NATIONAL LIFE STORIES an ORAL HISTORY of BRITISH SCIENCE Dr

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Dr David Davies Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/60 © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk . © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/60 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Davies Title: Dr Interviewee’s David Sex: M forename: Occupation: geophysicist/ editor of Date and place of birth: 11/08/39, Derby, UK ‘Nature’ journal/ Director of Dartington Hall North Devon Trust and Open College for the Arts Mother’s occupation: Comptometer Father’s occupation: Industrial chemist operator/ housewife Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 20/10/11 (track 1-2), 15/12/11 (track 3-4), 29/12/11 (track 5-8), 02/02/12 (track 9-10), 15/03/12 (track 11-12). Location of interview: British Library (track 1-2) and interviewee’s home, Fovant, Salisbury (tracks 3-12) Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz Total no. of tracks: 12 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 17:06:30 Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: Open. © The British Library. Interviewer’s comments: © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Davies Page 1 C1379/60 Track 1 Track 1 Could I start by asking then when and where you were born? Yes. I was born in 1939, in August 1939, just before the war started. I was born in Derby and – where my parents had lived for a few years, and I lived in Derby actually for the next eighteen years or so. So I was a Derby lad. And what can you tell me about your father’s life, either the sorts of things that he told you about it or things that you’ve found out since? Yes. Well, my father was brought up in Cardiff and he was one of nine children, and really fascinating indication of sort of social and medical changes; he was the only one of nine children to have children himself, so eight of the nine didn’t. Five of them died in childhood, three of them never married, ‘cause it was just after the First World War when women found it difficult to find men [laughs]. And he was born at the age of forty-six, which – these days there would be strong dissuasion from any woman having a baby at forty-six. So this incredibly tenuous thread, nine children, just one who passed on the line. I didn’t realise that for a long time, till I started looking at the family tree, he never talked about this. But it was obvious that, what, 1890, 1900, children dying at the age of nought to two was a commonplace really and wasn’t a matter of great remark, at least not in the backstreets of Cardiff and probably lots of other places too. He was a schoolboy in Cardiff and he went on to do an external London BSc degree in chemical engineering. I suspect he – he was the son of a carpenter and he went to – I suspect the thought – going to university was an impossible thought for him but studying at the local – at the tech in Cardiff was a possibility, and he got an external BSc degree about 1930 or so, I would say, ’31, something of that sort. At that time jobs were few and far between. It was a pretty grim time. And his brother, Evan, had moved to work in a sugar factory in deepest Norfolk, Evan was a bookkeeper, and he told my father that there was a job coming up. They needed a chemist in this sugar processing plant in Norfolk and he applied for it and got that job. So he moved away from Cardiff and never was to go back, and the little Welsh that he spoke, he almost lost that completely. He was – so he moved to a tiny place called Wissington on the River Wissey, outside Downham Market in © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Davies Page 2 C1379/60 Track 1 Norfolk, very, very isolated indeed. I mean, it was surrounded by sugar beet farms and it had little – apparently it had a little sort of tramway that delivered the sugar beet to this processing plant. I don’t know – I mean, the smell from sugar processing is pretty sickly and awful, so it must have been a – I think it must have been a pretty dire place, with at that time a tiny social life, because there were only a few people living by the factory. In fact, quite often Wissington, you can’t see it on maps, it’s not named, because it was such a small place. So he worked in the laboratory at the sugar factory and social life for him would be getting the bus to Downham Market to go and watch a film, I suppose. [0:04:28] But then every year the factory was visited by a team of comptometer operators and that’s where my mother comes in. I’ll talk about mother later. But anyway, he – so eventually he married one of these comptometer operators and moved eventually away from deepest rural Norfolk into somewhat more urban environment, working for a firm called British Celanese, who were a very big plastics, fabrics manufacturer, chemicals, based in a village called Spondon, which is just outside Derby. And he went there as an industrial chemist, works chemist, and he worked there for the rest of his life, from about 1937 – well, until he retired, he retired in about ’72. So he put in about thirty-four, thirty-five years’ service for British Celanese. British Celanese was a huge factory. At the time he went there it employed 10,000 people. And in Derby there were three major firms who were big employers, so Derby had very good – didn’t have employment problems. It had Rolls Royce, it had the railway and it had British Celanese. And really of those only Rolls Royce survives there today in any substantial size. British Celanese was taken over in the 1960s by Courtaulds. He was by then – I mean, he was working largely in acetone monochloroacetic acid and very smelly it was too. I mean, the factory was very smelly and he used to bring the smell home in his clothes, a little vinegary smell. [0:06:28] He was a very, very diligent worker, who was very – extremely committed. If he was working on a job he was absolutely devoted to it. And he didn’t – I mean, he didn’t © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk David Davies Page 3 C1379/60 Track 1 rise very high in the factory but he rose high enough to be managing a plant that was making – a sort of pilot plant, making monochloroacetic acid, and that was a real nightmare for him. It was a very difficult process and he – I mean, in the end it worked but it took an awful lot out of him. We didn’t have a phone at home until the 1950s and then the factory insisted on him having a phone, because he lived about a mile and a half away from the factory, within smelling distance I have to say. And he used to – and the factory wanted a phone for him because they wanted to be able to ring him up at any time of day or night and say, Trevor, this has gone wrong, what do we do about it. And one of the things I do remember certainly from my childhood and youth is the phone going quite regularly at two or three in the morning and him answering it, knowing full well it would be the factory, ‘cause these were continuous processes, and giving technical information about what to shut down, what to open up, and in the end saying, ‘I think I’d better come in,’ and then I’d hear him get his bike out of the shed and cycle off. So I mean, he started by working all out nights as well as days. In the end he was a daytime worker but he was called out a lot at night. So work was a real burden to him and it showed in his appearance. He was, until he retired, a sort of quite short person, quite stooped; you felt that he had the burden of the factory on him. And there was the additional scary experience that, when Courtaulds bought British Celanese, about 1960 or so, they engaged in a very large scale redundancy. They didn’t call it redundancy, they called it sacking in those days, and they got rid of probably three quarters of the staff who were there. They downsized it because they moved stuff to Courtaulds factories elsewhere.

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