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Recollections from 1956–1982

 

Date:	1956–1982
Author:	Stuart Malin
Title:	In Remembrance of me
About:	The text below consists of edited extracts from Malin's unpublished work In Remembrance of Me, a copy of which has been deposited at the British Library. Malin's connection with the Observatory began in 1956 when he attended his first Summer School at Herstmonceux. Appointed to the staff in 1958, Malin started work in the Magnetic Department. He then spent two years at the Radcliffe Observatory in South Africa before returning to his former department at Herstmonceux in 1965. By then, control of the Herstmonceux site had moved from the Admiralty to the newly formed Science Research Council. However, as part of the transfer, although still based at Herstmonceux, the Magnetic Department was administered not by the Science Research Council (SRC) but by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Malin remained at Herstmonceux until 1976 when the department was moved to Scotland. He remained in Scotland until 1982 when he resigned to take up the post of Head of Astronomy and Navigation at the National Maritime Museum where he was based on the Observatory site.
Images:	10
Copyright:	Text & images © Stuart Malin, 2024

 

 

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Vacation Courses at Herstmonceux Castle, 1956–1958

© Stuart Malin, 2024

When a notice appeared on the KCL Physics Department notice board inviting applications for a summer vacation course at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Herstmonceux Castle, I decided to go for it.

This was the first summer (1956) after Dr (later Sir) Richard Woolley had become Astronomer Royal and had moved from Canberra to take over the RGO at Herstmonceux.  On arrival at London Airport he was asked by reporters what he thought about space travel.  Possibly through jet-lag or more likely because he was hopeless at public relations, he replied “Utter bilge”, a remark that was to plague him for the rest of his life.  A couple of years later, after the first artificial satellite had been launched, he was asked if he would care to revise his opinion on space travel.  To his discredit, he gave the thoroughly pathetic answer “It depends what you mean by utter bilge.”

But he did get some things right, one of which was the institution of summer vacation courses for undergraduates as a way of introducing them to the world of professional astronomy.  The scheme was to bear an abundance of fruit.  There are very few leading British astronomers who did not get drawn to their careers by attending one of the courses.

The first one was rather slim and took place before the post-war move to Herstmonceux was complete and there were few facilities or telescopes.  I received a travel warrant and was met at Pevensey Bay Halt (made famous by Spike Milligan, who was stationed in nearby Bexhill during the war, as “the last outpost of British Railways”) and taken to the castle to join about five other students.  We were accommodated in attic bedrooms in the castle and could buy lunch in the staff canteen, but there were no arrangements for an evening meal other than to give us the use of the kitchen.  There was a morning and evening mini-bus run to the village to ferry staff to and from work, and we could hitch a lift to get provisions from the village shops.  None of us had much idea about cooking – me least of all – but somehow we managed.  I remember potatoes featuring prominently on the menu.  These we peeled in a machine that was designed for sack-loads of potatoes rather than the few we used.  This made timing quite critical – the interval between them being not properly peeled and reduced to tiny marbles was only a few microseconds.  Similarly with the heavy-duty masher that would spread our humble ration of potato as a wafer-thin inside coating to the enormous caldron, with about ten percent fired out of the top.  I don’t know what Mrs Marples, the Canteen Manageress (and much later Lady Woolley, but that is another story), thought of our abuse of her kitchen, and much admire her restraint in not telling us.

Each student was assigned either to a department or to an individual astronomer.  I was given to Bernard Pagel – I hope he was grateful.  My task was the measurement of radial velocities from the spectra of stars on photographic plates, which I found to be rather exciting.  I don’t know where the spectra had come from – certainly not Herstmonceux as there were no suitable telescopes there at the time.  On either side of the star spectrum there was a spectrum of iron from a source at the telescope, and therefore stationary.  The spectral lines from the star were displaced slightly relative to the corresponding iron lines because of the Döppler effect and this displacement was measured for a number of lines using a screw micrometer attached to a microscope.  The mean displacement could then readily be converted into radial (i.e. line-of-sight) velocity.  I was not very fast nor, I suspect, very accurate, but I threw myself into it with a will. 

After lunch on most days we would be given a lecture in the chapel.  Bernard Pagel and Olin Eggen bore the brunt of the lecturing, but others were given by various department heads and by the AR (the full title of Astronomer Royal was seldom used).  It was a privilege to be lectured to by such an august astronomical company, but straight after lunch was not the best time and, probably along with most of the others, I would doze off as soon as the first slide came up and the lights went down – a practice I have continued to this day, though with steadily decreasing feelings of guilt.  The late nights we kept did not help.  I would like to say that they were spent in looking at the stars, but that would not be true, not least because, despite being one of the sunniest sites in England, the Sussex nights were not special and only one in four, on average, was clear.

The evenings, after the nightly saga in the kitchen, were our own, except for Wednesday night, when country dancing in the ballroom was more-or-less compulsory.  This, together with playing Bach fugues on the piano, was one of the AR’s fetishes and no astronomer with any ambition would dream of being absent.  Besides, it was quite good fun and one of the few chances to get to grips with the host of young lady scientific assistants that the AR had collected.  This was before the introduction of electronic computers and nearly all of the heavy routine calculations were done by school-leavers with a few A-levels.  The AR must certainly be given credit for his ability to pick out pretty girls.  When the country dancing was over, the girls were all loaded into the observatory bus and shuttled off to the station, while we lonesome bachelors wandered forlornly back to our attic.  But at least the ice had been broken and we could follow up friendships the next day in the office, or after lunch in the extensive grounds.

Besides the beautifully restored Elizabethan castle (how many workplaces include a chapel and a ballroom?), the observatory had wonderful romantic gardens.  When the observatory first moved there from London many of the staff were accommodated in wooden huts to the south of the castle – strictly segregated into men’s and women’s hostels, which were separated by a common room with table tennis and similar facilities.  Being over a mile distant from the village, those who were not addicted to table tennis had to make their own entertainment in the evenings and this inevitably led to a steady stream of weddings.  Whenever this happened there would be a staff collection for a wedding present followed by a presentation in the staircase hall, attended by all staff and made by the AR.  He was primed by somebody with the basic data about the couple, but always started proceedings by announcing the forthcoming union as though it had been a newly discovered comet: e.g. 1956f, for the sixth wedding of that year.  These were embarrassing occasions both for the couple and for the AR, but tradition had to be maintained.  When my own turn came in 1963 Irene and I were lucky as the AR was abroad and the presentation was made by his Chief Assistant, Dr Hunter, who was much better at such things.

I had greatly enjoyed the first student course and signed up as soon as possible for the next one the following summer.  This was much larger and rather better organised than the first one, with a bus to take us out to The Chestnut Tree, a local restaurant, for our evening meal.  During one such meal, there was a sudden lull in the conversation and from the radio in the kitchen came the words “… enjoying the advantages of mains drainage”, an expression that has stuck with me ever since.  There were also girls on the course (as there were on the second course of the first year, but I was unaware of this at the time), but they were, with one exception, no competition for those provided by the observatory.  The exception was Charlie Sheffield’s girlfriend.  They had both managed to come on the course and treated it as a government-funded honeymoon in the most delightful of settings.

But Charlie at least did work during the day.  He and I were assigned to Eggen that year and shared a large office with John Alexander, who had just joined the permanent staff.  Charlie was a crossword maniac and was never happier than when he was worrying away at an anagram (except possibly at night).  We got involved in discussing the viability of hot-air balloons – this was long before the modern propane-powered ones had appeared on the scene – and undertook calculations involving mass, temperature-gradient, conductivity and so on.  But the results could only be verified by an experiment.  I recalled a Boys’ Own Paper article about making one from gores of tissue paper with a meths-soaked wad of cotton wool wired on at the bottom.  This we constructed and it worked quite well, even narrowly failing to set fire to the room in which we tested it.  But Charlie wanted something on a bigger scale.

He came into the office one day, after a trip to Eastbourne, with most of the contents of a model-making shop – balsa wood, tissue paper and dope.  (The sort of dope used for tightening tissue paper on balsa frames, I should clarify.)  Astronomy was abandoned as we designed and constructed possibly the largest hot air balloon since that of the Montgolfiers, standing some ten feet high.  After our lucky escape with the pilot version, it was clear that this was to be an outdoor balloon.  The launch had to be suitably marked, so we (“we” by now included most of the students and a few of the staff) arranged for a party to which all the girls and selected others were to be invited.  We obtained the firkin of Merrydown as well as other booze, with the aid of Arthur Milsom and Harry Cook, whose peaceful bachelor flat in the castle attic we students seasonally invaded.  The balloon was suitably decorated with its name “EGGEN” (for Extra-Galactic Geophysical Experimental Nephoscope) on one side and “Mars or bust” on the other.  It later emerged that many of the girls rightly feared for their modesty if the EGGEN failed to reach Mars.

Ideally we should have waited for a less breezy night, but we had little choice, so at dusk the launch went ahead.  With four stalwart(ish) students to hold it in place, the pre-heating pie-dish of meths was set alight and, after it was thought to have done its job, the smaller dish of cotton wool and meths that was to fly with EGGEN and provide a bit of weight at the bottom for stability was installed.  This was then lit and the students released their hold.  Whether they failed to release simultaneously, whether there was a skittish gust of wind, or whether there was a design fault is not clear, but the device rose swiftly into the air and then turned on its side, allowing the flame from the burner to catch the fabric.  However, it continued to rise, blazing impressively, to well above the height of the castle before plunging spectacularly into the moat.  This is all recorded on black-and-white photographs somewhere.  The experiment was deemed a resounding success, and we all repaired to the attic for the party.  That, too, was a success, but, as ever, the young ladies were whisked away by the observatory bus before any serious harm could be done.  The castle residents finished off the liquor and went to bed.  Only in my case at least the night didn’t end there, as detailed earlier.

This event set the pattern, and successive student groups (there were two sessions each summer) were expected to do something outlandish, such as the Great Telephone Plot of the following year.  Before proceeding to the following year, however – I was greedy enough to come three years in succession – there are a few more events of the second year to record.  The most important of these was my first proper girlfriend, Linda Mather.  She had joined the staff from school after taking her A-levels, as was the pattern for scientific assistants.  She was assigned to the AR’s department and shared the office with John Alexander (whom she later married), Charlie and me.  The boy-friend/girl-friend relationship ran its course over the next couple of years and then faded out, but we remained – and still remain – friends.

Other notable friends made on the second course were Gordon Walker and Terry Deeming.  We all hit it off very well and agreed to meet up again at Herstmonceux the following year, which we did.  Terry was extremely talented and could easily have pursued a musical career rather than an astronomical one.  To give some idea, he played the piano part of César Franck’s Sonata for Violin and Piano at a concert one year.  As a result he decided that the violin was a more useful instrument than a piano for social music-making, as well as being more portable, so he took it up.  The next year he performed the same piece at a public concert, but this time playing the violin part.  He was a student at Birmingham University, where Professor Zdenek Kopal was the leading astronomical light.  Kopal used to show visitors the department’s rather small telescope and describe it as “the largest telescope of its size in the World!”  Gordon was a Scot and proud of it.  He could quote long passages from Robert Burns and did so frequently.  We used to spend the evenings together playing table tennis, eating Wagon-wheels and gathered around Terry while he performed on the piano.  Both Terry and Gordon went on to become successful professional astronomers, Terry in Texas (where he died young) and Gordon in Canada, where he pioneered the discovery of planets orbiting nearby stars.

For my third Herstmonceux vacation course (what indulgence), I was working with the AR.  While it was a privilege to work with such an eminent scientist it was also rather daunting as, despite his best efforts, he was never an easy man to get on with.  Once again we were measuring spectral lines with a screw micrometer, this time from coudé plates obtained at Mount Wilson.  One of us would look through the microscope and bisect the line while the other would read the micrometer and record the result.  We took turns at each job.  Linda was also part of the team.

 

Herstmonceux – bachelor days, 1958-1963

My student days at King’s had finished, but I was in a sort of limbo as I couldn’t apply for a proper job until the examination results came out. So I indulged myself with a third vacation course at Herstmonceux. Not an entirely mad idea, as it was more than likely that I would eventually work there and it did no harm to get my feet under the table. When the results came through, they were not good enough for me to take up a PhD place at London University. So, on the Astronomer Royal’s advice, I applied to the Civil Service Commission for a place at Herstmonceux. The AR assured me that three years at Herstmonceux would be every bit as good as a PhD as far as career prospects went, and this proved to be true as those who entered three years later having completed a PhD came in at the same grade as mine. This remained true so long as I was at the Royal Greenwich Observatory (RGO), but a PhD would be a major asset if I wanted to work elsewhere, which is why I eventually got around to doing one.

The Civil Service were not the fastest of movers and the vacation course had finished before I had been called to interview. Finances were running low, so I went to work at the only factory in Wycombe that always had vacancies – Jackson’s Millboard and Fibre. The made large boards out of a papier mâché-type mulch for later use as door linings and suchlike in the motor industry. They worked three eight-hour shifts: 10 pm to 6 am, 6 to 2 pm and 2 to 10. After a week, one missed a shift and joined the next one. Some workers opted to do a shift-and-a-half to earn more money, and a few workers even did a shift-and-a-half, twelve hours on the trot, every day. One shift was more than enough for me. I started as sweeper-upper, being trained in this art by the foreman who explained the use of short, low sweeps to avoid raising the dust and the judicious use of water. I hadn’t realised how technical sweeping was. Or how physically demanding it was to keep it up hour after hour.

I soon progressed to the ovens, hanging the wet soggy boards onto a moving overhead chain as they entered the oven and unhooking them, lighter and firmer, but too hot to handle without gloves, as they came out. The rate of work was dictated by the speed of the chain, over which we had no control. The work was done by a team, two men hanging and two un-hanging and stacking. I was a welcome member of a team, not because of my less-than-muscular physique, but because I was able and happy to count up to fifty, after which number a different coloured board had to be inserted – a task that many of the others found beyond them. The work was adequately paid and kept my Austin seven in petrol, which was just as well, as public transport was not available for the times of some of the shifts. I suppose I could have cycled there, but I am not sure that I would have had the strength to cycle back. It was an interesting insight into a world that was completely new to me, but not one that I could have faced entering for more than a few weeks.

Eventually, to my great relief, I had the Civil Service interview (at a venue in London, but with a couple of familiar, if rather senior, Herstmonceux faces on the other side of the table). I was nervous and gave some rather silly answers to questions that I really knew the answers to perfectly well, but no opportunity to correct. I was relieved, therefore, to be offered the post of Assistant Experimental Officer a week or so later. It would have been better, but not very likely, to have been offered Scientific officer, as my mate Derek Jones was, but he had a very good degree from Cambridge and was a couple of years older than I was, having done his National Service in the Royal Air Force. I had deferred my National Service as was permissible during full-time study, but it was still hanging over my head.

Government Science jobs were divided at the time into three grades: (1) Assistant grade, comprising Scientific Assistants and Senior Assistants. Scientific Assistant was the entry level on leaving school, usually with good O-levels or a few A-levels. Promotion to Senior Assistant was very rare and only for those with many years of service who had not obtained qualifications to progress to the next grade. (2) Experimental grade, going from Assistant Experimental Officer (AEO – me) to Experimental Officer (EO) to Senior EO and, rarely, to Principal EO. Entry was at degree level. Experimental pay and promotion prospects were good, but the work was defined by others and lacked the prestige of (3) the Scientific grade, for which entry required a very good first degree or, more commonly, a higher degree. The range went through SO, SSO, PSO, SPSO, DC(Deputy Chief)SO, CSO (e.g. the AR), God. These were the ones who initiated research. PSO was the grade of a Head of Department, which seemed incredibly elevated to me until Derek Jones said that, so long as we kept our noses clean, we had a good chance of ending up at that level. As, indeed, he did.

So I hung up my Jackson’s broom (using the hanging-up skills I had acquired there), packed my worldly goods into my trusty Austin seven, said goodbye to my mother and Wycombe friends, and set out for a new life in Sussex. I had been invited by the other incumbents – Arthur Milsom and Rodney Jackson – to move into the bachelor attic of Herstmonceux Castle with them, even before the AR suggested it, so that is what I did. Bob Dickens, later my best man, had just got married and moved out, so their numbers needed reinforcing. Derek Jones, also a new recruit, moved in just before me. Arthur, an EO and the oldest inhabitant, was mother superior. He managed the rest of us and did all the cooking (brilliantly) with the rest of us as skivvies. It worked very well and I don’t recall any bickering. Rodney worked in the Chronometer Workshop, which reported directly to the Navy. Derek was an SO and I was an AEO.

The first working day I reported to the AR for assignment to a department. I had notions of joining the Astrophysics Department and solving the problems of the universe: where we have come from and where we are going to, that sort of thing. But he told me “I am going to assign you to the Magnetic Department.”  I suppose it could have been worse. It might have been the Nautical Almanac Office (NAO), where Bob Dickens worked, but the Magnetic and Meteorological Department, or Mag & Met as it was known, was not much better.

The PSO in charge of the department was Herbert Finch and his number two was Dick Leaton (SSO). More of them later. Then there was George Wells (SEO), the chief meteorologist, a lovely man who was nearing retirement. One of his favourite sayings, though he did not practice it, was “I burn my candle at both ends, it will not last the night. But oh my foes and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light.”  He was an avuncular figure and all the girls with whom he shared the observatory transport to and from Pevensey Bay Halt made a great fuss of him. He confessed that, as he got older, the girls he was attracted to got younger, and as he approached sixty his tastes were getting perilously close to the age of consent. But it was all talk – the only transactions that occurred were for George to lend them money when they got short towards the end of the month.

As well as measuring the weather, George was also a good indicator of it. Shortly before ten each morning, he would set out on the quarter-mile walk to the Met Enclosure, never wearing a coat. But if the temperature was well below freezing, he would weaken so far as to carry one. Everyone, from highest to lowest, knew him as George, except Finch, on whose desk resided the sole outside-line ’phone. When someone rang and asked for George, Finch would take a few seconds to realise who was wanted, then call across the office “Wells: telephone.”  They had been colleagues for only about twenty years!  But the old school was like that – just surnames. All letters sent out were deemed to be from the Astronomer Royal, no matter who had written them. To Woolley’s credit, things became a little more relaxed under his AR-ship, but he was still austere and remote, partly due, I suspect, to shyness. He said on one radio interview that he had a mental green baize door, on one side of which were the staff he knew and on the other side were the others. This did not go down at all well with the staff, who were well aware how few were on the “known” side.

But I was talking about the Mag & Met staff. Peter Standen sat opposite me at a desk that abutted mine. He had started work just a day earlier than me as a Scientific Assistant working with George Wells. That day was very important, as it meant that he had met the Duke of Edinburgh when he came to open the Equatorial Group of telescopes, while I did not. I made up for it later, though. Peter was an excellent athlete. At the time he was the English 400 and 800 meter junior champion. He spent most of his spare time training, and chided me for taking too little exercise. However, I claimed that I was fitter than him for what really mattered. I could sit at the desk for hours, whereas he had to get up and move around every few minutes. Also he was off work with colds or injuries far more often than I was. On one occasion he challenged me to a race round the cricket pitch (about 400 metres) – twice round for him and once for me. To my shame, he beat me.

For a short time I overlapped with Bob Lorton, who was a Scientific Assistant, but acted as though he was head of the department. He was good company in spite of his airs (inherited from his “county” mother) and introduced me to italic script. My writing, never good, had become illegible even to me after three years of note scribbling, so it was time to do something about it. Bob took me in hand and taught me from scratch. I can still do it beautifully if I take my time, and use it for writing invitations and entries in the St Margaret’s Book of Remembrance. Bob is remembered for turning out for an observatory cricket match dressed in immaculate whites, while everyone else just wore casuals, and then proving to be totally incompetent with both bat and ball. He wasn’t a lot of use at his work either.

The final staff member at Herstmonceux (there were others at the Hartland Magnetic Observatory – a field-station in North Devon) was Stella Francis, another Scientific Assistant, who was both scatty and charming. She and Peter, together with Brenda Denman of the Solar Department, which shared the same large room, undertook the important task of tea-making.

Much of the work of the Mag & Met was of a routine nature – making regular magnetic and meteorological observations and preparing them for publication – but every five years there was the more interesting job of preparing magnetic navigation world charts for the Admiralty. These charts had a long and distinguished history, the first having been prepared and published by Edmond Halley (the second AR of comet fame) in 1700. A new set was required for 1960 and that was the main reason for assigning me to the department. The task involved updating the 1950 charts using the best estimate of secular change over the interval 1950-1960 deduced from worldwide magnetic observatory data, and correcting the charts using post-1950 observations.

While working on the charts (there were five sectional charts as well as the World one), our American colleagues who produce a rival (but inferior) set of charts, sent us several boxes of computer print-out tabulating all the data they had collected from land, sea and air surveys around the world. I am not sure if this was meant to be helpful or to slow us down. There was a huge body of data to go through, and ultimately it did not add a lot to what we already had, but it was a kind gesture and the start for me of friendships that continued until after their and my retirement. Kendall Svendsen was a particular mate.

