NATIONAL LIFE STORIES
AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE
Professor Sir Peter Hirsch
Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean
C1379/84
IMPORTANT
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Please note that this transcript has been edited in accordance with the interviewee’s wishes to improve its technical accuracy. Additions have been included [in square brackets] and redundant words have been retained in the transcript but struckthrough.
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Interview Summary Sheet Title Page
Ref no: C1379/84
Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Hirsch Title: Prof Sir
Interviewee’s Peter Sex: Male forename:
Occupation: Materials scientist Date and place of birth: Berlin, Germany, 16 January 1925 . Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Textile trader
Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 1-2, 16 Aug 2012; 3-4, 4 Oct 2012; 5-6, 18 Oct 2012; 7, 25 Oct 2012; 8, 29 Nov 2012; 9-10, 31 January 2013. Location of interview: Interviewee's office, Oxford.
Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean
Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital
Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz
Total no. of tracks 10 Mono or stereo Stereo
Total Duration: 09:39:50 (HH:MM:SS)
Additional material:
Copyright/Clearance: Copyright to BL, interview open except for Track 6 13:02-13:29 which is closed indefinitely.
Interviewer’s Please note that this transcript has been edited in accordance with the comments: interviewee’s wishes to improve its technical accuracy. Additions have been included [in square brackets] and redundant words have been retained in the transcript. In some parts of this recording the interviewee was reading from a written memoir.
Peter Hirsch Page 4 C1379/84 Track 1
[Track 1]
I was wondering if you would mind briefly introducing yourself Sir Peter?
Well, I was born in 1925, 16th of January 1925, in Berlin. My parents were, my father was in the textile trade, he had a sort of textile business, and my mother effectively looked after my brother and myself. I had a brother who was four and a half years older than I was. We lived in interesting times, and, one of the things that perhaps I should say is that, like, we were Jewish, and, my father had actually fought in the First World War on the German side, and was wounded in Verdun, was awarded the Iron Cross. And, but that didn’t make any difference of course. My mother was born in a place called Grutschno, which is now in Poland, and I think was probably part of Germany at the time. She was born on the 6th of February 1892. My father was considerably older than she was, and he was born on the 1st of April 1879, somewhere in Poland, and I don’t know where, which however I believe was also part of Germany at the time. He has a very interesting first name, namely Ismar, i-s-m-a-r. Well, that may have biblical connotations, but I always, I was always told that [laughs], since his birthday was on the 1st of April, that was also Bismarck’s birthday, and what they did was remove the b and the k at the end. I don’t know if that story is true or not, but anyway, I think it indicates the fact that they considered themselves as Germans. [02:46] Now there’s another complication, and that is, my father and mother were actually divorced in 1934, and my mother married Herbert Meyersohn, who was a dental surgeon in Berlin, and he married her very shortly afterwards. I think that was the condition that my, her father had insisted on, that he should marry her immediately after the divorce. And, it’s a long story, because she had actually known Herbert from a long time ago, when, from, from when they came in touch with each other in a place called Bromberg, which is now Bydgoszcz in Poland, and Bromberg was then part of Germany. And, he had moved, he was a dental surgeon, he had moved to Berlin and met my mother again, and he, he tended to spend quite a bit of time in our household, and as a small child I just took that as being sort of normal, but in retrospect it, I think it was very much a ménage à trois. Anyway, my mother and father divorced in 1934, and then my father moved out. We were living in Berlin all the time. My father
Peter Hirsch Page 5 C1379/84 Track 1 moved out, but not too far away from where we were living, and my brother and I had good access to him. [05:00] Now, what happened was that, on the whole I had a fairly happy childhood, in the early years anyway, and my parents had bought a little cottage in a place called Ferch am Schwielowsee, which is outside Berlin, and that was a very nice place to be at. [04:38] And, then my father died in 1936 when I was eleven years old, and the latter part of my childhood was then much influenced by the Nazi persecution of the Jews. My parents were Jewish but not Orthodox, and I did have some religious instruction from the local synagogue leading to my bar mitzvah in 1938. And, after leaving the local primary school I went to a, what was called a Reform-Realgymnasium in Berlin Schöneberg, the school was called the Treitschke Schule. And it had a good reputation. But in 1938 I was forced to leave and joined a school for Jewish children, Goldschmidt Schule in Berlin-Dahlem. The situation then got increasingly worse, and, before he died my father was forced to leave his business, which was taken over by a non-Jewish deputy, and anti-Semitic propaganda was rampant, and I remember copies of the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer were pinned up on special billboards in prominent places, and there was one close to where we were living at the time, on the Bayerische Platz. My parents, we moved from the Meraner Strasse near the Bayerische Platz to an apartment in the Klopstockstrasse, near the Tiergarten, which was closer to where my stepfather actually practised, which was in the Moabit district. Interaction with non-Jews became impossible, and my stepfather was not allowed to treat non-Jews. The cottage in Ferch had to be given up, and it was for sale at a derisory knock-down price. [08:13] Then, my mother decided it was time to emigrate, and she was really the dominant person in this decision, and she took the decisive lead. And the way she organised this, this was in 1938 now, she had a friend... Stop a minute.
[pause in recording]
[08:45]
Peter Hirsch Page 6 C1379/84 Track 1
Through a friend , an ophthalmologist called Dr Lytton, who had emigrated to England previously and who had lived in Ealing, she found out about a scheme which was operated by His Master’s Voice, which became later EMI, and, the director of this scheme was a man called Shoenberg, who turned out, was the father of Professor David Shoenberg, FRS, at the Cavendish Laboratory, who taught me actually as an undergraduate. And under this scheme, HMV gave employment to students, young students like my brother, who wanted to study physics or engineering. And that scheme enabled them, if you were accepted for the scheme, you were given a visa. And that’s how my brother, who was eighteen at the time, in 1938, came over. He had already enrolled to study electrical engineering at the Technical High School in Berlin, Berlin Charlottenburg, but he was accepted on this HMV scheme and emigrated to England in the summer of 1938. Then, in the autumn, my mother got her friend to, Dr Lytton, to send a telegram to her, to say that my brother was dangerously ill and she should come and visit immediately. And armed with that, she went to the British Embassy and got a visa, a visitor’s visa, for a week. And, so she came over on this in October. Now in retrospect, I suspect that she may well have been helped by George Foley, an MI6 officer, who was at the British Embassy at the time and who is now known to have helped many Jews to escape from Nazi Germany. That’s a, just a suggestion, I have no proof of that whatsoever. But the timing is, is right for this. Because, there were enormous queues at the time at the British Embassy for people to try and get visas. Anyway, my mother left for London in October ’38, and there was a Jewish refugee organisation which was based at Woburn House in London, and that kept a list of job openings for refugees. And the rules at the time were, that if you found employment, or had a guarantor for your livelihood in this country, you could remain in the country after the expiry of the visa. And my mother found a post as a domestic servant with a family in Chelsea who took her in and gave her a small room, and she had a terrifically hard life, but she was safe. And she applied herself immediately to try and get myself and my stepfather out of Germany. [12:45] And, well about the same time, my stepfather and I moved again to another, a smaller apartment, in Berlin, in Levetzowstrasse, and the last few months in 1938 were rather frightening, particularly after the Kristallnacht, when a synagogue near us was destroyed and Jewish shops were attacked. And my mother then found a guarantor for me and I came over via a Kindertransport. We left the Hook of Holland on the last
Peter Hirsch Page 7 C1379/84 Track 1 day of 1938, on the SS Washington, an American ship, which arrived in Harwich on the 1st of January 1939, so that’s when I came to this country. My guarantor was a Mr Halfin, h-a-l-f-i-n, who lived in Cloncurry Street in Fulham, and took me into his house, and he and his family looked after me for the next few months. They were exceedingly kind to me. And the initial contact with Mr Halfin was arranged through Woburn House, who had a list again of potential guarantors. My mother then persuaded him to act as a guarantor for my stepfather, who got a visa on the strength of this and he then arrived in England in April or May 1939. And, he also managed to ship over some of our belongings, including some furniture. Mr Halfin gave him a clerical job in his taxi cab business which he had in Fulham. My parents then rented a flat in Harbord Street, that’s near the Fulham football ground actually, where I joined them, and, my mother got herself a job doing accounts for the firm Telfers, who made pies, Telfers pies, and my mother was the main breadwinner. So the family was then together again, although my brother continued to live in Hayes, Middlesex, to be near HMV where he worked. And it was my mother’s determination to get us out of Germany, and I very much doubt if any of us would have survived without her efforts. [15:32] Well two weeks after I arrived in England I was enrolled in Sloane School, Chelsea, it was a London County Council secondary school in Hortensia Road, near the Chelsea football ground actually. [laughs] And it had a good reputation. The headmaster was one Guy Boas, who wrote poetry, and encouraged school plays. Some of his poems are actually in anthologies of poetry by...
I’ve heard the name somewhere before.
Yes. My problem was that, when I arrived I couldn’t speak any English at all, but I had to learn it pretty quickly to get on.
Had you had any preparation for actually going to Britain before you left Germany?
No, not at all. No, not at all. And, I mean the sort of thing that happened was that, you know, the other boys would play tricks on me, like, telling me to go up to one of the schoolmasters, whose nickname was Boozer Brown, and I didn’t know what Boozer was, [laughs] so I went up to him and said, ‘Hello Mr Boozer Brown, can you
Peter Hirsch Page 8 C1379/84 Track 1 explain this to me?’ and, the result was, 10,000 lines I had to write. [laughs] So, there we go. So I had to learn English pretty quickly. When the war started, the whole school was evacuated to a place called Addlestone in Surrey, where I lived with a local family. Why that place was chosen is not entirely clear to me, because it wasn’t all that far from Weybridge, where in fact, there was a factory at Brooklands for making propeller blades. So... However, I mean it worked out OK. And in the holidays I went home to Fulham. And my stepfather, who was technically an enemy alien, had been interned, like everybody in his position, but was then given the option to join the Pioneer Corps, which is what he did. And, I took my general School Certificate in 1941, and on the strength of that was awarded a London County Council intermediate scholarship which helped me to stay on in the sixth form.
[18:25] Before we go any further, I’ve got one or two things...
Right.
...before we get any further away from, from, in chronological order. I was just wondering, could you describe your mother to me? She seems to have been quite an important figure in this.
Yes. Well she was a very forceful person. She loved her children dearly. She was quite influential in our lives. I mean she was the dominant person in the marriage, and had an enormous amount of go and ability really to get things done, and tremendous drive as you can see how she managed to get us out of Germany. And, that was also shown subsequently in getting my stepfather going again really after the war, so on. So she was a dominant but very loving person.
What was her name?
Oh, it was Regina. She, her father was a, well he, he was something like a corn merchant in a place called Schwetz, which was near where she was born I think in Grutschno, but he also ran a, I think, I suppose something like a pub. I don’t, I’m afraid we never really got down to the details of this. But that was one of the ways I
Peter Hirsch Page 9 C1379/84 Track 1 think in which he managed to, to do deals with the local farmers. And, I am not entirely clear about what my mother actually, what her training was. I have an idea that she did go to something like a, a technical, well, not university but, some establishment where they taught vocational courses, but I’m not, I’m not clear about the details. But, in spite of the lack of education, she was, or formal education, I mean she and my stepfather obviously were into poetry, and she was quite a romantic person. She was very good-looking and had, very bright, in her younger days, very bright and I suppose ginger [clarification – red hair] hair almost, I think. [laughs]
Did she have any sort of particular direction she wanted you to go in when you were younger?
Well, I think the ambition was that I should go to a university, and... But I very much followed in my brother’s footsteps, and, and I mean that’s... Perhaps I can talk about that a little bit later on, why did I do science? But, I mean she wanted me to do well academically. She was a very intelligent person, very intelligent person.
[22:47] Do you know how she met your father?
Ah. [pause] Well that’s a slightly complicated story. I think... She... My father was, as a young man I think he was working in a big store in Königsberg, in East Prussia, which is now I suppose Kaliningrad. And, the, it was either the owner of that sort of department store, or, it was either the owner or some other person associated with that place that was related to the family, and he was introduced to my mother through that contact. And they knew each other before the war. But my mother also knew Herbert Meyersohn at the same time. We’re talking here, you know, must be about 1912 or thereabouts, or ’13. I should explain that my mother was born in 1892. And, my father was rather keen on my mother, but my mother was keen on Herbert Meyersohn, but Herbert Meyersohn, [laughs] didn’t propose to her. And so after the war what happened is that, she married my father, so that must be, I think she got married in 1918, and, just at the end of the war, and, because my stepfather hadn’t made the move. [laughs] I think that, that I think was the position. But he then chased her afterwards. [laughs] And this led to this peculiar situation of the ménage à trois.
Peter Hirsch Page 10 C1379/84 Track 1
What sort of...
[25:32] So she was a very attractive person as you can imagine, OK, from this discussion, and very intelligent, and, somehow well read. I mean she, she obviously read a lot of Maria, Rainer Maria Rilke, a famous German author, and, oh various other things, but that’s the thing that comes to mind anyway.
Were there any subjects that interested her in particular? You mentioned poetry.
Well they were very interested in music, I mean, but she didn’t, she didn’t play. I don’t think she played any music. And... But, but I mean they, they were interested in music and theatre and that sort of thing.
Mm. What sort of...
And art. Yes.
[26:30] What sort of chap was your father?
Well I should explain that my father was, must be thirteen years older than my mother. And, I of course only knew my father after the war, because I was born in 1925. And when he came back from the war, he was diagnosed... Well first of all he had been wounded in the war, I think twice, shrapnel wounds, including one to the head. And, when they got married there was then the question of taking out a life insurance, which is what he did, and had a medical, and the medical said, ‘You are suffering severely from diabetes and you’ve got six months to live.’ And, that in some ways overshadowed his life later on, quite apart from the, you know, in addition to the difficulties with the Nazi situation which developed after 1933. He was a very caring person, but, and solid, a very solid personality you could rely on, and very loving. But physically not very fit. That’s what, yes, I remember about him. My
Peter Hirsch Page 11 C1379/84 Track 1 stepfather obviously was a romantic, and he was more of an age, similar age to my mother.
Do you think your parents had any particular influence on you, any inherited traits, nurture or nature?
Well I think, yes, I, I would say that, I think the general drive that my mother had has probably been reflected to some extent on me. And, I think that’s... Yes, that’s probably... Well I don’t know what other characteristics there are, but, my mother did have a big influence on me generally. So I suspect that any other characteristics I have, good or bad, [laughs] can be blamed on her.
[29:43] Can we talk for a little bit about what home was like in Germany? Where did you live when you were growing up? You mentioned several addresses, but...
Well, yes. Well I was born in a, we always lived in apartments, I mean that’s generally what people did, and I was born in an apartment in Barbarossastrasse. And I don’t really have much recollection about that. But then my parents moved to Berlin Schöneberg, which, to a flat in Meraner Strasse. And, my mother, I mean she got an architect, would you believe it, to actually, [laughs] be responsible for the interior decoration of this, this flat. And, he was a Hungarian I think. I can’t remember, it was something like Langley, something. And it included a built-in bar, would you believe it, I remember that distinctly, in the big sitting room that we had, there was a sort of bar that was built in. And it was, she was keen on this kind of modern, modern at the time, 1930s type of furniture and decorations and that sort of thing. So, she was very keen on, on that. What other things?
What was the neighbourhood like there?
What?
What was the neighbourhood like there?
Peter Hirsch Page 12 C1379/84 Track 1
Well it, it was middle class, a middle-class neighbourhood. You know, a very nice sort of area. My father used to go over to, I don’t know whether you would call it a pub or whatever it was, on Sunday mornings I think, and have a, have a drink and a Pastete, a pastry, that seemed to be a ritual. And, also, he kept an allotment, there was an allotment not far away, and he was quite keen on gardening, something that didn’t rub off on me I’m afraid. [laughs] And, we, we did have a maid, in the early days anyway, well still in the Meraner Strasse which must have been in the early Thirties. Yes. It was a, you know, a nice, comfortable home life really. And we met other people and, had friends, I made friends and so on. And of course, we had that cottage in Ferch which, that was an important part of, of our life and enjoyment I suppose.
What sort of things did you do at the cottage?
[laughs] Well... Well we had a, we actually had a... Well wait a minute, is a canoe or a kayak? I’m not quite sure. This, Ferch was, on the Schwielowsee, was on one of these lakes near Berlin, and my parents had bought a canoe or, no I think, a kayak I think, but it was wooden, with wooden seats. And my brother and I used to go out for paddles on the lake. That was one thing we used to do. Another thing I did as a small child was [laughs], I loved making, well I had, I had quite a lot of trams and things like that, and trains, which, I spent hours making tracks on wet, well you wetted the sand and then, OK, and made these tracks, and then you, you pushed these things around, and got great pleasure of, you had changing tracks from one to the other and so on. That was when I was still rather young. And, well we walked through the local forests and, and that sort of thing. There was a very large garden, and there was fruit to pick and this sort of thing. There was the occasional wild boar which turned up, but not, not in our garden but elsewhere, which, people went and killed it.
[35:55] What sort of things interested you when you were growing up?
Well, well I was, not... I wasn’t really... I think what I’d like to say is, what wasn’t I interested in? I mean I was interested in all sorts of things, but, I never had the burning ambition that my brother had to become a physicist or electrical engineer. I mean he built all sorts of gadgets at a very young age, and, electrical gadgets, and
Peter Hirsch Page 13 C1379/84 Track 1 traffic lights I seem to remember, and so on. And, he was, it was quite clear from day one almost that he was going to become a physicist. But I never had that burning ambition, I was... I can’t really tell you whether there was anything in particular that I was, you know, very very interested in.
What was your brother’s name?
What?
What was your brother’s name?
It was, well it was Hans, h-a-n-s, Hans Siegfried. He changed his name to John when he came over, and I changed my name too. My name was Kurt, k-u-r-t. So, if you like, my parents had two sons, Hans and Kurt. Short first names. There were occasions when we, we went on holidays, for example, a popular holiday in the summer was in a place called Norderney, which is, well it was north, it’s north, west Germany, it’s on the coast between, it’s an area between the Netherlands and Denmark, there’s a stretch there with sandy dunes and so on, and, well, not far from, I suppose Heligoland is the place which stands out in that area. And there was a place called Norderney where we used to go, and, paddle in the sea, that sort of thing. Got our feet wet. There was one occasion on which my parents, and I can’t remember whether it was me alone or whether it was my brother as well, this was, probably in my, in, yes, I think it was in the later period when my stepfather was around rather than my father. And, they, I was sent to a camp, holiday camp for children, in, in a place called Agnetendorf, which is on the Czech, well was, on the Czech border, so it was I suppose part of Sudetenland. And there is a, there’s a relatively big mountain there called the Schneekoppe, that one, you know, climbed up, or walked up rather. And, so that, that enabled my parents to have holidays by themselves.
[40:10] What sort of business was your father in again?
He was... Well, I mean he started off, learnt his trade of textiles in, as an apprentice in this department store in Königsberg, or Kaliningrad, OK? And, he then became I
Peter Hirsch Page 14 C1379/84 Track 1 think a, maybe he was in charge of a floor, something like that, in a department store somewhere, I think in Breslau, which is now part of Poland. And then he opened his own store in Berlin, and, it was, he bought and sold materials for clothes, OK. So, he didn’t actually sell finished garments, it was the intermediate stage of, that was his speciality, he, he bought and sold cloth, and he was very expert at it. I mean, you know, if you bought a pair of trousers or jacket or whatever it was, I mean he would just feel the cloth and tell you whether it was any good or not. He was very expert on that.
[42:00] You mentioned that your parents were Jewish and you were brought up Jewish. How much of a part of their lives was it?
Well not all that much to be honest. I did, I did have religious instruction, and I did have a bar mitzvah in 1938, and, I think, my parents did have, did keep the Friday evening Sabbath arrangement where, you know, you had candles and... But it was not Orthodox at all. But they did keep to that particular ritual. And, when it came to festivals, like Passover or, or the New Year or whatever it was, then, yes, there were trips to the synagogue. And, also in Berlin not too far away there lived my father’s sister, and, on, I do remember that on, on certainly one occasion if not more, Passover time we all went there, and they organised it. So, yes, there was the religious tradition, but it didn’t really make an enormous impact in one’s life, except that, well you were Jewish and, that had an effect relative to outside circumstances if you see what I mean. And, so, so you know, they would, you would categorise them as being, belonging to the Liberal side of the Jewish, to the Jews, not the Orthodox.
Were you personally religious much yourself when you were younger?
Not really, no. And I’m afraid that, I haven’t really, since coming to this country I’ve done really nothing, you know, I haven’t practised any religious rites if you like. I also married a non-Jew later on, we haven’t got there yet. [laughs]
Do you mind asking actually what you do believe in? If you had to tick a box on a sheet.
Peter Hirsch Page 15 C1379/84 Track 1
Well, I mean, if I... OK, if I’ve got to tick a box, and the box asks, you know, what religion, then I say Jewish, I don’t deny the fact at all, I’m just not a practising Jew, OK. But, I mean, I would consider myself as being I suppose a humanist or, a liberal humanist, OK, and that’s it, a tolerant one I hope.
[45:55] Could you define what that liberal humanism means to you for me please? It’s one of those phrases that has different meanings to different people.
Well I mean I, I believe in, in, the fact that all people are equal if you like, and one... I mean I hope that my, the morals that I, well the moral philosophy I suppose that I follow, is that you, well, you are tolerant of people and accept other people’s points of views, and, and you know, one feels, or I feel, that, on the whole rather, you know, all brothers are, [laughs] all, all friends are brothers, if you like. So that’s... Or, alle Menschen sind Brüder, to I suppose quote, quote that famous ode from Schiller, I suppose. So... And kindness. You know, I like... I think that is a, is a thing that I do follow. And I try and put myself in the position of the other person, of what they would like. [pause] Well I mean there are all sorts of aspects to this which come up in, in different activities, you know, like looking after research students and this sort of thing, and encouraging them and... Or, you know, encouraging one’s children and, or stepchildren in my case.
I’d like to take a short two-minute break.
Yes, sure.
[End of Track 1]
Peter Hirsch Page 16 C1379/84 Track 2
[Track 2]
You’ve mentioned a few I guess incidents about how living in Germany changed in the Thirties, but I was just wondering, was there any sort of, moment when things weren’t quite as they were?
Well, again, I can’t remember specific examples, but, I mean, there were, there were certain steps in the whole situation which, which changed the way one lived, like for example, the fact that I had to leave the school, the Gymnasium, because of, you know, I was a Jew. That was in 1938 though, that’s fairly late.
How did that happen?
Well you were just told, you know, or my parents were told. And, well, I mean there was an edict. [pause - drinking] And... There were, I mean there was a general atmosphere which was not very nice, like I, I remember vividly these terrible pictures in the paper called Der Stürmer which were pinned up on billboards, and I remember one specifically in the Bayerische Platz, you know, and, that was rather, you know, was rather frightening. And, so... But I mean as regards my own life, an important step was the fact that I had to leave the Treitschke Schule, and had to go to the Jewish school in Berlin-Dahlem which, you know, well it was a big change. And... Mm?
How did the two different places compare?
Well the Goldschmidt school was a very good school, and, well it was much smaller of course, but it, it was a very good school and the quality of the teaching was good. I wasn’t there all that long, really, a matter of, well less than a year I think before, you know, coming over. The, the other things which happened were of course, to my stepfather’s business and to my, well to my father’s business first and then to my stepfather’s business. And that was very... I remember my father, who had this textile business, and, and I think this is something that must have happened around 19... maybe 1935 or 6, I mean he died in 1936, and, effectively, his, he had a second- in-command called Jankwitz, I seem to remember, and, he effectively took over the shop, or had to take it over, and that was pretty traumatic. And, considered rather
Peter Hirsch Page 17 C1379/84 Track 2 disloyal, you know, it was question of disloyal, disloyalty. As regards my stepfather, well he suffered, I mean his practice suffered, because, you know, the number of people that he could actually treat decreased very significantly because of this rule that, you know, he wasn’t allowed to treat anybody who was non-Jewish. I can’t tell you exactly when that happened, but, it must have happened around 1937, 19... that sort of time. And, you know, we then started moving to smaller places, we moved from Meraner Strasse to Klopstockstrasse, that was in 1937 I think. And then my stepfather and I moved again, after, this was in 1939 now – 1938, sorry, when... Well I mean it was an even smaller flat, because his... And I can’t remember whether he was actually still able to practise then, to be honest. It is quite possible that at that stage he had to give up his practice, which was in the Flensburger Strasse I seem to remember. And, so, it wasn’t clear what we were living on during the last few months. So you could see that, you know, from a living point, economic point of view, things were getting more and more difficult very quickly, in 1937 and 1938.
[06:30] What did you think about all that’s happening at the time?
Mm?
What did you think about all this, what was happening at the time?
Well I didn’t like it. [laughs] That was the main thing. But, I was, you know, in 1937 I was twelve I suppose, and, I think, you know, my parents tried to shield us both from, from this, as much as they could, and... But nevertheless, I mean it, it had an, you know, an effect on one’s life and sort of behaviour that... There was a gradual increase in the, you know, in one’s fear if you like, of the situation, which became very serious in November 1938 from, you know, the Kristallnacht.
What happened?
Mm?
What happened?
Peter Hirsch Page 18 C1379/84 Track 2
Oh well I mean they, you know, they burnt the synagogues, and smashed, any Jewish shops would be smashed, and, set alight, that sort of thing, and people were taken away. And, there was, after that, a background of fear when, you know, when, when, would you be next, sort of thing.
Did you find that people treated you differently personally?
[pause] I think one’s contacts became much more limited, you know. I can’t give you an answer to that, because, I think what happened was that one’s contacts were really rather limited to other Jewish people. And you know, one’s school friends were exclusively Jewish, going to this Jewish school and so on.
[09:04] Talk about the school for a little bit. I was wondering how you actually took to school life generally.
Well I think I was a bit of a swot, you know. I was always keen on doing well academically, and totally useless at any sport. [pause - drinking] [laughs]
Were there any subjects that interested you in particular, or was it just a general...?
Well, I, I was an all-rounder, OK. I think this must be becoming clear now, you asked me what particular, the things I was particularly interested in, and the answer is, I think, I, I wasn’t enthusiastic about anything in particular, but I was an all-rounder, OK, but very keen on doing well academically. I mean, a thing you might ask me is, well what did you read, were there any books that you were very particularly keen on? And, well, I mean, the books that I remember that I, as a child, that I used to read and love reading were, books by a chap called Karl May, and, these were books about the Wild West in America, OK, written by a German who had never been there, and who had, you know, who had no, absolutely no idea of the country where all these things happened and so on, but he wrote the most magnificent books on it. And, people were, were, not only me but I mean, it was the sort of books that everybody read, at
Peter Hirsch Page 19 C1379/84 Track 2 my age, OK. Adventure stories and the Wild West. So, that was my reading matter. [laughs]
Did you have any fond toys, apart from the trains?
[pause - drinking]
People who grew up in Britain always tell me about Meccano. I’m wondering if...
Well, well things like cars and, you know, little cars. Schuco. I think, I seem to remember cars which, you know, you made them go, they didn’t fall off the table, this sort of thing. I think this happened fairly late in the proceedings or at least... [laughs] And, yah, I think that’s, that’s, that’s what I, you know, you’ve asked me, and that’s what I remember. You’ve got to remember that, of course, my brother had a lot of toys, and he was brilliant at making things, and I think that, that provided quite a lot of amusement as far as I was concerned.
Were there any things in particular you remember he made?
Yes, a traffic light [laughs] which was pretty smart, yes.
Did your brother go on to become a physicist?
[13:00] Yes, he did, yes. Well, I mean that’s... And, well maybe if we... I don’t know if you want to ask me anything else about Germany, but I mean if you want to go on to schooling in England, then... I think... I think I mentioned to you that, the school, Sloane School was evacuated to this place called Addlestone in Surrey, and I took the general School Certificate in 1941, and then got a London County Council intermediate scholarship, and I then stayed on in the sixth form. And, the school did provide a sixth form in both arts and sciences, believe it or not, in this great country house which, you know, which was used as a school, transformed to a school. And, so, the question was, was I going to go into the art stream or science scheme? And I opted for the science scheme, on the grounds that I thought that with a scientific
Peter Hirsch Page 20 C1379/84 Track 2 training it would probably be easier to get jobs. And also partly because, I was sort of following in my brother’s footsteps. But, I think as I mentioned to you before, I didn’t have this burning desire to do physics at that stage. And, I mean, I think in the general School Certificate I did quite well in a wide range of subjects, OK, as I say I was a swot and got very high marks in Latin and, you know, as well as in the science subjects. And, well in the sixth form, having opted for the science stream, I, I mean we got, you know, we were taught in physics and chemistry and, at least that’s what I was keen on, physics and chemistry, and mathematics. And we had an extremely good mathematics teacher, I mean I do remember that, a chap called Sparks, who was really brilliant, and, he got me very interested in problem-solving.
What makes a good maths teacher in this case for you?
Well... [pause] Well, relating mathematics to practical applications. But also, the other thing is, the elegance of mathematical proofs, that, you know, inspired or one got inspiration from if you like. And, he was, he explained things like the calculus and algebra and all that sort of thing in very clear and stimulating ways. And... Anyway, the school did encourage me to enter for Oxford or Cambridge. And there’s an interesting thing there. I did in fact, I sat for the scholarship examination which was run by St Catharine’s College and Selwyn College in Cambridge, and the reason for doing this was that the scholarship examinations took place in, it was either February or March, in the second year of the sixth, and it was deliberately designed, well, you know, I don’t know what the situation was in Oxford, but in Cambridge the situation was that the colleges were in groups, several groups. And, one of the groups consisted just of these two colleges, and they were unique in having their scholarship examinations in February or March, designed specifically for boys and girls like me from state schools who would not be able to stay on for [a third year in] the sixth form. So all this incredible talk about Oxbridge not doing enough to attract people from state schools, it was already done, in 1943, will you believe it, by some of the colleges, in this case St Catharine’s and Selwyn in Cambridge, for precisely this reason. So, I sat for the entrance examination or scholarship examination, and, because I couldn’t have stayed on for the third year in the sixth, and, which of course was the norm for public school entrance in those days, you know, people from the public schools in those days. And I was awarded an exhibition it was called in
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Natural Sciences by St Catharine’s College. And I went up to St Catharine’s in 1943. And, that really, you know, it was a very enlightened policy run by these people. I did take the Higher School Certificate of course, in 1943, in physics, chemistry, pure and applied mathematics, and got distinctions in chemistry, pure mathematics and applied mathematics, but not in physics. [laughs] And, but on the basis of these results I qualified for a state scholarship, which they had in those days. But, I was ineligible because of the German nationality. But fortunately, the London County Council awarded me a Senior County Scholarship, in spite of the fact that they had a similar nationality rule in their regulations, and that enabled me to take up a place in Cambridge. And, I seem to remember that my mother was again very active in that by approaching them and, and pleading with them to, to do this. And that was, they were very, very, the LCC was a very enlightened organisation at that time. So that’s how I got into Cambridge, and, to take, to read Natural Sciences. [21:28] And there’s something to be, there’s a lot to be said for the Natural Sciences Tripos in Cambridge, well at least, it was at the time. Because it forced you to take three experimental subjects, that was the rule. Which meant that in general you had to take a non-school experimental subject. So I took physics and chemistry and mineralogy, which was one of the possibilities, or, you could also do biology. But I was quite interested in taking the mineralogy.
What attracted you to it?
Mm?
What attracted you to it?
I don’t know, [laughs] to be honest. [pause] I... I suppose, yes, particularly I think at that time, I, I think I had a sort of, view that mineralogy and crystallography were very, were subjects which were well-defined and based on mathematical rules, whereas biological subjects seemed to me to be rather, well non-mathematical, and, just a matter of fact-finding. And that’s, that didn’t appeal to me. So, if you like, that, I think an important fact which I think made me decide what to do, what subjects to do, was the mathematical rigour. And that was due I think to the excellent
Peter Hirsch Page 22 C1379/84 Track 2 mathematics teaching that I had in, at school. I think that had a big influence on that really. And, I think altogether, I think as a general, I suppose philosophy or principle underlying what I’ve done, is, the fact that I like doing things which, you know, could be explained mathematically, rather than just collecting facts. And, I think that that’s one of the factors which also drove me more towards physics than chemistry eventually. That was how the situation looked at the time. I’m not saying that it is, you know, it’s quite different these days, I mean the subject developed and, you know, chemistry’s only a branch of physics anyway now, and I’m not sure that the thing isn’t, the same thing isn’t true of biology. [laughs]
[25:35] With that sort of mindset, going through school, were there any subjects that you didn’t like? You talked about being an all-rounder, but...
Well anything, any sporting activity. I mean I was hopeless at sports. I remember trying to play cricket and always hit my wicket. [laughs]
How did you take to school in Britain, apart from the sports?
Oh, you know, very well, really, once I had mastered the language. [laughs] Got over the writing of 10,000 lines or whatever it was I had to do when I first arrived.
How quickly did...
You...
Sorry.
Well, I mean it, it was, I think it was an extremely good idea to force me to go to school two weeks after I arrived here without knowing any English. It is, it was the best way of learning the language, it really was, and I’m very grateful to my guarantor that they had arranged this.
This Mr, Mr Halfin?
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Yes. Yes. Mm.
What sort of people were the Halfins? You mentioned you lived with them for a while.
Well they... Yes. They, as I say, they ran this taxi business, and they were very nice, middle-class people. Very kind. And, well very, you know, very helpful in, in many ways, and very kind. They were Jewish, and... But I can’t remember, I don’t, you know, they weren’t Orthodox Jews either. I, I think their origin was more, you know, Russian Jews, I think.
How did you settle into Britain more generally when you first arrived?
Well, really, you know, quite easily. I mean I, at that age I was shielded really by, either my parents or my, or my guarantor and so on, and, I settled in pretty quickly. And, I... Well, I mean, at school, I mean school of course was a, was an enormous, it had an enormous impact, and, because of the language difficulties, I was placed in a form which I think was called the Remove, you know, which was the sort of, the lowest of the low. And I gradually worked myself up from there, fairly quickly actually, to get into, you know, to the proper forms, appropriate to my age, when I had mastered the language. But, I mean, that was, the, the coping at school was I think the main, the main problem that I had initially. You know, you asked me how did I cope. That was, you know, the first problem that I had. And then of course, you see, you’ve got to remember that, then the war intervened very shortly, I mean you know, I arrived on the 1st of January 1939, at the age of thirteen, well nearly fourteen, my birthday was on the 16th of January, and, you know, by September the war had intervened and then we were evacuated, to Addlestone. And that if you like, I mean, that was a matter of coping with living with the local families there. And... But I was no different from anybody else then. I mean by that time I could speak English and, you know, there wasn’t really any... So anybody, you know, we all had the same problems, of being billeted with, you know, strangers.
