Third Part 3rd June 2009

0:09:07 Returned from USA in January 1968 and joined the Central Electricity Research Laboratories; given the task of looking at why three out of six cooling towers had all collapsed on one day in about 1965 in a high wind, all vibrating as they did so; they gave me time to study turbulence which I had not studied before; I began to develop new ideas of how turbulence impacts on buildings; we did experiments which emerged later into big theory about how turbulence is distorted; my whole professional life started with this academic research on inhomogeneous turbulence; continued this research after leaving, but while I was there found other scientists dealing with large questions such as the growing UK nuclear power programme, also researching acid rain; sadly these sorts of findings are not communicated well so that the Government was apparently not aware of acid rain until some twenty years after; the earlier research that I was doing in my PhD which was sponsored by the Electricity board, came to a grinding halt because they said that nuclear power was going to be so cheap that you would barely need to metre it; we had some discussions in seminars about why they were pushing ahead with nuclear power so strongly since the Act of Parliament that set up the Electricity Generating Board made no mention of nuclear being the reason for the institute; I learned that the Ministers in passing the Act stated in Parliament that this was one of the primary roles of the organization; we also did experiments looking at icing of overhead electric cables and oscillations of wind; it was then suggested that I apply for a job back in Cambridge and in 1970 I was appointed as a lecturer in applied mathematics, which was quickly turned into a joint lectureship in engineering; I had a very interesting time here for twenty-two years; the advantage was that both departments thought of me in the other department so I avoided much of the administrative responsibilities; I was able to have projects and research students in both disciplines; we were able to initiate new course on issues of environment; in the early 1970s one of the questions was whether we were getting into the period of a new ice age; by the late 70s after the hot summer of 1976, people began to measure increasing carbon dioxide on a mountain in Hawaii and the mood swung the other way; progressively I had more and more PhD students some of whom worked on this important theory of turbulence changes over hills and around buildings, continuing the work that I had begun; I began to work on the serious question of how pollutants disperse in the atmosphere; I wrote some important papers and it was nice to see people picking them up and using them for practical purposes, particularly in America; at that time it was hard to get new ideas applied in the UK; we estimated how pollution moved around and realized that if you could get the Americans to adopt them then it would be easier to get them taken up here; on sabbatical leave we went to America and I worked for the Environmental Protection Agency; I helped them with some experiments and also did field experiments on a hill in Idaho where pollution was impacting; this verified beyond doubt how pollutants move in complicated flows; by the middle 1980s, after writing reports for government departments etc., a number of people felt we ought to make it more systematic; with colleagues I formed a small company - Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants; we started with just one telephone answering machine, then moved to an office on Shire Hill, and is now on King's Parade; we had support from many Government agencies with computers; our methods were ones that people were able to use after a brief training; the late 80s was a time of great change in computing; we felt we needed a screen system so started developing our own variant of Windows; luckily Microsoft developed theirs, but it was useful having attempted to do our own

11:48:00 This was a very interesting period; the head of my department, Professor Batchelor, an Australian (when I was appointed I was the only Englishman on the applied side), and he was a very inspiring and extraordinary man; he was rather fierce and departmental meeting were extraordinary affairs; Herbert Huppert was there; he had come via the United States from Australia; because of his background he had an easy relationship with Batchelor; Herbert started off in oceanography and then switched to volcanoes and avalanches and his work had been influential; he didn't much enjoy the supervision side of college life, but I found that interesting; I often bump into people that I have supervised and find that quite fun; it is a very intense life of a Don in Cambridge where you are doing supervision, research, lecturing, and, in my case, consulting; when I came back from America in 1968 I had been so appalled by what I had been seeing of the ethnic divide that I threw myself into local politics in Britain, first in London in the Labour Party, where I was on their right wing; coming to Cambridge was interesting as the debates were about whether Cambridge should have its own science parks; Trinity, where I was, used its land for the first one, and that began to change the atmosphere in Cambridge; on our street, Americans came in to work on the sites; some people in the Labour Party were horrified by the thought of more middle-class people coming to Cambridge, suggesting it would become like an inland Bournemouth; the Cambridge science parks now employ over 30,000 people and it had revolutionized Cambridge; one of the big companies that came, for which I can take some credit, was a French-American oil exploration company called Schlumberger; persuaded them to build on the Cambridge University site and Swinnerton-Dyer, who was also on the planning committee, used the £3m they paid to buy the Old Addenbrooke’s site which was otherwise going to be sold; I was on the City council for three years from 1971-4 and in my second years was leader of the Labour group; during that time we introduced the pedestrianization of Cambridge; one of the minor reforms was to allow council tenants to choose the colour of their front doors; this was all part of my life as well as being a father of three children

