NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Eric Ash

Interviewed by Thomas Lean

C1379/92

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/92

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science

Interviewee’s surname: Ash Title:

Interviewee’s forename: Eric Sex: Male

Occupation: Electrical Engineer Date and place of birth: 1928, Berlin

Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Lawyer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 24 January 2013, 29 January 2013, 11 March 2013, 25 April 2013, 21 May 2013, 30 May 2013

Location of interview:

Name of interviewer: Dr Thomas Lean

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661

Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks: 13

Total Duration: 11:20:48

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: © British Library Board; no access restrictions

Interviewer’s comments:

Eric Ash Page 4 C1379/92/Track 1

[Track 1]

Your programme is about made in Britain. I wasn’t. Did you have that sort of information about me by now?

Yup.

Yah, OK, so I don’t have to tell you all that.

Ah, well, no. I mean you always have to assume that all that information may not exist in 1,000 years’ time.

OK. Fine. No, sure.

So, where were you born, and when?

I was born in Berlin, in 1928, and lived in Berlin up to the age of ten. My father was a lawyer, he worked for the AEG, a big electrical company in Germany. And, he always maintained that his colleagues very nearly killed him, because they kept on saying, ‘Don’t worry about this chap Hitler, nothing will ever come of it.’ We’re Jewish. In the end he decided maybe it wasn’t entirely safe, and so in 1938 we emigrated to London.

[01:05] Mm. What sort of a chap was your father, can you describe him to me?

What sort of a chap? Oh I think he was, he had a great sense of humour. I think he was pretty bright. He was a lawyer but he also took some interest in the sort of things that his company did, which was an electrical company, and some of that may have rubbed off on me. But, emigration was not easy for him. Lawyers can’t very easily transfer their skills to another language. And so he found that but, that second half of his life quite difficult.

Mm. Did you see much of his work for AEG when you were growing up?

Eric Ash Page 5 C1379/92/Track 1

Oh no. No, not at all. No, I was only ten. I was desperately impressed by the fact that there was a chauffeur that collected him every morning, and that was a big change in his life too, by the time we came to London where we were, near subsistence level in, well not, not desperately poor but I mean certainly, no chauffeurs around the place.

Mm. How high up was he in AEG, do you know?

He was the head of the legal department. I don’t know whether there’s a term for that, but, mm.

Mm. What sort of things interested him?

Well I tried to find that out, but, it was what would call commercial law, law of contracts and that sort of thing, rather than being directly concerned with, with the technical aspects of, of the, of the industry.

Mm. What sort of personality did he have?

Well I quite liked the bloke, which is not inevitable with one’s parents as you know. And he was, he was very open and he was interested in, well he liked swimming, he liked playing tennis and that sort of thing. He struggled with the language side. I mean he was fluent in English but, well I’d say semi-fluent. He certainly didn’t have a, he certainly had a problem with, with the accent. But you know, he, his English was good enough that he could go to the theatre and enjoy it.

Mm. Do you know how he met your mother?

Well, they were both in Berlin. I don’t think, I don’t think I, I know of any, the particular way they encountered each other, but I think they were within the Jewish milieu there, where it was sort of natural for people to meet. He was considerably older than my mother, by about fourteen years I think. He had been in World War I,

Eric Ash Page 6 C1379/92/Track 1 earned the Iron Cross, and, got the Defence Medal in World War II in London, which I thought was a nice combination.

What sort of background did he actually come from?

Well his father was a lawyer too. So I think, I think they were established in what was then Germany, Posen, which subsequently became Poland. [pause] And sadly I don’t know too much about his background. I, I do remember him telling me that, in 19... New Year’s Eve in 1900, he was walking along a river path wondering whether maybe in a century’s time a son of his would greet the next millennium. So I did. And just in case I didn’t make it, I informed my children that they would have to do it.

[05:40] What was he like as a father, do you remember?

I... He was, he was fairly liberal I would say in, in his perceptions. Of course my main experience of him as a father was after emigration to London, and shortly after that the war started, and so, what one could do and what one couldn’t do was rather circumscribed by the fact that there was a war on.

Do you think he was any particular influence on you, in ways you could point out?

Well, I think he encouraged me in thinking about engineering as a career. He certainly thought it was a bad idea to get involved in law, because he thinks one ought to be flexible and able to move from one country to another, which as an engineer or as a scientist you could do rather easily, but not as a lawyer. [06:40] And I used to construct things with Meccano. Does Meccano mean anything to you?

Well it does, but let’s assume it doesn’t. [laughs] What is Meccano?

Meccano was, was a construction set which involved strips of metal with lots of holes in them and nuts and bolts to put it all together. And it was a rather, un-prescribed way of constructing things. You could construct things according to what you saw on

Eric Ash Page 7 C1379/92/Track 1 the catalogue, but there was also freedom to construct things as you imagine them. And I know quite a lot of people who found that quite inspirational in their use, and who regret that it hasn’t really been maintained as much as one would have hoped in the present time. Things like Lego, which is plastic bricks, take the place of it to some extent, but it is, a little less demanding on children when they want to build something.

What sort of things did you use to build?

Oh, I was, I, I would build things like cranes or, or locomotives, that sort of thing. And I also got involved in, in doing things electrical, somehow or other, I think I got a, some kind of an electrical set where I could actually do some things. And then I always remember going to the library and getting, and I would have been I suppose about eleven, getting a book out with the title, Electricity For Boys , which really grates these days, and in fact, a considerable amount of effort on my part in later life has been to persuade women that engineering is a very good profession for them. But anyway, this book, Electricity For Boys , was actually a rather good book, and, and enabled one to do thing like make little motors and that sort of thing.

Make little motors from what? I’m afraid I’m part of the Lego generation, the idea of making...

Oh well you would have magnets and you would have wire and coils, and, you would, the coils could rotate on an axel. I can’t remember the details of the, of the thing. But it’s, you can make an electric motor with very simple bits and pieces.

I’ve always wondered, when you were making things like electric motors or Meccano things, are you following plans, or are you just, doing it yourself?

Well, some of each. Well as I say, the Meccano things, there were plans that you could follow, but you could also be let loose on it and, and do your own thing. On the electric motors, knowing, you sure had to know roughly what you were doing, but even so, there was scope for trying things out and see whether they worked. And my father actually was quite interested in that.

Eric Ash Page 8 C1379/92/Track 1

[09:50] Mm. I guess we’ve talked a little bit about your father. Could you tell me a little bit about your mother? What was her name?

Her name was Dora. And I now have a granddaughter called Dora too. She did start university to study law, but, didn’t pursue it. She found emigration not entirely easy, particularly in 1939 when my father was interned for six months. That was quite hard to take. It was a slightly panicky move on the part of the government of the time. There was the, there was the example of spies who had reputedly helped the Germans invade France and Norway, and the thought was that, what sort of spies might there be in London? Surely it might be the people who emigrated, or pretended to emigrate from London – from, from Berlin. And so people were put on the Isle of Man for something like six months I think. There was no harsh treatment, and after a while common sense prevailed and all these people were let out. Some of them in fact joined the Army at that point. My father was a bit too old for that. But that was tough on my mother more rather, because that was also the time when there were, when there was a fair amount of bombing in London.

Mm. What sort of person was your mother?

Well she was on the whole cheerful. And on the whole optimistic I would say. She was an avid reader, and was, tended to be up-to-date certainly in recent literature. And she enjoyed things like swimming and tennis herself, mm.

Mm. What influence do you think she was on you, are there any things you can point to?

I find that very difficult. I mean, clearly, her influence would have been enormous, you know, as mothers always are. But can I actually itemise what, what aspects of her character was in some sense transferred to me? I find that really quite difficult. I was not in very close touch with her, I wasn’t very intimate with, with my mother. I think I was probably more intimate with my father. But you know, we, all the same, we

Eric Ash Page 9 C1379/92/Track 1 were pretty good friends on the whole. But, I don’t think I can easily point to specific things that influenced me.

Mm.

[13:20] I suppose I could mention one thing. Neither of my parents were religious, and, that I am happy to say is my situation too. I happen to know that there isn’t a god, at least not the kind of chap as described in the Bible. And I think, although they were never militant about being non-religious, but certainly the fact that they weren’t religious is something which was clear to me. There is an interesting experience I do remember which was Christmas 1933, and we had always had a Christmas tree, and I remember that, I was five years old at three time. And on this occasion we didn’t have a Christmas tree, we had the Hanukkah candles, you know, the Menorah, the thing with eight candles. And I asked why, and I was told, ‘Well they’re very pretty too aren’t they?’ They didn’t really defend it very rigorously. But clearly they decided that in view of Hitler’s arrival, they had to show some solidarity with the Jewish community. But other than that, there was really no religious influence which came from my parents.

Mm. I was interested because you said you were Jewish. Did it feature at all in your childhood, apart from the...?

Not, not really. And I, I suspect that’s almost a second generation where it didn’t feature very much. So, I mean in no sense where they observant. And... On the other hand, I mean there was, there was no question that there was any suggestion that we were other than Jewish, and it was, when asked, I would always explain, yes, that we, we are Jewish, but it didn’t play a major role in our lives. So the Jewish culture is not one which got promulgated by my parents, and I suspect by my grandparents too to a considerable extent. Not that they were in any sense converted to some other religion, it just I think didn’t seem to them such a major part of life that it needed much expressing.

Eric Ash Page 10 C1379/92/Track 1

I was interested in the phrase you used a moment ago which was, ‘I happen to know there is no god’. You sound very sure of that. Can you talk...

I am very sure of that. Well, well let me put it this way. I am very sure that the god of the Bible is not to be taken seriously. I am entirely with, what’s his name, the biologist.

Dawkins?

Yah, Richard Dawkins, on, on that. On the other hand, I don’t go quite as far as Richard Dawkins by saying that, whereas that concept is clearly an absurdity, therefore there is nothing. I don’t take that step. I think it’s a very mysterious world, and, I find it quite hard to believe, when one looks at it and looks at the complexity of the world and complexity of, of cosmology, that there is no intelligence other than the likes of us in the universe. I think it’s a great mystery. And, in an abstract way, I am happy to celebrate that mystery. But I think, I, I think the concept of the god of the Bible is, is a great distortion of that mystery, it’s a, I think it’s a, it damages the marvels and the mystery of the universe. So in that sense... I have fairly recently in my life joined the British Humanist Association. Since you’re interviewing me, let me ask you. What’s your view on this?

Oh, I, I’d put myself as agnostic. Friends would accuse me occasionally of using this as an excuse to just sit on the fence when I’m having arguments about such matters.

Right.

But really, I, I think about it as keeping an open mind.

Yah, right. Well as you see, I have a very open mind except on the chap who is celebrated in the Bible.

[18:40]

Eric Ash Page 11 C1379/92/Track 1

Mm. I guess, a few people I’ve interviewed who have reached similar conclusions as yourself have pointed out that while they may not have believed in Christianity for instance, they’ve taken on board a certain set of values from it.

Oh yah. Absolutely.

Do you think you’ve inherited any values from...?

Oh good Lord yes. No no, I mean I, you know, I think, I, I think, oh, our society is imbued by, by what has been derived from various religions, Christianity probably first and foremost in the West. And, I, I think, much of what is advocated by Christianity and Judaism is to be applauded. It is, it is when they advocate aspects of religion which really seem to me totally trivial, that I find it objectionable.

Mm.

So I mean, certainly the, the dominant Catholic view on, on contraception, on gay rights and whatnot, I find totally unpalatable. But I don’t think that alters the fact that we derive a great deal of wisdom from Christianity, from Judaism. And probably from Islam, although I haven’t, I haven’t myself studied it enough to have a clear view of it. Reading Al-Khalili has given me a little bit of that, although he, he does point out that he has not a religious bone in his body.

[20:38] Mm. I guess, talking about religion, I was wondering, what do you actually remember of growing up in 1930s Germany?

Well, I, I remember, I mean, remember, you mean in the sense of the fact that one was rapidly found to be a second-class citizen? I was a primary school, and I was kicked out of that because they couldn’t any longer have any Jewish children in the school. But it was a, it was, it was a totally benign primary school, there was no unpleasantness about it. I do remember on one occasion the teacher saying, ‘I’ve got a new book, and it’s about Hitler’s Youth,’ and everybody was very keen to hear about Hitler’s Youth. Now this would have been, gosh, what time? ’35, thereabouts.

Eric Ash Page 12 C1379/92/Track 1

I then went to a Jewish school, which was probably the closest encounter I’ve had with Judaism. And I learnt some Hebrew, which I enjoyed doing, which unhappily has totally faded. I mean, my German is in pretty good shape, but what I learnt in Hebrew has just, well it was just not long enough and not deep enough to have been maintained. And having more recent times spent some time in Israel, it was a great pity that I don’t remember any of it. But other than that, the Jewish school was, was very good, I enjoyed it, and, I, I stayed there until the time that we emigrated.

Mm.

The only time that I had any kind of encounter with, with any ruffians around the place, I did... In those days, which amazes me, I must have been just nine or ten, I was allowed to cycle to school, and coming back on the bicycle, I was accosted by some young, young kids, and, but it didn’t really do me any harm, but it was, it was an encounter, and, a little bit scary. But other than that, I really had no problems. And my parents emigrated in good time, just actually a few weeks before what is now known as Kristallnacht, which is the occasion when, when the Nazis decided to break all the windows in any Jewish shops and raid the synagogues and that sort of thing. You know you mentioned a glass of water early on? Is there any chance that you can find it?

Certainly. It will take me about two minutes.

[pause in recording]

[24:00] I’ve got a question. I was thinking when you were talking about growing up in Thirties Germany, and characterising it as a, as a the period of becoming a second- class citizen, but, I wonder, do you remember how you actually, remember the experience at the time, how you found it?

I, I think, I think I remember thinking about it as being rather odd, rather than threatening. And, you know, we still did what I suppose middle-class families did, like go on holiday in the Alps and, and all that. So... And we had two servants, a

Eric Ash Page 13 C1379/92/Track 1 cook and somebody who looked after children, my sister and myself. So life seemed, in inverted commas, ‘quite normal’, with just this oddity. But I do remember for example, seeing on a wall poster under a glass case, the front cover of a, of a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer , and, seeing a big cartoon in front of it showing clearly a Jewish person with a large sack of booty of some sort on his back, and it said, ‘It was like this that the Jews came to Germany.’ And I remember seeing that, walking along with the lady who was looking after us you know, and it seemed pretty odd, but not threatening somehow. I mean I suppose nobody had the imagination of how threatening it actually was, and certainly not at that age.

I wonder sort of talking about growing up and being Jewish but not actually sort of, having that much of a Jewish upbringing at all, you know, did you actually feel like it applied to you at all, or...?

I... No I think, I think we, we knew that it did. The fact that our upbringing was, and religious side of it was, was absent, I don’t think made any difference. It was quite clear that we were Jewish, and, and that this sort of thing was addressed at our situation.

[26:30] You mentioned that you had, I guess a typical middle-class upbringing otherwise.

Yes.

I’m not quite sure what a typical middle-class upbringing is by the standards of 1930s Germany. Can you give me a few insights please?

Well, I, I think, I think that we were comfortably off, not madly rich but comfortably off, and, the sort of nice things that, that can happen if you have a, a little bit of extra money happened, like, like summer holidays for example. And, we, were well looked after, and, felt fairly free. I do remember on one occasion when my parents were, went out in the evening, I decided I’d like to go for a walk on my own anyway, and I don’t know what age I would have been, it would have been eight or possibly nine I suppose. And, I just went out. And we lived in a street which I suppose was about a

Eric Ash Page 14 C1379/92/Track 1 mile from the Brandenburger Tor, which is, you know, the, the victory celebration structure in Berlin.

Oh the Brandenburg Gate.

Yah, Brandenburg Gate. And I walked there, and enjoyed it, I think humming to myself as I went along. And, and then I came home again, and this lady who was looking after us was in hysterics you know. The idea that one could just walk out and... But I think it’s an illustration of the fact that I didn’t feel threatened or, or that things were abnormal.

What was your home like in Germany?

Well we lived in a flat overlooking the, oh heck what is it called? The technical university in Germany, on the street, so we were right opposite this technical university. And we had a garden, and, it was I think a fairly spacious flat as I remember it. We lived reasonably well.

Mm. You talked a little bit about enjoying Meccano and the boys’ book of electronics when you got to Britain. Do you remember any sort of younger hobbies, pastimes, interests?

I don’t think I do really. I mean, I, I remember learning to swim, I remember cycling. As I pointed out, even cycling to school, which, looking back on it, I find quite amazing. But there weren’t many cars around in those days, so, it was an OK thing to do for kids. One had friends. But I don’t remember that much in detail.

[30:00] Mm. How did you come to actually move to Britain?

Well my father... The firm that my father was working for, the AEG, did help to make smooth his passage to London, and there was a small subsidiary company called Welding Supplies Limited, which, they arranged for him to have a position there. So, that’s why we went to London, although other members of the family went to the

Eric Ash Page 15 C1379/92/Track 1

United States. And, I had actually experienced England just before then. We moved in 1938, and I think it was in 1936 when I was eight that I was sent over to London to stay with a lady who in fact taught my sister and myself English, that was one of the things my parents did arrange to do, in view of the likelihood of emigration. And a lady called Miss Murtagh, and she lived in Edgware, and I went there for something like four weeks in the summer, just to live with them. And I enjoyed that, and I certainly learnt more English in the process. And I know my maternal grandfather, who spoke not a word of English, picked me up from there and took me home. So, I remember that very clearly. So when I got to England, I could communicate in English reasonably well. My parents had the idea that, probably to deal with the language problem, the best thing to do was to send me to a boarding school, and so I went to a boarding school, to have sort of total immersion in English. And that was pretty successful, I mean I, language wasn’t thereafter any kind of a problem.

Mm. How did you actually get to England in 1938?

How did we...?

How did you get to England in 1938?

The first time in my life that we flew in an aeroplane. We flew to Amsterdam, and, the reason I believe was that, crossing the border, or leaving Germany, was easier at an airport than it was on a train. And, we were not allowed to take many goods and chattels with us in any case. But this was regarded as the easiest way of doing it. And my parents had some friends in Amsterdam, and we stayed there a day or two, and then went on the, the boat from, I think the Hook of Holland to, to Harwich, as I remember it. And then a train from Harwich to London. And then we stayed in some sort of a B&B for a, a little while.

[33:25] And do you remember what your, well I guess they wouldn’t be your first impressions of England, but your second impressions were?

Eric Ash Page 16 C1379/92/Track 1

Yah. No, it was quite exciting, we, we really enjoyed it. And, I remember we had breakfast on the train, and, I know that my father was somewhat appalled at the price, because he was of course trying very suddenly to adjust himself to a very much lower standard of living. But we had breakfast anyway. And then, eventually, and I don’t know how long it took, we rented a flat in Maida Vale. And that’s where we stayed and my parents stayed in fact until they died.

What was it actually like flying in the 1930s? I guess it’s not something that that many people got to do.

No, quite. Well I found it very exciting. My father had done a lot of it in his business, in the AEG. But, no, I mean it was a short flight, even then. But yes, I thought it was very exciting. I’m no longer excited by having to on an aeroplane.

What was Maida Vale like when you moved there?

Well it was a time of recession, and, I know that they found it quite difficult. The block of flats that we moved into, found it difficult to rent flats, and so there was a flat next door to us which was empty, and they said, ‘Well nobody’s going to rent this for the moment,’ so we could put our goods and chattels next door. And, and that, that was so for a year or so. But it was a, the flat was a pleasant flat. It had a balcony. It had enough room for us. I think, my parents did succeed in dividing one room so there was one for my sister and one for me. And, Maida Vale was, I think a fairly pleasant part of London. There was a park not far away which had tennis courts where my parents in fact played tennis all the time. And we existed there fairly happily.

Mm.

Until the war came and then that did change things a bit.

[36:05] Did you go to school in Maida Vale?

Eric Ash Page 17 C1379/92/Track 1

No, I went, I was in this boarding school. But when the war came, the first thing the Government did was to evacuate all the children in London, because they thought there would be a major attack on London almost immediately. My sister’s school was evacuated to Cornwall, and they had the idea that kids, siblings, went with their bigger siblings, so I, I went with my big sister who was four years older than me, and incidentally looks about four years younger than me even now, but that’s by the by. And, so, I was evacuated to Cornwall. But about four weeks later, the Government decided there wasn’t going to be that much of a war, or that much of an attack on London, and whereas my sister stayed in Cornwall, and later on moved to Torquay, with her school, since I wasn’t with a school there, I was sent back to London. And in fact spent the rest of the war in London. And for one year I didn’t go to school at all after that, and, my parents did get a tutor, and so I, I kept doing a bit of maths and stuff. And then when I did go to school a year later, I went to University College School, UCS, and stayed there until, for the rest of my school days in fact.

[38:00] Mm. You mentioned your sister a few times in passing. I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about her, and, what was she like in, when you were growing up?

Well, she is a bright lady, I think. She did... She was, as I say, evacuated to, eventually to Torquay. And she had a slight difficulty, because, at that time we were enemy aliens, and enemy aliens couldn’t be anywhere near the coast, because of course that’s where they might spy on the, when the Germans were coming over and all that. They were regarded as harmless until they were sixteen, and then my sister turned sixteen just when she was to do her, what we would now call GCSEs. And so there was a threat that she would have to leave her school in Torquay and wouldn’t be able to take them. But her headmistress had enough sense to deal with the situation and say she is not a spy and please can she do her GCSEs, which is what she did. And only then did she come back to London. And then she was apprenticed to a chartered accountant, and she did, she didn’t become an accountant, but she did fairly high-grade office work for most of her time. She was good at languages, of course her German was totally fluent, and she also was pretty good at French. And, so she, she was quite an employable person. She didn’t go to university, and, I regret to say, I

Eric Ash Page 18 C1379/92/Track 1 think this was because my parents at that time didn’t think that it was that important for girls to go to university, after all, they’d marry somebody, wouldn’t they? I might say one of my main themes being a parent, and I do have five daughters, no sons but five daughters, was, to me extremely important was that they should all go to university and have a career, and not rely on these uncertain people called men. Sorry, that’s going ahead of my time. She did marry. Her husband was also a refugee, and had rather little education, but he also coped, working in, in offices, and worked for a while in what is now called 3i I think, the bank.

The... Yes.

Yes. And they had two children, one of whom’s in Strasbourg working for the European Parliament, and the other one is a son who is in London, and is working in a, in the property field. So I think she has a fairly contented life. I still think it’s a pity that her talents weren’t explored further as they could have been.

How did you get on when you were younger?

Oh we got on very well. Common front to the parents of course, which I think is one of the best ways for siblings to get on with each other. No, we always got on very well. Still do. Mm.

[41:52] You raised another question I had in passing, which was, did your mother actually work at all?

Yes she did. But really only after emigration. And, she worked for a while in a charity concerned with first aid, and then rather, she was rather unhappy to be dismissed from that because, she might be a spy, might she not, when the war came, which seemed particularly mad. But then she worked for the National Children Adoption Association. I don’t quite know why, how that came about, but she did that for quite a few years, and enjoyed the work, and, got involved in some actual adoption cases too. It was run by somebody who was I think president of the Buddhist

Eric Ash Page 19 C1379/92/Track 1

Association, I can’t remember his name, but as a result of that, she learnt a bit about Buddhism. And actually I did too, but not very much.

[43:05] Mm. Could we talk a little bit about your schooling in England. You mentioned you went to a boarding school first. Whereabouts?

It was in Kent. It’s a school that no longer exists called Bickley Hall. And I enjoyed it. [pause] I mean I learnt quite a lot there. They were, I think fairly surprised that I could cope language-wise, and certainly helped in, in that respect. And I was reasonably good at things like arithmetic and whatnot. And so I think they took me slightly seriously. And I, I got involved with sports, I played cricket and soccer and that sort of thing. And I got on well with, with the kids there. It was of course a boys’ school, didn’t have any girls around. And it was really a good experience. But it couldn’t continue after the war had started. Well, after, sorry, after the... I’m just trying to remember how long I was there for. Was I there two whole years? I think, maybe it was a year and a half. But after the bombing started, I did not go back there.

Mm. What sort of a place was it?

It was what would have been a hall for, I suppose, some rich family of some sort, and it was turned into a school. And they had grounds for, for sport. I think the teaching was good, as far as I remember it. There was an emphasis on Christianity, but they didn’t thrust it down one’s throat. And, I didn’t participate in the actual prayers. Well I did to some extent. I certainly went to chapel. And, that’s where I first learnt to sing hymns, Onward Christian Soldiers and that sort of thing. And I do think singing hymns is great fun, and I still do. Now I think what it was was, they got kids to say their prayers at night, and I didn’t have to do that. But in every other way I think it was, it was a benign experience, it was a, I’d give them pretty full marks for dealing with Eric Ash.

I was wondering, a boarding school, how was it paid for, how did your parents afford the fees? You mentioned...

Eric Ash Page 20 C1379/92/Track 1

Well quite. A good question. But I mean, they were allowed to take a certain amount of money out of Germany, by no means all that they had, but they, they took some out. And I think they decided to invest it in that school. I don’t think it was a madly expensive school, but, nevertheless, I think it would have been quite a sacrifice on their part all the same.

How did you actually find life as a boarder?

The thing I remember most is how cold it was. We, the dormitories were unheated, and I think that first winter was jolly cold. And, we all got chilblains. And regarded that as normal. I mean it, it didn’t feel madly hard done by because we had chilblains, but it was certainly stressful. And I, I always remember that I had a sort of a knitted jacket which buttoned up in front which at night I would put on my legs to keep warm. Food was OK, except that I couldn’t ever bear porridge and still can’t. But, it, it was not stressful, it was not, it was not a, a difficult thing to do. I do remember that, the parents got weekly reports about their kids, and for three or four subjects they were told where one came in the class, what marks one got, what the top boy’s marks were, every week. And I remember coming bottom in geography, and my parents cross-examined me about this, and I did explain that somebody had to come bottom. And I think they sort of accepted that. But I didn’t come bottom in everything, so, so it was all right.

[48:20] Were your parents keen on education?

Yah. Yes they were all for it.

Mm. What was discipline like at the school? One always sort of, hears about boarding schools and assumes that it must exist.

Oh, discipline was fairly tight, and they did have corporal punishment, but not excessively so. I think I got whacked once for speaking after lights out or something of the sort. But, nothing, nothing really unpleasant.

Eric Ash Page 21 C1379/92/Track 1

Are there any subjects that you took to in particular while you were at school?

Oh I think maths was my favourite in a way, perhaps partially because you didn’t need to speak English for it. But, but I think I enjoyed most of the subjects.

What was the appeal of maths? As a historian and someone’s who’s always been on the arts side, it’s something I actually have problems understanding. You may have to...

I think the appeal is for anything that one can do. I mean if, if something comes relatively easy to you, you think it’s a great idea. The same with languages, I mean if somebody is good at languages, they love languages, you know. So I think I was reasonably good at it. But we also, we did Latin, and even started Greek, which I never got very far with. So, it was a fairly challenging programme, yes.

And you mentioned being evacuated and being, returning and then being taught by a tutor?

Yah.

How was that experience?

That was pretty good. I mean, I don’t remember anything much about him, but I mean I think he was, he was quite effective. So when I then did go to school, to UCS, I was not behind too much in various, main subjects.

[50:26] Mm. And, UCS, is that, University College School, was that associated with UCL then, or...?

It had been when it was founded in, whenever it was, in the 1890s or something, but the link at that time was pretty loose. There was a bit of a link actually, which I remember in an odd way. I left the school in 1945, and about thirty years later, maybe a bit more, thirty-five years later, some, that sort of time, they asked me to be a

Eric Ash Page 22 C1379/92/Track 1 governor of the school. And, I was at that time at University College London, at the university there. And, then... So I was a governor for some years. And then I went to Imperial College, and I was sacked, because my position on the governing body was as a UCL representative. So there was that link, that they had a, somebody on the governing body from there. And indeed, one of my former students at UCL, a lady who is now a professor, is now on the governing body of UCS.

What sort of school was it?

It was, I think, a good school. I think it was academically ambitious. We were very fortunate in the teachers we had. I think they were all very good, and, I think at least three of them were people who were retired and had been pulled back because of the war, the younger people had gone to the wars. So I had a maths teacher, maths, chemistry and physics teachers were all really exceptionally good. The English teacher, I don’t know about, but he wasn’t bad. I know the readings that we did, we either read a Shaw play or a Shakespeare play, one after the other. And we wrote essays for him. He was the only person who I think was a shade unhappy about having a German kid in his class, because, he or his son had been gassed in World War I, so there was a bit of baggage there. But I mean he, but he was, not unpleasant, but I remember that there was a reservation there.

Mm.

The headmaster was ambitious. There was a dramatic story about him. After I left the school, about a year or so after, he hung himself in a cupboard. The reason why was never quite explained, but I’m pretty sure he was gay, and I’m pretty sure that somehow or other he must have, not been able to contain his enthusiasms or something like that. I was, I was not aware of the fact that there was anything odd about him. But I do remember that when we were leaving, he addressed the leaving class, and said something about, ‘People wondered why I’ve never got married.’ And he said, ‘It is because my total enthusiasm has been really on the school.’ So he was aware of the fact that people might ask the question. But it was a rather sad ending to his career, to put it mildly.

Eric Ash Page 23 C1379/92/Track 1

Well when you said he had been ambitious, in what sort of sense?

Oh, I mean, kids doing well in examinations, going to the right universities and all that sort of thing.

Mm. Well why did you suspect he was gay, other than the marriage thing?

I mean I didn’t, I, I doubt that I would know what the word meant at the time. It’s only in retrospect that, one thinks about it.

Mm.

He, he was an imaginative chap. I mean one thing I always remember, an episode. We had mock exams, and this would have been, I’m guessing, ’44 or thereabouts, and, some parents wrote in to him saying that, little Johnny wouldn’t be coming to school the day before because he was so worried about the exams and he hoped to revise, or something of this sort. And the headmaster thought this was really wet, and he started a system called, oh, I’ve forgotten exactly what he called it, but it was sort of a, a military kind, kind of approach to examinations. And what it was, and it must have been summer when he was doing it, kind of thing, he set a system where you would come in and do a twenty-minute examination in some subject, then go to the swimming pool and swim two lengths, then another twenty minutes on another subject, then run up to the Whitestone Pond at the top of the heath and back again. Like this all day. Just to stop people being soft about, worrying about exams and, and imagining that you have to change your life in order to, in order to cope with them.

Mm.

So he had some good things, good ideas I think.

[57:20] Do you remember much of science teaching from...?

Eric Ash Page 24 C1379/92/Track 1

Oh yah, very much so. No, the, the science teaching was really very good. The chemistry teacher was definitely superannuated, but he really knew what he was doing. And, above all, the science involved a lot of lab work. We really did do some chemistry in labs, I think much more than people do now. I mean now as you know there’s this, terrible worry that schools have that one of the little kids might get damaged in a lab and therefore the safest thing to do is, either to keep them out of it or, or to, to make it ultra-safe in some way. And we didn’t have that, that problem. And, I remember being really quite excited by the idea of doing analysis in chemistry, where you got an unknown substance and at the end of the day you had to say what it was. And that was, was really fun. And in physics I remember doing the spectroscopic studies of things, and, finding it enormously exciting to see the spectrum of a, of a, of some substance and seeing the lines of the spectrum and identifying what they were from that.

Mm.

Have you done physics at all in your time?

Not since I was at school.

Yah, but I mean at school... Do you know what a spectrum is?

Well, I know what a spectrum is in some contexts, but, what’s a spectroscopic study?

Well I mean, you’re using a spectroscope to look at, to, to look at a substance which you are heating in a Bunsen burner for example.

What’s a spectroscope?

A spectroscope is, is an instrument that enables you to see the particular wavelengths of light that are being emitted. It is exactly what is still used that enable us to know a lot about the substances that we have in stars. You look at the light that comes from the stars and see what wavelengths are involved, and from this you can identify.

Eric Ash Page 25 C1379/92/Track 1

Mm. And what sort of instrument is a 1940s spectroscope though?

Oh, they were pretty damn good. I mean they... Good spectroscopes I think probably go back to the middle of the nineteenth century, I mean, to do that sort of work. I mean spectroscopy was an established subject, certainly early, early in the twentieth century, but quite a lot before then.

Mm. Why do you think the analysis part of chemistry appealed to you so much?

Well I think it’s a puzzle, one likes puzzles. And it wasn’t an artificial puzzle. I mean it was, it was the real thing, that you were given a substance and you really don’t know what it is, and you have to find out what it is. Well I suppose the teacher knew what it was. But still, it was, it was real life I think. No, I mean work in the laboratory, I think is what makes life real.

Mm. Real in what sense?

Well all sorts of things you can discover. Well I’ll give you one example which may be shocking to the listeners. But, as everybody of that age I suppose wonders, is whether they are fertile. Given a microscope, you can find out. And I did.

Hm. How much...

But I mean that’s something which one did, shows that one could be in a lab without supervision, you know?

Mm.

And, and explore what was going on. Mm.

That was a question that occurred to me, was, how much freedom do you get to play around in the school labs? Or was it supervised, or...?

Eric Ash Page 26 C1379/92/Track 1

Well, really quite a lot. But I’m sure they kept an eye on what we were doing. I mean you couldn’t use dangerous substances or use fume cupboards with... But it wasn’t, it wasn’t supervised to the extent of inhibiting what you, what you could do.

[1:02:28] Mm. Were you interested in science technology outside of school as well?

Oh yah. No, I mean I, I certainly was interested in that, and I did I think a fair amount of reading.

Any titles that stick in your mind?

[pause] No, actually that’s, that’s a good question. I mean I’m... I’m not sure that I can remember. But I certainly read, I think fairly widely. I remember reading a book about Jeans about astronomy. I don’t remember reading much about biology, which at that time was not that interesting. Because of course, proper biology only started in the Fifties.

Were there any particular branches of science that appealed to you more than others in your reading do you think?

Oh I think the physics side of it very definitely, and electronics. I mean, for example one thing I, I do remember doing is, I, I made a small radio with a, a crystal radio with a cat’s whisker. I don’t know whether that means anything to you or might to a listener. But, you get a, certain crystals which if you put a thin wire touching it, act essentially as a rectifier, and a rectifier is essentially what you need in order to demodulate a radio wave. So, with a crystal and a whisker and earphones, I was able to listen to the BBC without any batteries or anything of this sort. So that was quite exciting, the fact that you could do it at all.

Mm.

And of course this was before the days of transistors when it was obvious that you, you should be able to do that.

Eric Ash Page 27 C1379/92/Track 1

I’ve always wondered, what’s the sound quality like on a crystal radio set?

The sound quality wouldn’t be bad. I mean the sound quality would really depend on your earphones as much as anything else. So if it could demodulate at all, it probably did it quite well, yes.

Is it a tricky exercise to actually get it working?

Well there are different... The crystal has a, is sensitive, depending on where you put the wire. It doesn’t work equally well wherever you do it. But it wasn’t too difficult to do, no.

Where do you get things like crystals and bits of electronics from?

I have no idea. I would imagine one went to an electrical shop and asked for a crystal. But I, I really don’t know.

[1:05:55] Other than the, the sort of scientific hobbies we’ve talked about, did you have any other interests more widely?

Oh I was interested in music. I played the violin, and, I had violin lessons. And, and that, that has been a continuing interest for me, although I don’t play much violin these days. Happy Birthday for grandchildren, or...

Had you had much thoughts about what you wanted to do after school?

I, I was pretty keen on engineering. I did think about the possibility of medicine, and, I think the thing that put me off medicine was that it was a long study, and my parents at that time were really pretty hard up, and it didn’t seem like the right time to engage in a very long study. So I don’t know whether I might have done medicine but for that. But I was keen on electrical, electrical engineering, and, that’s what I did.

Eric Ash Page 28 C1379/92/Track 1

How did you decide where to actually go to university?

Again, I think, because of straightened circumstances at home, the obvious thing to do was to stay at home, and that meant really going to somewhere in London. [pause] There was actually a scholarship available to UCS, this was another link with UCL, and the headmaster gave that scholarship, it was his decision, to somebody else, whose exam results were not as good as mine. But in fact I took a scholarship examination at Imperial College and I was awarded a scholarship there. So that’s really what made the decision for me there.

Mhm. How well had you done in school?

Reasonably well, but, I wouldn’t say outstanding. I mean in current language, it wasn’t a series of A stars or anything. And it’s very hard to compare , the grades in those days and now. But I did reasonably well that I was I think regarded as an OK candidate for sitting the scholarship exam.

Was there any discussion of having to do sort of National Service or anything like that?

No, because, I mean for one thing I wasn’t, I wasn’t quite old enough. I was seventeen when I went to Imperial College. And the other thing was, the war was over. The war was over really just before I went to Imperial College. And that had a rather interesting effect on, on what happened to the freshman at Imperial College which is that it was predominantly given to veterans coming back from the wars, and the majority of my colleagues there were veterans, and, we were just school kids, a few of us, and we were rather made to feel it.

When you say rather made to feel it, are there any incidents that stick in your mind in particular?

No, nothing in particular. I mean, I do just remember one occasion, and that was a cold winter too, 1945, when one of the people in the class said that his wife had

Eric Ash Page 29 C1379/92/Track 1 warmed her feet on his tummy all night. And I found that quite an exciting thought. [laughs]

[1:10:25] And there were a couple of things that I guess you’ve raised in passing that I was just going to go back to and ask you about. One of them was, you mentioned that there was, there was only one teacher at school who was, a little bit funny about you being German.

Yah.

Did you ever encounter any other, I guess people with reservations about that, once you got to Britain?

Really, I think not. Which is a reason to be grateful to this country. I mean you know, I think we were well-received. And, you know, people were keen to, to help. I always remember that, before the war there were advertisements in buses which said, ‘Get them out of Germany before it is too late.’ This was, I’ve forgotten which organisation actually was responsible for that advertisement. But people were actually pretty benign.

[11:35] Mm. The other question I had was, which I guess is tangentially related to this, was, what do you actually remember of the war in Britain?

Of the...?

Of the war. Did you see much of it?

Oh yah. I mean being in London one, one was very much aware of it, yes. I mean for, quite a long time, one went into shelters at night, and, the place, the block of flats that we lived in, had a cellar, and we tended to bed down in the cellar. I don’t know whether we did it every night or, or only when there was an alarm. I was quite good at simulating the sound of the alarm on my violin actually, which was good for

Eric Ash Page 30 C1379/92/Track 1 scaring people around. But we tended to, to spend nights in the cellar at least for some time, and I’ve really forgotten for how long it was. I don’t think we ever bedded down in the Tube, although we saw, I mean we went on the Tube and saw people bedding down there. I certainly did my GCSEs exam in another cellar, which was at UCS, where, when there was an alarm we’d do our examinations down there. And, I do remember for example, the sport I did was rowing at UCS, and one would take the overland train to Putney and seeing very often on the way there and on the way back some of the houses that had been hit in the course of the previous night. So there was, it was very visible. On the other hand, I think the maximum number of people that got killed in any one night was 2,000, and mostly it was, really much smaller numbers. So by comparison with some of the things that went on subsequently in that war and in others, it was not that dangerous.

Was the area that you lived in bombed much?

Was it bombed?

The area you lived in, Maida Vale.

Yah, in fact, the block of flats that we lived in, one wing of it did have a direct hit. So one bit of it got knocked off at night. Happily nobody was in it at the time. But yes, that was a nice visible scene from our balcony the next morning. The other thing that was fun was collecting shrapnel, because, of course the anti-aircraft guns fired at the enemy planes, and the shells exploded and then rained down the shrapnel, which was a bad thing to hit you if it did. So I mean, large lumps of iron kind of thing. And I remember collecting some of that which seemed, you know, in the ground, as a kind of a trophy. Mm.

What does one do with one’s shrapnel once you’ve collected it?

Look at it. [laughs]

Did you collect anything else?

Eric Ash Page 31 C1379/92/Track 1

No I don’t think so.

Do you recall how you felt about the war at the time?

Once again, I, I don’t think I felt as threatened as in retrospect I think one should have done. I mean the idea of the Germans invading just seemed improbable, that they could actually do it. And looking back on it, we now know it wasn’t that improbable. If they had decided to do it, they might have done it successfully. So I, I mean I think really the most stressful thing of the war was having one’s father interned, but when he came back... I mean the other thing of course was, food rationing and having to queue up for all those bits of food that weren’t rationed. So I remember my mother would go to more than one greengrocer shop to get some cabbage for example. That sort of thing. But, as has been well established historically, this country was not badly fed during the war. There wasn’t much obesity. But one of the disgraceful aspects of the history of our times was that, kids who grew up before the war, if they were working class, tended to be a couple of inches shorter than middle-class kids. That hasn’t happened since. So I mean as far as some equity is concerned, the food rationing and the whole, the whole system of the way the population was taken care of in the war, actually worked rather well.

Mm. Do you remember meals in wartime yourself?

Do I remember...?

What the food was like in wartime.

Yes. I, I... It really wasn’t, wasn’t bad. I do remember that for many years afterwards I didn’t really want to eat any more peanut butter, because that was, tended to be a sort of a staple thing. Eggs of course tended to be extremely rare things, but there was egg powder, and so you could make omelettes with egg powder. And I always thought that really wasn’t at all bad. I think school meals at UCS were somewhat primitive. And I, they always announced what the menu was at the beginning of the meal, and I always remember, they said, ‘Plain or chocolate rice

Eric Ash Page 32 C1379/92/Track 1 pudding, benedictus benedicat.’ That was, that was sort of all one phrase. But no, we did not suffer seriously in that, in that sense at all.

[1:18:38] Do you know how your father actually found being interned on the Isle of Man?

He, he found it, I mean other than he was concerned about us being in London, he found it, really not bad at all. And, a group of them got together and gave talks to each other about this, that and the other. And, I think on the whole he thought they were reasonably well treated. Getting him out in the end was really done by maintaining that he was really very ill, which was, which was nonsense, he was not. But, gradually I think the Government realised that the vast majority of the people they’d got there, ought not to be there, were a drag on them actually. So gradually people were released.

Mm. What did he do when he got out, what sort of work?

Well he, he continued to work for a chartered accountant, and dealt with tax issues and that sort of thing. It wasn’t very inspirational work, but it was work, and, kept the pot boiling. Mm.

[1:20:05] I guess we talked a little bit about religion and your parents, but were they politically motivated, interested, at all?

Oh they were very interested in, in politics. And avid readers of the New Statesman . And I would say oriented left of centre, but not very far left of centre.

Mm. When you say they were interested in politics, were they actively interested in it, or was it just...?

No. They, no, they, they certainly didn’t participate in any way whatsoever. My father would have thought it was entirely out of place. We were, until, I don’t know when, ’46 or something like that, enemy aliens, we weren’t, until we were naturalised.

Eric Ash Page 33 C1379/92/Track 1

Mm. Shall we take a short break? That’s a good chunk of time.

[End of Track 1]

Eric Ash Page 34 C1379/92/Track 2

[Track 2]

Right. Could we talk for a little bit about Imperial College? When did you actually first go there?

’45.

Do you remember what it was like starting, your first day perhaps?

Yes, I, I think I do. I remember feeling pretty much adrift. It seemed, well as I mentioned before, we were a minority, there were so many people coming back from the wars. But, it was well organised, I mean one wasn’t left, one wasn’t left not knowing what to do. I do remember sitting in classrooms and being told what kind of things we would be doing, what kind of things are expected. I remember the union building, and, where one would have lunch, which was extremely primitive at the time.

In what sense primitive?

Well, I did... The food was edible but, but not above that standard.

[01:24] What degree were you actually signed up for?

BSc. Yah.

In what subject?

Electrical Engineering.

Mm. What subjects, what topics I guess, make up an electrical engineering degree in 1945, what classes did you take?

