| Description | Interview with Professor R. V. Jones recorded on 17 March 1987, by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of interview :
H Professor Jones, could I begin by asking you how you came to be appointed to the chair in Aberdeen in 1946 after a very distinguished wartime career in a different direction?
J Well, the professor of mathematics at Aberdeen at that stage, Edward Wright, had been a friend from about 1934/5 onwards and perhaps in 1935 he got the chair in mathematics here and of course I went off into air defence. But during the war when staff were very hard to find I did ask one of his friends, a friend in common, whether Edward was doing anything and he wasn't and I gather that he would be only too glad to have something more active to do with the war than was possible in the chair here. So I wrote to him and asked him if he would like to come and join me which he did. So he was with me from 1 April '43, up to roughly 1 April '45, yes I was just checking the '43, yes it was '43 because there was the Junkers 88 landed at Dyce on the 9 May '43 so we had a quick trip back just after he joined us. Now the point was that he came back to Aberdeen in September, well before September 45, in fact I think really strictly speaking a bit before the war ended, as I say somewhere about the beginning of April/May 45 and then the war ended and then there was this period after the war where I'd been warned that there would be at least a year of madness. Well the year of madness went on and on and I got a letter from Edward somewhere in the winter of 1945 which roughly to quote 'if life's too bloody on the air staff why not try our chair of Natural Philosophy' and by that time I thought I had completely burned my academic boats because I had really been concerned with defence problems from really early 1935 onwards and at the same time during the war I had suffered so much from the pronouncements of professors and Fellows of the Royal Society speaking. Whenever they were off their speciality they were likely not to be absolutely correct and it was such a challenge to come and bat on their wicket again that I said yes I would like to try. As a result I did apply for the chair and was appointed in April '46 and left the air staff at the end of September '46 and was here the next day. And it's really because of the connection particularly with Edward Wright and he had been here from the beginning of 1935 or so onwards.
H What sort of department did you inherit in Natural Philosophy?
J Well of course it was in ruins, in any academic sense, because my predecessor John Carroll had been continuously away from 1942 onwards and of course there had been shortened war courses almost entirely and the staff, at least one or perhaps two members of staff, were actually going to leave Aberdeen to join John Carroll who became chief scientist in the Admiralty. The result was that my total staff, I think including myself, when I arrived was nine, of whom three were graduates that summer here in Aberdeen having done shortened war-time Honours degrees, in other words three-year courses instead of four-year courses, and that was the total staff we had to look after not only all the teaching in natural philosophy but the radon service for the whole of Scotland, Medical Physics for the hospital and so forth and we had something of the order or more than 300 students so it was a case of starting really absolutely almost from scratch again but of course with a very important tradition. There were two things, one was George Thomson being here. The first thing I had ever heard about Aberdeen was as a schoolboy in my very last year when I went to my first lecture in wave mechanics at the Chelsea Polytechnic and I was told of this marvellous experiment being done by this chap up in Aberdeen, G. P. Thomson, which showed the electrons had wave properties that was the other thing. And the other thing which delighted me when I got the chair here, it was only then that I found that James Clerk Maxwell had had the chair in the late 1850s, so we had that tradition to build on, particularly Maxwell, and G P Thomson, and of course a lot of enthusiasm, a enormous amount of teaching, almost no text books available and of course not a great deal of equipment but the traditions again of a good workshop.
H Was this tabula rasa in any way an advantage? Had the discipline of physics been changed much by the war or during the war?
J No not the discipline. The public realisation of the importance of applications changed enormously and of course various branches of physical knowledge had advanced as a result of the war and the fact that for example the atomic bomb had been made to explode whereas at the beginning of 39, well it might just be a possibility but a very remote one, and of course the fact that radar receivers in 1942 had been jammed by the sun made academics, and then I think we must include almost all of us, realise that in fact there were radio waves coming in from external bodies like the stars and although an engineer for Bell telephones reported this in 1932, Jansky, his work hadn't been taken all that seriously. But no-one could deny the fact the sun was jamming radar and this was really the start of radio astronomical studies in a big way. So these were the ways in which physics had, it was the applications plus the new scope opened by up radio astronomy, the enormous importance of nuclear energy result in a focussing of, and of course the fact that our national survival depended very largely on the performance of radar in 1940. All these were factors which alerted the public and the government on the one side to the importance of the thing and it opened the windows as it were for the physicists on the other.
H What were your own hopes and intentions and priorities when you came to Aberdeen?
