| Description | Interview with Professor R.V. Jones, recorded on 17 March, 1987 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of interview : continuation
Well having got the general design and having seen how much accommodation it could provide one of the merits of this particular design was that the amount of waste space was relatively, when I call about waste space I talk about corridor space and so forth was the lowest it could possibly be theoretically. I then took it all to pieces and when we got an architect, he would of course put it all together in his own way, which he did and it's not quite the building that I originally designed but on the other hand there are a lot of features in common with it. The way we found the architect was I wrote round to many of the people who I knew were putting up buildings. One having listened to Basil Spence I said whatever we're going to have we weren't going to have Basil Spence. I gather he'd been quite good in Glasgow, he'd done the physics department in Glasgow but after that he said that the trouble was he thought he knew all about scientific buildings after that and I'm very glad we didn't have… Finally we approached the only chap who, I wrote to people like John Cockcroft and ICI and various other people, and he was the only man whose name appeared on two separate lists of recommendations so he was picked by that particular way, and we got on very well and we did the building inside the UGC figure of £6/10 a square foot despite the fact that there were something like 500 of those big double windows and something like £20,000 for a standby generator. Of course we needed that for the power for the crystal furnaces and so forth. It was all done inside the UGC figure, in fact the sort of minimum figure that the UGC was then providing physics departments, we did it all inside that and really it turned out to be very satisfactory. I mean some mistakes were made obviously but really it was a very good building to work in and so that's how the building was actually designed and I suppose we started building end of 59 beginning of 60 and it was officially opened in May 64 I think but it was actually opened for a meeting of the British Association here in September 1963 and we'd got everything moved over and we'd got operational as it were by that time.
H So the moving coincided roughly with the beginning of expansion. How suitable did the building prove for the problems of the period?
J Pretty well. I would have been tempted to perhaps even made the lecture room slightly bigger. Once the first year went above 300 it meant I couldn't take them all myself in one and I had therefore to duplicate my lectures giving myself excessive hours, but no it worked very well. Again you miss the subtle point, the new building mitigated against the warmth of relations between staff and students, to some extent between staff and staff. Where we'd all been pushed in together more or less, obviously there was sometimes more friction, but on the other hand everyone saw a bit more of everyone else sort of thing and we became a bit detached after going into the new building I thought and every now and again, a subtle point, I was very puzzled because I always waited behind after my lectures for example in Marischal because I said to the students if they had any problems at all please come up I would wait and almost always there was something of one sort or another. Either students with comments of information or so forth, or are asking questions they hadn't understood, or wanting some you know … This almost vanished when one got to King's. Now part of the trouble was the change in the student composition. I think they became less certain of themselves and shyer but also there was a point that I had, thinking it over, every student when I was lecturing in Marischal had to come down and out through the door to my left. What the fire people precautions would say … Now they all had to come down that way and so forth and therefore anyone who wanted to stop would just be coming down with the stream and stop but as we'd got it there were two good exits at the back of the lecture room and there were exits at the bottom but they were not intended for audience exits. At least there was one actually but that was into the preparation room and thinking it over I realise that this might be a cause of it that any student who would want to ask a question had now got to fight his way against the stream of people going out. And so I did get that altered, I got a second exit, or really a third exit put down at the lecture bench level so they could get out that way.
H Did that make a difference?
J It made a bit of a difference but not as much as I would have really hoped but that was partly due to the change in composition of the student body by that stage.
H I would agree with your perception of a change in the student body. Why was this? Was it simply a matter of expansion because in a sense because many of the same cohorts of students were still there even if others were there as well?
J Yes, they were getting more diluted. There was another thing about it that the old lecture room in Marischal, well they were wooden benches. My last lecture of the first year had become traditional. It started really when the first tape recorders came in and my last lecture was on the analyses of sound waves and so forth with the tape recorder and one could let the students sing a bit and it really got into terrific parties and many people came and they still came up to me, who never did Nat Phil at all but they came to this first year lecture. There were more than 300 in a lecture room for 138. They were standing on the benches all the way back. One couldn't do that in the new thing. I think we were all a bit overawed by it but also the fact the benches wouldn't have stood that kind of treatment. All these factors I think while not making things formal really attenuated the sort of closeness we'd had before but in addition there were now a lot of students there who were there almost because it was the fashion to come to university rather than particularly that marvellous ex-service thing when they'd come because they really wanted. But one did get them but it was more dilute. These are the only reasons that I can think. And of course there was a big difference in the students coming over, by this time we were beginning to head towards the 68 sort of thing. And I can tell you a story there which really does illustrate the change in the situation. It concerns one of our most eminent colleagues in the Medical Faculty. I had a reputation for knowing the name of all the students in my first year. I didn't you see, but it happened that by talking to them and drinking with them and sharing some of their problems I did know quite a number. In fact I knew so many that the impression got around that I knew everybody, I didn't, but they obviously appreciated … Now, our colleague was one of these very good chaps who made an absolute point of knowing all the students' names and for years, in fact we've got students staying with us now and they thought this was marvellous, a professor taking so much interest that they know and then came this change about 68. Now that wasn't fair the professor got an advantage of them, big brother keeping an eye on them and they resented the thing.
H That's interesting. I didn't myself notice that very sharply, but would the move, you talk about drinking with the students, in a sense was this easier in the Kirkgate than it became in Old Aberdeen?