I guess we’ve got about, two minutes left today.
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Yes, I think so. Yes.
[31:00] Just as a closing question. I was wondering if you could describe to me, paint me a portrait if you like, of yourself as you were I guess around the time you went to university.
[pause] Well, I wasn’t, I wasn’t very sociable really at the time. I was keen to, obviously to do well in university, and, and maybe I, one way of putting it is to say that, I, I wasn’t very happy during the first year, I was rather lonely, and that’s when it became clear that a lot, that I did lack a lot of, a lot of the social skills which my contemporaries who were English had, particularly those who had been to public schools. And, so on the whole, I, I was a bit of a, I was somewhat unhappy. I mean if you want a... During the first year of course, I didn’t have that many, didn’t make all that many friends, and... And then, you know, I didn’t play games. I mean the first thing that happens when you go up to, to a, you know, a university or a college or something, I mean, you know, they come along and say, ‘Are you going to row, or going to do this or that or the other?’ And the answer from me was always, ‘No.’ [laughs] So... And... But, I mean, a portrait. I find that rather difficult, except to say that I mean, you know, I wasn’t very sociable, and I, I was rather lonely. And the whole thing was overshadowed of course by the fact that you had to do all sorts of things like, fire-watching and so on and so forth, which was part of the war service, and you, you know, I joined the cadet force, I’ve forgotten what, which one it was I did. And... But things changed subsequently. And what made the difference was, was making friends, and in subsequent years, you know, were much more, a much happier situation. Will that do for the time being? Yes, all right. [laughs]
[end of session]
[End of Track 2]
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[Track 3]
I was wondering if we could pick up this week with a few more questions about the time at Cambridge. And you mentioned that you were quite a lonely chap in the first year. I was wondering if the situation improved.
Well it did improve considerably. I made friends with a chap called Bobby Burns, who later on became a physical chemist and did research with Professor Dainton, well he wasn’t professor then, Freddie Dainton. And, Bobby Burns was also an undergraduate at St Catharine’s, that’s where I had met him, and, we were contemporaries. And, we were very friendly, and he eventually went to Harwell where he worked on radiolysis. And, but sadly died, many years ago. And, well the other thing that happened was that, I became friendly with some contemporaries in St Catharine’s who were members of a club which called itself the Three Arts Club, and it had been started by a group of young people from Sutton Coldfield who had gone to the same or similar schools. And, many of them had attended the local King Edward Grammar School I think. And they had common interest in the arts, and also in hiking in the countryside, and they were a delightful crowd, and there were two or three of them who happened to be in Cambridge at the same time. And I was introduced to the Three Arts Club, although, I had no connection with Sutton Coldfield, simply due to the fact that I became friendly with three of them who happened to be at St Catharine’s. One, Wally Eldred, and he was reading metallurgy, and he actually went to the Atomic Energy Authority subsequently, and went to Windscale, and he was one of the people who was responsible together with somebody called Jack Harris at the Berkeley Nuclear Labs in devising means of extending the lifetime of fuel elements in civil nuclear reactors, for which they got a Royal Society medal some years ago, and he was also made a CBE. So that was Wally Eldred, and he’s still living near Windscale.
What sort of a chap was he back in the 1940s?
Oh a delightful chap. And he, he got married rather early, to a very nice girl called Pam, and I remember them entertaining me to dinner which was very nice. Another one was John Newton, who was also, as I say, a member of the Three Arts Club, and
Peter Hirsch Page 26 C1379/84 Track 3 he became professor of nuclear, he was a physicist and he became professor of nuclear physics somewhere in Australia, and I don’t know where. It might be Canberra. And he was quite well known. But, I lost track of him completely. And the third one was somebody called Donald Cruxton, and who actually died rather young, rather sadly. [03:45] So, things looked up. Another amusing thing which happened, [laughs] which gives you a sort of, well, a peculiar aspect of the times in which we were studying, which was towards the end of the war, and, I was interested in music in the sense that, I loved classical music, listening to it. I couldn’t play any instrument. [laughs] I did try to teach myself the violin after I had finished school, schooling, but the noise that I generated was so horrible that I didn’t persevere. [laughs] And what’s more, I never really mastered the skill of actually reading music properly. And, nevertheless, I mean in Cambridge, there was a Cambridge musical, Cambridge University Musical Society, and at the time they were very short of tenors. And, the conductor at the time, one Boris Ord, quite a famous chap, wanted tenors, and it didn’t matter, you know, how good or bad they were, he didn’t audition them. So... And Bobby Burns, who, my friend, who was in fact quite musical, and he did play the piano and he knew, he could read music. I used to go to the CUMS, the Cambridge University Musical Society, rehearsals with him, and, just, I learnt the music, you know, just listening to him and being half a bar behind, [laughs] initially anyway. So, and that was very enjoyable. And that lasted quite a long time, but eventually, towards, you know, I suppose 1945 or later, people came back from the war, and there were sufficient tenors available for Boris Ord to have auditions; at that point I gave up. [laughs]
Did you give up of your own free will, or...?
Absolutely. Oh yes, I wasn’t going to be made a complete fool of. [laughs] So, there we are.
[06:23] How did you actually become friends with Bobby Burns?
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Well, just by... I think, probably by chance, you know, doing college activities, and there was a Scientific Society and a John Ray Society which we both belonged to. So there we go. Let me just say one or two more things about the Three Arts Club. What it meant to me was that, in the holidays we went on hikes, I mean we, there might be, you know, something like fifteen of us all going to the Lake District or Cornwall or whatever it was, and, sometimes these were cycling holidays and sometimes they were hitchhiking holidays. Later on, after the war, we went abroad and hitchhiked. And, they, I mean, provided friendship and fellowship and, you know, we were young, and we, and, also I suppose, it introduced me to girls that way, OK, I mean, the Three Arts Club were obviously mixed. And, they were a delightful crowd, and so for the next ten years or so they provided me with really very pleasurable activities through, you know, the hiking and the, you know, one of the things was I suppose the love of nature, and that was very nice. And we, we stayed in touch over the years, and until about two or three years ago they had annual meetings, still, of the people who are still, [laughs] in this world, if you see what I mean. And, but we, we didn’t manage to get to those very much, I mean during the last few years anyway I was unable to travel very much because of disability of my wife, but... So... But, I did in fact, we did attend one of their annual gatherings about three or four years ago, which happened to be held near Oxford, and we managed that, and it was very nice, meeting these people. But I think the situation now is, there are still individuals dotted around, but a number of them have passed on, and, I think the, the club activity as a club has, you know, is no longer extant.
What’s the significance of the Three Arts?
Yes, well... [laughs] That’s a good question. Well I think that they were interested in, in music, and painting and, sculpture and, I don’t know what. Literature, I think, and they went to theatres and so on. You have to understand that, many of these activities, these cultural activities, took place in Sutton Coldfield, and I, I didn’t take part, OK, which... I mean, the club was formed when, I suppose, most of them were still at school at Sutton Coldfield, and, and I think the Three Arts was really going to the theatre and music and, and that sort of thing, OK, so, the Three Arts, whatever they were, and painting I suppose is the third. And, but I took part in the, the holiday
Peter Hirsch Page 28 C1379/84 Track 3 activities, the hikings and, and bicycle tours, and hitchhiking and so on, which was very very nice.
Are there any of those trips that stick in your mind in particular?
Well... [pause] No, I don’t know. [laughs] I suppose one... Yes, there was, was a trip, after, the first trip after the war which we took outside the country, was actually a hiking holiday in, a cycling holiday in Ireland. And, [laughs] one of the things that sticks in one’s mind was the enormous size of steaks that, you know, we were suddenly confronted with after the difficult times, you know, that we had during the war here. No, they were all, they were all very, very pleasant. Anyway, that’s, I hope that that is, you know, answers your question on what happened during, you know, later years. [11:55] As regards the actual, the university education I had, I took physics, chemistry, mathematics and mineralogy, and, and got a first in Part I in 1945. I think I’ve already said that, the rule of the Natural Sciences Tripos at that time was, you had to [take] three experimental subjects, and I took mineralogy. Now I was very lucky, my supervisor in chemistry was Fred Dainton, later Lord Dainton, who, he was lecturer in physical chemistry at that time. I found crystallography in particular very fascinating, it’s, I think it’s, the symmetry of crystals appealed to me very much, and, I think there’s a law called the law of constancy of angles or something like that which, and we used goniometers to measure the angles between different faces of crystals, and the amazing thing is, the accuracy, the degree to which these angles could be measured very accurately and always came out very accurately, the same whatever the shape of the crystal was, the angles were, the relative angles were the same. The underlying reason is the crystal structure. And, crystallography had an important influence in my future career, there’s no doubt about that. The teaching of crystallography was provided by the Department of Mineralogy, and it was absolutely superb. It was, the lectures were linked with practicals, [laughs] and they used the state of the art visual aids, an overhead projector, which no other department used at that time, and I think it was a very novel technology at that time.
What did they use it for?
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To... Well you, you had to draw lots and lots of diagrams. Like, for example, when you wanted to determine how many possible faces you could get from a crystal with a particular symmetry, OK, you could, you would draw a circle and then operate the symmetry element, whether it was an axis or a reflection plane or whatever, onto a particular face, and then you would say, ah well, you’d have, you’ll have all these other faces as well. There was a lot of drawing involved. And similarly, if you wanted to display the symmetry of the crystal, you used what’s called a stereographic projection, which in fact maintains the true [the angular relations between directions], enables you to see the angles between directions very clearly and accurately. It wouldn’t do for [geographical maps] stereographic projections, isn’t particularly good for drawing maps, you know, geographical maps, but it’s, for crystallography it’s absolutely essential, because it enables you to describe accurately the symmetry and the consequences of it.
[15:45] I guess crystallography is one of those subjects which people outside of mineralogy and metallurgy may not have thought much about. Would you mind briefly just defining it to me?
Well it’s the study of crystals really, and crystal symmetry, and in particular the, the combination of symmetry elements that you can have in a crystal. And, and from that, you can... The external symmetry of the crystal has got to be compatible with what the underlying structure is. And, I mean what the early mineralogists did was, having found out by, experimentally by measuring all these angles, they then deduced what the underlying crystal, regular crystal lattice might be, from which it would then follow that if you had a, some sort of regular pattern and you drew planes parallel to particular directions going through lots of these lattice points, you could then come up with a reason for having a law of constancy of angles. So, it was a great help if you like in deducing what the underlying structure is. And, well in the early days of course, before X-rays, all the measurements were done optically using goniometers and you measured angles. But of course when X-rays, X-ray diffraction became available, that’s the discovery by von Laue and Bragg, around 1912, then it was possible to actually study the underlying crystal structure.
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[18:00] What actually attracted you to the subject?
It’s... Well there’s a certain beauty and elegance to it, and the regularity of the crystal structures and the symmetry, and, what you could deduce from them. And then, I mean, during this mineralogy course you also learnt how X-ray diffraction pictures could be taken and interpreted, and I found that very, you know, fascinating. I mean you saw, you’ve got a film of spots, from, diffraction spots from the crystal, and, you could, what’s called index these, and then deduce what the size of the unit cell was and which, the size and shape of the unit cell was which was underlying the crystal structure. I found all this very elegant and fascinating.
Mm.
I remember that the teaching of somebody called Norman Henry in Mineralogy was really quite brilliant in explaining to us the stereographic projection and symmetry and so on and so forth. There is a book by Henry, Lipson and Wooster, which, on X- ray crystallography, which is very famous and which we used. And, anyway, I, my, my general view was, this idea that you had to take three experimental subjects was an excellent scheme in the Natural Sciences Tripos, and it provided breadth and the possibility of cross-fertilisation at the postgraduate level, which did in fact happen.
In what sense cross-fertilisation?
Well it meant that, you could, I mean, apply the, the X-ray crystallography if you like, to all sorts of things. I mean I don’t have to tell you that, nowadays of course the big thing, or, well not nowadays, but I mean, it started in, you know, in the late 1940s, crystal structure of proteins, OK, which led of course to DNA structure. So you can see, there’s cross-fertilisation possible between the biologists and the physicists through this incredible technique, and, it’s, it’s not only the technique but the, the underlying crystal symmetry consequences. So... And... And I do know, I know of people who started off as physicists and then, you know, went into the Medical
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Research Council and did protein structures or, I don’t know, looked at the structure of muscles and so on and so forth.
Mm.
[21:40] Anyway, by, by the end of Part I of the Natural Sciences Tripos, that’s after two years, OK... I should explain, in the first year you took mineralogy as a half subject and in the second year you took it then as what’s called a whole subject, I mean you did another half subject effectively of it. So... But I chose to read physics in Part II of the Natural Sciences Tripos, that’s how the system works, you do specialise in the final third year. And, there were some optional courses, and I opted for one given by W H Taylor, who was Reader in Crystallography, and, that was on tensor properties, and on topics of X-ray diffraction. And, my main supervisor during this period was one Charles Smith, who worked on creep of metals in the Metal Physics Group in the Cavendish which was headed by Orowan, Dr Orowan.
Mm, is that Egon Orowan?
Yes, it is indeed. And he, he, Charles Smith took me to see Orowan before I took my final examination, to explore whether he would take me on as a research student, and the interview was an absolute disaster, [laughs] because I was unable to answer several of his questions.
What happened?
Well, [laughs] I mean, he told me to come back after I had my Part II results. In fact I never did. What happened was that, that I hadn’t done the stuff, I had to say to him, ‘Well I haven’t done that yet.’ [laughs] So... And subsequently I think, you know, as I got more experience myself as a supervisor for a research student, it became clear, he actually gave me a PhD oral. So it was a disaster. But, anyway, I did get a first in Part II Physics, and got my BA in 1946, and, I was awarded college prizes and that sort of thing, was granted the status of scholar in 1946.
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What does that actually mean, the status of scholar?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I think the thing is that, I had a, this exhibition, you know, which is a minor scholarship, when I came to the college. I can’t remember how many years that was for. It may have been extended for three years, I can’t remember. It was something in the order of £60 a year or something, if that. But, I suppose being granted the status of scholar, meant that, well you know, if you had been a scholar, you would have had a major scholarship [laughs], but you weren’t at the time. Anyway, there you are. It’s something you can put in your CV and it might be of use early on, I don’t know.
[25:05] Talking about the sort of Natural Science Tripos overall, do you think it had any sort of particular benefits for you, do you think it was a good education, for any reason?
Oh excellent. Yes, well it was particularly good as I said because of this point of requiring three experimental subjects, which meant that you really, in practice you had to do one non-school experimental subject. So, I mean, people on the physical side would, you know, and other universities would normally take physics, chemistry and mathematics; in the Natural Sciences Tripos, you were forced to take physics and chemistry and something else, and it could be physics and chemistry and biology, or physics and chemistry and mineralogy, and, and that meant that you got a much broader education, and, and it, I mean my case, OK, it meant that actually I did my research if you like, started off anyway, on what you might call a borderline subject. It certainly used the techniques and, which I had learnt in mineralogy, as well as physics and chemistry. So I, I think it’s an excellent course. I think, in later years, I don’t know what the situation is now in Cambridge, but I believe what happened was, in my opinion, really not, [laughs] not very good, and that was, the physicists complained like anything, because, it meant that the amount of physics you could teach was more limited, OK, because, some time was taken up by an experimental subject. And I think the system was changed to give the flexibility to those people who would take physics and then what’s called advanced physics, and I think this business of three experimental subjects has been lost to some extent, which I think is rather a pity.
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Mm.
I should also say that, I believe the course that was run by the Mineralogy department was very influential throughout the university system in that, wherever crystallography was taught, or, not only... yes, crystallography was taught, not as necessarily a separate discipline, but as part of materials science or metallurgy, the nature of the teaching in crystallography that was done in Cambridge was copied, and I certainly did it when I came here in 1966. I gave a course called Crystalline State, which was based on the Cambridge course, that’s 1966, that’s twenty years on, OK, from when I was an undergraduate. It was very influential, this course.
What were the particularly important bits of it, do you think?
Well it, it was the, it gave a terrifically good grounding to the concepts of symmetry of crystals and the consequences of that, and how to deal with that. And, also, you know, it told you the limits, the number of, nature, the, the limits in the crystal structures which you could have, or the crystal lattices, there are only a certain number of crystal lattices which you can have, and so on and so forth, OK. And it, it gave you an extremely good grounding to the, what you would find when you study metallurgy and you are, you’re confronted with different crystal structures, you could understand what, what they meant and, you know, how they were built up and so on and so forth.
Mm.
[29:35] A very important feature really. Well, I think that’s probably all I need to say about the undergraduate education. There is one thing, yes, I might just record, and that is, it was either 1944, yes, I think it was in 1944, after the end of the first year, I remember both Wally Eldred and I tried to... You, you felt rather guilty of being in Cambridge and doing, you know, a university course, while other people were losing their lives, and we tried to, well we explored joining the forces, but in fact were told that we were in effectively a reserved occupation if you like. What they wanted was
Peter Hirsch Page 34 C1379/84 Track 3 to ensure that there would be sufficient people at the end of the war to have sufficient, to have a scientific background. And so, people of our age were told to stay put.
[31:00] Had you had much thought about what you actually wanted to do when you finished the course?
[pause] Well, well finish, finish the undergraduate course. Well, yes, well I’ll tell you about that. I mean I... In Cambridge at the time, the... Oh hang a on a minute, no, there is one other thing I thought I’d tell you also. I mean, to give you a flavour of what it was like, we did in fact join, you know, we had to join the, whatever it was, senior, senior cadet corps or what, I can’t remember what it was called.
Senior Training Corps?
Yes, I think that’s probably what it was. And, so there was a bit of square-bashing we had to do. But we also did fire-watching, OK. And, and the other thing which is quite interesting, that, well what about the college activities from, you know, initiated by the dons. And there was, I mean our tutor, and by tutor I should explain that, in Cambridge that meant really your moral tutor. There’s a distinction between tutor and supervisor. Tutor was your moral tutor, but, the supervisor was, was the chap who actually tutored you in a particular subject, OK. It’s different in Oxford, I mean a tutor here teaches you, you know, it’s called, what’s called a supervisor in Cambridge anyway. Anyway, but the tutor at the time who was dealing with, with me and lots of other people, was one Alfie Steers. He was a professor of geography of considerable eminence, I think he, I think he wrote a well-known monograph I think on the coast of the UK, or maybe England or whatever it is. But he had musical evenings, when he played, you know, gramophone records. The only annoying thing was that he never told you what it was that was being played, [laughs] you, the assumption, was, you knew it. But it was very pleasurable anyway.
How did you take to college life at Cambridge more generally?
Peter Hirsch Page 35 C1379/84 Track 3
Oh... Oh, enjoyed it very much, enjoyed it very much. I mean, the food at the time was of course very curious. There was a, [laughs] there was a time in which we seemed to get celery for breakfast, lunch and supper. And they had obviously bought up a celery field, you know, and you got it as, vegetables, or, cooked or raw, or as soup. [laughs] But it was, it was a very pleasant activity. [34:10] Well after the Part II, I applied for a place in, having got a first, in the low temperature Mond Laboratory in the Cavenidish. Because at the time research on liquid helium was all the rage, everybody wanted to do that, you know, to get, to reach very very low temperatures and see quantum effects with liquid helium, so on. And, the director of the Mond at the time was one Dr Shoenberg, David Shoenberg, and he turned me down on the grounds that the Mond was full. And I then applied to the Crystallography department where W H Taylor was head, I had attended his lectures in, option lectures in Part II. And, anyway, Will Taylor accepted me, but I was ineligible for a DSIR grant, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research grant, which all research students would be eligible for in my position. I was ineligible because of my nationality, you had to be British and I wasn’t. And, but Will Taylor organised a maintenance grant for me from the British Iron and Steel Research Association for two years, and I was also awarded a college research studentship, and I got a small stipend from the International Student Service, arranged by one Mrs Burkill, who was the wife of the mathematician, Dr Burkill FRS, Fellow of Peterhouse, and she really was an indefatigable supporter of refugee students in Cambridge.
What was she like to meet?
Oh very, very pleasant and very helpful. I mean she would always ask, you know, ‘Is there anything that, you know, we can do to help?’ and so on. She was very very pleasant.
[36:22] Mm.
Peter Hirsch Page 36 C1379/84 Track 3
Maybe I can say something at this stage about what had happened to, at home during this period. My stepfather had joined the Pioneer Corps. I mean, in his position, he was given the option of either being interned or joining the Pioneer Corps, you know, and, but while he was in the Pioneer Corps, he made enormous efforts to try and get a British qualification for dentistry. I should explain that in Germany he was a dentist, but the German qualification that he had, a licentiate, and Doctor of Dentistry, weren’t accepted here, I mean the professional institutions, you know, it’s typical of the professional institutions, they are very jealous of their, their own qualification rules. And, anyway, he studied in the evenings and passed an examination, on the strength of which he got leave from the Pioneer Corps to spend a year at Guy’s Hospital, to study for his final examination, and he obtained his LDS qualification, that’s the British licentiate qualification, in 1944 at the age of fifty-four. And he was then enrolled as a consequence of this in the Dental Corps, OK. And he worked in Woolwich Arsenal. And, yeah, on, you know, on soldiers... OK. And by the end of the war he had obtained the rank of Captain. And after the end of the war he, when he was demobbed, he set up a dental practice in Kilburn High Road. And, my parents then moved to a rented flat in Sussex Gardens, first to a rented flat in Sussex Gardens, and some years later they bought a flat in an apartment block in Finchley Road near Golders Green.
Did you see much of them during the war, when you were at Cambridge?
Ah well, during the war they were living in Fulham, in Harbord Street, and, I did go home from time to time, and, yes, I saw, you know quite a bit of them, yes. There was some... There was an interesting thing about the rented flat in Sussex Gardens, in that, I think the flat next door, or maybe upstairs, I think a floor higher up, was occupied by one Gerald Moore, who was a very well-known, was, a very very well- known pianist, accompanist of, particularly an accompanist of singers, and he practised, and so we had really, quite a lot of amusement of listening to all this beautiful music that came out from Gerald Moore’s flat from time to time. [40:17] Anyway, to come back to my PhD. The topic for my PhD research was the development of microbeam X-ray diffraction technique.
Peter Hirsch Page 37 C1379/84 Track 3
What’s microbeam X-ray diffraction?
Well, X-ray diffraction works by having a beam of X-rays which you use to illuminate a crystal or polycrystalline aggregate, and then, you get from it scattered beams in different directions which, and the directions in which the beams come off, and then you record them on a photographic plate, at least you used to in those days. They tell you then something about the underlying crystal structures, OK. And, the thing about the microbeam is that, well normally, you get the X-rays from an X-ray tube, and the X-ray beam that comes out may have a millimetre diameter, effectively anyway, I mean the actual spot on the target is, is probably normally something like ten millimetres by one millimetre. But you, you shoot, you know, the way it works is, you shoot beams of electrons onto a metal target, and then you get X-rays generated by the stopping of the electron stop in the crystal structure, in the material, and you get X-rays generated. And, and normally the spot from a normal X-ray tube is one millimetre by ten millimetres, but you, you take it, you look at the spot at a small angle, like six degrees or something, so that it looks as if it’s one millimetre diameter, foreshortened, the length, if the length of the thing is like this, if you look at it that way it looks shorter, OK? It’s short... [laughs] So that’s to get added brightness, that’s, that’s the... Anyway, but for the particular project that we were going to do, we needed a beam of X-rays which was considerably smaller than this, and I’ll explain why in a minute. And, so we were looking for a spot of maybe, a tenth of a millimetre rather than a millimetre of high brightness. [43:31] And, and the project was to apply the diffraction technique, X-ray diffraction technique, to the study of cold worked metals, and the idea of the project came from Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was head of the Cavendish at the time. But my supervisor was actually Dr W H Taylor, the Reader in Crystallography. And, there were two of us initially on the project, the other one being James Noel Kellar, who had joined Will Taylor’s department several months earlier, before I did, after returning from war service in the Navy, and after a year at sea as radar officer, he had become liaison officer on radar between civilian and naval establishments during which he had spent some time at sea and on shore. Anyway, he was demobbed, and came to Cambridge to do a PhD, and he, he and I had responsibility for this project. And I should explain that this was quite a complicated project, because, we wanted to get X-ray diffraction
Peter Hirsch Page 38 C1379/84 Track 3 spots effectively from very small crystals, and that is why we needed an X-ray fine focus tube of high brightness, but we also needed a rotating anode tube, a rotating anode. Now, I’ll explain what, the reason for that. The point is that, the amount... I mean you produce these electrons by shooting, you produce the X-rays by shooting electrons onto the target. What limits the intensity of the electron beam on the target that you can have is the melting of the target, the target heats up as a result of all the energy deposited by the electrons, most of which goes into heat, only a very small fraction goes into X-rays. And, so how can you increase the brightness of the spot? Well one thing is, by decreasing the size, you can increase the brightness, you can put more electrons in because the heat is conducted away more quickly if the spot is small rather than when it’s large. OK? But the other way of doing it is in fact to move the target all the time. So instead of having a stationary target, you have a target which rotates, OK? It’s called a rotating anode tube. And with luck you might be able to increase the intensity of the X-rays coming out by a factor of ten or something like this, OK. [46:45] So, this was a big project, because we had to build a rotating anode X-ray tube with a fine focus beam, so, OK, in order to improve the brightness. And Noel Kellar was responsible for the rotating anode tube side of it, and the fine focus development, whereas I was responsible for the collimator system, because, what we also wanted was to have a small beam, you know, we had to collimate the beam, the X-ray beam, make as small as possible to illuminate the specimen. And the way this... Sorry, what...?
How big is the target you’re actually aiming at?
The... Yes, well, what exactly do you mean? You mean, the target to produce the X- rays, or the target in which you, you then, having got the X-rays, you shoot. [laughs] Ah well, we were looking at illuminating areas of the material, say, ten microns. A micron is ten to the minus four centimetres, or ten to the minus six metres, OK. That, so, we were hoping to get down to a micron, but it was a few microns, more like ten microns. That was done by the collimator system, OK. [48:30]
Peter Hirsch Page 39 C1379/84 Track 3
And why, how did all this come about, is because Bragg was interested in the plastic properties of metals at the time, and there was a controversy about the nature and the reason for the X-ray line broadening that you get from cold worked metals. Now I should explain that, if you had a perfect crystal and you shoot a beam of X-rays onto the perfect crystal, OK, and then, then if... The crystal will only reflect these X-rays at particular angles, they’re called Bragg angles, because, he, you know, worked this out, and got a Nobel Prize for it in, around 1912. And, and what happens if you illuminate a, if you shoot a beam of X-rays onto polycrystalline metals, and which in fact the crystals have got any odd orientation, OK, you might think you would get nothing, or you’d get something which is uniform but isn’t like that, because, what will happen is, you will only get a reflection from a crystal which happens to be in the right orientation to give you a reflection, and when it is, it will reflect at a particular angle. This assumes that the radiation which comes in is monochromatic, that’s to say, it’s got one wavelength, OK, specific wavelength. And there is a law which you call Bragg’s law, which relates the angle of diffraction for a given, for a given wavelength, for a given spacing, lattice spacing in the crystal, OK? It depends on, so, it depends on the structure of the crystal. If you get a, the structure of the crystal will determine the angle at which you will get reflections, or the angles at which you get reflections. So you only get reflections of particular spacings of crystal planes in the lattice, OK, and these, the angle therefore at which you get the reflection, depends on the spacing between these planes. And in the crystal lattice, you can have all sorts of crystal planes and different symmetries, well, in different directions, and so you get different angles, OK? But for a, if you have a polycrystalline metal, and you illuminate that with an X-ray beam, then for a given lattice plane, reflections from a given lattice plane, you get then spots in a circle around the, well a cone really, coming from the specimen, where the, if you like, the internal angle of this cone is twice the Bragg angle. And each one of these reflections corresponds to a crystal in the polycrystalline aggregate, which happens to be in the right orientation to give a reflection, but it might give a reflection up there, or if its orientation is different, give a reflection up there. But the angle, the angle of scattering between the incident beam and the diffracted beam is always the same for a given spacing, OK?
Mhm.
Peter Hirsch Page 40 C1379/84 Track 3
So, the result of that is that, from a polycrystalline metal, you will get a series of rings on your photographic plate. And, now, if you... There was a... And what was found experimentally was that [for a cold worked metal] the diffraction rings were broadened; in other words, there was reflection not only at one specific angle, but in fact there was a small range of angles. And the question is, what was this range of angles due to, the spreading? Was it due to the fact that there were strains in the crystal which caused the scattering to be at a slightly different range of angles, or was it simply due to the fact that the crystals were very very small? Because when crystals become very very small, then you get broadening, you know, this is called particle size broadening. And there was a controversy in that, there was one school of thought was that it was due to strains, and, that was the school of Lipson who was then in Manchester actually, and, the other school of thought was, there was somebody called W A Wood who was an Australian, who thought it was all due to particle size. Now Bragg was particularly interested in this, because, he had been interested in the plastic properties of metals, and he had a simple idea of what happened when you plastically deformed the metal, that the original crystals would break up into smaller ones, OK? And so, he was rather interested in finding out whether in fact you could use, well, X-ray diffraction techniques naturally, because he was, X-ray diffraction was his field, whether you could, could find out whether it was due to particle size broadening or internal strains. And what...
It’s... Sorry.
Bragg had a very, well he had a pictorial mind, but, he also had very simple ideas, he was absolutely brilliant, and he suggested that if the diameter of the X-ray beam was reduced sufficiently, then instead of getting continuous rings where all the spots overlap, because you had got so many reflections which you, you know, if you illuminate lots and lots of crystals, then you got so many spots that they all overlapped, you get continuous rings, but if you then decrease the size of the beam and only illuminated a much smaller number of crystals, then you would get spotty rings, you would see the individual spots, OK, instead of continuous rings. And by counting the number of spots, you could then deduce what the crystal size was. So this was a totally independent method of determining this.
Peter Hirsch Page 41 C1379/84 Track 3
And then you could figure out whether you had small crystals or strained crystals.
Correct.
Right, OK.
[56:15] Yes, that was the idea, OK. Well, this was a terrifically difficult project. The rotating anode tube actually was provided for us by Metro-Vickers, and, we’ve always had an enormous amount of trouble with it, and to actually... and it was also quite difficult to, to get the small spots, small spots. My main job was actually dealing with a collimator system, and, for that we used fine glass capillaries. In other words, you sent the beam down glass capillaries OK, you know, just glass tubes, with very very small internal diameter, and the physics is such that if the X-rays actually hit the glass, the internal glass surface at a small angle, they actually get reflected to... Yes, something like that, OK, but the angles are very very small, the angles are very very small.
I suppose almost like optic fibres but with X-rays and...
Yes, that’s correct. Yes, that’s, that’s the idea, OK. You had to, you had to, I mean it was, this collimator system was a complicated system, and, you know, it was beautifully made by the technician in the crystallography lab, it was a work of art. He was an instrument maker of the highest quality. And, you had these things on slides, because you had to align them and move them around, you know. Well... Yes, go on, yes.
Could you perhaps... I can see you’ve mentioned a lot of sort of bits of this equipment, but I... Could you paint me a portrait, a sort of description of what the whole, the whole equipment set-up looks like if I was to see it?
Well it was a room, it was a room of equipment. I mean, you had to have high- tension transformer to, you know, because you, you wanted to get the electron beam probably at thirty or forty kilovolts, OK, so you had to have a high-tension... And the
Peter Hirsch Page 42 C1379/84 Track 3 high-tension transformer was maybe three-quarters of a metre cube, and there was always trouble with oil. Oh god! it was dreadful. And the whole thing was in a... Oh yes, and then, then we, we wanted, instead of wanting AC, we wanted DC, OK. And... Instead of AC we wanted DC. And so we used mercury rectifiers which we pinched from Cockcroft... There was a Cockcroft and Walton accelerator in the Cavendish which, you know, it was used in the days of Rutherford, and they had a lot of these mercury rectifiers, and we, you know, after the whole thing was broken up, we got some of these, and we used those to produce our rectified current. And, so it was an enormous, I mean it, it filled up a room. And we had to have a, a metal cage, well a sort of, grid cage, round it, you know, to keep people out, because of the high tension problems. There was also of course problems with the X-ray radiation. I think, you know, nowadays it would be completely impossible to have a system like this, the health and safety people would, you know, get really worried. [laughs] Oh one, one good thing was, we had a red light outside the room which we put on whenever the X-ray tube was going, and in fact, [laughs] we also put it on on many other occasions, and what it did was, one of the things it did is, it kept out the Cavendish librarian. She was terrified of coming in when the red light was on. And, you know, we used to have books out when really they should have been returned, and so this one was way of, of getting round this problem. [laughing] Well anyway, so there we go. I mean...
[1:01:20] Perhaps, one other quick question as well, which, I’m sort of thinking, this idea of small crystals or strained crystals, it sounds, it sounds a very academic sort of question, did it have any sort of practical significance beyond Bragg wanting to know one way or the other?