For remote parts of the world where no observations had been made, it was possible to do some rather refined interpolation using spherical harmonic analysis. Dick Leaton chose to chuck me in at the deep end, giving me the fearsome spherical harmonic equations and coefficients, and leaving me to get on with it. I was the first member of the department to have had a full-time university education – both Finch and Leaton had got their BSc’s externally, after many years of night-classes – and I suspect that I was being subjected to a sort of ordeal by fire. It was difficult, but I was not going to be beaten and, rather to their surprise, I think, I managed to sort it out and successfully make the calculations. Finch and Leaton had only recently managed to make a spherical harmonic analysis, following the example of Spencer Jones (the previous AR) and Melotte. After my struggles I was admitted to the club. A difficult, but useful introduction as I later went on to become an authority on the subject.

Although I applied myself conscientiously to the magnetic work, I was still a frustrated astronomer. The astronomical departments did not have enough staff to man all the telescopes, so people from other departments were encouraged to join in the observing. This suited me very well, and I became a regular observer on the 13-inch Astrographic refracting telescope (telescope sizes are specified by their diameter, which is a measure of their light-gathering power), the 26-inch photographic refractor and the largest telescope at Herstmonceux, the 36-inch Yapp reflector. Observing schedules were distributed a week in advance, specifying date, telescope and evening or morning session. The observer got paid 5/- (I think) and was given a half day off for each observing session, whether cloudy or clear. Unlike in Airy’s day (he was the Astronomer Royal from 1835-1881), the observer was not required to stand by the telescope if it was cloudy or raining, but was expected to keep an eye on the sky and leap into action if it cleared.

Much as I enjoyed observing, I did not enjoy getting up for the morning sessions. I would go to bed early and set the alarm. When it went off, I would first listen to see if I could hear rain; if so, I set the alarm clock for an hour later, turned over and tried to go back to sleep. If not, I had to stagger to the window, open it and look up, hoping for cloud. The sight of stars produced a sinking feeling followed by a brief bout of conscience-wrestling during which I wondered if anyone would notice if I didn’t turn up. Then I would get dressed and turn out. Once I had got to the telescope, all was well, unless it had clouded up in the meantime, which could be very annoying.

The small hours of the morning are not the best time for rational thought, so, as far as possible, one avoids thinking at the telescope. Though there is some scope for changing things in the light of observing conditions, as far as possible the observing programme is planned before going on duty. This plan is then worked through and the results recorded photographically (except for double-star observing, which is still done by eye) to be studied in detail during normal working hours. Nowadays, of course, electronic recording has taken over from photographic, but the principle is the same.

My favourite telescope was the 26-inch refractor, which was used for determining the distance of a star. From the different viewpoints of opposite sides of the Earth’s orbit, a fairly nearby star would appear to change its position very slightly relative to the distant background stars. This change of position (“parallax”) was measured by comparing photographic plates taken nearly six months apart. The difficulty is that, if you photograph a star when it is high in the sky at around midnight, six months later it will be high in the sky at around mid-day!  To overcome this problem, one photograph is taken just after dusk and the next, six months later, just before dawn. So the telescope was used intensively around dusk and dawn. To make the best use of these few precious hours, observing was sped up by having a rising floor that enabled the sharp end of the telescope to be reached easily and quickly. The floor was made by the Wurlitzer Company, which was more famous for making the cinema organs that would rise through the floor for inter-film entertainment.

It was fun to ride on the rising floor, which was so smooth that it appeared to be the telescope that was sinking rather than the floor rising. But it could be nausea-inducing if the dome was rotating at the same time. Guiding the telescope during an exposure was done from a standing position, but, for a star near the zenith, this was a bit of a strain on the neck, so I got into the habit of laying on the floor with my head on a pillow and using the floor slow-motion to bring my eye to the eyepiece. Until one day during maintenance the up-button stuck and the floor continued to rise, bashing into the telescope and doing quite a bit of damage. After that I put up with a strained neck.

Observing was not usually scheduled for the weekend, but, because I lived on site, I was sometimes scheduled for the 36-inch on a Saturday or Sunday. One Saturday the evening was very cloudy so Rodney and I decided to go to the cinema in Eastbourne. There was nothing of any particular interest available, so we settled for a film about the un-dead. It was so terribly made that it was enjoyable and we laughed all the way through. When we got back to the Castle, the sky had cleared, so Rodney went off to bed and I went to the telescope. I was alone in the Equatorial Group, working in darkness, and suddenly the un-dead did not seem quite so funny. It was one of those “Oh God, get me through to dawn and I will worship you forever” moments. He kept his side of the bargain, but I didn’t keep mine.

Another such moment occurred shortly after I had been with Kathryn to visit her grandmother in darkest Herefordshire. There was an ancient ruined church in a field nearby and the grandmother told us of recent goings on there that involved men wearing antlers, until the police broke it up. Alone in the Equatorial Group again, I imagined stag-horned men lurking in every shadow. I don’t know why the horns held me in such thrall, but they did. I turned up the dim red floor lights as much as I dared and chose to photograph the spectra of the faintest available stars, so that I would not have to leave the dome to go to the darkroom for a new photographic plate, and eventually dawn came to my rescue.

The castle itself was not a spooky place, but it did have its quota of ghosts. One of these was said to be a 7-foot headless drummer who would walk the battlements beating his drum on moonlit nights. How does one measure the height of a headless person?  I believe he was a 6-foot headed person who pulled up his jacket to the top of his head to appear both headless and 7-feet tall. Why should he do this?  Sussex was a notorious smuggling county and Herstmonceux Castle was close to the Pevensey coast with high tide at about midnight when there was a full moon. What better warning to the locals to keep their heads down as “the gentlemen came by”?

The other ghost was the Grey Lady. To collate the various stories about her, she was believed to be the wife of one of the early Lords Dacre whom he had bricked up alive in the castle walls. She would variously appear on her own near the Church, or with a donkey in the grounds, but always wearing a grey shift. Danny Elliott, the observatory stonemason, had a workshop near the West Gate, just by the Church. He had been working late to finish carving a commemorative stone that was to go in the newly-constructed clubhouse. He packed up about midnight and set off for home on his motorbike, with a necessary pause to open, get through, and close the gate. Just as he was about to continue on his way, a woman dressed in grey came from the direction of the church and started to cross the road in front of him. Danny waited for her to cross, but, as soon as she got into his headlights, she disappeared. Danny smartly let in his clutch and also disappeared – down the lane to his home. Next day he had the dilemma of whether to keep quiet about it, or whether to risk ridicule by telling. Obviously he chose the latter option, or I wouldn’t have been able to write this. He was not a drinker, nor given to hoaxes or flights of fancy. Just an honest craftsman who felt that the truth should be told and let the consequences take care of themselves.

One night Arthur, Derek, Rodney and I were sitting in the castle drinking Arthur’s excellent home-made hooch and talking about this and other older and less well documented appearances of the Grey Lady when we realised that it was nearly midnight and there was a full moon. So off we traipsed towards the church on a ghost hunt. We were all taking it suitably seriously except Rodney who, possibly as a result of Arthur’s brew, kept capering ahead and jumping out on us from behind bushes. I don’t know if this frightened her off, but we got to the church without any sighting of the lady. The church was unlocked (as was the practice in those days) so we went in, climbed the ladder to the belfry, and waited. At about 2 am we called it a night and went to bed.

But we hadn’t quite finished with ghosts. Each summer our peaceful bachelor flat was invaded by the vacation students. Both Derek and I had been vacation students ourselves, so were reasonably tolerant of them, but that did not prevent us from preparing a “welcome” in the form of a haunting. Arthur prepared a tape recording of ticking clock and rattling chains which, when played at half speed, was suitably spooky. Derek reckoned that he could gibber convincingly, Rodney had plans (never realised!) of wearing a sheet and walking up and down the bedroom corridor a couple of feet above the ground. My contribution was a rubber glove filled with water and on a string so that it could be lowered from the roof to paw at the bedroom windows. To help set the atmosphere, bits of cardboard were inserted into the socket of the main bedroom light so that it wouldn’t switch on. Obviously it wouldn’t be possible to haunt all the students, so we looked at the labels that had been stuck on the doors and selected “Yallop” as the most promising candidate. A speaker was installed above the ceiling for Arthur’s sound effects and the night that Yallop moved in we gave him the works. We couldn’t have picked a worse target. Over breakfast the next morning, we asked him if he had heard anything during the night. “Only a few fools making silly noises in the corridor.”

Despite a full work and observing regime, there was still plenty of time for social life and for relaxation. I rediscovered the delight of reading novels, rather than textbooks, without a feeling of guilt. I regularly bought a new Penguin each week. I had brought my radiogram from Wycombe and enjoyed lying on the bed reading a book and listening to classical records. The two pursuits got entangled: for example, I cannot hear Cesar Franck’s Symphonic Variations without thinking of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and vice versa. And I was beginning to get over my gawkishness with girls. There was a large pool of eligible young ladies at Herstmonceux and after Linda and I had wound up our relationship, I enthusiastically plunged in.

My flatmate Rodney was a source of great wisdom when it came to Going Out With Girls. Before a date, he would prime me on what I should and should not do. Then when I got back to the flat after a date, there would be a de-briefing (if you will pardon the expression), after which Rodney would advise me on how far I should go next time. It worked like a dream and it was only many years later that I found that Rodney’s experience of girls was even less than mine. It was all theory.

It was about this time that Granny Malin died, aged ninety four, which was a really great age in those days. She had never been the most loveable of old ladies, but I dutifully gave up a visit to the Lewes bonfire celebrations to attend her funeral. I was amply rewarded with an inheritance of £50, but I didn’t let it change my lifestyle!  The house and what was left of the money quite properly went to Aunt Dorothy, but it was a pretty poor reward for having given up any chance of a life. Dorothy told me that she would have liked to learn to drive and also to visit New Zealand, but by the time her mother died she was an invalid and could not even go upstairs.

After the 1960 charts had been finished, it seemed like a good idea for me to go down to Hartland and learn at first hand how to make magnetic measurements. I have since visited many magnetic observatories and become something of an authority on them through direct involvement, using their data and studying their history. But Hartland was my first. It is a top-quality observatory, so I couldn’t have done better. The man in charge was Percy Rickerby (SEO) and his staff were Peter Wilmoth (EO) and an odd-job man and his wife. Running such an observatory requires meticulous attention to detail, but is essentially repetitious and very boring. It calls for a particular frame of mind that I don’t have.

Nevertheless, it was interesting to spend a few weeks learning the routine. I stayed in Mrs Evans’ B & B in a room with a view of Lundy Island. That was when I developed a yen to go there which was not satisfied until many years later.

But I was writing about magnetic observatory routine. Before starting one must carefully remove anything magnetic from one’s person. (Sir Harold Spenser Jones, when Astronomer Royal, failed to remove the metal shoe inserts he wore for his fallen arches, and screwed up all the observations.)  The first visit is to the variometers – photographic recorders in a heavily insulated and sealed-off chamber – to wind the clocks, check the light bulbs and change the recording paper. Then back to the dark room in the main office block to develop them. A cup of coffee, a check of the chronometer against the radio time signal, and off again to the Absolute Building to make some accurate spot observations which will be used to calibrate the photographic records (magnetograms). These observations called for great care and skill as we were aiming for an accuracy of one nano-Tesla, which is right on the limits of detection.

The afternoon is spent measuring up the magnetograms and preparing tables of hourly mean values for transmission to Herstmonceux, and for sorting out the innumerable things that needed to be sorted out. But enough of this, even I am finding it boring. Observing instruments and methods have moved on so far and so fast that the methods I first learnt are now only of historical interest.

Back at Herstmonceux I needed something to get my teeth into, so Finch and Leaton introduced me to a project that they had started many years before, but had failed to bring anywhere near to completion. This was the analysis of Greenwich and Abinger magnetic data for variations induced by the Sun and the Moon. Greenwich and Abinger were the magnetic observatories that had preceded Hartland, before interference from electric trains had rendered each in turn useless as an observing site. The lunar analysis, as it was known, had been proposed by Sydney Chapman, the Great Man of geomagnetism, who had briefly worked at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, as Chief Assistant to the Astronomer Royal before moving on to better things. He was very keen on lunar analysis and, besides doing several himself, was always encouraging others to do more with a view to producing something approaching a global coverage. The solar variations are quite large and can usually be seen just by looking a magnetogram. But the lunar variations are miniscule and can be detected only by analysing a vast number of observations. The first stage is to punch alternate magnetic hourly mean values onto 80-column Hollerith cards, one card per day, and that is as far as Finch and Leaton had got, with most of the work being done by an agency. Before I could take things any further, the punched records needed to be checked for accuracy, and then I was ready to start the analysis itself which involved a lot of serious computing. But first I needed to understand the Chapman-Miller method, which is what was going to be used. This was contained in a heavily mathematical paper whose senior author was – you’ve guessed it – Sydney Chapman. It was stretching my maths to breaking point, but, with help from Dick Leaton, who was no mean mathematician, we managed to crack it.

Understanding the method was one thing, but applying it was something else. It had been hoped that the RGO would have acquired an electronic computer by that time, but the Admiralty was not to be hurried, so we had to start the process using electro-mechanical devices: sorter, tabulator, collator, etc., that were housed in the Nautical Almanac Office. The great monsters that always used to appear in science fiction films before electronic computers came along. I have to call them “electronic computers” because the word “computer” on its own had quite a different meaning in those days. It applied to a young, usually female, Scientific Assistant whose job it was to do all the routine calculations that would later be done electronically, and to make the tea as well. But from now on I will drop the “electronic” and hope that the context is sufficient to distinguish between flesh and metal.

In anticipation of the installation of the new computer, it was planned to remove the electro-mechanical machines that, by now, had become essential to the first stage of the analysis. In a bid to beat the removal deadline, we used them 24 hours a day, Peter Standen taking the daytime shift and me working through the night. The work involved sorting the many thousands of punched cards into groups according to various criteria (season, lunar distance, magnetic activity, etc.) using the sorter, then forming group sums using the tabulator and punching out a further set of cards. The operator did not have to do much more than keep the feeds stacked with cards and unload them at the other end. Except when, as often happened, particularly after the cards had been read a few times, there was a jam. Then the machine had to be stopped quickly before the tangled mass of cardboard had reached unmanageable proportions, the torn bits of card removed, jig-sawed together and new copies made. Card-handling required a lot of minor skills that have now gone forever. Joggling the cards with the heel of the hand to make them into a tidy pack; fanning them so that they could be counted by flicking them past a thumb; holding them up to a light to confirm that they all had a five punched in column 38; pushing a shard back into a mis-punched hole as a temporary repair and so on. The biggest nightmare was to drop a pack of cards and have to sort them back into order. This could be done using many passes through the sorter, but if only a few hundred cards were involved, it was quicker by hand and avoided the high risk of a jam. The final operation was to use the backs of dead cards for shopping lists.

We completed the group sums before the deadline and it was planned to do the remainder of the analysis on the new computer, when it arrived. It was to be a mighty HEC4 (HEC standing for Hollerith Electronic Computer, the firm that was later to become International Computers and Tabulators and then International Computers Limited, Britain’s inadequate answer to IBM.)  While it was awaited, a group of us was given lessons in how to program it by George Wilkins. One piece of homework was to write a recursive program to evaluate some function that could be defined by a series. Most students chose something useful like cosines or logarithms. I chose to program the Inverse Guddermanian. I am pretty sure my program was never used in anger, though it worked well enough. Even now I have no idea what the Inverse Guddermanian is used for.

Programming the HEC 4 was no simple task. Everything had to be written in binary (or bi-octal, but don’t let’s go into that) and punched onto a Hollerith card, twelve instructions to a card. Instructions were in very simple steps like “add the contents of register A to the contents of register B and store the result in register C”, or, even more simply, “shift the contents of register A into register A”, a do-nothing instruction that had to be inserted at various points in the program to avoid the computer getting indigestion. In code, this instruction was 39 ARA which was the number of a car I later acquired. Data were fed in on punched cards and stored in the 1024-word memory, which also had to accommodate the program. No, I have not dropped a “mega”; the total storage really was just over a thousand words. It was on a rotating drum and programs could be significantly sped up by choosing to return a result to a location two round from whence it came. Output was either on punched cards or on fanfold paper from a line printer – the characters for a whole line were selected by raising a separate line of type for each space to the appropriate level, then a bar would smack the lot against the paper through an inked ribbon with a most satisfying clatter. In this way a whole page could be printed in about a minute.

There was a wide range of noises available: the clunk of the printer, the grind of the card punch, the shlurp-shlurp of the card reader and an emergency bell. Though it was supposed to be for emergencies, it could be programmed in and I chose to use it far too often for the engineer’s comfort. I actually wrote a cha cha cha program by using all the noises rhythmically. The full-time engineer came with the computer and, as well as having a full day of the computer’s time each week for maintenance, he spent much of the remaining time changing diodes as they blew out. It was a rare event to get an uninterrupted hour of trouble-free computing out of the machine. The main part of it comprised banks and banks of glowing diodes, which produced so much heat that the computer had to have its own dedicated air conditioning, which occupied another room. But it was remarkable how much useful calculating we managed to get out of it.

The lunar analysis was finally finished, the results discussed (which was where Finch made his contribution), written up (largely by Leaton) and ready for publication. It would have been good to publish it in a respectable journal, but it was observatory policy at the time that everything should be published by HMSO in Royal Observatory Bulletins. This was intended to enhance the reputation of the RGO as an institution, but did not do a lot of good to the individual astronomers and was entirely unsuitable for geophysical publications. Nevertheless, we had quite a reasonable number of reprints which we sent to appropriate people. I still have a copy of a very complimentary letter that Sydney Chapman wrote on receipt of his copy

Computers were developing very rapidly and it was not long before the old HEC 4 was replaced with a serious machine. This was an ICL job (I forget the number) with spinning half-inch-wide magnetic tapes as favoured by the next generation of sci-fi films. It had a sensible amount of core store and, joy of joys, it supported FORTRAN, a high-level computer language that was half way to algebra. Another set of lessons was required, but I took to it like a duck to green peas, and soon became fluent. No more messing about with machine code and binary instructions. Not that I resented these. I learned to drive in a car with a crash gearbox, requiring double-declutching, which, I believe, made me a better driver. Similarly, I believe that learning the trade on the HEC 4 ultimately made me a better programmer. It was now possible to contemplate doing an entire spherical harmonic analysis by computer, without recourse to preliminary charting, and that is what I set about doing.

I was going to say something about Finch and Leaton, so will do so now. Herbert Frank Finch was a rather small man, a bit remote, but not unpleasant. He was an excellent pianist and a very good chess player. Unfortunately he was not much of a scientist, despite his part-time BSc degree (I don’t say part-time in any disparaging sense. Like the Open University degree, it is much harder to do it that way than full-time, when it is nearly impossible to fail). It was said that, when he did algebra, he would leave out all the plus and minus signs and add them later with a pepper pot. He had become Head of Department mainly by being in the right place at the right time – this happened during the war, when good staff were hard to come by. He has previously been in the Time Department. My first encounter with him was when I was a vacation student working with the AR in his office. He summoned Finch for some reason and when he knocked on the door, the AR invited him in, saying “Oh Finch. Wait a moment.”  Woolley then continued to measure a photographic plate with me reading off the numbers while Finch stood Just inside the door for fully five minutes. What an incredibly rude thing to do to one of his Heads of Department, even if it had not been in the presence of a student. It was no wonder that when Finch received similar summonses after I had started to work in the department, he would come over all dithery, straighten his tie, pull up his socks and rush from the room. I am not sure if he went via the loo, but I suspect so.  Another of his weak points was driving. Leaton used to tell the story of being driven by Finch (in his green Ford Popular) and saying, after a particularly near miss, “I don’t know how you missed that bus.”   “What bus?” was the reply.

Brian Richard Leaton was always known as Dick (he used to answer the internal ’phone with “Magnetic, Dick”, to the great amusement of Ray Foord, among others). He resented having to work for Finch, from whom he did not attempt to hide his scorn, though Finch chose not to notice. The pepper-pot remark (above) came from Dick. Dick and I got on pretty well most of the time, though as I began to make a name for myself, Dick also got a bit resentful of me, but for the opposite reason. He had started work at Greenwich straight from school. He then got drafted into the Air Force during the war, during which time he travelled the world and studied for a degree. He also acquired a wife, Olive, who was a WAAF working with a searchlight battery. (No, not that sort of battery, they were powered by generators.)  He had a great sense of humour and a huge fund of rather risqué stories which, with his background of amateur dramatics, he told with some panache. Dick was keen that the department should do some research as well as routine work, and it was he who got me started on writing research papers, some with him and some solo.

Having by now completed several major projects, I thought it was about time I made an attempt to transfer from Experimental to Scientific grade. Having convinced myself of the merits of my case, I applied for SO and got invited for interview in London, but I got steadily more apprehensive as the interview date approached. My flatmate Derek Jones (who had joined the observatory as an SO) took me in hand and gave me some coaching. During a walk along the sea front at Bexhill, he explained to me exactly how the interview panel worked. The chairman who sat at the centre was expert in nothing but interviewing. He would make the introductions and ask a few bland questions designed to put me at my ease. Then it would be the turn of the experts, who would press me with successively more difficult questions until they had established my limits. They were not vindictively trying to break me, just probing the depth of my knowledge. When asked a question that I could not answer, the technique would be to gaze into space while inwardly counting up to ten, and then say “I don’t know”. The pause was important, as it gave the impression that I was considering the question from every angle and probably knew more about it than they did, but modesty or discretion prevented me from divulging the answer.