J Yes it was that's true. By the way it wasn't just the Kirkgate it was the George and Ma Cameron's. Of course I was getting older there was always that. There's another thing in that that would have to be mentioned in my own case that after 57 or so, Susan my elder daughter started coming to the university and I felt I'd better pull back a bit myself because one didn't want to, as it were, muscle in on the younger generation's things, in quite the same way. So although with people like the foresters and the engineers and so forth my relations remained as close and as warm as ever and indeed with my own students, nevertheless that was also a contributing factor. One felt one had got to stay back a bit from the student body in a way that I wouldn't have done before.
H You talked about the dilution of the student body in the expansion. What about your colleagues in the department, you were saying that there were some difficulties in recruitment in the 50s? Were these a constraint on the progress of the department under expansion?
J Sorry, a constraint?
H Was recruitment of staff a constraint on expansion?
J Yes, very much so. Because one lost good members of staff, people like Peter Landsberg, Charles McCombie and Ray Stevenson who were going off to chairs which wouldn't have happened, at least nothing like the rate it did, so naturally you tended to lose some of the best members of your staff and it was very difficult to replace them because there were so many other universities and people looking at the map and seeing how far north Aberdeen was and so forth it really became quite difficult because there now was so much more competition from other universities now so the situation really didn't get any easier. By Robbins time it was beginning to get a bit easier, particularly with the new building and people could see the facilities. There was a hope of getting better staff but really all the time unfortunately one couldn't take the staff one would have liked to have had because you'd always got these large numbers even after Robbins even larger numbers of students and one had got to have enough members of staff that someone could get up in front of them, and, of course the show must go on sort of thing, but it meant that the competition from the really able staff people was now even more intense from the other universities than it was before.
H Did this at all shape the academic profile of the department? Did you find that you were taking better people in one branch of physics because you could get them than in other branches which you might have preferred?
J No, in that one so rarely had the choice, is what it came to.
H You would advertise a post in physics or in Natural Philosophy and not in radio astronomy?
J Yes. We did have some radio astronomy going by that time you see that's true but I would have liked more people who would have shared my interests in the sort of basic experiments in physics and in the design of scientific instruments and they were extremely hard to find because they were the very people who were becoming increasingly in demand. And although, with that in mind, I never filled all my posts and I was hoping after the first wave of Robbins we didn't get a chair, for example a chair for theoretical physics. Although I'd asked for this in 1951 in a Senatus meeting for the Quinquennium it became right at the bottom of the priorities and I could have got good people for a chair at that stage but come Robbins time when they did give me a chair the other universities had swallowed them up. And the result was I kept the chair opened, and I kept enough posts that once the situation got easier, if it did get easier, (and now there were new graduates coming round) one would be able to offer them posts pretty well straight away. Just at that time the economies began to bite and all my vacant posts were confiscated and so I never had the chance to build up the staff I would have liked to have built.
H The second chair was a chair of theoretical physics?
J Yes.
H And it was in that area that you failed to find a suitable candidate?
J Yes. I've got about three box files of letters up there writing to people about these and the number of people who very nearly came but didn't was really quite impressive.
H Yes indeed. Do you think this would have made a difference, if you'd got the right person?
J Yes. My war time deputy would have come when I came for example. He ultimately became head of the physics department at Bristol, that's a really big and good department and he would have come up with me but unfortunately he and Edward Wright had not hit it off during the war all that much, of course he was rude and Edward objected to his rudeness, but he was a bloody good physicist. And so that was a real tragedy because we complemented one another, as we did during the war, because he could do things that I couldn't do on the theoretical side on the other hand on the experimental side he reckoned that I could do things too and we were a very good team.
H How far did the rise of the Research Councils as a funding source affect the development of the department? Do you think they did fairly by you?
J It's difficult to answer that question. No, I think no is the answer to that, but not because of them and me in a way and certainly not because of any disregard for Aberdeen. The Advisory Research Councils, well I can tell you again because come 1955/56 I was chairman of the physics panel of the Grants Committee of the DSIR which was … Now again 23 universities, and issuing out of research students every year, everyone would put in to the departments - I'm talking all of the physics departments in the kingdom would look at the number of, put in for so many research students. All the papers would come to us on the panel, I was chairman, and what would happen would be, if the meeting was on the Tuesday on the Sunday I would go through all the applications and I knew everybody and everybody knew everybody at that stage and I knew that if Dee in Glasgow said that he wanted two research students he really could use those two research students. On the other hand some chaps would chance their arm a bit and so forth and as a result having regard the total number that were allocated, and one could fight perhaps a bit of a battle perhaps with the main committee whether physics should have a few more or not and I would do a draft allocation and we would then sit around the table on the Tuesday down in London and at the end of it we would get some sort of agreement and on the whole people weren't too unhappy with it. Now once you get to 80 physics departments, which was the post-Robbins thing, because more than merely the universities now, some of the colleges of technology were coming in, and also there were more than one physics department in the university. Now it isn't easy to know 80 heads of departments in the same way and the result there was of course it became much more formal and one had to put in enormous applications and of course all the paperwork and the bureaucracy you can imagine was going on in London and the result was for example: I in Aberdeen was one physics department among 80 would put in the application which meant an awful lot of work they wanted an enormous amount of stuff and at the end of it my expectation was perhaps half a research student and this made things difficult. Also difficult was now physicists in the country as a whole, because they took the big spenders, radio astronomy and nuclear physics and they categorised physics as radio astronomy, nuclear physics or other physics. You know 'other physics' but this was the sort of thing and so other physics quite mistakenly I think began to be treated as rather low priority. Solid state would count as separate but all the rest I mean there were a lot of very fundamental stuff like gravitation; everything else it was all kind of just thrown out the window as other physics. So the result is we were not treated, we did not do so well post-Robbins as we did and one of the crazy things and now this is a national criticism again that whereas one could, a student who got minimal qualifications and got university entrance could immediately without question get a grant. Once you came to research level what proportion of your first graduates could have grants. A complete misbalance between the undergraduate grants and the postgraduate grants which made it very difficult in a competitive subject to get a fair allocation. So on that side with regards studentships things didn't work out at all well from our point of view. On the equipment side, again things really got much more difficult. In the old days the University grant support for equipment was pretty good relatively and although I did get money in from the DSIR and on some occasions the Royal Society and so forth, getting money in was not one of my preoccupations at all because with the kind of work that we needed or wanted to do quite a bit of support really came in through the equipment grant to the University and that I thought was a fairly reasonable proportion. I mean part of ones support depended on what your colleagues thought of you and part of it depended on your national standing but when so much became concerned now with being administered by the Research Councils I would say there is quite a bit to be said for it but I didn't feel so comfortable in the system. One knew for example one's equipment grant from the University was going to be as much the same this year as last year but you knew roughly what you could measure. But once you become dependent on getting grants from outside bodies which for limited periods you've got to go on fighting, thinking of new things of getting grants and so on, and some of that's good, but I think it's gone too far.
