for them or anything like that. We were sort of – it was like a board of trustees in a way, you know. It was a – so – and I eventually fell out with them very badly over some issue. It was involving, I think, the Geological Survey and they wanted to do something and I really objected to it violently and I said, you know, you’re going to wreck the organisation if you do this. And finally they – in 1985, I suppose, early 1985, thereabouts, I simply resigned in a huff and it made the newspapers. I mean, it became a big fuss, professor resigns over policy of NERC and god knows what [laughs]. I didn’t want it to do that. That was the year I was lecturer of the Royal Society. I think maybe I was lecturer of the Royal Society ‘cause I made a fuss about NERC, who they didn’t – a lot of people don’t like [laughs]. So who knows. So yeah, I mean, that was what it’s all about. And I said then that I’m never going to get involved in any – I don’t mind being head of department somewhere and I was head of department in Durham for four years and then head of department in Oxford for five years. And I said after my five years I’m definitely stepping down. They said, ‘Oh well, it can be a lifetime thing.’ ‘What? A lifetime sentence? I don’t actually like doing it. I’m – let somebody else do it.’ So after five years I resigned from the headship of the department and it’s been a five year rotating thing ever since and that’s the way to do it in my view. Before me the previous professor was head of department for twenty-five years, poor devil. And it stops your research, you know, it really cuts into your time. So I said after that, 1991 I suppose it was, I will never become head of department again, I will never become a vice chancellor, however much they try to push me to do it. I will never – I’ll never try to run anything in future. I’m not going to do anything – any sort of administrative job outside anything I really have to do within the university and I haven’t. And I’ve been offered five vice chancellorships around the country and I said no to them all. I was offered the research directorship at British Petroleum in Sunbury, no, absolutely not. And various other things like that. But I said – I’m simply not interested in that kind of crap. It just doesn’t interest me at all. I want to do geology and other things, you know.

[1:09:26]

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Thank you. Could you then, in spite of what you just said, tell me about consulting work for oil companies?

Yes.

If you look at your CV there’s an enormous list, but coming from the outside, we’ve no idea what consulting means, whether, you know, it means you see one person and one company once and said something or, you know, how substantial it is, what you do, why you’ve done it and so on, that sort of thing.

Yes, yes.

I guess you may have to – because it’s such a long list, you may have to sort of sample a bit –

Sure, okay. I can give you it in generalities, the sort of different kinds of consulting that I do.

Yeah. And it’s interesting because it’s another way, I suppose, in which scientific knowledge is valued. I mean, it can be valued because it’s –

Oh yes, it’s worth money, oh, it’s worth money, which I discovered.

So perhaps you could tell me about the origins of it to start with. I mean, how does – are you approached by an oil company? How does it start?

Yes.

I think it started in ’67.

Sorry?

227 John Dewey Page 228 C1379/83 Track 7

I think your first contact was ’67, and so I wonder how it started.

Yes. I was approached – was it Shell? I can’t remember who it was in those days. I was approached to actually give some lectures. That’s one thing that commonly happens. They find that in-house, in-house in a company, their staff don’t have expertise in an area that they think is important. Like, for example, plate tectonics in the early days. I mean, from ’67 to about – ’67 onwards, certainly up to – when did I really stop doing mega lectures? Well, I gave one last year to Hess so I can’t – three to five day courses, which I’ve sometimes done alone, I sometimes do with Kevin Burke, sometimes done with Walter Pitman, and we give basically a really intense three to five day course outlining what – the details of how plate tectonics works, how we think it works, what it does for geology, what it does for geophysics and the oceans, if you like, an in depth analysis of plate tectonics as a paradigm and why it’s important for the earth sciences, how you explain sedimentary basins in terms of it, all those kinds of things, which is very important for oil companies. I’ve given courses on plate tectonics, the origin and the evolution of sedimentary basins, which is important for the – I’ve given courses on origin of mineral deposits for the mining companies, always to do with mostly solid geology in the framework of plate tectonics, I would say in general. Yes, I think that’s true. So that’s one thing, one way of consulting for companies, giving courses. Not including – I don’t go and give one day lectures and things like that generally. I like to do an in depth thing, you know, for three to five days. I think the shortest one I did was two days. The longest one I’ve ever done is five days. So it can be lecture courses, it can also be field courses. I’ve given field courses for quite a number of petroleum companies in the Alps, in Ireland, in Scotland, Norway, a variety of places, where they want a sort of in depth analysis of a certain group of rocks and how they work for their young staff, mostly their young staff, their new intake, new PhDs coming from – because very often if they find that they don’t – they aren’t trained, those kids. They may be very bright, they’re quite trainable, but there may be one big area of knowledge in which they’re rather deficient, which actually they think is important for the company’s work, both oil and mining companies. So I’ve done that, I’ve done field courses. I don’t do much of that these days. I do maybe one a year – oh no, no, not even that. I mean, I hadn’t done one for five years before I did Hess Petroleum in London last

228 John Dewey Page 229 C1379/83 Track 7 year and I probably won’t do another one for quite a long time, if ever again. But no, BP are actually interested in getting me to do field courses for them again, some field courses for their young intake, ‘cause they’re finding now that the level of education in British geology departments is getting very bad. They’re getting lots of very geophysical and very mathematical – but they don’t understand rocks, you know, which is rather central [laughs] to understanding geology. So I may do that. And then there is also direct ongoing advice to companies, in which – they give me a retainer, for example, say for a three to five – I sign on for three to five years and they say, we’ll give you, I don’t know £30,000, or whatever it is, a year and that’s a retainer and can you come to Houston to talk to Shell – talk to Exxon, to our people, for say, you know, three or four days and go around and see what they’re all doing, chat to them about their work. And that’s quite fun actually ‘cause I learn the in depth of what’s really happening in the inner workings of a petroleum company or a mining company and I get a lot of new data, a lot of new ideas and data out of it. So those are the kinds of things I do. Lecture courses, you know, training courses if you like, field courses and the in depth advice, ongoing consulting advice, usually with a retainer and I usually sign on for three to five years, something of that sort. I think BP are angling to get me on again but I’m not sure that I really want to ‘cause I’m seventy- five now and I’ve got lots of other things I want to do, you know. And I don’t need the money anymore so it’s – it’s just out of interest. It certainly is very interesting. I mean, I get a lot – a big charge out of – I used to get a big charge out of going to Houston for a week, up to a week, and going round all the offices, seeing what the people are doing about the geology of the Arctic, usually big exploration programmes, terribly interesting, and I learned a lot from them, really did. So it was a two way street. It was quite nice. They get a lot of information and ideas, I suppose, and I get quite a nice income out of it and a lot of interesting geological knowledge as well, which is almost as good as the income, yeah.

[1:15:30]

Can you think of an example where this kind of work has led to an amount of data or a new sort of insight which has then become part of a published paper or a –

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Oh, lots of – I mean, yes, yes, indeed. Lots of the – lots of my papers have things in them that are ideas – ideas and sort of bits of data, things that have been triggered – things that have been triggered by working with companies. I mean, that’s quite common. Sometimes if there’s a piece of data that I would like to use and it’s proprietary data, then I will contact the company and say, look, do you mind if I – is it okay if I use this, and they generally say yes. In one case they said no ‘cause it was actually very important, a piece of exploration in West Africa and they didn’t want any rivals coming in and – you know, which is fair enough. They were paying for my time so perfectly reasonable. But generally, yes, lots of my papers have things that I benefit from – perhaps put it this way, benefit from the experience I’ve had talking to companies. I think that’s a reasonable way to do it. And quite a number of interesting little examples of things I’ve done for a company, ideas I’ve given them, leading to discoveries, petroleum discoveries, one in – off the coast of – Ivory Coast, where they discovered a small oilfield which I predicted exactly for plate tectonics reasons, heating – the actual, you know, basin and the way the heating must have occurred as the thing opened, and that was quite nice. And then a couple of discoveries in the Anadarko Basin in Oklahoma and I said the gas must have come out – the gas must have migrated 1,000 kilometres from the Denver Basin. They said, no, it’s impossible, yet it turned out chemically – we did the chemistry of the gas and it was coming out of the Denver Basin, because you could see the up dip slope, which meant en route, even though the oil and gas – or it’s not oil ‘cause the oil doesn’t migrate, but the gas migrates, you know, 1,000 kilometres if the slope’s there and the porous rocks through which it can migrate are there. And it also meant that en route some of the gas could have been trapped in little side traps. So I said, ‘Look, if it’s coming out of the Denver Basin all the way to the Anadarko, even though it’s not – we know it’s not been generated in the Anadarko Basin, it’s come out of a deeper basin somewhere else, just as we might find gas trapped in the Anadarko Basin, what about possible little traps en route?’ And we made a structural prediction, about two traps en route, and we looked at it and said, yeah, looks right in the place. In fact they both turned out to have huge gas fields in them, which was – that was interesting. That came out of the theory if you like, you know. So that’s been very, very rewarding in a sense, to find that, you know, something you’ve done has been actually useful economically to the company, ‘cause if it’s just vague interesting knowledge, you know, that leads

230 John Dewey Page 231 C1379/83 Track 7 nowhere then so what, why are they paying me, you know. They might as well not [laughs]. But certainly there was Phillips Petroleum and – what’s the little – Seal, Seal Petroleum in North America, a very small company, asked me to do this job. And, you know, I mean, they’re worth millions of dollars, both of them, so it’s – I mean, my little bit of cash I got out of them for that, been paid hundreds and thousands of times over. So that was rewarding. So that’s fun.

So if they strike gas or oil based on what you’ve told them, do you get paid more?

Oh no, no.

So you don’t get –

I mean, I suppose I could have a contract that does that but … I’m not sure I – no, I don’t bother, you know, I just do the consulting and then I tell them something if I have an idea and if I have an idea that leads to something then they get it. They’ve paid me for the idea and I’ve been happy to go and talk to them, you know. I don’t know whether they do that actually. I didn’t – I’ve never tried it, so – it’s an interesting possibility [laughs]. You’re not the first person who’s asked that actually, interestingly enough. My father once asked me that too, ‘Well, what happens if they discover something really big and interesting, do you get a piece of it?’ ‘Well, no.’ ‘What?’ he said [laughs]. My father was horrified [laughs].

[1:20:12]

What are their sort of strategies for trying to sort of attract you or to try and sort of get you onto their – to do what they want you to do, in other words, to get you to say yes?

Yes. I think mostly they – I think the sort of benefits of getting me on board were greater in a sense when the whole thing was starting, ‘cause each company was vying with each other to use the new stuff and see where it led and so forth. So I got huge numbers of offers. In fact, you know, I could have done it fulltime, I mean, absolutely

231 John Dewey Page 232 C1379/83 Track 7 completely fulltime and not done any university teaching, which I didn’t want to do. So I was very sparing in the way I gave up my time. And I tended to go with the big majors, with Exxon, Shell, BP, ‘cause I thought, more reliable, you know, and you get these small fly by night companies and it’d be a different matter. Getting paid by them much be more difficult, as indeed a couple turned out to be. I’m still owed about £40,000 by some little company in North America. They went bankrupt so it was too bad [laughs]. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. So erm, where was I leading?

Yes. So at this time then when you had lots of companies interested –

Oh yes, yes.

How did they try – you know, how did one company try and make sure that they got you rather than the other one and all of that –

Well, I mean, I guess that they’d phone me up – in those days there was no email, of course. They’d simply phone me up and say, ‘Professor Dewey,’ you know, ‘We’d like you to come down and talk to us and possibly develop a longer term relationship with the company.’ So they said, ‘We’ll pay your fare down and put you up and give you a fee. Come and give us a lecture and we’ll see if we like you and so forth.’ So I went down and, bang, within an hour of the lecturing finishing I went out to dinner with them and they said, ‘Well, we’d like to offer you for five years,’ such and such, blah, blah, blah. And mostly I said yes but I never worked for more than one major company at one time. They were sequential. I worked for Shell, for Exxon, BP, ConocoPhillips, Conoco as it was then and Phillips as it was then, Arco, Amoco, that’s it. That’s it, Arco and Amoco. And they were all sort of sequential three year periods basically. I mean, I’ve given courses – that goes for the advice, ‘cause I found that if I were giving advice and seeing lots of data from this company and that company simultaneously it would be very hard for me to separate things out and be fair, you know. But courses, that’s a different matter. I mean, I’ve given – one year I think I gave courses to all the majors actually. Sometimes I’ll be – Walter and I would give a course, we’d send out the information to all the majors and say do you

232 John Dewey Page 233 C1379/83 Track 7 want to send people to it. We said we’re hiring conference facilities in a hotel in Houston for a week and this is the cost of individuals coming, and they’d all send their people to it. And that was also very good, that was quite nice, and they enjoyed it ‘cause they talked to each other, you know, and so forth, yeah. So that was the way I consulted basically, advice, lectures, fieldtrips.

[1:23:40]

What was the affect of becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society on your career, if any?

Let’s see, well, it was a great honour. It was wonderful, I liked it, you know, but I can’t think of any – I don’t know, maybe I got the Oxford job as a result of that ‘cause it happened the previous year. I don’t know. Had I not been a fellow – who knows, they may have appointed me anyway. But it gives you a sort of – a cache, I suppose is the word, I think it does, but I’ve never noticed any direct way in which it’s benefited me in terms of my career. I think my career’s been independent of all the honours and things like that and medals and prizes and god knows what. You know, they’ve sort of been added. They’re things that hang on you, you know [laughs], gongs or whatever they call them, and they’ve never really – they’ve been very nice but they’ve never really affected me, I don’t think. I’ve been pleased but in terms of giving you greater credibility, no, I don’t think so, I really don’t. It sounds a terrible thing to say but it – it’s an interesting way to ask the question. I’ve never thought about it really before in that way, but in honesty I just cannot think of any particular way in which becoming an FRS has benefited me, I mean, in an obvious way. It may have benefited me in a general sort of way but – Americans don’t take any notice of that anyway, I mean, particularly. The Brits do but they say, oh, it’s very good, but it doesn’t do you any good in Britain [laughs].

What about the sort of access to, you know, the place and meetings and mixing, if you do, or did with FRSs?

Yes. Well, one thing I’ve liked about the Royal Society is not so much the geology, you know, but it’s actually talking to physicists and chemists and biologists and going

233 John Dewey Page 234 C1379/83 Track 7 to – I very often go to meetings quite outside my subject. I go to meetings within my subject as well of course, you know, discussion meetings, but I’ve sometimes been to something that’s taken my fancy, you know, a meeting on black holes or something of that sort. There have been some mathematical abstractions that have left me for dead [laughs], you know, but overall I’ve learnt a lot from those meetings. And some of the biological meetings, ones on evolution and extinction, those sorts of meetings I’ve enjoyed very much. I’ve enjoyed some of the ecology meetings, you know, so plant and animal ecology of various kinds. I mean, they’re really very good. Have you been to a discussion meeting? Worth going to sometime. Get the list from the Royal. They are very, very good. They’re usually over two days and they have really distinguished people from all over the world giving lectures in sequence and they are fantastic. I mean, the things – I mean, you can learn – and they’re awfully good – most people are awfully good at keeping those lectures – ‘cause they know that a lot of journalists are coming as well and they keep them really quite simple and general and yet at a high level. So one can learn a lot of science at those things. If I lived in London I think I’d be at a lot of those discussion meetings, but it’s an effort. I mean, I find even getting – I go to London once every fortnight or thereabouts to do some work in the Geological Society of London library and go to lunch at the Royal Society, meet a friend, go to meet friends, go to the Natural History Museum and spend a day working there or something like that, but it’s – frankly I’d much rather do geology here in my office and paint and – you know, that’s what I really like doing [laughs]. So I think all those things have been appendages really rather than functional useful things. I may be wrong but that’s what my impression is really.

[1:27:46]

Is there a particular way in which you go about attempting to visualise the continental movement through time? What I think many people listening to the recording will think when they think about plate tectonics is the Atlantic opening and continents moving apart, but if you go back much longer timescales you’ve got things moving around all over the place and in different shapes. So I don’t know how you – is there a particular way in which you go about sort of visualising and memorising those things? Are there particular maps that you use or simulations or –

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Well, simulations, yes. I mean, I don’t try to – I can’t say that I really try to visualise the intricacies in my brain just abstractly – not abstractly but in my brain, trying to think, ah, the exact shape of the Iapetus Ocean. In general terms I remember there’s something here, something there, but mostly I’ve got computer simulations that I can call up on my computer very quickly and I say, ah, let’s look at the Jurassic relations between Australia and India and so forth, what was it like. So I can call it up very quickly, ah yes, that’s right. ‘Cause I do that when I need it for some specific scientific purpose. So I don’t – I can’t say I actually visualise and I can’t really visualise – of course the times and the rates are so enormously – either very slow – I think I mentioned this before, the continents are moving around at the rate at which fingernails grow. You now, that’s a sort of plate tectonic rate, fingernail growth and toenail growth [laughs]. Toenails are a bit faster, I think, but fingernails is the usual sort of rate, centimetres a year, so I don’t need – I don’t – you can’t visualise that and you can’t – and also you can’t visualise amounts of time involved. And really, what does a million years mean? It means nothing to me. The only thing that means anything to me is fifty years, sixty years, 100 years, the time I’ve been alive. That’s what human beings can recognise. I can’t really think of 1,000 years very early let alone a million years. 100 million years, forget it, it’s an abstraction. I know intellectually what it means but I can’t think emotionally what it means. And I think the only way you get at time is through process, you know. If you think – if you want to visualise a million years, well, the San Andreas Fault is moving at, let’s say – it’s slightly fast but five centimetres a year, let’s say, okay? So five centimetres a year is fifty millimetres a year, okay? Now a millimetre a year is a kilometre per million years. So if something’s moving at fifty millimetres a year, it’s moving at fifty kilometres per million years. So the San Andreas Fault – everything west of the San Andreas Fault after a million years has moved fifty kilometres to the north. Now that’s something you can visualise, you know, that – let’s say Monterrey will be up near San Francisco in a million years. So that’s a useful way of doing it. But I can’t visualise a million years. I can’t visualise plate tectonic rates over a long time. I can visualise instantaneous today, you know, it’s moved maybe in my lifetime – in my lifetime it’s moved maybe a metre. The Atlantic Ocean is a metre wider than it was

235 John Dewey Page 236 C1379/83 Track 7 when I was born. That’s all I can do, I can’t do the integration over vast amounts of time except on a simulation. Oh yeah, it’s an intellectual thing rather than emotional.

[1:31:28]

You mentioned the computer simulation there and last time you talked about the value, I think, of email and so on, but in what other ways has personal computing affected your work? I’ll just mention one thing that’s behind the question and that’s that in that interview I read it means your use of Adobe Illustrator in drawing geological maps, for example. But I wonder whether you could date the beginnings of your use of personal computing in your work and then say what you’ve done.

Very precisely, yes. When I started out and right through Albany days, Cambridge days, Albany days, early Oxford days, when I did diagrams for a paper I used a special card called Bristol Board. It’s a beautifully milled board, thin board, and it takes Indian ink beautifully, and I spent – I can let you have copies of some of my original drawings. They are now apparently great classics, apparently, if my – I’ve kept every diagram I’ve ever made for journals. You send them off to journals and then they photograph them and blah, blah, blah, and then send them back. But I’ve got all the original drawings of all my global tectonics papers and they were things that I lovingly drew with Indian ink, stencils. And I’m a reasonably good artist and a draftsman so I was able to draft amazingly good figures and everyone says, you know, Dewey’s figures are phenomenal, they’re wonderful, descriptive and clear, complicated sometimes, big complicated figures, but nevertheless, you know, you get at them and you can really understand what they’re all about. And I’ve got all those things. Now that was a part of my psyche in a way, that drawing and drawing those – intimately drawing those wonderful figures for papers was – ‘cause the way I wrote papers is that I always did the figures first. In fact I still do that, the figures always come first. I may sketch some ideas out for a paper but I never start writing a paper until I’ve done the figures or at least sketched the figures so that I’ve got the final – roughly I know what the final draft’s going to look like. I may change them a bit for the text but it doesn’t matter. But anyway, the diagrams are done first. I’m writing a paper at the moment on ophiolite soles, the metamorphic rocks, the base of ophiolites,

236 John Dewey Page 237 C1379/83 Track 7 and I’ve done all the figures and I shall start writing this week, this coming week. And so the figures were absolutely central to the way I thought about geology. And I often said to students, I’d say to a student, ‘Can you describe this phenomena you’ve discovered?’ ‘Well, it’s like this,’ blah, blah, blah. I’d say, ‘Well, draw it for me.’ They’d say, ‘Well, I can’t exactly draw it.’ I said, ‘Look, if you can’t draw it, it doesn’t happen.’ Geology’s a graphic science, you know. Rocks are made of shapes and sizes and things and relationships and you may not have the drawing skills to really sketch it accurately but you can – give me a rough idea and then I can help you. So drawing diagrams for papers was central to the way I did geology.