18:49:05 Another dimension was the great European dimension which I would have not been able to experience if I had stayed in America; I was an anti-European in the 60s having seen how backward their agriculture was, but I had some excellent German friends and I began to change my attitude; Batchelor was very keen on the European Mechanics movement and I began to take a big role in stimulating meetings; collaborative projects within the European Union were very exciting and enabled one to interact with people all across Europe; some of the ideas I had certainly emerged from that period; by the middle 80s we were visited by Frenchmen who suggested we should have a big European centre for fluid mechanics and computing; what that did turn into was a very effective network of 150 laboratories and companies across Europe of which I was the Secretary General; it has been running for twenty years despite Brussels not being very happy with it as they like to control everything; I joined the Meteorological dining club in the middle 80s and met other members there in London; in 1991 I was asked whether I would be interested in applying for the job as the head of the Meteorological Office; the idea of moving to Bracknell for five years to be in charge of 2,500 people and 300 researchers was very exciting; whereas computers were not being used in weather forecasts in the early 70s, by this time the connections between computing and satellites was all coming together; it was not just an administrative job but was also technical; I was interviewed in Whitehall; one of the interviewers was Swinnerton-Dyer among the academics; the second Under-Secretary for the Ministry of Defence confirmed that I thought it should remain in that ministry rather than going to Environment; I had been warned that this question would require a positive answer if I hoped to get the job

24:24:10 It was a challenging and interesting job; it was originally within the Government, then in 1989 it had become an executive agency and had a certain amount of independence under my predecessor, Sir John Houghton; soon after I arrived they wanted to turn it into a different sort of agency, a trading fund agency, that was expected to make profits; instead of being given an assured amount of money by different government departments, the money that was originally given to the Met Office was given to the clients in government; for example, the Royal Air Force were given money, and could have then decided to buy more meteorology and less airplanes or vice-versa; we had a famous City accountancy advisory firm advising us; it was interesting and part of the so-called total quality improvement, to do with thinking about how the organization was working, and the communications systems; very soon you find these gurus have their own ideas; the organization had been quite rigid and it was interesting to introduce these new methods of thinking; convened lots of meetings with the staff so they all knew me in the end, which was not true of my predecessor; the final conclusion was to become a trading fund on this basis but we had no idea what the profit would be at the end of the year; to our astonishment we got twice the profit we were meant to; by that time I had already left so my successor had to renegotiate contracts; found it very interesting going into the forecasting office and seeing hurricanes off Florida or snow storms in Iraq; I got interested in it at a human level as I was horrified three weeks after I arrived in the job to read of thousands of people dying of cold on the Iran-Iraq border; we knew that there was going to be this cold weather and I asked why we hadn't told them; I learned that we were not allowed to tell them; under international rules you are only allowed to tell people if there was an imminent hurricane; that is still the case; at the international meeting where I spoke on natural disasters in 1994 the Chinese delegate said this was monstrous interference in the internal affairs of other countries; we greatly improved the method of forecasting hurricanes; I had given a seminar in Beijing when a man from Hong Kong suggested that we could do a lot better with hurricane forecasting than we had been; I invited him to Bracknell and with a few lines of computer code within three or four weeks we suddenly improved the accuracy by some 30%; this method was then picked up by the rest of the world; so part of my time was representing the UK internationally; we had two or three week meetings in Geneva every summer where we really made big progress; in my first year I got them to agree to publish every year the final temperature of the world; I tried to get them to improve their financial reporting system; until 1995 meteorology was entirely concerned with the world outside towns whereas more than 50% were living in urban areas; we moved an important resolution and that began to change

33:24:24 During that time I was still a visiting professor in Cambridge and used to come up on Saturdays, and I began to move forward into the next phase of my academic research; the other thing was that I was in Whitehall and found what a devious place it actually is; we once had a meeting with very senior people from the MOD where someone said that at such meetings everybody lies; the Permanent Secretary was horrified, but after some discussion we concluded that people had to lie as they were dealing with such difficult things that they can't always say the truth; he was commenting that in Britain we have the defence, army and civilian people all in the same organization which makes it stressful in terms of decisions; most other countries separate them somewhat; nevertheless, I was surprised and shocked that you could agree something with someone and then it would be denied; the curious thing about the academic world is that people really don't lie much; learnt that you must never say that something was unacceptable because you have no way of retreat; the time came to consider my next move; after an extension of six months at the Met Office I came back into the academic world, and at the same time went back to my company as a director; in 1997 I spent three months in Toulouse working at a French institute connected to their meteorological office; I then went to America to do environmental work; by this time I understood weather, one of the features of which is its localized nature; like other things, there are standard models of weather, so that a valley was always a Swiss valley, whereas the weather pattern of a valley in Arizona is quite different