Eric Ash Page 35 C1379/92/Track 2

I suppose really, it had, a lot of what people would do now is still, is still, would still have featured at that time. But I suppose, first of all, what is electricity, how can you control where it flows and where it doesn’t flow, and then, how can you create electricity, how you can make generators, dynamos, and, and generators. How can you use it, that would be motors. And, on... I’m just trying to remember whether we had, whether we had much of the history of the subject or not at all. Not really a vast amount. We certainly found out about Faraday at one time or another. And then of course, the other great subject was telecommunications. And this would involve the theory of radio, or of electromagnetic waves, how they radiate, how they are confined, and how you can convey information using radio waves. And not yet radar. I remember discovering sort of, I suppose the end of my first year, about things called wave guides, which you use in order to have, to control the passage of microwaves, and which was the basis of radar systems. I don’t think there would have been much of that. There would have been a subject called materials, and, the person who taught us that was a chap called Lord Willis Jackson. Was he a lord or was he a knight? I can’t remember. But anyway, Willis Jackson. He was the head of the department. And he had during the war worked on new insulators that were extremely important in developing radar, things like polythene and that sort of thing. But, he made the study of materials central to what engineers do. [04:56] Now, I’ve mentioned the electrical side, but of course, engineers were supposed to know about most things, and so we also would find out about heat engines, even, including such things as boilers. And indeed I remember one of the experiments that we did was what is called a boiler trial, where we actually had to stoke a boiler with coal, and measure everything that went on in the boiler, and how much heat it produced and, and what gases came out of the chimney et cetera et cetera. So that was regarded as an important part of our education. And the other thing is, that was regarded as important, was structures, so although we were concerned with electrical engineering, we were also supposed to understand how to make things stand up and not fall down. And, there is one thing that I was taught then which I’ve tried ever since to forget, and that’s the middle third rule. And it goes like this. If you want to erect a big chimney, you calculate the combined effect of its weight and the wind forces on it. And when you combine the two, if the resultant gets into the middle third of the base of that chimney, then it won’t fall down. A really dumb idea to teach that

Eric Ash Page 36 C1379/92/Track 2 to kids. I’m sure it’s not even true. And as I say, I’ve been trying to forget the middle third rule but, it’s the sort of thing one can’t forget. [06:58] So, engineering was quite general in the first year. And of course we had mathematics. And mathematics was extremely well taught, by a chap whose name I do remember, called Bickley, and he was blind, almost completely blind anyway. And he would write on the blackboard in spite of that, and he would occasionally write on something he had just written, which made it challenging to find out what it was he was about. But he was such a good teacher, that one went along with it, and we admired him and, and certainly in our second year I remember he taught us some mathematics which would normally have been regarded as beyond what engineers are supposed to know.

What do you think made him a good lecturer, what about his style?

Oh I think the fact that he was fascinated by the subject. He was inherently genuinely enthusiastic about mathematics, and enjoyed conveying this enthusiasm to, to the class. And then, conveying some idea of the power of mathematics, the clever things you can do if you know the right kind of mathematics.

[08:38] Did you have any particular leaning towards theoretical or applied mathematics, or...?

Well, I think the big division is between applied mathematics and pure mathematics. I have never found pure mathematics accessible, it is... I know very little about it, and my enthusiasm has certainly always been on the applied side rather than the pure side.

Mm. Sounds like very sort of broad-based.

Very broad-based. In fact there was a lot of talk in those days, and there still is some places, whether you shouldn’t have a common first year between civil mechanical, chemical and electrical engineers; that didn’t then happen. Well it’s happened in some other places, well Cambridge is one place where it has happened. It’s, it’s a

Eric Ash Page 37 C1379/92/Track 2 debatable subject and you could debate it on, on either side. I mean I, I always said, thermodynamics is a common theme to all these engineers, and I would be very happy to be taught commonly, as long as the examples that they give relate to my side. And to give you an example, silicon crystals have defects in them, they’re never perfect crystals. The number of defects that they have under equilibrium conditions, if they’ve been allowed to settle down, is determined, or can be determined, by the theory of thermodynamics. So, if you want to teach me thermodynamics to tell me how many defects there are in silicon crystals, I would be very happy with it. If it tells you the details of how to run a boiler, I’m less enthusiastic. But I mean, that’s the sort of debate that, that goes on forever, and will continue forever.

Mm. Out of that very sort of broad range of subjects that you’ve described, do you think there were any sort of particular benefits for you?

Well I think I benefited greatly from the mathematics side. But I, but I think, I think, general electrical theory I found fascinating too, so, I think I benefited from all of it to certain degrees, but I think the mathematics was probably the most exciting. But, exciting in the sense of its applicability, the power it gave you to do things.

Can you tell me a little more about that, the applicability of it to different things you were doing elsewhere?

Oh, I mean, in, in the research in which I was subsequently engaged in, one normally is able to model the system on which you are working, and mathematics is the language that’s used for the modelling. So, it’s not really sort of, stuck onto the problem, it’s really inherent in the problem. And most of the things I’ve been involved in in mathematics aspects have been important. I mean, I’m not a hotshot mathematician incidentally, but, but it just is the language that you use.

[12:38] Mm. What’s the actual, the workload like, studying that large variety of subjects at first?

Eric Ash Page 38 C1379/92/Track 2

The workload was fierce. I can’t remember how many lectures we had on the average, every day, but a lot. And, we had a lot of coursework to do, a lot of examples to do. So, I mean it’s true to this day, that if you are going to read engineering, you are a busy person, you do have to spend a large percentage of your time actually doing the stuff. We had an additional incentive, and that, I mentioned all these chaps coming back from the wars; well there were a lot more queuing up to come in. And we had exams in every subject at the end of the year, and failure in any one of them meant that you would probably lose your place, and make room for a veteran. So you really weren’t allowed to, to fall on, fall down on the job. So it was pretty, pretty intensive. I, I don’t know whether, whether people get as many lectures these days as we did; I suspect in engineering, they probably do.

How long were the lectures?

Oh they were one-hour lectures, or, fifty minutes or something like that.

Mm. What was the balance like between, I guess, lectures and other forms of teaching?

I think, I think in, at Imperial College, I think they had a reasonably good balance of having enough lab work to be done, and, and also, not exactly computer work but modelling work on paper, as well as if you like the formal analytical work that was concerned in the examinations, in the actual subject matter. But I, I think it was a reasonably good balance. I mean looking back on it, there are certain things that I certainly think I would have liked to have seen taken out, and more physics put in. I’ve mentioned the middle third rule. I promise not to mention it again. But one of things that we had to do was workshop practice. We were supposed to be able to understand how one actually makes things in a workshop. I mean one of the first things we had to do was to take a bit of brass and file it flat. And, I don’t honestly think that was helpful, except to show that it’s difficult. The only thing I can say is that, there was a, a fellow student whose name is John Andreae, and his name begins with A, as mine did, and we would file in next to each other, and that was I think the beginning of our friendship, which has lasted to this day. But, the workshop practice stuff, I think there was sort of a theory that you, if you’re going to be an engineer,

Eric Ash Page 39 C1379/92/Track 2 you’ve got to know how to do things. And I think it was somewhat exaggerated. But on the whole I think it was a good course.

[16:30] Mm. And do you recall any lab sessions that were of more use and interest to you than filing bits of brass?

Oh, I mean most, most of the lab sessions, you know, were, were seriously interesting I would, I would say. I mean I even remember dealing with large motors, or large dynamos and synchronising them. If you have a, if you have an AC generator that produces fifty hertz electricity, and you want to join it onto the mains, you’ve got to do it at the right moment, because, this is going up and down and if you, if you try and join it in when the mains is doing the opposite, then you will get a big spark and, and not what you were trying to do. So that sort of thing on big things I think, I found interesting. Subsequently, when I was myself a teacher at University College, I tried and eventually successfully to get rid of all these large machines, because although I think in 1945 there was some point in doing it, I didn’t think there was when I got there, which was, I suppose, when was it? Oh, ’62 or something like that.

Was there much emphasis on heavy current engineering?

Yah, I mean that was the heavy current side. And there was the big division between the people who were going for the heavier current side and, and the light current side which was mainly telecoms. And, you know, the heavy current side was, going downhill as far as the excitement in the subject was concerned; the telecom side was roaring uphill. With the result that subsequently, the heavy side got left somewhat behind, and indeed there has been a shortage of heavy current engineers as a result, and has come up again since for various reasons.

Do you remember being interested in any of the, the sort of more scientific rather than the mathematical subjects? Which isn’t to say that maths isn’t a science, but...

Well I was certainly interested in the mathematical subjects. But I don’t think we had any lab sessions aligned to mathematics as such.

Eric Ash Page 40 C1379/92/Track 2

Mm.

Not the way you would these days like computer sessions. So there was none of that really. I mean the sort of thing that we would do is, there were graphical ways of solving problems in which you actually drew out things and came to certain conclusions. Really what nowadays you would do in nanoseconds on a computer, you could do over a few hours.

Mm. Do you have any...

And of course, the computers that were used were slide rules.

I’ve always wondered about slide rules.

Marvellous things. They were really very very good, for, for certain purposes. One could work them really quite fast. But, they had had their day. And round about... This is skipping around in time, you don’t mind non-chronological things?

Not where comparison’s concerned, no.

[20:38] Mm. I had a sabbatical year in Paris, and I think... I’m just trying to remember, get the year right. It was think 1979 to ’80. And my twin daughters were at school, and I remember having a session with the maths teacher suggesting that slide rules were out of date, and I failed. [laughs] I said, you know, four-function calculators are, have really taken over. And he said, ‘Well some of the kids couldn’t afford them.’ Although in fact they were about the same price as a slide rule. So it took a while. But that was, well if it was ’79, it would have been about thirty years later, mm.

Did you have your own slide rule?

Oh yah, absolutely. I think I only threw mine away fairly recently.

Eric Ash Page 41 C1379/92/Track 2

How long does it actually take to learn to use one in the first place?

Oh no, I mean it’s a very clever idea. I mean it’s, it’s basically based on using logarithms and for doing multiplications and divisions and whatnot. It’s very fast, and reasonably accurate.

Mm. And is it something you sort of just have in your back pocket ready for when you need it, or...?

Yah, exactly, that sort of thing. Mm. The more accurate of course you want, the longer it has to be. I know some people had very long ones. I think mine was never longer than this, a bit too big for a back pocket but...

You mentioned the distinction between sort of heavy current and more sort of light current telecommunications people.

Yah.

Where did you fall in that divide?

Oh very definitely on the light current side. It seemed to me far more exciting, and, it seemed to me light, light where the future was, and, well, there’s no doubt that’s where the future was. [laughs]

And do you recall why you actually thought the future would be electronics rather than electrical?

Oh, I mean because it was roaring ahead as a subject. I mean it, it... [pause] The first valves really appeared on the scene just before World War I think. The valves were a very major theme in World War II, and, they were still developing what Americans call tubes, but valves, thermoelectric valves. They were a very major theme for quite a few years after the war too, and they were really very clever devices. But all of the radar in World War II was done with valves, and it became very clear that you could do more and more things with valves as time went on. The idea of computers

Eric Ash Page 42 C1379/92/Track 2 gradually dawned on people, the fact that you could do very clever things with valves. [ring tone] Sorry, can I.....

[pause in recording]

[24:00] Are you ready to go again?

Yah.

You were talking about, you know, the state and future of electronics in about 1945/46.

Yes. It, it became, it was very clear that that is where things were happening at a very rapid rate. I mean, the essentials of an electric motor on an electric dynamo or generator were really very much in place by about 1890. The improvements that have taken place since are very important and the efficiencies have improved et cetera et cetera. But, the main theme was very much in place by about 1890. Electronics was really just starting as a serious subject, very much taken forward of course by World War II. So, it seemed very clear to me that that’s where the future lay.

Mm. And were there any sort of particular applications you had in mind in, you know, 1945-ish that might be useful for electronics?

Oh... I, I think probably 1945, my vision was, totally confined just for understanding radio and that sort of thing. And as I say, radar really appeared on the, was a secret during the war and really appeared on the scene only about a year or so later. But by the time I graduated, it was very clear that radar and everything that flows from it was going to be enormously important.

When did you actually start to learn about radar and other sort of World War II applications of electronics?

Eric Ash Page 43 C1379/92/Track 2

I would guess, not very much before my final year, which would have been ’48. I really can’t remember too well about that. But, I doubt that we had formal, formal lectures on radar. But I was certainly very much aware of the, of radar when I started doing research and when I graduated in ’48.

[26:28] Mm. Had you had much thought about what you wanted to do after university at all, or...?

I was pretty clear that I wanted to go into research, and I was pretty clear that I wanted to get a research degree of some sort.

Mm. You sound very, very definite on that. Can you talk me through your thinking a little bit?

Well, I mean if you were in the arts, the fact that something new hasn’t happened in the last year doesn’t matter that much. You can after all spend a lifetime on Aristotle or on Shakespeare. But if you are in the applied sciences, then it is really the rate of progress which animates what one is fascinated by. Unless you are animated by the history of science, which to some extent I am too. I mean I, I do think the history of, for example of the Royal Institution which I was much involved with at one time, I think is a very exciting scene. But when you are actually in the doing mode, it is the rate of progress which is what matters to you, and if one wants to play a role in the rate of progress, you are involved in research.

Mm. Was there much career guidance available?

[pause] Not a vast amount really. I don’t... I’m not sure that I ever talked at length to any of the people there as to what I really wanted to do next. [pause] [28:30] I mean, a major influence on me at the time was the arrival of a new member of staff at Imperial College, Dennis Gabor. Have you heard of him? Well, he’s a Nobel Laureate, and, he, he was the undoubted inventor of holography. Now at that time holography was just a little curiosity, nobody took it seriously. But he joined the staff

Eric Ash Page 44 C1379/92/Track 2 of Electrical Engineering, he became a reader in Electrical Engineering, and he gave advanced lectures which were fascinating, I still have some of them. And, he took on a PhD student, I was one of them. And, there was no question that he was a very exciting person to work with. A very odd person, but, brilliant, and I don’t use that word of many people that I’ve met in my life, but he certainly was one of them.

Could you actually describe him to me? What was he like to meet?

Well, he was a Hungarian Jew. He had emigrated from Germany very early on, like ’33 or, or thereabouts, born in Hungary but he worked... Actually I now remember the name of the place opposite where we lived, the Technische Hochschule. And he was working there. And he was discovered so to speak, he made contact with somebody called Allibone, who was at that time with a company called AEI.

T E Allibone?

Yah. You haven’t managed to interview him I’m afraid have you?

I’m afraid not.

He is dead. Pity. But, he made contact with, with Dennis Gabor, and found a way of getting him over to the UK where he worked at AEI. And the reason why he was interested in Gabor was, because Gabor was involved with examining gaseous plasmas, which turned out to be important for illumination, and AEI was at that time interested in that. So he worked at AEI for a number of years, well maybe until, until he came to Imperial, which would have been ’48, throughout the war. He, as I say, he was Hungarian. He had a very strong Hungarian accent. [pause] He, he was fascinated by, by physics, mathematical physics, and in particular he was interested in microscopy, and particularly the coming of electron microscopy, and he actually played a role in that. There is an article which I can let you have which is unfortunately in German but... Do you speak German?

I’m afraid not.

Eric Ash Page 45 C1379/92/Track 2

Well somebody can. Which describes his own experience of, as an inventor, which is quite a, it’s quite an amazing story. What I can let you have if you are interested, I wrote his obituary for Nature , and that has a bit of that in there. It’s one of the hardest things I ever wrote actually.

Why so hard?

Pardon?

Why so hard?

Because I didn’t want to make it sound like, golden syrup. I mean he was a complex character, a difficult chap, and I wanted to convey something of, of his nature. Anyway, I became his student, and, that was really my start in research.

[33:15] Mm. I’m interested in, you use the word, you know, brilliant, and wouldn’t use that word to describe that many people. Why would you use that word to describe him, in particular?

Because, he was a true lateral thinker, and, everything that he touched he probed laterally, and tried to understand in depth. He got some things terribly wrong. For example, there was some thought... I’m not sure I can remember this properly, but something that, that onion seeds in the ground gave forth some kind of a wave which could be detected, and he got involved in, in that, which turned out to be an absolute nonsense. He, he was involved in some theory of the plasma in which he maintained that Einstein’s theory of some of this was not actually correct and that there was something deeper to be found in plasma theory, which turned out not to be true. But everything that he touched on, he made a difference to. Certainly electron microscopy where he did play a role. And then, he did play a major role in understanding plasmas and the use of plasmas for illumination purposes. But he was also very interested in plasmas as a source of energy, and... I think I have to rethink that a bit, if you want me to talk about that. I can’t immediately recollect it well enough at the moment. And then he, he had a brilliant idea in understanding a very complex phenomenon,

Eric Ash Page 46 C1379/92/Track 2 which is possibly too technical to get involved in here, but, it is, if you shoot a beam of electrons through a thin film of metal, the electrons will lose some energy. But they tend to lose it in discreet amounts. There’s a sort of a quantum effect in their loss. And this was not understood. And, I remember that he gave a lecture at Imperial College to physicists and gave his explanation, that it was in fact a plasma effect, which was derided by the physicists. Here was this reader who was an electrical engineer, telling us physicists what was what. So, they did not always get on with him terribly well. And again, looking forward a little bit, he was elected to the Royal Society too late. When I say too late, I mean much later than he should have been. And I think it was because, he was imaginative, would tend to jump to solutions, some of which were right and some of which were wrong. But brilliant people are not people who get everything right; they are people who have the imagination to see possibilities.

[37:38] Mm. How did you become his PhD student?

Ah. I really can’t remember. I think I went to his lectures and I chatted to him, and... I think I had embarked on something towards an MSc, I can’t remember quite, but I talked to him, and he, I suppose he recruited me. It was early days for him, and there weren’t many other people around at that point, so he grabbed what he could get.

How was he as a PhD supervisor?

Very interesting. I mean he was certainly very supportive, no question about that. But he was difficult in some ways. And for one thing, he was extremely bright, and he would therefore explain things at his level of the intellect, which wasn’t necessarily one that I could grasp. So there was if you like a bit of a disjunction there between what he saw the situation and, and what I could understand. But he did parcel off bits of problems which he thought I could tackle.

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 47 C1379/92/Track 2

Over and above that though, he was also under the illusion that he was an engineer, when in fact he was a physicist. I mean he was trained as an engineer but I mean, he believed somehow or other in the practical side, and that he ought to have a grasp of it. So, one of the things he did is, he sort of took an interest in making little, filing jars for bits and pieces of the laboratory, and something which a technician should have done and, and not he. He was keen on doing things, I mean he for example taught me how to braze two bits of metal together. In the course of my work I needed some glassware, and I learnt some elementary glass-blowing in the process. And I always remember him coming up to me while I was in the middle of doing this, and saying, ‘Well, J J Thomson was very clumsy with his hands too.’ He wasn’t meaning to be unkind, he was expressing the difficulty I had in joining two bits of glass together, which I did succeed in doing anyway. He was a disaster in the laboratory. If he ever, if you ever let him get hold of any apparatus, it would tend to die. But nonetheless, he was inspirational, no question about it. But not everybody was able to cope with his, with his brilliance, eccentricity, call it what you will. And at least one student who came after me decided he had to leave, he couldn’t, he couldn’t work with him.

[41:20] Mm.

Is that enough of Gabor for the moment?

I had one other question. I was just sort of wondering about PhD supervision arrangements at the time.

Yah.

How closely did he supervise your work?

Oh, not very closely, but he was very accessible. So I did see him periodically. I would say not quite as tightly as I supervised my own PhD students. I tended to formalise that process quite a bit. I would see every PhD student I had at least once a week, and I would have minutes of the meeting, either the student would write the minutes or I would write the meeting, but it would write down what we had discussed

Eric Ash Page 48 C1379/92/Track 2 and what we thought we ought to do next. And the next time, one could then look to see whether either of us had done what we said we were going to do. I found that effective. But it’s not the only way of running PhD students, and it certainly wasn’t Gabor’s.

Mm. Did he talk at all about holography work at the time, or is that in the future?

Oh yah. I mean he, he did. And, and he got very involved with an extension of holography which is holographic microscopy, and indeed he had a, he embarked on, with a student, on a microscopic instrument which was based on holographic principles. So he was very much aware of the fact that this was an important scene. I really ought to have done my homework and tried to remember when, when he got his Nobel Prize. I think it was ’76 or something like that. It was certainly in the Seventies kind of thing. But holography didn’t really get going until sort of the mid- Sixties or thereabouts. And he had other brilliant ideas, for example, how to make a cathode ray tube, which was extremely thin, which you might be able to hang on a wall kind of thing. And he had an ingenious electron microscopal, an electron flow structure which made it possible, and indeed he had a PhD student who would try to make that thing too. It was a brilliant idea. Quite hopeless though, impractical, and has never been implemented, although in fact it has been tried.

You seem to remember him quite fondly. Do you think he was any particular influence on you?

Oh yah. No, I mean, he was a great character, and, he was kind to students, and got to know him better as time went on. I got married, we got to know him and his wife, and, I mean give you again one example of an encounter I had with him which would have been round about 1970. I was on sabbatical leave in the States, I was working for IBM for a year, and he was working for RCA at the time, or, one of the television companies anyway, but he was just sort of loosely attached to it. And then there was a PhD student, and the University of London needed two supervisors to examine this person, and they suggested we should meet in London. Well since he was in Connecticut and I was in New York, we decided there might be a better way of doing this, and we in fact went to Connecticut and held the examination there. And, and he

Eric Ash Page 49 C1379/92/Track 2 subsequently also visited my wife and myself where we were living in Upstate New York, and I remember driving him back to Connecticut, and saying to him at the time that, he was really ripe for a Nobel Prize before long, and he said, ‘Oh no no, that won’t happen because, Nobel Prizes are awarded for discoveries, not for inventions.’ And this was, holography was an invention. So, we got to know him quite well, and, and I think he, he was quite warmly disposed towards us. And was still able to congratulate me when I was elected to the Royal Society, although by that time he’d had a stroke and, and couldn’t communicate very well.

[pause in recording]

[47:00] Right, shall I put this back on?

OK.

What was the actual subject of your PhD?

Well the tile of my PhD was ‘Electron Interaction Effects’, and it actually had something to do with an idea that Dennis Gabor had, that when you have electrons going through a plasma, which is an assembly of electrons and ions, that they interact in a way which is much different and much stronger than one would have expected on simple theory. That turns out not really to have been true. But that was the starting point of the work that I was to do. And, one of the ways of investigating this was in fact to create a plasma, which was like what you see in a fluorescent tube, this was a mercury tube, and then shoot an electron beam through it, and see what happens to the electrons. Well, I was able to do this. And one thing which was quite intriguing is that, the plasma in such a, in such a glass tube, goes all the way up to the walls, but not quite. It isn’t fully, a full plasma near the wall of the tube, there is what they call a sheath, that is a sort of a gradual variation of what, of the plasma density as it goes to the, to the wall of the, of this glass tube. And what was interesting is, what is the electric field that you have in that sheath? Well by shooting an electron beam though it, any electric field there would deflect the electrons, and therefore you could actually measure how strong the electric field was.

Eric Ash Page 50 C1379/92/Track 2

Mm.

But, the other thing that was also not clear and was subsequently observed is that there was actually an oscillation of that sheath. It wasn’t steady state, but it was moving, and this variation is one that Gabor was very interested in, because he thought it might be associated with that initial thought he had about an unusual electron interaction effect. It was in fact just I think, just the plasma dynamics which have a tendency to oscillate. And that paper was published in Nature , and, has I think been cited quite a lot. [50:35] But I got very interested in another aspect of the whole thing, and that involves a little bit more technical explanation. The electron microscope is one of the things that has revolutionised many of the sciences of our time, biological sciences, material sciences, and the electron microscope has steadily improved with time. There is one problem with electron microscopes. Electron microscopes have electron lenses, that they are fully comparable to lenses that you have in an optical microscope. And the other thing that’s comparable with lenses in an optical microscope is that they don’t work perfectly. They have aberrations. Now in optical microscopes, you do clever things. You take one lens that fails to work properly in one sense, put it with another lens that works inadequately but in the opposite, and the two can cancel out. You can cancel out the spherical aberration, the particular aberration, and this way you can make rather perfect lenses. Unhappily, you can’t do this with an electron microscope, and there was a famous theorem, mathematical theorem, which proved that however hard you tried with the electric fields that you use in order to make an electron lens, you can never get rid of the aberration of the thing. That is provided of course this is in a vacuum. But supposing you now put a cloud of electrons in, in this lens, that changes the whole game. The equations that govern the electric fields are affected by the fact that you have electrons there, and the theorem which says that you can’t get rid of spherical aberration no longer applies. So the question was, could we possibly make an even better electron lens using a cloud of electrons within the lens? Well, I was able to produce a cloud of electrons in the lens, which was not an entirely easy task. And indeed it worked as a lens as you would expect it to do; the electron, the electrons work to diverge the electron beam, whereas the, the ordinary electrostatic

Eric Ash Page 51 C1379/92/Track 2 lens converged it. So that looked good as a possibility of doing it. And there was interest by the company AEI who was making electron microscopes in the possibility that one could make even better ones using that electron cloud in there. Turned out not to be true. And, I’m afraid that’s life. And the reason why it’s not true was actually something relatively simple, that we should have thought about beforehand, and that is, this electron cloud is not a smooth liquid. It is just a series of electrons. It’s granular. As a result, when your microscope electron beam goes through it, not only is it affected by the way we would hope it would be affected, but it is also scattered by the granularity of the electrons that you have there. And I was able to show that the granularity was a killer, that would not therefore work to improve the electron microscope. A slightly unsatisfactory story, but there were some positive things in it. For a start, I was the first person ever to make a divergent lens using an electron cloud, and that was considered to be of some interest. And there were other aspects of the thesis, but that was the main part, part of it. [55:05] I should say, perhaps add one more thing. The reason why there was great interest in the plasma at the time was the possibility that it could be the basis of fusion energy. There was a famous experiment done in Harwell, what the hell was it called?

ZETA?

Pardon?

ZETA?

ZETA. Well done. ZETA. Which was really based on this idea, and which turned out not to work, for much the same reasons that my electron microscope didn’t, idea wouldn’t work, and that is, the plasma has instabilities which make it impossible to maintain the, the beam long enough. Have you interviewed somebody on this?

ZETA?

Pardon?

Eric Ash Page 52 C1379/92/Track 2

ZETA? On ZETA?

Yah, on ZETA.

Just one or two technicians.

Yes. Right, OK. And of course, currently there is still great interest in the plasma thing, which may or may not eventually work or not. Have you interviewed Chris Llewellyn Smith? [pause] OK. I, I would commend him as a useful source of information on this and many other things. But anyway, I’m doing your job, I’m not supposed to be doing that.

Well, well we do always say, if you have any suggestions for interviewees, we’ll...

OK. Right. So anyway, as a result of this, there was an interest in plasma which was quite wide, and indeed the chap who did ZETA, I’ve just thought of his name, Thonemann, became my external examiner on my thesis.

Mm.

And, he... [pause] What was the question he asked me? [pause] He asked me, how do you, how do you measure the diameter of the Earth? This had absolutely nothing to do with, with my thesis, but, he was of the opinion that one should know things. Not sure whether I gave a good answer or not. But, it was an interesting examination.

How was the examination at the end?

Oh, they let me go through.

When you said interesting, I was wondering in what sense.

Oh, I mean an interesting examination is, is one that’s tough. I’ve been an external examiner many many times, and I always feel I’ve let the student that I’m examining down if he or she hasn’t sweated in the process.

Eric Ash Page 53 C1379/92/Track 2

[58:38] Mm. I guess we talked a lot about the science of your PhD, but I was just wondering, what sort of work did you have to do for it? What’s the practical day-to-day activities that, you know, you’re doing as a PhD student on it?

The practical day-to-day activity was very experimental. One actually had to make thermionic tubes with cathodes that sent out electron beams. One had to find a way of producing a cloud of electrons that would stay put. So it involved quite a lot of work on what at that time would have been called work on thermionic tubes. And indeed, the tubes that I made were kept in the department there for many years after I left; when they tore down the building they got of the tubes too.

How does one actually make a thermionic tube?

Pardon?

How does one actually make a tube?

Oh. Well, you... I suppose it depends what you want to do, but if you take the simplest thing, suppose you want to have an electron beam which goes from one end of the this glass vessel to the other, and maybe gets deflected on the way, well you have to have an electron gun at one end with a hot cathode to produce the electrons. And you, you have to put this in the tube. You then have to evacuate the tube, get as much air out of it as you possibly can, and that, that means a rather high vacuum is needed, ten to the minus six millimetres of mercury in pressure terms. So it’s, it’s what would be called a high vacuum, not an ultra high vacuum. And then you have to activate the cathode, make sure that it does what it’s supposed to do. And, then you normally would also remove even more air from the thing by using what’s called the getter, and that’s a, you melt metal that absorbs air inside the thing. You have to, finally when you’ve pumped the whole thing out, you have to take it off the thing by melting the little attachment that you have to the pump. It doesn’t sound like an impossible thing to do, but, it’s quite infuriating and, there are many disasters on the

Eric Ash Page 54 C1379/92/Track 2 way to making one that is successful. And the plasma work again was of a similar ilk, same kind of, of thing.

Did you have to make all your own equipment?

Yah, pretty much.

Are there any technicians around to help you, or...?

Well, no, there was a glass-blower, and he would do the difficult stuff, but I would do the easy stuff. There was, there were people in the workshop, you could get things made. But I found it was in the end easier to learn how to use a lathe and how to use a drill and all that.

Mm.

One learnt some things the hard way. So for example, I had a sheet of copper, maybe about, half a millimetre thick or something like that, and I wanted to put a half-inch diameter hole through it. So I put the thing on a drill, held the copper thing, and put the drill down. Well the result is a scar that you can still see here, about, sixty years later. Which taught me that one doesn’t do it that way. Again, incidentally, one example of the way people are so worried about people hurting themselves these days in a lab or in a workshop. If you don’t let anybody hurt themselves, they don’t learn. You just don’t want them to hurt themselves too much.

[1:03:15] Mm. Did you have much, I guess, practical training in laboratory practice, or...?

Well, there was this first thing that we, I mentioned, but that was so elementary, it didn’t get you terribly far. But yes, no we had some training on how to use the lathe and all that.

I was just wondering, who do you go to help for when something does go wrong, or, is difficult?

Eric Ash Page 55 C1379/92/Track 2

Oh, there was a workshop, and there were people in the workshop. And, it’s one of the things I’ve, that struck me in my subsequent career as quite an important thing to learn, and that is, if you are doing research, and if you are dependent on some people in the workshop, then one of the things you learn, in a very elementary way, is, management. You have to ask people, will they kindly do something for you. You have to communicate with them, tell them exactly what it is you want to do. Take some interest in, in their lives. And, collaborate. I found for example that if one’s talking to mathematicians, as I did at Imperial College, say you were looking for somebody who could head up a department, they’ve never had that experience. They’ve never at any time had to manage anybody. Maybe their wives, but that’s a different, that’s a different kind of a skill. And, so I, I think that’s an experience which, at the time I didn’t realise how valuable it was, but it certainly was valuable to me, and when I went into industry, I could for example ask somebody in a workshop there to make something that I wanted, and when they said, it’s too thin, you wouldn’t be able to do it, it wouldn’t work, I could tell them how to do it. And, then a) they did it, and b) one gained a bit of respect the next time one asked something difficult.

Could you give me a visual impression of what your experimental set-up actually looked like for your PhD?

Oh.

We’ve talked about it in sort of bits and the science behind it. I’m just wondering...

Well there’d be bench, and there would be, say, a long tube on it, and there would be various instruments of one sort or another. Well, one thing that comes to mind, again talking about current concern with safety, I would have a car battery on the floor, on the wooden floor, and that car battery would be at minus 2,000 volts. The reason being, the electron gun was at minus 2,000 volts, and I needed to heat the heater with the car battery. And that it didn’t strike me as dangerous. I knew the car battery was there, and I certainly switched it off when I left the room you know. But anybody seeing that now would have kittens.

Eric Ash Page 56 C1379/92/Track 2

Other than drilling a hole in your hand, did you have any accidents when you were doing your PhD?

No, not really. Mm.

Mm. You talked a little bit about how you sort of discovered a negative in the course of it. Were there any sort of defining moments over the course of your PhD do you think?

Did I change the world, did I say something as a result of this, we do this, which you couldn’t do before? I’m afraid not. I think, we contributed to the science a bit, but I, I don’t think I can claim that we had an application that actually made it.

Shall we stop for the day?

OK.

It’s well over an hour actually.

[end of session]

[End of Track 2]

Eric Ash Page 57 C1379/92/Track 3

[Track 3]

There were a few other questions about your time doing your PhD at Imperial that had occurred to me, and one of them was I guess post-war shortages. Doing a PhD not long after the end of the Second World War, did sort of shortages actually impact much on what you were doing?

I don’t think it really affected my work particularly. I didn’t actually need any very elaborate instrumentation that might have been difficult to commandeer at that time. And the things that I needed were sort of, the material that you have in a well-found laboratory, and, so there was no problem there.

Mm. Did you have any, I guess, problems or difficulties you recall doing your PhD, were there any key problems you had to overcome along the way, or...?

Oh lots and lots of those. I mean in any experimental research, one is bound to encounter major problems. A lot of my problems were to do with very basic things, like, how you make vacuum tubes, and how to make sure they don’t leak and, they don’t crack and all that. And then I had the task of dealing with cathodes that produce the electrons that we were using in the experiments, and although that’s a completely mundane bit of technology in as much as all these valves made by the million had cathodes in them, if you do them one at a time you have to learn the tricks, and that can be quite arduous.

I was interested when you were talking before about the object of your PhD research, you know, can we create a cloud of electrons and use them to improve an electron microscope lens? And you sort of found out, no. Was there any sort of, point at which, you know, it suddenly appeared obvious that you couldn’t, or was it more of a gradual process?

No that, it really emerged from some fairly simple theory. It wasn’t an experimental, an experimental discovery. It’s just, when one, when one put in a theory that was really fairly straightforward, it’s really binary collisions between electrons, it became

Eric Ash Page 58 C1379/92/Track 3 quite evident that the scattering would really be enough to obstruct the, any of the benefits that you might derive from the electron cloud in other ways.

Were you more attracted to theoretical work or experimental work at this point in your career do you think?

I, I suppose I was attracted to theoretical work, but I’m not sure that I was good enough. Whereas on the experimental side, I was relatively au fait with what needed to be done. But I enjoyed the theoretical work, and my supervisor, Dennis Gabor, of course was a superb theoretician, so that helped.

How much theoretical work actually is there in the course of your PhD? You talked about sort of doing lots of experiments last time, but I was...

Right. Well, there was theoretical work about what you would expect in an electron lens with an electron cloud inside it to do, and then there was certainly theoretical work concerned with the behaviour of plasmas in a glass tube, and I think last time I mentioned the fact that the plasma doesn’t quite reach the wall of the glass tube, there is a sort of a sheath around the plasma. And understanding, theoretically understanding what goes on in that sheath does involve some theory.

[03:55] Mm. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like working at Imperial College? Were there any other PhD students there?

Yes, there were a number of other PhD students. And, I was great friends with some of them. And at least one of them I still know after all this time, he’s a New Zealander. And we had a great deal of freedom to do what, to do our work the way we wanted to do it, which, looking back on it, seems to me was almost, a little bit surprising. But we did have a lot of freedom. And we all worked in our different ways. So for example, this friend of mine, who is now in New Zealand, decided that there were so many distractions during the daytime, that it was really easier to work in the evenings. And eventually got to the point where he didn’t work in the daytime at all, and he spent the whole night in the place. Again, nowadays, I’m not sure how that

Eric Ash Page 59 C1379/92/Track 3 would be looked on. But he found it was a very efficient way of, of working. I myself did a little bit of that, I tended to go into Joe Lyons and have fish and chips or something at a reasonable time in the late afternoon, and then carry on and work quite late into the, into the night. I found that worked well for me. And of course one didn’t have to necessarily get up at the crack of dawn the next morning.

Who was the New Zealander?

Pardon?

Who was the New Zealander?

His name is John Andreae, a-n-d-r-e-a-e. And he was working on the properties of liquids as examined by ultrasonic techniques, but he then went into artificial intelligence and that’s really what he’s mainly known for in the rest of his career.

Working what sound like quite, quite long days sometimes, is there much space for social life as a PhD student, or was there?

Oh, I mean that, that’s really a matter of taste isn’t it. I mean you can always find time for social life if you really want it. And, I don’t think it was, I don’t think it was that fierce that it really obstructed normal social interactions with, with people. I think the thing that was the main obstacle to social life was lack of money. One was really rather hard up. And I remember thinking at the time, when I do well enough financially, so that I can take a friend of mine and have coffee with her and not worry about the bill, that would be a big step ahead. Which is why it’s so good that we’re having coffee now without my having to pay a penny.

Curses, I forgot to pick the receipt up for my expenses as well. [laughs]

Oh dear.

What time did, what did you actually do for fun outside work when you were a PhD student?

Eric Ash Page 60 C1379/92/Track 3

Well, I was very interested in music. I played in an orchestra, in fact in two orchestras at one time or another. Imperial College, believe it or not, didn’t have an orchestra in those days, whereas now, it was in a competition last year I think and came out as the best university orchestra in the country. And it is actually quite magnificent now. But the orchestra I played in was at UCL, which was appropriate for my standard of violin playing. But I also did a certain amount of chamber music. I did like going to concerts, and of course, Imperial College is right next to the Albert Hall, so, in the Proms in the summer, that was certainly a main theme.

Do you think there’s any link between an interest in music and an interest in science?

I think there is. I mean it’s often said, and I’ve never looked at the evidence particularly, but I think, I think in my own experience, there does seem to be a link. I mean there is an element of precision in, in music, and, I don’t know whether that links with the prevision associated with the mathematical side of the sciences, but, somehow or other it does seem to be the case. And, getting ahead of myself, during my second period at Imperial College, one of the things I spent quite a lot of time on is enhancing the music even further than it was already at that time. And, one of the things we established was a new degree course called Physics With Music, and, what it amounted to is that in order to be accepted for this course, the student had to be good enough to be accepted in the physics department at Imperial College, which was tough in itself, and also good enough to be accepted by the Royal College of Music as a performer. And that combination is pretty rare, but it does exist to the tune of maybe four or five a year on the average. I somehow don’t know whether you would get the same sort of, the same sort of joint enthusiasm between historians and music. Maybe. I don’t know.

Not personally, no. [laughs]

Mm.

I do know quite a few musical historians.

Eric Ash Page 61 C1379/92/Track 3

Right. So I wouldn’t, I really wouldn’t like to pronounce on this music and science connection.

Mm.

But yes, social life did involve a certain amount of music. It also involved some rowing, I think I mentioned that last time. I was never terribly good at any sport but I always enjoyed it, and the main thing I got involved with at Imperial, I suppose mainly during my PhD times, was sculling on the river, and a friend of mine and I used to do it every Saturday morning. And we quite often did the Boat Race course. And, sculling was, was great fun. They had boats which were extremely lightweight, and you had to be I think under nine and a half stone in weight to be allowed to use one. But I qualified. But of course, these boats were quite easy to upset as well, so one got the odd bit of swimming in too now and again.

What’s the attraction with sculling? I’ve only had one fairly disastrous rowing experience myself [laughs], but I, I can’t see what the fun is in it.

In sculling? Well I think it’s... I mean, it’s the same to my mind as, as skiing, in that you are on your own, and you have the total responsibility whether things go right or wrong. And you don’t have to ask anybody for permission for doing this, that or the other. So it’s, it’s the independence of it I think that I enjoy.

[12:00] Mm. I was wondering if you could I guess, paint me a little picture of yourself, a description of yourself as you were approaching the end of your PhD.

Good heavens. Well I, I had dark hair. I, I don’t honestly think that I’ve changed such a vast amount since then. I think I had a fairly pronounced sense of humour, which happily has stayed with me through my life. I was keen on reading. One of the things I remember in my PhD is, quite often I would take about an hour off at teatime, go to the union and, and have tea and a bun, and read. And in as much as I am read in the classics at all, it’s probably mainly those times that, that I succeeded in doing it.

Eric Ash Page 62 C1379/92/Track 3

What sort of things did you read?

Well for example, I remember reading Dostoyevsky. [pause] Gosh, what else did I read? I mean I, I read a fairly vast amount of stuff. I would have read Victorian novels.

Mm. On the subject of sense of humour, is there much, is there much humour in the work that you’re doing do you think, the workplace?

Oh I think, humour can be found wherever you look for it.

Are there any examples?

I mean there is an argument going on at the moment that, even if, if something is anti- Muslim or anti-Semitic or something, it should still be allowed if it’s funny. I think there is a, there is a real problem there, because people are so passionate about their religion, that I can be, a joke can go too far. But, no, I, I think, I think, a sense of humour is something that is sort of inbuilt. I mean I think that, people who don’t have one I think have a more difficult time getting through all sorts of aspects of life. What else can I say? I was... I like girls, I always have done, I still do. So I mean as far as I’m concerned, social life limited to a series of chaps, was not that much fun. I think one, women are really the central part of the game. And of course at that time, when I went to university, I think there were two women in my class out of about forty or fifty or something like that. There were very few women at Imperial College. On the other hand, there was the Royal School of Music and there were lots of hospitals and lots of nurses and, medical schools around, so in fact it was entirely possible to enjoy the company of, of women.

Did you have any serious girlfriends?

[pause] That’s a difficult question to, to answer. I, I think if I had to give a yes/no answer, the answer is, yes. I mean yes in the sense of, if things had gone otherwise, one might have stuck together, forever and ever kind of thing. I don’t quite know

Eric Ash Page 63 C1379/92/Track 3 why that particular episode didn’t. But yes, no, it was, it was serious, in the sense that it mattered. Mm.

You mentioned one of your aspirations back then was to be able to go out with a girl and not have to worry about how much the coffee was.

Yah, quite.

I’m just wondering, you know, to someone who’s existing in a quite different time and place myself, what sort of things do you actually do on a date in the 1950s?

Oh we did have coffee. [laughter] No. We did quite a lot of things. I mean, I mentioned the Proms. But it was in those days possible to get into a theatre at a pretty low price. I mean even allowing for inflation, it was sort of affordable. And incidentally, my standard of living improved as time went on. When I graduated, I got an IEE scholarship, the Oliver Lodge scholarship. And I think when I got that, I was for a few months richer than I had been before and have been since. It seemed like a, a different world. I’ve forgotten how much it was, but it was enough to get over that sort of, financial niggle.

Mm. How did you win the scholarship?

Well I suppose I applied. You know, I can’t remember whether one took an examination. I think one took an exam and one was interviewed. Something like that, mm.

[17:50] Mm. Had you had much thought about what you wanted to do after your PhD was over?

I, I was sure I wanted to carry on in engineering in one way or another. I hadn’t really decided whether I was going to try and have a career in industry or in universities. And really the first thing I wanted to do was to see a bit of the world. The world was terribly constricted during the war of course. I know the great summer vacation that

Eric Ash Page 64 C1379/92/Track 3 my parents had in the war was to go to a B&B in Whipsnade, outside London. That was sort of the extent of one’s horizon. And the first time I, I ever went really further afield was, I think in, 1949, just after I’d graduated, and I went on a cycling holiday, on my own, to France. Cycled down to Rouen and then, then to, through the Jura, through a bit of a Alps, through Italy, back to the east, the winter route of Napoleon, back to Paris and then home. And that seemed like an enormous adventure at the time. I mean nowadays, I think people would, would dwell on it as, as being a very remarkable thing. But when I finished my PhD I did want to see more of the world, for sure; I particularly wanted to see the United States, which was so central in the science that I was involved with.

Mm. Well why did you go cycling on your own?

Oh, I thought one would meet more people, and certainly have a better chance to practise one’s French than if you go in a crowd.

Did you meet a lot of people?

Yah. One went to youth hostels and, places like that. Yes, one, one did meet a lot of people. I don’t know how, how good it was for my French, but I, I certainly met a lot of people in the process. And it, I think I enjoyed the business of not having to discuss with anyone, what shall we do next?

