Second Part

0:09:07 My first term at Westminster I was commuting from my parents' house in Putney; I enjoyed the feeling of being in London; I was in a day-boy house but it still had the structure of prefects; I then went into hospital, the first four weeks to Queen's Square Hospital; it was very new technology then but they were able to  put me on a pivoting X-ray table and X-ray the spine which revealed a tumour; they didn't tell me what they told my parents, that there was only a chance that they could remove it and if not I would die; I then went to another hospital where I had surgery and they did get it out; this had been causing me terrible pain because it had been pressing on a nerve; I was then put in a ward with veterans of Dieppe etc.; what was traumatic for me was that after the operation I could not lift my head as they had taken muscles from my back; today I am supporting my head from side muscles in my neck; living with such people in the ward was an experience and I think it led to my interest in left-wing politics; later while I was at Westminster when my parents were abroad, I spent time with my Aunt Peggy Jay, my mother's sister; she was the wife of Douglas Jay who was a Cabinet Minister in the Labour Government of 1951; I used to visit them in Hampstead at weekends and met my cousins, Peter and Martin, who had been at the Dragon before me; we used to talk about Labour politics and I began to take a lot of interest in it; as a boarder, we used to read a lot of politics and I used to go to the House of Commons sometimes; this was the period of Suez; listening to the Government speech on the radio announcing war, which the opposition opposed; on Fridays at Westminster we had Corps and also went on field trips and learned to fire Bren guns; we also had Political Society sessions where I remember quizzing Lord Althorp who used to write about whether we needed to be a republic or not; Ted Heath came, but one of the most interesting was C.P. Snow; he told us that the British were narrow-minded as compared to Russia, where he had just been; there, no physicist could pass his exams unless he could write a very detailed paper on 'War and Peace'; I found it very stimulating and began to read such works; it was a school that made you feel you should take an interest and participate in aspects of public life; children who are not brought up in capital cities feel politics quite alien generally, whereas those in such cities feel politics are relevant to them; the Dragon was unusual; the other feature of being at Westminster was that I did have some splendid teachers; for mathematics I had a great German teacher called Adolf Prag; we had a very small class; in those days the mathematics sixth had four boys in it while there were twenty-seven in classics; at that time Dan Mackenzie was in the same class; in a divinity class, which was taken by a Canon from Westminster Abbey, we were asked who believed in God; this was not a question we were usually asked, but Dan said he did not believe because he was a scientist; we were a very strong group of scientists and have remained close; at that time we were told that it would be impossible to become scientists unless we were fluent in German; even as an undergraduate when I had vacation jobs in ICI, I was told I had to learn German; in the United States in the sixties they had to learn two foreign languages, and many tried to learn Russian or German; at that time, as a scientist, you didn't feel you were the dominant culture speaking English

13:14:07 My parents were abroad much of the time and I had two holidays in Malaya where my father was Deputy High Commissioner; this was a period of war, fighting Chinese guerrillas; interesting seeing a country that was going towards independence; by that time I was seventeen and did a student project, touring round and getting information on smallholdings and rubber-growing; found the essay recently and can see it was based on many interviews and studies; although I was very interested in science I was also interested in wider political matters; Malaya became independent in August 1957 when I was there for the holidays; by July they had still not got a National Anthem; they had held a competition for it and Benjamin Britten had sent an entry to Tunku Abdul Rahman; my father was a very good pianist and played on Radio Malaya; the Tunku came to my father's house and asked him to play this piece; they agreed that it would not do but sent back suggestions of how it could be changed to Britten, who was not amused; they had the brilliant idea of taking a popular dance tune and slowing it down which worked very well; it was quite an occasion with the Duke of Gloucester representing the Queen; this was the period of the end of empire; more than many of my colleagues I have embraced Europe; I was sceptical to start with, and sadly this is still not the majority view, but the marvellous thing about modern Britain is that it is part of Europe

19:00:06 On religion, I am a semi-believer; I can't accept the bleakness of this extraordinary event in biochemistry and physics; by sometimes going to church, by sometimes having semi-religious social things together, we create good feelings about ourselves and work together better; it is not a rationally understood set of beliefs and reactions, but it is somewhere near where I am; by saying the Lord's Prayer as I have done for sixty years, I am somehow connected with the past; I don't go much further than that but see the alternative as too bleak

