Oral History of British Science

Professor Sir Alan Cottrell (1919-2012)

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

The Oral History of British Science team were saddened to learn of the death last week of interviewee Sir Alan Cottrell.  Sir Alan was born in Birmingham in 1919 and studied at the University there. A centrally important figure in the modern history of metallurgy, he spent the second Second World War improving the hardening of tank armour, before moving postwar to atomic research establishment at Harwell, where he worked ensuring the safety of the Magnox nuclear reactors. As Goldsmiths Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge he became a champion of new approaches to metallurgy and understanding how materials behave on an atomic level. In 1965 he left academic life to serve in a succession of senior posts in the scientific civil service, and succeeded Sir Solly Zuckerman as Chief Scientific Adviser in 1971.

In the following clip from his interview, recorded last year, Sir Alan reflected on the long term influence that being a scientist in wartime had on him.

 

Sir Alan Cottrell - being a scientist during WW2

 

The interview with Sir Alan can be accessed online via British Library Sounds.

From P.1127 to Harrier Jump Jet

Dr Thomas Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

The 1950s were a time of dramatic change in aircraft design. Aeronautical engineers experimented with the new jet and rocket engines, delta and swept wing aircraft shapes, and new concepts for flight, such as supersonic speeds and vertical take off and landing. Excited by the growing power of jet engines, aircraft designers reasoned that aircraft may no longer need conventional runways - they could simply blast themselves vertically into the sky on take off, and land on a cushion of jet thrust on return.

And yet for all the many vertical take off prototypes and projects that were started across the world in this time, only one led to a truly successful production aircraft - the Hawker P.1127, which evolved into the Harrier.

Last summer we took Made in Britain interviewee Ralph Hooper to Brooklands Museum in Surrey, home to one of the prototype P.1127s which he began the original design of in 1957. In the following video clip Ralph discusses the early days of this long lived aircraft.

  

The life story audio interview with Ralph is catalogued as C1379/27 on the British Library Sound Archive catalogue whilst the video interview is catalogued as C1379/27A.

 

Scientists in retirement

Dr Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet, writes:

Life story interviews do not stop at official retirement ages, or peter out once the scientist leaves their university department, government research establishment or private laboratory. Scientists are followed into retirement. 

Some scientists stop observing and experimenting, but continue to read about developments in their fields.  Others continue to work in laboratories at home.  Richard West explains why his particular form of Quaternary geology could be pursued independently of the University of Cambridge:  

‘And what has been the effect of not having access to...university equipment...?

It’s made no difference at all to me.  I can do all this at very low cost, I don’t need a grant, I can do it all at home; I call it kitchen science. ...No, I think normally if you’re in post...so much of your university time is taken up with committee work, going to meetings, teaching, trying to get money for research, but I can do all the things I need to do with the aid of a low power microscope and these measuring cylinders for sorting out sediment.’ [Richard West, C1379/34, track 14, 45:09 – 46:34]

For scientists whose research depends upon the use of instruments not easily set up at home, such as mass spectrometers, the internet has offered a form of remote control.  Stephen Moorbath continues to work in the isotopic dating of rocks through email exchanges with former colleagues running laboratories:

‘I don’t know how I’d manage without computers.  I’m glad I got into it, because I know one or two old colleagues who never got into it and they’re just isolated.  So it’s part and parcel of my life and it’s helped me to carry on.’ [Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36, track 11, 49:32 – 49:52]

Ann Wintle describes the use of email and Skype messaging to conduct research in luminescence dating, at a distance:

‘...when you’re wanting to have a detailed discussion with somebody equivalent to having a discussion with them in the room...the Skype comes in and then you’re – you can do instant texting...you can almost type as fast as you can talk.  ...And then we send – we’re still sending emails with files on if we want to know – you know, “well, what does that dataset look like” and, “ooh, go check your email box, I’ve just sent it to you.”  So you can get that and then you can look at it and then you can both talk about it.  ...I can see why in the past some people might have either gone very solitary when they retired or they disengaged totally from their academic field because they didn’t have any interactions....in this way...   Now you’ve got the communication...you can discuss things with anybody anywhere, so you’ve I think probably got more chance of staying involved with your research ideas.  Though you don’t have the equipment to do it yourself you’ve still got the ideas and if you hit it right you can persuade somebody to do the experiment you would do if you were there.’ [Ann Wintle, C1379/57 track 11, 13:57-15:37]