Well it’s rather important to find out what it, why, you know, what the structure of a deformed metal is like. Because, if you knew what the structure of a deformed metal is like, if you knew its microstructure, then you might think of ways of modifying it. Because... Well as a result of deforming it under different conditions, and you might make the material stronger, or, or weaker. You know, it is really trying to understand the basis of the mechanical properties of materials. If you, if you cold work a metal and you take something, a bar of copper or whatever it is which is annealed, or
Peter Hirsch Page 43 C1379/84 Track 3 aluminium, or anything, and you cold work it, then it hardens. Why does it harden? Why does it become hard, OK? And, what limits its hardness? So, from a practical point of view, it’s extremely important to try and understand what actually goes on during plastic deformation. And, as you will see when we, later on, that’s really what my research, you know, was about. And, this microbeam technique was, was the first step really. [1:03:10] Well let me now tell you a little bit about, before I tell you what the result of this was, let me tell you a little bit about what, rather, you know, what happened, on a personal level. In the summer of 1948, which was I suppose, two years after I started research, I started in 1946, Noel Kellar and I attended a crystallography congress in Holland, and after the meeting Noel and somebody called Rene Rhodes who was another member of the Crystallography department who later became Professor of Engineering at Warwick, all three of us went for a short sailing trip in two lakes near a place called Reeuwijk in Holland, in a sailing boat which we had hired locally. And we were told that it was possible to pass from one lake to the other through a canal. And during the passage through this canal there was a tragic accident. The mast of the sailing boat touched live overhead wires. And first Rene Rhodes and then Noel Kelllar, who was on the bank of the canal at the time, grabbed hold of the starboard stay to try and tilt the mast, to clear the wire. I was at the tiller at the time. And both became unconscious and slid into the water. And I tried unsuccessfully to pull them away from the wire, and then some people on the bank pulled the boat clear. And both Kellar and Rhodes were carried ashore, and tragically Noel had died but Rene Rhodes recovered. There had been no warnings that the overhead wires were live. And Noel was cremated in Holland and I took the ashes home to his wife, Steve, in Cambridge. They had two small children, a daughter, Janet, of two and three-quarter years, and a baby boy, Paul, only seven weeks old. And this tragedy was the most traumatic experience in my life, it was dreadful.
How did you react at the time?
Well it, it was just, dreadful. That’s all I can say, I mean it was a...
[1:05:55]
Peter Hirsch Page 44 C1379/84 Track 3
What sort of chap was Kellar?
Well he was much, well he was considerably older than I was, because he had been in the war. He had got a degree in physics at the University of Reading and where he had met his wife. And, he, he had then gone into the Navy. Well at first, he was actually a conscientious objector, but, later on he, he decided to join the war effort and he joined the Navy, became a radar officer. Oh he was a marvellous chap, and, we were great friends. I mean it was really traumatic. So... And it’s, well, you know, it’s one of these dreadful occasions which, which are with you for the rest of your life. You know, you ask yourself the question, well, you know, could I have done something different?
Mm.
[1:07:20] Well anyway, if I now say something about the project. By this time, somebody else had joined the team, John Thorp. He had joined us in 1947. He went later on, he became a lecturer at Durham, he was a physicist. Well John and I continued the work, and, we found that it worked well for cold worked aluminium. In other words, we got spotty diffraction rings.
Mm.
In fact the first, first experiments were actually done with a, not with our own X-ray tube which we were still struggling to build, but with a normal X-ray tube which they had quite a number of in the Crystallography department. The exposure times were 120 hours. Yes, because, the beam intensity was, you know, relatively low for a normal X-ray tube. Eventually when we got the rotating anode tube going, the exposure times were the order of ten hours, sort of thing. Well, as always happens, well as usually happens anyway, things always work out rather differently from what you, [laughs] what you think initially. And, we obtained spotty rings from aluminium, but the spots, individual spots were broadened, and it was clear that the little subgrains into which the original grains had broken, broken up into, OK, were, that these little subgrains were distorted, strained, and that line broadening in cold
Peter Hirsch Page 45 C1379/84 Track 3 worked aluminium was at least partly due to the elastic strains, and not due to small particle size. Well subsequently, Peter Gay and Tony Kelly worked, used the technique to look at iron and copper, and, they identified, where in fact the, the particles of the subgrains were rather smaller, but, it was quite clear that in these cases the major cause of the line broadening was in fact due to the strains. So the answer was, a mixed one. There was a break-up into smaller crystals which were misorientated, OK, but also that these were very very heavily strained, and that was the major cause of the line broadening. So, so... And aluminium, which was the first experiment which, the first result which we obtained, was, the subgrain size was deduced to be about, two microns. And, this work formed the major part of my thesis, which was called ‘X-ray Microbeam Technique’, and I got my PhD in December 1950.
Shall we take a short pause at that point?
Yes.
Because that brings us to the end of a, of a chapter almost. But I’ve got a few questions I’d like to follow up in a moment, but...
Well it’s, it’s not quite finished, but nearly. All right. Anyway...
Shall we take a short...
Yes.
[End of Track 3]
Peter Hirsch Page 46 C1379/84 Track 4
[Track 4]
Yes.
What was it actually like working at the Cavendish?
Well it was a very stimulating place. Unfortunately as far as we were concerned, working with the X-ray microbeam technique to study the structure of a deformed metal, Sir Lawrence Bragg had lost interest in the project. And his main interest lay in unravelling the structure of proteins, which was the aim of Perutz’s group, and in fact there were occasions when Bragg tried to get the use of our rotating anode X-ray generator for protein work, and we resisted this because of our own needs. So that was rather unfortunate. But as regards... OK, the atmosphere, I mean it was a very stimulating place. There were a lot of other people obviously working in the Crystallography department, and, Bragg had initiated a tea room arrangement where, the idea was that people in different groups would talk to each other, you know, over a coffee in the mornings. And, this only worked partially, because what happened was, the different groups tended to sit at, you know, their own table, if you see what I mean. Now one of the things that I do remember very vividly was, this was I suppose a little bit later on, but, was, when Crick and Watson were there. And you always knew, when you went to the tea room, you always knew that, whether Crick was there, because, he had a very loud voice and he talked sixteen to the dozen, and, so you heard what he was saying miles away before you got into the, into the tea room. And I remember once walking with, or behind Lawrence Bragg, or maybe we had just had a discussion and we were walking together, and he said something to the effect that, anybody who produces so much chuff must produce some good idea sometime.’ And, and of course he did. [laughs] So... And, there were a lot of people, visitors, who came, and one of them was von Laue, actually I remember that distinctly, so, so I met both Bragg and von Laue. They both got Nobel Prizes for X-ray diffraction. And, von Laue was of course a German and he was interned, you know, after the war I think for some time. And... Now here comes the anti-climax. Did I have the opportunity to speak to him? Well actually, I only met him by accident, in the toilet. [laughs] So that was my, my meeting with, with von Laue, but at least I did meet him.
Peter Hirsch Page 47 C1379/84 Track 4
Well what sort of chap was Bragg to meet as well?
Well he was very friendly and very approachable. I think on the whole rather a shy man actually. But he had very very simple and clear ideas. He had a pictorial mind. I mean he, you know, later on we’ll talk about the, the mechanism by which plastic deformation occurs, how metals deform by the movement of dislocations and these crystal defects, and one of the questions at that time was, how do you, how can you actually see these dislocations, you know, they are atomic size defects? And, he actually invented what was called the bubble model. It was a typical Bragg idea. In other words, to create an artificial lattice consisting of arrays of soap bubbles, OK, all of equal size, and, he had an arrangement by which you could get these rafts of soap bubbles of the same size. Now this was a two-dimensional lattice, OK. And then you could shear it, and you could see how this two-dimensional lattice deformed by the movement of dislocations. And at the time, in the late 1940s, it was a, and, you know, I suppose the beginning of the 1950s, it was a very illuminating advance, and it was typical Bragg, a simple idea and it worked. But of course, it was two-dimensional and it was a, it was soap bubbles, it wasn’t, wasn’t a metal. But as I said, there were lots of visitors and so on, and, and you know, it was a very exciting time, and you, you met people who were working in, you know, in different, different areas. [05:55] And, I actually did, during my PhD, I took part with Noel Kellar and somebody called R C Evans, Robert Evans, in a project on a parallel-beam concentrating monochromator.
What’s that? [laughs]
[laughs] Yes, well, if you... The beam of X-rays which you get out of an X-ray tube has a spectrum which has got a continuous part, there’s a continuous part of the spectrum, and there’s also, there are certain, at certain wavelengths you get sharp peaks, these are called characteristic lines. But if you wanted a monochromatic beam, that is to say, a beam with just one particular wavelength, rather than having a continuous spectrum plus a whole series of these spectral lines effectively, then, what you, the way to monochromatise the X-ray beam is to have, to use a reflection from a
Peter Hirsch Page 48 C1379/84 Track 4 crystal at a particular angle, OK? And it would reflect at that particular angle for a given wavelength, at this particular angle, and so you could get monochromatic radiation that way. And, that was quite important. And the question was, somebody called Fankuchen, an American, f-a-n-k-u-c-h-e-n, had suggested, and in fact I think developed, what was called a concentrating monochromator, in which use was made of asymmetrical reflection from a crystal of calcite. This is this business of foreshortening again. You have a crystal here which is reflecting a beam, OK, but if you cut the surface of the crystal at some angle relative to the reflecting planes, OK, you can in fact foreshorten... you can... It’s like looking at the reflected beam in such a way that you get a sharper reflection. It’s exactly the same concept as getting a foreshortening as it’s called of the initial X-ray beam from the target, the metal target in an X-ray tube, OK? So, but this time it’s the crystal which is cut at such an angle that the beam coming out is very narrow. And, so, the width of the reflected beam is then less than of the incoming beam and that leads to increased brightness, OK. And the maximum benefit, however, couldn’t be obtained in practice, because, it turned out that the surface of the crystal acted as if it was a non-reflecting but absorbing layer due to misorientations or amorphisation introduced by the cutting and abrading and polishing procedures. And, we did a series of experiments measuring the intensity as a function of this angle at which you, you know, you could foreshorten. And, this actually led later to a non-destructive X-ray method for determination of thickness, effective thickness of such surface layers.
Mm.
[10:09] And, as a result of this work I became interested in the dynamical theory of reflection from perfect absorbing crystals, which is relevant to what I’m going to say later on. And now you might say, might ask me, what is the dynamical theory of reflection from perfect absorbing crystals? The dynamical theory is to do with the fact that if you imagine you have a crystal and you, you get a Bragg reflection from it, the X-rays actually, the initial X-rays go in to, you know, quite a long way into the crystal, then are reflected by the series of planes. And, but then what happens is that, those reflected, the X-rays inside, that are generated inside the crystal, OK, reflected inside the crystal, get reflected back again. OK? So there’s an interaction between the
Peter Hirsch Page 49 C1379/84 Track 4 incident beam and the reflected beam, namely, the reflected beam is reflected again and so on and so forth, and that’s called the dynamical theory of reflection. And, the original theory was actually worked out by Ewald, e-w-a-l-d, also around 1912 or thereabouts. And... Anyway, I got interested in this, and there was a very good book by somebody called Zachariasen, called The Theory of X-ray Diffraction in Crystals, published in 1945, which gave explicit treatment, theoretical treatment, of the reflection of X-rays from perfect absorbing crystals, and, I collaborated with somebody called Ramachandran, G N Ramachandran, an Indian, who came to the lab almost certainly on a Commonwealth scholarship, he was a brilliant chap, who subsequently I should say became interested in proteins, protein structures and scattering from proteins when... and he, he was a very important scientist in India and got FRS for his protein work. When he was in the Cavendish he was there was a postdoctoral person, working with W A Wooster, and, now W A Wooster was a member of the Mineralogy department, but in fact, the research, he had a research activity going in the Cavendish, OK, and Ramachandran was working with him on a project, but, I can’t remember what it was. But anyway, he, Ramachandran and I worked on this intensity of Bragg reflection on perfect absorbing crystals, and treating in particular the effect of asymmetry of reflections. And, there were two papers, the first paper was reflection from the surface, and the second paper dealt with what’s called a Laue case, which is transmission through thinner crystals, and compared the theory with what had been experimentally found at that time, which was very exciting, by somebody called Borrmann, a German, where in certain directions, if you had the beam going through the crystal in certain directions, you actually got more transmission, and in another directions more absorption, OK. So you got directions of preferential absorption and transmission, all around the Bragg peak, very close to the Bragg peak, and that was very interesting and the theory predicted all that. And, so, out of that, you know, I got a couple of papers. But it did have an influence later on, on what I did later.
[15:15] How important was it actually seen to publish early on in your career at that point, how important...?
Peter Hirsch Page 50 C1379/84 Track 4
Oh it’s always. I mean particularly when you are young, you think publication is the, you know, the most important thing in the world, and, it’s very exciting, you know, getting results which you could then write up, and, very satisfying, very satisfying. And it is, it’s important from a career’s point of view for an academic to have, you know, a long list of publications. It’s, I have to say that, it wasn’t as bad in those days as it is now. I mean, the situation now is dreadful. The pressure to write for academics is just terrible, and it, it has led to people doing silly things. In my day, yes, you published, but you published when you were ready, and, you know, that, that was, that was accepted. But it was, it was an important feature of the work, yes.
[16:47] Another question as well. I was thinking, you’ve mentioned, you mentioned a technician in passing a little while ago. I was wondering, how important were they to the work you were doing?
Well very important. The crystallography, in those days the crystallography department itself had a workshop as it was called, and it was staffed by two technicians. And, one of them was an absolutely superb instrument maker. You couldn’t imagine a better one, I mean the quality of his work was absolutely superb, it was precision, first-rate precision. And, that helped very much because, the collimator system which I had designed, was built by him, and he, he built it beautifully. The only thing is, it took an enormously long time, he always took a very very long time. Yes, the workshop was an essential part of the whole department. I mean there were always things going wrong and they were repairing things and so on and so forth. And there was, they always had too many jobs to do. But, they were very, very important. And the different groups had their own workshops. I mean all of this, you know, I suppose became streamlined in the end, and, but that’s, you know, another story. This is what it was like in my day.
[18:26] I’m interested as well in the sort of, the different groups. You mentioned these sort of tea room things that were set up, and...
Yes.
Peter Hirsch Page 51 C1379/84 Track 4
I just wonder, how much interaction did you have with the other groups that were... What other groups were there for that matter, at the same time?
Well, I mean, there was... Oh there were a lot of other groups. I mean, there was the Low Temperature Group, OK, Shoenberg’s things. There were, there were still nuclear physicists there. There were... Then there was Orowan’s Metal Physics Group. There was, there was crystallography. And, well then there was the MRC, later on the Medical Research Council group under Perutz. I can’t give you the exact date, but it must have been the late, you know, it was sort of, founded in the late Forties, beginning of the Fifties maybe. And, and then there was astronomy, and of course radio astronomy in particular became a very big thing. And, well there were other, [laughs] there were, I think there was a hydrodynamics sort of section, somebody called G I Taylor, which was also relevant to what I’ll say later on, was still there.
Interesting phrase to...
So there were a number of, you know, a number of research groups. If you ask me how much interaction was between them, well not, not all that much. I think there was collaboration, as you can see from the examples that I gave you, of what happened to me, there was collaboration between myself and other people in crystallography, which happened to be there, you know, projects in which I was interested. And... But, I, you know, I mean, to quote a rather important example, Crick and Watson in the protein group collaborated with Bill Cochran, W Cochran, in crystallography, to work out the, the X-ray pattern from a double helix, and... Anyway, that gives you a flavour of it. I’m sure I haven’t got all the research groups.
[21:15] I was interested as well, you’ve sort of mentioned here numerous well-known physicists in passing.
Yes.
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How did you feel about working there amongst all these people who in some cases have Nobel Prizes, in other cases are clearly going to get them?
[pause] Well you just got on with the job. I mean it isn’t, it didn’t... I mean it... [pause] Most of the time you really came in contact with your supervisor, you know, in our case W H Taylor, and with other people within your own department. And, I mean you, of course you had great respect for all these terrific people, but you didn’t actually interact with them all that much. I mean, you know, Bragg gave me my research project; the amount of interaction I had with him subsequently was actually relatively small, and that was mainly due to the fact that he got primarily interested in the structure of proteins just at that time, you know. But it was, I mean, it was a privilege to be around in a period in which there were all these great people around.
Did you enjoy it?
Oh yes. Oh it was a very exciting time. Very exciting. I mean, it’s, it’s very hard work, and, but it’s very exciting. And it got rather more exciting, even, well even more exciting subsequently when we actually produced a technique, developed a technique for seeing individual dislocations. [23:25] I’ll tell you another example of interaction. There was an Australian... That was another thing which happened, there were a lot of people came and worked in the Cavendish, because the Cavendish was the Cavendish, you have people who like to do their postgraduate, or work, or, postdoctoral work there, and there was a geologist called Mervyn Paterson who came from Canberra, who worked in Orowan’s group, and he looked at the line broadening of alpha brass, you know, ordinary brass. And he worked out the theory of scattering from, if you had faults in the crystal structure, the stacking got faulty, called a stacking fault, and, well, I mean, you know, we, we, there was interaction there in that we, you know, he gave some lectures on this, and we went to that. So there was a, to those lectures, there were... And there were lectures from all sorts of other people, I mean, I remember going to lectures by Dirac actually who was there around that time. [laughs] And... Not, he wasn’t in the Cavendish, he was in mathematics somewhere, but, anyway, you know, you went to lectures of all sorts of things that you could go to lectures to, and Dirac’s was one set
Peter Hirsch Page 53 C1379/84 Track 4 of lectures I went to. So there was a lot of, you know, opportunity for interaction. And, in retrospect there was quite a bit of it was, quite a bit of opportunity was taken, but... But, anyway. There wasn’t as much as there might have been I suppose one could say. Yes.
I guess we’re sort of coming to an end for today, looking at the time.
Yes.
[25:44] But I have one final question for today, which is, what interested you about your work at this point, very early on in your career?
What interested me?
Mm, yes, what was doing it for you at this time?
Well I mean, you know, what happens is, at this stage you get into the field, and, you know, you do a PhD and you read the literature, OK, and, and I got interested in plastic deformation of metals, as... You know, so you start off with a diffraction experiment, OK, to, to answer a particular question, which we did answer, OK. But the answer came out rather more complicated than we had thought. But, as always, it raised a lot of other questions, and that is, how does the plastic deformation occur? And during that period, there was an enormous amount of activity going on amongst the solid state physicists to work out and develop the theory of dislocations in crystals. And, and so that was a very exciting time if you like, and it was, you know, I got interested obviously in dislocation theory, and, and in, you know, in, whether it would be possible to actually see these things, see the dislocation. So, the... And, it became, as a result of the microbeam work that we did, X-ray work, well perhaps I’ll talk about that next, the next time, but there was a direct consequence of this as to, which led us then to doing experiments on how to see dislocations directly in the electron microscope. And there was a great need for this, because there was all this enormous theory, detailed theory, dislocation theory worked out by the solid state theorists, and, but there was, there was very little experimental, well relatively little experimental
Peter Hirsch Page 54 C1379/84 Track 4 evidence for dislocations that you could, yes you could see them as, by etch pitting the crystal surface where the dislocations came to the surface, because regions were strained, you might get etch pits, and you saw dislocations that way. And there were one or two other ways you saw dislocations. But that was not a general method. And I remember going to a lecture, I don’t, I remember, I can’t remember the year, but it was an Institute of Metals conference, I think it was in Exeter, at which people were giving talks on, I can’t, I think, on steels and, various other topics, and I remember one eminent metallurgist getting up, and he got to slide number eight before he realised it was the wrong box. Because all the pictures looked the same, if you see what I mean. You got surface observations and they looked similar. And you realise, oh god! there must be a better way of actually seeing what goes on, than just relying on surface observation. And he, he had managed to talk to eight slides, [laughs] thinking that it was his box, before he realised that it wasn’t. And, yeah, I mean later on there were, we’re now going into the early Fifties, which is a bit later, so maybe can be left to a later date, but... Anyway. All right?
[end of session]
[End of Track 4]
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[Track 5]
I guess we’ve talked a little bit in previous interviews about how some of the funding streams for research studentships at that point were denied to you because of your German citizenship. Did you ever encounter any other, I guess, forms of prejudice?
No, I didn’t. And if anything, I think as I mentioned before, when, at the end of my school days, after the Higher School Certificate, I qualified in a sense for, academically, for a state scholarship, but that was ruled out because of nationality reasons. But the London County Council stepped in and gave me a, a scholarship or maintenance grant, in spite of the fact that, as I understood it, they had a similar rule. So if anything, I think they were very enlightened, and leant over backwards. But I’ve never had any funding problems due to prejudice, as far as I am aware.
[01:15] I guess we talked a lot last time about your work in the lab during your PhD period. What was life like outside work?
Well, I mean I did have holidays with the Three Arts people, as I, you know, I mentioned that. And... But I also saw quite a bit of Noel Kellar’s widow after he was killed in 1948, and, a year later Will Taylor, the head of crystallography, engaged her as his secretary in the crystallography department, and then later, in ’53, she became the university librarian’s [personal assistant]. But, I, I saw quite a bit of her. And, eventually, we, we actually got married. In 1954 she went to Reading to become establishment officer at the ERA horticultural research station at Shinfield, which I think no longer exists, which was just outside Reading. She had graduated with a BSc in horticulture from Reading University just before the war. And I continued to see her and her children after she moved to Reading, and then we got married on the 22nd of July 1959 in Reading Registry Office. And, incidentally, that registry office is famous for the fact that, that is the registry office where Christine Keeler got married in the end.
The Profumo affair lady.
Peter Hirsch Page 56 C1379/84 Track 5
Yes, the Profumo. Correct. Anyway, Steve and I have had a very happy marriage since 1959, we got married in ’59. And, I’ve got two fine and loving stepchildren, one stepdaughter and one stepson, and now four grandchildren, three boys and one girl, and a number of great-grandchildren, eight of them at the present time, and they’re giving me much love and joy.
What was Steve like in... Is Steve short for anything?
Her maiden name was Stephens, her first names are Mabel Anne, and she was called Mabel, and she hated it. So, she preferred to be known as Steve, as a corruption of Stephens. And, she had a very interesting history because her parents were Cornish farmers, from North Cornwall, and, it was quite difficult to make a living there, that was generally the case for Cornish farmers. And he emigrated, well first to Surrey and then to Hampshire. And he put everything on a train, hired, effectively hired a train and put all the livestock on it and god knows what, the whole thing. And, my, my wife was actually conceived in Cornwall but she was born in Surrey eventually. And he built up a successful farm eventually at a place called Binsted which is near Alton.
What was she like in the 1950s and Sixties? Can you describe her to me please?
Well she was extremely lively, and full of spirit and ready to do anything. And, and we had great fun. She was, when she was studying in Reading, she took up rowing, and this is in fact how she met her first husband, Noel Kellar. And, she became the, I think she was the first president of the Reading University [women's] rowing club, so she was a great rower. [06:15] It was quite interesting the way she got into Reading University. She had left school at the age of sixteen, she was at Farnham Grammar School I think, and she left school at sixteen and went to Sparsholt agricultural training college to do a course on horticulture. And in the final examination she tied for the top place with a male student. And there was a scholarship available to read for a BSc in horticulture at Reading for the top student, and this was awarded automatically to the male student. So you ask me about prejudice as regards my funding, but there was prejudice... This
Peter Hirsch Page 57 C1379/84 Track 5 was before the war. And... But, this injustice came to the notice of the professor of chemistry in Reading who, you know, he was concerned with admissions, who told her that there was a scholarship available for a four-year course, a BSc in horticulture followed by a one-year diploma in education, which she accepted, and she was the first one in her family to go to university. And her father gave her strong support.
[07:44] What sort of things interested her?
Well, I mean horticulture in general, and she became a very active member of the Horticultural Education Society [Horticultural Education Association], and was its treasurer from 1962 to ’71, and went to its meetings and had great fun. And, then she became joint treasurer till ’73. But, the society, the Horticultural Education Society, [Horticultural Education Association] was taken over in the end, or subsumed into the Institute of Horticulture, and she was made an honorary fellow in the Institute in 1986 for the work she had done. And, you know, there was a sort of, general, well not, well I suppose hilarity, in the fact that that is, that is an honour I would never get [laughs], and she did.
Did she do much gardening at home and things like that as well?
Oh she was, she... Yes, she was a terrific gardener, I mean she was extremely good. Unlike me, I mean I, I never learnt the difference between a weed and a flower, it’s a... And, even nowadays, I mean I manage to do the lawn, but I’m absolutely useless at doing any other form of gardening. But she was extremely effective. And, much later on when we had actually moved to Oxford, Paul, her son, my stepson, was working at an organisation called Quantel, and they asked her advice on a roof garden they wanted to make, and, she gave them advice and also told them which nursery and people to get onto. And they, they gave her some compensation, the result of which was, [laughs] an enormous number of shrubs which were bought to put in our own garden. Anyway, she was, she was a great and very effective gardener, and one of the sad things about her recent illness and disabilities is that she can’t do any gardening, which makes her very sad, but also has had an enormous effect on the garden itself.
Peter Hirsch Page 58 C1379/84 Track 5
Can I pause you for one second, just to...
Yes.
[pause in recording]
[10:42] Sorry about that.
It’s all right.
How many children and stepchildren do you have?
I don’t have any children of my own, but I’ve got two stepchildren. There’s Janet, who was born in 1945, and so she was, I suppose thirteen or fourteen when we got married. And she went to Queen Anne’s School at Caversham, and then she went to Bristol University where she did modern languages, and that’s also where she met her future husband, John Caldwell, and they got married in 1967 when he moved to Oxford and became a faculty lecturer in music and a fellow at Keble College. And, they had two children, Peter and Sarah. And, he’s a distinguished scholar specialising in mediaeval music and he’s written a number of operas recently, since he retired actually. [12:05] And, the stepson is Paul Kellar, he was born in 1948, and he went to Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, on a presentation by one of the governor, Dr Barnes Wallis. If you’re a governor of Christ’s Hospital then this is one of the things you can do. Barnes Wallis is of course a very famous engineer. And, this presentation came about through the efforts of W H Taylor, who was the head of the crystallography department, OK, and, and Steve, my wife, was a secretary of his, as I mentioned, from 1949 for a number of years. And Will Taylor had made a strong case to the clerk of Christ’s Hospital, and, that then got passed on to Barnes Wallis and this is how it, how it operated, the way it worked. And, so... Paul did very well at school. And I should say that when Paul went to Christ’s Hospital in ’57, he was nine, and we got married two years later, so, you know, when he was eleven.
Peter Hirsch Page 59 C1379/84 Track 5
Mm.
And, he, he did well at school, and then went to Cambridge, to St John’s College, and read engineering, and, having spent a year between school and university as a Rolls Royce apprentice. And, anyway, after graduating in 1970 he joined Rolls Royce Associates at Derby.
Rolls Royce Associates?
Yes, well I should explain. Rolls Royce Associates were a separate organisation, separate from Rolls, because, they dealt with, they were responsible for building the nuclear submarines. And I think the reason was, I suppose, the Americans I think probably insisted that the company has to be independent of Rolls Royce. And, then he, he joined Micro Consultants at Newbury in 1972, which was an engineering company headed by Peter Michael, [now] Sir Peter Michael, as a design engineer, and, then, he... And later on, Micro Consultants took over Quantel, and Paul became a group leader and then head of research, and he eventually rose to become its director of research. And, Quantel was a real success story for the UK. It provided hardware and software for the television broadcasting industry all over the world, and it, after 1979 the company had won nine Queen’s Awards for Industry, one general, one for exports, and seven for technology. And I remember when, at my... The department did a party on the occasion of I think my eightieth birthday, this department did, and they invited amongst other people Phil Ruffles, who was on the board of Rolls Royce at that time as director of research, and, I remember, I introduced him to Paul and I said, ‘I bet you that [laughs], Quantel has got more Queen’s Awards than Rolls Royce.’ And Phil Ruffles said, ‘Oh don’t talk rubbish.’ But it was true, at that time, at that time.
Mm.
And, so, there we are, it was extremely successful.
[17:00]
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I was wondering if you could describe each of your stepchildren to me, when they were younger.
Well Janet was very musical, which ended up, well which I suppose led to her marrying John Caldwell in the end, she was very musical, and, played the clarinet beautifully. And she was also very proficient at languages, I suppose having done languages at Bristol. We used to go on foreign holidays and that was very enjoyable. I remember going to Italy, I suppose when, must have been soon after we got married, and I tried to persuade them that spaghetti [laughs] grew on trees, but I don’t think they believed it. Paul, I would say was cranky from the word go. He, [laughing] he had... He, he learnt an enormous number of very curious facts. I think... And when he was at Christ’s Hospital they must have had access to all sorts of books from the library and so on, so he knew all sorts of facts. And, his, I mean his, his philosophy was that, he didn’t like writing anything, and, when you were at Christ’s Hospital, what you had to do, you had to write a letter home once a week, certainly that was true in the junior school, I can’t remember whether it was true in the senior school as well, so he had to sit down and write a letter. And, I remember one of the earliest letters that we got simply said, [laughs] said something to the effect, ‘As I’m looking out of the window, I see the leaves falling off the trees. Love Paul.’ [laughs] And, and, he didn’t like all the sports that, you know, they had to do. But, but they had the option of either joining that famous band they’ve got, they have a very famous band that goes marching through the, through the City of London, all dressed up in their black cloaks, you know. But he decided to join the orchestra, and to play the cello. And I’m absolutely certain that the reason for that was, that he didn’t have to hold the thing. I mean he could actually put it on the ground, [laughs] so he didn’t... Anyway. Yeah. And I remember once we went on an Italian holiday, and, we stayed in Rome for a few days, there was a conference on, and, we decided to visit the Forum. And he refused. He said, ‘What’s the point of going to the Forum? I’ve seen it all in pictures.’ [laughs] So... ‘I know what it’s like, I’m not going.’ [laughing] So, so there you are.
How did you take to fatherhood? And married life for that matter.
Well, like, he, he did? You mean, what...?
Peter Hirsch Page 61 C1379/84 Track 5
How did you take to it?
Oh, it was marvellous. It was, it was a marvellous experience, you know, oh yes, oh it was great fun, yes.
What did you like about it?
I did... I think the one thing I managed to do with Janet was to actually help her to learn to ride a bicycle, so, yes, that was one of my achievements. But, yeah. [laughs]
What sort of influence do you think you were on your stepchildren?
Oh that’s more difficult to say. I think... Well Paul became an engineer, but he became an engineer not because of me. I mean he always considered me as a, as a theoretical scientist, and, forever, [laughs] sort of makes the remarks to that effect, you know, ah well, you know, if I can’t fix something, well that’s what you would expect from a scientist. An engineer would fix that in no time. So... [laughs] No, he didn’t get that from me. I think that was in the genes from his biological father and grandfather I think. And he turned out to be a very successful engineer, and, I was very proud of what he had achieved, and for that matter what Janet had achieved in her life so far. And, and I think Barnes Wallis, who had presented him to Christ’s Hospital to... I think would be, I’m sure was proud. He had to write letters to Barnes Wallis every now and then, and Barnes Wallis would have been very very pleased that the result of all this was that Paul himself became an engineer. And what’s more, his two sons became engineers, they also studied engineering in Cambridge.
Why do you think Barnes Wallis actually decided to support him?
Well, I imagine because of the sad situation which had arisen with Noel being killed and the son’s changing situation. And that’s what... And, I mean that’s, that’s what governors tend to do, they select what they consider to be deserving cases, and, you know, Steve was at that time, I mean we weren’t married and she was trying to look after her two children and earn a living at the same time.
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Mm.
So...
[24:40]
Could you give me an idea of what sort of, I guess, activities would be family activities for you in 1960, as a rough date?
In the 19... Yes. [pause] Well, well the thing that I suppose sticks in my mind more than anything was, I think, were the holidays that we had, and many of them were abroad, you know, with, quite often combining going to conferences and, you know, taking the family at the same time. And, I went on sabbatical leave to America, and, they also came out, I think they came out later, and we had a very good time there, driving around and enjoying seeing places and so on. And, I remember Paul being considered rather cute by the Americans because he insisted, this was in summer, on wearing the long black stockings which Christ’s Hospital had insisted on as part of their uniform. They thought that was very funny. So, it’s really holidays which we enjoyed very much. And, then the other thing that we did was, I suppose this was a bit later on as they got a bit older, but we did have, we had holidays also in Cornwall, and we rented cottages in Rock, in North Cornwall, and went surfing, and we all enjoyed that very much.
[26:53] Are you one of those people who takes their work home with them, or do you leave it in the office?
No I’m afraid I take it home with me, yes, and there are periods when, you know, you have to work very very long hours I’m afraid, particularly if there are periods of exciting research that need to be done. Or, not need to be done, but are being done, you know. And then, then you can’t get the thing out of your mind.
Why?
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Well, I mean if there’s an exciting problem which you want to solve, it tends to, it tends to be with you and you have to try and, you know, you try and solve it. I mean that’s one’s natural curiosity if you like. And, well that’s what you do as a scientist, I mean, you know, there’s a problem, there’s a chink of light, and, ah, you know, maybe it is the answer. And then you sit down and try and work the thing out. And, it’s very difficult to leave it alone at that stage.
Can you think of any other, any particular problems that have engaged you in that way?
Well, I mean, look, there have been lots of problems like this, not particular ones. I mean, that goes on all the time to be honest. You know, if there is any... Well, well I mean particularly during the period when we had made our breakthrough of actually seeing defects in crystals, there were so many things which were cropping up at the time that, it was so exciting that you had to, you spend all your time doing it.
It’s interesting you use the word, there was research that needed to be doing. The first... Yes, and you noticed that as well, it’s... Did you...
Well, it was... Yeah, I think that, I, that’s not really what I meant. I mean, what I meant was, I mean, there was this, a particular research problem would come up, and then it was clear that lots, you know, what has to be done now in order to, to try and solve the problem, and that occupied one’s mind, you know, all the time, and, particularly if you, you had to sit down and work something out, maybe mathematically or, so on.
[29:40] Having touched on I guess family life, shall we return to your research for a little while?
Yes. Well, after my PhD, I was offered support by the National Coal Board to carry out research on the structure of coal using X-ray methods. And, whenever I said that to anybody, you know, it always caused people to laugh, to think that, work on the
Peter Hirsch Page 64 C1379/84 Track 5 structure of coal. And it was a curious situation, and you could see how it arose. At the time, the scientific member of the Coal Board, and this was around 1950, was Sir Charles Ellis, who was a famous nuclear physicist who had worked with Rutherford and Chadwick in Cambridge, and, they had written a very famous book, Rutherford, Chadwick and Ellis, that one was brought up on, I don’t know whether you would know, or maybe you never did physics, did you?
No, not beyond a certain level.
No. Anyway, he, he was a scientific member of the Coal Board, and he decided that a basic understanding of the structure of coal was needed. And, I think the idea behind it was that, the idea that all you can do with coal is to burn it, seemed very silly, and there must be other ways of exploiting this lovely black stuff, I suppose to make chemicals for example, I think that was the idea behind it. But, you see, you can see how it arose, because, Charles Ellis had been in the Cavendish, so obviously he turned to the Cavendish for help. And, he suggested this to Bragg, that, one, perhaps one could look at the structure of coal by means of X-rays, and Bragg then offered me this opportunity. And I accepted it for two reasons. One is, because of the intrinsic interest in trying to get as much information out of the diffraction patterns of nearly amorphous materials, which is what they were, and partly because it enabled me to stay on in the Cavendish and keep in touch and interact with Peter Gay and Tony Kelly, who were continuing the microbeam work on the four metals which we had started.