[1:34:50]

And then along comes this amazing computing generation, you see. So right through to – let me tell you when, 19 – 1994, ’95. I knew that this email thing was coming and people were using it and so forth and they were using CricketGraph and various – and Mathematica, there were various computer programmes and things, but I – I’m not saying I resisted but I – I didn’t resist. I basically said, well, I don’t need it yet, I’m doing my diagrams in my way. And then people would show me things on Adobe Illustrator and some of the new programmes that were being generated and I thought, god, they’re beautiful, wonderful things, and it might be rather fun to try some of those. So ’94, ’95, I suppose it was, yes, ’94, ’95, I almost switched overnight. I got myself a – ‘cause I had a secretary, you see, that’s the other thing, I had a secretary and she did all my letters and all the computing I needed to do, emails and all that sort of stuff. She did everything. But then I discovered I could actually do this very simply by myself. So I brought a primitive – a Mac, one of the old Macs, and got going on that and – it’s rather fun, you know, it’s okay. And then I went on sabbatical leave to Davis, where I eventually wound up, you know. I went in 1997, I suppose it was, on sabbatical leave, and a lady called Kate Hill, who was the computer specialist in the department, she worked about two days a week, got me going. She said, ‘Oh god, you’re not computer literate yet? You must, you must buy yourself one of the modern Mac – one of …’ I’ll tell you why she said that in a moment. But Kate Hill was an amazing lady. It turns out that Kate Hill was one of the founders of Apple Mac. She lived in Davis and she worked two days a week in

237 John Dewey Page 238 C1379/83 Track 7 the department. I said, ‘Look, you’re a multimillionaire, why do you work?’ She said, ‘The reason I do it is this. I’m the world marketing manager for Apple.’ She said, ‘I was in the garage with Steve Jobs when we started this company.’ She said, ‘And I was interested in computing systems.’ And Steve Jobs and some other chap, whose name I can’t remember, and Kate started the company. And they put their own money in and that few hundred dollars she put in is like – I think she wound up with almost – she wound up with several billion dollars actually. She died – she tragically died of cancer about two or three years ago. But Kate was one of the founders of – she said, ‘What I do, I like to keep my hand in with the end users. I want to see how …’ And she said, ‘And computers are very graphic things. Geology is a very graphic subject and the interface is wonderful in geology. It’s the best we have in Apple Mac, the geological applications using computers.’ And she said, ‘That’s why I do this job, you know, I just come in and I enjoy the company. It’s sort of a social thing for me. I could sit at home and do my marketing stuff all the time. I don’t have to travel the world anymore because I do it all by computer at home, you know, talk to my marketing managers all over the world and give them instructions and so forth and what are you doing.’ Anyway, so Kate got me going and I bought a – I had a desktop, a desktop computer, in Oxford before I went, which happened to be a Mac, ‘cause it was a Mac department. Most people in the department had Macs rather than PCs. And then Kate really got me going in – she made me buy a laptop. I bought an original – one of the original G3 laptops and got going with email and she – and every day she would come in, or the days she was working in the department she would come in and help me, you know, and say, ‘What are you doing today, John?’ ‘Can I show you?’ She said, ‘Oh, you must use these wonderful – do you know about these …?’ I was drawing a figure. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Why are you doing that?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s nice to feel the Indian ink and the pens and the stencil.’ She said, ‘You can do that thing in a quarter of the time using this amazing programme that Adobe company just down the road in Silicon Valley,’ she said, ‘Adobe Illustrator, it’s a wonderful programme, use it.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ll need some instruction.’ She said ‘The draftsperson here, Janice, Janice Fong, uses Adobe Illustrator.’ She said, ‘She’ll give you a day’s instruction.’ So she did and got me going and I gradually learnt how to do it and I’ve used Adobe Illustrator ever since. And similarly – so it was ’94, ’95, when I realised it was important. ’97, the sabbatical leave in Davis, that really got me

238 John Dewey Page 239 C1379/83 Track 7 going. And I don’t know how the hell I did geology before. I mean, in terms of communication with people, instant communication, instant transmission of data, I’ve drawn a diagram, can send it across the world to somebody to look at right away, I can get their stuff right away. It’s simply the data highway now. The data highway is just unbelievable, you know. It’s [laughs] – I can call up the Davis Library or the Oxford Library and get some paper quickly as a PDF onto my desktop within seconds, you know, whereas otherwise I would have to go to London to the GeolSoc London Library, it would cost me god knows how much in the rail fare [laughs] and so forth. So it’s been wonderful, it’s been absolutely marvellous. It’s changed my life completely and it’s enabled me to do geology much faster, at least – not the fieldwork, that takes exactly the same amount of time, but simply the writing of papers, the organisation, communication with people, with friends, getting data. Oh, the other thing is, amazing – I use PowerPoint of course for lectures. Everyone uses PowerPoint now. We don’t have slides anymore, these bloody thirty five millimetre slides. I’ve never seen – haven’t seen one for years. Anyway, so I do PowerPoints and I’ve got a huge collection of PowerPoint lectures that I’ve got together. And I – and of course you can use this wonderful thing, part of Google, Google Images, and you can call up images, then you type in what – say, ophiolites, suddenly you’ve got all the images of ophiolites and you can just drag them off, you know, pictures of the Oman, of New Caledonia. It’s – you can get a lecture together on some obscure topic within half an hour, by dragging them off the net and making your own PowerPoint, straight into a PowerPoint. I mean, different world.

[1:41:22]

How before that then did you get visual material for teaching? And a related question, to what extent did you use sort of models to utilise them?

Yes, interesting question and it’s a very complicated answer in a way. Back in the ‘60s, let’s say in the ‘60s in Cambridge, I would develop models of various kinds. Plasticine was excellent ‘cause, you know, you could make a geological model, say of a normal fault or a fold, and you can take the Plasticine and you can cut it through and show what the thing looks like internally. So I had a lot of those things. I’ve still got

239 John Dewey Page 240 C1379/83 Track 7 a few of those around. Three dimensional card models in – when I’d give my plate tectonics course, my kinematics and plate tectonics course, in Oxford in particular, I would get the students to cut card off. A lot of – draw the plate boundary on the card, cut it up and then move it, oh yes, it becomes – they visualise it much more easily. How does a ridge work, gosh. How does a transfer work, good god, yes, I understand now how it works. So cutting card up and moving bits of card around, excellent, that’s another one. So Plasticine, card, sounds like a children’s kindergarten really, doesn’t it, and it really is, it’s that sort of thing. But I got them using computers, the students using computers, before I retired. I got them in Davis using computers to do the plate tectonics, but not until I’d made them do it with card and with stereographic projections, the old fashioned stereographic projections, rotating the paper and so forth, because then they get a real understanding of how it works. Then they translate it onto the computer and it becomes much easier. If you do it on the computer to start with they haven’t done the manipulation and when you manipulate something you find that you understand it much better, three dimensionally, graphically and so forth. So yes, I mean, the technology of the computer’s wonderful but sometimes you have to do three dimensional graphics in the old way before you get into it.

[1:43:21]

Thank you. Would you be able to describe the department at Oxford when you returned – or when you came to the department at Oxford in 1986 –

After Durham.

Mm.

Yes. Do you want to talk about Durham at all or …?

Perhaps. Yes, I guess that’s –

Durham we could do quickly, I think, actually.

240 John Dewey Page 241 C1379/83 Track 7

Yes. I mean, we – I’m not missing it out completely because we did talk about it last time, but yes –

Oh did we? Okay.

Why not just – it would perhaps make sense as a pair then, wouldn’t it? If you could describe Durham physically as a department and then sort of culturally and socially, I suppose.

Durham – I enjoyed Durham greatly. It was a very, in quotes – not a – a very old fashioned department. It had been run by Kingsley Dunham, Sir Kingsley Dunham, who became Director of the Geological Survey, and then it was run by Malcolm Brown, who also became Director of the British Geological Survey. So it had a great tradition of doing basic geology, basic simple geology, very practical and going off into the Geological Survey. Now the great Arthur Holmes had also been professor in Durham before he went to take the Regis chair in Edinburgh, you know. That was probably the most distinguished geologist who’s ever lived actually in Britain, Arthur Holmes. In fact I had his desk. I actually – the wooden desk I worked at was the desk that Arthur Holmes had worked at in Durham, which was a wonderful thing. So I enjoyed Durham. I – I did a lot of interesting work there, I wrote some nice papers, but it was a sort of low key existence. It was a shock coming back from the vibrancy of the Albany department. The Albany department, I had to leave there because the department started decaying. We were losing support from the administration. They were off into criminal justice and sociology and all kinds of things and they weren’t too interested in science really anymore, which is a shame. The president left and a new president took over. These things happen, you know. So I was looking around to change and do I stay in North America, get a job in Princeton or Harvard or Yale or some damn place. Columbia wanted me to go fulltime there so I thought, well, do I want to live in New York as such? Yeah, it’d be alright, be okay. But then the Durham chair came up and I got a phone call from Martin Bott saying, ‘John, would you like to apply for the chair that’s coming up here?’ And he said, you know, ‘If you apply you’ll almost certainly get it.’ So I thought about it, god, do I really want to do it, Durham, Geordie country, North East England, you know, Dark Satanic Mills and

241 John Dewey Page 242 C1379/83 Track 7 all that kind of stuff. It’s not like that at all, of course. Durham is a delightful – it’s a rural [laughs], terribly rural, country place. And I talked to Molly about it and we decided jointly that, yeah, go for it, it’d be a nice change. ‘Cause our daughter was back here at ballet school by then in Elmhurst in Camberley in Surrey and Jonathan was getting to – getting to fifteen – was it fifteen or …? No, coming up to sixteen, I think he was. And we thought, do we really want him to be – to go through his final education in North America or do we want …? So anyway, we decided to come back. And Jonathan went to Repton and it was a very good experience for him. He had a lovely two years there and got some decent A levels, which was quite a good thing to have done. Anyway, so we came back and I took the chair in Durham and it was lovely. It was a very – what’s the word, Ruritanian kind of existence. It was very pleasant and nice people in the department. Again, they were sort of individualist and tight, you know. It was a typical British department. The students were very good and I had some very good graduate students there, some really super kids, three or four in Durham. I was only there four years. And we built a house, a very nice house, in an idyllic little village called Brancepeth. It was a typical middle class stone village, it was lovely, and we built a house in the grounds of Brancepeth Castle and it was a gorgeous place, absolutely gorgeous place. We loved living there and we had lots of friends there. It was lovely. And we liked living in Durham. We liked the North East of England very much. It was a very friendly, very happy – I got to like the Geordies very much too. They’re tremendous people, very down to earth and honest and very straightforward people. So anyway, and we enjoyed the countryside, walking in the countryside, Teesdale and Weredale, they were just – beautiful country. I mean, you could walk for miles without seeing anyone up in the moors. And cross country skiing in the winter was wonderful up there too. And we’d go to the coast a bit. The coast is a bit of a grotty place, coal over the beach, you know [laughs]. But the university was very nice. It was a very pleasant university, nice department, fairly low key. There was nobody of great distinction. Martin Bott was the only person of great distinction there. He was an FRS. And I think I became an FRS in my last year in Durham – yes, ’85, that’s right, last year there. So that was very nice. But again, there’s not a lot to say about it. It was a very pleasant existence and I got work done and I got on various committees and I had to go to London up and down quite a lot, which I – I eventually disliked intensely. So I thought Durham

242 John Dewey Page 243 C1379/83 Track 7 was getting a bit of a long way from anywhere and for things I wanted to do, get to the GeoSol London meetings and things like that, get into Royal Society meetings. And then the Oxford chair came up and I got a couple of phone calls saying, would you consider applying for the chair. And they said – they didn’t say you’ll get it if you apply but they said the chances of you getting it are very high. So again, I thought about it and thought about it. And Molly said, well, it’s getting closer to relations in the South of England, you know, in Huntingdonshire where our – all her brothers and things live. So I applied for it and I was told that very day, you’ve got it, you know, you’re appointed. And so we moved down and that was the beginning of the Oxford thing, yeah. So here we are in Oxford.

[1:49:51]

Now in Stephen Moorbath’s interview, which is open, he talks about the Oxford department changing with the plate tectonic revolution, becoming less sort of – I think he described it as classy, class based, and a bit more open. And obviously he’d been there since the sort of mid ‘50s.

Yeah, ever since the beginning [laughs].

Yes. So What did you find in 1986 in terms of the department, it as a physical place but also it as a kind of social space?

I found – it was very interesting actually. Came in ’86 and I didn’t know a lot about – I knew some people. I knew McKerrow, Redding, Harold Reading. Tragically he’s got Huntington’s Disease and he’s dying of this wasting disease at the moment. Moorbath I knew very well. In fact it was Moorbath who put me up for the Royal Society, funnily enough. He and Martin Bott were my two – in Durham, were my two – before I even came back. It was in ’82 they put me up. Anyway, came down to Oxford and expecting a sort of – I don’t know what I expected really. I’d sort of found the college system interesting. I’ve always enjoyed the college system since I’ve been here. I find it very congenial, ‘cause you’re having lunch with physicists, chemists, English scholars, historians, lawyers, I mean, fascinating people, a lot of

243 John Dewey Page 244 C1379/83 Track 7 very intelligent, very distinguished, very distinguished scholars of all kinds in many subjects and you learn a hell of a lot talking to them. I really – lunches are phenomenal in college. I still love them. You’ve been, of course, to one of them. So that was delightful. The department was – I have to say, was less delightful. I think they’d all discussed who they wanted and they decided of the applicants – it’s all a very secret thing in Oxford. They have these boards of electors. I mean, most decent universities, the person – the list of people who are interested are known and they come and give lectures and people sort of – they can vote of them. It’s not necessarily going to be final but they can express their opinions. In Oxford it’s all dead secret, you know. It’s ridiculous. I didn’t have to give a lecture in the department and I was told not to go to the department, what, you know, incredible, because they’re supposed not to know the list of – I said, what do you – are you serious. And they said, well, they do know, of course, because it got out, somebody spilled the beans. And there were, I think, about twenty applicants and there were three shortlisted and I was one of them of course. And they interviewed all three on the same day, at different times of course, and you weren’t supposed to see the others [laughs]. And then I – the registrar, after my – I was the last to be interviewed and the registrar said, ‘Well, we discussed it very briefly and we’d like you to take the job if you would.’ So I came and I came into a department that sort of wasn’t involved really very much in my election. But on the other hand one of them, a chap called McKerrow, a good friend of mine, always had been a good friend – he’d worked in the west of Ireland on rocks adjacent to mine. And he said – well, he told the department, ‘I’m not having this secret,’ he said, ‘I’m telling the department.’ And he said, ‘I’m going around and saying who would you like, you know.’ And so they all said [laughs] – they pretty well all said me. So I came to a department that had sort of – weren’t involved in the election process properly, so I felt a bit peculiar in a way, but I knew them a bit, I was friendly with them all. And I looked around that department and I thought, you know, it’s not really very good. It really – I mean, to be objective. I mean, McKerrow was an awfully nice chap and did some decent work but not a great scientist by any means, a good journeyman. Harold Redding was okay, you know. You could run all those people, they were perfectly respectable but there was nobody outstanding, a great – Moorbath was by far the most outstanding person there and he was coming towards retirement then and he retired very quickly soon after I arrived. And I thought, god,

244 John Dewey Page 245 C1379/83 Track 7 what are we going to do with this, you know, I don’t want to – ‘cause in Durham I was presiding over a department that was pretty ordinary, you know, pretty ordinary bunch, and I said, ‘I don’t want to do this again.’ I’d come from Albany where, you know, my God, things were exploding and exciting. I said, ‘Can’t we have a department like that here?’ Well, I knew we never would because of the British tradition of insularity and tightness. So I thought, well, what am I going to do. So I went to the vice chancellor and I said, you know, ‘It’d be nice to have a few extra positions.’ ‘Ooh,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘Your department’s very expensive, you know.’ And I knew what he meant, it wasn’t bringing in much in the way of money, in terms of overheads, and it was costing the university about £800,000 a year, which actually for a small department of, I don’t know, sort of fifteen – a moderate sized department, fifteen or so members of staff. But we had fifteen technicians we were paying, you know. It was actually really quite expensive for what they gave out in terms – now they taught well. The teaching – they were very dedicated to the teaching and they taught extremely well. There was one person who I thought was substantially distinguished, a man called Jim Kennedy, who was in the museum. He’d spent his life partly in the Natural History Museum and partly in the department. He had a joint appointment between the two. His main appointment was in the department as a lecturer in palaeontology. Now there had been some – before I arrived and, you know, some years before I arrived, there had been some distinguished people, people like Steve Richardson and Ron Oxburgh and some – you know, Tony Hallam, some very, very good people, but they’d gone off into chairs elsewhere, you know, as people do. But when I arrived there was – I mean, John Platt was very – I thought John Platt was a very clever man. He took the chair in University College, London, but then he went to take a professorship in the University of Southern California, ‘cause his wife’s American and she wanted to go back. So he’s very happy there now. So it was ordinary, perfectly respectable, very ordinary. I said, what do I do, vice chancellor said no chance of jobs. [Gasps] God, you know, what am I going to do, just wait these people out and when one of them retires we hire some bloody good young person, make sure that the person you hire is really top class. Okay. And then along comes the Oxburgh Review. Have you come across that at all? Let me have a pee and I’ll tell you about the Oxburgh Review.

245 John Dewey Page 246 C1379/83 Track 7

[End of Track 7]

246 John Dewey Page 247 C1379/83 Track 8

Track 8

… every year and suddenly the Oxburgh Review arrives and I saw this as my salvation. The Oxburgh Review was this. Ron Oxburgh, who had been a lecturer in Oxford, went off to take the Chair of Petrology and Mineralogy in Cambridge, okay. And it was he, quite fairly, who pulled together mineralogy and petrology, geology and geophysics to make a single earth science department. It was really Ron who really pulled that together. It was a wonderful thing, a sensible thing, to have done, ‘cause hitherto they’d been separate departments fighting like dogs over all kinds of things, ridiculous. They’d even had the door locked between two of the departments, I mean, so you couldn’t [laughs] … So anyway, Ron was Professor in Cambridge and then the government – the Department of Education, I suppose it was, or the earth science – the – what was it called before HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council of England? It was the UGC, University Grants Committee. They were very worried about the proliferation of lots of small departments in various subjects. Geology was one of them, material science was another. I think Russian was another. And they thought, look, you’ve got all these departments all over the place with maybe – some with only five or six people in them. They all want instruments to do the – it’s costing us a bloody fortune to do this. So why not have a rationalisation of some kind, close the really poor small departments and bring those people, if they want to, or give them early retirement or something like that – let the better ones go – let the better – the universities bid for those people and let them move around to concentrate resources in a few places, which – the argument was good but it actually – it turned out to be bad for geology because it got rid of some quite good small departments that were training students. Hull, for example, was not a great department but they were training students extremely well. Nottingham vanished. So a result of – so I’m overstepping myself here. So each department was invited to put in a bid for what they wanted to do under the Oxburgh Review. They were going to review the departments and decide which departments were going to close and allow those people – allow other universities to bid for those people and even possibly bring people from abroad as well. That was another thing. I thought, ooh gosh, there’s a wonderful thing. So I designed a really sexy document called the Future of the Earth Sciences and I thought this is the way to really improve the Oxford department. So

247 John Dewey Page 248 C1379/83 Track 8 the same – go back a bit. The year I was appointed, in 1986, another thing happened. There were two jobs in geophysics available. One was a result of the readership in geodesy coming up, for the retirement of Brigadier Bamford, he retired and they were going to replace him. And then Mike Worthington left to take up the chair at Imperial College. So suddenly two jobs available, and that was before I came, and they hired two very good people, Barry Parsons and Philip England. So they arrived the same year as me, so that was a great thing, you know. That was an improvement in the geophysics side, very well, but, you know, it didn’t help with the sort of rather ordinary nature of the geology. So the Oxburgh Review comes along and they say Goldsmiths is closing, Hull’s closing, so I made a list of all the people in those places and I talked to some of my colleagues and – or in fact most of my colleagues, and said, you know, given your druthers, who would you like – who would you bid for here. So we made up a list. There was Bob Spicer from Goldsmiths, a very fine palaeobotanist, fossil plants, and he eventually became Professor at the Open University, but he was very good, a wonderful colleague. So we bid for him. Martin Brasier from Hull, a man who’s become very, very distinguished in the origin of life and early history of life on earth and has done some superb work. He’s now a major consultant for NASA in America, you know, in extraterrestrial life and so forth. So anyway, people like that, we hired – we bid and got a number of really, really good people and it was an absolute delight. So that was a tremendous influx of some new blood. And we also were able to bid, because of the nature of Oxford I suppose it was really [laughs] – we also bid for some external people, for John Woodhouse, a very distinguished seismologist from Harvard. He was a friend of Phil England and he said, you know, he probably would come. We got his wife for free in a – not for free but we had to give her a lectureship. She’s another seismisicist interested in earthquakes and so forth, very, very good. And then we also hired Tony Watts, a very distinguished oceanographer, a geological oceanographer, from Lamont, Colombia. So we had this tremendous influx of really excellent people, you know, and it was a joy. Now the trouble was that many of them sort of went off and did their own thing or either left or sort of wanted sort of their own departments to become – subdepartments or groups to become much bigger and so overwhelm the rest and that’s happened to some degree, but nevertheless the department was quite suddenly increased in size and increased in quality. It was a – I was delighted, it really was first

248 John Dewey Page 249 C1379/83 Track 8 rate. Not everyone in the department was happy but it worked very well. As a result the teaching improved enormously and the amount of research that was being done increased enormously. The number of grants coming in increased enormously and the university started getting – they changed the system so they started getting overheads as well. So the university started getting overheads and they were pleased, you know. So it was wonderful all around and the students got a much more broad eclectic education in the earth sciences with lots of modern things as well. So all in all it was excellent. And that’s the way – then we hired Des McConnell. We had a readership in mineralogy and that was turned into a professorship of mineralogy – mineralogy and geochemistry, I think it was called, something like that. But anyway, we hired Des McConnell from Cambridge and he turned out to be an excellent acquisition, a brilliant man. But he’s now – he retied within four years unfortunately, or five years.

[6:59]

So it’s – but nowadays the department’s changed quite a lot. It’s changed – I mean, things evolve and change. I mean, you can’t complain. Much less geology is being done in the way that I would like in the department. They spend a lot of the first year doing maths and chemistry and things, which is not what students come up to read and a lot of students complain about this. But, you know, that’s the way they want to do it in terms of modern geochemistry, modern geophysics and so forth, it’s fine. But they’re into climate change in a fairly big way as well, which I think is a bit – jumping on the bandwagon. But that brings us up to the modern department. I don’t go in very much. I go in usually – largely ‘cause I have not much in common with people. There’s Mike Searle, with whom I have a lot in common, I talk to him a lot, Tony Watts. So I go in to coffee twice a week generally and have a chat, but I mostly work in college and work at home here and it’s very convenient. So I’m a happy man basically.

[7:58]

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How did you choose – apart from consulting with the rest of the staff, how did you choose both the people in Britain that you wanted to bid for and the people from universities abroad that you wanted to –

I guess by consultation and by, you know, saying, you know, whether people knew who was available. And they’d come to me very often and say, look, we must get Bob Spicer, he’s a bloody superb palaeobotanist. So he went on the list. We developed a list of people, you know. Martin Brasier – Martin Brasier and Bob Spicer were by general accord people we wanted. They said, look, we must improve the palaeontology side much more, and Jim Kennedy was very keen on that as well. So they were pretty clear. And we wanted what we call – we had Phil England and – Phil England and Barry Parsons as rather more theoretical model building geophysicists but we wanted also some sort of oceanographic geophysicists who did geology in the oceans so we got Tony Watts. We had Tony Watts on the list. That was – and then basically – that was the foreign component. So the foreign – the British component was relatively easy. We had to be much more persuasive to the committee, the Oxburgh Review, about the foreign component. We said, ‘Well, can we go for foreigners?’ They said, ‘Well yes, if you make out a good case, you know, you can certainly do and we’ll provide the cash for it, ‘cause we’re saving money at Nottingham and various other places.’ It was a UGC committee basically. So we said, ‘Look,’ we went around the department, ‘Anybody any ideas about some really good hires of people from abroad?’ And Phil England said, ‘Yes, Woodhouse would be a wonderful acquisition. He’s a solid earth seismologist with some tremendous discoveries to his credit.’ He became a fellow of the Royal Society about ten years after he arrived actually, so he was a great acquisition. To get him we had to give a job to his wife, which is perfectly reasonable. It’s not nepotism, it’s just natural bargaining, you know [laughs]. If we hadn’t got a job for her we wouldn’t have had him, you know. So Shamita Das, who’s an Indian lady, very good seismologist, came with him and we offered them – we went back to the committee and said ‘We want to hire Woodhouse and Shamita Das.’ They said, ‘Ooh, you can have one.’ We said, ‘Well, he won’t come without …’ ‘Oh right then, go ahead.’ So it was like that sort of negotiation. And then we said, well, we also wanted – everyone agreed Tony Watts. He came up on all the lists. Tony Watts is a practical geological

250 John Dewey Page 251 C1379/83 Track 8 oceanographer and he hummed and haaed, is he coming, is he not coming, and he couldn’t make up his mind, but eventually he said yes, thank god. And he was a wonderful acquisition, superb man, superb scientist. And who else – was that it? Let’s see, Brasier, Spicer … I think we got five, three from abroad and two from Britain. I think that’s right … Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. John Platt left and we hired Simon Lamb instead. He was my postdoc working in the Andes, a very good man. He’s now resigned and went to New Zealand to make films, so – luck of the draw [laughs].