We will never know if I would have got through the interview without Derek’s coaching, but it certainly put me into a much more confident frame of mind. I have used several of his helpful hints in later interviews, and been amused to see some of them used against me when I was on the interviewing side of the table. I think that, unlike Rodney and his amatory techniques, Derek was speaking from experience (gained in the RAF). Whatever the reason, as a result of that interview I became an SO.

Even after the promotion, the pay was still modest, so I continued to give Evening Institute lectures each winter. The pay for these was not special, either, but could be considerably enhanced if the Institute was sufficiently remote, as the mileage allowance was generous and tax-free. Gordon Taylor, a Senior Assistant in the Nautical Almanac Office, was said to make more from evening lectures than from his salary. He lectured at least three times a week and always a long way from Herstmonceux. There were several authorities who sponsored these lectures. My favourites (for purely financial reasons) were the Workers’ Educational Institute and the Oxford University Department of Extra-Mural Studies. Courses of twelve weeks could be managed solo, with a bit of cooperation from colleagues over swapping observing duties. They were all at it, so such swapping was part of the way of life. Twenty-four-week courses were rather more of a bind and best undertaken jointly. As well as spreading the load, this provided a regular swappee and halved the number of subjects one had to mug-up on. I shared a couple of courses with Bernard Yallop and others with Tommy Tucker, always amicably

As well as the money (always welcome) the courses gave valuable experience in preparing and delivering lectures. Also, the students got to be old friends by the end of a course and it was not unusual for one or more to have a “crush” on the lecturer – the glamour of even such petty authority!  Of course, it would have been quite unprofessional to take advantage of this, but it was flattering.

The lectures would last for two hours, with a break for coffee. This would often involve a trip to an adjacent building when I would always hope for cloud. Otherwise, someone was bound to ask “What is that bright star?”  My technique with such questions was to ask if anyone else knew the answer. When I had confirmed that they didn’t, I would assure them that it was Alcor, or some other randomly chosen name. If anyone did see through this ruse, they were too polite to confront me.

I am not sure exactly when, but sometime during my early years at Herstmonceux my deferment ran out and I was called for a medical preparatory to being called up for National Service. I was very pleased to fail the medical (asthma had its uses), so now I was free to pursue a career. I was also free to go out with girls, which I did enthusiastically. I mentioned earlier that there was a wide choice among the girls at Herstmonceux and I went out with quite a few of them – though not simultaneously. My longest-term girlfriend after Linda was Kathryn James, who I might easily have ended up married to except that neither of us was ready for such a commitment, so it faded out when she moved to London, though we carried on corresponding for a long time.

The most desirable of the observatory girls, Irene Saunders, was known to be off-limits, as she had a long-term boy friend with whom she had an “understanding”. That did not stop me pursuing her, however, eventually successfully.

Irene and I spent more and more time together and it soon became clear to both of us that we were going to get married, though we didn’t get engaged formally until her twenty-first birthday. Being a romantic, Irene wanted a June wedding while I, for reasons of a £40 tax rebate, wanted to get married before the end of the financial year at the beginning of April. Like the hero I was, I had made the big gesture and agreed to sacrifice the tax rebate, but then fate intervened.

One day I got a telephone summons to the ARs office. As usual with the AR the entire message was “Come to my office”, with no clue, other than the voice, who was calling or what was the reason for the call. Finch-like I pulled up my socks, straightened my tie and went to the loo, wondering what misdemeanour I had committed. There were two people in the office and Woolley introduced the stranger to me as Dr Stoy, Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape. He was looking for someone to replace George Harding as Cape Observer at the Radcliffe Observatory, Pretoria, South Africa. George was coming to the end of his three-year tour of duty there. I was surprised to learn that Woolley not only knew of my existence, but also that I was keen to get into astronomy, so this was my big chance. “Any questions?”  “How soon do I have to decide?”  “Dr Stoy leaves for South Africa in three days time. The longer you think about it, the less will be the time for the next man.”  “When would I go?”  “Middle of next April to allow a couple of weeks of overlap.”  “But I was planning to get married in June.”  “Then you will have to bring it forward.”

All of a flutter, I went straight from there to Irene’s office and broke the news to her. After the initial shock, she was as thrilled as I was. Next I had to ’phone my mother: “You know that Irene and I were planning to marry next June, well we are going to have to get married earlier”, but she wasn’t fooled. I don’t know if this was because she had faith in my, or Irene’s, respectability, or because she doubted my manhood. Anyway, she, too, was very pleased, or at least she simulated pleasure very well. So suddenly all systems were go, with me having a few weeks in each of the appropriate astronomical departments and Irene making plans for the wedding.

The event took place at St John’s Church, Polegate, on March 30th 1963. My best man was Bob Dickens. The reception was held at Herstmonceux Castle, a lovely setting which we were able to use for no charge as we worked there – a concession that did not last very long. We were due to sail for South Africa in about a week, so that was to be our honeymoon and, on the evening of the wedding, we just drove off to Folkestone and checked in at the first hotel we came across. Our suitcases had been thoroughly got at with confetti and shards from punched cards – small angular pieces of card that got everywhere and were almost impossible to remove. We were still finding them in the car boot three years later.

Next day we moved on to a Dover hotel for a couple of nights, then back to Polegate to pack for the journey and to say our goodbyes to family and friends. Also time to say farewell to this Chapter.

 

South Africa and early married life, 1963-1965

First a bit of background. John Radcliffe was appointed Royal Physician to King William-and-Mary in 1713 and he amassed a fortune with which he endowed the John Radcliffe Hospital, a library (the Radcliffe Camera) and still there was some left over. In the terms of the will, this could be used for a charitable, non-profit-making purpose. The trustees stretched the rules a bit to endow the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1773. At least astronomy satisfied the non-profit-making bit. Over the years, the site in Oxford became quite unsuitable for observing the night sky and the telescopes became obsolete. But the site itself had become extremely valuable. So the trustees, as imaginative as their predecessors, sold the site in 1934 and used the money to build the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere.

The Municipality of Pretoria in South Africa provided the site free, but still the money ran short and the trustees were left with a beautiful telescope – a 74-inch reflector by Grubb Parsons of Newcastle – but no means of paying for staff. This was solved by selling a third of the time on the telescope to the much bigger Royal Observatory at the Cape. The Cape Observer at the Radcliffe Observatory (to give him his full title) was traditionally supplied by the RGO, sent on a three-year tour of duty to work in Pretoria but answerable to Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape – Dr Stoy. That was to be my rôle, in succession to George Harding. George’s predecessor as Cape Observer had been Patrick Wayman, now back at Herstmonceux, and I understand that it was he who recommended me for the post. He and his wife Mavis were particularly helpful before we went, filling us in on what to expect. “We only ever saw one snake [pause] in the house!”

Dr Alan Hunter, Chief Assistant to the Astronomer Royal, was also very helpful, particularly in arranging for Irene to be transferred to South Africa as my assistant, retaining her grade of Scientific Assistant rather than having to take the much worse-paid post of Lady Computer as offered by the Radcliffe. My pay was enhanced by Foreign Service Allowance, which was supposed to reflect the extra cost of living in South Africa, but which, following difficulty in persuading people to go there after the Sharpville massacre in 1960, was more in the nature of a generous bribe. So we would be (relatively) rolling in it!

We sailed from Southampton on the Transvaal Castle, the newest ship of the Union Castle line. This caused a bit of a problem because Civil Service Regulations decreed that an officer of my grade should travel first, second, or third class (I forget which) and the Transvaal Castle was a one-class ship. Anyway, with the help of Harry Cook, the most generous possible interpretation of the rules was made and we had an excellent twin bedded (hardly ideal for a honeymoon, but there were no double beds on board) outside cabin on one of the higher decks. A small touch of luxury was that we each had our own bedside ’phone, though in the present mobile-swamped days this cuts little ice. Harry Cook had been of phenomenal help with all the regulations, making sure that we got such things as our tropical kit allowance and our once-in-a-career cabin trunk allowance. He also dealt with all the intricacies of exporting a car and three-quarters of a van load of effects – except that our effects were nothing like enough to fill even half a van – bills of lading and similar exotica.

Aunt Cath (she was younger than Irene, but married to Fred’s step brother, so technically an aunt) had written to the captain telling him that we were on honeymoon and could he arrange an apple-pie bed?  He sent us some champagne, instead, which was much more acceptable. But the cat was out of the hat and the newness of our marital status soon became common knowledge, though we were quite happy with that. Most people head north for the northern hemisphere summer, so there were relatively few going the other way and the ship was less than half full. This had many advantages, such as no competition for the facilities and only one sitting in the restaurant. We soon developed a circle of friends, starting with those who shared our table. (Table numbers were allocated from the outset and remained fixed throughout the voyage.)  One couple was Murray Armor and his wife. He was a senior administrator in Rhodesia, returning from leave. Then there was a younger couple, a now-anonymous Rhodesian District Officer and his wife. District Officers were the action men of the day, having responsibility for administering and policing vast areas. Murray lent us a book about the building of the Kariba Dam in which the DO, who then had a name, featured. When the lake behind the dam was filling, some elephants got isolated on an island which would later be submerged. DO rescued them by lassoing them and then swimming ahead of them pulling the lasso rope. Unlike the more placid Indian elephants, the African variety is not to be messed with even on dry land. It was a phenomenal achievement. He was great company and an excellent dancer, which Irene greatly appreciated as she loved dancing and, despite the efforts of Sonny Binnik, I was not.

We formed a group of six, with DO as the ringleader. We discovered the delights of the machinery in the gym, but most of it had broken down by the time we reached the Canaries. Then there was the children’s play area, which was deserted after 9 pm so we were able to play the theme from Z-cars on the jukebox until late at night. Deck games could be played without advance booking and the swimming pool was not overcrowded.

The Canary Islands made a welcome break, though two of our other friends, a solicitor and his wife, departed there. We knew we were approaching during the night when the ship started rolling for the first time. We had not appreciated how effective the stabilisers were until they had been switched off for entry into port. We went off on a taxi tour of the island, up the volcano to get a view down into it where intrepid – or foolish – farmers grew bananas. Our first experience of such exotica.

When the ship was approaching the equator, about half a dozen victims were selected to appear before King Neptune’s court at the crossing-the-line ceremony, which was to take place at the swimming pool. Irene was one of them. They were taken to the Captain’s cabin for briefing and, when asked her name, Irene automatically answered “Irene Saunders.”  So the crime of which she was accused before the court was that she, Miss Saunders, was sharing a cabin with a Mr Malin. She was found guilty, of course, and was sentenced to be given a raw-egg shampoo (complete with the eggshells) followed by being thrown to the bears in the pool. There was a special ducking stool from which she was tipped backwards and set upon by the bears. In reality, their job was to make sure the duckees did not get hurt and to conduct them to the steps. All great fun, followed by a complimentary proper shampoo for Irene.

In those days the voyage took fourteen days and by the end of that time we had had enough of it, even though we were on honeymoon and despite the busy social programme that was provided. Perhaps it was the first sight of the southern stars from the unlit deck of the ship that made me anxious to get to work on them. We went out and had a romantic star-gaze after a formal dance. It really was a spectacular sight with the Milky Way clearer and brighter than I had ever seen it from England. Of course it is much brighter than in the north, because the centre of the Galaxy is in the south. And there were many other new and exciting objects visible to the naked eye.

As the ship finally arrived in Cape Town, we got up before dawn at Murray’s insistence so that we could see the Sun rise over Table Mountain (the geography of Cape Town is complicated, but, trust me, the Sun really did appear from behind the mountain when viewed from the ship). Then we went back to bed until we were roused by a bearded Petty Officer from the British naval base at Simonstown. He had come aboard specially to see us safely through disembarkation. He took our passports told us to go and have a leisurely breakfast and then meet him back at the cabin. While going to breakfast, we saw Murray, the DO and their wives in a long queue waiting to get off the boat. “You should have started queuing by now” they said, “it will take you hours to get ashore.”  After breakfast, the Petty Officer took our bags and led us off the ship, past the long queue that was now waiting for Customs, past our astounded friends and past the immigration officials, who simply waved us through. Ah, the advantages of working for the Admiralty!

Joe Bates, from the Herstmonceux Electronics Department, and on a three-year tour of duty at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope (to give it its full title) was there to meet us as we stepped onto South African soil. We already knew him from Herstmonceux and it was good to see a familiar face. He took over from the Petty Officer and set about clearing our car through customs. It was a complicated process which I didn’t fully understand (or even partially), but I know it involved taking a South African official out to a crayfish lunch. In an incredibly short time, we were able to collect the car from the pound and head off into our new life. Well, almost. The car had been drained of petrol in Southampton, but there was enough petrol left to get it to a petrol station, with the aid of a shunt from Joe. Then off to the Royal Observatory, Cape, to meet some more Herstmonceux friends and to report for duty.

We had a great week exploring Cape Town and being thoroughly well entertained by friends and locals, including Dr Stoy who was the kindest and gentlest of bosses. Then it was time to set off to Pretoria, about a thousand miles north east into the interior of Africa. This should have been simple as all we had to do was head north out of Cape Town and keep going, but I have already mentioned that the geography of Cape Town is peculiar, and it takes time to get used to the idea of the Sun being in the north and going round the wrong way. Anyway, before we were out of the suburbs we were hopelessly lost in the middle of a township and surrounded by feral dogs. Eventually we found the road we wanted and started to enjoy the wonderful new scenery. The Morris Minor was happy to potter along at 50 mph, but didn’t like to be hurried at any greater speed, so progress was not spectacular. Just before dusk, when we were thinking of finding somewhere to stay, we arrive in Beaufort West, just at factory closing time. We were surrounded by black workers on all forms of transport from foot to lorries and suddenly we felt all alone on a dark continent. “Carry on driving” said Irene, and I was happy to do so. Very quickly, as is the custom in Africa, it was totally dark and we felt even more isolated – what were we doing in this place?  Then we saw a neon hotel sign off to the right near Richmond and headed for it. It was a comfortable and welcoming little place and, after a warm meal, we felt a lot better about things. When we went to the car next morning to continue the journey we discovered another African phenomenon – the car was covered in frost. It is said that Africa is a cold country with a hot Sun. I was constantly reminded of this while working through the night in Pretoria.

There were some more familiar faces to welcome us when we eventually arrived at the Radcliffe Observatory: George Harding, from whom I was taking over as Cape Observer, and Sheila and Phil Hill. Sheila had started work at Herstmonceux as a Scientific Assistant at the same time as Irene and they worked in the same department. Phil was a vacation student with me and had gone on to do a DPhil at Oxford before marrying Sheila (Irene was a bridesmaid and I was an usher) and getting a post-doctoral appointment at Pretoria. Sheila and Phil were on the Radcliffe staff, whereas Irene and I were still employed by the Admiralty, and the marked difference in salary, in our favour, was the cause of some envy.

There was a small building in the observatory grounds called Cape Cottage and it was intended for the use of a second Cape observer, sent up from Cape Town to share the observing duties during the long winter nights. There was no need for a second Cape observer when we first arrived, as George was still there, so Irene and I spent the first few weeks in the Cape Cottage.

It was Irene’s 23rd birthday shortly after we arrived, so obviously a present was called for. Funds were very low after wedding and transfer expenses and I had yet to receive my first pay-check in South Africa. I could have asked for an advance, but foolish pride and all that. Irene set her heart on a pendant necklace with a tiger’s eye in a silver mounting (not an actual tiger’s eye, of course, but the typically South African semi-precious gemstone of that name) so that was what she had to have. It cost more than half of all the money I had in the world, but was well worth it because it became Irene’s favourite piece of jewellery.

The observatory was on the outskirts of Pretoria next to a posh suburb called Waterkloof. The grounds housed, besides the telescope, an office block, four houses for staff (Dr Thackeray, Dr Wesselink, Dr Feast and Denis Pullin the engineer – or “Celestial Mechanic” according to the sign on his workshop door), the Cape Cottage, basic accommodation for a few of the African staff and, later, a swimming pool. The permanent residents were friendly enough, but we chose to move out into the real world and soon found a flat in Sunnyside, much nearer to the centre of town. It was also conveniently close to a good shopping centre.

On our first evening in Pretoria, after we had settled into the cottage, Phil took me over to meet the telescope in the ideal introductory conditions – that is, after dark when it was being used. It produced a mixture of feelings: excitement at the prospect of working with it, fear that I would not be able to cope and sheer wonder at the size of it. It was by far the largest telescope I had ever seen. By the end of my time there it had become an old friend with no secrets and quite a few bad habits that were mostly forgiven, but at that first meeting it was the Great Unknown.

It was not housed in a dome, but in what looked like a gasometer, though with two sections that could be moved apart to let the starlight in. This design was convenient as it housed a gantry crane that could be moved up and down, swung in and out, and traversed around the dome (as it continued to be called, despite its shape. The crane was essential for changing mirrors and shifting heavy machinery onto and off the telescope. The whole dome rotated so that the slit could move around to the part of the sky that was being observed. The telescope was the traditional open-work sort with the three-ton, six-foot diameter mirror at the bottom of the tube and a secondary mirror at the top end. It was on an offset English equatorial mount – look it up on Google if you are that interested. On the floor below the telescope was Denis’s celestial workshop, an aluminising plant (for re-coating the mirror when it needed it) and a dark room.  

Transport to and from the observatory was provided in an observatory minibus driven by John, who would do the rounds morning, evening and at lunchtime, collecting and delivering staff. Most of those who didn’t live-in were more remote from the observatory than us, so we were the last to be picked up and the first to be set down. Initially we would go home for lunch (beans on toast, or similar), but after the arrival of the swimming pool, we usually took a packed lunch and incorporated a lunchtime dip.

Life in Pretoria revolved around the telescope. And the telescope itself was governed by the Moon. At full moon, when the sky was too bright for observing faint objects, the telescope mirrors would be changed to the coudé mode and used for high-resolution spectroscopy of brighter stars. At the dark of the Moon, it would be converted to Newtonian mode and used for direct photography (with or without an objective grating), or low-resolution of very faint objects such as extra-galactic nebulae. For the rest of the time the telescope was in Cassegrain mode and used for medium resolution spectroscopy, or for photometry. Changing from one mode to another was done during the day and called for a full team of workers to man the crane, bolt and unbolt, and supervise the whole operation. Despite their great weight, the mirrors were very delicate and were irreplaceable.

The mode of the telescope determined where the light would come to a focus and, hence, where the observer was. In coudé mode, this would be a fixed position near the bottom end of the polar axis. This would have been convenient except that the exposures were very long, sometimes all night, and the rather cramped observing position got very uncomfortable after a while. (On one occasion I tried to continue the exposure for a second night, but it came out with a double image. Very frustrating after some twelve hours of concentration.) 

In the Cassegrain mode the secondary mirror sent the starlight back down the tube, through a hole in the middle of the main mirror, to a focus in the traditional place – at the bottom end of the tube. As the telescope followed the stars throughout the night, this position was always moving, sometimes close to the ground, sometimes high in the air. To keep in touch the observer sat on a reasonably comfortable chair mounted on a moveable structure and adjustable up and down a slope. The chair was sufficiently comfortable to fall asleep on an on one occasion I woke up to a sunlit morning sky and the eyepiece of the telescope away in the distance.

The focus for the Newtonian mode was up near the top end of the telescope and was approached using a platform on the crane gantry. One had to climb a vertical steel ladder, then through a gate onto the gantry. It could be moved up and down and swung in and out from a control box at the end. Other buttons on the box rotated the dome, so one needed to concentrate. Also, the platform, which had just two widely-spaced railings to protect the observer, was in total darkness forty feet above the ground. And the Newtonian focus bristled with unprotected high-voltage electricity sources. Dunno what “Health and Safety” would have said – we didn’t ask them.

As well as being hazardous, work at the Newtonian focus was very tiring as, between exposures, it was necessary to descend from the gantry to the basement dark room to change the plate, and then, after re-setting the telescope on the next star, back up again. And a particularly high level of concentration was needed for direct photography as any lapse would result in a blurred or trailed image. So it was usual to have a team of two for Newtonian work. This also made it possible to develop plates as they were taken, to check that focus and exposure times were right, or adjust accordingly.

In the long, and invariably clear, winter nights, Dr Stoy would send someone up from the Cape for a month to help out. One of these was Danie Malan, a remote relative of the one-time Prime Minister, though on the poor side of the family. Danie was an interesting character but was over-fond of brandy. Clearly it was not a good idea to work at the Newtonian focus with anything but a clear head and, after a night of him smelling of brandy and being clearly under its influence, I realised I had to so something about it. Though answerable to me, Danie was several years older and a lot more worldly-wise, so I had to steel myself. When he arrived the next night in a similar condition, I had a word with him and he appeared to take it well. In fact, I wondered if I hadn’t overdone it a bit, as he asked if he could go back to the Cape Cottage for a while. He returned shortly afterwards with a flask of brandy and two glasses!

