| Administrative History | Mr. Watson was a former Aberdeen University student |
| Description | Interview with Mr D S Watson, recorded on 7 September 1986 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview :
H Mr Watson, a university course is of course not the only entry into engineering. Could you say why you decided to come to Aberdeen University specifically to read for an engineering degree?
W The last bit is very easy to answer. I was brought up in a Scottish manse, the money was not in abundance and it was fairly inexpensive to go to Aberdeen and that I think helped to dictate the choice. Perhaps I never really thought, or my parents never asked me, to go anywhere else but that I think was one of the main reasons.
H And it seemed to you that a university course was for you the right entry into the profession?
W I think that was so partially because on both sides of the family they had been associated with the academic world. My father was a D.Litt. and a DD. I had an uncle who was Principal of University College of Nottingham, so the urge was really to go through the university and become a professional type.
H Had you any practical engineering experience before you came to university?
W Very little. I worked in one of the small oil engine firms in Aberdeen and of course at that time the slump came along, it folded up, probably just as well from my point of view in that I couldn't continue doing practical work and I then went off to university. In fact I read both electrical and mechanical engineering because in 32 when I graduated there was virtually nobody recruiting at all. It was just at the tail end of the slump.
H But you later had a distinguished career. Would you like to tell us a little about that?
W In B.T.H where I was they started off in the research labs on television, a very advanced subject in those days, and I was asked to join the team working on that. That led by fairly easy stages to my entry into the field of radar and I joined the HM Signals Corp in 1938 but by 39 there was an enormous expansion and many scientists from Cambridge descended not only into the Admiralty carefully selected by Sir Frederick Brundrett a very large number went to ARE under Sir John Cockeroft. Radar as anyone knows expanded enormously during the war and those who made good in their profession were well placed to either stay with the services or to go back to academic life. Many did go back to academic life, I stayed with the Admiralty because my main interest was in development rather than research. I was particularly interested in developing very large complex projects which I did for many years and eventually I was selected as Director of a very large establishment, R&D establishment on the south coast. After a number of years there I was asked to become head of the Royal Naval Scientific Service - a considerable jump from electrical engineering - and I became head of the Royal Naval Scientific Service and deputy chief scientist, the Navy. This was very much a Whitehall activity and the most interesting part of that activity was to act as the UK representative in the Anglo-French, Anglo-German, Anglo-Dutch joint naval committees. In these activities one had to act with considerable amount of diplomatic skill, so it was a fairly far cry from basic engineering. When I was sixty one I retired and I was asked to join the panel of chairmen who worked in the Civil Service Selection Board and I did that until I was about sixty seven. At that time there was a considerable cut back in recruiting of the Civil Service, that is administrators, foreign office types, tax inspectors and people of that type and I was purged, shall I say, having served for more years in that capacity than I really was entitled to expect. That's my career in a nutshell.
H Thank you. On the Civil Service Selection Board you were concerned with the administrative and the scientific services?
W I did a certain amount of scientific boards. They were a very different type to the Civil Service Selection Board. The Scientific Boards, you had a small team and you had three quarters an hour interview. The Civil Service Selection Board operated with a team of people but the candidates were grilled for two days and the candidates were either administrative civil servants or foreign office types or tax inspectors. I also did some statisticians as well but not very much on that front.
H If we could come back to your own career, how well did your education at Aberdeen University prepare you for this, what has to be a rather unexpected career?
W Well, I've given a good deal of thought to it because I know very often one meets various people at a university who rather regard you as a battery which has to be charged up and from time to time you're supposed to be returned to be charged up again. I've never gone along with that theory. I feel that the university gives you a rocket propelled start. You get up to flying speed and once you leave the university and assuming you've got up to flying speed you're on your own then and I think the main thing at the university is to make you considerably more mature than when you entered it. Perhaps hopefully the ability to look at problems from a whole variety of ways and perhaps to indulge in logical thought and perhaps occasionally to have a few tools of the trade that come in useful to you later on. But it's an educational process and I don't think, for someone like me, that what you actually studied made a tremendous difference. It certainly didn't to my career but it did give me the flying start.
H It did and was it, looking back, you would say a good university environment in which to be educated or are you simply saying that having four years to think and engage in a certain programme of studies in itself can provide this flying start?
W I think it's the whole background of the university and meeting, or competing to a certain extent, or collaborating as well, with people of your own age in group study doing group experiments. I think all that brings you on intellectually and in the three to four years that one spends at the university you enter, especially in Scotland, I think most Scots lads are pretty naive when they enter university. You emerge as a young man, not a very mature young man, a pretty naive young man, but certainly enormously improved relative to when you went up to university.
H If I could back to the details of your own studies and ask you to recall personalities who made an impact or maybe failed to make an impact. Professor Blackadder was fairly new in the engineering chair, what are your memories of him?
W It's awfully odd. With respect to Professor Blackadder I don't think he was what Bradman would call a real, … he wasn't a real Bradman, he was a good competent citizen. Perhaps I shouldn't say that as it's being recorded but the most odd thing about memory is the odd little things that you remember. For example he had the habit of discussing the bending of a beam by bending a metre stick like this. Of course some wag in the class carefully sawed it through at one of the [laughs] about fifteen inches or something like and when he said "the beam will bend so" there was a resounding crack. The detail of my civil engineering has really vanished although I remember doing the elaborate diagrams of lattice bridges and so on. It's just sort of vanished.
H You were saying it was more a technical education than an opening of doors?
W I would say it was not as intellectually stimulating as … Being concerned with electrical and mechanical engineering I only did the early bits of civil engineering because Blackadder only did civil and the mechanical and electrical was done at Robert Gordon's School.