This section is closed for twenty years until September 2033, or until the interviewee’s death, whichever is sooner: [00:11:12 - 00:19:32]

[19:32]

Thank you. Could you tell me – in the same way that you did for the earlier film, the Calder and Daley film, could you tell me what you can remember of sort of arrangements for organisation of your appearance in Earth Story?

Oh yes, Aubrey Manning and that one you mean, yes.

Yes. And the Ring of Fire programme. Now in this episode you sort of appear throughout the episode almost as the sort of – the stable element, the sort of stable scientific voice across it, appearing at the beginning, walking about in a particular region and then you appear again in that same region and then you appear in an office of some kind, which must be –

It’s my office in Oxford.

The Oxford office, yeah.

With Tony Watts I think that was, yes.

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Yes. So in the same way as the other one, how – I suppose how did your appearance in the film come out like that? What are the stages that go from an invitation to appear in a film to the appearance being that as opposed to anything else?

Yes. Well, the organiser of the whole series was Simon Lamb, who was actually a member of the department, of course. He was the lecturer in structural geology who replaced John Platt in the early ‘90s. And so he said, ‘John, do you want to appear in this – one of the programmes is going to be about subduction, the origin of island arcs and volcanoes and island arcs and the evolution of the continental crust and the way that you make the continental crust by adding stuff out of the mantle in island arcs.’ So he said, ‘We’re going to do a programme on that. One of the things is going to be on that. We’re going to call it Ring of Fire. We want to talk about the circum-Pacific volcanic ring and subduction and so forth but we want to go back into some of the older rocks as well and explain that some of these older rocks might have been formed by the same mechanism that volcanoes are formed in the modern ring of fire.’ So he said – we talked about it. He said, ‘What do you recommend?’ I said, ‘Well, you know, we could go up to North West Scotland and look at Lewisian rocks.’ These are the rocks that John Sutton and Janet Watson had deciphered so cleverly in the ‘50s. And I said, you know, ‘They’re gneisses, they’re typical average continental rocks made of hornblende quartz and plagioclase and there’s three principle minerals and if you put those together it’s basically a sort of diorite, granodiorite, and it’s the sort of thing that comes out the volcanoes round the Pacific.’ So he said, ‘Okay, fine. So we’ll have a meeting up in the North West Highlands. We’ll film up there and you can wander round and look at the rocks and we can show the minerals and so forth [coughs] and say that these rocks are jolly old and that something similar, not the identical process but a similar kind of process, was probably going on up here to make these rocks as is going on in the modern Pacific.’ I was more leery about that but it seemed sensible and logical, so – and he said, ‘This chap, Aubrey Manning, is going to be the core presenter for the programme.’ And he’s quite brilliant actually. I think – you can’t get anyone better than Aubrey Manning. I think he’s a marvellous – he understands things he immediately. He said – when I first met him up in Inverness. I went up on the night train with this lady called – this French lady called, erm … I’ve forgotten what her name is. Anyway, she was the producer for this particular

252 John Dewey Page 253 C1379/83 Track 8 programme, he was the presenter and I was the sort of – the performer [laughs], if you like. So I went up with this little thin very arrogant very bossy little Frenchwoman and she kept – the number of times we had to refilm the thing, she didn’t like this particular angle coming round the rock. She said, ‘No, it’s not aesthetic. You need to sort of stride out a bit more.’ Blimey, are we looking at rocks are we doing how beautiful I look in the field [laughs], you know. So anyway, I went along with it and Aubrey was getting pretty sick of it as well. So I went up by train with – no, I tell you what, she was already up there. I beg your pardon. I went up by sleeper from Kings Cross, I guess – is it Kings – yes, Kings Cross, I suppose it would be, up to Inverness on the overnight sleeper, and got off, was met by Aubrey Manning in Inverness, went to the hotel he’d been staying in and had breakfast. We had a long breakfast and chatted and so forth and he said how he liked to do things and what was I going to talk about and how was it going to work. And he said – again, he said, ‘Do you have a script?’ I said, ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’m just going to chat. I’m just going to chat.’ He said, ‘Excellent, that’s the way I like to do it too.’ He said, ‘I never know precisely what I’m going to say. I just simply say what comes out of here, you know, in response to what the actor is doing,’ i.e. me. So we drove off – then we drove off up to the Inchnadamph Hotel where we stayed and there was a television crew up there and this girl was already up there. And we spent about, hmm, four, five days filming on the rocks there. mean, for something like – how many minutes, five minutes? No, less than five minutes, we spent four bloody days filming [laughs]. And apparently that’s what they do. I hadn’t realised that, you know. They want the classic shot, for some reason. Erm, and there’s one wonderful part of it and you mentioned this, I think. We were walking round this rock and I got out my hand lens and I said, ‘Look, if you look at this gneiss you can see …’ And I put my hand lens on the rock and looked and said, ‘You can see quartz and feldspar and hornblende, you see.’ And it was just with an ordinary hand lens, just on the surface of the rock. Apparently – I didn’t know they were going to do this [laughs]. Simon Lamb had organised this. He simultaneously got a thin section of a rock and showed it under the microscope. And of course it wasn’t under ordinary plain polarised light, it was under what we call crossed nicols, where you have plain polarised light coming through the lower one, then it hits the slide, which you rotate, and it comes through an analyser at right angles to that, so that when you take the slide out it goes black. When you put the

253 John Dewey Page 254 C1379/83 Track 8 slide in the light is refracted through this one and it comes out in a different direction but you get these lovely so called birefringence colours and you can – and I said, ‘Yes, you can see quartz, plagioclase and hornblende,’ they were pointing to these various things in the – which is a very clever idea. But several of my friends [laughs] – we call this a polarising microscope. The microscope is polarising the light, which of course it doesn’t do. And several of my friend said, ‘John,’ he said. ‘Amazing.’ He said, ‘I’ve just seen the film.’ The following day three of them phoned up, they said, ‘I’ve just seen the film, very good,’ they said, ‘But I have one thing to ask. I simply – where do you buy those polarising hand lenses?’ [Laughs] It was wonderful. So I said, ‘I’m afraid you can’t, there’s no such thing [laughs]. That was a trick of the filming and Simon Lamb.’ So anyway, we did all the filming up there and he said, ‘Is there a script?’ ‘No, there’s not a script.’ ‘Great. Let’s just wander …’ Aubrey said, ‘Let’s just wander round and say what comes into our heads.’ So we did this and this little French girl didn’t like it, this producer. She wasn’t used to that. She liked scripts where you come round, you know exactly what you’re going to say, and we both said, ‘We’re not going to do that.’ ‘I designed and produced this.’ And I said, ‘Okay, we’ll all go home then. It’s fair enough.’ ‘No, no, no.’ [Laughs] So she said, ‘What we will do, we will take it lots …’ She obviously stuck it to us then. She said, ‘We’ll take it many, many times and I will choose the one that I like,’ which she did and she chose quite a good one actually, to be fair. And we took it time and time again saying different things. Then I’d say something cheeky like, ‘God, I’m dying for a whisky’ [laughs]. ‘Cut’ [laughs]. Oh dear, it was very funny. And then we shot the other stuff in my office in – actually I appeared in – it wasn’t just the Ring of Fire. I appeared in another one involving continental collision of India. We did that in my office as well. So we did some in my office in Oxford and some in the field. They were both terrific actually, both fun. I enjoyed them greatly. I like filming, I like appearing on film, ‘cause I like talking about geology and getting it over to people. That’s enormous fun and I feel it’s going to be of some value educationally to people.

What do you remember about the office based filming?

Cramped, cramped, because we had to set up all the – and it was bloody hot, you know. You’d get all these lights and you’d start sweating under them. It’s

254 John Dewey Page 255 C1379/83 Track 8 astonishing, the amount of heat that comes out of those lights. So you did it in fairly short bursts and I said, ‘Gosh, I must go and have a wash’ [laughs], so I came back. And Tony Watts felt the same. So we chatted – Tony Watts and I chatted about maps and about collision and all kinds of things. We just – again, we said what came into our head and they chose the bits they liked and I think that’s quite a good way to do it, you know. Rather than script it, where you have to follow exactly a script, I think it’s much better to let it go and if you don’t like the first one just do it again and see what they say next time, you know, and one of them is bound to be very good. So that’s the way they do it and apparently that’s quite a common – I think the Americans invented this way, it’s called the method. I remember Marlon Brando apparently did this. He just said, ‘I’m not – no script, I’m just going to say whatever comes into my head.’ On the Waterfront, you know, that classic film On the Waterfront , that was all done without a script and he just said – and apparently the greatest line that came into his head, he said, ‘I could’ve been a contender,’ you know. That was just out of his brain and it was brilliant, everyone remembers that in that film. So I think that’s a very good way to film. It takes longer but it means that it comes from the heart and it comes – it’s a much more natural – a natural way of speaking rather than saying what the script says. Marilyn Monroe apparently hated scripts ‘cause she couldn’t learn them and she kept – they’d have dozens of takes, you know, she’d keep on getting it wrong [laughs]. It was because she didn’t like scripts. And when they did it by the method, by the method of just random things, she was much better, you know. She was absolutely much better. That’s the way – I think that’s probably the way to do it.

Wasn’t that naturalness though undercut a bit by repeatedly filming the same bit?

It wasn’t quite the same bit. We’d do a different bit of rock sometimes, you know, and walk round a different bit of rock. It was all roughly the same. I suppose for that set, in which Aubrey Manning had said, ‘Well, what are these rocks made of?’ You know, and I’d say, ‘Well, they’re made of a variety of minerals,’ and I’d explain the minerals, silicon dioxide and silicate with aluminium in it – I almost said aluminum because I’ve been living in America for quite a while [laughs]. I think it may have slipped out at some point and she caught it actually very well.

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Is that why there’s a – just before you say hornblende there’s a sort of pause, is that the one where you might have said aluminum?

I think it might well have been actually, yes, it might well have been, yeah. It could well have been that actually, yeah.

So how many – roughly how many times did you do that shot where you say let’s look down the –

Probably twenty. I would say twenty, maybe less, fifteen minimum, twenty – about, yes, somewhere in there. So, you know – and it was amusing to us after a while ‘cause it was – it only took about a minute or so, a minute or two, but we probably spent a morning doing that shot [laughs]. And then the one where I’m striding across with Aubrey from one rock to another, that probably took about ten different takes ‘cause she didn’t like the way we strode. My God [laughs]. But it was okay, it was fun.

Did you learn anything about the character and motivation of Aubrey Manning?

I realised I liked the man enormously. I took to him – I took to him very much because he’s a guy who – he’s a zoologist, he’s Professor of Zoology in Edinburgh, as you know, or I think he’s retired now but he was Professor of Zoology in Edinburgh. And what I liked the man is that he learnt very fast. He could pick things up incredibly quickly, things he didn’t know and understand, but he suddenly – he understood the significance of them really quickly. And also he was very sharp, very quick, in picking things up in conversation. He’d pick up the idea but he’d respond very quickly when you were chatting to him on film. He liked the method, you know, he liked the method of acting and that method style of – ‘cause it is acting, isn’t it? I mean, you are acting, essentially. But also he’s a very – what’s the word? A very amiable man, very friendly and genuinely friendly. He was the sort of bloke you’d be happy to go on holiday with, you know. That’s the way I judge people, would I like to spend a week with this person in, let’s say, in Sardinia looking at rocks, and with Aubrey Manning, yes, absolutely, I would, I’d love – you know, and just chatting over

256 John Dewey Page 257 C1379/83 Track 8 meals with him. I enjoyed talking with him over meals about geology and other things too, zoology, what are you doing, where do you live in Edinburgh, do you know McCall Smith, oh yes, I know McCall Smith, I live almost next door to him, and things like that. So he’s great fun, great fun.

And was the French producer there for the inside shots, the Oxford department shots?

No, she wasn’t there for that. Let me think – or was she …? She was, she was, and she was much better. It was – she wasn’t bad in Scotland but she had her own way of doing things, you know. She wanted scripts and then realised she wasn’t going to get scripts so, you know, she had lots of takes. But in – somehow the takes indoors in Oxford were much quicker. We didn’t take many of those, I don’t think. Yes, I don’t think so, maybe up to ten or so, maybe five or something like that, you know, because she is quite fussy and maybe quite rightly fussy, you know. She wants things done her way and she wants a certain result and she’s determined to get it. She certainly liked whisky. Coming back – we came back on the train together, on the overnight sleeper, from Inverness to London and we sat in the dining car. I think we had dinner in the hotel, the Station Hotel, before we got on the train and then we hopped on the sort of overnight sleeper and we drank Lagavulin whisky. I drank a few and she could put it back. I was quite impressed, this little slip of a lady could really knock the whisky back [laughs]. Anyway, we both slept like a log, I guess, after that. And I haven’t seen her since. I think I’ve not seen her since that filming actually.

Yes, who was that producer?

I can’t remember the lady’s name.

Rachel Rice?

No. She was French, this lady.

Oh, Isabelle Rosin.

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Huh?

Isabelle Rosin?

Yes, Isabelle Rosin, that’s right, yeah, yeah. I mean, she was very professional and she knew what she wanted and she was determined to do it. But apparently she had this reputation as a filmer, having it her way, determined to have it her way.

[End of Track 8]

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Track 9

Now for the final session today we’re at the Natural History Museum and in spite of the fact that it’s got huge collections, as you’ve just been telling me, it might not be the first place that people would look for you possibly. So I wondered if you could explain why we’re here, in other words why you have this relationship with the Natural History Museum, the sort of origin of it.

It’s not very complicated. I have lots of associations, as I think I mentioned before, with quite a lot of institutions around the world, in New Zealand, South Africa and various parts of the States and France and so forth. And I came here for one simple reason. I got to know a very fine young researcher called Richard Herrington, who was on the mineralogy staff in – here we are in the mineralogy department in the museum and I got to know him really quite well ‘cause a lot of our research overlapped. In fact we’re writing a paper together at the moment. And we got chatting about the place and I said, ‘Well, you know, I work in Oxford but it’s not wholly satisfactory because I miss the stimulus of talking to people who are interested in the same sort of things as me, ‘cause the department’s gone in a different direction.’ So I thought, well, you know, how about the Natural – and then Richard raised it. He said, ‘What I’ll try to do is to get you a position in the Natural History Museum, a sort of honorary position, no salary or anything like that, just an honorary position as an honorary senior fellow.’ And he said, ‘What it gives you of course is full facilities. It gives you an office,’ the one we’re sitting in. It gives me all the library facilities of the museum. It allows me to get thin sections made, which is really quite a substantial benefit. And then also it allows you to make – have geochronology done, ages of rocks, measuring zircons. So you get all the facilities of the museum and none of the responsibility. I don’t have to do anything but I – so what I do, I come down typically – sorry, they did anyway. He put it to the board and the board said delighted and so here I am, given honorary fellowship. So I get a badge, this little badge I can travel around with and it gets me in everywhere. And I come down typically, oh, once a fortnight for two days usually and then I sort of work intensively for a couple of days quietly. I use – the library is wonderful here, that’s what it’s mostly about and working with Richard Herrington. And also I’m in London, I can go up to the Royal

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Society, I can go to the Geological Society in Piccadilly, so it’s a very, very convenient thing. And my son lives in Finsbury Park so I go and stay with him. So that’s how it happened, through a very good geological associate essentially who’s on the staff here.

[2:39]

And how is the sort of expertise and the stimulus you can get here different from what you would get, say, in the department at Oxford?

Well, the department at Oxford, there are very few people who are working on anything vaguely similar to what I’m working on. There are – I suppose you’d have to say there are three people there. But again, they’re younger and they’ve got their own research to do and they don’t want an old chap like me sort of bothering them too much and I don’t want to bother them. But I find that the stimulus here is very good because there are – in this mineralogy department there are a lot of incredibly good mineralogists and I learn a huge amount from them. I chat to them over coffee and so forth and I learn a lot from them. Then there’s Richard Herrington, my direct associate, who is a very clever young guy – oh, he’s not young, I mean, middle aged guy now, but he’s a very clever guy, works in the Urals and – he works on volcanic mass of sulphite deposits and that’s a great interest of mine and some of the research I’m doing. So really it’s the subject of research that makes this much more valuable to me than does Oxford.

[3:39]

Thank you. And while we’re on museums, I wonder whether you could say something about the role, if any, of museums in your early life and education, apart from, as you’ve told us, John Hayward had a sort of private small collection of his own at home.

Yes.

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But did museums figure in –

Oh, they figured very highly, yes. They were – museums are terribly important to me, London museums of course. I was born in – brought up in Chingford in North East London and I was – when I began to get really interested in geology and natural – and plants and fossils and all that, minerals and so forth, I realised of course the great resource of what was then the Geological Museum here, which has now been subsumed into the Natural History Museum. It’s still a geological museum but nevertheless it’s part of the Natural History Museum now. So anyway – ‘cause the Geological Survey used to be housed here, which is now up in Keyworth in Nottingham. So what I would do, I’d get – my mother would pack me a little satchel with sandwiches and a bottle of water and I’d get on the number thirty-five bus, by threepence, three old p that is, and get on the bus and take thirty-five minutes to come over, thirty-five, forty minutes. It would drop me just up the road here, just up the road from the Geological Museum in South Kensington, and I’d come in and spend the whole day here. What I’d do, I’d have a little notebook and I used to go round all the cabinets just making notes and making little drawings of things and so forth and going to the little library and reading in the library. Also they got to know me quite well and the librarian was very kind and helpful and the people in the Survey who were here were very kind and helpful. Peter Sabine, for example, a very nice man, he was the chief mineralogist in the Survey at that time. So I got to know them a little bit. So I was sort of launched on a geological career by the Geological Museum to some – to a large degree and it was a wonderful experience. I used to come about – in holidays, it was always holidays of course, I used to come about once a fortnight here, something like that, and spend a whole day. And so the museum was absolutely central. I didn’t go to the V&A or any of the others, just simply made a beeline for the Geological Museum [laughs]. I think I got to know every cabinet and every specimen in there. There were displays of the regional geology of Britain. I just learnt a huge amount of geology between the ages of sort of fourteen and eighteen by – from the museum.

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You say that you got to know all of them, was there anything – were there any cabinets that were especially interesting or striking for you at that age or any kinds of rock or kinds of display?

I think those that told a story. I remember a cabinet showing the geology of Dorset and the coast of Dorset and it told the story of the alpine earth movements that folded the rocks and thrust them up, and I’d seen those in the field as well because I used to go on bicycling tours, you remember, as I’d said, and I’d seen the rocks down there on the bicycling tour. So it all interacted extremely well, the two together. But I think probably the cabinets that told a story of – in which you had the rocks and the fossils and the minerals and a map and sometimes a three dimensional model – they were very good. There were some wonderful models in there in those days. And I used to make notes and draw sections across the rocks and so forth. So by the time I came to university I knew one hell of a lot of – I didn’t – perhaps I didn’t know the theory that desperately well but I knew – I was good on the rocks, minerals and fossils [laughs] and I could recognise things, so that was no problem to me. I remember in finals, I mean, we got some pretty obscure fossils. One was trigonocarpus, which is a carboniferous seed, and I knew it from the museum, trigonocarpus, lower carboniferous, probably Bear’s Den in Scotland, and the examiners were astonished apparently [laughs]. But anyway, there we are. So there is no substitute, in my view, for young people learning a lot of stuff. Never mind about – I mean, history lessons apparently in schools these days are all about sociology and motives and god knows what and they can’t remember any dates of anything that ever happened, so I’m afraid I’m of the old school in that sense. In geology you’ve got to know an awful lot because you can’t look everything up all the time. I mean, maybe you could say, well, you can look it up, well you can of course, but if you have to look everything up you’re spending all your time in libraries looking for stuff, you know. So there’s nothing like having it in your head. Then you can see – I think maybe that’s why I became a sort of more analytic synthesis type of geologist, putting things together, ‘cause I knew a lot about geology of all kinds and I’ve always read widely. And I think it’s much easier to sit and think, oh yes, I know something about the carboniferous of Russia or the Precambrian of India or something of that sort. If you

262 John Dewey Page 263 C1379/83 Track 9 have to look it up all the time it interrupts your train of thought, you know. So for that reason the museum was desperately important in my career.

And memory as well, by the sound of it.

And memory helps, yeah, a good memory. I’m blessed with a very good memory and that helps an awful lot.

[8:27]

Thank you. Could you now tell me about ambition? This is partly inspired by things you’ve said but also that very short National Academy of Sciences profile. You talk in it about focusing on science rather than sport because you felt that, although you liked sport and were good at various kinds of sports, you didn’t feel you were good enough at any one of them to be at the top and you wanted to be at the top of something.

Yes.

And so without sort of psychoanalysing yourself, I wonder whether you could tell me about that ambition as a young man, what it felt like, what you were ambitious for, what form ambition took.

I think, to be fair, it mostly took the form of an incredibly deep and profound interest. I mean, I never sort of thought about, oh, I’ve got to get to the top of this, I’ve got to get to the top of my profession. You know, I had the sort of normal ambition of most people, you like to be recognised as having a good idea or you’ve done a nice piece of mapping. You like to have it praised and you like to, you know, have your name propagated around the place and I’ve always liked that unashamedly. But I think my whole career has been – in sport as well, is based on enjoyment. It’s, you know – I don’t worry about self fulfilment and all that kind of stuff. I just like to enjoy what I’m doing, you know, and I simply deeply love geology and that’s why I would never have considered seriously an administrative position of any kind and I’ve been offered

263 John Dewey Page 264 C1379/83 Track 9 lots of them. I just want to do geology. The same with sport, I just wanted to play cricket and play rugby and so forth. But I realised of course at a very early age that, even though I was reasonably good at lots of sports, I was never very, very good at any of them, you know, so there’s no chance of ever forging a career in those things, except maybe as a grounds man in a cricket field [laughs]. I didn’t want to do that. Ad then geology just took – at the age of fourteen or so, geology just took over and I just really wanted to do that, but I was also interested in journals and art and I still paint a lot. I do lots of things that I enjoy basically and they’re mostly fairly cheap, thank god, you know. I don’t have race horses and yachts and that kind of stuff [laughs], a high life. I just want to do geology and paint and build my model railway and things like that, you know.