J The first problem of course was in fact the teaching where one had really this very large number of students to deal with and as a matter of fact that turned out not to be a drawback in many ways largely because of the students themselves. They were nearly all ex-service and in fact at one of the reunions last year one of the students reminded me of that at my very first lecture when I'd really wondered how I was going to start and I did start by asking how many had been involved in the war, in the services, nearly every hand went up and so I said 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years and by 6 years, there were still some had been 6 years at the end of when as it were I ran them out at the end I said well you know I've been involved for 10 years at least I said "Do you feel rusty?" and he said "Yes sir, I do" I said "Well look, I've been in for 10 years I feel even rustier, I'll try and keep one lecture ahead of you right the way through." And we had a marvellous esprit de core. From my point of view they were the vintage years because although the students were rusty they had all, at least nearly all of them, had passed really one or two vital tests. One was they'd been out in the services or perhaps in research establishments almost entirely the services and seen matters of life and death and for themselves decided they wanted to come to university and a lot of them, they were always inviting me out to the various pubs that we drank in so I can remember some of them saying to me in the George Bar you know we reckon we're damn lucky to be here. You know if it hadn't been for the war we'd have never have had this chance and by God we're not going to waste it. And so they both worked hard and they played hard and the esprit de core was tremendous. There were no text books almost available, so I tried to write up my lecture notes in enough detail for them to be able to use those notes and I said that I would try and get them duplicated so that they could listen because I had lost so much time myself trying to take notes missing points that I would much rather if we could do this. The trouble was I only had one secretary and she was a girl of sixteen and she was she wasn't very fast anyway and so we were getting further and further behind. Finally one of the girls in the class came to complain to me how far behind I was with the notes and I said well can you type and she said yes she thought she could. I said well look if you'll come in and help and between them we got the things up to date. This was the sort of spirit of the whole thing. So that was two reasons, one was of course part of the thing was teaching was a prime responsibility of a chair but also the other thing was that by putting in a lot of effort in the department on the teaching side I hoped we'd gain the good will of the other departments so that the support that we would need for research would be forthcoming. To give you one example there, which still has a legacy, I wanted money to rebuild the class library. Now Harry Steven who was professor of Forestry happened to be convenor of the Library Committee and so I saw him before I was actually formally in the chair on one of my earlier visits and it was almost like a bit out of Microcosmographia Academia I knew a bit about walking up King's Parade and my jobs and your jobs you see and Harry Steven said they hadn't been very happy about they way the first year Nat Phil teaching had been going and really he would appreciate it very much if I could take the class myself for the benefit of his Forestry students and this was sort of hinted as a quid quo pro, if I got the money for the library I should make sure I took the first year. Well it built up such a rapport particularly with the Forestry department that that still survives. So there was a double purpose in the teaching, one was teaching for its own sake and also to try and get as big a school of physics as possible though not a big school in the absolute sense. One of the points you see that when Edward Wright wrote to me in February 46 about the possibility of my coming up, was that we might together build a small but good school together and these were the sort of terms of reference that I took it when I came up and the thing then was of course to get on to the research side as quickly as possible and it was very important that one should. Well I'd lost really ten years of straight academic research. Nearly all my stuff between '35 and '39 for example couldn't be published because it would impact on defence and so forth and I had to really take stock. I would have gone for radio astronomy had I been a year earlier because after all I had been an astronomer and radio electronics were second sight to me in a way, but by that time I'd equipped, as Director of Scientific Intelligence both Cambridge and Manchester and I must say with all the German equipment that we brought back I distributed it in retrospect with an appalling impartiality but anyway that how set up Cambridge and Manchester so there was really no point in going into competition there. I did look at, I wrote to Dee I at Glasgow, who I had known very well at Malvern and I wrote to him before I came up and said what are you going to do at Glasgow, because whatever you're going to do at Glasgow I'm not going to do at Aberdeen. I saw too much of the national effort lost, I thought in my view, between the Clarendon at Oxford and the Cavendish at Cambridge before the war and I certainly don't want to do that and Dee told me what he was going to do. He only wished later it had been the other way round because he got committed to a large machine, a large cyclotron which took so much of his administrative effort that he really had so little time left for research. He rather wished I'd had the cyclotron and … Well, so in some ways it was a question of what the things really one knew one wouldn't have much chance at, mainly because other people were working on them elsewhere and one had really got to start from scratch. Well the two things that I still had possibly an edge on they were mainly concerned with infra red detection which I developed of course for air craft