In contrast, other scientists experience retirement as a break with the past.  Desmond King-Hele wrote a poem about his retirement from the Royal Aircraft Establishment in 1988:

            ‘Escape:

After 50 years in institutions where my life was sheltered and sure

             I’ve come out for community care

For a course of kill or cure

Life’s a joke that’s just begun

At the tender age of 61’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 1:27 - 1:47]

He explains that there was no wish to continue on an existing orbit:

‘I could see that the work that I had done had been extremely sort of … innovative in a way to start with, and then as time went on it became more routine but we were still contributing quite considerably to knowledge...about the shape of the Earth and the upper atmosphere, but there was no enthusiasm for the work from the RAE as you know, and it...was...obvious that all the new things that were coming in, like laser tracking...were going to lead to…much more accurate knowledge of the Earth in both respects....  And so I could foresee that the work was not going to continue to be, if you like, top class...so I was in a way quite content to allow it to cease rather than, like some academics do, continue on with their own line after they retire.  And I realised that what I wanted to do was to retire and do something different, like history of science; writing about Erasmus Darwin.’ [Desmond King-Hele, C1379/13, track 16, 3:02 – 4:30]

As the number of interviews complete or in-progress for An Oral History of British Science passes 60, a full spectrum of scientific retirements is becoming available at http://sounds.bl.uk.

Broken Black Arrow

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Forty years ago, on October 28th 1971, Britain took a small step of its own into joining the space race with the launch of Prospero X-3, a 66kg scientific satellite, lifted into low earth orbit about a 40 foot tall rocket codenamed BLACK ARROW.

Launched from Woomera in Australia, Black Arrow was uniquely a British effort. The rocket and its payload were designed and built by several British companies and government labs in such places as the Isle of Wight, Ansty, Westcott, and Farnborough. However, after the failure of two of the three earlier test flights, at the time of its success Black Arrow had already been cancelled on economic grounds, but permission was given to fire the last rocket, Black Arrow R3 anyway.

Despite its eventual success Black Arrow remained cancelled. Britain abandoned the development of space rockets in favour of using American launchers and channelled available resources into satellite development instead. To those making political decisions an independent space launcher was seen as an unaffordably expensive luxury at a time of economic hardships and when the Americans were offering to launch British satellites aboard their rockets at lower cost. And as it was, Black Arrow was too small to carry a large telecommunication satellite made with the bulky electronics of the day, the potential area of profit at the time.

However, to the engineers involved in creating Black Arrow it was a tough decision. It could have been the basis for a British space rocket industry, particularly as improvements in electronics soon made smaller satellites possible, and bought national pride to a country whose fortunes were at a low. Despite early setbacks it had been a great technical achievement for a bargain price. By developing the rocket from existing technology used in the smaller Black Knight scientific rocket, Black Arrow cost around £10,000,000 – peanuts compared to the $25,000,000,000 NASA was spending at same the time to put a man onto the moon.

Whatever the rights and wrong of the situation, Black Arrow was an incredible achievement for British technology, attested to by the fact that four decades later the Prospero satellite is still in orbit around the earth, a tantalising hint to what a British space programme could have achieved.

The following video clip was filmed with the lower section of a Black Arrow at the Rolls Royce Heritage Centre in Derby. In it John Scott-Scott, one of the engineers at Bristol-Siddeley involved with the development of Black Arrow's rocket engines, reflects on the success and cancellation of the project. 

   

The audio and video interviews with John Scott-Scott are archived at the British Library under the Sound Archive Catalogue reference C1379/32.

