IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Professor Sir Colin Humphreys Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/88 IMPORTANT © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no. C1379/88 Collection title. An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Humphreys Title. Professor Sir surname. Interviewee’s Colin Sex. Male forename. Occupation. Materials Scientist Date and place of 24 May 1941 Luton birth. Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation. Engineer Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to). 17 October (1-3), 19 October (4-6), 7 November 2012, (7-9). Location of Interviewee’s office Cambridge interview. Name of interviewer. Thomas Lean Type of recorder. Marantz PMD661 on secure digital Recording format . WAV 24 bit 48 kHz Total no. of tracks 9 Mono or stereo Stereo Total Duration. 09:29:57 (HH:MM:SS) Additional material. Video interview Copyright/Clearance. Copyright to BL. Interview open except for Track 9 [35.50 - 44.28] and Track 4 [24.40 – 24.42, 25.07] which are closed for 30 years. Interviewer’s comments. 3 Colin Humphreys Page 4 C1379/88 Track 1 Track 1 I’d like to start today if you could introduce yourself please Colin? Right, so I’m Colin Humphreys, I’m a material scientist, I work in Cambridge University, I’m called a Director of Research, I’m a professor here in the department and a director of research in the department. When were you born? I was born on the 24 th of May 1941, quite a long time ago [both laugh]. Whereabouts? In Luton in Bedfordshire. What did your parents do? So I was born into quite a poor family, so my father was a son of a gardener and he went I think part time to some technical college as a sort of mechanical engineer and he then started work in Leicester where he was born but he was then made unemployed. So he moved to Luton and met my mother there, as it were his wife and so I was then born in Luton and he worked at the Skefko Ball Bearing Company, SKF Ball Bearing Company which still exists, make ball bearings in Luton, manufacture them. So that during the war he wasn’t sent off for the war because he was making ball bearings for planes and so on and, you know, important civil and military purposes. And we lived in a road called Dale Road which was in really quite a deprived part of Luton, I mean you don’t realise at the time but you realise now, so it’s just rows of terraced houses, and people not very wealthy at all. So that’s where I was born and brought up. And what was your father’s name? 4 Colin Humphreys Page 5 C1379/88 Track 1 His name was Arthur, Arthur William Humphreys. [01:40] Do you know what he did at the ball bearing factory? Yes, he was responsible for measuring the roundness of these round ball bearings so [laughs] – and they just didn’t measure it by sort of, you know, callipers and micrometers, they actually would measure the noise they made because the more out of round they were as they went around in a ball bearing the more noise they made so they tried to minimise the noise as well as, you know, measuring the dimensions. And so he became head of this metrology department in Skefko. He was also an associate member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, which he was extremely proud of, so he wore his Institute of Mechanical Engineers tie on as many occasions as possible. And although this isn’t a very high grade of membership I mean it was something which he’d aspired to and became and he was just very proud of this. Could you describe him to me? Yes, he was six feet tall, I am six foot four or five feet tall, but I can come to – there’s actually a medical reason for that which is interesting [laughs] and I’ll come to that later. Yeah, he was six foot tall, he was quite a distinguished looking man, he was an upright man, you know, ‘cause lots of tall people sort of stoop but he was an upright man. And dark hair, and he had a certain presence, so in addition to this work he was great person to, you know, he went to church regularly and he ran the junior Sunday school so he was quite good at running things and organising things as well as, you know, being a very keen mechanical engineer. Did he run anything else apart from the Sunday school? I don’t think so, not as far as I know, I think church was quite a big part of his life so we used to go to church maybe three times – two or three times each Sunday so it was quite a big part of his life. 5 Colin Humphreys Page 6 C1379/88 Track 1 What denomination? Baptist, Baptist Church. What are the particular features of a Baptist Church at this time, I’m agnostic so it’s [laughs] – Okay, so yeah so the particular features of a Baptist Church and why it’s called a Baptist Church is because whereas in a Church of England and I believe Roman Catholic churches, they baptise people when they’re infants, in Baptist churches they don’t do that at all, they have a sort of infant dedication service but then people are baptised when they’re adult, so they – basically it’s called Believers Baptism. So when people say, ‘I’m a Christian, I believe,’ then you’re baptised an adult, probably minimum age of fifteen, something like that, and it’s a big – I mean it used to be done outside in rivers, right [laughs] but now it’s inside a church and it’s this big tank of water that you and the minister go down and you’re actually thrown backwards into this water, you come out again, you know, if you’re fat it’s difficult for the minister, you come out again and that’s baptism, adult baptism. Were you baptised as an adult then? So I was baptised – yeah, in Luton probably at about aged fifteen. So I was, that’s right. What sort of personality did your father have? He was quite a strong personality in many ways but less strong in other ways so it was a sort of mixed personality and we had a good relationship. And my brother I think was very caring and loving. [05:10] 6 Colin Humphreys Page 7 C1379/88 Track 1 I was the only – I was an only child, I was quite a sickly child, in particular when I was born I had some birth defect which I still don’t understand but basically what my parents said to me were my two feet were pointing backwards, and I never understood this [laughs] but my two feet pointed backwards and for that reason I never walked up to the age of two. And when I was two years old I had a major operation on both feet and I still remember both legs being in plaster, so they were in plaster for six months, where they sort of brought my feet pointing forwards [laughs]. And then I wore leg irons until the age of twelve, so from two to twelve, so I was like Forrest Gump in a way, I don’t know if you’ve seen this film Forrest Gump but he wore these leg irons and so that was just the same and I had to wear special shoes. These leg irons came up to my knees essentially. And what I do remember is, you know, after this operation but until I was about twelve beneath my ankle bone on the inside there was another bone below that which was bigger than my ankle bone and it stuck out, and I had to – I bought – had shoes but then they had to have some special leather sort of instrument which pushed them out so this – they could fit on my foot, otherwise because I had this big bone and so my feet were sort of like this and this big bone sticking out sideways, very strange [laughs]. And so I had these leg irons and I went regularly for exercises where I had some sort of electric shock – not shock – well sort of shock therapy but muscular thing so it flicked my feet in like this. So that was until the age of twelve, so I didn’t do any sport really because I couldn’t take these off. The only time I took these leg irons off was when I went on an annual holiday to the seaside and ran on the sand, I was allowed to take – that was wonderful, right, but otherwise no I kept these on.