NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Dr Alan Smith Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant C1379/65

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National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet

Title Page

Ref no:

C1379/65

Collection title:

An Oral History of British Science

Interviewee’s surname:

Smith Title: Dr

Interviewee’s forename:

Alan Sex: Male

Occupation:

geologist Date and place of birth: 24/02/37, Watford, Hertfordshire

Mother’s occupation:

/ Father’s occupation:

Engineer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 16/11/11 (track 1-3), 5/1/12 (track 4-6), 26/1/12 (track 7-10), 1/3/12 (track 11). Location of interview:

St. John’s College, University of Cambridge

Name of interviewer:

Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder:

Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz

Total no. of tracks:

11 Mono or Stereo: Stereo

Total Duration:

11:38:16

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance:

© The British Library

Interviewer’s comments:

Alan Smith Page 1

C1379/65 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you tell me when and where you were born please?

I was born in Watford, Watford Maternity Hospital, twenty-fourth of February 1937.

And can you tell me anything you know of your father’s life, based on what he might have told

you and anything you’ve found out since?

Well he, I think people who met him thought he was a genius really. He left school at thirteen

and, I mean I can tell you a lot, but the most important point is he went to night school, taught

himself how to do things and eventually ended up as a precision electrical engineer, and taught

himself how to use these machines called Brown and Sharpe automatic tooling, or whatever, I

can’t remember the names of them. But they were big machines and you use cams to activate

the tools. I think the tool would come in and then another tool would come in. He more or less

retired at the time that electronic tapes and computers were beginning to take over that role. But

that was all self-taught and he was not allowed to join the forces during the war because the

work he was doing was considered too important for him to go on the front actually. He worked

for the Admiralty a lot of the time and various other people. He had a [laughs], he really was an

amazing man. He was an excellent photographer and took lots of, made lots of films, very

impulsive sort of person, stabilised by my mother. And I suppose my wife would have said that

he spoiled me perhaps, I don’t know.

In what way?

Well, perhaps by putting me on some sort of, you know, can’t do any wrong, kind of thing. But

he was, he would have been an excellent professor actually, but he never had a chance and came

from a family of five. They lived in London for a lot of the time and his father at one time was a

docker in the London docks when the unloading and loading of ships was all done by hand. He

carried the sacks off the ships, he put them back on again. He was a big man, he could do that,

but it must have been literally back breaking for some people. And I was the first member of the

immediate family to go to university. I’m a product of the Butler Education Act I think, which I

think was an immensely good thing for the country actually.

Alan Smith Page 2

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[03:06]

What did your father tell you about his childhood then? So, his life before leaving school at

thirteen and going on to teach himself?

He didn’t tell me a lot, except discipline was fairly tough, his father used to beat him. I mean my

headmaster used to beat me, so that’s nothing new. But he loved playing practical jokes and he

loved helping people as well. So he was, he was very good at school. Oh yes, I remember him

telling me about he had a rival in the school – I forget his name, somebody Goldberg – and they

always vied with one another in spelling competitions. He was very competitive, good

sportsman, loved to play tennis and so on, good cricketer.

Did you know his parents, your grandparents?

I met his father, he was rather ill when I met him I think. Well no, he became ill, that’s right.

That’s when my… his father having worked in the docks had enough money somehow to buy a

farm in Essex, they farmed in Essex after the war and during the war. And his wife was also a

very spirited woman, she used to look after the chickens and the animals and she ended, after her

husband died and the farm passed to one of the sons in the family, in my father’s family, she

retired to a gypsy caravan. [laughs] I had lots of relatives in Norfolk. I’m essentially, I think,

seven-eighths East Anglian. The other eighth is French, somehow. I never follow that up

actually.

[05:11]

And what work did your father do for the Admiralty?

He made highly, well, precision parts of bronze and brass and copper which were a lot to do with

electronic or electrical circuitry. There wasn’t much electronics in those days. They were mass

produced. I know some of them went into submarines and things like that. It was just a small

part which, you know, electrical pins for example, which had to go very precisely into sockets

and that sort of thing. I don’t know the details of what they were used for because it was I

suppose secret work or something, I don’t know.

[05:55]

And what can you tell me about your mother’s…

Alan Smith Page 3

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My mother?

Yeah.

My mother, I never knew, well, I think they were very poor. She was an only child. Her father

had a dreadful accident in the First World War and lost the use of one of his hands I think, and so

he was an invalid almost in terms of working, I don’t think he could work easily. I never met

him because he died long before then and I never met her mother. She died probably after I was

born, but I never knew her. She was a very… she was also fairly competitive in a quiet way, she

was really thoughtful and became an accountant somehow. I mean not a formal accountant, but

she used to run the books for the company she worked for at one time and she ran the books for

my father actually.

How had they met?

I think tennis actually.

[07:00]

What memories do you have of time spent with your father as a younger child? So if we go sort

of no higher than sort of primary school age – things done with him, places gone with him?

Well, he used to take me down to the – we had an allotment in the war – used to take me down to

the allotment and show me things growing and show me how to grow things. I think he was

pretty horrified by the war and he made sure that I knew at a very early age what it involved. I

mean although he didn’t go into the forces he did act as a volunteer fireman and was in the

London Blitz and fighting fires there and he was horrified by what happened, but he wasn’t a

pacifist or anything like that. But we had, I think it was a… I can’t remember if it was a

Wellington or a Whitley bomber crash on the allotments in the night and he went down to help.

Couldn’t do anything, but in the morning he took me round to show me the crash and also show

me what happens to a human being when it gets burnt.

Could you describe what you saw that day?

Alan Smith Page 4

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Well, it was just an outline mass of charred material really, you couldn’t tell it was human.

Well, except from its gross shape. But I mean he was very, in that sense, you know, that was one

of the more shocking things he used to do to me. And I remember when the first films came out

of the German concentration camps from Auschwitz and Belsen and so on and there was a

showing in London, he took me up there to see them.

Why do you think that he did?

I think he wanted to show me how awful it was actually. I mean as I say, he wasn’t a pacifist but

he just wanted to show, you know. And it did leave a bit of an impression on me, I must admit.

And I suppose he was very, you know, his experience himself, if you’re a farm person, if you’ve

been on a farm you are really in touch with living things and you see them born, you see them

grow and you see them die or sent off to the abattoir and so on, and it’s part of your life and I

think, you know, he possibly thought he wanted to show me that’s how life is, actually. Because

nowadays you go to a supermarket and something comes in a package, you don’t really think

how it got there.

[09:27]

So the farm that you talk about in relation to him, is this the farm that his parents took up when

they…

Yes.

What experience did you have of that farm?

Well, it was lovely actually. It was a little – it was near Great Easton in Essex and it was very

idyllic in a way, there was a little lane going down to it. We didn’t have electricity initially, or

the farm did not have electricity, he’d managed to get that in. The water was, you had to pump

the water. There weren’t any insecticides of any moment really, so everything was wild flowers

everywhere, the sort of thing you read about actually happened at times. And I remember, you

know, stooking sheaves of corn with pitchforks, putting them on to a cart and taking them off to

be threshed.

What does that involve for someone who wouldn’t know? What is the practice?

Alan Smith Page 5

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Well, the old binders, the old first mechanical corn cutters would bind a sheaf and it would be

about that width, that high.

Just under a metre.

Something like that. I could just about lift it at that age, at ten or so. It wasn’t that heavy unless

it had been raining and the stuff was really wet. But what you did was to go behind the tractor

and a cutter and a binder – I don’t know if they were all in one machine, quite small compared to

what it is today - and you’d put them into stooks, which is about six or more, standing up leaning

against one another so that they would dry out if it was wet, and also so they could be picked up

by, or put into a threshing machine which would take the tops off and separate the grain from the

chaff, from the straw. And then you used to burn the whole lot. Not the grain of course, but it

wasn’t, nobody worried about smoke or fires in those days particularly. I have a vivid memory

again involving animals and they always cut the field from the outside in and left an ever

decreasing island in the middle in which all the rabbits and hares and everything else were stuck

and there would be a lot of people, well not a lot, I’d say twenty or thirty people round the edge

of this thing with sticks and so on waiting for them to come out and catch them for a nice piece

of rabbit pie I suppose.

Who were you with when you were involved in farm work, who were you doing that with?

Well, with my cousin who’s a few years older than I am, who lived near us. He used to go down

to the farm with me and my sister I think was down at the farm as well and well, the family

essentially.

Your mother and your father?

Yes.

[12:37]

What else did you do with your father? We’ve got the allotment, him showing you sort of

graphic scenes, the farm.

Alan Smith Page 6

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Well, I know… yes, I can’t remember much else actually at that young age. Come in!

[person arriving - break in recording]

[12:57]

I think I’d have to think hard about that actually. I mean he used to take me around – oh I know

what he used to do sometimes, yes – whenever he had finished an order for parts he would take

me with him to the places where these were to be delivered. I think it was in London, Camden

Town I think I recollect as a place where things were delivered at times. And then he would take

me, even in the war we went out to a restaurant, I mean it was very simple. And there’s a smell I

still can, a smell - I’ve never come across it since, a spicy smell – which sticks with me. So

that’s the sort of thing he used to do.

[13:45]

And time spent with your mother at this younger age?

Well, I used to help her I suppose with things like washing up and occasionally going for walks

and so on. Can’t remember a lot about her, being with her, basically, up to ten that is.

And where did you live?

In Bushey near Watford, and then we moved to Bushey Heath.

When did you move?

I think it was 1947. Yes, it must have been.

So the first house that you lived in, do you remember it clearly enough to take us on a sort of

tour of it?

More or less. It was quite small and it was semi-detached. You went in through the front door

and on the left it had a small sort of dining room/lounge and then the next room in the passage on

the left was a bedroom, had been a bedroom or was a bedroom with an air raid shelter in it. It

had one of these Anderson shelters, I think they’re called, with the great big steel plate from the

Alan Smith Page 7

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roof and steel or iron supports, the idea being I suppose if the house was bombed and badly

damaged but not destroyed completely, the shelter would hold up the rubble on top of you and

you wouldn’t be seriously injured, hopefully. So those were the two rooms on the left of the

passage way, on the right there was a little stairway going up to the first floor and then there was

a kitchen, a small kitchen. And then upstairs there was a bathroom with a toilet in it and two

bedrooms, basically. I was born actually as a twin, identical twin, but during the war we both

got gastroenteritis and he died and I survived.

How old were you both?

At least three. And the reason, well, he died, I think was that there were no, the drugs that were

available were mostly going to the front line rather than for domestic use. And probably some,

well I know my mother had acute appendicitis, peritonitis, at that time and she was able to

survive because I think there was, I think penicillin had just been invented and there was a little

bit for civilian use.

And how long until your sister came along?

My sister was two years younger than me. So we were initially a family of three and I think he

died or we had this disease probably the early 1940s I would think.

And I should imagine you can’t remember the experience of having that at three?

No. Can remember having measles. I don’t know when that was, but it would have been before

I was ten. It was quite a severe attack. My mother was worried because I kept on seeing these

things going up and down the wall, images. I mean they were abstract shapes going up and

down the wall and she was worried about that.

[17:32]

Was there anything at home that as a child you regarded as modern, any objects that you

thought of as being…

Well, we had a radiogram I suppose, a big sort of wooden typical 1930s model with a record

player on the top, or gramophone on the top. I suppose that was fairly modern. I never really

Alan Smith Page 8

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thought of it in those terms actually. I think they must have been fairly modern because they

must have furnished the house from scratch so they would have bought things that were current

at the time. I remember some of the mirrors were very 1930s, not quite art deco, but that sort of

inclined. Yeah.

[18:23]

And how did you, as a younger child, how did you amuse yourself when you weren’t with

parents, if you like, taking you to things?

Well, my father was, I had lots of good toys. I had a very nice set of bricks which I built all sorts

of things with, you know, a bit like Lego except they didn’t hang together, which I really

enjoyed actually. Yes, I could tell you another experience, war experience. During the late,

latter part of the war, you know, we were attacked by V1s and V2s and one of the V1s landed on

the cricket field next to the house, more or less. The blast from it blew my mother towards the

place of the blast, because the sound wave had reflected off the house opposite and I was lucky

to be at school because all my bricks were embedded with glass fragments, and I wasn’t there so

had I been there I’d have been severely damaged I think, maybe even blinded or something, I

don’t know. And ironically, we used to keep goats during the war to supplement meat and milk

and one of the favourite goats - used to eat people’s prize roses when it got loose and so on – was

severely damaged, had to be put down, so we had goat’s meat for several weeks on end, which

was quite nice actually. But I do remember that. And, you know, like most boys used to go

scouring for bits of shrapnel and this stuff called window – do you know window?

No.

It’s a strip, I don’t know if it’s aluminium or not, but it’s a strip that is still used in modern

warfare to confuse radar. It’s a metallic strip, you drop it and it falls slowly through the air and

radar screens get completely confused by the reflections from it so you can’t tell what you’re

looking at. And we used to find this lying around in places and bits of shells, fragments on the

street and so on.

What did you do with them?

I still have them actually. Some of them, just as souvenirs.

Alan Smith Page 9

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Do you remember what you did with them at the time?

Yeah, I put them in a little box and looked after them. I mean I can remember when we were on

the farm in Essex, again, this is another war memory, as the sun set you’d hear the sounds of

these very heavily loaded Lancasters and Halifaxes taking off to go and bomb Germany on a

thousand bomber raid on Berlin or something like that, and the whole, the sky seemed to

reverberate with noise, that they were getting assembled, basically. They took off and they

gathered together and then they went off as a procession, as it were, to go to Germany and can

remember seeing, specially American planes I think, coming back after daylight raids in

Germany full of holes, engine stopped, that sort of thing. Flying perfectly well, but quite

damaged.

You could see, so looking from the ground what did they…

You know, flying along in formation as best they could and there’d be a hole in the tailplane or

an engine would be stopped or something like that. So I did, I mean I lived through the war and

I didn’t notice, I couldn’t tell whether we were eating well or poorly but I never felt hungry or

anything like that. But I do remember eating a rotten egg. [laughs] Because we didn’t have

proper preservation. I think we had a fridge, I’m not sure actually.

How did you feel about the war going on, what were your…

It didn’t mean a lot to me really, but I used to cut out, I used to collect – my interests were very

varied – I used to collect the names of Russian generals so when there was a battle reported in

the paper I would religiously cut out that article if it had the name of a new Russian general that I

hadn’t heard of before. Yeah. I mean though we were bombed and, you know, there was the

Blitz and so on and V1s and so on, it didn’t somehow, it wasn’t as immediate as it would have

been had I been a bit older and obviously not as immediate as if one had been in Germany itself.

But I do remember these things about the war actually.

What other sights and sounds do you remember of bombing and other military activity?

Alan Smith Page 10

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Well, there was no… the only, as I say the bombings, well I didn’t hear the bombing except for

when these V1s came over and blew up and so on. I remember seeing them actually, one or two

of them, or at least one, at least and it had its typical sort of boom boom boom boom, vibrating

noise. As long as you heard that you weren’t worried. It’s when it cut out that you started to

flatten yourself somewhere. I remember also seeing the glider crews for Arnhem gathering

together, the huge numbers of Hauser gliders being towed by, I’m not sure, Dakotas I suppose,

just gathering in the sky and flying – this is, I saw these in Bushey, they were flying, obviously,

towards Holland. Not making much of a noise but fortunately my father had a pair of binoculars

and I used to use these all the time to see what was going on in the air, because we had a clear

view from our house of the sky really. We weren’t closed in or anything like that.

[24:33]

And apart from collecting the names of Russian generals or the articles containing them and bits

of shrapnel, what other sort of pastimes or ways of amusing yourself do you remember?

Well, again, you asked about toys and my father being an engineer himself, perhaps he saw me

as a future engineer, I think he might have done, to go into business with him or something like

that. But he gave me a wonderful Meccano set and I spent, I really enjoyed making things in

Meccano and that interest persisted until at least sixteen actually, because I remember one of my

first, well my very first job when I earnt some money, I bought a very nice lens, a Taylor Hobson

lens, and made a photographic enlarger with it, from Meccano, and I used to print things from it.

It was very… I really enjoyed that actually. I quite liked photography and still do, but I don’t do

much these days. So that’s another thing, you know. The nice thing about Meccano is you can

make all sorts of things and they have wheels so you can move them around and you actually, I

think I actually had a motor, clockwork motor that you could put on to Meccano things so they

could move around themselves. And that was, you know, for a kid that was really excellent to be

able to do that sort of thing.

[26:05]

And to what extent were you playing with your sister, she was only two years younger than you.

We used to have lots of games together actually and we used to play word games with her. I

remember one silly thing we tried to do was, specially on a long journey in the car, we’d be at

the back and my parents would be in the front and we’d try and think of a word, we’d make up a

Alan Smith Page 11

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word and we’d try and think how we could make it come into general use so that we had

invented the word. We made up words but none of them persisted as far as I know.

Do you remember any of them?

Well, one was a thing called a zake – Z-A-K-E. We thought that was sufficiently distinctive and

I can’t remember what meaning we attached to it. It was to describe a person, but I have no idea

what kind of person it was describing. Yeah, I do remember, as I say, playing like that a lot with

her. But we didn’t do much together, I don’t think, as brother and sister.

When did you start to take photographs?

Well, my mother I think allowed me to use her, she had a little Box Brownie camera and I used

to take perhaps one or two things like that. But I really got into it I suppose in my early teens

actually. And I had a very nice, although my father didn’t go to university his younger, one of

his younger brothers did, went to one of the polys in London at the time, it wasn’t Chelsea, I

can’t remember which one it was, but because he had done that, he took, for whatever reason, he

took a considerable interest in finding out what I was interested in and he used to leave me half a

dozen books on the subject and I can remember him quite clearly leaving me half a dozen books

on photography. He was a wonderful man in that respect. He’d find out what I was interested in

and then at Christmas or birthday time he’d come along with this pile of books and I really loved

reading them and so on, actually.

[28:17]

What else did you read as a younger child?

Anything and everything really. I remember, I do remember going into our local library and

there was a children’s section and I went through that and I decided I wanted to read something

else and the librarian realised that I was a reader essentially, and I was given permission to go

into the adult library and I used to read, I mean lots of… I can’t think of many things I didn’t

take an interest in. I can’t remember them but I was very, I was a prolific reader, I do know that.

Who had taught you to read?

Alan Smith Page 12

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I don’t know. Well I think, I can’t remember whether my mother taught me at all or whether she

read to me at all, I just can’t remember that. But I do remember very clearly in primary school,

that’s when I was under ten, we used to have to read from books, simple books, and I do

remember I had two places in the books, one of them was where the class was and the other was

where I’d got to, basically. Sometimes got caught out by not, losing the place where the class

was.

[29:34]

Where was your primary school?

Bushey, or Bushey Heath. It was called Merry Hill, that was the primary school, and Ashfield

was the school up to eleven. I don’t know what you’d call it actually. Maybe Merry Hill was

the infants. It’s the school for younger people anyway.

What else do you remember of Merry Hill infant school then, we’ll take the first one first.

Not a lot. One or two fights in the playground, nose bleeds and that sort of thing. I really don’t,

no I don’t have much of a memory of Merry Hill actually. Ashfield was more memorable. A

headmaster called Mr Brothers who occasionally, as I say, beat me for doing things, I can’t

remember if I did. Oh I remember, yes, I think it was at Ashfield and I can’t remember, maybe

Ashfield people went to Merry Hill to eat, I can’t remember actually, but we had a meal. I didn’t

like marmalade pudding, still don’t, and it was served and I had a look at it, didn’t eat it, and the

headmaster who was sitting on a desk high up, high table, saw I hadn’t eaten it and he got up and

he made a speech about it. He said, ‘Smith, you haven’t eaten your marmalade pudding’ and to

cut a long story short, he wouldn’t let the school go back to class until I had eaten my pudding in

front of everybody. That was a bit of a humiliation I suppose. So that was one of my memories

at Ashfield.

Was it a mixed school, Ashfield?

No.

I thought the fact that he said ‘Smith’, yes. So it was a boys’ school.

Alan Smith Page 13

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It was a boys’ school. Merry Hill was mixed, but Ashfield was not.

Do you have any memories of science teaching at Ashfield?

No, it wasn’t on the menu, as it were.

Nature study or natural history?

Nature. Yeah, I can’t remember. We had painting classes, we had… I remember again, I must

have been a bane to some people, but one of our mistresses – we had mistresses as well as men at

Ashfield – she’s a very nice woman, and for some reason or other she wanted to talk about, she

wanted us to find out about birds and my father had an interest in birds, this is one of the few

things he was actually… he had some… we didn’t have a lot of books at home and one of them

there was Birds of the British Isles or something like that, and I remember coming across this

bird called a twite – T-W-I-T-E – and it stuck in my memory as being such an unusual name.

And so I produced this in the class, I said there’s a bird called a twite. She said, ‘Don’t be silly’.

So I was a bit miffed at this and next day I brought in the book and showed it to her and she was

quite surprised actually.

And do you have memories of the teaching of other subjects at Ashfield?

No. No, I have no real recollection of the teaching at either of those schools actually.

And friendships at that school or at that age?

Yes, I had several friends actually from Ashfield, all local people, all boys. We used to get

together and play. Some of them will be mentioned in that diary actually.

What do you remember of things done with those friends?

We used to go riding bikes and loved to ride, well I suppose what people do nowadays, you

know, these skateboard… what do you call them?

Yeah, skate parks.

Alan Smith Page 14

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Skateboards and stuff. We didn’t have that, what we had was the common which had lots of

paths and pits and steep pits in it and we used to go riding up and down these banks, I mean just

like they do today actually, but it was all very improvised. And we used to go bike riding. Oh I

do remember something, I can’t remember how old I was, but it was about that time. Again, I

was collecting bus numbers [laughs] and I remember entirely on my own I went to the Old Kent

Road garage where I knew there were some new, some very difficult to see buses in any other

way and I remember going into the garage itself and being told off by the people in there, what

are you doing here, and that sort of thing. But – and trains I used to collect, train numbers,

cigarette cards, cigarette packets. I mean boys, we used to swap these things at school and so on,

at Ashfield, not – yes, at Ashfield I would think. Possibly at the grammar school I went to

afterwards.

Do you remember how you collected the numbers?

Yeah, there was a little book, they published books about these things, which is how you knew

how far you’d got in collecting everything that was going.

[35:16]

Any churchgoing?

Yes, my mother I think was more religious than my father. My father I think was not a believer,

as it were, I think my mother was more so. We used to go to the parish church, more to social

activities than anything else I think.

How did you sort of rate that experience, what do you remember thinking about it?

Well, it was interesting. I don’t think I was particularly religious. I mean I did, specially when I

got to university, read a lot about, you know, people like Schweitzer and that sort of thing. But I

think looking ahead, you know, jumping ahead a few years, I think this is my present position, I

realised probably at university that had I been brought up as a Buddhist or a Jew or whatever, I

would be that and I would think everybody else was wrong. So the question then is if you

believe that is the case, how do you tell what is right or are they all different facets in the same

thing. So I suppose that’s how I, I’m not really… I mean the Anglican church is an institution

Alan Smith Page 15

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which one would hate to see disappear, but I can’t take it as seriously as one should, if you were

religious that is.

Do you remember as a child whether you believed in God?

I think I used to say prayers, so I presume I believed in God. But I can’t be sure of that. I mean

I was never really definitely religious, but it seemed to be something one did, actually. It was

more of a social activity than anything else. I mean it’s a place where you met all sorts of

people, specially at Christmastime. We used to go around carol singing and that sort of thing.

Yes, I say my… again, my father, he liked the social aspect of the church but not the actual

requirement to believe.

When did you realise that? This difference between your mother and your father in that respect?

Well it wasn’t a strong difference, but I sensed it generally I think, because I think my mother

was more, she really was sorry to have missed church, whereas my father I think sometimes

missed it and it didn’t seem to worry him too much.

And your secondary school, where was…

Oh, I also went to Sunday school. Had a very nice deaconess who taught us and we used to

collect Sunday school stamps, which was rather nice. [laughs] Yes, she was quite nice. I must

have had, yes, that reminds me, I must have had an interest in astronomy by ten or before ten

because I did know most of the constellations by that time, I remember, because I was walking

back one evening with the deaconess and I was telling her, you know, there’s the Plough and

there’s Orion, or something like that, and she didn’t know these things so she was quite

interested. Yes, astronomy was another… because my father had binoculars you could actually

see the detail which you can’t see with your naked eye, which was fascinating actually.

Do you remember how you pursued it, I mean how you learnt the names of the constellations?

Well, this would be one of the books I got out of the library. There was a very good book, it was

like a star map but in small pages so you could tell where you were and all that sort of thing.

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Who took you to the library?

I don’t remember who took me, but once I started I went on my own actually. I mean we were

much freer in those days to do things that we wanted to do when we wanted them without a

parent being in the background actually. I was talking to my cousin last weekend, who’s eighty

now, how he used to take me to Merry Hill while he went to Ashfield for a few years and it’s

quite a walk, one and a half miles, two miles, something like that, there and back, and you just

wouldn’t do that today. Probably be not allowed or something silly.

[40:03]

And your secondary school?

Well, that’s Watford Grammar School. Yeah, that was a four mile cycle ride each way every

day, through Watford, through Watford high street. It was quite dangerous actually when I look

back on it. In fact, one of the people who was, who used to cycle also from Bushey, I used to

live at Bushey Heath at the time, but he was killed on his bike actually, because it was

dangerous. Well, looking back on it. Can’t believe we did it sometimes.

And what, we’ll start with sort of general memories of the environment, of Watford Grammar

School, the building and the routines and things – what do you remember?

It was a big, I think it was quite a big school for its time. I’m not sure how many hundred pupils

it had, but it was, my guess is about 500, but I may be quite wrong, and I think the school had

been built between the wars. It was a very well built, as most things were in the 1930s – I think

it was 1930s the main school was actually built – parquet floors, solid woodwork, solid

windows. I haven’t been to it actually since I left. But quite spacious, rather formal. The

headmaster used to wear a gown at assembly in the morning, and that sort of thing. Playing

fields on the spot, or one playing field on the spot, but others were some distance away. Entirely

boys. There’s a Watford Grammar School for Girls as well, which my sister went to. So it was,

no, it was a good school actually.

[42:10]

We’ll look at each of the subjects in turn, but we’ll start with science for obvious reasons. What

memories do you have for the teaching of biology?

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Not a lot, we didn’t have much biology actually. I think that was taught more in the sixth form

than lower down in the school and I opted for the physical and chemical side of things rather

than biology.

Let’s look then at chemistry before sixth form – who taught it?

Very well taught. A chap called Knight – K-N-I-G-H-T – who we called Inky of course. He

was a very good teacher. I mean there were very few teachers who weren’t good in that school

actually, in my recollection. They could control the class, they were very clear in what they

were saying and notes and everything else. I can’t think of somebody who was not a good

teacher actually.

Do you remember chemistry well enough to talk about the content of…

Yeah, I can remember chemistry. What’s amazing again, by present standards, we had all these

poisonous chemicals and acids lying – well, not lying around – but they were on the bench in

front of you and you just couldn’t do that these days actually. And I had a chemistry set, I was

given a chemistry set and loved playing around with that actually.

We’ll come back to the chemistry set. What do you remember doing in chemistry at school?

Well, I remember going through how you, not quite true to say analysis, but you had an

unknown chemical and you wanted to find out what metals were in it, you know, did it have

copper in it, did it have cadmium. These are the things we used to deal with at times. And there

were tests that you went through systematically to try and eliminate some metals and reduce it to

another group, and then you do another test and… it was just standard… that was probably fairly

advanced. I can’t remember what we did early on actually. I do remember some poor chap, we

were dealing with concentrated sulphuric acid or aqua regia or something and he decided he

wanted some of this, so he filled a test tube, put a cork on it and put it in his blazer pocket. And

halfway through the lesson you could see all this smoke coming out – he was lucky not to burn

himself seriously. But I mean that’s the kind of thing that we used to handle every day in

chemistry lessons. But I cannot remember, and I don’t have my… I don’t remember what we

actually did in general.

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Could you describe the rest of the room? You’ve talked about the chemicals sort of laying there

or available there anyway.

We had benches, perhaps half a dozen benches, with sinks, with little shelves like spice shelves

but they were bigger, containing standard chemicals that you needed, you know, dilute HCL, that

sort of thing, and one or two other things. I just can’t remember them. And there was a platform

on which the master would usually make a demonstration. I remember, for example, heating

potassium permanganate I think it is, and I can’t remember if you just heat it alone or not, but I

think it generates oxygen and we used to test for that and you put a taper which is glowing inside

and it would erupt into flame, that sort of thing. But that’s one of the things I can remember. I’d

have to think carefully about it.

Were there any sort of ideas or observations that were particularly striking, given that this was I

suppose the first time you’d encountered chemistry, because I think you said that there was sort

of limited science at the previous schools.

Yes.

I don’t know whether there was anything in chemistry in particular that was particularly

interesting for you at that age?

[46:42]

I don’t remember at school, but having a chemistry set at home made all sorts of interesting

things.

Let’s do that now then before we move away from chemistry. Could you first of all say where at

home you used the chemistry set?

Well, we had moved house from the small house I mentioned earlier to a much larger house in

Bushey Heath and I had sole use of a little room, I think we called it the playroom. Yes, my

sister didn’t actually have anything to do with it. It was a tiny little room, it must have been

almost a box room, and I used to do most of the chemistry experiments in there. Things like, it

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was fascinating, growing crystals, I do remember that, copper sulphate crystals sometimes as big

as that, on a bit of string.

How did you do that, because of course again, this sort of chemistry set tends not to be available

now. So, if you could take us, as far as you can remember anyway, step by step what you did

with this chemistry set to grow a crystal.

Well, there’d be instructions with the set and it would tell you how to grow crystals and the

simplest crystals to grow would be, I think sodium thiosulfate, I think it’s, is that hypo? I can’t

remember. It’s used in photography I think. But you can make a very super saturated solution

of it and you can seed it with a crystal and it’s like super cool water, you know, if you put a little

bit of ice in it you can see the crystals growing immediately and the whole thing solidifies, and

that was fascinating. But you can make very nice shaped crystals, not with that, but with copper

sulphate. But they didn’t give you a lot in the chemistry set, but you could go down to the

chemist and say can I have half a pound of copper sulphate, and they would give it to you, you

know, you could just buy it over the counter. I mean you could buy things like magnesium

powder over the counter and potassium chlorate. It’s the sort of thing that would be a dream for

the IRA or something like that, you could easily make explosives from what you could buy in a

chemist’s shop.

Did you make explosives?

Yeah, I did actually. [laughs]

What did you make?

Well, I tried gunpowder and then I made, I think the best explosive was potassium chlorate and

aluminium powder. It’s a wonder I didn’t damage myself actually. Talking to most of the

fellows here, they all did the same thing actually, one did in those days. Of my age, I don’t

know about younger people.

And so how did you use that to make an explosive? This sort of thing wasn’t available to me.

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Well, you needed a tube which you could make by wrapping newspaper round a broomstick with

glue every so often, so you’d end up with quite a rigid tube which you could then, might – I

don’t know whether we actually corked the bottom – but you’d have, the bottom would be filled

somehow or stopped off and then you could pour the powder, the explosive, as it were, in and

then put a little sort of tamping thing at the top. You could make a fuse easily from a piece of

paper and saltpetre. If you dried that it’ll glow and it’s not like a fuse that you see on television

which is hissing along, but it just glows and then gradually it will get into the mixture and it will

go off. Gunpowder, I never got an explosion from gunpowder.

Where did you detonate these tubes?

Usually in the back garden. The house we moved to after the war was large enough to have a

small tennis court in it, so there was plenty of space to set these things off and it’s only when – I

remember, I did succeed with the potassium chlorate and aluminium powder explosion, that did

go off with a big bang actually.

What was your parents’ view of this sort of activity?

Well I think they said, oh it’s just Alan doing something or other. [laughs] I was never

reprimanded for doing it.

So explosives and crystals, what else did you use the kit for?

Well, another thing was sulphur. If you melt sulphur – again, this is maybe incorrect memory –

but sulphur has many polymers, I think they’re called polymers, but it has many forms, there’s

alpha, beta and gamma sulphur and all that sort of thing, and they exist at different temperatures

and you could see how these things change as you cool them down. I thought that was

fascinating actually.

How did these change visibly?

Well, they changed colour. Not dramatically but I think one of the, whatever it’s called, is quite

deep orange, another is more yellow and that sort of thing, and you could see this happening, it

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was fascinating. Oh yes, I do remember doing some experiments on my own which weren’t in

the chemistry set, which was to distil coal.

How did you do that?

You had to have a flask. Yes, that was right. There was a very good optician in Watford - I

can’t remember his name, Turner or something like that – who sold glassware including

chemical things like condenser, you know, glass bottles and things for, reflux condensers and

that sort of thing. I used to save up for them and take them home and if you got the right thing

you could put coal into one of these with a tube coming off and some way of cooling it and you

could condense out of the coal thing, you know, tarry liquids and other liquids. It’s like a

fractionation coal, almost, though it was very crude. But I loved doing that sort of thing as well

actually. [laughs] Yeah, I’d forgotten about that. [53:00] Oh and, yes, I used to make – well

this is more physical but you can come back to that – I used to make little electric motors from

scratch.

Can you just say how you did that, including where you got the bits from to do so?

Well, I couldn’t make this obviously without some guidance and there was a leaflet or a booklet

about making your own electric motor and I remember it involved winding wire around a cork I

think and the cork had needles at either end which was the spindle which the thing would rotate

and you could make other bits out of tin. You’d cut up an ordinary can to give contacts,

intermittent contacts and things like that. I can’t remember the details but I do remember I did

actually get it to work once or twice, and it was very nice, to make something from scratch

which showed you how an electric motor worked.

Was your father involved in any of this?

He was very interested. He didn’t actually, he probably said, well why don’t you do this or you

could do it this way or something like that, but he didn’t actually, he did make one or two things

for me. I mean he made a lovely gyroscope at one time with a little hole in the spindle and you

put the string in and pulled it and it was a very nice… I don’t think I’ve kept that, I don’t know

what happened to it. But he was also very pleased with that as well.

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Was your mother involved in any of this?

No. I suppose she hoped I wouldn’t blow myself up, I don’t know. But she may not have

known very much actually.

[54:50]

Did your friends, to what extent did your friends have this sort of pastime?

Well, some of them, I remember one of them, he, when he left Watford Grammar School he, or

he might have left early, he became an apprentice to a motorcar… well an engineer basically, an

apprenticed engineer. And we were, I used to see him after he left school and we were talking

about how to make a better sort of container for the explosives and he made what I think people

would call now a pipe bomb. Basically a pipe with screws at either end so you could unscrew it

and screw it up, and a little bit on the side where you put the fuse, and we did actually detonate

that in Stanmore Common in a rabbit hole.

What happened? Can you describe the effect?

Well, it was just a big bang really. I don’t think we detonated it with a fuse, I think we had to

light a fire, because the fuse wouldn’t work, so we lit a fire and when the ashes were really red,

you know, a lot of ash and hot material around, put the bomb inside and then ran for cover,

basically. So that, I mean that was the most dangerous thing I did actually, I think.

Okay, let’s…

Sorry about that. Since the war, basically.

Yes, what influence do you think the war had on this sort of activity? I mean would you have

done this anyway do you think?

No, I don’t think, I don’t know, quite honestly. I just can’t say, but I know we used to have

fights actually in trenches that the Home Guard used to use for training purposes. We’d be in

one trench and another group of people, boys, we’d have catapult and BB guns and things like

that and clay pellets. Have you ever heard of pugging?

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No.

You have a long bendy stick and you get a nice piece of clay and you put it on the end and you

can throw that, if you bring it back you can throw it probably fifty yards at least, or possibly

more even. We used to pug one another. I mean it wasn’t dangerous, at least we didn’t think it

was dangerous, because there was nothing hard in it. Well hard, a piece of clay, but the worst it

could do to you would probably be to bruise you somewhat. But these were all simulations of

fighting which we saw or heard of every day actually.

Where were the trenches?

Right next to the cricket field. We didn’t fight physically in the sense of fisticuffs and so on, but

we used to fight with, as I say, catapults and guns and pugs and so on.

To what extent was it common for boys of your age to be making explosives? I mean were you

and your friend who made this pipe bomb exceptional or was this the sort of thing that was

happening?

I don’t know, quite honestly. But talking to other people in the college, they all tried this sort of

thing. I mean it’s just the fascination that boys have with explosions I think. I don’t know if you

had any experience like that.

I suppose the sort of materials weren’t so available. I mean the materials for the, for example

the pipe bomb, where would they have come from?

Well, he would have got those from his work, just a bit of brass tube with a screw at either end.

And the contents?

I would have made those. But you see I know a friend of mine, I still see him occasionally, he

was in his school’s army corps, whatever they call it, for schoolboys. The ROTC, whatever it

was called, something Officer Training Corps. Anyway, he used to go out on exercises as a

teenager - sixteen, seventeen year old - and they used to have to go from A to B and they were,

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they simulated what it would be like in a war situation with letting off thunder flashes and things

like that, I mean really big thunder flashes that simulated grenades. They weren’t, well they

were dangerous if they landed on you, but that’s what the school army cadet corps used to get up

to in their manoeuvres and so on. And I remember, he brought one of these home and you set it

off, it’s like a match, great giant match at the top and you set it off by striking this match and that

would set the fuse and there’d be a proper fuse and it would go off bang. And I remember he

brought one of these over one evening and we were playing around with it on the side of the

house and it started to go off, so we had to throw it away. So we threw it, I don’t know where

we threw it, in the garden somewhere, and sort of rushed inside and watched the thing go up and

it was really funny because all the neighbours’ houses, all the windows came open. They

thought there’d been some crash or other, anyway, I think it was attributed to us without any

evidence. [laughs] But I mean, it was really quite a violent time I suppose, thinking about it.

Because I mean as a young child, one didn’t realise this, but one probably, it probably soaked

into you in a sense, that people were doing things that were quite violent, but you didn’t think

they were unusual because that’s what it was like in wartime. I don’t recommend it, but that’s

how it was.

Is there any link between that sort of playing with explosives and your father’s keenness to show

you the sort of negative effects of war?

Most of the young boys I know of, well I don’t know what they’re like today because they may

not have access to these things, but people of that – yes, okay – people of that time used to do

these things and my contemporaries in college here all had that experience of trying to blow

something up. Whether that was due to the war and whether some of them actually didn’t live

through the war because they were a bit younger, I don’t know.

Were you aware of any girls doing this sort of…

No. Girls played with dolls. [laughs]

[1:01:57]

Physics then at the grammar school. Was it in a different room from the chemistry?

Yeah, it was the physics lab.

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Okay. Could you describe the physics…

I can’t remember it in detail but it had nice benches, nice solid wooden benches, power points.

People always, I mean I remember one boy who was lucky not to be electrocuted. He took a pair

of dividers and put them into the power point, there was a big bang. He wasn’t injured. So

that’s the sort of thing we had. Oh, there were always cupboards on the sides of both labs with

things in them, with a locked cupboard. Locked partly because some of them were probably

dangerous and partly because I think boys take things really, so you had to keep a check on

things. In the physics lab there would be things like rheostats, meters for measuring things and

as I say, in the chemistry lab there would be a locked cupboard where all the most dangerous

chemicals were kept like sodium and mercury and so on. We had stools I think. Physics was

fairly, wasn’t messy in the way chemistry was. You were, well, I can’t remember the details but

you were always measuring something like, what? Resistances of things. I honestly can’t

remember the details, but they were very simple physical experiments. Oh, we’d swing a

pendulum and measure the time it would take to swing and relate that to its length, change the

length and do it again. I think surface tension came into one experiment. In chemistry we used

to have boiling points of things when other things had been added to them. There’d be a simple

equation you could try and understand the relationship between the boiling point and what it

contained. Yes, we used to make constant boiling mixtures and things like that and I can’t

remember how we analysed them or anything. But getting back to physics it was fairly – oh,

yes, there’d be experiments with lenses and mirrors and that sort of thing, lighting. But I can’t

remember much about it actually.

What was your preference at that age, chemistry and physics?

Didn’t mind actually. I had a very difficult choice actually when I, in the sixth form, before I

went into the sixth form at the grammar school, I had exactly the same number of marks in the

arts subjects as in the scientific subjects and my French master wanted me to go into the arts

subjects, you know, history and French and all that sort of thing, and I went into the science

subjects because my father was an engineer, I think that’s really what tipped me into that side of

things.

Because he was advocating it or…

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No. Well, he might have been, he didn’t pressurise me in any way to become an engineer or

anything like that, but somehow I just felt, I can’t say I enjoyed, well I did enjoy it I think a little

bit more. It was to do with, you know, doing things rather than thinking about things. I can’t be

sure what caused me to do that, but I do remember having this dilemma and certainly the French

master wanted me to think about going into the arts and I thought well, you know, I did like

making things and I think that’s a part of what made me go into the science actually.

[1:06:15]

And teaching of geology at the grammar school?

None.

Geography?

Yes, I remember that.

Could you describe the content of that?

Now what I’m not absolutely sure is whether we had geography at Ashfield. Well, one of my

earliest, I think one of my earliest lessons would have been on the rivers of Hertfordshire. We

had to draw a, well, I think the schoolteacher drew a river which we copied into our little books,

and then he drew another river, and he labelled them and put the towns on them, and I do

remember that. Yes, that must have been – no, I can’t remember which school it was at. It’s

probably the grammar school actually. We then got on to economic geography with product,

how much coal X country produced and oil and cotton and goodness knows what. So that was

the geography we had.

Any physical geography?

Well, apart from the river bit, which was physical geography really, we must have had some,

yes, but I can’t remember it.

Any fieldwork, outdoor geography?

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No.

[1:07:36]

What clubs and societies were you in at the grammar school?

Well, I didn’t take part in many… I was a more independent individualist than some of the

people who joined clubs. I mean I wasn’t… I was an adequate sportsman but I was not really

good at sport, although I did discover right at the end I could actually run across country. But I

didn’t, you know, I wasn’t a good cricketer, I got hit on the head by a ball once and I think that

put me off. I did play, oh yes I did play hooker for the rugby team and that was pretty

uncomfortable.

What’s involved in being a hooker?

Well, you’re right in the front of the scrum, front row of the scrum, in the middle and your job

when whoever’s putting the ball in the side is to hook the ball back so it goes through the scrum

and out to the forwards who then – not forwards, forget what they’re called now – but the people

who run and try to get the ball on to the bit by the posts, you know, at the end of the pitch. But

that was, I mean it was alright up to a point, but people, if the referee sees it it’s bad for the

person who’s doing it, but they do it in such a way that the referee can’t see a hand coming up

and twisting your nose or poking, trying to poke your eyes out and that sort of thing. I did, when

I got here I did volunteer for the rugby team and I thought about it a bit and I thought well, it’s

silly actually, I don’t want to do that. So I did run for the school once or twice in the school

cross country team, not a very good cricketer at all. What else? Clubs. I did play chess for the

school once or twice but I wasn’t an avid chess person, but I did play once or twice. Can’t think

of much else actually. I didn’t act. I did start playing the cello and I quite – no, not the cello, the

double bass – and I did like that actually. The reason I liked it in part was because I couldn’t

take it home on the bus so I couldn’t practise at home, so all practice was limited to school hours

or after school hours and once I’d left school that was it. But that was quite fun. And then the

school, one of the cellists left the school orchestra, he might have gone to university or

something, left or something like that, and I was asked to play the cello, step in. The trouble with

the cello is you can take it home on the bus, and the other problem was that I didn’t like the

master who taught us that, so I never continued with that. My mother wanted me to play the

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piano, we had a piano at home, and I went, I sometimes played truant from the lessons because I

didn’t like my piano teacher either. So as a musician I’m hopeless actually, really. I like

listening to music but I can’t play it.

Can you remember why you didn’t like those two teachers, of the cello and of the piano?

Well, I think one, the piano teacher, it was terribly boring actually. It was all about exercises and

scales and all sorts of… the structure of music, which is very interesting, I mean it would be

interesting to me now, but I didn’t realise it was interesting at the time. And then the cello,

cellist, the chap who was… he seemed rather effeminate to me and rather precious, didn’t get on

well with him actually. We didn’t have a rapport.

[1:12:00]

Mathematics at grammar school, what was your experience of that?

Oh it was quite fun actually. Hard, but I quite enjoyed it really. I’m not a mathematic… I don’t,

I mean I have some ability. I’m not a mathematician at all but I could do it and it was quite

interesting actually. And we had some very good, we had one or two very good maths teachers

actually.

Are there kinds of maths or, I don’t know, particular theories or procedures that were

particularly interesting or striking through this sort of stage of your education?

I can’t remember, I mean it was all interesting in a way, but I can’t remember being attracted to

one part of maths compared with another. And we always found, I don’t… did we do? I can’t

remember whether we did vectors at school or that was university. I can remember doing

algebra and calculus and that sort of thing. I mean one of the great things about the education I

had in maths and probably in other subjects is it was a broad brush thing. Today, talking to

people when we interview them, they’re very good at a particular module in maths like statistics

or something like that, but they know nothing about say, vectors. And other people know all

about vectors but nothing about statistics and it’s very difficult here to teach people because you

have to go back to basics for the people who haven’t had that and you bore other people who

have had it. I’m just saying how education has changed actually in that sense. Whereas we had

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a very, you know, we went through a standard maths course involving everything really. I didn’t

like mechanics very much.

Why?

I don’t know. I’m not sure why actually. It’s strange when I think about it. But I do remember,

I could do it up to a point but I didn’t think much of it. I preferred algebra and calculus because

they were somehow more abstract I think and more interesting.

[1:14:26]

And what was the sort of, the conduct in boys that was valued at this school, if we think sort of

more generally about sort of the ethos of the school, what kinds of, I guess what kinds of

masculinity was the school keen on or what kind of conduct was it attempting to promote in

young people?

Well, it certainly hoped you would be interested in sports. In the class there was, I can hardly

ever think of any misbehaviour in the class, it was very disciplined actually. And people, it was

due partly to the teachers who knew how to enforce discipline. There were one or two teachers

did come in occasionally and if they couldn’t… we could tell when they couldn’t control the

class, basically, and we used to play them awfully. I remember one poor Latin teacher, he – Mr

Fettes – he was a reader for Oxford University Press, proof their books and that sort of thing –

very able man, but he couldn’t control the class. And when he was writing away we’d all

advance our desks a few inches and eventually he ended up completely enclosed by all our desks

and he didn’t know how to deal with that, just hadn’t got a clue actually. But most teachers, you

respected them and you behaved accordingly.

So were there sort of techniques for controlling a class that…

Well, there was always the cane at the back of it all. I mean the individual masters wouldn’t

cane you, the headmaster was the one who did that. I was never caned in the grammar school,

but some people were. They didn’t seem worse off for it, and I know people will say you

shouldn’t do that, but I don’t think we suffered enormously. Though of course there were

different boys and different kinds of boys and so on, so he would obviously have a, well perhaps

the ones who would have suffered didn’t misbehave and never were caned actually. It’s the

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more, the alpha males I suppose in the class who were often caned. Well, not often, but were

caned.

Where would you put yourself in that division?

I wouldn’t put myself as an alpha male. I tend to be an observer rather than a doer, in a way. So

that’s where I would put myself. I don’t know how you’d describe it. Yes, as I say, I observe

rather than lead things, if you like.

[end of track 1]

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[Track 2]

I wonder whether you could remember what your impression was as an older child now and

becoming a teenager at school, your impression of your parents’ political views or allegiances.

Well, my mother never really expressed any political views. My father, probably as an

independent sort of self-made person was very much against the unions. So I would have

regarded him as a Conservative. I mean he really hated people, really disliked people who did

not do any work. I don’t mean people who were unemployed, that’s a different… but people

who were in positions and were not looking after other people in terms… I mean the reason he

didn’t like – to get back to the beginning again – unions was they were not what he would like a

union to be, which was essentially like one of the medieval guilds that if you were doing bad

work you were told about it and if you continued to do bad work you probably lost your position

in the guild. I’m not sure of the details, but he wanted the unions to sort of have a pride in what

they did rather than just being a bureaucracy asking for better money for people. You know, the

classic case for him I think was the case, you know, British Leyland which had a marvellous

opportunity which it completely lost partly because of the managerial set-up, which was wrong,

but partly because people somehow weren’t invigorated with the ideals of doing the best they

possibly could. One of his philosophies actually was whatever you do, do the best you can.

Doesn’t matter what you do, you know, if you’re a waiter, doesn’t matter, if you’re some

assistant somewhere, doesn’t matter, just do the best you can because actually it’ll help you as

well as the people you’re working for. So he always put his heart and soul into whatever he did,

it didn’t matter what it was actually. And so he was infuriated with people who he thought were

just getting the money and not doing their job properly, which at that time in his view included

the unions. I think he was very much in favour of Mrs Thatcher, I think. But he never actually

said he was a Conservative, he never went to political meetings or anything like that, but he did

argue with people. We had some friends, or one of my mother’s friends was married to a chap

who worked on the railways and my father and he were always having quite long and intense

arguments about why the railways were so awful in his view. And this man was always

defending them and so on and said you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and so on, and he just

didn’t believe it, because I think of his own experience. The trouble was, he was talented so, you

know, if you’re talented you sometimes can’t recognise that other people don’t have quite that

way of approaching things actually. Anyway.

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[03:26]

And what do you remember of time spent with your parents now as an older child and as a

teenager?

Well, I think they were very supportive actually. They let me get on with whatever I wanted to

do and because I think they didn’t have the background that university gives you, they to some

extent were not able to help me to the extent they might have wished to be able to help me. But,

you know, that’s what happens.

And what were your father’s enthusiasms at this time? You’ve mentioned photography but…

He liked, he always, he liked inventing things. I don’t think he invented anything that was

patentable, as it were, but he just liked to solve problems and invent things. He loved growing

things, as I say. He just put his heart and soul into whatever he did and as I say, gardening and

his work and inventing, photography and so on were the sort of things he really loved.

What did he invent?

I can’t be specific, but I know he invented something for one of these machines that made his

bits and pieces which solved a problem and it was very specialised but it was something he

actually made himself and thought about himself. He was always thinking about how to make

things better, technically anyway.

Did he do this sort of work at home?

Yes, when we moved house to what was called Bushey Heath, we were very lucky in the sense

that we were given permission, or he was given permission to have a workshop in the house

grounds where he could carry on with his work. I don’t think you’d ever get that these days

actually, because it’s a totally residential area really. So he was very lucky to get that just after

the war and able to essentially work on the site. I mean he had a workshop right next to the

house. It wasn’t a big place, he didn’t employ anybody else, but it was full to the brim of all

sorts of things.

Did you go there with him? Did you work…

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I did once or twice and I wasn’t particularly good at it, so I didn’t.

And what were your…

He was a man – just to interrupt you, sorry – I think he was a man who was a bit frightened of

money and what it might do to him.

Oh. In what way and what gave you that impression?

Well, I believe he could have earned a lot more, made a lot more money than he actually did, but

he’d seen what had happened to some of his people he worked with, you know, they became

essentially corrupt and he thought, I think he felt that it might corrupt him if he got too much

money. I know that’s an unusual thing to say, but that’s what I feel about him actually.

In what ways had his friends become corrupt or his acquaintances become corrupt?

Well, through the war some of them were profiteering. Probably charging more money than they

should for what they were doing and probably not doing it as well as he would have done it and

he was asked to join them at one time, which is how he became… he left the company he was

working for and set up on his own, because he just didn’t want to join that kind of thing actually.

So I think he had a very strong moral sense in fact. He was a very complicated man really, but

he had a… that’s one of the things he did have in him was a very strong moral sense of what was

right and what was wrong. He wasn’t always right in the light of other people’s opinions but he

had this view of how things should be actually and when they weren’t that way he really was

quite upset, angry.

And what was your view of the relationship between your parents as you came to an age where

you were able to sort of stand outside it a bit?

Well, I think they got on reasonably well. It was a time, I can’t say, I mean I don’t think they…

obviously they were not always, it wasn’t a hundred per cent good relationship at times, partly

because I think my father was so busy that he didn’t see that my mother needed things that

perhaps he should have given her because he was so busy doing other things. I mean I know

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again about late teens my sister and I were… took the bull by the horns and decided to

redecorate one of the rooms in the house because we thought it was a bit, well needed it

basically, scruffy. Now he should have done that, he didn’t. But actually he was quite happy

once it was done, fortunately for us. Yeah, I just think he was… at times he could have and

should have perhaps given more time to my mother. But they didn’t come to blows about it or

anything like that and it was a time when if somebody, we never used the word divorce for years

or recognised anyone as divorced because it was that sort of thing. Divorce was something that

happened to other people and it wasn’t a very nice thing to talk about and people shouldn’t do it,

so he had that attitude. And I think he really liked, he loved my mother, I’m sure, but he

sometimes didn’t see that he should be doing other things he did do. So I think they got on

reasonably well.