Danie had done his National Service in the South African Air Force, and all of his intake except him had subsequently died in one way or another, mostly violently, so Danie felt that he was on borrowed time and lived it to the full. On one occasion he drove the 900 miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg non-stop to attend a rugby match, and then drove straight back afterwards. Another time, after we had finished a night’s observing and were leaving at dawn, we went out of the big front door of the dome together, to discover that there was a puff-adder on the steps, blocking our way. Most snakes slither away when disturbed, but the short, fat, deadly puff-adder holds its ground. The door had shut behind us, but, while I was fumbling for the key, Danie pulled a pistol out of his jacket and shot the snake dead. While admiring his fast reactions and presence of mind, I was a little disturbed to realise that I had spent the night with an armed drunk. A few years after we returned to England we heard that Danie had shot himself, apparently deliberately.

Another of those who came up during the winter months was Joe Churms, a lovely bloke, but grossly overweight. His wife (the one he had at the time – he got through quite a lot of them) was almost as large and it was fascinating to see them crush into their modest Austin A40. It was even more fascinating to find, when we went to the theatre with them, that there was also room for Irene and me in the back, though only just. Joe wanted to be a double-star observer, the one branch of astronomy that is still done by eye, but his sight was not good enough. He was very envious of Irene, who had phenomenal eyesight. She could see the phases of Venus without optical aid and, when Pat Wayman asked her how many of the Pleiades she could see she told him seven. He didn’t believe her until she had drawn them and he checked it against a photograph. During the day, Irene and Joe both measured spectra to determine radial velocities, and, from the same spectrum, Irene invariably got a better result (i.e. one with a smaller uncertainty).

There was no question of Joe going on the gantry, even if he could have negotiated the ladder, as it was designed to support only two normal people. And he was too large to fit into the cramped coudé observing position, so he came when the telescope was in Cassegrain mode and we would split the night between us, one working from dusk to midnight and the other from midnight to dawn. Even that was taking a bit of a risk, as Joe had once broken the observing chair, just by sitting on it. One night when I was doing the second shift, I drove from the flat to the telescope and was concerned to find that the dome was closed. Having confirmed that Joe was not in a heap on the floor and was not, in fact, there at all, I was working myself up into a fine state of indignation at his failing to turn up. It was only then that I realised that the sky was completely cloudy. This was such a rare event in the Pretoria winter that I had not even bothered to check.

It was only at the Newtonian focus that one could see anything of the sky, other than the miniscule part that was visible through the telescope, except when switching from one star to another. While working at the Cassegrain focus I was visited by a couple of policemen investigating reports of a strange object in the sky. I showed them where I had been sitting all night under the umbrella of the 74-inch diameter mirror. For all I knew a fiery chariot, drawn by a ghostly team of horses, could have been rampaging all over the sky. But I was able to tell them that their mystery object was almost certainly Venus, which was always re-discovered whenever it appeared in the evening sky, often enhanced with strange and imagined properties “I saw it move” for example. From the Newtonian focus one had a good view of the sky through the gap in the dome and one morning at about 3 am, always my worst hour, my heart leapt up when I saw puffs of cloud on the horizon and I thought I would be heading for bed within the hour, but once again I was having a bad cloud moment. It proved to be the Magellanic Clouds, two neighbouring extra-galactic nebulae visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. The sky remained clear till dawn.   

Staying awake was always a bit of a problem, particularly in the small hours. I fought off sleep with cigarettes, coffee (van Riebeck instant, which was mostly chicory, but I got to prefer it to the real thing) and the Paul Nell All-Night Show on Radio Laurenço Marques. This was a commercial station broadcasting into South Africa from neighbouring Moçambique and was the only thing available after 1 am. One could call in and Paul would play you a record of his choice, but I never bothered. The All Night Show wound up just before 6 am with a farewell message “To doctors and nurses working on their missions of mercy throughout the night, to farmers watching over their tobacco crops in Rhodesia …” and a long string of other night workers, but no mention of astronomers. I was tempted to ’phone in, but again never bothered. This was followed a by “Op die plaas” (On the farm), half an hour of Boer-music, all rum-ti-tum and truly horrible. One of my nightmares was for it to start when I was in mid-exposure and could not get to the radio to turn it off.

There was just one occasion when I did get around to responding to a radio programme (there was no television in South Africa until years later). That was in response to a quiz programme. The puzzle for the listeners was to continue the series 1, 10, 22, 1, …  There were three clues: (1) Ali Baba, (2) Gregory, (3) phoenix dactylifera. I solved it quite easily and did nothing about it. It was only the following week, when it was announced that no-one had solved last week’s problem and the deadline was being extended, that I wrote in. So did a couple of others, but I still won a token cash prize. I am tempted to give you the answer, but will leave it as an easy exercise for the reader.

During the day Irene and I, and anyone up from the Cape, would share the Cape Office – the largest room in the office block. Because of its size, it was a convenient place for people to come and socialise, and it was sometimes necessary to shoo them out when there was urgent work to be done. Work for Irene was mostly measuring stellar spectra to determine the radial velocities of stars. Because of her excellent eyesight and power of concentration, she was particularly good at this. I, too, measured radial velocities, but rather less well. A lot of my time was spent in preparing for my next session on the telescope – drawing up observing schedules, calculating when to observe a spectroscopic binary to remove ambiguities from its orbit, measuring focus-plates, etc. And over at the telescope helping to change the focus, making adjustments and working in the darkroom. One of the traditions that developed spontaneously was the observance of Trafalgar Day. One of the previous occupants of the Cape Office had hung up a Union Jack and we would ceremonially lower and raise this before drinking to Nelson.

A lot of my work was on observing programmes that had been set-up by others, for example the long-term Cape project for determining orbits of spectroscopic binary stars, but there was also the opportunity to “do my own thing.”  One of the first things I did was to continue an experiment I had started in Herstmonceux with Bob Dickens (my best man). We had been to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House at which Professor Herbert Dingle pointed out that, at the turn of the century, there were two theories of relativity, Einstein’s and that of Ritz. The latter had never been disproved, but Ritz had died in 1909 and so Einstein had won by default (there were also some arguments against Ritz by de Sitter, but they were not conclusive). Ritz proposed the Ballistic Theory of Light, in which light travelled at a constant rate relative to its source. So light from a receding source would be travelling slower than light from a stationary source. Dingle proposed a critical experiment to compare the speeds of light from nearby, non-receding sources, with light from a fast-receding star.  To get a sufficiently great difference in speed the receding source would need to be very distant, and hence faint. Bob was looking at the newly-discovered quasars, while I was looking at extra-galactic nebulae. Both types of source have very large red-shifts.

I go into this in some detail because it was potentially a very big deal – Nobel Prize stuff if Einstein’s theory could be disproved. It was difficult observationally and the uncertainties of measurement were quite high, but the experiment had been well-designed and its results were unambiguous. Unfortunately (for us) Einstein was right and Ritz was wrong. We got a couple of papers out of it, but no fame or fortune.

Neither did any of my other attempts fare much better, not even the idea of sending Christmas cards to the Nobel Prize Committee, enclosing fivers. This failed at the first hurdle through lack of fivers, cards, and addresses. Then there was the idea of developing the equivalent of a spectroscope for analysing smells into their constituents. I have recently read that the current theory of smell is that it is related to the frequency of vibration of the smelly molecules, and that Nobel Prizes have been awarded for this work, so I was not too wide of the mark. Who knows what a lifetime of hard work on it might not have produced?  Another pet theory is that the infinite set of numbers with the gaps completely filled by fractions and so forth, is fine for mathematicians, but is not the appropriate metric for the physical world. Rather, I would favour a finite set of numbers with nothing in the gaps, the largest number being equal to that which so intrigued Sir Arthur Eddington by cropping up all over the place, for example as the total number of particles in the universe. Not only would quanta arise naturally as a result, but at the other end of the scale, the size and age of the universe would be that number times the quantum of length and time, respectively. And the speed of light would be that number of speed quanta. And Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would just disappear. Yes, I am well aware of the problems of the number changing with time, quantization of angle, etc., but I still believe the idea may have some merit. It never got off the ground because I am not a good enough mathematician.

Every month, when the observing allocation came out (my ration was ten nights each month), we would look to see if there were any free weekends. If so, we would go off on a trip somewhere, usually with friends. One of the advantages of Pretoria was that there were 360 degrees of tourism available from it. North to Rhodesia and the beautiful Northern Transvaal, east to the Kruger Park, Swaziland, Moçambique and the Eastern Highlands, south to the Drakensburgs, Basutoland and Cape Town, and west to Bechuanaland and the Kalahari desert. What riches!  We visited all of them during our time there, some of them many times.

Our first visit to the Kruger Park was with Pat and Bill Symington, and their small daughter, Gillian. George Harding introduced us to Pat and Bill just before he returned to England, and they quickly became our closest friends. Bill was the Sixth (I think) Secretary with the Australian Embassy and had some sort of responsibility for trade. He was also the one who stayed on in Pretoria when the most of the Embassy made its annual migration to Cape Town. Because of historical enmities between the Afrikaner (Transvaal and Orange Free State) and the British (Natal and Cape) Provinces, no single site could be chosen for the capital of the Republic, so they had three: Cape Town, Pretoria and Bloemfontein, though the last named only gets in as the “Judicial Capital”, which is not taken very seriously by anyone outside the Free State. So Parliament and the associated functions, including the embassies, spends part of its time in Cape Town and the rest in Pretoria. What about the biggest town, Johannesburg?  That is the de facto commercial capital and doesn’t trouble itself about anything so trivial as politics.

When the Ambassador is away, the mice will play, as the saying nearly goes. And play we did, mostly tennis on the British Embassy court. Both Pat and Irene were excellent players, and Bill and I provided a bit of panache. It was not quite a clay court as it was made of anthills, which provided an excellent surface, but needed a lot of maintenance, though there were plenty of embassy “boys” to do this. OK, I know all about political correctness, but I don’t intend to revise history, and that is what they were called. And we felt no guilt about using their services, any more than they resented providing them. It was a happy arrangement that worked well enough at the time.

Coming to terms with apartheid and black/white relations was one of the things we had to do rather rapidly. Before we left England, I anticipated no problems. There had been a few black students at college and, apart from their skin colour and a funny way of talking, they seemed more or less like the rest of us. But we quickly found that they had been westernised (or do I mean “northerlied”?) and were not typical of the blacks we met in South Africa. The acceptable term for them when we were there was “Bantu”, meaning “the people”, so that is what I will call them here. They were to be distinguished from “whites”, “coloureds” and “Asians”. Asians are obvious, though they did not include Japanese who were honorary whites, for trade purposes. Whites were of English and Dutch (Afrikaans) origin, though many were much darker skinned than the Malaysians, who comprised a large part of the Asian population around Cape Town. The term coloureds was for those of mixed white/Bantu origin, largely originating from Afrikaans farmers exercising droit de seigneur over their black servant girls, though that had (officially) stopped generations ago. Such relationships were incomprehensibly classified as Communism, and liable to very severe punishment. Joy Penny, the Trade Union official at Herstmonceux, had taken great delight in warning me of this hazard.

Within a few days of moving into the Sunnyside flat, a Bantu girl (she was probably not much older than 50!) knocked on the door and asked if she could be our laundry girl. We thought long and hard about this. The laundry was a communal one on the roof, and it would not have done for Irene to be the only non-Bantu using it, even if she had been familiar with the breaking-stones-with-shirts method of doing the laundry that was used there. Also, it would not be good to deny the girl the opportunity of employment. So we eventually decided to take her on, but to pay her what we would pay someone for doing the laundry in England. All would have been well if Maggie had kept her mouth shut, but she blabbed to the others and soon there was the makings of a general strike. This was finally resolved after arbitration by paying Maggie the going rate and giving her the occasional gift over which she was sworn to secrecy.

Maggie continued to do our laundry throughout our time there, bundling it all up in a sheet and plonking it on her head while she carried it up the outside metal stairs to the roof. She couldn’t write, so we lost touch when we left, but she had long coveted our Dutch blankets, so we left them with her. At one time she was having trouble with harassment by the authorities in the township where she lived. I offered to intercede on her behalf, but she was insistent that I shouldn’t, as they would find some way of getting their own back, probably by evicting her.

There was a lot of petty harassment by the white officials, usually in connection with the pass laws. Everyone in South Africa had to carry a pass. I didn’t, as I was a British Admiralty employee and was excused. I was given a small piece of cardboard explaining this that I could produce if challenged – a pass in all but name. But I never was challenged, and neither were any of the whites. Blacks were frequently asked to produce their passes. Bill’s garden boy had removed his shirt while he clipped the hedge. He was doing the road side of it when a police car pulled up and he was asked to show his pass. It was in his shirt, inside the gate, but, instead of letting him get it, he was bundled into the police car and taken off to a cell. When he learned of this, Bill, always a touch volatile, exploded with rage and went storming down to the police station, high on righteous indignation and diplomatic immunity. The boy was immediately released and, so far as I know, suffered no further harassment.

Our flat was serviced, so the problem of hiring a cleaner was out of our hands. One of them (there was quite a big turnover as the Afrikaans manager was not the best of employers) came to us with the story of his sick brother back in his home town, and would we give him the train fare so that he could visit him?  By then we were a bit less naïve and I said that, rather than give him the fare, I would go with him to the station and buy him a ticket. The sick brother and my reputation for being a soft touch instantly evaporated.

On one of the lunchtime runs, the observatory minibus broke down outside our flat. While waiting for it to be repaired, we went in for lunch and invited John, the Bantu driver, to join us. He was a friend so, rather than leave him to eat in the kitchen, we invited him to join us at the table. He was not entirely comfortable with this, but did so. As always, the door to the balcony that gave access to the front doors of all the flats was left open and our next-door-but-one neighbour, Jacques Jacobs, who was a police sergeant, happened to walk by.  That evening we were leaning over the balcony watching the cloud building up for a thunderstorm, when Jacques came along and started chatting. This was a common occurrence, but this time he had something on his mind. He had seen us sitting down to a meal with a black man and felt it was his duty to tell us that this was against the law and could get us into trouble.

This was done in a spirit of friendship towards us innocent foreigners, but what was interesting to me was the great difficulty he had in concealing his disgust that we should even contemplate doing anything so obscene. Like a parent remonstrating with a small child for playing with its poo. As South African policemen went, Jacques was a moderate and considerate man, and was not deliberately cruel to the blacks. But he considered them to be more akin to animals than to the human race. Just as with a dog, he would only beat one if it needed to be disciplined. But he would no more sit down to eat with one than he would with a dog. This gave me a great insight into the Afrikaans mind. It did not stop us from enjoying games of carpet bowls with Jacques and his wife in their flat.

There was another Afrikaans family in the flat between ours and the Jacobs’ (about 75 percent of the population of Pretoria was Afrikaans), Mr and Mrs Visser – the name was pronounced that way, with the final “r” rolled, though it might have been spelled Fisher. Mr Visser was a retired railway man who drank a bottle of brandy a day and was always rather blurred. He and his wife were sociable and we would often get invited in for a glass of brandy (I believe that was their only nutriment), but it would be poured from another bottle to avoid Mr V having short rations for the day. Inevitably it killed him, though not for a surprisingly long time.

The Vissers were also regular thunderstorm watchers. These are a spectacular feature of the Pretoria weather and occur regularly at about 5 pm, hence the name “the businessman’s shower”. After an oppressively humid day the clouds would build up, there would be spectacular flashes of lightning (I captured six lightning strokes on a single photograph), a strong wind and then down would come the rain. In half an hour it would all be over, the air cool, and a comfortable evening to look forward to. But it was not the sort of thing one would wish to get caught in. This was not only because one would get soaked, there was also serious danger of injury. Pretoria is in a notorious hailstorm belt where some of the largest hailstones have been recorded. We managed to avoid being caught in one, but I unintentionally left the car out in one and was proud to show off the dents when I got it back to England. Luckily the windows were not broken, but the same storm intensified as it moved a few miles out of Pretoria and broke many of the windows in the hospital and also injured many people and killed one. The telescope dome was designed to be hailstone-proof, but the noise they made on its flat metal roof was deafening to anyone inside and was surpassed only by the noise of it being struck by lightning. This was not an uncommon event as it was the highest point for miles around and was made of metal. As a physicist, I knew that the metal dome formed a Faraday cage, inside which one was electrically insulated from the lightning stroke, but this knowledge was not very comforting when it happened.

One of the features of Pretoria was its jacaranda trees, which lined just about every street. For most of the year they were just ordinary trees, but in the spring, before the leaves came, they would burst into bloom and turn the whole city a glorious purple colour. It is rather a subtle colour and very difficult to catch in a photograph, but it is beautiful. Or at least it is if everything goes right. The weather has to be just right if the blossom is to come before the leaves, and one good rainstorm can wash all the bloom off the tree and onto the pavements where it becomes a treacherous brown slime. During our time there, we experienced only one really good display, but it was spectacular.

 Our first visitor to the flat was Dr David Evans, Stoy’s number two at the Cape. David’s interest was spectroscopic binaries and he was coming to Pretoria for a couple of weeks to fill me in on the programme, to do some observing and to check me out. In response to a fairly broad hint we invited him to stay with us. A strange man. Very loud, sociable and bouncy, but with many hang-ups. For example, he had a morbid dread of heights and insisted on the windows of the flat, which was on the fifth floor, being kept shut. He said we could call him David at home, but that at work he was to be called Dr Evans. He also had the unpleasant habit of making defamatory remarks about people behind their backs. I remember lunching with Dr Finsen, the Republic Astronomer in charge of the Johannesburg Observatory. He mentioned an astronomer I had not met and I said that Evans had told me he was not very good. Finsen snorted, “Do you know anyone for whom Evans has a good word?”  I could think of only one: my predecessor George Harding who was held up as a paragon to whose standards I should aspire. But only a few months after George had left, Evans was making such remarks as “It was not like George to make a mistake like that”, and within a year “George never was very reliable.” 

To his credit, Evans took his share of Newtonian observing despite his fear of heights, but he pushed off quite soon leaving me to continue to dawn. Thus, while he was joining the observatory staff for their morning coffee break, I was still sleeping it off. Irene was there though and heard him slagging me off for leaving the gate to the gantry ajar, which was simply not true. I doubt if this was the only example. Despite this, we maintained a superficially friendly relationship. When we were staying in Cape Town we saw quite a bit of him and his charming wife, and baby-sat his two small sons. But I never really trusted him.

Another visitor was Joe Bates from the Electronics Department in Herstmonceux and on a three year tour of duty in Cape Town. I had known him in Herstmonceux but not well, and again in Cape Town when we first arrived. We got on very well and became fast friends. While he was visiting, Bill Symington, through his diplomatic connections, got Joe and me on a prestigious visit to a gold mine at Welkom in the Orange Free State. The trip was really aimed at rich businessmen who might be persuaded to invest in the mine, and we tried, without much success, to look the part. We were flown there and back in a Dakota and excellently wined and dined before changing into overalls and being taken over a mile underground into the mine. The actual seam of gold, though rich, was less than an inch thick and showed up clearly between the other strata. But the tunnel itself obviously had to be a lot wider so that miners (and visitors) could get into it, albeit in crawling mode. I had learned from geology lectures that the temperature increases with depth, but it was fascinating to experience this directly – the mine was sweltering and the post-visit shower was a huge relief. After a sales pitch, we were shown the end product and invited to lift a gold block up one handed. Had we been able to do so, we were told we would be able to keep it, but the tapering sides and great weight made this impossible. Well, not quite impossible – the story was told of a member of the British Lions Rugby team who had managed it, followed by a rapid withdrawal of the offer.

We had other visits to gold mines, usually with visiting friends, in the Johannesburg area. The mines were less spectacular than that at Welkom, but on one Sunday each month the African miners would come and do their traditional dances in an arena. They would also practice them outside the arena while another tribe was having its turn, so it was all very noisy and chaotic, but great fun and wonderfully spectacular. Most of the dances were regional, but one had been specially developed at the mines – the gum-boot dance, with much stamping and slapping of rubber boots to the accompaniment of a kwela band with guitars and penny whistles. This was where the raucous and exciting tune “Tom Hark” was originally performed by Elias and his Zig-Zag Jive Flutes before it was copied and emasculated by more traditional bands for European consumption.

After Joe’s visit to Pretoria, during which he completely rewired the telescope with me acting as his assistant, we determined on a big holiday together touring around Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). The original wiring of the telescope had got off to a bad start as the telescope was built in Newcastle and the engineers had not realised that it would need to rotate in the opposite sense in the southern hemisphere, so ad hoc modifications were made during installation. The wiring had been thoroughly mangled by Denis Pullin. It worked reasonably well, but Denis used whatever coloured wire was to hand, with his fragile memory as the only record.  A live cable would be red on entry to the polar axis and emerge at the top end black. I believe this was partly intentional so that Denis would remain indispensable, but it made fault finding very difficult, particularly at night when Denis was not around. One of the first things I did was to produce a colour-coded wiring diagram for my own benefit, but this was kept as a secret between Denis and me. When I left, I presented it to him. Denis was a good engineer, but it was very difficult to prise him away from his Rand Daily Mail, which he would spread over his bench and read from cover to cover before contemplating work. One method that I found effective was to start doing a job myself, using Denis’s precious tools. He would see me at it and say “No, not like that, Stuart” and show me how it should have been done. When we revisited Pretoria twenty-five years later, Denis was a fragile old man (he was always slightly built and a heavy smoker) living in a retirement home. But it was still the same old Denis underneath and we were soon chatting away happily. I learned that he died shortly afterwards.