22:02:09 Westminster had a kind of connection with Trinity, Cambridge, for its scientists; I had a strong connection as my grandfather had been a Fellow of Trinity, and his two brothers had been there; before I went I had time out where I worked on a building site in Cardiff for four or five months as a trainee engineer; lived in a small council house and went down to the site by truck every day; I was paid 1/11d an hour so I got £8 a week with board and lodging paid; it was a cold site on the docks where they were building a terminal; witnessed extraordinary industrial relations where a foreman punched a worker on the nose; when I remonstrated with him he said he was trying to build an oil refinery not win a popularity contest; it was very interesting as I was already trying to understand the maths and science in relation to what these people were doing; it was a very primitive place and I had an escort who carried my theodolite; he was a huge black man and made sure that the workers obeyed my instructions; his piece of advice to me was to have children by one woman as family allowance was paid only for the second and subsequent children; he had three by different women so got nothing at that time; this situation was not rectified until the Labour Government of 1974; this was quite a formative period before coming to Trinity, and I had some pretty realistic ideas about society as a result; at Trinity I quickly joined the Human Relations and Industry Group which was run by the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations, Professor Kirkaldy at King's; a lot of engineers were involved as the thinking then was that to be an engineer you had to be a manager; we had evenings when shop stewards from the ship yards would confront managers; there was quite a sudden change in Cambridge where management became a more technical business; the only people who brought shop stewards to Cambridge after that was the Socialist Workers' Party; I also went to the Labour Party in Cambridge but found the undergraduate politics puerile; Raymond Williams was here but didn't come to meetings very much; I only got really interested in politics when I went to America as a post-doc. in 1967

30:46:17 I was taught by Mr Binney in Trinity, an old-fashioned hydraulics engineer; we used to go for walks with him on Sundays over the fens looking at the drains; the only superstar was Baker, the head of engineering; at that time engineering was a million miles from electronics; one of my professors, Shurcliff, with whom I became a research student, talked about modern ideas of connecting gases and magnetic fields, and commented on how the Americans were using this technology to control the way rockets might land, and the errors that might occur; taught with humour; found that the lecturers I liked, most did not, and vice versa; another element which was only found in the UK was being taught in the lab; marvellous to be taught in a place where machines were running while we were being taught; we still used fly-wheel gas engines that dated from 1905, but for teaching the principles they were tremendous

35:24:08 At Trinity in my year there were thirty old Etonians and ten old Westminsters; coming back as a Don was interesting as the Etonians treat them as akin to an under-gamekeeper or a floor sweeper; the important thing for them was beagling at the weekend with the Trinity Foot; I played soccer with them but also grammar school boys; saw it all as part of the pageantry of life; it was actually very friendly; some of my closest friends were reading philosophy, English and history, and we would spend a lot of time talking endlessly, or going to films; I went on a football tour in my first time with this extraordinary mixture of people; I think the collegiate system works very well for undergraduates but is a near disaster for many academic lives subsequently; having moved from Trinity to University College, London, and having seen American universities which don't have colleges, I see that having huge advantages; the curious thing about the collegiate system is that you may have conversations over lunch but they each goes back to his silo; if you don't have colleges, interdepartmental connections are stronger; another feature of Cambridge is that it prides itself on intellectual prowess and ownership, whereas if you are at an empirical, utilitarian place, like UCL, you judge knowledge more by its use and its connections; I felt very privileged when I went back to Trinity as a Fellow because I was of an era where a lot of the Fellows had had outside careers - E.H. Carr and Vivian, also Otto Frisch; the colleges were fantastic as they had come from all sorts of places; feel that the college recruitment policies have become far too narrow and Cambridge's reputation may be based on past glories; unless there is a very firm policy to keep recruiting people from outside, the system becomes too cosy; for undergraduates it is fantastic and I enjoyed it, but it was then very insular, English, male; I met an Italian girl here and later went to see her family in Rome, then I met my present wife, but it was a pretty male life; during that time I also travelled in Europe, Germany in particular, which I enjoyed; when I came to think about what to do, one idea was to train as a civil engineer; on one of my vacations I went to Pakistan where my father was then and saw large irrigation projects; I planned to go to America to learn civil engineering, but then I met my wife; instead I decided to become a research student in Cambridge, which I did with my supervisor, Shurcliff, in the new technology of magnetic fields which people thought was going to be a new way of improving the efficiency of power stations; it was an exciting period when a lot of public money was being spent; I had an industrial scholarship to pay for my PhD on this subject; in doing so there was new mathematics to be done, which was interesting; after a year my professor got the job of head of engineering at Warwick; I went with him and at that time also got married; I worked in an aircraft factory as there was no university; my wife, a textile designer, was wardrobe mistress in the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, a very progressive theatre in the 1960s; on one occasion the Minister of Culture, Jenny Lee, came and chaired the discussion at the end of 'Lock up Your Daughters'

47:00:00 I did a PhD and it was very exciting; I gave seminars on what I had done and people were very excited by it and gave me ideas of how it could be improved; by the time I had finished my PhD I had written joint papers with a number of professors; as a social person I thought you could make progress faster by working with other people;  I also had to confront distinguished people who had made mistakes in their maths; I then put in for a Trinity fellowship and got one; I then went to South Africa as a visiting lecturer for about three months; I then went to America on a Fulbright scholarship which was extremely influential in my life, partly because I was doing interesting scientific work but we were there in 1967 when things were hotting up; one evening we were driving back from New York and drove into Haarlem in the middle of a riot; my wife was working in the anti-Vietnam movement which was run with extraordinary efficiency; to be with the million people marching on the Pentagon was an extraordinary experience; while in Africa we were in a bus that was taken over by the Ugandan Army which was out of control; have been in quite a few events like this where things erupt; I incline towards the authoritarian, keeping things under control as people get very frightened if control is lost