[09:36]

And what were your sort of thoughts about what you wanted to do? We’re getting now to the

end of grammar school and your taking A levels, what had you in mind about…

I didn’t really know. In fact when I think about it, things happened to me, I didn’t take control of

them at that time. We had a wonderful headmaster who was actually again another, from this

college. He was in the French Resistance during the war, he was half French, and Harry Rée was

his name, and he ended up as – well, ended up – but he moved eventually from being head of the

grammar school, he became Professor of Education at York and he was a very unusual man. He

did things that upset some of the school staff. I know that because he thought that the brown sort

of Victorian aura you had in the school, which is a brown panelling and everything, he decided

to get rid of that and paint it. Made it much lighter and colourful, but it was horrible for some of

the older staff, they didn’t like it at all. And he was very informal, I don’t think he beat people

very much, you know, cane them or anything like that. He gave you a dressing down, but he was

a sort of breath of life or fresh air in the school really. Not a breath of life, a breath of fresh air.

We’d been very, very conservative. I mean we had a headmaster, Percy Bolton was his name,

when I first went there. And I remember we weren’t supposed to eat ice-cream dressed in school

uniform, it’s that sort of time, and some of the people in school had been seen eating ice-cream

in Watford and he raised this matter at assembly, he said, ‘Some boys have been seen eating ice-

cream out of…’ and he couldn’t bring himself to say ‘tubs’. He said, ‘out of buckets’. I mean

that was the kind of ethos he had, very old school, stiff upper lip. Very nice man. But Harry Rée

brought in this different… things and I think, well it was through him I’m here actually.

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How?

Well, in the sixth form we had to think about – this is where I hadn’t thought about what I was

going to do – he said you must apply for university, and so he put me in literally for this college.

I didn’t know anything about St John’s or university really, and he said try, you know, put Smith

into St John’s and Richie in Trinity Hall and Shenkman can try King’s. And we all had these

different, I imagine he had a sort of bit – well, I don’t know if he did – but you can imagine a big

map of Cambridge and there’s X and there’s Y and there’s Z. And we all tried and depending on

the outcome we got in or didn’t get in. So I didn’t have an idea what I wanted to do really when

I left grammar school, because I knew I was going to university. I didn’t know what that

involved in any detail at all and so I just went, came here, and that was it.

[13:09]

What was the application process then?

Well, you went in for the scholarship exams which were held – this is when we had scholarships,

we don’t have them any more, because they were thought to be unfair I think in some way. But

you entered what was called, as I say, the scholarship exams which were held about now in

December in, yes in the subjects you had been studying at school. It was several days I think, of

practical exams and written examinations and based on your performance in them you were

admitted and if you were admitted you might be a scholar or you might be an exhibitioner and

that’s how it was.

And what was the outcome for you?

Well, I got a scholarship, so I was very lucky. Had no idea, you know. I thought I hadn’t got

any chance at all. I remember being in the hall which we can see later and there was a chap

about half a dozen places down, we’d just done the maths exam and he had a great booming

voice, he said, ‘Well I managed to get about five questions done’, you see, and I thought God,

I’d only done perhaps five bits of five questions and I thought well, I haven’t got a chance of

getting in here, but it happened. He ended up as my roommate actually. He was a very nice

man. I’ve never heard a bad word spoken about him, actually and he was at one time the

university registrar and then he became Master of Downing College. Absolutely, you know,

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very, he was a very decent man actually, always listened to you, never said a bad word about

anybody and nobody ever said a bad word about him. But that was the beginning. He became

that after those examinations and he did well at them. And I thought, as I say, I thought I hadn’t

got a chance.

[15:23]

What did you choose to read?

Well, we had a different tripos then, it was the natural sciences tripos but we had a, I think we

had a – it wasn’t IA and IB – it was prelims to Part I and then Part I and then Part II, I think,

something like that. And I read geology, physics, chemistry and maths. What I’d done at school

actually, didn’t try anything new, except geology. And I think I tried geology because I

remember at school one of my geography masters had been, he was enthusing about a friend or

somebody he’d met who worked for Hunting Geophysics – I don’t know if you know them as an

exploration company? And he was talking about this chap who went all over the world doing

geophysics. And I thought well that sounds very nice. And I think that was where the seed for

doing some geological, geophysical was planted by those remarks actually. Because I didn’t

want to work indoors. The thought of working indoors all the time was something I just didn’t

want to do, so here was a way out which involved keeping my physics going and of course when

you got to university you could do geology as well, so I really liked geology. I wasn’t a person

like some people have been, you know, a collector of fossils from day one. Geology was never,

I don’t think I ever read a geology book actually until I came here. I was very interested in

natural history, you know, plants and flowers and the weather and all that sort of thing, but never

actually in geology per se.

What impression did you have then of what it might entail?

Which?

Geology.

Well, it was obviously, it became, it was obviously something to do with looking at rocks and I

found that fascinating, once I got some lectures.

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[17:29]

Could you then give us some sense of the content of geology in the first year?

Yes. Well, it’s typical geology course. It started out, well I don’t know whether it started out,

but there was stratigraphy was one of the major elements, tectonics. There was no geophysics in

that at that time. Palaeontology, obviously. Incidentally, this is a footnote, going through my

papers – I had to move my office two or three years ago and I came across my notes for geology

for Part II, that’s the third year, and looking through them I thought well, they’re not… I used to

take reasonable notes and so what I’ve done is to leave all my notebooks, collection of

notebooks, to the department as an archive so they can see what was taught prior to plate

tectonics in the third year.

Very interesting, yeah.

So I thought, you know, I didn’t know if they would want them, but as I say, they were complete

and I thought they might be interested. So that was the third year, but the first year was, we had

a lovely field trip to Arran in the soaking, you know, heavy rain. [laughs] Had cold and snow

and I wasn’t properly equipped. Because I didn’t know if I was going to go on to geology, but

I’ve always liked the outdoors and even though it was awful weather I somehow… it became

interesting. What was interesting about geology in those days and possibly to some extent if you

get the right field now, is that you could actually come up with an idea which might or might not

be true and which nobody else had actually thought of before. You know, it wasn’t like physics

where the frontier you get to in ten years’ time after you’ve graduated or something like that,

there was so much in geology. It’s a complicated subject really because it’s a complicated

organism, as it were. There are many bits that nobody’s looked at. It’s not like astronomy in

particular where there’s over-employment. By that I mean I remember in this college we had a

German PhD student, it was shortly after pulsars had been discovered and he was going to do a

PhD following up on pulsars, thought about it, came up with a plan, and of course the next week

in Nature somebody published a paper where it was all done, and I don’t know if he ever got a

PhD actually. So, you know, in some fields there are too, well not too many people, there are a

lot of people, very bright people, very capable people, doing things which you have to do

immediately otherwise you’re not going to be able to do anything.

And why is geology different, because as you say, the size?

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Because it’s so, it’s actually very complicated in a way. I mean you can simplify it, obviously,

you know, crust, mantle and core and so on, but when you look into the details of any one of

these things there’s still a huge amount to learn which we haven’t learnt yet. So the reason we

haven’t learned it, because, partly because the techniques are changing all the time, but partly

because there aren’t so many people in the subject that it’s saturated.

[21:06]

Could you tell the story of that, the Arran field course, obviously in as much detail as you can

remember? Yeah.

Go on, sorry. In what sense?

So just almost tell it as a sort of an account of the field course.

Well, we, I think we somehow got to Arran, I believe by train in those days rather than – we use

a coach nowadays – I think we used the train then. And we had a ferry from Ardrossan I believe,

to Brodick. It was one of those old ferries where I believe the car… it wasn’t a drive on, drive

off ferry, it was a ferry where you lifted things off the boat on to the harbour, on to the quay. It

was quite small, unable to dock in rough weather, you had to go down to Lamlash and really

rough weather there was no ferry. You then went, landed on the quay at Brodick and we walked

to this little hotel, the St Denys Hotel, run by a very nice couple who gave us very basic food, but

it’s what we wanted, you know, mashed potatoes, swede, mince, that sort of thing. And we went

out every day, whatever the weather unless it was a real blizzard, went out every day looking at

the rocks of Arran. Usually we’d get a coach, the coach would drop us off somewhere and then

we’d walk around the coast probably, or inland sometimes, and get picked up at the end of the

day. Sometimes we’d be in the coach all day, well not all day, but much of the day. And it was

led by staff members. There wasn’t a big party, the class was quite small I think, I can’t

remember the numbers but I would have thought it was probably under forty. I just don’t

remember, because we now have about 100, sometimes 150 people on the first year field and we

have to run it for three weeks and we stay in much more comfortable accommodation with

decent heating and drying facilities and so on, and quite good food. It’s extremely comfortable.

And we probably work harder actually, at the moment, in the sense that in the evening we get the

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students to give us talks about what they’ve been up to and we carry on teaching all the way till

bedtime, essentially. Well not quite, but almost.

What did you do in the evenings when you were on the courses?

I’m trying to remember. I think we might have looked at thin sections of rocks. I think we took

one or two microscopes. I can’t remember whether we took those up then or whether that was

something introduced by – well, Brian Harland who would have been a very interesting person

to talk to, he died unfortunately some years ago, two or three years ago, but he set up the field

trips for the department. We never had any field trips for a time, as I recollect, and well, it’s

partly the history of the department, but as I understand it, the Sedgwick Club, which is the

undergraduate geology club in the department, was set up because the lectures were so bad.

Now I don’t know how true that is, but it’s a good story. And a lot of the first year geology

course was essentially descriptive, because we didn’t understand – well, I say we – people didn’t

understand how to look at how things had originated, I mean we had no idea about, well we had

very little idea about how granites form, we knew roughly how they form but not entirely, there

were all sorts of contradictions and a lot of the teaching was essentially learning by heart what

this kind of granite is or what that kind of granite is and so on, being able to give a name to it but

not being able to explain anything at all really because we didn’t have the model or the theory.

And what did you do on the field course during the day?

We took notes of… we looked at the rocks, we looked at, as I say, the stratigraphy, there’s a very

good stratigraphic section in Arran going all the way from essentially metamorphic rocks with a

big unconformity on top of them, which was recognised by Hutton years ago, a classic

unconformity. And on top of that are sediments that go all the way from old red sandstone to

well, essentially the present day. So it’s a very good introduction to what the history of Britain

has been like in terms of the rocks that were laid down at different times. And that’s one of the

things, that was a critical thing. And we used to have, then we’d go and look at dikes, igneous

dikes, cutting the coast and different kinds of dikes, don’t know why, and so on. As I say, it was

very descriptive really.

Who was leading the…

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Well, Brian Harland, as I say he’s died, but he was the person who initiated this course, I think.

His wife’s still alive if you ever wanted to talk to her about things. And other staff members

came along to help with the trip. One in particular is Norman Hughes. And it was almost a

family occasion, I remember that, because people used to bring their wives along on these field

trips. That never happens now, but I suppose we were a small department at that time.

So Norman Hughes’s wife?

His wife came along, Elisabeth Harland came along, Martin Rudwick came along. Now he’s

somebody you might want to talk to, I don’t know. He’s more of a palaeontologist though, but

he writes about the history and philosophy of science, but it’s more the Victorian era rather than

the present day. I don’t know if Tony Hallam’s still alive. He was at Birmingham, but he’s

written books about the history of this part of the development of geology. He’s written about

plate tectonics I think. I’m sorry to say this, but he’s another Johnian. [laughs] But he may or

may not be alive, I don’t know. Haven’t seen him for years actually.

What did the wives do on the field trip?

Well they’d go, most of the wives of geologists are people who like being in the open, outdoors

and so on, so they’d go for walks. They’d go for a walk down one of the glens or something and

come back and say what they’d seen and so on. Pam Hughes was an artist, she would sketch I

think. I never saw her sketching, but I imagine she would when we were in the field. And they

just enjoyed being away for a week I think in a nice area.

[28:48]

And the undergraduates, what was the sort of gender make up of the field…

Interesting. Very few women. Very, very few. In fact I can’t, well, I don’t know about the first

year, but in the third year in Part II, when I read Part II I don’t recollect any women in the class.

It was a small class, possibly a dozen. There may have been one or two but I can’t remember

them.

And on the field course? Which is in the first year I think, how many? What would be the sort

of, I think you said there were about forty on this.

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Forty or fifty. That’s a guess really. It wasn’t over a… I mean the reason I say it was probably

of that order and not more is because we never ran more than one week. Nowadays we run three

separate weeks, but in those days we ran one.

And one coach?

Probably. I would guess.

And so how many of those – let’s take that as a rough number then, forty or fifty – how many

might be female undergraduates?

I can’t remember, but very few. That’s a very significant change that’s taken place in the

sciences in the last, probably thirty years, that we now have a majority of women in the subject

and when I was, you know, when I was reading it there were very few.

Why do you think that was?

Interesting question. I don’t know. I think it’s partly that geology overlaps with environmental

subjects and that women in particular I think have more of an interest in that than men on the

whole. I don’t know. Would be interested to ask them actually.

That’s an explanation for the increasing number since you mean?

Not just the increasing number, the increasing number and the increasing ratio of women to men.

[30:48]

Could we look at the other subjects then in the first year? I wonder whether you could give a

sense of the physics course?

I’m just trying to remember.

Is it difficult for you to separate the years out when we’re talking about these subjects?

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Sometimes. Geology I can separate them out to some extent. Physics, at the moment I’m

finding it difficult to remember, actually.

In that case shall we just go for sort of any memories you have of physics at undergraduate

level?

It was very highly, well it was quite mathematical. I mean you had to… I did take the so-called

B course, or the course intended for physicists, and that was quite mathematical and hard work,

but I enjoyed it actually. Not well taught in general in the sense that the people who taught us,

well it’s still true today, they don’t always have their best lecturers in physics in the first year and

I talked to one or two people about this and I don’t know how true this is, but they say well that’s

fine by… people are really interested in physics and it doesn’t matter how they’re taught, they’ll

keep their interest however badly or however well they’re taught and if they’re not taught well it

means what we in earth sciences get are people who intended to be physicists or chemists to

some extent, and find it’s not what they expected and in some senses it’s not what they, they find

the teaching is not as good as it is in geology, because we always put our best lecturers on in the

first year if we can because we’re in a very sort of Thatcherite market driven situation. You

know, people don’t do geology at school so how can we attract students into the subject. And

one way is to give good lectures. Now, that doesn’t answer your question about what I

remember about physics, but it was hard, I mean there’s no doubt about it that the physics course

here is not easy actually and is not, in many cases not topical. We don’t, as far as I can see, the

physics department doesn’t sort of start off by talking about Big Bangs and black holes and

things like that, it’s very basic physics and if you don’t like it, it’s too bad.

What was there in terms of practical work?

Again, I can’t remember, separate out the details, but it would be things like – oh, yes, well I can

remember some of it. And I can’t remember whether this is first year or third year, but you

would be passing liquids, water say, through a glass tube and changing the pressure or something

like that, or changing the diameter of the tube, different diameter tubes, and try to work out an

equation that would describe the flow, relating it to things like surface tension I think came into

it sometimes, pressure differences at the ends, length of… all that sort of thing. And then there’d

be a rider at the end which usually I found quite difficult sometimes, perhaps other people did, I

don’t know, but okay, you have this theory we’ve given you, you’ve verified it or something,

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and it’s for a circular tube. What happens if the tube is elliptical? [laughs] Yes. They did make

you think actually. And interestingly, this is related in a way, we have this supervision system,

do you know about that? Okay. Some of our supervisors in physics were very good and others

were not and I think all my contemporaries, I don’t think we had any theoretical physicists

among them, but the ones who read the physics were more, certainly geared to the practical sides

of things, we’d go wrong somewhere, we’d get the wrong answer numerically and we’d want to

know where we went wrong and if a supervisor couldn’t tell us where we went wrong we didn’t

think much of him, and there were one or two like that actually. And I remember going for

supervision with again, this chap Stephen Fleet I was telling you about, to a supervision with him

in King’s College, with a chap who shall be nameless, who had his feet up on the mantelpiece in

front of the fire and so on and he said, ‘And what do you think about Onsager’s relations?’ and

we had never heard of Onsager, didn’t know what he was, what he did, and we didn’t want that

sort of thing. I mean you could say well, you should have been more curious. Well, that’s true

but on the other hand we really wanted a practical, we’d like to get the practical stuff done first,

then we could talk about Onsager, but he went straight into this and didn’t help us at all. So we

complained about that and we got a change of supervisor actually. So we used to write essays of

course in physics once a week, we used to do practical classes. As I say, I can’t remember the

details of the practical classes, nothing stands out in my mind. Chemistry as an undergraduate, I

think I did organic chemistry, that’s right. I think that involved synthesising things occasionally.

I just can’t remember the practicals actually in either subject very well. I remember the lectures

in chemistry. Organic chemistry was full of named reactions, which I can remember the names

now but I can’t remember what they did.

What are some of the names?

I think one of them was called the Zerewitinoff reaction, Ponndorf-Meerwein. Things like that,

that’s not the correct names, I’m sure, but you know, they had all these wonderful names but you

had to remember what they did and I’ve forgotten now what they did or what they’re supposed to

do. And we had a wonderful supervisor in chemistry, a chap called Kipping, who I think was a

great table-tennis player, but he said, ‘Organic chemistry? You can summarise that up in one

occasion’ and he took the chalk, wrote on the board, ‘Stuff + muck = junk’. [laughs] But he

could get to you, you know, talk to you and he’d tell you if you were okay or not, or had done

something okay or not. So that’s what I remember. And what I can’t remember is what the

difference was between the prelims to Part I and the Part I itself. And I think, but I’m not sure,

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that prelims to Part I, you took an examination at the end of the year but it was not part of your

degree. In other words, you might have been classified but it somehow wasn’t part of your

degree. But in the prelims themselves, I think you did have an examination, obviously, but what

I can’t remember is whether you carried forward the subjects you’d had in the first year to that

second year examination. It’s quite possible you did, which would have made it pretty tough

actually at times. Because you had whole subjects and half subjects and things like that and I

just can’t remember, as I say, the details of what I did.

[38:48]

And the teaching and learning in maths?

Well, that was difficult sometimes, not always the easiest and the teaching wasn’t that good

sometimes. There were sometimes very good teachers and sometimes there weren’t and

supervision was, well I actually was supervised for one, a term at least, by Maurice Wilkes

actually. He was very, he was good.

Do you remember any detail of that supervision or of him?

Well, I remember he used a dip-in pen and an inkwell, I think. If not that, a fountain pen with

ink in it, and sometimes it sort of flew out of the pen on to his cufflinks. [laughs] A silly thing

to remember, but he was good. I can’t remember who else supervised me in maths, but

sometimes they were good and sometimes they weren’t.

[39:44]

And did you have a sort of favourite, you know, subject within the natural sciences tripos that

you were taking at this sort of stage in the first year?

I think I was, geology was just coming along. Physics was always interesting and organic

chemistry. I mean they were all interesting, that’s the trouble. Oh, I do remember now

something. Yes, I remember it was the bane of my tutor I think because I couldn’t make my

mind up what to read and I do remember I had thought of taking biochemistry, because I thought

there was probably some interesting medical things you might have a chance of certainly

learning about. It was a time when, I think it was before – when did Crick and Watson discover

DNA – I think that was before DNA had been discovered and there were lots of things about the

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phosphorus cycle and things like that. But I didn’t do biochemistry, I didn’t read biochemistry.

And then I was going to – when was that? For a time I toyed actually with electrical

engineering, I suppose because of my father in part. I mean I actually did start work on a

vacation job at Elliott Automation. They used to build, I think they built the first missiles,

guided missiles. I remember, it was just like, do you remember Frank [Fred] Kite in one of Peter

Sellers’s films?

I don’t actually, no.

I’m Alright Jack, I think it’s the film. And there was a chap in there, he was a union man, but in

Elliott Automation, he wasn’t a union man, but absolutely archetypal chap with a white or

possibly a brown overall, not overall, but a coat, work coat and he would, when he found me he

would come along and say, ‘Come and have a look at this’ and we’d go through the curtain

covering the entrance to this thing, and there was this missile being built actually, or the

guidance system for it. That was all very interesting. And after, I think it was after a few weeks

there I decided, again, I didn’t want to work inside.

What did you do there?

I was just a dogsbody really. I can’t remember what I did actually, but I might have been asked

to do some winding some wire around, you know, for a coil of some sort or other. And I can’t

remember what I did, I just cannot remember what I did there actually. I don’t think it was very

useful.

[42:46]

And can you say more about this feeling of not wanting to work inside, about that feeling, that

sense of not wanting to…

I just felt cooped up, really. And funnily enough, after that debacle, as it were, not doing the

electrical engineering, I decided I would go on to physics and possibly took an interest in

geophysics and I did get a job at Hunting Geophysics, as I mentioned, which is right next door to

Elliott Automation, quite funnily enough. And even though that was indoors, it was quite clear

that at times you would have a chance to travel and go out and see, you know, completely

different things. My job was to relate a thirty-five mil black and white film that had been shot on

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an aeromagnetic traverse across Libya to photographs that the Americans had taken in the war,

you know, large images and they’re different sizes, thirty-five mil is quite small and it’s quite a

small area and you had to find out where in this huge area they had actually photographed the

desert and link that small image to the larger one and then they could plot the data on these larger

photographs and then they could put the values on the traverses and then start to draw an

aeromagnetic map which helped them to decide where to, well, not, Hunting Aero Services

weren’t deciding this but the people who’ve commissioned it would then decide where to ask for

licences for oil. It was the days when, I remember having a chat from one of these people who’d

been out in Libya, I mean it was awful in a way, it wasn’t just Libya they went to, they went to

Algeria as well, and they had to live underground because it was so hot and there wasn’t any air

conditioning. I mean it was just dreadful really. But it still attracted me actually.

When was this, was this a vacation job?

Yes. Yeah, vacation job.

Do you remember which year, sort of between the first and second or second and third?

Good question. Can’t remember.

And so you say it was relating the aerial photographs to the magnetic data?

Yeah. The plane would be recording a magnetic field all the time it was flying and shooting off

this black and white thirty-five mil film with a little bit of overlap, but it’s no use to anybody

because you don’t know where that little frame is until you can put it on a map, and there were

maps made from these American air photos. So once you’d got the small frame from the thirty-

five mil on to the big photograph, you knew where that was in the world because there was a

map made from these photographs, and then you could then pinpoint where the plane had got

this particular reading and as it moved to another place it would give another reading and then

you could contour those readings and give you a map of the magnetic field, that’s how it was

done. And the magnetic field I suppose, well obviously it would pick up volcanoes because

they’re quite magnetic, but you can usually see that anyway in the air photos, but other times it

would tell you where the magnetic material deeper down in the earth was nearer the surface or

deeper. And you could then work out, make a guess as to the actual structure of the rocks and

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basically, I think they were looking for anticlines, you know, folds that have crests and so on,

because that was the major target for oil exploration in those days, because they’re very easy to

find on the whole and were looking for more sophisticated things. And that’s what we were

doing, it seemed quite interesting.

[46:46]

Was there any teaching of geophysics within geology?

No. Not to my knowledge. Not to my recollection, I should say.

And whereabouts were the lectures in physics and chemistry and so on being given?

The physics lectures were in the old Cavendish Laboratory, which it’s almost like one of these

old laboratories or lecture theatres you see portrayed in some of the old Italian medical lectures,

very high rake, it was almost peering down into the lecture. It’s not quite like that, but it seemed

it at the time and it seems more so now. So that was quite a claustrophobic feeling really inside

those if you thought about it. I mean I’m not claustrophobic but when I think about it, it was

claustrophobic, it could be claustrophobic. And when it was moved, when the new Cavendish

was built in west Cambridge, it had to be cleaned because people like Rutherford and so on had

been using mercury a lot in the lab, in the lecture theatre itself and there was mercury all over,

under the floorboards and everything else and that all had to be cleaned out before they could let,

I think the social scientists took it over. So that I do remember, that’s the physics lectures.

[48:12] I did go to a course in geophysics in probably my third year, which was given by Teddy

Bullard and that was part of the geophysics option you could get in physics. That was out at

Bullard Labs, I think, or maybe he came in and talked. Maybe it was another lecture when we…

I can’t remember where it was actually. Chemistry lectures were in a huge lecture theatre, one of

the biggest at that time in the university, because I think that was probably the most popular

science in the university at that time, may still be actually. It’s a central subject, you know.

Chemistry is sort of halfway between physics and biology, if you like, so many more people tend

to have done it at school, it’s a familiar subject if you want to carry on with it and you might try

another subject as well. And geology lectures were in the Department of Earth Sciences. The

main lecture theatre’s now gone completely, it’s been turned into a lab or one or two labs with

mezzanine floors and so on in it. I do remember, in the geology lectures we had arc lights with

carbon arcs. We had a technician called Albert, or he was the departmental photographer as

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well, but he would adjust the carbon arc for these very nice, beautiful glass plate slides that

people projected. I mean just absolutely gloriously detailed slides that people used before thirty-

five mil slides came in. I can still remember the hissing of the arc as it was adjusted.

Could you describe, as far as you remember it, the lectures by Teddy Bullard on geophysics?

They were very interesting. He always got to the fundamental points. He was a bit naughty, he

would show things he shouldn’t show in a lecture, but I won’t go into that in any detail. But he

was a good lecturer.

But, you may not want to go into detail, but what sort of naughty things?

Well, I mean, he would say, now here we’ve got some really good figures and he’d show up

some [laughs] figures which weren’t numerical. No, I mean he was a bit of a maverick actually.

He was not ever liked by the university. He was a maverick, he could afford to be a maverick

because he owned Bullard Ales, as they used to be, so he was quite wealthy and he was also, I

think at that time, he was a director of IBM UK. So he was completely, I mean as far as

financially, he was completely independent of the university. And I can remember, Carol

[Williams] might have, I don’t know if she said this in her book, but I remember a very, well this

is several years later, came back to Cambridge and worked in Bullard Labs and we had this big

house called Madingley Rise, big Victorian house, obviously not big enough for the department

because it was growing, and Teddy said, look, the general board are coming here some time or

other, I want everyone to come into this place – and I don’t think he actually said this – but the

essence of it was he wanted to make sure that it would be memorable for the general board and

the way you do this was by knocking into them when they’re drinking their tea. [laughs] So I

don’t know, they did come and we did get some new buildings, but he was a naughty character

really. He, you know, I think before we had all this health and safety stuff he was approached by

the university about what he did and he did this quite literally but he described it in very bleak

terms, well, sparse terms. He said, ‘Yes well, in our research we have little boats in the Gulf of

Aden and we drop dynamite off the end’, or something like that. [laughs] Which is perfectly

true, because that was to make explosions for seismic waves and so on. No, he was a real

character.

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It may be difficult to separate sort of your experience of him later from this particular course,

but do…

No, no.

Oh, do you remember any more of the content of the lecture course?

Well, as I say, it was a very good course on things like heat flow in particular, that was a real

problem in those days. Because the heat flow from the oceans was very similar, the first

measurements were just coming in. He’d invented a gadget which would actually measure the

heat flow, or actually it wouldn’t measure the heat flow, you would infer that, but it would

measure the temperatures at different depths in the mud on the ocean floor and if you know, you

know, you have a probe which is separated by two temperature, thermometers if you like, they’re

not… thermistors I think they were, rather than thermometers. If you know what the temperature

is here and the temperature is here and you know how far apart they are and what the thermal

conductivity of the mud is, you can work out the heat flow. And it turned out the heat flow from

the oceans and the very first measurements was very similar to the heat flow from the continents.

And this was very bizarre, nobody understood it, because the structure of the oceans as we

understood it, was quite different from the structure and the composition of the continents and

they shouldn’t have the same heat flow. And it was a puzzle, it wasn’t solved until plate

tectonics came along, really. So he talked about that, he talked about gravity because he did a lot

of work in East Africa on measuring gravity across the East African Rift, you know, trying to

find out what happened at depth under the rift, whether it was, some people thought it was due to

things being pushed together, I don’t know how they came across that idea, or being pulled apart,

which is the most logical thing. He talked about, he didn’t talk much about the origin of the

earth, but he talked a lot about seismology and how you knew what the Moho was and how, you

know, the boundary between the crust and the mantle, how that changed as you went from one

place to another. Those are the sort of things he talked about and I’m sure there were other

things he must have talked about. But he did it in a way which in a sense showed you what was

being measured and why the measurements were important and what they might tell you and

might not tell you and things that you didn’t know. So I mean I think he was a good lecturer.

[55:14]

And can you describe geology in Part II, which was the third year, so third year geology.

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Yes. Well, as I say, a lot of it was what I would call descriptive regional geology, you know,

here’s North America. We had a thing, I’m probably one of the last people who’ve had what’s

called a world stratigraphy course where you go round all the major continents and you say these

are the major successions, this is how the rocks change as you go upwards coming nearer to the

present time, and so I can remember, you know, quite a bit of some of the names of stratigraphy

in say, South Africa or North America or Australia. We had this huge broad brush approach,

which is very useful actually, but people couldn’t, we didn’t know why these things happened.

We didn’t know why the old red sandstone existed, didn’t know why the new red sandstone

existed or the carboniferous and what were they telling us, we didn’t know. And it was only, as I

say, eventually, well Continental drift and plate tectonics that showed what it was actually, and

lots of other things of course.

And fieldwork in the third year?

Third year. We had a trip to Northern Ireland to look at the Giant’s Causeway and the granites

there and metamorphism created by igneous rocks passing through sediments and things like

that. That was one field trip and might have been our only field trip then in the third year. Can’t

remember any others, but we were expected to spend a month at least on our own mapping an

area wherever we wanted to map it, providing it was approved of, and that still continues to the

present day. It’s, I think it’s one of the things that is beginning to pick us out as one of the few

remaining geology departments, or one of the few departments where that work is done. Most

universities don’t have the money to fund that sort of thing. They used to and several of them

now expect students to pay for that and we’re lucky in the sense that we do ask for money from

industry to help us run these field courses. But that’s not the same as the mapping, but the field

trips that we do are important because so many people are being trained now in geology and

geophysics and they never really see many rocks, they don’t know what they look like, they

don’t know how to interpret them. And it’s going to mean that some companies, if they employ

these people, unless they train them themselves, which they don’t on the whole, are going to look

for the wrong things actually, or find the wrong things. Fieldwork’s frowned on, it’s not, you

know, fieldwork, I mean…

What do you mean?

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What does it give you? Why does making a map on your own help you in any way in your

subject? You should be sitting at a computer or reading in the library, you know. That’s the sort

of attitude some people have, but people are going to make serious mistakes in the future

actually.

What area did you map?

I mapped an area in Scotland, on Loch Fyne. Complicated, a very complicated area. I wouldn’t

go there, I wouldn’t recommend anybody doing it again. But the thing was that the chap who

had suggested it didn’t tell me, I don’t think he told me at the time, but he really wanted me to

get up the hillside in this area to a place where there were some very interesting minerals created

by some basalt magma that had passed through the Dalradian and created all sorts of rocks due to

baking and heating, and I never got up there, never got to it. Because I got so interested in the

Dalradian per se, even though it was highly complicated, I just stayed in that and worked on that

for the time. And it was about, many years later that I learnt the whole area was actually upside

down and nobody told me. So it was a good training, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

And what is involved in geological mapping, for those who haven’t done it – what did you have

to do day to day to map that over a month?

Well, what you have are the rocks at the surface. Those rocks in general will not have been laid

down at the surface. They would have been laid down horizontally when they first formed, but

subsequently they would have been faulted, broken up into blocks, or folded, or thrust,

horizontal faults that move rocks large distances and so on. And in the case of the Dalradian

they would have been heated and metamorphosed at great depth, you know, ten, twenty, thirty

kilometres down, and then brought up again and eroded. So what you do, what you actually do

is to make a map of what you see at the surface and try to, from the attitude of the rocks at the

surface, to make a three dimensional portrait of it, as it were and from that you try and infer what

the history of those rocks is. So you try and work out the evolution of the area geologically as

far as you can. So it develops your three dimensional thinking, it makes you look at everything,

if there are sediments you look at the, you know, are they marine, do they have fossils in them,

what kind of fossils are they, what kind of sedimentary structures are they, were they deposited

in fresh water, shallow water, deep water, marine water. All that sort of thing. If they’re igneous

rocks, what kind of lavas are you looking at, are they lava flows in fact or are they sills that have

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been injected into rocks. There are innumerable questions you can ask about an area that’s good

for mapping. And when you, so you’re thinking all the time about things and you might have an

idea and you say, well I have an idea, I’d better go and look at that area again, see if I was right

when I made the first thing, or you might find you’re completely wrong. So it’s a good training

in thinking really, about the relationships between things. That’s why I say geology, that’s the

sort of thing that makes geology very complicated because you’ve got all these questions to think

about.

[1:02:21]

And what clubs and societies were you involved in at university?

Well, I was a member of the Sedgwick Club, which is the geology club, and I think I was a

member of the Physics Society and I think I was, I was a member of the union society which is a

debating society. I didn’t take part in the debates but I went along to them. I was a member of

the United Nations Association. I joined the Mountaineering Club for a time, just to find out

what was safe and what was not safe in mountainous areas. I don’t recollect any other societies,

but certainly I remember belonging to all those.

And what did involvement in the Sedgwick Club involve? What did you do?

Well, I think we occasionally had field trips. I can’t remember going on one actually. But we

had talks from outside people in particular, and we occasionally had a Sedgwick Club tea and

this is again where the wives would come along and help sometimes, bring in cakes and all that

sort of thing. And it was mostly, you know, third year students, faculty and wives. It was just

almost like a nice cosy little family group actually.

Who were the, we’ve got, Brian Harland’s been mentioned as another one who came on the

course. Who were the…

Norman Hughes was…

Norman Hughes. Who were the rest of the faculty then in the third year?

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There was a chap called Maurice Black, a chap called Bill Black. They both taught

sedimentology. There was a chap called Richard Hey – H-E-Y – who gave excellent lectures,

actually. In fact I went to his funeral about two weeks ago, he was ninety-four when he died.

But he gave really… he wasn’t, I wouldn’t say he was the most profound scientist, but he was

such a good teacher actually. You came away out of his lectures with a bundle of notes that you

could look at and learn from. That was long before the days of routine hand-outs. I’m not sure

if he gave any hand-outs, Brian Harland did and Norman Hughes would have done I think. The

professor was a chap called Oliver Bulman, who was a palaeontologist. Who else was on the

faculty? That’s most of the geologists actually, and the mineralogists were a different lot.

Professor Tilley was the head of the department. There was only one professor usually in the

department at that time. One reader maybe, and everybody else was a lecturer. Your structure,

your typical career was top of the lecturer scale, and that’s it. And then because Cambridge

didn’t have a senior lecturer scale it meant that the people at the top of the lecturer scale were

well into the senior lecturer scale pay-wise that you would get at other universities, which is why

it was difficult to move from here except to a chair somewhere else, because when you take into

account all the moving expenses, etc, etc, and there was no point in moving actually, unless you

didn’t like the place.

[1:05:53]

And what was the date of your last year in…

’59.

Was there, to what extent was there any discussion of continental drift in the teaching of

geology?

Brian Harland said this is an idea you should know about, but I think virtually all the members of

the department thought it wasn’t on. I mean there were some puzzles, obviously, and it may be

that some of them, you couldn’t reject the evidence out of hand, but I think it was like, you

know, there was no obvious mechanism. I think that was the main argument, one of the main

arguments. You could always explain similarities between North America and Britain by land

bridges. For some reason there was a bridge to allow all these peculiar animals to migrate from

one place to the other and now the bridge isn’t there, but you know, it obviously was because

they’ve gone from one place to another. Anyway. My own view about continental drift and

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plate tectonics is the people, anyone who had significant experience of the southern hemisphere

geology was very open to the idea of continental drift and many of them believed it. I mean the

classic person in Britain is Arthur Holmes. He was absolutely convinced and, you know, gave

diagrams about convection in the earth and that sort of thing. And Harry Hess at Princeton had

worked in South Africa, he was convinced. And there are several other people who had worked

in the southern continents and had seen not only the southern, a southern continent, from one

continent to another, or heard about it who thought well, this is a very plausible idea. We don’t

know how it works but it’s probably true.

Why were they likely, having had that experience of the southern continents to think that it was

more likely than those who hadn’t?

I think it’s clearer. The time when the continents separated in particular, or supposed to have

separated, gave rise to rocks, well before they separated, the rocks on Gondwana, the southern

continents, were very similar in Australia, Africa, etc, and of course the person who put forward

a detailed theory was Alfred Wegener and he used, I feel, to him the ice deposits were the most

important actually. Because he was basically a climatologist by training, or an atmospheric

physicist. He wrote a classic book on atmospheric physics in the early part of the last century and

well, he wasn’t a geologist, but when he learned that there was ice, icy deposits probably of the

same age in all the southern continents, they didn’t make sense on the present day earth but if

you put them together like a jigsaw puzzle, it made perfect sense. I think it’s those kinds of

things, we didn’t have ice in the northern hemisphere because we were in the tropics at the time,

but with ice you know it’s presumably polar, you can get some idea of the directions of ice flow,

you can, if you make this jigsaw puzzle it makes very good sense and I think it was that and

Alexander du Toit, the South African who made one of the best maps of Gondwana before we

had computers and so on, he advanced a lot of, put forward a lot of evidence that supported it.

But the geophysicists on the whole were convinced by Harold Jeffreys’s arguments that, well

Harold – I had to write about this some time ago – and Harold I think didn’t actually say that

continental drift can’t occur, he, I think he said that continental drift according to the

mechanisms that Wegener appealed to could not occur, which is perfectly true, but people took

that as a, by extension, a generalisation that continental drift could not occur. So, anyway, that’s

what I… I just feel that it was the people who had that experience who were probably in favour

of drift. Maurice Black may well have been in favour, I never asked him, because he did do

quite a bit of work in South Africa at one time or another.

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[1:10:30]

And is there something about the particular kinds of exposures of rock in these southern

continents or of the correspondence between the structures across them that made it appear

more likely here than further north?

I think for some reason, I haven’t really thought about this, but I think the geology of the

northern continents doesn’t make it quite so obvious. It’s really the geology between North

America and Europe that you would have to… that’s all you have in the northern continents

really because you’ve got, we’ve got Siberia’s too, but the whole of the Eurasian continent isn’t

obvious that it’s come together because Siberia’s collided with western Eurasia and it isn’t

obvious really, though you can make a good case for it I suppose, that North America was joined

on to Europe. I mean it’s plausible, but the trouble is that the kind of things that are used to

bring those two together, and the things do match up, but the things you’re matching up, you can

imagine would be reproduced by other processes in other parts of the world and you could make

a good case for, as some people have done sometimes, of saying well, maybe Australia was

joined on to something else. But you’re joining things which are not unique to those continents

but are found in different parts of the earth and would not correspond to things that had been

joined together. Whereas the southern continents, they all broke up, you have this unique

sedimentary deposit, the ice deposit, and it makes much more sense actually. Much more logical

and easier, I think, to understand. It’s just clearer. You’re not confusing with all sorts of other

things which you get in, you know, try to match the belt of the orogenic deformation, the

mountain building in Scandinavia with that in North America, or well, Scotland and

Scandinavia, the caledonised belt, does have its equivalents in North America, but the trouble is,

the mountain belt in Scotland and Scandinavia are of one age, that’s it, you know, they’re sort of,

say it’s a late, well mid paleozoic in age. But in the Appalachians, because of the way things are

worked out, the Appalachian geology is over-printed by some younger deformation which

confuses the issue. It’s not so clear, it’s messier, basically. I think. I don’t know whether other

people would agree with that analysis or not, but that’s my view.

[1:13:25]

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And what sort of things were you doing while at university when you weren’t doing your

undergraduate work or you weren’t involved in these particular clubs that you’ve mentioned.

How did you spend your time outside of what we might call work?

Well, there wasn’t a lot of time outside work actually, if you were a scientist you had four

subjects, three lectures a week in each subject, plus practicals in three of them. Plus supervision

work, plus supervisions. It doesn’t leave you a lot of time, but I suppose what I used to do was,

well, often go to concerts or go to the films or just have a chat. Didn’t do a lot of drinking. I

think none of my classmates were, you know, we drank very frugally if we drank at all. But it

was hard work here actually, you know, as an undergraduate. If you, as a natural scientist you

haven’t got a lot of time to do much else. You have time but you haven’t got a lot, especially if

you’re a sportsman or something like that. I always take my hat off to people who get firsts and

play for the university. I mean some people were, well, you’re asking about myself, but other

people, for example, might be choral scholars and they spent a lot of, most of their spare time

was spent in the choir or something like that.

Could you describe your relations with your parents at the time you were at university, sort of

timings of visits home and also…

I never went home in a term, I always spent eight weeks here, they might, sometimes I think my

parents came up to visit, I can’t remember in detail. But they were very kind, I mean my father

was very kind, he always drove me up here and picked me at the end of term, stuff to take away

and so on. But in general I never went home in term unless there was a special event like a

twenty-first birthday party or something like that, because you were just so busy. Go punting of

course. I used to do some sketching. I have got some old sketches of the college, which took a

bit of time. Don’t remember going on many trips outside the university. The university was

really the centre of one’s life actually. Because the terms are very short here, as you know,

they’re only eight weeks and as somebody once said, some of the senior tutors at the university

counselling services always advocated having a longer term, but the staff faculty of most

departments don’t want a longer term because they have less time to do their research. So I think

the general attitude in the university is Cambridge is a place where you do sink or swim actually.

And if you can’t keep up, you know, I’m sorry, it’s bad luck. And I think many of the tutorial

problems that, supervision problems that one has are with people who feel they can’t keep up

actually. It’s very ruthless in that sense. So you do, you are under pressure really to try and keep

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up if you can. I mean I don’t, having been through it, I don’t regret it. It was just really busy, I

mean Cambridge is a place where you learn to organise yourself well and you don’t mess around

really. I know if you’re Jonathan Miller and you take part in the Footlights and all that sort of

thing, well he’s an exception and so on. But I still think there’s room for people who don’t do

very well in their degrees who do something else. But you do have to get through and, you

know. And you see so many, well not so many, but you do see examples of people who’ve been

pushed by their parents, got into here, and they still need pushing, they have to be pushed

because they’re being stretched all the time. And if they come here and they’re fully stretched

when they come here and then they come here and they’re further stretched, it can lead to

breaking point actually. So it’s, as I say, it is a bit ruthless. And some people think they have to

get a good first and if they don’t, that’s it. I remember I had a friend who spent a whole night

persuading an Indian chap who said, if I don’t get a first I can’t get into the Indian Foreign

Service, and if I don’t get into that I don’t know what I’m going to do, and he was going to

commit suicide. People get, you get so caught up in yourself actually.

What was the nature and extent of your parents’ interest in what you were doing here as an

undergraduate?

Well, they were, a very general interest but not a specific one because they hadn’t got any

background for that really. My father tried to understand things and I gave him one or two of my

things to look at at times, he said, ‘Oh it’s well beyond me, I never had this sort of thing’. So I

mean they were interested but they weren’t able to comment usefully on it actually.

[end of track 2]

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[Track 3]

Could you tell me about your sort of experience of academic and intellectual life at Cambridge

beyond your own subjects at the time that you were an undergraduate?

Well, what amazed me when I first came here was just how much there was to actually listen to,

see, whatever. Talks about all sorts of different things and often by people who had been in the

news, especially politicians or whatever, writers and so on. They seemed to have a direct link to

the university somehow, largely I think through the officers of the society would probably

contact the previous officers and they would be perpetuating what had been done previously

actually. But it was wonderful to get first-hand discussion of things. I can remember when –

who was that chap who… long before Apartheid broke down in South Africa, he was a priest I

think or… it might have been, did he… or maybe it was the person who wrote Cry, the Beloved

Country, I can’t remember who that was – but he had first-hand knowledge of all these things

and there he was, you could ask him, talk to him. And sometimes – I know, yes, I was here

during the Suez and Hungarian crises. They were both kind of coincidence and I do remember

collecting money for the Hungarians at least, not for the Suez Crisis of course, but for the

Hungarians. Wasn’t much we could do, but I did go round. This was when I was a member of

CUUNA, the United Nations Association, I did go round collecting for them. And they had very

interesting speakers as well.

What was your reason for joining that particular group?

Well, I’m not particularly political but, you know, I suppose a bit of idealism in a way. I don’t

know where that came from, but I suppose one felt this was one way in which one could improve

things, somehow. I mean given its history, subsequently I’m not sure it’s done a great deal,

could have done a great deal more, but it was - how long after the war – less than ten years after

the war, is that right? Yeah, about ten years after the war we were still, I think rationing had

ceased and sweets rationing had ceased and so on, but we were still a very poor country really,

compared with where we are now. And one still felt it was possible to, well I think one can still

feel that but it’s much more difficult to do something that would make a mark. I wasn’t sure

what I was going to do and I didn’t actually spend a lot of time outside that kind of activity,

going to meetings and talking to people and so on. I wasn’t in the offices of the society. I think

somebody had asked me to join and I declined actually.

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So apart from collecting money for Hungarians, what other sort of activities were there?

Well, I used to go, well as I say, I joined the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club and

went on some climbs with them in north Wales, but again, you’d have the opportunity to meet all

sorts of people who’d done these fantastic climbs after the war. Chris Bonington I think, was he

one of them? I can’t remember the details but it was just so interesting meeting so many

different kinds of people, talking about what they’d been up to actually. And the concerts we

had were excellent. I don’t like orchestral music very much, but the chamber music here is

really first rate. Talking about them for the first time for thirty years is a bit difficult because I

can’t remember who they were, but it was really an eye-opener.

[04:25]

Now, I know you’d come from a boys’ school and as you’ve explained geology was top heavy in

terms of undergraduates, but I wondered about relations with women while at university?

Well, one had girlfriends, they were mostly from nurses and teachers at Homerton, places like

that. Yeah, I mean I had one or two girlfriends at that time.

How would you meet nurses and teachers?

Good question. [laughs] I think sometimes at parties, somebody would have a link to Homerton

or Addenbrooke’s or whatever, and sometimes, there used to be a thing, there used to be the

Dorothy Ballroom, we used to have dances on Saturday nights or something like that, and

women used to go there as well as men and I suppose that’s where one met people actually. I

wasn’t terribly involved, I mean I just had one or two people I used to take out somewhere, I

wasn’t serious about any of them. I remember going, yes, oh and there were the language

schools as well, as there still are. I remember there was a German girl, she was very nice and,

you know, I used to take her out, films and so on, and she was staying with somebody and I went

round to have tea with them I think and eventually it got pretty serious because the people who

she was staying with actually sort of approached me and said, ‘Are you thinking of marrying this

girl?’ And I thought God, no. I just wanted a bit of female company but I wasn’t interested in

marrying her at the time. Anyway.

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[06:15]

And then, could you sort of tell the story of what happens at the end of university and the next

step for you, the various sort of options you might have pursued.

Well, I know when I graduated, and I can’t remember which year this was, I did have an offer of

a job in Australia in seismics, commercial job, that’s right, doing exploration geophysics in the

Australian outback somewhere.

How had that come about, that offer?

Well, I suppose looking back, I think what happened was that one started to look around for a

job and I thought geophysics, I had probably more or less settled on geophysics or geology as a

possible career so I used to, I think I let the, whatever it was called then, careers appointment,

something like that, appointment board? I can’t remember the details of what it was called, but

there was an organisation like there is today which would tell people about what was available in

their field, or what they were interested in and that was when the offers came up, and I can’t

remember whether they were the same year or successive years where I had another offer from,

it was probably Shell, to work in, somewhere in Bolivia or somewhere, or Peru, in the jungle

[laughs] doing the same sort of thing actually. Which appealed up to a point, and I can’t

remember how on earth it came about that I decided I would like to do a PhD. I just cannot

remember whether it was suggested to me or whether I thought about it, or what. It was

probably suggested to me by one of my supervisors, Norman Hughes or Brian Harland in

particular, because they were the people who looked after me. And so I looked into it and

thought well it sounds like a good idea, and the way I selected where to go to for graduate school

was there was a book called The Crust of the Earth published by, or edited by a chap called

Poldervaart, who was I think a South African, and it was to celebrate some anniversary of

Columbia University, but it was published as a book and it had oh, probably thirty or forty

papers in it by different people, bringing one up to date, you know, what their current research

was all about. And I went through this and said, oh that looks interesting and I, you know, went

through the whole thing and came out with about half a dozen papers that I thought were very

interesting. So I wrote off to the departments concerned and they all offered me a place, which

was very nice, and the one I selected was the offer from Princeton. The reason for that was

simply that Harry Hess, who was the chairman of the department at the time, wrote me a

handwritten letter, personal letter. It’s quite clear he thought about me and thought about my

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situation and put himself in my place and I mean I remember one of the things he said in his

letter, he said well we’ll give you some more examinations. You probably don’t want those, but

looking at it from my perspective, we think that’s a very good thing for you to do. And so I went

to Princeton.

And do you remember why you’d written to Princeton?

Because one of the papers in that volume, by the Poldervaart volume, was very interesting, it

discussed problems that were very interesting. It was Harry Hess’s paper actually. He wrote

about what the ocean crust was made of and why the oceans were, you know, what they were –

this is all long before plate tectonics – but he had been a captain of a supply vessel I think in the

Pacific War and whenever he took supplies from California or the West Coast out to presumably

Hawaii, I don’t know if he went to the Pacific Islands or not, but he always had the echo sounder

on and he would always go by a slightly different route so he essentially was mapping the ocean

floor and keeping records of what he saw and made several discoveries as a result of that

actually. And it stimulated his interest in the ocean floor and ultimately gave rise to, well,

probably what you talked about with Fred Vine actually, the notion of ocean floor spreading and

things like that, which didn’t lead to plate tectonics immediately but it was one of the key

elements in making people think differently about the oceans.

Because he wrote a sort of geo-poetry paper?

Yeah. I mean he was, he was very much on to things in terms of rigidity and the way the earth

behaved. I mean he really, he regarded the ocean really, what we would call nowadays as rigid

bodies and behaving like plates, but he hadn’t quite got the whole thing together.

What was your parents’ view of the move abroad?

They were probably rather upset. I don’t remember them saying so, but here I was going

overseas for a time, and I thought well, I mean I didn’t really think, well I’m leaving my parents,

you know, they won’t see me for some time and so on, but they didn’t actually say anything but I

could tell they were, you know, they hadn’t expected it I don’t think. But I think my father was

all for it.

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[12:07]

Could you then tell the story of the arrival in America and the beginnings of this post?

Well, I can tell you something about the voyage over. It’s about five days I think, I think I was

on the Queen Elizabeth – was there a first and second? I can’t remember. Anyway, I was on the

Queen Elizabeth of that time, because I got a Fulbright Scholarship which paid for the travel to

and fro, one year, you know, one way there and one way back, and we were steerage essentially,

third class I think or economy class or whatever it was called, and we were always trying to get

into the second class or the first class. The way we did that was by finding some girls or other

who would invite us into their class and then they would invite us into the first. So we used to

play those sorts of games on the boat, it was quite interesting. And one met all sorts of people, I

mean we hadn’t met many Americans before and I can remember one chap who was just come

back from some big game shooting in Kenya or Tanganyika and so on, you know, like a

Hemingway sort of character. And all these young women from American colleges who’d taken

the summer off to go to Europe, to do Europe as they used to. So there were quite a lot of

interesting people on the boat. And then we landed. I can’t remember how I got to Princeton

actually. I just cannot remember who told me how to get there, somebody must have done. And

I was very lucky because I was given a room in the so-called graduate college at Princeton,

which is very much like an Oxbridge college, modelled on it, so I didn’t have to worry about…

or maybe, no maybe I wasn’t actually. No, I think I had to find my own lodging. I just cannot

remember, sorry. Sorry, backtrack. I was given a room and a roommate, a chap called Eldridge

Moores who’s still alive, been a lifelong friend. He was from Arizona, very interesting person.