H Did you feel either in this context or more generally, a disadvantage being , in a peripheral place, did you find this left you in a periphery in other ways at all, left you or your colleagues because you yourself obviously had frequent contacts at the Royal Society and in various committees ?
J Well that was absolutely deliberate on my part because I could see Aberdeen was too isolated. On the other hand the train journey from Aberdeen to London is one of the finest journeys in the world and if someone was paying your fare, there was a lot to be said and one reason why I did spend so much time in London really was all for the good of the department and the University because in fact the reason I got that building in about a fortnight, I remember meeting George Thomson. I mean this was so traditional on the steps of the Athenaeum and I was saying "I think we really will have to have a new building" and he was on the committee and he said "Yes I think you should". So there was a lot out of that and conversely people came up to Aberdeen more I think then than they probably do now but there was of course more to show them apart from anything else and I didn't find, I knew it was a bit of a disadvantage but I deliberately took that disadvantage as a challenge and not to get too isolated here.
H Is it perhaps more of a disadvantage for younger people who don't have the same contacts and perhaps don't have the same regularity of finance for journeys elsewhere or is it ever an advantage at a certain stage to be left on your own and not have too many visitors?
J Well yes it can be an advantage. Winston said every prophet has to spend periods in the wilderness of contemplation and this is the stuff of which psychic dynamite is made. Yes it can be but most of us in the academic world do need the stimulus of exchange with colleagues of similar, perhaps not too similar interests and from that point of view … By the way you talk about younger people. In my day when I ran the department there was no trouble about anybody at any level if he got the slightest reasonable case of getting expenses to go for example to a meeting in London or further afield. I think the tightness probably, I don't know what its like now, I imagine it affects everybody, Professors and others alike but in fact I used to try and push my chaps out as much as I could, encourage them to go. One got to know the conference racket, there was a hell of a lot of that in those rather spoiling days of affluence. You could form some relatively obscure society of people with similar interests and give it a fancy dress name and have international conferences all over the world but really contributing not very much. But every now and again a conference can be really very valuable and for those I would certainly have wanted my chaps to go and really and make a point of getting to them.
H But they may not get as it were invited to go and give a lecture in another university and spend a day or two in a laboratory? That sort of invitation won't come so often?
J Well again why should it unless there was something they could contribute? Provided they begun to build up some work of their own then fair enough and I mean this should really be an incentive and it certainly was possible to do that here. If you take for example George Thomson, of course not perhaps a typical example after all his father was J J down in Cambridge, but it was possible to do that kind of work here. I mean Kosterlitz is an excellent case in point and it can be done but some degree of isolation is at times an advantage. And indeed talking about the kind of research I've done myself to some extent I always felt a lot of it had to be like bits of knitting that I could take up and put down and get on with another job particularly teaching and administration and in the meantime you hoped that it wouldn't go bad on you so I deliberately to some extent took on things which were rather longer term because in a way I could perhaps afford to do them and other people couldn't and in fact there was only things that one could do. One couldn't do the spectacularly dramatic up to date hot news except in very few cases but one hoped one could build up a body of work which in general other people wouldn't have done and which nevertheless might contribute to some more fundamental aspect of physics rather than just on the peripherations of it.
H Have you ever regretted coming to Aberdeen?
