By the time I returned to England (after pausing to attend a joint meeting of the British Society for Chemical Industry and its Italian counterpart in Turin) the Churchill College Appeal was well under way and shortly thereafter the Trustees appointed Sir John Cockcroft as Master. Thereupon we appointed a Bursar (General Hamilton) and a Senior Tutor (J.E.Morrison) to help in organising and planning the new college. Building plans were approved following a competition among architects, and the actual construction was begun about a year later. From this time onwards I kept in touch with progress but was not intimately concerned with the further development of Churchill College.
It was my hope that with less commitment to Churchill College I would have much more time for research; but I had reckoned without knowing that in the autumn of 1957 I was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. One of the consequences of receiving such an award is that one has academic honours showered upon one and receives invitations to lecture, open laboratories and so on all over the world; some of these one can decline, but by no means all of them.
So it was that I found myself again visiting India in 1960 where, in addition to lecturing in a number of centres, I received the degree of D.Sc. honoris causa from the Muslim University of Aligarh. That really was a party! My wife and I travelled to Aligarh by train from Delhi, and were met and escorted from the station to the university by a troop of cavalry belonging, I presume, to the Officers Training Corps. It was quite an experience to arrive at the huge pandal which had been erected for the graduation ceremonies (for several hundred students were taking their degrees at the same function) with an escort of horsemen in highly coloured uniforms and bearing lances with pennants flying. At the ceremony itself I was impressed by the fact that all the girl students wore the traditional black Islamic garb with yashmak; I must say that several of them, whom I saw riding bicycles in this dress, looked rather comical - and, I thought, distinctly unsafe!
At home my duties as chairman of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and adviser to the Minister for Science still demanded a good deal of attention. I had also, since 1955, been intimately concerned with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and was a member of the Executive Committee of that body and later, from 1963 to 1965, its President. At that time, the Committee was under some pressure from overseas colleagues to stage some manifestation in the Southern Hemisphere, which had been totally neglected as a meeting location throughout the Union's history. It was finally decided that, with the help of our Australian colleagues, we should break new ground both geographically and subject-wise by holding the Union's first Natural Products Symposium in Australia in August 1960. Our Australian colleagues did a magnificent job and, with full cooperation from State and Commonwealth governments, the symposium, which divided its time between Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, was a huge success and began a regular series of such symposia under the auspices of IUPAC, which have since been held biennially in many countries around the globe. I had the honour to be President of the 1960 Symposium which was attended by a large number of the leading chemists from every continent. It was a truly memorable event.
My friend Bob Woodward of Harvard was also going to the Australian Symposium and, as he had never previously been in the East, we decided to fly out together and spend a day in Singapore en route. I met him on his arrival at Heathrow from Boston in mid-August and we both proceeded to the plane for Singapore; unfortunately we had both forgotten to do anything about cholera injections, so we were hauled off to a medical unit on the perimeter of London airport and forcibly inoculated before being put on our plane for a trip thereby made somewhat less comfortable than it might have been. However, we arrived in Singapore the following evening in time to have a shower and go to a party. Very late, we returned with our host and hostess (Mr Johnson, the Singapore manager of Glaxo Laboratories Ltd, and his wife) to their home for a few hours sleep (before that could be done I remember having to remove an enormous cockroach-like creature from Bob's bathroom, while he stood by petrified, and clearly in some doubt as to whether the creature was real or a figment of a slightly whisky-inspired imagination). The following day we crossed over the causeway and, with our hosts, spent a pleasant day in Johore as guests of the State's chief medical officer (an ebullient Chinese with a fine taste in food) and returned to Singapore to get the evening plane to Sydney and Melbourne.
On our return we were informed that our plane would be at least four hours late, and as a result we found ourselves at another party and were almost poured on to the Australian plane in the small hours of the morning. What with about three nights without sleep, and with sleet falling quite heavily on our arrival at Melbourne, we were not in the best of shape to deal with the mass of reporters waiting at the airport. Bob, however, pulled himself together sufficiently to deliver a strong attack on what he described as the most dangerous characteristic of the Australians - addiction to fresh air and physical exercise both of which he abhorred. The symposium opened in Melbourne then moved after a few days to Canberra and had its final week in Sydney. I had a large black Commonwealth limousine at my disposal in each city, so that Bob Woodward and I drove around in state. The whole trip was punctuated by hilarious incidents in which we were involved but perhaps the most memorable occasion was the delivery of my Presidential Address. I gave it in Canberra in that remarkable hemispherical building which houses the Australian Academy of Science. In the lecture room there, the wall behind the rostrum was ornamented by vertical slats alternately light and dark brown in colour set an inch or two apart. Now, when lecturing without using notes, I have a habit of frequently moving a step or two to right and left while I am speaking. With a background of coloured slats the effect on an audience of such lateral movement is rather like sea-sickness. Since that day in Canberra I have always claimed that, while most of my scientific colleagues both can and do put their audiences to sleep on occasion, few, if any, can emulate me in my feat of making members of my audience actively ill.
