Ken Moody interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 17th August 2008

Additional comments by Ken Moody inserted within square brackets

0:09:07 Born in 1940; mother's family were from Northern Ireland, rumoured to be sheep stealers, and reputedly related to John Adams a participant in the mutiny on the Bounty [who signed onboard Bounty hiding from the law as Alexander Smith]; grandfather was the eldest of twelve children, set for a career in the United Kingdom, but his brothers were sent off to the colonies; grandfather was a customs officer; mother born in Weymouth, then moved to Cardigan where she grew up as a young child; later moved to London and in her teens went to Winchmore Hill Collegiate School for Girls; paternal grandfather, always interested in money, married his first cousin; family originally from the Isle of Wight.  My mother was the second of five, the only girl; father was the second of five, the only boy; they married in 1934 and settled in Broxbourne; father worked in his father's business, which was concerned with real estate in Tottenham and was also an accountancy firm; grandfather had done well enough by the mid-1920s to buy a very large country estate in Hertfordshire.

5:22:02 I grew up in Widford, the village of that estate, during the war, so my grandfather was living just down the road, an authority figure; by then my father was dead as he died when I was only a month old; he had a brain haemorrhage at thirty-eight;  my mother, who had not worked since their marriage, was a qualified lawyer but was unable to become a solicitor as she could not afford to take the articles; she worked for the solicitors Longmores of Hertford from 1940 until she retired in about 1968 [she actually started working for the Colne Valley Sewerage Board, which was based at Longmores, in 1942; at the end of the war in 1945 she became a full-time employee of Longmores, as a general managing clerk]; the whole of my life was in and around Hertford until I went to Cambridge; mother was clever, interested in literature, a good mathematician; her older brother, Wilfred, was a scientist; he did the statistical estimation for the first traffic lights installed in the United Kingdom at Piccadilly Circus; his son, Frank Adams, was one of the world's great mathematicians; mother was also an amateur actress; later, when in a nursing home, she reacted to the French nursing staff by reciting Baudelaire; she was a terrific person, the centre of my life as I never knew my father; his name was Ken and at birth I was registered as John (after my maternal grandfather) Kenneth (after my father) Montague (after my paternal grandfather); I was renamed Ken after my father died; I had no siblings.

9:54:22 I went to the local kindergarten, Miss Lawson's, in Broxbourne where we were then living [my mother had let the Broxbourne house during the war, and we moved back there in 1945]; there from five until eight; I was taught parsing, tables, a little French, feel that I was privileged; when about three my mother sent me to work out the number of window panes in a window to keep me quiet; I returned alarmingly quickly with the answer, thirty-five, so I must have known either my five or seven times table by that stage; as a mathematician I liked rules so Mrs Pedley, who taught me to parse English, was probably the teacher who was most important in my formative years; at eight I went to prep school, Beaumont House in Heronsgate, between Rickmansworth and Chorley Wood; Peter Vesey, the Headmaster, taught the senior classes mathematics, an enthusiast and a terrific teacher; he was an important person in my life; another charismatic teacher was the Latin master, Vernon Birds, who had fought in the trenches and bore the psychological scars, but had great enthusiasm for the classics; school was quite successful for me, never bullied, and was extremely good at sums; I was also quite good at cricket; Broxbourne had a good tennis club where I played, and later took up squash.

18:16:16 Went to Haileybury [& ISC] in 1953 [on the site of the old East India Company College, with a strong military tradition]; it was between Broxbourne where we lived and Hertford where my mother worked; mother's boss, [Brigadier] John Longmore, was a governor, and he was able to help with bursaries; without this connection I am sure my mother would not have been able to send me there; in some ways it didn't suit me, but they let me play squash and tennis; Richard Rhodes-James, a housemaster, had been a Chindit in Burma, and was the officer in charge of C company in the Combined Cadet Force; I was a good mathematician in the sense that I could do all the questions; only at S-level did I have any real difficulties; I was lucky that when I entered the A-level course a new mathematics teacher, Stuart Parsonson, was appointed; Frank Newbold who took over as head of maths was a very good teacher but quite traditional; Stuart decided that there were capable people who could do S-level in two years instead of three; I was ready to take the entrance examination for Cambridge at the start of my third year in the sixth; there were a lot of good mathematicians; I was probably the best in my year; Vernon Birds's teaching meant that I came top in Latin in the school at O-level, and feel reasonably confident that I could have done Latin A-level as well as maths and physics, but I was told that if I wished to take Latin I would have to change to classics and learn Greek in a year; so I gave Latin up until I had to polish it up for the Cambridge entrance exam; English changed its nature after O-level, when it became a subject for relaxation in the mathematical sixth form; Jack Thomas would give us interesting books to read and make us talk about them; Bertie Bradstock taught us O-level French and was a real character; I was happy at school.