Oh that’s an interesting... Why didn’t you want to discuss what you were going to do next?

Well, I suppose I have a slight loner streak in me, and so at least some of the time I enjoy the idea of, of not being so linked to other people that one has to discuss what one should do next all the time.

[21:11] Mm. I was interested when you said that the USA was something that you thought about going to see because it was such a big thing in the science you were involved in at the time.

Eric Ash Page 65 C1379/92/Track 3

Right. Right.

In what sort of way was it a feature of the science you were involved in?

Oh I think that was an important thing. But in order to get there, I wrote to a number of universities, whether they had any postdoc positions available, and frankly I, I remember making my list of universities, a) that they were one of the universities, but b) that they had a decent climate. It seemed to me, if one’s going to spend a year or two out there, one might as well see the sun now and again. And I think I got one or two offers but the one I eventually went to was Stanford.

Mm. Whereabouts in the world is Stanford? I’m talking about the climate.

Whereabouts in the world?

Mm.

Well it’s California. You know don’t you? Yes, you... [laughs] You just want me to say it. Well it, it is California. The climate there is, is such that you don’t see much rain in the summer. It can be quite hot. Oddly enough it has a microclimate. So, it’s, it’s about thirty miles south of San Francisco, but in the summer when it was oppressively hot, if you went to San Francisco you might actually need a sweater, because, they have a lot of fog there and it’s just a much cooler climate. And in winter of course, they have a fair amount of rain. But the other thing they have is, mountains within reasonable distance and that’s in fact where I got involved with skiing.

What did you actually go to actually do in Stanford?

I, I worked on microwave tubes. These are thermionic devices, but particularly useful for microwaves which you use in, in long-distance telecommunications, but above all in radar. And at that time, this was an extremely active area of research. The areas that I’ve just mentioned, but over and above that, microwave tubes were of vital

Eric Ash Page 66 C1379/92/Track 3 importance for making particle accelerators, and Stanford in particular had a linear accelerator which used very powerful microwave tubes to give the electrons a kick as they went down the tube. And, the tubes that they used were quite dramatic, quite remarkable, because they were of a design, of a type, a klystron, that was already known from the war. But if I remember rightly, it was I think 1,000 times more powerful than any previous klystron. So it was an enormous leap in technology that took place. And, it, it was an area of California where these developments took place at a very rapid rate. It was the beginning of Silicon Valley. It slightly predates Silicon Valley as such, but I would say the enthusiasm and the vitality of the area, and the idea of starting new companies, whenever you’ve had a bit of an idea, all of that was taking place at the time, or starting at the time. And it was a very exciting place to be.

I was interested as well, talking about working on microwave tubes, which I guess are, you know, often military components as well, was there any sort of degree of security, secrecy, attached to the work you were doing?

Oh, oh there was, yes indeed, because a lot of the work was funded by the military. And, indeed I, I actually had the experience of being involved with developing a particular kind of a microwave tube which the military wanted to have, and, I designed it, and got it built, and then wrote a report on it, which was classified, and I wasn’t allowed to have a copy of the report. I mean, it was kind of crazy. It, it was security with a pedantic streak to it. But in practice, it didn’t actually interfere very much with the scientific work we were doing.

What was the tube for?

The tube was, I think it was concerned with, with a naval radar system.

[26:50] Mm. One of the things I guess I’m quite curious about is how much people who are developing, you know, components like microwave tubes actually get to know about the applications that they’re going to be used for at the end of the day. Is it something

Eric Ash Page 67 C1379/92/Track 3 on your mind during the design process, or are you just designing a tube to a certain parameter?

Well I suppose essentially, there would be a systems designer who would be concerned with developing a system, let’s say a, a radar system, and in developing that system the designer would envisage that the transmission tube would have a certain power, a certain frequency, and, certain other characteristics. And they would then go to a tube research laboratory, and would essentially say, ‘Make this.’ But of course, there would be to and fro interaction. If it turned out that it was rather difficult, and hit some of the parameters, maybe exceed others, that might be useful, so there would be discussion. But, in doing the research on tubes one would not be deeply involved in the systems, no.

[28:10] Mm. One of the other questions I was wondering about was, which department were you actually working in, and where did you fit into that department yourself?

It was called the Microwave Electronics Department, but it was part of Electrical Engineering. And, it was actually the interface between Physics and Electrical Engineering, and a lot of the people there were in fact from the physics department, and a lot of the PhD study there would have been from Physics and some from Electrical Engineering.

Mm. Are there any colleagues from that period that stick in your mind in particular?

Well, there are people that I knew then that I still know, yes. Absolutely. Certainly one of them, who lives in California, a very talented person called Gordon Kino. And to link back for a moment to my PhD, he was also a student of Gabor’s at Imperial College, but just, couldn’t get on with the bloke. I can’t quite remember exactly what the problem was, but, but it was, Gordon was involved in some theory and Gabor didn’t like it, or said it was all wrong. Anyway, one way or another, Gordon Kino decided it was not for him, and he emigrated to... And then I met him again when I went to Stanford. But he is a very talented chap and he spent his whole career at Stanford, now retired of course, as all my young friends are.

Eric Ash Page 68 C1379/92/Track 3

Well where do you actually fit in to the department yourself? Were you a postdoc, or a...?

I was just a postdoc. I mean I think there was another title, a research fellow or something of the sort. But they actually paid one. I mean it was the first time I had actually got sort of, a grown-up pay cheque. And there were quite a lot of us there like that. But, we interacted with the, with the academic staff, and in fact there was one chap called Dean Watkins, and he and I wrote a theoretical paper together. And he in fact started a company which I think is still running strongly called Watkins- Johnson, which I think is in, in California.

Mm.

But I’ve really lost touch with him. And, I do know that he is right of centre, to put it mildly, politically, and, I think it would be difficult to have much in common with him, mm.

Were you political yourself at the time at all?

No, I’ve never been seriously political. I mean I’ve always maintained that if you, if you want to get seriously interested in politics you have to actually do it, you actually have to join a party and, and recruit other people to it, and make speeches and all that. I’ve never, I’ve never done that. I’ve always been interested in politics. I have voted for three of the major political parties at different elections, never happily. The only time that I voted totally happily was joining the, the Common Market as it was called then, in 1874 or something – 1974. But most recently, I would have voted either Liberal Democrat or, or Labour. And I tend to vote for the person, in a parliamentary election I’m interested in who’s standing.

Mm. I was just sort of thinking, you know, America in the Fifties, you know, reds under the bed and all that sort of stuff.

Eric Ash Page 69 C1379/92/Track 3

Oh my God yes. No. Yes, you, you’ve reminded me of something. And that is, I was there ’52 to ’54, and, that was really the height of the McCarthy era, and, it really got somewhat frightening. I mean I think the, the McCarthy movement was gaining strength, the beliefs that there were an awful lot of communists around the place, and that this was going to be the undoing of the United States, was growing. It was difficult to find people of that persuasion at Stanford but not impossible. There were some people who had come to that conclusion too. But there sure was an awful lot in the media on it, and indeed, in ’54 my wife whom I had in the meantime acquired and I drove back from California to the East Coast, 3,000 miles, and we listened to the McCarthy trials almost all the way. And it was quite frightening. So I mean, when, when people now express total confidence in the strength of democracy in this country or the United States, and I always think back to that time. It was not totally obvious that it couldn’t have really gone the wrong way. There are enough stupid people in the world that things can go badly wrong if they once get a certain amount of momentum behind them.

Did you ever feel threatened by that sort of atmosphere yourself?

No. No, I, I wasn’t. I mean, for one thing I was not, was not and never been an American citizen. So even if I had expressed myself incautiously about the fact that maybe there are some OK Chinese in the world, nobody could have got at me particularly. Of course my wife was American.

[34:55] When did you actually meet your wife?

At Stanford, yes, during that time.

What was she doing there?

She was a postgraduate student, working in theatre and drama. And, she was also, yes, she was also involved in children’s theatre at the time too.

Eric Ash Page 70 C1379/92/Track 3

What was her name and what was she like when you first met her? Do you remember first meeting her?

Oh yah, I remember meeting her. Well, I, I don’t think she has changed that much either. I mean she didn’t look like an old woman, but... No, she was cheerful. Very active, very enthusiastic about what she was doing. Extremely busy all the time, doing more things than there was really time to do. In fact the first time I met her she was working part-time in a restaurant, that was my first encounter with her. She was making a certain amount of money doing that to keep the pot boiling. She, oddly enough, one of the ways she managed to make some money was teaching kids Latin. She had done Latin at college, and, and was pretty good at it. But for some reason at that time, in order to, for kids to get into universities or something, there was an emphasis on, learning Latin was regarded as a good thing, or, at least a, something in, in their favour. And so she tutored kids in the area there in Latin, and found that more profitable than waiting on tables.

When did you actually decide to get married?

I suppose, I suppose really fairly shortly before we came back to England, so, it would have been at least a year and a half after we had first met.

Was she American as well, or British, or...?

No she was American. Still is. Well she’s got two passports. And all of our daughters have two passports. For some odd reason that’s still allowed.

Did you get much idea of what she thought about the work you were doing back in the 1950s?

About what I was doing?

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 71 C1379/92/Track 3

No, I think she, she expressed an external interest, but, I mean it, it wasn’t something that she could really get involved with directly.

Is a young electronics engineer a good marriage bet in 1950s, or...? [laughs]

I’m not sure whether she was thinking of anything as drastic as that. She has said that the only reason she bothered to marry me was to get to London, that she really, being very interested in theatre and all that, she wanted to get to London. But no, I, I don’t honestly think matrimony was foremost in our minds for quite a while. We, we knew each other. And we did something which in those days was regarded as a deep, dark secret, and that is, we lived together. It’s something one didn’t talk about, you know, so, somewhat disgraceful, particularly for the girl.

Was that disgraceful in America or disgraceful in Britain?

Oh no, in... Well, I think in both places. I think, I think in the Fifties, the idea that people might live together without being married was still regarded as pretty shocking, called living in sin and all that, that sort of stuff. And so really the rule was... I mean I think, a lot of our friends did not know that we were spending time together in that way. The better friends did of course, eventually. But, we, we enjoyed doing quite a lot of things, going to San Francisco and, we skied together. That’s where I learnt to ski.

[39:50] One of the things I’d wondered about was, I guess, living conditions over in America compared to your experience in Britain.

Oh well they were dead easy, you know. I mean...

Can you give me a little contrast perhaps, or comparison?

Well, I mean you could buy things. In ’52 in London, we still had rationing, and I think you were allowed one egg a week or two eggs a week or something of the sort. I mean, nobody was starving, in fact people were well fed, and I think I mentioned

Eric Ash Page 72 C1379/92/Track 3 this last time we talked, the disgraceful thing about this country is that working-class kids grew to the same height as the middle-class kids, which they hadn’t done before the war. So there was, it was done fairly and, and there was enough food, but it certainly was difficult, and shopping was difficult, and... Whereas in, in the States, you went to the supermarket, which were open late at night. That was really exciting, the idea that you go at midnight and buy things. So, things were very easy. And, I, I was able to buy a car for $250. Even allowing for inflation I don’t know what that would be these days, but it was an affordable luxury.

What was your living conditions like, your accommodation I guess, over there?

I rented a, in fact it was a little hut. There was an area where, where you could rent huts that had the essential things like kitchens and bathrooms and whatnot, I mean very modest but, but available. In fact it was on the side of the Stanford golf course, and it was very pleasant.

Mm. You mentioned earlier about, you know, worrying about being able to afford a cup of coffee in Britain. How did your salary compare, once you got to the States?

Oh, I was rich. My elder sister had a baby, and I sent her a cheque for a refrigerator. Well that was the greatest thing that had happened to her. I mean it... I couldn’t splash a vast amount of money around, but I mean it was that sort of feeling, you know, one, it was not a tight constraint.

Can you talk a little bit about what it was actually like working at Stanford itself? What was the building you were in like?

Well they were, Stanford buildings, the ones that I was in, tended to be single floor, and, done in sort of the Spanish architecture type of thing. I’m not using quite the right word, but, sort of open-plan, very light and, light and airy. [pause] But that’s one aspect of it. The other thing that was to me a great revelation at Stanford, that you could go to any lectures. If you needed to get credits for your lectures, well you had to sign in and all that. But you could audit lectures, any lectures. And you could audit lectures in a completely different field. And, I thought that was remarkably

Eric Ash Page 73 C1379/92/Track 3 liberal and was made much use of. And for example, as a result of this, they expected academic staff to have a certain amount of breadth. So when it came to examining a PhD thesis, they would have a couple of examiners who knew the subject, but they might have somebody from, from the arts to sit in on it. And I thought that was a, a very good idea. It caused people to realise that the world wasn’t circumscribed by the immediate area of their, of their research.

[44:39] How did the facilities there compare to your experience in the UK?

Oh superb. Everything was, was laid on. I mean it was like being transferred into heaven. Not only was all the gear there that you needed, and you could get anything you didn’t want, but there were technicians who were prepared to do things for you. There was a little bit of that at Imperial College but not really very much, but there, you know, there was a real, there was real support. So the fact that Stanford turned out then to be very high in the pecking order in this area, and in fact in most sciences, was attributable to splendid resources that were put behind it, and it’s true to this day.

Mm. [pause] What was the working atmosphere like there?

The...?

The working atmosphere at Stanford like.

Oh, really very free and easy. I really liked it, enjoyed it. There were enough exciting things going on that people didn’t feel that they needed to be secretive about what they were doing in case somebody else got there first or something and, it really was I think a, a pretty liberal atmosphere, I think it worked, worked very well. And, people did socialise outside the laboratories where they were working.

Were you the only British person there, or were there others?

One was the chap, Gordon Kino, who I mentioned before, who was there. But no, there was, there were several others. Indeed there was one that I met on the boat

Eric Ash Page 74 C1379/92/Track 3 going over to the United States, on the old Queen Mary , a chap called Alan Brown, who had just graduated from Cambridge but hadn’t got his PhD yet, and he was there and he did his PhD at Stanford.

Mm.

And he is a close friend to this day.

[47:17] Can we talk for a little bit about microwave tubes, and actually designing them? How does one actually design a microwave tube, for a specific purpose, in the 1950s?

Well the first thing I ought to tell you is that, the last time I was involved with that at all would have been, maybe, ’57, or thereabouts. Half a century ago. So I am not terribly much in it at the moment. But, I suppose the essentials of microwave tubes is, the two main aspects of it is, one, electrons, an electron beam, which is propagating through this device, and the other thing would be, microwave structures of one sort or another with which this beam would interact. Now there are two basic kinds of structures that one would normally encounter. One is a resonator, that would be a microwave, a microwave resonator that would resonate specifically at one frequency or only a small range of frequencies. But then there was another thing, which was invented basically at Bell Laboratories in the Forties, a thing called a travelling-wave tube, and there, you still had an electron beam, but instead of having a resonator which just worked at one frequency, you had a propagating structure where the microwaves were propagating along with a beam. And in order to make that propagation work well, in order to make that interaction work well, you want the microwaves to go at a speed which was roughly the same as the speed of the electrons. Well, microwaves, left to their own devices, go with the speed of light. Electrons, unless you go to extremely high voltages, go a good deal slower than the speed of light. So what you have to do is, you have to have a microwave structure which slows down the microwaves, and the simplest way of doing it is to have a helical structure, so that essentially the microwaves have to take a long path round in order to make some advance forwards. And, the important thing about that sort of a structure is that it works, not just at one frequency but it can work at a whole, long,

Eric Ash Page 75 C1379/92/Track 3 wide range of frequencies, which was particularly useful for telecommunications, but is also useful in some aspects of radar. Now the helix is one example of a slow-wave structure, and a lot of my research then and subsequently when I came back to England was in fact concerned with devising appropriate slow-wave structures, structures that slow down the microwaves to such an extent that they could interact properly with an electron beam. So, the slow-wave structure part was a very important part of it. Making the electron beam itself was an important part of it. Now electrons are negatively charged, and so if you spray them around, they tend to repel each other and spray all over the place, and what you really want is to have your electron beams in a jet, in a, so that they are concentrated over a relatively small cross-sectional area. And how to, how to do that properly... [coughing] Excuse me. How to do that properly was a bit of science and engineering in its own right. Is that enough?

I was just wondering, what was the difficult part about that? You said to do it properly was a bit of science and engineering in its own right.

Well what you have to do is, you have to provide external electric fields which tend to concentrate the beam, and you can also use strong magnetic fields which stop the electrons spraying outwards. In strong magnetic fields, the electrons will go around the lines of force and stay put. But to do this properly involves some mathematics to, to understand, so you’re doing the right kind of thing. There are also some important mathematical limits that you can put on it. So for example, you might decide you would like to make an electron gun which would give you a beam of electrons having a certain amount of current in it, and concentrated on a, on a small area. You might then find that what you have just said is impossible. [53:20] There are limits to the extent to which you can concentrate an electron beam, and this was a discovery made, I suppose originally by Langmuir in the States, in GE, and, it was gradually understood that you had to work within certain limits that nature allowed you.

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 76 C1379/92/Track 3

Very similar things apply to light, the extent to which you can focus light into a spot, there is a limit to how concentrated you can make it.

I’m interested in as well, doing so much work on microwave tubes in, well this particular time period. I guess transistors are round the corner pretty much aren’t they.

Yah. Transistors are round the corner, but they started off by being very low-power devices. And, even to this day, if you look at the, the way in which you send a beam of microwaves up to a satellite, it would be done with a microwave tube, not with solid state devices. Now I could be out of date on this and it depends how much power, but I think for most of them it would be true that you would use very powerful microwave tubes, and you certainly still use them for particle accelerators. But when transistors started, they were feeble little devices, and, getting to the point where you could for example have a microwave cooker which was based on solid state devices, took very many years. I don’t know when that would have happened. Probably in the, early Eighties? I don’t know.

[55:15] Mm. And I guess sort of, linking in with this talk about electronics, I was thinking as well you mentioned sort of, the start of the Silicon Valley atmosphere there.

Right. Yes.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that, and how you experienced it yourself?

Well I, I don’t know that I experienced it very directly. I did, I did, I did get to know some people at Hewlett Packard, which remains one of the big companies there. I did get to know people at Varian Brothers. I remember visiting this new company, Watkins-Johnson, which I mentioned before, the chap I wrote a paper with. And I remember going to that company, Watkins-Johnson Company, and being rather pleased to see that they had an open-plan, they had an outside open space, and people playing table tennis. And the idea was very much that if you felt like playing table tennis, that’s what you should be doing. On the other hand, needless to say, if you

Eric Ash Page 77 C1379/92/Track 3 spent all your time playing table tennis, you might not get the promotion you were, you were after. But you know, it was that, that sort of free and easy atmosphere. And another example of that, Hewlett Packard, they encouraged their staff, if they didn’t have a Master’s degree, or if they did have one, to take a specialised course in something or other, and they gave them time to do this. But they didn’t have to spend the time doing that. If they wanted to go fishing instead, they could use the time for fishing instead of for learning a new branch of the science. And, I thought that was extremely broad-minded, and as I said before, on the whole people wouldn’t take advantage of it. But, you know, the fact that they could, gave them the freedom which otherwise you would normally only have in a university.

And did you have much contact with industry while you were out there?

I had a certain amount of contact, but there were reasons for discussing certain things with... Varians was another company there. But I wasn’t deeply involved in it. But, it is a fact that people did start opening companies very freely. And I remember, people were asking the question, ‘Why haven’t you opened a company? Why haven’t you got onto it?’ And it was quite easy to get money, I mean the venture capital market was coming into the game. So, anybody who wanted to, to start companies, was really able to, able to do so. So I think that, when I said Silicon Valley, I mean I think it was in the sense of starting companies. But probably they were mainly microwave companies in those days, microwaves and microwave tubes. I, I don’t know when the first solid state silicon companies were set up. I mean Shockley certainly set one up fairly early, but I think it was probably late Fifties I would guess, not when I was there.

Mm. I was wondering, did you actually think about setting up a company yourself while you were out there? It sounds like it...

No I didn’t. It didn’t... I’m not sure it even occurred to me. But, I just didn’t see my career as being an entrepreneur in that way. There was the other point, I had what I thought at the time of as elderly parents, I mean I would now think of them as terribly young, but, in London, and, I thought I would probably need to go back and be around for them at some stage. So it was another reason for not getting involved in it.

Eric Ash Page 78 C1379/92/Track 3

I did wonder, did you actually seriously consider staying out there?

Yah, it, it did occur to me. And, well I suppose what occurred to me more is going back to England and then coming, and then going out again. And that’s something that my wife and I discussed at great length, and... So for a long time for example we, we decided we wouldn’t ever attempt to buy anything, after all we might go back to California any moment now so to speak. Terrible mistake, we should have bought something straight away, but that’s beside the point. So we did discuss it at length. But I remember at one time saying, ‘Look, we’ve been back here now,’ two years, three years or something like that. ‘Let’s forget it, we’re here.’ And she was quite happy to be here.

Mhm.

Now last time I was here, you were able to show me where the loo was.

I was just thinking, this probably seems like quite a good point for a break.

Right.

I can pop this off.

[End of Track 3]

Eric Ash Page 79 C1379/92/Track 4

[Track 4]

.....I don’t think, no.

Did you enjoy your time working in America, at Stanford, in the Fifties?

Yah, very, very very much so. We have subsequently had a year in the States as well as various visits, but we actually had a whole year in the States later on in my career.

What did you enjoy about it?

What, California? Well, the thing that attracted me first of all was the weather. But then, then the intellectual atmosphere at Stanford which I think is, was remarkable and worth emulating. The science and... But I suppose the other thing is youth. I didn’t have any great responsibilities, like getting through a ruddy PhD, and I knew later on one would have to work for somebody more seriously. But one actually had a fair amount of freedom. So it was in that sense a great time.

Mm. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you liked about the, the scientific atmosphere, the working environment at Stanford that you mentioned a moment ago?

Well, I suppose it’s that, it’s pretty difficult at Stanford then and now to have a position as a professor, I mean, on the academic staff, and most of the people who were there were very bright. And, bright professors attract bright students. So the whole intellectual temperature was, was pretty high. And that lead to stimulating discussions and stimulating, stimulation as a work background quite apart from the work focus. And I did mention already the fact, the accessibility to lectures and all that. But, and Stanford as a whole was an exciting place to be. You didn’t have to worship the football team, and it was quite fun to see them in action once or twice. And, the environment there was, was great. I mentioned the skiing, was just a couple of hours’ drive away to the Sierras. And, well, the physics department had arranged to rent a large hut with many little bedrooms or bunks and whatnot in it, in the ski resort. And one could go there weekends, and book ahead of time, but go there. And, that made it terribly easy to do.

Eric Ash Page 80 C1379/92/Track 4

Mm.

I always remember skiing there with an intensity that I certainly haven’t done since. I remember on one occasion going up and down the mountain, and I reckon by the end of the day I had, the total height I had gone down was about that of Everest, just by going up and down, nothing very frightening about it. And I also remember never, never staying awake after dinner. It was, one really did it rather intensively.

Mm. Why did you decide to go back to Britain in the end? What was the cause of that at the time?

Well I mentioned one of the reasons, that one did have one’s roots there, one had one’s parents there. But, Clare, my wife, wanted to go, go to, anyway. And as I say, we didn’t really go back forever, we went back to see what it was like.

[04:15] Had you arranged a position before you returned?

I, I did in a way, not a terribly satisfactory position, but it worked more or less. It, it was actually at Queen Mary, what’s now called Queen Mary University, with somebody who had been a lecturer at Imperial College, had lectured to me, and he needed a pair of hands for the research he was doing, so I spent one year there.

Who was the lecturer?

The lecturer was a chap called George Walker. [pause] So I stayed there, I think it was only about a year really. And then, I think I replied to an advertisement from a company that no longer exists, Standard Telephones, and this was the research arm of Standard Telephones, Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, STL. And I applied for a job there and got it.

What sort of work were you doing at Queen Mary before?

Eric Ash Page 81 C1379/92/Track 4

George Walker was very interested in particle accelerators, and in a particular kind of particle accelerator which used dielectrics as a slow-wave structure. I mentioned a slow-wave structure as something to slow down the microwaves; well you can do it with dielectrics too. And that was a project that he had, and I worked on that for a year.

You said it wasn’t terribly satisfactory. What did you mean?

Oh, I don’t think the research got very far. I mean in every other way it was OK.

How was it being back in Britain after going away to the States for a couple of years?

Well, it, it was slightly difficult. I mean finding a place to live for example, we rented a... In fact we rented a flat from a very nice man who was a professor at Queen Mary, name of Fortescue, and he lived in the country and, but he had a flat in London, in Belsize Park, and a flat that he, wasn’t normally used. So he rented it to us, for I think five quid a week if I remember rightly. But I mean that was the first thing, the first problem was to find a place to live. Before we, before we got that, we lived in another flat off Hammersmith. So, so living, finding a place to live, then as now, was sort of the difficult thing to do.

How did your wife take to life in Britain?

Oh she enjoyed it. Yah, no she was, she was all for it. At first we wondered whether we could manage without a car, and we decided that a car really would be quite useful, and, so we bought a 1931 Morris Minor from a local painter for twenty-five quid. And that we had for, a couple of years or more. And it sort of worked, and we were able to drive to the coast with it and...

I can’t help but notice, that’s a, what, twenty-five-year-old car by this point. [laughs] Was that unusual at the time?

Oh no, it was regarded as a pretty old car, yah. It was more than that wasn’t it? It would have been... No you’re right, you are right, about that, yah. Yah. And... I

Eric Ash Page 82 C1379/92/Track 4 mean cars worked pretty well in those days. I always maintain there’s only about a couple of things that have happened since then that have improved cars. This one had cable brakes, so when you, when you used the brake at the same time you were going over a bump, the brake would alternately hold and not hold. You sort of had to keep your, work it with your foot. So I mean that, that was, wet weather was sort of an awkward thing to have to do. And, subsequently we got a 1937 Morris Minor which had hydraulic brakes. And, so I think that was one of the great advances in, in automobiles, and all the rest is really for kicks.

Do you have to do much maintenance to actually keep an old car on the road?

I did have to do a bit of maintenance, yah.

You personally, or...?

Personally. In fact I did that in the States too, in California. There was a friend of mine I met who, who was in fact a garage mechanic and he lent me his tools and, I actually replaced the big ends on, on that car, the $250 car. But, that took us from the West Coast to the East Coast.

[10:00] Mm. What was the job at STL that you applied for on your return?

Well it was very much on the line of what I was doing at Stanford, which was working on microwave tubes, and working on them for, mainly for the company itself. The company was Standard Telephones and Cables. And, at that time communications had been mainly by cable, copper wire cable kind of thing, but there was then the need for broadband, which would be regarded as very narrow band these days, but, but having, you know, I don’t know, a few dozen phone conversations on, going on at the same time. And this involved microwave communication, long- distance communication, where you had microwave towers and you radiated your microwave beam to another tower which would be, I don’t know, ten miles away or something, I can’t remember what the distances were. And that for a while, for quite a long time, was the main development for telecommunications, long-distance

Eric Ash Page 83 C1379/92/Track 4 telecommunications in the country. And these systems needed microwave tubes. The company, Standard Telephones and Cables, was much involved in this business, and they also had a tube factory in Paignton in Devon. So we were very much involved with working for them and with them.

Which bit of STL did you actually work for, what was the factory, or laboratory or...?

It was a research laboratory. It was at that time in Enfield, in a little back street called Progress Way. Subsequently, and this would have been, I was there eight years, so, ’55 to ’83, I would guess, about ’58 or thereabouts, the laboratory moved to Harlow New Town, into a brand new research laboratory which was built there at the time, and which is still there, although sadly not used for that purpose.

Mm. What sort of place was STL Harlow, can you describe it to me?

Well, it was pretty decrepit.

Harlow?

I mean... Pardon?

Harlow or Enfield?

Oh, Enfield. Yah.

Well could we contrast the two perhaps? What was Enfield like to begin with?

Yah, well Enfield was just a series of, spaces that were laboratories. Really fairly nondescript. I mean it had everything you needed, it had light and water and gas and, and all that. But it, it was a pretty ramshackle kind of a place. STL in Harlow New Town was a brand new building, was well designed, before the time that I had a personal interest in architecture so I can’t remember who the architect was. But, it worked pretty well. It was a very pleasant place to work in.

Eric Ash Page 84 C1379/92/Track 4

What sort of architectural style was Harlow?

Well Harlow itself was of course, Harlow New Town, built on the idea that, if everybody had a garden, they would live happily together. And in fact, I don’t think most people would now regard it as a terribly successful experiment. The centre of Harlow New town, the sort of shopping area, was fairly concentrated, and people had to drive to it. I think nowadays people would think that if you are starting a new town, you are much better to have it, a denser distribution of the, of the people there, and to have less driving and... But, the building, the STL building, was, I can only describe it as modern and sensible. It was I think on three floors, or, something of that sort. And, good spaces, good lighting.

Mm. When you said that your work was connected with microwave communications...

Yes.

Did you actually get to sort of see the overall system that you were involved in, or just the little bit of microwave tube work you were involved in?

Mainly the little bit of microwave tube work. I mean, one wouldn’t if one was working on those bits, which are the key to the whole system of course, the thing that makes it, makes the thing tick, you wouldn’t normally be directly involved in the systems design of the thing. That’s a separate form of engineering.

So it’s just the component itself then?

Yup. Right.

[15:20] Mm. Could you give me an idea of, I guess, what’s a typical day’s work for you like at STL Harlow? What time do you start?

Well, start by driving an hour, because, commuting from, from London. And, it... I’m not sure I can, that I can give you a very vivid description. I mean one had a

Eric Ash Page 85 C1379/92/Track 4 desk, one shared a, one shared a room with a colleague. And, one was working in one or two laboratories. One was interacting with different skills in the place. So for example, there were glass-blowers who were involved with the thing; then machinists involved with the thing; then there was the need to, certain technologies, like for example, how do you get a metal component into glass if you want to, if you want to have a wire going through the glass? And, if it’s more than a wire, if it has to be a more massive bit of metal, how do you actually do it? How do you join various things together? And how, above all, how do you measure what you are doing? That’s a, that’s a very important part of the business, when you make something, does it fact perform in the way that you had designed it to perform, that you wanted it to perform? So you have a lot of measurement apparatus involved. And there were technicians who were prepared to, to do this sort of thing. I think on... I remember it as a, on the whole a fairly cheerful atmosphere. Fairly productive I would say, I think we, we did reasonably well, what we were supposed to be doing. [17:35] I mentioned that we were associated with a factory in Devon, but I should have said, at least at a later stage in what we were doing, probably more associated with a factory in New Jersey in the United States. Because, Standard Telephones was part of the ITT, International Telecommunications... Oh what does the T stand for? Anyway, ITT. And they had a major factory and laboratory in New Jersey, and some of the stuff that we were involved in was manufactured there, which was an interesting experience, because, one of the tasks was, you make, you’ve made a microwave tube, and it does what it’s supposed to do, but there’s a lot of detailed technology that goes into the making of it, how you transmit that to a distant laboratory. And it’s one of things where so many times high technology companies have fallen flat on their face, they get the thing right in the research lab, but the transfer to something where it has to work every day of the week without any twiddling, is the difficult thing. And I remember we produced a book which we called the Bible, which was about this thick, where we tried to write down everything that we thought was relevant to doing this. So we had quite a lot of communication with, with the people in ITT, and they came over there, and, we at times went over there and had a chance to, to visit. [pause] ITT was jocularly known as the International Travel and Talk company, and there was an element of that. We had a lot of committees. For example there was a committee in Stuttgart for a particular

Eric Ash Page 86 C1379/92/Track 4 aspect of what we were working on, and we met twice a year I think. And that was fun, one met people in other countries and doing similar things but not quite the same thing. On the other hand there was an awful lot of talking, and probably more than was needed some of the time.

Talking about what sort of things?

Oh, talking about the technology I mean, yes.

Can you give me an idea of what one of those meetings was like when you were doing all this talking?

Again, I do have to tell you about what one can forget every half century. But what it would have been is, there would have been a number of products that we were separately or jointly working on, and so there would have been reports on how these products were fairing, did they work and what was the performance that they achieved? But then there would be talk about specific problems that we had encountered, and how, how we had resolved them. And that, as I say, is not an easy thing to transmit. Because, you don’t want it to be based on Joe having a magic touch. It’s got to, it’s got to be terribly, it’s got to be terribly well defined.

Mm.

I always remember being on an advisory committee for the Rank Organisation, this was subsequently, where we were told about some technology which involved grinding lenses, and the lenses had to be put onto a wax base so they stuck there while the grinding was going on. And when we enquired what temperature they, to what extent they control the temperature of the wax when they put the lenses on it, the answer was that, well there was a chap in the workshop who used to spit at it. And by hearing the right amount of sizzle, he would assume that he had got the right temperature. And we tried to suggest that perhaps, if they had some problems in variability in the product, this might be one place to look.

[22:40]

Eric Ash Page 87 C1379/92/Track 4

Did you get much involved with I guess production engineers then in the course of your work at STL?

A little bit. I mean there was one specific thing that I got very intrigued by, and that is, one of the tubes that we had to make was a microwave tube working at millimetric wavelengths, which is where things are very small, and incidentally there is a model of what we built, which is in a glass cabinet at University College down the road. Because it was quite a remarkable thing. But to make this thing, there was a lot of new technology involved. But one of the things was, we had to, I think cut a slot which was, I don’t know, maybe ten microns wide and a couple of millimetres long, or something of the sort. And, it was difficult to know how to do this. And we came across a technology called spark erosion machining. Does that mean anything to you? No, OK. Well, you have an electrode over the thing that you are trying to put a hole in for example, and you have an electric connection to it and you make sparks, and the sparks will gradually erode the metal underneath. And if you do it right you can do extremely fine work this way. But we couldn’t find a spark erosion machine that would be fine enough for this purpose, so we decided we’d build one. And we did, and it worked. And then, I remember this, because you asked about production engineering, it seemed to me since we had built this thing, and it worked, it ought to be useful to other people in the company, it’s a big company. So we sent messages around to various other branches of the company. And the result was that the head of the workshop there or something would be told about this possibility of doing this, but would then say, ‘Well I’ve never been asked to make a slot that was ten microns wide and two millimetres long.’ And so on the whole they decided that they wouldn’t pursue it as a product. We thought then, and I still think now, they were dead wrong. This was a way of doing something which previously couldn’t be done, but we had found a way of doing it. But you don’t necessarily get people with sparkling imagination in all of these, these places.

[25:38] Mm. How did you actually find being an industrial scientist after your experience at universities?

Eric Ash Page 88 C1379/92/Track 4

Well, I... I mean in some ways, I found it a good regime to be in. I like freedom, but there was a certain amount of freedom in a research lab which you wouldn’t have had maybe in other parts of the company. But I, I also found it quite satisfying that one, one knew what was needed. There was a goal, maybe not very well defined all the time, but there was something that you, a target that you could aim for. And I found that fascinating. And as I said before, the interaction with other parts of the company which did involve a certain amount of travelling and all that, was useful. I did keep some contact with the universities. I gave a series of lectures somewhere or other, which I quite enjoy doing, and had some friends in the universities. But, for eight years I was at STL, and, I was not sorry to be there. And... But eventually, I decided to leave and go to a university.

[27:08] Mm. I was wondering, I guess we’ve talked a little bit about some of the aspects of your work, meetings for instance, meeting other parts of the company, the travel. And we talked about microwave tube development, some aspects of it. But I was just sort of wondering, in terms of, you know, the scientific work that you were actually doing at STL, what sort of things, on a practical basis? [pause] I guess I’m wondering, what work goes into developing to...

It’s really hard, hard to say in general terms. I mean some of it was theoretical anyway. And you know, we, we actually wrote a number of papers and published them as well while we were doing that, even though that’s not the main incentive in a, in industry. But, I, I suppose really, on the... And there are two aspects. One is design, how you design things that might work, and the other thing is, to note that the technology is actually very tough. It isn’t easy to get these things to work, particularly not if you then want them to work for five years on end without stopping. So that, one is involved in a whole series of different technologies. I mean let me give you just one example again from the same device that I was talking about that led to the spark erosion machine. We had to make a microwave cavity, which is a hollow space in which the microwaves can bounce up and down, and they resonate at a particular frequency. Such a resonator was sort of a cylindrical hole, well, it’s a cylindrical hole with a bottom to it, and then you put a lid on it. And the way you put the lid on it is by a process of heating it, and just pressure. It’s a, it’s hobbing it. So

Eric Ash Page 89 C1379/92/Track 4 you heat up both sides of it, you put the two bits together, and you squeeze. But you’ve got to get the thing to be the right dimension, it’s got to resonate at the frequency that you want it to resonate at, because that’s the thing that you are designing. So, you couldn’t possibly do it by dead reckoning. So what you have to do is, you have to measure the resonant frequency, while you are doing it. And then you have a chance, then you can, when it gets to the frequency you want, you stop. Well you still have a problem because the thing is hot and in the meantime it’ll cool so that will change the frequency, but at least that’s something that you can do. When we worked out the actual mechanical precision that was needed to achieve this, it was approximately one atomic layer. So you had to get the thing right, the right height, to about one layer of atoms, which you couldn’t possibly do by dead reckoning. The only way you could do it is the way we were doing it. But this is an example of a bit of tough technology, which however was very successful, and it worked in the short term and in the long term.

Mm.

Mm. But there are lots, lots of other bits of technology, and they’re really all, they all, they’re all quite different. But they involve materials work, you’ve got to get the right materials, you have to join materials, you involve joining metal to metal, metal to glass, metal to ceramics.

What do you think the sort of key projects of your time at STL actually were?

What do I think...?

The key projects of your time at STL actually were.

Oh I think a number of... I was there eight years, so I mean a number of the things that we produced I think were regarded as seriously useful and important and where they’re used in systems. I think the toughest thing that we had was the device I was just talking about, this millimetric tube, which was subsequently manufactured in the States.

Eric Ash Page 90 C1379/92/Track 4

What was it used for?

Was it useful?

No, what was it used for?

What was it used for? Ah. Well that’s another story. It was never used for the purpose that was originally intended. I mentioned microwave transmission by going, having microwave beams going from one tower to another. And that enabled you to have several telecommunication channels at the same time being transmitted at the same time. But that wasn’t enough. One needed much broader band width as well. And there was a scheme which was run for many years at Bell Laboratories and other parts of the world, and including at University College London, which was to send the microwaves through a hollow pipe, about that sort of diameter.

Two, three inches, or...?

Yah, something of that sort. And it turned out, if you did it right, you could get very large band width, you could get a vast number of telecommunication channels. And for a long time that was the future. And the future was actually, actually arrived in, in the States, Bell Laboratories actually did have a complete system using these tubes, working. And so these tubes that one needed, these millimetric devices. But it was never in the end used in anger. And the reason why it wasn’t was optical fibres. When optical fibres appeared on the scene, it became evident that this was a much more effective technology, and, the klystrons are used for other purposes, of these things, but never for the thing that it was originally designed for.

[33:55] Did you see much of the optic fibres you worked yourself? I guess that’s happening at STL Harlow about the same sort of time period isn’t it?

Yah. It... I, I saw the beginnings, although I was never personally directly involved in it. The chap who was responsible, mainly responsible for the success of it, was a chap called Charles Keo, you’ve heard of him? He became a good friend of ours.

Eric Ash Page 91 C1379/92/Track 4

And I have been involved with him one way or another, for example as an external examiner in his university in Hong Kong where he subsequently was, and subsequently we know him and his wife. And as you probably know, very sadly he, he got the Nobel Prize but was unable to make the Nobel speech himself, he’s an Alzheimer’s sufferer. And, he knows he got the Nobel Prize, but only just. It’s a very sad story.

Mm.

But I, I was closely in touch with him, friends with him for many years after, after he left STL and went to Hong Kong. And I’m still corresponding with his wife. And he did actually have lunch with us a couple of years ago, after the Nobel thing, and, one could communicate up to a point, but it was a bit sad.

Mm. I guess that brings me on to, onto other related matters. One of them was I guess, was there much social life attached to working at STL Harlow?

No, not a vast amount. I mean partially because people lived in all sorts of different places. But I used to share driving with a Danish engineer who lived in Hampstead, and so, I got to know him very well, since we spent two hours together every day, and one of us driving. And I remember one occasion spending, I think it was five hours with him driving back, which was the last real pea-souper fog that we experienced, and, I think he was driving. Because I remember leaning out of the window telling him where the curb was. And it took us about five hours I think to get home. But, no, but there wasn’t... Well wait a moment. I suppose, you are, exciting my memory a bit. There was one person with whom I did have a social life for a long time, and that’s a chap called Bill Beck, b-e-c-k, who subsequently went to Cambridge and, as, onto the academic staff. But he was the boss of the group when I joined STL, and, so I got to know him very well, I got to know his wife very well. And we kept in social touch, well, all the time that he was there, but also afterwards. And with his wife to some extent.

[37:35] Who do you think your closest colleagues were at work?

Eric Ash Page 92 C1379/92/Track 4

[pause] Well, I think my closest colleague was somebody who I am very much in touch with. You know, you’re reminding me of all these people now. And that’s a chap called T M Jackson. He was a very remarkable chap. When I first went there aged, twenty-six was it? No, how old would I have been? ’54... Yah, twenty-six or something like that. He was a few years older than me. We shared an office. And he was a very ingenious person, a very imaginative person. I got to know him very well, and admired him enormously. Subsequently when Bill Beck left to go to Cambridge, I took over the group so I became his boss. I never dared ask him whether he had any O-levels, but I did eventually find out that he had a couple. His history is, he was Welsh, very Welsh. He wanted to be a Welsh policeman but didn’t grow to be tall enough, and in those days that apparently mattered. But he eventually found himself working in Malvern at what was then called RSRE Radios... RRE... Radio Research Establishment. And, he used to make tea there for various people. One of the people he made tea for was a chap called Alec Reeves, who was one of the few people I’ve met in my life I would regard as a genius. And just to digress one moment. Alec Reeves was the originator of pulse-code modulation. Does that mean anything to you? No, OK. Well, the essential thing, the central discovery was the idea that if you sent a message, and if instead of sending the actual waveform or whatever it was you were wanting to transmit, you chopped it up into little bits, and each little bit was given a code, a digital code, so the only thing that you actually sent were zeros and ones, which was has been of course the history of, of our time ever since. He invented this, this idea, in the Thirties, and, it’s a pity that he never got a Nobel Prize, he certainly should have done. He was not elected even to the Royal Society, God knows why not. But anyway. T M Jackson worked for him, and Alec Reeves could spot a bright person when he saw one, and that was the beginning of it all. It turned out that Jacky as we called him was able to do all sorts of things and do them very quickly, and he learnt very fast. And when Alec Reeves, when the war was over Alec Reeves, who made major advances in, in military radar during the war, he invented a system called Oboe, which was used in the bombing raids on Germany. He went to STL and then took T M Jackson with him, and that’s how Jacky got into STL. I remember that, I, when I encountered Jacky, I discovered he was, everything he touched turned to gold, so I made sure I hung onto him. So for example, this thing I’ve just described, how to make a microwave cavity with an accuracy of a single

Eric Ash Page 93 C1379/92/Track 4 atomic layer, Jacky was very much involved in doing that. And, by the time I left STL, I checked up on Jacky’s record, and he had more patents to his name than any other person in the company. He was a truly amazing chap. I’m still in touch with him, although he is seriously ill, he’s ninety-something, but he’s still quite sharp. And so we, we have communicated. So he, he was certainly an important influence on me. But we’ve touched on Alec Reeves, so if you want me to talk more about it.

I was wondering when you ran across Reeves, yes.