He became, well in his case, he teaches at Davis in California but he founded or started the

journal called Geology. It’s a sort of geological news magazine, with serious scientific articles in

it and it’s the best journal around actually for short articles. If you want to find out anything…

We’ve tried in Europe, I think Ron Oxburgh has tried to set up a similar journal called Terra

Nova, but it doesn’t work really, I don’t think, it doesn’t get the quality of the papers that

Geology has and I think in our library at the moment we don’t even take it. There’s no point

in… you don’t want to imitate the Americans, or imitate anybody’s, what they’ve done, unless

you can do it really much better, you want to do something different and we didn’t. And it’s

never worked. Anyway, I don’t think it has. If you see Ron Oxburgh you can ask him. [laughs]

And he was a wonderful musician as well as being a good geologist actually. I remember in my

time at Princeton, I know this is not quite to do with my arrival, but I remember one evening

after we’d had dinner and I was probably going back, I was going to go to the place where you

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read newspapers, I heard this wonderful music coming out, some room nearby and I thought well

there isn’t a concert on tonight, who’s playing, and it was Eldridge who was playing a Mozart

concerto and it was absolutely beautiful. So I was very glad to have met him, so we kept in

touch. [16:19] And he also comes into what I did next when I returned from America, which

again I know, it’s not quite time for that as it were, but he, there was – I will tell it now because

it’s very important. Harry Hess was always interested in the ocean floor, as I said, and there was

an argument at that time about what rocks, which were called ophiolites were, the things that are

in Cyprus and Oman and so on, and there were ideas around at that time that they were actually

bits of the ocean floor that had been pushed up during continental collision on to the continents,

so you could actually see what the ocean floor looked like by going to look at one of these

ophiolites. Well, Harry got an NSF postdoc position for Eldridge Moores to go and look at one

of the ophiolites in Greece. Now it turns out that isn’t the best place to go to look at ophiolites,

but it was, at the time it was pretty good, so Eldridge went out to Greece and on his way back

home to Princeton where he did his work, he used to come and see us in Cambridge sometimes,

because it was almost on the way home. And he used, Eldridge is a great enthusiast and he

enthused about Greece and at that time, which is after I’d got back here, I was looking for

somewhere to work – and we’ll come back to this later – but I was looking for somewhere to

work and I ended up in Greece as the result of his enthusiasm. So that’s another story, that’s

another part of the link to be continued. [18:02] But getting back to what you were asking me

about arriving in America. I remember coming up, you know, to New York, at the harbour

there, and what amazed me were the colours of the cars. [laughs] Because at that time virtually

every car in Britain was black and here were all these pastel shaded cars, pinks and blues and

some yellows and so on. And of course the skyscrapers and everything else, it was very exciting

actually. And the scale of the thing, you know, huge roads, huge buildings, huge cars, totally

different to Britain. And as I say, I got to Princeton somehow and I just cannot remember how

actually. I do remember something funny after I got there, I got my bike sent over, I think after I

arrived, my parents sent it over and I picked it up, after I’d settled down in Princeton, got the bus

into New York and went to the docks and picked it up and thought oh well, it’s not that far, so

I’ll cycle to Princeton from New York and so I did and I came to this junction which said, a

green sign, I think with white lettering on it, just said no lorries or trucks of course, no bicycles.

Oh no, it didn’t say anything about bicycles, it said no trucks. I thought well, it isn’t banning

bicycles, so I actually found myself on a freeway. I was stuck on it. I actually cycled, probably

the only person probably in Britain, probably in the world, I don’t know about that, but the only

person who’s actually cycled across the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey. Because we didn’t have

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any motorways here then – oh I think the first one had just been built or was being built at that

time - so I didn’t expect to see roads solely for cars, and I got sworn at many times as I cycled

across but… [laughs] Anyway, I made it without being arrested and got to Princeton with my

bike. [20:07] And Princeton was actually a wonderful, it was absolutely marvellous for me

actually. I did a lot of different things there because when I first arrived, having graduated in

geophysics, or physics rather, I was put on to a geophysical project initially, which meant in the

first summer going out to Wisconsin and building electronic equipment for seismic recordings

and things like that. I mean I’m not an electronic… I can read a circuit but not very well, but I

couldn’t build anything without guidance. Anyway, we went out and we shot explosives, again,

explosives coming into it again. Looking for the Moho, you know, the discontinuity at the base

of the crust, and you had to have very long lines to do that, probably a couple of kilometres or

something like that, and you had to have lots of vehicles spaced along these lines. Not lots, but

half a dozen or so. And you had to get up at dawn to record because that was the quietest time.

And we started out, we tested the equipment in Wisconsin, this was in the summer before I really

became resident in Princeton, and we tested out the equipment in the summer in Wisconsin,

showed it worked and everything else, and then we went out to the West to Montana and

Wyoming and I just fell in love with that country actually. And we recorded a lot of seismic data

in that area and the question was, what to do with it and it was run by a chap called John

Steinhart who was from the Carnegie Institute in Washington and it was clear to me that he

would be in charge of the project and he was doing a PhD as well, he was quite old, but he was a

mature PhD student, and that I wouldn’t really get much of a look in, so instead of opting for a

geophysical project I decided not to do that and I accepted a geological project in mapping,

again, mapping rocks in a mountain range west of Glacier Park. I didn’t do any mapping that

year because that year was supposedly the beginning of, the first part of my PhD and since I

hadn’t really cottoned on, didn’t really go for it, I had to start the end of my first year at

Princeton. Oh, and there was some suggestion I might be interested in palaeomagnetism because

we had a little, well it wasn’t the best place to do palaeomagnetism, but they had tried to make a

non-magnetic hut, or not a hut, but tried to create in a room in the geology department a place

that was essentially non-magnetic or where the magnetic field was very, very little so that you

could do palaeomagnetic measurements.

[23:11]

What were your relations with Harry Hess?

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Well, I mean they weren’t very… everyone got on well with Harry Hess, I think. Well, nearly

all the graduate students really liked him actually, we thought he was a terrific person and he was

very kind. I mean lots of stories one could tell about him. I think some of them might have been

published in a book, I’m not sure, but he was just a wonderful man actually.

Are there things about him that you know having known him and met him that you think might

not appear in the published record already?

Yes.

Aspects of his character?

Yeah, I’m sure. I mean I’ll illustrate by a story. This is going to get slanderous if I’m not

careful, but there was a very, well I won’t give you his name, but there was a Texan in the

department, a graduate student who was quite tall, six foot six at least, and those of us, we used

to call him the tallest living Texan in the world, his name was Hank Ohlen, he was absolutely

dirt poor and he had run out of money for his thesis, so he used to eat and sleep in one of the labs

and that was difficult so he used to do it very early, five o’clock in the morning every day, he’d

have breakfast and so on. And one day one of our, one of the professors there – I won’t give you

his name – but he was a bit uptight, he always wore a tie and everything else and jacket and was

very, a bit formal, a bit English in a way, and he came in early when Hank was having his

breakfast, he cooked it over the Bunsen burner in the lab and so on. And he could smell this

smell, went into the lab and found Hank cooking his breakfast or eating it or something and he

said, you know, I’m going to tell Professor Hess about you and he’ll doubtless, you know, he’ll

deal with you accordingly. Anyway, it was quite a severe ticking off and Hank was terrified, so

he didn’t do anything else, he cleared up and so on and he waited for Harry Hess to come in in

that morning. Harry used to keep odd hours, he often came in at ten o’clock, and he was a chain

smoker and Harry came in smoking, went upstairs to his office, followed by Hank or at least

accompanied by Hank; he was telling him what he had done and what Professor Dorf had told

him and so on. When he got to his office and opened it up, he took the cigarette out of his mouth

and said, ‘Didn’t hear you Hank’. Now, that might have appeared in a story. I know that story

appeared, but I don’t know if that characteristic was given to Harry in the book about Harry or

not, but he was a wonderful man. He had a great sense of humour actually. There was a time

when the space programme was just starting up and, you know, Kennedy had decided to go to

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the moon and so on and Harry thought well, you know, why don’t we have a project to drill

through the Moho in the oceans, you see, need a special kind of drilling ship and so on, and it

was quite expensive, but there was a lot of money around at that time. So Harry Hess and I think

William Bascom or somebody, and one or two other American scientists, formed – Fred Vine

may have told you about this – but formed a society called the American Miscellaneous Society

and they had a very funny motto, because they realised they were in competition with NASA,

and I think their motto was, ‘The earth’s bottom is more important than the moon’s behind’.

[laughs] And I’m pretty sure Harry, he could well have made that motto up actually. And he

was always coming into our optical mineralogy classes where we’d be identifying a mineral and

working out its properties and so on, smoking again, he’d take his cigarette out, one o’clock in

the afternoon he’d say, or two o’clock, and say, ‘Sorry chaps, I’ve got to go to Washington now’.

Because he had kept his membership of the navy up after the war and he had risen to the rank of

Rear Admiral, so he had bit of clout in the Pentagon, and he used to do down to the Pentagon

and argue about declassifying, part of his work was declassifying military secrets, one of which

were what we used to call the blue charts. They were big oceanographic charts about, I don’t

know, perhaps twelve of them covering the whole of the earth. They were not detailed but the

military thought they were state secrets, basically, and they wouldn’t release them. He got those

released. And in fact it was those charts that I used when I came back here and did this business

about moving continents and that sort of thing. So yeah, Harry was a great man. He drank too

much and he smoked too much, that’s all it was. It was a fatal recipe. He died quite young

really, as people, as scientists go.

[28:36]

And what was he saying at this time about continental drift, for example?

I never heard him speak about continental drift and I didn’t really ever talk to him in detail about

continental drift. Ron Oxburgh might have done because Ron was, Harry was Ron Oxburgh’s

supervisor for his work in the Caribbean and I know they would have talked about these kinds of

things, but I don’t know what Harry would have said or did say.

Was Ron there at the same time as you?

Yes, he was two years ahead of me and he, well he was married also, so we didn’t see a lot of

him. But he worked with Harry in the Caribbean. So I don’t know, I mean I, the trouble was

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that having been here with Harold Jeffreys with a very good book on geophysics, well he started

the subject really I think, of geophysics, he had very clear physical arguments about continental

drift and how the earth behaved and it was all beautifully set out and I was very much influenced

by him, so because there was a good physical argument of why it couldn’t happen I believed it.

And when Harry talked about things moving, well he must have talked about things moving a bit

and so on, I sort of thought yes, maybe, but I don’t believe it, you know. So at that time I was

very sceptical about the whole thing. I didn’t listen to Harry as much as I should have done, I

think.

[30:06]

And could you describe what was involved in the beginnings of your PhD work, which you say

you started at the end of a year of being there.

Yeah. Well, as I say, I fell in love with the West and there was another faculty member at

Princeton called John Maxwell who had a project to map a big thrust it’s called, a low angle fault

that move rocks horizontally for at least fifty miles, if not more, and well the question wasn’t so

much how it formed but how it linked to what was happening in Canada, because as you came

across the 49th

parallel from Canada down to the US, the geology changed dramatically on the

map, and the question was, why. Was this mis-mapping and if it wasn’t, why on earth did it

change. And the answer or possible answer was to be found in mapping this range west of

Glacier Park, called the Whitefish Range, which is in the Rockies just east of the so-called

Rocky Mountain Trench, which is a great big valley goes all the way up, a long way into

Canada. And it’s a very simple answer, it’s basically that this big fault is a single fault in the

older rocks and as it comes nearer the surface it splays into several faults and the geology is such

that the splays are essentially going down into Canada and they’ve been removed in the States.

So there’s what appears to be a boundary fault at the boundary. It’s not that the mapping was

incorrect, but the geology is such that it produces that effect and that’s one of the things that… I

met with another chap who mapped the eastern Whitefish Range, we mapped together and

showed it, that’s what it was. It’s very simple really, but nobody knew that at the time. And I

just loved being in these mountain ranges. You know, I was in the National Forest area and once

you got off the logging roads I never saw a person, single person for three field seasons, there

was nobody, just the animals, the wild animals actually. Bears and moose and stuff. And I just

liked it, you know. It was amazing, we didn’t have any mobile phones, we had no GPS, nobody

knew really where I was and I could easily have crocked myself on a dead fall and not be here.

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We just didn’t worry about it. Well, I suppose you were slightly concerned about it but we just

had confidence in our ability not to do that sort of thing. You couldn’t do it nowadays.

[end of track 3]

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[Track 4]

At the start of this session I understand you’ve got some additional memories, especially

memories of school, that you’d like to add.

Well, I don’t know how… it’s interesting in a way. I took the eleven-plus examination and at

the end of the year the class was told where they had come in the eleven-plus and I did not do

very well, I was certainly at least halfway down the list. But I don’t know how again I ended up

top of the list. [laughs] It’s one of those bizarre things actually. Can’t explain it.

You ended up top of the list?

Top of the class, basically. Well, I know throughout school I had two or three other people I

used to compete with and sometimes, you know, one of us would be first, somebody else would

be first, but we were always up there vying with one another. I could never do as well as some

people in maths, but I did better than other people in physics. I mean it was very competitive

really, but good fun, it wasn’t serious competition. But that’s the way it was all through the

school actually.

[01:16]

And there’s some travel during the school as well that you…

Right at the end in the sixth form, our geography master – I can’t remember his name at the

moment – but he was a very nice man and he loved to organise things for us to do and one of the

things he organised was an expedition as it were, based on North Sea trawlers sailing from

Grimsby and we, there were at least half a dozen of us, we were distributed amongst half a dozen

ships – oh it was Mr Reeves, that was his name – distributed amongst half a dozen ships and our

project was to collect samples of water at different points on the voyage using, we didn’t have

any GPS, but we could get latitude and longitude from maps, come back to the chemistry lab and

determine the salinity of the samples we collected, put those on a map and from that you could

actually see how the salinity varied from the River Humber into the open sea. That was quite an

experience.

How did you collect the samples?

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It wasn’t very scientific I don’t think. We probably – I just can’t remember – but I imagine we

put a container over the side like a small bucket or something, hauled it in and filled up a test

tube, which you then corked.

And how do you remember the sort of relations on board of the sights and sounds of being on a

North Sea trawler as a schoolboy?

Well, it was very smelly. [laughs] It was a real insight into the lives of these trawlermen. They

earned an enormous amount from their catches and they had so much money that some of them

when they landed just kept a taxi permanently on call, so they’d have a taxi twenty-four - not

quite twenty-four hours of the day - but certainly in the normal working hours they’d have a taxi

on hand. Rather like having a chauffeur. It’s a great pity, the way they used that money,

because they just dissipated it, some of them dissipated the whole of what they’d earned rather

than saving it up for something else. They were very down to earth people, as you might expect,

lots of swearing and so on. And I remember one chap in particular, he had been in the British

army when it freed the prisoners in the concentration camp at Belsen and he told me some pretty

horrific things about what it was like there. But they worked very hard and they earned what

they got, but it was a slice of life that I’d never seen before.

What did he tell you about the release from the camp, do you remember?

Well, he didn’t go into great detail as I can remember, but he was just, obviously he was

horrified by it and, you know, I’m sure they told me lots of other stories but I don’t think I kept a

diary for that in terms of writing them down. But it was, they were a very good group of people

actually.

How did they respond to having a, albeit a sixth former, but a schoolchild on their…

Well, I got along alright with them actually. I think this chap who’d been through Belsen, I think

he might have been the cook, or one of the cooks, and in odd moments I would do a little bit of

gutting of fish, but also help to peel the potatoes. And there’s nothing, it was really wonderful,

there’s nothing nicer than fresh fish for breakfast or lunch or dinner. I mean we ate a lot of fish,

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not fish all the time, but the fish we had was absolutely delicious. I don’t think I’ve ever had

anything quite like it actually since.

And where did you, what was your accommodation on board?

It was a bunk, not a lot of space. You couldn’t sit upright in it, at least I don’t think you could.

Maybe you could just. But it was a very low ceiling, as it were. And the toilets were very, just a

hole in the ship, a pipe going down to the bottom of the sea. It was quite exciting in rough

weather.

And how did your parents feel about this?

I don’t know. I mean I think they trusted the school. I don’t suppose you could do it nowadays,

I don’t know what the situation would be. There’d be all sorts of insurance problems I imagine,

but one just, at that time you could just do that sort of thing.

Do you remember anything of the scientific aims? I realise it was to produce this map of

salinity, but what was the sort of context for that?

I think it was just a project he thought was achievable, the schoolmaster thought was achievable

in the time we had, as well as opening our eyes to a wide variety of things apart from the project

itself actually.

[06:33]

And then how did you, you followed up this experience with…

Yes. After I left school I thought, I really enjoyed in a masochistic sort of way I suppose, the trip

on the trawler, and I knew that some of them went out, deep sea trawlers, and I asked, I can’t

remember whether I did it through my schoolmaster again or whether I had made contacts in

Grimsby myself, but I asked if I could go on a deep sea trawler, from Grimsby. And I got on to

one, I’d been accepted for a place in university here, and so I took up some books that I thought

would be useful for me in what I’d be doing here, I remember taking up some maths books

actually, which I would read when I didn’t want to do anything else. I think I might have been a

paying passenger, as it were, I can’t remember, but I wasn’t a fulltime deckhand or anything like

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that, but I did do quite a bit of fish preparation, that sort of thing. And as I say, we sailed all the

way round the North Cape in Norway, I think it is, into the White Sea and saw the Russian navy,

in international waters of course, undertaking target practice on targets they had. I don’t think

we saw any icebergs or things like that, and we had some very bad weather coming back, I do

remember, because we had to run from a gale which meant we didn’t sail around Norway, we

sailed through the fjords in Norway to escape the bad weather.

What was the sort of view of the crew, the workers on board to the Russian…

I think it was just part of the scene. I can’t remember that they commented on it in any way.

They were in their fishing grounds and the Russians were in their target thing and that’s how it

was.

Can you describe the work in preparation of fish on board, for those who, most people who

haven’t been on a trawler, what did you do?

I didn’t do anything, but the seamen, they trawl the bottom of the sea and they pick up fish,

bottom, you know, benthic fish I suppose, or anything else that’s around, you know, sole,

flatfish, probably cod if it’s around. I don’t know how they catch fish that was not on the

bottom. But when they feel it’s full they haul it up on cables and that’s where some of the worst

accidents happen because in a rough sea with a full load those cables can snap and they’re just

like whiplash and completely, certainly would break a man’s leg really seriously and I can

imagine they could actually sever it if it was really bad. So it’s quite dangerous, that bit is quite

dangerous. Then they bring it up with a little crane and it’s like a bag and it’s tied and they just

release the knot somehow and the fish just fall out on to the deck and then they throw away stuff

that’s not wanted or wrong type of fish, or in some cases they haul up things that are, I remember

on the North Sea trawler we hauled up an old 1914-18 mine, which I don’t think would have

gone off in any way, because the casing had rusted but the explosives were still there. And I

know they have at times, they thought – I didn’t see this happen – but they hauled up an airplane

wheel and as it came up the tyre expanded and made a huge noise when it burst and they thought

they’d hit a mine. It wasn’t one, it was just an old tyre that had blown up. Anyway, so they’d

have all this fish on the deck, they’d sort it a little bit and then they would spend time gutting it

with a very sharp knife and then having gutted it they would put it down below into holds that

had ice in them to keep it fresh.

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And you helped with which part of that?

I helped with that.

With the gutting and the storing?

The gutting, yes.

What appealed then to you about this sort of travel, which seems to be, well not obviously

picturesque, difficult, cold and involving the gutting of fish. What appealed to you at this age

about that thing enough to want to sort of volunteer for it a second time?

I think it was just the sheer love of adventure at the time. I used to love reading exploration

books, people, you know, about that fateful expedition to Everest. And there was a chap called

Colonel Fawcett who got lost in the Amazon jungle. I used to love reading those things and

imagining. I wouldn’t want to do several of them now, knowing how things are, but it was just

as a schoolboy, one, and I suppose perhaps even during the war, one had a sense of excitement

about things and I’ve always been curious about all sorts of things, so I can’t say any more than

that I don’t think.

[12:25]

And any other experiences of significant travel over the period that we covered last time?

Well, I know that when I was at university in the vacations I did a lot of hitch-hiking around

Europe. I probably went at least two or three times, and again it gave you an insight into all sorts

of people you wouldn’t normally come across. Seen kindness in many cases. I remember I was

in France once and had spent all day getting a lift outside of Lyons, on the outskirts of Lyons. I

was hot, tired and no lift, then a car drew up and gave me a lift all the way to Paris and it turned

out what had happened was that the driver and his wife had come down to Lyons to see their son

who’d had a very bad accident and was being treated in Lyons, I think, he might even had a brain

injury, I don’t know. They put me up in their house in Paris and I continued on my way home.

And I kept in touch with them for a little bit afterwards, but they were so nice actually.

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And what did you choose to look at on these travels?

All sorts of things, but principally museums I think, and sights like, you know, cathedrals,

architecture, that sort of thing. I remember hitch-hiking down to Marseille once to look at one of

le Corbusier’s constructions. It was called L’Unité d’Habitation, or something like that, because

I’d read about it and it seemed like an interesting new idea and a new way of housing people in

flats rather than just building in boxes. It was a kind of box, but it was an interesting box, and I

actually went down there and had a look around actually. The colours were quite metallic and

not to my liking, but the actual, the way it looked was so much more interesting than what we

were building at the time. So that’s one of the things I did. Another time we tried to get down to

Vesuvius because I was going to join a chap, a New Zealand mathematician who was in this

college and he had an absolute mania for volcanoes, being from New Zealand – that’s a non

sequitur – but anyway, he did and he even had, I know people laugh about them, he had spring-

heeled boots. He’d invented these boots which had sort of things like bedsprings on the bottom

which kept you off hot lava flow [laughs] and he had photographs of himself with a helmet on

and all sorts of ash falling around him. He was quite a, I mean he was probably reckless really,

but he wanted to see Vesuvius and I had started geology at that time, being here, and I thought

well, that would be an interesting thing to do so I tried to join him in Rome or Vesuvius or

wherever. I never got there because I fell ill actually, some stomach upset or something.

Do you remember the name of the person with the spring-heeled…

Yes, it’s Ron Keam. I saw him actually about fifteen years ago in New Zealand. He didn’t

recognise me at first, but he was an interesting, he’d followed his enthusiasm up so that he’d

actually put together a detailed account of New Zealand’s active volcanoes and he had tried to

get, well I don’t know if he did try to get funding for its publication, but whatever happened he

actually published the book himself, paid for the publication. And it’s a very thick book, lovely

colour plates, extremely expensive, I think over a hundred pounds, probably 200, I don’t know.

And because of the way he had done it, it wasn’t easy for him to sell these books so he had a lot

of spare volumes and he had one room in his house I think, it was almost full from floor to

ceiling of these books. And when I got there they were beginning to sell and he was beginning

to recoup his investment as it were, I’m not sure… well I’m sure he didn’t regard it as a purely

commercial enterprise, he was just interested in recording what had happened in New Zealand.

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But he was, it was very nice just to say hello to him actually. I think he lives in Auckland, I’m

not sure.

[17:25]

To what extent was geology the sort of motivation for other places that you visited on these

hitch-hiking vacations?

I’d have to think, I can’t honestly remember without further thought. Largely they weren’t. But

I don’t think geology did play a major part actually. I’m the sort of person that can switch off

my subject when I’m in places that have other things to offer. When I used to work in Greece I

drove down through Europe more than once and I didn’t take a great interest in the geology, I

was much more interested in the sights, the normal tourist sights, especially galleries and

museums and castles and things like that. So one is obsessed in a sense, as all academics are, by

their subject but I can switch it off.

[18:30]

Now, last time you told me that you’d actually had a twin brother.

Yes.

And I wondered what your parents said about that, either when you were a child or perhaps

later?

Very little actually. I mean they did refer to him because we had photographs of twin brother

and so on. Talked about Douglas. But it didn’t seem to weigh on them in a way that would

make it obvious to me that it weighed on them.

And apart from the photographs, I realise you were three and that’s sort of when very early

memories happen, do you have any memories of him?

No.

No.

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It’s possible it did have an effect on me but I couldn’t possibly say what it was. Though my wife

did suggest that, you know, it might have had an effect, especially a loss at that time of a twin

brother.

What’s your wife’s view?

Well, she’s not around any more. She died, unfortunately, last year or two years ago. But she

thought that some of my, the sense of loss might have affected me in some way and it would be

nice if she were around to ask, but it’s quite possible that she’s right because she was very

shrewd with people.

I think you mentioned also that she had a view that your father had spoiled you. I wonder

whether you wanted to say more about that? Perhaps this was your own perception.

Well, father and mother, both. I can’t, I mean I may have been spoiled but I don’t feel I have

been or was, but on the other hand, I’m not the best person to judge.

[20:37]

I wanted to ask about the souvenirs that you’ve kept of the shrapnel.

Yes.

Why do you think that you’ve kept hold of these? In other words, why do you think that you

haven’t thrown them away?

I suppose I have to some extent a collecting instinct for things that seem in some way

memorable, you know. Besides which, I think most boys used to do these things. At that age,

not all boys of course, but boys just collected anything and everything: cigarette packets,

cigarette cards, train numbers, bus numbers, car numbers. I don’t know what it is, but that’s

what we used to do in those days. I can remember even cutting out from the papers articles

about people, unsolved murders, and I think, used to think, well maybe we could do it. [laughs]

It was completely naïve and silly, but it occupied the time. So it was probably a, certainly a

boy’s thing, I don’t think girls do that actually. I don’t know any girls who did that, can’t think

of anything girls do like that actually. Sorry.

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What else have you kept? You’ve kept these pieces of shrapnel and you showed me today some

of the very intricate parts that your father engineered. I wonder what else you’ve kept from

childhood? What objects?

Well, I’m not sure if I still have them, but I did make a collection of seashells which I mounted,

from holidays in different parts of Britain. Swanage we went to once or twice and – this would

be when I was ten, eleven, that sort of thing. You know, they’re all mounted and it’s in a big

box. I don’t know if I’ve still got it actually. I might have thrown these away. Photographs,

I’ve got lots of photographs somewhere. Used to collect stamps as well, I still have a lot of

stamps actually, I don’t know what to do with them. Probably quite valuable, some of them,

because… Well, my father used to buy stamps, I think more as an investment than anything

else, but not seriously. So we have, I have somewhere at home sheaves of stamps of the Channel

Islands, issued just after the war, silver jubilee – silver jubilee or the coronation – or something

anyway, some of them with high denominations like five pounds. I don’t know how much

they’re worth today, but they won’t be worth very much because I think they’re all stuck

together, unfortunately. But they’re not things I collected myself but I have not thrown those

away, I have kept those.

I wondered whether there was a reason why some things are kept and some things are thrown

away, that you can identify?

Well, at one time I used to collect cigarette cards and things like that, I just didn’t see any point

in hanging on to them actually. Or bus numbers or whatever, train numbers. They just, you

know, they seemed interesting at the time, but apart from having done it, have no interest at all.

Those have been thrown away actually.

Why then keep the shrapnel? Why has that retained its interest?

Well, it’s a very dramatic incident in one’s… I mean it’s a, it’s a time when things were very

dangerous and very dramatic, I just felt it was worth having a record, if you like, of what it was

like at that time. Not a written record, but a material record actually.

Thank you. Could you, I’ve just got two more things on last time and then we can move on.

[25:16]

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Could you clarify for the non-specialist listener why Arran was a particularly good introduction

to British geology? What about Arran made it a good site to visit if you were introducing young

people to British geology?

Well, this is looking back because I used to lead trips to Arran when I was employed here. I

used to run what we, yes, run what was called the Arran field trip, but of course I didn’t set it up,

it was set up by a remarkable man called Brian Harland who died a few years ago, and if you

look at it standing back with the knowledge I now have and if you asked somebody to make an

island which illustrated a wide range of geological processes and effects and so on, you couldn’t

come up with something much better than Arran, except for the fact it’s a bit weak on fossils.

There are fossils, but there could be a lot more, and there are metamorphic rocks, there could be

different kinds of metamorphic rocks and so on, but in that small space there is a huge range of

things to look at. And I suppose one thing in geology, you need to know what kinds of rocks

have been deposited at different times to build up the succession of rocks through time and, you

know, everyone’s heard of Jurassic Park and so on, Jurassic’s one of those periods, which makes

up what’s called the timescale and the ones that are interesting to most people, those that contain

fossils and they start in the Cambrian and they go up all the way to the present day, and in Arran

you have more or less a complete representation of all those rock systems or, you know, rocks of

the Cambrian period, they’re not very good, actually they’re all messed up a bit, been

metamorphosed, but you eventually get into the carboniferous rocks where you have coal seams,

you have fossil plants, fossil ferns, sometimes the coal seams are covered by marine rocks which

have corals in them and things like that. And you can appreciate how different kinds of rocks

have been laid down at different times and how they vary compositionally, that is some are

chalk, some are sandstone, some are boulders and things like that, and how the fossils have

changed, and then you can relate that – which is what we do in the trip – relate that to the

changing position of Britain as it moved north from the southern hemisphere to the present day

position of the northern hemisphere. And that is quite exciting for a student I think.

Presumably when you went, first went on the course, you didn’t do that though with this place?

No, I was wondering if you would ask that. No, we didn’t do that, but on the other hand just to

see these different kinds of rock. You could see that sometimes - there’s a very nice desert

deposit on Arran, the new red sandstone, and you can see beautiful sand dunes and you know

they’re desert deposits because if you look at them with a hand lens it’s what called millet seed

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sand, they’re very small grains the size of a millet seed, a millimetre or so or less, which are

beautifully rounded and you don’t get that kind of thing except locally on a beach and a wide

area, windblown sand.

How was the sequence interpreted then, pre-plate tectonics when you were going there as an

undergraduate?

Well, changes in climate, that’s basically what was done, but not related necessarily to changes

in position. I mean you go all the way up to the present day, you can see the ice, they see the

moraines and glacial grooves and u-shaped valleys cut by the ice, and it’s not there any more.

And we know, I think at the time we knew it was about 10,000 years ago the ice essentially left

Britain. So you got actually a terrific history of how the earth had evolved in terms of changes

of climate and everything else, and also in changes of topography, because the old red sandstone,

the lower old age sandstone is made up of conglomerates, that is, rocks made of large boulders

and some of these boulders are almost a metre in size. So to transport those and round them, (a)

you had to have very powerful rivers and (b) those rivers indicate very steep gradients, otherwise

you wouldn’t have the velocity necessary, which implied in turn that you had high relief nearby,

ie mountains. At other times though, specially I suppose in the cold swampy area, you know the

topography was very low because you wouldn’t have cold swamps. So there are all sorts of

things. And then of course the other things, well several other things, but that’s one of the basic

things you see in Arran and there are not many places where you get such a complete succession

as in Arran. In other parts you might get just a bit of the Jurassic and the Cretaceous and not

much else, in other parts you might have just metamorphic rocks, but Arran has all those things

as well.

Is it necessary to travel across Arran in order to see these different things or are there particular

sites where quite a lot of it can be seen at once?

Nothing can be seen at once really, because the succession is quite thick, I mean there are

thousands of feet of rock laid down. So the way we used to run the field trip and probably still

do is to have a base, used to be in Brodick, and we’d go out each day, a bus would pick us up

generally, drive us to the start of a traverse or walk, ending in Corrie, which is north of Brodick,

and we’d spend the whole day walking through these rocks and then get picked up at the end of

the day by the bus. But in addition to all that, the central part of Arran is a granite and it’s got

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marvellous granite scenery on it and you can see at the edge of this granite how it’s baked the

rocks and in some cases forcibly intruded the rocks so that the rocks are overturned and things

like that. And you can also, it’s associated with, on the southern part of the island there’s a huge,

called a dike swarm, a dike being like a wall, vertical wall of rock a metre or so in width, and

these are mostly not granite but they’re basic igneous rocks, so basalts and things like that. And

quite apart from the fact just looking at them as a phenomenon, you have to try and think of a

way that this could have come about and that’s never been easy and today we relate it to the

activity on the fringes of the Iceland hotspot. So that’s another, we didn’t know about hotspots

then, but you can talk about them now. All these things continue, you know, they add to the

interest and value on the island and it makes it more interesting in fact for the people who teach

it actually. In fact, it would be fair to say that most of us who’ve been to Arran in one way or

another have actually written a paper about it, because we have found things that have not been

recorded previously, even though it’s probably the most tramped over area geologically in the

world, there are always new things to find and see. Students don’t know what they mean, so

they may see something new but they don’t realise it’s new and as a leader you’re always trying

to find out, you know, are we on time, shall we do this before this school comes along and all

that sort of thing. But occasionally you do see things that seem worth writing up.

[33:55]

Thank you. Now, at the end of the last session we left you in the White Fish Mountain Range and

you’d said a little bit about this PhD project. Why was this particular project identified as

something that needed to be studied or something that was interesting to study?

Well, on a purely map point of view, if you go across the international border between USA and

Canada, which the White Fish Range abuts against, you can see in Canada on the Canadian maps

lots of structures called thrusts. These are low angle faults rather like a deck of cards in cross-

section where the cards have slid over one another, and you can see a lot of those in Canada.

Come down to the US and look at the US maps that were extant at the time and you don’t see

them. You see a big thrust called the Lewis Thrust, but none of these small thrusts and the

question was, what is going on, how does the big thrust change into small thrusts as you go

across the border? Is this a mapping problem, ie people haven’t recognised small thrusts in the

US, what? And then having discovered what was going on, the question is, how do these things

form. So that was really the problem and it turns out it was a very simple answer, that the thin

thrusts, the ones in Canada, are in rocks that are at a much higher level in the earth’s crust and if

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you go down into deeper levels those thrusts coalesce into one big thrust and the attitude of the

rocks south of the border is such that the big thrust sheet is inclined to the north and disappears

under the Canadian rocks and the rocks in Canada on top of this big thrust are made up of lots of

little thrusts. So it’s a very simple explanation and then the question then comes, how do you get

these big thrusts. This is one of the biggest thrusts in the world. It’s like the Moine Thrust in

Scotland which moves things several tens of kilometres horizontally and the Lewis Thrust does

exactly the same thing, maybe eighty kilometres or more horizontally. And that’s a question

that, I think it’s still not completely solved actually, the problem of big thrusts and what they are

Anyway, it was a very simple thing, the big thrust had been cut up, the thrust sheet which makes

this big thrust has been cut up by high angle faults which are faults that aren’t related to things

being pushed, but things being stretched slightly and that’s another problem that we solved, but

didn’t solve, we had no actual explanation of why those large high angle faults cut the thrust,

where they came from, why they came when they did and so on. So if you like, structurally it

was a very simple problem. You had to walk around a lot of rock or through a lot of forest to

solve this problem, to find out where the rocks where, but the actual solution is simple and as a

result of that my thesis had to expand into, well, stratigraphy, the sort of thing that I was talking

about in Arran, the succession of rocks. And then that led into trying to understand how these

very old rocks, they’re about fifteen hundred million years old, what was the setting and where

do they form, why do they form, because the basin in which they form is about the size of Wales.

It’s an intriguing problem. The rocks are at least fifteen kilometres thick, without any thickening

due to tectonic processes, and a lot of them are very shallow water because they’ve got mud

cracks throughout. How on earth does that happen? And we still don’t know today I don’t

think, how that really happens, how you get fifteen kilometres of shallow water rocks. So I still

keep an interest in that, having… and in big thrusts, because as I say, they’re intriguing

problems that haven’t been solved yet.

[38:44]

Was there any physics or geophysics involved in your PhD work?

I did try and model thrusts using simple physics, yes. Essentially sliding a large slice of rock

horizontally, which did lead to one or two papers subsequently on thrusts and how they might

form. Because people talk a lot about gravity sliding, that is to say you have a high area and if

it’s high enough the rocks on the high ground will slide downhill on to the rocks on the low

ground and I think you can show that’s unlikely to have happened in these cases so I’m not in

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favour on the whole of gravity sliding, though I’ve become much more favourable to it in the last

ten or twenty years. So I do think they are somehow pushed and the question is, what’s the

origin of the force that pushes them? I mean you could say, well it’s just due to plate tectonics,

but I don’t think it is entirely, I think it’s related, some of it may well be related to the fact that as

you go west of the White Fish Range towards Idaho, you get into a thing called the Idaho

Batholith, which is a huge volume of granite created, that probably was created by plate

tectonics, ie subduction, but that huge volume of granite would have behaved like a fluid and if

rocks are fluid they act differently to… they can exert a much greater push than they would do

otherwise because they’re essentially exerting hydrostatic stresses on what they’re next to, and I

think, my own view is that those, fluid like behaviour is one of the driving forces for these big

thrusts.

And who was supervising this work?

My supervisor at the time was a chap called John Maxwell. He was a very nice, he’d been in the

oil industry in Texas and ended up in the faculty in Princeton. He was interested in tectonics,

basically. But because of my interest in sedimentology and stratigraphy and one or two other

things, I also got a lot of advice from the sedimentologist in Princeton who was a chap called

Van Houten who was very nice, and in particular a chap called Al Fischer who I think, I can’t

remember if he’s still alive or not, but he was a very dynamic professor actually, a wonderful

man. Complete contrast to anybody here at the time that I went to Princeton.

Really? In what way?

Because he was so informal. You know, we were a very formal department really. Everyone

wore a collar and tie every day and jacket and he, I know it’s a different climate in New Jersey,

but when I arrived, the first thing, when I first got to Princeton I stayed, I don’t know if I stayed

with him but Harry Hess who was the chairman at the time asked me round. I came, I was

sitting in his garden in his house, I think it was, and Harry Hess, I was having a drink or

something with Harry Hess and the lawn sprinkler was on and it was quite a big lawn, it wasn’t

on where we were sitting, but suddenly you could hear this tremendous roar of laughter coming

from where the sprinkler was, because Al Fischer, who it was, had walked right through it and he

was in shorts, you know, open-necked shirt, it was summertime, quite hot, I mean it might have

been in old money ninety degrees or something like that. And he was just such a jolly person

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actually and so enthusiastic. He was a very serious person, I mean excellent scientist, but he was

just so interested in everything actually and he was one of my supervisors. [43:19] He made

me, he made a suggestion about a very peculiar structure called molar tooth structure, which I

won’t go into any details about, but it’s a very peculiar structure which is probably due to

squashing of sediments as they get buried, but its origins are to me quite unclear. And it seems

to be something that occurs at a particular stage in the earth’s history in the sense that I’ve only,

the only other place where I’ve seen it, not in place, I found a pebble once in a bit of road

aggregate when I was doing a field trip in the Urals and it looked just like molar tooth structure

and it’s about the same age and it’s something that’s always intrigued me since. We don’t have a

solution, I don’t think we have the answer to it. I tried to persuade Andy Knoll who was at the –

can’t remember what the mission was called in Harvard – but I tried to persuade him that there

was some organic relationship, I don’t mean fossils necessarily, but something organic was

involved with this and he just wouldn’t accept it. But I still think that’s possible.

[44:34]

And what can you tell me about time spent when not working while you were in America,

pastimes and friendships and so on?

Well, a lot of the time, Princeton being an all-male institution at that time, I probably mentioned

how I met my wife – or have I, I can’t remember? Okay. Well, one of the things you, the classic

at the time is the American mixer – have you ever heard of that? A mixer is a sort of, what it

says, it’s a mixing device of bringing young men and young women together in a – who don’t

know one another very well – into a sort of situation where they meet and talk and dance and eat

and everything else. And so at the weekends quite often we used to go off to one of the

neighbouring women’s universities like Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia, or sometimes we drove up

to Smith in New York state or Vassar, and I think once we went up to Amherst, just to have an

evening with women actually, young women. So, you know, I spent quite a few weekends doing

that. Other times I had a friend who was, a man called Tom Simkin, he ended up as a curator of

the Smithsonian Institution, he was doing a PhD in Princeton on igneous rocks. I can’t

remember where he… I can’t remember where he did his thesis. It might have been in Skye

actually, in Scotland, but he, he was a climber and I went out climbing once or twice with him.

Pretty scary stuff I think, I mean I’m not a… I did, I never said it, I did join this mountaineering

club when I came here as an undergraduate just to see what was safe and wasn’t safe in

mountainous areas and I went out with him and we used to climb the Shawangunks I think in

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New York state, so that was another thing. And sometimes I’d go to New York just to have a

look around, stay in, I think Columbia University used to have accommodation available when

students weren’t in residence, like we do here, but they used to hire it out to anyone who wanted

it and you could get a very reasonable room in Columbia right in the centre of New York City

and I used to go up there, sometimes two or three days at a time, and just walk around New

York. I don’t think I did a lot of walking or hiking then. I’d have to think actually about how

else I might have spent time.

[47:37]

Could you describe the mixers or tell us a story of attending one?

Well, we’d all arrive, I mean there’d be a contact person in both universities and then we’d arrive

and like a reception room, a place where you might have a small dance, something like that, and

you would just start chatting with the girls. It was extremely… it was like a very… force feeding

of… [laughs] The most extremely rapid, you didn’t know these people when you, well perhaps I

think we did, we asked for return matches as it were and we did keep in touch with the women

involved and they kept in touch with us, so it was a way of meeting women and getting to know

them extremely quickly.

And were there significant relationships that developed out of mixers for you?

Not for me. No, I didn’t meet anyone I kept in touch with from the mixer, but… and I can’t

recollect – oh yes, I do – one of my best friends did meet his future wife at one of these things,

they’re still married, happily married. So some people, in some cases it led to permanent

friendships and sometimes to marriage and other times it was just a nice way of meeting some

girls and having their company for a time.

These were undergraduates?

These were all undergraduates, yes.

[49:26]

How then did you meet your wife, you mentioned…?

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Well, I met her in Princeton because, oh that’s another thing we used to do, there was a folk

dance evening or group within the town which met once a week and we used to, most of my

friends who I’ve kept in touch with used to go along to that and we used to do folk dances and

that did lead to several permanent, more permanent relationships, including, that’s where I met

my wife actually.

Could you tell the story of meeting your wife and then how that relationship developed?

Well, I met her at one of these dances and eventually, you know, after several weeks we became

quite friendly and she was an editor at the Princeton University Press and she graduated from

Barnard in New York, which at the time I think was essentially, I think it’s now – no, it is

separate I think still – but it’s essentially like Radcliffe and Harvard used to be, so Barnard and

Columbia were and maybe still are. And we became serious and got engaged and after some

time we got married.

Where were you married?

In, [laughs] well, another story. Her family was divorced, her father and mother had separated

rather acrimoniously so we both decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to be married in a

formal way with the family being present, so I suppose in a sense I eloped with her, I don’t know

if that’s true or not. Well, we didn’t have any relatives present at the time we were married. We

decided not to marry in New Jersey and she loved a place called Marblehead in Massachusetts

and so we went up to Massachusetts to marry. And it was very funny getting the permission to

do so because it wasn’t New Jersey. Went along to the, I suppose it was the equivalent of the, I

don’t know, registry office or something, can’t remember the details. And we were asked, you

know, tried to get permission for this to take place and the question was, why do you want to be

married in Massachusetts. And so Judy said well, we like Marblehead. And they didn’t quite

know what to put down, but I think they put down on the reason for choosing Marblehead, ‘for

aesthetic reasons’. [laughs] And I think we were married in probably Marblehead Town Hall by

the Chief Justice there or whatever he was called, a chap called Justice Blagdon, as I recollect,

and that was it. Came back to New Jersey, I continued studying, Judy continued editing and she

also helped, she taught me how to write, basically. I think she was very good at teaching. Well,

she used to write herself actually, she used to write stories and novels and things and well, we

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were totally different people with totally different interests, but that was one of the nice things

about it actually.

What were your wife’s interests?

Well, she graduated from Barnard, she did two senior theses, you normally do one. She did two:

one in religion and one in philosophy and I’ve started reading – as I say, she died a couple of

years ago – and I’ve started reading some of her books recently, fascinating stuff which I’d never

come across before. There’s a book I’m halfway through called The Pre-Socratic Philosophers

and I hadn’t come across this way of analysing old texts, or fragments of old texts and it amazes

me how much the classicists get out of such little evidence. But, you know, she had a very wide

range of interests. She was always interested in, especially in poetry, loved reading, wasn’t

very… she probably could have developed her artistic talents but she didn’t. She loved music

but didn’t play any instruments, though she had a good singing voice. And she was, you know,

she was a wonderful wife actually.

[54:25]

What at this time was the level and nature of her interest in your work?

She was interested but not deeply, I think. I mean she made a joke about one of her encounters

with geology, because in American liberal arts education you get exposed to some science as

well as arts and history and so on, humanities. And geology’s a favourite subject because it’s

regarded as a soft science, or it was regarded as soft science then, or soft subject because there

aren’t many equations in it. A lot of it was descriptive, qualitative, and so she used to, for her

science subjects she did actually take or read geology. I think the Americans call these courses,

for men at least, they call them’ rocks for jocks’, which is a standard subject to take and she told

me a funny joke about it just shows you how, well, I let you draw your own conclusions, but she

was talking about, she said she had talked about indigenous rocks when she meant igneous rocks,

and so on. But she, I mean she did take an interest in it and did help me with it. But I know one

of the things she edited at Princeton was a book called Physics for the Enquiring Mind by, oh, I

can’t remember, it might have been somebody Rogers, which was intended to be a book

explaining physics to people who had no mathematical background, which is quite a task. And I

tried to help her with some of that. But I think she might have regarded me, well at times she did

say so, that I was so dogmatic about some things that she thought could happen, which couldn’t

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happen scientifically, so she accused me of being arrogant about this, which is perfectly

reasonable.

What sort of things?

Oh, I can’t remember an example, but I would say, no, that’s not possible. And she’d say, how

do you know, and I said well, scientifically it’s just not possible, you see and I’m very dogmatic

about it and I did try and explain it sometimes, but in a sense you do need a background,

especially if it’s physics and so on. So she, I’m not sure if she ever accepted these as

explanations but she realised what I thought about them.

And you say that she helped you to some extent?

Well, she helped me a great deal, as I say, when I was writing my thesis. She wrote my thesis, I

mean she typed my thesis and used to, as an editor, she would edit it in the terms of the English

and also the sense and the way of expressing things and it read much better subsequently and I

learnt a lot about how to write properly. Well not properly, but you know, write well, better.

Not well but better, through her. And it’s interesting actually, looking back, how one wrote a

thesis in those days. You had these stencils actually, which had wax on them. The typewriter

would essentially release or cut out a hole in the stencil somehow, interesting to think how that

happened, but anyway, you’d end up with a stencil which had all the letters cut out and then you

put that on a duplicator or I think it was a Roneo machine or something like that, and the ink

used to come through the bits that had been cut out and you could then run off as many copies as

you wanted. But it was a real pain and if you made a mistake you had to paint the holes made by

the wrong letters, had to paint over them and create a waxed film which could then be cut for the

proper words and letters. So she did all that typing for me.

[59:03]

And what happened at the end of your PhD?

Well, we had a public examination, as is typical of American PhDs, and what that meant in

Princeton was that anybody who wanted to could come along to the examination and usually

PhD students got their friends sitting in the back row, not exactly waving rattles, but supporting,

morally supporting the defence and I don’t remember much about my defence at all except that I

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got through. I mean I can remember a funny – well, it’s not really funny – but we had a chap

with a wonderful name called Elmer Bierwagen who was the only one of our class actually who

left the subject and became a realtor, as they say in the States, an estate agent. But he wrote a

thesis on similar rocks to the ones I wrote on. I wasn’t there at the time but people, there was a

chap on his committee, examination committee, rather fierce sort of person who said, ‘Well

Elmer’, and one of the problems with the rocks he was looking at, which I had been looking at as

well, was were they deposited in the sea or in a lake, and he was asked, they said, ‘Well Elmer,

are these marine or lacustrine?’ And Elmer was so terrified he fainted. The story is that as he…

he was heard to say as he collapsed, ‘Shallow seas, shallow seas’. I don’t know if that’s true, but

apparently the department didn’t cancel the examination, they just put some, revived him and

carried on. But it’s quite a, well I suppose all PhD examinations are quite difficult and fearsome,

depending on how you feel you’ve done and what your nature is, but it was quite a public

occasion actually. I’ve done an examination in France for a PhD, or a doctorat de l’etat, I think

it was. I can’t remember actually which one it was, but everything there was fixed up

beforehand, but in the sense that the candidate had been approved, all he had to do was to sort of

make a plausible defence but you were not allowed to ask penetrating questions which would

show some deficiency in what the candidate had done, whereas in the States it’s very much a,

you know, you can ask anything you like and anybody passing through the department at that

time, if they want to can take part in that public examination. So if it’s a sabbatical visitor or a

day visitor even, if they wanted to could sit in and ask questions. I think the American PhD was

and probably still is better than the British PhD on the whole, partly because it takes longer and

you get more of a chance to chew over the problem than you do here. And very few people

finish here in three years. I know they’re supposed to, but it’s now three and a half years. When

I went to Princeton they hoped we would finish in three years and mine was three and a half

years, I was working part-time for the fourth year, and now PhDs generally are about five years

in the States. But I think you’re working some of that time for your, in quotes, your professor. I

don’t know.

[1:02:45]

And then what decisions did you make at the end of the PhD, what to do?

Well, I first of all, I thought I could stay in the States and I probably could have done but I didn’t

know at the time. I probably could have stayed in the States because my wife was American, but

I didn’t realise that at the time, or we didn’t realise that. Though I did apply for and get

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interviewed by and did accept an offer of a job from one of the oil companies in the States,

Standard Oil of California I think it was, and it was a fascinating job. They were, there was a

geological structure which was quite important in some oil fields they were looking at and they

didn’t understand how they formed and the project was to go to a place where they were very

well exposed and you could see what was going on and try and come up with a better

understanding of them, and this place where they were very well exposed was actually in the

Grand Canyon, so I would have been doing fieldwork in the Grand Canyon.

So why didn’t you…

On industrial salaries. [laughs] Which sounded very nice, but it never came to that because I

thought I had to go back and so what I did, I wrote to my supervisors here and said, you know,

I’ve finished a PhD at Princeton and I’m going to be looking for a job, do you know of any, and

they all suggested academic jobs, none of them said, you know, although I had been offered

these industrial jobs, which I would have been quite happy to take, I mean I haven’t really… I

keep in touch with industry and we’ve been supported by industry in my research. I don’t regard

industry as a sort of dirty word, which some people used to do. I mean just as an aside, industry

has a tremendous amount of data which they never have time to look at properly apart from how

it affects the existence or non-existence of oil and gas, not just the oil industry. And because it’s,

you know, so much is involved they are one of the driving forces behind new technologies. So

they have access to wonderful data which in universities we don’t have access to. It’s a pity. I

can understand it, but it’s a pity that we don’t. It’s a pity that they can’t write it up and let us

know what’s going on. [1:05:28] Anyway, so I wrote off to my supervisors and there was a job

offered at geophysics here, working with Teddy Bullard, Sir Edward Bullard as he was, and a

chap called Jack Miller on dating rocks. I also had an offer of a lectureship at Durham – no, was

it Durham? – Newcastle, with Keith Runcorn’s group, and an informal approach by people at

Oxford. So I had several offers and I took the one at Bullard Labs because it was the most

interesting one I think.

[1:06:19]

What was the informal offer from Oxford, which group there?

Well, they wanted – it was quite a small department at the time I think – and they wanted

somebody to do geophysics at Oxford. And I wouldn’t have been suitable for that really because

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although I can understand geophysics I can’t, I don’t originate it. I mean they really wanted

somebody who’s not a geologist. You can’t be a geologist and a physicist in the sense of

originating things in both fields I don’t think. Because to originate anything in any field you

have to do a lot of work and understand the ins and outs of it and if you choose geology you may

understand what geophysicists are doing but you wouldn’t have had the time and energy, unless

you were really exceptional, to originate something in geophysics itself. You probably need to

have, well you need to understand more mathematics than I would have time to try to get into,

and so on. I mean it’s very nice to be offered a possibility of a place at Oxford, but as I say, I

took the stuff at Bullard. There’s a long story here which actually still reverberates through my

career. When I arrived at geophysics the project initially was to collect rocks, or get hold of

rocks I should say, from South America and Africa, date them and see if the dates on the

opposite sides of the Atlantic, that is the bits that would have been joined together, whether they

were actually of the same age. So this would be a verification of the fit between South America

and Africa at some time in the past. Now the chap who made the fit initially was a chap called

Jim Everett. [1:08:22] Do you want me to tell you all the background between this, because it’s

quite fascinating. Are you warm enough? Is that radiator on, do you know? Yes, there was an

extraordinary Tasmanian called Sam Carey, some people used to call him the Tasmanian Devil,

but he was convinced continental drift had taken place long before it was considered respectable

academically in the northern hemisphere. And he had a very good delivery, very much like a

Baptist minister, and when I was at Princeton he came through to give us what we call a, I can’t

remember if it’s called the Tea Club or the Coffee Club talk at about four o’clock in the

afternoon or five o’clock in the afternoon, intended to be one hour long where somebody would

talk about their research. And he came along, talked about his research and showed qualitatively

why he believed the continents had drifted and Harry Hess, who knew him, stopped the

proceedings at six o’clock or something like that and said look, why don’t we all go home for a

bit, have some supper and then we’ll reassemble at eight o’clock, we’ll continue, because it was

very interesting stuff, it was fascinating stuff actually and it was so well delivered by this

preacher almost, and we went on for another two hours and we realised that he was on to

something but nobody could put it all together in a way it’s now put together in plate tectonics.