How was far competitiveness a part of ambition for you, speaking at the moment as a young man?

I think – yes, I think certainly in sport – naturally, you know, if you’re not competitive at sport you generally don’t do it well, and I think the same is probably true to some degree of geology. I mean, I think I’ve always been competitive, still am. Still ambitious in a sense, you know. I like to find things out very much. It’s finding things out. I think Richard Feynman once said that, the Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It’s glorious, an absolutely glorious book, everyone should read. But it’s the pleasure of finding things out and then the added benefit that people say, oh yes, gosh, that’s a jolly good idea, that’s really excellent, you know. I must confess, there is a glow that happens, naturally, you know. I think it’s true for everybody really. I mean, you like to be recognised and you like to be praised. Not praised unfairly and sycophantically, you know, I don’t like that, but I do like to have a genuine interest in my work and have it genuinely recognised.

[11:57]

Were there – you’ve talked a lot about collaboration. You must be one of the scientists who’s collaborated the most out of the scientists I’ve interviewed. But to what extent were there sort of – to what extent were you competitive with

264 John Dewey Page 265 C1379/83 Track 9 contemporaries? Were there people who were starting out at the same time as you and you sort of had an eye them? To what extent was that a part of being ambitious?

I never thought of being in competition with my sort of – my classmates and, you know, undergraduates in the same place and graduate students. I never thought of it – I was competitive in a broader sort of way. Within the science as a whole I felt more competitive and personalities didn’t really matter to me very greatly at all. I liked to talk to people and, you know, compare notes and get ideas. That’s why I like collaborating because very often two heads are better than one, particularly in the field. I mean, I like being in the field mapping and working by myself, but also there are several people like Paul Ryan, now retired, retired professor in Galway in Ireland, he and I just get on so well in the field because we compliment each other, we see different things. When we go to an outcrop it really works wonderfully [laughs], you know, I’m working away at something and he’s working away at something else, oh, look at this, have you noticed that, oh no, gosh, that’s interesting, what do you think that is, and so forth. So there are some people like that and there are – I think I’m to some extent competitive with them actually as well to some degree. I like to – I like to – I don’t mean dominate in a sort of nasty way but I like to sort of decide things. When we’re writing a paper together I like to sort of design and dominate the design of the paper and how it’s done and so forth. And eventually I very often turn out – I turn out doing most of the writing [laughs] for that reason. It’s not – yeah, it’s just that I like to control things, I think, you know, to some degree. But there are several people with whom I’ve really worked wonderfully. Paul Ryan is my principle colleague and still is at the moment. And then Walter Pitman, who’s Professor of Geophysics in Columbia University in America, he’s marvellous, I’ve done a lot of work with him and we really get on tremendously well. Again, we’re complimentary, I’m a geologist, he’s a geophysicist. And I suppose they’re the only two with whom I’ve really communed really well, although I’ve had lots of – as you say, I’ve had lots of research relationships with quite a number of people. They’ve always been amicable and I’ve never fallen out with colleagues for any reason and it’s all been rather smooth actually and simple, you know.

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What happens if you come against someone that you’re working with who almost equally wants to structure the paper or decide the way in which something is written up?

Well, I sometimes give in a bit, yeah, yeah, I think so. If somebody said I want this diagram drawn a particular way, I’d say, well, you do it, you go to your computer and use Adobe Illustrator, which you do nowadays. In the old days everything was done on drawing boards with card, big lumps of Bristol board, white board, and you had pen and ink and stencils and it was quite an artistic business, but nowadays it’s all – I mean, I work with Adobe Illustrator on my Mac computer now and it’s so much faster and you don’t smudge the ink either [laughs], no smudging. It’s wonderful. So I’d say, well, you go away and draw it on Adobe Illustrator and you can send me the file if you like and I can add and subtract to it and whatever. We sort of iterate, we sort of iterate and we get there. But mostly I think I do most of the writing and most of the drawing on most papers. It’s not that I’m necessarily better at it, it’s just that I like to be in control [laughs]. Yeah, that’s it.

[15:47]

And you’ve said a number of times that you’re still ambitious and I wondered whether you’re ambitious for different things now than you were when you were ambitious as a younger scientist.

No, I think it’s just a continuation of, again, the pleasure of finding things out, publishing and getting recognised for it. I like to keep my name in the forefront of the system. I don’t want to fade as an old chap, you know, into obscurity and go off and paint. I do paint, I love painting, I’m doing much more of that sort of thing nowadays, but I want to keep the geology going, I really do, ‘cause I’m desperately interested in it, you know. It’s just tremendous fun. If you find something you really like doing you want to go on doing it in general, you know.

In your experience, what is more common in science, for people to gradually fade away, as you say, or to, like you, want to stay doing it at the –

266 John Dewey Page 267 C1379/83 Track 9

Well, there are three things, I mean, there are three sort of conditions, I suppose. There’s my condition in which I just want to go on doing it. And another good example of that is Dan McKenzie in Cambridge. I mean, Dan, like me, has never – [laughs] well, he’s done even less than I have administratively. I mean, I’ve been head of department in three different places and I didn’t like it very much and Dan has just refused to do any administration and he’s a clever chap, you know. He’s just done wonderful research as a result of that and a bit of teaching and so forth. But Dan is a very – in a sense like me, he’s a very private researcher. He does work with people but he again is a man, I think, who likes to – like me. And he’s going on, he’s still working away and doing things and publishing excellent papers. So there’s that kind. And I don’t think there are – Brian Windley’s another one. I don’t know if you know Brian Windley. He’s in Leicester, he’s just retired from Leicester, a very good geologist, good sort of steady output of good stuff, you know. And he works away and he’s – he may be working harder than he did when he was teaching, which one does because you’ve got more time to do your research. Every day I can get up, you know, and if I want to do research all day I do. If I want to paint all day I do that. If I want to build model railways all day I do that or go for a walk or whatever, do what I want. So there’s that kind of person. Then there are those who sort of gradually do less and less and sort of fade and fade. And they stop going to meetings and they stop giving – I like to give keynote talks. I like to keep on having my name in lights in lectures, keynote talks around the world at conferences and things. I really enjoy that. I like lecturing, I love to lecture. It’s a sort of ego trip in a way, I suppose, really. But then there are those who – the next group who just fade gradually and by the time they’re sort of my age, seventy-five, they’re doing almost nothing. Then there are those – there’s four groups really. Then there is another group whose geology or science or whatever it is fades and that happens quite often early, in middle age, but then they start becoming administrators. Oxburgh is one example, O’Nions is another example, Bob May, John Krebs. There are – people who – and then they do administration very well, they run organisations, become presidents of the Royal Society, become rectors of Imperial College, you know. They do those sorts of things, which I personally would find abhorrent, you know. Just the notion of having to do an administrative job instead of doing geology, I couldn’t imagine. Anyway,

267 John Dewey Page 268 C1379/83 Track 9 there are those types, who keep on being productive but in a completely different way and helping to run organisations, which somebody has to do of course, to do it well. And then there are those who just give up immediately they retire. They come to retirement and they give all the books away and they go off and run cruises or collect stamps [laughs], they do all – they indulge in a hobby of some kind. Examples of those were Jimmy Brindley, the old Professor of Geology in University College, Dublin, a wonderful character, very good geologist and working until he retired. Then quite suddenly at seventy – you went to seventy in those days in Ireland, suddenly at seventy he retired and just simply gave up absolutely completely. Another good example was Van Bemmelen, the great Dutch geologist. He just simply retired and he said – he wrote to all his friends and said, please don’t send me anymore reprints of books, I’ve given up geology, I’m doing something quite different now. So there are four categories, I think, and they’re all equally valid, I suppose, you know [laughs]. But I think the saddest is when people gradually fade, you know, and I think those tend to be the people who’ve never been desperately good in the first place and they find, without the stimulus of colleagues and having students to work with and students doing some of the work for them and those kinds of things, they really can’t do it after a while. They lose the knack, if you like, of doing it and once you lose the knack, I think – maybe they never had the knack in the first place [laughs], mm.

[20:47]

Thank you. You mentioned Dan McKenzie in the first type. I just wondered how – what experience you’ve had of or perhaps how you’ve related to the more sort of forceful aspects of Dan’s character. Because I mean, his recording is open, he’s very open about being like that himself. If you see the John Lynch film of him, Turning Points, he’s talking about arrogance, you know, in a –

Oh, I mean, Dan is completely arrogant. I mean, I’m arrogant in a sense but I’m not – I don’t think I’m as arrogant as Dan. It’s not a criticism, it’s just an observation. That’s the way Dan is and it’s part of his character and it’s what makes Dan Dan. I mean, Dan is a wonderful scientist. I mean, in my view I think he’s probably the best

268 John Dewey Page 269 C1379/83 Track 9 geophysicist in the last century. I mean, that’s my personal view. I think he’s limited to the degree that I think he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. I don’t think – he doesn’t know fully he doesn’t know everything [laughs]. And I’ve had arguments with him but fairly minor and good natured, you know, and so forth. ‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘We’ll beg to differ over that,’ or something of that sort. But we haven’t had a lot to do with each other actually. I mean, I’ve admired his work, I think he’s liked what I’ve done. We’ve done quite different things with different groups of people. When I was in Cambridge as a young lecturer from ’64 to ’70, he was a graduate student and postdoc sort of thing and a young researcher. And he spent a lot of his time in America in Scripps, of course, in those days. I didn’t get – didn’t know him awfully well in those days. I suppose I got to know him just before I left Cambridge in ’69, after I’d been in Columbia, you know, doing the research that led to my change in – to plate tectonics and stuff like that. So I haven’t really interfaced with him very much. Had I been in Cambridge interfacing, there might have been sparks, I suspect. I don’t know. Maybe not, maybe we would have perhaps worked together, but I think our methodology is somewhat different and I think it probably wouldn’t have worked very well. I think Dan again, like me, likes to dominate. He likes to run – you know, if he’s got a research relationship, like me he likes to run it and the other chap has to – he maybe has to do all the sort of leg work. Very often I do that, get somebody to do all the legwork, plotting up stuff, which I find boring. Then I get the graph, oh yes [laughs]. So there we are.

But have you seen sort of the effect of Dan on people who are perhaps less able to cope with that kind of thing?

Yes, to some degree I have. I think Dan can be very intimidating because he is so clever. That’s the problem with Dan, he is a very, very clever man and he’s got a wonderful brain. I mean, one of the best brains I’ve known or seen. And I think he can intimidate people and frighten them off, if you like. For example, Dan’s had very few research students, very, very few indeed. And I think he’s been very demanding. I mean, I don’t – I mean, I know of one certainly who felt this and he was very demanding and she felt she couldn’t live up to what he wanted and went off and worked with somebody else. So I think that – so Dan’s been a real loner. I’ve been a

269 John Dewey Page 270 C1379/83 Track 9 loner in the sense that I’ve done what I wanted to do and I haven’t been – I’ve not been dependent on people. I’ve made natural associations because it’s sort of vaguely convenient and they wanted to do it and I said, well, why not, you know, it’s fine, a paper written by two of us will be better than two individual papers written by each of us. So, you know, I’ve done that but I’ve – Dan’s been a real loner. And he’s had associations with a few people, like for example James Jackson. They’ve had a strong association in Cambridge for the last twenty or more years, twenty-five years I guess. James is a very strong character, but I think that he and Dan do very similar things and they get on very well together and they write some very nice papers as a result. He’s worked with a few other geophysicists but I think he’s dominated those relationships. But I think he scares people. I don’t think I scare people generally. I go out of my way not to scare them, so to speak [laughs].

[25:11]

Thank you. To what extent is the enjoyment of fieldwork for you physical? You’ve talked about the kind of intellectual enjoyment of it, if you like, but, you know, what sort of percentage of the enjoyment, if at all, is physical? You talked, for example, somewhere about – in order to do geology you need to get sweaty, which suggests that there’s a kind of – and you’ve got this sort of –

Faintly macho thing, yes.

Love of – yes, love of sport. To what extent is it a sort of physical enjoyment?

It is. I certainly get a lot of – I mean, even now and I’m not as – I’m nowhere near as fit as I was when I was young, but, you know, I can still climb mountains quite happily and build up a sweat and get nicely out of breath and so forth, get the heart pumping. And I do enjoy that actually, I actually enjoy the physical effort of fieldwork. It’s – I think they’re called endorphins, are they, that start to flow when you start – particularly when you’re thinking and working at the same time. I think it’s very good for the body that is, you know. Somehow – I’m not – if I’m really – if I’m climbing a hill and getting pretty – you know, getting pretty tired and out of

270 John Dewey Page 271 C1379/83 Track 9 breath then I’ve got – I think you sit down before you can start thinking again, but nevertheless that’s a nice preparation for getting to the top of a mountain and coming over the top and finding the wonderful cool air on your face, a nice breeze blowing, and you sit down and perhaps relax and have lunch with a few friends up there, you know, and swig some water and survey the scenery, and it’s – and think about the geology. It’s a very, very special thing, that is. It is a – you’re right, it’s a lot of physical enjoyment too, the actual sweat of doing it, you know.

I was wondering also about mountain climbing and skiing, about the extent to which those activities offer a sort of unique view on your object of study. Is it – I mean, one way of thinking about this is that you climb mountains and you go skiing purely for enjoyment. Okay, they happen to be mountains and you work on mountains but, you know, so what really, but – or is there a – do you get a particular access to geology by doing this sort of thing? Do you get views on things that you –

Well, I should say, of course, that even though I work on mountains, many old mountains have been worn flat [laughs]. So although they’re mountains in the sense that their origins – you know, their orogenic – they’ve been formed by an orogenic process, a mountain building process, the mountain’s been stripped away and you’re seeing the guts of the thing really inside, which is fascinating. And, you know, you can look down sort of – sometimes even twenty kilometres into the crust by – in an eroded mountain, so – even much deeper, even to sixty, seventy kilometres sometimes. But I think that – [sighs] the physical is certainly part of the – it’s a lead into the intellectual process for me, getting tired, getting – sometimes pleasantly tired at the end of a day, coming back and working up the maps in the evening, you know, with a couple of glasses of wine, and sitting there and chatting over the maps and so forth with colleagues. That’s – you’ve had a wonderful sort of physical day, then you’ve got the mental day, mental evening, to follow, which is lovely. And then there still is the mental thrill of seeing an outcrop. I mean, I think Francis Pettijohn said two very – the very famous American geologist said two very witty impressive things. One was that the truth resides in the field. And that’s partly true. I mean, obviously a lot of truth comes in laboratory work and thinking and modelling and all those kinds of things, but ultimately, you know, the rocks are in the field and you’ve got to find

271 John Dewey Page 272 C1379/83 Track 9 out what they’re like, you know. It’s no use having an earth made of green cheese and plasticine, you know, meaningless. Then the other thing he said was that geology is very – it’s difficult in the field. Take a complicated outcrop, it takes a lot of work to decipher it. In fact Pettijohn said, ‘There is nothing as sobering as an outcrop’ [laughs]. Such a wise, wise remark and I find that too. And sometimes when you’ve really worked out something that wasn’t at all obvious to begin with, the pleasure of that is just divine, it’s extraordinary. Quite wonderful. So yes, I mean, the two are very closely interrelated for me, I think.

[29:31]

And could you say something, and this is going to be entirely separate from geology, about the extent of your skiing? Because when I was at yours last time you showed me a sort of – well, not really a run but a slope that you’d skied and it seemed rather – it seemed rather advanced skiing, you know, for someone who’s never skied before. And this isn’t just sort of going down a sort of marked simple run, is it?

No, although that’s what I mostly do, go down marked runs, you know, because that’s the safest thing to do. But I also – I’ve done a reasonable amount of so called off piste skiing, where you’re just skiing in wild country and it’s much more difficult. And then you’ve got to have your wits about you for holes and trees, you know, and cornices that can break off and drop you hundreds of feet and so forth. So you’ve got to have your wits about you when you’re doing – and also the physics of skiing in deep wet snow is much more difficult than on a nice groomed trail. So yes, I mean, I’ve skied some quite – I think nowadays at my age I like to ski the groomed trails because they’re simpler and it’s got a lot of immediate enjoyment, whereas there’s a fear factor off piste. That’s part of it, you know, the endorphins get – when you’re slightly scared, you know, it’s exciting. But that example I showed you on the Aletsch Glacier, that’s pretty advanced stuff actually. You’ve got to do it in the winter. If you do it in the summer it’s very dangerous because of crevices, whereas in the winter the crevices get filled and they’re smoothed off and there’s a nice cover of snow right across. But during the – everything starts melting in the spring and so

272 John Dewey Page 273 C1379/83 Track 9 forth and then you’ve got bloody great crevices and you can really get damaged quite badly if you’re not careful.

And where did you learn to ski? How is it that you started skiing?

I started skiing very late actually, mostly in America. I’d done a little bit of skiing beforehand. But in terms of skiing a lot, when I went in 1970 to the States, I – the whole family decided we’re all going to ski. In the winter you’ve got to – in upstate New York there’s nothing else to do in the winter. I mean, you can cross country ski or snowshoe but I always wanted to do a lot more downhill skiing, so I really took it up with a vengeance and really skied a hell of a lot and became really quite good. So I’ve really skied hard now for well over forty years. You do get steadily better, there’s no question, even as you get older and older. Once you’ve skied a lot, if you’re reasonably – I mean, my legs are in super condition so I’ve no problem with legs. If your legs are in good condition that’s the only bit of you that really matters, you know, for obvious reasons. I mean, the rest is just sort of being supported [laughs]. So yes, you do get better and better as you get older, you ski with more confidence. My children ski beautifully, I mean, ‘cause they were sort of, you know, seven and – six and eight, I think, when they first started, something of that sort – seven and nine actually – no, sorry, seven and five. Seven and five, that’s right. So they developed the confidence of youth, you know. When you’re tiny, no fear factor, and they grew up skiing and ski wonderfully, better than I do.

[33:00]

Could we move now to what seems to be an absolutely crucial period – well, move back to it, if you like, and that’s the ’67 sabbatical. And –

Oh yes.

What I want to – what can happen with science is that you can get the impression that it’s all ideas and that in that sense it’s not as arduous as I think perhaps it is. There’s a description of you doing this sabbatical work in ’67. It reads, with the help of a

273 John Dewey Page 274 C1379/83 Track 9 large map and extensive research in Columbia University Library, you plotted the geologic details of the entire Caledonian system. And so I wonder whether you could just –

Caledonian Appalachian system that should read, yeah, the two.

Okay. Could you then describe what might not be the most sort of exciting and glamorous part of science perhaps, but tell me about that library work in as much detail as you can, about – not just about the contents of it but the amount of it, what was involved, where were the records, how did you retrieve them, what was the process of plotting, and how long you actually spent doing that, to give a sense of the work, that kind of work.

Yes, this is very interesting actually and it’s a very important part of the way that I do geology. I mean, a lot of it’s in the field, making observations all over the mountain belts and – mostly old ones, Appalachian, Caledonian, Precambrian. I haven’t really worked in young mountain belts very much except in New Zealand more recently. But anyway, I was mostly working in the Appalachian Caledonian system, which was all dead by 400 million years ago. So what I was trying to do in that Appalachian Caledonian study in New York using the Columbia Library, geology library, was simply this. I was trying to understand how the geometry of all the rock groups related to one another in that whole system. I mean, where were the rocks that – I mean, I suddenly realised that in Vermont there were rocks that looked like an island arc. I mean, these andesites and rhyolites and basalts look just like the rocks of Arianis at the present day. I said, my God, you know, that must mean this was an island arc of that kind. So what I wanted then to do was take all these different elements of the modern world, you know, island arcs and continental margins, can I find these in the Appalachian Caledonian system. And when I started I had no idea really. So then I started – I said, the only way to do that is to make a detailed plot of the whole darned thing in a new way. Let’s plot all the rocks of a certain age of this kind, you know, these volcanic rocks of that particular kind. Volcanic rocks are related to rifting in continents, another kind of rock, where are the belts of those? Can I see anything like a continental edge between a limestone platform and deeper water,

274 John Dewey Page 275 C1379/83 Track 9 like a rifted continental margin, like the Atlantic edges, you know, can I see anything like that? Can I see sandstones coming off a rising belt, which would suggest that mountain building is going on, stuff’s rising and shedding of sediment? So I started plotting in big lumps, you know, sort of lower Ordovician, middle Ordovician, upper Ordovician, lower Silurian, blah, blah, blah, early Cambrian, middle Cambrian, late Cambrian. So I had these time slices and then I drew – I tried to put them on the map. And to do that I had to go through a staggering amount of information in the library. I mean, it would be nice to go to a map where somebody’s done it, you know, and just copy them down [laughs], but that wouldn’t have been quite as good. What I did, I first of all got out all the state maps, America, all the New England states from New York up to Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and so forth, Connecticut, then right down to Alabama. I went right down through and then up into Canada, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. I got all those maps out and I sort of made very precise copies of them. And then the trouble was they weren’t all at the same scale, so right away I had a problem of – but luckily they had things called reducing and enlarging Xeroxes and photographically you could reduce and enlarge. So I tried to get a set of maps all at the same scale and then I had to trace off, you know, these different belts of rocks. Then I developed a colour scheme, a big colour scheme of my own, you know, rocks of Ordovician age, of island arcs were red, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then I had these ophiolitic rocks, you know, which looked like ocean floor. We knew the oceans were made of gabbro and very heavy rocks. The oceanic crust was rather dark and heavier than the mantle, ‘cause it sits down, it musts be heavier. Continents sit up, they must be lighter. So we knew something like that. So I said – I suddenly realised there were belts of these kinds of rocks, of so called ophiolites, in zones where the – I said, God, could this be where oceans close, was there an ocean in there and maybe it closed up. So I started getting this map and it started to emerge. And I did this for about six months. I was in the library almost every day for at least four or five hours, mostly in the mornings and then I came back and plotted in the afternoons onto the big map. So I was working away at all these state maps, getting the scales changed and then copying them off and so forth. And then sometimes even within a state map it wasn’t that clear. I had to go to the secondary information, like the geology of this particular quadrangle in that particular area of the map, you know, to get more detail. So I did a huge amount of

275 John Dewey Page 276 C1379/83 Track 9 work on US GS professional papers. I mean, I suppose I must have consulted – in terms of maps, big maps, I consulted at least forty of those maps. Then in terms of secondary literature, I must have consulted well over 1,000 papers, scientific papers. So that’s a hell of a lot of work and so sometimes I’d take them home at night and read them and generalise them and so forth and copy the map, if there was a map, and then get that onto the main map. So gradually this map gradually emerged, all these colours, random colours, all over the place. And then finally I had the thing almost together and I pinned it right across a wall and I really stood back for the first time, my God, the colour patterns that started to emerge. You know, the orange pattern went right through from Newfoundland, right through New Brunswick, divided into two, probably two island arcs coming together. You see that in the Pacific, you know, the Philippines and the Marianas, two island arcs, they come together in Japan. So I thought, god, this really is beginning to look like the modern earth but it’s all squashed together in one piece. So ah, if continents are moving around, eventually continentals collide and they will squash – everything in the ocean between them, it will be squashed. So I suddenly realised that the Appalachian Caledonian system was a place where a big ocean complex with island arcs and continental margins and bits of ocean floor had been squashed together. And then I realised it’s even worse than that, it’s not just squashed together, ‘cause there are sideways movements as well. I mean, when two continents come together they very often don’t come together orthogonally, they come together obliquely, so there’s the sheering mode and the squashing and sheering, so a lot of the rocks are all sliced up into different belts and they’re sort of dissociated. Sometimes they’re repeated, sometimes excised, so it’s really quite complicated. And then I had to work all that out and luckily I did and I’ve been trying to work it out ever since actually in more or more detail. I suppose I’m just getting into much more detail of the timing and the geometry and how a particular plate boundary works and so forth. But that’s what I did, it was a huge amount of library work on maps and scientific papers and just gradually plotting it all up and trying to find a way of generalising it. I mean, obviously you could plot it all up in exactly the same form and you wouldn’t see anything, you know. It’s the colour coding, generalising and putting what appear to be disparate things together in one group, you know, all the andesites and trachites and rhyolites and so forth went – sorry, andesites and rhyolites went in one lot and all the green rocks went in another

276 John Dewey Page 277 C1379/83 Track 9 lot and so forth. And the different ages, that was a great key, you know, you may find an island arc which suddenly in middle Ordovician times stops. Well, maybe it’s collided with something, you know, and that’s why it stopped and a new arc takes over elsewhere and goes onto into the Silurian. So you begin to build up a much more sort of realistic pattern of what’s happening not only in geometry for a particular period but through time, how it evolves through time. So that was a great lesson for me and that was the first time that I’d done really that kind of work. And I’ve done a lot of it since. Whenever I look at any orogenic belt now – I’m looking at Eastern Australia a lot at the moment and what I’m doing, I’m just plotting everything up, just plotting it all up. Even though people have plotted it before, I’m doing it my way and – ‘cause until you plot it yourself, you know, it’s not stuck in your head. You see, oh, it’s a very nice map, you know, well, what is that belt of rocks all about. So I go into the chemistry of that and petrology of that particular belt in more detail and, you know, you gradually build up a much more firm and detailed picture in your head if you plot things. You’ve got to plot things. If you don’t you just get a sort of vague idea of geometries.