Yah. Alec, when Bill Beck left for Cambridge and I became the head of that group, Alec Reeves became my boss. And he was an absolutely amazing chap. Pulse-code modulation. But there are all sorts of other things that he created. And he had a remarkable vision. And I always remember, when he took me on, and this would have been, oh gosh, I suppose, something like ’59 or thereabouts, that sort of time I think, am I right there? Yah, somewhere round about that time. He asked me what I was doing, I told him what I was doing, telling him about all this microwave stuff. And, he said, ‘Well actually, what you should be working on is optics. Because it’s all going to go optical.’ And of course he was right. And, nobody believed him at the time, and nor was there the technology available that made it possible. And he had some ideas which wouldn’t work. But his vision was bang on. And I got to know him very well, and I really liked the bloke. [44:40] He was the inverse of an organisation man, and in a sense I suppose I was, so, once a month we went to a local pub for lunch and, oh, I mean just to give you one example. I needed to know the salary that one person in my group was getting, I don’t know, about a promotion or something, and he said, ‘Yes you can have that.’ And he handed me a sheaf, which was everybody’s salary. [laughs] I didn’t take advantage of it particularly. But that’s the sort of chap he was. He was also slightly mad. He believed in psychokinetics, in the idea that if you think hard enough about something you could actually physically move it. And, we had long debates about that. He was a very broad-minded chap. He was very keen on helping prisoners, he used to spend time visiting prisoners. I presume he was gay, but I don’t know whether that was an important part of his life or not, but, I would get, I got the impression.

Eric Ash Page 94 C1379/92/Track 4

Why do you say that?

Pardon?

Why do you say that?

Well when you get to know people well, you, and like them, you find out something, what makes them tick. He did live with his sister. And, I, I don’t know, I couldn’t put my finger on any one point particularly, but, that was, that was my impression. Mm. And he, he did actually see pulse-code modulation working the way he had hoped it would in the Thirties, so it was, it was in that sense a satisfying end to his career.

Do you think he was any particular influence on you?

[pause] Yah, I, I think he, I think he was. I mean particularly in the sense of, of not worrying whether something that you are thinking about at this moment was feasible or not, you know, if there is a thought that you have of something that might be interesting, one should pursue it, whether it’s practical or not. I think that was one thing. I think the other influence he had on me is that, to encounter somebody who is really mad in a sense, and yet absolutely marvellous in another, that these two things can go together. Not everybody is totally logical and totally sane like me.

[47:50] You’ve raised, it’s one other thing I was going to mention in passing. You were talking about patenting and how, was it, T M Jackson had more patents that anyone else at STL. I was just wondering, how did he take out a patent?

Oh well the company does that for you. I mean if the company’s any good, they, they cross-examine you periodically, do you have anything patentable? That’s an interesting question, because I mean, going into the future, when I was at Imperial, one of my problems was to convince my colleagues that something should be patented. On the whole academics regard that as a sideline, not to worry about it. So you really need people to want to patent things, or you need to have somebody on the

Eric Ash Page 95 C1379/92/Track 4 staff who keeps on probing, what there is that might be patentable. But the actual job of doing it, of course the company takes care of it.

Did you take out many patents yourself at STL?

I got a few. Oddly enough I got more I think in a sabbatical year I had at IBM subsequently, because they were so keen on, on patenting. But no, altogether I’ve had, quite a few.

Mm.

[end of session]

[End of Track 4]

Eric Ash Page 96 C1379/92/Track 5

[Track 5]

Fine.

You mentioned last time...

You say to Imperial of course...

The second time.

Yah. No but I mean, in between that, I had twenty years at UCL. Every twenty years counts a bit.

Do you know, I’ve actually got that written down, I don’t know why I said Imperial. [laughs]

Right. Right. Right.

Returning to STL, I was wondering, you mentioned that a lot of your work was on millimetric microwave radar tubes. Were there any other aspects of electronics work you became involved in in your time there?

Well, I... We were all... Yes. I was involved with microwave telecommunications more generally, so not just the millimetric system which in the end never flourished, but we were involved in other things too. And those days, microwave tubes were very important in point-to-point telecommunications.

Mm. Well what sort of state of the art had microwave communications reached by the late 1950s, early 1960s?

Well, it reached a stage where in fact, you got substantially more band width on microwave links than you got on cables, and they were cheaper. I mean the big problem about cables is, you have to dig a ditch, and that’s quite an expensive part of it. Whereas microwaves, you can have links which go over, I don’t know, typically

Eric Ash Page 97 C1379/92/Track 5 twenty miles or thirty miles between towers. And it was just, a technologically more advanced way of communicating.

Mm. And what does a microwave communication system actually consist of at this point?

Well it consists of what you would have in any communication channel. You start off with the data, whether it’s speech or, or vision or, or information. And you transform that into some kind of a signal which you then have to transmit. Now, when you use cables, this would be transmitted at relatively low frequencies, because cables become much more lossy the higher the frequency you go. In the case of microwaves, you would modulate this on a microwave beam, which would be running at something like, typically of the order of several gigahertz. So something like, a hundred to a thousand times higher frequency than you would use on a cable.

Mm. What does the actual equipment used consist of to actually transmit and receive microwave messages?

Well, for transmission, the main element that would have been used at that time are travelling-wave tubes. These are microwave tubes that are capable of producing a lot of power over a very large band width. It’s all due to inventions which took place towards the end of World War II, and involved two names which I think are still recognised, one is John Pierce from Bell Laboratories, and the other one is a chap called Rudy Kompfner, who was an extraordinary person. He was actually trained as an architect, was interested in amateur radio, used to write to an amateur radio magazine, and the defence system in this country picked up the fact that here was somebody, an Austrian, who actually knew something and picked him up. And he made major contributions to the development of travelling-wave tubes which became the main element in microwave communications.

[04:36] By travelling-wave tube, I’m assuming radio tube rather than a piece of metal with a hollow pipe sort of thing.

Eric Ash Page 98 C1379/92/Track 5

Well, a travelling-wave tube really consists of a slow-wave structure, that means a metallic structure on which electron waves can propagate but propagate relatively slowly. When they propagate at the speed of light, you can’t do much with them, you can’t get electrons to catch up with them, because the electrons are too slow. So you have to slow down the electromagnetic waves, and the simplest way of doing it is to make them run on a helix. And then you can get an electron beam to interact with this helix, with the electromagnetic waves on the helix, and amplify it.

How important a development were better ways of getting a slow-wave tube built?

I’m sorry?

How important were better ways of making slow-wave tubes in STL?

Oh, it was quite important. I mentioned the helix as the most fundamental way of doing it. It turned out that the helix had to be wound with extreme accuracy, because otherwise it really didn’t work very well over sufficiently large band widths. But there were other slow-wave structures, and that were used for different purposes, and in fact one of the things I worked on were novel slow-wave structures for different kinds of tubes of this sort.

When you say novel, novel in what sort of way?

Well they weren’t a helix. So, one example of such a structure was a series of rings connected by bars between the rings. All sorts of different ways of doing it. But, there are better and worse ways of doing it. And, the important thing in these structures is first of all that they have the band widths that you are looking for, secondly that they are relatively lossless, and thirdly, that they produce a strong electric field where you want to put your electrons so that they can interact strongly with the electrons.

Mm. And where do the ideas for different sorts of slow-wave structure come from in your experience?

Eric Ash Page 99 C1379/92/Track 5

Oh, it was a whole industry, lots of people were involved in, in doing it and analysing it. And, they are still of importance in certain, in certain areas, and there are incidentally other uses of slow-wave structures which emerged subsequently, in photonics and, in solid state devices. So the whole idea of a slow-wave structure is sort of a generic principle, and the fundamental point is one that I’ve made, that you want electromagnetic waves that are made sufficiently slow so that you can catch them and do things with them.

[08:00] Mm. I was interested, I guess most people don’t really sort of think about a microwave system, microwave communication systems. If I were to see one, what would it look like?

Well I think all you would see is a tower with a parabolic dish on top of it. I mean they’re mainly of course, television receivers these days or television transmitters come to that, but that’s the main thing you would see. But then, I’m afraid it’s extremely dull, you would see, inside you would see a cabinet full of electronics, including the travelling-wave I was talking about, or nowadays solid state devices which have, to a large extent, replaced travelling-wave tubes at least for terrestrial purposes, although not for satellite telecommunications.

[08:55] Mm. I was wondering as well, about 1960, what other tools of the trade are available to an electrical engineer like yourself, what sort of instruments and equipment are you using?

I don’t think that we had any very special equipment. I mean, it’s hard to know how to answer that question. I mean, one had microwave detectors which would be crystals of one sort or another, solid state devices. One had, one had the beginnings of computers, in fact, I wrote my first computer programme in 1962, and I was by no means an advanced student of it, I mean, I just did it because, a chap I shared an office with knew how to do it, and I got him to teach me. But, yes, I mean we, the theoretical calculations we did were very much wedded to being able to do

Eric Ash Page 100 C1379/92/Track 5 computations on what were then regarded as extremely fast computers, which would now be regarded as snail, snail pace computers.

What did you use before the computers to do computations for theoretical analysis?

Well there were calculating machines, mechanical calculating machines, where you turned a handle, and you could add, subtract, divide, multiply. And when I was a student I used these extensively. And they were still being used, gosh, I wonder when the manufacture of these machines actually stopped. I would guess as late as the mid- Fifties. And, before that, people still regard it as a joke these days, we used slide rules. Do you know what a slide rule is? You don’t. You’ve never seen one? OK. Well slide rules are really a way of using logarithms for doing calculations, and to do a multiplication using logarithms, you get the logarithm of the two numbers you want to multiply and add them up and then take the inverse, and that is a lot quicker than doing the multiplication. A slide rule is a ruler which has a sliding element in it, and that enables you to do that, that sort of calculation very fast. I mean, using slide rules, one can certainly do calculations, approximate calculations very much faster than you can without them. But they lasted a long time. I mean I, I can actually give you a date which you might find interesting, and that is, in 1969[sic – later refers to 1979] I got a sabbatical leave from University College and spent a year in Paris. Before doing that, I went to see the mathematics teacher in the school where two of my daughters were pupils, and I suggested to them that really it was time they stopped using slide rules, 1969, and that four-function calculators were coming in and they really were a better bet. And I failed in my advocacy. They said that, these calculators, not all the girls might be able to afford them, which I think was actually a misreading of the then situation, and I think they were actually no more expensive even then than slide rules. But in 1969 there were grown-up people who were making the arguments in favour of slide rules.

Mm. How many calculations are involved in designing a microwave tube?

Oh you can’t, you really can’t say that. I mean it’s... There’s no answer to that question. I mean, if you have a theory of, a concern with a particular structure, I mean there are many different kinds of calculations that one might want to do. It, it’s just,

Eric Ash Page 101 C1379/92/Track 5 it’s almost like asking, how many words do you need in order to talk to somebody about it. It’s, it’s part of the language.

Mm. I’m just sort of trying to get an idea, are we talking about dozens or hundreds, thousands? Just that sort of scale really.

Oh, I would, try to give an answer, I’d say hundreds. But it, but it really depends. I mean, there’s different kinds of calculations that one wants to make. One of them, one of the, the most detailed calculation is actually to figure out exactly what the electromagnetic field around one of these structures looks like. And that is really solving the fundamental equations of electromagnetism, so-called Maxwell’s equations, on a computer, and, you can, if you do that in detail, that involves a great deal of computation. But it is of course the way an awful lot of things are done these days, a lot of chemistry is done that way these days, you actually solve the Schrödinger equation to find out what the structure of a protein might look like.

Mm.

So, that’s an extreme form of computation, but more usually one would have certain approximations, and work with those.

[15:20] Well what did you actually write your first computer program for in 1962?

Solving simultaneous equations. A totally trivial thing, but just to find out how one writes things on a computer, that’s all.

Did you get any training in how to use a computer?

I’m sorry?

Did you get any training in how to use the computer?

Eric Ash Page 102 C1379/92/Track 5

Not much. The chap I was sharing an office with, a Hungarian called Laszlo Solymar, had got there a few months ahead of me in finding out how these things worked, and he showed me. But I didn’t go to any classes or anything of this sort.

Mm. How does one actually use a computer in 1962?

Well you had to put the program on some input format for the computer, which in those days was punched tape, not punched cards, that was very advanced, that came a little later. But just tape. And it’s amazing how rapidly one got to be able to use tape and, and punch it and, to get the configurations that you wanted to convey what you needed to convey to the computer. And I got to the point where I could look at a bit of tape, and just look at it and, and begin to read it. But as I say, that was before punched card. Punched card thereafter was the supreme way of doing it, certainly into the Eighties.

Are there any advantages of punched cards over punched tape from your point of view using it?

You can get more holes in it. You get readers of punched cards that can read a lot of things in parallel, but it’s just an advanced... It’s basically the same system, you have a hole or not a hole in a certain location, and that’s what the computer understands.

Do you have your own computer to use, or was it a shared one or...?

Oh good Lord no. No, I mean, the first time that I had my hands on a computer was certainly, well it was certainly when I was at University College, probably in the late Seventies, early Eighties maybe. And I wouldn’t have had my own computer. The computers we used were mainly as lab instruments anyway in those days. And I always remember, the unions got very worried about how we were going to get rid of secretaries, because you could do everything on a computer. And so I was asked, how many computers do you have in your department? Or how many word processors rather. And I wasn’t able to answer the question, because we had quite a few of these things in the laboratories, and you could program them to be word processors. So, quite rapidly of course that became a meaningless question.

Eric Ash Page 103 C1379/92/Track 5

Mm. If not your own computer on your desk, where is the computer in the 1960s for you?

Oh, it would be in a sort of, a holier-than-holy place where, I don’t think you had access to it particularly. I think you gave your tape and some guru would put the tape in for you, come out with the answers. But having one on your desk... I’m just trying to... Again, I wasn’t in the forefront of this, but I, I reckon, I reckon it would have been late Seventies or early Eighties that I had one on my desk. I’ve been, I’ve done all my writing throughout my career on keyboards, because, nobody could read my handwriting and I was in constant trouble at school with my handwriting. So the moment I escaped from school, I got on to typewriters, and did all my own typing. So it took me a while to see that actually it would be quite useful to do it on a computer rather than on a typewriter. And as I say, late Seventies, early Eighties maybe.

Mm. Once you’ve got computers to use, how much do you check the end results when they come out at the end?

Do you mean, if you’re using computers for analysis, for calculations? Well I mean that’s a very good question, because there’s a terrible tendency for people to use computers and come out with an answer, and have really very little guarantee that it has any relevance to reality. And so, at UCL when I had students, one of my principles was to insist that anything they produced on the computer would come out as a graph, not as a table, and that one could argue about whether the thing looked reasonable or not. But it’s, I mean it, it was a problem and it is a problem. You know, some of the debates that people have about climate change at the moment bears on the extent to which you can trust computer programs. There is an organisation called the Global, the Global Climate Consortium or something, Global Climate Warming Consortium, under Lord Lawson, which we were talking about early on. And, they are adamant that they, they say, so much of this climate stuff depends on computer models, and what are they? And, as far as they are concerned, computer models are not something that you should ever put any faith in. Well that of course is a nonsense. If you take that attitude, you would never step into an aeroplane, because, not only do they, were they designed on computers all the way, but most of them

Eric Ash Page 104 C1379/92/Track 5 these days are run on computers. So computer models is one of the most powerful, perhaps the most powerful thing that’s happened in science in our time. [22:10] But the question, how do you know when you’ve put something in a computer that the answer that comes out is meaningful, is a very real one and there’s no simple answer to it. I mean quite a good answer is to do it two different ways and see whether they agree. But you can’t always do that.

Mm. In your experience as a, I guess practical electronics engineer in the 1950s and ’60s, once you had computers, how much did you personally trust the results that were coming out?

Oh I was, was and still am, always suspicious about anything which comes out of a computer. I, I mean, you know, you know the, the saying, put rubbish in and you get rubbish out. So, I mean, it depends on the extent to which you’ve been able to define the problem and accurately convey it to a computer. That’s the first step. And then, quite apart from that, computers can get things wrong in rather subtle ways. For example, you can get situations where errors in the computer, inevitable errors because you have a finite number of digits, but inevitable errors multiply, so that in the end the errors take over from the real data. So there are very real problems in that. And, well, another real problem is, you can get instabilities in a computer, so that in fact, what comes out has no relationship whatsoever to what you hope would come out. It remains a very real problem.

Mm.

I mean in the same sense of course, you can always ask questions about the extent to which you trust the result of a laboratory experiment, and the scientific community is at one in saying, you don’t trust it until somebody else has done it too. So certain certainty is hard thing to acquire in science whether you’re in a laboratory or on a computer.

Do you remember any particular ways that computing came into your work as an electronics engineer?

Eric Ash Page 105 C1379/92/Track 5

I mean I think again, it’s a sort of, a question like, how many calculations do you do? It’s, it’s just a language, it’s a language that you, you use in doing your work. It’s unimaginable doing the work that we did without that language.

[24:42] I was going to ask, I guess one of the things I was wondering about was, I guess how much difference did having, you know, the ability of the computer available actually make to your work as an electronics engineer?

Well I... Yes, again that depends so much on, on what issues one is concerned with. I mean one thing we haven’t touched on yet that I was very much involved with was surface acoustic waves, and that’s work which I started when I was at UCL. Now, surface acoustic waves are acoustic waves which are launched on the surface of a crystal, and, you can use them for doing, carrying out various electronic functions. The most, the simplest and I suppose the most widely used one is as a filter, and, in that phone that you’ve just switched off there are probably two surface acoustic wave filters in it. So they are quite widespread devices. Now in order to make a filter, you can do some fairly simple mathematics to decide what, what response you would like. But if you want a very complicated response, which is what you would use for example in filters in a television set, the amount of computation which is involved is, is very considerable. And if you want to go into even greater detail and try and understand, let’s say the effect of how thick the metal is, the metal structure on your crystal, that becomes even more complicated. So the more detail you want to go into, the more computation you have to do. But you can do some things without computation.

[pause]

[27:00] What sort of things can you do without computation?

Make love. [laughs] No that’s not what, the answer you wanted.

Eric Ash Page 106 C1379/92/Track 5

In the context of electronics engineering. [laughs]

Ah, right. [pause] I would, I would say, a large part of microelectronics is very techniques-based, and where the detailed computations play a less important role. They’re fundamental, they’re necessary to understand what you are doing and direct you in a certain direction. But I would, I would guess that the people at Intel for example, I doubt that they use an awful lot of mathematics in designing their next processor. So, there are a lot of things which, which one can do without any, without detailed computation. But, it’s not easy to think of many examples of that. I mean take this aeroplane we were talking about, the 787. I believe they will have done extremely detailed calculations on the, the epoxy reinforced fibre of which the plane is made, and, to determine how often you can pressurise it before something cracks. In technology it’s fairly rare that you can do without calculations of any sort, but I’m sure there are examples where you can. I mean there used to be many more. I mean Lord Nuffield refused to employ any graduates in the Morris works for making cars, I think probably throughout his life, and I doubt that any, much mathematical modelling was done in, in my first car which was a Morris Minor 1931 vintage. But not now. I mean, in order to, in order to beat the opposition, if you are a car manufacturer, one of the important things is the number of miles you can do on a litre of petrol, and to maximise that, you are involved with very detailed calculations in what goes on inside a cylinder. I have to think harder about examples if you want them of, of branches of technology where you don’t need much mathematics or where you don’t need much calculation. I think it’s rare.

[30:10] On the subject of I guess calculations and analysis, theoretical work, how much of your work at STL was actually concerned with doing sums?

Oh, I know I’m repeating myself, but I mean, the sums are sort of part of the language, and you don’t necessarily differentiate between the physical stuff. But if I had to give an answer, I would say, quarter theory and three-quarters practice.

Mm. I guess we’ve spent a bit of time today talking about the theory bits. Could you give me one or two examples of the sorts of practical work that you would do?

Eric Ash Page 107 C1379/92/Track 5

Well we, did we talk about that the other day already, about millimetric waves?

We described what they do and how they work, but I guess, no sort of typical laboratory activities involving them.

Yes. Well I mean there’s, there’s design, and, you have to have designs that, where each part of the design is compatible with every other part. But there is the hard graft of the technology of putting things together, and how, how effectively you do that. And, so there’s a lot of different technologies involved, each one of which has to be tamed in some away or other. So, for example, in World War II one of the first new technologies that people had to develop was how to make glass to metal seals, how can you get a bit of metal going through glass, and make an effective seal. But, generally the use of, of metals, how you join metals together, which goes back I suppose to, almost prehistoric times or at least to, to classical times, but how to do that, and make seals that are totally leak-proof. There is a lot of technology involved in it, and that means doing a lot of experiments, a lot of trials, carefully recording how they, the results of these trials. And, eventually involving a technique which is the most reliable you can acquire. But the number of different technologies involved in making a microwave tube is very large. You have to make cathodes that work, things that you heat that spew out electrons, they have to do it, you want lots of electrons, not just a few, and you want the cathode to last for many thousands of hours. You want to be able to join metals together by a brazing technique which is vacuum-proof. I can make a long list of it, but I don’t think you want to hear that.

I was wondering, were you making things yourself?

Pardon?

Were you making things yourself at STL, or...?

With my bare hands you mean?

Mhm.

Eric Ash Page 108 C1379/92/Track 5

Largely not, no. One does tend to delegate this to technicians and to, and to workshops. But I mentioned early on that I had a sabbatical year in 19... [pause] I’ve just realised, I think I gave you a wrong date on... When I talked about the slide rules, did I say ’69?

I think you said ’69 in Paris.

I should have said ’79. [laughs] It’s much more dramatic, because they still had slide rules in ’79. [34:25] When I went to my sabbatical leave in Paris, I worked at the École de Physique et de Chimie in Paris, and I made a decision at the beginning of that year that every single thing I did I would do with my own hands, which I hadn’t done since I was a PhD student. And that was quite revealing, I think one learns quite a lot doing that. I started off on my first day there using an electronic instrument, of which we had several in my laboratory at University College, and it took me about ten minutes to find the on/off button. But gradually I did do real experiments and, and the machine, some bits on a lathe and whatnot. And did everything myself.

Mm. When you were at STL, who else is, who are you delegating these tasks to?

Well, there are technicians, whose job it is to, to develop the technology. And there are people in the workshop who can machine things for you. There was a glass- blower who could make glass envelopes for the things we were doing. So, these are all very responsible and, difficult tasks which are delegated to people who do it all the time. It is still a very good idea for the scientists and engineers to know how to do these things, even if they’re not doing them, because you’ve got a better chance of communicating with the technicians, and in particular when somebody tells you this can’t be done, if you happen to know that it can and you’ve done it, it helps the argument.

Eric Ash Page 109 C1379/92/Track 5

I was wondering a little bit about what your interaction with technicians is actually like. Can you just give me a flavour of it? Is it just a case of you telling them what to build, or is it more involved?

Oh, no it’s more involved. I mean it’s more partnership than that. But one would start by, by, usually with a drawing of some sort of what it is you want them to do, but, but one would have fairly constant interaction while they were on the job. And, there wasn’t much hierarchy in that. I mean you know, one was on very matey terms with... It wasn’t, you know, I am the great engineer and you are merely technicians, kind of stuff. And that’s one other reason why it’s important to do it yourself, because you find out how hard it is.

Are there any technicians you remember in particular from your time at STL?

[pause] I, I remember one or two, but I mean not in any detail. I think a technician that I remember most was at UCL when I was there, and, I wanted to do a particular experiment, and got him involved, he was an electronics technician, in setting it up, and we did it together. And this actually led to a letter in Nature which has been cited quite, quite a bit. But the sad thing about it is that this chap, whose name is Nicholls, developed what we would now recognise as Alzheimer’s, and, he really, gradually faded out from being able to do the things that he was doing so well beforehand. But yes, I was on very close terms with him, mm.

Mm. What was the experiment connected to?

The experiment was connected with what one would now call super-resolution microscopy. In a microscope, the resolution that you can get is normally limited by the wavelength of the light that you are using. What you would normally see in textbook objects that are smaller than half a wavelength of light in size, you can no longer resolve. But there are ways of getting round this, and one very simple way which has been used quite a bit is, you expose the object you want to see through a very small hole, and the hole is much less than half a wavelength in diameter. And if you get close enough to the object, you can actually resolve it. Now we did this experiment at microwave frequencies just to make it a lot easier than at optical

Eric Ash Page 110 C1379/92/Track 5 frequencies, but we showed that you could resolve objects which were very much smaller than half a wavelength.

[39:40] Mm. Linking back to that experiment with Nicholls, I guess, could you give me an idea of what each of you were doing to the end result?

Well he was, he was doing the electronics, I mean, that, that was... [pause] It was actually quite a simple experiment. But, he, he certainly produced the electronics that produced the microwaves, I mean, this would have been a mic... Well... I’ve forgotten the frequency. I, I need to look this up. But, to produce the microwaves and, and then, the detection system where you put the thing on an oscilloscope. But we would be working in the lab together on this, at least some of the time.

[40:47] To return to STL for a moment. I was wondering, did you have much contact with universities or Government labs when you were there?

Not a vast amount. I, I did actually have some contact with UCL which eventually led to my going there, and I gave some lectures there, and I also gave some lectures at, in the polytechnic, Polytechnic of North London was it? I can’t remember. [pause] I don’t think I had much contact with any other universities at the time, that I can remember. But, I do remember we did try and get some work done at UCL by some people that I knew then, and I can’t remember the details of that, but we did some, mm.

Mm. Did you have any contact with Government labs at all then?

Oh yes. Because we, we had Government contracts for radar systems for example. So yes, very much so. And to some extent even contacts with other commercial companies. Not, it wasn’t all fierce, fiercely competitive.

Mm. What sort of contacts with the people I would have assumed being your rivals?

Eric Ash Page 111 C1379/92/Track 5

Well I suppose it bears on Government contracts where one might, where one might have similar kinds of projects to, to pursue for a Government objective. But yes, and, I mean one of the things that somebody once explained to me is that actually the loyalty of engineer scientists tends to be to their field rather than to their company. So when you meet people in another company who are working on similar things, the danger is that you talk too much rather than too little. But, no we were very much involved with Government laboratories.

Mm. What sort of places?

Well, one was, I don’t think exists any more, SERL, Services Electronic Research Laboratory.

Oh, at Baldock.

Baldock, yes. Maybe it still exists, I don’t know. Doesn’t, does it?

No.

No, right. I think that was probably our main point of contact. Oh, and RSRE in Malvern.

Mm. And I guess one of the things I was wondering about was, what sort of contact, are you visiting them, are they visiting you? Just talking on the phone? What was the interaction I suppose?

Money. We want contracts from them. So one makes proposals to them, of things that you might, might be prepared to, to do, either in direct response to one of the requirements that they’ve noted or possibly even not. And, they then with luck get a contract, which pleases your bosses in the commercial company you are working in, and the interaction subsequently is report writing and getting visits from Scientific Civil Service people who are in those organisations to visit you and, and see what you do, see whether they’re happy with what you are doing.

Eric Ash Page 112 C1379/92/Track 5

Mm. What are scientific civil servants like to deal with in that sort of relationship?

More... I think, I mean, we talked about Cyril Hilsum early on. He wasn’t one of the people I dealt with at the time, but I mean he would, he would have done a lot of this from the Civil Service side, particularly on things like liquid crystals and whatnot. So, on the whole these scientific civil servant people were pretty damn competent people. On the whole, those days anyway, the Scientific Civil Service managed to recruit fairly high grade people. So one couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes, one actually had to come up with the results.

[45:28] How did your career at STL actually progress?

I’ve forgotten whether we talked about that before, but the chap who was my boss when I joined was, a man called...

T M Jackson?

Pardon?

T M Jackson, or Alec Reeves?

No neither of those. It was, it was a chap called Beck. I can’t think of his first name for God’s sake. A H W, Harold? No. Anyway. And after several years that I was there, I was there eight years altogether, he moved to Cambridge and became a lecturer in Cambridge. And I got his job. So, I ran a group of about thirty people, and I think I was probably the youngest chap in the group, which created the odd problem here and there but not, on the whole not, not too bad. But of course I had to have a boss too, and my boss was Alec Reeves, and we talked about him last time. One of the heroes in my life, mm.

Yes, what sort of boss was he?

Eric Ash Page 113 C1379/92/Track 5

Oh, very genial. But I think we did talk about that. Very imaginative. He, you wrote this down, that he anticipated optical fibres. I’m not sure he quite anticipated optical fibres as such so much as optical telecommunications, that, the future was going to go from microwaves into optics. And he was well ahead of his time in doing that, and anticipating it. Mm.

Mm.

Before the invention of the semiconductor laser.

What sort of boss do you think you were?

Oh marvellous. [laughs] You have to ask somebody else. No, I think on the whole, I think I’d give myself reasonably high marks for that. But... This begins to sound like self-praise. But on the whole I, I like people, I’m interested in people, and I regard running anything is a people, a people’s enterprise. And I think I was fairly good at giving credit to the right people and all that. [pause] I... You would have to ask other people. But of course most of them probably aren’t alive. [laughs] Not surprising since I was the youngest of that group at the time, and I’m now eighty-five. So, since they can’t talk, I can continue with my self-praise.

I don’t think you’re doing that so much actually. [laughs]

Mm.

[48:30] I was just wondering, did your responsibilities change as you became a manager?

Yah, no they do. And in fact that was, in a sense, an interesting aspect of it, because eventually I left STL and went to University College, and, did we talk about that transition last time? OK. Well, what happened was, I got a phone call from Harold Barlow who was at that time the head of the Department of Electrical Engineering saying, might I be interested in a job at UCL? And this was on a Friday, and I said, ‘Well actually I’m really quite content with what I’m doing at STL, so think, probably

Eric Ash Page 114 C1379/92/Track 5 it’s not for me.’ And I rang him back on the Monday and said, ‘I’ve thought about it over the weekend,’ and, there were two things that influenced me. One of them was, Harlow was a one-hour drive in the mornings and one hour-plus in the evenings, and UCL was a ten-minute cycle ride from home. But the other reason was that, I had reached a level at STL where the next promotion up would have taken me out of actually doing anything myself, other than being an administrator. And I really didn’t feel that I wanted to give up on research and being an engineer or a scientist. So these two things persuaded me to, become an academic.

Mm.

I’ve always said that avoiding commuting is not a terribly respectable reason for becoming an academic, but it did play a large part in my, in my case. I mean the alternative course would have been to move to Harlow New Town, but my wife said she would then divorce me, and since in other ways we got on all right, it seemed a pity.

[54:36] Can you tell me a bit more about your wife? You’ve sort of introduced her last time, I was wondering, how things have progressed in the ten years or so since we met her.

Oh. You, you don’t mean in the ten weeks since we last met, you mean...?

I mean in the ten years, I guess, that have passed in the interview, eight years.

Yah. No, I mean... She, she got involved in a number of things. She... She taught at a teachers’ training college for a while. She started a children’s theatre which was very successful for a while. And then subsequently she taught at the University of the South Bank. But she decided on having teaching as a major part of what she wanted to do because it gave school holidays, and, since we had all these odd children, that seemed to be quite important. She’s also what I call an architect manqué, she really likes buildings, likes design very much, and so we got involved in acquiring some properties, so that has led her really even to this day to running what is a small business.

Eric Ash Page 115 C1379/92/Track 5

Acquiring properties in what sense?

Buying them, without any money. In other words, mortgages. And it was actually, you know, it’s not that we are wise before the event, but being wise after the event, it was actually a fairly sensible thing to do, because inflation took care of a lot of the debt as one went along. So she’s still very much involved in that, but... We are also run by family, mm.

When do your children start arriving on the scene?

Well my eldest daughter is fifty-five. I can always remember that because she always was thirty years younger than me. So she would have arrived on the scene in ’58 I suppose. And the twins, our last lot, arrived I think in ’66.

Mm. How many children did you have, do you have?

Five. We had two, and then a third came along that we weren’t wholly expecting, and then my wife had this idea that since we have three, it’s an uneven number, one should square it up. And so we had our fourth, which turned out to be twins.

What’s family life like?

Hectic.

[laughs] I was sort of thinking specifically maybe the 1960s, 1970s when your family is still young.

Yah. It was hectic. I mean twins particularly. Twins tend to be born relatively small, so they take a long time before they sleep through a night. So for six months or so we, we didn’t get much sleep.

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 116 C1379/92/Track 5

And we had three others, aged between five and eight. So yes, it was quite a hectic time, mm.

Does having children change your life at all?

Oh yes, good Lord yes. Well I can’t imagine what it would have been if they weren’t there, so it’s... I think it’s, again it’s a bit like your question, how many calculations do you do? It’s, it’s just part of the, the sea in which you swim.

[54:52] Mm. How do you actually juggle family like and work in the Sixties and Seventies?

Oh, well I mean, my wife tended to have school holidays. I was an academic and, I have always maintained that academics on the whole work harder than people in industry. I mean that’s by observation, it’s not just a guess. And I think on the whole academics over-work rather than under-work. I mean, academics can take the system for a ride, you can do very little in the university if you set your mind to it. But most of them who have gone to a university because that’s what they want to do, tend to over-work. But, you have freedom. So, you know, if, if there is a problem at home, unless you happen to be giving a lecture at that time, you are, you can just buzz off and deal with it. So, freedom in the university I think is extremely valuable anyway but particularly if you are lumbered with all these kids.

What sort of father do you think you were? Can you give me an insight into I guess your parenting philosophy, or, style?

Well, I, I summarise it by saying to everybody who gets involved with this, you can’t get parenting right, it’s totally impossible. And the most you can hope to do is not to get it disastrously wrong. I think we succeeded on the latter.

Mm. Were you a particularly involved father, or...?

Yah, I think pretty much, yes. Yah.

Eric Ash Page 117 C1379/92/Track 5

Mm.

I mean, one doesn’t have to have kids, but if one does, I mean I think it is quite a privilege, and, it’s fun to see what happens.

Did you have anything in particular in mind you wanted for your daughters?

Very little. I mean very very few things. The one thing that I felt very strongly about is, they should be able to earn their own living, they should not have to rely on these frail people called men. They should be independent. But other than that, I mean, did I want them to be engineers, or, musicians or whatnot? No. I mean, I’m happy to see how they, what they wanted to do.

Mm. Well I guess looking at your home life again, did you have any other hobbies outside work?

[pause] Well I, I don’t know about hobbies. I mean, we like swimming. One of my tasks was to make sure all five of my daughters could swim properly, and I might say, I failed on every single one of them. And that was quite a lesson to me, because, I discovered that you can’t actually teach your kids that sort of thing, you need a professional to do it. And the reason is very simple. I mean, kids learn things from teachers because they want to earn their respect. They don’t need to earn the respect of their father or their mother, they’ve got that anyway, they know it. So they... But I took them to pools and, and they all learnt to swim pretty well. Indeed, two of them got involved in a swimming club, which I described as being almost fascist, because what, the people in the club really took the swimming desperately seriously. And so I think they started off every time they went there by doing four lengths with each of the four strokes as a warm-up, and then they started proper swimming. Surprise surprise, they were a bit tired by the time they got home. Do you swim? Yah. Seriously? Yes.

Not really. I, I only learnt to swim about four years ago, so... [laughs]

Oh really? Ah. That’s interesting. Mm.

Eric Ash Page 118 C1379/92/Track 5

Yes, so, I was never really good at it at school, so...

Oh. I was keen on it for no other reason than that when we go to the beach, I don’t continually want to count heads to make sure that they’re still there.

Mm.

And it’s quite interesting. Some years ago I would, I don’t know how many years, it would be interesting to remember that, but I used to say, ‘If you’re going to swim out any distance, you know, I’m going to come with you.’ And then from one year to the next it changed, ‘Daddy, if you’re going to swim out any distance, we’d better come with you.’ [laughs]

[1:00:20] Mm. I guess as well, something else I was wondering about was, have you got any technical hobbies outside work, what you do?

No. Well I’m, that’s not quite true. I mean certainly, I’ve done a lot of carpentry in my time, but, I was going to say, it’s not the carpentry you would recognise here, but in fact I’m not sure it isn’t. Because they use screws here, and that’s the way I do my carpentry.

Building what sort of thing?

Well when we first moved into the house that we are in, when we had I suppose, we had three children, the youngest was about two I think, and we had no money, which has been the story of our lives, so we managed to get into the house but we had no furniture. So for about six months we slept on a mattress, and then eventually I made a bed. And I made furniture for a study, and, shelves and work surfaces and all that sort of thing, which I enjoy doing. But, it’s not the sort of carpentry that carpenters would, would recognise. I mean, do you do any carpentry at all? No.

I have five thumbs on both hands, so... [laughs]

Eric Ash Page 119 C1379/92/Track 5

Yah. Yeah, well... I mean, give you one example. You should never put a screw into the end grain of wood, so you if have a bit of wood here, and you have the end grain there, if you put a screw in, it’s not very strong. However, if it’s a long screw, and if you use enough glue, it’s fine. So that’s, that’s my theory of carpentry, long screws and lots of glue.

Mm.

So, yah, that’s a sort of a hobby I suppose.

How well paid was working at STL, if you don’t mind me asking?

How well paid?

Mm, yes.

Oh gosh. I started in, in ’55, I think, and I think my salary was £1200 a year. And progressively it went up.

Mm. With a growing family, how far does that stretch?

[pause] Well not very far. That’s perfectly true. Which is why both of us worked. But I think... I’m just trying to think. [pause] We didn’t feel desperately poor. I mean we had our 1931 Morris Minor for example you know. [pause] But I, I suppose it was both of us having a salary, that helped a lot. And then my salary did go up at STL, and... Well, I’ve sometimes had a table of inflation, to be able to translate rapidly what it is in present-day times, and I always get irritated I might say with historians who talk about money in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth century, and give figures to, which are totally meaningless unless they have at least a footnote what it might be in modern terms. [pause] Yes. And when I got to UCL, which was, ’62 I think... Do I mean ’62? [pause] ’63 I think. Anyway. One of the other advantages of an academic is, you can, you are allowed to earn some money on a freelance basis, and I did a bit of that. So that eased the situation quite a bit.

Eric Ash Page 120 C1379/92/Track 5

There was one other question I was wondering about in passing, and you mentioned you didn’t want your daughters to sort of grow up, you know, needing to rely on a man for an income. Where does that sort of feeling come from?

Oh I... Well I mean, you just look at life all around you, you know. It’s a bad idea for anybody not to be capable of being independent, that’s all. I think it, it gives you choices, that’s all. I didn’t really mean that they should hate men or, or not have anything to do with them or anything of this sort. I just think, the ability to look after oneself is a freedom which I, I value.

Were there many women working at STL when you were there?

No. Very rare. Not even sure whether I can remember one. Well, I mean, secretarial staff of course, but, but I don’t think we had a single engineer who was a woman at that time.

Mm. Shall we take a short break and then move on to UCL perhaps?

God! Time does go, doesn’t it.

[End of Track 5]

Eric Ash Page 121 C1379/92/Track 6

[Track 6]

Well when did you start at UCL?

’63.

Do you remember what your first impressions were of the place?

[pause] Well I, I suppose, it was the extent to which one didn’t have to worry about efficiency, effectiveness. I mean it was all sort of, a much looser kind of environment. I remember I was asked to give a set of lectures on a particular subject, and I think there were seven students in the audience for that. And I said, ‘This can’t be cost-effective. I mean does it matter?’ And they said, ‘Oh no no no, this, you know, that’s, that’s perfectly all right, you know, it’s just that seven students wasn’t to hear this particular theme, that’s all.’ So, it was very free and easy in that sense.

Mm.

But then, I suppose, one very rapidly wanted to get involved in, in doing some research, so starting, starting up on that, was arduous. And one needed to get money for equipment. And I remember applying to the Royal Society for a grant, and the first grant I ever got was in fact from the Royal Society.

What was it for?

A heavy table. Which may not sound, [laughs] sound that inspirational to you, but if you want to do optical experiments, you want to put your optical elements onto a very steady platform.

Mm.

And the other thing I remember is, I was actually replacing somebody who had moved to the University of Southampton, and, he was about to take on a PhD student, and asked me to take him on instead. He was an Indian student, and frankly he wasn’t

Eric Ash Page 122 C1379/92/Track 6 very good. But what evolved subsequently was a bit worse than that, in that, he was importing mango jam from India, but it turned out only the top inch was mango jam, and the rest was cannabis or something, I can’t remember what. Now, there was a group of people who were involved in this, I mean he was the only one at UCL, and, he was well on the way to getting his PhD so this would have been three years later kind of thing, and the judge who was sentencing I think a group of three people, assumed this must be the leader, you know, he is a PhD student, he must be very bright and, the brains behind it. In fact, I think he was a stooge, I don’t think he was in any way behind it. But he did end up by getting a jail sentence. And the question then was, could he still get a PhD? And there were people who felt that if somebody had been so evil that he had gone to jail, the university can’t give him a PhD. And I took the opposite view, I took the view that society has punished him for the mango jam; it isn’t up to the university to double the sentence particularly. So he did eventually write up a PhD, not a very good one but it just about passed muster, in jail. And I needed to get an external examiner with me, and the chap I chose to do it was one who had landed me with this student, who was then in Southampton. And we, we actually conducted the PhD viva in jail, I think it was Margate jail, I can’t remember, somewhere, somewhere there. Anyway I think I’m digressing too much. That was my first PhD student. I had better ones after that.

[04:55] What was your actual position when you joined UCL?

I think I was a senior lecturer. And I got promoted to being a reader fairly soon afterwards, I think two years afterwards or something like that.

Mm. Did that seem like a fast rate of progression at the time, or...?

Well, reasonably fast, yes. And I became a professor, God I wonder what year that would have been. Maybe ’68, ’69, somewhere, round about that.

Mm. One of the things I was interested in was when you mentioned that, well your earliest impressions about being at the university was the lack of efficiency and effectiveness...

Eric Ash Page 123 C1379/92/Track 6

Yup.

...after working at STL. Had STL struck you as being an efficient and effective place beforehand?

Well, at least one knew what one was about, one was supposed to make money. Universities never quite know what they’re about. So there isn’t a yardstick, there isn’t a way you can measure things, like for example whether giving lectures to a very small number of students is justifiable or not. So that was a bit of a shock, seeing that change. I think STL on the whole was pretty efficiently run, yes.

Mm. What department did you actually join at UCL?

Electrical Engineering.

How big was the department back then?

I would guess, staff of maybe, fifteen or thereabouts. And, total number of students, gosh. [pause] I would guess about, probably about eighty undergraduate students and maybe, fifty or thereabouts postgraduates, or research students. Quite small in other words.

[07:30] What was your own research area when you started?

Well I started on something a little bit newer, which was in fact concerned with ultrasonics, and in particular, having been involved with travelling-wave tubes I mentioned before, it turned out there was, interesting different ways of amplifying waves which had a lot of similarity to travelling-wave tubes, but instead of slow-wave structures, it was in a crystal in which you had both the electrons and the propagating acoustic waves, instead of electromagnetic waves. And, with that system, one could actually get large gains over large band widths. And it turned out it, it was a dead duck. The reason being, as so often when you are working on any technology, there’s

Eric Ash Page 124 C1379/92/Track 6 another technology that leaps over this. And it turned out that silicon technology was all-embracing. And, when one, when we started this, whatever the year was, ’63 or something, you couldn’t make silicon transistors at very high frequencies, but gradually they got faster and faster and higher and higher frequencies, and it turned out that you could do with transistors everything that you could do with this rather more complex situation. But it did lead me to the interest in acoustic waves and in particular the possibility of surface acoustic waves, and so a lot of the work that I did subsequently was concerned with surface acoustic waves. [09:55] You look puzzled. I mentioned them before briefly. But, acoustic waves that we are using in communicating with each other at the moment go through the air, and they are ordinary, ordinary volume waves. But it turns out that acoustic waves can be made to hug the surface of a solid, and actually they were discovered in a sense by Rayleigh in the nineteenth century as earthquake waves. There is a component of earthquake waves which hugs the surface of the Earth, and is detectable as a separate entity, earthquake waves, by seismologists. But oddly enough, these same waves can also propagate at much higher frequencies, the earthquake waves have a frequency, I don’t know, maybe of the order of one or two hertz or something, I’m, I’m not sure, but very low frequencies. But you can propagate such waves on crystals at very high frequencies, and eventually people did in fact do it at gigahertz frequencies. Now, one of the components one needs in electronics is delay. If you want to delay a signal, you can have a delay line of some sort where you inject the signal at the beginning and it moves slowly through acoustic waves through a crystal. And such delay lines were well known and a very important part of technology going back into the Twenties I think. And they, there were really two main purposes. One was delay, and the other one is crystal resonators, and, and they have remained important to this very day.