27:14:03 I was a bird watcher from the age of three; before she was married my mother worked in the Cabinet Office as P.A. to Hubert Henderson, the Chairman of the Keynes group advising on the state of the economy in the depression [(Sir) Hubert Henderson was actually a professional economist who became secretary of the Economic Advisory Council]; Hubert was worried about her brain going to waste after she married, so he got Hope Bagenal, his brother-in-law, a visionary architect, to keep an eye on my mother [Hope was one of the leading acoustical architects of the period; mother prepared the index for his book Practical Acoustics, which appeared early in 1942]; he lived nearby and used to visit during the War, and we would go to watch birds; remember seeing my first kingfisher; I am not a twitcher but always have light-weight binoculars with me, true at both my prep school and Haileybury.  At Haileybury on Friday afternoons we were allowed to do things other than games under the heading of public works; I tried building, but later became a printer with E.J. Miller.  If you go to a well-organised Colonial Service school thoughts about God are subsumed by the strict timetable for Confirmation; a ritual process in which one moves from being a christened member of the church to being a confirmed member without too much thought going into the process; I went to church with my mother every Sunday; I think she became concerned with the substance as well as the ritual later in life; I could always take or leave the ideas; it was really when I went to university that I started to think about it seriously; one took communion at school, but by the time I left was no longer doing so; I am definitely not an atheist; I get strong theistic moments, for instance, with the sight of ducks on a bright summer's day; I describe myself when pressed as a vague pantheist; I could be a Buddhist more easily than most other religions.

32:09:15 Stuart Parsonson had been supervised by Norman Routledge while at Cambridge, so it was decided that I should apply to King's, where Norman was Director of Studies; I did the entrance exam; did not find all the papers easy but did well enough to get a Major Scholarship to King's; as I still had the rest of a year of school, Stuart Parsonson taught me the first year of the maths tripos; when I arrived at Cambridge I went straight into prelims to Part 2 so missed Part 1 completely; arrived at King's in 1958; Noel Annan was Provost; for students, he seemed a little pompous and full of himself; the most decisive thing for me going up in October 1958 was the dichotomy between half the entrants who had done National Service and the other half who had not; one moved into an independent, near adult society, which was a social shock; I found going up to Cambridge quite a frightening experience; then I found the ping-pong table, made friends, started playing squash.

39:03:00 Norman Routledge was a charismatic supervisor, a very capable mathematician, an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics; I don't think he got on with his research, certainly he was not confirmed to retiring age and left after a year; I think he was one of the last who lost his chance of an academic career by too much interaction with students; he was one of the founders of the King's loan record library, which was a wonderful resource for students at that period; I learnt to understand and enjoy classical music partly because of the records one could take out for a very small fee, partly because Norman, with Philip Radcliffe, an elderly music Fellow, organised weekly meetings called 'Chats about Recorded Music'; E.M. Forster would participate as well; I remember him listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and recalling what he had written about it in 'Howards End'; good environment as new doors to be opened - too many; there were a limited number of hours in the week and I came to appreciate Dadie Rylands only much later, though lots of my friends did then, as the Marlowe Society were making decisive recordings at the time; on friends - Alan Robiette and I ended up sharing part of a house when we became research students, and we both played cricket; Mike Stevens was another mathematician [of my year] who went off to Canada; he was a dynamic pianist who lived life to the full; I knew John Dunn then although he came a year later; of my year Alan Robiette is the closest; when Routledge was not confirmed, John Williamson moved from Christ's to King's to become Director of Studies; he was a very different character; by then he already had three children and lived in a large house in Hills Road; I got to know the family well; I found his mathematics, which was functional analysis, relatively easy by comparison with that of Philip Hall, who was another Fellow of King's; I attended Philip's Part 3 lectures but did not find them easy; I was obviously cut out to be an analyst rather than an algebraist; Trinity still had Swinnerton-Dyer, and probably half the people that lectured me were at Trinity; my cousin Frank Adams, whom I've mentioned, came back as a Research Fellow there; he later moved to Trinity Hall; I wasn't particularly influenced by Trinity, there were a lot of lectures, but supervisions were arranged within the College and there was a lot of work to do for these; there were mathematics societies and I would go to talks in the evenings if I was interested in the subject, but there was no sense in which I was attached to a particular college group.