detection and the applications of infrared detection in spectroscopy and the other was that in the course of all that and in the course of trying to make detectors for aircraft I'd begun to grow crystals of materials which transmit infrared originally to make windows for aircraft detectors. These would be windows through which the instrument would look out and the heat from the other aircraft would come through the window which wouldn't do with glass you see. And looking at the state of physics in 1945/46 and I really did talk to quite a number of people about this, that it's quite clear that whereas the 19th Century the great advance on the material side was the physics of gases, the physics of liquids was still going to be much too difficult and it still is in a way but the physics of the solid state was obviously coming on. The transistor hadn't actually been invented at this stage but one could see that this kind of thing might come out and the study of crystals which was as near ideal solids as we could get at the time would be a promising field and so one of the prongs of the attack was to grow crystals, build up on the crystal growing work I'd done before the war, and there I had one assistant, D A Jones who had been with me in the air ministry and came up and he was a splendid chap, he'd been Glamorgan's fast bowler and been a rugger blue, a cricket blue and a boxing blue with the Welsh universities and it turns out he had green fingers with the crystals and the result was that we went ahead pretty quickly on crystal growth and really built up a reputation within a few years as one of the few world centres. We supplied crystals anywhere from literally Calcutta to California for all kinds of purposes. The other was to build up infrared spectroscopy partly for the study of some of the properties of some of the natural crystals which had some rather obscure properties, well I got on to them when I was doing my doctorate thesis in Oxford and you know one would like to have carried on a bit and see if one could solve some of these puzzles. So that was that and the other thing was partly building on the reputation of the workshop and being very much concerned with the performance of instruments, particularly infrared detectors for all kinds of purposes. I almost automatically built up the workshop to a stage where we could do jobs the American Airforce couldn't do. They sent them over to us and it began a workshop with a world reputation. So that is roughly what I set out to do on the research side, crystal growing and on the theoretical side possibly the study of the solid state really with direct impact on what light it could throw on the property of crystals and visa versa. Infrared spectroscopy and all the electronic and mechanical problems associated with the design of scientific instruments and we moved on really through those two fields really over the next 20 years.
H In the fifties when you were still in Marischal did you find you had the facilities in laboratories, equipment and technicians which you needed?
J Well, the equipment wasn't too much of a problem. For example the Court when I came here, I asked for £10,000 to re-equip the department. They gave it to me in a fortnight which was quite a sum in those days. To spend that £10,000 wisely was a very difficult problem indeed. So many of our instruments were being sent for export that it became very difficult and it was only by knowing the instrument makers and knowing what instruments were coming along. It really took me, I suppose 10 years later there was still some trace of that £10,000 unspent although we were getting some other money in the meantime but that wasn't so difficult. The technicians' situation was very difficult. We had the head of the workshops, Andy Fraser who was good. His father had been George Thomson's technician/instrument maker too and we had one or two coming back from the forces who had served their time, occasionally in a Nat Phil workshop and also in the firm of Fraser & MacKay. The Fraser of the Fraser & MacKay, Charlie Fraser being Sandy Fraser's brother and they tended to come back to us and in those days you could take on apprentices very easily. This is one of the unfortunate things what's happened in recent years which of course people are now beginning to realise, that the payment of what were called apprentices has now been put up so much that you really got to think very seriously, it's going to cost you a lot of money to take an apprentice on whereas in the old days I could say to the Court I think I could take another apprentice. It was almost a matter of national duty to turn these chaps out and one could do it without much financial embarrassment. You got nothing out of him in the first two years because you were training all the time but if he was staying for a five-year apprenticeship which it was you would hope to be able to keep him for that time and by that time he would be beginning to be really effective in the workshop. Now the bug bear was this, it was the Court quite frankly, and certain members of the Court quite specifically who seemed to have a vested interest in keeping the pay of technicians down; and twice I lost all my workshop except for one man because the chaps just could not afford to stay at the money the Court was offering. Even when the Ministry of Supply who knew how important our work on crystal growing was offered to pay something comparable to the rates they would pay their technicians in their establishments which would be twice the rate for the universities and I got the money. The Court refused it saying this would spoil it for every other department. Well it got to such a showdown in the end that I fought the battle so firmly that in the end they called in a Ministry of Labour arbitrator and really he saw the work he was more indignant than I was. He talked about sweated labour and he sent in a report to the Court and that was promptly thrown, he was thrown out. It did have one final result because by this time some of the other departments were beginning to get difficulties too and the result was that we did have a committee on wages at last.
H This would be about when?