38:42:06 I then came back to Cambridge; if you have left a place and come back changed as a person it is very difficult to go back to that place again; people expected me to be unchanged; had difficulties over my Met Office pension which Trinity wanted to take from me; the result was that my Trinity fellowship continued but not my senior research fellowship; I then went back to University College in 1999 as Professor of Climate Modelling which was really appropriate; when I came back to Cambridge I was amazed to find there was no environmental cross-disciplinary thinking at all, nobody was thinking about climate and was nowhere near the big international discussions; UCL is a more empirical place, and people really look at the usefulness of things before they think of the intellectual idea behind it, which is exactly opposite to thinking at Cambridge; from 1999 until retirement I have been in London, focussing particularly on the Antarctic region which are the areas where the climate is changing most rapidly; in 1997 the Labour Party won the election; while I had been at the Met Office I had caused problems because on two or three occasions I was invited to advise the Labour Party leaders, like Michael Meacher, about how the Government had been changed under Mrs Thatcher with the new government agencies; I said that I thought it was effective, but the MOD people were not happy my talking to the potential incoming Government; even more terrible was that I had written down my opinion and given it to them; people put me up for a life peerage when the Labour Party came back to power, and I still think I am the only scientist who has been appointed to the senior side of the Party since Labour came back into power; I was appointed in 2000 and had to choose my title which is Lord Hunt of Chesterton, which I represented on the Council and was where I had lived; I have really found this role in the House of Lords interesting; one of the most intriguing things was that within a month of arriving in the House of Lords there was a Transport Bill which had not been widely proclaimed in the Party manifesto of 1997; this was a Bill that would integrate transport and the environment; because I had worked on the pedestrianization of Cambridge I was very interested; the Government had formed a new department of he Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions; then the Bill arrived in the House of Lords and to my astonishment the word "environment" was nowhere in the Bill; I asked Michael Meacher who confirmed that was so and it had gone right though the Commons with no one noticing; in the Lords the word was inserted throughout the Bill as  the purpose of taxing the car was to improve the environment; because I had been a civil servant I could ring people up in Whitehall and they confirmed that it was deliberate as the transport people would do all they could not to include the environment people; since then, the department has been split up and now there is much more environmental work in transport; one of the big improvements in legislation has been the pre-legislative scrutiny before a Bill comes out - a draft bill is produced, witnesses called,  and individual members of the public can write in their comments, and the Government does a response to the comments before it actually publishes the Bill; it is quite efficient with people from both Houses involved

47:58:10 From the political point of view think the great thing is that the UK is part of Europe which gives us a bigger canvas on which to operate; even now we are the only parliament, apart from the Czech Republic, that does not fly the European flag outside, so we are still reluctant Europeans; from a scientific point of view it has been amazingly exciting and even now I am involved in many projects; the company is involved in European issues and global ones too; one of the things we were involved in was to produce pollution forecasts down to individual streets which we can transmit to people via mobile phones; the method was picked up in Beijing so we could predict pollution levels street by street; my wife is asthmatic so I am well aware of people having breathing difficulties, so it is good to be able to give them advice; in the future we would like to have reflections back again on how useful the advice has been; one of things I have done in Parliament is to join a very rewarding group called Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment; it is a meeting-place for people from the leading industrialized nations, and at one I met colleagues from India who commented that in 2006 in Assam there had been a drought for the first time in recorded history, and that over the whole area the rainfall was halved; at the same time in the north west of India there was lots of rain for the first time in fifty years; it is going to be very serious; the ice and snow in the Himalayas will change and whole parts of China they are expecting will become desert; the big question is India, that has this huge and growing population, which depends critically on the monsoon, will have extraordinary consequences

53:39:13 My elder daughter, Jemima, is a novelist and has done a lot of journalism, and now has two children; my younger daughter, Matilda, became a doctor and specialized in paediatrics, and is now in general practice with two children; she married a novelist called Giles Foden who has just written a book entitled "Turbulence" which is a fictionalization of the story of my great uncle, Lewis Fry Richardson; my son, Tristram, became a historian; at Cambridge he studied history and the Footlights, so that presentation is an important part of his makeup; the only time Trinity had to censor its summer play was when he put one on about Trinity College and Barings Bank, in the year that it went bust; he has worked since in television and radio and has published two book, one of which has just come out, on Engels; he was taught by Gareth Steadman Jones who steered him in that direction; he is also married and has a baby son; I feel I have had a fortunate life, particularly after the near disaster at an early age