Mm. What’s a crystal resonator for?

On, if you want to know a frequency very accurately, control a frequency very accurately, you need some kind of a resonator in which a thing can, the signal can bounce forward and backwards in some way or other. And a very simple resonator is in fact a crystal, and in particular piezoelectric crystal, that’s a crystal in which the

Eric Ash Page 125 C1379/92/Track 6 acoustic waves create voltages in the crystal, so you can detect them by using ordinary electronics. And, one of the things that is very important in telecommunications is to have, to have frequencies which are very stable. And such, such crystals can be made which have quite amazing stability, which is why the watch you are wearing at the moment will probably be correct to a second or so for a month or two, that sort of order. These are very cheap common or garden crystals; if you make special ones, you can make it 1,000 times more stable. So it’s quite an extraordinary result, and very widely used.

What did you actually make crystals out of, what sort of crystals were you using back in the Sixties?

Well, we weren’t actually working on these resonators, but I mean, the standard crystal is quartz. But there are various other crystals which are used, and one of the main features that you look for in a crystal that you use, for example in a watch, is its temperature stability. So, whether you go out in the snow or you are in the heat of the sun, it doesn’t alter the thing too much. So that’s a large part of the game.

Mm.

[14:50] But, the surface acoustic waves I’m talking about was really quite new, although Rayleigh discovered it in the nineteenth century. And the thing about surface acoustic waves is the very fact that they propagate on the surface of a crystal, and you could launch them with an electrode structure on the surface, you can detect them with a similar electrode structure on the surface. But, one of the great advantages of it is, that it is on the surface, so you can get at it. So while the thing is propagating, you can put other electrodes on the surface, and these can influence the way the wave propagates, and they can produce filter functions so that only certain frequencies can get through. And that’s the surface acoustic wave filters that you have in your telephone. The idea of using surface acoustic wave filters, I wasn’t the only person to do it. There were several other people in the same game, in particular a chap in France called Tournois, t-o-u-r-n-o-i-s. But it was a very new game, and, we were talking about getting money from government authorities. I got a grant for working

Eric Ash Page 126 C1379/92/Track 6 on such things, and I think I was the first person in the UK to get a grant for working on this sort of thing.

How did you become interested in surface acoustic waves in the first place?

Well really through this thing I was mentioning early on, which is that you can make amplifiers on crystals. But I, I really asked the question of, whether the, the waves on the surface of a crystal would have the same velocity in respect of the frequency that they were propagating at. And I remember phoning up somebody at Mullard’s Electronics who was an expert on crystal resonators, and he didn’t immediately know the answer but he rang me back and said, yes, no they, they will be of a constant velocity. And that led to the idea that one could make filters, one would know how to design filters that way, and also resonators. And I remember giving a talk to people in the Post Office research laboratory, then still at Dollis Hill, on this, but they weren’t terribly interested. Other people took it up much more. And in fact, it has become a sizeable industry.

Mm. I was thinking, thinking back to the 1960s when you first had become interested in this. I understand the sort of principles involved of building a filter on a crystal, but, what does it actually look like in the lab, to actually see one of these things?

Well what it would look like is, if you saw one, you’d need a magnifying glass or possibly a microscope to see it properly, but you would see metal stripes deposited on top of a crystal. And, the way you would deposit these stripes is using the same techniques that you use in microelectronics, and then use photolithography. You look worried by that. Well that is, the key thing about microelectronics is that you make photographic masks and you print these masks onto silicon crystals, and the whole, the whole basis of modern electronics is that you can do these extraordinarily complicated things using just photographic masks. It becomes a printing game in the first instance. And we could use photolithography in the same way for making surface acoustic wave structures.

Mm. Did you actually have this photolithography equipment in your laboratory?

Eric Ash Page 127 C1379/92/Track 6

To, to... Yes. Yes, I mean... [pause] Yes indeed, I mean we, we would print these things ourselves onto, onto crystals. Much more complicated to do it for microelectronics, because you have lots more, different things to take care of. But one of the beauties of surface acoustic waves is their simplicity. It’s basically a crystal and metal stripes on it, which you can put on there with photolithography according to a design.

And where do you actually feature yourself in that process?

Well, you design the structures. And, you, you get the masks made, if they’re... You design it and you, you can get the masks made on a big scale and then have them photo-reduced to a very small scale.

[21:10] Mm. What are you actually designing this on? Is it sort of blueprints, diagrams, numbers? What is it designed for, let’s say a filter on a crystal?

It’s a very simple drawing that you do, and it’s really essentially where you put these metal strips and how you connect them.

Mm. Once you’ve got the device at the end of this, what do you do with it next?

Well you see whether it works the way you want it to work, whether there is in fact difference of filter, whether it filters the right frequencies and not the wrong frequencies. I mean the filter that you, that you need for a television set is really quite complicated. You have to avoid certain frequencies, stop certain frequencies, and pass certain frequencies, without any distortion. And... But I wasn’t personally involved in doing, designing such complex filters. We were really just more on the basic structures and the basic behaviour of acoustic surface waves.

Mm. And can you give me some idea of how your work in this field actually develops from that early interest?

Eric Ash Page 128 C1379/92/Track 6

Well I continued to work on such things for quite a long time, including my second sabbatical in my life, which was ’69 to ’70, which I spent at IBM in the States, in Yorktown Heights research laboratory.

Mm.

[23:00] And they got interested in surface acoustic waves as possible delay lines. At that time there was a possibility that they might have an impact on computer structures; that turned out not to be the case. It was in telecommunications that these filters really played their part. But in my time at IBM, I started doing some work on resonators. I’ve mentioned filters as one element you can make, but you could also make resonators which are in a sense rather special filters, I mean they, they propagate only at one particular frequency over a very small band of frequencies. And such resonators have become quite important. There are many companies who make such surface acoustic wave resonance. Siemens for example has a big, a big activity in this. And, during my time at IBM, I was also, got very interested in very high frequency surface acoustic waves, and there was a chap there by the name of Alec Broers. Have you come across him? Yes, or you...? Yes, you have. Have you done him? No. [laughs]

Whenever we sort of come across anybody, assume I, I have no idea about them, though in many cases I might. [laughs] It’s...

Yah. Yah. Well he, he was a Cambridge PhD who went to IBM. And he worked on electron beam lithography. I mentioned lithography just now, that’s what all of microelectronics is about. But eventually, it turns out that you can’t make what you need with optical lithography. Or, sorry, let’s start again. You can’t make the masks you need with optical lithography, and Alec Broers was involved in developing the technique for doing it with electron beams. And that’s used very widely now, I mean all the, all the companies that make complex microelectronic structures use masks that are made with an electron beam. And, Alec was able to make masks for surface acoustic waves which enabled one to go to very high frequencies like two gigahertz and that sort of thing. Well subsequently Alec went back to Cambridge. I had a slight

Eric Ash Page 129 C1379/92/Track 6 hand in this. I was on the selection committee for a chair in Cambridge, and, they were about to give it to an internal candidate, and some of us were able to tell Cambridge that that would be not the best bet, and they took Alec Broers, who then subsequently became Master of Churchill, and subsequently Vice-Chancellor, and is now in the House of Lords. So, he had a pretty sparkling career.

What was he like back in 1970?

Oh, just the way he is now actually, very easy to talk to, and... I did some skiing with him, he was s a very keen skier, and I could never keep up with him which I resented. But I didn’t resent it as much as not being able to keep up with his wife either, Mary. But we enjoyed skiing with them all the same.

[27:20] Looking back at that sabbatical at IBM, I’ve always wondered, what sort of place was IBM to work at?

Well it was a pretty amazing place in, in that, it was really like a university. One could really work on almost anything one wanted to work on, and people did. And it was an extremely broad-minded idea. I don’t think it’s anything like that any longer, the idea that industrial research laboratories hardly need their own justification. Of course IBM then set up a laboratory in Zurich, which was celebrated because they won the Nobel Prize two years running I think.

Mm. Well what sort of, what sort of place was the IBM facility? What sort of, a campus or a building or, what sort of a...?

No, it’s a building, with a celebrated architect, whose name will come to me in a moment. But it’s the best research laboratory building that I have ever experienced. I think it’s a lovely building. It’s built as an annulus with radial corridors going through the annulus. And, the architect made one sacrifice, which I think was enormously worthwhile although, it wouldn’t have been obvious to me, and that is, no daylight. All the corridors, these radial corridors, were all lit by artificial light. On the other hand, going on the outside of this annulus, or the inside, you had marvellous

Eric Ash Page 130 C1379/92/Track 6 views of New England scenery. The library had such views, the canteen had such views, but the individual laboratories were all in artificial light. And I found that, I thought I, I wouldn’t like it, but I found in fact it was, it worked really very well. If you have good light, interior lighting, and good air conditioning, it’s really totally satisfactory. The only time I found it was unpleasant is if occasionally I worked late at night, and I was on one corridor, and so the lights were on on my side of the corridor, but on the other side of the corridor they were all off, so one suddenly realised one was in a cave. But normally, it, it was, it was absolutely fine as far as I was concerned. And it was a very liberal-minded organisation at the time. But I suspect that didn’t quite survive into the late Eighties, Nineties and the, what do they call them, the zeros? No the noughties.

I think we’re in the noughties, yes. Although we’re not even in the noughties any more, which is a...

Yes. No, we’ve missed those haven’t we. Yes.

How does one actually get to go on a sabbatical to somewhere like IBM, is there any sort of process or...?

I had a friend there, so I had a, I had a contact. But, it was, IBM was very keen on attracting people from universities who would spend a year there. And IBM was extremely good at making contact with universities. And of course, recruiting people from universities, that was the name of the game. They were very good at it. I mean I was, I was very impressed by what I saw there. If they were thinking of hiring somebody, they would invite him, and if he had a wife, a partner, inviting them as well for maybe two or three days, and they would be asked to give talks to, one talk about their PhD subject or something. But they would then be interviewed by something like, I think five separate groups. And, you know, with a couple of people at a time or something. And if any of those groups had their doubts, that person would not be given a job. You needed unanimous enthusiasm by all of them. So surprise surprise, they picked up damn good people. [32:20]

Eric Ash Page 131 C1379/92/Track 6

I contrast this with an experience I had subsequently. Do you mind going out of chronology? I was at one time a board member of BT, and I took a great interest in the BT research laboratories in Martlesham, and one of the things I discovered was that the HR people, who were hiring, were doing absolutely nothing like what IBM was doing. And I think it’s, it’s been very much to the detriment of BT, they failed any of these careful checks. And indeed when I asked, talked to them about the hiring of PhD students, asking them, ‘Which universities have you been hiring from?’ and the chap didn’t know. It, it hadn’t occurred to him that this might be quite important. [33:33] Anyway, back to IBM. They certainly got the bright people. And the next thing they did is, having hired a person, they would ask them the following year to go back to the university, talk to their supervisor, and talk to all the students who were there. A very good way of recruiting. And of course IBM has been an amazingly successful company, not in recent times quite as successful as Apple, but on the other hand, Apple has had its problems very recently as you know, and IBM has somehow or other sustained itself through the whole of the modern revolution in electronics and computing, for many decades, and is still doing extremely well.

What influence do you think that sabbatical at IBM was on you?

Well, one influence was, on how to recruit. You know I think that, what they did was so obvious in a sense and yet so few people did it. [pause] No, the other influence I think was, how an industrial company can be pretty broad-minded about what they allow people to do. And I think a third influence was patenting. They’re very keen on patenting, and did a great deal of it. And they had a sort of, a slight encouragement for how, how to patent, how to reward people with patents, and that is, if you got a patent published, it was so many points; if it was finally granted, it was more points. And when you had a certain number of points, typically I think something like, arising from something like five patents, they would have a little celebration and hand over a cheque. And the cheque wasn’t that significant for people at IBM who were really quite well paid, but significant enough that you could buy a new washing machine with it, or something like that, I mean something tangible that would be noticeable in the house. And people really like that sort of thing. [pause] One other thing that struck me as quite important in their patenting method. If you had two people on a

Eric Ash Page 132 C1379/92/Track 6 patent, did you share the points between the two? The answer is, no. You gave each one the full complement of points. The result is, there was great encouragement for people to share ideas with each other. And, I think that was a very effective way of building a community where people didn’t hug their ideas for themselves.

[37:10] That’s quite a vivid portrayal of IBM you’ve just given me. I was wondering if we could take the same sort of approach on the same sort of topics that you brought up, and applying that to how UCL was beforehand. What sort of place was UCL to work at in comparison?

Well I mean UCL of course is, is a very liberal kind of a university. Its history I think is important. It was started in 1827, and at that time was the only place in England where you could study if you didn’t happen to be Church of England. Even the Catholics could not study in... Well I’m not sure about Oxford and Cambridge. But I think they, there was an impediment there anyway. Certainly not if you were Jewish or if you were a Muslim or, or God forbid, a non-believer like me. Are you a believer?

I think I’d probably label myself agnostic if I had to give an answer.

Yah, OK. So, I mean that’s the background. But not only that, I mean not only the Liberal attitude to religion, but, they invented a lot of what is now part of the academic, the academic scene. So for example, they were the first people to regard modern languages as a, as an appropriate academic discipline; the first people to have engineering as an academic discipline; certainly the first people to have at least some forms of art as a, I mean, nature studies for example, nature drawing. But I think the whole of the Slade School was totally novel when it arrived. They of course had Jeremy Bentham to inspire them in the directions that they went. So there were a whole series of disciplines that really were invented by UCL, and it was really the first proper English university, although that title was then taken away by the new University of London who created places like King’s College in, in order to counter the godless place of Gower Street. So, that, that spirit of liberalism really was maintained and was tangible I think in the time that I went there. On the other hand,

Eric Ash Page 133 C1379/92/Track 6 when I went there, there were three staff lounges. There was a ladies’ staff lounge, a men’s staff lounge, and believe it or not, a mixed staff lounge. The men’s lounge was of course the biggest. And, I wonder when that, why that system was abolished. Very late. I, I would guess as late as the late Seventies or maybe even early Eighties. Which is extraordinary, for a place like UCL. But, at least women had equal rights in every other way.

Which staff lounge did you use?

Oh, I, I would normally go to the mixed, but I, I would... The men’s one, I assumed when I first started in the system that there would be a lot of naughty suggestive drawings on the wall or, people would have conversations that would not be fit for women to hear. In fact what you found was, there was a mathematics table and, and a chemists’ table, and they’d talk about mathematics and chemistry. [pause] But I was not a, an active pioneer in women’s lib, although I supported it whenever I could.

You mentioned that there was a mathematicians’ table, a chemists’ table. Is there an electronics engineers’ table that you sit at, or do you...?

Well I mean, these were not formal, it’s just that, that people were so narrow-minded that they prefer to talk to their own people, rather than being exposed to something different. So I mean, in that sense, the mixed table, the mixed lounge, really made a lot more sense.

Where did you tend to sit?

Oh, not specifically at any table, no. But I suppose I’d, quite often I would be going with somebody to the lounge and talk to them there.

What sort of environment was the lounge to go into?

I, I would say, not terribly jovial. I mean it was, it was a fairly quiet kind of a place. [pause] I... I don’t, I don’t think that it was a centre of much political discussion, I

Eric Ash Page 134 C1379/92/Track 6 mean even in University College, political discussion. It’s not a very exciting place, no.

[43:48] What were your laboratory facilities like at UCL in the Sixties?

Well, you had to build them really, essentially. I mean had to, you had the... We had enough space, we were not badly off for space. That’s part of the, the generosity of the accountancy. I mean, much later universities had begun to count space. I mean nowadays, university departments have to break even on some metric or other, and in some universities space is, is one of the issues that comes into it. But at that time, that wasn’t the way people looked at it at all. I don’t even know whether one knew whether a department was breaking even in any sense. But there was enough space, we didn’t have terrible difficulty in setting up our equipment or experiments in order to, to pursue our research.

Mm.

But you did have to get money, in order to buy equipment, mm.

You’ve mentioned the Royal Society in passing already, but where else does one get money to buy equipment from?

Well there was some money within the university, but other than that, Government contracts, and in some cases industrial contracts, which we pursued, both of which we would pursue, yes.

Mm. I was wondering if you could give me an idea of what, perhaps describe to me what your work space at UCL was actually like.

Well, we all had an office, it was quite a smallish office but I mean, but as big as I would ever want myself. Unlike this thing that I inherited when I went to Imperial College, which was big enough for a tennis court or something. Totally, utterly ridiculous. But anyway. The spaces we had, I mean they were, gosh, I’d have to sort

Eric Ash Page 135 C1379/92/Track 6 of think in terms of square metres, but they were, they were big enough rooms for putting your equipment in. I mean, I, I would say quite a few rooms which would be ten times the size of this room for example.

Mm.

We were in the engineering building which had been built, relatively recently before then, I’m not sure exactly when, but I would guess in the late Fifties, and I think it was built on a fairly generous scale. I mean, one, I mean one space example that I remember, one of the things that electrical engineers are concerned with are electric motors and, electric dynamos and that sort of thing. And, at that time, one had electric, one did experiments as students, undergraduates did experiments on electric motors, which would be possibly the size of this table. And so you had a whole large floor area with lots of these machines in it. And, I remember subsequently when I became the Head of Department, which was in 1980, I said, ‘Please, let’s get rid of these machines, it is totally ridiculous.’ Because, you could do an experiment on a machine which is this size, and you can do it, deduce exactly the same kind of behavioural things. Of course, it won’t in detail, the actual numbers that come out will be different, but you can, but the principles that you want to expose by working on the big machine, you can do on a little machine. And instead of having large instruments with ammeters and, and pointers that moved around, you can do it all with electronic instrumentation. So I mean, at one blow we were able to win a vast amount of space.

[48:48] Mm. Well what sort of equipment, instruments, does one actually need to do research into acoustic surface waves in the Sixties?

Oh it, the actual experimental stuff that one was doing, would be things which you could put on a bench, which would fit into half the size of this room. I mean, you really don’t need a vast amount of space for it. You would have electronic instruments like oscilloscopes and that sort of thing on the bench. Making them is a different matter, with photolithography, for that you need to have a laboratory which has wet chemistry in it, because, the process of making these structures I was talking

Eric Ash Page 136 C1379/92/Track 6 about involves evaporating metal onto, onto a, a crystal, and then doing the photolithography, then you have to do chemistry on it and whatnot.

Mm. Can you describe to me I guess one of the experiments that you might do in your laboratory in the Sixties?

Well, on acoustic surface waves, I mean the main experiments you do is just, do electronic measurements. But I was involved in, well, for example in... Well let me go back one sentence. I mean when you do experiments on acoustic surface waves, you may want to use different crystals, and you need to know the parameters of the crystals that are involved. And in order to... So for example, one of the things you need to do is, you need to know very accurately the velocity of propagation of these waves on these crystals. And one of the ways in which one would do this was, using laser technology where you would shine laser beams onto the crystal and deduce things from the electronic instrumentation that was attached to the crystals. So that involved rather more space. And, as I say, lasers and...

[51:37] Mm. I was I guess wondering a little bit about, what a typical day was like, what sort of activities take up a typical day’s work at UCL. Could you perhaps talk me through what you might do in a day please?

I can’t remember. But I, I think... I, I think, some of it would be spent in my study, in my office. Quite a lot would be spent in the laboratory talking with students, doing things with students. And of course, one also gave lectures, and one had to prepare lectures. So that took up a substantial amount of time. And then we had a tutorial system where you would have tutorials with undergraduate students, and that would take up a, a fair amount of time. [pause] One would spend time reading in libraries. And of course there’s also time when one would spend outside the college, interacting with the various sponsors that one has. There would be interaction with professional, professional groups, in my case the IEE, Institution of Electrical Engineers. [pause] I don’t know how I spent my time. I was pretty busy. Well it was of course, particularly busy with PhD students. I mean at one time I had as many as eight, at one

Eric Ash Page 137 C1379/92/Track 6 time, which was a bit too much. But I, I reckoned that I wanted to have a one-hour session with each student one a week.

Mm. I always wondered, with sort of PhD students, who’s choosing the topics for them? And are they fitting in...

I reckon... Well I mean, first of all, you, the student would need to want to work with you, and, he or she would know something about the kind of work that you are involved in. And you would chat to them about the work, and if it interests them. That would be the starting point. But, I have always felt that, it’s very important to give a student a starting idea. There should be something novel that you can suggest which can be developed and could lead to publications and lead to, to progress in the field in some way. For good students, they would very rarely end up with, with, doing exactly what was, simply pursuing that particular line of research; they would have other ideas as they went along, and develop those. But I think it’s terribly important to have a starting idea. Because a new student, the idea of doing anything actually new is quite a, is quite a, a major step. I mean I should think in history, it’s sort of easier in a way, because as, you’ve got the whole world to, to draw on, and so doing something different would seem to me perhaps more natural than in science where the whole idea of actually going across a frontier is sort of frightening and, and difficult to, to imagine for a new PhD student. So I think that’s the important step.

Mm. Are your PhD students all researching their own sort of independent topics, or are you slotting them into a research group or a broader strategy for...?

I, I like to have, I liked to have more than one student in an area so they could talk to each other, not on the same theme, not so that they, they’re directly interacting with each other on a particular project. [56:33] But, I mean, we’ve talked about one area that I did research on, surface acoustic waves. I was involved with quite a few other areas as well. And I had one very good student called Kumar Wickramasinghe, and with him did some work on acoustic holography. This is the idea of using acoustic waves instead of light waves in

Eric Ash Page 138 C1379/92/Track 6 holography. And he subsequently went to the States and is now a professor at the University of San Diego and, doing some very exciting work.

Mm. How important are your research students to your own research?

Oh very important. I’ve always described them as essential slave labour. You, you couldn’t... In experimental research you can’t really expect to make progress just with your own bare hands. It can be done. Andrew Huxley never had more than one research student. But, there were different circumstances there. But basically, I think most academics in experimental research work with and through research students. [pause] The important thing of course is to make it an equal kind of a relationship, and with good students that’s quite easy. With not so good students, they tend to remain dependent on, on your ideas throughout their time. But yes, no, I think, I think it’s very important. Not true in every subject. I mean if you are a mathematician, I find that mathematicians, at Imperial College for example, were not particularly interested in having PhD students working with them. They did sometimes, they weren’t against it, but they didn’t actually need them.

An equal relationship in what sort of ways do you think between academic and PhD students?

Well the equality comes particularly in publications. One of the things that people play a lot of games with, more now than in my time actually, is, the order in which authors are put in a publication. I had a principal of doing it in anti-alphabetic order, which I thought was an extremely generous thing to do. I find nowadays, people interpret the last name on the thing as being the, very often the most senior person. So I think nowadays it wouldn’t look quite as generous. But, but I think it’s terribly important that people are encouraged. And I encourage students to write papers without my name on it. I have committed many sins in my life, but putting my name on something that I shouldn’t have it on, is not one of them.

Mm. Was there much, I guess, pressure on you publish, to have outputs from your work at UCL?

Eric Ash Page 139 C1379/92/Track 6

There’s much more pressure now than there used to be then. But there’s always pressure, yes, there’s no question. And pressure in order to, well, earn promotion in the university, very much pressure in order to gain the funds to continue your work. Pressure for students who should if possible have published something by the time they do their PhD.

Mm. Was that pressure coming from you as well, do you think, or from outside pressures?

Oh both. Both. But I think people who work in a university, voluntarily work in the university, are likely to be ambitious about, about being visible.

[1:01:25] Mm. Did you enjoy working at UCL?

Yes. Must be nice for you occasionally get a one-word answer. [laughs]

Actually I think one-word answers are one of those things we always try and ask you to unpack a little bit more, it’s... [laughs]

No, I mean I was very happy working at UCL. And, I mean, the best evidence I can give for that is, I stayed there for twenty years. Or just over twenty years in fact. And, and indeed, didn’t have any intention of leaving anyway. And, the idea of becoming a vice-chancellor was put to me a couple of times, and I always said, what a great honour but, but I don’t think it’s for me. And it was only when the Imperial College thing came up that I was tempted away.

Do you think UCL changed at all over those twenty years?

Yes. Yes, I, I think so. I mean I think, the... What I mentioned at the beginning, that, nobody seemed to worry about whether anything was cost-effective and whatnot. I mean that certainly changed. We had a number of financial crises which have become the norm in universities but they gradually came up. And, I, I remember, and I don’t know what year I would put it in, but I would guess it’s probably sometime in the

Eric Ash Page 140 C1379/92/Track 6

Seventies, there was an effort to try and reduce costs, and, on a UCL-wide basis, and, they formed a committee to do it. And the committee came up with two recommendations, one is cheaper biscuits for tea, and the other one is having cardboard nameplates on the door instead of plastic nameplates. It was not a very good committee by my standards, but, like they couldn’t count.

Was it a committee you were on yourself?

No, I wasn’t on it, no. No, they wouldn’t have come to that conclusion. I, I actually tried not to sit on too many committees there. I remember, it’s just reminded me, a recent event. David Edgerton we were talking about. I got an email from his wife just a few days ago, who is a medic at UCL, or, not, not an academic medic, I think she was in the health service, and she wrote saying that, they are removing the health service, or student health service, from the site, UCL site, and she really wanted to, she knew I’d been on the committee in the Seventies or whatever it was, you know, and, would I have any views on it? Well, I told her I certainly did have views, I thought it was totally absurd to remove it from the site. But, nothing very much that I could do. I told her that if I gave my views to Malcolm Grant who is the Provost, at my age of eighty-five he might not be that impressed that I could really run the show for him. But I remember being on that committee, and I found it very interesting. And I, one thing I always remember emerging from, from this, and that is, one of the functions of the health service was contraceptive advice. And, we were given the statistics of, you know, the number of users and all the rest of it, and I did a little calculation, and came to the conclusion that there were hardly any virgins left at UCL. Well I mean, nowadays that wouldn’t seem at all remarkable, but at that time it was still, you know, a bit of news, mm.

Did you tell anybody about your conclusion?

No. Well I might have chatted to people about it, but, I certainly didn’t advertise it.

Good. Shall we call it quits there for the day? It’s lunchtime by my reckoning.

Yah, I, I think you are probably right. I think I am slowing down a bit.

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[end of session]

[End of Track 6]

Eric Ash Page 142 C1379/92/Track 7

[Track 7]

I was wondering if we could pick up more or less where we had left of last time, which was talking about your time at UCL. And we talked about I guess a few little parts of your research there, but I was wondering if you could give me an overview of how your research actually developed over your time there.

I think it was largely concerned with acoustic imaging. I don’t know whether we touched on that before? Right. Well you can image with light and you can image with X-rays, but you can also image with acoustics. And that has some considerable advantages. Of course there’s medical acoustics, which is a very important clinical tool, but one can also make acoustic microscopes with a resolution which gets close to what you can do with light. And of course, the contrast mechanisms are different when you have a sample which is, reveals itself by its acoustic properties, which is its mechanical properties, rather than its optical properties. So that was an interesting theme which we pursued for some considerable time.

Mm. Could you explain to me the basic principle of how acoustic imagery works in a microscope?

Well essentially you need to launch the acoustic waves, which you do from a piezoelectric sample, piezoelectric crystal, and then you need to have an acoustic lens which will focus the acoustic beam onto the sample. And, you can then, there are a number of different modalities you can use, but, you can get the reflected wave and detect that, and then scan the sample, and in this way produce a complete image of the sample.

Mm. What did the images actually look like?

Well, to look at them, of course you put them into, into something you can see, in other words, the photographic image of the thing. But, if you, if you look for example at the acoustic image of a cell, it is recognisably the same kind of object as you would see with light microscopy.

Eric Ash Page 143 C1379/92/Track 7

Mm.

But the scope for acoustic microscopy is limited. I mean, it’s not ever going to replace optical microscopy, but for certain special situations it is a valuable tool. And one of the areas where one can utilise the acoustic properties of the microscope is in non-destructive testing. It is one of the great problems in engineering, is to find out where the cracks are, and how long those cracks will persist before the thing breaks up in some way. So there’s a whole vast business concerned with non-destructive testing. [03:35] The other area of acoustics, and I don’t know how much we discussed last time, was, with surface acoustic waves, the fact that you can make electronic components, and particularly filters, with surface acoustic wave devices designed specifically to filter the frequencies that you wish to select. So in your phone that you have right beside you here, there are probably two filters of this kind inside it. It’s become a very common bit of electronics, and it has the advantage that it’s passive, that it’s just a crystal with things written on the crystal, and it’s potentially very cheap.

Mm, I think we touched a little bit on filters last time.

Right.

I mean partly in your work previously in industry as well on that.

Yes. Yes.

I was wondering, what sort of applications were you actually thinking about using filters for back when you started your work on them?

[pause] I, I remember thinking... Well I suppose it really started at a bit of an angle. There was considerable interest in acoustic, acoustic or electric amplifiers, that is where you can amplify an electronic signal by propagating it through a special semiconductor crystal, and applying a voltage to the crystal. It turned out that was of considerable interest for a number of years and lots and lots of papers were published,

Eric Ash Page 144 C1379/92/Track 7 but in the end it turned out that silicon would beat the lot. The amplifiers... The original idea was that you could amplify at very high frequencies, but silicon transistors caught up, and so it was a subject which really never went anywhere. But whilst one was involved with sending acoustic waves through crystals, the question of what else you could do with them is one that arose in a number of people’s minds, and me and my group were one of them. There was another group in France that was also very much on the same tack, which are called Tournois, t-o-u-r-n-o-i-s. And, this gradually did become a very major research theme in many places. In the UK the most important place was the Royal Radar Establishment as it was known at that time, RSRE. [coughs] Excuse me.

[06:50] Mm. I was interested when you were talking about looking for applications for acoustics. I was just wondering, where did the idea for actually using acoustic and acoustic imagery come from? Why did you decide to start working on it in the first place?

[pause] You know, I really, I really can’t remember when we first decided that we wanted... I suppose it came from non-destructive testing. They are fairly primitive things which are not really imaging devices which are used to detect cracks, and I think it was probably a development from that that led to the idea that one could do an awful lot more with acoustic waves.

Mm. When you said you were working on acoustic imaging, I guess, are you working on complete systems or particular components?

I’d say a complete system. And, we tried very hard to make contact with industry, and get industrial companies interested in the, in the thing. I don’t think there was one that really ever made it in the UK, but there were several other companies, in Germany and in the States, who did actually market acoustic microscopes.

Why do you think British companies didn’t?

Eric Ash Page 145 C1379/92/Track 7

[pause] It, it was a theme which was a little bit off-beat, and, I don’t think on the whole there were many companies in this country who were open to off-beat ideas, particularly off-beat ideas that didn’t look as if they would lead to a major industry. I mean that’s another long story but I, I think it is extremely sad that British industry has been so relatively unsuccessful in picking up new technology. I think you mentioned the scanning electron microscope earlier on. Cambridge Instruments I think did build those microscopes, but really the predominant industry who, who grasped that that was a terribly important idea and had lot of applications, were Americans and Germans primarily. Oh and, and the Japanese too.

Mm. I’m interested...

[09:54] But you know, I mentioned to you earlier, this is not for your final version of this, that I spent some time under a scanner this afternoon, a Siemens scanner. There really is absolutely no reason why the UK shouldn’t in fact have been on top of the MRI industry. It was an invention really made in this country, or at least as much in this country as anywhere else. So, I think that’s a sad reflection on the times that I’ve witnessed British industry. And right now, it is not easy to know where to advise a new PhD doctorate, where in industry they should go, in order that they can pursue exciting new applied physics research. There is nobody in the game here who would participate in the fight that Apple and Samsung are having at the moment for example.

[11:00] Why do you think that is? I’m interested in actually your point of view particularly as someone who has worked both in industry and academia.

Yah. I, I find it... I don’t think I have a good answer to it. But I think, for some reason, the boards of British companies were very reluctant to spend money on R&D. I don’t know whether we have mentioned the fact that I was on the BT board?

Not yet, no.

Eric Ash Page 146 C1379/92/Track 7

OK, we’re coming to that sometime maybe. But I’ll anticipate by saying that one of the things that I tried to do on the BT board was to get BT to spend a higher percentage of their revenue on research, and I found it very much an uphill battle. And research does pay off, it is, it is not, it is not a bad way of spending money. I mean it’s not... From a sharp business point of view, it is not a bad way of spending money. But, GEC of course, which is with us no longer, was very behind in devoting energy and resources to, to research.

Interesting, when you actually worked in industry yourself, at STL, did you ever actually see that as being a problem then, from your point of view as a research scientist in industry?

Actually, the company I was working for was an American company, and on the whole I would say they were ahead of the game in backing up serious research. And, there is a chap called Charles Kao, you know about him? No. Well he’s originally from, from Hong Kong I think, but he was at STL, the company I was working for, and he recently won the Nobel Prize for optical fibres. And there’s no question about it, the first optical fibre work was done at STL. And they were ahead of the game in this way. Unhappily, there’s a sad ending to that story, because, they didn’t, they didn’t survive in the UK. They were bought up by Nortel, in Canada, and then Nortel eventually was bought up by somebody else. So, the STL story is history. So it weakens my case if I say it really pays to do advanced research. But I, I still believe that the STL/STC story was worth pursuing, and should have flourished.

Mm.

So I mean, I think a large part of the problem is, the boards of companies not having faith in research. And of course there is also the longstanding problem that we had in this country, much less so now than previously, of being entirely in favour of pure research and very little for applied research. I gave my inaugural lecture at UCL in, I suppose, ’63 or ’65 or, I can’t, I can’t remember, ’65 maybe, and the title of my inaugural lecture was, ‘Applied Research in the University – the Case for the Defence’. And, I remember pointing out at that time, the overwhelming amount of money that Research Councils were spending in the physical sciences was on things

Eric Ash Page 147 C1379/92/Track 7 like astronomy and particle physics, fascinating themes, but they are not the ones that are going to make business buzz.

How well was your talk received?

Well they clapped at the end. [laughs] [15:35] Did I change things in the UK? I, I would actually argue that it was one of the things, myself and many other people, that gradually persuaded SERC as it was... Do I mean SERC?

SRC?

I get mixed up in the... Science and Engineering Research Council, yes, that’s right, SERC. And it used to be SRC by the way, the engineering came in later. To persuade them to take the applied side more seriously. I sat on various committees of SERC, and there were a lot of other people. Well you’ve talked to Cyril Hilsum, a good example of somebody who pursued it very actively, and very successfully in the field of liquid crystals. So I think that was your, I’m giving you a very longwinded answer to your question, but I think, certainly, the people you had on boards of big companies was one of the obstacles. The pursuit of pure research as, as opposed to applied research, I think was, was another. There was a chap called Peter Medawar, have you heard of him? OK, well he was a medic, a Nobel Laureate who won the Nobel Prize for, something to do with blood cells, it’ll come to me in a moment. But, he wrote an essay once on the principle of maximum purity, saying that in the UK, wherever you start, the theme becomes purer and purer as you go on. And of course he was a medic and therefore an applied scientist. Mm. So it’s, that’s a long story. I think I’ve talked enough on that.

I was just sort of wondering, once you had actually got to UCL, and you’ve become a professor, is there much you do to encourage tie-ins with industry, links and that sort of thing?

Eric Ash Page 148 C1379/92/Track 7

Oh, tried very hard, there’s no question about that, for example, with the GEC for example, with Plessey. And of course, also because of my previous connection with STL, with STL and the American company, which was the IT, ITT company.

What sort of responses did you get from those industrial companies?

Well, it’s, I would say it tended to be an uphill battle, particularly I would say with the GEC, and that was a battle which I had to pursue later on when I was at Imperial College. If I’m not getting totally out of sequence, let me say one word about that. There was a scheme at that time which probably still exists, where industry would support a PhD student, and, and partially I suppose in order to get to know this person, and possibly recruit them at the end of the PhD. The amount of money which was donated on this basis was sort of minimal, and I can’t really remember the figures, but I think it was less than £1,000 a year, and, in order to support a research project you’d probably need about five or six thousand a year, at that time. Not only did they give minimal support, but they decided that any patents that should originate as a result of this work, would be theirs. Not only that, but background patents, patents that had been taken out by this group beforehand, they would also have access to. It was totally one-sided. And, it was very difficult, difficult to persuade them of the iniquity of what they were doing. The sort of, the basic theme was, well we pay our taxes, and the taxes support the university, why should we pay twice? But the taxes do not support the research of the university.

How did that particular disagreement get resolved?

It didn’t. We, we stopped using the GEC for that sort of purpose.

[20:38] Mm. Can you tell me a little bit more about the, the sort of, I guess the campaign aspect of this that you mentioned was going on at the Science Research Council? Or the SERC as it would have been.

Well, the trouble about academics is, they tend to stick with their knitting, and, speaking of myself, fully occupied with their own research, and with their own

Eric Ash Page 149 C1379/92/Track 7 teaching. And the amount of room left for mounting a campaign of some sort is limited. I think my inaugural lecture was an element of, of that campaign, and certainly whenever we’ve had opportunities within SERC and other, and for example in the IEE, in other words, professional organisations like the IEE or Institute of Physics, these things would be voiced. And in the end they worked, I mean there’s no question about it, by now, in fact, and some people think the pendulum has been swung too far. Now when people apply for a research grant, one of the things that they are supposed to put on the application form is the broader impact of what will, what will be the result of their research. And, you know about the Research Assessment Exercises that take place every few years in universities? It’s called something slightly different this time, but the next one is next year. But universities have to make the case for the quality of research that they have done, and the amount of money universities get is dependent on their score in this. It’s been a vast exercise which has happened by now probably about five times every four, four years or so, and it’s dominated the thinking in universities, even to the extent of, how do you steal professor X from university Y in good time that they can contribute to your Research Assessment Exercise? [pause] But, but one of... That’s right, I know what I was going to say. [interviewee away from microphone] In making the case, university case, one of the main things these days is to show the impact that you have had on the UK as a whole, and one of the areas of impact, is starting spin-off companies. So at the moment, there is a view that it’s gone too far, and you’ve got to show how you will exploit the research before you’ve done it, before you know whether what you are trying to do is relevant or will get anywhere. So there has been a big sea-change.

Mm.

But it’s a bit late. GEC is no more. Plessey is no more.

I’m going to pause you for one.....

[pause in recording]

[24:02] OK, fine.

Eric Ash Page 150 C1379/92/Track 7

I was wondering, back in the 1960s when you were at UCL, was there any equivalent to the research excellence exercise?

No. No that, that really started, I think the first time was, was just when I got to Imperial in 1985.

Mm. But if there’s no, I guess, REF equivalent, what sort of expectations are there on you as an academic in the 1960s do you think?

Well, let me just go back one sentence. There was nothing quite like that, but as a result, the Government had a much more direct non-evidence based method of distributing the funds. They gave a lot of money to Oxford and Cambridge, and as a matter of fact they gave a lot of money to Imperial College. And again, anticipating, when I came to Imperial College, and for the first time it was done on evidence-based, it turned out that Imperial had been over-funded. And my first two or three years, I had to claw back some money. But, but your question was slightly different. I think probably, the thing that motivates academics, quite apart from all this financial stuff, is, really is the, the extent to which they’re recognised by their peers. So it’s, the peer reviews is if you like informal, but you want, you want people to know that, by gosh, you’ve done something bright. I think it’s very much the way it is in the humanities, I mean, people are judged by their last book that they have written.

[26:12] Are there any particular, I guess, ways you think your career has been judged, awards that you’ve got, items of recognition?

Oh I suppose being elected to the Royal Society was a, the major example of that. Because, they don’t elect very many engineers to the Royal Society, I mean that, that is gradually changing a bit now but it was relatively rare at that time.

When were you elected to the Royal Society?

I should know, shouldn’t I. I think it’s, ’67?

Eric Ash Page 151 C1379/92/Track 7

Wikipedia suggested ’77, but, I wouldn’t believe Wikipedia. [laughs]

Wait a moment. I... [pause] Gosh, I should know to the nearest decade. [laughs] [pause] No I think, Wikipedia is right, it would have been ’77. But... Yes. Sorry, ’77, yah.

I was just wondering, how does one actually get elected to the Royal Society, what happened to you in that case?

Well, you have somebody who thinks that you ought to be elected, and who is then your sponsor, and, and makes the case. It’s as simple as that.

And did you know who your sponsor was?

Yes. At least I knew one person who was sponsoring me, a chap called F E Jones. You wouldn’t have heard of him I don’t think. But he was, he was a, he was a CEO of Mullard’s, another company that doesn’t exist any more, at the moment.

Mm. How do you know, how did you know him to be recommended by him?

I suppose we had contacts with Mullard’s. And he took an interest in universities and, and what people were doing, mm.

Was there any particular, I guess piece of work that you were nominated for, or...?

No. It doesn’t really work like that. I mean they, the case is made on the basis of the entirety of your publications, and... But somebody has to write a citation. I’ve never seen the citation that was written for me, so I don’t know exactly what they said in it. But I have written quite a few for other people in the meantime.

What sort of things do you actually say in citations, in general terms?

Eric Ash Page 152 C1379/92/Track 7

Well in general, that, the contribution made by this person is exceptional, recognised and useful. I think that, that would really be the essence of it.

Mm.

But then of course it goes into specifics. But, being an advocate for somebody is actually fairly hard work. I mean you, you have to collaborate with the person concerned, but you, he can’t actually do the work for you, but, you need to have a publication list and you need to, read the key publications and, and you need to, to make a coherent case. And then, typically it takes, if somebody is elected at all, it typically takes five years, but it can sometimes, I mean one person that I was involved with did it in year thirteen. So it can take quite a long time.

Mm. Do you know if your entrance to the Royal Society was a smooth process, or...?

No.

Is that no you don’t know, or no it wasn’t?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I was immensely surprised, so I can’t believe it could have been terribly smooth. But there we are. And incidentally, it’s got harder since then, because a number of scientists and engineers who are in the game, is certainly about double what it was in my day, and the number that we elect hasn’t changed much. Actually this very year, the Royal Society is increasing the number of people they are going to elect.

Mm. Why did you say you were surprised to be elected?

Well I knew other people who had been elected and they all seemed rather more eminent, as far as I could see. I mean this is not modesty, I really was surprised.

Once one has been elected to the Royal Society, what does one do then? What did you do then?

Eric Ash Page 153 C1379/92/Track 7

Well of course the standard joke about it is, FRS stands for Fees Raised Since. But actually, it doesn’t really make an enormous amount of difference. It’s not, having reached the stage, you can now do something else as a result. Well except for one thing. You might get nabbed to be a vice-chancellor. So that, in that sense it can make a difference.

[31:51] Mm. Have you got, did you get involved in any, I guess, Royal Society commissions, committees and that sort of thing earlier on in your career after you had been elected?

Yes. I really don’t have a record of them all. Even ’77 is quite a long time ago. But I was, at an early stage I was on Council once, and, and I was also at an early stage on the selection committee, for new, for new fellows. That was one of the things the Royal Society does rather well. When they elect somebody, they tend to put that person onto the selection committee for the next three years. Because unlike some of the senile people on the committee, they still know what’s what.

Can you tell me a bit more about how maybe the selection committee actually works?

Well the, the Royal Society has ten sectional committees. There is one for engineering, one for physics, one for mathematics, one for chemistry. I sat on the one for engineering. And you typically have, I suppose about a dozen or maybe a few more fellows who sit on that committee. Each year when the election process takes place, one person on the committee is asked to speak on behalf of a particular candidate, and then when everybody is... Oh, oh and the, all the paperwork that goes with the application is available to everybody on the committee, and assuming they’ve done their homework, and they’ve heard this person as the advocate of candidate X, they should be in a position to vote. And then there is a vote, and, we would put I think four people in order at the top of the list, of whom maybe two will get elected when it goes to Council. It’s a rigorous process, there’s no question about that. And one of the good things about it is that nobody sits on that selection committee for more than three years, so if you decide that candidate X is for the birds, you can say so for three years, but then, but no longer, somebody else can come in on it.