[42:36]

What do you remember of, this is a very specific memory, just using the photocopier in that library to do what you’ve said you were doing?

Yes. Well, I was shown how to use it, enlarging and reduction. Then you’ve got a lot – you have to use a little – and of course it was just the beginning of the calculator business, you see, and you’ve got to do an awful lot of – you know, I want to enlarge this 3.5 times. I can’t do it in one go so I’ve got to double it and then – you know, so 1.5 times that, you know, so you’re doing it in bits, in all these bits of paper [laughs] and it’s fairly chaotic, or what seemed chaotic, so I had to keep it all in folders and very carefully organised. But it was just before calculators. Calculators really started coming in, I suppose, erm … little handheld calculators. First of all they were very expensive. I think the first calculator I bought was 1,000 dollars. It’s something you can buy for five dollars in a shoe shop nowadays [laughs], you know. It was a Hewlett Packard. Then I bought a programmable one and that was 1,500 dollars. So I

277 John Dewey Page 278 C1379/83 Track 9 was using log tables for – and doing long division and short multiplication in – very good mental arithmetic, a lot of it, you know.

Just in order to get the scale right on –

Mm, mm, yeah, exactly, yeah. You know, if I want to get the scale, this one was a funny scale and it had to go up by 2.89 or something like that, I wanted it accurate, so – you know, and I couldn’t do it in one go so I had to calculate that in pieces, you know, and so on [laughs], dear oh dear.

So if we were – if I was a sort of ghost in that library at the time, what would I see you doing if I was sort of hovering above you in that library for that first six months?

You would see a large light table. I learnt – that’s something else I learnt in America. We didn’t so much – we did have them here but not to the same degree. They were much smaller, little piddly things, but in Lamont Doherty Geological Institute each major lab – ‘cause they were oceanographers, they dealt with large maps, you see, and they’d bring back these large maps and they had to spread them out and sometimes trace them, you know. This was before computers and before you could scan something and put it in a computer and deal with it. It was all done by hand, ink, Indian ink pens and, you know, that kind of stuff, pencils and rulers and pantographs. If you wanted to enlarge something you had something called a pantograph. Have you come across that? It’s like a – you have little – there’s a pencil here and there’s a little wire and it’s got cross pieces on it like this. And you have a little diagram here and you want it much larger so you push – you hold your pencil, you push the little needle around over the map here and it becomes a bit – it draws you a much bigger map up here. They’re quite good actually. So I got quite good with the pantograph as well. So I used the pantograph and I used the Xerox but not – didn’t have a handheld calculator, which was [laughs] – nowadays it would be much quicker. Nowadays you do it all by scanning and computing and dead simple. But what you would see, you’d see a large light table. They had these big tables, sort of four feet by four feet, with fluorescent tubes underneath and a ground glass top. So you could copy things, you could – tracing paper on top or – you know, it shines through. And I had a big table

278 John Dewey Page 279 C1379/83 Track 9 to work on like that in the library and I had maps pinned here, pinned there, bits of paper everywhere and I sort of took over a whole area of the library for this reason. But the librarian was very good and she helped me a very great deal and showed me things, how to do things and so forth. So it was a- it’s a mass of paper basically and coloured – lots of coloured pencils. I got through boxes of coloured pencils, you know, sharpening them and then [laughs] – and so forth. We didn’t have felt tip pens in the same way then, it was coloured pencils, you know, the old Faber Castell sort of things, you know. So I got through a lot of pencils, maybe sort of five or six boxes, complete boxes, of pencils. I’ve still got those, I’ve still got the whole roll that I used actually. I’ve still got the whole roll that I used. I can’t bear to sort of dispose of it. It’s no use now, I mean, it’s – but it’s just a sort of sentimental thing [laughs].

[46:58]

And what about the getting of this secondary information, what was involved at the most sort of mundane level, if you like, in actually getting these articles that have –

The papers, scientific papers, yeah. Well, you’d go to the journals, back numbers of the various journals and, you know, such and such, Bull Geol Soc America 1934, the geology of such and such a quadrangle in Alabama, you know. And it may have a big folding map and some did, lots of nice folding maps, so I’d take that to the Xerox and I’d make a copy of the map. And then I had to very often reduce it down – much easier reducing than enlarging it, of course. So I sometimes used a pantograph, sometimes a Xerox, depending on how complicated it was. And then I simply did a lot of Xeroxing of articles. Sometimes you’d Xerox a lot of the article ‘cause there’s a lot of descriptions of the rocks as well. I developed a huge collection of, say, well over 1,000, well over 1,000, reprints and I Xeroxed quite a lot of them. I’ve still got them in a – I’ve got that big collection in a box somewhere in my garage, I suppose it is. I know I haven’t thrown it away, yeah.

[48:13]

279 John Dewey Page 280 C1379/83 Track 9

Thank you. I’ve been reading a few books on the sort of history of plate tectonics written by historians and what some of them mention is criticisms of the application of plate tectonics in geology, especially among French geologists, including Le Pichon, who was arguing that geology should be about facts alone and not sort of speculation, not theory. And then someone called Anita Harris from the US Geological Survey –

Oh yes, yes.

And there’s a quote from her saying something like, geology often refutes plate tectonics so the plate tectonic boys tend to ignore data. I wonder –

That’s complete nonsense. She’s – I – between – don’t even write this down, she’s a complete fool. I know Anita Harris, a complete idiot. I mean, she doesn’t go in the field, she doesn’t know anything about geology. I mean, I’ve been in the field with her actually and she’s completely hopeless. I mean, she just doesn’t know anything. But there was a – you’re quite right, there were a lot of people – I mean, let me give you some examples. You know, this is all happening in the late ‘60s basically. My time at Lamont was ’67 and that’s when plate tectonics came in, you see. So I was drawing this map, just absolutely – timing could not have been better. So anyway, I came back in ’68, ’69. There was a big conference ’69 in Spain, and I was then beginning to say, my God, you know, surely we should be looking at – plate tectonics is the way the world works at the present day. Now you can generalise it, you can generalise it into big boundaries, you know. You can say, oh, here’s a sort of big trench on an island arc. Well, that’s not explaining all the details, the little bits of details, of the geology. I mean, all the geology fits into that in some way but just because you say, oh, this is a big island arc, that’s all the geology we need to know – that’s correct. I mean, I would be the first to say that. I – the – it … shall we go back a bit? There was a big reactionary movement in geology once plate tectonics came in and it started this way. I remember going to Manchester to give a talk. I was in Cambridge at that stage and I had been in Manchester before. And a very good friend of mine, Robin Nicholson, came to my talk and I gave a talk about geology and plate tectonics and how plate tectonics is really explaining a – it makes sense of a lot of geology that we didn’t understand before, you know, which obviously it does, you

280 John Dewey Page 281 C1379/83 Track 9 know, big relationships. And Robin Nicholson said after the talk, he said, ‘God,’ he said, ‘I hope that’s not true, John, all that stuff.’ I said, ‘Why Robin?’ He said, ‘It’ll put us all out of a job. It’s explaining everything, you know.’ And I said, ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. We are just beginning – it’s giving us a framework to now do the geology in detail in a way we couldn’t do it before.’ We’d have all these random facts, you know, sort of big – I mean, 10,000 feet of greywackes, why, in the west of Ireland, where – we now know it’s in a four arc basin in front of an arc. You still have to – in fact now there’s more incentive to really work out the detail properly and then fit it into a bigger and bigger picture because then you understand how things work in detail. It’s wonderful. But I think a lot of people hated it. They hated it because they saw it as a challenge to their sort of random fact field geology, you know. They had all these – oh, they said, geology’s terribly complicated, we don’t understand this, we don’t understand that, we’re working away at it, you know, we’re making geological maps and we’re doing all these kinds of things. A lot of their maps were crap actually, as it happened. A lot of very poor geological work was going on. And then along comes me and a few others like Clark Burchfiel and Warren Hamilton, I suppose the main protagonist, Bill Dickinson, and we all tried to use plate tectonics to understand geology, you know, in various ways at various scales. It’s quite true, we were interested in broader scale things, you know, how rift valleys work on a bigger scale and so forth, but also how things worked in detail. Can I apply this to the geology of Western Ireland, which I’d been working on for years before that. And so I said, I want to go back into the west of Ireland and really take it apart in a detailed new way. And I’m still doing it, I’m still doing it, you know, I’m still mapping there and working away and doing heavy minerals and looking at the details of the structure and so forth. There’s still a lot I just don’t understand about it, but we will eventually once we’ve done the detailing in much more detail. But a lot of people in the late ‘60s, particularly when I came back to Cambridge – Cambridge wasn’t too bad, I mean, ‘cause there were people like Dan McKenzie going there and he was heavily into the whole thing by that stage. So Cambridge wasn’t too bad but I met a tremendous resistance from people like John Sutton, my old professor in Imperial College. He – I think I mentioned him before. He fought it for – until ’73 at least and then tried to sort of make out, and his friends tried to make out, that he’d been in the forefront, the vanguard, of this great new movement, you know. It’s

281 John Dewey Page 282 C1379/83 Track 9 complete nonsense. And people like Adrian Philips in Trinity College, he’s another person that fought it for a long time and then wrote a series of terrible papers on the plate tectonics of the west of Ireland, you know, Ordovician plate tectonics of the west of Ireland [laughs], which is just awful, just terrible things. Again, sort of misrepresenting – not misrepresenting deliberately but not understanding a lot of the detailed facts and how they fit together. A lot of the problem was that people didn’t try to learn something about plate tectonics and what it was really saying in the modern world, you know. I mean, how does it work in detail. I mean, because in fact – erm, you know, first of all I suppose we were hot to trot in the sense that we’d take plate tectonics and say, my God, it’s really explaining everything, it’s wonderful, right. And then of course you gradually realise the gaps in our understanding and the detail it gives you, it’s an incredibly complicated story. But then there’s also the fact, which is something that I began to understand in the middle ‘70s, that the very nature of plate tectonics – this is hard to get people to understand. The very nature of plate tectonics – I like to say this, plate tectonics must make geology as complicated as we know it is, you know. We do have this incredibly complicated stuff in the field but it’s – and you say, well, how can you get all that complexity with the simple idea of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics is not simple, it is actually terribly complicated. The kinematics even of the simplest plate mosaic is very complicated because – I’ll give you an example. When you have two plates moving with respect – you can do it around a single pole of rotation. You know, there’s a pole of rotation and latitudes of rotation and the two plates can move around a sphere like that. But once you have three or more plates, you can’t do it around constant poles of rotation. The actual plate boundaries have to move in the frame of reference to the pole, so the slip vector must – the direction of slip along the plate boundary must continuously change. And then you have triple junctions, which evolve. So it changes from one triple junction to another kind, then one boundary’s been here and then suddenly it’s against another plate. It’s bewilderingly complicated. And I wrote a paper in 1975, which I think is still one of the best things I’ve ever done, completely theoretical, taking plate tectonics and looking at the motion of three or more plates on the sphere, what must happen to triple junctions, the slip vector and so forth. And by god, what came out of it was a great morass of immense complexity. I realised that, you know, maybe we’ll never understand geology in terms of plate tectonics [laughs] because it must make

282 John Dewey Page 283 C1379/83 Track 9 geology as complicated as we know it is. So plate tectonics is not – it looks like a simple concept, you know, it is a simple concept in a sense, but the actual kinematics of the boundaries is very, very complicated indeed. So that’s not surprising that geology is complicated [laughs].

[56:43]

Did you have any relations with or awareness of Le Pichon at the time? Was he one of those that you remember as having this view?

No, he was on sabbatical leave. When I was on sabbatical leave in Lamont in ’67, he was on sabbatical leave and he was writing his big paper on plate tectonics and plate kinematics. There were several people. Jason Morgan was – he of course was in Princeton and he wrote a great paper called Rises, Trenches and Great Faults, you know, wonderful, the beginning of plate tectonics. Isacks, Oliver and Sykes wrote their paper on seismology and new global tectonics. McKenzie and Parker wrote their great Nature paper, which I – the great Nature paper called the North Pacific, an Example of Tectonics on the Sphere. That was the first time that plate tectonics was properly quantified using Euler’s theorem. And then of course the idea of plate tectonics was really Tuzo Wilson’s. Tuzo Wilson had the basic idea. But as he said to me many years later, he said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I could have had plate tectonics completed but I didn’t know Euler’s theorem. Had I known Euler’s theorem I would have had it all, you know.’ But that was McKenzie and Parker. And Le Pichon wrote his big paper on – I can’t remember the title of it but it came out in the Journal of Geophysical Research. So there was a series of great classic papers at that time and Le Pichon was one of them. I didn’t really know Le Pichon when he was – he was very much his own man in Lamont, worked in a different department and he was down the oceanography building – sorry, I was in the oceanography building, he was down in some seismology building. But he was working away. I know that – Le Pichon’s not a geologist, you see. I mean, he’s a very clever guy, a very original guy, but he doesn’t understand the sort of – the complex details of geology and he has a sort of broad – a broad picture of it, rather like Dan does, you know. I mean, they’ve not been in the field and understood how very complicated the earth is in detail. So

283 John Dewey Page 284 C1379/83 Track 9 yes, I mean, he wrote this funny book called Plate Tectonics in that weird geodynamic series, what I call the grey books. And Le Pichon and somebody else, I think Francheteau and somebody else may – Bonnin – yes, Bonnin was another co-author in that. And they say that, you know, some of my pictures had a dreamlike quality, I remember that, cross sections have a dreamlike quality, you know. Well, that’s the way it is, you know. I was trying to put broad patterns of geological relationships into a plate tectonic scenario, but that’s not the detail, that’s just on that scale. If you draw a section, you know, 100 kilometres long, you can’t do the detail on that section. If you want to do the detail you zero into one little piece and do it that way.

Was that a criticism, they have a dreamlike quality?

I think so, yes. I think it was, yes. And another person [laughs], David Howells in the US GS in Menlo Park in California referred to some of my cross sections – and they are distinctive, there’s no question. If you see one of my plate tectonic cross sections, nobody else draws them with black oceanic crust, you know. Anyway [laughs] when – the whole concept of terrain tectonics was a silly term, I mean, terrains are inherent in plate tectonics, it’s not a separate kind of tectonics. But the Californians went wild with all this terrain stuff, you know, slices of things moving up the Californian coast into the graveyard of Alaska. And of course – which means that you can’t have a cross section in general across a plate boundary system that remains that same cross section, ‘cause things are coming in and out. We know that but, you know, you do your best there for a particular snapshot in time. So David Howells – again, it was sort of an implied criticism. He referred to my cross sections as Deweygrams [laughs], which is okay. I wish I – I quite like it actually. I’m quite happy to have them called Deweygrams. So there was a lot of – there was a period – an incredibly interesting period of antagonism, I think, that came in various waves at different times. There was a period when a lot of geologists were quite reluctant and didn’t like plate tectonics and thought it was a terrible threat to their existence and so forth. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. So I mean, I went in a sense – I mean, Charlotte Schreiber, a very great character, a nice lady, who was a Professor of Geology at Queens College in New York, she said – when I first started giving talks about plate tectonics and geology in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, she said I was full of

284 John Dewey Page 285 C1379/83 Track 9 optimism and gung-ho and said, oh god, geology’s wonderful, you know, or plate tectonics is wonderful, it’s going to explain the world and so forth. And said and now – I think it was in the sort of late ‘80s, early ‘90s, I was giving a few talks in New York occasionally. She said, ‘You’ve become quite a pessimist.’ She said, ‘You’ve changed completely. You’re now saying geology is so bloody complicated that we’ll never understand it in terms of plate tectonics’ [laughs]. And I’m sort of in that camp now. I mean, the kinematic results that plate tectonics generates geology, it is very – it must be and is very complicated. Another way to put it, we’re victims of the inversion problem. You can take a model and predict exactly – I mean, with all slip vectors changing and triple junctions, you can say precisely what that’s’ going to do, you know. You’re going to get a sequence of, say, strike slip faults and then a squash in this direction and a squash in that direction, it’ll produce a big complicated package of rock. You can put it precisely. What you can’t do is take that particular package of rock and work back. It’s the inverse problem, you can’t take the final result, the big mashed up mess in the final result, and work back to a unique pattern. That’s our problem, I think, and I think we’ll never solve that one. That’s my personal view. And also plate tectonics destroys a lot of the evidence. I mean, subduction, you’re carrying a lot of the stuff back into the mantle so you’re losing a tremendous amount of evidence, you know. And that’s true in the older belts, in the older mountain belts, where there’s no ocean floor left, it’s all going down the tubes. So, you know, in terms of climatic history and all that kind of stuff and even tectonic history of the oceans, can’t do it. Can’t do it, all gone. All gone.

[1:03:24]

When Tuzo Wilson said to you that if he’d known Euler’s theorem he could have got it, what do you suspect he felt about that? Where would you put him from sort of complete sort of annoyance and bitterness to a sort of rueful, you know, never mind?