But in addition to doing this he wanted to show how well the coast – not the coastlines – the

edges of the continents of South America and Africa fitted together. And you don’t do that at the

coastline because the coastline migrates very rapidly with a small change of sea level, you do it

at the edge of the continent where it goes down to the oceanic depths. And he had done this as

well as you could possibly do visually; he’d made a big globe, traced off the bathymetric

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contours, that is the contours at the edge of the continents going down into the oceanic depths,

selected one of them at about, I don’t know whether it was a thousand fathom or two thousand

fathom, I can’t remember. A thousand metres or two thousand metres, it doesn’t matter. But he

traced them off very carefully on to plastic caps that he could move around on this globe, he then

fitted the two contours of Africa and South America together as well as he could visually and

that was his starting point. It really was a very good fit. Now, this was published by, in a

symposium I think he organised, and it looked very convincing to most people and it was shown

to Harold Jeffreys who was in this college as the senior fellow at the time, or I don’t know if he

was senior fellow at that time, in the 1960s anyway, and Harold denied that there was a fit. He

just said, I deny there is a fit, you see. When Bullard heard about this he said we must do

something about this, so what he did was to get hold of a graduate student, Jim Everett, and said

look Jim, can you write a program that fits these two contours together, which he did. It was a

very elegant program because the computers were not very large at that time, they were some of

the first computers. EDSAC I think was the name of the computer he had that did this. And for

Jim and Bullard and myself, the question was not so much do they fit together but how good is

the fit. I mean you can have different degrees of fit. And so Jim’s program quantitatively

defined how good that fit was. [1:13:12] And I got involved with fitting things together partly

because I had this physical background and understood the mathematics involved and partly

because I’d had some experience with computers at Princeton because I had been a research

assistant in computing when I first got there for one year. And also because I was a geologist I

was the ideal person in a sense to say whether or not you could keep Iceland in a reconstruction,

whether it was plausible to keep Iceland in a reconstruction or whether you could get rid of it.

Should you keep Rockall or get rid of it. And I just adopted a purely pragmatic point of view

with a bit of geology saying well, obviously Iceland’s in the way, it wasn’t there when they fitted

together, so we’ll get rid of it. But Rockall looks as if it’s, if we get rid of Rockall we’re going

to have a big hole in this reconstruction so we’ll keep it. It was almost as basic as that. I mean it

was very, almost unscientific, but on the other hand essentially what we were trying to do was to

fit continents together so there were no gaps in the fit, because we I think intuitively felt at the

time that if the continents fitted together they fitted perfectly and they had just been changed,

their outlines had been changed as a result of separation and anything that, having fitted together

things as well as possible that lay on top of that and spoiled the fit, as it were, we thought there

must be a reason, geological reason for that and in the case of Iceland it’s obvious now, but we

didn’t know that at the time. So I was able to use my geological knowledge to fit together the

north Atlantic, whereas Jim Everett had fitted together the south Atlantic. So we fitted North

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America to Europe and Greenland and North America to – we had to rotate Spain, close up the

Bay of Biscay as Carey had said – and Africa and so on, so we got a, it wasn’t Pangaea quite, it

was the major continents around the Atlantic Ocean were fitted together. And the reason I was

involved with that was simply because we wanted the best fit possible on which to plot the data

we were going to get from dating these rocks from around the margins of Africa and South

America. So that’s basically how I got into this business which is again, another substantial part

of my research about what the world looked like in the past.

[1:15:43]

Before you go on with that, I’m going to pick up on lots of things.

Do you want to do that later or…

I’ll just do a couple of things now, then we’ll pause. One of the other offers that you had was

Keith Runcorn’s group. Can you say a little more about the nature of that offer or interview

or… This was the, of the three things, this was one of the three things that you might have done

when you returned.

Yeah. It was, well he ran the palaeomagnetics group at Newcastle, which along with Irving and

so on had really shown that continents drifted paleomagnetically and for some reason, which I

can’t – if you’re going to see Carol Williams, be interested to know what she feels about this –

but to my mind Irving and Runcorn and possibly Updike – I can’t remember who was in the

group, but certainly Runcorn and Irving were the two principle people in the group, and Blackett

perhaps to some extent, although I think he was more involved with the techniques and the field

rather than the implications of what they were finding. They had shown really, I won’t say

convincingly, but they had shown that it was highly likely the continents had drifted long before

this business of the fitting the continents together quantitatively had been undertaken, and I don’t

know why that was never sort of part of the mainstream. I know Jeffreys’ arguments against

palaeomagnetic evidence was that it wasn’t, the areas are too large that you couldn’t, because the

areas were so large you could not say that the continents had drifted. That was his, I think that

was his basic argument for all of his life as to why he didn’t believe continents had drifted based

on palaeomagnetic data, apart from the mechanism which is another story. So I presumably

would have gone to Newcastle and worked with Runcorn in his lab and with my physics

background and my geological background would have been able to help possibly understand

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and develop the data necessary to show that continents had drifted and just make that much more

precise. I don’t know. Because I don’t remember what he actually said to me in terms of what

he was offering.

Was this a telephone conversation or…

It was a letter.

Letter.

Oxford was only a casual remark by Professor Wager, nothing recorded to sort of… I think I

went to Oxford to give a talk about the reconstruction and he came up to me afterwards and said,

you know, would you be interested in something, and I declined that. Because I thought, you

know, it wasn’t quite for me really. Not that I knew what was quite for me, but anyway. I really

did enjoy working up at geophysics, it employed all my training and it was something that was

completely new and we didn’t know where it was going to go to actually.

[end of track 4]

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[Track 5]

Could you say some more about the year you spent at Princeton as a computer research

assistant?

Yes. When I arrived in Princeton I hadn’t got a scholarship or anything like that. I had a travel

grant, a Fulbright travel grant which took me over on the Queen Mary – the Queen Elizabeth.

And so I had to work as what is called a graduate assistant and there were several kinds of them,

the principle ones being teaching assistant or a research assistant and as I say, there were one or

two others. And I became a research assistant for one of the geophysicists in Princeton who had

some money from the NSF to interpret gravity anomalies and he wanted me to write a program

that would do this. I didn’t know anything about computing at the time but there was a large

computer out at, I think it’s Forrestal, which is a physics centre. They were working on trying to

understand plasmas, ultimately trying to understand what would happen in a fusion machine –

this is the 1960s and they still haven’t got there yet. But it was essential to do these calculations

and at night anybody else in the university could book in to use this computer. So I was able to

learn how to program, I suppose I taught myself mostly, and carry out the programs by working

at night. And I used to quite often work at three or four in the morning or something like that,

which I didn’t mind. And it was extremely clumsy way of doing things in the light of what we

do now, but you had business cards, IBM business cards, which had your program on it and you

had to do I think two or three passes through a machine that would turn it into machine language

that the machine could read and it would actually work fast. But of course, the program

wouldn’t work if you’d left out a particular hyphen or a comma or something like that, so you

were much, much more careful with writing a program and checking it out than you would be

nowadays, because nowadays you just write the program, if it doesn’t work it tells you what’s

wrong and you correct it and off it goes, almost instantaneously for small programs. But that’s

how I learnt how to compute so that’s another reason why I was very lucky, I had a little extra

arrow to my bow, as it were, when I came back to Britain. I wasn’t just a simple physicist who’d

done something or a simple geologist, I had a bit of programming experience, which meant I

could use Jim Everett’s program after a bit of training to help fit the northern continents together.

So I was very lucky in that way.

What was the programming language?

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[laughs] I can’t remember. I know it ended up as Assembler language. I think there was, yes I

remember an acronym – S-O-A-P, SOAP – which stood for something. It’s probably, AP might

be Assembler Program and I don’t know what S-O stands for. But it was very clumsy, very

primitive by what we do nowadays and what we’re likely to do in the future, but it enabled one

to do these things. And actually while I was at Princeton I did my thesis in four years, as I said,

three and a half years really because as at the last year I had also run out of money, but I got

another, a continuation of my research assistantship and I was able to use this huge IBM 7090, or

something like that, which seemed to occupy a large room all by itself and served by lots of

people. And that was the university mainframe computer, so that was a day when everyone

thought everything had to be done on a mainframe because the PC hadn’t been invented and that

sort of thing.

And so this is, you continued, you worked on this after your PhD?

Oh, I worked, at the end of three years I hadn’t finished my PhD but I talked to the chap I did the

first year’s work with and said, you know, is there any chance of getting a job for the fourth year.

And he said, well I can give you some money for part-time work and you can finish your thesis

around that. Because in the second and third year I was lucky, I got two fellowships based on

what I did in classes and so on. So I was able in the second and third years to, I had no monetary

worries at all. In fact I was able to save enough in those two years to fly back to England for one

Christmas actually. [05:27] It was an interesting experience in itself because they were all, I

think the first, I don’t know whether the first jets had come out, but I remember, we used to, we

flew first to Goose Bay in Labrador where we refuelled and then we flew to Reykjavik or

Keflavik or somewhere in Iceland where we refuelled again, so it took quite a long time to get

from A to B and it was nice because when you got to Iceland they served you, we had breakfast

in a café, not on the plane – or restaurant – and we had china, which I’d forgotten all about,

basically. And we had a tablecloth and things like that, which on the whole you didn’t tend to get

in American restaurants. Well, I suppose you got china but I’d forgotten about what it was like

to be essentially a European, compared with being an American.

What was your parents’ view of the marriage?

Sorry?

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Of your marriage in America. What was your parents’ view of that given that…

Ah, they…

They weren’t there, yeah.

Well, they were probably sad and unhappy a bit but they were, you know, when they met Julia

they were delighted to… they got on very well actually.

You’re saying ‘we’ about this flight home so I assume…

It’s a royal ‘we’. [laughs] Sorry.

[06:54]

Could you say more about Sam Carey’s talk in the department at Princeton on the qualitative fit.

Perhaps you could start with describing in more detail the model, if he had that with him, I don’t

know?

He didn’t have his model with him and he didn’t refer to it a great deal, possibly because – and I

can’t remember the sequence of events, I’d have to look it up in the literature – but possibly

because he was toying with another idea at the time, because he’s probably best known not just

for his – well, he isn’t well known for the fit of his continents so much as his ideas that the earth

had expanded and there are several other, several other people had suggested this at one time I

think. And it was partly due to the discoveries of the kinds of things that, Sirius in particular had

a very, a dwarf companion which was extremely dense and he had the idea somehow that when

he looked at the earth and saw all the seas and the continents he wondered whether you could

actually put all the continents together into one earth covering mass and the seas would

presumably be on top of that. But if you’re going to put them all together and get rid of the

ocean floor, what you would have to do would be to make the earth much smaller, or

significantly smaller than it is today because the oceans are about two-thirds of the earth’s

surface. And he came up with the idea that that’s what actually was the whole history of the

earth was related to expanding earth. And in fact, I mean I don’t know how true this is, but it’s a

good story, that he had people, graduate students, who actually looked for a mineral they called

Careyite in the field, which would have this mysterious property of being able to expand

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appropriately. I don’t know how true that is, but it was a story that used to circulate about him.

So I think he was, he was really baffled and well, he didn’t have a solution really. He was

baffled by things he called sphenochasms, which were things like the Bay of Biscay, which like

triangles that opened out, and also he was baffled – or not baffled – but he was very interested in

what he called oroclines, which were sharp bends in mountain ranges in particular. And it’s

these that gave him the ideas about, certainly continental motion and break up. I mean he

thought, I think one of his little mottoes might have been you can solve all these problems by

straightening out the oroclines. So you had something like the Carpathians going down into

Turkey eventually and they have this big bend in them and he thought well, they weren’t like

that originally, they were straight, so you had to change the geometry of the continents so they

became straight. Or there was this big, you know, the Aleutian Arc has this has an angular

relationship with the Rocky Mountains as you go towards, along the Cordillera towards Alaska

and he thought that could be solved just by straightening that out. But there was clearly

something in what he said and we didn’t know, well nobody knew what it was, but you could

dismiss it but it should have left a very nagging feeling in your mind because he was on to

something important.

And if not his globe then, or his model, what did he show in this talk in order to make the

argument?

I think he showed maps that appeared in his book, from his book which was called Continental

Drift: A Symposium or something like that. He wrote all his ideas up, I think published them in

colour in a book which was published by Hobart, the University of Tasmania, Hobart, and my

recollection is that he, well my guess, I can’t be absolutely sure but I think what he did was to

make slides of these and show them in his talk.

Do you remember your response to what he was saying?

My response was, I don’t quite believe it but on the other hand I don’t know what… there’s

something here interesting, don’t know what it is.

And what about other members of the department who were there?

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Well, we all felt it was fascinating and I don’t think anyone really came out and said it’s a lot of

nonsense, because we, at that time we had a very vague idea of what the earth was like and how

it behaved and that sort of thing and he obviously, you know, especially with, well, other people

had done this sort of thing before and there was a chap, I can’t remember if he’s Swiss or French,

but Argand had actually applied the same kind of logic that Carey used globally to the evolution

of the Mediterranean region. I mean he thought, Corsica and Sardinia had swung away from

France, the Bay of Biscay had opened because Spain had swung away from France, which was

essentially what Carey was saying, but he was saying look at it globally, not just locally. But it

was a very, you know, very interesting time. I mean after we had done all this fitting, Jim

Everett and I and so on, Bullard’s Lab, well, what used to be called Madingley Rise at the time,

had large blue charts, I don’t know if you know those blue hydrographic charts which were

digitised by Jim and me to get the reconstruction going. We used to have lunch there and, you

know, even people like Dan McKenzie and so on, we were all sitting round, puzzling about what

on earth was going on. We used to have a little idea and discuss it over lunch and realise it was

nonsense and we just didn’t cotton on to these things, even after the discovery by Fred Vine and

John Matthews of ocean floor spreading, we still didn’t understand how it all worked.

Do you remember any of the little ideas that you had sitting there?

No.

Theories about…

No. Baffled. No, I don’t remember.

What year did you come back to Britain to work with this chap?

’63.

[13:42]

’63. Now what I’d like to do is sort of to go quite slowly step by step through all of the work on

the fit of the continents, so what happens first when you come back in 1963 and you’re appointed

to work with Jack Miller, I think you said, on the dating of rocks either side of the Atlantic. So

what are you doing first, sort of practically day to day when you come back?

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I can’t remember, they’re bound to be mixed up in terms of what I did. But my first approach to

this problem was to find out what the countries were around this area. We knew some of them

like Brazil and so on, but there were lots of others and also of course in Africa as well. Then I

would try and find out some contact in one or other of these countries, usually either geological

survey and/or an oil company working in those countries, and then I would write a letter

explaining what I wanted, or what we wanted and why and what kind of rocks we wanted,

basically. We wanted dateable rocks so they would be metamorphic or igneous rocks and we

needed a certain size sample and after a few months, weeks, the samples started to come in. Not

everyone sent them, but there were probably, I’m not sure whether the British Colonial Survey or

whatever, the Overseas Survey still existed in places like Nigeria, which were important, and

Sierra Leone and so on, but irrespective of that, many of the people, specially in South America,

they sent us what we wanted. And the next job would have been to break these up, separate the

minerals out and date them. I did start a little bit of that, but I, well, as I say, to cut a long story

short again, I passed the project on to somebody else. But during that period I also got to know

Jim Everett and saw his fit of the continents, but I can’t remember when that happened, though I

do have the tapes in my department room, the original paper tapes, we were using paper tapes

rather than paper cards. I had the paper tapes which we used to make the fit of the North

Atlantic actually.

[16:27]

So what could you see of what Jim Everett had already done on the fitting of Africa and South

America, what could he at that stage show you, because this isn’t published work, but this is

something that he’d been doing. What could he at that point show you?

Well, the paper with the maps in it was published in 1965.

Yes, that’s with you and…

Yeah. So we had finished that work, written it up and it had been published by about two years

after the work was done. Now Jim’s work was probably done a little bit earlier, well it would

have been done a little bit earlier. What I don’t know, and you’d have to ask Jim about this,

what I don’t know is whether he had drawn large maps showing how these things fitted together

at that time. Because the actual, the way we made the maps was quite primitive in a way

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because I think we were able to digitise the submarine contour and the coastline, but because

these were maps of the earth and you were displaying a spherical shape on to a flat piece of

paper, you had to find some way of doing the projection correctly not only for something like

Africa which we might have fixed and brought South America in, but you had to, if South

America was brought in to fit against Africa without any distortion of the actual geometrical

relationships, you had to have a program that rotated things as well, and Jim wrote that. And in

fact to make the map, what we did was to put in what we call the grid crossing points, like every

ten degrees we’d put a, like say along the equator we’d have zero zero, which is zero longitude

and zero latitude, and then we’d go – or perhaps it was the other way round – we would have

zero, zero, zero – ten zeros – we’d have all these crossing points which were just crosses on the

map. So to draw the map, we didn’t actually draw the map by – can I borrow this? We didn’t

draw the map, we didn’t have the gridlines, the geographic gridlines like this, what we had were

a series of crosses representing the crossing of latitude and longitude lines and then by eye and

using drafting curves and so on, we would construct the map manually. And having constructed

that geographic grid we would by eye take the numerical values of the coastlines and the

bathymetry and draw those in manually as well. So it wasn’t drawn by computer in a sense, it

was drawn mostly by hand using computer generated crossing points and visually putting in the

latitude and longitude points of coastlines and the bathymetry.

And to clarify for the listener, bathymetry is because you were matching the continental edge…

That’s right.

…which I think from the paper you took to be 500 fathoms on the slope?

Yeah, Jim tried two values of the edge of the continent and he tried not just two, three or four

actually, and he showed that the minimum was the closest to a particular value and that was a

value that I used to fit the northern continents. I didn’t try the whole series of things. The

northern continents are much messier, basically, specially trying to fit Greenland to Labrador,

things like that. But it was a huge amount of manual labour in making those maps.

Where was that done?

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At Bullard Labs. We had a big table and spread out, we probably drew them on what’s called

Permatrace, which is a semi-transparent, can be opaque, not completely transparent, but I think

it’s a semi-transparent, well like a plastic film almost. Can’t think of anything… don’t think we

use it very much today. But it was quite strong and it was the standard drafting material and

used by engineers for making blueprints and things like that. And it had to be transparent to

some extent, a greater or lesser extent, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to make blueprint

or dyelines from it. So we made this map, get it just right, and then we would print the same size

dyelines off it, big ones.

What are dyelines?

Sorry, they’re like blueprints. They’re not quite the same as blueprints, but it’s a way of printing

on paper from a diagram that’s transparent. I don’t know how it works. It’s not quite the same

as a dyeline, because a dyeline usually has a background which is dark and the actual lines are

white, but the prints we had, the lines were black or dark blue, but they were called dyelines.

You used to take them up to a shop on Regent Street I think, where they had a big machine that

could do this. It was a standard engineering method of printing things.

[22:14]

Why had Jim Everett embarked on this construction of a computer program to match the

southern…

It really, well it was Teddy – it’s a long story – but essentially Harold Jeffreys saw Carey’s

reconstructions of the continents, of South America and Africa and just thought they didn’t

work. Don’t know why. But Bullard having heard Jeffreys’s comments and using his own eyes

saw that the fit was actually very good, he thought, given all the uncertainties, and probably

couldn’t be bettered visually. I mean Bullard was a great believer actually in the human eye as a

good judge of pattern recognition and pattern fitting. When the ocean floor anomalies became

known through Vine and Matthews’s work, he I think more or less said that if it doesn’t fit by

eye it’s not going to fit. So he realised it was a very good fit but he also realised that it would be

a really, a significant advance to have a quantitative fit, and so he asked Jim if he could write a

program that would do this and Jim’s a very good physicist and he wrote this program and that’s

how the maps were produced.

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[23:51]

And for the, obviously there’s a description of the operation of this program in the paper, but I

wondered whether you could, for the non-scientific audience, say how a computer program is

able to produce a quantitative fit between two continental edges.

Well, the first thing you do is to look at the curves that are the edges of the continents, edge of

South America and edge of Africa, those curves would be represented by points along, well it’s

like a dot-to-dot reconstruction. And what you do, what you get the computer to do is to

essentially move the two lines together by turning them about a point that’s on the earth, you can

move any two lines together by doing this, and it then measures the misfit, that is the difference

in longitude actually, the difference in the east-west direction, between the corresponding points

on those curves. So if you had a place where there’s a big overlap, the difference in the points

on the same latitude line, which is what you’re… you use the latitude line as, you use the

position of those points on a latitude line or the interpolator’s position of those points on the

latitude line, and the difference between those points, the longitude points on those two curves is

a term you use in the misfit. So if you have a big gap there’s a large difference along a latitude

line of the two points, if it’s a perfect fit there’s no difference at all. So what you do is to go,

choose a particular point about which you turn these curves and then you find the actual amount

of turning minimises the gaps and overlaps for that particular point that you’re turning them

about. And then you go to another point in the globe – the computer does this of course – do the

same thing again and you build a mesh almost, it wasn’t a mesh in this particular case, but it’s

equivalent to a mesh, of the values of the misfits for different rotations that you make on the

globe. And the one which is least is the one that you select as the best fit.

So it’s like a kind of a trial and error where the computer does all of the repetitive turning and

testing?

Exactly. As I say, it wasn’t… because computers were rather slow and those days Jim had a

very good program that would actually sort of track along, well it would make its own track and

find a minimum of its own, rather than looking at a whole grid it would somehow find its way

into the minimum. And what we hoped and Jim hoped, and generally it was true, that you would

find the deepest minimum, because obviously when you’re fitting curves that don’t really match

together but did match in the past, they’re slightly different, there will be another, you might find

two points, one of which gives the best fit, but another point might give you a very similar fit or

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it might in some cases give you a better fit. But we didn’t examine all that possible space, fitting

space if you like, at the time, but I think the eye, the fit by the eye was very good and the fit that

Jim made was very similar to that made by eye, for South America and Africa.

[27:54]

And so when you first met Jim, were you helping him to turn what he’d already done with the

computer for the southern continents into the maps?

No. He, I’m pretty sure he must have made a map himself originally. I can’t see how else he

could have shown me what he did and I’ve never read his thesis, I probably should, but basically

I think Teddy said, I think he thought – I don’t know whether I suggested it or Jim suggested it

or Teddy suggested it – but we all felt we should do something on the North Atlantic continents

as well and that’s what, as I say, I think I did. It’s very interesting, when I met Jim, I saw him, as

I say, a few years ago in Perth, and we were trying to recollect how it had happened, the sort of

questions you’re asking now, and we both realised we had faulty memories. Because Jim

thought he’d done the North Atlantic and I said no, I did it because I have the tapes at home that

show this, and then there was an equivalent in my case where I couldn’t remember what had

happened. Oh, he said yes, don’t you remember, you used to come in at night, at midnight

sometimes, and run this program, and I had no recollection of that at all. So it was very

interesting writing this up to realise some, what, thirty or forty years after the event, just how our

memories were playing tricks with us actually.

So it seems as if you had operated the program.

I did operate the program eventually, but I don’t remember sitting down with Jim and doing it

with him while he taught me how to do these things. It’s just something I’d forgotten about

completely. And he didn’t know or remember that I had actually fitted the northern continents

together.

[29:53]

How did you go, if we can now take as slowly as possible, step by step including details that

might seem rather boring to you, but I’d like to know sort of precisely day to day, because

presumably this took quite a long time, how you practically went about doing what Jim had done

for the southern continents, but doing it for the more complicated Europe, Greenland…

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North America.

North America.

Well, I don’t know if Jim did this, but what I did was to get a large sheet of tracing paper and

trace off the edges of the continents in those regions and visually with another piece of tracing

paper try to make a visual fit, more or less the way Carey had done. And in, well certainly up in

the polar regions it’s much easier because you can regard the earth as flat to a good

approximation over a large area there because it’s quite close, you’re not moving things a great

deal if you’ve got reasonable maps. Though it was a little bit tricky I think in that case as I

recollect, again I can’t be sure, but I was thinking it was a bit tricky because the maps, most of

the maps, or most of the world was on a Mercator projection which you can’t do this sort of

thing with and there may well have been some polar maps, North Pole and South Pole, which I

must have used because otherwise I don’t see how I could have done it. When you can’t show

the North Pole on a Mercator map anyway so there must have been a different map for that

region. But I tried to do what I thought was a visual fit. And that’s where I suggested getting rid

of this and keeping that and that sort of thing. And then I would computerise it by reading off the

co-ordinates of the points on these curves and then using Jim’s program would fit two curves

that seemed to have a reasonable fit, do exactly what he did, look around the area of the places

where you could rotate the earth and get a good fit, or rotate the curves rather, and get a good fit.

And then it was an iterative process, I kept on, just kept on doing that until I had what seemed to

be a visually good fit that I could justify also by computer output.

How did you move from the tracing paper when you’re joining visually to the computer? I mean

exactly how did you do it?

Well, you have a curve, so a continuous curve like a line on a piece of paper with wiggles in it,

and then you put little points on the lines. If the line’s fairly straight you probably wouldn’t put

a lot of points on it, but where it goes round a curve you try to simulate the curve as well as you

can by putting in the appropriate density of points that you pick so that the curve – you know,

it’s like, again, like a dot-to-dot thing. If you have an animal’s nose and you’re trying to draw an

animal on a dot-to-dot, you have to have a fair number of points around its nose, whereas the jaw

would be fairly straight. So there was, I think, what I can’t be sure of is whether we tried to have

as even distribution of points along the line as possible or whether we put more, I think we put a

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higher density of points in places where there was a curve to bring it out properly. But in other

cases sometimes, again, it’s not really scientific, or very scientific, we could see visually – and

Jim did this I think with the South Atlantic, it’s more obvious there – there’s something like the

Walvis Ridge comes off Africa, sticks out into the Atlantic and it just wasn’t, well, we felt that

was, or he felt that was a younger thing and I think he truncated the ridge so it wouldn’t appear

in that curve. There was a lot of fudging really. We wanted to get as good a fit as possible and

obviously, by cutting out these funny areas the fit was improved and we didn’t know at the time

that it was actually younger than the time the continents broke up, which confirmed the fact that

it was anomalous, but it just seemed intuitively I suppose it wasn’t, it can’t have been there when

the continents were fitted together. So there were bits of, you know short stretches where the

bathymetry was completely ignored and other places where it was put in.

[34:39]

What did you choose to ignore in terms of the northern fitting and why?

Well, I ignored Iceland because when you made a fit of the northern continents using Iceland it

was a very poor fit, you couldn’t make a good fit of it. And I think actually Carey kept it in, as I

recollect, I’ll have to look at his work again. But it made much more sense to remove it and

there was every reason to remove it because there was no sign of any old rocks in Iceland, they

were all volcanic, it’s erupting today at quite a phenomenal rate. I don’t know whether dates had

been obtained for Iceland at that time, but it just seemed highly plausible that you could remove

Iceland as something that had happened or been created after the continents separated. There

were also bits in the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland – is it – yeah, Canada and

western Greenland, which, where the bathymetry is difficult to digitise because the Davis Strait

has a ridge going across it, this is a high area, a submarine high area going across it, which if you

wanted to make a fit you had to remove. And that again is something which we now know is

younger than the time the continents broke up, but it was an arbitrary decision at the time which

was taken to make the fit as good as possible. And we had very little evidence in the case of the

Davis Strait I think because it’s submarine, I don’t think there was much known about the

geology of it at the time, but I think it did connect up with igneous rocks of quite a young age on

Greenland certainly, so again, it was plausible. Again, Rockall Bank, that does have volcanics

on it, you could say well why didn’t you get rid of that entirely, but it seemed obvious when you

started looking at the geometry that it was an essential part of the jigsaw puzzle, if you like. And

I think it, is it Porcupine Bank or Porcupine… yeah, there’s a Porcupine Bank and I think there’s

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the Porcupine Bight and it’s not a big thing in the Atlantic and I don’t think we did much with it,

but it looked as if it was one of these pieces where the bight was created by moving Porcupine

Bank away from whatever it joins on to. But we didn’t get into those details. And to fit the

whole lot together, that is the northern continents and the southern continents, it was obvious that

we had to close up the Bay of Biscay, so that was another thing we did. But we didn’t go on to

do the whole thing, that is reconstruct Gondwana, or extend our fit of the northern continents,

certainly of Europe, we didn’t go into Asia or anything like that.

[37:55]

Having done your dot-to-dot, as you explained, where it’s more curved you’ve got more dots and

so on, how exactly did you then take those and input them into the computer, and it may be

important to say what the computer at this time consisted of, in order to say how you interacted

with it.

Well, you, having got the dots, you read those off, the latitude and longitude values off perhaps

using dividers or something like that to do interpolation. So they were pretty crude, I think we

read them off to a tenth of a degree or something like that, and then we made a paper tape which

had a list of the points on those curves in order and a list of the second curve in order and that

was the data for the program, and then we chose a point on the earth’s surface about which we’d

move one of those curves and I think the program determined the angle, yes it must have done

actually.

How did you choose the point of rotation?

Just visually. You know, we’d say if you turn it about this point it’s going to get a reasonable fit,

and then we just let the computer get on with it, basically.

So you’d pick a place near to where you think it probably is and the computer makes the final

adjustment by trial and error to see where it actually is.

Yes. It walks around that point, basically, and comes up with some numbers and the one that’s

the best fit is the one which has the minimum overlap, minimum gap. I mean Jim had actually

the same experience and I can’t remember whether he removed the Niger Delta, but I think he

did remove the Niger Delta, because it was obvious to him that it just overlapped on to South

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America and it probably wasn’t there when the continents were joined together, but we didn’t

know anything about the timing of that and I think he probably just joined it, removed it, as he

did with the Walvis Ridge and one or two other things like that and subsequently he was proved

correct. Well, I think people had said before, but that’s how it was treated.

[40:20]

And for those who wouldn’t know, how at this time did you make a paper tape? You said you’d

made a paper tape with the numbers on.

Yes. Ah, you had a tape which was about an inch or half an inch, well, half a centimetre, I mean

a centimetre – whatever – wide, completely blank, no holes in it, and then you fed this through

what is essentially a typewriter and you pressed a key and that would then automatically put in

the appropriate number of holes in their correct position, so it represents say the figure nine.

And say it was ninety-one you were putting in, you’d press one and you’d get another series of

holes, different ones this time, so you’d have two series of holes next to one another representing

ninety-one, and then you’d put in ninety-one point four and so on and then you’d have to have

some space symbol, it wouldn’t have been a blank tape because it wouldn’t make sense. There

would be a code for a blank tape, it might be five holes – I’m just guessing, I don’t know, don’t

remember – and then you put in the next number. And that gives you a tape which has holes in it

and each row of holes corresponds to a particular letter or number or symbol which the computer

can read with a card reader, with, yes, to read that into the machine, what you did was to feed the

tape through a tape reader which was essentially a very fast, it moved the tape in very quickly, it

had, there was a light involved and I can’t remember… I think the light would go through a hole

in a row and if there were two holes in that row, go through those two holes, and that would be

translated somehow into code in the machine. And you get an idea of how slow things were

then, the computer, the people in the computer lab were very good engineers and I think we

used, I think they used valves at times rather than transistors, and relays and you could hear the

program working its way through your data and it would go, rrrhhh, and whirrr, and you knew

exactly where you were in the program. And sometimes it didn’t work and you knew exactly

where it had crashed from the noise that you could hear from the transistors and relays, well, I

say valves and relays. That was the old EDSAC machine and then of course you can do this in a

fraction of a second almost, no, a few seconds on a PC these days.

So where did you make the paper tape?

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In the computer lab.

So you made it and then fed it in in the same place.

Yes.

And when did you have to use the computer, could you go whenever you wanted?

We had a ration of time I think, all the scientific departments had a certain amount of time

available and of course Bullard being head of geophysics would have arranged for that

somehow. I don’t know how. I can’t remember actually how we queued up. I know there was a

queue at times, but I just, I cannot remember how the scheduling was done actually.

[43:46]

And what was the output from, other than the noises which helped you, what was the output from

the computer?

It was a series of, it was a printout on computer paper which you controlled, I mean you put in

the headings and asked the program to put out what you wanted. I mean the first thing you’d

probably print out would be the time, the date and who you are and everything else. Or perhaps

that was all done automatically, and then underneath that you’d put, you’d output your data, in

this program we output the data, wasn’t a lot, and then below that we’d have a list of all the

points we’d used to turn things, the angles, and the misfit. And I presume the last one was the

smallest and the best fit. I may actually have some output, I’m not sure. I know I’ve got the

tapes and I’ve got the program, but I don’t know if I’ve got output.

So you’ve still got as a sort of personal archive the tape that went in?

Yes.

And when you say you’ve got the program, is that a…

It’s another tape. Oh, I may have a printout of it actually. But I think the printout may not be the

original program because computing being what it was, the computer lab got rid of the old

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program language and this program I have I think is written in what’s called Titan Autocode,

which was run on the new computer that was called Titan rather than EDSAC. So that was what

the output was and it was several years later that we were able to put that out as a map showing

the actual misfit. Because now you can actually, in theory, and I don’t think I’ve got a program

that does this, but in theory you could just put in your data and come out with the best map. I

think I’d still do it in two steps, that is find the best fit, you know the latitude, longitude and

angle you have to rotate things through, put that into another program that will make you a map.

But actually in this case you had to do that step by hand?

Yes.

Which you described.

Yes.

[46:13]

What was the reaction of other members of staff, research students at Madingley Rise, seeing

you and perhaps you and Jim doing this work?

Well, I think they were intrigued by it again, you know. We didn’t, we believed it showed there

was a very good fit. What we didn’t know was what age it was and having been influenced

again by Harold Jeffreys’s book when he talks about early convection, or convection in the early

earth, you could make a case which is rather superficial really even at the time, because the

geology didn’t quite support this, but you could and probably mentally did make a case that this

was a fit when the continents were joined together way back in the early history of the earth, not

that they were joined together less than 200 million years ago, which is a twentieth of the age of

the earth. But, you know, it was just another intriguing piece of evidence at that time.

[47:15]

And to what extent was Teddy Bullard involved in this work?

Well, he was the overall supervisor, he conceived the original project in the sense that he realised

that the thing to do was to quantify this work and realised it could be done, I suppose he

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probably thought it could be done fairly straightforwardly using the computer that was available,

but I don’t think he actually, I think Jim said it, he didn’t take any part in actually running the

program or writing the program or producing the results, but he conceived the original idea. So,

you know, we all contributed in some way to this thing, but without Teddy’s original idea it

wouldn’t have been done and without Jim’s initiative and well, expertise and abilities it wouldn’t

have been done and I suppose without my background there’s a part of it wouldn’t have been

done. So we were all involved but I always think that Jim did the real work actually.

Because?

Well, he wrote the program really, you couldn’t have done it… He showed how, he found out

how you could do this thing on a computer which meant, you know, essentially answering the

sort of questions that you’ve just asked, how do you get this data into a machine and what is

going to be your measure of the best fit, what do you mean by the best fit and how do you

actually get a computer to make that for you, and nobody had done that before. So I always

think he, you know, all three of us contributed to this piece of work but I think Jim’s was

probably the most important, though you could argue that Teddy’s was because he thought of the

idea in the first place.

[49:14]

When you were doing the work on the northern part of this, what input did your geological

training have at this stage to that process, when you were for example identifying the continental

edge or deciding on omissions and inclusions? To what extent at this stage anyway, I realise

there’s explanation later, was it important that you were a geologist?

Well, as I say, you couldn’t make a good fit without removing some things and adding some

things and the things that one added, or kept in rather, and the things one removed, you needed a

geological knowledge to do that. I mean the geological knowledge was rather patchy at the time,

but on the other hand none of it was implausible and some of it was, you know, it was all

plausible and you wouldn’t know that unless you had had a geological training. I think that

would be fair to say.

In order to know what it was you were excluding?

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Yes. You weren’t throwing out huge lumps of continental crust, for example, which wouldn’t

make sense to throw them out. You were throwing out things that very plausibly were quite

young and not part of the continent. And keeping in things that were plausibly, pieces of

continent that in the case of Rockall had actually been covered up by younger rocks, but they

were bits, underneath those younger rocks there were bits of continent. You couldn’t see them

but it was plausible to make them.

[50:51]

You’ve described Teddy as you saw him as an undergraduate when he was giving the lecture

course. What did you learn about him professionally or personally through this work, through

coming back to Madingley Rise and working there on this? I suppose, what did you learn of his

character from that experience?

Good question. Well, he was almost avuncular in a way. He was, also he was very interested, I

mean he was fascinated by science and was always talking to people at teatime and coffee time

in badinage. We had some of the best discussions I know of at Madingley Rise at that time,

largely through his leadership. He would sit down with people and say, you know, what are you

doing and they’d tell him. And he’d say, well that’s interesting, is that related to this, or

something like that. He wasn’t so serious as some scientists are, he had a sense of fun and

practical joking actually. But he didn’t like authority, he liked to be his own man and he just…

I remember, I think he said this, I think I quoted him on saying this anyway, he said look, I don’t

mind when you work or how you work as long as you bring home the bacon. And that’s, you

know, as long as something comes out of it, that’s what’s interesting really. So he was very, he

didn’t keep tabs on you when you came in or when you left, what he kept tabs on is what you

were doing and how you did it. And in other words it was a very freewheeling sort of

department at the time.

What do you remember of the practical joking which you’ve just mentioned?

Well, it’s not, well, I do remember, it’s hardly, well it’s almost a practical joke. He, at that time

Madingley Rise had quite a few students. It was becoming better known I think in the world and

we were crowded, we needed more space and Teddy always wanted a new building I think, and I

don’t know whether he wrote to the university authorities asking for a new building and I don’t

know the ins and outs of how you did this, but I do remember he did invite members of the

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general board to come to Madingley Rise to see how crowded it was. I don’t know whether I

was actually there at that meeting, I was certainly in the department at the time, but what he did,

he said look, the general board’s coming up to see how we are, how crowded we are – I’m

putting words into his mouth – but bring your friends along, make sure you come along and

bring your friends if you want to. And so the place was absolutely crammed and Teddy said,

before they came along, he said, look, make sure you bump into some of these people when

they’re drinking their tea. [laughs] Just to give them a recollection when they thought about

Madingley Rise that it was really a very busy place, crowded out. I mean that’s the sort of thing

he would do. And I can remember he was rather unkind sometimes, I remember once a chap

from one of the London colleges came up to talk to him about a theory he had about how the

earth worked and it, I can’t remember his name, it might have been Dollar or something like that,

but even to somebody just starting in research, as it were, it was clearly nonsensical and I think

Teddy essentially, you could hear – he spoke quite loudly when this chap was there – and you

could quite clearly see he was leading him on all the time and all of us were sort of going, huh,

behind our cups of tea or whatever. It wasn’t very nice really, but on the other hand it sort of

appealed to Teddy’s sense of humour. And there were other things he did and I can’t remember

them but I think if you talk to anybody else who knew him well he would say these. I mean one

of the things, the general board, or I think the general board, asked various research schools or

departments, what do you do, and so Teddy said, well basically, we go out to the Red Sea, which

is true, and we have a rowing boat, I think, or boat, which is true, and we let off dynamite.

[laughs] Well, I mean it was a pretty bald statement, I mean I think he realised the effect that

such a statement would have in the administration, the schools, and they were horrified of

course. He just liked to tease people. And he, I don’t think he had any respect for people who

he thought were not very good. But that’s true of many people.

What makes you say that? Were there things that you…

Well, this chap who came up and talked about things. It obviously was a lot of nonsense really,

so Teddy just sort of listened to him but made his own comments which put him in a rather

unfavourable light. Anyway, how are we doing?

[end of track 5]

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[Track 6]

Could you tell me about the division of labour, if you like, for the writing of the paper that comes

out in 1965 on the fit of the continents work?

My impression is that the overall structure and arguments and presentation was probably that of

Teddy Bullard’s. He was a very good writer of science and Jim and I would not have had the

experience. It was almost my first paper and we would not have had the experience of putting

together a scientific paper, although I don’t know what Jim’s… Jim probably described the

program, with a bit of help from me, and then we described the maps and how they’d been done,

but the overall framework I think would have been provided by Teddy.

And what decisions were made about the presentation of the maps in this paper?

In what sense?

Well, I seem to remember there’s a number of sort of black and white ones and then there’s

colour plates…

Yeah, three colour plates.

Yeah, with the colour, and I wondered whether you made any particular decisions about how to

present this to make it sort of more in order to maximise the convincingness, if you like, of the

fit?

The medium is the message.

Yes.

It’s funny you should ask that because I do remember very clearly halfway – well we presented

the result at a Royal Society meeting on continental drift and that was published as one of many

papers in the Philosophical Transactions volume and before that, or sorry, during that meeting, I

don’t know who presented it and I don’t know what the nature was of the presentation. It would

have been slides, but whether they were coloured up I don’t know. I have absolutely no

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recollection of that actually, but I do remember one day when I came into Madingley Rise and

Teddy wanted to see me and he said, ‘Well Smith, I want you to go down to the Royal Society

and negotiate these maps to be printed in colour’. So I had to do that. I can’t remember

anything about the negotiations, but we obviously were successful and I’m very glad we did

print them in colour actually because they are so much more convincing, and interesting actually,

because you can see at a glance where things, where there are gaps and where there are overlaps.

Well, I think it was a very good decision by Teddy to try and do that. I don’t know how he got

the money for it, but it obviously did cost a bit.

Did you go to the symposium?

Yes, I did and I can’t remember a thing about it. It’s very bizarre when I think back, a complete

blank actually.

[03:08]

And could you then tell me about the reception of the paper, so – and this could include the sorts

of things that colleagues close to you, perhaps even in the department, might have said to you

about this work once it had been published - but also any wider reception scientifically or even a

kind of popular response to it.

It’s very strange for me to say this, but I can’t remember very much about it at all actually. I

mean I don’t remember people coming up to me and saying, oh that was a terrific piece of work,

or you could have done this better, or whatever they might say. I just cannot recollect any

comments at all actually. I think geologists were quite, well, those who weren’t, those who were

friends as it were, thought it was a good piece of work partly because I think it was quantitative

and geologists are not used to having quantitative bits of information. In fact, you could say it

was a geophysical paper rather than a geological paper, though it did require geology as well as

geophysics to do it.

And it has a discussion towards the end, which I suspect that you might have been behind and

it’s the sort of geological argument for the fit not being due to chance.

Ah, I don’t recollect… You’ve obviously been doing some homework. I haven’t looked at the

discussion, I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at it actually, I’m sorry to say. Once I’ve done

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something I tend to sort of move on. So I’m sorry to be so… my memory’s gone. I mean I can’t

even be sure that I went to the symposium meeting, but I think I must have done, but I cannot

recollect it actually.

And towards the end of the paper there’s a little statement which is that, it reads: ‘Some of the

most important data will come from detailed comparative geological studies across the gap’ and

it says that ‘for such studies the authors can supply dyeline prints of figures five, seven and

eight’.

Yes.

I wondered whether that happened, whether there were requests for that and the extent to which

research spread out from that, the use of these maps.

Good question. I have no recollection of anyone asking for a dyeline, though I might have given

dyelines to people. No, I cannot recollect that being the case actually. I think what’s, looking

back over the years, its importance or significance perhaps has grown in time, whereas at the

time it was, you know, one among many things that was going on which was a new approach but

wasn’t so, you know, it wasn’t like plate tectonics for example, in the sense of it being obvious

that something was happening which was very important and we had done a good job of making

the fit, you know, we had a good fit but we didn’t know what it meant, whereas in the plate

tectonics thing people knew or interpreted things like earthquakes in particular in a way that

made a lot more things seem evident than they would have done otherwise. So I don’t recollect

that, no.

Because you said that Teddy’s plan was to make this sort of qualitative fit more convincing by

having a quantitative version of that. I wonder to what extent that plan worked, you know, was it

more, did it become then more convincing?

Yes, I think it did. I think there’s no question it did become more convincing, but again, its

meaning was not clear. I mean obviously it fitted but how, you know, we just didn’t know how

to think about the earth properly at that time.

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[07:35]

Was there any response that you yourself noted from Harold Jeffreys to this…

No.

…now enhanced fit, no?

No. I don’t know if Teddy showed the fit to Harold. I don’t know actually. That’s an

interesting question. I wasn’t in the college at the time. I was elected a fellow in 1970 I think it

was, some years after I’d been back, I’d done this work and moved on to other things actually.

But it’s true, what was really funny was, I’d started doing a lot more global stuff, global maps at

about that time, and the British Antarctic Survey, or was it the Falkland Islands Dependency

Survey at the time? I can’t remember, but one of those, it was essentially our people in the

Antarctic, they saw some maps I did with Jim Briden some time later – I can tell you about those

because they were quite important apparently at the time – but they used some of the maps we

made of the Antarctic at different times, put them on a series of postage stamps, which is

rather… And this is when I was a Fellow here and there was I doing this and there was Harold

Jeffreys saying it couldn’t happen. We didn’t talk about it though. I didn’t know how to talk

about it with him really. But it was strange to be in the same college as Harold.

[09:17]

What then happened after, as you say, the fit of the continents work was one of the things that

was going on, and so once this paper had been submitted and the symposium had happened,

what are you then working on? So we’re in the sort of mid sixties now and you’re at Madingley

Rise.

Well, one thing that happened was I got a job in the Department of Geology, as it was then,

because there were three departments at the time: Mineralogy and Petrology, Geodesy and

Geophysics which is Madingley Rise, and Geology. Three small departments, basically. And an

advertisement came up in the University Reporter which advertised a demonstratorship, which at

that time was essentially assistant lecturer. I think it was a three plus two position, ie three years

initially and if you looked as if you were going to carry on doing things that were useful you got

another two years and it was a five-year term. And then after that you either got upgraded, and

not everyone did, or you found a job elsewhere. Well this university demonstratorship came up

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and people kept – I knew people in the department down here because I knew Brian Harland and

we had talked to one another and one or two other people I knew down here, and a chap called

Bulman who was head of the department – people said to me you should apply for this, Smith.

So I said why, because I believe it’s true to say that the salaries were identical and I’d have more

work down here because I’d be teaching. On the other hand I did like teaching or I decided I

would apply and did apply, but only after talking to Teddy Bullard about it and he said, I said

why should I apply for this job, what’s the advantage, and he said well, he said, ‘Smith’ he said,

‘When it’s time for you to leave you can say you’ve been on the university staff and that counts

for something’, whereas being a mere research assistant didn’t for some reason. And so I

applied and didn’t hear anything about the job for a long time actually, it just shows you how

things were done in those days. I was in the downtown site in the Sedgwick Museum on the

ground floor waiting to see Brian Harland about something – oh, it might have been about the

timescale actually, because he got me involved with that – and Brian, I said to Brian, no he was

in his office seeing somebody else at the time, and I was looking at an exhibit on the ground

floor which at that time was a museum and Professor Bulman turned up and he had a rather high

pitched voice, he said, you know – it was quite funny – he said, ‘Are you still interested in what

we were talking about?’ and I thought, what on earth were we talking about, because I had seen

him once or twice, and I just couldn’t bring myself to say, you know, what were we talking

about. And it occurred to me he was asking me about was I still interested in this

demonstratorship. So rather than say, I’m not sure what we were talking about, I said yes. And

he just said, ‘Oh good’ and walked away and the following Monday I got an offer of a

demonstratorship. Had no interview, didn’t have to go round talking to people about what my

research was and where it was going, as one does today, and that’s how I got my job in the

Department of Geology. And of course, luckily for me Bullard’s comment did apply in the sense

that I was on the university staff but I didn’t have to leave because after finishing my

demonstratorship I got upgraded to a lectureship.

[13:54]

Before we start on the Department of Geology could you just say when you came back to

England in 1963, where did you live, so I can get a sense of what’s happening in your personal

life. You’d been married in America, you’d come back to England, how did you set yourself up

privately?

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We had a flat in Arbury Road, just on the edge of the Arbury Estate. And then shortly after that,

once we settled, got our finances organised, we bought a house on Eachard Road, which is quite

close to Madingley Rise, which is why we decided to buy there. Like many people, today as

well as then, our parents helped, or my parents helped with the purchase of the house. I don’t

think it was a lot of money but it was enough to get us the house that we wanted. It was sort of

semi-detached 1930s house, a house I don’t like actually, but it’s all we could afford, and we

lived in that for several years. And then, yes, I can’t remember the timing of it, some years after

that we bought a house in Newnham, a new house, a lovely new house actually. Not quite right,

but not bad, and that’s where we stayed until my wife became ill.

And I wonder if we need the timing of children?

Yes. We have one daughter, or I have one daughter I suppose. She’s now forty-one, which

would make – she was born in 1968. No, sorry, 1969. 1968 both of us were in Prague when the

Russians invaded, so ’69 that would be – is that right? Yes, ’69, that would be six years after we

had left America.

And the date of this appointment as demonstrator in the School of Geology, this was nineteen

sixty…

Don’t remember.

After ’65 anyway?

Presumably. Though it could be during ’65 because that’s the date of publication of the paper. I

don’t know.

[16:46]

What did your wife do?

Well, when we, before we left America she was an editor at Princeton University Press and I

think she was in line to become, I know she was quite young, but the stories used to run around

was that she was being groomed to take over as managing editor one day, but I took her away

from all that and she came here, worked freelance as an editor for Cambridge University Press

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and was rather horrified to find the differences in the way editors are regarded in the States and

here. I mean as an editor in the States I think she felt more or less equal to the author and could

talk to him as an equal and make suggestions, quite substantial suggestions which the authors

would listen to and take note of, whereas here she was much a junior position, editor was

somebody who did a job for the author rather than being treated equally. Now that might be a

function of age because I know some editors in Britain are on the same terms as editors in

America, but it was quite a difference. She was just, you know, used to being listened to and

wasn’t listened to to the same extent as she was in the States. So she did some editing, she did

some writing, wrote stories and started a novel, that sort of thing really. Got to know – I think

she found Cambridge difficult as an American, specially a young American woman, I mean an

example of which is not so much Cambridge as the university was difficult because she wanted

to read books in the university library and she couldn’t get a ticket, they would not let her have a

ticket and if she wanted a book I would have to get it out for her, whereas in Princeton she could

go to the library, get whatever she wants, even though she wasn’t involved in the university she

could do these things. And that was also a rather, a difference basically, which I don’t think she

liked at all.

Why did you say that she found it particularly difficult as a young American woman?

Well, if you’re used to essentially being listened to and treated as an equal professionally with

other people and you have access to the libraries which you want and so on and you suddenly

come to a place which doesn’t give you these things, I think that makes life difficult for you.

Because there’s no obvious reason for it. I mean it’s all changed now. I think it has. I’m not

sure about the university library and so on, but I presume people like her would be easily able to

get a reader’s ticket nowadays, especially if they’re married to faculty and so on, but it wasn’t

the case then.

Did being female make more of a difference here than it did in America?

I think so, because I think American women on the whole were treated better at that time than

they were in Britain. You can see that in a way, you know, we’ve just had lunch and there aren’t

too many Fellows in the college who are women, whereas you would expect in general there

should be a lot more. I mean the problem with women in particular of course is the biological

problem of having children and raising a family, but some people manage it perfectly well. So I

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think it’s a sort of Britain, certainly academic Britain has just been playing catch-up for the last

forty or fifty years and still may not have got to the stage that some American women academics

have got to. I don’t know, you’d have to ask a lot of other people to see if that is the case.

Cambridge was very much a male dominated university I felt at that time. There were very few

mixed colleges. I don’t know if there were actually any mixed colleges at that time. So it was,

you know, strange for her.

What would have been the view of someone like Teddy Bullard, for example, on male versus

female research students, do you think? I ask only because Madingley Rise, and I’m not saying

this was any different to any other part of the university, but if you look at Carol’s book for

example, very few female research students.

Yes.

And I wondered why and perhaps what his view would have been on any…

I don’t know. I never heard him express a view. He must have been used to young women

because he had three daughters. [laughs] But I don’t, I never heard him say anything about

women, either in praise or derogatorily. And he just, I just don’t know what his views were

actually.

Your…

Oh, I think they might, some of them might have been… he might have been favourable in some

ways. The reason I say that is I recollect him talking about a Russian geophysicist, a woman,

who did a lot of work on heat flow. I can’t remember her name, but he obviously thought she’d

done some good work. So professionally I don’t think he worried about what sex you were.

Your wife had helped you by typing your thesis and helping with the construction of sentences

and so on, I think you seemed to imply, or the writing of it anyway.

Yeah, what an editor would do normally, yes.

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To what extent was she involved in or interested in your work when you came back to Britain,

when you were working for example on this fit of the continents work?

Well, I think she was interested but I don’t recollect her reading any of my papers. I think she

accepted that I was really interested in geology and she would help me to the full extent she

could actually. That’s all I can say I think.