Eric Ash Page 154 C1379/92/Track 7

Mm. What sort of other people did you actually meet at these Royal Society committees?

Oh, it’s a wide spread of people who are roughly in an engineering applied field. Subsequently when I was, and this is going beyond my Imperial College time, I was the Treasurer of the Royal Society, and then I attended four or five of these sectional committees. But the treasurer as an officer is allowed to speak at, on these occasions, but not to vote, which is, again I think is a good principle.

Mm. What sort of things does the treasurer of the Royal Society do? It sounds a rather important post.

Oh. Well the treasurer is a deputy vice, is the senior deputy president. That means when the, when the president can’t do something, the treasurer is usually asked to do it. So that’s one function. The other function is to look after the money. And also occasionally to encourage people possibly to contribute to the funds, like for example, a new Royal Society professorship, that sort of thing. But the treasurer also has quite a lot of influence on staffing within the Royal Society, so for example, when I came, there were about, the staff was about 120. Five of these were concerned with science advice. The number of people in the United States at NRC was several hundred. And during my time as Treasurer, I did manage to double the number, and we ended up with I think eleven or twelve. And I personally regard that as arguably the most important function of the Royal Society, because we give advice to Government or to anybody who’s prepared to listen, and, we are independent. It’s one of the main arguments for making sure that the Royal Society does have enough funds to, to do that.

[37:25] Mm. When you were Treasurer, was the Royal Society well-endowed for funds?

It, it’s not badly endowed. I mean, a lot of our money comes from Government, but not money that’s going to science advice. And a lot of the government money goes through the Royal Society to things like the University Research Fellows, who are

Eric Ash Page 155 C1379/92/Track 7 young researchers. But I would say that the Royal Society was comfortably afloat. But subsequently we had a major appeal, for I think 100 grand or something. I don’t mean 100 grand, what am I talking about? [pause] Was it £100 million? I... It was just after my time. David Sainsbury kindly chaired that, the committee. And they got most of the money. Yah, it was £100 million. So the Royal Society is now really, substantially better off than it was then. But it wasn’t badly off even then. Mm.

Mm.

And we get a few benefits, like for example, we have Carlton House Terrace on a peppercorn rent. We refurbished the building, spending twelve million quid on it, and that was one of my main tasks while I was there. And, a little bit worried about spending all that money on a building which wasn’t our own, but I believe that the Government is unlikely to change the peppercorn rent. [coughs] Excuse me.

Mm. Were there any other key issues of your time at the Royal Society as Treasurer?

[pause] Well there a lot of key issue, yes. I’m not sure whether, whether I can sort of list them now. But you know, there was, for example the BSE epidemic was, was one of the things which came up at that time. [40:00] Very much in my interest was climate change, and that’s an ongoing, ongoing issue. The work that I did there, really involved two major reports, one called, ‘Nuclear Energy...’ [pause] Something like, the future of weather, or something like that. I, I’ll look that up. And the other one, which I regard as even more important, ‘Economic instruments for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions’.

Mm.

And I don’t know whether you’ve just, whether you’ve read in the last few days the failure of the EU to push through the Kyoto business. No? Right. I think that’s a very important event. That was the best hope we had of something substantial being done, and it’s failed.

Eric Ash Page 156 C1379/92/Track 7

When did you first actually become interested in climate change?

[pause] I don’t know that I can give you a date for that. I remember the, what caused me to get interested in nuclear energy. Maybe I mentioned that to you once before, I don’t know. But, this daughter of mine, who thought this was going to be an awful building when she was an architect student in Cambridge.

Oh the British Library an awful building.

Yah. I’m just linking her to our previous conversation. She was, spent a weekend going up to Glasgow or Edinburgh or I can’t remember, no Glasgow I suppose, talked to her on the phone, and said, ‘What are you doing there?’ And she said, ‘Well, protesting about the nuclear scene here.’ So I said, ‘What do you know about it, dear?’ And the answer of course was, fuck all. Well, not the words she used, but... And it occurred to me, although I had no particular position in nuclear energy, but if you were in science or engineering, one really had to be, stand up and be counted on this sort of thing. And, that, that got me involved in it at that time.

Mm. And whenabouts was that?

I’ve just thought of the, the first... Well, ‘Nuclear energy – the future climate’, that was the title of it.

Whenabouts did you have that conversation with your daughter?

For once I think I can get the dates right. It would have been ’81 or thereabouts.

Mm. From that initial interest, where did you go with that then?

Well one reads about it. [pause] One has opportunities when giving lectures to, to go onto, onto that theme. [pause] You ask, what difference does it make to be an FRS. One of them is that more people ask you to give lectures, and, academics on the whole like hearing their own voice, and so, one says, yes, possibly too often. I don’t remember giving any specific lectures on, on nuclear, nuclear energy per se. I mean I,

Eric Ash Page 157 C1379/92/Track 7

I wasn’t advocating it. [pause] But it was, that was, that report, ‘Nuclear energy – the future climate’, that really got me involved very deeply into it.

[44:40] What was your stance on nuclear energy at the time?

Oh, I mean my, my feeling was then and now, that it is the safest form of energy that, that we have. And, that if one is serious about reducing carbon dioxide emission, you can’t ignore it.

Well what do you make of the risks, potential...

The...?

What do you make of the potential risks of nuclear energy set against that?

Well it’s, the risk is, evident and real, as it is for coal-fired power stations. I mean, if you’re coldblooded about it and talk about the number of casualties we’ve had on coal as compared with nuclear, I mean, coal wins hands down, in the number of casualties. But you know, it, it also implies a degree of passion in, in pursuing safety and security, which can’t be understated. I mean if you take the Fukushima thing, you can say in a nutshell what went wrong, and that is, it is an area where they have tsunamis, and they decided to defend against the tsunami by building a four metre high wall, when it was a known fact that in that area there had been tsunamis as high as fourteen metres, some time in the nineteenth century. So somebody, you know, decided, well, four metres, fourteen would be expensive. Totally irresponsible. But of course it’s a tsunami that killed 80,000 people, and I think, one person or two on the nuclear side.

I guess we’ve spent a bit of time discussing quite a broad range of issues. Shall we take a short break?

OK.

[End of Track 7]

Eric Ash Page 158 C1379/92/Track 8

[Track 8]

I wonder if you could talk for a little bit more about your work at UCL. And, you’ve mentioned that you’d done some work on surface acoustic waves and acoustic imagery. Where there any other sort of key areas of research that you worked in?

[pause] Well I was involved in certain areas of metrology, highly precise measurements, but they were really related to, to acoustics, very precise measurements of the velocity of sound in certain materials. And then, I was interested in super-resolution microscopy. With an ordinary microscope, you can resolve things down to a certain small size, and that certain small size is typically half a wavelength of the light that you are using to illuminate it with. But there are ways in which one can beat that, and I explored one of these possibilities. And I didn’t do it with light, because I was scared of the difficulty, and I shouldn’t have been. I did it with microwaves instead. And, we had used a very simple principle, and that is, illuminating the object through a very small hole, a hole which was much smaller than the wavelengths of the radiation which we were using. And then by scanning this very small hole across the object, one could image it, forward and backwards. And in this way we obtained images, microwave images, of, of an artificial object which was, I don’t know, ten, fifteen times smaller than the wavelengths. And indicated that of course one could do this with greater difficulty at optical wavelengths too. And super-resolution microscopy is something that a lot of people are involved with, and there are indeed better ways of doing it than what we did. But, our experiment has been cited quite a bit in this context.

What actually are the advantages of super-resolution microscopy, done along the lines you’ve described?

Oh I mean simply, seeing smaller things than you can see without it. There are all sorts of parallels to this super-resolution thing. For example, if you, if you are using a radar system to detect aircraft, again you are normally limited by the resolution, limited by the wavelength you are using, but again, there are some clever tricks you can use which can shrink that a bit and give you some super-resolution. You can of course, I mean, if one’s talking about optical super-resolution, you might ask, well

Eric Ash Page 159 C1379/92/Track 8 why do you bother? Why not use an electron microscope where the wavelength is much smaller still? Well the answer is that, the electron microscope is rather limited in some ways, like, if you are interested in looking at something which is alive, you can’t actually shove it into a vacuum, which is what you need for electron microscopy. So being able to image with light, which you can do at room temperature and in the air kind of thing, is potentially very important.

Mm.

This super-resolution microscopy is linked also to another modality which is very widely used now which is called confocal microscopy, but I mean that’s irrelevant to, to this story. [pause] Will that do?

[05:00] Mm. I was wondering as well, when you’ve talked about some of the work you’ve been doing today, who else is actually involved as well as yourself, is it a solo effort, or is there a wider research group or a team or...?

Oh no, there’s a wider research group. I mentioned one chap, Kumar Wickramasinghe. Actually this particular experiment we’re talking about, I did with one technician, which was quite interesting. His name was Mr Nichol. And he had a great deal of skill with electronics. Lovely to work with. And then he got less and less effective, and as I would now recognise, he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. And I don’t know what year we would have done this work, in the Seventies I think, maybe early Seventies. And I don’t think it was recognised, but, it was a rather sad ending.

Mm.

As indeed is that of Charles Kao that I mentioned early on, the chap who invented fibre optics.

[06:15]

Eric Ash Page 160 C1379/92/Track 8

Thinking about that experiment back in the 1970s, could you actually describe to me, what does the experiment actually look like? I’m having problems sort of seeing what an equipment set-up would look like for something like this.

It, it would be, it would look... I’m trying to remember what it looked like. [pause] We would have a microwave source, and I think we probably used a parabolic antenna, I really can’t remember now, to focus the microwaves onto the object. The object would have been on a movable scanner, which you could move forward and backwards. One would look at the reflected microwaves, and that would go through an electronic system, and then the image would appear on an oscilloscope. But now you’ve mentioned this, I think I must go back and look at the paper. It would have been, at least forty years ago I think, something like that.

[07:25] Mm. Thinking as well I guess about working in electronic engineering in particular, do the sort of changes in electronics, valves to transistors to integrated circuits, actually make much impact on your work in the Sixties and Seventies?

Yah. I mean, well, we didn’t use valves any more. And I don’t think I remember... I mean I started at UCL in ’63. I, I wouldn’t have used a valve deliberately. What I mean by that is, I wouldn’t have built a circuit with a valve in it. We would certainly have had equipment, like oscilloscopes and whatnot, that was still full of valves at the time. But, the move to doing everything in solid state happened very rapidly at that time. And, and by the early Seventies, very much to chips, where you no longer made circuits with individual elements, but used complete chips.

What was the practical upshot of that change to solid state electronics for you as an electronics engineer in the research field?

Well, it meant you don’t use soldering irons any more. You assemble things. Also there was a rapid move to the use of software of one sort and another, so for example, recording data would be done, not with a pen and ink but, with some kind of a memory device, as it is now. It would have started then. I remember... I mean, a sort of a, a memory point for me that I, that fixes, when integrated circuits really came into

Eric Ash Page 161 C1379/92/Track 8 their own, was in 1968. I was asked to give the IEE Christmas lectures at the IEE, which are meant for children, students and whatnot. And, and these lectures were given on understanding how solid state devices work and all the rest of it. But I showed them the most complicated circuit that had at that time been built, and I think it was... I have a feeling it, it was an array of optical detectors. And there were, I think it was sort of, eight, a row of eight by two. So I mean in modern terms, you might say, a chip with something like, let’s say thirty transistors on it. Whereas now of course we are up to I think ten, twelve or something, something of that sort. But it was still at that time quite amazing what you could do, what you could put onto one chip. That was ’68. By the Seventies, I mean there was just no two ways about it, everything was microelectronics. ’69 to ’70 I spent in the United States, I may have said that already.

At IBM.

At IBM, yah, that’s right. And that, that was sort of the turning point I think. At IBM people were at that time making semiconductor memories for the first time; up to that point they’d been magnetic memories.

Mm. Did having things like, have microchips available, actually affect the experiments you were doing?

Oh yah. No, I mean it...

And how I suppose as well.

Well, I mean, you could do much more complicated things, I mean, things which now would be quite simple, but to capture a complete image and store it in a semiconductor array. I might say, one other thing happened at that time, which I think bears on your question, and that is, what do you actually do with these chips? Well, one of the answers is, you leave it to your students. And that’s a serious point, you know. I, I don’t... One gradually got to a point where one delegated stuff because one hadn’t been brought up in it. There are exceptions. A chap who died recently, Andrew Huxley, was at that time working in the zoology or biology

Eric Ash Page 162 C1379/92/Track 8 department, because he was at UCL, and, he didn’t work with teams of students, in fact he never had more than one PhD student. He preferred to do everything himself. And, I mean one of the things that one could do is, you could have gate arrays, that’s essentially a series of transistor gates, which you could subsequently wire up to suit your purpose, and there’s ways of doing that. He would come over to my department at UCL and do it himself, which we all thought was pretty admirable. But he was an admirable chap all round.

[13:45] Mm. How big was your department at UCL?

Well, when you say my department, I became the head of it in, 1980. And, it was quite a small department. I would say the number of staff we had was probably about, twenty-five, or maybe even a little less. The number of students we would have had, undergraduates and postgraduates, would probably have been about 400, something of that sort.

Mm. Could you give...

I’m going to that department when you go to your train, because my predecessor-but- one was a chap called Harold Barlow, and there is an annual lecture in his name which I am going to go to. I will go to that department; there will not be a single person on the staff who was there when I left in ’85.

Who do you recall as being I guess your most important colleagues of that time at UCL?

[pause] Well I think there were, there were certainly a number. My immediate predecessor was an important colleague, Alec Cullan. But I would say the students I worked with were probably the most important colleagues for me. I’ve mentioned one, Kumar Wickramasinghe. I’ll mention another name, Simon Bennett, who is also, who was in the States for a long time, is now back in this country. So I think the closest liaison one had really was with one’s immediate students.

Eric Ash Page 163 C1379/92/Track 8

Mm. How much do you actually see of your research students who you are supervising?

I saw each one of my students at least once a week, for a scheduled hour. And, I did something which was regarded as somewhat unusual. We took minutes of our meeting, either the student or, or I would, and agreed at the end what we, each of us will do by next week. And then we would, next week, look at what we had said we would do and see whether we had done it. Because I think it’s a great help to, to have targets like that.

Was it an effective method in practice?

I think so, yah.

Mm.

Actually I wrote quite a long piece at that time for PhD students, which, I probably still have a copy somewhere, it’s called ‘To those about to’. And I was, much to my surprise I found it had spread to the University of Surrey and they were using it there.

Do you remember what the key tenets of your advice were, to PhD students?

Oh, it was actually a whole variety of, of thoughts. But I suppose, a key one was, that one should start off with a definite idea, but don’t believe that your thesis should be on that idea. Things will develop as you go along. But then, I had... It included, well it’s a whole range of things, it included practical ideas. Like for example, we had a laboratory which included wet chemistry where one did photolithography and that sort of thing. And, my recommendation was that, when you have used this laboratory, clear up everything that you have been involved with, plus one other thing. And I think that’s quite important, because if you just say, ‘Clear up everything,’ there’s a chance you might forget one thing. The next person coming in sees one bit of rubbish there; why shouldn’t he leave his rubbish there too? And you tend to spiral downhill. But, if you say, ‘Pick up everything plus one other thing,’ then you spiral uphill. It’s a trivial issue but, but actually, quite important. I would recommend it for people who

Eric Ash Page 164 C1379/92/Track 8 are in charge of a beach, if they, if they had a notice up saying that, I think it would make a big difference.

[19:00] Broadening out this issue slightly from just PhD students. I guess, looking back at your own experience as being a practical, practising scientist, what do you think does make a good scientist?

Oh gosh. [pause] Well I mean, curiosity must be item number one, no question about that. [pause] I think the second thing is, to be at the same time focused and unfocused. You have to decide what, specifically what you want to do, what experiment you want to do or what theory you would like to try to develop. But you should regard that as a springboard to things on either side too. I, I think, people who are not very successful in the research phase, tend to fix too early and too sharply on one thing. [pause] I mean my, my hero, I think we must have been over Dennis Gabor and my youth, weren’t we? Yes. It was Dennis Gabor, you know, who, whose mind could really go in a number of different directions, and fruitfully at all times. So one thing that’s, that’s needed, is a sort of a cussedness, and, a sort of a grim determination. Because it isn’t always fun. And one can spend time sometimes working for a long time on something and then find out that it’s no use, and one has to start again. So, so I think, the ability not to be too rapidly disastrously discouraged when things go wrong, I think is a very important part of it.

[21:17] Mm. I was interested, where do you think the scientific method comes into that process?

[pause] Well, I mean the scientific method is essentially, gathering evidence and believing it. I mean it is what distinguishes from all the evils of the world, where this is not done. Well you know my favourite target, religion, you know. But, the scientific method I think is having total respect for evidence. Is that enough of a summary?

Eric Ash Page 165 C1379/92/Track 8

I’ve always wondered I guess, looking at a lot of the debates over recent years, particularly the ones about science and religion, I guess the scientific method is always sort of held up as, as one of the tenets that makes science different, but...

Yah.

I guess I’ve always been curious as to how much practising scientists actually think about it in their day-to-day work. Is it something that’s explicitly there at the back of your mind, or just something implicit in what you’re doing I suppose?

No, I think it’s fairly explicit. And, you know, you can do experiments which appear to show what you were hoping it would show, but where it’s not absolutely clear, and, there is a temptation to assume that it must be OK. So I think to be ruthless in self- examination, I think, I think is very important.

I was interested...

And not everything yields to the scientific method, you know. I, I don’t know what I would do if I were George Osborne. I mean I suppose he’s conducting an experiment. But you know, it’s just, it’s not a, I’m not, I’m not really of the view that scientists are wise people who can give answers to everything. I don’t, I don’t think so. I think one can give negative answers to some things. I think for example, we can give a negative answer to those people who are currently saying that there is no climate change risk. But we can’t give positive answers to all sorts of abstruse questions.

Mm. Looking again I guess at the, one of the things I was interested you mentioned a moment ago was, the fact that scientists need perseverance as well. I was wondering, do you recall any particular dead ends in your own research or times that, you know, the work got particularly difficult, harder?

Yes, I, I, I can remember quite a few I think. Go through the list. I mean, I remember in my PhD work, trying to analyse something using a mechanical computer to do the arithmetic, and then realising, having done it, actually not, realising in discussion with Dennis Gabor, that my approach just wasn’t going to get there. And I remember,

Eric Ash Page 166 C1379/92/Track 8

January the 31 st 1949 was a very foggy day, and I spent it in a laboratory working on one of these mechanical things, and I was feeling slightly sorry for myself afterwards, that happened to be my birthday, and I had spent it in the fog doing something rather useless. But, it happens all the time, I don’t think I can give you a list of things.

[25:23] Mm. Looking back I guess after you became Head of Department at UCL, was there any particular direction you had in mind for where you were going to go, what direction you wanted to take the department that is?

I mean not in the sense of dictating, dictating specific research projects for other people. But, I suppose, one of the things I was very emphatic about was the need for taking teaching seriously, for having some passion for teaching. Because there is a tendency when everything is judged on your research performance to... So I think I, I succeeded in making that very clear. Something... I don’t know whether I started this or whether it happened before, but... I, I had... [pause] No, I, I certainly didn’t start it. But I had a tutorial group, and one of the things that I did in my tutorial group, and encouraged my colleagues to do with their tutorial groups, was to try and assess how well the teaching was going down. And, we had examples of lecturers who simply didn’t come across, and I did spend a considerable amount of time with them. And indeed, recommending to them that if they produced coherent written lecture notes, even if just for themselves, it would make their lectures more easily accessible to the students concerned. One of the other things I, I did, I tried to gauge how much time each academic was spending on necessary duties, like lecturing, or like supervising laboratories and whatnot. And, and, and try to do this numerically. So for example, if you have to get a new lecture course, how many hours should be allocated to preparing, and, if you’ve never given that course before, the answer might well be ten or more hours per lecture, whereas if you’ve given it five times already, it might be one hour per lecture. Anyway, using quantitative tools of that sort, try to add up what each person’s load was. And, then assigning duties which would tend to equalise what was going on. And I remember, the only serious protest I got was from the lecturer, who was, according to, to our system, the least heavily loaded lecturer of all. I think it was quite revealing to, to make this numerical so people could actually see what the score was. This is, doesn’t have much to do with academics, academic life

Eric Ash Page 167 C1379/92/Track 8 as such, I mean, so, and it’s just a simple management technique, but it seemed like a fairly obvious one to me. The other thing which involved my wife quite a bit is, we did try and do some entertaining, like, having all of them at our house at least once a year, with a vast vat of spaghetti bolognese or, or whatever. It makes a, I think a big difference if one can have a social dimension to, to one’s professional interactions.

Mm.

How are we doing?

[19:45] I think we’re doing pretty well. I guess one, one final one or two closing questions for today. One of them was, how did your own role actually change as, when you became head of department?

Not, not very much. I, I made sure that on this calculation, I, I was giving at least as many lectures as anybody else, and, and my score was reasonably high. Admittedly I, I had produced the algorithm. But I think it, it was genuine. So I did do, do all of that again. I don’t think in other ways it changed all that much. Indeed, when I resigned to go to Imperial College, I resigned rather late in the day, so the lectures that I was going to give, it wasn’t too easy to shovel them onto somebody else. So my first year at Imperial College I gave all my lecturers at UCL.

Mm. Did you actually enjoy lecturing?

Yes.

What about it?

What did I enjoy about it?

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 168 C1379/92/Track 8

[pause] Oh I think, I think I like... I like formulating the things that I am interested in, in a manner which I believe is accessible to the appropriate audience. I mean I think, there is an intellectual problem in doing that, and, I, I enjoy that. But as you’ve already found, I like hearing my own voice, and have all these eager people believing everything you say, or at least they do in the first year, is quite flattering.

Mm. And do you have to update your lecture course that often, or is it...?

Yes. Yes, I, I don’t believe... I mean it depends what you’re teaching. I taught a course, a Master’s course, in quantum mechanics, which I developed but never felt I needed to update, because I could only just understand it myself.

Did you actually see your career as going to continue at UCL?

Yes. I had been invited to have my name go forward for other vice-chancellorships, and I always said, it was a great honour but, not really for me. It wasn’t until Imperial College came up that I was tempted away to, to have a go at it. I really rather expected to stay at UCL, yes.

Good, that seems a pretty good point to stop for the day I think.

Right.

[end of session]

[End of Track 8]

Eric Ash Page 169 C1379/92/Track 9

[Track 9]

How do you remember 1985?

Well, by the fact that my eldest daughter got married. No, I mean that was the year that I went to Imperial College.

How did you feel about the prospects of becoming a vice-chancellor, rector?

Rector was the actual term used in those days. It’s now changed to president and rector. Because the term rector is well understood on the Continent, but not in the United States.

In what sense not understood?

Pardon?

In what sense misunder... not understood in the United States?

Well I think they are inclined to think that it a, that it’s a religious appointment of some sort.

Has that ever caused you any problems?

No, no I’ve, I’ve always confessed the problems that I’ve had with God.

How did you actually greet the prospect of becoming Rector of Imperial College?

Well, I, I found it a daunting thought. I had been asked before that whether I wanted to have my name put forward for vice-chancellorships, and I had always said, no thank you, I’d really prefer doing what I’m doing. But when Imperial College came along, I had been a student there, they gave me a scholarship in my youth, and somehow or other I felt drawn to having a go at this task.

Eric Ash Page 170 C1379/92/Track 9

Mm. What sort of state was Imperial College in in 1985? Can you give me a snapshot of, how it...

It was in, in good shape. It was highly regarded as a research university. They had I think missed the fact that you have to recruit students. The assumption in many of the departments at Imperial College was, that anybody who is to be accepted by them was extremely lucky, and there was really no need to sell their wares in any way. Well of course, that dates back to the time when there were very much fewer universities, and, one of my tasks was to explain to my new colleagues that actually they had to explain to potential students why Imperial College was a good place to study. And, it was to me always a totally fundamental principle that if you get good students, you can get good staff, because people on the whole like teaching bright students rather than run- of-the-mill students. And if you have good students and good staff, all the rest follows, clicks into place anyway. The only other thing that’s missing is the money.

What sort of state was Imperial in financially?

Imperial College was in a reasonably strong position financially, and in fact what was, what’s interesting was, that was a time, the first year that there was an assessment of, evidence-based assessment of the needs of a university. Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, have you come across that name? No. Well he is a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, and, he was, I’ve forgotten what the exact title of his job was, but he was given the task of assessing the needs of a university using a formula-based approach. Before that, people had stuck two fingers in the air and, seen where the wind was blowing, and hoped for the best that they got it right. As a result of that, Imperial College was rather favourably positioned. People had said, Imperial College, yah, great place, you know, a number of Nobel Laureates and whatnot, they must get a reasonable amount of money. When it came to the evidence-based assessment of needs, it turned out that we had been over-funded, according to this, according to this recipe. And for the first, two or three years of my time at Imperial College we essentially took a cut of about ten per cent. So that was a, a fairly daunting task too.

How does one actually cope with a ten per cent cut in funding?

Eric Ash Page 171 C1379/92/Track 9

Well, since most of the expense in a university is salaries, it does mean that you don’t replace some vacancies. That’s really what it... I mean there’s more to it than that, but I mean that, that’s really what it, what it amounts to. Seventy per cent of the costs are salary costs. So whereas my principle was to run Imperial College on a very loose rein, essentially that if a department was able to take care of its finances within the various formulae and whatnot, they would have pretty much total freedom, on making appointments and that sort of thing. But I did actually start a regime whereby I required that they had to have my signature for every permanent post, my point being that when you take somebody on, you are making what could be a forty-, fifty-year commitment, and that can’t be done purely in terms of the financial situation as it appears to a head of department at that particular moment. But other than that, I was basically a nice guy.

And how was that particular change treated, requiring your signature?

I think, I think people found it very odd, that, for example that I wanted to sign off on hiring a new secretary. The secretaries can last forty years you know. And, as we all know, getting rid of people is quite difficult in a university. I mean it used to be said that it was impossible; that’s not quite true. But, it’s not an easy thing to do.

[06:40] Mm. What did you actually think about the research excellence, Research Assessment Exercise that came in in your time there?

Well the Research Assessment Exercise, I think the first one that actually came into play was a year after I got there. I think that’s right, I’m not sure about the timetable. I, my personal view is that the Research Assessment Exercise as started by Peter Swinnerton-Dyer was actually a good idea. It did actually encourage universities to look objectively at what they are producing, which before that had not been forced on anybody. So I think it was a good idea. My personal belief is that in the successive exercises that have gone along, it’s turned sour, it’s become too extreme, too, in inverted commas, ‘important’, and actually not in inverted commas because too much money hangs on it. And, you get this phenomenon where universities try to recruit people from other universities just in time so that their research output can be counted

Eric Ash Page 172 C1379/92/Track 9 in your university, not in theirs. So I mean it leads to somewhat unhappy competition of, of that kind. But also, it does, it does put an emphasis on, on publications, which I think is justified up to a point but can be taken to extremes, and I think the Research Assessment Exercises in recent years have been to extremes. I can say one more thing about this, but is it too irrelevant to what you are...? No? OK. [pause] Now I’ve lost what I was, the thread of what I was going to say. [pause] It’ll come back to me in a moment.

I was wondering, I guess on a related topic, how your staff actually took to the first RAE.

Well... No, it, it wasn’t, it wasn’t just quite that. Oh I know what I was going to say. That’s right. There is an alternative way in which you could assess the research prowess of departments within universities, which several of us, me included, were advocating for a long time, and that is, if you simply take department X, scientific department, and see how they fared in raising funds from Research Councils, how much money have they actually been able to generate through Research Councils? Now that is fiercely peer reviewed, those applications. So, it is a measure, an immediate measure, on the performance of a department. And we did actually go through an exercise to see how much difference it would make. And it turned out that the Research Assessment Exercise would give a certain rating for a department, and if you did it this other way, you would get very close to the same thing. The big difference is, that doing it my way, other people’s ways, cost virtually no effort on the part of the universities, whereas the preparation for Research Assessment Exercises is a monstrous load. It really burns up an awful lot of people’s time, and, and also distorts the way they do things. So I still regret that that hasn’t been adopted. At one time the argument was, ah that’s all right for science departments; what about the arts? But since we now have an Arts Research Council, that argument falls flat. So, I think, the Research Assessments have developed their own momentum, their own experts, who love the whole thing, and who live every moment of it between each Research Exercise and it, it has become a, it’s become a sort of discipline in its own right, which I think has been detrimental to universities.

Do you recall how your staff greeted the prospect of the first REA back in the 1980s?

Eric Ash Page 173 C1379/92/Track 9

I think all of us were sort of surprised by what we were asked to do, but I think, people thought it not unreasonable at the time. And, of course, you always had somebody in the university who masterminded the whole thing for the university. I had somebody whom I had appointed as a researcher in fact, or strategist I think we called him, who was really terribly good at this. In fact, the other thing he was good at, he could always, from any metric judging universities, he could always find one that put Imperial College on the top. That’s the sort of people you need in order to run this sort of exercise. Mm.

[12:45] Mm. Do you recall what your first day was like at Imperial?

I recall one thing, and that is that I was... Well two things actually. I was asked to address the freshers on day one, and, two things. One, I was told that people wear gowns on these occasions, and I’ve never worn a gown in any seriousness, although there is a gown for the rector. But it turned out that on that day, or the evening before, the officers, the student officers, had had their gowns pinched by somebody. So they couldn’t come in gowns. And so we all agreed, I wouldn’t have to either. So no gowns on this occasion. The other thing was, shortly before this address, somebody came up to me and said, ‘Rector, this is your speech.’ And, that really shook me. I may be hesitant and I may stutter and whatnot, but I’d rather say what I think than have somebody tell me what to, what I should have said. So they never tried that again. And incidentally, I never read speeches. Annually when we had the graduation ceremonies, the rector has to make a sort of, a state of the union address in the Albert Hall, and I never read that speech; I always made notes, and maybe I sounded hesitant but, I know I sound completely wooden if I try and read something.

[14:40] Mm. I was wondering, when we talked earlier about when you started at UCL, you pointed out how it was a sort of liberal-minded atmosphere.

Yes.

Eric Ash Page 174 C1379/92/Track 9

I was wondering if you could give me, I guess an impression of what the atmosphere was like at Imperial.

I thought it was, somewhat similar. I mean I think people were, quite relaxed. The pressures on universities which subsequently grew, partially in the case of Imperial College, because we had been over-funded, but generally, they grew fairly rapidly. They hadn’t really hit in 1985. I do remember asking the, the secretary or, I mean, the chief executive chap, ‘Are we rich or are we poor?’ And, he thought for a moment, and he said, ‘Actually, I think we’re, we’re quite rich.’ And I think, the fact that there was no enormous pressure, financial pressure, on the university at that point, made people feel relatively relaxed. We had luxuries at Imperial College which I don’t believe have been fully maintained since, I don’t think they could have been, but we had good departmental libraries. So for example, the mathematics department had a departmental library which was, magnificent. And this was quite apart from ‘the library’, which was also well staffed and well looked after. And, as time went on, we had to tighten up on some of those luxuries.

[16:35] Mm. I guess I’m quite interested, I guess we all sort of see large organisations like Imperial College, and I’m wondering, as the person who’s in charge of this, what do you actually do on a daily basis? Can you talk me through I guess a typical day’s activities?

You know it’s twenty years ago, I can’t remember. But, I, I can put it in categories. I mean, clearly one is running a business, and so one has to understand the financial stresses and strains and, and strategies. When I came, the then chairman of the governing body, who was... God, what the hell was his name? He was a High Court judge, retired High Court judge. And he said, ‘You look after the academic side and I’ll look after the finances.’ Which was rubbish. He had no power to look after the finances, nor did he have much ability in that direction. So, running, running it as a business, was important, that’s on the financial side. Then running it as a business, it’s a peoples business, and, I’ve forgotten what the number of staff was that we had at the time. I ought to be able to remember that. Well, it, probably close to 1,000, and, if you count, count everybody. And as you know, if you’ve got 1,000 people to deal

Eric Ash Page 175 C1379/92/Track 9 with, at least one person is having hysterics in any one given day, so there are problems which arise simply because they are people. And, we had an HR department, and, dealing with the HR department was certainly part of the, the role. But what I regarded from day one as my most important single task was to encourage academic excellence in individual departments, and one of the things that I did is, I visited every department in the place at least once a year, and went right through it, talked to students, talked to staff et cetera et cetera. So, that task takes up time. [19:14] And then, going back to the human side again, people get old and retire, or they die, or you need to make new appointments. So dealing with staff issues is an important point. For example, after my first year, we decided that we would take two departments, one was called Management Science, and the other one was called Social and Economic Studies or something. The Management Science was almost pure mathematics, logistics, not much to do with management directly, except, the attempt to, to embrace it in mathematical terms. Whereas the Social and Economic Studies was an extremely soft department, I mean it was, the social side was the important thing. Also, I noticed that the Management Science department seemed unable to make ends meet, and whereas if physicists find it, or biologists find it difficult to take money seriously, I did think a management department should take money seriously and should be able to do it. So we decided to join those two departments together, and call it a management school, business school, which has flourished. It is now one of the top business schools in the country, I think it comes, in the pecking order, under LBS, and maybe second or third in the country, I don’t know, but it’s, it’s been very successful. But my God, there was opposition to that. And the, the soft side thought they’d be overrun by these hard people, and the chief person on the logistics side of it, on the hard side, thought that, he would lose his virginity or something worse if they merged with these other people. So it was quite difficult to do. You asked me what, you know, what would my role be. Well the most important single role I had at that time was to find somebody who would run it. And, we advertised the post of course, and maybe we used headhunters, I can’t remember. And, we then picked somebody. I remember the then head of mechanical engineering, Tom Husband, very bright chap, who on the selection committee when we had selected this person, said, ‘You know we’ve hired an operator.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I did. I thought that’s what was really needed at this point.’ This chap was not

Eric Ash Page 176 C1379/92/Track 9 a shining academic in his field. He was OK, and he had published stuff and whatnot, but he wasn’t international class. But she was an operator, and that’s what the place needed at the time.

Why, what sense an operator?

Politically savvy, with the possibility of being ruthless when necessary. Counting beans appropriately, and, all the, all these things that you would associate with a, a good businessman, but also somebody who understood the direction which one wanted to go in a business school. And I had a particular aim, which took an awful long time to mature but it, it seemed to me that if you are going to have a business school in a place like Imperial College, you should exploit the fact that you’ve got very bright scientists and engineers in the place, and what one really should have are joint PhDs between a science or an engineering department and a business school. The interface between science and, and business, seemed to me particularly appropriate for a place like Imperial College.

[24:00] It does bring me on to a question. I was wondering if you did have a particular, a particular grand vision, a grand design for Imperial College when you became Rector.

I don’t think so. [pause] No I, I mean I thought Imperial College was a pretty amazing place anyway. I think, it was in danger of getting a little bit sleepy, and it was certainly in danger of not keeping their eye on what I still regard as the most important ball in the game which is getting the bright students to come. I did have the ambition of enhancing contact with industry, and getting business more involved, and that is ongoing now. We made progress. But I don’t think we ever quite solved the problem. [25:25] And, but closely related to that was the question of the formation of spin-off companies, of individual academics who having made significant progress in a particular technology or science, who want to start a company, and that is something which I very much encouraged and which did flourish and is continuing to flourish in

Eric Ash Page 177 C1379/92/Track 9

Imperial College. On the other hand, I also had a difficult task in the beginning to create a situation where the borderline between a spin-off company and the college, the university, was relatively clearly marked. I mean to give you one example. There was a company that had formed spontaneously, I don’t even know whether it was a company or just a group in the Physics department, who had a particular skill. I’ve forgotten what your background was.

History.

It’s history. That’s right, well...

Well, plus a bit of computing along the way.

Yes. Oh yes, right. Well anyway, their particularly the skill was computer analysis of electron beams. You have electron beams and electron microscopes for example, and you have them in other electronic devices, and to understand how the electrons behave is a very important part of that business. And they were able to produce software which could really solve problems for people in industry. And, the situation that they had evolved was very simple, and that is that, all of the income which they derived from working for industry with this thing, was distributed amongst the people doing the work in the department. All the costs involved were attributed to the college. And I had great difficulty in persuading the then head of department that this really wasn’t right. The head of department, Tom Kibble, who may yet have a share in the Nobel Prize for the Higgs boson, but probably not, but he’s close to, he’s one of the people who did pioneering work in that respect, but he found that difficult to understand. So gradually we had to explain to people that, that in as much as you used facilities and, and time, energy and staff time and whatnot within the department, for the business purpose, that would have to be accounted for, would have to be paid for. It’s, it is a difficult, it’s been a difficulty in a number of other universities, through probably every university that’s tried it, how you actually do it. You start a company, you want to do research for the products that you are interested in that company, so you have PhD students, and these PhD students, are they working for themselves, for the university or for the company? It’s quite difficult to... [29:10]

Eric Ash Page 178 C1379/92/Track 9

I’m being very long-winded answering your question, what does a rector do. The other is of course, the outward-looking task of making and maintaining contacts with the rest of the world, particularly with people who have money to spend and would like to spend it on Imperial College. So, fundraising is an important thing. But the other thing, which I would put almost, coupled to it but almost equally important, is keeping in touch with alumni. When I came to Imperial College I asked, who are our alumni? And the answer that I got was a shoebox with cards in it, about 300 cards. And one of those cards was Eric Ash, with an address which would never ever have reached me. So, I reckon we started the alumni thing absolutely on ground zero, and by the time I left I think we had, I think something like 80,000 names on the alumnus register. But over and above that one has to see alumni, so I visited alumni in different parts of the world, and, I think that’s an important job for whoever runs a university.

Why did you think it was so important to have that contact with alumni?

Well because, the university is essentially the students who are there and essentially the students who were there. It, it’s really part of, of the overall enterprise, and, we want alumni to maintain interest in the university, we want them to consider sending their children there as students. I mean it’s far more developed in the United States, where alumni are really regarded as immediately an important part of a university. And they tend to recruit alumni on graduation day. A friend of ours who graduated from Brown University, and who is even older than I am, told us that, of his class who were still alive, ninety per cent of them were annual givers. And I don’t think there’s a university in this country that would get up to ten per cent on that.

I was going to ask, was there any financial motivation in that as well?

Oh yah, absolutely. You know, and, happily some of the alumni that we created turned out to be rather wealthy, and, they have made, continue to make constant contributions. Not on the same scale as Oxford and Cambridge manage to achieve on a constant basis, but, starting from near zero level, it did grow, and is growing, mm.

[32:30]

Eric Ash Page 179 C1379/92/Track 9

Mm. You mentioned fundraising as well. Were there any other fundraising measures you can tell me about?

Any other...?

You mentioned that fundraising was another one of your important duties.

Yah.

Were there any other fundraising duties that you recall in particular?

Well, I wouldn’t call it specifically just fundraising. But, you ask, what does a rector do? Well one of the things that I did as Rector is, first of all I got myself a wife. Well I had had her for about forty years anyway so that wasn’t total news. But we did do a lot of entertaining, which I thought was very important. [microphone noise] Sorry. The most... Well we, we did all sorts of different kinds of entertaining. One of the things we did is, Clare and I gave out ice creams on day one to all the overseas students when they arrived, which they, they thought was pretty odd, but in fact was quite a good way of making contact with them. Very important to me was that we had dinners for heads of departments. Heads of departments are really the core of, of the university activity, and having periodic dinners with the heads of departments, and their wives, was a great help. I always remember, this wasn’t day one of my time there, but in year one we decided we would have to follow what was happening nationally in a sense, and that is have a formula for distributing the funds that we had between departments. And, we had, we devised a formula and we had a departmental meeting of heads of departments, which got quite angry. It was quite difficult to manage. And in the end I said, ‘Look, we can’t quite resolve this at the moment. We can come back on Saturday and have a, and have a go then. Alternatively, we can appoint two or three people that you trust and we’ll have another go at producing a formula. But in the meantime, our wives are waiting outside for dinner.’ So we went outside, had drinks and had dinner, and that made such a difference, that one was able to dissolve all that into a social occasion.

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 180 C1379/92/Track 9

But the other thing that my wife and I did is, we had probably almost once a fortnight a dinner for twenty-four people, which we had in the flat, that’s, in the place where the rector has to live. And we had four round tables, six people at each table, and we divided it between staff in the university and people from the real world, fifty-fifty. And always with partners. And, they were very popular, and you know, we were able to invite important people to come to these things and they enjoyed them. And, it was great I think for professors to meet people from the outside world they wouldn’t otherwise have met. But even more than that, we did introduce quite a lot of professors to each other, who had been in the place for ten years but had never met. So I, I saw that as a very important part of, of the job. Have I told you enough about the job?

I was wondering, what sort of important people?

Oh. People from companies, business people. We had politicians.

[37:20] Mm. I was wondering, I guess I’m interested in, what are the trappings of power? What was your office like at Imperial?

The office was totally absurd. I mean, it was an enormous space. And I think the first rector must have had megalomania problems of some sort. And indeed I was told that, when he first occupied it, there was a separate lift so the rector could get to his office without having to encounter ordinary people. Well that had gone by the time I was there. But it was a very big office, which I used as a meeting place. Personally I would have been happy with an office about one tenth of the size. But I mean it was, it was useful as a meeting place. For example, once a year I invited new fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering, new fellows of the Royal Society, plus the existing fellows, just for a simple lunch. Smoked salmon on brown bread and grapes, I mean that, that sort of thing. And a bit of champagne. And that, the office for that was, was fine, you could get, I don’t know, forty people in there quite, quite easily, and... But, in every other way, it was sort of absurd. There was an outer office with, I

Eric Ash Page 181 C1379/92/Track 9 think we typically had three staff in there. I think that’s right. One of them was my PA and the other two were doing various other things.

What’s the décor in the office like?

The which?

What was the décor in the office like?

Oh, very simple. I had some pictures up. But, I, I didn’t attempt to re, re-model it for, for my reign to so speak.

I was just wondering, are we talking about wood-panelled walls, bookcases?

Yah. Yah.

What sort of, what sort of...

Yah. No, actually, you made an interesting point there. There were bookcases with glass doors on the front of them. I got rid of the glass doors. I thought, you know, the one thing you really don’t want is to have to move glass doors aside to, to pick out a, pick out a book. [40:00] The other thing is, I always maintain that I didn’t need a secretary, a PA, except to find my glasses. Because I, I did all my own typing anyway. I, I find that, I find I can type faster than I can think to dictate, so, I did do dictation, in the morning when the mail came in we rapidly ran through the post and sometimes I would dictate a quick, quick thing off the cuff, but anything more serious, I would write myself. And my PA allowed me to do so except if I was writing to a minister, and then she insisted on redoing it, not completely but making sure there are two places after a full stop and that sort of stuff.

[40:50] What was the rector’s flat like as well?

Eric Ash Page 182 C1379/92/Track 9

Oh, the rector’s flat was, two floors of a Norman Shaw building. There was the bedroom floor where we had, I’ve forgotten how many bedrooms we had there, one of which we converted into a study. And then there was one floor below, which we did change quite a bit. We, the kitchen was large, and we changed it so that it was a place where one could entertain as well in small groups. We got a good architect to do it, my son-in-law, and, I paid the architectural fees because I thought, it was too much nepotism to have a son-in-law do things for the college. But it, it created a very nice space, and I quite often had breakfast meetings, and I, I would make the breakfast, I mean a simple breakfast, and, I found that was a good informal way of, of talking to people.

[42:10] Mm. I was going to wonder, I’ve got a few little sort of snippets of the sort of things you were doing on a daily basis.

Mm.

But how, I guess, being in charge of a university, how does one actually one exercise one’s power? Are you sitting at your desk in your big office dictating, do this, do that? Is it committees? Is it pulling strings behind the scenes? What’s, what’s involved?