Tuzo Wilson was a – let me tell you about Tuzo Wilson’s character. I got to know Tuzo extremely well, first of all in that sabbatical leave he spent in Cambridge when he brought in this thing, his model of the transform fault, astonishing. I was open mouthed. It changed my life, it really did, and it got me into tectonics, that thing,

285 John Dewey Page 286 C1379/83 Track 9 really. I was working on detailed geology and structures and all kinds of things, you know, but then Tuzo showed me that simple piece of paper, my God, the power of kinematics. Anyway, so I got to know Tuzo then very well and he used to come into my room quite a lot for coffee and a chat and so forth, and Harry Hess at the same time too, was there just before. And then when I moved to America, Tuzo was principal of Erindale College in Toronto and then he became director of the Science Museum, the Science Centre, in Toronto, which is a wonderful thing, the Ontario Science Centre, which he virtually got going, a tremendous thing. I mean, got lots of schoolchildren interested in science, super. Anyway, so I got to know Tuzo really well and Tuzo’s character – I’ll tell you what Tuzo was really all about. He was an incredibly jolly – he was a very domineering man in a sense, you know. He liked to do the talking, a bit like me in a sense. He liked to do the talking. But he was a very jolly person. He was very kind and he always had a smile on his face. And the guy was smiling all the time and he – and I said to Tuzo, here’s an example, ‘Tuzo,’ I said, ‘So, you know, you’ve written some super papers and all kinds of ideas you’ve had. What – when you have ideas, what percentage do you reckon turn out to be, in quotes, right?’ Nothing ever turns out to be right. All you can ever do – I’m a Popperian, I think you can only ever prove things wrong. But things – I mean, things – Popper, as you know, said basically, all you can do is refute hypotheses, you can’t prove them, ‘cause however much data you get – there may be a piece of data that you eventually find that will completely refute the idea, you know, so tough. But it’s a paradigm, you know, it’s the best – the best way we have of the moment of explaining the earth is plate tectonics, but I’m not saying it’s correct. It looks pretty damn good but, you know, it may not be correct and all you can do is refute it. But anyway, Tuzo said that, he said, ‘Of all the ideas that I have, I suppose maybe ten percent turn out to be, in quotes, right or useful, you know.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And I said, ‘Do people ever nick your ideas?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘All the time.’ He said, ‘I give a talk on something I haven’t published and I see it in print, you know, six months later.’ ‘Does it annoy you?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘’Cause I know I’m going to have another 100 ideas.’ [Laughs] And he did, he was an ideas factory. Tuzo Wilson was an ideas factory, just unbelievable. I mean, a very clever man, rather like Sam Carey in a different way. I haven’t talked about Sam Carey have I? No, but I will do. He was a Professor of Geophysics – Professor of Geology rather in Tasmania in Hobart and he was a great

286 John Dewey Page 287 C1379/83 Track 9 expanding earth man, rather like Littleton in Cambridge. He believed that everything could be explained by expanding earth, changes – even to his death in his nineties he believed this and didn’t think subduction would happen, the earth just got bigger and bigger and the oceans grew and there was no subduction. And mountain belts were just vague wrinkles we didn’t understand, you know [laughs], nothing to do with collision or anything like that. But he had lots of ideas, he did, he was a remarkable guy, a very good geologist too. He used to give these two to three hour lectures on why plate tectonics was nonsense into his nineties and I used to go to a conference in Australia and Sam would be there. They said, ‘Oh, Sam’s going to give his lecture in the pub tonight, you know.’ So we’d all pile down to the pub in the little Australian town we were in and Sam would give his two hour diatribe against plate tectonics. It was wonderful [laughs]. But he started out mapping up in – on horseback actually up in New England and New South Wales against the Queensland border, superb, superb geologist. Worked in New Guinea during the war, was a captain – he was a captain in the army, or he’d be a colonel in the army, but he used to take his soldiers all over New Guinea while there were cannibals still there. His philosophy was – he said, ‘Well, cannibals are easy to deal with.’ I said, ‘Really?’ [Laughs] ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘If we were going through and I heard there was a cannibal group somewhere in the area, I’d make a lot of noise and ask the – try and find a way of getting the cannibal chief to come and see me.’ And the cannibal chief would come rattling his shield and he’d come up to Sam and Sam said, ‘Okay.’ So he’d walk up to the cannibal chief and he said, ‘I’d just punch him straight in the nose.’ And I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Then he fell down and thought I was a god, you see.’ [Laughs] So he said, ‘I never had any trouble with cannibals in New Guinea.’ He went all over New Guinea in the war. They were trying to keep the Japanese out, of course. But anyway, that’s Sam Carey. But he was anti plate tectonics to the death, literally to the death, but he – he had the idea of Spain rotating away from France, you know, which we know it did. It rotated and formed that gap at the Bay of Biscay. He called them sphenochasms. He had lovely words for them. But he realised, you know, when you get a hotspot like Hawaii, if you look at the islands going away from it they get older and older, which – clearly there’s been some source in the mantle and the plate’s gone across the top and has burned a volcano in it and it gets older and they’re hotspot tracks. He called them nemataths and he recognised them, he realised that they were there in some way. So

287 John Dewey Page 288 C1379/83 Track 9 he had lots and lots of ideas, very like Tuzo in a way, but Tuzo of course was more amenable to modern ideas and Sam wasn’t. They were rough contemporaries actually, rough contemporaries, mm. But Tuzo was never upset when people sort of either tried to prove him wrong or sort of pipped him to an idea or – so I think he was delighted. It was just an observation that – you know, I didn’t know Euler’s theorem, therefore I didn’t really have the sort of full kinematics. But he had plate tectonics, I mean, through his transform fault paper. That was an amazing paper. It wasn’t just the ridge to ridge transform, it was all the other kinds that join different kinds of plate boundaries together. Some get longer, some get shorter, some stay the same length, he had it all completely, wonderful, wonderful paper.

[1:10:13]

And another person – oh, I – you mentioned the expanding earth, Sam Carey’s argument. I was watching a film which was called the Drifting of the Continents, the Simon Campbell-Jones one that I’ll ask you about later ‘cause you appear in it briefly as well. But Ken Creer is someone who appears in it and he seems to be – in that video, which is 1970, he seems to be talking about the expanding earth almost as if that was his view at the time.

Well yes. I think that –

He had a model of an expanding earth, so I –

Yes. I think – well, Creer changed very quickly. Ken – he’s still going actually in Edinburgh. He’s an emeritus scientist in Edinburgh, comes into the department still occasionally, you know, and still – a great guy. He’s a very, very good scientist. He was one of the first paleomagnetists to get into glacial valves, you know, dating of valves and so forth and reversals of the earth’s magnetic field, very, very good work. But I think he – yes, a lot of people tied themselves to a sort of expanding earth ‘cause that was a simpler way to do it, ‘cause people weren’t thinking about – it wasn’t until – I tell you when it was. Subduction – I mean, Wadati and Hugo Benioff, the Japanese – and then Hugo Benioff in America, they realised that there was a plain of

288 John Dewey Page 289 C1379/83 Track 9 earthquakes going down into the earth, but it wasn’t – they didn’t really explain it. I mean, they said, well, it looks – earthquakes mean brittle material so there’s a slab of brittle stuff hanging there in some way, you know. So I think they realised that there was something strange going – you know, maybe going down, I don’t – they didn’t say so. But they didn’t talk about subduction, they didn’t tie to trenches. Well, they realised the trenches, these sort of linear furrows where this thing comes up. But it was George Plafker, P-L-A-F-K-E-R, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey based in Menlo Park, he’d worked in Alaska. He still is the great Alaskan geologist. He’d mapped huge areas of Alaska, I mean, you know, vast areas, and he knows Alaska like the back of his hand. And then of course along comes the 1964 Alaskan earthquake with attendant tsunamis and all kinds of things. And he realised that there were some areas that went up, new land just popped out of the sea, shallow sea, and areas that were completely flooded. So some people gained real estate, some people lost real estate, you know, and it was permanent, I mean, that was it. I mean, you’d see roads just vanishing into a lake [laughs]. And then places where you see a series of raised beaches, where a whole area of forest has come out and some of this forest is now twice as big as it was, you know [laughs], interesting. But then he said – then he plotted up all these areas that had gone up and areas that had gone down and he realised that there were strips along the island arc in Alaska. He said, good god, you know, it’s gone up and that’s gone down. And it was realised already from fault plain solutions in seismology that, you know, earthquakes will form a quadrant system, two of dilation and two of compression, so you always have the ambiguity. If you’ve got an earthquake at depth, you’ve got an ambiguity as to which plain it is. And if I draw it – I can draw it.

Could you –

Well, I can describe – I’ll describe it to you. It’s easier from your point of view if you see it as well. Okay, so if you have a cross section of Alaska, let’s say, and there’s a volcano on – we’re going from east on the right to west on the left and a volcano in here like that. And there’s a trench to the west okay, a deep, deep furrow in the ocean floor. Well, you have an earthquake somewhere down here under the volcanic region and you’ve got an ambiguity. Either you’ve got – either it’s a plain – sort of a gently

289 John Dewey Page 290 C1379/83 Track 9 dipping plain, dipping, well, in this case eastwards and in fact northwards in the case of Alaska. And it points – this plain will point right out towards the trench. The other plain at right angles to it will be a much steeper plain, dipping at around seventy – this will be dipping at, I don’t know, something like thirty degree, this about seventy – or say maybe twenty degrees. This will be dipping at seventy degrees. So you’re faced either with the steep one moving or the flat one moving. And geophysicists all said, ah, it must be the steep one in some way, it must be the steep one. Now the problem with that, if the earthquake is only at 300 – sorry, sorry, is only at thirty kilometres and the sort of zone along which it happens is several hundred kilometres, it would be very strange that this fault didn’t break the surface, the steep one. The steep one clearly did not break the surface. So he said, it can’t be that fault, it’s got to be this one. And then he found, if you plot earthquakes, all the earthquakes, various earthquakes, sit on that plain and it points towards the trench. It comes out at the trench. So he said, aha, maybe the trench is where the Pacific Ocean floor is slipping down and slipping down along this gently dipping fault plain under Alaska. And he called – and that’s subduction. So George Plafker, 1964, ’65, was the person who really discovered subduction from the Alaskan – 1964 Alaskan earthquake, a very clever piece of work, but the geophysicists didn’t like it. And, well, Frank Press I suppose was the principle person who believed in the steep plain but George Plafker said, no, it must be this. And then he realised that the places that have gone up are here and the places that have gone down, there. They’re defined by the quadrants. So he realised that from those you could say that, you know, this block would shoot upwards and this block would shoot downwards, hence up and down and hence transgression and hence new ground in other places. So Plafker was a very key – Plafker was a very key man in all this.

But even six years after that, it wouldn’t have been uncommon for people to have been still talking about an expanding earth, not an earth in which subduction takes place.

No, that’s right, that’s right, exactly. I think – well, you see, part of the reason, Paul, is that people did not know this paper. This was what we call a sleeper, you know. It’s easy to go back in ’70, ’71 and say, my God, this paper, Plafker’s brilliant, but Plafker is a geologist geologist. He hides his light under a bushel. He never pushed

290 John Dewey Page 291 C1379/83 Track 9 himself. He wrote all this stuff up but didn’t sort of make anything of it, you know. He said, well, it’s that plain and it’s obviously – this is slipping under there in some way like that, but he didn’t – I don’t think even he realised that this was – whole scale subduction of the Pacific Ocean floor is going on here. But that was an amazing piece of geological reasoning, I think. It shows the power of simple geometric reasoning. And then – but as you say, right – well, right until now, essentially with Carey, or at least a few years ago when he died, he was an expanding earther. Littleton in Cambridge was an expanding earther. Jeffreys in Cambridge was neither. He said that plate tectonics has not happened and continental drift can’t have happened, the earth is too strong. Well, he was just – it is strong but the lithosphere is strong, but he was thinking of it in the wrong terms, you know. His frame of reference was incorrect. Nothing worse than saying something can’t happen, ignore the evidence because I think it can’t happen because I’ve got the wrong idea about the strength of the earth, you know. It’s fantastic. Never – I mean, the geological data or geophysical – any data is sacrosanct as far as I’m concerned, it’s got to explain the data or have a decent chance of explaining the data, and if it can’t do that then, you know – or if there’s data that says that can’t happen, like an expanding earth, we know that’s absolute nonsense.

[1:18:25]

Could you tell me more about a character who appeared last time very briefly and that was John Sutton’s second wife, who, unlike his first wife, wasn’t a geologist.

Betty Middleton, yes, yes.

Betty Middleton. And you said that she was among those who believed that John had sort of virtually discovered plate tectonics. What I wanted to know was how you knew that. In other words, what was your experience of her? How did you …?

Yes. It was basically when John died. I’m just trying to think when it was, ’90 … Anyway, he died of cancer at the age of seventy-two, seventy-three, something of that sort. Of course his wife, Janet, had died ten years before, sadly of cancer of the ovary.

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And John – I and a friend called John Spring, one of my dear friends, who I saw today actually, we went down to Martinstown in Dorset to help her sort out a few of John’s things, because we were going to – John offered to write his obituary for the Royal Society and he did it and it was a very good obituary too. It told it like it is. I remember we were having lunch, we were having lunch, Betty gave us lunch, and – rubber chicken, you know, that kind of stuff [laughs]. And John said, ‘Well,’ he said – and John Spring said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Amazing, Betty, that John resisted plate tectonics for so long.’ She said, ‘What do you mean resisted?’ She said, ‘He virtually invented it.’ And I said, ‘Where do you get that idea?’ She said, ‘He told me. He said it was a terribly important idea.’ I said, ‘This must have been after ’73, ’74, Betty.’ ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘It was when – in the old days of the Yorker Pub in Piccadilly.’ ‘Cause when we – from the Geological Society, we used to repair after Geological Society meetings at Burlington House, next to the Royal Academy. We’d go to the pub, which no longer exists, called the Yorker and we’d it and have our pints, you know, and chat about geology and the life and god knows what. And she said – that’s where she met him actually, she met him in the Yorker after some meeting. And she said, ‘Oh yes, he told me, even back in the late ‘60s.’ I said, ‘No Betty, he was fighting it. He was fighting it like tooth and nail until ’73.’ ‘No, no, you’ve got it completely wrong.’ And of course she didn’t know what the hell she was – I think she was talking – she was – I think she’d just mistaken the dates, that’s what I suspect. But she was quite determined. And she was very upset with John Spring’s obituary because it was highly critical of John in many, many ways because – not only about plate tectonics. I don’t – that wasn’t mentioned much in the article, I think, but – I think he’d thought it – he said he was a slightly reactionary geologist who didn’t believe some of the modern stuff. But it was also over – he didn’t – I told you, he didn’t like my doing a big synthesis of the Ordovician in my thesis, he didn’t like that at all. I was far too young to do it, a, and, b, he thought it was all nonsense anyway [laughs]. So – where was I? He was …

About –

Oh yes, the obituary, the obituary, because he had a shocking argument, public argument, in – as the whole Imperial College school of HH Reed, John Sutton and

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John Ramsay had had a tremendous argument with the great William Quarrier Kennedy, who’s professor at Leeds. He’s probably one of Britain’s finest geologists ever, brilliant man, a dapper – a dapper man, who wore the most elegant suits. He wore what – we can’t say – use the term now but nigger brown suede shoes. He always had these beautifully brushed suede shoes and his nails were perfectly polished. His tie was immaculate, his hair was immaculate, and yet he was a wonderful field geologist. I mean, he did the most marvellous fieldwork, I mean, brilliant fieldwork, wonderful maps. He was a very, very clever man. And – oh, he had a silver cigarette case – I think he died of lung cancer actually because he smoked a hell of a lot. He had a silver cigarette case and he’d always open it and offer you a cigarette and he always had Virginia tobacco on one side, Turkish on the other [laughs], astonishing. Anyway, so William Quarrier Kennedy had a theory about the rocks of the North West Highlands of Scotland in the Mallaig area. And he said that very clearly the so called Moine rocks, Precambrian sediments and sandstones and slates and, you know, those sorts of things, have underneath them a basement, an older metamorphic basement, which he said is Lewisian, just like the stuff to the west of the Moine Thrust, this old, very old, 2,500 million year scorian and 1,700 million year Laxfordian complex, which we call the Lewisian, goes under it, down under the Moine Thrust, and comes up as basement underneath the younger rocks, the younger Precambrian rocks of the Moine. And HH Reed years before that had said, no, no, these are now Lewisian rocks, these are some kind of mafic or sort of highly ferric and magnesian rocks within the Moine, it’s part of the Moine complex. And these were all kinds of slithers, little slithers of these rocks, obviously been thrust up in some way. And so the Imperial College School said that – Kennedy read this paper in 1950 … or is it? ’56 or ’57, something like that. I was a young – I was an undergraduate then and I went along to this paper, I used to go to the Geological Society meetings in London, I was an undergraduate, and he read this immaculate paper, showed the map and said these were slices of Lewisian basement being thrust up. And then they all got up, Sutton, John Ramsay and – I’m not sure HH Reed was there at that time but – maybe he was, yes, I think he probably was. And they all got up and said this is nonsense, these rocks are nothing to do with the Lewisian, these are Archean Moine, something to do with the Moine, mafic intrusions in the Moine or something of that sort, in spite of the fact that they have a higher metamorphic grade

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[laughs] and all kinds of reasons, these things. And then – and they were really rude and Kennedy was very upset because they were so rude and dismissing of his ideas. And it turns out the guy was completely correct, absolutely correct. And he never came to the Geol Soc again, poor old William Quarrier Kennedy. He died a few years later than that, sometime in the ‘60s. But he wrote some wonderful – the Great Glen Fault was his idea, the displacement in the Great Glen Fault in Scotland, truly a wonderful clever man. Papers on the East African Rift Valley, papers on uplift erosion and denudation, really very, very clever guy. I mean, imaginative – rather like Tuzo Wilson in a way, very similar sort of – a mind that flitted around from geological problem to geological problem and solved many, many problems. Anyway, the Imperial College group were mapping in the Moine, you see, at that stage and they didn’t like this intruder [laughs] coming into their – it’s partly territorial. Geologists are really territorial people. And he’d had an idea that’s completely different. Anyway, one of them, John Spring, this friend I mentioned, with whom I went down to see Betty Middleton – John Spring was a graduate student in Imperial College, part of their mapping team, you see, doing his PhD on the rocks of Knoydart, a beautiful peninsula opposite Skye, a wonderful place. And he mapped Knoydart and came back after his first field season and said, ‘You know, I think Kennedy’s right,’ right in the middle of the Imperial College school. He said, ‘I’ve just mapped this slither of rocks and I can see a basalt conglomerate around it. And these rocks have an older structural history that I don’t see in the Moine.’ He said, ‘These must be older rocks.’ And then Sutton got furious and Ramsay got furious, said, ‘It’s nonsense. Go and remap it.’ He did, he remapped it and it got even worse, you know, or better [laughs]. And John Spring – and Ramsay eventually wrote a paper with John showing that Kennedy was right. But they never ate humble pie, never ate humble pie and to Kennedy’s death they never apologised for it. So Sutton was a very clever man at getting things wrong, absolutely amazing. I mean, astonishing. And yet he was very good to me as a graduate student. He once gave me ten quid. Did I tell you that?

No.

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He gave me £10. I – I was in pecunias , didn’t have much money and I was paying £4 on a flat in Queensgate, just up the road here, out of my eight quid, you know, so I didn’t have much left. And there was a conference in Wales that I wanted to go to and – a very relevant conference, my kinds of rocks. And he said, ‘Are you going to the conference next week, John?’ I said, ‘No, no, I can’t afford it.’ He said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Here’s ten quid’ [laughs], just like that. I mean, not lent, just given ten quid. And ten quid in those days was a fair bit of cash, you know. I mean, you’re looking at, I suppose – I got £8 a week, you see, to live on. Suddenly I get ten quid to go off to a conference. I thought I was rich [laughs]. So anyway, he was generous in that sort of way. He was always smiling. He walked around – like Janet Watson, walked around the department talking to people and was interested in what people were doing, but he just wasn’t a very good geologist. That’s the sadness, you know, the sad, sad truth. And he could be very irascible and very difficult as well at times. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of John Sutton, he’d make life difficult for you. So, you know, he was an interesting character.

[1:28:14]

They met at this Yorker pub. Was she a barmaid?

No, no. She was a sort of amateur geologist. She became a member of the – there are two organisations in Britain that deal with geology on a sort of organised scale. There’s first of all – well, several but the two main ones, the Geological Society of London, that’s the oldest and most prestigious. Then there’s a thing more for amateurs called the Geologists Association, which actually is a – I belong to it, a very good organisation. They have their own journal. But they work on a slight – perhaps a slightly more amateur sort of scale. The great Dennis Curry was a great person in this. You know Currys, the electrical people with televisions and stuff like that? Dennis Curry, the owner, was a very good amateur geologist. He worked on fossils and London clay, very good actually, did some lovely work. And so she was a member of this and everyone used to go to meetings of both, both the Geologists Association and the Geol Soc London. Now the Geologists Association would use the Geological Society of London rooms. They always had an office in the building,

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Geoc would have their own little office in the building, and so we’d repair over to the Yorker after both kinds of meetings. So that’s where John met Betty, at one of these oozing sessions we used to have after the meeting. We were all horrified when he took off with her and left Janet. But he did go back and – when Janet was ill with cancer he went back and nursed her, which was nice. That’s a good thing to have done.

What do you mean you were horrified?

Well, a lot of people sort of loved Janet, you know. I mean, she was the person of that pair – Sutton and Watson were a kind of – that was a sort of – a double name that people knew, you know, because of their work in the Lewisian, which was wonderful work, which of course is mostly Janet’s. It was mostly Janet’s work. She was a very, very clever woman. She was the daughter of DMS Watson, the great vertebraic palaeontologist in University College, London. But she was wonderful and all the students loved her and then when John took off with this blousy – well, barmaid type, I have to say [laughs], most of John’s colleagues and students were a bit disappointed, let’s put it that way [laughs].

What does barmaid type mean, for people not familiar with that expression?

Oh, sort of blousy, you know, sort of coarse and vulgar, that sort of – you know. But I think he just – maybe he liked that type of woman. You see, Janet was very reserved and a very ladylike woman. She loved music and art and theatre, a very civilised cultured lady and a brilliant geologist, absolutely brilliant geologist. And I think maybe John was missing something, who knows. You can’t get inside people’s minds and what they think and how they work and so forth. But there we are. That’s –

[1:31:19]

Last time you said that geologists are quite a raunchy bunch.

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Raunchy in a sense of – yeah, I don’t mean sexually. They’re sort of earthy, earthy people, you know. They like a good joke and they’re good drinkers and they like a good time with their mates, you know. I think that’s right. Good Essex boys, you know [laughs], that type of – I’m an Essex boy, of course. So yeah, they’re a very friendly collegial people. I think it’s being in the field, you know. When you’re out in the field – the sweatiness of the field, you know. They’re not a very refined lot like the mathematicians, for example [laughs], you know, or the lab sciences. They tend to be earthier, earthier and … That’s what I meant by raunchy I suppose really, although raunchy can have a different connotation, of course. No, they’re an interesting crowd, geologists, and I’ve always enjoyed them very much and I’ve got on with most of them too and I like most of the geologists I’ve met around the world. Very similar around the world, it’s a funny – it’s a small profession, of course, the number of people in – we tend to know each other quite well actually – well, not well but I mean, you know, I can name sort of twenty Australian geologists and lots of American ones and Danish and Finns, you know, Norwegians and Hungarians and so forth, which I think probably physicists don’t in the same way ‘cause they’re much bigger. There are huge numbers of – I mean, they know the big ones like Feynman and Niels Bohr and all those kinds of people, Lisa Meitner and God knows who, and Eisenberg and so forth, but I think that they don’t know the sort of run of the mill average blokes on the street, mm.

[End of Track 9]

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Track 10

This section is closed for twenty years until September 2033, or until the interviewee’s death, whichever is sooner: [00:00:00-00:23:09]

[23:09]

The other event was the leaving of NERC. You said that there was a proposal that they had, I think for the British Geological Survey.