[23:15]

When you’d moved to the Department of Geology, I wonder whether you could give us a

description of the Department of Geology at the time that you were appointed in the late sixties,

and if we could start with it as a physical place and then go on to…

Well, I can give you a good idea of how it seemed to somebody because when my daughter was

old enough, five or six or something, I don’t know how old she was, but I used to sometimes do

babysitting for her while my wife did other things, this is at weekends sometimes, Saturdays, and

I remember telling my daughter who was, you know, I said I’m going to go to the department

and – or we are going to the department – and she wasn’t sure what the department was. So she

said, ‘Oh Daddy, do you mean the church?’ That was the impression at that time that the

department gave to a very young girl. I mean it’s a lovely building, the Department of Geology,

it’s one of the first modern buildings I think in the country in the sense that the internal walls do

not carry loads. It’s the floor that carries the load and there’s a very strong concrete floor

supported by an iron framework, deliberately built that way to support all the load of the rocks

that are in the place. So it’s a very strong building and there was talk, I think a long time ago,

when I was around at the beginning of actually moving to west Cambridge and even knocking

the old museum down and I’m sure anyone who tried to do that would lose a fortune on it

because it’s such a well-built building actually. So you didn’t see that inside, what you did see

are large pillars, iron-frame windows, the whole of the ground floor was not paved, had glass

cases which held examples of building stones from around the world. So it wasn’t terribly

interesting, except to architects, and there were, there have been at times suggestions of

screening these off and having moveable displays of what the department gets up to, and it’s

never been done. So it’s a funny place, it does look like a Victorian museum, but it’s a very

noisy place in term time especially, because we let our students have coffee as long as they pay

for it, and the noise is quite incredible at times. So architecturally it looks very Victorian I think.

I think it’s an early Edwardian building in fact, much bigger than it was originally planned to be

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because of the way the money came in and so on, was quite an interesting story there, but it’s

still the way it was fifty years ago. [26:40] Now, the department is very, I mean as I came in, it

was almost Victorian again, very conservative. There was Professor Bulman – one professor –

one reader, Maurice Black at the time, several lecturers like Richard Hey who we talked about

earlier. As I say, very conservative and rather, I can’t say… it was full of people who were not

as well-known as the people I had met at Princeton, and I can say that because when I came

back, possibly when I flew back in the middle of my time at Princeton, I mentioned some of my,

you know, Princeton professors and all of them were well-known or people in the department

knew who they were, but going the other way when I went to Princeton and talked about people

in the department, not all of them, in fact a few of them were known to the people in Princeton.

So from that I assess that we had a very competent staff but very few stars actually. I mean some

of the lectures we had were absolutely first rate from a student’s point of view, but scientifically

some of them were not very good at all. I don’t mean they were incompetent, but they didn’t

publish much. They were very smart, didn’t publish much though, and they were not well

known outside Cambridge, or not as well-known as you might expect them to have been.

[28:28] And there was a very funny social hierarchy amongst the staff, there was a chap called

Bertie Brighton who had a long moustache, coughing all the time because he smoked like a

chimney and he was the curator of the Sedgwick Museum and his room was on the ground floor

near the entrance. Now at that time the entrance, which is now a proper reception area, was

actually a parking place for the staff’s bikes. You came in through the front door, off Downing

Street, and you had bicycle stands for staff’s bikes, which is quite amazing really. On the left of

that, as you came in from Downing Street, on the left was his room. His name was Bertie

Brighton, as I say, curator of the Sedgwick Museum, and at coffee time he used to have a little

clique, which consisted of four other, three other members of staff whose surnames began with

‘B’. There was Maurice Black, who also smoked, Bill Black who didn’t smoke, Oliver Bulman

who was the head of the department. So there were four ‘Bs’ in there actually, yes. And what

was so amazing in a way looking back was he always had a lighted fire in his - open fire - in his

room, a coal fire and that was always maintained by one of the museum assistants. His job,

whoever it was, was to keep that fire going and clean it up and prepare it for the next day. I

mean it was extraordinary. So I found that fascinating, because that was where the, essentially

anything that happened in the department was decided there.

In Bertie Brighton’s room?

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Mm. The impression I had. So younger members of the staff like Brian Harland and Norman

Hughes and one or two other people disliked this arrangement and there was a bit of a conflict

between those two groups actually. And it wasn’t immediately apparent that there was a conflict

but it’s almost a parochial department, quite honestly. Now, you could say well, it’s a tradition

in Cambridge in most departments not to boast about things and most people are very modest

and you don’t, you know, in this college for example, you wouldn’t know that somebody had

just got this prize or that prize or whatever because they don’t talk about it, but somebody might

say congratulations, that’s how you might find out about it. But you could say well, you’re

misreading parochialism, actually they were just being very modest and it’s true, they were on

the whole very modest, but I think they were also a bit parochial. And having been in America

and seen a different way of doing things and so on, I would have left the department had we not

united as a single department in the 19… whenever it was, when Ron Oxburgh became the first

chairman. I mean it was, I just felt it was a bit, almost claustrophobic at times really, very

narrow, you know. So although it was in Cambridge I didn’t feel that it really opened its eyes as

much as it should to the rest of the world. That was quite different from Bullard Labs or

Madingley Rise because Teddy was always having people coming in from especially the States,

sabbatical visitors, and we had, I don’t know if you know of a chap called Menard? He came for

a sabbatical at one time. A chap called Bob Fisher who did a lot of oceanographic work in the

Pacific, he came for a sabbatical at one time. Tuzo Wilson was always coming over and

dropping in and he did have a sabbatical at one time as well. So there was quite a different kind

of person who’d had quite different experiences to what was available, you know, what the

Department of Geology was like at that time. [33:18] And because my wife is American, so I

was quite open to considering offers from the US. I had several in fact. I think everyone in

Cambridge seemed to get an offer from the US until people take no as meaning no. And Judy

and I used to talk a lot about it at times, but I didn’t… she would have been happy if I had gone

to a place called Newbury College, I think, in New England, it was a liberal arts college. Harry

Hess told me about it and I declined. Maybe I shouldn’t have done, but somehow I didn’t feel

that Newbury was doing the kind of research I wanted to do. I had an offer, well, it wasn’t a

firm offer but there was a suggestion I should go to MIT, but Judy didn’t like the idea of being in

Boston I don’t think. So we had these discussions and all the time I found, you know, that

Cambridge was getting better and especially when we eventually decided, brought about a union

of the three departments, I was very happy.

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[34:41]

What were the relations between the Geology Department and Madingley Rise at this time?

Very little. Brian Harland was probably the only one who had any relationships. The real

problem I think with an earlier amalgamation which had been planned, was that Teddy was head

of geophysics and the thought, the thought was that, the likely thought was that he would

become overall chairman or head of an amalgamated department and I don’t think quite honestly

people in geology – I’m not sure about the other department, mineralogy and petrology – but I’m

not sure that people trusted him. I think they envisaged that he might shut different parts of the

departments down, you know, like palaeontology for example, which was where… which was

based in geology at the time, there were several palaeontologists at the time and I think they

were a bit afraid of Teddy.

Did they have reason to be based on Teddy’s view of geology?

[laughs] Well, again, I can only quote you something that I wasn’t at and it may not be entirely

true, but there was a dinner celebrating some anniversary of the Sedgwick Club, I think it was,

this undergraduate geology club. I don’t know what, it might have been its hundredth or

something, I really don’t know. But Teddy was the guest speaker and Bulman was there as well

and Teddy got up and started, I mean as reported to me, as I say I wasn’t there, he said

something like, you know, ‘You palaeontologists should do something interesting’. And he said,

he was really cheeky, he said, ‘Look, you’ve got these dinosaur eggs in the museum from the

Gobi Desert, why don’t you inject them with DNA and hatch them out?’ [laughs] Or something

completely ridiculous and absurd. But you could see he was impatient with what was being done

in the subject at the time and that’s one of the reasons I think, and probably others, that people

were rather wary of amalgamating while he was head of Madingley Rise. The amalgamation

occurred after Teddy had retired to California. And I think also the relationships between

mineralogy and geology were not good and we were adjacent departments. And I can remember

one meeting where we had, it was a discussion about a joint lecture course and again, I’m sure

I’ve got the gist of the thing but I may not have the actual data absolutely correct, but there was a

discussion about whether I think mineralogy and petrology should give thirteen lectures or

whether geology should give thirteen lectures or whether they should give twelve each or

something. It was one of these really stupid things, and there was a member of a department, I

won’t name him, bless his memory, he did help me a lot, but he was a bit of a spoke in the wheel

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kind of person and he said something which antagonised the Head of Mineralogy and Petrology

which was Professor Alex Deer at the time, and cut a long story short, Alex wrapped up his file,

folded it up, and led all his staff members out of the meeting. I mean it was just like something

out of I’m Alright Jack really. It was quite extraordinary. And so it wasn’t auguring well for an

amalgamation between mineralogy and petrology and geology, so we kept on all these little ways

and fortunately Deer was a very sensible person and ultimately, I can’t remember, I know I did

have a letter – I was on sabbatical at one time in Switzerland at ETH and a chap called Stuart

Agrell who was in mineralogy and petrology, wrote to me out of the blue saying, you know, who

do you think would make a good head for the combined department. And I did mention Ron

Oxburgh’s name because I knew him from, he was in Princeton with me, two years ahead of me

and I just thought he was very good and he was very good at administration as well as science

and I said, you know, he was a young chap at Oxford at the time, I think you might consider him.

And Ron did come, though I don’t know how influential I was in that because Stuart wrote to me

because he was on the, one of the electors of the chair, actually. But I like to think I did help a

little bit in getting Ron Oxburgh here. And Ron made a great success of the place. I mean he

made it, he was the absolutely ideal candidate for that position and ever since then we’ve gone

from strength to strength.

[40:03]

What were other members of the department working on at the time you joined in the 1960s?

Well, Brian Harland was the closest, he was interested in tectonics, he was extremely

imaginative, he was very, extremely hard working, but I sometimes felt he didn’t have, I mean

his mind was working so fast sometimes somehow it didn’t always gel into something that was

easy to understand. But he was a very inspiring lecturer. You couldn’t get good notes from him

but he was one of the few people in the department who talked about continental drift and told us

about it and what people felt and I think he was pretty much in favour of it himself. So he did a

lot of work in Spitsbergen and he was the one who set up CASP, this Cambridge Arctic Shelf

Programme, which is still going strong, and he, well he got me interested shortly after I arrived

back in Cambridge, in one summer I hadn’t got a field area and I was a bit disillusioned after I’d

done this work at Bullard’s that I didn’t get out into the open, and one summer when I wasn’t out

in the open I was working with him on a project to put together a geological timescale book,

which I did, helped him with that. And Brian, bless him, that was the first publication, special

publication of the Geological Society of London, of which he was secretary I think at the time.

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Again, having done that, stayed indoors one summer doing abstracting work and all that sort of

thing, I felt this isn’t really what I want to do and I can’t remember when I started it, but in

Princeton one of my roommates, well I had a roommate called Eldridge Moores, who I might

have mentioned in my earlier interview, where as I say, we shared a room together and Eldridge

stayed on at Princeton as a postdoc with Harry Hess and Harry Hess had an NSF postdoc to go

and look at some rocks in Greece, which might have been ocean floor, might not have been, we

didn’t know at the time. And Eldridge used to come through Cambridge to stay with us on his

way home to America and he enthused about Greece so much, his great enthusiasm, terrific

chap, I thought I would start a project in Greece, because I felt as a university lecturer or

demonstrator – I can’t remember – no, must have been a demonstrator at the time, I felt I

wouldn’t have much time, I needed to go to do fieldwork in an area which was well exposed,

where the rocks weren’t covered by forests and, you know. The White Fish Range wouldn’t

have been the best place to do work really from my point of view of being a university teacher

and so on. And that really meant you had to go to either something like an Arctic place or high

latitude place where there’s plenty of rock exposed, or a semi-arid or arid place where again,

there would be plenty of rocks exposed. And Greece was sufficiently semi-arid that there were

very good exposures of rocks in Greece and so one year I settled on starting some fieldwork in

Greece. [44:03] That was a lovely time actually. It was a very interesting area. I spent my first

summer doing a reconnaissance of much of Greece, finding out which areas would be of interest

scientifically, and settled on one in central Greece and spent probably ten, fifteen years either

working there myself or looking after research students who were mapping there. And it was a

very good decision in my view in a sense.

Very interesting that you chose the place almost before the, well, before the problem or before

the…

No. Well, yes it is, okay. I think I was interested in ophiolites and that was Eldridge Moores’

influence and Harry Hess and so on. So in a sense I chose the place because there were

ophiolites there, but I chose the place, the specific place because I went out the first season with

a chap who was collecting small fossils called fusilines, I went along with him almost as the field

assistant but keeping an eye on the geology, and one of the areas we went to had what appeared

to be, what were called ophiolites, very, you know, not very well mapped by the Greeks,

unfortunately, or fortunately because that meant I could go there. These were bits of ocean floor

perhaps but they were overridden or overlain by sediments that were shallower, they were not

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ocean floor rocks, but the interesting thing was, they were actually older than the supposed date

of the ophiolites and how on earth that happened at that time was unclear. I mean it obviously

involved thrusting like I’d been mapping in the White Fish Range and so on, but how that

happened and what it signified was completely unknown and not, you know, it wasn’t in the

literature and that’s why I started work in that area, why I went to Greece. So I suppose the

country came first, but partly because there were ophiolites there and they seemed very

interesting and partly because once I got there I found a place that was very well worthwhile

mapping.

Yes, could you explain why you picked this area in central Greece based on this reconnaissance

of the whole potential area?

Well, as I say, there were lots of these peculiar rocks called serpentines and rocks made of

olivine. They were considered, we didn’t know at the time, but they were probably parts of the

earth’s mantle which is under the crust. But they were lying around on the surface, they were

probably, the guess was that they were probably about 150 or so million years old and they were

overlain, they had rocks that were quite a bit older, about 300 million years old which had

shallow water fossils in them and that’s, unless something structurally is going on which is of

considerable magnitude, that doesn’t make sense. The question then was, what are the

relationships between these shallow water older rocks lying on top of very deep younger rocks.

And that was the basic problem. As I say, it involved, well… it was very complex structure, it

wasn’t the best place to answer that problem really, the best place was actually Oman, probably.

Well, I wasn’t, didn’t expect to go out there. So I started mapping there and all sorts of

interesting stuff. I mean I think I was one of the first who found that there was an episode of

intense deformation in the Cretaceous or late Jurassic in Greece and I don’t think people had

come across that before. And then of course the plate tectonics hypothesis or model or whatever

you want to call it, concept, was introduced shortly after I had started work in Greece and it

became obvious then that these were bits of ocean floor and that we were dealing probably with

what happens at plate margins, which was a new way of talking about these areas, to create an

orogenic belt. And eventually, as things evolved, the question then became, what starts an

orogenic belt off, because prior to the deformation the area had been almost exactly as you

would model it. The shallow water rocks were part of a continental crust, or they had been

deposited on the continental crust, the deeper rocks were part of the ocean floor, so as you went

from the shallow water older rocks out into what is an ocean you had a passive continental

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margin, rather like the Atlantic, you had something like the edge of a continent, an ocean going

off into an ocean, and then something had happened that had caused that margin to collapse if

you like, to be deformed in such a way that the ocean floor rode up on top of the continent. Now

that was a puzzle too because how is it these old dense – it’s not old – but these younger dense

rocks, because the ocean floor was much denser than the continent, how is it these end up on top

of a less dense continental crust whereas in other places in the world as we’re beginning to

understand it, at the time they should have been subducted and you wouldn’t see the ocean floor,

it would go underneath and disappear. So all these problems suddenly emerged as mapping

continued and some of them, well, they’re not solved today. I’m still interested in them and

write papers about them. I don’t do fieldwork any more but I do go on field trips and talk to

people about it, but we haven’t really solved these problems. And the more you look into them,

the more you realise that there are yet more problems to solve that don’t fit the model.

[50:36]

What do you remember of plate tectonics sort of emerging and becoming accepted, altering the

way that you thought? How did that happen suddenly?

It happened suddenly for me I think. Suddenly realised that, you know, this new way of looking

at the earth was the correct way, because everything fitted together, really. Well, not everything,

but it all made much more sense than the old way of looking at the earth as an apple that was

shrinking as it cooled down and wrinkling and giving rise to mountain belts, it wasn’t that at all,

it was something else much more interesting.

Where did you first sort of meet the idea?

Of plate tectonics? I can’t remember, but I do remember it had a profound effect on the way I

was thinking about things and I think there were two conferences I would have liked to have

gone to but I was doing other things at the time, I couldn’t get to them, they were both in

America and probably the most important one was, I don’t know if Fred Vine talked to you

about this, but it was in Wood… I think it was in Woods Hole, I’m not sure, but it was in 19…

probably 1968. I can’t remember the details, but the most important papers there were, well the

most important paper I think was probably one by seismologists principally from Cornell and

Lamont and it was – and also a chap from Princeton called Jason Morgan – and also a

Frenchman named Le Pichon, there were three papers and they all appeared in Journal of

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Geophysical Research. The first paper on earthquakes showed how the earthquakes, if you

interpret earthquakes as places of active deformation, the new seismic data that was coming in

from the instruments that had been set out to verify the nuclear test ban treaty, well that was

public domain knowledge of the earthquakes and you could see that the earthquakes weren’t just

scattered all over the world, they were confined to very particular places and if they were places

where the earth is being actively deformed, you then get the idea of a plate, the interior plate not

being deformed and the margins are where the deformation is taking place. And you could see

that actually in the earthquake distribution, it was so much better than it had been previously.

And you could actually – or I don’t know if that was done at the time – but you can determine

how things are moving relative to one another as a result of an earthquake, and it all fitted in not

only with the earthquakes, but fitted in with the previous ideas about ocean floor spreading

which hadn’t really given rise to the idea of plates. You know, we knew how the ocean floor

was growing, we knew how fast it was growing and how it was growing, but at that time nobody

came up with the idea of plates from that stuff, but that all slotted into this whole new idea of

looking at the earth. And Jason Morgan, he wrote a paper called Rises I think, and Trenches and

Great Faults and showed how transform faults, which Tuzo Wilson had talked about, also fitted

into this picture and lots of other things as well. And then finally, this Frenchman, Xavier Le

Pichon, he showed how you can actually calculate from the ocean floor record and assuming

plates, how you could calculate what was going on at each plate boundary on the earth. So you

actually had a predictive quantitative theory that explained so much and, you know, that to me

was when I realised that it was correct. I mean to my mind there’s no argument about it, that’s

how it is. So if people say this is a hypothesis the fact is you can make predictions from it,

numerical predictions and verify these predictions, so at last tectonics has become a science and I

can’t conceive actually any other way of looking at how the earth works. I don’t mean to say

that there aren’t bits we can’t explain, but the bulk of the earth and its history and everything

else, except perhaps very early on in the earth’s history, is due to plate motions and the existence

of plates and their coalescence, their disappearance and all that sort of thing, and it was very

exciting.

[55:39]

What was the response in the Department of Geology?

Well, at that time we had, there was a new lecturer appointed – John Dewey, you may know, you

may have interviewed him actually.

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Not yet.

Not yet. Well he was very much involved with the geological application of plate tectonics and

that went straight into his lectures and we started teaching it straightaway more or less, in the

first year lectures, you know, it was so interesting and easy to understand really, and exciting and

so on that it went straight in. So people like John and Brian Harland etc, were, well, and myself,

we all – Ron Oxburgh – we all got into, you can say it’s a bandwagon, but we realised that this

was a new theory of the earth that was correct. And you asked about who else was in the

department at the time; the two Blacks I mentioned, one of them had been a carboniferous

limestone stratigrapher who knew a lot about the stratigraphy of the carboniferous rocks, that’s

the coal bearing rocks, in northern England, so he was really a stratigrapher sedimentologist, to

some extent a palaeontologist. The other Black was a very clever man, bit reticent and reserved,

but he did a lot of work on algae, both present day algae or algae in the Bahamas, and algae in

the fossil record. He was a sedimentologist who was interested in essentially, he did a lot of

work in the southern uplands on present day limestone deposits as in the Bahamas and places

like that. He didn’t publish a lot but he was extremely good. Oliver Bulman, the professor, he

was essentially a palaeontologist interested principally in graptolites – I don’t know if you know

anything about them but they evolved a great deal in the Ordovician about four, five hundred

million years ago and they have no living relatives. To my mind they look like little fretsaw

blade lying around on the rocks, some of them do anyway, and they’re very interesting and our

department has probably had a… we’re one of the leading graptolite departments in the world

because after Bulman retired Barrie Rickards eventually came to the department, he was an

authority on those sorts of things. But who else was there? Norman Hughes was there. He was

a palynologist, he looked at pollen – what do you call them – grains? Anyway, pollen. And in

fact, a bit of an aside, he and Brian Harland supported me considerably through my… in getting

me to be able to stay on for a fourth year to study geology and I have a lot to thank them for

actually. Richard Hey you probably know about. He studied glacial deposits and did a lot of

good work on the glacial deposits of, well the area around Cambridge in particular. Colin Forbes

was an assistant curator at the museum, he did a lot of work on sea urchins I think, until he

became interested in water supply. So that, I think that was more or less the line-up of the

Geology Department at the time. It wasn’t a big department at all. There may have been other

people, I can’t remember now.

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[59:48]

And could you say how you were involved in moving plate tectonics from a new academic theory

to something that was taught in schools? I don’t know how soon after it happened.

Yes, well I, Maurice Black, he used to run the Oxford and Cambridge Geology Board, or Oxford

and Cambridge geology section of the Oxford and Cambridge Examinations Board and it was a

very, it was a very good thing to do. There were only about, as I recollect, there were less than a

hundred people taking geology through that board at the time, so Maurice used to mark the

papers, he awarded the marks and had a meeting presumably and set the papers and did this year

after year. When he retired he asked if I was interested in doing it and I did accept it, the

position as an awarder, and after being in it for a year or two I, I don’t know how long after plate

tectonics was discovered, I said why don’t we get this into the school syllabus, because it’s, you

know, you can explain it to people, it’s so easy to understand really. Not the nuances of it, but

the overall idea of plates and so on. And I put forward, you know, a short syllabus about this and

suggested it to the board and I can’t remember how it was accepted but it was very little

bureaucracy involved and it was just put in and I think one or two other things were taken out, I

can’t remember, I think you’d have to take something out, I would think. And it got into the

school syllabus straightaway. I mean compared with what you have to go through nowadays to

get any changes, it’s extraordinarily easy and I was in charge of the whole thing. Anyone who

studied geology for the Oxford and Cambridge Board I examined them and graded them and

didn’t think about dumbing down or anything like that, you just gave them grades and you didn’t

mark to a curve or anything like that, you just said, well this is a good answer and deserves this

mark, did a lousy answer, deserves these marks. And sometimes you had to make a little

allowance for the teachers, because some of them weren’t up to scratch, so you were marking the

teaching rather than the candidate at times, or at least the teaching, teaching wasn’t as good as

it… there was a range of teaching in the candidates, you could see that. You know, I can’t

remember, I think Stonyhurst used to put in several candidates each year and I think they had a

very good teacher and you could tell that. And there was some school in Cornwall who put in

candidates every year and the chap wasn’t – I presume it was a chap – wasn’t a very good

teacher.

How could you tell the difference between teaching and the candidates?

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When you get the same mistakes appearing only in a particular school’s candidates you know

something’s wrong. I mean I don’t… I couldn’t say I consciously, you know, I had a little piece

of paper which would say how to correct for this, but you would have a, you would realise that

the person who was answering this question was completely right about some things and then

there was a little something that obviously wasn’t right actually. And I can remember, it was

very funny, because I can remember marking one chap’s papers and he got into Cambridge

subsequently and I ended up as his supervisor in the department. And when I first encountered

him I remembered him from his school – it was a school in Cornwall, as I say – and he was all

over the place in terms of organising his knowledge but he was extremely knowledgeable and it

was partly, that was partly himself but partly his teacher. And it was very interesting because

through the years, we only had a three-year degree at that time, he gradually became more and

more organised and knowledgeable and, you know, thought about things and I think he went off

to Canada for a PhD, but he’s now a professor in Toronto I think, and he’s completely different

to what he was at school. It’s very interesting to see those changes happening in somebody

actually.

[1:04:33]

And what decisions did you make about either what aspects of plate tectonics ought to be

included or how it ought to be converted into school curriculum?

Well, I can’t remember how we did it in detail but there had to be something about earthquakes

and volcanoes and their relation to plate tectonics and things like the San Andreas Fault and how

continental drift actually was, it was continental drift in a sense, but it was actually you’re

looking at plate motions rather than just slabs of continents riding across different parts of the

earth, there was a very definite mechanism involved. So I suppose it’s the sort of thing you do in

any simple discussion of plate tectonics, you talked about plate margins, the kind of geology they

have, and show illustrations or discuss illustrations that – or discuss things that illustrate these

properties, you know, like the San Andreas Fault, Mount St Helens, for example, Iceland,

hotspots and that sort of thing. And obviously you can go on for a long time but there’s only a

limited amount of time in a school syllabus for this but you try to get the essence of it across

really. It’s… what surprises me at the moment is well, I’ll give an example. I used to supervise,

well I supervised last year, but I can remember supervising two students from this college, they

came into the supervision looking very tired and I’d set them an essay on, probably something

about plate tectonics, and they, I’m not sure if they sent it in on time or not, but they were tired

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but seemed to be happy. And it turned out after a little bit of interrogation that they had written

these essays, which were quite long, using material from the web. And it was quite, some of it

was quite wrong, and what surprises me is that you can have this stuff on the web and it’s quite

wrong. You would have thought, you know, there would be a consensus of what goes on and

people would know about this and somehow you could refer people to, you know, this is the best

explanation there is of subduction. You really have to look hard to find something that would

satisfy that criterion. I find it quite extraordinary. Because I always imagine that, you know, bit

like Wikipedia, here’s all this knowledge that gets into Wikipedia, and I must admit I find that an

extremely good source of information, but you don’t find that in terms of teaching. Different

departments teach in different ways and some of them get it wrong. I just find that bizarre in a

way.

Different school departments?

Different university departments. Because these people were writing, these were undergraduates

writing an essay about something on plate tectonics, and I said where did you get this stuff from

and they say oh, we got it from the web. I said well, what about books? I mean, didn’t we

recommend a few books you should have a look at, and they said yes. I said, well why don’t you

use those? And they obviously thought the web was superior to the printed word, which I found

very interesting actually. And I would have thought it could be, well not superior, but it should

be equal to it, but it isn’t. There’s an opportunity there for somebody to do something about it

but of course most people don’t have the time. Anyway.

[1:08:49]

Could you describe what was involved in the ophiolite fieldwork, once you’d decided on this

particular part of Greece that you were going to focus on, and I assume that you’re going out in

the summer vacation period each year?

That’s right, yes.

What is sort of involved in practice, step by step, in actually working in the field on this

problem?

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You have to have a base map. We had, I managed to… the Greeks would not let you have the

base maps you wanted, they were military secrets. But, for some reason, the Greek Geological

Survey had published geological maps with very good topography – well, not very good, but

pretty good topography on them – which were available to the public. These were probably the

same maps that the military held to be secrets. So I used to buy these and make enlargements of

them for use as field maps, ie, just like, they would be like Ordnance Survey maps, basically. It

was as if the Ordnance Survey maps were top secret but if you had a geology map with

topography on it, it wasn’t. Don’t ask me to explain that, but… So I had reasonably good base

maps and we also had friends in America who had access to Department of Defense maps and

we could, we managed to get copies of those which helped, but we never ever did show those in

the field, because if the Greeks found out we were using what was essentially military maps for

our mapping, they would not have been happy.

How were your friends able to get them?

Well, we had connections. [laughs] Anyway, they were very helpful. So you have a map, a base

map, and you go out into the field and you, if you’re mapping you’re looking for the boundaries

between different types of rocks and what happens at those boundaries, what kind of boundaries

are they. Are the boundaries between one rock type and another a boundary between rocks that

have been deposited one on top of the other and you’re looking at the original relationships

between those two rocks, or are they boundaries between two rocks that have been moved

relative to one another by some sort of deformation, and what is that kind of deformation if they

have been moved. And if they’re in stratigraphic order, they haven’t been moved, how on earth

is it that say, this rock down here which – have you ever heard of chert?

No.

It’s like flint, it’s like layers of flint overlaid by layers of limestone, how on earth does that come

about because it’s a dramatic change in chemistry. So all the time you’re mapping these

boundaries looking at what they are and thinking about what they might mean. And when you

have a large enough area mapped you can begin to unscramble what’s happened to them

tectonically, they’ve been completely smashed up in some cases, they’ve been folded in many

cases, thrust in others, you can unwrap that and look at the regional relationships rather than the

little area you’re mapping in and see how it fits into that and well, does it fit into that and what

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people are saying about it and if it doesn’t, what are you going to do about it? How are you

going to explain this and how are you going to verify your explanation? And you often have to

be a bit of a sort of fence sitter in the sense that there are often several explanations, you can’t

tell which is the right one and you have to carry these explanations round in your head when

you’re looking at these rocks. I think Chamberlin was a late Victorian American geologist who

said geologists have to carry around the theory of multiple working hypotheses in their heads,

because there are many ways of explaining, quite often many ways of explaining a particular

relationship you see in a small area and you just can’t, it’s not a good idea to be definite about

that until you’ve got some evidence from other areas. So it’s quite different from physics. So

you go round making all these maps, picking out the significant boundaries, and then try and

make sense of it all.

[1:13:41]

And so where did you stay while you were in Greece?

Well, the village I ended up at was the end of the road at the time in these Greek mountains,

there were no roads beyond this village, it had no electricity, had no running water, had

standpipes or sort of like troughs which were fed by springs from the mountains, and we had a

little room in a little house which is now under a preservation order. [laughs] It’s quite bizarre

really. But we had this little cottage, well not cottage, but the top room of a house where an old

Greek peasant couple lived, and that’s where we lived.

We?

Sometimes, well, I had a field assistant sometimes. At other times, my wife came out with me

twice actually. Complete… we were the first foreigners to be in that village since the war, so

they used to treat us like royalty almost, because we had a car. Nobody in the village had a car,

except people who were in the cattle trade or something like that. They were desperately poor.

There was hardly any meat when I first got there, except canned meat, Spam or something like

that. I think they ate meat once a week when we first got there. They had all sorts of ingenious

ways of flavouring things, they would stuff marrow flowers with rice or something like that and

actually, sometimes we bought our own food, or I bought my own food. There was a bus service

and I used to go down to the little, this little town called Lamia, at the weekends just to have a

decent wash actually, because the washing facilities were pretty primitive, and bring back quite

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often canned food or something like that, often tinned vegetables or something, because we

didn’t have… we had a camping gas stove for cooking on. It was pretty basic actually.

Did your daughter ever come?

Yes, she came not to the village, but she came to Greece once when she was about two or

something like that. We drove down through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and so on. Yeah. She

doesn’t remember much about it.

What did your wife, on the occasions when your wife came and on the occasion when your

daughter came, what did they do while you were in the field mapping?

Well, Judy came into the field once or twice and it wasn’t, it didn’t work out. She wasn’t a

geologist so I had to dictate everything to her and so on, and although she would have loved to

have carried on being in the field, it just took too long really and so, because she wrote and read

and so on, she used to spend the time in the village in the room either writing her own stuff or

sometimes the children would – she loved children – and she would gather the children around

her and learn Greek and teach them English and show them things. She got on very well with

them actually. So she wasn’t, I mean although she was on her own, she was able to find things

that she enjoyed doing while she was there, rather than twiddling her thumbs, as it were. And

when our daughter came out we rented a, had a long term let in a hotel room in Kamena Vourla,

as it’s called, which is a Greek resort where Jessica learned, well, saw the sea for the first time I

think. And it was a lovely place to be. That probably wasn’t as good a place as the village

actually. There was less going on, it was much more of a resort and of course you’d have to pay

attention to, well, you’d have to look after Jessica, our daughter, but that’s how she spent her

time.

And did you go out from this resort to your site?

No. What I used to do was to spend, if you like, the working week up in the village and then I

would come back to the hotel and spend the weekend with them both. We looked, both of us

looked back on that time with great fondness actually.

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And having done your work in the week, what memories do you have of time spent with the

family in this resort? What did you do, even if these things don’t seem to you exceptional, what

did you…

Well, we’d probably spend at least one day just relaxing on the beach, as it were. We didn’t do

any cooking when we were in the hotel of course and we used to go to different restaurants and

tavernas and bars occasionally I suppose, and sometimes we would just, we would explore the

neighbourhood in the car, looking in different places, different villages, different towns. And we

had a lot, well we, there wasn’t a lot written at the time, but we used to go to places in the Blue

Guide and that sort of thing. I’m just trying to think actually, how we spent the time, but it went

very quickly, I know that, and we enjoyed it immensely. Oh, and Judy of course, when she was

at the hotel she made friends with several Greeks and discussed all sorts of things with them,

because I remember one, there was one Greek woman she made friends with who used to bring

her mother to this resort town for the summer, and she was – I can’t remember what she did

actually – but it was a similar job to what Judy had been doing before she married, probably

editing or something like that, so there was a common interest in reading and writing and books

and so they used to swap, I suppose books and things like that, and she kept in touch with her

after we got back to England, kept in touch for several years actually. So there was no shortage

of things for my wife to do and my daughter was perfectly happy and I was beavering away in

the mountains. [1:20:57] But it was extraordinary because I was paid, I had a grant to do all this

work from Shell oil company. You know, it’s wonderful to look back and think you’ve been

paid by Shell to wander round the Greek mountains. But it’s how it happened actually.

How were you able to get the money from Shell for this work?

Well, I think it was partly, after Bulman retired – I’d forgotten this – but after Bulman retired we

had a new professor come over. He was an Englishman, had done his – he was actually… I

think he was on the staff at Harvard at the time – a chap called Professor Whittington, very nice

man, and he, I think he used to… Shell at that time had a field fund or something which they

would give to different universities, probably, I’m not sure of that. But he was probably written

to by Shell to say who should we, who can we support, or what of your staff members need

support, basically, and I think Harry probably said well, Smith could do with a bit of money, and

that’s how I probably got funded actually.

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Why were Shell doing it?

Well, they had had a project in Arabia, in Oman, the place I was telling you about, trying to

understand what on earth ophiolites were. This is all pre-plate tectonics, 1950s, 1960s, and they

had had some very good geologists out there who wrote a report on Oman, on the geology of

Oman, which included a detailed study of this thing called an ophiolite, which at the time

nobody knew what it was, but Shell thought it was important to understand what these things

were because they were all over the place in a sense. I mean there are lots of ophiolites in

Turkey and Asia and some in Scotland, well all over the place actually. I don’t mean they’re

extremely common because there’s only one really in England, which is down at the Lizard, and

there are one or two in Scotland, but if you look at it globally there are a lot of them around and

they just wanted to understand how on earth these things, what were they. So they had a long-

lived project, several years, in Oman because that is the best place I think to look at ophiolites

and try and understand them.

[1:23:45]

Why is Oman better? You’ve mentioned a few times that Greece isn’t the best.

Well, Greece isn’t the best for two reasons. One is that these ophiolites that we see in Greece

have been hit by two different, possibly three different times by deformation, so you hit them

once and they get in a bit of a mess, and then you hit them again and make a bigger mess, and

you might hit them a third time, but certainly twice, and so they’re difficult to disentangle.

Oman has only been hit once by forces that have put this ophiolite on the edge of Arabia, and it’s

a desert, so you either see rocks or you don’t. They’re either covered in sand or pebbles and a

wadi or something, or they’re just completely bare. That’s exaggerating it a bit, but they’re

beautifully exposed and you can see what’s going on. And so you can understand not

necessarily how these things form, but you can understand the relationships of different rock

types, you can see it very clearly. And from that you have a very good chance of coming up

with an idea which might explain how they originated. So that’s Shell’s interest in Oman. Also

Shell, that’s right – I’d forgotten about this – Shell had discovered oil in Oman, or I don’t know

if they discovered oil, but there is oil in Oman near these ophiolites and there is a company

which is called PDO – Petroleum Development Organisation – which is essentially Shell in

Oman, although it’s probably been – what do you call it, where you convert – when all the

personnel become not expats, but the native people, there are lots of Omanis now running that

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show and they have oil and they need to understand how it forms and I’m sure it’s true that the

emplacement of the ophiolite in Oman has had a profound effect on the distribution of the oil in

Oman, so again, they need to understand that to understand fully what’s going on.

[1:26:19]

If in Oman you could expect very clear exposures, perhaps a little covering, how did that

compare to the landscape where you were attempting to look at them in Greece?

Greece is not bad at all, it’s much better than most of the UK except for the Scottish Highlands.

But there are still wooded areas, there are still forests in these areas, second growth forests, but I

mean I remember talking to somebody about this, a classicist about this, because Athens at the

height of its power used to get a lot of its wood for its ships from Othrys, so there are parts of

Greece which are forested, you can’t see much going on, there are other parts which are not

forested but they’re covered by this stuff called holly oak – have you ever heard of that? It looks

just like holly but it bears acorns, it’s a type of oak where the leaves have adapted to being

chewed I think by goats and things like that, but I don’t know if the goats do that, but it’s a very

prickly waist high to head high shrub which is impossible to walk through, so you can’t tell

what’s underneath and you can’t see what rocks there are there. So again, there are significant

areas even in Greece which are covered up, to all intents and purposes, and you have to guess

what’s happening under them.

[1:27:55]

And what relations did you have with local people while you were staying in this area and

walking in this area?

Well, we had to get in touch with the police, we had to have a permit to do work in this area

from the Greek government, which we got from the Greek Geological Survey in Athens, and we

had to produce this permit when asked for it. So those are the relationships with the authorities,

if you like, and with the local people we used to say hello to them and so on and they didn’t

understand what they were doing, and some of them thought they’d discovered gold, which was

pyrite of course, fool’s gold as it were, and had lots of, you know, little encounter… I can

remember going one year, taking part in the Greek Orthodox Easter procession round the village

in the dark and things like that. I mean all sorts of little adventures. I remember one man came

up to me in the dark and wanted to know, he wanted to sell his wife to me. [laughs]

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Extraordinary. And we had a Greek wedding one time I was there. It was an old-fashioned

Greek wedding, they wanted to do it in the old days, there was a little village called Philiovon,

which was about three or four miles from Anavra, which is where I was working, and the bride

and groom rode horses from Filiadhon up to Anavra and accompanied by a band, a little band

with Greek instruments and everything else, and then we had a twenty-four hour wedding feast

in the village. And they showed us the bride’s dowry. There was this huge pile of stuff. I know

it included mattresses and what as a visitor I was supposed to do was to stuff money between

these mattresses. And then I was there during the coup of the colonels, which was quite exciting.

And I made a good friend in a place called Lamia, as I mentioned earlier, where we used to stay,

I used to have a room in a hotel when I cleaned up at the weekends, and made friends with a very

good, very intelligent Greek who had learned English and he used to tell me what was going on,

politically and so on, and the Greek secret police used to track me around. He used to tell me, he

used to point out the people. He would say, you know, ‘Those two people over there, they’re

Greek police and they want to know what you’re doing’. Didn’t ask me, but they asked him to

find out what I was doing. I don’t know if I said this, but one… the chap who I went round with

first had discovered this area, who collected these little fossils, had a friend in America who was

also completely obsessed by these little fossils and would collect them from all over the world.

He was a nuclear physicist who worked in the, I think the Battelle Institute in Idaho or wherever

it was on nuclear problems. But for fun he used to collect these things and he came to Greece

one day, and I think it’s where I met this English speaking Greek, because he drove into this

village while I was in the field, at great speed, got out with this Greek who spoke English and

disappeared up in the mountains after I’d left basically, to go and do my work. And when we got

back, all of us were arrested by the police and we’d apparently been tracked all day by some

farmers who had rifles which were loaded, didn’t know anything about this, and eventually,

because we were lucky to have this Greek who spoke English because he told us what they

thought we had been up to. They thought we had been involved in the civil war, which of course

carried on after the Second World War well into the 1950s I think, I don’t know how far, early

1950s I think, and during that time in the civil war a lot of material property was, you know,

people were robbed by one side or the other and in some cases they hid their ill-gotten gains in

various places and they thought we had come back to find one of these places where the gold or

jewellery or something had been hidden and we were going to take it away. And so that’s why

they followed us. Anyway, we told them no, no, no, we were looking at these tiny little fossils.

And I have this wonderful memory of going into this police station in Greece and there’s a little

dais where the sergeant, the enormous sergeant was sitting and interrogating us, looking down at

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us, and the Greek was translating for us and for him, and he didn’t quite understand what we

were doing but we had collected a lump of rock which had these fossils in it. So we gave it to

him and said look, you can see these things, you see. He said I can’t see anything, so we gave

him a magnifying glass and got him to look at these rocks and fortunately we had some scientific

papers which this chap had published on these fossils and there was a scientific paper with an

enlargement of one of these fossils and he could relate that to what he saw with his eyes and

although he didn’t understand what we were doing he realised that we were telling the truth.

[laughs] And I can remember coming back one evening, they used to have open door, people

used to come round with, you know, a cinema projector and they would show films, it was

before television really got going, and when television did get going they had a big screen in the

village square and it was just during the first moon landings and they saw these people jumping

around and also collecting rocks with hammers and they realised that what we were doing was

what they were doing. [laughs] So, you know, lots of little adventures actually.

[1:34:26]

To what extent were local people ever, I don’t know, helpful in some way in…

Not really. No, they were mystified I think rather than helpful. I found a phrase which I learnt

in Greek to tell people what we were doing which would actually sort of satisfy them up to a

point and essentially stop them asking further questions, because they kept on asking us about

metallo, was the thing they kept on asking us, about if it was metal, you know, gold, chrome, etc,

etc. And that was that I was trying to understand the history of the rocks in the area, and that

was a totally alien concept but it, you know. They didn’t understand quite what I was saying, but

on the other hand it satisfies them that that was the reason. And the Greeks are very good at,

well, we would call them fibs basically, but they’re good at telling things that aren’t quite true

which they wish to believe to be true. So you have to learn to distinguish between that sort of

thing.

What do you mean?

Well, this little room I had in this village, I got there early one year – oh, I told the lady who

rented to us that we’d be back in April or May or whenever, and I don’t think she really believed

us, but we did turn up in April or May, or whenever, and there was a great pile of carpets outside

the house and this had been rented out to the carpet seller. So, you know, this carpet seller was

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selling all these carpets to the villagers and obviously we couldn’t live there, but we could go

and look at other places. So we asked him, we said, how long are you going to be here for, and

he said a week, roughly. So we thought okay, maybe ten days. And we went off, but before we

went off we got talking a little bit about him and he said where do you come from, he mentioned

a village called Almyros and we said, any hotels there. And he said, oh yes, about half a dozen

hotels there. So, oh thank you. So we timed our arrival at Almyros after doing some work to the

early evening, drove down the main street, couldn’t see a hotel, drove down other streets,

couldn’t see a hotel, so we asked at a garage, where are the hotels in Almyros, because there are

six, you know. He said, no hotels here at all, none. Well, this chap had just wanted to give the

impression that Almyros was a big and thriving place and so he invented these hotels and he

wouldn’t have considered it lying, it’s just the way that they like to fantasise in a sense, making

the town better and bigger than they really were. But that often happened in other – I can’t think

of anything else but I know we came across it more than once.

[1:37:35]

And apart from observation and mapping, did you collect anything on this fieldwork?

Oh yes. You have to collect samples for analysis when you get back.

What kind of analysis was necessary?

Well, if they were sediments with fossils you often had to make a clean surface and polish it so

that somebody who was an expert could identify the fossil and give it an age, which is very

important in an area which is complicated. Other cases you had to make thin sections, that is

very thin slices of rock so that you can actually see through them, they’re thin enough to see

through, and you would use that to identify microfossils, that is extremely small fossils. That’s

what you would do for identifying fossils. Other times you want a thin section to see actually

what the rock is made of, you know, what the bits and pieces are in it and sometimes they were

interesting bits and pieces and you could tell, for example, you might have a sediment that had a

certain kind of mineral in it, like a mica, muscovite, which is a white mica, or a brown mica,

which is unusual. But the contents of all these rocks would tell you something about how they

came into being, basically. Which all adds up to the history and the evolution of the area. If

they were igneous rocks – I didn’t do this myself, but I had students who did this – they would

make thin sections and look at the minerals in the rocks, find out what it was, and then they

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would analyse the minerals using X-ray fluorescents or the electron microprobe and so on, to

find out what kind of igneous rocks they were and what their chemistry was and again, how they

might have originated. In fact it was one of my first students, Andrew Hynes, who’s now

Chairman at McGill in Canada, who was the first person from the Geology Department to use a

machine in the Mineralogy and Petrology Department when we were two separate departments.

Very first one. And that caused quite a lot of raised eyebrows, which gives you an idea of the

feelings at the time. But there was no adverse comment about it. So that’s what you do with the

igneous rocks and I suppose that’s, yeah, you’re always trying to find out how these things came

into being and if what you infer from one rock fits in with what you infer from another, and if

they don’t, you know, don’t fit together, how on earth, you know, what’s wrong.

[1:40:21]

Did you do any or have any of your samples dated?

Yes, sorry, that’s something else. We didn’t do, although I had been in dating at Madingley

Rise, I don’t think Jack Miller was doing as much dating when I was working in Greece as he

had been previously. I’m not sure what the situation was, but we didn’t actually ask Jack to do

any dating for us. I think he needed some money and we hadn’t got enough money to pay for

this sort of – well, we didn’t use the money to pay for that sort of thing, we went elsewhere. We

went to Leeds in fact for dating rocks. And that was fascinating again. In fact we wrote a paper

about the area, we had some dates, we didn’t know what on earth they meant so we didn’t

publish them. Didn’t see any point in publishing dates we didn’t really understand, so we didn’t,

and they turned out to be quite important, subsequently, when we did publish them. Because that

was another thing that we discovered. I don’t mean we were the first to discover it. But when

these big sheets of ocean floor come trundling across a continent as in Oman, they’re actually

quite hot for some reason, which again is another interesting problem. So when they override

these cold rocks they heat up the rocks they’re overriding, metamorphose them, you know,

change them into different minerals which you can date, so you can date when this happened,

and you can show that the date when this happened is very close to the time when these huge

sheets of rock were created and that’s a real problem and it wasn’t solved for a long time. And

it’s been solved up to a point now, but basically most of these so-called ophiolites that are on

continents were formed very shortly before they were put on to the continents, and we don’t

know why and it’s a general effect.

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No, that does seem confusing because you would have thought they’d be…

They’re not old rocks that have been pushed on to the continents because you can date the rocks

and you can date the metamorphism caused by them and if they were old rocks they wouldn’t be

hot enough to create those metamorphic rocks, because they would have cooled down. The

ocean floor being created all the time is cooling down all the time and by the time, you know, if

these rocks were cold, which they should have been, they would not have metamorphosed the

rocks that they override, because they would have been cold and they wouldn’t have

recrystallised the rocks.

So it means that something is coming up quickly?

Something is being… the ocean floor, and these are ocean floor rocks, but they’re a rather

special kind of ocean floor rocks which are created at a given time, T say, and then within

perhaps as little as one or two in some cases, or three million years, they end up on the continent.

Now how that happens and why it happens isn’t fully understood. So we got, although I got into

the Greek area trying to understand the overall relationship of ophiolites to the shallow water

rocks underneath, but as we went on mapping this stuff and thinking about it and reading what

other people had done and so on, we found there was a whole pile of problems we hadn’t even

thought of that suddenly emerged. Well not suddenly, but emerged over the years and it’s still

true actually. Even now there are – well I’m not doing any fieldwork – but people are

discovering things in these rocks which have a very, must be very significant in some way but

we don’t know what the significance is. So I mean it was a good area to work on and it’s still

got a lot going for it actually. But as I say, Greece is not necessarily the place to understand all

these problems because it’s been so highly deformed.

And how did you get samples back to the laboratory?

Ah, well we had to go through the Survey again, we had to get a permit to – and they had to be

inspected. So we used to, we found the best containers were actually olive oil cans because

they’re metal and if, you know, the carriers, if they drop these things they wouldn’t split open,

they’d just get dented, whereas if you use cardboard boxes or wooden boxes, unless they were

relatively small they were heavy and people do drop them, they do fall off backs of lorries and so

on, and you lose your samples. So we used to get somebody to inspect the rocks in Athens and

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then I think, I don’t know how we did this, but I think they gave us a certificate to say that these

had been inspected and we used to take them down to a welder who would weld the lid on so it

wouldn’t come apart. So it was a completely contained metal box which you could kick and hit

and everything else, but at least you wouldn’t lose your samples. We had to have them inspected

because the Greeks quite rightly are afraid that some people would be exporting archaeological

relics, which some people did do that, so that’s why they instituted this inspection. So it was

fairly straightforward. We found ways of getting it done quickly and safely. Still got some of

the rocks. Well, they’re archived in the department’s collections actually.

[end of track 6]

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[Track 7]

On this track I’d like to ask about the diary which you lent me, which is a diary which you kept

for a year, for 1948, so you were either ten or eleven during 1948.

I was eleven in February.

Yes, that’s right. And before I ask you about the content of it, I wonder whether you have any

memories of writing it?

I think so. Not very clear and I have very little idea what’s actually in it, I think you probably

know better than I do what’s in it. But I do remember keeping records of weather, ie wind

direction, rain temperature. Now whether they were in this diary or in subsequent or previous

ones, I don’t know. And sort of natural history things, like when things come out into flower and

that sort of thing, and possibly what I did. As I say, I haven’t read it for years so you can

probably ask me questions and I’ll try and answer them.

Do you remember when you, sort of when during the day you wrote it? Do you have a picture of

yourself somewhere as a child writing this diary?

If it was 1948 it would have been in our new house, I mean not new in the sense of new build,

but a house we had just moved into, because my father needed a larger workshop for his work

and fortunately we were able to get permission for him to have his workshop in the house itself.

Well not in the house, but in the outbuildings. So that would have been in there, which would

have been probably – and I can’t remember – I can’t remember if it was in the dining room at

home or my bedroom. I just can’t remember.

And do you have any sense of the experience you’d had of seeing other diaries by this age?

No. I think my father kept a diary, a very small pocket diary. This was a much larger affair and

I don’t know why I started it or how I started it. I don’t think, I don’t recollect reading any

books about diaries or books that had diaries in them.

And have you looked at it or read it since you…

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I’ve only read it, glanced at it since, you know, we’ve made contact with one another, and that

was very, very briefly for, you know, five minutes almost.

[02:27]

What then do you remember at this age of ten or eleven of interest in the weather?

Well, I was always curious about how the weather worked, and I’m still curious because I don’t

understand it properly. And it’s much more complex now we have… we can see it’s much more

complex now that we have these radar images of rainfall and things like that. In those days it

was largely a matter of tracking anticyclones and depressions, as they were called, as they came

across Britain. And there seemed to be a pattern of the weather coming from the west moving

east and sometimes things didn’t happen like an anticyclone stayed over Britain, we had some

wonderful weather for a time, especially in the summer, but it was very difficult to find in the

library any books that explained all this, actually. And I still have puzzles about the weather.

I’ve asked some of our Fellows who are physicists about why certain things are true and the

answers are not always clear. One of the things I’m still puzzled over, and I think it is related to

the earth’s rotation as somebody said when I asked them, is that you never find really storm

force or gale force winds in an anticyclone, you always get them in depressions. Now, why is

that, and some people give me an answer and other people don’t know. And they’re people who

are physicists, basically. But I think it is related to the earth’s rotation, but again, I haven’t

followed it up.

What do you remember of any weather equipment that you made or acquired?

Well, I remember there was a wonderful shop in Watford which is near Bushey, Bushey Heath

where I used to visit, I think it was called Turner’s and they were primarily an optician’s but they

sold all sorts of scientific equipment like condensers, you know, reflux condensers, beakers, test

tubes, microscopes, and I think that’s probably where I bought a thermometer I used. And I

can’t remember what I used for a rain gauge but I did have one and I might have made a little

weather station in the sense of a little box which had free access to the air, but was in shade or at

least kept the direct sun off things. But I can’t truly say I can remember that actually.

And you actually had a homemade rain gauge, according to the diary?

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I don’t think so, I might have again, bought it at this place called Turner’s and I can’t remember

how I even calibrated it. What I can’t remember actually is whether I did actually measure the

amount of rain. I think I did, but I can’t – it’ll be in the diary – but I can’t remember.

And do you remember a temperature chart on the wall of the playroom?

No.

Or apparatus that you made for telling air pressure?

No, I never remember that. No. I wouldn’t know how to do that… I’d have to think about how

to do that today actually.

And what do you remember of making forecasts?

Nothing. But incidentally, the best forecast – if you want to be more correct than the Met Office

the best forecast you can make is that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it is today. And

we get that more, that forecast is more correct than the Met Office, because the Met Office has to

deal with transitions and things like that. Anyway.

Do you still make weather observations or measurements today?

I have a rain gauge in my garden, primarily for the garden and just to get some idea of whether

the aquifers around Cambridge are going to fill up or not. I don’t keep a written record but I do

look, I mean I looked at it this morning and we had about three millimetres last night. We’ve

had quite a bit of rain recently, we’ve had over an inch, in old money, in the last couple of

weeks. But I don’t keep a record of it.