J The earlyish fifties. It would probably be about '54/55 I think that the first wages committee was on and so there was some of us from the Senatus and some from the Court on and we began to get things better then. I mean a lot of the troubles which come to the University when you look at it centre on the Court and its structure and the personalities and things became much easier after 55 because the chairman of the wages committee was William Taylor and he was one of the rare type that one gets. Unfortunately Aberdeen turns out some very good graduates but most of the good ones go away and one never sees them again. Had we got those chaps back, that's the General Council representatives on the Court, life would be different. But Taylor was an exception. He came back and I'm not sure if he was General Council or whether he became Chancellor's Assessor, no I don't think so, Scott Brown was Chancellor's Assessor, anyway Bill Taylor came back and he had been number two in the Ministry of Labour he was a very senior civil servant who'd just come out because of ill health and come back to Aberdeen. He was a chap you really could talk to and understood the problems and over that halcyon spell with Bill Taylor in the chair a lot of our technician troubles faded because he knew the problems of trying to keep a workforce, admittedly it was a very small one in our case, but nevertheless keeping it together and seeing that some sort of justice was being done for the chaps because they were really being very badly treated. So that's a very brief summary of the answer to the question. The equipment was not so difficult but keeping good technicians once you'd trained them to the competence, because I've seen it all over again once the oil industry came. We've had exactly the same problems all over again, time after time. This is where I came in and seen at least two rounds of it.
H Once the ex-service generation had passed, how did the supply of students hold up during the fifties?
J It didn't I suppose. When I came I suppose we had what 2,000/2,100 I think we might even have gone up possibly in post war to 2,300 I'm not sure and every year was different. I reckon perhaps 53 and 54 were the two most similar years I could recall because the numbers were about the same. The composition was beginning to level off, the ex-service students were tapering out and one was tending to get a more uniform group of students up from the schools but it would then drop to about 1,600 and the problem was of course was to build it up again and having regard the fact that the University was 1,200 before the war, having regard the fact that we took a larger proportion of our boys and girls in the age group into the University in Aberdeen than probably any other university in the Kingdom. I know I went into this with the Director of Education just before Robbins to see about feasibility of an expansion over the national 7% and we were taking about 6.9% by 1960 of the qualified pupils in our area into the schools. Now the point was, I'd hoped I might build up to an Honours school of, well an optimum I thought would be 25, but one could never do it from Aberdeen alone just judged on as it were the rate of a current physicist in the community even if you try and tempt them in; and it was quite obvious to me that if this university was going to hold its position and that went not really for physics but for every subject one could think of, one had to get good students in from outside the traditional parish. When Tom Taylor became Principal in 1948 at his first informal address to the staff he made the comment that he thought that Aberdeen had flirted too long with the south and we should turn our face to the highlands. I went along to see him the next morning and said look have you worked out mathematics of this? How many population in our parish? You see everything up north and west of Aberdeen, it was something of the order of half a million it wasn't very much more with a large proportion of course being in Aberdeen and I suppose the population of the whole country is getting on for 50 million. If you can run a proper university in Aberdeen and it's pulling its weight nationally all you'll get is one hundredth of the population. But you're one of 23 universities and you've got to be drawing on something like three from outside for every one you're getting inside if you're going to do the job properly. He began to see that there was something to this but unfortunately he didn't live long enough really to be fully converted. But this was the thing and I wanted to build up, because one could see what was likely to happen in the future, I wanted to build up connections with good schools in the south for example schools that I knew. Anyone had any connections with a good school in the south whether it was in south of Scotland or England try and make it easier for those pupils to come here and some of us will then try and work on those schools to say will you send some of your boys and girls up to us? The thing that we fell down on that one was quite simply the view of other departments, and in Science for example it was the biologists because in order to make it attractive for a boy or girl to come up, particularly from England, then you had to be able to offer an Honours degree in three years which was the English pattern as opposed to four years and therefore you must be able to get them exempted from the first year. So they should come into first year physics or first year chemistry or second year physics, second year chemistry, second year mathematics but that would mean that they would not be forced to do one of the biological subjects. So this was opposed from the start by the biologists and in the end, years and years later when people began to see that trouble was now upon us, thoughts began to change but by then it was far too late so we never built up the pattern of pupils coming up, good ones you see coming up from the south. That really was an unfortunate thing because once Robbins came along and created all those other universities and everyone cultivating its own patch as far as it could go we were really going to be in a pretty weak position and it was really the fact that there was too parochial an attitude by the university on the one side and also too parochial by various other departments. I think we all tend to be a bit parochial but they wouldn't see for years and years really what wasn't quite writing on the wall but one could see the way things might go and certainly the point that if we were going to be one of 23 universities we ought to be pulling one 23rd of the national weight to be average. That meant that opportunities were lost time after time.