J Yes. Not for a long time, but post-Robbins, the answer must be yes. As you know I disagreed completely with the policy of the University over the expansion, having been the man who wrote the first memorandum for expansion in 56 because I did not like the way, because it seemed to me that Aberdeen, I've tried to advise everybody, the only hope now is to swim against the stream. They went for quantity and I keep on using an analogy of the frog who blew itself up as big as a bull. And they went for quantity which you never win on in the end because lots of universities were going for that and the only hope would be to swim against the stream and stay reasonably small, build up, keep a reputation of quality so that when the disillusionment period set in one would still have something to show and ever since that stage, really post-62 when Tom Taylor died, although I had by no means agreed with Tom Taylor over many things, I think people were beginning to talk one another round quite a bit but from that point onwards when we went for quantity at all costs really one could see Aberdeen was not going to be a very happy place. I was able to some extent to take refuge. I could get down into my laboratories and get away from all the university strife and so forth and it really does become a fight with nature, nature always plays fair, tough but its fair. I am bound to say that since 62/63 I regretted. I stayed despite offers both of chair and of high government posts because I thought you know someone ought to stay and try … In early days I wanted to build the university up, partly because we were one of 23 and it was an awful challenge to try and build it up. Then I stayed because in a way I was brought up to fight and rearguard actions as whenever necessary and I stayed really very largely to see how much of it could be saved but perhaps I hung on to it too long in that respect. I mean Wellington used to say the greatest test of a General was to know when to retreat and to dare to do it. Well I may have known when to retreat but I didn't. I could have gone to other jobs after Robbins set in but again I hoped still that in the end things would pull themselves right but of course they hadn't yet. And I might say that for years before that it wasn't the university that kept me here it's the people in the town, particularly the people in the country, we'd always had very happy relationships with them and more that I'm afraid than most of my university colleagues that have kept me here.
H Within the department, perhaps we might talk later a little about the university, but within the department do you feel, I know you feel sad about things that have happened in recent years, do you feel you left achievements there that you're happy about in the end of the day?
J I don't know because a lot depends on … Achievements certainly, but how long some of them will have endured is another matter. I don't know what's going to happen to the workshop. The instrument course, this is where … there are times when I really could get very cross. I don't know whether you were at the Senatus meeting, I wasn't there but they had, about 78/79, a visit from the chairman of the Science & Engineering Research Council and they asked what Aberdeen should concentrate on and he told them instrumentation. In fact I have a letter from him, of course I wasn't there but Thomson in Chemistry told me and it was such an encouraging letter. Now what happened to the course in instrumentation, instrument design. First of all I set that course up with no increase in staff. We had built up a world reputation. Some of my chaps in the most senior positions in the microelectronics industry in the States and so forth and it was just more or less straight out of the window like that, the course no longer exists. There are at least 5 universities now doing it in Britain we were by way and ahead of everyone else the first. And I say achievements I mean it was an achievement to get that course but what's happened to it now and one's seen so much achievement destroyed. One hope's that one day the university will survive to the extent that it realised … it once had Maxwell here and had Thomson here and that some good work was done in my time. Students all over the world, I'm now talking about my specialist students but the foresters and everyone else all scattered all over the world who've written to me very warmly about their days in Aberdeen and what it meant to them, I mean this kind of achievements. Other than that, very difficult to say.
Second part of an interview with Professor R V Jones recorded in his house 8 Queen's Terrace, Aberdeen on 17 March 1987 by John Hargreaves.
H If we could go back on the general university context to the question of expansion. In the circumstances of the 1960s and the financing, was it possible, particularly was it possible in the sciences, to get quality without paying the price of quantity? Was not finance for equipment and expansion likely to go with those universities which were prepared to take more students?
J Yes, that was part of the trouble that there was certainly a fear that the universities would get grants in proportion to the number of students and of course this does pay therefore for you to expand from the point of economics of running a university because you've got overheads such as libraries whatever size of university you've got and this was one of the temptations why some universities fell for the expansion in the way they did. In fact I would say almost all of the universities fell for the expansion in the way they did and having put in the bids for the number of students they then had to make good those bids irrespective of the subjects the students wanted to take or the quality and there was that but I still think it would have been better to have fought it and I have one case which I think proves my point. And that was a man, he and I, well he said I would get physics and chemistry into Scottish schools as full subjects over his dead body at one stage, and that was Malcolm Knox the Principal of St Andrews. In fact we were named by Robbins as his two main critics. In fact I don't think Robbins could quite believe what he did to Tommy Knox, call him an academic dinosaur. But Tommy Knox did keep St Andrews small and St Andrews is really much the better for it and I must say on that, although he and I have had various fights on these things, on all academic points I think we stood shoulder to shoulder. One of the most touching letters I've every had was after my own book came out and he wrote to me from Crieff saying he'd read it and despite all the battles we'd had and so forth that really the stand I was making for academic standards and so forth was entirely something he was in sympathy with and he said I've been operated on for cancer but I'm afraid the cells are multiplying again, I don't think I've got very long and he ended up with the Latin quotation 'we who are about to die salute you'. Now he did succeed to a very large extent at St Andrews in doing it and St Andrews did expand but nothing like the extent that for example we did and its in the stronger position, certainly the Physics department now and in various other subjects I think. He came in for a lot of criticism from his own staff for staying in the sort of stick in the mud sort of thing but in fact I think it was the right thing to do and so it could have been done.
H Is St Andrews well placed from the point of view of research in the sciences because there is this difficulty of maintaining research in small universities?
J Yes certainly in physics. This was another galling thing that once the standards here went down, we were beginning to lose, there were two reasons why we lost students from our own area. One was of course the universality of the holding of grants which in the old days used to almost confine students to Aberdeen. That was not a good reason for them being here of course in many ways but there was that, but also the fact that students saw, at least prospective students from our own parish saw that the entrance standards to this University were now so low that there must be something wrong and they were going to other universities and I know one or two very good ones even in Physics who went to St Andrews rather than come here. And then of course Oxford began to poach and circularising the Grammar and Gordons and so forth if there were any good ones and let them in straight away to Oxford colleges purely on the headmaster's recommendation. And all these were factors which went against us and in fact in this particular case Aberdeen expanding and dropping its standards you know I was at conferences with headmasters and headmistresses on some of these problems and some of them made this point, warning us that some of their good pupils were now not looking at Aberdeen because of the situation.