Why do you take an interest in whether the aquifers will fill?

Because if they don’t we’re going to have a hosepipe ban and the garden’s going to be

struggling. But I have got water butts at home now so that there’s a reserve of water which will

keep me going for two or three weeks. But that’s why, basically.

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[06:48]

What do you remember at this age of your interest in astronomy?

Oh, I loved it actually. I do remember being very interested in astronomy. Before we moved

house, that would be before 1947, because I remember I used to go to Sunday school and I can’t

remember, it might have been in winter, winter Sunday school, I was going home, it was dark,

with a lady we called the Deaconess and I knew all about the constellations, I’d got this book on

the stars and I’d found out where the constellations were and worked out what they were. And I

told her about this and she was fascinated. [laughs] But it was, I did discover a very good book

on the sky, it not only gave you the constellations but told you stars in those constellations and

why they were particularly interesting. I mean like, I can’t remember which one it is in Sirius, it

has this dwarf companion, it’s very dense, you can’t see it with the naked eye but you can find

out where the – well it must be the brightest star in Sirius whose name I forget. But that’s, and I

found all that fascinating actually and that was a very good book for somebody of my age and

my interests actually.

How and where did you look at the sky?

Mostly with my father’s binoculars, he had a pair of binoculars, and you’d have to have a dark

place so presumably I did it in the back garden. I can’t remember doing it. But I do remember

seeing things like Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons and things like that. And I used to track

Venus in the sky. It, you know, reached a maximum distance from the sun, therefore set latest

relative to the sun and as it goes, well as we went around the sun Venus gradually approached

the sun and there was a time when you couldn’t actually see it. And the other thing I tried to do,

which I did once or twice, was to actually find Venus right in the middle of the day, it’s a tiny,

small point of light. And that was very pleased, when I could find that, seeing a star, well not a

star but a planet, in the daylight.

Do you remember calculating tables of astronomy?

No.

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[09:12]

Thank you. And what do you remember of your interest in ornithology at this age?

At that age I can’t remember, but I always have found birds fascinating and I’m not one of these,

what do you call them – twitchers – but whenever I go somewhere new I always try and find out

what the birds are that I’m looking at and in fact I have, I’ve got a bird list actually from my

travels around the world which is several pages long. So that’s what I do. And I do remember, I

don’t think… it was much later than 1948, but I do remember going, taking, well my father took

me to Liverpool Street Station, I think, and I travelled overnight to Orford where there used to

be, well, Havergate Island in particular. I was a member of the RSPB at the time and I do

remember going to Havergate Island which was absolutely marvellous because it was like a

living collection of virtually all the British waders exposed to view. And it was just at the time I

think when the first avocets had arrived and that was quite a thrill actually to see them. I can

remember, I took my bike on the train, cycled from probably Ipswich to Havergate and I

remember I got there before the rowing boat – can’t remember the man’s name who used to row

us across to Havergate, or who rowed across to Havergate – but he, you know, probably got

there about five o’clock in the morning and I thought well, I haven’t had any sleep so I moved

my bike over this forestry fence into the forest and sort of tried to sleep with my back against a

fir tree and I have never woken up so cold in my life, I was shivering and damp. [laughs] And I

had to, I literally put on all the clothes I had with me to get warm again. But it was a wonderful

trip actually. I think his name was Harold, the boatman, I can’t remember. We took off from,

oh, can’t remember the little – Orford somewhere I think, Orford Ness or something like that to

row across to Havergate Island. I don’t know if you’ve been there at all?

No.

No, it’s, it was wonderful. So in other words, I’ve always kept an interest in birds but not a

serious interest in the sense of being a twitcher, I don’t collect birds in that sense, but I do keep

mental observations of when the first chiffchaffs arrive or the first swallows or the first swifts or

cuckoos are more difficult because you can’t hear them from where we live in town, but it’s

always a pleasure to hear them when you’re out in the country.

And when you were on fieldwork abroad, for example in Greece, what’s the nature and extent of

your birdwatching or bird noting there?

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Well, I did keep a note. I mean the birds that really fascinated me, because they’re rare in

Britain, were the hoopoes and the bee-eaters, which are very colourful, and of course the birds of

prey, I think they have four different kinds of vultures in Greece, I think it’s four, but there’s

certainly two. And you could see them in the area I was working in actually, and that was quite

interesting. I always meant to go and look at the migration paths that birds take from Europe to

Africa during the winter because great numbers of them glide across the Bosporus from Greece

to Turkey, basically, and it’s a wonderful thing to see but I’ve never actually got there.

[13:01]

What do you remember of using your microscope at this age, including any memories you have

of things viewed through it?

Oh, I mean it was really thrilling. I think one of the thrilling things, it’s a very simple thing, is to

look at a human hair in the microscope, just to have a look at it. You know, we always think

human hair, or we thought then that a human hair was the finest thing you could come across,

and then to see it, I think quite a few millimetres across in one’s visual field was amazing

actually. And I also liked to look at the life you could get in a sample of pond water. I

remember seeing, oh some of the things that we talked about in biology class at school, I can’t

remember, possibly amoeba, and I know there’s something else, I can’t remember what its name

was, but to see these living things as tiny little objects was absolutely thrilling. And then of

course there’s all these routine things. You could take a plant and a razorblade and cut it up and

look at sections of it and see all the cells and all that sort of thing. But I never, I was never

sufficiently interested in biology to take it up as a subject. But I did like using the microscope.

If I can mention some of the things that you say that you looked at and just see whether this sort

of triggers any memories. A fly’s wing with pollen on.

Oh gosh, no.

A dead wasp?

No.

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Blood?

No, I can’t remember those things.

Starch grains?

Yes, I do remember that.

And zinc sulphate crystals?

No, I don’t remember that.

[14:47]

What memories do you have at this age, or any age as a child really, of making maps?

I can remember both making them and looking at them. Now I don’t know what age I was, but I

think just after we had moved to Bushey Heath where we had this much larger house I do

remember making a plan of the whole house, at least a ground plan, I don’t think I included the

first floor, but I do remember measuring out the garden and the house ground plan. And painting

it up with watercolour paints and so on. That’s somewhere at home, I can’t remember where it

is. And I do remember what really fascinated me was I could look for hours and hours at an

atlas. I just loved looking at maps actually.

Why?

They engaged my imagination in terms of, you know, if you look at a map of Arabia and you see

this huge empty space, empty quarter and so on, you wonder what it was like there and it’s a

matter of imagining oneself into the countries which were displayed in front of you. I think

partly, I mean I don’t know if it’s true, but I don’t know if it was stimulated by this, but I had an

aunt who lived in – well, quarter of an aunt – who lived in India during the war and she sent us

the most marvellous letters about Indian life and Indian animals and so on and sent us, well the

letters always had exotic stamps on them and I felt somehow that, well perhaps that stimulated

me, I don’t know. But I always loved to read what explorers had done and there was a chap

called Colonel Fawcett – I think F-A-W-C-E-double T – I think it was he, who got lost in the

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Amazonian jungle. I mean I don’t think I would have liked to have been with him because it

really was horrible, but I used to love reading travel books like that actually, and that coupled

with the atlases I think has stimulated my imagination.

[17:05]

What do you remember of making maps of outdoor places?

I can’t remember actually making a map of an outdoor place, but I used to do a lot of exploring

around the neighbourhood on my bicycle and I do remember buying Ordnance Survey maps and

taking them with me and seeing how far I could cycle from our house and then back to the house

in the same day. I mean I can remember going up to Tring, or near Tring, up to Aston Clinton,

that’s right. That was about the farthest I went north. And then I almost got into, I went past

Basingstoke on one cycle thing, back to where we lived. So I did do quite a lot of exploring, so

to speak, on a bike, with maps.

What do you remember of Stanmore Common?

Oh, that was a wonderful place actually. It was a real common land in the sense it had no

buildings on it or anything. It was really a wood, not a common in the old sense, well in the

sense that I envisage it as being sort of open grassland and so on. But it was really a wood and

again, it was a wonderful place for finding different kinds of mushrooms, flowers, birds, trees,

anything like that. And it was a wonderful place to cycle in actually.

Who did you go there with?

Well, when I was young I went on my own, but at school, when I was a bit older, I had two or

three friends and we used to cycle around, play games.

And Elstree Reservoir?

Oh that’s another place, yes. Forgotten about that. There are two reservoirs actually; there’s one

south of the road that goes between them, small one, which I never really went to, but the one on

the north side was excellent for birdwatching again, especially if you were lucky I think you

might have one or two waders though I can’t think of any at the moment, but you certainly had

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lots of things like grebes and gulls and that sort of thing and it was an ideal place for those birds

actually.

Can you picture it now?

Yes.

What do you see?

An expanse of water with overhanging trees and I think there was a concrete wall on one of the,

probably the thing that made it into a reservoir. Yeah. Walking around the edge, basically.

You did, according to your diary, make maps of Stanmore Common and Elstree Reservoir.

[laughs] I can’t remember that at all actually. That’s interesting. There’s an interesting object

or thing in Stanmore Common and I don’t know whether it’s related to the last century’s wars or

not, but it was an earthworks, for want of a better word, there was a big ditch around it like a

little wall, made presumably from the excavations from the ditch, and I always wondered

whether it had an archaeological significance but I never bothered to look it up, actually. You

say I made a map of these things? I don’t remember that at all actually. Interesting.

You also, on the fourteenth of August this year, in 1948, said that you were making maps about

geology.

Did I? That’s interesting.

What memories do you have of making…

Absolutely none. If you, I mean I have absolutely no recollection of doing that at all, actually.

Interesting.

No, I can’t think of where I would have put them either, at home, if I kept them.

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[21:04]

The Collins Magazine.

Oh yes.

What do you remember of reading that, because you received this sort of periodically through

this year?

That was a wonderful magazine. It folded I think, well it has folded, like so many magazines,

but I don’t know if it was devoted to natural history but it was certainly devoted I think to

outdoor things and I think it did have articles on natural history in it and it was beautifully

illustrated and beautifully produced. It might have been, it might have been the same publishers

who published the New Naturalist series, I’m not sure, but when those books came out and that

magazine came out it was a real step upwards in terms of interesting magazines. I used to love it

actually. I think my mother subscribed to The Children’s Newspaper, edited by AJ Mee, etc.

And I do remember she, yes, well, my father and mother together bought me – and I can’t

remember when they bought me these things – a set of the Children’s Encyclopaedias. I used to

read them from cover to cover actually, it was fascinating. So, you know, if couldn’t get a book

in the library I would often just sit down and just go through the Children’s Encyclopaedias

because they were so interesting actually, and so varied.

What did the Collins Magazine look like, what do you remember it looking like?

I remember, I think, that it was about an A4 size, bit less than A4 probably, glossy cover I think,

glossy pages. I don’t remember whether it had any colour illustrations, I can remember black

and white.

Are there any – this is asking quite a lot – are there any images or pages that you remember in

particular?

No.

[22:57]

Thank you. And bus numbering?

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[laughs]

As you called it.

Gosh. Bus number collecting. Yeah, bus numbers. Yes, like most of my friends we went

through phases or manias of collecting things. You know, it could be anything. I can remember

at least three or four different things we used to collect, one of which was bus numbers. Because

there were little books or booklets you could buy which listed all the buses in the London

Transport system, for example. And I don’t know what it was, but I do remember going off on

my own, I don’t remember how old I was, I even went to the Old Kent Road garage I think,

because that was where some of the prized numbers, some of the instances of a small number of

coaches which never actually made it into the mainstream were run by London Transport and to

get these was a real achievement, you see. It was good fun because I used to go up on the tube,

on the Bakerloo line and make my way there somehow. Probably got thrown out of the garage

once or twice because I was not supposed to be there. And that was one thing and then another

thing we did was collect train numbers, you know, because we were quite near the London

Euston line, used to go down to Oxhey and collect train numbers, get the Flying Scotsman and so

on, things like that. That was a great thrill as well. We used to collect cigarette packets. I can

remember the Passing Cloud, an old brand of cigarettes and, you know, if you got one of those

you could swap it for quite a few other not so… And stamp collecting of course, yes. And then

we used to collect transfers. I don’t know if you remember those little books of transfers. You

could float the transfer off – I don’t know how they’re made, they’re fascinating things, transfers

– and you could put them in a book and so on. And they often had a series of things, but they

were very difficult to do because they often broke when you were floating them off or mounting

them. And there were other things like cigarette cards. I was never really interested in football

cards, cigarette cards, but I did like the natural history cigarette cards and you’d swap these at

school. And I don’t know how one fitted all this stuff in, but those are the things that one did. I

used to collect, I had a book of unsolved crimes as well, from the paper. I used to cut out,

regularly cut out stories of dreadful murders and that sort of thing and I don’t know what I was

expecting to do with them, but it’s just the sort of thing one did as a boy actually. Oh, I had a

book of pressed flowers as well which I’d collected from the neighbourhood and so on. That’s

around somewhere, but I don’t know where it is.

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[25:55]

Any fossils?

Very few. I never, I was never one of the kind of geologists that from the age of year dot they

collect fossils. I used to collect shells, but not fossils. And the only fossil I ever found actually in

our house and garden was, I don’t know if I kicked it, but a piece of flint had inside it a beautiful

little shell, or impression of a shell, mould. And that’s the only fossil I can remember collecting

until I started geology at university. Geology was not a major interest, even though I made these

maps you mentioned, while I was at school.

Is that because of lack of teaching in it or because of the competition of other interests which

were…

Both, I should think actually. We were not in a geologically favourable area, we were essentially

on the, probably on the London clay and the chalk which was, well, parts of London clay are

superb but it’s very poorly exposed around the area I was living in. One or two streams, but that

was after I started geology. No, I would never dream of actually collecting fossils, it never

occurred to me to do that.

[end of track 7]

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[Track 8]

Yes, more memories of weather recording.

Yeah. One thing I really was fascinated by were the types of clouds that the weather produced,

you know, all these high cirrus, cirrostratus and stratus and then the cumulus and cumulonimbus

and altocumulus. I just, I liked the names – oh and nimbus of course – but the actual patterns

they made in the sky were fascinating and they were particularly important because you could

actually read the weather if it behaved normally, as it were, from the changes in the clouds. You

could, you know, one day have a clear sky and then suddenly – well not suddenly – but cirrus

would appear and then that would become a cirrostratus with a layer and you knew that

something, some bad weather or probably some rain was on its way or something like that. So

the clouds did have a predictive importance and relevance and I quite liked that. But I never

understood why there were different kinds of clouds and I still don’t actually. I mean I always

love watching them from an airplane when one’s flying. One of the things I found particularly

interesting is actually why some clouds show shadows or dark colours and others are in

essentially bright sunlight. It’s obviously to do with the shape of the cloud, the three-

dimensional shape which you can’t get just by looking out of a window. But there are, there

seem to be some anomalies which I don’t understand and if I keep flying I shall have another

look.

Before we go on with your recording today, you mentioned when I arrived today that you’d had

a dream which you think might be influenced by the sort of fact of doing these interviews and I

wondered if you wanted to describe that before we go on?

Well, I’m not pointing a finger or anything like that, but I think by asking these questions it

makes me think or remember things I have forgotten about for years, you know, well over sixty,

seventy years. I had a very vivid dream just before waking up today. I was in a little house, or I

don’t know about a little house, but I was on the ground floor of a house, I think it was a fairly

modern house decorated with plain walls, white walls and so on, looking out through the window

to the garden and there was a young wood, a stand of trees at the bottom of the garden, and I was

suddenly, well I don’t know, I can’t say I was woken up because I was dreaming, but I suddenly

heard this enormously loud noise and rushed to the window and saw this huge plane, it was a

Lancaster bomber, completely black, going through this, about to hit this wood, or going through

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it actually – that sort of thing happens in a dream – and then I thought God, is it going to crash,

and then somehow the pilot started going vertically and turning back on himself, which is

exactly towards where I was looking, and I woke up with a start. But it was a very vivid dream

and I think it must be related, well obviously is related to the war and one’s fears of what might

happen to you at the time.

[03:24]

Thank you. You mentioned that you were in Prague in 1968.

Yes.

I wondered whether you could tell the story of how you came to be there and what you saw when

you were there?

Well, the prime motivation for going to Prague was the International Geological Congress, held,

organised by the Czechs under communist rule, and they had put an enormous amount of effort

into getting it running. They had several, well certainly a few thousand geologists there. It’s a

congress that takes place every four years I think, international congress. People from all over

the world come and give talks, meet other people, discuss things, and the reason I went there

partly was because it was the congress, though I was a young faculty member at the time and

wanted to present a paper there, which has never been published, incidentally. One of my

unpublished papers drawers. It was about work I’d done in America and I was going to meet my

wife. She was being driven to Prague by one of our heads of department before we

amalgamated, a chap called Harry Whittington, and his wife Dorothy. She was American, he’d

been at Harvard and had been appointed as Woodwardian Professor. Very nice man, and they

agreed, well they didn’t agree, they offered to take my wife Judy with them to Prague in the car,

so they drove there. And I was going to meet Judy in Prague and then we were going to have a

holiday I think. I can’t remember the details. Anyway, to cut a long story short, there was a

very good field trip from my point of view, because I’m interested in tectonics, to what’s called

the Carpathian bend, which is, if you look at a map, it’s where the Carpathians turn almost

through 180 degrees and well, have a bend, if you look at the mountain range itself. And the

question is, you know, what caused that, was it an original bend from some reason or other, or

had it been straight originally and then bent subsequently, and I was curious about this because

we didn’t understand these things and I went on this trip. It was a bit disappointing because the

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exposures, that is the rocks you can see, are rather covered up by quite thick forest and

vegetation. You can see things but they’re not as well exposed as they were in Greece, which is

where I’d been working. Anyway, it was a good trip, they were very nice people and the trip

was actually in Romania and I took the train from Romania to Prague and it was a very crowded

train, went through Budapest and it was quite an eye-opener, because we went through, right

through the centre of the city, as I recollect, and you could see all these bullet holes and well,

shell holes in some cases, resulting from the Hungarian uprising in 1956 was it? Can’t

remember, actually. I think it was 1956. Same time as Suez almost. And, you know, you

realised what could happen if things went wrong. Got into, I got into Prague, got into my hotel,

met my wife, who went to sleep, woke up in the morning, put on the radio above the bed, and all

we could hear was martial music. And we thought well that’s perhaps how they do things in this

country. And we could hear sort of rat-a-tat-tats outside, didn’t know what they were or

anything like that. Anyway, we got up late, went down to the restaurant for breakfast, which is

on the first floor, and everyone was, it was completely full, people sitting down, but it was quite

silent or quiet and nobody seemed to do anything. So I signalled to the waiter to come across

and take an order for breakfast, and he spoke good English and he said, ‘Have you looked

outside Sir?’ [laughs] or something like that. And I said no, so we went outside and from the

balcony we could see all these tanks coming up the street and what was worrying about the tanks

or the people in the tanks was, I think most of them were essentially Asiatic, Mongolian or

something like that, who clearly didn’t understand, well I don’t know if they understood Russian,

I suppose they understood some Russian, but they didn’t understand English or the Czechs or

anybody. So here was a group of soldiers, heavily armed, with tanks, people walking the streets,

armoured cars and so on, who obviously wouldn’t understand what they were doing in terms of

the setting. So if they were ordered to do something they would do it without question.

Fortunately, it didn’t come to a shooting war, but you know, the question was, having got there,

how would you get out. And we were there for several days I think. The congress was cancelled

eventually. The reason it was cancelled, well, there was too much pressure I think, but it was a

terrible thing for the Czechs, they spent all these years planning this conference and as long as

the conference was going on the Russians could claim that everything was perfectly normal, and

of course it wasn’t and if they cancelled it they would lose this wonderful opportunity to meet

other people and discuss things with them. So they did cancel it eventually and I think the

people who’d flown there or taken the train just waited for their embassies to do something. And

I think the Canadian Embassy essentially rescued us in a sense by organising a train from Prague

to Paris, which we got on. And one of the most touching things I remember leaving Prague was,

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both of us were very touched by this, was the railway lines were lined with people in many

places who were waving to us, because they knew who we were, and saying don’t forget us, tell

everyone about us. It was very, it was a very tense time really, because you just didn’t know

what was going to happen. And I remember, having been through Budapest and got into Prague,

we were staying right, I think we overlooked Wenceslas Square at this hotel we had, and you

realised it was full of little passageways and alleys and so on, which would be absolutely ideal

for guerrilla warfare. So if the Czechs decided to start, or if the Russians decided to start

something, we’d be in the thick of it, basically. I mean there was a complete, well, I won’t call

him a maniac, but he was verging on being rather silly. I didn’t know him, I can’t remember his

name actually, but he was a young chap about my age and he used to go out, he was on his own,

he used to go out walking the streets and seeing what was going on, and occasionally tanks were

set on fire, Czechs would walk behind a tank and set fire to the sacking at the back of the tank,

which was fuel soaked, and start a fire on a tank and the tank would blow up, or at least catch

fire. And they did fire things. So when he got to know us he said, look, can you look after these

things for me, and these things turned out to be empty shell cases which we were supposed to

hide under the bed for him. It was a really sort of surrealistic experience in a way. So that’s

why, that’s how I came to be in Prague.

[11:55]

Thank you. Last time you said that plate tectonics very rapidly changed your conception of the

earth, or the sort of working hypothesis that you were using, what conception of the earth were

you operating with before?

It was rather a vague one when I think about, but it was based on Harold Jeffreys’s book and

people like him. Harold Jeffreys was in this college actually. He was a Fellow for over seventy

years, which gives you an idea of his distinction and antiquity and so on. But Harold essentially

founded, I think, the subject of geophysics and wrote several books, but his book The Earth was

absolutely splendid. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to set up seismological tables

about travel times of earthquakes using mechanical calculators, he didn’t have any electronic

calculators, and that was done with Bullen, one of his students I think, Keith Bullen. And that

was a real milestone in seismology. But because of this and partly because he did not believe

that the earth could convect and if it did, convection occurred perhaps, I can’t remember he said

this, convection probably occurred in the core, but not in the mantle around the core. And

therefore continental drift, if it occurred, would only have occurred when there was convection,

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which would have been very early on in the earth’s history, according to his views. So the idea

of continental drift was complete anathema to him and I think he proved that one of the

exponents of continental drift, Alfred Wegener, who put together the evidence for drift and had a

theory about how continents could move based on his exploration in the Arctic I think, and

looking at ice floes and regarding those as an analogue of how continents move around. Harold

shows that his ideas of how continents could move were completely wrong. Now, whether

Harold regarded that as a proof that continental drift could not occur, or certainly other people

regarded that as a proof that continental drift could not occur from a physicist’s point of view,

geophysicist’s point of view, and as you probably know, it gave rise to one of the most

interesting arguments in the twentieth century about whether continental drift did occur or

whether it didn’t. And academically in, specially in I think parts of America, it was rather

frowned on, it didn’t help your career if you believed in continental drift. It became almost a

religious thing, almost in that sense. And what Harold said was okay, we have mountains and

they have folds and the rocks are crumpled up and so on, the earth is cooling down, it therefore

contracts and what you’re looking at are the kind of wrinkles you would get on an apple that was

drying and shrinking and the crust has to adapt to that shrinkage, and that was his model for drift.

So there was a model for mountain ranges, it wasn’t predictive in the sense that plate tectonics is,

but it gave a reasonable explanation of what you could see. And then when plate tectonics came

along with this completely different way of looking at things, I could see how it would apply to

the earth and it just completely changed my views of things. I can’t remember how long it took,

but you know, it was obvious, somehow that it was right, basically.

So you would have, if asked, before plate tectonics you would have probably gone for the earth

cooling down, shrinking and buckling the earth.

Yes.

[15:57]

In terms of the Greek work, what were the advantages of the Department of Defense maps, the

US Department of Defense maps which you were able to get over what was available freely?

They were just better maps, that’s all. In fact, we never used them, we used them very little

because ironically the Greeks sold geological maps, their Survey, Greek Geological Survey, sold

geological maps which had topography on them and since the main purpose of getting the

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Defense maps was to have good topography and good maps, having the topography on them,

which is supposed to be a military secret, for some reason they took out every other contour. I

can’t remember the details, but they didn’t connect the two, they didn’t connect the fact that you

could buy geological maps with topography, the fact that actually they also had what they in any

other terms would regard as a secret. They weren’t very good maps, I mean there were, I must

admit… well they were much better than anything else, you couldn’t buy topographic maps at

the time but they were, there were occasionally times when I was mapping in the area and a

valley would be there on the map which wasn’t there in front of my eyesight, as it were, looking

at it, and vice versa. But they were much better, they were perfectly okay for mapping on the

scale we were doing the work.

[17:25]

And if you knew that Oman was a better site for doing the sort of work that you were doing, why

not work in Oman?

Well, I didn’t know about this until I really got into Greece and I wanted to, well, I wanted to

complete the work in Greece. It never occurred to me actually to go to Oman because I knew a

lot of people were going there. I did get out there. Ian Gass at the Open University very kindly

flew me out one season and showed me with his students the rocks in Oman because he knew I’d

been looking at similar rocks in Greece and we had some ideas about them and he wanted to find

out what we thought about the stuff in Greece and whether it was applicable to Oman. And I did

go out once or twice to Oman through Ian Gass’s good… He, we kept in… he and I got on quite

well and we used keep in touch and our students used to work with one another and so on and we

used to send students from here, Cambridge, to the OU because he liked the training they had I

think. Ian was very good at picking up people who could work in Oman, it’s not easy to work in

Oman, it certainly was much more difficult when he was working there than it is now, but he had

a knack of finding the right people to do that kind of work.

And more difficult to work there than Greece at the same time?

Yes.

Because?

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It was more of a closed country. I mean you had to have – I don’t know how true this is – but

after the war, probably after the war, the sultan who was in charge or ran Oman, I don’t know

whether he invented it or whatever, but the government of Oman in addition to having a visa you

had to have I think – I don’t know if it’s in addition to or whether this was a substitute for a visa

– you had to have what was called a ‘No Objection Certificate’ and the story is, and I don’t know

how true this is, but the story is that when the first plane, airlines used to drop off there, the

Sultan, so it was said, used to watch people coming down the steps and, you know, he said, ‘No

objection, no objection’ and then he would get a certificate or she would get a certificate, but

somebody else might not and they would get sent back. It was quite strict. I mean I think

Alastair Robertson, Edinburgh might have not had a ‘No Objection Certificate’ for one of his

visits and was sent back to Edinburgh. And it was a very, I mean the towns, when BP were

working – I think BP was working there, or maybe British… yes, it was BP I think – the people

who used to work there, I think most of them have gone now but it would be interesting to talk to

them because I think Muscat and the cities in Oman used to have a curfew, literally, I mean the

town gates would close and everything would shut up, basically, for the evening. And it changed

from that to what it is today in the space of fifty years or so, and Ian was at that transitional

stage.

[20:43]

You said something last time that intrigued me and it was about the Greek work and you said

that in geology you look at a small area but you can’t be sure about that area until you’ve got

evidence from another area, and then you said so that’s very different from physics, and I

wonder whether you could expand on that difference?

Well physics, you’re always trying to isolate phenomena. I mean specially in particle physics or

something like that. You try to pare down all the factors and you just have a small number of

variables looking at a particular feature. So you try, you ignore everything else except that

particular thing you’re working on and you try to eliminate all extraneous factors that would

upset that, and you do experiments and you come up with equations and you solve them and see

if your results conform to those solutions of those equations and if they don’t you adapt the

equations or change your experimental set-up, because you might have mistaken it. So the

physics is really focussing on very small things, well not small things, but small questions, not

small questions, isolated phenomena, it tries to isolate a particular phenomenon as much as it

can, whereas in geology you have to take it as it is, you can’t experiment, it’s there. It’s like

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astronomy, you know, you can’t do anything about the galaxy, you have to observe and make

different observations and put them together and make a story, which is quite different from

having an experimental set-up. You can’t experiment on what is there, you can experiment in a

lab on things that resemble what is there but it’s not what is there.

[22:25]

Thank you. I wonder whether you remember what members of the Department of Geology when

you first joined it would say about the Department of Geodesy and Geophysics?

Well, quite frankly I think they were rather scared of Bullard.

What did they say about him?

Well, he was a bit of a maverick. He was independently wealthy, he owned Bullard Ales at the

time, he was a very good scientist, and I think they feared him actually. I don’t know if I said

this last time, but this is one of the reasons why we didn’t amalgamate into one department until

whenever it was, twenty-five, thirty years ago, whereas Deer, when he was Professor of

Mineralogy and Petrology and also Master of Trinity Hall, he wrote a report called The Deer

Report, which again, memory may be in error, suggested or proposed that Geology, Mineralogy

and Petrology and Geophysics should amalgamate into a single department and that we should

move out to west Cambridge near Bullard Labs, as it is now, Madingley Rise as it was then. But

there was no possibility I don’t think of Geology agreeing to that unless we were pushed by the

university, say, agreeing to that until Bullard had retired. I mean I think, I do think people had

the view that Bullard just wouldn’t support many of the staff in Geology and if they retired or

something he would get somebody in who was more in his line of country. Whether that was

true or not, just can’t say.

Were there things that geologists tended to say about geophysics in the way that different

subjects will say things about others?

Yes, they did and I’m trying to remember what they said actually. I honestly can’t remember but

the impression, the residual memory that I have was that they were a completely different

subject. Didn’t relate, you know, didn’t have to worry about geology. Don’t know. Sorry, I

should know but I don’t. If I remember I’ll let you know.

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[25:04]

Thank you. Could you start to tell the story of the origin of work on the calibration of the

geological timescale which I think you start in the mid sixties.

Yes, that’s correct.

And the first edition of A Geological Timescale, Cambridge University Press, comes out in 1982.

Yes. There was an earlier book published by the Geological Society of London. It was their

first special publication, I think, which Brian Harland was the driving force behind and I got

involved with that work. This is how I got involved with it. I came back to Cambridge from the

States, I didn’t know what I was going to do in terms of work, but I knew that I liked working

outside and, you know, looking at rocks, as opposed to doing geophysical measurements, which

I did some in the States. And I didn’t want to do experimental geophysics or anything like that.

It was the idea of, I just liked going out and looking at remote areas I think. [laughs] I was

delighted when I had the opportunity to do that, which was triggered in part by Brian Harland’s

interest in the timescale because I spent one summer, probably 19… I don’t know, sixty… let’s

think. Might have been 1965 even, I can’t remember. But it was one summer and I did a lot of

data abstraction from publications of age dates, rocks that had been dated and the idea was to

document what had been done, what measurements were made, what the results were, what the

setting was geologically and put all these into a timescale volume. I can’t… I can’t remember

what it was called actually. It may have been called The Phanerozoic Timescale, I just… I think

there was a timescale in it. But as I say, Brian Harland was in it and our job was to abstract

virtually all the data which was relevant to setting up a geological timescale. We didn’t abstract

all dates because some of them were completely irrelevant, but those dates that might be relevant

to setting up a geological timescale. And I seem to remember that we had a meeting in Glasgow

and I can’t be sure of this, it’s probably in the preface to the book, where Holmes is actually

present, I met him briefly, Arthur Holmes. He was quite old, his mind wasn’t as clear as it had

been earlier and physically wasn’t in the best of shape, but it was very nice to meet the man

who’d really dated the earth, years ago. And geology suffered from the lack of a decent

measuring stick, if you like, if you regard timescale as a measuring rod in time, we didn’t have a

good one actually. There were huge gaps in it. And Brian realised this and he may have realised

this partly because he couldn’t solve some of his own geological problems from mapping in

Svalbard with the timescale that existed at that particular moment.

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[28:56]

So what did, for those who don’t know what a geological timescale is, what did exist before you

started this work?

Well, Holmes had set up a timescale. That is to say he had, you know, the rocks laid down from

the beginning of the earth, we don’t have those preserved, but as you come forwards in time you

get rocks that are younger and younger and younger and the most familiar geological name for

people at the minute is Jurassic, as in Jurassic Park and they know it’s something to do with,

whatever, what Jurassic was. And Jurassic was, you can say, what, 150 or so million years ago.

And you’d have another, the oldest rocks with fossils in them are about, well, with fossils

because they’re useful for dating things, because you can date things by fossils, you know, the

evolution of life. To understand how the earth’s evolved you do need, specially if you’re doing

physics and chemistry, you do need to know some numbers about when the Cambrian was in

terms of millions of years and dating rocks by radioactive minerals in them allows you to do this.

So the geological timescale is essentially a table listing what we call Precambrian, Cambrian, etc,

all those rocks that have fossils – well not the, Precambrian doesn’t have many fossils in – but

the Cambrian and subsequent rocks have lots of fossils in them and you can set up a timescale

based on the evolution of life, you know, from simple to more complex as we usually do it, but it

doesn’t have numbers attached to it. If you want to understand anything about rates and

processes and how fast things happen, how slowly they happen, you have to have a number and a

timescale gives you that number. It gives you a number for the names that we give to rocks with

fossils, basically. And the numbers available to Holmes were very small and because they’re

small, you might have a rock that has some fossils in, you wanted to know what its age was,

you’d have to guess it and there’d be a, the bottom of it, you would know it was bracketed by

two numbers but the rock itself, the uncertainty might be several tens of millions of years,

certainly in the worst cases, certainly several million years, and that’s just not good enough if

you’re going to be a science really. So Brian was really trying to make, collect data, put it all

together, because it’s scattered all over the place, put it together to give us a timescale which

would be better than the preceding timescale. And that’s been the story ever since. I know it

doesn’t answer your question about how I got involved and so on, but that’s where I first got

involved and then Brian some time later, I think, was it – I can’t remember if it was 1980 or not

– but Allan Cox who was at Stanford came over for a sabbatical in Cambridge, Brian Harland

was writing a book about tillites, that is old ice age deposits, I was working in Greece, and Peter

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Llewellyn who used to run the BP research labs in Sunbury, or maybe he’d just started doing

that, but somehow or other we all realised – I might actually have initiated this in some ways –

but we all realised that the timescale had existed even after Brian’s efforts in 1965 weren’t good

enough. We kept on finding anomalies that we couldn’t understand because things weren’t dated

properly or they had no dates and so we all of us collaborated to – I think it was in 1980,

timescale, I can’t remember actually, or 1982. Anyway, doesn’t matter. That was the second

timescale volume, concentrating particularly on the timescale without all these itemisations that

we had put in the previous one. I worked on that and that was very interesting because it did

actually give you a better understanding of what you were looking at, and that’s the reason,

really the only reason I suppose that I’ve ever contributed in some way to a timescale. I mean

the most recent one was in 2004, it was published, a big volume, I didn’t have a lot to do with

that except I did start, again, I did start that off and Felix Gradstein and Jim Ogg sort of ran with

it and produced this marvellous volume. I did a lot of the editing on it and that sort of thing, but I

did it because in part I found that successive timescales give you a much better inside picture, a

picture of what’s going on in the earth than a bad timescale, or you know, a poorly documented

or, yeah, a poorly documented timescale.

[34:04]

So in terms of the first timescale, the…

Yeah, Brian’s timescale?

Yeah.

You – sorry?

Did that sort of begin your involvement in it rather than being something you worked…

Yes.

So what was involved in helping with the second one, apart from, as you’ve said, collecting dates

from publications and sort of compiling them, what else was involved practically in this work,

what did you have to go and look at or…

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We didn’t look at very much. Certainly never looked at anything in the field. That’s interesting,

I can’t… Just trying to remember the dates. I know Allan Cox wrote a chapter on the magnetic

polarity timescale, you know, when the earth’s magnetic field changes every so often, what was

normal polarity becomes the reverse polarity and the magnetic field of the earth flips. It does

this randomly and that provides a very good barcode, if you like, it’s like a barcode, for dating

things. You can’t put numbers on it, except by actually dating the rocks and of course you can

put numbers on it from the ocean floor because the polarity timescale is tape recorded in the

ocean floor, as it were. Well, that’s fine for going back to about 180 million years or so and

earlier times we just have… at that time we had a relatively few number of dates that were

relevant to the timescale. Oh I remember, yes of course, we got Richard Armstrong involved in

British Columbia, he was a wonderful geologist. He ran an age dating lab and was also very

much a field geologist as well in the Western Cordillera in Canada in particular and he compiled

a database of several hundred dates that were relevant to the timescale and he criticised each one,

he looked at each one and evaluated them. And that was the data that we used to set up that

revised timescale along with the magnetic stripes. And then there was quite a lot of work had

been done on further sub-divisions of the timescale using fossils from all over the world and so

on and Brian in particular put all that together. I think my contribution was sort of general

putting together I think and working with Allan Cox and Richard Armstrong, I did go and see

Richard Armstrong actually in Canada and we went through the stuff together.

[36:58]

What use was made of dates from British laboratories?

Well, there weren’t many… to be able to have something useful for the timescale you have to

have a rock which has minerals in it that you can date, which were formed at the time the rock

was laid down, they’re usually volcanic rocks or ashes, and they have to be in fossiliferous

sediments otherwise you can’t link it to the biological timescale and there aren’t many of those

in Britain. There are some and in fact there were quite a few in, I think in Wales where they

have ash beds, volcanic ashes inter-bedded with rocks that carry a very rapidly evolving fossil

known as graptolites and you can get quite a few dates from them. But at that time the

technology was so slow really and so expensive that it took a real effort, I mean if you were

zircon dating, little what are called zircon, which is very stable once it’s formed, doesn’t change

its age by being heated again and things like that, unless you heat it very much. The zircons, I

think people used to get samples of a hundred pounds weight, or two hundred pounds weight,

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crush them all up, separate out the zircons, and that took forever. I mean I didn’t do it but knew

people who did it, and they were delighted to get one date. But now, I mean the present time,

people talk about zircon spectra or zircon age spectra where they’ve dated several hundred

zircons and you get a spectrum, you can see the whole range of what they are. And I mean it’s

extraordinary what technology, changes in technology, the influence they have had on geology

as a whole actually. Many of them are of military origin, I mean specially in geophysics. We

can do things we just couldn’t imagine doing years ago.

Did you have any links with Stephen Moorbath’s laboratory in Oxford?

I never, I mean I was going to work with Jack Miller, as I said, and I never got to the stage, I

never actually measured a single date. But I knew Steve Moorbath and we used to talk to one

another so, you know, I would talk to him as a colleague but not professionally in the sense of

age dating and… so I’ve never really worked, once I got into Greece I never really looked back

and I never really, you know, it’s all part and parcel of not wanting to spend my summers in a

lab, I just didn’t want to do that.

And this work is indoor work, it’s…

Yeah, well you go out and collect stuff and that’s very interesting, but you collect a sample. I

like to do work where it gives me an idea of how the earth has evolved rather than just dating

things or measuring magnetic things and that sort of thing. I mean I just like to look at… well,

it’s probably related to the fact I have interest in all sorts of things and I just think the earth is a

very interesting body and I don’t want to get stuck into a particular part of it. I mean you have to

get stuck into part of it, but not in the detail that would be necessary to measure age dates. You

know, when I started working Greece we didn’t know much about the dating there, we sent rocks

off to Leeds for dating and published with the people from Leeds with that information, but I

didn’t want to do it myself.

[40:36]

Thank you. Could you talk about work, which I think starts from the early seventies, on

essentially producing world maps. I mean I don’t know very much about this work at all, except

that I know it involves computer programming to a certain extent. But can we start with how this

work started if it didn’t start with the fit of the continents work.

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It did start with that. Yes, when Bullard, Everett and Smith, so to speak, published that paper,

computers were very rudimentary in terms of what they could do. As I mentioned last time, the

maps are not drawn by computer, the numbers for drawing the maps were calculated by

computer but the actual maps were hand-drawn and it was rather tedious and it was done in 1965

and I’d started work in Greece in about ’67 I suppose, ’66. That took a lot of time, so I sort of

left the whole business of map making or fitting continents together, I dropped it for a time. And

what stimulated us to, or stimulated me in particular, to start it again, keep it going, was a request

by people who were running a geological meeting through the Geological Society, the

Palaeontological Association, and the Systematics Association in London, about 1969, 1970. The

dates I can’t remember, but basically the idea was to have a meeting about fossil evolution. It

must have been after plate tectonics had been thought of because they wanted maps of the world

as it was in the past. Now, Stuart McKerrow, who was a very wide-ranging and interesting man,

geologist at Oxford, asked Jim Briden who was a palaeomagnetist at Leeds at the time, and me,

here, who could make some maps maybe, he more or less browbeat us. He said, look Jim, look

Alan, you’ve got to make some maps for us. And we said, well we can’t do that, there’s not

enough data, you see. He said, course there is. And he was a very optimistic person. And to cut

a long story short, Jim Briden and I - Jim is still at Oxford, he’s retired now but he lives in

Oxford - I made the maps, I wrote some programs that would move things around a bit, which

the old map making programs didn’t. Computers had moved ahead a lot, you could draw maps

by computer very easily compared to what we used to be able to do. We had enough knowledge

of the ocean floor, more or less, in the Indian Ocean, in the Antarctic Ocean and the Atlantic

Ocean and so on to reconstruct where the continents were at the time and we had palaeomagnetic

data that Jim looked at to know what the mean position of the, where the mean pole was for a

given time. And so we put it all together. We published these maps. I think I had a grant from

NERC at the time as well to do this. It all came together, I can’t remember the details, but I had

a research assistant called Gill Drewry who did a lot of the work and the three of us published

these maps. And they were the first ever, I think, although I’d have to check with some of what

Ted Irving did in Canada, but I think they were one of the, they were certainly one of the first

ever series of maps of the world as it had been in the past. And they were, you know, people

thought this was terrific actually. Both Jim and I are very pleased that we did this piece of work.

[45:16]

So, starting with the writing of a computer program that could…

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Well, I modified a computer program. We had a program that had been written, a program

called SuperMap. It was written by a chap called Bob Parker who was a graduate student doing

his PhD at Bullard Labs, or Madingley Rise and he wrote a program that would make maps,

present day maps using a computer.

How did it do that, how did SuperMap work?

Well, it was a Fortran program, pretty crude, well I think it’s pretty crude language nowadays.

What you did, you fed in, I think we used paper tape, as I mentioned last time. You fed in the

co-ordinates, geographical co-ordinates of the coastlines of continents and then got the computer

to calculate where they were on a flat piece of paper, as it were, and that’s a map. So Bob Parker

wrote this program to put, I think some of his own data or some geophysical data on to present

day maps, which was very convenient and I mean it was a very nice program actually, very

elegant program. And it didn’t have at the time any facilities for moving things relative to one

another, which you needed to do. I mean if you’re making a fit of the continents you need to

move things relative to one another and Jim Everett had written a program to do that, but it

wasn’t part of SuperMap and I probably got into Jim’s code for rotating things and put it into

SuperMap so that you could then not only make a map of the present day, but you could make a

map of where the continents were in the past if you knew how to rotate them. That’s what I did.

And that’s what you need to do if you’re going to make maps of the past. And Jim had all this

palaeomagnetic data and I don’t know whether Jim did this or I did this, but we managed to take

that data. Say you went back 200 million years and you had all the measurements of the

magnetism at 200 million years ago and put it on a present day map, you would find there was a

consistent pattern of where the pole was if you looked at the data from Europe, a slightly

different pattern for North America, a very different pattern for Australia and the southern

continents, and yet at the time all that magnetism was being put into those rocks, they would

have all had the same pattern, they would have been part of a unified pattern and the break up of

the continents would have moved those palaeomagnetic data to different positions, they wouldn’t

make sense. So by making a reconstruction and moving the palaeomagnetic data with the

continents that you use to move, or sorry, that you move to make the reconstruction, by moving

that data with the continents, you could then find out where the mean magnetic pole was at the

time the rocks were laid down and we assume that the mean pole of the magnetic field was the

geographic pole, ie the North Pole or the South Pole and that enabled us to make a geographic

map of the past. So that’s what we did and nobody had done it before I don’t think and it was

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really quite exciting. And I’ve kept, well, I’ve kept in that field up to the present time actually.

One of the things I have kept going.

[48:55]

So, how sort of step by step did you take Jim Everett’s code for the rotating around a pole and

insert that into SuperMap? For those of us who haven’t programmed, how do you do that?

It’s probably difficult to explain, but I’ll try. A program simply commands a computer to do

something. So a computer would read some numbers to make a map and latitudes and

longitudes, which is what you use for making maps, are latitudes and longitudes on a sphere and

a map is obviously a representation of a sphere on a flat piece of paper. So if you, well the

easiest way I suppose, one way you can realise it is take a sphere, which is transparent, and you

put something on it, you put a light inside, put a line on the sphere, put a light inside and see

where that shape that’s on the sphere, what it looks like when you put it, project it or put the light

in the centre of the sphere and project the sphere on to a wall for example, like the wall in this

room. So I think one can imagine doing that. And there’s a geometrical relationship between

the numbers on the sphere, of the latitude and longitude numbers on the sphere and if you like,

the co-ordinates on a piece of paper. Imagine it’s a piece of graph paper and you can project one

point on to the graph paper, another point on the graph paper, and you’d end up with a map.

Now you can never, well, there are lots, well there’s an infinite number of projections you could

use but a common one for visualising things is graph paper and I suppose you could imagine…

difficult to… no, I don’t see how you could do that one. But you could imagine wrapping a

cylinder of paper around a sphere, putting a light inside and doing exactly the same thing again

and you would end up with outlines of the continents on your piece of graph paper which would

represent the continents on a map. So that’s how you could make a map using a computer, if you

like. And then if you go back to the sphere, to move things on a sphere is very straightforward.

All you need is an axis, a line passing through the earth’s centre, that cuts the earth’s surface

somewhere and then you fix your continent – do it with a piece of plastic, you have a plastic

shell covering the earth – draw a continent on to the shell and then if you imagine this axis you

could imagine that it’s actually like a pencil or a knitting needle coming out from the earth’s

surface and you rigidly attach that continent to that knitting needle and then turn it so the earth is

rotating about that needle, you will get a new position for the continent. You won’t have

changed its shape, you will have changed its position. And all you have done geometrically is to

turn the points that represent the continent to new positions. It’s simply a rotation if you like, on

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the sphere, and all you need to know to make that rotation is where the axis and the knitting

needle if you like, where that cuts the earth, that’ll have a latitude and longitude, and the angle

which you need to turn it through. And it’s obviously much easier to demonstrate with an actual

sphere. You can’t do that if you’re talking I suppose, but you can rotate it and given it’s a

rotation, geometrically it’s very easy to work out, or relatively easy to work out where the new

co-ordinates are. And once you’ve got those new co-ordinates you can do exactly the same thing

you did with the present day earth, you can project those new co-ordinates on to a piece of paper,

make a map which shows where the continents have moved to. Now, so some geometrical

relationship, so you put this formula into the program, I mean it’s fairly straightforward but… so

you command the computer to turn these co-ordinates to their new positions using this algorithm

which rotates things. So that’s a very crude outline of how you can make a reconstruction using

a program and what you need to – all you need to do is to put a rotation algorithm, that is an

equation that turns points into a computer and it’ll do it for you. So all you need to make the

map are the places where these axis emerge at the earth’s surface and the angle through which

you have to turn different continents through to find out where they were in the past. If you

integrate that all together you get a reconstruction.

[54:23]

And how did it display the results?

As a map on a flat piece of paper. Is that a satisfactory answer?

Yes. I mean when did it first start to show you the reconstructions on screen?

Well, you can start at the present day and you could do it, you could rotate things through a year

and they don’t do very much and you won’t see it, but if you go back say ten million years

you’re beginning to see the movement in the continents. If you go back 100 million years you

really do see how they are moving and this has been going on presumably, well, we know it’s

been going on for at least 2,000 million years, but there’s a huge amount of argument and very

little data to say where the continents were and what they looked like at that time. We’re pretty

sure, we’re absolutely sure where the continents were, the major continents were, back to 180

million years, because we have now got excellent satellite control on where the magnetic

anomalies are in the oceans. We can date those anomalies and therefore we can, well, an

example, for example, the South America to Africa motion, if you wanted to find out what the

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world looked like there 100 million years ago, you go into the oceans and you find out there the

100 million year magnetic anomaly is next to South America or on the side of the Atlantic Ridge

next to South America, do the same thing for Africa and bring those two together, getting rid of

all the magnetic material that is younger than 100 million years, and that will tell you where the

two were at that time. And since we now have satellites to do this, the maps we make are

extremely precise, I mean better than a kilometre I would imagine. Or, of the order of a

kilometre error. Whereas before it was tens, hundreds of kilometres, or we didn’t believe it.

What do you remember of first seeing the results of this works, using the modified SuperMap?

I don’t’ remember much about it actually. I don’t think it was a great surprise because having

fitted the continents together, as it were, I mean I had fitted Gondwana after I did the work with

Bullard and Everett, fitted Gondwana together, you knew they had to move and in fact, you

know, people like du Toit in South Africa had made very good reconstructions without a

computer or anything like that. And so you had a very good idea of what the likely motions

were and in a sense it wasn’t a big surprise. The details were, I mean lots of interesting stuff

came out of it, but if we were just moving continents around as rigid masses which is what these

things did, the positions of the continents do change and you do see all sorts of relationships that

you wouldn’t have seen any other way and they are very exciting, but I don’t remember, I mean I

think we were so immersed in the work I never really sort of stood back and said this is terrific,

or something like that. But it was a very interesting time.

[57:43]

And so what, when you were first doing this work, what data was available for making

judgements about how far things should move…

Well, a lot of it, or all of it was really the magnetic anomaly maps in the, yeah, the magnetic

anomaly maps in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and to some extent the Antarctic Ocean. And

there were many people involved with that, I mean people like Lamont especially, a chap called

Pitman was very prominent in that sort of thing. I can’t remember who did the, oh, Klitgord was

also involved. I can’t remember who did the South Atlantic, but Dan McKenzie and others, John

Sclater, Bob Fisher did a lot of work in the Indian Ocean. And you took all that work, got the

rotations, this is the fundamental thing you need, and just put them into the programme, just

make a map. And the real problems are, not so much for the major continents but with the bits

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and pieces on the edge of the continents that have been deformed, like the Alps, the Himalayas

and the Carpathian bend I was telling you about. We really don’t know how to unscramble

those, even today. Not properly. It’s very difficult. It’s partly because I think, well, the

tectonics I think of the ocean floor are extremely simple and the tectonics of the continents are

incredibly complicated, partly because I suppose that when you tear things apart it’s fairly

straightforward, but when you squash them up together you get a mess [laughs], putting it very

crudely, but that’s the difference between extension, which is what happens in the ocean floor

and compression and mountain building and subduction and everything else that happens on the

edge of the continents when they move together.

How did the computer model deal with that then?

It doesn’t. You just say, we know this isn’t right, and all you can do is to, if you like, separate

those bits of the continents that we know have been highly deformed and keep them on the edges

of the continents which aren’t deformed. I mean a very simple example is I suppose in Britain.

If you go down to Devon and Cornwall the rocks of about 300 million years ago are very

complicated; they’ve been squashed up, intruded by granites, broken aside, moved as little

blocks, just one another, but then if you go across the Bristol Channel to the rocks of the same

age in Wales they are deformed but they’re much more regularly deformed, they’re folded and

you can unscramble folds, especially the folds that occur in that area. So it’s like rolling up a

carpet, or not rolling, but wrinkling a carpet in that case. And then if you go north of that the

rocks of that age are virtually undeformed and they continue undeformed all the way up to

Scotland and if you close up the Atlantic they would continue all the way across North America

to the west coast. So it’s only those bits that have been, well, crumpling up like a carpet is

perfectly easy to, it’s easy to unscramble. Or sometimes they are like tiles on a roof, they make

sheets that have been pushed one on top of the other and unscrambling those is straightforward,

it’s when you get into rocks that have metamorphism and ductile deformation and things like

that, that the difficulties are immense and we don’t have a good way of unscrambling that at the

moment. Got rough ways but not really good ways and the computer doesn’t, can’t handle it

because we can’t tell it what to do because we don’t know what happened.

[1:01:47]

And where was the computer that you were using for the first reconstructions?

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Well, initially we all, everything was done on the mainframe computer, EDSAC I think it was, or

Titan as it became I think. And then with the advent of PCs, I can’t remember when they came

out but I remember PCs, well everything is done on PC now. There’s been a transition between

the mainframe and the PC.

Roughly when did you first start to have your own, a computer on your desk and to be doing this

work at it?

Good question. I can’t remember, quite honestly. I do remember we had a period when we used

the BBC Microcomputer, but I don’t think we used that for making reconstructions, that was just

to calculate. And what I think the first PC that would do the reconstructions, I think it was an

IBM AT computer or something like that. I can’t remember, I’m sorry, really but… and of

course now, you know, absolutely standard now that computers can do this sort of thing much

more.

How did developments in the computing technology change what you were able to do?