Yes, you know, I can’t remember all the details of it now, but I know that they were trying to do something that I utterly objected to, which I thought was very bad for British geology, and I said so and they said, ‘Oh no, we’re going to do it anyway.’ And so I made a very public resignation, I resigned from NERC Council and made it very public and it was very embarrassing to them apparently. They were very upset by it. And that was the year I got elected – I think I might have been elected to the Royal Society because of that resignation [laughs], I don’t know. The great Stewart, Professor Stewart, from Dundee said that it was – well, they were discussing at the meeting which elections on council were made and the council made the final election and he said, ‘Good thing Dewey did that, a very fine thing, to show them what’s what.’ Because they’d – he didn’t like NERC Council, the way NERC was behaving in other ways, you know, in its environmental biology that he works on. So anyway, I got very upset and I resigned, but I came back into NERC Council strangely as the Royal Society representative. The Royal Society elect a representative so I went back as their representative and then – yeah, I worked out my time with them for three or four years or so and then that finished, I came off in a natural sort of way. I do tend to get pissed off and if I really get pissed off badly I simply walk away, resign, walk away. I can’t be bothered. I’m not prepared to stick things out in – because mostly, if you do stick things out, you never affect change. Britain has a massive inertia, committees, government, organisations in this country, they’re like blotting paper. You can punch them and you have no – they’re like marshmallow, you know. Your thumb – your fist vanishes into the marshmallow and you’re either sucked in and you agree with it or you simply walk away and I walk away. I walk away from bad

298 John Dewey Page 299 C1379/83 Track 10 situations that I don’t like and I just go off and – ‘cause it’s such a timewaster and it’s emotionally draining too. I don’t like to be emotionally drained by things that I can’t control. So NERC and the department, they were the two principle ones. I’ve done things in a minor sort of way occasionally, left committees, I can’t be bothered, you know, and so forth. I think I’m only on one major committee at the moment and that’s the 1851 Scholarships Committee, which I love doing actually. It’s great fun, you know, getting young people, young scientists who’ve just finished their PhD into a post doc to start their career going. We award seven a year. That really is wonderful, I love doing that and I learn such a lot. And I – some of the quality of the young scientists these days, they’re so good. I mean, better than we were. I think the standard in science now is incredibly high, incredibly high, judging by the applications we receive in the 1851. And the same is true of the 1983 Royal Society Fellows, they have a similar scheme. They elect more, they give about twenty or thirty out each year. We give only seven. But the quality of these people, these young people, incredible. The geologists, I mean, are marvellous, absolutely marvellous, some great ideas and they do very well very quickly. Rutherford was one, an 1851 Fellow. I think we’ve got something like twenty-two Nobel Prize Winners among our fellows going back fifty years, you know [laughs]. Paul Nurse is one of them, the President of the Royal Society. It’s phenomenal, wonderful.

[End of Track 10]

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Track 11

… at the moment and I don’t propose to walk away from that. They’ll probably throw me off eventually ‘cause they think I’m too old or something, give somebody else a chance, but no sign of it yet.

Could you tell me now about relations with local people on repeat visits to the same field area? I think probably the west of Ireland is going to be –

That’s my main stamping ground.

The place for this.

That’s where I’ve done most of my thinking, my work, where I’ve been happiest. I know the people, I know all the local people really well. I know all the pubs, I know all the restaurants. I know all the sort of local farmers, you know. I just know the people of Western Ireland really, really well and I love it. I wouldn’t want to live there but I like visiting. I’d like to live in London actually, that’s where I’d really like to live, but there we are.

Why wouldn’t you like to live there?

It’s too isolated from cultural activities. I mean, there’s the old ceilidh dance and things like that [laughs], which is fine, but, you know, I like theatre and music and art and literature. It’s not so much those things. I mean, I don’t go to the theatre a great deal and I don’t go to concerts a great deal, but I like having my own music and cultural environment, immediate cultural environment, and I like the college. I like the cultural environment of University College and meeting fellows, other fellows, every day and chatting and so forth, and I would seriously miss that, I really would. It’s people, it’s communing with people, I think, in Oxford that I enjoy most of all, not with geologists but with, you know, all kinds of intelligent scholars of various kinds in lots of different subjects, including English and Greek and Latin and all kinds of things, you know.

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How are you viewed by these sort of communities in the west of Ireland, as someone who, okay, isn’t part of it but has come back and come back and come back?

How do they view me, you mean?

Yeah.

I think they view me as a real sort of exotic friend. They see me as something surreal and exotic, I suspect. ‘Ah John, nice to see you again.’ Sometimes it’s really weird, like – did I ever tell you the story about Doug Shearman in Imperial College? I came back once and I hadn’t seen Doug for about ten years. I’d been living in America. And I came back into Imperial College and I was walking along the corridor and suddenly Doug Shearman came out with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, carrying a tray of fossil. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Hello John.’ He said, ‘Come and have a look at this. This is the most amazing thing I’ve discovered.’ You know, not ‘Amazing John, nice to see you again.’ [Laughs] It was as if I’d seen him at coffee that morning, you know [laughs] and hadn’t been away. And Ireland’s a bit like that. I go into a pub, ‘Ah hello John, would you like a pint?’ You know [laughs], as if I’d been in there, you know, for the last week or – you know. But I’m nevertheless exotic. I’m seen as exotic clearly. But I think they’re all very friendly and I think genuinely friendly too.

What do they understand of what you do there and have been doing there for years?

Virtually nothing, virtually nothing, and they’re not interested really. They – they show a vague interest. You show them a bit of pyrites or something, ‘Oh, is that gold?’ They’re not really interested, they don’t want to know. They want to take your money for the pint and, you know, that’s – it’s mostly commercial, it’s a commercial interest. There’s genuine friendship too. I like seeing people I haven’t seen for a long time. There are a lot of what I call – what are called West Brits, which are the sort of local Irish gentry, Protestants, who tend to still own the big houses and so forth. They’re diminishing now though. And I know quite a number of those

301 John Dewey Page 302 C1379/83 Track 11 people, Lady Harman and quite a number of aristocracy actually. Lady Harman, she’s dead now, and Mrs Willoughby and her husband. He died at ninety-eight. He was originally – he was a dean in the Church of Ireland and – a deacon or whatever it is, some big ecclesiastical position. So those people I’m afraid are – those are gradually dying out and I don’t know – the houses are bought by the nouveau riche Irish, you know, who I tend not to like. I tend to know the publicans rather well actually [laughs], the chaps who own the pubs and restaurants and so forth and hotels. I know the hoteliers quite well ‘cause that’s where I stay.

[4:27]

And obviously the people – you keep going back – the rocks don’t change, although your view of them might, but the –

Our view certainly does change, yeah, that’s right.

But the people, it must be constant – you must see sort of families growing up and –

Oh yes, wonderful. I mean, like the McDonald family from Erriff Bridge in the Erriff Valley. When I first went there, 1958, I arrived in the middle of the summer, just finished my degree, accepted at Imperial College to start and I was sent out to start mapping. And it rained all summer, god, it pissed with rain all the time, and I had this tiny little tent. And I thought, well, I’ll go to the middle of the PhD area first of all and it happened to be in a place called Erriff Bridge. And the McDonald family had a farm, the house on the big bend there, and I stopped off and banged on the door. ‘Oh hello.’ And I said, ‘Is there anywhere around here I could camp? I’m a geologist, I’m looking at the rocks.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You can camp in the field over there. Put your little tent in there, that’s fine.’ So I did and I spent two months there and I got to know the family really well. They eventually invited me in, you know, and gave me eggs and butter and bread and tea and all kinds of stuff really. They were very kind actually, nice people. And I got to know that family extremely well and, you know, they became really close friends. There were five kids, one away in England. There was John Joe who was the eldest, he was a real gentleman, a wonderful character.

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Died of booze eventually, Moonshine. He used to distil his own stuff. It obviously had some lethal product in it ‘cause he went bananas, you know, and died at the age of seventy, I think, something like that. And then there were the younger ones, Willie and Agnes. And Willie, he never married and kept the family farm. He’s still going. He must be – he would be sixty … late sixties now, I suppose, something of that sort. He was the youngest in the family. Then Agnes, he’d be a bit older. He’d be about three or four years younger than me. And he owns a farm just up the valley. He’s developed a beautiful farm, became not wealthy but well off. And his kids are now at university. That’s the astonishing transition, you know. It’s a wonderful transition in a way. But those kids will never come back and farm, he’s a bit upset about that. The kids are away and one’s a computer expert in Brussels, you know [laughs]. I mean, it’s a wonderful different world. All those kids, of course, were farmers, you know, they became farmers. And I remember the first week I was there, Willie and Agnes took me up – it was – they were bringing the sheep down and they were turning the – they were cutting the balls off young lambs, male lambs. I don’t know why they do that. They castrate them for some reason, I don’t know. Anyway, but they were doing it with their teeth [laughs]. I’d never seen this before. And they would swallow the testes. He said, ‘There’s lunch,’ he said, ‘There’s lunch.’ [Laughs] Astonishing. I reeled a bit, I reeled away, ‘cause I was a young lad from England, you know. A bit of a shock, that was [laughs]. And I wasn’t a shrinking violet by any means but that was an astonishing scene. So anyway, but I got to know that family really well and I’ve seen their families grow up. The daughter, Delia, is married to a man in Crossmolina, a man much older than her, who died actually recently. She’d be about – she would now be about, hmm … Same age as me, I’d say, seventy-five, seventy- six. And she married a man who was thirty years older, so he died a few years ago up in Crossmolina. A lovely girl. Very nice people, very moral, very moral, very good people actually, they really were – are.

And had they any idea – had they had a geologist camping in their – on the farm before?

No, no, they hadn’t. They’d seen a geologist in the area. In fact a friend of mine, McKerrow, who’s a professor at Oxford, you know – a reader rather, I should say, at

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Oxford. He was a very good friend, I did a lot of him in the west of Ireland. But he’d been working in the west of Ireland long before me actually and they’d met him in pubs down in Leenane, a sort of town around ten miles away, a little village about ten miles away. But they sort of vaguely knew there were sort of people called geologists who came and looked at the rocks, but I was the first sort of pet geologist they had in the area, you know [laughs], which was quite nice. But they were very kind, they were all very kind, all the families I got to know. In fact sometimes I would be going out in the field and I’d be passing a cottage, ‘Oh hello John,’ he said, ‘Come in for a cup of tea.’ And the trouble is that means something different. Cup of tea means – you go in for a cup of tea, you get a couple of boiled eggs and beautiful homemade Irish soda bread and home churned butter. One of the greatest meals in the world, that is, it really is. But, you know, if you’re passing ten cottages a day you get ten of those, it’s a bit too much. So I used to find ways of creeping around behind a cottage, you know, up into the hills. And then occasionally, ‘Ah hello John,’ [laughs] they’d come out of the back. So that was really funny, really funny. But I lived on boiled eggs and bread – enforced, like feeding geese for foie gras, force feeding, you know, force feeding me eggs and bread [laughs]. But they were terribly kind, all terribly kind, and I got to know a lot of them and I got to admire them very much indeed. And I got to dislike the Catholic priests intensely in the end.

Why?

Well, largely because they were clearly – the Catholic church is a powerful money ridden domineering system for controlling the people, you know, and getting money off them. Apparently, I read, in Germany, off the record – not so much off the record, but anyway in Germany the church are now trying to excommunicate people who won’t pay the ties to the Catholic church. I read in the Times this morning, astonishing. You know, you pay, what is it, five percent or six percent of your income and it goes straight to the church. Well, some are saying we’re not doing this and so they’re saying, well, we’re going to excommunicate you then. Well, do it andf we’ll form our own church [laughs]. Anyway.

[10:43]

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Did these people’s level of interest in geology vary or was it – you know, were there certain families who showed more interest than others?

Well, the Protestant gentry showed a lot of interest. I mean, Mrs – well, Isabel Marsh who ran Ashley Lodge, she owned the fishing on the Erriff, she rented the fishing on the Eriff river and she was a great fisher lady. Her husband was a judge in Dublin. And she showed great interest and I used to go for Sunday lunch many times when I was there with her. She invited me to have sherry and a nice Sunday lunch and it was suitable, it fed me quite well. And then Ruth Willoughby, whose husband was the old ecclesiastical gent, she was really interested in geology and I explained a lot to her and she learnt a lot, you know. And she read books on geology. I used to show her my rocks and I’d always go in for a cup of tea and have a chat with her and Old Willoughby when they were both alive, but they’re both dead now. Lady Harman was interested too over in Lewisberg. She was a tremendous character, all – yes, I’d say the Protestant ascendancy, if you like [laughs], call it that, the West Brits, they were all Church of Ireland people of course, Protestant Church of Ireland, and they were – they were intellectuals, they really were. They lived in country houses, you know, miles out in the boonies, but in fact they – some of their libraries were phenomenal, you know. They’d spend a lot of time reading and they travelled a lot too into the continent and so forth. So yeah.

[12:18]

And when you were first exploring this area, was local knowledge useful in guiding you to certain places or were you exploring independently of that?

Interesting. I mean, yes. I mean, there is – there was some – I mean, the area was roughly – the area that I mapped had been mapped in 1870 by a group of geologists, quite good actually, on the Irish Geological Survey, which was then of course part of the British Geological Survey before the separation of Ireland, the independence of Ireland. And people like Kinahan and Kilroe and Leonard, Symes, a lot of very good geologists about in the area and they made quite a decent geological map on a one

305 John Dewey Page 306 C1379/83 Track 11 inch scale. So they published these things. But it wasn’t a modern map and, you know, I improved enormously on it in terms of details. So I mapped this area in most intricate detail through a place called the South Mayo Trough in the south west part of County Mayo. Other modern geologists working there – McKerrow, I mentioned, from Oxford was working to the south of me. Alwyn Williams, who eventually became Sir Alwyn Williams – he eventually became provost of Glasgow University. He was mapping to the east of me and working away. But I was mapping in this rather mountainous sort of abandoned sort of area in the middle. It was quite inaccessible, a lot of it, so I used to go out with my tent and a couple of cans of baked beans and spend a week up in the hills, you know, camping in a sheltered spot. So that was lovely in a sense. It was – going up into the mountains with a tent and a rucksack with food and some bread and biscuits and things like that and some tea and a little bit of whisky I took up with me, and I’d map away and then cook my own little meals in the evenings and things, and go to bed pretty early and get up very early and start mapping away. So it was very good actually. I learnt a tremendous amount of self sufficiency and how to do things by myself, how to really, a, look after myself in the field and also to be very careful. We were all told, given lectures on – not so much as you would nowadays, but, you know, be safe in the field, don’t climb cliffs by yourself miles from anywhere, all – and so I did – although I did some of that, I’m afraid, one does, because you’re following a structure on a cliff, you want to know what it looks like [laughs]. I got into a few bad situations, as one does. But I never damaged myself in the field very badly. I had a few sprains and sort of broken nails and things like that but never injured myself seriously in the field, ‘cause I was very careful, very careful.

[14:57]

Why did you retire when you did in 2007?

Ah, you mean from Davis, from California?

Yes. Not just why then but why in the way you did. Why did you retire then and why did you come back to Oxford?

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Ah yes, yes, interesting. I was very happy in Davis, I really was. I loved the department. But I knew that – I think Molly and I, my wife and I, knew that we weren’t going to stay there forever. We thought about it, when we do retire, eventually decide – are we going to stay in California and buy a nice house on the coast somewhere – there are some wonderful places up in the Northern Californian coast and I can retire and paint, or are we going to go back to Oxford. We kept our house in Oxford, which is a lovely house. You didn’t come, did you?

Yes, yes.

Oh, of course you did, of course you did, yes. Well, we had that house and we kept that and we bought a house in California. Made a fortune when selling it, my God, it tripled in value in seven years. Incredible, I mean, it’s extraordinary. But anyway, so we came back to the house in Oxford because we had family – not so much me ‘cause my family’s mostly gone now, but Molly has lots of family, nieces and she has a couple of brothers, you know, and lots of – and sisters in law and things like that, and our kids were here. Well, actually one of our kids is in London, Jonathan, and one’s in New Zealand, so that’s irrelevant. But we decided we really wanted to come back to Oxford. And the question is when to retire. I was, I think, seven years or – yes, almost seven years in Davis and I thought, god, you know, I’m now seventy-three or thereabouts, do I really want to – no, seventy – yeah, seventy-two, I think it was, possible. I thought, do I really want to go on – ‘cause in America of course, there’s no retirement age, just go on as long as you want. They can’t kick you out. And many of my friends have gone on to eighty, you know, and – but there has to come a point somewhere at which – and you want it to be before you become gaga, before you lose interest. I mean, it’s no use saying, well, I think the time has come to retire now, I’ve really lost interest in teaching and I don’t want to do that anymore and maybe I want to retire. I think that’s the wrong time to retire actually. I think you should retire just before that. And I could see it was likely going to come within ten years and I thought, well, I’ve done seven years, I’m on the top of the game now, I’m really loving the geology, I’m enjoying the students and so forth, I’m going to retire now and then I can really do what I want to do in terms of spending all my time doing

307 John Dewey Page 308 C1379/83 Track 11 geology and painting and skiing and God knows what. And I really – I didn’t want to be beholden to any system because if you’re in a university, particularly in America, do a lot of teaching. I was teaching two courses a semester so eighty lectures every semester, so 160 lectures a year, plus all the labs and field teaching and so forth. And that I enjoyed, I love it actually, nothing wrong with that, but when you’re teaching a course through a whole semester it ties you down, you know. Supposing I suddenly decide – something happens in Australia and I go, my God, I want to go and map on the Cowra Bathlet [ph], I’ve had an idea, you know, I want to go for a month, can’t do it. And I wanted to be able to do that, which I do now. If I suddenly decide I’m going to New Zealand for the whole month of February to map a particular group of rocks in North Island, quite near my daughter’s house actually as it happens, and do a bit of painting – but if I was still working I couldn’t do that. So I decided that I would retire at the age of seventy-two, almost seventy-three, and I think the time has come. And so I did retire, I had a nice retirement party and everyone came and it was great fun. And I think I’m happier than I would be now if I’d just gone on that extra couple of years and sort of said, oh God, I wish I – you know, I’m getting resentful of the teaching ‘cause it’s tying me down. Once you start doing that it’s not good, it’s bad for the students, so I decided to go when I did, right on the cusp of being very happy doing it and I said, no, I’ll cut it off now and then I can sort of come out on a high note. Like I stopped playing cricket this year, for example, I stopped playing cricket this year during a game which I performed fairly well, I’d bowled well, taken a couple of wickets and made some runs, taken a couple of catches, and I thought, god, you know, I can’t do this forever, you know. I can’t run around the field like I used to by any means, you know, let’s call this season the end of it. So about a month ago I said, no more cricket, that’s it. So I’m starting golf again. I used to play golf a lot as a kid and so I’m taking up golf for my sport. So I play twice a week with a friend in Oxford and do that. So I think it’s important to get out of things, not when you have to but before you have to. I think that’s the trick of life. My father told me that and he got out early, he retired early and did other things, yeah. That’s why I retired from Davis when I did, mm.

[20:20]

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And this might be difficult to answer given what you said, but could you describe a typical day in retirement, and if the days can be so different, perhaps some varied days? So what might a day consist of?

Well, typically wake up – well, I typically wake up around half six and Molly about the same, she wakes up about the same time, so we tend to lie in bed and listen to the radio for at least half an hour, sometimes an hour, to the Today Programme. I like that, it gets me going, I don’t agree with that, don’t agree with that and you get the news and it sets you up for the day. Then I – Molly gets up typically at eight and I get up just after her and have breakfast and then I go to my emails and see all my friends communicating. I tend to do emails for about an hour or so, something like that, you know, correspondence, connections with friends and people, sometimes phone calls. Sometimes a bit of a job around the house I’ve got to do and I’ll do a bit of that, put a bracket up or a shelf, you know, something of that sort. Sometimes I’ll do a bit of work in the morning at home at my desk, a bit of writing or – more organisational things. I mean, like if I’m drawing a map, I do something very physical, you know, rather than too cerebral. So mornings tend to be rather practical times for me. And then usually around – hmm, it depends on whether I’ve got shopping to do in Oxford or whether – I go to Blackwells music store quite a lot and Blackwells bookshop. And I tend to do most of the cooking in the house and Molly does all the sort of general – so we divide that up and I do the cooking and all that sort of stuff, so I tend to buy the food and I go to the market and buy the stuff. So mornings are practical times. Then I have lunch in college typically. Then I do the puzzles in the Times, not so much the crossword, I’ve given up – I’ve got bored of the crossword, it’s a bit – so contrived. But I do all the sort of arithmetic, mathematical puzzles in the paper, the killer Sudoku and all that kind of stuff. And then that takes me through to about two. Then I get in the car, come home or if I’ve walked in sometimes I get the bus home. If I’ve taken the bus in I’ll walk home, exactly four miles. So I try to get two or three miles, four miles, walking done every day, just to keep me going, keep the knees from creaking. Then I get home sort of half twoish and maybe I’ll paint. Sometimes I’ll paint for about an hour and a half or two hours. Sometimes I go straight to my desk and start writing and working things out, reading, doing geology and so forth. I’ll mix it up. Sometimes if there’s a cricket match on I’ll watch television, watch the cricket

309 John Dewey Page 310 C1379/83 Track 11 or rugby or something for half an hour, an hour. I can’t really watch it for very long, I get uneasy, I want to go back. So I have a cup of tea. I tend to, you know, drink tea when I’m working. And then as I come through to five I’m usually either working or painting, then it comes through to six and – basically from half past two to six every day I’m doing a mixture of working and painting. And then I start thinking about supper. Sometimes I go in the garden and do a bit of work with Molly in the garden about that time. I start thinking about getting dinner organised and I’ll do any chopping and preparation I have to do and then do the cooking later. I listen to the six o’clock news. Always pour myself a wine. Like my father, I don’t accept a drink before six o’clock and I don’t refuse one after six o’clock. I’m absolutely rigid about that, I don’t like drinking during the day. So I’ll have a nice glass of wine or something like that or, you know, a gin and tonic or something of that sort, and that’ll sort of – then I’ll organise dinner and cook dinner and maybe watch Poirot or something, that sort of television, Foyle’s War, that sort of stuff, Poirot, period – I tend to like period dramas, you know, and Dads Army, those sorts of things. I mean, I don’t like a lot of American – a lot of rubbish I don’t like on television. I like good old fashioned programmes like that, Steptoe and Son, that sort – those kinds of things. And then I go back to my desk and do a bit of work. I sometimes work for an hour or two in the evening after dinner. And then we tend to go to bed around ten, half past. And I do Sudokus and read in bed, do a lot of reading in bed. That’s where I read my sort of novels and things like that. And then repetition the following day. Sometimes I come to London, I come down to London, the Natural History Museum or go and stay with Jonathan and go to the Royal Society, go the Geol Soc London, have lunch with my old friend John Spring, the chap who proved that there are basement slices in the Highlands. So I’m busy, I’m just constantly busy. I’m not doing much on the model railway at the moment. I must do more. I love the model railway but I’m finding that painting and geology are taking up my time, you know. You can’t do everything, you know, and you can’t do too many things. You say, you know, how do you decide what to do during the day. Well, as the maggot bites. If the maggot bites in this direction I’ll follow it that way. And I can do what I want now, you see, that’s the nice thing. But I don’t – I’m never bored. I’ve always got something to do, something interesting to do. I umpire at cricket. I umpire in the league on Saturday afternoons sometimes during the summer. Rugby is a great passion of mine and I’ll

310 John Dewey Page 311 C1379/83 Track 11 watch rugby quite a lot, mostly on television where you get a better view than you do when you go to the game basically [laughs]. So it’s – yeah, go ahead.