Mm.
[32:54] And, one interesting thing is that, during this period, we came into contact with Rosalind Franklin.
I’m going to ask, who?
Rosalind Franklin, who had carried out the seminal X-ray diffraction work on proteins during this time, and you know, there has been this, this competition, or there was this
Peter Hirsch Page 65 C1379/84 Track 5 competition between the lab at King’s College London, in which Rosalind Franklin worked as an X-ray crystallographer on proteins, and the people in the Cavendish, Crick and Watson, to try and determine the structure of DNA. And Rosalind Franklin was also working on the structure of DNA. And, well, I mean the story is very well known, that, they, you know, the Cambridge people did in fact get information on what Rosalind, or the diffraction patterns which Rosalind had obtained, and... Anyway, I won’t go into that now.
Could you describe what she was actually like to me when you knew her?
Oh very formidable. She was a very formidable lady. I mean, intellectually, very very strong, that was quite clear. And what is more, what Crick and Watson didn’t realise in dismissing her as a, almost as an upstart, was, she had already made, or got, her reputation as an X-ray crystallographer by working on graphitic carbons, on X-ray diffraction patterns from graphitic carbons, during a spell of some years in Paris with somebody called Professor Méring. And, so she was already an established X-ray crystallographer of high reputation before she started her work on DNA, and, Crick and Watson seemed to have overlooked it completely. Well what happened was that, Rosalind Franklin would... Well she had... Yah, I, I have a recollection that she had rather penetrating eyes somehow, and she was fairly severe looking, but she was a very very nice person. And she came to the Cavendish, I don’t know how frequently, but essentially to discuss the DNA work with Perutz and his group, and during those visits, sometimes she would come and see me to advise me on the work that I was doing on the structure of coal, because, I, I mean X-ray diffraction patterns of coal, there’s some relationship between that and the graphitic carbons which she had worked on. And she had also worked at some stage with the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, BCURA as it was called, with which I also had links. Anyway, she was very helpful.
In what sort of ways?
[37:00] Well, about interpretation of X-ray patterns of amorphous materials. And, anyway, what happened was that I... So we, we did, we got X-ray patterns from a whole series
Peter Hirsch Page 66 C1379/84 Track 5 of coals of different types, and, it led to a number of publications, but... And I also had an outstanding research student, Robert Diamond, who incidentally subsequently joined Perutz’s group to work on X-ray diffraction of proteins. And he had done an excellent study of X-ray scattering from carbonised coals, which is one of the things that we also went on to.
What made him a good student, from your point of view as a supervisor?
Oh, he, he was... Well he was highly original, and, he developed a matrix method for interpreting the X-ray patterns, which was quite new at that time. So he, he was very very good. And, I also established a link with somebody called Ken Brown, who was in physical chemistry, to do some infrared work on these coals, because, it seemed to me that the really interesting bit was the chemistry. I mean if you think about coal as a sort of simple picture of layers of graphite, or very small particles of graphite, but, of which there was, you know, various layers of what people would now call graphene, I suppose, single layers, which were, which were not stacked properly in a three-dimensional structure of graphite, but, the stacking was more random, what’s called turbostratic. But the really interesting thing as far as I was concerned was, I mean, what was round the edges of it, the interaction between hydrogen atoms and so on, because, I mean coal isn’t just carbon. And, so, we thought that, we might be able to get some useful information [from] infrared.
Mm.
[39:38] Anyway, during this period, I also remained in touch with the work on cold worked metals, and then in 1953 I got an ICI fellowship, this was three years after I got my PhD, which gave me more freedom to pursue further work on cold worked metals and the structure of coal. And, the work on coal was supported by the National Coal Board till the mid-Fifties. My last research student was somebody called Louis Cartz. But when he had finished, I left the field of coal research and concentrated on the study of cold worked metals. And it appeared to me that this wasn’t the way to make any progress on, on coals, and this was really a job for the chemists to do. So I left the field. And then I concentrated on the study of cold worked metals.
Peter Hirsch Page 67 C1379/84 Track 5
How did you get the ICI fellowship?
Well you applied for it. And, it’s, you know, it’s competitive, you make a case that you’re very good at research and so on, you know, the usual, usual thing. And, you have a list of papers, this is how the thing works. And, well you have to have, I mean the main thing is, get referees which will support you. Anyway, I did get this ICI fellowship, which I think lasted for three years. And... Anyway, I mean the thing, really... Then that leads to the study of crystal defects by electron microscopy, and the development of the diffraction contrast technique.
Shall we take a short pause?
[End of Track 5]
Peter Hirsch Page 68 C1379/84 Track 6
[Track 6]
I was wondering, you’ve mentioned Tony Kelly and, Gay?
Yes.
When did they arrive on the scene?
[pause] Peter Gay joined us around, I think it must have been, 1940... was it 1947 or 8, I think. [pause] And Tony Kelly... [pause] I think, the first one who joined us I think was John Thorp, who must have joined us around, 1947, ’47. And Peter Gay I think joined the microbeam group, I think in 1948, and Tony Kelly I think joined the group in 1950. I can check up on that, OK. Yes, he joined, Tony Kelly joined the group I think just after I finished my PhD. And, and he and Peter Gay then applied the technique to other, other materials other than aluminium, which was what I had started, Noel and I had started.
Is this the X-ray microbeam technique?
Yes.
Right.
Yes. And, what they found when they looked at copper and, gold I think, was that the, it was difficult to get spotty rings, because the subgrains were getting rather small, you know, too small. They [the original grains] were still broke up into subgrains. And so in particular for beaten gold foil the separate spots couldn’t be resolved on the spotty [diffraction] rings with the technique as it was available, where the spot size couldn’t be reduced to more, to less than a few microns. And, so the exposure times were very long by this X-ray technique and more than ten hours, and the technique was limited to cases where the particle size exceeded about a micron. But, at this time, we had already, this was in the early 1950s, we had already become aware of the possibility of using intense electron beams of small diameter in electron microscopes, and, somebody called Heidenreich at Bell Telephone Labs, as it was in
Peter Hirsch Page 69 C1379/84 Track 6 those days, had published transmission electron micrographs of electrolytically thinned specimens of beaten aluminium foil, and the results were published in 1949 and 1951. And he found by transmission through thin foils that the substructure of beaten aluminium consisted of subgrains about two microns in diameter, which was in good agreement with the X-ray microbeam work that we had carried out, and published at about the same time, or slightly later actually than this 1949 paper. [05:10] So these were in agreement. But, whereas we sweated like anything and had enormous long... to build the apparatus and then we had these exposure times of ten hours, minimum of ten hours, you got these pictures of aluminium foil showing the subgrains in ten seconds in the electron microscope. And, and that really in a sense depressed me and spurred me on. [laughs] And, we... So what Tony Kelly and I asked Jim Menter, who was working as a research student at the time in Bowden’s, Professor Bowden’s lab, called the Physics and Chemistry of Rubbing Solids, which was actually at that time part of the physical chemistry lab, they had an electron microscope which was suitable for taking electron diffraction patterns from small areas in an electron microscope, and it was a Metro-Vickers EM3 microscope which they had in that laboratory. And you note that whereas Heidenreich had done transmission micrographs, OK, microscopy, through thin foils, what we were looking for is small electron beams, small diameter, through thin foils, to enable us to do the diffraction patterns, because we had come from the diffraction pattern, OK, [laughs] the side of it, so we stuck to getting diffraction patterns with the smaller beams through thinner foils. And indeed, it worked in that spotty diffraction rings were obtained from beaten gold foil, and the results are published in a paper, which I’ve actually got here, which is called The Structure of Cold Worked Metals... sorry, The Structure of Cold Worked Gold I. And it’s all about the diffraction patterns from beaten gold foil. And, now Jim Menter was interested in using the electron microscope for electron microscopy, and he suggested that we should take electron micrographs of these specimens, and, they were taken, and they showed rather complicated structures. And the interpretation of these pictures, these micrographs, were to be subject of part two of this paper, it would have been called, you know, The Structure of Cold Worked Gold II, and it would be concerned with the micrographs. And, anyway, that paper was never published.
Peter Hirsch Page 70 C1379/84 Track 6
Why?
Ah. Because, it was the interpretation of that micrograph, or those micrographs, which we had got from beaten gold foil, which led us to the idea that you could actually see individual dislocations by electron microscopy.
Mm.
And the idea was that... Well I should explain that, Heidenreich had produced electron micrographs of beaten aluminium, or cold worked aluminium, and he saw beautiful subgrains, but not individual dislocations. At least he said he hadn’t observed any individual dislocations. That’s a significant statement, because with hindsight, if you go and look at his pictures, you can actually see evidence for it, but he had missed it.
[09:53] What is a dislocation, for the benefit of someone who doesn’t know?
Well, yes, what is a dislocation? Well if you think about the deformation of a metal, you know, you take a bar of aluminium, say, and you bend it plastically, OK, you know, you get plastic deformation, you bend it and you know, that’s a very common, common thing that occurs with metals, that you can deform them plastically. If you deform elastically, they come back, OK, but if you deform them plastically, then you get a permanent set. Now how does this plastic deformation occur? And, it occurs by the slipping over of planes of atoms over each other like in a stack of cards, if you imagine, you can change the shape of a stack of cards by just making the individual cards slide over each other and then you get an elongated thing, OK. And... But, in a metal, the way that sliding process actually occurs, it doesn’t occur by the card if you like, or the plane of atoms, sliding over the next one rigidly, but, it goes one atom line at a time, or one atomic plane at a time, and when the slip is sort of halfway, or has slipped, say the part on the left has slipped but the part on the right hasn’t slipped, then, you can imagine there must be an extra plane of atoms which is left there in the middle. And that thing is called a dislocation, OK. It’s the boundary between the part which has slipped and the part which hasn’t slipped. And that’s an atomic defect, a
Peter Hirsch Page 71 C1379/84 Track 6 line defect. And it has a strain field associated with it, as you can imagine. The simplest thing to think about is a type of dislocation in which, it just, where the boundary between the part which has slipped and hasn’t slipped is actually just one extra half plane of atoms, normal to the plane on which it slips. That’s called an edge dislocation, OK.
Mm.
And there are other dislocations, screw dislocations and, various other, and dislocations with mixed characters. And then what you have to imagine is that, when plastic deformation occurs, what happens is that this defect actually moves, OK, [RESTRICTED FROM PUBLIC ACCESS INDEFINITELY 13:02 – 13:29] [(additional text provided by interviewee) for an edge dislocation the movement is somewhat similar to that of a ruck in a carpet. If you form a ruck on one side of a rectangular carpet by displacing the carpet edge by a distance “a”, and this moves through the carpet and out of the opposite side, the carpet has moved a distance “a” over the surface on which it lies. In the crystal the ruck is the edge dislocation, it is characterised by the displacement “a”, in the simplest case equivalent to an extra plane of atoms normal to the slip plane, and terminating at the dislocation. When the dislocation] has moved through the whole of the crystal and comes to the surface, then, for a dislocation which is characterised by one plane of atoms normal to the slip plane, that will have left one step on, you know, when it comes out of the crystal, it’s left one step, [of] one atom plane thick if you like, OK. And then you imagine, you have a whole lot of these doing it, and your, eventually your, your stack of cards will [laughs], you know, have been sliding over one another.
Mm.
So, that’s, that’s what a dislocation is, it’s an atomic defect which has got a characteristic strain field associated with it.
[14:20] Why were people actually interested in knowing about dislocations in the first...?
Peter Hirsch Page 72 C1379/84 Track 6
Because, people are interested in the properties of, of metals and other materials, when you work them. I mean, it is well known that if you took a, you know, if you worked a piece of metal, then it hardens. Why does it become harder to move? And that, the answer to that is... As you’ve deformed it, OK? And the answer to that must lay in the interaction and properties of these dislocations; as a result of the deformation, you’ve introduced a lot of them, and they must interact and it becomes more difficult to move them. And that increases the hardness and the strength of the material. So it’s a very important, for a practical point of view, I mean trying to understand the strength of metals is extremely important. And, and to understand the basis of it, you have to really understand what, how the dislocations move and interact and so on.
Mm. Was it an important topic at the time?
Absolutely. It was an absolutely important topic. Well, I think we’ve discussed this already in relation to the microbeam work, OK. You know, work hardening was a very important topic which needed solving, and, as I said, that Bragg had this very simple idea of the thing [crystals] breaking up into little subgrains, and then you have to ask the question, well how does that actually happen in the material, OK? And it does occur by the movement of dislocations, and then they can aggregate in some way, in such a way that it actually, different bits of the original crystal rotate relative to each other, and there’s a boundary between them consisting of dislocations. You can make up boundaries between crystals of different orientations by, small orientation differences by arrays of dislocations. You can draw yourself a diagram and you can see it, quite easily how that happens. So, you have to understand how the dislocations move and their properties. And, well at the time, there was of course, well there was a lot of work that had been done by the solid state physicists in, well working out the theory of dislocations, but the experimental evidence for them was somewhat limited. It was limited mainly to doing surface observations, because, dislocations coming to the surface are regions of strain, and if you now etch them in some suitable way you will get etch pits. And so you can see arrays etch pits which might tell you what the arrangement of the dislocations is within the material, but that tells you what it is at the surface, it doesn’t tell you what it is inside, and, in any case, it’s somewhat limited by the, by having the right kind of etching solutions available
Peter Hirsch Page 73 C1379/84 Track 6 and so on, and sometimes it doesn’t work. There were also other ways of looking at dislocations, and in the case of silicon, people got beautiful pictures of dislocations inside the crystal, because silicon is transparent in the infrared, and what they did was, they deformed the crystal very very slightly, and then, they introduced copper as an impurity in the material, and when you then heated it, the copper would segregate to the dislocations, because there was a region of strain and therefore the copper atoms could fit in there more easily than elsewhere, and actually relieve the strain and reduce the energy of the crystal as a whole. And the result of that was, little copper precipitates all along the dislocation. And that you could then see [them] by optical microscopy in the infrared. So there were these special things, OK, but, there was no general technique for looking at dislocations in crystals. And, so that, that was, there was an obvious need for that, development of a technique to do that. [19:54] And, now to revert back to this photograph of beaten gold foil. It showed certain bands of contrast along a particular direction, in crystallographic notations it’s (111) planes, but certain planes have certain directions, which you could determine by, you knew what the orientation of the crystal specimen that you were looking at, or the material that you were looking at, by the diffraction pattern, OK, and you could determine the directions along which these, these bands occurred. And one could link that to certain streaks which occurred in the diffraction patterns. The spots in beaten gold foil were characterised not only by being broadened, but also [by] a streaking in certain directions. And these streaks were interpreted as rising from what are called deformation stacking faults. If you can imagine that perfect gold consists of planes of atoms which are close packed, they are, if you think, you, if you make up planes of table tennis balls, OK, and ten try and stack them over one another, then if you stack them in a certain way, you can get a model of what, a crystal like aluminium or gold or whatever it is, OK, a face-centred cubic it’s called, close-packed anyway, what the structure would be. And now, it means that they have to be, to make up a perfect crystal, they are stacked in a certain way, but, you could stack them in an alternate way, there are alternate ways of stacking it, and those are called stacking faults. And when they occur, they give rise to streaks in the diffraction patterns. And, the theory of... While we were, while I was in the Cavendish, there was a chap called Mervyn Paterson, who was a geologist, who had come to work in Orowan’s Metal Physics Group in the early 1950s, and he was working on the deformation of alpha brass, and
Peter Hirsch Page 74 C1379/84 Track 6 found evidence for stacking faults in his diffraction patterns, he was doing X-ray work, and he worked out the, the nature of the, of the pattern that you would get from, from, the effects of these stacking faults, these deformation stacking faults. And, the main thing about that is that if you, the physics of it is, that if you think about a beam of X-rays or electrons passing through the crystal, and it meets one of these stacking faults, the diffracted beam, the beam that’s diffracted by the perfect crystal, hits this stacking fault, and it suffers a phase change, because of the shift of the atomic plane relative to its perfect position. And, I, that set me thinking, and I wondered whether in fact the contrast that you got in electron micrographs from beaten gold foil was actually simply due to the fact that these were stacking faults. It all worked together, I mean there were the streaks in the diffraction patterns, and the idea that you would get a phase shift when the electron beam passes through this, this stacking fault would cause a phase shift, and that will change the intensity of the beam at the bottom of the crystal when it comes out. And, so, that was my idea of the contrast from the stacking faults, what I thought were stacking faults in beaten gold foil. [25:05] And, but then there was the next step in the argument, and that was that, in a famous conference in 1947 in Bristol, Heidenreich and Shockley wrote a rather important paper showing that in face-centred cubic metals the dislocations which we’ve talked about, are actually dissociated into what are called partial dislocations. The structure is such that, I talked about an extra plane in the atom, in the structure, terminating at the dislocation, but the structure is such that in face-centred cubic metals you should consider this extra half plane as being, consisting of two half plane, two planes, because the structure is more complicated and consists of two planes which are shifted relative to each other. And, the idea that Heidenreich and Shockley came up with was that, the energy of the dislocation could be reduced by these partial dislocations moving apart. You can imagine when that happens that, the dislocation associated with each partial dislocation has lower energy than the dislocation when they’re together, simply because the displacements are smaller than they are when they are together, OK, and you know, the strain field will be less, and therefore, there’s a repulsion between these partial dislocations, but when they move apart, they will leave a fault on the slip plane, OK. So, and that has energy. So, there will be some equilibrium distance at, well because the force between the partial dislocations falls off as one of a [over the] distance [between them], in other words, the strain fields fall
Peter Hirsch Page 75 C1379/84 Track 6 off, the interaction falls off. And that you balance by the energy of the stacking fault ribbon. Anyway, the point of all this is that, I had in mind that, that I thought that those bands of contrast in beaten gold foils were due to stacking faults and this change of phase, OK, and therefore, you know, you could quite easily see it in the micrograph. And now the idea was, ah, well a dislocation in a phase-centred cubic metals has dissociated and has got a little stacking fault in it, and you ought to be able to be able to see the dislocation as a result of the phase change as the beam goes through that stacking fault. That was the idea, OK?
Mhm.
So, I therefore started in 1954 a project to try and observe dislocations directly in the electron microscope as a result of this proposed contrast mechanism. I should also explain that when you, when you looked at the bands of contrast in beaten gold foil, that I deduced to be due to stacking fault, surmised they were due to stacking fault because of diffraction evidence, it suggested that the actual thickness of the specimens, you weren’t, you know, you weren’t sure what the thickness of the specimen is that you produced, you just hoped that by thinning the specimen down, you would get thin enough areas for electrons to go through, but that the thickness of the specimens would be as much as 1,000 angstroms, OK, or 100 nanometres. And, there was an electron microscopy section in the Cavendish at the time, and they were very sceptical of all this, that you could actually get good images from such thick foils.
Why were they so sceptical?
Because, they had worked on amorphous material, on, they had worked on sputtered, not amorphous but, sputtered, polycrystalline materials, OK, and their evidence was that, you know, you would only get penetration through foils of this, or maybe, you know, 100 angstroms, or something like that. So, yes, you know, these were evaporated or sputtered specimens. But, I had worked on the Borrmann effect in X- rays which, the Borrmann effect in X-rays was anomalous transmission in certain orientations, OK, and I thought, ah, well, maybe this, this explains why you can get, you could get with electrons a similar effect, or rather, this kind of effect might also
Peter Hirsch Page 76 C1379/84 Track 6 apply for electron diffraction from single crystals, in certain orientations you might be able to get through thicker crystals. So, there we are. I mean I... So that was the idea of the project. And in 1954, when I was still on that ICI fellowship, Nevill Mott became Cavendish Professor, and, this changed the future prospects completely, and he gave me much support for this project, because he was interested in dislocations and, and he arranged money from the Ministry of Supply for me to work on research on plastic deformation.
What sort of chap was Mott to meet?
Ah well he was fantastic. I mean he was, well very approachable, and, very stimulating, he had, always had lots of ideas. The only trouble was, once we got going, every time we met or ran into each other in the corridor he said, ‘What’s new?’ And, you know, that got a bit embarrassing because I didn’t get anything new every day, so, but still. Anyway, it was marvellous to have his support throughout the period from ’54 onwards. [32:30] Well, I then was very lucky in recruiting a research student, Mike Whelan, in 1954, to work on this project of seeing individual dislocations by transmission electron microscopy, and, but, it struck me that the structure of beaten gold foil was so complicated that it would be much better to start experiments on rather simpler material like aluminium, like Heidenreich had done at Bell Telephone, and perhaps annealed aluminium where we could, or partially annealed aluminium, where we might be able to see individual dislocations. And, now we didn’t have an electron microscope, we had to use a microscope in the Electron Microscopy Group which was headed by Cosslett at that time. And... Now it so happened that in 1954, Cosslett’s Electron Microscopy Group in the Cavendish acquired a new generation electron microscope made by Siemens which had a double condenser lens that enabled you to get very intense beams and very fine beams. And that was a new generation electron microscope, and that arrived just at the right time. And, anyway, what happened was that Mike Whelan started to research, and in, I think it was 19... Let me just think. [pause] I think I’ve got the date somewhere. In October 1955 he actually got... I should explain that he could, he used the microscope under the supervision of somebody called Bob Horne, and, Bob Horne was a very brilliant electron
Peter Hirsch Page 77 C1379/84 Track 6 microscopist, but he was interested in biological materials, but he had the responsibility for operating that electron microscope. And, anyway, in 1955, Mike Whelan had already seen arrays of dots along boundaries in thinned aluminium foil. These aluminium foils were produced by etching by him, OK, I mean you had to get foils which were thin enough, and a lot of time was spent in developing techniques for thinning these materials. And, anyway, he had seen these dots in the, in the electron micrographs, and we wondered whether they were in fact dislocations, and their spacing was such that, the spacing between the dots, that, if they were dislocations, they were, the spacing was consistent with the misorientation between one subgrain and the next across this boundary by use of a, when you used, or checked with a formula which had been derived by Charles Frank on misorientations across a boundary consisting of dislocations. However, our trouble was, we were, we had this background of crystallography, and, we were worried whether in fact these spots could be due to some sort of moiré effect. If you imagine you have two crystals overlapping each other slightly, you’re looking down there, you know, and there’s a boundary which is at some angle, and so you look through the crystal, or through a region of the specimen which goes through both crystals. And then it turns out that you could get diffraction effects from both crystals, then that gives rise, or could give rise to a moiré pattern if they’re slightly, if there’s slight disorientations. And as luck would have it, you know, the spacing of these spots would be the same as you would get from Franks’ formula for dislocations. Now that... OK. So, that held us back, OK. [laughs] And there was another thing that held us back. The Siemens microscope was, had a peculiarity. It had this double condenser lens, but, it was designed for biologists and not for materials scientists like us who were interested in diffraction patterns, and if you wanted to switch from microscopy to diffraction, and I was always insistent on getting a diffraction pattern from any area that we looked at and got, you know, a micrograph, that you had to switch from one to the other, and under those conditions you couldn’t use the double condenser lens. [laughs] Anyway, on one occasion Bob Horne operated the microscope in a different mode in which in fact he did use the double condenser lens, and you couldn’t take diffraction patterns, and so you got a very fine spot on the specimen, and then you, he took out the condenser aperture, and what that meant was, you blasted the specimen with an enormous number of electrons, OK. The result was, all these little spots started moving. And that was the breakthrough, because that meant they were all
Peter Hirsch Page 78 C1379/84 Track 6 dislocations, they were not diffraction effects, these were all dislocations which were moving. And that started the whole thing going. So it was... [laughs]
[39:48] What do you actually see them moving on?
Well they...
What’s the output of the electron microscope I guess?
A fluorescent screen. In those days there was a fluorescent screen, that’s where you saw the image, OK, so the electrons hit the screen and that, you get light out, OK. That’s... And you could then remove the fluorescent screen, and then there was the photographic film underneath, so you could get stills. But what we did is, we borrowed a camera from the National Physical Laboratory which we put outside the window, one of the windows of the Siemens microscope, OK, Mike Whelan organised all this, and, and took cine pictures of these moving dislocations. So what you actually saw was the plastic deformation of this material under the stresses which were operating in the microscope and the dislocations were moving around. And then there was another bit of luck, and that was, it so turned out that when they moved they left traces where they had moved, or the way they had moved. And that was due to the fact that, the vacuum wasn’t very good in the microscope, and what you got is, as you looked at the specimen, you got carbon films building up on the surfaces, and these carbon films exerted stresses, differential stresses between the carbon films and the metal underneath, and that, well it had two effects, it, a) you got stresses, but the other thing was, that the dislocations couldn’t actually escape through the surface. So, what they did is, they simply went to the surface and then they, they went along but they, the result was, they left something just below the surface, like a dislocation at the surface, and that gave rise to traces, slip traces. And some of these dislocations moved so fast you couldn’t actually see their movement but you could see the result which they left. Some dislocations moved very slowly, so you saw it in real time, OK. And, well there we go, I mean after that it, everything sort of, [laughs] fell out. It was, it was a marvellous moment. And it was a eureka moment, you know, I mean we, we, it was quite clear we now had a technique which enabled you to see the
Peter Hirsch Page 79 C1379/84 Track 6 dislocations directly without etching or doing anything else, just by transmission electron microscopy; all you had to do was to get nice polishing techniques. We showed these pictures to Nevill Mott, and, you know, the moving dislocations, and also G I Taylor, who was a very famous engineer, who actually was one of the originators of the idea of crystal dislocations in 1934, and he was still around. He was a terrific, great man. I mean, I mean he worked on plastic deformation, and he invented the concept of dislocations, producing the plastic deformation. I should explain, that concept was developed by G I Taylor and by Orowan and Polanyi at the same time, quite independently. And... [44:05] But G I Taylor was a great man, I mean we... We actually, when we set up our Electron Microscopy Group, we moved into his old experimental room in the Old Cavendish, which was full of sea anchors. Because one of the things that he did, he also developed a sea anchor which, when, which digs into the sea bed, so that it, you know, it doesn’t drift. And that’s used, I mean it’s, of general use. He was, oh it’s unbelievable what he did as an engineer.
What was Taylor’s reaction when you showed him the picture?
Oh he was, he was tickled pink, [laughs] I mean he really was incredibly pleased. And, you know, and then, although the existence of dislocations had been established in many materials from, as I say, from observations of preferential etching and various other things, growth spirals and so on, to actually see movement or motion of dislocations helped to convince a lot of people of the reality of these defects, and that they weren’t just a figment of imagination of the solid state physicists. And, oh there were a number of quite senior metallurgists at the time who were very sceptical of dislocations. And the other thing also was that, on the other hand... I mean any, as far as the people were concerned who believed in dislocations as the solid state physicists, they managed to explain every conceivable mechanical property by, by some dislocation mechanism. And there’s a very famous quote which I will quote for you. In 1954 there was a book published by W T Reed in America called Dislocations in Crystals, and, in his book, W T Reed said, ‘It became the fashion to invent a dislocation theory of almost every experimental result in plastic deformation. Finally it became apparent that dislocations could explain not only any result, but
Peter Hirsch Page 80 C1379/84 Track 6 virtually any conceivable result, usually in different ways.’ [laughs] So you could see what was needed was a generally available technique, for various, you know, various types of metals and so on, which could be used to actually find out what on earth was going on.
How did you feel when you first observed dislocation?
Oh, fantastically excited. We were terrifically excited. And, oh it, well it was a eureka moment for all of us, you know.
Do you remember where you were when the eureka moment happened?
Well I, yes, I actually didn’t... It was Mike Whelan and Bob Horne who saw it first, and then Mike came up to see me and, you know, I must have been in my office, and said, ‘Come and have a look at moving dislocations,’ which is what I did, immediately. And it was incredibly exciting. But we had... I mean from it, I mean came all sorts of, I mean, you know, we developed the technique and so on, and I can tell you a little bit about that in a minute. [48:10] But I should say that we were incredibly lucky, really incredibly lucky. If you go back and think, well, what was this brilliant idea that I had [laughs], why you should see dislocations because of this stacking fault business? OK, you saw stacking faults, and the dislocation in face-centred cubic metals were dissociated, and you would see it through the contrast from the stacking fault. Well we looked at aluminium first, OK, and in aluminium, it transpired that the width of dissociation was so small that it was totally negligible. And the reason why we saw the dislocations had nothing to do with that; the reason was the strain field, and I mean by, when we worked out the image contrast theory, it became perfectly obvious why, and you can see why, if you imagine, you have a, an extra plane in the crystal which is terminating, and you think about the other planes around it at, where that extra plane ends, they are bent. OK? And now, if you think about a Bragg diffraction, Bragg diffraction of X-rays or electrons or whatever happens at a particular angle, well that little area is misoriented, OK? So if you imagine... Well the result of that is, you either don’t see anything in that area, if you shoot the electron beams down there, or, if you misorientated the
Peter Hirsch Page 81 C1379/84 Track 6 crystal slightly so that it doesn’t get diffraction from the perfect part of the crystal, you can get diffraction from the part which has been bent in the right orientation. So, the reason why we saw it was because of that, because it was the nature of the strain field, OK. So we were very lucky that actually, the mechanism... The mechanism that I had postulated was right, OK, and in fact, it was later, you know, we, we demonstrated it for materials in which you got wide stacking faults, OK. It was right, but not relevant. And the other thing which wasn’t relevant also was, I was worried about, you know, transmission of electrons, you had to have anomalous transmission, and in fact that turned out to be unnecessary too. It wasn’t relevant in those early experiments. The Borrmann effect, or the anomalous transmission effect, did, does in fact occur, and it is very important, but it wasn’t relevant in these first experiments. So it was, you know, just luck really, there we go. But...
Mm.
[51:15] It was very exciting, and I remember showing the movies which we had made of aluminium, and also of stainless steel, I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I remember giving a lecture at MIT, and there was a very distinguished X-ray crystallographer there called Bert Warren, and he, having seen it, he said that he was now convinced, and that was very nice to hear, from an eminent chap like him. So there you go.
[51:50] What do you actually see on these films? Could you describe, you know, to someone who’s never seen them. What does the picture look like as it changes?
Well I can tell you something. I mean they actually, those films were made in 1956, and they do seem to have a rather long shelf life, because, I don’t know whether, there was a chap called Miodownik who ran a series of programmes this year in, first in February, and actually one of them, I think they were repeated only about a month ago or so, in which in fact they showed some of the motion. Well what you see is, if your dislocation line lies in the plane, or more or less in the plane of the specimen, OK, then you can see it bulge out, and that just means that the area of material which has slipped has increased as the boundary increases. So you can see it moving quite
Peter Hirsch Page 82 C1379/84 Track 6 slowly. And on the other hand, there are cases where, imagine you have a dislocation which is inclined in the specimen, you can see the way it moves, whether it moves in straight lines or whether in fact it moves round corners and so on. And, we observed many cases of cross-slip, it’s called cross-slip where the dislocation crosses, slips from one plane to another. There were a number of mechanisms which the solid state physicists said derived, OK, which we saw immediately, I mean, you know. And... But then, we also, it turned out that, just at the time at which in fact we had done this work, there was somebody called Bollmann at, in Geneva, quite independently, he was at the Battelle Institute in Geneva, and he had worked on a project of improving austenitic stainless steel, and somebody, the head of his metallurgy section had suggested to him that it might be possible to see dislocations directly by this technique, OK. That was if you like a guess, but he didn’t have any mechanism for it. But what Bollmann did, he developed a very successful electropolishing technique for producing the specimens of thin foils of stainless steel, and he made TEM observations, transmission electron microscope observations, of these foils of austenitic steel, and he saw a series of short lines in the microscope and wondered about their origin, whether there were surface artefacts or... But eventually, he interpreted them as dislocations crossing the foil, although they never moved in his case. And that had to do with the nature of the microscope, he was operating a different type of microscope, a Philips microscope, which [in] fact didn’t have the double condenser lens which the Siemens had, so he never got the very high stresses. And, and he also, he attributed the contrast to changes in lattice parameter around the dislocation, which is not, which wasn’t correct. And, anyway, it was rather a strange coincidence that his paper was received by the Physical Review, it was a short paper in Physical Review, published in July 1956, and ours was published in Philosophical Magazine in, [looking through material], well I think just before that time. [pause] Yes, it was, it was written up for publication, it was received on June, June 25th, and, I should explain that, that Bollmann’s paper was received by Physical Review on July the 5th. So, you know... And, anyway, it was a very strange coincidence. [57:10] Anyway, we collaborated, we, we won’t go into details with this, but we, we met, he was met, we met him at a conference in Reading in July, and decided to have a, a collaboration, and he gave us some stainless steel specimens and he also spent some time in the lab. And we made a film of the movement of dislocation in stainless steel.
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And, it was very interesting to see how different the motion was of dislocations in stainless steel from what they were in aluminium. And in stainless what you saw was dislocations moving strictly along tramlines. They never slipped out of their original slip planes, and you could see... You asked me, you know, what do you see. Well in the stainless steel film, you can actually see dislocations moving one behind the other, and pushing the one at the front along, simply because of repulsion between dislocations of the same type. And, so, in many ways the movement of dislocations in stainless steel was much easier to interpret. You also saw the actual dissociation of these dislocations into partials, and you saw all these beautiful images of contrast from the stacking faults, which, you know, we had predicted. And, under the peculiar stresses in the microscope, you don’t get an equilibrium situation, you actually, the stresses can operate in such a way as, they actually separate the partial dislocation, so you generated large, large areas of stacking faults, which is in fact a method of getting these deformation stacking faults formed when you plastically deform these materials. And, so you had the situation, you know, immediately, you know, by these two films, two crystal structures, two metals with the same crystal structure, both close-packed, face-centred cubic, but behaving, the dislocations behaving totally different, and the mechanical properties are totally different of course, aluminium and stainless steel, OK. And, and you, you could see that it had, obviously it had something to do with this business of the stacking fault energy, that in stainless steel the stacking fault energy was lower so you could get these wide stacking faults, and on the other, and also, once you get the thing dissociated, then it has difficulty in moving from one plane to another. The only way to move from one plane to another for the partial dislocations to come together again, at least that’s, that’s, that’s an easy of describing it, let’s put it this way, whereas in aluminium, the dislocations are more like lines, and there are certain dislocations called screw dislocations, which, if they’re not confined to a particular slip plane can keep on going, zigzagging around, and they can zigzag around obstacles. And so the work hardening will be, you know, much less, so you, you have a softer material. And, and also, we learnt a hell of a lot from, from studies, and Mike Whelan did detailed experiments on the nature of the, the structures of deformed stainless steel showing all the form of dissociations where it’s quite complicated, which in fact you can observe. [1:01:28]
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And, well, I mean, there you are, it was a terribly exciting period, because, there was so much to do, and so many opportunities, and, we, we got ourselves our own microscopes, and then, you know, the, the main thrust of the research then proceeded along three lines: the development of the theory of image contrast from the defects, really understanding what was going on, and why you saw them; and then the application of the technique to study the nature and interaction and distribution of defects, introduced in various ways; and then, the correlation with bulk mechanical and other properties measured on macroscopic samples. And, anyway, there we are. I can talk about that maybe on another occasion. Is this about right?