I seem to have wandered on to the Radcliffe staff, so I will continue along that route. Dr Thackeray, or ADT as he was always known, following the custom of using the observing-book initials, was the Director. He was a brilliant astronomical spectroscopist and had written a standard book on the subject. I had hoped to learn a lot of the trade by studying at his feet, but he was a shy man and not a good communicator. If I had obtained a star spectrum with some unusual features I would take it to him for his opinion. It was a privilege to see him read the spectrum as though it was a book, with the plate held up to the light and a magnifier stuck in his eye. He would talk about it happily and fluently like that, but when he came out from behind his magnifier and had to talk face to face, he would become tongue-tied. I exaggerate a little, but you get the idea. When he was not himself observing, he would still pop into the dome to see how things were going and exchange a few words. The conversation seldom got beyond “What star are you observing?”  “HD12345”  “Oh yes, an interesting binary with chromium emission lines. Well, carry on,” and he would depart. A likeable man, though, who was very hospitable, so long as he could stay in the background while his wife and daughters did the bulk of the entertaining. He was related to the author William Makepeace Thackeray, but I am not sure of the details. Long after we had departed, he was in the back of a Landrover heading for the Sutherland Observatory to which the 74-inch telescope had been removed. The driver was unsighted by a dust-devil and the truck left the road, spilling its passengers. When they had dusted themselves down they looked around for ADT and found him dead in the road.

Another regular visitor to the dome was Simon (pronounced See-mon), the Bantu night watchman. He looked in every morning at 3 am to check that the observer was not lying in a pool of blood.  He had obviously been told to keep his torch switched off when in the dome and on his own initiative he extended this to not making any noise. I don’t know whether this was from innocence or mischief, but the first I heard of him was a deep “Morning baas” from close behind the observing chair. I got to dread this. I would keep an eye on the clock, determined to be ready for him at three, but always forgot at the last moment and was caught unawares. Eventually I got into the habit of locking the front door, reckoning the chances of dying from being left unattended in the dome were considerably less than the probability of dying from a Simon-induced heart attack.

The Pool of blood thing is not entirely fantasy. David Evans was observing one night after taking over from me at midnight – this was in the very early days when we were still staying in the Cape Cottage. In the dark he walked into the spectroscope and hooked his eyelid onto a metal stud. When he recoiled, he tore his eyelid and it bled profusely (though there was no lasting damage). He found his way to the Cape Cottage and tried to rouse us by banging on the door and the bedroom window, but we were well away and heard nothing. He had more luck at Michael Feast’s house and Michael got up and drove him to the hospital. The first we heard of this was at coffee next morning when the heavily bandaged David delighted in telling all of us about his adventure with particular attention to the gory details. A visiting Australian astronomer remarked, true to his national traditions, “Very nasty. You don’t want blood on the observing floor, someone might slip on it.”

ADT liked to keep a tally of the number of snakes found on site, so when Simon the night watchman killed one during his rounds, he was required to leave it outside the office so that it would be seen the next morning and added to the count. Again he interpreted this imaginatively and arranged the corpses on the office hedge or doorstep in the most lifelike and threatening poses. Pity he was off duty and couldn’t see the response when the staff bus arrived – he would have been delighted.

The second resident astronomer was Dr Adrian Wesselink, who also lived on site with his family. He was a quiet Dutchman who had had a distinguished career in photometry and was approaching retirement. His pride was a photoelectric photometer, which, as a big concession, he allowed Phil Hill to use. Phil had two nights on the telescope separated by one of mine and he left the photometer in place to save the trouble of removing and re-installing it for my night, but failed to tell me. This would not normally have mattered except that I was trying to get a spectrum of the much fainter component of a binary star and the only way to avoid the light from the brighter component spilling onto the spectrum was to rotate the spectrograph. While cranking it round I heard a horrible sound of tearing metal and, on investigation, found that the photometer, which was bolted partly to the telescope and partly to the spectrograph, was being torn apart. I switched everything off and, with some trepidation, went and knocked on Adrian’s door. After some quite atypical swearing, for which he later apologised, he took it remarkably well and even allowed Phil to continue to use the photometer when it was repaired.

Michael Feast was the third on-site astronomer and was easily the most active and probably the brightest of them. He worked hard, published a lot, and eventually rose to become head of the South African National Observatory, which was the new name for the Cape and Radcliffe observatories when South Africa severed its ties with the UK. He also had a senior appointment in the International Astronomical Union. While at Pretoria he was friendly and was good company, if – perhaps justifiably – a bit full of himself. He had a somewhat stormy relationship with his wife (at the time) Connie, who was and continues to be charming. One of her party pieces was to swim the length of the pool by “Wiggling like a worm” – a sinuous manoeuvre that produced a surprising amount of forward motion.

Phil Hill had a three-year appointment at the Radcliffe Observatory, but was not actually on the staff. When his time was up he went to the Astronomy Department of the University of St Andrews, where he spent the rest of his life, suffering under Professor Stibbs and ending up as a Reader.  Shortly before he was due to retire, he died from cancer.

The nicest of the staff was ADTs secretary, Stella Blore, who befriended Irene in particular, but was a friend to everyone. She reminded me a bit of Mrs Sharp. Stella was widowed and lived with her daughter and her father, Mr Beans, who was a veteran of the Boer War. He liked nothing better than to tell stories of his experiences and I liked nothing better than listening to them. Also on the staff was Molly Shuttleworth, computing assistant, who was the wife of the Commander of the local South African Air Force base. This is relevant, because through her husband she was able to arrange helicopter trips for the male staff. Since they were performing for the Commander’s guests, the pilots gave us great rides, two at a time in an Alouette helicopter. Power is provided by jets on the ends of the rotors, whose pitch can be varied throughout each revolution. This simple (in principle) system makes for a very manoeuvrable craft. Irene, Sheila and Stella missed out, as Air Force regulations prohibited female passengers. Years later Irene was booked for a helicopter trip down the Grand Canyon, but again missed out because it developed a fault and the flight was cancelled. So she never did get to ride in one.

Every year around Christmas (when the nights were short and there was more cloud around – though still not much) Dr Stoy found it necessary to summon me to Cape Town for a month for “consultations”. These were completed in a couple of hours over a meal in his club, and the rest of my time was my own, though I chose to spend much of it at the observatory. I have already said what a nice man Stoy was, and this was his way of giving me an all-expenses-paid holiday with my friends. There were always several Herstmonceux staff on secondment to the Cape. During this break someone else from the Cape would take over my observing duties in Pretoria, so it was usually convenient to swap houses. We spent one Christmas in Danie Malan’s house in the observatory grounds. It was a bit of a shack and was overrun with ants when we arrived. South African ants are aggressive and determined, and they followed a set highway from the garden to the fridge from which it was very difficult to divert them. We were woken at a very early hour on Christmas morning by ants in the bed. The only thing that could be done about it was to strip and remake the bed. It was still well before dawn when we had finished so we wished one another a mournful “Happy Christmas” and gloomily opened our presents. The day picked up later when we went to Boulders Beach with the Bates’ and had a barbeque dinner. It was very hot and the water was too warm to be refreshing, but we had a good time. That night we had further insect trouble in bed – this time from sand fleas, picked up on the beach.

We did not go down to Cape Town for one Christmas, as my mother was visiting and there was too much to fit in at the Pretoria end of the country to allow time for such a long trip.

I keep starting on something and then getting sidetracked, so let me pick up some of the threads. The proposed Rhodesian holiday with the Bates family came to fruition and was brilliant. My car was too small for six people (Irene and me, Joe and Elma, and their two sub-teenage sons). It was quite a tight fit in Joe’s estate car, but a roof rack for the luggage made it possible. They stayed a couple of nights with us in Pretoria before we all headed north. Fascinating scenery in the Northern Transvaal, particularly the baobab trees with their fat trunks and stumpy branches that look more like roots and earn the nickname upside-down trees. Then across the Southern Rhodesian border at Beit Bridge with our first view of the “Great grey-green greasy Limpopo, all set around with fever trees,” and it really was all of those things. The fever trees have yellow bark, which makes them look most unhealthy. Most of the Rhodesian roads, if they were made up at all, were strip: two narrow strips of tarmac such as are often seen leading to the garage in a suburban driveway, but going on for hundreds of miles. It is surprising how little concentration is needed when driving on them, even at 70 mph. It is only when one meets someone coming the other way that a problem arises. The technique then is for both cars to move to the left (the side favoured by most of Southern Africa) so that the offside wheels are on the nearside strip, and return again once the vehicle has been passed. To make things a bit more interesting, both parties would play “chicken”, neither wanting to be the first to pull over. We always lost to lorrys, but managed to beat a few cars driven by old ladies.

Features of Southern Rhodesia included the Zimbabwe ruins, Salisbury, Bulawayo and the Wankie Game Reserve. The Zimbabwe ruins were fascinating and we had them almost to ourselves. At the time they were assumed to have been built by Arab slave traders as it was inconceivable that black Africans would ever have had the necessary skills. Now they are believed to be of native African origin and the country has been named after them. Salisbury (now Harare) was just a big, modern city, but interesting, nevertheless, particularly the tobacco auctions and the botanical gardens where I first encountered cycads: plants that still fascinate me. Bulawayo has an incredibly wide main road, the legacy of the days when it had to be wide enough to turn a wagon pulled by a span of oxen because the three-point turn had not been invented.

The Wankie game reserve was much smaller than Kruger, but much richer in elephants. We had had a good day out game spotting and it was time to head back to the rest camp before the dusk curfew, when we came across a large herd spread across the road. Obviously we could not get through and, along with several other cars, we were happy to sit and watch them. But time was getting on and it was beginning to get dark. When a gap in the herd appeared, the car in front of ours took its chance and drove through it, either not realising or not caring that this would take them between a mother elephant on one side of the road and her calf on the other. Not a good idea, as the road was blocked by more elephants only a hundred or so yards further on and they had to stop again. The mother elephant was enraged and went storming off, ears flapping, in pursuit of the offending car, though stopping just short of it. Eventually the elephants moved away and we all got back safely to the rest camp, whose gates were closed, but they reopened them for us and were very understanding of what was a common occurrence. But the children in the car in front of ours were in hysterics and I doubt if they have been near a game reserve since. We were certainly not unshaken, and we had only been spectators.

The real highlight of the holiday was the Victoria Falls, on the border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia. We spent several days there and “did” it thoroughly. In those days there was negligible formality at the border, so one could cross from one Rhodesia to the other at will. The falls result from the Zambezi River plunging into a deep gorge and they are over a mile wide, so the opposite side of the gorge provides an excellent, if wet, grandstand from which the whole length of the falls can be viewed at close range. We had been warned of how wet it would be, soaked in constant spray, so I wore just a bathing costume, plymsolls and a plastic mac whose main function was to provide shelter for the camera. As well as the magnificent falls there were fantastic rainbows in the spray, with all the associated phenomena such as a “glory” – a circular rainbow centred on the shadow of ones head. I went back at night to see my first (and only) moon bow.

The spray is a great feature of the falls, particularly when the river is in flood, as it was when we visited. It fills the gorge so that you cannot see the bottom and rises high into the sky like a pall of smoke. In fact the original native name for the falls, before Dr Livingstone came along and claimed them for Queen and Empire, translated as “The smoke that thunders.”  The “smoke” could be seen for miles around and the “thunder” could be heard throughout the night at our rest camp. It seemed such a waste to let all that water keep gushing when there was nobody to see it. Much later, Irene revisited the falls with my mother (I was tied to the telescope) when the flow was less. Quite a different experience, but with the advantage of seeing the full impressive depth of the gorge. Irene returned to Pretoria covered in mosquito bites to which she reacted badly and had to spend the next couple of days in a cold bath.

From the Victoria Falls, after haggling for souvenirs at the local market, we headed off into Northern Rhodesia. The countryside was much the same – miles of strip roads bordered by vast farms fenced off from the road by wire fences with every post capped with an empty beer can. The alternative name for a beer-can opener (this was before the invention of the ring-pull) was a Rhodesian spanner. As well as the farms there were some unfenced Bantu areas with the most picturesque of villages. I could not resist visiting them to take photographs, despite dire warnings from the others in the party that I might not come back. However, both there and throughout Southern Africa, I never received anything but the friendliest of welcomes. Irene, too, ignored the advice of white South Africans to keep herself locked up in the flat at night when I was observing, and was happy to go anywhere in Pretoria at any time, and never encountered any problems. There was violence around, but most of it was black on black. We would get anxious letters from England following reports there of rioting or a killing in Pretoria, but we never saw any of it.

The main reason for visiting Northern Rhodesia, apart from adding it to our country-count, was to see the newly-completed Kariba dam, and most impressive it was, too. It was particularly impressive to see such high-tech electrical generating equipment in such a remote part of, let’s face it, a rather primitive country. Lake Kariba, the world’s largest artificial lake, was formed by the Zambezi spreading behind the dam. The original plan was that it should be developed for fishing and boating, to boost the tourist trade, but it had rapidly become choked with Salvinia weed. I wonder if that problem ever got solved. It was not far from Kariba that we got a puncture and, while Joe and I changed the wheel, the boys mounted a rhinoceros watch as they had recently been reported in the area. They were relieved/disappointed not to see one.

Throughout the holiday Joe had suffered from stomach trouble, and it became a bit of a joke, which he took good naturedly. “Where’s Joe?”  “Oh, he’ll be in the loo.”  And he usually was. To try to settle things, he ate mostly baby food. Shortly after returned to Cape Town, we heard that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and had only a short time to live. Dr Stoy immediately gave Irene and me compassionate leave so that we could visit him in hospital. He was cheerful as ever and fully expected to recover, though Elma knew otherwise and was trying to restrain his big spending ideas, knowing that money would shortly be tight. We took our photographs along and had a slideshow in his hospital room in which we relived the holiday, which Joe declared to be the best he had ever had. A few days after we returned to Pretoria, Joe died.

On the journey down to see Joe we had driven through the Great Karoo, a semi-desert area which nevertheless supports most of South Africa’s sheep, at about one per acre. It was so arid that I took a photograph of it, just bare earth stretching away into the distance. It had rained while we were in Cape Town and on our return journey, just two weeks later, the desert had bloomed. I deliberately took a photograph of the same view, only this time it was a dense carpet of orange Namaqualand daisies, stretching from road to horizon. One of South Africa’s wonders.

We didn’t always travel from Pretoria to Cape Town by the most direct route through the Great Karoo. We deliberately varied the route to take in more of the country. On one occasion we went via Kimberley to see the “Great Hole” from which most of the world’s diamonds had come. Another time we went via Natal, Durban and the Garden Route, through spectacular scenery. It was on that trip, near the Oribi Gorge, that the usually trusty Morris Minor had a puncture on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. While I was changing the wheel at the side of the road, a group of Xhosa men in traditional tribal dress materialised and squatted around watching me. No aggro, but no sign of friendship either. It was the only time I ever felt uncomfortable with black Africans. The wheel was changed and we proceeded on our way, very conscious that we had no spare, but safely arrived in Umtata, the capital of the Transkei, for the night. Next day the puncture was repaired and we proceeded happily on our way.

Another thread to be picked up is our trip with the Symingtons to the Kruger Park – another of South Africa’s wonders, which is larger than Wales. I had learned of it as a schoolboy when Geoff Smith, the son of our Hazlemere neighbours, had given me a set of cigarette cards that he had collected while on National Service in South Africa. The cards, which were twice the width of the usual ones, depicted the animals of the Kruger Park, with details of them printed on the back. I was fascinated and learned all the names and most of the other details by heart. So when the chance came to visit the place, it was the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition. Again for reasons of car size, we went in Bill’s, with toddler Gillian climbing all over him as he drove. We learned a lot about child-rearing from Pat and Bill. Pat had been a nurse and knew that a degree of discipline was an important part of child training. For example, when it was time for Gillian to give up her dummy, Pat led her to the dustbin and persuaded her to put it in. That night, when she cried for her dummy, Pat reminded her that she had thrown it away herself. Bill, on the other hand, was a big softy. If Pat put Gillian on what would now be called the naughty stair, Bill would pick her up, give her a cuddle and say “Daddy Loves you!”  We determined that, when we had children, we would follow Pat’s example rather than Bill’s and that, if we disagreed about some parenting issue, I would not countermand Irene in front of the kids, but we would talk about it later. At least, that was what we intended!  Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Gillian grew up to be a lovely girl.

On that first trip to Kruger – there were many subsequent ones – we saw and photographed a lot of game and thoroughly caught the safari bug. We learned that you refer to game in the singular and disregard antelopes, giraffe, buffaloes, etc. On return to the camp after enjoying herds of wildebeest, impalas and kudu as well as seeing a dozen elephants, the correct answer to the question “See anything?” was “We saw elephant, nothing else.”  We had delicious barbecues prepared for us by a “boy” who was totally unimpressed by the tall stories Bill told him of our encounters with lion. The only disappointment occurred later, when we collected the processed photographs. Where there had been an elephant on the road just a few yards away, the picture showed only a small speck in the distance, which could have been anything. Time for a new camera. After a bit of research, I opted for an Asahi Pentax S1A with an additional 200 mm telescopic lens. I was delighted with it and kept it for years, until it was stolen from the boot of the car when I was having a tyre replaced by Quickfit. Its only disadvantages were bulk and weight. And, nowadays, that it was not digital. The virtues of our Pentax were so apparent that most of those who subsequently came out from Herstmonceux also got one – the Yallops and the Wallises, for example.

Having Just bought the camera, Irene and I wandered on towards Church Square in the centre of Pretoria. We were surprised to see such a large throng of people there, both black and white, so we asked what was going on. They were waiting outside the courthouse, or as near to it as they could get, to hear the result of a major trial that had just been concluded. We waited with them, to discover that Nelson Mandela had been given a very long sentence in prison. It was only later that we discovered that we were present when the history of South Africa was being decided.

As well as going on holidays with the Symingtons, we were frequent visitors to one another’s homes, often to play Canasta. The cards were secondary to chat and the eating of Pat’s delicious confections, which were always accompanied by lashings of cream. These were enjoyable, though sober events. The Symingtons were going through their Baptist phase at the time (they have long since emerged from it) and did not drink. But the Baptist connection had some valuable side effects for us. We went along with Pat and Bill to many of their social functions, tennis and barbecues, for example, and it was there that we met Theo and Elizabeth Scott, who have also become lifelong friends. We spent a lot of time with the Scotts and their lovely daughters Brenda and Heather, who have all since visited us in England, and we them again in South Africa, just as we have also visited  and been visited by the Symingtons in England and Australia.

I have been referring to barbecues, but I should really call them braai vleis, Afrikaans for burned meat. They were a major part of social life in South Africa and no outing was complete without one. On the subject of local cuisine, Theo’s invention of pre-scrambled eggs deserves mention. We were planning a visit with the Scotts to the Kruger Park via very rough roads in the Eastern Transvaal, and doubted the chances of eggs to survive intact. So Theo, ever resourceful, broke them all into a screw-top jar. On arrival, they were found to be thoroughly whisked. Irene and I had failed to get a booking for that trip, but we were sneaked into the park under blankets in the back of Theo’s car, and also spent a fairly comfortable night under the same blankets in the back of the same car.

There were numerous memorable trips: with the Symingtons to Basutoland, with the Hutchisons to the Eastern Transvaal, the list could go on and on, but I will restrain myself. Just a quick mention of the trip that Irene and I made to Bechuanaland (now Botswana), which was to be our first visit to a real desert – the Kalahari. The only two roads into the desert were dry river beds, but, the weekend we went it rained heavily for the first time in seven years. What had started as a dry river bed was fast becoming a very wet river, so we turned tail and managed to get back to Gabarones just in time. I now knew what a real desert looked like: it was covered in puddles. Gabarones has now dropped the final “s” and has become the capital. This is a bit sad, because it destroys the pub-quiz question “What is the only country to have its capital outside its boundaries?”  (The capital used to be Mafeking, in South Africa)  Mafeking’s other claims to fame are the Boer War siege, Baden-Powell and negative sleeping policemen (a trough rather than a hump – particularly nasty as they are not readily seen). Not bad for a one-horse doorp.

And another trip (so much for restraint) to the Royal Natal National Park Hotel in the Drakensburgs – the setting for the film Zulu, with the mountains forming an amphitheatre in the background. We went there on the spur of the moment without booking and feared for our chances of getting in when we saw the full hotel car park. Another car arrived at the same time and the occupants obviously had the same fears. This resulted in a race between them and us to get to reception. It turned out that the hotel was full, but for an extra four customers they were prepared to open the Royal Suite. This was where Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were on honeymoon shortly before her father died. They had been quartered in rather luxurious rondaavels (round, thatched huts), which was where we were put. I imagine the ring round the bath was preserved from the Royal occupancy. We were rather late for dinner, so it was just the Seneque’s (our sprint rivals) and ourselves. We got on brilliantly well from the outset and had a great long-weekend there with them. We walked until our feet were too sore to walk any more, then rode horses until our bottoms were in the same state, then just lay around enjoying one another’s company. They lived in Durban, but often came to Pretoria where we would meet up for a meal. Peter Seneque knew everyone in the South African art world and it was through him that we met George Boys whose exhibits for the Biennale we had admired and from whom we bought our treasured “floating still life” painting. George was completely non-arty and when we asked him to sign it, he asked whether we wanted it landscape or portrait. He was less obliging when we asked him to get famous and die, so that our investment would pay off.

