Thompson's History
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THE HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS IN BRISTOL: 1948 to1988 N. Thompson October 1992 CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 RECAPITULATION 5 (a) Appointment of Mott as Professor 8 (b) The Beginnings of Cosmic Ray Research 10 (c) Other Pre-war Research 12 (d) Post-war Planning 15 Appendix to Chapter 2 18 3 ADMINISTRATION (a) Organisation and Committees 20 (b) The Director of the Laboratory 27 (c) Policy and Planning 31 4 RESEARCH AND RESEARCH WORKERS (a) Theoretical Physics 41 (b) Cosmic Rays and Particle Physics 50 (c) Experimental Solid State Physics 59 (d) Applied Optics 65 (e) Polymers 74 5 TEACHING (a) History at Faculty Level 79 (b) The Physics Curriculum 86 (c) Laboratory Work and Tutorials 93 (d) Examinations and Assessment 98 (e) Graduate Teaching 103 (f) Extra Mural Teaching 106 6 PREMISES 107 7 STATISTICS (a) Undergraduate Numbers 118 (b) Survival Rates 126 (c) Applications and Admissions 129 (d) Graduate Student Numbers 133 (e) Academic Staff 134 (f) Non-academic Staff 136 8 FINANCE (a) General survey 138 (b) Powell and Cosmic Ray Research 141 (c) Funding of Graduate Students 143 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In 1956 Professor A.M. Tyndall, who had retired as Head of the Physics Department in 1948, wrote a "History of the Department of Physics in Bristol, 1876 - 1948, with Personal Reminiscences." This was not published, but one or two typescript copies are still in existence, including one in the University library. His final sentence is, "But the full history of the department since 1948 is a subject for others to write at some future date." Since I was a member of the Department from 1933 to 1975, continuously except for four years during the war, I feel bound to admit the force of the suggestion, made by some of my friends, that I should contribute the next chapter. The original idea was that my story should start where Tyndall left off. As it has turned out, a good deal of space has been devoted to earlier events. There are several reasons for this: (1) Some topics which seem to me to be important, or at least interesting, were not discussed at all by Tyndall. For example, he said nothing about either undergraduate or graduate teaching, and concerned himself mainly with research and the people who carried it out. (2) A recapitulation of some of the earlier material has been given here and there to provide an appropriate background for some of the later developments. (3) There are some matters which Tyndall may have thought inappropriate for inclusion when he wrote, but which have now passed into history, and can be set down. (4) This second instalment is different in character from the first. As indicated in his title, his was a personal account, with fascinating reminiscences; mine is more of a history (although here and there I have found it convenient to write in the first person singular). In view of our different relationships to the department, this is inevitable. The Physics Department was Tyndall's own creation, his life's work. I arrived as a very junior member of staff when it was already well established and saw things from a different point of view. When I embarked on the project my intention was to follow Tyndall's example and stop at the date on which I retired. However, the process of writing has been spread over more than a dozen years, and in some places I have been unable to resist the temptation to bring the account more up to date. Unfortunately I have not been sufficiently diligent to make all sections terminate at the same point. As a second best, wherever the phrase "at the time of writing" occurs, the date is given. In particular, any section dealing with statistical data is usually as complete as I can make it, from the earliest times up to 1988, at which point I decided that enough was enough. The result is that the final product is more a work of reference than a readable story. It includes too much detail to fit into the latter category, but I make no apology for this. It may be of interest to somebody, someday, and in any case can always be ignored. If not present it cannot properly be invented, and some of it is not to be found elsewhere. Since the whole account is a history, it contains numerous dates, but not being a proper historian I have not always taken the trouble to check that every one of these is absolutely accurate: the errors, if any, will not be large, and the spirit of the events has been preserved. The Department has never kept any kind of official record of correspondence, or, until recently, any archives of any kind. Mrs Terry, when she was secretary to Professor Tyndall, kept a scrap book of newspaper cuttings and similar material; this is now in the main University library. It was not continued in any systematic way after she retired. Each successive Head of Department kept his own files of correspondence and, on giving up his appointment, dealt with them as he thought fit. Some would be passed on to his successor, some he would wish to keep for himself, and the rest would be destroyed. There are two exceptions. The personal files relating to the appointment and subsequent career of staff, both academic and technical, have been kept fairly continuously since the 1940's, although they are not always complete. These still exist. Secondly, the record cards of individual students have been maintained continuously. However, at one stage, pressure on the space available in the filing cabinet in use at the time led to the extraction of some of the earlier cards. These were placed in the departmental stores, and at a later date were found to have vanished. I suspect that the explanation lay in the enterprise and enthusiasm for tidiness of an assistant storekeeper in post at the time, but this has never been established with certainty. It is just conceivable, although very unlikely, that they were not destroyed, and may still turn up. During the last few years before my own retirement I made a practice of collecting any archival material which came to my notice. The result is a somewhat random collection of papers some of which refer to the time before 1948, and so to the period that is covered by Tyndall's History. Much of what follows is based on this material, supplemented by my own imperfect memory. When, in the course of writing this account, it became clear that the records were so fragmentary, I did what I could to remedy what I considered to be a defect. Since 1981/82, our indefatigable departmental secretary, Felicity Hanley, and her successor Lilian Murphy, has collected and filed, each year, a number of notices, lists, time tables, exam papers and the like, sufficient to provide the bare bones of a continuing record. When I discovered that nowhere in the Department, or in the University, is there a complete set of past examination papers, I collected as many as I could, and put them in the library. The Examinations Office keeps copies for a few years and then destroys them. In the same way, the Registrar's Office from time to time goes through its accumulated records about individual members of staff and throws the old ones away. Fortunately, minute books of the more important committees are carefully preserved in the Registrar's department. One consequence of this state of affairs is that this present account is somewhat unbalanced. Some periods, and some incidents which happen to be well documented, are recorded in detail, while others, possibly equally important, are hardly mentioned. It has become apparent, for example, that several annual lists of this and that, which are available for most years, are missing for a few years around 1955 to 1965. This happens to be the period for which Pryce was Head of Department, but while this might account for the absence of some correspondence files, I am at a loss to see why departmental circulars should also be missing. One other curious gap concerns our library. There is a plate on its door saying that it is the Maria Mercer Library, but I never met anybody who knew who Maria Mercer was. In 1988, while writing this account, I was put onto the right track by our librarian, Lynne Burlingham. Eventually, I found that Maria Mercer was the last surviving daughter of John Mercer (1791-1866) a humble Lancashire weaver who taught himself sufficient chemistry to be elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1852. He was the inventor of the process of treating cotton known as mercerisation, and from that, and other commercial activities, he amassed a considerable fortune. When Maria died, in 1913, aged 93, she made bequests to various charities, and left the remainder of her estate, about £100,000, to be devoted to "such charitable purposes as her trustees thought fit." One thing they did was to offer "not less than £5,000" to the University of Bristol, towards the endowment of a Chair of Chemistry. Negotiations seem to have continued in a desultory fashion for some years. The trustees blamed the delay partly on "the depression in the cotton trade" [there was also a war in progress] and appear to have tried to withdraw their original offer. The correspondence, incomplete in our archives, and not always amicable, includes a letter asking the University "to accept £1,250 in full satisfaction of their gift." It ends with the receipt by the University, in 1923, of a cheque for £1,800.