This is, this is good with me.
Yes, OK.
[1:02:40] One final question though if I may.
Yes.
I was just wondering, in your own career, how important is this, the observation of dislocations?
Well it’s my most important piece of work that I ever did, there’s no question about that.
Why do you say that?
Well it is. I mean it... [laughs] It was a breakthrough, that’s the point. It’s... It meant that, suddenly, the world, you could see inside the material, and you saw all these defects in, in great detail, their interaction and so on. And, it changed the nature of the, the research in this field of deformation of metals, from one of theory to, it became an experimental subject. [pause] You asked me what effect has it had on me? Well, I mean it’s, it’s, it’s sort of, been my life’s work if you like, having had the luck and fortune of, you know, of being in the development of this technique, which is
Peter Hirsch Page 85 C1379/84 Track 6 very very, very powerful. The one thing you can’t... Are you still recording? Oh. [laughs] Well, the one thing that you couldn’t do with it at the time was to actually look at the core structure of the dislocation, the atomic structure, because the resolution of the microscope wasn’t good enough. The way you imaged it was by the strain field, and the strain field, you know, extends over larger distances, OK. So the one thing that you couldn’t do is to determine the actual atomic structure around the core. Jim Menter, whom I mentioned before, working in Bowden’s group, his subject, or his topic, was in fact to attempt to see the atomic structure of dislocations in the microscope, and he succeeded in doing it with the Siemens microscope on an organic material which had such a large lattice parameter that in fact, the resolution of that microscope, which was about, between ten and twenty angstroms at the time, was sufficient for him to be able to resolve the atomic planes. But it took many many, many years before the microscopes, the resolution of the microscopes, were improved to such an extent that you could actually see the core structure of the dislocations, OK, which, it can be done now. But, there are only certain situations in which you can do it, when for example, if you have a dislocation running straight down and you look down at it, and you see the atomic planes around it, but that, it’s a projection, and if in fact the dislocation is not aligned properly, then you’ve had it. And for any complicated dislocation structure, whether, a curved dislocation or anything like that, that’s an impossible technique to use. But, you can determine the geometry of it by this technique which we developed, which is now, you know, it’s commonly used throughout the world.
Good. Thank you very much. Do you ever, like, think it’s amazing that you can actually look at what’s happening inside a material as it’s happening?
Yes. Well, you know, you can, there is this, the series of programmes by Miodownik at King’s College, who, who actually, well he interviewed me, OK, I mean he had three programmes, one on the deformation of metals, one on ceramics, and one I think on polymers, OK, and in the one on metals, he actually shows a clip of the dislocation film. That’s why I say, the shelf life of this, of this film, seems to be rather long. [laughs] And, and there it is, they were shown in, I think it was February or March, and then it was shown again a few weeks ago. So maybe you can, you can dig it up from the BBC. It was on BBC4 I think it was.
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[Track 7]
Peter, I guess you’ve discussed quite a few colleagues and people you ran across over your time at Cambridge, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on one or two of them slightly. I’ve met Tony Kelly as an eighty-something-year-old. What was he like back in the 1950s?
Well he was very keen, he was a very keen research student, and, we, we collaborated quite well and easily on the [x-ray] microbeam work on spotty rings and, diffraction rings from deformed metals, and also on electron diffraction patterns from cold worked metals. And, he was a keen scientist with new ideas.
Mm. Are there any incidents in particular you remember working with him over?
No, not particularly. You’ve got to remember that, Tony Kelly arrived in 1950, when I had finished my PhD, and I had moved on to work on the structure of coal. So, we, there wasn’t an absolutely constant interaction with him all the time, because, I suppose most of my time was occupied with trying to understand diffraction patterns from coal.
Mm.
I can’t remember anything specific, really. It was by coincidence I think that he, he had also graduated from the University of Reading, just like Neol Kellar had earlier.
Mm. What was Peter Gay like?
Ah, well Peter Gay was a, he was a graduate of Cambridge, I think he had taken Part II Physics and joined the group. And he joined the group before Tony Kelly did, and he contributed to the building up of the microbeam technique facility. Whereas Tony Kelly’s contribution was really the application of it. And, yes, I should just, reverting back to Tony Kelly, I mean he, he also did, used the microbeam technique to study something different, namely, there was a phenomenon called Neumann bands in steels which he looked at and identified as twins, so there were small features in the, if you
Peter Hirsch Page 88 C1379/84 Track 7 looked at these alloys, these bands, and they were of a size that you could investigate by using a microbeam. Now, Peter Gay helped to complete the project of the rotating anode tube and, and, well the microbeam technique completely. And, he... Well, one of the very sad things about him was actually that he suffered from a stomach ulcer, and, he had to be on a milk diet all the time. And, he did actually, well, he... After... I can’t remember exactly what happened after he had finished his PhD. Incidentally we did collaborate on a number of projects using the microbeam technique, and also using this other thing that I was working on which was the concentrating monochromator and use of asymmetric reflections to... And there was a possibility of measuring the thickness of surface films, and we did in fact apply that and write a paper on that. But Peter Gay became what you might call a college man. I can’t remember whether he got a lectureship in mineralogy or, I can’t remember exactly what happened. It’s quite likely that that is what happened. But he became a fellow of Downing College and a tutor, and that’s where I think his main contribution was as a teacher and tutor and so on. But very sadly he died prematurely. He was a very nice man.
[05:30] Mm. The other person I was going to ask you about was G I Taylor. You mentioned...
Well I mean he was a great man, he was so incredible. He had worked on so many things, it was unbelievable. And, I mean if there had been such a thing as a Nobel Prize for engineering, he would have got it without any doubt whatsoever. He was totally brilliant at all the things that he, he had done. I think some of them were, [laughs] probably to the annoyance of various people. In those days if you wanted to get a big engineering job done, a piece of apparatus or whatever it was, the thing to do was to go to the workshops in the engineering laboratory. They were extremely well- equipped workshops, and, anything big, you, you know, you would ask them to do. That didn’t apply in our case to the making of the microbeam camera, which was done by the brilliant instrument maker in the crystallography lab, Charles Chapman. Anyway. [laughs] But one of the things that G I Taylor did, he more or less commandeered two lathes I think it was, or, I don’t know, perhaps apocryphal stories, in the engineering labs, and he did some experiment to determine the shear force
Peter Hirsch Page 89 C1379/84 Track 7 between two circular plates, and he did those experiments in the engineering lab, it was all to do with the predictions of the theory of, of viscosity and, you know, what you would expect as a function of speed of rotation and so on, that’s sort of one of the things. He was a... I mean I suppose hydrodynamics was his real field, and, somehow the plastic deformation of metals is, was a bit peripheral, although he did a hell of a lot of work on that in the 1930s. He was absolutely brilliant. I mentioned in particular the business about the sea anchors, which I’m sure were due to the fact he was a great sailor, and this is a phenomenon that he, dragging of anchors was a phenomenon that he, [laughs] annoyed him, so he dealt with it. And the reason why it was very much in my mind was, eventually, when, as I’ll tell you later, when we expanded, we acquired space in the Old Cavendish laboratory, and he had a big lab there which in fact we moved into. And that had also old equipment from G I Taylor, that’s a lab that he occupied, had occupied. And there was a wind tunnel there, and there were any number of anchors, which he had obviously experimented with. Oh he was a fabulous character. And I was very privileged, you know, to have the opportunity to show moving dislocations when he was still alive, and, you know, he got any number of medals. [laughs] And, yes, there was this, this occasion when I met him in the lift in the Austin Wing in the Cavendish Laboratory, just after he had got the Kelvin Medal of, I think that was probably from the mechanical engineers, it was a gold medal, one of the highest if not the highest medal that is given by the institution. I congratulated him and he said, ‘Oh yeah, well here it is, look. I’m just going upstairs to measure its density,’ [laughs] to make sure that it was really gold, solid gold. That was G I Taylor.
Is this the Taylor of Taylor instabilities, or is that a different Taylor?
Oh yes, absolutely, same bloke. Oh you know, you know that? Yeah yeah. Yah yah, oh yeah, you name it, he did it. [laughs] And... Yes, exactly. Well that, funny you should say that, because, that sort of phenomenon, phenomenon akin to that turned up in, in the study of dislocations actually. Similar sort of phenomenon, yes. Taylor instability. And, what’s more, you may be surprised to know it, I think it’s even of interest now to people who are trying to get streams of, of particles, of liquid drops, very recent research to, in which they try and get diffraction patterns from spot
Peter Hirsch Page 90 C1379/84 Track 7 drops... from, from little droplets. Anyway, yes, the same bloke as the Taylor instability. Right.
[11:01] You mentioned showing the films of dislocations happening to Taylor, and being impressed by it, but I was wondering, yes, what impact did actually observing dislocations make in the short term on metallurgy?
Well, I mean what...
What was, what was the reception of the idea I suppose as well?
Oh well, well in my view, what it did, it convinced some metallurgists who had considered dislocations to be a kind of figment of the imagination of the solid state physicists that they really were of real significance, and actually saw them [in the] metals and they saw them moving around, and so on. And the second thing that happened is that lots of people started using the technique, because, it turned out to be a powerful way of determining what really happened, rather than what was imagined to happen. And, the impact was considerable. I mean I think I’ve mentioned before that, I remember vividly going to MIT and showing the film and, well he was a great crystallographer at the time, called Bert Warren, who had not believed in dislocation, and he said, now that he had seen them move, he was convinced. So, I think that, that was a, one effect, and the other effect as I said was, a lot of people took up the technique immediately, because there was so much, it was a universal technique. The main problem in a sense was developing polishing techniques, thinning techniques, to get nice specimens. And the other thing is of course, you had to have the new generation of microscopes.
Were all the reactions to dislocations favourable?
Well... [pause] Well it wasn't a question of being, were favourable or not. I mean here are the facts. The reaction was, ah, well, well there they are, we’ve got to take them seriously. And, I think I mentioned, I quoted Reed’s statement that, the trouble with dislocation
Peter Hirsch Page 91 C1379/84 Track 7 theory before you had the experimental technique was that, anybody could explain any phenomenon, any, in the plasticity of metals, in any way, and what’s more, several different explanations for each phenomenon. And whatever phenomenon you could have postulated, it could have been explained. So it was rather necessary to have a [an experimental] technique. The other thing that one should say is that, almost all the models which had been developed by the theoretical physicists were two-dimensional, and one of the things that became clear was that by actually seeing the defects inside the metals, what you did, you saw them in three, you saw the three- dimensional arrangement, and the third dimension became very important. [14:55] Anyway, as far as we were concerned, we, we got strong support from Nevill Mott and Will Taylor to build up a group, to exploit this technique, for observation of defects in crystals. And, the thrust of the research was along three lines. Firstly the development of the theory of image contrast from defects in thin foils, and then the application of the technique to the nature and interaction and distribution of defects introduced in various ways. And then the correlation, the third one is the correlation with bulk mechanical and other properties measured on microscopic samples of the single crystals, with a view to identifying which mechanisms control the properties. And, we recruited research students and obtained additional space, and, I mentioned that we had moved into an area previously occupied by G I Taylor, who was retired. And, the group that we built up worked very closely together as a group and the mutual interaction was very strong. And in 1964 we formally separated from Will Taylor’s crystallography department and set up our own group, which was called the Metal Physics Group; by this time Orowan’s Metal Physics Group had disappeared, for some years. And it was recognised as a separate group in the Cavendish.
[16:55] Mm. Are you still actually... So you’re actually still in the Cavendish at this point?
Oh yes. Yes, yes. Oh yes, we were in the Cavendish, or in Cambridge, all the time.
Did you have any contact with the Metallurgy department at Cambridge?
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Yes, we did. And, I think I actually gave some lectures which, I’m not sure whether I gave it in the Cavendish or in the Metallurgy department, but certainly, there was some interaction between us. And, I think there were, I think for example, one of the visitors, an important visitor we had was a Japanese called Hashimoto, who I think, as far as I can remember, was actually a visitor officially to the Metallurgy department but in fact he came and worked with us. I hope I haven’t got that wrong, but I, anyway, there had been a lot of interactions. And later on, as I’ll explain, in 1965, or 1963, we had a summer school in which the lectures were given by a number of us in the Metal Physics Group but also by Robin Nicholson, who was a lecturer at that time in the Metallurgy department, and who had applied this technique in metallurgy, Sir Robin Nicholson, who, who was later on, became Chief Scientist. I think that was in Margaret Thatcher’s day. Anyway, that’s just an aside.
[siren outside]
Can I just pause you for one second?
Yes.
[pause in recording]
Sorry.
I had... Do you want me to continue?
Please.
I had also interacted with somebody called Gareth Thomas, to work, to interpret some micrographs which he had obtained actually by replica methods, and my student, or ex-student by this time, Mike Whelan, also collaborated with Gareth Thomas in Metallurgy too, in some work on observation, in situ observation of precipitation in copper aluminium [aluminium-copper] alloys. So there was a good deal of interaction with...
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Broadly speaking... Sorry.
Mm?
Broadly speaking, I was just wondering, what was the difference between what you were doing in the Metal Physics Group and what the Cambridge metallurgists were doing at the time?
Well, the Cambridge metallurgists, I mean as soon as we got, we developed this technique, and a lot of labs, including Cambridge metallurgy, built up an electron microscope facility by buying microscopes and then using the technique. But their main objective was application, and, whereas our objective... application to metallurgical problems. Whereas, our interpretation, our initial objective was to develop the image contrast theory, and, which we considered to be very important, so that people could be confident to understand what they were actually seeing. Because, you had to be careful and not just to believe in seeing is believing, because, the nature of the contrast you got depended on the conditions and how you determined it. [21:25] And, what happened, that, Mike Whelan, who was a research student, actually worked out the dynamical theory of contrast from stacking faults, which is the thing that, you know, started the whole thing off, he worked out the dynamical theory of contrast from stacking faults, which was a brilliant original piece of work, and we, we also worked out independently at the same time, what’s called the kinematic theory of contrast. I should explain that, in the kinematic theory, the way you calculate that, you determine that, is by, you assume single scattering, once the electron has been scattered once, it’s not scattered again, whereas in the dynamical theory, you allow scattering into the diffracted beam and then back into the direct beam and so on. So, you allow re-scattering, is more accurate. Anyway, all this work led also to the idea of column approximation, the idea of that is, if you imagine that, the electron beam and the angles at which the diffracted beams are diffracted are very small relative to the direction of the diffracted, to the incident beam. And, we interpreted, our interpretation of what you actually saw was effectively the projection, effectively the projection, if you look down a column, you see the, whatever is in the column,
Peter Hirsch Page 94 C1379/84 Track 7 projected. You know, the angles at which these beams were, if you like, scattered at slightly different angles, are very small. So that was the idea of the column approximation.
Broadly speaking...
And turned out to be very important.
Broadly speaking, could you just, just give me a quick definition of what theory of image contrast actually is, and what does it involve?
Well you want to... You see... You have a defect which is characterised by a certain strain field, the atoms are displaced. When the electron beam comes... What you want to understand is, you see the thing as a line or maybe as two lines, and, if the dislocation is lying at some angle across the thin foil, not parallel to the plane of the foil but at some angle, then what you see is, you see oscillations of contrast that changes [with depth], and why is all that? And, so you want to understand what that means, and what you can learn from it, OK. And then you find that the nature of the contrast also depends on which particular reflection, Bragg reflection, you use in this technique. You, in its simplest form, you try and get an image with just one reflection, OK, it’s if you like, a dark-field image in which you get an image not from the direct beam but from a diffracted beam, which goes off in a particular direction at a particular Bragg diffracted beam. And then you find that the nature of the contrast varies with the nature of the diffracted beam, and there are certain directions reflections in which you get no contrast at all, and that’s a key to the whole thing actually. So you want to understand that, and the way to understand that is to find out what the, what the intensity of the beam is at the bottom of a crystal if you go along a column. That’s... And on the kinematical theory, what you do is, you calculate how much is scattered away at every, I mean you, you cut the thing up into slices parallel to the plane of the foil, and then add up all the contributions, taking into account the phases of the beam, and the, the amplitudes of the diffracted beam depends on the displacement of the atoms, you know, if it’s not a perfect crystal, the atoms are displaced and that gives rise to phase changes, and then that gives rise to changes in the amplitude and so on. And, so, and then you add it all up at the bottom, find out
Peter Hirsch Page 95 C1379/84 Track 7 what the total intensity is. Well in the dynamical theory, the thing is more complicated, you allow the scattering [back into the direct beam], and that’s actually, has to be done by computation, whereas the kinematical theory, you can actually write down a formula in the end, lots of Bessel functions of various types, and you can draw amplitude phase diagrams. [27:20] But anyway, what is the importance of all this? The importance of all this is that you can differentiate now between just diffraction effects and what are real effects due to what might be steps in the dislocations that might move from one plane to another, or other defects. And, for example, the oscillation of contrast isn’t anything to do with, change the nature of the dislocation, it’s purely a diffraction effect. You have to understand that. The fact that you get no contrast at all, actually tells you what the important displacement vector is associated with the dislocation. It’s a... And that’s a, a, that is the method for determining what type of dislocation it is, whether it’s... I mean a dislocation and its strain field but, a dislocation has an associated strain field, but, you can characterise it by, if you imagine that you get an edge dislocation moving through the crystal, it will produce a step at the end of the crystal, but on the side face it won’t produce anything, because, the actual step is associated with or due to the displacement vector that is due to the dislocation. And that could be in all sorts of directions. And for a screw dislocation it’s actually parallel to the dislocation itself. And, and also, it turns out that the nature of the contrast from a screw dislocation is different from an edge dislocation and so on and so forth. So, all that is very important, it enables you, by working out what the theory is of image contrast, you can then, you can find out, or determine the methods by which you can determine, or characterise, the nature of the dislocation. That’s a very very powerful technique, and, in many ways, I think most unexpected, when we initially thought of seeing dislocations. One of the most powerful things about this technique is, you can characterise the dislocation in great detail by doing appropriate experiments.
Mm.
[30:26] So that, I think, I hope that that answers your, your question. And, my contribution to all this was, to the kinematical theory of the image contrast from dislocations which
Peter Hirsch Page 96 C1379/84 Track 7 was published in 1960, that was a joint publication with Mike Whelan and Archie Howie, who had joined us in 1957, I think. And... But the dynamical theory was worked out for the contrast of, well stacking faults was worked out by Mike Whelan in his thesis, that was in 1956, but then subsequently the dynamical theory of contrast from dislocations rather than stacking faults was worked out with Archie Howie, and Archie Howie and Mike Whelan were responsible for that, and, that led to what are called the Howie-Whelan equations, which, [are] a couple of differential equations which are solved by computer.
Mm.
And, well we applied the technique to study many different types of defect structures, and we collaborated with Bollmann, who I think I’ve mentioned had observed dislocations by TEM independently, just about the same time, and that led to an important paper on dislocations in stainless steel, revealing dissociation of dislocations, partial dislocations, bounding stacking faults, and, in great detail, in fact, Mike Whelan wrote a paper, a detailed paper on that which really, it confirmed many of the theoretical ideas that the theoreticians had come up with, including things like [inaud], extended nodes of dislocations, and so on, all the various details. And then, there was work with John Silcox, who joined us as a research student in 1957, which led to the first direct observations of what are called prismatic dislocation loops in quenched aluminium, and, which is a citation classic, that’s a... Now that, at the same time, Ray Smallman and Ken Westmacott at Harwell had made similar observations independently, and following suggestion from Alan Cottrell who was then at Harwell, we published a joint paper on this, which is a citation classic. What’s a prismatic loop? If you imagine you have sheets of atoms, and you take out a disc of these, just one plane, a disc of plane, and then let the thing collapse, right, then you get a ring of, of a defect where, you know, you’ve taken out a half plane or a plane or something, of a certain region, and that’s a dislocation line that’s associated with a displacement vector, or Burgers vector as it’s called, normal to the plane which you’ve taken out, and it’s called a prismatic loop.
Mm.
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[34:45] And, there’s a funny thing about this particular paper, because, we, I think we sent a manuscript of the paper to, to somebody called Bob Maddin, an American who had worked with Cottrell on quench hardening in Birmingham. If you, suppose you take aluminium near the melting point... Well, the, the concen... You always have a concentration of point defects in equilibrium, thermodynamic equilibrium, simply a certain amount of disorder, all to do with entropy, and, and the concentration of these point defects increases with increasing temperature, and it’s a question of their formation energy. And, so, if you take a metal near the melting point, you would have quite a lot of these vacant lattice sites, and now imagine you quench it down to room temperature, then you quench in these defects, they can’t, in the time available, they cannot move out of the crystal, OK. So they’re locked in. What do they do? They move small distances, and form discs of vacant lattice sites and then collapse. That was at least one possible model of what might give rise to quench hardening. Because you then had dislocation introduced into the crystal; you now think of dislocations moving through the array of dislocation loops, I mean they act as obstacles, and that leads to quench hardening, OK.
Mm.
That’s... There are other mechanisms for quench hardening, as always, dislocation is such a flexible animal that, there are contributions from other situations, other features as well, result of quench hardening. But anyway, it was clear that the observational dislocation loops gave an immediate, a reason of what the quench hardening might be due to. And we sent a copy of that to Bob Maddin who was back in America at that time, and he must have shown it to somebody called Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf, [laughs] who then complained that we hadn’t made sufficient reference to her paper which was published in Phil Mag earlier in the same year, where she predicted that such loops would be produced. And we hadn’t made special reference. Well anyway, we, we put a footnote on it, on our paper at the proof stage. But a year or two later I met her in the USA and she very, by this time I had got married, and she presented me with a wedding present which I, which was very nice of her, as obviously she had forgotten, forgiven, me. [38:06]
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Well, another significant thing is that John Silcox also looked at, he was a research student, he did a brilliant job, he looked at the quench hardening of gold. Suppose you do the same experiments on quenched gold. And the result of that was really very very interesting. The defects are in fact stacking [faults], they’re tetrahedra of stacking faults. Imagine you have a tetrahedron, OK, which consists of stacking faults. And that’s a three-dimensional defect which had never been predicted by the theoreticians, OK, because of the difficulty of thinking in three dimensions, which was quite interesting. I remember when I told Charles Frank about this, he said, ‘My god! why didn’t we think of that?’ [laughs] He should have thought of it.
This this sounds like a lot of successes happening. Are there any times when it doesn’t work?
Well, well I mean, the... Ah well I’ll tell you about that in a minute. You’ve got a new technique, and the world is wide open. You suddenly see, you are suddenly able to see inside a metal, or for that matter, non-metal also, and you see, you see all these defects. And, you know, the field is wide open, nobody’s looked at it. And so, there was a lot of activity by a lot of people looking at these defects, which, incidentally, that was why it was very important to, to have got the theory of image contrast right, so that you could reliably, you know, interpret them. And, well another thing that John Silcox did was, we looked at neutron irradiated material, and, there we saw really tiny black spots, black death as we used to call it. I think it was the first, first publication on the nature of radiation damage, and we postulated that they were probably small dislocation loops, too small to resolve. Well it turned out subsequently by an enormous amount of work done by lots and lots of other people that there were actually both small vacancy loops, but also loops of interstitial atoms produced in, by irradiation. Because what you do is, you knock out atoms into the wrong positions, you knock out an atom here and it goes into interstitial position, and they, these interstitials then move around and form, form little platelets and so on, OK, and so you’ve got what are called interstitial loops.
[41:25] Why were you looking at irradiated, radiation damaged material?
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Well that’s extremely, that’s a good question. It is because, at the time there was an enormous interest in the development of nuclear power for civil purposes, OK, nuclear reactors, and, there was an enormous amount of work going on at Harwell and lots of other organisations all over the world, to look at radiation damage. Because if you, if you built up a nuclear reactor, what happens to the containments of the, either in the water reactor or whatever, because, the neutrons would move around and they’d displace atoms and damage the material. And, there was, I think it was in 1957 there was a fire at Windscale which, it was a national emergency, where the moderator in the reactor which is, this particular type which, where the moderator is actually graphite, caught fire. And, Alan Cottrell, who was at Harwell at the time, was put in charge of a group to discover what had happened. And the answer was that, what happened was, what they were doing, they realised, they knew there would be damage, and what they were hoping to do, well what they did, was to heat the material, to the graphite core, slightly, to enable the atoms to move around and fall into the vacant lattice sites which had also been generated. Obviously if you knock out an atom, then you generate both a vacancy and an interstitial atom. That was the idea. I think the damage had, you know, the nature of the damage had been predicted. So, they, that was, the experiment to see if you can, you can anneal the damage out, and what happened was, the situation became unstable, instead of annealing out, the whole thing in fact caught fire. [44:21] That was extremely important at that time, because, they were designing at that time the Magnox reactors for civil nuclear power, and the question was, could this sort of thing occur, this instability also, in Magnox reactors? And Alan Cottrell and his group did experiments to show that in fact it, it couldn’t, it didn’t happen, and that was a great relief to everybody. But it was a period in which radiation damage in materials was of great importance, and I’m... And it created, I mean it wasn’t... Most of, well, almost all, apart from the initial work which we did, I think most of the work was done by, on this, immediately, and over many many years, by the national establishments, studying radiation damage. There was an enormous amount of interest at that time. And I have wondered, what would have happened if transmission electron microscopy hadn’t actually turned up at that time. I think it was a bit of luck that that technique became available at that time, because, it was virtually the only technique which you could use to really establish what the nature of the
Peter Hirsch Page 100 C1379/84 Track 7 damage was, because of the complexity of the damage, and you had to look, see it at high magnification and so on. And, I think that answers your question, why radiation damage was terrifically important. And people did experiments in which, macroscopic experiments, in which they irradiated materials and measured the yield stress, the strength of the material if you like, and they found, you found that in fact as you irradiated the material, that it got stronger. And, OK, well what you actually produced was a lot of defects in the material which made the thing stronger because, these defects, little dislocation loops, prevented or made it more difficult for other dislocations to move through the lattice and produce plastic deformation, or plastic set.
[47:20] This brings me quickly on to another question as well actually. I was wondering, you’ve mentioned Alan Cottrell a few times.
Yes.
What did you see of him over this period?
Well, not regularly obviously because we were working in the Cavendish and he was at Harwell at the time. But you can see from the... I mean he, I should perhaps have mentioned that he was my external examiner, PhD examiner, and... But, I did see him from time to time, but not regularly. I mean he was at Harwell and, you know, we were in the Cavendish, and... But, at times we collaborated [with people in his group], we wrote joint papers as I said with Smallman and Westmacott, who were at Harwell at the time, and... But there wasn’t all that much interaction. I do remember that when, when we showed him the film, must have been an occasion on which we showed him the film of the motion of dislocations in stainless steel. There is one sequence in which you can see dislocations are actually generated at an edge. If you imagine you have a thin foil and the thin foil tapers down to a hole effectively, then what you see in that film is actually dislocations being generated very close to the edge, they suddenly appear, you can’t actually see them move in from the very edge, but they suddenly appear. And, immediately, I remember showing this to him and he immediately said, ‘Ah yes, this is exactly what you would expect.’ You get them
Peter Hirsch Page 101 C1379/84 Track 7 nucleated when they’re very very tiny, and, under high stresses. So, there were times when, you know, then there were interactions of this, of this sort. [49:43] And we were of course very much influenced by Alan Cottrell’s work on plasticity which had preceded this technique, macroscopic plasticity, and, one of the things we got interested in, well very interested in, was in fact work hardening and what makes, what causes interaction of, what causes the increase in strength and work hardening and what are the nature of the interactions which are important. And, one of the things that Alan Cottrell did was, he did experiments, macroscopic experiments on the temperature dependence of the yield stress, the stress at which the material will yield, and he found that the yield stress consists of two components, one is a temperature- independent component, and the other is a temperature-dependent component. That’s after you’ve corrected for the temperature dependence of the shear modulus. So it’s a detail. But anyway. And he found that there is a constant ratio between the temperature-dependent and the temperature-independent component of the strength. That is to say, if you deform the material more and it got stronger, then, both components, the elastic... sorry, the temperature-dependent and the temperature- independent component, increased proportionately. That was called the Cottrell- Stokes law, and, Stokes is the chap who did the experiments. And, he concluded from this that the strength must be due to forest, what’s called forest cutting. If you imagine the dislocations, like a set of trees, and you’ve got another dislocation trying to cut through them, there are then two interactions, one is the elastic interaction with the trees, and the other is, when you actually cut through the trees, you actually produce a local change which is called a jog. You produce a step in the dislocation, just as you would produce a step on the outside of the crystal. So, and that is the temperature-dependent contribution, because it can be aided by thermal activation, whereas the elastic part of it, a long-range stress field, you can’t. That led to the idea of forest hardening. [52:54] And, and so, what we did was to see whether in fact there was experimental evidence for this, or, whether there was experimental evidence for a rival theory for the strength of metals, which is attributed to a German chap called Seeger, s-e-e-g-e-r, Stuttgart, where the strength was controlled by pile-ups of dislocations all on the same slip plane and producing great stresses. And, well, there were two things that came out of
Peter Hirsch Page 102 C1379/84 Track 7 our work in relation to all this, and that is that, Mike Whelan had studied the dislocation arrangements in deformed stainless steel, and it became clear from that work that these interactions between dislocations led to kind of, there were local, the elastic interactions were local, and, the Achilles’ heel of the elastic interaction was that the, if you had two dislocations at some angle interacting, they might form a kind of, a zigzag arrangement, but if you then applied a stress, you undid that zigzag, until the [intersected] dislocations were [was], if you like, along, with the intersecting dislocations, along its original direction. And that gave a new slant to the forest theory of hardening, and, in which in fact strong forest obstacles arise from attractive interactions, dislocations attracting, and then you have to undo the attraction, rather than the forest dislocations acting as, as elastic obstacles in the sense [of] that, repulsive interactions. It was the attractive interactions which were was the important thing, but there was an Achilles’ heel, you undid it, you unzipped it. And there was a well-known paper by Saada, a Frenchman, in 1960, which produced quantitative estimates of this. So you can see there is a lot of [laughs] goings-on at that time. [56:00] Then what happened was that, we looked at a lot of dislocation distributions in a lot of different metals, cold worked metals, copper, silver, gold, nickel, aluminium, and no pile-ups were ever observed, they were more like cell structures like, you know, we saw by the microbeam experiments indirectly. These are on polycrystalline materials. And, John Steeds, who joined the group as a research student in 1961, actually determined the density of the secondary dislocations relative to primary dislocations. What’s all that about, and that is, primary dislocations are the one which actually produce a deformation; secondary dislocations are sucked in on other planes to relieve stresses, local stresses and so on. And, he found that the densities of forest dislocations, these secondaries, were comparable to primaries and provided, that provided further support to forest hardening.
[57:23] Could we talk for a little bit about the group aspect of this as well?
Yes. Well that’s very interesting. We, I mean one of the fortunate things about this Metal Physics Group is, the extraordinary brilliance of the students which joined us. Mike Whelan was a most brilliant research student, I mean he essentially developed
Peter Hirsch Page 103 C1379/84 Track 7 the technique experimentally and, you know, the basic theory and the dynamical theory of stacking faults for his PhD. And then went on to collaborate with Archie Howie to work out the dynamical of theory and the application, you know, [to] lots of experiments with, with John Silcox and others. And, I mean he was, became an FRS, he was elected to the Royal Society. Archie Howie was elected to the Royal Society. John Steeds was elected to the Royal Society. So... And Mick Brown who joined us was elected to the Royal Society. And Colin Humphreys, who was also, joined the group later on, he, he was also elected to the Royal Society, but, you know, a bit later on, I mean a couple of years ago, but anyway, he was. So you can see, you know, the people, I was very lucky to have in the Metal Physics Group such brilliant people. [58:56] What I did do, I mean if I take any credit for anything, was, [laughs] I, I promoted interaction. Everybody interacted with anybody, everybody else. It was, if you ask me now, who was supervising whom, it’s actually difficult to say. I think, you know, we were looking at that the other day, well some fairly recently for different reason, but, there were situations in which I may have been the formal supervisor, but, but the actual interaction was, you know, was with somebody different. I think that was the case with Archie Howie and Mike Whelan. I think I formally supervised Archie, but in fact, [laughs] it was Mike Whelan and Archie Howie got together. And, on the other hand, Archie Howie I think was supervisor of John Steeds, but in fact he did a project of interest to me. So, it was... And it was a very exciting period in which everybody interacted with everybody else, and that was a very nice thing in the group. And...
How did you actually set up the group?
By accretion. [laughs] I mean, just, you... Well, what happens is that you just got research students to come and build it up by research groups. And then, one or two senior people came as postdoctoral people, like Mick Brown, you know. Because, you know, it was obviously an exciting place to be at where new results were appearing. And, well Mick came, and he, he actually collaborated with Mike Ashby in the Metallurgy department, and, you know, he did a terrific experiment on using this technique on the strain fields from small, from small precipitates, they had worked all that out. So... And, you know, somebody called Jock Eshelby, who was
Peter Hirsch Page 104 C1379/84 Track 7 also elected to the Royal Society, joined us for some years. Unfortunately he couldn’t find a permanent job in Cambridge and so he went off to Sheffield. And, the main thing was of course, we were clamouring for more space all the time, and, so we, we, [laughs] we grew by accretion, first by getting more space in the Austin Wing of the Cavendish Laboratory and then we moved into the Old Cavendish where, I mentioned G I Taylor’s old lab, where we set up the electron microscopes, because by this time we had, we had acquired a microscope and then several microscopes later. There was money available because of, you know, the things that you could do with this technique.