[26:22]

And when you are working on geology in that mix, what are you working on right now? What is –

Ah yes. I’m working on – I had a hell of a good idea with an old student of mine called Jack Casey, who’s Professor in the University of Houston. And I’ve got – I’ve actually got an appointment at the University of Houston. They pay me 20,000, 30,000 a year, something like that, and I go and give a few lectures and I supervise some research students and I run field courses in the west of Ireland for them, you know. It’s a lovely association. And I’ve been working with Jack on rocks we call ophiolites, which he did his PhD on in Newfoundland years and years ago back in the ‘70s. And we’ve had a terrific idea about how ophiolites work, the metamorphic rocks along the base of ophiolites. And we’ve finally figured out and we think they evolve in subduction zones and then get later attached to the base of an ophiolite before they’re so called abducted or pushed out onto the continental edge. And we’ve worked – these metamorphic rocks, they’re called the sole for obvious – the base, the base of an ophiolite, these high grade metamorphic rocks, high temperature, very high pressure, and they have all kinds of structures in them. And we’ve worked out the whole kinematics of the structural sequence in relation to the plate tectonics of how that thing was abducted and pushed out onto the continental edge, very exciting actually, very exciting indeed. So I’m writing that up a the moment and we’re probably sending a paper to Nature , that’s where we’ll send it, a short paper to Nature and then a longer paper somewhere else in another journal. So there’s that. I’m working on tsunami deposits in New Zealand, which I’m going to spend February, next February, working on, huge boulders, I mean, 100 ton boulders, and this deposit of Miocene Age, 30 million years old, and it’s strewn along the beach, the modern beach. So the modern shoreline with cliffs is mimicking the old Miocene shoreline and cliffs. It’s almost a palimpsest of one superimposed upon the other, and so one tells you a lot about the other too. And so I’m working out the modern processes of

311 John Dewey Page 312 C1379/83 Track 11 the beach and how the boulders get moved around and so forth and then – but these extraordinary boulder deposits I think must have been either a major tsunami carrying the stuff up on shore or a freak wave, a massive freak wave. Could be a meteorite impact, it could have been an earthquake or a – something of that sort. Anyway, huge displacement of volume – vast volumes of water carrying these things of high velocity up into the cliffs and shore. So I’m working on that. I’m working on little things called shear zones, which are little slip zones in rocks where one set of rocks has moved – outcrop scale, up to, you know, maybe a few feet across, that’s all. I’m working on the kinematics of how those things work in most intricate detail, how little quartz veins are evolved, how the cleavage forms and so forth. It’s a very quantitative – I’ve got some shear zones on the coast between Boscastle in Cornwall and Hartland Quay in Devon, along that Bude – the Bude coastline. I’ve been mapping little structures in all the outcrops along there and I’ve been slicing them up, making thin sections and looking at the quartz, all the details. So I’m working on that. I’m working on island arc – continental island arc collision in the west of Ireland and in various – in New South Wales in Australia. I’m still working on something called transtension in California, which is a kind of plate boundary that is – it’s pulling apart but it’s also moving sideways at the same time, obliquely pulling apart. And the structures within those zones are very, very complicate and we’ve been mapping those along the east side of the Sierra Nevada. We’ve finished the mapping now and now we’re writing it all up. We’ve already written about three or four papers and we’ve got about another two or three to write on that. So those are the main things that I’m working on and I’ve got other things in the pipeline as well. The Precambrian – I’m trying to synthesise what was going on in the Precambrian. I don’t think it was plate tectonics. I think modern plate tectonics started about 600 million years ago, just before the Cambrian. The whole earth history prior to that, right back to 4.5, was something different. Something like plate tectonics might have been going on in the later parts of the Precambrian but in the early Precambrian, the Hadean and the early Archean something quite different was happening. The rocks look quite different and assemblages are quite different. So I’m very interested in that and I’m going to spend much more time – when I’ve finished this modern crop of papers I’m writing at the moment on the things I mentioned, I’ll go back into that and start synthesising.

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[31:02]

And what’s your view on work that seems to be led by, among others, something called Nicky White at Cambridge, on mantle plumes and super plumes, which the New Scientist recently was anticipating as kind of the next revolution.

Yes, well, Nicky White has jumped – it’s not – Tuzo Wilson had these ideas back in the ‘60s, in the 1960s. Lots of people have been talking about these things and Nicky White’s just jumped on the bandwagon basically. He’s contributed nothing particularly new that I know of. But Tuzo Wilson and others really had great ideas about these things. I think that it’s part of the earth, they occur, plumes and super plumes and hotspots, you know, they – it’s something separate from plate tectonics, probably separate from plate tectonics, superimposed on it. I mean, you’ve got these great plumes of material coming up from the core mantle boundary probably, the big ones from that depth, and then burning their way through plates. And sometimes you get a plate moving across and it burns a track on the plate. Sometimes the plate is not moving very fast over the mantle and therefore it’s burning in the same place all the time, it’s a big volcano. Hawaii’s the best known example, I suppose, of one of these things. But I think nothing particularly new is being done at the moment. I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss about it in the New Scientist, it’s very odd, yeah.

[32:28]

And the final question, what affect on the way that you think about your life and career has doing this interview had?

Gosh. It’s made me – it’s made me sort of organise my thoughts in a more coherent way about things, that’s for sure. It’s been very good because I’ve been – I’ve already planned my memoirs, you know. It’s not an egotistical thing, but I tell the kids stories about the old days and they say, ‘Dad, you must write this down, you must write this down, Dad. This is wonderful, it’s a wonderful story.’ I’ve got a very good friend called Gordon Herries-Davies. I don’t know whether – he’s a bloke you might want

313 John Dewey Page 314 C1379/83 Track 11 to consider interviewing. He’s the most wonderful man. He’s one of my absolutely favourite people in the world. He’s a brilliant geographer. He’s a geomorphologist. He’s, you know, a physical geographer basically and very, very good. He was Professor of Geography in Trinity College, Dublin, for many years, for a lot of years. He’s an Englishman but he’s become more Irish than the Irish, you know. And he did – he lived in Nenagh in Tipperary in an old Georgian rectory after retirement for many years but now he’s retired – I say retired, he’s moved to North Uist in the Outer Hebrides to a wild spot where there are waves crashing on the shore and so forth. But Gordon Herries-Davies, he’s one of my dearest friends and whenever I used to go and stay with him in Nenagh we’d reminisce and I’d tell him stories about this and that and the other. ‘John,’ he said, ‘That’s a great story, you must write that down. You must write that down.’ So with my children’s and Gordon Herries-Davies’s – that’s H-E-R-R-I-E-S hyphen Davies, which is – my maternal grandfather’s name was Davies, a Welshman. But anyway, he, Gordon, said, ‘You must write it down.’ So, as I say, with Gordon’s prompting and my children’s prompting – I’ve planned it out, I’ve written lots of things down, you know, some of the chronology and so forth and when things happened, but it needs massive fleshing out. It’ll – and I’ve written some introductory chapters and it’s turned out to be about 150 pages [laughs]. I mean, this thing will be seven bloody volumes eventually, you know [laughs], if ever I do it. But this has been good for me. This has been very good in concentrating my thoughts into the important things, you know. You can get distracted by all kinds of extraneous detail that nobody really wants to hear about, you know. They want to hear about the scuttlebutt and the exciting things that have happened to you.

[35:11]

Did I tell you about the plane crash?

No.

I didn’t tell you about the plane crash? Oh, there’s a big change in my life. In 1970 – I believe it was ’76, I’ve not – I’ve got it somewhere in detail. But in 1976 I was doing fieldwork in Newfoundland and we would get into the field area, where I had a

314 John Dewey Page 315 C1379/83 Track 11 student working, a man called Jeff Karson, K-A-R-S-O-N, a mad Ukrainian American, wonderful guy, he was working away there and Bill Kidd and I were going in to visit him to see what he was doing, you know. So we spent about a week in there and then a plane was coming to get us out. And they were float planes and there’s a pond – they’re called ponds, they’re lakes, up in the hills. One was called Hines Pond, quite a long lake, quite easy to land a Beaver on it and take off again. Anyway, so the Beaver comes in – we were due to go out one day when the Beaver comes in, lands on the pond quite happily and we – and the pilot – he pulls the plane up to the edge of the lake – they drift, they tend to drift in and then they jump out in their wellington boots and so forth. And we had a cup of tea in – there’s a little hut up there right in the middle of nowhere, a tiny little sort of hunter’s hut, I suppose it was originally, by the edge of Hines Pond. And so he came and had a cup of tea with us. So we had a cup of tea. He said, ‘Right lads, we’re all going.’ So off we went. So we climbed into the plane, loaded it up with the rocks that we’d collected, a lot of rock, quite heavy, quite heavy. And there were three of us, me, Bill Kidd and another student called Arty Edelstein from Albany. And we’re all there and so he then turns round and cruises down to the end of the lake, right to the far end of the lake, and revs up, revs up, and then he starts pouring down the lake. I saw the end of the lake coming up and I thought, Christ, why isn’t he rotating. Well, he was trying to get the floats off. He couldn’t – the way they do it, they get one float off first and that reduces the drag and then they can get the other float off. So he was trying to get one off and he couldn’t get – it was the weight of the bloody rocks, I think. And anyway, about 100 yards before the end of the lake he finally got – we’re off, away we went. Unfortunately it was right – or virtually at the end of the lake we’d taken off and there was a hillside rising in front of us like this. And he put on the throttle and lifted and I – we were going up nicely, we’re clearing out quite nicely. Unfortunately we suddenly got a massive tailwind [laughs] and – because we came past a little side valley with a strong wind blowing down it, which turned, so it suddenly gave us a tremendous tailwind and so we lost lift. We lost almost all lift. Suddenly we started dropping. And I saw the ground coming up and I said, ‘We’re going to crash.’ It was a bare hillside, no trees, so you couldn’t sort of – they like to crash into trees so they go in and take the wings off – going between two trees takes the wings off, it plops the fuselage down. Beavers are amazingly versatile aircraft [laughs] in crashes or

315 John Dewey Page 316 C1379/83 Track 11 wherever. But anyway he couldn’t do that so he said, ‘Lads,’ he said, ‘Sorry, we’re going in.’ So [laughs] we went in and this tremendous ka-pow on the base, up in the air again, ka-pow. We’re still charging along at high velocity. And suddenly – then of course we hit a boulder and it tipped up on the nose. And I had this – I was sitting in the front seat with the pilot and Arty Edelstein and Bill Kidd were sitting behind. And suddenly I saw this mass of tangled propeller and engine block coming through the window at me. And I thought, God, I’m going to be mangled. Anyway, it stopped and we went – we flew upside down, we were completely upside down, and then cr-rash on the roof of the plane, you see, and then stopped. And I was hanging in my seatbelt and the pilot was hanging in his seatbelt, everyone was hanging in their seatbelt. And I suddenly – I was wet. I thought, Christ, I’ve got blood somewhere, I’m all wet. It wasn’t, it was – the fuel tanks had split on the base of the Beaver and – which was now above us, of course, and the tanks had split and were drenching us with fuel. And the pilot realised what was going to happen. He said, ‘For god’s sake, get out.’ So I fiddled with my door. I couldn’t – it had been smashed, my door, and I couldn’t open my door. The pilot luckily – the door had been ripped off and so he dove out and I dove out right above the pilot. We went out together. And as we went through the door a sheet of flame went up across the door and ignited us. We were human torches. Providence, lucky, we landed outside the plane, thought, Christ, a mass of rock. We landed on the one patch of wet grass and bracken, or something that looked like – heather, it was probably heather actually. We landed in this stuff and we rolled and put the flames out immediately. And I looked back and – all this must have happened in – not a nanosecond but it happened in a few seconds. It was all dragged out into a long period, you know [laughs]. And I looked back and I saw Bill Kidd, who had a big black beard, somewhat like yours, a big, big beard, on fire. He was coming out. And Arty Edelstein was coming out of the plane, his hair was on fire, and Bill Kidd – I’ve never heard – Bill rarely swore. The air turned blue with the most vile language. He was swearing, fucking this and bastard that and so forth [laughs]. Anyway, I said, ‘Bill, for God’s sake, get on the ground and roll, roll down and put the flames out.’ ‘Cause we were – anyway, the smell was bad, ‘cause you can smell burning flesh. I looked and I had – I was in shorts, I was in shorts and I had a big plastic anorak and it was fused to my shoulders, fused, like this, fused there. And I looked back and I had these great balloons of skin, great water – there was skin

316 John Dewey Page 317 C1379/83 Track 11 hanging like this with lymph inside it on the backs of both legs. And so I said, ‘Back to the lake. Down to the lake, it’s only about 100 yards away, down to the lake and jump in.’ And I said, ‘It’ll be bloody cold but this is the best thing you can do for burns, pure mountain water and cooling immediately.’ And it was, it turned out that – the doctor that we saw later that afternoon when we got to the hospital, he said, ‘Best thing you could have done, wonderful.’ So we lay in the lake for about an hour until – it’s amazingly soothing and we didn’t feel the – surprising how you don’t feel the cold. Anyway, we were all sort of bobbing around in the lake, all four of us, you see, like this. And then the guy who was – who we’d left, my student, Jeff Karson, went out – when we went off he went out to do some mapping for an hour or two in the afternoon and he came back over the hill and he looked down and he saw the smoking wreckage of the plane. ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘They’re all dead.’ He was convinced. So he cautiously came down to the plane and then he saw us bobbing around and several of us were smoking cigarettes, bobbing around in the lake [laughs]. He couldn’t believe it. The plane – the engine block melted, had actually melted. I mean, the thing – the wreckage is still there up in the Lewis Hills in West Newfoundland and people are shown it as a warning, you know [laughs]. And the engine block melted and ran as a silver lava flow down the hill. I’ve still got a piece of it, a big lobe of, you know, this liquid, I guess magnesium, it’s a lot of magnesium, and it burns, you know, it burns and melts. Still got a piece of it. The wingtips remained, wingtips weren’t burned, but all the wings were burned. ‘Cause, you know, there’s a lot of magnesium and it simply burns, it melts and burns. And so the wreckage is still there. And I’ve got a bit of the propeller somewhere too as well. And then – so Jeff saw us, he came down and said, ‘What the hell happened?’ Then I relayed it – you know, we relayed it to him. And at that moment – no sorry, when we jumped into the lake and we laid there I said to the pilot, ‘Earl, what are we going to do?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry’ [laughs]. I said, ‘I know you say don’t worry. I’m not worried ‘cause luckily we’re alive, you know, and I thought we were going to die.’ I was convinced when the thing went upside down we were finished and, you know, finished twice, first of all when I saw this thing coming in at me, then the crash and then the flames. I thought, well, three times in one sequence [laughs] within a few seconds, I thought we were dead. Anyway so we went – he said, ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘As soon as the plane crashed and burned,’ he said, ‘The transponder would go off.’ He said, ‘First of

317 John Dewey Page 318 C1379/83 Track 11 all it would go off when something strange happened to the plane. The transponder would go off and then the burning would just burn it out and it was gone. So the people in the seaplane depot about forty miles away on an inlet of the sea would know what had happened, the plane’s crash. So,’ he said, ‘They will send a plane immediately, a spotter plane.’ And they did. This is a Beaver we were in and they sent a small – what are those other little planes? I can’t remember the name of them, but anyway – and they sent another little plane across. And he obviously saw the smoking wreckage and – ‘Oh god.’ He landed – I’ve never seen anyone land so quickly, came roaring down. Otter, it was an Otter, a twin Otter, that’s right, a little twin Otter. And he landed and again cruised to the edge and then saw us bobbing, thank god for that. He said, ‘Well, I can’t take you off. I can take one of you. But,’ he said, ‘They’ve already ordered a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter to come and pick you up,’ he said, ‘If there’s any survivors here.’ So he got on the radio and phoned back and said, ‘They’re all alive but they must go to hospital first, they’ve got bad burned and some of them have, you know, really quite bad burns.’ And I wasn’t – I mean, I had these balloons of skin but I had so much clothing on that – this big plastic anorak and a hat and god knows what – I had a burn on the ear, I think, and – anyway, he said – he phoned and – ‘Send the helicopter immediately.’ They did and within about twenty minutes the Bell Jet Ranger came, picked us up and whisked us off, whisked us all off to Corner Brook Hospital, where we arrived and they took us in and they treated the burns. They said, ‘We’d like you to stay in overnight.’ We said, ‘No, no, we’re not staying in overnight.’ We were all bandaged up. My legs were all – [laughs] I was like something out of a cartoon, you know, a Knockout comic or something, those things. And the smell was awful, you could smell the burning flesh, you know. It’s funny, human flesh is like a pork joint burning, you know [laughs]. So we came back to the hotel. We were staying in quite a posh hotel called the Corner Brook Hotel, which is a – Corner Brook is the big logging centre of West Newfoundland for paper mills, they make paper there. And Corner Brook Hotel is owned by Bowaters, the big paper company, and we were staying there, rather posh, very nice. So we walked into the hotel where we had our rooms of course, you know, and we were ordered a room. We checked in and they looked at us very askance. They didn’t like the smell [laughs]. But they were very good actually. They didn’t make any fuss. We said, ‘We’ve had a plane crash and we want to go to bed.’ ‘Okay

318 John Dewey Page 319 C1379/83 Track 11 sir, that’s fine.’ I said, ‘Well look, we need to have a drink first.’ I said, ‘I really want a drink, a large one.’ So he went a bit white. So we walked into the bar – it was one of these slightly posh bars, a piano playing and so forth and various honeymoon couple scattered around, and here we were sort of walking with bandages and smelling up to the bar. It looked like something from the civil war, the American civil war. And the barman didn’t turn an eyelash, it was wonderful. I thought he handled it brilliantly. He said, ‘And what can I get for you, gentlemen?’ So he said, ‘I think’ he said, ‘I’ve heard what happened. It came on the news.’ We’d already been on the news actually. He said, ‘Drinks are on the house all evening,’ he said. ‘You can drink what you want and the meal’s on the house and we’re also making the hotel on the house as well,’ which was very – I mean, an incredibly nice thing to do. I remembered that for a long time afterwards. So we all ordered Harvey Wallbangers, massive vodka infused Harvey Wallbangers, and we drank those and we felt a lot better. But the leg stung for a while, for a few days, you know, badly, as the feeling came back to them, you know. But I went to bed and I slept very soundly that night.

[48:12]

But I found out subsequently that the pilot, Earl something or other, I can’t remember his – Earl White, I think it was, had crashed into some power lines in Ontario three weeks earlier. I think he was accident prone [laughs]. He’d written off a twin Otter by crashing into some power lines over a lake and they’d dropped into a lake and he survived that. He dropped out into the lake. And then three weeks – I think three weeks or a month after that he was killed in a Beaver. He hit some trees, killed himself, so – he was a bush pilot of the maverick type, you know. But he did jolly well actually to bring that plane in as he did actually ‘cause it could have been a lot worse than it – well, you say it could have been worse but it could have been worse. He slowed it down – because he pumped the flaps. As he knew were going in, there’s a little thing in the Beaver, you pump the flaps and the flaps come down, and he really slowed the plane up a lot. Had we gone in at full speed it would have been much worse, much worse, and we wouldn’t have landed in that nice grassy place, you see, we’d have landed on boulders and god, you know, you can’t roll in boulders to put yourself out. So that was it, that was my plane crash. And then we found all – we had

319 John Dewey Page 320 C1379/83 Track 11 to go back to the – I was going on to Britain and then going to a conference in France, in Grenoble, a big international conference, which was a biannual thing, and we realised that all our passports were burned. Everything was burned, all our money and everything. So I had to go back to the States to get organised, go to the British Embassy and god knows what. But they – we phoned ahead and the company – the airplane company phoned ahead. They phoned the embassy, they did everything for us. They said, ‘Look, these poor chaps have had a terrible time.’ And I arrived at the British Embassy in New York, at the British Consulate in New York, about two days later, took the train down from Albany, and they had everything waiting for me. The British Embassy had a new passport, everything, absolutely amazing. I was very impressed, very impressed. And the British do do things – when they want to do something really quickly and well they do it brilliantly, you know [laughs]. Well, look at the Olympics, you know. But anyway [laughs], so that was an amazing interlude. So it was my second life in a sense, you know. I felt very lucky to have survived that. So it was all gravy and bonus from here on. So I’m in my bonus period, you might say [laughs]. So I had two lives. But that was a bit of a shock, I must say, that was.

Did you ever go back for the rocks?

No, I didn’t actually, because they were all scorched, you know, and I thought, well, to hell with it. We went back subsequently and recollected them from the same outcrops, but I didn’t try to scrabble around – ‘cause they lost all the labels, all the labels had been burned off and so forth, so – they’re still there in the wreckage of the plane, you know. So they’re leaving it there, apparently the Newfoundland government are leaving it there as a sort of monument to the geologists who crashed in West Newfoundland in 1976. That was thirty-five years ago. God, thirty-five years, thirty-five years ago, amazing.

[51:17]

Did it have a substantial effect on the way you thought about life or did it quickly sort of fade?

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No, it was a bit of an amusing interlude, you know, ‘cause it’s – yeah, it’s – so that’ll go into my memoirs, I think, you know, those sorts of things and the things that have happened. No, it’s funny, there was no trauma, no post accident trauma of any kind. I just happened and it was rather sort of exciting in a way, you know [laughs], when you look back on it, you know. It could have been much worse. I mean, we could have all died very easily, by burning probably mostly. But we all survived that complete bloody crash and the burn, I mean, it’s just – all four of us, that was quite remarkable actually, with only burns. I mean, nobody was scarred for life by that. There were no terrible burns like that poor man in the Falklands, you know, that Welshman whose face was burned away, it was terrible, just dreadful, but nothing like that at all. It was just sort of – I think I had second degree burns on the legs. I lost the skin and they put pig skin on. They eventually – they do that, they put pig skin to – and apparently the pig is so close to the human body that it makes your own skin regenerate very quickly. So that – I mean, in a month’s time I was fine again. I went to the conference, which was at – I was coming to Britain. The conference was in three weeks’ time and I was coming to Britain to have a three week holiday and do some work in Ireland, you know, first. So what I did, I went back to New York and stayed for about a week in Albany, went down and got a new passport in New York and things like that, and then I flew – and all the airline companies, they were – I don’t know whether they’d do it these days. I think they’ve become much harder nosed, haven’t they, about when you fly and, you know, conditions of tickets and all that kind of stuff. But in those days – you know, our tickets were all burned up and we lost our reservations of course from Newfoundland across to Britain, and Air Canada and British Airways just gave me a brand new ticket all the way from New York to London and back again, which I thought was amazing, you know, ‘cause, you know, it was only from Newfoundland and I got it from New York as well. I mean, they – they flew us business class as well, which was incredible – well, flew me business class. Bill Kidd came a few weeks later. So that was very good. So everything was very well organised and very kind. And then I went to the conference three weeks later and told people what had happened. They were all amazed, you know. So I said, ‘You’re lucky, or unlucky, depending on how you feel about it, you know’ [laughs]. Yeah.

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