Lights in the Hotel were powered by a generator, which was switched off at night. We were safely in bed by then, but were woken by the sound of small feet scrabbling around above the ceiling. “Rats,” we thought, and spent the rest of the night with the sheets over our heads. When we raised the matter at reception the next morning, they told us that it must be the hotel cat, which had disappeared to have kittens. We felt much better about it after that. I seem to be fated that way, with nocturnal animals in France, Drakensburgs and Sydney (OK, we’ll come to that sometime).

One trip that I would not wish to skate over is the one we took with the Yallops to Moçambique. Rose and Bern got married and came to South Africa after us and were based in Cape Town, but they came up to Pretoria for Bernard  to help out with the winter observing. When there was a long weekend in the observing schedule, we took advantage of it and set out on holiday, this time taking both cars, neither of which would have been comfortable with four passengers plus luggage. Following our usual practice, we set out without booking ahead and started to look for accommodation when we were ready to stop. This usually worked pretty well, but when we arrived in Barberton the place was booked out, as it was school holidays and Barberton was conveniently close to the Kruger Park. After trying all the hotels we asked at a newsagent if they could tell us of any B&Bs. After some debate among those in the shop, one customer suggested that we should try Mrs Nell, who was known to take in boarders. Mrs Nell had one double room that would do for Rose and Irene, and Bern and I could have a bunk bed in the men’s dormitory. This turned out to be a lean-to outhouse with chicken wire in the windows, but we were in no position to argue. Mr Nell was a prison officer at Barberton’s notorious jail and I believe that most of the other boarders were, too. The main room, where we were given a typical Boer dinner with all the vegetables sweet and mushy, had drying meat hanging from the ceiling and was decorated with pictures from the days when the Orange Free State was an Afrikaans Republic, the picture of President Steyn (deposed by the British in 1902) being draped with the old Free State flag. We felt like the enemy. The final member of the Nell family was their teenage daughter, who could most charitably be described as plain. This did not stop us commemorating her by modifying the words of the then popular Herman’s Hermits song to “Mrs Nell you’ve got a lovely daughter.”  After an evening at the cinema we returned to the Nell’s, Rose and Irene went into their (ground floor) room and, after undressing and putting out the lights, let Bern and me in through the window. I still kid Rose that I am not sure which husband slept with which wife, but I don’t think there would have been much difficulty in telling, even in the dark. At least I am fairly confident that I didn’t sleep with Bern.

There was an overhead cableway bringing bucket loads of asbestos from the mine over the border in Swaziland. Asbestos was the second biggest business in Barberton (after the jail) and one of the main exports of Swaziland, so we headed off to the mine next day. Interesting place to visit, but the dust was appalling. We spent the whole time with hankies over our noses. I wonder what has happened to the mine now that asbestos is no longer an acceptable building material. I don’t wonder what happened to the workers – I am sure they are all long since dead from asbestosis. In the capital, Mbabane, I got a haircut for the equivalent of 5p, sitting in a chair on the roadside. Ken Witham had a theory I was testing about the ratio of the cost of a haircut to that of a gallon of petrol being a good measure of the degree of development of a country. Swaziland was starting from a long was back.

We drove to Lorenço Marques (now Maputo) via Piggs Peak and checked in at the hotel – this time we had booked!  The bathrooms contained bidets, which were new to Rose, so, with my great knowledge of such things, I explained to her how they worked. Unfortunately, I hadn’t come across the sort with sprays before, and destroyed my credibility by getting a faceful of water, to Rose’s delight.

One of the specialities of LM is its giant prawns. We had a meal of them under a thatched umbrella at a little beach café along the coast – delicious. I have a picture of Bern looking thoroughly dissolute with a prawn in one hand and a glass of vinho da casa and a cigarette in the other.

The Penguin Seamen’s Club was another experience that we were told we must not miss, so along we went and were conducted to a table by the dance floor. It was a favourite haunt of white South African men as it offered the opportunity to come into close contact with the dusky hostesses – forbidden fruit under the anti-communist laws of South Africa. Moçambique was part of Portugal at the time and there was no apartheid. (Angola was also part of Portugal – a device to avoid the United Nations getting involved, as anything that went on there counted as “internal affairs”.)  The floor show started with a little black man who twirled a chair around held only in his teeth. With our ring-side seats we felt very vulnerable, but the teeth held out. Next on was a stripper, a rather comely white girl. She practised the tease part of her art by inviting Bernard to unzip the back of her dress. Bernard rather grudgingly obliged by unzipping it about two inches, so she had to find another punter to do the rest. A little later in the proceedings she again approached our table, this time offering me the loose end of an unfastened bra that she held in place at the front. She was planning to dance away before I could reach it, but I was quicker and less inhibited than Bernard and managed to grab it. There was a brief tug-of-war before I released my grip. The bra came off eventually, of course, but not the nipple-caps that she wore beneath it, nor a substantial pair of pants. Ah, the innocent pleasures of those days.

We had a busy social life in Pretoria, partly due to the absence of television. There was cards with the Symingtons or Heaths, tennis with the Scotts and Hutchisons, country dancing and (for Irene) amateur theatricals. I think it was Sheila Hill who introduced us to the country dance group, but we were willing victims, having been regulars at the weekly country dance evenings in the Herstmonceux ballroom since our student days. Also, Arthur was accordionist for a British Morris Dance group when they toured Europe, and during my time with Katherine we had attended several residential English Folk Dance and Song Society weekends. Meals in the bachelor flat were usually accompanied by folk-song records, which it was not uncommon to join in, so we were fairly saturated in it. Once a month the English group would join with the German and Afrikaans folk-dance groups. The German thing was great fun, all kicking and thigh-slapping, but the Afrikaans “Volkspieler” was much more sedate. Far from being real folk music, it had been invented rather recently by Dr Pallasier – honorary PhD folk music – to try and construct a cultural heritage for the Boers. Its unique feature was that the performers sang as they danced, dressed up in Victorian – or perhaps that should be Krugeran – costumes and moving sedately around a circle. Favourites were “Haar kom die Alabama” and “January February March April …” (I won’t even attempt the Afrikaans version of the latter).

Irene had always enjoyed the theatre, both attending and acting, so she soon got involved with a local amateur group. It was through them that we me Marge and Ian Hutchison who became close friends (again visits to and from post-South Africa). Ian was the extrovert who loved to appear on stage while Marge, like me, was happier behind the scenes. Irene’s first part was small, but got her nominated for Best Newcomer in the Pretoria equivalent of the Tony Awards. My job was front-of-the-stage manager, carrying the heavy responsibility of switching the house lights off at the start and on again during the interval and at the end. Think of the chaos that would have ensued had I got it wrong.

Ian had been a rally driver and found it hard to kick the habit. His cars came with his job – insurance assessment – and he looked on them as a challenge, particularly a Ford that he hated but came to respect after it resisted his attempts to explode it for many months. He made a point of reversing out of his drive at about 90 mph. He didn’t like to be driven, so it was in his car that we would go on holiday. An exciting ride, but not too frightening as he was an excellent driver who was always in control even when drifting round corners on corrugated dirt roads. It was with the Hutchisons that I experienced steak for breakfast in a Boer hotel in the Eastern Transvaal. Just before we left, Ian was transferred to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, so we visited them there on our way home.  Shortly after our return to England, Ian was sent by his firm, Topliss and Harding, to spend some weeks at their London HQ. He and I took the opportunity to go to Paris. We had a great time doing all the sights and sampling the night-life. For economy we stayed in a B&B, sharing not only a room but also a double bed. Eyebrows would be raised nowadays, but then we thought nothing of it.

As well as the amateur dramatics, there was also the professional theatre. Pretoria was well served, particularly by PACT – the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal – with excellent productions. They were based in Johannesburg, but always brought their productions to Pretoria for a short run. The theatre in Pretoria had no permanent ushers, but got by with a group of amateurs managed by Gladys Devine. Sheila, Phil, Irene and I were among them. As a reward for half an hour of collecting tickets and showing people to their places, we got to see the show in the best available remaining seats – often in the front row. And there were enough of us so that we never had to ush more than one performance of one play. Because I had a dinner jacket, I got to ush a lot of first nights. One slight oddity was that, for reasons of political correctness, they put on a fair number of plays in Afrikaans, though, because of the paucity of competent plays written in that language, these were mostly translations. They were not very popular with either Audience or ushers, but, to help Gladys out, we would sometimes do one. Some of the best PACT plays we saw were The Cherry Orchard, Caucasian Chalk Circle, Rashamon Gate and Mother Courage and her Chickens, but the one that made the biggest impression was Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Afrikaans – a doubly surreal experience.

I am getting towards the end of our South African idyll, so time for a bit of winding-up. Two major items: first my promotion to SSO (Bob Dickens, my best man and friendly career rival got the same promotion on the same day), second a letter from Dr Hunter, the number two at Herstmonceux, to say that Finch had retired, Leaton was the new head of the Magnetic Department and he would like me to rejoin the department as his second in command. This was a matter of some urgency as the 1965 chart preparation was due, so would I care to shorten my South African tour by a few months and return?  The letter was written in confidence and Hunter assured me that, if I wished to continue my career in astronomy rather than return to geomagnetism, the matter would be closed and there would be no repercussions. I have mentioned earlier what a considerate man Alan Hunter was, and this was another example.

After careful thought and discussions with Irene, I decided that I had got most of the astronomy bug out of my system. As indicated above, it tends to lose its charm at three in the morning. I was a good observer and was still fascinated by the subject, but did not have the instinctive feel for how stars think, which is an important requirement for a “real” astronomer. On the other hand, I did have this feel for the Earth and about what made it tick. Also I had been happy working with Dick during the Finch era. So I agreed to accept the offer, recognising that this was a defining career shift and I would be turning my back on astronomy for ever – or so I thought.

My successor as Cape Observer was to be Derek Jones, my old buddy. He and Thelma, together with three (I think) children came out a month or so before we left, to learn the telescope, find somewhere to live and generally get settled in. With a growing family, our flat would have been no good to them, even if we hadn’t been living in it, so initially they stayed in a hotel. The first priority was to find them more permanent accommodation. It was a landlords’ market in those days and anything worthwhile was instantly snapped up. So each evening, we would position ourselves outside the headquarters of The Pretoria news and get a copy, literally hot off the press. After a lightning look through the “to let” section, we would circle the likely candidates and then drive off to suss them out. After a few abortive days we arrived at a particularly juicy candidate in Waterkloof, just as another car was driving up. I dropped Derek at the gate and he sprinted up the drive, a short head ahead of the other candidate. It was worth it, because the house was ideal for them, both in specification and location, so that was where they stayed for the next three years.

It was great fun having Derek around. When the comet Ikeya-Seki (comets are named after the first people to discover them, up to three names) was at its best in the morning sky of late October, 1965, we accepted the challenge of photographing it for The Pretoria News. As a dawn object, it was not visible until the sky was too bright for serious work, so no telescope time was wasted. I had previously used this “free time” for such ornamental pursuits as looking at Neptune and Uranus. We did not have coordinates, so had to aim the telescope by eye, about as easy as pointing an elephant at a keyhole. I was at the Newtonian focus – the only one suitable for direct photography – while Derek was at ground level twiddling the wheels. The telescope was just about horizontal and Derek was reluctant to go any further when I called “Just a bit further, I can see its glow beginning to appear on the edge of the field.”  He went just a bit further and for a fraction of a second I saw a streetlight before there was a “clunk” and it disappeared. Derek spun the wheel back just in time to prevent the mirror bowling down the tube and out of the dome. The mirror is supported from behind, but there is nothing to restrain it in front. Fortunately no harm was done and we went on to get an excellent picture that made the front page. But it could so easily have been the end of two promising careers.

Such an accident with a telescope would not have been unique. There is the famous example of Enjar Hertzsprung whose first job was at the Leiden Observatory. He inverted their refracting telescope to remove the lens cover, and a cannon ball that was at the bottom end as a counterweight, rolled down the tube and straight through the lens. He survived this and went on to greatness, but I would not recommend it as an example to be followed by an aspiring young astronomer. George Harding had a near miss. There was a vertical steel ladder inside the dome that gave access to the slit and it had a curious kink in it. George explained that he was rotating the dome with the telescope aimed just above the horizon and drove all hundred tons or so of the dome into the blunt end of the telescope. The only obvious damage was a seriously bent ladder, which had taken the impact. What to do?  ADT would have thrown a fit if he found out, and the ladder could not be repaired without serious engineering attention. So the ever-resourceful George reversed the dome all the way around and bashed the ladder against the other side of the telescope. Only the small kink remained, which ADT never noticed. Then there was the mirror for the 74-inch telescope in Canberra, which Woolley managed to spoil even before it was installed. The mirror arrived in Canberra with its surface protected by a plastic coating. Rather than wait for the Grubb Parsons engineer to arrive and remove the coating, Woolley tried to wash it off, first with distilled water, then progressively with more potent solvents. Nitric acid finally did the job nicely, but also damaged the surface of the mirror that it had been the purpose of the coating to protect!

Shortly before Derek arrived I was presented with an interesting observing challenge. The minor planet Icarus was heading back towards the Sun after many years in the outer regions of the solar system and was predicted to pass very close to the Earth. The predictions were not too accurate as there had been no actual observations of it since it had passed out of telescope reach after its previous approach, and there was a chance that it might actually hit the Earth, with apocalyptic consequences. So it was important to pick it up as early as possible. It was coming in from the south, so the 74-inch telescope at Pretoria was well placed to observe it. It was quite invisible to the eye, even through the telescope, and it was moving relative to the stars, so a time-exposure guided on a star would produce a trail rather than a sharp image, which would still be too faint to be detected. So it was necessary to calculate how it was expected to move during the exposure and constantly adjust the cross wires on which the guide star was centred to allow for this – no easy task, either mathematically or manipulatively. The only way of knowing if it had been got right was to look for a sharp image on the plate among the (deliberately) trailed star images. And even then you couldn’t be sure that it was not a fault on the plate unless it appeared in the right relative positions on more than one plate. After three failures, we got the very first images of it, from which the orbit-calculators in the United States were able to deduce that it would miss the Earth by a few million miles, so no drama after all. But there was a successful sci-fi film (“Meteor”) based on what might have happened if it had been on collision course.

Eventually it was time to leave. After a round of farewell parties in Pretoria we made our final journey down to the Cape for another week’s worth of parties there, including a mass assault on Table Mountain from the Kirstenbosch Gardens side, with a picnic half way up. This was slightly marred by mist, but the whole party of about 20 got to the top and then descended by cable car. I know that I couldn’t do it now as I tried just the first part of the climb last year and was knackered by it.

Ever since our arrival in South Africa I had been worried about how we would manage the departure procedure without the aid of Harry Cook. He had taken care of everything, so I didn’t know where to start. But then God came to my aid by getting Harry posted to Cape Town shortly before we left, so all was well. But I still have no idea of the details of transferring.

At one time we had the notion of returning to England by public transport, mostly ferries, by sailing up the waterways that run the length of Africa. Look at a map and you will see that there is a string of lakes connected by rivers and ending with the Nile. There would have been problems with entry into some of the countries, but it would have been possible, if we had not been pressed for time. So we did the next best thing by flying and stopping off at interesting places on the way. At that time you could break your journey as many times as you liked for the same fare, providing each leg took you nearer to the final destination. Having deposited the car at the docks we flew out of Cape Town waved off by an army of ex-pat astronomers. Jill Wallis was a bit tearful. She and Wol (Roy Wallis) had just arrived and she wished it was her going back to England. You wouldn’t think it now. She came to love the place and frequently returns.

Our first stop was Salisbury, to see Ian and Marge Hutchison. While there we posted an air-mail letter to England bearing a UDI commemorative stamp. Southern Rhodesia had broken away from British rule on November 11, 1965, only a few days before we got there, with a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). But the government under Ian Smith was not recognised by England. The letter, when it arrived, was an interesting documentation of this, as it was covered with “Postage Due” stamps and a note to the effect that the UDI stamp was invalid – a treasure for our collection. Then on to Nairobi and the New Stanley Hotel for a week. During that time we visited Treetops for a few days, a hotel built in the treetops beside a watering-hole in the Aberdare National Park. This was where Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip were on honeymoon when the news came through that King George VI had died and Elizabeth had to return immediately and be Queen. It was the same site, but a re-built Treetops, as the original one had been destroyed by fire during the Mau Mau troubles. A Landrover dropped us and the other visitors off at the end of the track and we walked from there, with an armed ranger leading and another bringing up the rear. We climbed up to the hotel and there we were, sealed in. The game-watching was great, either from comfortable aircraft-type chairs on the balcony, or from the bedroom windows, all of which overlooked the watering hole, which was floodlit throughout the night. One didn’t even need to get out of bed. But the other guests – there were about a dozen – were almost as interesting as the animals. Irene was easily the youngest and best looking, and the ranger invited her down the ladder to ground level to see a rhino at close range. I spoiled his fun by accompanying them!  There was a rich Indian businessman for whom money was God, a couple of Ethiopian diplomats, both male, and various others. We were all jammed round a long table for supper (food was conveyed around it on a small railway) and conversation ranged widely, but was largely about UDI. The Ethiopians told us of a contingent of their countrymen who were even then marching south to liberate the Rhodesians. This was true, but they marched for a day, found that nobody had thought to bring any food, so they went home again.

Back in Nairobi UDI was still the hot topic. We were looking through the railings at the newly-built Parliament Building when we were approached by a huge uniformed guard. “Are you Rhodesian?” he asked, aggressively. It was a relief to be able to tell him that we were English. His attitude changed immediately and he took us on a tour round the building. I still wonder what would have happened if the answer had been “Yes!”  We met up with the Ethiopian diplomats again and they were keen to show us the Nairobi nightlife. Actually, once again it was Irene they wanted to take, but I stayed close. They took us to the Top Hat night club, as famous in Nairobi as was the Penguin in Lourenço Marques, but we were not there for long. A message came through from the entrance that there was to be a police raid, so the staff rushed us all out by a back entrance in a very well rehearsed operation. Police raids were obviously a common occurrence. Either that, or it was a ruse to clear the place so that a new set of punters could be brought in.

Next stop Addis Ababa, though we only had one night there – just enough time to get a yen to do it properly sometime. I was particularly taken with the primitive cartoon-style paintings depicting the visit of the Queen of Sheba. Flying out of Addis was worrying, not only because the airport is in a hollow and planes have to land and take off steeply to avoid the mountains, but also because we were doing the next leg, from Addis to Asmara, with Ethiopian Airlines and the stop-over in Addis had resulted from one of their planes having to be taken out of service. The one we got on did not seem all that serviceable, no seats were allocated, so it was up to the passengers to choose their own, which was just as well as the first few we tried were all broken. The dusky air-hostesses were charming, but had negligible English and didn’t appear to know what they were doing. We managed to take off and avoid the mountains, but it was a great relief to hear the standard message “This is your Captain speaking …” delivered in a broad American accent. Ethiopia is fascinating from the air with a high plateau divided by innumerable steep-sided valleys. Haile Selassie I wanted to open up his country and realised that a network of roads was impossible through that terrain, so bought an airline on a “turn-key” basis, with all the technical side, including the pilots, supplied from the USA.

Yes, we were finding the return trip a bit wearing by this time, too, but there is more. On to Cairo and the Cleopatra Hotel. An outing to the pyramids where I opted for the camel ride, but Irene passed it up. She went ahead in the taxi while I was left to the mercy of the camel man. After adorning me with a tea-towel and launching me into the air aboard his animal, he then proceeded to ask me for money. I assured him that I had none on me, but if he cared to come around to the hotel …  He didn’t, of course, and I got my ride, but it was not a lot of fun. The pyramids were something of a disappointment. They were just like their pictures – no more and no less. And the constant pressure of salesmen was a pain. The best part of Egypt was our visit to the Helwan Observatory, a train ride away. It was both a magnetic and an astronomical observatory, so I was doubly interested. The director assigned a couple of PhD students to look after us during the rest of our stay in Egypt and they did a fine job. Part of the entertainment was a visit to ex-King Farouk’s pleasure tent in the desert, where an ethnic cultural show was put on. One of the acts was a middle aged, overweight belly dancer. The student nearest me leered and nudged me, but I had difficulty not giving the impression that all that jiggling flesh left me cold. A little later there was a lightly-clad, lithe young dancer and it was my turn to leer and nudge. And his turn to be left cold. Cultural differences, I suppose. After the show the students introduced us to a very special Egyptian delicacy that was served in a café in something that looked like a railway arch. It was cold rice pudding; again we had difficulty in feigning wonder and delight.

The final stop-off was in Athens, for which we had been thoroughly primed by Peter Andrews, but he hadn’t warned us to avoid being ripped off by the bureau de change at the airport. It was done with great charm, but when we checked the numbers in the hotel room, ripped off we thoroughly had been. At that time there was no restriction on tourists trampling all over the Acropolis, so that is what we did to our heart’s content – wonderful. By this time Irene had developed a rotten cold, so next day we took the easier tourist option of a coach trip to Delphi. That was good, but what we really wanted was to get back to England and see our families.