Oral History of British Science Interviewees and the Holocaust

Dr Sally Horrocks, Senior Academic Consultant for An Oral History of British Science, writes:

My Leicester colleagues Olaf Jensen and Alex Korb, who run the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, have organised a Holocaust Awareness Week from 24-27 October.  This has prompted me to think about the ways in which memories linked with the Holocaust, the impact of Nazi racial policies and associated events emerge from several OHBS interviews.  The ‘life story’ nature of the interviews means that although interviewees are selected because of their involvement with science and technology, their memories cover a wide range of topics outside these areas, ensuring that they will provide a resource for historians and other users with interests that have nothing to do with science!

 

Among our interviewees have been three, Frank Land, Stephen Moorbath and Stephanie Shirley, who as children fled from Germany during the late 1930s along with some, but not all, of their family members.  These interviews contain poignant accounts of childhoods and families disrupted and relatives left behind. They compliment a substantial body of existing oral history that the British Library already holds on this topic and I would be interested to know whether our accounts differ from those that were collected with an explicit focus on this aspect of interviewees lives, and if so how. 

Stephen Moorbath, who was interviewed for the Changing Planet strand for his work in geochemistry, was born in Magdeburg in 1929.  When he was nine his father, a Jewish doctor, was interned. Here he discusses how his family coped with his father’s internment, and the moment of his release.

Stephen Moorbath on father's internment

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:10:52 - 00:12:35)

 

Soon after this release Moorbath and his father left for Britain, arriving on 24^th May 1939.  His mother was left behind, but arrangements were in hand for her to leave Germany when war broke out, as he explains here.

Stephen Moorbath on moving to England

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:15:28 - 00:16:52)

 

Soon afterwards Moorbath’s father was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, leaving Stephen to be cared for with other Jewish refugee children by a series of hosts, some of them far from sympathetic to their charges.

Stephen Moorbath on refugee homes

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 2 (00:18:32 - 00:22:37)

 

Frank Land, interviewed for Made in Britain as a member of the pioneering LEO computer team at Lyons, also experienced the internment of his father on the Isle of Man.  Unlike Stephen Moorbath, however, he had been fortunate enough to arrive in England with his twin brother, Richard, and his mother, Zoscha and to have a number of relatives already resident in Britain.  With the family breadwinner absent Land’s mother established a successful business which she continued once her husband was released.

Frank Land on his mother's business

Frank Land, C1379/17 Track 2 (00:02:13 - 00:03:43)

 

Land also recollected the impressions he had gained from his father about the experience of internment, which was far from being wholly negative.

Frank Land on father's internment

Frank Land, C1379/17 Track 5 (00:02:17 - 00:03:32)

 

Unfortunately our project has come too late to include émigré scientist from Germany and central Europe who came to Britain during the 1930s, but earlier NLS projects carried out extensive interviews with two of them, Joseph Rotblat and Max Perutz.  What several of our interviewees do mention is the impact of the conviction for spying of one of these émigrés, Klaus Fuchs on security procedures, particularly at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.  Stephen Moorbath worked at Harwell between 1948 and 1951 and so was there when Fuchs’ activities became public.

Stephen Moorbath on the Klaus Fuchs scandal

Stephen Moorbath, C1379/36 Track 4 (00:05:43 - 00:07:22)

Guest Blogger: Charlotte Walter, MSc student

We have a 'guest blogger' this week: Charlotte Walter, a History of Science student at Imperial College London and UCL.  We are very keen to hear from researchers who have used OHBS material (or indeed any of the science and technology oral history collections at the British Library) so please do get in touch.

I recently used the oral history and National Life Stories data in my MSc dissertation, 'How Families Influence Scientific Careers' for the MSc Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, run jointly by Imperial College London and UCL. The oral history interviews explored all aspects of the scientists lives, and therefore gave me the opportunity to examine how families influence different stages of scientific career.

The study found that family encouragement, value of education and involvement in childhood experiences all appeared to contribute to individuals taking an initial interest in science, and encouraged scientists to take a scientific direction in their educational and career choices. The interviews also suggested that choices to work abroad – a common aspect of a scientific career – were connected to life priorities shaped by both current and anticipated family commitments. Lastly, the nature of scientific careers was found to present problems for scientists when balancing career and family life. This was seen to affect males and females differently, with the two female scientist interviewees both contributing part of their success to prioritising their careers over their family commitments. It is hoped that the results of this study will aid future policies which would benefit from appreciating how families influence all stages of scientific careers.