46:33:02 I had started at Part 2 so only had to do three years of the four year [Mathematical Tripos] course; I was accepted to do the Diploma in Computer Science in the year 1961-2 but did well enough in my finals [Part 3] to be selected to do research in mathematics; I then did a Ph.D. after which I went off to work for IBM; Margaret Grimshaw was my Ph.D. supervisor, a Fellow of Newnham, and an exceptionally nice lady, but she did very little to drive my mathematical research; I looked to John Williamson who was working in this general area; he had too many Ph.D. students so although I had a problem, I attacked it rather fitfully; I also did a lot of undergraduate supervision, up to fifteen hours a week at one time; it was actually rather irresponsible; John needed supervisors and I did it rather well; he took the view, quite rightly, that I was either supervising or playing squash, and a mixture was better than squash alone; I was all right for money as grants in those days were good; my grandfather had died and left me a legacy though it did not come for some years

51:06:04 I needed a change of career as at that stage, although I had finished my Ph.D., I had not published anything; also I did not have any academic drive, and did not think there was a future for me in mathematics.  I went to the Defence Operational Analysis Establishment who play war games; I also met Dr Hugh ApSimon, who had an algebra Ph.D. from Oxford and was a senior academic computer scientist at IBM Hursley; both of these environments offered interesting grounded problems that I was convinced would engage my brain in a way that research in mathematics had never done; King's came to the rescue and made the decision for me; at a dinner I sat next to Philip Noel-Baker, who asked what would be the productive element if I worked for the DOAE, and whether I would be happy with that thought; so I went to IBM; I joined IBM in February 1967 when there were high expectations about the amount of time their staff would put in; they were a paternalistic employer, and having looked at my background decided that I should be recruited to IBM Government Branch, which ran large scientific machines where my background would enable me to talk to customers; they sent me to the Rutherford Laboratory on the Chilton-Harwell site where I made lots of good friends; there is a story that IBM employees at that period had to wear white shirts and suits; not quite true, as the manager always warned us of a visit a day in advance so that one could dress correctly; I was there for nearly two years, though moved to [AERE] Harwell about half way through; by the middle of 1968 was working long hours, doing very interesting work; the more I learnt about computing the more I realized you only saw the IBM pitch; sometimes you knew that you would have taken other design decisions; having met Hugh ApSimon I was aware that there was a subject, computer science, evolving beyond my horizon, which was a bit unsatisfactory; at the time I had an Australian girlfriend, Anne Howie, and she was still completing a Ph.D. in zoology in Cambridge, so I did go back to Cambridge from time to time; I kept contact with the Computer Lab so knew there was another side to computing that I had no exposure to or experience of.

56:16:20 In 1961 when I had thought of doing the Diploma, Alan Turing was not talked about in King's; probably among the Fellowship, people like A.E. Ingham, a senior King's mathematician, would have remembered him; I think it was a hard subject to discuss because of his ending; there was also Maurice Wilkes in Cambridge at that time, and the Cambridge initiative to build computers was very much in competition with Manchester where Turing had been; Turing was also at the National Physical Laboratory, and these were the three locations in the UK principally connected with the emergence of computing; I did not come across Wilkes as an undergraduate or in 1961 when I went to find out about the Diploma; Eric Mutch, who was then the Deputy Director of the Mathematical Laboratory, was responsible for organising admission to the Diploma, and I spoke with him; I did not know of Wilkes's existence until 1968 when I was at Harwell; I think John Williamson had been talking with Roger Needham, Wilkes's deputy at that stage, about me as someone who might be better suited to an academic career in computing; John Williamson then told me that there was the possibility of a job in the Computer Lab; he had just got a Chair at York so suggested I could Direct Studies in maths at King's too; another disastrous career move, but I was attracted to both, and it seemed a reasonable combination; however the Mathematical Laboratory said I would need references; did not want to ask any of my senior advisors at IBM as my career there was going quite well; the customer came to mind and I picked the one I knew best, for whom I had done some useful work; I knew nothing about his background - this was John Burren the physicist at Rutherford, and it seemed to me that a half smile crossed his face when I asked him; what he didn't tell me was that he had shared a flat with Roger Needham as a graduate student in Cambridge; not only did he write me a good reference but it hit the right spot; IBM were sorry to see me go and gave me three years of academic absence on the correct assumption that it would not have been a final career decision; I was employed by King's without a Fellowship as Director of Studies, but lived in College.