 

Herstmonceux, 1965-1976

[section of exclusively domestic interest omitted] … Meanwhile, I was settling back into the Magnetic Department and greatly enjoying it. The office had been moved to a large, elegant room, entered up a beautiful carved staircase and through a (reputedly) Grinling Gibbons doorway, with a view over the formal gardens to the north of the castle. No wonder a visiting official from London reckoned that we should pay to work there, rather than be paid. During my time in South Africa I had been replaced with Margaret Penston, but she had now moved on and was replaced by David Barraclough at the grade of SO. He came from Halifax, where he was supposed to be completing a PhD, but the thesis never got completed. This was because, very late on in the work, he discovered that something closely similar had already been published elsewhere – as his supervisor should have known. David was, however, a good and energetic scientist and was eventually awarded the more prestigious DSc on the strength of his published work. Also in the department were Sue Pocock, AEO, Marion Whale, SA, Martin Fisher, SA and Flora Penfold, who was Dick’s secretary. They were soon joined by Pauline Green, SA. Various others came and went, but I will spare you.

I was bursting with research ideas and was soon pumping out papers as fast as I could write them. Dick, on the other hand, had virtually stopped doing science and was fully involved in administration. When it was his turn to give a talk to the vacation students and motivate them to pursue a career in science, he told them all about the Civil Service hierarchy and regulations. To be fair, there was an increasing administrative load. As well as Hartland and the Herstmonceux office, responsibility for the former Met. Office magnetic observatories at Eskdalemuir and Lerwick had been transferred to us, together with a few associated staff in Edinburgh, and there was a move afoot to transfer us from Herstmonceux to another location.

This was all to do with politics. All the observatory staff were part of the Scientific Civil Service under the Admiralty (we used to get confidential Admiralty Fleet Orders circulated to us) until some Government Minister thought it would be a good move to save money by reducing the number of Civil Servants – wild applause in the House of Commons. At the same time, it was announced that the Government planned to spend more money on science – more applause. In fact, it was the same people doing the same work in the same offices for the same salaries, plus a hoard of new staff to administer the changes. The new bodies were the Research Councils and the two relevant ones were the Science Research Council (SRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The boundary between their areas of responsibility was the surface of the Earth, with Sun, planets and stars in SRC and geology, oceanography, etc. in NERC. Where did the geomagnetic field fit into this, with its origin within the Earth, but extending beyond the orbit of Pluto and with major contributions from the Sun?

After careful deliberations, it was deemed that the Magnetic Department should be part of NERC, thus breaking the long association with the Royal Observatory and ultimately leading to relocation in one of the other NERC establishments. Sir Edward Bullard (who preferred to be known as “Teddy”) later told me that the “careful considerations” were simply that it was the “geo” in the word geomagnetism that condemned us to NERC. He apologised for what he came to realise was a mistake. Meanwhile, we stayed put and things carried on as before, though rent was paid from NERC to SRC for our accommodation.

By now I was specializing in the variations of the Earth’s magnetic field, as revealed by the data obtained from magnetic observatories. There are a few hundred of these worldwide, and I became familiar with all of them through correspondence, from their yearbooks and in some cases from visits. The long-term variations provide one of the few windows into the interior of the Earth, while the shorter-period ones originate in the high atmosphere. Erratic variations, such as magnetic storms, come from the Sun. Studies could vary from in-depth studies of a single observatory, or less detailed studies of the worldwide phenomenon. Either way, a great deal of time had to be spent in collecting the data and preparing them for analysis (e.g. punching onto cards and checking) before the fun part of the actual investigation. This would be followed by the chore of writing it up for publication, though after a bit this, too, became enjoyable.

Transferring the data from printed to machine-readable form was always a chore, but we managed to ease the pain a bit by enlisting the help of Ford Open Prison, near Arundel. What little work the prisoners had was incredibly tedious – scraping the sprues of moulded plastic potties, for example – so the Governor leapt at the chance of getting them to punch cards. We provided the card-punches and drove to the prison about once a month to deliver boxes of blank cards and collect the punched ones. The prisoners were slow and not very accurate, but at least it was getting done. We would get them to punch everything twice by sneaking back a yearbook again a few months after it had been done, then compare the two punchings automatically to pick out the errors. Sometimes we would find racing selections scribbled on the cards and those we checked were surprisingly accurate, but they always arrived too late to do us any good.

Most of the prisoners were in for crimes like embezzlement or forgery – nothing violent – and they were mostly more refined than the warders. When I arrived with a bootfull of rather heavy cards, one of the prisoners stopped me from lifting them and called a warder. “I would help you myself, but I have a bad back. This warder chappie will give you a hand.” 

I would usually stay for lunch with the Governor in the Staff Canteen, where there was excellent food and service by professional chefs and waiters who were serving time. When one had to be released, the staff would ’phone round the other open prisons to try to arrange a transfer. There was a famous case at the time where a vast amount of money had been made by a smart operator selling third party motor insurance. When he was convicted, he was an obvious candidate for an open prison and the Ford governor wanted to get him as an excellent candidate for card-punching, but he was outbid. He did manage to get a university mathematics lecturer on the job, but his crime was not serious enough for him to stay very long. One of the prisoners was permanent. He had spent more than half his life in prison and when he was due for release after a long stretch, he could not have coped in the outside world. So he stayed on voluntarily, doing odd jobs and continuing the life he knew.

The Governor was a humane man who was well aware of the three functions of a prison (punishment, rehabilitation and protection of the public), but was concerned that they had become mixed up. Conditions in general were too soft to be a punishment – some prisoners would deliberately work it to be released for the summer during the fruit picking season and then get re-admitted for an appropriately minor crime to spend the winter in prison. Attempts at rehabilitation could not be more than token because of the transitory nature of the prisoners. Protection of the public doesn’t really apply to an open prison. The story was told of a local Grand Lady who was attending an open day at the prison and, having been shown to a parking place by a prisoner, left her car unlocked. When the prisoner pointed this out to her, she said “Oh, I never lock my car when I come here and I have never had any trouble.”  “Yes, it’s normally OK ma’am, but there are a lot of outsiders around today!”

Two of the numbers associated with magnetic observatories were their magnetic latitude and longitude. These were of very little use and were based on an internationally agreed dipole model of the geomagnetic field that was hugely out of date. It struck me that the time had come, not only to up-date the dipole model, but to extend it to a lot more harmonics so that it was a realistic representation of the field. I suggested this to Dick Leaton and we discussed how to set about doing this. I drafted a letter to the international body and Dick, as Head of Department, co-signed it and sent it off. This was the start of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field which has since become a small industry. Al Zmuda, the recipient of the letter, liked the idea and suggested that a small committee should convene at Herstmonceux to progress it. This developed into the Herstmonceux Conference of 1966, attended, by invitation only, by all the leading lights of geomagnetism. Well, about twenty of them!  The Grand Old Man was Scott Forbush, who had only narrowly avoided death when the nonmagnetic ship Carnegie burned out in 1929 in Apia, Samoa, while being refuelled. He looked and sounded rather like Mark Twain. He had been instructed by his doctor to give up smoking and had done so, but still liked to retain all the manipulative side of it. He always had a pack of twenty-five Pall Mall non-filter cigarettes on the go. He would take one out, tap it, Strike a match, but blow it out before it reached the cigarette. Then at intervals he would drag on it, tap off the “ash” and finally, when the mouth end had got soggy, put it back in the pack to be used again later, only the other way round. In this way he got through about a hundred a day. He claimed that the only problem was having to decline the offer of a light from helpful people.

Others included Harry Vestine, of the Rand Corporation, who invited me to spend a couple of years with him in California; Paul Serson from Canada who later became a close friend and even invited me to take over from him as Head of the Pacific Geoscience Centre on Vancouver Island on his retirement; Joe Cain of NASA, who had obtained his PhD under the supervision of Sydney Chapman for a lunar analysis of data from Sitka; and Hugh Nelson from the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in Washington. All of these were to become close colleagues in later years. In fact, the Herstmonceux Conference did a lot to put the Mag and Met department as a whole, and me in particular, on the international scene.

In Finch’s day, he was the only one to go to an International Conference and he would treat it as a perk, giving nothing and learning little. I suppose Dick Leaton could have done the same, but I was the one who was writing and presenting papers, so he took me along, too. Unlike Finch, we both worked like mad at a conference, deciding beforehand who would go to which lecture or committee meeting and networking furiously. It paid off a treat, and soon our little department was a force to be reckoned with. There were two principal meetings: those of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) every four years, and the more specialised International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy (IAGA) in between. Soon both Dick and I were serving on several committees and chairmen of some. Dick, in common with many geopoliticians, considered this to be an end in itself, but I was more concerned to obtain a platform on which I could publicise the science I was doing.

At one of these conferences, my hero Sydney Chapman invited me to come and work with him in Colorado at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He had retired from the University of Oxford at the age of sixty-five, but was still going strong in the United States at the age of eighty, in Colorado and at the University of Alaska. Naturally, I was thrilled to bits at the prospect, but Dick was underjoyed as, once again, it was coming up to World Chart time. The original plan was that I should go for a year, but departure was delayed because Irene was pregnant with Rachel and the charts required an early return, so in the end it was only a little over five months – but what a productive five months!

After learning about having babies with Jane, we were much more expert with Rachel, even planning the pregnancy to keep Irene warm over winter and to have the baby in March. Jane, meanwhile, had performed such miracles as producing teeth, learning to walk and generally being a delight. Heavily pregnant ladies were not allowed to fly, and I was not all that keen on Rachel being born in America. The possible advantages of dual nationality were outweighed by the huge cost of American babies, so we planned to leave after the birth. Rachel was born in the same nursing home as Jane, with a faster and more comfortable birth than her sister, but with a less enjoyable stay. This was because Irene was in a ward with two others, neither of whom was married or even had a partner in attendance. Their babies were to be adopted, so having them was just a chore to be got over. As the only visiting male, it was part of my job to keep them stocked up with cigarettes. I also had to get Rachel registered, added to the passport and American visa-ed, which involved an interesting trip to London with Jane.

Instead of staying for the full ten days (or was two weeks par?), Irene came out early and, stopping only to buy her a hat, we went straight on to Freda and John’s wedding at Polegate. Jane was a toddler, but it was baby Rachel who nearly stole the show from the bride. She stayed at the back with me during the service while Irene was up front with her family. A couple of days later, when Rachel was just ten days old, we flew to the States.

It was a very long journey with a short break for customs at Washington, but all three girls behaved themselves very well and we got up-graded to first class for the Washington to Denver leg. Despite the late hour of arrival – about two in the morning – Sydney Chapman was there to meet us at the airport. He didn’t drive himself (the nearest he ever got to a car was co-ownership of an old banger with Julius Bartels for a few months), but, with his secretary’s help, had organised enough cars to transport us all to Boulder. She later told me that when she had spoken to Sydney about meeting his new student, he had quickly corrected her: “Not student – colleague!”  A fully furnished flat awaited us, into which we gratefully subsided.

My first task in the morning was to go and get the shopping. Irene gave me a list which included, inter alia, SMA and butter. The SMA was for Rachel’s bottle. After having had problems breast feeding Jane (mainly from not knowing how much she had had), Irene had decided to bottle-feed Rachel, who had already happily taken to SMA, as recommended by the doctor. But American SMA is a different formula from the UK version and was not at all to Rachel’s taste. After struggling for a few days, Irene switched her to tinned Carnation Milk, suitably diluted, and that was fine. So we always called Rachel our Carnation baby. The only item on the list that I failed to get was the butter. After several tours of the supermarket, I asked an assistant where it was hidden and was told that they did not stock it. “Why not?”  “Cholesterol.”  So I settled for white (because no added colouring was allowed in the US) margarine – looks revolting, but tastes OK. The point of all this is that that was the first time I had heard the word “cholesterol.

The flat was within easy walking distance of the Department of Astro-Geophysics where Sydney had his office, with mine adjacent. Also around were his secretary and a couple of assistants, Vic Tissone and Harriet Bribitzer. One of the first questions Harriet asked me was “Are you a leg man or a tit man?”  After a bit of thought, I gave her the wimpish, but honest, answer “I’m a face man.”  In an office down the corridor were a couple of programmers for my use: Astrik Diermendjian and Becky Marshall. Nearly all of these were better qualified than I was, with my mere BSc. Sydney said that this was of no relevance as I was there on my merits, but why didn’t I register for a PhD if that would make me feel more comfortable, or submit my published papers and go directly for a DSc, as Attia Ashour (another of his colleagues, from Cairo) had done?  I took this to heart, and in the fullness of time that is what I did, going for the “and” option rather than “or”.

Coming from Herstmonceux, I was used to the convention that senior staff were addressed by their surname, prefixed by their title, so I was inclined to address my hero as “Professor Chapman.”  But he said that he had adapted to, and preferred, the American system of using Christian names. It was a bit difficult at first, with such an aged and eminent man, and also because “Sydney” has always been something of a joke name, but I soon got used to it. He was the gentlest and most considerate of men. One of the first things he did was to get me a raise in salary on account of having two children to support, though I was already getting three times my Herstmonceux salary!  He never had to make formal requests, but merely suggested that something might be a good idea. For example, he happened to mention, in the hearing of the Director, that his office was rather hot. That afternoon an air conditioner was installed.

We worked closely together during the day and often went for walks together in the evening. On one of these, we passed a group of hippies on the university campus and Sydney remarked that he had always felt that there was something of the hippie in him!  He certainly lived very simply after his wife died, in graduate student accommodation. He would be very early into work, sometimes meeting Sadami Matsushita who was just going home after working through the night. The standard greeting was “Good morning, Mat.”  “Goodnight, Sydney.”  Sydney would then work through to mid-day when he would go off for lunch and his daily half-mile swim. Sometimes he would come back late afternoon or early evening, sometimes not. I imagined he thought great thoughts while swimming, but no. On the first length he would recite all the names beginning with “A”, then “B” for the second length and so on. The evening walks were also mostly work-free. We would chat about family, friends, colleagues, books, in fact almost anything except geomagnetism. All very friendly and I valued them greatly.

In the office it was quite the opposite – nearly all work and very little social, which suited me fine. Sydney was rather deaf and I had to shout a bit. One afternoon, after the initial awe had worn off, we were arguing about the interpretation of some results and things became quite heated. I was arguing my case with some fervour and shouting in earnest. Back in my office, I began to realise the enormity of this behaviour and wondered if it marked the end of my career, but shortly afterwards I learned from his secretary that Sydney had asked her if she had heard the argument – her office was adjoining his, so she could hardly have failed to do so – and told her (obviously aware that she would pass it on) that he had greatly enjoyed it. After that, we had many arguments, though never with any rancour.

I could go on and on with stories about Sydney, but these appear in the full version of In Remembrance of Me of which this is an abstract. I thought of him as a remote figure on a huge pedestal before I went to work with him and, despite his friendship, kindness, humility and generosity of spirit, he remained up on that pedestal, though no longer remote. Truly a great man.

During my time there, Peter Kendall (Professor of Maths at Sheffield University) came to work with Sydney for a few weeks and shared my office. He had been making such visits for some years. Thus began an enduring friendship as well as a series of collaborative papers. After Sydney died, Peter came to spend a summer working with me in Herstmonceux when we and our wives had a great social time, including a visit to Glyndebourne with all the trappings. Both wives died unreasonably young, and both husbands have remarried.

At the end of my stay in Colorado there was a big geomagnetic conference in Madrid, so I was sent there as a United States delegate. When attending conferences as UK delegates, Dick and I had always envied the Americans who, with their generous allowances, could stay in the best hotels and go to the best restaurants while we slummed it. Now I was an American delegate myself, things were much easier, but the allowance, though much more than I had been used to, was not as huge as I had expected. It was not until I submitted the claim form after the conference that I discovered that what I thought was the total allowance was only the per diem, and that hotel and travel expenses would be paid as well. Sydney came to the conference, too (staying, as was his habit, in the YMCA where a swimming-pool was available), and we presented much of our joint work there.

The collaboration continued after my return to Herstmonceux, mostly by post but also when he visited England. Sydney wanted me to join him in Alaska for another session, as he was trying to get me interested in aurorae, but unfortunately he died before this came about. One of his letters concerned some lunar analysis results that had been sent to him by an Italian scientist. They seemed abnormally large and would I have a look at them?  It soon became clear what the problem was, and thus began another lifelong friendship/collaboration, this time with Professori Antonino Palumbo of the Universita di Napoli. After the initial correspondence, he was keen that I should visit him in Naples, and I was equally keen, purely for touristic reasons.

He was expecting the colleague of the great Professor Chapman to be of a similar age, and was a bit thrown to find that I was younger than he was. But he recovered quickly and we had a great time together exploring that lovely part of Italy and doing just a little work. Work in Naples started late in the morning, stopped for a three-hour lunch break and seldom re-started afterwards. Neapolitans consider that life is for enjoyment and work comes very low on their list of priorities. Apart from his attitude to work and his extreme Catholicism, we agreed on most things. Being such an enthusiastic Catholic, he is always anxious to show me churches, which can be embarrassing in two ways. If there is a service on, he completely ignores it and takes me on a conducted tour pointing out with un-subdued voice all the architectural features. His other embarrassing habit is to prostrate himself (literally) for minutes on end in front of any unwary altar. His work is broad but shallow, and he was always trying to persuade me to re-write his drafts in good English, correcting and adjusting the science to make them publishable in a respectable journal, and to be a co-author. At first I would try to comply, though declining co-authorship, but short of starting from scratch both with the research and the writing, they hadn’t the tiniest chance of getting published, except in an obscure Italian journal where most of his work appeared, such as Bollettino della Società dei Naturalisti in Napoli. It was only a few years ago, after a particularly bad example (an attempt to put homeopathy on a scientific basis) that I plucked up the courage to tell him that, while I greatly enjoyed his company, I really did not want to have anything to do with his “science”. He took it surprisingly well, to my great relief.

Antonino is never happy when he is away from his beloved Naples, not even elsewhere in Italy, but we and his wife, Nilsa, did persuade him to come on holiday with his family to Sussex. Antonino suffered it, but his wife and children enjoyed it, and so did we. He also sent a few of his students over to work with me, and some of this was quite productive.

Another colleague who was bequeathed to me by Sydney was a former PhD student of his, Jagdish Gupta. Jagdish was the eldest son of a modest family from a farming district in Andera Pradesh and had been sent to the States to get educated. This paid off a treat, as he was able to send enough money back to support most of his family, including buying a bicycle repair business for his less talented youngest brother. Jagdish and I got on very well together both socially and professionally, and spent a lot of time writing papers together and staying in one another’s houses. We would talk late into the night about a wide range of subjects from family to work, philosophy and religion.

I was flattered when Jagdish said that he looked on me as an elder brother (with Sydney Chapman as our father, presumably!). Jagdish worked for the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in Ottawa, with Paul Serson as his boss. When Paul was trying to persuade me to take over from him on his retirement, he spoke a lot about the Department and its staff. He was concerned that Jagdish was likely to become sidelined, and so it proved. It was not long before the new Director (who was not, after all, me!) fired him. Jagdish sued for wrongful dismissal and got a substantial award so that, with a teaching job, he was able to continue to support his family, but it was a huge blow to his pride. He asked me if I could help, but by then I had left geomagnetism and had no suitable job to offer.

Soon after returning from Colorado, I was promoted to PSO, as Derek Jones had predicted would happen sometime before retirement, but I hadn’t expected it as early as 33. The only very mild shadow was that my friend, best-man and arch-rival Bob Dickens got the same promotion on the same day – would I never get away from him?

As a new PSO it was deemed that I should learn some of the appropriate administrative skills, so I was sent off on a three-week residential course at the Civil Service Training College at Sunningdale. If I had not had better things to do both at home and at work, this might have been an enjoyable jolly. The venue was a fine stately home in beautiful grounds, complete with its own putting green. But the course was run on Harvard Business School lines and was quite inappropriate for the Civil Service. Before arrival we were expected to have read Peter Drucker’s books on business management, indeed, it was said that the staff even observed St Peter’s day in his honour. He cultivated the Messianic image by writing parables: I remember the one about a traveller meeting three workers in a quarry. Asked what he was doing, the first said that he was breaking stones; the second claimed that he was earning money to feed and house his family, but the third man said he was building a cathedral. My sympathy was with the first man – no delusions. But the basic tenet of all Drucker’s writings was that a business has to make a profit – how does that apply to Government Service.

There were a few in-house lecturers, as well as a host of “Perceptual Psychologists”, but mostly we were lectured by “Business Consultants.”  These were essentially failed businessmen reduced to hiring themselves out by the day. So we would get one for a full day, even though their useful content was seldom more than an hour’s worth. As an example, one of these gurus told us, with the aid of a flip-chart, that Output = Effort ´ Ability, or some such nonsense. He then wanted to discuss the various terms: “Can anyone tell me what we mean by Effort?”  My answer was “If the equation had any meaning at all, then Effort is Output divided by Ability.”