H Where would you have drawn the line in terms of the numbers gained, I mean 10,000 was obviously ridiculous, would you have stayed at the 2,000 level or …?
J Well of course I said under no circumstances go above six, if you remember, I know you have a copy of my note of dissent in 63 because I was so appalled at the way the situation was being misrepresented saying there had been no meaningful objection to an expansion to 10,000 that I thought that someone must put something down on paper there. Really it's difficult to see how we could go much above three without some loss of quality. Five I would be rather worried about and six I would say absolutely stretching. I would have been very pragmatic about this, I would have taken all the students who I thought were reasonably good and a bit more in the hope of building up. The thing was it wasn't those who opposed the Robbins expansion did not believe in expansion, we certainly did believe in expansion, we did not believe in the way that was being done just as we don't believe in the way the contraction is being done either. I made the same point to Keith Joseph and Kenneth Baker that my criticism is exactly the same as it was then, try and do things much too quickly. You can't double up the university population in three years without enormous problems in maintaining anything like coherence and quality. And having been down to about 1600 in 1955 we could reasonably get up to perhaps 2,500 or so by 63 but going much beyond that would be difficult. And of course remember that big department was built for a population of less than 5,000 and indeed I had another sum of money for phase II. That one cost £675,000 that building, but another £486,000 was put aside for the second phase of the Nat Phil building and I was being pressed by the Court to build a second building in 1963 and I said for God's sake let me get into the one building first and see what mistakes I've made before I do the second one. And it was to be between the present building and the roundabout on St Machar Drive and after, by come 65 when I was beginning to breathe a bit more I wrote again to the administration saying well I've now got a bit more time, I've seen the department working, if you want I could now consider designing a second building. A letter from the Principal saying your £485/6,000 whatever it is has since disappeared. I'm sure he didn't mean quite what he said but it probably went on the psychology building I would suspect but for the university of 6,000 the idea that one would need this second whacking great building didn't come off. Maybe it's a pity it didn't because that would solve the engineering problem.
H But this was allocated in 63 but this was before we even had a 6,000 target?
J Yes I think so yes. It must have been that's right because we went into the building in 63 and I was asked before that to do it and I said please let me get into this one.
H Was this perhaps on the assumption of the swing to science?
J Quite possibly. I was never sure. It seemed to me beyond wildest dreams in some ways wanting a second building.
H If I could put a slightly personal query. This question of quality, how well in physics is quality assessed by performance in the leaving certificates?
J Not very well. There is a basic difficulty of course with any of these large scale exams and that is that they've got to be sat by large numbers of people and marked by large numbers of people and therefore one tends to get stereotyped questions so that all the examiners can be briefed as to what the standard answers should be and so many marks for this and so many marks for that or marks off for this and marks off for that and so forth. And it does put you in a straightjacket and it tends therefore to be stereotyping and thereby give precedence to people capable of stereotype knowledge and thinking and not enough to powers of observation, powers of reasoning in new circumstances which are the really vital things and so it isn't all that easy. One could devise exams which do test these qualities because certainly, the Oxford scholarship exam where I remember learning that in a scholarship exam one was looking for spade as opposed to an Honours final one was looking for aces as well and the only one setting challenging questions to a relatively minimal number of candidates where you can look at the way they tackled the questions much more than necessarily their actual knowledge and test out their powers of reasoning. Now I was subject to that in Oxford not merely in scholarships but also in our terminal exams. I did too well in the first one because I didn't realise a) it had been set by the professor himself: these questions they were much more interesting than the others. One could see a challenge in them and had a go at them, I don't think I really answered them properly but nevertheless and because my watch stopped I had spent so much time on these questions that I was only able to scribble down, I couldn't answer enough of the other questions to get by as it were and he sent for me and said he'd never see a paper done like this before and talked of fellowships and so forth straight away. The result was that he used to do this really testing out what we might be like as potential research students and I tried the same thing when I came to Aberdeen. The very first term, it really is a very interesting story here in that I had been so tied up with my first year teaching that I'd hardly seen anything of the Honours students and certainly hadn't been lecturing to them and so forth and the terminal Honours Christmas time examination came to me for approval. I don't suppose I could have done any of the questions in that paper but then I looked at the questions and I looked at the staff who had set them and I just did not believe that they really understood these questions. If they were it was window dressing, it wasn't good solid understanding at all. So I decided I was going to take a leaf out of ? book and I would set some of my own questions and I insisted I would set some questions. And one of them was most illuminating, because by this time it was long before anyone had got any hope of getting to the moon and I had started off thinking if I do something in medium level applied mathematics there's a great difficulty in physical observation with gravitation you can easily get the mass of the parent body if you've got a parent in the satellite from the orbit of the satellite but it's very much more difficult to get the mass of the satellite because both the pull is proportional to the mass of the satellite but also it's inertia's proportional and the two cancel out so when the satellite it is at that particular distance going round it will give you the same answer and you can only get at the mass of the main body by looking at its orbit too about their common centre of gravity and this was a nice little point and I thought I'll see if they know this one and I thought let's take it and dress it up a bit well how will we dress it up. So I then thought the moon, what if it was made of cheese, so I set the question. One's theories about the structure of the moon depend partly on the basic laws of physics and partly on observation and categorise under various heads some of the factors you consider relevant. And why I was saying cheese, well cheese was obviously quite different in density from what the moon actually is, and so the mass of the moon would be different from the mass of cheese and so forth and I hoped that they would unravel the question, really get at the key point and see whether they could think of a way of determining this mass by looking at the motion about the common centre of gravity. I almost had a strike amongst the staff. This wasn't fair. They wouldn't have seen a question like this before and they dug in their toes and it really wasn't quite right at all after all I hadn't been teaching the class and so forth and in the end I said well sorry chaps I'm the professor I'm going to have these questions. And I suppose there were about 25 in the class at that time. Two of them answered that the moon couldn't possibly be made of cheese because it was incandescent. So I then went along to the staff and said look chaps this is what 3 years Honours teaching is doing, they think the moon is incandescent, what the hell have you been teaching them. I remember on the other hand on that same paper I set one question, given a logarithm of 2, a logarithm of 3, estimate as best you can a logarithm of I think 2.711 or some number like that and I'd seen a way of doing it. But one student beat me. He'd been given log 2 and you remember that 2 to the 8th was 256 and that 2 to the 10th is 1024 so you could get 1.024 times, and he did it all on log 2, I must have rather missed the point of this question as I'd had to use log 3. I thought who the hell's this chap? That was Charles McCombie. So it is possible to set these questions but …
H But you don't do it ?