Well the levers of power are few and far between. In fact, my previous job was to be head of a department at UCL, and I always said, I really only have one power, and that is, I can tell a member of my staff what they are to teach next year. But then, if that member of staff comes to me and says, ‘Well yes sir, if you tell me to do that, that’s what I’ll do. But actually, I don’t like the subject, I don’t intend to learn much about it, but you know, I, I can go through the motions,’ I would then say, ‘Well maybe I’ll get somebody else to do it.’ So even that one power wasn’t particularly absolute. Being a rector, I suppose one important power is promotions, getting people promoted to readerships or, or to, to chairs. And I personally chaired every promotion for a professorship throughout the time I was there. And I changed the way we did it. They used to have long CVs and long publication lists and all that. And I shortened

Eric Ash Page 183 C1379/92/Track 9 that, and instead asked for four publications, actual publications, not just the titles. And then we had something to talk about you know, when we interviewed the person concerned. I think that was a good way of doing it. I don’t know whether they still do it that way now or not actually. But that’s a very important part of the, of the thing. [pause] There are other promotion issues, readerships, where one is unlikely to be very directly involved, but might be. And of course appointing new professors is very much a, an important task. And, I suppose, I did exert a fair amount of influence there. I mean one of the things that was the red rag to the bull as far as I was concerned, if somebody said, ‘Well we’ve advertised and this is the best of the bunch that came up,’ I said, ‘That is not the criterion. The criterion, is he up to the elevated standards that we, we’re looking for? And if not, don’t hire.’ So that, that, the whole appointments and promotion thing is an important part of power. In the case of professors, there was also salary. The salary that you paid was essentially determined by the rector, in discussion with the pro rector and other people. But, that, that certainly was a factor. I think the most dramatic thing I ever did on salaries was, we had a chap called, still there, Richard Dickins, who was a musician-in-residence so to speak, he conducted the orchestra. I mean Imperial College is, is fantastic on music. The Imperial College orchestra, a year or so when they had a competition, won the best university orchestra in the country. They are fully professional, it’s a, it is quite amazing. And Richard Dickins is, is a pretty remarkable chap. And, when I looked at what he was doing, I doubled his salary. It made me feel like a big boy doing that sort of thing. [laughs] It would never have occurred to me that I would ever have the opportunity to double anybody’s salary, but he was clearly desperately under-paid for the fantastic contribution he was making. And still is making incidentally. [47:00] What other powers, strings that one could pull? Oh, one very important one is space, how much space departments have, and if they, if they want to change the usage of space, they will need support from the college as a whole. So space is a very important issue.

Mm.

There are universities that have tried to put the cost of space into a formula allocation of, of what each department gets. I’ve, I was very reluctant to do that, because if you,

Eric Ash Page 184 C1379/92/Track 9 if you, if you do that, you will end up by having just software, a software university, because they’d only need space, and you’d get rid of your civil engineering. So, I didn’t think that was a good way of doing it. But, space is certainly an important issue, yes. [pause] What other powers? I don’t... I... [pause] I didn’t feel the need to throw my weight around all the time. [pause] I think the other really important power is, that having decided on a formula vote, like how much money each department gets, is giving freedom to departments that could cope within their budget. And that was much appreciated. I mean freedom, for example, if a secretary retires, that they can automatically appoint another secretary. Whereas if they’re in the red, they can’t. And, I even had one situation of one department, the Department of Geology, where we had to take their chequebook away. What I mean is, they were, they were not allowed to buy anything without the signature of the pro rector who was my number two. Somewhat humiliating, but, it’s the only way I think you can do it fairly, and something which incidentally was not done at UCL, which I could never understand. I mean Derek Roberts, who was my opposite number a lot of the time, came from industry, and I would have thought he would have been tough in that way. But he wasn’t. Have I answered your question?

[50:10] I just guess one or two follow-up ones.

Right.

One of them was working hours, what sort of working hours did you work as a rector?

Oh pretty long, I must say. I mentioned breakfast meetings. I quite often had eight o’clock breakfast meetings. I had one PhD student almost by accident, I mean he was somebody who was going to join me at UCL from Canada, and when I moved to Imperial he decided he’d stick along. And, I had regular meetings with him, but usually at eight o’clock in the morning. And, there was quite a lot of evening work I would, I would say, I mean, entertaining within the college, but also meetings outside the college, and, and I did have some other tasks, for example in my, I think 1987, my second year, I was the President of the IEE, Institution of Electrical Engineers as it

Eric Ash Page 185 C1379/92/Track 9 then was. And that involved a certain amount of evening work. And... But, keeping up with various connections in industry and other places quite often did involve evening work as well. And I would say that, I normally spent Saturdays in my office. It was temptingly easy to do, since it was a fifty metre walk. But I, I would normally do that. And indeed, one of the things I did when I left Imperial College, I left a proposal, which oddly enough has only just been adopted, not that it had anything to do with the fact that I made the proposal, but, and that is, to divide the top job into two, which is what happens in every American university, you have a president and you have a provost. The provost runs the shop; the president is the outward-looking chap, making inspirational speeches and all that sort of stuff, and fundraising. I, I actually think that it is a difficult job for one person to do with, if they’re covering all the bases that we are talking about. So that is now happening at Imperial College. They’ve just appointed the provost, they haven’t appointed the president yet for next year.

Mm.

The other thing is that I think it’s very much a two-person job. I don’t know how it works if you’re in a same-sex marriage, but in a conventional marriage, it was extremely... It was very much a two-person job between Clare and myself. I mean she actually had an office in the place, and she did a job, essentially looking after visiting sabbatical visitors who needed accommodation, needed help in one form or another, and she ran an office called Hub, in which she looked after some of the residential space that the college had, and made sure that it wasn’t in diabolical shape either aesthetically or, or practically, and... So she did a lot of work on that. Totally unpaid incidentally. She had to get somebody else, a secretary of the college, to arrange for her to have some pens and pencils, that sort of thing.

And how did she feel about taking on that role do you know?

How did she feel about it? I think she thought it was a worthwhile job. I mean, previous to that, she had been employed by a teachers’ training college, and subsequently by the University of the South Bank, and she was doing lecturing there. And, she gave that up and... And, we also still had some family responsibilities.

Eric Ash Page 186 C1379/92/Track 9

[pause] One of our daughters lived with us. [pause] I’m just trying to remember how many of them lived, lived with us. [pause] Well certainly it varied at different times, but certainly, Lucy, our third daughter, lived with us while we were there. And we had things like grandchildren and whatnot that appeared.

[56:00] On the subject of daughters as well, I was wondering, did you make any changes to the way that women were admitted to Imperial College?

Oh, encouraged it. I always claim that if they asked me, ‘What did you do at Imperial College?’ I always answer by saying that, when I went there, there were 1,000 women who were on the staff, on the academic staff. Not, sorry, the academic staff. 1,000 students I mean. And when I left there were 2,000.

Why did you think it important?

I think women are important. But I mean, first of all, not because they’re, so much because they’re women, but because they are half the human race, and half is quite a lot. But then, actually I do believe that women have a, add a different flavour to, to society, and I, I think, I think on the whole society is healthier if there is something nearer a balance between men and women. But we, we did quite a lot of things. We were one of the first people to have, to run a WISE course, Women in Science and Engineering, W-I-S-E, which was inviting girls from various schools to come and spend, I’ve forgotten how long it was, a couple of weeks probably, in the college, so they can see, see what it’s like, and they can understand that, it’s quite all right for a woman to be an engineer and all that. So we took a fair amount of trouble on that. And then incidentally, my success in going from 1,000 to 2,000, probably half of that is owed to the fact that in the meantime we had a medical school, and, that, the most important single activity I was involved in in my eight years was to join up with a medical school, so that Imperial College, which was not medical at all when I went, was, had a substantial medical school when I left and is now about fifty per cent medical.

[58:35]

Eric Ash Page 187 C1379/92/Track 9

Why do you think it was important to acquire a medical school, to branch out into medical school, how did it happen?

[pause] A lot of the research going on in Imperial College had medical aspects to it. I mean an extreme example was somebody in Physics who was working on, oh... [pause] Gosh, I’ve forgotten... Anyway, anaesthetics. And he had a, an interesting theory which I think in the meantime has cut a lot of ice on how they worked et cetera. But we had people in Mechanical Engineering who were working on prosthetics and... All over the place, Electrical Engineering, there was a great deal of medical-oriented work going on. And it, it seemed to me that it was important that one had a direct contact with, with medicine. [pause] I, I... You asked early on, what was my vision for Imperial College, and I denied that I had a vision. I did have one vision, and that is that, I thought that the twentieth century was very definitely the century for physical sciences. I thought, there was no question in my mind that the twenty-first century would be a century for life sciences. And I think that, I think, I think most people would agree that more than half of the excitement in science in the twenty-first century has been based on, on life sciences. So by not having an active life science department, which is what a medical school is, one was cutting oneself off from a large part of the universe. Could I try and make one more phone call for a moment?

Certainly.

[End of Track 9]

Eric Ash Page 188 C1379/92/Track 10

[Track 10]

How did you actually go about setting up a medical school at Imperial?

It’s a merger. We merged with St Mary’s Hospital Medical School. I got to know the dean of the medical school there. And it was in the air that smaller medical schools should join with, with universities that had all the sciences. So, UCH for example, the UCH medical school obviously joined with UCL, and, so, so it was in, in the wind. But it was not an easy thing to, to bring about. There was a strong feeling in the college that this would be fatal for Imperial College, if you once got involved with a medical school, they would sup up all the money. And St Mary’s Hospital Medical School was very tribal, and they, they really felt that they would be diluting themselves if they got involved with a place like Imperial. So, it was quite a battle. And, it’s one of the few times, I think perhaps the only time in my time there, that, when we had a meeting, I’ve forgotten what we called it, the senate or something like that, which all heads of departments and whatnot were involved in, it was one of the few times where, after a long debate as to the pros and cons, I asked for a vote, and I didn’t know which way the vote would go. And there was a passionate speech before by somebody, how bad it would be, and a very good rebuttal by somebody else et cetera. But in the end it was probably eighty to ninety per cent in favour of the thing. But, I didn’t tell anybody this at the time, but if it had gone against, I think I would have resigned, that was my intention. Because it seemed to me such an important thing for the college that we really had to push it through. And then, when we finally succeeded in getting the merger arranged, we had a ceremony at Imperial College, which included speeches and a lot of music, including a double violin sonata, a Bartók double violin sonata with one part being played by an Imperial College person and the other by a woman, a girl, from the medical school. And Princess Anne attended it. So it was a great occasion. And the flag at St Mary’s was flown at half mast. I always remember that contrast between, you know, triumph on the one hand and the problem that we still faced with hearts and minds kind of thing.

Mm. What sort of work had you had to actually do to bring about that merger yourself?

Eric Ash Page 189 C1379/92/Track 10

Oh mainly weight. But also, some joint sporting activities, some cultural activities. I mean we got medical school people joining the orchestra.

In the run-up to the merger happening, what sort of things did you personally have to do to bring it about?

One of the... Well, it, it had to be blessed by the university. That was relatively easy, because, Brian Flowers was the vice-chancellor at the time and he was all in favour of it anyway. But there were quite a lot of formalities. In fact it needed an Act of Parliament, not one of those that would have excited Paxman or anything, it’s one, in fact there was to me quite a revelation that you can have an Act of Parliament that nobody notices, if there isn’t any great opposition to it. But you wouldn’t have needed much opposition for it to have become a real issue, much more difficult. [05:15] But, I think one of the important things that we had to do, or I had to do, goes back to the Research Assessment Exercise. Because, St Mary’s research performance was not up to the standard of Imperial College, and so there was a danger that our grading in this Research Assessment Exercise would suffer as a result of that. And, informally we were given some kind of assurance that we would have time in order to bring them up to our standards. If I were to say that aloud and in the presence of St Mary’s people, they’d have kittens. But, you know, on... It was a fact that there were some extremely good scientists there. But, on the whole, research was, was not at the same level. Now subsequently, and this was after my time, we joined with Hammersmith as well, and they were very much on the same level as, as Imperial College. So overall, the medical school now I think is, is on the right level. Quite apart from the fact that one of the professors there has given me a new hip.

Did you have to do much involved... Did you have to do much to sort of integrate the two after they had been joined?

Yes. Well, I mean, again very much on the social level. And, we had joint membership of, of each other’s councils. So I was on the Council of St Mary’s, and, one of the Rothschilds. Give me, give me a Rothschild first name.

Eric Ash Page 190 C1379/92/Track 10

Victor?

Pardon?

Victor?

No. Anyway, one of the younger ones, who was chairman of the Council of St Mary’s, joined the Council of Imperial College. So we had that kind of interchange. The other thing that I did, which I think was the right thing to do, I mean even in retrospect I think was the right thing to do, and that is, we kept each other’s financial accounts totally separate for one year. For one year, the fact that we were one entity did not show up in the financial figures. And that gave people at St Mary’s confidence, and to some extent people at Imperial confidence, that we knew what we were doing when we did merge them. But, that was still a slow, hard business. I think I left in ’93, and the merger was ’88, and I think it was only just, just, the financial side was only just completed by about then.

[08:30] Mm. I was wondering as well, was there much time for your own research in all this, managing and socialising?

I’m sorry, did...?

Did you still have any time for your own research?

I, only in the sense of having one research student, and that, I mean that was if you like an act of research activity, but on a very narrow, one single theme with one student. And, when he got his PhD, I decided not to take on another. And my reason was, I always felt, like when I’d take on a PhD student, I owe them one idea to start them off, one direction in which they could go, which with luck might lead to some original stuff. And, if you are an administrator, which is what the rector really is, you don’t have time to do what, what you need to do to get ideas, which is to spend time in libraries and going to scientific conferences and generally chatting with people over cups of coffee. There really isn’t time to do that. So I decided not to take on another.

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Oddly enough I did take on a new PhD student when I left Imperial, when I retired, and I spent some years in the physics department at UCL.

[10:02] Mm. I guess a rather quick question. I was wondering what Brian Flowers was actually like to work with.

Brian Flowers?

As Vice-Chancellor, yes.

Oh, I mean he didn’t think of it as much of a job being Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. [pause] And, actually, Imperial had rather little to do with the University of London, and we were getting our, had been getting our own finances for some years beforehand directly from the Government and not through the university. And, so, unlike UCL that was very much beholden to the university for many more years, I didn’t have that problem. I... I had that problem just once, and it wasn’t, it was after Brian Flowers had retired, which was a real, a really odd story. We had a meeting in Senate House to discuss various issues, particularly funding of, computer funding, and I had to leave the meeting early because we were entertaining people for dinner that night. And when the results finally came out, I found that they had pinched, I’ve forgotten how much money, £100,000 or something like that, from the Imperial College budget. And I had to go to some considerable lengths to get it back. I did get it back. But, that was an unhappy experience. But, most of the time the University of London really didn’t matter to Imperial, and so Brian Flowers didn’t matter to me, or I to him. I mean we were good friends, but...

What sort of a chap was he to meet? I’m just curious, he’s one of those names that comes up.

Well, he was a good scientist, I believe. I haven’t ever looked into his science, but he was a theoretical physicist. And he was enthusiastic, and, wrote a book on computing late in life, and, a very likable chap in, in every way. On the other hand, in a funny way, he was not tough enough when he was at Imperial College, and he, he did some

Eric Ash Page 192 C1379/92/Track 10 things which I thought led to subsequent difficulties, and which I think in any management school you are told not to do, which is, he solved some personality problems by changing structures, the structure of departments. And, that’s the wrong way round, and, and led to longer-term problems as a result. He had a very major battle with somebody in the, in Mechanical Engineering, and I still got the backwash of that when I got there. And incidentally, that was a perfect example of what I was talking about early on, somebody who had started a company, again a software company, for solving physical problems using software. A very important bit of science, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, still is, and he started this company. But he used his students mercilessly to work for the company, and giving them a PhD as a reward kind of thing. So... That, that was, that was one of his, his failures. But one of the very positive things he did for the college was to start the group on environmental, environmental studies or environmental sciences, something, which was based on an MSc course which they started, and, a chap called Gordon Conway, have you come cross him at all? OK. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society too, and, actually if you want to interview an interesting chap, he would, I would put him down as another one. He subsequently headed up the Ford Foundation in India and then the Rockefeller Foundation in New York before he came back here. But he was the soul that started up the, this group, one on environmental sciences. And, at a last count, a high percentage of all the people with environmental science jobs in this country got their way through that, through that group. So that was very much Brian Flowers’s doing.

[16:07] Do you have much sense of what your own reputation was amongst the other people at Imperial?

My reputation?

Mm. Any idea how you were seen?

How I was seen. [pause] Well I originally had a contract for five years. They asked me, did I want one to retirement, which would have been eight years, and arrogantly I said, ‘No no, five years is fine.’ When the five years came up, I did find out that there

Eric Ash Page 193 C1379/92/Track 10 were a few people who thought, maybe five years was time enough for Eric Ash. So clearly there were people who in their folly didn’t appreciate the marvellous things that Eric Ash was doing. I think, I think on the whole, people thought I was OK. The fact that I took primary interest in the research in the departments when going around departments, and making contact with individuals, I think was appreciated. I think on the whole, the difficulties that we had with the pressure on universities, the financial pressures, the way we resolved those, my formula that I should make every head of department equally unhappy, was appreciated, I think. I think the social life that we engendered I think was appreciated. [pause] It’s hard to know, I mean I’ve never taken a vote on it. One would be quite interested to know. But I think on the whole, people, people thought it went all right.

[18:15] Mm. I had one other quick question as well. You mentioned that, you know, you thought it was important to get more women into Imperial.

Yes.

Other than women in science and engineering involvement, did you do anything else, other sorts of activities to encourage it?

Well Imperial was mainly science and engineering, other than the Management School, and we did have some good women in the Management School anyway. Did I encourage it? Well I would say, every time I was asked by a girls’ school to give away the prizes or make a speech or something, I would say, yes, I would always do it. [pause] One thing, going back to my time at UCL, we got applications through the UCCA process, and on that the headmaster or headmistress of the candidate would write their opinion, and we would normally interview, probably about half the people who applied, because there’s no point interviewing a lot more than we could take on. But I made it a rule that we would interview every girl who applied to Electrical Engineering, including one where the headmistress made a, a comment on the form, I can’t remember the exact words but something like, ‘God help whoever has to look after this creature in her next phase of her education.’ It wasn’t quite as, like that, but in that, reading between the lines, that’s essentially what, what she said. And, we

Eric Ash Page 194 C1379/92/Track 10 took her on. And she was a somewhat wild creature. I know one summer vacation she, she was asked how she spent it, and she spent it learning how to paraglide from an aircraft, you know, and, and freefall before using your, before using your, your parachute. And I think she came something like second in her year or something, and she was very bright. I would be quite curious to know what happened to her.

Mm.

But, I encouraged that sort of discrimination in the departments as well.

At Imperial you mean?

At Imperial, yah.

[21:10] Mm. Did you actually enjoy the job of being Rector?

I think, I think the simple answer is, yes. At least in the sense that I did not regret doing it. That must, that’s almost an answer isn’t it? I mean I thought it was quite a privilege to be, to be given this, this job. And I suppose that’s part of enjoying it, yes.

Mm. When did you actually retire from the post?

’93.

Had you had much thought about what you might do next, or you were just going to retire to, to do the gardening and read books?

No, I, I actually, I was asked to go back to my old department at UCL, but I, I thought that was a bad idea. So, I went to the physics department at UCL, and I spent some time there. [22:14] And one of the things I did, I mentioned, I took on a PhD student, and, did a PhD with him on something which I had always been interested in, still am in a sense, although

Eric Ash Page 195 C1379/92/Track 10

I think nowadays it’s, it’s much more widespread than it was at the time. But, my starting point was, that lectures on the whole are rarely wholly successful, and it’s quite difficult to give lectures which are inspirational in a, say, a thirty-lecture course, and have students remain excited by what you are telling them. Might be easier in history than it is in electromagnetic theory, I don’t know. But, the reason I reckon why lectures were difficult is that the lecturer was asked to do, involve in the highest cerebral activity, painting the picture of what he’s trying to present, and that is an arduous intellectual process. Whereas a student sitting there could participate in this intellectual fireworks possibly, or they could just listen, or take notes. And on the whole they are in a lower cerebral activity than the lecturer. And I thought that was a thing that you needed to solve. And so, the system that we devised was to give everybody a keypad, and one of the things that they could do is, continually tell the lecturer how he was coming across. So, press one key, you’re gabbling on so fast they don’t know what you are up to; another key, you’re going so slowly, I can barely keep awake; or just right, something like that. The lecturer would then see a bar chart, from the audience. And which could an audience of a couple of hundred you know, it’s, like that. But then, over and above that, it gets, you have the opportunity of asking the audience questions, true/false questions for example, but if you are careful you can do better than just true/false, and get people to respond to it. And, again, you can then have a bar chart to see how many people really are with you in what you are trying to present, how many are not. The great advantage of this is of course that if a student gives a really stupid answer, nobody knows who gave it. So, this was the kind of a concept. And, there was a physical part to it, how do you prepare a really cheap system that will enable you to do this with radio and all that, and the other is the actual experiment of running classes and seeing how it works out. And this student did both of them. And I think it was pretty successful. And I believe there are now quite a number of places that do something similar with... But I don’t know to what extent it’s really caught on. I think, I still think it has a lot of potential.

Mm. I was wondering, do you think it would be at all distracting for the lecturer though, having sort of, information flowing back the other way when he’s trying to...?

Well, you would only have a couple of bar charts. He can see them out of the corner of his eye.

Eric Ash Page 196 C1379/92/Track 10

What was he supposed to do when his ratings go down?

Well it’s not so much ratings going down, but, I mean I, it is something that I think most lecturers experience, whether they are presenting the picture that they are trying to present at the right speed, whether you are with the group, all of whom will have had possibly somewhat different backgrounds you know. So I think having, having speed information I think is actually quite useful, even if you did nothing else.

Mm. What actually was your area of research overall at UCL, when you returned?

Physical electronics, which is the physics of the electronic side, which involves things like, acoustics and... Well I think we’ve been over some of that early on.

I was thinking specifically about when you returned after you’d been at Imperial.

Oh. Well, I think that is actually this, educational technology was actually the only thing that I really got involved in. I did not really, at the age of sixty-five, start a new research project.

How did you get interested in the area of educational technology though? It sounds quite...

I had been for a long time. I remember very many years ago reading an article in the Scientific American before the days of widespread use of computers which talked about computer, I mean, computer teaching, and the idea was that you would be presented on the computer by a bit of information, and then you could be asked by the, a question by the computer. And depending on your reply to that question, you would then be taken to a different part of the program. So you would go through this web of knowledge, at your own speed and your own way depending on how you respond to different things. And that seemed to me like rather a good idea at the time. At the time it wasn’t very practical because, computers really weren’t quite up to it. But the other thing that’s difficult about it is, it’s, devising such a program is much more complicated than writing a textbook, because, it’s not a linear progress through a

Eric Ash Page 197 C1379/92/Track 10 body of knowledge, but it’s, it’s a more, a foggy kind of array of, of information and knowledge and, and... And I could imagine this working for history.

Mm. Whenabouts did you first become interested in it? You mentioned...

Pardon?

Whenabouts was that early computer program you mentioned?

Well, I mean I think I, I think I probably got interested in this when I first went back to university, which would have been in ’63.

Mm.

But I didn’t do anything about it, I just, I just thought it was a very interesting thought. The first time I actually did anything about it is when I left Imperial and had this one student.

[30:04] Why did you, why do you think you picked up the topic then in particular?

Well because I hadn’t done it before, and I thought it was an interesting thing to do. Oh and I got some money for it, I... I’ve forgotten where I got it from, from a Research Council or something. So I could actually pay for a student to do it.

And did you have much contact with, I guess, almost sounds like psychology in some way?

I didn’t have much contact with it, but, you are absolutely right, I mean... But I mean, teaching is a, is a psychological exercise isn’t it, I mean it’s a...

Mm. How, what sort of other research did you do in this area when you went back to UCL?

Eric Ash Page 198 C1379/92/Track 10

I didn’t. That was literally the only thing I did. I mean I was involved with quite a few other things, I just had an office in the physics department, and frankly I wasn’t enormously active in it. I, I did some things for them, for example, one of the things I did at Imperial College was to encourage departments to create an annual brochure of their department, just part of the business of selling it to new students, but part of the business also of, everybody in the department knowing what else was going on, so to produce a glossy of that kind. I would still advocate doing that. I know you can just have a website but I think, I think having something tangible, I think is, is useful. And I produced one of those for the physics department, and I had contact with a number of people in the department. But I didn’t do any research.

[31:50] Mm. Well when did you actually...

I, I was doing other things in the outside world, yes.

Could you give me some idea about some of those other things you were doing?

Well, for many years I was associated with the Tata Group in India, and I was an adviser on the Tata Group, and I’ve forgotten when it started. I can tell you when it finished, four weeks ago.

An adviser on what sort of topic? Tata are a steel-making company, that’s my main knowledge of them.

Well they, Tata do everything. They started off in steel-making, you’re absolutely right. But they are very much into electronics, they’re very much into computer science. Very much into automobiles. Renewable energy. Well energy in general, very much so. And, there is one company within the Tata Group called Tata Consulting Engineers, TCE, and it is with that company that I did my work. I used to go there typically twice a year, and, and then spend time with different groups. They had a nuclear group too, nuclear energy. And get them to present to me and I would critique what they were doing. And some of my advice was, if you like, technical.

Eric Ash Page 199 C1379/92/Track 10

Most of it was managerial. And actually I think they needed my managerial advice probably more than anything else.

Why do you say that?

Pardon?

Why do you say that?

[pause] Well, some rather elementary right-wing suggestions, like, paying bright people more than dim people. This was a bit foreign to them, and the idea that they should take on graduates and that maybe five years later some graduates might be earning twice as much as some others, was, was a very difficult concept for them. And, they had union problems too, which they were trying to deal with. And this, this also interacted with, with rewarding their staff. Transparency was a, something which was pretty strange to them, so for example, the idea if there was a group working on a major project, that it was quite a good idea for everybody in that project to know what was going on, and the flow of money and the flow of ideas and whatnot, was one. Then recruiting. I think, thought their, their technique for recruiting was, was pretty mundane, and the idea that if you’ve recruited bright people from one IT, institute of technology, that a good way of getting the next lot is to take the one you’ve got this year to go over there and tell them, ‘Come on chaps, it’s good in TCE,’ that sort of thing. [35:50] And then one which I never succeeded on, and still haven’t. The biggest problem that TCE had was a shortage of engineers, and recruiting engineers was a competitive business, particularly against the software industries. But they had some very good engineers, and, when they reached the age of sixty they retired them. And I talked to some of these people, ‘Do you want to retire?’ And they said, ‘Oh no no, it’s just the firm makes you do this.’ They did occasionally hire people back sort of on a consultancy basis, but without any responsibility, and, I tried very hard to persuade them this was completely nutty; if you have somebody who is age sixty who wants to carry on and has got all his experience, to let them go is crazy. But Tata is a, is also very tribal, even though it’s an enormous company, and, within the company, sixty

Eric Ash Page 200 C1379/92/Track 10 was regarded as the normal retiring age, unless you were a director in which case it was sixty-five. And that was a difficult thing to, to fight against. I tried to persuade them on another right-wing idea, which is that they should have something like stock options for the company they were working in, and they’re very slowly moving in that, in that sort of direction. Have I said enough on that?

I was just wondering, how well was your advice taken do you think?

Some of it was taken, some of it was taken quite well. But I’ve just given you an example where it really failed.

How did you actually first become involved with them?

There was a chap by the name of Syamal Gupta, who was on the main board of Tata, Tata Sons, who was also an alumnus of Imperial College, and I met him through the alumnus route. And he asked me to give him a hand. Which I did for some years, and I think, successfully. I’ll give you one example of a major success that I had, major in the sense that it involved a lot of money. But they really wanted to get more international business, not just consulting, engineering in India, but also in other places. And they had in various places but particularly in Mumbai, offices which to our eyes were just terrible. They just looked like a complete jumble, they had piles of paper strewn all over the place, and the lighting was erratic. And, the building was in a part of Bombay where the traffic was impossible. And, I told them that they would never get international business unless they looked like an international company. And I could give them an example of an international company, TCS, Tata Consulting Services, which was a software company, which was the most successful company that Tata spawned in recent years and an enormously successful company, and they got themselves brand new buildings and looked posh et cetera. And I said, ‘If you can’t do that, you won’t get international business.’ And they did eventually accept that, and, yah, I think they’ve got rid of the worst offices, and, got some new ones.

[40:00] Mm. On the subject of other, I guess, external activities, you mentioned you were President of the IEE as well?

Eric Ash Page 201 C1379/92/Track 10

Yah.

What’s actually involved with being president?

[pause] Well you make an inaugural speech, and if you like, I’ll give you a copy of that next time we meet, if I remember to do that. Maybe you can remind me in your next email. But it, it’s a professional organisation, and they have, they have various groups who look after various aspects of the IEE. And it’s very much an international organisation too, so one of the things the president has to do is to make a presidential tour sometime in the year that he’s there, which we did to Africa and India. You have some evening duties like attending dinners. Yes, you make speeches at lots of dinners. And you are concerned with the criteria for becoming a professional member of the, of the I-triple-E.

Mm. Were there any sort of key decisions you had to make in your time there?

[pause] I would say, no. I’d say the IEEE sort of more or less runs itself. [pause] I suppose the most important key decision, and that was quite important actually, before becoming a president, for many years I’d been an editor of one of their journals, a co-editor, two of us doing it, called Electronics Letters . It’s professionally the most successful journal that the IEEE produces, it’s also the most profitable. But we had terrible trouble gradually persuading the IEEE that it should be run more professionally in a number of different ways. I won’t go into details, it’s a bit boring, but there’s quite a lot of... And then my co-chair and I reckoned, if we could run it as if it were a normal business operation, which after all, it was profitable, if we could make the decisions bang, bang, like that, it would be greatly to the benefit of that publication. Well a lot of those decisions have gradually been made, so that was one of, one of the aspects of it.

Mm. I’m just going to pause for a second.

[End of Track 10]

Eric Ash Page 202 C1379/92/Track 11

[Track 11]

One of the things I guess I’d wondered about and I’ve meant to ask for a while is, have you always been Eric Ash?

Well I’ve just told you. I haven’t.

Well we hadn’t put it on tape.

Oh I’m sorry. [laughs] Sorry. I beg your pardon. [laughs] No, on tape. I was born Ulrich Asch, a-s-c-h. That was changed to Eric Ash when we came to this country in 1938, my father’s decision, he thought it would be easier to have a name that people would recognise, rather than one that would be difficult for them.

How do you feel about that change?

I think, it’s probably a mistake. But he didn’t ask me at the time, and, I’ve been Eric Ash for seventy-five years now so I’ve got used to it.

Why do you say a mistake?

I, I... I think, there is no reason why one should make it difficult for people to, to gauge one’s heritage, one’s history.

Mm.

I mean, in a sense there’s some echoes of this between, women changing their names when they get married, which, some of my daughters have and some haven’t.

Mm. Have you had much contact with Germany in your adult life?

I have had quite a lot of contact one way or another. First of all, before I went back into university, when I was at STL, the company had a major activity in Germany, in Stuttgart, and I was on a committee and fairly regularly attended meetings in Stuttgart.

Eric Ash Page 203 C1379/92/Track 11

But I suppose the biggest direct contact I’ve had with Germany was through the Bosch company. [02:15] I was for quite a number of years on the advisory board of the Bosch company. That could be a long one incidentally, but I’ll try and keep it short. They had an advisory committee in which they had one person from a number of major companies, major countries rather, and, in the United States the chap they had was Henry Kissinger; from the UK they had, don’t laugh, Eric Ash. Which was great fun because, I did manage to get to know Henry Kissinger rather well as a result of that. I mean he called me Eric. I admired him greatly incidentally, but that’s by the by.

Oh right, mm.

But we met once a year, and always inspected one part of the Bosch empire in Germany. And then we had a meeting in which we contributed our understanding of what was important in the politics and the economics of the country. And I plagiarised my friends, and, was able to, to contribute a bit. I did incidentally, this was I think the first time that I officially made comments about climate change, and, and the energy issue, and why I thought this was important for the Bosch company. It was interesting because, the time I did it there was a minister who was involved in it as well, and on the next day they didn’t quite issue a rebuttal but they wanted to put into context what I had said about the importance of, of energy and...

Whenabouts was that?

Pardon?

The German minister or British minister?

Oh German minister. Yes.

What did you say that was so controversial?

Eric Ash Page 204 C1379/92/Track 11

I, I can’t remember in detail, but I mean that, that the carbon dioxide emission from vehicles was one of the issues that one had to consider, which was the important issue for Bosch.

Mm. What was Kissinger like to meet in that sort of context?

Well he, he is just a marvellous speaker, summarising the issues in the world as he sees them at the time. I can’t remember any one of them in detail but it was, it was, it was just a joy to hear him, and, to hear him speak.

I guess I don’t really sort of think of him as being a sort of, a technical figure so much as being a...

Oh he’s, he’s not, no no. I mean he was... He was definitely the icing on the cake for the Bosch company.

Why do you say you admired him?

[pause] I think actually, he did an impossible job as well as it could be done, and I’m thinking particularly about the US exit from Vietnam. There was no elegant exit from Vietnam, and he encouraged what was the least inelegant exit. I think, I know people think he’s a war criminal, Cambodia and all the rest of it, but I, I think, when one looks at it in the round, at the situation that was, that actually faced the United States for having stupidly gone in there in the first place, I think he did a, a good job. And, of course the other great contribution he made was China. I mean he opened up the dialogue between the United States and China. I mean it’s attributed to Nixon, but it was very definitely Kissinger who had the, the nous and the intelligence to bring it about.

And did you have much interest in politics more widely?

Oh yah, no I mean, I mean he, he wrote a book which I have never read, even though he gave me a copy, called Diplomacy , which is sort of this thick, and it covers, everything. I don’t know that he would ever have discussed the EU for example in

Eric Ash Page 205 C1379/92/Track 11 the talk that he gave to this advisory committee. But he, he would basically have talked about the economy and politics in the United States. And he was of course a Republican.

[07:15] Mm. Where would you put yourself on the political spectrum?

Well, in the United States without hesitation, Democrat of course, between, between the two. But I, I would say, left of centre, not very far left of centre. You heard about some of the right-wing things that I did at Imperial College. I... I don’t have any strong political beliefs. I think my strongest political belief is that we should get rid of the Church of England as the, what’s it called, the...

State religion?

The state religion. But there’s a word for it, the...

Established Church?

The Established Church, that’s right. I think we should sack every one of the bishops in the House of Lords. And I think, I, I personally believe that religion is the biggest threat to humanity that we face. I think it’s more of a threat than global warming.

Why?

Well read the paper, you know. Where are people killing each other? [pause] I mean, you know, the, the Sunnis and the, what’s the others, the Shiite, you know, spend all their time trying to kill each other. Look at what happened in Northern Ireland you know. [pause] I think, I think the belief in God takes away responsibility from humans, that we have to run our own affairs.

Mm. Have you had any involve...

I’ve joined the Humanists by the way.

Eric Ash Page 206 C1379/92/Track 11

Ah, I was about to ask you...

Fairly recently.

Hm. Do you think there’s any sort of particular, I guess, moral compass that that viewpoint gives you?

I... I... [pause] When you say moral compass, I mean I, I believe that religion has contributed to our sense of morality. The slight mistake is that it attributes it to God whereas it emerged I believe fairly naturally from the obvious advantage that it’s a good idea to get on with people. [pause] I, I... [pause] I believe that, if you ask my sort of political persuasions, I think inequality is a great threat that we have, in this country too, and, I mean, one of my left-wing sentiments is on, against bankers. And it’s oddly not enough, not so much that sort of bankers get the odd million or two in their pay packet, but, that Barclays Bank had forty people who were earning more than a million, I think, this offends my moral compass, and the reason is, I do not believe that there are forty people in Barclays who could not be replaced by people who would work for 100k for example. There’s something which has gone terribly wrong with that level of inequality. So... And I do believe in the, the suggestion that nations where there is less inequality tend to be happier.

Mm. Have you played any part in wider debates about science and religion?

No. I mean, when anybody asks me, like you did just now and all this, I’ll tell them. I’ve written the odd thing I think, which I’ve made it clear what I believe about that.

[12:15] Mm. Well a slightly unrelated topic. I was wondering about awards. Any you won?

Awards?

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 207 C1379/92/Track 11

Well, first of all let me tell you about my honorary doctorates. They’re a joke. I mean, once you are, you have visibility, like the Rector of Imperial College does, and you are acknowledged as playing, having played some kind of a role on the science side, people tend to give you honorary doctorates, and it’s churlish to refuse them, so, they tend to pile up. But they’re really pretty meaningless. I mean the only awards that I’ve had that, you know, is seriously important to me, is the FRS, and, to a slightly less extent, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Marconi Award is an odd one. It has, it has an interesting history really. It all came to pass because Marconi had three daughters, and then decided he’d like to marry somebody else, and the person he wanted to marry was what they call the ‘black Catholic’, that means a Catholic who was in good standing with the Pope. And, such a Catholic cannot marry a divorced person. So Marconi couldn’t get a divorce from his wife, and so the only way of dealing with the problem was to have the marriage annulled. Well he couldn’t have it annulled on non, what’s the word, non-performance or something, since the three daughters were all there, so, they cooked up something, with the help of the Pope I think, because he’s such a famous man, that they had entered into this marriage without full commitment. The result of this was, that the three daughters were bastards, which in 1930 or thereabouts in Italy was not as much of a joke as it would be now. And one of them, Degna... Gioia Marconi, was very upset that the history of Marconi so to speak was entirely in the hands of the new family, and so she started up the Marconi Award. And, it’s an interesting award. It’s, it’s supposed to be somebody who has made the most contribution to something in communications in the course of the last year. I don’t quite know why I got it, not sure that I would have picked myself. Subsequently... [coughing] Excuse me. Subsequently I became the chair of the selection committee, so I had to face these issues myself, and one choice that I and my committee made at that time was the two Google boys, we elected them. But it’s not, it’s a slightly, it’s a slightly spurious choice I think, but it, it came with some money, I think $30,000 in my day, it’s about 100 now I think. So that was an interesting one. But... [pause] Oh, and then, things like, like getting a knighthood, or a CBE, I think that’s pretty spurious to be perfectly honest. I mean it sort of, tends to go with the job of being the Rector of Imperial College. So... Excuse me. [sniffing] I’ve had a cold recently. I’ve got a handkerchief. Oh it’s OK. [coughing] And whether you’re a knight or not, doesn’t make any difference.

Eric Ash Page 208 C1379/92/Track 11

[17:15] Getting a peerage is a different matter. I wouldn’t have minded that, if only to help to get rid of those bishops.

Why do you take so much offence to the bishops in particular in the House of Lords?

Oh I, I think the idea that... [coughing] That you discriminate in favour of one religion in that sense I think is a dreadful idea. And then of course we do have the Chief Rabbi. But there’s only one of them, but he’s bad enough. But I think the House of Lords is quite an interesting area to be. [coughing] I did once ask, I was once asked whether I wanted to be considered. [coughing] Sorry about this.

It’s OK.

I said yes but then they said I was too old anyway. So, it didn’t happen. I think the House of Lords is capable of doing some serious stuff. [coughing] Knighthoods occasionally get you an upgrade on an aeroplane, but, usually not. [coughing]

I had one final closing question today, which really was, why does the Fellowship of the Royal Society and the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering mean anything to you in particular?

[coughing] Why is it...?

Why do those two almost mean more to you than all the others?

[coughing] Well because you are elected by your peers. And it’s quite difficult to get in I suppose.

Shall we call it...

I had a task of introducing Professor Geim, who won the Nobel Prize for discovery of grapheme, but I introduced him to a meeting at the Royal Society, and I said that it is reputed that it’s quite difficult to get into the Royal Society, but we have a case here

Eric Ash Page 209 C1379/92/Track 11 to prove the opposite. All you need is a Nobel Prize and you are in. [laughs] [pause] It, it’s, it is a fairly rare honour, they don’t elect a vast number of people, and there are rather fewer engineers who are in it. So whether they were right to elect me, it’s still quite an honour.

Shall we call a stop for the day?

OK.

[end of session]

[End of Track 11]

Eric Ash Page 210 C1379/92/Track 12

[Track 12]

I was wondering if we could talk for a little bit about your time on the BT board.

Well I was invited to join the board, somewhat to my surprise. I then had to ask the chairman of the governing body of Imperial College whether that would be permitted, and he said no. Whereupon I decided I would do it anyway, but happily, the next day he came to see me and he said he had thought about it again, and he thought it would be all right.

Why the reluctance?

I think he thought being the rector was pretty much a full-time job and, there would be extra strain on my time and my energies going, doing the BT thing. On the other hand, as I pointed out, BT is a very important industry for many of the students that we had at Imperial College, and what’s more, there were opportunities to get them to support some of the work at Imperial. So I, I thought the link would be positive rather than otherwise.

Mm. How does one actually get approached to join the board of BT?

I think I just got a letter from somebody. I think somebody was on the board at the time, and they were looking for, for an additional person. And the additional person, which was me, was the only technically qualified person on the board, which struck me as really very strange. I mean BT is after all a high-tech company, depends entirely on advanced technology for doing their business, but I was for a while the only person on the board who had any technical knowledge. But at least they seemed to have wanted one, although I think they should, would have been better off with three.

I always wonder, you know, being on the board of BT, how much time does it actually take?

Eric Ash Page 211 C1379/92/Track 12

Well it takes, I think we had monthly board meetings as I remember it, so, that takes a good part of a day once a month. But that’s if everything goes straight. It’s like so many other jobs which are money for old rope as long as nothing happens, but if there are problems, then it can take a lot more time. And the sort of problems, when one wanted to recruit an additional member of the board for example, one got involved with meeting them, interviewing them, having dinner with them and that sort of thing. But, also one was involved in other things that were important to BT, for example, a European telecommunications conference, where, one goes there to see what’s going on at the conference, but to some extent to be seen as part of BT.

Mm. What actually were the responsibilities of a BT board member in your day?

Well the responsibilities I suppose are the responsibilities of any board member, which is to act on behalf of the shareholders with regard to the business which the company is engaged in. Now that, that’s a very broad definition, but it involves a whole series of things. For example, there is an audit committee, and some people, some of the board members will sit on the audit committee, and one of the things one is responsible for is understanding the audit by the auditors, asking the auditors questions. But perhaps more importantly, keeping an eye out for possible fraud. So, I think the audit committee has a, has a great responsibility in that direction. But otherwise too, if for example the company is concerned about embarking on a major new project within its remit, this is something which the board has a responsibility for assessing and commenting on. If there is any possibility of acquiring another company, then, the board members take responsibility for ensuring that due diligence has been carried out for the acquisition company. And it’s important in this sense that, if they get involved with buying a company which then turns out to be unprofitable or worse, then, directors of the board are, in principle can be sued by shareholders for not having done their duty. I always felt relatively save on that, because I think I was the only impoverished person on the board. So I think anybody who was going to have a go would shoot at other board members rather than me.

[05:25] Was it actually a paid position, or just done for the, a sort of voluntary basis, or...?

Eric Ash Page 212 C1379/92/Track 12

Was one paid for being...? Yah, one, one was paid. Much less than these days. It wasn’t a very large amount but it was, enough to make a difference, yes.

Mm. Are there any other, I guess, perks to being on the BT board?

Everybody on the board got a car phone. This was the early days, this would have been, I’m talking about 1983, or... I don’t mean ’83, I mean, probably about ’88 or ’89 or thereabouts. I was the only board member who was, didn’t have a chauffeur- driven car, but I did have a bicycle, so I asked to have a bike phone. And that’s what I got.

Oh gosh.

Just the same as a car phone, but that’s what we called it.

I’m trying to imagine what a car phone would look like transported to a bike. Do you mind describing it to me?