H That was exclusively done at Gordon's?
W Yes.
H What about the teaching there?
W Orkney who became an associate professor of Strathclyde I think later on was a very imaginative type. I think he was a very good teacher and certainly brought on his students extremely well. Edmonds who did the mechanical side also I think brought on his students very well in a … Engineering at Robert Gordon's College was fairly conventional stuff, it was bound to be, it couldn't be anything else. But I think we emerged from there, electrical and mechanical engineers, as pretty competent citizens ready to take up our profession intelligently and sensibly.
H How important were the courses in basic science subjects which were part of the degree? Do you have memories of good experiences there, or of good teachers?
W Or bad teachers! It's again very hazy. I don't think I value some of these things very well. The courses were not conjoint courses or courses associated with people doing other things. They weren't very well tailored to the engineers and they more or less put up with the purgatory without working up too much enthusiasm. I think this was rather a pity. For example we went along with the joint Physics Honours course doing dynamics of the particle. Well, what are engineers doing dynamics of the particle for? So very naughtily we, I think it applied to all of us, we tried to get up enough to scramble through that subject. I think looking back on it, it seemed to me that probably with the resources available it was very difficult to do anything else, I accept that. In an ideal world which we never had, of course, if the mathematics and physics had been more tailored to the engineers it would have made for an easier engineering course. Whether in the long run it was better for us I …?
H Who was the professor of physics? You had just missed Sir George Thomson.
W Yes. It was John Carroll who I knew later on in life when he was Sir John Carroll, deputy controller R and D of the Admiralty.
H Leaping forward to your later experience, do you have any comments to make on how universities are doing their jobs, specifically perhaps with training engineers but more generally as training students, and if I could add a supplementary do you have any particular image from that period in your life of the Aberdeen student?
W I'll make one or two generalised comments, not really answering your question directly. We did no postgraduate work, nobody did any postgraduate work in engineering. I don't know if that was any great disadvantage. When I was head of an establishment I had an arrangement with Southampton University that we would give them contracts and they would allow people with us to take external PhD degrees. This didn't really achieve very much. Some students were anxious to be called Dr so and so. It didn't carry much weight in the Civil Service and it did tend to divert them away from the work we wanted them to do so they could dress it up in academic dress. I think unless you want to go into the academic world I think the first degree is the important thing
H I was wondering, a slightly different emphasis, would you say that the students who come up with a first degree, perhaps in engineering, perhaps in some other subject, into the Civil Service and worked with you or been before you as chairman, have been better prepared by university than you and your contemporaries were yourself?
W I don't think so. It's impossible to judge because I think it depends on the intrinsic ability of the person and most of them have been reasonably well stretched at the university, that's what the university was for in those days.
H You referred earlier to the importance of your colleagues in the peer group, your fellow students in your education, have you any particular memories of your own graduating class?
W Only one or two that I have particular memories of. One - we were both doing electrical engineering at the same time - a chap [A M ] Hardie, who became I think deputy head of Bath University eventually. The other was George K T Conn who became professor of physics at Exeter. One of my other colleagues, I noticed that he'd become a Colonel in the REME by forty five, which was going pretty fast … These were all men of fairly considerable ability who would have done well in any walk of life.
H As students did you consort together out of class, did you work together, did you play together, did you tend to join the same societies or engage in the same relaxation?
W I think you've got to remember in those days we lived in what were known as digs and I think that that was a great disadvantage. When my son came to Johnston Hall for example I thought I wish I had lived like that. The amount we got together outside the university class was not very great. A number of us joined the OTC but that was by no means all in the engineering group - few in the engineering did. So I think living in digs rather spoiled university life. I think it was a considerable disadvantage.
H What sort of digs did you have?
W They were reasonably comfortable but pretty crude and the opportunities for study were not good but I of course living out at Oyne could go home at weekends always with the intention of studying hard but not always doing so.
H You mentioned in passing finance, can you recall any details of your income and where it came from and what it was spent on as a student?
W If I remember correctly the fees were about £34 per annum, I may be wrong there, but if you got three highers Carnegie paid half. Because I'd written a good paper in Nat Phil I got a MacRobbie I think it was scholarship for the magnificent sum of I think it was £40 per annum. Digs cost about twenty five shillings a week and incidental expenses would have been about five shillings, something like that. It wasn't a luxurious existence.
H Did you supplement it at all, either from your parents or by vacation work?
W My parents supplied all that because there was no grants in those days other than Carnegie as I said. So my parents had to fund the whole thing.
H You didn't work in vacations?
W Yes I did work but I worked really as a student apprentice for ten and sixpence a week or something like that. It was really negligible. And one of course in those days as you know full well, one didn't get any books or anything, it was really quite basic. I'm sure it applied in my case and it applied in other people's cases, we did not buy a sufficient number of text books which would have made life much easier. Tried too much to rely on lectures and one or two text books, so it was hard going.
H Were you or were your colleagues politically conscious? These were years when great events were happening in the world, were you conscious of them? Did you talk about them much?
W We were not at all like the Cambridge scientists and none of us would be chased up by MI5. I think generally amongst the engineers their noses were so much to the grindstone that I don't think politics was discussed at all. We were virtually apolitical. I think that's correct as regards the engineering faculty.
H Are there briefly any final recollections or comments on your student days that you'd like to put on the record?
W I suppose one would like to have some of them again. No, I don't think so. It's a stage that one passes through and I'm glad I've passed through it, but I've no special recollections on any heading really.
H Thank you very much Mr Watson.
END OF INTERVIEW
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