We could do it faster and more accurately. You just do things so much more quickly than you

used to be able to. You can ask questions. I mean making reconstructions now, you can make a

reconstruction very easily and you can zoom into it and you can plot all sorts of data on it in a

way that you couldn’t have done when the first computers came out. And that sort of change of

technology and everything else, the databases that are available now, that’s going to continue

and one can’t see an end to it actually. It’ll be available to everybody on the web, apart from a

few, you know, commercially valuable things. But everybody will have access to this sort of

thing and well, it’s almost miraculous, the changes that have taken place actually. And it’s not

just making maps on a computer, as I said, it’s the technology of dating things. Not only can you

date things much more quickly, but you can do it much more precisely. I don’t know if I said

this at all, but I remember reading a paper very recently about the age of a meteorite, which is

about four and a half thousand million years old, and the error quoted for that age was plus or

minus one million years. I mean that’s quite extraordinary compared with what it used to be.

And of course, high precision always turns up new problems which are the source of many PhDs

of course.

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[1:04:59]

What did you do with these reconstructions in terms of publishing or selling the results?

Well, we published them initially in this book that I think Norman Hughes of this department

was very much involved with along with Stuart McKerrow. So we just published them. And

then a curious thing happened really. We showed these to commercial companies and they said

we’d be interested in getting hold of programs to do this, but I don’t think – no, sorry –

commercial companies did not take an interest in this initially, I mean specifically oil and

mineral industries. People did not take an interest in reconstructions on the whole, but BP did

and I think in the 1980s, I think it was about then, again this is through the influence of Peter

Llewellyn who was running Sun… had a lot to do with Sunbury at the time, he learned of our

work and he and other people in BP realised that it could be important from the point of view of

oil exploration, because oil isn’t everywhere, it’s only in certain places and one of the controls

on it is, one of the controls is latitude, past latitude when the oil was forming. And so our maps

which would show past latitudes suddenly became of interest – I don’t know if they suddenly

became of interest – but they came of interest to BP and – yes, that’s about right – BP said, look,

we’d like you to collaborate with UEA – University of East Anglia – and make us some maps,

reconstructions, high quality maps if you like, on which UEA will plot the old coastlines of the

past. So we had a four, I think we had a four-year contract with, UEA and Cambridge had a

four-year contract, extramural research award it was called, with BP and we used to meet

regularly with them and discuss things and BP released some of their confidential data and put

them on these maps and so on. And I don’t know how true it is, but they had a big – well this is

true – they had a big geochemical database which listed where there were rocks in the world that

had, well they were carbonaceous, they were source rocks for petroleum and gas. They were

rocks that when heated up would give you petroleum and gas, depending on the temperature.

And they had a big library of this stuff and they plotted all these things on to their maps and they

said after we’d finished the project that they helped BP to become a bigger company than it was

because BP could say look, there’s not a good chance of oil being, gas being in this area or these

rocks, but it’s almost, you know, this is a very good area to look at and I think we helped them to

expand. So that was very nice to know that actually this blue sky research we had been doing

actually had a practical commercial application, which in fact, now I think about it, meant that in

our case the time lag between doing it as a blue sky project with no idea of commercial reward

and the commercial impact of that was fifteen years. So, you know, it’s not five years, not the

electoral cycle, and it’s not ten years which is a nice number, in this case it was fifteen years.

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But having done this and I imagine BP talked to, well they’re always talking to one another,

other companies used to come through Cambridge and when they saw these maps they said how

can we get hold of that software. Oh, we said, well, you know, we could sell it to you, we

thought. And we went to the university’s commercial arm at the time and we said to them look,

we’ve got one or two companies interested in this software, they want to buy it from us, how do

we get the money into the department. And they had no idea. [laughs] I mean in particular

they had no idea how much money the department would get and when it would be paid to the

people who were doing the work and you can’t, that’s no way to run a commercial operation.

And to cut a long story short, we went to the commercial arm of the university and we said, we

set up a little company to do this for us actually, and that’s been doing this work for the last

quarter of a century. It’s, we don’t, I mean I don’t, we have directors but none of the directors,

they’re all geologists and a mathematician, but we don’t make any money out of it. I think

that’s… my view is that if you’re using the facilities in the department to do these things you

don’t put it into your own pocket, you plough it back into the business, keep the research going.

I mean I find these, what is being done in terms of the maps and what you can do with them and

so on and so on is essential for my own research. But it also happens at the same time to be of

interest to industry and value to industry, so you know, I’m very happy. There isn’t a huge

market for this sort of stuff but there’s enough to keep a programmer going.

[1:11:29]

How did the involvement of BP and the interest of oil and mineral companies more generally

change the content of the program?

Well…

Apart from adding their own data, which you’ve said?

Well, one thing we did, Lawrence Rush, the programmer I work with, he set up the

reconstruction program for BP. They took it on board and then having got the code they

modified the code so that it would interrogate their databases and plot the data on the maps and

that sort of thing. The sort of thing we didn’t do or wouldn’t do. Not that sort of thing anyway.

And how did it evolve? Well, several things happened over the years. I mean, as I say, we had

this Fortran program initially and then we found that, we felt that C++ was a better programming

language, especially if you’re using graphical stuff, and so we moved that program over to C++.

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That was still mainframe programming at that time, that was in the early 1980s actually. And

then we got another contract from a consortium of oil companies, I think it was a sort of tax

write-off thing really, or something like that, where they supported us to convert those programs

to programs that would work on a PC, and that was very useful. And then having done that, that

worked for several years, ten, fifteen years, what we have found in the last five, ten years is

industry doesn’t want this program any more because they have to train people to use it and they

don’t like doing that, they like to, you know, time is money as it were, and there are much more

powerful geographical information systems as they’re called, available now commercially than

the program we wrote. Not many people would use this so it was quite a bit of expense from

their point of view to use the program we had written. So now we are working with, well we

have moved over to ArcGIS, which is a big commercial program for making reconstructions.

We use that now for our own purposes and we are now involved with a company in Australia

which is interested in doing this sort of thing. So there’s been a change of the language, a

change in the machinery as we go on and it gets more and more complicated so that I couldn’t, I

don’t, I know I couldn’t… I don’t want to program any more, it’s just too complex. ArcGIS is a

real mammoth program and it’s very clever but very difficult to understand how it works, you

know, compared with what I’m used to.

[1:14:52]

How did you go about developing your ability to program? We know how you started

programming from your assistant work in America, for example, but as you started to program

in different languages how would you go about learning those languages?

You just try it out. It’s a silly answer but I mean really, I don’t think I’ve ever been to… I’ve

been to one or two courses early on. I mean I even learnt Assembler language at one time. But

there are plenty of books, good books, and probably CDs these days, which tell you how to do

these things. I usually buy a book and look it up in the book actually and try and emulate what’s

in the book. It’s not difficult really. I mean as long as you start with simple things. What you

mustn’t do is to jump in at the deep end and expect things to work next week. It takes a long time

and some languages are dreadful and others are very friendly really. And I mean, I probably said

last time, that if you were writing a program, the worst thing that can happen, you go through all

these compilers, I think you had to go three steps and it would take an hour or so to get all this

stuff ready to run, and you’d find you’d missed out a hyphen. Well nowadays, if you miss out a

hyphen, usually the diagnostics are so good that it will tell there’s something wrong with this

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line, it might even fix it for you. So you get very careless actually, I’m much more careless than

I used to be. I just sort of write something down and hope it works and then if it doesn’t work

it’ll tell me what’s wrong and I fix it. I’m afraid that is a much more efficient overall thing for

me, but it’s a rather lazy thing to do. But computers are becoming so good at these things that

you don’t have to worry about it.

[end of track 8]

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[Track 9]

Could you talk about the roles of yourself and your collaborators on the world map work? I

know that you collaborated with different people at different times. You’ve got Brian Funnell for

example, and Jim Briden. So how you sort of divided the work among you in this project.

Well, our group in Cambridge, that’s working with Lawrence Rush and – was he around at the

time? No. The early work that we did for this symposium requested by Stuart McKerrow, that

was divided between me, Jim Briden and a research assistant called Gill Drewry. I would have

been responsible for the computing and the geology, Jim would have been responsible for the

palaeomagnetic data and also since he knows a lot of geology, well he may have been trained as

a geologist, I forget, but we would have collaborated on any geological problems.

What did Gill Drewry do?

She was responsible for drawing the maps and in fact, I’d forgotten that all those maps were

drawn by hand again. Whether they were redrawn from computer printouts, I can’t remember.

It’s quite possible they were. But she was essentially a research assistant putting together, well

making sure the data was there and coming and checking with us and so on and she did all the

drafting for the maps. They were some of the best maps I’ve ever made actually, because there

was enough time to do a proper job. Machines can’t do it always, the way we like. But she did a

very nice job of it actually. Yeah.

[02:08]

What decisions did you make about the presentation, the appearance of the maps, either on

computer or once they’d been, as you say, transcribed?

Computer maps, the appearance on the computer didn’t matter at that time, but it was important

to have good maps on bits of paper. They were all in black and white for publication and for use

in this meeting. And in fact, very interestingly, a chap called Bert Bally who – I don’t know if

he’s still alive – but he was very much involved with Shell in the States, employed by Shell. He

might well have been one of their chief scientists or whatever position they call, he took our

maps, redrew them and coloured them up and sent us some slides of them. So, you know, we

didn’t do that. We could do that nowadays but we didn’t do it then. And we could do that on

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computer nowadays but we didn’t do it at that time. [03:11] And moving on to the next set of

maps which were the ones where we worked with BP, Brian Funnell provided, he had a research

assistant called Richard Tyson, I think he went to Newcastle or Durham, and his job was to go

through the literature, put it all together, I think he put together 2,000 references at the time, and

use his judgement as to where the coastlines had been at the time of the map concerned and

document it and so on. Brian Funnell oversaw all that and I had Lawrence Rush here doing the

programming for that particular set of maps and I did the palaeomagnetism in fact, that was

necessary for that.

And could you expand that a bit – when you say you did the palaeomagnetism?

Yes. Well, what I did, I had a, I think it was at this time, again I can’t remember the timing but I

know there was a move at about this time for one of the associations of the geophysical

community, probably one of the committees of IUGS, which is the International Union of

Geological Sciences, to, there was a proposal to put together a database of all the palaeomagnetic

measurements that had ever been made. I didn’t have anything to do with this, I didn’t write

letters in support of it, and it did start and it was put together, well I don’t know whether Jim had

– he must have had some influence on putting the stuff together – but essentially the people who

make measurements of magnetism in rocks and get the magnetic pole of the time concerned, put

together a database which continued until very recently, ie in the last five years, which has about

8,000 or so measurements from all over the world, all through the geological column as it’s

called, you know, different ages in other words, from which you can reposition a continent, a

given continent, you take the, whatever measurements you have and if you have more than one

of course you average them and you can then reposition the continent on the earth as it was in its

proper latitude and orientation. You don’t know what its longitude is, but that’s an arbitrary

thing anyway, but you know what its latitude and orientation are and that’s essential for drawing

maps when you go back into the time when there was no magnetic stripes, ie prior to 180 million

years, there are no stripes so how are you going to reposition things, well you have to use the

palaeomagnetism. Palaeo of course meaning old, it just means old magnetism preserved in

rocks. And I remember talking to Fred Vine about this and he said, ‘Alan, you know if you

really think about it this shouldn’t work’. There are so many things that can go wrong. You may

not be able to magnetise a rock at the time it’s being laid down, it can be re-magnetised and it

can be imperfectly re-magnetised so you might partially re-magnetise so that you get a blurred,

you know, you get several components and trying to find out which component is the proper one

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is difficult. But it does work and it’s remarkable in a way that it does work and it’s the only way

we have at the moment of repositioning continents prior to about 180 million years, which is

essentially most of earth’s history. So when I say I did that, what I meant was, I went into the

database, there’s enough information in the database to choose magnetic poles that are

reasonably well dated, some of them have very wide range of uncertainty and I rejected those,

others have re-magnetised components and if they are re-magnetised or thought to be re-

magnetised you reject those. Others are well, incorrect in some way. Others probably have been

re-magnetised but they haven’t been detected as being re-magnetised, but they give a pole which

is quite different to most of the other poles that you’re looking at. And anything that was in

deformed rocks I got rid of, I mean you couldn’t use magnetic poles from metamorphic rocks

and I don’t like poles from granitic rocks either because I think they can be re-magnetised. So

my job, initial job, is to select the poles that you think are reasonable and fairly stable and pass

several tests that you can ask of magnetic poles. I’m not a palaeomagnetist, I just take their word

for it these are the things you can use, having selected the poles you can then find the mean pole

for different continents at different times and use those to make maps. When I said I did the

palaeomagnetism, that’s what I meant, really.

Selecting the poles which were…

Selecting the poles, finding the mean pole and then using those poles to reposition the continents

at different times.

[08:58]

How did the result of this work change from the first time you did it to this second time that you

were doing it for BP? In other words, how did the outcome, the former position of continents,

you know, the great continent, how did it look different from the first or the second based on

presumably more or different data and a different program?

Program wouldn’t make any difference, it uses the same algorithms, just a different code, like a

different language, computing language. Frankly, very little. I mean they looked very similar,

except I can qualify that by saying that the maps from 180 million years to the present day are

very similar, that’s because you’ve got the ocean floor data. Now the ocean floor data has

changed but not very much in the sense that the ages might be slightly different, but there’s very

little change in that. Once somebody’s done a survey of the ocean floor and found which

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magnetic anomalies are present, I mean that’s it, that’s the data. Prior to 180 million years

there’s still a lot of uncertainty about where some of the continents were relative to one another,

partly because the palaeomagnetism is much more prone to re-magnetisation, and this is

particularly true prior to 540 million years prior to the Cambrian, ie in the Precambrian, because

dating is much more difficult, you don’t have any fossils really that you can use for dating

things, you’ve got only age dates and you can’t always be sure that the magnetisation is of the

age that you get from an age dating program and there’s not a lot of it. I mean Precambrian

rocks, eighty per cent or more of the earth’s history, they get deformed and folded and are much

likely to have been messed around, so to speak, by deformation than the younger rocks are. So

the Precambrian has poles, there’s often a question mark about whether they’re the correct poles,

and this is why there’s so much uncertainty about, you know of Pangaea when all the continents

come together, about say 200 million years ago, there are suggestions there was a Pangaea called

Rodinia at about, well I’m not sure, I think it’s probably a wide range of guesses about when it

was around, and there’s no consensus at the moment at all about what it looked like or whether it

was actually a Pangaea, we just don’t know. It probably was, but it’s very dodgy. I mean… So

that’s, you could say that there’s much more Precambrian palaeomagnetism now and that does

help to constrain the way the palaeomagnetic, where the continents were, but you have to

remember that a lot of the palaeomagnetic work in the Precambrian on, say if you take Africa for

example, Africa is a mosaic built up of different Precambrian blocks. There might be half a

dozen or a dozen due to past continental - well, I was going to say continental drift - but past

plate collisions and separations and so on. So instead of having a big continent with lots of data

on it, you have lots of little blocks which have much fewer data and it’s much more difficult to

know what’s going on. So I don’t think, you know, that’s going to be, if we continue to fund

that sort of work, it probably won’t be sorted out for years, if ever.

[12:59]

And how did the way in which you presented the maps change, if they did, when you were

starting to sell these to companies? What differences were made about presentation then, if

any?

We wouldn’t present them as maps, as paper maps, we would sit them down in front of a

computer screen and just show them how the program worked and what it could do. So that,

yeah, that’s all we do nowadays. We don’t make maps. Not for industry anyway. I mean I’m

not, I don’t make maps for industry, I use the program to make maps which are interesting, but

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industry’s got tons of data which can go on to these maps and it’s up to them what they do with

the program once they’ve got it. I’m not, haven’t got the time to go into their, what they’re

interested in unless it happens to coincide with what I’m interested in really.

[14:10]

Could you describe the Department of Geology in the 1970s in terms of…

It was even the 1960s when I first came here, 1963.

Yes, we…

Do you want me to go that far back?

Yes, we’ve done a little bit of that, but nothing thorough so if you could, yes.

I need some notice to make it thorough, but it was really a, almost like a club, like so many

places were then. You always wore a tie, many of the older staff always wore a suit, or certainly

a jacket. You always lectured in gowns. I mean I never lectured in a gown except for – no, I

don’t think I have actually – but as a student one was lectured to by professors and lecturers who

wore gowns and I do remember seeing on occasion, I know it was our head of department, but at

least one person I saw had a mortar board, a square. So it was very formal, very conservative, or

fairly conservative, rather small, working on problems that interested people, but didn’t have a

broad outlook as far as I could tell, really. People worked hard though, well most people did.

It’s partly possibly inherited from the war in the sense that my understanding is that the

department was depleted in much of its staff during the war because they were involved in

fighting or doing something, and of course you were then trying to run a department with a much

smaller staff and possibly quite a few students, certainly after the war, people came, demobbed

and so on, had come to Cambridge for a degree and I don’t know what the numbers were but I

can imagine that the people after the war had to work jolly hard actually, to do a decent job. I

mean there were very few people who were not interested in teaching, I mean they were selected

in part because they were good teachers. They were good teachers actually. But they were

rather old-fashioned in that sense. I think, well it’s like most things, Brian Harland, as I say, he

was very interested in continental drift and thought there was something in it, but most people

didn’t and they thought he was a bit of a radical and possibly not sound sort of person. [laughs]

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I mean I don’t know how true that is, but the department at that time was not brim full of ideas,

unlike geophysics. When I joined geophysics it was just bubbling with ideas, we didn’t know

what was going on in the earth, we knew something new was going to come out of it, or we

hoped something new was going to come out of it, but it was always an interesting place to be,

specially at tea and coffee with Bullard, he would always ask people what they were doing and

come up with new ideas and so on, but that was never true at that time, except perhaps one or

two people, in the old Department of Geology.

Why do you think that was, why was the atmosphere so different? Why were questions being

asked about the sort of fundamental structure and history of the earth there but not in a geology

department?

Well, I think geology was almost at, I mean I remember talking to one staff member about

granites and how they were taught before the war, and he said you had a roomful of different

kinds of granites which had different names and different minerals in them but you really didn’t

know how they formed and what they represented, and it’s almost as if by giving something a

name you had solved the problem. I don’t know how true that is, that’s an impression I had.

And it was only a few people who were really questioning what was going on. Now, Mineralogy

and Petrology might have been different because they did do experimental work and it might

have been that there was much more discussion about things scientifically, I just don’t know, but

I didn’t have anything to do with them really. I mean a lot of the remarks I made just there,

some of them are things that I noticed as a student and some of them will be things I noticed as a

young faculty member. Yes, I think there was probably a lot more discussion in Mineralogy and

Petrology because Tilley, the chap who headed the department when I was an undergraduate,

and Deer subsequently, well certainly Tilley, he was always going off or talking to people from

the Carnegie Institute in Washington which did a lot of experimental petrology and, you know,

that was a very… so you had experiment and observation going on at the same time and you

could experiment on things like that in the lab. You could take a piece of basalt and melt it and

find out when it started to crystallise and when it was thoroughly crystalline and so on, and you

could see what sequence of minerals came out of these things, and probably having that kind of

experimentation, which is very difficult to do in palaeontology, for example, and you can do to

some extent, but not easily in sedimentology, it may be that that made it a more lively place, I

don’t know. But Mineralogy and Petrology was a very, all of us, or both departments were very

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hierarchical. Bullard, at Bullard’s, he was much less worried about hierarchies and things like

that. He was much more interested in the science.

[20:24]

How did the Department of Geology change in the 1970s?

Well, new people came in. I was very lucky when I came in, plate tectonics had just, well, I

think 1967 was supposed to be about the first paper on plate tectonics, but the real breakthrough

and the whole torrent of papers started in 1968 I think, probably resulting from a conference at

Woods Hole, I think. I can’t remember the detail, I didn’t go to it or anything like that. So when

I came in in 1963, yeah, I was there before plate tectonics was thought of and I remember as

soon as it became clear that it was a new earth, as it were, I just rewrote my lectures, or the ones

I did on plate tectonics, you know, got to put it in this context.

What lectures had you been doing before?

I used to do the first year, I had a first year course where I taught essentially what was called

mineralogy, microscope, taught the distribution of igneous rocks, some igneous rocks, at a first

year level. Metamorphism, structure, that sort of thing. And then when plate tectonics came in,

rewrote the whole thing. Not the whole thing, but I mean certainly the tectonics, granites and

that sort of thing, we related to completely different things. And probably changed our lecture

every year because new ideas came up. So, how did it change? Well, for a time it looked as if

plate tectonics was going to be the basis of everything, which it is in fact, but there was a time

when you thought well maybe sedimentologists and palaeontologists and every other ologist

would base all their work on the notions of plate tectonics, which they do to some extent and

there was a feeling that maybe people would talk a lot to one another about what they did and

what the importance was. I think, looking back, I don’t recollect that people talked much to one

another about what they were doing. It’s almost as if it was not the thing to do at tea and coffee,

so where else would you do it, well it isn’t clear. But there wasn’t the sort of, what I thought…

the people were genuinely interested in what they did but they didn’t want to enthuse about it to

other people. I think enthusiasm was frowned upon. [laughs]

Really?

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I’m not sure, but it’s a feeling, you know. Didn’t want to show too much enthusiasm about

anything.

Why’s that?

I don’t know, this is the impression I had and I don’t know how true that is. People were

excellent scholars and they knew what they were doing but they didn’t somehow communicate

that to other people. As an undergraduate I don’t remember being, having that, you know, spirit

of enquiry and enterprise come across in any of the lectures I had, except Brian Harland’s, as I

say, I think he had that.

And where was the department coming together for coffee and tea at this time? In an earlier

period you described a sort of divided department with certain lecturers meeting in the

curator’s…

Yes, that’s right.

Did this break down in the seventies or continue?

I think it broke down only when we became one department. That was largely Ron Oxburgh’s

doing.

So this continues all through the seventies then?

I think so. I mean I can’t see why it wouldn’t have. I don’t think it… there’s no reason why it

shouldn’t have done, because the people who would have changed it were quite happy with what

they had. That’s my view actually. I don’t know how true this is, but yes, I think, I mean the

story I heard – you’d have to ask Ron Oxburgh if this is true – but the story I heard was that Ron

insisted on having a common room which was a common room and I don’t know how true this –

this is the bit I’m not sure is true – I don’t know if he said this or not, but the story is that he

would not have come here had we not had that. And maybe it’s just gossip, I don’t know, but

it’s a good story and it illuminates, that’s what he would have done, I mean that was the kind of

person he was, because he saw the value of having everybody coming together. Now, we still

have tables in the department where you can always guarantee to find X or Y or something like

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that, but there’s much more mixing than there used to be and in particular, I think it would be fair

to say, and I can’t remember what happened prior to coming together, but research students mix

with staff and, you know, you might go and sit next to somebody, talk to them about what

they’re doing and so on, whereas before I think we were much more segregated. I just cannot

remember what we did for tea and coffee actually.

[26:28]

What do you remember of relations between the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at this

time in the seventies?

Well, I remember there was a very roly-poly chap called Albert who was our departmental

photographer and whenever he left at five o’clock, I think it was, promptly, he had a great big

key which fitted into a lock which was the dividing door, on the dividing door between the two

departments and he would really take great pleasure in locking that door at five o’clock. So that

gives you an idea, there wasn’t a free to and fro. And one, I know that Andrew Hynes, one of

my first research students, was one of the first people, if not the first person to use a piece of

equipment in Mineralogy and Petrology. He used an XRF to do some analyses and there were a

few raised eyebrows when this happened. [laughs] So that’s the kind of place it was, it was very

compartmentalised actually. And as I probably mentioned, we were so compartmentalised that

had we not come together in the 1980s or whenever it was, I would have gone back to America.

I just didn’t like, well, it was very cosy and comfortable and everything else, but it just didn’t

seem to be, you know, thriving scientifically, which I like.

And there was a relationship with the microscopes?

[laughs] Well, this is a story that I will tell which may be completely untrue, but it probably

captures something. My recollection, and the person who could tell you if this is true is a chap in

Trinity, he’s retired some years ago, he’s a very good storyteller, Graham Chinner. Very young

at the time and his head of department was Professor Tilley, also an Australian, who saw

Graham walking across the courtyard between the two departments carrying some microscopes,

that’s the story. And Tilley saw him and I’m sure that Graham will tell you the proper version,

but Tilley is supposed to have shouted at him out of his office saying, ‘Chinner, where are you

going?’ or ‘Where do you think you’re going?’. And Graham said he was going to return some

microscopes to the Sedgwick, that’s what we used to be called sometimes, because I think the

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Sedgwick had particular types of microscopes that Mineralogy and Petrology didn’t have but

Mineralogy and Petrology needed at times in the year and borrowed them from us. So while

Graham was returning these Tilley said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ and Graham said,

‘Returning these microscopes to Geology’ and Tilley is supposed to have said, ‘Well, don’t!’

[laughs] Now I don’t know how true that is but it does illustrate the kind of thing, the spirit that

existed, or lack of it or whatever, between the two departments.

[29:29]

Where were you living in the 1970s?

Let me just think. We started out, when my wife and I first came to Cambridge, we had a flat in

Arbury Road, north Cambridge. Shortly after that, a year or two, I don’t know how long after

that, we managed to buy a semi-detached, pre-war semi-detached house on Eachard Road and

we moved there because it was close to Bullard Labs which is where I was working at the time.

And then when I became a junior faculty member in geology I, yeah, I had to go down town, so

was in the centre of town then, but living in Eachard Road, and then I can’t remember when it

was, let me think. Probably in the mid 1960s we managed to buy quite a large house, completely

detached house in a new development in Newnham, which we lived in until my wife became ill,

which would have been, let’s see… probably in the 19… late 1970s she became ill and she had

Parkinson’s Disease and she realised that she couldn’t keep the house going on her own, you

know, so to cut a long story short we, after two other moves, we moved to Archway Court which

was a small townhouse, but it didn’t suit us really, didn’t like the atmosphere so much, and we

bought a house in a Victorian terrace in the centre of town just off Mill Road and spent a year in

a college accommodation while that was being modernised, basically, and we’ve been there ever

since. So we started out in a flat and ended up in a little Victorian terrace, which suited us. I

mean I didn’t like it at the time, but now, looking back – well, not looking back – but as time

went on I realised just how good a choice that was by my wife actually, because it’s a very easy

house to run, it’s got enough room, very private even though it’s a terrace, and as I say, that’s

where we are, well, that’s we lived ever since.

So in the seventies you were at Newnham in the large house?

Yes.

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[32:32]

What was the effect of having a daughter on your sort of working life, if you like?

I can’t remember the details. I can remember I used to take her to school. She used to ride her

bike to school. She was educated at Newnham Croft, which is a primary school, very nice

school. Lot of… I think – this is an aside – but one of the great things about Cambridge is the

state system is very good because a lot of the fathers and mothers are academics and make sure

that it is good. So we put Jessica, she’s always been in the state system and I think that’s

actually been very good to her because it’s exposed her to all sorts of people she wouldn’t meet

at an independent school. But the teaching’s good, so that’s what matters, in a way. But there’s

this additional bonus of meeting all sorts of different kinds of people, which I think is a useful

thing to have done actually as a child. I can remember as an example, when we were in this

townhouse in Newnham Jessica had a birthday party or something, had lots of friends round

anyway, and I can remember coming down the stairs and I could hear her speaking and her

friends speaking and they were talking very much in the local Cambridge dialect, which is very

close to Cockney, and as soon as I appeared Jessica started talking in standard English, it was

really funny. But I think it did her a lot of good actually.

What memories do you have of things done with her in the same way that we looked at the things

that your parents did with you when you were a child? What sorts of things do you remember

particularly doing with Jessica?

Well, I… riding to school and back, well not riding to school, it was quite a little adventure for

her, specially at times. I don’t remember I did anything independently of my wife except

sometimes on a weekend, or Saturday in particular, I would take Jessica into town and look after

her, possibly, well in the Department of Geology actually. So she would she would be doing

some drawing in my room in the Department, I would be doing a bit of work perhaps or some

teaching even. And whenever we went on holiday we did all sorts of things, like walking and

making sandcastles, all that sort of thing. I think Jessica’s bringing up in terms of being read to

or listening to music was something my wife did mostly. So I can’t claim to remember doing a

lot of things with Jessica actually, except later on when she was in her thirties and twenties and

thirties and so on, I did go away with her occasionally because my poor old wife was an invalid

at the time and couldn’t travel, really. So she used to go into respite care and I often had a

holiday with Jessica. But as a child I can’t remember much, when she was a child I can’t

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remember doing… We did things together on the whole. So probably if we were doing the

same things now I would be doing a lot more with her and my wife would probably be doing

more of her own things actually. Because I think she felt devoted to, she felt she had to give, as

women did in those days, felt they were expected to bring up the children. Whereas I think

today it’s much more of a joint effort, and I’m sure that would have been the case in my case

actually.

[36:52]

And what do you remember of Jessica’s interest in or involvement in what you were doing

professionally as she grew older and aware and…

Not very much. [laughs] I did try and explain to her, one of these things when we went away

for a week. I had to, I think I had a PhD exam in Scotland or something like that, in Edinburgh,

and she met me, she was in work at the time, but she took the train up and we had a few days in

Scotland and I did go up to a place called, nearly, I went to Isla and we looked across to Jura and

I was trying to explain to her about some rocks that were in the harbour. It might have been Port

Askaig I think, in Isla, rather unusual rocks in the British context, they were very old glacial

rocks, about 600 million years old, and I was trying to explain to her why, you know, what these

were and she said, ‘Oh yes, thanks dad’. Well, not quite, but she clearly did not, she does not

have an interest in geology, or science in general. Well, she does have an interest in science but

more biological sciences than physical sciences. No, she’s not that way inclined. [laughs]

[38:17]

And could you talk about your interests outside of work at this sort of time in the 19…

1970s?

Yes. What would you do out of work?

Well, with my, you know, again with my wife we’d often visit art exhibitions and art galleries,

that sort of thing. We would often go to concerts, we would often go walking. Those are the

sorts of things that we liked doing. Or not just art galleries, but looking at little towns in England

or wherever we were actually. I suppose what most people do, I don’t know. We didn’t have a

very specific interest, it was a very general interest. I mean you can probably determine it from

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some of the diaries that we kept together. I think, I can’t think of anything that we concentrated

on. Just liked to do those sorts of things.

How would your wife respond if you pointed out something geological to her on a walk?

Well, she was curious about it but not in any depth. I mean she was educated at Barnard and

Oberlin in the States, had a year at Oberlin and she had, most of her education was at Barnard,

which is a sort of sister college to Columbia in New York, and she did take a course on geology,

but it was for liberal arts people so it was very general. And she did make a joke of it because

she did say once that she had written about ‘indigenous rocks’ instead of igneous rocks. So she

was interested in what I did up to a point but she wasn’t a scientist in any way. Her own work, I

mean she loved reading and writing and she used to write short stories and novels and things like

that when she was healthy.

Do you know the content of those, did you read them?

Yes, I did. I often – well, it was difficult because she wanted me to act as a sort of editor cum

critic at the same time as I was establishing myself as a young faculty member, so it was quite a

lot of work in a way, but I did organise the… I used to organise… I mean, I’m not a good critic,

I’m very good at finding typographical errors but not criticising short stories very much, but I did

help her by making sure that she got her stories off to editors and people like that in the States.

She never published anything formally but she got to the stage where editors were actually

interested in what she was doing and encouraged her to keep at it and came up with some useful

criticisms, you know, develop this character, why don’t you develop this character or why does

this person do this, couldn’t he or she do that, or something like that. But unfortunately, as I say,

she became quite ill about, in the 19… when would it be? 1980, yeah, late 1970s, early eighties,

and she really wasn’t able to continue with her writing, unfortunately. So that’s… I think she

would have, I mean she has a novel which has never been published, which – she died about two

years ago – I’m hoping to get together and get it on to an electronic medium as it were, you

know, a CD or something, and then give it to somebody to look at and criticise and to see

whether or not it is publishable or what needs to be done to make it publishable.

What is the sort of general plot or content of this unpublished novel?

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I don’t know, I’ve never actually read the novel. She’d started it after she’d written some short

stories. I have read some of the short stories. They’re mostly about people. She’s very

interested in people and how they react and especially people who don’t come into… ordinary

people, if you like. And she, you know, I can remember one was about some people who look

after pictures in a museum, there was a very nice little sort of sketch of these people and their

interactions and so on. And I have got some of those into an electronic format. But I think, the

trouble nowadays probably is that, well, America has been the place where these things are

published, the short story is still important in America but so many of the little magazines that

used to publish these things have just disappeared. I don’t know if they, you know, things like

The Sewanee Review and, I mean she, well I don’t know if The Atlantic is still going, used to be

a very good magazine. But there’s less and less space for these sorts of things and people are

less and less interested in reading short stories, so I’m not sure what to do with her stuff actually.

How did what she was writing relate to her life in Cambridge as far as you can see?

Not at all, it was completely separate from it. She never wrote, as far as I know, about

Cambridge. I mean it’s always… possibly based on, well I suppose it has to be based on your

personal experience in part, but a lot of it was imagined and observed. I mean not, in other

words, it wasn’t personal in the sense of something she had experienced, except perhaps by

observation of what people did with their lives. But it was a great pity, I mean I think she had a

lot of talent and it never really got to the stage where she was able to achieve what she had set

out to do actually. Well, she was able to achieve what she set out to do in the sense of writing

something that was complete, but never got to the stage where it got to the stage where other

people published it, which is what I think, you know, one would like to do.

[44:51]

What was the effect of her illness on your working life?

Well, it made it rather difficult really, specially in the early, well… I really don’t know, I’ve

often worried, not worried, but often thought about that, but I haven’t actually come to any

conclusions. Except my daughter says, you know, it obviously did have an effect on you, on me

that is, and it obviously affected her as well because she was about ten when it was diagnosed, I

think. I think that’s about right, yeah. And she had it for over thirty years and got progressively

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worse and it’s a horrible thing to have actually. I don’t know if you know of anybody with

Parkinson’s?

I don’t, no.

Basically you lose, it’s a bit like multiple sclerosis in the sense that you lose control of your

body. The only good thing about it is you’re not in any pain, but the drugs they use to treat it are

effective initially. I mean normally you start off with shaking and not being able to walk

properly, but initially the drugs that are possible to take you wouldn’t know that somebody had

Parkinson’s for a few years. Oh, of course it varies, I mean there’s lots of different ways this

develops and so on. But it does affect the mind at times and specially later on and I’m never sure

whether the way it affected the mind was due to the pills she took or whether it was due to part

of the condition. But she eventually, the last I suppose, I honestly can’t remember the details,

but for a long time she was actually an invalid and couldn’t get out except for in a wheelchair

and that sort of thing. But one thing, she was a marvellous woman, she never complained about

it, which I’m sure I would have done, but she never complained about it at all actually. And it

means as time goes on you can’t lift things, you might drop them, you can’t cook because you

might set the place on fire or scald yourself or something like that. So she was reduced really to

watching television, listening to the radio, listening to music and so on and having occasionally

people read to her. But otherwise it was pretty awful.

Why could she not read, was reading difficult?

Holding things is difficult. Her grip was rather difficult at times and I’m not sure, I think her

sight was slightly affected as well. I mean you can see a television picture but you may not be

able to resolve it into the detail that you would have done if you hadn’t got it. But she was very

well looked after, I mean I know this is not science, as it were, but the National Health Service in

Cambridge was terrific actually. They wouldn’t always anticipate or deal with things unless you

told them, but once you told them something was wrong they would make sure something was

done about it. So she had a whole series of bits of equipment come into the house. She had a

whole series of carers who came in and they gradually increased the care as she got worse and so

on. And I have, you know, absolutely no complaints whatsoever about the way she was treated

by the National Health Service actually, it was wonderful really, what they did for her. And

what it meant was that during the day, she had three visits during the day and one in the evening,

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the evening – well, and one at night as well – but in the day her carers used to wash her, give her

food and that sort of thing and then if they had time left over they would sometimes take her out

for a little walk in a wheelchair and talk to her and so on. And it left me free to do things like the

housework and the groceries and shopping and cooking and so on. I always used to cook for her

in the evenings and do everything else about the house and I couldn’t have done that, I would

have to have… I don’t know what I would have done actually if I didn’t have that help at hand.

[49:52]

In what practical ways did it affect sort of working routines or practices?

Well, I probably never had a holiday, as such. Always regarded geological field trips and

conferences as my holiday, except occasionally, as I said, in the last few years with my daughter,

we used to have a break. And it meant I always, I sometimes declined to do things in the college

for example, I never accepted the job as a tutor which I might have done at one time, because I

just felt I couldn’t do those extra things and look after her at the same time. And I suppose you

could say my social life was centred around the college rather than anything else, you know, we

didn’t have dinner parties and didn’t go out to dinner parties because I was on my own really.

The college has been wonderful in that respect in the sense of giving me something which I

wouldn’t have had any other way, for which I’m extremely grateful, really. But – and I think, as

I say, it affected my daughter quite a bit. I think, I’m not sure, you’d have to ask her, but I think

she had… it was difficult for her. But I know it’s difficult for many teenagers anyway, so I don’t

know how you can distinguish between the difficulty of being, growing up as a teenager and

difficulty of having a mother who’s also not very well at the same time.

Did it change your relationship in any way with your daughter?

I think it, the only way it would have changed it, I think, is that… well, definitely due to

Parkinson’s, I think I grew much closer to my daughter in the later stages of her illness, yeah. I

think the problem is that sometimes, well, in Judy’s case it was difficult for her to imagine what

effect it had on other people. So she would want to do something which was totally impractical.

I mean she would love to have gone on a cruise, but she would have needed a fulltime nurse with

her to do that and she thought she could manage without that, but she couldn’t actually. So in a

sense it was… she wasn’t being realistic about the boundaries of her condition at times, which is

difficult for her. But as I say, she, well I can remember about two years before she died or

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something, we had a very wet summer in Cambridge and I tried to get her out into the garden but

there was so much wet in the lawn that you couldn’t push the wheelchair around. So I thought

this isn’t any good, so I remodelled the garden with raised beds and paved it and so on, and she

used to love coming out into that. Even two or three months before she died completely, she

used to love going out into the garden and looking at the flowers and everything else, so that was

a real, her mind was very clear at times but she was physically extremely weak actually. It may

sound… she weighed just over four stone when she died. That gives you an idea of what it does

to you. Because I think the problem is your muscles gradually, you can’t use them, and so you

can’t exercise easily and you can’t eat easily because you can’t chew stuff and all that, so it gets

very difficult. I mean scientifically I find it a fascinating disease because we don’t really know

what causes it, you know. Our Master, Chris Dobson’s working on that kind of thing, but if it’s

related to the folding of proteins or proteins that don’t fold properly, what causes them not to

fold properly? We don’t know, I don’t think. I mean there’s a very good story about some

young people in California who were brewing some drugs up in the kitchen or something, took

them, and they overcooked them or something like that, and they all ended up with Parkinson

condition. So that’s a clue as to what might cause it. But in essence, the main problem is – do

you know about neuron messengers and things like that?

Not very much, no.

Well, I mean when you pick up your hand and you close it and open it you’re aware of saying I

want to… we don’t actually in words, but you know you want to move your hand so you just

move it. What happens is, somehow the act of deciding to do this sends a messenger,

biochemical messenger down to your hand which enables you to do this. And I think it’s

dopamine, one of the things is called dopamine, that enables you to do these things. If you have

Parkinson’s disease dopamine is not produced or is gradually, the quantities produced

necessarily for doing these things is reduced as time goes on so you can’t do things as you want

to do. You might want to do something but you can’t do it because you haven’t got the

biochemical messenger. And why that dopamine cell, dopamine producing cells are not doing

their work or whether they’re dying off, they’re actually dying off, nobody knows.

Did you look into this while your wife was ill, look into the…

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Yes. I mean there’s a very good magazine called The Parkinson which tells you what research is

going on in Parkinson’s disease and the theories that are coming to, trying to explain this. And I

think they’ve almost got to the stage – I haven’t kept up with this recently – where they do have

some good theories and once you understand what the cause is then you can try and think about a

cure. Well, we don’t absolutely know what the cause is. But it amazes me in a sense in this day

and age of, you know, the genome and everything else, that we still don’t really know what

causes Parkinson’s disease.

[56:43]

Did you at any point stop work entirely or work only part-time in order to care for your wife?

No. Not before, I mean, no. When I was employed I worked up to the age of sixty-seven and

afterwards, I don’t think I really, I didn’t consciously stop work for days on end or anything like

that, but I might stop work for a little while. Used to take her out occasionally when I could, but

I never stopped work for days on end because I mean in a sense you couldn’t do very much

because she was, she often slept a lot and she couldn’t move around very much and got tired

very easily. So all you could do in a sense is to keep her company, which I did at times of

course, specially in the evenings when I got home. But she had this, quite a variety of changes

throughout the day because of the different carers that would come and look after her and see her

and so on. And she was a bit like me, we both don’t mind our own company in the sense that

we’re used to being on our own for long times, so we don’t miss, well we do miss, but we don’t

feel lonely when we’re on our own. I think that would be fair to say. But, yeah, well it’ll be

interesting to see what happens in the next few years with this disease actually. It’s very similar

to Alzheimer’s in some ways, except it doesn’t affect the memory quite so much as Alzheimer’s

disease, but I think things happen in the brain which are related to one another, but exactly how

isn’t clear.

[end of track 9]

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[Track 10]

Could you talk now about work which I think started in the early eighties on investigations of the

past magnetic field and plate motions with Fred Vine?

I never worked with Fred actually. We always get on well when we meet and talk science and so

on, but I’ve never actually worked with him on the magnetic field and – although we did share a

postdoc called Roy Livermore, which Fred might have mentioned, I don’t know if he mentioned

him or not, but worked on the magnetic field with Fred and me I suppose, though we didn’t meet

about it particularly well, or particularly, because he’s very much a self-propelled person and can

do his own work, as a postdoc should do actually. So, yes. Yes, I did work with Fred in a sense

on Pangaea, which I’d forgotten about. There are different versions of Pangaea, that is different

versions of how the continents fitted together about 250 or so million years ago. They’re not,

two or three of them are not very significantly different, but one of them is quite extremely

different, based on palaeomagnetism, because what it does is to put the north-west part of South

America – that’s places like Colombia and Venezuela – into, it joins them up to North America

in that great embayment into which we normally put Africa and the question is, why does the

palaeomagnetic evidence suggest putting South America into that slot rather than Africa. We

know Africa fitted into it most recently because of the ocean floor data which we can backtrack

in time and bring South America – oh sorry – bring Africa into North America, into that part of

North America which seems to fit. But South America isn’t a bad fit there, but geologically it

doesn’t make sense and the question is why does the palaeomagnetism suggest that South

America could have fitted into there rather than Africa.

Why geologically doesn’t it make sense?

Because you can’t trace the rocks from one continent to another easily and you can trace them

across from Africa to North America. I mean it’s not the best of arguments because this kind of

argument is more pattern recognition and pattern fitting rather than anything quantitative.

Whereas the palaeomagnetic data is quantitative, ironically. And the question is, why is this?

And the, a popular explanation, so to speak, which I did write a paper about with Jim Briden and

there was a chap called Van der Voo in America, I think he’s at Ann Arbor, I’m not sure. Also

wrote the same, had the same idea, that is that the earth’s magnetic field at this time was what we

call a non-dipole field, that is to say, at the present time the earth’s field is very much like that of

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a bar magnet, which is a dipole. It’s got a bit, you’ve got some extra components in the field

which make it slightly different to a dipole, and these non-dipole components today are fairly

weak and not really significant in any way, but you could make a case for believing the

palaeomagnetic data providing the non-dipole components of the field at that time were very

strong. Physically there’s some difficulties there, but they’re not insuperable. So to fit the

palaeomagnetic data from South America and North America together, to make them match, you

would have to have a non-dipole, a strong non-dipole field component. And that’s really what

we were working on. I think that’s right. No, sorry, backtrack on this a little bit. To make them

fit together palaeomagnetically with the field of the kind that we have at the present time you

would have to put South America into that slot off North America, to have them where they are

relative to one another on the old Pangaea fit, or the standard Pangaea fit, you would have to

have a very funny field, a strong non-dipole field. And that physically isn’t easy. I mean people

who’ve studied the field make models of the field and how it behaves and models of the

circulation in the outer core where the field is generated, I think find this a little bit difficult to

get such a strong non-dipole component at the earth’s surface, but it’s something that you could

imagine. Now, Roy Livermore, Fred Vine and I didn’t go that far. What we said was, let’s

suppose the field was normal and that you would have to put South America into that North

America slot, to go from that model to one where Africa fits into that North America slot

requires a huge structure which enables South America and Africa together to slide past North

America so you get a transition from one position to another to make the magnetic fields agree.

Now, if they slide past one another they can’t collide because the collision is over. Pangaea’s a

time when there’s no more collision, it’s finished. So the only kind of structure you could have

to enable that sliding to take place is what’s called a transform fault, rather like the San Andreas

Fault, but it would be huge and the question is, where is it, and we couldn’t find it. I’ve just…

we did write one or two papers, which said different things. But basically, we can’t find the

geological evidence for this putting South America opposite North America.

[06:57]

And what did the work sort of practically involve in generating theories about this and making

arguments about this, what was the scientific work that was actually happening? In previous

work you’ve been programming or plotting – what was involved here?

It involved gathering all the palaeomagnetic data together, as we’ve done in other papers, and

finding the mean pole of the magnetic field, assuming that the earth’s magnetic field then was

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the same as it is today and then showing that the pole you get, the mean field from say, one

continent, doesn’t match the mean pole, or can be made to match the mean pole from another

continent if you arrange the continents in a certain way. And if you go back to Triassic time

which is a bit younger than the time I’m talking about, say about 220 or so million years, you can

find that the field at that time fits perfectly on what we call the standard Pangaea. But if you go

back to 280 million years or 300 million years, it doesn’t. And that’s a time, that interval, there’s

no collision going on, it’s all… Pangaea is made as a continent, but the magnetic field suggests

that there is… You either, you suggest there’s a huge fault that enables the continents to slide

past one another, or you suggest that the magnetic field was peculiar, or you suggest the data’s

wrong and there’s, as I say, Van der Voo I think in Ann Arbor has been a great component of a

dipole, a non-dipole component, a strong one, but I think I’m right in saying, I think he said this

in a conference in Turkey last year, that I think his view is currently that the data is actually

wrong and there isn’t a problem. But that’s the kind of thing you get involved in. But the thing I

worked with Fred Vine and Roy Livermore was essentially looking at the different Pangaeas, not

the one that requires this huge sliding motion, but there are two other versions which are subtly

different and I think I’m right in saying it’s difficult to tell the difference between them using

palaeomagnetic evidence, because the scatter of the poles is quite large. But Roy Livermore did

actually use the ocean floor data, well used our maps in the past to look at a reconstruction, put

all the palaeomagnetic data on to the reconstruction and try to see if the magnetic field for those

periods, which is the Jurassic, the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, implied a peculiar field as well.

What he showed was, I think, from my recollection, is that the strongest non-dipole component,

which is called the G20 component, it’s called the quadrupole component, is more or less the

same as it is today, there was no evidence for anything peculiar in the field. And he also looked

at what’s called the octupole component, which I think is G40, and basically he said the data was

such that we can’t tell whether there was a significant… well, how big the G4 component was,

because the data aren’t good enough. So in other words, Roy, when I worked with Roy, he

showed the magnetic field as far as we could tell was perfectly normal all the way back to 200

million years, and with Fred we looked – and Roy – we looked at the different Pangaeas and I

think the paper I wrote about the geological evidence was with Roy and we couldn’t find any

evidence for a big structure that could accommodate the motions that the model would suggest.

And what were you using at this time to sort of visualise the possible position and orientation of

things?

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It was a program that made reconstructions and that’s all we used, with the data plotted on it.

Not only the data, but the, what’s called the polar wander path, that is, how the pole appears to

move from a particular continent, we plotted that on it as well. I mean it’s very straightforward

really, but although it was straightforward, it was at that time useful to review the evidence

because people were talking about extreme views and we thought they didn’t work and we

showed they didn’t work actually.

So by the 1980s, where is the computer that you’re using for all of this work?

I think it’s transitional between the mainframe and the first PCs that we bought. Well, I can’t

remember.

And once you’d got a PC was that in your office…

Office, yes.

…at the Department of Geology?

Yeah, mm. And it’s been there ever since. I mean, different PCs. And as I say, we went

through a stage of using BBC Microcomputers but that wouldn’t be for reconstructions, that

would just be for programming simple things and getting numbers out, because they weren’t big

enough. It’s a great shame it didn’t take off actually. It was, at the time it was one of the… it

was a world leader and typical British story, they have a very good thing but it doesn’t sell, or

you can’t sell it or something.

[12:23]

I wonder whether you could sort of sketch out what you regard as other significant work in the

1980s and nineties.

You don’t want to go back to the seventies?

You can do, yeah.

Well, did I talk about my work in America?

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After the PhD, no.

I did write up a paper for the Geological Society of America’s bulletin, along with my co-author,

although he didn’t actually do anything with this paper very much, on how the rocks I’d been

looking at for my thesis could be correlated, that is linked together throughout the full extent of

the rocks of the basin in which the – the sedimentary basin – in which the rocks were deposited.

It’s an area about the size of Wales and there were arguments about how you should match a

particular limestone with – should you match it with this limestone A or this limestone B and so

on, and I went into that and put together what I thought was a reasonable correlation and it’s

turned out to be correct. In fact, it sounds a bit like boasting, but it’s a fact that I saw some

people who worked on these rocks, still work on these rocks, at a conference this year in – or just

last year – and they said that was a key paper for kicking off all sorts of projects in that area. So

I felt very lucky actually. And so that was a paper just on rocks and correlation and stratigraphy,

nothing to do with physics or geophysics, but it does again raise all sorts of questions which I

haven’t had time to look at, I may look at if I live long enough, sometime in the future. So that

was one of the outcomes of my thesis, actually. [14:35] Oh, there was another outcome, yes,

which was quite interesting. There’s some funny structures, there’s these funny markings, well

they look like markings on rocks, look like wiggly markings on rocks and you can cut the rocks

open and you can see that they are not just markings on the rocks, they go right through the rock

and they look like wiggly things that have been put into the rocks and the question is, how did

that happen. It’s called molar tooth structure, and I’m still interested in that and I think somehow

it’s related to organic activity. But they’re not fossils but they might be related to organic

activity in a way I just don’t understand and to my knowledge nobody has actually come up with

a good explanation of why they exist.

When did you first see these?

In 19…60.

While working on your…

While doing my thesis. I had a very interesting – I can’t remember if I said about my thesis last

time.

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Yes, yes.

Basically, the structure or the problem I had was a very simple one, I didn’t realise it at the time,

but it had a very simple solution and I had to get interested in other things to get a thesis out of

what I was doing and one of the other things I got interested in was sediments and sedimentology

and this molar tooth stuff, it’s part of that story. I think it probably is restricted in time, which

either means it’s an integral part of the earth’s history as it developed, which could either be part

of the history which is inorganic in origin about changing the atmosphere and all that sort of

thing, or it could be related to some organisms that lived at that time but weren’t, had no hard

parts and weren’t preserved in any way. I still don’t, I don’t know the answer to that.

[16:38]

What’s quite interesting is that in other scientific fields you’ll have a scientist who works on a

particular problem for a certain number of years and then concludes that and moves on to

something different, works on that, but doesn’t necessarily or usually return to those things. But

what seems to be happening in your life story is that, for example, you’re seeing something in

1960 and still thinking about it now.

Yes. I’m not working on it now, but mentally I do think about it.

Thinking about it, but also saying you might go on to look at that, given time. And so this raises

the question of why you think it is that you work on things at certain times and not on others and

the reasons for taking up certain things at certain times throughout your career and also the

reason why some things remain questions or, you know, it’s almost as if there are certain phases

of interest that, you know, ebb and flow throughout. Have you any thoughts on why that is

possibly a feature either of the geological career or of your career in particular?