By HEC! An Electronic Brain For Business?!

Tom Lean, interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Consider how many computers fill the typical modern workplace, all those dozens of laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and other gizmos. Now, take a step back to the office of the late 1940s and count the computers. Or, more likely, notice their complete absence. But not for long...

After its early development by scientists and engineers in the 1940s, it was only a few years before people started putting the 'electronic brain' to work on commercial problems. Lyons' LEO office computers have become well known, but they weren't the only ones producing computers for business. The British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM), saw the development of computers as putting at risk its existing market of mechanical punched-card office machines. The solution? Build a computer of their own to offer to customers...

In the early 1950s Made in Britain interviewee Dr Raymond Bird was asked to build a computer for BTM based on a prototype built by Birkbeck College's Andrew Donald Booth. The resultant Hollerith Electronic Computer, or HEC1 was a compact and handy machine, which was the origin for the most commercially successful series of business computers in 1950s Britain, the HEC4 or BTM1200 series. Last year we reunited Ray with the HEC1 computer he built in 1951, now stored by Birmingham Museums, and filmed a video interview, excerpts of which are now on the British Library's YouTube channel.

The entire video interview is archived at the British Library (Sound Archive catalogue reference C1379/04A)

   

Scientific Manpower

Dr Sally Horrocks, Senior Academic Consultant for An Oral History of British Science, writes:

From World War Two through to the late 1960s there was a persistent belief among many politicians and policy makers that Britain was suffering from a shortage of what was termed ‘scientific manpower’. This belief had very real policy consequences, something that I have written about before, mainly using documents from The National Archives and the CBI Predecessor Archive at Warwick University’s Modern Records Centre.  Such material tends to tell the story from the perspective of the policy makers and administrators, and informs us about the motivations for policy decisions and their evolution.  As my contribution to the Kent Scientific Governance conference I decided to make my first foray into using the interviews collected by the Oral History of British Science to see what they could tell us about how the ‘administered'- those people whose lives and careers were directly affected by the policies and procedures whose evolution I had previously studied- felt about all this. 

Using OHBS interviews enabled me to ask questions about the problem of scientific manpower that I could not have contemplated previously, with each individual interview providing a window into the range of experiences and variety of impacts of policy, as well as how these changed over time.  Wartime graduates such as Geoff Tootill recalled how the decisions of officials of the Central (Scientific and Technical) Register, which allocated new graduates to appropriate wartime employment took his subsequent career in a direction he would never have envisaged before the war.  He and others also spoke eloquently about their commitment to the war effort and pride in the contributions they made.

GeoffTootill - Radio Location war work

Geoff Tootill, C1379/02 Track 1 (01:28:31 - 01:29:53)

 

The experiences of those who graduated immediately after the war were more equivocal, while the advent of National Service in 1949 forced many to make choices about the nature and timing of their service.  John Glen spoke about being asked to spend his National Service in the Metallurgy Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell rather than ‘square bashing’, an opportunity he jumped at.

John Glen - AERE Harwell

John Glen, C1379/26 Track 3 (11:34 - 12:46)

 

This was despite the requirements of secrecy that came with working at Harwell and difficulties this meant for his continuing interest in the physics of ice, which he had studied for his PhD.

John Glen - Official Secrets Act

John Glen, C1379/26 Track 3 (16:45 - 17:49)

 

Stephen Moorbath also worked at Harwell, in his case during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was able to benefit from efforts to increase the supply of scientists by securing a scholarship to study at university, something that had previously been unaffordable for him.  Once at Oxford he changed from chemistry to geology, the foundation of his subsequent career in geochemistry.

As yet we have fewer interviewees who graduated after the end of National Service (the last graduates were called up in 1959) but the very absence of mention of these issues in their interviews is perhaps itself indicative of the changed situation.

Interviewees also suggest that the direction of scientific manpower had personal and well as career consequences, bringing scientists into contact with future marriage partners and life-long friends as well as mentors and colleagues.  All of their recollections help us to understand the personal consequences that arose from these policies and suggest how they might be used by other historians to start asking questions that cannot be answered elsewhere in the archives. 