H What about staff recruitment during the fifties?
J That was bad too and it's this paradoxical situation which applies not merely to university teaching but to anything associated with education. Now what we were up against was this, that the war had shown the vital need of physics in national survival and it looked as though it was going to be pretty well as essential in, that was in war-time survival, now in civilian survival unless your industries are turning out the kind of products and one of the things that with few natural resources in this country, it's almost like the Japanese, it's got to be new things which have been developed. The problem was that the government having half learned their lesson had decided that never again should its research establishments be as weak as they had been before the war. The balance of strength between universities and research establishments before the war had been that nearly all the able people, not all but nearly all, were in the universities and the resources of the government establishments were relatively poor. I remember for example in 1935 having to do trials on detection of aircraft where I was supposed to be making the apparatus and doing the trials and the National Physical Laboratory was going to do the … no, they were to do the trials, that's right, it was the National Physical Laboratory to do the trials and I was to be present as Lindemann's observer. Well I found that they had got no equipment and I had to provide my equipment so I did the trials with the National Physical Laboratory as the observer and at that stage I was attached to the staff of Farnborough, Farnborough would ring me up and say well next time I was going down could I bring those from [ ]. This was the thing. Now, after the war the government made quite certain that it was never going to be caught out so badly again as regards its research establishments and it built up a research establishment, keeping of course quite a lot of people from the war-time days, but building them up as first priority, the universities second priority, industry third priority and schools last of all. Well some of us fought this I mean not only on our own behalf of the universities it was also on behalf of the schools because I point out this paradoxical situation that was arising that whenever a subject became of importance of the international survival that was going to be the one that was going to be taught worst in the next generation unless you were very sensible. I remember one of the people who was sensible was one of the, he'd been a doctor with me, Rae Burnett, he was director I think of Marconi Instruments and he made the point that you've got to plough back some of your seed core to bring on the next generation and that just was not done at that stage and what with the fact that the government establishments were paying salaries a good deal higher than the universities they were now offering better facilities for research than the universities. They had no teaching commitment and so this meant the universities and the industry and of course still worse the schools were faring very badly and it became really quite difficult to recruit staff. It wasn't quite so bad if one was in a big centre like Oxford or Cambridge and one or two of the others, but it really was very difficult to recruit staff and of course in addition to all that the brain drain started because good as the conditions were in the government establishments they weren't as good as they were in the States and this was the start of the brain drain which in about 63 had become in such proportions that we had government enquiries about it. Well after 63 it reversed a bit because so many more chairs had been created in Britain it may have pulled one or two people back but we suffered in all these respects and it would have applied to Physics particularly, Mathematics to some extent, Chemistry to some extent. I mean those subjects which the government could see were important to its own survival but did not see that one really ought to be building on particularly in the schools even more than the universities and this was part of the trouble that we're still suffering from.
H How far in your own recruitment policy were you trying to recruit people with particular specialities with a view to, how far were you taking the best people you could get in what may have been as you say a reduced field?
J Well it was possibly a compromise. If one saw there was someone really good, one would take him almost at all costs even it was something different, provided that there were opportunities for him to pursue that kind of work, but again no atomic or say nuclear physicist would particularly want to come to Aberdeen and it would have been very difficult to provide him with anything like the kind of facilities. We just weren't engined as it were in the way of big machines and so forth to do that so that was out.
H Did this have any sort of feedback, even at the undergraduate level that people said 'well nuclear physics seems to be the thing so I won't go to Aberdeen'?
J Not so much at that stage. You see, now this is another big difference post-Robbins that in those days anyone, and this was one of the attractions about coming to Aberdeen as opposed to an English provincial university for example, that you hadn't had the cream skimmed off by Oxford or Cambridge. At the lower end quite frankly we are taking a bigger proportion of pupils in the age group than any other university probably in the kingdom. At the bottom end you were as low as anywhere but at the top end every now and again you got one as good as anyone at Oxford or Cambridge and after doing a degree in Aberdeen they could go straight into research at Oxford or Cambridge as several of them did and this was one of the attractions that there was always this reward of a few good ones who would come on. And they would come at that stage almost irrespective as it were their own hankering for example. They might go onto and some of them did to nuclear physics and so forth. What one aimed to give was a good enough undergraduate course that they could really turn to any branch of physics and they would go on. Naturally one hoped that some would stay but they could go on but that was the thing. Occasionally you got someone who really, because of publications, knew the kind of thing we were doing and were attracted by that and would come but days and days and days I spent going round universities talking to my friends and saying have you got any good chaps you could send up you know the kind of things that we could do. I did sometimes get people that way but recruiting was very difficult because basically of the shortage.