The highlight of the Australian trip was the visit paid by a group of symposium participants to the Australian-mandated territory of Papua-New Guinea. This trip was arranged by the Australian government and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to give a selection of overseas delegates the opportunity to make some assessment of the territory's potential, and to comment, if we wished, on what the Australian authorities were doing there. The group - about fifteen to twenty in all, including our Australian hosts -was multinational, and Bob Woodward and I were fortunately, if not very surprisingly, included. It was a memorable trip to a fascinating country of jungle, mountain and swamp, with the climate up on the plateau beyond the Owen Stanley Range so beautiful, that I could understand why we found, living in Wau, two retired bankers and their wives from Europe; having set out on a trip round the world, they had found Wau so near to perfection that they simply gave up circumnavigating the globe and settled down there. After spending a couple of days in the Port Moresby area, we flew up in an ex-army DC3 through a high pass in the Owen Stanley Range to Wau - not a large place by world standards, but the headquarters of the local District Commissioner, and the southernmost point reached by the Japanese army in the last war. The grassy airstrip on which we landed was quite markedly sloping; so much so, that, on touching down at the lower end (where, incidentally, the Japanese had been finally halted), the pilot had to switch on power again in order to get our plane up to the top of the runway, where the somewhat rudimentary airport buildings were located. I remember that, while we were thus engaged in struggling up the hill, I observed a group of two or three local inhabitants clad apparently in stripes of blue, white, and red paint, with little or nothing else; they were leaning on spears, and their hideously painted faces were further adorned by what appeared to be bones through their noses, and a collection of rings or discs suspended from the septa thereof. My immediate reaction was to think how thoughtful it had been of the District Commissioner to have a welco
ming party specially dressed up to welcome the guests. However, as I drove in the Commissioner's jeep from the airport, I quickly realised that the men on the airport were not specially dressed (or undressed) for the occasion - all the local inhabitants about the place were in a similar state. Subsequently moving around the area and visiting various villages I came to realise that this was the normal attire of these stone-age people. We did see them in all their finery on one day when the Commissioner, having heard that a big tribal feast or sing-sing was being held in one area, persuaded the local chief, whom he knew, to let us come along to the village which had been built specially for the occasion; there we saw the tribal groups from surrounding villages assembling for the feast - all highly painted, with the warriors wearing their headdresses of bird of paradise plumes and performing elaborate formation dances, while the women and children sat around chanting and preparing mountains of food. The New Guinea Highlands can be described as a real man's country. In the Wau district each tribe did one day's work per month on the local roads for the government; on the occasion I saw this day of labour, all the work was being done by the women and children, while the men of the tribe, in their full war-paint, stood around in groups smoking and leaning on their spears. Wau was really a remarkable place. Some miles up a rough road, following the course of a stream in a nearby mountain valley, there was a clearing in the jungle in which were several buildings or huts, and in which the stream had been diverted into artificial channels, obviously used for gold-washing. Most of the huts were made out of what looked like flattened biscuit tins - a common construction material in that part of Papua - but one was more substantial, being solidly built of wood and stone. In it lived an elderly Scotsman, known locally (and inevitably, I suppose) as Mac, quite alone, save for the thirty or so Kuku-kuku tribesmen and their families who lived in the clearing and were his employees and bodyguard. The women did his domestic chores, while the men washed for gold in the stream. Mac himself told me he had been a gold miner who moved on from one gold rush to another; he moved from Alaska to join the New Guinea gold rush, and, when the latter waned, he decided that perhaps the time had come to retire. What better place was there to do so than the hills about Wau? Here he could have peace with his group of native 'boys', and a pleasant part-time occupation washing for gold in the stream. It seemed to work well enough; I was told by the Commissioner that, each month, Mac came down to Wau to bank his gold, get uproariously drunk for a couple of days, and be carried back up to his home by his Kuku-kuku 'boys' - members, I should add, of the most notorious cannibal tribe in the area. It was said locally, that the proceeds from his gold were sent regularly to his unmarried sister in Dundee, who was getting something like £10 000 p.a. from this source. Mac I found surprisingly well informed, although a month or so behind with the news; he abhorred radio, but was a subscriber to the Weekly Scotsman and The Economist, which he received regularly, and read from cover to cover. During our visit to him we had a hilarious ceremony (apparently planned in advance, but without my knowledge) at which the Doctorate of Science of the (non-existent) University of Wau was conferred upon me honoris causa by the self-styled Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor in the guise of the District Commissioner and his assistant, wearing as robes flowered dressing gowns borrowed from their wives. Mac and his 'boys' formed a suitable arc behind the 'Chancellor' as the 'Senate', while I was made to wear, as academic dress, a very fine beaten bark cape which, I was assured, had belonged to a gentleman who had been jailed a fortnight before for eating his wife.