It’s, it was about this sort of size.

Same size as my recorder.

Yah, that sort of, yes, that’s right. Maybe a little bit bigger. But that, that sort of size, yes.

Mm. Did you actually use it much?

I used it occasionally, and I was phoned occasionally on it, yes. Mm.

Oh, gosh.

Not as much as I use my mobile phone nowadays.

Eric Ash Page 213 C1379/92/Track 12

As someone who was given one of the earlier ones, what did you make of the prospects for mobile communications at the time, in the late Eighties?

I think BT in fact was very slow at recognising the importance of mobile communications. And that’s where really the business was taken by O2. I can’t remember the details of how it all went, but, they were definitely slow on it. And I would say, by having so little emphasis on technical expertise on the board, would have been one of the reasons why they were not that quick off the mark with new businesses that sprang from the technologies that they’re concerned with.

Mm. Can you give me any idea of I guess, who else was actually on the BT board with you?

Well, there was, there were one or two civil servants, there was at least one lawyer. They weren’t all, I mean there weren’t that many non-executive people on the board. I mean, probably half of them or thereabouts were executive directors, so they’re doing part, part of the business, mm. So for example, the corporate finance officer was, would have been on it. There was the secretary who had certain legal responsibilities. I can look it up for you, but I can’t remember.

I guess I’m just curious, as you pointed out, you mentioned that you were the only technical person on the board. What sort of other people were there?

Well later on, there was an additional technical person who joined me, I’m not sure whether maybe he’s somebody you’ve interviewed, Alan Rudge? No, you haven’t. Mm. And, he subsequently became, I think the chief technical officer of the company. And that was company at least.

Mm. Now is BT privatised by this point?

Oh no, it was privatised before I got onto it. I’m not sure whether they had non- executive directors before it was privatised. Probably not.

Eric Ash Page 214 C1379/92/Track 12

Mm. Do you recall there being any big key issues that came up over your time on the board?

Oh quite a lot of key issues. But I think they were all concerned with, with the business as such. I mean one of the key issues was to what extent BT should be directly involved in the hard technology to the extent that they should outsource it, and they tended to become more and more as time went on, and I think that’s true to this day, an assistance company. And so gradually they tended to de-emphasise the research they were doing on the actual technical issues, such as optical fibre telecommunications for example. I personally think that it was probably a mistake, or at least they, I think they went away from the high-tech stuff a bit too soon, sooner than perhaps they should have done.

[10:30] Mm. As the, I guess the only technical person on the board at first, did you ever think that you had a different perspective to the other people there, or...?

Yes. I mean one difference was that, I think that the company at the time was spending two per cent of its turnover on R&D, which was, would not be unreasonable for a commodities company selling coal or flour or something, but was, seemed to me very low for a high-tech company. I think Hewlett Packard at that time would have been spending between eight and ten per cent. And of course, the really successful companies that have come since then, like Apple, spent a lot more than that. So I tried to persuade them to go up to three or three and a half per cent. And in fact, I pointed out that doing so would probably cost them nothing, because although BT was privatised, there was Government regulation which governed how much BT could charge for their phone calls. So they were not totally free to make their own charges. And of course the way the Government would set those charges is so that BT would make what they would regard as a reasonable profit. If we made less profit because we were spending more on R&D, then it would simply mean we would have been allowed to charge a little bit more for telephone calls. And that’s the argument I used, and lost.

Why do you think you lost the argument?

Eric Ash Page 215 C1379/92/Track 12

I think, I think... I don’t think there was a conviction round the table that spending more money on R&D would in the long run strengthen the company. That was I think the key, the key point really.

Mm.

But if you ask, what do the directors do, I mean, directors come from different parts of, of life and business. For example, I said, we had a non-executive lawyer on the thing. And there were various issues that arise where you would expect a particular non-executive director to take a lead. And on the technical side, I thought I should. But as I say, that wasn’t a great success story for me.

Mm. Did you involve yourself much in BT’s technical side more generally?

I, I did, I spent a certain amount of time going to their research laboratories in Martlesham, and oddly enough I did more of that when I stepped down from the board, which I did after six years I think it was, which would have been about ’93 or something. And after that, they asked me to do some investigative analysis of what was going on in the research labs. So I then spent a lot more time in the research labs after that and just [inaud] reports to the chap who was running it, the person I’ve already named, Alan Rudge.

Mm. Can you give me an idea of the sorts of things you were doing on those visits to investigate BT’s technology?

Well one of the questions that is asked in an industrial research laboratory is, how far do you go towards blue sky research, and how far do you concentrate on bread and bugger research? And they set up a system, they had an internal system, which I think was focusing more and more on bread and butter and less and less on blue sky. And that is something which I got involved with quite a bit. In fact I tried to present sort of an algorithm by saying that, if they’re working on a project, it should either be seen to be of importance for BT business in the foreseeable future, or, it should be seen as world class research. And in the latter case, you shouldn’t ask, where does it fit into

Eric Ash Page 216 C1379/92/Track 12

BT’s future; you should just say, this is imaginative excellent research, and it should be pursued, not simply for its own satisfaction, but because one doesn’t know how blue sky research will actually pan out. And so it is worth pursuing if it’s good enough. Blue sky research which is mediocre is not worth pursuing.

How was your attitude received?

I think I, I think I had some influence on, in that direction.

[15:40] Mm. Are there any sort of particular technical interventions you recall in particular?

Well I remember one which I don’t, I don’t actually claim that I, I was key in it, but, it’s one, it’s an example that I gave. If you want to communicate on optical fibres, what you do is, you take the number of fibres that you think you need, you stuff them in a tube and put them in a cable, and then use them. But the situation is that quite often you think you might need, let’s say three fibres but anticipate the possibility of needing more in the future. And what one person on the technical staff there invented was something very imaginative called blown fibre, and that is, you could have a hollow tube, put the fibre in at one end, put compressed air with a fibre, and that will pull the fibre along to the other end. It’s the sort of thing which no bread and butter engineer would have suggested; you needed somebody a bit nutty to have that idea. And in fact it was a good idea and it worked, and has been used.

Mm. One of the things I was wondering about was, I guess looking at the period you were involved in BT, sort of, early 1990s sort of time, was, was there much sort of thought to digital computer communications at that time?

Oh yah. Oh yah, no no, that, we were right on the cusp of that. There was still a fair amount of analogue going on. I remember we even bought some old analogue switches still, much to my surprise, but it was just the time when everything was moving towards digital, as fast as one could go.

Eric Ash Page 217 C1379/92/Track 12

Maybe tell me a bit more about the sorts of things that were involved from your point of view as someone on the board, in that switch.

I don’t think I was... No, I don’t think a board member would be involved sort of in the detailed stuff. In fact, I’ve forgotten what the level was, but something had to be, have a price tag of I think something like £10 million attached to it before the board heard about it. So, there wasn’t an opportunity for discussing detailed technology.

Thinking back, back into that period, what were, or indeed were there any sorts of big coming technologies in telecommunications that you saw or people you were involved with were talking about?

It was, it was expanding in an imaginative way very rapidly. I mean, the digital revolution was, was full upon us of course, but, the idea of, of leading to a situation where, one statistic I saw recently, there are more liquid crystal screens in the world than people. I mean a lot of them will be quite small, you know. But I mean that, that didn’t happen overnight, I mean... And so, the idea that everybody could communicate with everybody else was moving ahead rapidly at the time, and now of course, it’s going further where the idea is not only that you communicate by telephone but you should be able to communicate in every possible way at any time in any place. So that revolution certainly was on its way then, and of course is still going ahead very fast now.

[19:30] One of the other things I was wondering about in relation to BT was, when you first started talking about it today, you said that there might be opportunities there for Imperial College. What sort of opportunities did you have in mind?

Well, doing collaborative research really. And we did have some, some research contracts with them. There was another situation, I’d better not put any names on this one, but, where I was in the process of recruiting somebody from another university, who was exceedingly bright and we badly wanted to have. And we couldn’t pay him enough. And since he was also going through a divorce, which was an expensive form of fun, that was quite important. But in fact he had skills which I thought could

Eric Ash Page 218 C1379/92/Track 12 be relevant to BT, I introduced them to the BT people and they were glad to use him as a consultant. So, everybody was happy. He got his divorce, he got his money, we got the bloke, and BT got some advice.

Mm. How did you feel about being on the BT board at the time?

Oh I enjoyed it. I mean I, I thought, I thought it was an exciting thing to do, I mean it was a completely different window on the technological world to anything I’d had. And there were various perks that went with it. For example, the annual telecommunication conference, I remember one we had in Geneva, and, I’m not used to being treated like a gentleman, but, going to these places with BT, one was you know, you, you went... I’ve forgotten if we had a private plane, but we certainly had a private helicopter when we got there, to go wherever we had to go. You know, and that, that’s just plain fun.

Is there any particular use of those meetings?

Well there was some use. I happen to remember that particular one. I did talk to Ian Vance who was then both chair and CEO, now Lord Vance. BT at that, at that particular meeting, was making the point that they’re a systems company, and, whereas other companies that we are competing with show their latest lasers or latest gadgets and whatnot. The BT emphasis was on saying, we’re a systems. Tell us your problems, we’ll solve them. But I felt we missed something important there, and that is, we missed the fact that to help on systems, you need immensely complicated software systems yourself, and that what BT had to offer wasn’t just fatherly advice, but it was in fact an immensely complex technology which was ready and which we could put to your use. I don’t think that bit of marketing was done very well.

Mm. Looking back at your time at BT overall, I mean, why did you decide to leave it in the end?

Because they kicked me out. [laughs] It’s, it’s fairly normal. On the whole, non- execs will do three years and another three years, and I had done six years. And also, by that time, I was what at that time I thought was quite old, like sixty-six I think.

Eric Ash Page 219 C1379/92/Track 12

But, I mean the idea of that is, is very sound. Non-executives are not supposed to be servants of the company, they’re supposed to be servants of the shareholders, and by the time you’ve been, and wined and dined, and chatted and been over various things with, with the company every month, there is a danger that one goes native, that one will act almost like as if one’s a company member. So, that’s regarded as a bad idea. My eldest daughter has just gone through this having been on a FTSE 100 as a non- exec for I think eight years which was regarded quite long.

[24:12] Mm. I was I guess interested as well, were there any other consultancy roles, directorships that you took up apart from BT?

Well, you were mentioning GE. I mean for, almost the only consultancy I did for what must have been fifteen years I would guess was in fact with GE in Schenectady. And, the reason... I mean I found that a very useful consultancy. If one is a consultant to a British company, and you are producing British students, there tends to be sort of a bias to send your students to a particular company, which, which could be, can be a bit unhealthy. Whereas if one’s consulting for an American company, which is remote, then it really doesn’t involve that particular problem. Anyway, GE was and is a great place, and was an exciting research laboratory to be associated with.

Mm. What sort of matters did you consult on?

Just about anything in the electronics field. But for example, medical electronics was, was certainly one of them. And, I always remember the time that they first got involved in CAT scanners, which was after they had been invented in the UK, but they caught up very rapidly. And what was to me fascinating was to see the way they could put powerful teams on something they really wanted to get alongside of and move with, in almost no time flat. And I think it’s been the great failure in the UK that we have very rarely had powerful enough teams on good ideas that have come through industry. I remember reading once that EMI, a company you’ve probably heard of, which was much involved in electronics and television and whatnot, before the war they got involved in television imaging including colour television, and I think they had something like five PhDs working on it in the late Thirties. I’m going

Eric Ash Page 220 C1379/92/Track 12 by memory, but it was something like that. That’s at a time when PhDs were rather rare birds. I don’t know of any company that’s put that sort of a team on anything in recent times. And I think the GEC, as opposed to the GE, has often fallen down on exactly that, on that problem, they have not put as much intellectual power behind some of the things they were pursuing as they should have done.

Mm. Why do you think that actually is?

I think it goes back to the history of technology in industry in this country. I mean, there is the well-known story of Morrison, who didn’t want to have any graduates in their car industry, because he thought they were too airy-fairy. The shipbuilding industry didn’t hire any graduates until the early Seventies, by which time it was too late, we’d lost the business to, the Japanese and the Koreans and, and whatnot. So, I mean there has been a backcloth of anti-intellectual stances taken by people in industry who believe that in industry you are down, it’s down-to-earth, a lot of it is common sense, you’ve got to be able to count, you’ve got to be energetic, you’ve got to know what you want to do, but, keep away from these apparently brainy chaps with crazy ideas. I’m exaggerating but I think that, that was the atmosphere, and I think, Arnold Weinstock, who was the head of GEC at the time, was certainly of that sort of opinion.

[29:00] Mm. As someone who was one of those, I guess industrial scientists, did you ever feel yourself as having airy-fairy ideas, or, or see yourself being seen as that sort of person?

How do you mean, that sort of person?

I was thinking earlier on in your career at STL.

Yah, right. No, STL was actually rather broad-minded in that respect. And of course, they did have, eventually produce that rather fabulous Nobel Prize for optical fibres, Charles Kao. But I think, I think there was more freedom for thought at STL than in

Eric Ash Page 221 C1379/92/Track 12 most other companies at the time, and it could be because it was an American company.

Mm.

I’m not sure whether I could prove that, but it’s... I didn’t, I didn’t feel too constrained in STL.

To return to consulting for GE. I guess I’m just wondering, you know, what are the nuts and bolts of consulting? Are you just sort of answering letters from the other side of the planet, or flying over there? How does it actually work on a practical basis?

Well it’s flying over there, and spending, I’ve forgotten how much time I spent there, but I would guess probably about two or three weeks a year actually in the research labs. But over and above that, it’s a matter of monitoring what’s going on in Europe. So I went to a lot of scientific conferences, and wrote reports on what I heard. And I found that very useful, because, a) I wouldn’t have gone to a lot of these conferences, and b) if I had, and didn’t have the GE imperative, I might have slept through some of the talks. But if you know you’ve got to write a report on it at the end, it focuses your mind, and you, you get more out of it and, you can produce more.

[30:57] Mm. That brings me on to, I guess, one question I have been wondering about which is, what sort of contribution do you think that, you know, someone like you, an external consultant, actually makes to a company like GEC in this case?

I, I think if they are good, I think they can make a significant contribution. I mean one of the things they can do, which is rather like the role of non-executive director on a board, which is to ask silly questions, most of which will be silly but some may not be. So in other words, you are a good probe. You have a view on the outside world, and so you, you have your familiarity with some things which would be a little more remote to the people who are there. I mean one example of that during my time in GE was, nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, scanning, which, my first report on it was the

Eric Ash Page 222 C1379/92/Track 12 chap who did have a share in the Nobel Prize in Nottingham, but, the report that I wrote about showed the cross-section of a, of a lemon. It was just able to resolve that, and that seemed important to me, and, I am not saying nobody else will have mentioned it in GE, they might or might not have done, but, it’s that sort of input which is a responsibility for a consultant, which I think can make a contribution.

Peter Mansfield, the chap in Nottingham?

Peter Mansfield. You’ve got the right man. Have you interviewed him? Are you going to? Mm.

I, quite a bit medically for my particular area of work I imagine.

Yes.

I was interested, fifteen years at GE, that sounds like quite a long time to be involved in something like that.

Well, I mean it’s, you don’t do the same thing all the time, you’re just so to speak on the staff at arm’s length. I’m not sure it was fifteen years, I, I’d have to look that up. What I do know is that I resigned from it after I got to Imperial College, and that would have been, I would have resigned maybe round about ’87, and, as is my habit, I like to resign from places before one gets sacked. But, I didn’t have time to do what, what a consultant needs to do with the job I was doing at Imperial. And, now, was it fifteen years before that? I don’t know. It might have been twelve or something. I don’t know. Over a decade anyway.

[33:50] Mm. I guess that covers, I guess two of your external activities and other involvements. But one of the ones that I was wondering about was, the Student Loan Company.

Oh right, yah.

Eric Ash Page 223 C1379/92/Track 12

I was wondering, how did that come up in your remit?

Well the way that came up was by being invited to become a non-executive board member of the company. And this was after I had stepped down from Imperial, again I’m bad on dates, I can you look them up, but, I think it would have been about ’94 or thereabouts. And I’m not sure who it was who proposed me to, to join the board, but it could have been anybody. And I suppose I was a fairly natural victim, recently retired from a university and having a certain degree of visibility.

Mm.

The Student Loans Company I think was really quite a remarkable invention, and I don’t think it’s had the credit that it should have had. I mean the way it came about was, Lord Baker as he now is, what’s his first name?

Kenneth?

Kenneth. You’re good at names, I’m not. I never was incidentally. Kenneth Baker, really suggested that the banks would be the right people to give loans to students. But in other words, you know, there’s no need to have anything public, it’s just a private, private thing, but somehow or other you have some kind of, a regulation I suppose as to, some boundaries within which these loans would be given out, and would be backed by Government. Students at that time were up in arms about the idea of loans, I mean fees and loans I mean. And then one of the banks decided they’d have nothing to do with it. I have a feeling it was Barclays but I can’t remember which one. And, they really wanted to show students how student-minded they were, and they didn’t want to have anything to do with this Government scheme, just come to us as customers, you know, was their line. When that happened, all the other banks said, we won’t play either, won’t let Barclays get ahead so to speak in this thing. And that’s when the idea came up that it has to be a Government company, a student loans company, that would act on behalf of the Government. And, on the whole I think it was rather well set up and worked not badly. And the big mistake that the Government made at that time, and are, believe it or not, still making, which is not to explain to students just how benign the rules are. The fact that you don’t actually

Eric Ash Page 224 C1379/92/Track 12 have to pay anything back until you earn a median salary, and if you marry a millionaire in the meantime, you still don’t have to pay it back. I mean it’s quite unlike any other kind of a loan. And so, even today I read in a newspaper about how students are not going to universities because they don’t want to incur the debt. Well they don’t incur a debt, not until they earn enough money to pay it off. But anyway, be that as it may. [37:49] Then things went somewhat wrong in the Student Loans Company, and two things went wrong, one which I regarded as relatively minor and the other was quite major. The minor one was that the CEO was a little bit free with his credit card. He had a company credit card. And, there was a bit too much entertaining and that sort of thing. There was a woman around as well who benefited to some extent from the credit card and... So, there were stories about that, rumours about that. More importantly, the Government had made some changes to the regulations for the student loans, and one in particular, what the Student Loans Company decided to do, was that those students who already had a loan from the previous year, could have, could apply in a much quicker, simpler way. Good idea, bad execution. And the result was that something like ten per cent of the students didn’t get their loans in time. They sacked the CEO, and they asked me to be acting CEO for what was originally assumed to be a few weeks, but turned out to be a year and a few weeks. My first morning as acting CEO, I think there were something like half a dozen press, radio and TV calls, what should I, what was I doing about it? And, I said, I wouldn’t respond to any one of them until I had gone some ways to get to the bottom of what the problem was. And we did get to the bottom of what the problem was, relatively soon. There was a very bright chap, I think was originally a chemist or something, who was on the staff, but, good on understanding software et cetera. And I worked with him a bit. And my first question was, can I see a flowchart? Are you familiar with flowcharts?

Well let’s assume not, but yes.

Well, it just means, you know, you do one thing, and then, depending on your reaction there, you either go this way or that way. And you have a complex network. And it turned out, looking at the flowchart, that it was possible for students to get into a kind

Eric Ash Page 225 C1379/92/Track 12 of an appendix where they’d never get out again. So, that, that was part of, part of the problem. So, I pointed out to my new colleagues that ten per cent of the students was approximately sixty per MP, and that’s the way it felt. So, it really was a rather hot scene for, certainly for a few days, but actually also for some weeks, and we put out some statements saying we’re curing it and, hang on,[laughs] and all will be well et cetera. And we did. I think it took about six weeks before we got to the bottom of it. [41:20] But it was to me an object lesson on the difficulty of large software systems, which the Government still hasn’t appreciated. They, they keep on starting things and then abandoning them. BBC hasn’t appreciated it, having just spent £100 million on not getting it right. Well, disastrously wrong in fact. And, it’s, it’s interesting how little understood this is. I was... Have we done the Royal Society?

We’ve done bits of the Royal Society.

Well let me just say, I was an officer of the Royal Society for five years. And, the House of Lords writes various reports on various scientific and technical issues, and they actually are better qualified to do that that the Commons, I mean they’ve got some good people there. And they invited a few of us, I think four or five of us from the Royal Society, to meet with them and make suggestions as to what they might most study. I made one suggestion, and my suggestion was, why do large software systems inevitably fail? And I still think that is a serious area of research which is under-researched. And I pointed out that we have an existence-proof in the form of babies. I mean a baby is an immensely complicated thing you know, and it’s the result of, of software which amazingly rarely goes wrong, you know. So it can be done. But we haven’t found out how to do it. Now admittedly, getting the software right for babies, might have taken a couple of million years or something; we don’t normally have time to solve our problems in that form. But, it still sticks in my mind that this is an underdeveloped area, and one that we are still burning our fingers on every time we try.

Mm.

I’ve got off the track haven’t I?

Eric Ash Page 226 C1379/92/Track 12

No, no it’s all... I was wondering, you’ve described what sounds like quite a difficult situation at the Student Loans Company. Why take the job, how did you feel about stepping up to be CEO?

Well, I have a terrible tendency to say yes when people ask me to do something. Over and above, they paid one, you know, so there was an incentive from that point of view. But it was actually an extremely interesting job. [44:15] The biggest difficulty I haven’t come to yet, I’ll just say it in a nutshell, that it wasn’t a real company. We had a board, we had a board of directors, but we had rather limited authority. And, the secretary of state for the department of science and education had a lot of the authority that a normal board would have. I mean to give one example. We had several hundred people working in what was essentially a call centre, I mean it was the Student Loans Company but it was, worked very much like a call centre. People took phone calls, reacted to it, sent out documents et cetera et cetera. And we were losing people. And the reason why we were losing people is because we were underpaying them, not by a vast amount, probably about ten, fifteen per cent or something, as compared with call centres in Glasgow. So, if this were an ordinary company, you’d say, well we have to raise our salaries, because if we lose people, a) it costs money to replace them, recruiting them; b) when they come they are green, so it costs more money to train them up. And I was able to show, quite convincingly I think, that increasing the salary by whatever it was, ten or fifteen per cent, would save us money. I was not able to persuade the department for science and education, and the main thing that they were concerned about is a parliamentary question. I mean to people, I don’t know how much interaction you’ve had with civil servants, but, the threat of parliamentary questions seems to be uppermost in, in the minds of civil servants. If they can’t sleep at night, I think it’s a parliamentary question they are worried about. Because you mustn’t have the minister be embarrassed by anything.

Mm.

Eric Ash Page 227 C1379/92/Track 12

So, there was a real limit to the extent to which one could run the thing efficiently, that was the frustration.

[46:30] I was wondering I guess in sort of big picture terms, how you felt about the idea of student loans as opposed to, to student grants, which I guess...

Is what I had. [laughs]

Well, no. [laughs]

Yah.

As someone with a student loan, I’m obviously biased here, but... [laughs]

I don’t think there was any choice. When I went to university I think it was something like six, seven per cent of the eligible population that went, and we are now, thirty per cent or something like that. When it was a small number, it was reasonable to put that on the tax system. But when it’s thirty per cent, what is the argument for getting everybody to pay for these thirty per cent of students who have this, who have this privilege? And I... So I think the argument for making it a loan, I find is quite solid. I think the terms of the loan is something which is worth debating in detail. But, it’s, it’s a, the loans we have at the moment are essentially graduate tax, it’s essentially like a graduate tax. You are paying off your loan at the moment? Yes. But, at what, nine per cent or something of your...? You don’t know. It’s not so bad that you know.

[laughs] Well, well I guess, sort of thinking about, I guess, my memory of that period is there being a lot of opposition to it coming in.

Oh yah.

I wonder, you know, how you actually thought about the opposition.

Eric Ash Page 228 C1379/92/Track 12

Yes. No I... I, I thought it was the right way to go. [pause]

What did you make of those who took a different point of view at the time?

Well...

I remember the demos and watching the demos on TV, so... I guess it would have been quite a political hot potato.

Well I think that people who are of an opinion opposite to mine were wrong. [laughs] No, I mean, students are meant to revolt. So I think that, the fact that people, students get agitated about things is, is entirely reasonable. I, I really, I really wouldn’t query the fact that they, that they put pressure on the Government to do it. I mean you know, it could have been worse. I mean this was started by a Conservative government, but very much continued by a Labour government, and without student protests about the thing, it could have made it harder. I think there are, there’s lots to be debated, I mean particularly I think clarifying to those coming from underprivileged families, that’s it’s OK to incur a debt which isn’t, which is only a debt when you earn enough money to pay it off. So I think there’s, there’s a lot to be debated there. And, the same debates go on in the United States of course too.

Mm. Do you have any, I guess, feelings about the current situation? We are now at nine grand a year tuition fees, £9,000 a year tuition fees, that sort of thing, student...

£1,000 a year did you say? £9,000.

I think it’s up to £9,000 now isn’t it?

Yah, £9,000, yah. I... I, I don’t think I’m, I’m equipped to debate it at this point, I mean I haven’t, I haven’t been involved in enough of it. I’m sure it’s, it’s the right figure, if you want to say, it shouldn’t be a burden on the average taxpayer whose kids are not going to university. So I mean it’s not an unreasonable figure in this sense. I mean where I think, again, this is going to be a finer point, where I think we really have to think a little harder too, is about foreign students. I mean I think, the fact that

Eric Ash Page 229 C1379/92/Track 12 we get very few Indian students these days I think is a terrible shame, and probably in the long run not good for the British economy. So, there is that question. I’m very interested in what I think is a growing although is only a gently growing move, for kids to decide they’d like to study in Europe, where it’s virtually free. Now admittedly if they do it in France it means that you’re speaking their funny language. Are you all right? Mm. But, I mean, thank God there are enough people now who can do it. And there are some universities, and Delft I think is one and Berlin is another, that do all the lecturing in English. So I think there will be natural counterforces to the student loans business, which will be another pressure to reduce it or at least not to increase it.

Mm.

But, so I’m, I can’t say I’m deliriously happy about the situation, but I do think we can’t go back to the financing of students as we did when there were so very few of them.

Shall we take a short break as we’re...

OK.

[End of Track 12]

Eric Ash Page 230 C1379/92/Track 13

[Track 13]

I was wondering if we could talk for a little while about your interest in climate change.

Right.

I guess we’ve talked about some of the work, the origins of it, but I was wondering more about your interest in it in more recent years.

Well I suppose, I’ve had an interest in it ever since I appreciated what a big problem it was. And, I’ve forgotten how many years back that goes. I certainly remember giving a talk to school kids at the RI with demonstrations on the effect of carbon dioxide on infrared and all that. And, and I’ve given a discourse at the RI on, I think with the title, ‘Saving the Planet’ or something like that. But, the nearest thing to actually doing work on it was during my time as an officer of the Royal Society. I became an officer... I can’t remember dates. I think it was ’97. And I was the treasurer, and, that also means senior vice-president. And one gets involved in a large number of issues. But there are two that I spent a lot of my effort on, and one was nuclear energy, and the other one was more directly emission of carbon dioxide. [pause] For nuclear energy, I had a group of people, and I chaired, and we produced a report, just before the turn of the century in 1999, with the title, ‘Nuclear Energy – The Future Climate’. And I looked at it recently, and, I don’t think I would change many words in it. We did then point out that the Government had a real problem with the fact that nuclear energy plants would have to be decommissioned, and that it was urgent that they should come to a decision. Well that was fourteen years ago, and, and they haven’t. And we are in potential trouble on energy in this country because of that. But that’s another long story. The climate change issue, I have regarded as a serious problem, I would think now for about fifteen years or something like that. We had a chief scientist, David King, who did say, this would have been, I don’t know, five years ago or maybe eight years ago, that he regarded the climate change as a more serious problem than terrorism, which is a rather graphical way of putting it. But I agree with him, I think it is. I think, I think it’s, it is the most serious general issue that faces mankind, with the exception of something else that I’ve touched on

Eric Ash Page 231 C1379/92/Track 13 with you I think, which is the belief in a deity which I think, I regard as, as, as one of the biggest risks to which we are, we are susceptible. But certainly climate change is the most immediate risk. And, I chaired a committee in the Royal Society with it, and we produced a report called ‘Economic Instruments for the Reduction of Carbon Dioxide Emission’. And the odd thing about this story is that doing what needs to be done, in principle is actually quite easy. What you need to do is spew out less carbon dioxide which you can do in a number of different ways. You can do it with wind farms, you can do it with nuclear, you can do it with solar. But you can also do it with coal, if you have a system for burying the carbon dioxide that you produce rather than spew it into the atmosphere. So it can all be done. [pause] The cost of doing it, if you do it properly, if one does all the right things, was estimated by Lord Stern who produced the Stern report five years ago, which corroborates with other economists who have looked at it, the cost is of the order of one to two per cent of GDP. Now a GDP has a trend of going up by about two or three per cent per annum. So putting those two things together, if we decided to solve the problem of carbon dioxide emission, the world cost would be foregoing an increase in riches which we normally expect every year by about one year. It seems totally trivial, and the reason why it isn’t is people. [06:05] You have the extraordinary phenomenon for example in Congress where the people who believe that climate change is a major issue and something needs to be done about it are Democrats, whereas those who feel nothing needs to be done about it, it’s just a, a way in which government wants to interfere with what we do, are Republicans. It seems totally extraordinary that that is so. I mean it, it’s similar to the irrational beliefs of religion, that you really can’t find a basis for. I don’t think we have really got to grips with this problem yet. One has hopes of the United States, and the great hope of the United States stems from the fact that the United States is a unity of states, and individual states have in fact shown the way, Cornwall for ex... California for example. I think with Obama, there is a chance that he might win through, and make a step change in the situation in the United States. In Europe, it is very difficult to know how it’s going to go. I’ve spent this morning at a meeting with some people from Ofgem and various other people who are concerned with the climate issues, and the chance of Europe getting together and doing the right thing, does not seem good to me. And so I am worried about it, I continue to be worried

Eric Ash Page 232 C1379/92/Track 13 about it. Now one of the odd things about the climate change issue is that not everybody believes there is a problem. That’s not surprising when you talk about ignorant people like Republicans or, the population at large, but it’s even true of scientists. And I know of several Fellows of the Royal Society who, I wouldn’t say they’re climate sceptics but they believe that the problem has been greatly exaggerated. People have done an analysis recently of the opinion of scientists who have had some publications in climate journals, in other words, some indications that they are professionals in the game, and over ninety-seven per cent of them believe that the problem is as great as it has been sketched. But it’s not everybody. And this of course has always been true in science, you very rarely get the hundred per cent thing when a new situation arises. Max Planck, I know you are a historian but you know who he is? Right. The chap who started quantum mechanics. Said at one time, that he thought that with quantum mechanics people would understand it and would gradually believe it, and it would become the norm. It’s not the way it went, he said. The way it goes is, that people die, and the young people who replace them see it as obvious. So, you know, the transition happens through life and death rather than through, through total conviction, scientific conviction. And that’s true of so many other things, I mean you know, and we’ve had this problem with MMR which has led to this outbreak of measles in, where was it, in Wales, in Wales somewhere or other.

In my home town actually.

Your home town?

Yes.

Right. But I’m sure your parents had the sense to have you inoculated. So it’s not unusual in science that it’s not totally homogeneous and perfect.

[10:25] Mm. How was your report on climate change actually greeted?

[pause] The DTI, as it then was, asked for I think fifteen copies of the report. And then ignored it. They’ve got, the Government has got a lot closer to what we were

Eric Ash Page 233 C1379/92/Track 13 recommending then, now. So for example, I’m not sure whether you’ve heard about the idea of having a floor price for carbon. Does that mean anything to you? Well, what this means is, that there is a penalty for emitting carbon dioxide, if you like, a carbon tax. And this in a sense exists at the moment but it’s at a very low level. What the Government have done is, they said they will put a figure to the tax – sorry, to the price of carbon dioxide emission, which won’t go below a certain level. So, avoiding carbon dioxide emission has a measurable benefit. It gets pretty close to what we were recommending in our report at the time. There is also, I’m glad to say, the EU is moving in the direction of one of our other main recommendations, which is to continue to have permits as we have now for emission of carbon dioxide, which are given to industrial companies, but these auctions will be, sorry, these permits will be auctioned. And, there is then governmental control over how much carbon dioxide is emitted because you, when you have sold all the auctions, I mean all the permits, through auction, that you have decided it is safe to do, there aren’t any more left. That’s the way I think it will go if one is optimistic.

[13:05] Mm. How were your concerns on climate change treated more generally within the Royal Society?

Oh I think within the Royal Society there’s a general agreement that this is the case, I mean, that is a concern. And, when I talked about the two reports that I was responsible for, they have to go through Council, and, so that’s quite a democratic system. Council is elected and Council has to approve the reports. So I think I can say, these were at the time the view of the Royal Society as a whole, and to the best of my knowledge they would still be counted in that way.

I seem to recall a few years ago there was some sort of controversy over the Royal Society website wasn’t there with its stance on climate change.

Yes yes, that was exactly what I was referring to early on.

Whenabouts, sorry?

Eric Ash Page 234 C1379/92/Track 13

Well, the Royal Society had a website in which they said essentially, what is known about climate change, what do we not yet know what should we do or something, it was a general kind of a pamphlet. And I found it quite unexceptional, and indeed I, I had to give a lecture to the Harveian Society in, Hampstead or somewhere, where I talked about climate change and all that, and I handed out these leaflets which in my opinion I thought, this was during the time of the controversy about it, were perfectly reasonable. The trouble is, that some people, and one of your interviewees, namely Cyril Hilsum, read it as if it were a PhD thesis, and looked at dotting i’s and crossing t’s and all the rest of it, and there were statements which could not be fully justified, not fully evidence-based. And I think, the mistake that he and one or two other people made was, what I would describe as a category error. This website was designed for the general public to give them an idea of how one could see the situation in the round, and, they parsed it so, as if every single phrase would have to be justified by scientific evidence. And that was just a wrong way of looking at it. I think Cyril has reformed to some extent. I must ask him next time I see him. Did you talk to him about that at all?

Cyril hasn’t signed out his paperwork yet so I would not be at liberty to discuss one way or the other unfortunately.

But did you discuss it with him?

[laughs]

I mean these TV interviewers who ask the same question thirteen times, surely I can ask it twice. [laughter]

You’ll have to see when the final document comes out.

Right.

[16:18] But there was a little question here that I was wondering about as well, which I guess is partly a public understanding of science question as well.

Eric Ash Page 235 C1379/92/Track 13

Yah. Yah it is.

I was just wondering what you made of public attitudes to this problem more generally. You mentioned doing your talk to the Harveian Society for instance. I was wondering that sort of contact.

Yah, I mean it’s, it’s very difficult for the public, because, particularly as you never get 100 per cent agreement amongst all scientists, so there are always some science sceptics. But then you have people like Nigel Lawson... Quite. [laughs] I’m sorry to have mentioned him in polite company. But, he, you know, he started a group, a sort of a climate denying group. Are you familiar with something you get on the website called Skeptical Science?

It’s like revisionist history.

Pardon?

Is this like revisionist history, or...?

No no. It’s, it’s actually, it’s a, it’s a group of people who pick up what everybody says about climate change, particularly climate denying, and says why it’s wrong, I mean why, you know, why the, why there really is a problem. And, and they have a, one of these coming out every day. Quite, I think you’d find it quite interesting to have a look at it sometime.

Mm.

But the public at large, is not convinced. I mean it’s sort of, you know, fifty-fifty kind of thing. And it is a very difficult thing to convince people. I’m... I occasionally give talks. I must stop doing this by the way. But I’m, I’m giving a talk in South Africa in February, and I will be talking on this theme. And one of the things that I’m going to emphasise is, the trouble with climate change is that it’s complicated. And when I say complicated, I mean it not in just a manner of speaking. Are you all right? Mm. Not

Eric Ash Page 236 C1379/92/Track 13 just in a manner of speaking, that it’s a little hard to understand or something like that. I mean complicated by comparison with other ideas. And the only scientific concept that I can think of which is as complicated in my view is the biological cell. I mean when I look at the biological cell and the papers that are written about it, I find it totally mind-boggling, the fact that I’m made up of all these cells, and that my genes are in every one of them, and that somehow or other all these complex chemical things go on in every cell, I find it just, hard to imagine. It is just mind-bogglingly complicated. I believe that climate policy, climate change, is of comparable complexity, it involves really every part of science, and biology and, and the interactions are extremely difficult. And the trouble about people like Nigel Lawson is, they think they have dealt with complicated situations, like should we have an election now or in six months’ time, or, should we raise income tax or lower it? And these are indeed complicated things, but they are nothing like the level of complexity that we are talking about here. And my belief is that the problem with science sceptics is that they simply don’t have any understanding of the degree of complexity that one’s talking about, and that therefore, having independent views without being within the field, is just useless. I mean my views on some of the protoplasms which are being generated in every one of my cells at the moment, I hope the right ones, my view on that is really, totally and utterly irrelevant unless one is actually a cellular molecular biologist. I mean you can’t even begin to have a view on it, you can’t even understand what it’s about. And I think that applies to, to the climate change issue.

[20:53] Mm. I guess that pretty much brings us up to the present day doesn’t it?

Nothing’s happened today has said it?

I was actually just wondering, you know, what does Eric Ash do today, or any other day for that matter? Have you retired and just stopped, or are you still doing things?

I’ve, I’m in the process of retiring quite a bit. I mean I, I’ve been retired for a long time, but I mean, I’ve had two industrial connections until recently, one with Tata in India and the other with the Keppel company in Singapore. I have retired from the Tata consultancy that I had there, again on the principle that I wanted to do it before

Eric Ash Page 237 C1379/92/Track 13 they sacked me. And, I am stepping down from the Keppel thing in November, I think. So I will then not have any direct connection with consulting to industrial companies. I do give the occasional talk. I am quite involved with a number of things in the Royal Society, some of which are very time-consuming. So for example, in the last few days I’ve been working hard on a committee that will take place next week, and it concerns what they call Research Merit Awards, and these are meant to be star performers in the academic world who their vice-chancellors think should have some extra salary which the university can’t afford, but which somebody should pay so we don’t lose them to China or the United States or, or wherever. And, I think we have twenty applications this time from different professors, in all sorts of different disciplines, from psychiatry to pure mathematics. And working my way through those and trying to understand why they think they are marvellous, and why their referees think they are marvellous, is a very time-consuming business, and one where one does use the breadth of one’s, one’s knowledge. So that’s, that’s one example. I do spend a fair amount of time with the Wolfson Foundation. Have I mentioned that to you before? Oh. I’ve been a trustee of the Wolfson Foundation for about twenty years. The Wolfson Foundation is a charity which gives money to science and medicine, people with special needs, and education which is the schools; universities come in mainly through the science and medicine. And we spend about £35 million a year on it, so it’s, it’s fairly serious money. And so, getting involved with that does involve a fair amount of time, because one does want to look at the case for awards for a particular university, or awards to a particular school. For example we make a habit of visiting every school that we give money to. We don’t give vast quantities of money to schools, typically £40,000 or something of that sort, but enough to make a difference to the school. But we found that it’s really important to visit the school.

Mm.

So that takes up a fair amount of time.

Do you still consider yourself as doing science?

No. You can’t do science unless you do it seriously. You, you can’t do science from, from the outside.

Eric Ash Page 238 C1379/92/Track 13

[25:00] One of the other I guess questions I wondered about as well was, I guess you mentioned your family in passing, I was wondering how much you actually see of them as well. You’ve mentioned assorted daughters, I wasn’t quite sure what they all ended up doing in the end. You’ve talked about them as children, but...

Well I can give you a quick catalogue.

I would be curious.

The eldest, Gillian, has twins and a younger one, twins out of university, the younger one just getting there. She is the marketing director of the Co-Op Group, which means she spends a lot of time working in Manchester. Number two, Cany, is an architect, and, she runs a practice with her husband, a fairly recent husband. They were just living together for eighteen years, and had three children and a joint practice and built their house together. And then they decided to get married. But, architecture’s a tough, tough old game these days, but they are keeping their head above water. Number three, Lucy, is a BBC journalist, who does mainly radio but increasingly television. She did a half-hour thing on HIV in the Ukraine recently. She’s a Russian speaker so she tends to get to Russia rather too frequently for our liking with some of the things she does, I don’t think are safe. Right now she’s in France for a few days, and that’s relatively safe I think. And she has two children, two daughters. And then, we have a pair of twins, our fourth daughter was twins. People sometimes ask, ‘Where do your twins come in your family?’ And I always point out, you never need to ask that. They would always come at the end. Emily has been working for a management consultancy company for quite a few years, but is currently working on strategy for Tesco. And they have two daughters. And then there is Jenny, who is a film director, and she’s done a lot of documentaries, drama- docs, but also some historical things which you might have come across. She’s, she’s worked for the History channel in the States, and did a whole series on history including the American Civil War. And she rather eccentrically, late in life, decided to have a baby, now aged four months. I think she just wanted a baby. And he’s

Eric Ash Page 239 C1379/92/Track 13 rather fun. So, we have no objection. All of our daughters live in WC1, which is rather convenient, when they’re there. So we do see quite a lot of them.

Mm.

Enough?

I’m just interested, none of them are scientists.

Pardon? None...

None of them are scientists.

No. None of them are scientists. Emily, who works for a management consultancy company, did a degree in engineering, so she understands quantitative thinking and all that. And of course, the architect daughter knows some engineering being an architect. Although I’ve told her, I would never enter a building that she had designed which hadn’t been checked out by an engineer.

I was wondering as well, I was wondering particularly about how you found doing this interview, which I guess we’ve been doing for a few months now. How have you found our sessions?

Well, I mean I’ve found it interesting, listening to myself I’ve found more interesting than I thought I would.

Oh good.

Because I had forgotten a lot of the things that I’ve, that I talked about. And as I said I think at the very beginning, I mean, professors love hearing their own voice. So, no I was fine with it, I... I’m not totally convinced that all this was needed for posterity, but, there it is.

Why do you say...

Eric Ash Page 240 C1379/92/Track 13

They can do with it what they like. [laughs]

Why do you say that?

Well I, I don’t think I’m that important a chap, in the history of technology of the twentieth century. I mean I’ve seen quite a lot but... I, I can’t say that the world would have been a vastly different place if I had never been born.

Why do you think it’s important to be important for, for your...

Well I, I don’t think it is. I’ve got used to being a nonentity, I mean as a... It doesn’t really worry me. But, I mean if you write a novel, nobody else would have written that novel. Whereas, it is very rare that, in science that you would write a scientific paper which wouldn’t have been written by somebody else within a year or two or a decade at the most. Very rare. I think, Einstein’s general theory of relativity might be an example, not the special relativity but the general, well that’s, the one that equates gravity with four-dimensional space and all that.

In that case, do you think there is any particular place for the individual in science?

I think there is. I, I think one can have fun in it. I think, one has the opportunity to influence other people. I’ve had quite a lot of PhD students. I think I’ve influenced quite a few of those in, I hope, a sensible direction. But even if one isn’t unique, even if one, one can’t put one’s finger and say, ‘I did this and it wouldn’t have been done by anybody else,’ one is still part of the wave, and it’s absolutely fascinating to be in touch with the wave and to see it develop. And one of my great irritations about dying is that there are some questions I really would like to see the answer to, and I probably won’t.

Like what?

Well one obvious one is, is there life in the rest of the universe? If I were a betting chap I’d bet heavily that there is, but I’d really love to know the answer to that one.

Eric Ash Page 241 C1379/92/Track 13

Mm. Have you mentioned doing this interview to anyone else?

Well to my wife.

And what does she make of it?

I think she takes it on the chin, but... She didn’t say, ‘Be careful what you say,’ or, anything like that. And I think of all the things I’ve said, there was only one that I actually regretted, which I’ve told you about, mm.

Mm. Good. Is there anything else you’d like to add before I hit the stop button?

No, hit the stop button.

Thank you very much.

[End of Track 13]

[End of Interview]