H The move to Old Aberdeen, was that planned before Robbins.
J Yes. The planning for that building, as it were the Science Faculty's agreement that there should be a new building for physics in Old Aberdeen or natural philosophy in Old Aberdeen, that was from 1956. By 1958 we'd appointed the architect and the whole of that building is essentially pre-Robbins even pre-Sputnik. So that was agreed. I wasn't at all unhappy with Marischal accommodation in fact I swithered a bit, I mean knowing how much of time would now have to go on the building, the design and everything else and the move that really had to be balanced against the fact that if we'd stayed in Marischal where the research was going really rather well we'd be turning out more research results for quite a time before we really got the new building operating. There is one point perhaps going back a little bit, we were talking about my coming here which is I think very relevant to the history of the University, and that is that after I got the chair and I was back in Oxford I was astonished when some of my Oxford friends congratulated me on having won the highest paid chair of physics in the country. I couldn't believe it. I wasn't exactly concerned about salary and so forth and it turned out that I was in fact paid more here than Lord Cherwell was getting, my old professor in Oxford. And the thing was that going back to those days before the universities were nationalised the Scottish universities did pay their chairs better, they worked their professors a damned sight harder I think also and there was a regular hierarchy for the careerist, a chair in the English provincial university, a chair in the Scottish university where the pay was better and then perhaps if you were good enough be invited back to Oxford with an increase in prestige but usually a decrease in salary. It was a very different situation here and of course it did mean that the professorial population in the Scottish universities tended to be in a way ventilated by this cycling of people round, but the prestige of the Scottish chairs at that stage was quite different from what it is now. Of course once all the other universities opened up and so many more chairs were created the chances of people being attracted to Aberdeen unless you are really very good at things and got a reputation ... When I came here the two proxime accessit for the chair, one had got the chair at Dundee and the other had got the chair at Trinity College Dublin already. They appointed be over two professorial applicants. How often do you get that in a chair here now and Aberdeen lost an awful lot partly through the nationalisation and instead of being the most northerly outpost of the universities of the empire or commonwealth they are now rather the end of the line. Its been a very sad transformation to watch.
H If we could move forward towards the transformation. In planning the new building, and I imagine you worked very closely with the architect, did you have special priorities, innovations you hoped to introduce?
J Yes, again the building. I'd thought about the building almost every since I came. We did a lot of alterations inside Marischal which we had to do to get the students any research in. In the end we were actually working on seven different levels in Marischal with putting Medicine in floors and so forth but I willingly did it because I realised this was going to be practice in laboratory design and from the point when we decided that we would go for the building and the question was getting the money out of the UGC. I did design in outline a complete building myself using a mathematical solution to a problem connecting four points of the corners of a square and I had a model of it made in the workshop and I took it down to the UGC, we sold it to them just like that. I got the money for that building, I suppose inside a fortnight at that stage, and that's pre-Robbins you see this was 56 and I decided that there were different requirements for example in teaching labs you wanted rather higher floor ceiling, greater floor ceiling spaces and also during vacation since you weren't using a lot of teaching accommodation you could turn the heating down and so forth. The thing was to have all teaching accommodation as far as possible in a separate wing and all staff in research rooms in another wing where you get three floors where you had two on the other about the same height. That had disadvantages. One of them was that I could see that this could create an us and them sort of situation if the students felt that they were all over there and we were all over here sort of thing which would be bad and so apart from having a tutorial room at the other side where people could go across I arranged that every member of staff would have a tutorial room and you couldn't do this for the first year in general, but everyone from the second year, every student from the second year would come over for tutorials in the wing where the research and staff was and that worked out not too badly and now it has of course caused an enormous amount of trouble because of course the UGC having changed the norms so much that such luxury is not permitted, whereas in fact it had an awful lot to be said for it. So there was that sort of thing, workshops, one wanted goods and it also happened with our particular kind of research where it involved very delicate instrumentation and one wanted to avoid vibration to be as much down on the ground as possible. At that stage Rex Knight was very critical of me for taking a building like that as opposed to having it all in a tower and by God I'm glad we didn't have towers. It happened that Tom Taylor who was Principal he didn't want a building which would tower above the High Street.
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