From Wau we went on through Bulolo and Lae, and saw something of the timber industry and the successful efforts being made to develop coffee and cocoa culture. The whole trip was a very jolly affair, punctuated by many amusing incidents, but also making me, at least, realise the potential of this remarkable country coupled, I confess, with a considerable feeling of unease about the future of the large population of rather child-like stone-age people, who were clearly about to be thrown all too quickly into the maelstrom of the twentieth century. The New Guinea party returned to Sydney, and there dispersed, most members returning to Europe or America, while I went on to pay my first visit to New Zealand, a country in which, like Australia, I had a number of friends - some like Professor 'Bob' Briggs of Auckland (who had been with me on the New Guinea excursion) and J. S. Watt, fellow-students from Oxford days, and others who had been my own pupils in Cambridge. I flew from Sydney to Christchurch, stopped there for a couple of days and gave a lecture, then drove southwards with my former student R. E. Corbett, visiting Mount Cook on the way to Dunedin and the University of Otago, where he later became Professor of Chemistry. From there I flew directly to Auckland, where I was joined by my wife; together we then drove down through the North Island to Wellington, our final port of call in New Zealand. It being September the weather was cold and rather broken, especially in the South Island, but this did not prevent me from enjoying the great natural beauty of New Zealand. I confess, however, that I was not in any way attracted by it as a place in which to live. The cities and their inhabitants seemed very provincial in their outlook, and I, for one, was conscious all the time of being remote and rather shut off from the world. I have often had this curious feeling of remoteness in the Australian outback, but only in Tasmania and in New Zealand have I experienced it in substantial towns.
My wife and I returned to Australia from Wellington, and proceeded directly from Sydney to Mackay in Queensland with our old friends Charles and Eileen Shoppee; from there we set out on a five-day cruise of the islands lying off the coast, and visited the Barrier Reef itself where, it being low water when we arrived, we were able to land and cruise around in glass-bottomed boats looking at the fantastic gamut of highly coloured plant and animal life that abounds on the reef. The Barrier Reef fully lived up to our expectations, and we were so attracted by the relatively undeveloped Lindeman Island in the Whitsunday Passage that we resolved to return to it. And return we did, for we spent two marvellous holidays there in 1968 and 1974. During the next five or six weeks we visited all the Australian capital cities, spending a most enjoyable time with friends in all of them before returning to Cambridge and normal life again. This was my wife's first visit to Australia; like me, she at once fell in love with the country, and we have been frequent visitors to it ever since.
During the winter and spring of the year 1960-61 I was able to push on with research, especially in the field of the aphid colouring matters, which got more complex and fascinating the farther we explored them. As far as I recall, life was rather uneventful although, outside the laboratory, I had A.C.S.P. work and made short trips to Germany and Switzerland, for the most part lecturing or dealing with International Union business. In May 1961, however, my wife and I went to the United States, where I received an honorary degree from Yale University. Although I had received a considerable number of honorary degrees from foreign universities, this was the first occasion I had attended (let alone participated in) an American Commencement Day ceremony. It was quite an experience -the procession across the open common in New Haven to the open-air auditorium, where, on a warm early summer morning, the graduations occurred; it was, incidentally, the first time I had seen degrees conferred on graduating students in blocks of fifty or so at a time, rather than individually. To a European like myself, the ceremonial seemed slightly brash, but it was impressive.