[1:02:20] I was going to ask, how does one acquire an electron microscope?
You apply to the, well what used to be, what was at that time, the Science Research Council, and you write a proposal. And, and you know, and then you hope you get the money. And, I, I seem to have a figure in mind that the Siemens microscope, the first Siemens microscope we got, cost something like £16,000. [laughs] Well, these days if you get an electron microscope of the type that is available now, it will cost you half a million if not more. You know, it’s quite a different situation.
How reliable was that Siemens electron microscope?
Well, I mean the Siemens electron microscope was, it always reminded me of a pocket battleship actually. [laughs] It was, well first of all it was, it was grey, it had this kind of, battleship grey. And it was solid, I mean it, it was... It was very reliable, is the answer. And that was one of its good features, reliability.
Did it have any bad features?
Well the original microscope had a bad feature because, I think I mentioned this before, it had this anomaly that you couldn’t actually take, operate it in a mode where you wanted to switch from microscopy [to] diffraction by using the double condenser illumination. But I mean that all, that was all changed eventually, when they realised
Peter Hirsch Page 105 C1379/84 Track 7 that actually, while the microscope was originally developed for biologists, that, you know, it wasn’t good enough for the materials scientists. Well I don’t know if... [1:04:30] Well perhaps, you asked me, well, you talk a lot about successes; what about things which didn’t work out? My view on this is that, while we were very successful in interpreting individual mechanisms, mechanisms between individual dislocations and defects and what they did, what was much more difficult was to identify the, or relate the mechanisms which you saw to the macroscopic, to model macroscopic properties. And the reason for that is that the macroscopic properties are really a many-body problem. It’s a very very complex thing, because you, you get lots and lots of interactions between the dislocations and these are long range. And, I mean I, I spent a long time trying to formulate a satisfactory model for the stress-strain curve you get, if you like, the hardening as a function of deformation in single crystals, of things like copper. And, but I, you know, it was clear that I couldn’t really do it very convincingly, I mean, there was, there were some things I did with Terry Mitchell which I think contributed perhaps to one’s understanding of this complex phenomenon, but, I never, I never really got a satisfactory explanation, and, and I attributed it to the, the lack of an explanation of what determines how far the dislocations move before they get stopped, which determines the rate of accumulation of dislocations and therefore the flow of stress. And so I decided to leave that problem, something was missing, somebody else had to take it over. I noticed a very interesting thing which I didn’t realise, and that is, I read Alan Cottrell’s interview that you did with him, and I noticed, at the end of the interview, I think you asked him what he was doing now or something, and he, he said, ‘Ah well...’ He was trying to explain, I think what he was trying to explain was, the linear, what’s called the linear hardening, in single crystals. And he complained the he didn’t have all the facts, he couldn’t, I mean he couldn’t. Well that’s, that’s it, the same problem. There have been rather important contributions to the understanding of work hardening by other people, much more, you know, more recently, one’s, Mick Brown’s made a contribution, and also a German. Oh. Mughrabi, Mughrabi, I think made a very important contribution to understanding of work hardening. Anyway, well before we... Well...
How are doing time wise?
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[1:08:30] Well, we’re not doing very well time wise, but, I, I think I ought to just say this. There is one other thing maybe I should mention, and that is... I, I had also, I mean at the same time I also had people working in the Metal Physics Group on macroscopic properties, and in 1960 I initiated an experimental programme on the plasticity of, not face-centred cubic metals, like copper, silver and gold, but body centred cubic metals, like iron and, refractory metals like niobium. And we did a lot of work on, experimental work on niobium particularly by Terry Mitchell and a chap called Foxall. [1:09:32] And, in 1960 there was an International Crystallographic Congress in Cambridge, and at that meeting I suggested that the lattice resistance of the motion of dislocations in body centred cubic metals, and the large yield stress at low temperatures, what you find if you measure the yield stress in iron or niobium as a function of temperature, as the temperature, as you cool the thing down, the yield stress goes up and up and up. So, low temperatures, the yield stress is much higher than it is at room temperature.
What’s yield stress, sorry? When it breaks I guess.
Well, no, when it actually starts plastically deforming, OK. So when you can start bending it if you like, or, or pull it out.
When it yields. Right, OK.
When it yields, OK, not fracture, yields.
OK.
OK? And, well that’s a particular phenomenon in body centred cubic metals. And the question always was, well that’s due to impurity interactions with the dislocations, which is a subject which Alan Cottrell actually worked on very very early on, a brilliant piece of work, interaction of impurity atoms, with a strain field around a dislocation, which would lock it, or at least make it more difficult for it to move. Or
Peter Hirsch Page 107 C1379/84 Track 7 whether there was an intrinsic mechanism, and there appeared to be evidence for both of these; in particular, when people got very very pure body centred cubic metals, they then found that the, the high yield stress at very low temperatures persisted, so it was an intrinsic phenomenon. And, I had the idea that it was all due to the peculiar symmetry in this situation where a screw dislocation, where the displacement vector in a screw dislocation is parallel to the direction of the dislocation, the screw dislocation is along a symmetry, a triad symmetry axis, three-fold symmetry axis. And therefore, there was a possibility that such a dislocation could reduce its elastic energy by splitting into smaller dislocations on three planes, three intersecting planes, and I thought at the time, there were certain planes called (112) planes, there were three of them around this axis. And then, before you can slip such a dislocation and move it, you have to make these dislocations constrict, these parts constrict again, OK, and that, that will be thermally activated, and the lower the temperature, the more difficult it gets, and therefore that could explain the higher yield stress. And it also explained, could explain the observation which had been made by etch pitting of dislocations by people called, a group, a pair of people called Stein and Low in America, who showed that the screw dislocations move much slower than edge dislocations in iron silicon alloys, and that was a very important experiment. Anyway, my suggestion, I made my suggestion as part of a talk I gave at this Crystallographic Congress, and, it’s always quoted as being published as a short abstract in the... Because there was never a paper published on this in the Crystallographic Congress, but it was published, supposed to have been published as a short abstract. But in fact, I don’t, I think that abstract doesn’t actually contain mention of it. And, I have to tell you that that particular proposal, and, well, I mean subsequently we did publish it, Terry Mitchell and I published it in Phil Mag, but the paper... But, and then I should explain that that particular proposal has led to an enormous number of publications and calculations by, by lots of other people, using atomistic simulations of determining what the nature of the displacements are along screw dislocations and seeing whether you get this three-fold splitting. And, so there’s been an enormous industry in this field. And the quotation is always, [laughs] you know, I suggested this, the quote of this Crystallographic Congress abstract, and in fact, I think, it must be one of the most cited of my papers which doesn’t exist. [laughs] Well I mean it exists, the abstract exists, but the information isn’t in there.
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So, which is rather funny. Anyway, it did stimulate enormous number of atomistic calculations in the following years.
[1:15:30] On the subject of publishing, are there any important journals you were trying to get articles in at this time?
Oh, Philosophical Magazine, which is quite interesting, because in those days, Philosophical Magazine was a journal [in] which you published, [work on] dislocations, yes.
Why that one?
Well it just so happened. I don’t know why. [pause] I... The tradition started, must have started in the days when the solid state physicists were putting the theories in there, but most of the, most of the work at that time on dislocations was published in Phil Mag. But of course there were also metallurgical journals which were used. [1:16:22] Well there was another, you know, an interesting thing, [laughs] you asked me whether things went wrong. Soon after my original suggestion, there was a chap called Sleeswijk, a Dutchman, who published in 1963 a paper which showed that if you used isotropic elasticity, this symmetrical dissociation into three (112) planes, through planes which are, whose directions are characterised by the indices (112), is actually predicted to be unstable, and the structure would collapse into an unsymmetrical dissociation into two (111) [(112)] planes with a third partial in intersecting, where the two planes intersect, which was a bit of a blow. But forty years later, [laughs] Sun and I showed that on anisotropic elasticity, which is what you should be using, the three-fold dissociation on the three (110) planes, is actually predicted to be stable on three (110) planes, is predicted to be stable or metastable, depending on the degree of anisotropy. And that reflects at least the results of the atomistic simulations, many of which showed this three-fold dissociation. [1:18:00] Well, there were lots of other things we did, you know, during this period. There were contributions from the image contrast theory by Howie and Whelan, and my
Peter Hirsch Page 109 C1379/84 Track 7 contributions there include the effect of thermal diffuse scattering on absorption of electrons, and that has quite important effects on the nature of the contrast you get. And there were various other things which I don’t think we... Well, one thing is quite amusing, because it’s relevant today: well all of it is relevant today, but, it’s something that’s very much in my mind at the present time, and that is, if you think about a dislocation in a thin foil, which is, you know, how you do the experiment, and the dislocation go through the thin foil, well the dislocation produces stresses at the surface, OK, but these stresses must be relaxed, because the surface is stress free. And that gives to additional displacements, and for a screw dislocation, which is normal to the foil, it gives rise to a very famous thing which is called the Eshelby twist, the dislocation – the lattice actually rotates around, around the dislocation. And, and the rotation, degree of rotation depends on the distance along the, along the depth of the dislocation; [in]the middle of the foil [it] is zero. And, but that gives to additional contrast effects, and, that’s one of the things that we did with Bill Tunstall who joined the group in 1962 and John Steeds, showing in fact the contrast from these surface effects which turn out to be quite, quite important, even these days. Well, I think I’ve said to you that, you know, I was very fortunate in having all these brilliant people.
[1:20:20] Why do you think it was such a successful group?
Well it was successful because, well a) there was, here was a technique available in a field which was a virgin field. There were so many things to, to be done. Why was it...? So, there were the opportunities there. And the main thing is really the quality of the people who were attracted to it, and that was... I mean, all I can say is, that’s what happened. I... They were lucky. Maybe I was a good salesman or something. But, you think about it, the number of FRS’s that came out of it is, is very significant, and, even those people who didn’t get FRS’s, they were really magnificent people. John Jakubovics who is no longer with us, Peter Hazzledine, who died, Chris Hall, Allen Metherell. There were an enormous, you know, lots of people who were brilliant, really brilliant. And, I can’t enumerate them all, but, they were all, Mike Duesbury, Terry Mitchell, John Venables, you name them, they... And, I was very fortunate in having them come.
Peter Hirsch Page 110 C1379/84 Track 7
Where do you find them?
Well I mean, there were, the Cavendish is an attraction anyway, OK, and so they look, you know, what you do, well I mean, you have to have, I suppose, an intrinsic interest not work on nuclear, if you’re a physicist, not to work on elementary particle physics, OK? But... Or whatever it is, low-temperature physics. But I think, you know, some of the people came from the Part II Physics, from the Cambridge Physics degree, but many of them came from elsewhere. John Jakubovics came from Bristol, John Steeds came from Bristol, and so on. [1:22:45] And, one significant thing which happened, in 1963 we organised a summer school, and the lectures on this technique, and the lecturers were, lecturers were Archie Howie, Robin Nicholson as I mentioned to you, Don Pashley, who actually worked at Tube Investments at that time. He never was part of the group, he was one of Jim Menter’s collaborators. And, and he worked at Tube Investments, but, he joined us lecturing. And, the other lecturers included Mike Whelan and myself. And the lectures were written up in a book entitled Electron Microscopy of Thin Crystals, and was published by Butterworths in 1965 and is called the Yellow Bible, and it was very influential over many years. Well it’s, I think it’s used, used now too. [1:23:55] And we had lots and lots of visitors. A Japanese, Hashimoto, and Fujimoto. There was an Italian called Ugo Valdré, who developed, who made a speciality of developing a goniometer stage for the microscope, so that you could actually orientate the specimen in different orientations which was very important, and he was the guy who did all that. And, we had Bollmann. We had a Czech visitor which was quite interesting, Franta Kroupa, from Prague, and, he returned several times to Cambridge. And I remember on his initial visit he espoused strong left-wing views, and he had a rather low opinion of Western culture, which turned out to be based on Hollywood movies. But after a few years his political views had moved strongly to the right. And when the Russians marched into, into Prague in 1968, he made a very courageous stand for freedom, and he published an appeal to the Western world in the Czech Journal of Physics, which cost him his job, which was very sad. And, on another occasion we had a Chinese visitor called Dr Liang, who came, oh this was
Peter Hirsch Page 111 C1379/84 Track 7 during Chairman Mao’s period, came under the auspices of the Royal Society Exchange Programme, and he did some very nice work, and we discussed possible publication of some of the work he had done. After due consultations with his fellow Chinese students, and probably the Chinese Embassy, he announced he wouldn’t be prepared to publish in a Western journal such as Phil Mag, because that would help the Western capitalist system. And, he considered that publication in the Czech Journal of Physics might be acceptable. But in the event, in fact nothing was published, because on the day the Cultural Revolution began he suddenly disappeared. And it turned out that, he disappeared together with all his fellow students and visitors in other laboratories in Cambridge, and the National Physical Laboratory, they all got together and went home, presumably told by the Chinese Embassy to do that. And they flew back to Beijing. And years later after the end of the Cultural Revolution I met him again at conferences in the US, and also in Beijing, and he was very apologetic about what had happened. [laughs] Poor old Liang.
[1:26:55] Interesting to see politics coming into this story.
Oh yeah.
Was there much discussion of politics at the Cavendish when you were there?
Well, only in so far as, you know, I mention these particular people, you know, from communist, from the communist world. But after, apart from that, not really. I mean we had lots and lots of visitors, somebody called Jacques Friedel, a very famous French physicist, used to come see us fairly frequently when he visited Professor Mott, because, he had, his, he had married Mott’s sister, so, you know, there was, they were very close. And he always used to come and visit us. And then there was Alfred Seeger from Stuttgart who was a long-range stress theory exponent. And he actually spent a few months in the Cavendish as a guest of Professor Mott. But we found discussions with him exceedingly difficult, because, whenever we suggested anything, any experiment, [laughs] he, he used to, it would be a question of him saying, well, either that he had already done it, or he was thinking of doing it, but, or he had considered and discarded it. But, there we go. It was a very very stimulating
Peter Hirsch Page 112 C1379/84 Track 7 period, there’s no question about that. And I think the work of the Metal Physics Group was very influential in establishing this technique. And then, organising disseminations throughout the world, and there are lots of people who went abroad and, and carried on the, the good work.
Shall we call it a day then for now?
Yes I think so.
[end of session]
[End of Track 7]
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[Track 8]
How did you come to leave Cambridge?
Well, the professor in the Metallurgy department in Oxford was Professor Hume- Rothery, and he retired at the end of 1966, September 1966. And so the university started its business of trying to get a replacement, and I was approached in March 1965 to meet the electors for this, the Isaac Wolfson Chair of Metallurgy, for oral discussion without commitment on either side, OK. And, the invitation was actually followed by, by letters from the professor of physics and professor of chemistry here, or one of the professors of physics and one of the professors of chemistry, Professors Bleaney and Anderson, they were heads of the Clarendon, [and] inorganic chemist[ry], encouraging me to, to accept the invitation to meet the electors. And the point about it was that, the metallurgy department here was a very small one, it had only been created a few years before, and Hume-Rothery didn’t get his chair till about, you know, two or three years before that. And, the department obviously needs to grow. And, anyway, [laughs] what Bleaney said was, ‘Use your bargaining power as much as you jolly well can, and you’ll get the support of the scientists here.’ Which was quite incredible actually. So there we are. It was a very small department. Anyway, I did go, and I, I met them in April 1965, and at that meeting they offered me the chair. And, [laughs] and followed the usual period of very difficult negotiations. And I wrote them a letter of what I needed and what I wanted. And at that time the department consisted of one professor, that was Hume-Rothery, one reader, Jack Christian, and three lecturers, and one departmental demonstrator. And, they were running a course of metallurgy, chemistry and metallurgy, Honour School of Chemistry and M etallurgy. So only one, relatively small, one third I think of the total course was taught by them. So it was quite a new department. So, I did send in a, my letter of what needed to be done to develop a department which was capable of teaching, in fact all aspects of materials science, I wanted to turn it into a department of materials science, standing on its own. I won’t bother to, you know, about the details of that, but... And, [laughs] I estimated that the number of undergraduate intake would reach about forty for the next quinquennium, that was five years hence, or six years hence or something at that time, and the number of DPhil students would
Peter Hirsch Page 114 C1379/84 Track 8 be expected to reach about forty. And then I asked for a minimum of eleven new members of staff.
How did the request go down?
Well, I’ll tell you. Oh and a new building of about twenty-five [laughs][thousand] square feet. OK. And, then I told them that there was, you know, there was a need of two lecturers immediately for 1966 so we could start a new course.
So twenty-five square feet?
25,000 square feet. Net, net, net, you know, there’s always a difference between net and gross. [laughs] And, and in the short term, I also asked them for about 6,000 to 7,000 square feet immediately before I came. [04:40] And it was rather funny, because the registrar had a book of properties. It was like going to an estate agent, it was quite extraordinary. He had this book of properties and he thumbed through and said, ‘Well now there’s that house, and there’s this house,’ and so on. It was terribly funny. Anyway, they identified what was the Mathematical Institute at 10 Parks Road, which is actually down the road here, with an annex, which would become available in 1966, because the mathematicians were moving to a new, much bigger, nicer Mathematical Institute. And, in, my letter I think concluded, ‘The university is capable to provide these additional facilities, space, posts and funds, with the cooperation of the departments of Chemistry, Physics and Engineering. The existing small department with its high reputation could be expanded into a leading school of metallurgy and materials science, both in teaching and research,’ OK. And, anyway, what happened was, [laughs] in June I got a letter from the university saying that they, they couldn’t actually commit themselves to, to this sort of scale of expenditure, and in the light of all this, I would presumably not wish to accept the electors’ invitation. And the letter was full of negatives, and, but they did offer to pay my expenses, which I thought was very nice of them. [laughter] So...
Quick question.
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Any... What? Oh sorry. Sorry, did that make a noise? OK. And, well I, I found it most unsatisfactory, because, the letter was so negative. And I had a letter from Professors Bleaney and Anderson giving me their active support and help. And they actually pledged, this was quite extraordinary, that they would give metallurgy priority for posts available to the faculty in 1966, in other words, they would be prepared to give up what they were expecting to get for their departments in order to get me started, which was quite extraordinary, which I thought was a good, good omen. So, anyway, I, I met them again, and, Hume-Rothery advised me to make my demands for the first year as small as possible, because that might strengthen my claim for increases in the new quinquennium. But I didn’t believe that at all, because my bargaining powers for the department were, were obviously greatest at this stage, and, you know, which was what Bleaney told me, was obvious anyway. So, anyway, I, [laughs] the timing is quite interesting. I wrote my second statement, my reduced bid, on the 9th of June, and I got a reply on the 27th of July. But in the meantime the University Grants Committee, as it then was, had invited bids for special grants for technology for the period 1965 to 1967, and the university did include in its bid posts, three posts for metallurgy, and staff and money for accommodation, additional accommodation and so on. And what’s more, the university underwrote, it agreed to underwrite the three lecturer posts, one of which was to be converted into a readership, and the conversion of the Mathematical Institute, if the bids, you see, were unsuccessful. [laughs] So, so all this was very promising. And, and it was really only possible because, the physicists, Professor Bleaney, Professor Anderson, Professor Holder who was Professor of Engineering, agreed to give metallurgy precedence over these three new posts, which were going to become available to the Physical Sciences Board in 1966 and ’67.
Do you know why they were so keen to have you?
No, I don’t, but, you’d better ask them, although, I think they’re all, they’re no longer with us. [laughs] Well anyway. Well, well maybe they thought I could build up the department. [09:50]
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However, [laughs] this is the funny twist. The university’s reply took so long, in the meantime something happened in Cambridge. Alan Cottrell resigned and went to, his, the Goldsmiths’ chair, and went to Whitehall, I think it was in 1965. And so, the university there started its process of trying to fill the chair. And they offered it to somebody called Professor Norman Petch, who I think at the time was in Leeds. He had been in Cambridge before in Orowan’s group in the Cavendish, and, he had a great reputation. And I think what must have happened is, Petch had actually applied for the post, and the University of Cambridge assumed that if somebody applies for a post, then they will accept it willy-nilly. And so what they do, when the electors had decided to elect him, they, they stuck the notice of the appointment on the railings of the [laughs], of the Senate House, so it was published before Petch had been told himself. And he then turned it down, which was terrifically embarrassing for all concerned. And then in August, shortly after Oxford had written back to me, they offered me the chair. So I was in the position, peculiar position, of having to choose between Hume-Rothery’s chair here and Cottrell’s chair in Cambridge, which I suppose, well it’s unique obviously because of the two people concerned, it doesn’t often happen. Anyway, so what did I do? The thing is that, that Cambridge of course was a very well-established department, and it had already an intake of something like thirty to forty per annum in its final year, and it also had recruited its intake in the third year from people in the second year through the Natural Sciences Tripos which they ran, which was, which they didn’t have here. You know, if you, if you went to Cambridge, you read natural sciences and you had to, you had to take three experimental subjects, which meant that in addition to physics and chemistry on the physical side, in addition to physics and chemistry and mathematics, you would have to take something else, like, mineralogy or crystallography or, whatever, which introduced you to metallurgy, metallurgical things, OK. Whereas here, you, the situation is, you entered the university to read physics, or chemistry, or metallurgy, OK. There were such things as joint honour schools, but, but, it’s a different thing. Well anyway. And it [Cambridge] was a, you know, a well-established department with lots of space, and the university had been committed to a new building for metallurgy and so on and so forth. So it was a very attractive proposition, it was a well-established department. [13:53]
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And, so what did I do? Well the thing is that, I, I did take people’s advice, and in particular, the professor of metallurgy in Sheffield, Professor Quarrell, was a member of the electoral board in both, both boards, and he advised me to go to Oxford and accept the challenge. And I was ripe for, I was ripe for a new challenge. I think, my feeling, I think, which persuaded me at the time was that, it was quite clear what had to be done here, there was a big job to be done. Whereas in Cambridge, it was really continuing and building on if you like, developing, what Cottrell had achieved. There wasn’t a possibility of putting my own stamp on it to the same extent as it would be here. And, so I think, I, I was attracted by the bigger challenge. And, there was, another factor was that, the, the terrific support I had here from physics, chemistry and engineering, OK, during the election process, which I didn’t get in Cambridge I have to say. What’s more, there was even a, a, [laughs] in the metallurgy, the [Cambridge] Metallurgy department itself actually sent a delegation to the registrar, I think, was it, or secretary of faculties, I think three chaps turned up and said they were worried about this, this idea of my appointment. Because, what they thought was that, the Metal Physics Group of the Cavendish would take over the Metallurgy department.
So the Metallurgy department of which university, Cambridge or Oxford?
Of Cambridge. Of Cambridge, oh yes, I mean... The Cambridge Metallurgy department was worried that the Metal Physics Group in the Cavendish, of which I was the head, OK, would actually take over the Metallurgy. I think that was the problem. They totally misunderstood what my motivation would have been, totally and utterly. I’m not like that at all, I mean...
How did you feel about that delegation being made at the time?
Well I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. But I, to be honest, I wouldn’t, that wasn’t the essential factor. The essential factor was that, here was really a new challenge and a, you know, where I could see what my vision was, and what I could do. And also of course I had been in Cambridge for rather a long time, and you know, a change was, was good. [17:02]
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So, so I accepted the Oxford position. And, well in the event, the university actually did get through the UGC technology initiative all the money that they had underwritten for these appointments I had, so it didn’t cost them anything in the end. Anyway, there we go.
What sort of vision did you have overall for the department at Oxford?
Well I wanted to, I really wanted to develop a materials science department for, a department, a bridge department if you like between physics and chemistry, the pure sciences and engineering. I... And, I mean in those days, in that period, there was generally, within the metallurgical community, in the departments, there was a desire to turn from metallurgy to materials science. There were other materials other than metals, OK. And, I mean Cottrell had, in this country, Cottrell had very much led the way I think in, well through his teaching already in Birmingham before he, through the course that he, he developed there, and then, when he, when, after the Harwell interlude when he got the Goldsmiths’ chair in Cambridge, he built up Cambridge as a materials science department. And, the idea being that you, you, you base the, the science of, and proper... the, the structure and, and properties of the materials, in terms of basic mechanism, basic physics and chemistry of the atomic structures, and not as metallurgy used to be taught, as an empirical subject actually, effectively. So, that was the idea of materials science, that you started off if you like with the basic solid state physics and solid state chemistry, and then built up, developed the properties of materials of different types, in terms of the physics and chemistry.
Were those ideas common already in the Oxford metallurgy department?
Well, the Oxford chemistry department – the Oxford metallurgy department itself, put in a statement at the same time as I had, because it was the beginning or, that was the time at which you had to put in statements for what you wanted in the next quinquennium, next five years. And they had similar ideas, there’s no question about that, OK, but their vision wasn’t if you like as, as ambitious as mine with all these, [laughs] numbers of posts and god knows what. But, but both statements were consistent. And of course, I, I discussed the matter with the department before I put in my statement. And, I mean what... That was, that was the vision, and the vision was
Peter Hirsch Page 119 C1379/84 Track 8 that I wanted to have a viable department, or set up a viable department here, with an annual intake of the order of forty, eventually, and, and postgraduate student numbers of the same order, and with a new building, if you like, to build this thing up to a similar size to, to the Cambridge department, OK, which was the outstanding department at the time.
[21:48] Did you take anyone with you from Cambridge?
Yes. And that was absolutely essential. The most important thing is, I took with me Dr Whelan, who was, who was in fact appointed to the readership here. And, he, his job was to set up the electron microscopy facilities here. Because, another, I should tell you, there was another reason for me to move, it’s perhaps a slightly different point. There was a, I felt there was an important reason for me to move from physics into a metallurgy department. I mean I could have stayed in the Cavendish, but I felt that the technique which we had developed in the Metal Physics Group needed application in the technologically-based department of metallurgy or materials science. It was an important technique, which should be used in the user departments, the proper user departments, which in my opinion was, was metallurgy or materials science. So that was a reason for going from physics into metallurgy, OK. In addition, a number of other people came with me, Roger Booker came, who, he was appointed to a senior research officer post on an outside grant; Mike Goringe, who became a fellow of Wadham College; Jakubovics came, he got a, what’s called a, well it was a CEGB research fellowship at Corpus; and Peter Hazzledine was made departmental demonstrator. All right? [pause] OK. And, and we, we moved into 10 Parks Road, what was the old Mathematical Institute, and, well I don’t, I don’t think I need to tell you what we did, we got the practical class there and so on. And the new Honour School of Metallurgy and the Science of Materials started in 1967 and ’68, so, we got going almost immediately.
[24:50] What was 10 Parks Road like?
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Well it, it... 10 Parks Road was a house with an annex, there was an annex to it. And all the electron microscopes were put in the annex, which was ground floor accommodation, and it used to be a maternity unit during the war, actually. And, that was quite useful for the microscopes. And, well 10 Parks Road was OK, it was not ideal, but, it, it, you know, some of the floors were put into, ground and first floor were made into experimental space, which was good enough at the time. The problem was that, it was rather separated from the main building here, which was, what’s now called the Hume-Rothery Building, where the reception is now, that building, which was built in 1957 I think it was. And therefore, there was a tendency for the people down 10 Parks Road to feel themselves to be separate, OK.
Where were you actually based?
In the Hume-Rothery [Building], in here, I was here. And... And, I, I think a lot of, well, the people who had been, were here, the metallurgists if you like, considered this lot up there to consist of a lot of physicists and chemists, so different animals from what they were. And, there were... But it was, I tell you, the spirit was terrific in the department, right from the word go. And, and that’s of course, you know, individual people are very important for that, and... But I tried my best to try and get the, the two parts of the department to, you know, to, to link up and to be as close as possible.
What sort of things can you do to help that process?
Well at one stage I had a, [laughs] I had a request from the people at 10 Parks Road, whether I could make, whether it was OK for them to allocate some space to having a little tea room there. And I flatly refused, saying, ‘You come over here and have tea or coffee,’ which of course didn’t work, I mean they continued to have their tea and coffee over there. [laughs] [27:55] Well, let me go [on] and say that, what happened... Well there was a funny interlude, almost a year later, well in... I told you there was a, the beginning of the new quinquennium, and, the university got its letter of allocation in 1967, in November 1967, and the letter of allocation is always in two parts, one is a memorandum which is applicable to all universities, and then a letter specific to the, to the particular
Peter Hirsch Page 121 C1379/84 Track 8 university. That’s how it worked, I mean it’s all different now anyway, yes. But the general memorandum for all the universities noted that, ‘Metallurgy student demand already falls far short of available places, and no new courses are thus needed, and it’s hoped that existing courses will be critically examined with a view to concentrating resources.’ OK? And, the letter specific to Oxford didn’t mention metallurgy at all, and that was disappointing in a sense, but, one had to realise that the previous year metallurgy actually got a hell of a lot of money from the UGC, OK, for three posts, and, also grants for equipment and for the Mathematical Institute conversion. But, then there was a theoretical physicist [Peter Roaf] here who suggested in an article in the Oxford Magazine that, on the basis of the two points mentioned relating to metallurgy, the implication of the UGC’s letter was that metallurgy should be closed, as well as forestry, actually that was another department, OK. And, he went on to say that, the university had just set up a new Honour School of Applied Physics, ‘Metallurgists would be of great value in teaching here. Other metallurgists would find a natural home in engineering. With these transfers and natural wastage, the reduction of staff may not take very long to achieve.’ Now all this was in the Oxford Magazine. And, well that letter, article, caused great concern in the department, particularly because, the new Honour School of Metallurgy and Science of Materials had only just started, and, we had advertised the course widely of course, to schools and Oxford colleges, and doubts raised about the future of metallurgy that way were bound to have a very bad effect on recruitment. So we were very worried about this. Well we got a strong rebuttal by one of the lecturers in the department, Simon Altmann, and, he, he argued that, this concentration of resources actually didn’t at all apply, and [that] metallurgy in Oxford should close. Anyway... And, I, I won’t bother to go into the details of this, but, there was a further correspondence, you know, another letter from Roaf and another letter from Simon Altmann. But in the meantime, I actually contacted somebody called Professor Ball, who was at Imperial College, he was Professor of Metallurgy at University [Imperial] College, and he was a member of the UGC technology subcommittee, and told him about this. And, the result of that was that, the chairman of that committee contacted the chairman of the UGC who was Sir John Wolfenden at that time, and the latter then wrote to the VC at the time, somebody called Turpin, who was president of, what was he, Oriel or Corpus Christi, I’ve forgotten, suggesting a meeting to discuss forestry and metallurgy, which oddly enough seemed to have become confused. [laughs] So...
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Anyway, the result of all that was that, there was a, a clear statement made by the UGC that the, the general statement, you know, in the memorandum, general guidance about excessive places in relation to student demands in certain areas of technology, particularly in metallurgy, shouldn’t be taken as implying any reservation in number, and it, and it, and it, it was put on record that they endorsed the university’s plans for the future expansion of undergraduate students into both engineering and metallurgy. So that was very, it was extremely useful, that, it turned out, and it totally demolished the physicists’ thesis. And we couldn’t have wanted a better outcome.
How did you know the chap at Imperial?
Well he, I knew him as a, you know, well-known professor of metallurgy. I knew him, well as another professor of metallurgy at the time, so...
[35:55] Are there any other strings you can pull around the university to help make your case in that case?
Well, I tell you what did happen, was, a... We obviously, I mean the department... The UGC technology subcommittee did in fact, well it was a special subcommittee in the materials science working party, and as a result of all this kerfuffle, it came and visited here, and we had to submit a statement of the current position in metallurgy and what our future plans were. And the university gave us very great support, OK. And, the result of this was, and they more or less supported what our estimates were, although they said that an undergraduate intake of forty by the end of the next quinquennium may be difficult to achieve without some degree of redistribution of candidates within the physical sciences, which was of course perfectly true. But nevertheless, it was a terrifically strong endorsement by the university. And, then... And, what was interesting, what came out of it was, the committee, there was a report of what the committee had deliberated and discussed by, the report was published by the secretary of faculties here, OK, and, what it said was, they had inspected our premises and were clear that the existing accommodation of metallurgy was the worst which they had seen anywhere, and the overcrowding was in some cases positively
Peter Hirsch Page 123 C1379/84 Track 8 dangerous. And that engineering, though overall better, was in some respects as bad. Well... And, and it, that turned out to be very, very helpful. And then what they said was very important. The situation and the implied Cinderella status of technology in Oxford concerned them greatly. And that is, technology, not only metallurgy but, I mean engineering, was relatively new in Oxford, compared with what it was in Cambridge, OK, and in other universities. And, and they made, effectively made that point. And it concerned the committee because, a) Oxford had among the best students in the country, and b), this was an important point at that time, I don’t think it is now, but, Oxford and Cambridge ought, they felt, to act as a trendsetter in encouraging the development of technology as a respectable academic subject. You’ve got to think back of what things were like, OK, in 19... beginning of 1970s.
[37:25] Could you give me a sort of feel of the context around it, that point of view?
Well, it’s simply that... Yah, I can. I mean, for example, Lord Nuffield, you know, the car manufacturer, guru, OK, commercial genius, and, he, he had wanted... I can’t tell you the period exactly, it was before I came, but not all that long. He wanted to give a lot of money to develop engineering, and the university wouldn’t accept it, will you believe it, and the result was, he gave the money instead to, to build or develop, or, Nuffield, what’s now called Nuffield College, OK. So all the money went to Nuffield College, because the university put spanners in the work for the development of engineering. That wasn’t all that long before I came, for metallurgy. Another thing was, when, I might tell you that, when... In 1956, when the Metallurgy department started here, that was, OK, which was ten years before I came, OK, with Hume-Rothery then becoming professor I think at one, later, they, they wanted to have an honour school of metallurgy, well it had to be chemistry and metallurgy, because they weren’t big enough to teach metallurgy by themselves. And, when that proposal was put to the faculty board in 1956, the faculty board said, ‘A degree in scientific metallurgy should contain no more technology than is involved in the degree courses of chemistry or physics.’ OK? That shows you what the view was about a technological subject.
Well why do you think they were so against technological subjects?