The Man From The Ministry

Tom Lean, project interviewer for Made in Britain, writes:

Once upon a time the British government maintained an extensive network of research establishments, which carried out advanced research into everything from radar and the atom bomb to mechanical engineering and house building materials. After changes in the 1980s, the establishments were run down and much research farmed out to universities and private companies. But many of our interviewees passed through posts in government laboratories over the years and I've got really interested in the stories of former scientific civil servants and the window they offer into a closed world now vanished.

Sally Horrocks (the Senior Academic Advisor for the project) and myself attended the splendid Governance in Science conference at the University of Kent earlier this month. For myself, this was a great opportunity to use some of the project material to try and build up a portrait of the scientific civil servant in context. I've been particularly interested in how the unique conditions of government service, such as secrecy, direct duty to the state, and the intricacies of civil service system shape scientific careers.

There can be, as we might expect, an element of duty to government scientific service. For example Sir Alan Cottrell, a metallurgist at the Atomic Energy Establishment Harwell in the 1950s and government Chief Scientific Advisor in the 1970s, reflected how being directed to work as a scientist on military research in the 1940s left him wanting his work to contribute something to the nation:

Sir Alan Cottrell - being a scientist during WW2

Despite what we might expect about scientists working to the direction of the state under secretive conditions, interviewees often remark on the generous degrees of freedom they worked under. For example former Royal Aircraft Establishment materials scientist Roger Moreton, one of the team that pioneered carbon fibre in the the 1960s recalled on several occasions in his interview the considerable freedoms to scientists working at Farnborough:

Roger Moreton - freedoms at Farnborough

*n.b. clips from two different parts of the interview.

However, for all the freedoms that interviewees explicitly talk about they also implicitly acknowledge their position as components in a wider system of government science. They describe careers in which they were directed into certain posts where their skills were needed, of moral compromises over their work, the intricacies of career hierarchies and civil service rank structures, and the tricks needed to progress within them. The impression we are left with is of individuals who were free to pursue their scientific interests, but at the same time caught within a government machine that imposed structures on them directed their freedoms to achieve wider goals. Two different perspectives on the scientific civil servant, but mutually compatible and both of them true.

Why not check out some of An Oral History of British Science's recordings with former government scientists?

• Sir Alan Cottrell - Atomic Energy Agency, Chief Scientific Advisor.
• Geoff Tootill - Telecommunications Research Establishment, Royal Aircraft Establishment, European Space Research Organisation, National Physical Laboratory.
• Desmond King-Hele - Royal Aircraft Establishment.

 

Past presence in place

Dr Paul Merchant, interviewer for A Changing Planet, writes:

Many of those interviewed for the Changing Planet strand of An Oral History of British Science produced scientific knowledges in particular places – on glaciers and ice sheets, by African lakes, on certain stretches of coastline or ocean.  They were actually there – their bodies were in these places – they didn’t just see; they moved, reacted, smelt, felt, heard and in other ways experienced place physically. 

Hayden Lorimer, a cultural geographer concerned with the history of geographical fieldwork, worries that these physical, bodily experiences might be difficult to recover in historical work:  

‘the pragmatic biographer must always acknowledge inherent difficulties in tracing ways of moving, feeling or performing in the past.  ...the passage of time quickly erodes ephemeral multi-sensual realms, rendering them all the more elusive.  ...a twin task emerges for historians of geography: first, one of accessing haptic, sonic and kinaesthetic forms of experience; and second, to consider the complex interplay between these embodied experiences and the formation of geographical knowledge’.¹

An Oral History of British Science is well placed to take this on.  The interviews are long (8-15 hours), allowing past practices/experiences to be turned over and over, stepped-out, mentally relived.  Landscapes are revisited in stories that linger on details of experience, of bodily relations with place.  But we must be careful to ensure that our questioning explores all kinds of sensing of place – not just looking.  Our interviews were present in landscape and we ought to consider carefully how best to explore this presence.     

1. H. Lorimer, 'Telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 28, 2003, p.202