Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: the Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought
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SIR PHILIP BAXTER, ENGINEER: THE FABRIC OF A CONSERVATIVE STYLE OF THOUGHT PHILIP GISSING A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Science and Technology Studies University of N.S.W. AUGUST, 1999 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am especially grateful to my supervisor, Dr David Miller, of the School of Science and Technology Studies, UNSW, for his astute comments and patient consideration of the issues raised by my evolving research. In the course of my research, I spent many happy hours in the University Archives, and wish to record here my deep appreciation of the unstinting support given me by the University Archivist Laurie Dillon and the staff of the Archives. At one stage, Laurie had interviewed Baxter on behalf of the university’s oral history project, and was personally responsible for the removal of his papers to the Archives following his death. I therefore benefited from Laurie’s deeper than usual understanding of my subject. It would be appropriate here too to thank the members of Sir Philip Baxter’s immediate family, his son Denis, and his daughter and son- in-law Valerie and Brian Craven, for their hospitality and frankness during visits I paid to them. Denis Baxter also made available to me the books and papers of his father in his possession, and provided me with a typescript of the play that became a focus of my research. Although the full extent of my personal debts could never be adequately set forth here, I would like to thank the staff and students of the School of Science and Technology Studies for their continued encouragement over a period of time that proved to be more protracted than I (and perhaps even they) could have possibly imagined when I embarked on my PhD research. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the friendship and support of David Oldroyd (my associate supervisor), Randall Albury, Paul Brown, Guy Freeland, Tony Corones, Gavan McDonnell, John Merson, Peter Slezak, Yvonne Luxford, Valentino Migotto, Lachlann Partridge, Harshi Gunawardena, Jo Wodak, Soula Georgiadis and Jorg Illi. I acknowledge specific debts to some of these people below, but for now let me say that the spirit of collegiality that I encountered in the School of Science and Technology Studies will remain an enduring memory of my time there. As I write these lines, I am reminded that as long ago as 1989, it was my enrolment in a first year subject called ‘The 17th Century Intellectual Revolution,’ taught by David Oldroyd and Tony Corones, that first stimulated my interest in STS. It is appropriate to mention here too the support I received as a casual tutor in the Department for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, specifically from the co-ordinators of HPS 2, Allan Chalmers and Michael Shortland. My thanks to them both, and also to Shari Lee. Dr Paul Brown kindly read Chapter 7, which benefited greatly from his comments, while Nigel Smith, a fellow PhD student in the School of Sociology, performed a similar service with regard to the material on Mannheim. Naturally, neither of them should be blamed for any remaining solecisms. I would also like to acknowledge here the encouragement and support of Dr Jim Franklin of the School of Mathematics, who on more than one occasion alerted me to sources that I might otherwise not have come across (specific debts of this kind are acknowledged in the endnotes). Throughout the period of research and writing, the Reader Services staff of the UNSW Library gave invaluable assistance with inter- library loans and CD-ROM bibliographic searches. The Sydney office of the Australian Archives was also very helpful, as was Tim Sherratt of the Australian Science Archives Project in Canberra, where I was able to consult the papers of Sir Ernest Titterton. I would also like to note here that during the period of writing and research, I was employed from time to time in a number of administrative areas of the university, specifically Undergraduate Admissions, the International Office, and the Office of the Faculty of Arts. In their own way, the relationships I developed here have helped to sustain me as much as my relationships with academic supervisors and colleagues. I would like to acknowledge specific debts to Anita Anderson, Margaret Scott, Graham Mayne, Randall Albury, Helen Milfull, and the members of the Admissions and Re- enrolment Committee of the Board of Studies in Science and Mathematics in the years when I acted as its Secretary. It is appropriate to end these reflections with an acknowledgement of the role played in my life by my family, Roseanne, Philippa and Genevieve. May we long make music together! TABLE OF CONTENTS Page No. 1. CHAPTER ONE 1 The Foul Sluggard’s Comfort 2. CHAPTER