J Well you can try but it is more difficult.
H The point I was trying to get at with regard to expansion, my own experience would be that there are a large number of extremely capable and in some cases extremely good historians who may have missed out particularly mature students. I'm wondering if in the case of physics the thing is affected by the lack of a basic mathematical background which I suppose is perhaps easier to assess the insights we were talking about?
J Yes you can see both but it is difficult if you've got to set new exams again every year and you're wanting to push something new at the students every time. I used to set one exam almost every year. Sometimes I couldn't manage I used to have what I called the Christmas exam. I mean students I think enjoyed it as much as I did. To some extent I could take some of their mathematics for granted but what I was looking for was people who would make physicists either theoretical or experimental. Of course a theoretical physicist without some appreciation of the experimental world isn't really going to be very much good at theoretical physics in a way. I don't say that he's got to be a good experimenter but he's got to have a feel for the thing and McCombie didn't turn out to be an experimenter with theories but he could also turn his hand if necessary. But these things are not too difficult if you're not going to do them on too big a scale and not too often is what it comes to. But I can imagine it might be much more difficult in a thing like History but there would have been relatively little problem with us. And time after time it was that kind of exam which really was a better differentiation for us even than an Honours degree because again in the Honours degree there was a fair amount of what one might almost class as stereotyping. In a way a lot of it was essential knowledge but not too imagination had been exerted on it.
H Could we perhaps move on and comment about your experience of the University government? Perhaps we might begin with a word or two about the Principals you served under if you wouldn't mind giving a comment or two for the record bearing in mind it can remain off the record if you so wish?
J Yes. Tom Taylor was in many ways a very narrow, or had been very narrow, almost puritanical, able as a lawyer, very sincere but in a way terribly parochial. His first speech as Principal said we have looked to the South too long we must turn our face to the Highlands. That was one thing. The most curious relationship we had for a start because on the one hand he was almost anti-science. He very much would have favoured the classics and again the first time at the Senatus he said something that too much priority was being given to science. On the other hand the point on which I was able to build a bridge, astonished me in that one of his heroes, possibly his greatest hero, was James Clerk Maxwell and I thought at least we've got a point here we can build on and over the years I think we came to respect one another rather more. He didn't handle students well. The story at the Jimmy Edwards rectorial Anyway that was all very unfortunate. Again he under rated Jimmy Edwards, I think as a man Jimmy Edwards had quite a lot to contribute, an awful lot in some ways very good. But anyway that was over. But the most interesting thing I think was he'd not got on well with the students, partly for that partly for other reasons and partly, I've had sympathy with him over this, partly he thought the standard of conduct was pretty bad. And the hops in the Mitchell Hall of a Saturday evening, he went in one day as Principal and tried effectively to bring the hop to its senses, he'd left his hat outside and some undergraduate was actually sick into his hat. It was all very unfortunate and some people would say well he ought never to have put himself in that position but who else was there to go and try and do something and he probably did it in rather a puritanical way. Where the change began to occur was, I'm not sure if it was 53, anyway at the Summer graduation he out of the blue gave an address on the merits of patriotism. This didn't go down very well with the remaining ex-service ones there. Their comments were really scathing about a chap like him, a pacifist talking about patriotism. But I went along and say him afterwards and said, look something's happened to you, you've changed. I said what made you talk about patriotism? And he said well I've led a very narrow sheltered life, he said I was unfit for the first war and really too old for the second, he said I've never been one of the boys and he said I've had some ideas about what the world was like. Despite the fact having for example prosecuted murder cases to the ground, he said he had led this very sheltered life he said it's only now since I've become Principal that I've began to get out and he said I tell you what's changed me. He said last year the meeting of the Principals and Vice-Chancellors was in India and they took us to Lucknow and there I saw the tomb of Henry Lawrence and what did it was just round the tomb of Henry Lawrence it said here lies Henry Lawrence who tried to do his duty. He said that was the point when I realised that the Empire had something to be said for it and he didn't say he'd done his duty but he'd tried to do it and that completely changed him. He'd really recanted, said people had been critical about him talking about patriotism and he himself had been … I mean it took a lot of guts to get up and say this and from that point onwards we began to warm up quite a bit and although he was still having as it were a lot to learn in the way of external experience and so forth so he was beginning to see it, it was years before he unfortunately in 62 died. I remember I was stepping off a plane in Los Angeles when a telegram was handed to me as I went down the steps and it said he'd died. I really was sorry because he having been very restrictive both on science and on general bonhomie in the University had come around a lot and he entirely understood the point about the Court and I actually got to the stage when he asked me to arrange, because I knew Charlie Alexander and Bertram Tours and he met them, we had lunches together, he asked each of them if they would come on the Court because he could see what the Court needed. He did at one stage actually apologise to me for some of the things one member of the Court had said, he was very upset that such things could be said and such criticisms were being levelled against professors and so forth and he was very much for getting better people on the Court. But the weakness which we encountered was anyone who was really much good, certainly in post-war years, is so much in demand and got so little spare time that he can't afford to come onto the Court to pull his weight.