The Perceptual Psychologists were strange Americans with smug grins and clip-boards. We were divided into groups of six and sent to separate rooms with one of these PPs. After a longish silence, we asked him what we were supposed to do. “That is entirely up to you” he said, grinning smugly and doodling on his clipboard. So we pushed off to the coffee room and read the papers. Next time we were told not to leave the room, so we all sat and stared at the PP in silence. After a while his grin appeared marginally less smug.

There were a few mildly useful bits – I was intrigued to learn about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Motivators, for example – and the social side with the other students was good, but the whole course could easily and to advantage have been compressed into three days rather than three weeks. At the end there was the inevitable feed-back questionnaire, so I said that I thought the course was an expensive waste of time. The response was “Just wait for a couple of years and you will find the value of what you have learned here.”  I have now waited for several decades and my opinion has not changed.        

The other thing I did on return to the UK was register for an external London PhD. I thought this would be a simple matter, just writing up some of the work that I had already done while in Boulder, but, like most PhD students, I soon discovered that it involved a very great deal of hard work, just getting that number of words down on paper, for a start. Had I realised from the outset what was involved I might have had second thoughts, but having started and with Irene’s encouragement, I got stuck into it every evening after the girls were in bed and eventually the thesis was complete. How was it to be typed?  Remember that word processors had yet to be invented. The standard pattern was to employ a professional typist. My thesis, though, involved more mathematics than your average typist could cope with. As ever, the solution was to do it myself. After getting familiar with one in America, I had managed to get the observatory to buy an IBM golf-ball typewriter (or was it the slightly flasher daisy-wheel version?  Memory fades), so I could switch from Roman to Italic to Bold type, or even Greek, but mathematical symbols like integral signs or sigmas with numbers above or below had to be added from Letraset rub-offs. And only the crudest of corrections, so re-typing of pages was frequent. Nevertheless, the job was eventually finished a couple of months before the earliest permissible submission date, so nothing to do but wait.

Derek Jones had similarly done an External London PhD and had had it sent back for a major re-writing job, so I was far from confident when I was called for interview. My external examiner was Professor Albert Price, of the University of Exeter. He, too, had worked under Sydney Chapman many years earlier, and was rather jealous of the casual relationship I had with the Great Man. In Price’s day, when Sydney was at the University of Oxford, it was necessary to make an appointment to see him and it was always “Price” and “Professor Chapman.”  Also, there was a long-standing feud between my friend Peter Kendall and Albert Price, each of whom despised the other on a personal rather than scientific basis. Indeed, Price had already warned me to be wary of Peter as friendship with him could be detrimental to my career – which advice I ignored of course. But at the vivar, Price really came good. He opened the proceedings by telling me “You’ve got your PhD, but let’s have a chat about the thesis anyway.”  How different from the attitude of the Astronomer Royal, Richard Woolley, who I met one day leaving the observatory to go and conduct a PhD examination in Cambridge. He said, only partly in jest, “I shall pass him, but I’ll give him hell beforehand.”  I have since examined many theses myself, and always adopted the Price approach rather than that of Woolley, unless there was some doubt about the outcome. Anyway, having got the pass/fail question out of the way at the outset, we had a friendly and productive chat about the thesis – much more so than if I had still been biting my nails. Price later said that my thesis was in the inter-upper-quartile of all the theses he had examined – whatever that may mean.

Arthur Milsom, ex-Mother Superior of the Herstmonceux bachelor flat, had transferred to the Hartland Magnetic Observatory and was interested in changing the instrumentation from swinging magnets to something more appropriate to the electronic age. We talked about it a lot and came up with the idea of using a fluxgate magnetometer mounted on a non-magnetic theodolite to make absolute determinations of declination and dip. Arthur looked after the electronics, I dealt with the theory and between us we sorted out the mechanics. After a bit of development, the instrument worked well and we exhibited it at the Physics Exhibition at Alexandra Palace. A similar instrument was being developed simultaneously in Canada, so we didn’t bother to pursue it, but this is now one of the standard observatory instruments.

I was not really an instrument man and was happier working at a desk than at a bench. I had many projects on the go, but a joint one with Raymond Hide, Deputy Director of the Met Office, was particularly fruitful and interesting. One of the few clues to processes deep within the Earth is the change in the length of the day. The decade-scale changes result from transfer of angular momentum between the mantle and the core, and this transfer takes place embarrassingly quickly. Traditional wisdom (that of Sir Edward Bullard) said that the transfer occurs because of electro-magnetic coupling, but an improbably strong magnetic field would be required for that to work. Ray Hide had the alternative theory that the coupling was due to bumps on the core-mantle interface (topographic coupling), but lacked observational evidence. That was where I came in. We found an interesting and significant correlation between the magnetic and gravitational potential that could only have resulted from such bumps. We got a lot of mileage out of this, both in terms of published papers and presentations at conferences.

Things were going too smoothly, with girls growing up and work going well, so it was time for a spanner. We had long been threatened with transfer from Herstmonceux to a NERC establishment and had ignored it because it was always “three years from today.”  But suddenly there was a serious proposal that the Mag and Met Department should go to the newly-built Murchison House, the Institute of Geological Sciences building in Edinburgh, and this time they meant business. After much kicking and screaming, it became clear that the move was inevitable, at least for those who were seriously committed to the subject. In the end, this proved to be just Dick Leaton, David Barraclough and me. What had been a thriving and productive department was to be broken up just because of some administrator’s whim.

There was one bright spot, for me at any rate, in the form of an invitation to an interview for the post of SPSO (IM). The IM was important, because such a senior post usually involves a lot of administration, but the IM (standing for Individual Merit) meant that the recipient would get all the advantages of the promotion, without any administrative responsibilities. Such posts were very rare and highly desirable as the recipient is free to pursue his own research without (much) hindrance. We had a family outing to London during which I went off to the interview and afterwards, after feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, we all went to London Zoo. In the waiting room for the interview, I met a seismological colleague, Stuart Crampin, who was on the same mission. I went first and, after the interview, I gave him a run-down on who was on the board and what questions had been asked, for which he was most grateful. No skin off my nose as it was not a competitive interview and depended, as indicated, only on individual merit. When the results came through, Stuart and I had both been promoted. So at last I had put one over on Bob Dickens (though he got promoted to SPSO later), but now had a new rival in the form of Stuart Crampin. A most amiable one, though, if somewhat obsessive about his particular speciality.

 A couple of months before the move to Edinburgh I turned forty, so we had a big birthday/leaving party at The Cottage. It took the form of a wake, following the demise of Stuart Malin the younger, though I was allowed to be present in my shroud.

 

Edinburgh, 1976-1982

Had I come to Edinburgh of my own free will I might have warmed to it a little more, but I hadn’t and I didn’t, though I did try. The workplace was Murchison House, named after the mediocre (check his entry in DNB if you doubt me) geologist Roderick Impy Murchison, on the King’s Buildings site of the University of Edinburgh.

The Geomagnetism Unit (what a come-down from Magnetic Department) shared the top (fifth) floor with the Seismological Unit, the idea being that the two units should meet and discuss geophysics. But the only common territory was the toilets, and no great thoughts were exchanged there. As well as Dick Leaton (Head of Department) David Barraclough and me from Herstmonceux, there were the ex-Met Office staff from Edinburgh, led by Bill Stuart and including several instrumental people, Kath Dyson – a good soul – and a few newcomers recruited to replace those who stayed in Sussex. The remaining four floors were occupied by geologists. With the staff from the Hartland, Eskdalemuir and Lerwick observatories, the Geomagnetism Unit comprised some 30 people.

Shortly before I left Herstmonceux, we had had a visit from B J Srivastava of the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India, who spent a couple of months, at his institute’s expense, working with me. Now he wanted me to pay a return visit to India, courtesy of the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. I was always game for a free visit to an exotic country, so off I went for a three-month stint early in 1977, to avoid the heat of the Indian summer and the cold of the Scottish winter. Irene was usually very tolerant of such trips and often came with me, but this one was for too long and too soon after the move to Edinburgh. On my return, we both agreed that I would not go off for so long until after the girls had left school, and we nearly stuck to that. Only nearly, because I was summoned to California at short notice to complete some work I was doing with the dying Sir Edward Bullard.

Teddy, as he preferred to be called, was in the same scientific league as Sydney Chapman, but of quite a different character. He had been expected to go into the family brewing business (Bullards’ Beers), and was disowned by his father for going into science instead. Shortly before his father died, Teddy received a knighthood for his contributions to science – he was Director of the National Physical Laboratory at the time. His father then conceded that his son had not, after all, done too badly. The father had also been knighted, I think for his contributions to the Conservative Party. Shortly afterwards, Teddy left the NPL to return to University science at Cambridge. Very quickly (though not as quickly as Teddy wished) he was promoted to professor and eventually became Director of the Bullard Laboratories in Madingley Road, Cambridge. He also maintained a parallel career in the USA, firstly as a director of IBM and then at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, which became his full-time job on retirement from Cambridge. But for an over-colourful first wife, he would probably have become Master of Churchill College, Cambridge. He was himself a very colourful and forceful personality.

Our interests overlapped and each was aware of the other’s work, but we did not start a serious collaboration until Teddy had attended a presentation where I spoke about what I had been doing with historical magnetic observations made in London. He had been working on something similar and, after we had got together to compare notes, we decided that each would benefit from what the other had done and decided to make it a collaborative project. It was more of a hobby than serious science, so we went along at a leisurely pace, meeting for alcohol, food and discussions when Teddy was in England, or keeping one another informed by post when he was in the USA. Then I received a letter, which I have before me now, so I can quote directly:

“Dear Stuart:

As I think you know I am pretty ill and am, in fact, unlikely to last long. I am anxious that our … papers on old magnetic observations should be completed and published … and am now writing to ask whether you could work here as a Green Scholar … starting as soon as is practicable for you.

The position is a prestigious one; we would pay the fares for you, your wife and children (how many?) and would bring you somewhere near a US salary by paying rent on an apartment or house, and on a car for expenses. … If I died before you came it would be even more important for you to come and sort out … than if I were still around

Sincerely,

Teddy”

Of course, I dropped everything and went as soon as I could, getting retrospective permission to go on paid leave from NERC. It was term-time, so not practical for Irene and the girls to join me until towards the end of my stay, after they had broken up for Easter.

Teddy was dying of cancer and was bedridden. I worked at his desk in his Scripps office, photocopying what I had produced during the day and taking it to him at his nearby house in the evening. If he was feeling well enough, we would talk for half an hour or so, partly about the work, but ranging widely, then I would leave him to rest while I got drunk on whisky with his wife, Ursula, and more often than not stayed for dinner. The theory was that Teddy would check what I had written before my next visit, but often he wasn’t up to it. He deliberately avoided painkillers because they fuddled him, but the pain wasn’t conducive to lucid thought, either. He did make some useful suggestions, though, and even added a few paragraphs.

After a few weeks the manuscript was nearing completion and Ursula told me that the doctors (yes, plural) said that he was only staying alive so that he could see it completed. I asked if that meant that I should speed things up or slow them down and Ursula replied that the humane thing was to finish it as soon as possible. On the day I took the last few pages to him he was not at all well. I said that it was now ready to send for publication, if he was happy with it. “No, only if you are happy with it,” was his courteous reply. He also insisted that I should be the first author, rather than alphabetical, as I had made the greater contribution. Together with the photocopied pages, I had brought a letter submitting it to the Royal Society for him to sign. He said he was not feeling well enough to look at it then, but might ’phone me later.

After the usual drink with Ursula, I was driving back to my apartment (yes, I know, but the rules were different then) when I came across Walter Monk, the Head of Department, out for an evening walk. He asked if I had just come from Teddy’s and how was he?  It had not struck me before, but when he asked, I told him that, if he wanted to see Teddy before he died, then he had better go that evening. And so it was. Teddy died that night, immediately after the paper was completed. Papers for publication in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London can be submitted only by a Fellow of the Royal Society, so there is a note below the authors’ names on the first page that succinctly tells the story: “Received 22 April 1980 – Sir Edward Bullard’s letter of 2 April 1980 submitting this paper for publication in Philosophical Transactions was unsigned because of his death on that date. The paper was formally communicated by W. H. Monk, For.Mem.R.S.”

Teddy was right. After his death there was still a lot of sorting out and winding up to be done. Irene and the girls joined me during the school Easter holiday and we took the opportunity for some tourism. I won the Father of the Year award for taking them to Disneyland, not just once but twice. Irene’s treat was to go to San Francisco, which satisfied a long urge. On the drive up, I had spoken about the Californian earthquakes in rather lurid terms. That night in San Francisco, the girls crept into our room and woke us up to say that there had been an earthquake. I realised that I had overdone things for their impressionable young minds and told them to go back to bed and keep their imaginations under control. Next day, we learned that there had, indeed, been an earthquake at the time they said.

After a quick visit to Tijuana, where we took a taxi ride, of course, the family returned to England and I moved from the apartment into the guest annex of the Bullard house to help Ursula sort out Teddy’s things. At work, I was doing the same sort of thing in his office. Since he was a committed atheist, there was no funeral, but there was a committal of the ashes to the Pacific which was attended by Ursula, Belinda Bullard (Teddy’s eldest daughter and the only half-way civilised one), Walter and Judy Monk, and me. We arrived at the harbour and sombrely boarded the Scripps whale-chasing boat which had been scrubbed and deck-chaired for the occasion. When we were seated, the captain started the engine and, before he had time to correct his error, reversed at high speed into the breakwater, dumping us all on the deck and breaking the rudder. Fortunately The Jar remained intact. It was impossible to retain po faces so all of us had a good laugh and said how much Teddy would have enjoyed it, while Walter and the captain went in search of another boat. One was found, but it was seriously un-scrubbed and stank of rotting fish. Nevertheless, it got us safely to a point in the Pacific that was in line both with Scripps and Teddy’s house, where it hove-to while Judy read a poem and Ursula scattered the ashes. I am not the best of sailors, but managed to keep things under control while we were moving. But the Pacific swell and the fishy smell when we stopped were a potent combination. I managed to avoid adding the contents of my gut to Teddy’s floating ashes, but only just. My plight must have been obvious from my green face, so, as soon as we got under way again, Ursula dosed me liberally with her usual elixir, a bottle of which she had thoughtfully brought along.

We had some interesting visitors while I was staying with Ursula. At one dinner party, the guests were the Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, his lovely Belgian wife and a young lady who made stained-glass pictures of genitalia. After we had eaten, Francis read to us from Hilaire Belloc and commissioned a bedroom window. Another time it was Jonas Salk, another Nobel Laureate who had developed the polio vaccine. Then there were the neighbours, who had built Ocean World and who insisted on reaching over the fence and pruning the Bullard shrubs. La Jolla had a band of professional widows who gave lectures about their dead husbands for cash. Ursula was keen not to join that club, which included one of Picasso’s ex-wives and Rita Bronowski, a homely little Lancashire lady, the widow of Dr Jacob Bronowski. One who I failed to meet was Dr Seuss, the childrens’ writer, but I saw his fabulous modern house.

Several memorial services were held, including one in Cambridge for which Ursula’s advice was sought on a suitable speaker. Several famous names were mentioned, but Ursula kept rejecting them. When I asked for her reasons she told me that it would not be appropriate to have someone who had slept with Teddy’s wife, nor someone with whose wife Teddy had slept, and “Teddy couldn’t abide queers!”  Eventually the choice fell on Sir Alan Cook, an eminent but tedious man who was one of the few to satisfy all three criteria. Alan also wrote a letter to the Times saying what a wonderful contribution to science had been made by Teddy’s Cambridge laboratories and citing as evidence the number of Fellows of the Royal Society they had produced. Ursula was very dismissive. “Doesn’t mean a thing,” she said “it’s just that Teddy looked after his own.”

Back home, I was slowly coming to terms with life and work in Edinburgh, but always very conscious of how far it was from London and civilization. I have always felt exiled if I was not within easy reach of London and am very happy to be living there now. Herstmoncuex and High Wycombe were OK because it was possible to go to a London theatre (for example) and get home the same night. While in Edinburgh I was on the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society. Council meetings started at 10 am on a Friday and were held in Burlington House, Piccadilly. The first Edinburgh-to-London plane of the day got in too late to reach Piccadilly in time so the only option was to take the night sleeper train. What a misnomer. The “night” bit is OK, but “sleeper”?  Not a hope. After the meeting I would take in a show then return on the next night sleeper leaving King’s Cross at about midnight. I would arrive back in Edinburgh in the early hours of Saturday, having missed two nights’ sleep and thus effectively wiped out a weekend. At least I was entitled to travel first class, so didn’t have to share and also had the delight of a small chamois leather pad and a hook on the wall above the bed. This I discovered was for a gentleman to hang his pocket watch on – I wonder if they still exist?

By now I had piled up enough published papers, with a healthy mix of solo and jointly-authored, to go for a DSc, as Sydney had suggested some years earlier. Higher doctorates are pretty rare, so something of an unknown quantity, but eventually the news came that I had been awarded one. The examiner was Professor Jack Jacobs who had come from Canada to succeed Teddy as Director of the Bullard Laboratories. Being outwith the Cambridge Establishment, it took a long time for him to get accepted, but eventually he was made vice-Master of Darwin College. One of the perks of the job was a suite in college with a well-stocked bar which he took as a challenge, inviting Ray Hide and me to help him try to drain it in an evening. While we attempting this Jack told us that, under the terms of his appointment, the only grounds for sacking him would be “gross moral turpitude” and he was intrigued to know just what that would involve. Moral turpitude he understood to be having sex with a student, and he doubted if he had the stamina to do this 144 times. He retired un-sacked, so obviously failed to reach his target.

At an IAGA meeting there was a session at which a venue for the next Electromagnetic Workshop was being sought. My friend Ahmet Işıkara said that the University of Istanbul would be glad to host it. The Chairman, Ulrich Schmucker, noted this rather casually and continued to seek invitations, managing to elicit one from Finland. At the closed committee meeting held afterwards, I asked Ulrich why he didn’t accept Ahmet’s offer. Essentially, the reason was that he had a low opinion of Turks (there were a lot of them doing menial work in Germany) and didn’t think them capable of organising a conference. I disagreed and said that Istanbul would be a wonderful place to meet. The upshot was that the committee agreed to hold the meeting in Istanbul on condition that I went out there for a few weeks beforehand to supervise arrangements. This suited both Ahmet and me a treat, what could be more appealing than a month in Istanbul?

As I had suspected, there was nothing wrong with the Turkish organising and I had little to do except help out and make a few suggestions.

The next conference I was associated with was the Scientific Assembly of IAGA, held in Edinburgh in 1980. This was a much bigger affair which lasted for two weeks and was attended by over 800 delegates and over 100 accompanying members. I was the Secretary of the Local Organising Committee. All other work was put on hold for about a year so I suppose this was my first taste of full-time administration, which I found quite stimulating for a while, but would not fancy as a way of life.

Dick had managed to defer his retirement until after the conference, but now it was time for him to go. Who would take over as Head of Department?  I was already an SPSO, so it would not be a promotion for me. The most likely candidate was Bill Stuart, but I was not at all sure that I would want to work under him, so I decided to apply. Three were called for interview in London: Bill, David Barraclough and me, and I got the job. The only obvious change was that I now had a designated parking space. There was more administration, of course, more meetings to attend, more staff to look after and regular visits to the three observatories, but still plenty of time for research. I saw my job as defending the staff from the more outrageous edicts from on high so that they could get on with their work in peace.

I had not been in post for more than a year when George Lewis brought along a paper to show me a job advertisement that he thought I might find interesting. Hello, I thought, trying to get rid of me already. But it was an interesting advert, for Head of Astronomy and Navigation at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich: effectively Director of the Old Royal Observatory plus a few other duties. And, at Civil Service Grade 5, it was one level up from SPSO, as what used to be called DCSO (in the museum world it was called Curator Grade A). Best of all, it was a chance to get away from Scotland before my daughters tied us there for ever by marrying and producing Scotch grandchildren. I had produced a special exhibition at the Royal Scottish Museum in collaboration with Alan Simpson to coincide with the Edinburgh Conference, so I had some idea of the museum business. I also knew the Old Royal Observatory and National Maritime Museum from many visits, mainly to pay homage to the Harrison chronometers. I consulted museum friends, most notably Anita McConnell of the Science Museum, who said of the Director of the NMM “He is a prick, but he is due to retire very soon”, and they all agreed that I should go for it, which I did.

I was not offered the job immediately, but only after the preferred candidate withdrew. My pride was a little hurt by this as I was not used to being second choice, and my inclination was to tell them what they could do with their job, but then I started to get wooed by both sides. First a ’phone call from Sir Herman Bondi, Head of NERC, who foresaw “A great future for you with NERC” and hinted broadly that he would propose me for the Royal Society. Then Sir Robert Boyd, Head of the Mullard Research Laboratory of University College, London, and the NMM trustee responsible for astronomy. He invited me to London to talk about things. After driving into the country in his white vintage Rolls Royce, he made his bid. Start at the top of the Grade 5 salary scale and have one day a week to work as Visiting Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy ay University College , London.

Quite a lot to think about. Had Bondi’s proposal been guaranteed to result in FRS, I would probably have stayed in Edinburgh, but I knew that being proposed was not the same as getting elected. In the end the clean air of London proved irresistible, so we were on the move again.