TWO 42 The Conservatism of Philip Baxter 3. CHAPTER THREE 72 Philip Baxter’s Other Island 4. CHAPTER FOUR 103 Baxter and the Atom 5. CHAPTER FIVE 135 Adventures in Redbrick 6. CHAPTER SIX 177 Engineering and the Community 7. CHAPTER SEVEN 207 The Gospel of St Philip Baxter 8. CHAPTER EIGHT 254 Concluding Remarks BIBLIOGRAPHY 270 APPENDIX 277 Typescript of The Day the Sun Rose in the West ABSTRACT This thesis is concerned with the life and career of Sir Philip Baxter (1905-1989), particularly during the period following his arrival in Australia from England in 1950. But the thesis is not a conventional biographical study in terms of either the sources used or its guiding themes. Instead, my subject’s values and attitudes are portrayed as reflections of a ‘conservative style of thought’, a concept developed by Karl Mannheim. This approach, centred on close readings of key texts, permits a deeper understanding of a figure who polarised opinion over a long career as Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, and as Vice-Chancellor of the University of NSW. My picture of Baxter draws significantly on the Archives of the University of NSW, which provided the bulk of my primary sources, such as correspondence files, typescripts of articles and talks, newspaper clippings, official documents and personal memorabilia. This material is a substantial but curiously unrevealing source for Baxter’s life. Although I rely largely on written material, on several important occasions I refer to discussions I had with Baxter’s children, colleagues and students. Insights thereby gained into Baxter’s childhood reading, and the circumstances of the composition of his play, The Day the Sun Rose in the West, profoundly influenced my portrayal of Baxter. Throughout, I argue for an appreciation of the significance of such material, even though in a more conventional study of an engineer/administrator it would be thought of only marginal interest. In Baxter’s case, certainly, careful interpretation of such material enables the construction of a compelling portrait of the man despite the unrevealing primary records and the still often fervently partisan personal recollections of those who knew him. My major conclusion is that previous characterisations of Baxter as a cold war warrior of the post-war period in Australia have failed to appreciate the complexity and coherence of his attitudes and philosophy. Secondly, I demonstrate that the notion of a ‘conservative style of thought’ captures that complexity as evidenced in the many facets of Baxter’s career and interests. 1 CHAPTER ONE THE FOUL SLUGGARD’S COMFORT How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow creature... not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it.— 1 Thomas Carlyle This nineteenth century explanation of the fascination of biography provides a useful starting point for my work on Sir Philip Baxter. In itself, it serves as a justification for my enterprise, as being potentially a source of ‘inexpressible comfort,’ but more to the point, it stresses the importance of the outward view. To ‘see into’ someone is but the first step in our acquisition of knowledge about them, since it need take no account of ‘the world’ at all. My thesis focuses on the second step, the higher order task of ‘seeing out’ of my subject, which necessarily involves sensitive contextualisation of his activities and ideas. ‘The world,’ however we may wish to define it, is inevitably involved here, and it is hardly surprising that the main theoretical concepts around which I have organised my reflections come from the discipline of sociology. My major conclusion is that previous characterisations of Baxter as a cold war warrior of the post-war period in Australia have failed to appreciate the complexity and coherence of his attitudes and philosophy. Further, I argue that that coherence is best apprehended and delineated through the sociological conception, due to Mannheim, of the ‘conservative style of thought.’ This receives a full discussion in Chapter Two, but it is worth noting here that the word ‘style’ has been carefully chosen, 2 to forestall any expectations that what is intended is a systematic exposition of ideas, with explicit logical connections. To attempt to develop such a system is to divorce the ideas from their social context and, in terms of Carlyle’s dichotomy, to suppose that we can discover them by ‘looking into’ someone. My view on the other hand is determinedly outward, unfolding and developing through a series of separate, but related studies of Baxter in a variety of contexts. Before embarking on these detailed studies, though, I feel that it would be helpful to address a number of important methodological questions, and assemble some of the basic materials on which subsequent chapters are based. Hence the sequence of ‘preliminary remarks’ which constitutes the rest of this chapter.