H What's the answer to this? What is the ideal, or best possible status for a governing body of a university like our own?
J I'm almost inclined to think of free housing to any of the better of our students who could be persuaded to come back. Some people, if I really had a lot of weight in the outside world, I mean sometimes the sort of chaps one gives honorary degrees to in view of their contributions subsequent to … Certainly for what is the other body select, the Senatus, really to be very careful to try and pick its best people for the job though you do want a body, and again it needs quality again and you want the right sort of relationship between them and the rest of the administration and this is a difficult one because I've been for example Governor of Dulwich and still am a Governor of Haleybury . I remember when we got the Saddlers company they came to our rescue in Alleyns my old school and I sat next to the master of the Saddlers company and he said can you tell me what my duties as a governor should be, I said yes they're very simple pick a good headmaster and then back him. That is the first function of the Court, you want someone to be a good picker. I again made myself very unpopular in the university. The day my building was opened by George Thomson in May 64 I did give a warning that everything in the garden looked rosy when you looked at the building but the seeds of trouble were already with us and that the most important thing was the reform of the universities. I didn't make it specific, though everyone took it as I meant it to, but in fact the top level, if you're wanting men who are going to pick really good men for chairs and you'd hope to have a sufficient proportion of the holders of your chairs be men of international status in learning by the time they'd got to a chair. You've got to be somewhere in that bracket yourself. Not necessarily in the academic world, but there's no substitute for that. Dulwich governors they were all imminent, at least not all imminent, but they had the weakness of being nominated as I was by the Royal Society, someone by the Royal Academy, someone by the British Academy. They weren't nominated as it were as a team, there is some value in having, in theory that balances out the experience, but doesn't necessarily get a team working together and if you you've got something of a team about the governing body that does help if they can shell out the work as it were properly. But a governing body like the Court gets itself too much into the hands of the permanent administration and that's alright if your Court has picked a good Secretary and he in turn picks good staff who sees that their job is not to lord it over the academics but supports the academics what is the University really for and so forth. That's the way things really have to go and reforms can get extremely difficult. I haven't talked about the other Principals. I'm not really sure that I want to talk very much about the other Principals. It would be embarrassing to say too much about Edward Wright for reasons that I'll explain. A long personal friendship, a great admiration for him both as a mathematician and as a human being. The way he looked after his wife was marvellous. Whether he was with me, I mean he would always get on with air crew, that was one of the reasons why I asked him in the first place I'm sure he would. But he and I disagreed so much about policy, about the expansion, that really life became very difficult. He wasn't easy because he was apt to contradict himself and almost forget at one stage. He was convinced I think in his latter days he was absolutely supporting me in opposing the expansion. It really makes it very difficult to say very much in that respect. He seemed far more tolerant of defects in others than he would have been of defects in himself I would have said. His mathematics would have been to a far higher standard than he would have tolerated I think in some other, even in his own department. Fraser Noble, lazy. Too much for the record, but charming chap, but always for the easy way out.
H Hamilton Fyfe I suppose you didn't know for very long?
J No I didn't, but I liked Hamilton Fyfe. He was quite a wit and very kind. The letters he wrote my wife because he knew she was in London when I came for my inaugural to reassure her, he wrote most enthusiastically saying that it even pleased an old colleague who had never been heard to approve one before, that is the kind of remark he would make. Yes he was very pleasant but I didn't see enough of him in administration to know. But in those days it was Butchart who was the great …
H You were talking about university Secretaries, perhaps you could personalise that a little?