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Well it was the attitude of, pure science was the, you know, the holy grail. And that’s been... I mean, that is one of the reasons really why... That’s, that’s one of the differences between what happens in this country, as compared to what happened in France or in Germany, OK, in the nature of the education. When... I mean this gets us onto a completely different subject, but it’s an important point, that, the philosophy in this country was to teach pure physics. Natural philosophy, it is a subject, you know, it’s like philosophy if you like, natural philosophy, you teach physics, a pure subject, and chemistry. And then it’s on the same, I don’t know, on the same cultural level I suppose as the classics, OK. Whereas, of course, Napoleon built up the École, what are they called?
École polytechnique?
[inaud] polytechnique, OK. I mean, to actually be useful. I mean that was... And it, that meant that the status, right from the beginning, the status of engineers was at a quite different level from what it was here. And that’s lingered, I’m afraid, that has lingered. And it lingered in Oxford for a long time, longer than in Cambridge, OK.
When you first became a professor at Oxford, you know, did you actually feel that way? Did you feel...
Well, I mean I should say that, I mean, the department was very nice, and one of the lecturers in the department gave us a party, you know, a sort of welcoming party which I went to. And there was a, I don’t know what he was at the time, he was probably a lecturer, tutor, in economics, he was an economist, at that party, and he later became a professor of economics in University College London I think, I won’t tell you his name, but, anyway... But I do remember this, I mean, you know, it’s 1966, a long time ago, but I remember it. And he gave me the following impression, it was pretty clear. First of all, the important people in Oxford were the tutors in the colleges, and that’s another thing, OK, you know, this university is unique, OK, it’s the most democratic university in the world in my opinion, [laughs] certainly in this country. And, and that’s to do with this, the college system, which is actually, somewhat different from what, in its influence from what it is in Cambridge, and of
Peter Hirsch Page 125 C1379/84 Track 8 course from other universities, OK. But, the thing is, the university, certainly in those days, was ruled by the college tutors and the teachers, the teaching here was brilliant, there’s no question about that, OK. The college tutors. The important people in this university. So what he said was, effectively, was, the important people are the college tutors, and professors are, don’t really have any influence, and they don’t have any influence in the acceptance, accepting undergraduates. That’s another thing, OK. They’re powerless. The undergraduates are accepted through the, by the colleges, not by the departments. So departments are relatively unimportant. So, it was made clear to me that the people who really counted were the tutors and the colleges; that professors didn’t have any power. And as regards professors of technology, they were definitely second class. So there we go, [laughs] that’s the impression I got in 1966. There we go. But things changed, there’s no question about that.
[44:55] Did you ever actually feel like you were in a Cinderella subject personally?
Well I mean, it... [pause] Well, I mean, yes at the time, the committee had identified the crux of the problem, the fact that technology in Oxford had Cinderella status, and, you know, one, one had that feeling. I mean also, if you think about it, we moved into the house vacated by the Mathematical Institute which moved into a new building, OK. I won’t bore you about it, but my next period in the, in fact the whole period really, while I was here, was concerned with, with getting more space. Because, we were always short of space. And we always took over... Well, the next thing really was, we took over 21 Banbury Road, which was a, a very important building as far as we were concerned. We were offered that because we were clearly very very short of space. And the nuclear physicists had moved... They occupied 21 Banbury Road, which was actually the [old Oxford Girls’] High School, it’s a listed building, and, and moved into a grand new building, which no doubt you have seen when you walked past, and we moved into, [laughs] into their cast-off space. And, there was a history of this, and, and you felt, OK, you know, we’re just a Cinderella subject here. But it didn’t really worry us very much, to be honest, it did not affect us. [47:10] We had to... The only way that we... What hampered us was that, in our development, was the relatively small number of applicants we had for undergraduate
Peter Hirsch Page 126 C1379/84 Track 8 places, and that was something that was always a difficulty. But, I think I mentioned to you that, my estimate to the university was that we eventually would have a number of graduate students of the order of forty, when the department had built up. In 19... When I came here, there were sixteen, which was in 1965 to ’66. In 1968/69, the number of graduate students was forty-six, we had already exceeded it. And that is the way the department grew, through the research activities. There was an enormous increase in the number of research students. And that was then followed by a very large increase of research fellows and postdoctoral people. And we kept on being short of space. And, we... All the time, I mean we, you know, we were short of space and we got a building here and a building there, but... 21 Banbury Road, which is across the road here, was an important increase, a very significant increase. But... And then we, we got a, we made an application and got agreement from the Science Research Council to place one of the AEI one million volt [electron] microscopes in Oxford, and, the delivery was estimated in the latter part of 1969, and that required a new building especially for it with some office space. And, it was actually completed in 1970, and the microscope was installed in 1970/71. And Alan Cottrell actually opened it on the 18th of June 1971. But, it didn’t, I mean that building didn’t significantly alleviate the overcrowding, since it, you know, mainly met the needs of the facility itself. But, it was a very important factor in our development, because, the university, in agreeing to give up this space for this new building, decided that really it had better have a plan for the whole of this site before it did this. And so in fact, a plan was, was set up, was formulated by the university, for 20,000 square feet of space for a science and materials building. That... You know, so... So if you like, it was a matter of the, you know, the tail wagging the dog, which was very useful.
Other than the microscope building, how do you actually convince the university to give you more space?
Well, simply, the, the way... Well the way I operated was that I just took in people, and then said to the university, [laughs] ‘We’ve got no space.’ Which is not what you should do, OK, but that was what we did do. And, I remember there was a terrible meeting we had in, in 1967. You, you can tell the way in which this expansion went, that in, it was already in January 1967 that we made a bid for more office space, and there was a hut at the rear of 9 Keble Road which, oh I don’t know, 790 square feet,
Peter Hirsch Page 127 C1379/84 Track 8 which had been vacated by nuclear physics of course, OK, and, I was interviewed by what was called the Buildings and Development Committee, and my god! they were hostile. They said, you know, ‘That wasn’t what you had asked for,’ and so on and so forth, and, they were very hostile. And, you know, I mean I, I think their view was, well this guy’s just empire-building, which is exactly what I was doing [laughs], of course, because I wanted the building, the department to become viable. But they did actually, eventually allocated that space, office space, for us, so... But that’s, I mean you ask me, how do you do it? And the answer is, we got the people, and then, then I made the case. Oh, I remember one of the questions that, one of the cases that I made to that committee, you know, this is so unimportant, I mean, now, but, I mean, one of the... But it tells you the sort of thing that goes on. One of the points that I made was, we were having all these visitors come from abroad, OK, and, they didn’t accept that as important. And I said, ‘Look, Oxford is an international university, how could you possibly say this?’ you know. And, that may or may not have had an effect. Obviously not everybody on that committee was hostile, but, certainly the chairman was. [53:47] Well anyway, so, there was this development, you know, which the university looked at, and a preliminary schedule for a new science and materials building, and a bid to the Wolfson Foundation was made which unfortunately was unsuccessful. And then Monty Finniston, who was, who was in charge of the metallurgy division at Harwell, who was a good friend of ours, introduced me to Robert Maxwell. And, I went and visited Robert Maxwell in the House of Commons, and he offered to lead an appeal, and to provide funds towards the departmental library. I’m afraid that, I didn’t like it, and I felt there was danger that Maxwell would impose conditions unacceptable to the department. And I didn’t pursue the matter further.
This is Robert Maxwell, the publishing baron.
Absolutely. Yes.
What didn’t you like about the offer?
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Well I didn’t like Maxwell. I, I had actually met him on other occasions, and I’m afraid I didn’t trust the man much. I think in retrospect, that was probably the right decision. Anyway.
When you said that, you know, Monty Finniston was a friend of the department, what did you mean?
Well, by, by supporting... Well initially, he had supported Hume-Rothery when he was first appointed here. I mean there was a question of, of actually setting up metallurgy and Monty Finniston was an important person to persuade the university that this was a good thing. There were other people as well who, who were instrumental in this. So... Well, Monty Finniston obviously was interested in having a possible, you know, a good supply of, a supply of good metallurgists, not only for Harwell but for, for the country as a whole. Well what happened next, since this, this particular thing didn’t work out, that, there had been discussions between the head of the computing lab here and also the professor of engineering science and myself about the development here of [the] Northern end [of the Keble Triangle]. And, we decided on a joint development, well the surveyor, university surveyor, who was very helpful, suggested a joint development for the three departments, and for the three departments to share. And what this would mean is that we should have, we’d have a shared space. And that’s what, what eventually should happen. And, it was interesting that, at the time the registrar wrote, ‘It is important that the overall development plan should be agreed however before the work on the planning of the electron microscope building goes ahead.’ So you can see, it was a matter of the tail wagging the dog, it was a very important trigger. Anyway, in the end, this building project was divided into two stages, and, we of course got much less space than we had originally expected. But anyway, there was a first stage. But, you could, you know, there was an enormous delay, and there was cutbacks in the UGC funding of course at that time and so on and so forth. And it was actually at that time when we got 21 Banbury Road. And... But it turned out to be an excellent building really for, for what we wanted.
[58:35]
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I’m interested in the other part of this process as well, you know, the building is sort of there to house these hoards of students you keep recruiting. Where do you get the funding for all the extra students?
Well at that time, we didn’t... The... [pause] Where did we get the funding for the students? I mean the students got their grants, OK, but we’re talking undergraduate students, and the research students also had their grants. What we needed was funds for running costs. And the way the university operated in those days was, if you had a building, then you got certain running costs depending on the size. And then of course, the most important thing was, that we got quite a lot of money, a lot of money, from Research Council grants and from industry, OK, which... Yah, I mean from organisations, particularly in the early days, from the research associations. Yes, and organisations like the Central Electricity Generating Board, and Harwell. But also industry direct, which, and, well there were other research associations in those days which no longer exist.
What’s a research association then?
Well, well, let’s... British Iron and Steel Research Association, I mean, there was a central facility of the British Iron and Steel Research Association which did work, which worked on a contract basis for all the iron and steel organisations, and similarly there was a Cast Iron Research Association. And, and so on. And, well there was the CEGB, Central Electricity Generating Board, which had its own labs, and similarly Harwell. And, they gave bursaries, OK, and also, you know, funds for postdoctoral people. And, but eventually, these research associations over the years disappeared, when, you know, the individual companies if you like, instead of having a central, a centre which they could tap to, I mean I think did their own research. That’s what’s happened. So they, you know, they disappeared gradually, these research associations. And...
How does one go about getting funding from industry as well in this period?
Well, you, well you, well you make contacts and you, you know, write to them, and say, ‘Look, we’ve got all these brilliant, these brilliant ideas here. And please can you
Peter Hirsch Page 130 C1379/84 Track 8 let us have money?’ And, that was an important thing, I mean it was absolutely essential in the way we operated. [1:02:00] In the early days, perhaps I should mention that, you might ask, how on earth did we manage to run this course, now, instead of just one third of the honour schools, but full-time, it’s a four-year honour schools, even though the number of, you know, lecturers, and the faculty was still very small and only gradually increasing? And the answer is, it was through all these research fellows who in fact contributed to the teaching. And some of those were supported on outside grants, like Roger Booker, he was a senior research officer, there was a post in those days, and that was on outside grants from, from the semiconductor industry. And, so that was a very important part of the way we operated and built the thing up.
What sort of venues do you actually make the contacts that eventually lead to these grants?
Well, conferences are very important, OK, that’s... And, also, I mean, industry itself is interested in establishing links with the universities, and they, you know, and they come and visit. And... Or we approach them and say, ‘Look can we visit and discuss, you know, are you interested in a project of this type?’ and so on. And, that’s how, how it, you know, how this thing worked. So, you get a picture of how we built up the department, in a period in which growth was very difficult, very difficult, because of the cutbacks.
When do the cutbacks actually start to feature?
Well I think, it started to feature already in the 1970s actually. [laughs] But there was a peculiar thing here, and that is that, you know, when I came, the way in fact grants to the various departments were allocated was on a historical basis. That is to say, if you got that grant in that year, then the next year you would get a similar grant inflated by inflation, or perhaps, you know, if there were a few posts allocated to the faculty board, then you made a bid for it. There was no way of reducing the number, OK, that’s how the thing operated. So in that, it was very difficult in that sort of system to, for a new subject to come up, and wanting to increase at a rapid rate. You
Peter Hirsch Page 131 C1379/84 Track 8 could really only do it by transfer of staff from other departments. Well eventually in fact that did happen, because there were, some of the departments here were terrifically overstaffed. Physics had been, and, particularly were a strong on example. Well, it was, and the physicists themselves realised this, and of course, you know, during the last twenty years or so there was a considerable cutback there. [pause] Oh well, anyway, eventually, we did get this joint building with the engineers and computing people. And, as far as we were concerned, the mixing was really more with, with the computing people than... Sorry, with, with the engineers. And, that, that presented really no serious problems. And there was a joint common room which facilitated the interaction between engineering and ourselves, which was good. And... But... And in the late Seventies I suppose we, I don’t know, by this time, I think... Yes, it was the late, I think the building was, this joint building was finished in ’76. And then, we, we were still housed in four different buildings and still in 10 Parks Road and then... Anyway, we, we managed to persuade the university to, to allocate us a house much nearer here, 12-13 Parks Road, which is very close to the original building which is called the Hume-Rothery Building, in exchange for the house in 10 Parks Road, so we, we switched. That happened about 1980. And... Well then there was a, [laughs] there was a bit of a lull for a few years, but not much, I have to tell you, and, then, then... Well, there were various initiatives from the UGC which were important.
[1:08:20] How does one actually apply to the UGC, at this time?
Well the university does. You do it, you persuade the faculty, you go, you apply to, you put your bid to the faculty board and the faculty board then asks the general board to, well the university, and the university makes the application in the end. [1:08:43] But, what happened in the middle of the 1980s was that, the UGC had a, a scheme, it was an engineering and technology initiative, aimed at increasing the output of graduates in science and technology, and, it made clear that they expected industry and other sources to share the costs. And, we made a bid for a new course in, a joint course with the engineers, called the Honour School of Electronic and Structural Materials Engineering. Now I should explain to you that, this happened in 1984/5,
Peter Hirsch Page 132 C1379/84 Track 8 and which incidentally, we had fifty-eight research students and thirty-three research assistants and fellows, you can tell the growth which is taking place. But anyway, we were interested in getting more accommodation, but we were also interested in getting a course going with more of an engineering flavour. And the reason for that was, one of the factors which affected me was that I actually had been seconded in 1982, between 1982 and 1984, to become part-time chairman of the UKAEA. And what I learnt there, amongst other things, was, that, one of the tremendous wastes and costs, which were unnecessary in my opinion, was due to the fact that, quite basic, there were quite basic failings in the application of metallurgical principles to the construction of a big project like for example the prototype fast reactor at Dounreay. And where, just to save money, I mean, you know, there were the things like, to do with the steam generators which were always things that went wrong, it wasn’t, [laughs] the things that went wrong were always the steam generators. And it was to do with welds, OK, there were lots and lots of, thousands of tubes on plates which had to be welded into them. And, and in order to save money they, they used the wrong kind of welds, which resulted in terrific problems which cost them millions. And there were other examples of this which worried me no end, and it seemed to me that what you needed was materials engineers and, and, who had really, their feet in both camps. And so I was rather keen to have a, a course of, a joint course with the engineers. And at the same time, there was, there was a champion for this kind of course in engineering called Dew-Hughes. But I have to tell you that, it was very difficult to get this thing through.
What was the opposition?
Well, I mean it was the business that, if you have a joint course, like this, then something has got to go, OK. I mean, the engineering course had so many papers, right, and one of the papers had to be dropped, which one? That was the problem. Anyway, the... Well what happened in the end, that, so that was one difficulty, and the other difficulty was to get the money. We had to get money from other sources, and we did get money from the Wolfson. We made an application to the Wolfson Foundation, and we also got money from other sources including industry, like the GEC and Monsanto and GKN, JEOL. So, and we got the money together. And, well then there was some, some hiccups I won’t bother you with, it’s, it’s a detail...
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What sort of hiccups?
[sighs] [laughs] Well, the UGC had noted that the SERC was withdrawing funds from nuclear physics. This was in 1985. And that consequently, space was going to become available in nuclear physics, and why couldn’t the department then go into that space? And a [no] new building for research was needed. And, oh, this was a dreadful bombshell, and which led to a flurry of correspondence including letters from the university, the UGC, and I wrote to Peter Swinnerton-Dyer who was Chairman of the UGC at the time, and, Sir Fred Dainton, who was, was a good friend of the department, and a trustee of the Wolfson Foundation which had supported the department’s application and was asked to help. Anyway, there was a lot of lobbying and in the end the UGC did agree, and it paid for the fees and furniture, which, but not for the running costs of the building. Anyway, we got the whole thing going, eventually. And, that meant, it gave us more space, and it also meant that, we had this, this course of Electronic and Structural Materials Engineering I think it was called. It never attracted many students, and, but, it, it... [looking through material] There was a, a quota, I think, I forget now what it, how many it was, maybe it was ten. We, I think we, we managed to get to ten. Maybe what we expected was twenty. We didn’t, we didn’t manage to get that ever. And there were problems with this course all the time, and the reason really was that, there was no continuing champion in engineering science. It is difficult to run joint honours courses like this, because, when you are, when you get accepted in Oxford as an engineer, the tutor expects to teach you for the whole of the period effectively, and, to... This business of a joint honour school is, causes difficulties. Anyway, nevertheless, we ran it, and we had support from, from industry for it, in particular from Derek Roberts, who was technical director of GEC at the time, and, he gave his total support to a joint four- year course in materials engineering. [1:17:57] Anyway, the course, there was tremendous difficulty as I mentioned in actually getting, getting the course, the nature of the course agreed with the engineers, and there were two steps in this. And the way the UGC operated was, you had to, suddenly, you know, they said, ‘Yes we agree in principle; now give us a full, a detailed estimate and structure within the next two weeks,’ something like... It was
Peter Hirsch Page 134 C1379/84 Track 8 terrible. And, and we had to get agreement from the engineers that they would actually go along with it, in a short period like this. And, they said, ‘OK, we agree in principle,’ because they didn’t want to be seen as scuppering the thing. And at that point, we didn’t have to discuss the details of the course. And then back comes the UGC, you know, a few months later and says, ‘Yes, we agree to the course. Now tell us in fact what, the details of the course within a fortnight.’ And it was another eleventh-hour thing, OK. Which, the engineers eventually agreed to, to drop one of their papers. And, so, that’s how the thing went. The course alas, it, it... It, it was moderately successful. We, we made great efforts to promote entry into this course. And of course, as far as the department’s concerned, we, we now were tapping a different source, totally, because we were, yes, we were tapping the applicants to engineering. Whereas, for a normal course if you like, or the main course, Metallurgy and the Science of Materials, we were tapping those people who wanted to enter that course direct. They were different people, OK. So that meant we were tapping new, a new source altogether. I have to say that there was some worry within the department that it might, recruiting through that channel might reduce the numbers, you know, who were applying for materials and, the other course, the Metallurgy and the Science [of Materials]... That did not happen. And... But, we never really got more than about ten or so, and in the end, it was decided to terminate the course, and the last entry was in 2004. The course had existed for some twenty years, and the question is, was it sufficiently useful? And my opinion is, yes it was, because, during that period there were some 100 to 150 high quality materials engineers produced, of really high quality. And you have to look at this in the context that, if you looked at the quality of the applicants into metallurgy or materials science courses, or materials engineering courses, throughout the UK, OK, that made an enormous difference, OK, because, there was a tendency for the, in those days for the quality of the candidates on the whole not to be all that good. So... And, so, you know, that was, that was, in spite of the fact that it no longer exists, it was very helpful. [1:22:30] Now, I should also say that there were other activities which took place. In 1977 there was an initiative inviting universities for first degree courses which have a pronounced orientation towards manufacturing courses, in the manufacturing industry, they were called Dainton courses. And, and the initiative was in response to a report which Freddie Dainton had written on the flow of candidates in science and
Peter Hirsch Page 135 C1379/84 Track 8 technology into [industry] higher education. And, we were rather keen on this, and we devised a four-year honour school in which much of the material on electrical and magnetic properties of materials would be replaced by economics teaching.
Mm.
And that led to another difficult negotiation, but, we did manage that with the economists and the Management Centre, and there was a very small quota of five for this course, and the university, the department got a new lecturer to teach that. And, it started in ’79, and, the intake really came from our existing materials, metallurgy and materials science course. And, there was a quota of five, and on the whole I think there was, that was, sometimes it was exceeded and sometimes it wasn’t. But, that... And, as part of this, they had to spend a period in a firm, on a management project, OK, in their fourth year, I think it was a six months period. And these people were terrifically good. It was very noticeable, they were excellent. And they had to be. There was a, they were recruited to this course after the first year, and they had to do, you know, they had to do sufficiently well, there was a hurdle at the end of the first year, because it was very difficult. Because what happened was, that the economists and the management people would teach to the final honours course level in a limited area, field, and... But the output was quite fantastic. The students were terrific. And the management project proved to be highly successful, and the firms liked these youthful people with no [laughs], no experience, to come in and make proposals of how they should change their, the management. And some of them got jobs immediately. Oh yes, it was, it was fantastic. And you felt that they were, these people, when you interviewed them, were particularly fluent when describing their projects. The name of the course was changed in 1995. I’m not sure now what, it... I suspect that, there may be a, I think that course may in fact possibly be on the way out, I don’t know what the present situation is, but over the years it has been, although small, has been very successful. [1:26:45] Now, what has happened over the years, particularly since I retired, I retired in 1992, at which... No, first of all I should say that, the way the department grew was by means of the incredible increase in the number of research students and research fellows and assistants, OK, to make us one of the predominant research departments
Peter Hirsch Page 136 C1379/84 Track 8 in the material science field in the country, there’s no question about that, I think, and, you know, by national comparisons, I think sometimes we came out top, and sometimes we came out second to, maybe, Cambridge, OK. But, the situation had changed. I mean, if you like, at least that vision, or if you like, the, the aim, had been achieved by the time I retired, OK. What hadn’t been achieved was to increase the number of undergraduates, and that has happened during the last ten or fifteen years, for reasons which I’m not entirely clear, but, the people coming after me as heads of department, maybe [made] more effort than I did, and there was a school liaison officer which was established. But, I mean in my day, the number of applicants was of the order of, or sometimes as, [laughs] as low as, as the number accepted, OK, which wasn’t a good thing. But... And it’s, it was of the order of twenty, sometimes it exceeded twenty, but, sometimes... I mean I remember the year that I retired, it was I think eighteen were accepted.
Why do you think...
Nowadays, it’s, it’s of the order, it’s over thirty, and the number of applicants is of the order of 100. It’s an enormous change which has taken place.
Why do you think it was so hard to recruit undergraduates?
Because it was a non-school subject. It’s, it’s a non, it was, a non-school, well still is, a non-school subject, OK?
In what sense non-school?
Well, because, at school you do physics and you do chemistry, or biology or whatever, but there isn’t a subject of materials science. But something has happened during this period, and I’m not clear what it is. It may be the... I, I don’t think it is all the local, the local efforts, because I think this is a national thing which has happened. Materials science has caught the imagination of people, and I don’t know why that is. It may be something to do with nanomaterials and that sort of thing. But it’s a totally different situation. I used to dread every year learning the numbers of applicants, you know, always one, I mean, the beginning of October, November/October time, you
Peter Hirsch Page 137 C1379/84 Track 8 know, which... Whereas nowadays, the limit is not, not on the number of people you can accept; it’s, it’s determined by the limited number of fellows in, in the college, fellows in the department, in, in the university, OK, they have increased. And, and in some cases what’s happened is, there may be two tutorial fellows in metallurgy in a particular, in a particular college, like St Edmund Hall or St Anne’s and so on. And there have been more, more colleges have, you know, established fellowships in the subject. But, in the end, the total number of people you can accept depends on the number of tutors there are, and that, that’s now turning out to be the, the limitation. But it’s of the order of, of, I mean sometimes the intake is now of the order of thirty- five, so my target of forty, you know, [laughs] I now can, I’ve lived long enough to, to be satisfied that it, maybe it has actually, nearly been accepted, you know, attained. And, so one is no longer worried about it. Because, in the days when the number of undergraduates were very small, in the early days, there was always a question of whether the department was viable or not, OK. We made it viable having an enormous number of research students, but that’s how the thing was built up. [1:32:08] Now the other thing I should say to you as regards the quality of the department, we recruited, and also the nature, I mean, we recruited people of course, new staff, and since I retired there was, you know, new people have come in, and, in different fields. My successor was David Pettifor, who is actually brilliant, well I would call him a mathematical physicist, solid state physics. And there had been appointments in the polymer field and, so on and so forth. And, the department has generated a considerable number of fellows of the Royal Society; for its size it has done extremely well compared to some of the larger departments in Oxford, like engineering or, or even physics.
Why do you think it has done so well? Is there a magic ingredient, or...?
Well I mean, in the end the magic ingredient is the quality of the people. I mean we had, 1967, I mean one of the research students who came was David Cockayne, and he developed what was called the, he was an electron microscopist and he, he developed the technique called the weak beam technique, which is, has been terrifically successful, and it’s a standard technique today if you want to study the defects at high resolution. And, well he, he was elected to the Royal Society. We
Peter Hirsch Page 138 C1379/84 Track 8 established here a group on atom probe analysis, and where you have a, it’s a technique whereby you have a fine tip and you essentially pull off with a high voltage or, maybe, I mean, by means of a laser light, one atom at a time effectively. And these, you have a position, a sensitive detector, and you can detect the position of these atoms, which gives you a magnified picture of the surface of the, of the specimen. But it also, its, time-of-flight mass spectrometer, and it tells you in fact what element it is, so you can do elemental analysis of, of the material. And that also, I mean it was led by George Smith over many years and he was elected to the Royal Society. And when I came here there was Jack Christian, who was a very distinguished metallurgist already at the time when I came, and he became even more distinguished. He studied transformations of metals, martensitic transformation in which he was an expert, and he wrote a very classic book on transformations. He studied body centred cubic metals, deformation of that, he made important contributions to this. He was elected to the Royal Society. And, one thing attracts another, the quality of the department is such then that other good people are attracted. I mean we attracted John Pethica from Cambridge, who had worked on and developed the, a scanning, a scanning type atomic probe microscope, atomic force microscope. And in fact he was, he was, he contributed shall we say to the development of the scanning tunnelling microscope which two Swiss scientists got the Nobel Prize for, and, he was mentioned by them as being an important contributor. And he developed that technique and also the atom force microscope, and he set up a group here, and, he got an FRS. So at some stage, I mean I can’t remember when it was, but there were any number of FRS’s round here, which was quite extraordinary when you compared it with, with other departments. So the quality, you know, the quality of the department was no longer in doubt.
[1:37:19] I guess we’ve spent a lot of time today talking about, you know, I guess, I guess empire building was the phrase you used.
Yes. Yes.
I’m wondering, could you give me an idea of, what is a typical day like for you over that period? Just to sort of, you know, bring this empire building down to, you know,
Peter Hirsch Page 139 C1379/84 Track 8 the personal experience on a day almost. What are you doing over the course of a day? Somewhere in the middle of this.
Well, well I mean, you know, like do I suppose most, like all heads of departments. I mean you do have to deal with all the administrative chores which turn up, and the bids you have to make. I mean we have to make, we had to make bids all the time for this, that and the other, and... And, as a result of all this, of course, you know, the amount of time you had available for personal research, and I haven’t talked about that at all, OK, was rather limited. But it was a very very busy time, and a very challenging time, and, and, well I found it very satisfying, but quite, quite hard. I mean, I don’t know how my wife put up with it, but there we go. I haven’t said to you anything about, you know, what research I did, if any, during this period. I mean, there were some things I did. I... Before I left Cambridge I had started work on mechanical properties of body centred cubic metals, because I had this idea of, as I mentioned, the importance of the dissociation of the screw dislocation because of its symmetry. But when I came here, because Jack Christian was working on it as well, I dropped it, I left him to, to develop it, because he was a first-class man and... Well, you know, I finished off writing a few papers but I didn’t do anything experimentally here any more. I...
Did you miss the research aspect of it?
What?
Did you miss doing your primary research?
Well I did, I did collaborate with a number of people on different things. I, I worked with John Humphreys on, who was here at the time, he became professor of, I’ve forgotten now what, maybe it was materials engineering or something, in Manchester. And... But, I collaborated here with a number of people, and, with John Humphreys, who worked with, who was one of John Martin’s students, John Martin was a lecturer here, and, he was a postdoc, and I collaborated with him on, on deformation of alloys with non-deformable particles, and he did excellent electron microscopy, and I helped him a little bit about the interpretation. And, I, I did, still, I think I wrote a paper with
Peter Hirsch Page 140 C1379/84 Track 8
Terry Mitchell on work hardening around that time, which was something that, you know, was an important area of my interest when I was in Cambridge, but I decided to give that up because I felt that somebody else ought to, you know, it needed new ideas. But, anyway, we, with John Humphreys I did do some work on alloys with non-deformable particles and we... And, that had some, led to some, some useful results. [1:42:05] Another thing that I got interested in was, was whether you could detect, see defects, not by transmission microscopy, but in fact by, by just scanning the surface and looking at the electrons which were scattered in a backscatter direction. And, that was an area in which I did some work here with, with other people, both on the theoretical side and experimentally, which, which I think was, was quite interesting. What made possible, what became possible was, I suppose, things like detectors became better, and this meant, the object of all this was that, you didn’t have to thin the specimen, you could actually look at a bulk specimen and look at it from the surface, and you could see, see the defects this way. And it does, it did have some, some application. I got rather interested in semiconductors, and, I did, I had a, I mean there was a thing about, an interesting result on the... The mechanical properties of semiconductors like silicon and germanium depended on doping, and I produced a simple theory for that. And I also produced a model for a reconstruction of the dislocation cores in these alloys which I think, that particular, the reconstruction idea did have some effect, I think some, was of some significance. And with other people I looked at various other mechanisms to do with semiconductors. [1:45:02] One of the important things I did, well I think it was important, was, I teamed up with one of the lecturers here called Steve Roberts, well he’s a professor now, on looking at the deformation of silicon as, with, or if you, the, with, as a function of temperature, but silicon with cracks in them. So, you know, you can, the question is, if you have, if you put a crack into silicon single crystals, and the object of the exercise was really to see, to try and get at the basic mechanisms of a crack propagation, OK, you put a crack in, and if you, you can do that by indentation for example, you put a surface crack in. If you then take that crystal and pull it or bend it, OK, it’ll break in a brittle manner. And as you increase the temperature, then you find that, it becomes at, above a certain temperature, [the] brittle-ductile transition, it becomes ductile. And what
Peter Hirsch Page 141 C1379/84 Track 8 happens in, you know, in this transition, OK, which is of, you know, understanding that is of some significance...
Why is it important?
Well, I mean it’s, this is a basic study. I mean in practice, it’s terrifically important, I mean, for big components. You, well you just think of a nuclear reactor in which if you do have cracks present, OK, and you have stresses occurring, that, you want to make sure that that crack doesn’t propagate in a brittle fashion. If it does, then, you get a catastrophe, OK. Well, I mean, there’s an enormous amount of knowledge and understanding on this, and for, in the areas that, in the area of, say, nuclear reactors, or any, any structural component, big structure component, the way to deal with that is by fracture mechanics and, fracture mechanics and, and you don’t look at... And you can determine what plasticity takes place, OK, by, by using various computer programs these days. Our aim of looking at these crystals of silicon, single crystals, was to really look at the basic mechanisms in terms of individual dislocations, and, what we did was to, to be able to determine what in fact the mechanisms were in determining the brittle-ductile transition for silicon with, and we, we derived the mechanisms, sort of individually, for dislocations, and what determined them. And, we made some approximations, but nevertheless, it, I think that was quite, quite useful, I think. And then I became interested in intermetallics. But I think, yes, I’m afraid, time is up.
I think we’re out.
I’m sorry...
Not at all.
...but this is it. OK. I haven’t, I must go. And so must you, to catch your train.
[end of session]
[End of Track 8]
Peter Hirsch Page 142 C1379/84 Track 9
[Track 9]
How did you become Chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority?
Well that’s quite an interesting story. In the department, we had quite a lot of collaboration with the people at Harwell, the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, in particular we collaborated on looking at the nature of radiation damage by electron microscopy. In 19... late 1973, I had an approach from Walter Marshall, who was then the head of AERE, I think that was his position. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority was Sir John Hill at that time, and, Walter Marshall I think was the head of the Research Establishment at Harwell. And Walter Marshall decided to set up a study group to study the integrity of light water reactors, it’s called the LWR study group, and the reason for the setting up of this was as follows. The CEGC at that time decided to have a big nuclear programme, and, it was an ambitious programme with, the idea of which was to build a lot of reactors, and the trouble was, or the question was, which type of reactor would you, which type of reactor... [background noise] Is somebody trying to break in? Which...
[pause in recording]
Sorry, what were you saying about, which type of...?