After the festivities were over, we were met by my friend Dick Perkin - the creator and President of Perkin Elmer Inc. - whom I had known since my former laboratory colleague, Ralph Gilson, had joined him to develop an English subsidiary. Dick lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, not far from New York, and he had driven up to New Haven to take us back to his home, where he and his wife Gladys entertained us for some days before we went north to Boston and Harvard to visit the Woodwards. Dick Perkin was a remarkable man. Although an extremely successful businessman, he was by no means a typical 'tycoon'. A modest, friendly, well-read person he could be, and was, a delightful h
ost and a loyal friend; his sudden death some years later was a sore blow to all who knew him. When he met us that day at Yale he was driving his latest acquisition - a light grey Bentley touring model built to his specification. He used to relate with glee, how he went down to the quayside in New York to collect it when it was unloaded from the ship which brought it from England. When he got there, the car was standing on the quay, and beside it stood a coloured man who was peering at the controls and, now and then, rather gingerly touching the coachwork. Said Dick, 'Well, what do you think of the car?' 'Dat ain't no motor car, sah! Dat sure am a automobile!' One evening, during our stay with the Perkins on that occasion, we had a barn dance for the children and their friends from the surrounding district. It was a terrific party, and I can still see Dick and my wife demonstrating the Charleston to the youngsters with astonishing vigour! Before returning home after these events, we had our usual spell in Harvard. Bob Woodward was in his usual form, which meant that I found sleep at a premium during my stay; but, as usual, our chemical discussions were stimulating. Later that summer I attended a meeting of the Bureau and Council of IUPAC in Montreal. I and the other delegates were comfortably lodged in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, but we had to travel each day a considerable distance across town to our meeting place at the University of Montreal. H. W. Thompson (later Sir Harold Thompson, but then, as now, universally and affectionately known as Tommy) was a member of the British delegation, and he had borrowed a car, either from Perkin Elmer Inc. or from Dick Perkin himself, on a visit to Norwalk, which he made en route to the Montreal meeting. On the second morning, Tommy very kindly offered to take my colleague Harry Emeleus and myself from the hotel to the university; we accepted, and set off. To whom any blame should be attached I do not know, but, on a street crossing, we were hit by a car travelling at high speed from our left; our car spun across the street and struck a bank building head on at a fair speed. I was sitting beside Tommy in the front seat; I remember realising that there was going to be a collision, and then the crash into the wall of the bank. I rather naturally assumed I was dead, but after I came to in a few moments, I realised that I wasn't; indeed, apart from a fair amount of blood running down one side of my face from a cut on my head, I seemed more or less all right, and was able to extricate myself and stand up in the street leaning on the car. Tommy had no more than a bruise, but Harry appeared to have broken his collar bone, and possibly dislocated a shoulder. We remained there until an ambulance arrived a few minutes later, and took us to the Queen Victoria Hospital. We were well treated, and after Harry's collar bone had been dealt with, and I had been sewn up, we were taken back to our hotel, each with a bottle of pain-killing tablets, which I fear we put on one side and relied on whisky to restore our rather flagging spirits. We sent Harry back to England, but I carried on, and, when the meeting ended, I went down to New York and spent a couple of days with my son Sandy who, having completed his Oxford Part I in chemistry, was spending the summer vacation working in the research laboratories of Merck Sharp and Dohme in Rahway, through the good offices of my old friend Max Tishler, the company's Director of Research. I thus suffered no harm from this adventure, but it certainly enlivened the IUPAC meeting; I fear the Perkin Elmer car was a write off! The Montreal meeting saw the beginnings of a battle over the position of Taiwan in IUPAC, and in the other constituent bodies of the International Council of Scientific Unions, which was to last for nearly twenty years before a solution acceptable both to Taiwan and the People's Republic of China could be reached. The Taiwanese had inherited the membership of the Republic of China when Chiang Kai Shek and his followers retreated to Taiwan; in Montreal the move to have them expelled was initiated by the Soviet and East European delegates, who wished to see them replaced by the mainland Chinese with whom the Soviet Union at that time had very close relations; it may be more than a coincidence that an amicable solution was only reached following the later breach in Soviet-Chinese friendship.
A Time to Remember Page 18