J Yes, well of course Butchart, I knew nothing about the university except that Edward Wright was here and that George Thomson had done this work which ultimately won the Nobel prize and when Edward Wright suggested to me that I might apply for this chair and I persuaded, was it Tizard and Lindemann, St Clair, Charles Portal and Charles Meadhurst, that's five of them, they were all people like that and Edward Wright wrote back and said it would be a very good thing if I could get George Thomson to support me. This set me back a bit because George Thomson and I had various fights during the war. He for the latter part of the war was scientific adviser to the air staff and I was in charge of scientific intelligence on the air staff and there were a kind of battle come between us as to whose responsibility it was a particular job. For example, if it was science applied to intelligence was it his job or mine. I mean I thought it was mine and it usually was. Occasionally we stepped across one another's boundaries like that, trod on one another's toes and so forth. This happened in various departments during the war, particularly in organisations which had been thrown together rather hurriedly and not anyone thinking the terms of reference out properly. Anyway I didn't know how things would sound with George Thomson but I wrote to him and said it had been suggested that I might apply for the chair at Aberdeen, it was also suggested that if I did he might well be the hanging judge, certainly among the referees, I would be most grateful if he would consider being my referee but in view of all the arguments we had during the war I would entirely understand if he didn't want to or if he was supporting some other candidate. I got a postcard back at once saying splendid I'd already written to Butchart. This meant nothing to me at the time, but by this time now I was getting letters from Butchart and I of course knew now that he was the university Secretary and he was a man of tremendous loyalties and obviously he and George Thomson were very good friends I think partly from hill walking in Aberdeen and they were obviously on very good terms and since George Thomson was supporting me that was me in as far as Butchart was concerned. Now when the day came for the interviews there was one interview by a section of the Court in the morning, those on the science and medical science and in the afternoon there was a full Court. At that time, I had just come off the train, I was perhaps feeling rather tired and I wasn't been speaking very loudly, not that I often do but as a result one the members obviously had some difficulty in hearing and he, I think it was David Campbell, Dean of Medicine and he expressed some misgiving that I might not be able to, with my quiet voice, control a first year class. My old intelligence system told me this over lunchtime, so I was ready for the meeting in the afternoon, but Harry Butchart didn't know that I already was aware of the danger and nevertheless he felt he ought to try and warn me. The interview was in the old Court Room in Marischal and three of the candidates, that was two other professors and myself there, and I think I went in last. Harry Butchart having shepherded one candidate out of course then called from the door for the next one to come in so when it came to my turn, the previous candidate came out, Butchart appeared at the door and called me in and somehow between the door of the court room and the court table which can't be much more than about 5 yards, Butchart tried to warn me somehow and what he did, he had a pretty hoarse voice in the first place, Harry Butchart trying to whisper was really quite something, he put his hand up to his mouth to shade it as far as he could from the Court and said in what was a Butchart's whisper 'some of the old boys on the Court are very deaf so would you mind speaking up'. So I thought well I've got another friend here and as a result I deafened them and I could see the faces of one or two people were puzzled as to how this so quietly spoken young man in the morning could be like this in the afternoon. Anyway that was the end of the interview and back I went with Butchart, and again in the 5 yards between the table and the door he then put his hand up to his mouth and whispered as best he could 'I think that was alright' and that was me in. He was a terrific character, I wasn't there, I suppose it was about the time I was appointed, but what was the chap I'm trying to think of begins with a J, the logic professor …
H Ferguson?
J No, in London ?
H Joad?
J Joad yes. Joad had come up to give some lectures, Edward Wright told me this, well some people approved of Joad and some people didn't and I think Butchart was one who didn't. Anyway Joad had been asked if there was anything he would like to do. Yes, he'd like to do some hill walking while he was up and Butchart said "I'll take you out" and Edward Wright said in the evening of that day he saw Butchart standing at the bus stop just beside Bissett's to get the bus back to Old Aberdeen. Edward Wright saw him there and said "Have you finished, how did you get on?" He just said "walked him off his feet'" Well he was like that all the time. One could have a battle with him about various things but he always said "I like a man with fire in his belly" and he did indeed. He was quite tyrannical, it was before my day, but in the morning I believe between the wars he used to have all the attendants in Marischal on parade and all inspected before they went off to their departments and that sort of thing. Anyone who'd had anything to do with the services of course that was a great leg up as far as Butchart was concerned and what else could one say about him? The point about, this really is interesting, I mean he did almost everything in the university and one day, I suppose early 50s, I was having breakfast in the Athenaeum with Eric Ashby who, I think he was Vice-Chancellor of Belfast at the time, and they had been doing an investigation of the administrative costs of running universities and over breakfast he said "Can you tell me how you do it in Aberdeen", I said what. He said "Well look, we've just this survey of administrative expenses and we find that the administrative cost per student in Scotland is about half of what it is in the English universities. But in the Scottish universities the cost per student in Aberdeen is one half of what it is in other universities" he said "How do you do it?" I said "Simple, we have a Secretary called Harry Butchart and he gets the professors to do it" Which was rather true. There was a marvellous chap, McCleverty who was the university Treasurer when I came, he died unfortunately fairly shortly after and Nelson took over. There was John Craig, (was Charles there?) Bremner and Miss Noble in his office and one clerk of works and I think that was the lot pretty well. It really did a lot. And I was mentioning of course J A Ross who ran from the Crombie Mills and Butchart was always very enthusiastic for the amount of work he put in, which he did, an enormous amount of work on the Court and he got very little thanks for it partly because he was such a tyrant, but the thing was that Butchart and Ross had got together on the building of the Chemistry building and the Chemistry building does look a bit odd, the old Chemistry building. One reason why it looks so odd is that Butchart and Ross between them decided that it would be relatively cheap to put another floor on and the university contracted to this extra floor without ever going to the UGC about it. So the UGC then found themselves let in for it and Keith Murray who was chairman of the UGC told me that the whole of the building watched by the UGC and the supervision of university expenditure was the Chemistry building in Old Aberdeen because Butchart and Ross had put that floor on entirely from their own initiative without consulting anybody.
H Angus as University Secretary
J Angus, very brusque, very tough hardish exterior. Inside one of the kindest hearts one could meet. Very conscientious, did a lot. Inimitably suffered by comparisons with Butchart as a man of real character and never established quite the position in the University that Butchart had established, but one who I think really would try and help whenever he could. The administration began to grow under him in a way that it wouldn't have done under Butchart.
End of Interview
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