Which type of reactor should be adopted. And, in the UK, the latest reactors were the advanced gas-cooled reactors, AGRs. Whereas, I suppose most reactors, all over the world, particularly in America, were water, water-cooled reactors. And, Walter Marshall was rather keen to introduce these pressurised water reactors into the UK, PWRs, as part of the, well really as the reactor in the CEGB system, or planned, planned system of reactors. And, at the time, Alan Cottrell was Chief Scientist in the Government, and, he of course had a lot of experience in nuclear reactors, and he produced a statement which was worrying, in that he, he was, he pointed out that with these pressurised water reactors, there’s a risk that you could get a catastrophic fracture of the pressure vessel, which if you like was the Achilles’ heel of the system, that, if you had a loss of coolant accident, and there was a leak, and, you then got very high stresses, that you could actually fracture the pressure vessel in which the reactor
Peter Hirsch Page 143 C1379/84 Track 9 actually sits, OK, the pressure vessel, steel pressure vessel is the containment. And, that really set the, [laughs] cat amongst the pigeons. [05:05] And, the result of that was, that Sir John Hill, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, got Walter Marshall to start an in-depth investigation of the structural integrity of PWRs. So, Walter Marshall set up this study group, and, he came to see me in 1973, asking me to join it, and I said to him at the time that I didn’t really know anything about this. But his view was, well, Alan Cottrell [laughs], had been Professor of Metallurgy at Cambridge, and as an antidote to, at least I think that was the idea, he, he had to get onto his committee the professor of metallurgy at Oxford. I think that was the idea. And he must have had the idea that I knew all about it, which I didn’t. I mean my knowledge of, in the nuclear field, really was, was concerned with the, the nature of the damage studied by electron microscopy, which is, which although it was relevant, it’s not directly... It isn’t the expertise that would be required to decide whether a pressure vessel, you know, conditions under which a pressure vessel could crack. Anyway, I did join the group, and, in fact, it turned out that in 1974, early summer of 1974, Walter decided, oh well I suppose it was in the spring of 1974, he decided that it was, it was time to produce a preliminary report. And, I had the unenviable job of actually chairing a committee to set up, to write a first draft, preliminary draft of this report. And, which, the, the gist of it was that, provided you did various things to make sure that the pressure vessel has been made properly and there were no cracks in it, and, you know, using NDT techniques and so on and so forth. Anyway, we went and saw the then Secretary of State for Energy, one Varley I think it was. And this was, he was a Labour politician, so the Government, I don’t, can’t remember who was Prime Minister at the time. And I accompanied Walter to see Varley [laughs], and present this preliminary report. And, I was very struck by the fact that as we walked out, the next people to see him were in fact the, the chairman of the Coal Board. [laughs] Varley was an ex-coalminer, and it was pretty clear where his, what his preferences were I think. Anyway, eventually, a proper report was published. It’s a very influential Marshall Report, and, it was published, must have been published, either very late Seventies or early Eighties, I can’t remember the date, I can look it up, but I can’t remember the date. And it’s called the Marshall Report, and it was very influential. And it had any number of recommendations in it and so on and so forth. Anyway, in 1982, Walter Marshall was
Peter Hirsch Page 144 C1379/84 Track 9 asked to become Chairman of the CEGB, and, ah, well, OK. In, early in 1982, Walter invited me to join the AEA board. By this time he had become Chairman of the AEA, OK, he had already become Chairman of the AEA, Sir John Hill must have retired, I can’t remember the date when Walter became Chairman, but he did. He was Chairman of the AEA, and he invited me to join the AEA board, it was early 1982. The whole thing was totally ridiculous.
Why do you say ridiculous?
Well you’ll, you will see in a minute. And, so I went and attended the, you know, meetings. And I think it must have been the second meeting which I attended, Walter said, ‘Stay behind.’ [laughs] And so I did, and he said, ‘You are going to become the next chairman of the AEA,’ [laughs] in his inimitable way. I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ It then turned out that he had been offered the job of the chairmanship of the CEGB, and he had accepted, and the question was, who’s going to take over from him? Well it was a totally ridiculous idea in my opinion to ask me to become chairman of the AEA having attended a couple of meetings of the board. [laughing] Anyway. I did look into it, and I decided, well, it sounds a rather exciting job, and I’ll do it part-time. Walter said, ‘Oh, it’s a terrifically easy job, there’s nothing to do. [laughing] You’ll only have to spend a day or two per fortnight on this job.’ And, anyway, I, I thought, well OK, I’ll do it as a part-time chairman. And I had a meeting with the then Secretary of State for Energy. There seemed to be any number of Secretaries of State of Energy around this time, and it was Lawson. And... Anyway, to cut a long story short, I agreed to do this on a part-time basis for two years. And, the university gave me leave of absence, they very surprisingly operated in a very rapid way, because I had to take over I think in September, something of that year. So, that’s how I became Chairman of the AEA. [laughs] It was all Walter’s doing, Walter Marshall’s doing. And how he persuaded people, without going through a proper procedure, is beyond me.
[13:06] Well what sort of chap was Walter Marshall?
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Oh, I mean he, he was, he had incredible charisma, and, very authoritative. Very very clever. He was a very clever politician. I, I would, I should stress that also in his younger days he was a brilliant scientist, there’s no question about that. But then he, he went into administration and, he was very much a political animal. And, very influential, very influential. And, well Margaret Thatcher thought a lot of him, because, he, he was very influential in the miners’ strike, keeping the electricity going, nuclear power. So, OK, that’s how I got the job.
[14:13] What does the UKAEA actually do, or did it do at the time?
What did it do? Well, it developed the technology for nuclear reactors, it was responsible for developing the technology for civil nuclear reactors. And it was an enormous organisation. It had, there was the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, there was another research establishment at Risley, there was Sellafield where reprocessing work was done of the fuel. There was another establishment down at Winfrith where they had developed a different kind of nuclear reactor. So it was an enormous organisation for development of nuclear energy. That was the purpose of it, and, that was what it did. And, at board level, there were representatives from the CEGB and British Nuclear Fuels, I mean these were if you like the customers eventually, and they were also people who spent a lot of money placing contracts with the Atomic Energy Authority. And it also had Department of Energy representation, and some independents.
Mm.
And the big programmes were, the biggest programme was on the fast reactor system in Dounreay. Yes I’ve forgotten to say, this was of course, Dounreay was another very important establishment, where there was a Prototype Fast Reactor, and most of the money I think, or the major part of the money, that the Atomic Energy Authority got, was actually spent on programmes to do with PFR. There were also programmes to do with advanced gas-cooled reactors, the AGRs, improvements of them, OK. And, there was also a programme on fusion, which was actually at Culham. And, so... And, there were also programmes on structural integrity of water-cooled reactors,
Peter Hirsch Page 146 C1379/84 Track 9 although, the Atomic Energy Authority itself had not developed any PWRs. It had developed, it had some interest in water-cooled reactors, the reactor at Winfrith. So, anyway, that was it. Well what did I spend my time doing in these two years? And it turned out that, of course most of the time, you had to fight off cuts. Because this was the period of government cuts to, well probably all departments, but, certainly, there were big cuts in, in the gradual run-down, I mean, the policy was fairly clear, you could see it on the horizon, of the atomic energy programme. And...
How does one fight off a cut?
Well you just have to make a very strong case with, with the, you know, Department of Energy, and it depends very much on the, the Secretary of State for, in the Department of Energy. I mean I, [laughs] I seem to have had experience with any number of them in this very short period, because, Lawson didn’t last long, because, he went and became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and funnily enough, in my discussions with him I had the strong feeling that all he was interested in was to make big cuts. And, you know, which, which was, from my point of view, very unfortunate. And then, he was replaced by Lamont. And, then he was replaced by Peter Walker at the end of my period. And so, so far as I was concerned, I was, I mean it was a very interesting experience, the experience with, negotiating with these ministers. I don’t think that, there wasn’t an awful lot, you know, that we could do; it was clear that there was a general policy of, you know, of running down the Atomic Energy Authority. And...
[20:38] How did people actually within the Authority you were working with see that change?
Well I mean, they didn’t like it, but... And, I actually instituted something during my two years which was a failure, and that was, every time they produced, they produced a budget, OK, of how the money would be spent, it, it would be, it would always be existing programmes. And I didn’t, I felt this was unfortunate, that although there were cuts, my feeling was, the thing to do was actually to have some free money so that we can channel it into new programmes, rather than just keeping the old programmes going. That’s not to say that it wasn’t important to keep old programmes
Peter Hirsch Page 147 C1379/84 Track 9 going, but not necessarily at the same level. And there’s a, you know, a question of priorities. So, I suggested that to the secretariat which in the end had to, had to supervise this business of getting the programmes into shape within a budget, that they should actually have another cut, internal cut if you like, which we, the board could then allocate. Well, it, it really didn’t, didn’t work. I mean it just, I’m afraid that, that was a failure.
[22:27] On the subject of existing programmes, you mentioned the fast breeder reactor in passing.
Yes.
Hadn’t that been on the go since the 1950s?
Oh yes, it’s been on the go for a very long time. And, the question, I mean there was this very, the great difficulty, it was a very expensive programme, and, would it ever come to fruition? And... And, I mean, one of the things that we did do was to look for collaboration, and there were two possibilities really, to collaborate in the development of the fast reactor with the Americans who had a programme, or with the French who had a programme, and they had a fast reactor called Phénix. And, actually Walter Marshall was very keen on collaborating with the Americans, and I wasn’t. I was much keener actually to collaborate with, with the French, who it seemed to me, the European, a European programme with, where the French and us had rather similar interests, and really similar development skills, were more suited for collaboration. And so we went for that. I don’t think Walter liked it. And... But the, the Department of Energy agreed, and there was a, towards the end of my period, an agreement was reached to have a joint fast reactor programme. And that was, I think was important, because, it meant that the fast reactor programme would continue. It gave it some stability in being joint with Europe and also reducing the cost somewhat that way, at least the potential of reducing the cost.
How did you actually see the fast breeder reactor programme yourself when you you’d been in...?
Peter Hirsch Page 148 C1379/84 Track 9
Well I did... Yes, well I mean I, I was, I, I supported the fast breeder reactor. But it had tremendous difficulties. I mean the great thing about the fast breeder reactor compared to thermal reactors is that, whereas the thermal reactors are limited to using uranium-235, which is only about seven per cent of the, the uranium – no, .7 per cent, .7 per cent, with the fast breeder reactor, you could utilise the other isotope, which is the rest of it, is U-238. Which, which is what’s called fertile; you can make it fissile by bombarding it with neutrons, and, you then make it into, well eventually into plutonium, OK, and that, that then becomes fissile, it’s called a fertile, U-238 is fertile. And, and, you can make a fast breeder reactor by using high energy neutrons, and make a reactor under those conditions. Whereas for the thermal reactors, you use, you have to use very slow neutrons, OK, thermal, thermal neutrons, thermal energy. And, you... But the potential of being able to use U-238, use the whole of the uranium inventory, is enormous, and, well one used to say, you know, that the, the energy, the potential is limitless. Well it’s, it’s certainly, you know, bigger than the amount of fossil fuel inventory in the world. So that, that was the attraction. [27:40] And, now the technology is difficult. You don’t have a moderator, you cool... And you, the temperatures are very high, and the, the coolant is sodium, liquid sodium, and there are all sorts of problems with that. And, that, that was all developed, and, PFR, and, the French had a somewhat different system, but basically it’s the same principle, difference in, if you like, details in the technology. And... But it, it was a difficult system. And, also, you have to associate with it a reprocessing system, because, you have to take fuel out every now and then to get rid of, to separate out nuclides which, which are formed during the process, and which would make, which makes reactors operating less efficient or not, not possible at all. So you have to combine it with a reprocessing route. Now there are all sorts of, there are two things about the fast breeder reactor. I mean I’ve told you about the advantages and the possibilities. The disadvantages are, that the technology is difficult, and the second disadvantage is a plutonium-based reactor, OK. You could argue of course, this is a way of actually getting rid of the plutonium. But nevertheless, I mean it does involve, and particularly with reprocessing, it involves moving plutonium around and so on and so forth. So... And that makes life difficult if you like politically as well. So my position on it was that, that I supported it, I thought the prospect was good, but, because the, because of
Peter Hirsch Page 149 C1379/84 Track 9 what I haven’t said yet, yes, because of the technology being difficult, the development costs were enormous, and the question was, whether you could make it economically feasible. That was really the problem. I suspect that if it turned out that the fast breeder reactor got to a stage in the development in which it could be shown to be economically viable, then some of these other difficulties, particularly the political difficulties, might have been forgotten. But, it never got to that stage. And the French also had great difficulties. And, and so eventually I think the fast breeder reactor died a natural death. It doesn’t mean to say that there isn’t, you know, the technology isn’t there potentially, but, but that’s what happened. But it happened after I, I mean, you know, during my period it was still, it was still being, it was still the biggest project in the Atomic Energy Authority.
[31:20] How was the fusion power projects in comparison to the Atomic Energy Authority at the time? I’m guessing neither of them have really got anywhere yet, it’s...
Well the trouble with the fusion... Well, the fusion... Well I mean, the fusion project was considered by the fusion enthusiasts as, you know, as the, the future for nuclear energy. The sceptics, and I have to say that at the time I was one of them, considered it to be always fifty years ahead, you know, in its exploitation, and, it’s somewhat better now. [laughs] But anyway, that was... So, there was a, there was some scepticism amongst, amongst us, and... But, as far as the fusion programme was concerned, the thing that went for it was that it was supported by European grants, OK, and this is the way... And a lot of money from Europe came back into the fusion research programme. And as far as the Government was concerned, it was very much in favour of the fusion programme, because, actually in effect it didn’t cost very much. It was one of the, one of the areas where there was quite a lot of money that came back from, from, from Brussels. And so they liked it. And then of course, JET was set up in, which was the European, Joint European Torus programme, which was also set up at Culham, and that was a good thing for, for Culham, and the UK, you had both the JET programme there and then supporting it, the rather smaller UK programme itself. But that itself, quite a bit of that was actually funded through Europe.
Peter Hirsch Page 150 C1379/84 Track 9
Mm.
So, the fusion programme was always liked by government circles. And I mean that’s true today.
[34:12] Mm. On the subject of more conventional reactors, was there much discussion at the time about nuclear power for the UK?
Well I mean the AEA’s mission was to produce the technology for nuclear reactors, OK, that’s what, what it was all about. It... And, the, the belief was that, obviously within the Authority that nuclear power was, was the important, an important, a very important energy resource for the UK, there’s no question about that. And, well that’s, that’s it. I mean you...
I, I was just...
What?
I was just sort of thinking, you know, were there any sort of, new prospects for new civilian reactor programmes actually being built? I guess there was... Haven’t been that many new reactors since the Seventies, and I was just wondering what the position was inside the UKAEA during your tenure there, as regards a new civilian nuclear programme.
Well I mean, what... OK, what transpired of course was that, the great CEGB programme for any number of nuclear reactors I’ve forgotten was then, trimmed down, and, but it... I mean the next reactor which was built was the Sizewell reactor, which was a PWR. And, that happened, I mean the decision was taken... Well I mean there was this incredible inquiry which took rather a long time, but... And, the Atomic Energy Authority did do some work in supporting the structure and integrity issue for the PWR. And it also did a lot of work of course on making sure that the AGRs, the gas-cooled reactors, were going to operate satisfactorily for long periods.
Peter Hirsch Page 151 C1379/84 Track 9
Mm.
But... But there were no, there was no new reactor system being developed. There were thoughts about it, but nothing, no new additional development. I do remember being quizzed by, I mean if you are chairman of an organisation like the AEA, you get quizzed by the Select Committee for Energy and, and, I think it was the Parliamentary... Oh, and also the Public Accounts Committee, which is quite an experience. But, I remember there was quite a lively discussion in my being quizzed by the Select Committee for Energy, and one of the points that they picked up, and there was a particular MP who harangued me on the subject, to the effect of, why do you spend so much money on structural integrity of PWRs, when in fact, twenty miles across the channel there are any number of them, and what do you do when there is a, you know, what influence do you have over, over, you know, if they have a loss of coolant accident or some other accident? And, well the answer to that of course was that, you keep on making improvements in the, in the way you ensure structural integrity. And that’s, it’s a sort of ratcheting effect, OK. And then that’s taken up by other people. But, I do remember that, very distinctly.
[39:10] How did you actually find running what sounds like quite a large organisation on a part-time basis?
Well it wasn’t a part-time job. I mean it, it was ridiculous. That became perfectly clear, and the Department of Education and Science, who paid me part-time, OK, got a very bad deal out of it. Well because, you know, this was a full-time job. What... In my ignorance, I had thought that I would get very much more involved in the actual technology, and if you like the physics and engineering, but it turned out to be a very political job, I mean it was highly political. And, I didn’t, I didn’t particularly like that. That was not the sort of thing that I was looking for, Whitehall politics. It was interesting to get into Whitehall politics, but it was not the sort of thing that I wanted. And, so, if you like, there was a bit of a disappointment in that I didn’t get to grips with the, really the technology which I had hoped for. And, at the end of the period, towards the end of the period, my two-year period, I was asked by the Department of Energy whether in fact I would continue to do it, but in fact as a full-time job, and I
Peter Hirsch Page 152 C1379/84 Track 9 said no, I want to go back to the university, which is what I did. But it was a very, very interesting experience. And, I think I’ve probably mentioned this before in this interview, one of the things I learnt was that, that it was important to, for engineers to have really some jolly good knowledge of the materials or, metals and alloys with which they work. And, there were some example that stuck in my mind, particularly with the Prototype Fast Reactor, where one of the problems that turned up and cost a lot of money, wasn’t actually to do with the core, or for that matter the sodium coolant, but in fact the heat exchanges with... It’s always, the steam, [laughs] anything to do with steam, it’s the steam generators which cause the problem, and cost a lot of money. And one of the things that struck me was that, one reason for it was that, they hadn’t spent enough, at the time when they were designed and made, they, you know, they, they cut down on the quality of the welds if you like, they used a cheaper variant of what should have been done. And the result was catastrophic. And, so, I mean that’s just an example. But my experience there, my impression was that, there was a case for having, when I got back to the university, a course on the materials engineering which I think I’ve, I mentioned before. So, that was of some importance. So, well, that I think... Well the other thing is that, I did in fact stay on, on the board of the Atomic Energy, till 19... I think it was 1992. I, I’ve forgotten. Well it’s in my CV, I think.
How do you actually remember board meetings of the Atomic Energy agency?
Well they were very pleasant. I mean there was... [laughs] Yes, they were very pleasant. Well most of the time was, was, was spent in, I think in trying to persuade the CEGB representative and the BNFL representative to fork out cash. I should also say, another thing that I tried to do while I was at the Atomic Energy Authority... So, anyway, that’s the answer to your question, OK, there was a lot of discussion about, who’s going to pay for what? There was always, the question is, was it the Department of Energy or the Department, or CEGB or BNFL who was going to pay for it? I’m just going to... Can we stop so we.....
[End of Track 9]
Peter Hirsch Page 153 C1379/84 Track 10
[Track 10]
OK?
Mhm.
Were there any other sort of key issues that came up over the time that you were a board member of the UKAEA?
Well one of the things that I, I encouraged was diversification, and, I was rather keen on the AEA trying to set up spin-off companies. And it then turned out that, the rules under which it was working as a trading fund didn’t permit the AEA to have, hold equity. It could get royalties but not equity. Which seemed to me most unfortunate, because, there should be encouragement really to set up spin-off companies from an organisation which was doing excellent research and development work. And, I had discussions with Peter Walker about this, whether it could be changed, the rules could be changed, and he said, ‘Well give me an example and then I’ll see what I can do about it.’ But I never managed to get an example, because it turned out that, there weren’t really... The entrepreneurial spirit in the AEA wasn’t sufficiently developed to produce a, a real spin-off company which one could give as an example to Peter Walker, which was a great, great disappointment to me.
Mm.
[02:00] The, the other thing was that... Also, another thing that happened was, in 1982, Walter Marshall gave up the chairmanship of the Light Water Reactor Study Group, because, he was then head of the CEGB, and I took over as chairman, and, produced in the end an addendum to the Marshall Report, or the second Marshall Report, or the Marshall-Hirsch Report or whatever it’s called, in 1987. And, this was in the period of the Sizewell inquiry, and, what... I mean the deliberations there were relevant to what went on at the Sizewell inquiry. The other thing was that in, after the... Well in 1987 the Light Water Reactor Study Group was effectively disbanded, because it had done its job, because the Sizewell project had taken off effectively. And, I, I then
Peter Hirsch Page 154 C1379/84 Track 10 became a member of a new organisation which, a new committee which was set up by Brian Eyre, called the Technical Advisory Group on Structural Integrity, and I was a member of that between 1988 and 2002. And it had representatives from various organisations, and, eventually also from Rolls Royce, and the structural integrity people, and, well all the interested parties. And that, the TAGSI is still going, I was its chairman from 1993 to 2002 when I eventually retired. But it is an ongoing committee, and I think it, it does fulfil an important function. So, although... And it really, it looks at the developments in structural integrity methodology, how you can improve validation and this sort of thing, and...
Mm.
But it’s important, because, if you, if the science gets a better basis, and if your understanding improves, then your uncertainties get reduced. And, that’s important with respect to how long a component could actually be considered to be viable. So it’s rather important in relation to how long a reactor system can be run.
Mm.
I think...
[05:50] I was going to ask a little bit more as well about the Light Water Reactor Study Group.
Yes.
Because, there was so much debate in the 1970s I guess over reactor choice between one system and another. Could you tell me a little bit more about how it actually worked in the 1970s when you were sitting on it?
Well, there were particular issues which, which were discussed in depth, and people would go away and write papers which you would then consider. And, for example, one of the things that was introduced, and was relatively new in, at least in the early
Peter Hirsch Page 155 C1379/84 Track 10 days as a study group, was probabilistic fracture mechanics, in other words, what is the developed [developing] methods of, to make estimates of the probability of a crack propagating catastrophically? So probabilistic fracture mechanics was developed. And then there was also a considerable amount of advance in thinking, and advance, in connection, and I think this is probably the most important development that occurred during this period, what, what could you say about the plasticity that you have, you have a crack and it starts opening, and you... How, how could the plasticity effectively increase the toughness of the material? And that, there was a lot of discussion about this, and it led to a better understanding, and therefore more conservatism. Well, you know, there were, you could have more certainty about an integrity of a component. That was very important in relation to, loss of coolant accidents and other kinds of accidents which [might] occurred. And, the work that the Light Water Reactor Study Group did, I think was of very high quality, and it had international repercussions. I mean it was, yes, I mean the work that was done was, was recognised internationally as of very high quality, and, and raised the level of, of the kind of analysis that one did everywhere. So it was very influential. The... [pause] Yah.
When did you actually leave being chair of the UKAEA and return to Oxford full- time?
1984, I was only there for two years. I, I didn’t like the, I... There was too much Whitehall politics for my liking, that wasn’t really what I, I was looking for. I found that very interesting. What I had hoped to get out of my period at the AEA was more involvement with the technology and the science, and that didn’t happen, it turned out to be a much more political job, and so I decided to go back to the university full- time.
[10:10] I guess we talked a bit about your research activities at the university, building the department, but were there any other innovations in that latter part of your career?
Well, yes I did... Well just as I, I was interested in trying to get entrepreneurial activities into, into the AEA, I was very interested in getting entrepreneurial activities
Peter Hirsch Page 156 C1379/84 Track 10 into the university. And, I was involved very much with the setting-up of a technology transfer company in the university called Isis Innovation. And, the trigger for this was actually an announcement by Sir Keith Joseph in 1985, who was the Minister of Education and Science at the time, to the effect that, the universities would be given the opportunity to assume the rights and responsibilities of the exploitation of researches carried out in the universities and supported by the Research Councils. Rather than the, the situation as it was, which was that, it was the job of the British Technology Group, BTG, to have the rights of first refusal to exploit the results of the researches supported by the Research Council. And, the university had actually been alerted already by Sir David Phillips who was Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, and independently by David Cooksey, who is now Sir David Cooksey, who was a venture capitalist of some note, that this would happen. And, at the time the university didn’t have any interest in owning intellectual property. There are good reasons for that, which I won’t go into, but... But, it essentially gave the, it had a policy on intellectual property where, the ownership of the IPR and the rights of exploitation were given to the inventors, but, provided in fact that there weren’t any external funding arrangements. And... So David Cooksey suggested that venture capital companies might be interested in setting up a kind of, joint management company with the university to promote commercial exploitation of, of technological innovation arising from these researches. David Cooksey was an Oxford graduate, in fact he was a metallurgist who graduated here in 1965, just a year before I came, and then went into industry, and he set up a, the first, I think... He founded a venture capital company called Advent in 1981, which I believe was the first venture capital fund in the UK. And, he established a technical advisory committee to Advent, and the external membership of this consisted, or included, Graham Richards who was a chemist here, he’s now Professor of Chemistry or was till he retired, and myself from Oxford, and Sir Hans Kornberg and Brian Pippard from Cambridge. And it was a very important link between the universities, these two universities anyway, and the commercial world. And...
How did that link actually sort of function?
Well I mean, we, we found out what was possible or not, and what in fact, what possible sponsorship could be produced by venture capital companies for setting up
Peter Hirsch Page 157 C1379/84 Track 10 an organisation in the university. Because, what Keith Joseph’s announcement really meant was that the universities either had to say, ‘No we’re not interested,’ or, they had to set up an organisation which enabled them to exploit the, the innovations, and the IPR. [16:40] And, Advent in fact proposed to the university, to Oxford, a joint management committee, joint management company. But in fact, it became much more complicated, because, as these things always do, the university sort of set up a small committee to look at this, and it was chaired by Patrick Neill, Lord Patrick Neill, who was Warden of All Souls at that time, and was also Vice-Chancellor-Elect from October 1985, which was a significant date in all this. And, anyway, there were a lot of discussions in the committee, and as far as the university was concerned, there were people in it like, the secretary of the Chest, who didn’t want to spend any money in this risky exercise. And there were, also, the other complication where [that] there were other potential investors opposed to [who also approached] the university expressing interest in commercialisation. So it became rather more complicated, and... Anyway, the vice-chancellor at the time, Geoffrey Warnock, did respond to the Research Councils saying that, the university would set up such a company and it was interested in exploiting technology, without actually giving details. And the surprise was that the, the Research Councils actually accepted that, [laughs] this sort of statement of intent. So... But it wasn’t at all clear what the precise mechanism would be. Anyway, there were, in the end there were really four serious bidders. And the university was always worried about, not wishing to give... I mean, the sponsors would, would obviously have some rights for exploitation, and the university was worried about going, or giving these rights to one particular company, OK, rather than several. And also, it was adamant that if entrepreneurs wanted to go some other route, they should be able to do so, OK, a democratic university of course, all that. Anyway, there were four companies who were seriously interested, apart from Advent, there was 3i’s, and BTG who in fact submitted a form of proposal and they were also interviewed, and Cogent was interviewed I think twice. Oh, sorry. Advent were also interviewed twice. I suggested that they should also consider Cogent, which, of which I was actually a non-executive director, which, Cogent was a company which was owned by Legal & General, and it was the only City-based company. And it had already been in contact with Imperial College and it had been set up, it was set up to
Peter Hirsch Page 158 C1379/84 Track 10 fund select, selected R&D projects and manage their exploitations. And it had arrangements with several research organisations.
How did you come to actually be on its board?
[pause] You know, that’s a good question. I can’t remember. [pause] I can’t remember. [pause] Well, I’m sorry, I... [laughs]
I suppose I’m curious how an Oxford professor goes to being on the board of an investment company.
[pause] Well I think it must have been... Yah. I, I suppose there were... I was approached by Tony Gray, who was running the show, he was the managing director effectively. And, I suppose he must have, it must have become known that I was on these committees in Oxford. I think this is how it happened. And, so, he, he had approached me. And I was very interested in this, because I did feel very much that, where research was being done, we, we really did have a responsibility of exploiting it or, as far as we could. [22:50] I mean I, I did have a strong view on this matter, that, it’s all very well for the universities to get a lot of money, and researchers getting a lot of money from the public purse, to carry out researches, but with it comes an obligation, and the obligation is that you should really do your best to give something back. And I have to say that the culture in the university, this university anyway at that time, was not up to it, that was not, you know, it’s pure science, we don’t want to soil our hands with, with this dirty commercialisation racket. And... And, anyway, to, to cut a long story short, what happened in the end was, that, because Patrick Neill, who chaired the committee, became Vice-Chancellor, and he didn’t really have the time any more, he asked me to, to effectively lead the negotiations in the end, and which is what I did from, I think it was 19... by this time, it must have been 1986 or 1980 [1987]... You know, time went on. And, yes, it was in fact, by this time it was January 1987, so it was a long business. And, I had discussions with all these four people, and it turned out that, both BTG and 3i’s didn’t really, well they made conditions which, which were not really acceptable within the brief which I had to try and get the damn thing
Peter Hirsch Page 159 C1379/84 Track 10 set up as soon as possible. And BTG was interested actually in doing all the licensing arrangements, and, and, 3i’s wanted really a business plan, and, you know, my view was, oh, this is going to go on forever. And, in the end, I suggested we should go ahead with Advent and Cogent. They agreed to it, and we had a meeting at which in fact, everything was agreed, that... So it was a club of two. And the council approved that in, I suppose early summer of 1987. And, the, the running costs would be met by the two sponsors, and they would also contribute one third each of the, what we called a pre-seedcorn fund of 50k per annum, and the university also producing a third, the university provided a building or, you know, and so on. And, we called the damn thing OURAD, which was dreadful, Oxford University Research and Development company, and, we, we then identified and financed, and appointed, a managing director, somebody called James Hiddleston, a chemist who had management experience in industry, and also we appointed a personal assistant for him. So that was the beginning of it. And...
[27:05] How successful has it been since those early origins?
[laughs] Well, let me first of all say that, OK, the company was incorporated in 1987. It was changed, the name, James Hiddleston was instrumental in getting the name changed to Isis Innovation. And, it... And really, it, it was a difficult... It got going, and, we, we did get a number of exploitations and licensing income. And, and also, set up a couple of spin-off companies, one of which was Oxford Molecular, which was chaired by Graham Richards, he had set it up, and that was extremely successful at the time, and, it made quite a lot of money for the university. I won’t bore you with all the conditions and so on about this. [28:45] But, of course, the sponsors agreed to pay the running costs for three years effectively, but the three years was soon up, and, we weren’t anywhere near self-supporting, it was quite out of the question. And, so, we then set up... The question was, what to do next? And we set up the Oxford Innovation Society, which consisted of fifty members of major industrial companies, and it was somewhat similar to a scheme operated by MIT. And, the idea of that actually came from Graham Richards, who was on the board of Isis. I was Chairman incidentally of Isis since, you know, from
Peter Hirsch Page 160 C1379/84 Track 10 its inception. And, that gave the, that was very successful, the Oxford Innovation Society, and it was a very good way of networking, it led to lots of contacts between academics and, and industry, and led to contracts and so on and so forth. And, it, it’s still going strong. The fiftieth meeting was held in December 2006.
Are there any sort of specific examples of things that have come out of it you find?
Oh, yes, well I mean...
Or just mention in passing.
In my, in my period, OK, the... There were two periods for Isis. There was my period where in fact we didn’t get effectively any money from the university, it was minimal, it was during a period of cuts. And, and it was a very small operation. And the main problem was, how to be self-supporting, and, that’s what we, we were. And we, in fact we did have an income stream to the university, but it was small. We also applied for a Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 1994, I think it was the inaugural Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. And, Oxford decided to put this thing in, and we got it, we got that. Well there were various crises and, there was a review, because, an important crisis was, was that the medical people didn’t think that the company was up to it. And the main problem really was that we were far too small and didn’t have enough expertise. And, and then the university set up a review, and it, it, it was clear that while in fact the, we were I suppose the only company which was self-supporting, the actual... And we had a sizeable expenditure on patents by this time, in 1994/5, there was about 224k, comparable to that, what Imperial College had. Nevertheless, that, what had come out of it wasn’t as much as one might have expected or, or hoped for. And, it was really, that the operation was too small. [33:05] Well, there were a number of important changes which took place. First of all, I resigned or retired in 19... I’ve forgotten when it was now.
’92 I’ve got here.
Peter Hirsch Page 161 C1379/84 Track 10
Was it? It could... No it was later than that I think. [pause] No, it wasn’t. I... I think...
I think maybe ’92 when was when you retired from being an active professor.
Yes. Yes. Yes, I think I... It must have been around, in 1990... [1996] [pause] I retired, resigned, either in 1996 or early ’97. And a new strategy was then initiated. There was a new chairman, Peter Williams, and a new managing director, namely Tim Cook. And, also there was a new vice-chancellor, and there was a generally, a new situation all round. And the vice-chancellor had entrepreneurial inclinations and so did the registrar. And at that stage there was big investment. They produced a business plan, and got a big investment to, to Isis. And, and that’s when the thing really took off. You know, the period that I was there, well, OK, I generated the company, I can take credit for, I suppose for saying, well all right, I was instrumental, very much instrumental in getting the thing set up and going. But the real exploitation started after I retired and got out of the way. [laughs] And, and, in 2007 I think there was a big dinner, I think celebrated the twentieth birthday of the technology transfer company, and, at that time, I mean in 2008, Isis is considered a very successful university technology transfer company. It’s got some sixty spin-out companies, it had, in 2008, sixty spin-out companies to its credit, most of them formed during the previous ten years, after my retirement. It, it had in 2008 a staff of forty-four, whereas we had a staff of two. [laughs] And, the university in 2007 and 8 invested about £1.2 million per annum, and received in return about £1.7 million royalties for distribution to researchers in departments, and the share in the equity of the spin-out companies. And in March 2008 the value of the university shares and spin-outs created since 1997 was estimated at £33 million.
Did you see it being that successful at the start when...?
[37:15] I was hoping. But what had also happened during this period is, is that the culture had changed in the university, and, there has been a culture change, from, from, we are pure scientists and don’t want to do, dirty our hands with commercialisation, to recognition that there was nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur and making
Peter Hirsch Page 162 C1379/84 Track 10 money. It is quite a different culture now from what it was. And, I think this was another contributing factor to the, the successful operation of, of the company.
Mm.
I mean, the... I mean the company which was set up during my period, which was Oxford Molecular, well there was another one, but, Oxford Molecular one, which was the really big one, that realised £8.7 million to the university, most of it in the years 1995 to ’97. You know, after a long period, if you see what I mean. So... I think to sum up, I think, my contribution to all this was to get it all started, but, but the real exploitation took place after I departed, and there was a new regime, and the university invested a lot of money, and they got good people in.
[39:03] You’ve mentioned your retirement a few times in the course of the last half hour.
Yes.
Have you actually retired? I can’t help but notice that we’re in an office at the university. [laughs]
Well, the answer to that is, I’m a full-time carer for my wife who is disabled, but, whatever little spare time I have, I, I do try and collaborate with people in the department, and, I’m very pleased to be able to do that, to keep my hand in that way, and, I’ve actually just written a paper on gallium nitride with, with various people here, and, and Colin [Humpreys], it was a joint operation. And, so, you know, so I try and keep my hand in, OK. And I’ve also recently given a talk in Cambridge Philosophical Society to the Bragg Symposium, which was a historical thing, you know, celebrating Bragg’s, the centenary of the, centenary celebration of Bragg’s law, 1912.
On the subject of history, how have you actually found doing this interview, or, this series of interviews?
Peter Hirsch Page 163 C1379/84 Track 10
Oh I’ve found them very interesting, and very pleasant, and, a very interesting exercise, and you’ve been very nice. [laughs] So I’ve got that on record now. [laughter] And, yes, I’ve found it very interesting to think back on what’s happened, yah, over the period. Anyway, I think that’s.....
[End of Track 10]
[End of Interview]