Yes, I hadn’t thought about it but I have got some views about it, now you mention it. I mean in

the extreme case, Dan McKenzie has criticised me at times for working on what he calls

impossible problems. In other words, I have a problem I’m interested in but I can’t get a solution

to it or I can only get a partial solution. And that is perfectly true, I wouldn’t say it’s working on

impossible problems, but it’s working on problems that you will not solve at the time that you’re

looking at them. And I think most of the cases I can think of for the things that I have worked on

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and haven’t solved, I’ve solved them as far as I mentally could and technologically could at the

time that they were being worked on, but I couldn’t get any further. I mean one of the things

I’ve also been interested in are these things called ophiolites, as mentioned in Oman. At the time

I first worked on them we didn’t even know their ages really. We didn’t understand how they

were formed and we had no data to suggest that and we were just floundering around in the dark,

but nevertheless you did have some new data which you could write up into a paper, but you

knew perfectly well there was a lot more that you could say if only you knew what it was that

was around and you had to wait for the development of new methods of analysis, new ways of

looking at things, before you can get on to the next stage. So in the case of ophiolites, for

example, we worked on very elementary papers on ophiolites, and then we started to get some

data, specially some age data, and that gave a new insight, and then people in Oman in particular

came up with a whole new idea about what these ophiolites represent, which took some time to

assimilate mentally, as it were, and that, I haven’t written about that in any detail, but I can see

that there’s a whole series of new things that have been discovered about ophiolites which would

make them a much more, well, I won’t say more interesting story because they’ve always been

interesting, but there’d be a much detailed story and all sorts of implications that we haven’t

even, well, we don’t know what they are yet because nobody’s really worked on them or thought

about them, and so this story of coming back to something successively is in part related to new

ideas that come out, not necessarily in your own field, and new data. So, you know, you don’t

have a problem that you can wrap into a nice parcel and tie it with a string around it and say

that’s that, you can get the brown paper and wrap it up a bit but you can’t tie it up with string

because there’s a lot more to discover. I mean the earth is a very complicated place really in

some ways. I mean, you know, are you a lumper or a splitter, sort of thing. But if you stand

back from it as a planet it’s a very simple thing, the lithosphere and plates and everything else,

but if you go into the details of it and how these things move around and how they interact, it is

very complicated and very interesting. So getting back to molar tooth structure, so much more is

known about the age of the rocks, or the rocks of that age and the way palaeobiology, you know,

of poorly preserved organisms is much better known now, that I can see that in a few years’ time

you’ll be able to say quite a bit more about molar tooth than you could in the 1960s. So I think

necessarily one goes as far as you can at the time, but there’s a lot more, a lot further to go but

you can’t do it because you haven’t got the data or the ideas yet.

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[21:43]

When Dan McKenzie said that you work on impossible problems, what was behind that

comment? Was it you work on impossible problems and that’s fine, or was it you work on

impossible problems, why not work on something else?

I think the latter actually. I mean he really does go to a problem and solve it as best as he can

and comes up with something quite interesting. Now whether he returns to things I don’t know,

but I do like working on problems that, you know, I find challenging. And okay, they’re

impossible to solve at the time, but gradually over the years you do see more and more. I mean

this ophiolite story is extremely interesting actually, it’s still evolving, as I say, even now as we

speak. You know, one of the things that used to be thought was that a continent breaks up and it

goes from a continent, a continental margin out into the ocean floor, and the ocean floor is

generated in the same way as it is at the mid ocean ridge, and that’s how things work. But it

looks now as if many continents break up but in the initial stages where you might expect ocean

floor you don’t get ocean floor, you get continental mantle coming up without the normal ocean

floor sequence in it. In other words, you get mantle rocks at the surface covered by oceanic

water, but you don’t have gabbros, you don’t have basalts, you don’t have dikes and all that sort

of thing and it’s only when that extension’s gone a bit further that you start to get these things.

That sort of thing has only been realised probably as a general effect, I don’t know how general

it is, but it happens on many margins now and nobody realised that. And when you realise that is

happening, you look at the magnetic anomalies on the edge of the continents with a different

light. You don’t try and find out, well you try and find out what the oldest anomaly is but it

probably isn’t at the edge of the continent, it’s probably a little way off in this zone which is

transitional between the oceans and the continents which people didn’t realise existed in the way

it seems to exist at the present time. And then, so you look at this and you think this is

happening, you say well where can we go and look at this stuff rather than drilling it, and lo and

behold you go back into the Alps, have a look at ophiolites there and you say gosh, yes, that’s

exactly what we think we’re seeing on the ocean floor today. And there’s this constant feedback

between observations in some areas and observations in other areas which gives you new ideas.

And because you can see it on land, if you like, in the Alps, you’ll be able to get a much better

idea what it actually consists of than you can from remote geophysical surveys and then you

might find something in the Alps which might explain some of the things you can’t explain on

some magnetic or seismic traverse across the continental margin. So there’s always this constant

interaction and development of ideas. Which I find very interesting actually, and rewarding, I

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mean not just interesting, but I find it very satisfying to, you know, you realise that you’ve

actually got on to the next stage of understanding, but having got there you also realise there’s a

bit more to go but you can’t go there at the moment because you haven’t, you know, we haven’t

got the ideas or the techniques to look into these things.

[25:21]

What do you read or do in order to keep up with arguments about particular geological

questions which you might have worked on twenty years ago or…

Just reading the literature that’s been published since then, that’s all.

And where, for those not in the field, where is the literature for your work?

Well, there’s a huge number of journals, I don’t know, probably hundreds of journals out there.

But there are some key journals which you would go to first of all because you know they’re the

top journals in the subject and so you try and find something about what you’re interested in in

them, and you know, you find the authors who have written these papers and you go and talk to

them sometimes, or meet them at a conference or something, or you email them I suppose these

days. And that’s how you would find out what they’ve done, what they’re thinking and so on.

What are the top journals?

Well, I always regard Earth and Planetary Science Letters as a very good journal. Journal of

Geophysical Research is excellent. Geophysical Journal International is very close to Journal

of Geophysical Research. And then there are the journals, the publications of people, societies

like the Geological Society of America, Geological Society of London, and so on. Each field has

its own, what I think people regard as top journal, basically. So if you get a… I don’t know, this

is probably all related to the Science Citation Index and impact factors and things like that which

I never look at, I’m afraid. I mean I’ve never actually looked up my own citation index. If

somebody said to me, that’s what it is, that’s fine, but I can’t be bothered to go and look it up.

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[27:13]

And while working on the geological timescale, while working on the maps of past distributions

of continents, what else at this time are you working on, what other questions are you working

on, what other projects?

Right now?

No, I mean through the…

Oh, then?

Yeah, through the seventies and eighties and nineties, even things that might just catch your

attention for a short while and occupy you?

I’d have to look at my bibliography, such as it is. Well, in Greece there was a lot of, quite a wide

variety of things to think about and write about. Not just ophiolites, the ophiolites in Greece are

not very good ones really, except for Vourinos and places like that. But the general structure of,

I mean the area I mapped in, I was very lucky, I mean I didn’t know it was going to turn out like

this, but it looks like a very small telescoped continental margin, the sort of thing you get in

Oman where the ocean floor rocks lie on top of, have been pushed out on to continental slope

and then on to continental margin and then on to the continent. So you can see the transition

from ocean to continent in Oman, if you drive for a day or something like that. In Greece you

see exactly the same transition but you can walk it in an afternoon. Now why is that, I mean

that’s ludicrous really, to have all these things walkable in an afternoon, and I have no real

explanation as to why you can do that. And that’s one of the things, I mean I haven’t written

about that in detail. I have written about the area in Greece and described that but I haven’t got

an explanation for it, actually. So I mean that’s one of the things I wrote about and I suppose in

a sense, I didn’t write a lot about Greece, but spent quite a bit of time supervising students who

were working there who would write it up, hopefully. And a lot of things you work, well in

Greece, a lot of things I’ve worked on are sort of tucked away in my mind, I hope, to think about

what I was just talking about, you know, I’ll come back to them sometime if I have the time.

Yeah. I mean one does rely on the work, enormously on the work of other people, because you

can’t do it all yourself, just too big.

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I’ll ask you about research students in a moment.

Yes.

[30:02]

Before that though, could you describe, would you be able to describe in as much detail as you

can, you know, an afternoon’s walk from the coast up through that sort of transition of rocks that

you’ve just described? And then after that I’ll come, I’ve got another question about the

advantages of having it in such a compact section, but what would we, if we were with you

walking on that afternoon’s walk, what would we see in terms of, what would this transition that

you’ve described historically, what would it look like now?

Well, imagine you are starting out on the top of a mountain, I suppose it would be about 5,000

feet or something like that. To go across these different rock types you would start out on top of

a mountain say, which is nothing but limestone. Very shallow water limestone, you can show

that from the sedimentary structures and some of the fossils in the limestone. You know, water

depth when the rocks were being laid down would be a few metres or tens of metres at most and

they give rise to very thick rocks which might be a kilometre or two kilometres thick and they do

this because the limestone was deposited in an area which was gradually sinking. And as it sank

the organisms that can make limestone flourished and deposited limestone in, well, they

flourished up to the point where they were very close to the surface. So you get a very thick

sequence of shallow water limestones. And then as you go to the top of this limestone you get

into what’s called, well a tectonic zone. It’s a zone of shearing, where rocks have been moved

horizontally and a sheet of rocks has been moved on top of the limestone which – and these

rocks are not limestone at all, they are characteristic of quite deep water, but they are of the same

age as the limestone. So if you unscramble it you have, imagine say to the east you have

limestone which passed, you know because they’re the same age, it passed laterally into rocks

that are not limestones at all, but characteristic of deeper water deposition with deeper water

fossils in them, usually microfossils, you don’t get many big fossils in these rocks. And as you

go, you know, the limestone rocks aren’t horizontal, they have a gentle slope or dip towards the

west, so if you go towards the west you’re gradually going from the base of the limestone in the

east, going through the limestone because it’s sloping west, up to the top of the limestone and

then you have a sheet of rocks which are highly deformed which don’t belong to – they’re not

limestones but they’re the same age as the limestones. I mean there are interbeds of limestone

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with these deeper rocks, but basically all these rocks were deposited in much deeper water. And

then as you go further west, eventually – this is very simplified – but eventually you would get

into ocean floor rocks and ophiolite which has been pushed on top of the deeper rocks which

were probably on the continental slope, that sheet of ocean floor rocks has been shoved on to the

slope, which it was at the time, and shows the full sequence of ocean floor rocks, you know, the

mantle, the crust and the pillow lavas at the top. So making it very simple, you have limestone

which is the continent, very shallow water, we can see the bottom of the limestone is resting on

metamorphic rocks which are typical of continents, so we know we’re on a continent, and to the

west we’ve got oceans, or an ocean, floor rocks, and in between we have the rocks that lie

between the ocean and the continent, ie the continental margin. That’s very simplified, but that

in essence is what you’re looking at.

[34:40]

And what’s the advantage of having that, as you say, so much more compressed spatially than in

Oman?

Well, the only advantage, and it wasn’t chosen because it had this advantage, it was found by

accident, the only advantage is that it’s very easy to examine and look at. The disadvantage in

Greece is that the Greek rocks have been deformed twice, severely, so seeing through both those

deformations to the earliest, what it was like before the deformation occurred is much more

difficult in Greece than it is in Oman. So in Oman it’s much more widely spread, it’s much less

deformed, so you can get even more detail than you can in Greece, but Greece is accessible, easy

to look at, highly deformed, and if you take, if you have some faith that one’s got the geology

right, it gives you a nice story.

[35:35]

Could you then, starting with your research student, talk about what’s involved in supervising a

junior geologist, in the field I think, because I think your research students were associated with

the Greek fieldwork.

Yes. Some of them were. Well, we did what at the time was essentially basic mapping. Well,

not just basic mapping, but the first thing you had to do was to make a decent geological map

because there weren’t any. The Greeks had made some maps but they weren’t good maps and

you couldn’t make sense of them, you couldn’t understand what was going on by looking at the

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Greek maps. What you knew was, from the Greek maps, that there were very interesting

problems but you didn’t know how they were going to work out. This is why we went there

really. So, as a field geologist, a research student would be briefed, I’d brief him on what to

expect in the field and say what the problems were as we understood them at the time. He would

have access to any maps that had been published or had been drawn, compiled from previous

research students and previous workers, and he would go off for a field season. And if you’re

mapping, what you do is to walk the contact, that is the boundary between different rock types,

and transfer that boundary to a map and try to understand what the rocks above that boundary

represent and what the rocks below represent and what the boundary represents, because

sometimes the boundaries are just a change of sediment type as you go up in time, that is you

might start with limestone and then it might get covered by sandstone and then the boundary’s

simply the transition from limestone to sandstone. At other times it might be what’s called a

tectonic boundary where you might have, the limestone was deposited, then it was raised up and

eroded and the sandstone was deposited on top of the eroded limestone, that’s an unconformity.

Then you might have another kind of tectonic boundary, a thrust fault, where the limestone was

deposited in one place, the sandstone in another and they’ve been brought together horizontally

by shearing. So you have to keep that in mind and you have to keep in mind the ages of the

rocks as far as you know them, are they upside down, are they right way up, because in a

complicated area like Greece there are places where rocks are upside down. And if they’re

upside down how on earth did they get there and how do they relate to right way up structures.

And you have to bear all that in mind when you’re making a map. And then having made the

map you look at the, bring some rock samples home, you try and find out if you’ve got small

fossils, microfossils or something like that. If they’re igneous rocks you would analyse them to

find out what they’re made of, what minerals they’re made of, what is the composition of the

minerals and all that sort of thing, and then you try to fit all that into a geological history of the

area and hopefully you have found an area which is going to reveal new things in that area, well

it will reveal new things in that area, but also new things about the processes in general that you

have been studying. And then you write it all up.

[39:07]

But how do you supervise them? I mean, in the field or…

Both. I mean I used to go out, spend a few days, a week or so, in the field each year when they

were mapping. Basically, I would meet them in Greece, at a place where we were staying, and

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we’d go out each day looking at something that they wanted to show me, and occasionally I’d

pick an area, I’d say can you show me this area because I don’t understand what’s going on here.

So that would be each field season, they might have three field seasons if they were lucky, of

about two months, three months each, and then when they came back into the lab we would just,

you know, as they were writing things up and analysing things we would have – wouldn’t be

formal about it – we would just meet as and when necessary. I mean some students are brilliant

in the sense that they can go on entirely on their own for a long time and they don’t need any

help whatsoever for a long time and they’re very good at ferreting out things that are important

and relevant from the library or from talking to other people, to students who – well I had one

student, I won’t give you any details about him, but he didn’t get a PhD because he wasn’t… he

was an excellent research assistant. If you told him to do something he would do it beautifully,

but if you asked him, well, what are you going to do next, he hadn’t got an idea of what he was

going to do next. He wasn’t creative, hadn’t been trained to think about things, but he’d been

trained to be a very good research assistant. And that kind of person is the sort of person who

takes an enormous amount of time and energy to try and get him finishing a PhD. This chap

could have finished a PhD, but for reasons again I won’t go into, he didn’t, which is a great

shame because he had a very interesting area which is still not understood. And I won’t say

where it is either. But I mean, you know, you have to, with students you just have to judge

where their strengths and weaknesses are and you have to know your own strengths and

weaknesses because sometimes you realise you can’t help them because you don’t know enough

or you just can’t… it’s a difficult problem or you’re just ignorant about it. I mean I’m not an

igneous petrologist so when people got on to ophiolites and their chemistry, I let them get on

with it because I couldn’t comment because it wasn’t my background actually. And in fact, it

was very funny because when we first started working on these things, even the people at that

time in mineralogy and petrology couldn’t help us, which is surprising, but they couldn’t because

they hadn’t had any experience of these things. And the people who used to help us in particular

were people, either visitors to the department, either short term visitors or people on sabbatical

leave. And they didn’t know a lot because it was all pioneering stuff at the time. We didn’t

know whether ophiolites, at the time we started working on them we didn’t know whether they

were bits of ocean floor or mantle or anything. This is partly a result of working with Eldridge

Moores who worked, as I say, on the Vourinos complex in Greece, he didn’t know whether that

was ocean floor or not at the time, Harry Hess didn’t know. It was one of several possibilities.

So, you know, one… well, you have to work on something unknown, otherwise you’re not going

to advance things very much. But that’s how I used to supervise them. And then of course they

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start writing up and then you get the red pencil out and the red pen and mark it up, as happened

to me.

[43:09]

What do you remember of seeking the help from the mineralogy department concerning

ophiolites?

Well, I remember we had these messy rocks from Greece and we just made thin sections of them

and looked messy and we asked these people, you know, what do we do, I mean how do they get

like this, why aren’t they fresh and why are some minerals preserved and others not and does

their preservation mean that they are particular kinds of rocks or not. Those sorts of questions.

And you analyse them and… [43:48] I mean one of the things, I don’t think we could explain

very well, well we couldn’t, and this didn’t involve mineralogy and petrology very much so

much as just a fact that the bottom of, well, associated with some of these ophiolites, even

there’s a little patch in the area one of my first research students looked at and he found typical

metamorphic rocks, ie rocks looking like schists or gneisses, with typical gneissic and schistose

minerals in them. They had been seen elsewhere by the French who did a lot of work in Greece

and they thought they were part of what we call the metamorphic basement, ie the sort of rocks

on which these limestones I was talking of been laid down. Bits of continental crust had been

picked up as these ophiolites moved out on to the continent, and then somebody dated them, we

dated them in fact, and they were so young, you know, they were about 180 million years where

if they were basement they should have been 300 million years, and we, I think I’m right in

saying, we didn’t publish these dates because we didn’t know what to make of them, we just

didn’t know whether they were dates that had been re-set by being heated. We didn’t understand

them and it turns out they’re very important because when these ophiolites are emplaced, moved

on to the edge of a continent, they’re hot and because they’re hot, when they move over suitable

rocks they metamorphose them, you get new minerals, high temperature minerals and a

metamorphic texture, ie a shearing texture, and they create rocks that look just like metamorphic

basement rocks but they’re not, they much younger and associated with the ophiolite. And that,

you see, if you… before we knew that we just thought they were bits of basement, and then we

dated them and didn’t understand it and then other people in other parts of the world, especially

in Canada, I think possibly Newfoundland or Quebec, possibly in Oman, I can’t remember the

time or the details, show that these rocks were hot because the ophiolite was hot when it was

emplaced. But if the ophiolite is part of an ocean floor and you know the depth of the ocean

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crust that you’re looking at, you can calculate what the temperature should be as the ocean floor

gets older and older. Essentially it cools down and as you go away from the ridge the level, the

temperature at the base of the ocean floor, that is the ocean crust, shall we say, say seven

kilometres down, gradually decreases. You can calculate what that decrease is and you can

calculate the temperature at which these metamorphic rocks form, and you can show that the

only way you can get this metamorphic band at the bottom of the ophiolite is if the ophiolites are

emplaced on to the continent when they are very young. Well, previously we didn’t understand

how ophiolites were put on to continents, thought they came from the mid ocean ridge and

somehow got to the edge of the continent, but this means that you’re pushing something on to

the edge of a continent within perhaps two or three million years of its having formed at a ridge.

Well that didn’t make sense and still doesn’t make sense in some ways, so this is how things

develop. I mean if you don’t know that age you can’t start speculating about this. If you know

the age you can start speculating about it but it means you’re into new ideas and new territory,

which you didn’t imagine existed before. [47:24] And then say, in Oman, this is a good

example again, in Oman the Open University group showed that the ophiolites were not, didn’t

have the composition of typical ocean floor, the sort of thing you get in the mid Atlantic ridge,

because they had the composition of the minerals and some of the minerals themselves indicated

that they came from an environment in which there was water present when they were being

generated. In the mid ocean ridge, okay, you have water above which is cooling the rocks as

they come up, but you don’t have water in the mantle because the minerals in those igneous

rocks are dry, there’s no structural water in them, they don’t have any, you know, very little sign

of water in these minerals. But the minerals in Oman do have a sign of water in them when they

were molten. Where does that water come from? Don’t get it in the mid ocean ridges. And this

is how they came up with the idea that the magmas from which these ophiolites formed had

water put into them because they were near a subduction zone. And now it turns out that most

ophiolites, I don’t know how many, but I would guess more than ninety per cent of the ophiolites

we see in the world are formed near subduction zones and emplaced on to the continents very

shortly after they’ve been created. Well, why is that? I mean we still don’t understand this

properly, but all these little bits of information come along and you just have to change your

whole model. It’s not, you know, big scale planetary science stuff, but it’s very interesting from

a point of view of how these things happen.

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[49:13]

To what extent is there a division in geology between that big scale planetary science stuff and

the kind of geology that you and others are concerned with, such as the work in Greece on

ophiolites?

Well, I would think there’s a transition, you know. I wouldn’t generalise, but in my own field I

feel you have these details which are very interesting and very important but they do, they must

fit into the large scale planetary picture, you know, plate motions and how plates work and how

subduction works. So I wouldn’t say that they were small scale in that sense, I think they do

throw light on to the large scale processes that we see about how plates interact with one another

and how they are created and how they’re destroyed, but you have to do detailed work to find

that out. I mean there’s a real pattern we don’t understand which is essentially a global pattern,

not only global in the sense of being widespread, but also it goes through time, geological time.

There are times in the earth’s history, of earth’s development, when ophiolites are created, and

then you don’t get any for a long time, well not a long time, but say, 50, 100 million years, then

you get another bunch of ophiolites suddenly being created and this is all related to subduction

somehow and we still do not have a good understanding of the interrelationships of plate

motions, ophiolite creation, all that sort of thing, subduction zones, and I’m sure in a few years’

time, well hopefully, say in a decade or so, we will understand that, that’ll illuminate a whole

series of other things which we can’t imagine at the moment. So that, I mean it’s… I like to go

from the detail to the big picture and back again because I find it so interesting.

[end of track 10]

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[Track 11]

I’ve been looking at the diaries from the Greek fieldwork and things from other fieldwork and…

Greek travel?

Yes. And I wondered, one of the entries in that is a description of the story that you told of being

asked to go to the police station and account for why you were there and the…

This is actually in that account?

Mm. And there were a number of details in that account that didn’t appear, as you might expect,

in your account and I wondered if I could jog your memory about them you could say a little

more.

Yes.

One was that the two Englishmen who turned up I think in, is it the village of Anora?

Anavra.

Anavra, Anavra.

A-N-A-V-R-A.

One was a mathematician called Nestil.

He was an American, a nuclear physicist.

What was he? I wondered whether you could say what he was doing there?

I don’t know what he, well, I can tell you what he was doing there. He was trained, he worked at

the Battelle Institute I think in America, western North America, I think it may be in Idaho, I’m

not sure, as a nuclear physicist, but he had a hobby which was collecting fossils which were tiny

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fossils called fusilines, which are a kind of foraminifera. You can see them with the naked eye

but they’re not big, they’re not like ammonites or anything like that. And it was just his hobby,

apparently he had a whole basement of his house, was devoted to preparing these specimens for

collections and examination.

And I wonder whether you remember the reaction of the sergeant and his deputies when you

showed a sample?

Well, I think, I can’t remember the details, probably the diary, the travelogue is a better

description of what happened, but my recollection is that that they were a bit sceptical when we

first talked about what we were doing and eventually when they saw these photographs and the

fact that they corresponded to something they could see with their naked eye, they began to

believe us and then when we showed them what you could see through a magnifying glass

looking at the rock, they were convinced I think. Didn’t mean to say they weren’t still

suspicious, but they realised that we were telling the truth about that.

Thank you.

[02:27]

I wonder whether you could, concerning another interview, if you could say who Nicolaus and

Magda are?

Nicolaus?

Nicolaus. I wondered whether they were part of the family that you were staying with. I’ll read

you the entry which might jog your memory. This is your wife writing: ‘Alan arrived home about

7pm followed shortly afterwards by Nicolaus and at his heels Magda, who’s been inserted by

grandmother. Alan and N (I assume meaning Nicolaus) discuss rocks, fossils, quote, ‘200

million years…’

Ah yes, I do remember.

‘…it astounds Nicolaus. He’s come to invite us to his brother’s wedding. So I wondered, who’s

this person that you’re discussing?

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I’d forgotten all about him, he was a very interesting chap, he was the only person in the village

who spoke English. He was a student I think in Germany at the time, had come home in the

vacation to see his parents and he was very interesting really, because he was very able, would

have liked to have read mathematics somewhere, but the scholarship he had was offered by the

church, it was the only scholarship he could get, and so he ended up as a theologian and actually

he did become a theologian and may well, I don’t know whether he taught theology, but he was

in Athens as a theologian eventually. That’s the Nicolaus. He was an only son as far as I

remember. His parents were typical Greek peasant family, very poor, but very nice. And Magda

I think was the daughter of, the daughter of our landlady.

And yes, I wondered whether you could say a little more about interaction with Nicolaus then?

Well, we talked about all sorts of things for a time. His English wasn’t perfect but in fact my

wife may well have talked with him a bit more because she was very, she was very interested in

theology and philosophy.

Did he come out with you?

He never came out on a geological field traverse or anything like that, but we walked around the

village once or twice. Thank you for reminding me, he was such a nice chap actually.

[04:54]

And I’d like to just read another short entry, because it seems to contain a sort of joke between

you and your wife concerning geology, and also indicates that you and your wife did different

things when she joined you on field days.

Yes.

And so Tuesday the twenty-third: ‘Sky cleared, it was warmer and I joined Alan in a long but

good field day. Took trail north of village, stopped at spring, climbed higher, intense folding.

Lunch with cows overlooking a valley. Then Alan climbed up to look at his favourite rocks

(limestone, a joke) and off to follow a contact while I went ahead to a wide, very beautiful

meadow over rough limestone into another meadow where a horse grazed and a shepherd had to

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chase his cows away. Alan found an interesting conglom (meaning conglomeration)’. What

does the limestone thing refer to, can you remember?

I can’t, I can’t remember, but the area I was working in had mountains of limestone, maybe Judy

was referring to that, I don’t know why it was funny though.

Perhaps you’d been complaining that this was all there was to see, I don’t know?

It could be something like that, yes. ‘Conglom’ is short for conglomerate, which is a geological

term for a rock made of boulders, basically.

And could you, this indicates that she almost took different routes when she went out with you, in

other words she didn’t go and do exactly what you did. How did that tend to work out?

She didn’t come out very often. That was right at the beginning of our stay there and for a few

days she did actually take my notes, or take notes for me in my notebook, but I think we found

that it, I can’t remember exactly why, but it was difficult for us to continue that kind of pattern,

possibly because it involved a lot of walking and scrambling and it wasn’t the sort of thing… she

could do it but she wouldn’t be as fast as I was and I just needed to get on with things, basically.

So we didn’t do it very often. But I think she was intrigued.

And I just wanted to know the identity of someone else.

Yes.

I don’t know how to say it, but I wondered whether this was the landlady?

No, that means grandma. Yiayia.

Okay. So your wife at one point was talking to grandma – grandma being, in terms of who…

She was the landlady of our little room that we had in this village.

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Oh good. I just wondered if it was because your wife had had a conversation with this person

and they were telling her that she shouldn’t be going out climbing, that that wasn’t a job for

women or something.

Probably. [laughs]

Okay. Thank you for those specific memories.

[07:56]

I wanted to ask whether you could say over the period of your career how you think that maths

and physics have impinged on the earth sciences. So from your vantage point in the earth

sciences, and working as you have, how have you seen physics and mathematics introduced into

geology or earth sciences more widely?

Well, I think I would go back to about the 1950s, before plate tectonics came about. There really

were two disciplines in the earth sciences. There was geology in which I would include

petrology, mineralogy and looking at rocks at the surface in particular, and there was geophysics

which largely, and not entirely true, but large scale geophysics was mostly seismology, which it

probably is today in many ways, but there was very little in seismology that seemed to have a

relevance to what geologists did on the surface if you like, but subsequent to plate tectonics they

came together very much actually and they still are together. I think certainly in our department

in Cambridge we expect people to be familiar with at least the rudiments of maths and physics,

even if they’re palaeontologists and I think that’s where the advances have been made, without

question, the advances have been made by applying physics to the earth as a whole, but realising

that the upper part of the earth is made up of these plates that move and it’s the motion of these

plates that actually determines most of what you see on the surface. So there’s interaction

between, or feedback between what geologists find and how plates move and so on. A lot of

things we still haven’t quite worked out, but they’re very much closer than they used to be. I

mean physics, geophysics is the only way we have of knowing about the earth’s interior, really,

and that’s done mostly through seismology, though not entirely. But we got to the stage now

where you can look at the train of waves generated by an earthquake and you can model how

those waves were formed in much more detail than we ever used to be able to and that precision

or increase in precision and understanding is continuing and feeding back on to what, I suppose

what geologists would call, what essentially is on the surface because geologists imagine what is

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present at depth but of course they can’t see it unless it’s been drilled in some way or other. It’s

very difficult to, well you can’t experiment easily on the earth. I suppose the only sensible way

you could experiment is by letting off a huge bomb and watching how the seismic waves behave,

but you can’t sort of take the earth apart, you have to infer it from your measurements.

[11:19]

Thank you. And I suppose a related question, how has the status of detailed observational field

geology changed over the period of your career, if it has?

Well, I think the emphasis nowadays, it’s very difficult to get support for detailed field geology,

for doing work of that kind any more, justifiably in a sense because the earth really, a lot of the

earth is really well known now in that sense, but there are quite a few things that we don’t

understand that do require field geology, but it’s not easy to get funding for that sort of thing.

Why’s that?

Well, I think it’s, I mean quite honestly some of it’s just simply it’s unfashionable. You know,

there are flavours in science, people follow things through and another thing is it doesn’t yield

results very quickly, because you have to spend, I would say you don’t really understand an area

you’re mapping for at least two years, possibly five years, and even then you might think you

understand it but as you get into it more and more you realise you don’t and I mean I’ve worked

in Greece for many years, still don’t understand the area at all in detail. I mean up to a point yes,

but there are many things I would like to understand which I don’t understand, but as more and

more work is done in these areas, specially with new techniques and new tools, you understand

more and sooner or later we’ll understand it properly.

Can you expand a bit more on the fact that you think it’s an unfashionable area now in terms of

the timing of that change and…

Well it doesn’t make the headlines. I’m just trying to think of… A good example, there are

good examples and I can’t think of them at the moment. Oh I know, yes. There’s this idea of

the ‘snowball earth’. I mean I’ve never accepted that as a model, but when it, you know, it’s

been the source of television programmes, newspaper headlines, even possibly the cover of

magazines like Time and so on, who quite rightly regard this as a very interesting idea, but it’s

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probably not true. And if you put forward the evidence to show it probably isn’t true, it’s often

not listened to. I mean the BBC had a television programme about the snowball earth, but as I

recollect they didn’t have a single person who said, how do you explain this, how do you explain

that, and you can’t have this, and so on. It was very one-sided. It’s a bit like the time that they

found these very curious things in meteorites from Mars. You can joke about little green men

from Mars and so on, but everyone believed it and it probably isn’t true and it became very

fashionable, you could get money for doing these things, looking at these things and so on. And

it does help push forward the subject, there’s no doubt about it, because you increase the

knowledge and you ask all sorts of questions you hadn’t asked before, but it’s not correct. So I

mean in the sense that it doesn’t make news, I think unfashionable science is science that doesn’t

ever get into the news actually, but it’s very important but doesn’t catch people’s imagination.

Which is fine, I mean that’s how things are, I’m not going to say it shouldn’t be like this, but

people do get swept along by these new ideas and so on. I remember talking to somebody who

shall be nameless I’m afraid, but came from a very good institution in the US and one of his

faculty members had made a splash, I think he actually sort of was featured on Time magazine or

something like that about something, which, you know, unlikely to be true, and I said this to him

because he was here for a time, he said I don’t understand why people make such a fuss about it

because I don’t think it’s true at all and he said, oh, doesn’t matter, he’s on Time magazine, that’s

good for us. And that’s the kind of science that… or kind of reaction I don’t like. I mean he had

an interesting problem, he came up with an interesting answer, but I think you could argue that

there were other answers which were equally probable, that’s all.

[16:28]

And if detailed observational field geology isn’t as fashionable as it might have been in the past,

what is a fashionable way of working in geology?

Well, you could take one of these things. When hotspots became important, I mean there had

been proposed or I think named even, I would think probably in the 1960s or possibly the fifties,

I can’t remember the details, and I think Tuzo Wilson might have actually coined the term, I

can’t remember, but you could get money to go off to some, you know, Tristan de Cunha,

Ascension Island, Pacific islands which were hotspots, and there might be a preference to giving

money for looking into the rocks on these islands, because they are sort of hotspot rocks if you

like, because they suddenly appeared to be very, well they were very interesting, they are very

interesting, but you couldn’t get money to do a similar sort of thing on some other igneous rocks

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which weren’t quite in the public domain but in the long term they might be equally important. I

mean I don’t mind that, but I think there’s been an emphasis, certainly in the last decade or so,

on lab work and computer modelling and that sort of thing, but unless you actually go out and

look at rocks your model’s only as good as the rocks themselves, as it were. Unless you actually

test your model against the evidence, which tends not to happen sometimes, it’s not very useful.

How can you do geology, how was geology done without going into the field and looking? How

are these people doing geology on a computer with models?

How do they do it?

Mm.

Well, I suppose a lot of it is actually, well, that’s a big subject. But… and I really haven’t

thought about it enough. But, for example, people model how a river deposits its sediment and

you can put in the parameters concerned and come up with something that’s plausible. But

unless you actually go out into the field and go to some sediments that are laid down by rivers

and measure their thicknesses and distributions and so on, you really don’t know how good your

model is although it may look very nice on the screen. That’s not a very good example. You

always have to come back to the evidence, which is always in the rocks. If you don’t test your

model against the evidence, you might be right, you might be very wrong.

When did you notice that it was first becoming difficult to attract funding for field mapping and

detailed geological work?

Well, that, it’s not so much – I haven’t been affected by this myself actually, because I’ve always

been able to get money to do what I wanted to do or I’m also not very expensive, I don’t need

big equipment and so on. But one would come across colleagues in other universities who were

interested in something, seemed quite important in a way or very interesting anyway, and they

just could not get any money for it, so they didn’t do it, which is a pity really. I mean I think it is

extremely difficult to know what to do, even a country like Britain which is quite big and had a

big survey and had a colonial survey, cannot cover everything in the earth sciences adequately

really. I think the way this has happened is by the people who run committees and give grants

and so on, more and more of them don’t actually have any experience or have very little

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experience of field geology, so they’re unable to judge in the facts quite often whether some

projects are very good or not. I mean you can see this actually, what’s happening in the oil

companies, for example, very few of them have field trained geologists coming into the

companies these days because universities have progressively cut back on field trips and training

for fieldwork because it’s expensive, quite honestly. So you get people coming into companies

who have very little field experience and some companies I think are starting to run their own

field trips because they realise it’s necessary to actually have some experience of rocks in the

field to understand what you’re looking at when you’re looking at, say, a seismic profile or

something like that. And in fact we have in Cambridge, in the Department of Earth Sciences we

have this charity called CASP, the Cambridge Artic Shelf Project, which was set up by Brian

Harland years ago, which is really, does work for industry, it does fieldwork for industry because

industry no longer has the capability of doing that sort of thing themselves. And that’s what’s

missing, basically. You know, it’s not so much a worldwide phenomenon, there are countries

which do train their field geologists, or train people in field geology very well and this is where

the oil companies will get some of their future geologists from, but we used to do that very well

ourselves, we don’t any more, or not as well as we used to.

[22:32]

You mentioned that you had a box file concerning your work on Pangaea, a number of box files.

I’ve got a, yeah, I’ve got lots of box files.

I wonder whether you could, as we haven’t covered that specifically, if you could say something

about that work beginning with the origins of it, when you started to work on it.

Well I suppose it started with the work with Bullard and Jim Everett and so on. We made a fit of

the continents by computer, then I got on to this business with Jim Briden of making maps of the

world at different times, and then I realised that in fact you could do something which had never

been done before, which was to calculate how two continents collided in terms of their relative

motions and rates of motions, in particular the collision between Africa and Europe in the

Mediterranean region in the broad sense of the term. So you could actually do some calculations

about how fast these things approach one another, the directions in which they approach one

another – that’s more difficult because there are lots of different fragments involved – but you

could set some boundary conditions and then having got these quantitative values you could

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compare those values with what actually you saw in the field, and that was something that we’d

never been able to do before. So you’d have mountain belts like the Alps and the Himalayas and

so on and you could calculate how much crust had been consumed in the approach of Africa to

Europe at different points at different times and compare that with what you actually saw in the

field. And you could also show – the interesting thing about plate tectonics, because a lot of it is

essentially geometry – you could see how the geometry of the collision varied along the length

of the collision and would, could and did give rise to entirely different effects depending on

where you were on that collisional belt. So sometimes, you know, specially towards the eastern

Mediterranean there was a lot of motion going on and it was largely at right angles, the motion

was at right angles, in other words Africa and Europe, collided at high angles to one another,

whereas if you went to the west, say Spain or even out into the Atlantic, there was a collision

going on but it was very oblique and gave rise to quite different effects. So you could begin to

understand, this wasn’t the first time this was done, you could begin to understand how totally

different geological effects were due to exactly the same cause in terms of the geometry

involved. The geometry’s very simple but the effects were quite complicated and different,

which is why you’ve got geologists arguing about all sorts of things, how could this be the same

age as something else because it’s quite a different thing, but it’s actually just, it’s just how the

geometry is.

And what was involved in terms of work not in the field and work in the field for this?

Well, not in the field was simply calculating the motions between Africa and Europe, which you

could do because you knew… essentially what you do, you set up what’s called a plate tectonic

circuit; you go from Europe to North America because you have the spreading pattern between

Europe and North America in the Atlantic, and then you go from North America to Africa and

you know the spreading pattern south of the Azores in particular, and the difference between

those two, or the sum of those two motions was the motion between Africa and Europe. So

that’s how you got the motion and the overall motion which set the boundary conditions and then

you would go into the field and find out when this type of deformation occurred, did the

deformation occur at the time you would predict from your calculations and how much was it

and what effect did that have and that sort of thing. And it’s the sort of thing that’s still going

on, we haven’t worked that out at all actually, really, in detail. We’ve got an outline, a good

outline of what’s happening but in detail, well in parts of the Mediterranean we still don’t

understand what happened. It’s easy for places like, well easier, for places like Sardinia and

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Corsica which have just been moved away from France, mostly France, so you can understand

what’s happening there and you can quantify it and so on, but the trouble is there are so many

bits and pieces in the Mediterranean that they interact with one another in a way that would

cause a second order theory, so to speak, or with geometry and we can’t do it, we haven’t… we

get the outline, but we still haven’t got it properly yet.

[22:46]

Can you tell me something about debates with or disagreements with other individuals or

producing different reconstructions of the continents, different Pangaeas, different Gondwanas,

and so on?

There are small scale differences, especially in places like the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

When I say small scale I mean you’re talking about less than 500, perhaps less than 100

kilometres and so on. And some of those differences are significant in the sense of trying to

understand the details of what’s going on in a particular place, but the only large scale

differences I know of concern Pangaea. Pangaea was formed by the collision of the southern

continents with the northern continents, ie the collision between Gondwana and the southern

continents and the northern continents being mostly North America, Greenland and Europe or

Eurasia. And this is all based on palaeomagnetic work, especially the work of Jim Briden and

Ted Irving and people like that, where there’s a real puzzle which may be resolved now, I’m still

not absolutely sure, but if you make, if you fit the margins of the continents around the Atlantic

together and around the Indian Ocean together to get Pangaea, you get quite a nice geometrical

fit, you put the palaeomagnetic data from the northern continents on that fit and the

palaeomagnetic data from the southern continents on that fit and assume the fit applied to 250

million years ago, which is I think just about the beginning of Triassic time, or if you make a fit

by closing up, using the ocean floor data, the magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor to make a

reconstruction, they’re very, very similar and the palaeomagnetic poles on those two major

continents, super continents if you like, they are in agreement with one another if you use the

dipole field model, which is the standard model for interpreting palaeomag, they are in

agreement with one another within their limits of error. If you go back into Permian time, which

is just before the Triassic, so you go back another 50 million years or so, we have no reason to

suppose there’s any large motion between Gondwana and the northern continents. In other

words, we would still have the same Pangaea, but if you plot the poles from the northern

continents on that Pangaea and the poles from the southern continents on that – or Pangaea of

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Permian time, same reconstruction but slightly different age – they do not match. And the

question is why. And there are lots of answers to this. One possibility, which I wrote a paper

with Jim Briden, we speculated that they didn’t match because the magnetic field at the time

might have had some non-dipole components in it, and this is a model that’s been used by many

people to explain why the palaeomagnetic data doesn’t match. But other people have said, oh

you can’t do that, the magnetic field is a dipole field and what you have to do is to move the

southern continents relative to the northern continents so that the poles do come in, do match

with one another assuming a dipole field. To do that requires a very large zone of shearing

between the northern continents and the southern continents and a displacement of several

hundred, if not a few thousand, kilometres, something like that, which you just can’t see in the

rocks, you cannot see where the shear zone would be and so the only way out of that is to say

well, that shear zone is being covered up by younger rocks, that’s why we don’t see it. But I

don’t think you can cover every possible site where this shear zone is likely to be by younger

rocks, so as a geologist I would say it doesn’t exist. So what do you do? Well, those two

positions, a large shear zone or a non-dipole field are essentially how that palaeomagnetic data

was explained. But I think I’m right in saying that quite recently some of the protagonists of the

strong non-dipole… I was never a protagonist with Jim about a strong non-dipole field but some

people were and my understanding, and I’d have to check this, I can’t say this is absolutely true,

but my understanding is that they now believe that the magnetic poles from Gondwana in

particular have been re-magnetised so you’re not comparing poles of the same age when you put

them on that reconstruction. And if that’s the case, that’s fine, it’s a nice solution. The field is

still dipole, Pangaea hasn’t got this huge shear zone in it, and it conforms more or less to what

you would expect.

Just for the listener, what is a dipole field?

It’s a very simple… imagine a bar magnet, you know, that you get in a compass or something

like that, it’s the field created by that magnet. It’s a sort of… the easiest way to see it is to take a

little magnet, put a piece of paper on top of it and I know most people won’t have it, but if you

had some iron filings and you sprinkle it on the paper you can see how the lines of force come

out at the north pole of the magnet and go back to the south pole and so on, that’s all it is.

And so a non-dipole field is?

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Something which has got a little bit of extra, well, mathematically you can break the field down

into all sorts of components and the next component, the next strongest component in the earth’s

magnetic field is what’s, I think it’s called G20, which means it’s essentially a quadrupole field

which is made of two little bar magnets in opposition, plus a dipole. And those two little

magnets in opposition create what’s called a quadrupole field which is a small fraction of the

present day field. There aren’t any bar magnets in the centre of the earth or anything like that,

but that’s the way you can model it mathematically.

Thank you. And what has been the…

But – sorry.

Yes, carry on.

[34:55]

Just to continue, this is important because what it means is that you can probably be fairly

confident of using a non-dipole field, sorry, the dipole field as long as you can go in time.

There’s no evidence that we had a strong non-dipole field. So that’s good, but what it also

means is that there are cases which have survived for many years where palaeomagnetists have

felt the field was, the directions of magnetisation that they had were the correct directions when

in fact they weren’t, because they were of a different age. So if you go back into the Palaeozoic

and especially in the Precambrian, you don’t, it’s very difficult to tell how much re-

magnetisation has taken place in those rocks, which means it’s very difficult to be sure when you

make Precambrian continental reconstructions using palaeomag, and that’s virtually all we have,

that you’ve got the right one. So it’s a bit worrying in that sense.

And how can you determine right from wrong palaeomagnetic data?

Well, I’m not a palaeomagnetist, but there are tests you can apply and I would say that they’re

very difficult, I mean it’s difficult to be sure actually. The real problem is you can’t date

palaeomagnetism except in very special circumstances as you can’t date when the magnetisation

in a rock was acquired and worse still, rocks often have at least one other component of

magnetisation and they may have two or even three and they may be incomplete. So what you

measure in a rock, in a hand specimen, is a magnetic field or direction of magnetisation, but it

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might be made up of two or three components and the skill in the palaeomagnetist’s work is

trying to find what those components are and what their ages are. And that’s a very difficult

thing to do actually. I mean you’ve probably, I don’t know if you’ve talked to Fred Vine at all,

but if you talk to him about the palaeomagnetism as I have at times, he – I can still say this - he

would say well, Alan, when you think about it, it shouldn’t work should it? [laughs] So it does

work but you have to be very careful and very skilful and I think in the next ten years there’ll be

a whole re-run, if you like, of palaeomagnetic poles in rocks because the technology is getting to

the stage now where you can clearly separate the different components out.

Thank you.

[37:42]

What’s been the effect of retirement on the way you work or perhaps the amount you work, I

don’t know, but the way…

It’s terrible, if anything I work harder than I used to when I was… no, I can’t be working harder

but I’m able to spend much more time following up things I’m interested in without having to

worry about teaching at a certain time or preparing for a lecture or going to a committee and

writing reports and all that sort of thing. And I’ve also developed other interests as well, so I’m

very… I recommend retirement to anybody actually.

In what way has it opened things up? You said you’ve developed other interests.

Oh well, I joined the U3A, University of the Third Age, and at least for two or three years I

joined a walking group and went walking around Cambridge, admittedly we often drove to the

starting point of the walk and so on. But it actually increased my knowledge, my geography of

Cambridge is so much better than it ever was actually, because I didn’t know where all these

little villages were. People talk about a town like Erith and I’d nod my head sagely but hadn’t

got a clue where it was really, so it was out in the Fens somewhere, so that was lovely. But the

trouble was I also still had a college connection and I couldn’t do a lot of the walks because of

the college meetings I had to go to, but what I decided to do instead was to make up my own

walks and I walked nearly, well, most of the major rivers in Cambridgeshire and the cuts of the

rivers and so on, which I found very rewarding actually. I did it on my own, but I don’t mind

that.

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What, I’m not saying… but why, why walk the rivers, why pick those as the routes for your

walks?

Well, I always find rivers interesting. I suppose that’s the real reason and, you know, it’s just

rivers, even though they’re in the Fens and very flat at times and so on, there’s always something

going on in a river, there might be boats on the river, bends in the river, little villages built on the

river, birds on the river. You know, there’s a lot going on where you have a river against the

land and so on. And that again, also of course helped me to increase my geographical

understanding of the area. I haven’t finished it yet.

And what note do you take of the birds as you go along?

I’m just curious to know what they are actually. I have a friend who I work with occasionally,

he lives in Holland, he’s retired like me and we went out in the spring, I think it was, to St Neots

and walked the river from St Neots north to, I can’t remember the name of the place but it has a

nice pub to eat in anyway. And we, instead of looking at the birds, we looked at the butterflies.

We found at least eight species of butterflies in that walk, many of which I’d forgotten all about,

I used to know them as a boy but I hadn’t seen them or recognised them for a long time. And,

you know, we’re both enthusiastic about that sort of thing. And the cinnabar moth – do you

know that at all? It’s, I think it’s a red and green moth that flies in daytime. Doesn’t look like a

moth actually, it looks more like a beetle in some cases, but its caterpillars are made up of red –

sorry – orange and black rings around it. It looks like a tiny Michelin man actually, and we saw

all these things all over the ragwort and that sort of thing, hadn’t seen that for a long time, hadn’t

noticed it for a long time. So, you know, that’s the sort of thing I quite enjoy actually.

[41:37]

And has it changed the way you work, the times of day, where, the amount?

Not really. I did change my way of working when, as you know, my wife was ill for a long time

and when she got really ill I used to spend more time at home. So I’ve got to the stage now

where I’ve kept that habit going. I’ll often work a bit in the morning at home, work in the

evening at home and just come into the department perhaps for half the day or less. I usually

come to college for lunch which is very, again, very useful. Or not just useful, it’s a wonderful

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thing to be able to do actually, given the company, not to mention the food of course. So that’s

how I’ve changed. Being able to do those sorts of things, you can’t do that if you’re teaching

because you have a definite schedule and it’s very, it’s very intense, teaching, actually. There’s

a chap I, one of the younger members of the department, I sent him an email about something

two or three weeks ago and he’s only just replied to it because he just couldn’t, he felt he

couldn’t devote the time to answering a simple email. It’s just so, you get so immersed in

teaching, basically. But of course once he’s finished his lecture course he can relax a little, catch

up. The other thing I’ve taken up is I’ve started doing a bit of watercolour painting which I’m

beginning to enjoy very much actually. I’m not very good at it, but, you know, I thought it was

so difficult, I didn’t think I’d be able to do it, but it actually isn’t that difficult really, you just

have to learn certain techniques and then apply them and use your imagination. So that’s

something else I do. Do a lot of reading. I’m [laughs] busier than I ever was actually. But it’s

very good.

[43:51]

And for someone listening to your interview who would like to investigate what archives you

have, I realise you may not know where you’re going to put archive material and so on, but

could you just give a sketch of the range and type of archive material that you’ve got concerning

your work?

Well, as you know, I’ve got some of the original maps for the Bullard and others’ reconstruction.

I think they’re worth keeping. I don’t know what to do, but I do have the original paper tapes

that we used for the data input for the programs and somewhere I’ve got a printout of one of the

programs, but I don’t know where it is actually. But it’s a very simple program conceptually to

write, I mean you could easily write it, reproduce what it did. And then what I got, well, one

doesn’t know how important these things are. I’ve got my thesis, my PhD thesis and a paper I

wrote based on that which people said started a whole lot of hares running in the western US, so

to speak. Because we, well, I was the principal author of the paper, wrote it with another person,

we just made a suggestion about how certain rocks in Montana were related to one another,

which nobody had suggested previously and the interpretation, yes, the interpretation we made of

those has led people to look into this area in a different way and started other things going, which

is nice to know. So I don’t know if that’s an important archive or not, but that’s one of the things

I have. And then I went on, as I say, with the maps for this conference, Organisms and

Continents Through Time, that was the first set of global maps anyone ever made, I made that

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with Jim Briden and Gill Drewry. So that’s another archive if you like. And I think prior to that

I had also reconstructed Gondwana by the computer, which was the first reconstruction of

Gondwana by computing. So again, that might be of interest. And then, as I say, I thought about

how the relationship between Africa and Europe, how that motion influenced the geology in the

Mediterranean region and wrote a paper on that, I think that’s probably something worth

keeping. Don’t know about much else that’s… well, I’ve forgotten what I’ve done actually over

the years, but more recently I made a compilation with Felix Gradstein and Jim Ogg on the

timescale, this is inherited really from Brian Harland. Did I say how that originated? Yes.

Well, that won a prize, apparently, for being one of the best reference books of the year it was

published. But I don’t have any archive material for that, it’s already, you know, it’s essentially

in the book, because in fact the three of us were essentially commissioners of chapters for that

book and, I don’t know how many chapters there are, but it’s probably ten, twenty chapters. So

the people who wrote those chapters would have their own archives but we don’t have those

archives at all. But it was a good thing to have done and, you know, there’s several other things

I’m working on at the moment. But, you know, some of the stuff, you get asked to go to a

conference and present a paper on something and you may not have a new idea and you’re just

recycling what you said two or three years ago and I don’t think it’s worth keeping at all

actually.

And what do you have in terms of letters and…

Very few.

…notebooks?

I’ve got some field… I don’t think the field notebooks are worth keeping. I mean when I look at

some of what the old Victorian geologists did, I haven’t seen their notebooks so much, but their

maps are absolutely superb, you know, and my maps aren’t like that. They’re messy. Yeah. I

wish I had made better, I could have made better maps and I wish I did do so, but I didn’t.

And the material that you do keep, what are your thoughts about where that might go at the

moment?

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Well, I, being in a college of course and having a library and lots of archives going back

centuries, the college is the first place I could think of actually. And I have talked to the librarian

about whether he’d be interested and he is interested, but there might be better places, I don’t

know. But I just don’t think, I haven’t got a huge correspondence like, you know, Harold

Jeffreys’ for example, or somebody like that, probably would, well, he didn’t have email for

example, so I imagine a lot of the stuff that would have been preserved a long time ago or fifty

years ago gets deleted. I don’t, I mean I don’t think I can retrieve any emails before about 2004,

because the trouble is the machines change so the format changes and unless you’re going to

spend the time and energy being able to read the old tapes or whatever they were at the time, and

put them into new format, it’s going to get lost. Or you may keep the tape but – well, I haven’t

kept the tapes, I think I returned them all to the computer lab because you couldn’t read them

anyway. I mean so much science actually is getting lost at the present time. [50:12] I heard a

story, I think it was one of the American oil companies, worked in South America, they had a

huge survey, it was probably millions of dollars if not a billion dollars, seismic survey of all the

basins on the west coast or the western margin of South America, absolutely invaluable data

really. Nobody’s ever going to do it again, especially when they didn’t find any oil in these

places, and all that data, it wasn’t thrown out initially but what happened to it, it became

unreadable. The formats had changed, the machines had changed, so what did companies do,

they probably throw it out. There was a lot of data which, in industry, which probably would be

of use or of interest to academics which is not preserved. And we’re never going to find that

data again I don’t think. But that’s not my data, basically.

[51:15]

And finally, can you say something about your experience of being interviewed for National Life

Stories, how you’ve found the experience, how you’ve responded to it?

Well, I found it very interesting actually because it’s made me think about things I hadn’t

thought about for many a year and I’ve been reminded of things I’ve forgotten about and it’s

stimulated me to try and find stuff that would be of interest in an interview which is buried at

home somewhere, for example. And stuff buried in the department, well, not buried but one

would hope it had been preserved in the department but it, unfortunately it isn’t, that sort of

thing. So no, it’s been a very interesting experience actually.

[end of track 11 – end of interview]